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Al Cross| Opinion contributor

Permanent federal approval for one coronavirus vaccine Monday should have eliminated the arguments of some sadly misled, vaccine-hesitant Americans that Operation Warp Speed is just one big experiment.

But as Kentucky deals with another deadly surge of the coronavirus, it has started a heavily fraught experiment involving all three branches of its government, one that will likely affect the course of the pandemic and the lives of many Kentuckians.

For almost 18 months, Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear has been a pandemic czar, under a state of emergency he declared under a law the last completely Democratic legislature passed for a Democratic governor in 1998. This year, the firmly Republican legislature put a strict 30-day time limit on governors emergency orders, and last Saturday the state Supreme Court unanimously upheld it, pending arguments that the idea that 30 days is unconstitutionally short.

Beshear said he was surprised by the decision, since the high court had unanimously upheld his use of emergency powers. But the state constitution makes clear that the General Assembly is the main policy-making branch of government; it writes laws and can limit governors emergency powers.

Beshear should know that; he was attorney general before he was governor. His remark may reflect the warped sense of reality you can develop when you are a czar, issuing orders and mandates that affect personal behavior while winning approval in public-opinion polls.

More: 5 takeaways from the Kentucky Supreme Court ruling on Gov. Andy Beshear's power

Most Kentuckians seem to take the pandemic seriously, but not enough to keep the state from having the nations fifth highest infection rate when this column was written Wednesday morning. Thats largely because we rank 28th in vaccinations, with only 48% of us fully vaccinated the only figure that counts against the highly contagious delta variant.

Too many Kentuckians take cues from irresponsible politicians like U.S. Sen. Rand Paul and Rep. Thomas Massie, who have repeatedly cast doubt on the need to get vaccinated and mask up; and from their allies in partisan media and echo chambers on social media, who make villains of public-health experts who deserve our respect.

Most Republicans who lead the General Assembly have been more responsible, focusing their criticism of Beshear on his unwillingness to work with them and, more recently, their preference for local and parental decision-making on the issue of masks in schools.

Beshear did himself no favors when he rebuffed Republicans offer of help early in the pandemic. He could have brought them at least partially into his tent, perhaps co-opting them but also learning from them, and about them. He has yet to develop a real working relationship with them, almost 21 months into his 48-month term. Now he must, and so must they.

Related: Will Gov. Andy Beshear call a special legislative session for COVID? Here's what to know

It may not be easy. Republican leaders are saddled with the consequences of their national partisan allies politicization of the pandemic, which has made much of their voter base resistant to vaccination and masking, the two main preventive measures we need.

That showed in Senate President Robert Stivers quick rejection of a mask mandate for all indoor public spaces, something Beshear would be reviving shortly if not for the Supreme Court. Stivers signaled Republicans preferred approach by announcing a pro-vaccination campaign in his home Clay County, which has the states highest infection rate. Shots will be given at schools, which will compete for prizes, and the vaccinated will get coupons for free pizza.

The incentive approach seems likelier to work on the local level, with local influentials delivering the messages, than the vaccine lotteries being used by Beshear and some other governors. More incentives are needed.

House Speaker David Osborne of Prospect has a district with one of the states lowest infection rates, but his job is more difficult because all his members are up for reelection next year, and some are outspoken firebrands who are indirectly damaging public health, like Paul and Massie.

Joe Gerth: Senate Republicans wait 18 months to tell us their COVID-19 plan ... and it's pizza

Osborne already had a big member-management problem. Republicans face the challenge of drawing new House districts to conform to the 2020 census, which will surely pit some of them against each other because rural areas have lost population. Republicans would rather put off redistricting until after the 2022 elections, but courts are unlikely to allow that.

Osborne told me in an email, Our caucus is going to continue to be deliberate and intentional in how we approach this pandemic. ... It is our intent to work closely with the administration, hear their recommendations, and work with them as well as other stakeholders to set the policies.

Before long, Osborne, Stivers and other legislative leaders will hear recommendations that will be politically unpopular. We can only hope that their judgments wont be determined by politics, and if that requires risking their own leadership positions by going against the political grain, they will show courage for the greater good.

Al Cross, a former Courier Journal political writer, is professor and director of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues at the University of Kentucky. He writes this column for theKentucky Center for Public Service Journalism. Reach him on Twitter@ruralj.

Read more:
Kentucky GOP lawmakers get the power they wanted. Now they must use it wisely, show courage - Courier Journal

From the right: Biden Needs To Show Strength

President Bidens withdrawal from Afghanistan has been compared to our 1975 Vietnam withdrawal, but its more like Beirut, 1983, when terrorists killed 241 US service members and President Ronald Reagan cut and run, emboldening Osama bin Laden, contends Marc Thiessen at The Washington Post. The 9/11 mastermind predicted wed retreat from Afghanistan, too, and now Bidens fulfilling bin Ladens prophecy. Instead, he should show strength, tell the Taliban theyre responsible for Thursdays attack and thus were not leaving on Aug. 31 but only when every American and our allies are out. He should also say were establishing our own secure perimeter around the airport and reclaiming the Bagram air base. When the United States runs after a terrorist attack, the result is not safety and security, it is even more terrorism.

Woke watch: Theyve Got Rocks in Their Heads

The University of Wisconsins decision to remove a campus boulder because of what some writer said one day during the Coolidge administration (using the N-word to describe the rock) infuriates The New York Times John McWhorter. The students who demanded the move are fashioning their take on the rock as a kind of sophistication or higher awareness. But what they are really demanding is that we all dumb ourselves down. They essentially demanded that an irrational, prescientific kind of fear that a person can be meaningfully injured by the dead be accepted as insight, implying that the rocks denotation of racism is akin to a Confederate statues denotation of the same. This is Kabuki as civil rights its fake, its self-involved, and it helps no one.

Conservative: Liberalism Failed in Afghanistan

Twenty years after 9/11, the War on Terror has come full circle, writes Daniel McCarthy at Spectator World. Everyone expected the Taliban to surge back to power as soon as American forces left Afghanistan. Instead, the surge began while Americas embassy in Kabul was still open. Simply put: Terrorism won, nation-building lost. The Washington foreign-policy community believed the absence of liberalism and democracy was the root cause of terrorism, and its cure was therefore the promotion of liberal democracy through regime-change and nation-building. Yet liberalism cannot bind people together in conditions of profound insecurity, as religion and tribalism do. Nor does liberalism provide such compelling reasons to kill or die. A man will die for heaven or kill for his brother. No man will die for liberalism.

Natl-security beat: Sack Austin and Milley

After Kabul fell, neither Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin nor Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley appeared publicly for three days to explain what happened or why we appeared so ill-prepared to extract our citizens, sighs Ray McCoy at American Greatness. When they did appear, Austin claimed he didnt have the capability to collect large numbers of people. And this was supposed to be the team that returned competence to Washington, the experts that Joe Biden said he would trust. The president now has a chance to do some good by sacking Milley and Austin, as well as the mediocrities running his national security policy. If everyone from Tony Blair to Rand Paul is trashing this performance, we might as well start from scratch.

Libertarian: SCOTUS Soundly Slaps Eviction Ban

By 6-3, the Supreme Court ruled that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lack the authority to promulgate and extend the eviction moratorium, Elizabeth Nolan Brown cheers at Reason. The ruling notes that the downstream connection between eviction and the interstate spread of disease is markedly different from the direct targeting of disease that characterizes the measures identified in the Public Health Service Act. This, she notes, is also an important affirmation that private property rights still exist in this country and a good stand for the separation of powers since Congress can still pass a law extending the eviction moratorium but its unconstitutional for the executive branch to unilaterally make this decision.

Compiled by The Post Editorial Board

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Biden needs to show strength and other commentary - New York Post

The director of the National Institutes of Health said Monday it appears Covid-19 originated from an animal, but he didn't rule out the possibility that scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were secretly studying it and that it could have leaked out from there.

It's still unknown if the virus leaked out of a Wuhan lab, NIH director Dr. Francis Collins said Monday in an interview on CNBC's "Squawk Box," adding that the World Health Organization's investigation into the origin of the coronavirus has gone "backwards."

"The vast evidence from other perspectives says no, this was a naturally occurring virus," Collins said. "Not to say that it could not have been under study secretly at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and got out of there, we don't know about that. But the virus itself does not have the earmarks of having been created intentionally by human work."

The WHO investigation has been made harder by China's refusal to participate, says Collins.

"I think China basically refused to consider another WHO investigation and just said 'nope not interested'," Collins told CNBC's Squawk Box.

"Wouldn't it be good if they'd actually open up their lab books and let us know what they were actually doing there and find out more about those cases of people who got sick in November of 2019 about which we really don't know enough," Collins said.

U.S. intelligence reports first reported by the Wall Street Journal indicated that in November 2019, three workers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology fell ill with symptoms similar to those seen in Covid-19 infections, a report that China said was "completely untrue."

About three months ago, President Joe Biden initiated an investigation of his own and gave his intelligence community 90 days to further the investigation the virus' origins and report the findings. The deadline is Tuesday.

"It will be an interesting week because tomorrow is the day of the 90-day deadline that President Biden set for the intelligence community to do all their poking around that they could to see if they could come up with anymore insight as to how this virus got started in China," Collins said.

Most of the information gathered will likely remain classified, but some information from the report will be released, according to Collins.

"We don't know what they're going to come up with either, but we're intensely interested," Collins said.

Collins also weighed in on the debate over whether or not the U.S. funded so-called gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab, a debate that Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky and medical advisor to the president, Dr. Anthony Fauci, have engaged in time and time again. Gain-of-function research is when scientists take a pathogen and make it more contagious, deadly or both to study how to combat it.

"The kind of gain-of-function research that's under very careful scrutiny is when you take a pathogen for humans, and you do something with it that would enhance its virulence or its transmissibility," Collins said. "They were not studying a pathogen that was a pathogen for humans, these are bat viruses."

Some of the research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology that was funded, in part, by the NIH through a grant to non-profit EcoHealth Alliance studied how bat viruses could infect humans.

"So by the strict definition, and this was look at exquisitely carefully by all the reviewers of that research in anticipation that this might come up, was that this did not meet the official description of what's called gain-of-function research that requires oversight," Collins said. "I know this has gotten lots of attention, but I think it's way out of place."

Read more:
NIH director says Covid likely came from nature, but doesn't rule out it could have escaped from lab - CNBC

Why the Delta scare? As a virus mutates, it becomes more contagious and less lethal. And then eventually it mostly disappears. Many voices claim that Delta will be with us for a very long time, but we should be so lucky. Its way more likely that it will soon be followed by a next variant that will in turn become dominant. And more contagious and less lethal.

And no, thats not because of unvaccinated people, or at least theres no logic in that. If most people are not vaccinated, the virus has no reason to mutate. If many people are, it does. So this CNN piece is suspect. Vaccinated people are potential variant factories, just as much, if and when the vaccines used dont stop them from being infectious, as the present vaccines dont, far as we know.

Unvaccinated People Are Variant Factories, Infectious Diseases Expert

Unvaccinated people do more than merely risk their own health. Theyre also a risk to everyone if they become infected with coronavirus, infectious disease specialists say. Thats because the only source of new coronavirus variants is the body of an infected person. Unvaccinated people are potential variant factories, Dr. William Schaffner, a professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, told CNN Friday. The more unvaccinated people there are, the more opportunities for the virus to multiply, Schaffner, a professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, said. When it does, it mutates, and it could throw off a variant mutation that is even more serious down the road.

Even more serious? Well, yes, it can become more contagious, but then it loses lethality. Maybe thats what we want. Maybe we want a virus that everyone can be infected by, and build resistance to, without serious consequences. Maybe thats even what we should aim for. And also, maybe thats what we already have, with survival rates of 99.99% among most people.

And maybe, just maybe, a one-dimensional solution in the shape of an experimental vaccine is the worst response of all. Because it doesnt protect from anything other than more severe disease, while unleashing potential adverse effects for decades to come in the inoculated. Maybe one dimension simply doesnt cut it. Maybe we should not refuse to prevent people from becoming infected, or to treat them in the early stages of the disease.

Maybe the traumatic effects of lockdowns and facemasks should be part of benefits and risks models. And maybe we should start trying vitamin D, ivermectin and HCQ on a very large scale. No research, you say? Theres more research for those approaches than for the vaccines. But its largely been halted in the west to maintain the viability of the one-dimension solution; the medical Siamese twin of the Trusted News Initiative, one might say. Of which The Atlantic is also a valued member, look at this gem:

The 3 Simple Rules That Underscore the Danger of Delta

2. The variants are pummeling unvaccinated people.

Vaccinated people are safer than ever despite the variants. But unvaccinated people are in more danger than ever because of the variants. Even thoughtheyll gain some protection from the immunity of others, they also tend to cluster socially and geographically, seeding outbreaks even within highly vaccinated communities.

The U.K., where half the population is fully vaccinated, can be a cautionary tale, Hanage told me. Since Deltas ascendancy,the countrys cases have increased sixfold. Long-COVID cases will likely follow. Hospitalizations have almost doubled.Thats not a sign that the vaccines are failing. It is a sign that even highly vaccinated countries host plenty of vulnerable people.

[..] And new variants are still emerging. Lambda, the latest to be recognized by the WHO, is dominant in Peru and spreading rapidly in South America. Many nations that excelled at protecting their citizens are now facing a triple threat: They controlled COVID-19 so well that they have little natural immunity; they dont have access to vaccines; and theyre besieged by Delta.

First, the vaccines dont confer immunity on the jabbed, there is no evidence of that. Second, a large majority of healthy people have an immune system strong enough to fight off the infection, even without ever being infected. So to suggest that unvaccinated people might gain some protection from the immunity of the vaccinated is simply nonsense.

As for Deltas ascendancy, yes, cases are rising in the UK and Israel, two highly vaccinated countries. Not that anyone would acknowledge a possible connection there: its all despite the vaccines, not because of them. But as the graph below shows, while cases there are up a lot, hospitalization and deaths are not over the past month. They barely register.

On January 20, the UK had 1,823 deaths. Today, they had 15.

I even enlarged the hospitalizations a bit, or you wouldnt see anything.

Hospitalizations have almost doubled, says The Atlantic. Yeah, but theyre still very low, as are deaths. And perhaps thats not all that surprising, because the Delta variant doesnt appear to be the big killer that everyone wants to close their borders and restaurants for again. Theres no conclusive evidence, its too early, but this is what we know today.

Rand Paul Cites 0.08% Delta Variant Death Rate Among Unvaccinated

Kentucky GOP Sen. Rand Paul is telling Twitter followers to not let the fearmongers win, amid growing concerns about the newest delta variant of the coronavirus. Paul, who is a doctor with a degree in medicine from Duke University, cited a study of the strain that shows only a 0.08% death rate among unvaccinated people. Dont let the fearmongers win. New public England study of delta variant shows 44 deaths out of 53,822 (.08%) in unvaccinated group. Hmmm, he tweeted Tuesday to his 3.2 million followers. The variant, which has caused virus outbreaks in Australia and other countries, has resulted in officials reimposing recently lifted health-safety orders including mask-wearing.

In another graph, the Delta variant Case Fatality Rate in the UK even appears 8 times higher among the fully vaccinated than the unvaccinated. Maybe the press should pay a little more attention to that, instead of the Great Big Delta Scare. All they do today is sell fear and vaccines, but that will backfire, promise.

And what goes for the press is also valid for politicians and their experts: there will come a day that people realize you could have focused on prophylactics and early treatment, but chose not to. And that this cost a lot of lives and other misery. What are you going to do then? Apologize?

Maybe its finally time for some real science, instead of clickbait and fear and gene therapy.

Pre-existing polymerase-specific T cells expand in abortive seronegative SARS-CoV-2 infection

Individuals with likely exposure to the highly infectious SARS-CoV-2do not necessarily develop PCR or antibody positivity, suggesting some may clear sub-clinical infection before seroconversion. T cells can contribute to the rapid clearance of SARS-CoV-2 and other coronavirus infections15 . We hypothesised that pre-existing memory T cell responses, with cross-protective potential against SARS-CoV-2612, would expand in vivo to mediate rapid viral control, potentially aborting infection.

We studied T cells against the replication transcription complex (RTC) of SARS-CoV-2 since this is transcribed first in the viral life cycle1315 and should be highly conserved. We measured SARS-CoV-2-reactive T cells in a cohort of intensively monitored healthcare workers (HCW) who remained repeatedly negative by PCR, antibody binding, and neutralisation for SARS-CoV-2 (exposed seronegative, ES).

16-weeks postrecruitment, ES had memory T cells that were stronger and more multispecific than an unexposed pre-pandemic cohort, and more frequently directed against the RTC than the structural protein-dominated responses seen post-detectable infection (matched concurrent cohort). The postulate that HCW with the strongest RTC-specific T cells had an abortive infection was supported by a low-level increase in IFI27 transcript, a robust early innate signature of SARS-CoV-2 infection16.

We showed that the RNA-polymerase within RTC was the largest region of high sequence conservation across human seasonal coronaviruses (HCoV) and was preferentially targeted by T cells from UK and Singapore pre-pandemic cohorts and from ES. RTC epitope-specific T cells capable of cross-recognising HCoV variants were identified in ES. Longitudinal samples from ES and an additional validation cohort, showed pre-existing RNA-polymerase-specific T cells expanded in vivo following SARS-CoV-2 exposure, becoming enriched in the memory response of those with abortive compared to overt infection. In summary, we provide evidence of abortive seronegative SARS-CoV-2 infection with expansion of cross-reactive RTC-specific T cells, highlighting these highly conserved proteins as targets for future vaccines against endemic and emerging Coronaviridae.

Reprinted with permission fromThe Automatic Earth.

Excerpt from:
The Great Big Delta Scare - LewRockwell

Its axiomatic that when you suddenly change the election rules and modus operandi, causing 65 million mail-in ballots (out of 159 million total) to flood unprepared local elections systems, you will get beaucoup irregularities, mistakes and fraud. To that extent, the impending Trumpite challenge when the Congress meets on Wednesday to certify the 2020 election results is spot on.

But at the end of the day, the challenge being mounted by Senator Hawley (R-Missouri) and the Cruz Eleven is both futile and mischievous. Thats because, thank heavens, American government is not organized into an all-powerful, centralized, unitary state like France, Red China or countless other authoritarian regimes in-between.

To the contrary, government in America remains decentralized and federalist, even if the founders design, culminating in the 10th Amendments reservation of unexpressed powers to the states, has been relentlessly chipped away since the New Deal. Indeed, when it comes to many aspects of day-to-day governance, such as on matters of public welfare or commerce, federalism has been drained of substance and the sovereign states have, regrettably, morphed into administrative appendages and fiscal supplicants of Washington.The Great Devaluation:...Baratta, AdamBuy New $25.00(as of 05:09 EDT - Details)

Yet notwithstanding that erosion, one originalist feature from the 1787 convention remains largely in tact: Namely, that the election of Federal officials congressman, senators and presidents is to be conducted by the states as seen fit by their sovereign legislatures.

And thats where the Trumpite challenge comes a cropper: No state has sent dueling slates of electors to the Congress, and no state legislature has petitioned the Congress asserting that its now certified tally of the presidential votes was the product of fraudulent or nefarious maneuvers.

Q.E.D. There is nothing to contest rooted in electoral Federalism because there are no state-based disputes pending before the new Congress. Thats essentially the position of solid libertarians like Congressman Thomas Massie. Hes dead-on correct and not just owing to Scaliaian regards for the Constitutions language and intent on the matter of Federal elections.

The far bigger issue is that there is really nothing more dangerous than the unitarianism implicit in the Trumpite challenge. Namely, the notion that a caucus of Washington pols can appoint themselves de facto commissioners of Federal elections and override state certified results that are not to their liking or partisan advantage even if they are able to proffer plausible evidence of state level irregularities.

For one thing, the nation has weathered prior episodes of state election irregularities and at the end of the day has not been worse for the wear. Clearly, in 1960 the Illinois Dems (led by Chicago Mayor Daley) stole the election for Kennedy, but in the great scheme of things we doubt whether Tricky Dick Nixon would have behaved any better had he won the first time.

Likewise, Bush the Younger may have won Ohios 20 electoral votes in 2004 due to local GOP chicanery. But had it gone the other way, a 271 to 266 win by John Kerry might have resulted in a much earlier end to the Bush Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Notwithstanding the limited gray matter under the latters great shock of dark hair, Lt. John Kerry saw the evil of Americas imperial wars first hand in Vietnam and was far more inclined to stop the pointless shedding of blood and treasure in those woebegone theaters than weekend-warrior national guardsmen, George W. Bush.The Last Gold Rushu202...Haynes, BillBuy New $28.00(as of 04:04 EDT - Details)

This time there is even less difference at stake. The Donald would surely bankrupt the nation by 2024, perhaps only a tad latter than is likely to be the case under Sleepy Joe and/or the Kamala Harris Regency, as the case may be.

But which claimant to the Oval Office will do the most damage in the next four years is not the real issue. The cardinal matter is that the Washington-based Democrat party is now intellectually and politically bankrupt. It has absolutely nothing to offer the American electorate except Woke virtue-signaling and collectivist rhetoric about the lie that America needs a unifer and that we are all in this together against a handful of billionaires, except for (most of) those who support the Dem agenda.

Consequently, the Dems real national agenda is brazenly this: Everything For More Democrat Votes. Period.

Their self-righteously proclaimed positions on open immigration, more beneficent welfare programs, the $15 minimum wage, Federal legislation against so-called voter suppression, statehood for DC and Puerto Rico, prison reform, Federal subventions to the nations decaying big cities etc. are all designed to round up more Dem votes and thereby keep todays mendacious class of Dem pols in power.

For crying out loud, these people are so craven that they speciously claim that requiring voters to present an ID is burdensome and discriminatory. In fact, if people are too incompetent to get an ID, their failure to vote is their own damn fault and leaves American democracy no worse for the wear.

Accordingly, there could be nothing more untoward than GOP sanctioning of Washington control of the elections for Federal office. That would open the floodgates to legislative artifice and lawfare maneuver in the courts designed to make voter harvesting of one kind or another easier and more fruitful for the Dem apparatus in the socially and economically dispossessed precincts of the nation.The New Great Depressi...Rickards, JamesBuy New $20.99(as of 04:29 EST - Details)

Meanwhile, what was actually being stolen in the recent past is not a few hundred-thousand votes in a handful of swing states that are the object of the futile Trumpite challenge.

At the end of the day, those legitimately dubious votes dont begin to ixnay the elections larger verdict: Namely, that Trump was such a lousy, self-obsessed candidate and the GOPs agenda was so me too Big government that Sleepy Joe Biden, who barely left his basement bunker, massively won the popular vote by 81.28 million to 74.22 million. Even street-fighter Sidney Powell has not claimed voter fraud of anything close to that huge 7.0 million popular vote margin, the second largest plurality in American history.

So what matters now is whether control of the GOP can be wrested from the careerist pols and neocon empire advocates who dominate the so-called conservative party today. Thats because what has actually been stolen in recent months and years is trillions of dollars from future taxpayers to fund that bipartisan fiscal bacchanalia fostered by the Trumpite-GOP; and also the tens of trillions of windfall gains to the top 1.0% and 0.1% that have been pilfered from the main street economy owing to the Feds hideously unhinged money-pumping.

Consequently, unless the likes of Rand Paul can mobilize a new coalition of liberty-seeking young people, antiwar believers of all generations and adult citizens who can be made to see that capitalist prosperity and future opportunities for individual betterment are being quashed by a rogue central bank, the Real Steal will go on until it ends in fiscal and economic catastrophe.

In that respect, we find it telling that noisy Trumpites like Senator Hawley, who has already effectively thrown his hat in the ring for 2024, dont have a clue about the Real Steal. For crying out loud, this brash populist know-nothing joined forces with Bernie Sanders in pushing the $2,000 helicopter drop of free stuff to everyone, and is so blindly and rabidly anti-Chinese that the neocon war machine could have ordered him from central casting.

By contrast, what Rand Paul and a few others understand, it that the motor force of the Real Steal lies in the upwardly soaring purple line in the chart below. Thats the Feds out-of-control balance sheet, which has grown by 10X just in the last 18 years.

Simply stated, there is no possible world in which sound fiscal governance and productive financial markets can function when the central bank is massively and systematically poisoning the system with falsified asset prices and overpowering inducements for debt accumulation and speculation in the public and private sectors alike.

The Feds Out-of-Control Balance Sheet, 2003-2021

As we have frequently noted, this central bank enabled distortion of fiscal and financial choice has been building for decades, ever since Alan Greenspan panicked during the overdue and healthy purge of the stock market on Black Monday during October 1987.

But by now the unproductive explosion of debt in all sectors of the U.S. economy government, corporate, household and financial has reached epic proportions. Since Q2 1987

This is the heart of the Real Steal. Owing to rotten money, the nation has gone mad burying itself in debt stealing from the future in order to live high on the hog today.

Total Debt Vs. GDP, 1987-2020

The problem is that under the baleful regime of Keynesian central banking, like in Orwells Animal Farm, all of todays high living hogs are not treated equal. On the margin, the overwhelming impact of runaway public and private debt has been the fantastic inflation of financial assets.Say Yes to No Debt: 12...Soaries Jr., DeForest BBest Price: $1.70Buy New $10.44(as of 04:29 EST - Details)

As the estimable Lance Roberts showed this morning, stock prices and earnings grew pretty much in tandem until 1987, as would be inherently the case under a sound money regime. Since then, however, the Feds uncontrolled money-printing has caused the mother of all financial distortions. To wit, since mid-1987

So, yes, there is a reason that Sleepy Joe won. The GOP has not had enough sense to understand that the Fed is the root of todays economic failure in Flyover America so the voters signed up for an old dufus and 47-year pol who still had enough wits about him to tilt at the baleful consequences of the nations rogue central bank.

PEAK TRUMP, IMPENDING CRISES, ESSENTIAL INFO & ACTION

Reprinted with permission fromDavid Stockmans Contra Corner.

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Stop the Real Steal! - LewRockwell