Jan 202022
 


Johannes Vermeer Woman holding a balance 1662-63

 

WHO: Lift International Traffic Bans, Proof Of Vaccination Not Needed (G.)
England Ends All COVID Passports, Mask Mandates, Work Restrictions (ET)
Starbucks Says Will No Longer Require Vaccine Or Testing For Employees (JTN)
Health Department Warning Over Vaccine Mandate For NHS Staff In England (G.)
Perspectives on the Pandemic With Dr. Peter McCullough (Mercola)
Proximal Origin (ET)
The Vaccinators Will Never Stop Vaccinating (eugyp)
Novak Djokovic Holds 80% Of Danish Biotech Developing Covid Treatment (MC)
The Correcting Decades Old Medical Fraud Act (Denninger)
Paul Krugman Is Still Wrong About Money (Steve Keen)
How Did Fox News Become The Voice Of Reason? (RT)
Senate Democrats Fail To Change Filibuster, Handing Biden Stinging Defeat (JTN)
Biden Asked Why Americans Think He’s Not ‘Mentally Fit’ (RT)
Schumer Holds Antitrust Bills As His Daughters Work for Facebook, Amazon (NB)
Why I Am No Longer A Tenured Professor at Uni of Toronto (Jordan Peterson)

 

 

 

 

Schwab
https://twitter.com/i/status/1483418602300661760

 

 

The more vaxx, the more infections.

 

 

180º. Do we get apologies?

WHO: Lift International Traffic Bans, Proof Of Vaccination Not Needed (G.)

The World Health Organization has recommended lifting or easing international traffic bans, citing the ineffectiveness of the measures to suppress the spread of the Omicron variant. The UN health agency recently updated its international health regulations recommendations during an emergency committee meeting on Wednesday. Recommendations included to “lift or ease international traffic bans as they do not provide added value and continue to contribute to the economic and social stress” of some countries. Implementing blanket travel bans are “not effective in suppressing international spread” and “may discourage transparent and rapid reporting of emerging variants of concerns” the agency said in a statement.

The failure of travel restrictions introduced after the detection and reporting of Omicron variant to limit international spread of Omicron demonstrates the ineffectiveness of such measures over time. Travel measures such as masking, testing, isolation/quarantine and vaccination should be based on risk assessments and avoid placing the financial burden on international travellers, according to their recommendations. The WHO also said the requirement to provide proof of vaccination against Covid-19 for international travel may not be needed as “the only pathway or condition” permitting international travel.

Do not require proof of vaccination against Covid-19 for international travel as the only pathway or condition permitting international travel given limited global access and inequitable distribution of Covid-19 vaccines. State parties should consider a risk-based approach to the facilitation of international travel by lifting or modifying measures, such as testing and/or quarantine requirements, when appropriate, in accordance with the WHO guidance.”

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The fun is in the details: no more mask in one week’s time. But you can still be fined for not wearing one till then.

England Ends All COVID Passports, Mask Mandates, Work Restrictions (ET)

Restrictions including COVID-19 passes, mask mandates, and work-from-home guidance will be removed in England, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced on Wednesday. Johnson also suggested that self-isolation rules may also be thrown out at the end of March as the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus pandemic becomes endemic. Effective immediately, the UK government is no longer asking people to work from home. The COVID pass mandate for nightclubs and large events won’t be renewed when it expires on Jan. 26. Also from Jan. 27, indoor mask-wearing will no longer be compulsory anywhere in England. The requirement for secondary school pupils to wear masks during class and in communal areas will be lifted on Jan. 20.


The Department for Education is expected to update its national guidance soon. Health Secretary Sajid Jajid will also announce plans to ease restrictions on care home visits in the coming days. Roaring cheers from lawmakers could be heard in the House of Commons following Johnson’s announcements on masks. People who test positive for COVID-19 and their unvaccinated contacts are still required to self-isolate, but Johnson said he “very much expect[s] not to renew” the rule when the relevant regulations expire on March 24. “As COVID becomes endemic, we will need to replace legal requirements with advice and guidance, urging people with the virus to be careful and considerate of others,” the prime minister said.

UK face masks

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220,000 U.S. employees. Many companies must follow.

Starbucks Says Will No Longer Require Vaccine Or Testing For Employees (JTN)

Starbucks has opted to do away with its COVID-19 vaccine requirement following a decision last week by the Supreme Court that blocked the Biden administration’s attempt to mandate vaccine requirements for large U.S. companies. “We respect the court’s ruling and will comply,” John Culver, chief operating officer for the major coffee shop chain, said Tuesday. The company will continue to encourage employees to get vaccinated, but the shots will not be a requisite of employment.


The “vaccine is the best option we have, by far, when it comes to staying safe and slowing the spread of COVID-19,” Culver also said, in a memo. Prior to the court’s decision, Starbuck’s announced it would be enforcing a vaccine-or-test model for the company’s 220,000 U.S. employees. Last week, the high court, in a 6-3 decision, blocked the Biden administration’s mandate for large employers from taking effect while other legal challenges to the mandate play out in lower courts.

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They basically came out and said: the vaccines don’t work: “32% effectiveness against Omicron infection, which wanes to in effective zero 20 weeks later..

But dismissal letters are ready to get sent in 2 weeks.

Health Department Warning Over Vaccine Mandate For NHS Staff In England (G.)

Ministers have been issued with a stark warning over mandatory Covid vaccines for NHS workers in England, with a leaked document saying growing evidence on the Omicron variant casts doubts over the new law’s “rationality” and “proportionality”. Two jabs will become compulsory for frontline NHS staff from 1 April after MPs voted on the legislation last month. But the document, drawn up by Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) officials and seen by the Guardian, said the evidence base on which MPs voted “has changed”, creating a higher chance of objections and judicial review. The effectiveness of only two vaccine doses against Omicron, and the lower likelihood of hospitalisations from the milder variant, are cited. More than 70,000 NHS staff – 4.9% – could remain unvaccinated by 1 April, the document says. NHS trusts in England are preparing to start sending dismissal letters from 3 February to any member of staff who has not had their first dose by then.


[..] The document prepared by DHSC officials noted that two vaccine doses provide up to 32% effectiveness against Omicron infection, which wanes to in effective zero 20 weeks later. At the time the policy was developed, two-dose effectiveness against infection with the Delta variant was substantially higher – 65% with Oxford/AstraZeneca and 80% with Pfizer/BioNTech, the DHSC memo said. Booster jabs have since been shown to be highly effective but are not part of the law for NHS workers. The document says: “While Omicron is more transmissible there appears to be a substantially lower risk of hospitalisation and mortality for those vaccinated vs Delta. “The low VE [vaccine effectiveness] against infection (and consequently effect on transmission) plus the lower risk posed by Omicron brings into question both the rationality of the VCOD2 policy and its proportionality and makes the case for vaccination requirement weaker than when [ministers] decided on the policy.

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“..It’s the scariest time to be an American, and thank goodness half of Americans didn’t take it.”

Perspectives on the Pandemic With Dr. Peter McCullough (Mercola)

McCullough believes many health care providers and the U.S. public are in a vaccination trance. It defies logic and commonsense how public officials and hospital executives can see the vaccines failing to work, can see the rising cases of adverse effects and deaths, and yet increasingly issue vaccine mandates or recommend the vaccine to groups for which it clearly shouldn’t be, like pregnant women. McCullough likens it to a form of psychosis or a group neurosis. The U.S. public, however, has seen so much fear, hospitalization and death during the pandemic that they may have been prepared to accept casualties associated with the vaccines. Still, a sizable number of Americans aren’t being fooled. “We’re at this pressure point, and I think right now, in talking to American people in my circles, they’re ready to take a time out,” McCullough said.

If it means taking a sabbatical from work or delaying school for a year, many Americans are willing to do it to avoid getting vaccinated. “The only way to stay healthy right now is to stay away from this vaccine. If you get COVID-19, get to one of these treatment networks and get immunity on the other side.” McCullough is a proponent of early treatment of COVID-19 and believes treatment options have been suppressed to allow for mass vaccination: “I think we’ve completely suppressed any form of treatment or help to people in order to promote the vaccine. Now the vaccine doesn’t work completely and it’s, frankly, dangerous. We’re down to almost one message: Take the jab or else … It’s the scariest time to be an American, and thank goodness half of Americans didn’t take it.

We’re going to have to see what this is going to look like. I think the next month or so is going to be incredibly interesting and it’s going to be ominous.” McCullough believes that eventually people will break out of the jab trance and realize that the answer isn’t these injections, while the handling of the pandemic, including mass jabs, will become a course in violation of human ethics and the Nuremberg code. With fear, isolation, hospitalizations and deaths still occurring, however, it may take years before the fog is lifted.

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In the thesaurus under “corruption”.

Proximal Origin (ET)

Four prominent scientists who played key roles in shaping the public narrative around the origin of COVID-19 received substantial increases in grant money from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci, in the subsequent two years, a review of funding data by The Epoch Times has found. Three of these scientists—Kristian Andersen, Robert Garry, and Michael Farzan—were advisers to a teleconference organized by Fauci held on Feb. 1, 2020, in response to increasing public questions about the origin of the virus. The scientists were also instrumental in the publication of Proximal Origin, a highly influential paper that promoted a natural origins theory for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, and has been frequently cited by the government and media.

Emails released under Freedom of Information Act requests, showed that the scientists had told the senior members of Fauci’s teleconference that they were 60 to 80 percent sure that COVID-19 had come out of a lab. Notably, despite their private concerns about the origin of the virus, the first draft of Proximal Origin was completed on the same day as the teleconference. Andersen and Garry were co-authors of Proximal Origin and Farzan was acknowledged in the Nature version of Proximal Origin for his participatory discussions in the article’s creation. Additionally, Fauci’s NIAID provided a substantial increase in funding to EcoHealth’s Peter Daszak, through whom NIAID had funded controversial gain-of-function coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.

Some of these funding amounts have continued through 2021—and one of the newest grants will continue through at least 2025. A significant portion of the funding increase for Daszak, as well as for Andersen and Garry, was provided through NIAID’s creation of the Centers for Research in Emerging Infectious Diseases (CREID). The program, which was originally referred to as Emerging Infectious Diseases Research Centers (EIDRCs) during the early planning stages in 2019, was formally announced under a new name on Aug. 27, 2020. It is not known why the program was initially delayed or why it was renamed.

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“..we now face a prolonged, multi-year struggle to retain control of our bodies and our bloodstreams..”

The Vaccinators Will Never Stop Vaccinating (eugyp)

The vaccinators are deranged lunatics, and whatever happens with Corona, we now face a prolonged, multi-year struggle to retain control of our bodies and our bloodstreams. This is what I get from COVID-19: What’s Next?, a World Economic Forum panel discussion featuring Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel. Like everything produced by the WEF, it’s stultifying, boring and terrifying all at the same time. Below the fold, I’ve transcribed the key moments for you, but the takeaways are simple enough:

—Moderna, just one of multiple pharmaceuticals eager to exploit our new vaccine mania, are expanding their manufacturing capacity to produce as many as 6 billion mRNA vaccine doses per year. —Moderna will have an Omicron-specific vaccine as early as March, and they won’t be the only ones. The compliant triple jabbed can look forward to having their fully vaccinated status revoked once again. —Moderna are working in close collaboration with “Dr. Fauci’s team” and with public health experts to develop an annual combined mRNA flu, RSV and Corona vaccine to reduce “compliance issues.” —The industry more broadly has targeted about 20 pathogens for vaccine development, from Zika to Nipah, with a view towards being able to rapidly deploy mRNA vaccines against future virus threats.

The vaccinators are a great sword of Damocles over our heads. As I type this, they are scouring the earth for the novel pathogens their products require, and they, together with their bureaucratic and academic allies, will do their level best to call into being new pandemic scares and vaccination campaigns whenever possible – perhaps every flu season.

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“The company is developing a peptide, which inhibits the coronavirus from infecting the human cell..”

Novak Djokovic Holds 80% Of Danish Biotech Developing Covid Treatment (MC)

Tennis champion Novak Djokovic has an 80% stake of Danish biotech firm QuantBioRes, which is aiming to develop a medical treatment to counter COVID-19, the company’s chief executive told Reuters on Wednesday. CEO Ivan Loncarevic, who described himself as an entrepreneur, said the investment was made in June 2020 but declined to say how much it was. QuantBioRes has around 11 researchers working in Denmark, Australia and Slovenia, according to Loncarevic, who stressed they were working on a treatment, not a vaccine. The company is developing a peptide, which inhibits the coronavirus from infecting the human cell, expects to launch clinical trials in Britain this summer, he added.

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All forgotten in the space of less than a year.

The Correcting Decades Old Medical Fraud Act (Denninger)

II. Definitions As used in this Title the following terms are defined:
• Sterilizing immunity – The induction of immune response in an individual by either infection or immunization, that both prevents the acquisition of the infection and its forward transmission.
• Durable – In a person of less than 15 years of age protection must be maintained at the specified level for at least five (5) years from the completion of the prescribed original sequence and for a person of 15 years of age or older protection at the specified level must be maintained for least ten (10) years from the completion of the original sequence. Boosters may be required to maintain protection beyond these time limits.

******* – As defined in 25 US Code Sec 4132 (2), a preparation given to a human being for the purpose of, and which does by scientific evidence, produce durable sterilizing immunity in no less than 90% of healthy human subjects.
• Prophylaxis – A preparation given to a human being for the purpose of, and which does by scientific evidence, attenuate or treat the symptoms of a disease should it be contracted, and which is given prior to exposure to the disease-causing agent. Scientific evidence of prevention of the infection or prevention of forward transmission is not required.

III. Prohibitions
1. It shall be unlawful for any medical practitioner in the United States, any public health authority, manufacturer, distributor, retailer or person otherwise providing a substance intended for use in a human being to represent that said substance is a ******* unless that substance has been shown, by scientific evidence, to produce sterilizing immunity when the prescribed sequence is completed for not less than five (5) years in a person under the age of fifteen (15) and for ten (10) years in a person 15 years of age or older.

2. It is the public policy of the United States to strongly discourage the combining of prophylaxis and ******* preparations into one unit dose. In order to discourage this practice a combined preparation that contains both one or more legally-defined *******s and prophylaxis as one unit dose must be labeled as, and treated for the purpose of this title, as a prophylaxis for the purposes of this title and in all matters related to public health.

3. No public health authority, school, business, medical establishment or other entity, public or private, including but not limited to CMS, State Agencies, border and customs agents, health service firms and others, without exception, may require that a person produce evidence of or accept a prophylaxis to condition any right or privilege, including but not limited to employment, transportation, education, lodging or entry into any place or facility within the boundaries of the United States and its territories. All such existing statutes, regulations and private claimed rights of action are void as of the date of enactment of this Title and of no force or effect.

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Isn’t this clear yet? Steve explains again.

Paul Krugman Is Still Wrong About Money (Steve Keen)

When a writer starts a new column, his first battle is to justify why people should read it. Paul Krugman has just made that task much easier for me, by publishing a column on money that, to use his favorite phrase, is “all wrong.” The crucial point at which Krugman gets it “all wrong” —yes, a Nobel Prize winner in Economics is wrong about money—is his assumption that, when they lend, banks lend out reserves: Since the 2008 financial crisis, however, banks have been voluntarily holding vast excess reserves, apparently because they don’t see enough good lending opportunities. If you’ve studied economics, you might think there’s nothing wrong with that statement, because that’s what the textbooks tell you: banks take in deposits from some customers, and then lend out the reserves these deposits create to other customers.


But in 2014, the Bank of England said that the textbooks were wrong: rather than banks lending out deposits that are placed with them, the act of lending creates deposits—the reverse of the sequence typically described in textbooks. Krugman read this paper, and expressed only confusion about it: he began his column with “OK, color me puzzled,” and the post got more puzzling from there. This week’s column, 8 years later, shows that he’s simply ignored what he didn’t understand—and he’s not alone. Virtually all mainstream economists still get this wrong, and textbooks continue to teach a story that the Bank of England said is false. This is a crucial mistake, and it’s why economists are so often wrong about the economy—including their failure to see the 2008 financial crisis coming. So, let’s get it right.

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The neocons have moved to where they think they can do most damage.

How Did Fox News Become The Voice Of Reason? (RT)

Imagine traveling back in time 20 years and explaining the current US geopolitical predicament to someone in 2002. They’d easily believe the country’s leadership is barreling headlong into a war it can’t win for reasons it hasn’t adequately explained. But the American of 2002, if you could pry him away from ‘CSI: Miami,’ would find it shocking to flip on the news networks and find the sole anti-war message at prime time coming from Fox News, and the loudest pro-war shrieking coming from the liberal CNN and MSNBC. As the Biden administration seriously entertains the prospect of war with Russia over Ukraine (the latest bright idea from the White House is to funnel arms to Ukrainian paramilitaries, Syria style), that’s exactly what’s happening. Fox News host Tucker Carlson opined at length on Tuesday night against going to war over Ukraine, arguing that such a conflict would be “incredibly destructive.”

Carlson’s guest, analyst Clint Ehrlich, expounded on this, stating that bringing Ukraine into NATO – the plan that triggered the current descent toward war – would not serve US strategic interests, or those of NATO itself. “It’s not just nuts. It’s dangerous. We’re sleepwalking toward a conflict with a country that has more than 4,000 nuclear weapons,” Ehrlich told Carlson. “It’s just shocking that people are not more upset by this.” Once considered a sewer pipe of neoconservative jingoism, Fox News is now anti-war – or at least its top-rated host is. On the liberal networks, things are different. MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough – a man who once accused “the Russians” of killing Jeffrey Epstein – practically pounded his fists into the news desk earlier this month, demanding that President Joe Biden “move aggressively” against Russia.

“We’ve got to be aggressive in our defense of our allies. And Ukraine, despite what you hear from Putin propagandists … we have to defend our democratic allies,” he said. In print media, rehabilitated warmonger John Bolton is in the Washington Post calling on the US to send troops to Ukraine “and possibly Georgia and others,” Jonah Goldberg is arguing in the LA Times that even meeting with Vladimir Putin is “a concession” to Moscow that the US should avoid, and The Guardian – the favored read of soy-eating peaceniks – is publishing rosy profiles of the brave Ukrainian civilians “ready to resist” a Russian advance because they “don’t like dictators.” Even the relatively centrist Wall Street Journal ran a column this week arguing for the formation of “an American and coalition force to defend Ukraine,” presumably forgetting that such almighty international coalitions were humiliated by shoeless goat-herders in Afghanistan and Iraq, never mind in mechanized combat against a rival superpower.

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Why let it come to a vote if this is obvious?

Senate Democrats Fail To Change Filibuster, Handing Biden Stinging Defeat (JTN)

Senate Democrats failed twice on Wednesday night to pass their signature legislation to nationalize elections, handing President Joe Biden a stinging defeat that was delivered in part by two centrists in his own party. The second vote came late Wednesday night when the Senate refused to change the filibuster rules in a 52-48 vote. Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin (W.V.) and Krysten Sinema (Ariz.) voted with Republicans to keep the filibuster rules, rejecting their party’s bid to end the 60-vote threshold for passing legislation in the chamber. A few hours earlier, Senate Republicans, joined by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), voted against moving forward with the Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act,


The motion to failed in the Senate by 51-49. Schumer joined Republicans “in order to enter a motion to reconsider the vote,” according to the Senate Press Gallery. Minutes before the Senate voted Schumer threatened that “if the GOP blocks this vote—we must change the rules of the Senate to pass these bills.” The bill, which was expected to fail, required 60 votes to move forward and overcome the Republican filibuster. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) complained about the legislation on Twitter. “Dems hv spent afternoon claiming 2 want to debate voting bill, claiming Rs don’t want to then they voted 4 motion 2 CUT OFF debate & amendments same day Senate took up bill w all amendments blocked by Sen Schumer,” he tweeted shortly after the vote.

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Bit of a cheap shot, perhaps, but his numbers set off major alarm bells.

Biden Asked Why Americans Think He’s Not ‘Mentally Fit’ (RT)

US President Joe Biden said he has “no idea” why a growing number of voters see him as mentally unfit, after a new survey found a large proportion of respondents are in doubt of his intellectual capacity. The president was asked about his faculties during a Wednesday news conference, with Newsmax reporter James Rosen fielding a carefully worded question about a poll conducted over the weekend. “I’d like to raise a delicate subject, but with utmost respect for your life accomplishments and the high office you hold,” Rosen said. “A poll released this morning by Politico-Morning Consult found 49 percent of registered voters disagreeing with the statement ‘Joe Biden is mentally fit.’” The journalist added that “not even a majority of Democrats who responded strongly affirmed that statement,” to which Biden replied “I’ll let you all make the judgment whether they’re correct.”


Rosen continued to press, however, asking why “such large segments of the American electorate have come to harbor such profound concerns about your cognitive fitness.” Biden responded curtly: “I have no idea.” “I don’t believe the polls,” Biden said in response to another question about moderate and independent voters increasingly dissatisfied with his job performance. Republican women questioned Biden’s mental state more than any other demographic in the poll, with a combined 87% saying they “strongly” or “somewhat” disagree with the statement that he is fit. Democratic men, meanwhile, were among the least critical. Some 49% of registered voters also said the president is not “stable,” with another 43% stating that he is and the rest declining to answer.

Biden Ukraine

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“..Facebook and Twitter gave over 90 percent of their political contributions to Democrats for the 2020 election cycle..”

Schumer Holds Antitrust Bills As His Daughters Work for Facebook, Amazon (NB)

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer decides what bills come up for a Senate vote. But with Schumer’s daughters employed by Facebook and Amazon, antitrust legislation may go the way of President Joe Biden’s popularity: down into oblivion. As majority leader of the U.S. Senate, Schumer (D-NY) controls the vote timing and selection of legislation that moves through the chamber, according to the New York Post. The Senate Judiciary Committee is reviewing Big Tech legislation that would prevent platforms from favoring their own products over competitors’, and that legislation may come up for a vote soon. Schumer reportedly has not said where he stands on the legislation. Might that stem from the fact that his two daughters work for Big Tech companies? Jessica Schumer is a registered lobbyist for e-commerce giant Amazon, per New York state records. Alison Schumer works for Facebook as a product marketing manager, the New York Post wrote.

The two sisters’ employment, it would seem, poses a potential conflict of interest for Schumer around antitrust legislation. “When they are on opposite sides of the divide it can make the public servant member of the family too sympathetic to the company that employs their child or family member,” Jeff Hauser of Revolving Door Project, which studies money in politics, reportedly told the New York Post. Schumer is not the only lawmaker with a potential tech-related conflict of interest. “When you put together the amount of money Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi made off tech with the fact that leader Schumer’s two kids work for giant tech companies, Democrats are going to have a very hard time explaining if major legislation doesn’t move forward this session,” a “progressive operative” reportedly told the New York Post.

The publication also has reported that the daughter of Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), “one of the most vocal opponents of antitrust bills,” works for Google’s legal team. Big Tech employees have proven before how leftist they are. Facebook employees orchestrated a movement demanding Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg censor then-President Donald Trump in 2020, for instance. Open Secrets records revealed that for “all federal candidates,” by October 2020, both Facebook and Twitter gave over 90 percent of their political contributions to Democrats for the 2020 election cycle, particularly to then-presidential candidate Joe Biden. Hundreds of Amazon employees demanded the platform stop selling a book that challenged the woke left’s narratives on gender identity in July 2021.

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The world is a different place.

Why I Am No Longer A Tenured Professor at Uni of Toronto (Jordan Peterson)

First, my qualified and supremely trained heterosexual white male graduate students (and I’ve had many others, by the way) face a negligible chance of being offered university research positions, despite stellar scientific dossiers. This is partly because of Diversity, Inclusivity and Equity mandates (my preferred acronym: DIE). These have been imposed universally in academia, despite the fact that university hiring committees had already done everything reasonable for all the years of my career, and then some, to ensure that no qualified “minority” candidates were ever overlooked. My students are also partly unacceptable precisely because they are my students. I am academic persona non grata, because of my unacceptable philosophical positions. And this isn’t just some inconvenience. These facts rendered my job morally untenable. How can I accept prospective researchers and train them in good conscience knowing their employment prospects to be minimal?

Second reason: This is one of many issues of appalling ideology currently demolishing the universities and, downstream, the general culture. Not least because there simply is not enough qualified BIPOC people in the pipeline to meet diversity targets quickly enough (BIPOC: black, indigenous and people of colour, for those of you not in the knowing woke). This has been common knowledge among any remotely truthful academic who has served on a hiring committee for the last three decades. This means we’re out to produce a generation of researchers utterly unqualified for the job. And we’ve seen what that means already in the horrible grievance studies “disciplines”. That, combined with the death of objective testing, has compromised the universities so badly that it can hardly be overstated. And what happens in the universities eventually colours everything. As we have discovered.

All my craven colleagues must craft DIE statements to obtain a research grant. They all lie (excepting the minority of true believers) and they teach their students to do the same. And they do it constantly, with various rationalizations and justifications, further corrupting what is already a stunningly corrupt enterprise. Some of my colleagues even allow themselves to undergo so-called anti-bias training, conducted by supremely unqualified Human Resources personnel, lecturing inanely and blithely and in an accusatory manner about theoretically all-pervasive racist/sexist/heterosexist attitudes. Such training is now often a precondition to occupy a faculty position on a hiring committee.

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Québec kids

 

 

 

 

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Jun 292021
 
 June 29, 2021  Posted by at 9:01 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  67 Responses »


Rembrandt van Rijn The Adoration of the Magi 1634

 

Conflict of Interest in WHO Recommendation Against Ivermectin (TSN)
Evidence of Antibody Dependent Enhancement? (DE)
Did Pfizer Fail to Perform industry Standard Animal Testing? (TSN)
More Crazy (Denninger)
Singapore Doctors Call To Halt Covid Vaccination Of Teens (RT)
Abu Dhabi To Ban Unvaccinated People From Most Public Places (F.)
Greece Offers Youngsters 150 Euros To Get Vaccinated (K.)
Falsehood Rules (Kunstler)
Google Tumbles As Biden Revives Trump-Era Antitrust Probe (ZH)
Why Giuliani’s Suspension Should Worry All Lawyers (Turley)
Manhattan DA Says No Charges For Trump: Lawyer (ZH)
Biden’s Lawless Bombing of Iraq and Syria (Greenwald)
Nike Partners WIth CCP With New Slogan ‘Just Obey It’ (BBee)
Olympics To Kick Off With Ceremonial Lighting Of The American Flag

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Trusted News Initiative (TNI).

The WHO is funded by Big Pharma. “Originally funded entirely by member states, the organization now receives less than 20% of its budget from these states and the rest from donors with their own financial and strategic agendas.”

Conflict of Interest in WHO Recommendation Against Ivermectin (TSN)

All dangerous diseases are best treated early. A major failure of the global COVID-19 strategy has been to wait a week for the disease to become dangerous, when breathing becomes a problem. Early treatment of COVID, even for those with mild symptoms, prevents later hospitalization. There are several early treatment drugs showing promise but ivermectin leads the pack regarding safety, effectiveness and price. Unfortunately, the biggest players in Western mainstream media are members of the Trusted News Initiative (TNI). The TNI is a story for another day but it’s remarkable that big media companies barely report that they have agreed to promote global vaccination and to make sure any “disinformation myths are stopped in their tracks”[i].

Unfortunately, as a result early treatment seems to be seen as a disinformation myth and is not mentioned. Early treatment is vital in treating serious diseases and COVID-19 is no exception. Considering the human and economic cost, the avoidance of early treatment with a very safe, effective and off-patent drug is a criminal tragedy of immense proportions and a winning lottery ticket for some pharmaceutical companies that are designing and selling novel patented drugs that could not compete with ivermectin in a free market. Mercks’ molnupiravir, for instance, is seeking an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) from the FDA and “Merck will receive approximately $1.2 billion to supply approximately 1.7 million courses of molnupiravir to the United States government.”[ii]

Ivermectin doesn’t need an EUA because it passed trials in 1986. It just needs to be recommended to treat COVID-19. However, if ivermectin was officially recognized as an effective treatment, it would legally prevent molnupiravir’s EUA until it passes trials and thus delay or endanger the $1.2 billion deal. An aggravating factor is the fact that molnupiravir (EIDD-2801) could cause harmful genetic mutations. [iii]

In the face of a public health crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic, government authorities and international organizations have traditionally looked to the World Health Organization (WHO) for guidance – trusting that the WHO is free of commercial interests. Originally funded entirely by member states, the organization now receives less than 20% of its budget from these states and the rest from donors[iv] with their own financial and strategic agendas. Margret Chan, the previous Director General of the WHO, said in 2015: “I have to take my hat and go around the world to beg for money and when they give us the money [it is] highly linked to their preferences, what they like. It may not be the priority of the WHO, so if we do not solve this, we are not going to be as great as we were”. [v]

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“Majority of Covid deaths are the fully vaccinated and A&E attendance is breaking records”

Evidence of Antibody Dependent Enhancement? (DE)

Are we beginning to see evidence of ‘Antibody Dependent Enhancement’ (ADE) due to the Covid-19 vaccines in the United Kingdom? The latest data on hospitalisations and deaths allegedly due to Covid-19 certainly suggests so. ADE can arise in several different ways but the best-known is dubbed the ‘Trojan Horse Pathway’. This occurs when non-neutralizing antibodies generated by past infection or vaccination fail to shut down the pathogen upon re-exposure. Instead, they act as a gateway by allowing the virus to gain entry and replicate in cells that are usually off limits (typically immune cells, like macrophages). That, in turn, can lead to wider dissemination of illness, and over-reactive immune responses that cause more severe illness. Barry Bloom, MD, PhD, of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health explanation of ADE is as follows – “The cause of ADE is having antibodies to a virus that don’t neutralize it. That enables the virus to be gobbled up by cells that have receptors for antibodies, but not the virus. That’s the way of getting virus into cells that it ordinarily would not infect,”.


ADE can also occur when neutralizing antibodies (which bind the virus and stop it from causing infection) are present at low enough levels that they don’t protect against infection. Instead, they can form immune complexes with viral particles, which in turn leads to worse illness. [..] In previous clinical trials of vaccine candidates to combat SARS and MERS, the studies each failed during the animal phase due to ADE also known as pathogenic priming or a cytokine storm. Phase three clinical trials are designed to uncover frequent or severe side effects before a vaccine is approved for use, including ADE. But here in lies the problem, none of the Covid-19 vaccines have completed phase three clinical trials. The Pfizer phase three trial is not due to complete until April 6th 2023.

Neurological issues

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Excellent article. Recommended.

Did Pfizer Fail to Perform industry Standard Animal Testing? (TSN)

The current mRNA vaccines are theorized to act locally in draining lymphoid tissue. Formulated lipid nanoparticles that contain mRNA able to produce the spike protein are syringe injected into a muscle such as the deltoid (shoulder muscle). Once the injection occurs, the muscle cells near the injection site are impacted by the mRNA-based vaccine (e.g. the lipid nanoparticles), while much of the dose moves into the intracellular fluid surrounding the muscle cells and consequently drains to lymph nodes. According to this theory, a properly functioning mRNA-based vaccine is delivered into and drives production of the SARS-CoV-2 Spike protein in muscle and lymph node cells. The cells then produce the Spike protein, which is then moved to the surface of these cells where it becomes attached.

The foreign virus Spike protein then triggers the immune system to recognize and attack any cell in the body that is either infected by SARS-CoV-2 or has Spike protein on its surface. The vaccine was designed so that the Spike protein is affixed via a transmembrane anchor region, so that it cannot circulate around the body via the bloodstream. The same general scenario applies to all mRNA-based vaccines as well as recombinant adenoviral vectored vaccines (such as the J&J vaccine) designed to use gene-therapy technology to express Spike protein in cells and tissues. This general strategy is designed to reduce the risk that any residual vaccine dose that does somehow end up in the bloodstream (or organs and tissues) ends up not being a safety risk due to unintended biologic effects.

Spike protein will remain affixed to cell surfaces, and therefore is not released into the blood where circulating Spike might cause problems by binding to its natural target, ACE-2 receptors. However, any cell that has Spike protein (or protein fragments) anchored on its membrane or displayed on MHC antigen-presenting molecules becomes a target for vaccine-activated immune cells and antibodies, which would then attack, damage or kill those cells in the same way that SARS-CoV-2 virus-infected cells would be attacked. In other words, if very active mRNA delivery particles or recombinant adenoviral-vectored vaccines spread throughout the body, the resulting production of the vaccine antigen (Spike, in this case) will both stimulate immunity and also cause those same cells to be attacked by the immune system. If this actually happens, the resulting “vaccine reactogenicity” could resemble clinical symptoms seen with autoimmune syndromes.

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“A consenting adult has the right to choose to do dangerous things.”

More Crazy (Denninger)

HCQ, I remind you, is used by millions of people with Lupus and Rheumatoid Arthritis in the United States alone. If it caused heart attacks in one person out of 150 and screwed up the hearts of 10% of the rest not one doctor would prescribe it for either condition as that is wildly dangerous and will kill people outright a decent percentage of the time. Ivermectin, I remind you, has a record across several billion doses administered of one serious adverse event (defined: lands you in the hospital) in roughly every 600,000 people who take it. It is for this reason that it is considered safe enough to buy over the counter in many nations and is handed out by non-medical personnel all over sub-Saharan Africa. Indeed doing that has basically eliminated river blindness, a disease that formerly devastated entire regions.

As for Covid and other viral infections there is plenty of science on multiple mechanisms of action that are likely involved. Yet pharma, the FDA, NIH and CDC all are aligned against it and did not run large, formal studies for early treatment despite being safer to do so than recommending you take Tylenol or aspirin because there’s no money in it; the drug costs pennies. HCQ is similarly cheap and it too was never formally studied by these so-called “agencies” either. Now let’s talk about the shots. We never give a measles shot to someone who had the measles. Why not? The scientific evidence is that they cannot get any benefit from it. While the measles vaccine is extremely safe and definitely safer than getting the measles there is no such thing as a completely safe drug. Ever.

If you cannot get the measles because you’ve already had it and are immune then irrespective of how low the risk is it is unethical and gross malpractice to give you said shot because it is scientifically impossible for you to benefit from it. The question is always one of risk and benefit, both potential since no drug or vaccine is 100% effective and the risk of contracting an illness is never 100% for the person taking the drug. There is never any other evaluation, which is inherently personal to each individual’s medical situation, that is appropriate, ethical, moral or legal – period. For any drug, vaccine or other medical procedure or act where the benefit is statistically zero it is thus never, under any circumstance, acceptable to recommend, cajole or coerce someone into accepting it because if the potential benefit is zero then any amount of risk is unacceptable, no matter how low.

(Incidentally for the religiously-bent about vaccines generally who have been flooding my email inbox you’re wasting your time; I have long since told my spam filter to throw your repeated screaming into the trashcan unread. My objection is with this specific set of shots because the data says they’re wildly dangerous in healthy people compared with the illness itself, even without early treatment and definitely when compared to outcomes with treatment.) For comparison Tylenol kills about 500 people in the US a year. If every person in the US had used Ivermectin for the last year it would have killed fewer people than that. That is what the data says, and we could have easily handed it out to any and all who wanted it and get the natural data resulting from it.

There was no statistically-measurable risk in doing so compared against common over-the-counter medicines that anyone can buy anywhere at any time and thus there was no ethical, moral or legal justification for failing to do so in the face of a pandemic for which there were no approved and known-effective treatments. A consenting adult has the right to choose to do dangerous things. This is why we test drugs on consenting adults first even through we know they might not only fail to work they might harm you. Only after years or even decades of such testing do we contemplate testing them on children and only when we have a reasonably-full understanding of the risks.

Rogan Kory

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“The medics who signed the letter argued that that the CDC should be given “a few weeks to produce robust and convincing data”

Singapore Doctors Call To Halt Covid Vaccination Of Teens (RT)

A group of medics have penned an “urgent open letter” to Singapore’s expert committee on Covid-19 vaccination, calling for the inoculation of youths to be ceased until the US CDC clarifies why a teenage jab recipient died. Written on “on behalf of many concerned pediatricians, primary care physicians, specialists, surgeons and GPs” and signed by a number of Singaporean medical professionals, the letter was posted on Facebook on Saturday. Its authors urged the authorities to “consider a short delay” in vaccinating youths with messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) jabs in view of the recent incident in the US. Earlier this week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) started an investigation into the death of a 13-year-old from Saginaw, Michigan, which occurred three days after he got his second shot of an unnamed coronavirus vaccine.

Vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson have received emergency approval in the US, and all three of them are also in use in Singapore. The medics who signed the letter argued that that the CDC should be given “a few weeks to produce robust and convincing data” on the teen’s death and the possibility of a link to the inoculation. They insist the issue is urgent because Singapore is pursuing “one of the most aggressive” mRNA programs in the world, in which at least 200,000 teenage boys are expected to be vaccinated. “Certainly, we do not want to see any more suspected vaccine-related deaths in any young persons in the prime of their life,” the letter said.

As concerns spread, Singaporean parents have also launched a petition, asking the authorities of the island city-state to suspend the vaccination of those under 30, especially school kids from 12 to 15 years of age, until the CDC probe is complete. It has so far been signed by some 2,000 people.

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“The UAE has the highest vaccination rate in the world..”

Abu Dhabi To Ban Unvaccinated People From Most Public Places (F.)

The United Arab Emirates has introduced some of the world’s harshest restrictions for unvaccinated people in its push to encourage uptake of the shot, announcing Monday that residents of its capital city Abu Dhabi who aren’t yet inoculated will be banned from most public places. The emirate’s media office said in a series of tweets that it is introducing the ban to encourage vaccinations and preserve public health, though 93% of target groups have been vaccinated. The ban will go into effect Aug. 20, giving the city’s residents some time to get vaccinated against the virus before the measures are enacted. Once that date rolls around, those without the shot will not be allowed to enter public and private schools, universities, nurseries, shopping centers, restaurants, cafes, gyms, museums, theme parks, resorts and all other retail outlets. The main exceptions are retail outlets selling essential goods, such as supermarkets and pharmacies, which all people will still be allowed to enter regardless of their vaccination status.


The order—which the media office said was approved by the Abu Dhabi Emergency, Crisis and Disaster Committee—will not apply to children under the age of 16 and those who have an official reason to be exempt from vaccination. “The committee stated the decision would enhance safety in areas that have been subject to additional precautionary measures and provide enhanced protection for community members,” the Abu Dhabi Government Media Office said in its statement. The UAE has the highest vaccination rate in the world, boasting a rate of 154 doses administered per 100 people, according to a tracker run by The New York Times. Though it has not shared updated data on how many people have been fully or partially vaccinated, Reuters estimates the number of doses it has administered (over 15 million) means around 77.1% of the country’s population has been fully inoculated.

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Immoral or amoral?

Greece Offers Youngsters 150 Euros To Get Vaccinated (K.)

The Greek government announced it will offer a pre-paid card with 150 euros to young people aged 18-25 to get at least one shot of a vaccine against Covid-19, as an incentive to increase the number of inoculations in the country. The card, dubbed “freedom-pass” by Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, will cover costs in travel and entertainment, such as plane and ferry tickets, hotel bookings, music, theatre and cinema, museums and archaeological sites. Presenting the card at the start of a meeting with ministers on Monday, the prime minister said he acknowledged the toll the long months of lockdown have had on the social life of young people.


“This is a debt to our youth, a gift of gratitude, particularly ahead of the summer. [It is] a ‘thank you’ for their patience and perseverance,” he told the ministers at the televised message. “At the same time, however, it is also an incentive for young people in particular to be vaccinated, who, by their very nature, contribute more to movement. And the more they are shielded [against the virus], the more we will limit the transmission of the virus.” Mitsotakis said this is especially true as countries are facing the more transmissible delta variant of the coronavirus, which targets primarily those who have not been vaccinated “but is threatening everyone.”

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“..a private Chicago-based non-profit called the Center for Tech and Civic Life, which received $350-million from Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg to arrange grants targeted at swing districts in Democratic strongholds such as Milwaukee, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta, for the purpose of hiring ballot harvesters, among other activities.”

Falsehood Rules (Kunstler)

Now there is one official forensic audit of the 2020 election underway in Maricopa County, Arizona, (the Phoenix metro area), ordered by the State Senate, and some conclusions from phase one, involving the paper ballots, are due to be released this week, with additional phases to come concerning the Dominion voting machines. Many other state legislatures sent delegations to Arizona to learn the ins-and-outs of conducting a forensic audit, and they are making noises about actually doing it. So, in stepped Attorney General Merrick Garland. At the start of the Arizona audit, he sent a letter to the Arizona State Senate threatening to use the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ to halt the audit on the basis of depriving voters of their civil rights. Arizona responded by promising to jail any federal officials who laid their hands on any ballots. That was the end of that gambit for now — they may try it again in phase two.

In the meantime, a county judge in Georgia (one Brian Amero) has ruled that 147,000-odd ballots alleged to have chain-of-custody problems must be made available for inspection, and also that five members of the Fulton County (Atlanta Metro Area) Board of Elections are now individually parties to the lawsuit brought by nine Georgia voters, and may be subject to deposition (being questioned under oath). That is believed to be the beginning of an effort to conduct a full audit in Georgia. So, again, in steps Attorney General Merrick Garland with his Civil Rights Division, led by political activist Kristen Clarke, bringing a lawsuit against the Georgia election reform act passed earlier this year — a shot over Georgia’s bow, shall we say. Ms. Clarke happens to be a colleague of Georgia activist Stacey Abrams, a former Democratic candidate for governor.

Ms. Abrams is also a part-owner of a company, NOWaccount, that does payroll for a private company called Happy Faces, which furnished dozens of poll workers to tally the 2020 election in Georgia, as well as the 2021 US Senate runoff election that put two Democrats, John Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, in office. Elections are supposed to be conducted by public officials, not by private entities. Supposedly, the Georgia election officials turned to Happy Faces because it was a way to avoid hiring workers for less than 30 hours-a-week, which would have otherwise required providing them with health care under ObamaCare, the ACA Act. Was that legal? It has not been adjudicated.

Nor has the much bigger scandal of a private Chicago-based non-profit called the Center for Tech and Civic Life, which received $350-million from Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg to arrange grants targeted at swing districts in Democratic strongholds such as Milwaukee, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta, for the purpose of hiring ballot harvesters, among other activities. Mr. Zuckerberg met with Kristen Clarke, Stacey Abrams, Al Sharpton, and other Democratic activists at a dinner in 2019, at which he promised to help. Did his help cross any legal boundaries? It has not been investigated, nor has the use of the company he runs, Facebook, in its campaign to influence public opinion by blocking news and deleting accounts of non-Democrats exclusively.

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it’s the ads again.

Google Tumbles As Biden Revives Trump-Era Antitrust Probe (ZH)

Minutes after news that a judge had dismiss an FTC anti-monopoly lawsuit against Facebook sent the social-media giant’s market capitalization past the $1 trillion mark, Google has just been hit by some disappointing news on the anti-trust front. Google shares tumbled heading into the close on reports that the Biden Administration was planning to revive a Trump-era investigation into Google’s display ad business. While a judge has granted some relief for Facebook, potentially taking it out of the sights of the FTC, which is now being led by anti-monopoly pioneer Lina Khan, it’s clear the Biden Administration hasn’t given up on scrutinizing American Big Tech.

According to Bloomberg, which broke the news Monday afternoon, antitrust investigators at the DoJ have stepped up scrutiny of Google’s digital advertising practices in recent months, a sign that the Biden administration is “actively pursuing a probe that started under former President Donald Trump.” DoJ sued Google last year over claims the Alphabet-owned company was abusing its dominance in the internet search market, its biggest business. Any additional legal action, including whether to bring a second suit, will likely depend on whoever is chosen as the assistant attorney general overseeing the antitrust division. It will be up to that person to decide whether to proceed, and it’s possible the government will bring no action against the company.

Staffers from the DoJ’s antitrust office have reportedly interviewed several of Google’s competitors about the firm’s practices in the advertising technology market. The probe places a target on the company’s second-most important business, according to people familiar with the action, who asked not to be identified discussing the early stage probe.

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“..the bar becomes “nothing but a continuation of politics by other means.”

Why Giuliani’s Suspension Should Worry All Lawyers (Turley)

Lawyers often make sensational, false claims that inflame public opinion, such as insisting former Attorney General William Barr violently cleared D.C.’s Lafayette Square last year to arrange for Trump’s controversial photo op outside St. John’s Episcopal Church. The claim outraged many Americans, even though there was no evidence to prove it; several lawyers repeated the photo op myth as fact on TV. An inspector general and a federal court both later debunked the myth, but the damage was done: To this day, many people believe it. Nevertheless, I do not believe any lawyers should be suspended for such claims, which should be protected as free speech. The New York court brushes over the free speech implications of its ruling with a conclusory statement that Giuliani knowingly misrepresented facts, even though it did not afford him a hearing on that or other questions.

It is not enough to declare “Don’t be like Giuliani.” What is missing in this opinion is a clear standard for when the failure to establish a case — as Giuliani failed to do with his election fraud claims — is a disbarring offense. In reality, many cases collapse in court over insufficient evidence. Election challenges are made without access to critical records or data held by election boards or officials — indeed, litigants often go to court to gain such access. Likewise, public interest lawyers often bring cases against the government, which classifies or withholds evidence. When I litigated the Area 51 case, I was suing a base that the government claimed did not exist, and all information about it was classified; we prevailed in establishing environmental violations but only after years of intense litigation and denials.

The concern in this case is that we are seeing a weaponization of bar investigations after a wide (and well-funded) campaign to harass Republican lawyers, their firms and their clients after the 2020 election. And it has worked: Many law firms are unwilling to take on Republican or conservative causes for fear of being targeted. The Giuliani opinion fuels those concerns. Despite a damning account of exaggerations and falsehoods, it often reads more like a venting — rather than a vetting — of grievances against Giuliani. Instead of issuing a well-deserved reprimand, the court declared Giuliani to be a public menace if allowed to continue practicing law, even for the period of his own adjudication. The premature suspension made little sense.

The bar was focused on Giuliani’s public statements, which will continue unabated by any suspension. Nevertheless, the suspension thrilled many in today’s bloodsport politics. Yet while the court seemed to apply a special “Giuliani rule,” it is unlikely to stay that way if — to paraphrase Carl von Clausewitz — the bar becomes “nothing but a continuation of politics by other means.”

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“This is so small that I can’t believe I’m going to have to try a case like this.”

Manhattan DA Says No Charges For Trump: Lawyer (ZH)

President Trump’s attorney said on Monday that Manhattan DA Cy Vance has indicated that he has no plans to charge the Trump Organization with crimes related to allegations of “hush money” payments or manipulated real estate values, according to Politico. New York attorney Ronald Fischetti said that during a meeting last week he asked Vance’s team for any details related to charges up for consideration, to which Vance’s team replied that while they are considering charges against the Trump Organization and individual employees related to alleged failures to pay taxes on corporate benefits – widely reported to include cars and apartments, the potential charges only involve a small number of executives. “We asked, ‘Is there anything else?” Fischetti told Politico. “They said, ‘No.’”


When asked if the meeting touched on allegations made by Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen and by adult film star and director Stormy Daniels, Fischetti replied, “Nothing. Not a word on that.” Fischetti also said that Vance’s team told him they will not bring charges against Trump himself when the first indictment comes down. “They just said, ‘When this indictment comes down, he won’t be charged. Our investigation is ongoing,’” he said. According to the Washington Post, Vance’s team is set to proceed with the charges unless otherwise persuaded not to. Fischetti says he expects them to drop this week or next. “It’s like the Shakespeare play Much Ado About Nothing,” he said, adding “This is so small that I can’t believe I’m going to have to try a case like this.”

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BAU. Twitter: “Defense stocks took off like a rocket when Biden was elected, now up 40%.”

Biden’s Lawless Bombing of Iraq and Syria (Greenwald)

For the second time in the five months since he was inaugurated, President Joe Biden on Sunday ordered a U.S. bombing raid on Syria, and for the first time, he also bombed Iraq. The rationale offered was the same as Biden’s first air attack in February: the U.S., in the words of Pentagon spokesman John Kirby, “conducted defensive precision airstrikes against facilities used by Iran-backed militia groups in the Iraq-Syria border region.” He added that “the United States acted pursuant to its right of self-defense.” Embedded in this formulaic Pentagon statement is so much propaganda and so many euphemisms that, by itself, it reveals the fraudulent nature of what was done.

To begin with, how can U.S. airstrikes carried out in Iraq and Syria be “defensive” in nature? How can they be an act of “self-defense”? Nobody suggests that the targets of the bombing campaign have the intent or the capability to strike the U.S. “homeland” itself. Neither Syria nor Iraq is a U.S. colony or American property, nor does the U.S. have any legal right to be fighting wars in either country, rendering the claim that its airstrikes were “defensive” and an “act of self-defense” to be inherently deceitful. The Pentagon’s description of the people bombed by the U.S. — “Iran-backed militias groups” — is intended to obscure the reality. Biden did not bomb Iran or order Iranians to be bombed or killed.

The targets of U.S. aggression were Iraqis in their own country, and Syrians in their own country. Only the U.S. war machine and its subservient media could possibly take seriously the Biden administration’s claim that the bombs they dropped on people in their own countries were “defensive” in nature. Invocation of Iran has no purpose other than to stimulate the emotional opposition to the government of that country among many Americans in the hope that visceral dislike of Iranian leaders will override the rational faculties that would immediately recognize the deceit and illegality embedded in the Pentagon’s arguments.

Beyond the propagandistic justification is the question of legality, though even to call it a question dignifies it beyond what it merits. There is no conceivable Congressional authorization — none, zero — to Biden’s dropping of bombs in Syria. Obama’s deployment of CIA operatives to Syria and years of the use of force to overthrow Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad never had any Congressional approval of any kind, nor did Trump’s bombing of Assad’s forces (urged by Hillary Clinton, who wanted more), nor does Biden’s bombing campaign in Syria now. It was and is purely lawless, illegal.

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“Chief Marketing Officer Bingbong Van Hummus”

Nike Partners WIth CCP With New Slogan ‘Just Obey It’ (BBee)

On the heels of the CEO proudly declaring Nike is a brand “of China, and for China,” the company has unveiled a new marketing campaign honoring the glorious Chinese Communist Party with the inspiring slogan “Just Obey It.” “The idea of obedience to brutal and murderous regimes really encapsulates the ethos Nike is going for as a brand,” said Chief Marketing Officer Bingbong Van Hummus. “The People’s Republic of China represents our highest ideals, and we hope to inspire athletes around the world to join us in the most important thing any high-performer can do: Just Obey.”


New apparel featuring the “Just Obey It” slogan is already being produced in Uyghur concentration camps by slaves, and Nike is optimistic about having their new products in the hands of progressive American athletes in the next few weeks. “As long as we don’t run into any delays– you know, from our slaves refusing to obey, we’ll be shipping from the beautiful and powerful country of China very soon!” said Van Hummus. Nike also announced they will be releasing a new Uyghur-inspired shoe with built-in iron shackles.

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“..a beloved pastime where American athletes who were given every opportunity to succeed get to show how much they hate America..”

Olympics To Kick Off With Ceremonial Lighting Of The American Flag

The 2020 Olympic Games will be kicking off next month with the ceremonial lighting of the American flag, a beloved pastime where American athletes who were given every opportunity to succeed get to show how much they hate America. “Before the Games, American athletes will get to show much they hate their country by taking the ceremonial torch and burning the flag,” said one commentator on ESPN. “We always feel the importance and gravity of this moment at every Olympic Games. As the torchbearer approaches the flag and lights it up, solemnly declaring to everyone that the U.S. is a horribly racist and oppressive country, I can’t help but shed a few tears.” “Stunning and, you guessed it, brave.” One Chinese gymnast suggested she would burn her own country’s flag as well, since the government kidnapped her family and forced her to compete at gunpoint, but she has since disappeared.

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“What made medicine fool people for so long was that its successes were prominently displayed and its mistakes (literally) buried.”
– Nassim Nicholas Taleb

 

 

 

 


The most detailed image ever of a human cell. It was made using 3D data from X-rays, nuclear MRI, and cryo-electron microscopy. The wildest part? We have 100 TRILLION of these inside us.

 

 

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Jun 232021
 
 June 23, 2021  Posted by at 8:48 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  85 Responses »


Edward Hopper New York movie 1939

 

‘It’s Anti-science, And It’s Anti-me’ – Fauci (RT)
Mass Vaccination Drives A Rapid Evolutionary Response Of SARS-CoV-2 (VDBossche)
Ivermectin: The Forbidden Treatment (APL)
Oxford University Explores Ivermectin As Covid-19 Treatment (R.)
Nearly 4,000 Fully Vaccinated People in MA Positive for COVID-19 (ET)
3rd COVID Wave Will Kill Or Hospitalize 60 To 70% of Fully Vaccinated (GGI)
Daszak Leaves UN-backed COVID Origins Probe (NYP)
Media Allowed Itself To Be Duped By One Man On Covid-19 (Bloom)
Gabon Paid For Protecting Forests, In African First (Y!)
A Court Ruled Rachel Maddow’s Viewers Know She Doesn’t Offer Facts (Greenwald)
EU Opens Antitrust Probe Into Google’s Online Ad Tech Business (F.)
Millions Become Millionaires During Covid Pandemic (BBC)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Craig Kelly MP
https://twitter.com/i/status/1407280779055419394

 

 

All America has had to say for a year and a half. Poor. Can’t disagree with Tony, because that makes you far-right.

‘It’s Anti-science, And It’s Anti-me’ – Fauci (RT)

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the president’s chief medical adviser, has dismissed controversy surrounding numerous past emails being published as “anti-science” nonsense from the “far-right.” Fauci has found himself facing new waves of criticism since thousands of his emails were released via Freedom of Information Act requests through Buzzfeed and the Washington Post. Critics have timed what Fauci has said in some of the emails during the pandemic to what he was saying publicly and accused the infectious disease expert of hypocrisy on issues such as masking and theories about the origin of Covid-19. In an interview with the New York Times published on Monday, Fauci dismissed his “far-right” critics as being “politically motivated” and pushing “nonsense” to discredit him.


“It’s clear. It’s anti-science, and it’s anti-me,” Fauci declared. He went on to say that every piece of correspondence is “perfectly normal, perfectly innocent, and completely above board.” Fauci has long been accused of flip-flopping on key guidances in short periods of time during the pandemic, something he has denied, explaining that his opinion has changed as the “science” has, an argument he doubled-down on in his most recent defense. “So the people who are giving the ad hominems are saying, ‘Fauci misled us,'” he said. “‘First, he said no masks, then he said masks.’ Well, let me give you a flash. That’s the way science works. You work with the data you have at the time. It is essential as a scientist that you evolve your opinion and your recommendations based on the data as it evolves.”

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Spike proteins all the way.

Mass Vaccination Drives A Rapid Evolutionary Response Of SARS-CoV-2 (VDBossche)

We do know about the outcome of a natural pandemic but don’t know at all about the outcome of the ongoing pandemic, as the latter has now become a ‘pandemic of variants’. From what follows below (and which is basically a summary of findings made by molecular/ genomic epidemiologists that I put into a broader context), there is however, one certainty, which is that Sars-CoV-2 variants are rapidly evolving in response to the natural immune selection pressure they are experiencing. Phylogenetics-based natural selection analysis indicates that a substantial amount of the immune selection pressure exerted during this pandemic is directed at the Sars-CoV-2 spike (S) protein, which is targeted by the vaccines.

On their journey to adapting to the host(ile) environment of neutralizing antibodies (nAbs), variants further exploit their evolutionary capacity to overcome this S-directed, population-level immune pressure. Hence, in a given vaccination setting and stage of the ongoing pandemic, the success of mass vaccination campaigns will to a large extent depend on the evolving prevalence of increasingly problematic variants. Alternatively, S-directed immune interventions that seem effective in one vaccination setting and stage of this pandemic may not work as well when applied to another vaccination setting or when implemented at another stage of the ongoing pandemic.

The observation that the effectiveness of mass vaccination campaigns, as assessed during a pandemic of immune escape variants, oftentimes evolves very differently between countries or regions is, therefore, not surprising. It is only when the population-level selective immune pressure will culminate that variants and, therefore, the effects of these campaigns will start to globally converge to the same endpoint, which is ‘resistance’ to the vaccines. It is only at that very endpoint that all assessments of the alleged ‘effectiveness’ of this experiment will be unanimous and consistent. [..] as the immune selection pressure in the global population is now ‘massively’ rising and the set of naturally selected, S-directed mutations together with the plasticity thereof dramatically expanding, one can reasonably expect that the edition of a super variant capable of resisting S-specific Abs will be precipitated such as to emerge within the next few months.

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“Please may we start saving lives now.” She heard nothing back.”

Ivermectin: The Forbidden Treatment (APL)

On Dec. 8 2020, FLCCC member Dr. Pierre Kory gave nine minutes of testimony to the U.S. Homeland Security Committee Meeting on the potent anti-viral, anti-inflammatory benefits of ivermectin. Nine million people viewed the video on YouTube before it was taken down by YouTube’s owner, Google. Capuzzo said mainstream and social media have gone to extraordinary lengths to keep people in the dark about ivermectin. Three days after Kory’s testimony, an Associated Press “fact-check reporter” interviewed Kory. Then she wrote: “AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. There’s no evidence Ivermectin has been proven a safe or effective treatment against COVID-19.” Like many critics, she didn’t explore the Ivermectin data or evidence in any detail, but merely dismissed its “insufficient evidence,” quoting instead the lack of a recommendation by the NIH or WHO.

On Jan. 12, 2021, the Brazilian Ministry of Health tweeted to its 1.2 million followers not to wait with COVID-19 until it’s too late but “go to a Health Unit and request early treatment,” (Ivermectin) only to have Twitter take down the official public health tweet for “spreading misleading and potentially harmful information.” On Jan. 31, the Slovak Ministry of Health announced its decision on Facebook to allow use of Ivermectin. Facebook took down the post and removed the entire page it was on, the Ivermectin for MDs Team, with 10,200 members from more than 100 countries. In Argentina, Professor and doctor Hector Carvallo, whose prophylactic studies are renowned by other researchers, says all his scientific documentation for Ivermectin is quickly scrubbed from the Internet. “I am afraid,” he wrote to Marik and his colleagues, “we have affected the most sensitive organ on humans: the wallet…”

As Kory’s testimony was climbing toward nine million views, YouTube, owned by Google, erased his official Senate testimony, saying it endangered the community. Undeterred, many front-line doctors have tried to persuade their health regulators of the efficacy and safety of ivermectin as a covid treatment. They include Dr. Tess Lawrie, a prominent independent medical researcher who, as Capuzzo reports, evaluates the safety and efficacy of drugs for the WHO and the National Health Service to set international clinical practice guidelines: “She read all 27 of the Ivermectin studies Kory cited. The resulting evidence is consistent and unequivocal, she said, and sent a rapid meta-analysis, an epidemiolocal statistical multi-study review considered the highest form of medical evidence, to the director of the NHS, members of parliament, and a video to Prime Minister Boris Johnson with “the good news… that we now have solid evidence of an effective treatment for COVID-19…” and Ivermectin should immediately “be adopted globally and systematically for the prevention and treatment of COVID-19.”

Ignored by British leaders and media, Lawrie convened the day-long streaming BIRD conference—British Ivermectin Recommendation Development—with more than 60 researchers and doctors from the U.S., Canada, Mexico, England, Ireland, Belgium, Argentina, South Africa, Botswana, Nigeria, Australia, and Japan. They evaluated the drug using the full “evidence-to-decision framework” that is “the gold standard tool for developing clinical practice guidelines” used by the WHO, and reached the conclusion that Ivermectin should blanket the world. “Most of all you can trust me because I am also a medical doctor, first and foremost,” Lawrie told the prime minster, “with a moral duty to help people, to do no harm, and to save lives. Please may we start saving lives now.” She heard nothing back.

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Oxford is AstraZeneca. They should never lead a study like this. And they know it.

Oxford University Explores Ivermectin As Covid-19 Treatment (R.)

The University of Oxford said on Wednesday it was testing anti-parasitic drug ivermectin as a possible treatment for COVID-19, as part of a British government-backed study that aims to aid recoveries in non-hospital settings. Ivermectin resulted in a reduction of virus replication in laboratory studies, the university said, adding that a small pilot showed giving the drug early could reduce viral load and the duration of symptoms in some patients with mild COVID-19. Dubbed PRINCIPLE, the British study in January showed that antibiotics azithromycin and doxycycline were generally ineffective against early-stage COVID-19.


While the World Health Organization, and European and U.S. regulators have recommended against using ivermectin in COVID-19 patients, it is being used to treat the illness in some countries, including India. “By including ivermectin in a large-scale trial like PRINCIPLE, we hope to generate robust evidence to determine how effective the treatment is against COVID-19, and whether there are benefits or harms associated with its use,” co-lead investigator of the trial Chris Butler said. People with severe liver conditions, who are on blood-thinning medication warfarin, or taking other treatments known to interact with ivermectin, will be excluded from the trial, the university added. Ivermectin is the seventh treatment to be investigated in the trial, and is currently being evaluated alongside antiviral drug favipiravir, the university said.

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How it started and how it’s going is the same. No progress:

“The health agency added, “There is some evidence that vaccination may make illness less severe.”

Nearly 4,000 Fully Vaccinated People in MA Positive for COVID-19 (ET)

Nearly 4,000 people in Massachusetts who have been fully vaccinated against COVID-19 have contracted the virus, adding to the growing number of breakthrough cases nationwide. According to the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, as of June 12, there were 3,791 people who tested positive for COVID-19 among the 3.7 million fully vaccinated people in the state, accounting for roughly one in 1,000 vaccinated individuals. “We’re learning that many of the breakthrough infections are asymptomatic or they’re very mild and brief in duration,” said Boston University infectious diseases specialist Davidson Hamer, the Boston Herald reported. “The viral load is not very high.”

“Breakthroughs are expected, and we need to better understand who’s at risk and whether people who have a breakthrough can transmit the virus to others,” Hamer added. “In some cases, they’ll be shedding such low levels of the virus and won’t be transmitting to others.” So-called breakthrough cases refer to cases appearing two or more weeks after a person’s final shot. That’s primarily the second Pfizer or Moderna dose, but can be the single-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine. “Vaccine breakthrough cases are expected,” the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention states on its website. “COVID-19 vaccines are effective and are a critical tool to bring the pandemic under control. However, no vaccines are 100 percent effective at preventing illness. There will be a small percentage of people who are fully vaccinated who still get sick, are hospitalized, or die from COVID-19.”

The health agency added, “There is some evidence that vaccination may make illness less severe.”

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From April, but a keeper.

3rd COVID Wave Will Kill Or Hospitalize 60 To 70% of Fully Vaccinated (GGI)

According to projections by UK’s top modelling agency the third wave of COVID-19 spike will hospitalize and kill 60 to 70% of those people who took both the vaccine doses. The paper suggests that the resurgence in both hospitalisations and deaths will dominated by those who have received two doses of the vaccine, comprising around 60% and 70% of the wave respectively. The modelling (read below in full) was presented to the UK’s top scientific advisory body Sage by one of its sub groups, the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling, Operational (SPI-M-O). This committee of academics has done modelling work throughout the pandemic and has looked at the impact vaccination will have on hospital admissions, infections and deaths.

Its findings suggest that a third wave is inevitable but that the size of the spike in cases depends on the effectiveness of vaccines, the speed at which restrictions are eased and the impact new variants have on transmission and illness. It suggests that the resurgence in both hospitalisations and deaths will be “dominated by those that have received two doses of the vaccine”. “Maintaining a large reduction in transmission from such measures after Step 4 [England’s plans to remove all restrictions from June 21] is taken is almost certain to reduce the size of the subsequent resurgence. This latest modelling reinforces this finding, as lower adherence to baseline measures and the resulting increased transmission could lead to a peak close in scale to that seen in January 2021.” The paper looks at a range of possibilities what we can expect from Covid as we ease restrictions going into the summer. It takes into account a range of difference sources including modelling from the University of Warwick, Imperial College London and London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.

“Scenarios with little transmission reduction after step 4 [full lifting of restrictions planned for June in England] or with pessimistic but plausible vaccine efficacy assumptions can result in resurgences in hospitalisations of a similar scale to January 2021.” The paper suggests that the resurgence in both hospitalisations and deaths will dominated by those who have received two doses of the vaccine, comprising around 60% and 70% of the wave respectively. “The resurgence in both hospitalisations and deaths is dominated by those that have received two doses of the vaccine, comprising around 60% and 70% of the wave respectively. This can be attributed to the high levels of uptake in the most at-risk age groups, such that immunisation failures account for more serious illness than unvaccinated individuals.”

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Where there’s Daszak, there’s Fauci.

Daszak Leaves UN-backed COVID Origins Probe (NYP)

The head of a New York City-based nonprofit that directed hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal grant money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology is no longer part of a UN-backed commission examining the origins of the coronavirus pandemic. EcoHealth Alliance president Peter Daszak’s profile on the website of The Lancet COVID-19 Commission has been updated to include the parenthetical quote “recused from Commission work on the origins of the pandemic.” Earlier this month, Vanity Fair reported that Dazsak helped organize a statement signed by 27 leading scientists that appeared in The Lancet — a prestigious British medical journal — in February 2020. The statement condemned what it called “conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin” and proclaimed “solidarity with all scientists and health professionals in China.”

“Conspiracy theories do nothing but create fear, rumours [sic], and prejudice that jeopardise [sic] our global collaboration in the fight against this virus,” the statement added. Though the statement initially claimed that the signatories had “no competing interests,” The Lancet issued a statement Monday saying it had invited all 27 signatories (at least one of whom has walked back his support of the natural, or zoonotic, theory) to “re-evaluate their competing interests.” The statement included an updated disclosure from Daszak attached to the February 2020 statement and two other pieces he co-authored or contributed to. In his expanded disclosure, Daszak stated that EcoHealth’s work in China — including at the Wuhan lab — was funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the US Agency for International Development (USAID). Daszak also denied that he or EcoHealth received money directly from the Chinese government.

“EcoHealth Alliance’s work in China … includes the production of a small number of recombinant bat coronaviruses to analyse [sic] cell entry and other characteristics of bat coronaviruses for which only the genetic sequences are available,” he wrote. “NIH reviewed the planned recombinant virus work and deemed it does not meet the criteria that would warrant further specific review by its Potential Pandemic Pathogen Care and Oversight (P3CO) committee.” The belated disclosure from The Lancet comes months after the nonprofit group US Right to Know reported that four of the statement’s co-authors had direct ties to EcoHealth Alliance. The Vanity Fair report stated that six signatories had either worked at EcoHealth Alliance or received funding from it.

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“What does it say about the state of our media and social media that one man can so wrongly shape a narrative?”

Media Allowed Itself To Be Duped By One Man On Covid-19 (Bloom)

The more we learn about Peter Daszak, one of the main villains of the COVID epidemic, the worse it gets. Daszak is president of EcoHealth Alliance, a nongovernmental organization mostly funded by the US government. EcoHealth passed some of that money on to the lab in Wuhan, China. It was Daszak who organized the letter in The Lancet from February 2020 dismissing as “misinformation” claims that the virus may have originated from the Wuhan Virology Lab. The letter created the illusion of consensus, which Internet companies proceeded to enforce through censorship, and the media reinforced by constantly interviewing Daszak himself. There might be journalistic value in hearing from the Chernobyl plant director about all those clouds floating over Ukraine.

But if he suggests the rash of mysterious sores and cancers were due to a faulty shipment of microwaves recently arrived in Pripyat, you’d probably think he was engaged in a bit of “motivated reasoning.” Apparently not the World Health Organization, which invited Daszak to join their microwave hunt in Wuhan. In the last two days, Daszak has been removed from The Lancet’s own UN-backed commission investigating COVID’s origins, though whether he removed himself or was fired remains unclear. It appears Daszak collaborated with Anthony Fauci as well, based on a recently released e-mail in which he thanks the NIAID director for “publicly standing up and stating that the scientific evidence supports a natural origin for COVID-19 from a bat-to-human spillover, not a lab release.”

To top it all off, the Trump administration canceled the EcoHealth grant in early 2020, a move that was characterized by “60 Minutes” and NPR as jeopardizing a possible COVID-19 cure. Both stories featured — guess who — Daszak. Now we learn that Google’s charitable arm may have also funded EcoHealth. Steve Hilton suggested Monday on Fox that the Google funding might have something to do with why information about COVID was so ruthlessly policed on social media platforms and search engines. We’ll be sorting through the many failures of the COVID pandemic for years, failures by the most important institutions of society, from big tech to scientific research to public health to the media, but whatever blame rests on them, we can say Daszak helped break them all. What does it say about the state of our media and social media that one man can so wrongly shape a narrative?

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Wonder where the loot ends up.

Gabon Paid For Protecting Forests, In African First (Y!)

Gabon has become the first African nation to receive a financial reward for protecting its forests as part of international efforts to fight climate change, the government announced Tuesday. Gabon has received $17 million in recompense for successfully cutting its carbon emissions by reducing deforestation and forest degradation, the environment ministry said in a statement. The payment came “after independent experts verified Gabon’s results” showing that the country’s carbon emissions in 2016-17 had dropped compared with the annual figures for 2006-15.

The funds were delivered by the Central African Forest Initiative (CAFI), an organisation launched in 2015 by the United Nations and backed by international donors. The scheme provides financial incentives to Central African governments to pursue economic growth without harming the vast forests that cover much of the region. The world’s rainforests are seen as a vital weapon in the fight against climate change by sucking out carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Gabon, where forests cover 90 percent of the territory, is home to some 18 percent of the Congo Basin forest, known as “the second lung of the planet” after the Amazon.

Under a 10-year deal signed with CAFI in 2019, Gabon is set to receive a total of $150 million if it meets its carbon-cutting targets. The small tropical country has pledged to cut its carbon emissions in half by 2025 from 2005 levels. The forests in Gabon alone “absorb a total of 140 million tonnes of CO2 each year, which is equivalent to removing 30 million cars from circulation throughout the world,” the environment ministry said. Gabon has been a leader in Central Africa in preserving its rainforests, creating 13 national parks since 2000 that cover around 11 percent of the country.

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For entertainment purposes only. Such an odd defense that Tucker can use it too.

A Court Ruled Rachel Maddow’s Viewers Know She Doesn’t Offer Facts (Greenwald)

In sum, ruled the court, Rachel Maddow is among those “speakers whose statements cannot reasonably be interpreted as allegations of fact.” Despite Maddow’s use of the word “literally” to accuse OAN of being a “paid Russian propaganda” outlet, the court dismissed the lawsuit on the ground that, given Maddow’s conduct and her audience’s awareness of who she is and what she does, “the Court finds that the contested statement is an opinion that cannot serve as the basis for a defamation claim.” What makes this particularly notable and ironic is that a similar argument was made a year later by lawyers for Fox News when defending a segment that appeared on the program of its highest-rated program, Tucker Carlson Tonight.

That was part of a lawsuit brought by the former model Karen McDougal, who claimed Carlson slandered her by saying she “extorted” former President Trump by demanding payments in exchange for her silence about an extramarital affair she claimed to have with him. McDougal’s lawsuit was dismissed in September, 2020, by Trump-appointed judge Mary Kay Vyskocil, based on arguments made by Fox’s lawyers that were virtually identical to those made by MSNBC’s lawyers when defending Maddow. In particular, the court accepted Fox’s arguments that when Carlson used the word “extortion,” he meant it in a colloquial and dramatic sense, and that his viewers would have understood that he was not literally accusing her of a crime but rather offering his own subjective characterizations and opinions, particularly since viewers understand that Carlson offers political commentary:

“Fox News first argues that, viewed in context, Mr. Carlson cannot be understood to have been stating facts, but instead that he was delivering an opinion using hyperbole for effect. See Def. Br. at 12-15. Fox News cites to a litany of cases which hold that accusing a person of “extortion” or “blackmail” simply is “rhetorical hyperbole,” incapable of being defamatory. . . .

In particular, accusations of “extortion,” “blackmail,” and related crimes, such as the statements Mr. Carlson made here, are often construed as merely rhetorical hyperbole when they are not accompanied by additional specifics of the actions purportedly constituting the crime. . . . Such accusations of crimes also are unlikely to be defamatory when, as here, they are made in connection with debates on a matter of public or political importance. . . . The context in which the offending statements were made here make it abundantly clear that Mr. Carlson was not accusing Ms. McDougal of actually committing a crime. As a result, his statements are not actionable.”

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Google’s monopoly is glaringly obvious. No probe needed.

EU Opens Antitrust Probe Into Google’s Online Ad Tech Business (F.)

The European Union on Tuesday opened a formal antitrust probe into Google to inspect whether the company violated the bloc’s competition rules by favoring its own online advertising technology over competing providers, in a move that follows a similar probe against Facebook earlier this month. The investigation will examine whether Google is distorting competition by restricting third parties from accessing user data for advertising purposes while using such data for its own service, according to a statement released by the European Commission. European Commission’s executive vice-president in charge of competition policy, Margrethe Vestager, said regulators are concerned that Google has made it harder for rival online ad services to compete.

Vestager also noted that the investigation will look into Google’s policies on user tracking to make sure they are in line with fair competition. The investigation will also look into the obligation to use Google’s ad manager when serving ads on YouTube, its plan to block third party cookies on Chrome and its plans to restrict access of advertising identifier information to third parties on Android devices where a user has chosen to opt-out of personalized advertising. The commission says it will take into account the need to protect user privacy under the EU’s data protection law but noted that it must ensure that all advertising market participants operate on a level playing field when it comes to protecting user privacy.

In a statement shared with Forbes, Google said their services are used by thousands of European businesses “because they’re competitive and effective” and it plans to answer the European Commission’s questions and demonstrate the benefits of its products. “Online advertising services are at the heart of how Google and publishers monetise their online services,” Vestager said. “Google is present at almost all levels of the supply chain for online display advertising. We are concerned that Google has made it harder for rival online advertising services to compete in the so-called ad tech stack.”

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“..if asset price increases, such as house price rises, were removed from the analysis, “then global household wealth may well have fallen..”

Millions Become Millionaires During Covid Pandemic (BBC)

More than five million people became millionaires across the world in 2020 despite economic damage from the Covid-19 pandemic. While many poor people became poorer, the number of millionaires increased by 5.2 million to 56.1 million globally, Credit Suisse research found. In 2020 more than 1% of adults worldwide were millionaires for the first time. Recovering stock markets and soaring house prices helped boost their wealth. Wealth creation appeared to be “completely detached” from the economic woes of the pandemic, the researchers said. Anthony Shorrocks, economist and author of the Global Wealth Report, said the pandemic had an “acute short term impact on global markets”, but added this was “largely reversed by the end of June 2020”.


“Global wealth not only held steady in the face of such turmoil but in fact rapidly increased in the second half of the year,” he said. However, wealth differences between adults widened in 2020, and Mr Shorrocks said if asset price increases, such as house price rises, were removed from the analysis, “then global household wealth may well have fallen”. “In the lower wealth bands where financial assets are less prevalent, wealth has tended to stand still, or, in many cases, regressed,” he said. “Some of the underlying factors may self correct over time. For example, interest rates will begin to rise again at some point, and this will dampen asset prices.” Total global wealth grew by 7.4%, the report said. Since the start of the 21st century, the number of people with wealth between $10,000 and $100,000 had more than tripled in size from 507 million in 2000 to 1.7 billion in mid-2020.

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Oct 212020
 


Pablo Picasso Self portrait 1972

 

‘Nonpublic Information’ Debunks Letter From ’50 Former Intel Officials’ (ZH)
Rudy Giuliani Files Police Report On Hunter Biden For Child Endangerment (JTN)
Hunter Biden’s Laptop Probe Referred to FBI, Delaware State Police Say (NW)
10 Tea Leaves Pointing To ‘Surprise’ Trump Victory (Del Beccaro)
Trump: Hunter Emails No Russian Plot, Tulsi Gabbard No ‘Russian Asset’ (RT)
Secret Service Travel Logs Match Details in Alleged Hunter Biden Emails (ET)
Hunter Biden Arranged White House Meeting for Elite Chinese Group (NR)
US Schools Report $6.5 Billion in Undisclosed Foreign Gifts and Contracts (ET)
No, Our Democracy And Freedom Are Not On The Line This Election (Rasmussen)
DOJ Antitrust Lawsuit Against Google Draws Bipartisan Praise (ET)
Senate Panel Delays Vote To Subpoena Twitter, Facebook CEOs (Pol.)
Facebook Workers ‘Ashamed’ By Censorship Of Hunter Files Reporting (NYP)
Meet Your -Chinese- Facebook Censors (Ahmari)
Studies Point To Big Drop In COVID-19 Death Rates (NPR)
Moscow Will Begin Mass Vaccination Against COVID19 In December (RT)
Nassim Taleb On Capitalism, Entrepreneurs, And The Pandemic (BI)

 

 

It’s Hunter season.

 

 

 

 

I think Tyler has the timeline a bit wrong. Tucker didn’t say this “Hours before Politico reported the existence of a letter signed by ’50 former senior intelligence officials'”, he said it on October 16 (maybe even 15?!) , and the letter was published the 19th.

‘Nonpublic Information’ Debunks Letter From ’50 Former Intel Officials’ (ZH)

Hours before Politico reported the existence of a letter signed by ’50 former senior intelligence officials’ who say the Hunter Biden laptop scandal “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation” – providing “no new evidence,” while they remain “deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case,” Tucker Carlson obliterated their (literal) conspiracy theory. According to the Fox News host, he’s seen ‘nonpublic information that proves it was Hunter’s laptop,’ adding “No one but Hunter could’ve known about or replicated this information.” “This is not a Russian hoax. We are not speculating.”

Meanwhile, the Delaware computer repair shop owner who believes Hunter dropped off three MacBook Pros for data recovery has a signed work order bearing Hunter’s signature. When compared to the signature on a document in his paternity suit, while one looks more formal than the other, they are a match. Going back to the ’50 former senior intelligence officials’ and their latest Russia fixation, one has to wonder – do they think Putin was able to compromise Biden’s former business associate, Bevan Cooney, who gave investigative journalist Peter Schweizer his gmail password – revealing that Hunter and his partners were engaged in an influence-peddling operation for rich Chinese who wanted access to the Obama administration?


Did Putin further hack Joe Biden in 2011 to make him take a meeting with a Chinese delegation with ties to the CCP – arranged by Hunter’s group, two years they secured a massive investment of Chinese money? The implications boggle the mind. Here’s the clarifying sentences from the ’50 former senior intelligence officials’ that exposes the utter farce of it all: “While the letter’s signatories presented no new evidence, they said their national security experience had made them “deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case” and cited several elements of the story that suggested the Kremlin’s hand at work. “If we are right,” they added, “this is Russia trying to influence how Americans vote in this election, and we believe strongly that Americans need to be aware of this.”

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A 14-year old relative. Most damning is that Joe knew about it.

Rudy Giuliani Files Police Report On Hunter Biden For Child Endangerment (JTN)

Rudy Giuliani, one of President Trump’s private attorneys, has reported to Delaware police concerns that materials on a laptop purportedly tied to Hunter Biden contained evidence of possible child endangerment. Giuliani, a former U.S. attorney and New York City mayor, confirmed Tuesday night he went Monday to a local police department in Wilmington to report his concerns of children endangerment and sexual exploitation. Giuliani told Just the News that former New York Police Department commissioner Bernard Kerik joined him when he delivered photographs and text messages to the New Castle County Police Department. “I told them other details about what appears to be an inappropriate sexual relationship,” he said in an interview. “They told me it would be investigated.”

Law enforcement officials in Delaware told Just the News that Giuliani’s concerns have been forwarded to the state Department of Justice. A spokesman for New Castle County police referred reporters to the state Justice Department. A spokesman for the state agency did not immediately return a call or email seeking comment. A senior federal law enforcement official told Just the News on Tuesday night that the FBI is in possession of the laptop and that the bureau concurs with Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe’s assessment that the laptop is not part of Russian intelligence operation, as some Democrats have alleged. That official declined to discuss the contents of the laptop.

[..] Giuliani said the materials he gleaned from the controversial laptop — which a Delaware computer shop owner alleges was left with him by Hunter Biden — gave him concern for the welfare of a minor girl. Giuliani declined to identify the alleged minor victim or who was in the photos. “There are many texts which I gave to them that point out that family was concerned about the safety of the child,” Giuliani said. “I will tell you the evidence I gave them states it was reported to Joe Biden. What did he do about it?“Giuliani dismissed suggestions that filing a police report as Trump’s private attorney two weeks before Election Day should be deemed political. “The conduct falls under the mandatory reporting requirements for child endangerment,” Giuliani said. “If I was the U.S. attorney or the mayor or Bernie was still the commissioner, it would have been a crime for us not to report what we had.”

Giuliani

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After they’ve had it for a year?! Yeah, that should work…

What the FBI is investigating is not the contents of the emails, but the RussiaRussia claims the Dems launched.

Is Giuliani’s report now also with the FBI?

Hunter Biden’s Laptop Probe Referred to FBI, Delaware State Police Say (NW)

The Delaware state police have passed on an inquiry concerning the laptop purportedly belonging to Democratic Presidential Nominee Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, to the FBI.On Tuesday, President Donald Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani told Newsmax that he handed over the laptop that he claims belongs to Hunter Biden to the Delaware state police on Monday. “In light of ongoing questions about the credibility of these claims and multiple reports that the FBI is investigating their veracity, law enforcement is referring this matter to the FBI,” a Delaware State Police spokesperson told Newsweek. The Delaware State Police also confirmed that they are not in possession of the laptop.


Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff accused each other of politicizing intelligence on Monday over emails allegedly found on the laptop. More than 50 former senior intelligence officials signed a letter on Monday detailing their belief that the laptop “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” After Schiff called revelations stemming from the laptop a Kremlin “smear” campaign, Ratcliffe on Monday insisted that the laptop “is not part of some Russian disinformation campaign.”

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Some good points.

10 Tea Leaves Pointing To ‘Surprise’ Trump Victory (Del Beccaro)

1. Pennsylvania Voter Registration. American presidential elections are decided by the Electoral College as President Trump and Joe Biden both know. In 2016, Pennsylvania and its 20 Electoral College votes were key to President Trump’s victory. He won Pennsylvania by a slim 44,292 votes out of nearly 6 million. That November, the Democrats had nearly a 900,000 voter registration advantage over the Republicans. That number is now down to a 700,000 registration advantage and has narrowed to 100,000 in the last year.

2. Florida, too. In 2008, Democrats held nearly a 700,000 thousand voter registration advantage and Barack Obama carried the state by 236,148 votes. By 2012 that advantage slipped to 558,272 registrations and Obama won there by 74,309 votes. In 2016, Democrats had a 327,483 registration advantage and Trump carried the state by 112,991 votes. Now the Democrats’ voter registration advantage is down nearly 200,000 to just a 134,242 thousand lead, which Politico called a “historic low.”

3. Latinos for Trump. Trump could well receive a historic level of support from Latino Voters in 2020. In Florida, a NBC/Marist poll had Trump leading among Latinos 50% to 46% over Biden, whereas, in 2016, Hillary won among Latinos in Florida 62% to 35%. That would be a 15% swing toward Trump if it held up on Election Day. After the first debate between Biden and Trump, a Telemundo poll showed Trump winning the debate overwhelmingly 66% to 34%. Snap media polls tend to reflect the sentiment of their viewers. Thus, it is no surprise that CNN viewers said Biden won the debate. The fact that Telemundo viewers decisively picked Trump as the winner, along with polls like those cited above in Florida, portend Trump getting the highest ever Latino support of any Republican presidential candidate.

4. African Americans For Trump. In September, according to polling done by Rasmussen, Trump’s approval rating among African Americans reached 45%. Keep in mind that President Trump only received 8% of the Black vote in 2016. If Trump received just 16% of the Black vote this November, let alone an even higher number, that would all but secure states like Michigan for Trump.

5. Biden the Tax Increaser. Candidates who promise tax increases, or have a history of supporting tax increases, tend to lose versus those pushing for tax cuts. President Jimmy Carter lost to challenger Ronald Reagan, Walter Mondale lost to President Reagan, Michael Dukakis lost to George H.W. Bush 41 and then 41 lost his reelection after his tax increase became a reality. George W. Bush beat Al Gore and then John Kerry. Barack Obama promised to reduce taxes and he beat John McCain who was not a tax cutter. Obviously, President Trump offered tax cuts while running against, and beating, Hillary Clinton. Joe Biden, on the other hand, is pushing for the largest tax increase in history.

6. Enthusiasm Matters. As the New York Post has reported, “just 46 percent of Biden voters in a recent Pew poll said that they strongly support him, compared to 66 percent of Trump’s base.” That is a 20 gap. In 2016, Trump had only a 13 point gap over Hillary. That increase of 7% bodes well for Trump, not Biden.

7. Early Voting in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Ohio. National polling from Pew Research indicates that “55% of voters who plan to cast their ballot in person before Election Day support Biden, compared to 40% who support President Trump.” However, in the key battleground states of Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin the early voting indicates that “registered Republicans are returning ballots at about the same rate as registered Democrats.” The parties are even in Michigan, Democrats up 2% in Wisconsin and the Republicans up 2% in Ohio.

8. American Voters Are More Satisfied in 2020 than they were in 2016. A new Gallup poll shows that 56% of Americans say they are better off now than they were four years ago. That could well be the telling in this case given that just four years ago marked the end of the Biden vice presidency. Why would voters return to Biden if they are happier now than when he was in office?

9. Party Identification. According to Gallup, by the end of September, when the polling firm asked voters this question, “In politics, as of today, do you consider yourself a Republican, a Democrat or an independent?” the answer came back as follows: 28% said Republican, 27% said Democrat and 42% said independent. That is meaningful because many of the polls giving Biden the lead appear to be sampling more Democrats than Republicans – sometimes by a wide margin. Also, in 2016, Gallup had Democrats up 32% to 27% but, as we know, Trump still won.

10. Voters Think Trump Will Win. In the Trump era, there has been a lot of talk about whether Trump supporters feel free to tell pollsters that they are supporting the president’s reelection. Some experts point to polls asking voters who they believe will win the election to be a truer indication of candidate support. Once again this bodes well for President Trump as a “Gallup poll shows only 40% of Americans think Biden will win the election; 56% predict a Trump victory.”

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Good comparison.

Trump: Hunter Emails No Russian Plot, Tulsi Gabbard No ‘Russian Asset’ (RT)

Donald Trump has compared Rep. Adam Schiff’s claim that Hunter Biden’s alleged leaked emails are part of a Russian disinformation plot to Hillary Clinton calling Democrat Tulsi Gabbard a “Russian asset” similarly without evidence.During a Tuesday Fox News interview, Trump addressed Schiff’s evidence-free claim that the Hunter Biden email leaks, which detail his alleged dealings in Ukraine and China, were coming “from the Kremlin.” The leaks were published by the New York Post last week. “It’s just crazy,” Trump said of the theory, referring to the Democratic congressman as “Shifty Schiff” and a “sick” man, who was purposefully obfuscating the issue.


“Thank god we have John Ratcliffe,” Trump added, pointing out that the director of national intelligence refuted the speculation on Monday. During his own sit down with Fox, DNI Ratcliffe said that there was “no intelligence” to support Schiff’s position, and accused the politician of “politicizing” intelligence. The president recalled similar accusations made by his failed 2016 rival Hillary Clinton, who previously implied that the Green Party’s former nominee Jill Stein and Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard were “Russian assets.” “This was like Tulsi Gabbard and Jill Stein, when Hillary Clinton said it about them… that they were agents of Russia,” Trump noted, adding, “They were not agents of Russia, they never spoke to anybody from Russia.”

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13 days left to go.

Secret Service Travel Logs Match Details in Alleged Hunter Biden Emails (ET)

Secret Service logs obtained earlier this year by Senate investigators include dates and locations matching those discussed in the emails allegedly belonging to Hunter Biden, the son of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.The alignment of the dates in the emails and the Secret Service protective detail logs is significant because the authenticity of the emails, first published by the New York Post last week, is the subject of heated debate. The FBI, which purportedly obtained Hunter Biden’s laptop in December last year, has not yet officially confirmed that it is in possession of the device and whether the emails are genuine.

In one alleged email, written after midnight on April 13, 2014, Hunter Biden wrote to Devon Archer, his business partner, that he will be traveling to Houston the next day. Secret Service logs obtained by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs show a trip by Biden on April 13-14, 2014. In another alleged email, Vadim Pozharskyi, a top executive from Ukrainian gas firm Burisma, wrote to Biden and Archer on May 12, 2014: “Following our talks during the visit to the Como Lake and our further discussions, I would like to bring the following situation to your attention.” While the email doesn’t cite a date for the trip, Secret Service logs include a travel entry for Biden on April 3-6, 2014.

In another alleged email, Archer wrote on May 12, 2014, that he is with Biden in Doha, Qatar. Secret Service records include a trip by Biden to Doha, Qatar, on May 11-14, 2014. The alignment in dates and location was first spotted by the staff of the Senate Homeland Security and Finance committees. Notably, some of the alleged Hunter Biden emails included discussions of Biden’s travel after he allegedly declined a Secret Service detail. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) penned a letter to the director of the Secret Service on Oct. 20 asking for records after the date when Biden purportedly stopped receiving a Secret Service detail.

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And associates.

Hunter Biden Arranged White House Meeting for Elite Chinese Group (NR)

In November 2011, an elite group of Chinese Communist Party members and billionaire cronies of the repressive regime in Beijing secured a meeting in the White House, said to be with Vice President Biden and other Obama administration officials, through Hunter Biden’s associates. News of the meeting has been broken by Peter Schweizer and Seamus Bruner. Schweizer, who has spent years tracking Washington’s web of money, influence and access, is the author most recently of Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends, which focuses on the Biden family — among other intriguing money trails on both sides of the political aisle. Schweizer and Bruner have obtained the cooperation of Hunter Biden’s former business partner, Bevan Cooney, who is serving a federal prison sentence for a fraud scheme.

Another Hunter Biden business partner, Devon Archer, was also convicted (and has had his conviction reinstated by the Second Circuit federal appeals court after a trial judge in the Southern District of New York set it aside). Hunter Biden was featured in the evidence but not charged. Cooney has given the investigative journalists access to his email account, which contains years of correspondence with Biden, Archer, and others. The authors have begun writing reports published at Breitbart, and Schweizer has also been interviewed about it on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program. Obviously, those are very pro-Trump venues, so it is worth noting that solid reporting Schweizer did on the Clinton Foundation (the subject of his book Clinton Cash) was closely examined and relied on by the New York Times.

[..] Based on Cooney’s emails, the authors report that in November 2011, Hunter Biden’s business associates arranged meetings at the Obama White House for a delegation of the “China Entrepreneur Club.” Established in 2006, the CEC is led by high officials of the Chinese Communist Party, some government officials (including diplomats), and billionaire business executives with close ties to the regime. This visit to the White House is said to have included a meeting with then–Vice President Biden. In discussions among themselves, Hunter Biden’s associates reportedly made it clear that they anticipated cashing in on business prospects that were expected to arise from providing the Chinese contingent with high-level access to the Obama administration.

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Balding

US Schools Report $6.5 Billion in Undisclosed Foreign Gifts and Contracts (ET)

American Universities failed to report $6.5 billion in foreign gifts and contracts, an investigation by the Department of Education found. Federal law requires schools to disclose substantial foreign gifts and contracts to the Department of Education (DOE) twice a year. Many have for years failed to do so, while others severely underreported the income. The deluge of the financial disclosures poured in as the department opened investigations into 12 elite universities. Universities reported receiving a total of more than $19.6 billion in foreign gifts and contracts from 2014 to 2020, including nearly $1.5 billion from China, almost $3.1 billion from Qatar, and more than $1.1 billion from Saudi Arabia, according to historical DOE data and most recent figures posted on its new online reporting portal.

Carnegie Mellon University reported receiving almost $1.61 billion in foreign gifts and contracts, the most of any university. Harvard tops the list in terms of total funds received from China, reporting nearly $116 million. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos unveiled the findings of the investigation at an event on Oct. 20, alongside officials from the Justice Department and the State Department. “The threat is real, so we took action to make sure the public is afforded the transparency the law requires,” DeVos said. “We found pervasive noncompliance by higher-ed institutions and significant foreign entanglement with America’s colleges and universities.”

The vast majority of the foreign funds went to America’s largest and most prestigious universities, which have received billions of dollars through a bevy of intermediaries, according to a report released by the DOE on Oct. 20. All of the institutions involved are in the meantime dependent on tens of billions of U.S. taxpayer subsidies while operating largely “divorced from any sense of obligation to our taxpayers or concern for our American national interests, security, or values,” the DOE report states. For the first half of 2020 alone, U.S. universities retroactively reported $2 billion in foreign gifts and contracts. One school, which isn’t identified in the report, failed to report $760 million in foreign funding. University officials told the DOE they were “dumbfounded” by the reporting error. Another unnamed school failed to report $1.2 billion in foreign gifts and contracts.

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“82% of senior citizens think that this is the most important presidential election of their lifetime. Think about that.”

No, Our Democracy And Freedom Are Not On The Line This Election (Rasmussen)

One of the things that never fails to amaze me as a pollster is the absolute intensity that accompanies the final weeks of a presidential campaign. A poll I conducted recently for HealthInsurance.com found that 82% of senior citizens think that this is the most important presidential election of their lifetime. Think about that. That’s what senior citizens are saying. These are voters who were around when the Berlin Wall went up and the Cold War was being fought in a space race. The civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, Woodstock and Watergate were part of their life experience. And yet, now, they say this year — 2020 — is the most important presidential election of their lifetime.

Of course, you don’t need a poll to sense the intensity that some activists and voters bring to the election season. Supporters of both President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden regularly assert that the nation will never recover if the other side wins. Our democracy or our freedom will be lost. This shouldn’t surprise me. It happens every four years. But it catches me off guard because I don’t agree with the assessment. America will survive another four years of Donald Trump as president or the first four years of Joe Biden as president. There will be differences, of course, because elections matter. They have consequences. But it’s important to remember that politicians aren’t nearly as important as they think they are. They don’t determine the nation’s agenda or decide the fate of the nation.

The culture leads and the politicians lag behind. It’s also important to remember that American society isn’t nearly as polarized as American politics. That’s the good news. Still, it seems like a good time to review the data and assess where we are as Election 2020 draws to a close. The place to start is with a number that partisan activists find impossible to believe. My polling shows that 14% of voters — 1 out of 7 — are not fully certain how they will vote. That number includes some who currently support Trump or Biden but could change their mind. It also includes some who are currently leaning towards a third-party candidate. Historically, many such voters end up deciding at the last minute to reluctantly vote for one of the major party candidates. And, there are a few who just don’t like the choice before them.

In a sense, this group of uncommitted voters might best be described as voters who want both Trump and Biden to lose. While most are unlikely to change their mind, the possibility remains that something might happen to cause a late break in either direction. As a result, with two weeks to go, it’s best to consider a range of possibilities. Biden and the Democrats are ahead at the moment, but victory is not assured. I’ll start with the best-case scenario for the Republicans. If the race gets a bit tighter, Election 2020 will be a toss-up with the presidency determined by a few key states — places like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. It will seem like four years ago with one big exception: This time around, extensive mail-in voting means we wouldn’t know the winner for weeks. And, we also wouldn’t know who controls the Senate, the results in a couple dozen House races, and who has control of a few state legislatures.

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I thought they would only agree on going to war.

DOJ Antitrust Lawsuit Against Google Draws Bipartisan Praise (ET)

Lawmakers in the House and Senate praised a Department of Justice (DOJ) lawsuit against Google over allegations that the tech giant used its power to preserve its monopoly. “Today’s lawsuit is the most important antitrust case in a generation,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) said in a statement after the filing. “Google and its fellow Big Tech monopolists exercise unprecedented power over the lives of ordinary Americans, controlling everything from the news we read to the security of our most personal information. And Google in particular has gathered and maintained that power through illegal means.” The lawsuit drew bipartisan support. House Antitrust Subcommittee Chairman David N. Cicilline (D-R.I.) said in a statement that the lawsuit was “long overdue.”

“The Subcommittee’s investigation uncovered extensive evidence showing that Google maintained and extended its monopoly to harm competition,” he said in a statement. “It is critical that the Justice Department’s lawsuit focuses on Google’s monopolization of search and search advertising, while also targeting the anti-competitive business practices Google is using to leverage this monopoly into other areas, such as maps, browsers, video, and voice assistants.” Cicilline said in early October in a House antitrust subcommittee that Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple all wield monopoly power. “It’s Google’s business model that is the problem,” he said. “Google evolved from a turnstile to the rest of the web to a walled garden that increasingly keeps users within its sights.”

The suit, filed in a Washington federal court, asserts that Google, a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., has tried to maintain its status as a gatekeeper to the Internet by using a number of interlocking businesses to shut out competitors, thereby securing itself as a monopoly. The DOJ claimed the Silicon Valley firm uses billions of dollars from its own advertisements to pay carriers, browsers, phone companies, and other entities to maintain Google as a default search engine. “Absent a court order, Google will continue executing its anticompetitive strategy, crippling the competitive process, reducing consumer choice, and stifling innovation. Google is now the unchallenged gateway to the internet for billions of users worldwide,” the DOJ lawsuit alleged, resulting in negative consequences for advertisers, consumers, and upstart companies that “cannot emerge from Google’s long shadow.”

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“One way or another, either voluntarily or pursuant to subpoena, they will testify and they will testify before the election,” Cruz said.”

Senate Panel Delays Vote To Subpoena Twitter, Facebook CEOs (Pol.)

The Senate Judiciary Committee on Monday postponed plans to vote on subpoenas to compel the CEOs of Twitter and Facebook to testify on allegations of anti-conservative bias after some panel Republicans expressed reservation about the maneuver. President Donald Trump and his Republican allies have scorched the two social media companies in recent days over their handling of disputed New York Post reports alleging ties between Joe Biden and his son’s business interests. GOP Judiciary leaders had announced plans to hold a markup Tuesday on whether to subpoena Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to testify on allegations the company’s decisions on user posts stifle conservative viewpoints, which Twitter denies. Chair Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) later said the planned vote would also target Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

The panel announced Monday it will now consider whether to authorize the subpoenas at a high-profile executive session Thursday where it is separately expected to approve Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett. The committee said in a statement it will continue to negotiate with the companies “to allow for voluntary testimony” by the CEOs, but that if an agreement is not reached the panel will move ahead with a vote on the subpoenas “at a date to be determined.” The subpoenas would require the tech moguls to testify on the alleged “suppression and/or censorship” of the New York Post reporting and on “any other content moderation policies, practices, or actions that may interfere with or influence elections for federal office,” according to a document released by the committee Monday.

Judiciary staff has indicated internally that plans for the vote were delayed in part due to some GOP panel members wavering on whether to support the action, according to one Senate GOP aide, who spoke anonymously to discuss private negotiations. Republican officials have also expressed trepidation about how quickly the committee has moved to vote on the subpoenas, the aide said. A committee spokesperson did not immediately offer comment on the matter. But they’re not off the hook yet: Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who chairs Judiciary’s Subcommittee on the Constitution, told reporters he’s expecting the committee to hear testimony from both Dorsey and Zuckerberg “shortly” whether they come willingly or not. “One way or another, either voluntarily or pursuant to subpoena, they will testify and they will testify before the election,” Cruz said.

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“But we didn’t have problems circulating leaked Trump tax or any other s–t surrounding Trump or COVID.”

Facebook Workers ‘Ashamed’ By Censorship Of Hunter Files Reporting (NYP)

“Facebook is almost an arm of the Democratic Party — an arm of the far-left wing of the Democratic Party.” So said the former Facebook insider as we sat down for an interview at a Midtown restaurant Friday afternoon.A gloomy rain had left the joint deserted, yet the man across the table from me spoke in hushed tones and looked over his shoulder in between remarks for fear of retaliation. Yet he felt he had to speak out, because staffers are “intentionally trying to swing people further to the left,” as he had put it in an e-mail requesting the meeting. I already knew that, of course. It was a Facebook communications manager, Andy Stone, who on Thursday announced the firm was reducing circulation of The Post’s still-undisputed reporting on the Hunter Files — an employee who happened to work for Democratic lawmakers before joining the tech giant.

What the Facebook insider wanted to impress upon me, however, was how Facebook’s partisan tilt is common knowledge inside the firm.He had the secret chats to prove it. Facebook employees who wish to speak freely take to Blind, an anonymous social network for the tech industry, where workers at major firms like Uber, Google, Twitter and the like trade gossip and occasionally blow the whistle on malfeasance. To gain access to the Facebook network on Blind, a user must sign up using his or her Facebook work e-mail address. The posters, in other words, are verified Facebook employees (and ex-employees in a few cases). So what do Facebook workers think about the company’s handling of our story? The comments speak for themselves: “[Facebook] employees want Trump to lose,” wrote one user. “If that means rigging [the platform] against him, they don’t care.”


The post garnered 29 “likes” from other employees. “I was shocked that Facebook did this,” said another. “We kinda called [brought] this on ourselves. So much for ‘we are not the arbiters of truth.’ ” That comment garnered 15 “likes.” Still other comments: “Facebook bets that Biden wins the election. So an effort to jump on the bandwagon.” “Yeah this one is unconscionable. I’m ashamed.” “Imagine if we censored some leaked Trump stuff. It would be the #1 upvoted question tomorrow for Mark [Zuckerberg company-wide]’s Q&A.” Another employee wrote a detailed critique: “Why do people hate Facebook everywhere? Here’s one reason. Freaking one-sided decision. The comms Twitter account [Andy Stone’s] was definitely left-leaning, and it’s a talking point, as well. No proper response to comms feedback. Don’t want to be the what-if person. But we didn’t have problems circulating leaked Trump tax or any other s–t surrounding Trump or COVID.”

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AI.

Meet Your -Chinese- Facebook Censors (Ahmari)

China is one of the most censorious societies on earth. So what better place for ≠Facebook to recruit social-media censors? There are at least half a dozen “Chinese nationals who are working on censorship,” a former Facebook insider told me last week. “So at some point, they [Facebook bosses] thought, ‘Hey, we’re going to get them H-1B visas so they can do this work.’ ”The insider shared an internal directory of the team that does much of this work. It’s called Hate-Speech Engineering (George Orwell, call your office), and most of its members are based at Facebook’s offices in Seattle. Many have Ph.D.s, and their work is extremely complex, involving machine learning — teaching “computers how to learn and act without being explicitly programmed,” as the techy Web site DeepAI.org puts it.

When it comes to censorship on social media, that means “teaching” the Facebook code so certain content ends up at the top of your newsfeed, a feat that earns the firm’s software wizards discretionary bonuses, per the ex-insider. It also means making sure other content “shows up dead-last.”Like, say, a New York Post report on the Biden dynasty’s dealings with Chinese companies.To illustrate the mechanics, the insider took me as his typical Facebook user: “They take what Sohrab sees, and then they throw the newsfeed list into a machine-learning algorithm and neural networks that determine the ranking of the items.” Facebook engineers test hundreds of different iterations of the rankings to shape an optimal outcome — and root out what bosses call “borderline content.”

It all makes for perhaps the most chillingly sophisticated censorship mechanism in human history. “What they don’t do is ban a specific pro-Trump hashtag,” says the ex-insider. Instead, “content that is a little too conservative, they will down-rank. You can’t tell it’s censored.”

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They don’t appear to know why.

Studies Point To Big Drop In COVID-19 Death Rates (NPR)

Two new peer-reviewed studies are showing a sharp drop in mortality among hospitalized COVID-19 patients. The drop is seen in all groups, including older patients and those with underlying conditions, suggesting that physicians are getting better at helping patients survive their illness. “We find that the death rate has gone down substantially,” says Leora Horwitz, a doctor who studies population health at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine and an author on one of the studies, which looked at thousands of patients from March to August. The study, which was of a single health system, finds that mortality has dropped among hospitalized patients by 18 percentage points since the pandemic began. Patients in the study had a 25.6% chance of dying at the start of the pandemic; they now have a 7.6% chance.

That’s a big improvement, but 7.6% is still a high risk compared with other diseases, and Horwitz and other researchers caution that COVID-19 remains dangerous. The death rate “is still higher than many infectious diseases, including the flu,” Horwitz says. And those who recover can suffer complications for months or even longer. “It still has the potential to be very harmful in terms of long-term consequences for many people.” Studying changes in death rate is tricky because although the overall U.S. death rate for COVID-19 seems to be dropping, the drop coincides with a change in whom the disease is sickening. “The people who are getting hospitalized now tend to be much younger, tend to have fewer other diseases and tend to be less frail than people who were hospitalized in the early days of the epidemic,” Horwitz says.

So have death rates dropped because of improvements in treatments? Or is it because of the change in who’s getting sick? To find out, Horwitz and her colleagues looked at more than 5,000 hospitalizations in the NYU Langone Health system between March and August. They adjusted for factors including age and other diseases, such as diabetes, to rule out the possibility that the numbers had dropped only because younger, healthier people were getting diagnosed. They found that death rates dropped for all groups, even older patients by 18 percentage points on average.

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How embarrassing for the West if this works.

Moscow Will Begin Mass Vaccination Against COVID19 In December (RT)

Moscow will receive its first large batches of the coronavirus vaccine in November, and mass vaccination in the Russian capital will begin in December and January, according to its Mayor Sergey Sobyanin. Sobyanin, who has run Europe’s largest city since 2010, believes that mass vaccination will be “the final victory over the pandemic.” Writing on his blog, the mayor explained that the high number of infections in Moscow is due to the city’s huge population and the significant number of tests being conducted. On Monday, confirmed cases in the capital hit 367,629, a quarter of the country’s overall number (1,415,316), despite officially having around only eight percent of the population.

In the same blog post, Sobyanin highlighted that he does not yet see a necessity to introduce “extreme” measures in the city, such as a curfew and a ban on movement, but did not rule out other less stringent measures. The main aim is to interrupt the spread of the infection, while not affecting the economy or depriving people of work, he wrote. “Ultimately, we are not making a choice between good and bad,” the mayor said. “All decisions are bad. We have to choose the lesser of two evils. But if we do nothing today, then tomorrow we will have to take tougher, more radical, and more unpleasant measures.” Last week, the capital introduced extra restrictions regarding nightlife, with those attending bars and clubs after midnight being forced to scan a QR code for the purpose of track-and-trace.

Moscow is currently hosting the third phase trial of the country’s homegrown Covid-19 vaccine, called Sputnik V. The mass post-registration testing of the vaccine, which was produced by the city’s Gamaleya Institute, involves 40,000 volunteers – a quarter of whom will receive a placebo.

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“I’m quite pessimistic in the days ahead” – on the likelihood of a spike in coronavirus infections as people spend more time indoors this winter, exacerbated by a lack of systematic testing.”

Nassim Taleb On Capitalism, Entrepreneurs, And The Pandemic (BI)

1. “There are two kinds of people. People who when they hear that there’s a problem, they go into their basement, start crying, have an emotional support group, do some praying, and wait for the government to save them. Others who take their fate in their own hands and try to say, ‘Hey, life gave me a lemon, let me make lemonade out of it'” – on the best way to react to a crisis. 2. “There are ways you can be ahead. You just have to fight” – on the subject of adapting to the pandemic. Taleb gave the example of a gym owner pivoting to installing home gyms, and a waiter making more money as a delivery driver.

3. “Capitalism is a wonderful mechanism to convert individual human greed into collective virtue.” 4. “Governments are good at doing things that look important but are not necessarily effective.” 5. “We’re spending $1 trillion on fighting illusory enemies with very complex nuclear stuff, but you can’t do something as basic as test people when they want to board a plane” – criticizing the government response to the pandemic. 6. “I’m quite pessimistic in the days ahead” – on the likelihood of a spike in coronavirus infections as people spend more time indoors this winter, exacerbated by a lack of systematic testing.

7. “Millennials think that joining an NGO is a great way to save the world. I say no. Start a company, that’s how you improve mankind. We did not pull 2 billion people out of poverty thanks to NGOs and bureaucrats, we pulled them out thanks to capitalism, by generating economic growth.” 8. “A soldier can fail without any shame to the country. We should interpret the failure of entrepreneurs as something that is helping the planet” – on the need to encourage entrepreneurs and remove the stigma of failure.

Read more …

 

 

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Matriarch

 

 

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Sep 042020
 
 September 4, 2020  Posted by at 9:35 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  13 Responses »


Robert Capa Catholic church between bricks from the destroyed Jewish Ghetto Warsaw, Poland 1948

 

Bipartisan Washington Insiders Plan for Chaos if Trump Wins Election (Webb)
Trump: Americans Who Died in War Are ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers’ (Atl.)
The Trump Era Sucks and Needs to Be Over (Matt Taibbi)
If Dems Win In 2020, It’s Virtually Impossible For GOP Ever To Win Again (PJW)
Cuomo Admin Accused Of Stonewalling Over COVID19 Nursing Home Deaths (NYP)
DOJ Conducting “Very Big” Voter Fraud Investigations – Barr (ET)
DOJ To File Antitrust Charges Against Google Within Weeks (ZH)
In the Worst of Times, the Billionaire Elite Plunder Working Class America (CP)
US Court: NSA Mass Surveillance Program Exposed By Snowden Was Illegal (DW)
Capitalism Isn’t Working. Here’s An Alternative (Varoufakis)
Eulogy to David Graeber (Steve Keen)

 

 

60 days to go till November 3 and hunting season is open. Smear’s the word. It’ll be so ugly many people will just turn away in disgust. Many others will keep staring at it the way people stare at traffic accidents.

 

 

Bradykinin give us even more incentive to roll out rapid tests, HCQ, zinc, vitamin D in huge quantities. What are we waiting for?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Taleb and Bar-Yam

 

 

Whitney Webb is one of multiple voices discussing the Transition Integrity Project (TIP). Bipartisan in this case means: anti-Trump. Basically, all these war scenarios claim that if Biden doesn’t win big, there’ll be war in the streets. They sort of openly advocate for that.

Bipartisan Washington Insiders Plan for Chaos if Trump Wins Election (Webb)

A group of Democratic Party insiders and former Obama and Clinton era officials as well as a cadre of “Never Trump” neoconservative Republicans have spent the past few months conducting simulations and “war games” regarding different 2020 election “doomsday” scenarios. Per several media reports on the group, called the Transition Integrity Project (TIP), they justify these exercises as specifically preparing for a scenario where President Trump loses the 2020 election and refuses to leave office, potentially resulting in a constitutional crisis. However, according to TIP’s own documents, even their simulations involving a “clear win” for Trump in the upcoming election resulted in a constitutional crisis, as they predicted that the Biden campaign would make bold moves aimed at securing the presidency, regardless of the election result.

This is particularly troubling given that TIP has considerable ties to the Obama administration, where Biden served as Vice President, as well as several groups that are adamantly pro-Biden in addition to the Biden campaign itself. Indeed, the fact that a group of openly pro-Biden Washington insiders and former government officials have gamed out scenarios for possible election outcomes and their aftermath, all of which either ended with Biden becoming president or a constitutional crisis, suggest that powerful forces influencing the Biden campaign are pushing the former Vice President to refuse to concede the election even if he loses. This, of course, gravely undercuts the TIP’s claim to be ensuring “integrity” in the presidential transition process and instead suggests that the group is openly planning on how to ensure that Trump leaves office regardless of the result or to manufacture the very constitutional crisis they claim to be preventing through their simulations.

Such concerns are only magnified by the recent claims made by the 2016 Democratic presidential candidate and former Secretary of State under Obama, Hillary Clinton, that Biden “should not concede under any circumstances.” “I think this is going to drag out, and eventually I do believe he will win if we don’t give an inch, and if we are as focused and relentless as the other side is,” Clinton continued during an interview with Showtime a little over a week ago. The results of the TIP’s simulations notably echo Clinton’s claims that Biden will “eventually” win if the process to determine the election outcome is “dragged out.”

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The for now (but don’t hold your breath on that one) ultimate smear piece, based exclusively on anonymous sources. All it says has been denied by not anonymous sources, who were actually present, like Trump himself, and Sarah Sanders, but that’s not the point. The point is smear; that’s how this will be fought.

Trump: Americans Who Died in War Are ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers’ (Atl.)

Trump remained fixated on McCain, one of the few prominent Republicans to continue criticizing him after he won the nomination. When McCain died, in August 2018, Trump told his senior staff, according to three sources with direct knowledge of this event, “We’re not going to support that loser’s funeral,” and he became furious, according to witnesses, when he saw flags lowered to half-staff. “What the fuck are we doing that for? Guy was a fucking loser,” the president told aides. Trump was not invited to McCain’s funeral.

(These sources, and others quoted in this article, spoke on condition of anonymity. The White House did not return earlier calls for comment, but Alyssa Farah, a White House spokesperson, emailed me this statement shortly after this story was posted: “This report is false. President Trump holds the military in the highest regard. He’s demonstrated his commitment to them at every turn: delivering on his promise to give our troops a much needed pay raise, increasing military spending, signing critical veterans reforms, and supporting military spouses. This has no basis in fact.”)

[..] On Memorial Day 2017, Trump visited Arlington National Cemetery, a short drive from the White House. He was accompanied on this visit by John Kelly, who was then the secretary of homeland security, and who would, a short time later, be named the White House chief of staff. The two men were set to visit Section 60, the 14-acre area of the cemetery that is the burial ground for those killed in America’s most recent wars. Kelly’s son Robert is buried in Section 60. A first lieutenant in the Marine Corps, Robert Kelly was killed in 2010 in Afghanistan. He was 29. Trump was meant, on this visit, to join John Kelly in paying respects at his son’s grave, and to comfort the families of other fallen service members.

But according to sources with knowledge of this visit, Trump, while standing by Robert Kelly’s grave, turned directly to his father and said, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?” Kelly (who declined to comment for this story) initially believed, people close to him said, that Trump was making a ham-handed reference to the selflessness of America’s all-volunteer force. But later he came to realize that Trump simply does not understand non-transactional life choices. “He can’t fathom the idea of doing something for someone other than himself,” one of Kelly’s friends, a retired four-star general, told me. “He just thinks that anyone who does anything when there’s no direct personal gain to be had is a sucker. There’s no money in serving the nation.”

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Would things be better if Trump were gone? The only alternative is having Hillary and Pelosi and Schiff in charge. Is that an improvement?

The Trump Era Sucks and Needs to Be Over (Matt Taibbi)

The question, “What is Trump thinking?” is the wrong one. He’s not thinking, he’s selling. What’s he selling? Whatever pops into his head. The beauty of politics from his point of view, compared to every other damn thing he’s sold in his life — steaks, ties, pillows, college degrees, chandeliers, hotels, condominiums, wine, eyeglasses, deodorant, perfume (SUCCESS by Trump!), mattresses, etc. — is that there’s no product. The pitch is the product, and you can give different pitches to different people and they all buy. In 2016 Trump reeled in the nativist loons and rage cases with his opening rants about walls and mass deportations, then slowly clawed his numbers up with the rest of the party with his “softening” routine.

Each demographic probably came away convinced he was lying to the other, while the truth was probably more that he was lying to all of them. Obviously there are real-world consequences to courting the lowest common denominator instincts in people, but to Trump speeches aren’t moral acts in themselves, they’re just “words that he is saying,” as long-ago spokesperson Katrina Pierson put it. In this sense the Republican Party’s 2020 platform is genius: there isn’t one, just a commitment to “enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda,” meaning whatever Trump says at any given moment. If one can pull back enough from the fact that this impacts our actual lives, it’s hard not to admire the breathtaking amorality of this, as one might admire a simple malevolent organism like a virus or liver fluke.

Trump blew through the Republican primaries in 2015-2016. His opponents, a slate of mannequins hired by energy companies and weapons contractors to be pretend-patriots and protectors of “family values,” had no answer for his insults and offer-everything-to-everyone tactics. Like most politicians, they’d been protected their whole lives by donors, party hacks, and pundits who’d turned campaigns into a club system designed to insulate paid lackeys from challenges to their phony gravitas. Trump had no institutional loyalty to the club, shat all over it in addition to its silly frontmen, and walked to the nomination.

[..] The paradox ensnaring America since November, 2016 is that Trump never intended to govern, while his opponents never intended to let him try. In an alternate universe where a post-election Donald had enough self-awareness to admit he was out of his depth, and the D.C. establishment agreed to recognize his administration as legitimate for appearances’ sake, Trump might have escaped four years with the profile of a conventionally crappy president, or perhaps a few notches below that — way below average, maybe, but survivable. Instead it was decided even before he was elected that admitting the president was the president was “normalizing” him. Normally no news is good news, and the anchorman is encouraged to smile on a day without war, earthquakes, terror attacks, or stock market crashes.

Under Trump it became taboo to have a slow news day. A lack of an emergency was a failure of reporting, since Trump’s very presence in office was crisis.

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The ruling class.

If Dems Win In 2020, It’s Virtually Impossible For GOP Ever To Win Again (PJW)

Professor Angelo M. Codevilla warns that if the Democrats win the 2020 elections, it would be “virtually impossible for conservatives ever to win again.” Codevilla, who is professor emeritus of International Relations at Boston University, made the prediction in a review published by the Claremont Review of Books for Michael Anton’s new book The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return. The book makes the argument that although some Americans may be disappointed in Trump’s performance, voting for him again is absolutely crucial for the republic’s survival because “this country’s ruling class would use control of the presidency to hurt us in our private and public lives for having dared to reject their mastery.” Importing non-citizens who are then given the vote, as well as institutionalizing elections by mail, which would give those who count the votes the power, would ‘guarantee disaster’ for the country, according to Codevilla.


He then issues a stark warning; It’s game over permanently for Republicans if Trump loses in 2020. “Should the Democrats win, the ruling Left – which includes just about everyone who controls American government and society’s commanding heights – is ready, willing, and eager to implement plans that would make it virtually impossible for conservatives ever to win national elections again,” writes Codevilla. The professor also cautions that Democrats’ stated refusal to concede to Donald Trump, which was recently amplified by Hillary Clinton, could manifest itself in “one or more blue state governors to refuse to certify that state’s electors to the Electoral College, so as to prevent the college from recording a majority of votes for the winner.” This threatens to set off a “systemic crisis” that could lead to a civil war “less like the American Civil War of the 19th century and more like the horror that bled Spain in the 20th.”

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It’ll be ready on November 5th. No, the joke is not lost on us. That’s two whole months for what nursing homes are by law obliged to tally on a daily basis. It shouldn’t even take two hours.

Cuomo Admin Accused Of Stonewalling Over COVID19 Nursing Home Deaths (NYP)

A government watchdog group is accusing Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration of sitting on data that would provide the full death tally of nursing home residents from the coronavirus. The Empire Center for Public Policy accuses the state Health Department of stalling on compliance with a Freedom of Information Law request seeking the information. Currently, New York’s tally of nursing home fatalities only counts those residents who died or are presumed to have died from COVID-19 inside those facilities. The figure excludes potentially thousands of nursing home residents who were transported to hospitals for treatment and died a few days later.

“The state Health Department is offering a new explanation for why it won’t provide the full death toll of coronavirus in nursing homes: it can’t find the records,” said Bill Hammond, a health analyst for the Empire Center who submitted the legal request for the data in early August. In a response letter sent to Hammond on Monday, the department said it could not yet fulfill the request “because a diligent search for relevant documents is still being conducted.” “We estimate that this Office will complete its process by November 5, 2020. The Department will notify you in writing when/if the responsive materials are available for release or if the time needed to complete your request extends beyond the above date,” said the department’s record access officer, Rosemary Hewig.

The delayed compliance in releasing information in response to legal requests has been a common practice of government agencies, with officials often saying they are still conducting a “diligent search” for records. “In this case, however, a search of any kind should not be necessary,” Hammond said in a blog post. He said the department’s Health Emergency Response Data System (or HERDS) has required nursing homes to file daily reports throughout the pandemic — including counts of all residents who die from coronavirus, both within the facilities or hospitals or elsewhere. “Those numbers are the basis for the partial count that the department does make public – which stood at 6,639 as of Aug. 29, but omits potentially thousands of residents who died in hospitals,” Hammond said.

Hammond said the “unusual methodology” is used by few if any other states and gives the public a “distorted picture of the pandemic.” “It makes it hard to compare New York to other states, or to gauge the merits of particular policies, such as the Health Department’s much-debated March 25 directive compelling nursing homes to accept coronavirus-positive patients being discharged from hospitals,” he said. The Justice Department is looking at whether the policies of New York and three other states contributed to COVID-19 nursing home deaths.

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And you thought hanging chads were controversial…

DOJ Conducting “Very Big” Voter Fraud Investigations – Barr (ET)

The Department of Justice is conducting several “very big” voter fraud investigations in multiple states, Attorney General William Barr told CNN in an interview aired on Sept. 2. “I know there are a number of investigations right now, some very big ones, in states,” Barr said in response to a question about how many voter fraud indictments the Department of Justice (DOJ) has brought on his watch. Barr said he did not know the exact number. At least 32 people have been criminally convicted of voter fraud in 2019, according to a database maintained by the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank. The attorney general made the remarks as part of a tense exchange with CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer about mail-in voting.

Barr has repeatedly said that mass mail-in voting is an invitation for voter fraud and coercion. Blitzer pressed the attorney general for evidence that this will be the case in 2020. Barr pointed to a recent conviction in Texas over 1,700 fraudulent ballots and noted that widespread evidence isn’t available because the United States has never attempted an election with the kind of massive access to mail-in voting available in 2020. At least 83 percent of American voters, or roughly 100 million people, will be able to vote by mail in the 2020 election, according to a tally by The Washington Post. “We haven’t had the kind of widespread use of mail-in ballots as being proposed,” Barr said.

“We’ve had absentee ballots from people who request them from a specific address. Now what we’re talking about is mailing them to everyone on the voter list, when everyone knows those voter lists are inaccurate.” Barr referenced the findings of a nonpartisan Commission on Federal Election Reform, co-chaired by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker, which determined in 2005 that mail-in voting creates the potential for voter fraud and opens the door to coercion if activists or party workers are allowed to handle ballots. Carter recently issued a statement to point out that the commission’s key finding was that states should invest in more research on mail-in voting. The former president encouraged states to invest resources to expand voting by mail.

More than 43 percent of likely American voters would not trust in the integrity of an election if all voters automatically received ballots or ballot request forms by mail, according to an Epoch Times National Poll conducted in late August. “This is playing with fire,” Barr said. “We’re a very closely divided country here and people have to have confidence in the results of the election and the legitimacy of the government. And people trying to change the rules to this methodology—which as a matter of logic is very open to fraud and coercion—is reckless and dangerous,” Barr said.

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Bill Barr Busy.

DOJ To File Antitrust Charges Against Google Within Weeks (ZH)

The Department of Justice will is preparing to slap Google with an antitrust case over the next several weeks, according to the New York Times – which insists, based on five sources, that Attorney General Bill Barr “overruled career lawyers who said they needed more time to build a strong case against one of the world’s wealthiest, most formidable technology companies.” The Times is suggesting, based on leaks, that Barr is rushing the case for political purposes and the charges are premature. “The Google case could also give Mr. Trump and Mr. Barr an election-season achievement on an issue that both Democrats and Republicans see as a major problem: the influence of the biggest tech companies over consumers and the possibility that their business practices have stifled new competitors and hobbled legacy industries like telecom and media.” -NYT

Some 40 lawyers working on a DOJ antitrust inquiry into Google parent Alphabet were reportedly told to wrap up their work by the end of this month, according to three of the five leakers, who we’re guessing are part of the 40-lawyer team – as “most of the 40-odd lawyers who had been working on the investigation opposed the deadline.” Others said they would not sign the complaint, while several left the case over the summer.

“Some argued this summer in a memo that ran hundreds of pages that they could bring a strong case but needed more time, according to people who described the document. Disagreement persisted among the team over how broad the complaint should be and what Google could do to resolve the problems the government uncovered. The lawyers viewed the deadline as arbitrary. While there were disagreements about tactics, career lawyers also expressed concerns that Mr. Barr wanted to announce the case in September to take credit for action against a powerful tech company under the Trump administration. But Mr. Barr felt that the department had moved too slowly and that the deadline was not unreasonable, according to a senior Justice Department official.” -NYT

Barr has shown a “deep interest” in the Google investigation, requesting regular briefings on the DOJ case, and “taking thick binders of information about it on trips and vacations and returning with ideas and notes.” The Times notes that antitrust action against Google has bipartisan support from a coalition of 50 states and territories, though Democrats and Republican state attorneys general conducting their own investigations are split on how to move forward. Republicans have accused Democrats of slow-walking the work in order to bring charges under a potential Biden administration, while Democrats have accused Republicans of wanting Trump to receive credit – a disagreement which could limit the number of states participating in prosecuting the Silicon Valley giant.

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But but, I read Jeff Bezos lost $9 billion yesterday!

In the Worst of Times, the Billionaire Elite Plunder Working Class America (CP)

In the midst of a global pandemic, unprecedented economic collapse, mass unemployment, hunger and desperation, the stock market is booming and the richest of the rich are richer than ever before. Since March, more than 58 million people in the U.S. have filed for unemployment. The Internal Revenue Service now predicts that the U.S. economy will have almost 40 million fewer jobs in 2021 than they predicted before the pandemic, as a result of the prolonged economic depression. As it becomes widely recognized that the economy is not going to “bounce right back” into full activity – even when coronavirus cases do eventually decline – and that the current depression will continue for a long time, companies are doing anything they can to drive their stock prices higher.

Desperate to maintain their profits, many large corporations are planning massive layoffs and acknowledging that currently furloughed workers are not going to have jobs to come back to. The Wall Street Journal reports that a recent study found, “nearly half of U.S. employers that furloughed or laid off staff because of COVID-19 are considering additional workplace cuts in the next 12 months.” The companies say low-paid workers will be the first to be cut. Twice as many workers had their pay cut by July 1 as during the Bush-Obama recession that began in 2009, according to the Washington Post. More than 10 million private sector workers have had their wages cut or been forced to work part-time. Car company Tesla forced all workers to take a 10 percent pay cut from mid-April until July. In the same period, Tesla stock skyrocketed, and CEO Elon Musk’s net worth has now quadrupled from $25 billion to over $100 billion.

Business software company Salesforce announced record sales levels one day and layoffs of 1,000 workers the next. The company’s stock rose 26 percent. Among small businesses, another study found that 50 percent of all small-business employees who were furloughed since March are still without work. Twenty-eight percent are still furloughed; 22 percent have been permanently laid off. Even in the government’s rigged and severely undercounted unemployment statistics, the number of people who have been unemployed 15-26 weeks is nearly double what it was at the height of the 2009 recession — and exponentially higher than at any other time since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

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So the entire NSA brass must all move to Russia now? And Edward can come back home? Or is exposing an illegal program more illegal than said program itself?

US Court: NSA Mass Surveillance Program Exposed By Snowden Was Illegal (DW)

A US federal appeals court on Wednesday ruled that the controversial National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance program exposed by whistleblower Edward Snowden was illegal. The ruling stopped short of calling the program unconstitutional. The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said that the program, under which the NSA collected and analyzed bulk data provided by telecommunications companies, was in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and could have been unconstitutional.= “Seven years ago, as the news declared I was being charged as a criminal for speaking the truth, I never imagined that I would live to see our courts condemn the NSA’s activities as unlawful and in the same ruling credit me for exposing them,” said Snowden, who fled to Russia after exposing the program, on Twitter.


“And yet that day has arrived.” He still faces charges of espionage in the US. After initially denying that the intelligence agency collected information on Americans, officials maintained that the spying helped the country combat domestic extremism. The most popular case cited was that of four California residents — Basaaly Saeed Moalin, Ahmed Nasir Taalil Mohamud, Mohamed Mohamud, and Issa Doreh — who have been convicted of funding the Al-Shabaab extremist group in Somalia. NSA’s domestic spying program helped get this conviction, which will not be impacted by the latest ruling. However, human rights organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union have hailed the ruling as “a victory for our privacy rights.”

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“..the pandemic stripped away the veneer of politics to reveal the boorish reality underneath: that some people have the power to tell the rest what to do.”

Capitalism Isn’t Working. Here’s An Alternative (Varoufakis)

Before 2020, politics seemed almost like a game, but with Covid came the realisation that governments everywhere possessed immense powers. The virus brought the 24-hour curfew, the closure of pubs, the ban on walking through parks, the suspension of sport, the emptying of theatres, the silencing of music venues. All notions of a minimal state mindful of its limits and eager to cede power to individuals went out of the window. Many salivated at this show of raw state power. Even free-marketeers, who had spent their lives shouting down any suggestion of even the most modest boost in public spending, demanded the sort of state control of the economy not seen since Leonid Brezhnev was running the Kremlin. Across the world, the state funded private firms’ wage bills, renationalised utilities and took shares in airlines, car makers, even banks. From the first week of lockdown, the pandemic stripped away the veneer of politics to reveal the boorish reality underneath: that some people have the power to tell the rest what to do.

[..] Suppose we had seized the 2008 moment to stage a peaceful hi-tech revolution that led to a postcapitalist economic democracy. What would it be like? To be desirable, it would feature markets for goods and services since the alternative – a Soviet-type rationing system that vests arbitrary power in the ugliest of bureaucrats – is too dreary for words. But to be crisis-proof, there is one market that market socialism cannot afford to feature: the labour market. Why? Because, once labour time has a rental price, the market mechanism inexorably pushes it down while commodifying every aspect of work (and, in the age of Facebook, our leisure too).

Can an advanced economy function without labour markets? Of course it can. Consider the principle of one-employee-one-share-one-vote underpinning a system that, in Another Now, I call corpo-syndicalism. Amending corporate law so as to turn every employee into an equal (though not equally remunerated) partner is as unimaginably radical today as universal suffrage was in the 19th century. In my blueprint, central banks provide every adult with a free bank account into which a fixed stipend (called universal basic dividend) is credited monthly. As everyone uses their central bank account to make domestic payments, most of the money minted by the central bank is transferred within its ledger. Additionally, the central bank grants all newborns a trust fund, to be used when they grow up.

People receive two types of income: the dividends credited into their central bank account and earnings from working in a corpo-syndicalist company. Neither are taxed, as there are no income or sales taxes. Instead, two types of taxes fund the government: a 5% tax on the raw revenues of the corpo-syndicalist firms; and proceeds from leasing land (which belongs in its entirety to the community) for private, time-limited, use.

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RIP

Eulogy to David Graeber (Steve Keen)

Oh David! @davidgraeber. . They say only the good die young, but why did you have to be one of them? There’s even more bullshit in the world now that you are no longer with us. It was a pleasure to know you, and it is a tragedy to say goodbye.


David was special for many, many reasons. The first I’ll mention is what I expect is the foundation of David’s appeal to Nika: his trusting innocence. There was a boyish openness and lack of ego in David that made you trust him, because you could. He was, at the same time, extremely intelligent and extremely funny. He had a nervy aspect, very befitting of someone raised in New York. But he was fundamentally funny, and looked on the world with a sense of bemusement, and all the while, incisive insight. He was intrinsically an anthropologist, in that he was capable of living amongst people and seeing their customs more clearly than they could themselves, while all the while celebrating those aspects, the good and the bad, because they were his people as well.

There was a selflessness to David too. There wasn’t an ounce of David’s body that was in it for David’s benefit alone. Well, he enjoyed his pleasures, but they could never be had at the expense of another person. That made him someone you could trust with your life. On top of that, he was an excellent if sometimes rambling speaker, whose charisma attracted support which was worth giving. David, I believe, came up with the slogan “We’re the 99%”. David, I believe, developed Occupy Wall Street’s voting system, which was a very powerful form of democracy that still respected the rights of the minority. He was a true leader in large part because he didn’t want to be.

He was also an excellent historian of money and debt. If you haven’t read Debt: the first 5000 Years, buy a copy and do so. It’s such a pity that David won’t be here to chronicle the start of its next 5000 Years. That’s the other thing: the suddenness. I knew David wasn’t feeling well—I’d exchanged a few messages with Nika where David’s health came up. Maybe it was Covid—I still don’t know. I won’t speculate. But it is so bloody awful to lose such a brilliant, lovely, funny, warm human being. It’s the unkindest cut of all that 2020 has managed to deliver.

Now we know why we speak of 20:20 vision, and 20:20 hindsight. We thought it was an ophthalmologist’s crazy numbering system. In fact, it was a warning from a time traveller.

Nassim Taleb – David Graeber

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“As humans we are fragile biological entities who will die unless we take care of each other”

– David Graeber

 

 

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Jul 202018
 
 July 20, 2018  Posted by at 9:25 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  5 Responses »


Edward Hopper Western Motel 1957

 

Possible Hand-Over Of Julian Assange To The UK May Be Imminent (Vos)
Spanish Court Drops International Warrant For Carles Puigdemont (G.)
Trump Lays Into The Fed, Says ‘Not Thrilled’ About Interest Rate Hikes (CNBC)
Trump Plans To Formally Invite Putin To US Later This Year (G.)
American Cold War Experts: “The Real Threat Is Russophobia” (ZH)
No-Deal Brexit Would Harm EU Countries As Well As UK, Warns IMF (G.)
Theresa May: I Will Never Accept EU’s Ideas On Irish Brexit Border (G.)
Android Antitrust Fine Will Demolish Google Profit (MW)
IMF Raps Greece Over Its Bid To Reintroduce Labor Negotiations (K.)

 

 

Darkness and shame.

Possible Hand-Over Of Julian Assange To The UK May Be Imminent (Vos)

What happens in a world without Julian Assange? It seems we may be in the unthinkable position of facing such a reality, after WikiLeaks Tweeted regarding the recent statement of Margarita Simonyan, RT’s Editor-in-chief. Her message read (In English): “My sources tell me that Julian Assange will be handed over to the UK in the next weeks or days. Like never before I wish that my sources are wrong’.’ An exceptionally brief article published by Russian Insider documented Simonyan’s foreboding Tweet, indicating that her statement seemed especially serious in light of the quality of her sources.

Russian media is hardly the first source of dire warnings regarding Assange’s safety in recent weeks. Just days ago, the World Socialist Website related: “The London Times reported July 15 on secret talks between the British and Ecuadorian governments. They are apparently intending to expel WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he has enjoyed political asylum for six years. The article said the talks were “an attempt to remove Assange from the embassy,” and they were being run at the highest levels of government. The Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Sir Alan Duncan, is personally involved.” These reports also follow a chilling article penned by award-winning journalist Chris Hedges, who wrote:

“The failure on the part of establishment media to defend Julian Assange, who has been trapped in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London since 2012, has been denied communication with the outside world since March and appears to be facing imminent expulsion and arrest, is astonishing. The extradition of the publisher—the maniacal goal of the U.S. government—would set a legal precedent that would criminalize any journalistic oversight or investigation of the corporate state. It would turn leaks and whistleblowing into treason. It would shroud in total secrecy the actions of the ruling global elites.”

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What should happen for Julian too.

Spanish Court Drops International Warrant For Carles Puigdemont (G.)

A Spanish judge has dropped the international arrest warrants issued for the former Catalan president Carles Puigdemont and five other pro-sovereignty politicians over their roles in last year’s illegal referendum and subsequent unilateral declaration of independence. The supreme court judge Pablo Llarena announced the decision a week after a German court said it would extradite Puigdemont only over alleged misuse of public funds rather than the more serious charge of rebellion. The dropping of the international warrant means Puigdemont and his former colleagues – currently in Belgium, Scotland and Switzerland – no longer face extradition proceedings.

But domestic warrants remain in force, meaning the six will be arrested should they return to Spain. In his ruling, published on Thursday, Llarena hit out at the court in Schleswig-Holstein, accusing it of “a lack of commitment” over acts that could have “broken Spain’s constitutional order”. The German court’s refusal to extradite Puigdemont on the rebellion charge – which prosecutors had argued could be equated to “high treason” in the German penal code – meant the deposed president could not be tried for the offence if sent back to Spain.

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More crazy reactions. Comparing Trump to Erdogan?!

Trump Lays Into The Fed, Says ‘Not Thrilled’ About Interest Rate Hikes (CNBC)

In a stinging and historically rare criticism, President Donald Trump expressed frustration with the Federal Reserve and said the central bank could disrupt the economic recovery. Presidents rarely intercede when it comes to the Fed, which sets the benchmark interest rate that flows through to many types of consumer debt. Fed officials, including Chairman Jerome Powell, have raised interest rates twice this year and have pointed to two more before the end of 2018. Trump, in an interview with CNBC, said he does not approve, even though he said he “put a very good man in” at the Fed in Powell.

“I’m not thrilled,” he told CNBC’s Joe Kernen in an interview to air in full Friday at 6 a.m. ET on “Squawk Box.” “Because we go up and every time you go up they want to raise rates again. I don’t really — I am not happy about it. But at the same time I’m letting them do what they feel is best.” “But I don’t like all of this work that goes into doing what we’re doing.” Markets reacted to Trump’s comments, with stocks, the dollar and Treasury yields all falling.

Fed officials did not comment on the president’s remarks. The White House, in a statement after the interview excerpt aired on CNBC, emphasized that Trump did not mean to influence the Fed’s decision-making process. “Of course the President respects the independence of the Fed. As he said he considers the Federal Reserve Board Chair Jerome Powell a very good man and that he is not interfering with Fed policy decisions ” the statement said. “The President’s views on interest rates are well known and his comments today are a reiteration of those long held positions, and public comments.”

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Keep talking.

Trump Plans To Formally Invite Putin To US Later This Year (G.)

Donald Trump has asked his administration to formally invite Russian president Vladimir Putin to visit Washington later this year, the White House announced on Thursday. Sarah Sanders, the White House press secretary, said Trump asked his national security adviser John Bolton to extend the invitation to Putin for a “working level” dialogue between the two leaders. The invitation comes as the White House has faced a tumultuous week in the aftermath of Trump’s controversial summit with Putin in Helsinki. Trump was roundly criticized from Democrats and Republicans in Washington for siding with the Kremlin over the judgments of US intelligence on whether Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election.

It took the president several attempts to walk back his comments, amplifying the fallout from his joint appearance with Putin. Trump was nonetheless unfazed by the backlash, deeming the summit a “great success” in a tweet earlier on Thursday while saying he looked forward to a second meeting with Putin. “The Summit with Russia was a great success, except with the real enemy of the people, the Fake News Media,” Trump wrote. “I look forward to our second meeting so that we can start implementing some of the many things discussed, including stopping terrorism, security for Israel, nuclear … proliferation, cyber attacks, trade, Ukraine, Middle East peace, North Korea and more. There are many answers, some easy and some hard, to these problems…but they can ALL be solved!”

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“Russophobia is running amok in this country.”

American Cold War Experts: “The Real Threat Is Russophobia” (ZH)

And now for expert analysis that runs refreshingly contrary to the week’s Trump-Putin mass hysteria over the Helsinki summit, we find ourselves surprised to feature an unusually honest Vice segment on HBO: These American scholars say the real threat to the U.S. is Russophobia. “If he [President Trump] means what he said he was right. It would be great to cooperate with Russia — I would go farther, it’s imperative… We are eyeball to eyeball in a new Cold War with Russia,” begins Stephen F. Cohen, considered among the world’s foremost Russian academic experts, while sitting beside John Mearsheimer in this latest Vice interview, who nods his head in approval.

Both have long been a thorn in the side of the McCarthyite commentariat which alleges Russian collusion behind every decision of the Trump administration. Mearsheimer, a longtime International Security Policy program director at the University of Chicago, questions the now largely cemented narrative created by those who have least understanding of the history of US-Russia relations: “Why won’t people engage in a legitimate debate with people like Steve and me? And I believe the reason they won’t is they would lose the debate – I’m fully confident of that.”

As the American public has from the time of Trump’s election endured endless obtrusive and cacophonous media noise with no real smoking gun (as Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper famously admitted a year ago) to back the charges of collusion — what CNN’s Van Jones early on admitted was “just a big nothing burger” — the voices of a small cadre of real Russian experts rarely breaks through to a mass audience. “There is an unwillingness to engage in debate on this issue, like I have never seen before,” Mearsheimer tells Vice. And Cohen adds: “We’ve demonized Putin and we’ve Putinized Russia so we demonize Russia. Russophobia is running amok in this country. I’ve seen these things from the inside. I’ve re-thought and re-thought how we got to the edge of war with Russia, where we haven’t been since Cuba in 1962. And I have concluded, and I would be happy to debate my opponents… It is 95 percent our own doing.”

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Getting bored of this yet?

No-Deal Brexit Would Harm EU Countries As Well As UK, Warns IMF (G.)

Britain crashing out of the EU without a deal would inflict significant economic pain across Europe, leaving the region without any winners, the International Monetary Fund has warned. As the new Brexit secretary, Dominic Raab warned Europe to prepare for a no-deal exit, the IMF said such an outcome would hurt the UK most but would also have damaging economic consequences for Ireland and other EU nations. In its annual health check for the euro area, the Washington-based fund said economic growth across the 27 remaining EU states would fall by as much as 1.5% by 2030, if Britain falls back on WTO rules for its trading relationship with the EU after leaving next year.

While economic output for the UK would drop by more than twice that amount – wiping out almost 4% of GDP – Ireland would suffer by almost as much as a result of its strong ties to Britain and shared border. The Netherlands, Denmark and Belgium, with similar close proximity and trading links, would also lose around 1% of GDP. Smaller nations with deep financial links to the City of London, such as Malta, Cyprus and Luxembourg, would also be negatively affected by a hard Brexit, the fund warned. The IMF said the long-run impact from a hard Brexit would be spread across the EU as a result of the economic and financial ties spanning the region, which have grown closer by about 40% over the past quarter century. The UK ranks among the EU’s three largest trading partners, accounting for 13% of trade in goods and services. There are also complex supply chain links between companies across the bloc.

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So no Brexit then?

Theresa May: I Will Never Accept EU’s Ideas On Irish Brexit Border (G.)

Theresa May is to tell the European Union it is time to drop what she feels is their inflexible view on an Irish border solution and “evolve” their position to break the impasse in Brexit talks. In a speech in Belfast on Friday she is expected to brand the bloc’s calls for regulatory alignment north and south of the border as a “backstop” solution in the event of no deal as “unworkable”, and repeat her assertion that a border down the Irish Sea is unacceptable to any British prime minister. “The economic and constitutional dislocation of a formal ‘third country’ customs border within our own country is something I will never accept, and I believe no British prime minister could ever accept,” she will say.

May will tell an audience of business leaders and politicians that the EU proposal is in breach of the Belfast Agreement because it would create a barrier between Northern Ireland and Great Britain and leave the people of Northern Ireland “without their own voice” in trade negotiations. “It is not something the House of Commons will accept,” she is due to say. The EU’s other 27 states will have a chance to examine and respond to the white paper when its General Council of ministers meets in Brussels on Friday morning. They will also receive an update on negotiations from the European Commission’s chief negotiator, Michel Barnier.

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They’ll force people to pay for the software now.

Android Antitrust Fine Will Demolish Google Profit (MW)

When Alphabet Inc. reports earnings Monday, the European Union’s $5.07 billion Android antitrust fine will ruin the company’s profit. Alphabet stock was relatively flat Wednesday, when the fine formally was announced, and Google has said it plans to appeal the fine. However, the company disclosed in an SEC filing that it will account for the fine in its second-quarter report, due Monday after the bell. In terms of what it will cost the company in cash, the fine is not tax-deductible and worth roughly 75% of the company’s expected second-quarter net income of $6.72 billion, which will drastically lower per-share earnings as well.

Since analyst estimates largely do not include the fine as of yet, Alphabet’s earnings are likely to miss published expectations on the bottom line by a significant amount. The question that remains beyond the fine itself is how Google, in the long-term, will respond to the ruling, which prevents the search giant from effectively forcing mobile phone makers and telecom companies to pre-install its search engine and Chrome web browser, among other Google mobile apps, in exchange for use of the Android OS. The ruling is set to go into effect in 90 days, though an appeal would delay implementation.

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How to spell sovereignty. When were countries growing fastest? When they had strong unions.

IMF Raps Greece Over Its Bid To Reintroduce Labor Negotiations (K.)

The International Monetary Fund on Thursday issued a clear warning to the Greek government against its plans to reintroduce collective labor negotiations, saying that such a move would put the competitiveness of the Greek economy at risk. The IMF’s observation, included in its Article IV report that is not only about the Greek economy but concerns eurozone financial policies in general, comes almost a month before the party the government intends to stage for the end of the bailout program. The IMF intervention is particularly important for two additional reasons: first because it concerns a key dimension of the post-bailout government narrative, and second because the IMF is not an independent observer, as its technical experts will be conducting a considerable number of visits to Greece in the context of the post-program surveillance, and will prepare two assessment reports on the Greek economy every year.

There is also a third and possibly more important factor that adds to the significance of the IMF recommendation: It may be just a taste of the attitude the Fund will adopt toward Greece should the government implement its plans to increase the minimum salary. This may actually be an intervention with a preventative character. The government has already legislated the return from August – after the program ends – of two main principles in collective labor negotiations: the provision for the extension of collective contracts and the principle of the more favorable regulation.

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