These Are About To Be Some Exceptionally Interesting Times...,

theeconomiccollapseblog |  Over the past couple of years we have become accustomed to expecting the unexpected, but soon we many have to start anticipating the unthinkable.  In this article, I am going to be discussing a couple of potential scenarios that would have been unimaginable to the vast majority of Americans just a few short years ago.  Unfortunately, our world is now changing at a pace that is absolutely breathtaking, and many things that were once “unimaginable” could soon become reality.

Let’s start by talking about the record-setting heat wave which is making the epic megadrought in the western half of the country even worse.  Many western farmers planted crops this year hoping that weather conditions would eventually turn in their favor, but that has definitely not happened.  In fact, at this point 88 percent of the West is experiencing at least some level of drought.

2021 has been the worst year of this multi-year megadrought so far, and last week was the worst week for this drought up to this point in 2021.  Old temperature records were shattered all over the West, and some areas were already seeing triple digits by 8 o’clock in the morning…

The West is in the midst of a record-breaking heat wave this week, as all-time records were shattered and daily records broken in over a dozen states.

Even by desert standards, the heat wave in the Southwest is atypical. On Thursday, the National Weather Service in Tucson tweeted that the city recorded a temperature of 100 degrees at 8:14 a.m., the second earliest time in the day recorded since 1948.

That is crazy.

Can you imagine hitting triple digits before you have even finished your morning coffee?

Summer had not even officially begun yet last week, and yet new all-time record highs were being established all over the place…

Record-breaking temperatures spread from California to Montana this week. On thursday, the all-time high temperature was tied in Palm Springs, California at 123 degrees, breaking the previous June record of 122 degrees.

Salt Lake City tied its all-time record high of 107 degrees. The old record was notably set in July — when temperatures are usually at their highest for the year in that region. This comes after daily record highs were broken Sunday, Monday and Tuesday in Salt Lake, each with temperatures exceeding 100 degrees.

We have never seen anything quite like this in the state of Utah.

More than half of the state is in the highest level of drought, and thanks to dramatic water restrictions farmers are being forced to choose which of their crops will die…

With drastic limits placed on what little water he has, Tom Favero said he and many farmers along this west side of Weber County were forced to watch some crops die. “We’ve all made serious choices of what fields we can water and what we can’t,” Favero said.

Another Utah farmer that lost a lot of corn and an entire field of barley said that it really “hurts” to see his hard work go to waste…

Farmer Dean Martini pointed at one of his fields. “That corn there, where I can’t water, I don’t have the water. It makes me sick to see it go to heck like that.”

With limits on amount and time, he said there wasn’t enough water flowing to make it across his fields. While some of the corn dried up, he had to let a whole field of barley go too. “It hurts buddy. That hurts,” Martini said.

Of course this is just the beginning.

If this summer is as hot and as dry as they are projecting, we could see catastrophic crop failures all across the West.

And that is really bad news, because the state of California alone produces more than a third of our vegetables and about two-thirds of our fruits and nuts.

A few years ago, hardly anyone would have imagined that we would be facing a crisis of this magnitude in 2021, but here we are.  Paleoclimatologist Kathleen Johnson is quite “worried” about what will happen this summer, and she is warning that this drought is shaping up to be the worst the region has experienced “in at least 1,200 years”…

I’m worried about this summer – this doesn’t bode well, in terms of what we can expect with wildfire and the worsening drought. This current drought is potentially on track to become the worst that we’ve seen in at least 1,200 years.

Now I would like to shift gears.

Data Show The Hysterical Karenwaffen Greatly Amplified Covid Gain Of Function

theatlantic |  Lurking among the jubilant Americans venturing back out to bars and planning their summer-wedding travel is a different group: liberals who aren’t quite ready to let go of pandemic restrictions. For this subset, diligence against COVID-19 remains an expression of political identity—even when that means overestimating the disease’s risks or setting limits far more strict than what public-health guidelines permit. In surveys, Democrats express more worry about the pandemic than Republicans do. People who describe themselves as “very liberal” are distinctly anxious. This spring, after the vaccine rollout had started, a third of very liberal people were “very concerned” about becoming seriously ill from COVID-19, compared with a quarter of both liberals and moderates, according to a study conducted by the University of North Carolina political scientist Marc Hetherington. And 43 percent of very liberal respondents believed that getting the coronavirus would have a “very bad” effect on their life, compared with a third of liberals and moderates.

Last year, when the pandemic was raging and scientists and public-health officials were still trying to understand how the virus spread, extreme care was warranted. People all over the country made enormous sacrifices—rescheduling weddings, missing funerals, canceling graduations, avoiding the family members they love—to protect others. Some conservatives refused to wear masks or stay home, because of skepticism about the severity of the disease or a refusal to give up their freedoms. But this is a different story, about progressives who stressed the scientific evidence, and then veered away from it.

For many progressives, extreme vigilance was in part about opposing Donald Trump. Some of this reaction was born of deeply felt frustration with how he handled the pandemic. It could also be knee-jerk. “If he said, ‘Keep schools open,’ then, well, we’re going to do everything in our power to keep schools closed,” Monica Gandhi, a professor of medicine at UC San Francisco, told me. Gandhi describes herself as “left of left,” but has alienated some of her ideological peers because she has advocated for policies such as reopening schools and establishing a clear timeline for the end of mask mandates. “We went the other way, in an extreme way, against Trump’s politicization,” Gandhi said. Geography and personality may have also contributed to progressives’ caution: Some of the most liberal parts of the country are places where the pandemic hit especially hard, and Hetherington found that the very liberal participants in his survey tended to be the most neurotic.

The spring of 2021 is different from the spring of 2020, though. Scientists know a lot more about how COVID-19 spreads—and how it doesn’t. Public-health advice is shifting. But some progressives have not updated their behavior based on the new information. And in their eagerness to protect themselves and others, they may be underestimating other costs. Being extra careful about COVID-19 is (mostly) harmless when it’s limited to wiping down your groceries with Lysol wipes and wearing a mask in places where you’re unlikely to spread the coronavirus, such as on a hiking trail. But vigilance can have unintended consequences when it imposes on other people’s lives. Even as scientific knowledge of COVID-19 has increased, some progressives have continued to embrace policies and behaviors that aren’t supported by evidence, such as banning access to playgrounds, closing beaches, and refusing to reopen schools for in-person learning.

 

mRNA Therapeutics Useless For Immunosuppressed Mubab (Biologics) Users

NYTimes |  For more than a year, Dr. Andrew Wollowitz has mostly been cloistered inside his home in Mamaroneck, N.Y.

As medical director of emergency medicine at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, Dr. Wollowitz, 63, was eager to help treat patients when the coronavirus began raging through the city last spring. But a cancer treatment in 2019 had obliterated his immune cells, leaving him defenseless against the virus, so he instead arranged to manage his staff via Zoom.

A year later, people in Dr. Wollowitz’s life are returning to some semblance of normalcy. His wife, a dancer and choreographer, is preparing to travel for work at Austria’s National Ballet Company. His vaccinated friends are getting together, but he sees them only when the weather is nice enough to sit in his backyard. “I spend very little time in public areas,” he said.

Like his friends, Dr. Wollowitz was vaccinated in January. But he did not produce any antibodies in response — nor did he expect to. He is one of millions of Americans who are immunocompromised, whose bodies cannot learn to deploy immune fighters against the virus.

Some immunocompromised people were born with absent or faulty immune systems, while others, like Dr. Wollowitz, have diseases or have received therapies that wiped out their immune defenses. Many of them produce few to no antibodies in response to a vaccine or an infection, leaving them susceptible to the virus. When they do become infected, they may suffer prolonged illness, with death rates as high as 55 percent.

Most people who have lived with immune deficiencies for a long time are likely to be aware of their vulnerability. But others have no idea that medications may have put them at risk.

“They’ll be walking around outside thinking they’re protected — but maybe they’re not,” said Dr. Lee Greenberger, chief scientific officer of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, which funds research on blood cancers.

The only recourse for these patients — apart from sheltering in place until the virus has retreated — may be to receive regular infusions of monoclonal antibodies, which are mass-produced copies of antibodies obtained from people who have recovered from Covid-19. The Food and Drug Administration has authorized several monoclonal antibody treatments for Covid-19, but now some are also being tested to prevent infections.

 

Texas Not Only Frozen But Also Wrecked And Parched...,

nbcnews |  As large parts of Texas woke up Thursday to another day of a power crisis amid extreme winter weather, issues with water systems added to the misery for much of the state's population.

Texans were under notice to boil tap water before drinking it after days of record low temperatures damaged infrastructure, caused blackouts and froze water pipes.

Millions across the U.S. were left without electricity or heat in the aftermath of the deadly winter storm as utility crews rushed to restore power before another blast of snow and ice this week.

• Out of more than a million people in the U.S. who did not have electricity, Texas accounted for nearly half with 511,421, according to the tracking site poweroutage.us. The state dropped below 1 million power outages for the first time Thursday.
• In Texas, the extreme weather disrupted water service for more than 12 million residents, forcing many of the more than 680 water systems in the state to issue boil water notices.
• Other parts of the country are bracing for snow. Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York City and the tristate area are expected to see 6 inches of snow, while Washington, D.C., is expected to get 2 to 4 inches.
• At least 37 people have died because of weather-related fatalities since Thursday, the majority in Texas.

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Another major winter storm is expected to track from the Lower Mississippi Valley into the mid-Atlantic and Northeast through Friday, the National Weather Service said, bringing more heavy snow, sleet and freezing rain to further complicate recovery efforts.

Travel remains paralyzed across much of the United States, with roadways treacherous and thousands of flights canceled. Many school systems also delayed or canceled face-to-face classes.

However, staying home also carried risks in places without power.

The winter weather has caused blackouts in Texas that affected 1.8 million customers Wednesday night, according to the tracking website poweroutage.us. That number was down to just over 511,000 as of 11:28 a.m. local time, the site said.

Without power or heat, some Texans posted videos on social media of them burning old furniture to stay warm. Others shared images of flooding caused by burst pipes and collapsed ceilings.

The extreme winter weather this week and accompanying problems — water facilities without power and lines that broke after freezing — disrupted service for more than 12 million Texans, forcing nearly 680 water systems to issue boil water notices, according to a spokesperson for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.

Nearly 264,000 Texans live in areas where water systems are completely nonoperational.

Texas Is Experiencing A Self-Inflicted $Trillion Dollar FAIL

slate |   Of all the continental states, Texas alone has its own power grid. (The rest of the continental U.S. is covered by two other grids.) The reason for this is very Texan: The utilities wanted to avoid the oversight from the federal government that comes with interstate business. So Texas developed a massive market governed by the rules of supply and demand that led to low prices for consumers.

But according to Ed Hirs, an energy fellow at the University of Houston, there’s no incentive for Texas power generators to jump in at a moment’s notice, thanks to the way the market is structured. The average wholesale price of electricity for the past decade or so has been lower than what it costs to provide that electricity. He notes that the high-cost generators know they have to be ready to go in the summer, but after that, they “button up and go fishing,” and it can be difficult to bring them back online quickly. For some companies, providing that reserve power in offseason times, such as February, could prove very rewarding if an unusual spike happens. But it’s a high-risk venture, and larger companies are motivated to avoid sinking so much into the cost of producing supply without a reliable demand. So Texas doesn’t have a lot of reserve power.

Julie Cohn, a historian with affiliations at the Baker Institute at Rice University and at the Center for Public History at the University of Houston, added that in Texas there is no law or regulatory entity requiring a power system to have a certain amount of backup in case of a sudden spike in demand, as is the case elsewhere. It’s possible that, because of its isolation, the Texas grid was unable to pull power from the surrounding regions. But as Gürcan Gülen, an independent energy consultant and a former researcher at UT Austin, noted, the surrounding regions were dealing with their own blackouts, so it’s unlikely that would have helped much.

At least one expert has argued that Texas had little reserve power on hand simply because it had little need to worry, given its abundant natural gas resources. But natural gas, which powers a large percentage of Texas electricity plants, was a major culprit in this week’s blackouts. Multiple technological elements in the extraction and distribution of natural gas failed in the extreme temperatures, knocking out about half of its normal output. This would have been a huge problem even if natural gas’s role in the state’s power generation wasn’t taken into account: Texans rely heavily on natural gas for heat and fuel during the winter, and when demand skyrocketed as temperatures plunged, the utilities were forced to prioritize individual houses and hospitals over the power plants. And even then, some of those power plants that received the natural gas were forced to halt operations due to the cold.

The cold was punishing for other power sources as well: At least one nuclear power plant partially shut down in the cold, and some coal generators failed in the frigid temperatures.

 

Melinda Gates: Uh, We Were So Focused On Vaccinations We Really Didn't Think Through The Lockdowns...,

aier  |  In a wide-ranging interview in the New York Times, Melinda Gates made the following remarkable statement: “What did surprise us is we hadn’t really thought through the economic impacts.” A cynic might observe that one is disinclined to think much about matters than do not affect one personally. 

It’s a maddening statement, to be sure, as if “economics” is somehow a peripheral concern to the rest of human life and public health. The larger context of the interview reveals the statement to be even more confused. She is somehow under the impression that it is the pandemic and not the lockdowns that are the cause of the economic devastation that includes perhaps 30% of restaurants going under, among many other terrible effects. 

She doesn’t say that outright but, like many articles in the mainstream press over this year, she very carefully crafts her words to avoid the crucial subject of lockdowns as the primary cause of economic disaster. It’s possible that she actually believes this virus is what tanked the world economy on its own but that is a completely unsustainable proposition. 

Further, her comments provide a perfect illustration of the core problem all along: most of the people who have been advocating lockdowns in fact have no actual experience in managing pandemics. To many of these, Covid-19 became their new playground to try out an unprecedented experiment in social and economic management: shutting down travel, businesses, schools, churches, and issuing stay-at-home orders that smack of totalitarian impositions. 

Here is what she says: 

You can project out and think about what a pandemic might be like or look like, but until you live through it, it’s pretty hard to know what the reality will be like. So I think we predicted quite well that, depending on what the disease was, it could spread very, very, very quickly. The spread did not surprise us.

What did surprise us is we hadn’t really thought through the economic impacts. What happens when you have a pandemic that’s running rampant in populations all over the world? The fact that we would all be home, and working from home if we were lucky enough to do that. That was a piece that I think we hadn’t really prepared for.

There are plenty of specialists who have lived through pandemics in the past and managed them by maintaining essential social and economic functioning. A major case in point is Donald A. Henderson, who as head of the World Health Organization is given primary credit for the eradication of smallpox. He wrote as follows in 2006:

Experience has shown that communities faced with epidemics or other adverse events respond best and with the least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted. Strong political and public health leadership to provide reassurance and to ensure that needed medical care services are provided are critical elements. If either is seen to be less than optimal, a manageable epidemic could move toward catastrophe.

Melinda together with her husband Bill have been the major funding source for pro-lockdown efforts around the world, giving $500M since the pandemic began, but also funding a huge range of academic departments, labs, and media venues for many years, during which time they have both sounded the alarm in every possible interview about the coming pathogen. Their favored policy has been lockdown, as if to confuse a biological virus with a computer virus that merely needs to be blocked from hitting the hard drive.

Turkey Also Regularly Uses Its Own Drones On Its Own Soil Against Its Own Citizens...,

theintercept |  Finding oneself in the crosshairs of a military drone is, for most people, not the most comforting situation. Yet at an air show last fall, tens of thousands of people had a different reaction.

A military drone took off from a runway, and moments later it began transmitting its view to a giant screen on stage. The video from the drone was clear enough to pick out your own face among the crowd. It was exactly what the drone’s pilot, seated in a trailer not far from the stage, was seeing. The crowd was in the crosshairs, and you could see the data about the aircraft’s pitch, roll, and altitude. In the bottom right corner of the screen, the words “Bore Invalid” indicated the drone was currently unarmed.

It’s the kind of video that, in a war zone, can end with a giant plume of smoke and the tattered remains of whatever the drone has just obliterated. Yet for this crowd, it was like catching a glimpse of themselves on the Jumbotron at a football game. When an announcer shouted out, “We see you, wave your hands!” they erupted in excitement.

The event had all the trappings of a typical air show. Hundreds of thousands of people — from government officials to school children bussed in by the thousands — paraded around the tarmac. They posed for selfies alongside fighter jets and attack helicopters. A team of F-16s flew in close formation, leaving intricate patterns of red and white smoke in their wake. A nearly constant series of sonic booms made it difficult to talk. Massive speakers blared pulsing music.

But there was something different about this air show: It wasn’t in America, the global pioneer of weaponized drones and the customary host of such pageants. It was in Turkey, just outside Istanbul. And the pilotless aircraft that delighted the crowd wasn’t made in America; it was manufactured by Turkey. The crowd was enthusiastic to be in its crosshairs because the spectacle signified that their homeland had taken its place among the most technologically advanced countries in the world.

Their country had entered the second drone age — in which the use of drones to kill people has proliferated far beyond the United States, the first country to kill people with missiles launched from drones after 9/11. Turkey now rivals the U.S. and the U.K. as the world’s most prolific user of killer drones, according to a review by The Intercept of reported lethal drone strikes worldwide. (Other countries that have reportedly killed people with drone-launched weapons include Israel, Iraq, and Iran.) The technology has been used by Turkey against ISIS in Syria and along Turkey’s border with Iraq and Iran, where ever-present Turkish drones have turned the tide in a decades-old counter-insurgency against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK.

While the U.S. was the foremost operator of armed, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the world for more than a decade, launching the first drone attack in 2001, today more than a dozen countries possess this technology. The U.K., Israel, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, Nigeria, and Turkey have all used armed UAVs to kill targets since 2015. Efforts by Washington to control proliferation through restrictions on drone exports have failed to slow down a global race to acquire the technology. Meanwhile, the U.S. has set a precedent of impunity by carrying out hundreds of strikes that have killed civilians over the last decade.

“We are well past the time when the proliferation of armed drones can in any way be controlled,” said Chris Woods, a journalist who has tracked drone use for more than a decade and director of the conflict monitor Airwars. “So many states and even nonstate actors have access to armed drone capabilities — and they are being used across borders and within borders — that we are now clearly within the second drone age, that is, the age of proliferation.”

 

 

BLM Is The Greatest Possible Gift To The Trump Campaign...,

Dailymail  |  Amid the violence, the White House issued a statement just before 1 a.m. Wednesday asserting that the unrest was another consequence of 'Liberal Democrats' war against the police' and that the Trump administration 'stands proudly with law enforcement, and stands ready, upon request, to deploy any and all Federal resources to end these riots.'

'Law enforcement is an incredibly dangerous occupation, and thousands of officers have given their lives in the line of duty,' said the statement from press secretary Kayleigh McEnany. 

'All lethal force incidents must be fully investigated. The facts must be followed wherever they lead to ensure fair and just results. In America, we resolve conflicts through the courts and the justice system. We can never allow mob rule.'

Philadelphia officials had anticipated a second night of unrest Tuesday, and a Pennsylvania National Guard spokesperson had told The Inquirer that several hundred guardsmen were expected to arrive in the city within 24 to 48 hours.  

Wallace was shot before 4pm Monday in an episode filmed by a bystander and posted on social media. Witnesses complained that police fired excessive shots.

Kansas City's Zipperhead Mayor Won't Be Held To Account For The Catastrophe He Caused...,

fox4kc  |   Kansas City department heads are being told to trim 11% from their budgets. That directive includes Kansas City police.

Mayor Quinton Lucas said Wednesday the cuts are because of a projected $60 million budget shortfall next year.

Because of the pandemic, it’s really no surprise Kansas City and probably most cities are worried about decreased revenue and tax dollars.

If it’s a way Kansas City makes money, it’s probably been affected in 2020. Earnings taxes, sales taxes, convention and tourism taxes are all down in the first four months of the fiscal year — a trend that’s expected to continue. 

“It’s now September, and we continue to be very down in a lot of commercial spending economic activity, and that’s probably going to be the case for the remainder of this calendar year and maybe into 2021,” Lucas said.

The budget cuts could mean layoffs or vacant jobs not filled. But the city will also look at other ways to cut costs without cutting too many services. 

It comes at a time when the Kansas City Health Department is trying to fight a global pandemic and the Kansas City Police Department is fighting what’s been called a pandemic of violence. Public safety accounts for 72.8% of the General Fund operating budget, and Lucas said he knows cuts there could have consequences.

“It’s why we organize a government to make sure that if you need a paramedic, if you have a big car accident, if you need to call police in the middle of the night, that somebody responds quickly,” Lucas said.

Judge Moyes, Brah....., You Plumb Forget You In Texas?!?!?!

dallasnews |  The fast-moving sequence of events that sprang her from jail, though, left some local lawyers and state Democrats distressed over state GOP leaders’ hasty back-pedaling from public health orders on the novel coronavirus.

Critics from the legal profession and Texas’ minority political party accused Abbott and other top Texas Republican politicians of advocating selective enforcement that aided a white business owner from Far North Dallas – all the while, setting a bad precedent.

“Greg Abbott dangles political red meat for his base while ignoring his own established guidelines and executive orders,” said Manny Garcia, executive director of the Texas Democratic Party.

“Abbott wants Texans to focus on the trivial,” to divert attention from deaths from COVID-19, Garcia said in a written statement.

U.S. Rep. Lance Gooden, R-Terrell, though, tweeted, “Great move by Governor @GregAbbott_TX.”

Abbott spokesman John Wittman declined to comment on criticism of the Republican governor’s intervention.

In Washington, President Donald Trump attributed Luther’s release to Abbott -- though it was her lawyer’s victory in obtaining an emergency order from the state Supreme Court, not Abbott’s action, that did the trick.

Abbott, during a White House visit, was happy to take credit.

“She is free today,” Abbott said, explaining the executive order he issued earlier in the day “saying that in the state of Texas, no one can be put behind bars because they’re not following an executive order. So that includes the woman.”

“Good,” said Trump, adding, "I was watching the salon owner and she looked so great, so 

professional, so good. And she was talking about her children. She has to feed her children.”

The day began with Luther in jail and Abbott, who’d criticized her jailing on Wednesday, tweaking his coronavirus orders to prohibit confinement -- a punishment he’d stressed in all his stay-at-home and closure orders in March and last month.

Abbott announced he was eliminating confinement as a punishment for violating the emergency orders over COVID-19, and said they would apply retroactively.

That meant Luther should be freed from the Dallas County Jail before her week-long sentence was completed, if Abbott’s latest tweak is “correctly applied,” he said in a news release.

Controlavirus And America's Socio-Politico-Economic Fracture Lines...,

charleshughsmith |  Meanwhile, the splintering of America's failing elites has been amplified by the pandemic. The moral decay of the elites is as visible as their insatiable greed. The two are of course intimately connected: once the morals of the ruling Elites degrade, what's mine is mine and what's yours is mine, too.

I've previously covered two other key characteristics of an empire in terminal decline: complacency and intellectual sclerosis, what I have termed a failure of imagination. We can see both complacency and intellectual sclerosis in the elites' response to the pandemic.

Michael Grant described these causes of decline in his excellent account The Fall of the Roman Empire, a short book I have been recommending since 2009:

There was no room at all, in these ways of thinking, for the novel, apocalyptic situation which had now arisen, a situation which needed solutions as radical as itself. (The Status Quo) attitude is a complacent acceptance of things as they are, without a single new idea.

This acceptance was accompanied by greatly excessive optimism about the present and future. Even when the end was only sixty years away, and the Empire was already crumbling fast, Rutilius continued to address the spirit of Rome with the same supreme assurance.

This blind adherence to the ideas of the past ranks high among the principal causes of the downfall of Rome. If you were sufficiently lulled by these traditional fictions, there was no call to take any practical first-aid measures at all.

And so we've reached the precarious state of disunion in which the only thing the warring elites can agree upon is that the Federal Reserve should rescue their private wealth, regardless of cost or consequences. America is doomed, not because its citizenry is incapable of adaptation, but because its ruling, warring elites are incapable of surrendering any of their wealth, power or control, or allowing anything to threaten their precious cartels and monopolies, starting of course with the key controlling monopoly, the Federal Reserve.

You Dirty, Wicked, Backsliding Rascals Fitna Put That Filthy Swine DOWN!!!

bloomberg |  A wave of shutdowns at some of North America’s largest meat plants is starting to force hog producers to dispose of their animals in the latest cruel blow to food supplies.

Shuttered or reduced processing capacity has prompted some farmers in eastern Canada to euthanize hogs that were ready for slaughter, said Rick Bergmann, chair of the Canadian Pork Council. In Minnesota, farmers may have to cull 200,000 pigs in the next few weeks, according to an industry association. Carcasses are typically buried or rendered. 

“This is an unacceptable situation and something must be done,” Bergmann, who is also a farmer, said Thursday.

The culling highlights the disconnect that’s occurring as the coronavirus pandemic sickens workers trying to churn out food supplies just as panicked shoppers seek to stock up on meat. Wholesale pork prices in the U.S. have surged in the past week.

bloomberg |  As businesses around the globe buckle under the strain of Covid-19, the world’s biggest pork producer is fighting not just one highly contagious virus, but two. And the outcome could determine whether Americans will have enough hot dogs, bacon, and ham this summer.

Hong Kong-based WH Group Ltd. is struggling to cope with the virus that causes African swine fever (ASF), a deadly malady that’s devastated hog herds and helped more than double pork prices in China, while also spreading to other countries in Asia and Europe. Like Covid-19, ASF is currently incurable and researchers have yet to come up with a vaccine. China’s pork production fell 29% in the first three months of 2020; the swine disease has slashed the size of the country’s hog herd by about half.

Now the coronavirus is piling on. Smithfield Foods, the Virginia-based subsidiary of WH Group, shut three of its U.S. plants this month because of Covid-19. They include a processing facility in Sioux Falls, S.D., that accounts for about a quarter of the company’s U.S. revenue.

When Smithfield announced the indefinite closure, more than 200 workers were sick; that number has risen to more than 700—almost half the state’s total. With the Sioux Falls site alone handling about 5% of all hog processing in the U.S., the maker of Farmland bacon, Farmer John hot dogs, Eckrich sausage, and Armour ham warned of possible supermarket shortages. “The closure of this facility, combined with a growing list of other protein plants that have shuttered across our industry, is pushing our country perilously close to the edge.

The Covid-19 Economic and Political Restructuring Narrative In The Light Of Preference Falsification

Thanks to Eric Weinstein, this year's curriculum kicked-off with an introduction to the concept of "preference falsification".  The ongoing and encompassing tsunami of current events make it exceedingly germaine for you to revisit this little-known - but nevertheless determinative concept.

voxeu |  We characterise the motivations central to the workings of civil society by a series of other regarding or ethical values including reciprocity, fairness, and sustainability. Also included is the term identity, by which we refer to a bias in favour of those who one calls “us” over “them.” We draw attention to this aspect of the civil society dimension to stress that in insisting on the importance of community in fashioning a response to the pandemic, we recognise the capacity of these community-based solutions to sustain xenophobic, parochial, and other repugnant actions.

Figure 2 illustrates the location in “institution-space” of different responses to the epidemic. At the top left is the government as the insurer of last resort. Neither market nor household risk-sharing can handle an economy-wide contraction of activity required by containment policies; and neither can compel the near-universal participation that makes risk pooling possible.

Closer to the civil society pole are social distancing policies implemented through consent. The triangle opens up space for modern-day analogues of the so-called Dunkirk strategy – small, privately owned boats took up where the British navy lacked the resources to evacuate those trapped on the beaches in 1940.  An example is the public-spirited mobilisation by universities and small private labs of efforts to undertake production and processing of tests and to develop new machines to substitute for scarce ventilators.

These examples underline an important truth about institutional and policy design: the poles of the institution space – at least ideally – are complements not substitutes. Well-designed government policies enhance the workings of markets and enhance the salience of cooperative and other socially valuable preferences.  Well-designed markets both empower governments and make them more accountable without crowding out ethical and other pro-social preferences.

Much of the content that we think is essential to a successful post-COVID-19 economic vernacular is present in two recent advances in the field.

The first is the insight – dating back to Hayek – that information is scarce and local. Neither government officials nor private owners and managers of firms know enough to write incentive-based enforceable contracts or governmental fiats to implement optimal social distancing, surveillance, or deployment of resources to the health sector, including to vaccine development.

The second big change in economics gives us hope that non-governmental and non-market solutions may actually contribute to mitigating problems that are poorly addressed by contract or fiat.  The behavioural economics revolution makes it clear that people – far from the individualistic and amoral representation in conventional economics – are capable of extraordinary levels of cooperation based on ethical values and other regarding preferences.  

As was the case with the Great Depression and WWII, we will not be the same after COVID-19. And neither, we also hope, will be the way people talk about the economy.

But there is a critical difference between the post-Great Depression period and today. The pandemic of that era – massive unemployment and economic insecurity – was beaten new rules of the game that delivered immediate benefits. Unemployment insurance, a larger role for government expenditures and, in many countries, trade union engagement in wage-setting and the introduction of new technology reflected both the analytics and the ethics of the new economic vernacular. The result was the decades of performance referred to as the golden age of capitalism, making both the new rules and the new vernacular difficult to dislodge. 

It is possible, but far from certain, that the mounting costs of climate change and recurrent pandemic threats will provide an environment that supports a similar symbiosis between a new economic vernacular and new rules of the game yielding immediate concrete benefits. 

If Elites Had Led With This Nut-Shrivelling Horror, We Would All Be United In World War C!!!

SCMP |  Doctors in the central Chinese city of Wuhan plan to embark on a long-term study of

the effects of the coronavirus on the male reproductive system, building on small-scale research indicating that the pathogen could affect sex hormone levels in men.

 

Though still preliminary and not peer reviewed, the study is the first clinical observation of the potential impact of Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, on the male reproductive system, especially among younger groups.

In a paper published on the preprint research platform medRxiv.org, the researchers – from Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University and the Hubei Clinical Research Centre for Prenatal Diagnosis and Birth Health – said they analysed blood samples from 81 men aged 20 to 54 who tested positive for the coronavirus and were hospitalised in January.

 

The median age of the participants was 38 and roughly 90 per cent of them had only mild symptoms. The samples were collected in the last days of their stay in hospital.

Using the samples, the team looked at the ratio of testosterone to luteinising hormone (T/LH). A low T/LH ratio can be a sign of hypogonadism, which in men is a malfunction of the testicles that could lead to lower sex hormone production.

The average ratio for the Covid-19 patients was 0.74, about half the normal level.

Testosterone is the main male sex hormone critical for the development of primary and secondary sexual characteristics including testes, muscle, bone mass and body hair. Luteinising hormone is found in both men and women, and best known for its ability to trigger ovulation.

 

 

 

Even MORE Fascinating When Shit Don't...., (Run Downhill That Is)

nola |  Toilet paper shortages – and hoarding – during the coronavirus outbreak have apparently led to the clogging of New Orleans area sewer pipes, as residents have increasingly turned to nonflushable paper in the bathroom. 

The Sewerage & Water Board said Friday it has been dealing with more sewer backups than normal, and urged residents to "think before they flush." 

"As a reminder, only human waste and toilet paper are flushable," an S&WB spokeswoman said. "Baby wipes, paper towels, and even 'flushable' wipes may clog your sewer line and cause overflows." 

The Jefferson Parish sewerage officials said the same thing this week. Residents living in apartments and other concentrated areas need to be especially careful. 

The backups come as New Orleans area grocers have struggled in recent weeks to keep toilet paper in stock. Shoppers at Walmart, Rouses and elsewhere have been seen filling entire carts with the toilet paper packages that have been placed on shelves.

Others seeking the household staple have had to go without. The scenario has led to physical fights in some stores, and now, to sewer backups.

Fascinating The Unexpected Ways That Shit Runs Downhill...,

CTH |  How weak and tenuous does a corporate financial position need to be such that being closed for one week means informing all nationwide landlords of your inability to pay the rent next week?   Consider this example: 

  

CALIFORNIA – The Cheesecake Factory, one of the most popular sit-down restaurant chains in the country, says it will not be able to make upcoming rent payments for any of its storefronts on April 1 because of significant loss of income due to the coronavirus crisis.

[…]  Company chairman and CEO David Overton writes, “Due to these extraordinary events, I am asking for your patience, and frankly, your help.” He continues, “we appreciate our landlords’ understanding given the exigency of the current situation.” The letter says that the company hopes to resume paying rent as soon as possible.

[…]  The Cheesecake Factory was founded in Beverly Hills in 1972 and maintains its original location on Beverly Drive, with 39 locations in California. In total, it operates 294 restaurants in 39 states, plus the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and Toronto, Canada. In 2019, the company also acquired Phoenix-based Fox Restaurants, including North Italia, Flower Child, and The Henry. Most of the company’s landlords are malls, including Simon and Westfield.  (read more)

This is one small example; however, it is an opportunity to imagine the beginning of a process were Blue team corporations start to tell Red team financiers they are refusing to pay their debts.

America Will Arrest More, Not Fewer Citizens Under Its Controlavirus Protocols

reason |  What if we arrested fewer people in the first place, that way we don't have to panic about exposing people behind bars (and the guards who take care of then) to the coronavirus? It's a shift we're beginning to see in some municipalities.

Reason's Zuri Davis has reported on the mechanisms some courts and jails have been using to release prisoners early, particularly those who are being jailed for low-level crimes, in order to stop or reduce the spread of disease among people in jail.

But many cities are also reconsidering whether the police actually need to arrest people for certain minor crimes and bring them to jail for processing in the first place. This is yet another temporary shift in behavior that might be worth considering even when the coronavirus is not such an omnipresent threat.

In Philadelphia, Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw has set forth new guidelines to stop police officers from arresting people accused of a host of nonviolent misdemeanor crimes. Instead, they'll briefly detain the suspect to confirm identity and fill out arrest warrant paperwork, then release the suspect. The arrest warrant will be served at a later time when the coronavirus risk has faded.

The list of crimes that will no longer lead to people being processed into jail includes prostitution and all narcotics crimes. (We should hope this prompts the city to realize they should have never thrown people in jail for these crimes in the first place.) The list also includes vandalism, several different types of thefts, burglary, and even car theft. So while these aren't violent crimes, they also aren't victimless crimes. This doesn't mean those people won't be held accountable by the justice system eventually and be ordered to make amends to their victims, by they're not going to be tossed in jail for now. Vehicle impoundments are also being suspended.

After making the announcement Tuesday, Outlaw clarified today that an officer "still has the authority to utilize discretion, and take an offender into physical custody for immediate processing, if the officer and supervisor believe the individual poses a threat to public safety."

Arresting fewer people who aren't dangerous is a great way to keep jail populations down and reduce chances for the coronavirus to spread. But it's honestly something that we should have started doing earlier, unprompted by pandemic, because we have too many people in jail who don't really need to be there, and because jail time disrupts many lives in unnecessary ways.

Coronavirus Blues: No Matter How Good The Chicken, Cain't Be No Finger Lickin!

nydailynews |  Kentucky Fried Chicken is suspending its signature slogan — for obvious reasons.

On Friday, the fast food chain announced it would suspend an advertising campaign focused on its famous “finger lickin’ good” motto amid the coronavirus crisis.

According to The Independent, Advertising Standards Authority — the self-regulatory agency focused on the British advertising industry — received 163 complaints about the U.K.-based television ads that started running in February.

“Our team in the UK didn’t feel like it was the right time to be airing this particular advertisement, so they’ve decided to pause it for now,” a KFC spokesperson told the Daily News Monday evening.

Weeks ago, the American-headquartered fried chicken giant announced a search for a “professional finger licker” willing to show off their skills with a widespread billboards campaign that went up across Britain.

With health officials all over the world stressing the dire importance for hygiene and hand-washing, the idea of any kind of finger-licking doesn’t quite strike the right tone.

For the time being, there won’t be any ads featuring people licking their fingers after eating the company’s flagship product. The slogan was trademarked by KFC, also known as Kentucky Fried Chicken, in 1956,

SARS-CoV2: A Biological Referendum On Competing Political Cultures and Economies

WaPo | On Friday, the Iranian government finally began to acknowledge what the world already knows: the covid-19 virus has hit that country extremely hard and it’s likely to get much worse.

In a televised news conference, the spokesman for Iran’s coronavirus task force announced that 4,700 cases of the virus have now been confirmed, including more than 1,200 in the previous 24 hours. The official death count stands at 124.

The ways in which key leaders’ responses differ from those of ordinary citizens tell you everything you need to know about the deepening gulf between the Iranian people and their government and how it might contribute to the spread of the disease.

The sudden sense of alarm contrasts starkly with how Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and other officials initially downplayed the threat.

In the early stages of the virus story, officials in Tehran were worried about turnout in the Feb. 11 parliamentary elections. They feared that low voter turnout — which, as anticipated, was aggravated by the Iranian military’s shootdown of a Ukrainian passenger jet in January — would further undermine the notion of public support for the system. Authorities prioritized their political concerns over the risk of the virus spreading.

Now, though, the news that an increasing number of ministers and lawmakers have tested positive for the virus — two of whom have already died from it — has shattered what was left, if anything, of the government’s credibility.

“Today, the country is engaged in a biological battle,” Gen. Hossein Salami, commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, said. “We will prevail in the fight against this virus, which might be the product of an American biological [attack], which first spread in China and then to the rest of the world.”

Have Han Elites Set the Stage for Collapse?

charleshughsmith |  Threats, propaganda and the Orwellian dissolution of social trust cannot stop a withdrawal from the status quo.

Longtime readers know I've had an active interest in what differentiates empires/nations that survive crises and those that collapse. There is a lively academic literature on this topic, and it boils down to three general views:

1. Collapse is typically triggered by an external crisis that overwhelms the empire's ability to handle it. Absent the external shock, the empire could have continued on for decades or even centuries.

2. Crises that could have been handled in the "Spring" of rapid expansion are fatal in "Winter" when the costs of maintaining complex systems exceeds the empire's resources.

3. Civilization is cyclical and as population and consumption outstrip resources, the empire becomes increasingly vulnerable to external shocks.

External shocks include prolonged severe drought, pandemics and invasion. In many cases, the empire is beset by all three: some change in weather that reduces grain harvests, a pandemic introduced by trade or military adventure and/or invasion by forces from far-off lands with novel diseases and/or military technologies and tactics.

More controversial are claims that political structures become sclerotic and top-heavy after long periods of success, and these bloated, brittle hierarchies lose the flexibility and boldness needed to deal with multiple novel challenges hitting at the same time.

We lack internal-political records for most empires that have collapsed, but those records that have survived for the Western and Eastern Roman Empires suggest that eras of stability breed political sclerosis which manifests as a bloated, parasitic bureaucracy or as ruthless competition between elites that were once united in the expansive "Spring" phase.

By the "Winter" phase, the elite hierarchy is willing to sacrifice the unity needed to survive for its own short-term advantage.

All of this applies directly to China, which is experiencing not just a public health crisis (Covid-19 pandemic) but a host of overlapping crises triggered by the epidemic.

The external shock of the coronavirus has revealed the fragilities and weaknesses of China's social, political and financial orders. These include:

1. Healthcare system crisis. The system is a patchwork that leaves non-government workers largely on their own. One doctor in Wuhan reported that a pregnant woman in his care died when the family ran out of cash for her care. (The central government announced it would cover all costs shortly after the patient died.)

The for-profit nature of much of the healthcare system is not widely understood outside China. If you want high-quality care without long waits, you must have cash.

Additionally many of the "doctors" are trained only in traditional Chinese medicine, so there is a shortage of trained personnel and facilities.

2. Food system crisis. It's not just Swine Fever that's straining the system; shortages are widespread and rising costs have been crimping working-class household budgets for the past few years.