Pages

Wednesday, June 8, 2022

2022-06-08

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

Economic and Market Fare:

World Bank: Stagflation Risk Rises Amid Sharp Slowdown in Growth

The world economy is expected to experience its sharpest deceleration following an initial recovery from global recession in more than 80 years



... As the AtlantaFed notes, "After recent releases from the US Bureau of Economic Analysis, the US Census Bureau, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the Institute for Supply Management, the Atlanta Fed nowcasts of second-quarter real personal consumption expenditures growth and real gross private domestic investment growth decreased from 4.4 percent and -8.3 percent, respectively, to 3.7 percent and -8.5 percent, respectively. Also, the nowcast of the contribution of the change in real net exports to second-quarter real GDP growth increased from -0.25 percentage points to -0.13 percentage points."

In short: the US consumer is getting tapped out, just as we have been warning repeatedly.



The latest ocean container bookings data reveals that despite the strong levels of inbound cargo during the first five months of 2022, import demand is not just softening — it’s dropping off a cliff. Because capacity on the trans-Pacific has remained relatively stable, Drewry’s container spot rates from China to the West Coast have plunged 41% month-over-month

... Consumer buying patterns are rapidly normalizing to pre-COVID levels, and U.S. retailers are stuck with too much inventory.

... This also puts U.S. containerized imports from all countries of origin down 36% year-over-year, which is a reversion back to the volume levels of the summer of 2020. But what is the cause of the sudden drop in containerized import volumes? Well, there are a few simultaneous factors converging that serve as likely explanations for why volumes are suddenly dropping. ..


Inflation continues to run hot—and now, finally, the debate about inflation is heating up.

On one side of the debate are mainstream economists and lobbyists for big business, the people Lydia DePillis refers to as having a simple mantra: “Supply and demand, Economics 101.” In their view, inflation is caused by supply and demand in the labor market, which is allowing workers’ wages to increase at an unsustainable rate (a story that, as I showed in April, has no validity), and supply and demand in the economy as a whole, with too much money chasing too few goods.

Simple, straightforward, and. . .wrong.

Fortunately, there’s another side to the debate, with heterodox economists and progressive activists arguing that increasingly dominant corporations are taking advantage of the current situation (the pandemic, disruptions in global supply-chains, the war in Ukraine, and so on) to jack up prices and rake in even higher profits than they’ve been able to do in recent times.

Josh Bivens, of the Economic Policy Institute, has offered two arguments that challenge the mainstream story: First, while “It is unlikely that either the extent of corporate greed or even the power of corporations generally has increased during the past two years. . .the already-excessive power of corporations has been channeled into raising prices rather than the more traditional form it has taken in recent decades: suppressing wages.” Second, inflation can’t simply be the result of macroeconomic overheating. That would suggest, at this point in a classic economic recovery, that profits should be shrinking and the labor share of income should be rising. As Biven notes, “The fact that the exact opposite pattern has happened so far in the recovery should cast much doubt on inflation expectations rooted simply in claims of macroeconomic overheating.”*

So, we have dramatically different analyses of the causes of the current inflation, and of course two very different strategies for combatting inflation. The mainstream policy (as I also wrote about in April) is to slow the rate of growth of the economy (for example, by raising interest rates) and increase the level of unemployment, thus slowing the rate of increase of both wages and prices. And the alternative? Bivens supports a temporary excess profits tax. Other possibilities—which, alas, are not yet being raised in the debate—include price controls (especially on commodities that make up workers’ wage bundles), government provisioning of basic wage goods (including, for example, baby formula), and subsidies to workers (which, while they wouldn’t necessarily lower inflation, would at least make it easier for workers to maintain their current standard of living).

What we’re witnessing, then, is an important debate about the causes and consequences of inflation


Economists are divorced from reality

American political debates over inflation have settled into predictable — and mostly unhelpful — patterns. On one side, “neoliberal” Democrats such as Lawrence Summers and Jason Furman argue that President Biden’s Covid stimulus bill was too aggressive, causing the economy to overheat and precipitating an inflationary wage-price spiral. On the other, progressives such as Elizabeth Warren and members of the Biden administration point to factors like idiosyncratic supply chain disruptions from the pandemic and later the Ukraine war, while increasingly leaning on explanations involving “corporate greed”. Republicans, meanwhile, are eager to blame Biden for inflation, but have added nothing of substance to discussions around either its causes or cures.

The conventional inflation narratives are both flawed, however, and are increasingly deployed to cover a retreat to the comfort of traditional ideological divides.

....... Indeed, the question going forward is whether there are structural issues — aside from idiosyncratic supply chain problems — that will cause inflation to remain elevated and lead to stagflation (high inflation and low growth). Here, there are reasons for concern, although they do not fit neatly into either conventional narrative and so have received relatively little attention.

The most intriguing and potentially alarming trends are visible in the oil market. ....... This trajectory is difficult to square with inflation accounts based on excessive demand. Oil demand has still not exceeded pre-pandemic levels; it is supply that has lagged.

.... Any serious analysis of today’s inflation must recognise the different dynamics at play across various sectors. The oil industry is not the same as the housing market, semiconductors, shipping, and so forth. Nevertheless, across industries, the trend of shareholders preferring cash returns over investment has been prevalent in recent decades.

..... Corporate profit margins achieved a record in 2021 (though they seem poised to retreat somewhat in the coming quarters), and studies have found that rising corporate profits have contributed significantly more to inflation than labour costs. Employees may be able to manage some concessions in a tight labour market, but the data hardly suggest that is the dominant factor.

... Contrary to neoliberal disdain for tariffs and “hipster antitrust”, however, prudent competition and trade policy reforms will be necessary to boost domestic investment in a highly concentrated economy whose industrial base has eroded.

... Even if inflation subsides more rapidly than expected, a new policy focus on the supply side is necessary. Avoiding stagflation simply by returning to “secular stagnation”, as Summers would put it, would only lead to further decline and likely a repetition of the same cycle in the future. Also required is the recognition that fundamental assumptions of economic theory — and the ideological approaches they inspire — no longer match the realities of America’s financialised economy.


Evidence-based answers to the main (policy) questions concerning the return of high inflation

A specter is haunting the US—the specter of stagflation

Financial Times’ Martin Wolf (2022) is the latest influential voice sounding the alarm bell on ‘the threat of stagflation’ and calling for the Fed to drastically raise interest rates to bring inflation down to its target level. Published on May 24, Wolf’s diagnosis of where the stagflation in the US economy is coming from reflects current establishment opinion: nominal demand, fuelled by over-expansionary fiscal and monetary policies during the COVID-19 crisis, is exceeding US supply. To bring down inflation, these macroeconomic policy errors need to be corrected convincingly and as soon as possible. This is how Wolf puts it:
“US supply is constrained above all by overfull employment […] Meanwhile, nominal demand has been expanding at a torrid pace. [….] The combination of fiscal and monetary policies implemented in 2020 and 2021 ignited an inflationary fire. The belief that these flames will go out with a modest move in interest rates and no rise in unemployment is far too optimistic. Suppose, then, that this grim perspective is correct. Then inflation will fall, but maybe only to 4 per cent or so. Higher inflation would become a new normal. The Fed would then need to act again or have to abandon its target, destabilising expectations and losing credibility. This would be a stagflation cycle — a result of the interaction of shocks with mistakes made by fiscal and monetary policymakers.” 
Wolf hedges his bets and does not state how strongly the Fed should raise the interest rate in order to avoid the ‘grim’ prospect of a stagflation cycle. Wolf is in the good company of Lawrence Summers who voiced similar concerns already in February. Summers, however, does not hesitate to provide more explicit guidance to monetary policy-makers in the Fed:
“[….] we’re likely to have a need for nominal interest rates, basic Fed interest rates, to rise to the 4 percent to 5 percent range over the next couple of years. If they don’t do that, I think we’ll get higher inflation. And then over time, it will be necessary for them to get to still higher levels and cause even greater dislocations” (Klein 2022).
Summers’ and Wolf’s calls for action are echoed by many observers in the financial sector. Mohamed El-Erian (2022), for instance, argues that
“Also similar to the 1970s, the US Federal Reserve [….] is already dealing with self-inflicted damage to its inflation-fighting credibility. With that comes the likelihood of de-anchored inflationary expectations, the absence of good monetary policy options, and a stark choice for the Fed between enabling above-target inflation well into 2023 or pushing the economy into recession.” 
Goldman Sachs Group President John Waldron has just one piece of advice for the Fed: “…. bring back Paul Volcker” (Natarajan and Reyes 2022). Wolf, Summers, El-Erian, and Waldron are thus putting serious pressure on the Fed to hike up interest rates more strongly and quickly than it is already doing.

On March 16, 2022, the Fed raised the interest rate by a quarter percentage point, from 0.25% to 0.5%—the first interest rate increase since 2018. And on May 3, 2022, it raised its benchmark rate by another half-a-percentage point. “We have to reassure people we are going to defend our inflation target and we are going to get inflation back to 2%,” St. Louis Federal Reserve President James Bullard stated recently, adding that “our credibility is on the line here” (Egan 2022). Bullard doubled down on his view by recommending that the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) should shoot for a policy rate above 3% this year.

Not only the Fed, but central banks all over the globe are raising rates rapidly in the most widespread tightening of monetary policy for more than two decades

...... For Summers, a ‘hard landing’, a cherished euphemism for a deeper, bruising, recession, appears to be preferable to the long-run societal cost of a scenario in which the Fed does not act strongly and quickly enough, loses its inflation-fighting credibility, and cannot prevent the de-anchoring of expectations. Wolf concurs (again) and adds that “the political ramifications [of such a stagflation cycle] are disturbing, especially given a vast oversupply of crazy populists.”

The arguments of Summers and Wolf are fairly typical of the much broader macroeconomic debate within a select in-crowd of Very Serious Economists over how to respond to the recent surge in US inflation. The tone of this debate in newspapers and online fora is dire (“stagflation, after all, is a grim threat”); the arguments are abstract (“monetary tightening is crucial to maintain the Fed’s inflation-fighting credibility and keep inflation expectations anchored”); the analyses are surprisingly ahistorical (“today’s situation is a repeat of the 1970s” and “bring back Volcker”), the discussions are relatively tone-deaf to the very inegalitarian negative impacts of the sharp increases in interest rates, the (social engineering) policy solutions are mechanical and actionable (“raise interest rates to 5% and the inflation will go away”); and the underlying thinking remains firmly within the box of establishment macroeconomics (“the Fed is capable of controlling inflation without killing the economy in so doing”).

A more acute assessment would recognize that interest rates are a socially very costly tool to ‘control’ inflation—especially when the sources of the inflationary surge lie in an unprecedented constellation of (mostly) supply-side bottlenecks which are driving up prices. Similarly, a close look at the past record of monetary tightening shows that the Fed has hardly ever managed to guide the economy to a soft landing with interest rate increases

... In a new Working Paper for INET, I attempt to recover the lost plot ...................................


Romanchuk: Disinflation Needed A Lot Smaller Than Early 1980 Case

Marijn A. Bolhuis, Judd N. L. Cramer, and Lawrence H. Summers released a NBER working paper “Comparing Past and Present Inflation” (link) which constructs a alternate CPI index that is comparable to the present methodology. Historically, the housing component was based on house prices and included mortgage rates — which meant that the housing component of CPI mechanically follows interest rates.

During the Volcker Madness, this meant that the rapid rate hikes drove up CPI and then CPI inflation fell after rates were reversed. This effect makes the Volcker policy appear more disinflationary — since it first raised peak inflation, then the effect reversed.

...... Core PCE annual inflation registered 4.9% in April, and so we need a 3% drop to return to 2%. If we look at the back history, we see that there were two historic disinflations since the 1970s of such a magnitude in roughly a one-year span.
  1. Core PCE inflation dropped from 10.2% in February 1975 to 6.0% in May 1976 (a 4.2% drop).
  2. Core PCE was 9.8% in January 1981, and dropped to 7.0% in March 1982 (and kept falling).
As seen by the recession bars, those disinflations coincided with recessions. Absent a recession, I see very little chance of a similar disinflation in core (although headline inflation might get whacked at some point due to a oil price whipsaw). So if the authors’ intention to solely focus on an immediate disinflation, we might need extremely aggressive rate hikes to cause an immediate deep recession.

Realistically, that is not an option embraced by policymakers — they accept that a disinflation will take time. This is particularly true for the housing component of the CPI (which has a considerable weight in core CPI), as its construction creates considerable lags — it is nearly impossible for it to turn on a dime.

Nevertheless, the belief that we are “close” to the 1970s inflation regime is hyperbolic — as the bottom panel demonstrates. The mid-1970s disinflation episode is usually ignored — since inflation persisted at a high level. The bottom panel shows the annualised inflation rate over a 3-year horizon (which covers the inflation drop then spike since the pandemic). Yes, the current reading is high — but nothing like the ever-rising pattern of the 1970s.

By the early 1980s, most developed countries (with a few exceptions) had been fighting a losing battle with inflation for a decade or longer. Inflation psychology was ingrained. Although inflation did not subside as quickly “Team Transitory” (although not a forecaster, I was a sympathiser) expected, 2022 is in a much better place than 1980 with respect to inflation.



..... The European Union of the past three decades has served as a regional microcosm of what came to be called hyperglobalization.1 Indeed, it was in a significant way a smaller-sized, continental model for the integrated global capitalism that was the ultimate objective of those subscribing at the time to the Washington Consensus. The EU offered a borderless internal market for goods, services, labor, and capital; rules-based economic governance was upheld by an almighty international court, the European Court of Justice (ECJ); and a common currency, the euro, was managed by an equally almighty central bank, the ECB. The arrangement closely matched the Hayekian idea of an international federation designed to limit discretionary economic policy—an almost perfect approximation of what Hayek called isonomy: identical market-liberal laws in all states included in the system.2 This no-more-political economy was ruled by a politically sterilized combination of technocracy—the ECB and the EU’s pseudo-executive, the European Commission—and what might be called nomocracy—the ECJ—under an in practice unchangeable de facto constitution. The latter consisted of two treaties,3 unreadable for the normal citizen, among twenty-eight coun­tries, each of them entitled to veto any change.4 Anchoring the whole project within the global financial system dominated by the United States, the treaties provided for unlimited capital mobility, out­lawing capital controls of any sort not just within the Union but also across its borders.5

That this construction suffered from what came to be euphemistically called a “democratic deficit” did not go unnoticed. Indeed, among insid­ers in Brussels, the joke is often heard that, with its current constitution, the European Union would never be allowed to join itself. ...

... Empires are at a congenital risk of overextension, in territorial, economic, political, cultural, and other respects. The larger they get, the more it costs to keep them together, as centrifugal forces grow and the center needs to mobilize ever more resources to contain them. After the global financial crisis of 2008 and its spread to Europe after 2009, the EU and EMU began to fracture along several dimensions, their economic, ideo­logical, and coercive capacities for integration becoming increasingly overtaxed. On the EU’s western flank, Brexit was the first case of a member state leaving a Union that ideologically considers itself perma­nent. There were many factors involved that contributed to the outcome of the Brexit referendum, which have been widely debated for almost a decade now. One major reason (less spectacular but certainly more fundamental than many others) why British membership proved unsus­tainable was a profound incompatibility of the British de facto constitution, and its parliamentary absolutism, with Brussels-style rule by judges and technocrats. Another reason, of course, was the inability and indeed unwillingness of Brussels to do something about the long-term neglect by British governments of the disintegration of the country’s social fabric.

Turning to the south, entrenched national ways of doing capitalism proved incompatible with the prescriptions of the EMU and the Internal Market, leading Italy in particular down a path of prolonged and by all indications irreversible economic decline. Attempts at reversing the trend either through “structural reforms,” according to neoliberal pre­scriptions, or via the ECB and the European Commission bending the anti-interventionist rules governing Monetary Union, silently tolerated by the French and German governments, failed dismally. By now it has become clear that even the European Union’s Corona Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF), and the subsidies it will provide to Italy, will not halt Italian decline either.7 Among other things, the Italian case shows that an effective regional policy aiming at economic convergence is even less feasible among, as compared to within, nation-states.

Furthermore, on the Union’s eastern periphery, countries carry a historical legacy of cultural traditionalism, political authoritarianism, and nationalist resistance against international intervention in their internal life, the latter reinforced by their experience under the Soviet empire. Efforts to impose western European mores and tastes on these societies, especially when accompanied by threats of economic sanctions (as in the case of the Union’s so-called “rule of law” policies), caused “populist” opposition and resentment against what was perceived by many as an attempt to deprive them of their newly recovered national sovereignty.8 Conflicts in the European Council over cultural issues went as far as western heads of governments more or less explicitly urging their eastern colleagues, in particular those from Hungary and Poland, to exit from the Union if they were unwilling to share its “values.”9 Combined with the threat of economic sanctions, this in effect amounted to nothing less than an attempt to bring about a regime change in fellow member states. ...

...... War is the ultimate stochastic source of history, and once it is underway there is no limit to the surprises it may bring. Still, even though the war in Ukraine seems far from over at the time of writing, one may feel justified observing that it has put an end, at least for the foreseeable future, to any vision of an independent, non-imperial, cooperative state system in Europe. The war also seems to have dealt a death blow to the French dream of turning the liberal empire of the European Union into a strategically sovereign global force, credibly rivaling both a rising China and a declining United States. The Russian invasion of Ukraine seems to have answered the question of the European order by reinstating the model, long believed to be history, of the Cold War: a Europe united under American leadership as a transatlantic bridgehead for the United States in an alliance against a common enemy, then the Soviet Union and now Russia. Inclusion in and subordination to a resurrected, remilitarized “West,” as a European subdepartment of NATO, seems to have saved, for the time being, the European Union from its destructive centrifugal forces, without however eliminating them. By restoring the West, the war neutralized the various fault lines where the EU was crumbling, some more and some less, while catapulting the United States into a position of renewed hegemony over western Europe, including its regional organization, the European Union. ...

...... Very likely, a protracted confrontation over Ukraine would force Russia into a close relationship of dependence on China, securing China a captive Eurasian ally and giving it assured access to Russian resources, at bargain prices as the West would no longer compete for them. Russia, in turn, could benefit from Chinese technology, to the extent that it would be made available. At first glance, an alliance like this might appear to be against the interests of the United States. It would, however, come with an equally close, and equally asymmetrical, American-dominated alliance between the United States and western Europe, where what Europe can deliver to the United States would clearly exceed what Russia can deliver to China. Something like a stalemated phony war in Ukraine could be in the interest of a United States seeking to build global alliances for an imminent battle with China over the next New World Order, monopolar or bipolar in old or new ways, to be fought out in coming years, after the end of the end of history.



... Musk and these other bosses are like King Canute trying to turn back the tide.  Since the pandemic, many workers are refusing to return to a full-time five-day week. 

.... But the real reason for opposition by employers is not just lower productivity but that management starts to lose control over its employees, both in terms of time and in dictating activity.  The oppressive boss-employee relationship begins to weaken.  And of course, there is the question of money.

.... These objections by the bosses to remote working and a shorter working week are now to be tested in a new pilot scheme.  More than 3,000 workers at 60 companies across Britain will trial a four-day working week, in what is thought to be the biggest pilot scheme to take place anywhere in the world.  Joe O’Connor, the chief executive of 4 Day Week Global, said there was no way to “turn the clock back” to the pre-pandemic world. “Increasingly, managers and executives are embracing a new model of work which focuses on quality of outputs, not quantity of hours,” he said. “Workers have emerged from the pandemic with different expectations around what constitutes a healthy life-work balance.”


QsOTW:

Cignarella: The cost of money will have to rise considerably higher for the Fed to address a problem that isn’t really a monetary policy issue, but one that is partly fiscal in nature and partly driven by supply and demand imbalances.


Hoz: The slow bleeding has led to complacency. On the surface everything looks good, but if you dig deeper the economy is melting down. The masses will soon come to the realization that the crisis is deepening and the government can not stop it, leading to a widespread panic selling.


Hudson: the U.S.-China conflict cannot simply be regarded as market competition between two industrial rivals. It is a broader conflict between different political economic systems - not only between capitalism and socialism as such, but between the logic of an industrial economy and that of a financialized rentier economy increasingly dependent on foreign subsidy and exploitation as its own domestic economy shrivels.


Charts: 
1:
9:



... ...


.......... And then the pandemic hit, which is where this all gets interesting. 

The pandemic had two long-term deleterious impacts on the economy which we are now confronting. First off as we all know it clusterfucked the supply chain. Inventories of everything became depleted. Double ordering ensued. Consumers hoarded merchandise. And THEN the tsunami of combined fiscal and monetary stimulus hit the economy. So not only did the supply curve shift in, but the demand curve shifted out. From an economic standpoint, that meant MORE demand and LESS supply and therefore higher prices of EVERYTHING at the same time. 

Fast forward to 2022, and now all of that stimulus is receding. There's only one problem. The price of EVERYTHING remains at record highs. So just as consumers are seeing less income, they are being asked to pay more for everything.

Where today's pundits are ALL wrong is in assuming this is 1979 deja vu when the middle class was at its apex. Today, union membership is at an all time low. Which means workers have very little bargaining power. Sure, they've benefited from a tight labor market, but that doesn't mean they've recovered from 40 years of wage deflation.

Because the economy did not float back from China and U.S. capacity utilization remains at record late cycle lows. 



(not just) for the ESG crowd:

New satellite data shows that in many coastal cities around the world, land is subsiding even faster than sea level is rising.


Climate change and rapid population growth are shrinking the lake, creating a bowl of toxic dust that could poison the air around Salt Lake City.




Other Fare:

Arnott and Mulligan: Non-Covid Excess Deaths, 2020-21: Collateral Damage of Policy Choices?

From April 2020 through at least the end of 2021, Americans died from non-Covid causes at an average annual rate 97,000 in excess of previous trends. Hypertension and heart disease deaths combined were elevated 32,000. Diabetes or obesity, drug-induced causes, and alcohol-induced causes were each elevated 12,000 to 15,000 above previous (upward) trends. Drug deaths especially followed an alarming trend, only to significantly exceed it during the pandemic to reach 108,000 for calendar year 2021. Homicide and motor-vehicle fatalities combined were elevated almost 10,000. Various other causes combined to add 18,000. While Covid deaths overwhelmingly afflict senior citizens, absolute numbers of non-Covid excess deaths are similar for each of the 18-44, 45-64, and over-65 age groups, with essentially no aggregate excess deaths of children. Mortality from all causes during the pandemic was elevated 26 percent for working-age adults (18-64), as compared to 18 percent for the elderly. Other data on drug addictions, non-fatal shootings, weight gain, and cancer screenings point to a historic, yet largely unacknowledged, health emergency.



Contrarian Perspectives

Extra [i.e. Controversial] Fare:

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


Regular Fare:

******************** Welsh: Is Capitalism Near Its End?

In the Book “Does Capitalism Have a Future” Emmanuel Wallerstein argues that capitalism cannot be saved because capitalism requires the endless pursuit of profits, and the world system is at a stage where there is no room for another wave of exploiting people who are largely outside the system, which capitalism in its modern form (from about the late 15 century), requires.

.................. Without this, the current form of capitalism is doomed, profits can only be increased by impoverishing societies as a whole, which destroys the wealth customers need to buy goods.

Though Wallerstein doesn’t emphasize it, there’s also the issue of simple depletion of minerals and of climate change: there’s plenty of hydrocarbons in the world, but using them is destroying subsistence and food production in general and drawing down water and so on. We are running out of other materials, almost exactly as “The Limits To Growth” predicted five decades ago.

The reason people like Bezos and Musk are obsessed with space and automation is that only if space mining, colonization and automation are viable solutions can the resource constraints and the expansion constraint be broken. Only that way can this style of capitalism continue, possibly nearly forever, by expansion to new worlds, the asteroid belt and so on. ....


Can progressive movements be taken back from the elite?

..... For all these reasons, there’s a need for an earnest critique of the elite appropriation of progressive struggles and its distortionary effects: how elite ends deviate from and are often contrary to the needs of ordinary people.

...... Then again, the United States itself stands in an elite position vis-à-vis much of the rest of the world: it’s the biggest consumer, the second biggest polluter, the biggest military power, a record-setter in fomenting regime change. If the American voter’s sulky alternation between its two leading parties expresses anything, it’s less solidarity with those who suffer from its supremacy than a desire to maintain that supremacy at any cost. To address the country’s elites in the language of elites about the urgency of ending elite capture just doesn’t feel like the kind of thing that will work.


It’s a lot easier to be the party that wants to break government than it is to be the one that wants to use it.    

.. I’ll get to why I think that is, but first, let’s acknowledge three structural difficulties Democrats face that Republicans don’t. These are rarely discussed or acknowledged, especially the first two. But they are fundamental to why Democrats have a harder time articulating a clear message.

Structural difficulty number one: There just aren’t as many liberals as there are conservatives in the United States. ...




Unsustainability / Climate Fare:


..... This is not just limited to solar panels.  Its also true for EVs; you have to dig half a million pounds of earth up to make just one battery, and there is no economically viable means of recycling them either.  Yes, technically they can be recycled, but then you get to pay even more.


Scientists are using dendroclimatology to investigate megadroughts in the western U.S., and the trees are telling a disturbing tale.

......... Compact signatories therefore legally bound themselves to unrealistically large allocations because their input data, unbeknownst to them and by sheer chance, came from an anomalously wet period in the climatic history of the U.S. Southwest. People in the region have been dealing with the consequences of this ever since.

It seems highly unlikely that the compact will be renegotiated given the current political climate. Politics may supersede nature in the short run, but Mother Nature will rule in the long run.

To summarize, tree-ring analysis demonstrates that: (1) the megadrought puts the U.S. Southwest in unprecedented and uncharted climatological territory, and (2) the allocation of the area’s largest and most important water source was based on data from an unusually wet period and therefore would be insufficient to supply this now-booming region even if it weren’t in a megadrought. You simply cannot make this stuff up.


Related Vid:

l



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; Marc Girardot; plus Walter Chesnut (on twitter); new additions: Sheldon Yakiwchuk and Aaron Kheriarty; 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…
but going forward, my linking to material by those mainstays mentioned above will be reduced to key excerpts and/or essential posts



The Lie Premise
The official lie premise of COVID is that a deadly virus was going to indiscriminately kill and the only solution was to suppress it using novel (aka never been done before because in theory they wouldn’t work) interventions like social distancing, school and business closures, lockdowns and universal mask-wearing, until a novel (aka never been done before because it didn’t work) gene therapy became available to protect everyone (but only if everyone took it, not just the ones who were ever at risk of the virus, which actually was only those who were already sick with something else).

The virus was so novel and virulent that it respected none of the centuries of intelligence on other viruses, like natural herd immunity, seasonality, and immaterial asymptomatic spread. ...

.......... Of course, this comes as no surprise since I have made the logical point many times that depletion of the vulnerable population should naturally lead to lower COVID deaths in the future.

The Conclusion
The premise that COVID was an indiscriminately deadly virus that could only be stopped by an experimental gene therapy is a big lie.

Conversely, the premise that the experiment has yielded worse outcomes than if it had not been conducted is substantially more plausible.

Given that the expectation is for lower COVID deaths regardless of the injections, the fact that the majority of counties have higher COVID death rates indicates that the injections are exacerbating the situation before even considering the plethora of adverse events.


More data shows how useless and destructive these measures are

Remember when the COVID vaccines were going to entirely prevent infections?

Those were the days, right?

Joe Biden said that if you got the vaccines, you wouldn’t get COVID. Dr. Fauci said the vaccines were 100% effective. Rochelle Walensky was on television news explaining that according to the real world data collected by the CDC, the vaccinated could not get or spread COVID.

There are endless examples of experts and media outlets parroting the same talking points — the vaccines stop the spread of the virus to others, making the decision to get vaccinated a societal “good.”

They could not have been more wrong — the vaccines conclusively do not stop transmission or infection.

Instead of accepting that inarguable reality and accurately communicating that getting vaccinated was exclusively an individual decision that did nothing to keep others “safe,” the self-proclaimed infallible leaders of The Science™ doubled then tripled then quadrupled down. ...


Shredding the narrative


a walk down memory lane because the past can be a slippery thing

...... the simple law of politics is this:
politics + X = political X
eg. “politics + science = political science”
always is it so.


A fact check from a year ago did NOT age well

I love old fact checks and hit pieces. But if you ask me which one I love the most, it is this one.

The author is Jonathan Jarry.

Jonathan Jarry is paid by “McGill University Office for Science and Society”. McGill, a university in Quebec, Canada, is generously sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and received 20 grants in the amount of $13,930,286. That support, obviously, is due to the pure generosity of Bill and Melinda Gates and in no way affects the independence of McGill and the pro-vaccine activities of Jonathan Jarry. Just sayin.

Jonathan’s debunking was, ironically, tagged under “Critical Thinking” and “Pseudoscience”. What is incredible here is how false — not even mistaken — was Jonathan’s entire article and how well Geert’s predictions have played out. ...



One of the more hilarious articles on herd immunity and vaccination I’ve encountered has, once again, been written by an epidemiologist.

This gentleman is poking fun at people who “were attached to the now-discredited notion of letting a dangerous virus rip through the population to reach the critical level of population immunity needed to reduce transmission.” It’s ironic that this epidemiologist dares to make such a statement as it quickly becomes crystal clear from his illiterate talk that he doesn’t even understand what herd immunity is all about.

In the case of acute, self-limiting viral infections that have the potential to spread asymptomatically (e.g., SARS-CoV-2), there is no immune mechanism other than sterilizing immunity that could lead to the “possible elimination or eradication” of SARS-CoV-2 that this windbag is alluding to. As none of the C-19 vaccines (including those that are in the pipeline) are capable of inducing sterilizing immunity, and as SARS-CoV-2 can spread asymptomatically, his idea that “when available and taken up at sufficient levels — [vaccines] could squash virus transmission” is completely nonsensical to begin with. He then goes further to make a mistake so egregious that it deeply perplexes me






The vaccinators are in summer hibernation, but very soon they’ll be with us again, hawking a novel set of wares. The media blitz will start anew and the medical bureaucrats will return to forcing superfluous and potentially harmful medical interventions on millions of people who don’t need them. One day, all of this will be recognised for the absurd hypochondriac panic that it is, but no few people will be hurt, and at least a few will die, before we get there. What follows are some thoughts I have about how to approach especially older acquaintances, who will be at ground zero of the coming propaganda campaign, and who probably don’t need a fifth dose of the magical miraculous mRNA elixir.

First, some notes on normie psychology:

You have to understand that they think the vaccines are the best things ever. They believe Pfizer and Moderna have almost singlehandedly turned the whole pandemic around and given them their lives back. If ever a doubt should creep into their minds about that, they will fall back to believing that being vaccinated is the right pro-social thing to do, and that not being vaccinated is evil, selfish and stupid. It is the unvaccinated who are responsible for variants, who spread Corona and who are prolonging the pandemic. Normies have The Science on their side, and they take great comfort in buying into and espousing the mythology that has been sold to them. This is how sophisticated propaganda and information management works. Contradictory information will make them extremely uncomfortable, and they’ll look for any reason at all not to believe it. If you cause them too much discomfort, they’ll get angry, tune you out, and put you in the antivaxxer bin, where you can be safely ignored.

It’s going to be very hard to win ground here, and your goal shouldn’t be total victory. You just want to get them to think for themselves, consider their own experiences as valid and real information about the world, and break out of the limited vaccinator-cult patterns of thought long enough to ponder how many boosters they really want to put up with.

The most important thing is to present a relaxed, jovial scepticism on key points. The goal is not to argue, but to challenge in an oblique, casual way, while giving as much as you take. Unless we’re talking about somebody who absolutely trusts you and is earnestly seeking your opinion, you shouldn’t be scheduling in-depth conversations or sitting down for a serious talk. You want to raise questions and plant little seeds of doubt, before they ever realise what is happening, and then you want to fade away before they notice that you’re encouraging them to have heretical thoughts.



... At the same time, we are analyzing the concomitance of cases, which occurred in various European countries, between the first doses of Pfizer or Moderna mRNA vaccine and the sudden and rapid onset of the first symptoms of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, which usually requires several years before observing its first symptoms. 

... Of these 26 cases, 20 had died at the time of writing this article while 6 were still alive. The 20 deaths occurred only 4.76 months after the injection.



Fortunately, I don’t have long Covid (and the anecdotes below make it clear that I would know if I had it). I don’t have it yet, I suppose. First, I’ll give a quick overview of what Long Covid is (not so easy to answer). I’ll look at the methodological problems in moving from symptoms to diagnosis, how long it lasts, and its prevalence. Next, I’ll zero in on one symptom universally acknowledged to be a symptom of Long Covid — “Brain Fog.” I’ll conclude by musing on one of the societal implications of large numbers of brain-damaged people in our population.

..... Let’s have a little fun with arithmetic. Suppose we assume that “everyone will get Covid” (since, after all, the Biden administration and the public health establishment are doing their very best to give to everybody, and reinfect those who have gotten it already). Let’s also assume that 20% of those who catch Covid get Long Covid (I’m picking the CDC’s estimate not because it’s the CDC’s, but because it’s in the middle of the range of estimates). Obviously, this would have enormous effects on the general population, but since our health care system exists to deny people care, it’s hard to predict precisely what the effects would be. Let’s look at a more tractable problem: What happens when 20% porition of the ruling class loses substantial cognitive function?

..... All of the Bilderbergers are movers and shakers, of course. And now 20% of the Bilderbergers, in our speculation, have brain damage. (What a shame about Chrystia Freeland. I hope she doesn’t suffer too much.) 



Tweets & Quotes of the Week:






Anecdotal Fare:

Rafaeli: Covid-19: Dr Cadegiani's patient number 3711

........... Cadegiani, since the beginning of the pandemic, has done several studies with various drugs to fight the disease. He researched hydroxychloroquine, nitazonixanide, ivermectin, and proxalutamide. All, according to the Brazilian media, "without proven effectiveness", despite the studies concluding positively. 

The website of the Questão de Ciência Institute, which aims to promote national scientific debate, stated that the study with proxalutamide, which concluded in a 78% reduction of deaths in hospitalized patients, is in fact unreliable. "The results, unfortunately, are nothing more than an expression of systematic errors and the lack of experience of the researchers involved," the story explains. They even cite a critique of the study in the journal Science, which summarized the proxalutamide result as "too good to be true."

In the meantime, entities that have analyzed the raw data from the proxalutamide study are giving it good recognition. At Canada's McMaster University, the birthplace of evidence-based medicine, the study was rated with one of the highest scores among all drug studies in COVID. They attested to the high quality of the work. ....




COVID Conspiracy Fare:

Nass: Fauci's COVID origins coverup spook has resurfaced to misdirect us about the origin of money pox

Andrew Rambaut (pronounced Rambo—and like Rambo, he is still in the ring, fighting for the globalists, when he should have taken his toys and slunk away long ago—after being beaten up as one of the stooges who produced the fake Nature Medicine paper on COVID’s origins) has long been associated with a group of virology spooks in Tony Fauci and Jeremy Farrar’s network. The field of evolutionary biology is supposed to tell you where new viruses have come from. But of course, it has been kidnapped to provide specious explanations when the biowarriors need to try and explain their concoctions as having natural origins.

Rambaut was also used to dispute the origins of HIV (as described in my friend Ed Hooper’s book The River) while teamed up with Eddie Holmes, another Fauci flunkie, more than 20 years ago. ....



Back to Non-Pandemic Fare:


... there was a catch: in exchange for this lavish military support, the producers agreed to let the US Department of Defense make changes to the script. The changes were substantial but trivial compared to the real issue missed by almost all ‘mainstream’ journalists; namely, that the US war machine would not have spent millions of dollars subsidising a movie unless the core themes of the story provided a powerful propaganda service to the US war machine. And such, indeed, was the case

...... Given the military involvement in both ‘Top Gun’ films and the massive impact of the first film on US military recruitment, a natural concern for anyone reviewing the new film would seem to be the role of the US military since 1986.

A really salient fact about the world since the mid-eighties, as we all know – as our newspaper front pages, echoing ‘Top Gun’ heroics, never tire of telling us – is that the US has been relentlessly bombing countries like Serbia, Panama, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia and Pakistan ever since.

.... The fact, as we have discussed, that the West got its hands on both Iraqi and Libyan oil challenges Starling’s idea that ‘unfettered American military might’ has been ‘dented’.

In a parallel universe, a film critic might have reflected on whether the vast death toll from US wars has ‘dented’ the ethical status of films like ‘Top Gun’ and ‘Top Gun: Maverick’. Instead, Starling noticed a different problem with the new film:

‘But at a time when a real conflict with unimaginable casualties and featuring medieval levels of brutality is taking place on NATO’s border – a conflict into which the US is still refusing to countenance direct military intervention – Top Gun: Maverick may be construed in certain quarters as borderline tasteless.’

In other words, the problem with the ‘Top Gun’ franchise is not that the US military machine has been blitzing the world before and since 1986. The problem is that, after all that good work, it is refusing to ‘countenance direct military intervention’ in Ukraine – having merely sent $60 billion in ‘aid’, most of it military – making the latest ‘Top Gun’ heroics somewhat embarrassing. This is what passes for ‘mainstream’ ethical discussion in our high-tech, neon-lit dark age.





.......... Economic Suicide

Apart from raw material extraction, technological corporations, weapons industries and vast service sectors (services servicing services), the Western world relies on ‘funny money’ in order to survive. In other words, it lives off printing presses that print banknotes. These create unpayable debt and systemic inflation. For decades the Western world has been living in a fool’s paradise of debt. However, it is now reaching a point when it can no longer even pay off the interest on that debt. Bankruptcy beckons.

On the other hand, the real world relies not on speculation in ‘derivatives’ and ‘futures’, but on solid things, commodities, food to eat (grain, maize and the fertilisers to grow them), oil and gas to power and heat, raw materials and minerals to manufacture with. In other words, for several decades the Western world has been living in a bubble. That bubble is now bursting: the chickens are coming home to roost, perhaps already this winter, if not before. Expect widespread protests throughout the Western world and against the Western world.

............... Let us be honest. Either Russia is victorious in this Very Special Operation or else we shall enter a Dark Age, from which there will be no end because it will be an Orwellian One World Government. Such One World Dictatorship will brook no opposition, all who challenge it will be repressed. This is our last chance to resist and strike back against the aggression



As far as the current Sino-US relationship is concerned, I would single out four crucial aspects.

Firstly, if China and the United States can ease their hostile relationship, it will make a huge difference to overall world peace.

But now American politicians, who have lost their minds, have taken a course towards a new Cold War towards China

So we can have no illusions, we must prepare to fight.

Secondly, most of the world is not willing to choose sides.

Since the Sino-US trade war initiated by Trump, virtually all countries have expressed a very clear general trend, they are not willing to choose between China and the United States.

Thirdly, American politicians are schizophrenics.

From Biden to Blinken, to Catherine Tai and Janet Yellen, almost all high-ranking officials suffer from “schizophrenia.”

There really are no mature politicians in the United States, no politicians who are consistent in word and deed. High-ranking American officials and leading think-tanks have given the country no good ideas, have corrupted the orderly world and the rules created after World War II.

Fourthly, China should be prepared not only for short-term confrontation, but also for long-term strategic preparation to counter the US plans to suppress China. ...



........... In due course Reagan’s dementia was diagnosed as Alzheimer’s Disease. Officially, that diagnosis wasn’t announced until 1994, four years after the president had left office. In fact, the evidence was being reported – also covered up – between 1984 and 1986.

A well-known reporter concealed for fourteen years what she had observed at the White House when she interviewed the president in 1986: “Reagan was as shriveled as a kumquat. He was so frail, his skin so paper-thin. I could almost see the sunlight through the back of his withered neck…His eyes were coated. Larry [Speakes, press secretary] introduced us, but he had to shout. Had Reagan turned off his hearing aid? Reagan didn’t seem to know who I was. He gave me a distant look with those milky eyes and shook my hand weakly. Oh, my, he’s gonzo, I thought. I have to go out on the lawn tonight and tell my countrymen that the president of the United States is a doddering space cadet. My heart began to hammer with the import…I was aware of the delicacy with which I would have to write my script. But I was quite sure of my diagnosis.”  

There are many types of dementia, and the type manifested by Alzheimer’s isn’t like the one which comes with Parkinson’s Disease. That’s called Lewy body dementia…

Taibbi has provided a diagnostic list of Biden’s intentional lies and his clinical misspeaks, flubs and gaffes, and compared them to those of George W. Bush. “The big difference between Bushisms and Bidenisms is the former were often endearing or unintentionally funny, while Biden is mostly just horrifying. His brain is like a cereal bowl in which the bits floating in milk occasionally touch and produce furious or incoherent exclamations: ‘immune to prostitute’, ‘I love those barrettes in her hair map,’ ‘I used to drive an 18-wheeler, man,’ ‘Putin may circle Kyiv with tanks but he’ll never gain the hearts and souls of the Iranian people,’ and so on. Even when the president is just mixing up words, it’s a freak show, like that time a few weeks ago when he talked about ‘our underlying effort to accommodate the Russian oligarchs and take their ill-begotten gains…We’re gonna accommodate them.’ Official White House transcripts now contain bracketed passages to explain to us what the president ‘meant’ to say.”

This may be gonzo journalism; it isn’t investigative reporting. Clinically, Biden is displaying the symptoms of Lewy body dementia; this means he can be quite lucid one minute and the next minute he illustrates what Taibbi calls the cereal bowl. In Bush’s case, there has been a clinical diagnosis of his father’s vascular parkinsonism, which is not the same thing as Parkinson’s Disease.  Genetic factors have been identified in both types of disease, so President George W, the son, may have an inherited disposition to turn into President George H.W, the father’s cereal bowl.

Notwithstanding, the symptoms of stupidity can mimic those of Parkinson’s and parkinsonism; stupidity can also be genetic. Stupidity is a presidential condition that isn’t covered by the 25th Amendment to the US Constitution – it isn’t a medically certifiable inability or disability to discharge the powers and duties of the presidency, voted on by the cabinet, as a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s or Lewy body dementia or Parkinson’s or parkinsonism ought to be. Stupidity is a condition that can be diagnosed and certified by American voters once every four years at a presidential election. Short of that, there are the regular job approval ratings which are measured and published every week. Disapproval of the president’s performance and a finding of stupidity aren’t quite the same thing, but they come close.





... "Neutral Ukraine" stopped being "solution" about two months ago and it is not about Ukraine anymore. In fact, it never was from the git go in 2014. It is, indeed, an existential struggle for Russia and Putin is one of the dovish ones in Russian leadership. Moreover, what Mearsheimer fails to understand, that Russia didn't even roll out big guns and they are being kept in reserve in case Russia decides, which appears to be the case, to "expand" on her military-political objectives for SMO and is now in the mode of breaking up NATO. In this case, it really doesn't matter what the US wants or cares about--it is all connected to the escalation dominance Russia possesses and I warned about it as early as 2015-16. It is not about Putin, it is about Russian people, as a nation and we are long past the point of any negotiations about Ukraine. As I write for 8 years in this blog--the subject of negotiations is what will be the conditions of surrender of the combined West.



Orwellian Fare:

What is the Institute for the Study of War? And why do America’s elite media outlets trust it?

Here’s a joke I recently heard a Russian tell:
A Russian is on an airliner heading to the US, and the American in the seat next to him asks, “So what brings you to the US?” The Russian replies, “I’m studying the American approach to propaganda.” The American says, “What propaganda?” The Russian says, “That’s what I mean.”
If you don’t get the point, I can help. A few weeks before I heard this joke, I heard a Russian make the point explicitly: Yes, Russia’s state-controlled media is full of propaganda, but at least most Russians are aware of that and take the prevailing narrative with a grain of salt; Americans, in contrast, seem unaware that their own prevailing narratives are slanted.


older fare, but worth reposting now, given current events:
Following the 9/11 script, objections to government overreach in the name of 1/6 are demonized as sympathy for terrorists. But government abuses pose the greater threat.

...ever since the pro-Trump crowd was dispersed at the Capitol after a few hours of protests and riots, the same repressive climate that arose after 9/11 has prevailed. Mainstream political and media sectors instantly consecrated the narrative, fully endorsed by the U.S. security state, that the United States was attacked on 1/6 by domestic terrorists bent on insurrection and a coup. They also claimed in unison that the ideology driving those right-wing domestic terrorists now poses the single most dangerous threat to the American homeland, a claim which the intelligence community was making even before 1/6 to argue for a new War on Terror (just as neocons wanted to invade and engineer regime change in Iraq prior to 9/11 and then exploited 9/11 to achieve that long-held goal).

With those extremist and alarming premises fully implanted, there has been little tolerance for questions about whether proposed responses for dealing with the 1/6 “domestic terrorists” and their incomparably dangerous ideology are excessive, illegal, unethical, or unconstitutional. Even before Joe Biden was inaugurated, his senior advisers made clear that one of their top priorities was to enact a bill from Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) — now a member of the Select Committee on 1/6 — to import the first War on Terror onto domestic soil. Even without enactment of a new law, there is no doubt that a second War on Terror, this one domestic, has begun and is growing, all in the name of the 1/6 “Insurrection” and with little dissent or even public debate.

Following the post-9/11 script, anyone voicing such concerns about responses to 1/6 is reflexively accused of minimizing the gravity of the Capitol riot and, worse, of harboring sympathy for the plotters and their insurrectionary cause. Questions or doubts about the proportionality or legality of government actions in the name of 1/6 are depicted as insincere, proof that those voicing such doubts are acting not in defense of constitutional or legal principles but out of clandestine camaraderie with the right-wing domestic terrorists and their evil cause.

When it comes to 1/6 and those who were at the Capitol, there is no middle ground. That playbook is not new. “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists” was the rigidly binary choice which President George W. Bush presented to Americans and the world when addressing Congress shortly after the 9/11 attack. With that framework in place, anything short of unquestioning support for the Bush/Cheney administration and all of its policies was, by definition, tantamount to providing aid and comfort to the terrorists and their allies. There was no middle ground, no third option, no such thing as ambivalence or reluctance: all of that uncertainty or doubt, insisted the new war president, was to be understood as standing with the terrorists.



CaitOz Fare:

You’re Only As Free As You Allow Your World To Be

..... Without egoing, it would just be human organisms peacefully existing on the planet they were born on until they died of natural causes. There’d be no reason not to collaborate with each other and with our ecosystem toward the common good and make sure everyone gets what they need, because there’d be no “me” whose interests need to be secured before those of “others”, no “others” whose wellbeing could be seen as taking anything from “me”. ...



Other Quotes of the Week:

Bacevich: Introducing the F-word into any conversation is intended to connote moral seriousness.  Yet all too often, as with its first cousin “genocide,” it serves less to enlighten than to convey a sense of repugnance combined with condemnation. Such is the case here.


Garcia: The people in charge of the country are now openly admitting that the select committee hearings on the attempted January 6th coup will be more of a glitzy political ad dressed up as a nail-biting Netflix series than it will be a slow, plodding search for truth and justice. But it will most assuredly have the "American way" written all over it.


Luongo: We’ve been trained to laugh at such profound government ineptitude. But this is no laughing matter. They are the ones laughing at us for thinking they are just stupid. They aren’t stupid; well, except for Elizabeth Warren.


Maté: The unanimous vote by progressive lawmakers for the $40 billion Ukraine funding bill has been followed by a near-unanimous refusal to defend it. To date, no member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus – with the sole exception of Cori Bush – has publicly explained why they chose to hand over billions of dollars to the weapons industry and intensify a proxy war against nuclear-armed Russia.


Tom Cruise, circa 1990: ‘Some people felt that “Top Gun” was a right-wing film to promote the Navy. And a lot of kids loved it. But I want the kids to know that’s not the way war is – that “Top Gun” was just an amusement park ride, a fun film with a PG-13 rating that was not supposed to be reality. That’s why I didn’t go on and make “Top Gun II” and “III” and “IV” and “V.” That would have been irresponsible.’

The family of yet another dead Clinton pal has petitioned a judge to prevent pictures of Mark Middleton from being released ...

All we know thus far is that the 59-year-old Middleton - who admitted Jeffrey Epstein to the White House seven out of at least 17 times - was discovered on May 7 hanging from a tree at the Heifer Ranch in Perryville by an electrical cord, with a shotgun blast to his chest. ...

The seemingly redundant 'suicide' methods used by the married father of two, or whoever killed him, will remain a mystery, for now.

... As the Mail notes, Middleton's mysterious death adds to the list of Clinton associates who have died unexpectedly - many in small plane crashes.

... Meanwhile, the Mail has provided a list of the 'Clinton body count.' ....



Pics of the Week:






Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)