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Why You Can’t Trust the CDC on Vaccines – Collective Evolution

Posted by M. C. on August 4, 2019

https://www.collective-evolution.com/2019/01/27/why-you-cant-trust-the-cdc-on-vaccines/

By

Written by Jeremy R. Hammond

In Brief

  • The Facts:The major media dismiss public vaccine policy critics as “conspiracy theorists”, but no conspiracy is required to explain how it can be true that the CDC deceives about vaccines.
  • Reflect On:Why is this information constantly ignored and demonized? What’s really going on here?

As I have covered in previous articles for Children’s Health Defense, the fundamental assumptions underlying the recommendation of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that everyone aged six months and up should get an annual flu shot are unsupported by scientific evidence. Examining a case study from the New York Times, we’ve seen how the corporate media manufacture consent for public vaccine policy by grossly misinforming their audiences about the science—and how, in doing so, the media are just following the CDC’s example. We’ve seen how the CDC uses deceptive fear marketing to increase demand for influenza vaccines, and how the CDC’s claims that flu vaccination significantly reduces deaths among the elderly have been thoroughly discredited by the scientific community.

As far as the discourse about vaccines goes in the mainstream media, this problem doesn’t exist. The media treat the CDC as practically the most credible and authoritative source for information about vaccines on the planet and unquestioningly amplify the CDC’s public relations messaging. We saw in our New York Times case study just how blatantly the media participate in misinforming the public, with health writer Aaron E. Carroll supporting his argument that everyone should follow the CDC’s recommendation to get a flu shot by citing a study whose authors actually concluded not only that the CDC’s policy is unsupported by the scientific evidence, but also that the CDC deliberately misrepresents the science to support its policy!

As far as the mainstream discourse is concerned, the idea that the public is being grossly misinformed about the safety and effectiveness of vaccines requires belief in “conspiracy theories”. But no conspiracy theory is required to explain how it can be that the CDC is misinforming the public about vaccines. The media is just demonstrably serving its usual function, as outlined by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky in their book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, of advocating government policy rather than doing journalism. This is not a conspiracy. It’s just an institutionalized bias stemming from what Chomsky has called the “state religion”—an undying faith in the fundamental benevolence of the US government and its agencies.

Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.

Likewise, no conspiracy theory is required to explain how it can be that the government agency charged with formulating public vaccine policy is misinforming the public about vaccine science. On the contrary, the CDC’s behavior can be explained to a considerable degree solely by good intentions. Public health officials generally are simply convinced that, in performing their individual function in the mechanisms of government, they are doing good and serving the public interest.

But as economist Milton Friedman once pertinently observed, “Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.” The road to hell is paved with good intentions, as the saying goes; or, as reiterated in Psychology Today, “If our interventions cause more harm than good, the interventions are not moral regardless of the loftiness of our intentions.”…

And it’s not as though the medical establishment has not been wrong before! As Dave Sackett, “the father of evidence based medicine”, once quipped, “Half of what you’ll learn in medical school will be shown to be either dead wrong or out of date within five years of your graduation; the trouble is that nobody can tell you which half—so the most important thing to learn is how to learn on your own.”

Too many people just don’t think for themselves, but succumb to groupthink. And this situation isn’t helped by the pharmaceutical industry’s undue influence on the direction of science. As BMJ editor Richard Horton has commented, “Journals have devolved into information-laundering operations for the pharmaceutical industry.”…

Among the numerous other problems affecting the quality of research are financial conflicts of interests and institutionalized prejudices. As Ioannidis elaborated:

“Conflicts of interest are very common in biomedical research, and typically they are inadequately and sparsely reported. Prejudice may not necessarily have financial roots. Scientists in a given field may be prejudiced purely because of their belief in a scientific theory or commitment to their own findings. Many otherwise seemingly independent, university-based studies may be conducted for no other reason than to give physicians and researchers qualifications for promotion or tenure. Such nonfinancial conflicts may also lead to distorted reported results and interpretations. Prestigious investigators may suppress via the peer review process the appearance and dissemination of findings that refute their findings, thus condemning their field to perpetuate false dogma. Empirical evidence on expert opinion shows that it is extremely unreliable.”

As The Atlantic noted, Ioannidis has estimated that “as much as 90 percent of the published medical information that doctors rely on is flawed”, and “he worries that the field of medical research is so pervasively flawed, and so riddled with conflicts of interest, that it might be chronically resistant to change—or even to publicly admitting that there’s a problem.”

That certainly also applies to the CDC, where corruption and conflicts of interest are an endemic problem.

The Endemic Corruption at the CDC

Perhaps the most infamous example is how the head of the CDC from 2002 to 2009, Julie Gerberding, left her government job to go work as president of Merck’s $5 billion global vaccine division. Merck’s CEO understandably described Gerberding as an “ideal choice”. She held that position until 2014 and currently holds the Merck job title of “Executive Vice President & Chief Patent Officer, Strategic Communications, Global Public Policy and Population Health”. That is to say, the former CDC director is now in charge of Merck’s propaganda efforts. One might say she’s basically doing the same job now that she did for the CDC, but even more lucratively. Apart from her salary, in 2015, Gerberding sold shares of Merck worth over $2.3 million dollars.

A more recent example came in January 2018, when CDC Director Brenda Fitzgerald was forced to resign after Politico reported that, after assuming leadership of the CDC on July 7, 2017, she “bought tens of thousands of dollars in new stock holdings in at least a dozen companies”—including Merck…

Examples of the corruption included the following:

  • “The CDC routinely grants waivers from conflict of interest rules to every member of its advisory committee.”
  • “CDC Advisory Committee members who are not allowed to vote on certain recommendations due to financial conflicts of interest are allowed to participate in committee deliberations and advocate specific positions.”
  • “The Chairman of the CDC’s advisory committee until very recently owned 600 shares of stock in Merck….”
  • “Members of the CDC’s advisory Committee often fill out incomplete financial disclosure statements, and are not required to provide the missing information by CDC ethics officials.”
  • “Four out of eight CDC advisory committee members who voted to approve guidelines for the rotavirus vaccine in June 1998 had financial ties to pharmaceutical companies that were developing different versions of the vaccine.”
  • “3 out of 5 FDA advisory committee members who voted to approve the rotavirus vaccine in December 1997 had financial ties to pharmaceutical companies that were developing different versions of the vaccine.”

A US Senate report from June 2007 noted how surveys showed that Americans “overwhelmingly” viewed the CDC as doing a good job at keeping them healthy, as well as how the CDC took advantage of that perception by seeking ever increasing levels of funding year after year—and yet the CDC had little to show for its exorbitant spending.

The Senate report named Julie Gerberding as an example of the problem. Under her leadership, bonuses for the people managing the CDC increased dramatically. The top three CDC financial officers, for example, had “taken in more than a quarter million dollars in bonuses” over the previous several years. A New York Times analysis, the Senate report noted, had found that “The share of premium bonuses given to those within the director’s office has risen at least tenfold under Dr. Gerberding’s leadership.”

Contractors who previously were employed by the CDC appear to have found a lucrative way to make their CDC connection pay off.

Another problem was the “revolving door” of Washington…

Conclusion

In sum, while the CDC is the mainstream media’s go-to source for information on any vaccine-related story, the public has every reason to be skeptical of the information coming out of this agency. It is certainly no “conspiracy theory” to claim that the CDC is misinforming the public about the safety and effectiveness of vaccines. On the contrary, that the CDC does so is demonstrable and recognized in the scientific literature.

It also requires no “conspiracy theory” to explain how this can be so. It certainly does not follow from the assumption that government officials in positions of power are acting out of benevolent intent that therefore their policies are not harmful. The institutionalized confirmation bias and endemic corruption are more than sufficient to explain how it can be that the CDC is misinforming the public about vaccines.

Be seeing you

 

 

 

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The truth about Parkland – spiked

Posted by M. C. on August 4, 2019

He vandalised the school, tossed furniture across classrooms, brought knives and bullets to school, and threatened to kill teachers. Eighteen months before his massacre, staff were so concerned about his violent tendencies and fascination with guns that they banned him from practicing shooting skills with the junior officer corps, and prohibited him from carrying a backpack – yet they still let him attend classes, until he was expelled in 2017…

In January 2018, just one month before the attack, the FBI’s national tipline received a warning from a woman who was concerned Cruz would ‘get into a school and just shoot the place up’. The FBI acknowledged that Cruz had made a death threat, but that tip was never forwarded to the local FBI office to act on. The FBI offered regrets to the families, but has not explained why this happened. It looks like sheer incompetence.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/01/22/the-truth-about-parkland/

…In one sense, the answer to what happened is no mystery at all: the Parkland shooter, Nikolas Cruz, is responsible for the killings. But, as the latest reports reveal, the police, school officials and other authorities had numerous opportunities to intervene to try to stop Cruz, but didn’t. While there were many acts of heroism on the day itself, there were also police and other officials who refused to act, out of cowardice. And even before the fateful day, too many adults looked the other way rather than address the problems with Cruz. Those who were supposed to be in authority have to bear some responsibility, too.

The cowardice of police officers and school staff

We knew from reports emerging after the 14 February attack that armed police had failed to confront Cruz, but the full details of their incompetence and cowardice are worse than first thought.

On that afternoon, Cruz was dropped off by an Uber at the school, and walked into the school with a rifle bag and a backpack. Outside, a campus monitor, Andrew Medina, spotted Cruz, knew he was carrying a gun bag, and knew Cruz as ‘Crazy Boy’. Medina radioed to tell another monitor in the building, but he did not pursue Cruz himself. He later said ‘something inside told me not to approach him’. The second monitor, David Taylor, started to follow Cruz in the school, recognising him as ‘someone they had previously discussed as being a potential school shooter’, but then walked away from him (later claiming that he was going to intercept him). Hearing gunshots, Taylor hid in a janitor’s closet, and did not notify others or set off a ‘Code Red’ alarm. Other monitors – Andrew Feis and Chris Hixon – acted more courageously than Medina and Taylor, and charged Cruz, but it cost them their lives.

While these two campus monitors were unarmed, the school also had an armed policeman (known as a school resource officer) on the site, Deputy Scot Peterson. Once in the building, Cruz pulled a fire alarm, and, as students spilled into the hallways thinking it was a fire drill, he started shooting them indiscriminately. Hearing gunfire, Peterson radioed to say ‘possible shots fired’ in the building, but he did not enter. Instead, he took cover, and called for an intersection to be cordoned off and a school lockdown. Four more Broward County deputies arrived on the scene, and heard gunshots, but remained in their cars. It was later revealed that Cruz used a relatively small magazine (six shots), and paused often to reload; it’s possible that during those pauses he could have been stopped – if police were there.

Six minutes after he began his deadly assault, Cruz dropped his rifle, left the school and ran across campus. The police thought he was still inside. Peterson told other deputies over the radio to stay out of the school. Police from another force, Coral Springs, arrived, and a Broward cop told them: ‘Don’t go in.’ They rightly ignored this advice, but it was too late. It was not until five minutes after Cruz had left that the first officer went into the building.

Prior training instructed police to rush towards gunshots, but that did not happen in Parkland on that day. No command post was immediately established – again, in contravention of training. It was not clear who was in charge, just chaos. After scrambling around and discovering Cruz had escaped, the police finally apprehended Cruz in town, over an hour after he started his rampage…

School officials knew well that Cruz had serious problems and was potentially dangerous. He was held back twice, and was frequently transferred between schools. He vandalised the school, tossed furniture across classrooms, brought knives and bullets to school, and threatened to kill teachers. Eighteen months before his massacre, staff were so concerned about his violent tendencies and fascination with guns that they banned him from practicing shooting skills with the junior officer corps, and prohibited him from carrying a backpack – yet they still let him attend classes, until he was expelled in 2017…

In 2013, following Obama administration pressure to reduce racial disparities in suspensions and expulsions, the district adopted a new policy to limit police arrests at school. The Broward programme, called PROMISE (Preventing Recidivism though Opportunities, Mentoring, Interventions, Support and Education), meant that even felonies such as weapons possession and assault could be kept from the police. Cruz’s lack of criminal record meant he could pass a background check and legally purchase the AR-15 rifle he used to kill…

 

As early as 2016, the police and FBI received tips that Cruz had threatened to shoot up a school, yet took no action. In September 2016, the sheriff’s office received a report that a teenager ‘planned to shoot up the school’. Police identified that person as Cruz, but did nothing more than inform the school. Maybe Cruz should not have been arrested as a result, but it is hard to explain why he wasn’t placed under greater supervision, given his background.

A year later, in September 2017, Cruz posted a comment on YouTube: ‘Im [sic] going to be a professional school shooter.’ The FBI learned of this, and despite Cruz listing his username as ‘nikolas cruz’, they said they could not identify the person who posted the comment.

Three months before the massacre, the sheriff’s office received a call warning that Cruz was collecting guns and knives, and would ‘kill himself one day and believe he could be a school shooter in the making’. In January 2018, just one month before the attack, the FBI’s national tipline received a warning from a woman who was concerned Cruz would ‘get into a school and just shoot the place up’. The FBI acknowledged that Cruz had made a death threat, but that tip was never forwarded to the local FBI office to act on. The FBI offered regrets to the families, but has not explained why this happened. It looks like sheer incompetence.

Aftermath: blaming guns…

Be seeing you

fast_and_furious.jpg

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Our Planet Is Not Fragile – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on August 4, 2019

Occasionally, environmentalists spill the beans and reveal their true agenda. Barry Commoner said, “Capitalism is the earth’s number one enemy.” Amherst College professor Leo Marx said, “On ecological grounds, the case for world government is beyond argument.”

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2019/03/walter-e-williams/our-planet-is-not-fragile/

By

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez claims that “the world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.” The people at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change agree, saying that to avoid some of the most devastating impacts of climate change, the world must slash carbon emissions by 45 percent by 2030 and completely decarbonize by 2050.

Such dire warnings are not new. In 1970, Harvard University biology professor George Wald, a Nobel laureate, predicted, “Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” Also in 1970, Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford University biologist, predicted in an article for The Progressive, “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.” The year before, he had warned, “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.” Despite such harebrained predictions, Ehrlich has won no fewer than 16 awards, including the 1990 Crafoord Prize, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences’ highest award.

Leftists constantly preach such nonsense as “The world that we live in is beautiful but fragile.” “The 3rd rock from the sun is a fragile oasis.” “Remember that Earth needs to be saved every single day.” These and many other statements, along with apocalyptic predictions, are stock in trade for environmentalists. Worse yet, this fragile-earth indoctrination is fed to the nation’s youth from kindergarten through college. That’s why many millennials support Rep. Ocasio-Cortez.

Let’s examine just a few cataclysmic events that exceed any destructive power of mankind and then ask how our purportedly fragile planet could survive. The 1883 eruption of the Krakatoa volcano, in present-day Indonesia, had the force of 200 megatons of TNT. That’s the equivalent of 13,300 15-kiloton atomic bombs, the kind that destroyed Hiroshima in World War II. Before that was the 1815 Tambora eruption, the largest known volcanic eruption. It spewed so much debris into the atmosphere that 1816 became known as the “Year Without a Summer.” It led to crop failures and livestock death in the Northern Hemisphere, producing the worst famine of the 19th century. The A.D. 535 Krakatoa eruption had such force that it blotted out much of the light and heat of the sun for 18 months and is said to have led to the Dark Ages. Geophysicists estimate that just three volcanic eruptions — Indonesia (1883), Alaska (1912) and Iceland (1947) — spewed more carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere than all of mankind’s activities during our entire history.

Our so-called fragile earth survived other catastrophic events, such as the floods in China in 1887, which took an estimated 1 million to 2 million lives, followed by floods there in 1931, which took an estimated 1 million to 4 million lives. What about the impact of earthquakes on our fragile earth? Chile’s 1960 Valdivia earthquake was 9.5 on the Richter scale. It created a force equivalent to 1,000 atomic bombs going off at the same time. The deadly 1556 earthquake in China’s Shaanxi province devastated an area of 520 miles.

Our so-called fragile earth faces outer space terror. Two billion years ago, an asteroid hit earth, creating the Vredefort crater in South Africa, which has a diameter of 190 miles. In Ontario, there’s the Sudbury Basin, resulting from a meteor strike 1.8 billion years ago. At 39 miles long, 19 miles wide and 9 miles deep, it’s the second-largest impact structure on earth. Virginia’s Chesapeake Bay crater is a bit smaller, about 53 miles wide. Then there’s the famous but puny Meteor Crater in Arizona, which is not even a mile wide.

My question is: Which of these powers of nature could be duplicated by mankind? For example, could mankind even come close to duplicating the polluting effects of the 1815 Tambora volcanic eruption? It is the height of arrogance to think that mankind can make significant parametric changes in the earth or can match nature’s destructive forces. Our planet is not fragile.

Occasionally, environmentalists spill the beans and reveal their true agenda. Barry Commoner said, “Capitalism is the earth’s number one enemy.” Amherst College professor Leo Marx said, “On ecological grounds, the case for world government is beyond argument.”

Be seeing you

 

 

 

 

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Life in the Marxist Age – American Free Press

Posted by M. C. on August 4, 2019

http://americanfreepress.net/life-in-the-marxist-age/

By Donald Jeffries

Portland State University philosophy professor Peter Boghossian recently attempted to expose how ludicrous political correctness has become. Unfortunately for him, his attempt succeeded all too well—and now he may be out of a job.

Over the course of a few years, Boghossian and two academics produced 20 hoax essays, collectively called “the Grievance Studies” experiment, that were written to be as ridiculous as possible and designed to appeal to small special interest groups made up of mostly far-left scholars.

Seven of Boghossian’s bogus studies were accepted for publication by social science journals, including a feminist rewrite of Hitler’s Mein Kampf. The journal Gender, Place, and Culture bit on a piece claiming to study “canine rape culture.”

In that study, Boghossian and his colleagues charged that, “dog parks are rape-condoning spaces and a place of rampant canine rape culture and systemic oppression against ‘the oppressed dog’ through which human attitudes to both problems can be measured.” Boghossian’s team even claimed to have “tactfully inspected the genitals of slightly fewer than 10,000 dogs whilst interrogating owners as to their sexuality.”

In another eagerly accepted article, the hoaxers demanded that the world of bodybuilding recognize “fat bodybuilding, as a fat-inclusive politicized performance.”

For his efforts, which once brought to light should have caused academia to engage in some self-analysis, Portland State University moved to fire Boghossian.

“I truly hope the administration puts its institutional weight behind the pursuit of truth, but I’ve been given no indication that’s what they intend to do,” Boghossian said.

All of the journals involved are part of the dubious field of “grievance studies.” Some in the mainstream media attempted to rationalize and defend academia’s attachment to the most extreme, and in these cases totally fabricated, areas of identity politics that focus on gender and race.

A group of 11 Portland State professors and one graduate student published an anonymous letter in the student newspaper Vanguard, which featured a menacing image of Boghossian equipped with a Pinocchio nose. They charged Boghossian’s team with repeated “fraudulent behavior violating acceptable norms of research in any discipline” and castigated the beleaguered professor for inviting James Damore, who was fired by Google for exercising his right to free speech, to an event at the university.

“Boghossian has not only indicated his less-than-collegial attitude through his hoaxes,” they charged, “but has actively targeted faculty at other institutions. None of us wish to contend with threats of death and assault from online trolls.”

.

Some in the academic world displayed a degree of rationality. Yascha Mounk, a Harvard lecturer in government, condemned what he viewed as unfair attempts to undermine the hoaxers.

“Even if all of the charges laid at the feet of Boghossian [and the two other authors] were true, they would have demonstrated a very worrying fact,” Mounk wrote. “Some of the leading journals in areas like gender studies have failed to distinguish between real scholarship and intellectually vacuous as well as morally troubling [expletive deleted].”

In a recent YouTube video, Boghossian read out an email from Portland State, which threatened an investigation and sanctions against him.

“I think that they will do everything and anything in their power to get me out,” he stated. “And I think this is the first shot in that.”

Boghossian’s case is merely the latest example of political correctness run amok on college campuses across the country. Earlier this month, it was widely reported that Washington, D.C.’s American University would be hosting a multisession seminar aimed at getting faculty to combat “white language supremacy.” The seminar will also propose “alternative” methods of assessing writing other than quality, such as “labor-based grading contracts.”

While even the most unthreatening and lukewarm “conservative” voices have been denied the opportunity to speak at various universities, some astonishingly anti-white figures have been welcomed.

Christian evangelical Wheaton College, not a typical leftist institution, permitted Emory University philosophy professor George Yancy to speak there in 2017, in the esteemed Billy Graham Center on campus. His speech was filled with expletives and hateful declarations like, “To be white is to be racist.” Stephens College, a women’s college in Columbia, Mo., recently announced that it will “admit and enroll students who were not born female, but who identify and live as women.” All-women Mount Holyoke College canceled plans to change its logo due to protests that it could be perceived as not being inclusive to transgender students.

Boghossian merely demonstrated what is obvious: In today’s America, satire is impossible while a frighteningly authoritarian political correctness rules the day.

Be seeing you

offended

Citizen: “What are you protesting against” Johnny: “What have you got?” The Wild One

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Doug Casey on the Nobel Prize in Economics – Casey Research

Posted by M. C. on August 4, 2019

A combination of hysteria, ignorance of science, and where the money is coming from. Almost all the money for research comes from grants. If you want a grant you have to display the right political attitude. The whole idea of global warming is completely corrupting the science community. If you deny AGW, it’s like denying the Jewish Holocaust in Europe. They won’t even talk to you. You’re certainly not going to get a government grant. Government and foundation grants are what drive science today.

https://www.caseyresearch.com/doug-casey-on-the-nobel-prize-in-economics/

By  October 26, 2018

Justin’s note: Two Americans just won this year’s Nobel Prize in Economics.

William Nordhaus, one of the recipients, was awarded the prize for his work on climate change. Paul Romer, the other recipient, won for research on how regulations and policies can encourage new ideas and long-term prosperity.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which selects the recipients, called these the “basic and pressing” economic issues of our time. And I believe many people would agree with that statement.

But Doug Casey isn’t one of them. I know because I recently spoke with Doug about this topic. And, as usual, he had some interesting things to say. See for yourself in today’s Conversations With Casey.

Justin: Doug, what do you think of the latest Nobel Prize in Economics winners? Do they deserve the award?

Doug: The Nobel Prize in Economics should be abolished, along with those for Literature and Peace. All three are passed out arbitrarily, to whomever is currently in fashion, or has the best political connections.

It’s all about Cultural Marxist and socialist intellectuals patting each other on the back. The prestige associated with everything from favorable book reviews to the Nobel Prize legitimizes these people in the eyes of the public. There have been exceptions—but very few, and only enough to keep the Nobels from being total laughing stocks. Left-wing intellectuals talking to left-wing intellectuals about topics of interest to nobody but left-wing intellectuals. All reported on glowingly by their minions in the lickspittle media.

These prizes have about zero relationship to those for Chemistry, Physics, or Medicine—where the achievement is quantifiable, and of objective benefit to humanity.

This year’s winners of the Economics Prize, Romer and Nordhaus, are typical. Neither is a real economist. An economist is someone who describes the way the world works, how men go about producing and consuming in a voluntary marketplace.

These guys aren’t economists. They’re political apologists, who prescribe the way they think the world ought to work, and try to enforce their notions on society. The whole study of economics is quite degraded. It’s now viewed as a subdivision of mathematics, with all kinds of arcane and irrelevant formulae. In fact, economics is a division of philosophy.

Romer, the son of a former Colorado governor, basically puts forward the notion that governments should encourage, or direct, spending to speed up progress. It’s a ridiculous notion, assuming bureaucrats are wiser and smarter than the people who actually created the wealth. It’s an idiotic and destructive view that underlies all socialist and fascist systems. The USSR was an archetype of this thinking. I’m genuinely surprised people don’t laugh and roll their eyes when they encounter these nostrums.

Justin: How about Nordhaus?

Doug: Well, his hobbyhorse is anthropogenic global warming [AGW], and what governments should do about it. This opens up several cans of worms. Number one, does AGW exist? And if it does, should the government do something about it?

Despite everything said in the popular press and in some scientific papers, my belief is that AGW is completely trivial. And what is there is going to drop as improvements in technology make all industrial and consumer processes vastly more efficient. The current hysteria has very little to do with physics, and almost all to do with aberrant psychology.

Can humans change the environment? Of course they can. We do it all the time. Humans have wiped out various species over time—everything from the dodo bird to the passenger pigeon to almost all of the North American buffalo. Humans can have a huge effect on the environment. But does that mean humans are causing AGW?

Contrary to what you hear in the popular media, the proposition is completely unproven. The temperature of the earth has varied radically throughout history, going back 4.5 billion years. This includes an epoch about 500 million years ago when the whole earth was a snowball for as much as 200 million years. Although the earth will wind up fried to a crisp in a few billion years when the sun turns into a red giant, cold is probably a bigger risk than heat. The sun is all that keeps us from approaching the absolute zero of interstellar space.

CO2 is the main focus of the current hysteria. Carbon dioxide levels have varied radically over the eons. In the days of dinosaurs, carbon dioxide levels were many times what they are today, and they’ve basically been going down since Day One.

CO2 is plant food; it is to plants what oxygen is to animals. At about 400 parts per million in the atmosphere it’s really just a trace gas. The vast majority of the so-called Greenhouse Effect is actually caused by potentially much more deadly dihydrogen oxide vapor. When the man in the street is told about this danger, about 10% of them want the government to illegalize it.

Atmospheric CO2 levels are dictated by volcanism and absorption of the gas in seawater. There are thousands of active volcanoes on the planet, spewing CO2, SO2, CH4, and numerous other greenhouse gases in massive quantity. A lot is absorbed by seawater, which has a vastly larger effect on the climate than the atmosphere.

Over the long run, however, CO2 levels are driven by rocks. What happened to all the CO2 when it was, say, 20% of the atmosphere—that’s 200,000 parts per million? It’s now the carbonate part of limestone-calcium carbonate—and other rocks.

But it’s foolish to get hung up on CO2. Many, many things drive the temperature of the earth. Part of it is cosmic rays. They have a huge influence on the amount of cloud cover, which can change temperature immensely. Part of it is the changing tilt in the earth’s axis. Part is the gradual, and cyclical, change in the earth’s orbit around the sun. Part of it may well be the solar system’s orbit around the galaxy, believe it or not.

People have completely forgotten that in the 1970s national magazines were showing images of glaciers knocking over the skyscrapers in New York because they were afraid of a new ice age. People have also forgotten that from about the 1500s through the 1800s, we actually had a little ice age. Before that was the medieval warm period, 700-1400 AD, and before that another cold snap that coincided with the Dark Ages. From roughly 200 BC to 200 AD—coinciding with the rise of the Roman empire—the world was warmer than it is today. They weren’t big CO2 emitters…

Be seeing you

 

 

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Tulsi Gabbard Is Driving The MSM Bat Shit Crazy – Caitlin Johnstone

Posted by M. C. on August 4, 2019

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2019/02/07/tulsi-gabbard-is-driving-the-msm-bat-shit-crazy/

author: Caitlin Johnstone

When Tulsi Gabbard announced her plans to run in the 2020 presidential election, I predicted that it would disrupt war propaganda narratives and force a much-needed conversation about US interventionism, but I didn’t realize that it would happen so quickly, so ubiquitously, and so explosively. Gabbard officially began her campaign for president a mere three days ago, and already she’s become the front line upon which the debate about US warmongering is happening. Even if you oppose Gabbard’s run for the presidency, this should be self-evident to you by now.

This dynamic became more apparent than ever today in Gabbard’s appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, hosted by spouses Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski. It should here be noted since we’re talking about war propaganda that in 2009 Scarborough turned down an easy run for the US Senate because he decided that he could have more influence on public policy as the host of Morning Joe than he could as one of 100 US senators, which tells you everything you need to know about why I focus more on US mass media propaganda than I do on US politics. It should also be noted that Brzezinski is the daughter of the late Carter administration cold warrior Zbigniew Brzezinski, whose influential ideas about US world domination, arming extremist factions to advance US interests, and hawkish agendas against Russia continue to infect US foreign policy to this day. Mika is part of a political dynasty, with both brothers being US political insiders as well.

So if you’ve ever wondered how outlets like MSNBC keep everyone on message and fully in alignment with the US war machine’s agendas, there’s a good insight into how. Combine that with the way they stock their punditry lineup with US intelligence community insiders and fire any pundit who refuses to toe the military-industrial complex line, and it’s not hard to see how they’ve developed such a tight echo chamber of hostility toward any resistance to US interventionism. Which explains what we’re about to discuss next.

Morning Joe’s pile-on against Gabbard began when the subject of Syria came up, and panelist Kasie Hunt instantly began losing her shit.

“Do you think Assad is our enemy?” Hunt interrupted during Gabbard’s response to a question about her meeting with Syria’s president in 2017, her voice and face both strained with emotion.

“Assad is not the enemy of the United States because Syria does not pose a direct threat to the United States,” Gabbard replied.

“What do you say to Democratic voters who watched you go over there, and what do you say to military members who have been deployed repeatedly in Syria pushing back against Assad?” Hunt replied, somehow believing that US soldiers are in Syria fighting against the Syrian government, which would probably come as a shock to the troops who’ve been told that they are there to defeat ISIS.

Journalist Rania Khalek summed up this insanity perfectly, tweeting, “The journalist interrogating Tulsi seems to believe that US forces in Syria are fighting Assad. Tulsi corrects her, says those troops were deployed there to fight ISIS. These people don’t even know what’s happening in the places they want the US to occupy.”

“This is such an embarrassing look at the state of corporate American regime media,” tweeted journalist Max Blumenthal. “@kasie doesn’t know the most basic facts about Syria and along with the smug co-hosts, doesn’t care to learn.”

And it didn’t get any better from there. After Gabbard took some time to explain to a professional cable news reporter the basic fundamentals of the US military’s official involvement in Syria, Scarborough interjected to ask if Assad isn’t an enemy, would Gabbard at least concede that he is “an adversary of the United States.”

Whatever the fuck that means. What Assad is is the leader of a sovereign nation which has nothing to do with the United States and isn’t taking anything from or harming the United States in any way.

Scarborough and Gabbard went back and forth about this stupid, nonsensical question before Brzezinski interjected to ask “So what would you say he is to the United States? If you cannot say that he’s an adversary or an enemy, what is Assad to the U.S.? What is the word?”

“You can describe it however you want to describe it,” Gabbard responded, explaining that whether a nation is adversarial or not comes down to whether or not they are working against US interests.

“Are Assad’s interests aligned with ours?” asked Hunt.

“What are Assad’s interests?” Gabbard countered.

“Assad seems interested primarily in the slaughter of his own people,” Hunt replied with a straight face.

“Survival,” Scarborough interjected, trying to save his colleague some embarrassment with a less insane response to the question of Assad’s interests.

Other bat shit crazy questions Gabbard was asked during her appearance include the following:

“You know there are people who will watch this have heard your previous comments who will wonder, what’s going on here? Why you met with Assad, why it looks like you were very cozy with Assad and why you’ve sort of taken his side in this argument. What would you say to that?”

“Do you think that Assad is a good person?”

“Your hometown paper said that you should focus on your job and talked about your presidential campaign being in disarray. How would you respond to your hometown paper?”

“Any idea why David Duke came out and supported you?”

“There have been reports that that Russian apparatus that interfered in 2016 is potentially trying to help your campaign. Why do you think that is?”

“Have you met with any Russians over the past several years?”

Gabbard shoved back against the various accusations of alignment with Trump, Putin and Assad, asserting correctly that those lines are only being used to smear anyone who voices an objection to endless war and insane nuclear escalations. She pushed back particularly hard on Kasie Hunt’s reference to the obscene NBC smear piece which cited the discredited narrative control firm New Knowledge to paint Gabbard as a favorite of the Kremlin, claiming that the article has been thoroughly debunked (and it has).

After the show, still unable to contain herself, Hunt jumped onto Twitter to share the discredited NBC smear piece, writing, “Here is @NBCNews’ excellent reporting on the Russian machine that now appears to be boosting Tulsi Gabbard.”

Hunt then followed up with a link to an RT article which she captioned with an outright lie: “Here is the ‘debunking’ of the NBC News report from RT, the Russian state media. You tell me which you think is more credible.”

I say that Hunt is lying because the RT article that she shared to falsely claim that the only objection to NBC’s smear piece came from Russia explicitly names an Intercept article by American journalist Glenn Greenwald, upon which the RT article is based and which does indeed thoroughly discredit the NBC smear piece. If Hunt had read the article that she shared, she necessarily would have known that, so she was either lying about the nature of the article she shared or lying about knowing what was in it.

So that was nuts. We can expect to see a whole, whole lot more of this as the plutocratic media works overtime to undermine Gabbard’s message in order to keep her from disrupting establishment war narratives, and I’m pleased as punch to see Gabbard firing back and calling them out for the sleazy war propagandists that they are. Her presidential campaign is shaking the foundations of the establishment narrative control matrix more than anything else that’s going on right now, so it looks like writing about these embarrassing mass media debacles she’s been provoking may be a big part of my job in the coming months.

Military interventionism is by far the most depraved and destructive aspect of the US-centralized power establishment, and it is also the most lucrative and strategically crucial, which is why so much energy is poured into ensuring that the American people don’t use the power of their numbers to force that interventionism to end. Anyone who throws a monkey wrench in the works of this propaganda machine is going to be subjected to a tremendous amount of smears, and I’m glad to see Gabbard fighting back against those smears. From personal experience I know that smear campaigns must be fought against ferociously, because the only alternative is to allow your detractors to control the narrative about you, which as far as your message goes is the same as allowing them to control you. It’s not fun, it’s not clean, but it’s necessary.

The narrative control war keeps getting hotter and hotter, ladies and gentlemen. Buckle up.

____________________________

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I’m an Austrian Economist – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on August 4, 2019

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2019/03/walter-e-block/im-an-austrian-economist-what-does-it-mean/

By

Real Clear Markets

In addition to being a libertarian in political philosophy, I am also a member of the Austrian school of economics.

Austrian economics has nothing to do with the economy of that European country. It is so named because its founding fathers all emanated from that part of the world. They include such European scholars as Carl Menger, Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich A. Hayek (Nobel Prize winner in the dismal science in 1974) and Joseph Schumpeter. Murray N. Rothbard and Israel Kirzner are the most high profile American Austrians. In like manner, the Chicago School of economics does not at all focus on the commercial well-being of that particular city. Rather, this perspective too takes its name from the fact that its progenitors were all in some way associated with the University of Chicago. Luminaries include Aaron Director, Henry Simons, Milton Friedman, George Stigler, Gary Becker and Ronald Coase.

Austrian economics diverges in several important ways from that followed by our colleagues in the mainstream of the profession. First and foremost, the praxeological school, at least insofar as I see matters, belongs in the realm of logic; it is not an empirical science. For the mainstream neo-classicals, logical positivists to the core, the be-all and end-all of proper empirical science is falsifiability and testability. All claims in economics are only tentative hypotheses, which stand or fall if and only if they can withstand empirical testing. While Austrians also entertain such hypotheses, we also deal in the realm of apodictic necessarily true laws. They cannot be tested nor falsified and yet are absolutely certain.

Let us consider some examples of the latter. 1. Whenever voluntary exchange occurs, both parties necessarily gain, at least in the ex-ante sense of anticipations. Joe sells an apple to Mary for one dollar. At the moment this commercial transaction takes place he values the money he receives more than the fruit he gives up. She more highly regards the foodstuff than the price she has to pay. We do not have a clue as to why these two folks have these preference rankings. It may be that the ordinary motives are in play. She sees a bargain, he fears the rotting process will soon occur, rendering his goods valueless; a dollar is far better than nothing. For all we know, however, the price is so low because he wants to ingratiate himself to her so that he can date her. Or perhaps she is poor, and he is “selling” her this apple to promote her self-esteem and is really doing this out of charitable impulses. But there is no testing possible here. We know it is undeniably true that both parties think this transaction will benefit each of them. Why else would both agree to the deal were it not for the fact that they hope to thereby improve their economic situations? Read the rest of this entry »

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The UK Government’s “Secret Plan” to Slash Taxes After a No-Deal Brexit | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on August 4, 2019

These possible policies include cuts to Britain’s corporation tax, value added tax (VAT), and even cutting all of Britain’s tariffs to zero .

GOOD

Other proposals being considered by Project After, alongside its proposed tax cuts, include massive increases in government spending, subsidies to key industries, and the raising of additional government revenue through the higher tariffs which would be allowed if a no-deal Brexit led to the UK adopting ‘WTO terms’ in its international trade.

BAD

https://mises.org/wire/uk-government%E2%80%99s-secret-plan-slash-taxes-after-no-deal-brexit

With fewer than 50 days left to go until Britain is scheduled to leave the European Union, it is becoming increasingly certain that politicians on both sides will fail to reach any sort of formal agreement on Britain’s future relationship with the EU before the date of Brexit arrives. Prime Minister Theresa May’s long-negotiated Brexit Deal, the many flaws of which left it almost universally reviled, was overwhelmingly rejected in the House of Commons last month by a margin of 230 votes, the most severe defeat for a sitting government in history . Parliament’s refusal to back either Mrs May’s deal or any actionable alternative has moved the entire Brexit process into a sort of limbo period, where it is uncertain what the next step will be, or whether any further steps in any direction are even possible. With Mrs May’s only hope being a renegotiation of her deal in time for a repeat vote before the 29th March Brexit deadline, and the EU adamantly refusing to return to the negotiating table, it is easy to see why a no-deal Brexit is now so widely regarded as the most probable outcome.

It was to this backdrop that the British press recently began reporting on the development of ‘Project After’, which one Whitehall figure described as “basically a Doomsday list of economic levers we could pull” in the event of a no-deal Brexit. This ‘secret plan’, as it has ironically been called throughout its extensive media coverage, is supposed to be considering the viability of numerous different policy directions intended to offset the economic armageddon which mainstream pundits so widely expect to result from a no-deal Brexit. These possible policies include cuts to Britain’s corporation tax, value added tax (VAT), and even cutting all of Britain’s tariffs to zero . Project After appears to have begun life two years ago as a Department for International Trade initiative, but since last summer it has been taken over by Cabinet Secretary Sir Mark Sedwill, the most senior civil servant in the UK, with input from numerous key arms of government, including the Treasury, the Cabinet Office, and the Bank of England.

From the perspective of Austrian Economics, it would be difficult to view these proposed tax cuts as anything other than an unambiguous good, inasmuch as they represent a diminution of the government’s disruption of voluntary, mutually-beneficial economic interactions between private individuals; yet another reason to view a ‘hard’ no-deal as the least worst of the possible Brexit scenarios. However, the mainstream economic paradigm from which the UK government is approaching the problem of Brexit means that their motive for considering tax cuts is very different than that stemming from any principled understanding of the economic destructiveness of interventionism. Specifically, the tax cuts being considered as part of Project After are motivated by a more general desire to “stimulate” economic activity through government measures, and are hence packaged together with a host of other policy proposals which certainly could not be characterised as rolling back government hegemony over the British economy.

Other proposals being considered by Project After, alongside its proposed tax cuts, include massive increases in government spending, subsidies to key industries, and the raising of additional government revenue through the higher tariffs which would be allowed if a no-deal Brexit led to the UK adopting ‘WTO terms’ in its international trade. Furthermore, the government has been developing another plan alongside Project After, called ‘ Project Bluebell ’, which is investigating potential protectionist measures which could be implemented after a no-deal Brexit, to shelter Britain’s more politically powerful industries — pharmaceuticals, agriculture, car manufacturing, etc. — from the effects of international competition, at the expense of taxpayers and consumers.

Even the few liberalising reforms which are being considered have been significantly scaled back from what was originally on the table. One civil servant has alluded to the fact that, in the early stages of Project After, significant Singapore-style deregulation and relaxation of labor laws were being considered as possible routes to post-Brexit economic growth. However, Theresa May’s commitment to transpose the bulk of existing EU regulations into British law after Brexit, put an end to any hope for significant deregulation as an aspect of this plan.

This latter point vividly illustrates the inescapable importance of education as a necessary first step before any sustainable progress toward a voluntary, free market economy can realistically be hoped for. It is certainly tempting to allow oneself to believe that, with just the right combination of dramatic events — a no-deal Brexit and a ‘secret’ government plan, for example — a top-down implementation of economic liberty might be just around the corner. However, as the sixteenth century French philosopher Étienne de La Boétie so famously demonstrated , no widespread system of social interactions, whether it be the rule of a particular government or the existence of a certain type of economy, can continue to exist without the tacit consent of the general public who go on peacefully operating within it. Unless, through the long-term process of education in sound economics, the benefits of a free market economic system come to be broadly accepted by the general public, all attempts at top-down economic liberalisation will be, at best, incomplete and temporary, as were the reforms of the classical liberals of the nineteenth century. More likely, however, is that without this strong foundation of public consent, such top-down attempts at free market reform will simply never get off the ground to begin with, as will likely be the case for this ‘secret’ government plan to cut taxes after Brexit.

 

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prince-charles-feb-1-2017-balloon-getty-640x480

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Gaines & Horton: It’s Time to Stop Fighting Osama bin Laden’s War

Posted by M. C. on August 4, 2019

For the dignity of servicemembers and for the future of the country, it is time to stop playing into al Qaeda’s hands.

https://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2019/03/09/robert-gaines-scott-horton-its-time-to-stop-fighting-osama-bin-ladens-war/

by Robert Gaines and Scott Horton

Osama bin Laden is long dead, but his plans live on through American foreign policy.

In 2001, al Qaeda consisted of only 400 ideologues in the far corners of the world. After the recent regime change wars in Iraq, Yemen, Libya and Syria, typical estimates place their membership at around 20,000. To top it all off, the American economy is out $5.6 trillion dollars for the whole failed project. This is not the legacy of a war to spread, or even protect, liberty and prosperity. Instead it is the legacy of an evil but gifted tactician, al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

Contrary to the popular misunderstanding of al Qaeda’s motives and strategy, bin Laden and his partner Ayman al Zawahiri were not trying to scare America away with the September 11th attacks. They were trying to provoke an overreaction. Al Qaeda’s leaders wanted the U.S. to invade Afghanistan in order to bog our military down, “bleed us to bankruptcy,” and force a worn-out, broken empire to leave the region the hard way, and permanently, just as they had done to the Soviet Union in the 1980s with American support. Only then could they hope to launch the revolutions they sought in their home countries without interference from the American superpower.

Osama bin Laden’s mentor Abdullah Azzam warned in 1986 that the U.S. was on deck for expulsion from the region after the USSR. After observing the effectiveness of asymmetric war against a superior adversary, bin Laden, galvanized by the sanctions against Iraq and the U.S. occupation of the Arabian Peninsula, took up Azzam’s mission. In an early declaration aimed at the U.S., bin Laden noted that the mountainous terrain of Afghanistan helped the mujahideen defeat one of the most powerful militaries in history, and declared that he would seek to lure America to its same fate.

After decimating al Qaeda’s old guard at Tora Bora in 2001, the U.S. military could have returned home victorious. Instead, our leaders chose to follow bin Laden’s wishes by committing to an extended occupation and impossible nation-building mission – one which has lasted for more than 17 years.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq to overthrow the man bin Laden called a “socialist infidel,” Saddam Hussein, was a massive boon to the terror organization, decimating a secular government, paving the way for the creation of the first al Qaeda franchise there in 2004, radicalizing of a generation of new fighters, and proving the limits of U.S. influence in the Middle East.

America’s further regime change wars in Yemen, Libya, and Syria have been strategic victories for the U.S.’s terrorist enemies beyond the former terrorist leader’s wildest dreams.

In his journals, bin Laden was optimistic about the 2011 Arab Spring, writing that it had “opened a door for jihadists.” He wouldn’t live to see the aftermath of the U.S. and NATO-backed regime change operation in Libya, but the country remains awash in members of Ansar Al-Sharia and the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) that the U.S. and NATO supported in the war. Both groups are led by veterans of al Qaeda in Iraq from Iraq War II.

The jihadists empowered by the regime change in Libya quickly spread to Mali, Chad, and Niger. A new generation of Sunnis with rifles and SOCOM operators are fighting now throughout the Maghreb, Sahel, and sub-Saharan Africa.

Saudi Arabia became bin Laden’s primary target for revolution when the king allowed the American military buildup there in preparation for the first Iraq war in 1990. As a key ally and major purchaser of American weapons, the kingdom has long appeared immune from the fate of Iraq or Libya. Now that the current regime has been racked by political purges and the financial burden of a war in Yemen, it’s not difficult to see how the legions of jihadists cultivated directly and indirectly by the U.S. and Saudi Arabia itself in the recent regional wars might return and wreak havoc there.

U.S. and regional allies’ covert intervention on behalf of the insurgency in Syria backfired horribly by helping to bring al Qaeda in Iraq back to life from its previous near-total destruction by Iraqi tribal leaders during the 2007 “Awakening” in Iraq. In 2011, al Qaeda in Iraq, or the “Islamic State of Iraq,” crossed into Syria to take part in the uprising against the Ba’athist dictatorship there. In Syria, AQI/ISI began calling itself Jabhat al Nusra, then Hayat Tahrir al Sham. It remains loyal to al Qaeda leader Ayman al Zawahiri. Their group now again numbers in the tens of thousands and for the time being remains ensconced in Syria’s northwestern Idlib province.

In 2013, the Iraqi-dominated faction split from al Nusra and Zawahiri’s al Qaeda. They returned to calling themselves the Islamic State (ISIS) and consolidated control over eastern Syria. A year later, they conquered all of predominately Sunni western Iraq, declared an Islamist “caliphate,” and seized numerous fully stocked military bases left behind by the United States just three years before. As President Trump correctly said during the 2016 campaign, this disaster was the direct consequence of the previous administrations’ wars in Iraq and Syria. The loss of western Iraq to ISIS led to the launching of Iraq War III in 2014-2017 to destroy the ISIS caliphate and drive them out of western Iraq and eastern Syria.

Now that fight is over. Trump should ignore demands for the continuation of a policy which has only furthered Osama bin Laden’s original agenda.

Two wars expanded into multiple conflicts that have enveloped entire regions, costing thousands of American lives, requiring vast defense expenditures, and killing or displacing millions of civilians. Though Washington hawks insist upon indefinitely extending commitments abroad, President Trump understands the consequences of open-ended war.

For the dignity of servicemembers and for the future of the country, it is time to stop playing into al Qaeda’s hands. Trump should withdraw from Afghanistan and Syria, and end the counter-productive war on terrorism.

 

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lab rat

Trapped

 

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Of Two Minds – The Source of Killer Inflation: Services

Posted by M. C. on August 4, 2019

https://www.oftwominds.com/blogmar19/services-inflation3-19.html?fullweb=1

Charles Hughes Smith

The soaring cost of services is driven by a number of factors.

What will the future bring: fire (inflation) or ice (deflation)? The short answer: both, but in very different doses. Goods that are tradeable and exposed to technologically driven commodification will decline in price (deflation) while untradeable services that are difficult to commoditize will increase in price (inflation), generating a self-reinforcing feedback loop of wage-price inflation.

Gordon Long and I discuss these trends in our latest program The Supply-Demand Services Problem (YouTube).

The big difference between goods that drop in price (TVs, etc.) and services that are exploding higher (healthcare, childcare, elderly care, higher education, local taxes and fees, etc.) is the relative size each occupies in the household budget: a new TV is a couple hundred bucks and a once-every-few-years purchase, while all the services cost thousands of dollars annually– or even tens of thousands of dollars.

A new TV or electronic gew-gaw is signal noise in the household budget while services consume the most of what’s left after paying for housing and transport.

A 10% decline in the cost of a new TV is $25, while a 10% increase in annual tuition and college fees is $2,500. Add in thousands more for childcare, elderly care, local taxes and fees and healthcare, and the deflationary impact of tradeable goods is trivial compared to the increases in untradeable services.

Not all goods are declining in sticker price. vehicles are rising sharply in price, a fact that’s erased by hedonic adjustments in official inflation (the new car is supposedly so much better than the previous model that the “price” actually declines-heh).

Then there’s the inexorable shrinkage of quantity and quality. The package that once held 16 ounces now contains 13.4 ounces, and the appliance that once lasted for years now lasts a few months as the quality of components is reduced.

The soaring cost of services is driven by a number of factors:

1. The cost of staying in business is rising: wages are going up, overhead is going up, rent is going up, regulatory burdens are increasing, compliance costs more and local taxes, fees and licensing are skyrocketing.

This drives the costs of local small services ever higher: childcare, haircuts, elderly care, educational enrichment programs, and so on.

2. Competition that would suppress price increases has been destroyed by cartels and monopolies and regulatory capture. Big Pharma has eliminated foreign competition, higher education is a rapacious cartel, healthcare is nothing more than a collection of cartels, Internet and telephony providers are either local monopolies or cartels, and so on.

3. In the endless quest for higher quarterly profits, Corporate America has stripped out on-the-job education, preferring to poach high-value workers from competitors rather than invest in in-house training. This has reduced the pool of workers with up-to-date real-world skills, as a college diploma even in the sciences doesn’t translate to marketable skills.

This dynamic pushes wages higher via poaching while reducing the supply of qualified workers.

4. Service-sector infrastructure is often obsolete, kludgy and costly. Insiders are loathe to invest in technologies that might reduce headcount, and even when funds are made available the integration of legacy systems often yields extremely poor results.

5. The cartel-monopoly structure of service sectors has inhibited the spread of cost-cutting technologies; online education that leads to a diploma should be nearly free and universally accessible, (see my book The Nearly Free University), but instead the higher education cartel continues to exact its pound of flesh for a diploma, a scrap of paper with rapidly diminishing returns in an economy over-supplied with college graduates and workers with advanced degrees.

6. The demands on workers’ time and energy continually increases, leaving many unable to provide the services that were once performed in the home–childcare, elderly care, food prepared at home, and so on.

7. The cultural focus on academic achievement and entertainment has stripped away basic skills that were once common, forcing households to pay for pricey services: changing the oil in a car, basic plumbing and home repairs, etc. are now uncommon skills.

8. These social and demographic trends are reducing the supply of service expertise: small business owners (Baby Boomers) are retiring and the skills of starting and operating a service business in a costly regulatory thicket are not being taught or nurtured.

As a result, there is a widening gap between demand and supply of essential services. This asymmetry is not easily remedied and as a result it will generate self-reinforcing inflation that the economy is ill-prepared to pay.

There is much more in our program:

(39:52)

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