Reply With QuoteLike that Constantine from the comics.Originally Posted by VNV
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There is a significant rise in mortality, but it also feels like there's some exaggeration and scare tactics going on to pump fear.
For example, the rise in claims was expected at many insurance companies. Insurer's were (mostly) not caught with their pants down. It's not like they were surprised by news of a pandemic or deaths from other causes like drug abuse (insurers are very aware of the drug abuse and depression problem in America). They priced this into their mortality predictions. But, I also get the strong impression that it was unexpected at some life insurers, particularly those who maybe played it a little fast and loose with their group life insurance plans.
Overall, mortality was up about 33% in 2021, and up 20% in 2020. The 40% figure was specifically sourced from One America, and then everyone ran with it as "the number". There are 2 major lines of life insurance business in the U.S.: group and individual life insurance. This 33% figure is split between group and individual business. Some carriers do a lot of group business (One America). Other carriers have insignificant group business (Penn Mutual). Some have slanted splits which favor individual business and so would be impacted, but impacted differently than other carriers with larger group business (New York Life, which has about a 30/70 split between group and individual business). When I looked at 13 different insurers that all ran different kinds of life insurance companies, a clear pattern emerged. Except for one insurer that saw a dramatic decline in death claims (and fell well-below the average), insurers saw an increase in death claims.
The other side of this story is the false doomsday narrative that there is a mortality crisis in the industry set to wipe everyone out. To get a sense of what's really going on in the industry, ignore the smaller players who might (or might not) be taking outsized risks on their book of business, and look at the mega life insurers like Northwestern Mutual and New York Life who run fairly straightforward life insurance businesses. Northwestern is massive and represents the classic old school life insurance business. In 2021, their death claims amounted to $3.965 billion against $17.7 billion in policy benefits and increases in policy reserves. Even if you just look at premium income, they took in roughly $16 billion in premiums and paid $3.965 billion in death benefits. A similar story plays out at the smaller, more aggressive, life insurers like Penn Mutual. Mortality is not not approaching any level which would threaten these companies' solvency.
As for total mortality in the U.S., the provisional death counts don't seem to indicate anything crazy going on. Death counts from all causes are *slightly* higher in 2021 compared to 2020, not 40% higher.
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Like that Constantine from the comics.
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The used Putin salesman is alive and well. They detained him, put him under house arrest in Kharkov, and have prohibited him from continuing to speak out on the war.
TMPHBITEU
You have CNN shoved so far up your ass that it's coming out of your mouth.
What kind of a rise in total mortality would it take to threaten their solvency?
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And this: Biden authorizes $1.3 billion more for Ukraine… – CITIZEN FREE PRESS
makes it necessary to bump this: The U.S. Has A Potemkin Government, And It's Not Just Joe Biden
It is just not possible to have a bigger bunch of fucking morons in charge of this situation right now. They're still wearing masks, just to remind you.
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Perhaps I was unclear. When I said "We are talking about a war...", I meant the war in Bosnia. I don't want to bore you with this war specifically, but in Bosnia you had things like the siege of Sarajevo, which went on for almost five years, and which included daily shelling of civilian targets with more than 3000 rounds of artillery daily shelling hospitals and marketplaces, broken supply lines, snipers shooting at civilians going to get water and shit like that, and you had only (see how sad I am about the low body count here) 14.000 casualties. Or to be more recent, the conflict in the Donbass has been going on for eight years and includes constant attacking of civilian targets. The UN estimates the number of civilian casualties at close to 3500, the Russians at 14.000. Meet these two estimates in the middle and you still fail to get tens of thousands.
It is simply not possible to kill tens of thousands of people in two months in the kind of warfare that you are seeing in Ukraine. To take another current example, you got Yemen in which the Saudis are bombing the shit of of the whole country from the air. This is a way to kill hundreds of thousands of people, but even there the majority of civilians are dying of hunger and disease and shit like that. I am sorry, I understand you may want your tens of thousands of dead civilians in Ukraine to be true, but the math simply does not work. I find your whole posturing extremely funny, not least because I spent part of my childhood sitting in a basement during bombing campaigns in a city which after a year of bombing looked twice as bad as Mariupol looks now.
TMPHBITEU
These two stories are interesting:
The Captain's Journal >> All Famines Are Man-Made
Shipping problems for nitrate fertilizer, the kind we use around here:
See if you can figure out exactly why Union Pacific is limiting fertilizer shipments. This is real damned serious, and couple with the drought will mean record prices for wheat very soon.CF Industries Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: CF), a leading global manufacturer of hydrogen and nitrogen products, today informed customers it serves by Union Pacific rail lines that railroad-mandated shipping reductions would result in nitrogen fertilizer shipment delays during the spring application season and that it would be unable to accept new rail sales involving Union Pacific for the foreseeable future. The Company understands that it is one of only 30 companies to face these restrictions.
CF Industries ships to customers via Union Pacific rail lines primarily from its Donaldsonville Complex in Louisiana and its Port Neal Complex in Iowa. The rail lines serve key agricultural areas such as Iowa, Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska, Texas and California. Products that will be affected include nitrogen fertilizers such as urea and urea ammonium nitrate (UAN) as well as diesel exhaust fluid (DEF), an emissions control product required for diesel trucks. CF Industries is the largest producer of urea, UAN and DEF in North America, and its Donaldsonville Complex is the largest single production facility for the products in North America.
“The timing of this action by Union Pacific could not come at a worse time for farmers,” said Tony Will, president and chief executive officer, CF Industries Holdings, Inc. “Not only will fertilizer be delayed by these shipping restrictions, but additional fertilizer needed to complete spring applications may be unable to reach farmers at all. By placing this arbitrary restriction on just a handful of shippers, Union Pacific is jeopardizing farmers’ harvests and increasing the cost of food for consumers.”
On Friday, April 8, 2022, Union Pacific informed CF Industries without advance notice that it was mandating certain shippers to reduce the volume of private cars on its railroad effective immediately. The Company was told to reduce its shipments by nearly 20%. CF Industries believes it will still be able to fulfill delivery of product already contracted for rail shipment to Union Pacific destinations, albeit with likely delays. However, because Union Pacific has told the Company that noncompliance will result in the embargo of its facilities by the railroad, CF Industries may not have available shipping capacity to take new rail orders involving Union Pacific rail lines to meet late season demand for fertilizer.
The application of nitrogen fertilizer is critical to maximizing crop yields. If farmers are unable to secure all the nitrogen fertilizer that they require in the current season because of supply chain disruptions such as rail shipping restrictions, the Company expects yield will be lower. This will likely extend the timeline to replenish global grains stocks. Low global grains stocks continue to support high front month and forward prices for nitrogen-consuming crops, which has contributed to higher food prices.
CF Industries intends to engage directly with the federal government to ask that fertilizer shipments be prioritized so that spring planting is not adversely impacted.
And this: COVID IS OVER: 95% of Cases In Mumbai Are Asymptomatic, Doctors Say 'No Cause for Concern' – PJ Media
Why has China shut down Shanghai, it chief financial, commercial, and shipping hub, when this sillyass "pandemic" has been over for a very long time?Mumbai is not under any kind of lockdown, nor have authorities warned that one might be coming.
Meanwhile, in China, the Communist country’s chief financial, commercial, and shipping hub will remain under lockdown until COVID is “eradicated.”
EFE reported on Friday that Shanghai authorities announced that the city’s “battle against Covid-19 has entered a key phase of stamping out viral infections within residential communities.”
Shanghai’s lockdown is now in its second month, with some distressed and starving residents hurling themselves off of high-rise balconies rather than suffer the lockdown any longer.
Lots of things are lining up in very ominous ways.
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From what I could find, they are limiting ALL shipments to try and work through a backlog. That's their story, anyway. Could be true, and this is just another case of COVID mishandling cascading across multiple sectors of the economy in ways no one could foresee. This is why centrally planned economies don't work.
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Maybe if we can figure out what the hell is going on in Shanghai and why, we might be able to see what's in store for the rest of the world?
It seems like a big part of the plan is to break people down to the point where any further resistance is futile. They must be up to some really nefarious shit.
✓ Member
Bless you, Jovan; you've got a lot of patience. This is essentially about the "Military Math" Ritter discusses in that video I posted, but with your concrete (and even personal!) examples of how such typical-civilian-casuality math was reached.
This may sound closed-minded but I'm at the point with this military operation that I got to with Covidiotism: there's plenty of internet evidence and analysis out there to help you find the Truthъ, so if you're still choosing to listen to officials and the MSM to remain ignorant and even fanactical, I'm not wasting my time helping you understand the information that has been our there for two years/two months. Go ahead and post a link here if you want, but if you're honest with yourself there are probably close friends and family that have bought into the Covidiotism and muh Russia memes, and you don't even waste time breaking them out of their trance, so it's even more futile to so much time into helping the Zealots who occasionally show up here.
And congrats to Ukraine on their handling of Gonzalo Lira: it's their first public handling of POWs/civvies that they managed not to bloodily botch.
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