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April
14
2021

Discard First Principles, Live in a Turd-World CrapHole
Karl Denninger

One of the first principles of economics is that everything has a cost.

Everything.

So there’s a virus. It kills some people. We quickly learn that it almost-never harms children, but often harms older, sicker people. This should not surprise; it is easier to kill an old and infirm person than a healthy, vibrant young individual with virtually any disease. In other words things like the 1918 pandemic flu are the exception, not the rule.

Indeed Chicken Pox is the same way; it almost-never hurts a kid. About 3/100,000 times it kills a child. But if you’re older it kills you 25 times as often. Chicken pox was dealt with for most of our nation’s history by deliberately infecting young people. I was deliberately infected, as were most people born before 1990 or thereabouts. There was no vaccine so the only question was when you were going to get it, not were you going to get it, and getting it as a kid was wildly preferable.

So got it I did, on purpose, as my mother took me across the street to play with my neighbor who had funny little spots all over his face and, she told me, was sad because he didn’t feel well.

Guess who had the funny and itchy little spots a few days later?

May I remind you that the CDC for months said that Covid-19 was a disease that likely hurt kids under 18 about 3/100,000 times.  Now they say a better guess is 2/100,000.  Both are vanishingly small numbers.  There are about 60 million kids under the age of 18 in the US or about 20% of the population; if we deliberately infected all of them we'd expect to lose 1,200 children.  Every death is sad but far more kids are killed by all manner of other things and in deliberately infecting them we would have built roughly 1/4 of the required population immunity to this disease, along with at the same time made damn sure it transitioned to an endemic virus that causes colds since every one of those kids would have T-cell reactivity and, when it came back around a year, two or three down the road they'd sneeze instead of getting seriously ill, exactly as they do for all the other coronaviruses that circulate.

The CDC also says that if you're over 65 your risk is now much higher; not the 4% or so they used to claim, but now roughly 9% or 90,000 per million (9/100.)  That's very high; not the previous 1,800 times higher risk but 4,500 times higher!

I'm not sure I buy that but it doesn't really matter whether it's 1,800x or 4,500x higher; the point is that it's wildly more-likely to kill old people than young people.  So what have we done?

We've deliberately cut down the number of interactions that young people have by masking them, closing schools, banning concerts, keggers and other big social interaction environments.  That has deliberately shifted infections from young people to old people.

Every governor and mayor who did this deserves to be arrested, indicted, be tried and hang for it; we're talking about a half-million dead people here, may I remind you, where the total number who had to die was a tiny fraction of that and, had we done nothing but let it rip the count would have been much smaller!

Who pointed this out months ago?  I did.  Right here.

In fact the correct action to take was to not only mandate group hugs in schools but throw keggers every single Friday night for everyone under the age of 30; no charge, come on in, mingle, listen to music, get drunk and even screw.  No masks, no distancing, do the grind on the dance floor with hundreds of other young people and spread the love.

Why?

Because the virus almost-never kills any of those people and yet if we had done this we'd have diverted cases away from old people.

What do we do for old people?

First, we demand that all care for them medically be provided by people who either (1) are seroconverted and thus presumed safe or (2) are housed in hotels and other quarantine-style facilities from which they do not leave except to go to work in said facilities for those who have not seroconverted and thus are at risk.

Since we cannot force people to work in this country that means we'd have to bribe them.  That's ok.  On a relative basis it's cheap and further, it would make up for some of the jobs lost from the old people who are rightfully hiding under their beds instead of going out and spending money.

Instead of demanding everyone wear masks the messaging would have been to strongly urge those who are over 30, especially those over 50 and morbid to avoid social interaction while egging on social interaction among mask-less young and healthy.  After the spring we would have banhammered all the "healthy at any size" folks from social media and called them what they are: Deatheaters.  We would have made clear that for older, fatter Americans it was very important to spend the next six months in the sun in shorts with shirts optional getting plenty of Vitamin D and eschewing all fast carbohydrates so as to lose that extra 50lbs, which was by no means impossible or even all that difficult if you stop eating the damned bread, pasta and pizzas.  Not only is that Vitamin D good but in addition it's nearly impossible to transmit a virus out in the sun as UV, which the sun provides in quantity, is known to destroy viruses in seconds.  As the summer waned we should have encouraged daily Vitamin D supplementation in reasonable amounts so as to attempt to maintain that protection.  While said protection is somewhat speculative doing so comes with no risk and almost no cost!

We decided instead to continue playing the virtue game with people who are fat and telling them it was all ok and now a large number of them are dead as a direct result.

We told them we'd have vaccines ready before death got to them which was a knowing and intentional lie; there was basically no possible way for that to happen even without testing that we did not perform but we didn't care; the billions pharma and the medical industry made were far more important than interdicting disease, which we had the means to do with cheap, off-patent medications and nutritional supplements.  Would that have worked for everyone?  Of course not but between them along with losing that 50lbs a hell of a lot of those people would still be alive.  In addition mostwho were Type II diabetic would be able to discontinue their drugs entirely or greatly reduce their use with their blood sugar returning to normal.

We couldn't have that, however, as that takes money out of the pockets of the ghouls and scammers.  So death it was, intentionally so, and now we're even parading fat jackasses like Pritzker around in the national media while he's being jabbed by another disgustingly and intentionally morbid person who calls themselves a "nurse"!  How stupid do you have to be in order to take "medical advice" (or treatment) from someone who clearly cannot manage the first fundamental rule of health -- controlling what and how much they put down their own piehole?

To top off our stupidity we're now we're planning to vaccinate kids against a disease that almost never kills them and for which there is no evidence that the vaccine will provide durable protection, while these experimental vaccines are wildly associated with deadly outcomes at a rate a hundred times higher than other common one-sequence vaccines.  Indeed the data strongly suggests these vaccines are about as dangerous in a young person as is the infection.  In other words it's far better to let them get it and build resistance on their own because this virus will never be gone and will come around again -- this adaptive immunity is superior since unlike measles where you get the inoculation once and then never have to worry about it again that will probably not be true for this coronavirus as we've never managed to produce durable protection against one before.  There's no reason to believe we can do it now.

Today we're still not telling people to get that Vitamin D and get rid of the extra 50 or 100lbs. We're still not telling people who are Type II diabetic to quit eating the damned fast carbohydrates, without exception.  We're still not interested in anything that might decrease those individuals lifetime extortion by the medical monster even though we now have a virus that is the best that Mother****ernature can serve up to nail those who are wildly obese and which we richly deserve for pushing our virtue-signaling bull**** on "body positivity" for the last couple of decades.

I still believe, based on the evidence, that this virus probably came from the Wuhan lab as an accidental release and it is a fact that the US, and in fact Fauci himself, funded that research.  The evidence for this is strong but conclusive proof one way or another will likely never be had because China has refused to allow outsiders to see the raw data they have.

Gee, I wonder why they don't want anyone to look....

In response for their careless disregard of human life, never mind their proved refusal to honor basic human rights within their national borders we continue to suck Chairman Xi's dick instead of forcing him to take our collective national phallus up his ******* -- a fate he and his pig-faced Communists richly deserve.

We think we're "cute" for internationalization and such but just as with this disease we never bothered with the cost side of the ledger there either and now we're paying for it again.

The wild spending spree started under Trump and now accelerated under Biden will eventually lead to very high inflation.  It always does.  Indeed the money and credit creation implies a roughly 30% "devaluation" already and that's if it stops now, which it won't.  May I remind you that half the nation's population will be rendered unable to eat, heat or cool their residences, nor will they ever be able to pay rent or their mortgage, if that sort of price adjustment actually occurs.  When people are literally starving and freezing to death and the government cannot make up for it because attempting to do so simply drives prices higher and makes it worse then the result is the destruction of civil society and likely Civil War.  Again we refuse to look at the costs of these programs and what they are inevitably going to do and thus we will deserve that outcome too.

Better wake up folks -- time is short and it does not matter which side of the aisle you're on as both sold you out.

Mr. Denninger, recent author of the book Leverage: How Cheap Money Will Destroy the World, is the former CEO of MCSNet, a regional Chicago area networking and Internet company that operated from 1987 to 1998. MCSNet was proud to offer several "firsts" in the Internet Service space, including integral customer-specified spam filtering for all customers and the first virtual web server available to the general public. Mr. Denninger's other accomplishments include the design and construction of regional and national IP-based networks and development of electronic conferencing software reaching back to the 1980s.

He has been a full-time trader since 1998, author of The Market Ticker, a daily market commentary, and operator of TickerForum, an online trading community, both since 2007.

Mr. Denninger received the 2008 Reed Irvine Accuracy In Media Award for Grassroots Journalism for his coverage of the 2008 market meltdown.

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