#28 Investments Evil and DDT

In My Right Mind

Radio Show #2021-8, Podcast #

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Note: For purposes of time, not all material here made it into the

podcast. It has been left in this script because it’s interesting. Thank you

Russ and PJ

S&P 500 IN SEPTEMBER:

I reported to you kind folks out there in radioland at the

beginning of the month that September is historically the worst month in the

stock markets, w/ the S&P 500 typically losing 0.70%. WHOOPS!

As I wrote this on Wednesday morning, the S&P 500 was down

4.3% for the month. So, expect to see lower account values when your

statements arrive next week. No big deal; in the average year we

generally see a pullback of 13%, according to Fox Bus News.

This is from Robert Almeida, the Global Inv Strategist for MFS:

“The markets are awash in crosscurrents, so it’s critical to focus

on what’s material and filter out market noise.

Profits are a function of revenues versus costs, and we think that

revenue growth is vulnerable and costs are likely to rise.

We expect high-priced financial assets that deliver underwhelming

fundamental performance to be repriced while stocks and bonds of companies that

meet expectations may be in short supply, earning them a scarcity premium.”

“When things get complicated, I find it helpful to try to simplify

them. In its simplest form, investing is an exchange of capital for a stream of

future cash flows. The cost of capital is set by its providers based on the

riskiness of the investment and the probability of realizing promised cash

flows. What makes investing difficult, of course, is that the future is

unknowable. Investors can only theorize about a project’s potential for success

or failure in terms of a range of potential outcomes.

Technology has democratized information, and society is more

informed than ever before. We have infinite and instantaneous access to news.

However, I question whether that has improved investors’ ability to price risk.

As John Naisbitt writes in Megatrends, “We are drowning in information but

starved for knowledge.”

I won’t bore you with the details, but he goes on to say in his

conclusion that he is not suggesting a bear market or correction is on the

horizon. I don’t have that type of clairvoyance, nor do my strategist peers

(though some think they do!). Anyway, that’s not how we think about investing.

Looking ahead, we expect high-priced financial assets that deliver

underwhelming fundamental performance to be repriced. When valuations are high,

the market’s tolerance for disappointing data (even if the miss is small) is

low. Conversely, stocks and bonds of companies that meet expectations may be in

short supply and outperform by earning a scarcity premium.

Combined with the poor risk/reward tradeoff in many financial

assets today, discretion has the potential to be worth more than it has in a

very long time. It’s a time for patient, skilled investors.

After all, as the saying goes, it’s the second mouse that gets the

cheese.

PATIENCE Grasshopper. I have been raising cash in my less

aggressive accounts because in large part, I agree with Mr. Almeida’s

outlook.

List of evils:

There was a column this week in the WSJ by one of my favorite

writers, lance Morrow entitled “Not that long ago Evil really meant

something.”. We can all agree that Hitler personified evil. And so

did Charles Manson. But like everything else in modern America, the word

evil has been dumbed-down. It seems that today, anyone who disagrees with

a neo-liberal is now…considered evil. Sean Hannity is evil. Tucker

Carlson is evil. I am evil because I report inconvenient facts to neo-liberals

who have no idea what a fact actually is.

So I wanted to go thru a list of things…or policies… and the

people who advocate for those policies that I find to be evil.

This is my partial list of evil stuff:

DENIAL OF ELECTRICITY TO 13% OF HUMANITY:

Power grabs cloaked in pseudo science, like the global warming

hoax might seem harmless enough. The lucid among us who actually

understand the scientific method understand this is total BS. But, it is

sold as saving the planet for future generations, and those of you who can’t

compute simple math or use logic to assemble and analyze facts, or who “feel”

like tackling a fake problem makes you virtuous, understand this: 940 myn

humans live without electricity, and neo-liberals, in their relentless pursuit

of political power are happy to deny those nearly 1 byn souls from ever

flipping a light switch, or owning a refrigerator to keep their food fresh in

the hot tropics. Those without electricity have a 15-yr lower life

expectancy…and live in squalor. Some 700,000 people die in sub-saharan

Africa every year due to burning dung, wood and cardboard in their homes for

cooking and heating.

Is it evil to deny those souls life extending electricity?

Can those of YOU who advocate for denying 1 byn people access to electricity

because doing so makes you feel good, can you virtuous souls imagine living the

rest of your short, miserable, disease-ridden lives without electricity?

Hell no. I mean, as neo-liberals there is simply no way to disabuse you

from being miserable. Misery is part and parcel of neo-liberalism…they

are just not happy people! California uses more electricity on its

pools and hot tubs than do all 44 myn inhabitants of Uganda. You think

those virtuos neo-liberals in Calif would forgo their warm spas? Then

think again!

So, I ask again, is denying 13% of the planet’s population

electricity not evil? Because it sure seems evil to me. In fact, in

my opinion, denying others the things you take for granted in order to feed

your vanity and ego is a primary definition of evil. (World Bank, UN, Biden

administration, The Brookings Inst, The New Climate Economy, Robert Kennedy,

etc.).

Dichloro-diphenyl-trichloro-ethane…or…DDT & MALARIA:

Based upon the lies that were written by Rachel Carson in her

ridiculous book “Silent Spring”, the founding administrator of the EPA, Mr

William Ruckelshaus…who was an attorney and a politician…not a scientist…banned

DDT. Because doing so made neo-liberals feel good….remember folks, we

need to live OUR lives in ways that make illiberals…. FEEL….good.

At the time of its banning, DDT was primarily used twice per year,

in very small doses…as a spray in mud huts in 42 countries, in Sub-Saharan

Africa. It was VERY effective at repelling the female anopheles mosquito

that carries malaria.

Here’s a quick history lesson that I find to be fascinating…and

for any of you long-time listeners, you might recall this is a pet issue for me

that I used to lambaste Michael Conniff over:

From The New Atlantis: “DDT was used during WW2 with great

effect. In the brief Sicilian campaign of early summer 1943, malaria had

struck 22,000 Allied troops — a greater casualty toll than that inflicted by

the Axis forces themselves. The Allied High Command declared that “from

now on, DDT marches with the troops.”

The order could not have come at a better time. As British and

American forces advanced in Europe, they encountered millions of victims of

Nazi (the Nat’l SOCIALIST German Workers Party) oppression — civilians under

occupation, slave laborers, prisoners of war, concentration camp inmates —

dying in droves from insect-borne diseases. But with the armies of liberation

came squads spraying DDT, and with it, life for millions otherwise doomed to

destruction. The same story was repeated in the Philippines, Burma, China, and

elsewhere in the Asia-Pacific theater. Never before in history had a single

chemical saved so many lives in such a short amount of time.

In recognition for his role in this public health miracle, Paul

Müller was given the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1948. Presenting the award,

the Nobel Committee said: “DDT has been used in large quantities in the

evacuation of concentration camps, of prisoners and deportees. Without any

doubt, the material has already preserved the life and health of hundreds of thousands.”

With the coming of peace, DDT became available to civilian public

health agencies around the world. They had good reason to put it to use

immediately, since over 80 percent of all infectious diseases afflicting humans

are carried by insects or other small arthropods. These scourges, which

have killed billions of people, include bubonic plague, yellow fever, typhus,

dengue, Chagas disease, African sleeping sickness, elephantiasis,

trypanosomiasis, viral encephalitis, leishmaniasis, filariasis, and, most

deadly of all, malaria. Insects have also caused or contributed to mass death

by starvation or malnutrition, by consuming up to 40 percent of the food crop

and destroying much of the livestock in many developing countries.

One of the first countries to benefit from the use of DDT for

civilian purposes was the United States. In the years immediately preceding

World War II, between one million and six million Americans, mostly drawn from

the rural South, contracted malaria annually. In 1946, the U.S. Public Health

Service initiated a campaign to wipe out malaria through the application of DDT

to the interior walls of homes. The results were dramatic. In the first half of

1952, there were only two confirmed cases of malaria contracted within the United

States.

Other countries were quick to take note of the American success,

and those that could afford it swiftly put DDT into action. In Europe, malaria

was virtually eradicated by the mid-1950s. South African cases of malaria

quickly dropped by 80 percent; Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) reduced its malaria

incidence from 2.8 million in 1946 to 17 (people) in 1963; and India cut its

malaria death rate almost to zero. In 1955, with financial backing from the

United States, the U.N. World Health Organization launched a global campaign to

use DDT to eradicate malaria. Implemented successfully across large areas of

the developing world, this effort soon cut malaria rates in numerous countries

in Latin America and Asia by 99 percent or better. Even for Africa, hope that

the age-old scourge would be brought to an end appeared to be in sight.”

Then…in 1962…one of the planet’s greatest (and by greatest, I mean

worst) perpetrators of genocide wrote her nonsensical book that was full of

lies called Silent Spring. This was the advent of the so-called

“environmental movement” which is the ruse under which power-hungry socialists

around the world are attempting to regulate, confiscate and control energy

assets under the guise of the Global Warming Hoax.

The New Atlantis goes on to say that “While it was excellent

literature, Silent Spring was very poor science. Carson claimed that DDT was

threatening many avian species with imminent extinction. Her evidence for this,

however, was anecdotal and unfounded. In fact, during the period of widespread

DDT use preceding the publication of Silent Spring, bird populations in the

United States increased significantly, probably as a result of the pesticide’s

suppression of their insect disease vectors and parasites. Since DDT was banned,

here in the USA we have lost 25% of our bird population.

In fact, the U.S. Starling population peaked in 1969, and has

dropped by 65% since then.

In her chapter “Elixirs of Death,” Carson wrote that synthetic

insecticides can affect the human body in “sinister and often deadly ways,” so

that cumulatively, the “threat of chronic poisoning and degenerative changes of

the liver and other organs is very real.” In terms of DDT specifically, in her

chapter on cancer she reported that one expert “now gives DDT the definite

rating of a ‘chemical carcinogen.’” These alarming assertions were

false as well.

Silent Spring led to the banning of DDT, essentially

worldwide. From the time DDT was banned in 1972-2006, how many

dark-skinned, sub-Saharan African women and children have been killed by

malaria?

According to every democrat’s favorite so-called health

organization…the WHO…some 44 myn people died from malaria due to the DDT ban

while byns more were infected and suffered from the disease. Now, Hitler

was responsible for the deaths of as many as 100 myn people; so Rachel Carson

is kind of a piker compared to Old Adolph. But can you imagine having the

deaths of 44 myn people on your resume?

So again I ask, is it not evil to deny something as vital as good

health…and LIFE…to others just because doing so makes YOU feel good? I

hope all of you neo-liberals that supported the DDT ban bathe in your

virtue…such as it is.

Oh, and here is a quote from one of the co-founders of the

infamous Club of Rome…a jerk named Alexander King back in 1990:

“My own doubts came when DDT was introduced for civilian use. In

Guyana, within two years it had almost eliminated malaria, but at the same time

the birth rate had doubled. So my chief quarrel with DDT in hindsight is that

it has greatly added to the population problem.” Well pal, since the avg

person generates 50,000 thoughts/day…there is no population problem!

And I suspect with all of the nonsense that Illiberals spew about

racism, that in large part, many of them are the true racists. Again,

some 44 myn black women and children perished due to the neo-liberal, American

Environmental movement. Congratulations you evil, selfish, toilet bugs!

Oh, and one last point here; to this day DDT is wrongly

thought to be a vial, deadly pesticide…and used in super-huge quantities it

is. But used correctly…. it is a wonder chemical. Yet ask yourself

what immediately comes to your mind when you hear the acronym DDT. I am

willing to bet that 99% of you have negative connotations when you hear

DDT. Now, ask yourselves what comes to mind when you hear or see the

words fossil fuels, or carbon dioxide. Get it? Get it? I hope

so!

72%:

A full 72% of my federal income tax check goes to re-distribution

of my income to people whom I will never meet. What moral justification

is there to confiscate my hard-earned money and give it to people who breed

beyond their means, or fail to save for their own retirement? I got news

for you; There is zero honest, high-minded, meritorious rationale for

robbing Russ to pay Jane and Joe 6-pack. Stealing from those of us who

produce….. to pay those who refuse to produce…..stay home from work is evil,

pure and simple.

DEFICIT SPENDING:

Is it evil to spend money that your children, their children, and

their children and their children haven’t even earned yet?

Democrats are great at manufacturing and counting votes. But beyond

counting votes. Most of them really suck at math.

I believe that spending money that isn’t yours is the height

of evil. Our current nat’l debt is almost $29 tyn, or about $87,500 per

man, woman and child living in our country. Our unfunded liabilities

combined with our nat’l debt is approx $240 tyn, or $725,000 per every man,

woman and child in the country. And of course we are witnessing the

democrats trying their darndest to run-up another $4.7 tyn to implement

evermore socialism. And of course it isn’t just democrats who have voted

80 x to increase our debt ceiling. Republicans talk a good game about

balancing the budget, but all of that talk is straight BS!

Again, those of you who advocate for deficit spending…for spending

money that future Americans haven’t yet earned are selfish, evil and vile.

THE GENERATIONAL WELFARE STATE:

The generational welfare state is one of the original sins of

neo-liberalism. And this original sin is funded with the aforementioned

deficit spending along w/ the confiscation and subsequent re-distribution of

income from those of us who work to those who don’t….or won’t.

When LBJ started your welfare state back in 1965, only 23.5% of

black children were born to a single mother. When the government promised

it could replace the father as head-of-household, for some reason, the percent

of black children born to a single mother exploded to more than 77%.

Fatherless children of all races, ALL RACES face the...