Peak Prosperity Publishing Note: This is the Introduction and Healthcare sections of Dave Collum’s Year in Review (exactly as it appears in the full review). We are posting this as a means to have a conversation in the comments on this portion of Dave’s Year in Review. We will post one section per day for the holiday week, each with it’s own comment section.
The full Year in Review can be found HERE.
The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.~ Mark Twain
This is my 14th Year in Review, and they are getting very hard to write. I am grateful to Peak Prosperity for providing this opportunity to hang myself. They began as a summary of my investments and a few comments about what I was pondering for some friends at the Prudent Bear chat board and have morphed into a beast that has tipped the scales at over 300 pages on a big year. I think the most epic was 2021 in which I wrote about rising authoritarianism.1 I had a goal—a plot rattling in my head—that had to be finished. Last year had three parts in which the final section on Covid and the lockdowns was roughed out but never uploaded. I am not sure whether I was Covid-saturated or I perceived that the world had had enough, but I just buried it in a shallow grave with other victims of Fauci. This year is at risk of the same thing happening.
For those with the appetite for industrial strength snark, Dave Collum’s review of the year offers magisterial and cynical analysis of a year most of us would probably rather forget.2~ Price Value Partners
A psychologist once suggested that I fly at 35,000 feet, spot something, drop down to check on it, and then return to full elevation. That’s not a terrible description. I am motivated to write guided by two beliefs: (1) I could figure out what was happening in the world, and (2) chronicling the human folly would somehow influence the outcome. I now believe neither to be true. The Truman Show is throwing too many plot twists that are so monumental that a sense of futility is taking over. I was told not to dwell on what I cannot control, which is now everything. The plot seems like a season of Yellowstone with the vague distinctions between good and evil, highly flawed players, and functional equivalents of The Train Station. (For those unfamiliar with Yellowstone’s plot, that is where they dump the corpses.)
Great people talk about ideas, average people talk about themselves, and small people talk about others.~ John C. Maxwell.
Diverse people talk about all three! In any event, these allusions to Hollywood are not by chance. I have a growing sense that Hollywood is profoundly corrupt—I am not just talking drugs and sex—and is charged with “fictionalizing reality.” Got a problem with elite pedophilia and Satanic cults? I believe we do. Hollywood created Eyes Wide Shut starring Tom Cruise. The CIA was too dark and sinister, so Hollywood fictionalized it with The Good Shepherd starring Matt Damon. Assassins-in-training in the CIA’s MKUltra program getting into mischief? Call Matt off the bench again to play Jason Bourne. By anchoring public perception on fictional plots, Hollywood disarms reality. Hey: it’s just a movie, right?
We now live in a nation where doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the press destroys information, religion destroys morals, and our banks destroy our economy.~ Chris Hedges
What keeps me writing? Narcissism. I love the hugs. Catherine Austin Fitts put my entire writeup on the coming pension crisis in her Solari Reports noting, “I loved reading your year-end War and Peace.” Larry Summers told me “you have no filter.” My first Covid writeup in 2020 was said to be in the hands of Steve Scalise’s staff for uploading to the Congressional record. (I have no idea if it made it.) As outlined below, I have wonderful chats with brilliant people on the podcast circuit.
There are the Joe Sixpacks who have no voice and reach out in comments sections or by emails thanking me for voicing their concerns. So many people just want a voice. Tweeters with 20 followers are thrilled when they get a response because somebody heard them. These are the guys who listened to Oliver Anthony’s Richmen North of Richmond and were brought to tears.3 The media tried to tell us Oliver wrote an anthem for angry white guys, but montages of black guys rockin’ to his lyrics proliferated on social media. When Elon Musk publicly told Disney’s Bob Iger to “Go fuck yourself” for trying to blackmail him by pulling ad revenues, that was the fuckoff heard ‘round the world. I don’t know if Elon is a good person—probably not—but he is playing one on the internet, and he is very special in his own way.
Musk: If somebody is going to blackmail me with advertising—blackmail me with money? Go fuck yourself.Andrew Ross Sorkin: But…
Musk: Go…fuck…yourself. Is that clear? I hope it is. Hi Bob! [referring to Disney CEO Bob Iger]
Sorkin: Blah, blah, blah: what do you do?
Musk: F…Y.4
That isn’t writing at all, it’s typing.
~ Truman Capote
Good writing on important subjects does not go out of date. If something is not important a month or even a year later, it was not important the day it was written. I try to touch third rails. If a 68-year-old tenured professor can’t speak up, then who can? It gets me in trouble occasionally. I got canceled pretty seriously in 2020, sleeping with a shotgun fully committed to taking at least one of those death-threatening neo-Stalinist Antifa curb stompers to the light with me if they had showed up at my house. Regular readers certainly have detected elevated anger as I witness the world’s events unfold in ways that were unimaginable a few years back. I have no intention of pussy footing around my foes. I would love to see that mass-murdering Tony Fauci fed to the spirit cookers.
You'll get a fair trial followed by a first-class hanging.~ Judge Roy Bean
Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.~ Harry S. Truman
If you came out of the Covid pandemic and not figured out that the entire narrative was an exercise in authoritarianism and possibly a largely peaceful depopulation, I think you are pretty lame. If, however, you grasp the Covid story, you probably have also figured out that the CIA whacked Kennedy, 911 was an inside job, and every war in at least a century was started with one or more false flag events. If so, Pat yourself on the back for grasping many big issues. Robbie Parker understands…
Maybe the Covid scam and all the associated lies proffered by credentialed experts have you wondering if the credentialed climate experts are lying too. Climate change, in my opinion, is the biggest scam in history. If, by contrast, you are supergluing yourself to roads during rush hour and throwing tomato soup onto masterpieces to save humanity, you suffer Munchausen by progressive and are a member of the biggest cult in history.5 Please—I beg you—when Reverend Jones gives you the nod, drink. (I have returned to climate change again this year, just to top off previous thoughts with some fresh ones and to piss of The Cult.)
If there must be madness, something may be said for having it on a heroic scale.~ John Kenneth Galbraith
If you support biological males competing in women’s sports, you must have gotten picked last for kickball, and you certainly don’t support women’s sports. If you oppose erasing the gender line in sports but don’t speak up, shame on you. It is called ‘pluralistic ignorance’ when members of a group privately disagree with what is considered to be the prevailing attitudes, creating a false consensus. The problem festers when those who know better refuse to speak up.
I will take the Women’s Sports Complex to task in Part III. And if you know that a million children are disappearing each year—you should know this because those are mainstream-accepted numbers—but have not taken the time to ask who is receiving these children, be patient. I intend to take you down that darkest rabbit hole in Part III. The guilty consumers of these children are not dirtballs hiding in trailer parks ring-fenced from elementary schools but rather dirtballs residing in C-suites, mansions in Hollywood, and the political Halls of Power. They should be rounded up, tried, and executed regardless of which country, corporation, or Congressional district they oversee.
Conspiracy theory is used against anyone who asks questions the government does not want to answer.~ Tucker Carlson
By now you’ve figured out I am a conspiracy theorist. I believe men and women of wealth and power conspire every day, and you likely gravitated to this review knowing that. I implore you to stop using the term “conspiracy theory” and “conspiracy theorist” pejoratively. When somebody comes at me with that, I wear that badge with honor, but not before I rip their faces off for trying to censor my uncomfortable speech. We know they lie to us all the time; we are simply trying to put the puzzle pieces together.
Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.~ Einstein
My views of finance and geopolitics have been profoundly influenced by my career in chemistry in which I have published over 160 papers, which is a solid count. Almost every one of these papers, however, chronicled how elite scientists who were trying to get it right managed to bone it, sometimes quite badly. I developed the rare skill of being able to confront credentialed experts and say with a firm voice, “I think you are full of shit.” I can entertain any idea that does not break the laws of physics, although endorsing it is another matter. I try to pry my Overton Window wide open to observe what I previously could not fathom. I then write to clear my thoughts and, hopefully, to pry your window open a little bit too.
Now that I have shaken off the pathological losers, let’s get down to business. Here I am again with my little pic and shovel trying to clean up a mudslide. I follow several guidelines when writing. I try not to dwell on things I can’t control and avoid topics that I can’t offer a fresh perspective. Last year I wrote about Ukraine by rounding up about 40 voices that I believed were sincerely trying to find the truth, and then compiled these disparate voices into a single narrative.6 I believe that writeup was some of my best work. Many may disagree because I pointed an accusing finger squarely at NATO, not Putin. I return to the topic this year to clean up some loose ends, fully convinced that the US war machine is hell-bent on mass murder of Ukrainians. Call me a liberal—a commie dog if you wish—but I am a former Goldwater conservative and Reagan Republican who is appalled by how profoundly the US has lost its way in the world.
Our lives have become wall-to-wall uncertainty...The main institutions of our society have abdicated their role for public-spirited adjudication of what is true based on expertise. What you are having—what you are seeing—is people coming to hate experts and coming to hate institutions because they are realizing that these institutions lie to people that they never considered unless they were Alex Jones fans to begin with. You are seeing a complete destruction of reality unless they were physically there...Nobody has an answer.7~ Eric Weinstein (@EricRWeinstein)
Part of my obvious dismay stems from the growing conviction that the world is hurdling toward global authoritarianism, the core of my 2021 YIR. It’s not just that Nazi Klaus and his you-will-eat-bugs hooey. Every time you let a computer decide for you—every time you push your credit card in the slot or go through TSA security—a computer is deciding your fate. It’s binary: yes or no. No human stands willing or capable of overriding the decision. We are already being ruled by algorithms, and our future is offering up authoritarian CBDCs, digital IDs, facial recognition software, and carbon budgets, all enabled with AI. It is a march toward digital authoritarianism.
No, this guy on Twitter is hysterical. He isn’t in finance but knows a ton. He is a professor at Cornell. You gotta follow him.~ Overheard by a friend at a Philadelphia sporting event.
Sources and Social Media. Source material is critical. Firstly, nearly all mainstream media is worthless. The serious players have moved to Substack, a platform I may land on at some point in retirement. The censoring is so bad that if you are not ready to hit odd places like Rumble armed with a serious filter, I don’t think you have a chance of lifting the skirt of geopolitics. Censoring is now a multi-billion dollar industry with conferences and trade shows.8
Fact-checkers are useful as a contra-indicator: a large number of fact-checkers tell’s you the lie is a whopper. Wikipedia’s fine for basic facts but as soon as there is a whiff of politics involved, the CIA and FBI are all over it. That is straight from the founder of Wikipedia, Larry Sanger. Given that the three-letter agencies have budgets in the trillions for their dark-ops shit, is there any doubt that they completely control (or at least sanction) the narrative? Throw on heaps of censorship, and we have no chance of getting the straight scoop without archeological levels of digging. I am a huge fan of ZeroHedge. Of course, they get stuff wrong, but they are often first on the scene of the drive-by shootings by the Deep State.
When I see this stuff I think, you’re just a fucking idiot.~ @KeithMcCullough
So I have given up treading softly. I avoid asterisks to protect the faction of p*ssies who think pussies is an abomination. I’ve also lost patience with the Sharia of the political left taking over the entire system. On occasions where I suggest somebody should get more boosts, this is not out of concern for their well-being.
Topics Untouched: There are topics I will not touch for a host of reasons having to do with lack of interest, vast crowds already crowing about them excessively in the Propaganda-Industrial Complex, or hopes for a fatter pitch. I am not going to write about the Biden administration this year (at least not directly): their capacity to deliver profound content has overwhelmed me, and every pundit on the planet is already writing about those sock starchers. What I will say is that the Biden administration’s weaponization of the Department of Justice and its shredding of the Constitution is the most treasonous chapter of American History. The whole lot—cabinet members, staffers, Garland, prosecutors, and the Big Guy himself—should be rounded up, tried, and, if convicted, hurled into the cells currently occupied by J6 political prisoners.
An evil enemy will burn his own nation to the ground to rule over the ashes.~ Sun Tzu
The RNC is pathetic, but the DNC appears Hell-bent on destroying the Nation; it looks premeditated. By stating that, don’t I risk losing half my audience? No. You’re it. If you haven’t already figured out that Joe is a child molesting, compulsive lying, womanizing rapist with late-stage dementia who sold us out to the Ukrainians and Chinese, I can’t help you. The evidence is out there for the curious. You must at least be wondering why the DNC shows no obligation to serve up a credible candidate for the Nation’s highest office. I am sure many will not agree with these views. Hold those lovely thoughts of yours.
The trouble with Dave is he tends to sit on the fence.9Feargus OConnor-Greenwood, author of 180 Degrees: Unlearn The Lies You’ve Been Taught To Believe
This may shock some, but I currently have little to say about Trump. I nervously voted for him in 2016 and wrote what I thought was a good analysis of the 2016 election and the implications of the sea change in the country.10 The 2020 election was less interesting to me, although I firmly believe the election was both slanted—biased by powerful forces trying to keep Trump out of the Whitehouse—as well as rigged by total fraud at the ballot boxes. Besides the evidence, I am confident that there was nothing both parties wouldn’t do to keep him out of power. I was agnostic about a rerun until I watched them—them as in both parties and all three-letter agencies—weaponize the Department of Justice against The Donald and anybody within his orbit to ensure nobody stays within his orbit.
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.~ Friedrich Nietzsche
A friend, Peter Boghossian, noted that the solution to extreme left-wing politics is not extreme right-wing politics. The legendary Doug Murray says that revenge is a terrible emotion. I agree with both of these guys, but we are in a cold civil war that I fear could turn hot. As songwriter Bruce Cockburn lyrically noted, “If I had a rocket launcher, some son-of-a-bitch would pay.” I never want to see somebody hurt, but it is also never off my list. I now want to see Trump win. I want to see his detractors completely lose their minds.
Tim Deace of the Tim Deace Show: Who is the alternative media host or platform you think needs more prominence in a post-Fox world?
Jill Savage: I am going to go with an off-the-wall one in Dave Collum. He has a year-in-review document that he does. He is a professor at Cornell, but he is brilliant. Every podcast that he does is a must-listen.11
I did not see that one coming. I am also leaving Covid and Fauci alone this year. I think he is a mass murderer, and the response to Covid he orchestrated was an abomination, but it is time to move on with selective forgiveness. If you acted in a way that appears cowardly to protect your job or well-being, I understand. I got jabbed to protect mine. (Just today, my urologist let loose on the vaccine and lockdown with the same angst about its risk and not having a choice.) I am, however, rooting for the civil courts to mete out justice to the authoritarians and institutions who could have attenuated the bad response. I am less optimistic that the real criminals will become Billy Holiday’s strange fruit hanging. Next time they try to take our freedoms like that—and there will be a next time—get ready to fertilize that Tree of Liberty. Not a gun fan? Well, a Louisville slugger or a sand wedge are multipurpose. How the doctors and scientists regain their credibility is unclear, but here is a good starting point: stop lying.
Nobody has the right to not be offended. That right doesn’t exist in any declaration I have ever read.~ Salman Rushdie
The obedient always think of themselves as virtuous rather than cowardly.~ George Carlin
I have always imposed a personal gag order for one topic: I have assiduously avoided debates about Israel and Palestine. Well, this was a good year to retake my vows of verbal chastity. I have some novel thoughts—some controversial ones—but you ain’t gonna read about them here. This, of course, will piss off both sides who believe they are fighting genocide, but you are gonna have to carry on without me. I have touched the topic in public three times.
- I said to the students in my graduate class the following:
Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.~ Plato
Notice that I was so anodyne that I did not say what changed the World.
- I commented once on Twitter the day after the attack:
- I’ve suggested on podcasts that the conflict could go global. This situation is way more risky than Ukraine. I envision World War III as a global civil war—a global-scale Rwanda. I hope not. It is, at the very least, yet another profound inflammation to keep former friends fighting.
We have a challenge around political diversity on the campus...I would love to see a way in which we would expand the breadth of voices that we hear in our community...the answer is more speech. Not indifferent speech, not less speech.~ Michael Kotlikoff, Cornell Provost and friend
Unfortunately, others at Cornell were more liberal with their free speech and got Cornell into a pickle. Professor Rickman made national headlines by saying he was “exhilarated” by the Hamas attack.12 Incoming! The University President, Martha Pollack, denounced him by declaring that these “do not represent Cornell’s values.” She noted that this was only the second time that she denounced the opinions of a faculty member. Any guesses who the target of the first one was? Yup. Me. I defended the police in 2020 when they knocked an old man over in Buffalo.13
She was fundamentally wrong; the old guy was a scam artist looking for a fight, and he faked his injuries. The police acted appropriately. Her denunciations of both Rickman and me were wrong at a fundamental level for another reason: She cannot speak for Cornell or its values. She can speak for her values with the gravitas of the presidency backing her. She can discuss Cornell’s codes of conduct. But Cornell is an eclectic glob of characters with divergent values and conflicting ideas. Nobody can speak for Cornell’s values.
Martha’s job got worse within the week when a Korean kid posted horrific anti-semitic shit across social media. Both reputational and dollar losses for Cornell that week were incalculable. Two months later three Presidents of other elite universities—Harvard, Penn, and MIT—got hammered in front of Congress.14 They were inexcusably unprepared for the questions, placing their jobs at risk by the blunder. They screwed the pooch badly, but, in the spirit of Rikki Schlott’s treatise, Canceling of the American Mind (see Books), I think canceling them is inappropriate.
I suspect they entered those hallowed Halls of Congress arrogantly marinating in their superior intellects and self-worth, not realizing their opponents were armed with machetes not brains. I would, however, fire Harvard’s Claudine Gay for what she did to Roland Fryer15 under the guise of social justice and Law Professor Ronald S. Sullivan16 for defending Harvey Weinstein because apparently some are undeserving of good legal counsel. One could argue she should be fired and lose her PhD for multiple counts of alleged plagiarism.17,18
Gay's whole research agenda, her whole career, was based on my work… I don’t believe her record warranted tenure.19~Professor Carol Swain, waiting for this moment to pounce
UPenn lost its president within days, but whether she left in shame or disgust is unclear.20 Billionaire Harvard alums are sharpening their Schiffs for Claudine, but I betcha she will sneak out the backdoor soon.21 Elite universities may have collectively forfeited billions of donations. That is understandable but also unfair in my opinion. Universities have thousands of faculty and tens of thousands of students, many with batshit crazy ideas. Would you pull your support because you discovered there were some nutjobs in that crowd? I bleed Cornell Red. It is a great institution, and I continue to support it. By the way, nothing I just wrote should be construed as support for any national or ethnic group, but it probably will be.
Major Themes of the 2023 Year in Review.Well, with all that taken off the table, what the hell are you gonna talk about? Cool your jets. I am returning to Ukraine for some cleanup of that narrative and will top off Climate Change because the Climate Grifters will be pillaging for decades. The usual discussions of broken markets, the Fed, inflation, and the economy are discussed to tee up my case for a Multi-Decade Bear Market. (This is my base case; it could get worse.) I peek at RFK, Jr. as the second most interesting candidate in many election cycles—Trump being the first—and the catastrophic collapse of Law and Order. Part I wraps with a look at the curious oddities underlying the Maui fires and use them as a springboard to examine directed-energy weapons. I pulled my books section forward out of fear that it will be omitted like last year’s because I ran out of gas.
Part 3 of this YIR, presuming I can finish it, is where the really disturbing stuff rears its ugly head. After some credible concerns about Woke Culture (neo-Marxism) and transgenderism (more neo-Marxism), I intend to shoot into the darkest rabbit hole ever—the influence of pedophilia and geopolitics. This is not generic Epstein crap, but rather an attempt to understand how a million kids disappear from the face of the Earth each year and the untold dark tale of their fates.
There is something happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear.~ Buffalo Springfield
Why has this year been such a personal battle? Well, the pedophilia theme sucked the soul out of me and continues to be a work in progress. A section on Healthcare touches upon personal challenges that imposed both time and emotional constraints on my creative juices.
You gotta get right back under the horse.~ Catherine the Great
Contents
Part 1
Introduction
Contents
My Year
Healthcare
Investing – Gold, Energy, and Materials
Gold and Silver
Broken Markets
Multi-Decade Bull Market: 40 Years of Recency Bias
The Case for a Multi-Decade Bear Market
Part 2
Law and Order
Media
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Climate Change-Epilogue
News Nuggets
Lahaina Fires and DEWs
The War in Ukraine–Epilogue
Part 3 (Coming in January of 2024)
January 6–Epilogue
Woke Culture and Rising Neo-Marxism
Transgenderism
Pedophilia and Geopolitics
My Year
You can skip this part, but it is my annual Dear Diary entry, and there is some generally useful content. After years of stellar teaching evaluations with particular enthusiasm focused on my entertaining campfire stories, I started having minor scuffles with the snowflakes. A half dozen years ago I gave a guest lecture for a colleague. While describing my proclivity for not accepting chemical dogma, I alluded to my tendency to not accept conventional wisdom outside academia too. One sentence piqued the students’ angst: “There is something odd about the Las Vegas shootings that is not right; I’m gonna figure that one out.” That’s all it took for five graduate students to converge on the Chair’s office with hurt feelings. I was spot on that one too; the Las Vegas shootings were totally whacked.1 My initial response was, “Fuck ‘em.” But the message is clear: political climate change is serious.It comes out of not loving your children. People who love their children don’t drill holes in your children’s life raft.~ Eric Weinstein
I went to a symposium on “Free Speech in the Classroom” organized by Cornell’s President. I was ready to pounce with a few questions. She was a no-show as were the hard scientists, leaving the room filled with professors in the squishier subjects. The takehome lesson for me was that everybody is afraid of the students. How could an LGBTQLMNOP Gender Studies professor possibly not be bulletproof? Well, while I am walking on egg shells teaching chemists-in-training (OK. stomping on them); the humanists are dancing on chards of glass in front of an army of activists-in-training looking for scalps. (Can I still say scalps? Apparently, because I just did.) Don’t be too quick to blame the colleges for this sad state of affairs, however. The freshman are Children of the Corn, some arriving pre-fucked up by indoctrination since daycare with parents who failed to adequately immunize them from bad ideas.
If people can't control their own emotions then they have to start to control other people's behavior.~ John Cleese
This year I started the semester debilitated by a 1.5-inch bladder stone to be taken out by Dr. Luke Skywalker and his lightsaber that week. I told my class on Day One of the semester, “no chemistry today” and chatted with them while writhing in pain in a semi-fetal position sitting on a table. I discussed grading policy, study hints and habits, the profoud importance of digitally disconnecting long enough to get work done, and the philosophy of the course. To get ahead of the rumor mill, I also explained why my 2020 cancellation originating from two brawls with national labor unions (UAW and AFT) and the subsequent smear campaigns by the butt-hurt union organizers has made me Google toxic.
I also assured them that I will likely say something that offends them but urged them to talk to me rather than some adult, because I am the only one who actually cares to have that conversation. Well, the call came in later that day: I was told to stay in my lane or risk a mass exodus from the class. After a fusillade of F-bombs—I used F-bombs like authors use a space bar—I prepared for the next lecture. At the end of the 2nd lecture, having made several dozen wisecracks and fully demonstrated my linguistic incontinence, I told the class about my scolding, that Larry Summers is correct about lacking a filter, and that, “if that is gonna offend you, I suggest you drop the course." (That was the last response my reprimander was looking for.)
Well, two lectures later the second gag order came in via the Department Chair. Comically, he could not even tell me the actual complaint, only that some nimrod in the university relayed a vague message. The following lecture I noted that it was getting comical and admitted I was wrong: “I misspoke: you should complain to the President because I am now gunning for a university record.” The semester was littered with standard harmless wisecracks and campfire stories and the occasional edgy statement with no complaints. I suspected that within a few lectures the students realized I was a harmless punk, not mean spirited at all, and care deeply about them. On 12/15/23 I got my teaching evaluations. Something in me snapped. It was audible. My wife tried to console me. It may be irreversible.
If my dog bothers you, I can put you in the other room.~ Source Unknown
On a positive note, we got another Boston Terrier! They are wonderful.2,3 That makes three for us and another two with my son. They are soooo affectionate, especially when I am eating. This particular photo made the Big-Time when Brent Johnson slipped it into his talk at the New Orleans Investment Conference. The fat bastard in the front is known as “Fucking Charlie” from a podcast with Anthony Pompliano in which I had to keep pushing him off my lap with the phrase, “Fucking Charlie!” Even so, my crew’s fame would have a tough time keeping up with the legendary singing French Bulldog, Walter Geoffrey.4,5
I just like Dave's voice. Whatever he says is fine, too.~ commenter with a nasal fetish
Talks and Podcasts. I got to speak at Porter Stansberry’s tent revival, oddly now estranged from Stansberry Research, joining Meb Faber as the two outsiders. I presented my Multi-Decade-Bear-Market thesis outline below. It was my second year at Brien Lundin’s New Orleans Investment Conference. I repeated the Bear Market theme but got to hang with old friends and join Lyn Alden, Peter Boockvar, and Jimmy Iourio on a panel discussing the Boom-Bust cycle. The bearishness was palpable.
I appeared on over 50 podcasts this year. I love chatting for hours with smart guys (especially Jake of Statefarm), and, if they want to record it, that’s fine too. Each one is special. The group ones with Tommy Carrigan, Jim Kunstler, and Tom Luongo have an interesting dynamic. Mike Farris is so affable. The podcasts with John Cullen (former Oracle code writer) on the Las Vegas shootings and Covid Narrative were highly produced and quite different as podcasts go. Maybe it’s just a coincidence, but fact-checking articles soon appeared after years of dormancy.6,7 I begged Rudy Havenstein (@RudyHavenstein) for years to do a podcast pushing Grant Williams knowing Grant’s enthusiasm for the idea. He finally bit with Grant and Stephanie Pomboy, and it was great.8 His second was prompted by Rudy to join him in a threesome; we asked hodler Marty Bent to host it.9,10 Well, that opened the floodgates for Rudy. He’s brilliant.
Dave is a cross between Carl Sagan, Albert Einstein, the Outlaw Josey Wales and many, many great philosophers and religious leaders. He’s flawed like all of us but has a steady moral compass with a conviction which defends it.~ comment in Cedric’s podcast
Links to my 2023 podcasts:
- Jesse Day (@jessebday) Commodity Culture.11
- 2022 New Orleans Investment Conference panel discussion on conspiracy theories. (I chose state-sponsored mass shootings).12
- 2023 New Orleans Investment Conference Conspiracy Theory Panel13 with Russell Gray (@REGuysRadio) and Chris Powell of Gold Antitrust Action Committee (GATA).
I like listening to people interview Collum to see how long he can go without talking about kicking someone's ass. Seriously, he does it every time.~ Commenter on Moriarty’s podcast
- Jonathan Kogan (@Kogz) of The Jonathan Kogan Show.14
- Jonathan Kogan (@Kogz) of The Jonathan Kogan Show.15,16
- Mike Farris (@CoffeeandaMike) of Coffee and a Mike.17
- Mike Farris (@CoffeeandaMike) of Coffee and a Mike.18,19
- Mike Farris (@CoffeeandaMike) of Coffee and a Mike.20
- Mike Farris (@CoffeeandaMike) of Coffee and a Mike (11/23).21
- Michael Gayed (@leadlagreport) of Lead-Lag Report (June).22,23,24
- Jim Iuorio (@jimiuorio) and Bob Iaccino (@Bob_Iaccino) on Futures Edge.25
- Keyvan Davani (@keyvandavani) of TheKeyvanDavaniConnection.26,27
- 2023 New Orleans Investment Conference talk and Boom and Bust panel28 with Lyn Alden (@LynAldenContact), Peter Boockvar (@pboockvar), and Jim Iuorio (@jimiuorio).
- Cedric Youngelman (@CedYoungelman) of The Bitcoin Matrix (1st).29
- Cedric Youngelman (@CedYoungelman) of The Bitcoin Matrix) (2nd).30
- Chris Irons (@QTRResearch) of Quoth the Raven (late 12/22).31
- Kai Hoffmann of Soar Financially.32
- Andrew Stotz of My Worst Investment Ever (3/23).33,34
- Andrew Stotz of My Worst Investment Ever (4/23).35
Wife Tricks Husband Into Listening To Her By Starting Every Statement With ‘Welcome To My Podcast’~ Babylon Bee
- Tommy Carrigan (@tommys_podcast) of Tommy’s Podcast with James Koutoulas (@jameskoutoulas).38
- Tommy Carrigan (@tommys_podcast) with Tom Luongo (@TFL1728) and James Kunstler (@jhkunstler) (4/23).39
- Tommy Carrigan (@tommys_podcast) with Tom Luongo (@TFL1728) and James Kunstler (@jhkunstler) (6/23).40
- Tommy Carrigan (@tommys_podcast) with Tom Luongo (@TFL1728) and James Kunstler (@jhkunstler) (8/23).41
- Tommy Carrigan (@tommys_podcast) with Tom Luongo (@TFL1728) and James Kunstler (@jhkunstler) (9/23).42
- Tommy Carrigan (@tommys_podcast) with Tom Luongo (@TFL1728) and James Kunstler (@jhkunstler) (coming on 12/20).
- Anthony Fatseas (@AnthonyFatseas) on WTFinance.43
- Tom Luongo (@TFL1728) of Gold Goats ‘n Guns.44
- Tom Luongo (@TFL1728) of Gold Goats ‘n Guns (11/23).45,46
- John Cullen (@I_Am_JohnCullen) discussion of Las Vegas shootings (continuous stream).47
- John Cullen (@I_Am_JohnCullen) discussion of Las Vegas shootings (full production).48
- John Cullen (@I_Am_JohnCullen) discussion of the Covid Pandemic.49
- Alison Morrow (@AlisonMorrowTV) with late arrival.50
- James Kunstler (@jhkunstler) on KunstlerCast (1/23).51
- Anthony Pompliano (@APompliano).52
- Jay Martin (@JayMartin) of the Jay Martin Show.53
- Jay Martin (@JayMartin) of the Jay Martin Show (9/23).54
- Marty Bent (@MartyBent) on Tales from the Crypt (1/23).55
- Marty Bent (@MartyBent) on Tales from the Crypt with Rudy Havenstein (@RudyHavenstein).56,57
- Kevin Estopinal (@KevinEstopinal) podcast (2/23).58
- Kevin Estopinal (@KevinEstopinal) podcast (6/23).59
- Jason Burack (@JasonEBurack) on WallStForMainSt.60
- Logan Moody (@realLoganMoody) The Contrarian.61
- Mark Moss (@1MarkMoss) Podcast.62
- Wall Street Silver (@WallStreetSilv).63
- WallStreetSilver (@WallStreetSilv).64
- Tom Nelson (@TomANelson).65
- Antonio Atanasov (@antonioatanasv) Resource Talks.66
Cherish those that seek the truth but beware of those that find it.~ Voltaire
Healthcare
Healthcare in the Collum-Cornell clan was fairly standard if graded on a tough curve set over the last 35 years. On December 5th, 2022 my wife fell and broke her neck. She had broken it a dozen years ago, and my mother cracked her neck and died in 1999, so this was getting routine. (As an ex-gymnast I knew six broken necks, including Mark Caso at UCLA who went on to become Leonardo the Ninja Turtle.1) Stay on the subject, Dave. Healing for the 12/5/22 break was proceeding well according to her neurosurgeon, but, after follow-up visits and several CT scans, he started talking nonsense about fusing it because of her unusual pain. Red flag: neurosurgeons operate on structural problems and neurological malfunctioning not pain. We got a second opinion ASAP and found out the most recent CT scan had been done of her head rather than her neck: seemed like a fuckup. Doc Two gets a CT on the neck, walks into the office, and asks the most loaded question: “Did you fall again?” Indeed, on December 8th—three days after the first break—she fell and broke it again. This was on C1—this one is often fatal—and it was not just a hairline crack. Did Doc One miss this niggling little detail and was covering his ass? She is not very comfortable, but there was nothing more to be done until a third (non-neurosurgeon) expressed concerns about the stability. We are now considering a fusion, which will cause total loss of mobility. She has almost none now.Urologist: You have to stop choking the chicken.Me: Why?
Urologist: I am trying to examine you.
I have now reached the “get off my lawn” age, and it is getting statistically challenging to respect my elders. (I thought getting old—adult-onset progeria—would take longer.) Running a distant second place to my wife, I had several issues too. The key YIR writing month of the year—December—was wiped out by a nasty flu-like ailment caught from the little Typhoid Harrys—the grandchildren—during Thanksgiving. But more serious troubles started much earlier.
Revised Hospital Chart Has Patients Rate Pain On Scale From Zero To Watching 'The View'~ The Babylon Bee
I had been pissing wads of bladder sand about every 4–6 weeks for several years. That stopped abruptly, which was either good news—not generating it anymore— or bad news because it had congealed into something bigger and unpassable. I reached the point of serious discomfort—bladder stones are spherical but jagged—and began doctor shopping with one criterion: will he see me. After two more months of painful urinations, each the volume of a shot glass, the medical system quit ghosting me and sent in Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck to blow up what had become a 1.5-inch asteroid.
Having now acquired experience with adult diapers, pissing what looked like egg-drop soup, and gulping down courses of antibiotics, I am symptom-free. My doc, however, said that I should get my prostate, which is now the size of an orange owing to mui macho loads of testosterone, pruned. They’re going in 2/1/24. Google reminds me it could have been worse and that bladder stones were likely the early demise of many an unhappy male in previous generations: This is not mine, but this guy suffered…
I wondered if the sudden bladder problems2,3 and a steeply rising blood pressure (50 points in the last two years) might trace to the vaccine. What is undeniable is that (1) getting old sucks, and (2) something has gone very wrong with our healthcare system. My wife has had 60 surgeries. That is not an estimate but rather a precise count. I am intimately familiar with how the medical system works from the consumer’s end. I also know the other end of the healthcare system owing to collaborations and consultantships with nearly a dozen big-cap pharma companies, including 20 years at Pfizer and a stint on Merck’s long-range steering committee. I’m tellin’ ya, somethin’ has gone wrong.
Bladder or prostate cancer was on my shortlist of concerns while being ghosted by the system. Imagine being told by your oncologist that you can meet with their physician’s assistant in two months. It is tempting to make appointments with all my docs pre-emptively—medical timeshares—and cancel them as they are not needed. Physicians have been demoted to purveyors of blood tests and scans, provided they can squeeze in a 10-minute cameo appearance on a Zoom call. The legendary Doctor Drew wonders about the invasion of AI into medicine.4 The new-fangled healthcare portals force you to interpret the test results in a process akin to self-checkout at Whole Foods. Your next colonoscopy may be a robotic gerbil fitted with a GoPro camera that you control with an app on your iPhone.
Pig orgasms can last up to 90 minutes.(I needed a quote, but I am a damned Snapple Cap.) I have resorted to using Twitter for medical help, which requires care and caution, but with 100,000 followers you’d be surprised by the results. I also have serious advice for everybody: if you go on a new drug of any kind, search the name of the drug on Twitter. You will very quickly find out if it is a bad or good drug by the tenor of the chatter. My wife had a bad experience with Keppra: the whole story was right there.
I finally succumbed to family pressure to get hearing aids. Somebody is going to have to explain to me how $20 worth of hardware can cost $7000. I asked the Woman in the White Lab Coat how I could stuff 10 iPhones in my ears or wrap 25 noise-dampening BOSE headphones around my head for the same price. The hearing-industrial complex smacks of a scam, but I must admit to hearing surreal things. Is that what rain sounds like? Is that what my blinker sounds like? Day one I was in the DMV, and I could hear every keystroke, every mouse click, every conversation. It was like a sci-fi movie.
Compared to others, my experiences are little annoyances, but the Healthcare system is confronting the perfect storm.
- Boomer healthcare will contribute massively to the GDP, leaving intellectually unwary economists oblivious to the fact that those trillions are not a product but rather the cost of maintaining a highly depreciating asset—Bastiate’s Broken Prostate Falacy.
- The aging boomers were already pushing the system to its breaking point. The medical-industrial complex salivated at the prospect of escorting the boomers to the light in a slow, costly cruise ship, but provisions for growing the staff to handle the rising demand were overlooked.
- As brilliantly delineated in These Are the Plunderers: How Private Equity Runs—and Wrecks—America by Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner (see Books), private equity has been buying up hospitals, companies that manage emergency rooms, and health insurers. These corporate raiders strip-mine services to the bone, load the companies with huge debts, and pay themselves astronomical dividends and management fees. Thanks to horrific monetary policy creating mountains of dumb money, they then dump these shells of companies staffed with Doctors of Walmart on the open market for bloated prices, after which 47% of them are restructured through Chapter 7 or 11 bankruptcies. Jobs and pensions are lost, lives are destroyed, and communities are left without hospitals as formerly financially viable enterprises are ground to dust. What mystifies me is why these pirates of the high seas don’t get capped in their asses by angry consumers.
- Covid knocked the healthcare system on its ass. The lockdown created a massive backlog of medical procedures while hospitals sat empty. The forced vaccinations elicited early retirements and firings of vaccine-hesitant workers—those unwilling to follow the policies of Dr. Mengele (Tony Fauci) and his bio-bimbo (Debbie Birks). You may notice they are now denying that they served up these policies. A physician’s assistant at the University of Rochester told me a mandated booster was canceled because they realized that the Rochester facility would lose another 25% of their staff.
- Our erstwhile healthcare heroes—doctors and nurses—have noticed that inflation is a problem. They are now striking owing to 16-hour shifts and staffing shortages, which I am told does not help the staffing shortages.5
I am increasingly aware of the importance of nutrition and health. (Yeah. I know. What a genius.) I used to think only bliss ninnies worried about ingesting toxins, but I am starting to wonder. Recent studies show the Amish are not getting all the modern ailments that plague “the English”, including a striking lack of covid mortalities, diabetes, and autism.14 And at a scientific level, the growing awareness that the bugs comprising the human biome—those 100,000 retroviruses and gazillions of unicellular organisms in our gut and elsewhere—are not just freeloaders but rather function symbiotically to help us reach old age. Biome transplants—sterilization of the entire gut and inoculation with a new biome from a healthy donor—are leading to extraordinary discoveries about how the biome influences your general health. Biome transplants from fat bastards can turn you into a fat bastard. I have to read more on this and a related topic, epigenetics. Personalized healthcare, in which they treat you based on your genome and your genetics, also seems promising. Alas, companies like Blackstone are already digging into the potential massive grift.15
Don’t get me wrong: I do not practice what I preach. I am a portly fuck with high blood pressure and a fondness for greasy food who is haunted by the pejorative, “muffin top.” There is a funny phenomenon, however, that I discovered by chance. Go to Google and search “identical twins smoking”. The smoking filters out the cute kids. The curious result is that you will see dozens of identical twins that remain identical deep into adulthood.16 You also discover that this was known.17
Does that mean if I had an identical twin he would lean on the heavy side as well (after years of being fit as shit, I hasten to add)? If body weight is based on life choices, are these choices genetically determined?
Oh well, I use intermittent fasting to touch the bag and start leading off like Barry Bonds. This prevents the walrus phase from becoming permanent. I have dropped 15 lbs since Thanksgiving. My goal is to clip my toenails without holding my breath. In the end, however, somebody will likely find me slumped over in a La-Z-Boy recliner having died of a heart attack with my cold dead fingers firmly gripping a half-eaten bag of Cheetos. If you look carefully, you will see a smile on my face.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://peakprosperity.com/dave-collums-year-in-review-healthcare/