Case Closed: Masks Don't Work

A major new gold standard Cochrane review study has come to a conclusion that only the utterly brainwashed would consider at all shocking at this point:  masks don't really work to stop the spread of respiratory viruses.  Never did, and never will.  Not even the vaunted N95.  Handwashing is likely modestly effective, but masks are basically a joke overall, and not a very funny one either.

This concurs with over a century of research that came out overwhelmingly in support of the anti-mask side of the debate.  In fact, by 1919 it was practically settled science that these devices aren't anywhere near what they were cracked up to be, a consensus which prevailed until March 2020.  Then the pandemic narrative took over and turned the science upside down for nearly three years straight, while any studies were to the contrary were systematically file-drawered for far longer than those supporting the narrative.  And now the entire pandemic narrative has collapsed faster than formerly healthy young athletes on the field after being jabbed.

We recently noted how the ever-insightful Ian Miller has so thoroughly debunked, deboned, sliced, diced, and julienned the pro-mask arguments, and laid waste to their utterly scorched remains for good.  And be sure check out the excellent Fargo study from Josh Stevenson et al. about masks for kids as well, likely the very best one yet, with the very least biases or confounding.  Spoiler alert:  masks STILL don't work.  Not for kids, not for adults, not for no one.

Oh, and let's not forget the dreaded Foegen Effect as well.  And other harms as well, see here.  That literally makes masks WORSE than useless.  Jettison them!

To the anti-mask side:  you are now hereby overwhelmingly vindicated, and really always have been in fact.  You have literally passed the biggest functional IQ test in all of modern history.  To the pro-mask side:  we are still waiting for you to apologize.  Yesterday.  And to those who switched jerseys anytime after February 2022 (that is, only when it became socially acceptable to do so), you are fooling no one.

QED

UPDATE:  Some may pedantically point out that "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence", therefore "no one can really say" that masks don't work.  True, you cannot (definitively) prove a negative.  But given the totality of the research and real-world evidence, it would be slothful induction (if not magical thinking as well) to still believe that masks have any sort of net benefit at all. If they did have a net benefit, it would have been self-evident long ago.  We need to see the forest for the trees.

"But...but...they worked in Japan!" See here for a good debunking of that myth as well.

And in case the pro-masker zealots pathetically trot out the fatally flawed Boston school mask study in desperation, rest assured that Ian Miller has successfully laid waste to that one as well.  And so has the ever-insightful Emily Burns, as well as Dr. Tracy Beth Hoeg, one of the authors of the Fargo study. 

Oh, and another study found that masks in HOSPITALS make no difference to infection rates.  Thus, if they don't even work in hospitals with all of their universal multilayered precautionary measures, they simply don't work at all, period.

UPDATE 2:  A re-analysis of the infamous Boston mask study has now thoroughly debunked it.

UPDATE 3:  For more on the harms of masks, see here.

UPDATE 4:  And another school masking study can be found here as well, co-authored by the aforementioned Dr. Tracy Beth Hoeg.  Again, surprise surprise, masks STILL don't work.  Period. 

Inflation Is Dead. Long Live Deflation!

If you did a double-take reading that headline, you're not alone.  As strange as it may sound, inflation has already been beaten for the most part, and now the underlying trend has shifted in the opposite direction.  First, the second derivative of price level (with respect to time) has turned negative many months ago, then the first derivative turned negative on a monthly basis more recently in December.  Inflation has apparently peaked in June 2022.  And consumer demand has been falling for many months now as well.  While we had two consecutive quarters of real GDP growth following two consecutive quarters of real GDP shrinking, we are still not out of the woods for a potential recession in 2023 either.  There is always a lag before the actual effects of monetary policy kicks in, usually at least two quarters, sometimes as long as four quarters.

The M2 money supply literally shrank for the first time since 1960 as well in 2022, albeit following an unprecedentedly high growth rate in 2020-2021.  Usually a shrinking money supply does NOT bode very well for the economy.  And that is a result of both fiscal and monetary tightening in 2022.

And while the labor market remains "tight", there is no real "wage-price spiral", and never was in recent years, since while wages rose, they rose less quickly than prices did overall.  Thus, no spiral happened. 

And while China's reopening will stoke pent-up demand for goods and services globally, which is inflationary, that same reopening will un-snarl any remaining snarls in the global supply chains, which is disinflationary, especially now that their "exit wave" of the virus has finally peaked and fallen.

After all, as we have noted before, the REAL root cause of the recent inflationary episode was the repeated and protracted global supply chain disruptions caused by the lockdowns and shutdowns, which of course greatly shrank supply of many goods and services.  And the unprecedented levels of money printing to paper over the predictable consequences, which (upon reopening in the West) stoked demand for goods and services at the same time that supply remained reduced, was like gasoline on the fire, worsening the supply-demand mismatch.  Of course, without printing all that money, and/or without eventually reopening, there would have been a full-blown Greatest Depression, and the architects of the lockdowns and shutdowns would have all been sent to the guillotine within a matter of weeks.

(The Russia-Ukraine war clearly didn't help, as both the war and the sanctions created artificial scarcity of oil and gas, but the general inflationary pressures were of course already there before the war began.)

Honestly, had the entire world simply "adopted the flu strategy" from the start of the pandemic, the supply chain disruptions and other economic effects would really not have been any worse than the 1957-1958 or 1968-1969 flu pandemics.  (Yes, you read that right:  we literally had WOODSTOCK in the middle of a pandemic!)  And while some fiscal and monetary stimulus would probably have been necessary, it would have been only a fraction of what was done.

It's not like the FERAL Reserve can actually do anything about supply chains anyway.  Hiking interest rates and/or shrinking the money supply can obviously quash demand, of course, but does absolutely zilch about the underlying cause of the inflation, which turned out to be largely transitory.

Thus, all signs strongly imply that the FERAL Reserve needs to stand down and stop QT and stop hiking interest rates, and start cutting them yesterday.  Seriously.  But given their tendency to overcorrect, they probably will do so in that regard.  And given how deflation is more harmful than inflation, they need to answer the "clue phone" before it's too late!

And Congress may even need to get a new round of stimulus checks ready as well, since they may be needed sooner rather than later to cure an incipient deflationary spiral.  And of course, they need to stop playing "chicken" with the debt ceiling yesterday!

UPDATE:  And now that the FERAL Reserve raised rates yet again, the above applies a fortiori now.

Don't Do "The Volcker" Again! (Part Deux)

As the FERAL Reserve is still committed to raising interest rates no matter the cost, even if it means deliberately engineering a recession, in an attempt to quash the worst inflation in 40 years, we would like to warn them as follows:

Stand. Down. NOW.  And prepare to reverse course a full 180 degrees, and soon.  Especially since the latest figures show that prices actually FELL slightly in December.  And with a looming recession all but certain now, they should be CUTTING rates now.

And the same goes for their Quantitative Tightening (QT) as well, which of course amplifies the effect of raising interest rates by literally sucking money out of the economy, thus shrinking the money supply.  And it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that, since there is exponentially more debt in the overall economy in 2022 compared with 1982, even a fairly modest increase in interest rates can have a much larger adverse effect now compared to back then.

Paul Volcker, former Fed chairman, (in)famously raised interest rates as high as 20% in the early 1980s, and it technically "worked" to quash inflation.  But it came at a terrible price:  not only a pair of really bad recessions with millions of jobs lost, but the resulting damage also inflicted serious sequelae upon the broader working class that persist to this day as well, both in the USA as well as abroad.  The first time, one could say it was naive at best.  Doing "The Volcker" a second time, however, would be downright stupid, if not utterly malicious, narcissistic, and even sadistic.

And the USA was actually one of the luckier countries.  Canada, for example, set interest rates even higher still, and kept them higher for longer than the USA, and they got even higher and more persistent unemployment as result, and inflation persisted longer as well.  It was a complete lose-lose proposition for them.  So don't do it again!

As the old adage goes, when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.  And this particular tool is like swatting a fly with a sledgehammer, or burning down the house to roast a pig.  And worse, it is fundamentally the wrong tool for the job.  Most inflations, including this one especially, are caused by shortages of goods and services.  The only real cure is to solve the shortages, something higher interest rates simply cannot do no matter HOW high they are (at best it reduces demand and squeezes "inflationary psychology" out the system, and at worst it simply exacerbates the "cost-push" side of inflation when kept too high for too long).

And Rodger Malcolm Mitchell notes that governments can easily solve shortages by purchasing at a premium whatever goods or services happen to be in short supply, which incentives production, and then re-selling them (or giving them away) at a loss.  Higher interest rates do absolutely zilch for that.

Of course, we would not have gotten into this situation had our "leaders" not imposed  lockdowns in a futile attempt to control an airborne respiratory virus, and then tried to paper over the inevitable and predictable consequences by printing ludicrous and unprecedented amounts of money that overwhelmingly went toward further enriching the already ultra-rich.  Had we instead adopted the time-tested "flu strategy" from the get-go, with or without a more moderate stimulus package for We the People, we would not have gotten in this predicament in the first place.  Yes, there may have been some leftover problems in the bond markets and especially the repo market from 2019, and the virus would have been somewhat disruptive to the economy, (like the 1957 and 1968 flu pandemics), but nothing even in the same league as what happened with lockdowns.  And from what we have learned the hard way, death rates would have been about the same or even lower.

(No really, cumulative excess all-cause death rates for countries, states, and communities that largely ignored the virus, or at least eschewed lockdowns and more-restrictive NPIs, were actually within error bounds or even lower than for their much stricter neighbors or national/regional averages.)

When you try to "burn the village to save it", eventually the village will return the favor.  It is simply the law of cause and effect, also known as karma.  Sooner or later, you always reap what you sow.  And as the saying goes, hindsight is quite literally 2020.  Will the Fed answer the "clue phone"?

BONUS POINTS:  The Brownstone Institute has an excellent article discussing how the combination of lockdowns and the aftermath (forced massive supply crunch) + stimulus (massive demand boost), followed by the Russia-Ukraine war and sanctions, unleashed the worst inflation in 40 years.  You mean you can't just paper over a massive supply crunch with more demand?  And that war and sanctions are both negative-sum games in which everyone loses to one degree or another?  Gee, who woulda thunk it?

The money supply has been shrinking at a record pace in recent months, thanks to the FERAL Reserve's Quantitative Tightening.  Usually a shrinking money supply portends recession, historically speaking. 

Of course, the other elephant in the room is corporate greed.  They ultra-rich and mega-corporations are taking in record profits, so it is not simply that they are passing higher costs of doing business onto the customers.  An excess profits tax would be the best way to curtail this sort of inflation, as would a one-off wealth tax on the very richest folks, much like several countries did after WWII.  Keep in mind that Trump himself actually proposed such a wealth tax back in 1999, and not a trivial one either, so the MAGA crowd would be truly hypocritical to oppose it.

FEBRUARY UPDATE:  It looks like inflation is largely beaten now, and the real looming threat is deflation. 

2023: The Year Of Reckoning

It's 2023 now, and the ever-insightful Michael P. Senger wrote an excellent article about how this should be the year of reckoning.  Reckoning for what, you ask?  Well, here is a partial list:

• Lockdowns
• Forced antisocial distancing 
• Forced school closures
• Forced business closures 
• Mask mandates 
• Jab mandates and passports 
• Jab injuries and deaths 
• "Run death is near" and other harmful snake oil
• Midazolam
• Denial of actual effective treatments and prophylaxis 
• Blatant censorship and blacklisting
• Lies, lies, and more lies
• Tyranny
• Reverse Robin Hood Economics
• Worst inflation in 40 years
• And finally, having the GALL to gaslight everyone about it

In a nutshell, CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY. And no, that is NOT an exaggeration at all, with the body count alone being proof positive.  The powers that be, and their sycophantic lackeys, absolutely must be held accountable, yesterday, with NO AMNESTY.

Otherwise, this will only happen again and again in the future.  Precedents have a way of sticking around.

The Pandemic's Best Kept Secret

The "public health authorities" sure have some 'splaining to do.  Like, yesterday.  Seriously.

From the ever-insightful Dr. Steve Kirsch's recent Substack article, in a nutshell:

"Special mention for the fact that the entire pandemic was completely unnecessary. 3 supplements work better than vaccines and are safe and cheap. All the lockdowns, masking, vaccines, mandates, social distancing, etc. were all unnecessary. And even though this is now known, nobody will pay attention since it will make them look bad.

"Uptake of vitamin C, vitamin D and zinc were significantly associated with the reduced risk of infection and severity of COVID-19 (OR: 0.006 (95% CI: 0.03–0.11) (p = 0.004)) and (OR: 0.03 (95% CI: 0.01–0.22) (p = 0.005))... this study was conducted before the start of mass vaccination against COVID-19 in Bangladesh."

https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/14/23/5029

That's over 150x decreased risk just from taking these 3 dirt-cheap supplements that everyone has known to be safe + effective for decades! And it was all pre-vax, it was for the original Wuhan strain that was most dangerous!"

Read that again, and again, and again and let it sink in.  Vitamin C, Vitamin D, and Zinc.  Those three things alone would have largely defanged and declawed this overall already relatively humdrum virus to begin with, which was basically a classic super-flu at worst, and never an existential threat.

How long did they sweep this under the rug?

But wait, there's more....

And let's not forget Quercetin either, per the late Dr. Vladimir Zev Zelenko.  (And the rest of the Zelenko Protocol as well, as needed, which includes HCQ and later IVM as well, also routinely censored.)

In a world of Lysenkos, be a Zelenko.

And of course Niacin (Vitamin B3), NAC (N-acetylcysteine), and Melatonin per Dr. Dmitry Kats.  He probably got the very most censorship of all.

And thiamine (Vitamin B1), per the late Bill Sardi.  And Resveratrol, Fisetin and Turmeric as well.

And nasal irrigation (such as Xlear nasal spray) and mouthwash too.

And aspirin instead of acetaminophen or ibuprofen. 

And perhaps even COFFEE!  Yes, really. 

Lockdowns, masks, closures, antisocial distancing, event cancellations, gathering bans and restrictions, NPIs, panic, hospital denials, ventilators, "run death is near", the magic rebound pill, and of course the jabs, were thus all completely unnecessary from the get-go, and all did far more harm than good on balance.

And last but not least, the reprehensible (and wholly unnecessary) way that nursing homes were mishandled has left an utterly indelible stain on the honor of so many "leaders", from certain big shot state governors to various presidents and prime ministers to healthcare bureaucrats to anyone else who crafted or carried out these evil protocols.

If that doesn't make you feel RIPPED OFF, check your pulse 'cause you might be dead!  That is, you might have been one of the millions of victims of this medical malpractice (at best) writ very, very large.  Scratch that, it's more like GENOCIDE or DEMOCIDE.

If it weren't so tragic, this would be the very most satisfying "I told you so!" in all of recorded history.

QED

UPDATE:  It gets even worse still for the powers that be, apparently, when one also notes that the standard of care for patients with post-viral pneumonia was abruptly changed worldwide, at or before the beginning of the pandemic.  And not for the better, either. The change was to no longer give antibiotics for pneumonia if Covid was thought to be the cause, even though it was very likely that many if not most of such deaths were from secondary bacterial infections.  And antibiotics would have been given had they not been inexplicably removed from the protocols, and thus deliberately withheld from patients for political reasons.  A good chunk of excess deaths could thus easily be attributed to that alone.

And don't forget to read the eye-opening Spartacus Letter if you haven't already.

Have A Safe And Happy Holiday Season

(This is a public service announcement)

It is that time of year again when the holidays are upon us, and many of us Americans (and around the world) will be celebrating with alcohol and/or other substances, pretty much back to normal now.  We at the True Spirit of America Party would like to remind everyone to be safe and celebrate responsibly.  There is absolutely no excuse for drunk driving at any age, period.  We cannot stress this enough.  It's very simple--if you plan to drive, don't drink, and if you plan to drink, don't drive.  It's really not rocket science, folks.  And there are numerous ways to avoid mixing the two.  Designate a sober driver, take a cab, use public transportation, crash on the couch, or even walk if you have to.  Or stay home and celebrate there.  Or simply don't drink--nobody's got a gun to your head.  Seriously, don't be stupid about it!  And the same goes for other psychoactive substances as well, and a fortiori when combined with alcohol.

ARRIVE ALIVE, DON'T DRINK AND DRIVE!!!   If you plan to drink, don't forget to think!  The life you save may very well be your own.

Dear Xi Jinping (And The Rest Of The CCP) (Part Deux)

It's great that you FINALLY, though belatedly, ended your inane and insane Zero Covid policy after the largest protests in Chinese history since Tiananmen Square.  Now is the time for you to lift ALL restrictions, cold turkey.  At least before Christmas at the very latest.  Period.  And use your infinite central bank digital currency (CBDC) to make your people as financially whole as possible, unconditionally, regardless of their social credit score.  That's right:  pay them reparations for all you put them through.  And give extra reparations to the Uighurs too.

Early treatment and prophylaxis are the only thing that works for this virus, and you know it.  Now roll those out ASAP.  You know you have those available. 

Oh, and do you remember a certain Dr. Dmitry Kats?  You should, because he sure remembers personally telling your government way back in MARCH 2020 (!) about the wonders of high-dose flush Niacin as early treatment and prophylaxis against this virus.  So either a) you deliberately ignored him and suppressed the evidence for political reasons, or b) you surreptitiously used Niacin to treat the virus (perhaps along with Vitamin C, D, Zinc, Quercetin, and/or other nutritional supplements or cheap generic drugs) but still maintained your Zero COVID policy for nearly three years, also for political reasons.  Either way, it's not at all flattering for your regime.  Seriously. 

Oh, and there's the door, Xi.  Step down now.  Don't let the door hit you on the way out.

Sincerely, 

The Rest Of The World

P.S.  Did you know you look like Winnie The Pooh?

Dear Xi Jinping (And The Rest Of the CCP)

We know you are in a pretty bad predicament of your own making, Xi.  The virus you infected the world with and then tried your darnedest to keep out is now finally coming back to give you a big dose of karma.  And your iron-fisted totalitarian "Zero Covid" (lol) strategy is now collapsing as we speak, and your people are finally fighting back.  Here's how you can come as close as you possibly can to saving face:

1. End the lockdowns immediately and open up, cold turkey.  Yesterday. 
2. Have plenty of vitamins, HCQ, Ivermectin, budesonide, and stuff like that ready for the inevitable virus surge.  Because your population's natural immunity has been weakened by nearly three years of this nonsense, and your vaccines are kind of a joke.  (Not like ours are really much better, of course.)
3. Apologize and make whole everyone you have wronged as best you can.  (Tall order, we know.)
4. STEP DOWN.

And don't let the door hit you on the way out!

Sincerely, 

The Rest of the World

P.S.  You really do look a lot like Winnie the Pooh.

DECEMBER UPDATE:  Looks like Xi and the CCP finally ended their inane and insane Zero Covid policy.   That goes to show that protests actually work.

The Verdict Is In: Sweden Wins!

After two an a half years, we can now see more clearly just how effective, or, not, the various pandemic strategies were.  We are please to note that the country we were rooting for the hardest, Sweden, has come out the winner with their light touch, no-lockdown approach.  That was according to their ranking in terms of all-cause percent excess deaths over the whole pandemic from 2020 through mid-2022, and they came out the best of all countries examined in the study, and yes, even better than their vaunted Nordic neighbors (even Iceland).  Really.

As for Belarus, Nicaragua, Tanzania, Uruguay, and Brazil, who also eschewed lockdowns (Nicaragua even encouraged mass gatherings), those countries were not listed, but a cursory look at their excess all-cause mortality shows that their numbers varied but were similar to or lower than their stricter neighbors.  And as we noted previously, while the USA did abysmally overall in terms of excess deaths, the 12 US states that never locked down at all generally did better overall than their stricter neighbors and the national average.  And Florida, when adjusted for age, outperformed New York, New Jersey, Michigan, and even California, and was ultimately an average state overall.

DECEMBER UPDATE:  Looks like now even China's ultimate lockdown failure is yet another way Sweden (and Belarus, Nicaragua, Tanzania, South Dakota, Florida, etc.) has been vindicated.

It has been said, "you either do China, or you do Sweden (etc.), as anything in between will do more harm than good in the long run".  Now, it seems that the first five words of that are no longer true, if they ever really were.

QED

A Very Prescient Video From The 1930s

Watch it for yourselves on Rumble.  You really need to sit down when watching it:

Link is here.

Don't Do "The Volcker" Again!

As the FERAL Reserve is committed to raising interest rates no matter the cost, even if it means deliberately engineering a recession, in an attempt to quash the worst inflation in 40 years, we would like to warn them as follows:

Stand. Down. NOW.  And prepare to reverse course a full 180 degrees, and soon.

And the same goes for their Quantitative Tightening (QT) as well, which of course amplifies the effect of raising interest rates by literally sucking money out of the economy, thus shrinking the money supply.  And it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that, since there is exponentially more debt in the overall economy in 2022 compared with 1982, even a fairly modest increase in interest rates can have a much larger adverse effect now compared to back then.

Paul Volcker, former Fed chairman, (in)famously raised interest rates as high as 20% in the early 1980s, and it technically "worked" to quash inflation.  But it came at a terrible price:  not only a pair of really bad recessions with millions of jobs lost, but the resulting damage also inflicted serious sequelae upon the broader working class that persist to this day as well, both in the USA as well as abroad.  The first time, one could say it was naive at best.  Doing "The Volcker" a second time, however, would be downright stupid, if not utterly malicious, narcissistic, and even sadistic.

And the USA was actually one of the luckier countries.  Canada, for example, set interest rates even higher still, and kept them higher for longer than the USA, and they got even higher and more persistent unemployment as result, and inflation persisted longer as well.  It was a complete lose-lose proposition for them.  So don't do it again!

As the old adage goes, when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.  And this particular tool is like swatting a fly with a sledgehammer, or burning down the house to roast a pig.  And worse, it is fundamentally the wrong tool for the job.  Most inflations, including this one especially, are caused by shortages of goods and services.  The only real cure is to solve the shortages, something higher interest rates simply cannot do no matter HOW high they are (at best it reduces demand and squeezes "inflationary psychology" out the system, and at worst it simply exacerbates the "cost-push" side of inflation when kept too high for too long).

And Rodger Malcolm Mitchell notes that governments can easily solve shortages by purchasing at a premium whatever goods or services happen to be in short supply, which incentives production, and then re-selling them (or giving them away) at a loss.  Higher interest rates do absolutely zilch for that.

Of course, we would not have gotten into this situation had our "leaders" not imposed  lockdowns in a futile attempt to control an airborne respiratory virus, and then tried to paper over the inevitable and predictable consequences by printing ludicrous and unprecedented amounts of money that overwhelmingly went toward further enriching the already ultra-rich.  Had we instead adopted the time-tested "flu strategy" from the get-go, with or without a more moderate stimulus package for We the People, we would not have gotten in this predicament in the first place.  Yes, there may have been some leftover problems in the bond markets and especially the repo market from 2019, and the virus would have been somewhat disruptive to the economy, (like the 1957 and 1968 flu pandemics), but nothing even in the same league as what happened with lockdowns.  And from what we have learned the hard way, death rates would have been about the same or even lower.

(No really, cumulative excess all-cause death rates for countries, states, and communities that largely ignored the virus, or at least eschewed lockdowns and more-restrictive NPIs, were actually within error bounds or even lower than for their much stricter neighbors or national/regional averages.)

When you try to "burn the village to save it", eventually the village will return the favor.  It is simply the law of cause and effect, also known as karma.  Sooner or later, you always reap what you sow.  And as the saying goes, hindsight is quite literally 2020.  Will the Fed answer the "clue phone"?

UPDATE:  The Brownstone Institute has an excellent article discussing how the combination of lockdowns and the aftermath (forced massive supply crunch) + stimulus (massive demand boost), followed by the Russia-Ukraine war and sanctions, unleashed the worst inflation in 40 years.  You mean you can't just paper over a massive supply crunch with more demand?  And that war and sanctions are both negative-sum games in which everyone loses to one degree or another?  Gee, who woulda thunk it?

The money supply has been shrinking at a record pace in recent months, thanks to the FERAL Reserve's Quantitative Tightening.  Usually a shrinking money supply portends recession, historically speaking. 

Of course, the other elephant in the room is corporate greed.  They ultra-rich and mega-corporations are taking in record profits, so it is not simply that they are passing higher costs of doing business onto the customers.  An excess profits tax would be the best way to curtail this sort of inflation, as would a one-off wealth tax on like richest folks, much like several countries did after WWII.  Keep in mind that Trump himself actually proposed such a wealth tax back in 1999, and not a trivial one either, so the MAGA crowd would be truly hypocritical to oppose it.

Have We Been Too Harsh On The Degrowth Movement?

In a recent previous article, we discussed the potential perils and pitfalls of the degrowth movement, and then at the end added an update.  We may have been a tad too harsh on some of the degrowth advocates as such, particularly Jason Hickel, by lumping them all together.  While our roadmaps for how to get there may diverge, our ultimate goals at least seems to be more or less the same as Hickel's (though that's not necessarily true of some of the other degrowth advocates out there).  Ditto for Charles Eisenstein and Kate Raworth, as well as Herman Daly, Joe Millwald-Hopkins and Yarnick Oswald.  They are some very insightful folks.

The TSAP still sees our own plan as being a more feasible roadmap towards that goal, as counterintuitive as that may sound.  Abundance is the one thing capitalism cannot survive for long, while forced austerity will not kill the beast, but rather merely weaken it a bit before it mutates further into a new variant of some sort due to selective pressure.

The system is the underlying problem here.  We essentially have three choices: 1) allow it to catastrophically fail in the future via business as usual, 2) force it to catastrophically fail sooner via austerity, or 3) humanely euthanize it via abundance ASAP.  And it's obvious which one we should choose.

So what exactly will post-capitalism ultimately look like when the dust finally settles?  The TSAP doesn't claim to know the details.  But eventually it will very likely organically evolve into something like a gift economy to one degree or another, as well as a steady-state economy of course.

One thing is absolutely certain, though:  if we are to create an economy that no longer has to "grow or die", we must first phase out and eventually abolish usury entirely.  That means that interest and all other kinds of fees for the mere use of money will need to be officially capped at ZERO, period.  To avoid seizing up the financial markets and crashing the economy, set a "sinking lid" at, say, ten percent APR, and then gradually lower the cap each year until zero is reached.  Usury has ultimately led to the financialization of the economy, inflation, worsening inequality, and just about every other social problem that has a name.  There is a reason why it used to be considered such a sin.  Let's make it history.

Also, as the late, great Buckminster Fuller famously noted all the way back in 1970:

We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living.

The glorified form of OCD that calls itself the Protestant Work Ethic (TM) will need to desist along with that other outmoded 19th century relic, conspicuous consumption, as they are both ultimately two sides of the same coin.  That means we will need a Universal Basic Income (UBI) with no strings attached as a prerequisite and precondition for any serious attempt at degrowth or post-growth.

Oh, and by the way:  unless the population also shrinks as well at least as fast as the economy does, degrowth is, ipso facto, fundamentally an exercise in futility.  That is true both from an economic perspective as well as an ecological perspective.  Fortunately, that can be done ethically and effectively via female empowerment and poverty reduction, as well as readily available access to birth control.  No coercion required.  The outmoded "everybody must procreate" myth needs to end yesterday as well.

And finally, before we can even consider degrowth in earnest, we would first need to get out of the destructive rut we are currently in.  Just like we needed to get out of the previous protracted rut of the Great Recession a decade ago.  The so-called "Green New Deal" is really only a lighter shade of brown as opposed to truly green, but it is nonetheless a decent way to get out of a rut while redesigning the economy for degrowth towards a steady-state economy.

So what are we waiting for?

UPDATE:  It should go without saying that the TSAP does NOT support anything even remotely resembling a lockdown, including, but not limited to, a "climate lockdown".  That is evil and illiberal to the max, and not only that, it wouldn't even work in the long run.  Thus, in no uncertain terms, we will support degrowth if and only if the individual rights enshrined in the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights are fully guaranteed, and the disastrous response to the pandemic is not even remotely considered as a model.

2023 UPDATE:  A new article points out that capitalism and degrowth are NOT at all mutually exclusive, and the former can easily co-opt and even thrive under the latter.  So those who love the idea of degrowth but loathe capitalism may be in for a very rude awakening to say the least. 

See also here as well for why degrowth is currently "a slogan in search of a program", as the late Herman Daly would say, and why we will still need to have some flavor of a Green New Deal either way.

Are The Kids OK? We Already Know The Answer

One year after the novel experimental gene therapies that "self-identify" as "vaccines" were "authorized" for children under 12, it looks like our suspicion was indeed correct that it was a big mistake to do so, and history will NOT be kind at all to those who did it.

The ever-insightful Dr. Peter McCullough got permanently banned from Twitter recently for daring to expose the unvarnished truth about what these jabs were doing to kids (and adults too, but especially kids).  Steve Kirsch, who also got banned long ago, posted on his Substack an excellent article about exactly what it was in his final tweet that got McCullough banned forever.  It was a link to a video on Rumble by the Vaccine Safety Research Foundation.  And it was apparently such an eye-opener that the powers that be felt it had to be forcibly silenced and memory-holed.  

But the funny thing about the truth is, it can't stay hidden and memory-holed forever.  Sooner or later, it always comes out.  Sunlight is the best disinfectant. 

"Financialization" Of The Economy Is Simply Usury By Another Name

The TSAP in a previous article wrote how the root cause of virtually all of the social and economic ills of the past half-century are a result of the "financialization" of the economy.  That is, when the financial sector (often known colloquially by the synecdoche of "Wall Street" or "The Banksters") takes on a massively outsized share of the economy and effectively becomes its master rather than its servant.  This occurred since 1971 when our "leaders" in Washington basically sold out to the 0.01% financial oligarchy, and made the conscious decision to have the lion's share of all newly created post-gold standard dollars flow directly from the printing press (or more accurately, keyboard) to Wall Street rather than to We the People.  The financial sector then used such massive excess money as leverage to further consolidate their power and control over the rest of us, and as they say, the rest is history.

But of course, it actually goes much deeper than that.  Professor Richard Westra had actually written a whole book back in 2016 about the deeper root causes of all of this financialization and the extreme inequality that has resulted.  And it turns out, there really is nothing new under the sun, but rather it is simply a newly-unleashed (and somewhat more sophisticated) reincarnation of the very ancient practice of usury.  He does not mince words here:

Usury laid medieval society to waste. Western civilization was saved by the rise of capitalism, which tamed the activities of money lending, and endowed them with socially redeeming value, tethering finance to expanding production of material goods and increased social wealth. Now, as the 21st century begins, bloating tides of money with no possibility of ever being converted into real capital wash over the world. Finance again has turned to its dark side, using money to make money with no socially redeeming purpose. Such is the endgame of economies managed by capitalists without capitalism. As Marx foresaw, capitalist society, like all others, is destined to be outpaced by history as the conditions of its existence decompose and become a drag on the human future. Either we will succeed in bringing about new politico-economic structures—or civilization will collapse into barbarism, just as usury broke it down in the past.

In other words, usury (broadly defined as the charging of any sort of fees for the mere use of money, thus using money to make money) has paradoxically both saved Western Civilization from itself once, but is now devouring that very same civilization.  In fact, Westra's book is titled, Unleashing Usury: How Finance Opened the Door to Capitalism Then Swallowed It Whole.  It is not even really capitalism anymore, as this financialization has fundamentally changed the rules of the game, turning it into "casino capitalism".  It explains not only the ever-increasing inequality that characterizes the postmodern era, but also debt slavery, wage slavery, inflation, and even the inane and insane addiction to growth for the sake of growth, the ideology of the cancer cell which eventually kills its host.  After all, without economic growth, there can be no interest payments, thus the "grow or die" paradigm reigns supreme.  All for the benefit of the oligarchs at the top.  Ellen Brown had also made similar observations as well in her book, Web of Debt, as has the American Monetary Institute as well.

Even Aristotle himself talked about it back then, and not favorably at all.  Can you say, ipse dixit?

Contrary to its proponents, usury does NOT create wealth, because it does not actually create anything of value.  Rather, it literally does nothing more than milk existing wealth, much like a casino does.  Thus, it is inherently a zero-sum game at best.  Worse, in the long run, it acts as a slow poison and ultimately becomes a wealth-destroying negative-sum game, cannibalizing the real economy over time.

After all, while banks do create the principal of a loan out of thin air every day, they don't create the interest that must be paid back, which has to come from somewhere.  And that "somewhere" is, of course, the real physical economy.  Thus results a cascade of perpetual debt, artificial scarcity, and an ever-yawning chasm between the haves and have-nots, which then gets blamed on anything and everything but its actual root cause.  But "pay no attention to the little man behind the curtain", say the mainstream economists.  Move along, nothing to see here folks....

There is thus a very good reason why the practice was banned or restricted throughout a large chunk of history, and why practically all major religions have at some point or another considered it to be a sin to one degree or another (and some still do to this day).  And only in the past half-century or so has it been allowed to proceed with almost no restrictions at all.  In 1978, for example, the federal usury cap on interest rates was lifted, followed by further deregulation of Wall Street, and again, as they say, the rest is history.

Thus, it would behoove America (and the world) to ultimately phase out the practice of usury.  Set a binding cap on all interest rates and similar financial fees that are charged to individual borrowers (but crucially, no limit on the reverse, such as savings accounts and government bonds, as that would not really be usury), say 10%, and make it a "sinking lid" that gradually drops each year until it ultimately reaches zero.  Also, phase out the practice of fractional-reserve banking in favor of full-reserve banking, by gradually raising the reserve ratio each year until it reaches 100%. Make the FERAL Reserve truly FEDERAL instead.  Bring back the ancient practice of debt jubilees as well.  And of course, reverse the deregulation of Wall Street that has occurred since the 1970s.  And finally, make it so any newly-created money goes first to We the People before it even reaches the big banks at all.

Additionally, the global scam of poorer countries being forced to borrow at interest (usually in a foreign currency, which makes it that much worse for them) from the oligarchs in rich countries, trapped in perpetual debt and thus manipulated for their resources, also needs to end as well.  Yesterday, full stop. World Bank and IMF, we're looking at YOU.

So what are we waiting for?

UPDATE:  The ever-insightful Jared A. Brock has an excellent article about the inherent unsustainability of usury (and rent-seeking in general) here as well.

Yet Another Study Confirms Lockdowns Did More Harm Than Good

We already know that lockdowns were the worst public health policy failure since, well, ever.  Or at least in the past couple of centuries or so.  The pro-lockdown narrative has been completely laid waste long ago, and can never be even remotely rehabilitated by even the most intellectually dishonest cranks and intellectual poseurs in the future.  History will NOT be kind to the lockdown zealots at all!

And just when you thought we have already seen the most unflattering studies of all, a new one comes along that makes lockdowns look even worse still.  This new study looked at differences in all-cause death rates among various pairs of neighboring US states in which one state imposed a mandatory stay-at-home order in the spring of 2020 and the other did not.  (For completeness, the authors also looked at lockdown states that did not share a border with non-lockdown states as well.)  In using all-cause mortality data, they sidestep the biggest possible source of bias, namely differences in how Covid deaths are counted, and also capture at least some of the collateral damage of lockdowns as well.  There were in fact a total of ten non-lockdown states, so that gives us plenty of comparisons for how lockdowns or lack thereof worked in practice in an American context.

After adjusting for a host of potential health and demographic confounders, the results were more likely to favor the non-lockdown states.  That is, on average, the lockdown states actually had higher death rates than the ten non-lockdown states.  Thus, one can firmly conclude that the lockdowns did more harm than good, effectively killing more people than they saved.  Read that again, let it sink in, and remember that deaths are just the tip of a very large iceberg of collateral damage.

Oh, and by the way, the authors found that this was true regardless of whether they restricted their analysis to 1) the first Covid wave only, 2) the lockdown period only, or 3) the entire period from March 2020 up to and including January 2022.

As William Farr (of Farr's Law fame) famously said, "the death rate is a fact, anything beyond this is an inference".  And the inferences we can draw from this study about these worse-than-useless policies are quite damning indeed.  The lockdown zealots really have blood on their hands, it seems, likely to the tune of 110,000 excess deaths according to this study.

And that's just for the lockdowns proper.  How about masks?  Well, there's that pesky Foegen Effect, impaired gas exchange, microplastic fibers, bacteria and mold growth, and of course the killing of our oceans when billions of them are disposed of.  Plus, they don't really work.  School closures?  Also more harm than good, at least in the long run.  Forced business closures?  Self-explanatory, and self-evidently more harm than good (and also subsumed under lockdowns as well).  Forced restrictions of healthcare?  Again, also self-explanatory, and self-evidently more harm than good.  "Flattening the curve" is literally nothing more than prolonging the worst of the pandemic, any way you slice it.  

And the jabs?  Well, those on balance also seem to be worse than useless as well for most people, and especially for kids.  Locking down and otherwise imposing restrictions while we waited for them to arrive was clearly NOT worth it at all.  And while we may never know exactly how many excess deaths were due to exactly which cause, be it the virus, the lockdowns and NPIs, or adverse reactions to the jabs, the latter are highly unlikely to be trivial either.

On that fateful day in March 2020, the hard-won wisdom of the ages, based on over a century of research, was summarily thrown out the window like so much garbage by people who really should have known better.  The official pandemic playbooks of several countries such as the USA, UK, Australia, and New Zealand, among other countries, and even the WHO as recently as 2019, not only did NOT promote the use of mass quarantines, let alone full lockdowns, but actually advised against doing so.  And while such time-tested advice was mainly geared toward influenza pandemics, at least some of the national playbooks (especially for the UK) explicitly applied this same reasoning to a potential "SARS-like coronavirus" pandemic as well.  Thus, this can be considered a classic example of a Chesterton's Fence:  before you remove a fence, be sure you know why it was put up in the first place.  Second-order thinking was clearly NOT being done here at all, it seems.

And even that is being charitable, assuming that the lockdown zealots were simply good people who made bad decisions because they panicked, when clearly some if not most of them had less-than-lofty ulterior motives that later became readily apparent once the initial "fog of war" had largely lifted.

The biggest question now is, will future generations ever forgive us?  Because that will be a pretty tall order for them indeed, as the regrettable consequences of the past two and a half years will continue to reverberate for decades to come.  And those who pushed for these worse-than-useless policies, doubling down and refusing to listen to reason, have an indelible stain on their honor.

UPDATE:  See the latest analysis from the ever-insightful Joel Smalley here as well.  It seems that the jabs are also responsible for a good chunk of both Covid and non-Covid excess deaths as well, particularly among younger folks.  After all, jab deaths and virus deaths are not mutually exclusive, as negative efficacy and host compromising can represent a collision of both factors together.

Degrowth Is A Nonstarter And Won't Work. Here's What Will Instead

From ecological overshoot to all of its attendant crises, including climate change, resource depletion, pollution, and mass extinction, along with the current global energy crisis, the idea of "degrowth" (i.e. a deliberate and planned shrinking of the economy) may seem like an appealing alternative in some circles.  However, not only is it a political nonstarter, but the level of central planning and austerity required would ultimately do more harm than good, get us permanently stuck in a bad place, and we would still end up destroying the Earth in the end (albeit a bit more slowly, compared to business as usual).  It would "flatten the curve", of course, but really just drag it out and prolong the pain without solving the problem.  In other words, it would basically be like Covid lockdown, only permanently, though hopefully minus all of the antisocial distancing and ocean-killing masks.  And we saw what a disaster that was, with the Global South faring the very worst in terms of collateral damage.

And that's before we get into the sort of extremely high and confiscatory tax rates (on both income and wealth) that would be required on not only the rich, but also on the middle class and working class, and even the working poor of the Global North.  Which the oligarchs would so artfully dodge with ease of course, leaving the rest of us holding the bag.  Though to be fair, not all degrowthers necessarily agree with that idea, and many prefer Pigouvian taxes on pollution and resource depletion (most notably carbon taxes), and perhaps also taxing advertising revenue as well, instead of income and wealth.

Some excellent articles casting doubt on degrowth can be found here and here, truly food for thought indeed.

Of course, we clearly need to end our inane and insane addiction to growth for the sake of growth, the ideology of the cancer cell (as Edward Abbey famously said) which ultimately kills its host.  We need an economy that is no longer dependent on growth and can still provide prosperity for all with or without growth.  We need to stop obsessing over the fundamentally flawed metric of GDP, which really ultimately stands for God Damn Profits nowadays.  Rent-seeking, usury, artificial scarcity, cronyism, speculation, and other forms of parasitism and economic manipulation from the top down are the ultimate reasons why our current economic system is so hooked on growth for the sake of growth.

As the futurist Walter Ignatius Baltzley noted back in 2015, the only way to end this system of cannibalism (sorry, "capitalism") is to give it the ONE thing that it absolutely cannot survive:  ABUNDANCE.  That's right, capitalism needs scarcity to function, which is why it has to create so much artificial scarcity nowadays to prop itself up.  Capitalism will thus fatally overdose on capital, in other words.  Abundance is of course the polar opposite of the sort of eco-austerity of degrowth.  With enough abundance, we can humanely euthanize this dreadfully toxic system for good, and easily transition to post-capitalism, and ultimately a post-growth and post-carbon economy. 

For example, Baltzley in another article applies this idea directly to Big Oil.  How do you win a tug-of-war against a much stronger opponent?  By simply letting go of the rope, and letting them fall on their butt.  Thus, as crazy as it sounds, get out of the way and simply give the fossil fuel fat cats what they say they want so much.  Yes, you read that right.  Let 'em "drill, baby, drill", and "frack, baby, frack"!  The government can even buy their oil (and natural gas) at a premium and then turn around and re-sell it at a loss.  The resulting massive surplus of cheap energy would flood the market, bringing down the cost of living in general, and by doing so....will also bring down the cost of renewable energy alternatives like wind and solar that will ultimately replace fossil fuels, while oil and natural gas become less profitable over time.  In the very short run, it would be quite a boon for Big Oil, but in the long run it would be giving them the very rope with which to hang themselves.  (Fortunately for us, Big Oil is extremely shortsighted.)

Yes, it's quite the Hail Mary pass indeed.  But when both Plan A and Plan B have been ruled out as impractical and/or politically impossible, and time is running out, that ultimately leaves us with Plan C.

So what are we waiting for?  Prime that pump, and prime it good!  Let Big Oil and the oligarchs enjoy their utterly foolish pride before the fall.  Remember, the bigger they are, the harder they fall.

Oh, by the way, wanna hear a joke?  Peak Oil.  That's the joke.  Yes, oil production will inevitably peak at some point.  Duh!  And hopefully demand will peak before supply does.  But we still have more than enough to deep-fry the planet many times over.

Quite frankly, the biggest supply constraint of all right now is NOT geology, but rather geopolitics, as Europe is currently learning the hard way with Russia weaponizing its natural gas against them. And the aforementioned plan would solve that as well.  Canada alone could supply more than enough (liquefied) natural gas to Europe to be free from Russian energy dominance, but they won't, because they never developed the export facilities to do so in time.  That leaves the USA to fill in the gap, of course.

UPDATE:  So what exactly will post-capitalism ultimately look like when the dust finally settles?  The TSAP doesn't claim to know the details.  But eventually it will very likely organically evolve into something like a gift economy to one degree or another, as well as a steady-state economy of course.

One thing is absolutely certain, though:  if we are to create an economy that no longer has to "grow or die", we must first phase out and eventually abolish usury entirely.  That means that interest and all other kinds of fees for the mere use of money will need to be officially capped at ZERO, period.  To avoid seizing up the financial markets and crashing the economy, set a "sinking lid" at, say, ten percent APR, and then gradually lower the cap each year until zero is reached.  Usury has ultimately led to the financialization of the economy, inflation, worsening inequality, and just about every other social problem that has a name.  There is a reason why it used to be considered such a sin.  Let's make it history.

Oh, and by the way:  unless the population also shrinks as well at least as fast as the economy does, degrowth is, ipso facto, fundamentally an exercise in futility.  That is true both from an economic perspective as well as an ecological perspective.

FINAL THOUGHT:  We may have been a tad too harsh on some of the degrowth advocates, particularly Jason Hickel, by lumping them all together.  While our roadmaps for how to get there may diverge, our ultimate goals at least seems to be more or less the same as Hickel's (though that's not necessarily true of some of the other degrowth advocates out there).  Ditto for Charles Eisenstein and Kate Raworth as well.

See here as well.

The Ultimate Death Blow To The Already Collapsed Narrative

The "vaccine" narrative, along with the rest of the official Covid narrative, has collapsed faster than formerly healthy young athletes on the field after being jabbed with novel experimental gene therapies misnamed "vaccines".  But like a zombie, it just won't seem to fully die already...until this new study of the unjabbed, that is.  The effective control group for this massive experiment are the unjabbed, and this new international cohort study's results are finally in:

• Over 70% of the unjabbed cohort relied on natural remedies (largely vitamins and minerals, like C, D, zinc, and a bit of quercetin here and there) and/or off-label generic drugs (largely HCQ and IVM) against the virus.
• Only about 0.4% of them were ever hospitalized for Covid at all, either as inpatients OR outpatients.  So much for a "pandemic of the unvaccinated" gumming up hospitals, right?
• Most had faced some level of discrimination in society, and many were fired from their jobs, due to their unjabbed status, which was of course harmful to their mental health.
• Otherwise, they seemed to be healthy overall.
• There was practically no confounding from flu vaccines or any other vaccines, as only a tiny sliver of the cohort expressed any intent to receive any at the time of the study, especially for flu vaccines specifically.
• And the real kicker:  people who said that they never wore masks had the lowest incidence of suspected or confirmed Covid of all of the subgroups in the study.  Reread that again and let that sink in for a moment.

Thus, not only does the "vaccine" narrative get thoroughly laid waste by this study, the mask narrative does as well, a fortiori.  Two zombie lies were thus killed with one stone.

The Alliance for Natural Health put out an excellent commentary about this study as well.

No wonder the powers that be wanted to get rid of the control group before the truth finally came out.  The perceived benefits of the jabs are shrinking, while evidence of the risks keeps on mounting every day.

Oh, and as for the other major component of the official narrative, namely lockdowns, well, that has also been thoroughly laid waste as well.  The delusional beliefs of the lockdown zealots have been revealed time and again to be, well, delusional.

Dear FERAL Reserve: Stop Hiking Interest Rates!

We at the TSAP have of course been advocating raising interest rates a while ago.  But now the FERAL Reserve seems to be overdoing it, to the point of further scaring already-jittery investors, and they need to tone it down a notch or ten, or they will risk creating a very nasty recession (or worse, stagflation or even a depression).  Inflation is still high but cooling off now, and keeping interest rates too high to for too long will ultimately do more harm than good.  Interest rates are a razor-sharp, double-edged sword, and to fight inflation any hikes need to be short, sharp, and early to be effective.  But they delayed it too long, didn't do it enough when it was needed, and now that the economy is in a technical recession, they want to keep hiking rates even more, in addition to quantitative tightening as well.

As Rodger Malcolm Mitchell notes, raising interest rates to cure inflation is often times the wrong medicine for the job.  Case in point, right now in fact.  Inflations are ultimately caused by shortages, and governments need to address the shortages to get to the root of the problem.  Neither taxes nor spending cuts nor interest rate hikes will do the trick.  Ironically, as Mitchell notes, solving shortages can often require MORE federal government spending to specifically incentivize more production of the things in short supply (oil, natural gas, energy in general, foodstuffs, computer chips, labor, etc.).  The government can purchase those things at a premium, and then sell or give those things away at a loss.  Two birds, one stone.  Problem solved.  Next.

Meanwhile, the Fed really needs to stop hiking interest rates, stop threatening to do so, taper off their quantitative tightening, and actually be ready to start cutting interest rates soon as well.

So what are we waiting for?

(NOTE:  Endorsement of some of Rodger Malcolm Mitchell's ideas, or the ideas of any third party for that matter, does not automatically imply endorsement of all of his ideas.)