Since Lockdowns, a 12% GDP Loss; Half of US Dollar Purchasing Power Stolen
any of us have had the intuition that the economic damage from 2020
Etienne Note: It’s funny, I was trying to raise money a couple of months ago to essentially do what the new alternative CPI measurement mentioned in this article, The Reality Index, has done. Use AI & alternative methods of calculating CPI (Zillow Data for actual Rents vs. the BLS homeowner survey as one example) to get closer to the actual inflation rate vs. the politicized BLS CPI that significantly undercounts inflation to rip off Social Security recipients, pensioners, and TIPS holders. I was able to raise some funds but didn’t get all I wanted so we made the decision to build out our own censorship-proof infrastructure to move off Substack since they are censoring us… HARD… and put the CPI project on the back burner. Fortuitously, Tom Elliott, Founder & CEO, Grabien Inc., came along and did the work for us. I wonder if our expose and investigation: THE GREATEST THEFT IN HUMAN HISTORY! How the Banks and “Government” Will Steal At Least $2.73 Million From Every Working American… “Legally,” helped to inspire this project? We are delighted and I am working on re-anchoring our calculations to the Reality Index vs. ShadowStats and the Chapwood Index for a more defensible estimate of the total theft of fractional reserve banking, “government” taxes, and Social Security underpayment! Stay tuned! Sign up at https://greatest-theft.com
to get notified when the next version of our expose is released as a book!
By Jeffrey A. Tucker — Brownstone Institute
Many of us have had the intuition that the economic damage from 2020 – including industrial stoppages, monetary printing, supply-chain disruptions, extended school closures, and general population demoralization – was in fact far greater than official statistics indicate.
What follows will shore up this intuition, using new techniques and numbers from an innovative project called RealityIndex.co.
It’s true that official data is bad enough, showing a 26% loss in purchasing power, slow growth in output, and only marginal improvements in real income. The labor participation rate and worker/population ratio never fully recovered and continue to fall.
Unavoidably Unsafe: Childhood Vaccines Reconsidered
New Book By Edward Geehr and Jeffrey Barke - 30 Q&As - Book Review and Summary
By Edward Geehr and Jeffrey Barke — Lies are Unbekoming
The Supreme Court of the United States has affirmed that childhood vaccines are “unavoidably unsafe” products. The doctrine is not rhetorical. It is the legal foundation on which the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act granted vaccine manufacturers blanket immunity from product liability, affirmed and extended in Bruesewitz v. Wyeth in 2011. The schedule that has expanded under this protection now contains seventeen vaccines and eighty-nine doses delivered before age six. Most parents signing consent forms for their children’s vaccinations have never been told the legal classification of what they are agreeing to. Unavoidably Unsafe (Skyhorse, 2024), by physicians Edward Geehr and Jeffrey Barke, grades each vaccine on that schedule against the CDC’s own published criteria and concludes that the legal admission may be the most honest statement in the entire architecture.
Geehr and Barke are conventional American physicians with three decades of medical practice between them. Both hold the MD degree. Barke is a California physician who became publicly visible on May 9, 2020 at a rally in his state — wearing scrubs and a lab coat under dark sunglasses — declaring that “never in the history of this great republic have we quarantined the healthy.” He was among the first mainstream physicians in the country to publicly object to the COVID-19 lockdowns. Both authors operate fully within the conventions of contemporary medicine. They use “germ theory,” “viral pathogenesis,” “antibody response,” “immune system,” and “autoimmune disorders” as the established categories of their profession. They do not challenge that framework. What they challenge is whether the seventeen products administered to American children under its banner have actually been tested, are actually effective, and are actually safe. The book carries a foreword by Del Bigtree of the Informed Consent Action Network.
Study Finds Sunscreen Use Linked to Higher Risk of Multiple Skin Cancers
A 470,000+ person study found sunscreen users faced dramatically higher risk of melanoma, basal cell carcinoma, and squamous cell carcinoma — even after accounting for major skin cancer risk factors.
By Nicolas Hulscher, MPH — Focal Points
A UK Biobank study involving over 470,000 people found that individuals who reported using sunscreen more frequently had substantially higher risk of multiple skin cancers — even after researchers accounted for major confounding factors like age, sex, skin type, tanning ability, sunburn history, sunlamp use, and time spent outdoors.
The findings are worrisome:
• MELANOMA: +292% higher risk (RR = 3.92)
• BASAL CELL CARCINOMA: +140% higher risk (RR = 2.40)
• SQUAMOUS CELL CARCINOMA: +126% higher risk (RR = 2.26)
The researchers categorized sun protection habits from “never/rarely” to “always” and found the strongest associations among the most frequent sunscreen users.
In other words: the more sunscreen use reported, the higher the observed skin cancer risk.
This was an observational study, meaning it cannot prove sunscreen directly caused cancer. However, the study was also not a simplistic comparison of random sunscreen users versus non-users. Researchers statistically accounted for many of the biggest known skin cancer risk factors — including skin color, hair color, tanning ability, childhood sunburns, tanning bed exposure, outdoor time, age, and sex.
Even after all of that, the association remained.
Many chemical sunscreens contain hormone disruptors that are rapidly absorbed into the bloodstream, including compounds like oxybenzone, octocrylene, and homosalate.
Some formulations have also been found contaminated with benzene, a known human carcinogen.
House Report Finds Minnesota Officials Ignored Fraud To Avoid Racism Accusations
A House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform report released Monday paints a devastating picture of both Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and state Attorney General Keith Ellison.
A House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform report released Monday paints a devastating picture of both Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and state Attorney General Keith Ellison, finding that they both knew about widespread fraud in state social services programs and failed to act.
The report centers on the Feeding Our Future scandal, in which a Minnesota-based nonprofit systematically exploited federal COVID-19 relief funds intended to provide meals to children.
So far, more than 60 people have already been found guilty of fraud in connection with the scheme, the majority of whom are of Somali descent. Some defendants used stolen taxpayer money to buy luxury goods, while others funneled proceeds to a radical Islamic terrorist group operating in Somalia. At least $300 million in federal child nutrition funds were placed at serious risk, and approximately $9 billion in Medicaid losses resulted from the broader fraud environment state officials allowed to fester.
“Fraud warnings were elevated to the most senior levels of the Minnesota state government, meaningful corrective action was delayed or avoided, and payments continued long after credible signs of fraud emerged,” the report states
Blind Submission To Authority Is Caused By Bad Parenting
Blind submission to authority is the result of propaganda and indoctrination, but it’s also the result of bad parenting.
By Caitlin Johnstone— Caitlin's Newsletter
Blind submission to authority is the result of propaganda and indoctrination, but it’s also the result of bad parenting. Raising kids who aren’t allowed to say no to you is raising adults who don’t think anyone should be allowed to oppose their rulers.
That’s mainly what you’re seeing in the comments section of any viral police brutality video with people defending the cop’s actions and saying the victim should have complied with commands more perfectly. All they’re really saying is “Don’t disobey Daddy and you won’t get smacked!”
You can see their parenting in their faces when conversing about politics and news in person. Discuss the latest act of war or abuse with someone who’s been trained to reflexively obey authority and you can watch them running calculations trying to find excuses to justify why the powerful are correct in this given instance, even if you’re presenting them with brand new information. They never pause to reflect on whether their apologia is grounded in facts or morality; they begin with the assumption that the authority figure must be correct and work backward from there.
An Indian Billionaire Was Targeted by Trump. Then He Poured Money Into a Startup Secretly Backed by Donald Trump Jr.
An obscure Texas firm secretly connected to the president’s son said it received at least $100 million from Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries. At the same time, the Ambani family secured major polic
Etienne Note: This article also appears in “Government”, Media and Academia Criminality Exposed, A digest of HUNDREDS and HUNDREDS of articles exposing and suggesting inter-generational organized crime’s control of the “Government,” Media and Academia by the Art of Liberty Foundation. You can view the other articles or subscribe on Telegram: https://t.me/Government_Scams
By Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski — ProPublica
In late November in Jamnagar, India, the scions of two of the most powerful families in the world stood face-to-face. On one side was 30-year-old Anant Ambani, son of one the richest men in Asia. On the other was Donald Trump Jr. For months, the Trump administration had been on the offensive against the sprawling Ambani energy empire, placing it at the center of an escalating tariff campaign against India. But after Trump Jr. touched down, the two men toured the Ambanis’ private zoo, and at night they performed a Gujarati folk dance, grinning as they moved together to the music.
Four months later, an obscure Texas startup called America First Refining announced that it had received a nine-figure investment from the Ambanis’ company. The deal puzzled numerous energy investors familiar with the project, which aims to build the first major new oil refinery in the U.S. in about 50 years. The company is run by a serial entrepreneur with a history of bankruptcy and lawsuits alleging fraud. After more than a decade of failed attempts to raise money, blown deadlines and rebrands, it had been floundering.
America First Refining’s unexpected breakthrough came after it forged a previously unreported relationship with Trump Jr., who secretly acquired a stake in the startup, according to records and seven people familiar with the company. The new details reveal the role the president’s son has played in a theme of Trump’s second term: overseas investors with interests before the administration putting money into the Trump family’s business interests.
Consumer prices rose 4.2% annually in May, highest in three years
Inflation accelerated in May as rising energy costs contributed to pain for consumers, though underlying pressures were less intense.
Etienne Note: We have been trying to get the population focused on the economic warfare and theft of inflation for some time. As we revamp our news website for the move off Substack due to their censorship, inflation and the economy will become a central theme. There is simply no more important piece of understanding then what is money, why does it have value and how the banks and “government” are stealing the value out of what society earns and saves. In many ways, everything else including the Iran War is noise and distraction. The war does mask much of theft of inflation making it appear temporary and related to the war but the underlying cause is monetary and the biggest theft in human history. We are using the new Reality Index (an alternative inflation index to the BLS CPI which is filled with shenanigans to mask the true inflation rate) to anchor our investigation into the total cost of the theft more defensible and understandable. Stay tuned and sign up to be notified when released at https://greatest-theft.com
Inflation accelerated in May as rising energy costs contributed to pain for consumers, though underlying pressures were less intense.
The consumer price index, a broad gauge of goods and services costs across the U.S. economy, rose at a seasonally adjusted 0.5% for the month, putting the annual inflation rate at 4.2%, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Wednesday. Both numbers were in line with the Dow Jones consensus though the monthly number was 0.1 percentage point below the April reading.
Inflation climbed above 4% for the first time in three years, though the increase met expectations amid concerns over how much the surge in energy prices would impact the economy. The level was the highest since April 2023 and above the 3.8% reading from April.
However, stripping out volatile food and energy prices, the so-called core CPI accelerated 0.2% for the month and 2.9% from a year ago. While the annual rate was in line with the forecast, the monthly gain was below the 0.3% estimate and less than the 0.4% April increase.
Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5
Today we’re launching Claude Fable 5: a Mythos-class1 model that we’ve made safe for general use.
Today we’re launching Claude Fable 5: a Mythos-class1 model that we’ve made safe for general use.
Fable 5’s capabilities exceed those of any model we’ve ever made generally available. It is state-of-the-art on nearly all tested benchmarks of AI capability, showing exceptional performance in software engineering, knowledge work, vision, scientific research, and many other areas. The longer and more complex the task, the larger Fable 5’s lead over our other models.
Releasing a model this capable comes with risks. Without safeguards, Fable 5’s capabilities in areas like cybersecurity could be misused to cause serious damage. We’ve therefore launched the model with safeguards that mean queries on some topics will instead receive a response from our next-most-capable model, Claude Opus 4.8. To release the model both safely and quickly, we’ve tuned these safeguards conservatively—they’ll sometimes catch harmless requests, though they trigger, on average, in less than 5% of sessions. With more capable models arriving in the coming months, we’re working to improve our safeguards and reduce false positives as quickly as we can.
LIVE EVENT — From Isolation to Action: Finding (or Creating!) the Freedom Movement in Your Community
You’re not alone — you’re just not connected yet. Join Etienne de la Boétie² (Art of Liberty Foundation) and the CounterForce Alliance team for a live stream on how to find or start a liberty group, make existing groups more effective, and use the tools that get results. Sunday, June 14th — 7:00 PM EST / 6:00 PM CST / 5:00 PM MST / 4:00 PM PST. Read the companion article: Finding (or Creating!) the Liberty Movement
Together, we build a freer future. Educate. Organize. Take action.
