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 March 1, 2022  Posted by at 12:23 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  11 Responses »


Edward Hopper Approaching a city 1946

 

 

On September 26, 2021, I posted the Spartacus letter in its entirety, because I thought it was too good to “disappear” in our daily news aggregator, Debt Rattle. This turned out to be a good decision, since the letter vanished from its original server soon afterward. But it was -and is- still here. Zero Hedge reposted my repost, and things went off from there, generating some 200,000 views here and 1.85 million at Zero Hedge. Plus who knows how many at other places.

The Spartacus collective -we now know they are indeed a group- returned a few days ago with an update letter, now on Substack. That is probably a safer place then their original Docdroid site, but I’ll repost this one as well. Nice to see they are aware of the Automatic Earth’s role in garnering attention for the first letter. My pleasure. You guys are very good.

Note: the original, COVID-19: A Web of Corruption, is here.

 

 

Foreword

My name is Spartacus, and I ve had enough.

I am one of the authors of the Spartacus Letter, a document that took the world by storm in September of 2021.

To date, four versions of the letter have been published, and all four can be viewed here:

Spartacus Letter V1

Spartacus Letter V2

Spartacus Letter V3

Spartacus Letter V4

We shared this document with numerous news outlets and sent it directly to Dr. Robert Malone, who linked it on his Twitter account. From there, it was reposted on the Automatic Earth blog, and then, on ZeroHedge, where it garnered over a million hits.

It was quickly decried as misinformation both by freelance analysts on Twitter, and by fact-checkers:

Twitter avatar for @conspirator0Conspirador NorteOo @conspirator0

The “Spartacus” COVID disinfo document first appeared on docdroid(dot)com on Sept 24 2021. The first Twitter account to share it was a small Italian-language account, @number229401056. The second was @RWMaloneMD, whose tweet linking the letter was retweeted nearly 1000 times.

Image

If you perform a Google search for the Spartacus Letter, Google s algorithm prioritizes one result above all others: a fact-check by Newswise debunking it, which, unsurprisingly, 77% of visitors to the page disagree with.

Is this the case? Could ICENI, with a fully-sourced document with over 600 citations that lays out an extensive argument regarding the nature and origins of COVID-19, have been intending to deliberately mislead the public, as our detractors state?

Perhaps we were not explicit enough.

SARS-CoV-2 is manmade. It was produced at the Wuhan Institute of Virology with US Government funding. It is the lynchpin of a plan by ruthless elites to take over the entire world. There is enough circumstantial evidence that, if taken together, implicates numerous government officials and scientists in this plot.

The people involved could be charged with crimes against humanity for their complicity in this, but if they were, it would bring the entire system crashing down around our ears simply due to the sheer number of the guilty and the loftiness of their offices.

There is no way to sugarcoat any of this. If people remain ignorant of the nature of COVID-19 and the events leading up to the present, then the petty tyrants stripping us of our civil liberties will win.

What follows will be something of a recapitulation of the Spartacus Letter, in great detail, with numerous hyperlinks and small blocks of quoted material and images within fair use limitations, for the sake of commentary and criticism of public figures.

What is COVID-19?

COVID-19 is the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2, a close relative of SARS-CoV, the causative agent of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, also known as SARS. SARS-CoV-2 is a coronavirus of the betacoronavirus genus, which it shares with SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV.

The healthcare establishment and the media have misrepresented COVID-19 as a lower respiratory disease, as a form of pneumonia. They have done so consistently for the past two years.

This time, Cavuto said he had a “far, far more serious strand” because his “very compromised immune system” simply hasn’t benefited in the same way from the vaccines as those with healthy immune systems.

Cavuto said that his most recent case of Covid-19 had led to pneumonia and landed him “in intensive care for quite a while.”

While it is certainly true that COVID-19 can cause pneumonia, it would be inaccurate to describe COVID-19 as a pneumonia per se. Due to the significant expression of ACE2 in vascular endothelial cells and pericytes as part of the Renin-Angiotensin-Aldosterone System (RAAS), SARS-CoV-2 preferentially attacks the lining of blood vessels and small capillaries, severely inflaming them, leading to sepsis, capillary leak, pulmonary edema, and yes, pneumonia.

However, therein lies the crucial distinction: SARS-CoV-2 injures the lungs by infecting the blood vessels that supply the alveoli and triggering sepsis and ARDS. It would be more accurate, therefore, to describe COVID-19 not as a pneumonia, but as a disease of the circulatory system.

This has been known since April of 2020, when University Hospital Zurich proclaimed that COVID-19 was, in actuality, a vascular endotheliitis.

During analyses of tissue samples taken from deceased COVID-19 patients taken following an autopsy, pathologists at University Hospital Zurich have now discovered that patients are not just suffering from an inflammation of the lungs, but also from an inflammation of all endothelial tissue in a wide range of organs. In addition, pathologist Prof. Zsuzsanna Varga has been able to use an electron microscope to verify for the first time that SARS-CoV-2 is present and causes cell necrosis in endothelial tissue.

The nature of COVID-19 as a vascular endotheliitis is now well-established in the primary literature.

The Lancet – Endothelial cell infection and endotheliitis in COVID-19

Post-mortem analysis of the transplanted kidney by electron microscopy revealed viral inclusion structures in endothelial cells (figure A, B). In histological analyses, we found an accumulation of inflammatory cells associated with endothelium, as well as apoptotic bodies, in the heart, the small bowel (figure C) and lung (figure D). An accumulation of mononuclear cells was found in the lung, and most small lung vessels appeared congested.

European Heart Journal – COVID-19 is, in the end, an endothelial disease

Inflammatory activation of endothelial cells can disrupt VE-cadherin largely responsible for the integrity of the endothelial barrier function.62 Activated endothelial cells can also express matrix metalloproteinases that can degrade the basement membrane and further interrupt endothelial barrier function. In small vessels, such as those that embrace alveoli in the lung, this impaired barrier function can lead to capillary leak.

What these papers are essentially describing is endothelial dysfunction and endothelial injury in the context of acute sepsis. Researchers have stated that severe COVID-19 is a form of sepsis. Why is this important? Because it has serious implications for how COVID-19 may be successfully treated. It also explains why many current treatments fail to rescue critically-ill patients.

Acute sepsis does a number of terrible things to the circulatory system and vital organs. One thing it does is severely disrupt the balance of oxidation and reduction reactions in the body.

Redox Report – Sepsis, oxidative stress, and hypoxia: Are there clues to better treatment?

Sepsis is a clinical syndrome characterized by systemic inflammation, usually in response to infection. The signs and symptoms are very similar to Systemic Inflammatory Response Syndrome (SIRS), which typically occur consequent to trauma and auto-immune diseases. Common treatments of sepsis include administration of antibiotics and oxygen. Oxygen is administered due to ischemia in tissues, which results in the production of free radicals. Poor utilization of oxygen by the mitochondrial electron transport chain can increase oxidative stress during ischemia and exacerbate the severity and outcome in septic patients. This course of treatment virtually mimics the conditions seen in ischemia reperfusion disorders. Therefore, this review proposes that the mechanism of free radical production seen in sepsis and SIRS is identical to the oxidative stress seen in ischemia reperfusion injury. Specifically, this is due to a biochemical mechanism within the mitochondria where the oxidation of succinate to fumarate by succinate dehydrogenase (complex II) is reversed in sepsis (hypoxia), leading to succinate accumulation. Oxygen administration (equivalent to reperfusion) rapidly oxidizes the accumulated succinate, leading to the generation of large amounts of superoxide radical and other free radical species. Organ damage possibly leading to multi-organ failure could result from this oxidative burst seen in sepsis and SIRS. Accordingly, we postulate that temporal administration with anti-oxidants targeting the mitochondria and/or succinate dehydrogenase inhibitors could be beneficial in sepsis and SIRS patients.

Another thing it does is promote endothelial dysfunction.

International Journal of Molecular Sciences – Endothelial Dysfunction and Neutrophil Degranulation as Central Events in Sepsis Physiopathology

Sepsis produces endothelial dysfunction, forcing a pro-adhesive, procoagulant and antifibrinolytic state in endothelial cells, thus altering the hemostasis, leucocyte trafficking, inflammation, barrier function and microcirculation [23].

We know this is occurring in COVID-19, because COVID-19 sufferers have elevated levels of both inflammatory cytokines such as TNF-a and IL-6, and oxidative and nitrosative stress biomarkers such as nitrotyrosine, coupled with low nitric oxide bioavailability. This has led some to hypothesize that, ultimately, severe COVID-19 is death by neutrophilia .

International Journal of Biological Sciences – A Multiple-Hit Hypothesis Involving Reactive Oxygen Species and Myeloperoxidase Explains Clinical Deterioration and Fatality in COVID-19

Multi-system involvement and rapid clinical deterioration are hallmarks of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) related mortality. The unique clinical phenomena in severe COVID-19 can be perplexing, and they include disproportionately severe hypoxemia relative to lung alveolar-parenchymal pathology and rapid clinical deterioration, with poor response to O2 supplementation, despite preserved lung mechanics. Factors such as microvascular injury, thromboembolism, pulmonary hypertension, and alteration in hemoglobin structure and function could play important roles. Overwhelming immune response associated with cytokine storms could activate reactive oxygen species (ROS), which may result in consumption of nitric oxide (NO), a critical vasodilation regulator. In other inflammatory infections, activated neutrophils are known to release myeloperoxidase (MPO) in a natural immune response, which contributes to production of hypochlorous acid (HOCl). However, during overwhelming inflammation, HOCl competes with O2 at heme binding sites, decreasing O2 saturation. Moreover, HOCl contributes to several oxidative reactions, including hemoglobin-heme iron oxidation, heme destruction, and subsequent release of free iron, which mediates toxic tissue injury through additional generation of ROS and NO consumption. Connecting these reactions in a multi-hit model can explain generalized tissue damage, vasoconstriction, severe hypoxia, and precipitous clinical deterioration in critically ill COVID-19 patients. Understanding these mechanisms is critical to develop therapeutic strategies to combat COVID-19.

This is also known as respiratory burst, or neutrophil degranulation, or, in extreme cases, neutrophil extracellular trap formation:

Neutrophils use enzymes such as superoxide dismutase (SOD) and myeloperoxidase (MPO) to produce hydrogen peroxide and hypochlorous acid (peroxide and bleach, essentially) in order to destroy bacteria and other pathogens by attacking their membranes with powerful oxidants.

Normally, our cells, which are made of essentially the same stuff as bacteria, survive this by using powerful antioxidant enzymes such as glutathione peroxidase (GPX) to break down hydrogen peroxide into water and reduce harmful lipid hydroperoxides to their corresponding alcohols.

ScienceDirect – Glutathione Peroxidase

Unfortunately, this virus has a very nasty trick up its sleeve. SARS-CoV-2 can directly inhibit the Nrf2 pathway, blocking endogenous antioxidant enzymes from functioning correctly.

Nature – SARS-CoV2-mediated suppression of NRF2-signaling reveals potent antiviral and anti-inflammatory activity of 4-octyl-itaconate and dimethyl fumarate

To identify host factors or pathways important in the control of SARS-CoV2 infection, publicly available transcriptome data sets including transcriptome analysis of lung biopsies from COVID-19 patients were analyzed using differential expression analysis14. Here, genes linked with inflammatory and antiviral pathways, including RIG-I receptor and Toll-like receptor signaling, were enriched in COVID-19 patient samples, whereas genes associated with the NRF2 dependent antioxidant response were suppressed in the same patients (Fig. 1a c). That NRF2-induced genes are repressed during SARS-CoV2 infections was supported by reanalysis of another data-set building on transcriptome analysis of lung autopsies obtained from five individual COVID-19 patients (Desai et al.15) (Fig. 1d). Furthermore, that the NRF2-pathway is repressed during infection with SARS-CoV2 was supported by in vitro experiments where the expression of NRF2-inducible proteins Heme Oxygenase 1 (HO-1) and NAD(P)H quinone oxydoreducatse 1 (NqO1) was repressed in SARS-CoV2 infected Vero hTMPRSS2 cells while the expression of canonical antiviral transcription factors such as STAT1 and IRF3 were unaffected (Supplementary Fig. 1). These data indicate that SARS-CoV2 targets the NRF2 antioxidant pathway and thus suggests that the NRF2 pathway restricts SARS-CoV2 replication.

The Nrf2 pathway directly regulates the function of glutathione peroxidase.

Elsevier – Nrf2-regulated glutathione recycling independent of biosynthesis is critical for cell survival during oxidative stress

Nuclear factor-erythroid 2 p45-related factor 2 (Nrf2) is the primary transcription factor protecting cells from oxidative stress by regulating cytoprotective genes, including the antioxidant glutathione (GSH) pathway. GSH maintains cellular redox status and affects redox signaling, cell proliferation, and death. GSH homeostasis is regulated by de novo synthesis as well as GSH redox state; previous studies have demonstrated that Nrf2 regulates GSH homeostasis by affecting de novo synthesis.

This is, of course, why severely ill COVID-19 patients are noted to have glutathione deficiencies.

Antioxidants – Severe Glutathione Deficiency, Oxidative Stress and Oxidant Damage in Adults Hospitalized with COVID-19: Implications for GlyNAC (Glycine and N-Acetylcysteine) Supplementation

Humanity is battling a respiratory pandemic pneumonia named COVID-19 which has resulted in millions of hospitalizations and deaths. COVID-19 exacerbations occur in waves that continually challenge healthcare systems globally. Therefore, there is an urgent need to understand all mechanisms by which COVID-19 results in health deterioration to facilitate the development of protective strategies. Oxidative stress (OxS) is a harmful condition caused by excess reactive-oxygen species (ROS) and is normally neutralized by antioxidants among which Glutathione (GSH) is the most abundant. GSH deficiency results in amplified OxS due to compromised antioxidant defenses. Because little is known about GSH or OxS in COVID-19 infection, we measured GSH, TBARS (a marker of OxS) and F2-isoprostane (marker of oxidant damage) concentrations in 60 adult patients hospitalized with COVID-19. Compared to uninfected controls, COVID-19 patients of all age groups had severe GSH deficiency, increased OxS and elevated oxidant damage which worsened with advancing age. These defects were also present in younger age groups, where they do not normally occur. Because GlyNAC (combination of glycine and N-acetylcysteine) supplementation has been shown in clinical trials to rapidly improve GSH deficiency, OxS and oxidant damage, GlyNAC supplementation has implications for combating these defects in COVID-19 infected patients and warrants urgent investigation.

Glutathione deficiencies, endothelial dysfunction, and chronic oxidative stress all point essentially to the same thing: untreated chronic malnutrition brought on by consumption of an energy-rich, micronutrient-poor diet. This is also known as Metabolic Syndrome, and has a close association with endothelial dysfunction and, indeed, premature aging of the blood vessels. It is, of course, why COVID-19 causes more severe illness in those with diabetes, high blood pressure, obesity, and old age. All of these conditions involve pre-existing endothelial dysfunction that renders one more vulnerable to sepsis.

There is, in fact, a close association between the severity of COVID-19 and the quality of one s diet.

BMJ – Diet quality and risk and severity of COVID-19: a prospective cohort study

Over 3 886 274 person-months of follow-up, 31 815 COVID-19 cases were documented. Compared with individuals in the lowest quartile of the diet score, high diet quality was associated with lower risk of COVID-19 (HR 0.91; 95% CI 0.88 to 0.94) and severe COVID-19 (HR 0.59; 95% CI 0.47 to 0.74). The joint association of low diet quality and increased deprivation on COVID-19 risk was higher than the sum of the risk associated with each factor alone (Pinteraction=0.005). The corresponding absolute excess rate per 10 000 person/months for lowest vs highest quartile of diet score was 22.5 (95% CI 18.8 to 26.3) among persons living in areas with low deprivation and 40.8 (95% CI 31.7 to 49.8) among persons living in areas with high deprivation.

It is plausible, though not conclusively proven, that COVID-19 could be warded off by simple changes to diet and exercise habits, especially the inclusion of antioxidant-rich foods high in Vitamin D, cysteine, dietary nitrate, and selenium in one s diet.

Rather than suggesting that people eat better and go on jogs, the authorities have spent the past two years locking people down, which has made them both more obese and more vulnerable to the virus.

Wiley – Effects of COVID-19 lockdown on eating disorders and obesity: A systematic review and meta-analysis

A total of 26 studies met inclusion criteria (n = 3399, 85.7% female). The pooled prevalence of symptomatic deterioration in EDs was 65% (95% CI[48,81], k = 10). The pooled prevalence of increased weight in obesity was 52% (95% CI[25,78], k = 4). More than half of the participants experienced depression and anxiety. Moreover, at least 75% of the individuals with EDs reported shape and eating concerns, and increased thinking about exercising.

What is actually happening in COVID-19 that causes all this oxidative damage? First, superoxide reacts with nitric oxide to form peroxynitrite, a damaging nitrogen radical. Then, peroxynitrite reacts with tetrahydrobiopterin in endothelial nitric oxide synthase, leading to those enzymes becoming uncoupled , which makes them recursively produce superoxide in a damaging biological feedback loop. Dr. Martin L. Pall refers to this phenomenon by the moniker NO/ONOO- Disease .

International Journal of Molecular Sciences – The NO/ONOO-Cycle as the Central Cause of Heart Failure

The NO/ONOO-cycle is a primarily local, biochemical vicious cycle mechanism, centered on elevated peroxynitrite and oxidative stress, but also involving 10 additional elements: NF-∫B, inflammatory cytokines, iNOS, nitric oxide (NO), superoxide, mitochondrial dysfunction (lowered energy charge, ATP), NMDA activity, intracellular Ca2+, TRP receptors and tetrahydrobiopterin depletion. All 12 of these elements have causal roles in heart failure (HF) and each is linked through a total of 87 studies to specific correlates of HF. Two apparent causal factors of HF, RhoA and endothelin-1, each act as tissue-limited cycle elements. Nineteen stressors that initiate cases of HF, each act to raise multiple cycle elements, potentially initiating the cycle in this way. Different types of HF, left vs. right ventricular HF, with or without arrhythmia, etc., may differ from one another in the regions of the myocardium most impacted by the cycle. None of the elements of the cycle or the mechanisms linking them are original, but they collectively produce the robust nature of the NO/ONOO-cycle which creates a major challenge for treatment of HF or other proposed NO/ONOO-cycle diseases. Elevated peroxynitrite/NO ratio and consequent oxidative stress are essential to both HF and the NO/ONOO-cycle.

As nitric oxide levels decrease and superoxide predominates (a textbook phenomenon in endothelial dysfunction), superoxide dismutase makes hydrogen peroxide, and then myeloperoxidase makes hypochlorous acid. Hypochlorous acid strips iron from heme. Then, free unliganded iron, hydrogen peroxide, and superoxide react in the Haber-Weiss and Fenton reactions to form damaging hydroxyl radicals.

Arch Neurosci – Oxidative Stress Gated by Fenton and Haber Weiss Reactions and Its Association With Alzheimer s Disease

It is difficult for most people to comprehend just how damaging hydroxyl radicals can be. Hydroxyl radicals occur naturally in the upper atmosphere, where they destroy pollutants. When they occur in the body, they oxidize lipids and DNA instantaneously, within nanoseconds, and no enzyme exists that can detoxify them. Hydroxyl radicals are often produced on purpose with hydrogen peroxide and iron catalyst in hydroxyl generators to create a powerful oxidant concoction that decontaminates and bleaches wastewater streams and HVAC systems by rapidly destroying biological material.

How fast?

That fast.

Why are COVID-19 patients dying in droves when they re intubated, with mortality from mechanical ventilation approaching 97% in some cases? It s because intubation mimics the physiology of ischemia-reperfusion injury. Under the acute sepsis triggered by COVID-19, cells experience hypoxia. They become stressed and switch to anaerobic metabolism and glycolysis to make ATP as a desperate last resort. Then, these cells are suddenly fed with O2 by a ventilator, which causes them to switch back to aerobic metabolism. As this happens, hypoxanthine and succinate breakdown produces superoxide radicals in very large amounts.

Superoxide is a precursor to many other types of radicals, as described above. There s even a name for it; the kindling radical/bonfire hypothesis .

Springer – Vascular Redox Signaling, Redox Switches in Endothelial Nitric Oxide Synthase (eNOS Uncoupling), and Endothelial Dysfunction

Many diseases and drug-induced complications are associated with or even caused by an imbalance between the formation of reactive oxygen and nitrogen species (RONS) and antioxidant enzymes catalyzing the breakdown of these harmful oxidants. According to the kindling radical hypothesis, initial formation of RONS may trigger the activation of additional sources of RONS in certain pathological conditions.

This process of ROS release greatly accelerates the damage caused by the virus, promoting lipid peroxidation and the formation of damage-associated molecular patterns and oxidation-specific epitopes. The DAMPs summon more neutrophils by their interaction with PRRs, which release more damaging enzymes. The OSEs cause the body to form autoantibodies against oxidized lipids, somewhat similar to some aspects of the pathophysiology of Lupus.

AHA Journals – Oxidation-Specific Epitopes Are Danger-Associated Molecular Patterns Recognized by Pattern Recognition Receptors of Innate Immunity

Oxidation reactions are vital parts of metabolism and signal transduction. However, they also produce reactive oxygen species, which damage lipids, proteins and DNA, generating oxidation-specific epitopes. In this review, we will discuss the hypothesis that such common oxidation-specific epitopes are a major target of innate immunity, recognized by a variety of pattern recognition receptors (PRRs). By analogy with microbial pathogen associated molecular patterns (PAMPs), we postulate that host-derived, oxidation-specific epitopes can be considered to represent danger (or damage) associated molecular patterns (DAMPs). We also argue that oxidation-specific epitopes present on apoptotic cells and their cellular debris provided the primary evolutionary pressure for the selection of such PRRs. Further, because many PAMPs on microbes share molecular identity and/or mimicry with oxidation-specific epitopes, such PAMPs provided a strong secondary selecting pressure for the same set of oxidation-specific PRRs as well.

This severe oxidative stress promotes steroid insensitivity. Suddenly, the corticosteroids stop working and the patient experiences inflammatory rebound.

Antioxidants – Oxidative Stress Promotes Corticosteroid Insensitivity in Asthma and COPD

Reactive oxygen and nitrogen species (RONS) promote corticosteroid insensitivity by disrupting glucocorticoid receptor (GR) signaling, leading to the sustained activation of pro-inflammatory pathways in immune and airway structural cells.

Elsevier – Steroid resistance and rebound phenomena in patients with COVID-19

A total of 319 COVID-19 patients were admitted to our hospital and 113 patients met inclusion criteria. The success group had 83 patients (73.5%), the rebound group had nine patients (8.0%), and the refractory group had 21 patients (18.6%). Compared with the success group, the rebound group received corticosteroids earlier, for a shorter duration, and stopped them sooner. The median time from symptom onset to rebound was 12 days. There was no rebound after 20 days. Compared with the success group, the hazard ratio for the number of days from corticosteroid onset to an improvement of two points on a seven-point ordinal scale was 0.29 (95% confidence interval [CI], 0.14 0.60, P < .001) for the rebound group versus 0.13 (95% CI, 0.07 0.25, P < .001) for the refractory group.

Antivirals such as Remdesivir, Kaletra, Ivermectin, and Hydroxychloroquine do nothing to stop this, because by the time someone is in the ER complaining of severe COVID-19 symptoms (which are actually acute sepsis brought on by a deranged, overreacting innate immune system), the virus is already gone.

Viruses – Remdesivir for Early COVID-19 Treatment of High-Risk Individuals Prior to or at Early Disease Onset Lessons Learned

Similarly to IAV infection, the highest viral load and infectivity for SARS-CoV-2 are observed +/”1 day around the day of symptom onset [15]. Both the amount of infectious virus as well as the amount of viral RNA as measured by qRT-PCR decrease rapidly thereafter. Accordingly, the number of cells within the patient s respiratory tract that are newly infected with SARS-CoV-2 declines sharply within a few days of disease onset. It is now well accepted that immunopathology plays a key role in severe COVID-19 [16]. Accordingly, treatment with corticosteroids, such as dexamethasone, improves survival in critically ill COVID-19 patients in the later stages of the disease [17].

Ultimately, the afflicted cells begin dying of ferroptosis and parthanatos.

PubMed – Ferroptosis: mechanisms, biology, and role in disease

As GPX4 is the major PLOOH-neutralizing enzyme, a general mechanism underlying erastin/RSL3-induced ferroptosis emerged: both compounds inactivate GPX4 RSL3 does so directly, and erastin does so indirectly by inhibiting cystine import, thus depriving cells of cysteine, an essential cellular antioxidant and a building block of GSH. Consequently, PLOOHs accumulate, possibly causing rapid and unrepairable damage of plasma membrane, leading to cell death (Fig. 2A). Conceptually, these findings establish ferroptosis as a cell death modality with mechanisms distinct from other known death processes. The pharmacological and genetic tools developed herein enable, and have become indispensable for, ferroptosis research.

PubMed – Parthanatos: mitochondrial-linked mechanisms and therapeutic opportunities

In the context of the CNS, which is highlighted in this review to illustrate PARP-1-mediated cell death mechanisms that are shared in most cases by non-neuronal systems, stimuli that induce pathological activation of PARP-1 in in vitro and in vivo studies include oxidative stress by reactive oxygen species (ROS), such as hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) or hydroxyl radical, nitrosative stress from NO or peroxynitrite (ONOO”), inflammation, ischaemia (or ischaemic reperfusion), hypoxia, hypoglycaemia and DNA-alkylating agents, such as N-methyl-N -nitro-N-nitrosoguanidine (MNNG).

That, in a nutshell, is the central pathophysiology of COVID-19. The virus has many other aspects. It can promote hypercoagulability and attack numerous vital organs throughout the body, including the brain, olfactory system, gastrointestinal system, pancreas, kidneys, liver, and even fat cells. However, all of these things occur in the context of acute sepsis and endothelial injury.

In short, COVID-19 is not the disease people have been told it is, and, as per ostracized physicians such as Dr. Peter McCullough, Dr. Paul E. Marik, and Dr. Vladimir Zelenko, it is not being treated correctly.

The medical establishment has shunned those pushing for time-sensitive early outpatient treatment of COVID-19 sepsis. The standard of care for COVID-19 is to send people home without a prescription for anything; no antivirals, no antioxidants. Either their infection resolves without incident, or they get sicker, come back, and are intubated and proned, their diaphragm paralyzed with drugs so they can t fight the ventilator, a drip of steroids running into their arm.

This is state-sponsored medical murder.

Why don t people want the vaccines?

Because they are extremely fishy even at first glance. That s why.

Even people with no knowledge of the background of all of this are deeply suspicious of the speed with which these vaccines were fast-tracked, as well as the authorities insistence on people taking them, on pain of job loss, being banned from travel, and essentially being evicted from society.

In absolute terms, COVID-19 is not even particularly lethal. The infection fatality rate for those under age 50 with no comorbidities is very low. In that context, the authorities panicked response and open hostility doesn t seem to make any sense at all.

The mRNA and viral vector vaccines for COVID-19 work essentially by using human cells as a bioreactor, delivering genetic material into cells to get them to express a modified form of SARS-CoV-2 Spike as a vaccine antigen. They do not contain whole virus, nor do they stimulate an antibody response against every structural protein of SARS-CoV-2.

It sounds almost elegant. Any virus could, conceivably, have a tailor-made vaccine produced against it in a matter of days by plugging the gene sequence for its structural proteins in and making a lipid nanoparticle or viral vector containing that genetic material.

Just one problem. It causes severe and life-threatening side effects.

Clinical Infectious Diseases – Intravenous Injection of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) mRNA Vaccine Can Induce Acute Myopericarditis in Mouse Model

Although significant weight loss and higher serum cytokine/chemokine levels were found in IM group at 1 2 days post-injection (dpi), only IV group developed histopathological changes of myopericarditis as evidenced by cardiomyocyte degeneration, apoptosis, and necrosis with adjacent inflammatory cell infiltration and calcific deposits on visceral pericardium, although evidence of coronary artery or other cardiac pathologies was absent. Serum troponin level was significantly higher in IV group. Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) spike antigen expression by immunostaining was occasionally found in infiltrating immune cells of the heart or injection site, in cardiomyocytes and intracardiac vascular endothelial cells, but not skeletal myocytes. The histological changes of myopericarditis after the first IV-priming dose persisted for 2 weeks and were markedly aggravated by a second IM- or IV-booster dose. Cardiac tissue mRNA expression of interleukin (IL)-1≤, interferon (IFN)-≤, IL-6, and tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-± increased significantly from 1 dpi to 2 dpi in the IV group but not the IM group, compatible with presence of myopericarditis in the IV group. Ballooning degeneration of hepatocytes was consistently found in the IV group. All other organs appeared normal.

Steve Kirsch, a vocal opponent of the vaccine mandates, has written on Substack about this very topic, as well as attorney Thomas Renz s leaked DMED data, which the DOD have been trying desperately to cover up.

Steve Kirsch’s newsletter
DMED data is explosive. Mainstream media has been ordered to ignore it.
Summary The medical database used by the US military shows a huge uptick in serious events in 2021. Only events caused by the vaccine (as noted by the uptick in VAERS reports for these symptoms) were elevated. The DoD has claimed the increase was because events in earlier years were under reported and they have corrected the error&

Read more

Elsevier – SARS-CoV-2 spike protein interactions with amyloidogenic proteins: Potential clues to neurodegeneration

The post-infection of COVID-19 includes a myriad of neurologic symptoms including neurodegeneration. Protein aggregation in brain can be considered as one of the important reasons behind the neurodegeneration. SARS-CoV-2 Spike S1 protein receptor binding domain (SARS-CoV-2 S1 RBD) binds to heparin and heparin binding proteins. Moreover, heparin binding accelerates the aggregation of the pathological amyloid proteins present in the brain. In this paper, we have shown that the SARS-CoV-2 S1 RBD binds to a number of aggregation-prone, heparin binding proteins including A≤, ±-synuclein, tau, prion, and TDP-43 RRM. These interactions suggests that the heparin-binding site on the S1 protein might assist the binding of amyloid proteins to the viral surface and thus could initiate aggregation of these proteins and finally leads to neurodegeneration in brain. The results will help us to prevent future outcomes of neurodegeneration by targeting this binding and aggregation process.

SARS CoV 2 Spike Impairs DNA Damage Repair and Inhibits V(D)J Recombination In Vitro

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS CoV 2) has led to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID 19) pandemic, severely affecting public health and the global economy. Adaptive immunity plays a crucial role in fighting against SARS CoV 2 infection and directly influences the clinical outcomes of patients. Clinical studies have indicated that patients with severe COVID 19 exhibit delayed and weak adaptive immune responses; however, the mechanism by which SARS CoV 2 impedes adaptive immunity remains unclear. Here, by using an in vitro cell line, we report that the SARS CoV 2 spike protein significantly inhibits DNA damage repair, which is required for effective V(D)J recombination in adaptive immunity. Mechanistically, we found that the spike protein localizes in the nucleus and inhibits DNA damage repair by impeding key DNA repair protein BRCA1 and 53BP1 recruitment to the damage site. Our findings reveal a potential molecular mechanism by which the spike protein might impede adaptive immunity and underscore the potential side effects of full-length spike-based vaccines.

FDA ACCIDENTALLY DISPLAYS LIST OF COVID VACCINE SIDE EFFECTS INCLUDING DEATH, MYOCARDITIS AND AUTOIMMUNE DISEASE

Under no circumstances should people be compelled to take these experimental and highly harmful vaccines, period.

If that were all there was to this story, one could employ Hanlon s razor and chalk this all up as a series of very unfortunate medical blunders and not the bloodthirsty malice and contempt towards the public that it truly is.

However, this isn t even the half of it.

Those who dig deeper encounter a horror story of biblical proportions, involving private-public collusion, government malfeasance, and national security skullduggery at the highest levels.

Where did the virus come from?

Since the 2000s, DARPA has greatly expanded their biodefense portfolio. A fellow named Michael Callahan was involved in this work, among many others. His job was to study old Soviet biowarfare sites like the Vector Institute, looking for technologies that could be patented and commercialized.

Unlimited Hangout – DARPA s Man in Wuhan

Callahan s nose for business came into play early on in the pandemic. After studying data from over 6,000 patient records from Wuhan, he reportedly detected a pattern that could point to a possible treatment using a low-cost and widely available ingredient of an over-the-counter histamine-2 receptor antagonist called Famotidine , more commonly known as the brand name Pepcid.

As an aside, Famotidine is not just an antihistamine. It is also a powerful antioxidant that interrupts the Fenton reaction, which, if one understands the pathophysiology of COVID-19, means that Pepcid makes perfect sense as a therapeutic agent.

In 2010/2011, NIH, DARPA, and DTRA may have discovered a cure for almost all pandemic viruses, but rejected it, despite evidence of its efficacy in a murine model. It was called DRACO, or Double-Stranded RNA Activated Caspase Oligomerizer, and it was developed by an MIT scientist by the name of Todd Rider. It is a recombinant fusion protein that kills virally-infected cells by ordering them to undergo apoptosis if it detects viral dsRNA. In mouse experiments, it was shown to protect mice from influenza.

PLOS One – Broad-Spectrum Antiviral Therapeutics

Funding: This work is funded by grant AI057159 (http://www.niaid.nih.gov/Pages/default.aspx) from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the New England Regional Center of Excellence for Biodefense and Emerging Infectious Diseases, with previous funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Defense Threat Reduction Agency, and Director of Defense Research & Engineering. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Opinions, interpretations, conclusions, and recommendations are those of the authors and are not necessarily endorsed by the United States government.

In the end, Dr. Rider had to resort to crowdfunding campaigns to continue his research. Unfortunately, these campaigns failed.

MEET TODD RIDER, THE MAN WHO MAYBE, PROBABLY CURED MOST OF THE VIRUSES ON EARTH

Modest amounts of funding from the National Institutes of Health have enabled the previous proof-of-concept experiments in cells and mice, but that funding grant is now over. Major pharmaceutical companies have the resources and expertise to carry new drugs like DRACO through the manufacturing scale-up, large-scale animal trials, and human trials required for FDA approval. However, before committing any of their own money, those companies want to see that DRACOs have already been shown to be effective against major clinically relevant viruses (such as members of the herpesvirus family), not just the proof-of-concept viruses (such as rhinovirus) that were previously funded by NIH. Thus the Valley of Death is the financial and experimental gap between the previously funded NIH proof-of-concept experiments and the threshold for convincing major pharmaceutical companies to advance DRACOs toward human trials.

However, I digress. Ever since the 2002/2003 SARS outbreak, there has been significant interest in SARS-CoV among virologists, including gain-of-function manipulation of SARS virions in the laboratory environment.

The usual stated purpose of gain-of-function research is to get ahead of pandemics by producing a human-adapted pathogen and preemptively vaccinating against it.

Potential Risks and Benefits of Gain-of-Function Research: Summary of a Workshop – Part 4

In the long-term it may also allow the generation of information that is not obtainable through other methods, but whether all the long-term benefits envisioned for GoF research will actually be realized is still unclear. Vaccine producers in particular disagree on whether GoF methods are essential for vaccine development, so the contributions of GoF research to vaccine development need careful evaluation. Increasing reliance on gene sequences to predict phenotypes may increase GoF research’s importance over time. As was clear from the presentations in Session 4 of the symposium, there is wide recognition that it is not yet possible to predict phenotype from genotype, but Dr. Philip Dormitzer, from Novartis Vaccines and a member of the symposium planning committee, noted that as more genotype-phenotype linkages are established, it may enable keeping certain viral characteristics out of vaccine strains.

Some scientists base their entire careers on this research, obtaining grant money from various institutions, including military think-tanks, to experiment on pathogens in this manner.

There s just one problem with this; gain-of-function research (a.k.a. Dual-Use Research of Concern ) has never successfully produced a vaccine against anything. It is simply bioweapon research by another, sanitized, euphemistic name.

GAIN-OF-FUNCTION RESEARCH ON SARS VIRUS, PERFORMED AT US LAB WITH BIO-CELLS FROM FORT DETRICK

Francis Boyle: We have an article here from the NAT MED 2015, December 21 SARS like cluster of circulating bat coronavirus show, potential for human emergence. This was at the University of North Carolina, in Chapel Hill. They have a biosafety lab level 3 there. And I have previously condemned them, for using gain-of-function work on MERS, which is the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome.

One of the foremost figures in coronavirus GOF research is a guy named Ralph Baric at UNC Chapel Hill.

He has been conducting research into various coronaviruses, including SARS, for many decades there. This is who Anthony Fauci is referring to when he speaks of GOF work being done in North Carolina .

‘Gain-of-function’ research: What it is and who is doing it in North Carolina

Gain-of-function research has been done in North Carolina, most notably at the lab of UNC-Chapel Hill researcher Ralph Baric. Baric is one of the world’s preeminent coronavirus researchers, beginning his study of the family of viruses in the 1990s before they were seen as potentially pandemic-level dangerous to humans. Baric has used gain-of-function techniques to show how coronaviruses could evolve to infect humans and to test new vaccine methods to neutralize them.

In 2015, Ralph Baric co-authored a paper with Shi Zhengli, a bat coronavirus expert from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, entitled A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence .

The emergence of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS)-CoV underscores the threat of cross-species transmission events leading to outbreaks in humans. Here we examine the disease potential of a SARS-like virus, SHC014-CoV, which is currently circulating in Chinese horseshoe bat populations1. Using the SARS-CoV reverse genetics system2, we generated and characterized a chimeric virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone. The results indicate that group 2b viruses encoding the SHC014 spike in a wild-type backbone can efficiently use multiple orthologs of the SARS receptor human angiotensin converting enzyme II (ACE2), replicate efficiently in primary human airway cells and achieve in vitro titers equivalent to epidemic strains of SARS-CoV. Additionally, in vivo experiments demonstrate replication of the chimeric virus in mouse lung with notable pathogenesis. Evaluation of available SARS-based immune-therapeutic and prophylactic modalities revealed poor efficacy; both monoclonal antibody and vaccine approaches failed to neutralize and protect from infection with CoVs using the novel spike protein. On the basis of these findings, we synthetically re-derived an infectious full-length SHC014 recombinant virus and demonstrate robust viral replication both in vitro and in vivo. Our work suggests a potential risk of SARS-CoV re-emergence from viruses currently circulating in bat populations.

In other words, Ralph Baric and Shi Zhengli were colleagues. Anthony Fauci pointing to Ralph Baric at UNC Chapel Hill as evidence of the NIH not funding GOF research in Wuhan is downright farcical; these scientists collaborated openly on various projects over the past decade.

A year before this paper was published, a moratorium on US federal funding for gain-of-function research was put in place. This moratorium lasted from 2014 through 2017.

U.S. halts funding for new risky virus studies, calls for voluntary moratorium

A group calling itself the Cambridge Working Group issued a statement in July saying that studies with “potential pandemic pathogens” should be “curtailed” until the risks and benefits could be evaluated; it has garnered hundreds of signatures. Another group of scientists supporting the experiments they call themselves Scientists for Science defended the studies as safe but also called for a meeting to discuss the issues.

U.S. Government Gain-of-Function Deliberative Process and Research Funding Pause on Selected Gain-of-Function Research Involving Influenza, MERS, and SARS Viruses

New USG funding will not be released for gain-of-function research projects that may be reasonably anticipated to confer attributes to influenza, MERS, or SARS viruses such that the virus would have enhanced pathogenicity and/or transmissibility in mammals via the respiratory route. The research funding pause would not apply to characterization or testing of naturally occurring influenza, MERS, and SARS viruses, unless the tests are reasonably anticipated to increase transmissibility and/or pathogenicity.

Researchers whose careers depended on GOF research were openly hostile to the moratorium, despite the noble intent behind it of preventing a lab escape.

Researchers rail against moratorium on risky virus experiments

Andrew Hebbeler, assistant director for biological and chemical threats in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), explained at a meeting today of the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) that the policy is a response to several recent biosafety lapses at federal labs involving mishandled samples of anthrax, H5N1, and smallpox. Although GOF actually encompasses “a huge swath of life sciences research,” he said, officials decided to focus only on influenza, MERS, and SARS because they are can be transmitted through the air and have the potential to spark a pandemic. OSTP told ScienceInsider that about two dozen studies funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) are affected; the pause also halts some studies at the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

In any case, the moratorium was ignored. Without contacting the White House for approval, federal funding for gain-of-function research continued, using intermediaries to subcontract the grants.

Enter Peter Daszak, the director of EcoHealth Alliance.

A man who pens psychotic love letters to viruses.

Springer – A Fall From Grace To& Virulence?

In Bruegel s painting of The Fall of the Rebel Angels we are witness to a tumbling maelstrom of falling rebel angels outcast from Heaven. Within the fray stands St. Michael in gilded armor, and his angels-at-arms serenely in pale albs, and almost as if threshing grain, hewing and striking down this inconceivable rout. The main focus of the image and what draws the eye is the extraordinarily creative mElange of creatures; mixtures of human, animal, plant, and inanimate objects slashing and stabbing as they fall from the great battlefields in the skies. They pour down in a vast column that stretches infinitely from the luminous sun; they fall from the light to the darkness. The column of falling angels is so numerous that it widens to encompass the whole lower canvas as it approaches the viewer. With a start, then, we realize that Bruegel intends that we too are in the thick of this. Will we succumb to the multitudinous horde? Are we to be cast downward into chthonic chaos represented here by the heaped up gibbering phantasmagory against which we rail and struggle?

Over the course of the past decade, EcoHealth Alliance have received millions of dollars in funding from NIH/NIAID, USAID (a known CIA front), and DTRA (yes, the Pentagon) to subcontract shady gain-of-function research to places like the Wuhan Institute of Virology. This can be confirmed by checking usaspending.gov and taking note of the exact amounts awarded.

Spending by Prime Award – EcoHealth Alliance

EcoHealth Alliance received millions of our tax dollars under UC Davis s PREDICT program, which is a part of USAID s EPT program.

UC Davis – PREDICT

PREDICT, a project of USAID s Emerging Pandemic Threats (EPT) program, was initiated in 2009 to strengthen global capacity for detection of viruses with pandemic potential that can move between animals and people. PREDICT has made significant contributions to strengthening global surveillance and laboratory diagnostic capabilities for both known and newly discovered viruses within several important virus groups, such as filoviruses (including ebolaviruses), influenza viruses, paramyxoviruses, and coronaviruses.

Independent researchers have done extensive digging into Daszak, uncovering incredibly alarming information about his background and character.

Fauci lied under oath and covered up for Daszak when he denied NIH never funded Gain-of-Threat research: Daszak authored a paper stating “This summary contains the information for the 2014 and 2017 NIH and NIAID grants to the Ecohealth Alliance that funded the WIV research on bat conronaviruses. As the grant description shows, this research included gain-of-function / gain-of-threat research to make coronaviruses viruses more pathogenic using techniques including genetic engineering, cell culture, and animal experimentation.”

DRASTIC Research uncovered documents showing that, in 2018, DARPA turned down a proposal by EcoHealth Alliance to receive grant money to conduct what they called the DEFUSE project, which EcoHealth had offered as a response to DARPA s PREEMPT program. The research would have involved exposing bats in caves to recombinant Spike proteins. DARPA, in their rejection letter, stated that this was dangerous gain-of-function research.

Moderna actually had considerable DARPA and BARDA funding for their mRNA technology, as a matter of fact.

mRNA Strategic Collaborators: Government Organizations

In October 2013, DARPA awarded Moderna up to approximately $25 million to research and develop potential mRNA medicines as a part of DARPA s Autonomous Diagnostics to Enable Prevention and Therapeutics, or ADEPT, program, which is focused on assisting with the development of technologies to rapidly identify and respond to threats posed by natural and engineered diseases and toxins. This award followed an initial award from DARPA given in March 2013. The DARPA awards have been deployed primarily in support of our vaccine and antibody programs to protect against Chikungunya infection.

This brings us to the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

On December 12th, 2019, before anyone even knew an outbreak had occurred in Wuhan, Ralph Baric signed a material transfer agreement (seen on Page 105 of this document) to take delivery of mRNA coronavirus vaccine candidates developed and jointly-owned by NIAID and Moderna .

Wait, NIAID and Moderna co-own an mRNA vaccine? Who is the director of NIAID again?

Oh, right.

This was a whole month before China allegedly sent us the sequence to what would become known as SARS-CoV-2. Moderna claimed they made a vaccine from this sequence within 48 hours.

Moderna’s groundbreaking coronavirus vaccine was designed in just 2 days

On January 11, researchers from China published the genetic sequence of the coronavirus. Two days later, Moderna’s team and NIH scientists had finalized the targeted genetic sequence they would use in the vaccine.

Because, clearly, that isn t suspicious, or anything.

Ralph Baric also played a role in validating the use of Remdesivir in COVID-19.

Remdesivir, developed through a UNC-Chapel Hill partnership, proves effective against COVID-19 in NIAID human clinical trials

Remdesivir was developed through an academic-corporate partnership between Gilead Sciences and the Baric Lab at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill s Gillings School of Global Public Health. The biopharmaceutical company sought the talents of a research team led by William R. Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Professor of Epidemiology Ralph Baric, who has studied coronaviruses for more than 30 years and pioneered rapid-response approaches for the study of emerging viruses and the development of therapeutics.

Wuhan is, of course, host to China s only P4/BSL-4 virology lab, the Wuhan Institute of Virology. As a matter of fact, the P4 lab at the WIV was built with the help of Alain MErieux, the founder of bioMErieux, who offered his services to the CCP as a consultant for the endeavor.

The Wuhan lab at the core of a virus controversy

The 300 million yuan ($42 million) lab was completed in 2015, and finally opened in 2018, with the founder of a French bio-industrial firm, Alain Merieux, acting as a consultant in its construction.

Alain MErieux was presented an award for his collaboration with the Chinese Communist Party.

Alain MErieux receives the Prestigious Chinese Reform Friendship Award

Alain MErieux s award is a continuation of the longstanding relationship the MErieux family and its companies have built with China over the past 40 years. China has become a strategic location for all of Institut MErieux s work in the field of diagnostics, immunotherapy, and nutrition. Through its companies bioMErieux, Transgene, and MErieux Nutrisciences, and alongside the MErieux Foundation, Institut MErieux has partnered with Chinese authorities and health stakeholders to address major public health issues in the country.

Why is this such a big deal? Well, StEphane Bancel, the current CEO of Moderna, was formerly the CEO of bioMErieux.

Moderna CEO Worked Under Pharma Billionaire Who is Great Friends with Chinese Dictator Xi Jinping and Pushed for Wuhan Virology Lab

Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel, who is pushing experimental COVID-19 vaccines designed to alter the RNA of recipients, previously worked as CEO of BioMerieux, a firm owned by a billionaire who was instrumental in the development of the infamous virology lab in Wuhan, China.

By the time February, 2020 rolled around, the lab leak theory was gaining serious traction among alternative media sources. Peter Daszak was panicking, at this point. He authored a letter along with numerous scientists stating, unequivocally, that the WIV was not the source of the pandemic.

Statement in support of the scientists, public health professionals, and medical professionals of China combatting COVID-19

The rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data on this outbreak is now being threatened by rumours and misinformation around its origins. We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin. Scientists from multiple countries have published and analysed genomes of the causative agent, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), and they overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife, as have so many other emerging pathogens.

As his uncovered emails would later show, Daszak actually contacted Ralph Baric and instructed him not to sign the letter, fearing the conflict of interest it would entail, but not caring about his own, or that of the couple dozen scientists who did end up signing it.

Dr. Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance Gets Brutal News Over Infamous Wuhan Conspiracy Theory Letter

Peter Daszak was also practically soiling himself at the prospect of all of this being traced back to USAID and UC Davis.

EcoHealth Alliance wanted to block disclosure of Covid-19-relevant virus data from China

As the outbreak spread to the US, Anthony Fauci waffled on masking, allegedly to prevent a run on masks, while the government turned down local offers by companies in the US to manufacture millions of masks.

Meanwhile, in New York, doctors cannot figure out why their patients on ventilators keep dying. Of course, it s because their patients have acute sepsis and the ventilators are making it worse by mimicking the pathophysiology of ischemia-reperfusion injury and accelerating COVID-19 s aggressive lipid peroxidation by feeding a ROS storm with O2, its main ingredient. They are setting off a deadly redox bomb in their patients chests by intubating them, but they don t realize this.

Of course, if a patient is blue in the face and desaturating, something must be done to alleviate it, but without endogenous glutathione peroxidase activity, increasing oxidative stress just makes this situation much, much worse. It actually increases hypoxia by chemically changing the blood and altering red blood cell morphology. ROS will compete with O2 for heme binding sites, crowding it out. Regardless of pneumonia or lung physiology or any of that, RBCs will become chemically incapable of accepting oxygen due to the simple laws of physics. Again, severe COVID-19 is an acute sepsis and endotheliitis first and second, and a pneumonia third, at best.

An anonymous scientist came up with a report that RaTG13 was a forgery, hand-entered into a BLAST database to falsify an ancestor for SARS-CoV-2, throwing suspicion off the WIV.

Sapan Desai and Surgisphere, a fake company, published a fake paper arguing that hydroxychloroquine caused heart rhythm irregularities. Before slamming Ivermectin as Horse Dewormer, the media called HCQ fish tank cleaner , drawing comparisons between it and the chemically similar chloroquine phosphate. Never mind that HCQ and chloroquine phosphate are essentially synthetic quinine, the main ingredient of tonic water and a historical malaria cure. Never mind that HCQ has known antiviral activity.

The people involved in these antiviral studies were so absolutely blinkered, they couldn t tell apart hydroxychloroquine and hydroxyquinoline, and ended up giving patients toxic doses of HCQ. Not to mention, the very sick patients enrolled for these antiviral studies had sepsis, and hardly any virus left in their bodies. They were well past the point of effectiveness of antivirals, having already been symptomatic for over a week, their viral loads having declined to negligible levels, a disordered immune response causing continuous damage to the lining of their blood vessels.

In 2020, Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret published a book called COVID-19: The Great Reset, which was basically a wish list of WEF policies that could be implemented using the virus as a convenient crisis to leapfrog off of.

“COVID-19: The Great Reset” is a guide for anyone who wants to understand how COVID-19 disrupted our social and economic systems, and what changes will be needed to create a more inclusive, resilient and sustainable world going forward. Klaus Schwab, founder and executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, and Thierry Malleret, founder of the Monthly Barometer, explore what the root causes of these crisis were, and why they lead to a need for a Great Reset.Theirs is a worrying, yet hopeful analysis. COVID-19 has created a great disruptive reset of our global social, economic, and political systems. But the power of human beings lies in being foresighted and having the ingenuity, at least to a certain extent, to take their destiny into their hands and to plan for a better future. This is the purpose of this book: to shake up and to show the deficiencies which were manifest in our global system, even before COVID broke out.”Erudite, thought-provoking and plausible” — Hans van Leeuwen, Australian Financial Review (Australia)”The book looks ahead to what the post-coronavirus world could look like barely four months after the outbreak was first declared a pandemic” — Sam Meredith, CNBC (USA) “The message that the pandemic is not only a crisis of enormous proportions, but that it also provides an opportunity for humanity to reflect on how it can do things differently, is important and merits reflection”– Ricardo Avila, Portafolio (Colombia) “A call for political change in the post-pandemic world”– Ivonne Martinez, La Razon (Mexico)”History has shown, the book argues, that pandemics are a force for radical and lasting change”– Mustafa Alrawi, The National (UAE)

As we rolled into 2021, the madness of vaccine mandates and passes began, with people facing ostracization, joblessness, and restriction of free movement as the price of vaccine refusal.

David E. Martin, the CEO of M-CAM, released a document showing that every part of SARS is a patented product.

Anthony Fauci stood up before Congress and perjured himself multiple times, denying that any GOF research took place at the WIV with NIH funding.

The NIH later admitted that GOF research did take place.

NIH admits US funded gain-of-function in Wuhan despite Fauci s denials

According to Tabak, the NIH had reviewed EcoHealth s research plan in advance of approving the grant but claims it wasn t subjected to additional review at the time as it didn t fit the definition of research involving enhanced pathogens of pandemic potential because these bat coronaviruses had not been shown to infect human.

Tabak said if EcoHealth had alerted NIH to the growth, it would have prompted a review to determine if the research plan should be re-evaluated.

Recently, an anonymous scientist came forward with a claim that SARS-CoV-2 s furin cleavage site contains a 19-nt sequence as its reverse complement, CTCCTCGGCGGGCACGTAG, which aligns with the sequence of a Moderna patented cell line.

Arkmedic’s blog
How to BLAST your way to the truth about the origins of COVID-19
I ve been meaning to write this blog for ever. Well, at least since Prashant Pradhan (a wonderful, honest and brave genomics scientist) raised the possibility back in February 2020 that the SARS-Cov2 virus was man made. And we have seen multiple confirmatory pieces that the virus was made in a lab, one of the better ones here on&

Read more

There is now a paper published in Frontiers in Virology on this matter.

Frontiers in Virology – MSH3 Homology and Potential Recombination Link to SARS-CoV-2 Furin Cleavage Site

Among numerous point mutation differences between the SARS-CoV-2 and the bat RaTG13 coronavirus, only the 12-nucleotide furin cleavage site (FCS) exceeds 3 nucleotides. A BLAST search revealed that a 19 nucleotide portion of the SARS.Cov2 genome encompassing the furing cleavage site is a 100% complementary match to a codon-optimized proprietary sequence that is the reverse complement of the human mutS homolog (MSH3). The reverse complement sequence present in SARS-CoV-2 may occur randomly but other possibilities must be considered. Recombination in an intermediate host is an unlikely explanation. Single stranded RNA viruses such as SARS-CoV-2 utilize negative strand RNA templates in infected cells, which might lead through copy choice recombination with a negative sense SARS-CoV-2 RNA to the integration of the MSH3 negative strand, including the FCS, into the viral genome. In any case, the presence of the 19-nucleotide long RNA sequence including the FCS with 100% identity to the reverse complement of the MSH3 mRNA is highly unusual and requires further investigations.

Andrew Huff, the former Vice President of EcoHealth Alliance, has come forward with a whistleblower complaint stating that Peter Daszak was a CIA asset.

EcoHealth Alliance: Whistleblower Exposes Corruption

In late October 2021, Huff says he came forward as a material witness and whistleblower related to numerous unethical and criminal behaviors that took place at EcoHealth Alliance. EcoHealth Alliance engaged in fraud against the U.S. government (Timecard Fraud and contract reimbursement fraud). Huff brought them to the attention of Peter Daszak, Dr. Aleksei Chamura, and CFO Harvey n. After raising these issues at the meeting, Harvey Kasdan went home from work, had a heart attack, and died.

Twitter avatar for @AGHuffDr. Andrew Huff @AGHuff

Here is a copy of the Whistle Blower complaint that I submitted to Senator Gary Peter’s Office. I would like to testify on this critical matter as soon as reasonably possible.

@SenEdMcBroom @SenGaryPeters @RepJackBergman @LeeSmithDC @SenStabenow @joerogan

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As of late, Moderna s stock price appears to be in rapid decline. StEphane Bancel deleted his Twitter account. Pfizer appear to be griping that they have to publish their data and thus be exposed to further scrutiny.

I, myself, cannot come up with a rational response to any of this without resorting to vigorous, sailor-like profanity that would sear your eyeballs. So, instead, I ll leave it up to the reader to decide what is actually going on here.

What do DARPA want with our brains?

All of this has a much darker undercurrent to it (if that could even be considered possible) when one draws the Lieber connection.

In 2020, a Harvard scientist by the name of Charles Lieber was indicted by the DOJ on charges of making false statements. He had taken money from China s Thousand Talents Plan, against the terms of his DOD grants. Charles Lieber received grants from DARPA, ONR, AFOSR, NIH, and MITRE, but he also double-dipped and took money from the CCP, hence the charges against him.

Harvard University Professor Indicted on False Statement Charges

It is alleged that, unbeknownst to Harvard University, beginning in 2011, Lieber became a Strategic Scientist at Wuhan University of Technology (WUT) in China.  He later became contractual participant in China s Thousand Talents Plan from at least 2012 through 2015.  China s Thousand Talents Plan is one of the most prominent Chinese talent recruitment plans designed to attract, recruit, and cultivate high-level scientific talent in furtherance of China s scientific development, economic prosperity and national security.  According to court documents, these talent recruitment plans seek to lure Chinese overseas talent and foreign experts to bring their knowledge and experience to China, and they often reward individuals for stealing proprietary information.  Under the terms of Lieber s three-year Thousand Talents contract, WUT allegedly paid Lieber a salary of up to $50,000 USD per month, living expenses of up to 1 million Chinese Yuan (approximately $158,000 USD at the time) and awarded him more than $1.5 million to establish a research lab at WUT.  In return, Lieber was obligated to work for WUT not less than nine months a year by declaring international cooperation projects, cultivating young teachers and Ph.D. students, organizing international conference[s], applying for patents and publishing articles in the name of [WUT].  

Charles Lieber worked under a cover story. He claimed to be working on silicon nanowire batteries for the Chinese, but no one can recall him ever working on batteries of any kind.

Why did a Chinese university hire Charles Lieber to do battery research?

In fact, one U.S. nanoscientist and former student of Lieber’s says: “I have never seen Charlie working on batteries or nanowire batteries.” (The scientist asked that their name not be used because of the sensitivity surrounding Lieber’s case.)

Charles Lieber s research actually involves something called bionanotechnology, which is the Frankensteinian blending of living tissue with artificial components (i.e. semiconductors, quantum dots, nanoparticles, synthetic polymers, et cetera), on the molecular level.

Charles Lieber s own papers explicitly describe the potential for his silicon nanowires to be used as biosensors, or even as brain-computer interfaces, (also known as brain-machine interfaces, or, in cyberpunk science fiction parlance, neural laces ):

Nanowire probes could drive high-resolution brain-machine interfaces

Brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) can serve as bidirectional connections that output electrical signals of brain activity or input electrical stimuli to modulate brain activity in concert with external machines, including computer processors and prosthetics, for human enhancement[1,2]. Reading electrical activity from neurons is the foundation of many BMI applications, such as brain mapping, that aims to understand brain functions by decoding the communication between neurons. Reading and processing this activity is also key to neural prosthetics in which brain activity is used to control devices such as artificial limbs. For these BMI applications, most of the in vivo recording tools used today read extracellular neural activity by detecting suprathreshold action potential signals that leak outside of neurons (Fig. 1a (i)), while critical subthreshold events, such as synaptic potentials and dendritic integration, remain hidden [3]. To achieve the most information-rich readings, which could provide more detailed mapping of brain function and the finest control of neural prosthetics, electronic devices need to provide access to intracellular signals from multiple neurons comprising the neuronal circuits and networks of the brain [4].

How is this relevant to COVID-19?

Charles Lieber is a colleague of Robert Langer, one of the co-founders of Moderna. The two of them are pictured here, left and right, with Daniel Kohane in the center.

These three worked on a paper together to create cybernetic heart tissue scaffolds with biosensor functionality.

Cyborg Tissue Monitors Cells

The cyborg-like tissue, described online at Nature Materials, supports cell growth while simultaneously monitoring the activities of those cells. It could improve in vitro drug screening by allowing researchers to track how cells in a three-dimensional environment respond to drugs in real time, the authors say. It may also be a first step toward prosthetics that communicate directly with the nervous system, and tissue implants that sense and respond to injury or disease.

Elon Musk s Neuralink presentation made waves when people started to consider the human applications, but even Neuralink is as barbaric as trephination next to the military s craniotomy-free, wireless nanoparticle BCI research.

Enter DARPA s BRAIN Initiative, and the N3 (Next-Generation Nonsurgical Neurotechnology) program.

Next-Generation Nonsurgical Neurotechnology

Whereas the most effective, state-of-the-art neural interfaces require surgery to implant electrodes into the brain, N3 technology would not require surgery and would be man-portable, thus making the technology accessible to a far wider population of potential users. Noninvasive neurotechnologies such as the electroencephalogram and transcranial direct current stimulation already exist, but do not offer the precision, signal resolution, and portability required for advanced applications by people working in real-world settings. The envisioned N3 technology breaks through the limitations of existing technology by delivering an integrated device that does not require surgical implantation, but has the precision to read from and write to 16 independent channels within a 16mm3 volume of neural tissue within 50ms. Each channel is capable of specifically interacting with sub-millimeter regions of the brain with a spatial and temporal specificity that rivals existing invasive approaches. Individual devices can be combined to provide the ability to interface to multiple points in the brain at once.

The grant proposal for N3 is very informative on the nature of the technology desired by DARPA:

Broad Agency Announcement Next-Generation Non-Surgical Neurotechnology (N3) BIOLOGICAL TECHNOLOGIES OFFICE HR001118S0029

TA2 involves the development of a system that includes a nanotransducer placed on or near neurons of interest and an integrated sensor/stimulator device that sits outside the skin. The nanotransducer may include technologies such as, but not limited to, self-assembled/molecular/biomolecular/chemical nanoparticles, or viral vectors. These nanotransducers must be delivered in a minutely invasive (nonsurgical) manner, which may include ingestion, injection, or nasal administration, and involve technology that includes self-assembly inside the body. While the major TA2 goals of developing neural read out and write in capabilities are similar to the goals from TA1, creating a nanotransducer with an optimal delivery route to the brain is a major additional component. Another major component of TA2 is achieving cell-type specificity.

There are six teams involved in the N3 program; Battelle, Carnegie Mellon University, Johns Hopkins University s Applied Physics Laboratory, PARC, Rice University, and Teledyne.

How close are they to achieving their goal?

Magnetism Plays Key Roles in DARPA Research to Develop Brain-Machine Interface without Surgery

DARPA is preparing for a future in which a combination of unmanned systems, artificial intelligence, and cyber operations may cause conflicts to play out on timelines that are too short for humans to effectively manage with current technology alone, said Al Emondi, the N3 program manager. By creating a more accessible brain-machine interface that doesn t require surgery to use, DARPA could deliver tools that allow mission commanders to remain meaningfully involved in dynamic operations that unfold at rapid speed.  

Nature – Wireless and battery-free technologies for neuroengineering

Tethered and battery-powered devices that interface with neural tissues can restrict natural motions and prevent social interactions in animal models, thereby limiting the utility of these devices in behavioural neuroscience research. In this Review Article, we discuss recent progress in the development of miniaturized and ultralightweight devices as neuroengineering platforms that are wireless, battery-free and fully implantable, with capabilities that match or exceed those of wired or battery-powered alternatives. Such classes of advanced neural interfaces with optical, electrical or fluidic functionality can also combine recording and stimulation modalities for closed-loop applications in basic studies or in the practical treatment of abnormal physiological processes.

Very close.

Incidentally, the head of Battelle s N3 team, Gaurav Sharma, was also involved in DTRA s Blood-Brain Barrier Program. Yes, the very same Defense Threat Reduction Agency that funded EcoHealth Alliance.

What did that program seek to accomplish?

Early Successes of DTRA s Blood-Brain Barrier Program Suggest New Countermeasures

The program aims to understand the effects of nerve agents and alphaviruses on the blood-brain barrier and find new transport pathways to deliver appropriate therapeutics into the CNS. The early successes of JSTO s program allows researchers to better assess the risks of emerging threats while enhancing their ability to protect and treat warfighters from a broad range of chemical and biological threats.

That s interesting. What does SARS-CoV-2 Spike, the supposed constituent of the vaccine, do to people s blood-brain barrier?

Elsevier – The SARS-CoV-2 spike protein alters barrier function in 2D static and 3D microfluidic in-vitro models of the human blood brain barrier

Key to our findings is the demonstration that S1 promotes loss of barrier integrity in an advanced 3D microfluidic model of the human BBB, a platform that more closely resembles the physiological conditions at this CNS interface. Evidence provided suggests that the SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins trigger a pro-inflammatory response on brain endothelial cells that may contribute to an altered state of BBB function.

Huh. The SARS-CoV-2 Spike S1 subunit is capable of permeabilizing the blood-brain barrier, opening it up for substances that might want to cross from the bloodstream to the brain.

So, how does all this wireless neural lace business work? It s actually both very complex and surprisingly simple. Nanoparticles that are sensitive to RF, electromagnetism, ultrasound, and/or light are introduced into brain cells, and then, an external encoder/decoder stimulates them wirelessly and reads back the response. It is very much like turning the human brain into a Wacom pen. You know how a Wacom tablet works, right? The tablet generates a field that the pen converts into an electric current by wireless induction. That s why the pens don t need batteries, and it s why nanotransducers implanted in the brain don t need them, either.

Shortly after the Spartacus Letter was posted on ZeroHedge, this absolutely ridiculous CNBC video was published on YouTube:

How small are nanotransducers, actually?

Well, here s one of Battelle s Magnetoelectric Nanotransducers, as seen under an electron microscope:

It s about 20 nanometers across, much smaller than the 120 nanometer diameter of a SARS-CoV-2 virion, and comparable to transistor gate sizes.

To put this in perspective, the inside diameter of a vaccine needle of average gauge is about 0.26 millimeters. That s 260,000 nanometers.

13,000 Magnetoelectric Nanotransducers could fit through a vaccine needle side-by-side.

You see, BCIs capable of two-way communication with a human brain don t just give you superpowers, or let you control drones with your mind, or listen to Katy Perry without headphones or speakers or whatever. They can also be used to manipulate mood, and for social control.

They could also be used to take away people s agency and turn them into, essentially, biological robots, utterly obedient to government and open to any manner of sadistic abuse.

This is not an exaggeration. It is a fact.

The ethics of brain computer interfaces

Reports have surfaced about a minority of people who undergo DBS for Parkinson s disease becoming hypersexual, or developing other impulse-control issues. One person with chronic pain became deeply apathetic after DBS treatment. DBS is very effective, Gilbert says, to the point that it can distort patients perceptions of themselves. Some people who received DBS for depression or obsessive compulsive disorder reported that their sense of agency had become confused2. You just wonder how much is you anymore, said one. How much of it is my thought pattern? How would I deal with this if I didn t have the stimulation system? You kind of feel artificial.

Neuroethicists began to note the complex nature of the therapy s side effects. Some effects that might be described as personality changes are more problematic than others, says Maslen. A crucial question is whether the person who is undergoing stimulation can reflect on how they have changed. Gilbert, for instance, describes a DBS patient who started to gamble compulsively, blowing his family s savings and seeming not to care. He could only understand how problematic his behaviour was when the stimulation was turned off.

Profound behavioral changes have already been observed in patients with DBS electrodes implanted in their heads. How far could they go if they had access to fine-grained stimulation of individual clusters of neurons?

A bioethicist by the name of Dr. James Giordano (who is well-acquainted with DARPA s research) is very concerned about all of this. That s why he gives horrifying lectures in front of West Point cadets like this one:

Are they already wargaming the military applications of weaponized neuroS/T, investigating the possibility of using nanoparticles to attack rival powers by making their own citizens go berserk? Yes, of course they are.

COGNITIVE WARFARE – June-November 2020 FranAois du Cluzel

The use of neuroS/T for military and intelligence purposes is realistic, and represents a clear and present concern. In 2014, a US report asserted that neuroscience and technology had matured considerably and were being increasingly considered, and in some cases evaluated for operational use in security, intelligence, and defense operations. More broadly, the iterative recognition of the viability of neuroscience and technology in these agenda reflects the pace and breadth of developments in the field. Although a number of nations have pursued, and are currently pursuing neuroscientific research and development for military purposes, perhaps the most proactive efforts in this regard have been conducted by the United States Department of Defense; with most notable and rapidly maturing research and development conducted by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and IntelligenceAdvanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA). To be sure, many DARPA projects are explicitly directed toward advancing neuropsychiatric treatments and interventions that will improve both military and civilian medicine. Yet, it is important to note the prominent ongoing and expanding efforts in this domain by NATO European and trans-Pacific strategic competitor nations.

&

A cognitive attack is not a threat that can be countered in the air, on land, at sea, in cyberspace, or in space. Rather, it may well be happening in any or all of these domains, for one simple reason: humans are the contested domain.

Naturally, this sort of escalation of neuroscience to the level of a new arms race will create all kinds of insane justifications in the minds of policymakers and intelligence officials. Populist unrest can be recast as inauthentic, the result of undetectable enemy action. Dissidents can be rounded up and injected with mind-control nanoparticles to make them friendly to the state again, and to cure whatever the Russian or Chinese nanoparticles did to them to make them get so upset and wave signs in the street in the first place.

I ask you, the reader, is this a world you want to live in? One where governments see your own body, your own mind, as not off-limits for direct tampering to achieve military and political objectives? A world where maniacs describe your own body, your own flesh and blood, not as something sacrosanct, but as little more than the contested domain of a new type of warfare that you never even knew existed?

No. We say no.

If governments are crossing this line, then they have become the enemies of all mankind.

-Spartacus

 

 

 

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Feb 162022
 
 February 16, 2022  Posted by at 9:22 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  163 Responses »


Leonardo da Vinci Ginevra de’ Benci 1474-78

 

The Global Covid Vaccination Campaign Is Courting Catastrophe (Kohlmayer)
New Research Points To Possible Reason For Long Covid (JPost)
Ukraine Crisis: A Nightmare Caused by US Interventionism (Ron Paul)
US Has New Ukraine Coup Plot Theory (RT)
‘West Has Been Destroyed Without A Shot Fired’ – Russia (RT)
US Accuses Zero Hedge Of Spreading Russian Propaganda (AP)
Protesters to End Border Blockades as Trudeau’s Threats Hit Home (BBG)
Democrats, the More Effective Evil (Chris Hedges)
Novak Djokovic’s Propensity For Self-sabotage Has Become A Defining Trait (G.)
Special Counsel John Durham Has Triggered a Media Meltdown (Turley)
’60 Minutes,’ CNN, MSNBC, Downplayed, Criticized Durham Probe (Fox)

 

 

 

 

I was ‘barred’ from publishing anything on Fauci: Former Forbes contributor

 

 

Dowd: Summation of Major Insurance company corporate group policy Loss Ratios (Death Claims) Q4 rate vs 2019 rate:

Unum $UNM +36%
Lincoln $LNC +57%
Pru $PRU +41%
$RGA +21%
Hartford $HIG +32%
MetLife $MET +24%

 

 

 

 

“..Under the normal schedule, the Covid vaccines Phase III trials would be completed in April of 2024. If this phase went without a hitch, April of 2024 would be the earliest that anyone could justifiably start saying that the Covid vaccines are “safe and effective.”

The Global Covid Vaccination Campaign Is Courting Catastrophe (Kohlmayer)

After receiving full approval, vaccines continue to be carefully monitored for adverse events in case some vaccinal flaw may have escaped detection during the multi-year trial phase. There have been a number of vaccines that were pulled from the market after they received full approval due to unexpected safety issues. Some of these include vaccines for Rotavirus, Lyme Disease, and Whole-Cell Pertussis among others. Therefore, for a vaccine to be justifiably declared “completely safe,” it must undergo at least five years of intensive testing in clinical trials and then several years of monitoring as it is administered in populations at large. The Covid vaccines, however, were publicly declared to be “completely safe” less than 8 months after the start of human clinical trials.

On the normal vaccine trial timeline, month 8 is in Phase 2 of the three-stage clinical trial regime. The claim that the Covid vaccines were “completely safe,” was, therefore, completely unjustifiable and unsubstantiated. Those who made this claim engaged in a deliberate and unconscionable act of public deception. And yet this claim was used as the basis for a worldwide campaign in which more than half of Earth’s inhabitants have been injected with experimental pharmaceuticals that did not undergo proper testing. The phrase “safe and effective” became the de-facto slogan of the planet-wide vaccination enterprise. Believing that the vaccines were “completely safe,” billions of people willingly – and even enthusiastically – lined up to receive their Covid injections.

Needless to say, not everyone was ready to accept the propaganda. Disregarding all reasonable objections, however, many governments decided that universal vaccination was their goal and decided that the unwilling needed to be coerced. This they sought to do through direct vaccines mandates and covid passports or digital certificates. The latter two were designed in such a way as to compel the hesitant to submit to the shots on pain of being excluded from the normal course of societal life. Government and public health officials justified this drastic approach by repeatedly stating that the vaccines were “completely safe” and effective, and because of this it was okay to force the shots even on those who did not want to take them.

The claim “safe and effective” was thus used as a means of allurement and coercion for the planet-wide Covid vaccination crusade. We need to pause here and contemplate the enormity of what the vaccinators have “accomplished.” Less than 22 months after the beginning of the clinical trials, they have managed to inject the plurality of mankind with their inadequately tested products. If things were being done properly, right now the vaccine developers would have been gearing for Phase III of clinical trials. This stage normally takes place between months 24 and 48 after the initiation of the trial process. This is how Johns Hopkins University describes what this stage is about: “Phase III clinical trials are critical to understanding whether vaccines are safe and effective.”

[..] Under the normal schedule, the Covid vaccines Phase III trials would be completed in April of 2024. If this phase went without a hitch, April of 2024 would be the earliest that anyone could justifiably start saying that the Covid vaccines are “safe and effective.”

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“It runs from the brain throughout the entirety of the face and chest, reaching the abdomen.”

New Research Points To Possible Reason For Long Covid (JPost)

Many symptoms of post-COVID syndrome could be caused by lasting damage sustained to one of the most important nerves in the human body during initial infection with coronavirus, new research has suggested. What is the vagus nerve? The vagus nerve is the 10th cranial nerve and is the longest and most complex of all of them. It runs from the brain throughout the entirety of the face and chest, reaching the abdomen. The vagus nerve serves as the main connection between the brain and the gastrointestinal tract, sending back information about the state of the inner organs.

As well as being crucial to the gastrointestinal system, as it controls the transfer of food from the mouth to the stomach and moves food through the intestines, the vagus nerve is also responsible for multiple other processes, such as controlling the heart rate, sweat production and the gag reflex, as well as certain muscle movements in the mouth, including those necessary for speech. New research set to be presented at this year’s European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ECCMID) investigates the connection between post-COVID syndrome, also known as long COVID, and the vagus nerve. The pilot study was authored by Dr. Gemma Lladós and Dr. Lourdes Mateu of the Germans Trias i Pujol University Hospital in Badalona, Spain. Its findings will be presented at the congress in Lisbon from April 23-26.

The study suggests that SARS-CoV-2-mediated vagus nerve dysfunction (VND) could be responsible for many of the symptoms of long COVID, including persistent voice problems, difficulty swallowing, dizziness, abnormally high heart rate (tachycardia), low blood pressure and digestive issues.

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“..Or it’s coming next Tuesday, or Wednesday, or surely before the end of the Olympics.”

Ukraine Crisis: A Nightmare Caused by US Interventionism (Ron Paul)

Over the weekend we heard that the US is evacuating its embassy in Kiev for fear of a Russian invasion. We also heard that Russia is evacuating its embassy in Kiev for fear of a US-backed provocation in eastern Ukraine that may lead to a Russian military response. We are in “uncharted territory” the media tells us. Yes, that is true. But it is uncharted because no one had ever imagined in the past that the US government would be so foolish to risk a thermonuclear war over the borders of a country – Ukraine – that have changed so many times over the past century. An urgent Biden-Putin phone call on Saturday did not lead to any breakthrough – as if anyone thought it would. Instead, it provided cover for Biden Administration hawks to claim they tried every diplomatic approach, but war seems to be the only option.

But this whole thing is a farce. As I see it, here is the Ukraine crisis in a nutshell: Biden to Putin: “Don’t invade Ukraine.” Putin to Biden: “We have no intention of invading Ukraine.” Biden to the US media: “Putin is about to invade Ukraine!” Then Biden’s top officials proceed to embarrass themselves by warning that the invasion was imminent. Or it’s coming next Tuesday, or Wednesday, or surely before the end of the Olympics. Does anyone think they have any credibility left with their constant hysterical warnings? Meanwhile “US intelligence” continues to leak incendiary information – likely self-serving – to a US media that has lost any interest in skepticism toward any “scoop” handed down by US government officials.

What the US media will not report is that this entire crisis – and the threat of a serious war – has all been brought about by US interference in the internal affairs of Ukraine, specifically the US-backed coup that overthrew an elected government in 2014. Every bit of unrest in Ukraine proceeded from that single foolish and immoral act by the Obama Administration.

Read more …

“..the former presidential candidate called the suggestion “funny,” noting that his current job description is “director of a sanatorium.”

US Has New Ukraine Coup Plot Theory (RT)

American intelligence believes that former MP Oleg Tsaryov could be made leader of a Ukrainian puppet regime after a successful Russian invasion causes the Kiev government to fall, Britain’s Financial Times reported on Tuesday. Citing an anonymous source in a Western intelligence agency, the outlet suggested that Tsaryov, who served in Ukraine’s parliament until 2014, would be made head of the country. Moscow “might position Oleg Tsaryov, and others, in leadership roles as part of this effort,” the source said, as quoted by FT. According to the newspaper, his name appeared in US intelligence materials that were shared with Australia, Britain, Canada, and New Zealand, all members of Five Eyes intelligence alliance.


Tsaryov, who served in Parliament for twelve years, is best known for standing as a pro-Russia candidate in the 2014 presidential election until he withdrew after attacks from Ukrainian nationalists. He then defected to Donetsk, where he became the first speaker of the parliament of Novorossiya, a breakaway state in east Ukraine that lasted less than a year. He later moved to Crimea, where he now resides and runs a medical retreat. Speaking to the FT, the former presidential candidate called the suggestion “funny,” noting that his current job description is “director of a sanatorium.”

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“15 February 2022 will go down in history as the day Western war propaganda failed..”

‘West Has Been Destroyed Without A Shot Fired’ – Russia (RT)

With Russia announcing that its troops are pulling back following the completion of exercises near the border with Ukraine, Moscow has insisted that predictions it could be just moments away from ordering a full-blown invasion have been proven false. In a fiery statement on Tuesday, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova poured scorn on weeks of reports and claims from US and European officials that Moscow’s armed forces could be just hours away from launching a strike against its neighbor. “15 February 2022 will go down in history as the day Western war propaganda failed,” she wrote. According to her, the West has been “shamed and destroyed without firing a single shot.”


At the same time, Moscow’s Ministry of Defense announced that a number of Russian troops had finished their training exercises in Belarus, close to the Ukrainian border, and will begin the process of withdrawing. Zakharova’s comments come after American business outlet Bloomberg reported on Saturday, citing unnamed officials, that an offensive against Ukraine could take place as early as Tuesday. The agency reported that a possible attack might include a provocation in the Donbass region or against Kiev. The White House’s national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, told CNN over the weekend that “sources” and “gathered intelligence” suggested “major military action” could “begin any day now.” He said that this included the coming week before the end of the Olympic games.

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Ha ha ha ha ha!

US Accuses Zero Hedge Of Spreading Russian Propaganda (AP)

U.S. intelligence officials on Tuesday accused a conservative financial news website with a significant American readership of amplifying Kremlin propaganda and alleged five media outlets targeting Ukrainians have taken direction from Russian spies. The officials said Zero Hedge, which has 1.2 million Twitter followers, published articles created by Moscow-controlled media that were then shared by outlets and people unaware of their nexus to Russian intelligence. The officials did not say whether they thought Zero Hedge knew of any links to spy agencies and did not allege direct links between the website and Russia. Zero Hedge denied the claims and said it tries to “publish a wide spectrum of views that cover both sides of a given story.”

In a response posted online Tuesday morning, the website said it has “has never worked, collaborated or cooperated with Russia, nor are there any links to spy agencies.” The officials briefed The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence sources. It was the latest effort by President Joe Biden’s administration to release U.S. intelligence findings about Russian activity involving Ukraine as part of a concerted push to expose and influence the moves of Russian President Vladimir Putin. U.S. officials previously accused Putin of planning a “false-flag” operation to create a pretext for a new invasion of Ukraine and detailed what they believe are final-stage Russian preparations for an assault. It’s unclear whether U.S. efforts are changing Putin’s behavior.

And without releasing more proof of its findings, Washington has been criticized and reminded of past intelligence failures such as the debunked allegations that pre-war Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Zero Hedge has been sharply critical of Biden and posted stories about allegations of wrongdoing by his son Hunter. While perhaps best known for its coverage of markets and finance, the website also covers politics with a conservative bent. In its response online, the website accused the AP of publishing a “bizarre hit piece” and said government officials were trying to distract from “our views of the current dismal US economic situation.” “The bottom line is that such hit piece accusations that we somehow work with or for the Kremlin are nothing new: we have repeatedly faced similar allegations over the years, and we can absolutely confirm that all of them are ‘errors,’” the website said.

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According to Bloomberg, the truckers are utterly defeated.

“A lot of grown men were crying,” Klassen said. “We didn’t think he was going to enact that. We could lose everything.”

Protesters to End Border Blockades as Trudeau’s Threats Hit Home (BBG)

Protesters against vaccine mandates at two border crossings in Western Canada plan to leave after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government invoked emergency powers that could freeze their bank accounts and suspend their insurance. A border crossing between Coutts, Alberta and Sweet Grass, Montana that had been closed Monday has partially reopened to traffic, Royal Canadian Mounted Police Cpl. Gina Slaney said Tuesday by phone. Demonstrators have been at the border post since late January in a protest against vaccine mandates and Covid-19 restrictions. “People are going home,” Slaney said, noting traffic is moving slowly as there are still vehicles on the road. “Vehicles can get through north and southbound lanes right now and it seems that vehicles are crossing the border.”

Demonstrators at a border crossing between Manitoba and North Dakota are also preparing to leave in unison Wednesday with a police escort, said Jake Klassen, a truck driver who joined the protest out of frustration he can not visit his daughter receiving palliative care unless he is fully vaccinated. People are worried the government will seize their property and protesters plan to leave in a “slow roll” tomorrow and reopen traffic, Klassen said by phone. “A lot of grown men were crying,” Klassen said. “We didn’t think he was going to enact that. We could lose everything.” The Manitoba border to the U.S. at Emerson was still closed as of 12:14 p.m. New York time, according to the website of Canada’s border agency. “We accomplished something, I believe, but we didn’t accomplish what we went there to accomplish,” Klassen said.

Ezra Levant

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“The war industry [..] is a bipartisan project. ”

Democrats, the More Effective Evil (Chris Hedges)

The desperate measures to stave off an economic crisis are self-defeating. The bag of tricks is empty. Massive defaults on mortgages, student loans, credit cards, household debt, car debt and other loans in the United States is probably inevitable. With no short-term mechanisms left to paper over the disaster, it will usher in a prolonged depression. An economic crisis means a political crisis. And a political crisis is traditionally solved by war against enemies inside and outside the nation. The Democrats are as guilty of this as the Republicans. Wars can get started by Democrats, such as Harry S. Truman in Korea or John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson in Vietnam, and perpetuated by Republicans. Or they can get started by Republicans, such as George W. Bush, and perpetuated by Democrats such as Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

Bill Clinton, without declaring war, imposed punishing sanctions on Iraq and authorized the Navy and the Air Force to carry out tens of thousands of sorties against the country, dropping thousands of bombs and launching hundreds of missiles. The war industry, with its $768 billion military budget, along with the expansion of Homeland Security, the FBI, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the National Security Agency, is a bipartisan project. The handful of national political leaders, such as Henry Wallace in 1948 and George McGovern in 1972, who dared to challenge the war machine were ruthlessly hounded into political oblivion by the leaders of both parties. Biden’s bellicose rhetoric towards China and especially Russia, more strident than that of the Trump administration, has been accompanied by the formation of new security alliances such as those with India, Japan, Australia, and Great Britain in the Indo-Pacific.

U.S. aggression has, ironically, pushed China and Russia into a forced marriage, something the architects of the Cold War, including Nixon and Kissinger with their opening to China in 1971, worked very hard to avoid. Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping, after meeting recently in Beijing, issued a 5,300-word statement that condemned NATO expansion in eastern Europe, denounced the formation of security blocs in the Asia Pacific region, and criticized the AUKUS trilateral security pact between the US, Great Britain and Australia. They also vowed to thwart “color revolutions” and strengthen “back-to-back” strategic coordination.

Read more …

People with principles are dangerous today. But he sabotages himself by NOT getting vaxxed?!

Novak Djokovic’s Propensity For Self-sabotage Has Become A Defining Trait (G.)

Over the past 11 years of men’s tennis, during which Novak Djokovic rose to dominance and improbably positioned himself as one of the greatest to play the game, the only time his success has been in doubt came after the summer of 2017 when he suffered through many months with an elbow injury. The injury became a point of contention between himself and his then-coach, Andre Agassi, who later said he had swiftly advocated for surgery. But Djokovic addressed the injury by resting for nearly six months, believing his body was built to heal itself naturally. It was not. After returning the next year to pain and early losses, Djokovic finally underwent surgery in February 2018. As he digested his guilt about agreeing to the surgery, he cried for days.

On Tuesday, Djokovic gave his first full interview since his deportation from Australia after arriving in the country without being vaccinated against Covid. Djokovic acknowledged that, as things stand in a worldwide sport that moves from country to country each week, his unvaccinated status means he is unable to play in the majority of tournaments. “That is the price I am willing to pay,” he said. In the same breath, Djokovic said with a smile that at such a critical moment in tennis history he understands his actions may deprive him of the possibility of winning the highest number of grand slam tournaments. He framed his decision in libertarian terms: “The principles of decision making on my body are more important than any title or anything else.”

Djokovic’s conversation with the BBC was a reminder that his propensity for self-sabotage has become a defining trait. The principles that made him so averse to surgery in 2017 were not in tune with reality. After his surgery, he won the final two majors of that 2018 season and he has won eight since. The most controversial on-court moment of his career so far, his disqualification from the 2020 US Open after unintentionally hitting a line judge with a ball, came after near misses from which he failed to learn. Here he is again, his own worst enemy. As Djokovic attempts to navigate the world while unvaccinated – and while his biggest rival, Rafael Nadal, just took advantage of his absence to win a historic 21st grand slam title at the Australian Open – according to the ATP 99% of the top 100 is now vaccinated. He stands alone.

Read more …

“..to this day, many refuse to cover extensive evidence of how the Clinton campaign manufactured this story that largely occupied the entire term of President Donald Trump.”

Special Counsel John Durham Has Triggered a Media Meltdown (Turley)

What is striking about the Durham filings is the audacity of the Perkins Coie operation. While the funding was buried away, the lawyers were seemingly unconcerned about approving such efforts or personally reaching out to sympathetic government and media figures. They were, to some degree, justified in their sense of immunity. Indeed, to this day, many refuse to cover extensive evidence of how the Clinton campaign manufactured this story that largely occupied the entire term of President Donald Trump. Before the Steele dossier was given to the FBI and the press, then-CIA Director John Brennan briefed former President Obama on Clinton’s alleged “plan” to tie candidate Trump to Russia as “a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.” That operation appears to have been launched through Elias and Perkins Coie.

After the 2020 election, Democratic members and legal experts demanded the disbarring of a host of Republican attorneys for their spreading disinformation of a widespread election fraud. These same figures, however, are entirely silent about the role of Clinton lawyers in secretly funding the debunked Russian collusion claims. There is no interest in whether, as alleged by reporters, figures like Elias lied about the involvement of the Clinton campaign. Sussmann is now facing a trial on this role in the operation. Elias remains unindicted. With little sense of irony, he has established a law firm to deal with ethics and campaign disclosures. Durham’s continued investigation may be pushing the media to the final stage called “postsyncope,” which involves “protracted confusion, disorientation, nausea, dizziness, and a general sense of poor health.”

That has reflected in the flailing effort by some to deflect from the alarming disclosures. New York Times reporter Mike McIntire seemed to express alarm that the Durham story was “trending.” However, McIntire offered “a periodic reminder that Trump’s campaign chairman secretly met and shared info with a Russian intelligence agent.” The “info” was polling data on the campaign that Paul Manafort gave a person with Russian intelligence ties. That, of course, has no relevance to the question of whether the Clinton Campaign spied on the Trump Tower, campaign, or the White House itself. The “periodic reminder” seemed to be to other media that they needed to continue to hold their breath and not recognize a major story. Such “protracted confusion” is natural, but it will not dissipate any time soon. Durham apparently is calling more people into the grand jury.

Durham Zero

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“This is ’60 Minutes.’ We can’t put on things we can’t verify.”

’60 Minutes,’ CNN, MSNBC, Downplayed, Criticized Durham Probe (Fox)

The mainstream media is getting a wake-up call after new allegations in the Durham investigation that President Trump and his campaign were being spied on. Special Counsel John Durham released in a filing Saturday that the Hillary Clinton campaign hired techs to “infiltrate” Trump Tower and White House servers to establish a “narrative” to link Trump to Russia. The new findings contradict various doubtful media coverage from programs like CBS’ “60 Minutes.” In an October 2020 interview, Trump appeared on the newsmagazine to address the ongoing investigation and his claim his campaign was spied on. He was shot down by host Lesley Stahl, who insisted the president was spreading unverified information. “There’s no real evidence,” she said.

“This is ’60 Minutes.’ We can’t put on things we can’t verify.” Meanwhile, former CNN dynamic duo Don Lemon and Chris Cuomo criticized John Durham and the Trump administration back in December 2019 for being adamant about uncovering the truth, yet coming up short. “Nothing happens and they just move on to the next conspiracy theory,” Lemon said to Cuomo during a handover. “It is never going to end and guess what? People who want to believe that BS are going to believe it.” In an October 2021 episode of MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show,” host Rachel Maddow suggested the intention behind efforts to probe the investigation was always to re-route the investigation away from Trump himself. “It’s a boomerang,” she said.

“Because it’s apparently an ongoing, concerted Republican and pro-Trump project to try to turn the investigation of the Russia scandal into some kind of scandal itself.” Since Durham’s bombshell report dropped, media pundits on the left have gone largely quiet. Publications like the Washington Post and The New York Times have failed to commission any coverage of the latest allegations as of Monday, nor has CNN.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

 

Kolakusic

 

 

 

 

Arthur C. Clarke

 

 

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Mar 122019
 


Robert Rauschenberg Buffalo II 1964

 

Theresa May Claims ‘Legally Binding’ Changes To Brexit Deal (Ind.)
Legal Uncertainty Hangs Over Brexit Vote (EUO)
May Tries To Claim Victory – But The EU Has Conceded Next To Nothing (G.)
Britain Must Leave EU By May 23 Or Hold Own EU Vote (R.)
Former Australian PM Calls Brexit Trade Plan ‘Utter Bollocks’ (G.)
Mueller Probe Already Financed Through September: Officials (R.)
Marco Rubio Accuses CNN Of ‘Russian Collusion’ (RT)
Manafort To Jail – Not About Justice; Not About Russia (Ron Paul)
News Corp’s Australian Arm Calls For Google Breakup (R.)
Facebook Removes Warren Ads Calling For Facebook Breakup (Pol.)
Facebook Bans Zero Hedge (ZH)
Biden on the Relaunch Pad: He’s Worse Than You Thought (CP)
Ides and Tides (Jim Kunstler)
Synthetic Chemicals Use Doubled In 20 Years, Will Double Again In Next 10 (G.)

 

 

Trying to patch together an idea of what was decided. It all appears vacuous. May assures Britain that the EU can’t make the backstop permanent, but 1) it can, and 2) it never wanted to, provided Ireland is taken care of properly. I can’t get rid of the notion that the UK can’t get rid of the notion that Ireland is a second-class country.

Biggest ‘gain’ for May: the UK can unilaterally declare that it believes it can unilaterally halt the backstop.

Today will be all lawyers trying to translate the hollow terms into legalese, but I haven’t found anything that could convince anyone anything has changed since two days ago. Maybe she’ll swing a handful votes, but she lost by 203 last time around.

 

WSJ: “The EU offered a new legal instrument that would allow the U.K. to seek independent arbitration if it believed the EU was not negotiating a new trade agreement in good faith. If the U.K. claim were upheld and the EU continued to drag its feet, the U.K. could be freed from the customs arrangement. The EU also offered a legally binding pledge to work quickly on a future trade agreement to ensure that the backstop is temporary. The two sides also agreed that the U.K. would set out its own interpretation of the deal, which would state that the U.K. believes it has the option to bring the customs union arrangement to an end.”

Jeremy Corbyn on Twitter: “The Prime Minister’s negotiations have failed. Last night’s agreement with the European Commission does not contain anything approaching the changes Theresa May promised Parliament, and whipped her MPs to vote for.”

Green Party’s Molly Scott Cato on Twitter: “I’ve never before seen a prime minister deliberately try to mislead her own Parliament. There have been no legally binding changes to the withdrawal agreement. This is action worthy of an autocratic leader from a banana republic not the leader of a democratic country.”

Theresa May Claims ‘Legally Binding’ Changes To Brexit Deal (Ind.)

Theresa May claims to have secured significant changes to her Brexit deal in a last-minute dash to Europe just hours before she must put her plan to a critical vote in parliament. In a late night statement on Monday in Strasbourg she argued the new-look deal meant Britain could not be trapped in the “Irish backstop” so hated by Eurosceptic Tories and her DUP allies, but major doubts remain over whether it is enough to win their backing on Tuesday. The prime minister’s deputy David Lidington warned that if her deal is rejected for a second time by MPs it will “plunge the country into a political crisis”. European leaders warned there would be no “third chance”, but Conservative Brexiteers insisted there are still “very worrying features” to the agreement, while Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said “MPs must reject this deal tomorrow”.

The announcement came after another dramatic day in Westminster on Monday, which began with talk of Ms May potentially delaying Tuesday’s vote on her deal after a seemingly fruitless weekend of talks. But speaking an hour before midnight, she said: “MPs were clear that legal changes were needed to the backstop. Today we have secured legal changes. “Now is the time to come together, to back this improved Brexit deal, and to deliver on the instruction of the British people.” The backstop is an arrangement in the existing withdrawal agreement that comes into play if the EU and UK fail to agree future trading arrangements by the end of 2020, thus keeping the Irish border open, but also locking the UK into a customs union with the EU on a potentially indefinite basis.

[..] In a commons statement Mr Lidington revealed that the UK had secured two new documents, a “joint legally binding instrument on the withdrawal agreement” and a “joint statement to supplement the political declaration” on future relations. There is also a third element – a unilateral declaration from the UK setting out what actions it would take if it felt the backstop is being abused by the EU. Mr Lidington said the new legal “instrument” confirmed that the EU could not try to trap the UK in the backstop indefinitely, because commitments they had made to not do so were now legally binding.

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It often takes going through several articles to get a rounded picture.

Legal Uncertainty Hangs Over Brexit Vote (EUO)

Uncertainty continued to hang over Tuesday night’s (12 March) big vote on Brexit in the UK parliament, as British MPs tried to make sense of last-minute tweaks to the exit deal. The opposition Labour party indicated it would vote against the accord. “This evening’s agreement with the European Commission does not contain anything approaching the changes [British prime minister] Theresa May promised parliament and whipped her MPs to vote for,” Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said on Monday. “It sounds again that nothing has changed,” his shadow Brexit minister, Keir Starmer said. Two MPs from May’s ruling Conservative party said the same. “Seems UK is still permanently locked into the EU, but can ‘argue’ it can leave. The catch? EU decides if we can leave,” Adam Afriyie said.

“We’re being played,” Sam Gyimah, a former Tory minister said. Nigel Farage, the EU-phobic British MEP for the UK Independence Party, was the most outspoken. “Nothing has changed. Reject. Reject. Reject,” he said. Meanwhile, the so-called Independent Group of ex-Labour and ex-Tory MPs said Brexit ought to be delayed in order to hold a second referendum. Dominic Grieve, Britain’s former attorney general, echoed their position. “The proper thing to do is to put it back to the public in a people’s vote, in a second referendum,” he said on Monday. Afriyie’s comment on being “locked into the EU” referred to the so-called ‘backstop’ – the previous deal that the UK would remain in the EU customs union until it found a mutually acceptable way to avoid a hard border on the island of Ireland.

The backstop prompted a historic majority of 230 MPs to reject the withdrawal deal in January, raising the prospect of a no-deal Brexit on 29 March. But EU commission president Jean-Claude Juncker and British prime minister Theresa May agreed three new documents at a meeting in Strasbourg, France, late on Monday designed to assuage those fears. The first one said the UK could start a dispute in an arbitration court to quit the backstop if the EU did not want to let it out. The second one said the EU and UK would try to find alternative arrangements to the backstop by the end of 2020. The third one was a unilateral British declaration in which the UK said it could quit the backstop if the talks on alternative arrangements broke down.

Both May and Juncker were emphatic in saying that the tweaks gave the UK the “legally binding” guarantees it needed to avoid being locked in to EU customs rules. “It [the backstop] would never be a trap, if either side were to act in bad faith, there is a legal way for either side to exit,” Juncker said.

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Jonathan Freedland is a bit of a douche, I avoid him mostly. But he makes some points here.

May Tries To Claim Victory – But The EU Has Conceded Next To Nothing (G.)

Think of what the ERG and the Democratic Unionists object to about the key stumbling block: the Northern Irish backstop, the insurance policy designed to avoid a hard border on the island of Ireland. They don’t like the fact that it has no time limit, that it could, theoretically, go on forever. And yet the best that May’s new motion laid before parliament could say is that the new legally binding joint instrument “reduces the risk that the UK could be held in the Northern Ireland backstop indefinitely”. “Reduces the risk” is not the same as “eliminates the risk” – and it’s that that many of those Brexiters wanted to hear. (Put aside the fact that it was always an unrealistic demand: you could say the same about the entire case for Brexit.)

A second demand of the Brexiters, one bizarrely endorsed in January by May herself and a majority of the Commons, was that the backstop be replaced by “alternative arrangements.” Gamely, May tried to pretend that she’d won an EU concession on that too, and that those alternative arrangements will be in place by December 2020. As indeed they will – if they exist by then. But for now, the technological wizardry so great that it would render the backstop redundant does not exist. And so this was another hollow victory.

Finally, the Brexit crowd wanted the UK to have the unilateral right to exit the backstop whenever it liked. May did indeed get something unilateral – the right to issue her own unilateral declaration, in which she could freely state that “it is the position of the United Kingdom that there would be nothing to prevent the UK instigating measures that would ultimately dis-apply the backstop.” This is rather like my son winning the right to declare that it is his position that he should get more pocket money. It doesn’t mean I’ve agreed to give him more pocket money. The clue is in the word “unilateral.” The EU is not bound by this UK declaration and has, in fact, conceded nothing.

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Anyone checked what the bookmakers say on the date? UK elections for the EU Parliament would be hilarious.

Britain Must Leave EU By May 23 Or Hold Own EU Vote (R.)

Britain must leave the European Union by the time EU voters elect a new European Parliament on May 23-26 or will have to elect its own EU lawmakers, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said on Monday. Writing to EU summit chair Donald Tusk after agreeing a deal to break Brexit deadlock with British Prime Minister Theresa May, Juncker wrote: “The United Kingdom’s withdrawal should be complete before the European elections that will take place between May 23-26 this year.” “If the United Kingdom has not left the European Union by then, it will be legally required to hold these elections.”

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Seems obvious.

Former Australian PM Calls Brexit Trade Plan ‘Utter Bollocks’ (G.)

The claims that British trade with the Commonwealth can make up for leaving the EU is “the nuttiest of the many nutty arguments” advanced by Brexit supporters and “utter bollocks”, the former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd has said. In a lacerating piece for the Guardian, Rudd dismissed the claims by some Brexit supporters that the UK could strike deals with his country, New Zealand, Canada and India to soften the blow and said the UK risked undermining western values by leaving the EU in a weaker position when it left.

“I’m struck, as the British parliament moves towards the endgame on Brexit, with the number of times Australia, Canada, New Zealand and India have been advanced by the Brexiteers in the public debate as magical alternatives to Britain’s current trade and investment relationship with the European Union,” he wrote. “This is the nuttiest of the many nutty arguments that have emerged from the Land of Hope and Glory set now masquerading as the authentic standard-bearers of British patriotism. It’s utter bollocks.” Of the prospect of a free trade deal with Delhi, he writes: “As for India, good luck!”

[..] he cast serious doubt on suggestions the UK could quickly come to a free trade agreement (FTA) with India, pointing out that talks he began with the nation on behalf of Australia a decade ago are still going on. “A substantive India-UK FTA is the ultimate mirage constructed by the Brexiteers. It’s as credible as the ad they plastered on the side of that big red bus about the £350m Britain was allegedly paying to Brussels each week. Not.”

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Have a nice summer.

Mueller Probe Already Financed Through September: Officials (R.)

Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the team he assembled to investigate U.S. President Donald Trump and his associates have been funded through the end of September 2019, three U.S. officials said on Monday, an indication that the probe has funding to keep it going for months if need be. The operations and funding of Mueller’s office were not addressed in the budget requests for the next government fiscal year issued by the White House and Justice Department on Monday because Mueller’s office is financed by the U.S. Treasury under special regulations issued by the Justice Department, the officials said. “The Special Counsel is funded by the Independent Counsel appropriation, a permanent indefinite appropriation established in the Department’s 1988 Appropriations Act,” a Justice Department spokesman said.

There has been increased speculation in recent weeks that Mueller’s team is close to winding up its work and is likely to deliver a report summarizing its findings to Attorney General William Barr any day or week now. Mueller’s office has not commented on the news reports suggesting an imminent release. Representatives of key congressional committees involved in Trump-related investigations say they have received no guidance from Mueller’s office regarding his investigation’s progress or future plans. The probe, which began in May 2017, is examining whether there were any links or coordination between the Russian government led by Vladimir Putin and the 2016 presidential campaign of Trump, according to an order signed by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

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Little Marco lost so bigly in 2016, why’s he still around? Court jester? Or is he going for McCain’s place as warmonger in chief?

Marco Rubio Accuses CNN Of ‘Russian Collusion’ (RT)

Senator Marco Rubio, the most outspoken cheerleader of US regime change in Venezuela, lashed out at several major outlets for not using his preferred terminology, going so far as to accuse CNN of ‘Russian collusion.’ “In order to undermine the constitutional basis for [Juan Guaido’s] interim Presidency [sic], Putin’s Russia repeatedly describes him as the ‘self-proclaimed’ president of Venezuela. And so does CNN,” Rubio (R-Florida) tweeted on Wednesday, adding, “Russian collusion?” It was the latest in a string of tweets by the senator whom President Donald Trump is, for some unknown reason, allowing to drive US foreign policy on Latin America.

On Tuesday, Rubio targeted the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal for their coverage of Guaido, this time objecting to their use of the term “opposition leader.” Rubio’s badgering of the media came shortly after State Department spokesman Robert Palladino tried to do the same thing with diplomatic correspondents in Foggy Bottom. Referring to Guaido as anything other than “interim president” was feeding “the narrative of a dictator who has usurped the position of the presidency and led Venezuela into the humanitarian, political, and economic crisis that exists today,” Palladino argued.

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CNN and Manafort, both. And neither.

Manafort To Jail – Not About Justice; Not About Russia (Ron Paul)

Former Trump campaign official Paul Manafort has been sentenced to nearly four years in prison for acting as an unregistered agent for Ukraine. But looking at the media coverage of the case one would never know that “taking down” Manafort was not all about Russia collusion. Reporting…or propaganda?

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Have they asked the CIA? Has Elizabeth Warren?

News Corp’s Australian Arm Calls For Google Breakup (R.)

The Australian arm of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp called for an enforced break-up of Alphabet Inc’s Google, acknowledging the measure would involve global coordination but calling it necessary to preserve advertising and the news media. The demand, published on Tuesday as part of a government inquiry, goes beyond the recommendations of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) which crossed swords with Google by requesting a new regulatory body to oversee global tech operators. In an 80-page submission largely centered on Google, News Corp Australia said the U.S. company had created an “ecosystem” where it could control the results of people’s internet searches and then charge advertisers based on how many people viewed their advertisements.

Efforts to curtail Google’s market dominance around the world had failed because of the search engine operator’s record of “avoiding and undermining regulatory initiatives and ignoring private contractual arrangements”. When Google had agreed to change its methods in response to investigation or new regulations in other countries, it often soon replaced the conduct with new methods which had the same effect: directing traffic and sales to its own sites and hurting competition. Calling Google’s behavior “anti-competitive”, News Corp accused the Mountain View, California-based internet company of damaging publishers’ ability to generate revenue and ultimately the sustainability of the news industry.

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And restores them again. But what nincompoop did that? Does (s)he still have a job today?

Facebook Removes Warren Ads Calling For Facebook Breakup (Pol.)

Facebook removed several ads placed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign that called for the breakup of Facebook and other tech giants. But the social network later reversed course after POLITICO reported on the takedown, with the company saying it wanted to allow for “robust debate.” The ads, which had identical images and text, touted Warren’s recently announced plan to unwind “anti-competitive” tech mergers, including Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp and Instagram. “Three companies have vast power over our economy and our democracy. Facebook, Amazon, and Google,” read the ads, which Warren’s campaign had placed Friday. “We all use them. But in their rise to power, they’ve bulldozed competition, used our private information for profit, and tilted the playing field in their favor.”

A message on the three ads said: “This ad was taken down because it goes against Facebook’s advertising policies.” A Facebook spokesperson confirmed the ads had been taken down but said the company is in the process of restoring them. “We removed the ads because they violated our policies against use of our corporate logo,” the spokesperson said. “In the interest of allowing robust debate, we are restoring the ads.” Warren swiped at Facebook over the removal, citing it as evidence the company has grown too powerful. “Curious why I think FB has too much power? Let’s start with their ability to shut down a debate over whether FB has too much power,” she tweeted. “Thanks for restoring my posts. But I want a social media marketplace that isn’t dominated by a single censor.”

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How long’s it been, 3-4 years?!, that Facebook blocked the Automatic Earth account? Still waiting for an explanation.

Facebook Bans Zero Hedge (ZH)

Over the weekend, we were surprised to learn that some readers were prevented by Facebook when attempting to share Zero Hedge articles. Subsequently it emerged that virtually every attempt to share or merely mention an article, including in private messages, would be actively blocked by the world’s largest social network, with the explanation that “the link you tried to visit goes against our community standards.” We were especially surprised by this action as neither prior to this seemingly arbitrary act of censorship, nor since, were we contacted by Facebook with an explanation of what “community standard” had been violated or what particular filter or article had triggered the blanket rejection of all Zero Hedge content.

To be sure, as a for-profit enterprise with its own unique set of corporate “ethics”, Facebook has every right to impose whatever filters it desires on the media shared on its platform. It is entirely possible that one or more posts was flagged by Facebook’s “triggered” readers who merely alerted a censorship algo which blocked all content. Alternatively, it is just as possible that Facebook simply decided to no longer allow its users to share our content in retaliation for our extensive coverage of what some have dubbed the platform’s “many problems”, including chronic privacy violations, mass abandonment by younger users, its gross and ongoing misrepresentation of fake users, ironically – in retrospect – its systematic censorship and back door government cooperation (those are just links from the past few weeks).

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The Democrats are killing their chances if they go with the old crowd. But then, they are controlled by that crowd.

Biden on the Relaunch Pad: He’s Worse Than You Thought (CP)

When the New York Times front-paged its latest anti-left polemic masquerading as a news article, the March 9 piece declared: “Should former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. enter the race, as his top advisers vow he soon will, he would have the best immediate shot at the moderate mantle.” On the verge of relaunching, Joe Biden is poised to come to the rescue of the corporate political establishment — at a time when, in the words of the Times, “the sharp left turn in the Democratic Party and the rise of progressive presidential candidates are unnerving moderate Democrats.” After 36 years in the Senate and eight as vice president, Biden is by far the most seasoned servant of corporate power with a prayer of becoming the next president.

When Biden read this paragraph in a recent Politico article, his ears must have been burning: “Early support from deep-pocketed financial executives could give Democrats seeking to break out of the pack an important fundraising boost. But any association with bankers also opens presidential hopefuls to sharp attacks from an ascendant left.” The direct prey of Biden’s five-decade “association with bankers” include millions of current and former college students now struggling under avalanches of debt; they can thank Biden for his prodigious services to the lending industry. Andrew Cockburn identifies an array of victims in his devastating profile of Biden in the March issue of Harper’s magazine. For instance:

• “Biden was long a willing foot soldier in the campaign to emasculate laws allowing debtors relief from loans they cannot repay. As far back as 1978, he helped negotiate a deal rolling back bankruptcy protections for graduates with federal student loans, and in 1984 worked to do the same for borrowers with loans for vocational schools.” • “Even when the ostensible objective lay elsewhere, such as drug-related crime, Biden did not forget his banker friends. Thus the 1990 Crime Control Act, with Biden as chief sponsor, further limited debtors’ ability to take advantage of bankruptcy protections.” • Biden worked diligently to strengthen the hand of credit-card firms against consumers. At the same time, “the credit card giant MBNA was Biden’s largest contributor for much of his Senate career, while also employing his son Hunter as an executive and, later, as a well-remunerated consultant.”

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“..you miserable, morbidly obese, tattooed gorks watching this out on the Midwestern buzzard flats should have thought twice before dropping out of community college to drive a forklift in the Sysco frozen food warehouse..”

Ides and Tides (Jim Kunstler)

What you really had to love was Mr. Powell’s explanation for the record number of car owners in default on their monthly payments: “…not everybody is sharing in this widespread prosperity we have.” Errrgghh Errrgghh Errrgghh. Sound of klaxon wailing. What he meant to say was, hedge-funders, private equity hustlers, and C-suite personnel are making out just fine as the asset-stripping of flyover America proceeds, and you miserable, morbidly obese, tattooed gorks watching this out on the Midwestern buzzard flats should have thought twice before dropping out of community college to drive a forklift in the Sysco frozen food warehouse (where, by the way, you are probably stealing half the oven-ready chicken nuggets in inventory).

Interlocutor Scott Pelley asked the oracle about “those half-a-million people who have given up looking for jobs.” Did he pull that number out of his shorts? The total number out of the workforce is more like 95 million, and when you subtract retirees, people still in school, and the disabled, the figure is more like 7.5 million. There was some blather over the “opioid epidemic,” the upshot of which was learn to code, young man. Personally, I was about as impressed as I was ten years ago when past oracle Ben Bernanke confidently explained to congress that the disturbances in Mortgage-land were “contained.”

David Leonhardt of The New York Times had a real howler in his Monday column on the state of the economy: “Americans are saving more and spending less partly because the rich now take home so much of the economy’s income — and the rich don’t spend as large a share of their income as the poor and middle class.” Suggestion to Mr. Leonhardt: Learn to code.

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Our chances of survival drop by the minute.

It’s Daly-Townsend’s take on the 2nd law of Thermodynamics: “No organism can survive in a medium of its own waste. “

The reason is that an organism’s waste is toxic to that organism.

If they don’t teach that in schools, why bother to attend?

Synthetic Chemicals Use Doubled In 20 Years, Will Double Again In Next 10 (G.)

Sales of synthetic chemicals will double over the next 12 years with alarming implications for health and the environment, according to a global study that highlights government failures to rein in the industry behind plastics, pesticides and cosmetics. The second Global Chemicals Outlook, which was released in Nairobi on Monday, said the world will not meet international commitments to reduce chemical hazards and halt pollution by 2020. In fact, the study by the United Nations Environment Programme found that the industry has never been more dominant nor has humanity’s dependence on chemicals ever been as great.

“When you consider existing pollution, plus the projected growth of the industry, the trends are a cause for significant concern,” said Achim Halpaap, who led the 400 scientists involved in the study. He said the fastest growth was in construction materials, electronics, textiles and lead batteries. More and more additives are also being used to make plastics smoother or more durable. Depending on the chemical and degree of exposure, the risks can include cancer, chronic kidney disease and congenital anomalies. The World Health Organization estimated that the burden of disease was 1.6 million lives in 2016. Halpaap said this was likely to be an underestimate.

In addition to the human health dangers, he said chemicals also affect pollinators and coral reefs. Global chemical production has almost doubled since 2000 and is now – if the pharmaceutical business is taken into account – the world’s second largest industry, the report noted. This is expected to continue for at least the next decade owing to massive increases in the expanding economies of Asia, Africa and the Middle East. By 2030, the industry is projected to almost double again from 2017 levels to hit $6.6tn (£5tn) in sales; China is forecast to account for 49.9% of the world market.

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Dec 182018
 


Titian The rape of Europe 1560-62

 

It took me a while to decide which word(s) best define the past year and the next one, but I think this is pretty much it. 2018 was chaotic more than anything else, and that chaos will give rise to mayhem in 2019.

What I think is striking is that this is true across the board, in all walks of life so to speak. In finance, in politics, in energy markets, in ecological matters, and perhaps most of all in the ways all these topics are being covered by what once were trusted media.

I’m going to have to come back to all these topics separately, so it’s promising to be a very busy holiday season, but it’s also good to try and put them together in one place, if only to show how interconnected everything is. And how futile it is to look at the economy without seeing its connection to energy flows and ecosystems. And vice versa.

 

In finance and economics, we’ve seen an avalanche of falling numbers recently, in stock prices, bond prices, housing, across the globe, and obviously that evokes a lot of comments in the financial press. But that press, and bankers investors on their own, still talk about markets.

However, as I wrote in April 2018, if there is no price discovery, and there isn’t, there ARE NO markets, and it would be good and beneficial if many more people absorb that simple reality. Many more so-called traders and investors would be a start, but by no means enough. Lots more people who have nothing to do with the ‘markets’ should understand why there is no such thing anymore.

As long as you limit it to stock and bond markets, it may appear fine that people don’t understand. But as soon as you acknowledge there are no housing markets either for the exact same reasons, the story changes considerably. Because then it becomes clear that all -former- markets, bar none, have been eviscerated by central bank policies that sought to prop up banks, often highly successfully so, which they knew could only happen at the expense of communities and societies.

We’ve ended up with scores of mom and pop ‘investors’ who own hugely overpriced stocks and homes, while their pensions funds hold zillions ‘worth’ of bonds and also increasingly stocks. The link between pensions and AAA-rate assets was pulverized in the process. That looks set to continue, and worsen, in 2019. But that may be just the look of things. Because there really are no markets, there is no price discovery.

What is still there is a lot of talk about whether the Fed -and other central banks- will raise rates further or not, or will stop or continue their asset buying schemes. Central banks are the only game in town, there are no markets, nobody knows what anything is really worth because the Fed etc. took the discovery process beyond their reach.

And now all those financial ‘subjects’ are sitting on all this stuff that only appears to have value, and that value hinges exclusively on what Draghi, Kuroda, Yellen and now Jay Powell have decided things are worth. And yes, it does make matters appear okay, but because they can’t do QE forever, all of those values will need to be re-assessed by actual markets once Powell et al. are either thrown out or decide for themselves to leave the arena.

It won’t be pretty, it will be devastating. It’s impossible to say if it will come to a head in 2019, because the Fed can lower rates a bit again after its recent rate hikes and prop up the zombie for longer. Then again Draghi can’t do that anymore since he’s already in negative rate territory, and while the euro could fall to parity with the USD as a consequence, there’s a limit to that too.

Anyway, more on that later.

 

Energy and ecology seem to become more intertwined as we go along, though that may well be a trompe oeil, trick of the eye. Still, if you see and read what people have to say about things like the big COP24 event in Katowice last week, it’s obvious that the 2nd law of Thermodynamics is a hard one to internalize. Because that law seems to say that the use of energy, period, produces waste, while all these mostly well-meaning folk are merely focusing on shifting between energy sources.

There is surprisingly little attention for not using energy in the first place, which the 2nd Law appears to stipulate is the only way to stop the rot. And it’s entirely feasible to build homes that use 70-80% less power to heat and cool, or to design a transport system in a city that saves that much energy.

But the ‘leaders’, politicians and business people, prefer to address solar panels and wind turbines that allow for the amount of energy used to fall only moderately, which when combined with the economic growth that nobody questions, will lead to the use of ever more energy.

And I get that, you need to shrink your present economies, and the models they’re based on, in order to save the planet. I’m not so much talking about climate change, since the earth is a system so complex we should really be very cautious about deriving any conclusions about it from simplified models, but the species extinction reported in 2018 is another, and more immediately convincing, story.

Still, conferences like COP24, or its predecessor COP21 which I wrote about 3 years ago in CON21, are not just entirely useless, they move everything backward that all the worried boys and girls are so worried about.

The movers and shakers of the world all owe their positions to the economies, and therefore the levels of energy use, that the worried people now want to move away from. And then they turn to the same movers and shakers to make that happen. Sorry, no can do. All you’ll get is lip service from people looking for money and power, who are not interested in being proved wrong if they are.

Today’s climate discussion is a road to nowhere where down the line there’ll be nobody left to talk to and no birds singing. You yourself probably won’t be there either. There is not one politician who will volunteer to give up their power if that could save the world their children will have to live in. They’ll come up with a story where their position is save and so is that world, and they’re more than likely to believe it.

 

As for the media, the tale gets darker fast. It didn’t start in 2018, but it did become a lot more outspoken. As I’ve said before, there are three targets for the former trusted sources of impartial news, even as those sources rapidly become more partial as we move forward. And that of course has to do with their new business model I wrote about a lot: writing negative stories about Donald Trump became an obvious source of revenue well before he was president.

Once he was elected, the media doubled down. They wrote against Trump at first thinking he would be beaten in the GOP primaries, then some more when he faced Hillary, then because they didn’t like him in the White House, and finally because he turned out to be the business proposition that quite literally kept them alive. What was it, over 100,000 new subscribers for the NYT a MONTH at a certain point?! Would CNN and Rachel Maddow even exist anymore without the Donald?

But that also means that the MSM cannot report anything positive about the man, with the exception of a bombing campaign in a faraway sandbox, and that is pretty crazy. No matter where you stand politically, not even Trump can do everything wrong, but CNN, MSNBC, WaPo,NYT et al can’t say it out loud, because their new readers and viewers want negative stories.

I’m not at all a Trump fan, I find it insane that America can’t find a single person among its 320 million inhabitants who could better represent it, but I also saw well over two years ago that the reporting on Trump was so biased someone had to restore at least some balance. And if that was to be me, so be it.

It’s like the entire US -and UK- press has become the National Enquirer, where the questions of truth or accuracy have become, and/or always was, a complete afterthought, irrelevant to whatever is actually published. And the readers and viewers caught inside the echo chamber will never know any better than that that is what the world really looks like.

It’s the ‘old’ media’s response to the threat of social media, a fight they cannot possibly win in the end, but not one they will relinquish easily; it will be the end of them. So there’s Trump, and then there’s Russia and Julian Assange. And there’s a live shooting practice going on in which all three are fair game.

According to two reports published just yesterday in the NY Times and the BBC, African Americans and French Yellow Vests were targeted by Russian bots, trolls, give them a name. What these once trusted media no longer understand, or don’t care about, is that they are effectively saying that African Americans and Yellow Vests are all so stupid and so unconvinced and unconvincing in their political convictions that a bunch of poorly defined Russians made them throw their votes away from Hillary Clinton and towards Trump.

Like African Americans have no opinions and therefore in the end no functioning brains. Like their f*king robots, some inferior lifeform. Is there anything you can say that is more racist than that? I come up empty. And I understand Kanye.

And that the ‘Russians’ caused tens of thousands of Frenchmen and -women to put on a yellow vest and protest Macron’s dismantling of -very- long-standing labor rights and taxation ‘reforms’ that benefit the rich French elite. You cannot insult two such vast yet diverse groups of people, who seem to have little if anything in common, African Americans and Yellow Vests, you cannot insult them more or worse than such reports do.

And they simply don’t see it. In their view, and which they -rightly by now- trust their public will eat up like hot cakes, their 24/7 anti-Trump and anti-Russia campaigns have been so convincing that they can basically say anything at all by now. If Trump or the Russians deny, that’s just what they would do if they were guilty. Assange can’t deny anything at all, they’ve totally silenced him. They being the US deep state in liaison with the MSM.

 

That’s how we’re about to enter 2019, how we’re about to move from chaos to mayhem. It is scary not just because of what we see happening today, but even more because we’ve never seen anything remotely like it. Sure, US media, any country’s media, have always supported government strategic lies in times of warfare or other tensions.

But an overall campaign against a sitting president, comprised of dozens of articles a day consisting of mere allegations and rumors, let alone the same against a state nuclear power arguably mightier than the US itself, and a journalist who’s the only one in his profession who’s actually done what journalists should do, not the well-paid follow the party line thing going on at the MSM, all this is unprecedented.

And given what we’ve seen in 2018 in the realm of banned social media accounts, in a wider sense of the word, we can only wonder how much worse the censorship can get in the mayhem year of 2019.

Can the Automatic Earth, and for instance our friends at Zero Hedge, only continue to exist next year if we agree to increasingly become the poodles of the ruling political classes, intelligence services, and their press masters and lackeys?

It’s starting to look that way. So in closing, I want to call on you to support us by donating a Christmas gift, and preferably a recurring one all through the 2019 mayhem year, so we know we can continue to present you with an alternative to the ‘appropriate’ information you’re ‘supposed’ to be receiving.

It’s later than you think.

 

 

Jun 092018
 


Dorothea Lange Children and home of cotton workers at migratory camp in southern San Joaquin Valley, CA 1936

 

My long time pal Jesse Colombo, now at Real Investment Advice, recently linked on Twitter to a Zero Hedge article, which quoted CoreLogic as saying more than half of American homes are overvalued. CoreLogic calls itself “a leading provider of consumer, financial and property data, analytics and services to business and government.”

Well, CoreLogic is way off. All American homes are overvalued. How can we tell? It’s easy. It’s so easy it’s perhaps no wonder that people overlook the reasons why. But we all know them: The Fed has pushed some $20 trillion down the throats of the financial system. It has also lowered interest rates to near zero Kelvin. Then the government added a “relaxation” of lending standards and an upward tweak of credit scores. And Bob’s your uncle.

These measures haven’t influenced just half of US homes, they’ve hit every single one of them. Some more than others, not every bubble is as big as San Francisco’s, but the suggestion that nearly half of homes are not overvalued is simply misleading. It falsely suggests that if you buy a home in the ‘right’ place, you’ll be fine. You won’t be. The Washington-induced bubble will and must pop, and precious few homes will be ‘worth’ what they are ‘worth’ today.

Here’s what Jesse tweeted along with his link to the Zero Hedge article:

“Almost half of the US housing market is overvalued” – this is why U.S. household wealth is also overvalued/in an unsustainable bubble.

He followed up with:

U.S. household wealth is in a bubble thanks to Fed-inflated asset prices. This is creating a “wealth effect” that is helping to drive our spurious economic recovery. This economy is nothing but a sham. It’s smoke and mirrors. Wake the F up, everyone!!!

My reaction to this:

Sorry, my friend Jesse, but every single US home is overvalued. It just depends on the vantage point you look from. All prices have been distorted by the Fed’s policies, not just half of them. Arguably some more than others, but can that be the core argument here?

Jesse’s reply:

Yes, that’s a good point.

Another long time pal, Dave Collum, chimed in with a good observation:

I think even us bunker monkeys start recalibrating, no matter how hard we try to maintain what we believe to be perspective.

Yes, we’ve been at this for a while. Even if Jesse was still a student when he started out. We’ve been doing it so long that he recently wrote an article named: Why It’s Right To Warn About A Bubble For 10 Years. And he’s right on that too.

Let’s get to the article the conversation started with:

 

More Than Half Of American Homes Are Overvalued, CoreLogic Warns

CoreLogic reports that residential real estate prices nationwide increased 6.9% year over year from April 2017 to April 2018. The firm’s Home Price Index (HPI) also shows a 1.2% rise on the month-over-month basis from March to April 2018. This has certainly sparked the debate of housing affordability across the nation with many millennials struggling to achieve the American dream.

CoreLogic Market Condition Indicators showed that 40% of the 100 largest metropolitan areas were overvalued in April, compared to 28% undervalued, and 32% in line with valuations. The report uncovers a shocking discovery that of the nation’s top 50 largest residential real estate markets, 52% were overvalued in April.

CoreLogic’s methodology behind overvalued housing markets “as one in which home prices are at least 10% higher than the long-term, sustainable level, while an undervalued housing market is one in which home prices are at least 10% below the sustainable level.”

The CoreLogic people probably mean well, but they also probably don’t want to rattle the cage. It’s not really important. As soon as someone starts talking about a ‘sustainable level’ for home prices, you can tune out. Because no such thing exists. Unless you first take those $20 trillion out of the ‘market’, free up interest rates, tighten lending standards and lower credit scores. Only then MAY you find a ‘sustainable level’ for prices.

Historically a house in the US cost around 3 to 4 times the median annual income. During the housing bubble of 2007 the ratio surpassed 5 – in other words, the median price for a single-family home in the United States cost more than 5 times the US median annual household income. According to Mike Maloney, this ratio is heavily influenced by interest rates. When interest rates go down the affordability of a house goes up, so people spend more money on a house. Interest rates have now been falling since 1981 when they peaked at 15.32% (for a 10-year US treasury bond).

Mike Maloney, another longtime friend of the Automatic Earth, is dead on. Price to income is a useless point unless you include interest rates in the calculation. And then you can get large differences. Since interest rates have been falling for 37 years, count on them to rise. And see what that does to your model.

“The best antidote for rising home prices is additional supply,” said Dr. Frank Nothaft, chief economist for CoreLogic. “New construction has failed to keep up with and meet new housing growth or replace existing inventory. More construction of for-sale and rental housing will alleviate housing cost pressures,” Nothaft added.

Right, yeah. Now we know the CoreLogic mindset. The more you build, the better home prices will be. Just one of many problems with that is that if you really expect prices to fall once you build, people will build fewer houses, because profit margins fall too. The whole idea that we can save housing markets by simply building ever more has never rung very true. But that’s for another day.

In a recent op-ed piece via The Wall Street Journal, Paul Kupiec and Edward Pinto place the blame on the government for creating another real estate bubble through “loose mortgage terms pushing home prices up.” They claim that mortgage underwriters need to tighten standards.

“Home prices are booming. So far, 2018 has posted the strongest growth since 2005. “About 60% of all U.S. metros saw an acceleration in the rate of price increases through February this year,” according to Housing Wire. Since mid-2012, real home prices have increased 28%, according to data from the American Enterprise Institute. Entry-level home prices are up about double that rate. In contrast, over the same period household income has barely kept pace with inflation. The current pace of home-price inflation is increasing the risk of another housing bubble.

The Fed is raising rates -finally- and home prices grow at the fastest rate in 13 years. Over the past 6 years prices are up 28%. Entry level homes are up more than 50% in that time frame. That is just profoundly scary. It’s like Dante’s descent into hell. And no, it’s not true that “The current pace of home-price inflation is increasing the risk of another housing bubble”. We’re already caught up head first in a new housing bubble.

“The root of the problem is declining underwriting standards. In April Freddie Mac announced an expansion of its 3% down-payment mortgage, the better to compete with the Federal Housing Administration and Fannie Mae . Such moves propel home prices upward. Because government agencies guarantee about 80% of all home-purchase mortgages, their underwriting standards guide the market.

Making lending even more dangerous, CNBC recently reported that “credit scores may go up” because new regulatory guidance allows delinquent taxes to be excluded when calculating credit scores. These are only some of the measures that “expand the credit box” and qualify ever-shakier borrowers for mortgages.”

As I said before: if you lower lending -and underwriting- standards and artificially raise credit scores, then yes, you can keep the bubble going for a while longer. But it overvalues properties. You’re just moving goalposts.

“During the last crisis, easy credit led home prices to rise at an unsustainable pace, leading marginally qualified borrowers to stretch themselves thin. Millions of Americans’ dreams became nightmares when the housing market turned. The lax underwriting terms that helped borrowers qualify for a mortgage haunted many households for the next decade.”

No, it’s not just homes. Stocks and bonds as just as overvalued. Because of a behemoth attempt at making the economy look good, even though it’s entirely fake. No price discovery, no market, just central banks and tweaking standards and surveys. C’mon, we all know where this must go. We just don’t want to know. So this Marketwatch piece gets a wry smile at best:

 

America Is House-Rich But Cash-Poor

The housing market has not only recovered from the Great Recession, it’s heated up. According to an analysis from Attom Data, nearly 14 million Americans are now “equity rich” – meaning they have at least 50% equity in their homes. It bears repeating that many owners and communities are not so lucky: over a million Americans are underwater, and some cities and towns are still reeling under the weight of abandoned and vacant homes and stagnant micro-economies. But for most of the country, rapidly rising home prices and a dearth of anything else to buy means people are staying in their homes longer, allowing them to accrue more and more equity: $15 trillion worth, to be exact.

 

 

Apr 302016
 
 April 30, 2016  Posted by at 8:52 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  Comments Off on Debt Rattle April 30 2016


Byron Street haberdashery, New York 1900

US Puts China, Japan on New Watch List for FX Practices (BBG)
US Chides Five Economic Powers Over Policies (WSJ)
UK Consumers Borrow At Fastest Rate In Over A Decade (R.)
Apple Stock Suffers Worst Week Since 2013 (R.)
Chinese Cities Dive Back Into Debt To Fuel Growth Even As Defaults Rise (R.)
China’s Stocks, Bonds, Yuan Are a Triple Losing Bet This Month (BBG)
Hong Kong Underwater Mortgages Jump 15-Fold in Q1 as Prices Drop (BBG)
Derivatives Houses To Open Accounts With Federal Reserve (FT)
Draghi Challenge Seen As Consumer Prices Fall More Than Forecast (BBG)
Fighting Deflation With Unconventional Fiscal Policy (VoxEu)
Oil Market Deja Vu Triggers Predictions of a Return to $30 (BBG)
Pipelines: The Next Devastating Phase Of The Oil Bust (Forbes)
More Tigers Poached In India So Far This Year Than In All Of 2015 (AFP)
Small Mammal Shuts Down World’s Most Powerful Machine (NPR)
The Full Story Behind Bloomberg’s Attempt To “Unmask” Zero Hedge (ZH)
Turkey PM: Denying Visa-Free Travel Means Collapse Of EU Refugee Deal (DS)

Very funny. But the one country that has seen its currency gain global advantage of late is the US itself.

US Puts China, Japan on New Watch List for FX Practices (BBG)

The U.S. put economies including China, Japan and Germany on a new currency watch list, saying their foreign-exchange practices bear close monitoring to gauge whether they provide an unfair trade advantage over America. The inaugural list also includes South Korea and Taiwan, the Treasury Department said Friday in a revamped version of its semi-annual report on the foreign-exchange policies of major U.S. trading partners. The five economies met two of the three criteria used to judge unfair practices under a February law that seeks to enforce U.S. trade interests. Meeting all three would trigger action by the president to enter discussions with the country and seek potential penalties.

The new scrutiny of some of the world’s biggest economies comes amid a bruising presidential campaign in which candidates from both the Democratic and Republican parties have questioned the merits of free trade. Republican front-runner Donald Trump has promised to declare China a currency manipulator, and the latest report may fail to appease critics in Congress who say China’s practices have cost American manufacturing jobs. “We will continue to watch this process closely to ensure that the president squarely addresses currency manipulation and stands up for the American people,” House Ways and Means Chairman Kevin Brady, a Texas Republican, said in a statement on the Treasury report. The Treasury had already been monitoring countries for evidence of currency manipulation under a 1988 law.

In the latest report, the department concluded that no major trading partner qualified as a currency manipulator; the last country it labeled as such was China, in 1994. Under the new law, Treasury officials developed three criteria to decide if countries are being unfair: an economy having a trade surplus with the U.S. above $20 billion; having a current-account surplus amounting to more than 3% of its GDP; and one that repeatedly depreciates its currency by buying foreign assets equivalent to 2% of output over the year. China, Japan, Germany and South Korea were flagged as a result of their trade and current-account surpluses, the department said. Taiwan made the list because of its current-account surplus and persistent intervention to weaken the currency, according to the Treasury. If a country meets all three criteria, it could eventually be cut off from some U.S. development financing and excluded from U.S. government contracts.

Read more …

But then again, the idea is probably that attack is the best defense…

US Chides Five Economic Powers Over Policies (WSJ)

The Obama administration delivered a shot across the bow to Asia’s leading exporters and Germany for their economic policies and warned that a number of major economies around the globe could face intense pressure to engage in currency interventions to counter slow growth. The U.S. Treasury Department, in its semiannual currency report to Congress, called out China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Germany for relying on policies it says threaten to damage the U.S. and the global economy. The countries are cited in a new name-and-shame list that can trigger sanctions against offending trade partners under fresh powers Congress granted last year to address economic policies that threaten U.S. industries.

U.S. officials are increasingly concerned other countries aren’t doing enough to boost demand at home, relying too heavily on exports to bolster growth. Counting on cheap currencies as a shortcut to boosting exports can create risks across the global economy, as nations fight to stay ahead of their competitors. Over the past two decades, for example, many U.S. officials have accused China of using an undervalued currency to bolster its manufacturing sector. A cheaper currency makes products cheaper overseas. Although China has moved to address some of those worries, tension over currency policy more broadly has heightened in recent years, amid an unprecedented era of easy-money policies, weak global growth and rising exchange-rate volatility.

The failure of many countries to overhaul their economies after the financial crisis has prompted economists to slash global growth forecasts. Amplifying those worries, a 20% surge in the dollar’s value against a basket of major currencies over the past two years has slowed U.S. growth, as American products became more expensive to international buyers. The Obama administration said in its new report that the economic and currency policies of China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Germany are adding to the global economy’s problems. Absent stronger efforts by those countries to boost domestic demand, “global growth has suffered and will continue to suffer,” the Treasury Department said.

Read more …

This is not good. This is very bad.

UK Consumers Borrow At Fastest Rate In Over A Decade (R.)

British mortgage approvals fell for the first time in six months in March shortly before a new tax took effect, but consumers borrowed at the fastest rate in over a decade, Bank of England data showed. Mortgage approvals for house purchases numbered 71,357 in March, down from 73,195 in February. Analysts in a Reuters poll had forecast 74,500 mortgage approvals were made in March. British finance minister George Osborne announced in November that he would add a surcharge on the purchase of buy-to-let properties and second homes from April 1, in a move aimed to boost home ownership by first-time buyers. The news spurred an increase in buying of such properties in recent months before March’s slowdown as the deadline approached.

Net mortgage lending, which lags approvals, rose by £7.435 billion last month, the biggest increase since October 2007, before the global financial crisis hit and above all forecasts in the Reuters poll. Figures released earlier this week by the British Bankers’ Association, which are less comprehensive than those of the BoE, also showed a fall in mortgage approvals in March accompanied by a rise in mortgage lending as previously approved deals were carried out. The BoE said consumer credit grew by £1.883 billion last month, the strongest increase since March 2005 and a long way above the median forecast for an increase of £1.3 billion in the Reuters poll of economists. The rise was not a one-off: in the first quarter as a whole, consumer credit rose by an annualised 11.6%, the strongest increase since the first three months of 2015.

Read more …

The narrative: “..progress [in China] has been a let-down..”. But a 26% plunge in revenue is not just a ‘let-down’.

Apple Stock Suffers Worst Week Since 2013 (R.)

Apple on Friday ended its worst week on the stock market since 2013 as worries festered about a slowdown in iPhone sales and after influential shareholder Carl Icahn revealed he sold his entire stake. Shares of Apple, a mainstay of many Wall Street portfolios and the largest component of the Standard & Poor’s 500 index, have dropped 11% in the past five sessions. That shrank the technology behemoth’s market capitalization by $65 billion. Confidence in the company has been shaken since posting its first-ever quarterly decline in iPhone sales and first revenue drop in 13 years on Tuesday, although Apple investors pointed to the stock’s relatively low valuation as a key reason to hold onto the stock. “If you’re going to buy Apple, you have to buy it for the long term, because the next year or two are going to be very tough,” said Michael Yoshikami, chief executive of Destination Wealth Management.

Faced with lackluster sales of smartphones in the United States, Apple has bet on China as a major new growth engine, but progress there has been a let-down. Revenue from China slumped 26% during the March quarter and its iBooks Stores and iTunes Movie service in China were shut down last week after the introduction of new regulations on online publishing. Pointing to concerns that Beijing could make it difficult for Apple to conduct business in China, long-time Apple investor Carl Icahn told CNBC on Thursday that he had sold his stake in the company he previously described as a “no brainer” and undervalued. The selloff has left Apple trading at about 11 times its expected 12-month earnings, cheap compared to its average of 17.5 over the past 10 years. S&P 500 stocks on average are trading at 17 times expected earnings.

Read more …

China is fast becoming a one-dimensional nation.

Chinese Cities Dive Back Into Debt To Fuel Growth Even As Defaults Rise (R.)

With a nod from Beijing, China’s local governments have embarked on a massive new round of off-balance sheet debt financing, underpinning a fragile pick up in the economy but raising red flags on financial stability. The increased borrowing for an economy already swimming in debt adds to concerns about growing bubbles in certain major asset classes, such as real estate and commodities, and a bond market seeing a rise in corporate defaults. Economists say increasing public sector investment – most of it financed locally with debt – is behind improvements in China’s economy. First-quarter GDP rose at the weakest pace in seven years, but other data suggested growth was picking up in March. “With new infrastructure projects effectively all funded by debt and more consumer mortgages, the leverage problem and risks on the financial sector are rising,” Credit Suisse analysts wrote in a research report.

Local government financing vehicles (LGFVs), which Chinese cities use to circumvent official spending limits, raised at least 538 billion yuan ($83 billion) in bonds in the first quarter, up 178% from a year earlier and the highest quarterly issuance since June 2014, Everbright Securities said, quoting figures from privately held financial data provider WIND. Issuance in March alone was a monthly record of 287 billion yuan ($44.3 billion). China’s planning agency, the National Development and Reform Commission, declined to comment on the sharp rise in LGFV issuance. Most of the LGFV debt in the first quarter was made up of so-called enterprise bonds, which the NDRC oversees. Beijing had been trying to move LGFV debt on to municipal balance sheets via the 2014 creation of a municipal bond market. But policymakers retreated from this in the middle of 2015, easing borrowing restrictions as economic growth stumbled.

Consequently, LGFV issuance in the first quarter of 2016 was nearly 60% as large as the municipal bond issuance meant to replace it, up from just 37% in the fourth quarter of 2015, central clearinghouse and brokerage data shows. “In the second half of last year, the government raised the%age of project financing that can be funded with debt,” said Yang Zhao, chief China economist at Nomura in Hong Kong, helping spark the flurry of LGFV deals. “If they continue on, the debt-to-GDP ratio could actually go up quite rapidly. I don’t think the policy is sustainable, and you’ll see policymakers slow down the pace of (credit) easing in a quarter or two.”

Read more …

“..Your return is too low for your risk in China.”

China’s Stocks, Bonds, Yuan Are a Triple Losing Bet This Month (BBG)

For the first time in two years, China’s stocks, bonds and currency are all a losing proposition. The Shanghai Composite dropped 2.2% in April, the yuan fell 0.6% versus the dollar, while government and corporate bonds tumbled, with the five-year sovereign yield rising 27 basis points. Even a sudden revival in the nation’s commodities markets is looking fragile after frenzied speculation prompted exchanges to take measures to cool trading. The declines mark a reversal from March, when the benchmark equities gauge jumped 12% and the yuan rallied the most since 2010 as new credit surged. Improving data from industrial output to retail sales have led traders to pare back bets for more stimulus, while rising credit defaults are fueling the biggest selloff in junk debt since the data became available in 2014.

Deutsche Bank is one bull looking to reduce holdings of Chinese stocks on bets the economy will fail to reach the government’s growth targets and yuan declines will accelerate. “Clearly there was a turn in China,” said Sean Taylor, CIO for Asia Pacific for Deutsche Bank’s wealth-management unit in Hong Kong. “You’ve seen money in the A-share market going to property and commodities. We’ve been adding risk in the last few months and coming into the summer, we will take it away and wait for opportunities to add again. We are not yet ready for China’s structural story because earnings haven’t come through.” Investor interest in the world’s second-largest equity market is waning, with turnover on the Shanghai Stock Exchange falling to levels last seen regularly in 2014 and a gauge of volatility dropping to a 12-month low. Investments in stock-market funds fell by 89 billion yuan ($13.7 billion) in April.

[..] Government bonds are coming under pressure as inflation increased to the highest since mid-2014, while corporate notes are slumping amid a spate of defaults and a surprise move by state-owned China Railway Materials to halt its bond trading this month because of what the company called “repayment issues.” “We will definitely see more defaults and difficulties for corporates in issuing new bonds,” said David Gaud at Edmond de Rothschild Asset Management in Hong Kong. “Credit costs will go up and credit spreads will widen. Your return is too low for your risk in China.”

Read more …

Small potatoes for now, but at the same time there’s nothing in sight that could reverse the trend.

Hong Kong Underwater Mortgages Jump 15-Fold in Q1 as Prices Drop (BBG)

The number of Hong Kong homeowners with apartments worth less than their mortgages surged 15 times in the first quarter, according to the Hong Kong Monetary Authority. The number of negative-equity mortgages rose to 1,432, with a total value of HK$4.9 billion ($634 million), for the three months ended March, from 95 such home loans worth HK$418 million in the previous quarter, the city’s de facto central bank said on its website Friday.

Property prices in Hong Kong, which reached a record last year, have been sliding and sales tumbled to a 25-year low in February amid economic uncertainty. Home prices in the city slumped 13% from September to March, according to data compiled by Centaline Property Agency. The government is determined to tackle the housing problem and maintain a healthy development of the market, the city’s Rating and Valuation Department said in a report on Friday, while maintaining that it has no intention to withdraw demand-side property curbs.

Read more …

The one word that comes to mind: incestuous: “..The switch has been made possible by clearing houses’ designation as systemically-important utilities..”

Derivatives Houses To Open Accounts With Federal Reserve (FT)

Derivatives brokers choosing where to park their margin money will now have the option of the world’s most powerful central bank. The Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago has authorised three of the US’s largest clearing houses, run by CME Group and Intercontinental Exchange, and the Options Clearing Corporation, to open an account at the central bank. ICE’s permit is for its US credit derivatives clearing house. The change at the CME applies only to house cash belonging to brokers, its executives said on a conference call on Thursday. Margin posted by their customers will continue to be walled off and held by commercial banks or in US Treasury bonds, they confirmed.

The switch has been made possible by clearing houses’ designation as systemically-important utilities, which recognised the dangers to the financial system if they failed and gave them access to the Fed’s cash in an emergency. Tougher regulation of markets means they must now handle billions of dollars of futures and swaps trades every day. Traders who use derivatives must safeguard their deals against defaults with margin and collateral. For clearing brokers whose business has been damaged by years of low interest rates, keeping cash at the Fed could yield better returns. New market rules also authorised a regional Fed bank to maintain an account for designated clearing houses and pay earnings on any balance, as it already does for US banks subject to Fed oversight.

“When effective, we expect to pass a higher rate to clearing members for their house positions than we do today,” John Pietrowicz, CME’s chief financial officer, told analysts. Mr Pietrowicz said the accounts would open in the “next month or so”. While the majority of the returns would be passed back to clearing members, CME would also be able to “earn more” as cash balances increased. CME applied for access to a Fed account in 2014, a spokeswoman said, and would direct funds into an omnibus account for collateral and settlement services. The derivatives industry and its regulator have argued in recent years that tougher banking laws have hurt the brokerage business by making clearing uneconomical. “The resulting industry consolidation would increase systemic risk by concentrating derivatives clearing activities in fewer clearing member banks,” Walt Lukken, chief executive of the FIA industry association, testified to a US House agriculture subcommittee on Thursday.

Read more …

It might be best to ignore these numbers. Whatever BBG’s economist panel predicts is always wrong. Growth numbers are always manipulated. One good thing to take away is that consumer prices do not equal inflation.

Draghi Challenge Seen As Consumer Prices Fall More Than Forecast (BBG)

Mario Draghi’s policy challenge was highlighted once again on Friday, with the fastest economic growth in a year overshadowed by a renewed drop in consumer prices. The euro-area inflation rate fell to minus 0.2% in April, a worse out-turn than the 0.1% decline forecast by economists in a Bloomberg survey. It wasn’t all bad news for the ECB president however, with the economy expanding 0.6% in the first quarter and unemployment declining in March to the lowest since 2011. Draghi has said the situation in the 19-nation region is slowly improving, but that hasn’t assuaged his concerns about the inflation outlook. Policy makers cut interest rates and ramped up other stimulus last month, and the ECB president has signaled he’s willing to do even more to revive price growth. “Draghi has to be on alert – despite the solid growth momentum, inflation is not picking up,” said Michael Schubert at Commerzbank.

“The ECB will have to do more in the future, an extension of QE being most likely, but for the time being we’ll have to be patient.” Eurostat released the euro-area growth data about two weeks earlier than usual as it tries to make figures on output more timely, which could help inform the ECB’s policy-making. The new timing brings the region into line with the U.S. and U.K., which also publish first estimates within about a month of the end of the quarter. Based on the latest data, the euro area grew faster than both countries in the January-March period, with the U.K. expanding 0.4% and the U.S. by 0.5% on an annualized basis. National euro-zone data on Friday also provided some positive news, with both the French and Spanish economies expanding faster than expected. Growth in France accelerated to 0.5% from 0.3%, helped by investment and consumer spending, while Spain shrugged off a political deadlock that’s left it facing new elections to grow 0.8%.

Read more …

More economists entirely clueless on the link between debt and deflation. There’s tons of them, and they’re on ‘both sides of the debate’. And it doesn’t matter one iota how many ‘equations’ from their school books they can quote. Suggesting that increasing VAT rates -in incremental steps- will make people spend more ignores the reason why they don’t spend now: debt. In fact, VAT increases will make things more expensive, and that will result in less spending, not more. That’s what Japan has been showing us for 20 years.

Fighting Deflation With Unconventional Fiscal Policy (VoxEu)

In his Marjolin lecture on 4 February 2016, Mario Draghi asserted that “there are forces in the global economy that are conspiring to hold inflation down” (Draghi 2016). Eurostat confirmed that in February 2016 the annual inflation rate for the Eurozone was -0.2% (Eurostat 2016). On 10 March 2016, the ECB board agreed upon a set of largely unexpected monetary policy measures, with the aim of boosting inflation and growth in the Eurozone. These measures were inspired, among others, by thoughts in Bernanke (2010) and Blanchard et al. (2010).

The conundrum the Eurozone faces is finding a recipe to support inflation and ultimately consumption and economic growth in a setting in which traditional monetary policy measures are not viable, and governments cannot support growth with fiscal spending because of their large debt-to-GDP ratios. In this column, we discuss an alternative to monetary interventions, which we call unconventional fiscal policy. • Unconventional fiscal policy aims to increase growth and inflation in a budget neutral fashion, while keeping constant the tax burden on households.

Feldstein (2002) introduced the notion of unconventional fiscal policy measures at times of liquidity traps. Among several possible interventions Feldstein proposed: “A series of pre-announced increases in the value-added tax (VAT) to generate consumer price inflation, and hence increase private spending via intertemporal substitution.” In his words: “This [VAT] tax-induced inflation would give households an incentive to spend sooner rather than waiting until prices are substantially higher.” The intuition for this proposal is based on a simple logic: announcing higher prices in the future will increase current inflation expectations. Higher inflation expectations at times of fixed nominal interest rates should reduce real interest rates (Fisher equation), and lower real interest rates should increase households’ incentives to consume rather than save (Euler equation).

Because imposing higher VAT reduces households’ wealth – especially poorer households’ wealth – and might affect households’ labour supply, lower income taxes (or transfers for those households that do not pay any income tax) should accompany the increase in VAT. Designed this way, the policy measure would be budget-neutral for the government, as well as for households. It would incentivise households to consume immediately, jump-start the economy, and hence help the economy exit the slump. In his presidential address to the 2011 American Economic Association Annual Meeting, Bob Hall (2011) reiterated Feldstein’s ideas, and encouraged further research to understand the viability and effects of unconventional fiscal policy, both theoretically and empirically.

Read more …

Clueless: “..the current recovery could boost industry activity and slow the decline..”

Oil Market Deja Vu Triggers Predictions of a Return to $30 (BBG)

Oil’s climb above $45 a barrel is reassuring influential figures from BP to the IEA that the industry is finally recovering from the worst slump in a generation. Others say the market is about to fall into the same trap as last year. There’s a sense of deja vu at Commerzbank, BNP Paribas and UBS, who say crude’s gain of about 70% from a 12-year low in January resembles the recovery that took hold this time last year – only to sputter out by May as the supply glut endured. Prices will sink back towards $30 a barrel in the coming weeks, BNP and UBS warn. “There are dangerous parallels to 2015,” said Eugen Weinberg at Commerzbank. “The market already appears overheated and a correction is overdue.”

Last year, Brent crude rose 45% from January to almost $68 in May as traders anticipated a rapid decrease in U.S. output as drilling rigs were idled. The rally reversed when production kept rising, peaking at 9.61 million barrels a day in June 2015, a year after the price slump began. While drilling cutbacks eventually took their toll and the nation’s output slipped to 8.9 million barrels a day last week, the current recovery could boost industry activity and slow the decline.

Read more …

At least something’s trickling down…

Pipelines: The Next Devastating Phase Of The Oil Bust (Forbes)

When oil and natural gas prices began their swan dive in 2014 and continued their descent in 2015, the casualties seemed obvious. Exploration and production companies would need to file for bankruptcy protection and restructure en masse. Banks that financed these companies would need to write down bad loans and noteholders that invested in their high yield debt would be left holding the bag, or at least, the equity securities of the reorganized producers. The damage would also extend to the so-called “midstream” companies that transport oil and gas from wells to processing facilities and end-users downstream. It was thought that the damage to such midstream companies would be substantial, but manageable.

However, an ongoing legal tussle in the Sabine Oil and Gas bankruptcy proceeding in New York threatens to devastate an important corner of the $500 billion midstream industry and set off a new and entirely unexpected phase of the energy crisis. The dispute started in September 2015, when Sabine filed a motion in its bankruptcy case seeking authority to reject contracts it had entered into with two separate midstream operators that provided gas gathering and other services. Rejecting contracts and walking away from pre-bankruptcy obligations is commonplace for bankrupt debtors, but in the oil and gas industry many midstream companies thought their arrangements were protected from this risk.

That is because such gathering contracts “dedicate” the relevant oil and gas mineral interests and surrounding acreage to the midstream companies, which is intended to create a property interest known as a “real covenant” that “runs with the land.” Under longstanding bankruptcy principles, conveyances of real property—and certain associated rights—are not contracts that can be “rejected.” If the midstream companies prevailed in the argument that contractual dedications could create real covenants, then if a producer filed for bankruptcy protection or if its mineral rights were transferred to a new owner, the midstream company would retain its exclusive property right to gather oil and gas produced from the land and receive a fee for such services.

This argument seemed a strong one. However, after examining the applicable Texas property law at issue, on March 8, 2016, Judge Chapman issued a non-binding bench ruling holding that the legal requirements for treating these arrangements as real property interests were not satisfied and that they could be invalidated in bankruptcy through the contract rejection process. This ruling rocked the midstream world. It also came when similar attempts to reject gathering agreements were underway in the Quicksilver Resources and Magnum Hunter Resources bankruptcy cases in Delaware, leading to a sense that the midstream industry was under assault.

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We’re fast losing the conditions that gave us life. But we lack the intelligence to understand this. Which makes it only fitting. If you’re not smart enough to survive, then you won’t.

More Tigers Poached In India So Far This Year Than In All Of 2015 (AFP)

More tigers have been killed in India already this year than in the whole of 2015, a census showed Friday, raising doubts about the country’s anti-poaching efforts. The Wildlife Protection Society of India, a conservation charity, said 28 of the endangered beasts had been poached by April 26, three more than last year. Tiger meat and bones are used in traditional Chinese medicine and fetch high prices. “The stats are worrying indeed,” said Tito Joseph, programme manager at the group. “Poaching can only be stopped when we have coordinated, intelligence-led enforcement operations, because citizens of many countries are involved in illegal wildlife trade. It’s a transnational organised crime.”

Poachers use guns, poison and even steel traps and electrocution to kill their prey. India is home to more than half of the world’s tiger population with 2,226 in its reserves according to the last count in 2014. The figures come after a report by the WWF and the Global Tiger Forum said the number of wild tigers in the world had increased for the first time in more than a century to an estimated 3,890. The report cited improved conservation efforts, although its authors cautioned that the rise could be partly attributed to improved data gathering.

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“Nor are the problems exclusive to the LHC: In 2006, raccoons conducted a “coordinated” attack on a particle accelerator in Illinois. It is unclear whether the animals are trying to stop humanity from unlocking the secrets of the universe. Of course, small mammals cause problems in all sorts of organizations. Yesterday, a group of children took National Public Radio off the air for over a minute before engineers could restore the broadcast.”

Small Mammal Shuts Down World’s Most Powerful Machine (NPR)

A small mammal has sabotaged the world’s most powerful scientific instrument. The Large Hadron Collider, a 17-mile superconducting machine designed to smash protons together at close to the speed of light, went offline overnight. Engineers investigating the mishap found the charred remains of a furry creature near a gnawed-through power cable. “We had electrical problems, and we are pretty sure this was caused by a small animal,” says Arnaud Marsollier, head of press for CERN, the organization that runs the $7 billion particle collider in Switzerland. Although they had not conducted a thorough analysis of the remains, Marsollier says they believe the creature was “a weasel, probably.” (Update: An official briefing document from CERN indicates the creature may have been a marten.)

The shutdown comes as the LHC was preparing to collect new data on the Higgs Boson, a fundamental particle it discovered in 2012. The Higgs is believed to endow other particles with mass, and it is considered to be a cornerstone of the modern theory of particle physics. Researchers have seen some hints in recent data that other, yet-undiscovered particles might also be generated inside the LHC. If those other particles exist, they could revolutionize researcher’s understanding of everything from the laws of gravity, to quantum mechanics. Unfortunately, Marsollier says, scientists will have to wait while workers bring the machine back online. Repairs will take a few days, but getting the machine fully ready to smash might take another week or two. “It may be mid-May,” he says.

These sorts of mishaps are not unheard of, says Marsollier. The LHC is located outside of Geneva. “We are in the countryside, and of course we have wild animals everywhere.” There have been previous incidents, including one in 2009, when a bird is believed to have dropped a baguette onto critical electrical systems. Nor are the problems exclusive to the LHC: In 2006, raccoons conducted a “coordinated” attack on a particle accelerator in Illinois. It is unclear whether the animals are trying to stop humanity from unlocking the secrets of the universe. Of course, small mammals cause problems in all sorts of organizations. Yesterday, a group of children took National Public Radio off the air for over a minute before engineers could restore the broadcast.

Read more …

Though they have every right to defend themselves, something makes me wish Tyler Durden had counted to 10 before writing this. They could have limited it to: “Zero Hedge admits to having hired an unstable writer”, and left it at that. That’s all the Bloomberg attempt at smut warrants. As is, Zero Hedge poebably killed the secrecy as much as Bloomberg did.

The Full Story Behind Bloomberg’s Attempt To “Unmask” Zero Hedge (ZH)

Over the years, Zero Hedge has proven to be a magnet for media attention. It started years ago with a NY Magazine article published in September 2009 which first “unmasked” the people behind Zero Hedge with the “The Dow Zero Insurgency: The nothing-can-be-believed chaos of the financial crisis created a golden opportunity for a blog run by a mysterious ex-hedge-funder with a dodgy past and conspiracy theories to burn” in which we were presented as a bunch of “conspiracy theory” tin foil hat paranoid loons. We are ok with being typecast as “conspiracy theorists” as these “theories” tend to become “conspiracy fact” months to years later.

Others, such as “academics who defend Wall Street to reap rewards” had taken on a different approach, accusing the website of being a “Russian information operation”, supporting pro-Russian interests, which allegedly involved KGB and even Putin ties, simply because we refused to follow the pro-US script. We are certainly ok with being the object of other’s conspiracy theories, in this case completely false ones since we have never been in contact with anyone in Russia, or the US, or any government for that matter. We have also never accepted a dollar of outside funding from either public or private organization – we have prided ourselves in our financial independence because we have been profitable since inception. Which brings us to the latest “outing” of Zero Hedge, this time from none other than Bloomberg which this morning leads with “Unmasking the Men Behind Zero Hedge, Wall Street’s Renegade Blog” in which it makes the tacit admission that “Bloomberg LP competes with Zero Hedge in providing financial news and information.”

To an extent we were surprised, because while much of the “information” Bloomberg claims it reveals could have been discovered by anyone with a cursory 30 second google search, this time the accusation lobbed at Zero Hedge by Bloomberg was a new one: that we are capitalists who seek to generate profits and who have expectations from our employees. This comes from a media organization which caters to Wall Street and is run by one of the wealthiest people in the world. Underlying the entire Bloomberg article is disclosure based on a former employee at Zero Hedge. Traditionally we don’t reply to such media stories but in this case we’ll make an exception as there is a substantial amount of information Bloomberg has purposefully failed to add.

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Brussels will never be able to push through visa-free travel for nearly 80 million Turks. It’s simply not going to happen, not in a democratic way. Greece should be very afraid.

Turkey PM: Denying Visa-Free Travel Means Collapse Of EU Refugee Deal (DS)

Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said on Thursday evening that there are disappointments and the EU has un-kept promises in recent Turkish-EU relations and that Turkey will stop implementing the recent readmission agreement if the EU does not keep its word and grant visa-free travel to Turkish citizens. Speaking to a group of journalist who accompanied his visit to Qatar on Thursday, Davutoglu said that Turkey is successfully implementing the EU-Turkey deal from March 18 and that the deal has ended illegal migration to Europe.

“Last October there were 6,800 illegal migrants passing over to Europe from Turkey every day. This figure went down to 3,000 in January after we started to implement the terms of the November deal with EU. We made a game changing move with the March 18 deal and this figure is now about 25 per day. Moreover, in April there have been some days on which no migrant passed to Europe,” Davutoglu said, and asked: “Have you heard about the death of a migrant in the Aegean Sea since April 4?” Asserting that Turkey will fulfill all EU criteria for visa-free travel on Monday, Davutoglu said that Ankara will stop implementing the readmission agreement if the EU does not grant visa-free travel.

“These two issues are linked to each other and are part of the deal with the EU. This is a test for everyone. We think that we have passed our test,” Davutoglu said, and added that it is now time for the EU to fulfill its obligations. “[The EU] promised to invest €1 billion for refuges until end of July. We will see whether they keep their promise or not. We have experienced disappointment in the past. We will react negatively if these experiences reoccur,” Davutoglu said, adding that in 2004 the EU had promised to lift restrictions on Turkish Cypriots if they vote for the Annan Plan, but it did not keep its promise afterward.

Read more …

Dec 052014
 
 December 5, 2014  Posted by at 8:29 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , ,  5 Responses »


Arthur Rothstein President Roosevelt tours drought area, near Bismarck, North Dakota Aug 1936

OK, I don’t see a whole lot of comprehension out there, so let’s try and link the obvious: employment to shale to plummeting oil prices to the debt the shale industry was built on (and which is vanishing). I know, people look at the US jobs report today, and at the stock exchanges (Europe up some 2% across the board), and think salvation has landed on their doorstep, but the true story really is very different.

The EU markets are up because of US job numbers + the expectation that Draghi will launch a broad QE in January. But US jobs are far less sunny than meets the eye at first glance, and the Bundesbank will not all of a sudden do a 180º on ECB stimulus options. Ergo: a lot of European investors are set to lose a lot of money.

Anyone notice how quiet Angela Merkel has become about the QE debate? That’s because she doesn’t want to be caught stuck in a losing corner. Even if the Bundesbank would give in to Draghi, and chances are close to zero, there would be multiple court cases in Deutschland against that decision, and chances are slim the spend spend side would win them all. That’s the sort of quicksand an incumbent leader like Merkel wants to avoid at all cost.

But let’s leave Europe to cook itself, and its own goose too. What’s happening stateside is more important today. First, Marc Chandler has a good way of putting what I have said for as long as oil prices started testing ever deeper seas: the danger to the industry is not even so much falling prices, it’s financing both existing and future endeavors. Shale is a leveraged Ponzi, that’s its most urgent problem. Even if shale could break even at low prices, financiers and investors would still leave the building.

Both shale oil and gas have two big problems: 1) projects are based on highly optimistic returns, and 2) they are financed with very large and leveraged debt loads. With WTI prices now at $66 a barrel, and the first Bakken prices below $50 a barrel having been signaled, the entire industry starts resembling a house of cards, a game of dominoes and/or a pyramid shell (pick your favorite) more by the day. Chandler:

This Is Oil’s ‘Minsky Moment’

[..] Marc Chandler says the energy sector has just suffered its own Minsky moment. And while he doesn’t expect it to take down the stock market, the slide in oil could have a serious impact on the high-yield bond market. Minsky moment is a term coined by Pimco economist Paul McCulley in 1998, and it refers to a point when a period of rapid growth and risk-taking leads to a sudden turn lower and a crisis. Chandler, global head of markets strategy at Brown Brothers Harriman, says that is precisely what is happening in crude oil.

“Many people a couple years ago, a year ago, were saying that oil prices could only go up – ‘we’re in peak oil’ – meaning that we’re running out of the stuff. So a lot of things were leveraged based on oil prices that can only go up. Sort of like house prices—’they can only go up.’ So what happened is, because people held this as a deep conviction, they leveraged up,” Chandler said.” [..] “The big risk now to our shale is not going to be that the price of oil drops so far that it’s not going to be profitable,” he said. “The weakness, the Achilles’ heel, is that they don’t get the cheap funding anymore.”

Even Nature magazine this week gave it a shot, and tried to lend scientific credibility to a certain view of shale. Here’s the editorial:

The Uncertain Dash For Gas

[..] The International Energy Agency projected in November that global production of shale gas would more than triple between 2012 and 2040, as countries such as China ramp up fracking of their own shale formations.

[..] Academic journals are filled with earnest projections about future energy dynamics, which usually turn out to be wildly inaccurate. Even worse, governments and companies wager billions of dollars on dubious bets. This matters because investment begets further investment. As the pipework and pumps go in, momentum builds. This is what economists call technology lock-in.

[..] Nature has obtained detailed US Energy Information Administration (EIA) forecasts of production from the nation’s biggest shale-gas production sites. These forecasts matter because they feed into decisions on US energy policy made at the highest levels. Crucially, they are much higher than the best independent academic estimates. The conclusion is that the US government and much of the energy industry may be vastly overestimating how much natural gas the United States will produce in the coming decades.

[..] The EIA projects that production will rise by more than 50% over the next quarter of a century, and perhaps beyond, with shale formations supplying much of that increase. But such optimism contrasts with forecasts developed by a team of specialists at the University of Texas, which is analysing the geological conditions using data at much higher resolution than the EIA’s.

The Texas team projects that gas production from four of the most productive formations will peak in the coming years and then quickly decline. If that pattern holds for other formations that the team has not yet analysed, it could mean much less natural gas in the United States future.

And then an article:

Natural Gas: The Fracking Fallacy

When US President Barack Obama talks about the future, he foresees a thriving US economy fuelled to a large degree by vast amounts of natural gas pouring from domestic wells. “We have a supply of natural gas that can last America nearly 100 years,” he declared in his 2012 State of the Union address. [..]

Over the next 20 years, US industry and electricity producers are expected to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in new plants that rely on natural gas. And billions more dollars are pouring into the construction of export facilities that will enable the United States to ship liquefied natural gas to Europe, Asia and South America.

All of those investments are based on the expectation that US gas production will climb for decades, in line with the official forecasts by the US Energy Information Administration (EIA). As agency director Adam Sieminski put it last year: “For natural gas, the EIA has no doubt at all that production can continue to grow all the way out to 2040.”

But a careful examination of the assumptions behind such bullish forecasts suggests that they may be overly optimistic, in part because the government’s predictions rely on coarse-grained studies of major shale formations, or plays. Now, researchers are analysing those formations in much greater detail and are issuing more-conservative forecasts. They calculate that such formations have relatively small ‘sweet spots’ where it will be profitable to extract gas.

The results are “bad news”, says Tad Patzek, head of the University of Texas at Austin’s department of petroleum and geosystems engineering, and a member of the team that is conducting the in-depth analyses. With companies trying to extract shale gas as fast as possible and export significant quantities, he argues, “we’re setting ourselves up for a major fiasco”.

The scientific ring to it is commendable, but this misses quite a few things. They cite David Hughes, but leave out the work of Rune Likvern, without whom in my opinion no true – scientific or not – view of the shale industry is complete. But okay, they tried, in their own way, and their conclusions may be a bit softened, but they’re still miles apart from those of either the industry’s PR, or the EIA.

And then we move to the next link: that between shale and jobs. Because that’s where falling oil prices start to go from joy for the whole family to something entirely different.

What happens if the US shale industry crumbles under the weight of its own leverage? Most people will probably think: we’ll just start buying from that oversupplied world market again. But it’s not that easy, that leaves out one big issue. American jobs.

And we can take it straight from there to today’s hosannah heysannah BLS report. Which, however, has issues that don’t show up at the surface. Tyler Durden:

Full-Time Jobs Down 150K, Participation Rate Remains At 35 Year Lows

While the seasonally-adjusted headline Establishment Survey payroll print reported by the BLS moments ago may be indicative of an economy which the Fed will soon have to temper in an attempt to cool down, a closer read of the November payrolls report shows several other things that were not quite as rosy. First, the Household Survey was nowhere close to confirming the Establishment Survey data, suggesting jobs rose only by 4K from 147,283K to 147,287K, and furthermore, the breakdown was skewed fully in favor of Part-Time jobs, which rose by 77K while Full-Time jobs declined by 150K.

And then for those keeping tabs on the composition of the labor force, the same adverse trends indicated over the past 4 years have continued, with the participation rate remaining flat at 62.8%, essentially the lowest print since 1978, driven by a 69K worker increase in people not in the labor force.

So according to the BLS Household Survey, the US lost 150,000 jobs, while the Establishment Survey, prepared by the same BLS, shows a gain of 321,000 jobs. Yay! pARty! But we’ve been familiar with all the questions surrounding the jobs reports for a long time, so that’s not all that interesting anymore.

Still, when you see that again most of the jobs that were allegedly created are low paid service jobs, and that wages are not going anywhere, you have to wonder what is really happening. Well, this. The vast majority of new US jobs since 2008/9 have come from energy- and related industries, which makes them a dangerously endangered species now oil prices or down 40% and falling.

Tyler Durden ran the following on Wednesday, and I think this is very relevant today:

Jobs: Shale States vs Non-Shale States

Consider: lower oil prices unequivocally “make everyone better off”, Right? Wrong. First: new oil well permits collapse 40% in November; why is this an issue? Because since December 2007, or roughly the start of the global depression, shale oil states have added 1.36 million jobs while non-shale states have lost 424,000 jobs.

The ripple effects are everywhere. If you think about the role of oil in your life, it is not only the primary source of many of our fuels, but is also critical to our lubricants, chemicals, synthetic fibers, pharmaceuticals, plastics, and many other items we come into contact with every day. The industry supports almost 1.3 million jobs in manufacturing alone and is responsible for almost $1.2 trillion in annual gross domestic product. If you think about the law, accounting, and engineering firms that serve the industry, the pipe, drilling equipment, and other manufactured goods that it requires, and the large payrolls and their effects on consumer spending, you will begin to get a picture of the enormity of the industry.

Simply put, this means 9.3 million, or 93% of the 10 million jobs created since the recession/depression trough, are energy related.

The links above, jobs to shale to oil prices, are intended to give people an idea of what’s in store if oil prices stay where they are or fall more. It’s 4 to 12 for US shale, and its saving grace is nowhere to be seen. And if 93% of all new American jobs since the recession, even if they are burgerflipping ones, come from the oil and gas industry, what’s going to become of either of the BLS reports?

I’ve been saying for weeks that lower oil prices would not be a boon but a scourge for the US economy, for several different reasons, and this is a big one. The losses to investors, the restructurings and bankruptcies, and perhaps even the bailouts, are a very much interconnected and crosslinked other. There’s no resilience – left – in a system like this, it bets all on red, and that makes it terribly brittle.

Nov 202014
 
 November 20, 2014  Posted by at 10:10 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , ,  9 Responses »


Jack Delano Colored drivers entrance, U.S. 1, NY Avenue, Washington, DC Jun 1940

It’s funny how things roll at times. When I wrote yesterday’s Making Money While The World Burns, and quoted Hugh Hendry, one of my heroes – well, close, he’s not Ali, but I love the man for his brain -, I hesitated, but thought his words were a great way to start a discussion on what people do when faced with certain conundrums. I certainly never meant to attack Hugh, though words can always be construed to mean things they were not meant to mean.

David Stockman picked up the essay (Jim Kunstler told me to use that word) and retitled it Making Money While The World Burns – The Troubling Case Of Hugh Hendry. Bless David for all the great work he does, and I would never even suggest he shouldn’t add that bit, that’s entirely his prerogative, but I myself would never call Hugh Hendry a ‘troubling case’.

I merely wanted to get a discussion going, and maybe to get people thinking about what they choose and why. Not to judge anyone, who am I to do that, but to get people to ask why they act the way they do, and what it is that makes them tick.

If I would want to judge anyone, it would be the politicians and central bankers who pretend they serve the public and then turn on a dime and screw that same public. Hugh Hendry doesn’t pretend to be anything he’s not. However, I can still ask questions about why he chooses to do what he does, and use that as a mirror, for lack of a better term, to gauge where I stand, what I think, and put that out there for my readers.

But I’m not Hugh Hendry, I’m not a hedge-fund manager, and I don’t morally judge people or tell them what to do and what not. That would be like starting a religion, separating right from wrong for other people, and I have no design on that. I’ll admit I thought about that religion thing in the past, but that was because it seemed the greatest way to get girls, not because I want to tell anyone what to think or do. As things went, I started a band, and that worked just fine, thank you very much.

Short story long, Zero Hedge’s Tyler Durden today posted a video and text excerpts of Hugh explaining his mindset, and included snippets of my ‘essay’, saying “Raúl Ilargi Meijer has a different perspective on Hendry’s change of tack”. And I don’t even know that I do. I’m just less focused on the short term, and the potential financial profits involved, than Hugh is. As I said yesterday, I think about the 50% increase in homeless kids in the States and the 50%+ jobless rates in southern Europe, and wonder if that justifies the drive for monetary profits.

But that’s just me. And I find it curious enough that that moral divide is never being breached in all the stuff I read every single day. It seems so obvious to ask that question. But that’s not the same as saying I judge Hugh Hendry, or anyone else, for not bringing it up, let alone living up to any conclusions I draw from it for myself. If there’s anything we need around here, it’s independent minds and neurons, not identical replicas.

So, Hugh talks about how he was a ‘bear’ and saw the error of his ways and is now a bull. But that’s just in as far as his ‘duties’ towards his hedge-fund clients are concerned. It doesn’t say anything about his longer term expectations. Which, I venture, have not changed, but merely been relocated to more remote locations of his – pretty brilliant – mind. And the gist of my question is, I guess, how other people process that short vs longer term divergence, if they are smart enough to see what Hugh does.

What Hugh Hendry implies that he got ‘wrong’ is that a few years ago, he saw, and understood, what was happening, and acted on it. And it’s not that he misunderstood, but that his acting on it did not garner the short-term profits he claims he’s tasked with making – as a fund manager -.

Because the financial system – as Hugh knows – may be screwed three ways to Sunday, but central banks have prevented it from showing its – fatal – injuries, by dressing it in layer upon layer of gauge and band-aids made of and paid for by the real economy’s present and – especially – future wealth and labor.

In the end that means you’re making money off of other people’s misery, be it in the present or the future. And that is a stark choice. In my view. If an economy stops growing, the only profit opportunities left involve taking something away from someone. Obviously, there’s tons of people who’ll swear our economy is still growing, but they’ll find neither yours truly nor Hugh Hendry in their camp.

Here’s Tyler Durden’s piece, with Hugh Hendry video and partial transcript:

Hugh Hendry Live 1: “It Felt Like The Sun Only Rose To Humiliate Me”

In the first of three interviews with MoneyWeek’s Merryn Somerset Webb, Hugh Hendry, manager of the Eclectica Fund, talks about what it takes to be a good hedge fund manager – and how he learned to stop worrying and love central banks. Key excerpts (click link above for full transcript):

MSW: What makes a successful hedge-fund manager and whether you are, under that definition, a successful manager.

Hendry: I think I’ve always answered that question by relating back to the ability to conceive of a contentious posture. I think if I was to quote from Fight Club, I think there’s a famous saying “Would you rather…” my children would say ,“Would you rather upset God or have God just ignore you?” There’s a degree to which being a successful macro-manager is upsetting, not only God, but to the rest of the world, if you will. By being out there with the articulation of qualitatively intelligent argument, which just isn’t shared by the majority. But which can stand the test of time and come to actually define the future. That is what global macro is all about.

With regard to language the notion of ‘bullish’ and ‘bearish’, I think, does an injustice to the complexity of the arguments that are necessary to construct a global macro hedge fund. I think if I had my time again, I would have been saying that we’re actually, perhaps, guilty of the misconstruing of a bull market in equities, for what is actually the ongoing degradation in the soundness of the fiat monetary system. I think that’s what I was trying to say.

MSW: You had given in to a bull market that you had refused to accept previously.

Hendry: The last time I was really angry was late 2010-2011. Where the market, in its wisdom, had yet to configure the changing economic landscape, and it was perceiving that the economy in Europe and elsewhere was recovering. I thought that was just insane, that we weren’t capturing the kind of deflationary zeitgeist that was approaching. I have to say when I look back in the last three years it feels as if the sun only rose each day to humiliate me after that point.[..]

But the mea culpa, that I think is very necessary in that I found myself unable to forgive the Federal Reserve and the other central banks for, if you will, bailing out Wall Street from the excess of 2008. I just couldn’t get over it. I luxuriated in the polemics of Marc Faber and James Grant and Nassim Taleb, in our own country, Albert Edwards, et al. I luxuriated as they ranted and it was fine for them to rant. But I am charged with the responsibility of making money and not being some moral guardian and certainly not a moral curmudgeon. I had to get over that. So again, back to my infamous letter of last year.

That was cathartic for me to say “You know what? I get it.” I think if we’re going to try and explain the qualitative arguments behind why we are more receptive to the notion of not only left tails where markets can fall, but the right-hand tail of the expression, where markets can actually continue to rise if not to accelerate. [..] So I really feel very, very isolated from their view of the world. Arguably, we’re talking about the here and now and the future’s a long time. But in the future, I’m sure our paths can converge once more.

MSW: Why do you think that [macro funds] as whole is failing to make money? What’s going on there?

Hendry: I can reflect on my own difficulties, if you will. What I’ve found is that macro is distinguished, I believe, by superior risk control. It’s almost analogous to a disaster insurance programme. In 2008, all the good macro managers, they made you money. That’s what you pay them for. The world became profoundly unsettling and you cashed in your insurance policy. Today, I question the relevancy of that disaster insurance. In a world where the central banks seem to have your back, seem to be underwriting risks and global asset prices, do you require that intense scrutiny of risk?

MSW: So your basic point here is that if the central banks have your back, there’s no need to have the same kind of risk controls that you used to have.

Hendry: There is less need. Less need. I tell you, I was at a conference with some of the great and the good global macro managers in September in New York and I asked them all the question, “If the S&P is down 12% what do you do? Are you selling more or are you buying?” Guess what? They’re all buying. So the central banks have created a behavioural tic which is becoming self-reinforcing and I believe we saw another manifestation of that behaviour in October.

But Raúl Ilargi Meijer has a different perspective on Hendry’s change of tack…

Hendry, I think, is as bearish (or negative) about the – future of the – world as he has been for a long time, only he’s decided to see things from his fund manager point of view, and to ride the crest of the waves the central banks have tsunamied towards our shores. He’s chosen to make a buck off of them waves, even as he’s aware of the damage they’ll will do once they hit land. In the exact same way as a surfer who sees a tsunami as merely a set of great waves to ride on. And, no value judgment involved, but that’s not what I see.

He sees the world going to hell in a handbasket (and Hendry recognizes that very much, that’s not why he shifted gears from bear to bull) and his response is to grab as much money and wealth as he can (for his investors … ). [..]

Hugh Hendry sees the world in an extremely bearish way, he sees hell, the handbasket, brimstone and far worse. But he wants to profit – in name of his investors (?!) – from the very mechanism that drives the world there: the power central banks and governments have been allotted, and the way they use it to protect the interests of investors, banks, insurance companies and uber rich individuals, all at the expense of booting the 90% who make up the real world and the real economy, ever deeper into the mud.

Seeking to profit from that is a choice. Hendry makes it, and so do many others, even many inside the 90%. Who mistakenly dream they’ll be able to hold on to those profits (they’ll wake up yet, and wish they had before). The whole idea of scraping out what you can before the tsunami hits is not my thing.

I don’t think Hugh Hendry and I see the world through hugely different eyes at all. It’s just that since I don’t have uber rich clients I tell myself I need to make even richer, I have the liberty to wonder what Hendry’s choices mean for the bottom layers of society. And yes, I also think that societies cease to function if the poor get too poor. Not very Hobbesian or Darwinian, am I?

By all means, let’s keep the conversation going, and let everyone decide for him-her-self where (s)he stands. Hugh Hendry thinks in money terms, and I tend to feel that’s a waste of a brilliant mind. But that’s not a judgment. It’s merely a question. And a pretty well defined one at that: Is a brilliant mind better engaged making money for the rich or trying to alleviate the sorrows of the poor? I can’t answer that for you.