Former Alabama Broncos star running back Ahmaad Galloway died suddenly this week at age 42.  Galloway was an eighth-grade English teacher at Compton-Drew Middle School in St. Louis, Missouri. When Galloway did not show up for work, the school contacted authorities. Police conducted a welfare check and found the former football star dead in his apartment.  The cause of death has not yet been made public. 

Compton-Drew Middle School Principal Susan Reid said she knew something wasn’t right.

“Ahmaad was always on time, very responsible, so we knew something might be wrong,” Reid told WVTM 13. “There wasn’t anything disrupted at Ahmaad’s apartment, so we are thinking that it could have been a medical issue.”

His passing is just one among a flurry of sudden fatalities in the past year among athletes and former athletes in particular, occurring at relatively young ages.  In the majority of deaths, heart failure or circulatory failure is found to be the culprit.

Jordan Brister, 18, died Sunday, Jan. 8, after suffering a cardiac arrest on Jan. 3 during the school day at Amplus Academy in Las Vegas, according to a statement by the school shared by NBC affiliate KSNV. He was found unresponsive in the school bathroom after attending gym class, his family told KSNV.

According to local reports from Campbell County, 17-year-old Max Sorenson died of a “medical event” at his home Monday, December 26. Campbell County Coroner Paul Wallem said that following the medical incident at his home, the high school basketball player was rushed to the Campbell County Memorial Hospital in Gillette, Wyoming.

However, despite efforts from the doctors, he was pronounced deceased.

Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) fighter Victoria ‘The Prodigy’ Lee has tragically died last week at just 18 years old, of a medical condition which has not yet been revealed to the public.

A 16-year-old girl in Las Vegas has died after “suffering a medical episode during an athletic event according to a message sent to families,” reported KSNV, the NBC affiliate in Las Vegas. The student has been identified as 16-year-old Ashari Hughes. The medical emergency occurred Jan. 5 during a flag football game, according to The Las Vegas Review-Journal. The newspaper also reported that Hughes collapsed during her team’s home game against Valley High School. She was taken to the hospital and died later that night.

The list goes on and on.

Excess deaths have jumped dramatically in the US (excess deaths being fatalities beyond the yearly average).  The majority of excess deaths in the past two years involving people under the age of 65 were not caused by Covid infection.  At least 32,000 excess deaths in 2021 have been directly attributed to heart failure and circulation related failures.  Circulatory deaths were a major contributor to additional deaths among ages 18 to 44.

The UK has released information indicating a similar spike in excess deaths last year – The highest in 50 years, in fact.  UK officials of course deny any connection to vaccine side effects (an often cited concern by the public), and instead claim that heart failure may be the after-effect of covid infection.  However, multiple reports and studies show that the covid virus causes no significant damage to the heart and is not a contributor to heart failure, despite rumors spread within the mainstream media. 

For example, In March 2021, a group of sports cardiologists reported on nearly 800 professional athletes who had tested positive for Covid-19. Less than 1% of these athletes had abnormal findings on cardiac magnetic resonance scans or stress echocardiography. None of these athletes had cardiovascular trouble when they returned to play. 

This means that there is some other cause besides covid which just happens to have started in 2021.  Studies do show a direct link between covid vaccination and Myocarditis.  This would help to explain the jump in non-covid excess deaths related to heart failure since 2021, but since most studies investigating vaccination side effects do not use unvaccinated people as a control group, there is no hard data on vaccinated versus unvaccinated negative events.

There will certainly be deaths among younger people for a myriad of reasons that are natural, and the cause of death of Ahmaad Galloway and others may be any number of culprits as many medical reports remain unreleased.  That said, it is important to note the ongoing and highly suspicious trend of heart damage to people well below the age of commonality and track it carefully.

At least 68 passengers have been killed after a Nepal airliner crashed Sunday in the county’s worst aviation disaster in more than 30 years.

The Yeti Airlines ATR 72 plane, which is a twin-engine turboprop meant for short-haul regional flights, went down near the city of Pokhara in central Nepal, carrying a total of 72 people including four crew members.

Nepal’s civil aviation authority has indicated that 37 were men, 25 were women, as well as three children and three were infants.

Hundreds of rescue workers descended on a large hillside where the airliner went down. Subsequent circulating footage showed huge flames engulfing the area in the immediate aftermath of the crash. The plane appears to be at the bottom of a river gorge.

One local resident identified as Bishnu Tiwari, who assisted in rescue efforts, described of the massive flames: 

“The flames were so hot that we couldn’t go near the wreckage. I heard a man crying for help, but because of the flames and smoke we couldn’t help him.”

The plane had reportedly been preparing to land when the crash happened. The New York Times details of the difficult rescue efforts:

The Nepal Army said it had retrieved 66 bodies from the site as of Sunday evening. Rescuers had taken 29 bodies to a hospital for identification and at least 33 were still at the site, according to Brig. Gen. Krishna Prasad Bhandari, a spokesman for the Nepal Army.

Tek Bahadur KC, the chief administrator of the district of Kaski, where the crash took place said rescuers had to struggle to reach the site, at first because of all the smoke, and because the plane had gone down into a gorge.

Widely circulating but unconfirmed footage showed the plane roll hard just before going down.

A video showing moments before a deadly plane crash in Nepal that saw 72 people killed earlier today. The Yeti Airlines jet crashed near Pokhara International Airport in Nepal and was carrying a total of 68 passengers and four crew members. pic.twitter.com/4DbGY7nUi7

— Ali Hashem علي هاشم (@alihashem_tv) January 15, 2023

The report further indicates there were a number of international passengers on the flight: “Out of the 68 passengers on board Sunday’s flight, 53 were from Nepal, five from India, four from Russia, two from South Korea, and one each from Australia, Argentina, France and Ireland, according to Nepal’s Civil Aviation Authority.”

In total there were 15 international passengers on board, and all four crewmembers were Nepalese.

The country of Nepal relies heavily on tourism, and these types of turbo engine planes are often used to fly passengers to remote cities and towns across the country, and are typically brief flights.

#Nepal
72 passengers were on board. Plane crash at Pokhra International Airport. pic.twitter.com/igBoObcCDm

— Aishwarya Paliwal (@AishPaliwal) January 15, 2023

Aviation monitors are now saying Sunday’s incident marks the third-deadliest crash in Himalayan nation’s history, with two 1992 crashes, one involving Thai Airways in July of that year which left 113 dead, and another involving Pakistan International airlines later in September which killed 167 people – among the deadliest.

Authored by Simon White, Bloomberg macro strategist,

Know your tails. In a year facing an unusually wide set of outcomes, knowing what the tail risks are and how to hedge them is of paramount importance.

The top three tail risks I see facing the global economy – and three havens offering a refuge – are:

1. Stubborn or resurgent inflation —> commodities and other real assets

2. US recession —> shorter-dated Treasuries or bills (or even cash)

3. Global funding crisis —> US dollar

A non-negligible risk facing markets this year and beyond is inflation that fails to fall back to pre-Covid levels and remains stickier and more entrenched. In this case, a greater exposure to commodities and other real assets is essential.

Commodities were the only main asset class to deliver a positive real return in the 1970s. Stocks, corporate bonds and US Treasuries all posted negative real returns in that decade. Moreover, commodities, despite their post-Covid rise, continue to be generationally cheap versus stocks and bonds.

Simply put, the investment community is still woefully underweight commodities, an asset that stands to be one of the few beneficiaries of persistent inflation. Using US ETFs as a proxy, commodities are only 2% of the total invested in stocks, bonds and commodities. Even a small redirection of flows from financial assets to commodities would lead to outsized gains in the latter.

Commodities are also a hedge against rising geopolitical risk, as countries seek to fortify their accessibility to raw materials essential for energy, infrastructure and renewable technologies.

How best to find safety from a US recession, the most likely of the three risks highlighted? Several reliable leading indicators are consistent with a recession beginning as early as the summer. Given the weight of data in favor of a slump, it would be remiss not posit that one is likely.

Treasuries are the haven of choice in a recession. Aside from their liquidity and the support they get from rate cuts, they benefit from raw fear: if you know in a panic people reach for US Treasury debt, then it’s rational to panic first.

Bonds have generally gone up for most of the past 40 years, so any historical analysis will have that bias. Still, it is clear from the chart below that Treasuries on average see an acceleration in their rally after the recession begins.

The caveat this time around is we are in an inflationary world, and bonds may not rally as much in an inflationary recession.

A way to mitigate this risk would be buying shorter-dated USTs or bills, avoiding some of the larger real capital losses that would come with longer-maturity debt.

Moreover, despite the recent rally, USTs are still deeply oversold and speculators remain very net short, meaning any rally has the potential to be turbocharged in a flight to safety.

The third major tail risk facing markets this year is a funding crisis, for which the dollar is a place of refuge. It remains the dominant currency in the international monetary system, despite initiatives to reduce the dollarization of the global economy, such as closer trade cooperation between China and Russia, and a mooted expansion of the BRICs. It eclipses the euro, yen, sterling and the yuan in FX reserves, debt outstanding and trade settlement.

Source: Atlantic Council

The Fed thus remains not only the domestic lender of last resort, but the international lender of last resort. Yet the US central bank is contracting its balance sheet, with the pace set to rise this year. The stickiness of the overnight reverse repo facility will ultimately ensure bank reserves bear the brunt of QT, heightening risks that dollar funding becomes scarce and expensive.

Disruptions to dollar funding often become self-fueling, due to the structural dollar short inherent in the global monetary system. In the chart below, we can see that rises in the dollar lead to falls in global crossborder lending in USD, as borrowers scramble to source dollars that are rising in cost, leading to default and deleveraging.

The dollar is likely to remain in a downtrend as long as the real yield curve keeps flattening, but it continues to be one of the best hedges if dollar-funding pressures arise this year, especially against EM currencies of countries with large external-debt positions and sizable current-account deficits, such as Turkey, Chile and Hungary.

Markets also face mounting exogenous risks this year, for instance a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Although not discussed here, such risks would likely precipitate at least one of the outcomes already highlighted.

In any crisis, it’s not about seeking what assets return the most, but finding what loses the least.

The options highlighted can’t be guaranteed to offer a positive return, especially in real terms, but they stand in a good position to outperform other assets in the scenarios explored.

A haven is defined as a “safe or peaceful place”. Unfortunately, 2023 is unlikely to offer any truly tranquil escapes, but real assets, USTs and the dollar promise to act as sturdy life rafts when a storm hits.

Authored by Thomas Brooke via Remix News,

Ukrainian refugees in Britain are making return trips to their homeland to receive medical treatment instead of waiting to access the U.K.’s National Health Service (NHS) after a spate of strikes brought the public healthcare system to its knees.

A report by British news outlet inews cited a number of instances in which those who had fled the conflict in Ukraine simply gave up on long wait times to access medical care in Britain, opting instead for the perilous 24-hour journey to the war-torn country to be seen by a medical professional almost immediately.

The left-wing news outlet used the reports to criticize Britain’s governing Conservative party, which has been locked in fierce, long-running negotiations with unions of NHS workers demanding pay rises in line with Britain’s inflation.

inews detailed the account of one refugee, Maiia Habruk, who reportedly fled the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv last year to settle in southeast London. After suffering a severe toothache, she logged her symptoms on an NHS chatroom and was told to expect a call from a medical professional the following day. This never happened, so she went to her local Accident and Emergency (A&E) department, also without success.

“After waiting four hours, the doctor didn’t even look at me, and she also told me to take paracetamol. Again, it didn’t help, and I was still in severe pain,” Ms. Habruk told the news outlet.

She ended up traveling back to Ukraine via Poland where she says she was seen by a doctor immediately.

“I was told it was an urgent issue with my wisdom tooth and that I had to have an extraction immediately.

“I do not in any way want to criticize the NHS. I think it’s amazing that everyone can get help for free,” she added.

The Ukrainian woman told the news outlet she knew of three others residing in London who had opted to return to war-torn Ukraine for medical treatment instead of waiting to use Britain’s public healthcare system.

Another Ukrainian woman living in the Scottish city of Glasgow, whose healthcare system is managed by the devolved left-wing Scottish government, also reportedly traveled home for medical treatment, according to Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Alex Cole-Hamilton, who raised the issue with Scotland’s First Minister earlier this week.

Some members of the public took to social media to question whether it is right that those choosing to make trips back to Ukraine remain entitled to claim asylum in Britain.

“If they are able to and willing also to return to Ukraine then they weren’t a ‘refugee,’” wrote one social media user, while another said:

“If the refugee can go home to see their doctor, then why are they in the U.K.? If it’s safe to see your doctor, it can’t be unsafe to live there too.”

A third added:

“Odd definition of refugee if they’re going back to their native country for appointments. Very odd indeed!”

The U.K.’s Conservative government announced in March last year that Ukrainians arriving in England are eligible for free-of-charge access to NHS healthcare, including GP and nurse consultations, hospital services, and urgent care centers.

However, nurses and ambulance staff in England have been on strike over the winter as they attempt to force the government’s hand to agree to pay hikes. The strikes have seen millions of Brits waiting even longer for medical appointments and ambulance response times being the worst on record.

Two more 12-hour nurse strikes have been organized for next week, while ambulance staff will walk out again on Jan. 23 if no suitable compromise over pay has been agreed upon.

Authored by Mark Jeftovic via BombThrower.com,

We’re one tragedy away from pitchforks & torches…

“No one must ever ask where another rabbit was, and anyone who asked ‘Where?’ – must be silenced.”

In the story Watership Down a group of rabbits flee their home warren of Sandleford, ahead of its imminent destruction at the hands of real estate developers. They set out looking for a safe, new home and among their adventures they encounter another warren called Cowslip. There, all the rabbits are uncharacteristically large, affable and seemingly well fed. For awhile, the Sandleford rabbits think they’ve found a safe haven.

There’s only one problem: every once in awhile one of the the rabbits goes missing. It turns out the entire warren is on a farmer’s land who feeds and otherwise takes care of them, but then sets out snares and traps them from time to time for their pelts.

There is only one rule at Cowslip’s Warren, nobody is allowed to ask or talk about any of the missing rabbits.

I want everybody reading this to think of two numbers from asking you two questions:

Question #1) How many people do you know who died of COVID?

I first started hearing rumblings of a new Coronavirus emerging out of China in January 2020 (although it looks now like COVID was already circulating throughout the world by mid-2019).

When I got wind of it, I was emailing friends and colleagues to get N95 masks and to stock up on groceries and medications. It looked bad. By February I was probably one of the first people seen around town wearing an N95 mask. In March I started running a spreadsheet using R0, fatality rates and case-doubling times that were coming out of the CDC, the WHO, and shrieking hysterics like Eric Feigl-Ding:

The famous “HMOG Tweet”.

The screen grab above is the famous “Holy Mother Of God” tweet, which is sometimes speculated as having rang the bell beginning the global COVID panic. Feigl-Ding refers to it himself as a seminal moment, and he’s also since deleted the tweet. It is archived here.

He’s still at it, btw…

This guy has one setting.

— Mark Jeftovic, The ₿itcoin Capitalist (@StuntPope) December 21, 2022

When it was all unfolding, I was initially afraid. My rough model posited that by the end of May we’d have 442,368 cases with as many as 22,118 fatalities and that was just in Toronto. By the end of July, 1.7 million cases and 88,473 fatalities.

I laid out previously what happened and what turned me into a lockdown skeptic: every day I’d plug in the new case and fatality numbers from the city, the province and federal levels and by the end of May I realized that my model was bust. By fall I knew that case numbers were bullshit (it didn’t matter how many people tested positive on a PCR test) and that lockdowns were a bigger problem than the virus.

There weren’t going to be 88K fatalities across the entire country, let alone Toronto (the official fatality count now for all of Canada is 49.5K – and we also now know that most of those, upwards of 90%, were with COVID and not from COVID. Toronto had about 3.7K total fatalities in over two years).

I naively thought this was good news. Surely everybody was looking at the data and surely everybody could see by mid-summer, that even adjusted for seasonality and expecting another wave in the fall, this was nowhere near the THERMONUCLEAR LEVEL EVENT certain prognosticators were promoting.

We all know what happened instead: by fall it had become a full fledged religion and well on its way to mass formation psychosis.

But in the early innings of that, when it looked really bad, I figured it meant that probably about once per week we’d be hearing about somebody within our extended family, circle of friends or colleagues who would die from this. Ditto for celebs, the evening news would be saturated with odes and tributes to noteworthy people who were just felled by COVID. Maybe one or more of my immediate family would die from this. Maybe I would. It was scary.

From our vantage point here in early 2023, I can only think of three celebrities who died with COVID: John Prine, Herman Cain, and much to the delight of the zerocovid lunatics: Meatloaf.

On January 1st, 2022 I surmised that the pandemic was mostly over. During the main run of COVID I did lose about four people within my social circle, none from COVID or even with COVID. That figure doesn’t count another two people I knew about in my area who committed suicide under lockdowns.

So without diminishing the tragedy of any of those 49K Canadians who succumbed with COVID, my number for the first question is zero.

Question #2) How many people do you know who died “suddenly and unexpectedly” over the last 18 months?

Recall how I was expecting to be hearing at least once a week about relatives, acquaintances and colleagues that had died from COVID, but instead didn’t hear anything.

However, when it comes to relatives, friends and acquaintances who have suddenly and unexpectedly dropped dead of a heart attack or some other unanticipated medical event, over the last year to 18 months or so… well that’s a different story.

Three. That’s people in my phone contacts. People I was talking to one day or one week and who were dead the next, add one more for someone I knew from yesteryear who was suddenly and unexpectedly a trending hashtag on Twitter.  None of these people were fighting a terminal diagnosis or dealing with “The Big C”. They were just running around, living their lives, and then they weren’t.

Before COVID, before the vaccines, there was always the odd account of somebody dying unexpectedly – maybe one every couple of years. As you age, more people you know pass away, but usually there’s an arc to it: a diagnosis, a treatment, then the passing.  I knew one person who died “suddenly and unexpectedly” in January 2020, and it was the first sudden death in my circle in years.

I’m no statistician, but four people I know personally joining the ranks of the “sudden and unexpected” (three of them coronaries), within the span of a little over a year… well that seems a little weird. The reason I think these all have a common thread through them, is three of the four of these people, I would describe as ideologically committed to COVID. They all had their doses and in most cases, their boosters. One I’m unsure of, so all I have there is the sudden massive heart attack.

In my case, the number for the second question is four.

Which of your numbers is bigger?

Which number is larger for the number of people within your circle of friends, family, colleagues and acquaintances who:

A) died of COVID since 2020, or

B) were vaxxed and then died “Suddenly and Unexpectedly”

— Mark Jeftovic, The ₿itcoin Capitalist (@StuntPope) January 14, 2023

When will the corporate media face the music?

In the curious case of the corporate media we have an inversion of sorts which points at a type of hyper-normality in the world (the prevailing official narrative is so absurd and obviously untrue that it takes an act of intentional neurosis to believe it).

I remember when COVID hit, here in Canada there was this one video clip of a body being taken out of a house as announcers breathlessly hyperventilated about the spread of the virus. It was the same video clip and it was reused for weeks, months even.

What is the MSM not amplifying?

They are dutifully ignoring the wave of sudden deaths among our youngsters, children and even middle aged adults. We have video montages circulating on Youtube and Rumble of the endless barrage of people dropping during live streams and sporting events, but for some reason these aren’t being run on endless loop up by the MSM.

In the last few months this tempo of young adults dying suddenly seems to have quickened, and a requirement for being vaccinated or even boosted seems to be a common factor across many of them.

The phenomenon of athletes dropping on the field gives us a bit of a petri dish, because nearly all organized sporting leagues implemented a vaccine requirement on its athletes in order to participate.

I don’t want to cycle through the litany of victims of these tragedies. If you search them up via Google you’ll just get first page results of Reuters funded “fact-checks” explaining why the vaccines have nothing to do with it, or MSM pieces blaming this epidemic of “Sudden Adult Death Syndrome” on climate change and kids having heart attacks from playing video games.

Siri? Explain “gaslighting”

If you can wind your way through all the fact-checks and debunking, you can find the odd mainstream piece that actually looks at the possibility. In September, Science Magazine almost grudgingly admitted,

“COVID-19 vaccines do have a rare but worrisome cardiac side effect. Myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart muscle that can cause chest pain and shortness of breath, has disproportionately struck older boys and young men who received the shots. Only one out of several thousand in those age groups is affected, and most quickly feel better. A tiny number of deaths have been tentatively linked to vaccine myocarditis around the world. But several new studies suggest the heart muscle can take months to heal, and some scientists worry about what this means for patients long term. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has ordered vaccinemakers Pfizer and Moderna to conduct a raft of studies to assess these risks.”

Baseless, my ass.

If you want to look at some actual data on Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting or actuarial data coming out of insurance companies, or actual peer reviewed research papers, or absolute excess mortality data comparing Covid to vaccine deployment, I  would recommend Edward Dowd’s “Cause Unknown”, which is a depressing read. From it we can just pull some raw data that presents a pretty compelling case that no matter what is really happening, ignoring it is an act of journalistic malpractice:

Via OpenVaers.com

We know now via the various Twitter Files dumps that Big Tech has been taking their orders from the government, intelligence agencies and Big Pharma (a.k.a The Pharmatrocracy) all along. Should we just assume the corporate press has been as well?

This would explain why instead of undertaking Watergate level investigative reporting into legions of children, athletes and young adults suddenly dropping dead or having heart attacks, strokes and other medical emergencies, live on the air; we’re getting gaslighted about childhood asthma from natural gas stoves.

Let’s just bang rocks together from now on.
MSM beyond salvation at this point. https://t.co/scZ2iBXPkj

— Mark Jeftovic, The ₿itcoin Capitalist (@StuntPope) January 12, 2023

I have been wondering if it is possible that the perceived increase in these reports of sudden deaths is the result of a self-perpetuating loop of increased focus on these events. A kind of hysteria of its own. This is why since the onset of COVID, I’ve always tried to find numbers and data – then I follow that data where it leads me.  Often times it’s not the same place as what I’m seeing on the television screen.

Anybody can look at a graph, and provided that the data is kosher, see when something is out of whack.

This one is out of Dowd’s book and sourced with CDC data is the aggregate excess mortality rate for millennials since before the pandemic.

We know that the survival rate from COVID goes up dramatically as age comes down. The vast majority of COVID fatalities were in our elderly (many of whom were forced into localized outbreaks where they died locked down and alone).

Two things stand out:

#1) The excess death rates spike higher as the vaccines deploy, reaching their highest when mandates kick in

#2) The trend line is going the wrong direction.

Since the vaccine rollout started, the narrative around them shifted quite radically. Here’s another graph from Cause Unknown, I added the annotations (somewhat off-the-cuff, I will admit, but the overall beats are 100% accurate):

It’s the deaths attributed to COVID before and after the rollout. The vaccines were supposed to effectively drive that to zero. These shots were pitched to the public as a magic bullet, the original announcements were of “95% efficacy” (on a virus we knew by then, had a 99.95% survival rate).

It turns out now, that not only does the vaccine not confer immunity (it was more expedient to change the meaning of the word “vaccine” instead), they didn’t even test if it reduced transmission (if you try to search up either of these, you just get more pages of “fact check” articles admonishing you that whatever it is you’re looking for, it’s a nothing-burger….)

Thanks, Fact Checkers.

The entire point of  the vaccine mandates was the premise that “the vaccines stopped transmission”. Everybody said this. They are now telling you they didn’t say this, and the media, with the complicity of Big Tech are telling you it never mattered.

How can anybody be faulted for not knowing what to believe or who to trust?

With the conventional narratives being so ephemeral and one “conspiracy theory” after another being validated (lockdowns, lab leak, vaccine passports…) is it any wonder people are becoming skeptical or outright distrustful of our institutions and media?

The tempo of sudden deaths and tragedies seems to be quantifiably increasing, but policy makers, pundits and the media are mostly doubling down on vaccinations.

This article claims that before 2021 the average annual number of athletes collapsing on the field was 29, and that since 2021 that’s blown out to 1,652 (and counting). For the sake of balance, here’s the AP Fact Check telling you “there’s nothing to see here”, saying, this number “simply cites a blog, goodsciencing.com, for that figure”.

The GoodSciencing article itself derives that number from media reports of each individual incident – and has a footnote with an attribution and a link for every one, all 1,652 of them.

We’re one tragedy away from pitchforks and torches

The disconnect between what the average person on the street is seeing happen right before their eyes and what they’re being told is happening (or not happening) by paternalistic fact-checking media propagandists will soon come to a breaking point.

The only thing that can stop it is for some policymakers and pundits to start throwing the engine brake and try to get out in front of what will be an inevitable public backlash. My fear is this won’t happen.

There is too much invested: the entire regime of Digital IDs and health passports was to be built atop the COVID vaccine deployment.  Vaxports were supposed to be the official lubricant of The Great Reset. If it turns out that these things are not only ineffective but harmful, it will set The Fourth Industrial Revolution back decades.

It’s going to take a long time to rebuild public trust and probably not while any incumbents are still in office.

There are glimmers of rationality returning, where we are beginning to see some institutions reverse course instead of doubling down:

• My alma mater, University of Western Ontario unexpectedly scrapped their vaccine mandate a few weeks after two students died suddenly in October and November. UWO not only required students to be vaccinated in order to attend on-campus classes, they even required at least one booster.

• The US military ended all vaccine mandates last week.

• York Region (part of the Greater Toronto Area) also ended their vaccine mandate last week. The City of Toronto this past November.

What I hope is that the tempo of this return to rationality accelerates, and mandatory vaccines are a thing of the past. Otherwise the risk increases that some kind of “George Floyd” moment occurs first. That’s when a particularly vivid tragedy strikes for all to see and it ignites the pent-up resentment, distrust and hostility into outright rage.

That won’t be good for anybody. We know what happened when the French people were told “to eat cake” until they hit a breaking point. The Terrors. Nobody was safe, the violence was undiscerning and total.

The choice we have today is between a complete moratorium on vaccine mandates and some kind of “truth and reconciliation” process to try and earn back the public trust, or something that more closely resembles pitchforks and torches (not to mention guillotines).

I think we’d all prefer the former.

*  *  *

Bombthrower is the high signal antidote to MSM agitprop. Sign up for The Bombthrower mailing list to get new posts straight into your inbox and get a free copy of our long term thesis on the  coming monetary regime change while you’re at it. Bitcoin is up 27% YTD, have we come off the bottom? Get The Crypto Capitalist Premium and Find Out. ($7 Trial)

Authored by Thomas Brooke via Remix News,

Approximately 330,000 illegal border-crossings into the European Union were recorded in 2022, the highest figure since the migration crisis of 2016 and an increase of 64 percent from the previous year, according to the latest data from EU border agency Frontex.

The Western Balkan migratory route, which sees migrants travel through Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serbia to reach the European Union’s external border at Hungary, overtook the Central Mediterranean route as the most-used pathway by illegal migrants. More than 145,000 illegal migrants were detected using the route last year, a significant increase of 136 percent over 2021.

Migrants using this route last year were most commonly from Syria, Afghanistan, Turkey, and Tunisia.

Croatia’s membership of the European Union’s borderless Schengen Area, which came into effect on Jan. 1, 2023, will inevitably lead to greater challenges in this region, extending the length of the EU’s external border considerably.

A total of 102,529 migrants were detected attempting to breach the EU border in the Central Mediterranean region to reach Italy, an increase of 51 percent over 2021. Migrants from Egypt, Tunisia, Bangladesh, and Syria were most commonly reported to be active on this route.

The Eastern Mediterranean was the third-most-used route by illegal migrants, primarily traveling through Turkey into Greece. Almost 43,000, primarily Syrians, Afghans, Nigerians, and Congolese, followed this route last year — an increase of 108 percent over 2021.

Decreases in activity were reported in the three other designated routes acknowledged by Frontex. The Western Mediterranean route into Spain saw 14,582 illegal migrants, down 21 percent; the Western African route to the Spanish Canary Islands recorded 15,462 illegal border-crossings, down 31 percent; and the Eastern Land Border into Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia saw 6,127 illegal migrants, down 25 percent over 2021.

Meanwhile, a 37 percent increase was recorded in exits from the Schengen Area towards the U.K. where 71,081 individuals were detected.

The 13 million Ukrainian refugees recorded entering the EU via its external land borders between Feb. 24 and the end of the year are not included in the figures, Frontex confirmed.

More than 80 percent of illegal migrants detected were adult men.

“Women accounted for fewer than one in ten of the detections, while the share of reported minors fell slightly to around 9 percent of all detections,” Frontex stated in a press release on Friday.

The EU border agency stressed that the figures were based on preliminary figures, admitting “the final figures may be higher due to delayed reporting.”

The statistics on illegal border-crossings are separate from the number of asylum applications made across Europe, which perhaps gives a more informed view of the crisis enveloping the continent.

Almost 790,000 asylum applications were made in the EU between January and October last year, according to EU Agency for Asylum chief Nina Gregori. This represents an increase of 54 percent compared to the same period in 2021 and does not include the temporary protection afforded to Ukrainians.

“It’s pretty clear that the growing number of applications will continue for the foreseeable future,” Gregori said in December, with asylum applications in excess of 100,000 each month in the latter months of the year.

Via The Cradle,

The Biden administration has told Congress that it is preparing the $20 billion F-16 fighter jet deal with Turkey, despite objections by US lawmakers in the past, Reuters reported.

According to three unnamed sources who spoke with the news agency, the State Department sent an informal notice to Congress on Thursday to inform the committees overseeing arms sales in the Senate and House of Representatives. The potential deal received a lot of criticism in the past, with experts arguing that the sale would “embrace authoritarianism” and aid Ankara’s violation of its neighbors’ sovereignty.

“How do you reward a nation that does all of those things?” Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair Bob Menendez remarked during an interview, adding, “I don’t see it. Now, if they want to start changing their ways, that’s a different story.” Menendez is one of the four lawmakers whose approval is required for foreign military sales.

However, the deal is unlikely to receive approval by Congress as long as Turkey continues to block Sweden and Finland from joining NATO.

The announcement came to light a week ahead of Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu’s planned visit to Washington on Wednesday. Turkey and the US are expected to discuss several issues regarding their differences in Syria and arms sales.

Earlier in December, US Congress lifted restrictions that prevented the sale of F-16 jets to Turkey, according to documents obtained by the state-run Anadolu Agency.

Citing a finalized draft of the US National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) bill, the Turkish news agency claims amendments submitted by congress members to block the sale were dropped from the bill.

Tensions between the two states were flared by Turkey’s purchase of the Russian-made S-400 defense missile system, triggering US sanctions and sidelining Ankara from the 5th generation F-35 advanced fighter jets. As a result of the US ban on sales, the Turkish military industry launched the ÖZGÜR project to modernize its F-16 Block 30 fleet and circumvent the undeclared sanctions on maintenance and upgrades.

Authored by Abir Ballan via The Brownstone Institute,

Trust the Authorities, trust the Experts, and trust the Science, we were told.

Public health messaging during the Covid-19 pandemic was only credible if it originated from government health authorities, the World Health Organization, and pharmaceutical companies, as well as scientists who parroted their lines with little critical thinking. 

In the name of ‘protecting’ the public, the authorities have gone to great lengths, as described in the recently released Twitter Files (1,2,3,4,5,6,7) that document collusion between the FBI and social media platforms, to create an illusion of consensus about the appropriate response to Covid-19. 

They suppressed ‘the truth,’ even when emanating from highly credible scientists, undermining scientific debate and preventing the correction of scientific errors. In fact, an entire bureaucracy of censorship has been created, ostensibly to deal with so-called MDM— misinformation (false information resulting from human error with no intention of harm); disinformation (information intended to mislead and manipulate); malinformation (accurate information intended to harm). 

From fact-checkers like NewsGuard, to the European Commission’s Digital Services Act, the UK Online Safety Bill and the BBC Trusted News Initiative, as well as Big Tech and social media, all eyes are on the public to curtail their ‘mis-/dis-information.’ 

“Whether it’s a threat to our health or a threat to our democracy, there is a human cost to disinformation.” — Tim Davie, Director-General of the BBC

But is it possible that ‘trusted’ institutions could pose a far bigger threat to society by disseminating false information?

Although the problem of spreading false information is usually conceived of as emanating from the public, during the Covid-19 pandemic, governments, corporations, supranational organisations and even scientific journals and  academic institutions have contributed to a false narrative. 

Falsehoods such as ‘Lockdowns save lives’ and ‘No one is safe until everyone is safe’ have far-reaching costs in livelihoods and lives. Institutional false information during the pandemic was rampant. Below is just a sample by way of illustration.

The health authorities falsely convinced the public that the Covid-19 vaccines stop infection and transmission when the manufacturers never even tested these outcomes. The CDC changed its definition of vaccination to be more ‘inclusive’ of the novel mRNA technology vaccines. Instead of the vaccines being expected to produce immunity, now it was good enough to produce protection. 

The authorities also repeated the mantra (at 16:55) of ‘safe and effective’ throughout the pandemic despite emerging evidence of vaccine harm. The FDA refused the full release of documents they had reviewed in 108 days when granting the vaccines emergency use authorisation. Then in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, it attempted to delay their release for up to 75 years. These documents presented evidence of vaccine adverse events. It’s important to note that between 50 and 96 percent of the funding of drug regulatory agencies around the world comes from Big Pharma in the form of grants or user fees. Can we disregard that it’s difficult to bite the hand that feeds you?

The vaccine manufacturers claimed high levels of vaccine efficacy in terms of relative risk reduction (between 67 and 95 percent). They failed, however, to share with the public the more reliable measure of absolute risk reduction that was only around 1 percent, thereby exaggerating the expected benefit of these vaccines. 

They also claimed “no serious safety concerns observed” despite their own post-authorisation safety report revealing multiple serious adverse events, some lethal. The manufacturers also failed to publicly address the immune suppression during the two weeks post-vaccination and the rapidly waning vaccine effectiveness that turns negative at 6 months or the increased risk of infection with each additional booster. Lack of transparency about this vital information denied people their right to informed consent. 

They also claimed that natural immunity is not protective enough and that hybrid immunity (a combination of natural immunity and vaccination) is required. This false information was necessary to sell remaining stocks of their products in the face of mounting breakthrough cases (infection despite vaccination). 

In reality, although natural immunity may not completely prevent future infection with SARS-CoV-2, it is however effective in preventing severe symptoms and deaths. Thus vaccination post-natural infection is not needed. 

The WHO also participated in falsely informing the public. It disregarded its own pre-pandemic plans, and denied that lockdowns and masks are ineffective at saving lives and have a net harm on public health. It also promoted mass vaccination in contradiction to the public health principle of ‘interventions based on individual needs.’ 

It also went as far as excluding natural immunity from its definition of herd immunity and claimed that only vaccines can help reach this end point. This was later reversed under pressure from the scientific community. Again, at least 20 percent of the WHO’s funding comes from Big Pharma and philanthropists invested in pharmaceuticals. Is this a case of he who pays the piper calls the tune? 

The Lancet, a respectable medical journal, published a paper claiming that Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) — a repurposed drug used for the treatment of Covid-19 —  was associated with a slight increased risk of death. This led the FDA to ban the use of HCQ to treat Covid-19 patients and the NIH to halt the clinical trials on HCQ as a potential Covid-19 treatment. These were drastic measures taken on the basis of a study that was later retracted due to the emergence of evidence showing that the data used was false. 

In another instance, the medical journal Current Problems in Cardiology retracted —without any justification— a paper showing an increased risk of myocarditis in young people following the Covid-19 vaccines, after it was peer-reviewed and published. The authors advocated for the precautionary principle in the vaccination of young people and called for more pharmacovigilance studies to assess the safety of the vaccines. Erasing such findings from the medical literature not only prevents science from taking its natural course, but it also gatekeeps important information from the public.

A similar story took place with Ivermectin, another drug used for the treatment of Covdi-19, this time potentially implicating academia. Andrew Hill stated (at 5:15) that the conclusion of his paper on Ivermectin was influenced by Unitaid which is, coincidentally, the main funder of a new research centre at Hill’s workplace —the University of Liverpool. His meta-analysis showed that Ivermectin reduced mortality with Covid-19 by 75 percent. Instead of supporting Ivermectin use as a Covid-19 treatment, he concluded that further studies were needed.

The suppression of potentially life-saving treatments was instrumental for the emergency use authorization of the Covid-19 vaccines as the absence of a treatment for the disease is a condition for EUA (p.3).

Many media outlets are also guilty of sharing false information. This was in the form of biased reporting, or by accepting to be a platform for public relations (PR) campaigns. PR is an innocuous word for propaganda or the art of sharing information to influence public opinion in the service of special interest groups. 

The danger of PR is that it passes for independent journalistic opinion to the untrained eye. PR campaigns aim to sensationalise scientific findings, possibly to increase consumer uptake of a given therapeutic, increase funding for similar research, or to increase stock prices. The pharmaceutical companies spent $6.88 billion on TV advertisements in 2021 in the US alone. Is it possible that this funding influenced media reporting during the Covid-19 pandemic? 

Lack of integrity and conflicts of interest have led to an unprecedented institutional false information pandemic. It is up to the public to determine whether the above are instances of mis- or dis-information. 

Public trust in the Media has seen its biggest drop over the last five years. Many are also waking up to the widespread institutional false information. The public can no longer trust ‘authoritative’ institutions that were expected to look after their interests. This lesson was learned at great cost. Many lives were lost due to the suppression of early treatment and an unsound vaccination policy; businesses ruined; jobs destroyed; educational achievement regressed; poverty aggravated; and both physical and mental health outcomes worsened. A preventable mass disaster. 

We have a choice: either we continue to passively accept institutional false information or we resist. What are the checks and balances that we must put in place to reduce conflicts of interest in public health and research institutions? How can we decentralise the media and academic journals in order to reduce the influence of pharmaceutical advertising on their editorial policy?

As individuals, how can we improve our media literacy to become more critical consumers of information? There is nothing that dispels false narratives better than personal inquiry and critical thinking. So the next time conflicted institutions cry woeful wolf or vicious variant or catastrophic climate, we need to think twice.

The profile of risks facing the world is evolving constantly. Events like last year’s invasion of Ukraine can send shockwaves through the system, radically shifting perceptions of what the biggest risks facing humanity are.

Visual Capitalist’s Nick Routley created the graphic below to summarize findings from the Global Risks Report, an annual publication produced by the World Economic Forum (WEF).

It provides an overview of the most pressing global risks that the world is facing, as identified by experts and decision-makers.

These risks are grouped into five general categories: economic, environmental, geopolitical, societal, and technological.

Let’s dive into this year’s findings.

2023’s Risk Profile

In the lower–middle portion of the chart are the risks that could have serious impacts—such as attacks involving nuclear or biological weapons—but that were highlighted by fewer experts.

Over in the top-right quadrant of the chart are the risks that a number of experts mentioned, and that are causing a strain on society. Not surprisingly, the top risks are related to issues that impact a wide variety of people, such as the rising cost of living and inflation. When staples like food and energy become more expensive, this can fuel unrest and political instability—particularly in countries that already had simmering discontent. WEF points out that increases in fuel prices alone led to protests in an estimated 92 countries.

One risk worth watching is geoeconomic confrontation, which includes sanctions, trade wars, investment screening, and other actions that have the intent of weakening the countries on the receiving end. Efforts to mitigate this risk result in some of the key themes we see for the coming year. One example is the onshoring of industries, and “friend-shoring”, which is essentially moving operations to a foreign country that has more stable relations with one’s home country.

How Prepared Are We?

It’s one thing to be aware of risks, but it’s quite another to have the ability to head off negative events when they come to fruition.

The chart below is a look at how prepared we are globally to deal with specific types of risks that could arise in the next few years.

At the top of the chart are risks that experts feel society is better equipped to handle with current plans and resources. Moving towards the bottom of the chart are risks that experts feel are more of a threat since mechanisms for handling them are weak or non-existent.

Experts are generally more confident in solutions in the military or healthcare domains. Environmental and societal challenges leave policy and decision-makers less confident.

One telling observation from the data above is that none of the risks left a majority of experts feeling neither confident in our ability to prevent the risk from occurring, or prepared to mitigate its impact. As the 2020s are shaping up to be a turbulent decade, that could be a cause for concern.