Lies, damn lies and statistcs

After the release of his emails under Freedom of Information (FOI) requests, Dr Anthony Fauci and his friends must vie for first place as the greatest conspirators of the Covid era. He is equally in the running to be the greatest source of disinformation on just about every aspect of the pandemic, ably assisted by ‘experts’ and public health authorities around the world.

Fauci could be relied on to misinform on any topic from the origin of the virus and the necessity of lockdowns to the demonisation of the unvaccinated and the safety and efficacy of the novel genetically-induced vaccines.

Fauci’s performance was a tour de force that involved overturning decades, even millennia of knowledge about infection. . It required the wholesale abandonment of the scientific method as the empirical means of acquiring knowledge because it relies on careful observation, truthful interpretation, rigorous skepticism and robust debate. It is not possible to engage in science without freedom of thought and speech but free speech was deemed so dangerous that doctors, scientists, academics and anyone who questioned the world according to Fauci was cancelled.

Why didn’t the mainstream media question any of this? Why, as Adam Creighton asks in an excellent article in the Australian this week, was the media so credulous and incurious, so ‘naive to the financial and political forces that pushed governments to eschew the more sensible path of voluntary Covid-19 vaccination’?

It is not necessary to speculate to answer that question. When Elon Musk bought Twitter in October last year he opened up the company’s internal communications to journalists including Bari Weiss, the former opinion editor for the New York Times who resigned after being bullied by woke colleague; Matt Taibbi, a former contributing editor to Rolling Stone and staunch critic of mainstream media; and Dr Michael Shellenberger, a former Democratic candidate for governor of California, environmental activist and strong supporter of nuclear energy. All three would have been seen as sympathetic to the Left at some point but each has been cancelled for their commitment to truth-telling. They are now up to their 19th Twitter file exposé.

Shellenberger explains in an interview with Joe Rogan this week that what they expected to find inside Twitter were ultra-progressive leftists who were biased in their content moderation. What they uncovered were documents and communications exposing a ‘censorship-industrial complex’, a huge operation run by current and former US government officials and contractors from a host of agencies including the FBI, the CIA and the Department of Homeland Security. This complex worked with a network of university think tanks and NGOs called the ‘Election Integrity Partnership’ to outsource the censorship of Americans in the lead up to the 2020 election. They did this to avoid violating the First Amendment which protects freedom of speech from government censorship.

None of this is surprising except the audacity of the whole endeavour. It was clear after the British people voted for Brexit and Americans elected Trump that the Democrats were going to do everything in their power to prevent his re-election. They blamed the Big Tech titans for his election to pressure them in to cooperating. They used ‘the complex’ to cook up the Steele dossier which they fed to mainstream media to propagate the Trump-Russia collusion fabrication. The security agencies framed Hunter Biden’s laptop as Russian disinformation so that social media would censor it in the lead-up to the 2020 election. From that point there was no great leap to branding the Covid lab leak as a conspiracy theory. They censored anyone who contradicted the official narrative.

Even parents grieving the death of their children killed by the vaccine.

In Australia, the Bureau of Statistics has revealed the death toll for 2022. An extra 25,235 Australians died unexpectedly – 10,000 from Covid and 15,000 from what? It was the biggest increase in mortality numerically since the Spanish flu of 1919 but more than half of the deaths weren’t caused by the pandemic virus. Did the vaccine play a role? The media didn’t ask. As Stalin would have said, it’s just a statistic.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/04/damn-statistics/ ?

******************************************************

Inflation dips to 5 percent as demand begins collapsing, Fed set to keep increasing

By Robert Romano

The consumer price index has continued to descend from its June 2022 peak of 9.1 percent down to a still elevated 5 percent in March 2023, according to the latest reading from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The decrease was almost exclusively due energy prices continuing to stabilize, with oil prices being down in March, with gasoline down 4.6 percent and fuel oil down 4 percent in just a month.

Electricity was down 0.7 percent and piped gas service was down another 7.1 percent in March, following an 8 percent drop in February.

But that was before OPEC+ slashed production in early April, which has seen light sweet crude oil rise from about $67 a barrel in late March to now about $83 a barrel in April, a 24 percent increase that will surely find its way to gas prices over the next several weeks.

The production cut was predicated on anticipated weaker demand, and so over the longer term prices could wind up dropping anyway.

However, the sudden rise in oil prices could serve notice on the Federal Reserve that inflation pressures due to supply issues are still very much an issue, as much as the $6 trillion that was printed, borrowed and spent for Covid is, which came at a time of production halts, economic lockdowns and paying people to stay home.

The M2 money supply increased dramatically from $15.3 trillion in Feb. 2020 to a peak of $22 trillion by April 2022, a massive 43.7 percent, leading to the inflation spike, where consumer inflation reached 9.1 percent in June 2022. By the time Russia invaded Ukraine in Feb. 2022—further worsening global supply issues—consumer inflation was already north of 7.5 percent. The M2 money supply has now decreased a bit to $21.1 trillion.

On March 22, the Federal Reserve noted that continued increases of the Federal Funds Rate, or “additional policy firming,” could be on the horizon, stating, “the Committee decided to raise the target range for the federal funds rate to 4-3/4 to 5 percent. The Committee will closely monitor incoming information and assess the implications for monetary policy. The Committee anticipates that some additional policy firming may be appropriate in order to attain a stance of monetary policy that is sufficiently restrictive to return inflation to 2 percent over time.”

The central bank added, “In determining the extent of future increases in the target range, the Committee will take into account the cumulative tightening of monetary policy, the lags with which monetary policy affects economic activity and inflation, and economic and financial developments.”

In just a year, the Fed has gone from 0.08 percent in Feb. 2022 on the effective Federal Funds Rate — at which point inflation was already 7.5 percent — to now 4.65 percent in March, leading to much hand-wringing on Wall Street about interest rates rising faster than ever.

To be certain, it is one of the quicker paces of increases of the Federal Funds Rate in recent memory, looking a bit further back in history, it looks a lot like the rate increases that combated the inflation of the 1970s and 1980s.

For example, in 1981, when the effective Federal Funds Rate rose from 14.7 percent in March 1981 to 19.1 percent in June 1981, a 4.4 percent increase.

That was dwarfed by 1980, when rose from about 9 percent in July 1980 to 19.1 percent in Jan. 1981, a 10.1 percent increase.

Or in 1979, when it rose from about 10.1 percent in April 1979 to about 17.6 percent in April 1980, a 7.5 percent increase.

Or 1973, hen it rose from Sept. 1972 to Sept. 1973, from about 4.9 percent to 10.8 percent, a 5.9 percent increase.

Those were rocky times, too, but what the Fed is doing is by no means unprecedented. What was unprecedented was printing $6 trillion and simultaneously shutting the economy down and reducing production—too much money chasing too few goods.

The Fed’s rate hikes come as 10-year treasuries remain at about 3.37 percent of this writing, and 30-year mortgage interest rates are at about 6.3 percent as existing home sales remain down about 22.6 percent from their 2022 highs a year ago, according to the National Association of Realtors.

The news comes as the annual growth of consumer credit appears to have peaked at 8.1 percent in Oct. 2022, flattening slightly to 7.8 percent annualized by Dec. 2022 and then ticked up to 7.9 percent Jan. 2023 and now is down to 7.6 percent in Feb. 2023, which could be a sign of weakening demand. Usually, it peaks just before or at the beginning recessions, and then will slow down significantly once unemployment begins rising.

Either way, a slowdown in the growth of consumer credit could indicate American households are maxing out on their credit cards, which will have a dampening effect on demand going forward.

And yet, unemployment remains at historic lows of 3.5 percent, and with the Fed projecting a 4.6 percent unemployment rate in 2024, as many as 2 million job losses still appear to remain on the horizon, meaning there’s still room for the Fed move rates higher. To be certain at 5 percent inflation, it would only take another quarter point hike or so to get the Fed’s interest rate above that of the consumer inflation rate. Stay tuned.

https://dailytorch.com/2023/04/inflation-dips-to-5-percent-as-demand-begins-collapsing-fed-set-to-keep-increasing/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=625c775a-3216-4b7f-9e77-e5da812a7e40

****************************************************

Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH) Also here

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH) Also here

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

***********************************************