Chinese And Russian Navies Circle Japan In "Show Of Force"

  How likely is a war in the Pacific? 

 To my opinion, very. And the assessment below for a war in October is quite realistic. Just before the US mid-term elections, following 6 months+ of war in Ukraine while everyone is financially and militarily focused on that conflict... 

 There is also little doubt that China is now using the Covid emergency to restructure it's economy. They witnessed how Russia was pushed into a conflict over Ukraine and probably saw the writing on the wall. Since they are clearly and so obviously next in line, better take the initiative and strike first...

 I was in Okinawa early this week and the flight patterns of the US and Japanese air forces was quite unusual and active with observation flights very early in the morning and a high level of training... 

 

In yet another example of the increasingly close alliance between Russia and China, the Chinese Navy and Russia's Pacific Fleet have been engaging in war game operations, seemingly in tandem around Japan, according to the Japanese Defense Ministry.  

Reports of coordinated military exercises have not been officially acknowledged by Russia or China, though Japan continues to post regular updates on ship movements.  The naval exercises were apparently focused around the islands of Miyako and Okinawa, which hold 50,000 US forces, as well as a 70-mile wide corridor between the island of Yonaguni and Taiwan.  

While not unheard of, military cooperation in the Pacific between Russia and China has grown in frequency, with naval exercises increasing over the past month.  While Japan calls these movements a “show of force,” they may very well be practice for a conflict planned in the near future.

After the recent BRICS summit in Beijing and the reaffirmation of China's economic support of Russia during its war with Ukraine and NATO sanctions, it only makes sense that the economic relationship would evolve into at least a loose military agreement.  The latest decision on the induction of Sweden and Finland into NATO as well as naval escalation in the South Pacific are only going to drive Eastern interests closer together over time.  

China is nursing a compulsive obsession when it comes to absorbing Taiwan into the CCP, and with the West overly focused on Russia and Ukraine, they may act soon.  If an invasion of Taiwan is planned it would have to take place sometime in September/October when weather conditions in the region are favorable to naval operations.  Leaked reports from Russian intel in March seem to indicate that a fall invasion of Taiwan was indeed in the works.  Some believe that the Russian war with Ukraine will force China to scuttle such plans, but there is also a chance that Ukraine will provide excellent cover for an action against Taiwan; forcing western governments to split their efforts and focus on two fronts instead of one.  

The bigger question is:  Will Russia and China form an official military alliance?  There is no debate now over their trade alliance, but the notion of military cooperation between the two countries will lead many people to scoff.  Keep in mind, however, that there were numerous skeptics that argued only a week ago that the Turkish government under Erdogen would “never” agree to Finland and Sweden joining NATO, and yet that is exactly what they did.  

The geopolitical landscape is changing fast and the old rules no longer seem to apply.

Biden & G-7 Push World Into "Nightmare Scenario"

  These people have no belief or principles. As we now understand, they navigate on sight, taking decisions without thinking much about the consequences. Some people in the background do have long term objectives but are these achievable or even a good thing?* No one knows. Few care. That's what decadence is made of: Erosion of trust in the system replaced by apathy and a fight for survival. The coming months will be quite a spectacle!

  * PS: I was recently reading a book about the 4th industrial revolution... I could not believe my eyes. It's all about software, integration, automation. Well written Science Fiction masquerading as new ideas. Robots doing all the work, connected machines everywhere... The only thing missing was "energy"! What energy exactly will power this utopia? It can't be coal, oil or gas. Nuclear power is out of the question too. So what's left? Solar and wind?  The ritual nonsense we hear daily on the news about energy is not just the figment of ignorant politicians in Brussels and Washington, it is the total sum of knowledge of our shadowy elites. If these people who indirectly lead the world understand so little about the real world we inhabit, we are indeed doomed.

Authored by Michael Shellenberger via Substack,

The West's Malthusian neoliberal political order is rapidly collapsing...

Led by U.S. President Joe Biden, the Group of Seven (G-7) economic powers announced plans to ban the transport of Russian oil sold above a certain price with the goal of hurting Russia enough so that it ends its war against Ukraine. "There is only one way out: for Putin to accept that his plans in Ukraine will not succeed," said German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

The G-7’s plan is to impose a price cap on Russian oil through the regulation of petroleum shipping, banking, and insurance.

The proposal is, in a word, ludicrous.

Russian President Vladimir Putin would never agree to a price cap. He would likely withhold oil from the market in the same way he has been withholding natural gas from Europe, driving up prices. Putin would then sell oil to countries including China and India at a 30-40% discount, as he has been doing, or larger. Russia produces oil at a price of just $3-$4 per barrel and Russian firms can profit with oil prices at $25-$30 per barrel. And while it’s true that there is a near-monopoly in shipping insurance, Russia has been creating alternatives to it.

Neither China nor India are likely to agree to the cap unless G-7 nations imposed severe “secondary sanctions” against them, which could escalate into a mutually destructive trade war. But even if they did formally comply, the two nations could easily cheat, as several analysts quickly noted on Twitter.

“A price cap will never work,” said one.

“Every refiner will bid price cap…. India and China… will cheat and pay above the cap and win all they want as [the] other option is twice the price. Nobody will know they paid it, either. Russia ends with more revenue.”

Defenders of the oil price cap proposal point to a similar oil price cap mechanism that President Bill Clinton led the United Nations Security Council to impose on Iraq in 1995, as part of the U.N.’s “oil-for-food programme,” which allowed Iraq to sell its oil in exchange for food and medicine. It was meant to serve the humanitarian needs of the Iraqi people while preventing Iraq’s then-president, Saddam Hussein, from increasing military capabilities. Oil buyers put money into an escrow account run by a private bank. Some of the money was then distributed to Iraq, some was for war reparations to Kuwait, and some was for U.N. operations.

But the Iraq oil-for-food scheme became famously corrupt and had to be shut down. And while the U.N. Security Council was united on Iraq, it is today divided over Russia's invasion of Ukraine. China, India and 33 other nations refuse to condemn Russia’s invasion, and China and India are, as noted, the largest buyers of heavily-discounted Russian oil.

Russia’s response to Western financial sanctions are further proof that an oil price cap can’t work. Biden in March said sanctions were “crushing the Russian economy” and that “the ruble is reduced to rubble.” But high energy prices have meant that Russia is making more money than ever, the ruble is at a seven-year high against the dollar, and China’s benefiting from discounted Russian oil. As such, the attempted bans on Russian oil are proof that the G-7’s latest price cap idea would backfire. Putin would simply reduce oil and gas exports to punish participating nations and further drive up prices.

"It is a nightmare scenario,” noted an oil trader.

The response to the G-7 Russian oil price cap proposal has been near-uniformly negative, even from economists sympathetic to the Biden administration and some G-7 leaders. “This is going to fail,” tweeted the head of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “The G7 won't enforce it on India, and China will retaliate until a workaround is reached.” Italy’s Prime Minister urged the oil price cap to include a natural gas price cap, and French President Emmanuel Macron has proposed a price cap on all oil, not just Russian oil. “The U.S.,” noted Politico, “which originally proposed the narrower Russian price cap, and is currently the world’s biggest oil producer, was blindsided by the French plan.”

In other words, the G-7 is in chaos. Last fall, G-7 leaders claimed climate change was the most important issue in the world, demanded that government subsidies to fossil fuels be phased out, and tried to deny African nations fossil fuels. Now, G-7 nations are subsidizing energy, waiving energy taxes, and burning more coal than they have in years. In the three decades since the Cold War, G-7 leaders have heralded a new global order based on free markets and neoliberal ideology. Now, they are proposing price-fixing and the creation of a Western energy cartel.

The bottom line is that there will be no Western energy cartel, nor even a price cap on Russian oil or gas. Global energy markets are far too globalized for an oil price cap to work. Russia, China, India and at least 33 other nations would circumvent it, and as soon as they did, the West would be forced to abandon it, too, given the crippling effect it would have on Western economies. Indeed, simply attempting to impose a global oil price cap would wreak havoc. Noted Bloomberg, “politicians are likely to quietly abandon the concept after agreeing to explore it.”

What, then, is going on? Why are President Biden and the G-7 pushing the West ever closer to a “nightmare scenario” of energy shortages and recession?

The Great Reset looms...

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JUST PADDLING WHILE THE EMPIRE BURNS

 A good read about the American decline as seen from America...

JUST PADDLING WHILE THE EMPIRE BURNS

The phrase “fiddling while Rome burns” is an intriguing idiom, referencing the great fire which ravaged Rome for six days in 64 A.D. and the legend that Nero, one of the most sadistic, decadent, and cruel rulers of all-time, instead of taking action to stop the fire, played his lyre while composing a song about Rome’s destruction. The Roman historian Tacitus wrote that Nero was rumored to have sung about the destruction of Rome while watching the city burn but it’s likely this was just a myth.

The fire destroyed seventy percent of the city and left half the population homeless. There are those who believe Nero set the fire on purpose, especially after he used land cleared by the fire to build his Golden Palace and its surrounding pleasure gardens. Being a soulless autocrat at heart, Nero did what all feckless politicians do, he blamed the Christians (an obscure religious sect at the time) for the fire and had many arrested and executed.

Whether this story is true or just a parable, the messages are pertinent throughout history, and never more so than now. Occupying one’s time doing inconsequential things while a catastrophic event is underway is the ultimate in leadership failure. Focusing on trivial matters while your people are suffering during a time of crisis is the mark of an ineffectual irresponsible leader or one whose true purpose is to burn down society so it can be “built back better” in the form of a communist totalitarian state ruled by a globalist elite cabal.

One cannot ignore the parallels to our American empire in flames as Biden, the hordes of hyena politicians in Washington DC, their captured corporate propaganda media mouthpieces, central banker fiat printing enablers, and the Davos billionaire cadre are attempting a controlled burn of our world, but it has become a conflagration destined to rage out of control and consume the planet in flames.

We are most certainly living in a time of crisis, as this Fourth Turning hastens towards our rendezvous with destiny. Not only is the American empire burning in an abstract sense, but once the ANTIFA, BLM and pro-abortion terrorist groups (all funded by Soros and Gates) hit the streets, the country is literally burning. The chaos, havoc, violence, and vitriol are all being engineered by the puppeteers/invisible government who control the minds of the masses through media manipulation, non-stop propaganda, technological deceit, and social indoctrination through government schooling. It was succinctly described by Edward Bernays nearly a century ago and has been perfected by those in governing the world today.

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.” – Edward Bernays – Propaganda (1928) pp. 9–10  

I wonder if the people of Rome were as baffled by their emperor’s total disregard for their well-being and safety as their city burned to the ground as the minority of critical thinking Americans are today watching Biden, his Obama handlers, and their toadies in congress systematically burn our once great republic to the ground. There is no doubt Biden is an incompetent, low IQ, hapless, dementia ridden, racist, pedophile, but what is happening in this country and across the globe is not due to incompetence, but a purposeful destruction of all productive structures, small businesses, Constitutional rights, and societal norms, in order to implement a totalitarian techno-gulag across the world run by a global elite of billionaires and their evil apparatchiks.

A crucial aspect of this New World Order is a massive depopulation of the planet to the desired number of serfs needed to do the slave labor necessary to keep the overlords in luxury and splendor. Private jets, yachts and fenced luxurious 25 bathroom mansions with private armed security for them. The serfs will own nothing, eat bugs, and be happy, or be swiftly terminated, since guns will have been outlawed. Our nation is beset by traitors within.

The pockets of firestorms swirling out of control across the world, purposely ignited by those running the show, makes it difficult to distinguish between fires detonated as distractions and the real inferno destined to reduce the world to ashes. Everything roiling the world over the last twenty-seven months has been initiated and/or utilized by the ruling oligarchs to implement their master plan of “building back better” after they burn the world to the ground. Even the distractions are designed to further their agenda. The latest distraction being the Supreme Court ruling on abortion.

The lunatic left is rioting and protesting in left wing cities where they can murder an unborn child any time they want, while woke corporations’ virtue signal, and insane females have mental breakdowns on Tik Tok. It gives the left-wing media something to scream about other than the January 6 “insurrection” hearings that no one watched. Pride month is nothing but a giant distraction, where drag queens, teachers grooming children, and transgender bullshit are jammed down our throats while corporations attempt to capitalize on the worship of abnormality to increase their profits. The government has achieved the goal put forth by William Casey in 1981.

The January 6 joke of an “armed insurrection” without arms, led by Buffalo guy and initiated by FBI plants (Ray Epps) and ANTIFA infiltrators, is another engineered distraction, with the current fake news hearings revealing much ado about nothing, and all designed to cover-up the traitorous coup conducted against Trump by the Deep State players in the Oval Office (Obama), FBI, NSA, DOJ, CIA, DOD, and the wicked witch herself – Hillary Clinton. The Washington establishment (One Party) initiated another distraction last week under the guise of protecting the children, with another un-Constitutional gun grabber law which will be overturned by the Supreme Court.

Red flag laws have already been deemed un-Constitutional by the Supreme Court, but that didn’t stop Pelosi, Schumer, and a bunch of traitorous Republican senators from virtue signaling with a new law. Until it is overturned, it will be used to take away the guns of anyone not toeing the government line. Just like Biden’s un-Constitutional demand that all employers mandate the poisonous gene altering jabs, knowing it was un-Constitutional, ignoring and tearing the Constitution to shreds is the goal. Biden’s previous ruse worked, as tens of thousands of employers mandated the jab before it was deemed illegal.

Just as Nero blamed the Christians for the disaster he created, Biden blames Putin, Trump, oil companies, the un-vaxxed, lawful gun owners, and the 70 million voters who still consider him an illegitimate president, for the ten-alarm fire engulfing the economy, stock market, and a society he continues to debase with far-left policies. At the current trajectory Biden may go down in history as infamous as Nero, with his fatally reckless actions trying to initiate World War 3 with Russia.

He and his NATO cronies have been outmaneuvered, outwitted, and embarrassed by Vladimir Putin regarding the Ukraine conflict, which they provoked and have continued to exacerbate with economic sanctions and attempting to incite Putin into a greater conflict. It has all blown up in Biden’s face, as his sanctions haven’t hurt Russia, but have certainly destroyed the finances of average Americans. The ruble is at a seven year high versus the USD, Russia’s oil revenues are soaring, Biden’s approval ratings are lower than whale shit, and the US and EU have entered a self-inflicted recession.

As Biden spends his days in a dementia haze, falling off bikes, crapping his pants, smelling little children, pumping green energy fantasies, honoring mentally damaged LGBTQ+ icons and pretending to be president, while his handlers orchestrate everything he does, says or thinks, the country accelerates towards economic implosion, global war, civil chaos, and hardship not experienced since the 1930s for the average American.

Everybody knows the 2020 election was stolen. Everybody knows we are on the wrong path. Everybody knows Biden is brain dead. Everybody knows Kamala is the dumbest human being on the planet. Everybody knows Biden’s team are a bunch of incompetent diversity hires. Everybody knows we pissed $54 billion down a Ukrainian toilet and Biden is responsible for double digit inflation and $5 gas.  Everybody knows bad things are going to happen in the next two years, which will require an entire chapter in history books, if the world still even exists. Leonard Cohen captures how everybody feels today.

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows

Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied
Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died

Everybody Knows – Leonard Cohen

I keep being drawn back to the theory Nero purposely burned Rome to clear space for his Golden Palace and pleasure gardens. Essentially his build back better plan. Despite the non-stop parade of distracting events, narratives, and false flags, the big picture has come into focus for me. What even I would have considered conspiracy theory a year ago, now makes the most sense based upon the incoming facts and actions of the major players.

I believe the entire Covid scheme, and the mRNA concoctions were planned and coordinated by those constituting the “invisible government” as a slow-motion depopulation plot designed to reduce the global population to a number they believe can be managed and manipulated to maximize their wealth, power, and control. First, the Wuhan flu gave a final push to the old, infirm, and obese. The lockdowns drove others to commit suicide, die of Chinese fentanyl overdoses, or die from undiagnosed cancers and heart disease.

The most sadistic and insidious aspect of this depopulation conspiracy is the so-called vaccines, that don’t keep you from contracting, spreading, being hospitalized, or dying from Covid, pumped into the bodies of almost 5 billion people. Critical thinking doctors, not bought off by Big Pharma, warned over a year ago about the potential side effects, anti-body dependent enhancement (ADE) created by the vaccines, and dangers of myocarditis in young seemingly healthy people. They also warned about the potential impact on fertility. Most were banned from Twitter and Facebook for their views.

Even though the government, the CDC, FDA, Fauci, Pfizer, Moderna and their captured MSM mouthpieces continue to lie and obfuscate, the data continues to mount, unequivocally proving these genetic altering spike proteins are causing hundreds of thousands of seemingly healthy people to “die suddenly”. Young athletes are dying. Pregnant women are losing their babies. Life insurance companies are reporting deaths in young age brackets far exceeding what actuarial tables predict. And now studies are showing fertility rate declines in Germany that are 9 sigma events – virtually impossible.

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I am now convinced what seems to be chaos, coincidence, and covid insanity is actually coordinated, conceived by Schwab, Gates, Soros, et al, and created to remake the world in the image these tyrant’s desire. They want supply chain disruptions. They want food shortages and starvation in 3^rd world countries. They want an energy crisis where fossil fuels become too expensive to afford. They want mass shootings as a reason to confiscate your guns. They want the cities to burn and murderers to roam free on the streets. They want financial markets to collapse and wipe out the middle class.

They want to decrease the “surplus population” by having the vaccines kill off billions in a slow methodical manner. They aren’t kidding with their slogans about you owning nothing and being happy. We are nothing but annoying parasites to these elitist overlords. They are at war with humanity and the vast majority of humans are too distracted by their social media likes, crypto accounts, sports betting, virtue signaling, and techno-gadgets to notice they are being herded, corralled, and being led to slaughter.

As I ponder these unthinkably diabolical big picture issues, I still have to live my life. Having been trapped working in my basement for the better part of two years and not being invited to anyone’s house due to our un-vaxxed status, we haven’t been travelling the highways and byways of Montgomery County for most of the last two years. Now that covid has subsided, we have been invited to a few family gatherings and spent a week of vacation at the Jersey shore.

My big picture view of an empire in flames is confirmed by my observations on the ground. As I drove on Ridge Pike towards the Royersford area on Memorial Day weekend I was met with a consistent theme – a country in decay. Despite government passing trillion-dollar infrastructure bills (just as Obama did in 2009) the roads are at 3^rd world standards. They are uneven, crumbling, potholed and patched. The sewer and water pipes below are leaking, decaying, and bursting. Our clueless leaders only know about it when it becomes a disaster.

As we traversed the ten or so miles on a once thriving route, you recognize the plethora of boarded up crumbling buildings, vacant strip malls, For Lease signs dotting the landscape, once flourishing small manufacturing businesses, restaurants, bars, boutique retail, independently owned gas stations, auto repair shops and numerous other formerly prosperous businesses either closed a decade ago during the great financial crisis or put out of business by the government mandated covid lockdowns.

It was not a mistake that hundreds of thousands of small businesses were destroyed, while the mega-corps like Amazon, Target and Wal-Mart reaped the spoils. The mega-corporations work hand in hand with the globalist cabal and their government apparatchiks. You can easily determine what a society values by observing the businesses that are thriving and expanding.

We most certainly value our vehicles, as high end car dealerships abound, and mega- gas station/food stores (Wawa, Royal Farms) are spaced every three miles along the route. While you are spending $130 to fill up your $90,000 leased Range Rover, you can dash into the Wawa and pick up a supersized Italian hoagie, with a bag of Funyuns, and 32 ounce Mountain Dew to wash it down. The only retail still standing are the national chains who were deemed essential and were allowed to stay open during the entire plandemic.

Even they have stopped expanding and are just milking the last vestiges of consumer debt financed purchases of Chinese crap Americans can’t afford and don’t need. The other three thriving business classes appear to be banks, national fast food joints, and hospital/medical facilities. Even though everyone can do their banking on-line there are still brand spanking new branches on every other corner. It is plainly evident the Wall Street banks are rolling in dough handed to them by the Federal Reserve, so building money losing bank branches doesn’t faze them. These whores will always be bailed out by their pimps at the Fed.

You can’t pass a McDonalds, KFC, Taco Bell, Burger King or Chick-fil-A without seeing a long line of cars at their drive through window. Because walking into the store to buy your 1,500 calorie snack would be too exhausting. The prolific number of these fast food outlets selling the most vile, mass produced, toxic sludge, disguised as food, is the main reason for the proliferation of medical facilities designed to treat the fall-out from Americans consuming this crap, along with the mass produced packaged foodstuff sold at grocery stores.

The fast food industry works hand in hand with the sickcare industry to enrich the corporations peddling poison and pills. As we see with the Big Pharma money grab related to the covid flu, which has proven to be no more deadly than the common flu, their “vaccines” don’t prevent you from ever getting covid (as previous vaccines for polio and smallpox did) and will require boosters every six months or so. The sickcare industry doesn’t want to cure anything. They want to treat you for life and reap ungodly profits while doing so.

My previous article – American Freakshow – detailed my observations from an hour or so on the Wildwood boardwalk. After spending a week at the shore, my initial observations were reconfirmed. The obesity epidemic, created by the corporate peddlers of toxic sludge fast food and manufactured foodstuff, is on full display in Wildwood. The obese are in heaven on the Wildwood boardwalk as they have their choice of fried Oreos, funnel cake (deep fried dough) dipped in sugar, pizza covered in cheese fries, triple cheeseburgers and pure sugar disguised as lemonade.

There is no shortage of miss-applied high self-esteem as 250-pound females jam themselves into bikinis and parade on the beach and boardwalk for all to see. The self- mutilation with tattoos and piercings among the young and old is astonishing and leads to the relevant response – WHY? It certainly isn’t because they make them more appealing, as 90% of the tattoos are hideous and 100% of the piercings are ghastly. Are they just following the herd? Are they trying to stand out in a world where they feel like a faceless nameless cog in the machine? Or do they want to self-mutilate as a cry for help? I certainly don’t know but see it as another example of a society in rapid decline.

The motels, hotels, and condos are filled. Rental prices have skyrocketed. Prices of properties have doubled in the last three years. The beaches are packed. The restaurants and bars are overflowing. It reminds me of those scenes when the ocean mysteriously receded and those unaware of what that meant ventured out to pick up the shiny seashells where the ocean was supposed to be. They were clueless that a tsunami was about to descend upon them and end their lives in torrent of waves and destruction.

"How I’m treating my COVID"

 Probably a few good advises below. But you can resume in "eat well and go to the beach!" You'll get everything you need including your vitamin C and D.

 This should be the end of Covid... but of course, it won't!

Guest Post by Steve Kirsch

I’m double vaxxed. It didn’t help of course. I finally got COVID for the first time. Here’s how I’m treating it.

Status update 9:52pm Jun 26
Don’t worry about me. I started early treatment immediately, just like what I tell people. I have my taste, smell, etc. all intact. No cough. No breathing difficulties. Just a little tired, that’s it. All in all, it feels like a very mild cold.

I’ve always said that the only thing we really needed to do to respond to COVID was tell people:

1. If you are sick, stay home
2. As soon as you realize you have COVID, start on an early treatment protocol like the one listed below.

Nothing else was needed. In fact, I’d argue that everything we did including vaccination, masking, lockdowns, mandates, remdesivir, standardized hospital protocols, and more was counter-productive; it just made things worse.

Introduction

I came down with COVID on Friday, June 24, 2022.

My wife had COVID (she got it from a golfing partner) and I didn’t wait long enough before interacting with her.

I am double vaccinated because in March 2021, I believed that the FDA and CDC were honest organizations. It wasn’t until 2 months later that I figured out I was badly mistaken. While many others realized this before I did, pretty much all our friends are still on the blue pill. I switched to the red pill as soon as I saw two black swans (a friend with 3 dead relatives 1 week after vaccination and a vendor and his wife both vaccine injured).

I suspected I had COVID because I woke up with muscle aches on Friday morning.

Since I was symptomatic, I verified it was COVID with a test from iHealth. These are the cheapest tests around, less than $5 per test ($9.79 per two pack) if you order from code1supply for example. The iHealth test showed positive for me 30 seconds after I applied the liquid to the well (it is normally supposed to take 15 minutes so I guess I had a high viral load).

Everyone has their own favorite COVID protocol

Here’s how I’m treating my COVID and it seems to be working pretty well since I’m just a bit tired.

This is not the only way to treat COVID. This is just what I’m doing.

Your treatment may vary depending on what drugs you are already on so check with your doctor before duplicating what I did.

Also, different doctors will have their own preferences. For example some people will have you take 40,000 units of vitamin D just once. Others say 10,000 IU per day. Which one is better? Hard to know. So all of these treatment protocols are approximate guesses as to the optimum protocol. Which means your doctor may recommend something different and it may be just as good. I’m not making the claim the protocol listed below is optimal.

One thing everyone agrees on is that you always want to start treating COVID instantly as soon as you get diagnosed which is why I always carry the meds with me when I travel.

I already had all the meds on hand because I pre-ordered everything using myfreedoctor.com. If you want to get the cheapest meds, it takes about a week, otherwise you have to use local pharmacies and that can be a lot more expensive.

Here’s the list of things I’m taking. For me, there are no side effects at all for any of these drugs making the combination very easy to take:

1. Vitamin C: 3,000 mg/day   (3 chewable tablets since I like chewables)
2. Vitamin D3: 10K IU/day. Two small little pills in my case.
3. Zinc: 50 mg/day (I have this covered since I take Biome Boosters from Progenabiome which supports Sabine Hazan’s research). Don’t overdo the zinc.
4. Aspirin: 81 mg (some advise more): I went with the chewable Bayer aspirin. There is some debate about whether full aspirin is better but I’ve read that it is better to take the lower dose, but I can’t recall where I read that; it turned out that different things are activated on the lower dose vs. the higher dose.
5. Pepcid: one10 mg tablet 2x per day (20mg /day). Malone’s paper recommends a much higher dose 60mg TID which is 180mg/day. He also recommends using this with Celecoxib which requires a prescription. Also the higher dose was used when this drug was used as the sole therapy. I went with the lower option so this may not do much
6. Allegra: once a day. This is complementary to the Pepcid and blocks a different set of receptors.
7. NAC: 600 mg/day
8. Nigella sativa seeds: 80 mg /kg per day x 10 days (split it up) which is 6gm /day; So I take 1.5 tsp 3X/day.
9. Ivermectin (15mg pills compounded): 2 pills/day for 10 days. Take with a fatty meal for best absorption. This is based on my weight which is 77 kg. Your dosage will be proportional to your weight.
10. Hydroxychloroquine (200 mg tablets): 2 tablets twice a day on day 1, then 1 tablet twice a day for 10 days total. Ideally take on an empty stomach.
11. Activia yogurt: twice a day. This contains bifidobacteria which is helpful for eliminating COVID from your gut.
12. Azithromycin (250 mg tablet): 2 tablets day 1, then 1 per day thereafter for 5 days total. Doesn’t do wonders for your gut bacteria though. However, even Sabine Hazan who is a gut bacteria expert recommends this for up to 5 days.
13. Melatonin: 3mg extended release at bedtime
14. Fluvoxamine: 50mg taken twice a day (total 100 mg per day) for 14 days. AVOID caffeine while on fluvoxamine. You’ll regret it if you ignore my advice.
15. Povidone-iodine nasal rinse: 4x day. First I microwave 60ml of distilled water in a NeilMed sinus rinse squeeze bottle. Then I add half an eyedropper of Povidone iodine 10% and 1/4 tsp of salt and use it just like a regular sinus rinse. It should look like a dark iced tea.
16. Crest Scope Classic gargle: 4x day because it has CPC (Colgate Total can be used as well). You can also swab your nostrils with this, but the saline rinse is more comfortable.
17. Plenty of rest
18. Walk around regularly to keep the blood moving. You want to minimize your risk of a DVT or pulmonary embolism.
19. If you sit, elevate your feet.
20. Take regular pulse ox readings while walking around
21. Glutamine: 10 g l-Glutamine available in powder forms taken 3 times a day with meals. In the control group, 38 out of 230 covid patients died. In the glutamine group, 0 out of 222 patients died. The effect of glutamine supplementation on serum levels of some inflammatory factors, oxidative stress, and appetite in COVID-19 patients: a case-control study – PubMed (nih.gov) Again, no mortality and no ICU admission in the glutamine group… Effect of oral l-Glutamine supplementation on Covid-19 treatment – PubMed (nih.gov). This is not to be confused with glutathione which you’d take if you were vaccine injured. On the other hand, there is this paper: Endogenous Deficiency of Glutathione as the Most Likely Cause of Serious Manifestations and Death in COVID-19 Patients.
22. Lactoferrin: 750mg per day for 14 days.
23. Prednisone 20mg tablets. Take 3 tablets/day for 5 days starting on DAY 8 as last resort and ONLY if needed. I have it handy but you should never need to use it. The mistake a lot of people make is not to read the instructions to only use it LATE in the disease. I know people who start taking it on day 1 and they regret the error. If you started treatment early, you aren’t going to need this drug.

For more ideas and options, see this article on How to treat COVID.

For more on the science behind any of these drugs/supplements, see c19early.com.

How am I doing?

Friday, Jun 24: Muscle soreness. Started treatment. Oura ring showed an elevated pulse (90bpm during sleep instead of 67bpm) as well as elevated temperature (2.6 degrees over normal).

Sat, Jun 25: Productive cough (yellow stuff), diarrhea. Oura says body temp 1.9 degrees over normal.

Sunday, Jun 26: Just feeling a little off/tired. No cough. My nighttime pulse is back down to 68 bpm during sleep. Oura ring indicated Body temp 1.2 degrees over baseline.

The Age Of Discord By Charles Hugh Smith

 Here is the follow up to my previous article.

 To me, our social crash looks like a corkscrew dive on a plane. It will be near impossible to exit from such a configuration. The Romans somehow succeeded in delaying slightly their 3rd century crash with the Christian "revival" of Constantine to finally exit the scene at the beginning of the 5th century when the "barbarians" pillaged Rome in 410. But because our society is more complex, the fall will be harder and faster. 

 At this stage, war is almost unavoidable and will naturally accelerate the dive speed. But conversely the rebound should also be much faster. With only 2 to 3 billion people, society should enjoy a post black plague-like revival with a renaissance-like new start based on new ideas and principles. It is just our society which has exhausted itself, not mankind. 

Unfortunately, from our vantage point it is almost impossible to look beyond the next wave which as it gets closer looks more and more like a tsunami!

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

It's very difficult to find common ground that supports cooperation in the disintegrative stage of scarcities, rising prices, catastrophically centralized power and social discord.

Today's topic echoes Peter Turchin's 2016 book, Ages of Discord, which I have often referenced in blog posts.

I'll also discuss two other books I've often referenced, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century by Geoffrey Parker and The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History by David Hackett Fischer.

Turchin proposes repeating cycles of history of social integration (people finding reasons to cooperate) and disintegration (people finding reasons to not cooperate).

Clearly, we're in a disintegrative stage.

Fischer proposed a repeating cycle of history in which humans expand their numbers and economy to consume all available resources.

Once all the low-hanging fruit has been consumed, scarcities arise, pushing prices above what commoners can afford, and the result is economic stagnation and social/political revolution.

Either humans exploit a new energy source at scale to provide for the larger population and higher consumption per person, or the population and consumption decline to fit available resources.

Parker covers the mutually reinforcing climate, political, social and economic crises of the 17th century. A long cycle of cold, wet summers reduced crop yields, leading to hunger and strife.

Parker also identifies another cause of the tumultuous, war-plagued 1600s: political leaders had consolidated too much power, enabling them to pursue disastrous wars without any restraint from competing domestic social-political interests.

Clearly, we're in Fischer's stage of overshoot and resource scarcity and Parker's extremes of centralized power free to pursue catastrophic wars of choice.

In the 1600s, those launching wars reckoned a clean, decisive victory was within easy reach. In every case, the wars dragged on inconclusively or generated even wider conflicts.

In the end, all the wars were settled diplomatically, not by military victory. The military gains were nil while the destruction was widespread and devastating.

Fischer details how poorly humans respond to scarcity and higher prices, also known as inflation or more. accurately, as the decline in purchasing power of money and labor. As scarcities and higher prices take their toll, society unravels: crime and social disorder accelerate.

What we're seeing in real time is a "circle the wagons" mentality of weeding out everyone but the True Believers in every movement. Litmus tests are handy for this test: answer wrong on any question and you're cast out: heretic!

It's not enough to tick one "progressive" or "conservative" box; you have to tick them all or you're a heretic who cannot be trusted. If you leave one box unticked, you might untick a few more in the days ahead.

This puts pressure on everyone to declare their loyalty to the "party" even if the loyalty is just for show. This dishonesty pleases those demanding every box be ticked but this forced loyalty creates an illusion of solidarity that unravels under pressure.

Officials vie to offer pledges of loyalty to Chinese President Xi Jinping ahead of 20th Party Congress

Exacerbating this is social media, which rewards those promoting the most extreme and divisive positions and deranges the populace by substituting recognition online, which encourages disintegration, for real-world engagement, which encourages moderation and cooperation.

Online, it's easy to be all-or-nothing: there should be no restrictions on social media, or we should just pull the plug and shut the whole mess down.

In the real world, these are knotty, nuanced problems. The Founding Fathers would not have tolerated sedition under the guise of free speech. The social order can only be maintained if every participant adheres to standards of civility and the common good.

When put under stress, humans harden their positions as a defensive measure. They become more argumentative and less tolerant, more strident in insisting that the One True Thing is the answer to our problems.

This leads to magical thinking, for example, that we can replace hydrocarbons with fusion or wind and solar. When the physical and cost limits of minerals are presented as impassable obstacles, people respond with denial: there must be a way to keep everything the same.

Humans have an easy time expanding their population and consumption per person and a hard time consuming less.

It's very difficult to find common ground that supports cooperation in the disintegrative stage of scarcities, rising prices, catastrophically centralized power and social discord.

This requires accepting that we can cooperate with people on one issue even though all the other boxes of our group/party/movement are left unticked.

History suggests the disintegrative stage will run its course and consumption will realign with available resources one way or another, and the best we can do is preserve our own sanity, community and willingness to nurture small patches of common ground that support productive cooperation.

Why Biden’s Green Energy Policy Will 'End In Tears'

 As I have written many times over the last few years, the green agenda is a joke. It is above all a trick to grab power but also as explained below an experiment that will end in tears and more ominously by the unavoidable crash of our civilization. It is at this stage unavoidable. You do not power a complex society with less energy unlike what we are being told. It is impossible and we are consequently witnessing the process of devolution where almost everything starts falling apart. (It may not be so obvious yet to many people, but as in the past, sacrifices are in full swing on top of the pyramids until the very last moments.)

 This has happened many times in the past. When societies are under stress, they do not change their ways but tend to do more of what doesn't work until they meet their fate. So let's burn the anti-green witches but not with oil, please!

 (The next article explore this social subject in more depth while adding an interesting angle.)

Authored by Kevin Stocklin via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

American Founding Father Benjamin Franklin once said that “experience is an expensive school but fools will learn in no other.” Germany’s green energy policy, launched in the year 2000, could have been a cheap lesson for America today.

The Biden administration has chosen to follow Germany, providing heavy subsidies for wind and solar, while suppressing industries that could reliably meet America’s energy needs and even reduce its carbon footprint. In January, the administration announced that it had “pulled every lever to position America to scale up clean energy … the Biden-Harris Administration has readied offshore areas to harness power from wind, approved new solar projects on public lands, and passed the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to build thousands of miles of transmission lines that deliver clean energy.”

On June 6, the Biden Administration invoked the Defense Production Act to increase the production of green energy and to replace the use of fossil fuels. While the legality of this move is questionable, it established the U.S. government as a major controlling party in America’s heretofore private energy industry. But like most grand government adventures into industrial policy, the push for renewables is already revealing itself to be enormously wasteful and counterproductive.

Twenty-two years ago, Germany stepped into the forefront of the green energy movement, implementing its “Energiewende,” an ambitious program of subsidies for solar panels and wind turbines, coupled with a reduction in coal, oil, and natural gas. After the 2011 nuclear disaster in Fukushima, Japan, Germany decided to also close its nuclear plants.

In 2000, less than 7 percent of Germany’s electricity came from so-called renewables. By 2021, that share exceeded 40 percent of the country’s electricity generation and about 20 percent of its total energy consumption, including electric vehicles (EVs).

By the end of 2021, before the Ukraine war drove prices even higher, German households paid 32 cents per kilowatt-hour for electricity. The rate in France, which kept its nuclear industry intact, was 23 cents. Americans paid an average price of 11 cents for electricity at that time—about a third of what Germans paid. Twenty percent of Germans’ electric bills went to a “renewables surcharge” to subsidize wind and solar.

Germany had spent heavily to increase its renewable energy capacity, but in the case of wind and solar, capacity never delivered the promised output. According to a 2020 report from the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Germany’s electricity output in 2000 was 54 percent of its total capacity, also known as the “capacity factor.” Unused capacity is the norm for power grids because the demand for electricity varies significantly depending on the time of day, the season, and the weather. By 2019, however, while Germany’s total electricity capacity had risen dramatically thanks to a sharp increase in renewables, its capacity factor had fallen to just 20 percent, largely because wind and solar generators were less productive than fossil fuels or nuclear.

The capacity factor for solar energy was just 10 percent because much of the country is often overcast. Wind energy was also producing well below capacity because wind turbines produced no energy on calm days and had to shut down on particularly gusty days to prevent turbine blades from being damaged. Even within those limits, the amount of energy produced by wind turbines was hugely variable depending on how hard the wind was blowing.

“It costs Germany a great deal to maintain such an excess of installed power,” the IEEE report stated. “The average cost of electricity for German households has doubled since 2000.”

A major problem with wind and solar is not only that they are unreliable, but also that they tend to generate the most power when people need it least. The peak seasons for wind generation tend to be fall and spring, but the peak demand for energy occurs in summer and winter when people need to heat or cool homes and offices.

An electricity grid must manage huge variability in demand. It must have enough capacity to cover peak demand, for example during the hottest hours of summer, but also have the flexibility to reduce power during early morning hours or springtime days when demand falls considerably. Because renewables are unpredictable in terms of how much energy they will produce, and when, they add substantial variability to the supply side of the equation as well.

“The whole idea that you would take something as complicated as an electric system, one of the most complicated things people have invented to date, and choose what to put on that system and how to run it by a popularity contest, to me that’s nuts and it’s going to end in tears,” Peter Hartley, Professor of Energy Economics at Rice University, told The Epoch Times. “Trying to run that system with politics is not a very smart thing to do.”

COVID Falls From G7 Agenda - Focus Now On Russia, Russia, Russia

 

 The war in Ukraine has become existential for the West. When the country falls, it is the whole financial construction which goes with it. No wonder the war is "total". There can be only one winner: East or West. No compromise is possible. Everybody knows it. They just pretend it isn't so. Just playing for time. Likewise, Covid was little more than a trick to re-float the system: Too little, too late!

 But as the dollar based financial system becomes weaker, the stress keeps growing. Saudi Arabia, India and many other countries see the writing on the wall. Do you really want to put your fate in the hands of a woke, bankrupt, morally decrepit Western hegemon? China may not offer a very attractive world economic model but for a while, it will be multi-polar...

COVID Falls From G7 Agenda - Focus Now On Russia, Russia, Russia

Remember at the beginning of this year when you could not turn on the TV or log on to the web without being bombarded by a non-stop wave of covid fear mongering? 

Remember when you couldn't even ask questions about the validity of the claims made by Anthony Fauci, the CDC and others without getting booted from social media? 

Remember the insanity and the zealotry of the devout covid cult sitting in their cars with masks on, walking around outside with their masks on, and then getting right in people's faces when they didn't have a mask on?

The covid pandemic event was a near perfect combination of induced fear in the minds of cowards, along with induced authoritarianism in the minds of people who, deep down, desperately want to control everyone else around them.

Where did all the hype go?  It disappeared in a matter of weeks once the corporate media gave up on the narrative.  There were a few reasons for this...

First, the Infection Fatality Rate of covid was far too small to warrant all the doom mongering.  With an average IFR of only 0.27% (recently adjusted to 0.23%), the vast majority of people have nothing to worry about from the virus.  Second, the lie of the “pandemic of the unvaccinated was exposed.  In fact, states and countries that actually tracked “breakthrough infections” showed that the vaccinated were far more likely to get infected than people who were not vaccinated and had natural immunity.  Third, the vaccine passport efforts failed in the US at the federal level and in red states, and thus, the rest of the world saw that half the country could function perfectly fine without medical tyranny.

Once there is a working example that defies the medical tyranny model, other countries are going to demand answers for why they have to remain in lockdown while some people can be free?  Only a few nations with the most extreme authoritarianism (like China) continue to enforce lockdowns and vax controls.  

All the excuses for lockdowns and forced vaccinations fell apart in the US, and any further push for vax passports was inspiring millions of Americans to potentially take up arms.  So, the establishment walked away from the plan.  It was as simple as that.

This abandonment of the precious covid program has been made evident in the latest G7 summit, which does not seem to have covid listed as a topic of discussion, and the pandemic has so far been completely overshadowed by other concerns.  World leaders have clearly moved on and are not even wearing masks for show anymore (If the vaccines actually work, what do you need a mask for?  If they don't work, then why take one?).  Instead, the subject of Russia and the war in Ukraine is dominating G7.  Secondary topics include climate change and “gender equality.”

The notion of covid as a nothing-burger issue seems to fall in line with shifts in public focus.  Inflation is currently on the top of the list of biggest problems facing the US (and most other countries), followed by violent crime.  Covid rates at the very bottom of the list in polling.  

The G7 summit will surely touch on inflation and other economic issues, but they appear intent on doing so only as a way to blame Russia for our economic decline.  To reiterate a fact that Joe Biden and many other world leader refuse to admit to:  The inflation crisis started WAY before Russia invaded Ukraine.  While sanctions against Russia will definitely expound on supply chain problems, the bigger issue is central bank fiat printing and too many dollars chasing too few goods.  

The Ukraine situation is also fading as a subject of widespread outrage among Americans.  Europe is more immediately affected because of their dependency on Russian oil and natural gas, but questions are rising about why we should be so focused on Ukraine when there are much bigger problems closer to home.  Overall, establishment politicians continue to ignore the one issue that the majority of the world wants answers and solutions for, which is economic decline.  But, in order to offer answers, they would first have to acknowledge the true gravity of the threat, and they're not going to do that until it's far too late to do anything about it.

Japan's the Worst Currency CRISIS in 20 years (Video 14')

 I always expected that the 60 trillion USD real estate bubble in China would explode the world economy. But it now looks more and more likely that it may be the Japanese Yen and the Bank of Japan buying for the first time over 50% of the JGB (Japan Government Bonds) which will do the trick. The reality is that no one knows. As the world economy becomes more fragile, teetering on the edge, the trigger may come from an unexpected player. A developing economy close to bankruptcy like Thailand in 1998. The war in Ukraine taking a wrong turn. Relations between China and the US getting off tracks. The list is getting longer. Time is getting shorter!

 

Tyranny of the Modelers by Dr Robert Malone

 "Who are you going to believe? Me or your own eyes?"

 We believed their false statistics pushed down our troughs with propaganda-like methods and have been paying the price since. 

 So it is worth understanding how these statistics were built to avoid the same mistake again.

Guest Post by Dr. Robert Malone

Intersection of Utilitarianism, Geopolitics, Public Health and Hubris

There are so very many factors that have contributed to the clear and compelling reality that the public health response to the global SARS-CoV-2 outbreak has been one of the greatest failures in public policy in modern history. But chief among those has been the grossly overestimated modeling projections of likely disease and death due to the virus.

Those well versed in the world of computer software coding are intimately familiar with the problem of “Garbage in – Garbage out” (GIGO), which is short slang for the real world issue that the utility of any coded data set analysis is a function of the quality of the underlying data being analyzed and the assumptions engineered into the computer code. In retrospect, it is abundantly clear that the underlying data and assumptions which were used to develop the modeling which formed the basis for global public health policy decisions concerning the management of the outbreak were seriously flawed. These flawed analyses, which were promoted via a wide range of government policy analysis and media channels, almost universally wildly over-estimated the risks of the virus.

At the core of both the national and globally-coordinated public health policy COVID-19 response decisions lies a philosophical belief system known as Utilitarianism. This is also the core philosophy often employed by Globalist organizations such as the World Economic Forum, and can be found intertwined with another logical framework known as Malthusianism. We are most familiar with the philosophy of Utilitarianism in the phrase “the greatest good for the greatest number”.

Quoting from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Utilitarianism is one of the most powerful and persuasive approaches to normative ethics in the history of philosophy. Though not fully articulated until the 19th century, proto-utilitarian positions can be discerned throughout the history of ethical theory.

Though there are many varieties of the view discussed, utilitarianism is generally held to be the view that the morally right action is the action that produces the most good. There are many ways to spell out this general claim. One thing to note is that the theory is a form of consequentialism: the right action is understood entirely in terms of consequences produced. What distinguishes utilitarianism from egoism has to do with the scope of the relevant consequences. On the utilitarian view one ought to maximize the overall good — that is, consider the good of others as well as one’s own good.

The Classical Utilitarians, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, identified the good with pleasure, so, like Epicurus, were hedonists about value. They also held that we ought to maximize the good, that is, bring about ‘the greatest amount of good for the greatest number’.

Utilitarianism is also distinguished by impartiality and agent-neutrality. Everyone’s happiness counts the same. When one maximizes the good, it is the good impartially considered. My good counts for no more than anyone else’s good. Further, the reason I have to promote the overall good is the same reason anyone else has to so promote the good. It is not peculiar to me.

All of these features of this approach to moral evaluation and/or moral decision-making have proven to be somewhat controversial and subsequent controversies have led to changes in the Classical version of the theory.

Malthusianism is the idea that population growth is potentially exponential while the growth of the food supply or other resources is linear, which eventually reduces living standards to the point of triggering a population die off. The theory is most clearly described in a 1798 treatise titled “An Essay on the Principle of Population”, by English political economist Thomas Robert Malthus. This is the philosophy underlying the often noted positions of Bill Gates and the World Economic Forum which call for a drastic reduction in global human population, often referred to as the depopulation agenda. This illogic is examined in a succinct analysis published in Scientific American by Michael Shermer entitled “Why Malthus Is Still Wrong. Why Malthus makes for bad science policy” As Mr. Schermer nicely summarizes,

“The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race,” Malthus gloomily predicted. His scenario influenced policy makers to embrace social Darwinism and eugenics, resulting in draconian measures to restrict particular populations’ family size, including forced sterilizations.

In his book The Evolution of Everything (Harper, 2015), evolutionary biologist and journalist Matt Ridley sums up the policy succinctly: “Better to be cruel to be kind.” The belief that “those in power knew best what was good for the vulnerable and weak” led directly to legal actions based on questionable Malthusian science. For example, the English Poor Law implemented by Queen Elizabeth I in 1601 to provide food to the poor was severely curtailed by the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, based on Malthusian reasoning that helping the poor only encourages them to have more children and thereby exacerbate poverty. The British government had a similar Malthusian attitude during the Irish potato famine of the 1840s, Ridley notes, reasoning that famine, in the words of Assistant Secretary to the Treasury Charles Trevelyan, was an “effective mechanism for reducing surplus population.” A few decades later Francis Galton advocated marriage between the fittest individuals (“What nature does blindly, slowly, and ruthlessly man may do providently, quickly and kindly”), followed by a number of prominent socialists such as Sidney and Beatrice Webb, George Bernard Shaw, Havelock Ellis and H. G. Wells, who openly championed eugenics as a tool of social engineering.

This is the philosophical basis of the depopulation agenda and policies which Mr. Gates and his Oligarch colleagues at the World Economic Forum seek to impose on all of us, for our own good of course. It is Malthusianistic theories which underly the idea that the only way to prevent catastrophic global warming is by restricting carbon dioxide release into the atmosphere. This is a philosophy which completely disregards the amazing innovative, adaptive problem solving capabilities of the human mind.

As taught in most Universities, “Public Health” (as in the Masters of Public Health degree programs) is also largely based on these two 18th and 19th century philosophical theories (utilitarianism and malthusianism). As opposed to the disciplines of Medicine and clinical research, which are grounded in the principles of the Hippocratic oath and beneficence as applied to the individual patient. Examples of beneficence in clinical research and medical practice include “Do no harm,” “Balance benefits against risks,” and “Maximize possible benefits and minimize possible harms.”

And here is where we get to the crux of the issue. Medical hubris and the public health. First a brief definition, so we are all on the same page:

Hubris (/ˈhjuːbrɪs/; from Ancient Greek ὕβρις (húbris) ‘pride, insolence, outrage’), or less frequently hybris (/ˈhaɪbrɪs/), describes a personality quality of extreme or excessive pride or dangerous overconfidence, often in combination with (or synonymous with) arrogance.

Apparently unaware of the irony, the WEF recognizes (in a very limited way) the problem of “How hubris put our health at risk”.

The core thesis of modern public health is that a utilitarian approach can be used to generate a sort of spreadsheet of maximal public health benefit. To take an extreme example to illustrate the point, here is a sort of parable:

A man walks into his doctor’s office for a health checkup. After completion of the exam, he asks “Doc, how am I doing?”. His utilitarian MD-MPH turns and says “you are in perfect health. Your heart is perfect, your liver is perfect, and your kidneys are perfect. And I have four other patients that will die in the next week if they do not get transplants requiring a donated heart, liver or kidney. So I will be prepping you for surgery in one hour.”

Four lives saved for one sacrificed. I think that we can all agree that, while this scenario may meet a utilitarian standard, it fails to meet the fundamentals of Judeo-Christian belief systems regarding the Hippocratic oath and principle of beneficence. But if reports are correct, in the very utilitarian, marxist reality which is modern China under the CCP, organ harvesting is a fact of life. And I believe that the utilitarian bias of the WHO and US HHS, combined with the hubris of a belief system that assumes that the likes of Anthony Fauci and other bureaucrats have sufficient comprehension of the enormous complexity of the interactions of an emergent viral variant with a global human population has lead us to a very similar endpoint.

To a considerable extent, this has been driven and justified by the hubris of public health modelers who believe that they have sufficient knowledge to be able to identify all of the important interacting variables in this interaction of virus with human host population, to be able to reduce this complexity to a set of equations or a spreadsheet, and with this tool in hand, to be able to calculate the utilitarian “greatest good for the greatest number”. And of those arrogant academic modelers whose hubris has lead to massive suffering and avoidable loss of life, chief among them is Neil Ferguson, the physicist (!!) at Imperial College London who created the main epidemiology model behind the lockdowns.

Quoting from Phillip Magness’ article “The Failure of Imperial College Modeling Is Far Worse than We Knew”:

Ferguson predicted catastrophic death tolls back on March 16, 2020 unless governments around the world adopted his preferred suite of nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to ward off the pandemic. Most countries followed his advice, particularly after the United Kingdom and United States governments explicitly invoked his report as a justification for lockdowns.

Ferguson’s team at Imperial would soon claim credit for saving millions of lives through these policies – a figure they arrived at through a ludicrously unscientific exercise where they purported to validate their model by using its own hypothetical projections as a counterfactual of what would happen without lockdowns. But the June hearing in Parliament drew attention to another real-world test of the Imperial team’s modeling, this one based on actual evidence.

As Europe descended into the first round of its now year-long experiment with shelter-in-place restrictions, Sweden famously shirked the strategy recommended by Ferguson. In doing so, they also created the conditions of a natural experiment to see how their coronavirus numbers performed against the epidemiology models. Although Ferguson originally limited his scope to the US and UK, a team of researchers at Uppsala University in Sweden borrowed his model and adapted it to their country with similarly catastrophic projections. If Sweden did not lock down by mid-April, the Uppsala team projected, the country would soon experience 96,000 coronavirus deaths.

I was one of the first people to call attention to the Uppsala adaptation of Ferguson’s model back on April 30, 2020. Even at that early date, the model showed clear signs of faltering. Although Sweden was hit hard by the virus, its death toll stood at only a few thousand at a point where the adaptation from Ferguson’s model already expected tens of thousands. At the one year mark, Sweden had a little over 13,000 fatalities from Covid-19 – a serious toll, but smaller on a per-capita basis than many European lockdown states and a far cry from the 96,000 deaths projected by the Uppsala adaptation.

The implication for Ferguson’s work remains clear: the primary model used to justify lockdowns failed its first real-world test.

As we look back at the long list of public health lies and tragedies that have occurred since January 2020, I have been trying to think through what systemic changes should be implemented to help prevent such catastrophically poor decision making in the future. I suggest that at the top of the list we include jettisoning both the philosophical dependence of public health decision making (as taught in MPH programs) on utilitarian philosophy, and instead substitute a Judeo-Christian values-based public health decision making process. We have let the MPH utilitarians interject themselves in place of the traditional role of the Physician, and have had to live through the consequences.

And we need to stop letting arrogant physicist modelers generate garbage out from their inadequate models that is then hyped by the press and employed by public health bureaucrats to justify globally deployed “solutions” which caused enormous suffering, avoidable death, and economic devastation.

Jamie Dimon Warns “Brace Yourself” for This “Economic Hurricane”

 We are now entering the storm of the 4th turning. None of us alive today will see the end of it. The reason is that unlike earlier ones we do not have the social, economic and technological (energy mostly) basis to rebuild our societies. So we will muddle through from bad to worse with mediocre politicians telling us that their policies are failing because we are not doing enough of what doesn't work. More green nonsense and woke policies is indeed what will save us... on the road to hell! This is why you can expect major dislocations and wars down this road. Was it unavoidable? Probably, unfortunately. But do we have the power to make it much worse than necessary? Most certainly!

Via Birch Gold Group

From Peter Reagan

We’ve suggested many times that an economic “storm could be brewing” so that you could start or continue preparing for it.

Well, if Jamie Dimon (CEO of JP Morgan) is correct, it looks like we might have underestimated how bad things could get. According to a recent report on CNBC, Dimon predicts that something much worse is barreling toward our economy:

“You know, I said there’s storm clouds but I’m going to change it … it’s a hurricane,” Dimon said Wednesday at a financial conference in New York. While conditions seem “fine” at the moment, nobody knows if the hurricane is “a minor one or Superstorm Sandy.”

He went on to describe part of the Fed’s game plan for addressing the rampant inflation of the moment, and how he thinks it backed the central banks into a corner:

“We’ve never had QT like this, so you’re looking at something you could be writing history books on for 50 years,” Dimon said. Several aspects of quantitative easing programs “backfired,” including negative rates, which he called a “huge mistake.”

“QT” here refers to quantitative tightening, basically the opposite of quantitative easing (QE). Where QE lowers borrowing costs and pumps money into the economy to encourage spending, QT raises borrowing costs and removes money from circulation. This effectively reduces the demand for loans and credit by making all sorts of loans more expensive for borrowers.

Dimon continued:

Central banks “don’t have a choice because there’s too much liquidity in the system,” Dimon said, referring to the tightening actions. “They have to remove some of the liquidity to stop the speculation, reduce home prices and stuff like that.”

Now, let’s be a little more explicit here…

When Dimon says “stop the speculation,” he’s referring to finally collapsing the “Everything Bubble” I’ve been writing about for months. He’s warning us that the Fed’s announced plans of raising interest rates and shrinking the money supply will make the stock market rout even worse than it’s already been (the S&P 500 is down about 14% year-to-date at the moment). Based on the CAPE or Shiller PE ratio, stocks have to fall another 50% to reach historically average valuations.

When Dimon says, “reduce home prices,” he’s referring to the absurd growth we’ve seen in home prices – up 20% in the last year alone! The astonishing pace at which home prices have outrun wages since 2000 makes it clear that housing is also in a bubble:

That’s right: home prices have risen 194% while wages have gone up 8% — home prices have risen 24 times faster than our ability to pay for them. The chart above also makes it clear how much more inflated home prices are right now than at the very peak of the housing bubble that led to the 2008-09 financial crisis.

That’s the scale of the problem the Fed’s trying to solve: both stocks and homes, the two investments most Americans rely on to build their savings, are astonishingly overvalued.

And that’s exactly why Dimon’s right that the Fed’s actions, and the economic consequences, will be exhaustively analyzed in economics textbooks half a century from now.

We’re spending a lot of time explaining this because Dimon talks like a multi-millionaire Wall Street elite who says things like “derivatives” and “gamma” without definitions.

The bottom line for everyday Americans is, Dimon’s hurricane warning is worth heeding. Because if he’s right, we’re looking at a Category 4 event…

What happened to the Fed’s “soft landing”?

The Fed is in a tough spot right now. In fact, Reuters reports that a “soft landing” isn’t likely:

The Fed is under pressure to decisively make a dent in an inflation rate that is running at more than three times its 2% goal and has caused a jump in the cost of living for Americans. It faces a difficult task in dampening demand enough to curb inflation while not causing a recession.

Major central banks, already plotting interest rate hikes in a fight against inflation, are also preparing a common pullback from key financial markets in a first-ever round of global quantitative tightening expected to restrict credit and add stress.

Here’s a translation:

The Fed must continue raising rates and shrinking the money supply in order to tackle inflation. That makes at least a recession virtually inevitable. Remember, Volcker’s Fed had to create two recessions in order to drag the nation out of the stagflationary 1970s, and one of those was so severe that some called it “the Little Depression.”

So if you take Fed Chair Jerome Powell at his word, that he’s really going to get inflation under control, logically, you should expect a recession. You should also expect inflated assets (stocks and housing included) to crash down to earth. And “major central banks” around the world are doing the same thing, at the same time. Don’t expect global investors to come riding the the rescue of the U.S. economy because they’re likely to have their own struggles at home.

It might be tough to take Powell’s commitment as an inflation-fighter seriously. After all, we’ve watched the Fed ride to the stock market’s rescue constantly for over two decades.

However, a different Reuters report explains that the Fed shifted its stance from “hope” to taking firm action on inflation (finally!):

The Fed hopes inflation will moderate on its own… But Powell has also made clear that the Fed is no longer counting on that, and will ratchet interest rates as high as needed.

“As high as needed” could mean up to 20% (that’s what it took Volcker’s Fed). Fed Vice Chair Lael Brainard is backing Powell up, saying it’s “very hard to see the case” for any pause in rate hikes and QT until inflation is back to normal:

We’re certainly going to do what is necessary to bring inflation back down. That’s our No. 1 challenge right now.

Neither Fed official mentioned the stock market or the housing market. They’re trying to say, without actually scaring anyone, “Look out below!”

I’ll bet the 1970s equivalents of Jamie Dimon warned about incoming hurricanes, too – because it takes strong economic medicine to counteract 40-year-high inflation. Overpriced speculative markets simply can’t withstand high interest rates and quantitative tightening. You could think of these macroeconomic factors as a kind of financial chemotherapy, which works by poisoning everything but hopefully only killing off the most dangerous forms of speculation.

It seems like Dimon’s hurricane will take the form of a lengthy, borderline-catastrophic recession.

And that’s the good news.

Dimon also explained his concerns on how the conflict in Ukraine is making matters worse:

Dimon said he is also worried about the conflict in Ukraine and the impact it will have on oil prices, predicting on Wednesday that it’s in the cards for crude prices to eventually spike as high as $150 to $175 a barrel.

“Wars go bad. They go south. They have unintended consequences,” he said, adding that this conflict will continue to roil the commodity markets around the world, impacting the prices of oil, gas and wheat.

Remember, the Fed can’t control geopolitical conflicts. The Fed can’t sort out supply chain snarls, or force Xi Jinping to cancel Covid lockdowns crippling China’s manufacturing centers.