Oct 082021
 


René Magritte Pandora’s box 1951

 

 

Pfizer Covid Jab ‘90% Effective Against Hospitalisation For At Least 6 Months’, says a recent Guardian headline. Do you remember 1 year ago or so, when these things were first reported on? We were told things like 95% effective against infection, nobody talked about hospitalization, and nobody ever mentioned a time limit.

I’m not sure if they are just moving goalposts or if maybe a whole new and different game has been started, but those changes in wording are stark. Effectively, we’ve been sold one narrative for a year and are now finding out that it was never true. It’s just that the propagandists, like the Guardian, are not yet ready to catch up with the changes. Here’s thinking that will change.

Meanwhile, a few billion people have been injected with substances that essentially don’t do what we were told they would. As for the effectiveness against hospitalization, that’s murky at best. For instance because in the US, as of August 7th 60% of hospitalizations were among fully-vaccinated individuals. But protection vs severe disease is the last leg the vaccine fanatics have to stand on, and they will protect that leg with all they got. Until they no longer can.

And even this article admits “Effectiveness against all Covid infections fell from 88% within a month of having two doses to 47% after six months..” OK, so after 6 months they’re useless. You wouldn’t get a EUA for 47%. But what do things look like after 3 months?

 


https://www.humetrix.com/powerpoint-vaccine.html

 

As you can see, things already get worse after a few weeks. Let’s be generous and say the substances are “effective” for 3 months. Of course, minus the first two weeks, when they are known to increase infection risk. That leaves 10 weeks of “effectiveness”. And after 6 months there’s nothing left. Says even Reuters.

Covid Vaccine Antibody Levels Drop ‘Nearly 10-Fold’ After About Six Months

A preliminary study this week claimed to have found a steep reduction in the number of coronavirus-fighting antibodies in patients roughly half a year after they received the COVID-19 vaccine. Researchers “analyzed blood samples from 46 healthy, mostly young or middle-aged adults after receipt of the two doses and again six months after the second dose,” Reuters reported this week. The study indicated that “vaccination with the Pfizer-BioNtech vaccine induces high levels of neutralizing antibodies against the original vaccine strain, but these levels drop by nearly 10-fold by seven months,” two of the researchers told the news wire.


The study, which has not yet been certified by peer review, comes amid growing talk of the possible need for a booster shot of the COVID-19 vaccine to ensure a robust immune response. The study determined that “administering a booster dose at around 6 to 7 months following the initial immunization will likely enhance protection against SARS-CoV-2 and its variants.”

Enhance protection? Or kill it? You be the judge. The Exposé looked at the latest report available from the UK Health Security Agency, which has recently replaced Public Health England. Its conclusion:

Covid-19 Vaccine Negative Effectiveness As Low As Minus 86%

The efficacy of all available vaccines combined is as low as – 85.71% within the 40-49 age group, and as high as – 3.4% in the 30-39 age group. This shows that the Covid-19 vaccines are making people more susceptible to catching Covid-19, rather than preventing cases of Covid-19 by the claimed 95%. By combining the numbers provided for all age groups over the age of 30, we have been able to calculate an average vaccine effectiveness of – 47.69%, and we’re definitely seeing this in the number of confirmed cases by vaccination status.


Between week 36 and week 39 of 2021 there were 41,149 confirmed Covid-19 cases in the unvaccinated over 30’s, 14,649 confirmed cases in the partly vaccinated over 30’s, and a frightening 243,373 confirmed cases in the fully vaccinated over 30’s. The new UK Health Security Agency report proves without a shadow of a doubt that the Covid-19 vaccines do not work, and actually make the recipients worse.

 

 

So, as I asked, now what? For the moment, the push for the vaccines is only getting stronger. People are being fired left right and center, including long term and dedicated health care professionals. Freedoms and rights continue to be taken away, and increasingly so. But people will start to see some of the real numbers, no matter how hard you try to hide them.

So as a politician or media person, you better try and stay ahead of the game. A huge number of people have died because, in order to get the authorizations for the vaccines, all prophylactics and early treatments had to be banned. And now the vaccines begin to actively kill many more. There is no way you can keep that hidden. And there’s no way you can keep pushing the vaccines when they kill those who are inoculated.

 

 

In many countries, the campaigns for booster shots are getting fired up. They will only make things worse, and fast. Ever more people will become spike protein factories, as their immune systems are no longer capable of dealing with the increasing amounts of spikes their own bodies produce. While the time the boosters provide “protection” will shorten. If you get a booster today, you’re likely to need another one around Christmas.

If I were a politician, I would be getting very worried about this. And I would probably look for someone to blame it all on, so I don’t get blamed myself. Maybe I would say Pfizer and Moderna have misled me, or my own experts. But I wouldn’t wait till fingers inevitably begin to point in my direction. Just saying.

 

 

 

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Jun 222021
 


Giorgio de Chirico The Archaeologists 1927

 

 

This is kind of a sequel to Let’s Save Some Lives , published here on June 6, when I said “All we can do is hope our immune systems are strong enough to fight off the vaccines.” and quoted Michael Yeadon, former Chief Scientific Officer of Pfizer, as saying: “Ivermectin is an off-patent drug that is one of the most widely used drugs in the world, and we know it is able to reduce Covid-19 symptoms at any stage of the disease by about 90%, so there is no need for vaccines.”. We’ll just keep on going.

 

 

It’s mighty cute that Matt Taibbi gets some coverage after writing Why Has “Ivermectin” Become a Dirty Word? , just like it was cute that Michael Capuzzo got some when he wrote The Drug that Cracked Covid a few weeks ago. Question is, where have all these people, the writers and their readers, been in the past year? As I wrote two days ago:

Taibbi should ask not only “WHY Has “Ivermectin” Become a Dirty Word?” but also “WHEN Has “Ivermectin” Become a Dirty Word?”. And then apologize to his readers for completely missing the story for a year, or at least the half year it’s been since Kory’s Senate testimony -which he talks about- was deleted by YouTube.

It’s also cute that the American Journal of Therapeutics recently published:

Ivermectin for Prevention and Treatment of COVID-19 Infection

Therapeutic Advances: Meta-analysis of 15 trials found that ivermectin reduced risk of death compared with no ivermectin (average risk ratio 0.38, 95% confidence interval 0.19–0.73; n = 2438; I2 = 49%; moderate-certainty evidence). This result was confirmed in a trial sequential analysis using the same DerSimonian–Laird method that underpinned the unadjusted analysis. This was also robust against a trial sequential analysis using the Biggerstaff–Tweedie method. Low-certainty evidence found that ivermectin prophylaxis reduced COVID-19 infection by an average 86% (95% confidence interval 79%–91%).


[..] Conclusions: Moderate-certainty evidence finds that large reductions in COVID-19 deaths are possible using ivermectin. Using ivermectin early in the clinical course may reduce numbers progressing to severe disease. The apparent safety and low cost suggest that ivermectin is likely to have a significant impact on the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic globally.

And The Journal of Antibiotics did the same with:

The Mechanisms Of Action Of Ivermectin Against SARS-CoV-2

Although several drugs received Emergency Use Authorization for COVID-19 treatment with unsatisfactory supportive data, Ivermectin, on the other hand, has been sidelined irrespective of sufficient convincing data supporting its use. [..]

Real-time data is also available with a meta-analysis of 55 studies to date. As per data available on 16 May 2021, 100% of 36 early treatment and prophylaxis studies report positive effects (96% of all 55 studies). Of these, 26 studies show statistically significant improvements in isolation. Random effects meta-analysis with pooled effects using the most serious outcome reported 79% and 85% improvement for early treatment and prophylaxis respectively (RR 0.21 [0.11–0.37] and 0.15 [0.09–0.25]).

The results were similar after exclusion based sensitivity analysis: 81% and 87% (RR 0.19 [0.14–0.26] and 0.13 [0.07–0.25]), and after restriction to 29 peer-reviewed studies: 82% and 88% (RR 0.18 [0.11–0.31] and 0.12 [0.05–0.30]). Statistically significant improvements were seen for mortality, ventilation, hospitalization, cases, and viral clearance. 100% of the 17 Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) for early treatment and prophylaxis report positive effects, with an estimated improvement of 73% and 83% respectively (RR 0.27 [0.18–0.41] and 0.17 [0.05–0.61]), and 93% of all 28 RCTs.

Those numbers are clear enough, I bet you if you get an honest report on the vaccines none can compete, but for these science journals the same question must be asked: where were you over the past year? You really had no idea? We did at the Automatic Earth, but our reach is limited; we’re lucky if we convinced a few thousand people to obtain ivermectin, if they could get it in the first place. Which is great, don’t get me wrong.

There are a number of parties to this: there’s the vaccine manufacturers, aka Big Pharma, there’s politicians including governments, there’s the experts the latter derive their knowledge from, and there’s the media. And they’re all a year late when it comes to ivermectin and HCQ and other repurposed drugs. And at some point it will become clear that there was no need to be late, and it cost an enormous amount of misery and deaths and overwhelmed health care systems and lockdowns and facemasks.

They will do what they can to keep it from becoming clear, but it’s too obvious by now. Big Pharma simply says its products are superior, and suppresses research into ivermectin etc. Politicians hide behind their experts, who claim they go with what science journals publish. And the press hides behind the experts: “See, there’s no research”, without asking why there isn’t. There is, by the way, there is a lot of research:

 

 

It’s a closed club that all say the same thing. And put the onus on the -prospective- patients. Whereas if common sense had prevailed, and we had all given everybody enough vitamin D to bring those levels to an acceptable height, and we had given them ivermectin either as a prophylactic or an early cure, this pandemic would likely never have happened.

But if we had done that, the mRNA vaccines would never have gotten Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) , we couldn’t have locked everyone down, and there wouldn’t have been any reason for the huge-scale bailout programs. Sure, a few really old and/or really obese people, both with comorbidities, might have died, even with vitamin D and ivermectin, but they might have anyway. And we don’t know, because they never got that support.

That is the story that needs to be told today. Not why ivermectin today has a bad name, but why it got one a year and change ago. Why Capuzzo and Taibbi are so late to this game, and why politicians today are pushing vaccine passports while if they had acted a year ago, there would not have been a pandemic of anything the present size. Who are these people listening to, who controls the narratives?

Meanwhile the stories about the vaccines keep on piling up. Along the lines of: why is myocarditis among young men such a problem, if they mostly recover from it? Or: why are 10s of 1000s of spontaneous abortions among young America women a issue, when they can simply have another child? The benefits outweigh the problems, we hear it every single day.

It’s sort of funny, if the effects weren’t so ghastly, that both ivermectin and the vaccines were never tested, even though the WHO says: “Vaccines are safe and effective and have been tested extensively”. The first because that would have made the second ineligible for EUA, the second because some parties really wanted to push our bodies into becoming spike protein factories, to see how these gather in our brains and ovaries and testes, and watch what happens.

So who’s going to pay the price for the full year delay, which is ongoing -there’s still no ivermectin distribution campaign other than in parts of India and a few South American and African nations-, who’s going to take the blame for all the deaths and misery? Or will the system remain closed to the public’s eyes?

 

 

 

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Mar 292021
 


Rufino Tamayo The Dance of Joy 1950

 

 

We’re running two grand experiments at the same time: we inject 100s of millions with untested substances, and then we let them fly and gather and tell them it’s safe to do so.

 

 

First things first: none of the “vaccines” that are being injected as we speak into 100s of millions of people have been approved by “medical authorities”. The Pfizer and Moderna mRNA ones, as well as the AstraZeneca and in some places Johnson&Johnson “substances” have only, best case, gotten a permit for Emergency Use Authorization (EUA).

This is needed because none of these things have ever been properly tested. The “logic” behind this is that we are in an emergency, so there’s no time for testing. Somehow, this “logic” is combined with claims about “listening to the science”. While not testing is the direct opposite of science.

In order to get the Emergency Use Authorizations, you need to show that there are no other substances available that could perform the job that the “vaccines” do. I put “Vaccines” in quotation marks because mRNA are not vaccines in the traditional sense, they are, at least potentially, much more invasive. A factor that has… never been properly tested.

The other substances that might work vs the coronavirus, repurposed drugs such as ivermectin and (hydroxy) chloroquine -about which many doctors have written very positive reviews-, if the (EUA) label is to be put on the new “vaccines”, must also remain untested, just like the “vaccines” themselves.

So there are a few “tests” out there that applied HCQ and ivermectin, but in the wrong environment. See, if you give them only to 80+ year-olds who are already on an intubator and have multiple co-morbidities, you may well end up with the verdict that they did not prevent that person from dying. The thing is, the same would be true if you gave that person an mRNA “vaccine”. But that last bit, we don’t hear about.

We recently had this from a medical journal in Holland, Google translated:

High Fine For Doctors Who Incorrectly Prescribe HCQ Or Ivermectin (MC)

Doctors who prescribe (hydroxy) chloroquine or ivermectin against covid-19 will now receive a fine of up to 150,000 euros imposed by the inspection. This may also include other medications that are prescribed outside the guidelines. The IGJ calls on pharmacists to report. The Health and Youth Care Inspectorate regularly receives reports that doctors prescribe medicines that are contrary to the treatment recommendations for covid-19, the IGJ reports on its website.


When asked, the IGJ spokesperson cannot explain exactly how many doctors this is about and what their specialty is. “We have talked to a number of doctors about this, but because some of them continue to do so, we are now going to impose fines. We are not going to warn anymore, “said the spokesman. [..] According to the IGJ, (hydroxy) chloroquine has been proven to be ineffective against covid-19 and at the same time can cause serious side effects. There is also no scientific basis for the use of ivermectin.

They either don’t test HCQ and ivermectin at all, or they test them in the wrong environment. When someone is dying from old age and co-morbidities, and then catches Covid, you’re not going to save them with HCQ or ivermectin. But nobody ever said you would. Moreover, you wouldn’t save them with mRNA either.

Chloroquine, later (hydroxy) chloroquine, was discovered in 1934, and used as a malaria treatment, for decades. Some 200 million people were treated with it, primarily in Africa, since, with great success. In fact, so many people were treated that it lost its effectiveness because the parasite that causes malaria slowly developed an immunity against it. But we would still have known if it killed large numbers of people. Same goes for ivermectin.

Ivermectin stems from 1975, long time ago, (though Joe Biden had been a senator for 3 years already ;-)), and many many millions were successfully treated with it as an anti-parasite drug. There’s an entire library by now of ivermectin vs Covid 19 studies. But the health board in Holland says :“There is also no scientific basis for the use of ivermectin.”. Yeah, sure. Look, what there is no scientific basis for is the use of the newfangled untested “vaccines”. Not testing equals not scientific. You could label it “technology” if you will, but not science.

 

Then we have Prof Anthony Harnden talking about the AstraZeneca vaccine reducing transmission by some 50%. Given the uncertainties and lack of testing and investigation, I would be inclined to label this prof a ‘lying, dog-faced pony soldier’. Yes, I am getting tired of this spiel.

Vaccines Do Not Completely Stop Transmission, JCVI Member Says

Covid-19 vaccines do not completely prevent transmission, Prof Anthony Harnden, deputy chair of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) has said. He told BBC Breakfast on Sunday that while they appear to reduce transmission by about 50%, vaccinated people can still get the virus and spread it to others. He added:


“There’s some good evidence now from Public Health England and from the Oxford/AstraZeneca trials that the vaccines do prevent transmission. But they don’t completely prevent transmission. The figures are still being calculated but it’s in the order of 50%. So, there will be some reduction in transmission, no doubt at all, but it’s still possible, even though you’ve been vaccinated, to get infected, have no symptoms and transmit it to others. That’s why it’s important that all those who get vaccinated still stick to the rules.”

In other words: Get that needle in your arm, stay home, put some underwear on your face, and keep your clap shut. The European Medicines Agency has two cents to spare as well:

EMA advises against use of ivermectin for the prevention or treatment of COVID-19 outside randomised clinical trials

EMA has reviewed the latest evidence on the use of ivermectin for the prevention and treatment of COVID-19 and concluded that the available data do not support its use for COVID-19 outside well-designed clinical trials. In the EU, ivermectin tablets are approved for treating some parasitic worm infestations while ivermectin skin preparations are approved for treating skin conditions such as rosacea. Ivermectin is also authorised for veterinary use for a wide range of animal species for internal and external parasites. Ivermectin medicines are not authorised for use in COVID-19 in the EU, and EMA has not received any application for such use.

Following recent media reports and publications on the use of ivermectin, EMA reviewed the latest published evidence from laboratory studies, observational studies, clinical trials and meta-analyses. Laboratory studies found that ivermectin could block replication of SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19), but at much higher ivermectin concentrations than those achieved with the currently authorised doses. Results from clinical studies were varied, with some studies showing no benefit and others reporting a potential benefit.

Most studies EMA reviewed were small and had additional limitations, including different dosing regimens and use of concomitant medications. EMA therefore concluded that the currently available evidence is not sufficient to support the use of ivermectin in COVID-19 outside clinical trials. Although ivermectin is generally well tolerated at doses authorised for other indications, side effects could increase with the much higher doses that would be needed to obtain concentrations of ivermectin in the lungs that are effective against the virus. Toxicity when ivermectin is used at higher than approved doses therefore cannot be excluded.

So that’s experiment number 1. 100s of millions of people injected with untested substances. For which there seems to be some evidence that they make a person less sick. But that’s all the evidence there is. They can still be infected, and there’s still no evidence that they can’t infect others. So by all means, let’s bet the house on that, shall we? And if we have to kill drugs that might do a much better job to get there, we will.

 

Then comes experiment number 2. The people who have been injected with this stuff will now be able to get vaccine passports of one sort or another, and travel, get into planes and theaters and what not, and, according to the CDC, gather without wearing masks. While “there’s still no evidence that they can’t infect others”.

I know that politicians are getting desperate, after a full year of lockdowns. But they could all have started nationwide campaigns of improving immune systems through vitamin D a year ago. That was the easiest thing ever, and still is, potentially decreasing both infections and deaths by 50%. Yes, there’s scientific literatute for this.

They could have initiated large scale trials with ivermectin, HCQ, doxycycline and other drugs, but none of them did, outside of countries like India, Peru, Argentina. So that didn’t happen either. Now all they have left are a bunch of non-proven and questionable technologies, and they’re promoting those as if their lives and careers depend on them.

And then we all double down and tell people they’re safe after getting a couple of “jabs”, and everyone around them is too, though there is zero evidence for this. That is a big gamble. But gambling is all we have left. Economies need to open or else. People must be able to see people or else. Governments need to get out of the way and let people take responsibility for their own lives.

We can only wait for the first politician and government and their “expert” advisers to come clean and say they failed. That would at least be a breath of fresh air. Here in Athens after a hard lockdown of almost 6 months, case numbers and intubations are higher than ever. The least they can do is say: we’re sorry, we were wrong, we screwed up.

But politicians and “scientists” don’t do that, unless they’re forced to, even if countless lives are lost in the process. So what do you do? Well, you force them to. And then you make them leave, and start saving lives.

 

 

 

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May 012020
 


Joseph-Désiré Court Le Masque 1843

 

No, I’m still not over the fact that they all initially missed the virus when they should have seen it most of all. The reasons why must be evaluated in every single location, in governments, CDC equivalents and obviously the WHO. A main reason is that they were all focusing on their economy, not the virus, -at least somewhat- ironically damaging their economies in the process.

I’m just afraid that you’re not going to prevent the next time, the next huge and deadly miss, as long as elections are popularity contests ultimately controlled by special interests. But at the same time, we’re past that first moment, which was somewhere in November or December (31st at the latest), and the next major threats loom.

After the Big Miss came the lockdowns, and as I said in Little Managers, that’s the one thing all these politicians may actually be somewhat good at. They stink at initial detection and reaction time, they stink at forward vision, but they can get people to stay home for a bit, and sell them that in the media.

They even get praised for it. Which is understandable, since their role is to set old ladies’ minds at ease, and most people, whatever age they are, have such minds, understandable but unfortunate, because 1) we’re about to leave the lockdowns phase as well and 2) they’re sure to screw up this one as royally as the first detection moment.

 

It would be good if everyone by now understood why lockdowns become inevitable after, but only after, initial detection has failed and the virus has been allowed to enter a society, if you face a highly contagious and deadly -to humans- virus that you don’t know anything about, but there are plenty people today who claim the lockdowns are what does the damage.

In case there is such a virus and you miss your first -and only- chance at “Crushing the Curve” (as opposed to flattening it, which is of limited use at best), you must prevent it from jumping from host to host, which means you need to keep people apart from each other to one extent or another. Societies have understood this for 1000s of years, and we don’t?

Keep people apart until you either know more about the virus, or you have a vaccine, or people become immune to it. Well, there’s no vaccine – did you know that no vaccine for a coronavirus was ever developed?-, immunity is in a very early phase, and just about literally everything we think we know about the virus is contradicted within 24 hours or so by a different report or group of “experts”.

 

These are truly not things we should let politicians fresh out of popularity contests decide. But that’s the model of our societies. The various relaxations of the various lockdowns are going to be an unmitigated disaster, guaranteed. We have all the elements for such disasters. It’ll work out fine in a few locations, but in most it will be terrible.

Because these guys and gals are under pressure from people who’ve been complaining about the lockdowns since the moment they were called. Because their “scientists” are, as we saw in The Only Man Who Has A Clue, utterly useless when it comes to even the most basic rules of risk assessment. But then for a few consecutive days numbers of cases and deaths seem to go down, and there is an election coming up next year or the one after that, and off to the races we are.

As long as there are no urgencies or calamities, we don’t notice these things, because everyone is busy living their own lives and fulfilling their own demands. And then when things do go wrong, there’s no redundancy, no resilience, no safety nets, and eventually no nothing. Because everyone’s too busy with their own lives.

We conduct our societies as if there is zero risk of a pandemic or any other disaster, because there’s no profit in redundancy. It’s a miracle we still have fire departments and hospitals, and those in most cases only still exist because someone has found a way to make money off of them (taxes).

 

Still, the worst thing about all the little managers “leading” us into the future is undoubtedly that little managers have no vision for that future. That’s why you hear “re-open”, re-this and re-that so much. But there is no “re-“, there is no going back to “normal”. And when you look at where we were pre-corona, you’d be mad not to ask why on earth we would want to go back there.

Shouldn’t we perhaps at least learn something from this virustime episode? Of course we should. But our “leaders” lack the ideas and vision to learn anything. They don’t go forward into the future, they go backward, fat asses first. They owe their jobs and their power to the past, after all.

And their only “science advisers”, the virologists and epidemiologists, also only look backwards, since their knowledge comes from past events, and they can only model the next “viral event” according to guesses, hunches, and a series of old algorithms. Some can construct a full genome of a virus within days or weeks, but still have no idea what it does.

We have the wrong people in charge at every step of the way. Because we have no idea what risk assessment is. Still, we’re all smart enough to understand that politicians and epidemiologists are the last people we would want to do that. And yes, that brings us straight back to The Only Man Who Has A Clue. When you don’t know what you’re up against, you don’t just try and guess and pray for a good outcome, you go back to basics: masks, testing, distance.

Lockdowns can’t last forever, people are social animals. Also, lockdowns don’t solve the problem, that’s not their goal; they merely buy you time. Would you say we have used that time wisely? Would you say it’s safe now to put less distance between people, who are for all intents and purposes potential hosts for a lethal virus?

I see a lot of claims that we know much more about the virus now, 4-6 weeks later, but I also see tons of contradictory reports, and I can only conclude we still know very little. Indeed, even many things we thought we knew turn out not to be true. And those happen to be the kinds of things that are essential if you want to assess risk.

Politicians and epidemiologists could only possibly have done one thing right -and they largely did- in this process: the lockdown. They understand what it is, and they have the tools to sell and enforce it. But that’s it. They don’t understand the risks involved in relaxing the lockdowns. It’s not just the pressure on them to “normalize” their societies, it’s that they don’t understand risk, period -but think and claim they do-.

That in itself is likely the biggest risk we face.

 

 

And I kid you not, I was setting out to write about finance and bailouts and stuff, and thought a little intro might be helpful, and it got a bit out of hand. Finance and bailouts “and stuff”, coming up, hopefully tomorrow. Got so much to say about that too. Sometimes it’s nice to just read news and opinions for a number of days without writing about it, but for me there’s always a lot of “what are these people thinking?”.

There are all these claims about elites and politicians and their grand schemes and plans and intentions, but so far I always veer back, along with Fat Tony, to the vastly underestimated achievements of sheer incompetence. But by all means, prove me wrong.

 

 

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Mar 082020
 


Heinrich Hofmann Christ and the Rich Young Man 1889

 

Around mid-January I started including coronavirus news in the daily Automatic Earth “Debt Rattle” news aggregators, and wrote the first essay on the topic on January 29. Tons of people since have asked why, but I thought the virus had “potential”. Though not everybody would agree, I still think that. So the Debt Rattles are full of coronavirus these days.

For a proper understanding, we must remember that China was 4-5 weeks too late in reporting the disease, and after that the west was 4-5 weeks late in acting on the news. This happens simply because a politician who cries wolf will have a short career, and reporters, certainly today, follow that same model.

I explained 5 weeks ago why this happens the way it does in China in The Party and the Virus, but western countries’ political and media systems are structured very much the same way. Being early to warn does not help your job prospects. Unless you’re 100% sure, but then you won’t be alone and there’s nothing left to warn about. So might as well stay mum.

Until you must speak, and then you’re way behind, and you’ll be as wrong as you are late. Cast in stone. Bias “R” Us. But then, that’s why there’s the Automatic Earth. The Matrix is never perfectly sealed.

 

In the case of COVID19, the story is not about the numbers of cases or fatalities at any given point after two months and change, it’s about the disruption it will cause. We have a highly contagious virus that can cause death. That is all you need to know really. Feel free to claim that reactions and measures are over the hill, but no government has the option to say things are not all that bad and it’s business as usual.

They all tried again though. It’s in their job description. One of their tasks is to prevent panic, and yes, they use that to hide their ignorance behind, but they still must do it. But that’s alright, because all halfway smart people know what to do when a politician says not to panic.

However, they will still quarantine you and close borders, no matter what you think. Politicians are dead set to react too late, and then when they do, to order measures that are over the top and at best partly effective. But it’s not them, it’s the model they function within.

I first said this days ago, that it’s easy for people to look past that reality, but it’s always good to see Nassim Taleb share that view, that what you think about your own situation is not an option for politicians:

 

 

And people comparing COVID 19 to seasonal flu are therefore way off base. It’s not apples and oranges, it’s apples and baseballs -if not baseball bats-. Both are round but they have little else in common. The seasonal flu has been around since at least 1899, when the first epidemic was reported, what ever that meant back then.

The COVID19 virus is, far as we know, 3 months and change old. So any numbers you can toss around, of so many people killed by one and not the other, are pretty much meaningless. They are completely different entities that just happen to perhaps look alike if you don’t look to close. You can bring up the comparison, but you don’t say a thing about COVID19 if you do.

 

There are more interesting things to say about COVID 19. Unlike seasonal flu (largely), this one is not standing still. That means it will take 12-18 months to develop a vaccine, while any given year’s vaccine vs that year’s “normal” flu takes a few weeks. That difference may not say it all, but it comes close.

The most striking characteristic of the virus may be, if not should be, its exponential (or quadratic, if you will) progress once it gets hold. Ben Hunt tweeted earlier today, in reaction to Rome shutting down a quarter of the entire country, that “Italy is a time machine that shows us our future. Why do we ignore it?” But it’s not just Italy. It’s a pattern, it’s a dynamic, it’s motion. All things that regular flu is not.

And here’s what that dynamic looks like:

 

First, South Korea till March 4. when it had 5,621 cases. Today it has 7,313. But it is suspicious; they have very few deaths AND very few recovered cases. Well over 90% of cases are unresolved, way more than in other countries. It also has by far the largest numbers infected per million people.

 


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Italy till March 4. when it had 3,089 cases. Today it has 7,375. 1,492 new cases today, and 133 new deaths (366 total). Ouch. 25% more cases, 57% more deaths.

 


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China may have leveled off a little (who knows, really?), but the rest of the world is just getting started.

 


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The US is starting to get in line:

 

 

And this pair of graphs from Worldometer just keeps going as well:

 

 

COVID19 is not a point in space, it’s not standing still. You can’t look at it and compare it to anything else around today, because it moves much faster. Let’s try this vein:

I would suggest we’re looking at something like this:
Wave 0: Wuhan/Hubei (11/58.5 million people)
Wave 1: Rest of China (1.375 million people, total China 1,435)
Wave 2: Italy, South Korea, Iran (59, 51 and 81 million people)

And the next wave could well be, given their development in new cases, countries that are following the early phases of the graphs for Italy and South Korea above:
Wave 3: US, Germany, France, Spain (?!) (330, 83, 67, 47 million people)

The UK is a candidate with its 66.8 million people, but it’s either cheating (don’t test) or it may “have to wait” for Wave 4. Note: the US doesn’t have all that many cases either, but its death rate is high.

I mention the numbers of inhabitants because Wave 3 may also include some countries with fewer people (Wave 3.5?):

Switzerland, Sweden, Belgium, Netherlands (8.5, 10.1, 11.5 and 17.1 million people) are all countries with relatively small populations and relatively high numbers of new cases that may well contain the same sort of clusters that have caused the explosion in cases in Wave 1 countries. We can not predict excatly what happens, but we can see trendlines.

 

The virus is a time machine in the sense that whereas we can -in theory- assume that the regular flu moves in human time, COVID19 very much appears to move in virus time. Almost something you would ask a quantum theorist to look into.

Meanwhile of course you can theorize about the possibility that this is a bioweapon, but first of all that doesn’t help any patients right now, and second it’s only interesting if you can find out whether it was made on purpose or by accident, released by accident or on purpose, and was it the Chinese, the Americans, the Russians, the British, or someone else, why did they do it, why does it target which group, etc etc.

This thing plays out today, not in an imaginary future where you may have found out the who what and why. In the meantime, people are dying.

If you look at the graphs for Italy and South Korea above, you can see your future. Not in a precise way, but certainly in a general one. You can see ahead. Time machine.

 

 

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Oct 092018
 


Pieter Bruegel the Elder Two monkeys 1562

 

And there we go again. Another IPCC report, and they all keep getting more alarming than the previous one. And then nothing substantial happens. Until the next report is issued and makes everybody’s headlines for a day, or two. Rinse, spin and repeat. “Now we really have to do something!”. “World leaders have a moral obligation to act!”.

Oh boy. To start with that last bit, world leaders don’t act because of moral obligations. They act to stay in, or get in, power. And they all know that to achieve that goal they must keep their people happy, even if dictators do this differently from ‘democratically elected’ leaders.

The first tool they have for this is control of the media, control of the narratives that define -or seem to- their societies. If a society is in bad shape, they will control the media to show that it is doing fine. if it’s actually doing fine, they will make sure all the praise for this is theirs and theirs alone.

So what makes their people happy? One thing far ahead of anything else is material comfort. If leaders can’t convince people that they’re comfortable, their power is in danger. Once enough people are miserable or hungry, a process is set in motion that threatens to push leaders aside in favor of someone who promises to make things better. There’s never a shortage of those.

 

Leaders, politicians, think short-term. They may see further into the future than the next election, but that is not useful information. If they enact measures aimed at 10 years from today or more, they risk being voted out in 2 years, or 4. It’s not even their fault, it’s how the system works. It is different for dictators, but not even that much.

The general notion is clear. But that means we can’t rely on our leaders to act against the climate change the IPCC keeps warning of. because is has a -much- longer time window than the next elections -or the next coup in dictator terms. Even if every IPCC report depicts a shorter window than the last one, it’s still not inside those 4-year election cycles (numbers vary slightly, 4 is typical).

A typical ‘response’ to the climate threat are the COP meetings and agreements. I have fulminated plenty against COP21, the Paris accord, even named it CON21. Because that was signed by those very leaders tied down in their election cycles. Completely useless. That most of the other signees were business leaders who represent oil companies, airlines and Big Tech with huge server parks seals the reality of the deal.

These are not the people who will solve the problems. They have too much interest in not doing so. The CEO’s have their profits to think about, the politicians their elections. They should be kept out of the decision-making process. But they’re the only ones who are in it.

I still think the issue was never better epitomized than in the December 2016 piece in the Guardian by Michael Bloomberg and Mark Carney entitled “How To Make A Profit From Defeating Climate Change” , about which I said at the time:

These fine gents probably actually believe that this is perfectly in line with our knowledge of, say, human history, of evolution, of the laws of physics, and of -mass- psychology. All of which undoubtedly indicate to them that we can and will defeat the problems we have created -and still are-, literally with the same tools and ideas -money and profit- that we use to create them with. Nothing ever made more sense.

That these problems originated in the same relentless quest for profit that they now claim will help us get rid of them, is likely a step too far for them; must have been a class they missed. “We destroyed it for profit” apparently does not in their eyes contradict “we’ll fix it for profit too”. Not one bit. It does, though. It’s indeed the very core of what is going wrong.

Profit, or money in general, is all these people live for, it’s their altar. That’s why they are successful in this world. It’s also why the world is doomed. Is there any chance I could persuade you to dwell on that for a few seconds? That, say, Bloomberg and Carney, and all they represent, are the problem dressed up as the solution?

This week’s IPCC report says the efforts to keep warming at acceptable levels (1.5ºC) will cost many trillions of dollars every year. But a billionaire publisher and a central bank head want to make a profit?! Hey, perhaps they can, as long as you and I pay… But they won’t solve a thing. if only because not doing that will be too profitable. Still, while they’re at it, maybe they can do us a favor.

You see, what is hardly ever mentioned, let alone acknowledged, is that we have more than one major existential problem, and they exist in such a form of symbiosis that solving only one doesn’t make much difference.

We have a changing climate, we have accelerating species extinction, we have plastics in our fish, and we have a global economy that’s about to topple over. The common thread in all these is an overkill in energy use and therefore an overkill in waste. Thermodynamics, 2nd law. Waste kills. By raising temperatures, finishing off wildlife, plugging rivers and oceans with plastics, making increasing amounts of people economically miserable.

But as I wrote a while ago, our economies exist to produce waste, it’s not just a by-product -anymore-. If we stop making things we don’t need, and things that do harm to our world and our lives, our economies will collapse. We must continue on our path or see our lifetstyles plummet. They will anyway, we’re just delaying the inevitable, but we’re stuck.

And politicians are utterly useless and utterly unfit in situations like this. But ask yourself: are you any better? If you were told that in order to ‘save the planet’, you’d have to cut your energy use in half, which would take away many of your comforts and luxuries, would you do it?

A better question yet is, if you would agree to do that, and then see that your neighbor does not, would you still cut your driving and flying and electricity? That’s hard enough on an individual level, but how about if one nation does, while another refuses? Or when nations that have much lower per capita energy consumption tell the West: you go first?

 

What do you think the odds are that we’ll find a global solution, approach, before the 2030 cutoff date the IPCC provides in its latest report? While the likes of Bloomberg and Carney still talk about climate change as a profit opportunity? I know what I think.

The report says we need to drastically ‘reform’ our economies and lifestyles. Cutting our energy use in the West in half won’t be enough, if only because billions of people demand more energy at their disposal. Will you cut into your lifestyle, will your children, when they see their neighbors increasing their energy use, when they see entire nations increase theirs?

We don’t have ‘leaders’ that can stop species extinction or a warming planet or an economic collapse, because they either are clueless or they will be voted out of power if they tell the truth. Extend and pretend is a term that’s used to describe economic policies a lot, but it actually paints an accurate picture of everything we do.

“Free”, surplus, energy can come in the shape of sugar in a petri dish full of bacteria, or of stored carbon on planet earth. In both cases, the outcome is as predictable as can be. Can we, with our billions of cars and billions of miles flown every year, and billions of phones and computers, return to the energy use of only 100 years ago? Don’t think so.

On the contrary, we’re constantly increasing our energy consumption. Just like the bacteria do in the petri dish. Until they no longer can, until reality, physics, thermodynamics, sets a limit. One of my favorite themes is that we are the most tragic species ever because we can see ourselves doing things that we know are harmful to us, but we can’t stop ourselves from continuing.

The best we can hope for is that tomorrow morning everything will be the same again as where we started today. But no, that’s not sufficient, either, many of the things we’ve unleashed have 20+ year runtimes, and they’re already baked into the cake of our futures. We can’t start afresh every morning, no Groundhog Day for us. Every morning the alarm goes off things have gotten worse. And we can’t stop that.

 

 

Jul 282015
 
 July 28, 2015  Posted by at 6:38 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  6 Responses »


Jack Delano Chicago & North Western Railroad locomotive shops 1942

As the “Varoufakis Files” provide everyone interested in the Greek tragi-comedy with an additional million pages of intriguing fodder -we all really needed that added layer of murky conspiracy, re: the Watergate tapes-, a different question has been playing in my head. Again. That is: Why are economists discussing politics?

Why are the now 6 month long Greece vs Troika discussions being conducted by the people who conduct them? All parties involved are apparently free to send to the table whoever they want, and while that seems nice and democratic, it doesn’t necessarily make it the best possible idea. To, in our view, put it mildly.

For perspective, please allow me to go back to something I wrote 3,5 months ago, May 12 2015:

Greece Is Now Just A Political Issue

[..] the EU/troika anno 2010 decided to bail out German and French and Wall Street banks (I know there’s an overlap) – instead of restructuring the debts they incurred with insane bets on Greece and its EU membership- and put the costs squarely on the shoulders of the Greek population.

This, as I said many times before, was not an economic decision; it was always entirely political. It’s also, by the way, therefore a decision the ECB should have fiercely protested, since it’s independent and a-political and it can’t afford to be dragged into such situations. But the ECB didn’t protest. [..]

The troika wants the Syriza government to execute things that run counter to their election promises. No matter how many people point out the failures of austerity measures as they are currently being implemented in various countries, the troika insists on more austerity. Even as they know full well Syriza can’t give them that because of its mandate. Let alone its morals.

It’s a power game. It’s a political game. It always was. But still it has invariably been presented by both the –international- press and the troika as an economic problem. Which has us wondering why this statement by ECB member and Austrian central bank head Ewald Nowotny yesterday, hasn’t invited more attention and scrutiny:

ECB’s Nowotny: Greece’s Problem Isn’t Economic

The Greek problem is more a political question than an economic one, a member of the European Central Bank said Monday. Discussions with political parties such as Greece’s left-wing Syriza and Spain’s Podemos may be refreshing by bringing in new ideas, “but at the end of the day, they must [end in] results,” ECB member Ewald Nowotny said, adding discussions are “not about playing games.”

The central banker declined to speculate on how to solve Greece’s financial problem saying the issue “is much more a political question than an economic question.” Mr. Nowotny also doesn’t see the ECB’s role as creating a federalized financial government inside the euro zone. “We cannot substitute the political sphere,” he said.

That seems, from where we’re located, to change the discussion quite a bit. Starting with the role of the ECB itself. Because, for one thing, and this doesn’t seem to be clear yet, if the Greek problem is all politics, as the central bank member himself says, there is no role for a central bank in the discussions. If Greece is a political question, the ECB should take its hands off the whole Greek issue, because as a central bank, it’s independent and that means it’s a-political.

The ECB should provide money for Greece when it asks for it, since there is no other central bank to provide the lender of last resort function for the country. Until perhaps Brussels calls a stop to this, but that in itself is problematic because it would be a political decision forced on an independent central bank once again. It would be better if the ‘union’, i.e. the other members, would make available what Greece needs, but they -seem to- think they’re just not that much of a union.

In their view, they’re a union only when times are good. And/or when all major banks have been bailed out; the people can then fight over the leftover scraps.

The IMF has stated they don’t want to be part of a third Greek bailout. Hardly anyone seems to notice anymore, but that makes the IMF a party to political decisions too. Lagarde et al claim they can’t loan to countries that don’t take the ‘right’ measures, but who decides which measures are the right ones? [..] Moreover, if we take Mr. Nowotny on his word, why are there still finance ministers and economists involved in the Greek issue negotiations? Doesn’t that only simply lead to confusion and delay?

It seemed crystal clear to me then, and does even more so today, but nothing has really changed, other than Greece having replaced one economist with another as finance minister. Which never really could help discussions in the eurogroup alone, because, as Ian Parker writes in his long must read “V” (for Vendetta) portrait, the rest of them are still not economists, and therefore have no appetite for discussing matters from that angle:

The Greek Warrior

At the level of the Eurogroup, Varoufakis told me, the conversation was “all about the rules.” It was not a forum in which to discuss debt unsustainability, or the rarity of economic growth under austerity conditions. Varoufakis told me that he was “accused of talking about economics.” Once, Varoufakis was asked what Greece’s target surplus should be, if not 4.5% of GDP. He “had to give a lecture” about the variables that made the question unanswerable in that form. “They’re not economists,” Varoufakis said. “Most of them are lawyers.”

At a certain point, it’s hard to escape the idea that it’s all like if you have a politically volatile discussion about building an airport, or ‘just’ a runway (commonplace issues), and the entire discussion is controlled by architects, or builders, instead of politicians. It makes no sense, and it can only possibly lead to undesirable outcomes. Because you got the wrong people in the wrong venue.

Moreover, unlike architecture, economics has huge credibility issues to begin with. Which is why politicians need to provide very specific instructions to their economists, or the entire exercise risks being watered down in no time to a battle between one economic stream of faith vs another. Keynes vs Mises, that kind of thing.

If we can agree with Nowotny (and I very much do) that this is a political issue, it’s the politicians who should make the decisions, on political grounds, and the economists should fill in the specifics after the fact.

Economists, and eventually lawyers, should fill in the details, but lawyers and economists posing as finance ministers should not be left in charge of the political decisions.

And no, here’s looking at Athens, naming an economist as finance minister does not make him a politician. Nor should it. An economist has his/her own place in the proceedings. But then, that’s where we hit upon the major conundrum: what makes a body a politician?

Turns out, that’s a hard one to answer. Because anyone can pretend to be a politician, and many do pretend just that. But how then, when we can agree that a certain issue is a political rather than an economical one, do we select the proper people to make decisions on the issue?

The simplest bit of deduction teaches us that putting economist Yanis Varoufakis on opposite ends of the same table with eurogroup finance ministers who are lawyers and don’t know diddly-squat about economics, doesn’t work. All a lawyer knows how to do is point to pre-conceived rules and regulations. It’s what lawyers do, it’s what enabled them to get their law degree.

But you might as well put a Chinese farmer and a West Virginia gun dealer together. They don’t speak the same language. Other then perhaps possibly that of compassion, but that’s the one quality lawyers are sure to lack once they get to be finance ministers.

Still, once you acknowledge that something is a political issue, you must make sure that only political arguments drive the talks, not economic ones, not even legal ones. And that’s what seems to be the little big 800-pound thingy, doesn’t it? They all just choose to pretend they speak the same language even if they know they don’t.

So all the eurogroup only possibly can do is to vent as little flexibility as possible. If they veer even an inch off the prescribed path, they would be instantly lost. Lawyers…

But that also, and very much so, means we need to wonder why Syriza insisted on prolonging the eurogroup talks all this time. The eurogroup, whatever it may be, and whatever we may think of it, is not a political forum. It’s evidently not an economic one, either, but that’s another story altogether.

Why did Varoufakis go back into that forum time after time, even after Nowotny said what he did? He must have known from that moment, and long before, that as an economist he had nothing to gain there. He might as well have sent his cleaning lady. And she might have come up with a better result to boot.

Why did Syriza never insist that the people involved be changed, and the venue, to be limited to Merkel and Hollande and Tsipras?

The question that lingers is why these talks are set up the way they are, where failure is all but certain. Is that intentional, as in where the lawyers are sent in because they are supposed to halt all sensible discussion no matter what?

Or, arguably more interesting, is it that when it comes to purely political issues, nobody really knows who to put forward? Who can really discuss exclusively political issues other than actual political leaders?

Well, we know it’s not economists, and we can count out cleaning ladies (though we could get lucky). We also know we shouldn’t let lawyers do the trick. They’re too narrow in their range. So who? I would almost say there’s no-one, but that automatically leads to the only possible option: the highest political ‘functionaries’.

Which in the case of the Troika vs Greece means Merkel, Hollande, perhaps Renzi, and Tsipras. The people who’ve been elected (or quasi) to be their nations’ top-notch political leaders. No Dijsselbloem, or Schäuble, or any of those guys. No Varoufakis either.

The ECB is both a participant in the talks and a creditor, a stakeholder. That pushes it painfully close to being a political participant, something a central bank should never ever be.

But the breaching of red lines and grey areas has become so ubiquitous in the whole ‘discussion’ that nobody seems to notice anymore, or wants to notice, for that matter.

The same goes for the role of the IMF. What do they think they’re doing? The Fund should stay far away from any political discussion, or it loses its credibility.

Both the ECB and the IMF try to keep up the illusion that their decisions are a-political and within their respective mandates, but that idea can only be maintained if and when the Greece issue were an economical one. We’ve already seen it’s not.

We end up concluding that the entire process has been a disaster, unless one’s aim from the get-go was to gut the Greek economy even more, and the outcome is -therefore- a disaster too.

But it’s still economists who keep holding the talks. The “technical experts” from the Troika that re-enter Athens as we speak may be a bit more knowledgeable when it comes to economics that the EU finance ministers, but still, they are loaded with their own issues.

If I were Tsipras I’d refuse to have any of my people talk to any Troika ‘negotiators’ from here on in, and insist on direct talks with Merkel and Hollande only (I’d have done that a long time ago, too). See what the real intentions are amongst those that have real power, and only after that, have staff, like economists and lawyers, discuss specifics and fill in details.

Things have been moving the 180º other way around now, and it could never even possibly have led to a positive result. You can’t start with the details.

Here’s still wondering why they all insist on doing things that way. Isn’t it obvious? Or has the whole thing simply been intentional all along?

Oh, and before I forget, most commentaries on the Greek issue in the media also come from economists. Some of those are palatable, even smart. But at the same time, they haven’t yet gotten the message either: it’s all about politics. If it were just economics, Greece would be solved in 2 seconds flat.

But it’s not. And there’s a reason for that which lies way beyond economics.

Dec 142014
 
 December 14, 2014  Posted by at 9:33 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , ,  16 Responses »


DPC Mott Street, Chinatown, New York 1900

Where are you going, America?

I don’t like to discuss politics too much. There are not enough smart, kind and honest people in politics wherever I look in the world for me to want to have anything to do with that game. I’d just spend all my time wondering what kind of mindset it takes to want to tell other people what to do, and be in control of the millions, billions and trillions of dollars that are taken from these people on a daily, yearly, basis.

Not that all of them politicians are bad, but those who have genuinely good intentions get drowned out, within seconds, by the ones for whom the need to have power over others is more important than anything else. And as I said, on the whole they’re not very smart. It’s for instance a very bad idea to let you countries’ economic policies be decided by the very people who make the decisions today.

They have no clue what they’re talking about. So they get advisors who they feel do know, and these advisors all come from the same small niche of society that steer everybody’s hard-earned cash towards that same small niche of society. 99% of economists are religious nuts who do even the Roman Catholic church one better because they chart graphs to ‘prove’ their beliefs are true -or even provable-.

They adapt the world to their theories, not the other way around, as physicists do. They pretend their field is a science, but, other than the graphs, it has none of the characteristics of a science. Falsifiability is not a term one can let loose on economics; within minutes, there’d be nothing left.

The other advisors politicians have when it comes to economic policies are bankers, who are convinced banks are the most important institutions and edifices in the world, just like priests and vicars would have described their churches and cathedrals not long ago. That is why last week we saw a spending bill being shoved through US Congress and Senate that includes parts openly written by Citigroup lobbyists, and which puts the risk of over $300 trillion in derivatives on American taxpayers’ shoulders.

America is a democracy in name only. And I often ask myself why Americans take that lying down. Why they think they don’t have to fight for their rights and their freedoms the way the founders did. Do they think they’re special, are they so full of themselves, and full of ‘it’, that they think it’s okay to let their rights being taken away from them, and their children, the same rights so many Americans died for in earlier days?

When you try and see things that way, what else do present day US citizens deserve than what’s coming to them? You can’t have freedom, and you can’t have rights, if you’re not willing to fight for them. And that doesn’t mean sending a bunch of your low-down poorest young people to some faraway desert, it means keeping in touch with what’s happening in your own town and county and state and country. And raising your voice if you don’t like what you see.

There’s a Senate report – many years too late – that confirms the CIA and other parties tortured often innocent people in the name of the United States, and that means you, in incredibly cruel ways reminiscent perhaps most of Medieval times or even before that, before man allegedly became civilized, but for which, by the looks of it, nobody will to be prosecuted in the US.

Letting people die of torture, and then afterwards finding out it was just another case of mistaken identity, has become acceptable in America. Congratulations. We’ve come a long way.

There’s the incredible story of the Ukraine, in which the Senate just days ago called for more economic sanctions vs Russia, and full-blown lethal military aid for Ukraine, where US patsies have taken over even more government positions by being handed hundreds of millions of dollars and fresh Kiev passports, and where now Russia will be forced to counteract, against its will.

Why do Americans allow for that to happen in their name? Don’t they care what other people in the world, in which they’re hugely outnumbered, since less than 1 in 20 is American, think about them? Don’t they care about the effect of harassing others incessantly for the purpose of enriching US companies?

Or do Americans think their superior weaponry allows them to do whatever they want to whoever they want to do it to? Somehow, that, too, is reminiscent of the Middle Ages. America hasn’t won an actual war since 1945, because bigger armies don’t win wars anymore. Having the biggest guns doesn’t either. Nuclear weapons are too destructive for that.

Ron Paul seems to be the only US politician who has any idea of what the US should stand for, who understands that empire building is a really bad idea with all the nukes around, and that coalition building and friendship with other peoples and nations is a much better way to keep Americans safe and -relatively – prosperous. And Ron Paul is getting on; who’ll stand up in his place?

But the biggest issues for Americans are not abroad, they’re right at home. As evidenced by Ferguson, by Eric Garner, and by the mass demonstrations in the past days. The problem is, since the 1960s people have turned their focus so much towards money and so far away from their personal rights and freedoms, and those of others, that one or two or ten demonstrations won’t make a difference anymore.

I was watching something on the 1964 Klan killing of three civil rights workers in the town of Philadelphia, Mississippi the other day, of Dr. King’s role, of how the entire town knew who was guilty but shut up. And I wondered what exactly America has achieved since then, what has changed and what is better 50 years on.

And sure enough I found my answer, in a graph of all places. It this doesn’t hurt your sense of justice, and your sense of pride to be an American, I don’t know what would. Nor do I understand, if you choose to keep silent, where you think this will lead in the future. What can you possibly say when you let these numbers sink in?