Authored by Mary Gillis via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The number of people under 50 getting cancer is on the rise, leaving scientists puzzled about the concerning uptick, according to a new study published in JAMA Network Open.

After analyzing a diverse group of 562,142 people between 2010 and 2019, data showed the rise in overall early-onset cancer was most pronounced in young people between the ages of 30 and 39. Other groups affected were women and several ethnic groups, with Asian or Pacific Islander people being affected the most, followed by Hispanic and American Indian or Alaska Native people.

Gastrointestinal cancers grew the fastest, averaging a 2.6 percent increase in incidence rate per study year. When gastrointestinal cancers were teased out and analyzed by type, data showed appendix, bile duct, and pancreatic cancer increased by 15 percent, 8.1 percent, and 2.5 percent, respectively. Incidence refers to the measure of the number of new cases that develop in a population over a specific period.

Additional analyses revealed breast cancer made up the highest number of early-onset disease cases, followed by thyroid and colon cancer.

In contrast, rates decreased among black and white people during the same 10-year period. Rates also declined in older adults over 50—a group typically hit hardest by cancer.

“This nationwide study provides updated evidence that the incidence of early-onset cancers in the U.S. is increasing and highlights several disparities,” the authors wrote in the paper.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) estimates 2 million people will be diagnosed with cancer in 2023. Breast cancer is the No. 1 cancer affecting women. An estimated over 300,000 women will be diagnosed this year. Prostate cancer is the leading cancer diagnosis among men. Similarly, the NIH estimates nearly 300,000 cases. Cancer costs the United States more than $156 billion annually, and the total cost of cancer globally is on pace to reach $25.2 trillion by 2050.

Risk Factors

Up to 50 percent of all cancers are preventable. Several lifestyle risk factors for preventable cancers include the following:

• Smoking.
• Being overweight or obese.
• Drinking too much alcohol.
• Eating a poor diet.
• Lacking physical activity.
• Being stressed.
• Exposures to radiation.
• Infections.

“There is a need to inform health care professionals about the increasing incidence of early-onset cancer, and investigations for possible tumors need to be considered when clinically appropriate, even in patients younger than 50 years,” the authors continued in the paper. “These data will be useful for public health specialists and health care policy makers and serve as a call to action for further research into the various environmental factors that may be associated with this concerning pattern.”

The authors pointed out the possibility that cancer statistics are underreported, and study results may not apply to other areas outside the United States. Therefore, they should be interpreted with caution.

Authored by Ben Weingarten via RealClear Wire,

President Biden’s stance toward China hardened this month when he issued an executive order prohibiting American investment in Chinese companies developing advanced technologies that could be used by the military. 

But a growing chorus of critics, including some Democrats, argue that the administration’s effort to grapple with America’s foremost adversary is contradictory, illustrated in the White House’s Beijing-empowering pursuit of ambitious climate change goals. 

Reducing greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050, as the White House has called for, will almost assuredly make the United States dependent on China while enriching it. 

China currently holds a commanding position in the clean energy industry, controlling the natural resources and manufacturing the components essential to the Biden administration’s desired alternative energy transition. Energy experts believe that its dominance will become more entrenched in the years ahead because of domestic environmentalist opposition to perceived “dirty” mining and refining operations, and the Biden administration’s “clean energy” spending blitz – which could provide Chinese companies and subsidiaries billions in subsidies. 

The Biden administration also considers it imperative to get buy-in from Beijing on dramatically reducing emissions, given it produces more than a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions globally. 

This too gives critics of the Biden administration’s green agenda pause. They see China as an unreliable partner that will leverage the Biden administration’s desire for it to go green to its own advantage. 

“China,” says Senator John Barrasso (R-Wy.), the ranking member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, “is playing us for suckers.” 

Red China’s Green Dominance 

China’s alternative energy clout comes from its command over supply chains that culminate in the production of wind turbines, solar panels, and lithium-ion batteries on which the net zero transition depends. 

On top of its own large domestic reserves, it has invested in mines worldwide, and grown into a global hub for raw material refining and processing. China underscored this point on the eve of Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s visit last month, when it imposed export restrictions on gallium and germanium, rare earth metals not only critical to the manufacture of semiconductors, but also found in electric vehicles and solar panels.  

According to the U.S. Geological Survey, China is the leading producer of 30 of 50 minerals, including among them rare earth metals, that the U.S. government deems critical, particularly for their usage in energy technologies.  

Rare earth metals are integral to the magnets key to electric vehicle motors and wind turbines. America is 95% net import reliant on such materials, which China produces 70% of globally. According to the International Energy Agency, the PRC dominates “across the [rare earth] value chain from mining to processing and magnet production.”  

Other critical minerals for clean energy technologies include: copper, key to solar cells, wind turbines, and electric vehicles; cobalt, key to lithium-ion batteries; nickel, also key to such batteries and in renewable energy storage; and lithium itself. China is the world’s largest refiner of all these minerals and produces 50-70% of all lithium and cobalt globally. The U.S. has no refining capacity for many of the same materials. 

In analyzing the International Energy Agency’s authoritative “Net Zero by 2050” roadmap, the Energy Policy Research Foundation concluded, in a report supported by the RealClearFoundation (which also funds RealClearInvestigations), that “replacing oil and gas with metal-intensive renewables and batteries risks further reinforcing China’s dominance in these critical minerals, at the expense of the energy security of most of the world.” 

Research shows that: 

• Ten of the top 15 global wind turbine manufacturers are Chinese. 

• China’s share in each of the five key manufacturing stages of solar panels exceeds 80%. 

• China dominates in every aspect of the lithium-ion battery value chain – the batteries that power electric vehicles and battery storage power stations. 

To put China’s clean energy dominance in perspective, as BloombergNEF reported, while “Saudi Aramco pumped some 11% of the world’s crude in 2021 … [t]hat pales before the 70% of production capacity in 11 clean energy segments nestled within China’s borders.”   

“By cultivating leadership in clean energy technologies,” the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission has assessed, “Beijing is seeking to profit from a global clean energy transition while further deepening its geoeconomic leverage.” 

Some lawmakers are concerned China might hold such leverage over President Biden himself. In 2021 the New York Times reported that Hunter Biden had “helped secure cobalt for the Chinese” in 2016, while his father was vice president. House Republicans were reportedly investigating this matter as of March, and the issue could resurface in connection with a potential impeachment inquiry into the Biden family’s alleged international influence peddling. 

Biden’s Green Energy Blitz – and its Limits 

Acknowledging China’s alternative energy prowess, and therefore America’s dependence on Beijing to hit its green targets, the Biden administration has pushed legislation – including the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which allocates $369 billion in green subsidies and incentives, as well as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which commits still billions more – and sought to use its executive authority and regulatory power to build America’s alternative energy infrastructure. 

The White House touts $3 billion in federal grants for expanding the manufacturing of batteries for electric vehicles and the grid; $50 million in funding for wind energy research and development; and $35 million more in funding for Las Vegas, Nevada-based MP Materials to establish an end-to-end magnet supply chain. 

All told, the Biden administration says it has committed some $22 billion in grants, rebates, and other initiatives “to accelerate the deployment of clean energy, clean buildings, and clean manufacturing.” It also takes credit for private sector investments of $133 billion in electric vehicles and batteries, and $103 billion in clean energy. Still, experts say these measures leave America lagging behind China, and that the aggressive goals set by the administration therefore require reliance on the Communist power. 

Mark Mills, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and energy-tech venture capitalist, said the Biden administration’s efforts are “window dressing – maybe there’s a new term equivalent to ‘green washing’ along the lines of ‘mineral washing’ – since there are no commensurate necessary regulatory changes for large-scale, chemically-difficult industries,” like mineral refining, necessary to meaningfully ramp up the onshoring of clean energy. 

Republican lawmakers likewise have criticized the Biden administration for imposing environmental restrictions they see as hamstringing the president’s stated agenda by blocking domestic projects that would unleash key natural resources. 

The U.S. Army Corps revoked a key permit for a major domestic nickel mining project in Minnesota, as recommended by the EPA, on grounds that it might not comply with the water quality requirements of a sovereign tribe downstream of the project. The Biden administration has also been reticent to engage in seabed mining, with U.S. Special Presidential Climate Envoy John Kerry indicating the administration is “very wary of procedures that could disturb the ocean floor.” 

Even if America overcame these environmental concerns and fast-tracked mining projects, it is not clear it could sustain a wholly domestic clean energy industry. Echoing an emerging consensus among experts from the right and the left, Cullen Hendrix, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and nonresident senior research fellow at the Center for Climate & Security, said, “The idea that you can have a truly made-in-America supply chain for all of these minerals is a fiction.” 

Certainly, says Dr. Victoria Coates, it cannot do so on the aggressive schedule the Biden administration has set, which would require the creation of vast supply chains during the next few years. The former deputy national security adviser, and later adviser to the Secretary of Energy during the Trump administration, Coates told RCI that home-sourcing desired clean energy technology not only would be “cost prohibitive,” but “I don’t know that we’d even be up and running by 2050, let alone implementing a transition that would impact carbon emissions.” 

Therefore, says Coates, now helming the Heritage Foundation’s Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy, America “can’t decouple from China in this process to get to that target on that time frame.” 

RCI contacted trade groups representing the solar, wind, and electric industries present at a Treasury-led clean power generation roundtable to ask them about the feasibility of decoupling from China, and whether and to what extent meeting the White House’s green goals would redound to China’s benefit, but did not receive any responses. 

Mills said that the massive increase in wind/solar/battery utilization required by the Biden administration would serve China’s “direct benefit.”  

Asked by RCI in an email whether it was concerned the clean energy transition would increase America’s dependence on, and otherwise redound to the benefit of China, a State Department spokesperson replied: “No,” adding that that the Biden administration’s policies “are all intended to revitalize American leadership in emerging technologies and supply chains, protect our national security, advance American competitiveness, and create well-paying, high-quality jobs at home.” 

Neither the White House, Treasury Department, nor Kerry’s office responded to a series of related inquiries. 

Conflicts and Contradictions 

The fundamental question for the Biden administration, Dr. Coates asks, is “How much China is too much China?” White House Clean Energy Czar John Podesta hinted that the bar may be high. In March, he told a renewable energy advocacy group that China would be a “big player” in the clean energy transition. 

Podesta drew a rebuke from fellow Democrat Joe Manchin. The West Virginia senator, who chairs the Committee on Energy & Natural Resources, released a statement saying that “It is beyond irresponsible for someone speaking on behalf of the White House to not only condone but also advocate for sending American tax dollars to Chinese companies.” 

Manchin added: “These words are especially concerning as rumors circulate about the Administration thoughtlessly considering opening up the EV credit’s eligibility beyond our free trade agreement partners and allowing the laundering of Chinese minerals and materials through Trojan horse agreements.” 

While the White House seeks to go green in a way that reduces dependency on China, there also appear to be loopholes in Biden administration policies, and its enforcement of them. One question is whether Chinese companies can benefit from subsidies under the Inflation Reduction Act despite the bill’s purported focus on building the American clean energy industry. 

Critics such as the Coalition for a Prosperous America have highlighted six Chinese companies that have announced plans to partner with American outfits to assemble solar panels and other components domestically, making them eligible for an estimated $1 billion in U.S. tax credits.  

This is also happening in the auto industry, where Ford recently announced a partnership with Chinese company CATL to build a domestic $3.5 billion electric vehicle battery plant. There are also growing concerns that the Treasury Department will loosely interpret provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act aimed at limiting such credits to electric vehicles and solar panels comprised of components and minerals from America or its friends. 

In March, the Treasury Department released the proposed regulations on electric vehicle credits, which included provisions that critics saw as skirting the IRA’s intended domestic sourcing requirements for such cars. Manchin called the guidance “a pathetic excuse to spend more taxpayer dollars as quickly as possible,” that “further cedes control to the Chinese Communist Party in the process.” 

When Treasury issued guidance in May indicating that solar project developers would receive a 10% bonus tax credit for using solar panels manufactured in America – even if they contained foreign silicon wafers, some 97% of which are produced in China – it drew stern rebukes from several populist Democrats. 

This was not the first time Biden had run afoul of some in his party over solar panels. Weeks earlier, Congress sent a veto to the president desk calling on him to rescind a two-year moratorium on solar tariffs from Southeast Asian countries Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Cambodia. This was seen as a boon to Beijing, as Chinese entities had been found to be circumventing more onerous tariffs by shifting their solar panel production to the neighboring countries. 

After a dozen Democrats voted with Republicans to pass a resolution disapproving of the moratorium in the House, nine Democrats in the Senate did the same. “The president got this one wrong,” said Sen. Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat.  

“You can’t say you want American manufacturing to lead the world and then allow Chinese companies, subsidized always by their government, to skirt the rules and dump solar panels into the U.S,” Brown  added.  

After Biden vetoed the resolution. Congress failed to muster the votes to override the veto. 

Democrats and Republicans alike have also raised concerns about how rigorously the administration is enforcing sanctions aimed at keeping Chinese solar panels from America’s shores under the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. The polysilicon pivotal to solar panels is largely produced in China’s Xinjiang region, where forced labor camps are prevalent.  

Another issue raised by critics is that because of the amount of money the administration is doling out, and the speed at which it is dispensing it, it is not carefully scrutinizing who the recipients might be – potentially to China’s benefit. 

Republicans point to a $200 million grant made under the Energy Department’s Battery Manufacturing and Recycling Grants Program, a creation of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, to a company called Microvast, as an example of this problem. Microvast’s battery production largely takes place in China, and by the company’s own admission China “exerts substantial influence over” the firm. Facing a firestorm from Republicans, the Energy Department ultimately scrapped the grant – with Secretary Jennifer Granholm admitting it had been subject solely to a “post-selection” review under a pilot vetting process, drawing their ire. 

The Department of Energy’s inspector general noted that the Biden administration had appropriated about $84 billion to stand up over 70 new programs in recent legislation – more than two times the Department’s total fiscal year 2022 budget. 

New programs, the inspector general warned “push funding through untested processes and newly designed and untested internal controls.” Combined with the speed at which the funds are moving out the door, the general warned that this creates “risks of fraud, waste and abuse.” 

“The IRA – and, generally, intensified government support for domestic production – risks opening the door to a wave of Chinese efforts to coopt that support and the domestic players benefiting from it,” the Foundation for Defense of Democracy’s Emily de La Bruyère recently argued in written testimony prepared for the U.S.-China Economic and Security Commission. “Those efforts,” she stated, “are particularly potent considering China’s existing industrial dominance in the sectors being prioritized by government action.” 

Climate and the U.S.-China Rivalry

“There’s simply no way to solve climate change without China’s leadership,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a May 2022 speech unveiling the Biden administration’s approach to China. As John Kerry has stated, “We could go to zero [emissions] tomorrow and the problem isn’t solved.”

Thus, the Biden administration has repeatedly stressed that as the world’s largest polluter, China must go green, and that cooperation on climate is essential. For its part, China has not only dramatically ramped up its production of coal plants, but also serves as the largest underwriter of fossil fuel infrastructure globally, by way of its Belt and Road Initiative. Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping insists that the “method, pace and intensity” for China to achieve carbon neutrality – which the country claims it intends to hit by 2060 – “should and must be determined by ourselves, and will never be influenced by others.” 

“China is not a partner on the environment,” Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, has said. “It is the No. 1 threat, globally.” 

The Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Eastern Theatre Command has released a provocative video showing troops practicing a coastal invasion of Taiwan. The video first appeared on the social media site WeChat Thursday, and features waves of PLA soldiers storming beaches, including armored vehicles and tanks driving into attack positions.

The clip didn’t specifically name Taiwan, but given the Eastern Theatre Command oversees the Taiwan Strait area, it’s being widely interpreted as a warning and threat aimed at the self-ruled island which is backed by the West. Watch:

The Daily Mail in highlighting the video on Friday, commented: “Meanwhile, the song featured in the video and the accompanying WeChat post were littered with evocative lyrics and phrases like ‘go over the city gate and the high wall’ and ‘no matter how dark it is, don’t be afraid… chase and win the warmest years’.”

At the same time, new joint Russia-China naval drills near Japan’s waters have alarmed Tokyo and its Western allies. Russia’s defense ministry (MoD) have confirmed the major exercises which rehearse ‘interoperability’ in the Pacific Ocean.

Russian state media summarized of the MoD statements: 

A Chinese vessel supplied a Russian warship with fuel and water as the two kept moving on parallel courses.

In a post on Telegram on Friday, the Russian Defense Ministry reported that the crews of the Admiral Tributs anti-submarine warfare ship and China’s Tayhu supply ship practiced synchronizing the two vessels’ speed while maintaining the right distance.

Russian military officials added that the two navies are currently conducting joint patrols in the East China Sea, covering more than 6,400 nautical miles (11,853km, or 7,365 miles) since the start of the maneuvers in the Pacific in late July.

The two navies have also been conducting anti-submarine and anti-aircraft drills, which have been closely monitored from Japan. 

Russia and China conduct series of naval drills in East China Sea pic.twitter.com/0lbEyzVShv

— TRT World Now (@TRTWorldNow) August 18, 2023

The Japanese government on Friday expressed “grave concern” given the close proximity of the Russian-Chinese naval grouping, consisting of nearly a dozen warships, having passed near Japan’s southern islands on Thursday. 

While the ships did not breach Japan’s territorial waters, the particular passageway used off the southern islands marked a first for the Russian and Chinese navies.

All of this comes just as President Biden is hosting his Japanese and South Korean counterparts at Camp David on Friday…

President Joe Biden opened a historic summit with Japan and South Korea at Camp David on Friday focused on strengthening security and economic ties at a time of increasing concerns about North Korea’s persistent nuclear threats and China’s provocations in the Pacific.

“Our countries are stronger and the world will be safer as we stand together. And I know this is a belief that all three share,” Biden declared at the start of the meeting with South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida at the presidential retreat in Maryland.

Addressing his fellow leaders at what he called the first standalone summit of the three nations, the American president said, “I want to thank you both for your political courage that brought you here.”

The three leaders are reportedly putting in place long-term joint naval exercises in Pacific waters as a response to regional provocations, including from North Korea and China. Beijing has been alarmed at deepening Washington-Tokyo defense relations in particular.

China has also warned that NATO must not seek expansion east into the Pacific arena, after months ago there was talk of NATO opening a liaison office in Japan, but which didn’t materialize. 

Authored by Debbie Lerman via The Brownstone Institute,

In discussions about the military and national security coup during the Covid pandemic, people often ask me:

Would it really have been so different if the NIH and CDC had remained in charge of the pandemic response?

What if the Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, and the National Security Council had never taken over? 

Wouldn’t the public health agencies have done basically the same things?

It is absolutely essential that everyone understand the answers to these questions.

They impact not just our awareness of what happened during Covid, but also our assessment of how to handle all viral outbreaks in the future.

In this article, I will describe how the response to the pandemic would have proceeded if normal public health guidelines had been followed, not just in the US but around the world, without interference from national security authorities or covert biowarfare experts. 

Public health guidelines

Before Covid, the guidelines for dealing with a new outbreak of a flu-like virus were clear:

• avoid panic, 

• search for cheap, widely available early treatments that may reduce the risk of serious illness,

• plan to increase healthcare capacity if necessary, 

• help local and state medical personnel to identify and treat cases if and when the virus causes serious illness, 

• and keep society functioning as normally as possible. 

This was the approach used in all previous epidemics and pandemics. The guidelines are detailed in the planning documents of the WHO, HHS, and EU countries.

When the military and national security agencies took over the response, these guidelines were replaced by a biowarfare paradigm: Quarantine until vaccine. In other words, keep everyone locked down while rapidly developing medical countermeasures. This is a response intended to counter biowarfare and bioterrorism attacks. It is not a public health response and is, in fact, in direct conflict with the scientific and ethical underpinnings of established public health principles.

Had we adhered to the public health protocols that were initially followed in the early months of 2020, life in the United States and around the world would have looked like life in Sweden during the pandemic, with even less panic: no masks, no school closures, no lockdowns, very low excess deaths. 

No panic

The reasons not to panic were apparent in early 2020 from the data we had gathered from China: the virus was deadly mainly to elderly people with multiple serious health conditions, did not cause life-threatening illness in children or in most people under 65, and did not seem poised to cause more of an increase in hospitalizations or deaths than a very bad flu season. 

It can be difficult at this point – after years of unrelenting censorship and propaganda – to remember that, at the beginning of 2020, the new virus emerging in China was not front and center in most people’s minds. The US media was busy covering election campaigns and economic issues, and the general attitude was that what was happening in China would not happen elsewhere.

Here are some examples of what medical and public health experts were saying in January, February and early March 2020:

January 30, 2020, CNBC: Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, Obama’s White House health advisor declared that “Americans are too worried about the new coronavirus that’s spreading rapidly across China.” He added: “Everyone in America should take a very big breath, slow down and stop panicking and being hysterical.” And he explained: “I think we need to put it into context, the death rate is much lower than for SARS.”

February 27, 2020, CNN: The CNN website reported that CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield “has a simple message for Americans: No, you shouldn’t be afraid.” The website also quoted NIH Director Dr. Alex Azar saying that “most people who get coronavirus will have mild to moderate symptoms and will be able to stay home, treating it like the severe flu or cold.” And it reported that the CDC “does not recommend Americans wear surgical masks in public. Surgical masks are effective against respiratory infections but not airborne infections.”

February 28, 2020, New England Journal of Medicine: Drs. Anthony Fauci and Robert Redfield wrote that “the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%” and “the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%).” They cited Chinese data showing that “either children are less likely to become infected, or their symptoms were so mild that their infection escaped detection.”

March 4, 2020, Slate : Dr. Jeremy Samuel Faust, Harvard emergency physician reassured readers that all the evidence available at the time “suggests that COVID-19 is a relatively benign disease for most young people, and a potentially devastating one for the old and chronically ill, albeit not nearly as risky as reported.” He said the mortality rate was “zero in children 10 or younger among hundreds of cases in China” and that it was important to “divert our focus away from worrying about preventing systemic spread among healthy people—which is likely either inevitable, or out of our control.”

No censorship or propaganda

If we had continued down the road of a regular public health response, opinions like these from our national public health leaders would have continued to be published and discussed openly. There would have been open discussion of the virus’s potential harms, and expert debates about various response measures. There would have been no need to censor any particular opinion or disseminate propaganda supporting any other. 

If some experts thought we should shut down the entire country (or world), they would have debated this position with those experts who thought this was a gross and dangerous overreaction. The media would most likely have taken the side of the less draconian measures, because it would have been common knowledge that the virus was not lethal for most people, and that the case fatality rate (how many people died after getting sick) was, as Fauci and Redfield reported in February 2020, around 0.1 percent in the general population, and much lower for anyone under 65.

If anyone had published a model showing millions of potential deaths based on a 2 or 3 percent or higher estimated fatality rate, their assumptions would have been openly questioned and debated, and most likely easily debunked using available data and observed fatality rates from the real world.

Here are other important topics the media would have been able to report on (as they were doing without censorship before the middle of March), had there been no intentional suppression of traditional public health guidelines, and no panic-fomenting propaganda:

China

Scientific and medical data from China was never considered reliable before Covid, because in a totalitarian regime it is assumed that the data must always conform to the regime’s agenda. Without censorship or propaganda, this would have remained true for everything related to Covid. The videos of people falling dead in the streets, the draconian lockdowns of millions of people, and the obviously absurd claims that the lockdowns in one area of the country had eradicated the virus everywhere for years on end, would all be openly questioned and debunked in the media.

Testing and quarantines

Without censorship or propaganda, the media would be able to invite top epidemiologists to explain to the public that once an airborne virus is widely disseminated in a population, you cannot stop it from spreading. You can use tests to help guide treatment. You can also use tests to figure out who has been exposed to the virus and is likely to have acquired immunity so they can interact safely with vulnerable populations. It would be common knowledge that it is not necessary or useful to test the entire population repeatedly or to quarantine healthy people.

Early spread 

It would have been reassuring for people to know that the virus probably started spreading before December 2019. This would mean that more people had already been exposed without getting sick or dying, which would support the low fatality estimates. It would also mean that since the virus was already widely disseminated, containment (using testing and quarantines) was not a viable or desirable objective, as experts were already stating (see Dr. Faust above).

Cases

Without unnecessary testing, the definition of a “case” would have remained what it had always been before Covid: someone who seeks medical care because they have serious symptoms. Thus, the media would report only on clusters of actual cases, if and when they emerged in different locations. There would be no ticker tapes with running numbers of asymptomatic people who tested positive. Instead of millions of positive “cases” (i.e., positive PCR tests), we would hear about hundreds or thousands of people who were hospitalized with serious symptoms, as in all previous epidemics and pandemics. This would happen in different places at different times, as the virus spread geographically. The vast majority of the population would never be counted as cases.

Natural immunity and herd immunity

Virologists and epidemiologists would be featured in the news, explaining that if you have been exposed to a virus you develop natural immunity. So, for example, if there were nurses at a hospital who had been sick with Covid, they could go back to work and not worry about getting seriously ill or spreading the virus. The public would also learn that the more people developed natural immunity, the closer we would get to herd immunity, which would mean the virus would have nowhere else to spread. Nobody would consider either of those terms a reckless strategy or a sociopathic plot to let the virus “rip” and kill large swaths of the population.

Early treatment

Doctors in China had several months experience treating Covid before observable clusters of cases emerged in other countries. They had developed treatment protocols with available drugs that they could have shared with the international medical community. The media would have reported on the efforts of researchers and doctors all over the world to find available treatments that could lower the risk of patients’ hospitalization or death. 

Vaccines

Without the quarantine-until-vaccine agenda, investments in vaccine development in 2020 would have been modest, and might have led to some clinical trials, although by the time they got to Phase III trials (on large numbers of patients), most people would already have natural immunity. The media would have been able to report in January 2020, as Anthony Fauci did in January 2023, that “viruses that replicate in the human respiratory mucosa without infecting systemically, including influenza A, SARS-CoV-2, endemic coronaviruses, RSV, and many other ‘common cold’ viruses” have never been “effectively controlled by licensed or experimental vaccines.” 

With a focus on early treatments and keeping most people out of the hospital and in a normally functioning society, no one would have been holding their breath waiting for a “safe and effective” vaccine to emerge after only a few months’ trials. 

Variants

Nobody would have cared about – or even heard of – variants. The discussion would have centered around who was getting seriously ill and dying, and how they could be treated to lower the numbers of hospitalizations and deaths. There would be no need to know whether someone was seriously ill with Alpha, Delta or Omicron XBB1.16, because the variant would have no impact on treatment. 

Long Covid

Every viral infection brings with it the potential for long-term symptoms, yet we’ve never talked about “long flu” or “long herpes.” There was no data back in 2020 suggesting that Covid was radically different and was more likely to result in troublesome symptoms once the initial infection was resolved. Thus, the topic probably would not even have come up. If it had, experts would have explained that feeling fatigued or depressed many months after a viral infection is probably not related, and that if you did not have a serious case of the illness you were very unlikely to have any serious long-term symptoms. 

Origins of the virus

If the biodefense experts had been honest with the public, they could have explained that the virus might have leaked from a lab, but that everything we knew about it – low fatality rate, steep fatality age gradient, no ill effects for children, etc. – was still true.

At this point, there could have been open and honest public debates about the most important topics relevant to the outbreak: What is gain-of-function research, why are we doing it, and should we continue?

There would have been no cover-ups or propaganda about the virus coming from an animal source. We would never know that pangolins or racoon dogs even existed.

Why this sounds like a fantasy

Once the biowarfare cartel took over the pandemic response, there was only one objective: scare everyone as much as possible to gain compliance with lockdowns and make everyone desperate for vaccines. Public health experts, including the leaders of the NIH, CDC, and NIAID, were no longer authorized to make their own pandemic policy decisions or public announcements. Everyone had to stick to the lockdown narrative.

The forces of panic and propaganda, in the service of enormous profits for pharmaceutical and media companies, once unleashed could not be contained.

It didn’t have to be that way.

The more people understand this, the less likely they are to go along with such devastating madness in the future.

Authored by Matthew Boose via American Greatness,

The phrase “our democracy” has become a pervasive cliche in American politics. But who is the subject in this presumptuous expression?

Although never defined explicitly, the answer is implicit in what it does not include.

To a greater and greater extent, American politics revolves around black people, women, and immigrant populations from the Third World, which together form the core of the Democratic party.

The remnants of the old country are now facing obsolescence, with only a weak and ambivalent vessel, the Republican party, to defend them.

The right, whether out of denial, cowardice, or a lack of imagination, has failed to grapple with the deep roots of its demise.

Republicans ostracized “nativists” and helped facilitate the demographic replacement of their own voters with the delusion that cheap Third World day laborers are “natural conservatives,” overlooking the most naturally conservative constituency of all: white men. The right failed to conserve gender roles, as women left the home and became angry foot soldiers of a socialist revolution.

Now we observe the results.

Consider abortion. The right keeps losing on this issue, with the latest setback coming in Ohio, a red, pro-Trump state. The American people, it is now clear after 50 years of Roe, regard abortion as basically another form of contraception. There is nothing Republicans can really say to disabuse the masses of this belief. It would require a fundamental revolution in thinking, a rejection of everything the population now takes for granted.

The left isn’t wrong when they paint conservatives as natural enemies of “our democracy.” There is nothing conservative about the radically egalitarian system that governs the country, which turns politics into a race to the bottom, a game at which the left naturally excels. The left, in all times and places, has thrived on destruction and decay. The muddled, obese, foreign mass that is today called “the American people” has only a faint connection to the sturdy, adventurous Anglo-Saxons who founded the nation. Their values – freedom of speech, property rights, religious toleration, free enterprise – it is not surprising to find, are being trampled by the government we now have, which imposes tyranny from above with the support and legitimacy of “we the people,” or what has become of the people, below.

As the country degenerates, the left grows more and more extreme without ever paying a price at the polls. On the other hand, the right is under constant pressure to moderate an already liberal agenda in a futile effort to delay extinction. What passes for conservatism has retreated to the slippery redoubts of “parental rights,” platitudes about women’s sports and “nation of immigrants” pablum.

Even still, there are some who argue the right is not persuasive or inclusive enough.

The release of new data showing young women sprinting to the left led some “conservative” women to blame the right and a supposed failure to police misogyny. This is further evidence of the deep, nigh inescapable influence of feminist thinking. The truth is that the right, which is by nature hierarchical, was never geared to win the arms’ race of universal suffrage. Now, what is left of the country of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson is on life support, as conservatives scramble to pander to the descendants of Montezuma, radicalized and unhappy women, and wimpy yes-men. The ridiculous fraud of birthright citizenship allows the children of illegal immigrants, mere economic opportunists thumbing their nose at the nation and its laws, to have a say in its future.

The ugly beast of socialism, led by the stalking horse of “democracy,” is killing America from the inside.

Politics and culture revolve around the grievances of the weak and the envious. To speak of great projects, or even the low bar of sobriety in government, is an absurdity amidst the deafening cry for revenge against white men and the civilization they built.

Our courts have been taken hostage by lynch mobs. Decadent judges showboat for approval from the crowd.

Power is wielded with a heavy hand against the enemies of the revolution, while violent criminals roam free. No one in authority accepts accountability. The soul of “democracy” is captured well by the obscene spectacle of Donald Trump’s show trial, led by patently unqualified, racially aggrieved prosecutors.

Those who find the present state of things tolerable, or even good, will never be shaken out of their delusions.

One cannot feel too sorry for them when they come face to face with the creatures vomited out of the belly of their beloved “democracy.”

If there is any hope of leaving this cesspool of mediocrity and disorder, it lies not with soft and flabby conservatism, which has utterly failed to yoke its vision to an unwilling, degenerate nation, but a politics that is willing to raise the bar.

With money-market fund assets hitting new highs, and banks’ usage of The Fed’s emergency funds facility at record highs, we wonder how much longer The Fed can keep the dream of rising deposits alive (after last week’s massive NSA inflows).

On a seasonally-adjusted basis, The Fed says that total deposits dropped $11BN last week (the first decline in 4 weeks). We also note that the prior week’s inflow was revised higher…

Source: Bloomberg

After last week’s enormous $121BN NSA deposits inflow, last week saw an $11BN outflow (on a non-seasonally-adjusted basis)…

Source: Bloomberg

The gap between SA deposits and NSA deposits remains more manageable (until the next time The Fed decides to fiddle)…

The divergence between money-market fund assets and bank deposits remains extreme…

Source: Bloomberg

On a seasonally-adjusted basis, Small Banks saw $5.6BN deposit inflows last week while Large Banks suffered $28.7BN outflows (with foreign bank inflows of $12BN making up the difference)…

Source: Bloomberg

And so, for a nice change, everything is tidy with domestic US banks seeing deposit outflows on an SA and NSA basis…

Source: Bloomberg

On the other side of the ledger, small banks continued to pump out loans (+$3.56BN, sixth straight week of increases), while large banks saw a $7.4BN contraction in loan volumes…

Source: Bloomberg

So, if The Fed’s data is to be believed, Small banks are ‘winning’ – deposit inflows and making loans; while large banks are leaking – deposit outflows and shrinking loans. All while Treasury prices tumble, stressing small bank balance sheets…

Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

“This voter is not convinced by virtues or statistics. He is convinced by dreams, visions, stories and jokes.”

– Curtis Yarvin

Draw back from the scene and understand that the sheer heaping-up of procedural legal bullshit in the various sham court cases against candidate Donald Trump is largely an attempt to confound, mystify, and preoccupy the public while the great scaffold of our national life collapses. The news — both legacy and alt — will be dominated day after day by analyses of every move and counter-move through endless thickets of courtroom minutiae while the US economy crashes and burns, residual wealth is confiscated, and the American social order turns into something like fiery goo.

By November of 2024, somebody will be elected president, or no one will be. At this point, it is probably down to an election that more than half the country won’t believe in, or no election at all due to civil chaos so extreme it will make the 1861 weeks of secession look as tame as a middle school fire drill. Beyond the hamstringing and hog-tying of their chief adversary, the Democratic Party lawfare necromancers have set up the gameboard with surpassing precision so that their opponents will never be able to win another election. Yet, they are so self-satisfied as to apparently think no one noticed. (We’ll be coming for you, eventually, Marc Elias.)

As to the parsing out of all those bogus charges against Mr. Trump, consider that we now live in a culture of no truth, only battling portfolios of narrative spin, at least according to the Marxian wokesters who have seized the machinery of law, so, there, with a snap of your fingers goes jurisprudence — as in: I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, blah blah….

The joke is on you.

There is no truth, anymore, so stop insisting that there is anything like it to determine, except whatever outcome the Party of Chaos seeks.

The suspended animation of August with its sand castles, lobster rolls, and care-free cocktail cruises will soon yield to the season of hurricanes, financial fiascos, momentous military movements, and reversals of political fortune. What, for instance, becomes of “Joe Biden,” the fictitious president, and that claque of grift-bedizened relatives around him? I’ll tell you one thing: no way is this fellow running for reelection, and the mighty pretense around that hallucination makes idiots of everyone on cable TV news. Somebody has already slipped Ol’ “Joe” the black spot. Dr. Jill has crawled into a bottle. The “Big Guy” is just sulking now, drowning his sorrows in ice cream — but his fate hangs there above the Rehoboth dunes like an ominous black sea-bird suspended on an ill wind, mocking him. You have finally screwed the pooch, Joey, it cries… caw caw caw….

We are thus close to the moment when impeachment can no longer be dodged. The reams of Biden family bank records that Mr. Comer of Kentucky has unearthed hither and yon, plus deal memoranda, video and audio recordings of dark confabs, and hundreds of tell-tale emails are of a different evidentiary nature than the roster of hypothetical thought crimes confabulated by Jack Smith, Alvin Bragg, and Fani T. Willis. Personally, I would like, at least, to see impeachment hearings where all that hard evidence of Biden family bribery is methodically laid out for The New York Times and CNN to ignore.

It will look like a game of chicken for a few days, but then the party honchos will “sadly” order Ol’ Joe to step aside before that grim spectacle goes too far.

The Ukraine War will then be Kamala Harris’s to lose — depend on it — though nobody will care. I have a feeling that Barack Obama will not be able to… how shall we say… work with her. All that cackling must conceal an inner vacancy so vast that Judge Crater, DB Cooper, and the brigantine Mary Celeste might be roaming around in there, along with Amelia Earhart, Jimmy Hoffa, and the Lost Colony of Roanoke. And I cringe to imagine the meetings with Kamala where Susan Rice, Lisa Monaco, and Torie Nuland try to tell the poor simp what to do. It will look like one of those girlie beat-downs on an Oakland street-corner.

Anyway, by that time the stock markets will be all a’crumble, all those Vanguard retirement funds will wash-up like so many writhing grunions on Cabrillo Beach, and your local bank will cap withdrawals at $500 a few weeks before executing the long-rumored bail-ins. At that magic moment, the Democratic Party will have everything it has wished for.

Of course, I can’t say the melodrama will play out exactly like that, in that sequence. But expect trouble in September. Expect disorder like you’ve never imagined. Think about retrieving whatever cash you have in the bank. Consider arming yourself for safety’s sake, if you live in a part of the country that allows it. Or maybe even if you live in the other parts. Lay in some beans and rice and some batteries. Buckle your mental seat belt. When August is over, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

*  *  *

Support his blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page

Aggressive interventions by Chinese authorities were a notable theme on the week (strong-arming funds not to sell stocks, tapping banks on the shoulder to buy yuan against the dollar, and making firms an offer they can’t refuse with regard share buybacks). However, Chinese stocks closed lower…

Source: Bloomberg

..and so did the offshore yuan…

Source: Bloomberg

So Mission Unaccomplished Beijing.

Interestingly, Goldman traders suggest that:

“to this point in the sequence, I’d argue the slowdown in China had been a net positive for US equities… with specific regard to the disinflationary impulse and the flow of capital...

…that said, coming out of a week that featured another disappointing set of data… and another dose of CNH weakness…

…it now feels like China growth fears can provoke a more global risk-off dynamic“

But, bear in mind that while the yuan has been spanked like a monkey against the dollar, it has actually rallied against the rest of its trading partners’ currencies…

Source: Bloomberg

And while Chinese data was a shitshow, US macro (hard and soft) surprised to the upside this week…

Source: Bloomberg

Which, combined with relatively hawkish Fed Minutes pushed rate expectations higher on the week (reducing expectation for cuts next year also)…

Source: Bloomberg

This prompted ‘risk-off’ as the S&P fell for the 3rd straight week, its longest weekly losing streak since Feb, and suffered its biggest weekly loss since the collapse of SVB in March. Small Caps were the ugliest horse in the glue factory…

All of the US Majors closed below their 50DMAs (note in upper right that Small Caps dropped to 100DMA and bounced)…

The S&P 500 closed down 0.01% today (lol!!!) as the algos ran the stop but couldn’t keep it green…

Regional bank stocks fell for the 3rd straight week…

The put/call ratio surged up to the highest since the SVB collapse…

Source: Bloomberg

Most notably it appears the $2.2 trillion OpEx was put-monetization day for all options players (including 0-DTEs)…

Source: SpotGamma

Treasury yields were all higher on the week with the long-end notably underperforming (30Y +12bps, 2Y +4bps)…

Source: Bloomberg

Which steepened (dis-inverted) the yield curve (2s10s) further (remember its the resteepening that is the real peril)…

Source: Bloomberg

Also of note is that the 2Y Yield ripped up to 5.00% once again… and failed…

Source: Bloomberg

The dollar rallied for the 5th straight week to its highest since early June, breaking back above its 200DMA….

Source: Bloomberg

Crypto was clubbed like a baby seal this week with three big legs lower…

Source: Bloomberg

Bitcoin plunged back to pre-BlackRock ETF headlines…

Source: Bloomberg

The intraday pattern of overnight strength and post-London-Fix weakness continued every day this week in Gold. Spot Gold is back below $1900…

Source: Bloomberg

Oil prices fell on the week – the first weekly loss since June – with WTI finding some support at $80…

Finally, next week brings NVDA’s “guidance heard around the world” on Wednesday and Jay Powell’s Jackson Hole speech on Friday, both of which could catalyze major moves in the market.

The S&P volatility term structure is starting to fear it…

Source: Bloomberg

And NVDA bulls ‘smell the fear’…

Source: Bloomberg

But could Powell really push us off the cliff?

Source: Bloomberg

Of course not, we have Bidenomics (oh, talking of which, there’s always the chance that the govt shuts down in a week or two – that would slow the flow of money).

Authored by Kit Knightly via Off-Guardian.org,

A few days ago YouTube amended their Covid19 Misinformation policy, changing it so it now applies to all things medical.

The original policy was put in place in the early days of the pandemic, May 2020, and outlawed content in the video sharing platform that “contradicted the WHO or local health authorities” concerning the pandemic:

Over the years it’s been regularly updated, outright banning all “vaccine misinformation” in late 2021.

The latest revamp is the biggest so far. The new “medical misinformation policy” – no longer just “covid19 misinformation” – now addresses cancer treatments, abortion and non-Covid vaccines, according to CNN.

A YouTube spokesman told the media that the new policy will be focusing on three key areas: “Prevention, treatment and denial”:

• Videos promoting alternative medicine or dietary tips that claim to prevent disease – gone.

• Videos sharing alternative or natural treatments – gone.

• Videos claiming establishment treatments (eg. radiation or chemotherapy) do more harm than good – even from people who have had those treatments – gone.

• Videos claiming X disease does not exist – gone.

In short, YouTube will no longer allow any medical content at all that isn’t simply parroting government policy or promoting big pharma products.

Tellingly, it’s all about approval from authority, not accuracy of the information. In fact, nowhere in the entire document is there any kid of differentiation made between “accuracy” and “authority”.

In YouTube world something is “information” if it’s confirmed by the government, and “misinformation” if it is not. Reality is subject to the approval of the state, and the state is always right.

Which tells you everything you need to know.