Japan's Experts Baffled By High 'COVID Deaths' Despite High Vaccination Rate

  Covid again but in Japan this time. While you would have expected the unruly foreigners to follow whatever rules they saw fit, no so in Japan. The Japanese did exactly as they were told: They stayed home then put their masks on and finally lined up in drove when the vaccines were available. And sure enough, mortality was lower in Japan... for a while.

 But it is now exploding! While Covid positive cases are high but mostly asymptomatic, the death rate is literally through the roof. Excess mortality is almost exactly similar to other countries in Europe at around 10% months after months with no reason whatsoever. And so doctors are starting to ask questions.  

 Worse, Japan is proving that the effects of vaccines are cumulative both in weakening the immune system in general and the heart in particular.

Authored by Guy Gin via 'Making (COVID) Waves In Japan' Substack,

After three booster campaigns in 2022, the Japanese are now in a league of their own among mRNA consuming countries, administering far more boosters than countries that had far more coercive vax campaigns.

Japanese over 65 have done their best to reduce Japan’s 612-million-dose stockpile of mRNA jabs, with 3rd, 4th, and 5th jab rates of 91%, 82.5%, and 56%, respectively. But unfortunately, Japan has started 2023 by reporting its highest ever daily Covid death tolls. During the booster era starting in early 2022, each wave has been noticeably higher than the last.

What could possibly explain this? Let’s ask Takaji Wakita, chairman of Japan’s Covid Response Advisory Board.

The cause of the rise in Covid deaths is *hard to explain.*

What about Dr Satoshi Kamayachi, director of the Japan Medical Association?

JMA director on increased Covid deaths: “There’s a lot we don’t know, and we don’t have evidence.”

Nice to see an expert admit the limit of his knowledge. But there must be something Dr Kamayachi can tell us, right?

Dr Kamayachi, citing the rapid spread of Covid infections as one reason, explained that the majority of those who died were over 60 and many had underlying medical conditions. The direct cause of death is often heart failure or kidney disease, and he said that "thorough analysis is needed."

Heart failure, you say? Well, it’s not like most Japanese over 60 have been injected multiple times with anything that causes cardiovascular problems, is it? And kidney disease is coincidentally a side-effect of Remdesivir, an approved Covid treatment in Japan.

Of course, Japan has been counting anyone who dies with a positive test result as a Covid death regardless of actual cause of death since 2020, but Dr Kamayachi and the rest of Japan’s experts haven’t bothered bringing up the issue of attribution until now. In fact, they were more than happy to cite inflated mortality data to help promote the jabs. But now that people may question why daily reported Covid deaths are higher than ever after the majority of over 65s have taken the experts’ advice to get multiple boosters, underlying medical conditions can apparently be discussed.

But although he’s three years late, Dr Kamayachi has a point. Although reported Covid deaths have been much higher in the booster era, far fewer Covid cases have been receiving mechanical ventilation (the gray line shows the number of ventilators/ECMO secured for Covid patients).

But even if hardly any of them have been struggling for breath on mechanical ventilation, Japan’s elderly have been dying in higher than expected numbers in the booster era. The national figures for December won’t be out until late Feb, but Yokohama (Japan’s second largest city) has already releases its all-cause death numbers for 2022. Somehow I doubt Dr Kamayachi will call for a “thorough analysis” to find out the cause of the increase since August.

All-cause deaths in Yokohama 2016-2022

Although there’s no good news here for Japan’s vaxed-to-the-max elderly, there is for Japan’s medical establishment: high numbers of Covid deaths mean the publicly funded Covid gravy train will keep going. From The Nikkei.

On 11th Jan, experts offered their views on reclassifying Covid-19 under the Infectious Diseases Act. In light of the current situation where the number of reported Covid deaths per day is the highest ever, the experts called for the government to continue to provide a certain amount of financial support to cover treatment and hospitalization costs and for securing hospital beds.

Basically, the government’s selected experts, including Dr. Wakita above, recommend that Covid should be downgraded “gradually”, i.e., medical costs should continue to be covered by public funds rather than health insurance/out-of-pocket payments like every other medical condition. This might seem reasonable. But under the current scheme of Covid support payments, hospitals can be paid ¥436,000 (US$3,370) per day to “secure” a single ICU bed regardless of whether anyone is in it. And overpriced Covid treatments include glorified cold medications like Shinogi’s Xocova.

So let’s recap what the experts have told us.

The cause of increased Covid deaths? “Dunno.”

Should the government keep showering medical institutions and pharma companies with money? “Absolutely!”

Well, what were you expecting them to say?

They Promised "Safe And Effective"; We Got "Sudden And Unexpected"

  The good thing about Covid-19 is that it is exposing the control systems of how our society really works with the Deep State and other powerful people manipulating politicians through think tanks and public opinion though controlled Media, social and traditional. 

 The oil of the system is free money splashed generously on the political system, (Who is not a millionaire nowadays in Washington?) and on the medical system where huge sums have been spent to "compensate" for the pandemic. (4.000 USD equivalent per day per Covid bed for hospitals in Japan!) 

 No surprise, so few voices are being critical. The only problem left is to deal with a stubborn reality... 

 

Authored by Mark Jeftovic via BombThrower.com,

We’re one tragedy away from pitchforks & torches…

“No one must ever ask where another rabbit was, and anyone who asked ‘Where?’ – must be silenced.”

In the story Watership Down a group of rabbits flee their home warren of Sandleford, ahead of its imminent destruction at the hands of real estate developers. They set out looking for a safe, new home and among their adventures they encounter another warren called Cowslip. There, all the rabbits are uncharacteristically large, affable and seemingly well fed. For awhile, the Sandleford rabbits think they’ve found a safe haven.

There’s only one problem: every once in awhile one of the the rabbits goes missing. It turns out the entire warren is on a farmer’s land who feeds and otherwise takes care of them, but then sets out snares and traps them from time to time for their pelts.

There is only one rule at Cowslip’s Warren, nobody is allowed to ask or talk about any of the missing rabbits.

I want everybody reading this to think of two numbers from asking you two questions:

Question #1) How many people do you know who died of COVID?

I first started hearing rumblings of a new Coronavirus emerging out of China in January 2020 (although it looks now like COVID was already circulating throughout the world by mid-2019).

When I got wind of it, I was emailing friends and colleagues to get N95 masks and to stock up on groceries and medications. It looked bad. By February I was probably one of the first people seen around town wearing an N95 mask. In March I started running a spreadsheet using R0, fatality rates and case-doubling times that were coming out of the CDC, the WHO, and shrieking hysterics like Eric Feigl-Ding:

The famous “HMOG Tweet”.

The screen grab above is the famous “Holy Mother Of God” tweet, which is sometimes speculated as having rang the bell beginning the global COVID panic. Feigl-Ding refers to it himself as a seminal moment, and he’s also since deleted the tweet. It is archived here.

He’s still at it, btw…

When it was all unfolding, I was initially afraid. My rough model posited that by the end of May we’d have 442,368 cases with as many as 22,118 fatalities and that was just in Toronto. By the end of July, 1.7 million cases and 88,473 fatalities.

I laid out previously what happened and what turned me into a lockdown skeptic: every day I’d plug in the new case and fatality numbers from the city, the province and federal levels and by the end of May I realized that my model was bust. By fall I knew that case numbers were bullshit (it didn’t matter how many people tested positive on a PCR test) and that lockdowns were a bigger problem than the virus.

There weren’t going to be 88K fatalities across the entire country, let alone Toronto (the official fatality count now for all of Canada is 49.5K – and we also now know that most of those, upwards of 90%, were with COVID and not from COVID. Toronto had about 3.7K total fatalities in over two years).

I naively thought this was good news. Surely everybody was looking at the data and surely everybody could see by mid-summer, that even adjusted for seasonality and expecting another wave in the fall, this was nowhere near the THERMONUCLEAR LEVEL EVENT certain prognosticators were promoting.

We all know what happened instead: by fall it had become a full fledged religion and well on its way to mass formation psychosis.

But in the early innings of that, when it looked really bad, I figured it meant that probably about once per week we’d be hearing about somebody within our extended family, circle of friends or colleagues who would die from this. Ditto for celebs, the evening news would be saturated with odes and tributes to noteworthy people who were just felled by COVID. Maybe one or more of my immediate family would die from this. Maybe I would. It was scary.

From our vantage point here in early 2023, I can only think of three celebrities who died with COVID: John Prine, Herman Cain, and much to the delight of the zerocovid lunatics: Meatloaf.

On January 1st, 2022 I surmised that the pandemic was mostly over. During the main run of COVID I did lose about four people within my social circle, none from COVID or even with COVID. That figure doesn’t count another two people I knew about in my area who committed suicide under lockdowns.

So without diminishing the tragedy of any of those 49K Canadians who succumbed with COVID, my number for the first question is zero.

Question #2) How many people do you know who died “suddenly and unexpectedly” over the last 18 months?

Recall how I was expecting to be hearing at least once a week about relatives, acquaintances and colleagues that had died from COVID, but instead didn’t hear anything.

However, when it comes to relatives, friends and acquaintances who have suddenly and unexpectedly dropped dead of a heart attack or some other unanticipated medical event, over the last year to 18 months or so… well that’s a different story.

Three. That’s people in my phone contacts. People I was talking to one day or one week and who were dead the next, add one more for someone I knew from yesteryear who was suddenly and unexpectedly a trending hashtag on Twitter.  None of these people were fighting a terminal diagnosis or dealing with “The Big C”. They were just running around, living their lives, and then they weren’t.

Before COVID, before the vaccines, there was always the odd account of somebody dying unexpectedly – maybe one every couple of years. As you age, more people you know pass away, but usually there’s an arc to it: a diagnosis, a treatment, then the passing.  I knew one person who died “suddenly and unexpectedly” in January 2020, and it was the first sudden death in my circle in years.

I’m no statistician, but four people I know personally joining the ranks of the “sudden and unexpected” (three of them coronaries), within the span of a little over a year… well that seems a little weird. The reason I think these all have a common thread through them, is three of the four of these people, I would describe as ideologically committed to COVID. They all had their doses and in most cases, their boosters. One I’m unsure of, so all I have there is the sudden massive heart attack.

In my case, the number for the second question is four.

Which of your numbers is bigger?

When will the corporate media face the music?

In the curious case of the corporate media we have an inversion of sorts which points at a type of hyper-normality in the world (the prevailing official narrative is so absurd and obviously untrue that it takes an act of intentional neurosis to believe it).

I remember when COVID hit, here in Canada there was this one video clip of a body being taken out of a house as announcers breathlessly hyperventilated about the spread of the virus. It was the same video clip and it was reused for weeks, months even.

What is the MSM not amplifying?

They are dutifully ignoring the wave of sudden deaths among our youngsters, children and even middle aged adults. We have video montages circulating on Youtube and Rumble of the endless barrage of people dropping during live streams and sporting events, but for some reason these aren’t being run on endless loop up by the MSM.

In the last few months this tempo of young adults dying suddenly seems to have quickened, and a requirement for being vaccinated or even boosted seems to be a common factor across many of them.

The phenomenon of athletes dropping on the field gives us a bit of a petri dish, because nearly all organized sporting leagues implemented a vaccine requirement on its athletes in order to participate.

I don’t want to cycle through the litany of victims of these tragedies. If you search them up via Google you’ll just get first page results of Reuters funded “fact-checks” explaining why the vaccines have nothing to do with it, or MSM pieces blaming this epidemic of “Sudden Adult Death Syndrome” on climate change and kids having heart attacks from playing video games.

Siri? Explain “gaslighting”

If you can wind your way through all the fact-checks and debunking, you can find the odd mainstream piece that actually looks at the possibility. In September, Science Magazine almost grudgingly admitted,

“COVID-19 vaccines do have a rare but worrisome cardiac side effect. Myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart muscle that can cause chest pain and shortness of breath, has disproportionately struck older boys and young men who received the shots. Only one out of several thousand in those age groups is affected, and most quickly feel better. A tiny number of deaths have been tentatively linked to vaccine myocarditis around the world. But several new studies suggest the heart muscle can take months to heal, and some scientists worry about what this means for patients long term. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has ordered vaccinemakers Pfizer and Moderna to conduct a raft of studies to assess these risks.”

Baseless, my ass.

If you want to look at some actual data on Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting or actuarial data coming out of insurance companies, or actual peer reviewed research papers, or absolute excess mortality data comparing Covid to vaccine deployment, I  would recommend Edward Dowd’s “Cause Unknown”, which is a depressing read. From it we can just pull some raw data that presents a pretty compelling case that no matter what is really happening, ignoring it is an act of journalistic malpractice:

Via OpenVaers.com

We know now via the various Twitter Files dumps that Big Tech has been taking their orders from the government, intelligence agencies and Big Pharma (a.k.a The Pharmatrocracy) all along. Should we just assume the corporate press has been as well?

This would explain why instead of undertaking Watergate level investigative reporting into legions of children, athletes and young adults suddenly dropping dead or having heart attacks, strokes and other medical emergencies, live on the air; we’re getting gaslighted about childhood asthma from natural gas stoves.

I have been wondering if it is possible that the perceived increase in these reports of sudden deaths is the result of a self-perpetuating loop of increased focus on these events. A kind of hysteria of its own. This is why since the onset of COVID, I’ve always tried to find numbers and data – then I follow that data where it leads me.  Often times it’s not the same place as what I’m seeing on the television screen.

Anybody can look at a graph, and provided that the data is kosher, see when something is out of whack.

This one is out of Dowd’s book and sourced with CDC data is the aggregate excess mortality rate for millennials since before the pandemic.

We know that the survival rate from COVID goes up dramatically as age comes down. The vast majority of COVID fatalities were in our elderly (many of whom were forced into localized outbreaks where they died locked down and alone).

Two things stand out:

#1) The excess death rates spike higher as the vaccines deploy, reaching their highest when mandates kick in

#2) The trend line is going the wrong direction.

Since the vaccine rollout started, the narrative around them shifted quite radically. Here’s another graph from Cause Unknown, I added the annotations (somewhat off-the-cuff, I will admit, but the overall beats are 100% accurate):

It’s the deaths attributed to COVID before and after the rollout. The vaccines were supposed to effectively drive that to zero. These shots were pitched to the public as a magic bullet, the original announcements were of “95% efficacy” (on a virus we knew by then, had a 99.95% survival rate).

It turns out now, that not only does the vaccine not confer immunity (it was more expedient to change the meaning of the word “vaccine” instead), they didn’t even test if it reduced transmission (if you try to search up either of these, you just get more pages of “fact check” articles admonishing you that whatever it is you’re looking for, it’s a nothing-burger….)

Thanks, Fact Checkers.

The entire point of  the vaccine mandates was the premise that “the vaccines stopped transmission”. Everybody said this. They are now telling you they didn’t say this, and the media, with the complicity of Big Tech are telling you it never mattered.

How can anybody be faulted for not knowing what to believe or who to trust?

With the conventional narratives being so ephemeral and one “conspiracy theory” after another being validated (lockdowns, lab leak, vaccine passports…) is it any wonder people are becoming skeptical or outright distrustful of our institutions and media?

The tempo of sudden deaths and tragedies seems to be quantifiably increasing, but policy makers, pundits and the media are mostly doubling down on vaccinations.

This article claims that before 2021 the average annual number of athletes collapsing on the field was 29, and that since 2021 that’s blown out to 1,652 (and counting). For the sake of balance, here’s the AP Fact Check telling you “there’s nothing to see here”, saying, this number “simply cites a blog, goodsciencing.com, for that figure”.

The GoodSciencing article itself derives that number from media reports of each individual incident – and has a footnote with an attribution and a link for every one, all 1,652 of them.

We’re one tragedy away from pitchforks and torches

The disconnect between what the average person on the street is seeing happen right before their eyes and what they’re being told is happening (or not happening) by paternalistic fact-checking media propagandists will soon come to a breaking point.

The only thing that can stop it is for some policymakers and pundits to start throwing the engine brake and try to get out in front of what will be an inevitable public backlash. My fear is this won’t happen.

There is too much invested: the entire regime of Digital IDs and health passports was to be built atop the COVID vaccine deployment.  Vaxports were supposed to be the official lubricant of The Great Reset. If it turns out that these things are not only ineffective but harmful, it will set The Fourth Industrial Revolution back decades.

It’s going to take a long time to rebuild public trust and probably not while any incumbents are still in office.

There are glimmers of rationality returning, where we are beginning to see some institutions reverse course instead of doubling down:

• My alma mater, University of Western Ontario unexpectedly scrapped their vaccine mandate a few weeks after two students died suddenly in October and November. UWO not only required students to be vaccinated in order to attend on-campus classes, they even required at least one booster.

• The US military ended all vaccine mandates last week.

• York Region (part of the Greater Toronto Area) also ended their vaccine mandate last week. The City of Toronto this past November.

What I hope is that the tempo of this return to rationality accelerates, and mandatory vaccines are a thing of the past. Otherwise the risk increases that some kind of “George Floyd” moment occurs first. That’s when a particularly vivid tragedy strikes for all to see and it ignites the pent-up resentment, distrust and hostility into outright rage.

That won’t be good for anybody. We know what happened when the French people were told “to eat cake” until they hit a breaking point. The Terrors. Nobody was safe, the violence was undiscerning and total.

The choice we have today is between a complete moratorium on vaccine mandates and some kind of “truth and reconciliation” process to try and earn back the public trust, or something that more closely resembles pitchforks and torches (not to mention guillotines).

I think we’d all prefer the former.

*  *  *

Bombthrower is the high signal antidote to MSM agitprop. Sign up for The Bombthrower mailing list to get new posts straight into your inbox and get a free copy of our long term thesis on the  coming monetary regime change while you’re at it. Bitcoin is up 27% YTD, have we come off the bottom? Get The Crypto Capitalist Premium and Find Out. ($7 Trial)

Destroying American Democracy - An Inside Job

 As discussed in the previous article: Why should we keep the pretense of democracy while the system is being gutted from the inside?

 The reality is that a civilization is built on principles and although these principles are relatively easy to ditch, the social inertia means that people cling to past ideas long after their expiration date.

 Remember that in some Roman cities which somehow had succeeded in transitioning peacefully to the new authority of the "German" occupiers, very little had changed even two centuries after the end of the Western Roman Empire. So much so, that in the year 800, when Charlemagne was crowned Emperor, his tittle was Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire...

Authored by Pete Hoekstra via The Gatestone Institute,

Over the last few years, there has been much written about the destruction of American democracy. Frequently the threat has been of alleged interference in U.S. elections by Russia, China or other state actors. Government agencies, the name of election integrity, were assigned to identify and disrupt these foreign intrusions. As more and more information is revealed about these agencies, it seems that America's Intelligence Community participated in these activities domestically, and in a way that poses a grave threat to both election integrity and American democracy.

Just last week it was revealed that the FBI again withheld pertinent information from the American public, for past two months, until after the November 8, 2022 federal election. As with the Bureau's reported cover-up of evidence influence-peddling reportedly found on Hunter Biden's laptop, agents knew, since November 2, 2022, about at least some of the three sets of classified material that illegally found their way into the garage and library of President Joe Biden and into the Penn Biden Center think tank at the University of Pennsylvania -- to which anonymous members of the Chinese Communist Party have donated $54.6 million.

Their existence only became known this week, after the newly elected Republican-majority House of Representatives announced that it would hold hearings on "how the [Justice] department handled investigations into classified materials found at former President Donald Trump's Florida home and those found at President Joe Biden's office in a Washington think tank bearing his name and his Delaware home..."

In addition, the recent release of the "Twitter Files" has raised at least two major concerns regarding actions by the Intelligence Community. The first is that the wall of separation between the Intelligence Community and the U.S. media has not only sprung a leak, it has totally collapsed. The report that officials from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) met weekly with Twitter executives to coordinate information is totally inappropriate. Would officials from the ODNI review, affirm or label certain sets of information as false? When ODNI was created, no one intended its officials to have a role in these types of discussions.

It also appears that intelligence officials in recent years have politically weaponized intelligence. The combination of a politically weaponized Intelligence Community, operating hand-in-hand with organizations that are the main gateways for information to millions of Americans, poses a serious threat to American democracy and the integrity of our elections.

Let us just briefly look at the steep slope of lying, deceit and corruption that has seeped into the leadership of the U.S. Intelligence Community.

First, there are not enough words to praise our Intelligence Community and the men and women who risk their lives to keep America safe. These are the rank-and-file professionals that form the core of the Intelligence Community. Most are dedicated to the mission of gathering the necessary information to protect our nation. Their leaders have a responsibility to serve these individuals. Too often, however, as the current array of whistleblowers indicates, those leaders have let these individuals down.

Imagine their reaction in 2013 when, in response to a question from Senator Ron Wyden to then-Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper about whether the National Security Agency (NSA) collects "any type of data on millions, or hundreds of millions of Americans," Clapper answered, "No sir, not wittingly." Clapper, who had been given the question the previous day, was asked after the hearing if he wanted to amend the answer, and declined. It was shortly thereafter that a massive NSA program containing millions of pieces of Americans' data was revealed. Clapper was caught in a huge lie -- to U.S. Senator Wyden and the American people.

On January 12, 2017, CNN reported that President-elect Donald Trump had been briefed by DNI Clapper, FBI Director James Comey, CIA Director John Brennan, and NSA Director Michael Rogers. The topic: "Russian operatives claim to have compromising personal and financial information about Donald Trump." It was intended to inform the President-elect that these allegations "are circulating among intelligence agencies, senior members of Congress, and other government officials in Washington." The briefing also touched on other major allegations they claimed were "circulating."

Having this false information -- some of which the FBI actually altered -- in the public domain was evidently intended to damage Trump. The Russian "hoax" allegations would haunt and damage the Trump presidency for almost two years. Clapper himself stated:

"I express my profound dismay at the leaks that have been appearing in the press ... they are extremely corrosive and damaging to our national security."

Clapper also released a statement that neither he nor anyone else in the Intelligence Community were responsible for the leaks. How did this highly classified information, then, get into the public domain?

A House Republican investigation provides the answer. Clapper denied leaking the dossier but admitted to discussing the dossier with CNN correspondent Jake Tapper and perhaps other journalists in early January 2017. Later in 2017, Clapper would go on to join CNN as a "national security" contributor and CNN would receive an award for its reporting at the White House Correspondents' dinner.

Today we know that the "Russia hoax" was a lie. After a 22-month investigation, no evidence of collusion between any element of the Trump campaign and Russia was uncovered. The supposedly compromising evidence had never existed; the information in the "Steele dossier" was false -- and the FBI had known it was from the start. The entire fabrication had been an attempt to attack and politically weaken Trump.

In October 2020, shortly before the elections 51 former intelligence professionals had even signed a joint letter stating that the Hunter Biden laptop had "has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation." They stated that their national security experience made them "deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case." They went on:

"If we are right, this is Russia trying to influence how Americans vote in this election, and we strongly believe that Americans need to be aware of this."

The New York Times raised questions about the authenticity of the materials found on the laptop. Bill Evanina, the National Counterintelligence and Security Center Director, had indicated in August that Russia was trying to denigrate the Biden campaign. All these manufactured "facts" were apparently intended to create circumstances where reasonable people would have to conclude that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation.

Signatories of the 2020 letter included Clapper, Brennan, Michael Hayden, Jeremy Bash and David Buckley. Clapper and Brennan are familiar names. They were involved in the January 2017 briefing to President Donald Trump on the fake Steele dossier. Jeremy Bash and David Buckley are worth mentioning because they continue to play significant roles in domestic and national security areas in the U.S. government. Buckley was the majority staff director on the House Select Committee investigating January 6th. Bash has been named to co-chair a government commission to review the war in Afghanistan.

The fraudulent efforts by the U.S. government, Clapper, Brennan and the 49 others -- along with Hillary Clinton, her campaign committee, the Democratic National Committee and the suppression of the media and social media (here and here) -- to influence the public unfortunately met with some success. For almost two years, the authenticity of the material found on Hunter Biden's laptop was questioned. Today, its authenticity has been verified; the information is real and damning. As summarized by the New York Post:

"Yes that letter from the Dirty 51 had all the classic earmarks of a disinformation operation, all right – one designed to ensure Joe Biden won the presidency. And it was essentially a CIA operation, considering 43 of the 51 signatories were former CIA."

One final example of the Intelligence Community involving itself in domestic politics comes from the recent release of the "Twitter Files." According to tweet #20 of the third tranche released:

"This post about the Hunter Biden laptop situation shows that Roth not only met weekly with the FBI and DHS, but with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence."

Tweet #17 states: "executives were also clearly liaising with federal enforcement and intelligence agencies about moderation of election-related content."

Finally, the FBI paid Twitter $3.5 million reportedly to "handle requests from the bureau."

We now know what happened. Twitter suppressed discussion of the Hunter Biden laptop story and suppressed conservative messaging, while at the same time it appears the FBI, DHS and the ODNI had literally had set up shop at Twitter.

The American people should be outraged. This level of collaboration between federal law enforcement and a private sector company on controlling speech is terrifying. Having our Intelligence Community, which is supposed to be focused on foreign intelligence collection, involved is even more terrifying.

DNI James Clapper lying to the American people in 2013 about government surveillance of them, the promoting of the Russian hoax theory in 2017 by CIA Director Brennan, DNI Clapper, FBI Director Comey and others, the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story by 51 former intelligence professionals, and the close working arrangement between the FBI, DHS and the ODNI in 2020-2022 raises a staggering series of questions:

• Can our government, law enforcement, and the Intelligence Community still be trusted?

• Have those federal government agencies literally weaponized law enforcement and intelligence against political opponents in the U.S.?

• Has more than one solitary person -- former FBI attorney Kevin Clinemith, for altering an email -- been held accountable for these egregious abuses of power?

• Why wasn't there a more powerful response from the Intelligence Community and the law enforcement community about the disinformation from the 51 former intelligence professionals?

• Who authorized the cozy relationship between law enforcement, the intelligence community with Twitter?

• Who in these government agencies reviewed and approved of the output and decisions coming from these joint efforts?

• Were political appointees in the review loop?

• Who has the records, notes and decisions that emanated from these groups?

It is clear that our law enforcement community needs to be investigated, but most importantly we need to investigate how our Intelligence Community has evolved from having literally a non-existent relationship with speech in America to being inside the room determining what speech is allowed.

There also needs to be a significant investigation by an outside, non-government group to understand how far this massive government overreach into free speech and election manipulation went.

Clearly the government has been influencing what we get to see and hear. It needs to stop -- now -- before our democracy is destroyed.

Why Was Hunter Paying Joe Biden $50k Per Month To Rent the House Where Classified Documents were Found?

  This article is outside the scope of this blog, being more political than data related. Still, the picture of corruption currently being drawn in the US is such that we will soon hear about Watergate 2.0 and as such it will impact deeply everything else.

 Another article that I will post soon shows that the Deep State, mostly CIA, NSA and other agencies are more and more behaving like the Praetorian Guards of the late Roman Empire, without even pretending to hide the truth. 

 In this case, is Biden being thrown under the Bus? Was he "expendable" from the beginning? Maybe so but then what is the end game? More specifically: How much risk is the US ready to take against Russia and China?   

 There can be little doubts now that we are entering WW3 in earnest. Russia is massing 2 to 300.000 soldiers at the Ukrainian border for a death blow while China is gearing up to challenge the dollar directly. Arabia is readying to ditch the Petro-dollar while the old empires of Persia, Anatolia and India are waking up. 

 Democratically or not, (Why keep the pretense?), now would be a good time for better leaders to come to the front both in the US and in Europe!

Why Was Hunter Paying Joe Biden $50k Per Month To Rent the House Where Classified Documents were Found?

A Thursday tweet from the NY Post's Miranda Devine containing a background check for Hunter Biden has people asking questions.

"The now-52-year-old began listing the Wilmington home as his address following his 2017 divorce from ex-wife Kathleen Buhle — even falsely claiming he owned the property on a July 2018 background check form as part of a rental application," the Post reported.

Of note, this is the same house where classified documents were found.

Yet, upon closer inspection, Hunter lists the "Monthly Rent" as $49,910 - or roughly $550,000 for the 11 months he indicated he lived there?

A Zillow search reveals that the most expensive home currently for rent in Wilmington, Delaware is going for $6,000 per month.

According to Town & Country magazine, Biden's home is worth around $2 million.

Could Hunter, a crackhead, have accidentally listed the annual rent payment to his father for the house which contained classified documents? Sure. But why was his wealthy ex-VP dad charging him rent in the first place, when Hunter was allegedly broke?

Trending Politics asks the quiet part out loud; was this Hunter's way of funneling money to his father?

After Hunter’s divorce was finalized in May of 2017, he was included in an email from his business partner James Gilliar about a venture with Chinese state-funded energy company CEFC China Energy. The email stated that Hunter and his partners would receive 20% of the shares in the new business, with 10% going to Hunter’s uncle James Biden and the other 10% being “held by H for the big guy.”

Tony Bobulinski, another one of Hunter’s former business partners, claims that he had a meeting with Joe Biden regarding the CEFC venture on May 2, 2017, and that the president was the individual referred to as the “big guy” in Gilliar’s email. Additionally, Gilliar himself confirmed that Joe Biden was the “big guy” mentioned in a message found on the laptop.

And as the NY Post reports, "The following year, federal investigators began looking into whether Hunter and his business associates violated tax and money laundering laws during their dealings in China and other countries. Emails and other records related to the deals were found on the laptop, which Hunter dropped off at a Delaware repair shop in 2019 and never reclaimed."

"I hope you all can do what I did and pay for everything for this entire family for 30 years," Hunter told his daughter Naomi in January, 2019. "It’s really hard. But don’t worry, unlike pop, I won’t make you give me half your salary."

As the Post continues:

The laptop doesn’t contain any direct evidence of such money transfers but shows Hunter was routinely on the hook for household expenses — including repairs to the Wilmington home.

In December 2020, weeks after his father was elected president, Hunter Biden announced that his “tax affairs” were being investigated by federal authorities in Delaware, and said he was “confident that a professional and objective review of these matters will demonstrate that I handled my affairs legally and appropriately.”

Recent reports have indicated investigators believe they have enough evidence to charge the first son with tax crimes — as well as with lying about his drug abuse on a federal form so he could buy a gun in 2018.

So, was the $49,910 'monthly' rent a simple crackhead mistake when that was in fact the annual payment amount, or did Hunter create "Exhibit A" for any honest prosecutors to pursue? We aren't holding our breath on the latter.

COVID Vaccines Are "Obviously Dangerous" And Should Be Halted Immediately, Say Senior Swedish Doctors

  To say that this is news would be an over statement since hundreds of virologists have from the beginning stated that the vaccines were dangerous.

 Now their predictions are becoming reality. From excess mortality to lower fertility. From heart attacks in young sports people to an increase in all kind of diseases including cancers linked to dysfunction of the immune system. 

 

 Still, pharmaceutical companies remain able to control the message and prevent the truth from coming out. Until when?

 

Authored by Dr. Johan Eddebo via The Daily Sceptic,,

There follows a public statement by a group of five senior Swedish doctors who, in collaboration with Dr. Johan Eddebo, a researcher in digitalisation and human rights, are raising the alert about the Covid vaccines, which they describe as “obviously dangerous”. They say there should be an “immediate halt” to the mass vaccination pending “thorough investigations” of the true incidence and severity of adverse effects.

The true character and scope of the harm caused by the unprecedented mass vaccinations for COVID-19 is just now beginning to become clear. Leading scientific journals have finally begun publishing data corroborating what the underground research community has observed over the last two years, especially in relation to complex problems of immune suppression.

Truly concerning numbers pertaining to both births and mortality are also emerging.

At this moment in time, a new, allegedly super-infectious Omicron variant is all over the headlines. A sub-variant of XXB, this strain is said to possess immune escape capabilities of precisely the type that some independent researchers predicted would follow on the heels of the mass vaccinations’ narrow antigenic fixation. 

The WHO maintains that worldwide, 10,000 people still die due to Covid every single day, an implausible death toll more than ten times that of an average flu. It reiterates the urgent need for vaccinations, especially in light of China’s reopening and allegedly falsified data on mortality and infections.

The EU has even called an emergency summit in light of the purported Chinese “Covid chaos” that “calls to mind how everything began in Wuhan, three years ago”.

In Sweden, the Minister for Health and Social Affairs has said he cannot rule out new restrictions, and states that everyone must take “their three doses”, since “only” 85% of the population is ‘fully inoculated’.

That such an extensive vaccine coverage has not yielded better results after nearly two years is a remarkable fact. Even more so in light of some individuals receiving four or more repeated exposures to the same vaccine antigen, yet still contracting the disease they are supposedly immunised against.

At the same time, even more ominous warning signs abound.

One such warning sign is the fact that average mortality in many Western states is still at a remarkably high level, in spite of the direct effects of the coronavirus being marginal for more than a year. Data from EuroMOMO indicate a marked excess mortality in the EU for all of 2022, and the German Bureau of Statistics reports that the country’s mortality in October was more than 19% over the median value of the preceding years.

Is this due to Covid, as the WHO’s ’10 000 per day’ figure would seem to indicate?

Blame is placed at the feet of ‘Long Covid‘ as well as the regular acute infections, but according to the EuroMOMO and Our World in Data stats, the bulk of the excess deaths in Europe during 2022 are actually not due to clinically manifest coronavirus infections.

Moreover, we shouldn’t see continued excess deaths from a respiratory virus of this kind after three years of global exposure due to the inevitable consolidation of natural immunity.

If such a situation persists, the hypothetical connection to a vaccine-related immunity suppression that just now has come into focus becomes pertinent to investigate in detail. 

If, as has been argued, the vaccinations, and especially the boosters, alter the immune profile of recipients such that Covid infections get ‘tolerated’ by the immune system, it’s possible that vaccinated individuals will tend towards a situation of long-term, repeat infections that do not get cleared, and do not present with obvious symptoms, while still promoting systemic damage. 

The literature now indicates an extensive substitution in the vaccinated of virus-neutralising antibodies for non-inflammatory ones, a ‘class switch’ from antibodies that work towards clearing the virus from our system, to a category of antibodies whose purpose is to desensitise us to irritants and allergens.

The net effect is that the inflammatory response to Covid infection gets down-regulated (reduced). This means that full-blown infections will present with milder symptoms, and that they won’t get cleared as effectively (partly since fever and inflammation are essential to your body getting rid of a pathogen).

That these developments alone aren’t cause for an immediate halt to the mass vaccinations, as well as thorough investigations, is astonishing.

There is of course another, and more well-known, potential partial explanation of the surprising excess mortality. We have indications of clotting disorders connected to the Covid vaccines, evident in a new major Nordic study, while repeated studies evidence a clear correlation between heart disease and Covid vaccination (see Le Vu et al., Karlstad et al. and Patone et al.).

A newly published Thai study moreover indicated that almost a third of the vaccinated youth enrolled exhibited cardiovascular manifestations, and a yet unpublished Swiss study suggests that as many as 3% of everyone vaccinated manifest heart muscle damage.

And as stated above, we also see signals pertaining to fertility disturbances connected to the Covid vaccines.

An Israeli study shows impaired motility and sperm concentrations after both Pfizer and Moderna vaccination. The safety committee of the European Medicines Agency has also affirmed that the vaccines may cause menstrual disturbances, and Pfizer’s own studies indicate that the lipid nanoparticles of the mRNA-vaccines cluster in the reproductive organs.

The hypothesis that COVID-19 vaccinations influence fertility is supported by a significant and unprecedented decline in the Swedish birth rate during the first months of 2022. According to Swedish demographers, the decline is ”surprising”.

There are similar data from many other Western countries, and to continue the mass vaccinations for low-risk groups such as children or pregnant women is utterly irresponsible – especially since the vaccinations do little or nothing to stop the spread as was initially promised, and is often still falsely maintained.

One hopes that the hypothesis of a decline in birth rates due to the vaccinations can be falsified through a thorough and independent investigation as soon as possible. The numbers are truly worrying.

Yet the fact that Pfizer’s data pertaining to fertility disturbances had been hidden away and needed to be discovered through a FOIA request is typical for the entire situation.

There’s almost no independent public debate on these issues, and critical perspectives are actively suppressed by the major digital platforms.

Public watchdogs such as the European Medicines Agency are funded by the pharmaceutical industry and often base their recommendations on Big Pharma’s in-house studies. The independence of our scientific and academic institutions is threatened, and we see a confluence between scientific research, private corporate interests and political and ideological objectives on every level.

To place a digital filter of censorship on top of all of this, where proprietary algorithms micromanage the flow of information and the public debate in accordance with the intentions of their owners, in practice means to abolish the open democratic society and independent scientific research.

Recent disclosures also show that the digital platforms have actively worked towards suppressing critical perspectives on the Covid policies and the mass vaccinations. Twitter has for this purpose developed clandestine censorship strategies and employed so-called ‘shadowbanning’ with the effect of an almost undetectable suppression of the visibility of posts and accounts connected to undesirable perspectives and analyses. Facebook took down more than seven million posts to influence the debate on Covid only during the second quarter of 2020. YouTube has banned publishing of video material that contains critical perspectives on the Covid vaccinations. Such content is designated ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ whether or not it is supported by relevant data.

These kinds of measures have very serious consequences. Digitalisation’s centralised control of the flow of information doesn’t just affect policy on the local and regional level, but also influences the way in which scientific and journalistic work can be designed and carried out. It creates structures that immediately repress heterodox views and silences critical voices through fear and indirect persecution.

Public trust in our common institutions will inevitably be eroded by this development.

The open society now desperately needs a renaissance. The democratic and scientific discourses must be rebuilt from the ground up, and in a way which respects the new and unique risks of our contemporary situation, and which protects and emphasises the responsibility of the individual citizen.

Key to this in our current predicament is to press on with critical questions pertaining to the obviously dangerous mass vaccinations and to investigate the corruption of our political and scientific institutions that the Covid situation has shed light on. 

It is critical that we immediately begin to remedy the significant damage that has been rendered to global public health, and to the open society as such. 

Johan Eddebo, Ph.D, researcher in digitalisation and human rights

Sture Blomberg, MD, Ph.D, Associate Professor in Anaesthesiology and Intensive Care and former senior physician

Ragnar Hultborn, Professor Emeritus, specialist in oncology

Sven Román, MD, Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist, since 2015 Consultant Psychiatrist working in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry throughout Sweden

Lilian Weiss, Associate Professor, specialist in surgery

Nils Littorin, resident in psychiatry, MD in clinical microbiology

The authors are members of the bio-medico-legal network of Läkaruppropet. They are organising a conference in Stockholm on January 21st-22nd in conjunction with the Swedish Doctors’ Appeal network. Its main focus will be on the consequences of the global COVID-19 politics and the effects of the Covid vaccines.

Covid-19 - Aw Crap….

   Covid-19 is not finished, far from it! 

  This chimera from hell (There is no doubt about this now) concocted in a Chinese lab (nor about that) is mutating as expected and becoming both more virulent and less dangerous, also as expected. 

  But the "vaccine" is another story altogether. It's long term effects are still being assessed although the suspicious surge in aggressive cancers and heart attacks in relatively young populations is becoming more and more obvious as excess deaths are being tabulated in many countries. 

  What could be the cause? Here's a possibility:

Guest Post by Karl Denninger

Well, here’s the medical facts that entirely explain why people with more shots get more covid.

I’ve been paying attention to this possibility for a while but until the study work came out that proved it all there was is speculation.  ADE (“Antibody dependent enhancement”) is a fairly poorly-understood thing; most people believe it is confined to making a particular infection more serious than it would otherwise be.  Of course having it occur when it otherwise would not fits that quite-nicely, but isn’t what people tend to think about.

Now, unfortunately, we have the evidence.  Here’s the salient graph and lots of discussion which I’ll try to recap for you here:

Let me explain this one for you because it makes very clear what’s going on.  There are multiple sub-types of IgG antibodies.  IgG are the last ones that show up; IgA typically is in the mucosa of the nose, and is a “front line” of defense if you will.  IgM shows up second; it generally is gone about two weeks or so after you recover.  IgG is the “long term” antibody recognition but it has multiple subtypes.

This is very important for human and animal life, because not all things that can elicit a serious immune response should get one.  For example: A bee sting.  A serious immune response to that could kill you and in people seriously-allergic that’s a real risk.  So why don’t most people get a serious immune response?

As it turns out they sort of do, but its focuses in one sort of IgG build, IgG4, which suppresses the cascade of events that cause the body to go after the thing in question and destroy it, along with all the side effects that produces (fever, serious inflammation, etc.)

Well, when you get Covid typically IgG3 is the one that neutralizes most of the virus.  IgG1 and 2 do some of the work, but most of it is done by IgG3.  You’re not supposed to build an IgG4 response, and with natural infection without vaccination you don’t, thus there’s no inhibition and your response is and remains effective at neutralizing whatever it is.  Typical vaccines (e.g. measles) elicit a response that looks exactly like an actual infection because that’s how they’re designed and intended; they use the whole virus and their intent is to make your body think it is being invaded by the real deal and respond as it would to the real deal.

None of the western world Covid jabs do this on purpose.  They were all crafted to use only part of the virus, and the reason for that is past experience trying to create coronavirus vaccines all ended in failure with many of them producing wild enhancement of the infection instead of protection and in animal testing reliably killed the animals.  Thus the decision was made without long-term safety and efficacy testing to use only the spike, with the idea that doing so would prevent the bad outcome.

They were wrong; it didn’t prevent the bad outcome but instead shifted it in ways that were wildly insidious and unforeseen.

As it turns out what is now in the data is that IgG3, which the component that provides most of the protection against Covid is down to a flat zero by the time you take the third shot while IgG4 which causes the body to tolerate the infection and not clear it skyrockets from nothing prior to the second shot to being extremely high for the third and subsequent.

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This was never detected in the trials because they didn’t look and it takes time to find it because the conversion only happens when you get infected after you’re jabbed. So if you only test for three months and don’t look at the IgG profile you’ll never see it happen, never mind that until you boost the data is that while its detectable after the second shot (and thus could have been detected if they bothered to look) the response curve is exponential and its the third one that basically zeros the IgG3 response if, following the first booster, you get infected again — and you will as neutralization from the booster itself wanes.

Remember, IgG4 causes the body to tolerate the infection rather than attack and clear it.

This turns you into a walking virus mutation and production factory, a source of infection to everyone around you and, to the extent that the virus does direct damage to your body systems, and we know the spike does, it also is likely to lead to very severe long-term problems that look like other conditions.  Nobody is looking for spike damage specifically in, for example, heart attacks, strokes and pulmonary embolisms, never mind the possibility of potentiating cancer by suppressing immune response if that suppression and tolerance goes beyond Covid, and it very well might.  If that’s not bad enough everyone that got jabbed has the same profile of response where the normal situation is that responses differ in different people because our body systems operate slightly differently (we’re all genetically unique.)

Now who’s most-likely to have had the most number of jabs and thus are walking around tolerating infections and giving them others?  Health care workers!  And who goes to the hospital or doctor? Compromised individuals who can least-withstand infections.  Gee, that was smart, right?

What’s worse is that we do not know if this is local to Covid or even just coronaviruses.  It might not be.  We may now have created a couple hundred million people in the US alone who have coded their immune systems to tolerate certain proteins that are common across all manner of respiratory viruses and worse, if its not local to viruses to be more-susceptible to cancer and other immune-sensitive problems with no way to reverse the effects!

If you recall I pointed out very early on in this thing that jabbing people with a non-sterilizing immune product, which these jabs all are, was wildly irresponsible because at minimum it would likely cause a decrease in symptoms and thus make it more likely rather than less that you’d go out and infect other people unknowingly.  That was and remains correct however what nobody knew because we didn’t look is that said non-sterilizing jabs had an even worse outcome in that they shift your immune response from elimination to tolerance so now, particularly after the third, you are likely to carry and not eliminate covid which makes you a literal Typhoid Mary, and if that’s not enough we have no idea if this effect is local to Covid itself (which, in the world of Omicron isn’t so awful as Omicron doesn’t seem to be killing many people) but it may extend to influenza and even RSV, and is even more-likely to extend to the other two common beta coronaviruses OC43 and HKU1.

And finally, this may be permanent in those people who took the jabs.  We don’t know.

But what we do know, factually, is that when you get infected with Covid post Jab #3 your neutralizing antibody product is a statistical zero while your “tolerance” antibody production shoots the moon.  This is exactly backward from what you want to happen and we are now left trying to figure out exactly how badly you screwed both yourself and others.

Will 2023 Be "Just An Average Recession In An Average Year" Or Will It Be Transformational?

  I also believe that 2023 will be a transformational year on par with 1989 or 2008... if we are lucky. It could also be on par with 1914 or 1939...

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

It shouldn't surprise us if 2023 turns out to be atypical and disruptively transformational in ways few believe possible.

It seems expectations about 2023 cleave neatly into two camps: the dominant mainstream view is that 2023 will be economically difficult due to a mild recession, but this will be nothing more than a run-of-the-mill recession.

Inflation will likely moderate but remain higher than recent averages. Everything else--politics, social issues, entertainment, fashion, social media, etc.--will continue on whatever path it is currently on.

In other words, 2023 will be much like any other year.

The implicit assumption in the mainstream view is that historical cycles are figments of fevered imaginations. The flow of human history is entirely contingent and follows no pattern or cycle.

The much smaller "outlier" camp sees the potential for a disruptive transformational year.

Those of us who conclude cycles are based on the ebb-and-flow dynamics of credit, energy and human nature and are therefore not just real but consequential despite their predictive imprecision see 2023 as a potential pivot in cycles which entered a new phase in the 2020-2021 time frame.

This cyclical shift isn't a result of Covid or the response to Covid. It's the result of diminishing returns and the exhaustion of the dynamics which powered the previous era: hyper-financialization, hyper-globalization and low-cost, abundant energy.

In terms of human nature, confidence and complacency rise and fall, euphoric greed and panicky fear ebb and flow and as Peter Turchin has demonstrated, order and disorder take turns as reasons to cooperate decay into reasons not to cooperate.

As David Hackett Fischer demonstrated in The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History, systemic increases in price--what we call inflation--sow the seeds of economic, social and political disunity, conflict and collapse.

In his book The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization, Thomas Homer-Dixon proposes a cyclical dynamic powered by the relative costs and rewards of participation in the status quo:

Once the costs exceed the rewards, people lose the incentive to support the status quo with their labor and participation. They drift away (what I term opting out) or reduce their effort to align with the diminished rewards and opportunities to advance their own interests.

The Russian economist Kondratieff famously observed how credit cycles between expansion and contraction, and this cycle powers economic expansion or contraction.

The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph Tainter outlines a dynamic in which the advantages of adding complexity to a social / economic system are substantial at the beginning but as the returns from additional complexity diminish, the costs eventually outweigh any gains and the system decays.

The success of adding complexity is institutionalized by the status quo, which then clings to this strategy even as the returns on adding complexity become negative and thus destructive.

I call this "doing more of what's failed."

Other systems analysts (Donella Meadows et al.) have illuminated the nonlinear character of systemic transformations. Ugo Bardi calls this "The Seneca Cliff": systems which expanded slowly and steadily can decay and collapse quite suddenly and violently, surprising everyone who took the previous stability as permanent.

Systems follow their own rules, and so unlike politics, our opinions don't change the results.

All of these dynamics are (in my analysis) clearly visible in the global status quo. The rational conclusion is the risks of disruption, disorder and conflict as things decay and fall apart are relatively high.

While some trends and conflicts can last for decades (the Thirty Years War in Europe, the Cold War between the US and the USSR), diminishing returns on status quo "solutions" that no longer work as anticipated tend to unravel on the periphery which then spreads quickly to the core.

Those economies and societies which are hidebound / centralized politically and economically are brittle because they lack the systemic means to adapt quickly and successfully to diminishing returns and seismic shifts in price and the availability of essentials.

Brittle systems that lack the structural means to adapt decay and collapse. This is scale-invariant, which means this is equally true of households, small businesses, global enterprises, nations and empires.

There are many such brittle systems in the global status quo, and to expect all of them to remain stable as diminishing returns start yielding negative returns (i.e. cost more than they produce in gains) and scarcities drive prices higher than the bottom 90% can afford as inflation reduces the purchasing power of their earnings--this expectation is based on a confidence that past trends are essentially permanent and every system in the world today will adapt successfully to scarcity, disorder and the reversal of financialization and globalization.

Maybe this will be the case, but given all the dynamics that are so readily visible, it would be prudent to consider the potential for dominoes falling on the periphery (i.e. in "places that don't matter") will soon be toppling dominoes in the core centers of power and control.

In my analysis, the dominant dynamic is always natural selection. Our opinions and projections don't change anything. What divides the systems that endure and become stronger and those that decay and collapse is their evolutionary vigor, which is a function of decentralized competition, transparency, sharing of information and experimentation that is rewarded rather than punished.

I cover these dynamics in my book Global Crisis, National Renewal: A (Revolutionary) Grand Strategy for the United States.

Simply put: systems that view dissent and disorderly churn as threats will decay and collapse because the most powerful forces of adaptability are dissent and disorderly churn.

It shouldn't surprise us if 2023 turns out to be atypical and disruptively transformational in ways few believe possible.

Lessons from Japan - Japanese Decline: The Full Story (Video - 23')

  As we enter 2023, the rise and fall of Japan may be a harbinger of things to come for the world.

 First China, which is on the verge of following on Japanese footsteps: The closing of the American technology pipeline, the rapidly evolving shape of the age pyramid and the bursting of a giant real estate bubble. 

 But at a higher level, the whole world now resemble the Japan of 1989: The end of a growth period built on the global supply chain and semiconductors. Financial assets running ahead of real assets with the consequent creation of a giant market bubble ready to explode just as the lack of energy and raw materials makes the next growth cycle impossible to quick-start.  

 It goes further as the West, just as Japan did in the 1980s, decides to invest massively in the wrong technologies which will hamper instead of foster the next growth cycle. In the case of Japan, it was the 5th computer generation, rockets and robots which all came to little more than the Sony Aibo dog while absorbing huge amount of capital. 

 Now it is our obsession with green technologies which are neither green nor leading to the "better" world people expects since you simply cannot run a modern, efficient economy based on diluted and intermittent energies such as wind and solar. Or electric vehicles which although they may be ideal for some limited applications are in no way capable of replacing our current fleet of cars and trucks. 

 It takes insight and foresight to chose wisely how to aim in the right direction. The Japan of the 1950s and 1960s displayed this skill and created a prosperous country. The Japan of the 1980s and 1990s completely lost its mojo and crashed what was on the verge of becoming the most prosperous economy in the world. With this in mind, it is sad to see the whole world rushing head first into a blind alley which unlike Japan capable as it was to keep its social stability in the storm, will necessarily fare much worse as the clouds gather and the waves rise from 2023 onward.

 

Why EU Leaders Dread A Ukraine Peace Process

  The article below is interesting because it highlights the chasm in Europe and the risks of implosion. Not for what it says about Ukraine. 

 It is also irrelevant about Ukraine. What the Europeans fail to understand, except maybe Macron and possibly Scholz is that Ukraine is existential for Russia. Kiev was the original capital of the Russ and the Eastern part of the country is still called Novo Russia. Either the Russian army wins the war and Ukraine is dismantled or the Russian army loses the war and we are staring at the possibility of a Nuclear exchange. The third path for negotiations has now been preempted. This will be decided by the middle of next year. My bet on this one is on the first outcome in spite some systemic incompetence displayed by Russian generals until recently.

 By then, the global South will be drifting further away from the dollar based balance of the last 70 years. Saudi Arabia just opened the floodgates. A cold Winter will highlight the nonsense of the Western energy policies although Europe will probably double down on its carbon taxes. Absolutely everything will be taxed, they just need the money.

 With or without black swans, social peace will crumble in most developed countries. It is already starting in Paris and Berlin although you wouldn't know if you just read the news. Developing countries will go bankrupt in drove or/and stop paying their dollar denominated debt which will be too expensive anyway. 

 And then China... Tensions in the Pacific but no war, the Chinese army is not yet ready. Real Estate bubble popping but no financial crash, the control of the CCP is just too absolute. Still the end of growth and the stranglehold of the US on technology will impact the country badly.

 Interesting times indeed await us in 2023. I expect a mix of 1989 and 2008. Let's hope we don't get 1939 or worse, that 2023 creates a name for itself!

Authored by Yanis Varoufakis via Project Syndicate,

After the 2008 financial crash, the European Union only papered over the internal North-South conflict that emerged, and the war in Ukraine has produced a new East-West divide. Once peace arrives, both fault lines will only grow deeper, uglier, and impossible to ignore.

This is not a polemic about whether Russia can be trusted to respect any future peace treaty with Ukraine. Nor is it a commentary on the merits of ending the war by diplomatic means. It is, rather, a reflection on the latest European paradox: While peace in Ukraine would help stem Europe’s economic hemorrhaging, the moment any peace process begins, the European Union will be divided by an internal East-West fault line, which is bound to reawaken the EU’s earlier North-South conflict.

A credible peace process will require difficult negotiations involving the world’s great powers. Who will represent Europe at that high table? It is hard to imagine Polish, Scandinavian, and Baltic leaders ceding that role to their French or German counterparts.

In the EU’s eastern and northeastern flanks, French President Emmanuel Macron is considered a Putin appeaser ready to impose on Ukrainians a reprehensible (to them) land-for-peace agenda. Likewise, setting aside Germany’s long-term reliance on Russian energy, Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s standing as a torchbearer of Europe’s collective interest has been damaged further by his €200 billion ($212 billion) fiscal defense of German industry – the type of tax-funded protective shield which Germany vetoed at the EU level.

Meanwhile, French and German elites pour scorn on the idea that the EU might be represented in any peace process by the likes of Kaja Kallas, Estonia’s Prime Minister, or Sanna Marin, her Finnish counterpart. “The moral crusades of the Ukraine war maximalists are fashionable now but they will hinder, not help, any peace process,” was how a German official put it to me.

So, the question remains: Who will represent the EU in any future peace process?

Had the EU seized upon the massive banking-cum-debt crisis of the post-2008 era to democratize its institutions, Europe might now be credibly represented by its president and foreign minister. Alas, as things stand, European citizens and national leaders would cringe at the thought of being represented by Charles Michel, the EU Council President, and Josep Borrell, the EU foreign policy supremo. Macron and Scholz, alongside almost every other European president or prime minister, would surely object.

The optimistic view in Brussels is that, despite its lack of legitimate envoys and military weakness, the EU will carry considerable weight in any negotiations because it is the economic powerhouse that will pay for Ukraine’s reconstruction and be the arbiter of any process by which Ukraine joins the EU single market, customs union, or even the EU itself. But is such optimism justified?

The EU will undoubtedly pay huge sums and orchestrate any postwar Ukraine accession process. But there is no reason to think this will guarantee the EU an influential role during the peace process. In fact, there are good reasons to think that the EU’s role as the main funder of Ukraine’s reconstruction will divide and weaken the Union more than even the crisis a decade ago.

The EU’s own European Investment Bank estimates the cost of Ukraine’s reconstruction to be around €1 trillion – the amount of the EU’s budget over the 2021-27 period and 40% higher than its post-pandemic recovery fund, NextGenerationEU. Already hamstrung by its domestic €200 billion plan to shore up Germany’s collapsing industrial model, and the €100 billion Scholz has earmarked for defense spending, Germany lacks the fiscal space to provide even a fraction of that sum.

If Germany can’t pay, it is clear that the other EU member states can’t, either. The only way to pay for Ukraine would be for the EU to issue common debt, retracing the painful steps that led to the recovery fund’s creation in 2020.

Pressed to deliver the cash, the EU might well go down that path, only to find it leads to vicious acrimony. True, EU leaders agreed on common debt during the pandemic. But inflation was negative at the time, and all EU members were facing an economic implosion as lockdowns killed demand across Europe. Once peace prevails in Ukraine, they will need to agree to even more common debt to fund Ukraine’s reconstruction at a time when interest rates have quadrupled, inflation is rampant, and the economic benefits to EU members are bound to be grossly uneven.

Spain will question the fairness of shared debt when German companies get the lion’s share of Ukraine’s reconstruction business. Poland will protest loudly when Germany and Italy announce that, with peace restored, they will be buying energy from Russia again. Hungary will sell its acquiescence to any Ukraine fund dearly, demanding even more exemptions from the EU’s rule-of-law and transparency conditionalities. In the midst of this bedlam, the old North-South (or Calvinist-Catholic) divide, on the merits of fiscal union, will return with a vengeance.

Germany already fears that France will insist on permanent, and fairly regular, issuance of common debt, which the German political class will resist, and not only because the German Constitutional Court has already ruled against the idea. The deeper reason is that the fiscal union France seems to favor would require German conglomerates to abandon a practice that is in their DNA: accumulating US assets that they purchase on the back of the large net exports to America made possible by stagnant German wages and underpriced natural gas.

So, unless President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act changes Germany’s mindset by raising a protectionist barrier around the United States that kills off German net exports to America, any negotiations to end the Ukraine war are bound to aggravate the EU’s East-West divide – and then reignite the old North-South divide.  

None of this should be surprising. After the 2008 financial crash, the EU only papered over the North-South fault line that emerged. The war in Ukraine inevitably produced a new East-West fault line. Once peace arrives, both fault lines will only grow deeper, uglier, and impossible to ignore.