Excess Deaths

Also, Matt Taibbi's latest

Rather than try to write more about the mandates and the continuing implosion of the economy—soon to worsen—I thought I’d just briefly note two related items at Alex Berenson’s substack. They have to do with a phenomenon that is cropping up in more and more highly vaxxed nations, although public health authorities seem to be trying to downplay and disguise the data:

Scotland is 87% adult vaccinated; weekly deaths are now 30% above normal

Alex Berenson Oct 14

Even excluding Covid deaths they were almost 20% above normal for the most recent week, and the trend is rising.

20 straight weeks of excess deaths.

Nothing to see here, folks. (Though even the BBC is now asking questions.)

As Berenson means is, this is the 20th week in a row of elevated excess all cause mortality. That is, excess deaths above the five year average. Also, the latest numbers are the highest since January, so they’re going up.

Also:

It’s not just the UK; all-cause deaths are also now running well above normal in Germany (80% adults fully vaccinated)

Alex Berenson Oct 15

Add Germany - Europe’s most populous nation - to the countries seeing unusually high all-cause mortality that is NOT Covid-related.

Or so they say. Berenson is a skeptic in that regard, I believe.

In September, Germany reported almost 78,000 deaths, more than 10 percent higher than the expected figure, German government demographers said earlier this week.

The 7,200 extra deaths are equal to about 30,000 additional monthly deaths in the United States.

The demographers noted that the rise was not caused by a sharp increase in Covid deaths. Fewer than 1,500 people died of Covid in Germany in September.

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Unlike Britain, Germany does not provide detailed near-real-time statistics on the causes of death. So it is impossible to know whether cardiac deaths, which have driven much of the recent increase in the United Kingdom, have played a similar role in Germany. But the German demographers noted that a similar increase [in all cause mortality] appeared to occur across Europe in early September.

It should go without saying, but …

By basing these stats on a five year rolling average the stat keepers are trying to rule out statistical blips that don’t really mean anything. When you get 20 weeks in a row above that rolling five year average it’s a good guess that something is up.

But our rulers seem uninterested.

Anyone who’s interested in the supply chain implosion and mandate crunch, I highly recommend articles by sundance and Karl Denninger. Both articles stress both the large number of unvaxxed but skilled workers involved, as well as the potential for vast disruption to the economy as a whole—the effect will not be limited to discrete sectors:

The Great National Showdown Over Worker Mandates For The COVID Vaccine Looms

Our Vapid Government

Also, Matt Taibbi’s latest is about the Intel Community’s counter-intuitive image makeover. To him, anyway. The beginning is mildly amusing but says pretty much all you already knew about liberals:

Yes, Virginia, There is a Deep State

A major untold story of the Trump era has been the political comeback of the CIA, NSA, and FBI, who thanks to an ingenious marketing campaign now enjoy widespread support among young liberals

Matt Taibbi

On The Young Turks the other night, during a segment called — this is not a joke — “RebelHQ,” commentator Ben Carollo extolled the virtues of the CIA. In one section, he described how intelligence officials responded to “Donald Trump trying to plan some ridiculous scheme to maintain himself as president”:

It’s not a conspiracy theory to say that these government officials wanted to listen to congress and cared about Democratic norms and respected the constitutional structure of the way the United States is today.

When I first heard Carollo talking about the desire of intelligence officials to “listen to congress,” I thought he was being literal.

Maybe, I thought, he meant that time in 2014, when the CIA spied on the the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation into its torture program, wiring up Senate computers and reading staffers’ emails. Or perhaps he meant that time in 2015, when the Obama administration was using the NSA to listen to Israeli critics of his Iran deal, and ended up with “inadvertent” access to phone calls back and forth with political opponents in the U.S. congress, on both sides of the aisle.

Or, maybe Carollo also meant that time when the CIA intercepted communications between the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community and congressional staff, about pending whistleblower complaints. As the ICIG put it in one of its declassified notifications, “CIA security compiled a report that includes excerpts of these whistleblower-related communications, and this report was eventually shared with CIA management.” This way, the CIA bosses could know ahead of time who was going to congress with complaints about abuses! Good times.

Alas, Carollo didn’t mean intelligence officials are listening to congress in that sense. His video essay entitled, “Fact-checking Glenn Greenwald’s stunt on Fox News,” was designed to refute the apparently ridiculous notion that “there’s some sort of secret deep state working behind the scenes.”

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