. . . gimme a . . . t-i-o-n. Wha’ do you got? You got INFLATION.

It looks like the analytical geniuses over at the San Francisco Fed have finally figured out something that Larry Summers anticipated nearly a year ago: When you pump trillions of dollars of stimulus spending into the economy, it causes inflation to overheat to the highest level in a generation.

Of course, Summers was aggressively poo-poo’d by policy nabobs at Treasury . . . when he first projected that inflation would likely exceed 5% by the end of 2021 thanks to the federal government’s decision to hand out trillions of dollars in stimmies, benefits and PPP loans (combined with the Fed’s ’emergency’ policy posture that involved backstopping corporate debt and slamming interest rates back down to the zero-bound).

Biden did it, or stood by while his people did.

While he has since been vindicated, at the time, Summers was nearly excommunicated by his fellow Democrats for having the audacity to suggest that the federal government shouldn’t have ridden to the rescue of ordinary people during a once-in-a-century pandemic (or, at the very least, it maybe should have considered a more measured approach).

Wha’? And lose all that good will from stimmie recipients?

Now, months after Summers inflationary fears were vindicated, the Fed has finally summoned the courage to acknowledge that maybe the government’s balls-to-the-wall COVID stimulus was responsible for stoking the voracious inflationary spiral that – contrary to Jerome Powell’s assurances – has been anything but “transitory”.

Oh, when will they ever learn? Oh, when will they ever learn?

Here:

Rigidity, a favorite word of his. Follow the commandments, and you don’t get it. You’re rigid. Phew.

Watch out.

This should strike fear in all of the faithful Catholics in the United States: Cardinal Cupich and club just had an invitation-only event featuring the sixty bishops who voted against discussing Eucharistic Coherence, the liberals from Rome steering the “synodal process”, and the liberal Catholic media.

They had to fess up because JD Flynn and The Pillar caught wind of it, but clearly, Cardinal “We should all get together as brother bishops and discuss” Cupich has now become Cardinal “It hasn’t been going too well so we need to spin the narrative” Cupich.

Feisty female commentator lays it out.

Translation? “We need to make it look like we are the loyal bishops and paint everyone else like they are disobedient schismatics. We need to work the synodal process like Germany.”

She quotes Natl Catholic Reporter:

Through a series of keynote presentations and panel discussions centered on tracing the roots of Francis’ papacy to the 1962-65 Second Vatican Council, invited participants also considered the opposition the pope continues to face from some quarters of the U.S. church, more than nine years after his March 2013 election.

And explains feistily:

Some quarters? Uh, let’s see. I believe that is the 75% of bishops and cardinals who don’t agree with the positions of Cardinal Cupich, James Martin, SJ, Cardinal Tobin, and the rest of their ilk on sodomy, same-sex marriage and abortion.

They absolutely do not want those percentages known because then the faithful who don’t pay attention to the elitist politics of Cardinal Cupich’s people might just come to think, “Huh, maybe this isn’t exactly a schismatic group when the vast majority of our bishops and cardinals feel this way.”

more more more . . .

He was warming up for the big one, trying it out a decade and a half before it.

In 2005, George W. Bush gave a press conference on the need to mobilize all national resources for a war on the Avian bird flu, which many people including Anthony Fauci predicted would carry a 50% mortality rate. Not just among the infected: “50 percent of the population could die,” the world’s leading authority on the pathogen told a gullible media always hungry for headlines and clicks.

They ran for the phones with that one. It’s what they do.

False letter to editor or not, government went to work on it.

On June 8, 2020, WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus announced that asymptomatic people could transmit covid. That same day, Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO technical lead for the covid pandemic, clarified that people who have covid without any symptoms “very rarely” transmit the disease to others. WHO then backtracked on their original alarmist statement one day later.

Weeks later, Kerkhove was pressured by the public health establishment, including Harvard’s Global Health Institute, to backtrack on her statement that asymptomatic spread was very rare, claiming that the jury was still out. Her original claim that asymptomatic spread was not a driver of the pandemic was correct, as is now clear. Given that no respiratory virus in history was known to spread asymptomatically, this should not have surprised anyone.

Backtrack the backtrack and do it again, until you get it right. Dizzying, eh?

However:

. . . the damage was already done. The media (God bless ’em) ran with the asymptomatic threat story. The specter of people with no symptoms being potentially dangerous—which never had any scientific basis—turned every fellow citizen into a possible threat to one’s existence.

We should notice the complete reversal that this effected in our thinking about health and illness. In the past, a person was assumed to be healthy until proven sick. If one missed work for a prolonged period, one needed a note from a doctor establishing an illness. During covid, the criteria was reversed: we began to assume that people were sick until proven healthy. One needed a negative covid test to return to work.

Madness.

Grim conclusion:

It would be hard to devise a better method than the widespread myth of asymptomatic spread combined with quarantining the healthy to destroy the fabric of society and to divide us. People who are afraid of everyone, who are locked down, who are isolated for months behind screens, are easier to control.

A society grounded on “social distancing” is a contradiction—it’s a kind of anti-society. Consider what happened to us, consider the human goods we sacrificed to preserve bare life at all costs: friendships, holidays with family, work, visiting the sick and dying, worshipping God, burying the dead.

Enough to make people sceptical. Not to mention madder’n hell and becoming unwilling to put up with it.

How did it start?

In January 2020, at the very start of the pandemic, the New England Journal of Medicine published a letter that suggesting the possibility that covid could be spread by people who did not show any symptoms of the illness.

This article was based on a single case report. Germany’s public health agency, the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), later spoke with the person mentioned in the case report, who was supposedly the asymptomatic spreader, and she clarified that she did have symptoms encountering the second person mentioned in the article.

So, this case report, published in one of the world’s most prestigious medical journals, was a false alarm. But no matter, the myth of asymptomatic spread was born.

“Suggesting the possibility . . . a single case report . . . person mentioned in the case report, supposedly the asymptomatic spreader, clarified that she did have symptoms encountering the second person mentioned in the article . . .”

Another nail in the coffin of socializing amidst newspaper etc. gullibility and government chicanery or ineptitude.