2021-03-31

PASSPORT TO TYRANNY Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep57

The first seven minutes make the point.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCnPpIqlqTQ

Spending with no limits


$200 billion, $2.2 trillion, $900 billion, $1.9 trillion. Over a year, Congress has passed $5.2 trillion in extraordinary spending — and President Biden wants another $3-4 trillion, split between infrastructure and social spending.

When a "normal" federal budget, pre-COVID, was $4.4 trillion, and with borrowing, not taxes, funding nearly half of federal spending, it's not crazy to ask how much is too much, before we risk huge inflation.

"Modern monetary theory" is a trendy philosophy — AOC is a fan — that holds that the government can spend as much money as it wants. Drinks all around! Even if bondholders don't feel like lending to us to make up the difference in spending and revenues, the Federal Reserve can create new money through "keystrokes," argues the first-ever MMT textbook, published in 2019.

The Fed has been doing that. In early 2008, the amount of money available in the U.S. economy was $7.5 trillion. By 2012, it had risen to more than $10 trillion. Much of this was the Fed printing electronic dollars, to encourage people to spend after the economy crashed: the Fed "grew" its own holdings from less than $1 trillion to more than $3 trillion.

(This may sound confusing, but it is no different than if you received a bank statement listing the amount of money in your checking account, didn't like it, and so took a pen and added some zeroes.)

That didn't cause inflation (sort of), so why should this?

But this time is different. In a year, the Fed has nearly doubled its own holdings (again, that pen!) from $4 trillion to $7.7 trillion. Money in the U.S. economy has risen from $15.4 trillion to $19.7 trillion, partly because people who have kept their jobs have so little to spend on, with travel and entertainment off limits.

People who lost jobs need relief. But relief is different from hosing the economy with cash.

The danger of too much spending is that it doesn't create productive goods or services; it just makes things cost more. That's especially true because, when the economy opens up, people will spend the money they've saved — they're already searching for plane flights.

$1 trillion? Why not $5 trillion! For progressives, the sky is no longer the limit on spending (nypost.com)


DASZAK "Coronavirus is a pretty good…You can manipulate them in the lab pretty easily. It’s spike protein"

In April, he told the show DemocracyNow that, "The idea that this virus escaped from a lab is just pure baloney. It's simply not true. I've been working with that lab for 15 years. They're some of the best scientists in the world."

Daszak has pushed that line ever since. Relentlessly.

Last summer, he wrote an op-ed in The Guardian entitled, "Ignore the conspiracy theories: scientists know Covid-19 wasn't created in a lab." Then made the point on Twitter repeatedly.

But going forward, it may be much more difficult to dismiss this story. On Sunday, the former Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Robert Redfield, told CNN that based on everything he knows, he too believes the coronavirus likely came from the lab in Wuhan.

REDFIELD: I am of the point of view that I still think the most likely ideology of this pathogen in Wuhan was from a laboratory, escaped. Other people don't believe that. That's fine. Science will eventually figure it out. It's not unusual for respiratory pathogens that are being worked on in a laboratory to infect the laboratory worker.

Tucker Carlson: Why the media, scientific community and WHO won't investigate COVID origins | Fox News

2021-03-26

Former CDC Director: COVID-19 Escaped From Wuhan Virology Lab

It seems to me that this is speculation.  Although quite possibly true, we don't know yet if it is.  Early on, the director of the Wuhan Virology lab said that COVID-19 did not match their genomes. 

https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_breakingnews/former-cdc-director-covid-19-escaped-from-wuhan-virology-lab_3750784.html

However, it would be quite a coincidence that the virus emerged from the same area as the virology lab, while that lab that was deliberately working on "adding function" to viruses, which was research either partially or fully funded by the United States.

How Long Will COVID-19 Vaccine-Induced Immunity Last?

2021-03-21

How the Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid-19 Vaccine Works - The New York Times

The New York Times articles for these two vaccines look the same.

AstraZeneca Vaccine
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/health/oxford-astrazeneca-covid-19-vaccine.html

Johnson & Johnson Vaccine
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/health/johnson-johnson-covid-19-vaccine.html

Both vaccines use a weakened virus to deliver DNA to cells.  Since viruses are known to cause cancer (through DNA mutations), I prefer the mRNA approach of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.

2021-03-19

Second Pfizer COVID-19 vaccination

My second Pfizer COVID-19 vaccination yesterday has not caused any problems. I was concerned because a couple of people I know had a negative reaction to it. The first vaccination made my arm feel more sore than I thought it should, but only for a couple of days. With the second vaccination, I only had a little bit of soreness last night. It makes me wonder if the level of soreness is affected by how the person giving the injection does it.

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Why a Hass Avocado Seed Does Not Give Us a Hass Avocado Tree

A bit of trivia, but I think that this is interesting.



2021-03-11

Do Salt Lamps Work?

I found this video fascinating, and I have probably shared it before.  When I hear people say that they want to add ions to air, I assume that this is a bad idea because ions are reactive chemicals.  It is the equivalent of putting bleach into the air.   According to the video, there are many ions in the air already, but compared to the total number of molecules, the number is not significant.  The video also demonstrates that salt lamps don't really produce negative ions like they claim that they do.

From Fox News - Idaho killer Joseph Duncan has terminal brain cancer

Convicted killer Joseph Duncan has terminal brain cancer, which will likely kill him before his federal death sentence is carried out, court documents say, according to reports this week. 


https://www.foxnews.com/us/idaho-killer-joseph-duncan-has-terminal-brain-cancer




2021-03-01