Oct 302020
 
 October 30, 2020  Posted by at 9:06 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , ,


Minor White Windowsill Daydreaming Rochester NY 1958

 

A Fake Persona Laid The Groundwork For A Hunter Biden Conspiracy Deluge (NBC)
NY Post’s ‘Smoking Gun’ Hunter Biden Email 100% Authentic (DC)
Joe Biden’s Biggest Problem Is That There Is No Vaccine For Trumpism
‘We’ve Got To Stop The Bleeding’: Democrats Sound Alarm In Miami (Pol.)
Glenn Greenwald Leaves The Intercept After Editors Refuse Biden Criticism (ZH)
The ‘Censored’ Biden Story That Made Glenn Greenwald Quit The Intercept (ZH)
FBI Initially Turned Down Purported Hunter Biden Laptop (JTN)
UPS Suddenly Locates “Lost” Biden Evidence, Returns Docs To Tucker Carlson (ZH)
Western Rewriting History Of WW2 Has Incensed Russians (Robinson)
US GDP Booms At 33.1% Rate In Q3 (CNBC)
COVID Measures ‘Monument Of Collective Hysteria And Folly’: Ex-Judge (G.)

 

 

 

 

Someone said on Twitter yesterday: “You two are creating a world characterized by illogic, distrust and uncertainty. It’s a world no one wants our kids to grow up in. It’s sad that you do this. Here’s the absurdity behind the false Christopher Balding story:”

I am one of the two this person talks about, don’t know who the other is. (S)he is referring to an NBC article yesterday, “How A Fake Persona Laid The Groundwork For A Hunter Biden Conspiracy Deluge”.

It is about the report Christopher Balding published on Oct 22, (see here), but NBC’s criticism of the “Balding report” does not address its contents, only its shape, and calls it “FAKE”. That is, Balding and others invented a person who was cited as the author of it. And yes, that is a peculiar way to publish something, but Balding has always said the real author needs protection.

Then the NBC piece attempts to mix the report with other stories, the ones derived from the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop. But there is hardly any overlap. It appears to be a intentional confusion, so people will believe everything regarding Hunter Biden accusations is fake. But at the same moment, the Daily Caller reports that forensic analysis proves “NY Post’s ‘Smoking Gun’ Hunter Biden Email 100% Authentic”. And that in turn comes one day after the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee said all Bobulinski material has been verified.

Christopher Balding has reacted on Twitter, his entire reaction thread is here.

Balding reacts

 

 

A Fake Persona Laid The Groundwork For A Hunter Biden Conspiracy Deluge (NBC)

One month before a purported leak of files from Hunter Biden’s laptop, a fake “intelligence” document about him went viral on the right-wing internet, asserting an elaborate conspiracy theory involving former Vice President Joe Biden’s son and business in China. The document, a 64-page composition that was later disseminated by close associates of President Donald Trump, appears to be the work of a fake “intelligence firm” called Typhoon Investigations, according to researchers and public documents. The author of the document, a self-identified Swiss security analyst named Martin Aspen, is a fabricated identity, according to analysis by disinformation researchers, who also concluded that Aspen’s profile picture was created with an artificial intelligence face generator.

The intelligence firm that Aspen lists as his previous employer said that no one by that name had ever worked for the company and that no one by that name lives in Switzerland, according to public records and social media searches. One of the original posters of the document, a blogger and professor named Christopher Balding, took credit for writing parts of it when asked about it and said Aspen does not exist. Despite the document’s questionable authorship and anonymous sourcing, its claims that Hunter Biden has a problematic connection to the Communist Party of China have been used by people who oppose the Chinese government, as well as by far-right influencers, to baselessly accuse candidate Joe Biden of being beholden to the Chinese government.

The document and its spread have become part of a wider effort to smear Hunter Biden and weaken Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, which moved from the fringes of the internet to more mainstream conservative news outlets. An unverified leak of documents — including salacious pictures from what President Donald Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and a Delaware Apple repair store owner claimed to be Hunter Biden’s hard drive — were published in the New York Post on Oct. 14. Associates close to Trump, including Giuliani and former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, have promised more blockbuster leaks and secrets, which have yet to materialize. The fake intelligence document, however, preceded the leak by months, and it helped lay the groundwork among right-wing media for what would become a failed October surprise: a viral pile-on of conspiracy theories about Hunter Biden.

The Typhoon Investigations document was first posted in September to Intelligence Quarterly, an anonymous blog “dedicated to collecting important daily news,” according to its “about” section. Historical domain records show the blog was registered to Albert Marko, a self-described political and economic adviser, who also lists the blog on his Twitter bio. When asked about the provenance of the document, Marko said he received it from Balding. Balding, previously an associate professor at Fulbright University Vietnam who studied the Chinese economy and financial markets, posted the document on his blog on Oct. 22, seven weeks after it was initially published.

Logan Hall NBC

Read more …

“Graham said the only way the email could have been faked is if someone hacked into Google’s servers, found the private key and used it to reverse engineer the email’s DKIM signature.”

NY Post’s ‘Smoking Gun’ Hunter Biden Email 100% Authentic (DC)

An email Hunter Biden received in April 2015 from a Burisma executive discussing an introduction to then-Vice President Joe Biden, which lies at the heart of a New York Post investigation, is unquestionably authentic, a cybersecurity expert told the Daily Caller News Foundation on Thursday. The DCNF obtained a full copy of Hunter Biden’s alleged laptop from former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani on Wednesday. The DCNF provided Robert Graham, the founder of the cybersecurity firm Errata Security, with a copy of the email and its metadata for forensic analysis. Graham, who has been cited as a cybersecurity expert in The Washington Post, the Associated Press, Wired, Engadget and other news and technology outlets, told the DCNF that he used a cryptographic signature found in the email’s metadata to validate that Vadym Pozharsky, an advisor to Burisma’s board of directors, emailed Hunter Biden on April 17, 2015.

In the email, Pozharsky thanked Hunter Biden for “inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together.” The New York Post first reported the email in October, describing it as a “smoking-gun” showing that Hunter Biden had introduced his father to the Burisma executive in 2015. The email was sent less than a year before Joe Biden pressured former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to fire a prosecutor who was reportedly investigating the gas company in return for a $1 billion loan guarantee. Graham previously told the DCNF that emails sent from Gmail, such as Pozharski’s message to Hunter Biden, can be “absolutely verified beyond a shadow of a doubt” by testing its contents against the unique DKIM signature found in its metadata.


Graham used the DKIM signature within the email to verify with a private key on Google’s servers that the sender, recipient, subject, date and body of the message that the DCNF obtained from Giuliani were unchanged from when the email was originally sent in April 2015. Graham said the only way the email could have been faked is if someone hacked into Google’s servers, found the private key and used it to reverse engineer the email’s DKIM signature.

Daily Caller vs NBC

Read more …

“America is past the “I have a plan” phase. A sizable contingent of regular citizens have decided either that the disease is a “hoax,” or that it’s not worth altering their everyday lives for in any major way.”

Joe Biden’s Biggest Problem Is That There Is No Vaccine For Trumpism

As the 2020 presidential election hurls itself at us, there is one thing upon which the far right and far left agree: The COVID-19 pandemic should be over within days after Nov. 4. The right says the “deep state” is holding on to a secret vaccine that it will introduce to the world once Donald Trump is thrown out of office. The left says that Trump is the primary cause of the virus’ spread, and that with the biological weapon in chief out of office, people will soon be out safely ingesting each other’s disgusting germs.Alas, despite these extremes being so far out there that they meet again in the back, neither is right. Trump is not entirely to blame for the virus’ spread, and Joe Biden’s election will not be a panacea in stopping it.

Sure, Biden has a “plan” to solve COVID-19, and it contains all the commonsense proposals: vaccine funding, paid leave, more protective equipment and more funding for testing. But America is past the “I have a plan” phase. A sizable contingent of regular citizens have decided either that the disease is a “hoax,” or that it’s not worth altering their everyday lives for in any major way. In other words, COVID-19 is a cultural problem, not a governmental one. It is the cultural component in which Trump has failed America the most. Over the summer, it appeared the virus was waning — businesses had quickly ramped up production of masks and ventilators needed in hospitals and emergency rooms and limited state shutdowns were being enforced. Infection rates were dropping around the country.

Then, in the wake of the death of Minneapolis man George Floyd’s at the hands of police, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets to protest, effectively signaling the end of lockdowns. Science professionals who urged staying home were silent on the protests, leading those on the right to throw up their hands and say, “Well, I guess lockdown is over.” That is where Trump’s mismanagement has cost America. In the early days of the virus, Trump said all the wrong things, telling Americans it was just “one person coming in from China” and it would “disappear one day, it’s like a miracle.” And speaking of miracles, he vowed to have churches open for Easter.

Say we were to give Trump some benefit of the doubt — in the early months of the spread, everyone was still figuring out what was happening, and rapid spread would have occurred under any president. [..] Unless Biden can legislate trust in the media and politicians, the pandemic will stretch well into his presidency. The reality is a sizable portion of America is carrying on, waiting for a vaccine — which, ironically, many of them won’t take because it will probably be Joe Biden at the helm of the country when it is released. And sadly, there is no vaccine for Trumpism.

Read more …

“To date, Republicans have turned out 59 percent of their voters in Miami-Dade and Democrats have turned out 53 percent, a 6-point margin. That’s twice the margin Republicans had at this point in 2016..“

‘We’ve Got To Stop The Bleeding’: Democrats Sound Alarm In Miami (Pol.)

Democrats are sounding the alarm about weak voter turnout rates in Florida’s biggest county, Miami-Dade, where a strong Republican showing is endangering Joe Biden’s chances in the nation’s biggest swing state. No Democrat can win Florida without a huge turnout and big winning margins here to offset losses elsewhere in the state. But Democrats are turning out at lower rates than Republicans and at lower rates than at this point in 2016, when Hillary Clinton won by 29 percentage points here and still lost the state to Donald Trump. One particular area of concern is the relative share of ballots cast by young voters of color and less-reliable Democratic voters.

Part of the problem, according to interviews with a dozen Democratic elected officials and operatives, is the Biden campaign‘s decision to discourage field staff from knocking on doors during the pandemic and its subsequent delay in greenlighting — and funding — a return to door-to-door canvassing. “We did not get the kind of funding for different vendors who would do that type of work until late in the campaign,” said Rep. Frederica Wilson, a party institution who represents Miami’s heavily Black congressional district. Wilson said the good news is that Biden’s running mate, California Sen. Kamala Harris, is working with her on a turnout event for this weekend geared toward young Black men.


But the veteran congresswoman said there are still skilled operatives in her district who excel at turnout work who have yet to get approved by the campaign, a puzzling delay for an operation that raised a record $363 million the month before. “I screamed. Hollered. I called. I lobbied from the top to the bottom,” Wilson said of her efforts to get turnout operations started in the community, including sending written proposals to Biden’s campaign and having virtual Zoom meetings with his advisers.

Read more …

The election, actually the entire Trump presidency, has brought out the best and the worst in US journalism. It will never be the same.

Glenn Greenwald Leaves The Intercept After Editors Refuse Biden Criticism (ZH)

The Intercept co-founder Glenn Greenwald resigned from the outlet on Thursday, after ‘editors censored an article I wrote this week, refusing to publish it unless I remove all sections critical of Joe Biden, the candidate vehemently supported by all Intercept editors involved in this effort at suppression.’ Greenwald writes at his new home (greenwald.substack.com):”The censored article, based on recently revealed emails and witness testimony, raised critical questions about Biden’s conduct. Not content to simply prevent publication of this article at the media outlet I co-founded, these Intercept editors also demanded that I refrain from exercising a separate contractual right to publish this article with any other publication.


I had no objection to their disagreement with my views of what this Biden evidence shows: as a last-ditch attempt to avoid being censored, I encouraged them to air their disagreements with me by writing their own articles that critique my perspectives and letting readers decide who is right, the way any confident and healthy media outlet would. But modern media outlets do not air dissent; they quash it. So censorship of my article, rather than engagement with it, was the path these Biden-supporting editors chose.”Apparently he’s also blocked from publishing the article elsewhere, though he’s “asked my lawyer to get in touch with FLM to discuss how best to terminate my contract.”

People who quit
https://twitter.com/APompliano/status/1321915427522576384

Read more …

“Rather than condemn Biden for ignoring these questions — the natural instinct of a healthy press when it comes to a presidential election — journalists have instead led the way in concocting excuses to justify his silence.”

The ‘Censored’ Biden Story That Made Glenn Greenwald Quit The Intercept (ZH)

Publication by the New York Post two weeks ago of emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop, relating to Vice President Joe Biden’s work in Ukraine, and subsequent articles from other outlets concerning the Biden family’s pursuit of business opportunities in China, provoked extraordinary efforts by a de facto union of media outlets, Silicon Valley giants and the intelligence community to suppress these stories. One outcome is that the Biden campaign concluded, rationally, that there is no need for the front-running presidential candidate to address even the most basic and relevant questions raised by these materials. Rather than condemn Biden for ignoring these questions — the natural instinct of a healthy press when it comes to a presidential election — journalists have instead led the way in concocting excuses to justify his silence.

After the Post’s first article, both that newspaper and other news outlets have published numerous other emails and texts purportedly written to and from Hunter reflecting his efforts to induce his father to take actions as Vice President beneficial to the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, on whose board of directors Hunter sat for a monthly payment of $50,000, as well as proposals for lucrative business deals in China that traded on his influence with his father. Individuals included in some of the email chains have confirmed the contents’ authenticity. One of Hunter’s former business partners, Tony Bubolinski, has stepped forward on the record to confirm the authenticity of many of the emails and to insist that Hunter along with Joe Biden’s brother Jim were planning on including the former Vice President in at least one deal in China.

And GOP pollster Frank Luntz, who appeared in one of the published email chains, appeared to confirm the authenticity as well, though he refused to answer follow-up questions about it. Thus far, no proof has been offered by Bubolinski that Biden ever consummated his participation in any of those discussed deals. The Wall Street Journal says that it found no corporate records reflecting that a deal was finalized and that “text messages and emails related to the venture that were provided to the Journal by Mr. Bobulinski, mainly from the spring and summer of 2017, don’t show either Hunter Biden or James Biden discussing a role for Joe Biden in the venture.”

But nobody claimed that any such deals had been consummated — so the conclusion that one had not been does not negate the story. Moreover, some texts and emails whose authenticity has not been disputed state that Hunter was adamant that any discussions about the involvement of the Vice President be held only verbally and never put in writing.

Read more …

And then sat on it for a year.

FBI Initially Turned Down Purported Hunter Biden Laptop (JTN)

The family of the Delaware shop owner who says he came into possession of a laptop purportedly belonging to Hunter Biden first tried to turn over the computer to the FBI in summer 2019 but was rebuffed, only to have agents return months later during President Trump’s impeachment proceedings, his lawyer said Thursday night. In a lengthy statement to Just the News, attorney Brian Della Rocca provided a detailed timeline of the actions his client, John Paul Mac Isaac, says he took in trying to get authorities to investigate the laptop. The lawyer also decried public figures on both sides of the aisle for politicizing the episode and for attacking the Delaware computer repairman without having the facts.

Mac Isaac “unwittingly became the target of a smear campaign by doing what he thought was right,” Della Rocca said. “John Paul is not a right-wing fanatic, nor is he a Russian hacker.” In the statement that was originally drafted to be an op-ed, Della Rocca made several new revelations about the laptop that has stirred worldwide political intrigue on the eve of the American presidential election, an FBI investigation, and a news media and social media censorship campaign. Among the revelations: • A man claiming to be Hunter Biden dropped off three laptops on April 12, 2019 to Mac Isaac’s shop to be repaired, and returned two days later with an external hard drive. The man believed to be Hunter Biden eventually abandoned one of the laptops and the external hard drive without paying for them. • Mac Isaac’s father, a retired Air Force colonel, first tried to provide a copy of the laptop to an FBI office in Albuquerque, N.M., in summer 2019, but the bureau turned him away.


• FBI agents from Albuquerque, N.M., contacted the father in October 2019, as impeachment proceedings were ongoing in Washington, to discuss the laptop and then to interview the younger Mac Isaac in Delaware. A few weeks later, FBI agents in Delaware seized the original laptop from Mac Isaac. • On Oct. 13 of this year, Hunter Biden’s attorney contacted Mac Isaac to discuss the hard drive and followed up with an email but no further action. Three people familiar with the matter told Just the News on Thursday that the FBI has an ongoing investigation into business transactions involving firms associated with Hunter Biden and other business associates. The investigation began in 2019 around the time the FBI followed up on Mac Isaac’s concerns and has since expanded to issues raised by an IRS whistleblower complaint filed a year ago. The probe got new evidence in recent days when Hunter Biden’s former business partner Tony Bobulinski turned over documents and other materials during an FBI interview, one person with knowledge of the case said.

Read more …

This story just gets crazier.

UPS Suddenly Locates “Lost” Biden Evidence, Returns Docs To Tucker Carlson (ZH)

Delivery giant UPS confirmed Thursday it found a lost trove of documents that Fox News’ Tucker Carlson said would provide revelations in the ever-growing scandal involving Joe Biden’s son Hunter and his overseas business dealings. UPS Senior Public Relations Manager Matthew O’Connor told Business Insider on Thursday afternoon that the documents are located and are being sent to Carlson. “After an extensive search, we have found the contents of the package and are arranging for its return,” he said in a statement. “UPS will always focus first on our customers, and will never stop working to solve issues and make things right. We work hard to ensure every package is delivered, including essential goods, precious family belongings and critical healthcare.”

It came after Glenn Zaccara, UPS’s corporate media relations director, confirmed Carlson used the company to ship the materials before they were lost. “The package was reported with missing contents as it moved within our network,” Zaccara said before they were located. “UPS is conducting an urgent investigation.” During his Wednesday night broadcast, Carlson said that a UPS employee notified them that their package “was open and empty … apparently, it had been opened.” “The Biden documents never arrived in Los Angeles. Tuesday morning we received word from our shipping company that our package had been opened and the contents were missing,” Carlson also remarked. “The documents had disappeared.”


On Tuesday night, Carlson interviewed former Hunter Biden associate Tony Bobulinski, who claimed that the former Democratic vice president could be compromised by the Chinese Communist Party due to Hunter and brother James Biden’s business dealings in the country. Joe Biden has not responded to Bobulinski’s allegations. Last week during his debate with President Donald Trump, he said he had “not taken a penny from any foreign source ever in my life.”

Read more …

Paul Robinson is a professor at the University of Ottawa. He writes about Russian and Soviet history, military history, and military ethics.

Western Rewriting History Of WW2 Has Incensed Russians (Robinson)

It used to be simple: The Nazis and their allies were the bad guys, and the Americans, British, and Soviets were the good guys. Then contemporary politics took over and the narrative around WW2 became a modern battleground. The conflict ended 75 years ago. But the struggle over its history has perhaps never been as intense as it is today. In the first few decades after the war, the interpretation of it was fairly clear, and almost universally accepted: The war was a product of German aggression and the extreme ideology of the Nazis. The Germans were the criminals; and the peoples of the Allied powers were the victims. Quantitatively, the largest group of these victims was in Eastern Europe – Jews and citizens of the Soviet Union, who the Nazis killed in the millions.

From the mid-1980s, a new narrative began to creep into public discourse in the West. This maintained that Nazism was not uniquely evil nor solely responsible for the war. Rather Nazism and communism were equally morally repugnant, and Germany and the Soviet Union were mutually responsible for the tragedy. The USSR, rather than being a victim of aggression, was itself one of the prime aggressors of the era. At first, this revisionist view was restricted to a narrow group of academics. Most notable was the German historian Ernst Nolte, who in 1986 provoked the Historikerstreit (‘Historians’ Dispute’) in what was then West Germany, by suggesting that the genocidal campaign of the Nazis was just one of many such campaigns by other states, most notably the Soviet Union, in an overall ‘age of genocide’.

This theme was then popularized by certain other historians of an anti-Soviet, and later anti-Russian, bent. But what really gave it legs was the collapse of communism and the rise of nationalism among states of the former Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact. In countries such as Poland, Latvia, and post-2014 Ukraine, nationalist leaders have sought to promote their own legitimacy by adopting a strong anti-Russian line, and historical revisionism has proven to be an essential part of their toolkit. As part of this process, history has been rewritten to portray the Soviet Union as having occupied and oppressed the nations of Eastern Europe during World War II, to suggest a moral equivalence between the Nazis and the communists, and in extreme cases to portray locals who fought alongside the Germans as heroes rather than collaborators. For instance, in Ukraine.

[..] It was in this context that Russian President Vladimir Putin this week denounced any attempt to equate the USSR and Nazi Germany. This followed a complaint by Elena Yampolskaya, a member of the Russian parliament, who noted that two books had recently been published in Russia which suggested similarities between Nazism and communism, and in one case argued that “the Soviets were worse than the Nazis.” Putin agreed with Yampolskaya’s complaint that this was “absolutely unacceptable.” The Russian Federation should pass legislation similar to that of other countries which criminalizes denial of the Armenian genocide, Putin said, adding that, “We will not allow this heroic page in history to be crossed out.”

Read more …

Good for Trump in the election?

US GDP Booms At 33.1% Rate In Q3 (CNBC)

Coming off the worst quarter in history, the U.S. economy grew at its fastest pace ever in the third quarter as a nation battered by an unprecedented pandemic started to put itself back together, the Commerce Department reported Thursday. Third-quarter gross domestic product, a measure of the total goods and services produced in the July-to-September period, expanded at a 33.1% annualized pace, according to the department’s initial estimate for the period. The gain came after a 31.4% plunge in the second quarter and was better than the 32% estimate from economists surveyed by Dow Jones. The previous post-World War II record was the 16.7% burst in the first quarter of 1950.

Markets reacted positively to the news, with Wall Street erasing a loss at the open and turning mostly positive. “It’s obviously good news that the economy bounced back in the third quarter,” said Eric Winograd, senior economist at AllianceBernstein. “There’s still a lot of work to do here and the pace of improvement … is going to slow. The stimulus programs that provided much of the economic lift last quarter have expired or are expiring. Fiscal support is diminishing. That is part of the reason that the pace of growth is going to slow from here.” Increased consumption along with sold gains in business and residential investment as well as exports fueled the third-quarter rebound. Decreases in government spending following the expiration of the CARES Act rescue funding subtracted from GDP.

The powerful growth pace came after states across the country shut down large swaths of activity in an effort to stem the spread of Covid-19, which the World Health Organization declared a pandemic on March 11. [..] While the news on Q3 was good for the $21.2 trillion economy, the U.S. faces a tougher road ahead as coronavirus cases increase and worries grow over the health and economic impacts. Nearly half the 22 million jobs lost in March and April remain unfilled and the unemployment rate remains at 7.9%, more than double its pre-pandemic level as 12.6 million Americans are still out of work.


“This is going to be seized upon by both ends of the political spectrum as either evidence of the strength of the post-lockdown economic rebound or a cursory warning that the gains could be short-lived,” said James McCann, senior global economist at Aberdeen Standard Investments. “The reality is that the GDP numbers demonstrate that the U.S. economy did indeed rebound strongly as lockdown measures were lifted.”

Read more …

Jonathan Sumption, former British supreme court justice, slams ‘cavalier use of coercive powers’ and ‘loss of freedom’.

COVID Measures ‘Monument Of Collective Hysteria And Folly’: Ex-Judge (G.)

The government has deliberately stoked fear over coronavirus while behaving like an authoritarian regime relying on police state tactics, according to the former supreme court justice Jonathan Sumption. In his most forceful critique to date of the government’s handling of the pandemic, the outspoken lawyer condemned the way “the British state exercised coercive powers over its citizens on a scale never previously attempted”. Delivering the Cambridge Freshfields annual law lecture, Lord Sumption said: “The ease with which people could be terrorised into surrendering basic freedoms which are fundamental to our existence … came as a shock to me in March 2020.”

He is not the only former judge recently to lament the loss of effective parliamentary scrutiny of emergency Covid powers. Last month Lady Hale, former president of the supreme court, alleged that MPs and peers had surrendered their role during the coronavirus pandemic.In his address Sumption said the emergency measures were “the most significant interference with personal freedom in the history of our country”. He stated: “I do not doubt the seriousness of the epidemic, but I believe that history will look back on the measures taken to contain it as a monument of collective hysteria and governmental folly.”

The government, he noted, had already tried to avoid parliamentary scrutiny during Brexit by proroguing parliament, a procedure subsequently ruled unlawful by the supreme court last year. “Governments hold power in Britain on the sufferance of the elected chamber of the legislature,” Sumption argued. “Without that we are no democracy. The present government has a different approach. It seeks to derive its legitimacy directly from the people, bypassing their elected representatives.” Sage, the government’s panel of expert scientific advisers, he said, had this year noted: “Citizens should be treated as rational actors, capable of taking decisions for themselves and managing personal risk.” That warning, Sumption said, had been ignored.

[..] The police had repeatedly exceeded their powers, he suggested. “When I ventured to criticise them in a BBC interview for acting beyond their powers I received a letter from the Derbyshire police commissioner objecting to my remarks on the ground that in a crisis such things were necessary. The implication was that in a crisis the police were entitled to do whatever they thought fit, without being unduly concerned about their legal powers. That is my definition of a police state.” By using “propaganda”, he said, the government had “to some extent been able to create its own public opinion – fear was deliberately stoked up by the government”.

Read more …

 

 

We try to run the Automatic Earth on donations. Since ad revenue has collapsed, you are now not just a reader, but an integral part of the process that builds this site.

Click at the top of the sidebars for Paypal and Patreon donations. Thank you for your support.

 

 

Taiwan COVID
https://twitter.com/i/status/1310613292293984256

 

 

 

 

Support the Automatic Earth in virustime, election time, all the time. Click at the top of the sidebars to donate with Paypal and Patreon.

 

Home Forums Debt Rattle October 30 2020

Viewing 15 posts - 1 through 15 (of 15 total)
  • Author
    Posts
  • #65004

    Minor White Windowsill Daydreaming Rochester NY 1958   • A Fake Persona Laid The Groundwork For A Hunter Biden Conspiracy Deluge (NBC) • NY Post’
    [See the full post at: Debt Rattle October 30 2020]

    #65006
    John Day
    Participant

    I put up a quick post of the Greenwald Biden story, which I knew would be here, before I bike to work this morning.
    The other big thing is the brave Siberian virologist we read about yesterday.
    Vaccines won’t wor unless you get a new one every 6 months.
    Take vitamin-D.
    Line-out a way to get a rapid test on short notice for loss of smell and raw throat.
    Arrange for a doctor to prescribe ivermectin, zinc and doxycycline when you get sick.

    #65007

    Line-out a way to get a rapid test on short notice for loss of smell and raw throat.

    Rapid tests should be available everywhere and for everyone by now, but they’re not. And no suggestion of everyone taking vit. D either. Why listen to the science when the science fails?

    #65008

    I don’t 100% get the Greenwald story. The Intercept has largely been a shitpile for a long time, other than his contributions. Their handing over Reality Winner files to the NSA should have been enough/too much. And no, that was not his story or his doing. But it feels too much like all the chumps at the Guardian claiming they didn’t write Luke Harding’s lying pieces, so they’re clean. No, you’re not. It’s where you work. Good that Greenwald and Taibbi take a stand, but that doesn’t make it the right stand at the right time and place.

    #65009
    Mister Roboto
    Participant

    There is part of me that agrees with USA Today columnist Christian Schneider that it may well be too late to get a handle on the pandemic in the USA. But there is another part of me that also hopes he’s wrong.

    #65010
    zerosum
    Participant

    Where is the truth?
    Lies! Smearing! Apology! Retractions! Suing!

    ——
    https://nypost.com/2020/01/18/how-five-members-of-joe-bidens-family-got-rich-through-his-connections/
    The Biden family’s apparent self-enrichment involves five family members: Joe’s son Hunter, son-in-law Howard, brothers James and Frank, and sister Valerie.
    Joe Biden’s younger brother, James, has been an integral part of the family political machine from the earliest days when he served as finance chair of Joe’s 1972 Senate campaign, and the two have remained quite close. After Joe joined the US Senate, he would bring his brother James along on congressional delegation trips to places like Ireland, Rome and Africa.
    When Joe became vice president, James was a welcomed guest at the White House, securing invitations to such important functions as a state dinner in 2011 and the visit of Pope Francis in 2015. Sometimes, James’ White House visits dovetailed with his overseas business dealings, and his commercial opportunities flourished during his brother’s tenure as vice president.
    James Biden remained with Hill International, which accumulated contracts from the federal government for dozens of projects, including projects in the United States, Puerto Rico, Mozambique and elsewhere.
    From the book “Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite” by Peter Schweizer. Copyright C 2020 by Peter Schweizer. Reprinted by permission of Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publisher
    Schweizer wrote “Clinton Cash”, a 2015 book discussing donations made to the Clinton Foundation by foreign entities and Bill and Hillary Clinton’s income after they left the White House in 2001.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Schweizer
    —–

    https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/08/02/joe-biden-investigation-hunter-brother-hedge-fund-money-2020-campaign-227407#:~:text=James%20Biden%2C%20known%20socially%20as%20Jimmy%2C%20is%20seven,embarking%20on%20a%20career%20as%20a%20serial%20entrepreneur.
    In James and Hunter’s five-year tenure, Paradigm became associated with a number of alleged and confirmed frauds, including Allen Stanford’s multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme, while seeking to draw on their powerful relative’s political allies for financing.

    The pattern of dubious associations and possible conflicts of interest would continue later with Hunter’s foreign dealings, which led him to a lucrative appointment to the board of a Ukrainian oil company and to deals with firms connected to the Chinese state. But it started far earlier.
    ——–

    #65011
    Doc Robinson
    Participant

    “To date, Republicans have turned out 59 percent of their voters in Miami-Dade and Democrats have turned out 53 percent, a 6-point margin. That’s twice the margin Republicans had at this point in 2016..“

    That “6-point margin” is misleading when you consider that the number of Democrats in Miami-Dade is 50% higher than the number of Republicans.

    If you look at the number of votes already cast by Democrats and Republicans in Miami-Dade, the Democrat number is 35% higher than the Republicans.

    Republicans–
    59% of 418,661 voters is 247,010 who already voted.

    Democrats —
    53% of 628,412 voters is 333,058 who already voted.

    https://www.miamidade.gov/global/elections/voter-registration-statistics.page

    #65012
    Doc Robinson
    Participant

    A little more attention to the Assange case, from an article published today:

    Peter Oborne, writing last month, issued the call to fellow journalists to take up the case for WikiLeaks. He starts with a scenario: imagine a political dissident held at London’s Belmarsh Prison charged with espionage offences by the People’s Republic of China. The real offence? Exposing atrocities by Chinese troops. “To put it another way, that his real offence was committing the crime of journalism.”

    Add to this the findings of the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture that the dissident in question showed “all the symptoms typical for prolonged exposure to psychological torture”, with Beijing pressuring UK authorities to extradite him to a place he could face 175 years in prison. “The outrage from the British press would be deafening.” Protests and vigils outside Belmarsh would be unhalting; debates would take place on “prime time news programmes, alongside a rush of questions in parliament.”

    Oborne acknowledges the UK-US alliance. But that should not matter one jot “as far as the British media is concerned.”

    https://dissidentvoice.org/2020/10/begging-outrage-british-journalists-for-assange/

    #65013
    zerosum
    Participant

    POLSTERS MANIPULATION
    Markets falling
    Covid 19 rising
    Poll say, Biden leading

    Trump response
    “VOTE FOR ME. After the election, You are going to see a +$ 2 TRILLION AID PACKAGE.”

    #65014
    Dr. D
    Participant

    “A Long Slog” – NYC Recovery Lags Rest of Country as Downturn Could Last Years”

    So mysterious. Can’t figure it out. With modest cases NYC has still voluntarily – and illegally – shut down all churches, all temples, all businesses, all contact? Now why has that affected their overall economy and sales tax and doubled youth suicide? Maybe we’ll never know.

    “NY COVID-19 Hospitalizations Top 1,000”

    In a state of 20 million? That’s 0.005%. Who are over 80yo. With 94% comorbidities.

    If you’re as bad at math as everyone else, “suicide” is a very, very large number, as is drug abuse, alcohol health problems, and domestic violence. Doubling any of these numbers would swamp fears COVID in an instant. It doesn’t. Because no one knows math. Math is racist. As is all knowledge and hard work. I’m just quoting Robin DiAngelo here.

    In other news, “Chicagoans Categorically Reject Progressive/BLM Demands to Defund The Police”

    Yes that means black and minority people ALSO want police and often MORE of them, not less. Unlike AWFL white liberal reporters from Westchester, graduates of Vanderbilt and Yale, they can do math.

    Speaking of idiot sons of idiot sons who could never accomplish anything if not for corruption and nepotism and would go straight to the bottom in a world of open competition, there once was a man named “Hunter”. If you didn’t already remember a man named “George.” See why they hate capitalism and would do anything to stop it?

    “The Intercept Responds to Greenwald Resignation, Says He’s ‘Throwing Tantrum’”

    That’s the best you have? Wow, snappy. “No we didn’t, you’re a poopy-pants.” Well, I’m convinced!

    …So where is the part about how you openly and intentionally breached contract, twice, and being informed didn’t care but continue with breech of contract in favor of censorship? Any comment? And I agree about letting the Intercept get run over from the get-go. It was a trap. However, if there was any time to play Streisand good and hard, this is it.

    “no one by that name lives in Switzerland,”

    Huh? Is that even possible? Are there only a million ppl there? Also if this was so prominent and (implied) it generated the Post Article, why have I never heard of it? Am I not far enough right? Do I read too little?

    Okay: alternate view: since “Politico” wrote about this years ago, AND supposing it were true, and everybody knew about it. (I mean, didn’t we? Long before 2015 Ukraine? Where did Joe’s 3 mansions and private islands come from?) then these guys only knew what EVERYBODY ALWAYS KNEW: D.C. is totally corrupt. Shocking, I know! but try to adjust.

    “Graham said the only way the email could have been faked is if someone hacked into Google’s servers, found the private key and used it to reverse engineer the email’s DKIM signature.”

    He is mostly right, as I brought up before. That’s why, although it’s totally not true and we know that because we’re not asking or investigating, Joe hasn’t denied it. Why should he? That’s what we pay NBC, CNN, NPR, for. …Well they don’t own papers for the profits, honey, ’cause there ain’t none. They get PAID by what they print and refuse to print.

    “The right says the “deep state” is holding on to a secret vaccine”

    Use a “telephone”: no they don’t: they think it’s only marginally more dangerous than the flu because that’s what the CDC numbers tell us. So the reason it will be over is because the Left won’t need it afterwards. If Trump loses, they WILL do the vaccine, but will also do MORE pandemics, one a year if they can, and kill everyone while the world is under house arrest. Like China. Dissidents just happen to get it and happen to disappear. So it WON’T end. That’s my understanding of what the Right thinks, because I bothered to read them. Apparently only NON reporters have this curiosity anymore. And the Right thinks that THIS one will be over — because CDC numbers say it has been since July — but that the nefarious “They” will release a bunch much worse ones to undermine Trump if he remains. True? Not the point.

    “COVID-19 is a cultural problem, not a governmental one.”

    Also wrong: the “Culture” will not imprison people if they do – or don’t – wear masks or quarantine. We won’t stop you if that’s your choice. Only the GOVERNMENT has this power to make this a PROBLEM: Universal Austerity and Universal Prison House Arrest. On the poor. The rich still do what they want: look at the stars freaking out from quarantine while on a 50-acre palatial estate and 6,000ft house. The GOVERNMENT does it. Only, exclusively and mustly. Making things far worse and cost more is what governments DO. And P.S. that’s Trump’s government, yet they love it. Aside from bombing brown people overseas, it’s the only thing he does right.

    “Well, I guess lockdown is over.” That is where Trump’s mismanagement has cost America.”

    Trump didn’t say this, nor did he do it. It is within the jurisdiction of the governors, who said many things. Trump just didn’t trample his boundaries, That’s so unheard-of to follow the law, they can’t adjust.

    In the early days of the virus, Trump said all the wrong things, telling Americans it was just “one person”

    Which is also totally false, as he did only and everything Fauci of the CDC said, shut down travel months before WHO, overrode Biden, and permitted the governors although he disagreed with them. If it was “one person” why did he shut the borders? So he said the wrong things? He said Fauci’s things, and Fauci has publicly said so.

    Say we were to give Trump some benefit of the doubt”

    You don’t have to, there were every possible combination of responses worldwide. None of them seemed to matter except maybe Japan.

    “a sizable portion of America is carrying on, waiting for a vaccine”

    The Right is not waiting for a vaccine. They refuse it. The Left will ALSO refuse it now, like Anti-Vaxxer Cuomo has said, because it comes from Trump and the FDA. Gates has said he’ll ALSO refuse it, since it won’t work. …You know, the vaccine we don’t have. I mean the OTHER, 2nd vaccine we don’t have, as we don’t have the 1st one either. Yet they know! They’re like the ‘Rona: They know!!!

    But we can’t stop until we have a vaccine we don’t have, that won’t work, and neither side will take. Gotcha.

    Well if you had any doubts reporters talk to no one, read nothing, and do not yet know “Google”, here’s your proof.

    Not sure why they – and all of us – all were galvanized, mobilized, by the Greenwald story. That is odd since there have been many, and we already knew each and every piece of info. Just one of those things, those moments, those turns, like the Pentagon Papers, I guess. We all felt it though.

    “UPS Suddenly Locates “Lost” Biden Evidence”

    Let me get this straight: an insured, registered package went missing but no one knows what signature it disappeared under. And then they found the empty box. Later, only after it became national news, they found the contents some distance from the box. Am I getting this right?

    “[The USSR] was itself one of the prime aggressors of the era.”

    Yes! I can tell that by the way they had no tanks, no jeeps, no planes and no guns. No ammunition, no fortified lines, no factories, no hardening of St. Petersburg, and by how they did not go into Poland, Czechoslovakia, or Germany. I mean, isn’t it obvious? And it’s TOTALLY not the West funding, giving oil, IBM computers, trucks (Ford won a medal) Chamberlain appeasing, all the West standing by until it was far too late because they thought and arranged for Germany to fight RUSSIA, because under MacKinder, for England to survive, Asia must be made to fight Asia. No! That’s totally silly. It’s Russia. Who nearly lost. Because they had no military. THEY started the war.

    Pretty tricky those Russians, starting a war they almost lost that kills 20 million without an Army, just so they could get those Krauts. Who then prospered and became their enemy in the 60s. It’s the “Novachok” plan: attack openly with something that can kill no one.

    “US GDP Booms At 33.1% Rate In Q3 (CNBC)”

    The things people will believe. 1 It’s all a lie and had been since Carter. 2, Trump did nothing, the governors opened up. 3 Trump is the one who “let” it get voluntarily wrecked in the first place.

    “Governments hold power in Britain on the sufferance of the elected chamber”

    They only get what you let them. The Bill of Rights means nothing either without us giving them h—l. We’re no different. The Rights come from God, our Creator, NOT NOT NOT the government. The government is who STOPS all Rights. The Document constrains the GOVERNMENT, who won’t, so we keep our guns handy to scare them straight.

    The police had repeatedly exceeded their powers,” As always.

    “fear was deliberately stoked up by the government”. As always.

    “Vote for me and get ANOTHER $2Trillion (mostly to my pals)” As always.

    #65015
    zerosum
    Participant

    Both, Trump and Biden, are saying,
    “Vote for me and get ANOTHER $2Trillion (mostly to my pals)” As always.
    Which liar will get the remaining 10% vote?

    #65016

    I got nothin’. I have been grinding my teeth a lot lately.

    #65017

    Earthquake?

    #65019
    Dr. D
    Participant

    Giant Asteroid 2020?

    #65042
    Geppetto
    Participant

    Careful what you wish for. The Sumatran tidal wave in 2004 killed over 170,000 peeps. Considering the precautionary principle perhaps all those blue coastal counties should consider moving to higher ground? Especially since the boundary plate dynamics of say…Cascadia will prob never stop. And that’s just one. Not even a black swan.

    Natality……mortality. Collapse your personal wave function on which ever one suits your fancy, I’ll take the first.

Viewing 15 posts - 1 through 15 (of 15 total)
  • You must be logged in to reply to this topic.