Triumph of Liberty

MN Gordon on EconomicPrism (https://economicprism.com/how-to-triumph-in-2021-or-die-trying/):

“In this context, those counting on government stimulus or relief payments to keep shoes on their feet and food in their bellies are going to be lacking.  Indeed, many already are.  But as disappointment has slipped to disenchantment something remarkable has happened.  The populace has made ever greater demands for the government to do something.

“In the midst of this, America’s fake news media recites the story of the national struggle with delicate and excruciating regularity.  They frame all happenings from the locus of the two party political system.  Any diverging views are carefully sifted out.  What’s reported is only what the story script editors allow to pass through their single micron particulate filters.

“We are told a never ending Marxian tale of the evil rich exploiting the noble poor.  We’re offered story after story with arduous focus applied to gradations of skin color, fractions of ethnicities, and the virtues of non-binary gender designations.  Political correctness condescends any exceptions with forceful rigor.  Step out of line and you’re brutally cancelled.

“Even worse, we’re told the individual must submit to the greater good of the collective.  That what’s yours is theirs.  Those who object are cast as selfish lowlifes.  Thus, we must hunker down so that we may bend the curve.

“On top of that, the goal of hard work and paying one’s way in life has been reduced to a game for suckers.  Stealth taxation through currency debasement has turned workers into chumps.  Small business owners who believe in doing things themselves have been made out for fools.

“But what’s the alternative?  Being crippled by dependency like everyone else?

“By this, we firmly stand amongst suckers, chumps, and fools.  Because suckers, chumps, and fools stand for freedom and independence.  They want no part of endless government.  They downright refuse it.

“Moreover, in the face of today’s assaults on liberty, suckers, chumps, and fools have come to embody the human spirit.  And the human spirit, as we understand it, will triumph or die trying.  Here’s what we mean…”

Read on about the case of Henry Worseley: https://economicprism.com/how-to-triumph-in-2021-or-die-trying/

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Worsley_(explorer)

Special Ed Poolside – the Chicago Way

“As recently as Thursday,” according to WGN, Sarah Chambers “tweeted to rally special education teachers not to return to work Monday because it’s unsafe. Just a few hours earlier, Chambers posted a picture on Instagram that appears to show her pool side in Puerto Rico and talking about going to Old San Juan for seafood.”

The Chicago Way – where corruption is an art form.

Here’s the rest of the story – absolutely hilarious: https://wirepoints.org/chicago-teachers-union-big-shot-says-unsafe-to-teach-live-from-her-pool-side-in-puerto-rico-wirepoints/

The Easiest Game of Connect-the-Dots

  • “In 2013, scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology collected horseshoe bat feces at a cave 1,000 miles away infected with a coronavirus 96.2% identical to the virus which causes COVID-19 (Nature).
  • “Peng Zhou, Wuhan Institute of Virology’s head of Bat Virus Infection and Immunization, was researching “the molecular mechanism that allows Ebola and SARS-associated coronaviruses to lie dormant for a long time without causing diseases,” while a press release from his lab was titled “How bats carry viruses without getting sick.“
  • “Zhou’s colleague, Shi Zhengli, has been involved in bioengineering bat coronaviruses – co-authoring a controversial 2015 paper which described the creation of a new virus by combining a coronavirus found in Chinese horseshoe bats with another that causes human-like severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in mice.
  • “In 2015, Nature magazine expressed concern over Zhengli’s experiments with bat coronavirus. The same year, the US government suspended funding to the labdue to their concern over risks of experimenting with bat coronavirus.
  • “Meanwhile, the US State Department warned over safety standards at the Wuhan lab in a series of cables beginning in 2015, according to the Washington Post’s Josh Rogin.”

The rest is here: https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/chinas-clampdown-covid-19-origins-exposed-ap-journalists-tailed-samples-seized

20 million Americans Jobless

20 million at the end of 2020 compared to 2 million at the end of 2019.

And that doesn’t count those who were pushed out of the workforce by US deficit spending and open border policies.

California (and New York) top the states with the biggest increase in jobless claims (as lockdowns accelerated).

https://www.zerohedge.com/personal-finance/2020-ends-around-20-million-americans-still-jobless-benefits

Inflation Ahead? Or Is It Already Here?

Here is the M1 – the most liquid of all measures of the USD money stock.

Note the growth during the Obama years following the Great Financial Crisis. Slowed a bit under Trump. But relentlessly grew faster than the economy.

Until CoVid hit when the M1 exploded. Until November 2020 when the M1 went hypersonic.

Several things are happening here – none of which are good.

First, recall Corrupt Joe was talking about ending the special capital gains tax rate which is lower than tax on regular income. Assuming the rich see that prospect happening, you can make the case that the super-rich are cashing out of assets now which means the dough hits checking accounts while they rebalance their portfolios.

That might explain why we see some of the ~$3 trillion in the M1. Especially “post-coup” (I mean, the “election”).

But, recall we saw a lot of cash injections this year with few places to go. CARES pumped $1.8 trillion into the economy. The current stimulus package is worth $900 billion. That will begin hitting the M1 over the next month or so. And the deficit in Fiscal 2020 was another $3.1 trillion.

As the money supply increases, pretty safe to say the prices of a lot of things will go up.

Let’s see what’s gone up so far.

November monthly sales were up 21.4% year-over-year (YoY). Median price of existing home were up 14.6% YoY according to the National Association of Realtors.

Despite all that, over 2.7 million mortgages are in CoVid forebearance with delinquency rates over 17%(!).

We have not seen the money supply growth rate higher than what we’ve seen this year. Not even during the 1970s.  

Federal Reserve monetary policy has been buying up trillions of dollars in assets—including government debt. This has fueled new money creation.

If you consider the broader index, the story gets worse. Here is McMacken’s analysis: https://www.eurasiareview.com/17122020-us-money-supply-was-up-37-percent-in-november-oped/

Anyway you look at it, next year does not look good.

The Mathematics Against Lockdowns

In a bioRxiv preprint first posted October 21, 2020 (and later published in Molecular Biology and Evolution), Dellacour et al. (2020) report their studies of the spatial density of available SARS-CoV-2 genomes mapped in the Belgium epidemic.

Their phylodynamic analysis demonstrates real-time dispersion dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 lineages.

Among other things, their spatially-explicit phylogeographic analyses highlight that the national lockdown had a relatively low impact on both the lineage dispersal velocity and long-distance dispersal events within Belgium.

Simply put, the Belgian lockdowns show no statistical evidence of materially impacting pandemic dispersion.

Reference

Simon Dellicour, Keith Durkin, Samuel L. Hong, Bert Vanmechelen, Joan Martí-Carreras, Mandev S. Gill, Cécile Meex, Sébastien Bontems, Emmanuel André, Marius Gilbert, Conor Walker, Nicola De Maio, Nuno R. Faria, James Hadfield, Marie-Pierre Hayette, Vincent Bours, Tony Wawina-Bokalanga, Maria Artesi, Guy Baele, Piet Maes (2020) A phylodynamic workflow to rapidly gain insights into the dispersal history and dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 lineages bioRxiv 2020.05.05.078758; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.05.05.078758

Now published in Molecular Biology and Evolution doi: 10.1093/molbev/msaa284

Hack

In June, Attorney General Bill Barr sat for an interview in CNN’s Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer and predicted widespread fraud with mail in voting. He said: “People trying to change the rules to this, to this methodology – which, as a matter of logic, is very open to fraud and coercion – is reckless and dangerous and people are playing with fire.”

At the time, Barr was the nation’s top law enforcement officer with an obligation to prevent election fraud under a bevy of federal statutes.

And he did … nothing.

Worse than that – read Tom Farnan’s piece below.

The Banality of Bill Barr.