“Our Press and our schools cultivate Chauvinism, militarism, dogmatism, conformism and ignorance. The arbitrary power of the Government is unlimited, and unexampled in history; freedom of the Press, of opinion and of movement are as thoroughly exterminated as though the proclamation of the Rights of Man had never been. We have built up the most gigantic police apparatus, with informers made a national institution, and the most refined scientific system of political and mental torture. We whip the groaning masses of the country towards a theoretical future happiness, which only we can.”
“I am beyond their timid lying morality, and so I am beyond caring.” — Captain Willard, “Apocalypse Now“
Z-Man in Taki:
The grandees of official Washington, of course, will be celebrating. Their long nightmare has finally come to an end. Donald Trump has been evicted from their presence. For four long years—in defense of our democracy, of course—they have labored to get the rightfully elected president removed from office. That day has finally arrived. To put it another way, they will not have Donald Trump to kick around anymore.
The question lurking on the edge of those celebrations is, can they reel back the madness they have unleashed over the past four years? Largely due to their reaction to the 2016 election, they have smashed every institution on which their legitimacy rests. The narrative thread of the past four years has been establishment types corrupting the institutions to undermine the Trump administration.“The narrative thread of the past four years has been establishment types corrupting the institutions to undermine the Trump administration.”
As it stands, roughly half the country thinks the election was rigged and that future elections are going to be rigged. It is pretty much impossible to sell the whole democracy thing when half the voters do not trust the voting process. Lost in all the excitement is the fact that Congress has an approval rating of just 15%. The fact that the “people’s house” now sits behind layers of razor wire and is patrolled by the army does not help their image, either.
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The bottom line is, while the ruling class is partying behind their barricades this week, the problems facing them grow worse. It is more than a bit ironic that they have picked now to embrace a siege mentality and bunkerize the Imperial Capital. They have broken the country so thoroughly that the only thing that could possibly unite the people is the shared hatred for the people on the other side of those barricades.
On the same day that China published a much stronger than expected (if largely laughable as we first noted and Michael Pettis subsequently confirmed) GDP print, making China the only major economy to grow in the “year of covid”, China customs data showed that grains imports soared to record highs in 2020 after tight domestic corn supplies pushed prices to multi-year peaks, driving demand for cheaper imports.
To be precise, a record 11.3 million tonnes of imported corn last year – exceeding the annual quota of 7.2 million tonnes.
A first.
Meanwhile, everywhere else, grain prices have exploded by over 60% in the past 6 months…
Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai explains to Arizona legislators that the Dominion Machines Counted Biden Votes as 1.3 Votes and Trump Votes as 0.7 Votes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwHa1pfyJjc
Europe has been taking it on the chin this month pushing up European power and gas prices to their highest levels in years, and record spikes in power markets.
“The current cold spell in the northern hemisphere is paving way for a tighter global gas market throughout the year,” said Massimo Di Odoardo, director of European gas at WoodMac.
If the cold weather persists over the next month, power prices in Germany and the Nordic market could gain as much as 10 per cent because of the hike in demand, said Arne Bergvik, chief analyst at Swedish utility Jamtkraft AB.
The past week showed what the volatility is all about. An 18 per cent jump last Tuesday in the benchmark contract was followed by the biggest plunge ever a day later. Prices moved at least 10 per cent from the five-day average on 66 occasions over the last year, according to ICE Endex.
“We have a completely reversed situation at the start of 2021 compared with a year ago when the weather was mild and wet,” said Bergvik at Jamtkraft. “If the cold and dry weather continues prices should go up.”
The shift towards a colder planet is evident in the current northern hemisphere snowmass which has returned to the 30-year average.
These effects are evident in European natural gas demand for space heating and electric power prices.
Over the past six to eight months, the U.S. has seen perhaps one of the largest migrations of people based on economic and ideological concerns in almost a century. Not since the Great Depression has there been so many Americans relocating in search of a better life. Today, however, those who relocate seem to be largely conservatives and moderates. There is a very good, multifaceted, reason for this.
I think one of the best recent explanations for the conservative migration is visible in the near-180-degree turnaround by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo on his draconian lockdown mandates. All of a sudden, Cuomo has announced that New York simply cannot stay closed any longer and that businesses need to reopen quickly.
With the successful conclusion of the Econo-Bio War of 2020, there is no need for lockdowns anymore. China and their US allies/business partners (The Party and Oligarchs) need to rev things up.
And fast,
Back to Smith:
I don’t believe Cuomo is mending his totalitarian ways, but at least for now, I think he is realizing what most of us in the alternative economic field have been saying for the past year: Blue state economies are dying because they are oppressive and this stifles trade and business.
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On the other side of the country, California is witnessing its own exodus, and it started well before the pandemic struck. In 2019, California saw over 653,000 residents escape the state’s suffocating bureaucracy and high taxes. In 2020, the state has hit its lowest population growth rate in history, even after accounting for babies born. More than 200,000 people left the state than moved in in the past year, and before anyone claims that these people are “liberals” invading red states, even the California media admits they are mostly conservatives seeking to escape the socialist sinkhole.
The election that capped the Econo-Bio War pitted tax consumers/debtors against tax producers/savers. With the help of stuffed ballots – and votes in excess of population in some cases – the tax consumers/debtors won.
That means mo’ debt and taxes.
But what does this mean for leftist states in economic terms? First, a huge loss of tax revenue, and this is dangerous for blue states in particular. California was projecting a $5.6 billion surplus in January of last year, only to face a $54 billion deficit by August. The state’s net tax revenue fell by 42% from March to May year-over-year, far outpacing losses in the rest of the country. Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom begged Congress for $14 billion in federal aid, claiming that the government has a “moral and ethical obligation to help the states”.
And this seems to be exactly how states like California are surviving, by stealing tax dollars from people in other states that have been more responsible in caring for their economies.
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Furthermore, blue states tend to have the highest levels of unfunded pension liabilities. In other words, their public pension obligations are only partially funded and are suffering a net loss. California, Connecticut and Illinois top the list and the only red state that comes close in terms of percentages is Alaska. Red states top the list in terms of the best funded pensions and the lowest debt per capita.
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The most likely reaction among blue states or the federal government under Biden will be to try to “redistribute” the wealth and stability from red states to blue states. This could happen in the form of stimulus measures that unfairly benefit blue states. The resulting dollar devaluation and price inflation might hit red states harder because they would not be receiving bailouts to offset the higher costs. In the worst-case scenario, in which a full spectrum financial collapse occurs, we may even see the federal government attempt to redistribute production and manufacturing from red states to blue states in the name of “national emergency.”
There could also be an attempt to stop people from moving away from blue states entirely. We have already seen a beta test for this in California, where legislators are attempting to pass a bill which would legally require former residents to continue paying taxes to the state for years after they leave.
Of course, this would lead to severe resistance from conservatives, but that is a discussion for another time. The bottom line is this: the economic and pandemic policies of blue states have failed miserably. Their only option is to see the error of their ways, become fiscally responsible and remove totalitarian lockdown measures, or, attempt to leech success from the red states like parasites. Which one do you think they will choose?
Well, all of that is in the future.
In the present, it’s “party on, Wayne” as “The Party” takes over in DC.
Bootheels on the necks to follow.
“The ideal set up by the Party was something huge, terrible, and glittering—a world of steel and concrete, of monstrous machines and terrifying weapons—a nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting—three hundred million people all with the same face.”
The lesson is not that lockdowns made the spread of Covid-19 worse—although the raw evidence might suggest that—but that lockdowns probably didn’t help, and opening up didn’t hurt. This defies common sense. In theory, the spread of an infectious disease ought to be controllable by quarantine. Evidently not in practice, though we are aware of no researcher who understands why not.
We’re not the only researchers to have discovered this statistical relationship. We first published a version of these findings in April, around the same time similar findings appeared in these pages. In July, a publication of the Lancet published research that found similar results looking across countries rather than U.S. states. “A longer time prior to implementation of any lockdown was associated with a lower number of detected cases,” the study concludes. Those findings have now been enhanced by sophisticated measures of actual social distancing, and data from the reopening phase.
There are experimental controls that all this research lacks. There are no observable instances in which there were either total lockdowns or no lockdowns at all. But there’s no escaping the evidence that, at minimum, heavy lockdowns were no more effective than light ones, and that opening up a lot was no more harmful than opening up a little. So where’s the science that would justify the heavy lockdowns many public-health officials are still demanding?
With the evidence we now possess, even the most risk-averse and single-minded public-health officials should hesitate before demanding the next lockdown and causing the next economic recession.
Well, science does eventually catch up on these these.
Bendavid et al. (2021) summarize their investigation as follows: The most restrictive non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) for controlling the spread of COVID-19 are mandatory stay-at-home and business closures. Given the consequences of these policies, it is important to assess their effects. We evaluate the effects on epidemic case growth of more restrictive NPIs (mrNPIs), above and beyond those of less restrictive NPIs (lrNPIs).
Their conclusion: While small benefits cannot be excluded, we do not find significant benefits on case growth of more restrictive NPIs. Similar reductions in case growth may be achievable with less restrictive interventions.
Reference
Bendavid, E., Oh, C., Bhattacharya, J., & Ioannidis, J. P. A. (2021). Assessing mandatory stay-at-home and business closure effects on the spread of COVID-19. European Journal of Clinical Investigation, e13484. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/eci.13484
With the Manchurian Candidate – China Joe and members of the Famiglia Biden crime family – about to complete the coup and take office, you got to give credit to Secretary of State Pompeo for releasing their assessment of the Red Ponzi’s Bio-Econo strike: https://www.state.gov/fact-sheet-activity-at-the-wuhan-institute-of-virology/
Since there’s the Ponzi’s economic allies in the new regime are likely to drop this into a Memory Hole (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_hole) as it’s “bad for business”, here’s the full text:
For more than a year, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has systematically prevented a transparent and thorough investigation of the COVID-19 pandemic’s origin, choosing instead to devote enormous resources to deceit and disinformation. Nearly two million people have died. Their families deserve to know the truth. Only through transparency can we learn what caused this pandemic and how to prevent the next one.
The U.S. government does not know exactly where, when, or how the COVID-19 virus—known as SARS-CoV-2—was transmitted initially to humans. We have not determined whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan, China.
The virus could have emerged naturally from human contact with infected animals, spreading in a pattern consistent with a natural epidemic. Alternatively, a laboratory accident could resemble a natural outbreak if the initial exposure included only a few individuals and was compounded by asymptomatic infection. Scientists in China have researched animal-derived coronaviruses under conditions that increased the risk for accidental and potentially unwitting exposure.
The CCP’s deadly obsession with secrecy and control comes at the expense of public health in China and around the world. The previously undisclosed information in this fact sheet, combined with open-source reporting, highlights three elements about COVID-19’s origin that deserve greater scrutiny:
1. Illnesses inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV):
The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses. This raises questions about the credibility of WIV senior researcher Shi Zhengli’s public claim that there was “zero infection” among the WIV’s staff and students of SARS-CoV-2 or SARS-related viruses.
Accidental infections in labs have caused several previous virus outbreaks in China and elsewhere, including a 2004 SARS outbreak in Beijing that infected nine people, killing one.
The CCP has prevented independent journalists, investigators, and global health authorities from interviewing researchers at the WIV, including those who were ill in the fall of 2019. Any credible inquiry into the origin of the virus must include interviews with these researchers and a full accounting of their previously unreported illness.
2. Research at the WIV:
Starting in at least 2016 – and with no indication of a stop prior to the COVID-19 outbreak – WIV researchers conducted experiments involving RaTG13, the bat coronavirus identified by the WIV in January 2020 as its closest sample to SARS-CoV-2 (96.2% similar). The WIV became a focal point for international coronavirus research after the 2003 SARS outbreak and has since studied animals including mice, bats, and pangolins.
The WIV has a published record of conducting “gain-of-function” research to engineer chimeric viruses. But the WIV has not been transparent or consistent about its record of studying viruses most similar to the COVID-19 virus, including “RaTG13,” which it sampled from a cave in Yunnan Province in 2013 after several miners died of SARS-like illness.
WHO investigators must have access to the records of the WIV’s work on bat and other coronaviruses before the COVID-19 outbreak. As part of a thorough inquiry, they must have a full accounting of why the WIV altered and then removed online records of its work with RaTG13 and other viruses.
3. Secret military activity at the WIV:
Secrecy and non-disclosure are standard practice for Beijing. For many years the United States has publicly raised concerns about China’s past biological weapons work, which Beijing has neither documented nor demonstrably eliminated, despite its clear obligations under the Biological Weapons Convention.
Despite the WIV presenting itself as a civilian institution, the United States has determined that the WIV has collaborated on publications and secret projects with China’s military. The WIV has engaged in classified research, including laboratory animal experiments, on behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017.
The United States and other donors who funded or collaborated on civilian research at the WIV have a right and obligation to determine whether any of our research funding was diverted to secret Chinese military projects at the WIV.
Today’s revelations just scratch the surface of what is still hidden about COVID-19’s origin in China. Any credible investigation into the origin of COVID-19 demands complete, transparent access to the research labs in Wuhan, including their facilities, samples, personnel, and records.
As the world continues to battle this pandemic – and as WHO investigators begin their work, after more than a year of delays – the virus’s origin remains uncertain. The United States will continue to do everything it can to support a credible and thorough investigation, including by continuing to demand transparency on the part of Chinese authorities.
Econophysics2020 
