Wednesday, March 16, 2022
President Joe Biden is right to call Vladimir Putin a war criminal
Tuesday, March 15, 2022
The points made by the psychiatrist on the Clay and Buck Show sounded like they were taken almost verbatim from journalist Charles Mackay's 1841 Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
Hi, I'm president Joe Biden and the buck stops with COVID-19, Vladimir Putin, and high fuel costs, not with me
Joe just wants you to forget that his anti-fossil fuel policies pushed gasoline from $2.09 to $3.44 in one year from his election, that he did nothing to dampen the NATO connections with Ukraine which have inflamed Putin, and that he failed to shut down the virus.
He also omits that his ignominious withdrawal from Afghanistan broadcast the very weakness which was later on display when he promised Putin that US and NATO troops would not get involved in Ukraine.
"Step right this way, Vladimir!"
LOL, as telegraphed on March 10th, Massachusetts subtracts 3,770 COVID deaths from total because they died of COVID longer than 30 days after infection
The new system will narrow the state’s definition of who died of COVID. Currently, Massachusetts records anyone who died within 60 days of a COVID diagnosis as having died from COVID, unless it is clear the person died from another cause, such as a traumatic accident. Under the new system, recommended by the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists, COVID deaths will now be those that occur within 30 days of a diagnosis. The council helps establish uniform methods for states to track and record various diseases. This “will also improve our ability to compare our data with data from other jurisdictions and other states,” Brown said. She said most, but not all, states have adopted this new method. ... The state for the first year counted anyone who had been diagnosed with COVID at any time as a COVID death. ... Most of the overcount, she said, occurred between the summer of 2020 and April 2021, before the state adopted an updated system. That updated method used the 60-day window, counting anyone who died within 60 days of a COVID diagnosis as a COVID death, as well as those in which COVID or an equivalent term was listed on their death certificate. ... Barbara Anthony ... said the Baker administration has been less than transparent about COVID death counts. She said the state did not publicly announce it had significantly changed its system for counting total deaths last April, when it switched to the 60-day method. ... “It’s mind boggling, frankly,” said Anthony, who also is a senior fellow in health care policy at the Pioneer Institute. “It’s not a transparent way to run an operation, and it undermines the faith of the public.”
So, the real story is Massachusetts has changed its counting method TWICE to reduce an "overcount" mostly during the UK variant wave when most authorities increasingly look to excess death data and conclude that COVID death counts don't actually capture the true number of COVID deaths.
Massachusetts is completely counter trend.
Monday, March 14, 2022
Gold fanatics never mention the potentially bad tax news
The war in Ukraine has pushed more investors into gold, which some see as a “safe haven” in volatile times, and fueled a price rally. ...
And because the IRS classifies metal coins as collectibles, ETF investors face the top 28% tax rate that applies to all collectibles when they sell shares.
The IRS outlined this thinking in a 2008 memo. (While the memo doesn’t carry the weight of official law, accountants have largely accepted its rationale, Lewis said.) ...
Stock investors generally pay one of three tax rates on their profits — 0%, 15% and 20%, the top rate — based on their income. These rates are preferential with respect to an investor’s regular income tax rates, of which there are seven (10%, 12%, 22%, 24%, 32%, 35% and 37%).
Conversely, the capital-gains tax rate on collectibles aligns with these seven [ordinary income tax] rates, up to a 28% maximum. That means an investor whose annual income puts them in the 12% tax bracket would pay a 12% tax rate on their collectibles profits; an investor in the 37% bracket would be capped at 28% on their collectibles profits.
Hero Joe Manchin won't support Biden climate lunatic Sarah Bloom Raskin for Federal Reserve Board
This red diaper doper baby thinks it would be a good idea for banks to refuse to lend to the oil and gas industry in order to end it.
She's an Obama administration retread.
Sunday, March 13, 2022
Welcome to February 2022 CIVPART data at 62.3%, otherwise known as September 1977
The 2020 average was revised to 61.8 and the 2021 average is 61.7.
One way to grow the participation rate, as seen in the first chart, which is monthly, is TO NOT HAVE TO COUNT PEOPLE.
How do you do that?
The economy sucks so bad you drop out of the labor force, which instantly shrinks its size. So as jobs recover a little bit the participation rate looks better because more people compared with the smaller underlying base are working again.
Not in labor force on an average basis hit an all time high in 2021 of 100.24m, pushed mostly by the 2008 catastrophe for older workers, while growth in the labor force has been anemic to flat because people aren't having enough kids.
People who remember the malaise of the Jimmy Carter era who are still alive today can relate.
CIVPART hovering on the 63% line was the Trump era's "greatest economy ever", lol.
Click any graph to enlarge.
Friday, March 11, 2022
I have seen many examples of Russian military vehicles abandoned in Ukraine in recent days increasingly due to MUD: Here's two tanks in Chernihiv
Or are they in Sumy? The locations are quite distant from each other.
Verifying this stuff is driving some of these guys crazy.
LOL, according to this stupid definition by a university pinhead, there are only 23.8 million middle class workers
“If you are holding a position that is non-managerial, non-executive level, doesn’t have a lot of decision power, you would have been classified in our study as working class,” Addo says [here].
In February 2022 there were 128.2 million total private employees. 104.4 million of them were "production and nonsupervisory".
That's a ratio of workers to supervisors of about 4.4:1 in the private sector. In the federal government, the ratio's much worse, somewhere between 7-10:1. That's probably closer to the truth also for the entire government sector, which is 22.2 million strong.
The supervisors are the elite minority, hello.
The best proxy for middle class has always been homeownership: house, condo, whatever. It's one of the most basic things which has defined us and more importantly united us for generations. There was a time when everyone said, rich and poor alike, that they were middle class, it was that strong of an American ideal.
Now we're stuck with a bunch of eggheads trying to divide us by overthrowing definitions.
Total households in 2020 numbered about 128.5 million in the United States. Roughly 84 million were owner occupied at the time, 42 million renter occupied, a ratio of 2:1.
The average size of a household in 2020 was about 2.53: (84 + 42) 2.53 = 319 million (a relatively small additional number of Americans lives in subsidized housing, military housing, and institutionalized housing).
A broad swath of Americans, 66%, lives in an owned home, with about a third distributed at the top and the bottom renting out of either convenience or necessity.
And most of them are by definition nonsupervisory employees.
CBS eyeball news can't even get the basics right for "excess deaths" story
The eyeball news story gets it wrong by screwing up the time frame. The reporter is just lazy:
Two years after the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus a global pandemic, new research suggests around 18.2 million people have died worldwide as a result. That toll is more than three times higher than the WHO's tally of nearly 6 million officially reported COVID-19 deaths through the end of 2021.
The new figures, published Thursday in The Lancet, are based on the number of "excess deaths" in countries around the world. Researchers determined how many additional deaths occurred from January 1, 2020 through December 31, 2021 by modeling the number of "expected" deaths in years unaffected by a global pandemic, compared to the total number who actually died from any cause.
You can't use "the current total". This is March, hello. You have to use the total on 12/31/21 as the study did, which was closer to 825,000. That means C19 deaths in the US might have been as much as 37% higher than actually reported, not 18%.
The disparity between excess deaths and C19 deaths for the US is much larger than the story lets on.
Similarly with the global total figures. There were about 5.46 million deaths globally due to COVID-19 on 12/31/21, not "nearly 6 million", so the excess deaths are about 3.33 times greater than the C19 deaths, not simply 3.03 times greater.
Perhaps the most significant new piece of information from the story is that "deaths from heart attacks and stroke have climbed beyond pre-pandemic levels", but the story won't suggest that there might be an association between those deaths and mass vaccination, only with the disease itself.
How many older people have died of heart attack and stroke after vaccination without contracting COVID-19? There must be many, many millions globally, by definition, but no one is publishing this information.
The bias in favor of the safety of the vaccines will not hold up forever as new evidence like this emerges.
We were confidently told these vaccines would stop the spread, even at the 50% threshold, which turned out to be a huge lie. Even after Provincetown the authorities bent over backwards to stick with the narrative.
Then we were told the vaccines would stop serious outcomes, yet US deaths in January and February 2022 are the fifth and fourth worst months for deaths of the entire pandemic.
The time for the end of this farce is long past.
Thursday, March 10, 2022
The US Senate quickly approved the omnibus spending bill and already has sent it on to Biden for his signature by the deadline tomorrow
Story here.
I'm guessing that will be the last spending bill of any significance until September when they have to do another continuing resolution because of the upcoming election in November, after which we'll have another omnibus instead of regular order, which no one even remembers what it looks like anymore.
Our government is perennially dysfunctional.
Build Back Better is well and truly dead: House passes $1.5 trillion omnibus to fund federal government through September
$780 billion is for the Department of Defense.
The bill(s) go to the Senate next.
The usual sausage making, with a little spice added in.
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