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2020-04-15 07:00 by Karl Denninger
in Editorial , 260 references
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Folks, this tinfoil garbage just won't quit.

Look, I get it -- people love to find something to blame, and "oh, it was a bioweapon" is one of the common ones going around, along with "it's triggered by 5g!" (which is just flat-out horsecrap.)

The problem with bioweapons is that they're doomsday devices in that they have a 100% chance of scoring an "own goal."  To prevent this you must first have a vaccine with 100% coverage on your side so your people don't get the bug, and that vaccine must have permanent immunity.

Let me repeat this for you just in case your IQ is smaller than your shoe size: There has never been a successful attempt to prevent the spread of a virus beyond some arbitrary line on a map.  Ever.  Even in the days of old before international commerce and easy air travel it never worked.

Second, if you were going to create a viral weapon the last thing you'd use is a coronavirus.  Why?  Because despite decades of trying there has never been a successful, durable vaccine for a coronavirus either, so the odds of scoring such an "own goal" are in fact 100%.

Coronaviruses not only infect people they infect animals.  We have tried to create vaccines for animal husbandry and pet purposes on multiple occasions, and have failed every time to obtain permanent immunity.  We have also wound up creating amplification effects by accident too; the poster child for this one was a feline "vaccine" that actually wound up amplifying the effects of the virus instead of attenuating or preventing infections!  This is why, by the way, that there is no reason whatsoever to believe we will ever have a permanent vaccine; despite attempts in both animals and humans we've never succeeded before with this particular type of virus.

Now is it entirely possible -- even probable -- that this specific virus was an accidental release?  Yep.  In fact I'd say it's more likely than not.  That's the "civil standard of proof", and it's present.  Why?  Because this virus behaves like an attenuated live virus, but not attenuated enough.  For those who think that sort of idea is crazy I remind you that we've used that exact concept for decades with oral polio, and it works.  So the theory that this was an accidental release from Wuhan's lab and they were working on a vaccine for SARS, for example, is not crazy.  The only crazy part is that their odds of success were near zero in the first instance, but scientists try to find breakthroughs in things that appear to have a near-zero probability of success all the time.

But a bioweapon?  Nope.  There are plenty of candidate virus families to use for that sort of thing, if you're into attempting it. 

Coronavirus isn't one of them.

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2020-04-14 15:24 by Karl Denninger
in Editorial , 409 references
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The data continues to come in and is clear.

Not only are the hospitalization requirements from nursing home and other "skilled care" institutions for elderly people ridiculously over-represented (in every state where I have found detailed information by forty to fifty times or more their percentage of the population at-large) but they are also ridiculously over-represented when it comes to deaths, usually by the same percentages.

Without these deaths and hospitalizations and deaths, in fact this disease would be of no special concern at all.  Oh certainly, it would kill some people -- but by no means would it rate as a serious public health threat worthy of closing the entire economy and causing an economic depression.

It wasn't originally either, by the way -- this hasn't changed.  "Mitigations" will not change if you will get the virus; that has been admitted since this began.  They only change when you get the virus.  If it's going to kill you, it's going to kill you.

So the plan should have been, and we the people should accept nothing other, than the following on an immediate basis -- under pain of whatever we have to do to enforce it.

1. All skilled nursing home and other similar facilities are locked in.  This includes staff; if there is insufficient housing then rent some RVs or other trailers, stick them in the parking lot, and there you go.  Nobody comes in or leaves unless they have a positive antibody test and a negative PCR test, demonstrating they cannot transmit the virus.  Any staff member who refuses is summarily fired and, if they are a licensed individual, their license is revoked.  Deliveries are made to the curb of the facility with zero contact between such persons and the staff.  Period.

2. Any person who can demonstrate immunity may enter upon and leave said facility as they wish; this includes visitors, workmen and others.  No other person, except in the case of documented emergency (e.g. plumbing malfunction,  emergency transport of a resident to a hospital, etc) may do so and any person who must for emergency reasons must be screened on-site for the virus before being allowed in the building.  If this is impractical (e.g. EMS workers) then the entire path on which they travel and any location where they or any of their equipment goes must be immediately sanitized upon their departure by a person who is antibody-positive.

3. A person (e.g. resident) who leaves may not return until and unless there is a 14-day quarantine facility on site with completely separate airhandling and no physical interconnection or they test positive for antibodies, documenting that they do not have a latent infection that can become transmissible.

Everyone else goes back to work and all constraints otherwise are dropped.

If we had done this at the outset we would have saved roughly half the lives lost thus far and more than half the hospitalizations.  There would have been zero justification for locking down anything.  Likewise, there is no justification for doing so now.

People in this circumstance account for approximately 1/2% of the population of the nation.  We are being collectively punished to "protect" these people and not only are we failing to do so, as they're dying at ridiculously outsized rates, in addition collective punishment when one has committed no offense is both blatantly unconstitutional and a proper casus belli.

Again, there is no particular problem with hospital capacity absent these individuals and, in addition the mitigation measures not only cannot prevent you from getting the virus they were never claimed to be able to either; the entire justification for them was to avoid overloading the hospitals.

Well, that's how you accomplish that -- and any politician who is empowered to drop the constraints and doesn't must be immediately ejected from their office and our economy restarted now.

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It showed up in your mailbox, on your TeeVee, in your political ads.

It was cute.  It looked a bit like a rodent, a viper or a dragon.

But it was cute and cuddly.  It had forlorn eyes that gazed at you oh-so-lovingly.

It snuggled with you at night.

It just wanted a bit of food, a bit of warmth, a bit of comfort.

You couldn't leave it outside to freeze to death and die in the wintertime, or to be eaten by a hawk in the summer.

So you took it in.

You nurtured it.

You fed it.

You kept it warm at night.

You even let it sleep with you.

It will be ok, you assured yourself.

But it was indeed a monster, and it did what all monsters do.

It grew.

It got bigger, and stronger.

At first the little bite off your plate was no big deal.  But a while later you realized it was consuming a decent amount of your food.  Your budget increased to support it.  After all, it was cute and cuddly, and you liked it.

It was hot when you were cold, and cold when you were hot.  More was spent on A/C or heat which you didn't want or need, but it did.  After all, it was cute and cuddly, and you liked it.

Eventually it got big enough that those formerly-forlorn eyes looked menacing.  You didn't dare kick it out of your bed, or your home.  Now you were afraid; if you did throw it out, it could get back in by force.  It might be able to kill you in your sleep.

More months and years went by.  Now it's consuming enough food and other resource that it's no longer cute at all.  You're foregoing your own nutrition.  You're only showering once a week because it's using so much water you can barely afford the bill.  Your power bill is crippling you.  Your homeowners insurance company, knowing you have a dangerous creature on your property, has made your insurance costs skyrocket.  It bites you one day, "it's an accident" you tell yourself, and the doctor hits you for $20 large to pay for stitches, rabies and other shots.  You don't have it, but you have to spend that or you might die.

It's no longer simply about the risk of killing you in your sleep.  Now it can kill you any time it wants.  It has razor-sharp teeth and demands more and more food.  When it's hungry and you have no money to buy it food, it eats your couch.  Oh, and it shits everywhere too -- all over your carpet, your nice wood floors and even in your bed.

Welcome to your own self-imposed hell.

What is this monster's genus and species?

It's debt.

Netflix is getting hammered on this.  They have an insane amount of debt that they took on which generates a forward and irrevocable obligation to pay in the form of interest for "original content."  But their subscriber growth rate, which made people think this was reasonable, was a chimera; it was a forward projection of exponential growth forever into the future, which is mathematically impossible: There are only so many humans on the planet.

Now it's caught up with them.  The monster is taking nips out of their feet while they sleep.  Soon it will consume their head.

How'd they get a $400 stock price, now just over $300?  On bullcrap you believed -- willingly, knowingly, while prodded by CNBS and others.  But let's not kid ourselves -- you hit the "buy" button, didn't you?

The same is true nationally.  It's true for the entire stock market.  Buybacks, funded with debt, are a noose around your neck you cannot get rid of.  The shares are repurchased, you bought them at a fixed price but when they're worth less on the open market you have a loss you cannot get rid of and, much worse, you have a forward obligation to pay that interest forever on your loss-making transaction!  There's only one thing worse than a loss-making transaction and that's one that never, ever stops costing you more and more money!

EPS goes up when you do this as long as earnings are increasing.  But when you have a loss the loss per share goes up by exactly the same amount.  This garbage may well double the stock market originally when the earnings are improving (and it did) but it inevitably will crash the market by twice as much when earnings turn bad since the negative number will be twice the size it would have been otherwise.  Instead of a 40% loss it'll be 80% -- or even 100% when the firms involved all go bankrupt because they simply can't pay.

The same is true for government deficit spending on things that are just flat-out gone; that is, anything that is consumed.  Like food stamps, health care and similar.  The interest expense is there forevermore unless you pay down the debt which you cannot do until and unless you stop deficit spending entirely.  That now amounts to a trillion dollars a year, or roughly one quarter of all government spending.  Do you think the government will stop feeding the monster even after it has chewed off an entire foot and half a leg?

Everyone knew this when that crap started -- both at the government and individual company level.

They knew it and did it anyway.

They lied to you.

On purpose.

They're still lying.

Kudlow, Cramer, President Trump, Nancy Pelosi, all of them.

That meets the classic definition of fraud and should be justification to hang them all except for one problem: You cheered it on, welcomed it, voted for it and in fact in the political sphere both parties were equal participants and there has not been one revolt, organized or not, by anyone in this nation demanding it stop "or else."  Quite to the contrary; everyone is demanding that the monster be fed even more and get ever larger -- forever!

So get up, stand in front of the mirror and then fuck yourself because you're looking at the responsible party.

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2019-04-18 14:54 by Karl Denninger
in Editorial , 740 references
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Yeah, I read it.

Here's the quick summary.

On collusion: There was no "strong evidence" say much less anything that would rise to probable cause.  At all.

On obstruction: It's complicated.

One of the reasons its complicated is intent.  All criminal statutes require mens rea, with only a smattering of exceptions (oddly enough the statute Hillary violated with her "email server" does not require intent; negligence is sufficient.  Nonetheless remember, she was not prosecuted.)

Obstruction is a funny statute though, in that you can obstruct an investigation into something that didn't happen.  The reason for this is that the prosecution is presumed not to be corrupt!

But.... what if it is?

In this case we know it was.  Specifically, we know the originating event that led to Mueller's appointment was the Steele Dossier which was a piece of opposition research paid for by a political opponent's campaign during the election and that the origin of the alleged "evidence" that gave rise to the investigation was intentionally concealed from a FISA judge and worse, it wasn't just concealed -- the FBI affirmatively lied.

Had they not lied the FISA judge would have never approved anything and there would have been no Mueller; a mere assertion alone by Ohr or Strzok without alleged facts doesn't get there.  The FISA warrant on alleged verified information does.  But.... the FISA warrant was predicated on repeated lies.  Not mistakes -- perjury.  That's a felony standing alone.

Further Mueller had no business being appointed in the first place; he was charged with investigating his own former coworkerswhich is a clear conflict of interest and in violation of federal procedure governing said conflicts.  In other words by the very standards of the appointing department his appointment was facially void.

To put it in simple terms the "prosecution" has been proved corrupt and worse, once that was discovered nobody stopped the investigation and indicted the corrupt individuals despite the predicate acts that gave rise to the appointment being facial felonies under long-standing Federal Law.

So this gives rise to the obvious question: Can you be convicted of obstruction if the investigation is corrupt at inception?  The courts have never ruled on that as far as I know.

But I'll give you my 2 bits on how that had better be decided if it ever goes before a judge or jury:

If a court ever rules you can commit Obstruction of Justice (as a matter of a criminal law) and thus be jailed for acting to stop a corrupt investigation when same is aimed at an elected official in the United States Government then we may as well just start The Second American Revolution right here and now.  A corrupt investigation or prosecution of such a person at the federal level has no check and balance; there is no further and higher law enforcement agency to appeal to. It is by definition an act of Sedition in that it seeks to overthrow a properly-elected government official through the use of force.  There is no law that should ever be respected by anyone, of any political stripe, that seeks or claims to criminalize same.  I give anyone using non-violent means to stop such a coup -- and that's exactly what it is -- credit for their restraint, as said restraint is by no means a part of any ethical or moral duty in such a circumstance.

We shall see if the criminally insane who knowingly cheered on and even suborned this lawless behavior by the FBI and the Left continue or fold their cards.  That determination remains to be seen, but it's my bet that this report and the Democrats's reaction to it, especially by people like Cummings who is already shooting off his mouth, will do nothing more or less than drive this nation further toward a very uncivil set of events.

After all neither political party will do a damn thing about in excess of $3 trillion stolen by the medical industry from the American people every single year -- $25 per day, per person in the United States!  Is it any surprise that these same people think it's perfectly fine to overthrow elections "at whim" and, by the way, what makes you think this behavior won't be repeated since there's no indication anyone has or will go to prison for any of it?

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2019-04-09 11:42 by Karl Denninger
in Editorial , 212 references
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Read this article carefully.

We have unprecedented levels of low unemployment in America. It could even be said that we really have too many jobs and not enough people to fill them. While this currently isn’t a problem, it will soon have devastating impacts on our nation’s economic stability, and the only answer is to increase immigration to America.

In the past 60 years, the birthrate in the United States has decreased by over 50 percent and is only falling faster. This is not by design.

There are multiple factors contributing to this trend: people are getting married later and having kids later in life, women are focusing on their careers more than ever before, and contraception has become more effective.

All of these causes make one thing clear: the declining birthrate shows no sign of stopping.

Well gee, so you think this is just about women marrying later and having kids later in life?

Are women focusing on their careers or being forced to in order to eat?

Yes, contraception has become more effective -- that's good rather than bad.  I presume you don't think a high abortion rate is good, yes?  Oh wait -- we have that too.  How effective is that contraception you flaunt so daringly?

Why don't you take a big mug of STFU, quaff it and sit down, jackass.

America (and the rest of the western world) has spent the last fifty plus years doing all of the following:

  • Punishing men for choosing to have children.  That's right -- punishing.  If you're a man there is literally no possible way for you to secure the right to raise your own kids.  Even if you have billions you can't get there from here.  You have better odds if you have money and your wife (or paramour) decides to cut you out of the picture but most of the time you get both severely restricted in your ability to raise said kids and you get the whole bill.  You don't think that situation, which the "feminists" cooked up and rammed down everyone's throats might make men who are intelligent, skilled and desirous of a family think twice about making children, do you?

  • Punishing women for choosing to have children.  That's right -- punishing.  If you're a woman how often do you hear the bullshit about you can have it all, chick! -- career, motherhood, etc?  How many kids are in daycare instead of home and why does daycare exist if this is true?  Oh by the way, how do you pay for said daycare and how many hours out of the waking day do you spend raising said kids?  Well under half.  What the hell sort of message does that send -- that you're a walking uterus and once you crank out that baby it'll take a village!  Oh Hitlery, cry me a fucking river you evil five-alarm bitch. Not one woman in a thousand can pull the shit you and your spawn got away with.  If you think this is some grand voluntary set of choices for 99.99% of women in America go visit all those women who don't have much in the way of choice at all; that would be damned near all of them.  It's not like the "zero inflation, high productivity" world we live in and have for the last 50 years, according to the government, has made it trivial for a single-earner, two parent household to buy a house, put food in the fridge, keep the water and power on and pay for the trip to the doctor when the juniors get the sniffles has it?  Why do you think we have all those abortions taking place asshole?

You think people don't respond to incentives?  The hell they don't.

You think a woman chooses to have an abortion when she can reasonably choose to have and raise the child instead?  What sort of bullcrap is that?  You think the 16, 18, 20 or 25 year old woman created the societal circumstances we live in today -- the near-requirement for two good incomes among a couple to raise a kid in most metropolitan areas of the nation, $100,000 college tuition bills, $10,000+ property tax bills, $20,000 per year family "health insurance" policy costs and more?  Schools that are diverse but where half the fucking High School "graduates" can't write a basic business letter, balance a checkbook or make change for a $20 in their head?

Did said young woman -- or young man -- get a vote on that property tax bill?  Did they get to choose whether their teacher was minimally competent in basic mathematics?  Did they have a voice -- any voice whatsoever -- in the crap that was stuffed in their heads for the previous 20 years?

Who created, promoted and continues that pattern today?  The power structure in our government does and nearly all of it is felony-level fraud from top to bottom.

The article points out that Medicare and Medicaid currently spend $1.3 trillion a year.  Uh, gee, someone else has read the MTS -- the government's official general ledger!  Fancy that.

What that article doesn't point out is that the tax rate on Medicare covers less than a third of the Medicare spending and zero of Medicaid!

Oh by the way -- that omission isn't an accident.

Social Security isn't the problem -- it's running a small (about 15%) cash deficit and can be reasonably fixed by either raising the cap on FICA tax, modestly increasing the tax rate or some combination of the two, along with getting all the able-bodied fraudsters (there are a lot of them) off SSDI.  Likely half of those on SSDI can work -- they just choose not to because they're not highly-skilled and all-in they figure it's better to sit around on their ass and blow the government check on booze, drugs or both.

Medicare and Medicaid, when those programs were put in place, lived in a world when health care was 3-4% of GDP -- that is, 3-4% of the economy.  Despite the greatest improvement in technology the world has ever seen over the last 50 or so years, which is the definition of productivity and which should have dropped that percentage of the economy by half or thereabouts instead medical care has increased as a percentage of GDP by more than five hundred percent and every damn bit of it is directly a result of the government -- and it wasn't an accident, it was done intentionally.

If we lived in a nation where the Rule of Law meant anything every single member of said government and all of those involved in same would have long been indicted, tried, convicted and hung.  There would be a literal gallows on the National Mall.

This is all fraud and felony and it has utterly destroyed, along with the bullshit run by Marxists, some of whom claim to be "feminists", the incentives for people to have children.  As a direct result intelligent men and women are choosing not to.

Rather than solve those problems and re-create said incentives this jackass in the referenced article and many just like her of both sexes instead propose to import tens of millions of stupid, uneducated and illiterate people.

Why do they have to be stupid, uneducated and illiterate?

Because if you import educated and intelligent people they won't make any children either -- they can and will figure out that their kids, should they choose to have them, are overwhelmingly at odds of getting screwed and thus you've gained nothing.

So instead all the various thugs and felons who infest both think tanks and government propose to and actively do import a bunch of people who can't add 2 + 2 or, much worse, who intend to use a penis and vagina as a means of forcibly overthrowing our representative government over time, installing a religious caliphate in its place.

Medicaid, I remind you, in states that have "capitated" same spends about $700/month per person.  If you import a stupid and uneducated person and allow them to have legal status they will place over $8,400 a year on the government in the form of spending instantly and forever just on this one program alone.  If said person can make $10 or even $15/hour they'll never pay anywhere near that $8,400 in taxes annually and that ignores the rest of the tax expenditures (e.g. school costs for the kids they bring in with them or make once here, SNAP, WIC, Section 8 housing, EITC and more.) 

You cannot get out of this box via immigration and attempting it will simply speed up the collapse.

The short term answer is to break all the medical monopolies and start throwing people in prison for violating the law.  This, by the way, isn't a choice because those stupid, uneducated and illiterate people are incapable of earning enough income to pay a material amount of tax in excess of that which they consume in government services.  It's true that said people pay taxes (e.g. if you rent a place to live you pay property taxes in your rent just as certainly as you do if you buy a house) but in terms of their total tax contribution .vs. government outlays it is either neutral or negative, and in terms of Medicare and Medicaid it is deeply negative.

Breaking the medical monopolies will halt the collapse immediately and it is the only means of doing so.  This is not politics -- it's math and there is no escaping mathematics.

2024 is not far away folks and the nasty is that close.  Those aren't my numbers they're the government's numbers.

Longer term the solution is found in fixing the incentive structure in this nation so that:

  • Both sexes (yes, there are only two) who desire families can pair off and be reasonably certain they will be able to raise their children even if something goes wrong in their adult relationship.  This means a complete upending of how divorce, custody and child support work in the United States.  There are answers to this problem that do not require a return to the 1950s paradigm; there were serious injustices then but what we have now is worse as intelligent members of both sexes are literally choosing to commit slow genocide by choice rather than create children that they know will have no reasonable hope of a decent future.  We either fix this on a legal level or we will never have educated, intelligent couples choosing to have more than a replacement level of children.  Period.

  • The lie of "low inflation" and "great standards of living" has to be turned into a truth.  This means the destruction of monopolist and cost-of-living jacking practices across the board so that virtually any couple can have one person go earn a living and the second raise kids at home.  It has to work everywhere in the United States, not just if you're able to earn $200,000+ a year in a city or $100 large in the suburbs and rural areas.  Chief among the cost-push problems are those imposed by the medical scam but the issue does not solely lie there.  Teacher, police, fire and other public-sector unions must be destroyed outright; they are largely responsible for the insane cost-of-living ramp via embedded and hidden taxes and fees that drive up everyone's cost of living.  Even FDR, a staunch socialist, said that public-employee unions were unacceptable and needed to be banned.  The reason for this is clear: An adversarial negotiation, which wage and working conditions always is, cannot take place if one side of the table can vote the other side out of office and replace them!  Every one of these unions is by definition an instrument of financial rape and fraud and anyone maintaining or attempting to maintain them needs to go to prison -- or be tried and hung.

No, those changes aren't going to come in a day.  But then again neither will fixing demographics.  It requires at minimum 20 years to start to fix a demographic shift since that's how long it takes to choose to have a kid, make the kid and raise the kid!

Demographics is destiny and the fact of the matter is that unless we provide incentives for intelligent and educated people in this country to produce at least a replacement rate of children there is no long-term solution; said educated and intelligent people will disappear as a result of their own choices.  Unless you intend to imitate Genghis Khan and start raping women as he did you have only incentives to work with; there is no forcible way forward that government can elect.

Importing people who are unintelligent and uneducated only makes the problem worse and also invites into our nation those who would, under that guise, use their reproductive capabilities to destroy the very foundation of this nation by breeding a huge number of people who have no respect for representative government, no intention of assimilating and every intention of, when their numbers are numerous enough, overthrowing said government and our Representative Republic by force.

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