The "Soft Landing" Lie: A Global Economic Slowdown Is Already Underway

  The recession is coming. It is unavoidable, just as day follows night. But this particular recession "cannot" happen because it will blow the bubble of bubbles. This is why war is likewise unavoidable. Since human life is so short, we cannot build "context" and understand what is happening. If we could, we would see cycles like seasons repeating. The Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter and Spring again of life to borrow the tittle of a Korean movie, but applied to society.

Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us,

If people have learned anything from the past few years of Ivy League elites and TV talking heads feeding them economic predictions, I hope they finally understand that the “experts” are usually wrong and that alternative analysts have a far better track record. Whenever establishment economists make a a call the opposite generally turns out to be true.

By extension, alternative economic predictions are usually well ahead of the curve – What we talk about might be labeled “doom mongering” or “conspiracy theory” today. In three years or less it will be treated as common knowledge and the mainstream “experts” will claim that they “saw it coming all along” while taking credit for financial calls they never made.

This has been a long running pattern and it’s something those of us in the alternative media have come to expect.

For my part, I warned for years about the threat of the impending stagflationary crisis which ultimately struck hard in the “post-pandemic” US. The establishment gatekeepers denied such a thing was possible. When it happened, they claimed it was “transitory.” Now, they argue that a soft landing is imminent and there’s nothing to fear from trillions in helicopter money being pumped into the system. They claim nothing of significance will change.

I also predicted that the Fed would create a Catch-22 scenario in which interest rates are raised into economic weakness while inflationary pressures expand. I suggested that the central bank would keep rates higher for far longer than mainstream analysts claimed. This is exactly what has happened.  My position is simple – The Federal Reserve is a suicide bomber.

Who are you going to believe? Independent economists who have proven correct time and time again? Or, the Ivory Tower guys who have been consistently wrong? I’ll say this: If success in economics was actually based on merit and correct analysis, people like Paul Krugman or Janet Yellen would have been out of work a long time ago.

As for the ongoing narrative of a soft landing, the question I have to ask is HOW exactly they are going to make that happen? First, let’s clarify why central bankers are the problem (along with the governments they covertly influence)…

Central Banks Are At The Core Of Economic Troubles

There are only two logical reasons for central bank induced inflation: To hide the effects of a massive deflationary slowdown caused by too much debt, or, to deliberately trigger a currency collapse. Both motives could apply at the same time.

Central bankers don’t just facilitate this inflation at the behest of governments, they tell governments what to expect and what to promote to the public. Anyone that claims otherwise has an agenda. Central banks write their own policy and control their own mechanics. Governments have no say whatsoever in their operations, as Alan Greenspan once openly admitted.

The reality is, governments go begging hat in hand to central bankers and the banks decide whether or not to give them that sweet stimulus nectar. Politicians engage in collusion with central banks on a regular basis and they defer to bankers on an array of economic decisions. Economic advisers to the US president almost always include high level central bankers who then cycle right back into the Federal Reserve.

Central banks and their private international counterparts are in control, political leaders are simply pawns. Whenever there’s a crash the public focuses on government while the central banks fade into the background and avoid all scrutiny.

Inflation Addiction And The Ultimate Catch-22

Inflation for banks is a tool for fiscal change, but also social change. It’s not a coincidence that financial crisis events always lead to more centralization of global power into fewer and fewer hands; this is by design. Inflation allows the establishment to delay or initiate a crisis with greater precision.

An even more powerful tool is the WITHHOLDING of stimulus and cheap money once an economy is addicted to the flow of fiat.

I have been arguing for many years that central banks were constructing a situation in which the system is utterly dependent on fiat stimulus in order to maintain the illusion of growth. If the bankers return to lower rates and QE, inflation will continue to explode. If they stay with higher rates and a trickle of stimulus then a global crash is inevitable.

It’s one or the other, there is no soft landing when trillions in money creation are at play in such a short period of time. Central banks must return to near zero rates and QE if they hope to prevent a debt implosion. This might seem like a soft landing scenario at first, but when CPI ramps up (as it is starting to now at the mere mention of rate cuts) consumers will be hit even harder.

I’ll ask this question once again because I don’t think some people are getting it: What if their goal is to create a crash?

The Great Global Slowdown Has Already Started

In the past six months both the World Trade Organization and the World Banks released statements warning of an impending global slowdown. After an initial surge in exports and imports caused by massive pandemic stimulus measures, the effects of the helicopter money are now fading. By the end of 2024, global trade will register the slowest growth since the 1990s.

The UN also suggested growth deceleration was coming in the next year due to falling investments and subdued global trade. Keep in mind that the alternative media has been warning about this outcome for the past couple years at least as covid funding dried up. Globalist institutions are simply informing the public at the last minute; too little, too late.

The World Bank asserts that global trade is flatlining and international trade data supports this theory. China’s export market plunged by 7.5% in March, far more than expected and well below the 2.3% decline predicted by a major poll of mainstream economists by Reuters.

By the end of 2023 European exports declined by 8.8% compared to a year earlier and the union barely avoided a recession (according to official numbers). All hopes in Europe rest on the possibility of a steeper drop in inflation and central bank interest rate cuts. As I have been saying since 2021, don’t get too excited about banks lowering rates. It’s not going to happen at the pace that investors want, it’s not going to bring back QE anytime soon and when they do cut rates CPI will immediately spike once again causing panic among consumers.

I suspect that, after an initial rate cut event and an inflation resurgence, central banks will return to tightening with even higher rates in 2025.

In the US, a net importer of goods rather than a primary exporter, consumer volume has been in steep decline. Due to inflation, Americans are buying less goods while paying more money. And this is how inflation skews economic data. Higher prices on goods make retail sales look great, but in reality people are simply paying a higher price for the same amount of products (or less products).

Consumer credit data shows a steep decline in debt spending; credit card delinquency is at all time highs, APR is at all time highs and debt growth has collapsed in the past couple of months. Considering that the American consumer is a primary driver of global exports, it makes sense that international trade is now plummeting. Consumers are broke. The covid stimulus party is officially over and inflation is dragging the market down.

The IMF has recently noted the signs of global slowdown but, as usual, they argue that a “soft landing” is imminent. In other words, they claim there will be no serious repercussions for the economy. They do mention one interesting caveat in their analysis – The danger of global conflicts “derailing” the supposed recovery.

War leads to rising protectionism, the IMF says, and protectionism is a big no-no. In a world economy based on forced interdependency this is partially true, but the bigger picture is being ignored. The world economy should be built on redundancy, not interdependency. Interdependency creates weakness and the potential for dangerous domino effects. This is a fact that globalists would never willingly admit to.

For now, it appears that the global slowdown will become undeniable in the next six months, either right before the US elections in November, or right after. Central banks have chosen to create this Catch-22 and they are, for whatever reason, stalling the big drop. My theory? They have a scapegoat (or scapegoats) in mind and they’re waiting for the right time to unleash the next chaotic event. Covid is gone, so they’re going to need a war, multiple wars, or political conflict in the west and in many other parts of the world as a distraction.

Japan Is Now Caught In A Doom Loop

  A good article from a fellow Japan lover although he arrived at the very peak of the Japan bubble. (It was such a good time before. People will never know!) But that was 35 years ago. Now after all these years "investing" in US treasuries, Japan will need the money back to defend the Yen. So it was all for nothing in the end? Maybe investing in real assets would have been a better idea? Although of course the option was never on the table at the time. That's called monetary colonialism! (An interesting book of monetary policy on the subject is called: Super Imperialism by Michael Hudson.)

By Russell Clark, author of the Capital Flows and Asset Market substack

Japan and Treasuries

My interest in Japan dates from 1991 when I was fresh faced high school exchange student in Kobe. There are no prizes for finding me in the above photo. I was the only “foreigner” in the school, and would go days without seeing anyone else that looked like me or even speaking English. I managed to combine my knowledge and experience in Japan with my other love, economics. I don’t think its too much of an exaggeration to say I owe my career and wealth through studying the Japan experience carefully and then applying those lessons to the rest of the world.

One of the most fascinating things about Japanese, economically speaking, is that almost its entire foreign reserves are made up of US treasuries, with almost no gold. As the right hand side column below shows, the share of gold as foreign exchange reserves is highest for the “old world”, while new powers such as China, Japan, Taiwan and Saudi Arabia have relatively low shares.

In absolute terms, China and Japan are by far the largest holders of foreign exchange reserves.

While China has larger foreign reserves than Japan now, Japan basically “invented” the idea of sovereign bonds as foreign exchange reserves. During the gold standard days, if a country like the US wanted to consume more than it produced, it would need to transfer gold overseas. With limited gold supply, this limited consumption. Moving to a treasury based financial system essentially removed this constraint. The only issue is whether other governments would accept treasuries or not.

Why did Japan buy treasuries? Well when the bubble economy burst in the early 1990s, the BOJ cut rates to near zero, but the Yen did not collapse as expected.

In fact in the first stages of BOJ interest rates cuts, the Yen actually rallied. The failure of monetary policy to work as it should led the Ministry of Finance to intervene to try and help weaken the Yen, and official buying of US dollar assets took off.

In pro-labor terms, when a government is pro-capital it wants to devalue to reduce the wages of its workers. This creates a trade surplus, which should cause the currency to appreciate, but if the government wants to keep the exchange rate competitive (i.e. keep real wages low), then it needs to buy more and more treasuries. A pro-labor government is happy to see its currency appreciate, and hence does not build foreign currency reserves. What is odd recently is that even as the BOJ remains extremely tardy in its monetary policy response, the Ministry of Finance in Japan has started using foreign reserves to “strengthen” the Yen. As the Economist points out, Japan is currently intervening in the currency market to try and strengthen the Yen.

We don’t know the cost of the foreign exchange intervention at the moment [ZH: we do, it was $59BN], but as can be seen above, Japanese foreign exchange reserves have not been rebuilt since the last intervention in 2022. Japan also does not run the structural trade surplus that it did from 1980 to 2010.

With falling foreign exchange reserves, trade deficit, and the likely increase in defence spending that the Russian-Ukrainian war implies, BOJ policy looks increasingly wrong. Markets seem to agree, with 10 year JGB yields at 13 year highs.

With either a Biden or Trump presidency in 2025, the chances of an austerity driven fiscal policy or a change in trade policy looks unlikely to me. The Japanese may well be caught in a doom loop, where they need to sell more foreign reserves to prop up the currency, which cause US yields to rise, which causes the Yen to weaken further and so on.

Until and unless the BOJ becomes more aggressive, Treasuries look like to have a systematic buyer turn into a systematic seller. China is likely a seller of treasuries and buyer of gold for political and strategic reasons, and Japan is a seller of treasuries for economic reasons. I am still baffled to why retail investors prefer treasuries to gold.

Japan was the key to understanding why treasuries did so well form 1980 to 2020. I think it is now the key to understanding why treasuries are going to do poorly from 2020 onwards.

Douglas MacGregor Warning: "Russia Forces Decimate Ukraine - Nuclear Shadows Over NATO" (Video - 24mn)

  Douglas MacGregor offers a great and intelligent analysis: Economic crash in the West or nuclear war! Unfortunately I agree. Well worth listening!

 

Everything CHANGES for the US Dollar in 7 Days (Video - 7mn)

  The video is longer but only the first 7mn are worth listening to. (The rest is advertising.) 

  In a nutshell, May 2024 will be a turning point. Ukraine is about to collapse, Putin was just inaugurated, the BRICS will take some important decisions soon, Israel is close to doubling the ante in Gaza, GPT-5 is ready to launch... 

  The convergence of factors is such that it is safe to say that we will enter a new paradigm in June and things will be different. Let's hope the world can stay a little longer on the brink but the omen are not good. Eventually something is bound to happen and things will change. End of May? Stay tuned.

 

‘We Get Paid to Vaccinate Your Children’: Pediatrician Reveals Details of Big Pharma Payola Scheme

  Politicians paid by lobbyists, doctors paid by laboratories, hospital paid by the government for each "declared" Covid patient, and we wonder why things are not working smoothly. They are in fact working rather well for some, just as corrupt African governments do function perfectly for those who benefit directly from their largess. It's just in the long term, meaning unfortunately "now" that performance starts to decline sharply until the system breaks down,

Post by   John-Michael Dumais

In an interview on Children’s Health Defense’s “Vax-Unvax” bus, Dr. Paul Thomas exposed the financial incentives pediatricians receive for administering vaccines, including kickbacks of up to $240 per visit.

Can pediatricians afford to run their medical practices without the generous kickbacks they receive for vaccinating every child?

Dr. Paul Thomas, a Dartmouth-trained pediatrician, discussed this dilemma during an April 16 interview with Polly Tommey on Children’s Health Defense’s “Vax-Unvax: The People’s Study” bus tour.

“You cannot stay in business if you’re not giving pretty close to the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] [childhood vaccine] schedule,” said Thomas, who ran a general pediatrics practice with 15,000 patients and 33 staff members.

Thomas also addressed the risks and harms of vaccines — including COVID-19 mRNA vaccines — and the importance of boosting our immune systems naturally.

‘We were losing … over a million dollars’

Thomas, author of “The Vaccine-Friendly Plan: Dr. Paul’s Safe and Effective Approach to Immunity and Health-from Pregnancy Through Your Child’s Teen Year,” gave parents in his practice a choice: vaccinate their children on the CDC schedule, vaccinate more slowly by waiting for the child’s immune system to develop or not vaccinate at all.

As more patients refused vaccines, Thomas began to notice the financial impact on his practice.

He and his staff conducted a thorough analysis of their billing records, examining the income generated from vaccine administration fees, markups and quality bonuses tied to vaccination rates.

The results shocked him. “We were losing … over a million dollars in vaccines that were refused.”

He explained that pediatric practices heavily rely on vaccine income to stay afloat, with overhead costs running as high as 80%.

“It is very expensive to run a pediatric office,” he told Tommey. “You need multiple nurses, multiple receptionists, multiple billing people and medical records — it’s a huge operation.”

Three financial incentives for giving vaccines

Pediatricians receive several types of financial incentives for administering vaccines.

The first is the administration fee, which Thomas described as a “Thank you for giving the shot.” He estimated that pediatricians typically receive about $40 for the first antigen and $20 for each subsequent antigen.

“Let’s just say a two-month well-baby visit, there’s a DPT — that’s three shots, three antigens,” he told Tommey, plus “Hib [Haemophilus influenzae type b], Prevnar [pneumococcal], Hep B [hepatitis B], polio, rota [rotavirus] — [that’s] about $240.”

The second way pediatricians profit from vaccines is through a small markup on the cost of the vaccines themselves, though Thomas noted that this is not a significant source of income.

The third and most substantial financial incentive is quality bonuses tied to vaccination rates. Insurance companies offer pediatricians bonus payments for meeting certain benchmarks, typically around 80% of patients being fully vaccinated by age 2.

“I get dinged maybe 10-15% off of those RVUs — relative value units — that are ascribed,” he said, describing the points system used to calculate physician reimbursements.

With his practice’s vaccination rate a mere 1%, Thomas was at risk of losing up to 15% of his overall revenue.

“Really, it effectively means a pediatric practice cannot survive using insurance without doing most of the vaccines, if not all of them,” he said. “And I think that explains the blinders — [why doctors] just won’t go there and look at the fact that these vaccines are causing a lot of harm.”

Neurodevelopmental issues ‘clearly linked to vaccines’

Tommey asked about sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS).

“When you hear the word syndrome, it means we don’t know what it is … [or] what causes it,” Thomas said. “But we actually have a pretty good clue.”

Thomas said six studies examined the correlation between SIDS cases and vaccines. “In one data set, 97% were in the first 10 days after the vaccine. Only 3% were in the subsequent 10 days,” he said.

Other studies showed similar patterns, with 75-90% of SIDS deaths occurring within the first week after vaccination, he said.

Thomas also highlighted the increased risk of neurodevelopmental disorders, allergies and autoimmune diseases in vaccinated children.

“We know without a doubt that things like neurodevelopmental concerns, learning disabilities, ADD, ADHD [attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder], autism [are] clearly linked to vaccines,” he stated. “The more you vaccinate, the more likely you are to have these problems.”

Vaccinated children are more prone to infections and illness compared to their unvaccinated peers, according to Thomas, who published a study comparing the health outcomes of each group.

“It’s the vaccinated who get more ear infections, more sinus infections, more lung infections,” he said. “Any kind of infection you look at, the vaccinated get more.”

‘Healthy adults just “Boom!” — dropping dead’

The risks associated with vaccines extend beyond childhood. Thomas drew attention to the recent phenomenon of “Sudden Adult Death Syndrome” (SADS) following the COVID-19 vaccine rollout.

“We see it on the news, we see it on the ball fields: healthy adults just ‘Boom!’ — dropping dead,” he said. “And that’s all happened since the COVID jabs.”

Thomas expressed particular concern about the mRNA technology used in COVID-19 vaccine development. He pointed out that despite decades of research, mRNA vaccines have never been proven safe or effective.

He cited previous attempts to develop mRNA vaccines for respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), which consistently failed in animal trials.

“When they got to the animal trials, they would vaccinate the rats,” he said. “When they re-exposed those rats, in one study, 100% of them died.”

The COVID-19 mRNA vaccines’ narrow focus on the spike protein is also problematic because it causes the immune system to become “focused on just one thing,” Thomas said.

“When the [viral] organism mutates, those who are vaccinated can’t recognize this new mutation,” he said, recalling how at a family gathering during the pandemic, it was mostly the vaccinated who contracted COVID-19.

Thomas shared a personal story about his mother’s experience with pulmonary fibrosis after receiving three COVID-19 vaccines.

“After her third COVID shot, she started really running out of energy and then getting short of breath,” he said. “Within a month, her lungs [had a] ground-glass appearance.”

Tommey asked about the risks of vaccine shedding.

“Shedding seems to be happening, and it’s been documented in studies,” he said, explaining that vaccinated individuals can expose others to spike proteins through body fluids and secretions.

‘We can no longer go to our doctors and say, “Fix me”’

Thomas discussed the likelihood of new pandemics being declared in the future, driven by the immense financial gains pharmaceutical companies reaped from the COVID-19 vaccines.

“They made too much money — Pfizer alone made over $100 billion,” he said. “So the power that the public health machinery got to themselves with COVID has to be intoxicating to them.”

In light of this, Thomas stressed the importance of personal health and natural immunity.

“We can no longer go to our doctors and say, ‘Fix me,’ after we’ve trashed our own health,” he said. “So we’ve got to take responsibility for eating right, avoiding stress, getting adequate sleep … [and] boosting our immune system naturally with organic produce.”

Thomas also encouraged people to question public health authorities and make informed decisions about their health.

“I can no longer trust the CDC, the FDA [U.S. Food and Drug Administration], the NIH [National Institutes of Health],” he said. “Some good people work in these institutions, but the institutions themselves are captured.”

Thomas said that when it comes to vaccines or a new pandemic illness, “They’re the last people you want to trust.”

‘Vax Facts’ book coming soon

Thomas shared information about his upcoming book, “Vax Facts,” co-authored with his partner DeeDee Hoover. He said the book provides an easy-to-read, comprehensive guide to understanding the vaccine issue, regardless of one’s current stance.

“This is going to … allow you to really understand it in an organized, reasonable way why it makes sense now to pause” taking vaccines, Thomas said.

Withdrawing From The Rat-Race Is Going Global by Charles Hugh Smith

  Charles Hugh Smith writes a weekly column in which he highlights some deeper trends of our society. Here, it is the massive withdrawal of millennials  from the rat race. It is called "Laying flat" in China, "Hikikomori" in Japan. Nothing new in Asia except for the scale and for the fact that the trend is going global, No surprise there with the massive devaluation of salaries in real value as well as in percentage of domestic income as explained below.

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

Mere mortals are left in a hopeless situation. In response, they're withdrawing from the competition en masse.

The world has changed over the past two generations in ways that don't fit the heavily promoted narratives of "growth" and "progress." The "growth" and "progress" narratives hold that everything is getting better in every way and every day--next stop, Mars!--but if we consider everyday life, a much different picture emerges.

1. Globalization shifted high-pay work overseas to the benefit of capital, who reaped the profits from global wage arbitrage and to the detriment of workers in developed-nation economies.

The conventional-economic apologists glorified this as a net positive: everyone who lost their jobs to globalization would move up the food chain and get jobs as currency traders, highly paid tech workers, etc.

2. In reality, most were left with lower pay, precarious jobs as developed economies were producing ever larger cohorts of elites--college graduates and increasingly, those with advanced degrees--competing for those highly paid jobs.

Laid-off production-service workers could not compete with the growing army of credentialed elites for the remaining secure, highly paid jobs.

3. At the same time, the lower levels of the university-educated elites could no longer compete due to the overproduction of elites described by historian-author Peter Turchin as a key destabilizing dynamic in eras of social disorder. Two generations ago, a PhD was scarce enough to guarantee a secure job in academia, government or industry. Today, even a PhD from an elite university is little more than a ticket to enter the next round of cut-throat competition for the few tenure-track positions available.

4. This competition for the remaining secure, highly paid jobs was intensified by another change: the mass entry of women into the labor force in the 1970s led to the rise of households in which both spouses had well-compensated jobs in the upper reaches of the economy. These households had far more resources to pour into the advancement of their children, and a heightened awareness of the winner-take-all nature of elite competition.

5. As this chart from a Financial Times article depicts, the net result is the Millennial generation is highly unequal in wealth and prospects. Two generations ago, about 20% of the workforce had a college diploma; that percentage has roughly doubled, even as the number of jobs that actually require a university education to do the job has declined. Those with the support of two professional parents entered the competition as early as kindergarten and continued apace into their mid-20s, leaving their less-prepared competitors in the dust.

Meanwhile, labor's share of the economy's income has been declining for 50 years, leaving less income, fewer benefits and less security to divide among the workforce.

6. Concurrent with hyper-globalization, the hyper-financialization of the economy generated competition for productive assets and real-world assets such as housing. Workers in the low-pay, insecure reaches of the economy cannot compete with the wealthy elites (the top 10% own 90% of financial assets) for housing or other assets, while this credit-driven bubble has pushed prices higher, further reducing the purchasing power of wages.

Where one secure income was once enough to support a middle class household that owned the family home and sent the children to college, it now takes two secure incomes to support even the lowest rung of middle class expectations.

7. At the same time, society lost respect for essential work in favor of digital visibility. Validation, respect and being recognized for one's work are no longer available for those doing the work that keeps civilization functioning; recognition and admiration--and envy--are reserved for those with high visibility on social media or mass media.

8. This competition for visibility is not only cut-throat, it is artificial. Reserving recognition and respect for the few with high visibility in the world of screens has generated a great many perverse outcomes. Since mere mortals cannot possibly compete, every competitor must present an artificial self that is a pastiche of what's considered essential to gain media visibility: not just being attractive, but super-attractive, not just wealthy but super-wealthy, not just talented but super-talented, and so on.

Mere mortals are left in a hopeless situation. In response, they're withdrawing from the competition en masse. This abandonment of the competition is largely beneath the surface, as the apologists' happy-story narrative collapses once we recognize the hopelessness and the solution--withdrawal from the economy and society.

BOMBSHELL EVIDENCE! These are actual photographs of Israeli military explosive experts wiring the 91st floor of the World Trade Center for the 9/11 controlled demolition of the Twin Towers

  This should be taken with a grain of salt until formally confirmed (which it will never be of course). Still, the probability is very high.

  Having seen WTC-7 be demolished (which was confirmed, then denied) it is almost inescapable that the two towers of the World Trade Center were likewise destroyed. 

  The reason I believe this specific "conspiracy theory" is that almost half a century ago, in 1977, I visited the WTC. A year after its completion. And as it was explained at large later, could see with my own eyes that it was indeed built differently that other towers at the time. Mostly around a very strong core with floors hanging and supported on the periphery by curtain walls. So when the towers fell, I could certainly understand why the walls gave up under pressure, but why would the core? Especially when you know that the steel used for the core was thicker and thicker as you went down and the weight increased.

  So even if one or two floors had failed, unlikely it itself, the dynamics of the fall should have been towards a slowing down of the speed as each floor offered more and more resistance and more importantly, the core should NOT have failed at all and therefore should have remained standing up.   

  I am not alone to believe that: More than 1,000 architects and engineers have asked for a full investigation to take place to understand exactly what took place and how the impossible unfolded. They are still waiting to this day. I guess we'll know the answer no sooner than we know who blew up the Norstream Pipeline!

  PS1: I would be rather surprised that people actually took pictures of such a sensitive mission but who knows. Time will tell. Even if the pictures are not real, the suspicion remains. 

  PS2: The source of this article is the Burning Platform and behind it State of the Nation. These are esoteric sites with interesting articles but were caution is necessary. They sometimes unearth interesting facts and often verge on flat earth nonsense, so again, caution is advised. If you want to walk in the bogs, you'll probably gonna get you shoes dirty. It's the price of being inquisitive and wanting to know.

Via State of the Nation

Notice the “BB18” stamped on the boxes in the first two photos that follow.  Also, check out how these Israeli demolition experts are rigged up to accomplish a very serious job on the 91st floor of the World Trade Center.

*BB18 is a three-phase busbar terminal power feed lug, which is intended for use with LPSM/LPSC series fuse holders.  They are sold by Littelfuse as seen in this link: These are power feed lugs for use in FUSE holders that were in the boxes photographed on the 91st floor of the WTC before 9/11.

Submitted by Revisionist Historians for World Peace

---

What’s really quite incredible about this back story is that The New York Times ran a special piece promoting a story that made these demo experts appear to be art students.  In other words, the NYT was in on the false flag 9/11 terrorist attacks which was carried out to launch the bogus War on Terror, as well as to pass the utterly treasonous Patriot Act and to establish the nation-destroying Department of Homeland Security.

Art students were given special access to one of the most
secured office buildings in the USA!!!  Really?!?!?

Not only that, but this same group of MOSSAD/IDF terrorists actually had a not-for-profit arts organization established in 2011 in Seoul, South Korea put up a website documenting their entire fake story, with pictures and diagrams and videos and all.  As follows:

This is the absurd cover story for the controlled demolition
experts who placed the nano-thermite charges in the
World Trade Center prior to 9/11/01.

Conclusion

The criminals actually had the chutzpah to provide hard evidence of their own involvement in the false flag 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York City.  They really felt they could commit these crimes against humanity with total impunity and even keep this article posted to this very day with their photos for the whole world to view: https://publicdelivery.org/gelitin-b-thing/.

COVID19 vaccines linked to myocarditis, pericarditis, ITP, Guillain Barre Syndrome, Bell’s Palsy, ADEM, PE, Febrile seizures & more

  Slowly, very slowly the truth about the Covid Vaccine is starting the emerge. As expected, it is a catastrophe of epic proportion. Mostly useless with countless side effects. It should never have been tested on the population as it was. This was nothing short of a crime but don't expect to read anything in the press about it anytime soon. It will be buried, then ignored just as its countless victims. The medical profession saved society from its "viral" members just as the church saved souls in the Middle Ages by sending them back to their maker!  Progress?

Post by Steve Kirsch

That’s the headline from an article by UCSF Professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics and Medicine Vinay Prasad MD MPH, not some “misinformation spreader.” He’s right.

Executive summary

UCSF Professor of Epidemiology Vinay Prasad MD MPH just published an article entitled “COVID19 vaccines linked to myocarditis, pericarditis, ITP, Guillain Barre Syndrome, Bell’s Palsy, ADEM, PE, Febrile seizures & more.”

In the article, he points out two major reasons that the study of 99 million vaccinated people under-reported safety signals:

1. Using electronic health records (EHR) will result in under-reporting of symptoms
2. The comparison rates were not age stratified

Prasad also says, “First, let us be clear, the benefit of COVID vaccination is small, uncertain or not present in several populations… absolute benefits to healthy people under 20, 30 or 40 were always minuscule— bordering on zero— and possibly not present. Available data lacks power to show a benefit in 20 year olds.”

He’s right about that too, but it’s even worse than he said. Much worse.

The study failed to recognize significant signals, and showed evidence that side effects were reduced by vaccination. How is that possible?!?

Zero benefit for all

Professor Prasad should have said “the benefit is zero in all populations.”

I’m unaware of any population that can benefit from these shots. Someone show me. Please.

How can the study miss the huge Bell’s palsy signal?

Secondly, the study appears to be incapable of finding a signal.

Let’s look at Bell’s Palsy for example.

The paper shows a mild signal: OE of 1.05 for Pfizer and 1.25 for Moderna.

But the signal in VAERS is off the charts: virtually every single case of Bell’s palsy ever reported in VAERS in the last 35 years is from the COVID vaccines.

If the mRNA COVID vaccines weren’t strongly causing Bell’s palsy at a higher rate than background, how can we explain this VAERS signal? Nobody wants to explain that.

I tried to engage Roger Seheult MD, founder of Medcram who produced a video on VAERS to explain data like this, but he blocked me.

The block was expected. That’s the way real scientists are supposed to respond to those who challenge their work: you block or ignore all challengers. You never respond because you don’t want to risk having someone make you look bad. It’s always better to leave bad information out there than to have to admit you made a mistake and have your reputation damaged!

How can the COVID vaccine reduce side effects? Is it a miracle drug? Or is the study flawed?

Finally, it was also interesting to see that for the 3 vaccines tested, more than half the side effects studied had scenarios where the shots provided a statistically significant benefit:

1. Guillain-Barre Syndrome
2. Bell’s palsy
3. Febrile seizures
4. Generalized seizures
5. Thrombocytopenia
6. Idiopathic thrombocytopenia
7. Pulmonary embolism
8. Splanchnic vein thrombosis

Seriously?!!?! Vaccines don’t work that way. They always increase side effects. They never reduce them.

Yet, in this paper, in 8 of the 11 side-effects examined in the study Tables 3 and 4, there were one or more table rows (each row is a vaccine type and dose number) where there were one or more statistically significant reductions in incidence.

This does not inspire confidence in this study or in the peer-review process of the top medical journals.

Bottom line: A study showing statistically significant reductions in side effects from a deadly vaccine should cause anyone with a working brain to seriously question the study conclusions.

Summary

A widely acclaimed study of 99M vaccine recipients showed statistically significant reductions in over half of the side effects studied.

That’s simply not possible. There is simply no mechanism of action that could account for such effects.

How these studies are taken seriously by the medical community is truly a mystery to me. That is what an enlightened press should be writing about: how the medical community embraces so obviously flawed peer-reviewed studies.

I am exhausted from Watching the West Self-destruct by Paul Craig Roberts

 

  A stunning and interesting post by Paul Craig Roberts on the current state of universities in the UK. You would expect these places to have evolved radically over the last few decades with the advent of computers and now AI. They have but not in the right way. Women and minorities have been promoted (that's OK) but at the expense of white males (that's not!). Woke has replaced brain, first in humanities then in science. Paul Craig Roberts sees these universities as the announcers of things to come for the West. Maybe. Or is it just one more wheel flying off the wagon?

Post by Paul Craig Roberts

As a former postgraduate member of Merton College, Oxford University, I receive every year from Merton College a thick, well prepared report replete with color photos titled Postmaster and the Merton Record. The report provides a thorough report on everything associated with the college and present and past members as reported during the year. For example, undergraduate performance and prizes, publications and awards of faculty, concerts, the performance of the various sports teams, social events, reports of marriages, deaths, births, remembrances from past graduates, photographs of the college, gardens, and members, and books on the library’s shelves as if to say that here at Merton we still have the timeless products of Western Civilization in print form on library shelves instead of online somewhere in the cloud.

In the current issue, those still alive who attended JRR Tolkien’s lectures provide their memories of this remarkable scholar of ancient languages and storyteller (The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings). It all reminds us that at Merton some semblance, some remnant of Britain’s ancient lineage lingers still among the tower of babel England has become.

No doubt the expense and effort to which the college goes to remain in touch with past members–all of whom compose The Merton Society–has in mind bequests. Little doubt Merton graduates attribute part of their success in life to the preparation that Merton gave them. So the large expense of the preparation and distribution of this report is justified. But for my generation and perhaps the one following I wonder about the impact of the report. Clearly, for my generation the collage is no more. It is simply there only in the buildings and memories. The college is no longer a men’s college. Gowns no longer exist. Merton even has female Wardens (presidents). As far as I can tell, and I am unsure, Oxford colleges are now organized like American colleges where students take courses and are graded on the course and graduate when they complete the designated course requirements.

In my day there were no courses and no course requirements. Unlike the US, a bachelor’s degree was a three, not a four-year, process. A student selected a field–mathematics, science, history, literature, languages, classics, PPE (philosophy, politics, and economics–imagine an American student learning all three in three years!) and was assigned a tutor by the college. The student was handed a reading list and encouraged to attend lectures on his chosen field of study. Lectures were provided by lecturers, senior lecturers, (`I am unsure if Oxford had the next rank, readers, or whether these were only at the “red brick universities”) and professors. If memory serves, in the entirety of Oxford colleges there were only two professors of economics. One was a theorist John R. Hicks, and the other, John Jewkes, was an empirical economist who was a member of Merton.

As there were no classes, the purpose of the Oxford gown was to admit you to lectures. As a student at an Oxford college it was your responsibility to prepare for the exam at the end of three years which would determine whether you got a first, a second, a pass, or a fail. A first was a pass into the City (England’s Wall St) or the civil service and a successful career. The colleges didn’t want any results below a second and so tutors did their best to motivate any students who might come up short on motivation.

When you stood for exams, you knew they would be sent to other universities for grading. In those days, integrity was important, and universities did not want to raise integrity questions by being accused of grading their own students easily in order to give them a push ahead. Standards and honor had to be preserved. In those days a first from Oxford or Cambridge was almost as good as being born into an aristocratic family that somehow still managed to have some money despite the dispossession of the aristocracy by the government.

Today all of this is gone, and it is very sad. My impression, I would be happy to be wrong, is that Oxford and Cambridge have been partly, not totally, placed in the role of selling entry into the First World to sons and daughters of well-to-do Indian, African, Asian, and Middle Eastern families. At times over the years I have noticed that white males have almost disappeared from the photographs in Postmaster, although not in the current issue. The aristocratic class seems to have faded away, and with an Indian prime minister of Great Britain and a Muslim Mayor of London, it is unclear in whose hands the British economy rests. Jaguar, for example, once the dominate power at Le Mans and the creator of what Enzo Ferrari himself declared to be the most beautiful car ever made–the E-Type, a specimen of which resides in permanent display in the New York Museum of Modern Art–has passed through a variety of foreign owners and I am unsure where its ownership resides today.

As readers of the few accurate histories of World War II know, US President Roosevelt used the war to destroy England’s leadership of the world economy and to turn the British into a satrapy of the American Empire. The greatest and most accurate of all WW II historians, David Irving, makes it clear that while Churchill was at war with Germany, Roosevelt was at war with England. It was Roosevelt who won. But don’t expect any Oxford historians to say this.

Reading what I have written, it is clear that these matters have been on my mind for some time as I have been diverted from my intention, which was to remark that the important fact of which the Merton College Record has made me aware is that as women, women have disappeared. Today women occupy male roles. With men’s roles colonized by women, there are no longer any male roles.

The Merton hockey team has more female than male members. When I was at Oxford, rugby was more violent than US football. The 11 member Merton rugby team has 4 female members.

What is my point? Nowhere in the 222 page report is that any woman in a woman’s role except on the childbirth page where female Merton graduates have done the dirty on feminism and become married mothers. But there are very few of them, an insufficient number to keep Briton British.

It is astonishing to me how rapidly the Western World has collapsed compared to the long drawn-out time required for Rome to disappear. One would think that, unlike Rome under pressure from external armies, the West with no one attacking it should be able to prolong its continuing existence despite the West’s lost of belief in itself.

But apparently, this is not to be.

The question of the survival of Western civilization is not raised at Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford. Indeed, they all seem to want Western civilization not to continue as they have branded it racist. Nowhere is there university faculty with interest to defend truth and the continuation of Western civilization’s existence.

The foundation of the Western world is the pursuit and defense of truth. When that no longer exists, neither does Western civilization.

McMaken: The FBI And CIA Are Enemies Of The American People

  The only thing I object with in the article below is that the CIA "had a role" in the assassination of JFK. The assassination was fully organized and implemented by the CIA. - Link: https://rumble.com/v2czv70-jfk-to-911-everything-is-a-rich-mans-trick-documentary.html

  Likewise later, Nixon was removed, more subtly but just as efficiently with Watergate. The reputation of Carter was tarnished, (remember the peanuts grower?) to insure that he wouldn't be re-elected. Until finally they placed on of their own on the throne: Bush Senior, who by accident is the one person who 20 years earlier was in charge of implementing the Kennedy assassination. Go figure! 

  A smooth coup d'etat implemented over time. Until today when a senile puppet is presiding over ice cream choices and implementing a divisive policy to ensure the long term power of the deep state. Tocqueville would be appalled!

Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,

Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson sat down for a three-hour-plus discussion on the Joe Rogan Show last week, covering everything from UFOs, to religion and artificial intelligence. But perhaps the most important topic they covered was the insidious and dangerous role played by the US regime’s intelligence agencies in America. 

Specifically, Carlson suggested the CIA continues to lobby for keeping the JFK files secret, possibly because the CIA had a role in the assassination. Tucker also brought up how the FBI’s second-in-command was responsible for taking down Richard Nixon. Carlson described how intelligence agencies hold immense power within Congress because members of Congress—who are generally disreputable people with many secrets—are terrified of being blackmailed. After all, in a post-Patriot Act world of nearly unrestrained spying by the US regime, there is no privacy in America. 

I’ll let you, dear readers, listen to the full interview and make up your mind for yourselves as to the details of the discussion. 

What I want to highlight here, however, is how remarkable it is that two major media figures—Rogan and Carlson—are announcing to their millions of listeners and readers that organizations like the CIA and the FBI are despicable agencies committed to undermining the legal and constitutional institutions of the United States. 

This is long overdue. 

Deep-state agencies like the CIA and the FBI have for far too long been considered reputable organizations just trying to “keep us safe” or somehow defend the United States from alleged foreign threats. Conservatives have long been among the worst offenders. Libertarians know this well, and have observed for decades the breed of “small-government” conservatives who one minute claim “the government can’t do anything right” and then the next minute simp for “heroic” CIA and FBI agents. People such as these have long checked their critical thinking skills at the door as soon as the discussion turns to the regime’s spy agencies—or the Pentagon, for that matter. This is not to say that Leftists are guiltless on this. While historically it was the Left that actually made some efforts to expose intelligence agencies and their crimes in the 1970s, that is now ancient history. The Left in 2024 has rarely met a regime spook it didn’t like. This was made explicit last month when Adam Westbrook and Lindsey Crouse declared in The New York Times that “the Deep State is actually kind of awesome.” 

The job of opposing these contemptible enemies of freedom at America’s intelligence agencies—especially the FBI and CIA and NSA—falls to the minority of Americans who actually care about law and human rights enough to seek true restraints on regime power. Those of us in this minority must never miss an opportunity to disparage, doubt, question, and generally express loathing for these organizations and for every single agent and employee at these agencies who collects a taxpayer-funded salary. 

A Danger for Many Decades 

Since at least the early 1960s, many have understood that the post-war intelligence agencies have posed an especially dangerous threat to the people of the United States. For example, exactly one month after Kennedy’s assassination—surely, just a coincidence!—former president Harry Truman expressed alarm about the CIA’s meddling in domestic affairs. He wrote in The Washington Post: “For some time I have been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas. ...I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations.”

Then as now, however, The Washington Post was an arm of the deep state and the editor buried Truman’s op-ed on Page A11. The CIA was outraged enough by the column, however, that CIA director Allen Dulles lied and claimed that Truman had been “quite astounded“ when he saw his own article and that the whole thing was really the work of a Truman aide.

This bizarre attempt by CIA operative to “retract” Truman’s article was nonetheless contradicted by Truman himself who reiterated in a 1964 letter that Truman had only intended the CIA to be an informational service for the president, and that “[I]t was not intended to operate as an international agency engaged in strange activities.” Truman would later tell an interviewer that “[I]f I’d known what was going to happen, I never would have [created the CIA.]”1 

Of course, Truman may have known about many of the CIA’s “strange activities” by the late 1950s, such as MKULTRA, and related “mind control” experiments with LSD and other drugs. The CIA was known to drug the agency’s victims against their will, such as seven black inmates in Kentucky who were were fed “’double, triple and quadruple’ doses of LSD for 77 straight days.” One might also mention the very suspicious case of Frank Olson, a bioweapons expert who was given LSD by CIA agents without his knowledge. Olson later “fell” to his death from a hotel window in 1953. The agency lied about drugging Olson for 22 years. 

The CIA faced some scrutiny in the wake of the Vietnam war as the Left began to rein in the deep state which had spent years attempting to destroy American opponents of the war through a variety of dirty tricks. Yet, the agency had hardly been “reformed” by the time the US’s “war on terror” was launched in late 2001. The CIA returned to its illegal medical torture—assuming it had ever stopped—with new medical experiments on regime prisoners. Documents uncovered by the ACLU have shown that CIA doctors are still used to provide a veneer of scientific legitimacy to CIA torture programs. In the age of vaccine passports, this alliance between doctors and the CIA should alarm any defender of human rights. 

In spite of all this, the CIA continues to fail spectacularly at its original mission of collecting useful information. The CIA failed to see the Iranian Revolution coming. The CIA was clueless about Soviet Missiles shipped to Cuba in 1962. The CIA believed the Soviet Union was an economic powerhouse in the 1980s. And, of course, the CIA let 9/11 happen right under its nose. 

Given all this, even conservative stalwarts have seen the light on the CIA in recent years. The late Angelo Codevilla, for example, penned a 2020 article calling for “breaking up” the CIA. The CIA, Codevilla notes, is now so “ideologically partisan,” so “obsolete,” and its record of failure so undeniable, that the agency is now “inherently dangerous and low-value.” 

End the FBI

The CIA isn’t alone in its war on American freedom and decency, however. The FBI is almost equally dangerous, which is why Codevilla also calls for the FBI to be “restricted to law enforcement.” 

Unknown to many Americans, the FBI doesn’t even consider itself to be a law enforcement agency anymore. The FBI is now a “national security” agency, and that means the FBI is an arm of the American spy regime. This, of course, is why the Department of Justice can now be used for blatantly political purposes such as when the FBI spied on candidate Donald Trump in 2016. 

Here at mises.org, we’ve already reported on the mixture of abuse and incompetence that characterizes the FBI. The FBI expends countless hours tracking down harmless “enemies” of the regime—such as little old ladies prosecuted for the January 6 riot—while ignoring real criminals like Larry Nassar. Nor surprisingly, local police will tell you it’s the state and local police who do the real work of tracking down real criminals, and then the FBI swoops in to take the credit. 

Moreover, the history of the FBI lends substantial plausibility to Tucker Carlson’s claim that intelligence agencies are in the business of blackmailing members of Congress. This is a known tactic employed by J. Edgar Hoover during this 48-year reign at the FBI. Hoover, of course, was lauded for decades as a hero, but in reality, he was, in the words of historian Beverly Gage, a “one-dimensional tyrant and backroom schemer who strong-armed the rest of the country into submission...the most influential federal appointee of the twentieth century.” Hoover and his army of compliant FBI agents spied on anyone and everyone—especially elected officials and other public figures—who might be useful as a target for blackmail.

So, what to do with these agencies? 

There is nothing that these agencies do that could justify their continued existence. Both agencies—neither of which in their present forms are authorized among the enumerated powers of the US constitution—were sold to the taxpayers as agencies to be used only against hardened criminals and foreign dictators. Today, these organizations spend their time exploiting the taxpayers for ever larger budgets, for ever more power to spy on Americans, and new ways to trick those same Americans into supporting the regime’s latest wars. 

They are, simply put, the regime’s secret police, devoted to building the regime’s power. One answer is to eviscerate their budgets, repeal their enabling legislation, and encourage aggressive lawfare against the regime in retribution for these agencies’ many crimes. That’s probably a best-case scenario. Other scenarios likely require the bankruptcy of the regime, or perhaps its dissolution. That is likely to come with substantial and negative economic effects in the short term. Unfortunately, many Americans are still enthralled to these organizations thanks to relentless state propaganda that tells us this American version of the KGB exists for our own good.  Abolition will clearly take time. Now is a good time to start.