Monday, April 30, 2018

Robert Whitaker: America’s Prescription Drug Epidemic

This article was originally published by Adam Taggart at PeakProsperity.com



The United States has one of the highest rates in the world of prescription drug use, especially for the psychiatric and anti-anxiety drug classes:



  • 1 in 6 Americans takes a psychiatric drug

  • Over a 130,000 U.S. toddlers, children between zero and five years of age, are prescribed addictive anti-anxiety drugs including the wildly-addictive and difficult to stop using benzodiazepines

  • A very high proportion of the school shootings in the U.S. were committed by young adults on such drugs.


The benefits of these drugs are marketed to us daily, but what about the downsides? What about the side effects? More importantly, do they even work? What does the data tell us?


To answer these questions, we talk this week with Robert Whitaker, an American Journalist and author who has won numerous awards as a journalist covering medicine and science. In 1998 he co-wrote a series on psychiatric research for the Boston Globe that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for public service. His first book, Mad in America, was named by Discover Magazine as one of the best science books of 2002 and his book Anatomy of an Epidemic won the 2010 investigative reporters and editor’s book award for best investigative journalism. He’s also the publisher of MadinAmerica.com.


The irony is this. Before you go on an antidepressant, you have no known serotonergic deficiency with that system. But, once you go on and you have this drug that perturbs normal activity, it actually drives the brain into the very sub-serotonergic state hypothesized to cause depression in the first place.


This problem is called ‘oppositional tolerance’ within research circles. It means that basically what every psychiatric drug ultimately does is drive your brain in the opposite direction of what the drug is trying to do.


For example, anti-psychotics block dopamine function, but they do that by blocking the receptors in the post-synaptic neurons. Which made researchers hypothesize that maybe schizophrenia and psychosis is due to too much dopamine. While they didn’t find that in a matter of course in those disorders, once you’re on this drug, it will actually increase the density of your dopamine receptors.


So, conceptually, here’s the thing. We’re told these drugs fix known chemical imbalances in the brain. What science tells us is that we don’t know the biology of these disorders, the drugs perturb normal activity, and at the end of the compensatory process the drugs have induced the very abnormalities hypothesized to cause these disorders in the first place. That’s the scientific story(…)


The drugs may have efficacy in clinical trials over the short term (meaning they beat placebo in those studies ), but the evidence is overwhelming that over the long term the medications of *whatever* class of drugs does is increase the risk that a person will become chronically ill, functionally impaired, and end up on disability (…)


When we talk about drugs that worsen outcomes over the long term we are saying in the aggregate. In other words, you look at the spectrum of outcomes in the medicated group and you compare that the spectrum of outcomes in the unmedicated group in every study you can find the spectrum of outcomes are better in the unmedicated group.


Humans have a resilience within them and psychiatric disorders so often can be episodic in nature. I mean, that’s the natural course for most depressive episodes and including the majority of the first psychotic episodes and obviously with anxiety and these sort of things. So, one of the reasons you see that drugs have worsening outcomes in the aggregate because actually there’s such good natural recovery rates. That’s what lost from this conversation is what the capacity is to recovery from a depressive episode and anxiety episode and even psychotic episodes without drugs and with other support


Click the play button below to listen to Chris’ interview with Robert Whitaker (45m:06s).



To read the video transcript, please click here

Bill Gates Warns Of Coming Apocalyptic Disease — Pledges $12 Million To Universal Vaccine

By Aaron Kesel


The next deadly disease that will cause a global pandemic is coming, Bill Gates stated at a discussion on epidemics, hosted by the Massachusetts Medical Society and the New England Journal of Medicine, Business Insider reported.


“There’s one area though where the world isn’t making much progress,” Gates said, “and that’s pandemic preparedness.”


“In the case of biological threats, that sense of urgency is lacking,” he said. “The world needs to prepare for pandemics in the same serious way it prepares for war.”


According to Gates, a small non-state actor could build an even deadlier form of smallpox in a lab.






Gates presented a simulation by the Institute for Disease Modeling that simulated a new flu like the one that killed 50 million people in the 1918 pandemic. The study found if there was a new flu it would now most likely kill an astounding 30 million people within six months.



The single time in history that the military tried a sort of simulated war game against a smallpox pandemic, the final score was “smallpox one, humanity zero,” Gates said.


What’s the solution? A universal flu vaccine of course! Gates announced on Friday that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation would pledge $12 million in grants to encourage the development of a universal vaccine.


Gates believes that “there needs to be better communication between militaries and governments to help coordinate responses.” Gates added that he thinks governments need ways to quickly enlist the help of the “private sector” (black budget military covert world) when it comes to developing technology and help each other to build tools to fight an emerging deadly disease.


Gates expressed that malaria was back on the rise again and would continue to claim more lives worldwide unless governments reinvigorated their push to eradicate the disease, Stratis Times reported.


Melinda Gates recently said that the threat of a global pandemic, whether it emerges naturally or is engineered, was perhaps the biggest risk to humanity.


“Think of the number of people who leave New York City every day and go all over the world — we’re an interconnected world,” she said.


The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has made it very clear that their aim is to wipe out wild polio from the planet. However, as Activist Post reported, they have done quite the opposite and may be responsible for thousands of children suffering from vaccine-induced polio.


The Supreme Court of India conducted an extensive investigation into the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation with judges demanding answers from the Foundation and Gates.


In 2009, tribal children from the Khammam district in Andhra Pradesh, India were administered with a Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) vaccine meant for cervical cancer. Around 16,000 girls between the age of 9-15 years were given three shots of vaccine, (manufactured by Merck) by the state health department. The girls were told that they were being given “well-being” shots. The incident started getting attention when some months later, several girls’ health deteriorated and the following year, five of them died. Two such similar cases of deaths were reported from Vadodara, Gujarat, where 14,000 tribal children were also vaccinated with the HPV vaccine Cervarix, made by Glaxo SmithKline, Dailymail reported.


GlaxoSmitheKline (GSK), incidentally, was accused of dumping polio virus into a Belgium river.


Approximately 120 girls reported epileptic seizures, severe stomach cramps, headaches, and mood swings, of those who did not die. Other girls receiving the Gardasil vaccine have experienced infertility.


Around the same time when these incidents were reported, young girls were hospitalized in northern Colombia with similar symptoms. Coincidentally, these girls had also been given doses of the HPV vaccine too.


Skeletons started tumbling out when an NGO visited Andhra Pradesh. Health activists from the NGO Sama visited Khammam in March 2010 and found out that more than 100 girls were having epileptic seizures, stomach aches, headaches and mood swings. The girls also complained about early menstruation, heavy bleeding, and menstrual cramps. Sama raised the issue that these students were made guinea pigs on the pretext of providing healthcare. The illiterate parents were kept in the dark about the real vaccine, and most of them gave their consent in the form of thumbprints.


The American NGO, Program for Appropriate Technology in Health (PATH) had carried out the studies. They were testing how the cervical cancer vaccine would react on young females. And this unethical test of PATH was being funded by none other than the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Ironically, the study was considered a success by the Foundation. The Foundation also aided PATH in the study of Rotavirus vaccine and pneumococcal vaccine in Africa and Asia.


A few days after the World Health Organization (WHO) declared in 2009 that two HPV types cause 70% of cervical cancers, PATH started its five-year project across various parts of the world: Peru, Vietnam, Uganda, and India, Economic Times reported.


This all follows through with Gates’ agenda of depopulation.


In 2010, Bill Gates told a TED conference, that vaccines need to be used to reduce world population figures in order to solve global warming and lower CO2 emissions.


Stating that the global population was heading towards 9 billion, Gates said, “If we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services (abortion), we could lower that by perhaps 10 or 15 percent.”



Bill Gates has harped on this idea of a super virus for the past several years, including at another TED Talk in 2015 entitled: “The next outbreak? We’re not ready.”


Then in 2016 he echoed that warning by stating that the world was “vulnerable” to a deadly epidemic in the next decade.


For years Bill Gates has been issuing warnings, but last year he expressed that bio-terrorism — a virus created in a lab — could kill 30 million people or more within just a year.


“Whether it occurs by a quirk of nature or at the hand of a terrorist, epidemiologists say a fast-moving airborne pathogen could kill more than 30 million people in less than a year. And they say there is a reasonable probability the world will experience such an outbreak in the next 10 to 15 years,” Gates said last year, at the Munich Security Conference in Germany, Forbes reported.


Is this writer the only person who will refuse universal vaccinations that are backed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation?


Aaron Kesel writes for Activist Post. Support us at Patreon. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Steemit, and BitChute. Ready for solutions? Subscribe to our premium newsletter Counter Markets.


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Cancer-Linked Weedkiller Found in Every Food Tested Except Broccoli

Weedkiller Food FDA(ANTIMEDIA) — The FDA has detected significant levels of glyphosate, a commonly used herbicide, in a wide variety of foods — but it’s unlikely the agency will release these findings to the public. According to internal documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by the Guardian and the advocacy organization U.S. Right to Know, in January of last year, FDA […]

Iran: The True Focal Point for the IMF-NATO Hegemony


The “Iranian problem” is one that was created by the United States and Britain decades ago. Mossadegh was removed from office when the Shah was inserted…that selfsame Shah who supported Anglo-American oil interests in his country until Ayatollah Khomeini sparked the Iranian Islamic Revolution in ’79. That revolution began the takeover of the U.S. embassy in Teheran and the hostage situation that effectively ended the Carter presidency (rather his actions to resolve it, such as Operation Desert One). President Reagan came in, the hostages were released, Iran and Iraq fought a bloody war, and relations with the U.S. were discontinued.


Now the “crisis” in Syria has many parts, all of which have been outlined in previous articles: the creation and fostering of ISIS by the U.S. to overthrow Assad, the indirect proxy war and standoff with Russia, the U.S. desire to run a natural gas pipeline through NW Syria to Qatar. The crisis recently (and temporarily) culminated in the brave alliance of the U.S., France, and Britain…coalition of the willing… and their “Sitzkrieg/phony war” of the cruise missile strikes in Syria. No hard targets for the Tomahawks: only what intelligence claimed was a threat.


The purpose of the strikes: to erase any evidence that could potentially prove a lack of evidence in the phony chemical attack in Douma. The “attack” was a false flag with crisis actors and film production crew, complete with rubberized lacerations, fake limbs, and moulage blood…that stimulated the coalition to act. Photos and film are all over the Internet of such.


To summarize: by blowing up a target with a classified intelligence rating, the true capabilities of the complex destroyed will never be known by outsiders, and it is therefore shielded from public scrutiny by the rating.


The proof of this happened just the other day, on 4/28/18, as reported in the article “Trump Seals JFK Documents Until 2021,” released on Alex Jones’ Prison Planet, and relying on reporting from the Dallas Morning News. Here’s an excerpt:


WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump issued an order Thursday keeping some of the most sensitive records from the Kennedy assassination files sealed for another 3-1/2 years, as the National Archives released a final batch under a law meant to force most of the records into the light by last fall.  In 1992, Congress set a 25-year deadline for releasing remaining documents stemming from John F. Kennedy’s murder in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.  When the deadline arrived — Oct. 26 last year — Trump gave federal agencies a six-month extension to plead the case for keeping selected records sealed, if they could assert a vital national security interest. The FBI and CIA in particular had pressed for more time.


Do you see the pattern of obfuscation that has not truly changed? Who is being protected here? Perhaps the better question is “Who can protect us from our alleged protectors?” There is a tie-in to the current events in Syria: whether it is the Kennedy issue of yesteryear or the debacle in Syria, there is no transparency in our government, and certainly no accountability to the American people.


Iran is “against the grain,” and taking down Syria is key for the control of Iran, a country rich in natural resources such as gold and oil. Iran is also not a part of the IMF Hegemony, a group of bankers and oligarchs backed by the “muscle” of NATO and the blustering from the three nuclear powers involved in the latest Syrian strike. It has recently been reported that there is an Iranian military base in the heart of Damascus, which should come as no surprise. Syria is critical to the Hegemony in the future acquisition of Iran. Saudi Arabia also wants to see Iran taken down by the United States.


The Petrodollar is linked and inextricably intertwined with Saudi interests (they have the oil, and the U.S. has the military force). The problem is we are seeing the world beginning to “disconnect” itself from the Petrodollar to embrace the gold-backed currencies such as the Yuan that are now also trading in oil. The BRIC nations are on the rise, and the Petrodollar nations are on the wane.


Toynbee showed many parallels in history that we are following today: a morally defunct empire with a debased monetary system, exercising totalitarian and draconian measures over its citizens while overextending itself militarily. In any global conflict, regardless of our position, a U.S. victory would be Pyrrhic in nature, and such a conflict would result in the U.S. being fragmented and unable to maintain its current form of existence.


Iran is the focal point of conflict, of struggle between spheres of influence (such as the U.S. and its allies, and Russia and her allies). Syria is a preliminary and necessary step. Israel is pushing the U.S. to deal with Syria and Iran, as is Saudi Arabia. No matter who wins, the American people lose, and more: as the Kennedy records censorship proves, we will not find out who was responsible for a conflict until many years have passed, if we find out at all. Their agendas have not stopped, and Syria and Iran are two critical “dominoes” needed to be toppled in order to realize their globalist goals of a totalitarian new world order.




Jeremiah Johnson is the Nom de plume of a retired Green Beret of the United States Army Special Forces (Airborne).  Mr. Johnson is also a Gunsmith, a Certified Master Herbalist, a Montana Master Food Preserver, and a graduate of the U.S. Army’s SERE school (Survival Evasion Resistance Escape).  He lives in a cabin in the mountains of Western Montana with his wife and three cats. You can follow Jeremiah’s regular writings at SHTFplan.com or contact him here.


This article may be republished or excerpted with proper attribution to the author and a link to www.SHTFplan.com.

CONFIRMED! Court Ruling: HPV Vaccine Gardasil KILLS


The Tarsell’s 21-year-old daughter Christina Richelle “died from an arrhythmia induced by an autoimmune response” to Gardasil, an HPV vaccine that she received only days before her death. Her family undertook a long and drawn out battle with the government over her death, only for every parents’ worst fears to be confirmed.


The Tarsell family fought against the United States government eight long years to validate a medical burden of proof that the Gardasil vaccine (often declared the “cervical cancer vaccine”) killed their daughter.  Richelle died just days after receiving the vaccine. Will this vaccine kill everyone? Absolutely not.  But the government should not be hiding the risks, which obviously include death, especially when demanding by law this vaccine be administered. 


The final ruling has been confirmed by the Department of Health and Human Services: Merck’s Gardasil vaccine causes autoimmune problems that cause sudden debilitation and/or death. If the young girl had been gunned down by a madman with an AR-15, then there’d be national headlines and a march on Washington. Since this young woman was “shot” to death by a vaccine, the whole story gets swept under the rug. -Natural News


Hopefully, with the help of other websites such as Natural News, awareness about the side effects of vaccines, which include death, should be made public.  Although the mainstream media cannot be bothered to report on the failure of vaccines, it is important that all the information be made available before having anything injected into yourself or your children.


The Gardasil vaccine is responsible for ending the lives of 271 young women to date, according to over 57,520 adverse event reports obtained from the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System. As stated by Natural News, if 271 young people died in a school shooting, the news coverage would be nonstop in support of gun bans. How about a ban on Gardasil – a real modern day assault weapon?


The Tarsell’s case was initially taken up by the Vaccine Court, which is a payout system most have never even heard about. It was set up by the United States government to compensate families for vaccine damage. Vaccine makers pay an excise tax into this system for every vaccine they sell. This money (cost of doing business) is used to pay out damages to select families who can medically prove they were damaged by a vaccine. This system protects vaccine makers from being sued in a true court of law, ensuring that vaccines will continue to be manufactured for the “good of all.”


Meaning, the government protects vaccine manufacturers, but cannot be bothered to protect your basic human rights, like standing up to vaccine manufacturers who attempt to harm your right to life.

Medela Offers Breastfeeding Advice through Alexa. Alexa Uses WiFi. No “Safe” Level of Cell Phone or WiFi Radiation Scientifically Determined for Kids or Pregnant Women

By B.N. Frank


Medela is a breastfeeding supplies company.  Posted on their website:



Alexa, Ask Medela About Breastfeeding



Medela is expanding its breastfeeding support with a new skill for Amazon Alexa.


With the Medela skill, Alexa can answer the most frequently asked questions about breast milk feeding. Just enable the Medela skill and ask Alexa about:



  • Breastfeeding

  • Storing breast milk

  • Breast pumping

  • And more!






Answers were developed with Medela’s team of board-certified lactation consultants.


Medela’s announcement was covered last year by many media sources and it’s still making the rounds in family magazines.


Alexa operates using wireless WiFi radiation.


No “Safe” level of cell phone or wireless WiFi radiation has been scientifically determined for children or pregnant women.


A 2010 NBC article reported that 1 in 3 Are Sensitive To WiFi and Electrical Pollution (Electrosmog) and 3% are HyperSensitive.


In 2011, all sources of cell phone and wireless WiFi radiation were classified as a Possible Carcinogen by The World Health Organization.  Other potential health risks – especially regarding children’s brains – were reported in 2011 as well.


2012 research determined that cell phone and WiFi radiation can disrupt the blood-brain barrier which may cause it to leak.


Research has determined that exposure to cell phone and wireless (WiFi) radiation can worsen pre-existing conditions even if it didn’t cause them.


Some scientists insist that all sources of Wireless WiFi Radiation be classified as “Carcinogenic” instead of “Possibly Carcinogenic.”


Research has confirmed that exposure cell phone and wireless WiFi radiation along with Electromagnetic Fields has a cumulative toxic effect when combined with other toxins.


For those that don’t have access to Alexa, Medela also offers smart phone apps.  Medela also sells a “Smart” Breast Pump.


Sigh.


For more information, contact:


Democrats Want To Spend $500 Billion To Give Everybody A Job

Government can

Can the government really create jobs without increasing taxes?


Six potential Democratic presidential candidates have an incredibly expensive new plan that would add more than half a trillion dollars ($543 billion) to the national deficit every year. They want Uncle Sam to provide a government job for everybody that wants one. Thats the Democratic jobs bill.


The most socialist Democratic proposal in generations is known as the Federal Jobs Guarantee, and it might be the most expensive social program ever.


Taxpayers need to pay attention because the guarantee’s biggest fan is U.S. Senator Cory Booker (D-New Jersey); who is a probable presidential candidate.


Booker’s Federal Jobs Guarantee Development Act would provide every unemployed American with a $15 an hour government job that would offer the same health insurance that federal employees get, Vox reported. Under Booker’s proposal, the federal government would pay local governments to provide the jobs.


Democratic Presidential Hopefuls Want 500 Billion Dollar Job Bill


Booker did not say what the jobs would be or what all those government employees would do. He merely promised that the government would provide jobs. Frighteningly, Booker is far from alone. U.S. Senators Liz Warren (D-Massachusetts), Kamala Harris (D-California), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-New York), and Jeff Merkley (D-Oregon) all endorse the jobs guarantee. Merkley is already actively campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination, and the others are potential nominees.


Not surprisingly, another active promoter of the Jobs Guarantee is US Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont). Sanders was the self-proclaimed “democratic socialist” who’s driving much of the new Democratic spending bill.


Democrats Adopt Both Communist And Nazi Ideas


The jobs guarantee is not a new idea, back in 1978, the Communist Party held a “March for Jobs” on Washington DC in which it demanded, “Jobs Now.”


Nor was it just the Communists who guaranteed jobs to the people. In 1934, Adolph Hitler promised jobs for the Germans through what he called a “labor battle.” Among other things Hitler vowed to create 600,000 jobs building superhighways called the Autobahn, DW reported.


The Nazis never made good on that promise, although they did create 120,000 roadbuilding jobs. By 1939 Hitler did create millions of “jobs” for men in the German Army. During World War II, the Nazis created another eight million “jobs” for slave laborers – some of whom ended up working on the Autobahn.


Nobody knows how much Jobs Guarantee Would Really Cost


The worst part of the Jobs Guarantee is that nobody knows how much it would cost. The Week writer Jeff Spross; who supports the guarantee, estimated that Booker’s proposal would cost $543 billion in the first year alone.


The U.S. national debt reached $14.7 trillion in 2017 and is projected to grow to $28.7 trillion by 2018 without the guarantee, Seeking Alpha Contributor Elliott R. Morss noted. The national deficit; the difference between the amount of taxes the federal government collects and federal spending, was estimated at $630 billion in 2017, the deficit is expected to grow $1.08 trillion by 2022.


Disturbingly editorials endorsing the Jobs Guarantee are already popping up in liberal media outlets like The New York Times and The Nation. None of those editorials say where the money to pay the $15 salaries will come from.


Even though it is socialist, the Jobs Guarantee is likely to be popular with Democratic politicians because it will be easier to sell to voters than welfare. Another reason why Democrats want more government workers is that government employee unions are vital supporters of their party.


Democratic politicians like Booker view every new government worker as a potential vote, so they want the biggest possible government they can create regardless of cost. Americans had better get ready for massive increases in government and taxes because Democrats appear to have adopted insane Nazi policies.


The post Democrats Want To Spend $500 Billion To Give Everybody A Job appeared first on Off The Grid News.

Reported Missile Strikes on Syrian Army Depots Kill 26

Several Syrian military bases have been struck by missiles in the Hama and Aleppo provinces, a source in Syria law enforcement told Sputnik.

Pedophaelia and Sex Trafficking, It Is A Deeper Rabbit Hole Than You Can Imagine


Young people, both girls and boys, go missing from virtually every community in the United States. Why? Human trafficking, for sex and even for organ harvesting, is a world-wide problem, yet the Elite in politics and the mainstream media (MSM) never speak of it. Why?


There is the truly Dark Side of this trafficking, too, that is Satanism.


Since President Trump took office, there have been hundreds, if not thousands, of arrests concerning sex crimes, human trafficking and organ harvesting. Yet, the MSM rarely mentions these massive arrests. For years, the MSM has remained silent on these problems/crimes. Why?


This subject is not a comfortable subject for good people, but it must be discussed if we are to end this morally repugnant criminal behavior. Liz Crokin has been fighting for years to expose sex traffickers and pedophiles.






The post Pedophaelia and Sex Trafficking, It Is A Deeper Rabbit Hole Than You Can Imagine appeared first on Oath Keepers.

Economic Nationalism Versus Protectionism


President Trump has espoused a view of world trade that is centered on his beliefs in economic nationalism, which his opponents have derided as being protectionism. That protectionism can be a part of economic nationalism, is true, but economic nationalism is more than that.


What is wrong with the US proclaiming that all trade agreements must be mutually beneficial to both sides of the agreement? For years the US has given benefits to its trading partners at the expense of its own businesses and citizens. Isn’t it time for us to demand fair trade? Mutually beneficial trade?






 


The post Economic Nationalism Versus Protectionism appeared first on Oath Keepers.

WW3 ALERT: Iran Threatens ‘Strikes Will Be Met With Force’ After US-led Syria Attacks


Iran has issued a chilling new warning to the United States an allied forces which allegedly coordinated an attack on Syria on Sunday. Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei has warned that attacks on Iranian military bases by the US or its allies will not be tolerated and will be met with “firm force.”


Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, supreme leader of Iran, has launched a blistering verbal attack against the US in the wake of missile strikes on Syrian bases in Hama and Aleppo on Sunday night, according to The Daily Star.  In a bellicose speech on Monday, Khamenei accused the US of causing a “regional crisis” in the Middle East by creating “instability” that has “brought misery to people.”


The Syrian government says that rockets struck several military bases outside of Hama and Aleppo in new “aggression” by unidentified enemies. “Syria is being exposed to a new aggression with some military bases in rural Hama and Aleppo hit with enemy rockets,” an army source reported to state television, according to TelesurTV. The state news agency says the source of the blasts is being investigated by authorities.


Missiles struck a number of Syrian military facilities in strikes that a UK-based war monitor said killed at least 26 troops, many of whom were Iranians.  Iran will respond in kind to missile strikes on any of its bases in Syria or elsewhere, Khamenei was quoted as saying by Israeli state media.  “The era of ‘hit and run’ attacks has ended, and from now on attacks will be met with firm force,” Khamenei said just hours after the missile attack on Syria that has been blamed on Israel, the US, and Britain.


Allegations RAF jets were involved were denied by the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) but the US military is yet to comment. According to Russian, Syrian, and Iranian media reports, Sunday’s strike on military bases in Hama and Aleppo appears to have been carried out by Israel, which has been accused of bombing Iranian military bases in the past, most recently on Syria’s T4 air base earlier this month.


“All these reports over [an] attack on an Iranian military base in Syria and the martyrdom of several Iranian military advisers in Syria are baseless,” an official told Iran’s Tasnim news agency.

UK Moves to Ban Knives—As They Simultaneously Sell Israel Sniper Rifles to Kill Palestinians

palestinians

While the UK Government moves forward with its "War on Knives," it is also selling arms to an Israeli government that routinely perpetrates war crimes against innocent Palestinians.


The post UK Moves to Ban Knives—As They Simultaneously Sell Israel Sniper Rifles to Kill Palestinians appeared first on The Free Thought Project.

Baby Alfie’s Case Proves Kidnapping & Child Abuse Are Allowed When Gov’t Calls it ‘Health Care’

abuse

If parents deprived their children of food and water until they died, they would be charged with child abuse. But when the state does it, it is called health care.


The post Baby Alfie’s Case Proves Kidnapping & Child Abuse Are Allowed When Gov’t Calls it ‘Health Care’ appeared first on The Free Thought Project.

China Begins Monitoring Brain Waves in the Workplace and Military


By Nicholas West


Like the proverbial canary in the coal mine, China is offering a grim vision of the future as it implements a full-scale technocracy that is still debated as conspiracy theory by many people in the West.


I have been writing for years about the various stories that have emerged about developments in neuroscience that have included the reading of brain waves for a multitude of applications, good and bad. Naturally, for authoritarian control freaks, the idea of being able to directly monitor and analyze the thoughts of your population is a dream come true; and for anyone else who simply wishes to have more data at their disposal for targeted advertising or other economic management schemes, it’s a technology too tempting to refuse.


South China Morning Post covers both aspects of this emerging reality, as they report that assembly lines workers, train conductors and military personnel are having their respective hats, caps and helmets outfitted with the latest brain-reading sensors to determine efficiency and safety patterns.






Concealed in regular safety helmets or uniform hats, these lightweight, wireless sensors constantly monitor the wearer’s brainwaves and stream the data to computers that use artificial intelligence algorithms to detect emotional spikes such as depression, anxiety or rage.


The technology is in widespread use around the world but China has applied it on an unprecedented scale in factories, public transport, state-owned companies and the military to increase the competitiveness of its manufacturing industry and to maintain social stability.


[…]


The research team confirmed the device and technology had been used in China’s military operations but declined to provide more information.


The technology is also being used in medicine.


Ma Huajuan, a doctor at the Changhai Hospital in Shanghai, said the facility was working with Fudan University to develop a more sophisticated version of the technology to monitor a patient’s emotions and prevent violent incidents.



The Chinese government acknowledges that workers expressed initial concern over the perception that they were having their minds read, but after some acclimation “they got used to the device. It looked and felt just like a safety helmet. They wore it all day at work.”


Future plans include use for flight operators in airline cockpits, but it “means the pilots may need to sacrifice some of their privacy for the sake of public safety.”


Readers in the West should ignore this news at their peril. The foundation has been laid by heavy investment into the BRAIN initiative in the U.S. and its counterpart in Europe, the Human Brain Project. Not only have these projects been researching brain wave reading through direct skull application, as this news from China demonstrates, there also has been heavy study into remote mind reading.


While many documents have surfaced over the previous decades suggesting military interest in remote mind reading and control, additional concrete evidence came to our attention at Activist Post in 2013 when a whistleblower at Arizona State University revealed a secret DARPA program being conducted there using Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation. This technology stimulates the temporal lobe with electromagnetic pulses and can be employed for a range of uses.


Subsequently, we have seen a rise in studies of brain-computer interfaces with a distinct mention of mind control techniques being introduced with the same magnetic manipulation via “neural  (or smart) dust” or high-powered lasers that enable reading and manipulation from a distance.


Just recently, an “accidental” FOIA request resulted in other mind control documents being released; I’d encourage you to read that report here.


So, even though this news from China might appear shocking and advanced to many readers, I would argue that the technology they are using is rudimentary compared to what is already available, However, the fact that a major government with a population that is nearly 1/5th of the entire planet is beginning to roll this out should spark heightened awareness about where all of this is headed if we don’t consider the ethics now before this technology gets away from us.


Nicholas West writes for Activist Post. Support us at Patreon for as little as $1 per month. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Steemit, and BitChute. Ready for solutions? Subscribe to our premium newsletter Counter Markets.

Eat Those Varmints: 3 Nuisance Animals that Make Tasty Meals

If you’re a homesteader or small-scale farmer, you’ve likely engaged in varmint battles over the years. How many times have you gone out to your chicken coop, only to find a bloody pile of feathers? Or went to check on your garden, and found your zucchini crop gone, plants and all? Have you watched as all the walnuts on your trees seemingly vanished right before your eyes?


Varmint animals are smart, sneaky and can do a number on your homestead. Protecting your livestock and crops, and keeping local varmint populations under control, is a crucial task for most homesteaders. But maybe you can beat them at their own game, too. Many of the most common varmints are edible themselves and make excellent table fare. Here are three nuisance animals that might be your next meal.


 


Woodchucks


Woodchucks are found throughout the Eastern United States and into Canada. They often wreak havoc on garden beds with their ravenous appetites. Their burrows are a hazard in fields, and they can even undermine earthen dams over time. People often pay exterminators good money to get rid of them. Fortunately, woodchucks are also delicious.


Woodchucks used to be eaten commonly a few decades ago. Their meat is tasty, and it can be prepared much like any other small game animals. Woodchuck pie is a hearty meal worth trying on an autumn day. Wash it down with a glass of fresh cider.  Woodchucks are also great in stew as well.


Dispatching woodchucks is not particularly hard. You can trap them, or use a small caliber rifle to shoot one. If you plan on hunting them, be prepared to shoot quick, and from a distance; they are never very far from a burrow entrance they can duck in to.  They are straightforward to butcher, too, although you need to remove their scent glands before cooking.


 


Squirrels


Chances are you have squirrels where you live and do battle with them from time to time. They can threaten fruit and nut crops, as well as garden beds. They sometimes gnaw their way into your home and nest in attics, making a real mess. And they’ll certainly take more than their fair share at your bird feeders if given half a chance. Fortunately, squirrels are easy to kill and tasty to eat.


Squirrels don’t fear humans too much, especially when they’re in trees. You can often shoot two or more with a small caliber rifle before they get the hint. They’re also quite easy to trap as well; a squirrel pole is simple to build, and one of the most effective traps out there.


It typically takes a few squirrels to make a good meal. Fortunately, they aren’t too hard to hunt or trap. Once you have killed a few, try serving your family some baked squirrel.  Squirrel is also terrific base meat to use in a slow cooker recipe as well.



Crows


Depending where you live, crows can be a real nuisance.  They can descend on your garden en masse and tear it apart. They will steal food from your poultry, and at times will even kill baby chicks. Fortunately, despite the old idiom about eating crow, they can be quite tasty.


Hunt crow in your fields like you would kill any small game bird. It’s best to use a 20 or .410 gauge shotgun. Crows are smart and often get out of range before you can shoot them. However, sometimes they get complacent when they’re living around humans for a while. Most crow recipes call for using breast meat, which is relatively small. Like squirrels, you’ll need to shoot a few crows to get enough for a meal.


Once you’ve shot and dressed a few crows, try cooking them up in a delicious blackbird pie. Alternatively, you could make a crow and mushroom stew as well. Pair either of these meals with a wine made from berries these crows would have eaten up in your garden had you given them the chance.



Parting Shots


Make sure you check your local hunting or trapping regulations before you go after these or any other nuisance animals; always be a safe, courteous hunter, too. Once you’ve ensured that you’re okay to hunt these varmints, have at it! It is quite satisfying to make a tasty meal out of nuisance animals that would have terrorized your crops or livestock if given half a chance. Happy hunting!


The post Eat Those Varmints: 3 Nuisance Animals that Make Tasty Meals appeared first on Off The Grid News.

8 Fun Facts About Potatoes

We don’t always have to look that far to find interesting stuff.  In fact, sometimes it turns out that it’s been right there in our everyday lives all along.  To wit: the humble potato



Here are eight facts about potatoes—some are well-known, and others less familiar. 


1.       Potatoes have been said to provide almost complete nutrition.  I have no plans to try living on potatoes alone and certainly do not recommend it for anyone else.  But it has been done.  People throughout history have thrived for long periods of time on a diet of mostly potatoes, or potatoes and milk, and the potato is still considered a staple in many cultures.  Potatoes can comprise a significant portion of a healthy diet, being high in vitamins C and B6, potassium, and manganese, and providing a modest percentage of daily requirements for protein, thiamin, niacin, and folate.[1]


2.       They are excellent keepers.  Most homesteaders—and even folks who do not grow much of their food—are likely to know this one. Adequately cured for several days in moderate temperatures and humidity, and stored in a cold dark, well-ventilated storage cellar, potatoes can keep from one growing season to the next.


3.       Potatoes are easily grown in almost any climate.   They thrive in places as far-flung as Idaho to China to South Africa to Mexico, in temperatures from cold to temperate to sub-tropical.  Potatoes can be a bit picky about soil composition, particularly acidity, but the soil can easily be amended to their liking.


4.       Potatoes originated in South America.  They were introduced to Europe by way of the Canary Islands from the Spanish explorer Francisco Pizarro in the early 1500’s, one of the few specimens to survive the arduous intercontinental voyage in primitive conditions, and were quick to take root in the Old World.[2]


5.       Entire cultures have risen and fallen because of potatoes.  Most people have heard of a connection between potatoes and Irish people in history, but not everyone understands quite how consequential it was.  It was the easy-to-grow and nutritious potato which allowed the peasants of Ireland to prosper on little land and few other resources.  Between the time it was first introduced to Europe in the 16th century until late blight hit the island in the mid-1800’s, the potato came to be the single most important food in Ireland.  But because it was so crucial to people’s very survival, when late blight destroyed the potato harvests, it decimated the population which depended upon potatoes for survival.[3]


6.       Potatoes are clones.  Just to clarify how that’s noteworthy, here’s a quick refresher on the birds and the bees.  Most higher organisms—that is to say, plants and animals—reproduce sexually.  That means that DNA from each of two parents combine to create a new and completely unique organism.  Not so with cloning, which instead is an exact replication of a single parent organism.   When we plant potatoes, we don’t use seeds, which are the result of sexual reproduction.  Instead, we use chunks of potato, which has the same DNA as the one used to plant it. 


7.       The world’s supply of potatoes is potentially at significant risk.  The reasons are multifold.  Two points which contribute to this risk have already been mentioned:  the history of a single plant disease having wiped out nearly every potato in Ireland, and the fact that almost all potatoes grown today are clones. 


Additionally, commercial potato producers grow only a fraction of the original varieties, which minimizes the gene pool and makes them that much more vulnerable to a pandemic.  But perhaps one of the most important and most overlooked factors is this:  because potatoes are being grown in an increasing number of ecosystems to which they are not indigenous, they lack the advantage of being cross-bred with wild relatives that can provide genetic defenses.  These factors combine to create a precarious existence for potatoes in our diets.[4]   


8.       It was the first vegetable, and entirely possibly the only one ever turned into a popular kids’ toy.  That’s right; I’m talking about Mr. Potato Head!  People of a certain age—ahem—might even remember the fact that the original version included only accessories, which kids attached to real potatoes.  This might sound a little unappealing to modern sensibilities, which probably indicates that in the sixty-some years since Mr. Potato Head arrived on toy store shelves, there have been almost as many changes in cultural norms as in the potato itself.


Potatoes indeed represent an essential component in the diets of myriad cultures, both in contemporary times and throughout history, providing solid nutrition that is easy to reproduce and stores well.  But there are far more potato varieties in existence than many of us embrace or even know about, which not only limits our eating and growing experiences but could prove to be the potato’s undoing.








[1] http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/vegetables-and-vegetable-products/2770/2


[2] Dunn, Rob. Never Out of Season: How Having the Food We Want When We Want It Threatens Our Food Supply and Our Future. New York, Boston, London: Little Brown, and Company, 2017.






[3] Pollan, Michael.  The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-eye View of the World.  New York: Random House, Inc., 2001.




[4] Dunn, Rob. Never Out of Season: How Having the Food We Want When We Want It Threatens Our Food Supply and Our Future. New York, Boston, London: Little Brown, and Company, 2017.




The post 8 Fun Facts About Potatoes appeared first on Off The Grid News.

Former UN Weapons Inspector: Syrian Gas Attack Story Raises Serious Questions

Scott Ritter is arguably the most experienced American weapons inspector and in this interview with Dennis J. Bernstein he levels a frank assessment of U.S. government assertions about chemical weapons use.





Ritter: "They just make it up."



Authored by Dennis Bernstein via ConsortiumNews.com,



In the 1980’s, Scott Ritter was a commissioned officer in the United States Marine Corps, specializing in intelligence. In 1987, Ritter was assigned to the On-Site Inspection Agency, which was put together to go into the Soviet Union and oversee the implementation of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty. This was the first time that on-site inspection had been used as part of a disarmament verification process.



Ritter was one of the groundbreakers in developing on-site inspection techniques and methodologies. With this unique experience behind him, Ritter was asked in 1991, at the end of the Gulf War, to join the United Nations Special Commission, which was tasked by the Security Council to oversee the disarmament of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. From 1991 to 1998, Ritter served as a chief weapons inspector and led a number of teams into Iraq.



According to Ritter, in the following Flashpoints Radio interview with Dennis Bernstein conducted on April 23rd, US, British and French claims that the Syrian Government used chemical weapons against civilians last month appear to be totally bogus.





Dennis Bernstein: You have been speaking out recently about the use of chemical weapons in Syria. Could you outline your case?



Scott Ritter: There are a lot of similarities between the Syrian case and the Iraqi case. Both countries possess weapons of mass destruction. Syria had a very large chemical weapons program.



In 2013 there was an incident in a suburb of Damascus called Ghouta, the same suburb where the current controversy is taking place. The allegations were that the Syrian government used sarin nerve agent against the civilian population. The Syrian government denied that, but as a result of that incident the international community got together and compelled Syria into signing the Chemical Weapons Convention, declaring the totality of its chemical weapons holdings, and opening itself to be disarmed by inspections of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. Russia was chosen to be the guarantor of Syria’s compliance. The bottom line is that Syria had the weapons but was verified by 2016 as being in 100% compliance. The totality of Syria’s chemical weapons program was eliminated.



At the same time that this disarmament process was taking place, Syria was being engulfed in a civil war which has resulted in a humanitarian crisis. Over a half million people have died. It is a war that pits the Syrian government against a variety of anti-regime forces, many of which are Islamic in nature: the Islamic State, Al Nusra, Al Qaeda. Some of these Islamic factions have been in the vicinity of Ghouta since 2012.



Earlier this year, the Syrian government initiated an offensive to liberate that area of these factions. It was very heavy fighting, thousands of civilians were killed, with massive aerial bombardment. Government forces were prevailing and by April 6 it looked as if the militants were preparing to surrender.



Suddenly the allegations come out that there was this chemical weapons attack. It wasn’t a massive chemical weapons attack, it was dropping one or two so-called “barrel bombs,” improvised devices that contained chlorine gas canisters. According to the militants, between 40 and 70 people were killed and up to 500 people were made ill. The United States and other nations picked up on this, saying that this was proof positive that Syria has been lying about its chemical weapons program and that Russia has been behind Syria’s retention of chemical weapons. This is the case the US made to launch its missile strike [on April 14].



There are a lot of problems with this scenario. Again, why would the Syrian government, at the moment of victory, use a pinprick chemical attack with zero military value? It added nothing to the military campaign and invited the wrath of the West at a critical time, when the rebels were begging for Western intervention.



Many, including the Russian government, believe that this was a staged event. There has been no hard evidence put forward by anyone that an attack took place. Shortly after allegations of the attack came out, the entire town of Douma was taken over by the Syrian Army while the rebels were evacuated.



The places that were alleged to have been attacked were inspected by Russian chemical weapons specialists, who found zero trace of any chemicals weapons activity. The same inspectors who oversaw the disarmament of Syria were mobilized to return to Syria and do an investigation. They were supposed to start their work this past weekend [April 21-22]. They arrived in Damascus the day after the missile strikes occurred but they still haven’t been out to the sites. The United States, France and Great Britain have all admitted that the only evidence they have used to justify this attack were the photographs and videotapes sent to them by the rebel forces.



I have great concern about the United States carrying out an attack on a sovereign nation based on no hard evidence. The longer we wait, the longer it takes to get inspectors onto the site, the more claims we are going to get that the Russians have sanitized it. I believe that the last thing the United States wanted was inspectors to get on-site and carry out a forensic investigation that would have found that a chemical attack did not in fact take place.



DB: It is sort of like cleaning up a police crime scene before you check for evidence.



SR: The United States didn’t actually bomb the site that was attacked. They bombed three other facilities. One was in the suburbs of Damascus, a major metropolitan area. The generals said that they believed there were quantities of nerve agent there. So, in a building in a densely populated area where we believe nerve agent is stored, what do we do? We blow it up! If there had in fact been nerve agent there, it would have resulted in hundreds or even thousands of deaths. That fact that nobody died is the clearest evidence yet that there was no nerve agent there. The United States is just winging it, making it up.



One of the tragedies is that we can no longer trust our military, our intelligence services, our politicians. They will manufacture whatever narrative they need to justify an action that they deem to be politically expedient.



DB: Isn’t it also the case that there were problems with the allegations concerning Syria using chemical weapons in 2013 and then again in 2015? I believe The New York Times had to retract their 2013 story.



SR: They put out a story about thousands of people dying, claiming that it was definitely done by the Syrian government. It turned out later that the number of deaths was far lower and that the weapons systems used were probably in the possession of the rebels. It was a case of the rebels staging a chemical attack in order to get the world to intervene on their behalf.



A similar scenario unfolded last year when the Syrian government dropped two or three bombs on a village and suddenly there were reports that there was sarin nerve agent and chlorine gas wafting through the village, killing scores of people. Videotapes were taken of dead and dying and suffering people which prompted Trump to intervene. Inspectors never went to the site. Instead they relied upon evidence collected by the rebels.



As a weapons inspector, I can tell you that chain of custody of any samples that are to be used in the investigation is an absolute. You have to be at the site when it is collected, it has to be certified to be in your possession until the laboratory. Any break in the chain of custody makes that evidence useless for a legitimate investigation. So we have evidence collected by the rebels. They videotaped themselves carrying out the inspection, wearing training suits that would not have protected them at all from chemical weapons! Like almost everything having to do with these rebels, this was a staged event, an act of theater.



DB: Who has been supporting this particular group of rebels?



SR:  On the one hand, we have the actual fighters, the Army of Islam, a Saudi-backed fundamentalist group who are extraordinarily brutal. Embedded within the fighters are a variety of Western-trained and Western-funded NGOs such as the White Helmets and the Syrian-American Medical Society. But their primary focus isn’t rescue, in the case of the White Helmets, or medical care in the case of the Syrian-American Medical Society, but rather anti-regime propaganda. Many of the reports that came out of Douma originated with these two NGO’s.



DB: You mentioned “chain of custody.” That’s what was most ridiculous about sending in inspectors. The first thing you would want to do is establish chain of custody and nail down the crime scene.



SR: I was a participant in the Gulf War and we spent the bulk of that war conducting a massive aerial campaign against Iraq. I was one of the people who helped come up with the target list that was used to attack. Each target had to have a purpose.



Let’s look what happened in Syria [on April 14].  We bombed three targets, a research facility in Damascus and two bunker facilities in western Syria. It was claimed that all three targets were involved with a Syrian chemical weapons program. But the Syria weapons program was verified to be disarmed. So what chemical weapons program are we talking about? Then US officials said that one of these sites stored sarin nerve agent and chemical production equipment. That is a very specific statement. Now, if Syria was verified to be disarmed last year, with all this material eliminated, what are they talking about? What evidence do they have that any of this material exists? They just make it up.  



If I had been a member of that inspections team, I would have been able to tell you with 100% certainty what took place at that site. It wasn’t that long ago that the allegations took place, there are very good forensic techniques that can be applied. We would be able to reverse engineer that site and tell you exactly what happened when. Let’s say an inspection team had gone in and we found that there was sarin nerve agent. Now, the US government can say, there is not supposed to be any sarin nerve agent in Syria, therefore we can state that the Syrians have a covert sarin nerve agent capability. But still you don’t know where it is, so now you have to say we assess that it could be in this bunker.



We bombed empty buildings. We didn’t degrade Syria’s chemical weapons capability. They got rid of it. We were among the nations that certified that they had been disarmed. We just created this phantom threat out of nothing so that we could attack Syria and our president could be seen as being presidential, as being the commander in chief at a time when his credibility was being attacked on the home front.



DB: Amazing. That helps clarify the situation. Of course, it also leaves us terrified because we are so far away from the truth.



SR: As an American citizen who happens to be empowered with knowledge about how weapons inspections work, how decisions are made regarding war, I am disillusioned beyond belief.



This isn’t the first time we have been lied to by the president. But we have been lied to by military officers who are supposed to be above that. Three top Marine Corps officers stood before the American people and told bald-faced lies about what was going on. We have been lied to by Congress, who are supposed to be the people’s representatives who provide a check against executive overreach. And we have been lied to by the corporate media, a bunch of paid mouthpieces who repeat what the government tells them without question.



So Donald Trump can say there are chemical weapons in Syria, the generals parrot his words, the Congress nods its head dumbly, and the mass media repeats it over and over again to the American public.



DB: Are you worried that we might end up in a shooting war with Russia at this point?



SR: A week ago I was very worried. If I am going to give kudos to Jim Mattis it will be because he took the desire of Trump and Bolton to create a major crisis with Russia over the allegations of Syrian chemical weapons use and was able to water that down into putting on a show for the American people. We warned the Russians in advance, there were no casualties, we blew up three empty buildings. We spent a quarter of a billion dollars of taxpayer money and we got to pat ourselves on the back and tell everybody how great we are. But we avoided a needless confrontation with the Russians and I am a lot calmer today about the potential of a shooting war with Russia than I was a week ago.

Deutsche Bank Calculates The Level Of The New "Fed Put"

Back in February, in the immediate aftermath of the Feb. 5 volocaust, we quoted a troubling - for stock bulls - statement from outgoing NY Fed president Bil Dudley, who revealed that not only was the recent market correction not "a big drop", but that the Fed"s "Powell Put" was far lower.



Specifically, commenting on the February rout, Dudley said an equity rout like the one that occurred in recent days "has virtually no consequence for the economic outlook" and added that, if the market continued to go down sharply, “that would affect my view,” he said at a New York event, but "this wasn"t that big of a bump in the stock market" and " is not a big story for central bankers yet."



In other words, the Fed"s "Powell put" is well lower from the current S&P level... but how much lower?



That is the question Deutsche Bank"s derivatives strategist Aleksandar Kocic, who had been discussing where one can find the new "Fed put" for weeks, believes he has answered in a note released overnight.



Following a lengthy introduction in which he admits that the Fed"s new role has basically transformed to be the market"s Chief Risk Officer, although using far more words to get to the same point, to wit...




It appears as if the Fed, on top of inflation and growth, now has to worry about, or at least be cognizant of, a wide range of issues - from re-emancipation of the markets, tail risk, convexity flows, and balancing of the policy mix, to maintenance of global stability and financial conditions. Although the Fed does not control asset prices, they are relevant indicators of financial conditions and, as such, they can be on the Fed’s radar screen. In the past, through its actions, monetary policy acted indirectly as a source of market volatility. Now, it appears that the Fed needs to be occupied with its “management”, during both easing and tightening cycles. Monetary policy has become exaptive: A tool or an institution that was conceived and developed to serve one particular function but has subsequently been coopted to serve another. (Exaptation example: feathers in prehistoric animals that may have been used for attracting mates or keeping warm later became essential for modern birds’ flight.)




... Kocic then lays out his empirical approach of quantifying the new Fed put, which is another way of stating how high will the Fed raise rates before it relents amid rising market volatility and instability.




Rate hikes serve as brakes against an economy that is overheating. While this is a way of controlling inflation, hikes reduce leverage and slow growth. As such, they go against the grain of risk asset. From an equities point of view, rate hikes should not be aggressive to overpower positive economic developments. If financial conditions tighten too much, risk assets are likely to pull back. This implicit “agreement” is embedded in the Fed’s pace and reflects the  logic behind the “Fed put”.




Since the way Kocic"s thought experiment is structured has just one variable, it is easy to plot various manifestations of short rates vs the S&P. Seen in this light, "stock prices show alignment with the short rate across different cycles (at least, that was the case in the past)."



Specifically, to demonstrate his point, Kocic shows a chart of of 2Y swaps vs. the Log(S&P) levels "to keep things in scale." Here, it becomes obvious that where there "collinearity between the two has been rather compelling in the past", the Fed"s QE broke the correlation starting with the financial crisis, and continuing roughly through 2014:




The anomalous dispersion captures the QE period between 2009 and 2013 and is an echo of unprecedented distortions introduced by the stimulus.






Breaking up the chart above into three distinct time frames, roughly defined as pre-QE and after, reveals that historically short rates vs the S&P scaled appropriately for two Fed cycles: 1999-2000 and 2004-2007. Specifically, Kocic calculates In both cases the beta is about 10 – for a 1% rise in rates, there is a 10% appreciation in S&P.





In striking contrast, the next chart focusing on the post-2014 period, shows a dramatic rise in S&P to 2s beta, roughly 30x. The chart also shows something else: a sharp, post-January divergence between the two. To Kocic this is "the market’s restriking of the Fed put."





 



Which brings us to the crux of the argument: calculating the actual strike price of the Powell put.



According to Kocic, "one can estimate this strike in two different ways." First, delta neutral, in which a rise in vol is compensated with lowering of the strike in such a way that the underlying is unchanged. Using this approach we find that the S&P drop started at the point when S&P was at 2800 which places the new strike of the Fed put somewhere in the 2300 — 2400 range.



Here, as Kocic explains, the "Fed put is embedded in the beta, which represents response of stocks to rates rise. Higher strike, i.e. lower deductible, implies a more protective Fed; lower beta corresponds to a higher deductible or a lower strike of the put." And as shown above, where previously the beta was 10, it has since jumped to 30, meaning that the Fed remains highly protective (as Bank of America repeatedly showed before). According to Kocic, "this is a residual of the Fed"s awareness of the distortions caused by QE as well as the market"s vulnerability to stimulus withdrawal."



In quantitative terms, this would sugges that using the old beta of 10, the SPX should have been around 2300. To the Deutsche analyst this means that the current restriking of the Fed put is not very far from what the "old" striking would imply.



In simple English, what all of the above means stated simply is that the S&P has no less than roughly 300 points of downside from here before the Fed even bothers to intervene; it also means that if stocks demand Fed intervention as they often have in the past, the S&P will have to drop to the revised Fed put level of 2300-2400 before the requested response is triggered.



* * *



But wait there"s more, because as Kocic further explains, it is very unlikely that the market will sell off in a calm, cool and collected manner from its current level to 2,300; in fact, the drop would likely be far more stormy as a result of unwinding convexity flows, which push investors out of equities and into bonds. His explanation below:



Restriking of the Fed put is a withdrawal of convexity from equities. It is effectively a removal of a put spread from the market. However, in the environment where everything is bound to sell off (a market mode that is a mirror image of QE), volatility is one of the key decision variables. More volatile equities are less desirable than less volatile duration. In that environment, convexity withdrawal creates a reinforcing loop where more turbulence in risk assets tends to cause stability in fixed income. The figure shows the convexity flows across the two markets.





The implication of these cascading convexity flows is that as equities tumble, there would be an outsized bid for all fixed income instruments:




Restriking of the Fed put is re-syphoning of convexity. Withdrawal of convexity from equities means higher volatility and their underperformance, which fosters preference for bonds and reinforces their stability. This becomes a supply of convexity to rates and, as monetary policy remains in place, this means: higher real rates, stronger USD, and lower expected inflation (which reduces the tail risk of the bond unwind). All of these make bonds more desirable than risk assets.




However, even here there is a peculiar paradox, because as flows flood into fixed income, they create the kinds of curve vol distortion and migration we discussed last week in "The Key Story For The Bond Market Is About To Play Out", a process which as Kocic explains once again, makes rate hikes less effective at a parallel shift in the curve, instead assuring curve flattening and subsequent inversion.




On the other side, as normalization of the curve is countering the fiscal shocks with monetary tightening, it is pushing duration investors to the long end. At the same time, as the long end remains anchored, rate hikes appear less effective, forcing the Fed to continue with rate hikes and thus increasing the probability of overshooting and disrupting equities further, which is effectively further withdrawal of equities convexity. Pension fund flows in this context only reinforce preference for bonds.




The implication here being that the mere act of lowering the Fed"s put activates feedback loops processes that  destabilize the market, threatening a potential waterfall of selling, which coming in a time of rising rates, leads to further curve flattening/inversion, and ultimately concerns about Policy error, which result in even more selling.



In other words, unless Powell promptly and actively approaches the market to assure it that the Fed strike price has not been lowered, a very unpleasant feedback loop may emerge in which selling of stocks results in more selling of stocks... until eventually the strike price of the Fed"s new "put" is reached. What happens then will be up to Powell: will he once again bail out markets and investors, or will stocks continue to drop in light with his striking comments from 2012.



After all, recall that it was Powell himself who in October 2012 told his fellow FOMC members the following truth:




I think we are actually at a point of encouraging risk-taking, and that should give us pause. Investors really do understand now that we will be there to prevent serious losses. It is not that it is easy for them to make money but that they have every incentive to take more risk, and they are doing so. Meanwhile, we look like we are blowing a fixed-income duration bubble right across the credit spectrum that will result in big losses when rates come up down the road. You can almost say that that is our strategy.




It wasyour strategy unti 2018. The only question is what your strategy will be going forward...