About Me

Thursday, September 30, 2021

ESG = Energy Stops Growing; an Energy Crisis is Here.

From Adventures in Capitalism dated 6/2/21:

For most of my career, oil demand has grown each year and supply has roughly kept up. Sure, it’s overshot in both directions. We’ve seen shortages and we’ve seen gluts. We’ve even seen oil go negative. Throughout this time, we’ve always intuitively known that the cure for high prices is high prices. Last week may have forever changed this prudent logic. I’m starting to wonder if ESG really means Energy Stops Growing.  

[Doug here: An Energy Crisis has already arrived. US natural gas prices are soaring to nearly $6, Brent Crude has vaulted to $80, Northern Europe natural gas and electricity prices have gone exponentially higher in a hyperinflation, major industrial plants are shutting down due to energy costs, UK energy companies are going belly-up on a daily basis.

UK, N.Europe Nat Gas Prices
Dutch natural gas for next month, the European benchmark, rose as much as 13.4% to 98.23 euros per megawatt-hour. The U.K. contract also surged 17.4% to a new high of 252.53 pence a term. Both contracts have more-than-doubled in price over the past month. German power for next year jumped as much as 12% to 132 euros per megawatt-hour, while the French equivalent gained 10.3% to 135.50 euros per megawatt-hour. Both reached record highs on Thursday. Converted to oil price equivalents, these are price rapidly approaching $200/barrel.

European stockpiles of everything from gas to coal and water for electricity production are in short supply and there are few signs the situation will improve anytime soon as demand continues to roar back from a pandemic-driven lull, Bloomberg writes today.]

For those not paying attention, an obscure ESG hedge fund, Engine No. 1, captured two Exxon Mobil (XOM – USA) board seats. It now seems that for companies in indexes, whoever controls the ETF’s votes, now effectively controls their corporate destiny. ETFs are about marketing and asset gathering. There is no better way to stay in the news, looking responsible, than to burnish your ESG credentials. Does an ETF manager care if energy, one of the smallest weightings in most indexes, is now forced to destroy capital by going into run-off while trying to do “green” things? Probably not—they’re all cheering as BP (BP – USA) does exactly that. The attack on XOM was meant as a warning shot to all of corporate America; go along with ESG—or risk a pirate attack.

Meanwhile, over in Europe, Royal Dutch Shell (RDS.A – USA) was told by a court in The Hague to cut emissions by 45% by 2030. Clearly this is impossible even if they don’t drill another well. I expect that this will only embolden similar lawsuits. Most will be thrown out, but enough will be decided against energy producers that it will move the needle. If courts legislate against energy production, then producers will go into run-off. It’s not like there are a lot of investors stepping up looking to fund production growth anyway.

If you hijack energy company boards and get them to stop drilling and you have courts telling energy companies to stop drilling, pretty soon there won’t be any new supply as producers will get the message and stop drilling. Meanwhile, demand will keep growing—it always does. As these data-points continue to stack up, I’m starting to wonder if we’re hurtling towards an energy crisis. [Doug here: You nailed it! A crisis is here now and worsening as we speak.]

The (Fauci) Fox is Guarding the Henhouse

From Terry Paulding at American Thinker:

The compulsion to find out whether the Wu Flu started in the Wuhan lab, and at whose behest the research was done, has been almost as strong as the desperate drive to stop anyone from finding the answer.  On Sunday Morning Futures, Maria Bartiromo discussed this with Devin Nunes, wishing for the answer.  Concurrently with watching the show, I opened my email and found a link from Alex Berenson to the March 24, 2018 document outlining the gain of function research.

The document is a detailed description of the proposed research, complete with a chart of expected milestones (page 31).  Page 10 has an easy, colorful chart (unlike the density of the verbiage) showing us laypeople what they intend.  Page 22 shows a management plan, divided into Host-pathogen prediction and Intervention development stages.  This one document is the "holy s---!" origin proof.

Notice that Peter Daszak wrote it.  Besides being the head of EcoHealth Alliance, which proposed and arranged for the research in Wuhan, he was the only U.S. representative in the WHO's investigation of...COVID's origins — the same man oft-quoted as saying there is "NO evidence" that the lab leak theory is true.

Daszak has ties to Fauci.  Before this research started, Fauci provided $600,000 to the Wuhan lab supporting it.  That information was obfuscated, and emails between the two were redacted but finally released in July.

I think if I were to put together a Venn diagram of COVID, the central connector would be one Dr. Fauci.  He funded EcoHealth Alliance, which funded and administered the Wuhan research.  Fauci also has close ties to Moderna, including the fact that NIAID (National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases), which he's chaired since 1984, funded the Moderna trial.  He pushed Remdesivir, an expensive drug that didn't work to cure COVID patients.  And he was a key player in denigrating and banning hydroxychloroquine, the first cheap, easily obtainable drug that worked to stop COVID's progress.

Fauci's been at it a long time, and there's a world of history to follow if you want.  His wife, Christine Grady, heads the department of bioethics at the NIH (National Institutes of Health).  You know, the body that presides over the ethical questions of testing vaccines.

We now know beyond a doubt that the whole pandemic has been mishandled, and is continuing to be mishandled, in the U.S. and elsewhere.  We also can see alternative approaches: Norway, for instance, just decreed that normal life should resume, downgrading the pandemic to an endemic problem, meaning something that will always be with us, like the flu.

It's time to take a critical look at our COVID response and then to change it drastically.  With no leadership from the top, this may be impossible.

Dr. Fauci is still the voice of COVID USA.  He's had his hand in every aspect of the virus, from creating it to masking us, shutting society, and resisting early treatment, leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths.  His current stance, that everyone should be vaccinated regardless of age, health status, or previous COVID infection, is destructive to our lives and economy.

Far from being the face of our public health, Fauci is the face of destruction.  It's time he was indicted, not extolled.  It's also time we stood up and said "no" as loudly as possible — no to vaccinating our children, no to mandates, no to masks, and no to all the rules that keep us from living free lives.  The more of us do that, the faster this will end.

Wednesday, September 29, 2021

YouTube Bans Channels Airing Criticism of Covid Vaccine

From the terrific Jonathan Turley Blog

YouTube continued the expansion of corporate censorship on the Internet with the encouragement of leading Democratic leaders. The company has banned channels associated with anti-vaccine activists like Joseph Mercola and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Once again, rather than rebutting or refuting claims made by others, many sought to silence those with opposing views. YouTube will not allow people to hear views that do not comport with an approved range of opinions.  The move magnifies concerns that we are seeing the emergence of a new type of state media as private companies conduct censorship operations barred by the Constitution for the government to conduct directly. This move comes days after Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) asked Amazon to steer customers to “true” books on subjects like climate change to avoid their exposure to “disinformation.” It also follows YouTube censoring videos of jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny before Russia’s parliamentary elections. The move helped Putin and his authoritarian government crack down on pro-Democracy forces.
The Google-owned site is now openly engaged in viewpoint regulation to force users to view only those sources that are consistent with the corporate agenda. Facebook banned misinformation on all vaccines seven months ago and Twitter regularly bans those questioning vaccines.

These companies are being encouraged by many on the left to expand censorship.

Faculty and editors are now actively supporting modern versions of book-burning with blacklists and bans for those with opposing political views. Columbia Journalism School Dean Steve Coll has denounced the “weaponization” of free speech, which appears to be the use of free speech by those on the right. So the dean of one of the premier journalism schools now supports censorship.

Free speech advocates are facing a generational shift that is now being reflected in our law schools, where free speech principles were once a touchstone of the rule of law. As millions of students are taught that free speech is a threat and that “China is right” about censorship, these figures are shaping a new society in their own intolerant images.

In one critical hearing, tech CEOs appeared before the Senate to discuss censorship programs. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey apologized for censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story, but then pledged to censor more people in defense of “electoral integrity.”

Delaware Sen. Chris Coons, however, was not happy. He was upset not by the promised censorship but that it was not broad enough.

He noted that it was hard to define the problem of “misleading information,” but the companies had to impose a sweeping system to combat the “harm” of misinformation on climate change as well as other areas. “The pandemic and misinformation about COVID-19, manipulated media also cause harm,” Coons said. “But I’d urge you to reconsider that because helping to disseminate climate denialism, in my view, further facilitates and accelerates one of the greatest existential threats to our world.”

 

Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal also warned that he and his colleagues would not tolerate any “backsliding or retrenching” by “failing to take action against dangerous disinformation.” He demanded “the same kind of robust content modification” from the companies – the new Orwellian term for censorship.

This is the face of censorship. As demanded, the companies are now sanitizing their sites to remove opposing views on these subjects. Rather than offer a free forum for the full debate on such issues, anti-free speech advocates have again prevailed in silencing those with opposing views.

Dr. Doug: Is a Coronavirus Vaccine a Ticking Time Bomb?

“Right now, the fatality rate of the virus is estimated to be approximately 0.26%, and this number seems to be dropping as the virus is naturally attenuating itself through the population. It would be a great shame to vaccinate the entire population against a virus with this low of a fatality rate, especially considering the considerable risk presented by ADE. I believe this risk of developing ADE in a vaccinated individual will be much greater than 0.26%, and, therefore, the vaccine stands to make the problem worse, not better. It would be the biggest blunder of the century to see the fatality rate of this virus increase in the years to come because of our sloppy, haphazard, rushed efforts to develop a vaccine with such a low threshold of safety testing and the prospect of ADE lurking in the shadows.” (“Is the Coronavirus Vaccine a Ticking-Time Bomb?”, Science with Dr. Doug)

Counterfeit Capitalism: Why a Monopolized Economy Leads to Inflation and Shortages

From Matt Stoller blog BIG:

From railroads to plastic bags to semiconductors to ice cream, Wall Street and monopolists are creating shortages and exploiting them.

How Uber Caused a Shortage

I’ve lived in Washington, D.C. for fifteen years, and one of the many unacknowledged changes has been the disappearance of taxis. While the city has good public transportation, you could jump into a taxi for a reasonably priced convenient ride around commercial areas. Around 2012, Uber and Lyft came into the market, and for the next seven years, it got even better, with cheaper Uber fares within minutes. At the time, everyone knew that Uber, and its tech economy cousins, were heavily subsidized by investors, with Uber losing up to $1 million a week. But the cheap rides were too good a deal to pass up.

It couldn’t last forever, and it didn’t. Slowly, cabs, under pressure from ride shares, disappeared. Taxis had been a reasonable business in D.C., and the drivers had middle class lifestyles, but there was a tipping point, and the industry collapsed. Similarly, driving for Uber, once a reasonable side job, became worse as the firm cut the amount paid to drivers. Now, cabs are mostly gone. And today, ride shares are often a ten to twenty minute wait, and more expensive. It’s not just a D.C. problem; nationally, Uber/Lyft prices up 92% over the last year and a half. And at least in Washington, cabs, though they could now go back to their previous pricing, have not returned. In other words, there is both inflation, and in some ways, a shortage of taxi services.

Professional class people not being able to cheaply zip around is not the biggest problem in the world, but the story I just told you about why that service shriveled isn’t an isolated incident. While once ride shares were plentiful, now they are not. A would-be monopolist both raised prices to consumers, cut wages to drivers, and reduced the amount of driving services available in general.

And this story brings us to the problem of shortages and inflation.

The Shortage Problem

Last February, before Covid hit in force, I predicted in Wired magazine that this pandemic would introduce us to the problem of shortages. And now, almost every week I get emails from readers complaining about not being able to buy things they need. Politicians I know are hearing about it on the campaign trail. If you talk to local economic development officials, they will note that both shortages of goods and labor are the top concern of most businesses at this point. Reddit has a subreddit dedicated to shortages. The most recent Federal Reserve Beige Book mentions “shortage” 80 times. Even CNN is covering the problem, noting that shipping boxes have doubled in price and the cost of moving goods from East Asian to the U.S. or Europe has gone up five-fold.

The problem is everywhere.

There are shortages in everything from ocean shipping containers to chlorine tablets to railroad capacity to black pipe (the piping that houses wires inside buildings) to spicy chicken breasts to specialized plastic bags necessary for making vaccines. Moreover, prices for all sorts of items, from housing to food, are changing in weird ways. Beef, for instance, is at near record highs for consumers, but cattle ranchers are getting paid much less than they used to for their cows.

The debate over shortages has become so important that it is now a key political problem for the Biden administration. And yet, policymakers have no institutional measurement system useful for tracking it. Economists in the policy realm are obsessed with inflation, aka pricing changes, but they don’t have a similar popular metric to focus on with regards to shortages. This institutional gap blinds them, in part, to what is happening, because if there’s no transaction because the good doesn’t exist or can’t get to the buyer, then there’s no price. Hundreds of drugs, for instance, have been in shortage for decades, but the substitute of an inferior medicine doesn’t reflect in the consumer price index.

Nevertheless, economists are taking notice that something is off in our economy, because supply chains are disrupting pricing, and causing inflation in many unusual segments, like used cars and hotels. At the Federal Reserve, there is a debate over whether this inflation is ‘transitory’ - a result of one-time shocks from the pandemic - or something else.

Among economists like Paul Krugman, the problem is temporary. Supply chains will eventually work themselves out. Inflation hawks by contrast see money printing from the Fed as inducing price hikes. Republican Jim Banks, for instance, chalked up inflation to “reckless spending bills Democrats have pushed for during the last year,” but it’s not just a partisan play; Obama advisor Larry Summers agrees with that formulation.

If you ask about supply chains, however, the answers get a lot more vague. In response to a question about shortages, Adam Posen, a former Bank of England official turned D.C. think tank expert, told the New York Times that normalcy might be “another year or two” away, though there is “genuine uncertainty here.”

What If There Is No “Normalcy”?

For forty years, everyone but logistics professionals have had the luxury of ignoring the details of how we make, ship, and distribute things. Stuff just kind of showed up in stores for consumers. Economists who talk about the broad economy, meanwhile, were obsessed with money; they thought about the Fed printing more or less of it, or taxing and spending. They too assumed stuff just kind of shows up in stores.

Yet, using this macro-framework is oddly divorced from what people are experiencing. Much of the handwaving - the assumption that things will return to the way they were and it’s just a matter of waiting, or that everything is driven by money printing or government spending - reflects the intellectual habits borne from not having to think about the flow of stuff.

There is a third explanation for inflation and shortages, and it’s not simply that the Fed has printed too much money or that Covid introduced a supply shock (though both are likely factors.) It’s a political and policy story. The consolidation of power over supply chains in the hands of Wall Street, and the thinning out of how we make and produce things over forty years in the name of efficiency, has made our economy much less resilient to shocks. These shortages are the result.

Uber’s attempt to monopolize the taxi market with cheap prices, and the resulting shortage years later after the market was ruined, is a very simple way to understand the situation, if you imagine that taking place across multiple industry segments beyond taxis. Monopolistic business models often appear to be efficient or good for consumers - for a time - but end up destroying productive capacity on the backend, which then creates or worsens a shortage. In that case, cab drivers, who used to be able to make a reasonable living, haven’t really come back.

Two years ago, I coined the term “Counterfeit Capitalism” to describe this phenomenon. I focused on the fraudulent firm WeWork, which was destroying the office share market with an attempted monopoly play turned into a straight Ponzi scheme, enabled by Softbank and JP Morgan. Like counterfeiting, such loss-leading not only harms the firm doing the loss-leading, but destroys legitimate firms in that industry, ultimately ruining the entire market.

In the gig economy, the consequences are becoming clear, as Kevin Roose of the New York Times noted a few months ago in a story titled “Farewell, Millennial Lifestyle Subsidy.” But beyond Uber and the gig economy, or firms like Amazon that pursue loss-leading strategies, such destructive business practices are also routine.

Take lumber, whose pricing increased dramatically earlier this year. As Sandeep Vaheesan pointed out, there’s a very clear predatory pricing monopoly story here. In the early 2000s, Ross-Simmons Hardwood sued lumber giant Weyerhaeuser Co. A key cost for lumber mills is the price of logs, and Ross-Simmons accused Weyerhaeuser of artificially paying more for logs to drive competitors out of business. This practice was similar to Uber incurring losses to subsidize the cost of rides to underprice taxis and capture the market, only in this case it was Weyerhaeuser incurring losses to keep the price of logs higher than they should be.

As Vaheesan put it, this behavior changed the market. “Why invest in sawmills,” he asked, “if dominant players will buy up necessary inputs as a means of crushing the margins of competitors?” Though a jury agreed that Weyerhaeuser was engaged in predatory conduct, in 2007, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Weyerhaeuser. And whaddya know, during the pandemic lumber prices spiked, even as tree growers didn’t see the benefit. More broadly, this ruling undermined small producers in capital heavy industries, who had less of a reason to invest in capacity.

This decision, like many others, was part of a forty year trend of facilitating monopolies. It wasn’t necessarily done in bad faith; policymakers followed the lead of economists, who believed dominant firms were dominant because they were efficient. This faith in efficiency over all else meant that the public structuring of markets to force resiliency - aka regulation - was illegitimate. So too were attempts to use public rules like tariffs to retain domestic production of key goods.

Alas, this philosophy has led to a series of bottlenecks in our supply chains, which are now global. After all, what else is a monopoly but a business model designed to secure or create a bottleneck? It is those bottlenecks that are worsening, or in some cases, creating the shortages we see all around us, on a worldwide scale.

Industrial Supply Crashes

I first noticed the problem of concentration and supply in 2011, when I wrote a piece on shortages of specialized video tapes, a result of the earthquake in Fukushima and the consolidation of productive capacity in that region. Before digitization, such video tapes were necessary, not to watch shows, but to film them. Because of the shortage, the NBA scrambled to get enough tape to broadcast the NBA finals, with one executive saying, “It’s like a bank run.” Why was this shortage so acute? The earthquake halfway around the world had knocked offline a Sony factory that made them. That was known an industrial supply chain crash, like a bank run, only with actual inputs and outputs of real world stuff.

This wasn’t the first such industrial supply chain crash in the era of globalization. There was one in 1999, when an earthquake in Taiwan hit semiconductor production, causing factories all over the U.S. to shut down and firms like Dell and Hewlett-Packard to stop selling computers. The key to these supply crashes was the consolidation of production in one area, often under the guise of trading off resiliency for efficiency. This was also the logic behind mass outsourcing of production.

Similar to the lead-up to the financial crisis, policymakers only saw in these trends the efficiency of large firms and beautiful global supply chains, not the pooling of hidden risk. The intermingling of banks and shadow banks into a complex and unknowable system caused a huge crash in 2008. Who knew AIG, Goldman Sachs, and fly-by-night California mortgage lenders connected to German land banks? Certainly regulators didn’t. The same is happening in slow motion with our supply chains. As one trucker noted, his Freightliner is in the shop due to a broken air line, and he was told that shop had seven other trucks sitting there with a similar issue, and so they can’t truck anything. That specialized part to repair his vehicle is no longer made domestically, but must be… trucked in from Mexico or Canada. See the problem?

The lack of resilient supply chains in the United States (and around the world) was masked, until a global shock came among. That Covid would cause such a shock was obvious; as I noted above, before the pandemic hit in force, I predicted it. And now, the pandemic is introducing shortages into our politics for the first time in living memory, largely because our highly thinned out supply chains are no longer resilient.

Forty years of consolidation suddenly met with a pandemic that required a social flexibility that our monopolistic commercial systems can no longer provide.

The Basics of Shortages: Bank Runs and Economic Shocks

So what is actually happening? I’m not sure, but below I’m going to lay out some of the dynamics I’m seeing.

First, there are two things at work that have nothing to do with monopolization. The first is Covid, a massive shock to our economic system that changed consumption habits. We switched from restaurants to grocery store food, from movie theaters and concerts to home electronics and hunting gear, from vacations to home improvement, from public transportation to driving, etc, along with parallel shifts in various commercial sectors.

Under any circumstances, such changes would necessarily cause chaotic price movements. Hotels and airline prices collapsed, lumber prices skyrocketed, and gun owners are still experiencing the “Great Ammunition Shortage.” But some significant shifts were inevitable.

Then there is the dynamic of bank run-like panics, which induce shortages by drawing down inventories. One home builder wrote me about shortages in his industry, noting that a lack of supplies “are, predictably creating further shortages, reminiscent of the toilet paper shortages in 2020: once someone finds black pipe or whatever, they buy way more than needed since they might not find it again. I'm as guilty as anyone; I have 50 stoves sitting in a storage unit since I'll need them at some point. Meanwhile, a 54 unit project is in suspended animation while I wait for the Packaged Terminal Air Conditioners that won't be in until next year.”

Another example is the gas lines resulting from panic around the shutdown of the Colonial Pipeline earlier this year. People topped up their tanks en masse, which caused shortages at gas stations even when there wasn’t an actual lack of adequate gasoline supplies.

Supply shocks, and some panic buying, was inevitable. In an economy with lots of flexibility and multiple buyers and suppliers at every level, these problems are manageable. But a monopolized economy makes the problem much worse.

The Different Types of Bottleneck Problems

Here are the five ways I’m seeing it play out.

1) Monopolies manipulate prices and lower supply. Unregulated firms with market power raise prices, cut wages, and reduce supply. That’s just what they do. A very simply example of this problem is in the beef, poultry, and pork industry, the three types of meat that are responsible for roughly half of the inflation in food. The White House came out with a very good blog post on the problem, noting that “just four firms control approximately 55-85% of the market for these three products.” The result is price spikes to consumers, lower amounts paid to farmers and ranchers, and record profits for the packers. Half of our food inflation, in other words, is a meatpacking monopoly story.

It’s not just meatpacking. The list of supply reductions seems endless. For instance, there is a shortage of various forms of generic pharmaceuticals. One would think we’d be investing in more production. Yet, as a result of a merger between Mylan and Viatris approved by the Trump administration, Viatris just shut down a giant pharmaceutical plant in West Virginia, costing 1500 jobs, but also reducing the capacity of the U.S. to make its own medicine. Similarly, in 2017, Linde and Praxair, two industrial gas giants, merged. Whaddya know, now there’s an oxygen supply shortage.

2) The Keurig Interoperability Problem: Then there are the artificial bottlenecks produced on purpose to exploit market power. For instance, why don’t we have enough specialized plastic bags to use in making vaccines? Over the past fifteen years, the producers of biopharmaceutical equipment consolidated the entire industry, such that there are really four producers each of whom sells, in business school speak, an “integrated set of products” to pharmaceutical firms who want to make stuff.

However, as I noted back in May, an ‘integrated suite of products” is really a euphemism for locking in your customers through product design, a classic sign of monopoly. If you use one kind of bioreactor bag, you can’t easily switch out to another, because the industry refuses to standardize. As this International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Associations noted, “the high degree of specificity and the lack of standardisation of these items represent a hurdle to short-term supplier switches and thus flexibility.” 

Basically, it’s as if these firms all make their own type of Keurig coffee machine, and don’t let the coffee pods work with each other’s machines to lock in their customers. There is no shortage of coffee, but the focus on market power has created an artificial bottleneck via product design. (To amplify the market power problem, these firms created intellectual property thickets, with thousands of patents on the plastic bags alone.)

Such interoperability issues are pervasive; railroad monopolies, for instance, don’t allow switching of freight loads to rival networks, which hinders shipping. Many of these shortages in the economy, in other words, are intentional.

3) Right to Repair, or the McDonald’s Ice Cream Problem: Another artificial bottleneck created to facilitate certain corrupt business models is to prevent firms from repairing their own equipment.

For instance, why is McDonald’s often out of ice cream? Their ice cream machines are always broken, leading to unhappy customers and frustrated franchise owners. There’s no shortage of vanilla, cream, sugar, or other inputs, but McDonald’s, and the food equipment conglomerate Middleby, do not allow franchise owners to repair their own equipment, because allowing that would jeopardize the fat maintenance equipment fees they get from servicing overly complex machines. And so there’s a shortage of ice cream.

If McDonald’s couldn’t force franchises to buy specific equipment, or if Middleby didn’t roll up the food services equipment space, or if it was illegal to block people from repairing their own equipment under reasonable terms, then there would be no shortage.

This problem, like the Keurig interoperability problem, is pervasive. John Deere tractors, weapon systems, wheelchairs, ventilators and many types of electronics have provisions preventing the ability of owners to repair their equipment. And market power creates an incentive for monopolists to produce over-engineered crap that breaks down, or to make it impossible to replace a part with a similar though not identical part from a rival firm.

When you need a flexible supply chain in a crisis, the ability to repair something comes in very handy. And the inability to repair stuff means shortages.

4) Infrastructure Monopolies: One of the most problematic monopolies is that of Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC), which is the main fabricator of high-end chips used in everything from phones to computers to cars, whose customers include every major tech firm. Semiconductors, like oil, are infrastructure at this point, going into a large swath of products. Infrastructure monopolies are bottlenecks whose effects cascade down supply chains. I mean, PPG, which is a paint conglomerate, is pointing to chip shortages as a cause of its supply disruptions.

As Alex Williams and Hassan Khan note, sustained national investment by Taiwan, combined with disinvestment by the U.S. government, led to the consolidation of manufacturing capacity in TWSC. Additionally, TWSC engaged in dumping of products on the U.S. market in the 1990s, which is a form of predatory pricing. Intel, rather than focusing on competing, organized itself around monopolization, and thus loss the technological lead over semiconductor production in the early 2010s.

The net result is that we are now highly dependent for a key form of infrastructure on a monopoly that cannot expand as quickly as necessary, and that is halfway around the world in a drought-riven geopolitically sensitive area. Disruptions or supply shocks thus mean begging Taiwan for one’s ration of semiconductors.

But there are many other infrastructure monopolies we’ve facilitated over the last forty years. There are, for instance, railroads, an industry where there used to be 30+ competitors, and which now has seven monopolistic rail lines that are constantly reducing service and destroying freight cars. Railroads, like many network systems, require not only competition, but regulation, or else the incentive to disinvest by owners is too strong. For instance, in 2019, the Union Pacific shut down a Chicago area sorting facility to increase profit margins for its Wall Street owners. As a result, in July of this year, the rail line had so much backed up traffic in Chicago that it suspended traffic from West Coast ports. Such a suspension of service backed up port unloading, causing a cascading chain reaction, delays piled upon delays.

Regulators are noticing. A few days ago, the head of the Surface Transportation Board Martin Oberman, told his industry that US railroads are focusing too much on pleasing Wall Street at the expense of shippers and the general public. To reach Wall Street profit goals, he said, “railroads have cut their workforce by 25 percent…Operating the railroads with that many fewer employees makes it difficult to avoid cuts in service, provide more reliable service, and reduce poor on-time performance.” So we know the problem. Infrastructure monopolies, when unregulated, intentionally create shortages.

We saw something similar with ocean shipping lines that have consolidated into three global alliances that build larger and larger boats. When a big dumb boat crashed in the Suez canal, a significant amount of global shipping came to a halt, which again, caused a cascading chain reaction that is still being felt, months later. And trucking is also being disrupted by the private equity roll-up of third party logistics firms which, like Uber, pushes down wages and likely removes supply from the market.

5) Power Buyers and Economic Discrimination: Then there’s price discrimination to remove small players from the market. One BIG reader, an administrative assistant at a small college, noted she’s seeing “shortages in previously plentiful food items.” There are a host of foods they can’t get anymore. “We order from Sysco mainly, and we sometimes can't get basic things like spicy chicken breasts for sandwiches. We get the same spicy chicken that Wendy's serves, so we presume Wendy's is taking priority on this.” Sysco has tremendous market power in food distribution, it is what is known as a power buyer, using a system of rebates to coerce suppliers and buyers into using its services.

Power buying is why large firms like Walmart are out-competing small ones. Walmart, for instance, tells its suppliers they must deliver on time 98% of the time, or it will fine them 3% of the cost of goods. “Known in the industry as "power buyers," large retailers have had an advantage for years when buying goods because they order larger quantities than smaller wholesalers do,” wrote CNN’s Nathan Meyersohn on this problem. “Large retailers' scale and buying clout make them a top priority for manufacturers, he said, and they often get promotions, special packaging or new products early.”

Price discrimination means smaller firms, both producers, distributors, and retailers, can’t get access to what they need to do business, and small firms are often more flexible than big ones, and serve customers in rural or niche areas. In West Virginia, for instance, where small pharmacists were the key vaccine operators, the roll-out of the vaccine to nursing homes was initially far quicker than in states that used CVS and Walgreens. The collapse of niche specialties, or the disappearance of small dealers who can fix products or service customers, is one result.

There are many other ways power buyers operate, and I’m going to devote a BIG issue to breakdowns in the pharmaceutical supply chain as a result of what are known as Group Purchasing Organizations. But that’s the gist of the problem.

A lot of people look at the economy over the last year and a half, and see the shortages that we’re having as a result of the pandemic and the resulting supply shock. But while Covid provided the spark, it also leveraged pre-existing fragilities existing all over the economy, including some shortages that were longstanding before the disease emerged. What all of these examples I offered have in common is the basic idea that when a monopolist concentrates power, that monopolist also concentrates risk.

The story of my book Goliath is the story of how policymakers and Americans came to see monopolies as efficient, or useful, or perhaps simply inevitable. We relaxed antitrust policy, facilitated the rise of concentrated power, and enabled looting by financiers. And this created a political crisis which is simple to explain. American commerce, law, finance, and politics is organized around producing bottlenecks, not relieving them. And that means when there’s a supply shock, we increasingly can’t take care of ourselves.

The scariest part of this whole saga is not that a bunch of malevolent monopolists run our economy, inducing shortages for profit. Indeed, these shortages are not intentional, any more than the financial crash of 2008 was intentional. Most of what is happening is unintended. Bad actors aren’t steering the ship. They are just making sure that no one else can, even when it’s headed for the rocks.

Monday, September 27, 2021

Beyond Brilliant: The Spartacus Letter

 From The Automatic Earth:

Hello,

My name is Spartacus, and I’ve had enough.

We have been forced to watch America and the Free World spin into inexorable decline due to a biowarfare attack. We, along with countless others, have been victimized and gaslit by propaganda and psychological warfare operations being conducted by an unelected, unaccountable Elite against the American people and our allies.

Our mental and physical health have suffered immensely over the course of the past year and a half. We have felt the sting of isolation, lockdown, masking, quarantines, and other completely nonsensical acts of healthcare theater that have done absolutely nothing to protect the health or wellbeing of the public from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

Now, we are watching the medical establishment inject literal poison into millions of our fellow Americans without so much as a fight.

We have been told that we will be fired and denied our livelihoods if we refuse to vaccinate. This was the last straw.

We have spent thousands of hours analyzing leaked footage from Wuhan, scientific papers from primary sources, as well as the paper trails left by the medical establishment.

What we have discovered would shock anyone to their core.

First, we will summarize our findings, and then, we will explain them in detail. References will be placed at the end.

Summary:

  • COVID-19 is a blood and blood vessel disease. SARS-CoV-2 infects the lining of human blood vessels, causing them to leak into the lungs.
  • Current treatment protocols (e.g. invasive ventilation) are actively harmful to patients, accelerating oxidative stress and causing severe VILI (ventilator-induced lung injuries). The continued use of ventilators in the absence of any proven medical benefit constitutes mass murder.
  • Existing countermeasures are inadequate to slow the spread of what is an aerosolized and potentially wastewater-borne virus, and constitute a form of medical theater.
  • Various non-vaccine interventions have been suppressed by both the media and the medical establishment in favor of vaccines and expensive patented drugs.
  • The authorities have denied the usefulness of natural immunity against COVID-19, despite the fact that natural immunity confers protection against all of the virus’s proteins, and not just one.
  • Vaccines will do more harm than good. The antigen that these vaccines are based on, SARS-CoV- 2 Spike, is a toxic protein. SARS-CoV-2 may have ADE, or antibody-dependent enhancement; current antibodies may not neutralize future strains, but instead help them infect immune cells. Also, vaccinating during a pandemic with a leaky vaccine removes the evolutionary pressure for a virus to become less lethal.
  • There is a vast and appalling criminal conspiracy that directly links both Anthony Fauci and Moderna to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
  • COVID-19 vaccine researchers are directly linked to scientists involved in brain-computer interface (“neural lace”) tech, one of whom was indicted for taking grant money from China.
  • Independent researchers have discovered mysterious nanoparticles inside the vaccines that are not supposed to be present.
  • The entire pandemic is being used as an excuse for a vast political and economic transformation of Western society that will enrich the already rich and turn the rest of us into serfs and untouchables.

COVID-19 Pathophysiology and Treatments:

COVID-19 is not a viral pneumonia. It is a viral vascular endotheliitis and attacks the lining of blood vessels, particularly the small pulmonary alveolar capillaries, leading to endothelial cell activation and sloughing, coagulopathy, sepsis, pulmonary edema, and ARDS-like symptoms. This is a disease of the blood and blood vessels. The circulatory system. Any pneumonia that it causes is secondary to that.

In severe cases, this leads to sepsis, blood clots, and multiple organ failure, including hypoxic and inflammatory damage to various vital organs, such as the brain, heart, liver, pancreas, kidneys, and intestines.

Some of the most common laboratory findings in COVID-19 are elevated D-dimer, elevated prothrombin time, elevated C-reactive protein, neutrophilia, lymphopenia, hypocalcemia, and hyperferritinemia, essentially matching a profile of coagulopathy and immune system hyperactivation/immune cell exhaustion.

COVID-19 can present as almost anything, due to the wide tropism of SARS-CoV-2 for various tissues in the body’s vital organs. While its most common initial presentation is respiratory illness and flu-like symptoms, it can present as brain inflammation, gastrointestinal disease, or even heart attack or pulmonary embolism.

COVID-19 is more severe in those with specific comorbidities, such as obesity, diabetes, and hypertension. This is because these conditions involve endothelial dysfunction, which renders the circulatory system more susceptible to infection and injury by this particular virus.

The vast majority of COVID-19 cases are mild and do not cause significant disease. In known cases, there is something known as the 80/20 rule, where 80% of cases are mild and 20% are severe or critical. However, this ratio is only correct for known cases, not all infections. The number of actual infections is much, much higher. Consequently, the mortality and morbidity rate is lower. However, COVID-19 spreads very quickly, meaning that there are a significant number of severely-ill and critically-ill patients appearing in a short time frame.

In those who have critical COVID-19-induced sepsis, hypoxia, coagulopathy, and ARDS, the most common treatments are intubation, injected corticosteroids, and blood thinners. This is not the correct treatment for COVID-19. In severe hypoxia, cellular metabolic shifts cause ATP to break down into hypoxanthine, which, upon the reintroduction of oxygen, causes xanthine oxidase to produce tons of highly damaging radicals that attack tissue. This is called ischemia-reperfusion injury, and it’s why the majority of people who go on a ventilator are dying. In the mitochondria, succinate buildup due to sepsis does the same exact thing; when oxygen is reintroduced, it makes superoxide radicals. Make no mistake, intubation will kill people who have COVID-19.

The end-stage of COVID-19 is severe lipid peroxidation, where fats in the body start to “rust” due to damage by oxidative stress. This drives autoimmunity. Oxidized lipids appear as foreign objects to the immune system, which recognizes and forms antibodies against OSEs, or oxidation-specific epitopes. Also, oxidized lipids feed directly into pattern recognition receptors, triggering even more inflammation and summoning even more cells of the innate immune system that release even more destructive enzymes. This is similar to the pathophysiology of Lupus.

COVID-19’s pathology is dominated by extreme oxidative stress and neutrophil respiratory burst, to the point where hemoglobin becomes incapable of carrying oxygen due to heme iron being stripped out of heme by hypochlorous acid. No amount of supplemental oxygen can oxygenate blood that chemically refuses to bind O2.

The breakdown of the pathology is as follows:

SARS-CoV-2 Spike binds to ACE2. Angiotensin Converting Enzyme 2 is an enzyme that is part of the renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system, or RAAS. The RAAS is a hormone control system that moderates fluid volume in the body and in the bloodstream (i.e. osmolarity) by controlling salt retention and excretion. This protein, ACE2, is ubiquitous in every part of the body that interfaces with the circulatory system, particularly in vascular endothelial cells and pericytes, brain astrocytes, renal tubules and podocytes, pancreatic islet cells, bile duct and intestinal epithelial cells, and the seminiferous ducts of the testis, all of which SARS-CoV-2 can infect, not just the lungs.

SARS-CoV-2 infects a cell as follows: SARS-CoV-2 Spike undergoes a conformational change where the S1 trimers flip up and extend, locking onto ACE2 bound to the surface of a cell. TMPRSS2, or transmembrane protease serine 2, comes along and cuts off the heads of the Spike, exposing the S2 stalk-shaped subunit inside. The remainder of the Spike undergoes a conformational change that causes it to unfold like an extension ladder, embedding itself in the cell membrane. Then, it folds back upon itself, pulling the viral membrane and the cell membrane together. The two membranes fuse, with the virus’s proteins migrating out onto the surface of the cell. The SARS-CoV-2 nucleocapsid enters the cell, disgorging its genetic material and beginning the viral replication process, hijacking the cell’s own structures to produce more virus.

SARS-CoV-2 Spike proteins embedded in a cell can actually cause human cells to fuse together, forming syncytia/MGCs (multinuclear giant cells). They also have other pathogenic, harmful effects. SARS-CoV- 2’s viroporins, such as its Envelope protein, act as calcium ion channels, introducing calcium into infected cells. The virus suppresses the natural interferon response, resulting in delayed inflammation. SARS-CoV-2 N protein can also directly activate the NLRP3 inflammasome. Also, it suppresses the Nrf2 antioxidant pathway. The suppression of ACE2 by binding with Spike causes a buildup of bradykinin that would otherwise be broken down by ACE2.

This constant calcium influx into the cells results in (or is accompanied by) noticeable hypocalcemia, or low blood calcium, especially in people with Vitamin D deficiencies and pre-existing endothelial dysfunction. Bradykinin upregulates cAMP, cGMP, COX, and Phospholipase C activity. This results in prostaglandin release and vastly increased intracellular calcium signaling, which promotes highly aggressive ROS release and ATP depletion. NADPH oxidase releases superoxide into the extracellular space. Superoxide radicals react with nitric oxide to form peroxynitrite. Peroxynitrite reacts with the tetrahydrobiopterin cofactor needed by endothelial nitric oxide synthase, destroying it and “uncoupling” the enzymes, causing nitric oxide synthase to synthesize more superoxide instead. This proceeds in a positive feedback loop until nitric oxide bioavailability in the circulatory system is depleted.

Dissolved nitric oxide gas produced constantly by eNOS serves many important functions, but it is also antiviral against SARS-like coronaviruses, preventing the palmitoylation of the viral Spike protein and making it harder for it to bind to host receptors. The loss of NO allows the virus to begin replicating with impunity in the body. Those with endothelial dysfunction (i.e. hypertension, diabetes, obesity, old age, African-American race) have redox equilibrium issues to begin with, giving the virus an advantage.

Due to the extreme cytokine release triggered by these processes, the body summons a great deal of neutrophils and monocyte-derived alveolar macrophages to the lungs. Cells of the innate immune system are the first-line defenders against pathogens. They work by engulfing invaders and trying to attack them with enzymes that produce powerful oxidants, like SOD and MPO. Superoxide dismutase takes superoxide and makes hydrogen peroxide, and myeloperoxidase takes hydrogen peroxide and chlorine ions and makes hypochlorous acid, which is many, many times more reactive than sodium hypochlorite bleach.

Neutrophils have a nasty trick. They can also eject these enzymes into the extracellular space, where they will continuously spit out peroxide and bleach into the bloodstream. This is called neutrophil extracellular trap formation, or, when it becomes pathogenic and counterproductive, NETosis. In severe and critical COVID-19, there is actually rather severe NETosis.

Hypochlorous acid building up in the bloodstream begins to bleach the iron out of heme and compete for O2 binding sites. Red blood cells lose the ability to transport oxygen, causing the sufferer to turn blue in the face. Unliganded iron, hydrogen peroxide, and superoxide in the bloodstream undergo the Haber- Weiss and Fenton reactions, producing extremely reactive hydroxyl radicals that violently strip electrons from surrounding fats and DNA, oxidizing them severely.

This condition is not unknown to medical science. The actual name for all of this is acute sepsis.

We know this is happening in COVID-19 because people who have died of the disease have noticeable ferroptosis signatures in their tissues, as well as various other oxidative stress markers such as nitrotyrosine, 4-HNE, and malondialdehyde.

When you intubate someone with this condition, you are setting off a free radical bomb by supplying the cells with O2. It’s a catch-22, because we need oxygen to make Adenosine Triphosphate (that is, to live), but O2 is also the precursor of all these damaging radicals that lead to lipid peroxidation.

The correct treatment for severe COVID-19 related sepsis is non-invasive ventilation, steroids, and antioxidant infusions. Most of the drugs repurposed for COVID-19 that show any benefit whatsoever in rescuing critically-ill COVID-19 patients are antioxidants. N-acetylcysteine, melatonin, fluvoxamine, budesonide, famotidine, cimetidine, and ranitidine are all antioxidants. Indomethacin prevents iron- driven oxidation of arachidonic acid to isoprostanes. There are powerful antioxidants such as apocynin that have not even been tested on COVID-19 patients yet which could defang neutrophils, prevent lipid peroxidation, restore endothelial health, and restore oxygenation to the tissues.

Scientists who know anything about pulmonary neutrophilia, ARDS, and redox biology have known or surmised much of this since March 2020. In April 2020, Swiss scientists confirmed that COVID-19 was a vascular endotheliitis. By late 2020, experts had already concluded that COVID-19 causes a form of viral sepsis. They also know that sepsis can be effectively treated with antioxidants. None of this information is particularly new, and yet, for the most part, it has not been acted upon. Doctors continue to use damaging intubation techniques with high PEEP settings despite high lung compliance and poor oxygenation, killing an untold number of critically ill patients with medical malpractice.

Because of the way they are constructed, Randomized Control Trials will never show any benefit for any antiviral against COVID-19. Not Remdesivir, not Kaletra, not HCQ, and not Ivermectin. The reason for this is simple; for the patients that they have recruited for these studies, such as Oxford’s ludicrous RECOVERY study, the intervention is too late to have any positive effect.

The clinical course of COVID-19 is such that by the time most people seek medical attention for hypoxia, their viral load has already tapered off to almost nothing. If someone is about 10 days post-exposure and has already been symptomatic for five days, there is hardly any virus left in their bodies, only cellular damage and derangement that has initiated a hyperinflammatory response. It is from this group that the clinical trials for antivirals have recruited, pretty much exclusively.

In these trials, they give antivirals to severely ill patients who have no virus in their bodies, only a delayed hyperinflammatory response, and then absurdly claim that antivirals have no utility in treating or preventing COVID-19. These clinical trials do not recruit people who are pre-symptomatic. They do not test pre-exposure or post-exposure prophylaxis.

This is like using a defibrillator to shock only flatline, and then absurdly claiming that defibrillators have no medical utility whatsoever when the patients refuse to rise from the dead. The intervention is too late. These trials for antivirals show systematic, egregious selection bias. They are providing a treatment that is futile to the specific cohort they are enrolling.

India went against the instructions of the WHO and mandated the prophylactic usage of Ivermectin. They have almost completely eradicated COVID-19. The Indian Bar Association of Mumbai has brought criminal charges against WHO Chief Scientist Dr. Soumya Swaminathan for recommending against the use of Ivermectin.

Ivermectin is not “horse dewormer”. Yes, it is sold in veterinary paste form as a dewormer for animals. It has also been available in pill form for humans for decades, as an antiparasitic drug.

The media have disingenuously claimed that because Ivermectin is an antiparasitic drug, it has no utility as an antivirus. This is incorrect. Ivermectin has utility as an antiviral. It blocks importin, preventing nuclear import, effectively inhibiting viral access to cell nuclei. Many drugs currently on the market have multiple modes of action. Ivermectin is one such drug. It is both antiparasitic and antiviral.

In Bangladesh, Ivermectin costs $1.80 for an entire 5-day course. Remdesivir, which is toxic to the liver, costs $3,120 for a 5-day course of the drug. Billions of dollars of utterly useless Remdesivir were sold to our governments on the taxpayer’s dime, and it ended up being totally useless for treating hyperinflammatory COVID-19. The media has hardly even covered this at all.

The opposition to the use of generic Ivermectin is not based in science. It is purely financially and politically-motivated. An effective non-vaccine intervention would jeopardize the rushed FDA approval of patented vaccines and medicines for which the pharmaceutical industry stands to rake in billions upon billions of dollars in sales on an ongoing basis.

The majority of the public are scientifically illiterate and cannot grasp what any of this even means, thanks to a pathetic educational system that has miseducated them. You would be lucky to find 1 in 100 people who have even the faintest clue what any of this actually means.  (Continued below)

Monday, September 20, 2021

Are the Vaccine Conspiracy Theorists Right??

From Michael Whitney at UNZ Review:

Did the regulators at the FDA know that all previous coronavirus vaccines had failed in animal trials and that the vaccinated animals became either severely ill or died?  Yes, they did.

Did they know that previous coronavirus vaccines had a tendency to “enhance the infection” and “make the disease worse”?  Yes.

Did Dr Anthony Fauci know that coronavirus vaccines had repeatedly failed and increased the severity of the infection?  Yes, he did. (See here: Fauci on ADE)

Did the drug companies conduct any animal trials prior to the FDA’s approval that would have convinced a reasonable person that the vaccines were safe to use on humans?  No, they didn’t.

Did they complete long-term clinical trials to establish whether the vaccines were safe?  No, there were no long-term clinical trials.

Did they conduct any biodistribution studies that showed where the substance in the injection goes in the body?  They did, but the data was not made available to the public.

Do the contents of the vaccine largely collect in various organs and in the lining of the vascular system?  Yes, they do.

Do large amounts of the substance accumulate in the ovaries?  Yes.

Will this effect female fertility and a woman’s ability to safely bring a baby to term?  The drug companies are currently researching this. The results are unknown.

Does the vaccine enter the bloodstream and collect in the lining of the blood vessels forcing the cells to produce the spike protein? Yes.

Is the spike protein a “biologically active” pathogen?  It is.

Does the spike protein cause blood clots and leaky blood vessels in a large percentage of the people that are vaccinated?  It does, although the blood clots are mostly microscopic and appear in the capillaries. Only a small percentage of vaccinees get strokes or suffer cardiac arrest.

Should people be made aware of these possible bad outcomes before they agree to get vaccinated? (“Informed consent”)  Yes.

Did the FDA know that Pfizer had “identified vaccine-associated enhanced disease, including vaccine-associated enhanced respiratory disease, as an important potential risk”?  Yes, they did, but they did not demand that Pfizer fix the problem. 

Here’s more:

“The FDA noted that Pfizer, “identified vaccine-associated enhanced disease, including vaccine-associated enhanced respiratory disease, as an important potential risk”. The EMA similarly acknowledged that “vaccine associated enhanced respiratory disease” was “an important potential risk… that may be specific to vaccination for COVID- 19”.

Why neither regulator sought to exclude such dangers prior to emergency use authorization is an open question that all doctors and patients are entitled to ask. Why medical regulators failed to investigate the finding that large vaccine particles cross blood vessel walls, entering the bloodstream and posing risks of blood clotting and leaky vessels is yet another open question again.” (“Open Letter to the EMA and European Parliament”, Doctors for Covid Ethics)

Did the drug companies vaccinate the people in the placebo group after the clinical trials in order to conceal the difference in the long-term health outcomes between the two groups?  That is the conclusion a rational person would make.

So, they nuked the trials? Yes.

Did the FDA largely shrug-off its regulatory duties and abandon its normal standards and protocols because: a) It wanted to rush the Covid vaccines into service as rapidly as possible?    b) It knew the Covid-19 vaccine would never meet long-term safety standards?

We don’t know yet, but the adverse events report strongly suggests that the Covid-19 vaccine is hands-down the most dangerous vaccine in history.

Is the FDA rushing the “boosters” without proper testing?  Yes, it is. Here’s a clip from author Alex Berenson’s latest at Substack:

“Pfizer basically hasn’t bothered to test the booster AT ALL in the people actually at risk – it conducted a single “Phase 1” trial that covered 12 people over 65. The main Phase 2/3 booster trial (beware efforts to cover multiple “phases” of drug research at once, you want it bad you get it bad) included no one over 55.

No one.  As in NONE.” (“Are you kidding me, Pfizer, volume 1 gazillion”, Alex Berenson, Substack)

Have the boosters been modified or improved to meet the changes in Delta variant?  No.

Is there any additional risk in taking a booster-shot after already taking two experimental gene-based vaccines in less than a year?  Considerable risk. Here’s more from the Doctors for Covid Ethics:

“Given that booster shots repeatedly boost the immune response to the spike protein, they will progressively boost self-to-self immune attack, including boosting complement-mediated damage to vessel walls.

Clinically speaking, the greater the vessel leakage and clotting that subsequently occurs, the more likely that organs supplied by the affected blood flow will sustain damage. From stroke to heart attack to brain vein thrombosis, the symptoms can range from death to headaches, nausea and vomiting, all of which heavily populate adverse reactions to COVID-19 vaccines.

As well as damage from leakage and clotting alone, it is additionally possible that the vaccine itself may leak into surrounding organs and tissues. Should this take place, the cells of those organs will themselves begin to produce spike protein, and will come under attack in the same way as the vessel walls. Damage to major organs such as the lungs, ovaries, placenta and heart can be expected ensue, with increasing severity and frequency as booster shots are rolled out.” (“Open Letter to the EMA and European Parliament“, Doctors for Covid Ethics)

So, it’s the double-whammy. On the one hand, the booster will perform largely like the original vaccine, penetrating cells and forcing them to produce spike protein which, in turn, generates blood clots and leaky blood vessels. And, on the other, the newly-produced S proteins trigger a damaging immune response in which the complement system attacks and destroys the cells that line the inside of the blood vessels. Every additional booster will intensify this process weakening the vascular system and increasing the clotting. If the Doctors are correct in their analysis, then we could see a sharp uptick in all-cause mortality in the heavily-vaccinated countries in less than a year. Cardiac arrests are already rising.

Here’s another question that’s worth mulling over: Was there any reason for the regulators at the FDA to think that these problems would not arise following the launching of the vaccine campaign?

No. They should have known there would be problems as soon as they saw that the vaccine did not stay in the shoulder as it was supposed to. The vaccine wasn’t supposed to enter the bloodstream and spread across the body leaving billions of spike proteins in its wake. (The spike protein is a cytotoxin, a cell killer. It is not an appropriate antigen for stimulating an immune response. It is a potentially-lethal pathogen that poses a threat to one’s health even if it is separated from the virus.) Nor was the vaccine supposed to trigger Antibody-Dependent Enhancement (ADE) which is the condition we hinted at above when referring to “vaccine-associated enhanced disease”. Here’s a brief explanation:

“ADE has proven to be a serious challenge with coronavirus vaccines, and this is the primary reason many have failed in early in-vitro or animal trials. For example, rhesus macaques who were vaccinated with the Spike protein of the SARS-CoV virus demonstrated severe acute lung injury when challenged with SARS-CoV, while monkeys who were not vaccinated did not. Similarly, mice who were immunized with one of four different SARS-CoV vaccines showed histopathological changes in the lungs with eosinophil infiltration after being challenged with SARS-CoV virus. This did not occur in the controls that had not been vaccinated. A similar problem occurred in the development of a vaccine for FIPV, which is a feline coronavirus.” (“Is the Coronavirus Vaccine a Ticking-Time Bomb?”, Science with Dr. Doug)

Is this what we are seeing right now? In all the countries that launched mass-vaccination campaigns early (Israel, Iceland, Scotland, Gibraltar and UK) cases, hospitalizations and deaths are rising faster in the vaccinated portion of the population than the unvaccinated. Why?

Are they really experiencing a fourth or fifth wave or have the vaccines generated “inactivity-enhancing” antibodies that make the disease worse? This 2-minute video helps to clarify what’s going on:

Vaccines are made to a specific variant. And when that variant mutates, the vaccine no longer recognizes it. It’s like you are seeing a completely new virus. And, because that is so, you actually get more severe symptoms when you are vaccinated against one variant and it mutates and then your body sees the other variant. The science shows, that if you get vaccinated in multiple years (for the flu), you are more likely to get severe disease, you are more likely to get viral replication, and you are more likely to be hospitalized…. We are seeing the same thing in Covid with the Delta variant. So we are actually mandating that people get a vaccine when they can actually get more sick when they are exposed to the virus...In fact, this week, a paper came out that showed that–with the Delta variant– when you are vaccinated your body is supposed to make antibodies that neutralize the virus, but they were supposed to neutralize the old variant. When they see this new variant, the antibodies take the virus and help it infect the cells.” (“Expert testimony on mandatory vaccinations”, Dr Christina Parks PhD., Rumble, start at minute 5:05)

Repeat: “If you get vaccinated in multiple years, you are more likely to get severe disease, you are more likely to get viral replication, and you are more likely to be hospitalized…. With the Delta variant– when you are vaccinated …. the antibodies take the virus and help it infect the cells.”

This is ADE, and this is probably why hospitalizations and deaths are rising among the vaccinated in Israel, UK and the rest. True, the Delta variant is less lethal than the Wuhan virus but, unfortunately, that rule does not apply to those who have been vaccinated and whose antibodies promote the uptake of the virus into their cells. This increases the viral replication function that increases the severity of the disease. In short, people are getting sicker because they were vaccinated. Here’s another short video that helps to explain:

“…The vaccine-induced antibodies will stand up against the virus. and once a virus is under pressure; it changes, it becomes a variant, and the variant cannot be stopped by vaccine-induced antibodies. Vaccine-induced antibodies. also shut down your innate immune system… so variants can come straight through and infect those that are vaccinated. That is viral immune escape, and that means that the vaccinated are defenseless against variants. This is no longer a pandemic of Covid-19. It is a pandemic of variants…

And there is something called recombination, and recombination means a vaccinated host can be infected by more than one variant at a time. …If a vaccinated host is co-infected by more than one variant, the variants will mix DNA, and change and camouflage and produce a super variant. And if a super variants are produced, nothing can stop them. And already they are saying that the latest variant to come out is vaccine resistant. And this is just the beginning. Dr Geert Vanden Bosche warns that if we do not immediately stop mass vaccination campaigns around the world, the world will experience an international catastrophe of mass mortality. I didn’t say that, he did. The vaccinated are a threat to us all.” (“Viral Immune Escape Explained”, Dr. Michael McDowell, Rumble)

It’s not the variant that intensifies the disease, it’s the fact that the vaccine targets one narrow endpoint, the spike protein, that gradually adapts to survive. As the virus progressively learns to avoid the vaccine, vaccine-induced immunity wanes. Natural immunity produces broad, robust immunity to the whole virus not merely one part of it. It is strong and enduring.

So how will the vaccinated fight new forms of the virus, after all, the vaccine is not a medicine that overpowers a particular pathogen. It is a subtle (genetic) reprogramming of the immune system that forces one’s cells to produce a particular version of the spike protein. Boosters that stimulate production of the same protein will have only modest impact. In short, boosters are still fighting the last war.

Also, as we mentioned above, coronavirus vaccines tend to create antibodies that “enhance infectivity” when they encounter adapted forms of the virus. That means that millions of inoculated people will now face forms of the virus for which they have almost no protection and for which their compromised immune systems can only provide limited help. Here’s more from the article above:

“Right now, the fatality rate of the virus is estimated to be approximately 0.26%, and this number seems to be dropping as the virus is naturally attenuating itself through the population. It would be a great shame to vaccinate the entire population against a virus with this low of a fatality rate, especially considering the considerable risk presented by ADE. I believe t his risk of developing ADE in a vaccinated individual will be much greater than 0.26%, and, therefore, the vaccine stands to make the problem worse, not better. It would be the biggest blunder of the century to see the fatality rate of this virus increase in the years to come because of our sloppy, haphazard, rushed efforts to develop a vaccine with such a low threshold of safety testing and the prospect of ADE lurking in the shadows.” (“Is the Coronavirus Vaccine a Ticking-Time Bomb?”, Science with Dr. Doug)

“Blunder”, he says?

It wasn’t a blunder. It was deliberate. The Covid-19 vaccine was supposed to fail like all the coronavirus vaccines before it. That’s the point. That’s why the drug companies skipped the animal testing and long-term safety trials. That’s why the FDA rushed it through the regulatory process and suppressed the other life-saving medications, and silenced all critics of the policy, and pushed for universal vaccination regardless of the risks of blood clotting, cardiac arrest, stroke and death. And that’s why the world is on the threshold of an “international catastrophe of mass mortality.” It’s because that’s how the strategy was planned from the very beginning.

The vaccine isn’t supposed to work, it’s supposed to make things worse. And it has! It’s increased the susceptibility of millions of people to severe illness and death. That’s what it’s done. It’s a stealth weapon in an entirely new kind of war; a war aimed at restructuring the global order and establishing absolute social control. Those are the real objectives. It has nothing to do pandemics or viral contagion. It’s about power and politics. That’s all.

Monday, September 13, 2021

A Panel of Scientists Conclude Vaccine Boosters Not Needed

From Zero Hedge

As a growing chorus of scientists and activists question the Biden Administration's push to roll out booster jabs to Americans as quickly as possible, more research has just been released suggesting booster jabs simply aren't necessary for most people - especially those who have already been vaccinated once.

The finding comes via a report citing the opinions of an all-star panel of scientists from around the world published via the Lancet. Governments would be better served to focus on immunizing the unvaccinated and to wait for more data on which boosters. What's more, it's not yet clear what doses would be most effective according to the authors, a group that includes two prominent US FDA
experts.

The scientists' assessment was based on a wide range of real-world observational studies as well as data from clinical trials before the vaccines were approved. "None of the studies has provided credible evidence of substantially declining protection against severe disease," the authors wrote.

The FDA scientists involved were Marion Gruber, who leads the FDA’s Office of Vaccines Research and Review, and her deputy Philip Krause. Both recently announced their plans to step down later this year. Now it's pretty clear that they're perhaps doing so to oppose the booster jab rollout.

The WHO has urged against broad use of boosters, saying it would make better public-health sense to focus on immunizing those who haven’t gotten any shots yet whether because of anti-vaccine sentiment in countries with ample reserves, or because they live in places with little access to shots.

"Even if boosting were eventually shown to decrease the medium-term risk of serious disease, current vaccine supplies could save more lives if used in previously unvaccinated populations," the authors wrote.

What's more, boosters could lead to even more harmful side effects in the population, a phenomenon which isn't well understood, even as cases of heart inflammation have increasingly been tied to mRNA vaccines.

Torrance Stephens: Egg Throwing White Liberals are the True Face of the Democratic Party

From Torrance Stephens at Substack (banned from Twitter and YouTube for Thought Crimes)

 History has demonstrated the nature of the Democrat party and their policy preference. Joe Biden makes this clear. It was Malcom X who addressed this suggesting that Blacks’ biggest enemy is a white liberal when he stated:

“The worst enemy that the Negro have is this white man that runs around here drooling at the mouth professing to love Negros and calling himself a liberal, and it is following these white liberals that has perpetuated problems that Negros have. If the Negro wasn’t taken, tricked or deceived by the white liberal, then Negros would get together and solve our own problems. I only cite these things to show you that in America, the history of the white liberal has been nothing but a series of trickery designed to make Negros think that the white liberal was going to solve our problems…The white liberal aren’t white people who are for independence, who are moral and ethical in their thinking. They are just a faction of white people that are jockeying for power…The white liberals are more dangerous than the conservatives; they lure the Negro, and as the Negro runs from the growling wolf, he flees into the open jaws of the "smiling" fox.”

History supports his statements.  If it were not for U.S. Representative Justin Morrill (R-VT) in 1862, who got the Land Grant Act passed, which established colleges for African Americans, there would be no state funded historically Black Colleges and Universities. Even before this, the historical record notes that the Republican Party was formed essential to counteract the pro-slavery policies of the Democratic Party during a period in the nation’s history in which we saw Democratic President Franklin Pierce signing the Kansas-Nebraska Act (which allowed for the expansion of slavery into newly acquired U.S. territories in 1854). Ironically the same year, Montgomery Blair, a republican argued in front of the Supreme Court on behalf of his client Dred Scott albeit it unsuccessfully where the record noted the only dissent with the court decision majority of seven democrats was Republican Justice John McLean.

The Democrat Party, in particular southern democrats whom were former confederate veterans found the “Ku Klux Klan” in Pulaski, Tennessee, on December 24, 1865.  To be accurate, the Ku Klux Klan was founded and formed to be the military wing of the Democratic Party and actions around the nation after its inception until this very day still supports this objective. KKK violence was aimed specifically intimidate and kill newly freed slaves and Republicans.  For example, in September of 1868 Democrats in Louisiana murdered around 300 African Americans whom attempted to defend their assault against a Republican Newspaper editor. The following month, while campaigning for re-election, Republican U.S. House Representative James Hinds was assassinated by self-proclaimed Democrats and KKK members.

In 1871 the Republican congress passed the Ku Klux Klan act which outlawed the Democratic Party military wing. Republican President even dispatched troops to South Carolina after democrats threated blacks with death around the nation for even trying to vote.  In one case, African American Republican activist Octavius Catto was murdered by democrats in Philadelphia. A few years later in 1874, nearly 30 were killed when democrats took control of the Louisiana state house because Republican Gov. William Kellogg dared to have an integrated administration.

It is no secret historically that no matter what they are called (progressives, democrats, liberals, or socialist), this coterie has desired for decades to disrupt the basic fabric of the United States of America. One could say it began December 20, 1860, when the state of South Carolina left the Union, right before the convening of the 37th United States Congress. It continued with the election of America's first progressive Democratic president, Woodrow Wilson in 1912. This is clear if anyone has read the speeches of Wilson, or any of the books of history on him, his presidency or the period.

Woodrow Wilson’s writings, speeches and policies make two things clear: he was a devout racist and that he despised the freedoms and liberties advanced in the Constitution of the United States. On the first level, it was extremely evident he did not respect the 15th Amendment of the constitution therefore he did all in his power from demanding segregation of the federal workforce to promoting the Ku Klux Klan. As the 28th president, he was the first southerner to be president since Reconstruction and helped expunge advances African Americans had made since Reconstruction with one of his first actions - segregating federal government employees by race. Some historians assert that he only won because Republican votes split between Taft and Roosevelt.

Unequivocally, I can say Malcom X was correct in his assessment and we observed this recently when a white women threw an egg at Larry Elder, a Black man attempting to become the first Black governor is the history of the state of California. Politic aside, this should be disgusting to all. Throw an egg at me and I’m popping that azz with brass and lead. I will admit that Black democrats are just as dangerous. However, the white progressive liberal democrat is the most dangerous of them all. Not only do they pity others, they seek to absolve themselves of guilt by making things worse. In New York city they abrogate bail to intentionally send violent felons to poor and minority communities. Same is true for Chicago, San Francisco and Oakland. I won't even discuss St. Louis, Baltimore or DC. Fck, you can carjack a man in DC and kill him and get less than three years time. All across the nation in particular in major urban cities like New York and San Francisco, Asians are the targets of hate crimes by mostly Black folk, and Jews too, typically by folk released via bail reform.

The reality is that progressive policies advanced by democrats have never been based on justice and have been supported on the politics of racial division and bigotry (and this since the 37th Congress). They have no genuine interest in promoting policy that will benefit Black Americans nor America as a whole. They have established a low bar for how they see Black America because progressive liberalism is merely a racial pie topped with white whipped creamed guilt.  

It is sad and truly fckd up that rather addressing getting stranded Americans from the Taliban run Afghanistan, or the aftermath of Hurricane Ida, or inflation (would add border but I would be piling on) The Biden administration has prioritized campaigning for Gavin Newsom.

Think about it, 24/7/365 the media rambles on, without interruption about “right-wing violence” but Rand Paul lost part of his lung because of it, Scalise, got shot and almost died and Larry Elder, a Black man is having eggs chucked at him. Dang, let us be real and call balls and strikes - let us call things how they are. They love abortion because it is a legal way to implement genocide on Blacks and the poor. Can't a trick exercise agency and keep her legs closed? They release cats back on the streets they good and damn well know will only roam poor and urban neighborhoods. That say they care but we only see them in person in our churches when the begging for our votes, outside of that only on TV reading from scripts on screens they didn't write.

Now you can make up some sh$t that ain't happen and get more press than a dry cleaners. Jussie Smollett comes to mind, the first cat attacked by racist Trump MAGA hat wearing supporters in a district that went 90 percent for Biden and without dropping his Subway sandwich. Then there was a car at Kansas State University covered in racist graffiti in 2017, that the car’s owner admitted that he was responsible for the graffiti. At the same school in 2018, a student posted a photo of a racist sign he said he found on his apartment door but later admitted that he created the sign himself. In Texas, a waitress at a Waco restaurant claimed that someone wrote a racial slur on a receipt. This was also proven false. Ironically, a Black student at Wayne State University claimed that someone threw eggs at her residence hall door and that someone tore down her LGBT Pride sticker. This too was proven false. The most recent involved Michelle Fiscus, who reported receiving dog muzzle in mail on July 3 after advocating for vaccination of children without parental consent. The investigation proved she sent it to herself. I could go on, but I suspect you get the point.

The point is that racism lives on because of liberal ideaology. The need it like a crack ho needs crack. Y'all can hate me, IDGAF I'm just calling it like I see it. Y'all can focus on my typos if you want but for me I'd rather be honest and truthful that exacting in my typing or grammar. Reckon we all make mistakes, such is the nature of being human. Throwing eggs at a black person when you are white demokkkrat is a throwback gesture. Maybe I shouldn't say such because to say throwback implies the behavior left, but it never did, and remains in the hearts and minds of those that have always believed Black should do what whites demand and think like whites suggest, or else they should be hung from a tree. Watch you back, cause the folk that say the believe black lives matter, the same ones that hold their purse tighter when they on the elevator with you, or if you having a Barbecue in the park - and these at conservatives.