Divemedic

Transitory Inflation

A billionaire hedge fund manager is contradicting the Fed’s claim that the high inflation we are seeing now is “transitory.”

The central bank in August 2020 tweaked its policy, saying it would allow inflation to run “moderately” above 2% “for some time” in order to help the central bank meet its goal of full employment. The problem here isn’t that the economy is preventing full employment. There are jobs, business wants to hire. It’s just that the money being dumped into the economy by the Federal Reserve and the Federal Government are allowing people to sit at home without working.

It is only a matter of time before the Reserve Banks have to acknowledge what all of us already know- inflation has massively taken off. Once the FR makes it official, the market will tank, the bond market will go sour, and interest rates on the debt will soar. That will force the government to devalue the dollar in order to be able to afford the interest payments on our $30 trillion (give or take) debt.

Our rate of borrowing is already incredible. We have increased the National Debt by $6 trillion in the past two years. Since September of 2016, we have borrowed $9 trillion. It took our nation from its inception all the way to 2007 (231 years) to borrow $9 trillion. Since 2007, we have borrowed another $19 trillion.

Our debt is so large that a one percent increase in interest rates represents almost $350 billion in extra interest that must be paid. An interest rate that increases by just 3 percent will leave no money in the budget for anything else, not even Social Security.

Every President and Congress for the past 80 years has kicked this can down the road.

Trump increased the National Debt by 141% from $19.6 to $27.7 trillion in four years.

President Obama increased the debt by 185%- to $19.57 Trillion.

President George W Bush borrowed $5 trillion in 8 years, increasing the national debt by 187%.

It took President Clinton 3 and a half years to borrow his first trillion dollars. All told, he borrowed $1.2 trillion in his first term, and $600 billion in his second. He increased the national debt by 140% in eight years.

George HW Bush borrowed his first trillion in 3 years, and he increased the National debt by 170% in four years.

Reagan borrowed his first trillion in 6 years, and doubled the National debt during his eight years in the White House.

Carter increased the National debt by 150%, but “only” borrowed $300 billion in 4 years. I guess that was when $1 billion was real money.

Ford increased the debt by 147% in 3 years., Nixon by 135% in 5 years, Johnson by 116% in 6 years, Kennedy by 106% in 2 years, Eisenhower by 108% in eight years.

Biden may well be the President who is left holding the bag.

By Divemedic, ago

Emails, and the chain of command

According to Newsweek, Americans were emailing Pence and asking him to remove Trump from office by using the 25th Amendment. So? Which Americans? Why does that matter?

Now knowing what we know about Milley telling military leaders to ignore the President’s orders, Trump had already been removed from office in all but name. That was why Pence was the one ordering the National Guard into the Capitol.

Because the Washington, DC area is a Federal District, the General in charge of the unit answers only to the President of the United States. This authority to activate the D.C. National Guard has been delegated by the President, to the Secretary of Defense, who has further delegated to the Secretary of the Army.  Note that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs is not anywhere in that chain of command, nor is the Vice President.

The D.C. National Guard is the only National Guard unit, out of all of the 54 states and territories, which reports only to the President. Any orders given to the Commanding General of the Washington, DC National Guard by any other entity or individual are not lawful orders. Why is that important?

On January 6 at 3:30 pm, Vice President Pence ordered the activation of the DC National Guard.  The Vice President is nowhere in the military chain of command, and as I pointed out, doesn’t have the power to order the DC national guard to do anything. Anyone who obeyed these orders was doing so without lawful authority. Those orders were not lawful orders.

No matter who sent emails to the Vice President.

By Divemedic, ago

Genius

Some serious time, effort, and skill went into this piece of satire. Every time I watch it, I catch something else.

By Divemedic, ago

Thoughts on J6 trials

The government is dragging its feet and burying the defense attorneys in evidence. The idea is to delay trials and force plea deals. At least one judge is concerned about the right to a speedy trial. One of the things that really bug me about these articles is how they always mention that the J6 protesters entered the Capitol in a “military stack” formation, because they held on to each other to avoid being separated as they entered.

You know who else travels in a military stack formation?

Oh shit. Kindergarten commandos in a military stack formation.

One couple from Central Florida has been languishing in jail while awaiting trial.

All of this is being done to arm twist the defendants into accepting plea deals. The people involved have already spent more time in jail awaiting trial than they would have by pleading guilty. In fact, this guy just accepted a plea deal, and he will still be sitting in jail until late January. The crime he plead guilty to carries a maximum of six months in jail. Kelly agreed to a deal pleading guilty to one count of parading and demonstrating inside the Capitol, and will likely be released with time served and a fine.

According to the article, the government claims that Kelly broke a window to break into what he thought was the White House. There are a few problems with this. First, if he thought he was breaking into the White House, there is no way that he could be guilty of conspiring to interrupt the count of the electoral college votes. Second, he didn’t break a window to enter. Here is the picture provided by the DOJ, showing him walking in through the door:

On top of that, he wasn’t too interested in doing anything like hunting for Senators. He was more interested in taking pictures and texting.

This entire thing is bullshit.

Side note: Be careful when out shooting. Do not take pictures. The government will use that to make it seem as though you are training to be a member of the militia Delta force.

By Divemedic, ago

Rats

The rats are fleeing the sinking ship that is the US economy. The regional Presidents of the Fed, who affect the economy far more than POTUS does, are busy dumping US dollar denominated securities ahead of the Fed’s expected decision to taper off on buying bonds and securities. This policy saw the Fed propping up Wall Street by purchasing stocks, bonds, and securities using dollars that they were creating out of thin air. Worse, they were purchasing those items from their own personal accounts.

This policy of using money created out of thin air has artificially propped up stock prices for years. It has also apparently been lucrative for the officials at the Fed. Now that this policy is coming to an end, the market will take a hit.

Now the officials at the Fed have decided to come clean and get out, coincidentally at the same time the Fed is to stop buying. I have a friend who is an executive at a large New York bank. He is prohibited from doing this, and his stock purchases are watched closely by the SEC to prevent insider trading to the point where he doesn’t bother because the bureaucratic hoops are too onerous. The people in the government are apparently exempt. (Yes, I know the Fed is an NGO, but that is smoke and mirrors)

I only have a few assets still in the market. A 401K, and a couple of stocks that pay dividends at the end of the quarter. I am waiting until the dividends pay out, then those stocks are gone as well. I’ve held them for over a year, so I only pay the long term capital gains rate on the profits.

By Divemedic, ago

Biden cutting off COVID medication to southern states

The Biden Administration, through the Federal Department of Health and Human Services, has cut off the shipment of monoclonal antibodies to Texas, Florida, Mississippi, Tennessee, Georgia, Louisiana and Alabama because of a claimed shortage. The federal government and mainstream media are promoting the restriction as “staving off shortages” due to “dwindling supplies.”

However, you will note that all seven of the states have Republican governors. One of those, Florida, is the governor that Biden threatened just last week. If you remember, he made the statement:

If they’ll not help, if these governors won’t help us beat the pandemic, I’ll use my power as president to get them out of the way.

Make no mistake, Joe Biden and the rest of his administration is at war with the citizens of this country. This decision WILL kill people. This is every bit as despicable as providing small pox infected blankets. This is a deliberate attack against the citizens of the southern US.

If it’s administered within ten days of the initial infection, the treatment can reduce the need to hospitalize a COVID patient by 70 percent, according to medical experts. Governor Desantis has been recommending the treatment since August. My mother and brother both received the treatment and recovered fully with only minor symptoms.

Now the President is using medicine to conduct biological warfare against the south. The first civil war started over much less.

By Divemedic, ago

Let’s do some science

The goalposts keep moving. The latest we are being told is that the COVID vaccine keeps the illness from being as severe. We are told that we should trust the science, and I am a facts and figures kind of guy, so let’s do just that.

So we will do what is called a retrospective analysis of COVID data to see if the presence of the vaccine changed the Case Fatality Rate (CFR) of COVID. All figures for this analysis were obtained from this website.

By December 15, 2020, exactly zero percent of the US population had received a COVID vaccine. Also on that date, 17,299,965 Americans had been determined by various tests to have COVID. Of them, 320,309 had died. That means that 1.85 percent CFR.

In the ensuing months, 70 percent of the public received a COVID vaccine between December and September. So how did it do?

As of September 11, 2021, a total of 41,905,818 had tested positive for COVID. As of that same day, 678,866 of them had died. That means that 24,605,853 people tested positive for COVID and of those, 358,557 died from December 16, 2020 to September 11, 2021. That means a 1.46 percent CFR .

Reducing the CFR from 1.85 to 1.46 represents a 31 percent reduction in the CFR. So what caused this reduction in the fatality rate? There are a couple of things that this could point to:

  1. The vaccine does in fact reduce the severity of COVID.
  2. During the first few months of the pandemic, tests were in short supply. For this reason, the only people being tested were those who were the sickest with apparent COVID symptoms. Those who had only mild symptoms, or no symptoms, simply weren’t tested, and this skews the CFR higher.
  3. The medical profession has simply gotten better at treating the illness.
  4. The new strains of COVID are less virulent

In science, you want to eliminate all of the variables except for the variable you want to test (called the independent variable) and the result (called the dependent variable). So how do we do that?

The independent variable is the vaccine. We will isolate that by looking at the 90 day period from June 15 to September 15. During that period, an average of 60 percent of Americans was vaccinated.

To isolate the dependent variable, we will look at a 90 day period immediately prior to the vaccine becoming available. That will eliminate factors 2 and most of 3, which will allow us to examine as pure a set of variables as possible with the dataset we have.

So- let’s do some math. From September 15 to December 15, 2020, a total of 10,343,397 Americans tested positive for COVID. During that same time period, 115,703 died. The CFR for the 90 day period immediately preceding vaccine distribution was 1.12 percent. Now from June 11 to September 11, 2021, a total of 7,697,685 people tested positive, and 63,589 died, for a CFR of 0.83 percent. So there was a 25.9 percent reduction in the CFR between the two time periods.

The conclusion here is that vaccinating approximately 60 percent of the public corelated with an approximate 26 percent decline in the CFR. Note that this does not mean that the vaccine was the cause of this decline. In fact, it implies the opposite. If the vaccine were the cause of this decline, the decline in the CFR should have been larger.

Real scientists would be looking into other reasons for the decline. I am betting that they aren’t.

By Divemedic, ago