More infants are now dying in the U.S. than in the last two decades, according to data from the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS).1 The U.S. provisional infant mortality rate rose 3% from 2021 to 2022 — the first increase since 2001 to 2002. Prior to this increase, infant mortality rates had declined 22% between 2002 and 2021. “Seeing an increase that hits the statistical significance mark indicates that this was a bigger jump than we’ve had in the last 20 years, and that is something we need to keep an eye on to see if it’s just a one-year anomaly or the start of increasing ra ..read more

Dear Mike Johnson and Congress: When you create a BUDGET, the point of the budget is to spend within the lines – like coloring.  There are no extra lines in coloring, the single line is finite.  The entire purpose of a Budget is to spend according to that budget.  What is the legality of a ‘supplemental budget’?   You can ‘create’ a budget, you just don’t have any intention of ‘holding’ to that budget.  And instead of withdrawing this ‘extra’ money from a savings account – you borrow it from Taxpayers to the tune of $36 tril ..read more

In February 2021, EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen exchanged dozens of secret text messages with Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, in which they apparently discussed the details of the EU Commission eventually purchasing 1.8 billion doses of Pfizer-BioNtech’s ineffective and dangerous gene therapy shot in order to inflict it on the people of Europe. The terms of their deal—including what the EU Commission paid for the doses—have never been disclosed to the public that was cajoled and bullied into receiving them. While the New York Times has never done any reporting on the vaccine ..read more

The Iranian defeat of the US-Israeli missile defense architecture has global security consequences. The world’s attention has, rightfully so, been focused on the fallout from Iran’s retaliatory strike against Israel on April 13-14, 2024. Iran’s purpose in launching the attack was to establish a deterrence posture designed to put Israel and the United States on notice that any attack against Iran, whether on Iranian soil or on the territory of other nations, would trigger a retaliation which would inflict more damage on the attacker than the attacker could hope to inflict on Iran. To achieve th ..read more

So they’re really doing it. The Biden administration is really ignoring Australia’s request to end the case against Julian Assange, and they’re proceeding with their campaign to extradite a journalist for telling the truth about US war crimes. In order to move the extradition case forward, per a British high court ruling US prosecutors needed to provide “assurances” that the US would not seek the death penalty and would not deprive Assange of his human right to free speech because of his nationality. The US provided the assurance against the death penalty (which t ..read more

“Mosquitoes seek stagnant water but do not cause the pool to become stagnant” and polluted (Rudolph Virchow, physician, and proponent of terrain theory of disease).  Note: Anopheles mosquitoes breed only in clean, still, sunlit water not polluted with poop, rotting vegetation or garbage. Both Germ and Terrain Theories falsely assume the cause of disease is externalities rather than internalization of self-portrayed benevolent, but coercive, malevolent institutions.  Since the declaration of a pandemic disease emergency in 2020 there has been an ongoing dispute between academic virolo ..read more

As I predicted on April 11, the police state got the Republicans to reconsider and to pass their warrantless spying and home entry. The Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson cast the deciding vote that nixed the warrant requirement. This tells us all we need to know about Republicans. They are part of the problem. Super-Patriots will say “we have to do this to protect ourselves from terrorists.” They don’t understand that without the Constitution we have no protection. See this. Edward Snowden reports that the situation is even more serious than I thought. A section of the FISA Act is b ..read more

When the latest CPI number came in hot at 0.4% for March and the annual core CPI inflation rate held at 3.8%, Betsey Stevenson, professor of economics at the University of Michigan appearing on CNBC’s Squawk Box said nonchalantly “Three percent inflation is no big deal.” The comment got a rise out of co-host Becky Quick who reminded the professor that the three percent was adding on to the already higher prices consumers continue to suffer with. To Ms. Quick’s point, the latest Grant’s Interest Rate Observer cites once-upon-a-time Fed Chair William McChesney Martin who said (approxim ..read more

I came of age living outside of a central Texas town of Moulton, population (at that time) of 792. I went to school in Shiner, which was a 24-mile round-trip commute, and at the tender age of 14 and without a license, I ferried my siblings to and from school in the 1973 Ford Country Squire station wagon, with faux wood panelling. Moulton was the quintessential Texas tank town, located in the heart of the German-Czech belt of central Texas. Downtown was centered on the railroad tracks, though the freighters rarely stopped there, even at that time. The central district was tw ..read more

Donald Trump last week said he opposes any national legislation on abortion, and said he supports state governments adopting their own policies. According to USA Today:  “Former President Donald Trump said individual states should choose their own abortion restrictions, avoiding talk of any kind of federal government ban and drawing criticism from Democrats and anti-abortion Republicans alike on a pivotal election issue. …At the end of the day, this is all about the will of the people.” Democrats naturally condemned these remarks, insisting that the only ..read more