Connect with us

Government

Martenson: It’s Time To Position For The Endgame

Martenson: It’s Time To Position For The Endgame

Published

4 years ago

on

Martenson: It's Time To Position For The Endgame Tyler Durden Sun, 08/09/2020 - 11:00

Authored by Chris Martenson via PeakProsperity.com,

Do you sense an approaching endgame?

Like there’s another heavy shoe to drop? Perhaps an entire closet’s worth?

Certainly there’s entirely too much confusion surrounding SARS-CoV-2 and how to deal with it.

Should people wear masks?  Will schools re-open?  Should they?  Why isn’t Covid-19 being treated consistently across medical centers?  Are there things we could and should be doing to minimize the impacts before people catch it?

I believe there are good common-sense answers, even if complicated, to these and many other related questions  But common sense is in short supply these days, especially amongst our “leaders” in the US (who actually act like bad managers).

Our clueless politicians busy themselves either pandering to or hiding from the media cameras when it comes to Covid-19 response. Meanwhile, Big Pharma is doing everything it can to direct the action in ways that funnel any profits into its pockets — public health be damned.

It’s a certified shit show. No question about it.

But It Gets Worse

Beyond the pandemic, the central banks are busy ignoring Plutarch as they embark on the grandest social experiment in all of human history by floating billionaires’ yachts ever higher as more and more average folks drown beneath the rising waterline.

Displaying either a level of tone-deafness exceeding that of Marie Antionette, or a level of psychopathy matching that of Ted Bundy, the US Federal Reserve is — RIGHT NOW — engaged in the largest transfer of wealth in all of US history.

Between March-April 2020, the Fed added a staggering $282 billion to the bottom-line wealth of US billionaires:

But that wasn’t enough.

So the Fed kept printing. And buying, buying, and buying more and more financial assets held – of course – mainly by the already-wealthy.

By May 2020 the total added became $434 billion, making all the US billionaires more billionaire-y:

But even that wasn’t enough for the Fed.  So it printed even more, increasing the total to $583 billion by June:

Yep, you guessed it. It didn’t stop there. By July, the grand total was up to $637 billion:

Considering that US GDP dropped by -32.9% (annual rate) and clocked in at an annual rate of $19,408 billion in the second quarter of 2020, the US Federal Reserve had granted an astonishing (truly!) 3.3% of the entire output of the entire country to US billionaires.  For doing absolutely nothing.

Yes, people have many reasons to be angry and to protest these days. But they ought to be furious with the Federal Reserve and its lackeys in Congress who have utterly and completely failed to check these egregious, unfair, and socially destructive policies that grossly reward the elite at the expense of the bottom 99%.

Let’s do a little math here. Handing 3.3% of the value of the entire economic output of 160,000,000 working people to roughly 600 individuals is the equivalent of granting each one of those 600 billionaires the entire yearly output of 9,020 people.

It’s like the Fed decided that each billionaire deserved to have 9,020 people become their slaves for the year.  How is that *not* psychopathic?  How is that fair?  What’s the plan here? Keep going until these 600 people own everything in the world?

And where’s the media on this? They happily parrot every statement the Fed makes, without asking even the slightest of critical questions. They are failing us badly, too.

Okay, so why should you care?

Because what the Federal Reserve is doing generates enormous systemic risks which could well destroy the economy and much of our future prosperity.

At heart, I am a conservative in the sense that I’d like to keep (i.e. “conserve”) what we’ve got, both ecologically and economically. I’d vastly prefer that we change our nation’s destructive path now on our own terms than being forced to on reality’s terms later on. As painful as the former may be, the latter will be much more so.

History is complete on the matter: one cannot print one’s way to prosperity.  It’s been tried over and over again and my view is that if it could be done, we’d all be speaking Latin because the Roman Empire with it brilliant engineers would have figured it out millennia ago and would never have collapsed.

If the Romans couldn’t work it out, it simply can’t be done.  Mathematically, it also doesn’t pencil out.  Money is a social agreement, a contract.  It’s not real wealth.  Taking the attempt to the extreme, what would happen if everybody had a billion dollars and nobody had to work?

So printing currency only manages to delay and exacerbate the inevitable by building up the energy for its own destruction.

And the longer the delay, the worse the reckoning when it ultimately arrives.

Being Resilient

Given the fact that America is doing a supremely poor job of managing Covid-19 at the national level – mirrored by many other countries worldwide – it’s all but certain that ‘the economy’ (such as is was) is not coming back.

Tens of millions of jobs have vanished and are not coming back in time to save our over-indebted system.

The central banks’ efforts to prop everything up by jamming stocks, bonds and derivatives to higher and higher price levels are seriously misguided.  Such efforts both add to social injustice – a friction that eventually bursts into flames – and badly distort the price discovery mechanism which then leads to faulty economic and financial decisions.

As Charles Hugh Smith writes:

 If the “Market” Never Goes Down, The System Is Doomed

August 6, 2020

“Markets” that never go down aren’t markets, they’re signaling mechanisms of the Powers That Be. Markets are fundamentally clearing houses of information on price, demand, sentiment, expectations and so on–factual data on supply and demand, shipping costs, cost of credit, etc.–and reflections of trader and consumer emotions and psychology.

If markets are never allowed to go down, the information clearing house has been effectively shut down. Whatever information leaks out has been edited to fit the prevailing narrative, which in this moment is “central banks will never let markets go down ever again, so jump in and ride the guaranteed Bull to easy gains.”

The past 12 years offer ample evidence for this narrative: every dip draws a near-instantaneous monetary-policy response that reverse the dip and gooses markets higher.

That permanent monetary intervention distorts markets doesn’t matter to participants. Who cares if markets have become “markets,” simulacra of real markets that are now nothing but signaling mechanisms that all is well so buy, buy, buy? If gains are essentially guaranteed, who cares that markets are not longer information clearing houses?

Indeed. There’s no reason to care until the fatal spiral downward surprises us all.

(Source)

Yes, it’s all about narrative control. Which is why we cannot trust our health authorities, our monetary authorities, or our political authorities. Each are engaged in their own interlocking versions of narrative control that stretch further and further from the truth (and obvious common sense) with each passing day.

Charles’ words above remind of why we need to care: a fatal downward spiral awaits, one that will catch much of the world by surprise.

Which then brings us to resilience.  More and more people are turning to self-reliance, in whole or part, as they correctly assess that the rising risks.  Social decay, erosion of public services, loss of trust, and even failure points in the food system.

These risks threaten the very bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: food, shelter, water, and safety.

In the post-Covid-19 world, gun sales are up and urban apartment sales are down.  There’s a cultural sea change occurring, not that you know it by the mainstream press. As with most important things, it’s ignored at first:

Here at Peak Prosperity, our wish for you is to be happy, joyous, healthy and to live in peace and safety.  In a word: resilient.

To get there (and stay there) you’re going to have to try new things, skate to where the puck is going to be, and take some risks.

Myself? I moved to the country, bought cows, chicken and pigs, and have a garden.  These things bring me joy and provide me with food security.  I’ve had more than half of my net worth stored in gold and silver for a long time now, because I knew that someday the Endgame would arrive.

We’re there.  The Fed’s recent actions are nothing more and nothing less than a final looting operation.

Same as every other time in history, the last official act is to loot the Treasury.  But today, in the US, we don’t have a Treasury with anything of value left within it.  It has no gold, neither does it have any silver.  It has a negative net worth, with a Net Present Value (NPV) of approximately -$200 trillion.

So what’s left to loot?

The answer is both grubby and disturbing: the purchasing power of every dollar in circulation. 

That’s all that’s left to loot.  At least at scale.  We’re not (yet) to the point of the government confiscating half my chickens, which I half-jokingly (and half not) expect may come to pass once everything falls apart.

Every bank account, every reserve dollar, and every dollar claim is going to be debased.  There’s nothing to debate or even argue about because it’s all right out in the open:

Fed Weighs Abandoning Pre-Emptive Rate Moves to Curb Inflation

Aug. 2, 2020

The Federal Reserve is preparing to effectively abandon its strategy of pre-emptively lifting interest rates to head off higher inflation, a practice it has followed for more than three decades.

Instead, Fed officials would take a more relaxed view by allowing for periods in which inflation would run slightly above the central bank’s 2% target, to make up for past episodes in which inflation ran below the target.

“It would be a significant change in terms of how they are thinking about” the trade-off between employment and inflation, said Jan Hatzius of Goldman Sachs. “A lot of those things look very different now from the way they looked a few years ago,” he said.

(Source)

Translation:  The Fed is going to let inflation rip. And the media’s favorite Fed apologists will do their best to convince us this is actually a noble and good act.

As I’ve explained extensively, inflation is merely government-enabled theft.  It steals a tiny bit from everyone’s past efforts, saved as money, and transfers those bits mainly to itself and a few well-connected insiders.

Snip a penny’s worth of purchasing power from every dollar and you’ve nipped 1% off of tens of trillions of stored dollars.  1% of $1 trillion is $10 billion.  So many tens of billions of dollars of purchasing power is being snipped and transferred.

It’s one of the oldest games in the book, and the Fed’s apologists and enablers help them keep the game covered up.  But it’s not hard to understand if you take the time to look.

Your financial resilience depends on your understanding of inflation and how it works.  My Crash Course chapter on Inflation is a good starting point — you can watch it here.

It’s Time To Position For The Endgame

Between Covid-19 and the Fed’s crazy actions, there’s not a lot of hope of returning to normalcy any time soon.

A lot of people have already arrived at that conclusion. A growing number have already moved to homes outside of cities, where at least they have a degree more control over their destiny.

That’s a good thing, in my view. But it’s just a start.

If current trends continue, we’re actually looking at many years, possibly decades of very difficult times.

But how to prepare? What path will the system follow as it fails us?

In Part 2: Is High Inflation Now A Bigger Danger Than A Deflationary Crash?, we revisit the probabilities of what’s more likely to transpire next given the massive monetary and fiscal actions the authorities are proving themselves willing to take.

Is a crash still a realistic threat? Or will the purchasing power of our currency be sacrificed in the name of “doing whatever it takes!” to prevent the elites from ever having to suffer losses?

The future success of your preparations depend entirely on the answer to this question.

Click here to read Part 2 of this report (free executive summary, enrollment required for full access).

Read More

Related Topics:
Continue Reading

Government

Supreme Court Rules Public Officials May Block Their Constituents On Social Media

Supreme Court Rules Public Officials May Block Their Constituents On Social Media

Authored by Matthew Vadum via The Epoch Times (emphasis…

Published

3 hours ago

on

March 17, 2024

By

Supreme Court Rules Public Officials May Block Their Constituents On Social Media

Authored by Matthew Vadum via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Public officials may block people on social media in certain situations, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously on March 15.

People leave the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington on Feb. 21, 2024. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

At the same time, the court held that public officials who post about topics pertaining to their work on their personal social media accounts are acting on behalf of the government. But such officials can be found liable for violating the First Amendment only when they have been properly authorized by the government to communicate on its behalf.

The case is important because nowadays public officials routinely reach out to voters through social media on the same pages where they discuss personal matters unrelated to government business.

“When a government official posts about job-related topics on social media, it can be difficult to tell whether the speech is official or private,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote for the nation’s highest court.

The case is separate from but brings to mind a lawsuit that several individuals previously filed against former President Donald Trump after he blocked them from accessing his social media account on Twitter, which was later renamed X. The Supreme Court dismissed that case, Biden v. Knight First Amendment Institute, in April 2021 as moot because President Trump had already left office.

At the time of the ruling, the then-Twitter had banned President Trump. When Elon Musk took over the company he reversed that policy.

The new decision in Lindke v. Freed was written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

Respondent James Freed, the city manager of Port Huron, Michigan, used a public Facebook account to communicate with his constituents. Petitioner Kevin Lindke, a resident of Port Huron, criticized the municipality’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, including accusations of hypocrisy by local officials.

Mr. Freed blocked Mr. Lindke and others and removed their comments, according to Mr. Lindke’s petition.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit ruled for Mr. Freed, finding that he was acting only in a personal capacity and that his activities did not constitute governmental action.

Mr. Freed’s attorney, Victoria Ferres, said during oral arguments before the Supreme Court on Oct. 31, 2023, that her client didn’t give up his rights when using social media.

“This country’s 21 million government employees should have the right to talk publicly about their jobs on personal social media accounts like their private-sector counterparts.”

The position advocated by the other side would unfairly punish government officials, and “will result in uncertainty and self-censorship for this country’s government employees despite this Court repeatedly finding that government employees do not lose their rights merely by virtue of public employment,” she said.

In Lindke v. Freed, the Supreme Court found that a public official who prevents a person from comments on the official’s social media pages engages in governmental action under Section 1983 only if the official had “actual authority” to speak on the government’s behalf on a specific matter and if the official claimed to exercise that authority when speaking in the relevant social media posts.

Section 1983 refers to Title 42, U.S. Code, Section 1983, which allows people to sue government actors for deprivation of civil rights.

Justice Barrett wrote that according to the so-called state action doctrine, the test for “actual authority” must be “rooted in written law or longstanding custom to speak for the State.”

“That authority must extend to speech of the sort that caused the alleged rights deprivation. If the plaintiff cannot make this threshold showing of authority, he cannot establish state action.”

“For social-media activity to constitute state action, an official must not only have state authority—he must also purport to use it,” the justice continued.

“State officials have a choice about the capacity in which they choose to speak.”

Citing previous precedent, Justice Barrett wrote that generally a public employee claiming to speak on behalf of the government acts with state authority when he speaks “in his official capacity or” when he uses his speech to carry out “his responsibilities pursuant to state law.”

“If the public employee does not use his speech in furtherance of his official responsibilities, he is speaking in his own voice.”

The Supreme Court remanded the case to the 6th Circuit with instructions to vacate its judgment and ordered it to conduct “further proceedings consistent with this opinion.”

Also on March 15, the Supreme Court ruled on O’Connor-Ratcliff v. Garnier, a related case. The court’s sparse, unanimous opinion was unsigned.

Petitioners Michelle O’Connor-Ratcliff and T.J. Zane were two elected members of the Poway Unified School District Board of Trustees in California who used their personal Facebook and Twitter accounts to communicate with the public.

Respondents Christopher Garnier and Kimberly Garnier, parents of local students, “spammed Petitioners’ posts and tweets with repetitive comments and replies” so the school board members blocked the respondents from the accounts, according to the petition filed by Ms. O’Connor-Ratcliff and Mr. Zane.

But the Garniers said they were acting in good faith.

“The Garniers left comments exposing financial mismanagement by the former superintendent as well as incidents of racism,” the couple said in a brief.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit found in favor of the Garniers, holding that elected officials using social media accounts were participating in a public forum.

The Supreme Court ruled in a three-page opinion that because the 9th Circuit deviated from the standard the high court articulated in Lindke v. Freed, the 9th Circuit’s decision must be vacated.

The case was remanded to the 9th Circuit “for further proceedings consistent with our opinion” in the Lindke case, the Supreme Court stated.

Tyler Durden Sun, 03/17/2024 - 22:10

Read More

Continue Reading

International

Home buyers must now navigate higher mortgage rates and prices

Rates under 4% came and went during the Covid pandemic, but home prices soared. Here’s what buyers and sellers face as the housing season ramps up.

Published

5 hours ago

on

March 17, 2024

By

Springtime is spreading across the country. You can see it as daffodil, camellia, tulip and other blossoms start to emerge. 

You can also see it in the increasing number of for sale signs popping up in front of homes, along with the painting, gardening and general sprucing up as buyers get ready to sell. 

Which leads to two questions: 

  • How is the real estate market this spring? 
  • Where are mortgage rates? 

What buyers and sellers face

The housing market is bedeviled with supply shortages, high prices and slow sales.

Mortgage rates are still high and may limit what a buyer can offer and a seller can expect.  

Related: Analyst warns that a TikTok ban could lead to major trouble for Apple, Big Tech

And there's a factor not expected that may affect the sales process. Fixed commission rates on home sales are going away in July.

Reports this week and in a week will make the situation clearer for buyers and sellers. 

The reports are:

  • Housing starts from the U.S. Commerce Department due Tuesday. The consensus estimate is for a seasonally adjusted rate of about 1.4 million homes. These would include apartments, both rentals and condominiums. 
  • Existing home sales, due Thursday from the National Association of Realtors. The consensus estimate is for a seasonally adjusted sales rate of about 4 million homes. In 2023, some 4.1 million homes were sold, the worst sales rate since 1995. 
  • New-home sales and prices, due Monday from the Commerce Department. Analysts are expecting a sales rate of 661,000 homes (including condos), up 1.5% from a year ago.

Here is what buyers and sellers need to know about the situation. 

Mortgage rates will stay above 5% 

That's what most analysts believe. Right now, the rate on a 30-year mortgage is between 6.7% and 7%. 

Rates peaked at 8% in October after the Federal Reserve signaled it was done raising interest rates.

The Freddie Mac Primary Mortgage Market Survey of March 14 was at 6.74%. 

Freddie Mac buys mortgages from lenders and sells securities to investors. The effect is to replenish lenders' cash levels to make more loans. 

A hotter-than-expected Producer Price Index released that day has pushed quotes to 7% or higher, according to data from Mortgage News Daily, which tracks mortgage markets.

Home buyers must navigate higher mortgage rates and prices this spring.

TheStreet

On a median-priced home (price: $380,000) and a 20% down payment, that means a principal and interest rate payment of $2,022. The payment  does not include taxes and insurance.

Last fall when the 30-year rate hit 8%, the payment would have been $2,230. 

In 2021, the average rate was 2.96%, which translated into a payment of $1,275. 

Short of a depression, that's a rate that won't happen in most of our lifetimes. 

Most economists believe current rates will fall to around 6.3% by the end of the year, maybe lower, depending on how many times the Federal Reserve cuts rates this year. 

If 6%, the payment on our median-priced home is $1,823.

But under 5%, absent a nasty recession, fuhgettaboutit.

Supply will be tight, keeping prices up

Two factors are affecting the supply of homes for sale in just about every market.

First: Homeowners who had been able to land a mortgage at 2.96% are very reluctant to sell because they would then have to find a home they could afford with, probably, a higher-cost mortgage.

More economic news:

Second, the combination of high prices and high mortgage rates are freezing out thousands of potential buyers, especially those looking for homes in lower price ranges.

Indeed, The Wall Street Journal noted that online brokerage Redfin said only about 20% of homes for sale in February were affordable for the typical household.

And here mortgage rates can play one last nasty trick. If rates fall, that means a buyer can afford to pay more. Sellers and their real-estate agents know this too, and may ask for a higher price. 

Covid's last laugh: An inflation surge

Mortgage rates jumped to 8% or higher because since 2022 the Federal Reserve has been fighting to knock inflation down to 2% a year. Raising interest rates was the ammunition to battle rising prices.

In June 2022, the consumer price index was 9.1% higher than a year earlier. 

The causes of the worst inflation since the 1970s were: 

  • Covid-19 pandemic, which caused the global economy to shut down in 2020. When Covid ebbed and people got back to living their lives, getting global supply chains back to normal operation proved difficult. 
  • Oil prices jumped to record levels because of the recovery from the pandemic recovery and Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

What the changes in commissions means

The long-standing practice of paying real-estate agents will be retired this summer, after the National Association of Realtors settled a long and bitter legal fight.

No longer will the seller necessarily pay 6% of the sale price to split between buyer and seller agents.

Both sellers and buyers will have to negotiate separately the services agents have charged for 100 years or more. These include pre-screening properties, writing sales contracts, and the like. The change will continue a trend of adding costs and complications to the process of buying or selling a home.

Already, interest rates are a complication. In addition, homeowners insurance has become very pricey, especially in communities vulnerable to hurricanes, tornadoes, and forest fires. Florida homeowners have seen premiums jump more than 102% in the last three years. A policy now costs three times more than the national average.

Related: Veteran fund manager picks favorite stocks for 2024

 

Read More

Continue Reading

International

Mistakes Were Made

Mistakes Were Made

Authored by C.J.Hopkins via The Consent Factory,

Make fun of the Germans all you want, and I’ve certainly done that…

Published

1 day ago

on

March 17, 2024

By

Mistakes Were Made

Authored by C.J.Hopkins via The Consent Factory,

Make fun of the Germans all you want, and I’ve certainly done that a bit during these past few years, but, if there’s one thing they’re exceptionally good at, it’s taking responsibility for their mistakes. Seriously, when it comes to acknowledging one’s mistakes, and not rationalizing, or minimizing, or attempting to deny them, and any discomfort they may have allegedly caused, no one does it quite like the Germans.

Take this Covid mess, for example. Just last week, the German authorities confessed that they made a few minor mistakes during their management of the “Covid pandemic.” According to Karl Lauterbach, the Minister of Health, “we were sometimes too strict with the children and probably started easing the restrictions a little too late.” Horst Seehofer, the former Interior Minister, admitted that he would no longer agree to some of the Covid restrictions today, for example, nationwide nighttime curfews. “One must be very careful with calls for compulsory vaccination,” he added. Helge Braun, Head of the Chancellery and Minister for Special Affairs under Merkel, agreed that there had been “misjudgments,” for example, “overestimating the effectiveness of the vaccines.”

This display of the German authorities’ unwavering commitment to transparency and honesty, and the principle of personal honor that guides the German authorities in all their affairs, and that is deeply ingrained in the German character, was published in a piece called “The Divisive Virus” in Der Spiegel, and immediately widely disseminated by the rest of the German state and corporate media in a totally organic manner which did not in any way resemble one enormous Goebbelsian keyboard instrument pumping out official propaganda in perfect synchronization, or anything creepy and fascistic like that.

Germany, after all, is “an extremely democratic state,” with freedom of speech and the press and all that, not some kind of totalitarian country where the masses are inundated with official propaganda and critics of the government are dragged into criminal court and prosecuted on trumped-up “hate crime” charges.

OK, sure, in a non-democratic totalitarian system, such public “admissions of mistakes” — and the synchronized dissemination thereof by the media — would just be a part of the process of whitewashing the authorities’ fascistic behavior during some particularly totalitarian phase of transforming society into whatever totalitarian dystopia they were trying to transform it into (for example, a three-year-long “state of emergency,” which they declared to keep the masses terrorized and cooperative while they stripped them of their democratic rights, i.e., the ones they hadn’t already stripped them of, and conditioned them to mindlessly follow orders, and robotically repeat nonsensical official slogans, and vent their impotent hatred and fear at the new “Untermenschen” or “counter-revolutionaries”), but that is obviously not the case here.

No, this is definitely not the German authorities staging a public “accountability” spectacle in order to memory-hole what happened during 2020-2023 and enshrine the official narrative in history. There’s going to be a formal “Inquiry Commission” — conducted by the same German authorities that managed the “crisis” — which will get to the bottom of all the regrettable but completely understandable “mistakes” that were made in the heat of the heroic battle against The Divisive Virus!

OK, calm down, all you “conspiracy theorists,” “Covid deniers,” and “anti-vaxxers.” This isn’t going to be like the Nuremberg Trials. No one is going to get taken out and hanged. It’s about identifying and acknowledging mistakes, and learning from them, so that the authorities can manage everything better during the next “pandemic,” or “climate emergency,” or “terrorist attack,” or “insurrection,” or whatever.

For example, the Inquiry Commission will want to look into how the government accidentally declared a Nationwide State of Pandemic Emergency and revised the Infection Protection Act, suspending the German constitution and granting the government the power to rule by decree, on account of a respiratory virus that clearly posed no threat to society at large, and then unleashed police goon squads on the thousands of people who gathered outside the Reichstag to protest the revocation of their constitutional rights.

Once they do, I’m sure they’ll find that that “mistake” bears absolutely no resemblance to the Enabling Act of 1933, which suspended the German constitution and granted the government the power to rule by decree, after the Nazis declared a nationwide “state of emergency.”

Another thing the Commission will probably want to look into is how the German authorities accidentally banned any further demonstrations against their arbitrary decrees, and ordered the police to brutalize anyone participating in such “illegal demonstrations.”

And, while the Commission is inquiring into the possibly slightly inappropriate behavior of their law enforcement officials, they might want to also take a look at the behavior of their unofficial goon squads, like Antifa, which they accidentally encouraged to attack the “anti-vaxxers,” the “Covid deniers,” and anyone brandishing a copy of the German constitution.

Come to think of it, the Inquiry Commission might also want to look into how the German authorities, and the overwhelming majority of the state and corporate media, accidentally systematically fomented mass hatred of anyone who dared to question the government’s arbitrary and nonsensical decrees or who refused to submit to “vaccination,” and publicly demonized us as “Corona deniers,” “conspiracy theorists,” “anti-vaxxers,” “far-right anti-Semites,” etc., to the point where mainstream German celebrities like Sarah Bosetti were literally describing us as the inessential “appendix” in the body of the nation, quoting an infamous Nazi almost verbatim.

And then there’s the whole “vaccination” business. The Commission will certainly want to inquire into that. They will probably want to start their inquiry with Karl Lauterbach, and determine exactly how he accidentally lied to the public, over and over, and over again …

And whipped people up into a mass hysteria over “KILLER VARIANTS” …

And “LONG COVID BRAIN ATTACKS” …

And how “THE UNVACCINATED ARE HOLDING THE WHOLE COUNTRY HOSTAGE, SO WE NEED TO FORCIBLY VACCINATE EVERYONE!”

And so on. I could go on with this all day, but it will be much easier to just refer you, and the Commission, to this documentary film by Aya Velázquez. Non-German readers may want to skip to the second half, unless they’re interested in the German “Corona Expert Council” …

Look, the point is, everybody makes “mistakes,” especially during a “state of emergency,” or a war, or some other type of global “crisis.” At least we can always count on the Germans to step up and take responsibility for theirs, and not claim that they didn’t know what was happening, or that they were “just following orders,” or that “the science changed.”

Plus, all this Covid stuff is ancient history, and, as Olaf, an editor at Der Spiegel, reminds us, it’s time to put the “The Divisive Pandemic” behind us …

… and click heels, and heil the New Normal Democracy!

Tyler Durden Sat, 03/16/2024 - 23:20

Read More

Continue Reading

Trending