The Independent Analyst and the Information Age

Struthers Report V29 # 6.3

Life of an Independent Analyst in a Controlled Information Age

Not sure what struck me to write this, but as my readers you will get a better understanding of what I do and about me. I simply work out of my Family Office and have been doing that full time for 20 years now. I really enjoy the work, researching, analyzing and is the main reason I do it, well it can be lucrative too. And it is probably more work than many realize.

Information Age

As I spent a career at IBM, I grew up working closely with technology that exploded the 'Information Age'. It started more in earnest with the onset of the personal computer and internet. Back then, I asked myself - how can I exploit this? So I started a online newsletter (information).

Wikipedia points out - The world's capacity to store information grew from 2.6 (optimally compressed) exabytes (EB) in 1986 to 15.8 EB in 1993; over 54.5 EB in 2000; and to 295 EB in 2007. This is the informational equivalent to less than one 730-megabyte (MB) CD-ROM per person in 1986 (539 MB per person) to roughly sixty-one CD-ROM per person in 2007. It is estimated that the world's capacity to store information has reached 5 zettabytes in 2014, the informational equivalent of 4,500 stacks of printed books from the earth to the sun. That's insane 4,500 trips reaching the sun by books.

This is a ridiculous amount of data and it grows like crazy because everyone of us adds to it all day long. Every text message, phone call you make, social media posts, your daily financial transaction, every click on the internet and your daily movements followed by GPS are uploaded to data centres.

What is the number one and most expensive commodity in the world? It is data. The exponential increase in data is the major factor spurring this growth. The rising need for social, mobile, analytic s and cloud services grows around the world. The recent explosion in the usage of social media is s a strong driving force. The Covid-10 pandemic contributed to the recent strong uptick in demand. As noted above there were about 5 zettabytes in 2014 and this is expected to hit 175 by 2025. This is one of the best charts I could find and it shows growth to 40 zettabytes in 2019

The Information Age was about collecting data and analyzing it. What is important to understand is now that has evolved to controlling and manipulating the data. Data has become so powerful, those that control it, can control the world. I will get to this topic further down, back to what I do.

I typically get up between 5am and 7am EST and go pretty steady to around Noon. I make some lunch but eat my lunch and breakfast in front of the computer screens. I have two desks and large computer screens. In the afternoons I work to around 4pm to 5pm, but often take an afternoon break to run some errand or some household chore. Some days I quit early around 2pm or 3pm but will still check stock and market prices a few times until 4pm close. I keep in close contact with around 35 friends, family and colleagues, lets call it the 'Beat on the Street'. I spend about 1 to 6 hours per day on the phone, seems there are busy and quiet days. I work 2 or 3 hours Saturday or Sunday morning, sometimes both days, but mostly weekends are the break, times for hobbies, socializing and leisure.

So what do I do in all that time? A lot of reading, researching and listening (phone, webinars, Zoom). As an analyst that follows markets, economics, business, investments and everything that effects these it is very important to get news, views and data from multiple sources, both right and left perspectives.

On a daily basis, I read or listen to news from CNN, BNN, FOX, NY Times, Wall Street Journal, Seeking Alpha, MINING.COM. Bloomberg, Rueters, Globe and Mail, National Post, Stockwatch, GATA, Epock Times, Linkedin, Twitter, Youtube and UK Daily Mail. I also read articles from another 50 or so sources, each of them 1 to 3 times per week. It is a lot of reading and I clip data, quotes and charts into a file that I might use in my newsletter.

What I found nice when I was in the US, you could flip between CNN and FOX news to get left and right views. In Canada we only basically get left wing news so I subscribed to Epock Times ($16/month) that leans more right. I read Rebel news a lot in Canada too but to quote articles there, I think the word 'rebel' would not appeal to some. Elon Musk recently reported that Canada's CBC is 69% government supported. This is true, but this number will fluctuate a few % a year depending on their advertising revenue. Mostly government propaganda is a bigger problem in Canada.

I have noticed the left wing news has really deteriorated in the last several years. I believe this is from too much government influence and propaganda peddling along with too much corporate influence. Big pharma is putting $100s of millions annually into left wing news, more so during the pandemic and still is now. We are seeing much the same thing now with climate change and the green energy push. It is pretty hypocritical that all the main stream media is promoting climate change and save the planet while they slaughter about 60 million trees per year to make their newspapers, magazines and advertisements. And 60 million trees are in a day when everything is online. I get all my sources online and nothing in print other than the advertisements thrown on my doorstep once a week for free.

The left deterioration shows up very clearly in the Nielsen media ratings. CNN has dropped to 16th position on cable news with only 473,000 prime time viewers, mostly older people as they only have 100,000 adults 25-54. Nielsen “these are poor numbers by CNN standards”. It will get worse as old people perish. Fox news is at the other end in #1 position with 2.09 million prime time viewers with 245,000 adults 25-54 at prime time. The most popular at Fox is (now I must say was) Tucker Carlson's 1 hour evening segment. I believe he is popular because he is more of an investigative journalist as he will have experts come on to give opinions on the timely news events. He is not afraid to report on controversial topics, will go outside the box and also gets interesting people for interviews. For example, in his last week or so he interviewed Donald Trump, Elon Musk and Robert F Kennedy junior. I record the show so I can skip commercials and events that don't interest me.

I wrote most of this about a week ago so adding a few paragraphs on Carlson. He was a bright beacon for legacy (cable) news because he had the highest rating for a news show host in history and included many younger people. He was not afraid to report far right views and that and his huge following made him a target of the left and big money.

Tucker was exposed as part of a defamation lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems and as a bully who called for the firing of Fox journalists whose coverage he disliked. He has also drawn condemnation from the right and left for his role in providing security camera footage revealing a far different account of the assault on the United States Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

So he was mean to people? We also know that last week, Tucker attacked Big Pharma in one of his monologues. If he ends up an independent or on his own platform his following will be even bigger and his voice louder, but I wonder if a gag order for a number of years is part of his departure. It will be sad if true and with news out today, it sounds like he has retired. What is certain, this proves that nobody is safe and can become a victim of the state and it's elites because they don’t like what they say.

I am not going to get a lot into detail on this Dominion Voting thing, but it is never the system or computer that commits fraud, it is a person who programmed the system or manipulated the data that is entered. Fraud is rampant everywhere now and all I can say is that elections are not immune.

Regardless, I watch and listen to all news sources as if gives you the best view where the world is and where it might be going. It is the same thing when I analyze stock markets, commodities, economics and stocks. I get data from multiple sources. If you only ask/interview company executives on their investment merit you will only hear the positive view. You have to look at other analysts/newsletter reports, SEC filings, corporate history and their peers and competition etc. I use Stockwatch and track about 400 companies at a cost of around $100 per month and that also allows me to group them into market sectors. I subscribe or swap with other newsletters I consider worthy and source information form dozens of internet sources. Every credible source is now online. About 30 years ago and more I had to input all the market data on a daily basis and create my charts with my own program. Today you can get all the most sophisticated chart data online for free. Whether stocks, markets or commodities I look at and analyze the bullish and bearish views and data.

As many of you know, I analyzed Covid-19 and the shots very extensively. There is no doubt that government policies on Covid-19 were major influences on the economy and varying degrees on different market sectors. The inflation problem today is a direct result of those policies that caused supply/labour shortages and excess money printing. Many analysts and newsletters avoided the controversy and is probably the main reason they got most of their forecasts wrong.

I did what I always knew worked best and that was to get data and opinions from numerous sources. I intensely followed data from Health Canada, CDC, FDA, World Health and numerous state and provincial health organizations. I closely followed Pfizer, Johnson and Johnson, AstraZeneca and Moderna as they were exploiting vaccine potential. They were among my 400 stock watch list. I closely monitored UK Health as they got Covid earlier then we did and both them and Israel started taking vaccine shots first. There was very obvious data from these official sources that something much different was happening than our legacy media and health officials were reporting as the narrative.

The most important take away from the Covid-19 plandemic and the experimental shots is that we were lied to.

Doing what I always do, I also sourced data and information form numerous doctors and scientists that were raising red flags and potential problems. As many of these were new to me, I did extensive research into their back grounds. The fact that these few that were standing up for what they believed and were vastly experienced, experts in their fields, but were heavily censored and in many cases fired from their jobs was another huge red flag. Healthy and proper science and medicine is debate and looking at both the positive and negative effect of policies and drugs. The big problem here is that government, health organizations and big pharma teamed up to make piles of $$ and force policy direction. It was an experiment in the biggest way.

To this day, I believe 40% to 60% still have little clue of the real facts and truth. Here are some examples.

Government and Public Health promoted fear so they could put severe policies in place to see how much people could be controlled. Just a few months ago it was revealed by emails obtained, that the UK Health Minister, himself and some colleagues were playing around with data to promote fear and see what people would do. They timed the release of the variant or news of the variant to create fear and than joked about it. “This will fix them.” The fear creation was obvious everywhere when you looked at government official data and saw how the news flow differed.

A prime example in the data is that cases were based on PCR tests that were purposely carried out to error on the side of a positive case. The CDC recommended a maximum of 22 to 25 cycles in the test and most health organizations were doing 30 to 40. The cycles magnify the potential for virus detection. This is where they came up with another falsehood about non symptomatic carriers. The number of cases was wildly exaggerated to create fear. The Chinese did this more than anyone as they stood to make big $$ selling PPE to the world and wanted to see a collapse in Western economies.

It was the exact same thing with hospitalization and death. Official data reported hospitalizations and death 'with Covid' not caused by Covid. Everyone that came to a hospital was tested with the exaggerated PCR test for Covid, because if they were positive, different quarantine actions were required. More important is that hospitals got extra funding for Covid patients, extra funding if a ventilator was used and extra funding if certain drugs were used. Money was a huge influence to exaggerate numbers. A prime example is a car accident victim comes to the hospital and tests positive for Covid. The statistic is now a Covid patient and then they later die from their injuries and the stats are now death 'with Covid' or 'Covid related death'. This was reported by health officials and the media as lumped into Covid deaths. Another huge exaggeration.

About 2 years later this data reporting was changed, to separate hospitalization and death caused by Covid instead of 'with Covid'. I remember that numbers fell about 1/2 and it was first changed in Ontario at the Brampton hospital and soon everywhere followed. However the real reason for the change is because it made vaccines look better because now there was a big drop in hospitalization and death numbers.

Another falsehood was the shots would stop transmission. I will give Pfizer as the example but in all cases, the other big Pharma companies did the same thing. No where in Pfizer's trial data was there an objective to stop transmission and Pfizer admitted this eventually. Health officials had to know if they did their jobs at all.

Another falsehood was that the shots resulted in less hospitalization and death and they used the official stats to prove this. However what they did in their reports is they included hospitalization and death statistics from when Covid started and of course we all know that there were no shots in the first year so this inflated non vaccinated numbers. Now somebody that knows how to look at numbers accurately, you have a look long after the shots were given out. For example you could look at the May 2022 government data and then compare to the June 2022 data where numbers of vaccinated and non vaccinated were pretty constant. Doing that it showed vaccinated people had higher hospitalization and death rates, opposite to the official narrative. I provided a couple examples of that data, one also from the UK data. Now maybe this is not an out right lie, but a half truth on how data was used to meet a narrative.

And another falsehood is that the shots were fully FDA approved. To this day the only approved shots given are approved for 'Emergency Use Authorization' (EUA) only. This is marked on every vaccine vile to this day. The FDA did approve some Covid vaccines like Pfizer's Comirnaty but it was never approved to sell. The FDA narrative was since it was the same formulae as the 'EUA' that this should be used up first. Of course the Emergency Use stuff will be around forever and the FDA has now changed Corminaty to EUA only. Biden says he will end the Covid emergency in June, but they have said this many times and extended it. Anyway they have come up with a way the shots can still be given when the emergency is lifted.

Pfizer and Moderna's EUA approval was based on just 28 days of trial data. One cannot come to any valid conclusion on a drug or vaccine in just 28 days, but we later learned that this time period provided the most positive results. Pfizer tried to conceal their trial data for 75 years, but a court eventually ruled to release the data within a year. The trial data would never have much long term meaning because they allowed the placebo group to take the shots, so that ended the validity of any longer term data.

Many things were learned from that data and probably most important was there were 4 deaths among the vaccinated group. Of course Pfizer said it had nothing to do with the shots but provided no data and did not investigate either way, well so they said.

The most recent shot called 'Bivalent' is 1/2 old shot with 1/2 new formulae. This way government and big pharma don't have to write off losses to the old expired vaccines. Sort of like spoiled meat, all you have to do is mix in 1/2 new meat and it is good to eat. No thank you !

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Scott W. Atlas, MD is the Robert Wesson Senior Fellow in health policy at Stanford University's Here are his 10 biggest falsehoods—known for years to be false, not recently learned or proven to be so—promoted by America's public health leaders, elected and unelected officials, and now-discredited academics:

1. SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus has a far higher fatality rate than the flu by several orders of magnitude.

2. Everyone is at significant risk to die from this virus.

3. No one has any immunological protection, because this virus is completely new.

4. Asymptomatic people are major drivers of the spread.

5. Locking down—closing schools and businesses, confining people to their homes, stopping non-COVID medical care, and eliminating travel—will stop or eliminate the virus.

6. Masks will protect everyone and stop the spread.

7. The virus is known to be naturally occurring, and claiming it originated in a lab is a conspiracy theory.

8. Teachers are at especially high risk.

9. COVID vaccines stop the spread of the infection.

10. Immune protection only comes from a vaccine.

None of us are so naïve as to expect a direct apology from critics at my employer, Stanford University, or in government, academic public health, and the media. But to ensure that this never happens again, government leaders, power-driven officials, and influential academics and advisors often harboring conflicts of interest must be held accountable.

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I could go on with a lot more, but is it any wonder public confidence in government and courts has plunged. This chart from NY Times.

President Joe Biden to run again, but according to a recent NBC News poll, 70% of Americans—including over half of Democrats—don’t think he should seek re-election.

Now to conclude with the control and manipulation of the 'Information Age'.

Most people do not realize how much information is controlled that they see. On Facebook the news and events you see are tailored to you so to keep you engaged and click on news and links. This is how they make money by keeping you engaged and clicking. The so called click bait has been going on a long time. You will see different news and events on your feed compared to your friends.

The old legacy media outlets have mainly become government propaganda and approved narrative outlets. You will only see one side of a story or event there.

Google is among the worse, don't 'google it'. I use Duck Duck Go for search. Google does not give you what you are looking for but what they want you to find. This is based on them pushing the approved narrative, censorship and who pays them the most to come up in search results. My website, playstocks.net is totally censored by Google and Bing search as well. That is because I wrote articles on Covid-19 that did not fit the narrative. You will never find my website on google unless you type the name in, but that means you already know it anyway. If you have a website, there is an easy way to test where you rank. Your website should have a meta description for the home page that is used by search engines. If you search your meta description you should come up among the top 3 in search, depending how many web sites compete with your meta description, so it is best to make it detailed and somewhat unique.

If you don't believe me, try my meta description which is “Learn about Inflation, Gold, Crypto currencies, Bitcoin, Oil & Gas, Commodities and option trading” At one time I had Covid-19 in the meta but I removed it to see if censorship would stop. It did not. My website will never come up in google, at least not in the top 10 pages, as I quit looking beyond that. However, in Duck Duck Go it comes up in the 2^nd position as it should. Only coindesk.com comes ahead of me as they are probably even paying a small search engine like Duck Duck Go $$ to key on Bitcoin and Crypto currencies. If you have a website, try your own test.

I encourage people to use Duck Duck Go as you will get way better search results. This should last until Duck Duck Go gets too big and then they will be pressured to be compromised.

It is another reason I started on Substack, because now I can be found there with google search.

If anything you should have learned about the Covid-19 pandemic is the relentless effort to control the information and narrative. Anyone of influence that did not go with the narrative was censored and in many cases punished, losing their job etc. They went as far as creating fake Twitter and Facebook accounts of these people to degrade them. There was actual accurate data out there but you would not find it with google and what you would find was spun inaccurately in the narrative. How many would bother going to the Health Canada, UK Health or CDC websites on a regular basis for data?

My next report on Climate Change has an important point by the Heartland Institute. The alarmists have the money and the large microphones, but we have the truth.

That is a big challenge these days, finding the accurate and truthful data and information. It really takes someone like myself as an independent analyst that has nobody to answer to but my readers. It takes experience or at least some perseverance knowing where to look. It takes trust on who and what you can rely on. The corruption in the world these days is at levels few can believe. My big fear is that I know all this will get much worse before it gets better. And that will happen until a lot more people get involved and stop taking the BS like sheeple.