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A Very Bad Diet Of Cheap Money And Delusional Thinking

A weekend topic starting with Tulsa World in Oklahoma. “In August 2019, the median sale price of Tulsa homes was $165,000. That number has jumped nearly 34% to a median sale price of $221,000 in 2021, according to realtor.com. ‘The buyer demand came out because interest rates were fantastic,’ said Paul Wheeler, who has been a realtor in Tulsa for over 28 years. ‘My first house had an 11.5% interest rate. Now? (The interest rates) got down around two and three percent. We call it free money.'”

“Despite the housing market frenzy highs, Wheeler said he thinks the market peaked around July 1. He also does not anticipate ‘the bubble to burst’ or the market to crash. ‘Now, all that being said, it’s calming down,’ Wheeler said. ‘I think the values have risen to a point where the buyers are going ‘OK, I don’t know that I’m willing to pay that much above traditional market rates.’”

From ABC News. “The news of higher house prices will please millions of Australians who own their own home or investment property. Bill Shorten, who made housing affordability a centrepiece of Labor’s 2019 federal election strategy, noted: ‘This nation can’t keep giving away money to property investors to make losses on property.'”

“Under Mr Shorten’s plan, negative gearing would have been restricted to new homes, and the capital gains tax discount — which allows investors to flip properties at a profit without hefty tax bills and costs the federal budget just shy of $10 billion annually — would have been reduced from 50 per cent to 25 per cent.”

“But last week, as Labor leader Anthony Albanese reportedly sold his Marrickville investment home for $2.35 million, he announced the party would dump both policies ahead of the next federal election, at the same time as abandoning Labor’s opposition to the federal government’s stage 3 tax cuts. ‘We took those policies to the last two elections. They didn’t find favour with the electorate,’ Labor’s financial services spokesman Stephen Jones said. ‘We need to ensure that the policies we take to the next election are going to be able to assist first home buyers to get into the market.'”

From Stuff New Zealand. “For a market to function properly, market participants must be rational and they must have perfect knowledge. New Zealanders don’t seem rational in regards to housing. We are obsessed with owning a house at any cost, and irrationally believe house prices will never fall. There are two financial concepts many New Zealanders get wrong.”

“The first is price verses value. In finance, price and value are two different things, and yet we tend to use these terms interchangeably. Price is simply what you pay for an asset, like the price of a house; value is what the asset is actually worth financially. We can value a house by its rental income. A healthy rental return should be about 8 per cent. But in New Zealand, most landlords are getting very little, or even negative, rental returns, and are relying on capital gains to make money. This tells us house prices are much higher than they should be.”

“When you are getting a good yearly rental return, you are investing; when you are relying on capital gains to make money from your house, you are speculating. And, in finance, speculating is just a nice way of saying gambling. This is where lack of knowledge distorts the market. Mistaking price for value, we are gambling on housing when we think we are investing. We pay more for houses than we should because we don’t understand the risk we are taking, erroneously believing that no matter how much we pay for a house, some other mug is going to come along in the future and pay us more for it.”

“There must come a time when it simply won’t be physically possible for most New Zealanders to buy a house. That no matter how hard we scrimp and save and sacrifice, we can’t afford a house. And if speculators don’t have any buyers for their houses, they can’t make any money and panic sell, so the housing market collapses.”

“Building more houses and releasing more land for residential purposes won’t fix the problem. In the same way that you can’t outrun a bad diet, you can’t outbuild an asset bubble, and New Zealanders are on a very bad diet of cheap money and delusional thinking. The solution, if there is a solution, lies with the people who caused the housing bubble in the first place, us.”

From News Letter. “House prices in Northern Ireland plunged 50% from their 2007 peak to their lowest point in 2013. Since then they have slowly risen by 50%. That takes them back to where they were, right? Well not quite, as anyone who was keen on maths at school might remember. The key thing to know is that Ireland — both sides of the border — had one of the biggest house price collapses in recorded economic history.”

“The boom of 2006 and 2007 was a disaster, yet most of society colluded in it. Young people who borrowed ruinous amounts of money to get on the housing ladder were told by the elders and betters: ‘You can’t go wrong with property.’ Many of those people are still in negative equity, 14 years later.”

“In many respects those young buyers were given bad advice for good reasons — older folk wanted to reassure the younger generation that owning your home is a good and safe thing to do, which it had been for generations of people. But there is also a lot of stupidity and greed when it comes to housing booms. Soaring prices become like a pyramid scheme in which the people at the top get the gains, and the people at the bottom are left with a huge bill when it all collapses — as it inevitably will.”

“The point is this: not only can you ‘go wrong’ with property, if you buy at the height of a housing boom you might have to wait decades to get your full money back, if indeed you ever do.”

From PBS News Hour. “Judy Woodruff talks to Mary Daly, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, about what she is seeing. ‘Well, lower interest rates, as you have said, allow people to purchase homes, importantly, also allow people to refinance homes, if — even if they’re staying in the one they own, have more money to spend and help themselves through the pandemic, buy cars.'”

Related Posts

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This Post Has 133 Comments

  1. ‘lower interest rates, as you have said, allow people to purchase homes, importantly, also allow people to refinance homes, if — even if they’re staying in the one they own, have more money to spend and help themselves through the pandemic, buy cars’

    Central bankers are dangerous idiots.

    2. Astounding! Can;t believe this passes as thoughtful insight in today’s media. We are DOOMED.

  2. ‘We took those policies to the last two elections. They didn’t find favour with the electorate…We need to ensure that the policies we take to the next election are going to be able to assist first home buyers to get into the market’

    I’ve followed this closely, and Australia is the clearest example of deciding, choosing the bubble path. It clear because they actually talked about it, unlike in the US where it’s drowned out as a conspiracy theory.

    No matter. Tree don’t grow to the sky. But from a policy standpoint, it’s just dumb. The more we spend on shacks and interest the less we have to spend on other things. It actually hurts the greater economy every day. It distorts capital, causes things to be built that otherwise wouldn’t. It’s a waste of resources. The negatives are too long to list. So why do they keep doing it? Power. They keep people dazzled with shiny cars and HGTV and stories of quick riches to cover up the failure of globalism.

    1. “The more we spend on shacks and interest the less we have to spend on other things.”

      This is true for the homebuyer but is not true for the neighbors. When the homebuyer plunks down a gob of money for a house a whole bunch of neighbors get to enjoy a gain in equity wealth. This equity wealth gain is something that can be cashed out and spent, and this spending is what drives the financialized economy.

      If the prices paid for a house is a stupid price then the equity wealth gains for the neighbors will reflect this stupidity. Luckily for wonderful guys such as myself this widely-based stupidity (something that is a terrible thing to waste) is widely shared by both the buyer and the buyer’s neighbors and this stupid equity wealth is stupidly transformed (for a fee) into equity debt, something I get to sponge off of.

      1. So long as real estate keeps going up, homeowners keep getting wealthier. And it isn’t like the poor renters didn’t have an opportunity to join the party, with all of the affordable lending programs in play. Home ownership is available to anyone who wants to get a share of the free money.

        1. “So long as real estate keeps going up, homeowners keep getting wealthier.”

          And as long as money is being made available to stupid people real estate prices will keep on going up. The stupider the people the higher the price rise.

          2. What a depressing armpit of a shack. I wouldn’t pay $50,000 for that. And look at all the houses for sale!

  3. ‘In August 2019, the median sale price of Tulsa homes was $165,000. That number has jumped nearly 34% to a median sale price of $221,000 in 2021’

    I’ve never been to Tulsa, but I’m pretty sure it’s a sh$thole. So what are these people up to pushing shack prices up in sh$tholes?

    1. “So what are these people up to pushing shack prices up in sh$tholes?”

      Come into my bank and I will present to you a real live demonstration. Bring with you a list of marketable body parts.

    2. “pretty sure it’s a sh$thole”

      Passed thru it once. Yes it’s a $hithole.

      People on here used to say it’s location, location, location. I guess that’s not valid anymore. How’s it possible for the prices to shoot up like this in any corner, any town USA? Something’s afoot and it’s not the shortage of shacks.

    3. Tulsa is now almost 30% vibrant. Plus who knows how many of the non vibrants are honorary vibrants.

    4. I drove through Oklahoma City once and it had the shithole vibe as well. I only drove through, so to be fair I know nothing about it.

    5. I am considering moving to Oklahoma in the near future because of their progressive medical cannabis program.
      I figure if I stay medicated enough, I’ll forget that I’m in Oklahoma.

      1. Prepper god Bear Independent lives in Oklahoma near the Arkansas line. He moved there from Texas and says it’s Texas on steroids. If you like gunz, you’ll like Oklahoma.

    1. a realtor is a person who will keep selling tickets to a sold out movie & but then shouts “fire” when empty.

  5. Today is Sunday, August 8th and Joe Biden is not the legitimately elected president of the United States.

    The 2020 election was stolen.

    And a message to the SPLC and other traitorous agents of globalism, you can’t cancel this blog, and you can’t silence us.

    January 6th was only the beginning 🙂

    1. https://frankspeech.com/

      Lot’s of data coming out on the 10th. I watched a speech yesterday (should have saved the link but didn’t). This guy made a lot of good points: WHO says CCP virus less deadly that common cold. That’s right, not less than the flu, but less than the cold. He went on to say that all this crap about masks, etc, was just to demoralize people. I thought about that and pretty much every waking day for years now has been a blur of lies, disinformation and fear mongering.

      I think one has to actively strain to see through it all. It helps that I don’t watch TV and don’t go into an office every day to fit into “normal” conversations. I can see how people are ground down. We are told men can be women. OK. The Chinese let thousands of people fly out of Wuhan for weeks, while they couldn’t leave the city otherwise. But communism is normal in the US people! Those fires are mostly peaceful. Censoring half the planet is done to save the planet. No mention that none of this would have been tolerated months ago.

      We gotta keep a cool head. We’ll get these people locked up and tried. They did this to us, not the other way around.

      1. I thought about that and pretty much every waking day for years now has been a blur of lies, disinformation and fear mongering.

        What astonishes me is how 95% of the sheeple go on grazing obliviously on the green shoots sprouting from the manure the MSM spreads across their pasture.

      2. “don’t go into an office every day to fit into “normal” conversations”

        The contractor I am working for now may as well be called Anti-Woke Electric. There is nothing we can’t talk about openly working there.

        So happy I left the corporate / government plantation. It’s a nice feeling knowing I can never be cancelled.

        1. fit into “normal” conversations

          I had my hair cut yesterday for the first time since January. My stylist, who’s known me since 2004/2005, tried to talk up the jabs, their technology and wished me luck against the scariants without one. I told him that I’m very familiar with the technology and that our public health officials are lying to us. His response (paraphrased): why would they do that; it would hurt people.

          1. my barber is an elderly Vietnamese guy who has been cutting hair for 50 years.
            Tony (his name) only charges $7.00, but I always give him a $20.
            he knows pretty much 1 style; GI crew cut & small variations. haha!
            but he is pleasant, fast, little chitchat . . . and I don’t mind fixing it later at home in the mirror.

      3. I have been asked half a dozen times by acquaintances if I’ve had the jab. I’m tired of it. Next time somebody asks me I’m straight up telling them my health is none of their focking business. Whatever happened to decorum, anyway?

  6. I’m 61 and a few months short of 62. I don’t do Fakebook, Tweeter or any of that sh#t, as far as social media goes this blog is it for me. But that does leave me out of touch with lifelong friends I grew up with. Since I do text, this morning I sent this as a group text message to four of those guys I am lucky enough to call lifelong friends that I haven’t seen in a few years and don’t really know when I will see again.

    https://youtu.be/1LTPRub6vKE

    1. Or the California guvnah going out to eat while everybody is locked down and having a lobbyist pay the $14,000 bar tab. Nothing to see there.

      I said long ago this mouth hanky thing showed how ridiculous it had become. There was a rumble in Tucson about a cinco de mayo pechanga that was insisting on mouth hankeys. I thought to myself: so the mouth hankey would be necessary because, we’re all gonna die!? If that’s the case, why the fook would I be going to some made up beer selling fake holiday?

      We’ve known there is no bring out yer dead cart. Never was. It’s all just a bunch of abuse from the globalists. I don’t think there is a “variant.” And who cares if there is when the CCP virus is a joke. How do they lie, let us count the ways: dude falls off a motorcycle. The CCP virus kilt him! This injection is killing thousands of people. “You can’t say that!” Oh yes I can.

      1. “You can’t say that!” Oh yes I can.”

        We are the leaderless resistance.

        Anybody in a “group” or who is recruiting to join a “group” is a Fed and/or globalist.

        This is the HBB, this is not Facebook or Twitter.

      2. It’s all just a bunch of abuse from the globalists.

        Sometimes when there’s a seemingly complex problem that needs to be solved, it’s best to boil it down to the basics. In this instance, somebody needs to start killing all of the billionaire globalists. DEAD.

          3. I was tempted to write “Dances with…” but couldn’t think of anything that wasn’t in bad taste.

      3. Haha, Thx Tarara,
        I assume from your comment that you saw him on that bike many years ago? When i saw that pic, my only thought was, “Light in the loafers”. Kinda like Red-Pilled’s stylist.

        1. NJGeezer
          🤣 Yeah, among other ones – too sweet smile, flinching at some wrestling exhibit, bromance with Branson, etc. There’s plenty. I don’t really care what floats his boat but he’s cringe personified. It would be old news if he, among others, didn’t have his hand up Joe’s butt working his words/actions. Sickening.

    4. By the way, he caught backlash for the nearly 600 invite party, so he pared it down to the hundreds.

          2. rms
            👍🏻 They’re so anxious to test/restrict us. We should demand all office holders be subject to psychological and drug testing. It’s well known that psycho/sociopaths are attracted to politics, along with other surprising 👀 professions (Realtor® not there).

        2. So they say.

          That was my point. From the hundreds to the hundreds. The bottom line – rules for thee, not for me. These people are frauds. See AOC’s mask theater video the other day.

          1. “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” — George Orwell, ANIMAL FARM

            I recently re-read “1984” and “Animal Farm.” Astonishing how prescient Orwell was in foretelling how the globalists and their collectivist Quislings would stop at nothing less than total power and control.

      2. Presumably, Obama required a negative COVID test to get into the party. But we didn’t hear anything about how people were tested, or when. And with 600+ people, surely a few household names would have tested positive and gotten kicked out. We didn’t hear anything about that either.

  8. Now? (The interest rates) got down around two and three percent. We call it free money.’”

    We in the sound money camp call it fake money, conjured up out of thin air and backed by nothing.

    1. But nevertheless this fake money spends just as well as the real kind.

      Why, it’s a miracle!

        1. “Until it doesn’t.”

          When this “it doesn’t” thingy happens then it is time to pack up and leave. Until then enjoy the party.

  9. He also does not anticipate ‘the bubble to burst’ or the market to crash.

    “The Fed has created the Mother of All Bubbles, and the implosion of Housing Bubble 2.0 is going to be one for the ages,” said no realtor ever.

  10. Bill Shorten, who made housing affordability a centrepiece of Labor’s 2019 federal election strategy, noted: ‘This nation can’t keep giving away money to property investors to make losses on property.’”

    Imagine if a candidate emerged who would make sound money, honest markets, and jailing central bankers, crooked policymakers & captured regulators a centerpiece of their electoral strategy.

  11. “There must come a time when it simply won’t be physically possible for most New Zealanders to buy a house. That no matter how hard we scrimp and save and sacrifice, we can’t afford a house. And if speculators don’t have any buyers for their houses, they can’t make any money and panic sell, so the housing market collapses.”

    Oh dear. I fear a scenario where all of the rapacious globalist oligarchs who flee in their Gulfstreams to their luxuriously appointed New Zealand bug-out compounds when their policies crash the U.S. economy and the vengeful pitchforks & torches come looking for them, find a country full of enraged FBs awaiting them in New Zealand.

    1. I’ve seen some threads on the /r/collapse sub-Reddit about locating the air intakes for the bunkers of these globalists, and sealing them off so they all suffocate locked inside.

      Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of folks if you ask me, the only good globalist is a dead globalist…

    2. find a country full of enraged FBs awaiting them in New Zealand

      Which is why really rich guys like Larry Ellison have their own private islands. Heck, he bugged out to it last year, and runs his empire from there and not from the HQ in Austin.

      1. When it all comes crashing down, having your own private island is going to be no protection, especially when your security is comprised of those whose friends and families are going to be among those badly hurt by the globalist looting and asset-stripping of the productive economy. You can rent loyalty while times are good, but in a full-blown collapse scenario, those victimized by globalization are not going to be in a forgiving mood.

        1. Not really.

          I’m an American.

          New York City, Washington DC, Los Angeles are not American cities, they are occupied cells of globalist poison.

          The HBB knows who the real enemies of America are, and we’re not afraid of naming names.

      2. It’s hard to believe the country that gave us the fine Yugo automobile could ever fall apart.

      3. The thing about Yugoslavia is that from day 1 it was an artificial union. Its citizens thought of themselves first as Slovenians, Croatians, Serbians, Bosnians, etc. Those that strayed from their ancestral lands found themselves to be outsiders, and later as refugees when the civil war began. It was tribalism at it’s finest. There was no way that union could hold together, and after Tito died it quickly unraveled.

        1. “Its citizens thought of themselves first as Slovenians, Croatians, Serbians, Bosnians, etc.”

          Slavs I know in the U.S. used to proudly considered themselves as being Slavs. Then Yugoslavia broke apart (something that happened thousands of miles away) and they suddenly became Croats, Serbs, etc. and many took up with the ethnic divisions that were left behind when they all thought of themselves as Slavs.

          I have seen this firsthand and it was an interesting experience.

          1. They all are “Slavs”, (Poles. Czechs and Slovaks are also “Slavs”) but there are important differences. For instance: Croatians are Catholics, Serbs are Orthodox while ethnic Bosnians are Muslims. In the US that might not seem like a big deal (muh diversity), but over there it is. Sure to us mongrel Americans there is no discernable difference between them. But that’s not how they see it. The fact that it unraveled so quickly and they started killing each other says a lot.

            I took a river cruise on the Danube a few years ago. The crew was half Hungarian and half Serbian. There were no other “Slavs” on board.

    2. They aren’t going to stop if everybody is compliant. Even if you took the vaccine , don’t take their booster after booster. Toxic chemicals in shots . I would drink lots of water and take a bunch if vitamin c to delete that junk, at least a few Drs have been saying that it can be deleted.
      I think most people thought they could take the shot and get back to normal. No, they want booster after booster , but who cares what criminal psychopaths want, they don’t care what harm they cause, they have no liability.

      1. Even if you took the vaccine , don’t take their booster after booster.

        That’s what I’m telling people.

  14. “There are two financial concepts many New Zealanders get wrong…in New Zealand, most landlords are getting very little, or even negative, rental returns, and are relying on capital gains to make money. This tells us house prices are much higher than they should be.”

    It also brings to mind a third concept: Ponzi finance.

    “When you are getting a good yearly rental return, you are investing; when you are relying on capital gains to make money from your house, you are speculating. And, in finance, speculating is just a nice way of saying gambling.”

    Isn’t this why people buy stonks, cryptocurrencies and lumber futures, as well as houses? Whatever we pay today, we can sell for more tomorrow.

  16. The Comrades of Proven Worth (D) at our NEA indoctrination mills need to exalt this gentleman as a stellar exemplar of the supreme Democrat-Bolshevik virtues of parasitism and freeloading. Forward, Soviet!

    America’s ‘most successful squatter’, 52, who has lived in Long Island home without paying mortgage for 20 years claims he has COVID and tries to delay eviction AGAIN

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9872937/Long-Island-squatter-52-not-paid-mortgage-20-years-claims-contracted-COVID-19.html

    A New York man has claimed he has COVID-19 in his latest bid to avoid evicting from the Long Island home where he has not paid his mortgage for more than 20 years.

    Guramrit Hanspal, 52, has previously filed a number of lawsuits and bankruptcy documents to remain in the home he bought for $290,000 in 1998.

    1. “Hanspal bought the house at 2468 Kenmore St. for $290,000 in 1998. He’s made only one mortgage payment of $1,602.37 before defaulting, the New York Post reported. He hasn’t paid anything since.

      Diamond Ridge bought the home from Chase in 2018 and the company offered Hanspal $20,000 to leave. He refused the offer, forcing Diamond Ridge to continue running a legal tab of over $150,000 and paid at least $50,000 in property taxes.”

      The rival to Mr. Banker has been found.

  17. Posting from a few hundred feet below the summit of a 13,000+ foot mountain in Southern Colorado. It’s like a switch got flipped overnight, with the visibility and air quality going from bad to extremely bad.

    And on the subject of housing, the private land I camped on last night was purchased with cash for less than a price of a used car.

    LOL@ people in Dumver renting money from the bank for 30 years to pay $500 a square foot to live in a nest of vibrancy.

    1. “…the visibility and air quality going from bad to extremely bad.”

      California wildfire smoke has already reached Chicago.

      2. It was pretty bad on Friday. It looks better today, at least in Larimer county which borders Wyoming.

        1. It’s called “creating shareholder value.” Another gift that keeps on giving from the globalists and their Fed accomplices.

        2. To be fair the forestry services haven’t had the funding to properly manage public lands, e.g., clear under brush, tag and clear dead trees, etc., as the money has been squandered in the middle-east. And PG&E has really old equipment up in northern California. I’m sure there’s lots more blame to go around.

    3. ‘And on the subject of housing, the private land I camped on last night was purchased with cash for less than a price of a used car.’

      Are there Karens around that land who will snoop on whether you camp too long for them?

  18. Oxide posted “This is the most clinically significant data that we have.”

    To explain further, demonstration of the existence of neutralizing, even strongly, neutralizing, antibodies in an vitro assay is not a significant indicator of clinical safety and efficacy. For example, numerous experimental HIV vaccines were able to elicit a neutralizing antibody response but had little or no efficacy while the vaccine that elicited only weakly neutralizing antibodies, R144, demonstrated moderate efficacy. The examples are too numerous delineate here. If it were really that simple, we would have efficacious and safe vaccines for almost every known human infectious disease because eliciting a response that generates neutralizing antibodies is a rather mundane task. A reasonable analogy, since this is the summer of the Olympics, is that winning the 100 meter dash is not a reliable indicator of winning the decathlon.

    Oxide posted “So, who do we trust?”

    The correct answer here is we trust no one.

    1. Will you trust a clinical study of healthcare workers in South Africa? Half a million J&J doses. Shows an efficacy against 72% reduction in hospitalizations for Delta. 96% of breakthrough cases are “mild,” whatever that means. The numbers are almost exactly same as the numbers in the J&J trails for Alpha. They say no booster needed.

  19. Would you believe me if I told you that we are not only running out of houses and toilet paper, but also used cars?

    1. ‘It’s a war zone:’ Hickory dealers talk used car price spike
      Kevin Griffin Aug 6, 2021
      Randy Marion Sav-A-Lot General Manager Tim Thomas, seen here placing a price tag in a vehicle, said car sellers are feeling the impact of used car prices.

      Used car prices around the country have surged and Hickory has not been spared.

      “It’s a war zone, especially at auction,” said Tim Thomas, the general manager of Randy Marion Sav-A-Lot in Hickory.

      The spike in prices is driven, he said, by the microchip shortage that is affecting the market for new vehicles and creating increased demand for used vehicles.

      “I could say it’s a little frustration because there’s more obstacles because right now, like I said, there’s not a lot of used car inventory out there so trying to find the right car for the right person, now it’s kind of tough,” Thomas said of the situation.

      The inventory crunch is such that the dealership, which previously kept around 220 cars on the lot, was down to between 110 and 120.

      Thomas pointed to a Ram truck with 10,000 miles. A year ago the vehicle would have sold somewhere in the upper $30,000s but was now up in the mid-$40,000s.

      Other dealers are reporting a similar situation.
      …

      1. Meanwhile, used car prices auction prices are down over 3% in the past month. This whole fantasy is over.

          2. I happened to catch a weekend car show on the radio yesterday. They had a top five list of used cars that cost thousands more than an exact same new model.

          3. Probably likewise for the pandemic housing bubblet, though we won’t know for sure until it shows up in lagged housing market indexes.

            Yesterday we helped some old friends prepare to move out of state. Like several other families we know, they managed to sell at the top of the pandemic wave before it broke, and have a nice pile of Powell bux in the bank to show for it.

          4. Approximate recent sales price history for our friends’ house (rounded to nearest $50K):

            1997 $250K
            2007 $650K
            2021 $1,200K

            No bubble here, folks! A doubling of home prices every ten years is normal…

          5. Further detail: Said freinds were underwater on their mortgage for at least a portion of the 2007-2012 period, before the Fed’s post-2012 housing bailout lifted housing prices across the land. So their capital gain measured from the bottom of the crater was actually larger than $550,000.

  20. After numerous Nazis were hanged for conducting scientific and medical experiments on concentration camp inmates, the Nuremberg Code laid down directives – not “guidelines” – for human experimentation.

    Nuremberg Code: Directives for Human Experimentation

    https://ori.hhs.gov/content/chapter-3-The-Protection-of-Human-Subjects-nuremberg-code-directives-human-experimentation

    1. The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.

    2. The experiment should be such as to yield fruitful results for the good of society.

    3. The experiment should be so designed and based on the results of animal experimentation and a knowledge of the natural history of the disease.

    4. The experiment should be so conducted as to avoid all unnecessary physical and mental suffering and injury.

    5. No experiment should be conducted where there is an a priori reason to believe that death or disabling injury will occur.

    6. The degree of risk to be taken should never exceed that determined by the humanitarian importance of the problem to be solved by the experiment.

    7. Proper preparations should be made and adequate facilities provided to protect the experimental subject against even remote possibilities of injury, disability, or death.

    8. The experiment should be conducted only by scientifically qualified persons.

    9. During the course of the experiment the human subject should be at liberty to bring the experiment to an end.

    10. During the course of the experiment the scientist in charge must be prepared to terminate the experiment at any stage, if he has probable cause to believe, in the exercise of the good faith, superior skill and careful judgment required of him that a continuation of the experiment is likely to result in injury, disability, or death to the experimental subject

  21. Nuremberg Code?! it’s just a “piece of paper” say the same people who ignore the U.S. Constitution

    as anyone who has ever been in a courtroom will agree, the judge often plays fast & loose with law.
    in said courtroom, the “law” is pretty much whatever the men with guns says it is.

  22. Counter Narrative (TM):

    “The largest decrease in hesitancy between January and May by education group was in those with a high school education or less. Hesitancy held constant in the most educated group (those with a Ph.D.); by May Ph.D.’s were the most hesitant group.”

    2. This is pretty effing funny. People who have PhD aren’t very smart, they’re Piled High and Deep, they live in an ivory tower, they don’t have real jobs, they’re out of touch… until they do something you like. Then it’s All Hail The Smart People!

      🙄

      1. Piled High and Deep

        For those piled high and deep in the relevant field it makes complete sense.

        Dr. Malone has been asked to be an expert witness for a biotech executive in MA who’s had her 14yo son removed from her custody. The son wants the jab; the biotech exec and her husband don’t.

      2. Some PhDs view MS degrees as consolation prizes for dropping out of PhD programs. Careful throwing stones.

        1. Of course you’re not; you work for the government where competence is a bug, not a feature.

    1. The Iron fist they rule with is fragile and they know it.

      If you don’t mind I think I will start using that.

      Stand Together

  24. I wiped out a $25 KFC gift card in the matter of 15 minutes this afternoon.

    What’s on the snack menu?

    2. “I wiped out a $25 KFC gift card in the matter of 15 minutes this afternoon.”

      My youngest daughters fiancé wiped out a 3 foot Iguana that was trying to cross the I-95 entrance ramp in the rain at Indiantown Rd. this afternoon.

      He said he thought it was something that fell off of a landscape truck on the side of the road until the non-native invasive little green bast@rd bolted in front of him, thumped and got caught up under the front bumper of his Honda Civic.

      They sent me a picture of the lifeless little dragon tucked up in there with his face and tail hanging out and I responded…

      That dog won’t hunt.

    1. I ran across an app called Freebie Alert. A few listings have simply said “whole house contents – come and get it”.

    1. The current wave of housing market mania provides an excellent example. The brains of housing market experts are particularly infected.

    2. Clearly the fear mongering and fraud of the unjustified Pandemic of masks, lockdowns and untested vaccines was Mass Psychosis to bring on a Dictorship by criminal Entities who are psychopaths, looters, parasites, and killers.

    1. The Financial Times
      Chinese economy
      China Covid outbreak linked to Delta variant weighs on economy
      Worst surge in infections since start of pandemic puts recovery under pressure
      A health worker takes a swab sample at a pop-up Covid testing station in the Sanlitun area of Beijing, China
      The spread of the Delta variant has prompted Chinese authorities to require mass testing and impose travel restrictions
      Thomas Hale in Hong Kong, Edward White in Seoul and Christian Shepherd in Beijing August 9 2021

      China’s most severe coronavirus outbreak since last year has added to concerns over an economic slowdown in the country, as Beijing rushes to contain a rise in cases linked to the highly transmissible Delta variant.
      …
      China’s economy grew 7.9 per cent year on year in the second quarter, boosted by a low base in 2020 when the country was grappling with the pandemic, and 1.3 per cent on a quarter-on-quarter basis.

      Goldman Sachs downgraded its expectations for real gross domestic product growth over the third quarter to 2.3 per cent quarter on quarter, compared with 5.8 per cent previously.

      “With the virus spreading to many of China’s provinces and local governments reacting swiftly to control the spread of the highly contagious Delta variant, we have begun to see softening in national aggregate data,” analysts said.
      …

    2. Economics
      Delta Impact Increasingly Threatens Some Parts of U.S. Economy
      By Reade Pickert
      August 5, 2021, 10:04 AM PDT
      – BofA says credit-card pullback could partly reflect virus
      – Anecdotal reports show events canceled, office returns delayed
      Customers dine indoors at Reading Terminal Market in Philadelphia last month. Photographer:
      Hannah Beier/Bloomberg

      From event cancellations to consumer behavior, there are growing signs the coronavirus delta variant risks slowing the pace of the U.S. economic recovery.

      Because any effect from the delta variant will take time to emerge in traditional monthly indicators, economists and policy makers are closely watching a mix of anecdotal and high-frequency data for any signs of impact.
      …

      1. It’s certainly risky for a business to invest in a venture or venue when it could be shutdown arbitrarily.

    3. Covid-19 cases are rising in countries praised for stopping outbreaks. Do they need to change their strategies?
      By Julia Hollingsworth, CNN
      Updated 5:00 AM ET, Mon August 9, 2021
      Disturbing video shows ER overwhelmed by ‘onslaught of patients’

      (CNN) A year and a half since the first Covid-19 cases were identified, many countries in Asia-Pacific feel right back where they started.

      While Britons hit the nightclubs after a long winter of coronavirus restrictions, millions of people in Australia and China are back in lockdown. Health systems in Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia are overwhelmed. And countries like the Pacific island nation of Fiji, which last year had only reported a handful of cases, are now battling major outbreaks.
      To some, it’s hard to understand why Asia-Pacific is being hit so hard. Many Asia-Pacific countries turned themselves into hermit nations, closing off borders to almost all foreigners, imposing strict quarantines for arrivals, and introducing aggressive testing and tracing policies to catch any cases that slipped through their defenses. They lived with these tough border rules so cases could be brought down to zero — and keep people safe.

      And it worked — until the highly contagious Delta variant took hold.

      Now the fresh outbreaks are throwing the zero Covid strategy favored by China and Australia into question, and prompting a larger debate about just how sustainable the approach is.
      …

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