Month: December 2021

Authored by Matt Taibbi and Matt Orfalea via TK News,

For a while now it’s been clear the primary objective of most pandemic coverage is to scare the socks off mass audiences. Good news, bad news, boring news, interesting news, news that’s more of a wash in the final analysis, news that’s a net plus overall: it’s all presented as terrifying, more signs of the Apocalypse. There’s no better example than the stampede to advertise the “first death from Omicron” in the United States.

Matt Orfalea does a hilarious job of stitching together an homage to the latest moral panic. So many great little details here, from the “Way Too Early” background to one reporter’s premature death report to the “aggressive Covid vice” imagery, the dramatic Biden-cough, and so much more.

It was the world’s loudest record-scratch when the WHO in the first week of December said the ominous “Omicron variant” of Covid-19 had been detected in 38 countries, but without any known deaths.

No deaths? How could that be? In the United States in late November, we’d already skipped past the stunned-curiosity phase and moved straight into active mass panic, with “fallout from the Omicron variant” causing the Dow to fall 652 points in a day when news of the mutant contagion arrived. Right away, we had a travel ban from southern Africa, an address urging calm from President Mumbles, and a declaration of a “Variant of Concern” from the CDC, as “scientists raced” to learn more about this “almost Frankensteinish” new strain of Covid-19.

The next month of Omicron coverage offered a fascinating window into our Covid-fixated future. For most of December, we were presented with an unbroken string of scare stories that in many cases actively buried the lede on the most important question: is this thing going to kill me? The Washington Post on December 14th, for instance, ran a story about how the “CDC warns” that a “punishing wave” could be coming as soon as January. The piece noted Omicron was “dramatically more transmissible” and “a more slippery foe when encountered by neutralizing antibodies,” but ignored the issue of lethality altogether, which would seem impossible to do by accident.

“How deadly is the Omicron variant? WHO releases death report,” wrote the Express U.K. earlier this week, with the following sub-headline:

OMICRON cases have increased more than tenfold since authorities identified the first UK infections in November, but scientists’ knowledge of the variant has increased in kind. The World Health Organization (WHO) released its first death report this weekend, outlining how dangerous it really is.

Reading that headline hits your fear center, making you anxious to know just exactly “how dangerous it really is.” What does that mean? Scrolling down, you first read that Omicron mutations “allow it to escape immunity provided by both vaccine doses,” that “it reduces two doses of Pfizer to 30 percent effectiveness, with AstraZeneca potentially down to zero,” and that while boosters can restore effectiveness to 75 percent, “many are at Omicron’s mercy.” Not good!

Only far down the piece do you read that since the WHO’s “no deaths” report in early December, the disease has “spread rapidly, and one person in the UK has died with the new variant… Recent data suggests the disease Omicron causes is milder than its predecessors…”

The distinction between “dying with” and “dying from” is a sticking point in theory if you’re trying to accurately gauge the lethality of a thing, but journalists have mostly shrugged it off.

On December 20th, a man in Houston died “with” Omicron. The Harris County Public Health office issued a release citing an “Omicron Variant-Related” death, but Harris County judge Lisa Hidalgo, sporting a stylish tree-branch-pattern mask, wasted no time in announcing, “The Omicron variant of COVID-19 has arrived in full force.”

As shown in Matt’s video, Hidalgo raised the county’s County’s Covid-19 “threat level” status to “Level-2 Orange,” bringing us back to the halcyon days of the War on Terror, when the government each day assigned us a mathematical Expected Freakout Level (EFL) about things over which we had no control.

Within hours, national press outlets like CNN had reported the “first death attributed to the Omicron variant,” gushing, as Jeremy Diamond is shown doing in this video, that “Covid surges are surging!” Pundits wasted little time wagging their bony death-fingers in our direction: “First Omicron Death in U.S. Was Reinfection—A Warning to Those Who’ve Already Had COVID,” wrote Newsweek.

Shortly after, a Harris County Public Health official named Martha Marquez hedged, saying they could confirm the dead man was Omicron-positive, but the cause of death had not yet been determined.

The arrival of both the Delta and Omicron variants were reported in ways that recalled the classic “Africanized killer bees” media panics of yore. Stay in your homes and be vigilant about the highly aggressive African invader who just might move in next door: for a good long time, this was a staple of local TV, as noted in Bowling for Columbine:

Descriptions of Omicron as the scary scary thing coming from southern Africa have been near carbon-copies of those old bee stories. Kudos to the few outlets at home and in Europe that pointed out the hypocrisy of this coverage. If you’re really bent on using the deadly new “Africanized” variant to frighten people into getting vaccinated, shouldn’t you also be “racing” to pass patent waivers so countries like India and South Africa can make their own vaccines, thereby preventing the spread of mutations before they even have a chance to become headlines here?

If they’re determined to keep going in the scare direction, they should do a better job of it. Omicron is certainly an improvement over Delta, but they should dispense with the pretense and start giving true Fangoria names to coronavirus strains: the “Mutilator” Variant, the “Suffocating Agony” variant, the “Shaft-Sagger,” the “Face-Eater,” etc. Would you bet against something like that coming?

* That is not @Orf in the death suit.

On the last day of the year, the COVID pandemic is ending 2021 with a bang: health authorities around the world have confirmed more than 1.2M new cases in the 24 hours to Thursday – a new record.

The US also booked a new record of its own, with 355.9K new cases, dragging the 7-day average to a new record high as well.

Data on hospitalizations and deaths shows hospitals in the US still have plenty of ICU beds available, although there are some areas where the outbreak is more intense. An uptick in vaccinations has put the US rate north of 63% in terms of those deemed “fully vaccinated” (a definition that may soon change). Deaths in the US have actually slowed in recent weeks.

While the number of canceled flights has declined, 1,125 flights were scrubbed Friday as rising coronavirus cases hobbled airline staffing. Winter storms threatened to further disrupt travel over New Year’s weekend. JetBlue scratched 175 flights, accounting for 17% of its schedule, by 1620ET on Thursday, according to FlightAware.com. Allegiant canceled 96 flights, or 19% of its service. United Airlines scrubbed 199 flights, representing 9% of its schedule.

Just weeks after the FDA approved the Pfizer pill Paxlovid, which can supposedly treat COVID in high-risk patients if taken within a few days of the onset of symptoms, Britain’s regulator, the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency, has followed suit.

The decision comes just weeks after British regulators approved a similar medication produced by Merck.

As COVID cases surge and hospitalizations start to overwhelm the NHS, Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government races to build an armory of weapons against the resurgent pandemic.

BoJo used his New Year message to urge any British holdouts to go and get their booster shots, as growing pressure on the UK National Health Service threatens to undermine his strategy to get through the omicron wave.

As cases flare in Southeast Asia, Singapore is extending its testing regime for travelers arriving via its quarantine-free vaccinated travel lanes for another four weeks, according to the Ministry of Health. Hong Kong, meanwhile, will require visitors to some restaurants and recreational venues like cinemas and gyms to have at least one vaccine dose before the Lunar New Year.

South Korea said its newly strengthened social distancing rules will remain in place for at least two more weeks. The restrictions, which ban private gatherings of five or more people and close restaurants and coffee shops at 2100 local time were reinstated in mid-December as daily cases hit a record.

Back in North America, Quebec is bringing back its controversial overnight curfew beginning Friday at 2200 local time and continuing through 0500 the next day. Dining rooms at restaurants will also be closed but take-out and delivery will, as usual, be allowed to continue.

Finally, for all its efforts, the Australian government has failed to prevent a surge in COVID cases. New South Wales, Australia’s most populous state, reported on Friday a record 21.2K new cases in the past 24 hours, a 73% increase compared with a day earlier, though hospitalization numbers rose more modestly.

Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk.com,

Isabella Weber, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, trots out proven economic nonsense in a Guardian article.     

Please consider her economically illiterate proposal: We Have a Powerful Weapon to Fight Inflation: Price Controls. It’s Time We Use It. 

Inflation is near a 40-year high. Central banks around the world just promised to intervene. However, a critical factor that is driving up prices remains largely overlooked: an explosion in profits. In 2021, US non-financial profit margins have reached levels not seen since the aftermath of the second world war. This is no coincidence. The end of the war required a sudden restructuring of production which created bottlenecks similar to those caused by the pandemic. Then and now large corporations with market power have used supply problems as an opportunity to increase prices and scoop windfall profits. 

The White House Council of Economic Advisers suggests that the best historical analogy for today’s inflation is the aftermath of the second world war. Then and now there was pent up demand thanks to high household savings.

President Truman was aware of the risks of ending price controls. On 30 October 1945, he warned that after the first world war, the US had “simply pulled off the few controls that had been established, and let nature take its course”. And he urged, “The result should stand as a lesson to all of us. A dizzy upward spiral of wages and the cost of living ended in the crash of 1920 – a crash that spread bankruptcy and foreclosure and unemployment throughout the Nation.” Nevertheless, price controls were pulled in 1946, again triggering inflation and a boom-bust cycle.

Today, there is once more a choice between tolerating the ongoing explosion of profits that drives up prices or tailored controls on carefully selected prices. Price controls would buy time to deal with bottlenecks that will continue as long as the pandemic prevails. Strategic price controls could also contribute to the monetary stability needed to mobilize public investments towards economic resilience, climate change mitigation and carbon-neutrality. The cost of waiting for inflation to go away is high. Senator Manchin’s withdrawal from the Build Back Better Act demonstrates the threat of a shrinking policy space at a time when large scale government action is in order. Austerity would be even worse: it risks manufacturing stagflation. We need a systematic consideration of strategic price controls as a tool in the broader policy response to the enormous macroeconomic challenges instead of pretending there is no alternative beyond wait-and-see or austerity.

Price Controls Never Work

Never. How many times do we have to prove this?

Nixon tried them, so did Venezuela, Argentina, and countless other nations. 

There are however, conditions in which price controls might seem to work. 

Conditions Under Which Price Controls “Seem” to Work

• Price controls are set high enough that they weren’t needed. 

• The supply constraints or the issue resulting in higher prices was on the verge of being fixed by the market anyway.

Isabella Weber was soundly and repeatedly blasted on Twitter for her nonsense.

The rules of interventionism:

1) Say there is no inflation. Print
2) Say it is transitory. Print
3) Blame businesses. Print.
4) Blame consumers. Print
5) Price controls and rationing -> Crisis.
6) Print to combat deflation.

Repeat

— Daniel Lacalle (@dlacalle_IA) December 30, 2021

https://t.co/WiO3BMAFKh

Then again, price controls have been such a success in Argentina over the years. 😐

— Andrew Stuttaford (@AStuttaford) December 29, 2021

Shortages and Black Markets

Does the guardian have any actual economists working for the organisation?

Practically, Price controls lead to shortages. Morally speaking they’re a fascistic means of interfering with the producer-consumer relationship. Trade should be voluntary. https://t.co/fGvX1gXseE

— Louis Le Marquand (@LouLeMarquand) December 30, 2021

If the government sets prices too low there will be shortages. Venezuela provides a huge case in point where the official price of gas is a dime. 

Try getting any for a dime. 

Not only do price controls lead to shortages, they lead to black markets where people are willing to pay a higher price and do. 

Fundamental Issues

1. Interest rates are too low

2. We had three rounds of stimulus overkill

3. Pandemic lockdowns cause labor shortage

4. Productivity going to hell because of boomer retirements 

5. More regulations under Biden

Law of Bad Ideas 

In 2014 I proposed a Law of Bad Ideas

Law of Bad Ideas: Bad ideas don’t go away until they have been tried and failed multiple times, and generally not even then.

Corollary One: Left alone, bad ideas get worse over time.

Corollary Two: The overwhelming desire to implement bad ideas leads to compromises guaranteed to make things worse.

Corollary Three: Those in positions of political power not only have the worst ideas, they also have the means to see those ideas are implemented.

Corollary Four: The worse the idea, the more likely it is to be embraced by academia and political opportunists.

Corollary Five: No politically acceptable idea is so bad it cannot be made worse.

Today I propose a couple new corollaries

• For every problem there is at least one economically preposterous idea on how to fix it!

• For every problem an economically illiterate person attacks the symptoms. 

When I first saw the Guardian headline, I thought it was clickbait nonsense to generate reads. Unfortunately, Weber is serious as well as seriously delusional.

She did not mention any of the five fundamental issues. Instead she attacked prices, a symptom of the problem.

Weber is not fit to teach at the University of Massachusetts or anywhere else.

4,000 Years of Price Control

Four Thousand Years of Price Controlhttps://t.co/TAWy5X9pxnhttps://t.co/SSYyZSm7cd https://t.co/eMjE0gzZF8

— Mike “Mish” Shedlock (@MishGEA) December 30, 2021

Every Measure of Real Interest Rates Shows the Fed is Out of Control

If you want to understand the key issue, please see Every Measure of Real Interest Rates Shows the Fed is Out of Control

You might also wish to consider Food! What’s in Your Basket and How Much is Inflation Eating?

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AccuWeather meteorologists say that millions of Americans will be ringing in the new year with a massive winter storm that is expected to blanket the Midwest and parts of the Northeast with as much as 18 inches of snow.

As of 0900 ET, winter storm warnings have been posted for the Four Corners region and Central Plains. 

High-risk metro areas for accumulating snow include Denver, Kansas City, Deis Monies, Chicago, and Detroit. Some areas could receive between 12-18 inches through New Year’s Day. 

After the storm, temperatures will slide across the country. The average temperatures for US Lower 48 will begin to dip from 47 degrees Fahrenheit today to 33 degrees Fahrenheit on Jan. 3. Temperatures will oscillate between 40-35 until Jan. 10. Then average temperatures will drive below freezing through Jan. 15. 

Meteorologists at private weather forecasting firm BAMWX continue to predict colder weather is set to trend for January. 

There are definitely changes ongoing in the atmosphere that better support a pattern transition and more availability of cold air in January. The orientation of the Polar Vortex should allow cold air to bleed further east rather than be bottled up in W. NA. #Energy #NatGas pic.twitter.com/8ee5OwvMjT

— BAMWX (@bamwxcom) December 29, 2021

With snow and cold weather inbound for a large swath of the country, keep an eye on natural gas contracts linked to Henry Hub for possible upside (read more on natural gas trends). 

Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

Most people simply do not understand that we really are moving into a long-term economic emergency.  So much of the economic optimism that fueled rallies in the financial markets throughout 2022 was based on a belief that the COVID pandemic would soon be brought to an end.  Well, that obviously has not happened.  After everything that has been done, the COVID pandemic in the United States is now worse than ever.  In fact, on Wednesday there were 465,470 newly confirmed cases in the United States alone.  That shattered the old daily record by more than 100,000.  The Omicron variant is spreading like wildfire, and this is going to cause mass panic during the early stages of 2022.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what this is going to mean for the economy.  Fear of Omicron is going to weigh heavily on production all over the globe, and so there will be less stuff available for us to buy.  Meanwhile, fear of Omicron is also likely to make our supply chain crisis even worse.  It will be even more of a challenge to move goods around the globe in a timely manner, and that is going to mean even more empty shelves.

But thanks to the reckless policies of the Biden administration and the Federal Reserve, Americans have lots and lots of money in their pockets.  All of those dollars are going to be chasing declining levels of goods and services, and that is going to result in hair-curling inflation.

Of course what we have already experienced has been painful enough.  Earlier today, the top moderator of one of the most popular discussion forums on the Internet posted this…

Just bought 2 prime ribeyes for $64…

I was shocked!

That’s got to be double what I used to pay.

Meat prices are getting really crazy, but they are only going to go even higher.

The same thing can be said for all other food prices too.  Even before Omicron came along, major companies all over the country were preparing major price hikes for 2022.

For example, the maker of Oreos and Ritz crackers has announced that all of their prices will be going up 6 to 7 percent next year…

Mondelez International, which makes snacks including Oreo cookies and Ritz crackers, will increase prices by 6% to 7% in January, the company said last month.

Other food producers will be implementing much larger price increases.  When the Wall Street Journal reported that Kraft Heinz would be lifting prices by as much as 20 percent in 2022, that definitely alarmed a lot of people…

According to the Wall Street Journal, Kraft Heinz’s price increases were among the most dramatic heading into 2022, with some items going up as much as 20%; the price of the company’s Grey Poupon mustard, for example, will increase between 6% to 13%.

And it is being reported that General Mills will also be raising prices by around 20 percent…

A “major regional wholesale supplier” leaked to CNN a letter that General Mills sent retailers to inform them that the price of some products could increase by as much as 20% starting in mid-January. This would be on the extreme end, but that high rate is certainly concerning.

So get ready to pay a whole lot more for cereal.

Even prices at Dollar Tree will be going from $1.00 to $1.25 in a few months.

Sadly, this is just the beginning, and even Goldman Sachs is now admitting that “the inflation overshoot will likely get worse”…

In a recent analyst note to clients, Goldman Sachs economists warned that pandemic-induced disruptions in the global supply chain – which have caused congestion in ports and warehouses nationwide – could last longer than expected as surging demand struggles to keep up, meaning that inflation metrics will remain “quite high for much of next year.”

“It is now clear that this process will take longer than initially expected, and the inflation overshoot will likely get worse before it gets better,” they wrote.

The optimists at Goldman Sachs believe that things will eventually improve, but that is because they still have faith that the gurus at the Federal Reserve can magically make everything better somehow.

But the Fed only has two “solutions” to any crisis.

They can cut interest rates, but they have already been pushed all the way to the floor.

They can also pump more money into the system, and they have been doing this for years.  But now all of that money pumping has created a raging inflation nightmare, and they don’t know how to put the fire out.

They could try to get inflation under control by raising rates, but that would severely hurt the economy at a time when we are plunging into a fresh crisis because of Omicron.

So now the Fed finds itself in a very tough spot, and Nouriel Roubini is warning that this could lead to big trouble in 2022…

As long as central banks were in unconventional policy mode, the party could keep going. But the asset and credit bubbles may deflate in 2022 when policy normalization starts. Moreover, inflation, slower growth, and geopolitical and systemic risks could create the conditions for a market correction in 2022. Come what may, investors are likely to remain on the edge of their seats for most of the year.

There will be no easy way out for the Federal Reserve this time.

When push comes to shove, Fed officials will always resort to printing more money, and that is going to set the stage for the sort of economic scenarios that I have described in my books.

It looked like 2022 was going to be really bad even before Omicron came along, and now the outlook for next year is downright horrifying.

Fear is poison for any economic system, and the level of fear in this country just continues to rise with each passing day.

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It is finally here! Michael’s new book entitled “7 Year Apocalypse” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.

For the past 18 months we’ve reported how a large percentage of those ‘hospitalized with Covid’ were actually admitted for other ailments, only to test positive after admission during routine screening – meaning ‘Covid hospitalizations’ for the purposes of policymaking (and fear mongering) were vastly overstated in many (if not most) cases.

Public health officials have largely avoided this important distinction, while pushing the false narrative over hospitalizations – until now.

In a Thursday appearance on MSNBC, America’s top Covid official, Dr. Anthony Fauci, admitted to a distinction between the number of children hospitalized with Covid as opposed to “because of Covid.“

“And what we mean by that: If a child goes into the hospital, they automatically get tested for COVID and they get counted as a COVID-hospitalized individual, when, in fact, they may go in for a broken leg or appendicitis or something like that. So it’s over counting the number of children who are, quote, hospitalized with COVID as opposed to because of COVID,” said Fauci.

Fauci: “If you look at the children that are hospitalized, many of them are hospitalized with Covid, as opposed to because of Covid.” pic.twitter.com/57Rdx8gPg3

— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) December 31, 2021

Fauci – whose comments come after a record surge of children in the US having been “hospitalized with Covid” – was slammed by Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, who tweeted: “Now Fauci says this?” adding “Is this because pandemic politics have changed for the Biden admin?” (h/t Fox News)

Now Fauci says this?

Is this because pandemic politics have changed for the Biden admin? https://t.co/1IJKSHQ2gS

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) December 31, 2021

And of course, despite Fauci’s admission, he still recommends that parents vaccinate children, telling NewsNations‘s “Morning in America” that while it’s true that “the numbers are very low,” parents have to consider that “when it’s your child, it’s a very high number.”

So – an appeal to emotion by ‘the science’ in order to get kids jabbed.

Authored by Thomas Lifson via AmericanThinker.com,

The Internal Revenue Service realizes the rampant crime wave in Democrat-run cities is an opportunity for the tax man. And Fifth Amendment protection from self-incrimination apparently doesn’t apply to filing income tax returns, the IRS seems to believe.

Patrick Reilly of the New York Post reports:

Steal any property or deal any drugs this year? Well, the IRS wants it reported as taxable income. (snip)

“If you steal property, you must report its fair market value in your income in the year you steal it unless you return it to its rightful owner in the same year,” the IRS told sticky-fingered Americans.

The agency also reminded those who’ve pocketed any by cash selling narcotics —  or through any number of unspecified “illegal activities” — to report their earnings.

“Income from illegal activities, such as money from dealing illegal drugs, must be included in your income on Schedule 1 (Form 1040), line 8z, or on Schedule C (Form 1040) if from your self-employment activity,” the bureau said.

Here is the summary notice, highlighted:

Reilly quips:

The IRS did not say whether career thieves could deduct work expenses such as ski masks, crowbars and getaway vans on their tax forms.

Just one day after we reported that Tesla was recalling about 475,000 vehicles in the U.S., the EV maker is now reportedly recalling almost 200,000 vehicles in China. 

Reuters reported Friday morning that Tesla will recall 19,697 imported Model S vehicles, 35,836 imported Model 3 vehicles and 144,208 China-made Model 3 vehicles in China.

The cars are being recalled “due to possible security risks such as sudden opening of the trunk lid during movement,” the report says.

It’s poor optics for the automaker in China, where Tesla has been fighting tooth and nail (including suing some of its critics) to keep its image looking clean and appease Beijing. In fact, Tesla filed “defamation claims against at least two Chinese citizens who raised concerns about the safety and quality of its vehicles,” Bloomberg wrote last week.

Recall, yesterday we wrote that Tesla’s latest quality control issue in the U.S. stemmed from opening and closing the trunk lid that may damage the rearview camera cable harness and increase the risk of a crash. Tesla filed a recall with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) on Dec. 21 for 356,309 U.S. vehicles that could be prone to wiring harness damage, reports on Thursday morning revealed. 

There was also a recall of 119,009 2014-21 Model S U.S. vehicles that had a front trunk latch assembly possibly misaligned, preventing the secondary hood latch from engaging. 

Adding fuel to the fire for Tesla is the fact that NEV subsidies are going to be reduced by 30% heading into 2022 and will be phased out in China entirely heading into 2023. 

Maybe this is why Elon Musk is predicting a recession “not later than 2023”. 

For years we’ve covered the countless quality control issues some Tesla owners have reported, to the point that it has now become clear that the high-tech EV carmaker with a $1 trillion market cap has had an awful lot of trouble manufacturing its flagship car that has created a cult following.

Some owners have reported bumpers ripping off in adverse weather conditions, roofs flying off, and trim and paneling not lining up, among many other defects.