U-Haul Growth Index Confirms Blue to Red State Exodus

“With a strong job market and low cost of living, it’s a no-brainer. Texas doesn’t have an income tax, so families get more for their money”

If you want to annoy a blue-state governor, one of the best ways to do it is to point out to him or her that people are leaving blue states in droves, something that has been taking place for well over a decade now and which was confirmed last year by Census numbers and again earlier this month by U-Haul’s annual growth index report.

According to their analysis, the two states that netted the most one-way inbound traffic from U-Haul in 2021 were Texas and Florida:

The Lone Star State earned bragging rights as the leading growth state of 2021, narrowly besting Florida for tops honors, according to transactional data compiled for the annual U-Haul Growth Index.

Tennessee ranks third, South Carolina fourth and Arizona fifth among the top growth states.

Growth states are calculated by the net gain of one-way U-Haul trucks entering a state versus leaving that state in a calendar year. Migration trends data is compiled from well over 2 million one-way U-Haul truck customer transactions that occur annually.

[…]

“We see a lot of growth coming from the East and West Coast,” said Matt Merrill, U-Haul Area District Vice President of the Dallas Fort-Worth Metroplex and West Texas. “A lot of people moving here from California (and) New York. We also see a lot of people coming in from the Chicago markets. I think that’s a lot due to the job growth – a lot of opportunity here. The cost of living here is much lower than those areas. Texas is open for business.”

The Lone Star State earned bragging rights as the leading growth state of 2021, narrowly beating Florida for tops honors, according to transactional data compiled for the annual U-Haul Growth Index. (read more)

US Rep. Kat Cammack Sounds Alarm – Dems Breaking All the Rules to End Free and Fair Elections Forevermore – Hiding HR1 in a NASA Bill – Contact Senators Now – List Attached

US Congresswoman Rep. Kat Cammack sounds the alarm.  The Democrats are breaking all the rules to end elections in America forevermore.

Rep. Cammack did not vote for the Democrats’ scam move to steal elections.  No Republican did.  Officially, this bill was created by the Democrats to concur with Senate amendments and further amend the bill to merge the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and the Freedom to Vote Act into previously passed legislation extending NASA’s authority to lease its facilities. (read more)

Media Beginning to Notice Food Supply Chain “Perfect Storm” as It Arrives

Quite remarkably this ABC report on empty shelves is not far away from outlining the truth.  They are still obfuscating some of the predictable reasons, and they completely ignore the vaccination mandate aspect that is going to worsen the issue, but they are nibbling the edges, nonetheless.

The backward-looking comparative statistics they cite, “15% shortage for food and beverages” overall, are nonsense.  The severity of unavailable products is much higher than that.  You will note from your own store visits the most unavailable products are the manufactured food and heavily processed products.

(video)

The raw material shortage inside the retail manufacturing supply chain path, combined with the increased demand on those manufactured sectors, is the direct cause of the manufactured food shortage. {Go Deep}  [Example: a high demand for citric acid means complex foods that use citrus flavorings (ie. sports drinks) are in short supply.  Chase that backward, and you see shortages in citrus & higher citrus costs, etc.]

Each seemingly small issue creates another small issue, which creates another small issue, which ultimately pokes holes in the supply.  Poke enough holes in enough small categories from manufactured condiments to manufactured drinks, to manufactured cereals, pasta, grains, soups, pet foods, and the complex food processing system overall begins to show the larger problem.  It’s a system collapse by a thousand paper cuts.

Some well intentioned people will claim the shortage of processed and manufactured food is a good thing, and people should eat more fresh foods and be healthier.

Let me be very frank about this.  Without full-service fresh prepared food delivery operating normally (restaurants, hotels, cafeterias, lunchrooms, food trucks, venues etc) there isn’t enough fresh food in the U.S. retail distribution system (grocery chains) to feed 350 million people.

We simply need processed and manufactured foods.

Additionally, many of those manufactured foodstuffs (spices, sauces, etc) are additives to what people call “fresh food” preparation.  If you want salt, pepper, olive oil, butter, tomato paste, pasta, flour, etc., you need processed and manufactured food.

As we go into this phase, the ABC report was correct on where these issues will be less noticeable, less fragile.  The smaller grocery outlets with closer connections to the field.   The closer the grocer is to the farmer, the less fragile they are in this shortage phase.   “Grocers” (traditionally defined) will do better than “supermarkets”.

Also think about it like this.  Does your grocery store have an in-store bakery?  If so, their ability to make bread means they are less susceptible to running out of bread.  If processed industrial bakeries experience issues, your in-store bakery may not.  You will pay much more, but the product will exist.  The key is having knowledge of where the product exists.

On a supermarket basis, the total operational excellence comes into play now.   Top shelf field-to-fork operations like Hannaford, HEB, Publix and Wegmans will fare much better than Kroger, Ahold, Giant Eagle, Albertsons, Shop Rite, Meijer, Safeway, Winn Dixie etc.   You can see how the former group rely more on fresh product supply chain relationships, and the latter group are weighted heavily toward low-price highly manufactured.

What are you seeing around you?

Resource Material:

The Bigger Big Picture

The Supply Chain Warning

Government Intervention

Govt Making Matters Worse

(read more)

taking back education

the national school board association is collapsing. well, there's a little dollop of good news and a path to a better way

if there is one little ray of sunshine in the dystopian scholastic hellscape of the last two years, it is this:

parents all over america got a good, hard look at what is being done to their children in schools.

they saw what was being taught

they saw what kinds of people they had left their children alone with

they saw the true colors of the teachers’ unions

and they saw the school boards and the school board associations for the unaccountable karen conclaves of tyrants, bullies, and lunatics that they are

and more and more, all over america, they rose.

this was the bridge too far. the parents have had it.

this is the vast middle that is generally not actively political, the families focused on work and on raising their children.

and they are not just angry, they are incandescent.

and they are right.

these tinhat despots woke up the momma bears and papa lions.

you do NOT survive that.

nor should you.

it is not easy to turn soccer moms and carpool dads into aggressive social activists.

it is not their nature and they have other stuff to do.

but muzzling their kids, subjecting them to alienation, indoctrination, and depriving them of education and then turning around and seeking to brand these parents as literal domestic terrorists when they complain?

well, that’s gonna do it.

yessirre bob it surely is.

and these chickens are coming home to roost.

and they are not happy poultry.

We’ve seen this coming for a while now, like a slow-motion train wreck. After the National School Board Association (NSBA) sent a letter to the Biden administration comparing parents to domestic terrorists and even suggesting the PATRIOT Act might be used to reign them in. That turned out to be the last straw for a lot of parents and maybe also for the NSBA.

The group apologized for the letter in late October but by that point the damage was done. Within days, five state associations canceled their membership in the national group. By early December the number of associations who’d left had climbed to seventeen. As of today the number who have left is at nineteen and the continued survival of the national association is very much in doubt.

this is helpful at a high level, but it’s the grassroots and the localities where this fight must continue.

there is a simple fact that cries out for redress:

we left our children alone for decades with an increasingly marxist and totalitarian group of evangelical indoctrinators. and they have run amok.

they have proselytized race, gender, and class war to our impressionable young ones and sought to induct them into collectivist cults and grievance cultures.

they have weaned them on self- hate, othering, intersectional division and conflict, and notions of gender, race, and health based original sin that demands contrition.

they instilled systems of imaginary structural oppression instead of encouraging and lauding achievement. self-improvement was shunted aside in favor of self-flagellation or self-pity.

they are not teaching they are preaching and their gospel is grotesque.

history has become hallucination. math is racist. children are dangerous disease vectors.

the teachers, the teachers unions, the curriculums, and the classrooms have become outlandishly toxic. not all of them, not every one, but an awful lot of them. enough that the system itself has become something overtly pernicious.

and it is time to take it back.

do not let this motivation fade. do not let this newfound engagement and organization falter. pick it up, push it further, make it count.

school choice should be the THE issue of the moment. break the monopoly, bring the market.

school boards cannot be reasoned with. teachers unions cannot be made to serve the children instead of themselves. governors that ban teaching critical race theory are great, but that which one can ban, the next can reinstate. that does not go away. you cannot slap a coat of paint on this and make it OK. it’s all rust and no boat. it’s time to walk away and start again.

choice and only choice is the solution.

fund the kids, not the schools. let students and parents select the education they desire. force schools to compete rather than granting them unaccountable monopolies that grow ever more expensive while providing ever less education and ever more indoctrination.

this is WAY past stupid. this is abuse.

you cannot trust the state to teach your children because its goals for them are not your goals for them.

education is not “too important to be left to the free market” it’s too important to be left anywhere near anything as irresponsible, ineffective, and self-serving as government.

it’s time to innovate. it’s time to thrive.

make school choice absolute. every kid gets money, spend it as you like. period. no rules, no accreditation, no “spend on government approved programs,” nothing.

sure, some people will do dumb things and things you don’t like. you may hate some of the schools and ideas they choose. so what?

the price of freedom is other people’s freedom.

what’s the alternative? education boards? approved teaching plans and teacher certification? you’ve just created the new commanding heights to control the system and limit choice, demand ideological inculcation, and prevent innovation.

and it’s not as if the existing system is working…

if you let the state decide what education is, you’re going to get statist education.

you’ve invited the vampire back in and he’ll drain you dry faster than you can say “ow, my neck!”

is this the end? no. this is the start. do we one day want to separate the idea of education and government altogether? sure. but in the real world, that’s not happening tomorrow. this could. and this is the leading edge of one helluva wedge to drive in. this will build the systems, the schools, the curricula that we need and make them responsive to us.

children will become customers, not chattel and the commanding heights of this system will be taken from these oppressive lunatics and be returned to those it is supposed to serve.

education, not indoctrination.

this cannot continue as it has if we are to survive as a civil society. you cannot have schools proselytizing poison.

and so we must change it.

if not now, when?

if not you, who? (read more)

michigan nursing home death counts were under reported

yet another governor caught hiding the results of her disastrous mandates

one of the great scandals in early covid was the policy of forcing nursing homes full of high risk old folks to take in covid patients to “free up hospital capacity.”

this was the epidemiological equivalent of dropping off a shipload of plague rats in the galapagos.

this error was was severe, counter to sense and to guidelines, and in and of itself constituted such horrendous public health malpractice that it should have disqualified those who put such notions into practice from any further participation in covid discussions.

it did not, of course, work out that way.

but to not only engage in this weapons grade stupidity, but to then lie about at and hide the results of what you did? that is an entirely different level of reprehensibility. how anyone can even consider allowing such people to retain office staggers me.

i mean, what would it take to get people to realize they cannot trust her?
(read more)

Bushwhacked by Alex Berenson on Fox News

Professional jealousy is an ugly thing

Alex Berenson goes on Fox News and directly calls me a liar to my face and says I didn’t invent RNA vaccines.

Unprofessional, rude and an arsehole to boot.

But beyond that, I think we can all assume CONTROLLED OPPOSITION.

So, for Alex, who evidently doesn’t know how to do an internet search, find a patent and read it - I will make it easy for him. (read more)

— James Howard Kunstler

Brilliant Agitprop Appears in Washington, DC

Some brilliant, soviet era inspired agitprop showed up in Washington DC overnight highlighting the agenda of the current Joe Biden administration.

No-one knows who the artist is….

The artwork has a certain familiarity.I love great agitprop.  This type of sand is very difficult for the regime to keep sweeping away….

The artist is unidentified for obvious reasons, but it looks like something Oleg would do.

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Vaccine Passports, Food Insecurity and the Law of Unintended Consequences

The axiom of “the law of unintended consequences” has never been more appropriate than right now.  In the background, as you are reading, there is a looming storm that is going to soon surface in the food supply chain, and the regional vaccine passports are going to make things worse.

To understand what is happening, it becomes necessary to give a more specific background on how the things work inside the supply chain that has been disrupted by government intervention.  This is complex, but I hope to make it understandable for the average person.

How do we avoid supply chain chaos?   My response seems counterintuitive to those who do not understand this unique issue.

Effective immediately, or at least as soon as possible, every venue that can provide food on a commercial basis must be removed from all COVID regulations, including vaccine passports.

Restaurants, school lunchrooms, cafeterias, industrial kitchens, hotels, bars, food trucks and every possible venue for the delivery of freshly cooked meals must immediately be reactivated, and all terms and conditions for visiting those venues, like “vaccine passports”, must be cancelled quickly.

If they are not, and worse, if the restrictions expand beyond current status, there is going to be a worsening retail food crisis as the total food supply chain begins to collapse even further.

Beginning around 1990, the retail food industry, the supermarket and grocery business, began a process for automated replenishment.  Walmart’s introduction into the grocery business was the trigger, as the massive internal supply chain created by the Arkansas company was the leading edge in growth and retail sales.   Walmart began selling groceries, cheap groceries, by using their supply chain efficiencies to undercut prices within the retail food industry.  It was a seismic change.

Soon other regional supermarket chains began to modify their ordering, purchasing and buying offices to add inventory efficiencies into their operational systems.  If they did not adapt their inventory management, they would lose competitive price position.

As years passed, technology in the inventory management system became more and more important, as the thin margins inside the retail supermarket system looked to capitalize on automated replenishment.  This is the beginning of “Just in Time” inventory within the retail food distribution network.

Computers began to make forecasts for products and shelves were replenished through a complex system of automated orders.  Years of multi-SKU data was assembled to create forecasts for future orders.

Instead of clerks, managers and supermarket operators ordering products from store level, slowly those same people became responsible for only recording the amount of an existing item currently on the shelf.  The computer algorithm -filled with historic data on consumer purchasing- would forecast the need and place the order.  This system formed the cornerstone of automated replenishment, as computers told the buying offices how much of every item would be needed, and when.

Billions were invested by the industry, as a whole, to develop this complex replenishment system.  Within the process of just in time ordering (JIT), slowly computers replaced humans in the ordering process.  Retail stores no longer housed massive amounts of inventory.  Warehouses that feed the stores no longer housed massive amounts of inventory awaiting the orders from the stores.  Warehouses even changed their terminology to “retail distribution centers“, as they became hubs for distribution and not holding centers for inventory.

Years and years of refinements to this process continued as the computers learned in ever more granular detail how to trigger replenishment orders based on checkout scan data.  Tens-of-millions continued to be invested in the latest tech software and scanning systems that would thin down the supply chain at each step.

In essence, the timeline from field to fork was also being reduced, as the total food supply chain inventory management system refined each year becoming more and more efficient at recognizing purchasing patterns and predicting sales.

The value inventory efficiency to the industry was great.

The cost of excess inventory to support sales was reduced, and the efficiencies of the Walmart purchasing, and supply chain excellence was being duplicated in every retailer.

Without excess inventory, the value of store inventory counted as “days on hand” was also reduced.  This meant more profits for the retail outlets, as the overhead cost of their inventory was lowered.

Companies passed along these supply chain efficiencies in the form of lower prices to the consumer.  This was, in very direct measures, the Walmart influence in the retail food supply industry.   All regional supermarket chains were duplicating the Walmart supply chain excellence, and that allowed them to compete on price.

Eventually, what was once seen as a Walmart competitive advantage, became an industry-wide way of doing business.   The retail food supply chain for grocery outlets was structurally and permanently changed.   Every retail outlet was/is using some form of just-in-time inventory management with automated replenishment based on computer forecasts for purchasing needs.  However, there is a downside…. less inventory in the total system means less capacity to deal with increased demand.

This supply chain system is best understood in reverse:

♦ The data from retail scanned sales is shared backwards into the supply chains, with retail grocery stores sharing their scan data with suppliers.  The suppliers like Kraft foods then know exactly how much anticipated product is needed, by which retailers, where and when.

♦ The suppliers and manufacturers then share that information backwards into the food processing sector.   The processors of raw material food now know what products are needed by the branded suppliers.

♦ The processors then share that information backwards in the supply chain to their raw material providers. Those are the protein conglomerates and farming groups.  This is also where Big Ag makes import/export decisions and controls the prices for their own profitability.

The contracted commercial farmers, cattlemen, fishermen etc., all know -or are instructed- roughly what crops, pork, beef, chickens, poultry, etc. will be needed in the following season to provide to the processors, who provide to the manufacturers, who provide to the suppliers, who provide to the distribution centers, who provide to the retail stores.   This is the complex system known as the retail food supply chain.

As you can see from above, this complex inventory management system originates with historic data from the stores and travels throughout the supply chain providing users at each step to assemble the data that pertains to their role.   This is like thousands of interconnected gears in a finely tuned machine, and this is NOT a system that can be interrupted without consequence.

CTH warned in March 2020 [LINK HERE], when government first suggested that all retail food establishments (restaurants, lunchrooms, hotels, cafeterias, etc.) should shut down due to the pandemic, that closing 60% of fresh food distribution would be catastrophic for the total food supply chain.

“A government cannot just shut down 30 to 50 percent of the way civil society feeds themselves, without planning and advanced preparation for an alternative. Those who ARE the alternative, the retail food grocers, need time to prepare themselves (and their entire logistical system) for the incredible impact.  Without preparation this is a man-made crisis about to get a lot worse.” (LINK)

Those decisions in 2020 triggered a cascading sequence of events that has yet to be fully understood. {Go Deep}

For 30+ years, the highly complex and data driven retail food supply chain, the delivery vehicle for 40+ percent of total food available, has become increasingly refined.  Unfortunately, like a finely tuned watch, those refinements also mean the supply chain is vulnerable to unforeseen changes in the system.

The government upended the total food supply system by shifting 25 to 40% more customers into the retail grocery supply chain for their food.  The supply chain we just explained cannot handle that level of stress.   Operational capacities are reached very quickly throughout the system, and even the packaging of increased demand is an issue.  Suppliers for packaging also have capacity constraints.

Processors cannot process enough.  Manufacturers cannot manufacture enough. Suppliers cannot supply enough. Distribution centers cannot distribute enough, and stores cannot stock enough.

The entire food delivery system is not designed for this and cannot reasonably be expected to adjust on this scale; it is just not feasible.  We are seeing the cascading results of this in our supermarkets right now.  People are starting to worry, and there is good reason to worry.  {Go Deep}

This is where the vaccine mandate and mandatory vaccine passports make things worse.  Even a small amount of excess demand right now is causing exponential problems for a system that is already beyond capacity.   The system stressors, specifically the demand side, need to be reduced.

If just 10% of a population, within a metropolitan region of consumers, are blocked from restaurants or food venues because they are unvaccinated, they are going to put stress on the alternative, the grocery supply chain…. meaning, more empty shelves and cases.   Those empty shelves impact the vaccinated and unvaccinated alike.

Restricting restaurant capacity, shutting food venues, closing school lunchrooms, shutting or restricting cafeterias or hotels, blocking venue access by vaccine restrictions, all of these have damaging unintended consequences to the food delivery system.  We need every possible fresh food delivery system open for everyone…. and that needs to happen quickly.

Additionally, the trucker vaccine mandate -scheduled to go into effect for domestic freight haulers on January 22nd- needs to be cancelled fast.

If these mandates, COVID restrictions, passports and gateways continue as blocks in the system, it is very likely the shortages in the food supply chain will only worsen.

It is only going to take a few visits of worsening empty shelves before “national food security” panic becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

MASSACHUSETTS –  BOSTON — Vaccinated state residents are now able to access a digital record of their COVID-19 vaccine history, including a scannable QR code, that could be stored on their smartphone and presented to businesses requiring immunizations for entry.

Gov. Charlie Baker’s administration is rolling out the “COVID-19 SMART Health Care” just as the city of Boston prepares for a new vaccine requirement to take effect at the end of the week in all restaurants, gyms and entertainment venues.

Boston is one of the few cities in the state to adopt a universal vaccine requirement for certain businesses. (read more)

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Three Days Late, the Supreme Court Strikes Down OSHA’s Vaccine Mandate

On January 10, 2022, businesses across America with more than 100 employees were in compliance with OSHA by demanding their workers get vaccinated or submit to unrelenting testing that is mostly unavailable at the time of this writing. Workers across the country have been fired from their jobs for not submitting.

While waiting for the courts to come up with a definitive decision, HR departments around the country have imposed the mandate.

Three days following the imposition of the edict, the Supreme Court has finally issued its opinion. In a 6-3 decision, the Court has struck down the mandate. The PDF is embedded below. 

While the court struck down the broad mandate, in a separate opinion decided on a 5-4 vote, it has kept a federal regulation pertaining to federally funded health-care facilities. The dissenting opinions in this case had even stronger language. 

Here are some quotes from the main opinion on OSHA:

Permitting OSHA to regulate the hazards of daily life—simply because most Americans have jobs and face those same risks while on the clock—would significantly expand OSHA’s regulatory authority without clear congressional authorization….

It is telling that OSHA, in its half century of existence, has never before adopted a broad public health regulation of this kind—addressing a threat that is untethered, in any causal sense, from the workplace….

We are told by the States and the employers that OSHA’s mandate will force them to incur billions of dollars in unrecoverable compliance costs and will cause hundreds of thousands of employees to leave their jobs….

Although Congress has indisputably given OSHA the power to regulate occupational dangers, it has not given that agency the power to regulate public health more broadly. Requiring the vaccination of 84 million Americans, selected simply because they work for employers with more than 100 employees….

Justice Gorsuch wrote a concurring opinion with tougher language, and Justices Thomas and Alito joined in signing: 

Yet that is precisely what the agency seeks to do now—regulate not just what happens inside the workplace but induce individuals to undertake a medical procedure that affects their lives outside the workplace. Historically, such matters have been regulated at the state level by authorities who enjoy broader and more general governmental powers. Meanwhile, at the federal level, OSHA arguably is not even the agency most associated with public health regulation.… 

On the one hand, OSHA claims the power to issue a nationwide mandate on a major question but cannot trace its authority to do so to any clear congressional mandate. On the other hand, if the statutory subsection the agency cites really did endow OSHA with the power it asserts, that law would likely constitute an unconstitutional delegation of legislative authority. Under OSHA’s reading, the law would afford it almost unlimited discretion…

We do not impugn the intentions behind the agency’s mandate. Instead, we only discharge our duty to enforce the law’s demands when it comes to the question who may govern the lives of 84 million Americans. Respecting those demands may be trying in times of stress. But if this Court were to abide them only in more tranquil conditions, declarations of emergencies would never end and the liberties our Constitution’s separation of powers seeks to preserve would amount to little.

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White House Calls on Businesses to Ignore Supreme Court Decision on Vaccination and Force the Vaccine Mandate Regardless of Constitutional Merit

Not to be deterred by such pesky inconveniences as a Supreme Court decision, immediately after the high court ruled the vaccine mandate was unconstitutional federal overreach – the White House told employers to enforce the vaccine mandate anyway.

White House Spokesperson Jennifer Psaki said the Biden administration would “not be deterred” by the Supreme Court decision, and all employers should immediately continue to “initiate vaccination requirements.”  WATCH

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Meet the Capitol Insurrection Hoax—Just Like Charlottesville, It's Another MSM Lie

Not content with treading on Christmas with Hanukkah etc., the Democrat-Media Complex apparently has now decided to swamp Epiphany, traditionally the end of the Christmas season, with mass public ululations about their January 6 Capitol Insurrection Hoax. Thus Witchfinder in-chief Merrick Garland, in an overwrought speech opening the ritual, actually demanded a “moment of silence” for five (?) police officers who subsequently died [AG Merrick Garland delivers remarks ahead of ‘solemn’ anniversary of the Capitol riot and vows the DOJ has ‘no higher priority’ than holding those involved ‘accountable’, Business Insider, January 5, 2022 ] But Garland must know, and he must know that we know, that not a single one of these deaths was in any way caused by Trump supporters, whereas the deaths of Trump supporters Ashli Babbitt, and arguably Kevin Greeson and Rosanne Boyland, if not more, certainly were caused by police action. The only explanation: Garland incapable of processing his hypocrisy because he is part of a political coalition that is systematically more hysterical than the white American norm. Unfortunately, his coalition is now in control of the U.S. and is attempting a communist coup—while it can.

The 2021 Capitol Insurrection Hoax, like the 2017 Charlottesville Unite The Right Rally and subsequent Charlottesville Narrative Collapse, point to a truth about the media landscape as it has emerged since the post-Trump Tech Oligarch internet crackdown, in alliance with vigilantes like the ADL and the SPLC.

Because of the internet, it is still possible, although now much more difficult because of post-2016 deplatforming, shadow-banning etc., to find Politically Incorrect facts and analyses. This situation is similar to, but not quite as bad as, that in the pre-Reagan Era (I remember!), when patriots were with difficulty able to inform themselves, under the Main Stream Media’s radar, via the direct-mail revolution pioneered by Richard Viguerie and others. But it’s not what the internet originally promised.

Thus the net effect of the internet has been to make it easier for the Regime Media to co-ordinate its Narratives—and to punish deviation among fellow professionals. That’s why you never see any Regime Media reference to Trump’s claims of election fraud without the adjective “baseless” or “unproven” attached as if by a software program, although there’s plenty of reason to doubt what went on in 2020 and earlier media ethics would have required an impartial affect i.e. “alleged election fraud”.

And thus the Regime Media was able to totally invert the truth about Charlottesville, so that a lawful rally in defense of the Robert E. Lee statue, which was deprived of police protection and attacked by communist paramilitaries, became a neo-Nazi riot. An example of punished deviation: Thus Taylor Lorenz, then of The Hill and now of New York Times obediently deleted tweets (viewable here), saying James Fields’s car was being swarmed by Antifa and Fields may have acted in self-defense, after pressure from the Left.

And even more dramatically, the January 6 Mostly Peaceful Protest, which was obviously a Kavanaugh-type incursion into the Capitol, then unattacked by police, has been inverted into an “insurrection”—even though none of the participants were armed, in significant contrast to Charlottesville, where many patriots were legally carrying—but, still, no-one was shot.

In the year since the January 6 Mostly Peaceful Protest, and proving that internet-enabled Alternative Media still lives, wonderful work has been done, particularly by Revolver.News in exposing the role of government agent provocateurs, and by American Greatness’s Julie Kelly, in exposing police brutality and, especially, the appalling conditions in which patriots are held in the Garland Archipelago. Her book January 6: How Democrats Used the Capitol Protest to Launch a War on Terror Against the Political Right is just out.

I am proud, however, of Noah Arnold and my analysis of the role of the Lying Press, which I think has stood up very well. (read more)

After Kazakhstan, the Color Revolution Era Is Over

The year 2022 started with Kazakhstan on fire, a serious attack against one of the key hubs of Eurasian integration. We are only beginning to understand what and how it happened.

On Monday morning, leaders of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) held an extraordinary session to discuss Kazakhstan.

Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev framed it succinctly. Riots were “hidden behind unplanned protests.” The goal was “to seize power” – a coup attempt. Actions were “coordinated from a single center.” And “foreign militants were involved in the riots.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin went further: during the riots, “Maidan technologies were used,” a reference to the Ukranian square where 2013 protests unseated a NATO-unfriendly government.

Defending the prompt intervention of CSTO peacekeeping forces in Kazakhstan, Putin said, “it was necessary to react without delay.” The CSTO will be on the ground “as long as necessary,” but after the mission is accomplished, “of course, the entire contingent will be withdrawn from the country.” Forces are expected to exit later this week.

But here’s the clincher: “CSTO countries have shown that they will not allow chaos and ‘color revolutions’ to be implemented inside their borders.”

Putin was in synch with Kazakh State Secretary Erlan Karin, who was the first, on the record, to apply the correct terminology to events in his country: What happened was a “hybrid terrorist attack,” by both internal and external forces, aimed at overthrowing the government.

The tangled hybrid web

Virtually no one knows about it. But last December, another coup was discreetly thwarted in the Kyrgyz capital, Bishkek. Kyrgyz intel sources attribute the engineering to a rash of NGOs linked with Britain and Turkey. That introduces an absolutely key facet of The Big Picture: NATO-linked intel and their assets may have been preparing a simultaneous color revolution offensive across Central Asia.

On my Central Asia travels in late 2019, pre-Covid, it was plain to see how western NGOs – Hybrid War fronts – remained extremely powerful in both Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. Yet, they are just one nexus in a western nebulae of Hybrid War fog deployed across Central Asia, and West Asia for that matter. Here we see the CIA and the US Deep State crisscrossing MI6 and different strands of Turkish intel.

When President Tokayev was referring, in code, to a “single center,” he meant a so far ‘secret’ US-Turk-Israeli military-intel operations room based in the southern business hub of Almaty, according to a highly placed Central Asia intel source. In this “center,” there were 22 Americans, 16 Turks and 6 Israelis coordinating sabotage gangs – trained in West Asia by the Turks – and then rat-lined to Almaty.

The op started to unravel for good when Kazakh forces – with the help of Russian/CSTO intel – retook control of the vandalized Almaty airport, which was supposed to be turned into a hub for receiving foreign military supplies.

The Hybrid War west had to be stunned and livid at how the CSTO intercepted the Kazakh operation at such lightning speed. The key element is that the secretary of Russian National Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev, saw the Big Picture eons ago.

So, it’s no mystery why Russia’s aerospace and aero-transported forces, plus the massive necessary support infrastructure, were virtually ready to go.

Back in November, Patrushev’s laser was already focused on the degrading security situation in Afghanistan. Tajik political scientist Parviz Mullojanov was among the very few who were stressing that there were as many as 8,000 imperial machine Salafi-jihadi assets, shipped by a rat line from Syria and Iraq, loitering in the wilds of northern Afghanistan.

That’s the bulk of ISIS-Khorasan – or ISIS reconstituted near the borders of Turkmenistan. Some of them were duly transported to Kyrgyzstan. From there, it was very easy to cross the border from Bishek and show up in Almaty.

It took no time for Patrushev and his team to figure out, after the imperial retreat from Kabul, how this jihadi reserve army would be used: along the 7,500 km-long border between Russia and the Central Asian ‘stans’.

That explains, among other things, a record number of preparation drills conducted in late 2021 at the 210th Russian military base in Tajikistan.

James Bond speaks Turkish

The breakdown of the messy Kazakh op necessarily starts with the usual suspects: the US Deep State, which all but “sang” its strategy in a 2019 RAND corporation report, Extending Russia. Chapter 4, on “geopolitical measures”, details everything from “providing lethal aid to Ukraine”, “promoting regime change in Belarus”, and “increasing support for Syrian rebels” – all major fails – to “reducing Russian influence in Central Asia.”

That was the master concept. Implementation fell to the MI6-Turk connection.

The CIA and MI6 had been investing in dodgy outfits in Central Asia since at least 2005, when they encouraged the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), then close to the Taliban, to wreak havoc in southern Kyrgyzstan. Nothing happened.

It was a completely different story by May 2021, when the MI6’s Jonathan Powell met the leadership of Jabhat al-Nusra – which harbors a lot of Central Asian jihadis – somewhere in the Turkish-Syrian border near Idlib. The deal was that these ‘moderate rebels’ – in US terminology – would cease to be branded ‘terrorists’ as long as they followed the anti-Russia NATO agenda.

That was one of the key prep moves ahead of the jihadist ratline to Afghanistan – complete with Central Asia branching out.

The genesis of the offensive should be found in June 2020, when former ambassador to Turkey from 2014 to 2018, Richard Moore, was appointed head of MI6. Moore may not have an inch of Kim Philby’s competence, but he does fit the profile: rabid Russophobe, and a cheerleader of the Great Turania fantasy, which promotes a pan-Turk confederation of Turkic-speaking peoples from West Asia and the Caucasus to Central Asia and even Russian republics in the Volga.

MI6 is deeply entrenched in all the ‘stans’ except autarchic Turkmenistan – cleverly riding the pan-Turkist offensive as the ideal vehicle to counter Russia and China.

Erdogan himself has been invested on a hardcore Great Turania offensive, especially after the creation of the Turkic Council in 2009. Crucially, next March, the summit of the Confederation Council of Turkic-speaking States – the new Turkic Council denomination – will take place in Kazakhstan. The city of Turkestan, in southern Kazakhstan, is expected to be named as the spiritual capital of the Turkic world.

And here, the ‘Turkic world’ enters into a frontal clash with the integrating Russian concept of Greater Eurasia Partnership, and even with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) that, crucially, does not count Turkey as a member.

Erdogan’s short term ambition seems at first to be only commercial: after Azerbaijan won the Karabakh war, he expects to use Baku to get access to Central Asia via the Caspian Sea, complete with Turkey’s industrial-military complex sales of military technology to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

Turkish companies are already investing heavily in real estate and infrastructure. And in parallel, Ankara’s soft power is on overdrive, finally collecting the fruits of exercising a lot of pressure, for instance, to speed up the transition in Kazakhstan from Cyrillic script to the Latin alphabet, starting in 2023.

Yet both Russia and China are very much aware that Turkey essentially represents NATO entering Central Asia. The organization of Turkic states are cryptically called the Kazakh operation ‘fuel protests’.

It’s all very murky. Erdogan’s neo-Ottomanism – which comes with massive cheerleading by his Muslim Brotherhood base – essentially has nothing to do with the pan-Turanic drive, which is a racialist movement predicating domination by relatively ‘pure’ Turks.

The problem is that they are converging while becoming more extreme, with Turkey’s right-wing Grey Wolves deeply implicated. That explains why Ankara intel is a sponsor and, in many cases, a weaponizer of both the ISIS-Khorasan franchise and those Turan racists, from Bosnia to Xinjiang via Central Asia.

The Empire handsomely profits from this toxic association, in Armenia, for instance. And the same would happen in Kazakhstan if the operation is successful.

Bring on the Trojan Horses

Every color revolution needs a ‘Maximum’ Trojan Horse. In our case, that seems to be the role of former head of KNB (National Security Committee) Karim Massimov, now held in prison and charged with treason.

Hugely ambitious, Massimov is half-Uyghur and that, in theory, obstructed what he saw as his pre-ordained rise to power. His connections with Turkish intel are not yet fully detailed, unlike his cozy relationship with Joe Biden and son.

A former Minister of Internal Affairs and State Security, Lt Gen Felix Kulov, has weaved a fascinating tangled web explaining the possible internal dynamics of the ‘coup’ built into the color revolution.

According to Kulov, Massimov and Samir Abish, the nephew of recently ousted Kazakh Security Council Chairman Nursultan Nazarbayev, were up to their necks in supervising ‘secret’ units of ‘bearded men’ during the riots. The KNB was directly subordinated to Nazarbayev, who until last week was the chairman of the Security Council.

When Tokayev understood the mechanics of the coup, he demoted both Massimov and Samat Abish. Then Nazarbayev ‘voluntarily’resigned from his life-long chairmanship of the Security Council. Abish then got this post, promising to stop the ‘bearded men,’and then to resign.

So that would point directly to a Nazarbayev-Tokayev clash. It makes sense as during his 29-year rule, Nazarbayev played a multi-vector game that was too westernized and which did not necessarily benefit Kazakhstan. He adopted British laws, played the pan-Turkic card with Erdogan, and allowed a tsunami of NGOs to promote an Atlanticist agenda.

Tokayev is a very smart operator. Trained by the foreign service of the former USSR, fluent in Russian and Chinese, he is totally aligned with Russia-China – which means fully in sync with the masterplan of BRI, the Eurasia Economic Union and the SCO.

Tokayev, much like Putin and Xi, understands how this BRI/EAEU/SCO triad represents the ultimate imperial nightmare, and how destabilizing Kazakhstan – a key actor in the triad – would be a mortal coup against Eurasian integration.

Kazakhstan, after all, represents 60 percent of Central Asia’s GDP, massive oil/gas and mineral resources, cutting-edge high tech industries: a secular, unitary, constitutional republic bearing a rich cultural heritage.

It didn’t take long for Tokayev to understand the merits of immediately calling the CSTO to the rescue: Kazakhstan signed the treaty way back in 1994. After all, Tokayev was fighting a foreign-led coup against his government.

Putin, among others, has stressed how an official Kazakh investigation is the only one entitled to get to the heart of the matter. It’s still unclear exactly who – and to what extent – sponsored the rioting mobs. Motives abound: to sabotage a pro-Russia/China government, to provoke Russia, to sabotage BRI, to plunder mineral resources, to turbo-charge a House of Saud-style ‘Islamization’.

Rushed to only a few days before the start of the Russia-US ‘security guarantees’ in Geneva, this color revolution represented a sort of counter-ultimatum – in desperation – by the NATO establishment.

Central Asia, West Asia, and the overwhelming majority of the Global South have witnessed the lightning fast Eurasian response by the CSTO troops – who, having now done their job, are set to leave Kazakhstan in a couple of days – and how this color revolution has failed, miserably.

It might as well be the last. Beware the rage of a humiliated Empire. (read more)

Supreme Court Stays OSHA Large Employer Vax Mandate, Upholds CMS Healthworker Mandate

Split verdict. 6-3 against OSHA mandate, with liberals dissenting. 5-4 in favor of CMS mandate, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Barrett, dissenting.

Just breaking. Split verdict. 6-3 against OSHA mandate, with liberals dissenting. 5-4 in favor of CMS mandate, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Barrett, dissenting. (In other words, Roberts and Kavanaugh voted with the liberal bloc on CMS.)

OSHA

The Supreme Court has  stayed the OSHA large employer mandate (6-3, Breyer/Sotomayor/Kagan dissenting):

PER CURIAM.

The Secretary of Labor, acting through the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, recently enacted a vaccine mandate for much of the Nation’s work force. The mandate, which employers must enforce, applies to roughly 84 million workers, covering virtually all employers with at least 100 employees. It requires that covered workers receive a COVID–19 vaccine, and it pre-empts contrary state laws. The only exception is for workers who obtain a medical test each week at their own expense and on their own time, and also wear a mask each workday. OSHA has never before imposed such a mandate. Nor has Congress. Indeed, although Congress has enacted significant legislation addressing the COVID–19 pandemic, it has declined to enact any measure similar to what OSHA has promulgated here.

Many States, businesses, and nonprofit organizations challenged OSHA’s rule in Courts of Appeals across the country. The Fifth Circuit initially entered a stay. But when the cases were consolidated before the Sixth Circuit, that court lifted the stay and allowed OSHA’s rule to take effect. Applicants now seek emergency relief from this Court, arguing that OSHA’s mandate exceeds its statutory authority and is otherwise unlawful. Agreeing that applicants are likely to prevail, we grant their applications and stay the rule.

The heart of the ruling was that Brandon OSHA did not have the authority:

Applicants are likely to succeed on the merits of their claim that the Secretary lacked authority to impose the mandate. Administrative agencies are creatures of statute. They accordingly possess only the authority that Congress has provided. The Secretary has ordered 84 million Americans to either obtain a COVID–19 vaccine or undergo weekly medical testing at their own expense. This is no “everyday exercise of federal power.” In re MCP No. 165, 20 F. 4th, at 272 (Sutton, C. J., dissenting). It is instead a significant encroachment into the lives—and health—of a vast number of employees. “We expect Congress to speak clearly when authorizing an agency to exercise powers of vast economic and political significance.” Alabama Assn. of Realtors v. Department of Health and Human Servs., 594 U. S. ___, ___ (2021) (per curiam) (slip op., at 6) (internal quotation marks omitted). There can be little doubt that OSHA’s mandate qualifies as an exercise of such authority.

The question, then, is whether the Act plainly authorizes the Secretary’s mandate. It does not. The Act empowers the Secretary to set workplace safety standards, not broad public health measures. See 29 U. S. C. §655(b) (directing the Secretary to set “occupational safety and health standards” (emphasis added)); §655(c)(1) (authorizing the Secretary to impose emergency temporary standards necessary to protect “employees” from grave danger in the workplace). Confirming the point, the Act’s provisions typically speak to hazards that employees face at work. See, e.g., §§651, 653, 657. And no provision of the Act addresses public health more generally, which falls outside of OSHA’s sphere of expertise.

The dissent was, as predicted, PEOPLE ARE GONNA DIE!:

Every day, COVID–19 poses grave dangers to the citizens of this country—and particularly, to its workers. The disease has by now killed almost 1 million Americans and hospitalized almost 4 million. It spreads by person-to-person contact in confined indoor spaces, so causes harm in nearly all workplace environments. And in those environments, more than any others, individuals have little control, and therefore little capacity to mitigate risk. COVID–19, in short, is a menace in work settings. The proof is all around us: Since the disease’s onset, most Americans have seen their workplaces transformed.

So the administrative agency charged with ensuring health and safety in workplaces did what Congress commanded it to: It took action to address COVID–19’s continuing threat in those spaces. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) issued an emergency temporary standard (Standard), requiring either vaccination or masking and testing, to protect American workers. The Standard falls within the core of the agency’s mission: to “protect employees” from “grave danger” that comes from “new hazards” or exposure to harmful agents. 29 U. S. C. §655(c)(1). OSHA estimates—and there is no ground for disputing—that the Standard will save over 6,500 lives and prevent over 250,000 hospitalizations in six months’ time. 86 Fed. Reg. 61408 (2021).

Yet today the Court issues a stay that prevents the Standard from taking effect. In our view, the Court’s order seriously misapplies the applicable legal standards. And in so doing, it stymies the Federal Government’s ability to counter the unparalleled threat that COVID–19 poses to our Nation’s workers. Acting outside of its competence and without legal basis, the Court displaces the judgments of the Government officials given the responsibility to respond to workplace health emergencies. We respectfully dissent….

Underlying everything else in this dispute is a single, simple question: Who decides how much protection, and of what kind, American workers need from COVID–19? An agency with expertise in workplace health and safety, acting as Congress and the President authorized? Or a court, lacking any knowledge of how to safeguard workplaces, and insulated from responsibility for any damage it causes?

CMS

On the CMS healthcare worker mandate, the Court upheld the mandate (Thomas/Alito/Gorsuch/Barrett dissenting), staying lower court rulings against the mandate:

PER CURIAM.

The Secretary of Health and Human Services administers the Medicare and Medicaid programs, which provide health insurance for millions of elderly, disabled, and lowincome Americans. In November 2021, the Secretary announced that, in order to receive Medicare and Medicaid funding, participating facilities must ensure that their staff—unless exempt for medical or religious reasons—are vaccinated against COVID–19. 86 Fed. Reg. 61555 (2021). Two District Courts enjoined enforcement of the rule, and the Government now asks us to stay those injunctions. Agreeing that it is entitled to such relief, we grant the applications.

The majority held the order was withing the government’s authority under statute:

First, we agree with the Government that the Secretary’s rule falls within the authorities that Congress has conferred upon him.

Congress has authorized the Secretary to impose conditions on the receipt of Medicaid and Medicare funds that “the Secretary finds necessary in the interest of the health and safety of individuals who are furnished services.” 42 U. S. C. §1395x(e)(9).* COVID–19 is a highly contagious, dangerous, and—especially for Medicare and Medicaid patients—deadly disease. The Secretary of Health and Human Services determined that a COVID–19 vaccine mandate will substantially reduce the likelihood that healthcare workers will contract the virus and transmit it to their patients. 86 Fed. Reg. 61557–61558. He accordingly concluded that a vaccine mandate is “necessary to promote and protect patient health and safety” in the face of the ongoing pandemic. Id., at 61613.

The rule thus fits neatly within the language of the statute. After all, ensuring that providers take steps to avoid transmitting a dangerous virus to their patients is consistent with the fundamental principle of the medical profession: first, do no harm….

We accordingly conclude that the Secretary did not exceed his statutory authority in requiring that, in order to remain eligible for Medicare and Medicaid dollars, the facilities covered by the interim rule must ensure that their employees be vaccinated against COVID–19.

The Thomas dissent, joined by the others, disputed that CMS has this power:

To obtain a stay, the Government must show that there is (1) a reasonable probability that we would grant certiorari; (2) a fair prospect that we would reverse the judgments below; and (3) a likelihood that irreparable harm will result from denying a stay. Hollingsworth v. Perry, 558 U. S. 183, 190 (2010) (per curiam). Because there is no real dispute that this case merits our review, our decision turns primarily on whether the Government can make a “strong showing” that it is likely to succeed on the merits. Nken v. Holder, 556 U. S. 418, 426 (2009). In my view, the Government has not made such a showing here.

The Government begins by invoking two statutory provisions that generally grant CMS authority to promulgate rules to implement Medicare and Medicaid. The first authorizes CMS to “publish such rules and regulations . . . as may be necessary to the efficient administration of the [agency’s] functions.” 42 U. S. C. §1302(a). The second authorizes CMS to “prescribe such regulations as may be necessary to carry out the administration of the insurance programs” under the Medicare Act. §1395hh(a)(1).

The Government has not established that either provision empowers it to impose a vaccine mandate….

These cases are not about the efficacy or importance of COVID–19 vaccines. They are only about whether CMS has the statutory authority to force healthcare workers, by coercing their employers, to undergo a medical procedure they do not want and cannot undo. Because the Government has not made a strong showing that Congress gave CMS that broad authority, I would deny the stays pending appeal. I respectfully dissent.

Alito issued his own dissent, joined by the others:

…. But even if the Federal Government has the authority to require the vaccination of healthcare workers, it did not have the authority to impose that requirement in the way it did. Under our Constitution, the authority to make laws that impose obligations on the American people is conferred on Congress, whose Members are elected by the people. Elected representatives solicit the views of their constituents, listen to their complaints and requests, and make a great effort to accommodate their concerns. Today, however, most federal law is not made by Congress. It comes in the form of rules issued by unelected administrators. In order to give individuals and entities who may be seriously impacted by agency rules at least some opportunity to make their views heard and to have them given serious consideration, Congress has clearly required that agencies comply with basic procedural safeguards….

In these cases, the relevant agency did none of those things, and the Court rewards this extraordinary departure from ordinary principles of administrative procedure. Although today’s ruling means only that the Federal Government is likely to be able to show that this departure is lawful, not that it actually is so, this ruling has an importance that extends beyond the confines of these cases. It may have a lasting effect on Executive Branch behavior.

(read more)

USAAPAY.com EDITORIAL

DO NOT GET A PCR TEST

The pandemic of lies is based on PCR tests and the fiction of "cases."

It is most ludicrous when it claims that a false positive becomes an asymptomatic case in the absence of disease or symptoms.

At this point it is safe to assert that all positive tests are false positives. Their agenda demands that more people stay home to inflict more damage on the economy.

The PCR test was never meant to diagnose any disease or measure viral load. The corrupt test is dialed up (made more sensitive) during "surges" and dialed back down (lower CT) when pandemic fatigue rises.

A can of Coca Cola has tested positive. The test cannot distinguish between influenza or one of the circulating betacoronaviruses. The test also picks up viral fragments from the spike protein mRNA gene therapy shots.

The test is useless except for the authoritarians who use fear to control the public.

You can end the pandemic of lies by refusing to be tested.

new estimates: 76% of Americans have had covid

a new set of estimates have emerged on past covid prevalence in the US. they purport to show that ~76% of Americans have, by now, had covid.

this seems like a plausible number to me and having taken a quick look through their methods and sourcing, it seems like they took a reasonable approach, subject of course to all the limitations and estimations inherent in extrapolating a number like this (which are not insubstantial). this is a model, not a collected dataset, but it seems a fairly reasonable one.

what this shows is is a disease that’s over and going to wind down and go endemic.

how it fares in future years in terms of evading acquired immunity (it has certainly evaded vaccines already) is an open issue, but i think the odds on bet is that yes, it will be somewhat evasive, and no, that is not a threat to anyone.

it’ll be like other coronaviruses, widespread, mutating somewhat, and mild to the point of being more annoying that anything else. it’s going to become a cold.

children will get it at a time when it poses them almost no threat.

they will acquire immunity as they do to 50 other common childhood infections. they may get it again later, but it will be mild because the immunity, while not perfect, will be cross reactive.

the same will be true of the adults. i have heard of VERY few cases of SARS-CoV-2 reinfection that were in any way severe. the odds on bet is that this will persist, just as it does in the other big 4 of circulating covid colds. (read more)

Drosten, Corona Astrologer, Noted Hysteric: "We have to open the door for the virus here and there"

Omicron looks to be the first exit ramp, that anybody in government wants to take.

At the very start of the Corona pandemic, German state media gave the virologist Christian Drosten his own regular podcast. Through the 125 episodes that have been inflicted upon the Germanophone world since, Drosten has lent his authority and opinion to whatever policies the government happens to be pursuing at the moment. He started out relatively relaxed, but when containment mania seized Merkel’s cabinet, he dutifully joined the ranks of lockdown hardliners. You could never close too soon, you could never open too late. Infections were always about to peak sometime in the summer. That was Christian Drosten, Corona astrologer.

Now there is a new variant and a new government, and Drosten has begun to sing a different tune. People, who somehow made it through all of these months and all of those podcast episodes without once asking themselves what Drosten was up to and what his purpose might be, are actually surprised.

“All of a sudden the cautious Drosten is sounding quite different,” declares Thomas Vitzthum, in a hilarious Welt article.

He’s saying Omicron isn’t very dangerous!

The virologist now acknowledges that disease severity is lower in Omicron. “I think it’s fair to say that by now.” He also says in the podcast produced with NDR: “The admission rates to intensive care units are rising very slowly [in the UK], really quite slowly. In fact, so slowly that one has the impression right now: Maybe it's not such a big problem."

He is qualifying the hospitalisation numbers!

“We have to differentiate: In the hospital admissions, we see that more than half were not admitted because of Corona, but because of other things ..., and in the admission screening ... they emerge as Corona patients. Corona is not the primary diagnosis. And at the same time, you don’t necessarily see this direct progression to the ICU at the moment.” That’s seen only very rarely. “That is of course relatively reassuring right now.”

He wants to abolish quarantine for the contacts of infected persons!

Drosten is prepared to allow more infections with the milder Omicron variant: “We're not tearing down the gates completely, but we have to open the door for the virus here and there.” Politicians would have to decide where. He also states his goal: Corona “will become endemic” and “it must become endemic.” Drosten is not in agreement with demands for more lockdowns.

Suddenly, Drosten, who never met a case wave that couldn’t bring him to hyperventilation, is bringing out his old trial-balloon talking point from 3 September again, declaring that we should regard “breakthrough infections” in the vaccinated as totally normal.

“He continues to warn the unvaccinated,” Vitzthum says, “but without prophesying impending disaster” for them. You can taste the vague, confused disappointment. Even Drosten’s podcast host, NDR, has posted a carefully muted article on the episode, under a headline screaming that “Booster-Doses Provide Better Protection Against Omicron.”

It is like I wrote yesterday: Large parts of the bureaucratic and the political leadership want to end this. It is finally clear to everyone that no amount of vaccination will eradicate SARS-2. This is a virus that was already underwhelming relative to our extravagant countermeasures, and nobody wants to be associated with further chaos and shutdowns over the still milder Omicron. There is, however, in the panic of the journalists and the civil service, a great inertia pressing for more measures, now and always. Talking them down will be no easy task, especially after they spent all these months filling them with fear. Drosten and his political minders have an enormous problem before them, one entirely of their own making. Maybe government by panic isn’t such a great idea after all. (read more)

Errors, Forced and Otherwise

There is nothing as revealing as their mistakes.

Complex human institutions, which have eschewed rigid hierarchy and command discipline for a looser, consensus-based administration, are characteristic of western societies and their liberal democratic governments. Such institutions have a lot of idiosyncrasies, and among them is the inability to pursue any kind of complex strategy. Strategies are birthed in the minds of individuals or small groups; they require clear lines of command and a lot of people willing to follow orders unquestioningly. Institutions that have succumbed to committee government have tendencies instead of strategies. Western Corona policies reflect the diffuse, profoundly demobilised attitude of the institutions that sustain them. We might say that these are tendential rather than strategic regimes. Their policies are not machines, carefully assembled to produce a desired outcome, but instead a random assemblage of everything that a few thousand different committees managed to dream up or copy from other committees in other countries doing the same thing, all because they seem to serve the same basic end. Tendential policies will always be less than the sum of their parts.

The aims of consensus-based administrative governments are not hidden. They cannot be, because the high degree of self-coordination these institutions demand. Thus their aims are always both painfully overt and shamelessly simple, to the point of seeming stupid. The aim of containment and mass vaccination policies, quite clearly, is the eradication or the long-term suppression of SARS-CoV-2. This is not to say that every last person participating in this circus genuinely sincerely in their deepest self cares about whether SARS-2 goes away. It is only to say that no other purpose unites or explains the system, as a whole. Cynical profiteers and grifters and opportunists all find themselves very much at home in western institutions, which do not plan or plot, but merely tend.

Recognising this is clarifying and important. Without an understanding of what it is our governments are trying to do, we will never be able to assess how they are progressing, and – most importantly – the kinds of mistakes they make along the way. A lot of overtly conspiratorial analyses tend to reconstruct mistakes as in fact clever elements in highly complicated evil plots. This is demoralising, because it serves the myth of an omnipotent, omniscient adversary, but it is also confusing. The truth is that our adversaries make mistakes all the time, and many of these mistakes have typical characteristics from which we can learn.

There is, for example, the mistake of overvaccination. I know that a lot of you think the vaccines are themselves the goal, and for some of the grifters and opportunists in Pharmaceutical Land that’s surely the case. Nevertheless, imposing medications on people who don’t need them is pointless, it cultivates unnecessary opposition, and it is the sort of the thing that, in the longer term, might even entail serious political and legal liability.

Why can’t you prove that you’ve recovered from Corona with a positive antibody test, and thereby achieve coveted ‘recovered’ status? On 25 May 2021, some benighted intern at Germany’s Federal Centre for Health Education was compelled to explain this absurd but universally observed rule on the internet:

Both full vaccination and recovery from infection usually result in protection against COVID-19. It is not yet known, however, how long protection conferred by recovery or vaccination lasts. Currently available data suggest post-recovery protection persists for at least 6 to 8 months. An antibody test is not suitable for determining for certainty whether this protection is still in force. This is because a person may have experienced COVID-19 and still not developed measurable antibodies. On the other hand, infection from another coronavirus (not SARS-CoV-2) can cause positive antibody results without COVID-19 infection.

Moreover, it is still unknown how many antibodies must be present to assume reliable protection after surviving an illness. The quality of tests on the market for the detection of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies also varies widely. There are differences in the specificity of the tests: this means that depending on which test is used, the result is of varying reliability.

In summary, the results of antibody tests do not currently allow reliable statements about protection against COVID-19. Even with a positive antibody test—without PCR evidence of a passed infection—it can therefore not be safely assumed that a person has passed a SARS-CoV-2 infection.

It would be embarrassing to refute these inadequate, desperate paragraphs, and so I won’t bother. This is what somebody who doesn’t have an argument sounds like. In view of the goals of Corona containment, this is a clear unforced error: Early in the vaccine campaign, when doses had to be rationed, it was obvious folly even on the terms of the vaccinators to jab the seropositive. Now that we know the recovered enjoy vastly better immunity to SARS-2 than the vaccinated, it makes even less sense. Sure, the megaphone of the press can overcome mistakes like this and shout down the naysayers, but that’s wasted energy they might have spent on some other project. Vaccinating the recovered is just a stupid thing to do.

Another glaring, ongoing error is the failure to exploit seasonality, even at the level of cynical messaging. I’ve already discussed early efforts in this direction, but I did so behind the paywall, so I’ll risk quoting myself:

This effort had both a Chinese and a western end … By mid-February, Hubei had endured three weeks of lockdown, and new Corona infections were in decline. Yet the middle of February is also past the peak of the Chinese flu season (see the second figure here). Were cases merely declining in Hubei because of the weather? Scientists in the circle of Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch threw together this co-authored pre-print from 18 February (likely begun before the 10th) that answered this question in the negative: “Changes in weather alone ... will not necessarily lead to declines in case counts without implementation of extensive public health interventions.” A fuller study, more directly relevant for the unfolding Western pandemic, ensued on 6 March. Here, Lipsitch and his colleagues argued that the first pandemic wave would be largely undeterred by summer. Lipsitch made similar statements on his blog around the same time: “Changing seasons and school vacation may help, but are unlikely to stop transmission.” Lipsitch’s decree, now totally discredited by experience, echoed around the world. Within days, Christian Drosten, director of virology at the Charité hospital in Berlin and a preeminent European Corona prophet, declared that seasonal effects would be “relatively small” and that Germany would face “a peak in cases in the period between June and August.”

Early containment advocates were at pains to supply their favoured policies with an exit strategy. Ascribing the waxing and waning of Corona to government policies rather than the seasons opened the way for governments to declare an early victory for lockdowns and retire the more burdensome aspects of the containment circus. It thus seems highly probable that these attacks on seasonality were deliberate, part of a strategy by eradicationists to reassure governments that they had a way out, if it didn’t work.

This is precisely the exit ramp that China took. Western governments, however, still have trouble internalising the seasonal patterns of Corona infection. Germany walked into the Fall 2020 infection spike totally oblivious, believing that the decline in cases seen in April was down to things like masking and capacity limits. In Fall 2021, they did the same thing for different reasons, having spent the entire summer declaring victory for the vaccines. State-adjacent modellers repeatedly underestimate seasonality and routinely make fools of themselves in the press.

The total inability of our policies to come to terms with how Corona is actually transmitted represents a third key and revealing mistake. SARS-2 spreads like a gas. The virus particles leave your lungs suspended in very tiny droplets, and they can remain in the air for hours. Inhaling these infected aerosols is mostly how people get Corona. Aerosolised transmission was obvious from very early on; contact tracers knew it just from studying the particulars of specific outbreaks. Yet the focus on fomites and droplets just won’t go away. Obsessions of this nature might have some side benefits for the Zero Covidians, in that masks increase the cost of social interaction and keep the pandemic visible, but these must be totally swamped by the downsides of planting in the minds of millions of people a false transmission model.

[...]

There are other glaring mistakes as well. There is the mistake of publishing vaccine efficacy statistics, especially in the UK and Israel, in a moment of overconfidence. There is the mistake of failing to address the problem of Corona’s origins in mainstream media outlets, even as the lab leak hypothesis has become the favoured theory – effectively ceding this entire delicate subject to DRASTIC and a few other internet dissidents.

There is a lot to learn from mistakes like these, but the biggest lesson is about the incredible rank-and-file inertia driving Corona containment policies: Hundreds of thousands of poorly informed dim people in the middle bureaucracy bought very hard into the propaganda they helped create, and they now believe that vaccines, not recovery, are the only solution to Corona; that SARS-2 is only weakly seasonal if at all and that infection waves are driven entirely by human behaviour; and that fomites are a significant transmission vector and masks will save you. There is no turning off or redirecting or adding nuance to a broadly distributed consensus like this, which just marches on and on, oblivious to everything. With a very loud and insistent messaging campaign, led by the right collection of Corona saints, it might be possible to mute the fervour of the faithful on some of these points. But the effort would prove costly, it would risk alienating some of the most ardent supporters of the containment regime, and there is no prospect of more than marginal success.

Despite all the limitations of our aimless, drifting tendential institutions and policies, there are here and there clear attempts by specific people and organisations to strategise, even to conspire. These strategies are always subverted by the rampaging hysterical mob. The single-mindedness and myopia of this ideological system has become a serious problem, and no few of our Corona conductors have noticed this. The SARS-2 variants offered a transient opportunity to construct a new, parallel version of Corona, attended by a different collection of more realistic or more useful doctrines. This is probably a major reason that the discourse around variants was so overplayed. Yet before long all of the variants bled into each other, and we just ended up with Variant Corona, which was like Vintage Corona in almost every way, save for being slightly worse.

Omicron is qualitatively different from all prior SARS-2 lineages, and it’s encouraging that establishment mouthpieces have been open about this so far. If they aren’t able to take this exit, they will have to wait for the ideological fervour of the Corona enthusiasts and the vaccinators to subside, and that could take a very long time. (read more)

Project Veritas Obtains Hidden Military Documents Showing NIH Intent to Create SARS-CoV-2, Using Gain of Function Research

Project Veritas has obtained military documents hidden on a classified system [HERE – and HERE – and HERE] showing how EcoHealth Alliance approached DARPA in March 2018, seeking funding to conduct gain of function research of bat borne coronaviruses.

The proposal, named Project Defuse, was rejected by DARPA over safety concerns and the notion that it violated the gain of function research moratorium.  However, according to the documents, NIAID, under the direction of Dr. Fauci, went ahead with the research in Wuhan, China and at several sites across the U.S.

(video)

[WASHINGTON, D.C. – Jan. 10, 2022] Project Veritas has obtained startling never-before-seen documents regarding the origins of COVID-19, gain of function research, vaccines, potential treatments which have been suppressed, and the government’s effort to conceal all of this.

The documents in question stem from a report at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, better known as DARPA, which were hidden in a top-secret shared drive.

DARPA is an agency under the U.S. Department of Defense in charge of facilitating research in technology with potential military applications.

Project Veritas has obtained a separate report to the Inspector General of the Department of Defense written by U.S. Marine Corp Major, Joseph Murphy, a former DARPA Fellow.

The report states that EcoHealth Alliance approached DARPA in March 2018, seeking funding to conduct gain of function research of bat borne coronaviruses. The proposal, named Project Defuse, was rejected by DARPA over safety concerns and the notion that it violates the basis gain of function research moratorium.

According to the documents, NIAID, under the direction of Dr. Fauci, went ahead with the research in Wuhan, China and at several sites across the U.S. (read more)

Here’s my answer to the question posed by James O’Keefe.

In the original pdf guidance for the 2014 research pause of into weaponization of SARS viruses there was an important footnote [LINK]

[FN¹  SOURCE – U.S. Government Gain-of-Function Deliberative Process and Research Funding Pause on Selected Gain-of-Function Research Involving Influenza, MERS, and SARS Viruses – pdf, page 2 – October 17, 2014]

Timeline:

♦ October 17, 2014 – U.S. funding of SARS to create a biological weapon was paused due to the extreme risk of a pandemic.  However, the pause allowed agencies within the U.S. government to continue funding if they determined “the research is urgently necessary to protect the public health or national security.” [LINK]

♦ 2014 through 2020 the Pentagon continued funding research in Wuhan, China. Fear of discovery would explain why many top officials in the U.S. Defense Department were against the Trump administration [with increased severity after the COVID pandemic began]. [LINK]

♦ May 2016 – [An Election Year] – “after thorough deliberation and extensive input from domestic and international stakeholders, the NSABB [National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity] issued its recommendations. NSABB’s central finding was that studies that are expected to enhance Potential Pandemic Pathogen (PPP) have potential benefits to public health but also entail significant risks. NSABB recommended that such studies warranted additional scrutiny prior to being funded.”  Anthony Fauci is on the NSABB.

♦ January 9, 2017 – [Four Days after the Susan Rice Oval Office meeting with Obama, Biden, Comey, et al] – The Obama Administration re-authorizes funding for the creation of SARS biological weapons.  “Adoption of these recommendations will satisfy the requirements for lifting the current moratorium on certain life sciences research that could enhance a pathogen’s virulence and/or transmissibility to produce a potential pandemic pathogen (an enhanced PPP).“ [LINK]

Given the workarounds, exceptions and plausible deniability for the consequences, built into the original moratorium guidance in 2014, the defense department was operationally permitted to keep funding the biological weapons research in Wuhan, China.  The 2014 ban was a funding moratorium in name only; however, it appears the funding for U.S. research in North Carolina was stopped.

What was reauthorized in 2017, just before President Trump took office, was the need to use “national security” as an excuse to continue the research.  It also appears funding of SARS as a biological weapon inside the U.S. (North Carolina) was now permitted again.

REFERENCES SO FAR:  – 2017 – Policy Guidelines from Obama Administration – 2014 – pdf link of Research Funding Pause – National Science Advisory Board (Wiki) – Pentagon Funding for SARS research 2013 through 2020.

If you accept that the Pentagon would never spend to develop a biological weapon in China (Wuhan Lab) unless they already had developed that weapon on their own (North Carolina Lab), then the question about the release of that weapon starts to take shape.

Remember, the State Department was looking into the origin until Joe Biden shut them down and redirected the goal to the Intelligence Community.  In essence, Biden handed the mission to the Fourth Branch of Government.   Not surprisingly, after a few months the IC said their results were “inconclusive.”

♦ [Excerpt] – […] In one State Department meeting, officials seeking to demand transparency from the Chinese government say they were explicitly told by colleagues not to explore the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s gain-of-function research, because it would bring unwelcome attention to U.S. government funding of it.

In an internal memo obtained by Vanity Fair, Thomas DiNanno, former acting assistant secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance, wrote that staff from two bureaus, his own and the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, “warned” leaders within his bureau “not to pursue an investigation into the origin of COVID-19” because it would “‘open a can of worms’ if it continued.”

[…] In late March, former Centers for Disease Control director Robert Redfield received death threats from fellow scientists after telling CNN that he believed COVID-19 had originated in a lab. “I was threatened and ostracized because I proposed another hypothesis,” Redfield told Vanity Fair. “I expected it from politicians. I didn’t expect it from science.” (read more)

♦ Washington (CNN) – “President Joe Biden’s team shut down a closely-held State Department effort launched late in the Trump administration to prove the coronavirus originated in a Chinese lab over concerns about the quality of its work, according to three sources familiar with the decision.

The existence of the State Department inquiry and its termination this spring by the Biden administration — neither of which has been previously reported — comes to light amid renewed interest in whether the virus could have leaked out of a Wuhan lab with links to the Chinese military. The Biden administration is also facing scrutiny of its own efforts to determine if the Chinese government was responsible for the virus.

♦ “On Wednesday, Biden issued a statement that he has directed the US intelligence community to redouble its efforts in investigating the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic and report back to him in 90 days.” (LINK)

♦ [WASHINGTON DC] – The intelligence community failed to conclusively identify the origin of the coronavirus following a 90-day investigation ordered by President Biden, but experts are divided on why. 

A report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) found that officials were unable to rule whether the virus escaped from a lab or spread to humans through an infected animal.  But the ultimate conclusion reached by the $85 billion-a-year community was that it would be unable to pinpoint the origin of the virus if China didn’t fully cooperate.  (LINK)

If you have followed how the U.S. Intelligence Community operates, you can see a pretty clear picture emerge of a strong likelihood surrounding what took place.

The U.S. Defense Dept developed SARS-CoV-2 in North Carolina.  The 4th Branch (Intelligence Community) wanted to use it.  The Pentagon restarts funding for development of SARS-CoV-2 in partnership with Wuhan, China – setting up the cover story.  The 4th Branch (Intelligence Community) then uses the virus by releasing it in/around Wuhan.  Everything after that is simply part of the 4th Branch covering their tracks.  Wuhan, China becomes the patsy.

The IC release of COVID-19 would have two transparent motives for the 4th Branch:  (1) Get rid of Trump via mail-in ballots, and intelligence assistance toward the 2020 election result; and (2) Expand their influence and control operations as the most powerful force in U.S. government.

One of the central players, who likely knows the details behind who exactly executed the release, is former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who has been blaming the Chinese almost exclusively.  [Methinks he doth protest too much.]  Pompeo is the ultimate weapon of the deep swamp.

Former DNI John Ratcliffe is also a staunch figure pointing at Wuhan, China.  Keep in mind DNI Ratcliffe was the recipient of the 4th Branch Intelligence Community products that pointed to Wuhan, China, though Ratcliffe had no involvement.

If it sounds like this thesis is too far ‘out there‘, then you may not fully understand how the Fourth Branch of Government operates…..

…… Also, there were trillions at stake.  He could not be allowed to win.

(read more)

Unmasking the Authoritarians

Health ‘Experts’ Finally Admit Masks Control People, Not Viruses

These masks and the mandates that accompany them have never been about controlling a virus. They’ve always been about controlling people.

e’ve been censored. Hollered at by Karens in the grocery store and sometimes even outdoors. We’ve been lectured, demonized, scoffed at, and called murderers and rubes — all for the sin of ignoring mask security theater and daring to show the lower half of our faces in public.

That’s why it’s just remarkable to hear the experts now admit that the same face coverings required in so many establishments and localities are not stopping any virus from spreading.

CNN medical analyst Leana Wen, who was previously president of abortion giant Planned Parenthood, said so on the network — and not only in reference to the current variant, as if new data has suddenly justified a change in guidance. She explicitly said cloth masks haven’t been effective since the dawn of the Wuhan virus.

“Cloth masks are not appropriate for this pandemic. It’s not appropriate for omicron, it was not appropriate for delta, alpha, or any of the previous variants either, because we’re dealing with something that’s airborne,” Wen said.

“Don’t wear a cloth mask,” she said in another segment, going so far as to call them little more than “facial decorations.”

It isn’t just one floating head on CNN. In a letter to Capitol Hill staffers, the attending physician reportedly announced the end of blue surgical masks, cloth masks, and gaiters, ordering that “the more protective KN95 or N95 masks” must now be worn.

“…[S]urgical masks are NO LONGER ENOUGH for an airborne virus that’s transmitting as fast or faster than any virus known to mankind,” tweeted a paranoid professor from the University of Colorado at Boulder. The Washington Post jumped in too.

And here’s the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention spilling the beans that a surgical mask “is not considered respiratory protection.”

WebMD piled on also, urging Americans to discard the kind of cloth face masks worn by busybody fellow shoppers while they lecture the unmasked to cover their faces. Those aren’t good enough and never have been.

This is now the wisdom imparted by the experts, that the sweaty, flimsy, itchy muzzles that have been forced on schoolchildren, healthy athletes, socially distant employees, grocery-shopping moms, and even their toddlers are “not appropriate.” They’re nothing more than “facial decorations” against a virus that’s in the air and can’t be contained.

It’s almost like conservatives have been reading the available scientific studies and saying this since the beginning, like here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. Maybe sweat-soaked cloth masks in the gym actually aren’t great for your health, many on the right suggested. My 3-year-old’s mask that she can’t stop touching probably isn’t keeping her healthier, others thought. Yet the response from the left to this pushback was routine scorn and censorship.

Amazon banned a book by former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson that discussed the scientific evidence that mask mandates are ineffective. Big Tech weaponized fake fact-checks to choke out The Federalist’s science-backed reporting on masks. Former White House COVID Task Force advisor Dr. Scott Atlas was banned from publishing references to scientific mask studies, as CNN’s Jake Tapper and Dr. Sanjay Gupta cheered Twitter on. Google-owned YouTube infamously nuked a June interview of Atlas.

Yet now, the left’s “experts” are going on network television to announce that we must stop wearing the cloth and surgical masks that have become synonymous with COVID morality, and they’re announcing that actually we’ve known these masks have been “inappropriate” all along.

Americans are just supposed to take this. In response to the gaslighting, they’re just supposed to obediently discard the cloth masks they’ve been berated and coerced into wearing and instead go buy some stronger mask to protect God-knows-who from this wave of a virus that manifests as the common cold for even the vast majority of the yet-unvaccinated.

While in many sane areas of the country, masks have long been an afterthought, that’s not the reality for other Americans. Mask mandates still prevail in too many places, with the entire state of Oregon tossing around the idea of a “permanent” mask mandate.

Other authoritarian pockets such as Madison, Wisconsin, just never let their temporary mandates expire. Of course, these mandates don’t require any particular kind of face covering. So as Wen said, the masks are nothing more than “facial decorations,” meaning the mandates are nothing more than political theater.

The gaslighting is enough to drive anyone absolutely mad, but with the experts’ admission that most of our masks aren’t cutting it, they’ve also admitted something far more consequential. These masks and the mandates that accompany them have never been about controlling a virus. They’ve always been about controlling people. (read more)

Democrats Plan to Starve You into Submission

Temporary Empty Shelves Are Not a Supply Chain Crisis, It Is Important to Understand the Difference

Unfortunately, there is a lot of wrong information being discussed and shared.  Even reputable regional media are giving inaccurate information, making wrong interpretations {LINK}, and generally getting the explanations wrong.  Additionally, there’s general misinterpretations of ordinary outages based on the day of the week (Sunday) and bad weather in the Northeast {ex Twitter Thread}.

All of these #BidensEmptyShelves assumptions, which are being heightened by increased attention and social media, are leading to confusion.

An empty retail shelf or case for a 24, 36 to 48-hour period is not, I repeat, NOT, part of a systemic supply chain disruption.  Those are mostly location and regional specific out of stock situations caused by localized events, weather and employee shortages.

What CTH has been describing for the past several months is NOT what is noted above.  What we have been describing is a long term supply chain crisis that will slowly unfold over a period of about a week or two, and then remain a problem over time, for a period of 6+ months. {GO DEEP}

The thirteen bullet points below are the issues we will first notice as the general food supply chain begins to show signs of that type of vulnerability.  This outline explains why it is happening and how long it can be expected.

In the previous October, November and December warnings, we emphasized preparation and counted down the 90-day window.  Now, as we enter the final two weeks before mid/late January, the date of our original prediction, it appears that some media are starting to catch up, and the larger public is starting to notice.

Feel free to note in the comments section what is happening in your area.  Hopefully, most of us are much better positioned than the average person who has not been following this as closely over the past several months.

Initial food instability signs in the supply chain.  Things to look for: 

(1) A shortage of processed potatoes (frozen specifically).

And/Or a shortage of the ancillary products that are derivates of, or normally include, potatoes.

(2) A larger than usual footprint of turkey in the supermarket (last line of protein).

(3) A noticeable increase in the price of citrus products.

(4) A sparse distribution of foodstuffs that rely on flavorings.

(5) The absence of non-seasonal products.

(6) Little to no price difference on the organic comparable (diff supply chain)

(7) Unusual country of origin for fresh product type.

(8) Absence of large container products

(9) Shortage of any ordinary but specific grain derivative item (ex. wheat crackers)

(10) Big brand shortage.

(11) Shortage of wet pet foods

(12) Shortage of complex blended products with multiple ingredients (soups etc)

(13) A consistent shortage of milk products and/or ancillaries.

These notes above are all precursors that show significant stress in the supply chain.  Once these issues are consistently visible, we are going to descend into food instability very quickly, sector by sector, category by category.

At first, each retail operation will show varying degrees of the supply chain stress according to their size, purchasing power, and/or private manufacturing, transportation and distribution capacity.

♦ BACKGROUND – Do you remember the dairy farmers in 2020 dumping their milk because the commercial side of milk demand (schools, restaurants, bag milk purchasers) was forcibly locked down?   Plastic jugs were in short supply, and the processing side of the equation has a limited amount of operational capacity.

To remind us of how the issues started in 2020, a dairy farmer helps to explain:

“Are we dumping milk because of greed or low demand, no. It’s the supply chain, there are only so many jug fillers, all were running 24/7 before this cluster you-know-what.

Now demand for jug milk has almost doubled.  However, restaurant demand is almost gone; NO ONE is eating out. 

Restaurant milk is distributed in 2.5 gal bags or pint chugs; further, almost 75 percent of milk is processed into hard products in this country, cheese and butter. Mozzarella is almost a third of total cheese production; how’s pizza sales going right now??

A bit of history – Years ago (40+) every town had a bottler, they ran one shift a day, could ramp up production easily.  Now with all the corporate takeovers (wall street over main street) we are left with regional “high efficiency” milk plants that ran jug lines 24/7 before this mess, no excess capacity.

Jug machines cost millions and are MADE IN CHINA. Only so many jugs can be blown at a jug plant.  We farmers don’t make the jugs, damn hard to ramp up production.

I’m a dairy farmer, believe me NO dairyman likes dumping milk; and so far there is NO guarantee they will get paid. Milk must be processed within 48 hours of production and 24 hours of receipt in the plant or it goes bad. Same with making it into cheese and butter, and neither stores well for long.

The same supply line problems exists where restaurants are supplied with bulk 1 pound blocks of butter or single serv packs or pats; and cheese is sold in 10 to 20 pound bags (think shredded Mozzarella for pizza).  Furthermore, it is not legal for this end of the supply chain to sell direct to consumers in most states.

Take cheddar cheese for instance; it goes from mild to sharp to crap in storage. Butter, frozen, only stores for so long and then must be slowly thawed and processed into other uses as it gets “strong”.  At Organic Valley we cook it down into butter oil or ghee for cooking.

We are headed for the same problem with canned veggies.  The vast majority of produce comes off and is processed in season; canned or frozen.  The supply is already in cans for the season; restaurants use gallon cans or bulk bags of frozen produce.

At some point we will run out of consumer sized cans in stock because home size sales are up (40%+) and restaurant sales are almost nonexistent.  Fresh produce out of U.S. season comes from Mexico (different climate).  I’m talking sweet corn, green beans, peas, tomatoes, all veggies are seasonal in the USA.  Fresh, out-of-season, row crops are  imported.  (There are exceptions, like hydroponic grown, but small amount of total).

Someone mentioned “time to raid all those bins of corn”.  Those bins on the farm contain yellow corn, cattle feed and totally unfit for human consumption, now or at harvest.

Eggs? Same problem.  Bakeries and restaurants of any size use Pullman egg cases, 30 dozen at a pop, 30 eggs to a flat, 12 flats to a case.  There are only so many 1 dozen egg cartons available and only so many packing machines.

Industrial bakeries and processors of packaged food buy bulk liquid eggs, no carton at all.  Also in many states it is illegal to sell this supply-chain directly to consumers. 

On your standard buffet of any size, do you really think they boil eggs and peel them? They come in a bag, boiled and diced; those nice uniform slices of boiled egg you see on your salad, a lot of them come in tubes boiled and extruded at the same time, just unwrap and slice. Your scrambled eggs come in a homogenized bag on most buffets.

Another example of Main Street being gutted and “improved by wall street” NO local egg processors available or many small egg producers either, all corporate and huge, contracted to sell to the corporate masters.

This is a warning the same problems exist in all supply chains.

The supply chain is farked.”

~ David Osterloh, Dairy Farmer 

Potato farmers and fresh food suppliers were also told to dump, blade or plough over their crops due to lack of commercial side demand.  These issues have longer term consequences than many would understand.  These are fresh crops, replenishment crops, which require time before harvest and production.

The retail consumer supply chain for manufactured and processed food products includes bulk storage to compensate for seasonality. As Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue noted in 2020, “There are over 800 commercial and public warehouses in the continental 48 states that store frozen products.”

Here is a snapshot of the food we had in storage at the end of February 2020: over 302 million pounds of frozen butter; 1.36 billion pounds of frozen cheese; 925 million pounds of frozen chicken; over 1 billion pounds of frozen fruit; nearly 2.04 billion pounds of frozen vegetables; 491 million pounds of frozen beef; and nearly 662 million pounds of frozen pork.

This bulk food storage is how the total U.S. consumer food supply ensures consistent availability even with weather impacts.  As a nation, we essentially stay one harvest ahead of demand by storing it and smoothing out any peak/valley shortfalls. There are a total of 175,642 commercial facilities involved in this supply chain across the country

The stored food supply is the originating resource for food manufacturers who process the ingredients into a variety of branded food products and distribute to your local supermarket. That bulk stored food, and the subsequent supply chain, is entirely separate from the fresh food supply chain used by restaurants, hotels, cafeterias etc.

Food ‘outside the home’ includes restaurants, fast food locales, schools, corporate cafeterias, university lunchrooms, manufacturing cafeterias, hotels, food trucks, park and amusement food sellers and many more. Many of those venues are not thought about when people evaluate the overall U.S. food delivery system; however, this network was approximately 60 percent of all food consumption on a daily basis.

The ‘food away from home‘ sector has its own supply chain. Very few restaurants and venues (cited above) purchase food products from retail grocery outlets. As a result of the coronavirus mitigation effort, the ‘food away from home’ sector was reduced by 75% of daily food delivery operations. However, people still needed to eat. That meant retail food outlets, grocers, saw sales increases of 25 to 50 percent, depending on the area.

Covid regulations destroyed this complex supply chain in 2020.  It takes time to recover, because the replenishment is based on harvest cycles.  This stuff must be grown.

When the food at home sector was forced to take on the majority of food delivery, they immediately hit processing constraints.  The processing side of the supply chain to funnel food into suppliers for the grocery store has “x” amount of capacity.  That system cannot (not feasible) and did not expand to meet the 20 to 50% increase in demand.

Think about potatoes.  A potato farmer sells into one of the two paths “food at home” (retail stores, or a processing supplier) or “food away from home” (commercial food or commercial food processors).   Other than bulk raw potatoes, the harvest goes into: (1) processing or (2) storage.

(1a) processing for retail sales (40%), ex. Ore Ida frozen potatoes, canning, or any of the other thousand retail products that use potatoes, whole or mashed.

(1b) processing for commercial sales (60%), ex. McDonalds french fries, or any of the thousand restaurant, lunchroom and cafeteria needs that use potatoes, whole or mashed.

♦ Processing – When 1b was shut down in 2020, 1a quickly reached maximum retail processing capacity.  Massive multi-million machines and food processing systems have a capacity. The supplies they use also have a capacity: plastic bags, cardboard, trays, bowls, etc.  The 1a processing system can only generate “X” amount of retail product at maximum capacity.

The remaining 1b commercial product was shut down.  A massive percentage of 1b (commercial) potatoes have nowhere to go, except waste.

♦ Storage – Each processor in 1a stores product (deep cold or frozen storage) for 365-day processing and distribution.   Those storage facilities have a limited amount of capacity.   The 1b customers need fresh product for the majority of their outlets. Ergo, storing for 1b customers who might eventually be allowed to open later only works for a short period of time.  The fresh potato sales missed by 1b outlets = the 1b discard by potato farmers.

When you restart 1b suddenly the 1b short term (fresh) storage product is quickly depleted.  Refilling that 2020 storage is dependent on a new 2021 harvest, which simultaneously has a greater immediate demand because the supply chain on the processing side was boxcar’d (over capacity) and then reset to a higher capacity playing catchup.

The amount missing from 2021 storage, because it was used instead of saved, is essentially equal to the amount that was wasted in 2020.

Now you end 2021 will less reserves because storage is depleted, because a greater percentage of the current harvest was immediately used.  You enter into the beginning of 2022 (winter) in a race to try and spread out the stored potatoes as you cross your fingers and race against the clock for the next harvest before running out.

You probably noticed – but attached to this issue is yet another motive to keep people (employees) away from large industrial cafeterias and even students from school lunchrooms.   The total food supply chain needs time, and harvests, to catch up.

In the example above you can replace *potato* with just about any row crop or retail/commercial food commodity like milk.

The reason I list the shortage of potatoes as the #1 precursor is because every food outlet sells a potato in some form.  Every supermarket and every single restaurant (fancy, sit down or fast food) sells some form of potato.   Potatoes are demanded by every single food outlet; therefore, a shortage of potatoes is the first noticeable issue.

The 2020 demand disruption problem now becomes a 2021/2022 supply chain problem on both the fresh and processing side (depleted inventories), with each vector now competing for the same raw material: wheat, soybeans, grains, beans and stored row crops.

Making matters worse, the protein suppliers also need grain as feed for cattle, pigs, cows, chickens, etc.

[Note: who gets the short straw? The pet food manufacturers]

That’s the nub of the background supply chain issue in the food sector.   Additionally, recovery is not a single-issue problem.

The recovery price and shortages relate to everything from current oil and gas prices to diesel engine oil prices, to fertilizer and weed killer costs, to plastic costs and petroleum packing shortages (Styrofoam especially), to cardboard and sustainable packaging costs, to energy costs and transportation/delivery costs.   All along this complex supply chain there’s also workers and higher payroll costs.

Thus, we get the double-edged sword of higher prices (inflation) and simultaneous shortages.

Here’s what you can do to offset grocery store shortages (while possible):

(1) Buy the generic or store brand equivalent (sub-set inside retail supply chain)

(2) Purchase the organic version (another sub-set inside retail supply chain)

(3) Purchase the powered/dehydrated version (potatoes, milk, etc) and experiment (jazz it up).

Each retail operation, or chain of stores, will show varying degrees of the supply chain stress according to their size, purchasing power, and/or private manufacturing, transportation and distribution capacity.

This is where field to fork supplier relationships can make a big difference.  However, every outlet regardless of their operational excellence, is going to have significant shortages in their inventory.   It’s an unavoidable outcome of the previous chaos.

On average, the retail shortages will last for about as long as one full harvest schedule (4 to 6 months) depending on the commodity.  By September of 2022, the various sector should be relatively recovered.

However, government intervention could make the issues worse, or the recovery time take longer, depending on how they respond when people get seriously stressed in a few weeks.  The densely populated urban areas are going to be making a lot of noise and demanding the government fix the crisis.

Final note on INFLATION – The short term prices will go up again.  Another 10, 20 up to 50% should be expected depending on the item.  Those prices will eventually level off, but it’s doubtful they will be able to come back down until supply and demand find some equilibrium again, if ever.  Right now, predicting future retail prices is too far off to even fathom.

I hope this outline provides you with information to help you make decisions for your family. (read more)

Why Novak Djokovic’s visa cancellation was overturned

The decision to cancel Novak Djokovic’s visa has been quashed by the Federal Circuit Court, and he will be freed from immigration detention.

On Monday afternoon, Judge Anthony Kelly read out a minute agreed to by both Djokovic and the government, which ordered the government to pay Djokovic’s costs and release him from detention within 30 minutes.

Djokovic’s passport and personal effects must be returned to him.

The government acknowledged it had not given Djokovic enough time to make his case while he was being held after arriving in the country.

The decision to revoke his visa under Section 116 of the Migration Act was “unreasonable”, because Djokovic had been told, at 5:20am on the morning of January 6, that he could have until 8:30am to respond to officials.

The call to cancel the visa happened before that deadline, at 7.42am, robbing Djokovic of time he could have used to “consult others” and make further submissions on his own behalf.

The world’s top male tennis player — who is unvaccinated — thought he’d successfully received a medical exemption to enter the country but he was detained by the Australian Border Force after touching down in Melbourne last week.

In a submission to the court, Djokovic’s lawyers said he contracted Covid-19 in December, which was the basis for his exemption application. But there has been confusion over whether being infected with the virus in the past six months was a valid reason to receive an exemption from being vaccinated.

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‘Significant police presence’ with Djokovic

The Daily Telegraph’s chief sports writer Oliver Brown reports there is a “significant police presence” at the office of Djokovic’s lawyers in Melbourne.

As previously mentioned, the Immigration Minister could decide to revoke Djokovic’s visa again. As yet, we have no indication that has happened. We shall watch this space for more updates.

Djokovic’s brother has claimed authorities want to “capture and lock up Novak again” and he’s currently with his lawyers considering their options. No proof to support that yet.

Djokovic’s father Srdan has told Serbian reporters his son has been arrested. Again, this is not yet supported by any proof.

Images from the ground level outside Djokovic’s location show Victoria Police at the building, as would be expected for such a high profile individual.

Can Djokovic play in the Open now?

That is the million dollar question, isn’t it? Or to be more precise, the $4.4 million question. That’s how much Djokovic would earn for winning the Australian Open.

As things stand, at the exact moment I’m typing this (it’s 7:13pm in Sydney, for reference), yes he is free to play.

But if the Immigration Minister decides to use his personal power to revoke Djokovic’s visa again, as described in an earlier post, the world number one will once again find himself prevented from competing.

On top of that, he could be banned from entering the country for three years.

So at the moment we’re all waiting to see what the minister does.

Transcript of Djokovic interview released

The court has released more documents pertaining to the case, including transcripts of Djokovic’s interviews with officials after landing in Melbourne.

That transcript includes confirmation that Djokovic is not vaccinated against Covid, and has caught the virus twice.

“I am not vaccinated,” he said.

“Thank you. Have you ever had Covid?” a Border Force official asked.

“Yes,” Djokovic answered.

“So when did you?” they asked.

“I had Covid twice. I had Covid in June of 2020 and I had Covid recently in - I tested positive on December 16, 2021,” he said.

Djokovic said he had the documents to confirm that infection if required. The interviewer said they would make a photocopy of them.

The player showed officials evidence of a positive PCR test on December 16 and a subsequent negative PCR test on December 22.

The rest of the transcript shows how confused Djokovic was upon learning that his visa might be cancelled. It shows that he repeatedly requested more time to speak to his agent, as well as Tennis Australia, before his visa was rescinded shortly before 8am.

Minister to consider cancelling visa again

This chaotic saga may not be over yet, despite the outcome in court today.

After Judge Anthony Kelly read out the minute agreed to by both sides, which will set Djokovic free from detention, government lawyer Christopher Tran indicated the federal Minister for Immigration and Migrant Services, Alex Hawke, would consider whether to use his “personal power of cancellation” to cancel Djokovic’s visa again.

That scenario would come with an additional, significant wrinkle: it could entail banning the world number one from Australia for three years.

“If this man is to be summarily removed, he cannot return to this country for three years. Am I right about that?” Judge Kelly asked.

Mr Tran indicated that was indeed the case.

Such a decision could be appealed.

“The stakes have now risen, rather than receded,” the Judge noted. He said he expected to be informed in advance if he would be required for further proceedings going forward.

Court quashes decision to cancel Djokovic’s visa

At about 5:15pm, as court resumed, Judge Anthony Kelly read out a minute agreed to by both Novak Djokovic and the government, which quashed the decision to revoke the player’s visa.

The government was ordered to pay the tennis player’s costs and release him from detention within 30 minutes. Djokovic’s passport and personal effects must be returned to him as well.

Judge Kelly said the decision to cancel Djokovic’s visa under Section 116 of the Migration Act was “unreasonable” because he’d been told, at 5:20am on the morning of January 6, that he could have until 8:30am to respond to officials.

The decision to cancel Djokovic’s visa happened before that deadline, at 7:42am. Judge Kelly said that robbed Djokovic of time he could have used to “consult others” and make further submissions about “why his visa should not be cancelled”.

Djokovic leaves hotel, has deportation injunction extended

The hearing was adjourned for lunch shortly after 2pm and was expected to restart at 3.15pm AEDT. However, that was pushed back until 3.45pm.

The injunction preventing the Australian government from deporting Djokovic was due to expire at 4pm on Monday but when the hearing resumed, Judge Anthony Kelly agreed to extend the injunction on his deportation until 8pm.

Shortly after that decision was confirmed, the court was temporarily adjourned again.

Meanwhile, the Herald Sun reports Djokovic has left the hotel he was being detained in to join his legal team at another premises for the hearing.

On Monday Judge Kelly ordered Australian Border Force to allow the tennis star out of immigration detention at the Park Hotel in Carlton so he can view the hearing at another location.

Although allowed of his hotel for the hearing, Djokovic remains in detention and will return at the end of today’s proceedings.

Judge: Novak can leave detention to view court hearing

Ongoing issues with the live stream of Novak Djokovic’s court hearing today have meant the world’s top male tennis player has been unable to watch the proceedings.

On Monday afternoon, Federal Circuit Court Judge Anthony Kelly made an order that Australian Border Force must allow Djokovic out of immigration detention at the Park Hotel in Carlton so he can view the hearing at another location.

“The respondent, by her servants or agents, including the Australian Border Force, take all steps and do all things as may be necessary to bring the applicant to premises as specified by the applicant’s solicitors on Monday, 10 January 2022 (and each day thereafter, including upon the delivery of judgment), to permit him to remain there until the conclusion of each hearing and to secure his safe return to detention upon the conclusion of each hearing,” the order reads.

The court’s live feed paused before midday on Monday after being overwhelmed by users trying to tune in.

‘What more could this man have done?’: Judge asks glaring question

Monday’s hearing was accidentally interrupted by a member of the public, who joined the live stream but was not on mute. “We’re in,” the person said, prompting a rebuke from Judge Anthony Kelly.

“Can I ask whoever is on screen to mute themselves. There is every importance that the only people who should be online with their microphones are those who are making submissions to the court,” Judge Kelly said.

“Any other behaviour by any person who may be wishing to watch this live will produce a very real risk that the bandwidth available for this hearing will be overwhelmed and the hearing will be interrupted and that is utterly unacceptable.”

Shortly after the interruption there was a big moment when Judge Kelly made poignant comments about Djokovic. He told the court the Serbian was right to assume his medical exemption was valid.

“The status attached to this medical exemption ... the applicant in this case ... can be assumed not to be a specialist medical practitioner. It would be, you’d think absurd, that a person could issue a medical exemption to themselves,” Judge Kelly said.

“The evidence seems to underline a relatively significant fact, particularly in context of a cancellation of a visa.

“Here, a professor and a physician have produced and provided to (Djokovic) a medical exemption. Further to that, that medical exemption and the basis on which it was given, was given by a (panel) established by the Victorian Government.

“That document was in the hands of the delegate. The point I am somewhat agitated about is what more could this man have done?”

Djokovic’s lawyer said his client understood that he “had ticked every box”.

Team Novak takes exception to ‘typo’

Novak Djokovic’s lawyer Nick Wood SC is arguing the Notice of Intention to Consider Cancellation of his client’s Visa is “defective” because it included a typo.

Lawyers for the Department of Home Affairs acknowledged in court filings on Sunday that a typo existed in the document but that it was insignificant.

They said the “unfortunate typo” is “unfortunate but immaterial”.

But in court on Monday, Mr Wood said it mattered. “It is more than a typo. The notice was defective," he said.

The court also hears Djokovic begged authorities to let him use his phone after it had been confiscated at Melbourne’s Tullamarine airport.

“If you will let me talk to people although you’ve taken my phone from me I will try and get you what you want,” he said, according to Judge Anthony Kelly.

Djokovic’s lawyer Nick Wood said his client did everything to provide authorities with documentation.

“Mr Djokovic was doing his level best to provide material to the officer at Tullamarine. Mr Djokovic did provide that evidence (in Dubai) before he boarded that aircraft,” he said.

There was a strange moment when court was temporarily adjourned shortly before 11.30am AEDT. Djokovic’s lawyer was stopped in his tracks mid-sentence for an unknown reason. The adjournment was only brief though, and normal proceedings continued.

Tech troubles plague Djokovic hearing

Tech dramas have plagued the start of the hearing.

Members of the public were supposed to be able to watch and listen to proceedings via a secure link but that was not working at 10am AEDT.

It was suggested on social media the amount of people wanting to watch via the link may have caused disruptions.

An old audio/visual link that was sent out previously was reportedly working, but those on the call could allegedly be heard because they were not muted.

Australian journalist Sarah Dankert tweeted: “While there’s a public broadcast, there’s an old teams link that is still working for the Djokovic case and the court official is gone after having trouble with mute all. We’ve had techno blasting, giggling, shouting and someone is just saying Nole repeatedly in a pained voice.”

The court is aware of the tech issues and is looking into it. The hearing was delayed before getting underway around 10.30am AEDT.

However, even once it started, the live link still wasn’t working — meaning nobody outside the court knew what was happening.

Hearing gets underway

Amid all the tech dramas proceedings finally got underway — though still not everyone could hear and see inside the courtroom.

Djokovic’s lawyer started by outlining his team’s arguments. They were complex and the lawyer used a lot of acronyms.

The judge wasn’t a fan, telling him: “You’re going to have to drag yourself back to the last century. I hate acronyms.”

Australia’s cruel new threat to Djokovic

Djokovic is arguing he has a valid reason for a medical exemption not to be vaccinated against Covid-19 because he has contracted the virus within the last six months.

His lawyers submitted a 35-page document Saturday arguing his visa was wrongly cancelled and should be reinstated, allowing him to compete.

The team argued that Djokovic’s claim of a positive PCR test on December 16 means he meets the criteria for a vaccine exemption under the guidance of Australia’s immunisation advisory body.

But Australia’s Home Affairs Department has rebuffed his arguments point-by-point and urged the judge to dismiss the case, with costs.

Djokovic is unvaccinated and poses a risk to people and the health system in Australia, the government said in a 13-page document lodged with the court on Sunday.

The government added “there is no such thing as an assurance of entry by a non-citizen into Australia”.

“As for material given to the applicant by the Department, it had not represented to the applicant that his so-called ‘medical exemption’ would be accepted,” the submission said.

Significantly, the government’s submission also said it retains the right to keep Djokovic detained even if he wins Monday’s case.

“If the Court makes an additional orders for immediate release of the applicant, notwithstanding the above, the respondent submits that the Court should make it expressly clear that that order does not purport to (nor could it) prevent the respondent or any officer of the Commonwealth from exercising any power to detain that might be available to him or her despite the quashing of the delegate’s cancellation decision,” the submission said.

“An order for immediate release does not prevent re-detention if there is power to detain.”

‘Conflicting information’: Tennis chief spills

Tennis Australia boss Craig Tiley said the organisation received lots of “conflicting advice” as it communicated with state and federal authorities about the rules for unvaccinated players coming into the country with an exemption if they had contracted Covid in the last six months.

“On the course of this journey, as the introduction of medical exemptions were proceeded with, there was plenty of contradictory information, plenty of conflicting information, and we were constantly seeking clarity from day one to ensure that we did the right thing and we were able to bring the players into the country again,” Tiley told Nine on Sunday.

“All I can say is the there was much conflicting information, the whole time. Every single week we were talking to Home Affairs, all parts of government to ensure that we were doing the right thing and we were on the right process with these exemptions, but knowing also that everyone coming had to be vaccinated.

“The conflicting information and the contradicting information we received was because of the changing environment.

“I’m not going to blame anyone, all I will say is we know what we know, we know what we have in front of us and will do the best job we can.”

Djoker’s family keeps on fighting

Djokovic’s family has already blasted Scott Morrison and Australian authorities for their treatment of the 20-time grand slam champion and they were at it again overnight.

At a rally in the Serbian capital of Belgrade, Djokovic’s mother Dijana said her son was staying “in not humane conditions”.

“They detained him and even don’t give him breakfast, he has only lunch and dinner,” she said, quoted by N1 regional television.

“He does not have a normal window, he stares at a wall.”

Srdjan Djokovic, Novak’s dad, took another crack at Morrison, adding: “We hope the court is independent and that it will bring the right decision and that Novak will get out as a winner and as a free man as the person he is.

“What is it that (he did) to deserve such treatment from their politicians, from their prime minister? Their fight between the federal and local governments and the tennis association — we are not interested in that at all.” (read more)