World News
Sweden: A Beacon Of Light Against A World Gone Mad
Sweden, where virtually nobody outside hospital settings uses masks, has had lower 7-days rolling deaths per capita than the U.S. for four months straight.
Penned by Joakim Book at the American Institute for Economic Research
And so it was time again. Tightened restrictions, mandatory limits on public life, curfews, orders to stay-at-home, travel bans with invasive hoops, and all the other anti-corona policies that ostensibly aren’t lookdowns: they look like lockdowns, they quack like lockdowns, but in these euphemism-prone times we call them by any other names than lockdowns.
Maddeningly, the goalpost keeps shifting, updating life and language faster and better than George Orwell himself could have done. First, we had to take precautions to flatten the curve. Hospitals and fears, remember? Then we had to stop traveling, or visit the mall ‒ because who needs that, anyway?
Then we had to wear cloth over our faces and stay away from each other. For the elderly’s sake, naturally. Then we had to give up public life for everyone’s sake. The next step, bravely taken by authoritarian politicians and epidemiologists across the Western world, is to intentionally overdo the restrictions ‒ “for now” ‒ so that we have any hope of getting freedoms back for the holidays.
No matter how hard these enlightened autocrats have squeezed, this badly-behaved virus refuses to listen. How odd, they must think; we passed a law, made an announcement ‒ why isn’t it working?
Back to your rooms, the Austrians said. After an explosive number of positive tests in the last week, enough with the provisional liberties and niceties, you’re grounded for the rest of November. Gatherings and cultural events are closed; Christmas markets are out. The Icelanders, already in the spring proclaimed corona free and all summer celebrated in puff pieces by Elizabeth Kolbert in The New Yorker and Adam Roy Gordon in the Atlantic, still dreamily speak of celebrating Christmas.
When the latest rounds of tighter and tighter restrictions came into effect this week, the government talking heads, and the prime minister in particular, told their subjects to give up on Halloween and the next few weeks. Let’s sacrifice these few weeks, they said, so that we can loosen restrictions for Christmas. Fat chance.
The Brits and the French have been even more adamant on setting timelines, or “circuit-breakers,” on their invasive policies. We strip you of liberties, dignities, and the things in which most people find joy ‒ but for a good cause, and just for a little while, okay?
The naivety here was always impressive. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. Most people could have plausibly believed what their politicians told them about timelines in the spring; this was a new situation, we didn’t know what the novel threat was, and old handbooks could be thrown out before anyone had time to object. The withdrawn freedoms would be rolled back in time, but as political economist Robert Higgs taught us long ago, never quite fully.
A little over half a year later, we’re going through the same ordeal again. With much better knowledge about the (overblown) risks, with much better tools in preventing spread and safeguarding the elderly. Still, it doesn’t seem to matter. The political overlords, not exactly known for their excellence in interpreting statistics, look at their exponential graphs ‒ and do the exact same thing they did in the spring.
It’s almost as if the virus doesn’t care about your crackdowns, your faster and harder tightening of the societal and commercial noose. If you squeeze people just a little bit more, maybe ‒ just maybe ‒ the virus will listen…? French ministers, like American policy-makers in the spring, started mandating what kinds of products may be on the supermarket shelves: soap is acceptable; makeup isn’t. The Germans, widely celebrated for their track-and-trace program and generous financial schemes, opted for a “mild” lockdown ‒ “just” for four weeks.
Perhaps, suggested Holman Jenkins in the Wall Street Journal recently, “the bigger numbers might suggest we are grappling with a natural phenomenon over which we exercise little control.”
Take the bamboozled and highly infected discussion over mask-wearing. They’re effective, they’re not effective; they’re effective if you use them right; and even if they’re not, every little bit counts. In its beautiful infographic the New York Times describes how they work: “A good mask will have a large surface area, a tight fit around the edges, and a shape that leaves space around your nostrils and mouth.”
Even if accurate, we don’t need to go much further than our closest supermarket to notice that that’s not the kind of masks worn by most people. Most people wear loosely fitted, thin pieces of cloth that probably capture some particles ‒ what do I know? ‒ but is unlikely to approach the efficacy that its proponents describe. We reuse them without washing them ‒ can anyone really be bothered? ‒ we don’t put them on properly, they leak left-right-and-center.
The fallback line? Well, not individually but they’re part of a bigger package. The New York Times quotes Linsey Marr at Virginia Tech saying that “something is better than nothing.”
Perhaps every little helps in a what-otherwise-would-have-been sense, but that’s not how most decision-makers justify the above withdrawal of our liberties. Rather, they say that the infection rates are “too high,” the curve too steep, the hospital capacity for treatment too close for comfort. Presuming their honesty ‒ the faking of which I don’t put past them ‒ there’s scant evidence that aggregate mask use correlates in any way with infection rates.
Sweden, where virtually nobody outside hospital settings uses masks, has had lower 7-days rolling deaths per capita than the U.S. for four months straight; lower than the mask-wielding and lockdown-prone U.K. for almost two months. Even the much-praised German experience now has more people dying from (and with) Covid-19 than Sweden does. Infection rates and spread too: the trends since the height of summer or beginning of fall look the same, regardless if you’re a massively mask-wielding country or not.
Yes, it is possible that without widespread mask use among Americans and Brits, infection rates would have even higher and death rates too. I keep wondering, what would the numbers have to look like for you to even consider that what we’re doing isn’t working? That perhaps locking down societies, practically, doesn’t do much to combat the disease, but quite a lot to ruin people’s lives and livelihoods?
We can choose cherry-picked countries for our various cases all we like: the “success stories” of Vietnam, New Zealand, or Australia haven’t done things much differently than Denmark, Austria, France, U.K. or the U.S.: squeeze your populace, and say the magic incantations. Perhaps the virus deity will grant your wishes.
I’m reminded of two-decades old words by Jason Diakité (stage name ‘Timbuktu’), one of my favorite musicians and one of the most successful hip-hoppers in Sweden. In the early 2000s, he released a pretty obscure song called Ett Brev (“A Letter”) structured like a letter to the then-prime minister of Sweden. A political rapper ‒ naturally hard left like all good artists ‒ Diakité was objecting to the many frightening trends he saw in Europe: dismantled social safety nets, overburdened health care services, opposition and hatred towards immigrants. He explicitly included a list of countries where Nazis were allegedly “gaining the upper hand” in typical Antifa-like hyperbole: France, Italy, “BeNeLux,” and Sweden’s immediate neighbor Denmark. The list of places going radically south, as he saw it, was long.
In all of these places, “Forces for good have presumably surrendered.” Little did Diakité know that almost two decades after he penned those provocative lines, his words would ring true across most of the Western world.
The authoritarian threat of 2020 is very different, and instead of neo-Nazi movements of the early 2000s the culprits are established, well-meaning politicians and technocrats. Much like then, Sweden is depicted as a beacon of light, standing against a world gone mad, the last outpost of sanity and the values underpinning Western Liberal Democracy.
Most everywhere else, different rules apply: no matter the facts, we must squeeze harder. The badly-behaved virus must stop progressing, must cease and desist. Anything else, apparently, “just doesn’t seem worth it.”
World News
The CEO Of Blackstone Is Warning That “A Real Shortage Of Energy” Will Cause Social Unrest All Over The Planet
And as energy prices escalate, that will push all prices throughout our economic system higher and higher and higher.
We are facing an unprecedented global energy crunch. Demand for energy is continually rising, and the production of energy is not keeping pace. One of the biggest reasons for this is that large financial institutions have become extremely hesitant to fund any new energy projects that will add more carbon emissions to the environment. Instead, they want to fund projects that will help us transition to the new “green economy”, but meanwhile we are getting to a point where we will soon see widespread shortages of traditional forms of energy. So now we all get to suffer. A lack of oil is pushing the price of gasoline to alarming heights, shortages of natural gas are already causing tremendous disruptions in Asia and Europe, we are being told that we are facing a propane “armageddon” this winter, and supplies of coal have dropped to dangerously low levels around the world.
In other words, we are potentially heading into the most painful global energy crisis in modern history.
When CNN asked Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman about this, he openly admitted that we are “going to end up with a real shortage of energy”…
Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman warned Tuesday that high energy prices will likely set off social unrest around the world.
“We’re going to end up with a real shortage of energy. And when you have a shortage, it’s going to cost more. And it’s probably going to cost a lot more,” the private-equity billionaire told CNN International’s Richard Quest at a conference in Saudi Arabia.
When the power goes out, people are not going to be happy.
And people are really not going to be happy if it goes out for an extended period of time.
According to Schwarzman, we will soon see “very unhappy people” all over the globe…
“You’re going to get very unhappy people around the world in the emerging markets in particular but in the developed world,” Schwarzman said at the Future Investment Initiative. “What happens then, Richard, is you’ve got real unrest. This challenges the political system and it’s all utterly unnecessary.”
Sadly, he is right that this global energy crisis did not have to happen.
If the global elite had continued to fund traditional energy projects at the pace that was needed, we could have avoided this nightmare to a very large degree.
But traditional forms of energy are now being shunned, and billions of people will suffer as a result.
Meanwhile, prices throughout our economic system continue to rise at a very alarming pace. Just check out what has been happening to the price of turkey…
The U.S. Department of Agriculture, for example, released data recently showing the average wholesale price of Grade A frozen 8- to 16-pound turkey has spiked by 21.91% since last year. That means what cost $1.15 per pound a year ago will now ring at at $1.41. And just for context, the same would have cost 96 cents in 2019 and 84 cents in 2018.
If math isn’t your thing, that’s a 68% wholesale price increase in just two years.
Overall, we are being told that this upcoming Thanksgiving will be the most expensive Thanksgiving that any of us have ever experienced…
Matthew McClure paid 20% more this month than he did last year for the 25 pasture-raised turkeys he plans to roast at the Hive, the Bentonville, Arkansas, restaurant where he is the executive chef. And Norman Brown, director of sweet-potato sales for Wada Farms in Raleigh, North Carolina, is paying truckers nearly twice as much as usual to haul the crop to other parts of the country.
“I never seen anything like it, and I’ve been running sweet potatoes for 38 or 39 years,” Brown said. “I don’t know what the answer is, but in the end it’s all going to get passed on to the consumer.”
Unfortunately, more price hikes are on the horizon.
In fact, Kimberly-Clark is opening warning that they are going to be boosting prices even higher…
Prices of toilet paper, diapers, facial tissues and paper towels will likely rise in coming weeks as Irving-based consumer giant Kimberly-Clark warned Monday that inflation and supply chain concerns aren’t “likely to be resolved quickly.”
So I would stock up on paper products while you still can.
In case you haven’t figured it out yet, inflation is eventually going to get far worse than what we witnessed during the 1970s.
At this point, even many top Democrats are warning that high inflation is with us to stay. Here is one recent example…
Former President Barack Obama’s chief of global development on Tuesday predicted inflation was here to stay, despite the Biden administration’s protestations to the contrary.
Prices “will go higher, and the Fed has misread the inflation dynamics in a big way,” former Global Development Council Chairman Mohamed El Erian said in an afternoon interview with Fox News’ Sandra Smith, adding that the Federal Reserve was “still hostage to this notion that it’s transitory.”
And the shortages that we are currently experiencing are ultimately going to get worse too.
Right now, we are already facing the worst shortage of alcoholic beverages since the 1930s. When asked about his empty shelves by a reporter, one gas station owner said that he has “never seen anything like this”…
Supply chain issues are impacting the alcohol supply in the U.S., and it’s making alcohol more expensive and difficult for bars and liquor stores to get.
“I have so many empty shelves. In the two years of doing this, I’ve never seen anything like this,” gas station chain owner Ali Ali said.
As I discussed yesterday, now Biden wants to take countless more truck drivers off the road, and that will make our supply chain headaches a whole lot worse.
And as energy prices escalate, that will push all prices throughout our economic system higher and higher and higher.
Yes, all of this is really happening.
This is not a drill.
We are in the early chapters of a full-blown economic meltdown of epic proportions, and nothing will ever be the same after this.
If you want to keep waiting for conditions to “return to normal”, you are going to be waiting for a really, really long time.
We have entered a truly horrible nightmare, and there will be no waking up from this.
World News
Georgian Protesters Storm LGBT Office, Tear Down Pride Flags And Replace Them With National Flag
Will Biden target them with drone strikes in order to spread “our values?”
Georgian protesters on Monday forced the cancellation of an LGBT pride march after storming the office of an LGBT lobby group, tearing down their pride flags and replacing them with Georgia’s national flag.
This is what anti-imperialism looks like:
#Georgia 🇬🇪: a man on a scooter reportedly tried to drive into a group of journalists as they were reporting on the anti-pride violence in #Tbilisi.
— Thomas van Linge (@ThomasVLinge) July 5, 2021
Source: https://t.co/SpUIIzAzRa pic.twitter.com/HSffPvAoVL
From Reuters, “LGBT+ campaigners in Georgia call off pride match after office attack”:
LGBT+ campaigners in Georgia called off plans to stage a pride march on Monday after violent groups opposed to the event stormed and ransacked their office in the capital Tbilisi and targeted activists and journalists.
Activists launched five days of LGBT+ Pride celebrations last Thursday and had planned a “March for Dignity” on Monday in central Tbilisi, shrugging off criticism from the church and conservatives who said the event had no place in Georgia.
[…] Video footage posted by LGBT+ activists showed their opponents scaling their building to reach their balcony where they tore down rainbow flags and were seen entering the office of Tbilisi Pride.
[…] Campaigners said some of their equipment had been broken in the attack and that they had been forced to cancel.
Will Biden target them with drone strikes in order to spread “our values?”
World News
Pfizer vaccine losing effectiveness amid Delta variant surge, Israeli Health Ministry says as it mulls 3rd shot & new restrictions
In addition to booster shots, health officials are also mulling whether to revive some pandemic restrictions.
Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine has dropped to 64% effectiveness in preventing infection amid the spread of the Delta variant in Israel, the Health Ministry said, as officials consider the need for booster shots and new restrictions.
The vaccine fell to 64% effectiveness in preventing symptomatic infection over the last month, the Health Ministry reported on Monday, noting that the decrease coincided with the rapid spread of the more contagious Delta variant across Israel. However, health officials said the Pfizer shot still offers strong protection against severe illness and hospitalization, reporting 93% efficacy.
While the ministry did not give the previous figures in its statement, a report published in May said the Pfizer vaccine was 97% effective against severe illness after two doses. In March, private Israeli researchers also found the immunization to be 91.2% effective against any level of symptomatic infection.
The new data comes amid a small surge across Israel, where the number of active cases hit 2,766 on Monday after 369 new infections, with the Delta variant believed to make up more than 90% of the overall total. As of July 4, around 70 patients were hospitalized, half of them in serious condition, compared to 21 with severe illness on June 19.
The fast spread of the Delta variant, which was first observed in India, has prompted Health Minister Nitzan Horowtiz to order two medical studies looking at the need for a third vaccine dose, saying they would provide “vital information” to policymakers. Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s office added that the studies will “evaluate the efficacy of the vaccine and the rate at which it wears off over time.”
While nearly 60% of Israel’s population of 9.3 million have received at least one dose of the Pfizer vaccine – helping to bring daily infections down from their peak of around 10,000 in January – cases are still cropping up among the immunized. Last Friday, more than half of the new infections reported were in patients that had been vaccinated, according to Ynet, underscoring the need for further study.
In addition to booster shots, health officials are also mulling whether to revive some pandemic restrictions, most of which were lifted in March, as well as bringing back some version of its coronavirus ‘passport’ system, the Jerusalem Post reported. An indoor mask mandate had previously been dropped, but was brought back in late June as daily cases began to accelerate.
Foreign travelers could also face additional testing and quarantine protocols in the coming weeks, though the Health Ministry has yet to make a decision.
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