“If it bleeds, we can kill it.”
- Dutch (Arnold Schwarzenegger) in ‘Predator’, dir. John McTiernan, 1987.
One of the many life-lessons from Covid: never meet your heroes. It was preferable to live in ignorance about Arnie’s views about individual liberty than have lockdowns confirm them (“Screw your freedom !”) In the same way it was preferable to simply enjoy Gene Simmons’ onstage antics as the demon figure from the rock band Kiss than to have confirmation of his explicit support for the biowarfare establishment (“You’re willing to walk among us unvaccinated, you are the enemy.”) Perhaps ‘shock jock’ Howard Stern was the most narrowly fascistic in what was a very crowded field: “When are we going to stop putting up with idiots in this country and just say it’s mandatory to get vaccinated ? F*ck ‘em, f*ck their freedom.”
But then the last four years have been disillusioning about human nature on so many levels. Dr. Toby Rogers picks up the narrative in this recent address to writers, hosted by Jeffrey Tucker and the Brownstone Institute:
Get your Free
financial review
“I. Introduction
“Over the next 15 minutes I want to talk about the crisis of Covid, the economic crisis we face, and how our economy has changed over the last four years.
“The crisis of Covid is not just that the ruling class killed a lot of people.
“The crisis of Covid is that the fundamental basis of our economy shifted from a positive-sum game to the worst negative-sum game in human history..
“Let’s start by defining some terms. Economists love to talk about games as a way of modelling the different choices we face and the decisions we make as individuals and as a society.
“As I imagine you know, in a positive-sum game the total gains of the participants are greater than the total losses.
“This is what Adam Smith marvelled about in The Wealth of Nations. The butcher, the baker, and the brewer buy goods and services from each other and everyone is better off than they would have been in the absence of this exchange. The synergies that come from the free exchange of goods and ideas are the essence of liberalism..
“Then there are zero-sum games. In a zero-sum game, the gains of one participant are exactly balanced by the losses of another participant.
“Gambling and sports are classic examples of zero-sum games.
“Mafia-style economies can also be viewed as zero-sum games. Some people do well at the expense of others. Profits come from power and control rather than innovation. It’s a lousy way to run an economy.
“Then there are negative-sum games.
“In a negative-sum game, the total losses of the participants exceed the total gains..
“Now let’s apply these definitions to our current situation.
“When our country was founded, white men participated in a positive-sum economy — free and equal exchange between sovereign citizens. With the civil war, the franchise was extended to people of colour. With the gains of the civil rights movement in the twentieth century, that positive-sum economic game was extended to the whole of society.
“Covid marks an abrupt shift from a positive-sum game to the most extreme negative-sum game in history. I take the point that this had been coming on for fifty years if not longer. But Covid marked the moment where the ruling class revealed their true intentions.
“By Covid I mean, the development and release of SARS-CoV-2, the murderous hospital protocols, government edicts that blocked access to safe and effective medicines, and the creation of the most dangerous vaccines in human history.
“II. The Great Poisoning as a business model and economic system
“Robert Kennedy Jr. actually figured out this shift right before Covid and I think it’s the most important economic insight of our lifetime.
“At a speech at a fundraiser in Florida in early 2020 before we realized that Covid would be a thing, Robert Kennedy Jr. explained that Big Pharma globally makes about $50 billion a year from vaccines but then makes another $500 billion a year from treatment of vaccine injuries. This stunned me at first, but when I started to do the math I realized that he is right. We’ll return to this in a moment..
“Let’s walk through each piece of this slowly because it’s really mind-blowing.
“Vaccines are an incredibly difficult topic to study.
- The blacklisting and censorship are so severe that anyone who goes near this topic with an open mind is committing career suicide.
- There are no double-blind, randomized controlled trials with a true saline placebo and so there are no proper meta analyses or systematic reviews of vaccines or the vaccine schedule.
- The studies that do exist are low quality and contaminated by financial conflicts of interest.
- I wrote an article about this problem a couple months ago titled, “Systematic review and meta-analysis are broken.”
“It basically takes four or five years to read all of the pro studies and identify their weaknesses and then work through the alternative literature to find the censored studies, read the documents turned over via the Freedom of Information Act and in discovery in the courts, and to interview enough parents of vaccine injured children to understand the scope and dynamics of the problem.
“Almost no one has the bandwidth to do that. It’s actually an interesting epistemological problem because the only people who are willing to take this on are parents of vaccine injured children and a handful of academics who are naïve enough to think that they can change the world — and then they get lynched by the drug cartel.
“But if one does the hard yards one will see that autism, ADHD, autoimmune disorders including arthritis, deadly allergies, asthma, Alzheimer’s, childhood cancers, diabetes, eczema, seizure disorders, and sex dysphoria are vaccine injuries. The various studies that prove that are generally censored by Google (or de-ranked into oblivion) and so you have to use alternative methods and networks for finding them. All of these medical conditions require expensive treatments over a lifetime.
“I am conscious of the fact that many other toxicants also increased over the last fifty years — pesticides, plastics, fire retardants, SSRIs, Tylenol, electromagnetic frequencies, etc. — and all of these toxicants certainly contribute to the rise in chronic illness. And I’m aware that many of these conditions existed prior to vaccines. But the sharp rise in the number of people with these conditions is highly correlated with the ever-expanding vaccine schedule and independent scholars have established causation between vaccines and each of the medical conditions that I listed (see for example, Vaccines and Autoimmunity by Shoenfeld et al., Vax-Unvax: Let the Science Speak by Brian Hooker, and Miller’s Review of Critical Vaccine Studies by Neil Miller.)
“Injected vaccines are unique in that they:
- bypass the body’s usual defence mechanisms against toxicants;
- are given in bolus doses in utero and during infancy when the kidneys, liver, and immune system are still developing; and
- usually include adjuvants that are designed to increase the body’s reaction against them.
“So if you look at the list of blockbuster drugs that generate billions of dollars a year in revenue you see:
- Humira which is used to treat arthritis;
- Keytruda and Opdivo which are used to treat cancer;
- Dupixent for asthma and eczema;
- Trulicity for diabetes; and
- Skyrizi, Cosentyx, and Enbrel to treat plaque psoriasis which is an autoimmune disorder.
“These are all in the top 20 blockbuster drugs in the world..
“What most people don’t realize is that these are all treatments for vaccine injuries. The childhood vaccine schedule creates customers for life.
“My specialty is modelling the costs of autism. A study I conducted with Mark Blaxill and Cynthia Nevison showed about $300 billion a year in current costs rising to over a trillion dollars a year in costs by the early 2030s and $5.5 trillion a year by 2060.
“The costs of autism will cause the economic and political collapse of the United States in our lifetime..
“With Covid shots we see increased rates of myocarditis, pericarditis, cardiac arrest, strokes, turbo cancer, rapid onset dementia, blood clots, and sudden adult death. The $50 billion that Pfizer and Moderna made from Covid shots in 2021 and 2022 is just the tip of the iceberg. The big money is in treating the injured. So for example, Eliquis, which is used to treat blood clots, generated 18 billion dollars in sales for Bristol Myers Squibb and Pfizer in 2022 and of course blood clots are a side effect of Covid vaccines.
“So instead of the free and equal exchange of goods and services between sovereign citizens, we have an economy based on bondage — people are poisoned and they spend all of their earnings and stored family wealth just trying to survive.
“III. Pharma is not the only industry engaged in a negative-sum game
“The military industrial complex does this too, by destroying countries and then rebuilding them.
“The food industry engages in a negative sum game by making food addictive and ignoring nutrition.
“Social media companies promise connection but actually leave people lonely, anxious, and depressed..
“The point is that we live in this sort of penal colony economy where we dig a hole and then fill it up again over and over and over and then we’re surprised when we don’t get anywhere.
“IV. So what are the macroeconomic implications of all of this?
“Over time, the consequence of this system is that all wealth drains out of the middle and lower classes and goes into the hands of the Feudal Lords at the top of this negative sum game. The result will be endless economic stagnation, recessions, and depressions even as the GDP looks great because Pharma is generating all of this seeming economic activity as they take up an ever-larger share of the economy.
“In the very near future we will reach a point where the global economy sinks into a depression. And when that happens:
- We will not be able to use Keynesian stimulus to flood the economy with more money because that would trigger catastrophic inflation. So the Democrats’ key policy tool is off the table.
- Austerity won’t work because that will kill demand. So Republican’s key policy tool is off the table.
- The ruling class will somehow try to blame us, in the crazy way that they do, for the economic crisis.
- And when this happens, quite literally, the only way to generate trillions of dollars of economic stimulus to jump-start the economy will be for government to STOP poisoning the entire population. Vaccine schedules for the whole population should not exist. Individualized N-of-1 medicine is the only way forward. If we prohibit vaccine mandates for school and work, over time the trillions of dollars that are currently going to Pharma to treat vaccine injury, will go back to individuals and families and they can spend that money on whatever they want — education, housing, transportation, starting a business — in the free and equal exchange between sovereign citizens. That’s how we get back to a positive-sum economy with genuine growth once again.
“So we face an information problem — most people don’t realize that this is happening and the first twenty-five times that they hear it normality bias will keep them from comprehending it..
“And we face a collective action problem in that the benefits of the current system are concentrated and the rewards of moving to a different system are diffuse.
“But at the end of the day this is just a political organizing problem. The status quo is untenable, a bus headed over a cliff. The science is on our side. We just have to build a movement that is large enough that when the moment comes we will be able to force government to do the right thing to build the better world our hearts know is possible..
“V. The Wuhan Cover-Up
“That’s where I initially intended to end my remarks. But then I started reading Robert Kennedy Jr.’s new book, The Wuhan Cover-Up, on the plane. It’s astonishingly good, perhaps the most important book in American history. So let me just say a brief word about his book and how it fits into the argument that I just made..
“What’s clear to me now is that the biowarfare industry has captured:
- Pharma,
- academia,
- the military,
- the media,
- the political system,
- the regulatory agencies,
- the intelligence agencies, and
- international organizations.
“And with the help of a massive amount of propaganda, the biowarfare industry has also captured the American mind..
“Our economic system now is the opposite of liberalism. It’s the fulfillment of the dreams of the Third Reich. With CRISPR, the biowarfare industry can infinitely change the DNA and RNA of humans and viruses. They’re bad at it right now. But the temptation is too great, they will never stop playing God.
“Why hasn’t big business pushed back against this? Companies including Walmart, Apple, Ford, and Nike have a lot to lose from this widespread destruction of American society. My hunch is that it’s because the biowarfare industry has captured capital itself. Pandemics, chronic disease, and response is a growth industry — one of the only growth industries on Earth at this point. DNA is the new terra nullius to be conquered and colonized.
“So first it was the childhood schedule, then Covid, and now the plan is for new pandemics as far as the eye can see.
“That’s the system that we are fighting to overthrow.”
Over recent weeks, ITV viewers in the UK have, with a growing sense of disbelief, watched a documentary drama series titled ‘Mr Bates vs The Post Office’. We recently quoted Ramesh Thakur of Brownstone in his assessment of the series, and of the scandal it depicts:
“The UK has been consumed by a scandal involving the use of faulty accounting software, Horizon from Fujitsu, used by the Post Office to accuse postmasters and postmistresses of stealing funds. Under UK law, the Post Office is empowered to prosecute alleged offenders directly. Between 1999 and 2015, an astonishing 700-750 hardworking and conscientious managers of local community post offices, often the pillars of society and the very backbone of small businesses in the country, were convicted.
“Their protestations of innocence and suggestions of glitches in the software were dismissed: the computer does not lie, the courts were told, and they accepted the infallibility of technology. Many were coerced into pleading guilty because they could not afford to fight a state behemoth. They lost the respect of their peers, many were ruined financially, several went to jail, and some committed or tried to commit suicide.
“It was only in 2019 that High Court Judge Peter Fraser cleared the postmasters and pinned responsibility for the financial discrepancies on the software. The Criminal Cases Review Commission has described the scandal as the ‘biggest single series of wrongful convictions in British legal history.’ But the scandal wasn’t over yet. Their efforts to overturn the wrongful convictions and receive reparations have been painfully slow and around 70 claimants died in the interim with their names still not cleared. As of January 2024, just 93 convictions have been reversed and only 30 people have received any compensation.
“Although the scandal has been bubbling away under the radar for more than 20 years, a four-part ITV dramatisation that screened recently finally caught the public’s attention, and then some. Mr. Bates vs the Post Office tells the sorry tale through the eyes of one brave man, Alan Bates, unflinchingly supported by his wife Suzanne Sercombe, who kept fighting the entire system and establishment to clear his name, exonerate their colleagues, and indict the senior executives. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has pledged to introduce a Bill this year to exonerate all the postmasters convicted through the dodgy Horizon-based evidence.
“The Metropolitan Police have launched an investigation into potential fraud, perjury, and perverting the course of justice.
“There are many parallels of this scandal with the Covid saga over the last four years. In what follows, I draw in particular on comments on the Horizon scandal in two recent articles in the UK Telegraph by columnists Allison Pearson (which attracted nearly 5,000 online comments) and Allister Heath (2,600 comments), and a third article in the Conservative Woman by Professor Angus Dalgleish.
“The first obvious parallel is the blind faith in computers and technology that was untested in the real world. The two equivalents in the case of Covid are the elevation of mathematical models to science and the use of unreliable PCR tests, especially with elevated cycle threshold counts. The PCR machine can be made to run multiple ‘cycles’ (like a washing machine) to keep amplifying the target viral material in the sample to make it detectable. The CT value, the number of cycles it takes to detect the virus, becomes increasingly less accurate beyond 25-28 CT yet in some cases it was raised up to 40 and those who tested positive were treated as Covid cases.
“Another parallel is in the awarding of state honours and medals to the perpetrators of mass cruelty. The then-CEO of the Post Office Paula Vennells got a CBE for her services to the PO, (she has since bowed to public pressure to hand back the honour) while the number of health officials and scientists receiving honours have been sickeningly high.
“A third is in the refusal of ministers and parliamentarians to listen to the ordinary people desperate to get their honour and lives back.
“The Post Office minister at the time, Sir (another one) Ed Davy, refuses to accept responsibility and instead blames it all on civil servants: they lied to him on an industrial scale! In fact it is the complicity of all the top institutions and their smug and self-righteous senior personnel – from cabinet ministers to judges, lawyers, executives, investigators, the Post Office board and the Fujitsu board, the engineers, and technicians – that has been so sickeningly repeated in the Covid years.
“It seemingly did not occur to anyone to ask why over 750 managers with hitherto unblemished records were suddenly all committing financial fraud at the same time, which coincided with the mass rollout of a new accounting software to post office branches across the country. No one seems prepared to stand up for the victims of the wrongs and the harms.
“And no one still today is prepared to inquire into the dramatic explosion of reported adverse events and excess deaths that coincide with lockdowns and mass vaccinations. They too have encountered unconscionable delays in having their cases investigated and compensation awarded. In a related vein, very few countries seem prepared to take back healthcare workers and civil servants dismissed for refusing to comply with vaccine mandates.
“A fourth commonality is the role of Andrew Bridgen MP crying in the wilderness in both tragedies that something wrong was happening to the Horizon- and vaccine-injured that needed to be looked at. While his name has become familiar in the time of Covid, he had the conviction and the courage to act on it in trying, in vain, to highlight the plight of the postmasters for many years.
“A fifth common theme is the class divide, where the rapacious political, bureaucratic, and business elites got the financial and social rewards but the harms, pain, and suffering were borne by the workers. The rewards – promotions, bonuses, honours – for ruining so many innocent, decent, honourable lives really stick in the craw.
“A final common theme is that justice will not be seen to be done and the sense of justice will not be appeased unless many of the top people responsible are put behind bars. There will be no emotional closure for the victims and their families and no effective deterrent to future wrongdoing by jumped-up and condescending members of the ruling class without full and transparent criminal justice accountability. As Heath writes, the postmasters, ‘the best of Britain, were persecuted by the worst of Britain: the overpromoted corporate-bureaucratic class, the useless apparatchiks of Britain’s Kafkaesque bureaucracies, the unaccountable arms-length bodies, the out of control lawyers, the civil servants and the subsidy-hungry corporations.’
“What we need to close this particular circle is both a proper inquiry and a human-interest personalised TV dramatisation of the Covid-related injustices inflicted by the unholy collusion between the different components of Big State, Big Pharma, Big Tech, and the mainstream media.”
Regardless of what happens in the future, and regardless of how long the scandal has taken to emerge into the sunlight, in the eyes of public opinion, and of anyone who has watched ‘Mr Bates vs The Post Office’, the Post Office – and Fujitsu – have already been found guilty, and some form of meaningful reckoning and proper accountability now seems inevitable.
For some years now, as fiduciary investors for our clients, we have responded to the growing predations of the Big State by favouring more independent investment solutions, namely: defensive ‘value’ stocks whose corporate issuers are cash-flow positive and unencumbered by significant debts; systematic trend-following funds which offer portfolio and asset class diversity and a degree of ‘crisis insurance’; and not least real assets, notably precious (monetary) metals and related listed mining interests trading at undemanding multiples. This last category of investments has recently delivered mediocre performance at best – a characteristic nicely addressed by this 29th February letter to the FT from Rohitesh Dhawan of the International Council of Mining and Metals:
“Your note on Anglo American (Lex, February 23) fails to point out that in matters of health and economy, it pays to not confuse chronic and acute issues. Like a flu, low metals prices today are an acute problem; they’re horrible while they last, but they usually pass if you are resilient. Strong balance sheets, as noted in the article, provide that buffer for many large-cap miners.
“Chronic issues like heart health determine your life expectancy. On that basis, the prognosis for mining remains good. It is as true for the “old economy” as it is for the “new” that everything we see, touch and use is either grown or extracted (mined). Ignore this truism, and get distracted by short-term volatility at your peril.
“And when it comes to the health of the planet, the cure to climate change in the form of renewable energy relies on minerals. For that reason, producing them responsibly must be non-negotiable.”
………….
As you may know, we also manage bespoke investment portfolios for private clients internationally. We would be delighted to help you too. Because of the current heightened market volatility we are offering a completely free financial review, with no strings attached, to see if our value-oriented approach might benefit your portfolio – with no obligation at all:
Get your Free
financial review
…………
Tim Price is co-manager of the VT Price Value Portfolio and author of ‘Investing through the Looking Glass: a rational guide to irrational financial markets’. You can access a full archive of these weekly investment commentaries here. You can listen to our regular ‘State of the Markets’ podcasts, with Paul Rodriguez of ThinkTrading.com, here. Email us: info@pricevaluepartners.com.
Price Value Partners manage investment portfolios for private clients. We also manage the VT Price Value Portfolio, an unconstrained global fund investing in Benjamin Graham-style value stocks.
“If it bleeds, we can kill it.”
One of the many life-lessons from Covid: never meet your heroes. It was preferable to live in ignorance about Arnie’s views about individual liberty than have lockdowns confirm them (“Screw your freedom !”) In the same way it was preferable to simply enjoy Gene Simmons’ onstage antics as the demon figure from the rock band Kiss than to have confirmation of his explicit support for the biowarfare establishment (“You’re willing to walk among us unvaccinated, you are the enemy.”) Perhaps ‘shock jock’ Howard Stern was the most narrowly fascistic in what was a very crowded field: “When are we going to stop putting up with idiots in this country and just say it’s mandatory to get vaccinated ? F*ck ‘em, f*ck their freedom.”
But then the last four years have been disillusioning about human nature on so many levels. Dr. Toby Rogers picks up the narrative in this recent address to writers, hosted by Jeffrey Tucker and the Brownstone Institute:
Get your Free
financial review
“I. Introduction
“Over the next 15 minutes I want to talk about the crisis of Covid, the economic crisis we face, and how our economy has changed over the last four years.
“The crisis of Covid is not just that the ruling class killed a lot of people.
“The crisis of Covid is that the fundamental basis of our economy shifted from a positive-sum game to the worst negative-sum game in human history..
“Let’s start by defining some terms. Economists love to talk about games as a way of modelling the different choices we face and the decisions we make as individuals and as a society.
“As I imagine you know, in a positive-sum game the total gains of the participants are greater than the total losses.
“This is what Adam Smith marvelled about in The Wealth of Nations. The butcher, the baker, and the brewer buy goods and services from each other and everyone is better off than they would have been in the absence of this exchange. The synergies that come from the free exchange of goods and ideas are the essence of liberalism..
“Then there are zero-sum games. In a zero-sum game, the gains of one participant are exactly balanced by the losses of another participant.
“Gambling and sports are classic examples of zero-sum games.
“Mafia-style economies can also be viewed as zero-sum games. Some people do well at the expense of others. Profits come from power and control rather than innovation. It’s a lousy way to run an economy.
“Then there are negative-sum games.
“In a negative-sum game, the total losses of the participants exceed the total gains..
“Now let’s apply these definitions to our current situation.
“When our country was founded, white men participated in a positive-sum economy — free and equal exchange between sovereign citizens. With the civil war, the franchise was extended to people of colour. With the gains of the civil rights movement in the twentieth century, that positive-sum economic game was extended to the whole of society.
“Covid marks an abrupt shift from a positive-sum game to the most extreme negative-sum game in history. I take the point that this had been coming on for fifty years if not longer. But Covid marked the moment where the ruling class revealed their true intentions.
“By Covid I mean, the development and release of SARS-CoV-2, the murderous hospital protocols, government edicts that blocked access to safe and effective medicines, and the creation of the most dangerous vaccines in human history.
“II. The Great Poisoning as a business model and economic system
“Robert Kennedy Jr. actually figured out this shift right before Covid and I think it’s the most important economic insight of our lifetime.
“At a speech at a fundraiser in Florida in early 2020 before we realized that Covid would be a thing, Robert Kennedy Jr. explained that Big Pharma globally makes about $50 billion a year from vaccines but then makes another $500 billion a year from treatment of vaccine injuries. This stunned me at first, but when I started to do the math I realized that he is right. We’ll return to this in a moment..
“Let’s walk through each piece of this slowly because it’s really mind-blowing.
“Vaccines are an incredibly difficult topic to study.
“It basically takes four or five years to read all of the pro studies and identify their weaknesses and then work through the alternative literature to find the censored studies, read the documents turned over via the Freedom of Information Act and in discovery in the courts, and to interview enough parents of vaccine injured children to understand the scope and dynamics of the problem.
“Almost no one has the bandwidth to do that. It’s actually an interesting epistemological problem because the only people who are willing to take this on are parents of vaccine injured children and a handful of academics who are naïve enough to think that they can change the world — and then they get lynched by the drug cartel.
“But if one does the hard yards one will see that autism, ADHD, autoimmune disorders including arthritis, deadly allergies, asthma, Alzheimer’s, childhood cancers, diabetes, eczema, seizure disorders, and sex dysphoria are vaccine injuries. The various studies that prove that are generally censored by Google (or de-ranked into oblivion) and so you have to use alternative methods and networks for finding them. All of these medical conditions require expensive treatments over a lifetime.
“I am conscious of the fact that many other toxicants also increased over the last fifty years — pesticides, plastics, fire retardants, SSRIs, Tylenol, electromagnetic frequencies, etc. — and all of these toxicants certainly contribute to the rise in chronic illness. And I’m aware that many of these conditions existed prior to vaccines. But the sharp rise in the number of people with these conditions is highly correlated with the ever-expanding vaccine schedule and independent scholars have established causation between vaccines and each of the medical conditions that I listed (see for example, Vaccines and Autoimmunity by Shoenfeld et al., Vax-Unvax: Let the Science Speak by Brian Hooker, and Miller’s Review of Critical Vaccine Studies by Neil Miller.)
“Injected vaccines are unique in that they:
“So if you look at the list of blockbuster drugs that generate billions of dollars a year in revenue you see:
“These are all in the top 20 blockbuster drugs in the world..
“What most people don’t realize is that these are all treatments for vaccine injuries. The childhood vaccine schedule creates customers for life.
“My specialty is modelling the costs of autism. A study I conducted with Mark Blaxill and Cynthia Nevison showed about $300 billion a year in current costs rising to over a trillion dollars a year in costs by the early 2030s and $5.5 trillion a year by 2060.
“The costs of autism will cause the economic and political collapse of the United States in our lifetime..
“With Covid shots we see increased rates of myocarditis, pericarditis, cardiac arrest, strokes, turbo cancer, rapid onset dementia, blood clots, and sudden adult death. The $50 billion that Pfizer and Moderna made from Covid shots in 2021 and 2022 is just the tip of the iceberg. The big money is in treating the injured. So for example, Eliquis, which is used to treat blood clots, generated 18 billion dollars in sales for Bristol Myers Squibb and Pfizer in 2022 and of course blood clots are a side effect of Covid vaccines.
“So instead of the free and equal exchange of goods and services between sovereign citizens, we have an economy based on bondage — people are poisoned and they spend all of their earnings and stored family wealth just trying to survive.
“III. Pharma is not the only industry engaged in a negative-sum game
“The military industrial complex does this too, by destroying countries and then rebuilding them.
“The food industry engages in a negative sum game by making food addictive and ignoring nutrition.
“Social media companies promise connection but actually leave people lonely, anxious, and depressed..
“The point is that we live in this sort of penal colony economy where we dig a hole and then fill it up again over and over and over and then we’re surprised when we don’t get anywhere.
“IV. So what are the macroeconomic implications of all of this?
“Over time, the consequence of this system is that all wealth drains out of the middle and lower classes and goes into the hands of the Feudal Lords at the top of this negative sum game. The result will be endless economic stagnation, recessions, and depressions even as the GDP looks great because Pharma is generating all of this seeming economic activity as they take up an ever-larger share of the economy.
“In the very near future we will reach a point where the global economy sinks into a depression. And when that happens:
“So we face an information problem — most people don’t realize that this is happening and the first twenty-five times that they hear it normality bias will keep them from comprehending it..
“And we face a collective action problem in that the benefits of the current system are concentrated and the rewards of moving to a different system are diffuse.
“But at the end of the day this is just a political organizing problem. The status quo is untenable, a bus headed over a cliff. The science is on our side. We just have to build a movement that is large enough that when the moment comes we will be able to force government to do the right thing to build the better world our hearts know is possible..
“V. The Wuhan Cover-Up
“That’s where I initially intended to end my remarks. But then I started reading Robert Kennedy Jr.’s new book, The Wuhan Cover-Up, on the plane. It’s astonishingly good, perhaps the most important book in American history. So let me just say a brief word about his book and how it fits into the argument that I just made..
“What’s clear to me now is that the biowarfare industry has captured:
“And with the help of a massive amount of propaganda, the biowarfare industry has also captured the American mind..
“Our economic system now is the opposite of liberalism. It’s the fulfillment of the dreams of the Third Reich. With CRISPR, the biowarfare industry can infinitely change the DNA and RNA of humans and viruses. They’re bad at it right now. But the temptation is too great, they will never stop playing God.
“Why hasn’t big business pushed back against this? Companies including Walmart, Apple, Ford, and Nike have a lot to lose from this widespread destruction of American society. My hunch is that it’s because the biowarfare industry has captured capital itself. Pandemics, chronic disease, and response is a growth industry — one of the only growth industries on Earth at this point. DNA is the new terra nullius to be conquered and colonized.
“So first it was the childhood schedule, then Covid, and now the plan is for new pandemics as far as the eye can see.
“That’s the system that we are fighting to overthrow.”
Over recent weeks, ITV viewers in the UK have, with a growing sense of disbelief, watched a documentary drama series titled ‘Mr Bates vs The Post Office’. We recently quoted Ramesh Thakur of Brownstone in his assessment of the series, and of the scandal it depicts:
“The UK has been consumed by a scandal involving the use of faulty accounting software, Horizon from Fujitsu, used by the Post Office to accuse postmasters and postmistresses of stealing funds. Under UK law, the Post Office is empowered to prosecute alleged offenders directly. Between 1999 and 2015, an astonishing 700-750 hardworking and conscientious managers of local community post offices, often the pillars of society and the very backbone of small businesses in the country, were convicted.
“Their protestations of innocence and suggestions of glitches in the software were dismissed: the computer does not lie, the courts were told, and they accepted the infallibility of technology. Many were coerced into pleading guilty because they could not afford to fight a state behemoth. They lost the respect of their peers, many were ruined financially, several went to jail, and some committed or tried to commit suicide.
“It was only in 2019 that High Court Judge Peter Fraser cleared the postmasters and pinned responsibility for the financial discrepancies on the software. The Criminal Cases Review Commission has described the scandal as the ‘biggest single series of wrongful convictions in British legal history.’ But the scandal wasn’t over yet. Their efforts to overturn the wrongful convictions and receive reparations have been painfully slow and around 70 claimants died in the interim with their names still not cleared. As of January 2024, just 93 convictions have been reversed and only 30 people have received any compensation.
“Although the scandal has been bubbling away under the radar for more than 20 years, a four-part ITV dramatisation that screened recently finally caught the public’s attention, and then some. Mr. Bates vs the Post Office tells the sorry tale through the eyes of one brave man, Alan Bates, unflinchingly supported by his wife Suzanne Sercombe, who kept fighting the entire system and establishment to clear his name, exonerate their colleagues, and indict the senior executives. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has pledged to introduce a Bill this year to exonerate all the postmasters convicted through the dodgy Horizon-based evidence.
“The Metropolitan Police have launched an investigation into potential fraud, perjury, and perverting the course of justice.
“There are many parallels of this scandal with the Covid saga over the last four years. In what follows, I draw in particular on comments on the Horizon scandal in two recent articles in the UK Telegraph by columnists Allison Pearson (which attracted nearly 5,000 online comments) and Allister Heath (2,600 comments), and a third article in the Conservative Woman by Professor Angus Dalgleish.
“The first obvious parallel is the blind faith in computers and technology that was untested in the real world. The two equivalents in the case of Covid are the elevation of mathematical models to science and the use of unreliable PCR tests, especially with elevated cycle threshold counts. The PCR machine can be made to run multiple ‘cycles’ (like a washing machine) to keep amplifying the target viral material in the sample to make it detectable. The CT value, the number of cycles it takes to detect the virus, becomes increasingly less accurate beyond 25-28 CT yet in some cases it was raised up to 40 and those who tested positive were treated as Covid cases.
“Another parallel is in the awarding of state honours and medals to the perpetrators of mass cruelty. The then-CEO of the Post Office Paula Vennells got a CBE for her services to the PO, (she has since bowed to public pressure to hand back the honour) while the number of health officials and scientists receiving honours have been sickeningly high.
“A third is in the refusal of ministers and parliamentarians to listen to the ordinary people desperate to get their honour and lives back.
“The Post Office minister at the time, Sir (another one) Ed Davy, refuses to accept responsibility and instead blames it all on civil servants: they lied to him on an industrial scale! In fact it is the complicity of all the top institutions and their smug and self-righteous senior personnel – from cabinet ministers to judges, lawyers, executives, investigators, the Post Office board and the Fujitsu board, the engineers, and technicians – that has been so sickeningly repeated in the Covid years.
“It seemingly did not occur to anyone to ask why over 750 managers with hitherto unblemished records were suddenly all committing financial fraud at the same time, which coincided with the mass rollout of a new accounting software to post office branches across the country. No one seems prepared to stand up for the victims of the wrongs and the harms.
“And no one still today is prepared to inquire into the dramatic explosion of reported adverse events and excess deaths that coincide with lockdowns and mass vaccinations. They too have encountered unconscionable delays in having their cases investigated and compensation awarded. In a related vein, very few countries seem prepared to take back healthcare workers and civil servants dismissed for refusing to comply with vaccine mandates.
“A fourth commonality is the role of Andrew Bridgen MP crying in the wilderness in both tragedies that something wrong was happening to the Horizon- and vaccine-injured that needed to be looked at. While his name has become familiar in the time of Covid, he had the conviction and the courage to act on it in trying, in vain, to highlight the plight of the postmasters for many years.
“A fifth common theme is the class divide, where the rapacious political, bureaucratic, and business elites got the financial and social rewards but the harms, pain, and suffering were borne by the workers. The rewards – promotions, bonuses, honours – for ruining so many innocent, decent, honourable lives really stick in the craw.
“A final common theme is that justice will not be seen to be done and the sense of justice will not be appeased unless many of the top people responsible are put behind bars. There will be no emotional closure for the victims and their families and no effective deterrent to future wrongdoing by jumped-up and condescending members of the ruling class without full and transparent criminal justice accountability. As Heath writes, the postmasters, ‘the best of Britain, were persecuted by the worst of Britain: the overpromoted corporate-bureaucratic class, the useless apparatchiks of Britain’s Kafkaesque bureaucracies, the unaccountable arms-length bodies, the out of control lawyers, the civil servants and the subsidy-hungry corporations.’
“What we need to close this particular circle is both a proper inquiry and a human-interest personalised TV dramatisation of the Covid-related injustices inflicted by the unholy collusion between the different components of Big State, Big Pharma, Big Tech, and the mainstream media.”
Regardless of what happens in the future, and regardless of how long the scandal has taken to emerge into the sunlight, in the eyes of public opinion, and of anyone who has watched ‘Mr Bates vs The Post Office’, the Post Office – and Fujitsu – have already been found guilty, and some form of meaningful reckoning and proper accountability now seems inevitable.
For some years now, as fiduciary investors for our clients, we have responded to the growing predations of the Big State by favouring more independent investment solutions, namely: defensive ‘value’ stocks whose corporate issuers are cash-flow positive and unencumbered by significant debts; systematic trend-following funds which offer portfolio and asset class diversity and a degree of ‘crisis insurance’; and not least real assets, notably precious (monetary) metals and related listed mining interests trading at undemanding multiples. This last category of investments has recently delivered mediocre performance at best – a characteristic nicely addressed by this 29th February letter to the FT from Rohitesh Dhawan of the International Council of Mining and Metals:
“Your note on Anglo American (Lex, February 23) fails to point out that in matters of health and economy, it pays to not confuse chronic and acute issues. Like a flu, low metals prices today are an acute problem; they’re horrible while they last, but they usually pass if you are resilient. Strong balance sheets, as noted in the article, provide that buffer for many large-cap miners.
“Chronic issues like heart health determine your life expectancy. On that basis, the prognosis for mining remains good. It is as true for the “old economy” as it is for the “new” that everything we see, touch and use is either grown or extracted (mined). Ignore this truism, and get distracted by short-term volatility at your peril.
“And when it comes to the health of the planet, the cure to climate change in the form of renewable energy relies on minerals. For that reason, producing them responsibly must be non-negotiable.”
………….
As you may know, we also manage bespoke investment portfolios for private clients internationally. We would be delighted to help you too. Because of the current heightened market volatility we are offering a completely free financial review, with no strings attached, to see if our value-oriented approach might benefit your portfolio – with no obligation at all:
Get your Free
financial review
…………
Tim Price is co-manager of the VT Price Value Portfolio and author of ‘Investing through the Looking Glass: a rational guide to irrational financial markets’. You can access a full archive of these weekly investment commentaries here. You can listen to our regular ‘State of the Markets’ podcasts, with Paul Rodriguez of ThinkTrading.com, here. Email us: info@pricevaluepartners.com.
Price Value Partners manage investment portfolios for private clients. We also manage the VT Price Value Portfolio, an unconstrained global fund investing in Benjamin Graham-style value stocks.
Take a closer look
Take a look at the data of our investments and see what makes us different.
LOOK CLOSERSubscribe
Sign up for the latest news on investments and market insights.
KEEP IN TOUCHContact us
In order to find out more about PVP please get in touch with our team.
CONTACT USTim Price