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There are many things you could not say in public two or three years ago, all of which are now safe to say. Here is a starting point of the list of things you can now talk about in the open:

• The virus came from a lab leak.

• Natural immunity works. (previous post)
• Masks don’t work. (previous post)

As I find articles to further develop the issues now say to say, I will have further discussion.

The virus came from a lab leak.

This was crazy talk three years ago but is slowly becoming accepted: the most likely place the COVID-19 virus came from was a Chinese research laboratory. Oh, by the way, said lab was funded in part by Dr. Fauci’s department.

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There are many things you could not say in public two or three years ago, all of which are now safe to say. Here is a starting point of the list of things you can now talk about in the open:

• Natural immunity works.
• Masks don’t work.
• The virus came from a lab leak. (next post)

A slow trickle of news reports are showing that lots of the crazy, coo-coo bird, nutzo, conspiracy theory wackiness you heard from your friends two or three years ago were actually correct. My friends deemed nuts by society who were saying these things were right.

Natural immunity works.

2/27/23 – Wall Street Journal – Three Years Late, the Lancet Recognizes Natural Immunity

Research report by Lancet has one surprise and two not-at-all-surprises. 

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The Fed formally approved rules which will provide significant restrictions on investment activities by regional bank presidents, senior staff, and a host of staff have access to market-moving information as a part of their job.

This follows multiple news reports of Fed officials who were trading securities with somewhat awkward timing, such as after decisions had been made and before the full impact hit the market or in anticipation of major decisions which would be made within days.

The Fed issued a press release on 2/18/22: FOMC follow adopts comprehensive new rules for investment and trading activity.

Here are a few comments in the press release, which provide a great summary of the new restrictions. I converted the comment into bullet points:

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Been a while since I updated the sentences so richly earned by parents in the “Varsity Blues” college admissions scam.  Six more parents have learned the consequences of cheating and bribing their darlings into schools, usually as fake athletes.

Punishment for not pleading guilty.

Of particular note is two men who went to trial earned 15 months and a year plus a day.  The other four in this update who all seem to have been into the scheme to roughly the same extent, earned 6 weeks, 6 weeks, 6 weeks, and 2 months.

See a pattern?

There is a brutal penalty to be paid in the United States for insisting on a trial by jury of your peers.  In this small sample, the two who demanded trial earned average of 13.5 months average. The four who pleaded out earned average of 6.5 weeks, or 1.6 months.

That is a difference of 11.9 months.  That is about a year. Or, 8.4 times longer.

Six sentences

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Today, January 28, 2022, marks the twentieth anniversary of the Ulvog CPA firm.

It has been a joy to serve the nonprofit community for these two decades as an independent CPA firm. Focusing on the religious nonprofit community has been a professional honor and a personal delight.

Thanks to all the organizations who have made this journey possible.

Looking forward to many more years of serving churches and ministries.

God’s blessings to you all.

The supply chain for everything is tangle up to the extent it will take lots of time to function normally again.

Two articles describing the depth of issues:

• Analogy of turning off a complex computer system. Some of the hundreds of components won’t work when you throw the ‘on’ switch.
• Description of the demand side pressure on supply chain. All those trillions of federal dollars sloshing around have created demand which has overloaded distribution systems.

American Thinker – 12/11/21 – We broke everything in the name of Covid – Author ran a large IT department at one point in the past. Every few years they had to shut down the entire computer system so that the factory could go through maintenance of the electrical system.

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At a time when the media is telling us this Covid pandemic will continue forever and there are frequent variants that will kill us all dead, who should we actually be paying attention to?

The possibilities:

• people who know how to spell epidemiology, or
• actual epidemiologists, or
• people who are so convinced that Covid is deadly that they don’t bother to protect themselves; these are the people who also routinely ignore the rules they dictate we must follow.

People who know how to spell epidemiology and actually know someone they went to school with who is an epidemiologist:

Tweet by Martin Kulldorff

“The vocal pro-lockdown “public health scientists”, with their limited knowledge of infectious disease epidemiology, will be the last to recognize the public health disaster they created.”

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The amount of money Congress has pumped into the economy in an attempt to fight the Covid pandemic is staggering. Don’t quite have enough adjectives to describe the amount of money that is forced into the economy without any corresponding increase in production.

The amount spent directly on the pandemic is more than four times the annual budget at the federal level.

This is one of the primary reasons we are seeing inflation rates running at a thirty year high.

A close cousin on the list of inflation causes is the Fed flooding the economy with liquidity.  See previous discussion: Just how much money has the Federal Reserve created out of thin air and injected into the economy?

I’ve pulled together the amount of money appropriated by Congress in 2020 and 2021 which are focused on fighting the pandemic and stimulating the economy. Here is my tally, with amount of funding in billions of dollars, date Congress passed the legislation, and name of the program:

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The double whammy of Covid pandemic and government policies in reaction to the pandemic continue to hammer the educational sector. Unsettling thing is to consider these articles only discuss the current impact and not the long-term destruction of education for all students from pre-K to grad school.

Articles for you to consider:

• Columbia University settles for a refund of fees their class-action lawsuit claiming refund of fees and tuition.
• Freshman enrollment in colleges and universities continued to decline in fall 2021. The anticipated return of students who skipped matriculation in fall 2020 has not happened.
• As an indicator of what is likely happening in all primary and secondary schools across the country, Washington state public schools estimate enrollment for the next two years will be down another 4.5% from their February 2021 estimate.

TaxProf – 11/27/21 – Columbia Settles Covid-19 Class Action Tuition Refund Suit For $12.5 Million – Looks like Columbia University got off easy. Students there established a class and were suing for refund of tuition and fees because they were prohibited from in-person classes and instead attended an Ivy League school on their monitor.

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The Producer Price Index (PPI) in October 2021 continues to show unusually high and ongoing inflation. Increasing October was 0.6%, which follows a 0.5% increase in September and 0.7% increase in August.

The PPI has shown high inflation for all of 2021. The worst months were 1.2% in January, 1.0% in April, and 1.0% in July. Those extremes have not repeated for the last quarter, which is a small amount of good news.

Graph at the top of this post shows the monthly change and final demand (the total index in other words) in blue. The average of the monthly changes in green. The red line shows core change, which excludes food, energy, and trade.

The PPI was increasing around 0.4% the month until the end of 2020. Since then it has averaged 0.8% for 2021 through October. Ouch.

This index is explained by the Bureau of Labor Statistics as follows:

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Another senior official in the Federal Reserve had odd trades in 2020.  This brings to three the number of extremely senior Fed officials doing strange things.

On 2/28/20 the chairman of the Federal Reserve issued a statement saying that the evolving coronavirus would require close monitoring by the Federal Reserve. Unusual release also indicated there were risks emerging in terms of economic activity.

Such statements get close attention by the investment markets because they contain any hint of what the Fed is thinking and what the Fed might do. The market then responds to those statements, inferring what it means and what those actions might do to interest rates and the stock markets.

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August 26, 2021

Navy Corpsman Maxton Soviak, 22, of Berlin Heights, Ohio, Navy

Lance Cpl. Kareem Nikoui, 20, of Norco, California, USMC

Lance Cpl. David L. Espinoza, 20, of Rio Bravo, Texas, USMC

Lance Cpl. Rylee McCollum, 20, of Jackson, Wyoming, USMC

Lance Cpl. Jared Schmitz, 20, of St. Charles, Missouri, USMC

Cpl. Hunter Lopez, 22, of Indio, California, USMC

Staff Sgt. Taylor Hoover, 31, of Salt Lake City, Utah, USMC

Cpl. Daegan William-Tyeler Page, 23, of Omaha, Nebraska, USMC

Sgt. Nicole Gee, 23, of Sacramento, California, USMC

Cpl. Humberto A. Sanchez, 22, of Logansport, Indiana, USMC

Lance Cpl. Dylan R. Merola, 20, of Rancho Cucamonga, California, USMC

Sgt. Johanny Rosario Pichardo, 25, of Lawrence, Massachusetts, USMC

Staff Sgt. Ryan C. Knauss, 23, of Corryton, Tennessee, Army

Over 100 Afghanistan citizens seeking to flee the country to save their lives.