Jeremiah Babe,
“Stock Market Euphoria Will Wipe Out Millions;
Hit Job On Precious Metals; Bad News Gets Worse”
So, we rise from the rubble...
Friday, January 8, 2021
A Rousing Musical Interlude! Outlaws, "Green Grass & High Tides"
Outlaws, "Green Grass & High Tides"
Turn it up! lol
"Ironic, huh? "
"Thought is real. Physical is the illusion. Ironic, huh? "
- Robin Williams, "What Dreams May Come"
"A Look to the Heavens"
“Two stars within our own Milky Way galaxy anchor the foreground of this cosmic snapshot. Beyond them lie the galaxies of the Hydra Cluster. In fact, while the spiky foreground stars are hundreds of light-years distant, the Hydra Cluster galaxies are over 100 million light-years away.
Three large galaxies near the cluster center, two yellow ellipticals (NGC 3311, NGC 3309) and one prominent blue spiral (NGC 3312), are the dominant galaxies, each about 150,000 light-years in diameter. An intriguing overlapping galaxy pair cataloged as NGC 3314 is just above and left of NGC 3312. Also known as Abell 1060, the Hydra galaxy cluster is one of three large galaxy clusters within 200 million light-years of the Milky Way. In the nearby universe, galaxies are gravitationally bound into clusters which themselves are loosely bound into superclusters that in turn are seen to align over even larger scales. At a distance of 100 million light-years this picture would be about 1.3 million light-years across.”
Chet Raymo, “On Being Good”
“On Being Good”
by Chet Raymo
“Several years ago, I attended a seminar on the foundations of ethical systems. The participants quoted Plato, Jesus, Heidegger, and a host of other authorities; they trotted out every philosophical and theological reason why we can or should be good. Of course, prominent among the arguments was that old canard: Without the promise of eternal salvation or the threat of damnation, we would all be scoundrels.
No one mentioned that we are first of all biological creatures with an evolutionary history, and that altruism, aggression, fidelity, promiscuity, nurturing and violence might be part of our animal natures.
I looked around the auditorium and saw folks of every religious and philosophical persuasion, and of many cultural and ethnic backgrounds, and I thought, "Gee, I'd trust any one of these folks not to take my wallet in a dark alley." Sure, humans are capable of great evil, but most of us are pretty good most of the time, and I suspect that it has more to do with where we have been as a biological species than with where we hope to be going in some airy-fairy afterlife.
We are animals who have evolved the capacity to cherish our fellow humans and to resist for the common good our innate tendencies to aggression and selfishness, not because we have been plucked out of our animal selves by some sky hook from above, but because we have been nudged into reflective consciousness by evolution. When it comes to living in a civilized way on a crowded planet, I choose to put my faith in the long leash of the genes rather than fear of hellfire or the chance to walk on streets of gold.”
"The Only Consequence..."
"What we think, or what we know, or what we believe is, in the end,
of little consequence. The only consequence is what we do."
- John Ruskin
The Poet: David Whyte, "The Winter of Listening"
"The Winter of Listening"
"No one but me by the fire,
my hands burning red in the palms while
the night wind carries everything away outside.
All this petty worry while the great cloak
of the sky grows dark and intense
round every living thing.
What is precious inside us does not
care to be known by the mind
in ways that diminish its presence.
What we strive for in perfection
is not what turns us into the lit angel we desire,
what disturbs and then nourishes
has everything we need.
What we hate in ourselves
is what we cannot know in ourselves but
what is true to the pattern does not need
to be explained.
Inside everyone is a great shout of joy
waiting to be born.
Even with the summer so far off
I feel it grown in me now and ready
to arrive in the world.
All those years listening to those
who had nothing to say.
All those years forgetting how everything
has its own voice to make itself heard.
All those years forgetting how easily
you can belong to everything
simply by listening.
And the slow difficulty
of remembering how everything
is born from an opposite
and miraculous otherness.
Silence and winter
has led me to that otherness.
So let this winter of listening
be enough for the new life
I must call my own."
- David Whyte,
my hands burning red in the palms while
the night wind carries everything away outside.
All this petty worry while the great cloak
of the sky grows dark and intense
round every living thing.
What is precious inside us does not
care to be known by the mind
in ways that diminish its presence.
What we strive for in perfection
is not what turns us into the lit angel we desire,
what disturbs and then nourishes
has everything we need.
What we hate in ourselves
is what we cannot know in ourselves but
what is true to the pattern does not need
to be explained.
Inside everyone is a great shout of joy
waiting to be born.
Even with the summer so far off
I feel it grown in me now and ready
to arrive in the world.
All those years listening to those
who had nothing to say.
All those years forgetting how everything
has its own voice to make itself heard.
All those years forgetting how easily
you can belong to everything
simply by listening.
And the slow difficulty
of remembering how everything
is born from an opposite
and miraculous otherness.
Silence and winter
has led me to that otherness.
So let this winter of listening
be enough for the new life
I must call my own."
- David Whyte,
"The House of Belonging"
"Economic Market Snapshot PM 1/8/21"
"Economic Market Snapshot PM 1/8/21"
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"Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will
do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone."
- John Maynard Keynes
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"Down the rabbit hole of psychopathic greed and insanity...
Only the consequences are real - to you!
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Gregory Mannarino, PM 1/8/21:
"MUST WATCH:
The New Puppet Biden Will Further Destroy America"
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"The more I see of the monied classes,
the better I understand the guillotine."
- George Bernard Shaw
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MarketWatch Market Summary, Live Updates
CNN Market Data:
CNN Fear And Greed Index:
Daily Job Cuts
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And now, the End Game...
"Compared To What?"
"Life is hard? True- but let's love it anyhow,
though it breaks every bone in our bodies."
- Edward Abbey
"When I hear somebody sigh, "Life is hard,"
I am always tempted to ask, "Compared to what?"
- Sydney Harris
"Fake Revolutionaries"
"Fake Revolutionaries"
By Bill Bonner
"Aaahhh!
You say you want a revolution,
Well, you know,
We all want to change the world."
– The Beatles
WEST RIVER, MARYLAND – "The media is having a field day – showing, over and over again, the cockeyed videos. A crowd of yahoos gets hotted up. They make a break for the Capitol… bust through the windows and doors…
And there they are. One man sits at Nancy Pelosi’s desk and puts his feet up. Another – with horns on his head… and tattoos on his naked torso – stands on the dais of the Senate. And all over, they wander… aimlessly… pointlessly strewing papers and asking themselves… “What the Hell are we doing here?”
Myth Versus Reality: An “insurrection!” screamed the papers. An “invasion” said the commentators. A “revolution,” said the analysts. “Pearl Harbor,” opined Senator Chuck Schumer, surely losing his mind. “Domestic terrorists,” insisted Joe Biden. “A coup d’état,” said some other clown. And onto the news channel came Michelle Obama, who let out that it was a “desecration” of the Capitol. Yes… there… she had managed to find the right nail and give it a whack. For the only significant damage was there – to the myth…
According to the propaganda, the U.S. Capitol is the beating heart of American democracy. It’s where the peoples’ representatives get together to solemnly debate – with the golden oratory of Cicero and the unerring courage of Augustus – the important issues facing the American people. They carefully weigh the pros and cons, the costs and the benefits, and put aside their own self-interests and bugaboos so as to come to decisions that benefit us all.
Of course, the story is fake. Congress is a collection of 535 self-serving hacks. With rare exception, they pass laws involving trillions of dollars (not their own money), written by lobbyists and cronies, without even reading them. Few have any historical perspective. And no principles cling to them that would withstand a morning shower. And then, in their latest tomfoolery, they disappear “mothers,” “grandmothers,” “aunts,” and “uncles” from federal documents – as if they didn’t exist.
Selfie Time: But Ms. Obama is right. The Temple had been defiled. The holiest of holies… the St. Peter’s Basilica for America’s right-thinking True Believers… Mecca for its Democrats and Republicans… a revered shrine for summer visitors… its sacred walls were breached by a mob of left-behinds (we have it on good authority that there were few hedge fund managers or professors of social policy studies in this unruly horde)…
And there they were, taking photos of each other so the feds can arrest them for criminal trespass, vandalism, treason, drug possession, and whatever other charges they might stick onto them. What a jolly time for everyone!
Tourist Revolutionaries: And like almost everything else that passes for news or public affairs – no matter what your politics or perspective – it was a joke. A scam. The “revolution” was televised, but like reality TV or professional wraslin’, it was fake. These were no “terrorists”… no revolutionaries… no insurrectionists…They were just a hopeless, low-IQ mob… clueless… aimless… and thoughtless…
Real terrorists would have come with bombs, gasoline… and a plan. They would have killed a few members of Congress and taken the rest hostage… or simply burned down the Capitol Building.
Real revolutionaries would have a real revolutionary leading them… towards a real revolution. Donald Trump is no Vladimir Lenin. No Che Guevara. No Fidel Castro. No Maximilien Robespierre. He is no revolutionary at all. Had he broken into the Capitol, he wouldn’t know what to do either… which he proved in the White House. For four years, he led a fake MAGA program… neither draining the Swamp nor staunching the flow of wealth from the masses to the elite. Now, he’s the perfect person to lead a fake “coup.”
Real Revolutionaries: Real insurrectionists don’t just stroll about the temple… admiring its lavish works of art and leaving papers on the floor. They destroy it. Like Oliver Cromwell… using the Irish Catholic churches as stables for his horses and latrines for his men. Like Solomon’s Temple, razed to the ground by the Babylonians in 586 BC. Like Sitting Bull at the Little Big Horn, leaving no one left alive. And they don’t stop with the holy shrine.
In 1793, the city of Lyon, France, defied the revolutionaries. But it was soon conquered by them. Every house belonging to a “rich” person was to be torn down. And a real revolutionary rabble doesn’t content itself with acting like ill-bred tourists. It murders… rapes… hangs… burns… tortures… and loots.
Women are stripped and ravaged – in the streets. Men are gunned down, without trial… often just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Groups – Blacks, Jews, the rich, Catholics, gypsies, collaborators, counter-revolutionaries (almost any group you want) – are targeted for execution. At the Massacre of Badajoz, at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, for example, the revolutionaries held a solemn mass… and then murdered 4,000 local people who were still loyal to the government.
The mob in Washington on Wednesday held no mass. It didn’t intentionally murder anyone. It didn’t even massacre the Capitol Police… or cut off the head of its commander (as the French revolutionaries did at the Bastille) and put it on a pike. Nor did the barbarians violate a single fetching Democrat in the Capitol Building… or even so much as set fire to a trash can.
Real Insurrection: Finally, a real insurrection doesn’t happen when the stock market is at an all-time high… food is still abundant on the shelves… gasoline flows freely from the self-service pumps… you can get a mortgage at 2.5% interest… and the feds’ are still handing out money, which is still thought to have real value…
No, Dear Reader, we have a long way to go. The real revolution is still ahead. We are now only at the slippery, sloppy edge of our empire’s destruction, in other words. There’s a lot more to come. Stay tuned…"
Gregory Mannarino, AM 1/8/21: "Alert: Critical Must Watch - Total Meltdown"
Gregory Mannarino, AM 1/8/21:
"Alert: Critical Must Watch - Total Meltdown"
"Fog and Noise"
"Fog and Noise"
by Jim Kunstler
"Is there a game on? Consider: What you’re seeing may not be what you think you’re seeing. If an “orderly transition to the next administration” meant what you think it means, Nancy Pelosi would not be shrieking for an insta-super-quickie impeachment. By the way, what would that look like as a procedural matter? Think: Chinese fire drill.
The New York Times’s panties are on fire, declaring a national emergency. Headline this morning: "Democrats Demand Trump’s Removal.' Funny… they didn’t feel this exercised when Antifa attacked congressmen and senators on the streets of Washington last summer, leaving the president’s acceptance speech at the White House. Twitter and Facebook are busy throwing overboard anybody who dares to challenge the narrative they’ve helped to craft. Something’s up now and it’s making them even more hysterical than usual.
"Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Thursday called for Vice President Mike Pence to immediately initiate the removal of President Donald Trump, declaring him a seditious threat to the country who can’t be trusted to finish even the last two weeks of his term." - Politico
Consider also: you and I are in that fabled fog of war, and that fog is going to hang around in the days ahead. You may see strange shapes moving around in that fog, and that’s about it. Eventually, the fog will lift and the battlefield will not look the same as it did a week ago. So, it’s hard to see right now, but I hear a lot and I’ll just report what I hear for what it’s worth. I can’t prove any of this is true right now. A lot of it may seem crazy, fantastical. What with the pitch of news media mind-f***ery we’ve been living under, there have probably never been stranger days in our America.
The game is a deadly one because there is so much at stake: careers, reputations, fortunes, lives, the climax of four years of seditious Gotcha. The “Resistance” threw everything it could at the Golden Golem of Greatness. It discommoded him in his duties, and wasted the nation’s precious time in a gathering crisis of civilization, but nothing stuck to him: RussiaGate, impeachment, not even Covid-19. The November 3rd election was the final play. Ever find, in a game of chess, that you’ve unwittingly blundered into checkmate?
Who, exactly, invaded the Capitol building on Wednesday when that mass of Trump supporters swarmed up the hallowed hill? Some Antifas and BLMs were on the scene for sure, probably in the vanguard, probably the one’s smashing the windows to break in. But somebody else went in there, too, and rounded up a whole bunch of congressional laptops, including several in Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office, foolishly left behind when members were evacuated in a panic.
Perhaps you’ve heard of the Italian job. A story circulating on the web from one Maria Zack, founder of a fair election monitoring org called Nations in Action, says that the election ballot fraud operation was run out of Italy through a set of that country’s communication satellites by a CIA team working with former Italian government officials, and one of Italy’s defense contractors. The story claims that former president Barack Obama was directly involved and that the operation was financed with dollars skimmed from the billions of dollars transferred to Iran under the terms of Mr. Obama’s No Nukes deal. Affidavits and depositions are filed. The UK’s MI6 may be involved, as they were in the RussiaGate shenanigans. Is this just another mind-f**k? Maybe. I guess we’ll have to stand by and find out. You can do that, can’t you? In the fog of the moment?
Did congress knowingly certify a fraudulent election? That will be a tantalizing question in the days ahead. Another rumor in the fog says that Director of National Intelligence Ratcliffe delivered a report on foreign interference in the election to members of congress following the conclusion early Thursday morning of their electoral college business. Was that the match that set Resistance panties on fire? Mr. Ratcliffe has been missing-in-action for more than a week. His report was originally scheduled for delivery to the president November 18. It was postponed and everybody forgot about it, especially the news media.
Let’s also just step back for a moment and ask: why did so many flag-waving MAGAs turn out Wednesday on the Mall in Washington DC? Answer: because they have been served one shit sandwich after another for four years by the Democratic Party and their captive news media, and the latest one featured vote tabulations getting erased in real time at ten-plus thousand vote increments right before their eyes on the flatscreen in the wee hours of November 4. And after that, and other balloting monkeyshines, the response from their government was a mere yawn. Total institutional failure. The ballot fraud that so many witnessed was never aired or adjudicated in a proper legal forum, and they were good and goddam pissed about it.
Mr. Trump is rumored to be at an air force base in Texas, having vamoosed the White House as being unsafe for him. Is he cornered by his antagonists or does he have a planned operation underway? Who knows (not me)? He certainly had enough time to plan it, and the king-post in the whole deal may have been that he had to exhaust all the ritual avenues in disputing the election fraud before he could launch a counter-coup. If his adversaries intend to run the 25th Amendment on him, he will have to act quickly.
The president didn’t appear panicked in the speech released on Thursday, in which he promised that orderly transition to the next administration, certainly not panicked in the inflamed manner of Nancy Pelosi. In the mythology of my people, the Golem was a giant fashioned out of clay by a rabbi seeking desperately to protect his village from a pogrom. I didn’t dub Mr. Trump the Golden Golem of Greatness for nothing. For the moment all is fog and noise."
"Covid-19 Pandemic Updates 1/8/21"
"Covid-19 Pandemic Updates 1/8/21"
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JAN 8, AT 7:50 AM: "Miami Doctor Dies After Receiving First Dose Of Pfizer Vaccine" "In my mind his death was 100 percent linked to the vaccine. There is no other explanation."
JAN 8, AT 7:15 AM: "US Tops 4K Daily COVID Deaths For 1st Time; UK Approves Moderna Jab: Live Updates"
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Jan. 8, 2021 7:54 AM ET:
The coronavirus pandemic has sickened more than 88,201,100
people, according to official counts, including 21,689,734 Americans.
Globally at least 1,900,100 have died.
Jan. 8, 2021 7:54 AM AT:
Coronavirus in the U.S.: Latest Map and Case Count○
"The COVID Tracking Project"
Every day, our volunteers compile the latest numbers on tests, cases,
hospitalizations, and patient outcomes from every US state and territory.
- https://covidtracking.com/
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Every day, our volunteers compile the latest numbers on tests, cases,
hospitalizations, and patient outcomes from every US state and territory.
- https://covidtracking.com/
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"COVID Tests Gone Wild - An Epidemic of COVID Positive Tests"
"COVID Tests Gone Wild -
An Epidemic of COVID Positive Tests"
Editor’s Note: In the setting of COVID-19, almost every country in the world closed its borders, locked down its citizens, and forced businesses to close. Today, most governments still restrict travel, economic activity, and social gatherings. The justification for these unprecedented measures has been a growing number of COVID-19 cases. This has unleashed an epidemic of COVID testing—with PCR and rapid antigen tests as the means of identifying positive COVID cases. Our very own Dr. John Hunt examines the science behind COVID testing, whether the testing paradigms are effective, and the rationality behind government response to the virus.
"COVID Tests Gone Wild -
An Epidemic of COVID Positive Tests"
by John Hunt, MD
"What COVID tests mean and don’t mean: RT-PCR tests can be designed to be highly sensitive to the presence of the original viral RNA in a clinical sample. But a highly sensitive test risks poor specificity for actual infectious disease.
Rapid antigen tests are different. They measure viral protein. They do so by reacting a clinical sample with one or two lab-created antibodies that are labeled with a measurable marker. These antigen tests are often poorly specific, meaning they can show as positive in the absence of any actual viral protein or any COVID disease.
For a lab test, what does it mean to be sensitive? What does it mean to be specific? I’ll use COVID to help explain these terms. In order to do this correctly, we need to avoid using the language of the media and government because those institutions tend to mislead us via language manipulation. For example, they’ve wrongly taught us that a COVID-positive test is synonymous with COVID- disease. It isn’t, as you will soon see.
So for this article, I will use the term "Relevant Infectious COVID Disease" to mean a condition, caused by COVID-19, in which a patient is sickened by the virus or has (in their airways) living replicating virus capable of being transmitted to others. This seems a fair definition of what we should be caring about in this disease. If the patient isn’t sick and isn’t capable of transmitting the disease, then any COVID RNA or protein that may appear in a test is not relevant, nor infectious, and therefore of little to no consequence.
You can think of a test’s sensitivity like this: In a group of 100 people who absolutely have Relevant Infectious COVID Disease, how many people does the test actually report as "positive?" For a test that is 95% sensitive, 95 of these 100 patients with the true disease will be reported by the test as COVID positive and 5 will be missed.
Specificity: In a group of 100 people who absolutely do not have Relevant Infectious COVID Disease, how many will be reported by the test as "negative?" For a test that is 95% specific, 95 of these healthy people will be reported as COVID-negative and 5 will be incorrectly reported as COVID-positive.
Sensitivity and Specificity are inherent characteristics of a test, not of a patient, not of a disease, and not of a population. These terms are very different than Positive Predictive Value (PPV) and Negative Predictive Value (NPV). PPV and NPV are affected not only by the test’s sensitivity and specificity but also by the characteristics of the people chosen to be tested and, particularly, the patients’ underlying likelihood of actually having true Relevant Infectious COVID Disease. The Positive Predictive Value - the chance a positive test actually indicates a true disease - is greatly improved if you test people who are likely to have COVID, and, importantly, avoid testing people unlikely to have COVID.
If you do a COVID test with 95% sensitivity and 95% specificity in 1,000 patients who are feverish, have snot pouring out of their noses, are coughing profusely, and are short of breath, then you are using that test as a diagnostic test in people who currently have a reasonable up-front chance of having Relevant Infectious COVID Disease. Let’s say 500 of them do actually have Relevant Infectious COVID Disease, and the others have a common cold. This 95% sensitive test will correctly identify 475 of these people who are truly ill with COVID as being COVID-positive, and it will miss 25 of them. This same test is also 95% specific, which means it will falsely label 25 of the 500 non-COVID patients as COVID-positive. Although the test isn’t perfect it has a Positive Predictive Value of 95% in this group of people, and is a pretty good test overall.
But what if you run this very same COVID test on everyone in the population? Let’s guesstimate that the up-front chance of having Relevant Infectious COVID in the US at this moment is about 0.5% (suggesting that 5 out of 1000 people currently have the actual transmittable disease right now, which is a high estimate). How does this same 95% sensitive/95% specific test work in this screening setting? The good news is that this test will likely identify the 5 people out of every 1000 with Relevant Infectious COVID! Yay!
The bad news is that, out of every 1000 people, it will also falsely label 50 people as COVID-positive who don’t have Relevant Infectious COVID. Out of 55 people with positive tests in each group of 1000 people, 5 actually have the disease. 50 of the tests are false positives. With a Positive Predictive Value of only 9%, one could say that's a pretty lousy test. It’s far lousier if you test only people with no symptoms (such as screening a school, jobsite, or college), in whom the up-front likelihood of having Relevant Infectious COVID Disease is substantially lower.
The very same test that is pretty good when testing people who are actually ill or at risk is lousy when screening people who aren’t. In the first scenario (with symptoms), the test is being used correctly for diagnosis. In the second scenario (no symptoms), the test is being used wrongly for screening.
A diagnostic test is used to diagnose a patient the doctor thinks has a reasonable chance of having the disease (having symptoms like fever, cough, a snotty nose, and shortness of breath during a viral season).
A screening test is used to check for the presence of a disease in a person without symptoms and no heightened risk of having the disease. A screening test may be appropriate to use when it has very high specificity (99% or more), when the prevalence of the disease in the population is pretty high, and when there is something we can do about the disease if we identify it. However, if the prevalence of a disease is low (as is the case for Relevant Infectious COVID) and the test isn’t adequately specific (as is the case with PCR and rapid antigen tests for the COVID virus), then using such a test as a screening measure in healthy people is forcing the test to be lousy. The more it is used wrongly, the more misinformation ensues.
Our health authorities are recommending more testing of asymptomatic people. In other words, they are encouraging the wrong and lousy application of these tests. Our health officials are doing what a first-year medical student should know better than to do. It’s enough of a concerning error that it leaves two likely conclusions: 1) that our leading government health officials are truly incompetent and/or 2) that we, as a nation, are being intentionally gaslighted/manipulated. Or it could be both. (Another conclusion you should consider is that my analysis of these tests is incorrect. I’m open to a challenge.)
So what if you, as an individual, get a positive PCR test result (one that has 95% specificity) without having symptoms of COVID-19 or recent exposure to a true Relevant Infectious COVID Disease patient? What do you do? Well, with that positive test, your risk of having COVID has just increased from less than 5 in 1,000 (the general population risk) to about somewhere perhaps 5 in 55 (the risk of actual Relevant Infectious COVID Disease in asymptomatic people with a COVID-19-positive test). That’s an 18-fold increase in risk, amounting to a 9% risk of you having Relevant Infectious COVID Disease (or a 91% chance of you being totally healthy). That may be a relevant increase in risk in your mind, enough that you choose to avoid exposing your friends and family to your higher risk compared to the general population. But if the government spends resources to contact-trace you, then they are contact-tracing 91% of people uselessly. And they are deciding whether to lock us down based on the wrong notion that COVID-positive tests in healthy people are epidemiologically accurate when indeed they are mostly wrong.
For the 50 asymptomatic low-risk people falsely popping positive out of each group of 1,000, what makes them pop positive? For a rapid antigen test, it is because the test is never meant for use as a screening test in healthy asymptomatic people because it’s not specific enough. For a PCR test, positivity confidently means that there was COVID RNA in that sample, sure, but your nose or mouth very likely just filtered some dead bits of viral debris from the dust particles in the air as you walked through CVS to get the test before you learned you were supposed to use the drive-through. PCR can be way too sensitive.
A few strands of RNA are irrelevant. Even a few hundred fully intact viral particles are not likely to infect or cause disease. Humans aren’t that wimpy. But keep in mind that there is a very small chance that the test popped positive because you are about to get sick with COVID-19, and the test caught you, by pure luck, just before you are to become sick.
On top of this wrong use of diagnostic tests as screening tests, the government has been subsidizing hospitals for taking care of COVID-19-positive patients. Let’s say a hospital performs a COVID test 4 times during a hospital stay as a screening test in a patient who has no symptoms of COVID. If that test pops positive once and negative three times, the hospital will report that patient as having COVID-19, even though the one positive result is highly likely to have been a false positive. Why do hospitals do this testing so much? In part, because they’ll get $14,000 more from the government for each patient they declare has COVID-19.
When we see statistics of COVID-19 deaths, we should recognize that some substantial percentage of them should be called "Deaths with a COVID-19-positive test." When we see reports of case numbers rising, we should know that they are defining "case" as anyone with a COVID-19-positive test, which, as you might now realize, is really a garbage number.
Summary:
1. We have an epidemic of COVID-positive tests that is substantially larger than the epidemic of identified Relevant Infectious COVID Disease. In contrast, people with actual, mild cases of COVID-disease aren’t all getting tested. So the data, on which lockdowns are supposedly justified, are lousy.
2. The data on COVID hospitalizations and deaths in the US are exaggerated by a government subsidization scheme that incentivizes the improper use of tests in people without particular risk of the disease.
3. Avoid getting tested for COVID unless you are symptomatic yourself, have had exposure to someone who was both symptomatic and tested positive for COVID, or have some other personal reason that makes sense.
4. Know that getting tested before traveling abroad puts you at a modest risk of getting a false-positive test result, which will assuredly screw up your trip. It’s a new political risk of travel.
5. There is a lot more to this viral testing game, and there are a lot of weird incentives. There are gray areas and room for debate.
Yes, the COVID disease can kill people. But a positive test won’t kill anybody. Sadly, every COVID-positive test empowers those politicians and bureaucrats who have a natural bent to control people - the sociopaths and their ilk."
John Hunt, MD is a pediatric pulmonologist/allergist/immunologist, a former tenured Associate Professor and academic medical researcher, who has extensive experience and publications involving PCR, antigen testing, and analysis of respiratory fluid. He is internationally recognized as an expert in aerosol/respiratory droplet collection and analysis.
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Related:
Thursday, January 7, 2021
"New Great Depression Coming In 2021"
Full screen recommended.
"New Great Depression Coming In 2021"
by Epic Economist
"What to expect for 2021? According to economic analysts, financial experts, strategists, and researchers we're either headed to a new Great Depression, while civil mayhem, mass manipulation, political tyranny, and many more catastrophic events take over our country, or our reckoning day will finally arrive and we'll start to set a different course for our future by breaking the chains that tie us to the hypocrites who have been ruling us. In this video, we compiled the assessment of several specialists for what's next in the U.S. economic collapse.
Differing from the opinion of other forecasters, best-selling financial author James Rickards defends that the extraordinary amount of printed money launched into the markets and the economy to ease the burden of the crisis won't immediately lead to inflation. However, that doesn't mean we will escape from it or that we'll be seeing brighter days in 2021. Rickards is anticipating tougher times for the U.S. economy. In his view, we're directed towards a much slower and weaker economy.
He explains that low consumer spending is one of the factors that will slow down inflation at the initial stages of the collapse. Amid record unemployment rates, multiple financial setbacks, and increased amounts of debt, the tendency is that Americans will prefer to hold on to their money, aiming to put their finances in order before they resume engaging in new spending. So all of the “extra money” handed in the form of stimulus checks and unemployment benefits won’t be reinjected into the economy and trigger inflation right away.
But for the United States to be able to cope with the huge national debt, there's no choice other than launching massive inflation into the system. That's to say, inflation won't naturally arise as a result of the trillion-dollar liquidity injections pumped into the system in 2020. Much worse than that, policymakers and the central bank will have to spark it, to produce it by doubling the current inflation target of 2%, and generating a lot more economic deterioration, so that they can wipe away the debt they created.
In other words, as prices skyrocket, Americans will be increasingly less able to afford essential products and services. So, ultimately, we're the ones who are going to pay the price of this crisis. That’s the scenario of the New Great Depression. Now that Biden has been consolidated in the presidency, Rickards foresees that his policies "will impose major headwinds on an economy that is already struggling". Biden's plan for spending and tax raises will likely put the nation exactly on Rickard's forecasted path.
Goldman and BofA strategists have been warning the same. Goldman projects more fiscal stimulus in the near-term of at least $600 billion, accounting for 2.7% of GDP. A more aggressive take of this scenario comes from the BofA, whose projections signal that an injection of $2 to 4 trillion in deficit spending might occur. That would create higher risks for the markets and compromise the bank's second-half 2021 outlook on GDP growth and inflation. BofA's latest forecasts suggest that this year the inflation target will be readjusted to 2.25%.
So as our living standards are set to decline, authorities, politicians, policymakers, and the mainstream media will try to convince us that all of that was necessary to keep the health crisis under control. At this moment, our economy continues to be impaired by business shutdowns that not only prompt mass lay-offs, bankruptcies, and permanent closures as it undermines our prospects of recovery and growth.
The results of the lockdowns have been devastating for millions of lives. Consequently, hatred and civil turbulence have spiraled out of control. Our society has never been more angry or divided since we’ve lost confidence in most of what we used to trust and think was normal. Now, despair is taking over. All the elites want is to make the population desperate and powerless so most Americans can fail to see their real intentions: destabilize our social and economic juncture to make us more tamable and accept whatever they propose to keep unconsciously enabling them to expand their power and wealth at our own expense.
Only when we acknowledge that truth, that we can forge our own path back to a world in which freedom means something again, or we’re going to be stuck in this wormhole of populist anger, petty politics and destruction that is pitting us one against the other. But all is not lost yet. Well, we could stay on the current catastrophic course or we could reverse it. Not Trump. Not Biden. And definitely not the architects and enablers of America's downfall. “We the people” are the hope for a better year."
"A Look to the Heavens"
"Have you ever seen the Pleiades star cluster? Even if you have, you probably have never seen it as large and clear as this. Perhaps the most famous star cluster on the sky, the bright stars of the Pleiades can be seen without binoculars from even the depths of a light-polluted city. With a long exposure from a dark location, though, the dust cloud surrounding the Pleiades star cluster becomes very evident.
Click image for larger size.
The featured exposure covers a sky area several times the size of the full moon. Also known as the Seven Sisters and M45, the Pleiades lies about 400 light years away toward the constellation of the Bull (Taurus). A common legend with a modern twist is that one of the brighter stars faded since the cluster was named, leaving only six of the sister stars visible to the unaided eye. The actual number of Pleiades stars visible, however, may be more or less than seven, depending on the darkness of the surrounding sky and the clarity of the observer's eyesight."
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