Sep 012021
 
 September 1, 2021  Posted by at 9:05 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , ,


Vincent van Gogh Ward in the hospital in Arles 1889

 

Who’s Really Being Hospitalized? (Margulis)
60% of Those Older Than 50 Who Die From Covid Are Double Vaxxed (Mercola)
‘Get Sicker’: Anatomy Of A Failed Policy (Pfeiffer)
There’s An Off Ramp – But It Has A Price (Denninger)
The Case For Covid Vaccine Passports Was Just Demolished (Fee)
Key Vaccine Leaders Departing FDA As Covid-19 Booster Questions Linger (FPhar)
Greek Health Ministry Bracing For ‘Great Exodus’ (K.)
Pharmacy Customers Refuse To Say What Ivermectin Prescription Is For (G.)
Zero Covid, A Once Wildly Popular Ideology, Quietly Faces Extinction (Subs)
Singapore Gives Up Goal of Zero Covid Despite High Vaccination Rate (Gizmodo)
Obama Officials’ Lies About Edward Snowden and Russia (Greenwald)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The stories are collapsing.

Who’s Really Being Hospitalized? (Margulis)

After a battery of testing, my friend was diagnosed with pancreatitis. But it was easier for the hospital bureaucracy to register the admission as a COVID case. Let me explain. This patient had none of the classic symptoms of COVID: No shortness of breath, no fever, no chills, no congestion, no loss of sense of smell or taste, no neurological issues. The only COVID symptoms my friend had were nausea and fatigue, which could also be explained by the surgery. However, nearly three weeks earlier, a COVID test had come back positive. The mainstream media is reporting that severe COVID cases are mainly among unvaccinated people.

An AP headline from June 29 reads: “Nearly all COVID deaths in US are now among unvaccinated.” Another, from the same date: “Vast majority of ICU patients with COVID-19 are unvaccinated, ABC News survey finds.” Is that what’s really going on? It’s certainly not the case in Israel, the first country to fully vaccinate a majority of its citizens against the virus. Now it has one of the highest daily infection rates and the majority of people catching the virus (77% to 83%, depending on age) are already vaccinated, according to data collected by the Israeli government. After carefully reviewing the available data, including the safety and efficacy profiles of the mRNA vaccines, my friend had taken a cautious approach. Though a medical doctor who gives vaccines in the office every day, my friend opted to wait and see.

According to WebMD, a “huge number” of frontline hospital workers have also chosen not to get the vaccine. Indeed, various news reports, from California to New York, confirm that up to 40% of health care workers have decided the risks of the vaccines do not outweigh the benefits. After admission, I spoke to the nurse on the COVID ward. She was suited up in a plastic yellow disposable gown, teal gloves, and two masks underneath a recirculating personal respiratory system that buzzed so loudly she could barely hear. The nurse told me that she had gotten both vaccines but she was feeling worried: “Two thirds of my patients are fully vaccinated,” she said. How can there be such a disconnect between what the COVID ward nurse told me and the mainstream media reports?

For one thing, it is very hard to get any kind of accuracy when it comes to actual numbers. In fact, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have publicly acknowledged that they do not have accurate data. As reported by the Associated Press, “The CDC itself has not estimated what percentage of hospitalizations and deaths are in fully vaccinated people, citing limitations in the data.” At the same time, data collection is done on a state by state basis. In most states, a person is only considered fully vaccinated fourteen days after they have had the full series of the vaccine. This means that anyone coming into an American hospital who has only had one dose, or who has had both vaccines but had the second one less than two weeks prior, will likely be counted as “unvaccinated.”

So when the South Carolina’s Department of Health and Environmental Control released a report about COVID severity on July 23, 2021, they reported higher morbidity and mortality rates in the “not fully vaccinated.” Are these people who have had one vaccine and gotten sick, two vaccines and gotten sick, or no vaccines at all? Without more details, it is impossible to know what is really going on. “We don’t have accurate numbers,” insists Dr. James Neuenschwander, an expert on vaccine safety based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. But what we do know, Neuenschwander says, is that the vaccines are not as effective as public health officials told us they would be. “This is a product that’s not doing what it’s supposed to do. It’s supposed to stop transmission of this virus and it’s not doing that.”

Read more …

“…breakthrough cases are now multiplying at breakneck speed. “There are so many breakthrough infections that they dominate..”

60% of Those Older Than 50 Who Die From Covid Are Double Vaxxed (Mercola)

The oft-repeated refrain right now is that we’re in a “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” meaning those who have not received the COVID jab make up the bulk of those hospitalized and dying from the Delta variant. For example, August 20, 2021, England’s chief medical officer professor Chris Whitty tweeted: “Four weeks working on a COVID ward makes stark the reality that the majority of our hospitalized COVID patients are unvaccinated and regret delaying. Some are very sick including young adults. Please don’t delay your vaccine.” Curiously, if you take the time to actually look at the data, you’ll find that this blanket statement is rather deceptive. Here’s a graphic published in the Evening Standard, sourced from Public Health England:

As you can see, as of August 15, 2021, 58% of COVID patients admitted to hospital who were over the age of 50 had actually received two doses of COVID injections and 10% had received one dose. So, partially or fully “vaccinated” individuals made up 68% of hospitalizations. Only in the 50 and younger category were a majority, 74%, of hospitalizations among the unvaccinated. Whitty, however, completely neglected to differentiate between the age groups. The same applies to deaths. Unvaccinated only make up the majority of COVID deaths in the under-50 age group. In the over-50 group, the clear majority, 70%, are either partially or fully “vaccinated.” It’s also unclear whether hospitals in the U.K. (and elsewhere) are still designating anyone who is admitted and tests positive with a PCR test as a “COVID patient.” If so, people with broken bones or any number of other health problems who have no symptoms of COVID-19 at all might be unfairly lumped into the “unvaccinated COVID patient” total.


In Israel, where vaccine uptake has been very high due to restrictions on freedom for those who don’t comply,4 data show those who have received the COVID jab are 6.72 times more likely to get infected than people with natural immunity. The fully “vaccinated” also made up the bulk of serious cases and COVID-related deaths in July 2021, as illustrated in the graphs below.8 The red is unvaccinated, yellow refers to partially “vaccinated” and green fully “vaccinated” with two doses. By mid-August, 59% of serious cases were among those who had received two COVID injections,9 mirroring the data coming out of the U.K.

In an August 16, 2021, Science article,10 Israeli Minister of Health Nitzan Horowitz is quoted saying the nation has entered a “critical time” in the race against the pandemic. Horowitz allegedly was given a third booster shot August 13, 2021, the day they began offering a third dose to people over the age of 50. From Public Health England’s data, it seems clear that the COVID shots are failing to protect people over the age of 50 in the U.K. as well, so it’s probably only a matter of time before booster shots are rolled out there too. And, provided the COVID injections are the same irrespective of country, there’s every reason to assume the same trends will emerge in other countries, including the U.S.


According to Science magazine, breakthrough cases are now multiplying at breakneck speed. “There are so many breakthrough infections that they dominate and most of the hospitalized patients are actually vaccinated,” Uri Shalit, a bioinformatician at the Israel Institute of Technology told Science. Nearly 1 million Israelis over the age of 50 have now received a third booster of Pfizer’s mRNA shot. Time will tell whether this will worsen the rate of breakthrough cases or tame it. Dvir Aran, a biomedical data scientist at the Israel Institute of Technology doesn’t seem very hopeful, telling Science the surge is already so steep, “even if you get two-thirds of those 60-plus [boosted], it’s just gonna give us another week, maybe two weeks until our hospitals are flooded” again.

Read more …

“Existing drugs could have relegated COVID to a manageable outpatient disease by the first half of 2021.”

‘Get Sicker’: Anatomy Of A Failed Policy (Pfeiffer)

Throughout COVID, the media has stepped into line like good soldiers in a war on disease, failing, in the process, to do its job. It gave government a pass on the dearth of outpatient care. It fostered the fiction that aggressively treating COVID is a right-wing construct. It dismissed vaccine side effects as rare. It enabled vast censorship. News outlets might be excused for initially minimizing falling vaccine efficacy in this dynamic situation. But it cannot be excused for its politicization of and disdain for generic early treatments. As a mainstream community journalist for decades, with two books and many awards, I am appalled at what this profession has become.

Existing drugs could have relegated COVID to a manageable outpatient disease by the first half of 2021. We have promising generics: ivermectin primarily but also fluvoxamine, hydroxychloroquine, budesonide and protocols that employ them with zinc, Vitamin D and the like. They have been suppressed around the globe, as countries – mainly, but not all, in the first world — have caved under pressure to conform to the U.S.-hatched strategy. In the white-hot frenzy of pack journalism, doctors’ licenses have been threatened, and reputations imperiled, including of a prison doctor who used ivermectin and kept inmates out of hospitals. Will nursing home practitioners, who told me of their own ivermectin success, be next in this witch hunt? Indeed, somehad used it to control scabies and found a remarkable drop in COVID.

As the globe is buttressed by new variants, vaccine efficacy is being tested and so is that of ivermectin. Leading proponents are adjusting doses and adding to treatment cocktails as part of a logical ongoing effort: Use emerging science and clinical experience to learn what works. Although off-label use of approved drugs is well established — accounting for 21 percent of office prescriptions and half of oncology drugs – doctors have instead been told to follow only a few, patented, government-sanctioned treatments, available only in hospitals. Who could blame them, in this heated environment, for not practicing medicine but following orders? Nonetheless, the forces of commerce and incompetence that have pushed a false narrative and demonized treatment for COVID must be held to account.

Read more …

“The fifth jab would put the risk of getting screwed at ten percent, which is approximately the rate of death from the original SARS and the sixth would be odds-on as literal suicide.”

There’s An Off Ramp – But It Has A Price (Denninger)

[..] all of the current vaccines deliberately produce that spike protein, which by itself causes disease, specifically clotting-related disease, in your body. Deliberately causing your body to produce that pathogen (which then elicits the antibody response) is how all of them work. This means there is no safe way to vaccinate against this disease because introducing the spike into your body, no matter how you do it, inherently runs the risk of serious clotting-based disorders. You might or might not get nailed but there is no avoiding the risk. That same risk is what kills you, most of the time, if you actually get Covid-19 and die but the premise that you avoid that risk when taking a jab is a lie.

You cannot; the risk is inherent in introducing the spike into your circulation and there is no way around that with an IM injection because the muscles of the body are very well-perfused (that is, there’s a lot of blood flow in them) even if the person who performs the injection does not hit a blood vessel, and they might. These facts are not up for debate on a scientific basis any longer. They also fully explain the myocarditis, pericarditis and myriad other so-called “rare” events that occur with these jabs such as strokes, heart attacks and other clotting-based disorders. In addition the data is that the 2nd shot in the 2-shot series is much more dangerous than the first, which implies an exponential expansion of risk. Whether that expansion of risk bleeds back off over a couple of months or so is entirely unknown as it has not been studied.

Without a data set of hundreds of thousands (so as to get statistical significance) and both baseline and follow-up d-Dimer testing, at minimum, we will never be able to put numbers on this, nor get a decay rate on the risk if it decays, and nobody is doing those studies. That’s the bad news; if you take repeated shots and the risk does not bleed off then eventually you will kill yourself. If, for example, the risk on the first shot is 1/100,000 (extremely rare), on the second 1/10,000 (that’s a bad pattern) and the risk does not bleed off over the space of three or four months then the risk from the third is 1/1,000 (that’s 0.1% and quite nasty) while the risk from a fourth jab rises to 1% at which point you’re in the ballpark for a severely morbid person when it comes to Covid-19 infection itself killing them.

The fifth jab would put the risk of getting screwed at ten percent, which is approximately the rate of death from the original SARS and the sixth would be odds-on as literal suicide. How many jabs did you say you’re willing to risk taking again? You cannot get your health back if you ruin it by being stupid. The younger you are the worse the risk is in terms of years of enjoyable life lost. To take that sort of risk when you’re 85, fat, diabetic, you have an almost-10% risk of death in the next year from all causes and the Coof is 10% likely to kill you is very different than to take that same risk to your health when you’re 17, male, have a BMI under 25, there’s not a damn thing wrong with you medically, your all-cause risk of death (most of it by violence) is 7/10,000 and your risk, by the CDC’s numbers, of Covid-19 killing you if infected is approximately 1/100,000.

Read more …

Never was one.

The Case For Covid Vaccine Passports Was Just Demolished (Fee)

A newly published medical study found that infection from COVID-19 confers considerably longer-lasting and stronger protection against the Delta variant of the virus than vaccines. “The natural immune protection that develops after a SARS-CoV-2 infection offers considerably more of a shield against the Delta variant of the pandemic coronavirus than two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, according to a large Israeli study that some scientists wish came with a ‘Don’t try this at home’ label,” the Scientific American reported Thursday. “The newly released data show people who once had a SARS-CoV-2 infection were much less likely than vaccinated people to get Delta, develop symptoms from it, or become hospitalized with serious COVID-19.” Put another way, vaccinated individuals were 27 times more likely to get a symptomatic COVID infection than those with natural immunity from COVID.

The findings come as many governments around the world are demanding citizens acquire “vaccine passports” to travel. New York City, France, and the Canadian provinces of Quebec and British Columbia are among those who have recently embraced vaccine passports. Meanwhile, Australia has floated the idea of making higher vaccination rates a condition of lifting its lockdown in jurisdictions, while President Joe Biden is considering making interstate travel unlawful for people who have not been vaccinated for COVID-19. Vaccine passports are morally dubious for many reasons, not the least of which is that freedom of movement is a basic human right. However, vaccine passports become even more senseless in light of the new findings out of Israel and revelations from the CDC, some say.

Harvard Medical School professor Martin Kulldorff said research showing that natural immunity offers exponentially more protection than vaccines means vaccine passports are both unscientific and discriminatory, since they disproportionately affect working class individuals. “Prior COVID disease (many working class) provides better immunity than vaccines (many professionals), so vaccine mandates are not only scientific nonsense, they are also discriminatory and unethical,” Kulldorff, a biostatistician and epidemiologist, observed on Twitter.

Read more …

Very odd moment: boosters.

Key Vaccine Leaders Departing FDA As Covid-19 Booster Questions Linger (FPhar)

Two key vaccine leaders will leave the FDA this fall, just as the agency faces key decisions over COVID-19 booster shots and as variants take a bite out of the shots’ efficacy. FDA Office of Vaccines Research and Review Director Marion Gruber, Ph.D. and Deputy Director Phillip Krause, M.D. will depart the agency. Both have been with the agency for decades and have been pivotal in the United States’ effort to authorize COVID-19 vaccines to fight the pandemic. The news was first reported by Biocentury. Gruber will leave the agency on Oct. 31 and Krause’s last day will be sometime in November, according to a letter shared by the FDA with Fierce Pharma. The letter was signed by Peter Marks, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, under which the vaccine research office sits.

Marks will serve as acting director of the OVRR for now as a search begins for a new chief. An acting director will be announced later. “[Gruber’s] contributions throughout her career have been immeasurable, but never more so than during the COVID-19 pandemic,” Marks said. “Her leadership in the center’s efforts to authorize three COVID-19 vaccines, and more recently to approve one of those vaccines, ensured that the vaccines met the high standards the public has come to expect from FDA, and has positively impacted the public health in the U.S. and across the globe.” [..] For his part, Krause was responsible for liaising with public health officials around the world to “address critical vaccine-related issues,” according to Marks. “His keen insight and experience in addressing a wide variety of challenges will truly be missed,” the letter said.

The departures are the latest high-profile officials to leave the key federal agency that still lacks a permanent leader. Janet Woodcock is leading the agency on an acting basis and will not be considered for the commissioner job permanently. Nevertheless, the FDA expressed confidence that the vaccine work would go on. “We are confident in the expertise and ability of our staff to continue our critical public health work, including evaluating COVID-19 vaccines,” an FDA spokesperson said. Gruber and Krause are leaving the agency following criticism of the White House’s decision to leap frog over the agency to recommend COVID-19 booster shots. The move to start boosters next month has been blasted by the World Health Organization, which questions the data to support the need for a third shot—especially as poorer nations continue to struggle with getting first shots to people.

Read more …

Note: in the top article, WebMD is cited as saying in the US, up to 40% of health care workers have chosen not to get the vaccine. But Greece claims “more than 90% of the doctors and 80% of the nurses had been vaccinated”.

Greek Health Ministry Bracing For ‘Great Exodus’ (K.)

With the deadline for the mandatory vaccination of health workers expiring on Wednesday, the Heath Ministry is preparing for an imminent “great exodus” of staff due to the suspensions that will ensue with a wide array of preemptive measures to fill the gaps and to ensure that services are fully operational. These measures include a reshuffle of healthcare workers within hospitals, mergers of clinics and departments, the replacement of those suspended with auxiliary staff and partnerships with the private sector for support services such as catering, care etc. Wednesday is the last day for staff to get at least the first dose of vaccine against Covid-19 so as to avoid suspension as of tomorrow. The government has insisted the relevant legislation for mandatory vaccinations will be strictly implemented.


Those who are exempt from the precepts of the legislation are obviously those that have already been vaccinated and workers who have been infected with the coronavirus within the last six months. Those who do not fall into these categories and have not received approval for exemption due to health issues by the competent committees will be suspended. Moreover, as clarified by the former deputy minister of health, Vassilis Kontozamanis, based on the payroll system in the public sector, which provides advance payment of earnings every two weeks, the government will request that they return this amount of salary as unduly paid. Speaking on the radio station 9.84 on Tuesday, Secretary General of Health Services Yiannis Kotsiopoulos estimated that about 10,000 health workers will not continue working in the National Health System. According to the most recent data, more than 90% of the doctors and 80% of the nurses had been vaccinated against Covid-19, while the percentages are lower for the rest of the staff.

Read more …

The Guardian campaign vs ivermectin. Check the picture they use.

Pharmacy Customers Refuse To Say What Ivermectin Prescription Is For (G.)

Australian pharmacists have reported an increasing number of people arriving with prescriptions for the drug ivermectin, but refusing to say what it will be used for. The Pharmaceutical Society of Australia said its members were encountering resistance from some customers when asked why they were seeking ivermectin. “PSA is aware that some pharmacists have experienced an increase in presentations of prescriptions for ivermectin, including where the patient is unwilling or unable to discuss what they are being used for,” a PSA spokesperson said. The Therapeutic Goods Administration on Monday said there had been a shortage of Stromectol 3mg ivermectin tablets in August.


The drug is typically used in humans for treating river blindness, scabies and roundworm infections, but has increasingly been sought as a treatment for Covid-19, despite not being approved for that use in Australia. The TGA also noted there had been a tenfold increase in detections of the drug being imported into Australia, prompting the regulator to warn against using the drug for Covid-19 treatment, stating there is “insufficient evidence” that it works and it may be dangerous to health. The university behind the initial lab trial for ivermectin used to treat Covid-19 has also warned against people self-medicating with the drug or buying drugs meant for livestock. Much of the initial focus on the drug as a Covid-19 treatment stemmed from an April 2020 lab trial at Monash University in Melbourne, where ivermectin was found to have killed the Covid-19 virus in a cell culture within 48 hours.

Read more …

“New Zealand is fully trapped in the Zero COVID death spiral, and it has no way out of it for the foreseeable future.”

Zero Covid, A Once Wildly Popular Ideology, Quietly Faces Extinction (Subs)

The Zero COVID ideology began with a Chinese government lie. Zero COVID once recruited almost unanimous advocates in world governments, “global health” organizations, and “public health experts” far and wide. Yet today, just 18 months after its first implementation, the Zero COVID ideology is so rare and so unpopular that you have to travel to remote parts of Oceania or within the confines of an elite American liberal arts university in order to find it. Zero COVID, the idea that demands the total elimination of a virus from a nation state, was spawned as part of a disinformation operation by the Chinese Communist Party in Wuhan, China. In early 2020, Chinese authorities declared the virus that causes COVID-19 had been successfully eliminated from the population through brute force restrictions such as lockdowns, masks, and using the power of a Police State to force people to stay inside their homes for an indefinite period of time.

When COVID-19 spread far and wide, almost every nation in the world (other than rare holdouts such as Sweden and Belarus) implemented the aforementioned draconian policies in an attempt to “stop the spread” and eliminate the virus from the world. In the beginning, even questioning these baseless, pseudoscientific ideas was tantamount to being something of a bioterrorist. Through much of 2020, yours truly was constantly castigated by actors across the political spectrum for asking about the wisdom of using the power of government to wage an elimination war against a submicroscopic infectious particle. Zero COVID was science. Zero COVID was truth. Zero COVID superseded every constitutional protection out there, because no right was too important when a virus was out there.

In 2020, COVID Zero’s membership roster was probably in the billions. Now, the adherents of the COVID Zero ideology are facing imminent extinction. The 18 month effort to contain COVID-19 was not only unsuccessful, it brought unprecedented economic and societal disaster in addition to the unconstrained virus problem. Today, few, if any governments have fully owned up to their failures. Most have taken the scapegoat approach, and without evidence, have blamed “the unvaccinated,” the “highly contagious” Delta variant, or some combination of the two to justify their catastrophic blunders. Over the past few months, the remains of the Zero COVID damn broke in the few nation state holdouts where rulers still adhered to the Zero COVID ideology.

In Australia, Vietnam, South Korea, Singapore, and elsewhere around the world, the lid on the pressure cooker came flying off, and local populations saw skyrocketing COVID numbers. Now, every country in the world but one has quietly, through their own policies, accepted the failure of the “global elites’” Zero COVID virus elimination strategy. Read some of the media stories that lauded Zero COVID “success story” nations, and you’ll find that they’ve come to age like months-old milk. New Zealand, the one Zero COVID country that remains, is currently under another hard lockdown, which has recently been extended until at least mid September. The country is now almost 2 years into its self siege, in which the government has decreed that the vast majority of citizens cannot enter or exit the country. As for a reopening timeline, Auckland no longer has one. New Zealand is fully trapped in the Zero COVID death spiral, and it has no way out of it for the foreseeable future.

Read more …

Bit late.

Singapore Gives Up Goal of Zero Covid Despite High Vaccination Rate (Gizmodo)

Singapore has decided to give up on the dream of covid-zero and will instead learn to “live with the virus,” according to the country’s Prime Minister, Lee Hsien Loong on Sunday. The decision comes despite the fact that Singapore has one of the highest covid-19 vaccination rates in the world, with 80% of the adult population fully vaccinated—second only to the country of Malta’s 82%. Singapore, a country of roughly 5.7 million people, has been among a handful of countries that have pursued a strategy of completely eliminating covid-19, rather than just suppressing the virus. Other covid-zero countries over the past year have included New Zealand, Taiwan, China, Vietnam, and Australia.

“It is no longer possible to bring covid-19 cases down to zero, even if we lock down for a long time. Therefore, we must prepare for covid-19 to become endemic, like the flu or chicken pox,” Lee said on Sunday during a speech to commemorate the country’s National Day, according to a transcript from the Strait Times. “Fortunately, with vaccination and added precautions, we can live with the virus and become ‘Covid resilient’,” Lee continued. Singapore has done exceptionally well during our global health crisis, reporting roughly 67,000 cases of covid-19 since the start of the pandemic, and just 55 deaths. And Singapore was reporting fewer than 30 cases per day for much of 2021 until a surge of cases in July that saw the country averaging 150 cases per day.

But Loong promises his government isn’t giving up on suppressing the virus, they’re just abandoning the covid-zero model. “We may have to tap on the brakes from time to time, but we want to avoid having to slam on the brakes hard. So in the next phase, we will move step by step. Not in one big bang like in some countries but cautiously and progressively, feeling our way forward,” Lee said. That “big bang” is likely a veiled reference to countries like the UK, which celebrated a “freedom day” in July where all covid-19 restrictions were lifted, only to see a surge in cases and deaths. Case numbers in the UK have started to plateau again, thanks largely to the vast majority of people in the region having covid-19 antibodies either through vaccination or previous infection, but cases are still very high at roughly 25,000 per day. The U.S. has also seen a surge of infections recently, with a seven-day average of about 157,000 new cases each day.

Read more …

“It is hard to overstate how dispositively Rhodes’ own book proves that Obama officials generally, and Rhodes specifically, lied blatantly and cavalierly to the public about what happened..”

Obama Officials’ Lies About Edward Snowden and Russia (Greenwald)

Ever since Edward Snowden received asylum from Russia in 2013, Obama officials have repeatedly maligned his motives and patriotism by citing his “choice” to take up residence there. It has long been clear that this narrative was a lie: Snowden, after meeting with journalists in Hong Kong, intended only to transit through Moscow and then Havana on his way to seek asylum in Latin America. He was purposely prevented from leaving Russia — trapped in the Moscow airport — by the very Obama officials who then cynically weaponized his presence there to imply he was a civil-liberties hypocrite for “choosing” to live in such a repressive country or, even worse, a Kremlin agent or Russian spy.

But now we have absolute, definitive proof that Snowden never intended to stay in Russia but was deliberately prevented from leaving by the same Obama officials who exploited the predicament which they created. The proof was supplied unintentionally in the memoir of one of Obama’s senior national security advisers, Ben Rhodes, entitled The World as It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House. It is hard to overstate how dispositively Rhodes’ own book proves that Obama officials generally, and Rhodes specifically, lied blatantly and cavalierly to the public about what happened: a level of sustained and conscious lying that can be explained only by sociopathy.

The memoir of Rhodes, now appropriately an MSNBC contributor, is an incredibly self-serving homage to himself that repeatedly attempts to demonstrate his own importance and accomplishments. The passage about Rhodes’ conduct regarding Snowden is very much aligned with those goals. While repeatedly emphasizing how traumatic the Snowden revelations were for the Obama administrations, Rhodes boasts of the crucial role he played in preventing Snowden from leaving Russia as the NSA whistleblower was desperately attempting to do so — exactly the opposite of what people like Rhodes and Hillary Clinton were telling the public about Snowden.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Home Forums Debt Rattle September 1 2021

Viewing 40 posts - 41 through 80 (of 89 total)
  • Author
    Posts
  • #85982
    Oroboros
    Participant

    @ John Day

    A curious tidbit about gardening tips on Facebook recently.

    (I refer to it as sh*tFacebook because it has the intellectual quality of drunken college students)

    A guy I know who’s really into gardening for self reliance reasons said the people who are judged to be ‘preppers’ are getting notices on their Facebook posts about gardening that pop up and say that this gardening post is a little bit too much like ‘survivalist information’ and should be regarded as unreliable!

    Detailed gardening tips that resembles ‘preparedness’ advice are now labeled possibly dangerous on sh*tFacebook.

    So watch out about your avocado tips John, you’re undermining the System!

    hahaha

    It’s getting pretty insane

    #85983
    Oroboros
    Participant

    “…first they came for the left wing, I said nothing, then they came for the right wing, I said nothing, then the writers, I said nothing ……..and then they came for *the gardeners*…..”‘

    Whoa I said, who gonna grow the food!

    If you touch my zucchinis you’ll never see another sunrise dude!

    #85984
    citizenx
    Participant


    @deflationista

    More than half of all car deaths are people who were wearing seatbelts.

    For cowardly liars like yourself…

    Got your crash helmet yet? You will need it.

    #85985
    citizenx
    Participant

    null

    #85986
    a kullervo
    Participant

    @userzeroid

    No worries, no ire from me (maybe because i’m not an expert.)

    Optimists, realists, pessimists, they’re all alike: they gaze endlessly at their belly buttons and cogitate, “what a wonderful view!”

    We all do the same: we spend a lifetime doing our best to satisfy our needs, justify our blunders and boast our petty achievements and then… fear, maybe relief and finally oblivion…

    And if anyone reading this is thinking they did what they did to improve the lives of future generations all I can say to you is you still have a lot to learn.

    #85987

    I would venture to say that we have crossed, in “well-vaccinated” countries (and what a term that will turn out to be), the threshold where more people die from the vaccine than from Covid. I know you can mock me for it, and we won’t know for a long time since the relevant info remains hidden, but there you go. That’s where I think we are.

    I was talking to a Dutch guy earlier today on a terrace in Athens, (haven’t spoken Dutch in forever), ad all I got was official positions. “That can’t be true, they would have told us!.”

    Yes, I do despair at times. No, they don’t tell you, that’s the exact problem. They won’t tell you until they’re flooded by it, and then they’ll blame it on the Mu variant.

    #85988
    oldandtired
    Participant

    Re Rickovers speech.

    Pre Chernobyl
    Pre 3 Mile Island
    Pre Fukushima

    Nuclear cannot be done without the support of fossil fuels. JHK has done an excellent job explaining.

    #85989
    those darned kids
    Participant

    cow paste works better than horse paste for the mu variant.

    #85990
    a kullervo
    Participant

    @Raúl Ilargi Meijer

    More worrying/annoying, IMHO, is the threshold of gullibility that was crossed and stands as a clear point of no return (that will only be solved through violence.)

    #85991
    a kullervo
    Participant

    @those darned kids

    Excellent point!
    (Thank you for the good humour.)

    #85992

    “It’s not so bad to lock it in until we can find a plan to use it responsibly, but know it IS in there.”
    I fear an Ice Age. I think keeping some oil for that future is a good idea. The technocrats want an energy based currency. When the time comes to convert, their mega-inflated shares of fiat will convert to huge shares of energy. There won’t be enough for the Deagel-doomed states to keep their teeming masses warm. So it’s only kindness to kill them now./s

    Species 8472 could not be assimilated. They lived in “Fluid Space”.
    The humans that survived the end of the Borg then went on to torture them, as per “Picard”, the intensely dark continuation of the series. Last night on “Voyager”, two crew members were held by “Patriots” in 1996. (“Voyager”, set in the 24th century, has a lot of time travel in it). The leader said to the captives: “There’s two kind of people in this world: the Collectivists, and the Individualists!”

    Remember when theaters and broadcasters were told to stop subliminal advertising? They have broken every other law and rule of decorum- is there any reason to think they aren’t back to their old tricks? They Live.

    Maxwell- I love your Turkish Taffy metaphor!

    #85993
    Bill7
    Participant

    an interesting thread from Patrick Lang’s blog:https://turcopolier.com/a-killer-vaccine/

    #85994
    Mr. House
    Participant
    #85995
    userzeroid
    Participant

    Obivion. Yep. I have known so many individuals who have gone. They are hardly remembered at all. Even “the great ones” are only know superficially at best. You are correct in that the human experience is fleeting. I cannot lighten up that particular fact.

    My take on the energy issue is based on the unpredictability of innovations. They are non-linear (one could even view them often as ‘mistakes’) and as outliers they have taken us thus far (who would have imagined it!) Along with the horror of the human economy we have the stunning beauty of the natural world we inhabit. And the rules of the cosmic universe that govern “reality”.

    At this point one could take the entire human experience and put it down to a cosmic joke. I’m sure Alan Watts, Carl Sagan and Terence McKenna would have been in on that one (come to think of it, so would George Carlin)

    The future is as yet unwritten. It will probably look a lot like the past. I guess I am an optimist at heart. But I’m also a realist.

    Good to share a few words with you here. All the best

    #85996
    Rototillerman
    Participant

    @deflationista: Facebook and the Gates Foundation occupy the #2 and #4 positions on the all-time donor list for the Texas Tribune. I’m sure that fact has no effect on editorial policy, and would never cause them to cherry pick facts and dates in support of The Narrative.

    https://www.texastribune.org/support-us/donors-and-members/

    #85997
    phoenixvoice
    Participant

    I know for me, if it weren’t for my domestic partner, my parents, my sister and her husband and TAE, I would be going out of my mind, sure that I was the only one able to see the wizard behind the curtain and feeling very alone. It isn’t enough to simply know that there are people out there who see what I see, I need to also be in active communication with people who can see what I see.

    @ TDK “ cow paste works better than horse paste for the mu variant.”
    ROFLMAO
    Hope you don’t mind if I pass that joke on.

    #85998

    With the utmost apologies- I hope this makes sense to anybody who actually reads music.
    This tune goes with the poem I wrote down here on 21 August. I can’t get it out of my head. If it sounds like some other tune, I’d sure like to know.
    I woke up in the morning with it, after a night of discussing how bad my mate feels that he may have to quit if the “vaccine” is required in his Netherlands job. This came up after mentioning John Day, Willem over at OffG, and a number of other commenters at various sites expressing their sadness about it all.

    d b b a b bbb C D a (pause) [repeat]
    a a a b C C b a b (pause) [repeat 3 times]
    a a a g fsharp g

    Where capital letters are high notes and more space is a longer pause.

    #85999
    Polder Dweller
    Participant

    “ The only doubt remaining: will a major armed conflict/destruction be avoided?”

    The way I see it, the US is likely to have fairly serious internal problems which may lead to the break up of the union, but in the short to medium term, a major conflict with an external power looks avoidable.

    Unfortunately for those of us in Europe (including the UK) things don’t look rosy at all. I expect some kind of war here a bit over a year from now. Buoyed by their success in Afghanistan and massively aided by the ongoing vaccine debacle, the various sleeper cells in Germany in particular (where they accepted a million “Syrians”) and throughout the west of the continent thanks to the refugee crisis from a couple of years ago will rise up and attempt to take over.

    I start wishing we had a 2nd amendment here.

    #86000

    Dang! It corrected my extra spacing, so I have inserted commas, instead.

    d b b a b, bbb C D a (pause) repeat
    a a a b C C, b a b (pause) repeat 3 times
    a a a, g fsharp g
    Where capital letters are high notes and more space (or comma) is a longer pause.

    #86001
    userzeroid
    Participant

    @MPSK I can hear it. Sounds nice. I’ll revisit your words from the 21st to hear the syllabals in time with the melody.

    #86002
    deflationista
    Participant

    I would venture to say that we have crossed, in “well-vaccinated” countries (and what a term that will turn out to be), the threshold where more people die from the vaccine than from Covid.

    Raul has officially jumped the shark.

    September 1, 2021 at 6:06 pm. Reply #85987.

    #86003
    those darned kids
    Participant

    of course.

    no one is as cool as the fonz.

    they didn’t send richie or potsie ¿now did they?

    #86004
    Polder Dweller
    Participant

    “Raul has officially jumped the shark.”

    Evidence?
    Oh sorry I forgot, you don’t do evidence.

    #86005
    generic
    Participant

    Texas data:

    “DSHS doesn’t track the number of COVID-19 hospitalizations among vaccinated people statewide because hospitals are not required to report that information to the state.”

    If any part of the data is manipulated, I reject it all.

    #86006
    Mr. House
    Participant

    Words we can and should all live by:

    “I’m called ‘the poorest president’, but I don’t feel poor. Poor people are those who only work to try to keep an expensive lifestyle, and always want more and more,”

    “This is a matter of freedom. If you don’t have many possessions then you don’t need to work all your life like a slave to sustain them, and therefore you have more time for yourself,”

    “I may appear to be an eccentric old man… But this is a free choice.”

    #86007
    deflationista
    Participant

    Speaking about manipulated data:

    Florida changed its COVID-19 data, creating an ‘artificial decline’ in recent deaths*

    https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article253796898.html

    * You should probably just ignore this 1) because it harms your political/world view and 2) Bill Gates might have donated money to the Miami Herald at some time in the past

    #86008
    absolute galore
    Participant

    The seatbelt analogy is lame. A seatbelt is a mechanical device you can take on and off when you are riding in an automobile. An mRNA vaccine is genetic code that goes into your body and makes changes. It has a very short history of observation as to outcomes in humans. You can also choose not to ride in cars. You can’t choose not to get the virus.

    Oroboros wrote: A guy I know who’s really into gardening for self reliance reasons said the people who are judged to be ‘preppers’ are getting notices on their Facebook posts about gardening that pop up and say that this gardening post is a little bit too much like ‘survivalist information’ and should be regarded as unreliable!

    I’m putting this “A guy I know” info into the apocryphal folder until you can come up with something more substantial. Smells like leg-pulling to me.

    Dr. D asked where Illich saw the cutoff point. That’s what Energy and Equity is about–how to determine that point. This was written in the early 1970s. From what I understand, he was more discouraged later in life that we would be able to control our appetite for energy.

    Another excerpt where he talks about limits and ranges. The full book is available as a free pdf (google will bring it right up). Also full text online here:

    In previous discussions, I have shown that, beyond a certain level of
    per capita GNP, the cost of social control must rise faster than total
    output and become the major institutional activity within an
    economy. Therapy administered by educators, psychiatrists, and social
    workers must converge with the designs of planners, managers, and
    salesmen, and complement the services of security agencies, the
    military, and the police. I now want to indicate one reason why
    increased affluence requires increased control over people. I argue
    that beyond a certain median per capita energy level, the political
    system and cultural context of any society must decay. Once the
    critical quantum of per capita energy is surpassed, education for the
    abstract goals of a bureaucracy must supplant the legal guarantees of
    personal and concrete initiative. This quantum is the limit of social
    order.

    I will argue here that technocracy must prevail as soon as the ratio
    of mechanical power to metabolic energy oversteps a definite,
    identifiable threshold. The order of magnitude within which this
    threshold lies is largely independent of the level of technology
    applied, yet its very existence has slipped into the blind-spot of
    social imagination in both rich and medium-rich countries. Both the
    United States and Mexico have passed the critical divide. In both
    countries, further energy inputs increase inequality, inefficiency,
    and personal impotence. Although one country has a per capita income
    of $500 and the other, one of nearly $5,000, huge vested interest
    in an industrial infrastructure prods both of them to further escalate
    the use of energy. As a result, both North American and Mexican
    ideologues put the label of energy crisis” on their frustration,
    and both countries are blinded to the fact that the threat of social
    breakdown is due neither to a shortage of fuel nor to the wasteful,
    polluting, and irrational use of available wattage, but to the attempt
    of industries to gorge society with energy quanta that inevitably
    degrade, deprive, and frustrate most people.

    A people can be just as dangerously overpowered by the wattage of its
    tools as by the caloric content of its foods, but it is much harder to
    confess to a national overindulgence in wattage than to a sickening
    diet. The per capita wattage that is critical for social well-being
    lies within an order of magnitude which is far above the horsepower
    known to four-fifths of humanity and far below the power commanded by
    any Volkswagen driver. It eludes the underconsumer and the
    overconsumer alike. Neither is willing to face the facts. For the
    primitive, the elimination of slavery and drudgery depends on the
    introduction of appropriate modern technology, and for the rich, the
    avoidance of an even more horrible degradation depends on the
    effective recognition of a threshold in energy consumption beyond
    which technical processes begin to dictate social relations. Calories
    are both biologically and socially healthy only as long as they stay
    within the narrow range that separates enough from too much.

    The so-called energy crisis is, then, a politically ambiguous issue.
    Public interest in the quantity of power and in the distribution of
    controls over the use of energy can lead in two opposite directions.
    On the one hand, questions can be posed that would open the way to
    political reconstruction by unblocking the search for a
    postindustrial, labor-intensive, low-energy and high-equity economy.
    On the other hand, hysterical concern with machine fodder can
    reinforce the present escalation of capital-intensive institutional
    growth, and carry us past the last turnoff from a hyperindustrial
    Armageddon. Political reconstruction presupposes the recognition of
    the fact that there exist _critical per capita quanta_ beyond
    which energy can no longer be controlled by political process. A
    universal social straitjacket will be the inevitable outcome of
    ecological restraints on _total energy use_ imposed by
    industrial-minded planners bent on keeping industrial production at
    some hypothetical maximum.

    Rich countries like the United States, Japan, or France might never
    reach the point of choking on their own waste, but only because their
    societies will have already collapsed into a sociocultural energy
    coma. Countries like India, Burma, and, for another short while at
    least, China are in the inverse position of being still muscle-powered
    enough to stop short of an energy stroke. They could choose, right
    now, to stay within those limits to which the rich will be forced back
    through a total loss of their freedoms.

    The choice of a minimum-energy economy compels the poor to abandon
    fantastical expectations and the rich to recognize their vested
    interest as a ghastly liability. Both must reject the fatal image of
    man the slaveholder currently promoted by an ideologically stimulated
    hunger for more energy. In countries that were made affluent by
    industrial development, the energy crisis serves as a pretext for
    raising the taxes that will be needed to substitute new, more
    rational,” and socially more deadly industrial processes for those
    that have been rendered obsolete by inefficient overexpansion. For the
    leaders of people who are not yet dominated by the same process of
    industrialization, the energy crisis serves as a _historical
    imperative_ to centralize production, pollution, and their control
    in a last-ditch effort to catch up with the more highly powered. By
    exporting their crisis and by preaching the new gospel of puritan
    energy worship, the rich do even more damage to the poor than they did
    by selling them the products of now outdated factories. As soon as a
    poor country accepts the doctrine that more energy more carefully
    managed will always yield more goods for more people, that country
    locks itself into the cage of enslavement to maximum industrial
    outputs. Inevitably the poor lose the option for rational technology
    when they choose to modernize their poverty by increasing their
    dependence on energy. Inevitably the poor deny themselves the
    possibility of liberating technology and participatory politics when,
    together with maximum feasible energy use, they accept maximum
    feasible social control.

    The energy crisis cannot be overwhelmed by more energy inputs. It can
    only be dissolved, along with the illusion that well-being depends on
    the number of energy slaves a man has at his command. For this
    purpose, it is necessary to identify the thresholds beyond which
    energy corrupts, and to do so by a political process that associates
    the community in the search for limits. Because this kind of research
    runs counter to that now done by experts and for institutions, I shall
    continue to call it counterfoil research. It has three steps. First,
    the need for limits on the per capita use of energy must be
    theoretically recognized as a social imperative. Then, the range must
    be located wherein the critical magnitude might be found. Finally,
    each community has to identify the levels of inequity, harrying, and
    operant conditioning that its members are willing to accept in
    exchange for the satisfaction that comes of idolizing powerful devices
    and joining in rituals directed by the professionals who control their
    operation.

    #86009
    Mr. House
    Participant

    https://www.zerohedge.com/political/cdc-director-tells-unvaccinated-not-travel-over-labor-day-weekend-except-what-about

    Uh except they never really shut down travel thru out all of 2020.


    @Deflationista

    A few weeks back or a month ago, someone posted a comment of yours from 2012. You never responded to that, and i’d really like to know what in your mind has changed since then?

    SteveB:

    “In this country, you gotta make the money first. Then when you get the money, you get the power. Then when you get the power, then you get the women.”

    Ending the use of money only means that those with power and influence will find another means of exchange to put their feet on our throats.

    Money simply allows us slaves to believe that we are not slaves. We buy the stuff that our masters make for us, giving them more and more money and power. They even make us sick, so they can peddle their drugs to make us ‘better’.

    The best we can do is opt out. But even that is getting more and more difficult. And maybe even one day will be illegal.

    We are toast.”

    So again, what in your mind has changed that you do not feel that way anymore? In my mind everything you mention in that comment has only gotten worse. Curious

    #86010
    Mr. House
    Participant

    Also if anyone enjoys roman history you might like this:

    Collections: The Queen’s Latin or Who Were the Romans? Part I: Beginnings and Legends

    I read part five and enjoyed it so much i’m starting from the beginning. Hat tip to someone over at the archdruid report who posted it!

    #86011
    Bill7
    Participant

    The less stuff I have the better I feel. The bike’s got a bombed-out bottom bracket, though, and I’ve got to fix that soon. Garden is doing well..

    Techno-world holds no lasting appeal.

    #86012
    oldandtired
    Participant

    At the end of Rickovers speech:

    Certainly no one likes taxes, but we must become reconciled to larger taxes in the larger America of tomorrow.

    It means that we must reconcile ourselves to continuing higher taxes to build up and maintain at decent salaries a greatly enlarged corps of much better trained teachers, even at the cost of denying ourselves such momentary pleasures as buying a bigger new car, or a TV set, or household gadget.

    An ever larger share of what we earn must go to solve problems caused by crowded living – bigger governments; bigger city, state, and federal budgets to pay for more public services.

    You’ll have nothing and you’ll like it.

    #86013
    zerosum
    Participant

    Pregnant and barefoot
    Does this apply to all pregnant women

    https://www.texastribune.org/2021/08/30/texas-abortion-inducing-pill-texas/
    TEXAS LEGISLATURE 2021
    Bill limiting abortion-inducing pills nears final passage in the Texas Legislature
    Senate Bill 4, which was advanced by the Texas House on Monday evening, would bar access to abortion-inducing pills to patients who are more than seven weeks pregnant.

    BY KEVIN REYNOLDS AND KATE MCGEE AUG. 30, 2021

    #86014
    zerosum
    Participant

    I jst learned — another expression ” to lie”
    Biden Told Afghan President To “Create Perception”

    #86021
    ₿oogaloo
    Participant

    I’m coming under harsh institutional scrutiny for giving people real information about vaccine risks/benefits, and now for prescribing ivermectin based treatment.

    This is very disturbing. If they fire you, I am happy to volunteer behind the scenes to support the lawsuit.

    #86023
    Oroboros
    Participant
    #86024
    Archie
    Participant

    This story is fictional. Any similarity between its characters and actual people is intentional.

    This is very well done and humorous. Also, he is a fan of TAE Summary!!

    The Oopsilon Variant

    #86025
    V. Arnold
    Participant

    On February 2, 1996 Ivermectine was approved for human use:
    https://www.naturalnews.com/2021-09-01-fact-check-fda-approved-ivermectin-humans-1996.html?utm_referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fzen.yandex.com&utm_campaign=dbr

    Lies on top of lies, on top of more and more lies…the layers of the onion are infinite in the West…
    Find those you can trust and believe, and hold them dear…

    #86026
    John Day
    Participant

    @Oroboros and my parents said know:
    Thanks for thinking of me.

    #86027
    V. Arnold
    Participant

    @ Archie
    What a hoot…thanks for that Oopsilon piece…

    #86028
    praecursator
    Participant

    Anaemic attempt at a hit piece on the FLCCC by Fluffpost:

    People Are Eating Horse Paste To Fight COVID. These Doctors Are One Reason Why. | HuffPost

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