Month: January 2022

Authored by Bill Blain via MorningPorridge.com,

“Trying to fire-up the induction hob by rubbing two sticks together proved a waste of time..”

Markets are welcoming victory versus COVID, but the next crisis is upon us: Energy instability. The consequences could be dramatic..

Back to the grindstone with a vengeance today – holidays are over and the Christmas decorations are back in their boxes. Time to get serious about 2022. Time to buy or time to sell?

I am unconvinced many market participants understand just how much the ground has shifted over the last quarter – particularly in relation to Energy pricing. The first few months of 2022 are going to be about the market learning what the new landscape looks like, and how it adapts to a new and changing economic reality. This new year is going to be fundamentally different and more challenging in terms of how to invest “smart” in a new and utterly changed financial market environment.

On the plus side, the outlook for 2022 has rosy overtones: Increasingly it looks like the back of Coronavirus has been broken. Infections of the new Omicron might be running out of control around the globe, but new variant hospitalisations and deaths are way down. The crisis is now coloured by issues such as the number of workers off sick – or more likely isolating at home with positive test results and minor symptoms. Official UK vaccine numbers (rather than dubious source material from the University of Facebook) show booster shots are 88% effective against Omicron, and the hospitalisation risk of the new variant is 1/3rd of the previous Delta.

Hallelujah! Ding-Dong! Yippee…

The market bulls are predicting a massive economic boost from the global economy reopening. We’ll see that confirmed by a host of new supply chain blockages, rising job vacancy numbers, short-term pressure on wages and increasing consumer confidence as the pandemic scales down from end-of-the-world contagion to a bad flu. That is the way viruses evolve and mutate – we learn to co-exist.

Even if interest rates start to rise as central banks address the “transitory” inflation effects caused by supply chain bottlenecks, and scale back asset buying programmes, the market bulls believe normalised interest rates will not prove an insurmountable barrier to continued market upside on the back of 2 years of covid-repressed demand. (Central Banks are hoping a post-pandemic boom will prove their stay-out-of-jail card..)

But, but and but again… Things are seldom so simple. Contain your enthusiasm.

The big issue will be Energy – a factor I’ve commented upon many times in the Porridge.

This new energy crisis has been a long-time brewing – unnoticed by the markets, and hidden under a bushel of ESG wokery, underinvestment, and neglect of energy security by governments. (The UK government’s blithe assumptions future energy security could be safely covered by the markets now look bumptiously foolish.) Energy prices will remain volatile on the back of increasing shortage – and the effects of a Gas Shock (in particular) will rock markets. Fixing energy security is a long-term issue, and will be made more complex and expensive by green politics.

Energy matters. It is one of the 3 core ingredients of economic growth.

To make economies work you need a willing workforce to make and buy stuff, access to capital to build the economy, and energy to transform raw materials into finished goods. Long-term inflation and economic destabilisation will occur when any of these become prohibitively expensive.

If you want to know how an energy crisis impacts markets, go do a Wiki search on the 1973 Oil Shock. When I was clearing out my parents house last year I found petrol rationing coupons from 50 years ago hidden at the back of a drawer.

Markets are serious underestimating just how painful and economically destructive sustained energy price and supply volatility could be. Thus far we’ve had an incredibly mild European winter – simply delaying the impact. We’re all going to feel it in Q1 when the power bills tumble through the letterbox.

The short-term outlook the market is taking to the bigger Energy crisis was illustrated y’day in the price action on Tesla. The stock rocketed 13.5% higher – up $144 bln in market cap – on the back of Tesla’s success in overcoming the supply chain issues that have so blighted the rest of the autosector. It delivered a record 308,600 electric cars in Q4, confirming is got the manufacturing ability to deliver. It nearly doubled 2021 production (to 936k cars) from 510k in 2020! Respect….

But…. Increasing production is retrospective news.

Surely, Tesla’s already massively bloated market valuation included the expectation Musk was going to deliver his promised 1 million cars? Musk promises much – and gradually, very gradually, he is now delivering cars. They are, apparently, good cars and I won’t dwell on stories about people driving them over cliffs, or blowing them up because of repair costs. (Finland: where the owner unsurprisingly found his battery didn’t last long in sub-zero conditions, and when faced with a $15k bill for a new battery pack, simply dynamited the car instead)!

Tesla is now a good auto manufacturer with a very valuable franchise value garnered through its lead in the EV sector. It now faces growing competition in the EV space, which it will counter from its first mover status. It promises, and promises and promises, autonomous driving – just like everyone else. While Musk seems impervious to the delivery delays on his self-driving car, what happens as the price of lithium batteries becomes unsustainable, and folk start to realise the charging costs of an EV have risen by a factor of 4? Or when someone launches a non-lithium battery?

Energy costs will impact across the economy. Energy inflation will impact consumer spending – which probably explains the briefness of Apple’s flirtation with a $3 trillion valuation. How many bright shiny things can we afford to buy when we can’t heat the house? Never forget the old story about 70% of American workers being one pay-check from penury – what happens when their pay-checks stretch half-as-far.

There are, of course, a host of other energy-inflation consequences I haven’t mentioned this morning – particularly what happens in high-yield bond markets when higher-energy bills come due this quarter.. just saying, but Slaughter on Junk Avenue is a theme I expect to write about soon.

The knock-on effects and consequences of higher energy prices are only dimly understood by markets…

*  *  *

An aside – Crimes against women.

Through the holiday I followed the saga of the Maxwell trial. After 500 days of speculation and solitary she was found guilty. The papers are full of tributes to the bravery of the women who testified and are now able to bury the hurt and damage done to them. I couldn’t help but wonder at the media circus around it.

Sexual abuse doesn’t stop at Epstein. It happens across the globe. There are multiple cases of Sexual Grooming, Pimping, and Rape being perpetrated by gangs of Asian men on vulnerable girls in UK cities. We’ve known about it for decades, but the police still don’t record the ethnicity of perpetrators (for fear of upsetting minorities). There have been few successful prosecutions. The lives of literally thousands of young girls are being blighted in perpetuity – but you ain’t seeing any of them receiving a penny and definitely not multi-million dollar payoffs, or supported by the press to pursue their abusers.

There is something distinctly unsavoury about the whole Maxwell trial. One law for the rich and wealthy, versus none for the poor? Something has to change.

By Venus Upadhayaya of Epoch Times

China has “standardized” the names of 15 places in Arunachal Pradesh, an Indian state on the border with Bhutan and Burma that the Chinese regime has attempted to claim and aggressively intruded upon for the past few decades. However, Indian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Arindam Bagchi said that assigning invented Chinese names to locations in the state won’t alter the fact that Arunachal Pradesh is and always will be an “integral part” of India.

India has governed Arunachal Pradesh since 1954, when the area was established as the North-East Frontier Agency (NEFA) under the British Raj. After the Sino–Indian war of 1962, relations between the two countries deteriorated and border disputes emerged. These have escalated in recent years with the Doklam standoff in 2017 and the bloody clash in the Galwan Valley in 2020.

In 1972, India renamed the NEFA as Arunachal Pradesh, a federally governed territory, or Union territory, and in 1987, it was given the status of a state under the Indian constitution.

However, since 2006, China has claimed the territory and refers to Arunachal Pradesh as “Zangnan,” or South Tibet. On Dec. 29, the Chinese Ministry of Civil Affairs said it had given formal Chinese names to 15 places in “Zangnan.” The announcement came days before China’s new land border law took effect on Jan. 1.

The Chinese “standardized” names apply to eight residential areas, four mountain peaks, two rivers, and one mountain pass, according to Chinese state-run outlet Global Times.

Along with assigning names, the Chinese regime has also set up an administrative structure for the area under Chinese counties and prefectures.

These include Sengkezong and Daglungzong in Cuona County of Shannan Prefecture; Mani’gang, Duding, and Migpain in Medog County of Nyingchi Prefecture; Goling and Damba in Zayu County of Nyingchi Prefecture; and Mejag in Lhunze County of Shannan Prefecture.

China’s claims on Arunachal Pradesh began in 2006, when then-Chinese Ambassador to India Sun Yuxi asserted, “The whole of Arunachal Pradesh is Chinese territory,” ahead of then-Chinese leader Hu Jintao’s official visit to India.

“Lying Maps”

Frank Lehberger, a sinologist specializing in CCP policies in Tibet and a senior fellow at the Indian think tank Usanas Foundation, compared the Chinese attempt with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s invention and perfection of “death by cartography.” Stalin personally redrew maps in the Central Asian Fergana Valley to ensure that all former Soviet republics in that region would remain dependent on the Soviet Union and would be shaken by inter-ethnic violence if they tried to declare independence.

Lehberger pointed to delimitation exercises, also called “lying maps,” that he said Stalin followed for the purpose of automatically creating civil unrest, in case of a breakup of the Soviet Union.

“Stalin drew those maps of the internal borders in the Soviet Union in such a way that they could not be detangled in case of the collapse of the Soviet Union and that border wars and civil wars would ensue almost automatically,” Lehberger said. “He got his wish. It happened there twice in 1990 and 2010, at the border of Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, as well as in 2008 in Georgia, 2014 in Crimea, and 2021 in Armenia.”

He added that on old and new Chinese maps, or on official lists of place names in Arunachal Pradesh, Itanagar, which is the state capital of Arunachal Pradesh, is nonexistent.

Out of the 15 places recently named by China, The Epoch Times could locate the following on Google Earth: Duding (Tuting in India), Mani’gang (Monigong), Sengkezong (Senge), Daglungzong (Taklung Dzong), Migpain (Mipi H.Q.), Goling (Goiliang), and Damba (Dhanbari).

While one location is labeled as Mejag in Lhunze County of Shannan Prefecture (known as Meyaba Rai), Lehberger called this fake because Google Earth shows the entire vicinity consists only of thick mountain forests. No dwellings or infrastructure, where civilians could permanently live, appear there.

The first batch of six modified names for places in Arunachal Pradesh was given by the Chinese ministry in 2017, in what Indian media called a retaliatory move following a visit by the Dalai Lama. The state is also a seat of Vajrayana Buddhism and houses the four-century-old Tawang monastery, one of the biggest Buddhist monasteries in Asia.

Lehberger told The Epoch Times that China’s attempt to assign names to places in Arunachal Pradesh is a practice that began even before Sun Yuxi’s statement, in the early 2000s.

Lehberger, who has spent years researching Chinese maps of Tibet and Arunachal Pradesh, shared with The Epoch Times a 2005 map from an official Chinese atlas that includes the regime’s “invented names” for areas in Indian territory.

“Here next to the nonexistent Itanagar on the Chinese map, you find only tiny ‘villages’ with fake names like ‘Ta-geng-si’ or ‘Duo-li.’ Similar sounding Indian place names do not appear anywhere in the vicinity of [the Arunachal Pradesh state capital of] Itanagar on Google Earth,” he said.

He added that the only indirect hint that the Chinese atlases provide for the existence of the state capital is the location of its eastern suburb of Doimukh. The Chinese phonetic spelling of this town is rendered on many Chinese maps as Duo-Yi-Mu-ke. He called it “a deliberate attempt to distract” from the existence of the capital city, which has a population of about 65,000 and is home to Arunachal Pradesh’s legislative assembly.

By filling in place names in the Indian state, Chinese maps do not “look so empty for ordinary Chinese, who have no clue that since 1962 Arunachal belongs to India,” he said. The CCP can’t admit the existence of Itanagar as a metropolis in so-called South Tibet or Zangnan, because it’s bigger than the “supposed county seat of Cuona” from where the area is “supposedly” being administered.

Neither “Ta-geng-si” nor “Duo-li” is among the 15 or so “standardized” names of places in what China claims as “Zangnan,” but Lehberger said that the 2005 map establishes that those two nonexistent places were already officially sanctioned by the CCP and its map-making departments.

Lehberger pointed out another nonexistent village, supposedly south of the Dafla Range and a few kilometers southwest of the Dikrong Power House. While it’s marked on the 2005 official Chinese map of Tibet as “Wupang,” it doesn’t exist on Google Earth.

“Call it the logic of the Chinese lies,” he said, adding that the “name standardization” is just the communist regime’s way of making those place names public on the international stage, a process it has been working on quietly for more than two decades.

“People in India must wake up to what [the Chinese regime has] been doing already for decades.”

He said the government of India should consider canceling the joint declaration it signed with China in 2003, when it recognized that the Tibet Autonomous Region was a territory of the People’s Republic of China. Doing so would theoretically render “null and void” any Chinese attempt to use its border law to redraw the line of actual control and steal more territory from India. The precedent for canceling such a declaration has already been set—by the Chinese regime itself.

“China in 2020 did unilaterally abrogate an internationally binding agreement on the status of Hong Kong, guaranteed by the U.N.,” he said. “So there is a precedent already and it was initiated by the Chinese leadership.

“This proves that the Chinese government and leadership are not willing to fulfill any international treaty obligations, be it with the UK regarding Hong Kong, or with India. Therefore, India should take this into account.”

As the Omicron variant, also referred to as “omi-cold,” spreads around the U.S., unleashing more fear porn fueled by corporate media, Reuters reports Walmart temporarily shuttered dozens of stores to sanitize them against the virus.

Despite cases soaring, hospitalizations and deaths remain flat (and are even falling in many regions)…

Reuters reports 60 Walmart stores across the U.S. were temporarily closed in December to sanitize them against the virus. Texas and New Jersey stores were closed for two days while cleaning crews sanitized facilities.

“To present a safe and clean in-store environment for our associates and customers,” a company spokesperson told Reuters in a statement.

Sixty sounds like a lot, but compared to total U.S. stores (4,700), it only represents just 1.27%.

Reuters’ headline is undoubtedly an eye-catcher and seems intended to remind everyone of the early days of the pandemic when retailers closed up shop to sanitize.

Perhaps this is more fear porn by Reuters, who is interested in keeping people in a state of high anxiety. As mRNA inventor Dr. Robert Malone tweeted before he was banned from Twitter, there is a “conflict of interest of the chairman of the board of Reuters (Jim Smith) who also sits on the board of Pfizer. “

So could Reuters’ promotion of fear porn about a variant that is less severe be an eyeopener to an underlying objective to keep people hypnotized while they’re subliminally told get get vaccinated and multi-boosted. Seems like a well-coordinated agenda is being exposed. 

Authored by Francis P. Sempa via RealClear Defense (emphasis ours),

The Biden administration appears to be heading in the direction of waging a two-front Cold War over Ukraine in Eastern Europe and Taiwan in East Asia, both of which could turn “hot” any day. The imprudence of such an approach should be obvious, but the great danger is that such “crises” could get out of hand before the leaders involved step back from the brink.

Russia’s Vladimir Putin may want to extend Russia’s rule to Ukraine and other former Soviet republics, but he definitely wants to ensure the end of NATO expansion. China’s Xi Jinping, like all of his predecessors, wants Taiwan unified with the mainland, and while he would prefer to do it peacefully, he may be willing to risk war with the United States to achieve his goal–especially if he believes he can win such a war at an acceptable cost.

That leaves the Biden administration, which to date has been sending mixed signals to both Russia and China. Administration spokespersons have warned of severe consequences should Russia invade Ukraine, but President Biden has stated that those consequences will be primarily economic in the form of sanctions. Meanwhile, President Biden has stated that the United States will defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese attack, but administration spokespersons have walked that back and reaffirmed the U.S. policy of “strategic ambiguity.” This is a recipe for confusion, misunderstanding, and possibly war on two fronts.

This muddled U.S. approach was highlighted at the recent Summit for Democracy, where the U.S. President portrayed international politics as a global struggle between democracies and autocracies and characterized the United States as democracy’s “champion.” Biden and other American democracy proponents appear to have forgotten the wise counsel of Secretary of State John Quincy Adams that America was the well-wisher of freedom to all but the champion only of her own. The U.S. democracy proponents have likewise forgotten the prudent diplomacy of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger that sought America’s geopolitical benefit to exploit the divisions and fissures between the two most powerful autocracies on the Eurasian landmass. And they have forgotten the wise and timeless counsel of Sir Halford Mackinder, the great British geopolitical thinker, who urged the democratic statesmen of his time to reconcile democratic ideals with geopolitical realities.

Foreign policy and strategy involve understanding and prioritizing threats and then devoting the necessary resources to meet those threats. China clearly poses the greatest threat to U.S. national security interests in the Indo-Pacific region and beyond. The Biden administration’s focus should be there, and it should allocate resources accordingly. China’s President Xi needs to understand that he cannot forcibly annex Taiwan without incurring unacceptable costs in a war with the United States. “Strategic ambiguity” should be replaced by “strategic clarity.” Meanwhile, the U.S. should use diplomacy to wean Russia from China’s orbit, including foregoing any further expansion of NATO and avoiding the democracy versus autocracy rhetoric. High-sounding principles are no substitute for hard-headed realpolitik. Biden’s role model should be John Quincy Adams, or George Washington, or Richard Nixon, or looking across the oceans, Otto von Bismarck or Lee Kuan Yew–statesmen who understood geopolitical realities and who were unbound by so-called universal principles. Or perhaps, Biden could simply emulate Abraham Lincoln, who during the Trent Affair in the midst of the American Civil War, wisely cautioned his Cabinet and military advisers: “One war at a time.”

*  *  *

Francis P. Sempa is the author of Geopolitics: From the Cold War to the 21^stCentury, America’s Global Role: Essays and Reviews on National Security, Geopolitics and War, and Somewhere in France, Somewhere in Germany: A Combat Soldier’s Journey through the Second World War. He has written lengthy introductions to two of Mahan’s books, and has written on historical and foreign policy topics for The Diplomat, the University Bookman, Joint Force Quarterly, the Asian Review of Books, the New York Journal of Books, the Claremont Review of Books, American Diplomacy, the Washington Times, and other publications. He is an attorney, an adjunct professor of political science at Wilkes University, and a contributing editor to American Diplomacy.

The US Defense Department in its latest annual review of China’s military capability outlined it’s expanding its nuclear weapons forces faster than previously predicted. The November report predicted the likelihood that China’s PLA will possess more than 1,000 nuclear warheads by 2030.

On Tuesday, amid a major statement agreed upon by five nuclear-armed nations at the UN vowing to prevent nuclear war, Beijing has slammed Washington’s assessment of an increasing nuke arsenal in China, saying the assessment is untrue and ‘disregards facts’. 

Director general of the Foreign Ministry’s arms control department, Fu Cong, had this to say Tuesday: “On the assertions made by U.S. officials that China is expanding dramatically its nuclear capabilities, first, let me say that this is untrue.” He repeated the longtime Beijing position that the country maintains the minimum level necessary for nuclear deterrence, also given China is a “no first use” nation. 

He said that for his country to joint nuclear reduction talks with the West, the two superpowers who possess by far the most in the world would have to drastically reduce their own arsenals first – namely the United States and Russia. 

“We will be happy to join if they have reduced to our level,” Cong said. The top arms control official added, “the two superpowers need to… drastically reduce their nuclear capabilities to a level comparable to the level of China, and for that matter to the level of France and the U.K., so that other nuclear states can join in this process.”

He particularly pointed out that China’s arsenal remains much, much smaller compared to what Washington has at its command. But again, this comes amid the backdrop of Western leaders complaining that China is the only country that’s actually on the increase in terms of its developing stockpile.

And amid recent US and Western media reports that have put satellite images purporting to show nuclear silos in China front and center, the Chinese official asked the US and other to stop basing assessments on what he dubbed unreliable methods. The official dismissed the latest ‘evidence’ of expanding silos in the desert as but overhead images of “wind generators”.

You will find more infographics at Statista

“As for the silos, I have also read the reports on this matter, but they are conflicting reports; someone says that they are silos for rockets, someone else – that they are wind generators,” Fu Cong said further in the press briefing. 

“I am not in a position to confirm any report. But I can say that it’s not a serious matter to try to calculate the size of China’s nuclear forces based on these satellite images.”

Satellite images show China is building more than 100 ‘nuclear missile silos’ in the desert https://t.co/9vMgsgTSER

— Daily Mail Online (@MailOnline) July 3, 2021

Since last summer, there’s been a series of reports detailing silo expansion in remote parts of China based on satellite images produced by Planet Labs and others, which often drive headlines in the West, putting renewed pressure on Beijing to explain itself. 

Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

Over the past several days I have had some time to think, and my thoughts have repeatedly turned to the current state of the Internet.  For a couple of decades after it was popularized, the Internet was one of the greatest tools for free speech that the world has ever seen.  It allowed ordinary people like me to share truth on a massive scale with other ordinary people all over the planet.  I have always been grateful for that opportunity, but now our ability to share truth with one another over the Internet is being systematically eroded.  Nobody can deny that this is taking place, because it is literally happening right in front of our eyes.  Over the past decade, control of the Internet has become increasingly centralized. 

The big tech companies have become exceptionally powerful, and they have become addicted to using that power to suppress speech that they do not like.

This is an extremely dangerous trend, because the Internet has become the primary way that the vast majority of us communicate with one another.  It truly is our modern version of “the marketplace of ideas”, but now the big tech companies are absolutely determined to distort it into something else entirely.

At this point, there are a whole host of ideas that you aren’t allowed to freely discuss on the Internet anymore.

In fact, there are a whole host of questions that you aren’t even allowed to ask.

When a society gets to a point where you aren’t even allowed to ask questions, that is a very clear sign that you are living under a very oppressive authoritarian regime.

Years ago when they started banning various prominent voices we all knew that it wouldn’t end there.

And it hasn’t.

Today, the big tech companies have no problem banning literally anyone.  For example, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene just got permanently banned on Twitter…

Twitter permanently blacklisted the personal account of a sitting member of Congress, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) over the New Year’s weekend. “Twitter is an enemy to America and can’t handle the truth,” Rep. Greene said, in a statement responding to the ban. “That’s fine, I’ll show America we don’t need them and it’s time to defeat our enemies.”

Rep. Greene has one of the largest followings on social media of any Republican member of Congress. Prior to her ban, she had over 465,000 followers on Twitter, meaning the Republican party and conservative movement has lost one of its most influential accounts on the platform.

Five years ago, if you told me that the big tech companies would start banning our politicians in Washington, I would have told you that you were crazy.

But now nobody is safe.  Once Twitter and Facebook banned a sitting president, we all knew that there was no going back.

Of course the pandemic has given the big tech companies an excuse to push their levels of censorship to even higher levels.  Just a few days ago, Twitter banned Dr. Robert Malone just before he was interviewed by Joe Rogan…

Dr. Robert Malone played a key role in the invention of the mRNA vaccine, the type of vaccine that is being administered to many Americans in an effort to stave off COVID-19. Malone has often been critical of the use of the vaccines, as well those in the media and government who support them.

He shared a great deal of research on his Twitter account, which had more than half a million followers.

“We all knew it would happen eventually,” Malone said on his Substack. “Today it did. Over a half million followers gone in a blink of an eye. That means I must have been on the mark, so to speak. Over the target. It also means we lost a critical component in our fight to stop these vaccines being mandated for children and to stop the corruption in our governments, as well as the medical-industrial complex and pharmaceutical industries.”

So now it appears that Twitter is preemptively banning people.

We truly have entered “Minority Report” territory, and that is extremely chilling.

Considering everything that has been happening with the pandemic, you would think that we would want to hear what one of the inventors of mRNA technology has to say.  Dr. Robert Malone has decades of experience, and he had been one of the most respected names in his field.

But because he has viewpoints that don’t align with the official narratives being pushed by the pharmaceutical industry, he is being blacklisted by the big tech companies.

If you think that you can get around all the censorship by simply refusing to use the big tech company platforms, you are wrong.

Just consider this example.  Gateway Pundit is reporting that T-Mobile is literally erasing links to their articles from text messages…

Hi Jim. In one of the screenshots you can see where my sister tried to send me your website link four times but I never got it. The other two screenshots it shows me sending a link to one of your articles, that’s the one with the picture of the fox in it. In the other screenshot from my sister it shows that she never received the link. The text message it still has the fox in it. I hope this helps. But what I realized is it’s actually just my boost T-Mobile carrier that’s blocking your links. I have a friend in the 949 area code and he was able to send it to his wife, however, I can only receive it in a group text. Let me know if you have any more questions. Thanks. Mark.

I have had a similar experience with articles written by Mike Adams of Natural News.  When I try to send links to Natural News through Facebook Messenger, the links are simply erased from the messages somehow.

That is the level of censorship that we are now facing.

They literally want to control what we see, what we hear and what we think.  And of course this is setting the stage for a level of authoritarianism unlike anything we have ever seen before in all of human history.

Without freedom of speech, all of our other freedoms will rapidly become meaningless.

Sadly, at this point freedom of speech in the United States is getting pretty close to being completely wiped out.

Our Republic is rapidly dying, and millions upon millions of Americans are cheering as it happens.

The big tech companies have become the arbiters of truth, but most of the “truths” that they are relentlessly pushing are actually lies.

I don’t know if there is a way out of this mess, but we must find one, because the future of our society hangs in the balance.

*  *  *

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

Two weeks ago, the White House pinned the blame for rampant, not-so-transitory inflation felt by consumers across the board on the ‘greed of meat conglomerates.’

Jen Psaki blames increases in meat prices on “the greed of meat conglomerates.” pic.twitter.com/NlSXwIcUTP

— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) December 14, 2021

An absurdity which came just four weeks after the world’s largest meat producer, Brazil’s JBS SA, warned that labor shortages are in fact holding back production.

Meanwhile, Kamala Harris – the woman who’s just one heartbeat away from the Oval Office – has no clue what’s going on.

“We have to address the fact that we have got to deal with the fact that folks are paying for gas, paying for groceries, and… need solutions to it. So let’s talk about that.”

Kamala’s response to questions about inflation really highlights that constant complaint from her staffers that she “refuses to wade into briefing materials.” pic.twitter.com/EE8sGMBqYG

— Matt Whitlock (@mattdizwhitlock) December 30, 2021

Yet, as adults in the room such as Michael Snyder noted last month, “the price of beef in the U.S. has risen more than 20 percent since last October,” which is “deeply alarming” – but get used to it:

During the early portion of this crisis, Tyson Foods was reluctant to pass increasing costs along to consumers, but now we are being informed that they don’t intend to make the same mistake again…

Stewart Glendinning, the chief financial officer of Tyson Foods, said that they have been slow to increase their prices, in line with inflation, but are now making up for the delay.

‘We expect to take continued pricing actions to ensure that any inflationary cost increases that our business incurs are passed along,’ he said, on the company’s quarterly earnings call.

Sadly, this is just the beginning.  The price of meat is only going to go higher from here, and eventually it will get to a point where meat prices become exceedingly painful.

Of course there are many that would argue that we are already there.

*  *  *

Which brings us to today – as the White House announced on Monday that it would peel off $1 billion for independent meat and poultry producers in order to ‘boost competition in the meat-processing industry and lower prices for consumers,’ according to CNN.

The plan, which will dip into the $1.9 trillion Covid-19 emergency relief bill passed last year, will allocate up to $375 million in grants for independent processing plant projects, $275 million to partner with lenders to expand ‘business opportunities’ and increase access to capital, $100 million for workplace training, $50 million for R&D (?), and $100 million to reduce overtime inspection costs imposed on smaller processing plants.

President Joe Biden on Monday will meet virtually with family and independent farmers and ranchers to discuss his administration’s plan to create “a more competitive, fair, resilient meat and poultry sector,” according to the White House. Attorney General Merrick Garland and Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack will also attend the meeting.

 

The announcement comes as food prices — particularly for beef — skyrocket and inflation remains a top concern of the White House. Persistent global supply chain issues and the emergence of the Omicron variant of Covid-19 threaten to prolong these rising prices. -CNN

“Over the last few decades, we’ve seen too many industries become dominated by a handful of large companies that control most of the business and most of the opportunities — raising prices and decreasing options for American families, while also squeezing out small businesses and entrepreneurs,” reads a statement from the White House.

The meat industry is consolidated specifically because the federal gov’t overregulates it. Ask any farmer. As one of many examples, ranchers can’t slaughter their own meat due to @USDA regs.

As usual, Democrats blame the private sector for problems of their own creation. https://t.co/xEfQjdSiHz

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) January 3, 2022

The Biden admin is also launching a whistleblower ‘portal’ so people can report potential meat-related greed within 30 days.

US Chamber of Commerce chief policy officer, Neil Bradley, scoffed at the initiative.

“It is pretty clear that the administration is attempting to use higher prices to justify their preexisting agenda to overturn decades of bipartisan consensus around antitrust and competition policy in favor of a ‘government-knows-best’ regulatory approach,” he said, adding “That isn’t economics, it is politics and sadly, such government intervention would likely further constrain supply and push prices even higher.”

When do they just nationalize the industry?

Authored by Willy Forsyth via The Brownstone Institute,

In October of 2021, I deployed to McMurdo Station, Antarctica for the second time. Each austral summer, McMurdo Station becomes home to about 1,000 eclectic and wonderful people who are the workforce behind the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) United States Antarctic Program (USAP), which facilitates research with a logistical prowess on par with that of the US military. 

Despite McMurdo’s remoteness and lack of the usual American amenities, there is normally a rich community life on this strange island. The community organizes yoga classes, cafes, art galleries, music festivals, craft fairs, holiday parties, and more.

I was enamored by this social-scape during my first visit in 2017, but in 2021 community life at McMurdo has been unrecognizable due to the NSF’s Covid policies for the Antarctic. 

While USAP research stations are some of the only populations in the world with zero Covid, residents of these stations live under stricter Covid precautions than many Western cities during peak waves of infection.

In the time between my two Antarctic deployments, I received a Master of Public Health degree from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. There, I learned the importance of evidence-based public health interventions, of carefully analyzing health risks, of targeting interventions based on those risks, and of always considering unintended negative consequences. 

So, throughout the pandemic, I have been baffled to see many public health professionals and scientific institutions advocate for broad, extreme, and unprecedented measures without supporting evidence. The NSF’s scientifically inconsistent Covid policies for Antarctica are the most prominent examples of this fallacy I have now experienced.

The NSF formulated these polices early in the pandemic. Given the remote and resource-limited nature of Antarctica, the NSF recognized that Covid outbreaks in the intimate station populations would spread quickly and might easily overwhelm clinical capacities. And with aerial medical evacuation dangerously unreliable, the NSF smartly formulated policies to prevent Covid from reaching Antarctica and to mitigate its impact in case it did. 

The policies begin with medical screening for health risks, which include known Covid risk factors. Deployers to McMurdo travel as cohorts that isolate in hotel rooms for three days, confirm a negative PCR test result, then fly on a private, direct flight to Christchurch, New Zealand. 

When the first cohorts of the summer season arrived in September, there had been zero Covid cases on the entire South Island for almost a year. PCR tests and screenings for symptoms took place on arrival, days three, seven, and 12 during 14 days of strict isolation in Christchurch’s proven and effective “managed isolation and quarantine” (MIQ) facilities. US and Royal New Zealand Air Force aircrews subjected to the same isolation procedures as USAP cohorts then flew them to “the ice”. While at great expense, these sound, evidence-based procedures have to-date successfully kept Covid out of all USAP stations.

It is after arriving to Antarctica where these policies go awry. Following passenger plane arrivals of Covid-free cohorts, the entire receiving station population must wear masks, social distance, and adhere to inconsistently and arbitrarily reduced capacities in public and recreational spaces for one week. 

In October a new passenger plane arrived about every five days, protracting restrictions to the entire month. We were relegated to constant face coverings where we lived and worked and a loss of any social or recreational activities that usually preside at McMurdo Station – all in the absence of Covid. Even the most ardent mask supporters had become “anti-maskers”. 

Beyond low morale, the policies contribute to immense operational and safety setbacks. The station population this season is small – around 500 – and has been slowly dwindling in response to the strict policies and a vaccine mandate that took effect one week after my cohort (with an 85% vaccination rate) arrived. Multiple written assurances that those who were non-vaccinated would not be medically disqualified, were reversed. Several workers in critical departments refused the vaccine and were sent home, many others quit due to the other extreme policies. Nearly all departments are now short-staffed.

The station power plant is only about half-staffed. A power supply failure in the Antarctic environment means water sources could freeze and food would not be safely stored. The fire department was so short staffed they could not fully support the airfield where frequent flights may have to land in inclement weather on an ice runway. 

This hazard legally barred the New York Air National Guard – who flies special ski-equipped LC-130s on essential cargo flights – from arriving on schedule, greatly impeding logistics and supply chains. They since arrived with a waiver but could not fly regular intracontinental missions for three more weeks until more firefighters from New Zealand arrived. 

These avoidable, policy-derived setbacks contributed to three of six research projects in West Antarctica canceling before beginning, reducing total supportable research projects from the seasonal average of 60 down to 11, and caused the entire month of normal life in December to be robbed by mask-wearing and canceled holiday events. 

These policies are dictated by the NSF’s mysterious Covid Control Board. As affected people have attempted to clarify questions or contact this Control Board, no one, at multiple management levels, has been forthright with the identity or public health qualifications of their members. USAP employees with unrelated administrative jobs have had time and energy absconded to develop Covid solutions for a population where Covid does not exist. Their policy is protecting no one from nothing. 

When prodded about the senseless and inconsistent policies, USAP managers feebly attempt to defend them without providing any sort of evidence for their foundation. There are no references to any Covid research or CDC guidelines. Questions routed to the NSF leadership addressing these issues have gone unanswered. The real humans subject to these excessive policies have loud voices that are simply being ignored.

There is no hope for life at McMurdo void of Covid precautions despite the strict isolation process en route, despite the now 100% vaccinated population, and despite screenings for comorbidities. A recent Covid outbreak at a Belgian research base with similar demographics and no reported health impacts beyond mild symptoms demonstrates the minimal risk of Covid itself while the negative impacts of the policies remain clearly evident. 

Yet, workers are threatened with termination if they defy the illogical rules. The things that draw people to McMurdo station have been needlessly lost. Antarctic research – which provides some of our greatest insight for understanding the difficult problem of climate change – has been stymied, community members’ lives have lost value, and all these hindrances are driven not by scientific evidence, but by politics and optics. 

USAP workers are being uniquely challenged in one of the most uniquely extreme, uniquely isolated, and uniquely Covid free places on earth. If an enterprise mostly created and funded by the NSF cannot utilize scientific reasoning and accept normalcy where there is no Covid, how can we trust our scientific institutions to seek to in the rest of the world, where Covid is here to stay?