Category Archives: Health

The Economic Cataclysm Ahead

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By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

The economic storm hasn’t passed; the false calm is only the eye of the financial hurricane.

To understand the economic cataclysm ahead, do the math. Those expecting the Covid-19 pandemic to leave the U.S. economy untouched are implicitly making these preposterously unlikely claims:

1. China will resume full pre-pandemic production and shipping within the next two weeks.

2. Chinese consumers will resume borrowing and spending at pre-pandemic rates in a few weeks.

3. Every factory and every worker in China will resume full pre-pandemic production without any permanent closures or disruptions.

4. Corporate America’s just-in-time inventories will magically expand to cover weeks or months of supply chain disruption.

5. Not a single one of the thousands of people who flew direct from Wuhan to the U.S. in January is an asymptomatic carrier of the coronavirus who escaped detection at the airport.

6. Not a single one of the thousands of people who flew from China to the U.S. in February is an asymptomatic carrier of the coronavirus.

7. Not a single one of the thousands of people who are in self-quarantine broke the quarantine to go to Safeway for milk and eggs.

8. Not a single person who came down with Covid-19 after arriving in the U.S. feared being deported so they did not go to a hospital and are therefore unknown to authorities.

9. Even though U.S. officials have only tested a relative handful of the thousands of people who came from Covid-19 hotspots in China, they caught every single asymptomatic carrier.

10. Not a single asymptomatic carrier caught a flight from China to Southeast Asia and then promptly boarded a flight for the U.S.

I could go on but you get the picture: an extremely contagious pathogen that is spread by carriers who don’t know they have the virus to people who then infect others in a rapidly expanding circle has been completely controlled by U.S. authorities who haven’t tested or even tracked tens of thousands of potential carriers in the U.S.

These same authorities are quick to claim the risk of Covid-19 spreading in the U.S. is low even as the 14 infected people they put on a plane ended up infecting 25 passengers on the flight. These same authorities tried to transfer quarantined people to a rundown facility in Costa Mesa CA that was not suitable for quarantine, forcing the city to file a lawsuit to stop the transfer.

Do these actions instill unwavering confidence in the official U.S. response? You must be joking.

Do the math, people. The coronavirus is already in the U.S. but authorities have no way to track it due to its spread by asymptomatic carriers. People who don’t even know they have the virus are flying to intermediate airports outside China and then catching flights to the U.S.

None of the known characteristics of the virus support the confidence being projected by authorities. The tests are not reliable, few are being tested, carriers can’t be detected because they don’t have any symptoms, the virus is highly contagious, thousands of potential carriers continue to arrive in the U.S., etc. etc. etc.

The network of global travel remains intact. Removing a few nodes (Wuhan, etc.) does not reduce the entire network’s connectedness that enables the rapid and invisible spread of the virus.

Second, what authorities call over-reaction is simply prudent risk management. As I noted yesterday in How Many Cases of Covid-19 Will It Take For You to Decide Not to Frequent Public Places?, when an abstract pandemic becomes real, shelves are emptied and streets are deserted.

It doesn’t take thousands of cases to trigger a dramatic reduction in the willingness to mix with crowds of strangers. A relative handful of cases is enough to be consequential.

Many of the new jobs created in the U.S. economy over the past decade are in the food and beverage services sector, the sector that is immediately impacted when people decide to lower their risk by staying home rather than going out to crowded restaurants, theaters, bars, etc.

Many of these establishments are hanging on by a thread due to soaring rents, taxes, fees, healthcare and wages. Many of the employees are also hanging on by a thread, only making rent if they collect big tips.

Central banks can borrow money into existence but they can’t replace lost income. A significant percentage of America’s food and beverage establishments are financially precarious, and their exhausted owners are burned out by the stresses of keeping their business afloat as costs continue rising. The initial financial hit as people reduce their public exposure will be more than enough to cause many to close their doors forever.

As small businesses fold, local tax revenues crater, triggering fiscal crises in local government budgets dependent on ever-higher tax and fee revenues.

A significant percentage of America’s borrowers are financially precarious, one paycheck or unexpected expense away from defaulting on student loans, subprime auto loans, credit card payments, etc.

A significant percentage of America’s corporations are financially precarious, dependent on expanding debt and rising cash flow to service their expanding debt load. Any hit to their revenues will trigger defaults that will then unleash second-order effects in the global financial system.

The global economy is so dependent on speculative euphoria, leverage and debt that any external shock will tip it over the cliff. The U.S. economy is far more precarious than advertised as well.

The economic storm hasn’t passed; the false calm is only the eye of the financial hurricane.

Why this Draconian Response to COVID-19?

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By Jeffrey A. Tucker

Source: Activist Post

Imagine if you are the organizer of a major arts and tech event that attracts a quarter-million attendees. One week out from the conference, the mayor cancels your event. Your event is not named specifically, just that all events involving more than 2,500 people are officially banned. He does this using emergency powers, justified in the name of containing a virus.

And that’s it. This is what happened to South by Southwest, one of the most important events in the world in Austin, Texas, which has thus far not reported a single case of COVID-19. Based on last year’s numbers, It’s the end for:

  • 73,716 conference attendees and 232,258 festival attendees;
  • 4,700 speakers
  • 4,331 media/press attendees
  • 2,124 sessions
  • 70,00 trade show attendees occupying 181,400 square feet of exhibit space
  • 351 official parties and events
  • 612 international acts
  • 1,964 performance acts

Local merchants are devastated. All hotel and flight reservations are lost. It’s a financial calamity for the city (last year brought half a billion dollars for local merchants) and for untold millions of people affected by the abrupt decision.

Draconian, to say the least.

Making matters worse, a vicious and completely false report published by Variety said that the festival was aching for the city to make the call so that the festival could collect insurance money. This turns out to be entirely wrong: South by Southwest had no insurance against infectious disease. It was a smear and response to mass frenzy. After all, a petition on Change.org signed by 55,000 people had demanded the cancellation.

The city acquiesced to the mob. A grand and glorious conference was destroyed – the first of many this season.

Italy now has 16 million people under quarantine, which is to say that they are prisoners.

Anyone living in Lombardy and 14 other central and northern provinces will need special permission to travel. Milan and Venice are both affected. Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte also announced the closure of schools, gyms, museums, nightclubs and other venues across the whole country. The measures, the most radical taken outside China, will last until 3 April.

Americans have been quarantined on cruise ships and then forced to pay for their later hospitalization. The government that quarantines you has zero intention to pay the costs associated with your care, to say nothing of the opportunity costs of missing work.

The press isn’t helping. The New York Times has cheered it all on, aggressively advocating that governments go Medieval on this one.

In six months, if we are in a recession, unemployment is up, financial markets are wrecked, and people are locked in their homes, we’ll wonder why the heck governments chose disease “containment” over disease mitigation. Then the conspiracy theorists get to work.

The containment strategy was never debated or discussed. For the first time in modern history, governments of the world have taken it upon themselves to control population flows in the hopes of stemming the spread of this disease – regardless of the cost and with scant evidence that this strategy will actually work.

More and more, the containment response is looking like global panic. What’s interesting, Psychology Today points out, is that your doctor is not panicking:

COVID-19 is a new virus in a well-known class of viruses. The coronaviruses are cold viruses. I’ve treated countless patients with coronaviruses over the years. In fact, we’ve been able to test for them on our respiratory panels for the entirety of my career.

We know how cold viruses work: They cause runny noses, sneezing, cough, and fever, and make us feel tired and achy. For almost all of us, they run their course without medication. And in the vulnerable, they can trigger a more severe illness like asthma or pneumonia.

Yes, this virus is different and worse than other coronaviruses, but it still looks very familiar. We know more about it than we don’t know.

Doctors know what to do with respiratory viruses. As a pediatrician, I take care of patients with hundreds of different viruses that behave similarly to this one. We take care of the kids at home and see them if the fever is prolonged, if they get dehydrated, or if they develop breathing difficulty. Then we treat those problems and support the child until they get better.

Meanwhile, the New England Journal of Medicine reports as follows:

On the basis of a case definition requiring a diagnosis of pneumonia, the currently reported case fatality rate is approximately 2%. In another article in the Journal, Guan et al. report mortality of 1.4% among 1,099 patients with laboratory-confirmed Covid-19; these patients had a wide spectrum of disease severity. If one assumes that the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases, the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%. This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%) or a pandemic influenza (similar to those in 1957 and 1968) rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which have had case fatality rates of 9 to 10% and 36%, respectively.

Slate’s piece on this topic offers more perspective:

This all suggests that COVID-19 is a relatively benign disease for most young people, and a potentially devastating one for the old and chronically ill, albeit not nearly as risky as reported. Given the low mortality rate among younger patients with coronavirus—zero in children 10 or younger among hundreds of cases in China, and 0.2-0.4 percent in most healthy nongeriatric adults (and this is still before accounting for what is likely to be a high number of undetected asymptomatic cases)—we need to divert our focus away from worrying about preventing systemic spread among healthy people—which is likely either inevitable, or out of our control—and commit most if not all of our resources toward protecting those truly at risk of developing critical illness and even death: everyone over 70, and people who are already at higher risk from this kind of virus.

Look, I’m obviously not in a position to comment on the medical aspects of this; I defer to the experts. But neither are medical professionals in a position to comment on the political response to this; mostly they have assiduously declined to do so.

Meanwhile, governments are willy-nilly making drastic decisions that profoundly affect the status of human freedom. Their decisions are going to affect our lives in profound ways. And there has thus far been no real debate on this. It’s just been presumed that containment of the spread rather than the care of the sick is the only way forward.

What’s more, we have governments all-too-willing to deploy their awesome powers to control human populations in direct response to mass public pressure based on fears that have so far not been justified by any available evidence. For this reason, we have every reason to be concerned.

Are we really ready to imprison the world, wreck financial markets, destroy countless jobs, and massively disrupt life as we know it, all to forestall some uncertain fate, even as we do know the right way to deal with the problem from a medical point of view? It’s at least worth debating.

‘What More Do You Need to Know?’ Health Insurance Stocks Drive Wall Street Rebound on Biden Super Tuesday Wins

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“Biden is the preferred candidate for the financial markets.”

By Eoin Higgins

Source: CommonDreams

Health insurance industry stocks surged Wednesday morning in the wake of former Vice President Joe Biden’s strong showing in the Democratic presidential primary’s Super Tuesday contests, opening up 600 points after traders appeared to bet the candidate’s resurgence would box out any chance of single-payer universal healthcare.

“What more do you need to know,” tweeted journalist Jack Mirkinson of the market’s spike.

Sanders has made Medicare for All a centerpiece of his campaign. The healthcare industry has poured millions in ad buys against Sanders after the Vermont senator won primaries in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada.

“The industry has long seen Biden as their white knight,” said Dr. Adam Gaffney, the president of Physicians for a National Health Program and an outspoken Medicare for All advocate.

Biden on Tuesday won at least nine of the 14 states up for grabs to Sanders’ four. At press time, Maine was yet to be called, with Sanders and Biden locked in a razor-thin contest.

The market surge came after a rough week for the stock market, which at the end of February saw its biggest decline since the 2008 financial crisis after fears of the economic cost of a worldwide coronvirus pandemic increased.

Business commentators also made the connection between Sanders’ victories in the early primary states, particularly in Nevada, and the market’s poor performance last week.

On Fox Business February 28, billionaire Steve Forbes remarked that the weeklong drop was not only about fears of the coronavirus.

“There’s the political side,” Forbes said of the reason for the poor performance. “In the last week, week-and-a-half, the possibility of Bernie Sanders becoming president of the United States has increased, exponentially.”

According to the Washington Post:

Stocks of healthcare companies roared in response to Biden’s performance. Cigna was up more than 10 percent in morning trading, while UnitedHealth Group rose nearly 12 percent. Humana jumped 1.25 percent and Anthem soared nearly 14 percent.

Investor Ed Yardeni told the Post that Wednesday’s spike was a correction to earlier fears of what he called “Bernie Sanders’ socialist program.”

“The market’s sell-off last week on Sanders’ primary victories and rebound on Monday after Biden’s big win in South Carolina and this morning after Super Tuesday suggest that domestic U.S. politics may matter as much as the global health crisis on investors,” said Yardeni.

As Common Dreams reported, the results—which saw billionaire Michael Bloomberg and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) coming in far behind the two frontrunners—transformed a once-crowded primary into a two-man race. Though Biden put up a good showing, exit polls from the contests showed a majority of Democratic voters backing the elimination of private insurance in favor of a government-run system guaranteeing healthcare for all.

It’s better to focus on where you are going than how you are feeling

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By Christian Jarrett

Source: aeon

The notion that emotional pain and suffering reflect a deviation from a default happy baseline has been referred to as the ‘assumption of healthy normality’. But it’s a mistaken assumption. Estimates of the lifetime prevalence of psychiatric disorders indicate that around one in two adults will meet the criteria for a mental-health condition at some point in their lives. Given that psychological pain is so ubiquitous, we should focus less on what might make us happy, and more on achieving a sense of meaning, regardless of how we’re feeling. Psychotherapy should help people manage effective functioning while they are distressed, above and beyond aiming to reduce symptoms such as difficult thoughts, emotions and sensations. Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) takes this approach, using mindfulness, acceptance and other behavioural strategies to promote more flexible and value-driven behaviours. The goals in ACT are not necessarily to change or reduce one’s problematic thoughts or emotions, but to foster meaningful and effective behaviours regardless of mood, motivation or thinking. In other words, the primary goal is to promote what therapists call ‘valued living’.

Think of valued living as going about your daily life in the service of values that you find important, whereby engaging in these actions creates a sense of meaning and purpose. From an ACT perspective, symptoms of psychiatric disorders, and psychological suffering more broadly, are problematic when they are linked to rigid behaviours that pull us away from valued living. We might not have any control over the pain we experience – in fact, our emotional pain is profoundly human – but one area where we can exert some control is what we do in response to that suffering. Many common responses to difficult thoughts and emotions – such as avoidance, substance abuse, withdrawal and aggression – can alleviate distress in the short term, but also lead to long-term damage in our relationships, our jobs, our freedom and our personal growth – the very areas that provide that sense of meaning and purpose. By letting go of an agenda guided by minimising pain, and recalibrating toward a more value-driven agenda, our choices can be based on who we want to be, rather than how we want to feel.

In their 2013 study, the psychologists Todd Kashdan and Patrick McKnight of George Mason University in Virginia examined the day-to-day relationships between valued living and wellbeing in a sample of individuals with social anxiety disorder. This is a common but debilitating condition that’s marked by intense fear of social situations that might involve being negatively judged by others. People with social anxiety disorder often want and value positive relationships but considerable distress makes them avoid social interactions, so this is an excellent group in which to examine values and meaning.

In the study, participants began by identifying their central aim or purpose in life (eg, ‘trying to be a good role model to others’). Then, each day over the next two weeks, they rated their daily efforts and progress toward this goal, and provided daily ratings of their self-esteem, meaning in life, and experience of positive and negative emotions. On days when they reported investing greater effort toward their main life goal, they also tended to enjoy greater wellbeing: they said their life had more meaning, and they scored higher on self-esteem and the experience of positive emotions. Importantly, support was not found for the reverse path – greater wellbeing did not predict greater effort or progress toward strivings. This study highlights that sometimes we need to make the value-guided choice, regardless of how we feel.

If only it were so easy, though. For this reason, in ACT-based treatments, there is substantial focus on skills and techniques that can assist one in cultivating a more aware, willing and tolerant stance toward difficult feelings and other internal experiences. This stands in explicit contrast to a ‘do X and your distress will alleviate’ approach. The ACT techniques are not in the service of changing emotional states – they are in the service of facilitating valued action.

The effectiveness of ACT across different diagnoses and problem areas shows that committing to the benefits of valued living transcends traditional diagnostic categories. In addition to anxiety disorders, in studies of post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and resilience, chronic pain, suicidal ideation and many more, engaging in behaviours consistent with personally held values has been linked to a range of positive outcomes.

Which brings me back to my work as a therapist. While the breadth of exercises and techniques employed in ACT is beyond the scope of this article, there is one exercise I’d like to share that has helped some of my clients see the inextricable link between valued living and painful experiences. In this activity (of which there are different variations), the therapist first asks the client to write on an index card some of the internal experiences they are struggling with most – difficult thoughts and judgments, emotions, memories.

I ask them, what do you notice when you read that index card? I feel awful, I don’t want this. What do you want to do with the card? I want to throw it in the trash. Then the client flips the card over, and I ask them to write out some of the things that are most important, most meaningful to them – being a parent, caring and supporting others, learning, growing, etc. What do you notice when you read this side? Warmth, it feels right, this is who I want to be. Where is the pain, where is the other stuff? Still here, on the other side of the card. What happens if you push that pain away, escape or avoid it? I push the meaningful stuff away too. In your heart of hearts, what does your experience tell you right now? If I’m going to do the things that are important to me, be the person that I want to be, I also have to make room for the painful stuff.

In my experience, this is both an emotionally difficult exercise and also one that helps a person grasp that it’s impossible to disentangle pain and valued living. Sometimes it is hard to engage with those struggles in session, but we regularly return to the rationale of the approach – that maybe a different stance toward pain is necessary. And that is the crux of the work in ACT – opening up to the demons, judgments and suffering that lie underneath, all for the purpose of moving toward that which is meaningful.

The valued path is not necessarily the happy path. Social connectedness sometimes brings us in contact with memories of abuse and trauma. Being a parent stirs up doubts, uncertainty and feelings of anxiety, fear, anger and shame. Advocating for social justice requires repeated exposure to the inequities in our societies and the feelings of helplessness that can come from fighting for an equality that might not exist until after you’re gone. But a growing body of psychological research suggests that the valued path is the more workable one, whereas the happy path can be more of an illusion.

For readers who would like to find out more, I recommend the book Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life (2005) co-authored by the founder of ACT, Steven Hayes, and also Things Might Go Terribly, Horribly Wrong (2010) co-authored by another ACT pioneer, Kelly Wilson. And here is the international directory of ACT therapists, maintained by the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science.

Omens, Portents, Karma and the Mandate of Heaven

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By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

The question of legitimacy isn’t limited to China.

what makes humans unique among social mammals? Some say humor, I would nominate superstition: regardless of how hard we promote our rationality and logic, humanity continues to sense portents and omens in events and feel the intangible tug of karma: the consequences of past actions that we arrogantly thought we’d escaped forever.

Michael Snyder recently compiled a list of peculiarities that are raising eyebrows around the globe: One, sure, two, not that unusual, three, well things happen in threes, but ten disturbances and we’re only six weeks into 2020? 10 ‘Plagues’ That Are Hitting Our Planet Simultaneously (Zero Hedge)

As the saying has it, Nature Bats Last, and maybe arrogant, destructive humanity’s war on Nature is about to get its comeuppance. Maybe overdosing hundreds of millions of chickens and pigs to knock down bacteria in overcrowded conditions has finally generated a karmic blowback via bird and swine viruses.

As for karma in human society: maybe the disruption of the supply chain in China is a karmic response to offshoring production to fatten Corporate America’s profits at the expense of all else in America’s society and economy.

Then there’s the celestial right to rule, a.k.a. The Mandate of Heaven, the concept rooted in Chinese culture that political leadership which fails the people invites divine retribution in the form of withdrawing the support of Heaven. This withdrawal of support manifests in the tangible world as natural disasters: earthquakes, floods, droughts, plagues, etc.

Though it’s not politically correct to discuss The Mandate of Heaven in any serious way, the reading of omens goes back in Chinese history to oracle bones, the process of heating bones until they crack and then interpreting the patterns as portents to the future.

With human and domestic animal epidemics devastating China in a novel cluster of natural disasters, The Mandate of Heaven is in play even if no one dares speak of it openly. The regime is well aware that these parallel plagues are understood as manifestations that question the legitimacy of the current regime.

The question of legitimacy isn’t limited to China. Soaring wealth inequality, the dependence on debt to fund “growth” and the political disenfranchisement of the masses are global manifestations of political-financial systems that invite divine retribution for their excesses of corruption, self-aggrandizement, and exploitation of the planet and its human workforce.

Financial Feudalism

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By Michael Krieger

Source: Liberty Blitzkrieg

“Happy 18th Birthday! Meet your new Daddy,” read one website advertisement. “Do you have strong oral skills? We’ve got a job for you!” cooed another.

A message on another billboard directed at the “daddies” was more blunt: “The alternative to escorts. Desperate women will do anything”…

SeekingArrangement was founded by Las Vegas tech tycoon Brandon Wade. Wade is apparently worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $40 million. His motto is, “Love is a concept invented by poor people”…

SA also markets itself as an antidote to student debt. In the U.S. and elsewhere, college students are enduring financial instability and hardship. Because of rising college fees and rent, and the lack of time available for work during studies, many women are extremely vulnerable to exploitation. “SeekingArrangement.com has helped facilitate hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of arrangements that have helped students graduate debt-free,” Wade boasts on the website. Promotional videos show young, beautiful women enrolled in “Sugar Baby University” — in classrooms, holding wads of cash, driving luxury cars, and discussing the pleasure and ease of being a sugar baby.

When signing up for an account, potential sugar babies are told, “Tip: Using a .edu email address earns you a free upgrade!”

– TruthDig: Sugar-Coated Pimping

When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.

– Frédéric Bastiat

Watching politics unfold in the post-financial crisis era has been extraordinarily frustrating. While it’s been refreshing to observe the emergence of grassroots populism over the last few years, there’s a problematic lack of depth and clarity embedded in these burgeoning mass movements. Tens if not hundreds of millions of Americans now acknowledge that something’s deeply broken within the current paradigm, but we remain focused on identifying symptoms as opposed to understanding and rectifying the systemic nature of the problem.

Of course, there are numerous complexities when it comes to the administration of an imperial oligarchy, and our system didn’t emerge overnight. Perhaps the most fundamental mutation of the post WW2 era came in 1971 when the international convertibility of U.S. dollars into gold was severed. This is when the country began its long transformation from a largely industrial empire to a financial one. I’ve often highlighted how the purely fiat USD reserve currency is the most powerful weapon ever invented, and how the U.S. control of the global financial system is the true backbone of empire, but it’s equally important to understand how the predatory financial system is also used to subjugate Americans in their own country.

In order to understand how this works we need to dig into the most fundamentally important four letter word in any modern economy: Debt.

When most people consider the debilitating societal effects of excessive debt they tend to see it from one basic level. How the bottom half of the population essentially has no choice but to borrow in order to participate in the economy as constructed. This is because the cost of so many things has been inflated way beyond the capacity of most people to purchase them outright. Specifically, wage growth has failed to keep up with the soaring costs of fundamental things such as shelter, healthcare and higher education.

For instance, home prices have been rising faster than wages in 80% of U.S. markets, which means the higher cost tends to offset historically low mortgage rates. Low interest rates don’t really help such people, it just lets them maybe, barely purchase an intentionally inflated asset to live in by taking on a huge chunk of debt. An asset that could quickly become completely unaffordable should the economy turn down as it did a decade ago.

As such, you have multitudes taking on debt defensively just to keep going and avoid falling further down the socioeconomic scale. Debt doesn’t empower such people, rather, it turns them into modern day indentured servants endlessly stuck on a hamster wheel with little to no hope of getting off. This is not an accident, it’s a tried and tested tool which, when combined with incessant mass media propaganda, is an effective way of creating a submissive, confused and desperate underclass.

Many people understand this by now, but what’s far less understood, yet potentially more significant, is how the wealthy use debt.

When you own your primary home outright and you’ve got enough savings that healthcare premiums and paying for your kids college in cash doesn’t make a dent, debt becomes something else entirely. Debt’s no longer an albatross around your neck, instead it becomes a tool to increase wealth. Debt becomes leverage.

Much of the explosion in wealth inequality over the past several decades can be traced back to this systemic interclass weaponization of debt. If you’re very wealthy and connected, access to extremely cheap debt is virtually unlimited, and this access is used to make leveraged bets on all sorts of stuff, but primarily real estate and financial assets such as stocks and bonds. Hasn’t this always been the case you ask? Aren’t those with capital always extremely advantaged over those without it? Isn’t that the history of capitalism and America since the beginning? My answer would be yes and no.

The main difference between prior periods of history and, let’s say the 21st century, has been the vast increase in power of the financial services sector thanks to the Federal Reserve’s willingness to encourage and enable the insatiable reckless behavior of the speculator class. It’s no secret the Fed has been intentionally boosting assets across the FIRE sector such as real estate, stocks and bonds since the crisis. Those with the capital to ride the coattails of this irresponsible and undemocratic central planning rushed out to take on debt to buy these assets, thus multiplying the return on investment.

While the white-collar cubicle worker with enough extra income to diligently add to their retirement account over the past decade has done fine, bankers or hedge fund managers who took on massive leverage to amplify such bets made generational fortunes while creating nothing of value. It’s the way debt works for the financial services sector versus how it works for the average person in a world dominated by big finance and the central bankers who provide them unlimited welfare.

The same thing occurs within the corporate suite, as executives across industries have used access to extremely cheap debt to buyback stock and reward themselves handsomely despite creating nothing of societal value while doing so. It’s pure financial engineering. Nobody should become generationally wealthy this way, but it’s exactly what’s been happening. So you see, debt’s not just a means to subjugate a desperate bottom half of the population, it’s concurrently an effective tool to expand wealth and power at the top. 

Then there’s this.

When was the last time the bond market paid you to make an acquisition? As Max Keiser so eloquently puts it, this is interest rate apartheid.

But it’s even more pernicious than that. It’s still possible for regular wealthy people to take on too much leverage, make a mistake, and lose their fortunes — unless of course you’re an executive at major financial services firm. In that case you simply can’t lose, which was the primary lesson learned from the response to the financial crisis.

Not only were the titans of this industry not jailed, they walked away with their fortunes intact. The Federal Reserve and the U.S. government made this happen. It wasn’t an accident and it wasn’t to “save the economy;” that’s just nonsense talk for the confused masses. The entire point was to consolidate and further entrench the unaccountable power of those at the very top of the finance feudalism paradigm and signal they’ll also be bailed out for any future catastrophe they create.

Significantly, financial feudalism isn’t just interclass, it’s also intergenerational. The stock market and real estate crash of a decade ago was the market’s attempt to reset those assets more in line with median incomes, but central banks would have none of that. They determined asset prices needed to be re-inflated as much as possible as fast as possible, and these unelected banker stooges went about implementing this major policy decision of central economic planning with zero public debate. Young people entering the workforce had no savings and poor wage growth, so a generation was quickly priced out of homeownership while simultaneously stuck with an enormous pile of student debt. The results of all this are unsurprising.

The crisis facing this country is simmering and metastasizing under the surface of misleading aggregate economic data and record stock markets. While it’s tempting to focus on the symptoms, we’ll never confront and tackle any of this properly unless we understand the structure and how the game is really played. The system you’re living in isn’t capitalism or socialism, it’s financial feudalism. 

The Power of Vulnerability

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By Milan Karmeli

Source: Collective Evolution

Vulnerability is about being honest, and this includes embracing our dark side. No matter whether we find ourselves on the conservative spectrum or liberal, we often abuse morals and ideals in order to avoid our own shadow. In this turbulent ‘Trump era,’  where values fly high for all sides, vulnerability could become the currency that returns our sanity. My intention here is not political, but recent events coinciding with personal ones have created some urgency around the issue.

In the name of righteousness and higher ideals — personal, social, or political — we often establish a perimeter of comforting beliefs around us. This way we don’t need to face our own fear and insecurity. Instead of taking responsibility for our insufficiencies, we respond with judgment and morality. Fearing to face our simplicity and delicate humanity, we try proving our sophistication through how good, spiritual, or moral we are. Survival at any cost justifies the means to an end, but is basic survival what we really want?

If you’re interested in understanding how comfortable you are with your own vulnerability, take a moment to sense how you respond to abandonment, rejection, judgment, or betrayal. 

Vulnerability Wasn’t Top Priority Growing Up

For most of us, childhood experiences left lasting imprints. When we got out of line, according to the values and needs of others, judgment or ridicule often followed. It became unsafe to express feelings and fears. Almost as a natural consequence, we began pretending that we don’t need anything and can do it ourselves. Hiding our true needs became the best strategy and we embarked on a journey of manipulating our way through life. To say the least, we became creative in coming up with ways to keep our true needs hidden — even from ourselves. 

We learned to trust that suffering shown through sadness, crying, or pain point to or represent our vulnerability, though even these seemingly obvious markers may not really be signs of such at all. Often they are more representative of (un)conscious of manipulation of our partners. It’s safer to express needs through suffering. Not from bad intentions, but because it’s not as exposing.

What we call a ‘need’ easily turns into ‘demand.’ And what we often call ‘vulnerability’ becomes our personal way of blackmail and punishment. Even waiting silently and lonely for a response after an argument can ‘look and feel’ vulnerable. However, deep down hides a righteous expectation to be seen or heard. If we look close, we can discover pain buried beneath.

Practicing Vulnerability With Those Close to Us Makes Us More Human

When we’re truly vulnerable, we don’t use morality as a weapon in judging who’s right or wrong. What we do is recognize and acknowledge our feelings, fears, and needs. We do not generalize or base our arguments on past events, but respond to the feelings stirred through a specific event. We take off our masks and become available to ourselves and others. In many ways, we actually choose to become choice-less.

Betrayal, sacrifice, and other patterns that result in disappointment become central themes in our close relationships, but this is mainly because we enter those connections protected and guarded in the first place. Sacrifice, for example, is a tricky form of manipulation. We feel pain and righteousness at the same time. Sacrifice always leaves us with anger in our belly and the sense of missed opportunities.

I remember the deep pain I felt when my partner rejected my attempts to ‘help’ her time and time again. My response was to shut down and give her the silent treatment, while at times also throwing some moral judgment her way, such as “I give you everything I have, and what about you?”. But was I open when I gave so much, or rather feeling morally superior by loving ‘more’? I placed myself in an untouchable place and at the same time lost my vulnerability.

In relationships with those close to us we have a rare opportunity to exit the spiral of survival that gives us the illusion of staying on top of our game. That place which makes us believe we’re protected by high ideals, values, and other virtues — and sometimes also by self-judgment that we’re evil beyond repair. 

Search for truth is a delicate process and doesn’t follow any defined path other than facing the complexity of our human existence as honestly, responsibly, and sincerely as we can. So long as we choose our personal safety and false importance, we prevent the power of vulnerability to guide us back to our hearts.

Vulnerability Can Be One of Our Greatest Teachers

There’s a big difference between saying and feeling things, and so a sentence like “I don’t need anything and can do it alone” can easily slip off our tongue. Nevertheless, the pain of loneliness and abandonment remains. There is no doubt that we can and could do many things by ourselves, like raising children, being without close friends, a lover, touch, recognition and the list goes on. 

But what we really want is to learn to express our fears, and needs. Our demand for acknowledgment, the requirement to have our needs satisfied, or maintaining moral high ground, all leave us in a state of fight, in which receiving becomes impossible. Vulnerability forms the basis for our receptivity.

In expressing true vulnerability we hold the ground for our feelings and needs. We sense it as a state of integrity in which we accept the totality and complexity of our human imperfection. It’s a place of power, in which we accept that we need and thereby acknowledge our dependency on each other. It’s empowering when we connect with our humility and simplicity.

Where to begin being vulnerable?

Vulnerability is best expressed in the “I” form. We take responsibility for our own state of mind and feelings, and don’t hold our partners prisoners to our moral standards and ideals. We don’t use sacrifice, guilt, shame, or judgment to drive our point across.

It’s challenging, since it leaves us with little or no protection other than the acceptance of who we are. The “I” form takes the guessing game out of the relationship, where we expect our partners to ‘know’ what we fear, feel, or need. 

This way those close to us can decide to satisfy our needs or not. Everything else turns into an expectations game in which there are no winners, and this triggers resistance. They feel manipulated. And for us, vulnerability holds the key to accepting more parts in ourselves, which forms the basis of coming out of hiding and denial, and into our light.

WUHAN AND HARVARD… AND JEFFREY

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By Joseph P. Farrell

Source: Giza Death Star

I’m constantly amazed at the information that people email to me, but this one is a whopper doozie spotted by V.S. I’ve already blogged about the arrest of Dr. Charles Lieber of Harvard, and about this strange tie to the Wuhan University of Technology. But there’s more lurking in the background of that Harvard connection than meets the eye, and I just have to share this one:

Wuhan Coronavirus, Jeffrey Epstein, and Harvard University
by inconspiracy

There you have it. So it’s important to review what this article is saying: Dr. Lieber worked at the same university as Drs Church and Nowak, both known associates of Jeffrey Epstein and recipients of his largesse. Given the nature of their work, it strains credibility to assume that Lieber was unaware of their work or they of his. They are, after all, all faculty members working in more or less the same broad discipline. As they article makes clear, all were working in aspects of modifying biology and doing genetic engineering, all areas of obvious biowarfare implications. All of this raises some intriguing high octane speculations and questions:

1) Why would professors, who are recipients of government funds for research, also take private funding in the millions from Epstein? Did they need it? And was Epstein in fact laundering money for other interests in sponsoring this research? And does that mean that their are private interests trying to obtain a biowarfare capability? Their taking of Epstein money on an individual basis was quite probably entirely innocent. But it’s the overall pattern of a Harvard connection that I find highly odd.

2) Do these questions in their turn indicate that all of China is being turned into a biowarfare, economic warfare, and social engineering experiment?

In respect to these questions, the article itself asks a highly pertinent question regarding Dr. Lieber toward the end of the piece:

Why  would someone (Lieber) getting $10 million plus from the U.S. funding agencies go through the hassle of setting up a secret lab in another country and risk his entire life’s work for less money. What was he doing there exactly?

Indeed, and for whom was he really doing it? China? Harvard? Some private international interest?

Like the author of the article, I eagerly await for more details to come out. In the connection to the idea of some private international interest however, I’m reminded of a detail that occurred prior to 9/11, when Russian economist Dr. Tatiana Koryagina mentioned in Pravda, prior to the events of 9/11, that the US would shortly be attacked on its own soil by a private group with assets in the trillions of dollars. Recently, Harvard took its funding entirely black, and I have to wonder, in the light of this article, if it is one of the crucial “fronts” or “nodes” for some sort of private network. Would it be involved in such activities as a massive social engineering experiment?

Well, as I detailed with co-author Gary Lawrence in our book Rotten to the (Common) Core, another Harvard chemist – indeed, a former president of the institution – comes to mind: Dr. James Conant Bryant, and with him, the answer to that question is a resounding yes.

See you on the flip side…