Debt Rattle May 16 2020

John French Sloan Backyards, Greenwich Village 1926

Love that picture; the cats, the girl in the window, the clothes hanging on the clothes lines, and the kids building a snowman…
Wonderful…

How ‘Overreaction’ Made Vietnam A Virus Success (BBC)

With the benefit of hindsight, some ‘overreactions’ can still look like overreactions, while some others can end up looking like under-reactions. That’s the thing about uncertainty and limited information. Precautions, based on the best information available at the time, can later be seen as mistakes, when the situation becomes more clear. Rational caution could retrospectively be construed as irrational fear.

If a family pays for 12 months of auto insurance, but is not involved in any car accidents during the entire year (and they are not stopped by the police during that year), then was the money wasted? Was it a mistake for them to pay for car insurance that year? Were they too fearful about the small possibility of being in a car crash?

So what’s the solution to ennui?
Lust, passion, fervor, purpose.
War works, doesn’t it?
What’s the solution to 30 million workers without a job?
War works again.
What’s the solution to a nation divided?
What’s the solution to cowardice?
War.

Rattle those bright shining sabers.
Their soulmates await in the distance.
Let’s join with our friends and our neighbors
And alter our state of existance.
[bitter/s]

War. It may not be the usual response to an enigmatic pathogen, but it is the historical answer to economic upheaval.
I don’t see how China is at fault for the West’s ineptitude. Of course, if they played us for Keystone Cops (six feet apart, of course), does that make them bad, or smart?
Currency war; trade war; cold war, hot war. “The Art of War” is short enough for even generals and politicians to read. It is the Alpha Dog’s handbook.

“The very idea of global social and economic shutdown as a means to fight an illness is itself the most vile example of Doublethink ever devised. The whole concept places the entire human race at risk of starvation and economic ruin in order to prevent some small fraction of humanity from getting sick.
“Even more absurd is the notion that isolating those who have survived the virus, thus depriving the rest of us from sharing their immunity.”
This from a site called The Far Side from Bernard Grover(“augenguy”). Those who think the world has been put under an evil spell by Fauci and Ferguson would appreciate it. It wouldn’t hurt those who think we are being “compassionate” with his nightmare behavior to read it, as well.

my parents said know

Yes Smells like War. Would explain the whole thing wouldn’t it ?

A little poem called world war 3 – a little poem wrote by me.

The war machine and the .1% agree, they no longer need you and me.

Unleash a virus, lock down the world, blame it on China. that’s not absurd.

fill up the factories building destruction. the final point to democracies abduction.

for the 1% half the worlds not enough. They will only be happy when they have all the stuff.

http://www.johndayblog.com
Forgive me for posting what was posted here yesterday, but it’s part of the political discourse.

“A truth that’s told with bad intent beats all the lies you can invent” William Blake opens for Ben Hunt       A political narrative of betrayal is always a top-down application of social abstraction, where a behavioral model is treated as the thing unto itself, falsely elevated as the subject and object of policy, rather than relegated to the analytical toolbox where it belongs. A political narrative of betrayal will always use “model” as a noun rather than “model” as a verb. A political narrative of betrayal always BEGINS with a prescriptive model of mass behavior – a model that by the most amazing coincidence serves the institutional advantage of the narrative creator – and ENDS with a forced fit to the individual citizen.  All political narratives of betrayal start like this, with a disembodied, modeled abstraction like “the American way of life” or “the economy” or “the market” or “public health” or “national security”. An abstraction that is then defined for you in such a way as to logically require the willing abdication of your individual rights, first as an American and ultimately as a human being…  The American Way of Life™ does not exist. It’s not a thing.   What exists is the way of life of Americans.https://www.epsilontheory.com/a-truth-thats-told-with-bad-intent/ 

Gail Tverberg has the completely valid other horn of the dilemma:  We are finding that using shutdowns to solve COVID-19 problems causes a huge amount of economic damage. The cost of mitigating this damage seems to be unreasonably high. For example, in the United States, antibody studies suggest that roughly 5% of the population has been infected with COVID-19. The total number of deaths associated with this 5% infection level is perhaps 100,000, assuming that reported deaths to date (about 80,000) need to be increased somewhat, to match the approximately 5% of the population that has, knowingly or unknowingly, already experienced the infection.
  If we estimate that the mean number of years of life lost is 13 years per person, then the total years of life lost would be about 1,300,000. If we estimate that the US treasury needed to borrow $3 trillion dollars to mitigate this damage, the cost per year of life lost is $3 trillion divided by 1.3 million, or $2.3 million dollars per year of life lost. This amount is utterly absurd. (Note: It IS Absurd and completely unreal, making the zombie system keep walking forward by plugging impossible black holes of debt due today with even more vast impossible IOUs of future payment.)
Understanding Our Pandemic – Economy Predicament

Want a fast recovery? Invest in tests, Fed’s Kaplan says
Even with tens of millions of jobs lost and a historic decline in output projected this quarter, the U.S. economy could still pull off a relatively quick recovery, Dallas Federal Reserve President Robert Kaplan said on Thursday…
“The highest return on equity investment we can make in this country is testing.”  (He doesn’t know about Vitamin-D) https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-fed-kaplan-idUSKBN22Q3NW  

5000 IU/day of vitamin-D cuts COVID morbidity and mortality by something like half. It’s the lowest hanging fruit of public health and personal choice. I gave away 1250 doses at work yesterday for coworkers to share with their families. It’s what I could get my hands on. I ordered 3000 more doses to do the same thing when it arrives. This will be my 4th or 5th  round of that intervention. 

Democrats push new $3T coronavirus relief bill through House

Welcome to the hall of mirrors…

@Huskynut,
Well, I see that my artifice of presenting Ben Hunt and Gail Tverberg as the horns of a dilemma, then cutting that Gordian knot with vitamin-D may not have gone off as successfully as planned.
More tomorrow.
Tomorrow morning I’ll drop the truth-BOMB about our friendly new coronavirus.

I am appalled that Canada’s and US’s top health officials are still saying masks don’t work!

Everywhere where masks are worn by most of the people, they have the numbers to prove it does work!

I’ve driven more than a dozen time beside my home depot and, to my amazement, the parking lot has always been full. (Lots of people spending money.)

I cannot tell if our experts and leaders are telling the truth.

Trillions of dollars have been given out.
Claims of billions upon billion of dollars were being lost by the entertainment, hotels, casinos, airlines, etc., .
Question:
1. Are the consumers richer and sitting upon a pile of cash just dying to go on a spending spree?
2. Can all those claims of loss be an exaggeration?
3. Why did those trillions of dollars that were given out not replace those billions of dollars than were loss?

Who is telling the truth? I cannot tell.

China must know what it was or they wouldn’t want to destroy it. Or if they were trying to claim it wasn’t theirs, they would have said so then, not months later. This says “lab” to me, although it doesn’t have to be malicious. At least we got the dreadful pangolin thing gone. At this rate we can tell the truth by 2056, after 99.95% of us die of something unrelated.

Winning nations said they were overreacting, but the U.S. was told that too. Vitamin D has proven to be strangely more relevant than one might expect, which helps explain the distribution worldwide, as the distribution in Viet Nam, but also Florida, America’s waiting room. And is another point of how the medical advice has been 180 wrong out of all the institutions and therefore governments. No masks, send patients TO nursing homes, stay inside as far away from vitamin D as possible. Lupus patients do indeed have better immunity: don‘t look at HCQ. WHO says don’t give immune suppressants to fight the overreaction, etc. Has expert advice killed 1/3 of the people? Half? We may never know. That could be part of the strange distribution as well.

“Medicare for All means never losing your health insurance if you lose your job,”

Before 1990, our health care mostly worked and only needed a seasonal overhaul. Since government-lobbyist complex got involved, it doesn’t work at all, doubly since ACA, a lobbyist wish-list, as expected. And with 10 years of 10% increases leading up to and after. Gosh if lobbyists and government co-created this against doctors, what’s the solution? “pushing new subsidies for private health insurance companies,”

“an anti-inflammatory drug approved for rheumatoid arthritis”

Huh. Isn’t HCQ also used for RA and a lot cheaper?

Seems strange that the military could give doses faster than the ten-thousand existing hospitals we already have, sounds more like a PR exercise, showing we’re “doing something”. Yes, something irrational and oversold. But I’m sure they’re helpful, they’re just a LOT smaller than all doctors and hospitals combined. The number difference is so massive, they could probably beat the U.S. military in lasertag by sheer numbers.

24% unemployment. How long do you think we can live when nobody is doing any work? Guess we won’t find out now, and so much the better. They’re trying to stop the planting, so I’m glad they won’t get the chance. They wouldn’t like the results of their initiative.

ICU room: is Denmark a success or a failure? If they hold off having any virus will they never have immunity and be hiding and at risk for 20 more years? While Sweden goes back to life? Not declaring here, just asking. What’s the plan?

“People aren’t protesting for the right to BE waitresses and hairdressers, they’re fighting for the right to HAVE them. This is about white people demanding service.”

Wow. #OppositeLand, how wrong can you be? The people protesting were the WORKERS, willing to put themselves in danger to WORK. FOR you. The chronic complainers who clearly don’t grow food and deliver it. The people complaining were all the people who aren’t essential and don’t work, as they didn’t have any trouble or worries sitting at home. It’s pretty amazing. I feel there’s a certain divide that pairs up with a certain outlook: one group hates work and their dream and goal in life is to never work or do anything useful again. That’s the UBI, etc group, anti-capitalism, all that stuff. The other group WANTS to work, and is constantly annoyed and dodging the first group trying every method – regulation, rules, helping – to STOP work, to STOP others from doing what they want, which is expressing themselves, helping other people…through work. Okay, fine, although you’re trampling the rights of the workers…in the name of the worker’s rights. We’ll see how that works in the election, as attacking the working class didn’t work so well in ‘16. However, if you go system-wide with one group vs the other, it’s pretty easy to see what will happen. One method will stop all production and collapse us into the stone age, the other would move us forward to over-abundance. …And that’s been proven out every time, dozens of times, since October 1917.

No, they’re fighting you – on the edge of using guns – for the right TO cut YOUR hair, not their own. To support THEIR kids, not fighting to have someone else, you, support them. Please don’t diminish how radically different this is. Some people love life and want to go live it. Some people love others, and put themselves at risk to help them. Some people live bravely and don’t cower in their basements fearing death. They don’t stop you from hiding and shirking work, so give them the same courtesy.

They’re radically anti-worker. That’s just amazing to me. Especially when they still want all that stuff — iPhones, tacos — that work provides. They just don’t want to pay? Is that why they use 3rd world and slave labor abroad and promote 2nd class citizens at home? Don’t sweat it, man, just do some nobility of work and feel better about yourself. Don’t consume: create.