Jul 022020
 
 July 2, 2020  Posted by at 10:44 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,


Marion Post Wolcott Unemployed coal miner’s mother in law and child. Marine, West Virginia 1938

 

Crisis at Houston Hospitals as Coronavirus Cases Surge (PP)
Coronavirus Immunity May Be More Widespread Than Tests Suggest (BBC)
Doctors Say Half Of ‘Cured’ COVID Patients Still Suffer (ToI)
House Votes To Block Trump’s Ability To Withdraw Forces From Afghanistan (Hill)
House Dems Introduce Resolution To Impeach AG Barr (SAC)
Freedom Rider: Russia, Afghanistan, and the Big Lie (BAR)
WaPo Admits ‘Russian Bounties’ Info “Deemed Sketchy” (ZH)
Afghan Bounty Scandal Comes at Suspiciously Important Time (MPN)
Biden Pulls Together 100s Of Lawyers As Bulwark Against Election Trickery (R.)
Storm Warning (Kunstler)
Top of the World (R.)

 

 

As the virus rages on into ever larger record numbers, today we are treated to the hilarious sight of two presidential candidates each accusing the other of being a Marxist. #ComradeTrump goes viral. One gets the feeling that maybe both parties hired the same PR firm. Or at least ones that use the same playbook. Which fails to mention that the Soviet Union dissolved some 30 years ago.

Or maybe those PR guys are all 80 years old, you know, same age as the candidates themselves? See, I’m thinking you must have been at least 15 years old when the wall came down, and therefore now be 45 years or older, to be scared by a portrait of Lenin or Stalin. And that would mean the PR fails to reach anyone younger than that.

Or, yeah, you can say he’s the second coming of Maduro, the man whose life his administration has been trying to turn into a living hell. But then you would fail to reach anyone with one single working neuron left. Or maybe I would just not be a good PR guy.

 

 

But at least we now know what that NYT and WaPo Afghan bounty story was planted for: the Democrat House gets to block Trump from bringing American troops home. While accusing each other of being extreme left, which will at some point force entire dictionaries to revise the meaning of such terms, they all move steadily towards the far right and the bidding of the war machine.

It’s theater, nothing in it is real, and you’re -literally- buying into it. Or wait, no, there is one thing that is real: people are going to get killed.

 

 

Both the world and the US set new highs.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“..an abrupt turn from three days earlier, when the hospital system sent a note to thousands of patients, inviting them to keep their surgical appointments.”

Note to staff at a Houston safety net hospital:
-50% of new COVID tests coming back positive
-No more ICU beds
-No more remdesivir
-No more convalescent plasma
-12 COVID patients in need of ICU care — stuck in the ER
-Tomorrow will be worse…

Crisis at Houston Hospitals as Coronavirus Cases Surge (PP)

At Lyndon B. Johnson Hospital on Sunday, the medical staff ran out of both space for new coronavirus patients and a key drug needed to treat them. With no open beds at the public hospital, a dozen COVID-19 patients who were in need of intensive care were stuck in the emergency room, awaiting transfers to other Houston area hospitals, according to a note sent to the staff and shared with reporters. A day later, the top physician executive at the Houston Methodist hospital system wrote to staff members warning that its coronavirus caseload was surging: “It has become necessary to consider delaying more surgical services to create further capacity for COVID-19 patients,” Dr. Robert Phillips said in the note, an abrupt turn from three days earlier, when the hospital system sent a note to thousands of patients, inviting them to keep their surgical appointments.

And at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, staff members were alerted recently that the hospital would soon begin taking in cancer patients with COVID-19 from the city’s overburdened public hospital system, a highly unusual move for the specialty hospital. These internal messages highlight the growing strain that the coronavirus crisis is putting on hospital systems in the Houston region, where the number of patients hospitalized with COVID-19 has nearly quadrupled since Memorial Day. As of Tuesday, more than 3,000 people were hospitalized for the coronavirus in the region, including nearly 800 in intensive care.

“To tell you the truth, what worries me is not this week, where we’re still kind of handling it,” said Roberta Schwartz, Houston Methodist’s chief innovation officer, who’s been helping lead the system’s efforts to expand beds for COVID-19 patents. “I’m really worried about next week.”

Read more …

Here’s your daily dose of hope….

Coronavirus Immunity May Be More Widespread Than Tests Suggest (BBC)

People testing negative for coronavirus antibodies may still have some immunity, a study has suggested. For every person testing positive for antibodies, two were found to have specific T-cells which identify and destroy infected cells. This was seen even in people who had mild or symptomless cases of Covid-19. But it’s not yet clear whether this just protects that individual, or if it might also stop them from passing on the infection to others. Researchers at the Karolinksa Institute in Sweden tested 200 people for both antibodies and T-cells. Some were blood donors while others were tracked down from the group of people first infected in Sweden, mainly returning from earlier affected areas like northern Italy.


This could mean a wider group have some level of immunity to Covid-19 than antibody testing figures, like those published as part of the UK Office for National Statistics Infection Survey, suggest. It’s likely those people did mount an antibody response, but either it had faded or was not detectable by the current tests. And these people should be protected if they are exposed to the virus for a second time. Prof Danny Altmann at Imperial College London described the study as “robust, impressive and thorough” and said it added to a growing body of evidence that “antibody testing alone underestimates immunity”.

Read more …

…. immediately followed by something worse..

Doctors Say Half Of ‘Cured’ COVID Patients Still Suffer (ToI)

Recovered COVID patients are baffling doctors with complaints of freak pains, lungs that just won’t get back to normal, and a range of incapacitating psychological issues. “What we are seeing is very frightening,” Prof. Gabriel Izbicki of Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek Medical Center told The Times of Israel. “More than half the patients, weeks after testing negative, are still symptomatic.” Izbicki is working on a study that involves follow-up with patients who were in hospitals or coronavirus hotels, looking at the aftereffects of the virus and trying to understand why patients continue to suffer long after being confirmed negative. “There is very little research about the mid-term affect of coronavirus,” he said, adding that it is much needed to guide doctors.


In Bnei Brak, at Israel’s first community clinic, doctors have been seeing a spike in recent days in the patients with pains that appear to come from nowhere. “It can appear in the arms, legs, or other places where the virus doesn’t have a direct impact, and if you ask about the pain level on a 1 to 10 scale, can be 10, with people saying they can’t get to sleep,” said Eran Schenker, director of the month-old clinic in Bnei Brak run by Maccabi Healthcare Services. “It’s something which we’re starting to see much more in the last week.” A patient from the clinic spoke to The Times of Israel on condition that her name is not published. She was diagnosed in March and tested negative a month ago. But the woman, a Bnei Brak resident in her 40s, still has severe fatigue and anxiety, and can only walk for a few minutes at a time.

Read more …

TEXT gress to limit the powers of the presidency so of course preventing his ability to end a pointless war is the one time they actually decide to do it

House Votes To Block Trump’s Ability To Withdraw Forces From Afghanistan (Hill)

The House Armed Services Committee voted Wednesday to put roadblocks on President Trump’s ability to withdraw from Afghanistan, including requiring an assessment on whether any country has offered incentives for the Taliban to attack U.S. and coalition troops. The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) amendment, from Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.), would require several certifications before the U.S. military can further draw down in Afghanistan. The amendment was approved 45-11. Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.), the No. 3 House Republican, argued the amendment “lays out, in a very responsible level of specificity, what is going to be required if we are going to in fact make decisions about troop levels based on conditions on the ground and based on what’s required for our own security, not based on political timelines.”

“And that is crucially important, and I think it is our number one priority,” she added. The amendment comes as Trump’s withdrawal deal with the Taliban remains precarious as high violence levels persist in Afghanistan. The U.S. military has said it is down to 8,600 troops in line with the agreement to get to that level by mid-July. But military officials have insisted any further drawdown will be based on conditions on the ground that are not yet met, even as Trump pushes for a speedy withdrawal. [..] Among the amendment’s requirements is an assessment of whether any “state actors have provided any incentives to the Taliban, their affiliates, or other foreign terrorist organizations for attacks against United States, coalition, or Afghan security forces or civilians in Afghanistan in the last two years, including the details of any attacks believed to have been connected with such incentives.”

Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) framed the measure as particularly important in light of the revelations. “There’s been bipartisan criticism of what a weak deal [Trump] got with the Taliban, a deal that is already falling apart,” Moulton said. “Now we learned that he was making this deal at the same time as there were bounties on the heads of American troops, American sons and daughters. We clearly need more oversight over what the president is doing in Afghanistan.”

Read more …

Comedy Capers.

House Dems Introduce Resolution To Impeach AG Barr (SAC)

House Democrats on Tuesday introduced a resolution to ‘investigate and consider’ impeaching Attorney General William Barr. The move comes just a few months after their failed attempt to impeach President Donald Trump. Congressman Steve Cohen, R-TN, brought the measure to the House floor with the support of 35 co-sponsors. The group alleges that “Attorney General Barr has undermined our judicial system and perverted the rule of law.” He added, “In the past few weeks alone, Barr has ordered the attack on peaceful protestors in Lafayette Park, in violation of their constitutional rights, and moved to drop charges against Michael Flynn, the President’s former campaign advisor, despite his guilty pleas. He fired without any explanation the U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York who was overseeing investigations into the President’s associates and possibly the President himself.”


“The pattern here is unmistakable. Barr obstructs justice by favoring the President’s friends and political allies. He abuses his power by using the Department of Justice to harass, intimidate and attack disfavored Americans and the President’s political opponents. My oath to support and defend the Constitution compels me to confront this corruption. Congress is a co-equal branch of government and we must get to the bottom of this and hold Bill Barr accountable.” Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee Rep. Jim Jordan criticized his colleagues’ move saying, “Are you kidding me?”, adding “Bill Barr is cleaning up the mess that Obama, Biden, and Comey created!”

Read more …

The black left doesn’t buy it either.

Freedom Rider: Russia, Afghanistan, and the Big Lie (BAR)

There is no end to the Russiagate fraud. All major charges have been disproved. No one was convicted of the dreaded “collusion” that was reported endlessly for the last four years. Damning information is now declassified and casts doubt on the veracity of the whole story. CrowdStrike, the Democratic National Committee cyber security firm, admitted under oath they had no proof of hacking by Russia or anyone else. Robert Mueller ended his two-year long, multi-million dollar investigation with nothing except convictions for process crimes. Why then did the New York Times print a story with an unnamed intelligence agency source claiming that the Russian government paid the Taliban to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan? The charge is ludicrous on its face but the story is quite useful to people who want to hide their own criminality while simultaneously keeping Trump hamstrung in an election year.

Russia is the nation least likely to do business with jihadists. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, jihadists nearly tore Russia apart. Separatists from the Chechnya region terrorized the entire country which was weakened and divided after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Because of that experience Russia eagerly assisted the United States after the September 11 attacks. Far from impeding the U.S. presence, Russia and other former Soviet republics were steadfast participants in the Northern Distribution Network (NDN). NDN was a supply line carrying materiel from Russia, through central Asian nations and finally to Afghanistan. Russia allowed the use of its air space in troop transit flights. Far from being an enemy, Russia assisted the U.S. and its coalition in their fight against the Taliban.

Russia’s NDN cooperation lasted until 2015, when U.S. meddling in Ukraine poisoned relations between the two countries. Hostility towards jihadists remains a focus of Russian foreign policy decision making. The concern that ISIS might take control of Syria was the primary reason that Russia finally helped president Assad in 2015. Not only does this latest claim make little sense, but there is no source for this information. We are told that an anonymous intelligence official revealed the Russian bounty and that Donald Trump was aware of it but did nothing. Anonymous intelligence sources are the cause of much mischief. They will tell the public that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction or that Muammar Gaddafi is planning a massacre. In both instances the rationale for lying was to get public approval for U.S. aggression. In this case keeping the failing Russiagate narrative alive is a motive for more disinformation.

The timing of this dubious reporting is significant. An appeal’s court recently ruled that a federal judge must dismiss Michael Flynn’s conviction for lying to FBI agents. Flynn was set up by James Comey and Barack Obama with some involvement or knowledge on the part of Joe Biden. The timing of this development could not have been worse. When Flynn’s charges are dismissed, the story will truly begin to unravel and the corporate media will lose its monopoly on information.

Read more …

But wait, just now the NYT “reports” they have tracked down an Afghani who paid someone with Russian dollars!

WaPo Admits ‘Russian Bounties’ Info “Deemed Sketchy” (ZH)

Congressional leaders have demanded answers, and those answers have come in the form of multiple US intelligence agencies and chiefs essentially throwing cold water on the NY Times Russian bounties to kill American troops in Afghanistan story, as we’ve detailed. We expect this “bombshell” will be very short-lived, perhaps being memory holed by the weekend, akin to the fate of other Russiagate-related ‘anonymous sources say’ type stories. The Pentagon is the latest to say that DOD-wide there is currently “no corroborating evidence at this time to validate the recent allegations regarding malight activity by Russian personnel against US forces in Afghanistan,” according to a late Tuesday evening statement by Defense Secretary Mark Esper.

And yet the Times is busy publishing photos of slain Marines to help bolster what’s increasingly looking like a propaganda hit piece ahead of the November election, for which there’s already been considerable backlash from the public. As of Wednesday it’s been revealed that a highly respected career intelligence officer previously made the decision to not brief President Trump on what the Washington Post now belatedly admits was widely “deemed sketchy” information the CIA had obtained in 2019 through either a foreign source or report. This line from the Post is certainly awkward for them and the Times:

“The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that White House officials were first informed in early 2019 of intelligence reports that Russia was offering the bounties to kill U.S. and coalition military personnel, but the information was deemed sketchy and in need of additional confirmation, according to people familiar with the matter.”

Read more …

“They are reporting the ‘fact’ that there was a rumor.”

Afghan Bounty Scandal Comes at Suspiciously Important Time (MPN)

Based on anonymous intelligence sources, The New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal released bombshell reports alleging that Russia is paying the Taliban bounties for every U.S. soldier they can kill. The story caused an uproar in the United States, dominating the news cycle and leading presumptive Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden to accuse Trump of “dereliction of duty” and “continuing his embarrassing campaign of deference and debasing himself before Vladimir Putin.” “This is beyond the pale,” the former vice-president concluded. However, there are a number of reasons to be suspicious of the new reports. Firstly, they appear all to be based entirely on the same intelligence officials who insisted on anonymity.

The official could not provide any concrete evidence, nor establish that any Americans had actually died as a result, offering only vague assertions and admitting that the information came from “interrogated” (i.e. tortured) Afghan militants. All three reports stressed the uncertainty of the claims, with the only sources who went on record — the White House, the Kremlin, and the Taliban — all vociferously denying it all. The national security state also has a history of using anonymous officials to plant stories that lead to war. In 2003, the country was awash with stories that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, in 2011 anonymous officials warned of an impending genocide in Libya, while in 2018 officials accused Bashar al-Assad of attacking Douma with chemical weapons, setting the stage for a bombing campaign. All turned out to be untrue.

“After all we’ve been through, we’re supposed to give anonymous ‘intelligence officials’ in The New York Times the benefit of the doubt on something like this? I don’t think so,” Scott Horton, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com and author of “Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan,” told MintPress News. “All three stories were written in language conceding they did not know if the story was true,” he said, “They are reporting the ‘fact’ that there was a rumor.” Horton continued: “There were claims in 2017 that Russia was arming and paying the Taliban, but then the generals admitted to Congress they had no evidence of either. In a humiliating debacle, also in 2017, CNN claimed a big scoop about Putin’s support for the Taliban when furnished with some photos of Taliban fighters with old Russian weapons. The military veteran journalists at Task and Purpose quickly debunked every claim in their piece.”

Read more …

Ha ha ha. Lawyers For Honesty is a great name. Everyone knows how honest they are.

Biden Pulls Together 100s Of Lawyers As Bulwark Against Election Trickery (R.)

Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden said on Wednesday that his party has assembled a group of 600 lawyers and thousands of other people to prepare for possible “chicanery” ahead of November’s election. “We put together 600 lawyers and a group of people throughout the country who are going into every single state to try to figure out whether chicanery is likely to take place,” Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, said on a video conference with donors to his campaign. “We have over 10,000 people signed up to volunteer. We’re in the process of getting into the states in question to train them to be in a polling place,” he said, in a time when the coronavirus pandemic requires extra precautions.


Biden’s remarks come as the candidate offers dire warnings about efforts by Republicans to cheat in the Nov. 3 election while also criticizing his election opponent, Republican President Donald Trump, for undermining confidence in the vote. A senior political adviser and top lawyer for Trump’s campaign, Justin Clark, said Biden is lying and stoking fear while Democrats are trying to “fundamentally change” how elections are conducted, an apparent reference to their support for widespread mail-in voting. Republicans have argued that mail-in voting and other changes being suggested by Democrats in the midst of the pandemic could create fraud. “They are inserting chaos and confusion into our voting process because it is the only way they can win,” Clark said in a statement, adding that the president is committed to “fair and free elections.”

Read more …

“Imagine how many mortgage, car payments, and small business loan defaults will crackle across the land, and how that will thunder through the banking system.”

Storm Warning (Kunstler)

While Mr. Trump seems to dimly apprehend the urgent need for economic restructuring, he’s able to express it only in messages that sound like a 1961 Frigidaire commercial, with overtones of Marvel Comics superhero grandiosity. The president may understand that a country can’t consume stuff without producing stuff, but he doesn’t get that it’s too late to bring back all that activity at the scale we used to run it when he was a young man in the 1960s. His answer to the call of restructuring — what the Soviets called perestroika before they fell apart — is to pile on more debt, that is, borrow more from the future to pay for hamburgers today.

That dovetails neatly with the needs of the financial community, led by the hapless “Jay” Powell at the Federal Reserve, who is on a mission to destroy the U.S. dollar in order to save the banking system and its auxiliaries in the stock markets. He literally doesn’t know what to do — except “print” more dollars to support share prices, a symbolic talisman of theoretical economics that has less and less to do with what people actually do on-the-ground in the hours when they’re not sleeping. It looks unlikely that the Fed will rescue either Wall Street or Main Street. The longer he props up the former at the expense of the latter, the more certain it is that it will provoke insurrection that goes well beyond the current hostilities.

The looting and arson of recent days hugely aggravated a central feature of it: the destruction of small business. In Minneapolis alone, the damage stands at $100-million. Things were difficult enough under the strictures of Covid-19, but this guarantees that many cities will not see the return of commerce — and there are only a few other reasons for cities to even exist. Not only did the Democratic Party fail to object to the mayhem, but the city governments they controlled abetted, incited, and applauded the anarchy. Meanwhile, last Saturday in Tulsa, Mr. Trump made the signal error of bragging on the latest highs in the stock markets. Hasn’t he learned by now what a flimsy representation of reality that is?

Evidently not. The air may be coming out of that lifebuoy in the next couple of weeks, and his election prospects will sink with it. This will happen as the nation approaches the dark moment when the postponement of debt repayments ends. Imagine how many mortgage, car payments, and small business loan defaults will crackle across the land, and how that will thunder through the banking system.

Read more …

What happens when you have no markets.

Top of the World (R.)

Tesla’s electrifying rise claimed its biggest victim yet. During morning trading on Wednesday, shares in the Silicon Valley upstart rose some 5% to briefly hit a market value of $210 billion, overtaking Toyota Motor as the world’s largest carmaker by market worth. Undeserved as that may be, it shifts Chief Executive Elon Musk’s performance bonus into overdrive. The maker of the Model 3 has long traded on a far higher multiple of earnings than its traditional, internal combustion engine-focused rivals. But after a 400% share-price turbo boost over the past 12 months – lapping Ford Motor, then General Motors then Volkswagen – Tesla now trades at 69 times estimated 2022 earnings, according to Refinitiv data. Toyota, by contrast, trades just below 10 times earnings for that calendar year.

Tesla’s current price requires the utmost faith in Elon Musk’s ability either to deliver millions more vehicles a year than the 400,000 he managed last year, or to roll out a large fleet of cheap-to-run robo-taxis. Neither looks likely any time soon. But the valuation also starts the clock on another huge payout for Musk. Shareholders two years ago approved a 10-year performance package that allows the boss to be given shares equal to 12% of the amount outstanding, worth in total as much as $60 billion. Getting them requires hitting both a market value target as well as either a revenue or adjusted EBITDA goal.

He was awarded the first of the 12 possible tranches a little over a month ago, based on a $100 billion market value and $20 billion of annual revenue. The shares had already zoomed past the second market-value target – $150 billion – on the way to its current level, though Musk has to wait for that to register on a six-month average basis.

Read more …

 

 

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• CNN headline yesterday: “Russian voters OVERWHELMINGLY back a PLOY by Putin to rule until 2036…”

• CNN headline today: “SOME Russian voters back a PLOY by Putin to rule until 2036..”

Isn’t that a cute change? And I’m thinking: yeah, because we know if they had the choice, they’d all vote for Joe Biden…

 

 

 

 

 

 

Support the Automatic Earth in virustime.

 

Home Forums Debt Rattle July 2 2020

Viewing 40 posts - 1 through 40 (of 40 total)
  • Author
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  • #60712

    Marion Post Wolcott Unemployed coal miner’s mother in law and child. Marine, West Virginia 1938   • Crisis at Houston Hospitals as Coronavirus Ca
    [See the full post at: Debt Rattle July 2 2020]

    #60713
    V. Arnold
    Participant

    It’s theater, nothing in it is real, and you’re -literally- buying into it. Or wait, no, there is one thing that is real: people are going to get killed.

    There you go…
    Act II is yet to play out…

    #60714
    boscohorowitz
    Participant

    Burkha Bans Reconsidered

    Invest in burkha futures now! Get in on the ground floor!

    #60715
    John Day
    Participant

    @oxymoron: Thanks for complimenting me and boscohorowitz yesterday.

    @zerosum
    : That “Gray Man” thing seems to assume being on foot in a mega city like New York or London. You might prefer being closer to your vegetable garden when things break. I do. I kept reading to the end for something I could use. It was kind of reassuring not to find it. I have a 1997 Ford Ranger with dings. It’s gray. It’s invisible on Texas roads. Jenny has a 2009 Toyota Matrix, bright metallic gold. It’s really visible, but never sinister or suspicious. I always wear a bright yellow windbreaker with lots of internal pockets when going through airports, customs, and so on. I’m easy to find, but always have nothing-to-hide. Those are all variations on not attracting suspicion. I can go anywhere in Austin on my bicycle, too. Whoosh, there I go, some guy on a bike, gone, forgotten…

    @boscohorowitz
    : “She blinded ME with …….”

    #60716
    Carlos Jimenez
    Participant

    Tucker’s the master of sarcasm. May be that’s why he’s got the highest count of viewers on cable ever as opposed to CNN making stuff up every minute.

    Talking about that, I thought I was reading The Onion when: “Mercedes Benz paints its race cars black to combat racism”. Apparently not, they’re picking up the mission that CHOP dropped.

    #60717
    Carlos Jimenez
    Participant

    On the Depression Era picture atop, it reminds me of “You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive”. Wether by black lung, hunger or the Pinkertons doing the corporations dirty work with Gatling guns.

    The newer Devil’s trick is ‘mountaintop removal’ same killing machine different operation. Crapitalism will never stop until all resources are exhausted and all life on the planet is choked up by waste to the point of death.

    No better voice than Natalie Merchant’s to ask the question: “Which Side Are You On”.

    #60718
    John Day
    Participant

    It looks baffling to some “medical experts” that a lot of people who were badly ill with COVID are still tired,hurting, and with ling and other organ dysfunction.
    They are not acknowledging that this vessel attacks the layer of cells lining the arteries and arterioles all through the body. It also has ways of evading immune system attack. It prevents infected cells from expressing a surface-marker that says they are infected. The killer-T-cells don’t come kill them, so they later release their festering swarm of viral particles into the bloodstream.
    Your very own immune system is the “wonder drug” for this infection. Do take 5000 units per day of vitamin-D, 10,000 a day for a month or so, if you are just starting. Summer-sunbathing-beauties probably don’t need the loading dose.

    #60719
    John Day
    Participant

    Oops: “ling” means “lung”. “vessel” should read “virus”

    Joe Biden

    #60720

    FBI has arrested Ghislaine Maxwell. In New Hampshire. Expected to appear in a federal court later today.

    #60721

    The issue I have with jobs reports like the one today (4.8 million new jobs “won”?) is that if I say I don’t believe a single digit of them, people will say I’m a whining pessimist.

    But if I say I do believe every single digit, they’ll say I’m an absolute moron. And somewhere in between, according to their political color, they will, in the current situation, throw in either pro-Trumper or anti-Trumper.

    #60722
    boscohorowitz
    Participant

    One wonders: bug out to where?

    Any survival primer that tells me to not help others reminds me of why I don’t read survival primers. I get the rationale, particularly regarding mob midst-dom (that portmanteau went too far, jah?). But death already has my number, one day is as good a day to die as another, and our selfish genes steadily conquer our humanity by this divide’n’survive thing that got us into this mess in the first place. I submit that, in such times, there is more worth dying for than living for. I don’t mean as in suicidal escape but as rreasons to continue living, period.

    Genetically, it sucks. The most cooperative and caring typically get taken out first while the more selfish and callous win the spoils. But genes are mindless drones. The will to survive foremost is, for this bleeding heart, where the currency of life experiences moral deflation.

    Reminds me of the ending to William Gibson’ short story, Dogfight:

    “A little adrenaline would pull him out of this. He needed to celebrate. To get drunk or stoned and talk it up, going over the victory time and again, contradicting himself, making up details, laughing and bragging. A starry old night like this called for big talk.

    “But standing there with all of Jackman’s silent and vast and empty around him, he realized suddenly that he had nobody left to tell it to.

    “Nobody at all.”

    #60723
    generic
    Participant

    51,097 new cases.

    Joke going around here: “What borders on stupid?”

    Answer: “Canada and Mexico.”

    #60724

    I hadn’t seen this yet, from yesterday. Must be a link with the arrest.

    Epstein ‘sex slave’ Virginia Giuffre, Alan Dershowitz both lose in new court ruling

    Attorneys for alleged Jeffrey Epstein “sex slave” Virginia Roberts Giuffre were ordered Wednesday to destroy evidence from her case against Ghislaine Maxwell — as lawyer Alan Dershowitz was also denied access to the potentially explosive information.

    Manhattan federal Judge Loretta Preska said she was “troubled” to learn during oral arguments last week that Giuffre’s lawyers, from the firm of Cooper & Kirk, had been given sealed records from her since-settled suit against Maxwell, who Giuffre claims recruited her to have sex with Epstein and his pals while she was underage.

    The other men allegedly include Dershowitz, whom Giuffre is suing for defamation over his public denials of her accusations, including calling her a “certified, complete, total liar,” and who is counter-suing Giuffre for causing “serious harm … to his reputation, his business and his health.”

    “As a practical matter, the Court would be surprised — shocked, even — if Cooper & Kirk was not in some sense ‘using’ the Maxwell discovery in its representation of Ms. Giuffre in her action against Mr. Dershowitz,” the judge wrote.

    #60725
    zerosum
    Participant

    ITS NOT OVER – WORLD WIDE CIRCUS – POLITICIANS LOVE IT
    ….. painless free stuff from government.

    https://mises.org/power-market/mmt-not-modern-not-monetary-not-theory
    Stephanie Kelton, economics professor at SUNY Stony Brook, is the author of The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People’s Economy. Professor Kelton was an advisor to the Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns, and her ideas increasingly find purchase with left progressives. It is certainly possible that she has a future either in a Biden administration or even on the Federal Reserve Board, which is a testament to how quickly our political and cultural landscape has shifted toward left progressivism.
    And left progressivism requires a “New Economics” to provide intellectual cover for what is essentially a political argument for painless free stuff from government.

    #60726

    According to charging documents, Maxwell “befriended” some of these victims, “including by asking the victims about their lives, their schools, and their families”. She and Epstein spent time forging relationships with these girls, by taking them shopping and to the movies. The alleged grooming happened, according to the documents, at Epstein’s manse on the Upper East Side neighborhood of Manhattan, his estate in Palm Beach, Florida, his ranch in Sante Fe, New Mexico, as well as Maxwell’s residence in London.

    After developing a rapport, the documents allege, “Maxwell would try to normalize sexual abuse for a minor victim by, among other things, discussing sexual topics, undressing in front of the victim, being present when a minor victim was undressed, and/or being present for sex acts involving the minor victim and Epstein”.

    Sometimes, Maxwell would give Epstein massages in front of victims whereas other times, she urged them to give him massages, “including sexualized massage during which a minor victim would be fully or partially nude.” These would often involve Epstein sexually abusing these minors.

    On some occasions, Maxwell was “present for and participated in the abuse”

    #60727

    And two counts of perjury.

    #60728
    zerosum
    Participant

    Behind the curtain old news
    Monday, June 15, 2020
    https://www.commerce.gov/news/press-releases/2020/06/commerce-clears-way-us-companies-more-fully-engage-tech-standards
    Commerce Clears Way for U.S. Companies to More Fully Engage in Tech Standards-Development Bodies
    This action is meant to ensure Huawei’s placement on the Entity List in May 2019 does not prevent American companies from contributing to important standards-developing activities despite Huawei’s pervasive participation in standards-development organizations.
    Other side to story
    https://www.beijingnews.net/news/265635037/trump-surprises-with-lifting-of-ban-on-us-firms-working-with-huawei
    The move was seen by many in China as an admission by President Donald Trump’s administration that it cannot ignore Huawei’s influential role in developing the technical standards critical for future technologies.

    #60729
    boscohorowitz
    Participant

    My son the skater lives in downtown Seattle. I sent him this letter just now:

    BLM made you want to help. Here’s a way to help: a large part of the Capitol Hill thing population was homeless people who enjoyed a space where cops didn’t hassle them and good food was reliably available.

    Now that the cops have chased BLM out, the homeless are most likely taking the worst of it. The cops will surely use this as an excuse to harass them elsewhere. Not too far, just away from the de-re-militarized zone 😉 .

    You could make up a buncha sandwiches, including lettuce, toms, etc. — these people rarely get fresh veggies/fruit, and hand them out. Also, sani-wipes. Tampons for the ladies. $30 and an afternoon’s skating around the area would make a lot of outcast people surprisingly happy, although the expressions of gratitude you’ll receive will range from tearful thanx to shove-off grunts. People living exposed like that to both the elements and the sordid social facts of our culture, tend to become emotionally calloused.

    Media/culture tells us it has to be big to make a difference. This is, imo, partly because that makes easier targets for them to manipulate or even destroy. LIfe is composed of little things. The personal and singular is powerful, very powerful. It’s where all the real action happens.

    Best to bring a buddy with you. The homeless are mostly harmless and mostly good if fractured people. But sometimes there’s a serious paraschizo, someone like that, and they are hell to deal with alone.

    And of course, skateboards make great weapons/shields.

    But that’s just precaution. The biggest danger from the homeless are fleas and disease.

    #60730
    Dr. D
    Participant

    Continuing their unbroken streak, Leftist BLM arrested for unprovoked crowd shooting of SUV and driver.

    Well, you can’t very well arrest them BEFORE the crime, but fat lot of good it does after.

    Oh and CHAZ finally ends with extreme “police” brutality, where CHAZ police empty 300 unprovoked rounds into two black children: 14 and 16. The 16 year old died.

    Good job BLM. That’s showin’ how to do it. Took only 7 days.

    What “Capitalism” do you mean? If a Choctaw trades red ocher with a Comanche, do the mountains fall? They are in a state of *perfect* capitalism: they own things, control the equipment to make them, and trade, often using abstract currency. There’s no enforcement, and no one can make them do anything. So the problem is where…? And does the cure to this terrible mountain-felling system kill 100M people per 100 years, beyond the daily terror, oppression, tyranny, and complete environmental ruin? If so, I’d rather have the disease.

    I’ll take this one up: If the BLS said it, it’s a lie. The BLS is a subset: adult Americans, subset: Media. Every word, every breath, every number, every time.

    Universal lies like MMT. Sure, it works. It’s a time-delayed reverse-progressive tax increase on the poor. It works by causing inflation that inevitably must help the top, the first-holders of new money while it raises prices on the last-holders of money, the bottom. It delays wage increases while increasing investment profits, and therefore turbo-charges all income disparity. That’s why they all want it, why it’s promoted in schools and billionaire-owned media articles and not banned and de-platformed like every idea that would actually reduce income disparity and harm the rich. –Incidentally the same reason why Socialism is allowed and promoted by all rich men and institutions everywhere: the few billionaire party-members will still be the deciders — far stronger — and live in palatial Dachas while they send you to Siberia and grab your daughters. And as always, the poor are easily sold on it and buy in, which utterly destroys them, as it has in Argentina and every other place it’s ever tried, and is the largest reason they have indeed been destroyed in America every minute of every day since we started MMT in 1971.

    But by all means, do it more: utterly annihilate the poor. We’ll just invest and profit 25-fold by it with a 60% ruined economy and 30% unemployment rate with 20% of that nation on food stamps and the resulting nationwide riots. Why? Since nobody listens to what we say anyway. I’ll advise you not to and list why in endless mind-numbing detail, but they have to learn for themselves like always in history. The unlearning and unwary may indeed be going to h–l. Doesn’t mean we have to help, though.

    #60731
    boscohorowitz
    Participant

    The study concerns households and larger cloistered environments like schools, which few appear to be seriously considering reopening. The words ‘public’ and ‘outdoor’ appear zilch in the article.

    Households/schools are contagion environments almost impossible to control, which is why nursing homes and hospitals are notorious places to catch a wicked bug, and why PPE is so adamantly demanded in healthcare facilities these days.

    (My wife works in medical admin. Local major hospital sent letter explaing that further practitioner privileges in said hospital depended on passing a $25 test to ensure practitioners had masks and they passed some kind of proper fit test. Three days later, another letter said, Cancel that. Most likely because the insurance comapnies, who probably instigated the first letter, discovered that there are no guarantees with this stuff, and the legal wrecking ball could swing both ways in subsequent litigation. In such cases, bureaucracies prefer to stick with silence than stick their neck out. The requirement was reduced to ‘wear a mask’ and follow pre-established guidelines for dealing with previous bad bugs like MRSA, requirement my wife’s practitioners were also familiar with and performed often.)

    The article is rife with statements like this: “Most studies were underpowered because of limited sample size, and some studies also reported suboptimal adherence in the face mask group.”

    This I agree with: “Disposable medical masks (also known as surgical masks) are loose-fitting devices that were designed to be worn by medical personnel to protect accidental contamination of patient wounds, and to protect the wearer against splashes or sprays of bodily fluids (36). There is limited evidence for their effectiveness in preventing influenza virus transmission either when worn by the infected person for source control or when worn by uninfected persons to reduce exposure. Our systematic review found no significant effect of face masks on transmission of laboratory-confirmed influenza.”

    I wear the nice home-sewn face masks, made by my wife, in public more to make everyone feel safe. As the numbers rise, I am switching to my own sockmask design, which actually fits snugly and doesn’t pressurise at critical junctures creating vent jets like all other masks do except some high-techs made with modern form-fitting materials (and are probably uncomfortable).

    “We did not consider the use of respirators in the community.”

    Respirators, while uncomfortable, work far better than a loose-fitting mask like 99% of the people wear. If we had a disease prevention program instead of Fauci’s Farce, we’d have a zillion of ’em pre-made and arrangements to convert factories overnight to produce a gazillion bazillion more in short order. THat issue is separate from What Is Known to Work and What Isn’t or Doesn’t.

    “In this review, we did not find evidence to support a protective effect of personal protective measures or environmental measures in reducing influenza transmission.”

    Neither did I find in this review a basis to conclude that PPE Doesn’t Work.

    Someday, maybe, we’ll be able to distinguish politics from epidemiology, although the similarity from harmful pandemical pathogens, and electoral republican democracy is rather striking.

    Certain fetishist and probably many Islamically raised males should like this:

    booty

    As for capitalism vs socialism, etc.: since I’ve compared pathogens to politics, I’ll note that capitalism is a slow-moving virus that very gradually infects the whole populace asymptomatically relative to nasty pathogens like Ebola, they produce in time more total devastation than any other system outside of despotic tyranny.

    Which is what capitalism has turned into long before socialism as even coined as a word (early 1800s).

    “Socialism emerged as a response to the expanding capitalist system. It presented an alternative, aimed at improving the lot of the working class and creating a more egalitarian society. In its emphasis on public ownership of the means of production, socialism contrasted sharply with capitalism, which is based around a free market system and private ownership.”

    Socialism and communism are failed vaccine attempts to curb the destructive and impoverishing tendencies of capitalism, a cancer that is the other opiate of the masses, and feels good until it doesn’t, whereupon it then feels very bad.

    TB Sheets

    #60732
    Glennda
    Participant

    You are in good form today, Raul. I laughed 2x, first with the Biden/Trump accusations of Marxist, then at the end with the picture of Putin that he killed Jesus. Always good to see the humor in the nonsense.

    As a Californian, it was good to see a list of the cities with the big surges. Living in the East Bay area, I can see a few more quiet months of quiet home life in my future. My veggies are doing well, and I can still water them and get a crop or two before we will need to “conserve” water for the rest of the hot summer in to fall.

    Thanks for the good reads with my morning coffee.

    #60733

    Oh, that’s just great, Glennda, so you’re having a quite morning coffee while I’m tearing my hair out… 😉

    But yeah, it’s like we’ve already landed in Monty Python territory, and there’s still 4 months to go. “You’re a Marxist!” “No, you’re a Marxist. And then some bystander asks: “what a Marxist?”, and they both go: “Shut up, we”re having an argument here!”

    And you know, I’m reading people like Bosco here (nothing personal) talking about socialism etc., and I think: I never met an American who has any idea what it is. For Americans, socialism equals communism equals Marxism etc. It just means: some sort of idea that we don’t support.

    They think Norway is socialist, and so is Czechia, but don’t ask them about the difference. Mention Medicare 4 All, and everyone but AOC and Bernie says: “Socialism. Bad”. While tons of countries have some form of it that are definitely not socialist. Except in American eyes, of course, just because they have it. Germany? Socialist! Canada? Socialist. UK? Socialist. Finish the story and color the pictures.

    #60734
    Maxwell Quest
    Participant

    Just stumbled across this and it really grabbed my attention. A new Unity Ticket composed of Andrew Yang and Admiral William H. McRaven for the 2020 presidential race, both of whom have agreed to lead jointly. This is being proposed by Intellectual Dark Web member, Dr. Bret Weinstein. At first glance, this looks like something I could get behind.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptrrDfDGzqs

    https://medium.com/@ArticlesOfUnity/the-articles-of-unity-f544f930d336

    #60735

    I’ve lost my will to post here-
    It’s hot. My brain is stuck.
    The way the world is headed
    I no longer give a …
    Damn!

    Went to grocery store yesterday that required masks. Instant asthma, foggy glasses, had to keep moving it to smell the produce, voices were all muffled. Worst of all, the place was filled with faceless zombies. We are hardwired for smiles.
    We have entered the world of the living dead. But, gee, we’re safe, right? Safe is all there is, right? Better to be safe in Hell than to cough in Paradise, right?
    Oh- and no masks with no social distancing didn’t cause The Virus to spread during our little riots. That’s so precious! God loves riots!

    #60736
    boscohorowitz
    Participant

    I just cited when the word and the concept called socialism first came into parlance, R, to point out that capitalism(s) has/have been dominant longer than socialism(s) have been around. That’s all. What do you expect from a 15 year old girl anyway?

    Me, I like socialism, whatever the fuck it supposedly is. I like the emphasis on ‘social’, which is the primary substance of any political system. I understand there’s a spectrum of not-entirely-capitalist economies, and that some of those non-entirely-capitalist approaches are loosely labeled ‘socialist’.

    I also understand that none of these systems — cap, soc, com — have stood the test of enduring historical time and are all virtually in collapse because none of them adequately divorced themselves from virulent capitalism. Hence the vaccine metaphor. You do know the difference between a metaphor and a comprehensive definition?

    It’s one thing to put words in a man’s mouth. That’s bad enough if sadly common. It’s another to put words in another man’s mouth and say he doesn’t even know what they mean. First you step in it, then you put your foot in your mouth. Why do you do that?

    The problem with passive-aggression is that it ends in aggression. Me, I’m aggressive-passive. You can figure out the rest. Nothing personal my ass.

    I’ll give my money away locally from now on and stick to reading Charles Hugh Smith.

    #60737
    Mr. House
    Participant

    Let me get this straight, we all accept that rich powerful people will murder a man in prison so their dirty deeds won’t come out, but not that they would create a false flag/pandemic to cover up financial collapse. The thing we’ve been coming to this site for a decade to learn about.

    #60738

    15 year old girls are so easy to offend, it’s almost not funny.

    #60739
    Mr. House
    Participant

    9/11= once in a lifetime event!
    2008= once in a lifetime event!
    coronaviru= once in a lifetime event!

    I’ve only been alive 36 years but damn thats a lot of once in a lifetime events

    #60740

    And I did specifically say Nothing Personal, I was using you as an example for how I think Americans understand socialism. But let’s not go there, shall we, certainly given that Epstein is in the news again so much today. Let’s call a truce. Whether you want to donate money for hanging out here all the time, that has always been, and always will be, your prerogative.

    #60741
    teri
    Participant

    Excess deaths year-over-year in US:

    https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/01/official-us-coronavirus-death-toll-is-a-substantial-undercount-of-actual-tally-new-yale-study-finds.html

    And I must add, screw Trump. No matter what else he is accused of (whether or not the accusations are true or false and no matter who has uttered them – forget all that other BS), the truth about Covid19 is that he has totally fucked up the response to it and a LOT of people died who otherwise would still be alive. A lot more will lose their lives because of this administration. We could have starved the virus of hosts with a strict couple of months on lockdown, followed by testing and tracing.

    This country that, during WW2, went through 6 years of food shortages, gas and food rationing, women suddenly leaving the home to work, kids entering daycare when such was unheard of before, teenagers replacing men at work and at home as the men were off to war, etc., couldn’t suck it up for a couple of months to stop the virus. Now we have a president who says we won’t shut down again (as if what we did was a proper “shutdown”) and who simply doesn’t care how many of us die.

    Lots and lots of information coming out about the long term health effects of Covid. Life expectancy in the US will be plummeting for the foreseeable future. No-one has written an article about this as yet that I have seen, but I expect there will eventually be studies that show how many years the average lifespan has decreased thanks to this disease. No doubt some politicians will see this as an answer to the so-called social security shortfall.

    #60742
    zerosum
    Participant

    CIRCUS
    He said it, therefore , It must be true this time around.

    https://thehill.com/homenews/media/505656-carville-repeats-prediction-that-trump-will-drop-out-of-race
    Carville repeats prediction that Trump will drop out of race
    BY JOE CONCHA – 07/02/20 01:50 PM EDT
    “I think there is a significant chance he doesn’t run,” Carville told “Morning Joe” on Thursday. “This thing is going so poorly. He’s so far back. It doesn’t make much sense for him to run.”
    —–
    Trump is a tenant of the white house. Most pissed off tenant wreck the house as a revenge.
    As tenant of the USA, it takes a lot more time to wreck everything. Watch for the signs of wreckage or delayed destruction that will cripple the incoming tenant.
    tit for tat. (the infliction of an injury or insult in return for one that one has suffered.)

    #60743
    Carlos Jimenez
    Participant

    “What “Capitalism” do you mean? If a Choctaw trades red ocher with a Comanche, do the mountains fall? They are in a state of *perfect* capitalism: they own things, control the equipment to make them, and trade, often using abstract currency. There’s no enforcement, and no one can make them do anything. So the problem is where…? And does the cure to this terrible mountain-felling system kill 100M people per 100 years, beyond the daily terror, oppression, tyranny, and complete environmental ruin? If so, I’d rather have the disease.”

    Well Dear Dr. D. I thought any explanation of “what kind of capitalism” was self explanatory, not the least because I called it “CRAP-italism” or as Noam Chomsky would call it: “REC”, Really Existing Capitalism. Where the financial “industry” makes 40% of the GDP and I can’t think of any economy that can thrive with so much skimming at the top from the labor below. Last time I checked, real wealth comes from labor not from usury. REC socializes losses and privatizes profit, a chosen elite can print money from thin air and charge interest on it. Commercial banks can do same with the full backing of the government stamp, at interest. It’s not counterfeiting is they do it.
    Talk about an “exorbitant privilege”.
    All big corporations enjoy some kind of ‘qualified immunity’, they can sow death an disease for ever and not be accountable. The Price-Anderson Act of 1957 is exhibit “A” of this long American tradition not always put into law but in effect is the law of the land. The “carbon free” “too cheap to meter” nuke power industry could not exist anywhere on the planet save for the goobmint blanket immunity as there’s no Insurance co. that would take that risk. And this works in practice for every other mega corporation.
    I’m sure you didn’t know this… Of course you do, which is more baffling, with due respect, that as an MD committed to the health of the people and the planet too, I reckon, can so cavalierly discount the destruction of our life support systems if it doesn’t surpass your chosen threshold of a 100 million per 100 years deaths.
    Your Choctaw trading with a Comanche is a bit too Disneyesque. That Choctaw and that Comanche and the Seminole down here and most everywhere else in the Indian nations, have bought hook line and sinker into the white man’s magic medicine of the Casino cargo cult and they’re raking it. Yes they did made a Faustian bargain alright. So much so that the IRS is dragging them to court to collect from the independent “Nations”.
    “What we have here…” as the Captain would say in “Cool Hand Luke” “it’s a failuh to communicate”
    I’m certainly not opposed to capitalism neither am I subscribing implicitly to socialism. A man should enjoy the fruits of his labor, store it and trade it or pass It on to his children.
    But our current system is a Death Star with ever more suction power.
    And a system prostrated to Thanatos is incapable of finding anything sacred. Everything is for profit. The mountains, the land, the trees, the rivers and the sea are all for profit or else their existence can not be justified, per se. That’s why we eat plastic from inside our fruits, our fish and our meat, along with the rest of the witch’s brew.

    And your trading injans far from being involved in trading ocher, fur or bison, if they didn’t hit the Casino jackpot, are destined to a short and brutal life of slow genocide extracting dense energy resources in the mines under a slightly better system than ‘encomiendas’.

    Flagstaff, a day’s long travel? from your veggie garden in Austin is poked with a thousand hell holes in the ground from abandoned Uranium mines that will keep on dispensing death to the nearly 10 mn people of the surrounding area but mostly, to the natives of Navajo Res. Even their houses are built with uranium saturated earth. They can’t escape it.
    As they can’t escape the second wave of the curse of resources: the rich coal deposits, so that Sodom and Gomorrah, aka Vegas, Phoenix, LA, etc can enjoy golf courses and swimming pools in the desert.
    Meanwhile, Black Mesa’s water for human (the native kind) consumption was depleted by the coal industry.
    I really don’t care if a million or as little as one life have been destroyed in Appalachia along with a rich environment, all dumped into the hollows and replanted like a Walmart parking lot.
    Still it is a horrible crime. An unsustainable, unacceptable and selfish crime that borrows limited resources from the future to live up the overshoot, today.
    Having said that, from the oposite side of the street as it were, I have enjoyed all along your steady counterpoint to Ilargi’s, it has helped me navigate and find my own position somewhere in between, in reference to the virus. The latter drawed a smile on me when he called you “TAE’s Resident Doctor”. A bit tongue in cheek a bit seriously, you have become that in the end, by way of steady and intelligent argument backed up by real time experience. Thank you for that.

    #60745
    Huskynut
    Participant

    I just can’t get my head around why Maxwell would return to the US. She was safe from extradition living in France. Either she thought she could live without notice or consequence in the US (who in her situation would take that chance?), or else she is so confident of protection from any meaningful consequence (ie she’ll get a short easy sentence like Epstein’s first one, and is then free to live an unrestricted life).
    My mind boggles that she could be confident of either of those things. But perhaps there’s enough blackmail evidence in every direction that she can/does feel confident.
    Is there some other possibility I’m missing?

    #60746
    V. Arnold
    Participant

    Wow Ilargi; you’re on a roll today.
    Keep it coming…

    #60747
    V. Arnold
    Participant

    51,097 new cases.

    Joke going around here: “What borders on stupid?”

    Answer: “Canada and Mexico.”

    LOL, that’s a keeper…
    Thanks

    #60748
    Doc Robinson
    Participant

    @ Huskynut, some news reports are saying Maxwell stayed in the USA during this past year. To avoid being arrested at the airport?

    “Ghislaine Maxwell, the longtime girlfriend and alleged accomplice of accused … been “hiding out” in various locations around New England for the past year”

    “Ghislaine Maxwell… holed up in New England since the disgraced financier’s arrest last July.”

    #60749
    ₿oogaloo
    Participant

    When the coronavirus hit, I was optimistic that it would be the catalyst for a lot of positive changes in the US. I figured that people would demand a better health care system. I figured that the slowdown would be the pin that would reset the financial system. I figured that people would demand policy changes that put main street before Wall Street. Forget it. Americans are too stupid and too propagandized to find their way out of this mess.

    Antifa apparently has no idea what fascism is. If they had any idea, they would be attacking the unholy alliance of the Fed, the DC Swamp, and US mega businesses — the very definition of fascism. But rather than direct their wrath at institutions, they pick on individuals who have no power. And not to demand meaningful change, but for their own individual therapy.

    BLM could have been a movement for positive change, one that brought people together. I had always thought of BLM as meaning “Black Lives Matter too” — in the spirit of MLK. But now you can be fired for suggesting that everyone’s life matters — something that I never regarded as being particularly controversial. BLM has been brilliantly co opted to turn justified indignation against police violence and police culture into a race war. The US has lost its collective mind.

    Meanwhile, the looting continues, and only a few seem to notice. Or care.

    And now the evidence is piling up that there may be no herd immunity for this virus. The antibodies don’t last long enough. And this thing attacks too many organs, and has too many entry mechanisms. Because it is not natural. Because it came from a lab. But people do not seem to care. Instead of demanding an end to “gain of function” virology research, people just shrug it off. Very few want to know the truth about where this came from.

    The world has gone mad. I am tempted to leave the city, move to the country, unplug from the internet, and retreat from the madness. Unfortunately family obligations will postpone that for a while. But what will the world look like 10 years from now? Craziness.

    #60750
    V. Arnold
    Participant

    Boogaloo
    When the coronavirus hit, I was optimistic that it would be the catalyst for a lot of positive changes in the US. I figured that people would demand a better health care system. I figured that the slowdown would be the pin that would reset the financial system. I figured that people would demand policy changes that put main street before Wall Street. Forget it. Americans are too stupid and too propagandized to find their way out of this mess.

    Coming to grips with the genuine U.S. of 2020 is a six step process; it starts with denial and ends with acceptance…

    March 19, 2003 (Iraq’s destruction) was the last straw for me…
    The U.S. is well on its way out as a world power: Usian’s are the only ones who don’t know that reality, staring them in the face.

    I’ve already started to distance myself from the intertubes: TAE will remain as my main go-to place for reality checks.
    Good luck, and don’t let the bastards get you…

    #60751
    teri
    Participant

    Ok, I have to ask: Is “Dr. D” really a medical doctor? I frankly find that hard to believe.

    So, are you a doctor, Dr. D, or that just a nickname you picked up along the way? If you are not, please do not allow people on this forum to continue carrying on with this assumption based on a screen name.

    If you are…well, dear god.

    #60752
    V. Arnold
    Participant

    So, are you a doctor, Dr. D, or that just a nickname you picked up along the way? If you are not, please do not allow people on this forum to continue carrying on with this assumption based on a screen name.

    If you are…well, dear god.

    Thanks for that belly laugh…

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