Saturday, January 2, 2021
Best Explanation Yet Of The Oligarchs' And Technocrats' "Great Reset"
Saturday, December 19, 2020
We Need A Debt Jubilee Yesterday
Forget a mere "stimulus", that is far too stingy to get America out of the hole we are in now. We need a massive DEBT JUBILEE like the ancient Israelites used to do every 49 years (and frankly never should have stopped doing!), and not just for student loans (though certainly for that too). And the forgiven/cancelled debt amounts must be 100% non-taxable since we do not want to defeat the purpose of the jubilee. So how can we do this without zeroing out everyone's bank account? Easy, just print (or more accurately, electronically keystroke) the money. The federal government is Monetarily Sovereign, and money is simply an accounting entry ever since we got off the gold standard on August 15, 1971. So make the entry and be done with it. And it wouldn't even be inflationary, since striking debt by the same amount as the amount of money creates has a net effect of zero on the money supply. Meanwhile, removing this massive debt burden would be a massive B-12 shot for economic growth. So even people who have zero debt and feel they have no dog in the fight would benefit from a stronger economy that is no longer weighed down by a massive collective debt overhang.
Additionally, we would also need a permanent Universal Basic Income (UBI) of at least $1000/month for adults and $500/month for people under 18 (and double those amounts for the first three months), single-payer Medicare For All, free public college for all, and things like that as well if we are to truly transcend the crisis America is in. Again, for a fraction of the amount that the FERAL Reserve creates every year to give/lend to the big banks, we could do it without raising taxes or inflation.
As for putting Americans back to work, there are three words: Green New Deal. The infrastructure upgrades and changes that need to be made will create lots of new jobs. And since goods and services would by definition increase in tandem with the new money created to fund them, the net effect on inflation would also be effectively zero as well.
(Hat tip to the brilliant and wonderful Ellen Brown for pointing so many of these things out.)
That said, what we will NOT advocate is shutting down the economy again and hoping to print our way out of it. Because deliberately shrinking the goods and services in the economy via shuttering the economy by fiat, while simultaneously printing money to paper over the hole, WILL be VERY inflationary if maintained for more than a few weeks at most. Just ask Argentina how well their world's longest lockdown is working, with 40% inflation and a COVID death rate higher than wide-open Brazil.
So what are we waiting for?
Sunday, December 6, 2020
The TSAP's New Updated Position On Face Mask Mandates
NOTE: The following shall fully supersede any positions taken or advice given prior to December 1, 2020, and shall remain in effect until further notice.
With the CDC doubling down on universal face mask use 11 months into the pandemic, and President-Elect Joe Biden wanting Americans to wear masks during his first 100 days in office (which will not even start until January 20, 2021, thus lasting until April 30, 2021), it is time for a fresh review of the TSAP's position on face masks and any mandates thereof.
From April/May until August 2020, the TSAP had enthusiastically supported broad but nuanced, relatively short-term mask mandates, primarily as a safe pathway out of lockdown. Since then, in light of recent evidence, our position has gradually shifted.
A cursory review of the empirical evidence so far reveals that while masks may very well be marginally effective at the micro level, they apparently are practically insignificant at the macro level, at least in the long run. To wit, as the charts here so clearly show, broad mask mandates do not appear to have had any noticeable impact on the course of a country, state, or locality's epidemic curve. To name a few, Hawaii, Illinois, LA, Miami, Kansas, Wisconsin, Israel, Japan, Spain, Argentina, and most notoriously Peru all have seen no beneficial long-run impact on cases (which actually increased at some point after implementation, even in conjunction with strict lockdowns in some cases), and the same was ultimately true for deaths and hospitalizations as well, except for Hawaii and Japan whose death rates remain unusually low for reasons not yet fully understood. As for Czechia, the crown jewel of early mask mandates, it appears to have only worked the first time in conjunction with their early suppression strategy in the spring, but not the second time around when the virus came roaring back in the fall. Ditto for Slovenia, a fortiori in fact. France and Italy's second waves were also a milder version of this phenomenon. Meanwhile, mandate-free Sweden, Denmark, Norway, North and South Dakota, Georgia, and the parts of Florida without local mandates don't seem to have had worse trends overall compared to many places that have such mandates. And until very recently, The Netherlands as well, having gone until December without a broad mask mandate.
Wednesday, December 2, 2020
The Placebo "Vaccine" That Actually Works
- Vitamin C (preferably liposomal)
- Zinc (including lozenges)
- Quercetin (a zinc ionophore)
- Niacin (Vitamin B3)
- Thiamine (Vitamin B1)
- Inositol (Vitamin B8)
- Resveratrol
- Vitamin A (use with caution)
- Melatonin (at night)
- And last but not least, a multivitamin containing selenium, magnesium, copper, and Vitamin E
Saturday, November 14, 2020
The COVID-19 Pandemic Has A Kill Switch. Let's Use It, Yesterday!
- Vitamin D, first and foremost.
- Vitamin C (preferably liposomal)
- Zinc (including lozenges)
- Quercetin (a zinc ionophore)
- Niacin (Vitamin B3)
- Thiamine (Vitamin B1)
- Inositol (Vitamin B8)
- Vitamin A (use with caution)
- Melatonin (at night)
- And last but not least, a multivitamin containing selenium, magnesium, copper, and Vitamin E
- Wash your hands, don't touch your face, cover coughs and sneezes, stay home if sick, avoid people who are currently sick, and all that jazz. Vulnerable people should avoid crowds as much as possible. You know, common sense, basically.
- Clean and disinfect high-touch surfaces frequently, including your phone.
- Ventilate, ventilate, ventilate indoor spaces as much as possible.
- Do temperature checks to enter public buildings and workplaces, and perhaps for public transportation as well.
- When doing contact tracing, do backward rather than forward tracing. That works much better given the stochastic nature of this virus.
- When it comes to gatherings of any kind, remember that SIZE MATTERS, as the risk of virus exposure and spread increases exponentially with the number of people present. This is especially true in enclosed spaces for prolonged periods of time.
- Use face masks judiciously, not superstitiously. They are filters, not barriers. Change/clean them as frequently as possible so they don't backfire and become fomites (germ carriers).
- And most importantly, take the proper precautions to stop the nosocomial spread of the virus within hospitals and nursing homes, which account for the lion's share of deaths in many countries, but some countries managed to solve nonetheless.
- Reduce the cycle threshold for PCR testing to 30 for standard sensitivity, and perhaps 35 for high sensitivity testing.
- Confirm all positives with a retest before reporting results, especially positives with a cycle threshold >25.
- Test sensitivity is rather overrated, apparently, at least in terms of a tradeoff with speed and frequency.
- Do not include positive antigen (i.e. rapid) tests in reported "cases" unless also confirmed by PCR.
- Do not mix in positive antibody test results as new "cases", as that is comparing apples and oranges.
- Do not count multiple positive tests of the same individual as separate "cases", unless they are at least several months apart.
- Consider restricting virus testing to symptomatic individuals only, except in very sensitive environments such as hospitals and nursing homes.
- Report COVID hospitalizations as such only if the patients are there because of the virus (think CLI, ILI, shortness of breath, and/or pneumonia), not just because they tested positive after being admitted for something unrelated.
- Make sure all deaths designated as COVID deaths really are from COVID. That is, no motor vehicle accidents, gunshot wounds, alligator attacks, deaths of despair, etc. with merely incidental positive tests.
- Report cases by specimen date and deaths by date of death.
Friday, November 6, 2020
You Lost, Donald. Accept it.
Monday, November 2, 2020
The Difference Between Naive and Stupid
Well, it's official. Several European countries are now back to lockdown once again. It seems nearly every country not named Sweden or Belarus is blindly copying one another to one degree or another now just like before. And even on this side of the proverbial pond, there are still plenty of folks eager to copy them if allowed the chance. They clearly didn't learn the first time that lockdowns simply don't work, and do far more harm than good on balance.
The first time they did it, they were naive at best, but the second time is just plain stupid. The first time was an argument from ignorance, while the second time is an argument from thick-headedness.
Hey geniuses, wanna know why you are getting a second wave of the virus now? Let us count the ways:
- You are testing much more than during the first wave, often many times more.
- You are using such a high PCR cycle threshold that creates far too many false positives.
- You are still quite liberal with what you define as a COVID death.
- "Mitigation fatigue" is all too real, and viruses gonna virus regardless.
- And last but not least, your lockdowns the first time merely postponed the inevitable. Really. Whether you shaved off a little bit from the first wave (like the UK) or nearly suppressed the first wave entirely (like Czechia), guess what? You are getting right now exactly what you had postponed earlier, except now during flu season. A real genius move, guys.
And before you say "But Sweden is getting a second wave too!", take a look at the hard data on Worldometer or Our World In Data. Cases are apparently way up in recent weeks, yes, but hospitalizations are only modestly up, and deaths are still largely crawling along the baseline, having had no excess deaths since July and on track to have a below-normal flu season. Whatever their second wave, it does not appear to be particularly deadly, and they are currently in a much better position than nearly all the rest of Europe as they head into winter.
UPDATE: And yes, COVID-19 apparently does have a strong seasonality to it in both the USA and Europe, which is of course a double-edged sword. As for Sweden, deaths are apparently up, but still no excess deaths since all-cause mortality remains largely in the normal range per EUROMOMO. After all, "excess" is relative. And also, where did the flu go? It seems that in practically every country, including Sweden, it seems to have mysteriously vanished for some reason. Things that (should) make you go, hmmmm.
As for Finland and Norway, who still have some of the lowest COVID death rates in the Western world, keep in mind that both countries were actually LESS stringent than Sweden for the majority of the pandemic (i.e. from May until early November).
The UK's Lockdown 2.0 and the subsequent perpetual lockdown-in-all-but-name appear to have not done a lick of good at all in terms of the number or timing of COVID cases, hospitalizations, or deaths. It appears to be at best irrelevant to the virus, if not perverse.
Banning all or practically all mixing between households, especially at this very late stage of the pandemic, is utterly risible if it weren't so tragic. News flash, for most of the pandemic there has been, and still is today, far more transmission within households than between them, and not primarily driven by children or asymptomatic spread either. Once the proverbial genie is out of the bottle, such government overreach is simply a cruel joke.
And meanwhile, several US states are in fact backsliding towards lockdown once again, with practically all states except Florida and South Dakota tightening restrictions at least somewhat since September. Riddle me this: if it worked so well the first time, why are we doing it again? If it did NOT work the first time, why are we doing it again?
In fact, going into the holiday season, Florida is actually doing better than the national average now in spite of barely any restrictions since September 25, and both North and South Dakota have peaked and declined organically since mid-November despite mild/late (ND) or no (SD) restrictions, around the same time as the stricter Midwestern states. California, on the other hand, is not doing so hot at all.
Even Georgia, notably first out the gate to lift restrictions and reopen in general and also first out the gate to reopen schools statewide, was not the disaster that was predicted, and seven months later they are....average compared to the rest of the country. And sadly while both Dakotas are now cumulatively among the top ten worst states in terms of deaths per capita, the timing of their admittedly severe but very late outbreaks and decline of same does not show any relevance to policy measures.
JANUARY 2021 UPDATE: Looks like Sweden did unfortunately have low to moderate excess weekly deaths for several weeks in a row in late November, December, and early January per EUROMOMO. But they still had far less than they did during their first wave and significantly less than most European countries did during their second wave, especially the UK (again), Spain (again), Belgium (again), Italy (again), France, Portugal, and much less than Czechia and Slovenia as well. And it began much later as well. 2020 seems to have been Sweden's worst year for all-cause deaths since 2012, and fairly comparable to 2015, while some other countries in contrast had their worst year in decades. And it looks like Sweden's second wave is almost over now, with cases now plummeting despite it being the middle of winter. Meanwhile, Florida and California are both shaping up to be about average among US states on a cumulative basis despite taking polar opposite approaches to their epidemics, kinda like how Sweden and France are both around the European average as well. As the old saying goes, that's why you never call the winner at halftime.
Regardless of what NPIs were done, it appears that the winter wave is now in rapid retreat worldwide in nearly every country, well before the vaccines would have had much if any effect. Reducing the cycle threshold for PCR testing and/or making testing more targeted per revised WHO guidance has likely played a role in many countries and US states, but enough naturally-acquired herd immunity to bend the curve down has also most likely been achieved as well.
Note that other endemic coronaviruses (i.e. common cold viruses) tend to peak seasonally in January or so and then sharply decline afterwards. Thus, the decline of this virus will most likely continue through the spring and summer as well, give or take a possible March secondary peak in some places perhaps.
(And again, where did the flu go? Hmmmm....)
So what do you call it when you do the same thing over and over and expect different results?

