Not So Briefly Noted: Luongo On De-Dollarization; Iatrogenic Pandemics

Yesterday evening Tom Luongo concluded his two part series on Jay Powell’s War for the Dollar. Much of this installment is over my head, but the concluding paragraphs provide what is, to my mind, an excellent framework within which to understand the linkage between so much of what is going on in our world today. The war on Russia, the rise of BRICS (and related monetary and economic defenses against the collective West), the rising importance of natural resources, the Western strategy of inflating into debt default as the prelude to totalitarian social control. Here’s the link for those with a more sophisticated understanding that I have of finance and economics:

The War for the Dollar is Over Part II: The Fly or the Windshield?

Before we get to the conclusion of the article, this very brief paragraph succinctly describes where we are, as well as the tie in to the US led War on the World. The premise is that the collective West has overpromised on Socialism. “Social welfare” spending is out of control and expanding. The response of the ruling classes is to crush the middle, working, and lower classes, but a plausible narrative for draconian controls must be found. Thus:

The Davos solution to their problems of overpromising the deliverables of socialism financed through the dollar is to default on those promises through global monetary inflation using war with Russia and China as the cover and Climate Change as the reason why it’s necessary.

This is to save themselves and secure totalitarian control for their posterity into the next cycle of history.

Luongo has been arguing for several years that Jay Powell’s Fed, with the backing of key large NY commercial banks, is unwilling to surrender to this type of centralized totalitarian control based on Neo-Malthusian mythological narratives. They’re not idealists in the usual sense, but they see a way forward through the Western crisis using more traditional means: a reform of the financial markets to promote rational credit allocation and rational government spending controls. The alternative promoted by the Globalist elite is to conquer the world in the name of Climate Change—or, now, through promotion of anti-Russian and anti-Chinese hysteria. The preferred method for global conquest was to be sanctions shock and awe, but that has—as we know—devolved into military conflict and regime change. Sanctions have backfired and there is every reason to believe that the military solution will also fail.

That brings us to Luongo’s conclusion. He prefaces his concluding paragraphs with a snippet from Powell’s Senate testimony earlier this week. In that snippet Powell states that US debt is growing substantially faster than the economy, and that is unsustainable. Now, while Powell is here focused on getting the US financial house in order, without regard for accommodating Congressional spending excesses (he makes no bones about that), all this is happening within a global context and can’t be separated from that larger picture. As evidence for that, I cite once against Powell’s stated position that he is OK with more than one world reserve currency. That means that he’s OK with some degree of de-dollarization, at least as regards the dollar’s current status, but as an American he wants that to happen on terms that are as palatable as possible for American interests. That should also mean that he probably also regards the Davos war of global conquest as a dangerous delusion—but all that is left unsaid in the Senate setting.

Luongo then concludes:

Read that passage carefully and you’ll see this FOMC Chair isn’t above telling Congress their business. You may not believe Powell but we know there are ways of getting out of this fiscal and monetary mess if we commit to doing it, rather than pouring gasoline on the socialist fire that the “Biden” Administration just did with their budget proposal.

Moreover, what’s unspoken by Powell and others in the position to support him is what’s lurking on the other side of the International North South Transport Corridor (INSTC), a growing international framework for trade wholly outside the control or threats of the western political establishment and their slap-happy sanction monkeys we call heads of state.

Powell can see the de-dollarization writing on the wall and he knows now is the time to slow down that trend and find a way to make the dollar more trustworthy. But, again, he can only deal with one side of that equation — the monetary policy side. The Fiscal and regulatory side are still firmly controlled by, frankly, shitbag commies; old, terrified colonial interests in Europe and the northeast US who see their time passing and refuse to accept it with grace.

People who would rather burn the world to the ground than let it fall into the hands of those they consider ‘the help.’

But ‘the help’ are no longer helpless in the face of a big bully US dollar. They have a plan and they are executing it. That plan clearly involves the return of gold as the asset to balance the trade books to rebuild global trust and if the US and Europe don’t stop acting like entitled, spoiled children on the world stage, they will drop the gradualism and one day we will wake up in a different reality.

This was Powell’s real message to Congress this week. It is the clear geopolitical imperative staring us all in the face. But if we don’t start down it now voluntarily, the superior monetary system will eventually outcompete and capital will flow to where it is treated best.

This is the future policy choice we have to make our peace with.

It’s worth noting that, while the US is, of course, a major holder of gold, US gold holdings are dwarfed by those of the BRICS countries—especially India, China, and Russia. The funny money experiment is failing. The hard money reality that follows will see a reshuffling of rankings. The US, with its vast resources not only in mineral wealth but in fresh water, arable land, and the potential for restoring an almost unparalleled transportation network, should be able to compete in that new world. Only Americans can defeat America.

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Many readers probably saw Scott Atlas’s article earlier this week, America' COVID Response Was Based on Lies. Atlas’s article was also republished elsewhere under titles like “The Ten Biggest Lies” because Atlas lists ten lies about Covid. Yesterday El Gato Malo published a long essay at Brownstone Institute that starts from that idea, but advances a separate lie that Atlas didn’t list:

The Greatest Lie Told During Covid

El Gato Malo agrees, of course, that many, many lies were told to justify the Covid Regime of lockdowns and social control but, he says,

What if embedded in all of this is perhaps one more lie?

The greatest lie. 

The one lie to rule them all. 

This is the one that will come back to haunt us over and over if we do not call it out by name and lay plain its resounding lack of basis in fact. 

It’s the lie they have been trying to sell for decades and failing (or at least having only moderate success and thus wreaking only moderate havoc).

It’s the one lie to rule them all. The one lie to rule us all. The truly big lie constituting a forest that has been lost for the trees and perversely therefore winds up being reinforced by the very debate about the little lies. And that lie is this:

Pandemics are dangerous to modern societies.

Because the fact is that they are not. 

He’s right. Most of my life the big lie that a pandemic so dangerous that it would threaten human life on earth has popped up at regular intervals. The universal response for such a pandemic threat is always—injections of “vaccines”. Or other medications. It fits in with other forms of Neo-Malthusian hysteria—overpopulation, human caused climate change—all claimed to threaten human life on earth, all seeing human beings as the ultimate enemy of, well, the ruling classes, who are insulated from all the grubby, lower forms of human life.

Now, in the disease based form of this lie the great boogeyman has always been the Spanish Influenza of 1918. And this boogeyman is exactly what El Gato Malo attacks. He presents evidence that a large percentage of the deaths in that last great pandemic were in fact iatrogenic in nature, caused by the misuse of the latest wonder drug of that time—aspirin. He begins this part by pointing out the well known epidemiological principle that diseases that are fatal to high percentages of those infected tend not to spread widely—whereas respiratory diseases, which do not exhibit a high degree of mortality, do spread widely:

Diseases that kill at high percentages tend not to spread because killing the host is evolutionarily maladaptive. It’s like trying to conquer the world by burning down your own house and car. Even the really nasty historical killers like smallpox were only infecting ~400k people a year by the late 1800s and excursions above 1 death/year per 1,000 population during outbreaks were very rare not in spite of, but because the fatality rate was so high.

But respiratory diseases are different and tend to spread far more. Fatality rates are low. The claimed Spanish flu CFR was always suspicious in this regard. And there may be a reason:

He then proceeds to point out that there is a long history of iatrogenic deaths, sometimes caused by the misuse of new “wonder drugs” that are poorly understood but are brought too quickly into widespread use:

And one of those drugs was aspirin.

Aspirin had just come into widespread availability in 1918 (and Bayer was rushing it to market for the pandemic). It was the new wowie-zowie drug and doctors (and especially militaries) all over the world fell in love with it. They prescribed it widely to those with Spanish flu. In doses ranging from 8 to 31 grams per day. Oopsie.

A typical aspirin today is 325mg and max dosing per day is ~4 grams. 

A toxic dose is 200-300mg/kg of weight. That’s about 20g for a 180 pound person. 

So 31g is “You’re going to die really, really fast and there is not a damn thing anyone can do to stop it once you take that dose.”

This is why incredible caution should be exercised around large departures from tested and true medical practice and new pharma modalities and products.

So, Operation Warp Speed? A bad idea from the get go. The very concept of a crash development of a new form of “vaccine” was dangerous based on the past history of vaccines generally, but especially so in view of the unproven nature of mRNA technology in this field, and the decidedly negative results of the animal tests that had been run.

But he runs through a brief survey of fatality rates for the Spanish Flu and concludes:

This case fatality rate has never looked even remotely plausible for flu. You simply do not get a respiratory disease like that in a modern (or possibly any) society, especially not in young, healthy people. It’s just not a thing.

But widespread poisoning by well-meaning medical professionals who have no idea how dangerous the products and procedures they are playing with is.

So, he establishes, in principle, a parallel with mRNA and aspirin without naming it and doesn’t explore

But it gets worse, and the area of the Covid Response that El Gato Malo focuses on in detail is the misuse of ventilation—in contravention of all the well established safety protocols for the use of ventilators. So, in answer to the question, What about all those deaths in the early stages of Covid? he responds:

It was not covid that did this killing. It was covid response and the derangement of medicine and medical and social practice.

Here’s a clear and classic example from early covid: ventilators.

“Vent early, vent hard” was the suddenly ascendant treatment modality. It ran riot in New York and many other parts of the world. It was used not just to treat patients but to “protect doctors” under the misbegotten theory that an intubated patient would not spread covid and that “doctors needed to be protected.”

There was a whole national campaign to build more ventilators with everything but Rosie the Riveter. Industries (even Tesla) diverted from what they were doing to make them. Patients were intubated when they should not have been. When this failed to work, they kept turning up the pressure on the vents.

And this killed people wholesale.

And:

That’s not covid death.

That’s iatrogenic death.

Once the Big Apple figured out that vents were killing people in droves and switched to proning as others had done, this death rate dropped. But an awful lot of people had lost their lives by then. And, as in Spanish flu, this high death rate was used as a pretext for more aggressive and ill-considered actions that drove more iatrogenic death. It’s a vicious cycle and once it gets going, it’s self-feeding. Every time you inadvertently kill people out of ignorance or fear, it makes the purported pathogen look more deadly and drives you to new “reactions” and mis-calibrations where you once more kill people. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Now, to illustrate this principle, El Gato Malo provides a three state chart—NY, CT, MA. What’s interesting is that NY implemented two methods of iatrogenic killing: aggressive venting and forcing sick people into nursing facilities. CT and MA only implemented the latter measure—bad enough, but the comparison gives a basis for comparing the relative deadliness. And because a picture is worth a thousand words …

And there’s lots more.

So, El Gato Malo adds his own list of questions to the Ten Big Lies of Dr. Atlas. His questions apply broadly to ALL so-called pandemics, and constitute a call for a reasoned response to new diseases—which very likely will mean a minimalist response:

• How much of [excess mortality during Covid] was iatrogenic? 

• How much came from the insane policies of scaring people away from doctors and medical treatment?

• How much from barring access to longstanding effective drugs and treatment in favor of new ones that mostly failed spectacularly and killed people?

• How many deaths of despair were caused among the alone and isolated in care homes?

• How many deaths in hospitals because patients were denied the ability to see family and perhaps more importantly because friends and family were denied the ability to be there for their loved ones to serve as advocates and organizers? (if you have ever been in hospital or been there to protect those close to you from one and make sure sound and sufficient care is supplied and applied you know what i mean on this. A hospital is no place to be alone and helpless.)

• How many killed by vents, by bad nursing home policy, by putting “saving hospitals” above “saving people” and by “wonder drugs” that failed to live up to billing and whose side effects were not taken into account?

• To what extent was the “covid pandemic” just a replay of Spanish flu where much, probably most of the fatality rate was from bad response rather than truly bad virus?

And then there’s the question of how much of this was deliberate. After all, there were eminent voices of reason out there from the beginning. Mass hysteria doesn’t always just happen on its own. We have seen, in a wide variety of settings—warmongering, disease mongering, climate mongering, censorship, social controls, demonization of parents, etc.—that governments seeking total control have a vested interest in generating panics, because it excuses government excesses.

It’s a thoughtful essay.