Jan 272021
 
 January 27, 2021  Posted by at 10:04 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , ,


Gustave Courbet Sunset on Lake Geneva 1876

 

Bill Gates Advised Oxford to Ditch Open Source COVID Vaccine (MPN)
FBI Knew DOJ Was Preparing To Fire Comey Long Before Trump Ordered It (JTN)
Washington Will Remain Militarized Until At Least March (Greenwald)
Biden is Already Breaking Promises (Lawrence)
Legal Counteroffensive Against Big Tech Crackdown On Conservative Dissent (JTN)
Meet the Censored: Status Coup (Taibbi)
US Billionaires ‘Have Received $1.1tn Windfall In Covid Pandemic’ (G.)
Ted Cruz Attempts To Impose Term Limits On Members Of Congress (JTN)
Judge Bars President Joe Biden From Enforcing 100-Day Deportation Ban (AP)
Migrants Increasing At “Concerning Rate” On Southern Border – CBP Agent (ZH)
Ghislaine Maxwell Asks To Throw Out Case Over Epstein Plea Deal (G.)
UK Sells Arms To Nearly 80% Of Countries Under Restrictions (G.)
Humans Are Estimated To Eat A Credit Card Worth Of Plastic Every Week (USPIRG)

 

 

 

 

Tulsi Brennan Schiff
https://twitter.com/i/status/1354035548524957697

 

 

“As a result, the planet’s poor will have to wait until at least 2024 to be immunized.”

Bill Gates Advised Oxford to Ditch Open Source COVID Vaccine (MPN)

Europe is reeling from the shock news that biotech giant AstraZeneca will not be delivering anything like the number of vaccines it promised. The company informed European Union officials that they will only be supplying 31 million doses to 27 E.U. countries, rather than the 80 million they had promised would arrive by the end of March. Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conti predicted that the news would reap “enormous damage” on the continent that has already sustained over 32 million confirmed cases and 703,000 deaths due to COVID-19. The Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine had been hailed last year as a miracle in the global fight against the coronavirus primarily because the research team at Oxford University had promised to share the rights to its product with any and all drugmakers, meaning that poorer countries could produce and inoculate their citizens at cost price ($3-$4 per shot — a fraction of the price of those from Pfizer or Moderna).

Last year, economist and drug patent reform advocate Dean Baker told MintPress that, “The Oxford vaccine is even more striking, since the point was to pay researchers, but not to rely on patent monopolies to generate large profits. We ended up with a cheaper, better vaccine…It would be great if we could take away some lessons from the experience of vaccine development in this crisis and get away from the antiquated patent monopoly mechanism for financing research.” However, behind the scenes, the Oxford team reneged on their promise, signing an exclusive deal with pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca, who made no commitment to selling the lifesaving vaccine at a low price. Even less well-known is that the decision was taken at the behest of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.

“We went to Oxford and said, ‘Hey, you’re doing brilliant work,’” Gates said, “But…you really need to team up.” The 65-year-old tech tycoon is a strong proponent of patents and spends much of his time shaping global health policy. James Love, director of Knowledge Ecology International, a nonprofit that works to expand access to medical technology, said that “Gates has staked out this outsized role in the vaccine world…He has an ideological belief that the intellectual property system is a wonderful mechanism that is necessary for innovation and prosperity.” The decision to put profit before people is likely to have a devastating impact on the Global South. Poor countries are not in a position to inoculate their entire populations, especially as the world’s wealthiest nations hoard the large majority of the available vaccines while refusing to support moves by companies in the Global South to produce them for themselves.

As a result, the planet’s poor will have to wait until at least 2024 to be immunized. This latest news is unlikely to do anything but set that clock further back. Unable to secure a profit in immunizing Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans, Western multinationals have turned their back on those regions, prioritizing those who can pay the most. As a result, those in the Global South have turned to Russia and China for help. While Western media have dismissed these efforts as “vaccine diplomacy” and a “charm offensive,” while casting doubt on the Sputnik V vaccine’s efficacy, global opinion studies show the Russian offering is actually the most trusted option.

Read more …

Special Counsel.

FBI Knew DOJ Was Preparing To Fire Comey Long Before Trump Ordered It (JTN)

Newly declassified FBI memos provide startling new details that undercut the frenzied 2017 effort to investigate Donald Trump for obstruction, revealing the FBI knew Director James Comey’s firing had been conceived by Justice Department leadership long before the president pulled the trigger during a key moment in the Russia probe. The memos written in May 2017 by Acting Director Andrew McCabe and a lieutenant also provide contemporaneous proof for some of the more jaw-dropping lore of the now-discredited Russia collusion scandal. For instance, the memos directly state that then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein offered to wear a wire to secretly record Trump in the Oval Office and that Rosenstein also wanted to seek Comey’s advice — after his termination — on a possible Russia special counsel. The bureau nixed both ideas, the memos show.

The documents — declassified by Trump during his final 24 hours in office — also provide a tantalizing list of names the Trump administration considered for FBI director, including former Democratic Senator Joe Lieberman, ex-director and eventual Russia Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and retired Gen. John Kelly. Eventually, Trump settled on former prosecutor Chris Wray for the job. But the memos’ most explosive revelations chronicle the decision by McCabe in his early days on the job to open a formal investigation of Trump on the grounds that Comey’s firing may have been an act of obstruction of justice designed to thwart the Russia probe. The notes show McCabe informed Rosenstein during a May 16, 2017 meeting — one of their first after Comey was fired and McCabe became acting director — that he had opened the obstruction probe.

“I explained that the purpose of the investigation was to investigate allegations of possible collusion between the President and the Russian government, possible obstruction of justice related to the firing of FBI Director James Comey and possible conspiracy to obstruct justice,” McCabe wrote in typewritten notes of the meeting. One of McCabe’s lieutenants who also attended the meeting, then-bureau attorney Lisa Page, took her own notes, observing that Rosenstein’s expressed outrage over Comey’s firing seemed odd since Rosenstein had revealed to FBI officials he and then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions had been contemplating it since January 2017. “This was a strange comment,” Page wrote, “because it was my understanding that the DAG had previously indicated that he and AG Sessions had been discussing firing Director Comey since January, but given the nature of the conversation there was no room for follow-up.”

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“The option to use active duty forces in a law enforcement role should only be used as a matter of last resort, and only in the most urgent and dire of situations.”

Washington Will Remain Militarized Until At Least March (Greenwald)

Washington, DC has been continuously militarized beginning the week leading up to Joe Biden’s inauguration, when 20,000 National Guard troops were deployed onto the streets of the nation’s capital. The original justification was that this show of massive force was necessary to secure the inauguration in light of the January 6 riot at the Capitol. But with the inauguration over and done, those troops remain and are not going anywhere any time soon. Working with federal law enforcement agencies, the National Guard Bureau announced on Monday that between 5,000 and 7,000 troops will remain in Washington until at least mid-March. The rationale for this extraordinary, sustained domestic military presence has shifted several times, typically from anonymous U.S. law enforcement officials.

The original justification — the need to secure the inaugural festivities — is obviously no longer operative. So the new claim became that the impeachment trial of former President Trump that will take place in the Senate in February necessitated military reinforcements. On Sunday, Politico quoted “four people familiar with the matter” to claim that “Trump’s upcoming Senate impeachment trial poses a security concern that federal law enforcement officials told lawmakers last week requires as many as 5,000 National Guard troops to remain in Washington through mid-March.” The next day, AP, citing “a U.S. official,” said the ongoing troop deployment was needed due to “ominous chatter about killing legislators or attacking them outside of the U.S. Capitol.”

But the anonymous official acknowledged that “the threats that law enforcement agents are tracking vary in specificity and credibility.” Even National Guard troops complained that they “have so far been given no official justifications, threat reports or any explanation for the extended mission — nor have they seen any violence thus far.” It is hard to overstate what an extreme state of affairs it is to have a sustained military presence in American streets. Prior deployments have been rare, and usually were approved for a limited period and/or in order to quell a very specific, ongoing uprising — to ensure the peaceful segregation of public schools in the South, to respond to the unrest in Detroit and Chicago in the 1960s, or to quell the 1991 Los Angeles riots that erupted after the Rodney King trial.

Deploying National Guard or military troops for domestic law enforcement purposes is so dangerous that laws in place from the country’s founding strictly limit its use. It is meant only as a last resort, when concrete, specific threats are so overwhelming that they cannot be quelled by regular law enforcement absent military reinforcements. Deploying active military troops is an even graver step than putting National Guard soldiers on the streets, but they both present dangers. As Trump’s Defense Secretary said in response to calls from some over the summer to deploy troops in response to the Black Lives Matter and Antifa protests: “The option to use active duty forces in a law enforcement role should only be used as a matter of last resort, and only in the most urgent and dire of situations.”

Read more …

“We want you to endorse our commitment to aggression, to unlawful interventions, to ‘regime change’ ops, to merciless sanctions, and altogether to the empire. But you must make it look nice. Make it look thoughtful and complicated and considered.”

Biden is Already Breaking Promises (Lawrence)

[..] let’s draw the old lesson. You can have democracy at home or empire abroad, but you can’t have both. We will continue to suffer the latter under Joseph R. Biden, Jr. Those drawn into thinking the Biden regime would conduct America’s affairs abroad decently and humanely and in principled fashion will now discover they have been savagely sucker-punched. Those who understood from the outset that Biden’s people would go nowhere near the essential, determining questions of exceptionalism, universalism, and our consequent dedication to empire will be repelled but not surprised as the policy framework is revealed. In this case, the moment of truth came even before Biden’s inauguration.

His saccharine inauguration speech last Wednesday, with its Hallmark-card calls for unity, was quite secondary to the confirmation hearings the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held the previous day. In a matter of hours, Biden’s key national security people — Antony Blinken as secretary of state, Avril Haines as director of national intelligence, and Lloyd Austin as defense secretary — gave us a remarkably fulsome idea of what we are in for these next four years.Haines and Austin, neither of whose records are to be admired, are at bottom functionaries who were nominated and swiftly confirmed because they do what they are told and do not think too much—always a career-advancer in Washington. It is instead Blinken, who is said to enjoy some kind of “mind-meld” with Biden, that we must consider carefully. (Such a meld must be odd terrain.)

Blinken’s Senate testimony last Tuesday sprawled over four hours. It is best to scrutinize his remarks while seated in a chair with sturdy armrests, ideally to calm one’s nerves with a pot of chamomile tea. Seen or read as a whole, those four hours gave us an extraordinary display of how empire works and how it prolongs itself. One by one, Blinken’s senatorial interlocutors told him in so many words, “Son, this is what you need to say if you want our confirmation. We want you to endorse our commitment to aggression, to unlawful interventions, to ‘regime change’ ops, to merciless sanctions, and altogether to the empire. But you must make it look nice. Make it look thoughtful and complicated and considered.”

[..] Among Blinken’s many rather sad-to-witness “Yes sirs,” two standout: his finely chiseled endorsement of Pompeo’s reckless assassination a year ago of Qassem Soleimani, Iran’s revered military commander (“Taking him out was the right thing to do”), and his approval of the Trump administration’s decision to send lethal arms to the manically corrupt regime in Kiev (“Senator, I support providing that lethal defensive assistance to Ukraine,” when the Obama administration, from which he comes, did not.)

Read more …

”.. their job, under state law, is to act as a steward for shareholders. That is their legal obligation. They are not to act as an extra-governmental arm of one party of another.”

Legal Counteroffensive Against Big Tech Crackdown On Conservative Dissent (JTN)

Paxton said the tech firms also open themselves up to challenges under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which offers broad legal immunities for social media networks that claim they are neutral platforms rather than media companies making editorial decisions. “These companies put themselves out as neutral platforms,” Paxton said. “If in reality, they’re not doing that, one, they don’t deserve the protection of federal law, special protection that no other company has. And two, they may need to be looked at under consumer protection laws, because they’re presenting consumers with a choice that says, ‘We are a platform that allows any speech,’ when in reality, they are controlling what speech is being put out there.”

Justin Danhof, general counsel for the National Center for Public Policy Research, faults conservatives themselves for long trying to brush aside the threat of social media viewpoint bias and censorship with hopeful assurances that “the free market will solve this.” “They said, ‘Just create a new platform,'” recalled Danhof. “‘If you don’t like censorship occurring on Facebook and Twitter against conservatives — which has been happening for a decade — create a new platform.’ So Parler did. But then [Big Tech] disappeared Parler.” Facebook and Twitter have both long denied any viewpoint bias against conservatives in their content moderation practices. Danhof compared what tech firms are doing in the United States to how these companies are acting in China.

“Apple — of course — deletes many apps from its app store, largely news apps, at the behest of the Chinese Communist Party,” Danhof said, alluding to deleted apps that pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong were using to communicate and to get news and information. “So clearly, in China, Apple is operating as an extra-governmental arm of the Chinese Communist Party — acting at the behest of the communists to do what they want,” Danhof said. “Well, we have folks like Nancy Pelosi and AOC, Kamala Harris in the United States calling on Twitter and Facebook and others to ban President Trump. And to take down Parler. And what are they doing? They’re honoring those requests.”

Twitter’s permanent ban of President Trump led to a dramatic loss of share value for the company. Danhof argues that the company’s political decision has hurt its investors, thus exposing the company to civil action by shareholders for breach of fiduciary duty. “Lawsuits should abound from shareholders,” Danhof said. “Because boards of directors and management — their job, under state law, is to act as a steward for shareholders. That is their legal obligation. They are not to act as an extra-governmental arm of one party of another.”

Read more …

Live streamers.

Meet the Censored: Status Coup (Taibbi)

On January 6th, Jon Farina, photographer and videographer for Jordan Chariton’s Status Coup outlet, captured horrifying images. At the Capitol, a pro-Trump mob tried to burst into the building, and a police officer who attempted to intercede was caught in a door. He cried out in pain, but the crowd was indifferent, chanting, “Heave, ho!” as they tried to break in. Farina, in the middle of the physical mayhem as photojournalists often are, caught the scene up close while 30,000 people watched the live feed. Farina’s footage rocketed around the world, and major press outlets celebrated his work as an example of hard-hitting reporting. CNN did a laudatory story about the freelance photojournalist, with Pamela Brown asking Farina to “bring us inside the mayhem.”

Other outlets like USA Today quoted his recollections of that day, and the likes of Steven Colbert on CBS, as well as ABC News, NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, the Guardian, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, the New York Post, the Daily Mail, and others used it as fodder for outraged coverage of the riot: For a week or so, Status Coup was feted for service on the front lines of responsible journalism. Nearly two weeks later, on January 18th, another Farina live stream was shut down by YouTube, thanks to policies that will make it very difficult for non-corporate media going forward to do live reporting. In fact, it’s not a stretch to say that if the incident from the 18th happened earlier, we may never have gotten the Capitol pictures.

On the 18th, Farina was in Richmond, Virginia, where a significant rally of pro-gun protesters was expected. There had been widespread reports warning of unrest. CBS relayed FBI fears of “credible threats of violence,” while the Washington Post said officials were “on edge” ahead of the Martin Luther King Day protest, gearing up for a full-scale assault: Members of the National Guard are on standby. Plywood covers the windows of the State Capitol. Tall metal barricades surround Capitol Square, with police vehicles idling on pathways just inside locked pedestrian gates. Downtown streets will be closed; signs warning against carrying guns have gone up around the city. “The violent, lawless insurrection and assault on democracy and its institutions that unfolded last week in Washington, D.C., will not be tolerated in the city of Richmond,” Mayor Levar Stoney warned on Thursday.

The threats may have been credible, but when Farina began live-streaming to an audience of 6,000, the event turned out to be peaceful and unremarkable, though not without interest from a news perspective. “Frankly, there might have been more press than protesters,” Status Coup’s Chariton said later. “And while it was live, it was pretty informative. Jon talked to 4-5 people, and they pretty much all made it clear that they weren’t Trump supporters, that they didn’t support what happened in the Capitol. They were pretty relaxed compared to the propaganda ahead of time.” Despite the seeming unremarkableness of the event, it shut down abruptly mid-feed. Chariton assumed something happened on Farina’s end. “Then I got an email from YouTube, telling me we’d violated their ‘Firearms Policy.’ I wasn’t aware they had a firearms policy.”

Read more …

And that’s just the 660 richest.

US Billionaires ‘Have Received $1.1tn Windfall In Covid Pandemic’ (G.)

The richest 660 people in the US have collected a $1.1tn (£800bn) “windfall of wealth” since the coronavirus pandemic began, according to a report by a US progressive thinktank, the Institute for Policy Studies. The report found that the collective wealth of America’s 660 billionaires has risen by 39% since the World Health Organization declared that Covid-19 was a pandemic virus in March 2020. The billionaires combined wealth has increased from just under $3tn on 18 March 2020 to $4.1tn, according to Forbes magazine data. The report noted that there had also been “46 newly minted billionaires since the beginning of the pandemic”, when there were 614.

Chuck Collins, the director of the Institute for Policy Studies’ Program on Inequality and co-author of the Billionaire Bonanza 2020 report, said: “Billionaires are reaping unseemly windfalls of wealth during the pandemic. They benefit from having their competitors shut down or controlling technologies and services we are all dependent on in this unprecedented time. We should tax these windfall gains to pay for recovery.” Collins said the gains the billions have made since the crisis began could “pay for all the relief for working families contained in the $1.9tn coronavirus relief package proposed by President Biden, while leaving the nation’s richest households no worse off than they were before Covid-19 hit”.

Frank Clemente, the executive director of Americans for Tax Fairness, said: “While we can all rejoice that our nation’s response to the terrible pandemic is now in steadier and more caring hands, we can only lament that America’s billionaires are not making a meaningful contribution to that national effort, even as their wealth continues to soar. “The Covid crisis is crushing people of colour and low-income workers while billionaires who are nearly all white have seen fortunes skyrocket. This is why we need the fair-share taxes programme Joe Biden ran on, won on and is now ready to pursue.”

Read more …

Fat chance.

Ted Cruz Attempts To Impose Term Limits On Members Of Congress (JTN)

Texas GOP Sen. Ted Cruz on Tuesday reintroduced an amendment that would put term limits on members of Congress, saying the rise in “political careerism” is not what the country’s founders intended. “Today my colleagues and I reintroduced a constitutional amendment to impose #TermLimits on Members of Congress,” the Texas lawmaker tweeted. “The amendment would limit U.S. senators to two six-year terms and members of the U.S. House of Representatives to three two-year terms.” Cruz gained the support of fellow Republican Sens. Mike Braun and Todd Young of Indiana, Marco Rubio and Rick Scott of Florida, and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania for the proposed constitutional amendment.


This marks the third time Cruz has introduced legislation to impose term limits on Congress, having also done so in 2017 and 2019. His previous attempts never made it to the Senate floor. “Every year, Congress spends billions of dollars on giveaways for the well-connected: Washington insiders get taxpayer money and members of Congress get re-elected, all while the system fails the American people,” Cruz said in a statement. “The rise of political careerism in today’s Congress is a sharp departure from what the Founders intended for our federal governing bodies. I have long called for this solution for the brokenness of Washington, D.C., and I will continue fighting to hold career politicians accountable.”

Read more …

Immigration remains a touchy issue.

Judge Bars President Joe Biden From Enforcing 100-Day Deportation Ban (AP)

A federal judge on Tuesday barred the U.S. government from enforcing a 100-day deportation moratorium that is a key immigration priority of President Joe Biden. U.S. District Judge Drew Tipton issued a temporary restraining order sought by Texas, which sued on Friday against a Department of Homeland Security memo that instructed immigration agencies to pause most deportations. Tipton said the Biden administration had failed “to provide any concrete, reasonable justification for a 100-day pause on deportations.” Tipton’s order is an early blow to the Biden administration, which has proposed far-reaching changes sought by immigration advocates, including a plan to legalize an estimated 11 million immigrants living in the U.S. illegally.

Biden promised during his campaign to pause most deportations for 100 days. The order represents a victory for Texas’ Republican leaders, who often sued to stop programs enacted by Biden’s Democratic predecessor, President Barack Obama. It also showed that just as Democratic-led states and immigration groups fought former President Donald Trump over immigration in court, often successfully, so too will Republicans with Biden in office. David Pekoske, the acting Homeland Security secretary, signed a memo on Biden’s first day directing immigration authorities to focus on national security and public safety threats as well as anyone apprehended entering the U.S. illegally after Nov. 1. That was a reversal from Trump administration policy that made anyone in the U.S. illegally a priority for deportation.

The 100-day moratorium went into effect Friday and applied to almost anyone who entered the U.S. without authorization before November. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton argued that the moratorium violated federal law as well as an agreement Texas signed with the Department of Homeland Security late in the Trump administration. That agreement required Homeland Security to consult with Texas and other states before taking any action to “reduce, redirect, reprioritize, relax, or in any way modify immigration enforcement.”

Read more …

Touchy.

Migrants Increasing At “Concerning Rate” On Southern Border – CBP Agent (ZH)

As caravans build up in Honduras, migrants are increasing at a “concerning rate” at the United States southern border, according to Matthew Hudak, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) chief patrol agent of the Laredo sector in Texas. He warns that immigration is just a piece of the threat coupled with the pandemic health risk and other crimes along the border. “Like everybody, we’re tracking the formation of these caravans in Central America,” said Hudak. The Laredo Sector is one of nine CBP sectors along the southern border. It contains about 135 miles of the international border with Mexico. On Jan. 8, CBP Acting Commissioner Mark A. Morgan issued a statement on potential migrant caravans: “Do not waste your time and money, and do not risk your safety and health.”

According to Hudak, the Laredo Sector hasn’t seen a reduction of migrants in response to the statement. It has made over 30,000 arrests in this fiscal year, a 50 percent increase over the same period last year. Hudak added that similar trends are identified by other sectors on the southern border. The U.S. government fiscal year starts on Oct. 1. Hudak called the 50 percent increase “a pretty concerning rate.” He told The Epoch Times that some portions of the caravan of 9,000 migrants will make their way to the southern border. Part of the group was stopped in Guatemala on Jan. 16. Depending on the pace and the means with which these migrants travel, the arrival time at the U.S.-Mexico border may be between a few days and a few weeks. As of Jan. 21, he hasn’t yet seen a dramatic increase of migrants indicative of caravans arriving at the southern border.

Hudak said that human smuggling is usually achieved with systems shared with drug and firearm smuggling, and the fees migrants are charged feed larger criminal organizations. Therefore, he sees a more significant threat: “We may be talking about one piece of it, which is immigration, but it’s part of a much larger criminal enterprise.”

Read more …

And the jury was too white.

Ghislaine Maxwell Asks To Throw Out Case Over Epstein Plea Deal (G.)

Lawyers for Ghislaine Maxwell complained on Monday that the pool of grand jurors who indicted her was not diverse enough, according to new court documents. “The fact that Ms Maxwell herself is neither Black nor Hispanic does not deprive of her of standing to raise this challenge,” the attorneys wrote in court papers, arguing that the US constitution “entitles every defendant to object to a [pool] that is not designed to represent a fair cross section of the community, whether or not the systematically excluded groups are groups to which he himself belongs”. Maxwell’s purported concerns about diversity stem from the geographical circumstances surrounding her indictment.

Maxwell is facing charges in the southern district of New York’s Manhattan division relating to her alleged involvement in her late friend Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking of minor girls. However, she was indicted by a grand jury in the SDNY’s White Plains division before her 2 July arrest, as Covid-19 had limited grand jury proceedings in Manhattan. White Plains grand jurors hail from counties outside of New York City. Maxwell’s attorneys said they were therefore “drawn from a community in which Black and Hispanic residents are significantly underrepresented by comparison. “The sixth amendment guarantees a criminal defendant a grand jury selected from a fair cross-section of the community.

“Ms Maxwell’s right under the sixth amendment to a grand jury drawn from a fair cross-section of the community applies to the grand jury that indicted her. “Here, the use of a White Plains jury resulted in the systematic underrepresentation of Black and Hispanic persons from the jury selection process, in violation of Ms Maxwell’s sixth amendment right.” Maxwell’s lawyers also argued that prosecutors could have waited to convene a grand jury in Manhattan, claiming that one such panel met “as early as” 25 June. “There appears to have been no reason, other than a publicity-driven desire to arrest Ms Maxwell on the anniversary of the Epstein indictment, why the government could not have waited until that time,” they said.

Maxwell’s attorneys made the claims as part of their push to dismiss her case. Among 12 arguments attacking the indictment, they said a non-prosecution deal Epstein reached with the federal government in 2008 should shield Maxwell too. The agreement sought to protect Epstein and those around him, but Maxwell was not identified by name in a document signed when Epstein agreed to plead guilty to state charges in Florida that forced him to register as a sex offender. Lawyers for Epstein planned to argue that the deal protected him against sex-trafficking charges in New York City.

Read more …

Insane.

UK Sells Arms To Nearly 80% Of Countries Under Restrictions (G.)

British ministers and officials have approved the sale of arms to nearly four-fifths of countries subject to arms embargos, trade sanctions or other restrictions over the past five years, according to analysis. The UK has exported military hardware to 58 countries of the 73 listed as subject to restrictions by the Department for International Trade (DIT), including sniper rifles to Pakistan, assault rifles to Kenya and naval equipment to China. The exports are legal but researchers with the group that compiled the report, Action on Armed Violence, said they represented “a systemic failure to consider the human rights record of states before exporting weapons to them”.

Countries covered by sanctions range from a handful where all arms sales are banned to a larger group covered by transit controls, where a special licence is required, for political, security or human rights reasons. Five countries listed by the trade department as key export markets for British arms makers: Bahrain, Bangladesh, Colombia, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, also feature on the Foreign Office’s latest list of 30 “human rights priority countries”, although not all are subject to sanctions. The report’s author, Murray Jones, of Action on Armed Violence, said his research – which reviewed UK export records between January 2015 and June 2020 – “demonstrates the frailty of the UK’s commitment to human rights abroad”.

Licences have been granted to export aircraft parts, riot shields and hundreds of sniper rifles to Pakistan, including 630 in 2016 and a further 20 in 2019, despite the Foreign Office warning in November of “increased pressure on civic space and freedom of expression” in the country, including threats to minorities. The sale of 3,000 assault rifles to Kenya for £9.45m was authorised in 2017, although security forces in the African country were accused by Amnesty International the year before of carrying out “enforced disappearances, extrajudicial executions and torture with impunity, killing at least 122 people”.

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Even more insane.

Humans Are Estimated To Eat A Credit Card Worth Of Plastic Every Week (USPIRG)

For years, we have known that the harmful effects of plastic are found everywhere in our natural environment. We’ve seen images of birds and sea turtles choking and entangling themselves to death on plastic waste. But beyond its impact on wildlife, microplastics are now concealed in the air we breathe, water we drink, and food we eat; humans are estimated to eat a credit card worth of plastic every week. We also know that plastic isn’t just harmful as physical waste; plastic products often contain harmful chemicals. A recent report compiled a summary of international research on endocrine-disrupting chemicals used to make plastic — including 144 chemicals/chemical groups known to be hazardous to human health — intended to give plastics attributes like antimicrobial properties, colorants, flame retardants, solvents, UV-stabilizers, and plasticizers.

The aforementioned report focuses on a specific kind of health effect seen in plastics and the chemicals they can leach, called endocrine or hormone disruption. Our hormones play crucial roles in many of our bodily systems and are vital to our reproductive development and growth. This means children are especially susceptible to the health risks of harmful chemicals found in plastic. The chemicals found in plastic products can linger in our environment even after the plastic has been cleaned up. A recent study found that when scientists introduced and then removed plastic from an aquatic environment, sea urchins still developed abnormal skeletons and nervous systems because of the chemicals left behind. To make matters worse, plastics have the unique ability to bind together chemicals that are otherwise more diluted in the environment, meaning they become carriers of all sorts of concentrated toxins.

Hazardous chemicals can be found in single-use plastic food wrapping and containers, which have direct contact with the food we eat and may introduce these chemicals into our bodies. One familiar example is BPA, which is well known due to “BPA-free” marketing and the European Union listing BPA as a substance of high concern. Exposure to BPA can affect brain development and behavior. BPA has also been linked to hormone disruption, reproductive problems in men and women and other harmful health impacts. There is a solution. Many of the most common single-use plastics polluting our environment contain toxic chemicals that harm human health. By banning unnecessary single-use materials — like plastic film used in plastic bags and polystyrene used in Styrofoam packaging — we could prevent a lot of these chemicals from seeping into the environment.

To reduce our risk of exposure to these toxic chemicals and maintain a cleaner environment, we must start by calling on our legislators to ban unnecessary single-use plastic and transition to non-toxic, reusable alternatives. Nothing we use for a few minutes should persist in our environments and threaten our health for generations.

Read more …

 

 

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Home Forums Debt Rattle January 27 2021

Viewing 33 posts - 1 through 33 (of 33 total)
  • Author
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  • #68885

    Gustave Courbet Sunset on Lake Geneva 1876   • Bill Gates Advised Oxford to Ditch Open Source COVID Vaccine (MPN) • FBI Knew DOJ Was Preparing To
    [See the full post at: Debt Rattle January 27 2021]

    #68886
    V. Arnold
    Participant

    Gustave Courbet Sunset on Lake Geneva 1876

    That is likewise, intense; I love the drama…
    …and the downside that goes with it, hand in hand…

    Having stood on the rocking deck of a small troller; appreciating the moment…not defined by language…
    it ventures images that bring memory back to life…accurate to the event…

    #68887
    V. Arnold
    Participant

    Having read down the Debt Rattle stream, I realized there was nothing; absolutely nothing, I could add to the narrative…nothing…
    The narrarative itself becomes the everlasting gobstopper…
    …and it goes on and on and on and on adinfinitum…

    #68888
    Basseterre Kitona
    Participant

    75% and 90% Efficient at what exactly?

    A plastic bag secured over your head is 100% Efficient…at both keep out airborne viruses and death by suffocation. These people think we are stupid, hate us, and want us dead. It is as simple as that.

    #68889
    Mr. House
    Participant

    Russian Shamen

    Inspired by his american brother?

    #68890
    Dr. D
    Participant

    Found on the internet:

    “I am not banning fracking. Let me repeat that, I am not banning fracking. I don’t care how much Donald Trump lies about it, a Biden Administration will not ban fracking.” – Joe Biden, Aug. 31 2020

    “BIDEN BANS FRACKING” CNN, Jan. 21, 2021.

    “Ted Cruz Attempts to Impose Term Limits on Members of Congress (JTN)”

    Very sure this would require a Constitutional Amendment. Luckily, nobody’s followed the law in 100 years so it doesn’t matter.

    I’m proposing a National Law or executive order that requires the wearing of a clown hat and flip flops nationwide for 100 days. In Minnesota. In January. We now have a clear precedent that this is legal. It doesn’t matter that it’s totally without reason or science, so is the mask mandate, now tested a year with 300M-1B people.

    After that, I’m going to require you buy a private service with a season pass for Six Flags. If you refuse we will make you pay a fine under a law that wasn’t passed, and if you refuse that, we’ll put you on a different, more dangerous roller-coaster down at the station for your own safety. When you get home, we’ll deny you U.S. postal service for life and remove your telephone land line.

    All totally legal, according to recent precedent and recent reports.

    “Migrants Increasing at “Concerning Rate” on Southern Border – CBP Agent (ZH)”

    But they’re all citizens, so this shouldn’t be a problem.

    UK Sells Arms to Nearly 80% of Countries under Restrictions (G.)”

    Yes, and they cross-sell to fill the other 20%. But don’t worry: it’s RussiaRussiaRussia! Brrr. Human Rights! Exceptional Nation! There. All better.

    Humans Are Estimated to Eat a Credit Card Worth of Plastic Every Week (USPIRG)”

    Every body has to eat their peck of plastic, as we say in the ‘States. You know what we also say that fixes all this? “Use it Up, Wear it Out, Make it Do, or Do Without.”

    That is, I don’t WANT the plastic packaging. I very, very much do NOT want to wear it, to be sold it or be involved with it. Jeff Bezos has FORCED me to eat it when I didn’t want to. …At the same time he puts one bubble pack in a refrigerator box with one box of crackers in it.

    Thanks to all your “Helping” it is now literally illegal NOT to triple-plastic-pack things, after 50 years of the plastics lobby. Government! Always helping! Always safer and more medical! Fixing your life like they did Stocks, College, and Health Care! Now their “health and safety” has made you sick and unsafe! Like 100% of the time before.

    Please for the love of God stop helping before we all die on the road of your good intentions.

    Masks:

    Okay so NBC now admits masks don’t work worth a s—t. Wow. And yet Fauci told us to wear them. …Or not to wear them. Or both, whatever he told us something and he’s never wrong especially when he reverses himself. Then reverses again. Because, that’s Science™! Science is when you repeat an experiment and it’s different every time.

    #68891
    zerosum
    Participant

    Resistance is futile. We are the Borg. Lower your shields and surrender your ships. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile.

    TAE …. you have been notified.

    https://taibbi.substack.com/p/meet-the-censored-status-coup
    The borgs Silicon Valley is shutting down speech loopholes. The latest target: live content

    Already assimilated:
    USA Today CBS, as well as ABC News, NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, the Guardian, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, the New York Post, the Daily Mail, and others

    #68892
    zerosum
    Participant

    More from yesterday’s comments.

    https://www.thoughtco.com/morpheus-wisdom-quotes-from-the-matrix-2832834
    Morpheus on Reality and Illusion
    “What is real? How do you define real?”
    “This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill—the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill—you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.”

    “I’m trying to free your mind, Neo. But I can only show you the door. You’re the one that has to walk through it.”

    “Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real? What if you were unable to wake from that dream, Neo? How would you know the difference between the dream world and the real world? ”

    “What you know you can’t explain, but you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life, that there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.”

    “If real is what you can feel, smell, taste and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.”

    #68894
    zerosum
    Participant

    POSSIBLE LIFE …SOMEWHERE (MICROSCOPIC)
    AVATAR
    Dr. Grace Augustine : I’m not talking about pagan voodoo here – I’m talking about something REAL and measurable in the biology of the forest.

    Selfridge : Which is *what* exactly?

    Dr. Grace Augustine : What we think we know – is that there’s some kind of electrochemical communication between the roots of the trees. Like the synapses between neurons. Each tree has ten to the fourth connections to the trees around it, and there are ten to the twelfth trees on Pandora…

    Selfridge : That’s a lot, I’m guessing.

    Dr. Grace Augustine : That’s more connections than the human brain. You get it? It’s a network – a global network. And the Na’vi can access it – they can upload and download data – memories – at sites like the one you just destroyed.

    Selfridge : [after a stunned pause] What the HELL have you people been smoking out there?

    [beginning to laugh]

    Selfridge : They’re just. Goddamn. Trees.

    Dr. Grace Augustine : You need to wake up, Parker. The wealth of this world isn’t in the ground – it’s all around us. The Na’vi know that, and they’re fighting to defend it. If you wanna share this world with them, *you* need to understand *them*.

    #68895
    Bill7
    Participant

    From ‘America’s Woke Elite Momoculture’:

    “..More and more Americans are figuring out that “wokeness” functions in the new, centralized American elite as a device to exclude working-class Americans of all races, along with backward remnants of the old regional elites. In effect, the new national oligarchy changes the codes and the passwords every six months or so, and notifies its members through the universities and the prestige media and Twitter. America’s working-class majority of all races pays far less attention than the elite to the media, and is highly unlikely to have a kid at Harvard or Yale to clue them in. And non-college-educated Americans spend very little time on Facebook and Twitter, the latter of which they are unlikely to be able to identify—which, among other things, proves the idiocy of the “Russiagate” theory that Vladimir Putin brainwashed white working-class Americans into voting for Trump by memes in social media which they are the least likely American voters to see.

    Constantly replacing old terms with new terms known only to the oligarchs is a brilliant strategy of social exclusion. The rationale is supposed to be that this shows greater respect for particular groups. But there was no grassroots working-class movement among Black Americans demanding the use of “enslaved persons” instead of “slaves” and the overwhelming majority of Americans of Latin American descent—a wildly homogenizing category created by the U.S. Census Bureau—reject the weird term “Latinx.” Woke speech is simply a ruling-class dialect, which must be updated frequently to keep the lower orders from breaking the code and successfully imitating their betters..”

    Yea, and verily..

    America’s Woke Elite Monoculture

    #68896
    madamski cafone
    Participant

    “I’m proposing a National Law or executive order that requires the wearing of a clown hat and flip flops nationwide for 100 days. In Minnesota. In January.”

    I remember well those crazy days of the Red Pill Laws, when they tried to make consensual reality too weird to believe anymore. What is often forgotten is that we had to wear the flip-flops on our hands and the clown hats on our faces not the tops of our heads. We learned again that we can’t legislate reality, only the delusions we’ll allow others to share about reality.

    The Movement to Restore Clown Hats to Heads and Flip-Flops to Feet was given abundant sympathetic press coverage until the first beheadings and behandings went viral, which led to the Pink Fuzzy Mittens riots in the coastal cities while the Headless Underwearers wreaked brief havoc in the Rustcorn Belt.

    By then, the original offending Red Pill Laws had been repealed, but nobody cared. They were too busy figuring out what they were fighting for to remember why they started fighting. Something about not wanting to wear masks in public.

    A populist dictator, a Native American New Age shaman reality TV star who wore a tinfoil codpiece, restored order by promising 40 acres and a mule to anyone who voted for him.

    #68897
    madamski cafone
    Participant
    #68903
    sumac.carol
    Participant

    Timely quotes from David Graeber:

    – In the ancient world, all revolutionary movements had a single program: cancel the debts and redistribute the land

    – If one looks at the history of debt..one discovers profound moral confusion.
    .the majority of human beings hold simultaneously that (1) paying back money one has borrowed is a simple matter of morality, and (2) anyone in the habit of lending money is evil.

    – Mone has a capacity to turn morality into a matter of impersonal arithmetic– and by doing so, to justify things that otherwise would seem outrageous or obscene.

    #68904
    sumac.carol
    Participant

    Last quote should start with “money” not “mone”

    #68906
    John Day
    Participant

    @Doc Robinson: Thanks for finding that Castro/Trudeau tarmac snapshot for me last night.
    That’s the one.

    #68907
    John Day
    Participant

    We are living within a competition between a machine paradigm and living ecosystems which self organize and evolve around light and water.
    https://www.johndayblog.com/2021/01/distributed-strengths.html

    The industrial economy which developed machines that use combustion of coal and oil, then machines powered by electricity is really new on the scene, just born, but has become all that we learn about and see in our even-shorter lifetimes. We as organisms and as a cooperative species are truly ancient compared to combustion powered machines. Our bodies and our human ways contain deeply embedded adaptive mechanisms, selected for by hundreds of thousands of cycles of good times and bad surprises. Our individual experience gets surprised a lot, but our ways of engaging problems together are far more deeply proven. We cooperate well in small groups, platoon sized groups, but we can work well together in groups of up to about 150 members. Bigger groups than that require a hierarchy, because we quarrel too much to get tasks accomplished. Centurions commanded 100 soldiers in the Roman army. It was an empirically driven arrangement. It worked.

    Hierarchies above that basic building block get more and more machine-like, and less adaptive at the level where humans engage problems, because of strict orders from above. We all have more experience with this rigidity and the ground-level stupidity it enforces than we did 20 years ago, 40 years ago, and so on.
    Rigid hierarchy has flourished in our lifetimes despite it’s inefficiencies, including “corruption” (siphoning off resources) and maintenance of the hierarchy by burdensome compliance-assurance work, which displaces productive work.
    Compliance tasks might be worthwhile if they prevent corruption, but corruption is tricky. Corruption can just move up to a higher level of the command structure, leaving all of the lower level inefficiencies intact, then take half of the pie, not just bites, or the pie can go somewhere else, altogether.
    Large hierarchies have been able to grow and dominate because they can crush smaller organizations, or subsume them into the inefficient-but-unassailable “machine”. What large organizational machines need to keep growing, or even maintain their inefficient, complex structure is lots of energy and material flows into the machine. Every player must be fed, watered and rewarded for compliance. All of this must continue to be more desirable to the players than doing something outside the organization, something like working a small farm, our ancient fallback option.
    Hierarchical organizational machines have a new tool, of course, which is direct communication and enforcement between the top layers of hierarchy and the performance of specific tasks at the working end, through computer networks, which become essential to systemic function.

    When we were traveling as a family in the late summer of 2005, we traveled by train from Germany to Croatia, then back to Germany. Getting the tickets arranged in Germany took a full half hour of the diligent effort of the german clerk at the train station, getting everything arranged on her computer, assured, confirmed, and reserved for us. We were grateful for her efforts. On the way back to Germany, the Croatian clerk was able to get all of our tickets arranged, confirmed, printed and handed to us in less than 5 minutes. I was very impressed at her efficiency. She spoke English. I told her that it had taken a half hour for a German clerk with a computer to do the same thing. She immediately responded that it was because she had a computer that the German was so slow. The Croatian clerk had made one phone call, then processed our tickets.

    Now I experience this effect every day. All my medical documentation and all orders must be through the electronic medical record. I cannot print x-ray reports these days, because the new system since last fall prints 1/8 page onto a whole sheet of paper. Why the software does this to me is not yet diagnosed. We have a platoon of computer, software and network software and hardware geeks, currently working from home. The structure to emulate a quick flip through a paper chart is slow, and prone to thousands of little failure modes that need constant monitoring and fixes, and the system must be protected from hacking, which is endemic.
    Despite what all of the advertising said, this is bad for patients and doctors, extremely expensive, and is always broken to some degree.
    It is mandated by law. It keeps hierarchy in control. It is prone to catastrophic failure, at which point nobody gets medical attention, prescriptions or necessary procedures.
    That’s the threat the system wields.
    Can we do anything at all to help each other outside the internet?

    The monopolistic hierarchical machines own all of our life support structures, and if we fail to support and feed the system, we face removal from life-support. As individuals we can store water, beans, rice, salt, oil, onions, spices and maybe some propane, but that does not mean we have other options to engage in smaller and more efficient human economies to meet our basic needs.
    They have been eliminated.
    Can we do anything to help each other from day to day without the internet?

    China and India are ancient and successful civilizations. Chinese imperialism has always been rigidly hierarchical, whereas India had the caste system, where roles were distributed throughout all of society, in every village and family, so functionality was embedded at all levels. Any town could reorganize after a war, for instance, and without orders from elsewhere. There is much to criticize in the caste system in our modern world, and China has vaulted ahead of India in the last 40 years, but these have been the good times, of plenty of fuel, food and mineral wealth.
    China has strip mined her farmers to feed factories in Guangdong. India continues to have a majority of citizens directly involved in subsistence farming. India took out a lot of loans from the World Bank in the last 10 years.
    Bayer/Monsanto and Cargill have a plan for repaying those loans by replacing all of the small family farms with a few big factory farms, using lots of fertilizer, GMO seed, pesticides and diesel powered machinery. The profits can pay on those loans. The farmers can find other work. The economy can export more stuff. What could go wrong?

    Indian Farmers on the Frontline Against Global Capitalism
    Indian farming “reforms” will benefit a handful of billionaires at the cost of small farms and ordinary laborers.
    ..He, along with thousands of other farmers, are mobilising against three important pieces of farm legislation that were recently forced through parliament. To all intents and purposes, these laws sound a neoliberal death knell for most of India’s cultivators and its small farms, the backbone of the nation’s food production.

    Indian Farmers on the Frontline Against Global Capitalism

    The Consequences of Moving from Industrial to Financial Capitalism
    MICHAEL HUDSON AND PEPE ESCOBAR
    The wealth is no longer made here by industrializing. It’s made financially, mainly by making capital gains. Rising prices for real estate or for stocks and for bonds. In the last nine months, since the coronavirus came here, the top 1 percent of the U.S. economy grew by $1 trillion. It’s been a windfall for the 1 percent. The stock market is way up, the bond market is up, the real estate market is up while the rest of the economy is going down. Despite the tariffs that Trump put on, Chinese imports, trade with China is going up because we’re just not producing materials.
    ​ ​America doesn’t make its own shoes. It doesn’t make some nuts and bolts or fasteners, it doesn’t make industrial things anymore because if money is to be made off an industrial company it’s to buy and sell the company, not to make loans to increase the company’s production.​..
    …​The government in America provided low-cost education, not student debt. It provided transportation at subsidized prices. It provided basic infrastructure at low cost. And so, government infrastructure was considered a fourth factor of production.
    ​ ​And if you read what the business schools in the late 19th century taught like Simon Patten at the Wharton School, it’s very much like socialism. In fact, it’s very much like what China is doing. And in fact, China is following in the last 30 or 40 years pretty much the same way of getting rich that America followed.
    https://www.unz.com/mhudson/the-consequences-of-moving-from-industrial-to-financial-capitalism/

    ​Tulsi Gabbard, like Ron Paul, Cynthia McKinney and Dennis Kucinich, is no longer a member of Congress.
    Tulsi Gabbard: Domestic-Terrorism Bill Is ‘a Targeting of Almost Half of the Country’
    ​ ​“It’s so dangerous as you guys have been talking about, this is an issue that all Democrats, Republicans, independents, Libertarians should be extremely concerned about, especially because we don’t have to guess about where this goes or how this ends,” Gabbard said.
    ​ ​She continued: “When you have people like former CIA Director John Brennan openly talking about how he’s spoken with or heard from appointees and nominees in the Biden administration who are already starting to look across our country for these types of movements similar to the insurgencies they’ve seen overseas, that in his words, he says make up this unholy alliance of religious extremists, racists, bigots, he lists a few others and at the end, even libertarians.”
    ​ ​She said her concern lies in how officials will define the characteristics they are searching for in potential threats.
    “What characteristics are we looking for as we are building this profile of a potential extremist, what are we talking about? Religious extremists, are we talking about Christians, evangelical Christians, what is a religious extremist? Is it somebody who is pro-life? Where do you take this?” Gabbard said.​
    “You start looking at obviously, have to be a white person, obviously likely male, libertarians, anyone who loves freedom, liberty, maybe has an American flag outside their house, or people who, you know, attended a Trump rally,” Gabbard said.
    https://www.nationalreview.com/news/tulsi-gabbard-domestic-terrorism-bill-is-a-targeting-of-almost-half-of-the-country/

    #68908
    John Day
    Participant

    https://www.johndayblog.com/2021/01/distributed-strengths.html
    Look, this shark’s even closer. It’s right here, already!
    Covid-19 Variant In California May Explain Sharp Rise In Cases
    ​ ​ But just as the U.K. has identified a more transmissible variant, termed B.1.1.7, South Africa has identified another highly transmissible variant, and a third variant has arisen in Japan and Brazil, California has found one of its own. The California strain, known as Cal.20C, has been identified in 35-50% of recently diagnosed cases in Los Angeles. And as has been the case for the other variants across the world, all of which have crossed oceans and borders, the Cal.20C variant is more infectious than the prior forms of coronavirus, or SARS-CoV2.
    https://www.forbes.com/sites/ninashapiro/2021/01/21/covid-19-variant-in-california-may-explain-sharp-rise-in-cases/?sh=75f579b47425

    I posted this broadly insightful article from LArry Romanoff in December.
    Here is the reminder that SARS-CoV-2 was circulating in America in fall of 2019 (and very likely near Ft Detrick Maryland, even before that.)
    ​ ​A number of American cities made the same discoveries of the virus in their wastewater samples from 2019. The US mass media didn’t pick up the stories, but the local papers did. It was at that point that Pompeo issued another gag order that hospitals and labs were forbidden from disclosing any virus information directly to the CDC or the media but that all must be passed through the White House. That killed all further reports of COVID-19 in America’s wastewater in the second and third quarters of 2019.
    ​ ​With the accumulated volume of evidence, it now seems a certainty that COVID-19 was circulating in the US since June or July of 2019, far earlier than admitted, and that the CDC’s prevention (and forbidding) of testing was to bury this evidence. One example was headlines in the US media on June 21, 2020, stating, “Over 40 mysterious respiratory deaths in California could dramatically rewrite narrative of COVID-19” in the US.[21] The LA Times reported on “a cluster of mysterious respiratory deaths” beginning in December of 2019. The local news website http://www.bakersfield.com stated this meant that COVID-19 was circulating in California “way earlier than we knew”. Evidence of COVID-19 was also found in many blood donations collected from residents in nine states across the US as early as mid-December, according to a study published on Nov 30 in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases.
    https://www.unz.com/lromanoff/covid-19-un-explained/

    ​Thanks Jeremy​.
    ​ ​The previously discussed, WHO-sponsored meta-analysis of ivermectin against covid-19 has now been published as a preprint. It found a highly significant 75% reduction in covid mortality, based on randomized controlled trials only, and will be continually updated with additional trial results.
    ​ ​To date, the mode of action of ivermectin against SARS-CoV-2 has remained somewhat of a mystery. Early studies indicated that ivermectin may inhibit viral protein transportation. But a new US-Canadian study, published in Nature Commincations Biology, found that ivermection is highly effective (>90%) in inhibiting the main enzyme (3CLpro) involved in the replication of SARS-CoV-2 (and other RNA viruses). This might explain why ivermectin appears to be highly effective even as a prophylaxis against SARS-CoV-2 infection.
    ​ ​Nevertheless, many patients, and even doctors, continue to be denied access to low-cost and safe ivermectin, especially in Western countries. Others are paying obscenely overcharged prices, visit dubious online merchants, or resort to animal-grade products. Given the current global covid death rate of 15,000 people per day, the SPR Collaboration has decided to provide access to a certified Indian pharmaceutical exporter of ivermectin, vetted by SPR readers: Kachhela Medex Ltd.

    Why Ivermectin works, and where to buy it

    Identification of 3-chymotrypsin like protease (3CLPro) inhibitors as potential anti-SARS-CoV-2 agents
    https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-020-01577-x

    ​Pierre Kory MD gives an update on Ivermectin treatment of COVID, based upon the WHO meta-analysis findings paper above, of which he is a co-author. He is an ICU doc, who has been treating COVID patients for almost a year now, in the worst hot spots.
    Thanks Jeremy. Medical lecture starts at 12 minutes.

    #68909
    John Day
    Participant

    A healthy Florida doctor got the Pfizer COVID vaccine, and noticed little spots of bleeding in his skin a week and a half later. 15 days after the first vaccine dose, he bled into his brain and died of a hemorrhagic stroke (not an ischemic stroke that chokes off blood supply). He had gotten autoimmune thrombocytopenia. His immune system had attacked his platelets until he bled freely. He was not reportedly feeling sick, but he knew what those little petechiae meant, and sought medical care.
    ​https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/healthy-florida-doctor-dies-after-pfizer-covid-vaccine/

    Hank Aaron got the Moderna vaccine, and died 17 days later of a “massive stroke”. Which kind of stroke?
    Baseball Hall of Famer Hank Aaron, who battled racial prejudice and hatred on his way to breaking the major leagues’ career home run record, has died at the age of 86, the Atlanta Braves announced.
    According to a person with knowledge, Aaron died Friday morning after suffering a massive stroke. The person requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.
    https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/mlb/2021/01/22/hank-aaron-baseball-hall-of-famer-dies/437341002/

    ​There is a coroner’s report, which fails to answer that very basic question of “which kind of stroke did Hank die from?”​
    Coroner’s report quoted as “natural causes” of death. Here we get non-medical hearsay.
    In an interview with Ambassador Andrew Young, who also received the shot with Aaron, Young also told 11Alive Aaron “never had any reaction.”
    “I talked to the fella who was his driver, and I said, ‘was hank feeling any discomfort or any problem over the last few days?’ and he said, ‘no, he wanted to keep his schedule,'” Young recounted.
    https://www.ksdk.com/article/sports/mlb/hank-aaron-cause-of-death-natural-medical-examiner-says/85-8260cf39-f023-4963-b3cd-bea3cd7e358a

    What do you mean by “stroke”, sir? What about that doctor in Florida, sir? ​Was that a​ “stroke”, or not?​ Who pays your salary?​
    ​ ​A spokesperson at the Fulton County Medical Examiner’s office, which examined Aaron’s body after his death, told PolitiFact that his cause of death was natural and not linked to the COVID-19 vaccine. ​
    ​ ​If Aaron did die of a stroke, that would make it even less likely that the vaccine contributed in some way to his death. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said that it would be “biologically implausible” for the COVID-19 vaccine to cause a stroke.
    “The coronavirus can cause strokes, but the (Moderna COVID-19) vaccine only contains one protein of the virus, and there’s no evidence that that one protein is inducing inflammation of the blood vessels (which could cause strokes),” he said.
    https://www.tampabay.com/news/health/2021/01/26/no-evidence-the-covid-19-vaccine-caused-hank-aarons-death-politifact/

    #68910
    kultsommer
    Participant

    Tulsi had to “admit”, first, that there was a “mob storming the Capitol” before making her point across. That’s classic DC’s chicken legs in the yarn that keeps them busy.

    What is it in for “them” by proposing a term limit? I mean, just imagine Marco Rubio or Rick Scott leaving the post with the sense that they “served enough”? What is the act about? Being a safety valve to let some steam off and reinstall bit of hope and belief in the system?

    For decades, even any minimum wage, butt hanging dork was defending the right of “he must be smart” to amass any amount that he can muster by any means. Any questioning of that was labeled with “s” or “c” word.
    What is the outrage then, again?

    As for the art, as Jimmy Dore would have said…….. just enjoy the “radiation”.

    #68911
    zerosum
    Participant

    “Woke speech is simply a ruling-class dialect, which must be updated frequently to keep the lower orders from breaking the code and successfully imitating their betters”

    The workers, also have dialects that “the suits”, don’t know about. Also, it can separates the “pretenders” from the “doers”.
    example
    Listen to two doctors talking about their specialty.
    Next, listen to two tradesman exchanging ideas on solving a problem that they encountered and solved.
    Also, the poor, the street people, have their own communication identifiers.
    “Woke speech” is an attempt at trying to help the aspiring enabler realize the futility of becoming a first class enabler. (nouveau rich vs old money)

    #68913
    zerosum
    Participant

    THE BIDEN DREAM – red pill, blue pill – will the effect last more than 4 years?
    The Borg – Resistance is futile.
    Avatar – The wealth of this world isn’t in the ground – it’s all around us.
    The Matrix – Morpheus on Reality and Illusion – red pill, blue pill

    #68914
    zerosum
    Participant

    The Choir
    (To preach to the choir means to preach to those who already agree with you)
    If Dr. Fauci does not positively mention head lice medicine or malaria medicine, vitamine C and D, and zinc while promoting vaccines and other ways of minimizing covid19 negative effects then you know that he has an hidden agenda.
    In other words, go look somewhere else for the truth.

    #68917
    Bill7
    Participant

    Short, very good video by Swiss Artists Agianst Covid Restrictions:

    Interesting the question-begging narrative shaping going on ATM: “Should I be wearing three masks, or would four be better?.. After I’m vaccinated [no thanks] how many masks should I wear, and how far away then from other humans should I remain at all times?”

    Mmm.

    #68923
    Bill7
    Participant

    Basseterre Kitona said:

    > A plastic bag secured over your head is 100% Efficient…at both keep out airborne viruses and death by suffocation. These people think we are stupid, hate us, and want us dead. It is as simple as that.<

    Agreed. They Very Few are trolling us *so hard*, and laughing as their ever-changing rules and Lockdowns
    kill us off.. I had a PMCer say to me the other day: “well, at least we got rid of one Huge Problem..”, which
    he left unnamed, in that class’s style; my response: “meet the New Boss, same as the Old Boss.”

    Trump!™ was just part of the Uniparty’s show.

    #68926
    cloudhidden
    Participant

    @ John Day
    I believe the photo of Fidel, Margaret Trudeau, and the baby was taken in 1976.
    Justin was about 5 years old then. The baby was his younger brother Michael
    That said, Justin and Fidel sure do look similar, far more than Justin/Pierre

    #68927
    Bill7
    Participant

    > so NBC now admits masks don’t work worth a s—t. Wow. And yet Fauci told us to wear them. …Or not to wear them. Or both, whatever he told us something and he’s never wrong especially when he reverses himself.

    Tomorrow: “free yourselves from the White Oppressor by wearing *six* masks!.. or none! Or a Hazmat suit
    and *twelve* effing masks..”

    Disorientation of the citizenry is the short-term goal; the carefully-calibrated, Uniparty-instigated Civil War comes a little later..

    Honestly, watching this guy surf is probably a better use of time than paying attention to the evilnet:

    #68928
    John Day
    Participant

    @Cloudhidden: Well, that would explain why the article with that picture was taken down from Off-Guardian.

    #68933
    V. Arnold
    Participant

    sumac.carol
    Timely quotes from David Graeber:

    – In the ancient world, all revolutionary movements had a single program: cancel the debts and redistribute the land

    So happy to see you grooving on Graeber…
    A bright light too soon gone…rip…

    #68934

    Who gave the order to station the NG in DC? Trump? DC mayor? “The office of the president elect?”
    Can I see it?

    #68935
    WES
    Participant

    China joe says we can no longer say “china virus”.

    #68936
    WES
    Participant

    my parents said know:

    I think it is pretty safe to say the coup plotters felt they needed military protection since they stole the election and were afraid of citizen blowback.

    Notice they are keeping that protection around until March!

    That says something, doesn’t it!

    #68938
    sumac.carol
    Participant

    “We coperate well in small groups, platoon sized groups, but we can work well together in groups of up to about 150 members. Bigger groups than that require a hierarchy, because we quarrel too much to get tasks accomplished.”

    In my experience, I can’t even think of 20 people I could work well with, non-hierarchically, on any reasonably challenging project before serious issues would emerge. 100 would be only in my wildest dreams. Am I the exception?

    #68940
    V. Arnold
    Participant

    In my experience, I can’t even think of 20 people I could work well with, non-hierarchically, on any reasonably challenging project before serious issues would emerge. 100 would be only in my wildest dreams. Am I the exception?

    I would be hard pressed to come up with 20 as well.
    Hermits don’t do well in crowds; 20 would be a mob… 😉

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