Some serious time, effort, and skill went into this piece of satire. Every time I watch it, I catch something else.
tyranny
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?
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.
Criminals
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.
Crime
Always be armed
when you answer the door. Two men, backed up by three others, posed as utility workers and knocked on a man’s door Saturday night.
Do that at my house and see what happens. FAFO
Communism
China is asshoe
China’s takeover of Hong Kong continues. Most of the protesters who were in the news as China took over? They are either dead or in a reeducation camp, as are their families.
This is where Communism and Socialism always ends: Poverty, death, and prison.
COVID
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.
COVID
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:
- The vaccine does in fact reduce the severity of COVID.
- 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.
- The medical profession has simply gotten better at treating the illness.
- 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.
Economy
We are the Taliban’s bitch
We are sending money to the Taliban. Let one more person try to tell me “We won all of the battles, so we technically didn’t lose to the Taliban.”
Power Grab
Factions and the Power Struggle
In the old Soviet Union, there was a constant power struggle between factions. There were three main centers of power in that country, and after bloody infighting, they wound up in an uneasy truce, sharing the power of the entire nation. That is why the Kremlin was guarded by three different forces, each one loyal to a different faction.
I think that the Conservative Treehouse is on to something. The US government (and to some extent, the political parties) is fractured and the factions are struggling for power. For convenience, let’s just go with what CT began with, but make a few tweaks:
♦ TEAM One – The Department of State is aligned with the CIA. Their media PR firms are the majority of the MSM, most of Big Tech (Facebook, Alphabet, Twitter, etc.), and the Washington Post. Their ideology is favorable to the United Nations. Their internal corruption is generally driven by relationship with foreign actors. Members of Team One: Hillary Clinton, Clinton Global Initiative, Muslim Brotherhood, Samantha Powers, Susan Rice, Cass Sunstein, Brookings Institute, Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Council on Foreign Relations, the NFL, NBA, and a majority of the Federal Bureaucracy (Dept of Ed, Energy, HUD, etc).
♦ TEAM Two – The White House is aligned with the Pentagon (DoD) and National Security Council (NSC). Their media PR firms include Fox News, The Wall St Journal, and other “right wing” news sources. New York Times, Politico, etc. Their internal corruption is generally driven by domestic influence. Members of Team Two: Barack Obama, George Bush, Dan Quayle, Mike Pence, Wall St, Big Banks, Multinational Corporations, Defense Contractors, FBI, most of the Judicial Branch, Nancy Pelosi, the “Never Trump” wing of the Republican Party, and Mitch McConnel.
The Trump Presidency really made both teams angry. Since he was not an insider and thus not a part of either team, this represented a threat to both teams. He HAD to go. In a rare show of unity, they united to eliminate the threat he represented. He really wasn’t a great President and had his flaws, but he really pissed off both sides, and this was fun to watch. His Presidency was the last hope of avoiding the takeover of one team or the other, it just came too late.
China has its hands in both teams. They are the funding behind both teams, and are stirring the pot. We know that they are also funding dissidents in this country, so it isn’t so far fetched to think that they are funding BLM and Antifa. China doesn’t care who wins, as long as there is discord in the US. If the US is made weaker, China gets to do what it wants on its side of the world without concern for US interference.
The American people, you will note, are not involved in this power struggle. If they will care enough to get involved remains to be seen.
What I can’t figure out is where some of the more minor players fit. AOC, BLM, and Antifa are good examples of those who appear to not be a part of either team, but still have some influence in the game. Perhaps there is a third team here at play?
economics
401k in an inflationary period
My wife is a high earner with substantial amounts in a profit sharing acct and a 401 acct. If anyone has the words to convince her to at a minimum take some $ off the table I’d appreciate it. She deflects my words like reverting back to mean, things go down, etc.
If you have a 401k with employer matching, she might be correct. Let’s look at a 401kas an example. Her employer matches her contributions, up to 7% of her income. Let’s look at the math to see what happens if she deducts 7% from her pay:
Let’s say she has an income of $50k per year. That means a deduction of $3500 a year. Her employer matches that with another $3500, for a total of $7000 put into her 401k.
Assuming that the two of you have a taxable income between $81,050 and $172,750, your marginal tax rate is 22 percent. What this means is that In exchange for this $7000, her take home pay is only reduced by $2,730 because she doesn’t pay tax on that money, since it is deducted before income taxes are calculated.
So she ‘loses’ $2,730 in take home pay, but turns that into $7,000 in retirement savings, which translates into an instant 154% return on investment.
The larger her employer match, the better off she is. If her employer doesn’t have employer matching for the 401k, the advantage is much less, and inflationary periods really hurt you. In the example above, if there were no employer matching, that $2,730 becomes only $3,500, which lowers the return to 28%, which in this inflationary environment doesn’t help as much the inflation is hurting you.
In my case, once I have worked there for a year, my employer offers a 4% match. I plan on deducting that maximum 4% as soon as I am eligible.
EDIT: Comments have devolved into nonsensical gobbledygook. I normally leave them open, but I’ve had enough. Comments closed.