Sep 042022
 
 September 4, 2022  Posted by at 8:28 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,


Odilon Redon Breton harbor 1879

 

France Says Imposing Price Cap On Russian Oil Will Be Difficult (CNBC)
Mass Anti-Government Protest Hits Prague (RT)
One In Six Italians Faces Energy Poverty (RT)
The West Wants To Disarm The ‘Powder Keg’ Of Europe, Risks Igniting It (Norin)
Gazprom Discloses Major Challenge For Nord Stream (RT)
Sweden, Austria Bail Out Energy Companies, Trigger Europe’s Minsky Moment (ZH)
Russia Wants UN To Pressure US On Visas (RT)
Bill Barr Slams Trump’s Special Master Request As ‘Red Herring’ (Fox)
Prosecuting Trump In The Shadow Of Hillary’s Emails (Turley)
Biden Admin Held Weekly Censorship Meetings With Social Media Giants (PM)
The Terrifying Vacuity of Klaus Schwab (Eugyp)
Fauci’s Red Guards (Michael P. Senger)
1st Peer-Reviewed Study on Pfizer, Moderna Vaccines Confirms ‘Excess Risk’ (BN)
Vaccine Vultures (Todd Hayen)
Ivermectin Reduces Covid Death Risk By 92% (Blaze)

 

 


MAGA kids

 

 

Putin dollar

 

 

 

 

Biden day after

 

 

Rallies

 

 

The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.
– Mark Twain

 

 

 

 

Ha ha ha! That’s one big gaping barn door he’s opening here:

“It should not be a Western measure against Russia, it should be a global measure against war..”

France Says Imposing Price Cap On Russian Oil Will Be Difficult (CNBC)

French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said on Saturday that efforts by G-7 nations to introduce a price cap on Russian oil would require commitment from the wider international community to be successful. The G-7 economic powers announced Friday that they had agreed on a plan to impose a set price on Russian oil. The initiative is the latest attempt to apply economic pressure on Moscow over its invasion of Ukraine. But aside from cutting Russia’s oil revenues — a key source of funding for President Vladimir Putin’s war chest — Le Maire said the policy should be implemented as a “global measure against war.” “You need an outreach because we don’t want this measure to be only a Western measure,” Le Maire told CNBC’s Steve Sedgwick at the Ambrosetti Forum in Italy.

“It should not be a Western measure against Russia, it should be a global measure against war,” he added. The G-7 — which consists of the U.S., Canada, France, Germany, the U.K., Italy and Japan — is yet to finalize how the price cap will be implemented, a process that Le Maire acknowledged will be “quite difficult.” However, it is expected to be ready before early December when EU sanctions on seaborne imports of Russian crude kick in. “We know that we need the unity from all the 27 member states if you want to get the green light for introducing that cap,” he said, referring to the EU bloc of nations, a non-enumerated member of the G-7. More than that, however, Le Maire said the policy would require participation by other major global economies.


It follows comments from Kadri Simson, the EU’s energy chief, who urged involvement from China and India, both of which have increased their purchases of Russian oil this year, benefiting from discounted rates. “If we want to be efficient in these sanctions, we need to reduce the revenues that Russia is gaining from oil and gas selling,” Le Maire said.

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First step. “The protesters demanded the Czech Republic to take a neutral military stance, as well as to secure direct contracts with gas suppliers, including Russia.”

“They require direct gas supplies from Russia and food and energy guarantees for the Czech Republic. They hold the EU solely responsible for the European economic disaster and the rise in energy bills.”

Mass Anti-Government Protest Hits Prague (RT)

Tens of thousands hit central Prague on Saturday, taking part in a protest dubbed ‘Czech Republic First.’ The protesters urged the government to resign over soaring energy prices, inflation and the international policies they believe have brought the country to that state. According to police estimates, some 70,000 took part in the rally, with the organizers putting the mark even higher at 100,000. The event brought together people of polar political views, with the Communist party and right-wing Freedom and Direct Democracy Party alike taking part in the protest. “The aim of our demonstration is to demand change, mainly in solving the issue of energy prices, especially electricity and gas, which will destroy our economy this autumn,” one of the event’s co-organizers, social democrat Jiri Havel, told local media.

The protesters demanded the Czech Republic to take a neutral military stance, as well as to secure direct contracts with gas suppliers, including Russia. They have also condemned the government for supporting the EU’s sanctions against Moscow, adopted in multiple waves in wake of the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine. “The best for the Ukrainians and two sweaters for us,” one of the banners displayed at the event read, referring to the rising heating costs and potential energy cuts in winter. The protest came a day after the government survived a no-confidence vote over the same issues, with the opposition blaming it for inaction in wake of the soaring energy prices and inflation.


Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala, leading the ruling five-party, center-right coalition, was quick to accuse the protesters of acting against the country’s best interests, implying the Kremlin might have had a hand in staging the protest. “The protest on Wenceslas Square was called by forces that are pro-Russian, are close to extreme positions and are against the interests of the Czech Republic,” he told CTK broadcaster. “It is clear that Russian propaganda and disinformation campaigns are present on our territory and some people simply listen to them.”

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The protests won’t be long now.

One In Six Italians Faces Energy Poverty (RT)

One in six Italians, or up to nine million people, could sink into energy poverty due to soaring bills across the EU, Italy’s ANSA news agency reported on Saturday, citing the Italian General Confederation of Crafts. Households are considered to be in energy poverty if they cannot afford to regularly heat their homes in winter or use air conditioning in summer, and are forced to stop using high-energy household appliances, or severely limit their use. Southern regions of the country are reportedly the worst-hit. In Campania, between 519,000 and 779,000 households are using electricity or gas on an irregular basis. In Sicily the figure is between 481,000 and 722,000, and in Calabria there are 287,000 such households.


Earlier this week, local media reported that Italy’s Ecological Transition Minister Roberto Cingolani planned to ask the entire population to turn the heating down, starting from October. Italy has already introduced some limits on the use of central heating in public buildings and apartment blocks, and these are expected to be tightened under the new measures. On Friday, Italy’s Serie A football league announced plans to put a four-hour limit on the use of floodlights in stadiums on match days, as part of energy-saving measures. The new rule is expected to cut floodlight electricity consumption by about 25%.

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Evgeny Norin is a Russian historian focused on conflicts and international politics.

“The US diplomat offered Serbs a brighter future in exchange for giving up their historic lands.”

The West Wants To Disarm The ‘Powder Keg’ Of Europe, Risks Igniting It (Norin)

Just a day before the agreement was struck between Serbia and Kosovo, US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Gabriel Escobar made an infuriating statement, “It’s time to forget the narrative ‘Kosovo is Serbia’ and move to the one that says ‘Kosovo and Serbia are actually Europe.’” The US diplomat offered Serbs a brighter future in exchange for giving up their historic lands. His words, however, sparked protest among the Serbian public and politicians. “The line between terrorists and freedom fighters is very thin for them. This is US policy. What can you expect from Mr. Escobar? Why do we keep pretending we don’t know what it is about?” said an outraged Serbian president, Alexandar Vucic, in an address to the nation.


Escobar’s rhetoric didn’t go unnoticed in Russia either. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova reminded her American colleague that “UN Security Council Resolution 1244 <…> is still the legal framework for the Kosovo settlement, clearly reaffirming the territorial integrity of Serbia.” There are two sides to this story, but history definitely favors the Serbian and Russian perspectives. Kosovo is located in the south-west of Serbia, near the Albanian border. In the 12th century, it became part of the nascent Serbian state, gaining prominence during the Middle Ages. The head of the Serbian Orthodox Church resided in Kosovo’s Peja. Kosovo also played an important role in the building of the Serbian nation. The Battle of Kosovo, when the Turkish army fought the Serbs and won, became one of the bloodiest battles in Serbia’s history and a symbol of heroic defeat. A large portion of Serbian poetry is dedicated to those events.

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Siemens denies.

Gazprom Discloses Major Challenge For Nord Stream (RT)

Germany’s Siemens Energy is ready to correct a turbine fault in the Nord Stream 1 natural gas pipeline, but there is currently nowhere to service the failed equipment, Russian energy major Gazprom said on Saturday. “Siemens is taking part in the repair works under the terms of the current contract [with Gazprom], has detected faults and signed an act on diagnosing of oil leaks, and is ready to fix them,” the Russian company said via its Telegram channel. “There is just no place to carry out the repair works,” Gazprom added, providing no further details. Earlier this week, the company [said] an engine oil leak was found in the turbine during a joint inspection with manufacturer Siemens Energy at the Portovaya compressor station near St.Petersburg. Natural gas supplies via Nord Stream, a major gas route from Russia to Europe, have been terminated for an indefinite period due to the leakage. The pipeline had been due to restart early on Saturday after a three-day maintenance break.

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Add this to the war tab. All EU countries must follow.

Sweden, Austria Bail Out Energy Companies, Trigger Europe’s Minsky Moment (ZH)

Last weekend, Credit Suisse repo guru Zoltan published what may have been the most insightful snippet of the entire European energy crisis (to date) when he extended the infamous “Minsky Moment” framework to Europe, and specifically Germany, which he said “can’t cover its payments without Russian gas and the government is asking citizens to conserve energy to leave more for industry.” He then elaborated that “Minsky moments are triggered by excessive financial leverage, and in the context of supply chains, leverage means excessive operating leverage: in Germany, $2 trillion of value added depends on $20 billion of gas from Russia… …that’s 100-times leverage – much more than Lehman’s.”

But while Germany still pretends it can somehow avoid a devastating crisis this winter besides bailing out Uniper, one of the country’s biggest utilities (after all, admission would make Trump’s 2018 warning accurate and prescient, and everyone knows that according to Western intellectual snobs Trump can’t possibly ever be correct), other European nations are succumbing to what Zoltan dubbed a “supply-chain Minsky moment.” On Wednesday it was Austria, which announced it would bail out the country’s main energy supplier with a two-billion-euro ($2 billion) loan, the AFP reported. Chancellor Karl Nehammer said the loan to Wien Energie was an “extraordinary rescue measure” to ensure its two million customers – mainly Vienna households – continue to receive electricity. It will run until next April.

Wien Energie asked for a bailout this weekend after suffering financial trouble amid soaring energy prices and speculation the company mismanaged their funds. Nehammer said Wien Energie, which is owned by Vienna, would have to answer questions as to how they got into trouble. “The goal was to help people quickly… It has now been agreed that all of these questions, which are rightly raised, must be answered promptly by Vienna (and) the energy supplier,” he told reporters. The company – almost entirely dependent on Russian gas – said earlier this week that it had been hit by the “price explosion” which it has not yet passed on to customers, assuring it remained solvent. As part of its rescue, the company is expected to pass through soaring costs, which means a historic price shock is coming to Austria next… and soon Sweden.

Following in Austria’s footsteps, on Saturday morning Sweden announced it will give emergency liquidity support to electricity producers after the government said it feared Russia’s decision to halt gas deliveries to Europe could place its financial system under severe strain. Prime minister Magdalena Andersson said the government would offer hundreds of billions of kroner in support to electricity producers, the FT reported. The PM warned that, left unchecked, rising collateral demands for electricity producers could ripple through the main Nasdaq Clearing market in Stockholm and, in the worst case, spark a financial crisis…. just as Zoltan warned almost half a year ago. Her remarks came after Russia said on Friday evening that it would no longer supply gas via the Nordstream 1 pipeline. That announcement came after energy markets had closed for the weekend. s

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Visas for UN diplomats.

1947: “visas shall be granted without charge and as promptly as possible… irrespective of the relations existing between the governments of the persons referred to… and the government of the US.”

Russia Wants UN To Pressure US On Visas (RT)

Russia’s permanent representative at the United Nations, Vassily Nebenzia, has asked the organization to persuade the US to grant visas for members of Moscow’s delegation to the UN General Assembly. They are heading to New York to attend the high-level general debate that will be held between September 20 and 26. The request was made in a letter that Nebenzia forwarded to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Friday. The document has been seen by both Russian and the Western media. In his message, the envoy pointed out that, with less than three weeks remaining before the General Assembly, not a single member of Russia’s delegation has received entry visas from the US.

The Russian side, headed by Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, had submitted the relevant applications to attend the event to the American embassy in Moscow, the diplomat reportedly added. “This is even more alarming since, for the last several months, the authorities of the US have been constantly refusing to grant entry visas to a number of Russian delegates assigned to take part in the official United Nations events,” the letter read, as quoted by the media. Earlier this week, Nebenzia pointed out that Russian Interior Minister Vladimir Kolokoltsev and his delegation could not attend a meeting of UN police chiefs because the US refused to grant them visas.


The Russian envoy cited the 1947 agreement between the UN and the US, which states that “visas shall be granted without charge and as promptly as possible… irrespective of the relations existing between the governments of the persons referred to… and the government of the US.” The already strained relations between Moscow and Washington have deteriorated even further since the launch of the Russian military operation in Ukraine. The US has slapped harsh economic sanctions on Russia while backing Kiev and providing it with billions of dollars in military aid, as well as with intelligence. Nebenzia urged Guterres “to once again emphasize to the authorities of the US that they must promptly issue requested visas for all Russian delegates and accompanying persons,”including the Russian journalists covering Lavrov’s trip to the General Assembly.

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They even searched Barron’s bedroom.

Bill Barr Slams Trump’s Special Master Request As ‘Red Herring’ (Fox)

The legal fight between former President Donald Trump and the Department of Justice escalated Friday morning when the DOJ released a detailed inventory of the documents seized in last month’s Mar-a-Lago raid. The inventory list comes following an order from Florida Federal Judge Aileen M. Cannon, who is deciding whether to appoint a “special master” to the case. On “America Reports” on Friday, former Attorney General Bill Barr criticized Trump’s push for a “special master” as a distraction from the details of the case and argued it is not likely to be granted. “I think the whole idea of a special master is a bit of a red herring,” Barr told hosts Sandra Smith and John Roberts. “I think it’s a waste of time.”


Since the raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home, the former president has slammed the DOJ for what he argues was a politically motivated witch hunt. Trump recently called for a special master to hold an independent review of the documents. According to details revealed in the warrant, affidavit and the inventory list, dozens of the documents seized from Trump’s property were classified materials. A portion of the items taken were not classified, with several entries labeled “Article of Clothing/Gift Item.” Trump has claimed the documents at his Florida home were documents he had “declassified” prior to leaving office and were protected under executive privilege.

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“With Hillary Clinton selling “But Her Emails” hats at $30 a pop, Merrick Garland will have to explain the prospect of one politician going to jail while the other goes retail.”

Prosecuting Trump In The Shadow Of Hillary’s Emails (Turley)

A criminal charge of obstruction against Trump would offer certain political benefits for Garland. As previously discussed, the government has routinely elected not to prosecute high-ranking officials for improperly removing classified material or has sought mere misdemeanor charges in the most egregious cases. Prosecuting Trump for a misdemeanor for possessing or removing classified documents would seem gratuitous, while prosecuting him for a felony would raise questions of biased or selective prosecution. After all, in 2016, Hillary Clinton had not just 113 documents containing classified material but some documents “classified at the Top Secret/Special Access Program level” on her private email servers. (In Trump’s case, the government allegedly found roughly 100 documents in the Mar-a-Lago raid in addition to roughly 150 handled over by the Trump team under an earlier subpoena.)

Clinton’s documents were even more vulnerable to being compromised via her unclassified email account and, according to the FBI, “hostile actors gained access” to some of the information. Yet she was never subjected to a raid, let alone a charge. Yet, while less glaring as a contradiction than the charges on the possession or handling of classified information, an obstruction charge would allow up to a 20-year sentence and could be brought with misdemeanor charges on the mishandling or retention of classified information. Thus, an obstruction charge against Trump would be prosecuted in the shadow of Hillary Clinton’s case. In addition to the transfer of top-secret and other classified documents to her private server, Clinton and her staff did not fully cooperate with investigators.


During the investigations of her conduct, some of us marveled at the temerity of the Clinton staff in refusing to turn over her laptop and other evidence to State Department and DOJ investigators. The FBI had to cut deals with her aides to secure their cooperation. Later, more classified material was found on the laptop of former congressman Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.), who was married to top Clinton aide Huma Abedin — 49,000 emails potentially relevant to the Clinton investigation. After Congress sought these emails, Clinton’s staff unilaterally destroyed thousands of emails with BleachBit. Clinton was aware that Congress and the State Department were seeking the emails in 2014. Her lawyers turned over about 30,000 work-related emails to the State Department and deleted 33,000 others while insisting they unilaterally deemed them “personal.”

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Democracy is something else.

Biden Admin Held Weekly Censorship Meetings With Social Media Giants (PM)

Federal officials in the Biden administration secretly conspired and communicated with social media companies to censor and suppress Americans’ private speech. This is revealed in a new lawsuit brought in a joint effort by The New Civil Liberties Alliance, the Attorney General of Missouri, and the Attorney General of Louisiana against the President of the United States. The suit is brought under the first amendment right to freedom of speech. The lawsuit seeks to identify among other things “all meetings with any Social-Media Platform relating to Content Modulation and/or Misinformation.” The discovery shows that there was “A recurring meeting usually entitled USG – Industry meeting, which has generally had a monthly cadence, and is between government agencies and private industry.

Government participants have included CISA’s Election Security and Resilience team, DHS’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis, the FBI’s foreign influence task force, the Justice Department’s national security division, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Industry participants have included Google, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Microsoft, Verizon Media, Pinterest, LinkedIn and the Wikimedia Foundation. The topics discussed include, but are not limited to: information sharing around elections risk, briefs from industry, threat updates, and highlights and upcoming watch outs.” Communications across 11 federal agencies reveal that the federal government, under the Biden administration, “has exerted tremendous pressure on social-media companies—pressure to which companies have repeatedly bowed,” the New Civil Liberties Alliance details in a new release.


The social media companies that were part of this Partner Support Portal include Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn. The CDC invited “all tech platforms” in to their meeting to discuss how to suppress free speech about Covid online. Those agencies involved include the White House, HHS, DHS, CISA, the CDC, NIAID, the Office of the Surgeon General, the Census Bureau, the FDA, the FBI, the State Department, the Treasury Department, and the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. The NCLA notes further that, during the discovery process of this lawsuit, “the government has been uncooperative and has resisted complying with the discovery order every step of the way—especially with regard to Anthony Fauci’s communications.”

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Eugyppius has read The Great Reset, so you don’t have to.

The Terrifying Vacuity of Klaus Schwab (Eugyp)

Like many bad books, The Great Reset lapses into occasional inadvertent autobiography. In the final pages especially, where Klaus Schwab writes of his hopes for a “Personal Reset” through state repression, we catch a glimpse of the man during the first-wave lockdown at his house in Cologny. At first he enjoyed the break with routine and the opportunity to commune with nature, but before long he began to feel a nagging unease. He’d spent most of his years prior to 2020 flogging “stakeholder capitalism”, his umbrella term for various schemes to disarm criticism of the globalist corporate borg and co-opt leftist opposition.

Schwab succeeded in parlaying his simplistic ideas into an international conference circuit, known today as the World Economic Forum, where he could hobnob with corporate and political celebrities and burnish his Bond-villain reputation among political dissidents. But the pandemic had thrown Schwab off balance. For once his reprocessed nostrums about environmental, social and corporate governance issues were no longer in demand; virologists and epidemiologists and exponential growth curves filled the news instead. His powerful celebrity clients were suddenly listening to other people. Obscurity loomed.


Thus Schwab enlisted his sidekick research-assistant Thierry Malleret, booted up his laptop, and spent a few months decanting the cloud of buzzwords, talking points and half-remembered powerpoint presentations plaguing his brain into a meandering and thoroughly pointless document. When he had finished, he sent the whole thing to Malleret’s wife for a proof-read, and then he ordered his own Forum Press to print off a few thousand copies. Thus did yet another lamentable exercise in self-publishing come to pass.

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“..forced preference falsification..”

Fauci’s Red Guards (Michael P. Senger)

One aspect of dictatorships that citizens of democratic nations often find puzzling is how the population can be convinced to support such dystopian policies. How do they get people to run those concentration camps? How do they find people to take food from starving villagers? How can they get so many people to support policies that, to any outsider, are so needlessly destructive, cruel, and dumb? The answer lies in forced preference falsification. When those who speak up in principled opposition to a dictator’s policies are punished and forced into silence, those with similar opinions are forced into silence as well, or even forced to pretend they support policies in which they do not actually believe. Emboldened by this facade of unanimity, supporters of the regime’s policies, or even those who did not previously have strong opinions, become convinced that the regime’s policies are just and good – regardless of what those policies actually are—and that those critical of them are even more deserving of punishment.

One of history’s great masters of forced preference falsification was Chairman Mao Zedong. As László Ladány recalled, Mao’s decades-long campaign to remould the people of China in his own image began as soon as he took power after the Chinese Civil War. By the fall of 1951, 80 percent of all Chinese had had to take part in mass accusation meetings, or to watch organised lynchings and public executions. [..] This decades-long campaign of forced preference falsification reached its apex during the Cultural Revolution, in which Mao deputized radical youths across China, called Red Guards, to purge all vestiges of capitalism and traditional society and impose Mao Zedong Thought as China’s dominant ideology. Red Guards attacked anyone they perceived as Mao’s enemies, burned books, persecuted intellectuals, and engaged in the systematic destruction of their country’s own history, demolishing China’s relics en masse.

Through this method of forced preference falsification, any mass of people can be made to support virtually any policy, no matter how destructive or inimical to the interests of the people. Avoiding this spiral of preference falsification is therefore why freedom of speech is such a central tenet of the Enlightenment, and why it is given such primacy in the First Amendment of the US Constitution. No regime in American history has ever previously had the power to force preference falsification by systematically and clandestinely silencing those critical of its policies. Until now. As it turns out, an astonishing new release of discovery documents in Missouri v. Biden – in which NCLA Legal (New Civil Liberties Alliance) is representing plaintiffs including Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff, and Aaron Kheriaty against the Biden administration for violations of free speech during Covid – reveal a vast federal censorship army, with more than 50 federal officials across at least 11 federal agencies having secretly coordinated with social media companies to censor private speech.

“Secretary Mayorkas of DHS commented that the federal Government’s efforts to police private speech on social media are occurring “across the federal enterprise.” It turns out that this statement is true, on a scale beyond what Plaintiffs could ever have anticipated. The limited discovery produced so far provides a tantalising snapshot into a massive, sprawling federal “Censorship Enterprise,” which includes dozens of federal officials across at least eleven federal agencies and components identified so far, who communicate with social-media platforms about misinformation, disinformation, and the suppression of private speech on social media—all with the intent and effect of pressuring social-media platforms to censor and suppress private speech that federal officials disfavour.” The scale of this federal censorship enterprise appears to be far beyond what anyone imagined, involving even senior White House officials. The government is protecting Anthony Fauci and other high level officials by refusing to reveal documents related to their involvement.

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8 mice.

1st Peer-Reviewed Study on Pfizer, Moderna Vaccines Confirms ‘Excess Risk’ (BN)

A landmark peer-reviewed study appears to be the first of its kind to provide hard data on the “excess risk” of adverse side effects of Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna mRNA vaccines in an independent “randomized clinical trial.” The results of the accepted scientific study confirm that the concerns that many patients had about the mRNA vaccines were well-founded. “In the Moderna trial, the excess risk of serious AESIs (15.1 per 10,000 participants) was higher than the risk reduction for COVID-19 hospitalization relative to the placebo group (6.4 per 10,000 participants),” the study found. “In the Pfizer trial, the excess risk of serious AESIs (10.1 per 10,000) was higher than the risk reduction for COVID-19 hospitalization relative to the placebo group (2.3 per 10,000 participants),” the study added.

The study was published on ScienceDirect on August 31, 2022. The authors include researchers from Stanford University, the University of Maryland, and UCLA. The study provides the following list of confirmed adverse events (or side effects) of the respective mRNA vaccines. It also provides the risk ratios versus Covid-19 (over 1 is a factor increase, under 1 is a factor decrease). The study also provided known complications for Covid-19. “Although the randomized trials offer high level evidence for evaluating causal effects, the sparsity of their data necessitates that harm-benefit analyses also consider observational studies,” the authors state. “Since their emergency authorization in December 2020, hundreds of millions of doses of Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines have been administered and post-authorization observational data offer a complementary opportunity to study AESIs. Post-authorization observational safety studies include cohort studies (which make use of medical claims or electronic health records) and disproportionality analyses (which use spontaneous adverse event reporting systems).”

“In July 2021, the FDA reported detecting four potential adverse events of interest: pulmonary embolism, acute myocardial infarction, immune thrombocytopenia, and disseminated intravascular coagulation following Pfizer’s vaccine based on medical claims data in older Americans.” the researchers add. “Three of these four serious adverse event types would be categorized as coagulation disorders, which is the Brighton AESI category that exhibited the largest excess risk in the vaccine group in both the Pfizer and Moderna trials. FDA stated it would further investigate the findings but at the time of our writing has not issued an update.”

Joseph Fraiman announced the study results on Twitter: “Our study examining mRNA vaccine serious adverse events study is now peer-reviewed in the Journal Vaccine,” Fraiman wrote. “Serious adverse events of special interest following mRNA COVID-19 vaccination in randomized trials in adults.” Thus, the objection to Americans’ concerns that the mRNA vaccines may have adverse side effects has come to a close, despite the initial advertisements that the vaccines were “100% safe and effective,” prevented infection and transmission, and had no known serious side effects.

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“We have been brainwashed to believe anything other than the New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, or other puppets of the system, is pure hogwash. It is now the other way around.”

Vaccine Vultures (Todd Hayen)

Vultures are birds that seek out wounded animals about to die and then swoop down on them when they are dead (or close to death) and devour them—apocryphally starting with gouging out the eyes. Vultures are typically not classed in the “warm and fuzzy” anthropomorphic grouping, although they accomplish a great service to the ecology of the planet, such as other animals thrown in the “yuck” bucket of human perception such as flies, spiders, laughing hyenas, and carrion beetles (who knows what a carrion beetle is?—they ARE pretty, so before you know what they do for a living, you might like them). So are we human vultures when we swoop down on dead or dying people we have heard about to see if they are vaxxed or not and if what they are suffering or dying from is due to the jab? Two? Three, god forbid four?

At the beginning of the vaccine madness, I was quite brazen and would unashamedly blurt out when hearing of someone’s misfortune, “were they vaccinated???!!!” I never got brazen enough to ask this to the person suffering (obviously if dead), but did to their friends, or whoever was explaining what was happening. I eventually backed off of the personal incidents I was experiencing as it did seem a bit too vulture-like, but I still would ask sheep in my company what they thought of dozens of athletes dropping in the fields, now extended out to just average Joe’s not waking up or doctors way too young to be experiencing such severe cardiac issues. Now I don’t even do that. I just listen. It seems this particular vulture just enjoys the shock of seeing no one (sheep) realizing the secret. “You’ll see,” I say to myself, in my evil vulture voice. “You’ll see.”

Now, isn’t that sick? Maybe. But what else is this experience going to drive us to if not un-empathetic lunacy. Think of Lord of the Rings’ Gollum. Isn’t that what did him in? We have been put into this untenable position of finding “joy” or at least “satisfaction” in the trauma of another. At its worse it is a form of schadenfreude, pleasure derived from another’s misfortune. But I would argue this is not really the case. I do not think what we are feeling (assuming others are fellow vaccine vultures) is “pleasure” and whatever it is that we are feeling is not due to someone else’s health misfortune. Of course the definition does include “self satisfaction from another’s failures”—maybe that is the closest schadenfreude comes to defining vaccine vultures.

[..] I have recently decided that the number one culprit for keeping sheep asleep is the media. The media has always played the role of the unbiased family member that will let you in on any corruption it saw in our leaders or other groups trying to get our attention. I think that is still true (that people rely on media for that reason) but the corruption is now in the media, at least the mainstream media. We have been brainwashed to believe anything other than the New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, or other puppets of the system, is pure hogwash. It is now the other way around. I do believe that if any of these “gods of media” ran a story like we see day in and day out in the alternate media, many sheep heads would turn regardless what the venerated talking heads of government and power had to say.

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“An observational study with the size and level of analysis as ours is hardly achieved and infeasible to be conducted as a randomised clinical trial. Conclusions are hard to be refuted. Data is data, regardless of your beliefs.”

Ivermectin Reduces Covid Death Risk By 92% (Blaze)

A new peer-reviewed study found that regular use of ivermectin reduced the risk of dying from COVID-19 by 92%. The large study was conducted by Flávio A. Cadegiani, MD, MSc, PhD. Cadegiani is a board-certified endocrinologist with a master’s degree and doctorate degree in clinical endocrinology. The peer-reviewed study was published on Wednesday by the online medical journal Cureus. The study was conducted on a strictly controlled population of 88,012 people from the city of Itajaí in Brazil. Individuals who used ivermectin as prophylaxis or took the medication before being infected by COVID experienced significant reductions in death and hospitalization.

According to the study, those who took ivermectin regularly had a 92% reduction in their COVID death risk compared to non-users and 84% less than irregular users. “The hospitalization rate was reduced by 100% in regular users compared to both irregular users and non-users,” the study stated. The impressive reduction for regular ivermectin users was evident despite the regular users being at a higher risk for COVID deaths. The regular users were older and had a higher prevalence of type 2 diabetes and hypertension than irregular and non-users. Irregular users of ivermectin had a 37% lower mortality rate reduction than non-users. The study defined regular users as those who used more than 30 tablets of ivermectin over five months.


The dosage of ivermectin was determined by body weight, but “most of the population used between two and three tablets daily for two days, every 15 days.” “Non-use of ivermectin was associated with a 12.5-fold increase in mortality rate and a seven-fold increased risk of dying from COVID-19 compared to the regular use of ivermectin,” the study read. “This dose-response efficacy reinforces the prophylactic effects of ivermectin against COVID-19.” Cadegiani believes the study showed a “dose-response effect” – which means that increasing levels of ivermectin decreased the risk of hospitalization and death from COVID-19. Cadegiani wrote on Twitter, “An observational study with the size and level of analysis as ours is hardly achieved and infeasible to be conducted as a randomised clinical trial. Conclusions are hard to be refuted. Data is data, regardless of your beliefs.”

Read more …

 

 

 

 

 

Sanctions make Russia rich

 

 

 

 

Buttigieg
https://twitter.com/i/status/1565941643869577217

 

 

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  43 Responses to “Debt Rattle September 4 2022”

  1. Great: formatting is dead again.

    “70,000 Czech Protesters Flood Prague over Energy Crisis”

    Population 10M. 1 in 145 Czechs are at this protest. But as our Press Secretary says, they’re not mainstream, they’re the fringe. Like the Truckers were.

    And Sweden is on national bailouts already. What did Swedes use before candles?

    And bailout? We’re on year 21 of the 2001 bailout. They said “Pshaw! Don’t be ridiculous, you non-experts: It’s temporary! Greenspan will just raise rates and remove stimulus, no problem!” That’s almost as temporary as Nixon in 1971. So we are STILL on mega-trillion 0% stimulus. Because we’re not in a recession and the economy is so awesome.

    And it won’t cause inflation! Trust me. Still waiting for that brass band playing “The Automatic Earth Was Right.” Still looking to remove Krugman’s Nobel.

    Anyway, Weimar inflations go on so long you forget they’re not normal. On purpose. Powell is 1,000 basis points behind the curve. The stock market follows only Fed liquidity and no fundamentals whatsoever. …While the Fed drains that liquidity every day. Okay, I’ll sit here with popcorn, nothing bad will ever happen.

    …And you wonder why they want a war.

    Biden was a new high for the Babylon Bee.

    Biden: “I don’t consider any Trump supporter a threat to the country.”

    To be fair, he didn’t remember saying anything at all. Again, “Closing the Collapse Gap with the Soviet Union.” At the end, the leader was useless, and no one knew who was running the country. This was dangerous and they were knocked out to some extent by lack of belief after the big collapse at Chernobyl.

    “ France Says Imposing Price Cap on Russian Oil Will Be Difficult (CNBC)”

    You mean the other 200 countries don’t want to join your suicide pact? And are happy that you joined it and leave more for them?

    “Italy’s Ecological Transition Minister Roberto Cingolani planned to ask the entire population to turn the heating down, starting from October.”

    See? You can have all the heat you want in the summer. Just not in the winter. Who says we’re not generous? Possibly missing the point?

    “6 in 10 British Factories” Were just intentionally shuttered by the British government. On purpose. For no reason anyone can tell. But I’m sure the people will ask the government to do something about…the government doing something about it.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRj0oub2TLY

    “It’s time to forget the narrative ‘Kosovo is Serbia’ and move to the one that says ‘Kosovo and Serbia are actually Europe.’”

    Does this sound as condescending and dumb to them as it does to me? Hey el Stupido Americano! We know we live in Europe! (Did you NOT know?)

    “Sweden, Austria Bail Out Energy Companies”

    Yes, but leads to a huuuge number of questions. Bail out? Why? Let them go bankrupt. It sheds debt and make it cheaper to turn them on later. Where does the money come for the bailout? From the people with 10,000€ power bills? Why would bailing them have any effect? They have no supply, therefore they have no business model for any foreseeable future. Since this is all government-enacted and war-footing, why would you not nationalize? You give money to the CEOs instead?

    All of that means, no bailout. This is unprecedented, so you have an open field for solutions. This just means “We wanted our pals who owned their bonds to get paid while the Swedish people die like dogs.” You know: like they did in Greece.

    “Visas for UN diplomats.”

    Yes but that’s a law and treaty and the Anglos haven’t followed either in 400 years. Where did I get such a bad view on governments? Hearing it from similar Western ranching cranks in the 90s and trying to refute them. Because I engaged with the material and their argument. Not happy to discover it either, which is why most people choose to trust government instead of look, because they know by are in denial. They are lying to themselves like any abused spouse.

    “They even searched Barron’s bedroom.”

    They had a warrant for all documents, reaching over all time, space, and reality. This is so Donald can prove a negative: that he is innocent of all crimes they have not yet accused him of. That he can’t prove a negative, nor divide by infinity, is a sure proof of his guilt. Hmmm…MAYBE those are illegal under the 4th and all human rights?

    Should be fun when they arrest him a day before the midterms. Oh, in defense of “Democracy” that has a one-party system.

    “Merrick Garland will have to explain the prospect of one politician going to jail while the other goes retail.”

    No he won’t. He’ll say “Suck it, peasants, or I’ll burn your whole town and rape your mother.” Have we learned nothing yet?

    In my opinion, nothing could be better. If I were in charge, I would stage exactly these events. …Well, we TOLD you the easy way for DECADES since 1954, but you wouldn’t believe it, so I guess we need to play it out in person, complete with arrests.

    “Biden Admin Held Weekly Censorship Meetings With Social Media Giants (PM)”

    Admit nothing. Deny everything. Make counter accusations. Since this is true, why is this so easily popped up in headline news? So…we just admit everything now? Dark Brandon channels Hitler and the sound-and-light guys all said “This is a GREAT idea! Americans will LOVE this!!!” Hmmm.

    ““stakeholder capitalism”, was tried in the 30s through the 50s before collapsing. Both socially and monetarily. The ESGs collapsed in 1/10th the time, but 10x the money. So he’s a record-holder in that regard. He fails more, harder, and faster than anyone in history!

    “Fauci’s Red Guards (Michael P. Senger)”

    Yes, Bernays and the engineers are well aware of what gears in the system must be turned to fabricate this outcome, and use the process regularly, moving from one nation to the next, strategically lifting “disaster capital” assets. “

    “There were two times for making big money, one in the up-building of a country and the other in its destruction. Slow money on the up-building, fast money in the crack-up.” Rhett Butler

    By FORCING one country to crack-up, and ARRANGING the other country to collapse, they make money on both sides. However, they have to hide that distinctive sucking sound… Look at it from their point of view: if you’re a trillionaire, where do you find enough profit to turn the dial? Only from destroying massive nations like the United States, and goosing enormous nations like China, riding the capital flows.

    ““We have been brainwashed to believe anything other than the New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, or other puppets of the system, is pure hogwash. It is now the other way around.”

    One of the strangest things with the cult propaganda is I CAN quote only the NYT, WaPo, on e.g. Covid or Ukrainian corruption and Nazis, and it still won’t be believed. It’s “Authority”, appeal to Authority, but the Authority shifts everywhere, nowhere, as if directed remotely by an evil spirit.

    https://sinfest.xyz/btphp/comics/2022-09-02.jpg
    https://sinfest.xyz/btphp/comics/2022-09-04.jpg

    Back home, apples are possibly cooking on the tree. From the evidence, that may be the sun, not the general heat, tho hard to tell sometimes. I do wonder if you’re having the same season shift and hot sun in the southern hemisphere I can so easily see in the Northern. Was thinking of the dust mulch, which is both simple and effective. Many smart tools were invented to do this, and it is sad the tilling, esp rototilling super-oxygenates and therefore burn tilth so fast. No answer there yet, probably can’t be. But one reason it works is to cut off the wicking effect from moisture down deeper, which keeps seeds on the germination surface too dry.

    It’s hard to put so many pieces together. Suppose we had to, we could get men in the field to do it the old ways. But could we? I can’t ship the men in so easily without gas. There are no longer enough hoes, 50 at a pop. Even the tiny old tilling tractors exist but too few to make a difference. Everybody would also be slower and need to be fed. So again, we CAN do it, but the point of this is to not give us the time to create the social habits and infrastructure. Those things also need predictability, and one you can point to. No one’s going to stand in a 110f field for three months because it might work.

  2. Dr.D the apples around here seem to be dropping early and in large amounts. The weakening magnetic field may be playing a roll in our shifting weather patterns. As you know a lot of moving parts. It may be some of the reasons for beaching whale pods and crazy insect movements. I see a lot of bees and wasps/hornets doing some off colour things over the past few years. Mostly dying in otherwise perfect surroundings. As well as very irregular flight patterns that would seem to indicate poor navigation instruments, weak magnetic field? Moving field, multiple poles?
    This guy has some ideas about the poles:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wk2O9RUEBQ4

  3. I see no mention of taxing national or international companies on their revenues.

    “In defending her new tax, Freeland said that the government spent a lot of money during COVID and they have to get the funds somewhere. The real truth is, the Trudeau government has a spending problem, not a revenue problem.”

    Just add some zeros to the digital readout, there fixed for you. Governments don’t RAISE money, they take it or create it but never raise it.

    https://torontosun.com/opinion/columnists/lilley-trudeau-and-freeland-bring-in-luxury-tax-saying-the-rich-dont-pay-their-fair-share

  4. Home / Economy / A basket of bad ideas
    A basket of bad ideas
    3 days ago Economy 1,748 Views

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    The self-destruction of yesterday’s common sense
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    Fool, liar, or both?
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    Voiced by Amazon Polly
    I’ve often wondered whether the band on the Titanic really played-on bravely even as they approached their watery fate, or more likely that they were suffering from what psychologists refer to as denial. That is, faced with growing evidence of their own, imminent icy end, might they have unconsciously grasped at the belief that surely someone would arrive at the last minute to rescue them. I wonder too whether a similar psychological denial has affected the collective leadership of Western Europe as they face the biggest economic crisis since at least the 1890s.

    Certainly, the European – including the UK – technocracy has constructed its own mechanisms for filtering out any expert testimony which might challenge its view of how the world works and its beliefs about how it might be improved. Despite appearances to the contrary, Klaus Schwab and his western political minions are trapped in an even narrower echo chamber than the ones you and I get caught up in. This surely explains why more thought and preparation did not occur before the two years of economic vandalism of lockdown and the mortiferous decision to disconnect Europe’s main gas supply. They blithely assumed that gas – and energy more generally – is just another cheap input to production. In any case, they are not the ones who will have to shiver in the dark this winter. As Mary Harrington writes:

    https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2022/09/01/a-basket-of-bad-ideas/

  5. Minsky Moment

    refers to the onset of a market collapse brought on by the reckless speculative activity that defines an unsustainable bullish period.
    2. A Minsky moment is a sudden, major collapse of asset values which marks the end of the growth phase of a cycle in credit markets or business activity.
    3. A Minsky Moment is the point in time that precedes a complete market crash.
    4. Minsky Moment refers to an abrupt market collapse or bubble burst following a temporary long bullish trend.
    5. Minsky moment refers to a period of time when there is a sudden rise or major collapse of asset values as a result of increased debt.
    6. A “Minsky Moment” is the reversal of leverage following prolonged bullish speculation.
    7. Minsky moments are triggered by excessive financial leverage, and in the context of supply chains, leverage means excessive operating leverage: in Germany, $2 trillion of value added depends on $20 billion of gas from Russia… …that’s 100-times leverage – much more than Lehman’s.”
    8. A “Minsky Moment” is using printed worthless money to buy assets
    9. A “Minsky Moment” is when you realize “MONEY made your leaders lie to you”

    • Sweden, Austria Bail Out Energy Companies, Trigger Europe’s Minsky Moment (ZH)
    ——–
    Would you play Russian Roulette? Increased risk categorized as coagulation disorders,

    • 1st Peer-Reviewed Study on Pfizer, Moderna Vaccines Confirms ‘Excess Risk’ (BN)

    In the Moderna trial, the excess risk of serious AESIs 15.1 per 10,000 participants vs placebo group (6.4 per 10,000 participants)

    “In the Pfizer trial, the excess risk of serious AESIs (10.1 per 10,000) was higher than the risk reduction for COVID-19 hospitalization relative to the placebo group (2.3 per 10,000 participants),”

    “In July 2021, the FDA reported detecting four potential adverse events of interest: pulmonary embolism, acute myocardial infarction, immune thrombocytopenia, and disseminated intravascular coagulation following Pfizer’s vaccine based on medical claims data in older Americans.” the researchers add. “Three of these four serious adverse event types would be categorized as coagulation disorders, which is the Brighton AESI category that exhibited the largest excess risk in the vaccine group in both the Pfizer and Moderna trials. FDA stated it would further investigate the findings but at the time of our writing has not issued an update.”

    MONEY made them lie to you … despite the initial advertisements that the vaccines were “100% safe and effective,” prevented infection and transmission, and had no known serious side effects.
    ——-
    Would you play Russian Roulette? decrease death risk by 92%

    • Ivermectin Reduces Covid Death Risk By 92% (Blaze)
    The peer-reviewed study was published on Wednesday by the online medical journal Cureus. The study was conducted on a strictly controlled population of 88,012 people from the city of Itajaí in Brazil. Individuals who used ivermectin as prophylaxis or took the medication before being infected by COVID experienced significant reductions in death and hospitalization.
    “The hospitalization rate was reduced by 100% in regular users
    The regular users were older and had a higher prevalence of type 2 diabetes and hypertension than irregular and non-users. Irregular users of ivermectin had a 37% lower mortality rate reduction than non-users. The study defined regular users as those who used more than 30 tablets of ivermectin over five months.

    The dosage of ivermectin was determined by body weight, but “most of the population used between two and three tablets daily for two days, every 15 days.”

    https://www.cureus.com/articles/111851-regular-use-of-ivermectin-as-prophylaxis-for-covid-19-led-up-to-a-92-reduction-in-covid-19-mortality-rate-in-a-dose-response-manner-results-of-a-prospective-observational-study-of-a-strictly-controlled-population-of-88012-subjects?email_share=true&expedited_modal=true

    Regular Use of Ivermectin as Prophylaxis for COVID-19 Led Up to a 92% Reduction in COVID-19 Mortality Rate in a Dose-Response Manner: Results of a Prospective Observational Study of a Strictly Controlled Population of 88,012 Subjects
    Published: August 31, 2022

    MONEY made them lie to you

  6. Apples dropping is common way for trees to shed excess moisture needs. We have trees here in Aus -which is known to have the widest swings between drought and flood of any continent – that drop entire limbs and kill regularly. The apple trees are saying I want to live long and prosper and keep moisture in my cambium layer which is like the heart staying warm and sacrificing the hands which go blue.
    The dust mulch works incredibly well but stone mulch better. The stones condense moisture over night the dust doesn’t. The dust also is usually dark and evapotranspiration elevates. Our main use of dust or no-mulch is because our insects are woody decomposers as we are usually semi-arid ish – thought the last 2.5 years we are England – wet wet wet. If the pole shift occurs we will be subtropical – I dunno stranger things have happened – like Mass Formation!

    When it is really dry here – and we can get to 300 mm in a year with huge evap in summer we Mulch as much as is humanly possible with the trees with 1 drip toward the centre of the tree for the tap or dominant root to do most work in water. I will also ruthlessly prune to get the roots water harvesting potential to match the canopy and when there is nothing there you thin the canopy – there will be years like we are having when there is TOO much growth and inferior and poorly ripened fruit – well it was in summer.
    Hang in there you upside down mother truckers always facing downwards (North Hem)- we had a time 2013 to nearly 2015 when the kangaroos and other forest creatures were ripping poisonous bark of shrubs to eat and foxes were making their claws/paws bleed to dig through rock to eat bugs.

  7. oxy: “Apples dropping is common way for trees to shed excess moisture needs.”

    Makes sense. Tree drops fruit when stressed so it can live to procreate another season.

    “Hang in there you upside down mother truckers always facing downwards (North Hem)”

    What? WHAT?? Did you just call a bunch of us a derogatory name?? 😉 lol. Thanks for the chuckle.

  8. So Biden is condemning all “violence for political purposes.”

    Said in a country that was founded on a violent revolution for political purposes.

    Not that I’m “pro violence,” I prefer non-violent solutions, but I recognize that when politics become unsupportable, violence often happens.

    The deadly violence on J6 came from the Capitol police.

    Ballots are a way to avert violence…so maybe if the Dem party apparatus doesn’t want violence it should stop paying mules to stuff ballot boxes.

  9. The Great Reset via Eugyppius
    It looks like – from the snippets quoted — that Schwab’s sentences are as complex as Hannah Arendt’s. However, where Arendt’s sentences are flush with meaning and are often worth pausing for, so the meaning can be grasped and grokked, Schwab’s complex sentences are a smokescreen puffery — like the ploys of the wizard in the Emerald City.

  10. <>

    Yes, how? And yet…
    The choir that I enjoyed participating in for 4 years is meeting again. Indoors, masked. They take a 10 minute break and eat snacks on the patio in 95-100 degree heat. They perform masked, and all participants are required to be “up to date” on their Covid jabs. They believe that they are “liberal,” “progressive,” “inclusive,” and considerate of others’ health vulnerabilities. They are patting themselves on their backs for their moral superiority, for all of the inconveniences that they endure in order to live according to their “principles.” They are deluded. They are nuts.
    They are no different than the dead kool-aid drinkers, the villages that put “witches” to death, the folks during the Black Death who hunted and killed the pussycats who could have been busy devouring young rats.
    I continue to receive the emails from my former UU church & choir. I could easily unsubscribe…but it is important to be cognizant of what the local nut jobs are up to.

  11. Lovely, it lost my quote between the
    One aspect of dictatorships that citizens of democratic nations often find puzzling is how the population can be convinced to support such dystopian policies. How do they get people to run those concentration camps? How do they find people to take food from starving villagers? How can they get so many people to support policies that, to any outsider, are so needlessly destructive, cruel, and dumb?

    No edit button today

  12. @ RIM
    I prefer the buttons that auto-insert the HTML tags to entering them manually. Of course, if the buttons are permanently going away, I could just learn the HTML tags rather than having hazy familiarity with them…. The brain likes being lazy, and has to have crutches removed in order to learn…which I know only too well from teaching music.

  13. I must admit, this is the kind of thing I like reading about:

    ‘The CFO of Bed, Bath and Beyond, Gustavo Arnal, has been identified as a man who jumped to his death from the 60 story “Jenga Building” in Tribeca on Friday.

    The 52 year old executive fell from the 18th floor of 56 Leonard Street on Friday and was identified on Sunday morning by the New York Post. The Post notes he had just sold 42,513 shares of stock on August 16, netting a little over $1 million.

    In 2021, his total compensation was more than $2.9 million, which included $775,000 in salary. He joined the company in 2020 after stints working as chief financial officer for Avon and as an executive for Procter & Gamble, the report notes.

    Bed, Bath & Beyond has been on a roller coaster ride over the last month, which shares running up to as high as $28 per share just days ago on a “meme stock” rally. It then saw investor Ryan Cohen exit his position in the company, sending shares plunging.

    In the days following, the company announced plans to try and reduce costs and stave off bankruptcy, including a $500 million financing agreement in order to help pay its vendors. It released a statement about its strategic and business updates that will result in store closures and a reduction of its workforce. Its plan includes closing approximately 150 lower-producing banner stores and a reduction of 20% of its workforce.

    The company also filed to sell shares of its common stock. “We may offer, issue and sell shares of our common stock from time to time,” a form S-3 shelf filing read just days ago.

    But the measures didn’t convince the street. As we wrote on August 31, we spoke with at least one institutional trading desk specializing in consumer discretionary who said they’ve all but given up on Bed Bath & Beyond and left the ‘meme stock’ for the ‘apes.’

    Subsequently, both the company’s debt and equity were downgraded.

    Analysts from Raymond James called the plan “kicking the can down the road”, insinuating that it was just a matter of time before the struggling retailer faced bankruptcy. By the end of last week, the company’s stock had fallen back to single digits, closing with an $8 handle, down more than 65% from highs it set just days ago.’

    https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/bed-bath-beyond-cfo-leaps-death-tribeca-skyscraper

  14. With respect to growing fruit on trees, I was fortunate to be lent the best book ever on the topic.
    Unfortunately, I had to return the book, along with its companion about growing vegetables.

    I don’t know whether these books are still available retail in NATOstan countries. The author is Russian, of course –you know, that ‘backward’ nation in which ‘nobody knows anything, and the people are so demented they almost unanimously support an evil dictator’.

    https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25042816-growing-fruit-with-a-smile

    Kurdyumov insists that there should be no bare ground around trees.

    That weeds should be cut off, not dug out.

    That there must be masses of mulch.

    That apparently ruthless trimming results in better harvests.

    That an awful lot of knowledge acquired by German horticulturalists in the nineteenth century was ‘lost’ in the west but was embraced in the East.

  15. I have images in my mind the suicidal attacks made by lightly armed Japanese soldiers against Americans armed with heavy machine guns and tanks, and supported by ground-attack aircraft in 1943-1945 in the Pacific War.

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

  16. Yet to be confirmed: reports of Gernam-made Leopard tanks being blown up in the latest suicidal attacks made by the Ukrainian fascist fanatics and conscripted peasants.

    This is significant because Ukraine didn’t have any Leopard tanks, and they must have come from a NATOstan country.

    Also, not having any Leopard tanks suggests that the operators of them must have been from a NATOstan country. Poland?

    Much is yet to be confirmed with respect to the details.

    However, it is abundantly clear that the Ukrainians and their NATOstan sponsors have already lost, and it’s simply a matter of time until Russia liberates Odessa.

  17. It’s a doozy. About twenty times the size of Taiwan:

    ‘Meanwhile the regions from Hong Kong to Japan and South Korea are bracing for a super typhoon, Typhoon Hinnamnor. Most of China’s coastal regions will be affected too, including Shanghai. Hong Kong and Shanghai equity markets are likely to be closed today. This is a biggie with winds expected to gust up to nearly 300 kph and sustained winds over 200 kph.’

    https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/150290/typhoon-hinnamnor

  18. A super typhoon, Typhoon Hinnamnor, will destroy crops and increase the number of people not getting enough food.

  19. phoenix: “So Biden is condemning all “violence for political purposes.”

    Biden appears to have forgotten the urban environments that were vandalized and burnt to the tune of billions of dollars, many civilian lives lost, police killed and injured, going on for months in 2020 …

    Ok, on a different topic. I just watched a bit of the Trump rally yesterday in PA. First observation, Biden couldn’t have even walked the runway Trump walked unless he had handrails (have you noticed he never lets go of a handrail when exiting AF1?) Second, holy cow. What a juxtaposition between that and Biden’s speech two days before.

    I can’t be the only American who is mortified and embarrassed when thinking about Biden having a telephone conversation with another world “leader” (using that term loosely). In person meeting? [forehead slap …]

    Omg. Please make it stop.


  20. Mattias Desmet

    Am I an expert in Mass Formation or a Trojan Horse?

    https://mattiasdesmet.substack.com/p/am-i-an-expert-in-mass-formation

  21. The Ukrainian strategy seems now to be the following:

    Send in poorly trained peasants as cannon fodder until the Russians run out of bullets and are exhausted from killing and wounding them. And then send in the better-trained, better-armed soldiers to take the ground the Russians have decided to vacate.

    The Russians take a break, and then come back to annihilate the Ukrainians who have advanced eastwards.

    It’s kind of medieval.

    I guess it continues until the NATOstan countries have completely depleted their weapon and shell stocks.

  22. What happens in Californian towns when the local water supply fails?

    They truck in water.

    And what happens when the supplier for the water tankers says there is no more water for you?

    Almost all economic activity comes to a standstill.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MZFrJPPIQ8

  23. Yes, AFKTT, we understand. When there is no water, there is no anything. Including life. Got it. 🙂

    Observation RE: john fetterman campaign (senate candidate) who said he isn’t ready for a debate because he’s recovering from a stroke. Seriously? If you aren’t capable of doing the job, you aren’t capable of doing the job. Full stop.

    When is the last time you told your employer you couldn’t do your job and your employer said, “Hey, no problem, let us know when you’re able! In between, we’ll carry your ass.”

    • Factoid:

      https://journal-neo.org/2022/09/04/us-dependence-on-russian-uranium-and-sanctions-policy/

      “However, unlike Russia, the US does not produce or process uranium, nor does it have uranium reserves, which the US has thought about creating, but has never done so. Even at its peak back in 1980, the US was only able to produce 40% of nuclear rods required for its nuclear power industry. As a result, Russia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan provide about 50% of the uranium for the US industry, with Russia accounting for about 20% of US uranium needs. In 2021, the US imported $670 million worth of enriched uranium and radioactive isotopes from Russia.”

  24. “One In Six Italians Faces Energy Poverty (RT)”

    Yeah, we wondered what was happening in Italia.
    But note also, this morning’s headline in Bloomberg:

    “Meloni says she’ll keep Italy on Draghi’s course on Russia, debt”

    A little-known Italian politican ahead in polls “wanting to maintain course set by Draghi”
    New WEF puppet being rolled out.
    So much for having seen the last of Draghi.

    Indeed, more protests are urgently needed!

    BTW lovely Odilon Redon today.

  25. Serious question for RIM and others living in/close to the pulse in Europe: how can any average person afford a utility bill that is several times higher than normal?

    I know winter is worse here in the northeast of the US, but I couldn’t afford to have my utility bill double (am I misunderstanding the Europe increase? I get the feeling it’s actually worse than double?) …. and I don’t live paycheck-to-paycheck, but double would be tough.

    I find all this unbelievable. How can an average person afford that??

    • ‘How can an average person afford that??’

      They can’t.

      My daughter [in England] told ne was in tears when she saw the latest energy bill. And winter hasn’t even started.

      Now it’s a choice between paying for heat or paying for bus fares or food.

      She did note that the house she rents now is better insulated that the one she rented before.

      Some other poor bugger is in that poorly insulated house, not far from the border with Scotland, where the sun rises around 10 am and sets around 2 pm in midwinter.

      Solar heating and power: deliver the best results when you least need them, and deliver the worst results when you need them most.

      So it goes….as Kurt Vonnegut used to say.

  26. The dialogue between myself and hospital staff prior to having cataract surgery.
    “Have you been vaccinated for Covid ?”
    Reply
    ” No-one has been vaccinated for Covid , the vaccines are non sterilising , so they are not vaccines they are at best only therapeutic.”
    Puzzled looks from staff.
    ” Are you taking any medications.? ”
    “I took horse dewormer last night.”
    Staff look at each other like they did not hear that right.
    ” Do you have worms.?”
    “No , it’s Ivermectin , I take it periodically as a prophylaxis for Covid , I have never had Covid so it seems to be working.”
    Staff have totally blank looks , have absolutely no idea what I am talking about , ask no further questions.

  27. AFKTT: “‘How can an average person afford that?? They can’t.”

    Thank you for responding. I am sorry your daughter is going through that. My current housing is energy efficient so I’m lucky. Even then, double or triple current bills and the conversation gets a bit tougher.

    So … if my current bill were, say, US $150 per month … how much would it increase this winter if I were in the, um, er … demented European countries?

  28. This video highlights the insanity of building yet more houses that people cannot afford in a desert.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyIQKUuUyK4

    To the east of the village I live in, there is a similar phenomenon. But there the $700,000 houses are being constructed on poorly contoured land that resembles paddy fields at the moment.

    All the roads and kerbs, and so-called drains have been constructed. So it will always look like paddy fields whenever there is significant rain.

    All this insanity is proceeding when interest rates rising and house prices falling.

    Hmm?

  29. @upstateNYer

    If trapped in the predicament of having to live in a seriously cold place where the cash cost of living-space-heating was more than I could possibly afford there THREE ways to make it definitely livable, and almost comfortable. It’s best to do all three. I’m assuming access to adequate nutrition, but even with short rations these three things will help, and even starvation is better if one can do it while thermally comfortable.

    First and foremost is clothing. If properly fed one’s body generates all the heat it needs, the trick is to hold onto that heat and not lose it to the environment. Luckily for everyone, and with a minimum of research, it’s relatively easy in these modern times to achieve comfortable body temperature in ambient temperatures hovering around 32 F / (0 C). You can even be stylish if you’re got good and creative aesthetic skills.

    Think layers. Three layers indoors and 4 layers outdoors. Silk or rayon long-johns that are close fitting (not thick, baggy or saggy) as layer one, and woolen everything for layer number two. All woolens are not equal, and the best soft high insulate value are pricey (on the up side they last almost forever). There are good synthetics, but nothing matches or beats soft natural wool. Cotton is practically useless, sometimes worse than useless, because it acts like an evaporative cooler when damp or wet (which it will always be due to the vapor from your skin and condensation from the air where cold outside air contacts the warm air that’s trapped in one’s clothing.

    Modern dress tends to be tight at the ankles , waist, and neckline, but to best use and retain body heat requires as-loose-as-possible fit in all of those locations. Loose boots not tight shoes, and the boot tops should vent up into trousers, and the trousers go over the boot tops, not tucked into them. Boots, by the way, should be as close to Eskimo style mukluks as one can find. Three layers of socks. Thin and smooth inners, medium thick middles, and heavy wool outers. The thin inners should wick moisture away from the skin. Heat from your lower limbs must be able to freely rise and circulate, so layer number two should also be loose at the waist so that warmth from the legs can reach the torso.

    The torso is the crucial zone, and one’s body automatically protects it increased allocation of warm blood circulation, so utilize that fact by allowing the warm torso to warm the neck and head. This is accomplished by loose neckline and a hood, with a scarf or turtleneck sweater to keep the chin warm and stop air loss through the front of the hood under the chin.

    The greatest heat loss per square inch is from the top of one’s head, so either wear a stylish hat or keep the hood raised or both.

    Heavy mass is the enemy of insulation. Trapped air is it’s friend. The warmest coats are often the lightest weight, and my favorite is eider down (pricey) but there are good synthetics as well, and all of the stuff I’ve listed can be obtained in good looking light weight versions just as easily as heavy utilitarian versions, although lighter fashion usually comes with a heavier price. Layer 4, when going out-of-doors (or even indoors if necessary . . . why not) is a thigh-length fur-rimmed hooded parka coat. There are many to choose from. The good ones cost a small fortune. . . but still a lot cheaper than the average UK heating bill.

    Moving on to step # 2, I’ve mentioned in other post that the Eskimo have a saying that “Food is sleep.” The reverse is also true. Sleep, deep restorative rest that allows the body to repair and prepare (both physically and mentally) is crucial to staying warm. The single most important item to have in harsh cold conditions is the best sleeping bag that you can manage to afford. Do some research and get the best eider down sleeping bag that you can.

    And lastly comes item #3, the cozy nest. The smaller the room the easier (and cheaper) it is to heat. Even a clothes closet feels like the Luxury Suite when it is warm and cozy inside and colder than banker’s heart on the outside. Close off a small room. Insulate the s**t out of it, and hole up there when you need to bring your core temperature up to normal. Or just to hide from the cold cruel world for an hour’s respite.

    Hope this helps.

  30. Just catching up, and now it’s bedtime…
    Working on the subfloor, flattening the high spots with a belt-sander.
    Sore and stiff in odd places.
    Looking forward to first winter in this very well designed, built and insulated structure.

  31. Wise words from DBS who masterfully covers dressing for cold weather and no disagreement on DBS’s write up. Just some comments if you will. Effective cold weather clothing is not cheap. Cotton and cotton blends are your enemy. If you are working outside keep your lunch rations small and change your socks before going back out. In my case wicking compression socks have been extremely beneficial for warm toes. My heirs are in line for 50 pairs of used mostly matched wool socks,

  32. https://interx.com/how-to-keep-your-hands-warm-with-raynauds-disease/#:~:text=By%20covering%20the%20arteries%20in%20your%20wrists%2C%20you,that%20extended%20past%20the%20start%20of%20your%20wrist.

    Cover your wrists. By covering the arteries in your wrists, you can keep your hands warmer. There are a few options on how to keep them covered – but it all comes down to personal preference! You could try a soft wrist brand, shirts with thumb holes that cover the tops of your hands, arm warmers, or mittens that extended past the start of your wrist. As long as your wrists are covered, you can preserve the warmth.

    Those with Raynaud’s have a greater struggle as the cold causes the blood vessels in their fingers to constrict. This results in the fingers turning white or blue and causes a prickly painful sensation in the affected areas.

  33. By the way, it is not just Europe that is witnessing the phenomenon of people being unable to afford electricity and food.

    It’s happening in ‘the lucky country’ (Oz)

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtZn1yAhIHg

    Meanwhile, in ‘Godzone’ (NZ), a substantial sector of the populace -especially Polynesians living in rented accommodation in Auckland- has been below the poverty line for decades.

    The answer to the unaffordable accommodation crisis in Auckland is for two or three families to occupy one house. If there is no room in the house, or even that is too expensive, people live in galvanised steel garages and the like.

    And then the government ‘wonders why’ there is an epidemic of communicable diseases and ‘wonders’ why the hospital system is stretched to the limit and overrun with people who cannot afford to go to a doctor.

    It’s been quite a downhill slide since the saboteurs infiltrated the Labour party in the early 1980s and morphed it into a ‘soft’ fascist party. LINO: Labour In Name Only

    Under Adern, the ‘soft’ fascism has been morphed into ‘hard’ fascism, with vicious assaults on all kinds of accepted rights and theoretical constitutional rights.

    There are many who say that the last election was rigged, and that the ‘Smiling Assassin Mark II (John Key being the Smiling Assassin Mark I) never got anything like the number of votes that were announced.

    Where have we heard that story before?

  34. Hand in hand with the surge in poverty comes the burgeoning crime wave, whereby people who cannot get what they want take to stealing it.

    Car or other vehicle ram raids have become increasingly popular in 2022, along with hold-ups of small businesses and break ins.

    Predictably, the bought-and-paid-for politicians try to outdo one another as to who is going to “Get tough on crime!”

    All this talk about ‘getting tough on crime’ is ridiculous, of course, since the biggest criminals in the land meet regularly at parliament to play their parts in the steal-what-you-can-while-you-can Punch and Judy show.

  35. This really is quite good. Watch if you can:

    UNREST BEGINS – Massive EU Protests Spiral Out Of Ukraine Crisis

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eu56LFRLQl8

  36. A test

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