Europe's Spendthrifts Are Stuck In Irreversible Debt-Traps

 It takes a long time to grow a debt bubble, but history shows that in reality it is not that long. 80 years on average, a human lifespan. If you take the early 1950s as the start of the current one, we are almost there, close to the end of the current one. What will give first? Debt in China? Profligacy in the US? Distortions in Europe? This article explains this last possibility. I agree. This would explain the Covid madness engulfing the continent...

Authored by Alasdair Macleod via GoldMoney.com,

A Euro Catastrophe Could Collapse It

This article looks at the situation in the euro system in the context of rising interest rates. Central to the problem is role of the ECB, which through monetary inflation embarked on a policy of transferring wealth from fiscally responsible member states to the spendthrift PIGS and France. The consequences of these policies are that the spendthrifts are now ensnared in irreversible debt traps.

Even in a Keynesian context, the ECB’s monetary policy is no longer to stimulate the economy but to keep the spendthrifts afloat. The situation has deteriorated so that Eurozone commercial banks appear to have credit restricted in New York, evidenced by the reluctance of the US banks to enter into repo transactions with them, leading to the market failure in September 2019 when the Fed had to intervene.

An examination of the numbers strongly suggests that even Eurozone banks, insurance companies and pension funds are no longer net buyers of Eurozone government debt. It could be because the terms are unattractive. But if that is the case it is an indictment of the ECB’s asset purchase programmes deliberately suppressing rates to the point where they are unattractive, even to normally compliant investors.

Consequently, without any savings offsets, the ECB has gone full Rudolf Havenstein, and is following similar inflationary policies to those that impoverished Germany’s middle classes and starved its labourers and the elderly in 1920-1923. That the German people are tolerating such an obvious destruction of their currency for the third time in a hundred years is simply astounding.

Institutionalised Madoff

Schemes to pilfer from people without their knowledge always end in disaster for the perpetrators. Central banks using their currency seigniorage are no exception. But instead of covering it up like an institutionalised Madoff they use questionable science to justify their openly fraudulent behaviour. The paradox of thrift is such an example, where penalising savers by suppressing interest rates supposedly for the wider economic benefit conveniently ignores the theft involved. If you can change the way people perceive reality, you can get away with an awful lot.

The mass discovery by the people of the fraud perpetrated on the people by those supposedly representing the people is always the reason behind a cycle of crises and wars. It can take a long period of suffering before an otherwise supine population refuses to continue submitting unquestionably to authority. But the longer the condition exists, the more oppressive the methods that the state uses to defer the inevitable crisis become. Until something finally gives. In the case of the euro, we have seen the system give savers no interest since 2012, while the quantity of money and credit in circulation has debased it by 63% (measured by M3 euro money supply).

Furthermore, prices can be rigged to create an illusion of price stability. The US Fed increased its buying of inflation-linked Treasury bonds (TIPS) since March 2020 at a faster pace than they were issued by the US Treasury, artificially pushing TIPS prices up and creating an illusion that the market is unconcerned about price inflation.

But that is not all. Government statisticians are not above fiddling the figures or presenting figures out of context. We believe the CPI inflation figures are a true reflection of the cost of living, despite the changes over time in the way prices are input. We believe that GDP is economic growth — a questionable concept — and not growth in the quantity of money. We even believe that monetary inflation has nothing to do with prices. Statistics are designed to deceive. As Lord Canning said 200 years ago, “I can prove anything with statistics but the truth”. And that was before computers, which have facilitated an explosion in the quantity of questionable statistics. Can’t work something out? Just look at the stats.

A further difference between Madoff and the state is that the state forces everyone to submit to its monetary frauds by law. And since as law-abiding citizens we respect the law, we even despise those with the temerity to question it. But in the process, we hand enormous power to the monetary authorities, so should not be surprised when that power is abused, as is the case with interest rates and the dilution of the state’s currency. And it follows that the deeper the currency fraud, when something gives, the greater is the ensuing crisis.

The best measure of market distortions from deliberate actions of the monetary authorities we have is the difference between actual bond yields and an estimate of what they should be. In other words, assessments of the height of negative real yields. But any such assessment is inherently subjective, with markets and statistics either distorted, rigged, or unable to provide the relevant yardstick. But it makes sense to assume that the price impact, that is the adjustment to bond prices as markets normalise, is greatest for those where nominal bond yields are negative. This means our focus should be directed accordingly. And the major jurisdictions where this applies is Japan and the Eurozone.

The eurozone’s banking instability

A critique of Japan’s monetary policy must be reserved for a later date, in order to concentrate on monetary and economic conditions in the Eurozone. The ECB first reduced its deposit rate to 0% in July 2012. That was followed by its initial introduction of negative deposit rates of -0.1% in June 2014, followed by -0.2% later that year, -0.3% in 2014, -0.4% in 2016 and finally -0.5% in September 2019. The last move coincided with the repo market blow-up in New York, the day that the transfer of Deutsche Bank’s prime dealership to the Paris based BNP was completed.

We can assume with reasonable certainty that the coincidence of these events showed a reluctance of major US banks to take on either of these banks as repo counterparties, as hedge and money funds with accounts at Deutsche decided to move their accounts elsewhere, which would have blown substantial holes in Deutsche’s and possibly BNP’s balance sheets as well, thereby requiring repo cover. The reluctance of American banks to get involved would have been a strong signal of their reluctance to increasing their counterparty exposure to Eurozone banks.

We cannot know this for sure, but it is the logical explanation for what happened. In which case, the repo crisis in New York was an important advance warning of the fragility of the Eurozone’s monetary and banking system. A look at the condition of the major Eurozone global systemically important banks (G-SIBs) in Table A, explains why.

Balance sheet gearing for these banks is roughly double that of the major US banks, and except for Ing Group, deep price-to-book discounts indicate a market assessment of these banks’ credit risk as exceptionally high. Other Eurozone banks with international counterparty business deemed not significant enough to be labelled as G-SIBs but still capable of transmitting systemic risk could be even more highly geared. The reasons for US banks to limit their exposure to the Eurozone banking system on these grounds alone are compelling. And the persistence of price inflation today is a subsequent development, likely to expose these banks as being riskier still because of higher interest rates on their exposure to Eurozone government and commercial bonds, and defaulting borrowers.

The euro credit cycle has been suspended

When banks buy government paper, it is usually because they see it as the risk-free alternative to expanding credit to non-financial private sector actors. In the normal course of an economic cycle, it is inherently cyclical. Both Basel and national regulations enhance the concept that government debt is risk-free, giving it a safe-haven status in times of heightened risk. In a normal bank credit cycle, banks will tend to hold government bills and bonds with less than one year’s maturity and depending on the yield curve will venture out along the curve to five years at most.

These positions are subsequently wound down when the banks become more confident of lending conditions to non-financial borrowers when the economy improves. But when economic conditions become stagnant and the credit cycle is suspended due to lack of recovery, banks can accumulate positions with longer maturities.

Other than the lack of alternative uses of bank credit, this is for a variety of reasons. Trading desks increasingly seek the greater price volatility in longer maturities, central banks encourage increased commercial bank participation in government bond markets, and yield curve permitting, generally longer maturities offer better yields. The more time that elapses between investing in government paper and favouring credit expansion in favour of private sector borrowers, the greater this mission creep becomes.

As we have seen above, the ECB introduced zero deposit rates nearly 10 years ago, and private sector conditions have not generated much in the way of bank credit funding. Lending from all sources including securitisations and bank credit to a) households and b) non-financial corporations since 2008 are shown in Figure 1.

Before the Covid pandemic, total lending to households had declined from $9 trillion equivalent in 2008 to $7.4 trillion in 2019 Q4. And for non-financial corporations, total lending declined marginally over the same period as well. Admittedly, this period included a credit slump and recovery, but on a net basis lending conditions stagnated.

But bank credit for these two sectors will have contracted, allowing for net bond issuance of collateralised consumer debt and by corporations securing cheap finance by issuing corporate bonds at near zero interest rates, which are contained in Figure 1.

Following the start of the pandemic, lending conditions expanded under government direction and borrowing by both sectors increased substantially.

Meanwhile, over the same period bond issuance to governments increased, particularly since the pandemic started, illustrated in Figure 2.

The charts in Figures 1 and 2 support the thesis that credit expansion and bond finance had, until recently, disadvantaged the non-financial private sector. The expansion of government borrowing has been entirely through bonds bought by the ECB, as will be demonstrated when we look at the euro system balance sheet. They confirm that zero and negative rates have not stimulated the Eurozone’s economies as Keynesians theorised. And the increased credit during the pandemic reflects financial support and not a renewed attempt at Keynesian stimulation.

The purpose of debt expansion is important because the moment the supposed stimulus wears off or interest rates rise, we will see bank credit for households and businesses begin to contract again. Only this time, there will be a heightened risk for banks of collateral failure. And higher interest rates will also undermine mark-to-market values for government and corporate bonds on their balance sheets, which could rapidly erode the capital of Eurozone banks, given their exceptionally high gearing shown in Table A above.

Figure 3 charts the euro system’s combined balance sheet since August 2008, the month Lehman failed, when it stood at €1.43 trillion. Greece’s financial crisis ran from 2012-2014, during which time the balance sheet expanded to €3.09 trillion, before partially normalising to €2.01 trillion. In January 2015, the ECB launched its expanded asset purchase programme (APP — otherwise referred to as quantitative easing) to prevent price inflation remaining too low for a prolonged period. The fear was Keynesian deflation, with the HICP measure of price inflation falling to -0.5% at that time, despite the ECB’s deposit rate having been already reduced to -0.2% the previous September.

Between March 2015 and September 2016, the combined purchases by the ECB of public and private sector securities amounted to €1.14 trillion, corresponding to 11.3% of euro area nominal GDP. The APP was “recalibrated” in December 2015, extended to March 2017 and beyond, if necessary, at €60bn monthly. And the deposit rate was lowered to -0.3%. Not even that was enough, with a further recalibration to €80bn monthly in March 2016, with it intended to be extended to the end of the year when it would be resumed at the previous rate of €60bn per month.

The expansion of the ECB’s balance sheet led to the rate of price inflation recovering to 1% in 2017, as one would expect. With the expansion of credit for the non-financial private sector going nowhere (Figures 1 and 2 above), the Keynesian stimulus simply failed in this objective. But when in March 2020 the US Fed reduced its funds rate to 0% and announced QE of $120bn monthly, the ECB did what it had learned to do when in a monetary hole: continue digging even faster. March 2020 saw the ECB increase purchases under the asset purchase programme (APP) and adopt a new programme, the pandemic emergency purchase programme (PEPP). These measures are the reason why the volumes of the Eurosystem’s monthly monetary policy net purchases are higher than ever before, driving its balance sheet total to over €8.5 trillion today.

The ECB’s bond purchases closely matched the funding requirements of national central banks, both being €4 trillion between January 2015 and June 2021. The counterpart to these purchases is an increase in the amount of circulating cash. In other words, the ECB has gone full Rudolf Havenstein. There is no difference in the ECB’s objectives compared with those of Havenstein when he was President of the Reichsbank following the First World War; a monetary policy that impoverished Germany’s middle classes and pushed the labouring class and elderly into starvation by collapsing the paper-mark. Except that today, German society is paying through the destruction of its savings for the spendthrift behaviour of its Eurozone partners rather than that of its own government.

The ECB now has an additional problem with price inflation picking up globally. Producer input prices in Europe are rising strongly with the overall Eurozone HICP rate for November at 4.9% annualised, and doubtless with more rises to come. Oil prices have risen over 50% in a year, and natural gas over 60%, the latter even more on European markets due to a supply crisis of its governments’ own making.

Increasingly, the policy purpose of the ECB is no longer to stimulate the economy, but to ensure that spendthrift member state deficits are financed as cheaply as possible. But how can it do that when on the back of soaring consumer prices, interest rates are now going to rise? Clearly, the higher interest rates go, the faster the ECB will increase its balance sheet because it is committed to not just covering every Eurozone member state’s budget deficit but the interest on their borrowings as well.

But there’s more. In a speech on 12 October, Christine Lagarde, the President of the ECB indicated that it stands ready to contribute to financing the transition to carbon neutral. And in a joint letter to the FT, the President of France and Italy’s Prime Minister called for a relaxation of the EU’s fiscal rules so that they could spend more on key investments. This is a flavour of what they said:

"Just as the rules could not be allowed to stand in the way of our response to the pandemic, so they should not prevent us from making all necessary investments," the two leaders wrote, while noting that "debt raised to finance such investments, which undeniably benefit the welfare of future generations and long-term growth, should be favoured by the fiscal rules, given that public spending of this sort actually contributes to debt sustainability over the long run."

The rules under the Stability and Growth Pact have in fact been suspended, and are planned to be reapplied in 2023, But clearly, these two high spenders feel boxed in. The Stability and Growth Pact will almost certainly be eased — being a charade, rather like the US’s debt ceiling. The trouble is Eurozone governments are too accustomed to inflationary finance to abandon it.

If the ECB could inflate the currency without the consequences being apparent, there would be no problem. But with prices soaring above the mandated 2% target that is no longer true. Up to now, the ECB has been in denial, claiming that price pressures will subside. But we know, or should know, that a rise in the general level of prices is due to monetary expansion, the excessive plucking of leaves from the magic money tree, particularly at an enhanced rate since March 2020 which is yet to be reflected fully at the consumer level. And in its duty to fund the PIGS government deficits, the ECB’s balance sheet expansion through bond purchases is sure to continue.

Furthermore, if bond yields do rise, it will threaten to undermine the balance sheets of the highly geared commercial banks.

The commercial banks position

With the economies of Eurozone member states stifled by the ECB’s management of monetary affairs since the Lehman crisis in 2008 and by more recent covid lockdowns, the accumulation of bad debts at the commercial banks is a growing threat to the entire financial system. Table A above, of the Eurozone G-SIBs’ operational gearing and their share ratings, gives testament to the problem.

So far, bad debts in Italian and other PIGS banks have been reduced, not by their being resolved, but by them being used as collateral for loans from national central banks. Local bank regulators deem non-performing loans to be performing so they can be hidden from sight in the ECB’s TARGET2 settlement system. Together with the ECB’s asset purchases conducted through national central banks, these probably account for most of the imbalances in the TARGET2 cross-border settlement system, which in theory should not exist.

The position to last October is shown in Figure 4. Liabilities owed to the Bundesbank are increasing again at record levels, while the amounts owed by the Italian and Spanish central banks are also increasing. These balances were before global pressures for rising interest rates materialised. Given the sharp increase in bank lending to households and non-financial corporations since March last year (see Figure 1), bad debts seem certain to accumulate at the banks in the coming months. This is likely to undermine collateral values in Europe’s repo markets, which are mostly conducted in euros and almost certainly exceed €10 trillion, having been recorded at €8.3 trillion at end-2019.[vi] The extent to which national central banks have taken in repo collateral themselves will then become a major problem.

It is against the background of negative Euribor rates that the repo market has grown. It is not clear what role negative rates plays in this growth. While one can see a reason for a bank to borrow at sub-zero rates, it is harder to justify lending at them. And in a repo, the collateral is returned on a pre-agreed basis, so it’s removal from a bank’s books is temporary. Nonetheless, this market has grown to be an integral part of daily transactions between European banks.

The variations in collateral quality are shown in Figure 5. This differs materially from repo markets in the US, which is almost exclusively for short-term liquidity purposes and uses high quality collateral only (US Treasury bills and bonds and agency debt).

Bonds rated BBB and worse made up 27.7% of the total collateral in December 2019. In Europe and particularly the Eurozone rising interest rates can be expected to undermine collateral ratings, which with increasing Euribor rates will almost certainly contract the size of the market. This heightens the risk of a liquidity-driven systemic failure, as repo liquidity is withdrawn from banks that depend upon it.

Government finances are out of control

The first column in Table B shows government debt to GDP, which is the conventional yardstick of government debt measurement relative to the economy. The second column shows the proportion of government spending in the total economy relative to GDP, enabling us to derive the third column. The base for government revenue upon which paying down its debt ultimately rests is the private sector, and the third column shows the extent to which and where this true burden lies.

It exposes the impossible position of countries such as Greece, Italy, France, and Belgium, Portugal and Spain, where, besides their own private sector debt burdens, citizens earning their livings without being paid by their governments are assumed by markets to be responsible for underwriting their governments’ debts.

The hope that these countries can grow their way out of their debt is demolished in the context of the actual tax base. It is now widely recognised that will already high levels of taxation further tax increases will undermine these economies.

We can dismiss as hogwash the alterative, the vain hope that yet more stimulus in the form of a further increase in deficits will generate economic recovery, and that higher tax revenues will follow to normalise public finances. It is a populist argument amongst some free marketeers today, citing Ronald Reagan’s and Margaret Thatcher’s successful economic policies. But in those times, the US and UK governments were not nearly so indebted and their economies were able to respond positively to lower taxes. Furthermore, price inflation was declining then while it is increasing today.

And as a paper by Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff pointed out, a nation whose government debt exceeds 90% of GDP has great difficulty growing its way out of it.[vii]Seven of the Eurozone nations already exceed this 90% Rubicon, and their debts are still growing considerably faster than their GDP. At 111% the entire Euro area itself is well above it. Taking account of the smaller proportion of private sector activity relative to those of their governments highlights the difference between the current situation and that of nations that managed to pay down even higher debt levels after the Second World War by gently inflating their way out of a debt trap while their economies progressed in the post-war environment.

Additionally, we should bear in mind future government liabilities, whose net present values are considerably greater than their current debt. Over time, these must be financed. And with rising price inflation, hard costs such as healthcare escalate them even further. The position gets progressively worse as these mandated costs become realised.

There is a solution to it, and that is to cut government spending so that its budget always balances. But for socialising politicians, slashing departmental budgets is the equivalent of eating their own children. It is a reversal of everything they stand for. And it requires welfare legislation to be rescinded to stop the accumulation of future welfare costs. There is no democratic mandate for that.

Conclusion

Rising interest rates globally will affect all major currencies, and for some of them expose systemic risks. An examination of the existing situation and how higher interest rates will affect it points to the Eurozone as being the most likely global weak spot.

The Eurozone’s debt position pitches the entire global financial and economic system further towards a debt crisis than generally realised. Particularly for Greece, Italy, France, Belgium, Portugal, and Spain in that order of indebtedness, the problem is most acute. They only survive because the ECB ensures they can pay their bills by funding them totally through inflation of the quantity of euros in circulation. The ECB’s entire purpose has become to transfer wealth from the more fiscally prudent member states to the spendthrifts by debasing the currency.

In the process, based on figures provided by the Bank for International Settlements the banking system is contracting credit to the private sector, and it is not even accumulating government bonds, which is a surprise.  Much like banks in the US, Eurozone banks have become increasingly distracted into financial activities and speculation. The difference is the high level of operational gearing, up to thirty times in the case of one major French bank, while most of the US’s G-SIBs are geared about 11 times on average.

This article points to these disparities between US and EU banking risks having been a factor in the US repo market failure in September 2019. And we can assume that the Americans remain wary of counterparty exposure to Eurozone banks to this day.

That the ECB is funding net government borrowing in its entirety indicates that even investing institutions such as pension funds and insurance companies, along with the banks are sitting on their hands with respect to government debt. It means that savings are not offsetting the inflationary effects of government bond issues. It represents a vote to stay out of what has become a highly troubling and inflationary situation. The question arises as to how long this extraordinary situation can continue.

It must come to an end some time, and by destabilising a highly leveraged banking system the end will be a crisis. With its GDP being similar in size to China’s (which is seeing a more traditional property crisis unfolding at the same time) a banking crisis in the Eurozone could be the trigger for dominoes falling everywhere.

As for the euro’s future, it seems unlikely that the ECB has the capability of dealing with the crisis that will unfold. It has cheated the northern states, particularly Germany, the Netherlands, Finland, Ireland, the Czech Republic, and Luxembourg to the benefit of spendthrifts, particularly the political heavyweights of France, Italy and Spain. It is a rift likely to end the euro system and the ECB itself. The deconstruction of this shabby arrangement should prove the end of the euro and possibly of the European Union itself.

Mass Formation: Deployed on You After Over 200 Years of Study

 More than the virus itself, this is what I have been focusing on over the last 2 years. The ability to mold public opinion has progressed tremendously over the last 100 years, first with mass medias, but more recently it has become qualitative and much more granular while adapting to the Internet. It is unfortunately China which is at the forefront of this trend with it's total control of the Internet and its social credit system. But Western countries are catching up fast and in doing so reviving the 1930s dream of combining the state and giant corporations into a techno-fascist state. What is going on right now is by no means an accident, it is a deep historical trend which is just reasserting itself after the long post war hiatus of freedom and prosperity. Will it be kept at bay once again? I hope so in the long term but remains extremely pessimistic in the short term. The forth turning we have just entered, like winter is not only here to stay. It may only be the beginning!  

Via Dr. Robert Malone

Junior academics cited by “Forbes”, AP, Reuters and “The Independent” have not done their homework

Today in “factchecking the factcheckers”, junior academics cited by Forbes, Associated Press, Reuters and The Independent have just not done their homework concerning the work of Professor Dr. Mattias Desmet of the University of Ghent in Belgium. All I can say about this is that I hope that their naive, ignorant, grandstanding statements to the press are brought up during their future Academic Tenure and Advancement reviews.

But there has been an amazingly coordinated effort to shoot the messenger and actively character assassinate (or “defenestrate”) me as a surrogate while avoiding any reference to the highly credentialed academic Professor Dr. Mattias Desmet who actually developed the theory and has documented the extensive evidence in an upcoming academic book. So, what can we learn from this in the short term?

Clearly, Google was not the only corporation triggered by Joe Rogan podcast # 1757 which previously reached #1 podcast ranking worldwide, has been referred to as “the most important interview of our time” and has been seen by over 50 million viewers. But what absolutely has been generated by all of the coopted reactionary press and Big Tech titans metaphorically tripping over their shoelaces is a massive trove of real time data validating the brilliant Mass Formation intellectual synthesis developed by Professor Desmet over the last two years.

In this coordinated propaganda and censorship response, we can clearly see the hands of the BBC-led Trusted News Initiative, the Scientific Technological Elite, the transnational investment funds and their World Economic Forum allies which control Pfizer and most of Big Pharma, Legacy Media and Big Tech (and many national governments) acting in real time to suppress a growing awareness by the general public of having been actively manipulated using crowd psychology tools to generate clinically significant fear and anxiety of COVID-19 (otherwise known as “Coronaphobia”) to advance their agendas on a global scale. Multiple governments have now admitted to actively using fear and ‘Mass Formation’-related theories as a tool for totalitarian population control during this outbreak. This is occurring at the same time that Omicron is destroying the legitimacy of government and WHO propaganda concerning the “Safe and Effective” mRNA vaccines and associated mandates.

But what confuses me is why the western press is all following the same narrative as Forbes, which is now owned by a Chinese media holding company. Is this all really just about China wanting to advance a New World Order agenda, and working in a coordinated fashion together with captured western legacy media and their transnational fund overlords?

Break out the popcorn, because we have an “approved narrative” dumpster fire in progress.

 

“I don’t see how people could claim that ‘mass-formation’ doesn’t exist or has never been scientifically studied. The term just refers – it goes without saying – to the process of the formation of a mass or a crowd. Mass formation has been studied for over 200 years, beginning with such scholars as Gustave Le Bon, Freud, McDougal, Canetti, Hannah Arendt, etc. In the twentieth century, psychologists such as Ash and Sheriff have studied mass formation experimentally.

Some of these scholars did explicitly use the term mass-formation, others didn’t. But what they studied was basically the same: the way in which individual’s mental states is influenced by their tendency to conform to group thinking. I myself have over 100 publications on Web of Science, a large part of them focusing on how individuals’ personality structures is influenced by their relationships with other people. Once you understand the basic mechanisms through which individual’s personality is in the grip of the opinion of other people, you understand the elementary mechanisms at work in this enormous psychological process that is happening when a mass emerges in a society.

In my upcoming book: The psychology of totalitarianism, I analyze and describe the way in which the psychological process of mass formation got stronger and stronger throughout the last two centuries and eventually leads to totalitarian thinking and in the end also to the emergence of totalitarian states.”

Mattias Desmet, Professor of Clinical Psychology at Ghent University in Belgium

 

Covid 19: Scientist letter to the government in Israel

This is a very good example of the push back around the world.

Unfortunately, most people are not aware of this. The narative and the medias are so completely under control that most people still believe that there is indeed a consensus around the Covid vaccine. To undo the damage will be a long and winding road, with progressive governments in most Western countries still doubling down on repressive policies. And why not since clearly nothing works!

Professor Ehud Qimron, head of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Tel Aviv University and one of the leading Israeli immunologists, has written an open letter sharply criticizing the Israeli – and indeed global – management of the coronavirus pandemic.

Professor Ehud Qimron (center) at Tel Aviv University (Haaretz)

 Open letter to the authorities (this is a mechanical translation from the original Hebrew):

Ministry of Health, it’s time to admit failure

In the end, the truth will always be revealed, and the truth about the coronavirus policy is beginning to be revealed. When the destructive concepts collapse one by one, there is nothing left but to tell the experts who led the management of the pandemic – we told you so.

Two years late, you finally realize that a respiratory virus cannot be defeated and that any such attempt is doomed to fail. You do not admit it, because you have admitted almost no mistake in the last two years, but in retrospect it is clear that you have failed miserably in almost all of your actions, and even the media is already having a hard time covering your shame.

You refused to admit that the infection comes in waves that fade by themselves, despite years of observations and scientific knowledge. You insisted on attributing every decline of a wave solely to your actions, and so through false propaganda “you overcame the plague.” And again you defeated it, and again and again and again.

You refused to admit that mass testing is ineffective, despite your own contingency plans explicitly stating so (“Pandemic Influenza Health System Preparedness Plan, 2007,” p. 26).

You refused to admit that recovery is more protective than a vaccine, despite previous knowledge and observations showing that non-recovered vaccinated people are more likely to be infected than recovered people. You refused to admit that the vaccinated are contagious despite the observations. Based on this, you hoped to achieve herd immunity by vaccination — and you failed in that as well.

You insisted on ignoring the fact that the disease is dozens of times more dangerous for risk groups and older adults, than for young people who are not in risk groups, despite the knowledge that came from China as early as 2020.

You refused to adopt the “Great Barrington Declaration,” signed by more than 60,000 scientists and medical professionals, or other common-sense programs. You chose to ridicule, slander, distort and discredit them. Instead of the right programs and people, you have chosen professionals who lack relevant training for pandemic management (physicists as chief government advisers, veterinarians, security officers, media personnel, and so on).

You have not set up an effective system for reporting side effects from the vaccines and reports on side effects have even been deleted from your Facebook page. Doctors avoid linking side effects to the vaccine, lest you persecute them as you did to some of their colleagues. You have ignored many reports of changes in menstrual intensity and menstrual cycle times. You hid data that allows for objective and proper research (for example, you removed the data on passengers at Ben Gurion Airport). Instead, you chose to publish non-objective articles together with senior Pfizer executives on the effectiveness and safety of vaccines.

Irreversible damage to trust

However, from the heights of your hubris, you have also ignored the fact that in the end the truth will be revealed. And it begins to be revealed. The truth is that you have brought the public’s trust in you to an unprecedented low, and you have eroded your status as a source of authority. The truth is that you have burned hundreds of billions of shekels to no avail – for publishing intimidation, for ineffective tests, for destructive lockdowns and for disrupting the routine of life in the last two years.

You have destroyed the education of our children and their future. You made children feel guilty, scared, smoke, drink, get addicted, drop out, and quarrel, as school principals around the country attest. You have harmed livelihoods, the economy, human rights, mental health and physical health.

You slandered colleagues who did not surrender to you, you turned the people against each other, divided society and polarized the discourse. You branded, without any scientific basis, people who chose not to get vaccinated as enemies of the public and as spreaders of disease. You promote, in an unprecedented way, a draconian policy of discrimination, denial of rights and selection of people, including children, for their medical choice. A selection that lacks any epidemiological justification.

When you compare the destructive policies you are pursuing with the sane policies of some other countries — you can clearly see that the destruction you have caused has only added victims beyond the vulnerable to the virus. The economy you ruined, the unemployed you caused, and the children whose education you destroyed — are the surplus victims as a result of your own actions only.

There is currently no medical emergency, but you have been cultivating such a condition for two years now because of lust for power, budgets and control. The only emergency now is that you still set policies and hold huge budgets for propaganda and consciousness engineering instead of directing them to strengthen the health care system.

This emergency must stop!

 

The Defenestration Of Dr. Robert Malone

 I am personally a great fan of Dr Malone. His statements are well built, balanced and if anything, he knows what he is talking about. He may be wrong, sometimes, we all are on occasions. But this is no reason to shut him up. The censorship of the big internet companies is a crime against free speech and should be denounced vigorously. If not now, when?

Commentary authored by John Mac Ghlionn via The Epoch Times,

Dr. Robert Malone is a U.S. virologist and immunologist who has dedicated his professional existence to the development of mRNA vaccines.

In the 1980s, Malone worked as a researcher at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, where he conducted studies on messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) technology. In the early 1990s, Malone collaborated with Jon A. Wolff and Dennis A. Carson, two eminent scientists, on a study that involved synthesization.

In fact, Malone is the father of mRNA vaccines. He has served as an adjunct associate professor of biotechnology at Kennesaw State University, and he co-founded Atheric Pharmaceutical, a company that was contracted by the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in 2016.

As you can see, Malone is no ordinary man. In fact, he’s a rather extraordinary man. Before embarking on a distinguished career in science, Malone worked as a carpenter and as a farmhand. Becoming a doctor was a lofty aspiration, but through hard work and determination, his dream became a reality. Over the course of three decades, Malone has established himself as one of the most competent people in the fields of virology and immunology.

Dr. Robert Malone (L) speaks at the Global Covid Summit in Nashville, Tenn., on Dec. 18, 2021. (Courtesy of Global Covid Summit/Screenshot via NTD)

Why, then, is he considered “a pariah” (in his own words) by so many of his peers? Why did Twitter recently suspend his account?

Malone is arguably the most qualified person in the world to speak on what we as a society should and shouldn’t be doing during the pandemic. Yet for reasons that will become abundantly clear, he finds himself ostracized, largely silenced, and cut off from the scientific community. Why?

Two months before his Twitter account was suspended, Malone wrote a rather prophetic Twitter post:

“I am going to speak bluntly,” he wrote.

“Physicians who speak out are being actively hunted via medical boards and the press. They are trying to delegitimize us and pick us off one by one.”

He finished by warning that this is “not a conspiracy theory” but “a fact.” He urged us all to “wake up.”

Sadly, many of us are still asleep.

In my research for this piece, it seems clear to me that Malone has been silenced, not because he’s some quack spouting nonsense, but because he challenged—and still challenges—the overarching narrative about vaccines and the lethality of COVID-19.

Malone was recently interviewed by Joe Rogan. For the uninitiated, Rogan is the host of one of the most influential podcasts in the world. At one point during the three-hour interview, Malone referred to Dr. Anthony Fauci as Tony Fauci, a man he knows personally. Malone, in other words, knows where all the skeletons are hidden. The same is true for Dr. Peter McCullough, another world-renowned expert who has appeared on Rogan’s podcast.

Prior to writing this piece, I consulted both Malone and McCullough.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, speaks during a briefing at the White House on Dec. 1, 2021. (Susan Walsh/AP Photo)

Over the course of the past 18 months, Malone has been painted as some kind of anti-vax fringe scientist, a man of questionable merit who’s spouting nonsense.

Well, he’s not. Malone happens to be vaccinated. All he has ever asked for is the chance to have frank and honest discussions on vaccines.

In his own words, vaccines have “saved lives. Many lives.”

“But it is also increasingly clear that there are some risks associated with these vaccines,” Malone said. “Various governments have attempted to deny that this is the case. But they are wrong. Vaccination-associated coagulation is a risk. Cardiotoxicity is a risk. Those are proven and discussed in official USG communications, as well as communications from a variety of other governments.”

Malone isn’t a crazed conspiracy theorist: He’s a man who’s intimately familiar with the benefits and the risks of vaccines. He’s a proponent of informed consent. Perhaps before letting someone inject a vaccine into your body, you should be fully informed of the risks involved, he says. He isn’t an unreasonable man.

Nevertheless, in this age of faux outrage and fabricated storylines, society needs a fall guy, a boogie man, a sacrificial lamb. Malone fits the bill. He knows too much. It’s much easier to discredit a decorated physician—who challenges the overarching narrative—than it is to actually debate him.

Zero Degrees of Separation

The story goes deeper. In 2019, the BBC established the Trusted News Initiative (TNI), a partnership that now includes organizations such as Facebook, Twitter, Reuters, and The Washington Post. We’re told that it was established to tackle “disinformation in real time.” TNI was ostensibly designed to wage a war on “fake news.”

Upon closer inspection, however, it appears to have been designed to promote very specific narratives and to silence any dissenting voices, such as Malone’s. Instead of trusting the TNI, we should question the motives of its members.

After all, The Washington Post recently published a piece asking people to stop criticizing President Joe Biden. The message is clear: Stop being mean to the president, even if the president is being mean to you (on more than one occasion).

Then, there’s James C. Smith, chairman of the Thomson Reuters Foundation. He sits on the board of directors for Pfizer, a company that’s responsible for the creation of vaccines with questionable efficacy and that has a history of manipulating data. In short, Pfizer is a company with a questionable reputation. Nevertheless, Pfizer Chief Executive Albert Bourla was recently named CNN’s Business CEO of the Year. Make of that what you will.

When one thinks of TNI (and the mainstream media in general), various terms instantly spring to mind. “Objectivity” isn’t one of them. “Highly compromised” and “conflict of interest” do come to mind, however.

Speaking of objectivity, or the lack thereof, in August 2021, The Atlantic ran a much-cited hit piece on Malone, which was high on accusations, but low on actual evidence. It attacked his character and credibility—repeatedly. Rather intriguingly, the article, like all of The Atlantic’s COVID-19 articles, was funded by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

The former is an organization established and owned by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation owns stock in Johnson & Johnson, a company whose vaccine has been associated with the development of blood clots—the very thing Malone has been warning us about for the better part of two years.

People might scoff. But contrary to popular belief, democracy doesn’t die in darkness. It dies in broad daylight. Its death is slow and protracted, one by a thousand cuts rather than by one fatal stab.

As author Steve Levitsky once wrote, democracies don’t often die at the hands of military generals, “but of elected leaders—presidents or prime ministers who subvert the very process that brought them to power.”

“One of the great ironies of how democracies die is that the very defense of democracy is often used as a pretext for its subversion,” he wrote. “Would-be autocrats often use economic crises, natural disasters, and especially security threats—wars, armed insurgencies, or terrorist attacks—to justify antidemocratic measures.”

Apply these lines to the pandemic, and Levitsky’s words carry more weight than ever before.

In the United States, one must not question the efficacy of masks, vaccines for kids, the logic (or lack thereof) of lockdowns, or the unconstitutional nature of vaccine mandates. What about the little matter of vaccine breakthrough deaths? Don’t ask any questions.

But wait, if science can’t be questioned, doesn’t this make it propaganda? Hush now. Don’t you love America? Don’t you want people to live, rather than die? Then shut up and get the vaccine, then the booster shot, then the booster-booster shot. We, the arbiters of truth, know what’s best for you. Somewhat ironically, these self-appointed arbiters of truth spout no shortage of lies.

Is it any surprise, then, that more and more Americans continue to lose faith in the mainstream media and the government? Yet here we are, being condescended to by the likes of CNN’s Don Lemon and MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace. Worse still, we’re supposed to take orders from Fauci, a man who supposedly represents science, yet goes out of his way to smear scientists. Why would a man of science attack the very thing that he’s supposed to represent?

According to numerous reports, Fauci has repeatedly deceived the American people. It’s important to remember that Fauci is, first and foremost, a talking head for the U.S. government. In reality, he’s a politician with a medical degree.

To quote the author Gillian Flynn, the author of “Gone Girl”: “The truth is malleable; you just need to pick the right expert.”

Who better than Fauci, a highly qualified individual with his own fan club? But don’t be fooled. Fauci might act like he answers to no one, but he does. He answers to the U.S. government. Who, then, does the government answer to? Big Pharma, it seems.

In 2019, the Roosevelt Institute published a fascinating report, “The Cost of Capture: How the Pharmaceutical Industry has Corrupted Policy Makers and Harmed Patients.” The report outlines the many ways in which the pharmaceutical industry has shaped policies through corporate capture. This is a phenomenon that sees private industries use their significant financial and political influence to manipulate a state’s decision-making apparatus. The report warned about the dangers of lobbying and of deeply flawed medical research.

What we’re seeing is the convergence of Big Pharma, Big Tech, and Big Government. Let’s call it the unholy trinity, with Big Tech doing the bidding of Big Government, and Big Government doing the bidding of Big Pharma.

Interestingly, but not surprisingly, YouTube has removed the Joe Rogan episodes featuring Robert Malone and Peter McCullough. Why? Because when it comes to viruses and vaccines, these are among the most notable and accomplished experts in the world. They appear to know things that the government doesn’t want us to know. Additionally, Google, the owner of YouTube, appears to be closely involved with the U.S. government.

What we’re left with is the equivalent of a digital dictatorship, with even the most qualified people being silenced, ostracized, and, in some cases, defenestrated. Robert Malone is a wise man, an honest man, and a highly credible man. The grief that has come his way—and continues to come his way to this day—is unwarranted. But as he knows only too well, this is the price one must pay for challenging the unholy trinity.

The Death Of Truth

 This trend is truly frightening!

Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

Over the past several days I have had some time to think, and my thoughts have repeatedly turned to the current state of the Internet.  For a couple of decades after it was popularized, the Internet was one of the greatest tools for free speech that the world has ever seen.  It allowed ordinary people like me to share truth on a massive scale with other ordinary people all over the planet.  I have always been grateful for that opportunity, but now our ability to share truth with one another over the Internet is being systematically eroded.  Nobody can deny that this is taking place, because it is literally happening right in front of our eyes.  Over the past decade, control of the Internet has become increasingly centralized. 

The big tech companies have become exceptionally powerful, and they have become addicted to using that power to suppress speech that they do not like.

This is an extremely dangerous trend, because the Internet has become the primary way that the vast majority of us communicate with one another.  It truly is our modern version of “the marketplace of ideas”, but now the big tech companies are absolutely determined to distort it into something else entirely.

At this point, there are a whole host of ideas that you aren’t allowed to freely discuss on the Internet anymore.

In fact, there are a whole host of questions that you aren’t even allowed to ask.

When a society gets to a point where you aren’t even allowed to ask questions, that is a very clear sign that you are living under a very oppressive authoritarian regime.

Years ago when they started banning various prominent voices we all knew that it wouldn’t end there.

And it hasn’t.

Today, the big tech companies have no problem banning literally anyone.  For example, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene just got permanently banned on Twitter…

Twitter permanently blacklisted the personal account of a sitting member of Congress, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) over the New Year’s weekend. “Twitter is an enemy to America and can’t handle the truth,” Rep. Greene said, in a statement responding to the ban. “That’s fine, I’ll show America we don’t need them and it’s time to defeat our enemies.”

Rep. Greene has one of the largest followings on social media of any Republican member of Congress. Prior to her ban, she had over 465,000 followers on Twitter, meaning the Republican party and conservative movement has lost one of its most influential accounts on the platform.

Five years ago, if you told me that the big tech companies would start banning our politicians in Washington, I would have told you that you were crazy.

But now nobody is safe.  Once Twitter and Facebook banned a sitting president, we all knew that there was no going back.

Of course the pandemic has given the big tech companies an excuse to push their levels of censorship to even higher levels.  Just a few days ago, Twitter banned Dr. Robert Malone just before he was interviewed by Joe Rogan…

Dr. Robert Malone played a key role in the invention of the mRNA vaccine, the type of vaccine that is being administered to many Americans in an effort to stave off COVID-19. Malone has often been critical of the use of the vaccines, as well those in the media and government who support them.

He shared a great deal of research on his Twitter account, which had more than half a million followers.

“We all knew it would happen eventually,” Malone said on his Substack. “Today it did. Over a half million followers gone in a blink of an eye. That means I must have been on the mark, so to speak. Over the target. It also means we lost a critical component in our fight to stop these vaccines being mandated for children and to stop the corruption in our governments, as well as the medical-industrial complex and pharmaceutical industries.”

So now it appears that Twitter is preemptively banning people.

We truly have entered “Minority Report” territory, and that is extremely chilling.

Considering everything that has been happening with the pandemic, you would think that we would want to hear what one of the inventors of mRNA technology has to say.  Dr. Robert Malone has decades of experience, and he had been one of the most respected names in his field.

But because he has viewpoints that don’t align with the official narratives being pushed by the pharmaceutical industry, he is being blacklisted by the big tech companies.

If you think that you can get around all the censorship by simply refusing to use the big tech company platforms, you are wrong.

Just consider this example.  Gateway Pundit is reporting that T-Mobile is literally erasing links to their articles from text messages…

Hi Jim. In one of the screenshots you can see where my sister tried to send me your website link four times but I never got it. The other two screenshots it shows me sending a link to one of your articles, that’s the one with the picture of the fox in it. In the other screenshot from my sister it shows that she never received the link. The text message it still has the fox in it. I hope this helps. But what I realized is it’s actually just my boost T-Mobile carrier that’s blocking your links. I have a friend in the 949 area code and he was able to send it to his wife, however, I can only receive it in a group text. Let me know if you have any more questions. Thanks. Mark.

I have had a similar experience with articles written by Mike Adams of Natural News.  When I try to send links to Natural News through Facebook Messenger, the links are simply erased from the messages somehow.

That is the level of censorship that we are now facing.

They literally want to control what we see, what we hear and what we think.  And of course this is setting the stage for a level of authoritarianism unlike anything we have ever seen before in all of human history.

Without freedom of speech, all of our other freedoms will rapidly become meaningless.

Sadly, at this point freedom of speech in the United States is getting pretty close to being completely wiped out.

Our Republic is rapidly dying, and millions upon millions of Americans are cheering as it happens.

The big tech companies have become the arbiters of truth, but most of the “truths” that they are relentlessly pushing are actually lies.

I don’t know if there is a way out of this mess, but we must find one, because the future of our society hangs in the balance.

2022: More Stupidity, More Arrogance, More Evil, More Rebellion

 I wish a Happy New Year to the people and friends who read my blog. More than entertain, I try to provide food for thoughts and look for the truth in a world trying hard to strip the meaning from the word.  I also welcome feedbacks and ideas as it is by listening and debating that we enrich each others.

Chaos will reign as the future upends the past. Chaos doesn’t lend itself to prediction.

Post by Robert Gore at Straight Line Logic

Stupidity, arrogance, and evil ultimately destroy themselves, but their rampage was unabated in 2021. A group of stupid, arrogant, and evil people are using a virus and its variants to shepherd the world into a scheme of totalitarian global governance. This was conspiracy theory when the virus first surfaced; now it’s nakedly obvious reality. The one redeeming feature of the year was that more people saw the light.

The self-impressed and self-anointed rule not by claim of divine right, but by claim of superior intelligence and virtue. Real intelligence and virtue hope to find the same in other people; our commissars prey on human weakness. Fear and panic are their allies, truth and rationality their enemies.

As word leaks out of Covid outbreaks on 100 percent vaccinated college campuses, sports teams, naval vessels, and cruise ships, and as fully vaccinated athletes drop incapacitated or dead in front of stadiums full of people and millions of TV viewers, the truth that can’t be hidden is grasped by anyone with a shred of intellectual integrity. The vaccines have failed their ostensible purpose, to protect against the virus and its variants. They have, however, admirably fulfilled their real purpose: a totalitarian grab for power and control.

The coming year will see attempts to institute the rest of the agenda: mandatory vaccination, implanted vaccine passport microchips, fully digitized money, a social credit system, and segregation or elimination for those who refuse to play along. The coming year will also see the inexorable progress of the Doom Loop described in “The Means Are The End.”

The vaccines and their perpetual boosters are an intentional attack on the human immune system. They will continue to produce their adverse effects, including impaired natural immune system functionality, which increases susceptibility not just to Covid and variants, but to many other maladies as well. Early indications are that the omicron variant is more likely to strike the vaccinated than the unvaccinated.

Because it’s essentially the common cold, Omicron has been hailed as the usual downward viral mutation that either burns itself out or becomes an endemic but low-level threat. Covid, therefore, is over. The optimism is misplaced and betrays either ignorance or deliberate obfuscation of the true aims of the Covid commissars. Covid has never been about health and safety, it’s been about power and using vaccines to insidiously and inexorably degrade the true frontline health defense, the immune system. The commissars would insist on vaccinations and boosters even if Covid developed a beneficial variant (see “The Oopsilon Variant,” SLL, 9/1/21).

The gap between excess deaths and baselines will continue to widen in highly vaccinated areas. That makes blaming the steadily shrinking pool of unvaccinated scapegoats problematic, so the deaths will be blamed on breakthrough Covid even though its downward mutations make it less lethal.

Any actual science that might point the finger at vaccines, particularly autopsies, will continue to be discouraged or banned. The surprisingly few autopsies that have been conducted indicate that the spike proteins the vaccines prompt the body to produce end up in virtually every human tissue, organ, and system and cause persistent, long-term damage (see here and here). Real science will be ignored, as it has from the beginning, and the commissars will continue to chant: “Get vaccinated and booster, booster, booster forever.”

The Covid and vaccine charade is an excellent distraction from the mess they’ve made of the world, particularly the U.S. government and its satraps. In government nothing succeeds like failure and they continue to double-, triple-, and quadruple-down on failure.

No country has ever fiat-debted its way to prosperity, and many have done so to their ruin, but the last two years have seen an unprecedented explosion of such debt. While it initially produces an increase in demand from those who receive it, that sugar high soon runs into an iron law of reality: pieces of paper and computer entries don’t conjure real goods and services.

With more demand and the same or less supply, fiat-debt inflation conjures only rising prices as both producers and consumers catch on to the currency debasement. Count on prices ratcheting higher as those responsible for it continue to blame the phenomenon on everything but their currency debasement. It will continue as government debt “monetization”—exchanging government fiat debt for central bank fiat debt—remains essential to financing governments.

Creditors will express their dissatisfaction with microscopic yields in a world of non-transitory, persistently rising prices by selling the debt instruments that are handing them negative real yields (nominal yields minus the inflation rate). Interest rates being the inverse of bond prices, falling bond prices will cause interest rates to rise, which would put pressure on all debt-supported financial and real asset prices as well.

Creditors will express their dissatisfaction with microscopic yields in a world of non-transitory, persistently rising prices by selling the debt instruments that are handing them negative real yields (nominal yields minus the inflation rate). Interest rates being the inverse of bond prices, falling bond prices will cause interest rates to rise, which would put pressure on all debt-supported financial and real asset prices as well.

Rising interest rates will make it increasingly difficult for governments to fund themselves. Central banks will continue to fill the every-increasing gap in demand for government fiat debt, a financial Doom Loop of fiat-debt inflation met with more fiat-debt inflation that eventually becomes hyperinflation. It will be hard to blame this Doom Loop on the unvaccinated, although attempts will be made, but there is another set of all-purpose scapegoats available: Russia and China, the leaders of an Eurasian-centered multipolar axis.

They have seen this train wreck coming and have been “dedollarizing,” a polite term for getting out of crappy fiat debt before it gets even crappier. They’ve also been stockpiling “Real Money” (gold and silver). On current trend the Russians and Chinese will have most of the world’s real money when the American block’s currencies collapse. They will of course be blamed for that collapse, which bears a startling resemblance to blaming the unvaccinated for refusing dangerous vaccines that don’t protect the vaccinated. Like probity at a frat party, logic is always in short supply among collapsing governments.

If it weren’t, our collapsing government wouldn’t be trying so hard to antagonize the governments of Russia, China, Iran, and the rest of the Eurasian block. Vladimir Putin has issued an ultimatum. Perhaps he’s bluffing and the high-tech weapons he and his Chinese buddies have been bragging about are fictional. Perhaps they’re not, but don’t expect American policymakers to even acknowledge the possibility.

Good poker players always reckon the cost of being wrong before they call a bluff, but nobody in the Biden administration seems to have any recognition of the downsides. They include losing a world war against a powerful alliance. The American political establishment floats on an arrogant bubble of belief in a military that just lost Afghanistan, wastes much of its appropriations on boondoggles like the F-35, and whose leadership is more interested in woke doctrine and Covid orthodoxy than defending the country. Even victory would be Pyrrhic: a few more Americans than Russians and Chinese left standing after global nuclear annihilation.

The bright spot of 2021 can be summed up in three words: Let’s Go Brandon! Just as the Trump election had much wider significance—as much a vote against those who presume to rule as a vote for Trump—Let’s Go Brandon! encompasses the entire presumptuous class, not just the increasingly despised Biden. Their dirty secret is that they’ve been at war with the 99 percent since FDR. Their greatest fear is that the 99 percent catch on, which they increasingly are.

Once enlightened, they don’t go back to sleep. They don’t watch CNN or take out subscriptions to the Washington Post or New York Times. Instead, they turn to the alternative media, a hydra that continues to defy the many efforts to suppress or eradicate it. They make Robert F. Kennedy’s take down of Saint Fauci the number one Amazon bestseller and Let’s Go Brandon! a viral cry of rebellion. Never underestimate the power of great memes, which can be more powerful than blockbuster disclosures and incisive commentary.

The Internet is home to much of the world’s remaining vitality. Governments want to kill the vitality without killing the Internet, which is essential to commerce, finance, production, infrastructures, governance, and armed forces. It can’t be done. China offers a test case. By the government’s own falsified statistics its economic debt-fueled “miracle” is faltering as it stifles the Internet and enacts other totalitarian measures.

Vitality’s root word is vital, and the vitality and dynamism that flow from freedom are vital for economic, social, and political progress. If the presumptuous class thinks docile automatons and a state-approved, bulletin-board Internet will produce anything but regress they’re deluded.

And evil. Their ultimate aim is to kill millions or billions, and whatever remains of the human spirit. Ultimately they are cowards, as are their praetorian military and police who they think will protect them. Their loyalty only extends to their next payday and the opportunities their positions give them to extort and terrify the citizenry.

There is abundant docility, but the human spirit is unquenchable and animates the growing rebellion. The rebels already greatly outnumber the miserable mélange of rulers, hangers-on, and the praetorian guard. Most of the docile will meet the fate evil has in store for them. The graveyards will be filled with Darwin awardees who didn’t think or act for themselves. However, the hell this evil is bent on creating for us will assuredly be its own as well.

One bothersome detail dramatically ups their fear-and-loathing quotient: most of the U.S. enlightened own firearms. Imposing totalitarianism is going to be a whole different kettle of fish than in the EU, Australia, and New Zealand, although many of their unarmed citizens are commendably taking to the streets. Whatever bravado cowards demonstrate disappears when the other side starts firing back.

Beyond the continuing stupidity, arrogance, and evil of the presumptuous class and the intensifying resistance to it, predictions about 2022 are a fool’s errand. The centrifugal forces of decentralization and autonomy are overwhelming the dying forces of centralization, command, and control. The process is bloody and chaotic. Chaos doesn’t lend itself to prediction.

The obvious advice is to do the best you can to stay prepared financially, logistically, and emotionally. The only other nugget is to think and act for yourself. There’s no guarantee that will keep you out of the graveyard, but failure to do so guarantees a spot.

Happy New Year to The Burning Platform!

The Covid narrative is insane and illogical…and maybe that’s no accident

 I find this post quite amazing. 

Just think: What if this was true?

Guest Post by Kit Knightly

“Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense.”
George Orwell, 1984

The “Covid pandemic” narrative is insane. That is long-established at this point, we don’t really need to go into how or why here. Read our back catalogue.

The rules are meaningless and arbitrary, the messaging contradictory, the very premise nonsensical.

Every day some new insanity is launched out into the world, and while many of us roll our eyes, raise our voices, or just laugh…many more accept it, believe it, allow it to continue.

Take the situation in Canada right now, where the government has enforced a vaccine mandate on healthcare workers, meaning in British Columbia alone over 3000 hospital staff were on unpaid leave by November 1st.

How have local governments responded to staff shortages?

They are asking vaccinated employees who have tested positive for Covid to work.

Whether or not you believe the test means anything, they notionally do. In the reality they try to sell us every day, testing positive means you are carrying a dangerous disease.

So they are requesting people allegedly carrying a “deadly virus” work, rather than letting perfectly healthy unvaccinated people simply have their jobs back.

This is insanity.

But could anything more perfectly illustrate the priorities of those running the game?

We already know it’s not about a virus, it’s not about protecting the health service and it’s not about saving lives. Every day the people running the “pandemic” admit as much by their actions, and even their words.

Rather, it seems to be about enforcing rules that make little to no sense, requiring conformity at the price of reason, drawing arbitrary lines in the sand and demanding people respect them, making people believe “facts” that are provably untrue.

But why? Why is the story of Covid irrational and contradictory? Why are we told on the one hand to be afraid, and on the other that there is nothing to be afraid of?

Why is the “pandemic” so completely insane?

You could argue that it’s simple happenstance. The by-product of a multi-focused evolving narrative, a story being told by a thousand authors all at once, each concerned with covering their own little patch of agenda. A car with multiple drivers fighting over a single steering wheel.

There’s probably some truth to that.

But it’s also true that control, true control, can only be achieved with a lie.

In clinical psychology one of the diagnostic signs of the psychopath is that they tell elaborate lies, compulsively. Many times they will tell a lie even if the truth would be more beneficial.

Nobody knows why they do this, but I have a theory, and it applies to the swarming groups of little rat minds running the sewers of power as much as it does any individual monstrosity.

If you want to control people, you need to lie to them, that’s the only way to guarantee you have power.

If you are standing in the road, and I yell “look out, there’s a car a coming”, and you move just as a car whips past, I will never know if you moved because I said so, or because there actually was a car.

If my interest is in making sure you don’t get hurt, this would not matter to me either way.

But, what if my only true aim is the gratification of watching you do what I say, simply because I said it?

…well, then I need to scream out a warning of a car that does not exist, and watch you dodge an imaginary threat. Or, indeed, tell you there is no car, and watch you get run over.

Only by doing this can I see my words mean more to you than perceivable reality, and only then do I know I’m truly in control.

You can never control people with the truth, because the truth has an existence outside yourself that cannot be altered or directed. It may be the truth itself that controls people, not you.

You can never force people to obey rules that make sense, because they may be obeying reason, not your force.

True power lies in making people afraid of something that does not exist, and making them abandon reason in the name of protecting themselves from the invented threat.

To guarantee you have control, you must make people see things that are not there, make people live in a reality you build around them, and force people to follow arbitrary, contradictory rules that change day by day.

To truly test their loyalty, their hypnosis, you could even tell them there’s nothing to be afraid of anymore, but they need to follow the rules anyway.

Maybe that’s the point. Maybe the story isn’t supposed to be believable. Maybe the rules aren’t meant to make sense, they are meant to be obeyed.

Maybe the more contradictory & illogical the regulations become, the more your compliance is valued.

Maybe if you can force a person to abandon their judgment in favour of your own, you have total control over their reality.

We started with an Orwell quote, so let’s end with one too:

Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”

Isn’t that what we’re seeing now? What we’ve been seeing since the beginning?

People being mind broken into being afraid of something they told isn’t frightening, following rules they are told are not necessary, taking “medicine” they are told does not work.

Maybe forcing people to believe your lies, even as you admit you are lying, is the purest expression of power.