(a) Radio Free Ukraine shares an intercepted phone call between two Russian colonels, an obscenity-laden rant (you could generate an interesting jam track from all the “bleep”s over the audio) with English subtitles. “We’re f***ed, you motherf***er Putin!” “Sh*tf***er” and “incompetent f***ing layman” Shoigu, additional generals without true military background are “bootlickers”, “sycophantic f***ers”,… “all the rest of them, f***ing c*nts”, etc. etc.
More transcription here (warning: Daily Beast link, NSFW).
The Ukrainian channel actually tried to call the two senior field officers for their comments, but they refused. They sure have no desire to be Novichok-ed or given the Lubianka basement room treatment.
(b) Johnny Depp wins defamation case against Amber Heard. Personally I hold Hollywood in such profound contempt that the Bard’s “a pox on both their houses” comes to mind, but it is good that frivolous defamatory accusations have consequences.
(c) Last Sunday’s Jerusalem Day, Israel was widely expected to get HamAss or P*sslamic Jewhate rockets like last year, when this triggered an 11-day war. Bomb shelter rooms at work were prepared. Not wanting to sound “I told you so” but I was a bit skeptical from the beginning, and in the end nothing was fired. Why? The JPost’s longtime Arab affairs correspondent Khaled Abu Toameh, one of the newspaper’s few trump cards, considers several factors.
the organizations haven’t recovered from the thrashing they received in last year’s war
severe diplomatic pressure was applied, especially by Egypt, possibly by Qatar too
the Gaza economy is in the toilet, and the 12,000 daily commuters into Israel are a source of revenue that cannot be spared
(d) Meanwhile in the city of Tianjin (formerly Tien-Tsin), home of China’s oldest university in the Western sense, insane and arbitrary “Zero-covid” lockdown, er, “static management” policies wreak havoc. The “zero-COVID” policy, early in the pandemic, was spun by propaganda as proof of the superiority of the Chinese system. Now that the hyper-contagious but fairly mild omicron variants have removed whatever rationale for such policies as ever existed, the party leadership does not want to admit defeat, nor say “omicron is different” — but instead doubles down on teh burning stoopid. University students are holding protest demonstration.
ADDENDUM 1: via Michael Ramirez, a Russian diplomatic counselor at the UN in Geneva says in his resignation letter:
BREAKING: Russia’s Counsellor to the United Nations in Geneva has resigned.
Boris Bondarev: “Never have I been so ashamed of my country.”
UN Watch is now calling on all other Russian diplomats at the United Nations—and worldwide—to follow his moral example and resign.
Those who conceived this war want only one thing — to remain in power forever, live in pompous tasteless palaces, sail on yachts comparable in tonnage and cost to the entire Russian Navy, enjoying unlimited power and complete impunity. To achieve that they are willing to sacrifice as many lives as it takes. Thousands of Russians and Ukrainians have already died just for this.
Because there are no possible ways to analyze, categorize, parse, or dissect population data other than by “Share of Trump votes,” there must not be any other possible explanation for anything other than that red counties = bad (high Covid deaths!), blue counties = good (not as high Covid deaths!).
Of course I am being facetious. The entire proposition is just silly. The concept of innate differences in populations is a well established consideration for those who study population health. One might think that our nations most prestigious newspaper might require their top writer to consult with population health experts or even an actuarial scientist in order to obtain a more informed perspective and give the data more rigorous analysis.
Let’s take a look at the highlights of David Leonhardt’s “Red Covid” series.
“What distinguishes the U.S. is a conservative party — the Republican Party — that has grown hostile to science and empirical evidence in recent decades. A conservative media complex, including Fox News, Sinclair Broadcast Group and various online outlets, echoes and amplifies this hostility. Trump took the conspiratorial thinking to a new level, but he did not create it.”
“Democratic politicians have been imploring all Americans to get vaccinated and many Republican politicians have not.”
“The brief version: The gap in Covid’s death toll between red and blue America has grown faster over the past month than at any previous point.
In October, 25 out of every 100,000 residents of heavily Trump counties died from Covid, more than three times higher than the rate in heavily Biden counties (7.8 per 100,000).”
“As the chart makes clear, the toll has been even worse in counties where Trump won by a landslide than in counties that he won narrowly. “This phenomenon is an example of how the country’s political polarization has warped people’s thinking, even when their personal safety is at stake. It is a tragedy — and a preventable one, too.”
Before getting into the specifics about these over-simplifications, I would like to make clear that I believe that Leonhardt’s statements above reflect a genuine belief. He truly believes that political preference is the causal explanation for Covid mortality. Not health status, age, weight, comorbidities. Just one thing: personal political preference.
To be clear, he believes that the underlying explanation for higher Covid-19 mortality in red counties is actually the lower vaccination rates in red counties. So by extension, this is explained by political preference.
What I hope to lay out below is a more complete picture of what is going on when we subdivide the county level data into the categorizations that Leonhardt chose: ‘Share of Trump Vote within county’ (0-30%, 31-45%, 46-55%, 56-70%, and 70%+). Using historical county level mortality data, I will attempt to answer the following questions:
How do Covid mortality trends compare with historical trends when categorizing by political preference?
Does Covid-19 mortality correlate with all cause mortality?
Did 2021 see a major, unprecedented divergence in overall mortality between ‘red’ and ‘blue’ counties?
There could be additional analysis done to see whether or not vaccination rates are correlated with overall mortality (as opposed to just Covid-19) over the long term, However with the definition of “fully vaccinated” or “up to date” being a moving target, I have chosen not to compare deaths by vaccination rate by county for now (many others have already undertaken that task!). To be clear, I believe that for those who are at risk, the vaccines have been shown to reduce the risk of the disease to those individuals. The goal of this analysis is to look deeper into these political subdivisions that the New York Times’ insists is an unquestionable explanation for Covid-19 mortality otherwise known as “Red Covid.”
To start out- let’s take a look at the difference in the counties that we are comparing here. Looking at the “70% + Trump Vote” group- it represents 25 million Americans, and the average population of the counties in that group is 23 thousand. These are primarily rural counties. Compare to the Biden Counties where Trump had less than 30% of the vote that represents a 110 million Americans (primarily in Urban areas), and average population in those counties is 137 thousand.
To caveat the remaining analysis with that population data, we are comparing very very different demographics, and are not controlling for those underlying differences. The correct way to make these comparisons would be to control for those differences- primarily by age adjusting, in order to tease out the effect that different vaccination rates or different policies might have. The NYT articles did not do this, and in one case attempted to dismiss the importance of age differences between these groups. I will simply use the same categories they did, but take a higher-level view of these categorizations to see whether or not the primary proposition by Leonhardt is plausible or not.
How do Covid mortality trends compare with historical trends when categorizing by political preference?
To answer this question, we should look to see whether or not this trend of higher mortality in more conservative areas is a new or unique finding. Is this something new or unique that was caused by the pandemic? A paper in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, written in 2015 (Pre-Trump era), answers this question for us.
“In this analysis of 32 830 participants and a total follow-up time of 498 845 person-years, we find that political party affiliation and political ideology are associated with mortality. However, with the exception of independents (adjusted HR (AHR)=0.93, 95% CI 0.90 to 0.97), political party differences are explained by the participants’ underlying sociodemographic characteristics. With respect to ideology, conservatives (AHR=1.06, 95% CI 1.01 to 1.12) and moderates (AHR=1.06, 95% CI 1.01 to 1.11) are at greater risk for mortality during follow-up than liberals.”
So according to this paper, conservatives mortality rate was observed to be slightly higher than other political groups. To see if this shows up in All-Cause Mortality data, I took county level mortality data from pre-Covid years (2018 & 2019) from CDC Wonder, and grouped them with the same groupings that NYT uses - ‘% Share of Trump Vote’ to see whether or not the higher mortality rate during the pandemic is unprecedented.
It turns out that Trump counties had higher mortality than the other groupings at ~1200 deaths/100k population in both of the preceding years, 2018 & 2019. So the data shows that Red counties having higher mortality rates overall is not a new phenomena at all, and fits with historical trends. Interestingly though, blue counties had only slightly lower mortality than ‘Light Red’ counties, with ‘Purple’ and ‘Light Blue’ counties having the lowest. There are many plausible explanations for this, with the simplest one being that these counties are just simply older populations. Let’s see how the data changes when we age-adjust the mortality rates. (Side note: for an detailed post on the importance and the how/why behind age adjustment see Mary Pat Campbell’s post here:)
You can see that when adjusting for age, the difference in rates between county groupings almost disappear.
Does Covid-19 mortality correlate with all cause mortality?
An underlying assumption in the NYT pieces is that these groupings are representative of some sort of massive difference in overall death and mortality burden. The pieces focus exclusively on deaths from or with Covid-19, and there’s really no mention of the overall impact of mortality. Without question, Covid-19 caused excess death and increased the overall mortality burden in the population.
But the question remains - to what extent was that burden higher or lower in ‘Red’ vs. ‘Blue’ areas of the country? We can answer this question by comparing Covid-19 deaths within these groups with the overall mortality for these same groups. Let’s see what happens when we do that. Since the NYT focused on 2021, the year when vaccines became widely available, we’ll start there.
Take a look at Covid-19 mortality rate on the left, vs All Cause mortality rate on the right.
As you can see, the chart on the left is what the NYT series of articles focuses on - this sizable gap between red and blue. Looking at the chart on the right (Mortality from all causes), you can see that the differences disappear. I wonder if anyone reading these articles would walk away realizing that despite lower Covid-19 mortality rates in blue counties, those same deep blue counties actually had higher overall mortality than purple or light blue counties?
Did 2021 see a major, unprecedented divergence in overall mortality between ‘red’ and ‘blue’ counties?
When you compare mortality rates in 2021 by these groupings with the same in 2019, you would see that they are overall higher, but comparatively, each grouping retains their same ranking as their non-pandemic year. So while it may be true that Covid-19 death rates were lower in dark blue counties, this did not translate to overall death rates in those counties. (I would age-adjust these rates if I had the data available, but currently CDC Wonder does not have 2021 data yet as of this writing).
Another way of looking at this is to look at the Year over Year change of rates within each group. As you can see from the chart below, the percentage change remains pretty consistent among each individual grouping, with 2020 seeing the largest change rate, and 2021 seeing a small but significant change rate from 2020 (meaning overall mortality was still quite elevated relative to 2019).
In summary, when we take a historical view and higher level view while maintaining these same groupings, these stark differences in Covid-19 mortality rates do not seem to translate into overall morality rates. Why?
At the risk of this analysis turning into another pile-on pointing out the New York Time’s errors, I’d like to offer a more benign explanation. It’s one that has plagued journalists and reports throughout the pandemic. Why is it that everything is framed in Red and Blue? One simple reason: the availability of the data. Leonhardt is using data that is easily accessible and is already formatted for easy analysis.
This is what is called an availability bias. It’s essentially creating a hypothesis or completing a study based on a specific set of data, purely for no other reason than that the data is there. Just because the data is available does not mean it’s the best data to use to try to answer a question.
Republicans are People Too
Why does all of this matter? After all, we’ve seem to come to accept that mainstream reporting and cable news have a left wing bias. What’s the big deal?
When it comes to population health, the goal is to promote the health and wellbeing of everyone, and when public health messaging and reporting become unabashedly partisan, employing the tactics of accusation and shame, it very likely will have the opposite of the intended effect of promoting better health.
Conservatives and “Red Counties” need good health advice too. They need to be able to trust the source. Even taking the NYT’s premise of “Red Covid” at face value, who does this message help? Clearly, not the people they are describing.
It was a small trial, just 18 rectal cancer patients, every one of whom took the same drug.
But the results were astonishing. The cancer vanished in every single patient, undetectable by physical exam, endoscopy, PET scans or M.R.I. scans.
Dr. Luis A. Diaz Jr. of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, an author of a paper published Sunday in the New England Journal of Medicine describing the results, which were sponsored by the drug company GlaxoSmithKline, said he knew of no other study in which a treatment completely obliterated a cancer in every patient. . . .
Not expecting a complete response to dostarlimab, Ms. Roth had planned to move to New York for radiation, chemotherapy and, possibly surgery after the trial ended. To preserve her fertility after the expected radiation treatment, she had her ovaries removed and put back under her ribs.
After the trial, Dr. Cercek gave her the news.
“We looked at your scans,” she said. “There is absolutely no cancer.” She did not need any further treatment.
Apparently the women of the University of Pennsylvania's female swimming team had to be psychologically broken by the university in order to keep them from protesting against having a man on their team:
The TN House Health Subcommittee held a hearing on COVID-19 vaccines featuring testimony from Dr. Ryan Cole and Dr. Richard Urso. Users who have shared links to this testimony on Facebook have had their accounts locked.
What did these doctors say that needed to be censored by Facebook “fact checkers”?
It is absolutely scientifically clear that these vaccines do not prevent acquisition of the disease SARS COVID2, does not prevent transmission of the disease, does not prevent illness from the disease and does not prevent death from the disease. In fact, in studies, the all cause mortality rates have been shown now to be higher in numerous studies in those who receive the vaccine and those who have not. It does not prevent transmission.
Those who have gotten the shots can acquire and transmit the shots at equal volumes. University of Wisconsin, University of California, Vietnam. Multiple studies affirmingly this scientifically peer reviewed data.
Dr. Ryan Cole
Short Version
Full Hearing
Links to studies referenced by Dr. Cole can be found at SUPPORTING EVIDENCE.
CONCLUSION
It is chilling to note that this public testimony on the efficacy of vaccines involved in mandates throughout America and the world has been so ruthlessly censored. How many lives have been lost as a result of similar censorship practices since the beginning of the COVID crisis?
Please share this link with your network of friends and families.
Conference season is almost over for me; thanks for your patience. In the meantime, please enjoy this picture of a small mushroom in Saxony, and note also this sequel to the mask replication study I posted about on Sunday:
The CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report were totally happy publishing the original paper on Pediatric COVID-19 Cases in Counties With and Without School Mask Requirements, despite serious defects. Yet they refused to publish the much larger replication study, which failed to find any protective effect from masking when using the same methodology on a much larger dataset. Publication bias is a pervasive problem with all Corona research, and it is the major reason why most mask studies are garbage.
JEFFREY CARTER: No One Is Talking About This. “I have been looking for some good data on food. Frankly, I have seen my grocery bill go up quite a bit and I am trying to figure out if I should stockpile foodstuffs or not.”
Plus: “I used to trade Lean Hogs, so I watched the food supply stuff relatively closely. I have heard that if you want a slot at the slaughterhouse this year, you are out of luck if you don’t have one. It’s hearsay for me as I don’t have good data on anything but my guess is that livestock farmers are going to really cull their herds this year. It’s just too expensive to feed them. Short term, that might drive meat prices down. Long term, they will skyrocket. If you look at futures prices for lean hogs, that’s what they are telling you.”
Paul was addressing The Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act of 2022, blocked by Republicans in the Senate, that demands the FBI and Department of Homeland Security change the way they investigate and monitor domestic terrorism suspects.
The official summary of the bill notes that an “interagency task force” would be established in order to probe into “white supremacist and neo-Nazi infiltration of the uniformed services and federal law enforcement agencies.”
“This bill should be called by a more accurate name: the Democrat plan to brand our police and soldiers as white supremacists and neo-Nazis,” Paul proclaimed.
He continued, “How insulting,” adding “We knew that Democrats despise and want to defund the police, but now, they believe that the police, federal law enforcement, and the U.S. military are full of white supremacists and neo-Nazis?”
Referring to the now mothballed ‘Disinformation Governance Board’, Paul also noted “Those of us who still care about the Bill of Rights just got done taking down the DHS ‘Ministry of Truth,’ and a day later, Democrats want to create the DHS Thought Police. You couldn’t make it up if you tried. But they don’t stop there.”
“The bill creates two other Thought Police offices at the Department of Justice and at the FBI, which seems like a self-defeating choice, since elsewhere in the bill, we are told that federal law enforcement is shot through with white supremacists and neo-Nazis,” Paul urged.
Aren’t you excited? The far-left has been hard at work trying to come up with a new way to demonize conservatives and anyone else who disagrees with their politics. Perhaps terms like “racist,” “homophobic,” and “sexist” have become too hackneyed even for progressives. Now, they just might be ready to introduce a new favorite smear, the way Steve Jobs used to present Apple’s latest iPhone.
So what’s the new word, you ask?
Here’s your answer: Christofascist.
That’s right, folks. If you’re reading this, you’re likely a conservative/libertarian type, so this article is to let you know that to progressives, you are a Christofascist seeking to assert your religious morals on the rest of the nation — whether they like it or not.
That’s a bold strategy for the left in an election year. What could go wrong?
A Denver Public Schools parent has concerns about his child’s safety after a homeless encampment popped up directly across the street from his kid’s school.
Kieran Schweidel records his walk to his kid’s school and said he sees multiple encampments on the way.
He said his concern is the proximity of a handful of tents near Polaris Elementary School.
“I’m not looking to fix the city at large. I don’t think it’s fixable. Just around the school. Please, can we keep that safe? If children aren’t sacred, I don’t know what should be,” Schweidel said.
Meanwhile, Michael Shellenberger’s longshot campaign for California governor produced this compelling video on homelessness:
DAVOS MORPHED INTO A SPECTRE LAIR SO SLOWLY, I HARDLY EVEN NOTICED:
World Economic Forum shill, Yuval Noah Hariri:
"Covid is critical because this is what convinces people to accept to legitimize total biometric surveillance. We need to not just monitor people, we need to monitor what’s happening under their skin”pic.twitter.com/qoPKVGxR7d
Contemptible News Network, a.k.a. Complete Narrative Network, lives up to its name with a new “report” trying to blame/frame Israel for the killing of Al-Jazeera’s Shirin Abu Akleh.
A new @CNN report is now claiming “evidence” that Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was killed in a “targeted attack” by Israeli forces.
It’s a wildly irresponsible report, reminiscent of the al-Durrah libel of 2000 that fueled the deadly 2nd Intifada.
CNN’s claims defy logic and some are overtly false. The report also makes ample use of multiple discredited sources and uses word tricks to misdirect the reader.
Below is a partial breakdown of the deceitful account and the unanswered questions it leaves.
CNN essentially offers 4 arguments to make its case. Each of them is problematic. Credit for some of the below goes to a handful of intrepid internet sleuths, including blogger @elderofziyon.
First, a bit of logic:
1. Per CNN’s own map, the Israeli forces were positioned in between Abu Akleh and the militants. If they were shooting at each other (green arrow for IDF, red arrow for gunmen), then the Palestinians were the only ones shooting in Abu Akleh’s direction.
2. CNN confirms that both the Israelis and the militants were using M16 and M4 rifles.
It then cites an “expert” who claims that the Palestinians, about 300 meters away from Abu Akleh, were out of range.
The M4’s range is 500+ meters. The M16’s range is 800+ meters.
3. The report relies heavily on “eyewitnesses.”
Citing witness testimony from within what @NatanSharansky would call a “fear society” is inherently problematic.
The sources are highly motivated to toe the line and would place themselves at great personal risk if they didn’t.
4. CNN then cites “explosive weapons expert” Chris Cobb-Smith, who is no objective observer.
Cobb-Smith has a history (over a decade) of directing his “expertise” towards incriminating Israel. He’s also tied to some reliably anti-Israel groups, including Forensic Architecture.
Cobb-Smith claims that the grouping of bullet holes at the scene could not have come from random (militant) fire.
But CNN ignores the likelihood that the gunmen were firing — and specifically aiming — in the direction of the IDF, whom Abu Akleh was standing behind.
Also, the spacing of the bullet holes shown by CNN, with one higher up and two lower down, seem unlikely to have come from a sniper, as CNN asserts.
I know of no military that would retain a sniper who was that bad a shot, no less the IDF.
5. CNN’s final piece of “evidence” comes from forensic audio analyst Robert Maher who matches the distance (200m) from which the deadly bullet was fired to the IDF.
Maher seems straight enough, but here’s the catch. Per CNN, there were 2 volleys fired in Abu Akleh’s direction…
Maher only analyses the second volley because, CNN says, “eyewitnesses” say Abu Akleh was hit in the second barrage. But what if the eyewitnesses were wrong, per the above, and she was killed in the first?
Why does CNN not give us the same data from the first volley?
If, as seems a more likely scenario, the militants (from 300m) came up behind the Israelis and fired in their (and Abu Akleh’s) direction, then the Israelis would have returned fire (from 200m) towards them.
Maher may be right on distance, but the IDF was shooting the other way.
In sum, CNN’s report appears carefully constructed to fit a pre-determined conclusion: Israel is guilty.
It will no doubt be used to recruit for terror groups who prey on innocent civilians in Israel and in worldwide Jewish communities.
One can only imagine how credible CNN’s readers would find Huwail’s testimony if they knew he has described the terrorist who murdered four people in a vehicle ramming and knife rampage in Beersheba on March 22 as a “lone lion” who had “sounded the alarm of this criminal Zionist occupation.”
Mediatamites (“media-schandknapen”) will be mediatamites.
The role of regulations in the inflation crisis is largely overlooked but shouldn’t be. When Washington wraps the economy in red tape, businesses must spend massive sums on compliance.
That cash doesn’t materialize from thin air. Every dollar that goes toward hiring lawyers, filling out paperwork and redesigning products and assembly lines gets passed to consumers through higher prices. Mercatus Center research finds that a 15% increase in federal regulation hikes the cost of consumer goods by a full percentage point.
AND:
Lowering inflation requires limiting regulation.AFP via Getty Images
All told, the cost of Biden’s regulations far outpaces that of his predecessors’. In his first 12 months, he saddled the economy with more than $200 billion in higher costs, per the American Action Forum. That’s three times more than Obama imposed and 40 times what Trump did.
So businesses are spending at least 131 million more hours annually complying with Washington’s mandates and dictates. Since time is money, that’s extremely expensive for the consumers who ultimately get stuck with the bill.
The Biden regulatory burden is only going to increase — and probably at an even quicker pace. Congress has been unable to pass most of the president’s legislative agenda, which is heavy on imposing new mandates on the economy, so the White House is increasingly defaulting to federal rulemaking. That translates to more regulation — and higher inflation.
Perhaps the Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Humanized Computing needs to look for a different kind of smarts. The journal – a Springer Nature title – has just retracted 51 papers. The episode is the latest in a string of high-volume retractions by major publishers of papers included in special issues. In at least five … Continue reading Journal about ‘ambient intelligence’ retracts more than 50 papers at once
Parental demand led to American mom-and-pop vendors selling European formula because the manufacturers wouldn’t make the effort. They even provided translated instructions. But the FDA in the past year has cracked down on these sellers. Without notice, thousands of families were left scrambling to find more formula. Parents who tried to purchase directly from Europe had hundreds of dollars of formula seized by U.S. customs agents. One parent reported that she had nearly $700 of formula destroyed at the border—in the middle of a national formula shortage.
The FDA’s actions have exacerbated the problem they were trying to solve. The agency cites concerns about storing and transporting powdered formula to avoid bacterial contamination or product deterioration. But by shutting down trusted vendors who had built a reputation on importing and selling high-quality products, the FDA drove desperate parents to untested sellers, creating the storage and handling concerns that caused the FDA to distrust European products. The difficulty finding preferred baby formula brands also increased the likelihood of inauthentic products and unscrupulous sellers taking advantage of parents in need.
The FDA is a debacle with an awful track record and should be abolished or replaced.
Australian eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman called for a “recalibration” of free speech while speaking on a panel during the opening day of the World Economic Forum, Monday. Inman discussed the prospect of re-envisaging what freedom of speech means, while speaking on a May 23rd panel for the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) annual meeting in Davos focused on “Ushering in a Safer Digital Future.” Inman, who also served as the Director of Public Policy for Twitter in Australia and South East Asia, explained how “we’re going to have to think about a recalibration of a whole range of human rights”: “We
Below is an expanded version of my column in The Hill on the implication of Hillary Clinton in false Alfa Bank claims of Russian collusion. While most media ignored the testimony of Clinton’s former campaign manager in the Sussmann trial, it adds to a damning record on how the Clinton campaign was behind arguably the most successful disinformation campaign in American political history with both the Steele dossier and the Alfa bank claims. Ironically, despite Sussmann efforts to conceal his connections to Clinton in the FBI meeting, it was his counsel who effectively outed Clinton in the scandal. Former Clinton Campaign manager Robby Mook then violated the Eleventh Commandment of Democrats: Thou shalt not name a Clinton in a scandal.
Here is the column:
The trial of former Clinton campaign attorney Michael Sussmann crossed a critical threshold Friday when a key witness uttered the name “Hillary Clinton” in conjunction with a plan to spread the false Alfa Bank Russian collusion claim before the 2016 presidential election.
For Democrats and many in the media, Hillary Clinton has long held a Voldemort-like status as “She who must not be named” in scandals. Yet, there was her former campaign manager, Robby Mook, telling a jury that Clinton personally approved a plan to spread the false claim of covert communications between the Trump organization and the Russian bank. It was one of the most successful disinformation campaigns in American politics, and Mook implicated Clinton as green-lighting the gas-lighting of the electorate.
The mere mention of Clinton’s name sent shockwaves through Washington. In past scandals, the Clintons have always evaded direct responsibility as aides were investigated or convicted, from the Whitewater land dealings to cattle futures. Even when long-sought documents in Whitewater were discovered outside of the family quarters and bearing Hillary Clinton’s fingerprints, Washington quickly moved on.
Clinton was presumed to be untouchable in the Sussmann trial after Judge Christopher Cooper, an Obama appointee, issued a series of orders limiting the scope of the trial and its evidence. The orders were viewed as “spar[ing] the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee … potential embarrassment.”
Ironically, after successfully excluding such areas from the trial, it was the defense that called Mook to the stand — and he proceeded to confirm that Clinton herself approved of the collusion disinformation tactic.
It was Washington’s worst-kept but least-acknowledged secret.
Thus, Mook testified that Clinton did precisely what Brennan warned Obama was being planned.
The date of Brennan’s warning is important: It was three days before the FBI’s collusion investigation began. It also was a couple of months before Sussmann contacted then-FBI general counsel Jim Baker while claiming he was not representing any client. (He was counsel to the Clinton campaign and, according to prosecutors, billed the time to the campaign.)
There is a strikingly familiar pattern in both the Steele dossier — which became the basis for the Russia collusion investigation — and the Alfa Bank tale. Campaign associates developed both claims while actively seeking to conceal their connections from the public and the government, including reportedly denying the funding of the Steele dossier and concealing that funding as legal costs.
The campaign then pushed these unfounded claims to the media and the FBI. Indeed, prosecutors this week contended that Sussmann continued to push the Alfa Bank claims after Trump was elected, in an apparent effort to fuel the Russia collusion claims being breathlessly reported in the media at the time.
When Clinton allegedly approved this disinformation effort, her campaign was aware that the Alfa Bank theory was never viewed as credible by researchers tasked with supporting it. Those researchers warned that it would be easy to “poke several holes” in the claim and that the data could be seen as “a red herring.” Yet, trial witnesses admitted that they hoped the media would make the claims stick.
Despite a record of Clinton associates aggressively pushing these false allegations to the FBI on both the Steele dossier and Alfa Bank, Mook and another witness, Clinton campaign general counsel Marc Elias, insisted they preferred to use the media for such efforts. The campaign found a conduit in one liberal magazine, for example, whose story was then cited as a “bombshell” report, as if the campaign had had nothing to do with it.
For her part, Clinton not only approved using the false Alpha Bank claim but personally helped to portray it as an established fact, tweeting: “Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank.”
That claim was then further amplified by one of her campaign advisers, Jake Sullivan, who now serves as President Biden’s national security adviser. Sullivan declared at the time: “This could be the most direct link yet between Donald Trump and Moscow. Computer scientists have uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank.” Sullivan added that he could “only assume federal authorities will now explore this direct connection between Trump and Russia as part of their existing probe into Russia’s meddling in our elections.”
As the FBI’s Baker and other witnesses told jurors this week, there was in fact “nothing there.”
The sudden and unexpected inclusion of Hillary Clinton in Sussmann’s trial occurred despite the best efforts of Judge Cooper and the defense. Besides limiting the scope of evidence involving Clinton, the judge allowed three Clinton donors to sit as jurors, along with another juror who is a supporter and donor to liberal firebrand Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.).
For special prosecutor John Durham, it must seem like the only juror missing is Chelsea Clinton. When we discuss a “jury of your peers,” however, it is not meant to suggest that a Clinton lawyer should be tried by Clinton supporters.
Months after approving the Alpha Bank disinformation strategy, Clinton called in December 2016 to censor opponents who she accused of spreading falsehoods to try to influence elections. She declared that “it’s now clear that so-called ‘fake news’ can have real-world consequences.” Indeed, Clinton has pushed for state and corporate censorship while demanding a “global reckoning” with those who spread disinformation. Of course, Sussmann could still face the real consequence of conviction given the strength of the evidence against him. Yet, there will likely not be consequences, let alone a “reckoning,” for Hillary Clinton.
WHY ELIZABETH WARREN’S NEW ‘ANTI-INFLATION’ PLAN WOULD FAIL MISERABLY: “So, under Warren’s legislation, we would see more shortages and rationing. This isn’t just economic theory. It’s reality. Peer-reviewed research has shown that during the pandemic, states with similar ‘anti-price-gouging’ laws saw more shortages of COVID-19-related goods such as hand sanitizer than states without them.”
FASTER, PLEASE: New technology makes cancerous tumors eliminate themselves. “Scientists at the University of Zurich have modified a common respiratory virus, called adenovirus, to act like a Trojan horse to deliver genes for cancer therapeutics directly into tumor cells. Unlike chemotherapy or radiotherapy, this approach does no harm to normal healthy cells. Once inside tumor cells, the delivered genes serve as a blueprint for therapeutic antibodies, cytokines and other signaling substances, which are produced by the cancer cells themselves and act to eliminate tumors from the inside out.”
In the three months or so since we last spoke, the world has become an entirely different place – at least for those of us who keep up with any sort of international, financial or stock market news.
The headlines are new, and the problems are of course very real. Russia has started one of the biggest, shittiest wars in a generation – killing untold thousands of people, displacing millions, and halting trillions of dollars of production and trade. This has compounded the “everything shortage” of broken supply chains that we have all been feeling for the past two years, creating even more inflation especially in oil prices. And just to amplify everything even further, China has launched a batshit crazy (and medically impossible) “zero covid” policy, locking down hundreds of millions of its own people who can no longer produce or export the things that the rest of the world’s economy had grown to rely upon.
The resulting shortage of goods and workers has created rising prices (inflation), which has triggered our central bankers to finally rise from their slumber and start jacking up interest rates.
Slamming on the Brakes: Mortgage rates have almost doubled in just nine months.
Which has in turn triggered the more skittish stock investors to run for the exits and completely change their view of our economic future, flooding the financial news with red ink and scary headlines.
The bottom line is that the overall US stock market is down about 20% over the past three months. Which means that if you add up your net worth as I do occasionally, you may find that almost a fifth of it has suddenly gone up in smoke.
Fortunately, this is just an illusion. While the human side of every war is awful and you should help out if you can, the financial side of this panic is very normal and we were overdue for something like this to happen.
A 20% drop in stock prices is called a “bear market” and they traditionally happen every few years, lasting just 9 months or so from top to bottom. But in the Mustachian Era (the years since 2011 when I started writing this blog), there has only been one: the 2020 Covid Crash which only lasted about a month. Heck, even in my 25 year investing lifetime (roughly 1997 to present), there have only been a handful:
Bear market date
Decline (peak to trough)
Duration (months)
March 2000 – Sept 2001 (dotcom bust)
-36%
18
Jan – October 2002 (more dotcom+housing)
-34%
9
Oct 2007-Nov 2008 (great financial crisis)
-52%
14
Jan – Mar 2009 (more GFC)
-28%
2
Feb-March 2020 (covid crash)
-34%
1
April 2022 – ??? (the current blowup)
-20% so far
What’s your guess?
Data source: S&P market data
.
So if you’re under 40, some of this may feel unfamiliar.
Now that we’ve covered the background, we can get into some better news:
This is all a normal, healthy part of the economic cycle. In fact, our central bankers have deliberately created this situation for your own good and they probably should have done it a year ago.
If you are still buying or holding shares (as opposed to actively selling them), this stock market crash is actually making you richer
Even if you are retired and living entirely off of your investments, stock market declines are to be expected and should not derail your life of leisure – as long as you are following a rough approximation of the 4% rule and remain flexible and understand the concept of a Safety Margin.
If you really understand the points above and really feel excited about them, you can drop the fear and stress out of your investing life, which means you will live a life that is both wealthier, and more fun. So let’s cover each point properly, so you can be excited about all this as I am.
1) Why is this healthy again?
First, the part about the Federal Reserve and why a central banking system is so useful (despite the claims of financial anarchists like Bitcoin lovers):
When something bad happens (like the sudden deliberate recession we caused due to our own 2020 Covid shutdowns), the Fed can drop interest rates and “print money” in other ways to boost investment and demand in the economy. And it works – this is why our economy bounced back so quickly from the largest slowdown in history.
Some might say it worked too well – while we have benefited from record low unemployment, we have also seen prices of houses, stocks, and everything else rise with alarming speed. So eventually, they had to turn off the booster.
By raising interest rates, the central bankers put a slight drag on business spending, consumer borrowing and stock market exuberance. This lowers demand for everything, which pours some cold water on inflation. The deflating of the most overpriced stocks shows that the policy is working. And over the next year, higher mortgage rates should also end the crazy bidding war of a housing market we’ve been seeing in most cities.
But stock market crashes and even brief recessions are good for more than just fighting inflation. They’re good for fighting a persistent flaw in human nature itself.
Humans are lazy creatures at heart. When things get too easy, we lose our edge and our motivation to learn, innovate and make changes. It happens at the individual level, as I notice when I waste certain evenings on the couch accomplishing nothing. And it happens even more in the collective sense, if a group of people secures a nice stream of power and profit that remains unchallenged.
Imagine that you’re running a company. Your customers keep buying your stuff no matter what you do, investors bid your stock price up to the moon regardless of your financial performance, and there is no competition on the horizon. What do you think will happen to your monopoly?
There’s no need to speculate on this, because it has happened to varying degrees since the beginning of economic time. The answer is that you start to suck. Your product innovation stagnates, your customers grow less and less happy, and your investors grow nervous. Eventually, something comes along to poke at this bubble of complacency – in this case war and covid and inflation – and then POP! – your sales dry up, your stock price crashes, and your cozy corporate desk has turned into a tattered lawn chair in the parking lot and your business is done.
But wait! While you were adding that final layer of lipstick to your obsolete film camera or manual typewriter or gasoline-powered line of cars and trucks, there actually were competitors out there, inventing better products and offering better customer service and keeping their balance sheets lean, because they had to, because things for them were hard.
Your inefficient company goes out of business, and your more nimble competitors welcome your former customers. They may even suck up the best of your former employees and buy your old factory to start making new, better products.
This happens all the time, and while it can be painful for those who weren’t prepared, it’s a healthy thing for business overall. And a healthy thing for overpriced housing markets, and the speculatively inflated prices of oil, lumber, copper and everything else.
To a certain extent, the high prices were useful in sending a signal that we need to produce more of these things. But beyond that limit, people started buying overpriced stocks, houses, cryptocoins and commodities simply because they hoped to make a quick buck by flipping them to someone else at a higher price. Instead of investing in a productive asset, these speculators were just assuming the recent momentum would continue. This type of gambling is a waste of everyone’s time, and a good price crash is the way we flush the financial toilet.
2) My net worth has just cratered by 20%. How exactly does this mean I am getting richer?
Results of a recent Twitter poll – Mustachians are well ahead of average Americans, of whom only about 18% consider this a buying opportunity (!)
The first thing to ask yourself is, “20% of what?”
Sure, stock prices are down from a recent peak, but that peak itself was just an arbitrary fleeting moment of investor enthusiasm. Was that previous price really the “right” value for stocks, or did you just grow attached to it because of our known human weakness of Loss Aversion?
To put it another way, what if instead of looking at our investments as the financial media likes to portray them, which is like this:
Financial media: “Aaack, scary red line just dropped to ZERO!!!”
What if we decided to be more sensible, start the damned Y axis at zero as every graph should do, and zoom out to a reasonable time horizon,such as the Age of Mustachianism which happened to begin in 2011. And ignore the wiggly blue line and follow the more meaningful red line.
More accurate representation: “Whoa, stocks are a great long-term investment!”
Well, how interesting. Not only has this crash returned us to a roughly straight line of longer term stock market growth, but that line itself is very generous, representing a 12.8% annual compound gain if you factor in a quarterly reinvestment of dividends (which typically add about 2% to your annual returns but aren’t shown in these charts). Over longer periods like 50 years, stock returns have been closer to 10% after dividends, which means we’ve still had more than our share of good times.
In the long return, stock prices are determined by this formula:
Stock price = company earnings x BRM*
*(Bullshit Random Multiplier)
The BRM, more formally known as the Price-to-Earnings ratio or P/E, is supposed to be based on a mathematical estimate of the present value of all future dividends you will receive if you hold a stock for the entire life of the company.
When we expect higher interest rates or inflation over the next 20 years, the P/E should fall because those distant future earnings become worth less in today’s dollars. Meanwhile, if we somehow realize that the long-term future of the business world is even more rosy than we thought, the P/E should rise because investors can accurately predict a larger stream of future earnings.
But the “bullshit” factor comes in due to things like the “He Said She Said” nature of whatever Elon posted on Twitter today, momentum trading algorithms, meme stock traders banding together to drive up random stocks regardless of underlying value, and more. In short, the short term BRM is just a measure of the present moment’s balance of greed and fear.
As an investor, however, you don’t care about the BRM. In fact, you don’t even really care about the share prices of your investments, because the price of an individual share only matters twice in your lifetime:
The moment you buy it,
And the moment you sell it.
Everything else is just silly noise.
Right now, most of us are still earning money and accumulating more shares. Even Mr. Money Mustache, as a person who retired 17 years ago, is still in this boat for the simple reason that my retirement income from dividends and hobby businesses is still greater than my annual living expenses (which still hover around $20,000 per year).
On top of this, if you are holding mostly index funds as you should be, your stocks deliver a nice helping of dividends every three months, which you have set to automatically reinvest into still more shares of those same index funds. In today’s market, you are getting about 25% more shares for each dollar that you invest. Which translates to a full 25% more wealth from those shares in your future.
(It’s fun math – a 20% drop in prices means you get 25% more shares for your dollar, and a 50% drop means twice as many, or100% more shares per dollar invested.)
3) Okay, but I really am retired and trying to live off my investments now. How is this not a disaster for me?
First of all, you’re still getting the dividends that we celebrated in point 2) above. When the stock market crashes, dividend payments usually remain far more stable because the big, established companies in your index funds continue to make money.
It’s quite similar to owning a portfolio of rental houses spread throughout the world: while house prices fluctuate all the time in different cities, the total rent paid by a group of thousands of tenants will tend to remain pretty stable and just rise at the rate of inflation.
So this stream of money will keep coming in and covering a substantial portion of your living expenses (between 30% and 50% for most retirees in today’s market conditions if you retired using the 4% rule).
Even if you don’t adjust your spending or income during this bear market, the end result is that you simply need to sell a tiny percentage of your shares at a discount during the bear market – which means your portfolio shrinks a bit faster.
But the 4% rule already takes this into account: if there were no such thing as bear markets, the safe withdrawal rate would actually be equal to the long-term average of stock market growth, which is closer to 7% after inflation. By sticking to 4% or slightly less, you are giving yourself a high chance of weathering the storm.
cFireSim: Economic History to the Rescue!
What if I “retired” at age 47 on $1 million, hoping to spend $40k (rising with inflation) for the next 50 years? Assuming a small $1k boost from social security in my 60s, I’d have a 95% historical success rate. Only the Great Depression and the 1960s slump would have foiled this plan, and even then just barely.
To really understand what this means I reached out to Lauren Boland, the financial calculations wizard behind the amazing cFireSim retirement simulator. Her long-running site gives you the best shot at answering the question: “If I retire with a fixed chunk of money, what are my chances of success?”
I asked her what it really means when the stock market drops: does a 20% drop really make you 20% less “retired” or is actual outcome more subtle? True to form, she got back to me within just a few minutes with these thoughts:
MMM: How should potential retirees think of the recent crash in valuation – has it really pushed out their retirement date, or not?
Lauren:
It depends on how flexible you are willing to be with your spending. As stocks get more expensive (a higher price-to-earnings ratio), it can be a perfect time to spend more (take those gains), and when they drop in value (like right now), you may want to spend less to preserve your capital.
We have a name for the this idea of stock crashes that come at just the wrong time: the Sequence of Returns Risk. If you retire just BEFORE a big stock market crash, your first few months or years will drain your portfolio a bit more than you expected, until stock prices recover. So, recent retirees are living this right now if they retired without much safety margin.
On the other hand, If you HAVEN’T retired yet, and your numbers still look good even now, I think it may actually be a better time to retire, since you can hope that history repeats itself and there is a recovery. It’d be like retiring at the bottom of 2009 with still-decent numbers.
— (thanks Lauren!) —
Okay, so we’re probably not screwed either way. But still, as a Mustachian this seems like a great excuse to refer to point #1 above: use the chaos and disruption as an excuse to make yourself stronger. Become more efficient with your spending, find enjoyable ways to create value for others that happen to produce money for you as well, and improve your exercise, eating and personal growth programs as well. Because hey, why not?
Epilogue: How does all this Misery end?
Although you now understand that even the current situation is normal and healthy, there is even better news at the core of it: It’s a self-correcting problem, and the solution is already in the works.
A shortage of goods, a sloshing overflow of the money supply and inappropriately low interest rates led to everything getting more expensive. But meanwhile, companies have built more factories and hired more workers to increase production and now the central banks have cranked up interest rates and reversed their other support programs as well.
The result: mortgages cost more so housing sales have slowed. Consumers and businesses are both pissed off by recent price increases and more cautious about the future so they are buying less stuff, which reduces the Everything-Shortage that we mentioned earlier. Suddenly, supply catches up to demand and prices stop rising.
Or to summarize all of this in a much pithier way: the solution to high prices, is high prices.
The world is scary and the stock market has plunged, but the fundamental picture hasn’t changed at all: billions of humans are working hard and applying their ingenuity every day to get ahead. It’s a messy process, but on average we continue to succeed at this task over time. People who understand this unchanging mechanism will look at this year’s sale on productive asset and say, “Cool – sign me up for another helping of future wealth, and thanks for the deal!”
In the comments – what are YOU doing in response to this bear market? Are you scared, or doubling down on investing?
The shooter who targeted Taiwanese congregants at a Southern California church is associated with a group tied to the Chinese Communist Party that calls for China’s takeover of Taiwan, Radio Free Asia reported.
David Chou, a 68-year-old Chinese immigrant who on Sunday killed one congregant and wounded five others at Geneva Presbyterian Church before being subdued by parishioners, in 2019 participated in an event hosted by the Las Vegas Association for China’s Peaceful Unification. The group is controlled by the Communist Party’s United Front Work Department and argues that “peaceful unification” between China and Taiwan “is the only way to avoid war.”
Eric Swalwell and Fang-Fang could not be reached for comment.
Calling parents who disagree with educrats “terrorists” is a bad look. But it’s beyond looks. People should be prosecuted for what was done here. (Bumped).
The ban, outlined in an internal notice by the party’s powerful Central Organization Department, could play a role in Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s efforts to increase his influence at a twice-a-decade leadership shuffle scheduled for later this year.
Issued in March, the directive prohibits spouses and children of ministerial-level officials from holding—directly or indirectly—any real estate abroad or shares in entities registered overseas, the people said.
Senior officials and members of their immediate families would also be barred from setting up accounts with overseas financial institutions unless they have legitimate reasons for doing so—such as study or work—the people said.
It isn’t clear if the rules apply retroactively, but family members of some senior officials have sold shares in overseas companies in order to comply, the people said. It isn’t known if the directive will be made public.
The directive came as Mr. Xi seeks to minimize geopolitical risks for the Communist Party amid concerns that officials with overseas financial exposure could become a liability if the U.S. and other Western powers impose sanctions against Chinese leaders and their relatives, similar to what was done against Moscow following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Hmm.
UPDATE: A friend writes: “That CCP order probably has a lot to do with controlling high-ranking members. Overseas accounts and real estate are not only great investments, but safety valves. Bolt holes. I still think we should hit the PRC with about a $3 trillion sanction for loosing the Wuhan.”
Russia’s Counsellor to the United Nations in Geneva has resigned.
: pic.twitter.com/ZuKqq0gJO8
Jay Bhattacharya @DrJBhattacharya
