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Sunday, March 27, 2022

2022-03-27

 *** denotes well-worth reading in full at source (even if excerpted extensively here)

Regular Fare:

********** Roberts: The war on inflation

... It is the primary job of central banks to control price inflation; not to help to sustain employment and economic growth – they are secondary.  (“The ultimate responsibility for price stability rests with the Federal Reserve” – Jay Powell). That’s because inflation is the main enemy of the banking system.  Creditors and lenders of money lose out if inflation rises, while debtors and borrowers gain.  And central banks were created to support the financial sector and its profitability and not much else.

And indeed, there is not much else they can do.  I have shown in many previous posts the evidence that central banks have little control over the ‘real economy’ in capitalist economies and that includes any inflation of prices in goods or services.  For the 30 years of general price disinflation (where price rises slow or even deflate), central banks have struggled to meet their usual 2% annual inflation target with their usual weapons of interest rates and monetary injections.  And it will be the same story in trying this time to reduce inflation rates. 

... As Powell put it: “contrary to expectations, COVID has not gone away with the arrival of vaccines. In fact, we are now headed once again into more COVID-related supply disruptions from China. It continues to seem likely that hoped-for supply-side healing will come over time as the world ultimately settles into some new normal, but the timing and scope of that relief are highly uncertain.”  And this poses an intractable problem for the central bankers in their quest to protect bank profits.  Their monetary weapons will prove useless in this war on inflation.  Powell said that “We have the necessary tools, and we will use them to restore price stability.”  But does he? As Andrew Bailey, governor of the Bank of England, said: “Monetary policy will not increase the supply of semiconductor chips, it will not increase the amount of wind (no, really), and nor will it produce more HGV drivers.”  And Jean Boivin, a former Bank of Canada deputy governor now at the BlackRock Investment Institute, commented: “We are not dealing with demand-push inflation. What we are really going through right now is a massive supply shock and the way to deal with this is not as straightforward as just dealing with inflation.”  

If rising inflation is being driven by a weak supply-side rather than an excessively strong demand side, monetary policy won’t work.  Monetary policy supposedly works by trying to raise or lower ‘aggregate demand’ ...

Nevertheless, central banks have only the monetary weapon to apply to accelerating inflation. ...

Whatever the predictive value of the bond yield curve, the point is that the US economy, the best performer among the G7, is set to slow as the year progresses.  There is little room for any further growth through employing more workers, while productivity and business investment is slowing.  Year-on-year nonfarm business sector labour productivity advanced only 1% at the end of 2021, down compared with 2.4% in 2020.  And business investment was only just 2.4% above pre-pandemic levels at end-2021.  Several forecasts now suggest a significant slowdown in economic growth in the US and the UK, and probably an outright recession in the Eurozone before the year is out. ...

There is an alternative to monetary policy.  It is to boost investment and production through public investment.  That would solve the supply shock.  But sufficient public investment to do that would require significant control of the major sectors of the economy, particularly energy and agriculture; and coordinated action globally.  That is currently a pipedream.  Instead, governments are looking to cut back investment in productive sectors and boost military spending to fight the war against Russia (and China next).

Which way will it go?  Will Powell, Lagarde and Bailey be mini-Volckers or will they step back from the conflict and opt for fewer rate hikes and be forced to live with higher inflation?  Either way, it suggests that inflation globally will not subside until a new slump emerges, signalling that the central bank war on inflation has been lost.


UK macro-policymakers just keep accepting economic damage as irreversible. They shouldn't.



Unless the U.S. and its allies mobilize to save it, the second great age of globalization is coming to a catastrophic close.






Nawaz: President Biden Chillingly Declares a New World Order
The collapse of World Dynasties, the rush to Central Banking Digital Currencies and the Japanese Legend of the Sessho-Seki

...........

3) Why Does All This Matter?

If you believe the rhetoric of the World Economic Forum (WEF), all of the above changes are benign.

The reality is that never before in history has the world seen a control mechanism as complete, as total and as all encompassing as CBDCs. You should be very worried.


The ‘great expropriation’ will come to be regarded as a turning point — one which the great powers of the world will likely regret.



Around 90 central banks are either in the process of experimenting with or are already piloting central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). In a world of just over 190 countries that is a large contingent, but given they include the European Central Bank (ECB) which alone represents 19 Euro Area economies, the actual number of economies involved is well over 100. They include all G20 economies and together represent more than 90% of global GDP.

.................... So how could CBDCs impact our lives? Here are four of the most important ways: ....


Farmers on the Brink

At Doomberg, we pride ourselves on seeing patterns early and being months ahead of the news flow. We are consistently human-centric. Never have we been more certain in our beliefs while fervently wishing that we are wrong. A global famine is no joke, and correctly forecasting one would bring no joy.


  • The continent relies heavily on Russian and Ukrainian exports, but Russia’s invasion and resulting sanctions have disrupted supply and pushed up prices
  • Wheat, corn, sunflower oil and fertiliser are among the products affected, along with oil, compounding the impact of political instability and drought


We believe big, earth-shattering changes are under foot in the credit market.  A seemingly firm foundation may soon give way like liquified soil following an earthquake. Where to begin… Many investment gurus in the early 1980s were predicting the future while projecting the past.

...... To be fair, there were a few outcasts in the late 1970s who foresaw what was coming.  A. Gary Shilling was one of them.

.... Shilling, having a deep conviction and wanting to warn investors, wrote a book about his important insight.  The book was first published in the early 1980s, and its title asked two significant questions: Is Inflation Ending?  Are You Ready?

The book’s sales were an utter flop.  No one, save a handful of shrewd individuals, could actually fathom that consumer price inflation was dissipating.  But the book’s forecast was right on the money.

What’s more, Shilling also put his money behind his convictions.  By the mid-1980s he achieved financial independence through aggressive investment in the long bond.

Shilling’s astute call and capital deployment into the long-term decline in interest rates starting in the early 1980s is remarkable.  But what’s also remarkable is Shilling’s ability to successfully ride out this trend long after other big investors bailed out.

..... Here’s Gross:
“I suspect you can’t get above 2.5 to 3 percent before you crack the economy again.  We’ve just gotten used to lower and lower rates and anything much higher will break the housing market.”
Of course, breaking the housing market is precisely what needs to happen. 

.... The U.S. economy has entered the death zone…where higher and higher interest rates will be needed for years to come to counter raging consumer price inflation.  The credit market reversal has only just begun.

Conversely, debt driven financial assets like bonds and houses will deflate.  And home equity will be ravaged in kind.



Amid all the good news about successful labor organizing and job growth in the United States is the stark reality that wages continue to remain inexcusably low even as inflation rises. A new government report by numerous agencies including the U.S. Treasury Department came to the stark conclusion that corporate power is suppressing wages.





Other Charts: (source links: one-three, four, five)







Bubble Fare:


What we are witnessing is a commodity driven liquidity collapse. Higher oil and commodity prices are forcing the Fed to accelerate their tightening plans. Of course they are using the wrong tool for the wrong problem. Rate hikes are a demand side solution, whereas the sanctions-driven commodity shortage is a supply side problem. The end result of this failed gambit will be a demand collapse in conjunction with a global supply glut. This is total economic mismanagement driven by the ubiquitous assumption that markets won't rationally respond to inflated prices. The overwhelming consensus at this latent juncture is that prices of everything, especially risk assets will keep climbing while the Fed tightens liquidity at the fastest pace in decades. Where this is all headed is inevitable deflationary asset collapse as illustrated below

..... Unfortunately, there is no one to warn the sheeple because the prospect of a global deflationary asset crash is not an option. It's not something that today's pundits could even mention since they would have an exodus of subscribers. What we have instead is mass groupthink on a record scale. 



The expected return from a roulette spin is negative: -5.26%. An operation that has a negative expected return is not an investment. It’s not even an intelligent speculation. It’s simply a gamble. Of course, you might get lucky, but on average you won’t. If you insist on playing anyway, the last useful resort is to follow the advice of Baltasar Gracián y Morales: “Quit while you’re ahead. All the best gamblers do.”

Why are you taking market risk? Whether you’re investing for yourself, or you’re a member of an investment committee making decisions for a pension fund or charitable organization, you’re responsible for asking that question. The natural answer is that you expect positive and adequate investment returns to compensate you for the risk. The next questions are then a) on what basis do you expect that investment return? and b) on what basis do you believe that the expected return is adequate and proportionate to the risk you’re accepting?

In their classic 1934 text, Security Analysis, Benjamin Graham and David Dodd described “investment” as buying a security at a valuation that is associated with a reasonable expectation of acceptable long-term returns, based on a careful analysis of the relationship between the current price and expected future cash flows. In contrast, “speculation” means buying a security on the expectation that its price will advance. If you are not using well-defined and historically reliable valuation measures as a basis for investment, and you don’t have a well-defined and historically validated basis on which to expect speculative behavior from other investors, you’re probably gambling. 

In our own work, intelligent investing involves careful consideration of the arithmetic that links current prices with future cash flows; and the historical evidence that relates reliable valuation measures to subsequent long-term returns. Valuations also provide information about the potential market losses that investors may experience over the compete market cycle.

The problem with simple P/E ratios (or even P/E ratios based on year-ahead estimates of “forward” earnings) is that stocks are not claims on a single year of earnings. A good valuation measure is just shorthand for a proper discounted cash flow analysis, and relates the current price with observable fundamentals that are representative of decades of likely future cash flows. Indeed, as the title of last month’s market comment suggests, the most negative market returns follow periods when investors pay Top Dollar for Top Dollar: high P/E multiples on earnings that rely on elevated profit margins. Once a high P/E and a high profit margin are embedded into price, both have to be sustained indefinitely in order for prices to avoid very strong headwinds.

In this context, the attention that Wall Street pays to “forward operating P/E ratios” is cringeworthy. The chart below shows the reality of the situation, in data since 1980. The red scatter shows fitted regression values, and the chart is oriented in 3D to capture that linear relationship. The green dot in the lower right corner is the fitted value based on the current forward P/E and operating profit margin, and is clearly the worst fitted value in the dataset.

.....

....


COVID-19 notes:

Vitamin D for COVID-19: real-time meta analysis of 186 studies



(not just) for the ESG crowd:









A new report grades companies on their efforts to meet the Paris Agreement goals. Microsoft leads the pack while Tesla is bringing up the rear.

Tech companies have talked up their climate pledges. A new report from corporate accountability non-profit As You Sow shows some are for real and some falling behind. The group found Tesla — which claims its mission is to "accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy" — is making the slowest progress to reach net zero emissions. Microsoft, Apple and Alphabet, on the other hand, are amongst the leaders in the tech industry.



It’s an open secret within energy circles that the eventual death of oil and thermal coal won’t come from environmentalists or even directly from renewable energy, but rather when big banks decide to stop financing it, rendering it ‘unbankable’. And the U.S. oil and gas sector came dangerously close to meeting that fate after Wall Street banks started disavowing oil and gas lending at the height of the ESG (environmental, social, and governance) craze.

... One year after Wells Fargo & Co. became one of the last big U.S. banks to make a net-zero promise, the bank has become the biggest fossil fuel lender








Pics of the Week:

Something positive to recharge mentally





Contrarian Perspectives

Extra [i.e. Controversial] Fare:

*** denotes well-worth reading in full at source (even if excerpted extensively here)


Regular Fare:


Mega corporations like Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and Danone are making around 494 times what they spend by bottling water in Mexico and selling it back to locals who have no choice but to buy it.



In confirming that federal prosecutors are treating as “authenticated” the Biden emails, the Times story applies the final dollop of clown makeup to Wolf Blitzer, Lesley Stahl, Christiane Amanpour, Brian Stelter, and countless other hapless media stooges, many starring in Matt Orfalea’s damning montage above (the Hunter half-laugh is classic, by the way). All cooperated with intelligence officials to dismiss a damaging story about Biden’s abandoned laptop and his dealings with the corrupt Ukrainian energy company Burisma as “Russian disinformation.” They tossed in terms thought up for them by spooks as if they were their own thoughts, using words like “obviously” and “classic” and “textbook” to describe “the playbook of Russian disinformation,” in what itself was and still is a wildly successful disinformation campaign, one begun well before the much-derided (and initially censored) New York Post exposé on the topic from October of 2020.

Not to be petty, but — well, yes, let’s be petty, just a little, and point out that many of the people who were the most pompous about this story turned out to be the most wrong, including the conga line of Intercept editors and staffers who essentially knocked Glenn Greenwald all the way to Substack over the issue. There are more important things going on in the world, but for sheer bootlicking conformist excess and depraved journalist-on-journalist venom the “Russian disinformation” fiasco has no equal, and probably needs recording for posterity before it’s memory-holed via some creepy homage to Severance, or a next-gen algorithmic witch-hunt, or whatever other federally contracted monstrosities are being readied for deployment somewhere far up the anus of Silicon Valley. ....



Unsustainability Fare:

Burying ‘An Atlas Of Human Suffering’: Climate Breakdown And The Tory Chancellor

As the US economist and media analyst Edward Herman rightly noted in the aftermath of the mass slaughter of the first Gulf War:
‘It is the function of defense intellectuals and other experts, and the mainstream media, to normalize the unthinkable for the general public.’

....

More starkly put, this is but one climatic effect that could initiate irreversible runaway global warming.

All this comes hot on the heels of the ‘bleakest warning yet’ on climate breakdown last month by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

António Guterres, the UN secretary general, said:

‘I have seen many scientific reports in my time, but nothing like this. Today’s IPCC report is an atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of failed climate leadership.’

Many of the impacts of global warming are now simply ‘irreversible’ and there is only ‘a brief window of time to avoid the very worst’.


How Fossil Fuel Governments Control the IPCC


  • While Europe appears to be turning to nuclear energy, high costs are stopping the U.S. from following suit.
  • Only the US government has the borrowing capacity for the large-scale nuclear projects that would be necessary.
  • Chinese officials announced a plan to construct 150 new nuclear plants within the next fifteen years, the U.S. government should be taking note.
..... There are three basic business risks associated with nuclear power for an investor-owned utility:  financing, operating, and sales. (Four if you add in new construction risk which is not inconsequential.) The simple reason no US investor-owned utility — apart from Southern Company’s Plant Vogtle—- is building or considering new nuclear investments is the first risk, financing. To paraphrase a former NYC mayoral candidate, the capital costs are “too damn high”. By any metric, nuclear power is economically uncompetitive. According to the recent Lazard study comparing the cost of new power generation, it is about three times more costly than natural gas and five times more costly than new wind and solar.


Could this project win some battles while we fight the war against climate change?


A newsletter about food systems, climate change and everything connected to them

....Andy Jarvis, associate director-general at The Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT (research director at the Colombia-based CIAT (International Center for Tropical Agriculture) at that time), called the relationship between climate and agriculture “an unhappy marriage”.
“(They) are absolutely intertwined and completely connected to each other but actually pretty antagonistic,” he said.
You see, agriculture is extremely vulnerable to climate extremes while farming emissions exacerbate global warming.

I love that quote and have used it many times since, and when I saw this latest report from the Global Alliance for the Future of Food about how food systems are rarely considered in NDCs (Nationally Determined Contributions aka countries’ blueprints on how they are going to limit/reduce their emissions), my first thought was that the unhappy marriage remains unhappy.



STORY AT-A-GLANCE
  • Due to the tremendous profitability of the energy industry, it has historically attracted the most ruthless individuals who robbed and murdered without any qualms
  • Unfortunately, both the “old normal” and the “new normal” methods of energy production are on the destructive side
  • The same players who have been destroying nature and polluting for decades are now pretending to care about the environment, and are using new messaging to continue dominating the market and create new markets for themselves out of thin air
  • The World Economic Forum says that they want to “redesign” core planetary and cellular processes
  • Bill Gates and other oligarchs are heavily invested in nuclear energy, while its safety is questionable


Related Tweets:

Van Steenbergen: My point exactly is: Once we see small cracks in the sea ice the surface concentrations of methane jump up like crazy. So, there's only one conclusion: "A lot of methane is waiting beneath the surface to be released." Abrupt Arctic Ocean stratification explains the methane burps.


Dynes: We are already at a stage where no further external energy or forcing is needed for the Arctic sea ice system to move from one state to another - this ice is our natural SRM. Replacement SRM for cooling is now essential.



COVID Fare:

I've continued to come across too much excellent COVID-related content (with contrarian evidence-based points-of-view!!) to link to it all
Read everything by eugyppius; el gato malo; Mathew Crawford; Steve Kirsch; Jessica Rose!
Paul Alexander, Berenson, Chudov, Lyons-Weiler, Toby Rogers are also go-to mainstays; a list to which I have added Andreas Oehler, Joey Smalley (aka Metatron) and, Julius Ruechel; Denninger worth staying on top of too for his insights, and especially his colorful language; and Norman Fenton; new addition: Marc Girardot; plus Walter Chesnut on twitter; I will of course continue to post links to key Peter McCullough material, and Geert Vanden Bossche, and Robert Malone, and Martin Kulldorff, and Jay Bhattacharya, and Sucharit Bhakdi, and Pierre Kory, and Harvey Risch, and Michael Yeadon, and John Ioannidis, and Paul Marik, and Tess Lawrie, and Zelenko, and Dolores Cahill, and [local prof] Byram Bridle, and Ryan Cole, and Meryl Nass, and …
but going forward, my linking to material by those mainstays mentioned above will be reduced to key excerpts and/or essential posts

cliff notes:

when you account for all post booster risk instead of accepting the “booster +12 days” definition the reported efficacy of this study not only vanishes, it inverts.

90%+ VE becomes negative 50-90% for most outcomes.

you cannot trust any study or outcomes assessment that uses these definitions.



All deaths are equal, but some deaths are more equal than others.

It is still a mystery to me that the public health and statistics authorities still publish analysis and research based on numbers of deaths.

Given that we are playing out the plot of George Orwell’s 1984, I thought I would take the liberty of paraphrasing one of his other famous quotations. My apologies!

So, it is with death, that in fact, all deaths are not equal at all. This is recognised in the death handbooks and why we have another metric called “life-years lost”. Typically, it also takes health into account as well which gives us “QALY” lost, i.e. “quality-adjusted life-years” lost.

As the name suggests, it rescales deaths in terms of how many years of life were lost as opposed to an absolute number of deaths.

Just look here how good the analysis used to be in 2015, pre-COVID1, when our public health authorities did proper cost/benefit analyses. ....

........... Nevertheless, we also observe that 2019-20, the year of COVID, had relatively the largest impact on the over 75s. This unassailable fact has been known since March 2020 at the latest.

Conversely, 2020-21, the year of the vaccine, has fared substantially worse for the 15 to 64 year olds in relative terms.

..... My allusions to the causal effect of the vaccine are probably clear, even to those who have not read the rest of my research supporting that assumption. But can we back it up with the life-years lost data?

Let’s take a look at the time series data broken down by age for a clue. ....

......... We know that interventions didn’t reduce any COVID mortality so all we’re left with is collateral harm? 

.... This is the one chart you need because it tells you everywhere you need to investigate:
  1. On a macro level, COVID does not (did not) materially affect anyone over the age of 44. No intervention whatsoever could be merited for anyone under 45 on the basis of any cost/benefit analysis.
  2. The impact of those interventions are already profound and show no sign of abating. In fact, they are currently increasing.
  3. The most significant mortality event occurs a few weeks after the start of the mass vaccination campaign. This gun is not so much smoking as still burning as bright as a supernova.

Vaccine Safety Myth - A Probabilistic "Theory" on the Safety and Toxicity of Cell-Penetrating Vaccines

..... Apologies to all, this article is a bit technical at times and long , but it is an indispensable step to pinpoint the circumstances by which these vaccines can be dangerous.

Note: For the purpose of simplification, I will be using the term nanoparticle for any vaccine vector vehicle capable of penetrating a cell and delivering inside a foreign genetic load that includes mRNA/DNA vaccines, attenuated viruses and viral vectors.

For over a year now, I have been highlighting a fact that most “experts” have seriously been overlooking for the past decades:

All cells penetrated by nanoparticles, mRNA or viral vector, will necessarily be destroyed by the immune system
As you can see below in the description of the mechanism of action of an anti-COVID mRNA vaccine, the transfected1 muscle cell is supposed to die. That’s what apoptosis means. The destruction of all transfected cells is part of the process by which the immune system is stimulated, and it happens quite rapidly. ................

........ In conclusion, it is imperative that Public Health authorities throughout the world acknowledge the dangers of intravenous injections of these vaccines, immediately review injection protocols and materials used to strictly avoid any rapid concentrated injection of these vaccines into the bloodstream.

The fact that the FDA, the CDC, as well as the European Pharmaco vigilance agency have been blind for over a year to the harm caused by the reckless vaccination processes rolled out in haste is absolutely intolerable. A complete overhaul of these organisations needs to happen.


This is the most important article I ever wrote, as it is key to understanding the past two years. I began it in May 2020 and kept adding items.



I would like to discuss very disturbing statistics from the UK, that clearly shows that Covid is becoming a chronic disease, in the same sense as AIDS is a chronic disease. Covid, for many Brits, is an illness that will just not go away. Endless bouts, recurrence, or even never-ending disease, is now the norm and not the exception, and will lead to a catastrophe.

Covid, now a “chronic disease” that makes people ill continuously or very frequently, is completely opposed to “endemic disease”, like colds, that would make people ill for just a few days a year.

Before I go further, let me point out again that I am NOT trying to badmouth the splendid United Kingdom. It is a wonderful country with rich culture, incredible people, and OUTSTANDING STATISTICAL AGENCIES. It is the latter that let me show the disaster unfolding there. People of the UK are diverse, and are not biologically very different from people in other countries. What I write about the UK, applies to any other highly vaccinated Western country......

... Three Covids a Year will Kill Us

Covid-19 is not a harmless cold. It depletes immune T cells, similarly to how AIDS does:

...... All of this is suggesting, but not fully conclusively, that it is the vaccinated people who bear the brunt of repeat reinfections.

... An additional issue is that as Covid “affects the brain”, we as a society may lose the intellectual capacity that we need to deal with this smartly, in a year or so, if our vaccinated best minds succumb to brain damage from repeat infections.


Commentary:

eugyppius: The End of Corona?
Some speculation about the future.

...... What has ended, is merely the acute phase of a much larger and longer-term phenomenon. In fact, I think Acute Corona has been over for longer than many of us realised. As staged by pandemic planners, virologists, and politicians, this charade was always meant to close with mass vaccination in the final act. When the vaccines failed, there was a paroxysm of rage and despair, and then the energy was gone. While Omicron finally broke the containment regime, it would’ve come apart in any case. After the vaccines, there was simply nothing left for anybody to do. Sooner or later, one jurisdiction after the other would’ve started looking for the exits. Omicron was the proximate cause only.

We are left, then, with Chronic Corona, because while the specific energies SARS-2 called forth have exhausted themselves, the broader structures responsible for all of this remain not only intact, but strengthened, even optimised, for the pandemics of the future. We’ve entered an uncertain interwar period, where immediate capacity for action is expended, but the driving problems remain unresolved—if anything more deeply ingrained.



.... But so many other things just happened with Covid-19, rather serious things, and no one has had to answer for them, certainly not Dr. Anthony Fauci, who just days ago talked up another booster shot of his obviously defective mRNA “vaccines.” Dr. Fauci proposed that despite a raft of emerging statistics from the life insurance realm that indicate a shockingly high number of mysterious all-causes deaths for people in the prime of life. Several conditions appear to be killing them: 1) blood clotting in the capillaries of various organs, apparently caused by the “vaccine’s” main active ingredient, spike proteins; 2) heart inflammation (pericarditis and myocarditis); 3) a mystifying array of neurological afflictions; and 4) switched-off immune system toggles, including the cellular mechanism for preventing the growth of cancers.

This developing picture of a public health catastrophe, growing more robustly detailed by the week, has somehow not alerted the general public, not least because the entire public health officialdom does not want them to know about it. In fact, as averred to above, they are all still busy promoting the “vaccines” which are responsible. Rochelle Walensky, Director of the CDC, is rather well-known — though her duties appear limited to the public impersonation of a “concerned mom” — but whoever heard of Rebecca Bunnell, PhD, Director of the CDC’s Office of Science? Does Science play any part in the emerging disaster of sharply rising all-causes deaths? It would be good to know, don’t you think? Anyone heard from Daniel Jernigan, MD, Deputy CDC Director for Public Health Science and Surveillance (DDPHSS)? You’d think he would be out there surveilling things.

How about Brian C. Moyer, PhD, Director of the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics. He would be in charge, presumably, of the VAERS system, which tabulates adverse vaccine events. That system evidently under-reports adverse events by a shocking amount — some say only 1 percent are ever recorded. Why is that? Because it is a website that is so notoriously ill-designed and hard to use that the CDC pledged to fix it more than ten years ago and never got around to it. Why is that, Dr. Moyer? Has anyone asked him? I don’t think so.



Edward Dowd, a former BlackRock portfolio manager, made the appalling revelation during the March 10 episode of “The Alex Jones Show.”

According to Dowd, an investment adviser on Wall Street, an insurance industry expert who is part of his team stumbled upon the buried truth when, looking for something else, he broke down the CDC figures by age and created his own baseline death rates from there.

Showing charts the actuarian plotted from the figures, Dowd pointed at chart four as the punch line.

“Basically, you see that millennials experienced 84 percent excess death in the fall and winter of 2021. So excess deaths accelerated when mandates and boosters hit,” Dowd told Jones.

“And this age group is important because they’re healthy. And you can’t say that they, you know, miss their cancer screenings. This is ages 25 to 44. So this is just devastating evidence that the vaccines are causing this age group to die at an accelerating rate.

“I know I showed percentages in that chart, but the actual bodies are 61,000. That’s the Vietnam War event that just occurred to the millennial generation – 58,000 died in the Vietnam War.”

Dowd said he’s certain the vaccines are the culprits because the acceleration started in the summer when the mandates started hitting in August and September last year.






Once again, America's most famous "leftist" has many wondering if he was always such a dope

Can someone who cares about him, and his legacy, not step in, for his sake, and get him to shut up? How one would do that I have no idea, since he thinks his every word is genius, and that anyone who disagrees with him is stupid. As one who’s tried to argue with him (about Bush/Cheney’s election theft), and who was privy to an epic back-and-forth with him on 9/11 (which he thinks went down as advertised), I can tell you from firsthand experience (nor am I the only one who can) that Chomsky never actually addresses counter-evidence, but, metaphorically speaking, just sails up high above it—high enough to gaze down at anyone who dares present it to him—and calls it wrong. It’s a mode of “disputation” all his own, which I call “argument by levitation.” 

So there’s actually no way to tell Noam Chomsky that he’s (please forgive my rudeness) full of shit, because he knows everything, so if you tell him something that he doesn’t know, it must be wrong, there being nothing that he doesn’t know. Thus Chomsky knows that “vaccine hesitancy” is a “far-right phenomenon,” and that the FDA and CDC are honest regulators of Big Pharma, just as he’s always known that JFK’s assassination didn’t matter (“Who cares?” he once said on that subject, publicly), and that 9/11 went down as advertised, and that Bush/Cheney’s election theft was no big deal (he once told me this himself), and—astoundingly—that “January 6th” was an “attempted coup,” which he’s compared to Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch

..... However, it’s not just about that defunct “leftist” sage, but about what calls itself “the left” today, since nearly everybody who “identifies as” being on “the left” today appears to worship him, and therefore swallows even his astonishingly cruel and ignorant pronouncements on how anyone who will not get injected is a fascist—when, in fact, this lethal “vaccine” program is itself a patently fascistic project, and Chomsky’s fierce endorsement of that project is fascistic, too.




In memory of all those who "died suddenly" in the United States, March 15-21


This story is an interview with Kathleen Brown, a retired dental hygienist in Nova Scotia, Canada. Kathleen is on a mission to look into the obituaries of the people who passed suddenly, unexpectedly, or after a brief illness in Nova Scotia—and to demand an investigation from authorities on why there is an increase of sudden deaths in people 65 and younger.

... When Kathleen started looking into what was going on in her province, she saw that the number of COVID deaths in Nova Scotia, even by the official counts, was small comparing to the number of total deaths. (The population of Nova Scotia is just under one million people; the total number of people who officially died with / from COVID since the beginning of the pandemic is around 200; the number for the annual all-cause mortality is over 9000; the stats section with sources is included later in the article.) ... 


Pushback Fare:

Army doctor Dr. Pete Chambers gave an informed consent briefing to 3,000 soldiers. After that briefing, just 6 soldiers wanted to be vaccinated. Chambers was subsequently relieved of his duties.



COVID Idiocracy Fare:

Rigger: Bewilderment, Bemusement and Bejeezus

Around about 2 years ago the UK entered into lockdown for the first time. A year ago I was carrying my Dad’s coffin into the chapel. Now, a couple of days after yet another birthday with scarier numbers than covid attached to it, I’m sat here typing this and wondering what in the name of holy fuck happened?

We broke the world for a virus with an overall fatality rate of less than 0.3% ...

..... These kinds of, shall we be charitable and say, logical flights of fancy are not unsurprising in themselves. After all, there are more than a few of us, myself included, who, at times, cannot think our way out of a wet paper bag. What is more surprising is the seriousness with which this stuff is taken. It’s clearly and obviously stupid. It’s beyond stupid - it has passed through the great wormhole of lunacy and is vacationing in a parallel dimension. It’s one of those dimensions where God, taking a well-earned Sunday break to rest, beheld His work and said “Oh Crap”

When it comes to covid it has been “Oh Crap” indeed.

For some reason world governments decided to take what was a moderately serious disease outbreak and elevate it to “Oh Crap” status. This was clearly deliberate. It was not accidental that anyone dying, for whatever reason, within 28 days of a positive covid test was listed as a “covid” death.

This wasn’t some forgivable cock-up. This wasn’t some panic-porn-induced frenzy of helplessness in the face of an overwhelming threat. This was deliberate anti-scientific bollocks forced upon us in a national teabagging of truly staggering and unprecedented proportion.



Back to Non-Pandemic Fare:

GeoPolitical Fare:

A Manufactured World Crisis

Few people today ask the most important question about the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. Many people want America to stay out of the fight, but even they don’t ask the vital question. Why does the world face a crisis today? Why has a border dispute between Russia and Ukraine escalated to the point where people fear nuclear war?


Pearl Harbor My Eye!

We were already getting sick and tired of this Zelensky clown, but the sheer chutzpah of comparing Ukraine’s predicament with Pearl Harbor or 9/11 is just fricking outrageous. To paraphrase Senator Lloyd Bensten’s famous retort to Dan Quayle in the 1992 VP debate: We knew the United States of America and Ukraine isn’t any United States.

To the contrary, it is a cesspool of corruption, mal-governance and rank stupidity on the foreign policy front. For crying out loud, its situation is comparable to the drug cartels taking over Mexico, demanding the return of the Gadsden Purchase and then seeking to join a Russian-led anti-American treaty organization.

That is to say, Ukraine brought the Russian attack on itself by poking the bear in its eyes repeatedly since the 2014 coup. Yet now its leader has the gall to petition the US Congress to start WWII via standing-up a No Fly Zone in lieu of the obvious solution: Namely, Zelensky should resign and make way for a collaborationist government that will sue for peace on the following basis:
  • Recognize that Crimea is Russian territory and always has been since it was purchased by Catherine the Great in 1783;
  • Permit the separation of the Donbass Republics from Ukraine because the overwhelmingly Russian speaking populations there has been part of “New Russia” for more than 300 years and do not wish to be ruled by the anti-Russian fascists and oligarchs who control Kiev;
  • Amend the constitution of the rump state of Ukraine to prohibit its joining NATO or any similar western alliance, while reducing its military to a domestic law enforcement agency.
Those terms may seem harsh, but it’s the only alternative to the complete destruction of Ukraine and an eventual Russian win anyway

..... So for god’s sake Washington needs to stop standing on ceremony and leading the hapless Ukrainian government down the primrose path to national destruction. There is no way out of the current catastrophe except for Washington to:
  • concede that recruiting Ukraine to join NATO and potentially putting NATO missile bases within one minute’s cruise missile flight time from Moscow was an egregious mistake; and
  • that its demonization of Putin as a modern day Hitler on a quest to revive the Soviet Empire is just plain War Party hogwash and is no justification for its sweeping Sanctions War, most especially if Kiev capitulates to Moscow’s terms.
The truth, in fact, is more nearly the opposite. That is, there really are not two distinct nations there, one invading the other. Russia and Ukraine have never been neighboring independent states like Germany and France or Spain and Portugal or Columbia and Peru. To the contrary, they have been an intermingled territory and peoples for the last 1300 years with borders, governing arrangements episodic external invasions all over the lot.

The Ukrainian language itself is testimony to that history and geography.

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How Ukraine Will Be Partitioned After Kiev Capitulates:


How the West Sabotaged Ukraine

Vladimir Putin is responsible for his decision to illegally invade Ukraine. But that doesn’t make it any easier to watch western governments and their mainstream media outlets with their self-righteous displays of concern about Ukraine. After virtue signaling an implied commitment to allowing Ukraine into the EU, it is now being made clear that it will not be admitting Ukraine any time soon. Neither Washington nor Europe is using its power and influence to conduct diplomacy with Russia to facilitate a settlement to the conflict. Indeed it appears that all the US-led West is willing to do is throw a lot of weapons at Ukraine, which will keep the war going, maximize death and destruction for Ukrainians that will never lead to a victory over Russia, and create blowback risks to the West.

This all puts the lie to the West “standing with Ukraine.” It is, however, consistent with how the US and EU have dealt with Ukraine since 2013 as they sought to present that divided country with an ultimatum that could only threaten its fragile stability and hobble its society.

As Jack Matlock explained in his book Superpower Illusions, the greatest threat to post-Soviet Ukraine was not Russian imperialism but the country’s own internal divisions. As a result, the newly independent country needed to embrace a pluralistic approach to governing the state that was based on a civic rather than an ethnic identity to ensure the social cohesion necessary for long term peace and stability.





The supreme target is regime change in Russia, Ukraine is just a pawn in the game – or worse, mere cannon fodder...

.............. So Ukraine, with its pathetic neo-Nazi gangs, is just an – expendable – pawn in the desperate drive to stop something that is beyond anathema, from Washington’s perspective: a totally peaceful German-Russian-Chinese New Silk Road.

.... We are at just the early stages of the final push by the dying Empire to attempt arresting the flow of History. They are being outsmarted, they are already outgunned by the top military power in the world, and they will be checkmated. Existentially, they are not equipped to kill the Bear – and that hurts. Cosmically.


Two leaked stories from the Pentagon have exposed the lies of mainstream media about how Russia is conducting the Ukraine war in a bid to counter propaganda intended to get NATO into the conflict, writes Joe Lauria.


Directly confrontational U.S. and Russian narratives on the threat of weapons of mass destruction being deployed in Ukraine

... But let us put these contentious issues aside for a moment and ask whether the Russians have any reason whatsoever to resort to weapons that violate all international conventions for the sake of victory in their Ukraine campaign. On the basis of available information about the state of the fighting, rumored losses of personnel and depletion of conventional weapons, there are no reasons for such action by the Russians.  All evidence suggests that the Russian campaign has been conducted so far with a view to reducing civilian deaths to a minimum.  The UN agency responsible for monitoring such things has reported a little over 2,000 deaths in the first month of the Russian military operation. This is absolutely miniscule for a campaign of this magnitude. U.S. forces inflicted hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths in their own operations in Iraq in 2003 at this stage in the fighting. Moreover, the recent slowdown in the Russian offensive may be little more than a regrouping for continued assault when fresh reserves and equipment arrive. 

...... If I am correct and there is no factual or logical basis to assume that the Russians will deploy internationally prohibited weapons of mass destruction in Ukraine, then why all the noise about it? To answer that question, you have to turn to Russian media. 

Yesterday’s Russian television broadcasts give you the answer. Programming was filled with one dominant issue:  the documentary evidence that Russian military investigators have found in their seizure of biological laboratories in Ukraine financed by the Pentagon and curated by Americans.  The Russians are asserting that these labs were being used to conduct internationally prohibited development of biological weapons.  They provide details on the various toxins produced there and on human experiments, including on Ukrainian soldiers, resulting in multiple fatalities and hospitalizations. The documents and other evidence were shown on the screen quickly, but I have no doubt that they will be properly published in the days ahead. 

Perhaps most damaging in the present U.S. – Russian confrontation which has become so personalized on the two presidents is that the Russians are publicizing documents showing that Joe’s son Hunter was directly involved in the work of the criminal biological labs through a company of his that operated in Ukraine during the presidency of Barack Obama.



Is the Pentagon waging information war against the State Department? That’s one interpretation of the fact that this week, as Secretary of State Antony Blinken was asserting that Russians have committed war crimes in Ukraine, anonymous Pentagon sources were emphasizing how few of the bombs, missiles, and artillery shells delivered by Russia have hit civilians. 


'These are not serious people.'

.... Now the names we have for Putin roll around among us like pinballs. “He’s Hitler” has fallen somewhat out of fashion, the hyperbole having proven too silly—or maybe because the NATO allies are now arming a Nazi-infested regime in Ukraine. But he’s all sorts of other things that keep us well on the side of repugnance and hostility and safely away from any serious, adult understanding of the man, the nation, and what the man and the nation are doing—in Ukraine at the moment but anywhere else for that matter.

.... Straight off the top there is the question of statesmanship. When those purporting to serve as America’s statesmen and stateswomen think calling other world leaders names is properly part of the diplomatic repertoire—a prominent part, I’ll add—we are left with only one conclusion: We have no one capable of sailing our ship of state, no one in any position of influence worthy of the title “diplomat.” These are not, in short, serious people.  

... There will be no diplomacy. Power and coercion are all the Americans know.

...... There may be an argument for casting the Obama administration as an exception, but I don’t buy it. At bottom, Barack Obama’s perspective on the world and America’s place in it was no different than any other post–2001 president’s. He tinkered with the methods of American power—fewer invasions, more drones, a veneer of diplomacy—to obscure our continued reliance on power alone and our indifference to other people’s rights, views, aspirations, and interests. 

Look where all this has landed us. Every time I hear Biden call Putin or some other world leader not to Washington’s liking a name out of the American inventory of epithets, it is a reminder of how grotesquely U.S. “statecraft” has been infantilized. We cannot be surprised. How much distance is there between the infantilization of the American public and the infantilization of our post–2001 excuse for diplomacy? Again, I see none. 





Emails from Hunter Biden's notorious laptop reveal that the first son helped secure millions of dollars for a DoD contractor - Metabiota - which specializes in researching pandemic-causing diseases that could be used as bioweapons, according to the Daily Mail, which obtained Hunter's emails.


Maria Zakharova: BioBiden

We can get a rough idea of the US political elites’ involvement in the military biological activity in Ukraine if we rely on open sources as well as leaked documents. Below is an attempt to reconstruct the chronology of this involvement, though not a comprehensive one. There are many gaps in this truly diabolical plan that are still to be filled.


Vids:

Clarity on Putin’s Aims


Tweet Vid:





CaitOz Fare:


You know you are being aggressively propagandized about Ukraine by the mass media and by Silicon Valley. You can feel it in your guts. Everyone can feel it, on some level. It feels gross.

The split on this issue is between those who trust this gut feeling and those who choose to psychologically compartmentalize away from it. Because if you don’t compartmentalize away from it, the implications of this are very frightening. It means pretty much everything you’ve been told your whole life about the government, about your nation, about the news media, and about the way the world works, has been a lie.

But that is the basic reality. If you’ve already seen this, you won’t experience cognitive dissonance when you observe it in the unprecedented imperial narrative management campaign we’re seeing with Ukraine. If you haven’t seen it, you’ll likely experience a lot of cognitive dissonance if you try to square your gut feeling that you’re being propagandized about Ukraine with your belief that your favorite politicians and news sources always tell you the objective truth. And you will compartmentalize accordingly.

That’s just how we’re wired. Our minds are wired to select for cognitive ease and forcefully reject information which challenges our present worldview. Pushing past the cognitive discomfort and facing reality is the only way to come to real understanding.

.....

Michael Parenti said years ago that the ultimate neocon plan (which today has become simply the mainstream orthodoxy on US foreign policy) is a confrontation with disobedient governments, the ultimate target being China, to ensure the supremacy of American global capitalism. There’s no good reason this needs to happen. There’s no good reason the defensive Russia-China tandem described years ago by Gilbert Doctorow needs to be targeted in the way it’s currently being targeted by this war that was deliberately provoked by western powers.

They are lying to you. They are lying when they say they tried to prevent this war. They are lying when they say de-escalation is impossible. They are lying when they say World War 3 is inevitable, or is upon us already. Peace and detente are very possible. All that would need to happen is the dropping away of this notion that this planet of ours needs to be dominated by a single power structure. That’s all we’d need for the threat of nuclear armageddon to go away. That’s all we’d need to ensure humanity’s progress into the future.

We can simply move from endless escalation to diplomacy, from diplomacy to de-escalation, from de-escalation to detente, from detente to true peace, and from true peace to collaboration and human thriving. The only thing stopping that from happening is this insane drive to dominate.

Don’t believe the liars.


***** The Only ‘Agency’ Ukraine Has Is The Central Intelligence Kind

Calling this a “proxy war” between Russia and the United States or calling Kyiv a “puppet regime” of Washington is strictly taboo now. That Ukraine has lacked independent agency in this war and the events leading up to it is something you are simply not allowed to say.

Well, I’m saying it. This is a proxy war. Kyiv is a puppet regime. Ukraine does not have independent agency in any meaningful way. This is not the fault of the Ukrainian people, who are obviously far and away the greatest victims of the Russian invasion, but of the giant western power structure which deliberately worked to take away the nation’s agency many years before the invasion took place.

I mean, my god. The US and its allies are pouring billions of dollars worth of weapons into Ukraine from around the world, the CIA has been training Ukrainians to kill Russians, the US intelligence cartel is directly sharing military intelligence with Kyiv as we speak, and this follows US-backed coups in Ukraine in 2014 and in 2004 before that.

This is a proxy war. This is exactly the thing that a proxy war is. The only “agency” Ukraine has is the Central Intelligence kind.

In an excellent article for Multipolarista titled “Ukrainian leftist criticizes Western war drive with Russia: US is using Ukraine as ‘cannon fodder’“, Ukrainian-American Yuliy Dubovyk writes the following:
Like any other US puppet regime, Ukraine doesn’t have any real independence. Kiev has been actively pushed to confront Russia by every US administration, against the will of the majority of Ukrainian people.

… The support for Ukraine that fills the Western media now is not out of real solidarity with the people of Ukraine. If that were the case, the US wouldn’t have overthrown our government twice in a decade; it wouldn’t have supported the policies that made us the poorest country in Europe; it wouldn’t have fueled a brutal civil war for the past eight years.

The reason US media outlets and politicians are all backing Ukraine now is because they want to use the Ukrainian military and civilian population as cannon fodder in a proxy war with a political adversary.
Yes indeedy. ...



... So the US government is continuing its policy of refusing to attempt any high-level diplomatic resolutions to this war despite its public hand-wringing about the horrific violence that’s being inflicted upon the people of Ukraine. This revelation fits nicely with a recent report by Bloomberg’s Niall Ferguson that sources in the US and UK governments have told him the real goal of western powers in this conflict is not to negotiate peace or end the war quickly, but to prolong it in order “bleed Putin” and achieve regime change in Moscow.

....... The US empire doesn’t care about Ukrainian lives, and it’s insulting that its operatives continually pretend to. The empire will happily feed every man, woman and child in the entire nation into the mouth of this war if it means unseating a disobedient leader from a nuclear-armed seat of power which has become unacceptably cozy with Beijing and intolerably comfortable with intervening against US imperial agendas. And all the Ukrainian-flag-waving propagandized westerners with their #StandWithUkraine Instagram activism and blue and yellow profile pics will cheer for it every step of the way.

I hope this brutal proxy war ends and peace comes to Ukraine very quickly. But from what we’re seeing today there appears to be an immense globe-spanning power structure holding its foot against the door of the only exit from this horror.





Really underneath the narrative spin it’s just a giant tyrant doing tyrannical things. Heinlein said “Man is not a rational animal; he is a rationalizing animal.” This applies to empires and their narrative control mechanisms just as much as to individuals.



Other Quotes of the Week:

Gingrich: Referring to Joe Biden and Harris, Gingrich proclaimed “You know, he may or may not have cognitive decline problems at his age, but at her age, she’s just dumb.” “Let’s be clear, Kamala Harris may be the dumbest person ever elected vice president in American history and that’s why people keep resigning,” Gingrich further asserted

Kolakusic: “To defend our rights and the rights of our children, which we have acquired over the centuries, many of us – including myself – are willing to risk our own freedom and our own lives,” he said. “Unfortunately, today there are those among us who trample on these fundamental values.” Kolakusic then turned to face Trudeau. “Canada, once a symbol of the modern world, has become a symbol of civil rights violations under your quasi-liberal boot in recent months,”

from Crimea: Are we worried? Yes. 80 % of Crimeans have got relatives in Ukraine. But, we saw what Nazi battalions did in Ukraine. I personally saw it in Donbass.  Someone has to finish it.  I never ever thought it could happen with…my countries [Russia and Ukraine]


Soldo: Canada has crossed the rubicon, or, to use another phrase, it has let the genie out of the bottle. We all know how power hungry government officials and those in the private sector are, so what is stopping this from proliferating? And this brings us back to the concepts of freedom and democracy: Trudeau’s overreach erodes those liberal values. There is no doubt whatsoever that the west has taken an authoritarian turn. That makes the notion that it is fighting on behalf of ‘democracy’ against authoritarianism all the more ridiculous.



Big Thoughts:

Preparing For Less




A shift has occurred from an identity-based discourse based in advocacy to an identity-based discourse that’s very obviously a means of establishing personal power. This is partially due to the victories of the old discourse, but primarily because–as I outlined in the last post–our politics are broken in a way that allows for the moral urgency of old, abandoned concepts to be applied to the new definitions of those concepts. 

If you were to ask parents what they’d think about a male 2nd grade teacher telling kids he had a husband, you’d see massive support among Dems and Independents–something like 95% and 85%, respectively. And, in a huge recent victory for gay rights, a solid 40-60% of Republicans also wouldn’t care. This culture war issue has be won! That should be a good thing!

But, sadly, when it comes to identity, victory equals defeat. No victimhood means no moral standing–the urgency dissipates, and your ability to justify yourself (and therefore your politics) gets usurped. More simply, the NGO sinecures stop flowing when problems get resolved. So they’ve had to raise the stakes in order to keep their victimhood profitable–and they’ve managed to do so in a manner that makes further progress significantly more difficult to achieve.



DO NOT RIP Fare:



A substitute teacher in 1998 confronts former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright who just passed away at age 84



Pics of the Week:





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