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On Wednesday, a woman dropped dead at this Saskatoon Shoppers Drug Mart after her booster. A friend of mine witnessed it. Two days later, they are refusing to be honest with people about the potential harms. Please share, it could save someone’s life. pic.twitter.com/hvhKwl1TVy — Heart (@Heart4Truth) September 17, 2022   New video added.   […]

GOODER AND HARDER, FUN CITY: That NYC psycho who smashed up a McD’s and threatened a bunch of people with an axe? Yeah, he was released without bail.

The post What state do you hate most? appeared first on Liberty Unyielding.

CHINA IS THE MODEL FOR THE Global Ruling Class. “We’ve already highlighted the many, many problems with the Online Safety Bill in the UK, which will be a massive attack on free speech, in that (among many other problems) it seeks to force websites to remove content even if it’s ‘lawful,’ meaning that they will massively overcensor. As I’ve pointed out, this is exactly how the original Great Firewall of China began, with instructions from the government to remove ‘harmful’ content or face consequences. The reaction, of course, was to remove anything that the government might consider to be harmful. It should be no surprise, then, that some of the people backing the bill have literally cited China as an example of how this regulation can work.”

QUESTION ASKED:  Why did Google/Blogger ban a decade-old post on Nazi hostility to Christianity?

JUST NBC THE RACISM! I don’t think anyone thought this quote through:

Since deleted, likely because, as Mollie Hemingway writes, “this tweet made their political allies look horrific.”

By Nicole Silverio Twitter suspended Daily Caller education reporter Chrissy Clark on Thursday evening for exposing a state agency promoting transgenderism to preschool aged children. The article, “Wisconsin Education Department Promotes ‘Gender Expansive’ Resources For Three-Year-Olds,” describes the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction promoting transgender video resources and books for three to five-year-olds. One video […]

The post Twitter Suspends Daily Caller’s Chrissy Clark Over Her Article On Promoting Transgenderism To Preschoolers appeared first on Liberty Unyielding.

It seems like this should be a MUCH bigger deal than it is currently, but we've got a Meta executive admitting to congress that they take their marching orders from Biden and his White House.

THE REAL EXTREMISTS ARE IN THE WHITE HOUSE: FBI Agents Accuse Biden of Pressuring FBI to Fabricate ‘Extremist’ and ‘White Supremacist’ Cases.

SOME PARTS OF AMERICA STILL WORK: Starlink Provides Service To Antarctic Research Station, Now Accessed On All 7 Continents.

I switched to Starlink a couple months ago and the service is very good. And after years of fiddling with pro-level (or at least prosumer-level) networking gear, I’m very happy with Starlink’s foolproof WiFi mesh units.

TIKTOK IS CCP SPYWARE, PERIOD: TikTok exec won’t say under oath if Chinese communists are accessing US user data.

FRAUD, BULLYING, INTIMIDATION: Facebook Worked With FBI to Spy on Americans Who Questioned 2020 Election.

HMM: Did Democrats Let the Capitol Riot Happen? Whistleblower Memo Raises Questions.

POLICE WHO USE DEADLY FORCE SHOULD HAVE NO MORE PRIVILEGES THAN CIVILIANS IN THE SAME CIRCUMSTANCES, and no one would be making excuses for a civilian who did this:

At 11:30 p.m., Officers Ord, Marrero, and Oviatt, without any advance notice to Mr. Huff, went to Mr. Huff’s home. They parked around the corner and, wearing all black clothing, proceeded to “creep” through neighboring yards towards Mr. Huff’s residence. When Mr. Huff, who was smoking outside, saw these unidentified individuals advancing upon his home, he believed that Mr. Bejar-Gutierrez was following through on his earlier threats. He ran inside and retrieved a shotgun. He was facing the window with both hands by his side. His left hand held the shotgun by the barrel—his finger was not on the trigger and the gun was pointed at the ceiling. About 30 feet away, Officer Ord drew his weapon and, as he yelled, “Put your hands up, put your hands up!”, fired five shots at Mr. Huff. Mr. Huff, who was diving away from the window as Officer Ord opened fire, was shot in rectum and severely injured. Another round entered the room where his daughter lay sleeping.

Officer Ord attempted to justify his actions by exclaiming that Mr. Huff “came into the window with a gun,” and afterwards stated, “They are racking up in the garage,” when, in fact, Mr. Huff, bleeding profusely on the floor, was merely calling 911 for help. Mr. Huff was charged with multiple felonies, all of which were ultimately dismissed. The second is a claim for municipal liability brought against the City for its allegedly unconstitutional policies, practices, and customs.

Note the willingness of the officers to lie afterwards.

This old picture of myself and a fellow outlaw is given as proof of my deep anti-social propensities.

A friend of mine, long ago, would sit and listen to George Carlin’s FM & AM record album.

I could mimic Carlin’s delivery and voice, especially the radio bits. None of which is apropos of anything, except that during one joke, Carlin was teasing women who watch soap operas (do they still have them?). The ladies, he said in an exaggerated tone, called these “My stories.”

Well, this is my story. Which I’d ordinarily never bother anybody with. Except that the coronadoom panic is passing back to the lucrative global-warming-of-doom, now “climate change”, manufactured lucrative panic, which is lucrative. Many might not recall the old glorious global warming days, which lead to events which caused my expulsion from polite society, so a brief review is in order.

I was an Associate Editor of Monthly Weather Review (until 2011), and of course a member of the American Meteorological Society, including being on its Probability and Statistics Committee, and was in other suchlike organizations. I was, for one year, a forecaster with the National Weather Service. I spent a summer at NCAR. I was a named person. I won awards.

My BS “degree” was in meteorology and math. My MS “degree” was in atmospheric physics. I programmed my first climate-crop model in Fortran. I have had peer-reviewed papers in the Journal of Climate. Among others.

I went into weather because, while I was doing cryptography in the Air Force, the first global warming panic was underway. And I believed it. I even wrote one of the authors of the first IPCC report, and he graciously sent me a copy when I was overseas. I wanted to go into some kind of science after the service, and this field seemed especially important.

As I was doing my Masters, I realized that to understand what a forecast really was, and what distinguished good from bad ones, I had to figure out probability and statistics. So I did my PhD in those subjects. My dissertation was on model goodness—and badness.

I still believed global warming was important, like nearly every Expert, but the longer I looked at climate model performance, and especially models that are driven by climate model input, and their monumental failures and vast over-certainties, I became more and more disillusioned.

So I dropped out, so to speak, to think. Luckily, I was working outside academia and could do this. If you understand this paradox, you understand much.

Many people don’t know this, but to get a PhD in “science” (in the States), one never has to read or study any philosophy. At all.

This is not sensible, because in order to understand science, and uncertainty, one has to know philosophy. Most scientists wing it, absorbing field-dependent tidbits and myths (I use this word in its old-fashioned sense, and not as “something false”), and many even deny they have a philosophy—which is a philosophy.

After about ten years of reading—starting with Jaynes, then Jeffreys, then Stove, and then etc.—I came to realize what I didn’t know. Which was a lot. What I did know was that others must surely be as ignorant as I was about science. So I wrote Uncertainty (in 2016). Which maybe ought to be titled The Philosophy of Uncertainty. With something about Science in a subtitle. (I am a terrible title writer.)

Climate models aren’t that good. They run hot. They often don’t have skill. Persistence can beat them (persistence is saying next year will be like this year). Model hot flashes should be embarrassing. They aren’t. Why? Partly because scientists cherish models over Reality. But that’s not all.

It is a trivial truth that man influences the climate. All creatures do. And all things. It’s when you marry that triviality with something like a Gnostic or pantheistic belief that man is an evil presence that we begin to understand that many want, and even need, to believe there is a climate “crisis”.

Here’s one of several incidents that proves this.

A group of us—Christopher Monckton, Willie Soon, David Legates, and moi—wrote a paper describing a simple model of the climate. Why Models Run Hot: Results From An Irreducibly Simple Climate Model (update: link fixed). A peer-reviewed paper, and therefore above criticism. Yes? Never mind.

We said, in essence, yes, man will cause a slight warming, but it won’t be very large, and we’ll be fine.

What wonderful news! The world was not going to end in heat death. All would be well! We don’t need to panic!

What a relief.

Yes?

No.

What they call a “firestorm” erupted. My old site was hacked, Christopher was called every bad name there was. Willie and David suffered greatly. There were Congressional investigations, FOIA requests, hersteria, histeria, apoplexy, sputtering, protests, and other forms of lunacy.

It was discovered that we took no money, not a cent, not any form of compensation or consideration, to write the paper. This really rankled.

Of course, it wasn’t a surprise to us that we would be met by hostility. But because it was hostility, and not sane criticism, was all the proof we needed to understand the whole thing is not science, but something else.

Yes, our model could be wrong. Many models are wrong. I make many mistakes. But the possibility of our being in error is nothing to be angry about.

Right?

Besides, I ask you, whose model in the years since has matched Reality better?

What caused certain people to be furious was that if we were right, there was no need for them. No need for their “solutions”, or activism, or bureaucracy, or laws, or regulations, or for money or prestige or “oxygen” to be given them. That you are not needed is not a happy message. So I understand.

Along the way, I investigated many methods used to prove (P < 0.05) the sky is falling. The stuff done in the name of time series analysis, for instance, is black comedy. But there is also the deeply suspicious methods of temperature “homogenization”, falsifiability (ignore it!), the epidemiologist fallacy, how smoothing increases correlation and induces the false belief in causation, the extreme dangers of “trend analysis”, and many, many more.

You can search for those on the Classic Posts page. The search, unfortunately, is crude. One of these days, he said with something resembling a resigned sigh in his voice, I’ll clean this up.

Or maybe I won’t have to. Since all bad things come around, we’ll surely be doing all these topics again soon.

Anyway, once it became known I was a “climate denier”, I suddenly had fewer friends. I had a job lined up at Livermore lab in California, to run the stats group. When I got out there, I was met with “Briggs? Briggs who?” Seems I angered one of the true believers.

Pat Michaels, may he rest in peace, lined up a job for me at Cato. But I was fired, once again right before starting. Turns out I angered another true believer there. One of the VPs was not happy with my stance against “gay marriage”.

I had another job lined up with a prestigious consulting firm. A VP there said “I’m not going to work with a climate denier.”

Then, after connections got me back in academia part time, I was fired from Cornell. And then—

But you have the idea.

Long boring story later, and we discover that the same foundational problems in “climate change”, and the burning need to protect these problems from scrutiny, are found in every branch of science, to various extent. I don’t mean just woke and DIE, which are the most potent corrosives known to man. Woke and DIE will kill anything they touch, not just science.

The problem is deeper than woke. It’s also the Expertocracy, pervasive scientism and scidolatry, the mad expansion-team effect, peer review, the vast monies pumped into the system, and similar faults.

But the deepest problems are philosophical, and go to the misunderstandings of what science is, and what science is not, which science can do, and what it can’t. If we can’t fix these, we can’t fix anything.

Turns out there are still people who care about this—about which more shortly.

Buy my new book and learn to argue against the regime: Everything You Believe Is Wrong.

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You’re sick. Not doing at all well. You go to a celebrated doctor (God bless you for trusting him) at a major hospital. Guy was recommended by many as knowing most about your symptoms.

He diagnoses you. Bad news. What you have is going to kill you. Very probably.

But before you can think about modifying your will to give your dishes to your neighbor instead of your sister—why did she marry that man?—the doctor says there is hope.

There’s this new treatment, he says. Involves major surgery and a course of harsh medication. Hasn’t really been tried yet, except in a handful of experimental cases. And it didn’t work in all those cases. There’s no guarantee of success.

You want to try it?

You tell the doc, yes, you might like to try it. But first you’re going to get a second opinion. After all, your life is on the line.

That’s when something happens.

Your doctor begins to shout at you. Do you know who I am, he yells? Now you’re really worried, because it seems your doctor has amnesia.

But no. Because now he tells you that he has forbidden you to ask for a second opinion. He cannot be questioned, he says. He asks: which of us has the medical degree, you or me? How dare you doubt him. He knows best.

He says he won’t allow you to leave the hospital without the treatment. Of, if you do go without it, he’s going to have your company fire you, take away your insurance, and kick you onto the street.

There are many questions that arise from this scenario, but here’s the main one which interests me: given what happened, and your doctor’s arrogant apoplexy, what is the probability of success of this new treatment?

Now please watch this.

DeSantis ???

"We rejected the elites… They were wrong about lockdowns, they were wrong about epidemiological models, they were wrong about forced masking, they were wrong about natural immunity, and they were wrong about the efficacy of mRNA Vaccines." pic.twitter.com/2rFt4bbPcd

— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) September 12, 2022

The elites, which I call Experts, indeed blew it. They called it wrong about lockdowns. They pooched it with masks. They erred about closing schools. The models which led policy were hilariously wrong. They weren’t even close with social distancing, and the miraculous six feet savior protection zone.

They oversold, in no small degree, the vax. They said if you got it, you could not become infected, or get sick. They said that. Often. What a blunder! They said the vex could not cause harm, kicking a century’s worth of science under the bus. Vaxes by design cause harm.

Then they said, in many places, either get the vax or lose your liberty to work. Or to buy and sell.

Were all these monumental idiocies sins?

A sin, as at least Yours Truly knows well enough, is when you knowingly embrace a wrong. You choose evil over good.

Uncertainty is not a sin.

If you can’t tell whether or not it’s going to rain, but gamble because of the now-sunny skies that it won’t, and yet you get wet, this is not a sin. This is an honest mistake. But if you think it will rain, but lie to your “friend” and say it won’t. That’s a sin.

When the doom was released upon the world, rulers and Experts embraced panic in various degree. Take Andrew Ferguson’s preposterously ridiculous model.

It should never have been believed, but it was. It was believed because of haste and because of limited knowledge of rulers. Those rulers picked the wrong Experts to advise them. This was often incompetence. Incompetence is not a sin.

The came the evidence the model was wrong. It wasn’t long in coming, either. It was not incompetence that causes rulers and Experts to ignore the error. It was something else.

And not just about these models. But about lockdowns—which competent rulers and Experts would never have advocated, as even the WHO, at first, said don’t do them (in a large report coincidentally published in 2019). When it became clear lockdowns were only causing harm, rulers asked neighbor to rat out neighbors who violated the rules (which German is now doing for those having high thermostats).

You know the whole sad story. It was just like the scenario above. Take your medicine or else. It was forbidden to question Experts and rulers. People who did were canceled. Then came the lies, repeated endlessly, from those in power. Long past a time where incompetence could explain their actions.

It was the lies and the quashing of resistance that were the real sins. It was them outlawing knowledge of Reality.

And now those who question “covid measures” have been determined to be a terrorist threat. By the Department of Homeland Security.

That Department, you must recall, was created in the last panic. Created in opposition to all sober opposition, opposition which predicted, long time readers will recall, that you, dear reader, would eventually become the enemy.

It’s scarcely worth saying we told you so.

Buy my new book and learn to argue against the regime: Everything You Believe Is Wrong.

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IT BEGINS: Cockatoos are pillaging trashcans in Australia, and humans can’t seem to stop them.

YOU DON’T SAY: United Kingdom Data Show the U.S. Public Is Badly Served by the FDA.

In the United Kingdom, people who smoke have the choice of thousands of different vaping products, flavor choices and nicotine strengths, which are greatly succeeding in tempting many away from combustible tobacco and onto consuming nicotine in a far safer manner, as the latest ASH data show.

This is because manufacturers in Britain need only notify the regulatory body which vaping products they intend to market, ensure they are free of certain harmful ingredients, and ensure they are sold only to adult smokers to help them quit.

By contrast, the FDA is preventing the United States from enjoying a “vaping revolution” similar to that of the U.K. by only authorizing a handful of vaping products made by three companies, all of them only in tobacco flavor. This is in complete disregard to governments worldwide that recognize that vaping is at least 95 percent less harmful than smoking and that there have been no reported deaths from nicotine vaping use anywhere in the world since their introduction 20 years ago.

So why is the FDA taking such an over-precautionary approach to vaping, peddling dangerous misinformation at every opportunity? This has resulted in the United States essentially forgoing the huge public health benefits enjoyed by the British population thanks to its establishment’s embrace of harm reduction when it comes to nicotine use.

Nicotine is enjoyable and mostly harmless when you don’t inhale smoke with every drag. But scolds don’t like people enjoying themselves, and the FDA is full of scolds who would apparently rather see people suffer from cigarettes than enjoy vaping.

Previously: Democrats Want to Ban Vaping Because They Want People to Die.

COLD WAR II: China’s economy is slowing, its population aging. That could make it dangerous.

Two foreign policy scholars, Hal Brands of Johns Hopkins and Michael Beckley of Tufts, have offered a frightening thesis: China’s leaders know their power is about to diminish, and that will make them more likely to take risks in the short run — to invade Taiwan, for example.

China “is losing confidence that time is on its side,” they write in a recent book, “Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict With China.”

“China will have strong incentives to use force against its neighbors … even at risk of war with the United States,” they warn. The “moment of maximum danger,” they suggest, is this decade: the 2020s.
A chorus of other China scholars have disagreed.

First, they note, there’s no evidence that Xi or other leaders believe their power is declining; they continue to predict the rise of China and the decline of the West.

Even if China’s economy slows down, it will be growing — still the second-largest in the world.

“Countries can muddle along with a great deal of poor economic performance and still be a major force in international politics,” noted Aaron L. Friedberg of Princeton, author of “Getting China Wrong.”

Besides, Xi and other Chinese leaders have a strategy for solving their economic challenge, he argued. “They see advances in technology as the key to solving all their problems,” he told me. “That’s how they plan to achieve higher productivity and reasonably high economic growth.”

Hopefully, recent developments in Ukraine will convince Xi that jaw, jaw is much better than war, war.

THEY’RE NOT NICE. THEY’RE PUDDINGHEADS:  Nice People Do a Lot of Damage.

The White House quietly loosened Trump-era restrictions on the sharing of U.S. technology with firms blacklisted for their ties to the Chinese Communist Party, including the controversial Huawei, The National Pulse can report. The National Pulse is exclusively funded by our readers. If you value real news, please contribute today. The Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) issued a revision to a Trump-era Export Administration Regulations (EAR) newly authorizing the release of certain technology and software for the alleged purpose of “standards setting and development in standards organizations.” The move, which applies to firms that have been blacklisted

The post Biden Quietly Loosens Tech Export Rules to Chinese Communist Firms Just Days After Huawei Lobbyist’s Brother Joins White House. appeared first on The National Pulse..

GREAT MOMENTS IN DIVERSITY: Private School Diversity Director: ‘BIPOC Students’ Must be Protected from ‘White Gaze.’

The Director of Diversity and Inclusion for a private school in Baltimore expressed support for racial segregation in order to protect students from the “white gaze” and promoted turning children into woke activists.

Kalea Selmon, the Director of Diversity and Inclusion at Maryvale Preparatory School, gave a presentation where she argued that nonwhite students must be given spaces away from white students and described how those who work in education can use students as activists.

The presentation was given at the People of Color Conference, which is hosted by the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) and tells teachers and administration how to embed the tenets of Critical Race Theory into their schools. The NAIS is America’s largest accreditation agency for K-12 private schools.

In a video of part of her presentation, Selmon claims that “BIPOC spaces are sacred.” The term stands for “Black, Indigenous, People of Color.”

Selmon then goes on to say “It’s necessary for BIPOC students to have space away from white gaze and that it is absolutely okay to give black and brown students things you’re not giving white children because the white children are fine.”

So the spaces are separate — and equal as well?

THE HYPOCRISY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES ON THE QUEEN VS. GORBACHEV:

Hey, no bias there!

This week the world learned of the passing of England’s 96 year old Queen Elizabeth II. A couple weeks ago Russia’s 91 year old Mikhail Gorbachev, the last president of the Communist Soviet Union, passed away. And the difference in coverage in the media was, shall we say, interesting.

The New York Times published an essay by one Maya Jasanoff. Jasanoff is described as “a professor of history at Harvard, is the author of three books about the British Empire and its subjects.” The title of her essay:

Mourn the Queen, Not Her Empire

Among other things Professor Jasanoff says this on the Times pages beneath a photo of the Queen with the leaders of the British Commonwealth:

“What you would never know from the pictures — which is partly their point — is the violence that lies behind them. In 1948 the colonial governor of Malaya declared a state of emergency to fight communist guerrillas, and British troops used counterinsurgency tactics the Americans would emulate in Vietnam.”

Fighting communist guerrillas is bad? Hmmm. Also, 1948? Elizabeth didn’t become queen until 1952.

Contrast this with the Times obituary of Gorbachev’s death.

Mikhail S. Gorbachev, Reformist Soviet Leader, Is Dead at 91

Adopting principles of glasnost and perestroika, he weighed the legacy of seven decades of Communist rule and set a new course, presiding over the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the U.S.S.R.

If you really want to see the Times slobber over a much bloodthirstier Communist, read their obit for Stalin: “Stalin Rose From Czarist Oppression to Transform Russia Into Mighty Socialist State.”

REAL ESTATE NEWS: Two Rocky Super-Earths Discovered Around A Nearby Star, And One Could Be Habitable.

Two era-defining articles popped up in today's Wall Street Journal. 

In "the coming global crisis of climate policy," Joseph Sternberg writes 

...Anyone who still thinks climate change is a greater threat than climate policy to financial stability deserves to be exiled to a peat-burning yurt in the wilderness.

...the world’s central banks and other regulators are in the middle of a major push to introduce various forms of climate stress testing into their oversight. ...The fad is for quantifying, with preposterous faux-precision, the costs of reinsuring flood risks, or fire, or the depressed corporate profits of a dystopian hotter future.

Well, if you seek “climate risk” to financial stability, look around you. It has arrived, although in exactly the opposite manner to what our current crop of eco-financiers predicted....

The U.K. may be facing a wave of business bankruptcies exceeding anything witnessed during the post-2008 panic and recession...The culprit is energy prices...Matters are probably worse in Germany,...

Banks and other financial firms inevitably will find themselves right at the edge of the water if or when a tsunami of energy-price bankruptcies washes ashore.

If you've been living in that solar-heated yurt, you may not be aware that central banks and financial regulators (SEC) are moving headlong to de-fund fossil fuel investments via regulation. The fig leaf for this activity is the notion that fossil fuel companies, though funded almost entirely by common equity, pose "risks" to the financial system. (Lots on this in previous blog posts, click the "environment" tag.) 

Getting transition risk wrong. 

Sternberg got a detail wrong and unintentionally pulled a punch. Writing, 

The Federal Reserve, Bank of England and European Central Bank, among others, want to know how global temperature variations a century hence might weigh on Citi’s or Barclays’ or Deutsche Bank’s capital and risk weightings today. 

Actually, no. The "climate financial risk" stress tests aren't quite that transparently dumb, since bank balance sheets don't have risks more than 5 to 10 years out. Instead they start with the theory that extreme weather events will cause financial problems in this shorter horizon. When it's pointed out that even the IPCC says that the probability distribution of weather really isn't changing that fast, and economists point out that floods and hurricanes have never caused a financial system crash, they admit that's really not going to happen. They move on to stress test "transition risk," that governments might pass climate policies so extreme that they cause a financial meltdown. This is exactly what is just about to happen. 

That observation is the really devastating one: They were supposed to stress test "transition risk." But governments did pass transition policies that threaten a really big risk to the financial system. And  those were exactly the same policies that the aforementioned central banks wish to privilege as a result of these "stress tests," namely banning fossil fuels before replacements are available at scale and subsidizing electric cars, windmills and solar panels. But they got the sign exactly wrong. The transition risk to the financial system is not that governments would bankrupt oil companies. Duh, restrict supply, the price goes up, not down. The transition risk is that oil companies are swimming in profits and everyone else is going to go bust.  

Does anyone know what exactly any of this will mean for the financial system? Of course not. No one has seriously bothered to “stress test” catastrophic increases in energy prices.

The unraveling of risk regulation. 

Actually, the point is even deeper and more devastating.  What we are seeing is the fourth grand failure in 15 years of the whole idea that regulators can monitor bank assets and thereby keep the financial system safe. The financial crisis of 2008 erupted despite plenty of bank risk regulation. Rivers of new rules were adopted, including the US Dodd-Frank act and subsidiary regulations, along with stress tests, all aimed at regulators supervising bank assets. No sooner had the barn door been closed after the departing horse, but the European debt crisis broke out. This too was fundamentally a banking crisis: Allowing Greece to fail would have imperiled too many banks, French and German as well as Greek. So much for the asset risk regulators. 12 years of heightened regulation and stress tests later, along came covid-19, threatening another wave of bankruptcies, and another perceived threat to the financial system. No stress tester ever thought about "what if there is a pandemic," despite their repeated eruption through human history. The Fed bailed out treasury markets, money market funds, individual companies, state and local governments, and even issued a Mario-Draghi-worthy "whatever it takes" to prop up the price of corporate bonds. This time nobody even had the decency to worry about containing moral hazard. And that horse having just left the barn, here we are once more facing an even larger financial crisis... that not a single stress tester had the imagination to foresee as even a possibility. 

I don't fault them, they're only human. The point: the whole project of counting on armies of bureaucrats to foresee risks and safeguard bank assets is hopeless.  If it's hopeless for real estate, soveriegn default, pandemic, and war (when our side has visibly invited the Trojan pipeline in), goodness gracious the idea that the same system can foresee "climate risk to the financial system" is ludicrous.  

Fiscal crisis? 

What next? Well, stress testing having failed once again, here comes the bailout and stimulus, which seems to be our governments' only response to anything. 

European governments aren’t blind to the energy-price threat—an awareness that, perversely, creates a threat of its own. The only politically viable solution for this winter will be subsidies on a monumental scale. Hundreds of billions of dollars for households and businesses (and utilities) across the Continent already have been announced, and desperate capitals won’t stop there. This will require substantial borrowing on top of the fisc-wrecking bond issuance during the pandemic.

And also  

...on top of the additional borrowing governments normally do during recessions to finance social-welfare assistance. All of this while interest rates start rising after resting for more than a decade on (or below) the floor.

There is no lack of demand mysterious Keynesian economics afoot here. This is a good old fashioned shoot-self-in-foot supply shock. Borrowed or printed money cannot make a nation better off. 

I have been opining that the next crisis, with trillions in bailout and stimulus might be the one in which investors finally say no more. We shall see. 

Meanwhile, back in the UK; economic fallacies

 U.K. Government to Cap Household Energy Prices for Two Years

The U.K. government said it would cap household energy prices over the next two years, a costly bailout aimed at staving off a deep recession and bringing down inflation, but one that could add to growing worries about the British government’s financial health.

The package, which economists say is likely to be worth more than $120 billion, ... also marks the first big act in office for new U.K. Prime Minister Liz Truss...

Ms. Truss was advertised as a libertarian. I see that lasted about 10 minutes.

Perhaps the most basic principle of sound economics is, "don't transfer income by distorting prices." Don't silence the incentive. If one wishes to cushion the effect of a shock, then send people money to keep their real incomes constant, but don't subsidize the thing in short supply. 

Yet the political system inexorably controls prices. Usually that means rationing,  though the UK may be able to import what people demand at the controlled prices instead. 

Why? There must be a question to which this is an answer. And I suspect this is it: Citizens of a democracy don't really care about the effects of energy prices on overall income distribution. What they really want is to go about their business as before. They don't want a 2,000 pound check and still have to figure out a way to save gas. They want to drive to bloody work just as before. They don't want precisely the pain of substitution that relative prices would signal. And politicians of a democracy give them what they want. 

In this theory, politicians aren't dumb. They're doing what people want them to do. 

"Bringing down inflation" is another economic howler. What a brilliant idea! We can just stop inflation altogether! Just require that every store charge exactly what it did a year ago, and the government will borrow or print money to make up the difference! I hope you can see the problem here. Economic principle #2 for today: Cheaper to the individual, at the point of sale, does not mean cheaper to society as a whole. You can pay at the pump or you can pay the tax man. This fallacy pervades the recent "inflation reduction act" in the US. Subsidies to solar panels, windmills, electric cars, and price caps on prescription drugs do not make them "cheaper" to society. It just changes where you pay. 

"Growing worries" You bet. We create inflation by printing up money and debt and handing it out. Then, to solve the problem we... print up more money and debt and hand it out. You can see where this is heading. Another economic principle: there is always supply and demand.  Politicians blame "supply" for higher prices, but the prices would not be high if people were not demanding all those expensive goods, and willing and able to fork over the money. 

“Extraordinary challenges call for extraordinary measures, ensuring that the United Kingdom is never in this situation again,” Ms. Truss said.

Or ensuring that the United Kingdom is perpetually in this situation, perhaps.  

FDA THUMBS NOSE AT FOIA REQUEST FOR COVID SAFETY DATA: Epoch Times’ Zachary Steiber filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the results of a specialized data mining procedure regarding COVID vaccination safety:

“The Epoch Times asked the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in July for all analyses performed by the agency for the COVID-19 vaccines using a method called Empirical Bayesian data mining, which involves comparing the adverse events recorded after a specific COVID-19 vaccine with those recorded after vaccination with non-COVID-19 vaccines.

“According to operating procedures laid out by the agency and its partner in January 2021 and February 2022, the FDA would perform data mining ‘at least biweekly’ to identify adverse events ‘reported more frequently than expected following vaccination with COVID-19 vaccines.’ The agency would perform the mining on data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).

“In a recent response, the FDA records office told The Epoch Times that it would not provide any of the analyses, even in redacted form. The agency cited an exemption to the Freedom of Information Act that lets the government withhold inter-agency and intra-agency memorandums and letters ‘that would not be available by law to a party other than an agency in litigation with the agency.’

Translation: So sue us.

Administration quickly agreed to shell out for inflated tests.

BEHOLD, MY SHOCKED FACE!  Obama Foundation executives earn lavish salaries as fundraising plummets, and it defaults on agreement with city.

Reporter had covered embattled county public administrator's career in detail.