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Debt Rattle December 1 2022

Dec 012022

December 1, 2022 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:25 am Finance Tagged with: Apple, Assange, BRICS, China, Cryptome, Elon Musk, Eric Idle, free speech, Twitter, Ursula, Yellen, Zelensky 75 Responses »

Pablo Picasso Coffee maker 1943

• More Than 100,000 Ukrainian Soldiers Have Died In Conflict – EU (RT)

• Von der Leyen’s Comment On Ukrainian Military Losses Retracted (RT)

• Kiev Reacts To Redacted EU Assessment Of Its Casualties (RT)

• The Global South Births A New Game-Changing Payment System (Escobar)

• China Wants More Russian Gas (RT)

• Russian Coal Exports Shift To China (RT)

• Poland To Charge Ukrainian Refugees For Government-Provided Housing (Az.)

• Congress Wants $45B Tacked on to Biden’s Military Budget Request (Celente)

• Washington Goes to War Against Twitter and Free Speech (Turley)

• Yellen Hints At ‘National Security’ Probe Into Twitter Purchase (RT)

• EU Threatens Musk With Twitter Ban (RT)

• Musk Says Twitter Clash With Apple A ‘Misunderstanding’ (AFP)

• Ex-Twitter Safety Chief: Hunter Biden Laptop Censorship Was A ‘Mistake’ (Fox)

• Eric Idle Insists He Wants To Be ‘Cancelled’ (DM)

• Cryptome Founder Asks to Be Indicted With Assange (Lauria)

Brilliant T-shirt sold in Japan.

Reed Hastings

“@elonmusk is the bravest, most creative person on the planet”, says Netflix’s Reed Hastings
pic.twitter.com/5zBlvu9gGV

— Tesla Owners Silicon Valley (@teslaownersSV) November 30, 2022

Tucker DealBook

NYT lesson: Good liberals can always be forgiven pic.twitter.com/EkPObMiCiq

— Wittgenstein (@backtolife_2023) December 1, 2022

Clare Daly

After 11th anniversary of #Gaddafi's death during #NATO's assault on #Libya – all in the name of freedom, democracy & human rights – we'd do well to remember what happened next: terror, death, lawlessness, rape, poverty, starvation. Libya riven by conflict. That's NATO's legacy. pic.twitter.com/7CUgdSvcmJ

— Clare Daly (@ClareDalyMEP) November 30, 2022

Ursula didn’t get the memo. In 3 parts. First, she posts the number -with video. Then Zelensky protests. Then the video is removed and re-done. Finally, Ukraine reacts: if you post these numbers, we can’t manipulate them anymore.

• More Than 100,000 Ukrainian Soldiers Have Died In Conflict – EU (RT)

European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen has presented the total number of losses estimated to have been suffered by Ukraine in its conflict with Russia. “More than 100,000 Ukrainian military officers have been killed so far,” von der Leyen claimed on Wednesday, while adding that around 20,000 civilian lives have also been lost amid the fighting, which has continued since late February. The head of the European Commission didn’t reveal the sources of the information she provided. In late September, Russia’s Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu stated that Ukrainian losses had to date amounted to more than 61,000 troops, which was ten times higher than those of Russia.

In her address, von der Leyen also proposed to set up a specialized, UN-backed court to investigate and prosecute what she described as “Russia’s crime of aggression.”She also said that a special structure would be created by the EU to manage and invest 300 billion euro (nearly $311 billion) in Russian Central Bank reserves and 19 billion euro of Russian business figures’ assets, which the EU froze after the outbreak of the conflict. The plan is to use the proceeds from those activities to rebuild and assist Ukraine, according to the commission president.

Here is the original clip. pic.twitter.com/nD0xChqc8O

— The Sirius Report (@thesiriusreport) November 30, 2022

Some people are convinced it was retracted after US protest. But Ukraine protest would have been enough.

• Von der Leyen’s Comment On Ukrainian Military Losses Retracted (RT)

A claim about the number of Ukrainian soldiers killed during its conflict with Russia has been removed from a speech by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on the executive’s official website. “More than 100,000 Ukrainian military officers have been killed so far,” she said during an address earlier on Wednesday, adding that around 20,000 civilians had also died in nine months of fighting. The source of this information was not provided. However, the reference to Kiev’s death toll soon disappeared from the text of the speech on the European Commission’s website. It was also cut from a video of the address on the website and on von der Leyen’s account on Twitter.

The editing was noticed by some media outlets and social media users, who compared the two versions of the statement online. The move was then officially confirmed by the European Commission. The EU executive body’s spokeswoman Dana Spinant took to Twitter to thank those who had “pointed out the inaccuracy” in von der Leyen’s speech. “The estimation used, from external sources, should have referred to casualties, i.e. both killed and injured, and was meant to show Russia’s brutality,” she wrote. In late September, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu stated that Ukrainian losses had by then amounted to more than 61,000 troops, which was ten times greater than Russia’s.

Judge Nap Macgregor

Oh yeah, she also talked about the stolen Russian assets.

• Kiev Reacts To Redacted EU Assessment Of Its Casualties (RT)

A claim that Ukraine has lost more than 100,000 personnel in the conflict with Russia has been deleted from the Twitter account of European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. Kiev had objected to the figure, saying it was up to President Vladimir Zelensky and top Ukrainian officials to voice such numbers. Zelensky’s spokesman, Sergey Nikoforov, told Ukrainian media on Wednesday that such “sensitive” information should only be made public by the country’s top military commander General Valery Zaluzhny, Defense Minister Aleksey Reznikov, or the president himself. Earlier in the day, the head of the EU executive branch cited an assessment that more than 100,000 Ukrainian troops and over 20,000 civilians have been killed in the conflict with Russia.

The video statement has since been pulled from her Twitter account and replaced with a new version, which omitted the figures. Von der Leyen did not identify the source of the assessment. Earlier in the month, US General Mark Milley, who serves as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that over 100,000 soldiers may have been killed and wounded on each side of the conflict, with 40,000 civilians killed as collateral damage. Milley, speaking at the Economic Club of New York, said that the winter season would cause hostilities to go “static” and open “a window of opportunity” for negotiations. The call for diplomacy reportedly outraged officials in Kiev, who pledged to continue fighting against Russia until it fully regains pre-2014 positions. In her Wednesday address, von der Leyen urged the UN to convene a special tribunal to try Russia for its alleged crimes against Ukraine.

The Commission chief also shared the EU’s plans to invest seized Russian national reserves and “oligarch” money for profit that would later be used to rebuild Ukraine. She estimated Ukraine’s damage at €600 billion ($621bn) so far, which dwarfs the €319 billion ($330bn) of Russian funds blocked by the EU. The assets would only be unfrozen after anti-Russia sanctions are lifted, to be paid in compensation to Ukraine, the official stated. Top Russian officials, including President Vladimir Putin, have criticized the freezing of assets by the US and its allies, including the EU. At first, they devalued national reserves denominated in dollars and euros through inflation, and later “pawed and pocketed” them, Putin remarked in October.

In the background, these preparations continue.

• The Global South Births A New Game-Changing Payment System (Escobar)

The Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) is speeding up its design of a common payment system, which has been closely discussed for nearly a year with the Chinese under the stewardship of Sergei Glazyev, the EAEU’s minister in charge of Integration and Macro-economy. Through its regulatory body, the Eurasian Economic Commission (EEC), the EAEU has just extended a very serious proposal to the BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) which, crucially, are already on the way to turning into BRICS+: a sort of G20 of the Global South. The system will include a single payment card – in direct competition with Visa and Mastercard – merging the already existing Russian MIR, China’s UnionPay, India’s RuPay, Brazil’s Elo, and others.

That will represent a direct challenge to the western-designed (and enforced) monetary system, head on. And it comes on the heels of BRICS members already transacting their bilateral trade in local currencies, and bypassing the US dollar. This EAEU-BRICS union was long in the making – and will now also move toward prefiguring a further geoeconomic merger with the member nations of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). The EAEU was established in 2015 as a customs union of Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus, joined a year later by Armenia and Kyrgyzstan. Vietnam is already an EAEU free trade partner, and recently enshrined SCO member Iran is also clinching a deal. The EAEU is designed to implement free movement of goods, services, capital, and workers between member countries.

Ukraine would have been an EAEU member if not for the Maidan coup in 2014 masterminded by the Barack Obama administration. Vladimir Kovalyov, adviser to the chairman of the EEC, summed it all up to Russian newspaper Izvestia. The focus is to establish a joint financial market, and the priority is to develop a common “exchange space:” “We’ve made substantial progress and now the work is focused on such sectors as banking, insurance, and the stock market.” A new regulatory body for the proposed joint EEU-BRICS financial system will soon be established. Meanwhile, trade and economic cooperation between the EAEU and BRICS have increased 1.5 times in the first half of 2022 alone.

Not using Russian oil and gas does nothing for climate. You don’t want it, others will use them. And you will be cold.

• China Wants More Russian Gas (RT)

Russian gas export to China via the so-called eastern route, the Power of Siberia pipeline, should be steadily increased, according to Huang Yongzhang, Vice President of China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC). The 3,000 kilometer (1,864 mile) cross-border pipeline started deliveries of Russian natural gas to China in 2019. Its capacity is 61 billion cubic meters (bcm) of gas per year, including 38 bcm for export. Last year, Russian gas supplies to China increased by 10.4 bcm via the mega pipeline. “It is necessary to steadily increase gas supplies from Russia to China via the eastern route. The parties continue cooperation in this area, using all its advantages, strengthening and deepening business cooperation,” Yongzhang said on Tuesday at the Russia-China Energy Business Forum.

He also called for the strengthening of the scientific and technical cooperation between the two nations in order to improve the quality of joint work in the oil and gas sector, as well as in the field of green and low-carbon energy. The agreement on gas supplies via the Power of Siberia pipeline was reached in 2014, with Gazprom and CNPC signing a 30-year contract. The $400 billion agreement is Gazprom’s biggest deal ever and the Power of Siberia is the first natural gas pipeline between Russia and China. The Russian energy company is currently working on the Power of Siberia 2 project, which involves construction of a gas pipeline to China through the territory of Mongolia. The pipeline will be capable of delivering as much as 50 billion cubic meters of gas, once operational.

You can hear the Chinese laughing in the background.

• Russian Coal Exports Shift To China (RT)

Russia has this year become the second most important supplier of coal to China, the head of oil giant Rosneft Igor Sechin announced at the Russia-China Energy Business Forum on Tuesday.“Deliveries of high-quality Russian coal to China in [those] ten months of 2022 amounted to 53 million tons. This is about 23% of total imports to China, second place after Indonesia, which supplies 134 million tons,” Sechin said. According to the CEO, in order to further increase coal supplies to Asia, Russia is investing in the development of the Eastern Range of the country’s train-services supplier Russian Railways (OAO). The project is expected to increase transportation capacity to 195 million tons per year.

Russia has dramatically increased exports of energy commodities, including coal, to Asian buyers after the EU suspended coal purchases from the country earlier this year as a Ukraine-related sanction. Chinese purchases of the Russian fossil fuel, in particular, reached a five-year high in September, soaring to 8.54 million tons. It was a 57% year-on-year rise, according to data from China’s General Administration of Customs. Beijing has also been stocking up on Russian oil. Total Russian crude exports to China in the period January to October jumped by 9.5% to nearly 72 million tons, slightly less than what Saudi Arabia, China’s largest supplier, exports to the Asian nation, Sechin said.

The head of Russia’s biggest oil company stressed that both Moscow and Beijing are looking forward to further developing trade relations, particularly in the field of energy. Sechin also noted that the overall trade turnover between Russia and China jumped 33% this year, reaching $153.9 billion in the first ten months. “If these rates are maintained, by the end of this year the trade turnover may reach a record high of $180 billion. We can expect that the goal of reaching $200 billion in trade turnover will be achieved even before the set target date, 2024,” he said.

“More than a million Ukrainian refugees made a temporary home in Poland..”

• Poland To Charge Ukrainian Refugees For Government-Provided Housing (Az.)

Poland plans to charge Ukrainian refugees for food and housing after four months of staying in state accommodation, the government said, Report informs referring to Reuters. More than a million Ukrainian refugees made a temporary home in Poland, Ukraine’s western neighbor, after Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, relying on the kindness of strangers who opened up their homes and government aid. But after an initial outpouring of public support for refugees, resources are drying up and refugees are having a harder time finding flats and getting support with Poland facing a cost of living crisis and budget strains.

“Citizens of Ukraine who stay in Poland in collective accommodation centers will participate in the costs of housing and meals,” the government said in a statement. Those staying in such accommodation, for example government-funded hotel rooms or school dormitories, longer than 120 days will have to cover 50% of the cost up to 40 zlotys ($8.87) per day, per person. After 180 days it would be 75% of the cost up to 60 zlotys. Those unable to work because of their age or disability would be excluded, as would pregnant women, according to the plan. The government wants the new rules to apply from March 1, 2023. The bill will go to parliament where it is expected to pass comfortably.

“..the deal would set the budget at $847 billion for national defense..”

• Congress Wants $45B Tacked on to Biden’s Military Budget Request (Celente)

We have long noted that the one issue that can bring together the most hardened liberal Democrats, and the most conservative Republicans is the vote for war. After all, what other issue would you find Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Mitch McConnell agreeing on? It was reported Wednesday that members of the House and Senate Armed Service committees agreed to add $45 billion more to President Joe Biden’s already gargantuan 2023 National Defense Authorization Act, according to a newly released report on Wednesday. Politico, citing four people familiar with the negotiations, reported that the deal would set the budget at $847 billion for national defense, with the possibility of reaching as high as $858 billion.

We reported in July that the House voted in favor of an $850.3 billion national security budget that members say will help the U.S. respond to continued threats and surging inflation. The House passed the bill in a 329-101 vote. The “no” votes included 62 Republicans and 39 Democrats.“With inflation factored in, it is a good increase but it’s essential because of inflation and also the need to continue significant programs,” Sen. Jack Reed, the chair of the Senate Armed Services, said in an interview, according to Politico.As the global economies sink into recession, as world hunger escalates, as inflation spikes and people pay much more to buy a lot less, as world poverty levels increase and the middle class shrinks…countries around the world have increased their military budgets and built up their defenses since the Ukraine War began in February.

But the War Machine Always Wins. And Bill La Plante, the undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, said months ago that he expected Congress—no matter what party was in control—would approve new weapons purchasing power at levels not seen since the Cold War. “They are going to give us multiyear authority, and they’re going to give us funding to really put into the industrial base,” he told George Mason University at the time. “And I’m talking billions of dollars into the industrial base—to fund these production lines. That, I predict, is going to happen, and it’s happening now. And then people will have to say: ‘I guess they were serious about it.’ But we have not done that since the Cold War.”

“Despite a creepy Facebook advertising campaign to convince the public to embrace censorship, it has not worked. The public is not buying. They are buying Free Twitter…”

• Washington Goes to War Against Twitter and Free Speech (Turley)

Washington this week is in full wartime footing. No, it’s not over the Russian invasion of Ukraine or North Korean missiles or even Chinese expansionism. It is about Twitter and the threat of Elon Musk to restore free speech protections to social media. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has emerged as the bellicose general rallying others to the “censor or die” pressure campaign against Twitter. The problem is that citizens are flocking to Twitter and signing up in record numbers. They want more, not less, free speech. The over two million new sign-ups per day represent a 66% increase over the same period last year, according to figures released by Musk.

A reporter this week was so alarmed that she asked the White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre about the concern that millions are still signing up at Twitter and demanded to know who is “keeping an eye on this” for possible federal action. Unable to convince users to embrace censorship, Clinton and others are pressuring corporations and foreign governments to deter Musk from restoring free speech. Since users are embracing the new Twitter, the campaign has focused on preventing them from signing up by removing the app from the Apple and Google stores. In the meantime, Apple is joining the boycott by withholding advertising revenue to coerce Musk to reverse his free-speech pledge.

Musk, however, is sitting on the ultimate weapon to bring this war to an end: free speech itself. However, it will require more than rhetorical recriminations like Musk asking why Apple executives “hate free speech in America?” The fact is that these media and political figures are becoming more and more alarmed as Musk threatens to release files on the past censorship of stories like the Hunter Biden laptop. Musk has reason to wonder why Apple CEO Tim Cook would join this anti-free speech campaign. The reason is as obvious as it is craven. These boycotts are not about corporations or shareholders. If anything, they are more likely to diminish profits. It is about the executives themselves. Many are allies of figures like Clinton. Others are yielding to these demands to avoid being attacked or tagged by the left.

[..] If Musk carries through on his pledge, the public will have a free speech alternative and they are already speaking loudly by signing up with the company in record numbers. Despite a creepy Facebook advertising campaign to convince the public to embrace censorship, it has not worked. The public is not buying. They are buying Free Twitter. So, the only way to regain control is to prevent people from getting the app or threaten to force Twitter into insolvency. The problem is Musk, an eccentric billionaire who is not easy to intimidate. Musk now stands against a massive alliance of governments, corporations, celebrities, and politicians. He has only the public and free speech on his side. He needs to use both.

DeSantis

Heavy D with a message for Tim Cook. pic.twitter.com/9D61CHfQ7R

— Cernovich (@Cernovich) November 29, 2022

Yellen is so out of her depth here, I suspect that’s why they let her do the talking.

• Yellen Hints At ‘National Security’ Probe Into Twitter Purchase (RT)

US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has said federal officials could seek to launch a review into billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk’s recent purchase of Twitter if it were deemed to carry national security risks, backtracking after she downplayed any chance for a probe. Speaking at an event hosted by the New York Times on Wednesday, Yellen claimed she had “misspoke” when she said there was “no basis” to investigate Musk or his finances during an interview earlier this month, now saying the government could take that step after all. “I’m not going to say specifically what we are looking at. We don’t comment on what’s in progress,” she said, but added the Treasury “does look at transactions that involve foreign investments in the United States to see if they create national security risk.”

While she stopped short of confirming that a probe was underway, Yellen said “if there are such risks it would be appropriate for the Treasury to have a look.” The secretary’s comments follow earlier reports that the Treasury had already requested approval to begin reviewing Musk’s Twitter deal, though sources told the Washington Post at the time that such actions are “fairly routine” and do not always result in a full-fledged investigation. Earlier this month, President Joe Biden also stated that Musk’s “relationships with other countries is worthy of being looked at,” following reports that foreign investors such as Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal now hold significant stakes in Twitter. However, Biden stressed that he was not claiming the billionaire had done anything “inappropriate,” and did not indicate that he was under investigation.

Musk has faced pressure from abroad as well, with the European Commission recently threatening to ban Twitter outright should the platform run afoul of the EU’s digital regulations. According to a Wednesday report in the Financial Times, the bloc has presented Musk with a “checklist of rules” and demanded he submit to an “extensive independent audit” sometime next year, insisting Twitter must continue to “aggressively” police disinformation and hate speech. The billionaire has repeatedly vowed to make Twitter a bastion of free expression, even suggesting an “amnesty” for previously banned accounts so long as they did not violate the law or post spam. However, critics have argued the more hands-off approach will foster hatred, extremism and misinformation online, with some even urging major platforms like Apple and Google to remove Twitter from their app stores.

“Musk replied that the DSA [EU’s Digital Services Act] was “very sensible” and should be applied worldwide.”

• EU Threatens Musk With Twitter Ban (RT)

As Elon Musk pledged to run a more fair and transparent Twitter that won’t interfere in elections, the EU’s internal market commissioner, Thierry Breton, on Wednesday demanded tougher censorship, reportedly warning that the platform might be banned if it doesn’t comply with the bloc’s laws. “Twitter has failed in trust & safety for a very long time and has interfered in elections,” Musk tweeted on Wednesday, responding to claims by former executive Yoel Roth published by Reuters that his takeover had made the company less safe. “Twitter 2.0 will be far more effective, transparent and even-handed.” Within the hour, Breton tweeted that he welcomed Musk’s “intent to get Twitter 2.0 ready” for the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), a law scheduled to come into force in 2024.

He added that the platform would have to “significantly reinforce content moderation and tackle disinformation,” among other things. Breton attached a short video from a call he held with Musk, though without any sound. According to the Financial Times, however, the EU commissioner actually threatened Musk with a ban unless Twitter complies with a list of demands. This includes not having an “arbitrary” approach to reinstating banned users, “aggressively” pursuing “disinformation” and agreeing to an “extensive independent audit” by next year. Failing to do so would infringe on the DSA, which could expose Twitter to massive fines or even a ban in the EU, Breton reportedly said. According to FT’s sources, Musk replied that the DSA was “very sensible” and should be applied worldwide.

Musk bought Twitter for a reported $44 billion and took ownership of the company on October 27, declaring “the bird is freed.” Within hours, Breton responded that “In Europe, the bird will fly by our rules.” The DSA was approved by the bloc earlier this year. It requires “content moderation” from major social media platforms, so they can swiftly censor “hate speech” or any information that Brussels deems false. The EU has already invoked these powers to ban RT and several other Russian media outlets, with most US-based platforms eagerly complying. The video hosting service Rumble, however, chose to turn off their service in France rather than comply with demands from Paris to censor certain Russian outlets.

Declaring “free speech” – as guaranteed in the US Constitution – to be his guiding principle, Musk has rolled back some of Twitter’s censorship policies and lifted the bans on many “permanently suspended” accounts, including former US president Donald Trump. The decision to reinstate Trump and declare a general amnesty for accounts that hadn’t broken the law was put to a vote on Twitter, with most users voting in favor in both cases.

“Tim was clear that Apple never considered doing so.”

• Musk Says Twitter Clash With Apple A ‘Misunderstanding’ (AFP)

Twitter owner Elon Musk said he met with Apple chief Tim Cook on Wednesday and “resolved the misunderstanding” that prompted him to declare war on the iPhone maker’s App Store. “Among other things, we resolved the misunderstanding about Twitter potentially being removed from the App Store,” Musk tweeted. “Tim was clear that Apple never considered doing so.” Musk also tweeted a video clip of “Apple’s beautiful HQ” in Cupertino, California, noting that he had had a “good conversation” with Cook. The world’s richest person opened fire on the planet’s most valuable company early this week over fees and rules at the App Store, saying Apple had threatened to oust his recently acquired social media platform.

The billionaire CEO had tweeted that Apple “threatened to withhold Twitter from its App Store, but won’t tell us why.” Apple, which has not issued a public statement on the matter, typically tells developers if fixes need to be implemented in apps to conform to App Store policies. Analysts told AFP the clash may have came down to money, with Musk irked that the App Store takes a commission on transactions such as subscriptions. Musk has delayed the relaunch of the Twitter Blue subscription tier intended to have users pay for perks such as account verification check marks. Twitter rolled out Blue early in November, but pulled the plug after impersonators paid for check marks to appear legitimate in what former head of safety and security Yoel Roth referred to as “a disaster.”

Both Apple and Google also require social networking services on their app stores to have effective systems for moderating harmful or abusive content. But since taking over Twitter last month, Musk has cut around half of Twitter’s workforce, including many employees tasked with fighting disinformation, while an unknown number of others have quit.

Tucker Apple

Tucker Carlson: Apple has done plenty to eliminate free speech pic.twitter.com/d0uK90bLgW

— Wittgenstein (@backtolife_2023) November 30, 2022

Musk has promised full disclosure.

• Ex-Twitter Safety Chief: Hunter Biden Laptop Censorship Was A ‘Mistake’ (Fox)

The former head of trust and safety at Twitter recently admitted that the social media company’s decision to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020 was a “mistake.” During a sit down with journalist Kara Swisher, ex-Twitter safety chief Yoel Roth said that despite concerns about the authenticity of the laptop story, it still did not reach a point where he wanted to remove the content — which was later censored anyway. Initial reporting suggested that Roth blocked user access from the October 2020 story, but the former Twitter division lead said the decision was not up to him. “We didn’t know what to believe, we didn’t know what was true, there was smoke — and ultimately for me, it didn’t reach a place where I was comfortable removing this content from Twitter,” Roth said.

“But it set off every single one of my finely tuned APT28 hack and leak campaign alarm bells.” Roth repeatedly reiterated that despite Big Tech companies’ high-alert status and his personal feeling of responsibility to protect the “integrity of conversations” from foreign governments attempting to interfere in elections, it never rose to the level where he believed the story should be censored. “But — so it was a mistake?” Swisher asked. “In my opinion, yes,” he responded. Roth planned to meet with the Department of Homeland Security’s now-defunct Disinformation Governance Board, where the government was expected to ask Twitter to become more involved in efforts to monitor misinformation.

Both Roth and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed they were approached by the FBI prior to the 2020 election, warning the platforms about foreign propaganda and misinformation. When the New York Post’s bombshell report was first published with weeks to go before the 2020 election, Twitter and Facebook were quick to limit or block sharing of the story in an unprecedented display of coordination. Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has also admitted the social media platform was wrong to intervene in the Hunter Biden story. Last week, Twitter’s new CEO Elon Musk said that he might release more information on how the social media company censored the Biden laptop story.

‘I would like to be cancelled so I can go home and read a book and not have to make an a**e of myself all over the world..’

• Eric Idle Insists He Wants To Be ‘Cancelled’ (DM)

Famed English comedian Eric Idle says he wants to be ‘cancelled’ for his comedy. The 76-year-old funnyman, who first rose to fame in the 1960s as a founding member of the Monty Python comedy team, is outspoken about political correctness. He says that there is a lot of bullying going on in the name of decency. ‘I would like to be cancelled so I can go home and read a book and not have to make an a**e of myself all over the world,’ Idle joked in The Daily Telegraph on Tuesday. Idle, who is in Australia to perform a show in Sydney this week, explained in the chat that he thinks comedy is about saying the wrong thing at the right time. ‘You have to remember that Python was offensive when it started. We were not the cuddly old f***ers we are now,’ he told the publication.

‘It was very offensive. The point was absolutely to upset and insult the bourgeois.’ Idle, who is in Australia to perform a show in State Theatre on Thursday, explained that comedy is about saying the wrong thing at the right time, Pictured: Idle in Monty Python’s Life of Brian, a box-office smash despite offending audiences After debuting on the BBC in 1969, Monty Python earned a reputation for outrageous, surreal, often violent and sexual humour. Idle says the point of comedy is to test boundaries and say the ‘unsayable’. ‘And so who are the people saying you can’t do that?’ he says. ‘I don’t understand that. Who is the committee that does this? ‘It sounds a bit like the French Revolution committees, who said, ‘off with his head’. I think a lot of bullying goes on in the name of decency.’

Monty Python, who formally disbanded three decades ago, often attracted notoriety and scandal. Their films Monty Python and The Holy Grail (1975), and Monty’s Python Meaning of Life (1983) became box office hits, while shocking audiences. But it was their 1979 smash Life of Brian, a parody of pious religious movie epics that created a storm of protest around the world. Set in the time of Christ, the film features a climax where the hero, Brian (Graham Chapman), a Jew, is crucified because he has been mistaken as a messiah by the Romans. As he and others hang on crosses, they sing ‘Always Look on The Bright Side of Life,’ a jolly sing along composed by Idle. Condemned by a diverse range of religious groups as blasphemous, Idle says the film would never be made today because ‘you don’t laugh at religion.’

“Cryptome published the decrypted unredacted State Department Cables on September 1, 2011 prior to publication of the cables by WikiLeaks..”

• Cryptome Founder Asks to Be Indicted With Assange (Lauria)

The founder of a U.S.-based website that earlier published the same un-redacted documents that WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange was later indicted for has invited the U.S. Department of Justice to make him a co-defendant with Assange. “Cryptome published the decrypted unredacted State Department Cables on September 1, 2011 prior to publication of the cables by WikiLeaks,” John Young wrote in a Justice Department submission form, which Young posted on Twitter on Tuesday. “No US official has contacted me about publishing the unredacted cables since cryptome published them,” he wrote. “I respectfully request that the Department of Justice add me as a co-defendant in the prosecution of Mr. Assange under the Espionage Act.”

Assange has been charged with possession and dissemination of classified information, some of the same material that Young possesses and disseminated. Young founded Cryptome, which he calls a “free public library” in 1996. It was a precursor of WikiLeaks in publishing raw, classified and unclassified government documents on the internet. Young testified at Assange’s extradition hearing in London in September 2020. His sworn statement says: “I published on Cryptome.org unredacted diplomatic cables on September 1, 2011 under the URL https://cryptome.org/z/z.7z and that publication remains available at the present. … Since my publication on Cryptome.org of the unredacted diplomatic cables, no US law enforcement authority has notified me that this publication of the cables is illegal, consists or contributes to a crime in any way, nor have they asked for them to be removed.”

A cornerstone of the Justice Department’s case against Assange is that he recklessly published State Department cables leaked to him by Army Intelligence Analyst Chelsea Manning, which, the U.S. says, endangered the lives of named U.S. informants. Young is asking the Justice Department why he too hasn’t been prosecuted for publishing these names before Assange did. At Manning’s court martial, Brig. Gen. Robert Carr, testified under oath that no one was actually harmed by the WikiLeaks releases. Then Defense Secretary Robert Gates called the leaks “awkward” and “embarrassing” but said they did only “fairly modest” damage to U.S. foreign interests.

Musk 2008

When @elonmusk predicted the future during this 2008 interview. pic.twitter.com/et1d8xqlLZ

— History In Pictures (@HistoryInPics) November 30, 2022

Parking

Watch until the end. Really funny. Not mean, just genuinely funny. pic.twitter.com/wYW4wcIsi6

— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) November 29, 2022

DogBrush

Very clever
pic.twitter.com/ObFYvI1TAO

— Tansu YEĞEN (@TansuYegen) November 30, 2022

Holidog
https://twitter.com/i/status/1597858949772234752

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Debt Rattle November 30 2022

Nov 302022

November 30, 2022 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:20 am Finance Tagged with: Apple, Big Pharma, censorship, deposition, Elon Musk, Fauci, Grenada, Iran, SBF, Serbia, Twitter, Zelensky 35 Responses »

Pablo Picasso Coffee maker 1943

• Twitter Stops Enforcing COVID-19 Misinformation Policy (ZH)

• ‘Negative Efficacy’ Should Have Stopped COVID Vaccine Recommendations (ET)

• 12 Ways To Hold Big Pharma Accountable For Covid Evils (Fed.)

• A Look from Inside – The Fauci Deposition

• Elon Musk’s Twitter Is A Monster Of The Left’s Own Making (QTR)

• Musk Says Exposé of Twitter’s ‘Free Speech Suppression’ Coming ‘Soon’ (ET)

• Kremlin Outlines Conditions For Ukraine Talks (RT)

• NATO Says ‘Door is Open’ for Ukraine Membership….But (Celente)

• EU Fails To Agree On Russian Oil Price Cap As Full Ban Looms (ZH)

• Rand Paul Calls Out Complete Lack Of Oversight On Ukraine Aid (SN)

• The Four Fuckeries (Jim Kunstler)

• Will The US Try To Pull Off A “Grenada” In Serbia? (Saker)

• US Paralyzed By Islamic Republic Of Iran’s Strategic Swing (Escobar)

• Apple Turns Off China Protest Communication Tool (SN)

• SBF Doesn’t Know What Happened To His Twitter Stake (Axios)

Actual scientists are speaking out. Watch. “Most of them fall asleep crying.”

https://twitter.com/i/status/1597663704044408832

Finland PM Marin Sanna visits New Zealand.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1597825029324296192

A good step, but only step no. 1. You will have to address the lives lost due to censorship of for instance doctors, on top of the whole Pfizer/Fauci/White House/EU terror. Twitter is complicit in this.

• Twitter Stops Enforcing COVID-19 Misinformation Policy (ZH)

Twitter will no longer enforce its Covid-19 misinformation policy, under which users who deviated from prevailing establishment narratives frequently had their accounts locked or suspended. The longstanding policy did not apply to misinformation from government officials, who regularly lied about things such as transmission, masks, vaccine efficacy, side effects, or any of the other ‘science’ which turned out to be patently false. Twitter did not officially announce the change, rather, the company added a note to a page on its website outlining its Covid-19 policy. “Effective November 23, 2022, Twitter is no longer enforcing the COVID-19 misleading information policy,” reads the note, which follows a line that still reads: “As the global community faces the COVID-19 pandemic together, Twitter is helping people find reliable information, connect with others, and follow what’s happening in real time.”

What’s more, Sky News reports that the company’s Covid-19 ‘misleading information’ policy was nuked, which showed that the company operated on a strike system in which those who had a label added to their tweets were given one strike, while those with deleted tweets were given two strikes. Users with two to three strikes would have a 12-hour lockout, while those with four strikes were permanently suspended. “The platform suspended more than 11,000 accounts and removed nearly 98,000 pieces of content for violating its COVID misinformation policy between January 2022 and September 2022, according to information published by Twitter. The site also reduced the visibility of tweets or accounts believed to be in violation of the policy by stopping tweets or retweets from those accounts appearing in certain parts of Twitter, displaying their replies in lower positions in conversations and excluding their tweets or account from recommendations on the site.” -Sky News

Of note, half of Twitter’s content moderation, human rights and communications teams were laid off when new owner Elon Musk took over. Hundreds more left after Musk issued an ultimatum to staff requiring them to sign up for “long hours at high intensity” or leave.

Twitter reports that since January of 2020, 11.72M accounts were “challenged,” 11,230 accounts were suspended, and 97,674 pieces of content were “removed.”

Talk about sliding scales. Not even when we knew the mRNA was endangering and killing people, did we stop.

• ‘Negative Efficacy’ Should Have Stopped COVID Vaccine Recommendations (ET)

It is a well known fact that COVID vaccine effectiveness wanes quickly as time goes on; this is confirmed by countless studies. Although the official narrative for COVID-19 vaccines nowadays only emphasizes its efficacy on protection against ICU admission and death rates, it actually implies the indisputable fact that vaccines don’t protect, contrary to their design, against infection or even symptomatic infection, especially after the emergence of various Omicron variants. Even the protection two shots offers against hospitalization drops to about 40 percent after less than a year. It’s actually looking worse for protection against severe symptoms, as efficacy rates seem to drop into the negatives about five months into full vaccination.

When a vaccine’s efficacy drops into the negatives, it means that vaccination actually elevates the risks of hospitalization and severe diseases rather than reducing the risks. In simple terms, it does more harm than good when the efficacy is negative. During the time prior to the pandemic, any vaccine with an efficacy less than 50 percent would be regarded as a poor product. When a product shows negative efficacy, it should be banned. It seems that the pandemic isn’t only bad for our health, but also is tugging at our common sense.

No room for all twelve here.

• 12 Ways To Hold Big Pharma Accountable For Covid Evils (Fed.)

What is the common denominator between the pharmaceutical companies, the public health bureaucracy, medical associations, the corporate media, and Big Tech companies when it comes to censorship and medical misinformation? Money, of course. According to Statista, the pharmaceutical and medical industry spent $5.6 billion on U.S. television advertising in 2021, second only behind the life and entertainment industry at $10.1 billion. For reference, total U.S. TV ad spending is expected to exceed $68 billion in 2022. According to eMarketer, pharmaceutical and health care companies combined spent an estimated $9.5 billion on digital media in 2020, with 56 percent going toward search advertising, dominated by Google and Facebook, which have aggressively censored medical information that deviated from the official public health narrative.

This accounted for about 7.1 percent of all U.S. digital ad spending. The pharma industry pays, in the form of user fees, for 75 percent of the FDA’s drug review budget, according to Forbes, and 45 percent of its overall budget. One investigation showed that 40 of 107 physician advisers on the FDA committees examined “received more than $10,000 in post hoc earnings or research support from the makers of drugs that the panels voted to approve, or from competing firms.” According to an analysis by the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has numerous conflicts of interest, including openly accepting private gifts through the CDC Foundation, accepting supposedly “prohibited” donations, and “automatic” conflict of interest waivers for advisory committee members.

In 2010, the CDC inspector general noted a “systemic lack of oversight” of its ethics program. The CDC uses taxpayer money to develop patents and then receives money from pharma companies in the form of licenses and royalties. The NIAID, headed by Fauci, also accepts donations, such as a $100 million pledge by Bill Gates for work on gene therapies. Individual public health officials and scientists, including Fauci and former NIH Director Francis Collins, receive royalties on patents used by the industry, teaching hospitals accept industry donations, and doctors accept “consulting fees,” and other travel and meals payments from pharma companies when they promote their products.

Strange story: a 7-hour Fauci deposition, and absolute crickets from the media.

Jim Hoft and attorney John Burns were present at the deposition. Excellent read.

• A Look from Inside – The Fauci Deposition

Here are some observations and highlights from the Fauci deposition: ** Fauci is a skillful liar. As we have seen now for months in his public comments, he lies when he feels he can get away with it or when he feels there will be no meaningful consequences. ** Fauci frequently lied unless and until he was confronted with alternate facts. For example, he claimed he really wasn’t familiar with Ralph Baric (creator of the COVID virus) or Peter Daszak (who brokered Fauci’s NIAID grant money to the Chinese biolab in Wuhan), until he was confronted with evidence that his own chief of staff emailed him describing Daszak and Baric as being part of Fauci’s team! ** Fauci claimed that he had no knowledge that his communications team did not coordinate with social media companies to stop “misinformation and disinformation” until he was forced to admit that he actually did know of certain instances of coordination.

** Fauci continued to push the now-debunked assertion that COVID-19 was a naturally occurring virus. ** Fauci said disinformation and misinformation (information he disagrees with) puts lives at risk. ** Fauci refused to define “gain of function” research saying it was too broad of a term to define. ** FUN FACT: until VERY recently, Fauci’s daughter worked for Twitter. ** FUN FACT: Fauci is a hypochondriac. In a bizarre and stunning segment during the deposition, Fauci blew off some of his frustration on the poor court reporter. The court reporter transcribing the deposition sneezed, and Fauci stopped the deposition and scolded the court reporter: “WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU??? Do you have some sort of respiratory illness, because in the era of COVID, I’m concerned about being near you.” Court Reporter: “I’m not sick, I just have allergies. I can wear a mask though.” Fauci: “Ok. Thank you, because the last thing I want is to get COVID. [notably, (1) Fauci himself did not wear a mask at any point during the deposition, and (2) he appeared to be several feet away from the court reporter].

** FUN FACT: in another Fauci hypochondria spasm, Fauci conspicuously mean-mugged Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry after Landry sneezed into his suit coat jacket. ** Gamesmanship. Whenever introduced to a difficult topic, he dishonestly refused to define key terms so he could avoid being pinned down and held accountable. For example, when discussing the topic of “gain of function” research, he refused to acknowledge what the term meant, objecting that it was a term so broad it could not be defined. ** Fauci repeatedly claimed that he “couldn’t recall” or “couldn’t remember,” and attempted to bolster these incredible statements by appealing to the volume of emails he would receive or issues or studies that would come across his desk. This is simply not credible for nearly all of such statements, because the incidents in question were either recent or within the past three years, and they were all highly politically charged.

[..] ** Other Fauci deceit tactics: throwing subordinates under the bus. Fauci is a famous survivor among bureaucrats. One way he has survived this long is by only taking credit for wins and pawning off losses on hapless subordinates. This trend continued in his deposition, in which he brazenly argued that, while he is the head of the NIAID and its $6 billion dollar budget, he repeatedly didn’t have any knowledge about what his immediate direct reports were doing right under his nose. Fauci supports accountability, so long as he has a subordinate to sacrifice.

“The social media platform had been the topic of political discussions about censorship, but no one had really done anything about it.”

• Elon Musk’s Twitter Is A Monster Of The Left’s Own Making (QTR)

I don’t believe Musk about everything, as my long-time followers know, but I do believe him when he says the platform has become more popular since he took it over. Not only is it more entertaining than its ever been, it’s simply a nice feeling not to have to run my Tweets over in my head before publishing them, thinking: “What would some hyper left-wing hipster in a beret in an office in San Francisco working a 4 hour work week as a content moderator think of what I’m about to post?” But this article isn’t just for those who are enjoying Twitter’s re-birth. More importantly, it’s for those who are having emotional meltdowns over it. What these users, former users, advertisers and general fragile individuals need to understand is that Elon Musk buying Twitter never even happens without an environment that creates the impetus for it to take place.

Putting Musk’s actual motives aside (I have often wondered if he actually wanted to buy Twitter when it came down to brass tacks), he projected publicly that his interest in taking a stake in the company was because they were actively suppressing free speech. Soon, a public discussion about Twitter’s censorship – which had kicked off years prior when Tim Pool publicly skewered head Twitter censor Vijaya Gadde on Joe Rogan’s podcast – was on the table. The social media platform had been the topic of political discussions about censorship, but no one had really done anything about it. Nobody made drastic moves to affect change. And love him or hate him, that’s exactly what Elon Musk did. The impetus for Musk to throw his hat in the ring on the discussion wasn’t just run-of-the-mill moderation issues, either. It was, instead, an incessant and burning need to eliminate content that Twitter didn’t view as favorable to its political leanings.

No matter what side of the aisle you’re on politically, it’s tough to push back against the idea that conservatives were targeted for suspension disproportionately on the platform. Furthermore, legitimate news stories that otherwise would have been worthy of Pulitzer Prizes – like the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story – were actively blackballed from the platform and users who discussed them risked being suspended or banned. These are nearly the very same actions that Beijing takes on Chinese social media when a story or narrative gets out that isn’t stamped with the government’s approval. Now, it looks as though we’re going to find out exactly what was going on behind the scenes at Twitter when the decision to actively censor a major story that could have had an impact on the 2020 election was made. And I don’t care who is running the platform, that type of transparency is sorely needed.

This goes back to the lives lost to mRNA. Let’s see you do it.

• Musk Says Exposé of Twitter’s ‘Free Speech Suppression’ Coming ‘Soon’ (ET)

Elon Musk said Monday that Twitter’s internal files on the company’s “free speech suppression” will be revealed “soon,” raising expectations that light will be shed on the circumstances around Twitter’s censorship of the New York Post’s explosive story that exposed information on a laptop allegedly belonging to Hunter Biden. “The Twitter Files on free speech suppression soon to be published on Twitter itself. The public deserves to know what really happened …” Musk said in a post late Monday. Critics have long held that Twitter has used vague standards to censor or suspend accounts and that the ones targeted are predominantly those expressing conservative views. Twitter has denied any bias in its actions, repeatedly insisting it is simply following its content moderation policies.

Weeks before the 2020 presidential election, the New York Post published an article that allegedly detailed meetings President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, had with a Ukrainian energy firm before then-Vice President Biden pressured Ukrainian government officials to fire a prosecutor probing the company. The story was seen by Biden’s political opponents as evidence of corruption and the news quickly spread across Twitter, prompting the social media firm to start removing links to the article and, for a period of time, suspending the New York Post’s Twitter account. Conservatives saw Twitter’s actions in this regard as evidence of the company’s pro-Biden, anti-Trump bias. Twitter said at the time that it was simply enforcing its rules on hacked materials, which prohibit distribution of information that is obtained through hacking.

Musk in April spoke out in opposition to Twitter’s decision to temporarily suspend New York Post’s Twitter account. “Suspending the Twitter account of a major news organization for publishing a truthful story was obviously incredibly inappropriate,” Musk said in April, responding to a post about the Hunter Biden laptop story. Musk, who took over Twitter in late October, has vowed to make the platform into a politically unbiased bastion of free speech. He said in an open letter following his acquisition of Twitter that he bought it because “it is important to the future of civilization to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence.” “There is currently great danger that social media will splinter into far right wing and far left wing echo chambers that generate more hate and divide our society,” Musk added.

“Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky emphasized that “there will be no Minsk-3 [agreement], which Russia would violate right after sealing it.”

Of course Zelensky knows full well Russia didn’t violate Minsk 1 and 2. Ukraine did. And US.

• Kremlin Outlines Conditions For Ukraine Talks (RT)

Peace negotiations could start between Russia and Ukraine if Moscow sees genuine “political will” on the part of Kiev to engage in dialogue, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov has said. Earlier this month, he noted that the Ukrainian leadership seemed reluctant to sit down for talks at present. When asked by Russian journalists on Tuesday whether there are any preconditions for any potential dialogue to begin between Moscow and Kiev, Peskov said: “It has to be political will, readiness to discuss those Russian demands which have been known for long.” Speaking via video-link during the G20 summit in Indonesia’s Bali in mid-November, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky emphasized that “there will be no Minsk-3 [agreement], which Russia would violate right after sealing it.”

The Ukrainian head of state was referring to the Minsk-1 and Minsk-2 agreements brokered by Germany and France back in 2014 and 2015, respectively. The accords, among other things, envisaged special status for Donetsk and Lugansk regions within the Ukrainian state. Russian President Vladimir Putin cited Kiev’s failure to implement the agreements as one of the reasons for the start of Moscow’s military campaign against its neighbor in late February 2022. Commenting on Zelensky’s remarks at the G20 summit, Peskov argued at the time that they “absolutely confirm” Kiev’s unwillingness to engage in talks. Addressing leaders in Bali, the Ukrainian head of state proposed ten steps that, in his view, would lead to peace. Among the key points of his plan is the complete withdrawal of Russian forces from all Ukrainian territories and respect for the country’s borders drawn up in 1991, following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Meanwhile, Moscow claims some of those regions, most notably Crimea, as its own, following referendums it had held there. It came shortly after The Washington Post reported in early November that the Biden administration had privately asked Zelensky to signal willingness to hold talks with Russia, if only just for show. Washington was reportedly concerned that Kiev’s irreconcilable position could see support from some of its Western allies dwindle amid what anonymous White House officials described as a growing “Ukraine fatigue.” The article claimed that Washington was not serious about getting Kiev to negotiate, and only sought to ensure that weapons and other aid kept flowing from as many nations as possible.

Escalation tactics. Anytime it’s clear Russia is winning, they bring in heavier weaponry. Forcing Russia to follow suit. Same with dangling NATO membership in front of Zelensky. The war must go on.

• NATO Says ‘Door is Open’ for Ukraine Membership….But (Celente)

Jens Stoltenberg, the secretary general of NATO, dangled the possibility that Ukraine may someday, in the future, join the Alliance and benefit from the protection of Article 5 that, when distilled, says: an attack on one, is an attack on all. He made the comment during a two-day summit in Bucharest where Ukraine’s electric grid and Russia’s relentless air campaign took center stage. The Russian strikes have left millions in the dark as temperatures hit 19 degrees in Kyiv. “NATO’s door is open,” he said, according to The New York Times. But he noted that the calvary is not coming during this conflict. “NATO will continue to stand for Ukraine as long as it takes. We will not back down.” In September, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, announced that Kyiv filed a new, expedited application to join NATO in light of Russian President Vladimir Putin annexing four occupied regions in the country.

Zelensky, correctly said in a statement that Finland and Sweden benefited from an accelerated accession into the Alliance. (But neither of those countries are members.) “De facto, we have already proven interoperability with the Alliance’s standards, they are real for Ukraine — real on the battlefield and in all aspects of our interaction,” Zelensky said. “Today, Ukraine is applying to make it de jure. Under a procedure consistent with our significance for the protection of our entire community. Under an accelerated procedure,” the statement continued. Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, killed the idea and said, the issue should be taken up “at a different time.”

NATO’s refusal to accept Ukraine into the fold is understandable because it would assure the beginning of WWIII. But it has still been a sensitive subject in Kyiv. Last summer, Ihor Zhovkva, the deputy chief of staff for Zelensky, said in an interview that Kyiv was told by NATO that it is “not a member because we do not want you.” “NATO is telling us we are not giving you anything,” he said in an interview with a local news outlet in Kyiv, according to Bloomberg. Some could argue that Ukraine was the victim misleading public statements from the U.S. and NATO prior to the invasion. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Stoltenberg said Moscow would be met with a“forceful” response if there was an invasion. Blinken went further and said the U.S. has a “sacred obligation” to defend its allies.

Under Article 10 of the 1949 Washington Treaty, NATO has the right to invite any willing European country into the fold. But Stoltenberg made it clear, before the invasion, that there is a distinction between a NATO partner and ally. Kyiv is a partner. NATO is compelled to only defend allies. NATO countries never embraced Ukraine as an ally because it meant certain war with Russia.

“(see, it was all theater, everything – from day one – and politicians knew it as soon as they did the math)”

• EU Fails To Agree On Russian Oil Price Cap As Full Ban Looms (ZH)

In its relentless pursuit of virtue-signaling hills that it is willing to die on within minutes, several months ago the EU had a brilliant idea: let’s implement a toothless oil price cap on Russian oil exports, one which actually has zero impact on deeply discounted Russian oil and thus doesn’t lead to any more European energy shocks, but because of the optics and the much “lower” permitted transaction price, it will make for great headlines and show the world just how powerful the EU is. Well, the plan almost worked… until Poland and the Baltics forgot to read the fine print, thought that Europe actually does mean business, and blew up the deal. Recall on Friday, negotiations on the Russian oil price cap were suspended – despite a willingness by most European nations to just cross the checkmark and move on – as Poland and the Baltic states objected to a proposed ceiling of $65.

There was some hope that this opposition was just for show, and that come Monday the Poles would relent after some “closed door” negotiations, Europe would slap a $65 price cap, Russia would continue to sell its oil to China and India, and – quietly – to Europe, and gradually renormalize a fractured oil market where India and China pay a 25% discount for oil while the rest of the world has to pay a premium as an offset. However, it was not meant to be, and on Monday European Union governments again failed to agree on a price cap on Russian seaborne crude oil, as Poland again insisted that the cap had to be set lower than proposed by the G7 to cut Moscow’s ability to finance its invasion of Ukraine, diplomats told Reuters. “There is no deal. The legal texts have now been agreed, but Poland still can’t agree to the price,” one diplomat said.

No new date for talks has been set yet, diplomats said, even though a far worse outcome may await Europe in just one week: as a reminder, the price cap mechanism is to enter into force on Dec. 5. And if there is no agreement on the G7 price cap idea by next Monday, the EU would implement harsher measures agreed at the end of May – a ban on all Russian crude oil imports from Dec. 5 and on petroleum products from Feb. 5, Polish diplomats said. That would be a truly catastrophic scenario, and one which could promptly send the price of oil into the stratosphere as JPMorgan explained not too long ago. To be sure, it’s not too late for Poland to fall in line: Hungary and two other landlocked central European states secured exemptions from that ban for the pipeline imports they rely on.

Meanwhile, even the G-7 group of nations has proposed a softer version of the EU ban to keep oil supply to the global economy steady, because Russia supplies 10% of the world’s oil (see, it was all theater, everything – from day one – and politicians knew it as soon as they did the math). It proposed that the EU and other global customers keep buying Russian crude, but only if its price is at or below a G7 agreed level. That would cut the Kremlin’s revenues. The G7 has proposed a cap of $65-70 per barrel, but Poland and some others argue this will not hurt Moscow because Russian crude is already trading below that range at $63.50, and after today’s oil price rollercoaster, the “Russian” price briefly dipped below $60. With Russian production costs estimated at around $20, Moscow has a very large profit from its oil exports. Poland, Lithuania and Estonia have been pushing for a price cap of $30 per barrel.

And yet, despite consensus that Polish opposition would be overturned, the country’s resolve has only hardened: “The Poles are completely uncompromising on the price, without suggesting an acceptable alternative,” the EU diplomat said. “Clearly there is growing annoyance with the Polish position.” Which is hilarious because only Poland is adhering to the principle of what the price cap was supposed to achieve – namely choke off Russian oil profits; and yet for all the pompous rhetoric by G-7 nations, everyone is happy to keep the spectacle going knowing full well that this is just one giant virtue-signaling scheme. Everyone, except Poland that is… and as a result the “annoyance” is not with Putin but with the “Polish position” which is keeping fat European technocrats away from their well-deserved 3-star meals for a fake job well done.

“..the Biden administration inspected only 10% of 22,000 weapons the U.S. has provided to Ukraine..”

• Rand Paul Calls Out Complete Lack Of Oversight On Ukraine Aid (SN)

Senator Rand Paul reacted Monday to news that the Biden administration is struggling to account for some $20 billion in aid that was sent to Ukraine, noting that both political parties ignored his call for an inspector general to overlook it. A report from Fox News, linked in a tweet by Paul, notes that according to the Washington Post, the Biden administration inspected only 10% of 22,000 weapons the U.S. has provided to Ukraine between February and November. It also outlines how Republicans could push for audits to determine where all the military aid is going and how much of it is ending up in the wrong hand.

“Didn’t someone try to legislatively mandate a special inspector general to scrutinize Ukrainian spending?” Paul urged, adding “Oh, that’s right, it was my amendment and most Democrats AND Republicans opposed any semblance of oversight.” Just a fortnight ago, following the throughly debunked “Russian missile attack” on a Polish border town, which turned out to be a Ukrainian missile that had stayed off course, Biden asked Congress to provide another $37.7 billion in emergency aid to Ukraine. The United States has already pledged more than 52 billion euros in military, financial and humanitarian aid to Ukraine since the war began in February 2022 and October 3, way more than any other nation or nations combined.

“..and also stranded the media in an endless loop of ass-covering they are still locked into..”

• The Four Fuckeries (Jim Kunstler)

“We want to save the planet, and the life upon it, but we’re not willing to pay the price and bear the consequences. So we make up a narrative that feels good and run with it.” — Raul Ilargi Meijer.” I doubt there is another era in the history of Western Civ when the forces in-motion acting on society were so mystifying to those acted upon. And isn’t it especially galling that this is so in an age after rational scientific practice had decoded so many of nature’s secrets? Did that project somehow fail in the end? Has the Enlightenment been defeated? How have we become trapped like frogs being boiled haplessly in our own pond-water? I have reduced these forces to four obvious streams of the sheerest seemingly evil fuckery, which is to say nefariously managed events meant to harm us. They are surely all related in some way. Let’s try to de-mystify them to understand what we’re up against.

First: Covid-19. How is it that we don’t know for sure how this organism came into the world, or understand what ensued after it did? Answer: the people who caused it to happen in the Wuhan lab have been busy covering their asses for three years, and successfully so. Yet we know exactly what Anthony Fauci, Francis Collins, Peter Daszak, Ralph Baric and others did. The paper trail in correspondence and patents alone is clear. We just can’t seem to do anything about it. We don’t know why they did it yet, too, but there are plausible guesses. Maybe Dr. Fauci wanted to cap his long, checkered career with a final heroic triumph: the introduction of world-saving mRNA vaccines — incidentally, a great financial boon to himself and the pharma industry he secretly served. Like everything else Fauci worked on for forty years, this experiment ended in disaster: a Frankenstein disease that persists in the population and vaccines that maim and kill people. How did Fauci and company get away with it? Here’s how:

Two: Government’s war on its own citizens. I’d date this for the sake of simplicity to the DOJ’s and FBI’s campaign to defenestrate Donald Trump starting in 2016 for the crime of winning an election. What began as the Russia collusion prank morphed into RussiaGate, another ass-covering extravaganza in which public officialdom gave itself blanket permission to lie about everything it was doing. The likes of James Comey, Andrew McCabe and Barack Obama’s girl squad in the White House — to name just a few of many participants — also managed to hook in the mainstream news media under the supposition that they were the good guys fighting a disgusting, pussy-grabbing supervillain, which disposed the news media to go along with all the FBI and DOJ lies, and also stranded the media in an endless loop of ass-covering they are still locked into.

“..it was simply impossible to fail no matter how inept and incompetent the entire invasion was..”

• Will The US Try To Pull Off A “Grenada” In Serbia? (Saker)

Remember the 1983 US invasion of Grenada aka “Operation Urgent Fury”? It all began on October 23, 1983 when two truck bombs blew up the buildings housing the US and French “Multinational Force in Lebanon”. This attack resulted in 307 people killed including 241 U.S. and 58 French military personnel. Following the bombings, US diplomats engaged in their usual frantic flag-waving and promises to never ever give in to terrorism. The biggest problem for the US was that it had no way to retaliate in a way which would satisfy the flag-waver’s desire for blood. Just blowing up random buildings in Lebanon made very little impact, as for the promises to stay for as long as needed, it was obvious PR – it was clear to everybody that the time to pack and leave had come.

Of course, this was very humiliating for the wannabe “indispensable nation” cum “city upon a Hill”,,, So Reagan, with his undeniable genius for PR and optics, ordered the invasion of Grenada just two days after the bombings in Beirut. Why Grenada? Well, for one thing it was barely defended (mostly by Cuban engineers and locals with small arms) and truly tiny (so tiny, in fact, that the overwhelming majority of US Americans had no idea where it was or why there was suddenly an urgent need to invade. Second, it was very close to the USA, so everybody could get a slice of the cake, including the 1st and 2nd battalions of the US Army’s 75th Ranger Regiment, the 82nd Airborne and the Army’s rapid deployment force, U.S. Marines, Army Delta Force, Navy SEALs, and ancillary forces totaling 7,600 troops.

In terms of hardware, the US brought in 7,300 troops, 4 tanks, 1 LHA (USS Saipan LHA-2), 1 aircraft carrier, 3 destroyers, 2 frigates, 1 ammunition ship and even 27 F-14A Tomcats. All that against a few hundred construction workers armed only with small arms! I won’t go into all the details here, but let’s just say that this invasion was one of the worst and most poorly executed operation in the history of warfare: a truly HUGE US force was brought in to strike at a basically defenseless tiny island nation with the sole purpose of changing the optics of the disaster in Lebanon.

But, no to worry, the Pentagon handed our more medals than the number of participants, while some US special forces who wanted to press charges against helicopter pilots for cowardice (who abandoned the SOF on a runway because of small arms fire) were “counseled” against the idea. Bottom line is this: after the epic disaster in Beirut, the US wanted a quick and easy war to restore the “prestige” of the US armed forces, only to end up with yet another epic disaster, but at least in the case of Grenada, it was simply impossible to fail no matter how inept and incompetent the entire invasion was.

Iran=BRI, SCO, INSTC, BRICS+.

• US Paralyzed By Islamic Republic Of Iran’s Strategic Swing (Escobar)

Iran’s parliament has just approved the accession of the Islamic Republic to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), previously enshrined at the Samarkand summit last September, marking the culmination of a process that lasted no less than 15 years. Iran has already applied to become a member of the expanding BRICS+, which before 2025 will be inevitably configured as the alternative Global South G20 that really matters. Iran is already part of the Quad that really matters – alongside BRICS members Russia, China and India. Iran is deepening its strategic partnership with both China and Russia and increasing bilateral cooperation with India.

Iran is a key Chinese partner in the New Silk Roads, or Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). It is set to clinch a free trade agreement with the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) and is a key node of the International North-South Transportation Corridor (INSTC), alongside Russia and India. All of the above configures the lightning-fast emergence of the Islamic Republic of Iran as a West Asia and Eurasia big power, with vast reach across the Global South. That has left the whole set of imperial “policies” towards Tehran lying in the dust. So it’s no wonder that previously accumulated strands of Iranophobia – fed by the Empire over four decades — have recently metastasized into yet another color revolution offensive, fully supported and disseminated by Anglo-American media.

The playbook is always the same. Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei actually came up with a concise definition. The problem is not bands of oblivious rioters and/or mercenaries: “the main confrontation”, he said, is with “global hegemony.” Ayatollah Khamenei was somewhat echoed by American intellectual and author Noam Chomsky, who has remarked how an array of US sanctions over four decades have severely harmed the Iranian economy and “caused enormous suffering.”

Apple is not looking good lately.

• Apple Turns Off China Protest Communication Tool (SN)

As it mulls kicking Elon Musk’s Twitter off the app store, it has now been revealed that Apple restricted the use of AirDrop in China, a move that harmed the organizational efforts of demonstrators protesting against the CCP’s lockdowns. Over the past week, multiple major cities across China have seen massive protests against lockdowns, with the normally compliant Chinese exploding into rage in response to their government’s ‘zero COVID’ policy. Much of the unrest blew up in response to an incident in Xinjiang’s capital Urumqi, where at least 10 people, some say up to 40, were killed during an apartment fire because lockdown rules stopped residents from fleeing the burning building.

Most of the city’s residents have been prevented from leaving their homes for over 100 days as a result of the draconian rules, which are still in place nearly three years after the pandemic began. With Beijing now trying to contain what some are calling the most serious mass uprising since Tiananmen Square, Apple is apparently helping them to crush dissent. Earlier this month, Apple restricted the use of AirDrop in China, which protesters had been using to evade censorship. AirDrop allows local connections between devices, meaning it cannot be monitored or censored by local authorities. However, Apple launched an update to the app in China that restricted usage to just 10 minutes, making it harder for protesters to communicate with other activists, as well as send messages nearby bystanders and tourists.

AirDrop was also being used by protesters in Hong Kong, who were brutally suppressed by the CCP during months of unrest in 2019. The smartphone company chose to roll out the new “feature” in China only right as the country experienced its biggest demonstrations in decades, which some would suggest is more than just a coincidence. “Apple has helped Beijing to suppress public dissent multiple times, mostly by complying with its requests to remove apps used by protestors for information and communication,” reports Reclaim the Net. “Apple also helps the Chinese Communist Party prevent users from remaining private by banning VPNs in the region.”

“..Bankman-Fried, as of Nov. 10, either believed that Alameda owned a stake in Musk’s Twitter, or that he was uncertain, and therefore misleading potential investors.”

• SBF Doesn’t Know What Happened To His Twitter Stake (Axios)

Sam Bankman-Fried tells Axios that he always intended to roll over at least a portion of his former firm’s $100 million Twitter stake into the new, privately held entity led by Elon Musk. But the former FTX CEO said in an interview on Monday night that he’s not sure that ever happened with the Alameda Research controlled stake. It’s the first time Bankman-Fried has addressed the question around his Twitter stake since Musk said last week that neither SBF nor FTX ever held a position in the privatized Twitter, a statement that contradicted a Semafor news report. Alameda Research, the entity that Bankman-Fried said owned the Twitter stake, is the trading firm that he controlled and is the entity at the center of FTX’s implosion.

A text message seen by Axios that Bankman-Fried sent to Musk said the Twitter stake Alameda owned was worth around $100 million. “I believe that that it was intended for Alameda to rollover at least $20 million or more,” Bankman-Fried told Axios. “I don’t know for sure whether that ultimately happened.” Bankman-Fried noted that at least some of the Twitter stake may have been sold prior to Twitter going private, but he could not confirm. Bankman-Fried, through his advisers, had offered to help Musk buy out Twitter in the spring with potentially billions of dollars. But he later backed out of his offer after the two spoke by phone, Axios previously reported.

Bankman-Fried said at the time that he was interested in rolling the stake into the privatized company, with Musk acknowledging that Bankman-Fried was “welcome to roll.” The Twitter stake was listed on a Nov. 10 balance sheet shown to prospective FTX investors before the company went bankrupt, according to the Financial Times. The balance sheet, upon which Semafor also relied for its reporting, listed $43.3 million of Twitter stock as an illiquid deliverable — or sellable — asset. That suggests that Bankman-Fried, as of Nov. 10, either believed that Alameda owned a stake in Musk’s Twitter, or that he was uncertain, and therefore misleading potential investors.

Big house cats. Sound on.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1597818714631852033

Backwards dog

I must move in stealthily! pic.twitter.com/axCMfPRqCT

— Figen (@TheFigen_) November 29, 2022

Blob top jellyfish
https://twitter.com/i/status/1597658696481312768

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Debt Rattle November 29 2022

Nov 292022

November 29, 2022 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:55 am Finance Tagged with: Apple, Assange, audits, Boeing, Crimea, Dutch farmers, Elon Musk, Luciferian, Twitter, Zelensky 88 Responses »

Salvador Dali Cubist self portrait 1926

• The US Is a Luciferian Project (Garlington)

• About Saving Face: Some Advice to Volodymyr Zelensky (Batiushka)

• Kiev Planning To ‘Retake’ Crimea In 2023 – The Economist (RT)

• Beijing Protesters Spooked By Phone Calls From Police (AFP)

• NYT: Lockdowns Are Draconian When China Does Them (Eugyp)

o US Diplomat Reveals Contents Of Spy Chief Talks (RT)

• Boeing Offers To Make Bombs For Ukraine – Reuters (RT)

• Putin Confession Suggests Ukraine Conflict Could Last For Years (Trenin)

• Biden Admin Scrambles To Track $20B In Ukraine Aid As GOP Warn Of Audits (Fox)

• EU Gets Tough on China as US Steals European Industry (Gallagher)

• Netherlands To Forcefully Shut Down 3,000 Farms (CS)

• New Twitter Sign Ups Hit All-Time Record Despite Cancel Campaign (Turley)

• Twitter Owner Musk Signals New ‘War’ Against Apple (AFP)

• UK Deployed 15 Staff On Secret Operation To Seize Julian Assange (Dec.uk)

• Media Groups Urge US To Drop Julian Assange Charges (G.)

J6 FBI
https://twitter.com/i/status/1597293108857032704

It takes 15 SECONDS to understand the Ukrainian genocide

“People are not gods. They must not act like gods or assume godly authority. If they do, terrible retributions are in store.”

• The US Is a Luciferian Project (Garlington)

All of this is the regression of human development, not its advancement. It is consonant with the spirit of Antichrist, as described in the Book of the Holy Prophet Daniel (7:23-25):‘”Thus he said: `As for the fourth beast, there shall be a fourth kingdom on earth, which shall be different from all the kingdoms, and it shall devour the whole earth, and trample it down, and break it to pieces. As for the ten horns, out of this kingdom ten kings shall arise, and another shall arise after them; he shall be different from the former ones, and shall put down three kings. He shall speak words against the Most High, and shall wear out the saints of the Most High, and shall think to change the times and the law; and they shall be given into his hand for a time, two times, and half a time.’

St. Jerome provides a commentary: ‘The Antichrist will wage war against the saints and will overcome them; and he shall exalt himself to such a height of arrogance as to attempt changing the very laws of God and the sacred rites as well. He will also lift himself up against all that is called God, subjecting all religion to his own authority.’ The modern American project of god-like, autonomous individuals is Promethean/Luciferian at its core, attempting to ‘change the times and the law’ given by the All-Holy Trinity in ever more disturbing ways – by pursuing genetically modified crops and animals; synthetic biology; transgenderism; transhumanism; etc. Is it any wonder that many tradition-respecting countries are becoming reluctant to ally with Washington City and its friends in the wider apostate West?

Within the US itself there is, nevertheless, resistance; there are dissenting voices and views. The people of New England and their descendants in Utah and in the cities along the Pacific Coast have always been at the forefront of pushing new, subversive ideologies – feminism, communism, polygamy/Mormonism, homosexual rights, man-boy love, polyamory. But outside of Yankeedom we meet with more reasonable, more traditional voices. The South, for instance, the South shorn of Yankee-imposed ideologies, that is true to her history and character and inherited customs – Southerners of this kind insist on the ‘given-ness’ of creation, on its immutability, that man must respect certain boundaries regarding it or risk experiencing great cataclysms and tragedies.

Wendell Berry, a typical Southern agrarian of this sort, writes in his essay ‘The Gift of Good Land,’ ‘It [the land}s a gift because the people who are to possess it did not create it. It is accompanied by careful warnings and demonstrations of the folly of saying that “My power and the might of mine hand hath gotten me this wealth” (Deuteronomy 8:17). Thus, deeply implicated in the very definition of this gift is a specific warning against hubris, which is the great ecological sin, just as it is the great sin of politics. People are not gods. They must not act like gods or assume godly authority. If they do, terrible retributions are in store. In this warning we have the root of the idea of propriety, of proper human purposes and ends. We must not use the world as though we created it ourselves.

“As the US realises that the free nations of the world are turning against it, it will not hesitate to blame the Kiev regime. The US must save face. Kiev has been warned: it will have to start negotiating with Russia again.”

• About Saving Face: Some Advice to Volodymyr Zelensky (Batiushka)

It is now dawning on the US elite that they totally underestimated Russia in all respects. For instance, on 25 March 2014 the arrogant Obama contemptuously called Russia ‘a regional power, threatening others out of weakness’ (sic!). (Clearly, he was talking about the USA). As a result, blinded by hubris, some in the US are now admitting that the Ukraine, the most corrupt country in Europe, is a dead duck, the game is simply no longer worth the candle. Apart from being a black hole for Western money and military equipment, the Ukraine is no longer the problem. It is a sideshow, a distraction, a mere symptom of something far more important. The real problem is what is now happening worldwide under Russian leadership – the ending of the unipolar world, of US global hegemony, camouflaged beneath the more innocent-sounding term ‘globalism’.

Following Russia’s decision and ability to stand up to the world’s bully, the whole Non-Western world is now also standing up to him. For example, at the recent G20 meeting in Indonesia, the debate was not about the Ukraine, but about whether or not to continue to accept American Fascist rule (‘the rules-based international order’). All the Latin American and African and four Asian countries said no, it’s finished, the world is now multipolar. Taiwan will inevitably be Chinese and soon – and wait till Chinese troops appear in Mesopotamia to take control of Iraqi oil and gas and rebuild that tragic country. Freedom beckons. Long-deluded Western elitists must be shocked: other ‘regional powers’ are now also standing up to the bully. Perhaps also out of weakness?

Zelensky must have suspected that his boss, until now the self-imagined master of the universe, is going to get rid of him. He is a loser and the Yanks cannot stand losers. As the US realises that the free nations of the world are turning against it, it will not hesitate to blame the Kiev regime. The US must save face. Kiev has been warned: it will have to start negotiating with Russia again. Zelensky had better plan his escape now, because Ukrainians will not forgive him for stringing them along with a pack of lies. Regardless of Zelensky’s delusional assertions that there will be no negotiations with Russia and that it will re-occupy Russian territories, including the Crimea, there are three reasons for him to throw in the towel now, before it all gets much, much worse.

Not going to happen. Zelensky’s Waterloo.

• Kiev Planning To ‘Retake’ Crimea In 2023 – The Economist (RT)

Ukraine’s armed forces are reportedly preparing for an assault on Crimea, to “retake” the peninsula which voted to reunite with Russia in 2014. A former Ukrainian commander told the Economist that the operation was being planned for 2023, but declined to give more details. Former air assault commander, Mikhail Zabrodsky told the outlet that if the army announced its intentions on social media or television, it would “never achieve anything.” He did admit, however, that an operation designed to retake the peninsula would not be a “senseless frontal assault” and would be done using a combination of land troops, sea landings, and air attacks, including the use of drones. “We will surprise people—and many times—again,” he said.

However, Zabrodsky, who claims to remain close to the military planning process in Kiev, stressed that there are still many battles to win before the army could consider a timeframe for such an attack. Military experts have warned that an effort to forcefully retake Crimea or the territories of the Donbass republics, which recently joined Russia after holding public referendums, could prove costly for Kiev and drive Moscow to escalate, perhaps even to the use of tactical nuclear weapons. “There is a real prospect that things will end in a bloodbath. That is an operation Ukraine does not need,” retired navy captain Andrey Ryzhenko told the Economist. Top US General Mark Milley said earlier this month that the probability of a Ukrainian military victory which included taking Crimea was “not high” and not likely to be happening “anytime soon.”

Nevertheless, Kiev has insisted it is determined to seize the peninsula, with President Vladimir Zelensky saying he has no desire to seek a peaceful settlement to the ongoing conflict with Moscow without “de-occupying” the territory. Ukraine’s Deputy Defense Minister Vladimir Gavrilov also suggested earlier this month that Ukrainian forces could step into Crimea “by the end of December.” Crimea overwhelmingly voted to join Russia in 2014 following violent riots in Kiev that ousted democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovich. This autumn, the two Donbass republics, as well as Kherson and Zaporozhye Regions, also voted to become part of Russia in referendums not recognized by Kiev or its Western backers. In late September, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that Moscow would defend its new territories “with full force and all the means at our disposal.”

I can see how this would freak you out.

• Beijing Protesters Spooked By Phone Calls From Police (AFP)

Beijing protesters have been interrogated by police via phone call after attending rare large-scale protests calling for an end to China’s harsh zero-Covid controls, one told AFP on Monday. Hundreds of mostly young people braved icy temperatures to gather near a riverbank in the capital Sunday evening, as a vigil for victims of a deadly apartment blaze in northwestern China’s Xinjiang region turned into calls to end zero-Covid. People have taken to the streets in major cities and gathered at university campuses across China in a wave of protests not seen since pro-democracy rallies in 1989 were crushed. A woman protester told AFP that by Monday evening she and five of her friends who attended the protest had received phone calls from Beijing police, demanding information about their movements.

In one case, a police officer visited her friend’s home after they refused to answer their phone. “He said my name and asked me whether I went to the Liangma river last night… he asked very specifically how many people were there, what time I went, how I heard about it,” she told AFP, asking to stay anonymous for safety reasons. “The police stressed that last night’s protest was an illegal assembly, and if we had demands then we could submit them through the regular channels. ”She said that the police officer was mostly “even-toned” during the brief call and urged her not to attend future events. “I had previously prepared for this, but of course I was still agitated,” she said, adding she would “try her best to continue” attending similar protests in the future, and “prepare better” next time. “I never thought that this kind of civil society activity could ever happen in China,” she said.

“Western lockdowns were necessary to save lives. Chinese lockdowns are the repressive tactic of an undemocratic regime.”

• NYT: Lockdowns Are Draconian When China Does Them (Eugyp)

Three years ago, Zero Covid was the aspiration of public health bureaucrats and politicians across the West. Charlatan techbros like Tomas Pueyo appeared on national television to demand nationwide house arrest; leaders like Angela Merkel surrounded themselves virus-eradicationist modellers and imposed unprecedented months-long closures upon their countries. When protests inevitably broke out, they were violently suppressed; the protesters were slandered as conspiracy theorists and fascists. The New York Times played a leading role in this long and excruciating charade. In April 2020, they reported that “an informal coalition of influential conservative leaders and groups, some with close connections to the [Trump] White House” was responsible for “quietly working to nurture protests and apply … pressure to overturn state and local orders intended to stop the spread of the coronavirus.”

In March 2021, they ran an obnoxious opinion piece about What Happened When Germany’s Far-Right Party Railed Against Lockdowns, which called the German protesters “an amorphous mix of conspiracy theorists, shady organizations and outraged citizens” and appeared to accuse the right-populist party Alternativ für Deutschland of opportunism for joining their ranks. What a difference a few years have made. China Protests Break Out as Covid Cases Surge and Lockdowns Persist is a lead headline in today’s New York Times: “Strict Covid restrictions are hurting the country’s economy and angering members of the public, who are taking to the streets,” we read in the article that follows. Western anti-lockdown protesters are fascists and conspiracy theorists; Chinese anti-lockdown protesters, on the other hand, are ordinary people protesting their oppression:

“Lift the lockdown,” the protesters screamed in a city in China’s far west. On the other side of the country, in Shanghai, demonstrators held up sheets of blank white paper, turning them into an implicit but powerful sign of defiance. One protester, who was later detained by the police, was carrying only flowers. Over the weekend, protests against China’s strict Covid restrictions ricocheted across the country in a rare case of nationwide civil unrest. There had been signs of dissent, but the new wave of anger may pose a bigger challenge for the government. Some demonstrators went so far as to call for the Communist Party and its leader, Xi Jinping, to step down. Many were fed up with Mr. Xi, who in October secured a precedent-defying third term as the party’s general secretary, and his “zero-Covid” policy, which continues to disrupt everyday life, hurt livelihoods and isolate the country.

Western lockdowns were necessary to save lives. Chinese lockdowns are the repressive tactic of an undemocratic regime.

“The diplomat noted that the ongoing Ukraine conflict was not on the officials’ agenda.”

o US Diplomat Reveals Contents Of Spy Chief Talks (RT)

The heads of American and Russian intelligence agencies have discussed the risk of a potential nuclear confrontation between the two countries, Washington’s Charge d’Affaires in Moscow, Elizabeth Rood, has told RIA Novosti. The diplomat noted that the ongoing Ukraine conflict was not on the officials’ agenda. In an interview with the Russian media outlet published on Monday, Rood said: “The US and the Russian Federation have [communication] channels for risk management, especially in terms of nuclear risks, and precisely this issue was the goal of CIA Director [William] Burns’ meeting with his Russian counterpart.” She pointed out that the two spy chiefs had not, however, discussed the situation in Ukraine or ways to end hostilities there.

The American diplomat added that Washington and Moscow could hold consultations in a similar fashion down the road, if necessary. “For now, as far as I know, nothing is being planned,” Rood noted. The high-level meeting in Türkiye’s capital, Ankara, was first reported by Russia’s Kommersant newspaper in mid-November. It is believed to have been the first in-person contact between top US and Russian officials since Moscow launched its military campaign in Ukraine in late February. Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, confirmed that a high-level meeting had taken place in Ankara on November 14, stopping short, however, of revealing any details regarding the participants or the topics discussed there. “It was the American side’s initiative,” he explained.

Recent comments by Rood about Ukraine not being on the agenda of the meeting between Sergei Naryshkin, chief of Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence service, and Burns echoed those made earlier by an unnamed White House official cited by Reuters. That source was also quoted as saying that the two spy chiefs had touched on the issue of American citizens in Russian custody and Russian nationals held in US prisons, and the possibility of a swap deal. Earlier this month, US President Joe Biden expressed hope that his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, would be willing to discuss such an exchange, which would involve US basketball star Brittney Griner, who is serving nine years in a Russian prison for drug offenses. According to media reports, in exchange, the US could release Viktor Bout, a Russian national and alleged arms dealer, who is serving a 25-year jail term in America.

When they make them they want them to be used.

• Boeing Offers To Make Bombs For Ukraine – Reuters (RT)

The Pentagon is reportedly considering an offer from Boeing to mass-produce cheap precision bombs for Ukraine using existing US stores, as Washington and its allies struggle to keep up with Kiev’s military aid requirements. According to Reuters, Boeing has proposed supplying Ukraine’s forces with the so-called Ground-Launched Small Diameter Bomb (GLSDB) system, which would pair the $40,000 GBU-39 Small Diameter Bomb (SDB) with the relatively abundant M26 rocket motor. The weapon has been in development since 2019. In a document seen by the outlet, the manufacturer claims the availability of the necessary components would enable it to produce the ordnance and start delivering it to Ukraine as early as spring 2023.

However, there are still logistical obstacles to overcome, as at least six suppliers would have to expedite shipment of parts in order to produce the weapons quickly. Boeing’s plan also asks for a price discovery waiver, which would exempt the contractor from an in-depth review to ensure the Pentagon is getting a fair deal. According to SAAB AB’s website, who manufactures the weapon together with Boeing, the GPS-guided GLSDB is capable of striking targets at a range of up to 150 kilometers, which would potentially allow Kiev to strike Russian forces far beyond the front line. While both the US military and Boeing have declined to comment on the report, Pentagon spokesperson Lt. Cmdr. Tim Gorman told Reuters that Washington and its allies “identify and consider the most appropriate systems” that would help Kiev.

He refused to elaborate on providing any “specific capability” to Ukraine. Moscow has repeatedly warned the US and its NATO allies against supplying weapons to Ukraine, arguing that it only serves to prolong the conflict and could eventually lead to a direct confrontation between Russia and the West. As countries like the US and UK have made more advanced weapon systems available to Kiev’s forces, capable of reaching deep behind the front lines, the Kremlin has described the ongoing conflict as nothing short of a proxy war against NATO. President Vladimir Putin has also stated Russia is fighting “the entire Western military machine.”

“..he now regards the Minsk agreements of 2014 and 2015 as a mistake..”

Because they stopped Russia’s advance in the Donbass. They were a trick.

• Putin Confession Suggests Ukraine Conflict Could Last For Years (Trenin)

Last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin commented, during a meeting with soldiers’ mothers, that he now regards the Minsk agreements of 2014 and 2015 as a mistake. This concession makes a powerful contribution to the possibilities of peace negotiations to end the fighting in Ukraine. It is worth remembering that in 2014, Putin acted on a mandate from the Russian parliament to use military force “in Ukraine,” not just in Crimea. In fact, Moscow did save the cities of Donetsk and Lugansk from being overrun by Kiev’s army, and defeated Ukraine’s forces, but rather than clearing the whole region of Donbass, Russia stopped, and agreed to a cease-fire brokered in Minsk by Germany and France.

Putin explained to the mothers that at the time, Moscow did not know for sure the sentiments of the Donbass population affected by the conflict, and hoped that Donetsk and Lugansk could somehow be reunited with Ukraine on the conditions laid down in Minsk. Putin might have added – and his own actions, as well as conversations with then-Ukrainian President Pyotr Poroshenko, confirm it – that he was prepared to give the new Kiev authorities a chance to settle the issue and rebuild a relationship with Moscow. Until rather late in the game, Putin also hoped that he could still work things out with the Germans and the French, and the US leadership. Admissions of mistakes are rare among incumbent leaders, but they are important as indicators of lessons they have learned.

This experience has apparently made Putin decide not that the decision to launch the special military operation last February was wrong, but that eight years before, Moscow should not have put any faith in Kiev, Berlin, and Paris, and instead should have relied on its own military might to liberate the Russian-speaking regions of Ukraine. In other words, agreeing to a Minsk-style ceasefire now would be another mistake which would allow Kiev and its backers to better prepare to resume fighting at the time of their choosing. The Russian leader realizes, of course, that many nations in the non-West, those who refused to join the anti-Russian sanctions coalition and profess neutrality on Ukraine, have called for an end to hostilities. From China and India to Indonesia and Mexico, these countries, while generally friendly toward Russia, see their economic prospects being impaired by a conflict that pits Russia against the united West.

The Western media also promote the message that global energy and food security is suffering because of Moscow’s actions. Russia’s arguments and protestations to the contrary have only limited impact, since Russian voices are rarely heard on Middle Eastern, Asian, African, or Latin American airwaves. Be that as it may, Moscow cannot ignore the sentiments of the larger part of humanity, which is now increasingly referred to in Russian expert circles as the Global Majority. Hence, official Russian statements that Moscow is open for dialogue without preconditions. However, any Russian delegation to talks would have to take into account the recent amendments to the country’s Constitution, which name the four former Ukrainian regions of Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson, and Zaporozhye as part of the Russian Federation. As Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has put it, Russia will only negotiate on the basis of existing geopolitical realities. It should be noted that the Kremlin has not retracted the objectives of the military operation, which include the demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine, which means ridding the state and society of ultra-nationalist, anti-Russian elements.

“If America pulls back, Putin could snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.”

• Biden Admin Scrambles To Track $20B In Ukraine Aid As GOP Warn Of Audits (Fox)

President Biden’s administration is scrambling to track the nearly $20 billion in military aid it has sent to Ukraine as Republicans warn of impending audits when they take control of the House in January. Likely future House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has said his party will not be giving Ukraine a “blank check” to fend off Russia’s invasion. A potential audit would determine how much, if any, of the U.S. aid is ending up in the wrong hands. The Biden administration’s previous tracking efforts have inspected only a fraction of the aid provided to the country. The Republican push to ramp up oversight enjoys some bipartisan support in Congress. Some staunch Ukraine allies fear the party will cut off aid to the country entirely, however.

Firebrand Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., has vowed to “hold our government accountable” for Ukraine spending, and some of her colleagues across the aisle are echoing the message. “The taxpayers deserve to know that investment is going where it’s intended to go,” Rep. Jason Crow, D-Colo., told the Washington Post. “In any war, there can be missteps and misallocation of supplies.” The lawmakers agree that current monitoring efforts appear woefully inadequate, with the Biden administration inspecting just 10% of the 22,000 weapons the U.S. has provided to Ukraine between February and November 1, according to the Post. U.S. allies in Europe have expressed hope that Republican skepticism of Ukraine aid will not lead to a widespread cutting of funding, however.

“You’d be playing into Putin’s hands,” U.K. Parliament member Tobias Ellwood said in October. “If America pulls back, Putin could snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.” McCarthy has based his criticism of the aid packages on America’s economic situation as the economy threatens to fall into a recession. “I think people are gonna be sitting in a recession and they’re not going to write a blank check to Ukraine,” McCarthy said last month. “They just won’t do it. … It’s not a free blank check.”

The entire continent is made up of sock puppets.

• EU Gets Tough on China as US Steals European Industry (Gallagher)

European leaders have finally woken up to the fact that Washington is benefitting at their expense with the US/NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. Despite their economies being harmed by Washington, the EU continues to take a much tougher stance against Beijing. NATO leaders are set to meet Nov. 29-30 in Bucharest and will discuss ways to “reduce dependency” on China. At the same time, EU leaders are debating how to deal with their US “ally” coaxing European industry to American shores. Ahead of French President Emmanuel Macron’s visit to Washington, Paris is signaling that Europe would be more willing to go along with a more hardline China stance if the US backs down on efforts to poach European industry with its subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act.

Yet, there are reasons to believe that’s a dead end, and some Europeans are already waving the white flag. While the EU is suddenly in emergency mode over its industry being wiped out by American rivals – something that’s been obvious to many for months – its focus all year has been on Moscow and Beijing. Here’s a brief roundup of the China focus: The bloc is busy hammering out an Anti-Coercion Instrument, which aims to take countermeasures against outside countries that attempt to pressure bloc states using the member states’ economic dependencies. China, which implemented a de facto trade embargo against Lithuania after it allowed Taiwan to open a liaison office in Vilnius, is widely seen as the primary target of the rule.

European lawmakers are also finalizing new rules to curb acquisitions or bids for public contracts by subsidized foreign companies. Again it is widely believed the rules are aimed primarily at China. It came on the heels of the uproar over Chinese efforts to obtain a controlling stake in a Hamburg port terminal. In the end, Berlin approved a sale of 24.9% of the terminal to Cosco. American companies could also face scrutiny from the new legislation due to the Inflation Reduction Act, which has subsidies for US-based manufacturers of electric cars, batteries and renewable energy products and consumers who buy such American-made products. But it would only apply to American companies if they try to buy EU companies or in public procurement bids and not in the case of EU companies relocating production or building of future factories.

China’s Global Times argues that Europe should blame the US for its decline in competitiveness but doesn’t believe that will be the case: Europe has a kind of concern or fear about the rise of China, which is also consistent with the strategy of containing China pursued by the US, Zhao Junjie, a research fellow at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences’ Institute of European Studies. [..] He added that this decision by the EU is very unwise, especially when European economic prospects are unclear, as the implementation of trade protectionism and blocking of normal market business behavior will ultimately damage European companies.

Pre-Covid this was seen as following the science. But now things are different. Now it’s just WEF. And people won’t follow that.

• Netherlands To Forcefully Shut Down 3,000 Farms (CS)

To comply with the European Union’s radical climate laws, the Dutch government of World Economic Forum acolyte Mark Rutte will force up to 3,000 farms to shut down for good. Farmers will be made an offer on their farms, which the government claims is “well over” market value. According to nitrogen minister Christianne van der Wal, the government purchase will be compulsory. “There is no better offer coming,” claimed van der Wal. Recent EU nature preservation rules require member states to reduce emissions across sectors of the economy. As one of Europe’s most prominent farming nations, half of the Netherlands’ emissions come from agricultural activity. Rutte has warned that those who refuse to comply could face government force.

When the Dutch government announced a nitrogen fertilizer reduction mandate, the country saw nationwide protests from farmers. Former agricultural minister resigned from his position as a result of the movement. The Dutch farmer protests received international attention, with protests popping up in Canada in support of the uprising. Rutte’s government policies have many observers concerned about the direction he is taking the country. Earlier this month, the country’s finance minister Sigrid Kaag proposed a law to allow banks to spy on transactions of citizens which totaled more than €100. Privacy watchdog Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens called the bill an unprecedented “surveillance of the Dutch” people.

“Biden is accusing Twitter of “spewing lies all across the world” by seeking to reduce one of the largest censorship systems in history.”

• New Twitter Sign Ups Hit All-Time Record Despite Cancel Campaign (Turley)

Since Elon Musk bought Twitter with a pledge to restore free speech protections, the media and political establishment have maintained an unrelenting campaign to use pressure from corporations and foreign governments to force him to restore censorship policies. Reporters have covered seemingly every celebrity declaring that they are leaving the site or even selling their Teslas in protest. As companies joined the boycott, commentators gleefully announced the “death,” “collapse,” and “demise” of the social media company with some mocking Musk’s endangerment of billions for free speech. New figures, however, appear to show that the public is solidly with Musk on the free speech issue. New signups at Twitter are at an all-time high with two million new signups per day.

As these companies and activists demand censorship, customers are signing up in mass to embrace the greater diversity of viewpoints and expression at the company. While companies are yielding to demands from the left that they cut off ad revenue until Musk restores censorship, users are flocking to the site. The over two million new sign-ups per day represent a 66% increase over the same time frame last year, according to figures released by Musk. Of course, it has long been known that the public wants more, not less, free speech. It is the political establishment that is struggling to retain control over speech on social media at any cost. Facebook even tried a massive commercial campaign to convince the public to embrace censorship.

President Joe Biden has led calls for censorship on social media, which have been largely heeded by companies like Facebook and Twitter. Biden is accusing Twitter of “spewing lies all across the world” by seeking to reduce one of the largest censorship systems in history. President Biden has previously accused social media companies of “killing people” by refusing to impose robust censorship over a wide range of subjects. Many of those banned or censored were doctors with opposing views on the data and the science related to the pandemic. Some of those doctors were the co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, which advocated for a more focused Covid response that targeted the most vulnerable population rather than widespread lockdowns and mandates.

“It’s not even that they worry about the content. Twitter is a tainted brand, a brand non grata companies don’t want to be associated with..”

• Twitter Owner Musk Signals New ‘War’ Against Apple (AFP)

Twitter owner Elon Musk on Monday opened fire against Apple over its tight control of what is allowed on the App Store, saying the iPhone maker has threatened to oust his recently acquired social media platform. Musk also joined the chorus crying foul over a 30 percent fee Apple collects on transactions via its App Store – the sole gateway for applications to get onto its billion plus mobile devices. A series of tweets fired off by Musk included a meme of a car with his first name on it veering onto a highway off-ramp labeled “Go to War,” instead of continuing onwards towards “Pay 30%.” The billionaire CEO also tweeted that Apple has “threatened to withhold Twitter from its App Store, but won’t tell us why.” Both Apple and Google require social networking services on their app stores to have effective systems for moderating harmful or abusive content.

But since taking over Twitter last month, Musk has cut around half of Twitter’s workforce, including many employees tasked with fighting disinformation, while an unknown number of others have voluntarily quit. He has also reinstated previously banned accounts, including that of former president Donald Trump. Yoel Roth, the former head of trust and safety at Twitter who left after Musk took over, wrote in a New York Times op-ed that “failure to adhere to Apple’s and Google’s guidelines would be catastrophic,” and risk “expulsion from their app stores.” Describing himself as a “free speech absolutist,” Musk believes that all content permitted by law should be allowed on Twitter, and on Monday described his actions as a “revolution against online censorship in America.”

He also tweeted that he planned to publish “Twitter Files on free speech suppression,” but without clarifying what data he had in mind to share with the public. Though Musk says Twitter is seeing record high engagement with him at the helm, his approach has startled the company’s major moneymaker — advertisers. In recent weeks, half of Twitter’s top 100 advertisers have announced they are suspending or have otherwise “seemingly stopped advertising on Twitter,” an analysis conducted by nonprofit watchdog group Media Matters found. Musk on Monday accused Apple of also having “mostly stopped advertising on Twitter.” “Do they hate free speech in America?” he asked, before replying with a tweet tagging Apple CEO Tim Cook.

In the first three months of 2022, Apple was the top advertiser on Twitter, spending some $48 million on ads which accounted for more than 4 percent of the social media platform’s revenue, according to a Washington Post report citing an internal Twitter document. Sarah Roberts, an information studies expert at University of California, Los Angeles, told AFP that “Musk didn’t understand that Twitter itself was a brand, had cachet.” “Now companies don’t even want to be associated with it. It’s not even that they worry about the content. Twitter is a tainted brand, a brand non grata companies don’t want to be associated with,” she added.

The swamp is putrid.

“..he watched a live-feed of Assange’s arrest from the Operations Room at the top of the Foreign Office alongside Pelican personnel. After Assange had been imprisoned in Belmarsh, Duncan had a drinks party at his office for the Pelican team.”

• UK Deployed 15 Staff On Secret Operation To Seize Julian Assange (Dec.uk)

The British government assigned at least 15 people to the secret operation to seize Julian Assange from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, new information shows. The WikiLeaks founder was given political asylum by Ecuador in 2012, but was never allowed safe passage out of Britain to avoid persecution by the US government. The Australian journalist has been in Belmarsh maximum security prison for the past three and a half years and faces a potential 175-year sentence after the UK High Court greenlighted his extradition to the US in December 2021. ‘Pelican’ was the secret Metropolitan Police operation to seize Assange from his asylum, which eventually occurred in April 2019. Asylum is a right enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The operation’s existence was only revealed in the memoirs of former foreign minister Sir Alan Duncan which were published last year.

The UK government routinely blocks, or obfuscates its answers to, information requests about the Assange case. But the Cabinet Office recently told parliament it had seven officials working on Operation Pelican. The department’s role is to “support the Prime Minister and ensure the effective running of government”, but it also has national security and intelligence functions. [..] Other government ministries refused to say if they had staff working on Pelican, including the Ministry of Justice (MoJ). The MoJ is in charge of courts in England and Wales, where Assange’s extradition case is currently deciding whether to hear an appeal. It is also in control of its prisons, including Belmarsh maximum security jail where Assange is incarcerated. When asked if any of its staff were assigned to Pelican, the MoJ claimed: “The information requested could only be obtained at disproportionate cost.”

Sir Alan Duncan, foreign minister for the Americas from 2016-19, was the key UK official in the diplomatic negotiations between the UK and Ecuador to get Assange out of the embassy. In his memoirs he wrote that he watched a live-feed of Assange’s arrest from the Operations Room at the top of the Foreign Office alongside Pelican personnel. After Assange had been imprisoned in Belmarsh, Duncan had a drinks party at his office for the Pelican team. “I gave them each a signed photo which we took in the Ops Room on the day, with a caption saying ‘Julian Assange’s Special Brexit Team 11th April 2019’”, he wrote. Ecuador’s president from 2007-17, Rafael Correa, recently told Declassified he granted Assange asylum because the Australian journalist “didn’t have any possibility of a fair legal process in the United States.”

Given all of the Guardian’s efforts to paint Assange as a traitor, writing such letters takes gall.

• Media Groups Urge US To Drop Julian Assange Charges (G.)

Twelve years ago, on November 28th 2010, our five international media outlets – the New York Times, the Guardian, Le Monde, El País and Der Spiegel – published a series of revelations in cooperation with WikiLeaks that made the headlines around the globe. “Cablegate”, a set of 251,000 confidential cables from the US state department, disclosed corruption, diplomatic scandals and spy affairs on an international scale. In the words of the New York Times, the documents told “the unvarnished story of how the government makes its biggest decisions, the decisions that cost the country most heavily in lives and money”. Even now in 2022, journalists and historians continue to publish new revelations, using the unique trove of documents.

For Julian Assange, publisher of WikLeaks, the publication of “Cablegate” and several other related leaks had the most severe consequences. On April 12th 2019, Assange was arrested in London on a US arrest warrant, and has now been held for three and a half years in a high-security British prison usually used for terrorists and members of organised crime groups. He faces extradition to the US and a sentence of up to 175 years in an American maximum-security prison. This group of editors and publishers, all of whom had worked with Assange, felt the need to publicly criticise his conduct in 2011 when unredacted copies of the cables were released, and some of us are concerned about the allegations in the indictment that he attempted to aid in computer intrusion of a classified database.

But we come together now to express our grave concerns about the continued prosecution of Julian Assange for obtaining and publishing classified materials. The Obama-Biden administration, in office during the WikiLeaks publication in 2010, refrained from indicting Assange, explaining that they would have had to indict journalists from major news outlets too. Their position placed a premium on press freedom, despite its uncomfortable consequences. Under Donald Trump however, the position changed. The DoJ relied on an old law, the Espionage Act of 1917 (designed to prosecute potential spies during world war one), which has never been used to prosecute a publisher or broadcaster. This indictment sets a dangerous precedent, and threatens to undermine America’s first amendment and the freedom of the press.

Obtaining and disclosing sensitive information when necessary in the public interest is a core part of the daily work of journalists. If that work is criminalised, our public discourse and our democracies are made significantly weaker. Twelve years after the publication of “Cablegate”, it is time for the US government to end its prosecution of Julian Assange for publishing secrets. Publishing is not a crime.

The editors and publishers of:
The New York Times
The Guardian
Le Monde
Der Spiegel
El País

Julian Assange speaking in 2011: "We need a Cablegate for the CIA, we need a Cablegate for the SVR [Russian intelligence], we need a #Cablegate of the New York Times, actually, to see all the stories they're censoring…" #Cablegate12 #FreeAssangeNOW pic.twitter.com/MjhU44tVOU

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) November 28, 2022

You have 2 cows
https://twitter.com/i/status/1597106643329687552

Kitty tail
https://twitter.com/i/status/1597423159367847936

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Debt Rattle December 8 2021

Dec 082021

December 8, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:29 am Finance Tagged with: Apple, boosters, breakthrough, FDA, Green Pass, mandate, NIH, Omarova, Omicron, Pfizer, Ukraine, WHO 81 Responses »

Gustave Caillebotte Paris Street, Rainy Day 1884

• Judge Blocks Biden’s Vaccine Mandate For Federal Contractors Nationwide (JTN)

• South Africa Healthcare Chief Says Omicron May Signal the End of COVID-19 (SN)

• Green Pass and COVID-19 Vaccine Booster Shots in Israel (SSRN)

• Beyond Omicron: What’s Next For Covid’s Viral Evolution (Nature)

• SARS-CoV-2 Breakthrough Infections In Vaccinated Individuals (Nature)

• WHO Europe Says Covid Vaccine Mandates Should Be ‘Last Resort’ (Y!)

• Vaccine-Resistant Mutations Correlate Strongly With Vaccination Rates (NIH)

• Study Shows Omicron Variant Partially Evades Vaccine’s Protection (GR)

• FDA Wants Until at Least 2096 to Fully Release Pfizer’s Vaccine Data (Siri)

• New NIH Records Reveal Information About Research Into Coronavirus (JW)

• Controversial Biden Banking Nominee Omarova Bows Out (JTN)

• Apple Signed Secret $275 Billion Deal With Chinese Government (ZH)

• Putin To Biden: ‘Finlandize’ Ukraine, Or We Will (Pat Buchanan)

EU ministers conference: After February 1, free travel in all of EU for every citizen who’s had a booster shot within 9 months of their second shot.

BUT: people already know the Omicron shot is supposed to come in 100 days.

Yeah, the unvaxxed occupy all hospital beds… Just not in Wales?!

The judge ruled that federal contractors nationwide are no longer subject to Biden’s vaccine mandate.

This prevents a lot of misery.

• Judge Blocks Biden’s Vaccine Mandate For Federal Contractors Nationwide (JTN)

A U.S. district court judge blocked the Biden administration on Tuesday from enforcing a COVID-19 vaccine mandate on employees of government contractors across the nation. This conservative win adds to a string of losses for President Joe Biden in federal courts. Southern District of Georgia Judge R. Stan Baker ruled in favor of multiple contractors across seven states – Alabama, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, South Carolina, Utah and West Virginia. A district judge in Kentucky last week issued a preliminary injunction prohibiting the Biden administration from enforcing their vaccine mandate on contractors, but it only applied to three states – Kentucky, Ohio and Tennessee. Because one of the plaintiffs in the Georgia decision, Associated Builders and Contractors, Inc., is a trade group with members across the United States, Baker’s decision applies nationwide.

Baker, a Trump appointee, wrote that the plaintiffs “will likely succeed in their claim that the President exceeded the authorization given to him by Congress” when Biden issued an executive order on Sept. 9 mandating federal contractors to receive COVID-19 vaccines. The White House announced last month that it was delaying federal contractors’ vaccine mandate deadline until January, not December as previously planned. Last week the Biden administration also pushed back its deadline requiring federal workers to be vaccinated. Federal workers now have until January to be vaccinated. A federal judge in Louisiana issued a preliminary injunction earlier this month to stop “Biden’s national vaccine mandate for healthcare workers,” Just the News reported.

“There have been zero deaths from Omicron worldwide and in countries like the UK it hasn’t even caused anyone to be hospitalized.”

• South Africa Healthcare Chief Says Omicron May Signal the End of COVID-19 (SN)

The CEO of South Africa’s largest private healthcare network says that the Omicron variant is “so mild” that it “may signal the end of COVID-19.” According to Richard Friedland, chief executive officer of Netcare Ltd., the early days of the variant suggest there is absolutely no need to panic and that it might actually be a good thing. “If in the second and third wave we’d seen these levels of positivity to tests conducted, we would have seen very significant increases in hospital admissions and we’re not seeing that. In our primary care clinics it is mainly people under 30-years-old,” he said. “So I actually think there is a silver lining here and this may signal the end of Covid-19, with it attenuating itself to such an extent that it’s highly contagious, but doesn’t cause severe disease. That’s what happened with Spanish flu.”

“We are seeing breakthrough infections of people who have been vaccinated, but the infections we’re seeing are very mild to moderate. So for health care workers who have had boosters, it’s mostly mild. I think this whole thing has been so poorly communicated and so much panic generated.” Friedland’s comments won’t be welcomed by Big Pharma, which continues to make vast profits from endless booster vaccines. Not will his remarks be amplified by the corporate media, which has enjoyed a huge boost in ratings from endless COVID fearmongering. However, the CEO’s statement correlates with what other health experts on the ground in South Africa have said about Omicron.

The doctor who first discovered the variant says the it is “mild” and hasn’t caused an uptick in hospitalizations. Angelique Coetzee, chair of the South African Medical Association, echoed Dr. Barry Schoub’s sentiments, noting that the patients infected with omicron had “symptoms (that) were so different and so mild from those I had treated before.” There have been zero deaths from Omicron worldwide and in countries like the UK it hasn’t even caused anyone to be hospitalized.

Twitter comments: “Notably, the new Israel booster study finds highly negative VE for the first month after booster administered and only afterwards turns positive which makes overall VE low (35% for first 3 months).”

“This says vaccines not very effective for first three months, but boosters are being recommended at 3 months intervals for some. So right when they become most effective, get another one? Maybe I’m not understanding.”

• Green Pass and COVID-19 Vaccine Booster Shots in Israel (SSRN)

The paper describes an analysis based on data published on November 1, 2021, by the Israeli Ministry of Health (MOH) on its control dashboard about returning Israelis through the national airport. The data include the respective numbers of Vaccinated and Unvaccinated individuals and the number of positive COVID-19 cases identified in each group. These reflect the modified definitions of Vaccinated and Unvaccinated status after the Pfizer booster vaccination campaign in Israel (August-October). In particular, to maintain a Vaccinated status and specifically the “Green Pass”, individuals who received the initial 2 doses more than 6 months ago were required to receive the booster vaccine.

Israel national airport is a unique setting, where the Vaccinated and Unvaccinated individuals all have to test, which allows a more objective assessment of both the booster and Green Pass efficacy in preventing infections. The analysis suggests that the positivity rate (number of cases divided by number of tests) among the Vaccinated cohort throughout August-October is only 1.54-fold smaller than the one among the Unvaccinated cohort (about 35% relative protection). More specifically, compared to the Unvaccinated group, the Vaccinated group has a significantly higher positivity rate during the month of August, then in September it shows a 3.45-fold smaller positivity rate (71% relative protection), and this protection decreases to 2.66-fold (62% protection) during October.

The analysis suggests that the relative protection of the booster shot against infection is likely to be significantly smaller than the initial estimates of 10-11-fold (over 90%) reported by the MOH, probably around 60% at best. This also implies that the absolute number of infected individuals in the Vaccinated group is likely to be at least as high as in the Unvaccinated, raising serious concerns that the new Green Pass is inefficient in preventing infection spread, and could expose high risk individuals to risk.

Two long and detailed articles from Nature. Which leave me with the impression that they’re more sophisticated sales jobs for the vaccines.

• Beyond Omicron: What’s Next For Covid’s Viral Evolution (Nature)

Delta and its descendants now account for the vast majority of COVID-19 cases worldwide. Most researchers expected these Delta lineages to eventually outcompete the last holdouts. But Omicron has undermined those predictions. “A lot of us were expecting the next weird variant to be a child of Delta, and this is a bit of a wild card,” says Aris Katzourakis, a specialist in viral evolution at the University of Oxford, UK. Teams in Botswana and South Africa identified the variant in late November — although researchers say it is unlikely to have originated in either country — and health officials have linked it to a rapidly growing outbreak centred in South Africa’s Gauteng province. The variant harbours around 30 changes to spike, many shared with the other variants of concern, and scientists worldwide are working to gauge the threat it poses.

The swift rise in cases of Omicron in South Africa suggests that the new variant has a fitness advantage over Delta, says Tom Wenseleers, an evolutionary biologist and biostatistician at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium. Omicron carries some of the mutations associated with Delta’s sky-high infectivity. But if increased infectivity were the sole reason for its rapid growth, it would translate to an R0 in the 30s, Wenseleers says. “That’s very implausible.” Instead, he and other researchers suspect that Omicron’s rise may be largely due to its ability to infect people who are immune to Delta through vaccination or previous infection.

Scientists’ portrait of Omicron is still blurry and it will take weeks before they can fully assess its properties. But if the variant is spreading, in part, because of its ability to evade immunity, it fits in with theoretical predictions about how SARS-CoV-2 is likely to evolve, says Sarah Cobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago in Illinois. As gains in SARS-CoV-2’s infectivity start to slow, the virus will have to maintain its fitness through overcoming immune responses, says Cobey. For instance, if a mutation or set of mutations halved a vaccine’s ability to block transmission, this could vastly increase the number of available hosts in a population. Cobey says it’s hard to imagine that any future gains in infectivity could provide the same boost.

That evolutionary path, towards immune evasion and away from gains in infectivity, is common among established respiratory viruses such as influenza says Adam Kucharski, a mathematical epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. “The easiest way for the virus to cause new epidemics is to evade immunity over time. That’s similar to what we see with the seasonal coronaviruses.”

Oh yeah, boosters!

• SARS-CoV-2 Breakthrough Infections In Vaccinated Individuals (Nature)

Vaccines against viruses work by generating immune responses that inhibit the infection process (mainly serum antibodies that bind and/or neutralize virus particles and, for mucosally applied vaccines, also mucosal secretory IgA) and by creating immune memory in the form of antigen-specific memory B cells and T cells that are primed to produce a rapid anamnestic response when the infection reintroduces the vaccine antigen into the body. These mechanisms can prevent initial proliferation of the virus or, failing that, rapidly control it, reducing the amount of virus to which the host is ultimately exposed and the duration of the exposure. While the amount of circulating antibody present following vaccination (or any antigenic stimulus) increases rapidly, on a timescale of days to weeks, it also declines rapidly from its peak on a timescale of weeks to months, and then more slowly over a time scale of decades.

The first phase reflects antibody secreted by short-lived plasmablast populations, which expand right after antigen exposure as a first line of defense. They typically die within 1–2 weeks after antigen exposure and the antibody they secreted declines based on the specific antibody half-life (approximately 21 days for IgG). The second, usually very slow, phase of decline likely reflects the kinetics of long-lived plasma cells, which migrate to the bone marrow and from there secrete antibody into the blood, often maintaining stable titres for many years. Importantly, although peripherally injected vaccines can induce low levels of IgG and monomeric IgA antibodies at the mucosal surfaces of the upper respiratory tract (which are the main entry portal for respiratory viruses) they do not induce secretory IgA efficientl2. The small proportions of IgG and IgA that land on the mucosal surfaces of the upper respiratory tract after intramuscular vaccination disappear relatively quickly as serum antibodies wane.

Whether a breakthrough infection occurs when a vaccinated host is exposed to an infectious person depends on whether the immune response present in that person at the moment of exposure is sufficient to abort or rapidly control the infection (Fig. 1). Given the kinetics of immune responses, it is not surprising that the amount of protection offered by a vaccine against infection might decline over time, allowing more breakthrough infections as the immune response wanes over months (as observed for influenza virus vaccines) and/or as immune memory wanes over years (as observed for mumps vaccines). Likewise, protection might increase after a breakthrough infection or after a subsequent vaccine dose, which enhances the person’s immune response. It is also unsurprising that older individuals, whose neutralizing antibody responses to COVID-19 vaccines are typically lower, appear to be at greater risk of breakthrough infections at any given time following vaccination.

Covid has exposed the WHO as a failed entity.

• WHO Europe Says Covid Vaccine Mandates Should Be ‘Last Resort’ (Y!)

The World Health Organization (WHO) in Europe on Tuesday cautioned against making Covid vaccines mandatory, while urging better protection of children among whom cases are high. Europe is battling a fierce surge in the pandemic, with the WHO registering 120,000 Covid-related deaths on the continent since November 23 when it warned of up to 500,000 more deaths by March 2022. Regional director Hans Kluge said compulsory vaccines should be “an absolute last resort and only applicable when all other feasible options to improve vaccination uptake have been exhausted”. Noting that mandates have increased vaccine uptake in some cases, Kluge said these were “context specific”, and added that the effect mandates may have on “public confidence and public trust” must also be considered.

The regional health bloc also noted that the number of cases had increased “across all age groups, with the highest rates currently observed in the five to 14 years age group.” “It is not unusual today to see two to three times higher incidence among young children than in the average population,” Kluge told a press conference. “The health risks extend beyond the children themselves,” Kluge added, noting that children risk passing the infection to parents and grandparents in the home. Improved ventilation and the use of masks should be a standard at all primary schools as part of a safe learning environment, while avoiding school closures and remote learning, the regional director said. “Vaccinating children should be discussed and considered nationally,” Kluge added.

The WHO’s European region comprises 53 countries and territories, and includes several in Central Asia. The organisation also expressed concern about rising cases of the recently discovered Omicron variant of the virus, but stressed that the fight should still be focused on the currently dominant Delta variant. “The problem now is Delta and however we succeed against Delta today is a win over Omicron tomorrow, before it eventually surges,” Kluge said. Meanwhile in Norway, where 29 cases of the Omicron variant have been confirmed, health authorities warned that the new variant would likely add to the stress on health services to a “significant degree”.

Is anybody tracking this on a broad scale?

• Vaccine-Resistant Mutations Correlate Strongly With Vaccination Rates (NIH)

The importance of understanding SARS-CoV-2 evolution cannot be overlooked. Recent studies confirm that natural selection is the dominating mechanism of SARS-CoV-2 evolution, which favors mutations that strengthen viral infectivity. Here, we demonstrate that vaccine-breakthrough or antibody-resistant mutations provide a new mechanism of viral evolution. Specifically, vaccine-resistant mutation Y449S in the spike (S) protein receptor-binding domain, which occurred in co-mutations Y449S and N501Y, has reduced infectivity compared to that of the original SARS-CoV-2 but can disrupt existing antibodies that neutralize the virus.

By tracking the evolutionary trajectories of vaccine-resistant mutations in more than 2.2 million SARS-CoV-2 genomes, we reveal that the occurrence and frequency of vaccine-resistant mutations correlate strongly with the vaccination rates in Europe and America. We anticipate that as a complementary transmission pathway, vaccine-breakthrough or antibody-resistant mutations, like those in Omicron, will become a dominating mechanism of SARS-CoV-2 evolution when most of the world’s population is either vaccinated or infected. Our study sheds light on SARS-CoV-2 evolution and transmission and enables the design of the next-generation mutation-proof vaccines and antibody drugs.

Trying to confuse natural immunity and vaccine “protection”.

• Study Shows Omicron Variant Partially Evades Vaccine’s Protection (GR)

Researchers studying the effects of Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine on the Omicron variant announced on Tuesday that the variant is partially capable of evading the vaccine’s protection. The team, which has been working in South Africa since the discovery of the new variant, said that those who have recovered from Covid and are fully vaccinated, as well as those who have received a booster shot, are well protected against the variant. The team conducted tests in lab dishes with samples from a dozen people who were fully vaccinated with Pfizer’s vaccine. The results indicated that Omicron is capable of escaping the vaccine’s protection– but only partially.

“There is a very large drop in neutralization of Omicron by BNT162b2 [Pfizer/BioNTech] immunity relative to ancestral virus,” said Alex Sigal, the study’s lead author, on Twitter. Sigal works for the Africa Health Research Institute in Durban. “Omicron escape from BNT162b2 neutralization is incomplete. Previous infection + vaccination still neutralizes,” Sigal said. Sigal told CNN that these results were much better than what he and his team had expected: “I thought this news was very positive. I expected worse,” Sigal said in an interview. Many experts were expecting Omicron to almost completely bypass the protection of vaccines. “This is not a variant that has completely escaped. It certainly escapes. It is certainly bad. But it looks to me like there are ways of dealing with it.”

The study analyzed human lung cells and blood to find their results. It has yet to be peer-reviewed. “Previous infection, followed by vaccination or booster, is likely to increase the neutralization level and likely confer protection from severe disease in Omicron infection,” the study read. Some of the samples had a 41-fold reduction in neutralizing antibodies deployed against the Omicron compared to the levels of antibodies present in earlier Covid-19 variants. But Sigal said that that number is fluid and subject to change with further tests and variables, including if the person had been previously infected. The news comes as evidence is mounting that Omicron may be producing less severe infections than previous Covid-19 variants, like Delta.

On Saturday, the South African Medical Research Council published a report about an Omicron-driven outbreak in the Tshwane district in South Africa’s northern Gauteng Province, one of the first areas in the world where Omicron has overtaken Delta as the dominant strain. The researchers wrote that in the last two weeks there has been an “exponential” rise in caseloads, but significantly, the surge has not corresponded to a significant uptick in hospitalizations and deaths. “The relatively low number of COVID-19 pneumonia hospitalizations in the general, high care, and ICU wards constitutes a very different picture compared to the beginning of previous waves,” the report said, examining data from the Steve Biko and Tshwane District Hospital complex.

How does “never” sound to you? Just dump Pfizer, it’s the only way out of the pandemic.

• FDA Wants Until at Least 2096 to Fully Release Pfizer’s Vaccine Data (Siri)

A prior post explained that the FDA has asked a federal judge to make the public wait until the year 2076 to disclose all of the data and information it relied upon to license Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine. Literally, a 55-year delay. My firm, on behalf of PHMPT, asked that this information be disclosed in 108 days – the same amount of time it took for the FDA to review and license Pfizer’s vaccine. The Court ordered the parties to submit briefs in support of their respective positions by December 6, 2021. The FDA’s brief, incredibly, doubles down. It now effectively asks to have until at least 2096 to produce the Pfizer documents. Not a typo. A total of at least 75 years. Other than producing an initial ~12,000 pages in around two months, the FDA thereafter only wants to commit to producing 500 pages per month. The FDA also disclosed that it actually has approximately at least 451,000 pages to produce.*

Each side gets to file response briefs on December 13, 2021, and then there is oral argument on December 14, 2021 before the Judge. If you want to read the response to the FDA’s position, a copy of the introduction in the brief my firm filed is below. And below that, a downloadable copy of each side’s full briefing is available. Enjoy. And if you find what you are reading difficult to believe – that is because it is dystopian for the government to give Pfizer billions, mandate Americans to take its product, prohibit Americans from suing for harms, but yet refuse to let Americans see the data underlying its licensure. The lesson yet again is that civil and individual rights should never be contingent upon a medical procedure.

Why is all this stuff heavily redacted? Who has the right to be kept secret, and what is that based on?

• New NIH Records Reveal Information About Research Into Coronavirus (JW)

Judicial Watch announced today that it received 221 pages of records from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) which include a grant application for research involving the coronavirus that was submitted in 2018. The grant application appears to describe “gain of function” research involving RNA extractions from bats, experiments on viruses, attempts to develop a chimeric virus and efforts to genetically manipulate the full-length bat SARSr-CoV WIV1 strain molecular clone. The documents were obtained by Judicial Watch through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit for records of communications, contracts and agreements with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The lawsuit specifically requests records about National Institute of Health (NIH) grants that benefitted the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

On January 27, 2020, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) official David Morens emailed Chief of Staff Greg Folkers in a heavily redacted thread, writing: “[S]ome background on our support of the Ecohealth group (Peter Daszak et al), which has for years been among the biggest players in coronavirus work, also in collaboration with Ralph Baric, Ian Lipkin and others. [Redacted]”. NIAID has been funding Peter’s group for coronavirus work in China for the past 5 years through [grant] R011R01A|110964: “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence.” That’s now been renewed, with a specific focus to identify cohorts of people highly exposed to bats in China, and work out if they’re getting sick from CoVs.… Collaborators include Wuhan Institute of Virology (currently working on the nCoV) and Ralph Baric.

The results of the work to date include: • [Redacted] • Discovered Swine Acute Diarrheal Syndrome Virus (SADS-CoV) killing >25,000 pigs in Guangdong Province (Published in Nature) • Found SARS-related CoVs that can bind to human cells (Published in Nature), and that cause SARS-like disease in humanized mouse models. • [Redacted] Also, prior to the above R01, Peter’s folks worked under an R01 with Eun-Park as Program Officer on viral discovery in bats, and originally identified SARS-CoV as having a likely origin in bats (published in Science). Folkers forwards the message to Anthony Fauci and others.

In a “Notice of Award” dated July 13, 2020, the NIH increased the amount of NIH money going to Peter Daszak’s firm, EcoHealth Alliance, by $369,819 with a project period that runs from June 1, 2014, through June 30, 2025, for Daszak’s project “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence.” EcoHealth was to receive $637,980 in each of the years 2019 through 2024 under the grant.

Did they really think they could push through Marx in the US?

• Controversial Biden Banking Nominee Omarova Bows Out (JTN)

Cornell Law Professor Saule Omarova withdrew her nomination for comptroller of the currency following Senate Republicans voicing concerns about her Marxist ties. In Omarova’s withdrawal letter posted Tuesday by the White House, she wrote that while it was an honor to be nominated by President Joe Biden, “it is no longer tenable” for her to continue as a nominee and ultimately lead the agency in charge of regulating American banks. Biden responded that he accepts Omarova’s withdrawal, and says she “was subjected to inappropriate personal attacks that were far beyond the pale.” Biden described his former nominee as “a strong advocate for consumers and a staunch defender of the safety and soundness of our financial system” who would have “brought invaluable insight and perspective to our important work on behalf of the American people.”

Republicans, moderate Democrats and banking industry officials disagreed with Biden’s nomination. Omarova, a Kazakh native educated in the USSR, was under scrutiny for a history of leftist statements, as previously reported by Just the News. In 2019, she tweeted, “Until I came to the US, I couldn’t imagine that things like gender pay gap still existed in today’s world. Say what you will about old USSR, there was no gender pay gap there. Market doesn’t always ‘know best.'” A video surfaced earlier this year of the Moscow State University alumna cheering for oil and gas companies to go bankrupt. Gov. Greg Abbott (R-Texas) responded by calling on Biden to withdrawal Omarova’s nomination. As recently as October of this year, a paper by Omarova was published titled, “The People’s Ledger: How to Democratize Money and Finance the Economy.”

The professor called for “replacing commercial bank reserve accounts with universally available deposit accounts” so “all U.S. citizens and law-abiding citizens and lawful residents, local governments, nonbanking firms and nonbusiness entities” can bank at the Federal Reserve. Her proposed plan would have the Federal Reserve take money from these accounts when “it is necessary to expand the money supply in order to stimulate economic activity.” Her thesis at Moscow State University was “Karl Marx’s Economic Analysis and the Theory of Revolution in The Capital,” but she declined to provide it to the Senate Banking Committee to review.

No word on what is in the deal. Over a quarter of a trillion dollars.

• Apple Signed Secret $275 Billion Deal With Chinese Government (ZH)

Investors and journalists have been openly questioning whether Apple CEO Tim Cook, once praised for his deep-rooted connections within the CCP, has allowed his relationships in China to sour as the US has stepped up criticisms over human rights – treatment of the Uyghers in Xinjiang and elsewhere – and Taiwan. These ties have grown intensely controversial, eliciting criticism from lawmakers, rivals and even the company’s own employees. And just as the SEC prepares to boot dozens of Chinese companies off of US stock exchanges for refusing to comply with US audit standards (something the CCP has expressly forbidden under the auspices of data privacy), reporters with the Information have just published a bombshell: At some point in the not-too-distant past, Cook struck a $275 billion deal with the Chinese government while facing pressure from the CCP.

The deal emerged after a series of meetings between Cook and Chinese officials back in 2016. China is Apple’s second-biggest market after the US, and has long been targeted as a critical market for growth. Apple’s iPhones have seen growing popularity despite rising tensions with the US. This year, Apple became the second-biggest smartphone maker in China. The deal, which was forged over the span of years, represents a five-year plan, according to documents from inside Apple that have been seen by the Information. Whether talks on another five-year plan are in the works isn’t yet clear.

The fact that Apple never disclosed this deal to the US – it’s only just now being publicied – will likely trigger an angry response from lawmakers, who are bound to question Apple’s loyalty to the US, along with whether it prioritized profits and growth over respecting human rights (so much for all that climate virtue signaling). Before the deal was struck, documents show, Apple executives were scrambling to salvage their relationship with Chinese officials, who had accused Apple of not contributing enough to the local economy. Amid the government crackdown and the bad publicity that accompanied it, iPhone sales plummeted, though they have since bounced back.

Yesh, just try and put US missiles on Ukraine soil. Buchanan’s view is from the Cold War.

• Putin To Biden: ‘Finlandize’ Ukraine, Or We Will (Pat Buchanan)

Either the U.S. and NATO provide us with “legal guarantees” that Ukraine will never join NATO or become a base for weapons that can threaten Russia — or we will go in and guarantee it ourselves. This is the message Russian President Vladimir Putin is sending, backed by the 100,000 troops Russia has amassed on Ukraine’s borders. At the Kremlin last week, Putin drew his red line: “The threat on our western borders is … rising, as we have said multiple times. … In our dialogue with the United States and its allies, we will insist on developing concrete agreements prohibiting any further eastward expansion of NATO and the placement there of weapons systems in the immediate vicinity of Russian territory.” That comes close to an ultimatum. And NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg backhanded the President of Russia for issuing it:

“It’s only Ukraine and 30 NATO allies that decide when Ukraine is ready to join NATO. … Russia has no veto, Russia has no say, and Russia has no right to establish a sphere of influence trying to control their neighbors.” Yet, great powers have always established spheres of influence. Chinese President Xi Jinping claims virtually the entire South China Sea that is bordered by half a dozen nations. For 200 years, the United States has declared a Monroe Doctrine that puts our hemisphere off-limits to new colonizations. Moreover, Putin wants to speak to the real decider of the question as to whether Ukraine joins NATO or receives weapons that can threaten Russia. And the decider is not Jens Stoltenberg but President Joe Biden.

In the missile crisis of 60 years ago, the U.S., with its “quarantine” of Cuba and strategic and tactical superiority in the Caribbean, forced Nikita Khrushchev to pull his intermediate-range ballistic missiles, which could reach Washington, off of Fidel Castro’s island. If it did not do so, Moscow was led to understand, we would use our air and naval supremacy to destroy his missiles and send in the Marines to finish the job. Accepting a counteroffer for the U.S. withdrawal of Jupiter missiles from Turkey, Khrushchev complied with President John F. Kennedy’s demand. Russia’s missiles came out. And Kennedy was seen as having won a Cold War victory. Now it is we who are being told to comply with Russia’s demands in Ukraine, or Russia will go in to Ukraine and neutralize the threat itself.

When the Warsaw Pact collapsed and the USSR came apart three decades ago, Russia withdrew all of its military forces from Central and Eastern Europe. Moscow believed it had an agreed-upon understanding with the Americans. Under the deal, the two Germanys would be reunited. Russian troops would be removed from East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania. And there would be no NATO expansion into Eastern Europe. If America made that commitment, it was a promise broken. For, within 20 years, NATO had brought every Warsaw Pact nation into the alliance along with the former Soviet republics of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Neocons and Republican hawks such as the late John McCain sought to bring Ukraine and two other ex-Soviet republics, Georgia and Moldova, into NATO.

Putin, who served in the KGB in the late Soviet era and calls the breakup of the USSR the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century, is now saying: Enough is enough. Translation: “Thus far and no further! Ukraine is not going to be a member of NATO or a military ally and partner of the United States, nor a base for weapons that can strike Russia in minutes. For us, that crosses a red line. And if NATO proceeds with arming Ukraine for conflict with Russia, we reserve the right to act first. Finlandize Ukraine, or we will!”

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Debt Rattle May 15 2021

May 152021

May 15, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:03 am Finance Tagged with: age of fear, Apple, immune system, Israel, mockingbird, Palestine, Pfizer, variants, WHO 26 Responses »

Wassily Kandinsky Contrasting Sounds 1924

• Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine Reprograms Innate Immune Responses

• Long Covid-19 Linked To Early Aging Of Immune System (CGTN)

• Pandemic To Be ‘Far More Deadly’ This Year – WHO (Y!)

• Delay Child Vaccinations And Share Jabs With Covax – WHO (BBC)

• India Variant Could Seriously Disrupt Lifting Of UK Lockdown (G.)

• Failed Biden Nominee Neera Tanden Hired As White House Senior Adviser (F.)

• The Age of Fear (Whitehead)

• On the Hypocrites at Apple Who Fired Antonio Garcia-Martinez (Taibbi)

• Remember It’s a Sin to Kill a Mockingbird (Turley)

• Carbon Pricing Isn’t Effective at Reducing CO2 Emissions (INET)

• Escalation In Palestine – Hizbullah Is Ready To Join The Fight (MoA)

• Israel, the Big Lie (Chris Hedges)

Burr

Senator Burr asked Fauci, Peter Marks from the FDA, and @CDCDirector what percentage of their own employees are vaccinated.

Fauci probably a bit more than half, around 60%.

Marks said about the same.

Walensky dodged the question. pic.twitter.com/zoeZXZeCWM

— Phil Kerpen (@kerpen) May 14, 2021

This is the scary part. This is why we should not use untested substances on hundreds of millions of poorly educated people.

• Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine Reprograms Innate Immune Responses (MN)

Researchers in The Netherlands and Germany have warned that Pfizer-BioNTech’s coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccine induces complex reprogramming of innate immune responses that should be considered in the development and use of mRNA-based vaccines. Jorge Domínguez-Andrés and colleagues say that while the vaccine has been shown to be up to 95% effective in preventing infection with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and subsequent COVID-19, little is known about the broad effects the vaccine may have on the innate and adaptive immune responses.

In the current study (not peer-reviewed*), the research team from Radboud University Medical Center and Erasmus MC in the Netherlands, and the Helmholtz-Centre for Infection Research (HZI), Hannover Medical School (MHH), and the University of Bonn, in Germany, confirmed the efficacy of BNT162b2 vaccination at inducing effective humoral and cellular immunity against several SARS-CoV-2 variants. However, they also showed that the vaccine altered the production of inflammatory cytokines by innate immune cells following stimulation with both specific (SARS-CoV-2) and non-specific (viral, fungal and bacterial) stimuli.

Following vaccination, innate immune cells had a reduced response to toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4), TLR7 and TLR8 – all ligands that play an important role in the immune response to viral infection. Neta and colleagues also found that cytokine responses to fungi were increased following vaccination. The mRNA BNT162b2 vaccine induces complex functional reprogramming of innate immune responses, which should be considered in the development and use of this new class of vaccines,” writes the team.

More immune system perils.

• Long Covid-19 Linked To Early Aging Of Immune System (CGTN)

New studies show the effect of severe cases of the virus on the immune system and the premature aging of T-cells suggest a possible explanation for Long COVID-19. According to one publication, three months after patients have been discharged from hospital many showed signs of “premature immunosenescence” – the age-related decline in the body’s ability to form a defence against viruses and other illnesses. Researcher Niharika Duggal of the University of Birmingham said this included the loss of “naive” immune system cells (which have yet to be used in the body’s response), with an accumulation of “memory” B and T-cells, which circulate in the body holding the information to fight against a pathogen.

These symptoms are usually seen in people over 60 years old, but they were spotted in several COVID-19 survivors. It has been previously proved that traumatic injury and chronic disease can cause premature immune system aging, but this research is the first to argue a viral infection does the same. However, the research is still at an early stage and one researcher suggested it could be cause, rather than effect. Janet Lord of the University of Birmingham, explained: “Analysis of people in the UK … who developed COVID-19, showed they were biologically 10 to 14 years older.” She said it’s possible that patients who show prematurely aged immune systems may have caught the virus due to a weaker system – rather than the virus severely damaging the body’s immune response over a long period.

Fear campaign?

• Pandemic To Be ‘Far More Deadly’ This Year – WHO (Y!)

The World Health Organization issued a grim warning on Friday that the second year of Covid-19 was set to be “far more deadly”, as Japan extended a state of emergency amid growing calls for the Olympics to be scrapped. “We’re on track for the second year of this pandemic to be far more deadly than the first,” said WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. The mood also darkened in Japan where the coronavirus state of emergency took in another three regions just 10 weeks before the Olympics, while campaigners submitted a petition with more than 350,000 signatures calling for the Games to be cancelled. With Tokyo and other areas already under emergency orders until the end of May, Hiroshima, Okayama and northern Hokkaido, which will host the Olympic marathon, will now join them.

Japanese public opinion is firmly opposed to holding the Games this summer. Swiss tennis great Roger Federer said Friday that “what the athletes need is a decision: is it happening or isn’t it?” “I would love to play in the Olympics… But if that doesn’t happen due to the situation, I would be the first to understand,” he added. The pandemic has killed at least 3,346,813 people worldwide since the virus first emerged in late 2019, according to an AFP tally of official data. India meanwhile started deploying Russia’s Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine, the first foreign-made shot to be used in the country that has been reeling from an explosion in cases and deaths.

The first token batch of Sputnik vaccines — reportedly 150,000 doses — arrived on May 1 and a second delivery is expected in the next few days. A number of leading India-based drugmakers have agreements for local production of Sputnik V with the aim to produce over 850 million doses of the jab per year. India has been adding roughly as many new Covid cases daily as the rest of the world put together.

Forget about herd immunity through vaccines. Not going to happen. Your immune system will have to do the job.

• Delay Child Vaccinations And Share Jabs With Covax – WHO (BBC)

Wealthier nations should postpone plans to give children and teenagers Covid vaccines and instead donate supplies to low-income countries, the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) says. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on Friday urged countries to supply more vaccines to the global fair-access scheme Covax. The international distribution of Covid vaccines remains vastly uneven. Since the first vaccines were approved in December, wealthier countries have bought up most of the supply. Many are racing to vaccinate as much of their population as possible. Speaking at a virtual conference in Geneva on Friday, the WHO’s Dr Tedros said he understood why some countries wanted to vaccinate children and adolescents, but said “right now, I urge them to reconsider”.

“In low and lower-middle income countries, Covid-19 vaccine supply has not been enough to even immunise healthcare workers, and hospitals are being inundated with people that need lifesaving care urgently,” he said. Last week, US President Joe Biden laid out plans to begin coronavirus vaccine shots for 12- to 15-year-olds as soon as possible. He also said he hoped that 70% of US adults would receive at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine by 4 July, when American families are expected to come together to mark Independence Day. Meanwhile, Canada has authorised the use of the Pfizer coronavirus vaccine for children aged between 12 and 15. The province of Alberta, which has the highest rate of the virus in the country, has already started offering the jabs to citizens over the age of 12. In Switzerland, some places began offering Covid vaccination appointments to 16-year-olds last week.

Still makes me cringe: “..allowing people to meet in groups of six indoors ..”

• India Variant Could Seriously Disrupt Lifting Of UK Lockdown (G.)

The final stage of the lifting of coronavirus lockdown restrictions across England could face “serious disruption” due to the India variant, the prime minister has warned, as he announced plans to accelerate the vaccine programme to curb its spread. Boris Johnson said the gap between the first and second Covid jab would be cut from 12 weeks to eight for all over-50s and the clinically vulnerable, admitting: “The race between our vaccine programme and the virus may be about to become a great deal tighter.” He announced that the army would be deployed to two variant hotspots – Bolton and Blackburn with Darwen – to help with vaccinations, and urged residents in those areas to “think twice” before taking advantages of the freedoms allowed again from Monday.

Johnson said plans to ease restrictions on 17 May – allowing people to meet in groups of six indoors – would go ahead, but that the variant “could make it more difficult” for the final stage of unlocking to proceed on 21 June. He said the India variant appeared to be “more transmissible” than the dominant strain in the UK, which originated in Kent, but that it was not yet clear by how much. If it is significantly more, then, he warned, “we’re likely to face some hard choices”. “I have to level with you that this new variant could pose a serious disruption to our progress and could make it more difficult to move to step four in June,” Johnson said. Asked whether the lockdown easing would have to be paused during a press conference, he added: “The truth is, we cannot say for certain … The situation is very different from last year, we are in the throes of an incredible vaccine rollout … We just have to wait and see … We rule nothing out.”

“Tanden’s new post will not require Senate confirmation.”

• Failed Biden Nominee Neera Tanden Hired As White House Senior Adviser (F.)

Neera Tanden will have a place in the White House after all following the withdrawal of her nomination to lead the White House Office of Management and Budget, with President Joe Biden on Friday hiring her as a senior adviser on Friday, according to a White House official. Tanden, the former president of the liberal think tank Center for American Progress, will be charged with handling the White House’s response to Republican lawsuits before the Supreme Court seeking to dismantle the Affordable Care Act.

Tanden has also been tasked with reviewing the United States Digital Service, an Obama-era White House office that oversees federal websites and consults with federal agencies on technology. Tanden’s nomination was derailed when Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), a crucial vote for any Biden nominee in an evenly divided Senate, announced his opposition over her social media posts disparaging Republicans. Tanden failed to make up the votes on the Republican side, having previously slammed critical swing votes like Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) in tweets. Tanden’s new post will not require Senate confirmation.

“We allowed them to languish in schools which not only look like prisons but function like prisons..”

• The Age of Fear (Whitehead)

Young people will find themselves overtaxed, burdened with excessive college debt, and struggling to find worthwhile employment in a debt-ridden economy on the brink of implosion. Their privacy will be eviscerated by the surveillance state. They will be threatened, intimidated and beaten by militarized police. They will be the subjects of a military empire constantly waging war against shadowy enemies and government agents armed to the teeth ready and able to lock down the country at a moment’s notice. As such, they will find themselves forced to march in lockstep with a government that no longer exists to serve the people but which demands that “we the people” be obedient slaves or suffer the consequences. It’s a dismal prospect, isn’t it?

Unfortunately, we failed to guard against such a future. Worse, we who should have known better neglected to maintain our freedoms or provide our young people with the tools necessary to resist oppression and survive, let alone succeed, in the impersonal jungle that is modern America. We brought them into homes fractured by divorce, distracted by mindless entertainment, and obsessed with the pursuit of materialism. We institutionalized them in daycares and afterschool programs, substituting time with teachers and childcare workers for parental involvement. We turned them into test-takers instead of thinkers and automatons instead of activists.

We allowed them to languish in schools which not only look like prisons but function like prisons, as well—where conformity is the rule and freedom is the exception. We made them easy prey for our corporate overlords, while instilling in them the values of a celebrity-obsessed, technology-driven culture devoid of any true spirituality. And we taught them to believe that the pursuit of their own personal happiness trumped all other virtues, including any empathy whatsoever for their fellow human beings. We have allowed them to be manipulated by a corporate culture that simply wants money and control. However, as Aldous Huxley warned: “The victim of mind-manipulation does not know he is a victim. To him, the walls of his prison are invisible and he believes himself to be free.”

I know little about the situation, but I love Taibbi’s love of the man.

• On the Hypocrites at Apple Who Fired Antonio Garcia-Martinez (Taibbi)

I’m biased, because I know Antonio Garcia-Martinez and something like the same thing once happened to me, but the decision by Apple to bend to a posse of internal complainers and fire him over a passage in a five-year-old book is ridiculous hypocrisy. Hypocrisy by the complainers, and defamatory cowardice by the bosses — about right for the Invasion of the Body Snatchers-style era of timorous conformity and duncecap monoculture the woke mobs at these places are trying to build as their new Jerusalem. Garcia-Martinez is a brilliant, funny, multi-talented Cuban-American whose confessional memoir Chaos Monkeys is to big tech what Michael Lewis’s Liar’s Poker was to finance.

A onetime high-level Facebook executive — he ran Facebook Ads — Antonio’s book shows the House of Zuckerberg to be a cult full of on-the-spectrum zealots who talked like justice activists while possessing the business ethics of Vlad the Impaler: Facebook is full of true believers who really, really, really are not doing it for the money, and really, really will not stop until every man, woman, and child on earth is staring into a blue-framed window with a Facebook logo. When I read Chaos Monkeys the first time I was annoyed, because this was Antonio’s third career at least — he’d also worked at Goldman, Sachs — and he tossed off a memorable bestseller like it was nothing. Nearly all autobiographies fail because the genre requires total honesty, and not only do few writers have the stomach for turning the razor on themselves, most still have one eye on future job offers or circles of friends, and so keep the bulk of their interesting thoughts sidelined — you’re usually reading a résumé, not a book.

Chaos Monkeys is not that. Garcia-Martinez is an immediately relatable narrator because in one breath he tells you exactly what he thinks of former colleagues (“A week before my last day, I had lunch with the only senior person at Goldman Sachs who was not an inveterate asshole”) and in the next explains, but does not excuse, the psychic quirks that have him chasing rings in some of the world’s most rapacious corporations. “Whenever membership in some exclusive club is up for grabs, I viciously fight to win it, even if only to reject membership when offered,” he wrote. “After all, echoing the eminent philosopher G. Marx: How good can a club be if it’s willing to have lowly me as a member?”

The irony is that if Garcia-Martinez has a failing as a writer, it’s that he’s too nice. Universally, the best writers are insane egomaniacs obsessed with staring at the great mirror that is the page. Garcia-Martinez, on the whole, would rather be sailing. I believe the reason he decided to go back to tech is that he preferred a quiet life of flying a desk to make mortgage payments to the never-ending regimen of self-salesmanship that the literary life requires (and which, again, is the easy part for most egocentric writers).

And these people never happen to think of book burning?

• Remember It’s a Sin to Kill a Mockingbird (Turley)

We have previously discussed efforts to ban classic books, including To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. Lee’s book has been banned in states from Mississippi to California. The work, which exposed the deep-seated racism in our society, has been denounced as “violent and oppressive for black students.” I have opposed such efforts. Now, Loudoun County teacher Andrea Weiskopf has publicly called for the book to be banned in my neighboring county of Loudon. The reason? The character Attitus Finch is white and therefore the book is nothing but a “white savior” tale that traumatizes black students. The remarks reflects a harmful but growing movement to ban such books in public schools. The attack on this book in particular has left many of us dismayed. As Atticus himself said “remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”

Weiskopf told the board that not only is this classic work harming students but that, if any member does not accept that premise, they should not be making any decisions on book selections. ANDREA WEISKOPF: “It’s funny how they are so afraid of having their children seeing another view of sexuality, gender or religion…If you want to talk about books that are assigned, let’s read To Kill a Mockingbird together. If you aren’t able to consider the racial trauma this assigned book causes black children with its white saviorism, then you have no business discussing any books.” Her diatribe reminds me of the observation in the book that “It’s never an insult to be called what somebody thinks is a bad name. It just shows you how poor that person is, it doesn’t hurt you.”

Use less energy, only solution.

• Carbon Pricing Isn’t Effective at Reducing CO2 Emissions (INET)

How does carbon pricing affect macroeconomic balance and ultimately CO2 emission? What about electric vehicles that are now being promoted by the Biden administration? Economists’ standard advice for controlling global warming is to impose a high price on emitting CO2, which is said to discourage carbon-intensive activities and induce carbon-saving technical change. In a recent review of the New Deal, William Janeway (2021) draws a distinction between efficient and effective policies. He comes close to economist-speak by describing efficiency as a low-cost means for moving toward a desired goal. Whether an efficient intervention will be effective in reaching the goal is another question altogether. In the short- to medium-run, raising carbon prices within a politically acceptable range may be efficient at inducing macroeconomically small changes in the structure of the economy and level of emission.

But the move will not be effective, because the changes will remain small for at least three reasons. Energy constitutes a relatively small proportion of economic activity. It is crucial for the functioning of the macro system, but usually is not the tail that wags the dog. Carbon pricing brings in the “little triangles” of economic welfare analysis applied by Arnold Harberger (1954, 1971), which are not significant in terms of GDP (James Tobin, 1977). The reason, as illustrated below, is that the percentage change in, say, gasoline demand in response to a higher tax is the product of a negative price elasticity of demand which is a fraction of the percentage change in price, typically less than 100%. The product of two fractions is smaller than both, meaning that the demand response is weak. Even if the magnitude of the long-run elasticity is bigger than the short-run value (say -0.4 < -0.2 or 0.4 > 0.2), the conclusion remains.

Finally, following Harberger and lurching into jargon, economists usually assume that the proceeds of a tax are passed in “lump sum” fashion back to consumers. This transfer produces an “income effect” stimulating demand for all goods including gasoline. The increase can partially offset the price-induced demand reduction due to “substitution” of other goods for lower purchases of gasoline. Substitution effects almost always dominate income effects, so that most of the transferred income gets spent on non-energy goods and services. Total gasoline consumption still declines.

Somewhat similar reasoning applies to electric vehicles (EVs). They have a great advantage in delivering around 70% of the energy they use for moving the vehicle as opposed to 25% for internal combustion engine (ICE) counterparts. But the electricity has to come from some source. As of now 60% of the energy going toward electricity generation in the USA comes from fossil fuels. Unless that share is substantially reduced, EVs will not shift energy accounting by very much. They are efficient in reducing end-use of petroleum in the transport sector, but not effective in controlling CO2. Details appear below.

Moon of Alabama with an original take.

• Escalation In Palestine – Hizbullah Is Ready To Join The Fight (MoA)

The current war the occupiers of Palestine wage on the indigenous population has some unusual features. While the conflict was, without doubt, started by the colonial occupiers the course of the recent escalation seems to be managed by the resistance side. It may well be part of a larger plan. The Israeli army had for some time planned a large scale 30-days long maneuver to rehearse an attack on Hezbullah in Lebanon. Last week Hizbullah reacted to that: “The Lebanon-based Hezbollah terror organization has announced it is on high alert following the IDF’s launching of its largest-ever military exercise. The IDF launched on Sunday its “Chariots of Fire” month-long exercise simulating war on several fronts, and primarily against Hezbollah in the north, including the massive firing of missiles and rockets from all arenas on the home front. This is the largest and most comprehensive IDF maneuver in its history…”

[..] With unrest in Jerusalem, pogroms in Israeli cities, a potential third intifada in the occupied West Bank and a ground invasion of Gaza the Israeli army will be very busy. If it comes to that during the next few days the time could be right for Hizbullah, already on full alarm, to step in and to attack the occupation on the grounds that it is holding. Nasrallah’s speech last week can be understood as an announcement of such a step: “My last message will be for the Israelis themselves. I tell them this: you know well, in your heart of hearts, whether it is based on your religious texts or doctrines, on your books or your prophecies, and also based on what some of your leaders and experts say, and also some of your religious authorities, you know (very well) that this entity (Israel) has no future, that it is on the verge of extinction and that it has little time left to live, very little time. Therefore, in this battle you are wasting your energy, and your young people are wasting their youth and their blood, in vain and to no avail.”
…
We believe in this near future (where Israel won’t exist anymore), we believe in it very firmly, and this faith is not based only on religious and ideological bases, but is based (above all) on the data, on the events which occur, especially on those of the last decades, the last years and on what will happen (soon) in this region.”

It is possible that Netanyahoo had planned the original escalation in Jerusalem to stay in office: After four elections Israel still has no new government. Prime Minister Netanyahoo is on trial for corruption. A larger war that can be spun into a victory could help him to avoid a judgment and gain votes for the likely soon coming next election. It that was his plan he has achieved a first step towards it: “Yamina party leader Naftali Bennett has taken “off the table” the option of forming a government without Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud, due to the ongoing military conflict with Gaza terrorists, a political source says. Bennett has renewed his negotiations with Likud due to the emergency situation, and teams from both parties met today, the source says on condition of anonymity.

But it is not Netanyahoo who can decide when the missiles from Gaza will stop flying. It is not Netanyahoo who can control the Palestinian youth. The escalation dominance is not in his hands but in the hands of the resistance. It is the resistance that decides when the conflict ends.

Hedges has been there, done that.

• Israel, the Big Lie (Chris Hedges)

I spent seven years in the Middle East as a correspondent, four of them as The New York Times Middle East Bureau Chief. I am an Arabic speaker. I lived for weeks at a time in Gaza, the world’s largest open-air prison where over two million Palestinians exist on the edge of starvation, struggle to find clean water and endure constant Israeli terror. I have been in Gaza when it was pounded with Israeli artillery and air strikes. I have watched mothers and fathers, wailing in grief, cradling the bloodied bodies of their sons and daughters. I know the crimes of the occupation—the food shortages caused by the Israeli blockade, the stifling overcrowding, the contaminated water, the lack of health services, the near constant electrical outages due to the Israeli targeting of power plants, the crippling poverty, the endemic unemployment, the fear and the despair. I have witnessed the carnage.

I also have listened from Gaza to the lies emanating from Jerusalem and Washington. Israel’s indiscriminate use of modern, industrial weapons to kill thousands of innocents, wound thousands more and make tens of thousands of families homeless is not a war: It is state-sponsored terror. And, while I oppose the indiscriminate firing of rockets by Palestinians into Israel, as I oppose suicide bombings, seeing them also as war crimes, I am acutely aware of a huge disparity between the industrial violence carried out by Israel against innocent Palestinians and the minimal acts of violence capable of being waged by groups such as Hamas. The false equivalency between Israeli and Palestinian violence was echoed during the war I covered in Bosnia.

Those of us in the besieged city of Sarajevo were pounded daily with hundreds of heavy shells and rockets from the surrounding Serbs. We were targeted by sniper fire. The city suffered a few dozen dead and wounded each day. The government forces inside the city fired back with light mortars and small arms fire. Supporters of the Serbs seized on any casualties caused by Bosnian government forces to play the same dirty game, although well over 90 percent of the killings in Bosnia were the fault of the Serbs, as is also true regarding Israel. The second and perhaps most important parallel is that the Serbs, like the Israelis, were the principal violators of international law. Israel is in breach of more than 30 U.N. Security Council resolutions. It is in breach of Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention that defines collective punishment of a civilian population as a war crime.

It is in violation of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention for settling over half a million Jewish Israelis on occupied Palestinian land and for the ethnic cleansing of at least 750,000 Palestinians when the Israeli state was founded and another 300,000 after Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank were occupied following the 1967 war. Its annexation of East Jerusalem and the Syrian Golan Heights violates international law, as does its building of a security barrier in the West Bank that annexes Palestinian land into Israel. It is in violation of U.N. General Assembly Resolution 194 that states that Palestinian “refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date.” This is the truth. Any other starting point for the discussion of what is taking place between Israel and the Palestinians is a lie.

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Debt Rattle May 1 2021

May 012021

May 1, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:41 am Finance Tagged with: Apple, Assange, Biden, blood clots, deportations, genes, stimulus, toxic, vaccines, vax mandate 53 Responses »

Pieter Bruegel the Elder The Fall of the Rebel Angels 1562

• Why Are The Covid Vaccines So Toxic? (AchGut)

• Covid Lies Cost 100,000 US Lives – Mark Skidmore (USAW)

• Perspectives on the Pandemic: “Blood Clots and Beyond” (JP)

• Biden Mulls Vax Mandate For All US Military After Huge Numbers Refused (ZH)

• It’s Time To Start Shunning The ‘Vaccine Hesitant’ (Stern)

• Supreme Court: Pfizer, Moderna et al. May Own Your Genes Once Injected (CB)

• Record 34% Of US Household Income Now Comes From The Government (ZH)

• US Household Income Soared 21% In March, Largely Due To Stimulus Checks (JTN)

• Election Panic Coming in 2022 – Martin Armstrong (USAW)

• Rudderless, Leaderless, and Drifting (Kunstler)

• The Myth of “Efficient Markets” (Rickards)

• EU Charges Apple With Breach Of Competition Law (DW)

• First 100 Days: 300,000 Deportations (CD)

Google translate from German. Long and good. Do read.

• Why Are The Covid Vaccines So Toxic? (AchGut)

In calendar week 16/2021, more than 3,700 people in the USA had died in close connection with the vaccination with (biochemically very similar) SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccines from Pfizer / BioNTech or Moderna, with around 210 million inoculated doses. That’s 17 deaths for every million people vaccinated. AstraZeneca’s vaccine, which is based on an adenovirus, has 24 deaths per million vaccine doses in the UK and 18 in France, and 6 in Germany. On average, the mRNA vaccines bring about 20 deaths per million vaccinated, the AZ Vaccine on 10. The figures were compiled by the Rossiya Segodnya agency from Moscow, but we checked them on a random basis: they are correct. Of course, a causal relationship has not been proven in many cases, but such an accumulation of medical reports of deaths in connection with vaccinations has never occurred in the last few decades.

With conventional vaccines, one or two people vaccinated die for every 10 million people vaccinated. Even if you subtract half of the reported deaths in order to price in the spontaneous mortality rate of the sometimes very old vaccinated people, you still have to ask yourself: Why do the SARS-CoV-2 vaccines have such a high lethality? Two major causes of death stand out: anaphylactic shock and bleeding disorders. It has long been known that free mRNA in the extracellular space can trigger acute allergic reactions up to anaphylactic shock. In this syndrome, the immune system overreacts and there is massive release of vasodilating and bronchoconstricting substances. This leads to a general dilation of blood vessels (vasodilation) and bronchospasm with severe restriction of gas exchange in the lungs.

The blood fluid seeps into the periphery of the blood circulation, resulting in a lack of volume, as not enough blood fluid can be pumped back to the lungs and heart. At the same time, the little blood that is still available is no longer adequately supplied with oxygen. The heart begins to race, but the blood pressure drops: shock. The patient dies of cerebral hypoxia (insufficient oxygen supply to the brain) or heart failure. In many cases, the mRNA-carrying lipid particles that make up the vaccines from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna burst when passing through the logistics chain or are already defective from production. As a result, the naked mRNA is brought into the extracellular space (the space between the cells of the muscle into which the injection is made) during the injection. They cause anaphylactic shock in susceptible patients. The risk of anaphylactic reactions with mRNA vaccines is many times higher than with conventional vaccines. That explains some of the dead, probably just under half.

“..the question, from a pure cost benefit, is how many lives are saved as opposed to how many lives are damaged from the treatment..”

• Covid Lies Cost 100,000 US Lives – Mark Skidmore (USAW)

Michigan State Economics Professor Mark Skidmore revealed more than three years ago, there was $21 trillion in what he called “Missing Money” from government books. He’s doing some new number crunching surrounding public policy and the effects on the Covid 19 (CV19) pandemic. It’s all laid out in a brand new report. What he found is appalling. One big fact his research revealed is up to 100,000 lives could have been saved by using Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ). Instead, the medical community and the mainstream media trashed it and told people it was “dangerous” and it “did not work.” That was a total lie. Dr. Skidmore explains, “So, we have all these countries that used it, and a number of countries, such as the United States, that for some reason did not use it and actually prevented it . . . claiming it was unsafe.

“So, our estimate is if the U.S. just allowed it and made it widely available from the beginning, we could have saved 80,000 to 100,000 lives.” Dr. Skidmore said medical officials such as Dr. Fauci, who serves as the director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, knew HCQ worked well against Corona Virus. In fact, Dr. Skidmore goes on to point out, “There was a paper published in the Virology Journal in 2005 . . . this is the outfit that Dr. Fauci oversees . . . . So, their journal published this paper that said HCQ was effective in treating the Corona Virus. The people who authored this study had been a part of the CDC at the time. So, we have known this for a long time. . . .We also now know there are as many as 200 peer reviewed studies that say it is effective if taken early on when somebody gets sick. It’s pretty overwhelming evidence if you take it early on, it’s extremely effective.”

That’s not all that works, and this too was suppressed and trashed by most of the medical community. Ivermectin, Vitamin D, Vitamin C and Zinc are a few that are also proven scientifically effective to reduce or obliterate CV19. Dr. Skidmore says, “These are inexpensive ways to help protect yourself and your family. . . . It’s overwhelming evidence that these different types of treatments are very effective.” Another revelation of Dr. Skidmore’s study was the CDC changed the definition on how to count CV19 deaths. Skidmore says, “In the middle of the crisis last year, the CDC changed the definition on how you count fatalities, but they only did it for Covid. It amounts to this, basically, the way we counted how somebody died, was you ‘died of’ some disease of some condition. They changed the definition so that it was more characterized that you ‘died with.’ And, if the CDC would not have changed the definition for Covid deaths? Skidmore says, “I think we would have had far fewer deaths. The data suggests that. . . . If they used the old number, there would have been less (CV19 deaths).”

Dr. Skidmore’s study also points out that the vaccines were never approved by the FDA. Dr. Skidmore explains, “You can look it up. The vaccines are only authorized for emergency use, which means it’s experimental, and it’s still experimental. They are tracking it all. . . . The (vaccine) fatalities are now up to 3,000, and there are many strange and unusual side effects that have occurred. It’s the same thing in Europe and other places. There are many reports of neurological problems, blood clots and a range of related issues. . . . There are all kinds of negative reactions and the question, from a pure cost benefit, is how many lives are saved as opposed to how many lives are damaged from the treatment (vaccines), and we don’t really know what the injuries are, and we don’t know what the long run effects will be.”

“..we may be creating dangerously overactive immune systems in billions of unwitting subjects.”

• Perspectives on the Pandemic: “Blood Clots and Beyond” (JP)

In February, 2021, Professor Sucharit Bhakdi, M.D. and a number of his colleagues warned the European Medicines Agency about the potential danger of blood clots and cerebral vein thrombosis in millions of people receiving experimental gene-based injections. Since then, two of the four injections have been suspended or recalled in Europe and the United States for just that reason. In this episode of Perspectives, Professor Bhakdi explains the science behind the problem, why it is not just limited to the products already suspended, and why in the long term we may be creating dangerously overactive immune systems in billions of unwitting subjects.

Illegal as hell, but who cares anymore?

• Biden Mulls Vax Mandate For All US Military After Huge Numbers Refused (ZH)

President Biden told NBC News in an interview which broadcast Friday that he’s mulling ordering all US military personnel to get a COVID-19 vaccine as commander-in-chief. “I’m not saying I won’t” rule it out, he emphasized in the new interview. This would also mean that anyone wanting to enter military service would have to receive the jab as a requirement to get in, which would likely cause a blow to military recruitment in the near-term. However, he didn’t outright say he’s ready to pull the trigger on the policy, which if enacted would constitute the largest federal government-ordered mandate in terms of forcing the vaccine on some 1.3 million active duty service members, not to mention over one million more reserve personnel.

Describing the decision as a “tough call” he suggested it was being hotly debated. “I don’t know. I’m going to leave that to the military,” Biden told NBC News’s Craig Melvin. “I’m not saying I won’t. I think you’re going to see more and more of them getting it. And I think it’s going to be a tough call as to whether or not they should be required to have to get it in the military, because you’re in such close proximity with other military personnel.” In follow-up to Biden’s comments, national security advisor Jake Sullivan confirmed that a DoD-wide vaccine mandate is “something the Department of Defense is looking at in consultation with the interagency process and [I] don’t have anything to add on that subject today.”

The whole debate was sparked in earnest when multiple headlines earlier this month took note of the large numbers of military members who were rejecting the vaccine. For example, one recent USA Today report noted that nearly 40% of US Marines who have been offered a COVID-19 vaccine have refused to recieve it, according to Pentagon figures. And an earlier report in The Guardian described that “Reluctance to be vaccinated for Covid-19 is now rife in the US military, with about a third of troops on active duty or in the national guard refusing to be administered the vaccine.”

The new religion.

• It’s Time To Start Shunning The ‘Vaccine Hesitant’ (Stern)

For the better part of a year, as the coronavirus racked up hundreds of thousands of American deaths, the flickering light at the end of the tunnel was herd immunity — the antibody force-shield that comes when enough people have survived the illness or have been vaccinated against it. “Go get vaccinated, America,” President Biden said in his speech to Congress this week, referring to the shot as “a dose of hope.” Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease doctor, suggested in December that if 75% to 85% of the population got vaccinated, we could reach herd immunity by June. And with herd immunity, we’d return to a measure of “normalcy,” meaning indoor dining, movie theaters and hugs.

But herd immunity is slipping away because a quarter of Americans are refusing to get the COVID-19 vaccine. Dr. Gregory Poland, director of the Mayo Clinic’s Vaccine Research Group recently said: “There is no eradication at this point, it’s off the table. …We as a society have rejected” herd immunity. Hmm, no! “We” have not rejected anything. A quarter of the country is ruining it for all of us. It’s not just wacky former rockers who have put herd immunity out of reach. It is white evangelicals (45% say they won’t get vaccinated). And it is Republicans (almost 50% are refusing the vaccine). In Texas, 59% of white Republicans have said “no” to the vaccine. You can slap the euphemism “vaccine hesitancy” on the problem, but in the end the G.O.P., and the children of G.O.D., are perpetuating a virus that is sickening and killing people in droves.

A big part of the problem stems from the cultish relationship many evangelicals and Republicans have with former President Donald Trump. They absorbed his endless efforts to downplay the danger of the virus and turn public health precautions into a political freedom movement. But the time for analyzing why these human petri dishes have chosen to ignore the medical science that could save them, and us, is over. We need a different strategy. I propose shunning. Biden’s wildly successful vaccine rollout means that soon everyone who wants a vaccine will have one. When that happens, restaurants, movie theaters, gyms, barbers, airlines and Ubers should require proof of vaccination before providing their services.

And it shouldn’t stop there. Businesses should make vaccination a requirement for employment. A COVID outbreak can shut down a business and be financially devastating. And failure to enforce basic health and safety measures is not fair to employees who have to work in offices, factories, and stores where close contact is required. Things should get personal, too: People should require friends to be vaccinated to attend the barbeques and birthday parties they host. Friends don’t let friends spread COVID.

“hacking the software of life.”

Good overview of history of legal implications of gene tech.

• Supreme Court: Pfizer, Moderna et al. May Own Your Genes Once Injected (CB)

Yes, this article contains a lot of scientific and legal mumbo-jumbo. But in a nutshell, biotechnology companies can own living things if said things are genetically-modified and not naturally-occurring. No mouse is born in nature like the OncoMouse. It is thus patentable. Oil-eating bacteria come from genetic manipulation, thus patentable. Notice how all these so-called doctors and scientists avoid pointing fingers at Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson et al. when someone dies within hours, days or weeks of receiving their shots. It’s almost as if said doctors and scientists are carefully navigating the trademark and patent landscape. They don’t want to trespass on someone else’s property, if you will. Moderna owns several mRNA patents. Doctors and hospitals wanting a piece of the mRNA pie cannot bite the hand that feeds them.

The synthetic mRNA of Pfizer and Moderna, along with the viral vector DNA delivery systems of Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca, change your genetic code, making you “genetically-modified.” Granted mainstream media say the foregoing is “conspiracy theory.” But Moderna Chief Medical Officer Tal Zaks tells you straight up that 1) the shots change your genetic code and 2) the shots do not stop the spread of COVID-19. He says the Moderna shot is “hacking the software of life.” Viral vectors do the same thing. So do these companies “own you” once you get the shots? Well, they own mice and bacteria created with their inventions. Once you get these shots, you are no longer a “naturally-occurring” human being. Prosthetic limbs, breast implants, etc. are not “natural” per se. But they are removable and not part of what fundamentally makes you human. Gene therapy is irreversible. Do the math yourself.

“And that’s how creeping banana republic socialism comes at you: first slowly, then fast.”

• Record 34% Of US Household Income Now Comes From The Government (ZH)

Following today’s release of the latest Personal Income and Spending data, Wall Street was predictably focused on the changes in these two key series, which showed a modest jump in personal spending, which however was dwarfed by a record surge in personal income, to be expected in the month when Biden’s latest $1.9 trillion stimmy hit. But while the change in the headline data was notable, what was far more remarkable was data showing just how increasingly more reliant on the US government the population has become. We are referring, of course, to Personal Current Transfer payments which are essentially government sourced income such as unemployment benefits, welfare checks, and so on. In March, this number exploded to a mind-blowing $8.1 trillion annualized, which was not only double the $4.1 trillion from February, but was also $5 trillion above the pre-Covid trend where transfer receipts were approximately $3.2 trillion.

This means that excluding the $8.1 trillion surge in govt transfers, personal income excluding government handouts would be virtually unchanged from a year ago level at $16TN. [..] government stimulus checks hitting personal accounts [..] in turn helped double the savings rate to a whopping 27.6% from 13.6% in February.

Stated simply, what all this means is that the government remains responsible for a third of all income, or 33.8 to be precise! Putting that number in perspective, in the 1950s and 1960s, transfer payment were around 7%. This number rose in the low teens starting in the mid-1970s (right after the Nixon Shock ended Bretton-Woods and closed the gold window). The number then jumped again after the financial crisis, spiking to the high teens. And now, the coronavirus has officially sent this number to a record 34%! And that’s how creeping banana republic socialism comes at you: first slowly, then fast.

And then prices start soaring.

• US Household Income Soared 21% In March, Largely Due To Stimulus Checks (JTN)

U.S. household income spiked an astronomical 21% in March, due in large part to the $1,400 coronavirus stimulus checks that went out that month, the government said on Friday. A press release from the Bureau of Economic Analysis said that, in the U.S., “personal income increased $4.21 trillion (21.1 percent) in March,” while disposable personal income increased by an even higher 23.6%. The spike “largely reflected an increase in government social benefits,” the BEA said, noting that the American Rescue Plan Act “established an additional round of direct economic impact payments to households.” The BEA also noted a rise in personal consumption expenditures, one that appears to be tied to the ongoing reopening of major swaths of the U.S. economy, particularly restaurants. “Within services, the largest contributor to the increase was spending for food services and accommodations,” the press release said.

“One of the number one selling objects in Europe is a safe. People are storing cash. Biden was the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

• Election Panic Coming in 2022 – Martin Armstrong (USAW)

According to a recent poll, 51% of Americans think Joe Biden cheated to get into the White House. The breakdown is 74% Republicans and an astounding 30% Democrats think cheating played at least a part of the 2020 Election outcome. In Arizona, the 2020 Election ballots are finally being audited as court battles to stop it continue. Legendary financial and geopolitical cycle analyst Martin Armstrong is predicting an election “panic in 2022.” Armstrong explains, “It means extremely high volatility. Despite whatever they want to say, there is a large proportion of the population that do not believe the election. Polls are saying it’s at 51%, but it’s probably close to 60% or 70%. You are also seeing that 60% of Americans want a third party, and you are talking about Democrats and Republicans. . . .

I think because we have such a high number of people who do not trust the election results, I don’t think they are going to be able to get away with rigging the elections again. It’s going to turn into violence. There is no question about that.” Armstrong also sees Biden Administration tax plans on things like capital gains causing problems in the not-too-distant future. Armstrong says, “If they eliminate capital gains, I don’t care if you are Republican or Democrat, you are going to have to sell. Your accountant is going to say if you don’t sell, you going to pay twice or three times as much in taxes next year. So, they can create a serious, serious collapse in the world economy. This is in addition to all this Covid nonsense that they have created.”

Armstrong has been saying for months that deflation would be the overarching theme in the economy. Is that going to continue or has there been a change? Armstrong says, “Deflation is now over. People have to understand. It has nothing to do with the supply of money. . . . If you don’t see a bright rosy future, what do you do? You save your money. . . . One of the number one selling objects in Europe is a safe. People are storing cash. Biden was the straw that broke the camel’s back. People are now seeing that things are going to cost more in the future than they do today. They have also created shortages because of these lockdowns. The inflation is just beginning to start now. It’s based on shortages, and it will continue going into about 2024.”

The bottom line on the cause of inflation, according to Armstrong, is “a loss of confidence in government.” Armstrong also predicts, “We are looking at the prospect of a serious war between 2025 and 2027. All this is completely because of this great reset nonsense. They have been using the Corona Virus as an excuse to try and shut down the economy. If you look at rents in New York City, they are in a freefall. Real estate is going crazy outside of the urban centers. In Florida, what was a $500,000 house last year is now more than $1 million.” On Trump, Armstrong says, “I don’t see him returning to office before 2024.” But, if massive ballot fraud is proven with the Arizona audit going on right now, Armstrong predicts, “The state legislature can recall a Senator” who won by election rigging.

“There’s no Heimlich maneuver for a nation choking on debt.”

• Rudderless, Leaderless, and Drifting (Kunstler)

The numbers are already pretty grim: 70 percent of Republicans and 30 percent of Democrats say they doubt the veracity of the 2020 election. Will the discovery that massive, widespread election fraud actually occurred lead to a constitutional crisis? How will Joe Biden survive in office if a growing percentage of the public sees him as illegitimate? And what might happen if the establishment attempts to blow the whole matter off? Can they still say “nothing to see” when the public has seen so much that they can’t unsee? None of that will happen in a vacuum. Plenty of other events are roiling in the background with the potential to go critical.

Joe Biden’s proposals to jack the US economy by $5-plus-trillion won’t be very good for the credibility of the US dollar, with other countries already eager to dissociate themselves from dollar-based global trade payment arrangements. But that’s just financial esoterica compared to what’s happening on-the-ground across America, with households running on debt and back payments for rent and mortgages piling up, and landlords and banks taking the hit in the meantime. There’s no Heimlich maneuver for a nation choking on debt. And that plan to become the Big Rock Candy Mountain, where they hung the jerk who invented work, is liable to disappoint even the mesmerists in the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

If you don’t allow markets to function, they cannot be efficient, either.

• The Myth of “Efficient Markets” (Rickards)

Mainstream economists have insisted for decades that markets are highly efficient, and they do a nearly perfect job of digesting available information and correctly pricing assets today to take account of future events based on that information. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Markets do offer valuable information to analysts, but they are far from efficient. Markets can be rational or irrational. Markets can be volatile, irrationally exuberant, or in a complete state of panic depending upon the emotions of investors, herd behavior, and the specific array of preferences when a new shock emerges. If markets were so efficient, why was Wall Street surprised when it was obvious to anyone paying attention that Biden was going to raise the capital gains tax?

The capital gains tax increase information had been there for all to see for six months, but it took a press release to get Wall Street to sit up and take notice. It should have been priced in long before, and the announcement just would have confirmed market expectations. So the next time you hear about efficient markets, take it with a large grain of salt. But my forecast from six months ago was wrong in one respect. I said the tax rate on capital gains would almost double from 20% to 39.6%. It turns out the rate will actually be 43.4% once a 3.8% investment income surtax is added on top. That surtax is a holdover from Obamacare.

If one were to add state and local income taxes, the combined rate on capital gains could exceed 50%, depending on the jurisdiction. Of course, capital gains taxes are imposed on investments you make from after-tax dollars, so even the initial investment has already been taxed. And the corporations whose stock you buy pay corporate income tax too. When those burdens are included, you’re lucky to get even 25% of your gains back net of taxes. This will be a headwind to stock markets for the foreseeable future.

“The US company could be slapped with fines of as much as 10% of its global turnover.”

• EU Charges Apple With Breach Of Competition Law (DW)

EU antitrust regulators on Friday charged Apple with illegally distorting competition in the music-streaming market through restrictive App Store rules. It is one of the biggest-ever competition cases against the US tech giant and could lead to hefty fines. An Apple spokesperson rejected the accusations, saying the EU’s case was “the opposite of fair competition.” The charges follow an EU investigation stemming from a complaint by the popular music-streaming service Spotify. “Our preliminary conclusion: Apple is in breach of EU competition law,” EU Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager said in a statement.

The European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, said Apple’s App Store rules force rival developers to use its in-app payment system — which charges up to 30% commission — and prevent them from informing users of cheaper payment methods. Vestager said this ultimately raised the cost for consumers and limited their choice. “By setting strict rules on the App Store that disadvantage competing music streaming services, Apple deprives users of cheaper music streaming choices and distorts competition,” the commissioner’s statement said. “This is done by charging high commission fees on each transaction in the App Store for rivals and by forbidding them from informing their customers of alternative subscription options.”

This is the first EU antitrust charge targeting Apple. It follows an investigation by the bloc, launched in June, which found that the App Store commission fees are passed on to consumers. The probe was launched after Swedish music streaming app Spotify, which competes with Apple Music, lodged a complaint about the company’s rules two years ago. The European Commission said Apple now has the chance to respond to the allegations and present its case in a hearing before a final ruling is handed down. The US company could be slapped with fines of as much as 10% of its global turnover.

Biden’s Promise: Moratorium on deportations for the first 100 days of his administration.

Biden’s Reality: Over 300,000 deported in 3 months.

• First 100 Days: 300,000 Deportations (CD)

Rights group United We Dream warned Tuesday that unless he takes immediate steps to improve his administration’s treatment of immigrants, President Joe Biden is at serious risk of repeating the destructive failures of former President Barack Obama, who deported roughly three million people during his eight years in office. Despite Biden’s characterization of Obama’s mass deportations as a “mistake” and pledge to usher in a more humane immigration system, United We Dream estimates that the administration has deported just over 300,000 people since January—largely using a Trump-era policy called Title 42.

The policy was first issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) last March—at the start of the coronavirus pandemic—and has been kept in place by the Biden administration. As Human Rights Watch (HRW) explained earlier this month, “The Title 42 expulsion policy has effectively closed the U.S. border to nearly all asylum seekers based on the misapplication of an obscure, 75-year-old public health law.” “That law, the Public Health Service Act of 1944, was designed to confer quarantine authority to health authorities that would apply to everyone, including U.S. citizens, arriving from a foreign country,” HRW noted. “Quarantine authority was never meant to be used to determine which noncitizens could or couldn’t be expelled or removed from the U.S.”

In a statement on Monday, Cynthia Garcia of United We Dream stressed that “Title 42 was designed under one of the most anti-immigrant administrations in modern history.” “President Biden and the Department of Homeland Security must be reminded that their inaction to protect vulnerable immigrant communities seeking refuge in the U.S. is not only putting lives on the line; it upholds a white nationalist immigration system that seeks to expel and keep Black and brown immigrants out at any cost,” said Garcia, who voiced dismay at the Biden administration’s deportation of vulnerable Haitians and others.

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Debt Rattle April 28 2021

Apr 282021

April 28, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:59 am Finance Tagged with: Apple, blood clots, Covid pill, fake news, Gaetz, Google, India, inflation, new world order, supply chains, Wuhan 38 Responses »

Juan de la Corte (1597–1660) Lot And His Daughters Escaping From The Destruction Of Sodom And Gomorrah

• COVID Pill That Cures Body At First Signs Of Infection May Come This Year (JTN)

• Single Dose Of Covid Vaccine Can Nearly Halve Transmission Of Virus (G.)

• The BBC & Bloomberg on India: B Stands For Bullshit. (Slog)

• Oxford Jab ‘Could Be Banned For Under-40s’ After Blood Clot Reports Double (Metro)

• A New World Order Brought To You By COVID-19 (Whitehead)

• Scientists “Debunking” The Wuhan Lab Leak Theory Linked to CCP (NP)

• Don’t Look Now (Jim Kunstler)

• Supply Chains Implode As “Price Doesn’t Even Matter Anymore”

• Gundlach Rejects The Fed’s “Inflation Is Transitory” Narrative (ZH)

• CNN’s New “Reporter,” Natasha Bertrand, is a Deranged Conspiracy Theorist (Greenwald)

• The Deep State Targets Matt Gaetz (AG)

• Apple iOS 14.5 Update Includes ‘App Tracking Transparency’ Feature (G.)

• Google Ad Surge Drives Up Profits For Parent Firm Alphabet (Y!)

• Hunter Biden To Guest Teach A Class On “Fake News” This Fall (DM)

I forget who drew my attention to this UK government report, Covid-19 Response Spring 2021, but it paints a very stark and completely ignored reality: only 66% of people can ever be successfully vaccinated and may be protected.

34% either can’t be jabbed for medical reasons, or the vaccines don’t catch on. And that’s assuming full uptake, which of course you’ll never ever get. So the number of not successfully vaccinated will be higher than 34%, perhaps quite a bit, no matter the PR campaigns and threats.

This should put the entire Covid response on its head, but for some reason it doesn’t. Those 34+% would appear to be ineligible for a “vaccine passport” as well, depriving them of basic human rights.

Lemme guess: Pfizer waits until everyone has been vaccinated, and then introduces this pill?

• COVID Pill That Cures Body At First Signs Of Infection May Come This Year (JTN)

The Pfizer pharmaceutical company is conducting trials on an antiviral drug could be ready for public use later this year that is intended to attack the spine of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and result in a cure to the sickness. The oral drug would stop the virus from mutating in the nose, throat and lungs, according to The Telegraph newspaper, ultimately causing the virus to dissipate. The possible home cure is being tested on 60 volunteers ages 18 and 60 at Pfizer facilities in the U.S. and Belgium. “We have designed PF-07321332 as a potential oral therapy that could be prescribed at the first sign of infection, without requiring that patients are hospitalized or in critical care,” said Mikael Dolsten, who leads the company’s worldwide research, development and medical division.

The first phase of the trial looks at the tolerance to the drug including “significant side effects, and how people feel after taking it,” according to documents. The second phase studies the response to several doses, and the third phase looks at food consumption while taking the pill. More trials would be needed to determine how the drug reacts with people who are infected with the virus. Pfizer says if the trials are successful the drug could be available for public use later this year.

VItamin D can do that too. Ivermectin can do more.

• Single Dose Of Covid Vaccine Can Nearly Halve Transmission Of Virus (G.)

A single dose of a Covid-19 vaccine can slash transmission of the virus by up to half, according to a Public Health England study. The PHE finding offers further hope that the pandemic can be brought under control as it indicates that vaccinated people are far less likely to pass the virus on to others. The study found that people given a single dose of either the Pfizer/BioNTech or Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccines – and who became infected at least three weeks later – were between 38% and 49% less likely to pass the virus on to people living in their homes, compared with those who were unvaccinated. Protection was seen from about 14 days after vaccination, with similar levels regardless of a person’s age. Other studies have already shown that both vaccines are highly effective at stopping people getting sick and ending up in hospital.

Experts will now assess whether two doses of vaccine can cut transmission of the virus even further, and more work is being carried out on transmission in the general population. PHE said similar results could be expected in places where the risk of transmission is like in the home, such as shared accommodation and prisons. The health secretary, Matt Hancock, said: “This is terrific news – we already know vaccines save lives and this study is the most comprehensive real-world data showing they also cut transmission of this deadly virus. “It further reinforces that vaccines are the best way out of this pandemic as they protect you and they may prevent you from unknowingly infecting someone in your household.

I’m guessing the truth is somewhere in the middle. India is not doing great right now, but it’s also not collapsing.

• The BBC & Bloomberg on India: B Stands For Bullshit. (Slog)

Unless you made an early getaway to Planet Drongo before the lockdown, you will have read pretty much everywhere that “India sees world’s highest daily cases amid oxygen shortage”. In fact, the BBC tells us that “some people” have died waiting for oxygen, the Indian health service is “completely overwhelmed” and the country now has “sixteen million cases”. So it’s a disaster, right? Well actually, no – it isn’t. The Indian health ministry has already made it clear that the Covid19 variant they’re dealing with this year has “a considerably lower death rate than the previous version”. Go to the Worldometer site, and you’ll see that India’s deaths per million is a minute 134: that’s 7% of the US and French figures, 6% of the UK and Italy’s and the lowest by far of any country in the Top 30 for cases.

Virtually no vaccination has been undertaken in India (only 1.3% are fully vaccinated) and the country is not using lockdowns. The Times of India has just denied the BBC’s ‘deaths from oxygen shortage’ fakery. What India IS doing, however, is employing the anti-inflammatory drugs tocilizumab and itolizumab and the antivirals favipiravir and hydroxychloroquine on a very wide scale. Go to Pharma site/accolyte spaces, and you’ll see all four drugs being rubbished: the Pharmafia and their bureaucratic whores don’t want any signs of a success to get out. But the Truth already is out there: India is doing spectacularly well without either vaccines or lockdown. You won’t find that reality expressed anywhere in the Western MSM, but the facts show that its infection management drugs have delivered one of the lowest case to death rates on the planet.

Not that you’d notice, reading Bloomberg: “India saw the world’s biggest one-day jump in coronavirus cases ever as a ferocious new wave grips the country, overwhelming hospitals and crematoriums and prompting frantic cries for help on social media. The South Asian nation reported 314,835 new infections Thursday, topping a peak of 314,312 recorded in the U.S. on Dec. 21. People took to Twitter and Instagram to call for everything from hospital beds to medicine and doorstep Covid-19 tests. The grim milestone shows how the pandemic crisis has shifted firmly to the developing world, where variants and complacency are threatening containment measures and there’s a lack of vaccines, with supplies dominated by richer nations.”

It’s a pack of lies from end to end. India has a population of 1.4 billion people – so overcrowding is almost generic – and being four times more people than the US, the comparison with America is completely ludicrous. Hospitals do not get overwhelmed when 134 folks out of a million get ill. India’s water purity and basic hygiene measures are very Third World. Yet despite all that, it is doing phenomenally well against Covid….by having and doing respectively none of the advantages and policies of the West.

“..the total number of people in the UK who developed blood clots after getting one dose has gone from 79 to 168 in a fortnight..”

• Oxford Jab ‘Could Be Banned For Under-40s’ After Blood Clot Reports Double (Metro)

Under-40s may be offered an alternative to the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine after blood clot reports doubled, reports claim. The chance of dying from a blood clot after having the jab is about one in one million – with 19 fatalities from around 20 million vaccinations. However, the total number of people in the UK who developed blood clots after getting one dose has gone from 79 to 168 in a fortnight, Medical Healthcare Products and Regulatory Agency (MHRA) data suggests. These new cases have taken the odds of experiencing a blood clot up from one in 250,000 to one in 126,000. The MHRA has reiterated that the benefits of the Oxford-AstraZeneca jab outweigh the risks for most people – but is considering offering under-40s the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine given that younger people are more likely to be affected by blood clots, The Telegraph claims.

It comes after the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) decided that under-30s should be offered an alternative to the Oxford jab. Currently, anyone over the age of 45 can get a jab in England. Over-50s in Scotland and Wales are being offered their doses, while Northern Ireland has already started vaccinating over-35s. Deputy chief medical officer Jonathan Van-Tam said on April 7 that 0.8 per 100,000 30 to 39-year-olds suffered serious blood clots after getting their Oxford/AstraZeneca jab. This was compared to 2.7 in 100,000 who would be kept out of intensive care by taking the vaccine. But these figures were based on fewer cases and the MHRA is yet to release what these odds are now 168 people have had blood clots.

“The new platinum card of the Covid age is the vaccine certificate.”

• A New World Order Brought To You By COVID-19 (Whitehead)

The COVID-19 pandemic has propelled us into a whole new global frontier. Those hoping to navigate this interconnected and highly technological world of contact tracing, vaccine passports and digital passes will find themselves grappling with issues that touch on deep-seated moral, political, religious and personal questions for which there may be no clear-cut answers. We are about to find our ability to access, engage and move about in the world dependent on which camp we fall into: those who have been vaccinated against COVID-19 and those who have not. “It is the latest status symbol. Flash it at the people, and you can get access to concerts, sports arenas or long-forbidden restaurant tables. Some day, it may even help you cross a border without having to quarantine,” writes Heather Murphy for the New York Times.

“The new platinum card of the Covid age is the vaccine certificate.” This is what M.I.T. professor Ramesh Raskar refers to as the new “currency for health,” an apt moniker given the potentially lucrative role that Big Business (Big Pharma and Big Tech, especially) will play in establishing this pay-to-play marketplace. The airline industry has been working on a Travel Pass. IBM is developing a Digital Health Pass. And the U.S. government has been all-too-happy to allow the corporate sector to take the lead. Spearheaded by the National Security Agency (NSA), which has shown itself to care little for constitutional limits or privacy, the surveillance state has come to dominate our government and our lives. Yet the government does not operate alone. It cannot. It requires an accomplice. Thus, the increasingly complex security needs of our massive federal government, especially in the areas of defense, surveillance and data management, have been met within the corporate sector, which has shown itself to be a powerful ally that both depends on and feeds the growth of governmental bureaucracy.

I’m not much into CCP bashing, but also not into too many coincidences.

• Scientists “Debunking” The Wuhan Lab Leak Theory Linked to CCP (NP)

Several researchers used by leading corporate media outlets to debunk claims that COVID-19 originated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology have previously attended events or accepted awards from the controversial lab, The National Pulse can reveal. The researchers’ Chinese Communist Party ties – which present a clear conflict of interest – are omitted from the media reports, which instead present the scientists as unbiased adjudicators of COVID-19’s origins. In March 2020, NBC Science Contributor Dr. Joseph Fair called for the Trump administration to “stop blaming China” for the outbreak of the virus, despite mounting evidence – even at the time – that China was hiding information and data, and silencing whistleblowers. Dr. Fair equated called the lab leak theory – now increasingly mainstream – as a “conspiracy.”

Fair spoke at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in 2013, The National Pulse can reveal. “During the visit, he attended “Ge Hong Elite Forum” and gave an excellent academic report named “Biosafety Level 4 Containment Research and Recombinant Biology: How advances in molecular biology can advance in-vitro product design”. Many teachers and students, including Director Chen Xinwen and researchers such as Hu Zhihong and Wei Hongping, listened to the report,” a summary notes. “Dr. Joseph Fair is now engaged in the rapid diagnosis work of virulent viruses for GVFI and looks forward to cooperating with the Institute in the relevant research field in future,” the description adds. Fair’s Twitter account also contains posts describing WIV researchers as “collaborators,” “colleagues” and friends,” adding “I’ve very much enjoyed working with them over the years.”

Fair has praised the labs “openness with regards to sharing data” despite the institute erasing 16,000 virus samples in late 2019 and continuing to do so throughout the pandemic. Dr. Ian Lipkin, who’s seen his claims that there is “no evidence to suggest that [COVID-19] was created in a lab” amplified by outlets such as CBS and USA Today, also spoke at the WIV, in 2015. “He had given an excellent report on “Small game hunting”, which was presided by Professor Zhengli Shi, to the teachers and students in our institute,” a WIV summary revealed. The unearthed visit follows National Pulse reports highlighting Lipkin receiving awards from the Chinese Communist Party and describing himself as a “consultant” for the communist regime.

“..the supernatural victory on Super Tuesday that rescued his pitiful old ass from the glue factory of broken-down political war-horses.”:

• Don’t Look Now (Jim Kunstler)

This was only one of countless mysteries orbiting around the dimming star that is Joe Biden. The biggest one, the planet Jupiter of all puzzlements, is how the guy managed to get elected occupant of the oval office. Or, more to the point, how did others manage to get him elected? I mean, considering those few embarrassing campaign forays from the basement to a bunch of empty parking lots back in the fall of 2020, not to mention the supernatural victory on Super Tuesday that rescued his pitiful old ass from the glue factory of broken-down political war-horses. We may be about to find out as Arizona’s State Senate finally got around to approving a full audit of the November 3rd vote in Maricopa County, comprising Phoenix and its asteroid belt of suburbs, which amounts to more than two-thirds of the state’s population.

The Democratic Party tried pretty hard to stop the durned thing, sending its gnarliest Lawfare warrior, one Marc Elias from the Clinton-indentured DC firm of Perkins Coie, and a posse of 70 other attorneys, to bury the proceedings in court orders. But all they got was a weekend pause from an Arizona judge who imposed a $1-million-dollar bond payment on the Democrats to cover expenses for the interruption — which would then be forfeited if the audit went forward. The Dems declined to pay up, so the pause was lifted and the audit goes forward today. The usual suspects in the mainstream media attempted to bury the Arizona vote audit story or denigrate it — for instance the The New York Times, which characterized the inquiry in its Saturday lede as “false claims of a stolen election,” and then “a snipe hunt for skullduggery,” before asserting the boilerplate “baseless theories of election theft” to seal the deal with its avidly credulous readership.

Rachel Maddow of MSNBC practically jumped up and down going woo-woo-woo to discredit the audit. What do you suppose they’re afraid of? I’ll tell you: For one thing, if the vote turns out to have been compromised by fraud, Arizona is liable to lose a Democratic senator elected on Mr. Biden’s (possibly) phantom coattails — Mark Kelly (D) who defeated incumbent Martha McSally (R) — which would cancel the Democrats’ current one-vote majority grip on the body. The result of that would be the end of the party’s effort to jam various new laws down America’s craw: DC statehood, the HR-1 voter fraud act, the Supreme Court-packing bill, and, actually, anything else on the party’s Satanic wish-list for disassembling the republic.

“.. it will almost feel like trade is coming to a halt.”

• Supply Chains Implode As “Price Doesn’t Even Matter Anymore”

The number of container ships stuck at anchor off Los Angeles and Long Beach is down to around 20 per day, from 30 a few months ago. Does this mean the capacity crunch in the trans-Pacific market is finally easing? Absolutely not, warned Nerijus Poskus, vice president of global ocean at freight forwarder Flexport. “It’s not getting better. It’s getting worse,” he told American Shipper in an interview on Monday. “What I’m seeing is unprecedented. We are seeing a tsunami of freight,” he reported. “For the month of May, everything on the trans-Pacific is basically sold out. We had one client who needed something loaded in May that was extremely urgent and who was ready to pay $15,000 per container. I couldn’t get it loaded — and we are a growing company that ships a lot of TEUs [twenty-foot equivalent units]. Price doesn’t always even matter anymore.”

Poskus said that trans-Pacific import volumes are still rising. He noted that January trans-Pacific imports were up 10% versus 2019 (comparisons to 2020 numbers are skewed by COVID) and 13.5% in February, then jumped 51% in March. “So, we’re now at 1.5 times pre-pandemic levels.” With imports far outpacing retail sales growth, he attributed volumes to inventory restocking. “The restocking is actually affecting the trade even more than growth in demand. That tells me that this will last even longer. Let’s say U.S. consumer demand slows down in Q3 and Q4. That’s not expected, but even if it does, [capacity availability and rates] shouldn’t improve quickly, simply because of the huge restocking demand.”

Poskus also believes there is a growing export backlog piling up each day in Asia, awaiting available ship slots. If that backlog grows too big, he said, “I honestly don’t know what’s going to happen.” As a result of the backlog and restocking demand, he thinks “prices will remain high and shipping will probably remain difficult for the rest of this year. And then after that, you have the peak for Chinese New Year in 2022.” He said that the situation today is the worst he’s witnessed — and he believes it’s about to get even more severe. “Buckle up. The month of May will be the worst people have ever seen,” he predicted. Because some shippers will have to wait in line behind the growing backlog in Asia, he expects “what’s going to happen soon is that some importers won’t even be able to get on the boat. For them, it will almost feel like trade is coming to a halt.”

“.. it really depends on just how much manipulation the authorities are willing to do.”

• Gundlach Rejects The Fed’s “Inflation Is Transitory” Narrative (ZH)

Don’t believe your lying eyes, will be the message tomorrow from The Fed’s Jay Powell as he hypnotizes investors to believe that “inflation is transitory” and they have “the tools” to manage it. ‘Bond King’ Jeff Gundlach is not buying that line and told BNN Bloomberg in an interview this morning. “…more importantly, I’m not sure why they think they know it’s transitory… how do they know that?” “…there’s plenty of money-printing that’s been going on, and we’ve seen commodity prices going up massively… home prices in the US are inflating very substantially… so there’s a lot of inflation that’s already baked in to input prices.” Gundlach does admit that Powell has a point in the very near term as the prints were about to see “which could be as high as 4% [for CPI]” are off of year-ago, very depressed levels.

“…what he means by transitory is that the base effect will lead to problems in the next few months but then the base effect will become less problematic.” But, Gundlach adds, “it’s not clear to me that inflation is going to go back down to around 2 to 2.5%… we don’t know, nobody knows… but we’re most concerned with the fact that The Fed thinks they know.” This is worrisome because The Fed’s track record is anything but inspiring… “when I go back to the global financial crisis, when we almost had a complete meltdown of the financial system, Ben Bernanke completely missed all of the problems that led to the crisis.” Bernanke’s infamous “contained to subprime… and subprime is only a sliver of the market” comments could be about to be trumped by Powell’s “inflation is transitory” comments as Gundlach warns “there’s plenty of indicators that suggest inflation is going to go higher and not just on a transitory basis.”

The Fed is “trying to paint the picture” of control, but Gundlach tries to make clear: “they’re guessing.” So, what does that mean for markets? While some fear “we ain’t seen nothing yet” in terms of yields rising (and multiple contraction), Gundlach notes that “it really depends on just how much manipulation the authorities are willing to do.” The billionaire fund manager notes that yields are “still very low… well below the current inflation rate… so we have negative yields everywhere on the yield curve.” It’s also “hard to figure out who’s going to buy the bonds,” he notes, “as we are about to see issuance like we have never seen before.” Foreigners have been selling bonds for years and domestically there is little demand, so Gundlach notes the only one left to soak up all this extra supply is The Federal Reserve, which has already expanded its balance sheet massively in the last 12 months.

“Who’s going to buy all these many trillions of dollars of bonds? Foreigners have been selling for years and they’ve accelerated their selling in the last several quarters, domestic buyers are not exactly selling, but they’re not adding to their holdings. So what’s left to absorb all of the spawn supply is the Federal Reserve.“ “Left to true, free markets, bond yields at the long-end would obviously be higher than they are now.”

“Each month, Bertrand produced dozens of Russiagate articles for the site that were so unhinged that they made Rachel Maddow look sober, cautious and reliable.”

• CNN’s New “Reporter,” Natasha Bertrand, is a Deranged Conspiracy Theorist (Greenwald)

The most important axiom for understanding how the U.S. corporate media functions is that there is never accountability for those who serve as propagandists for the U.S. security state. The opposite is true: the more aggressively and recklessly you spread CIA narratives or pro-war manipulation, the more rewarded you will be in that world. [..] On Monday, CNN made clear that this dynamic still drives the corporate media world. The network proudly announced that it had hired Natasha Bertrand away from Politico. In doing so, they added to their stable of former CIA operatives, NSA spies, Pentagon Generals and FBI agents a reporter who has done as much as anyone, if not more so, to advance the scripts of those agencies.

Bertrand’s career began taking off when, while at Business Insider, she abandoned her obsession with Russia’s role in Syria in 2016 in order to monomaniacally fixate on every last conspiracy theory and gossip item that drove the Russiagate fraud during the 2016 campaign and then into the Trump presidency. Each month, Bertrand produced dozens of Russiagate articles for the site that were so unhinged that they made Rachel Maddow look sober, cautious and reliable. In 2018, it was Jeffrey Goldberg himself — knowing a star CIA propagandist when he sees one — who gave Bertrand her first big break by hiring her away from Business Insider to cover Russiagate for The Atlantic. Shortly thereafter, she joined the Queen of Russiagate conspiracies herself by becoming a national security analyst for MSNBC and NBC News.

From there, it was onto Politico and now CNN: the ideal, rapid career climb that is the dream of every liberal security state servant calling themselves a journalist. Her final conspiratorial article for The Atlantic before moving to Politico is the perfect illustration of who and what she is. CNN’s new national security star was no ordinary Russiagate fanatic. There was no conspiracy theory too unhinged or evidence-free for her to promote. As The Washington Post’s media reporter Erik Wemple documented once the Steele Dossier was debunked, there was arguably nobody in media other than Rachel Maddow who promoted and ratified that hoax as aggressively, uncritically and persistently as Bertrand. She defended it even after the Mueller Report corroborated virtually none of its key claims.

Smear sells.

• The Deep State Targets Matt Gaetz (AG)

It’s now been over three weeks since a torrent of sensational headlines about U.S. Representative Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) blared from corporate media newsrooms. It sounded about as bad as it could get for the representative from Florida’s 1st Congressional District; breathless claims that he was “under investigation for underage sex trafficking” touched off a media frenzy. No stranger to controversy, Gaetz’s initial instinct was to confront the allegations live on Fox News with Tucker Carlson. While many saw it as a bizarre interview, it may at least have been the right move in terms of staring down a bloodthirsty establishment. As several weeks have passed, though, the controversy seems to have generated more heat than light. Indeed, this might be the longest running “sex scandal” in the nation’s history without an accuser.

But the media has been busy. Since the original story broke, there’s been a drip of follow-on stories at outlets like the Daily Beast, Politico, the Washington Post, and CNN—all using a shady collection of off-the-record and dubious government sources. Unsurprisingly, given that sourcing, none of the stories have contained anything close to serious detail or evidence. Reporters keep dropping tidbits of evidence likely to be emanating from within the Justice Department, yet none of which confirms any of the headline-grabbing allegations. Few of these articles even attempt to deal with the wild allegations first made about the congressman. Writing in Politico on Tuesday, Betsy Woodruff Swan stated: “[Gaetz] has not been charged with a crime, and no women have publicly accused him of sexual misconduct in the three weeks since the New York Times first reported on the investigation. He has denied any wrongdoing.”

Note how—after making a sensational media splash for maximum public relations damage—the accusations against Gaetz have shifted, from shocking and unsupported claims of underage sex trafficking and pedophilia to the less scurrilous (and still unsupported) accusation that Gaetz had sex at parties. Crucially, there has not been any evidence of payments, prostitution, or underage girls. As Scott Adams recently said, while some may first cringe at hearing too much about the sex life of a politician, deep down, they’re more likely to be indifferent. CNN even had to note in a recent report: “One of the women who spoke to CNN said she did so in part because the picture of Gaetz as potentially connected to sex trafficking that has emerged in recent days does not align with what she saw. Both women said that they never saw anyone at the parties who appeared to be underage.”

Seems hard to argue against, but sure enough many are trying.

• Apple iOS 14.5 Update Includes ‘App Tracking Transparency’ Feature (G.)

Users of iPhones can now prevent advertisers tracking them across their apps, after the release of the latest software update from Apple introduced the controversial feature despite the protests of Facebook and the advertising industry. The update, iOS 14.5, includes a setting called “app tracking transparency”, which for the first time requires applications to ask for users’ consent before they are able to track their activity across other apps and websites. If users decline, then applications will not be able to access the unique user ID that they need to follow individuals as they live their digital lives. The prompt, which will say “Allow [app game] to track your activity across other companies’ apps and websites?” will show up for apps that request access to the ID number.

They may be able to use other methods, known as “fingerprinting”, to achieve the same goal, but Apple says that doing so could cause them to be expelled from the App Store. First announced last summer, app tracking transparency led to immediate pushback from the wider advertising industry. Initially slated for release in the autumn, Apple delayed its implementation for six months in order to give the industry time to prepare. But the delay wasn’t enough for some, and in December, Facebook launched an all-out assault on Apple, with the company’s head of ads and business products, Dan Levy, claiming that the setting was actually “about control of the entire internet”. “This is about a long-term view that is anti-personalised advertising and we think is trying to take the world back 10 or 20 years,” he added.

Facebook launched a glossy advertising campaign arguing that the real victim of the changes are “your neighbourhood coffee brewery, your friend who owns their own retail business, your cousin who started an event planning service and the game developers who build the apps you use for free”. Those small businesses, the company said, would lose out if they were no longer able to target customers with personalised adverts. The social network is not alone in its opposition: a group of Germany’s biggest media, tech and advertising companies, led by digital publishing house Axel Springer, have filed a complaint with the German competition regulator arguing that the new rules could lead to a 60% fall in advertising revenues for app developers.

Looking at ad reveue here, I can assure you they’re keeping it all for themselves.

• Google Ad Surge Drives Up Profits For Parent Firm Alphabet (Y!)

Google parent Alphabet on Tuesday reported that quarterly profit more than doubled as digital advertising surged with more people relying on the internet during the coronavirus pandemic. Profit in the first quarter leapt to $17.9 billion from $6.8 billion in the same period a year ago while revenues jumped 34 percent to $55.3 billion, led by gains in advertising and cloud computing services. “Over the last year, people have turned to Google Search and many online services to stay informed, connected and entertained,” said Alphabet and Google chief executive Sundar Pichai. The surge in Alphabet’s earnings comes as the tech giant faces increased scrutiny from regulators regarding its power.

“Google essentially manufactures money; they are almost entirely ads,” said analyst Rob Enderle of Enderle Group. “There is not a risk of downturn in revenue, it is that regulatory action strips the revenue from them.” Facebook and Google are the “short list” when it comes to scrutiny by regulators in Europe and the United States because of “their broad impact on the political process and almost complete dominance of ad revenues,” the analyst maintained. Google is among internet giants in the crosshairs of regulators and critics concerned about whether it unfairly wields its power to dominate markets and fend off competition.

[..] Alphabet shares were up nearly five percent in after-market trades that followed release of the earnings figures. “Google had an absolute monster quarter with ads leading the way,” said analyst Patrick Moorhead of Moor Insights and Strategy. “YouTube grew an eye-watering 49 percent year-over-year, which I attribute to increased YouTube viewing and increased YouTube TV subscribers.”

I must admit I didn’t see this coming. Hunter, that is. That fake news producers would teach on fake news is all too predictable.

• Hunter Biden To Guest Teach A Class On “Fake News” This Fall (DM)

Hunter Biden is helping teach a class on fake news at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana this fall. The course titled ‘Media Polarization and Public Policy Impacts’ will include several guest speakers throughout its 10 weeks, including the president’s son. The course description, according to a copy of the syllabus obtained by DailyMail.com, says: ‘America’s rapidly advancing partisan divide is fueled substantially by the growing political polarization increasingly evident in our news media.’ ‘This course will explore the current state of the media landscape in the United States and how media polarization, fake news, and the economics of the news business impact public policymaking in Washington, D.C,’ it continues. Hunter, 51, is a Yale-educated lawyer and has never, in any capacities, worked as a journalist, reporter or in the media world.

‘Hunter Biden has no background in media,’ conservative filmmaker Phelim McAleer said. ‘He has never worked for a newspaper or a media outlet.’ ‘Hunter Biden lecturing a class on fake news is like Harvey Weinstein teaching a course to prevent sexual harassment. It shouldn’t be happening. Period.’ the ‘My Son Hunter’ producer continued. Tulane University confirmed the course in a statement to DailyMail.com and confirmed the list of speaker, including:
Hunter Biden
Dr. Deborah Birx, White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator under President Donald Trump
Juan Williams, political analyst for Fox News Channel
Susan Glasser, columnist for The New Yorker
Margaret Sullivan, Washington Post columnist; Kylie Atwood, national security correspondent for CNN
Margaret Brennan, Face the Nation moderator
Bret Stephens, New York Times columnist
Dr. Michael Fauntroy, a professor in the Political Science Department at Howard University.

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Debt Rattle June 26 2020

Jun 262020

June 26, 2020 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 11:33 am Finance Tagged with: Apple, Assange, Bayer, Biden, coronavirus, Covid19, Fed, Monsanto, travel, troop drawdowns 47 Responses »

Dorothea Lange Depression refugee family from Tulsa, Oklahoma 1936

• US Coronavirus Cases ‘May Have Topped 20 Million’ (BBC)

• Pompeo Says US, EU Working To Resume Trans-Atlantic Travel (R.)

• House Defense Bill Targets Troop Drawdowns In Africa, South Korea (Hill)

• No More Crossing Borders For Work (Salmon)

• The Fed Said It Could Supply $2.3 Trillion. It Hasn’t Come Close So Far (CNBC)

• Parents To Sue Trump, Meme Creator Carpe Donktum Over Manipulated Video Of Toddlers

• Why Joe Biden Can Do No Wrong (Turley)

• Bayer Wants To Resolve Future Roundup Liability In A Class Action (R.)

• New Assange Indictment Only Adds ‘Window Dressing’ to ‘Continue Smear Campaign’ (Sp.)

• Doctors for Assange: UK Officials May be Legally Culpable for His Torture (CN)

Say what you will, but that virus is not sitting still, got to give it that. And as for us, we’re either not sitting still enough, or we’re making the wrong moves.

And I still can’t decide what I find scarier, that or the fast deteriorating political and media climate stateside.

Worldometer reports new cases for June 25 (midnight to midnight GMT+0) at + 179,718.

New cases past 24 hours in:

• US + 41,317
• Brazil + 40,673
• India + 17,720

From Worldometer:

From COVID19Info.live:

This is where you say all bets are off, I guess.

• US Coronavirus Cases ‘May Have Topped 20 Million’ (BBC)

At least 20 million people in the US may already have been infected with Covid-19, according to the latest estimate by health officials. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) says the true number of cases is likely to be 10 times higher than the reported figure. It comes as the state of Texas halted its reopening as infections and hospitalisations surged. The US has recorded 2.4m confirmed infections and 122,370 deaths. Some southern and western states have been reporting record numbers of cases in recent days. The University of Washington predicts 180,000 US deaths by October – or 146,000 if 95% of Americans wear masks.

“Our best estimate right now is that for every case that was reported, there actually were 10 other infections,” CDC Director Dr Robert Redfield told reporters. This was because testing was restricted to people with symptoms and asymptomatic carriers were not tested, he said. “We probably recognized about 10% of the outbreak by the methods that we use to diagnosis between the March, April and May,” he said. Dr Redfield said that between 5% and 8% of the population had been exposed to the virus and urged Americans to keep social distancing, wearing masks and washing hands. “As we go into the fall, in the winter, these are going to be really, really important defence mechanisms,” he said.

[Texas], which has been at the forefront of moves to end lockdown measures, has seen thousands of new cases, prompting Republican Governor Greg Abbott to call a temporary halt to its reopening. “This temporary pause will help our state corral the spread until we can safely enter the next phase of opening our state for business,” he said. Texas confirmed a record 5,996 new cases on Thursday. There were also 47 new deaths, the highest daily toll for a month. The state has also seen record number of people requiring hospital treatment for 13 days in a row. Elective surgery has been suspended in the Houston, Dallas, Austin and San Antonio areas to free up beds. More than 10% of the tests carried out over the past week have come back positive. All but 12 of the state’s 254 counties have reported cases.

Yeah, Europeans can’t wait to invite a bunch of infected Usaians to their homes.

• Pompeo Says US, EU Working To Resume Trans-Atlantic Travel (R.)

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo played down concerns Thursday that the European Union might refuse to allow Americans into the 27-nation bloc as it considers lifting restrictions on overseas travelers starting next week, due to the spread of the coronavirus in the United States. “It’s a challenge for all of us to decide how and when to open up our economies and our societies. Everybody’s trying to figure that out,” Pompeo said during a videoconference organized by the German Marshall Fund think tank. “We’re working with our European counterparts to get that right.” European nations appear on track to reopen their borders between each other by July 1. Their envoys to Brussels are debating what virus-related criteria should apply when lifting entry restrictions on travelers from outside the EU that were imposed in March.

As the criteria are narrowed down, a list of countries whose citizens might be allowed in is being drawn up. The list would be updated every 14 days based on how the coronavirus is spreading around the world. The EU’s executive commission recommends that “travel restrictions should not be lifted as regards third countries where the situation is worse” than the average in the 27 EU member countries plus Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland. That is likely to rule out people living in the United States, where new coronavirus infections have surged to the highest level in two months, according to figures compiled by Johns Hopkins University.

Beyond epidemiological concerns, any country being considered would first be expected to lift its own travel restrictions on visitors from all 31 European nations. This would also rule out the US. In a March 11 decree, President Donald Trump suspended the entry of all people from Europe’s ID check-free travel area. More than 10 million Europeans usually visit the United States each year.

The war party has two wings.

• House Defense Bill Targets Troop Drawdowns In Africa, South Korea (Hill)

The House Armed Services Committee’s version of the annual defense policy bill seeks to put roadblocks on withdrawing U.S. troops from Africa and South Korea. The so-called chairman’s mark of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) – the version of the bill drafted by Chairman Adam Smith (D-Wash.) – would require the Pentagon to report to Congress on the effects, implications and costs of a troop drawdown in Africa on military, diplomatic, development and humanitarian efforts. It would also require a report on the effects of a drawdown within 90 days if the number of troops dips below 80 percent of current force posture.

Reports first surfaced earlier this year that Defense Secretary Mark Esper was eying slashing the number of U.S. troops in Africa as part of a global review of U.S. force posture to redirect troops to counter Russia and China. He later confirmed he was considering a reduction but insisted it would not be a full withdrawal. The plan received bipartisan backlash from lawmakers who argued the troops are needed not only to fight terrorism, but also to serve as a buttress against Russian and Chinese efforts to increase their influence in Africa.

More recently, President Trump announced he plans to withdraw thousands of U.S. troops from Germany. Trump has framed the drawdown as a punitive measure in response to Germany not meeting NATO’s defense spending goal, while national security advisor Robert O’Brien argued in a Wall Street Journal op-ed the forces are needed in the Indo-Pacific region.

Picked this from Felix Salmon for this crazy stat:

“..pre-coronavirus Apple was buying 50 business class seats per day just from San Francisco to Shanghai…”

• No More Crossing Borders For Work (Salmon)

Another area where there’s no sign of any recovery is in the movement of workers across borders, especially when it comes to movement in and out of the U.S. Why it matters: Multinational U.S. corporations are built on international travel. Apple spends $150 million a year on air travel, for instance, and pre-coronavirus was buying 50 business class seats per day just from San Francisco to Shanghai. That level of investment in cross-border ties helped to create a company that’s now worth $1.6 trillion. Driving the news: U.S. borders remain shut to travelers from China and Europe. There are only eight flights per week between the U.S. and China; the United Airlines SFO-SHA route where Apple used to spend $35 million a year currently has no flights at all. The EU is almost certain to ban U.S. travelers when it reopens on July 1. And Donald Trump has banned thousands of nonimmigrant workers from entering the country this year.

Because it only supports member banks.

The program is too complicated on purpose: the banks all have legal departments that have no trouble deciphering it.

• The Fed Said It Could Supply $2.3 Trillion. It Hasn’t Come Close So Far (CNBC)

When the coronavirus pandemic locked up capital markets and pulled the economy into recession, the Federal Reserve took aim with a $2.3 trillion bazooka to try to help. Thus far, though, the central bank has only fired off surprisingly few rounds. In the three months since a slew of programs were announced, the Fed has loaned out just $143 billion, or a mere 6.2% of its total firepower. The most ambitious initiative, the Main Street Lending Program, has yet to make a loan, according to the most recent Fed balance sheet data, though officials expect that to change in a matter of days.

As for the rest of the measures, from municipal lending to corporate credit to the Fed’s role in the Paycheck Protection Program, there are several likely explanations for why what was supposed to be an infusion of cash into the economy instead has been a comparative trickle. One is simply that the programs, particularly in the case of Main Street, are complicated and have proven difficult to launch as the Fed gathers feedback and works through logistics. Another is that there is simply less demand from entities that are finding other ways to make do. And on that same point, the notion that the U.S. economy is recovering more quickly than expected from a recession that began in February has negated the need for the arsenal that the Fed launched starting in March.

“The economy is getting better, so you’re not seeing as many firms short of cash as you’d seen in March and April,” said Yiming Ma, an assistant finance professor at Columbia University Business School. “Some of the terms are just not very attractive to firms who potentially do need the funds.”

Newsflash: we don’t all have the same kind of humor. But this goes very far.

• Parents To Sue Trump, Meme Creator Carpe Donktum Over Manipulated Video Of Toddlers

The parents of two toddlers featured in a manipulated video posted on social media by President Donald Trump plan to file a lawsuit against the president, his campaign and the creator of the video, pro-Trump meme creator Carpe Donktum, escalating the fallout from the doctored video, which was taken down by Facebook and Twitter. Lawyers representing the parents of the children featured in the video are drafting a lawsuit alleging the video was altered and shared as an “advertisement and political propaganda” without permission or parental consent. Logan Cook, who goes by the username Carpe Donktum, altered footage of the two children in which one, who is Black, is running away from the other, who is white, and added a fake CNN chyron reading “Terrified toddler runs away from racist baby.”

The original clip, which went viral last year, actually shows the two toddlers running up to each other and hugging. (The edited video appears to be a satirical attempt criticize how the media takes statements out of context and reports on race.) Both Facebook and Twitter took the video down after the parents of the children filed a copyright complaint, and before that Twitter labeled the video “manipulated media.” Twitter late Tuesday permanently banned Cook for repeated copyright violations.

“The fact that Twitter and Facebook disabled this fake video within 24 hours of President Trump and his campaign tweeting it, coupled with Twitter permanently banning Cook, is very strong evidence that a jury will likely find that all of these people broke the law by using this video as advertisement and political propaganda,” said Ven Johnson, one of the attorneys representing the parents. Cook’s work is frequently shared by Trump, and the president reportedly called him a “genius” when he visited the White House last year. Twitter previously suspended Cook for eight days after he posted an edited video showing Trump as a cowboy attacking CNN reporter Jim Acosta.

Facebook and Twitter usually leave controversial posts from world leaders online, though Twitter has taken to labeling tweets with misinformation or those that “glorify violence” in recent weeks. But there’s one rule even world leaders can’t break: copyright. In October last year, another video posted by Trump featuring a Nickelback song was taken down after a copyright notice was filed. And earlier that year Twitter took down another video that included music from the Batman movie The Dark Knight Rises without permission.

It’s going to be an absolutely crazy election.

• Why Joe Biden Can Do No Wrong (Turley)

In the 11th century, Pope Urban II formalized the use of indulgences, which could be purchased to forgive sins. A papal bull of the Crusade accompanied those who fought in the Holy Land and committed atrocities in the name of a higher order. The practice was defended as essentially drawing from the “treasury of merit” created by Jesus Christ, the saints and the faithful. Now the 2020 election has become the ultimate crusade, and President Trump’s critics seem to be enjoying indulgences in tossing aside moral and ethical considerations. The freedom that is Biden is nowhere more evident than in a recent column by The Nation’s Katha Pollitt, who wrote about the allegations of sexual assault made by former Biden staffer Tara Reade.

Pollitt dispensed with any struggle over feminist or moral qualms, declaring, “I would vote for Joe Biden if he boiled babies and ate them.” As Pollitt explained, “We do not have the luxury of sitting out the election to feel morally pure or send a message about sexual assault and #BelieveWomen.” Otherwise, Pollitt would have to deal with her column during the confirmation hearing for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, in which she denounced “some of his defenders [who] seem to be saying that even if the allegations are true, it shouldn’t really matter.” For years, critics have expressed disgust at Trump’s statement that “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and wouldn’t lose any voters.”

Yet they now afford Biden the same immunity even if he turns into the ancient god Cronus and starts snacking on boiled babies. The same indulgence has been claimed by politicians and commentators in dealing with other Biden allegations of sexual assault. Many of them demanded during the Kavanaugh controversy that all women must simply be believed when alleging sexual harassment. Those who questioned the allegations of Christine Blasey Ford were denounced for insensitivity, if not complicity, in the abuse of women. Today, some of us have said that Biden has the stronger case thus far, but we still support an investigation.

Yet many Kavanaugh critics quickly declared Biden to be innocent and opposed any search of his records — including those under lock and key at the University of Delaware — for any allegations of sexual abuse. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) simply cut off questions by testily declaring, “I don’t need a lecture” when confronted with her prior statements. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) declared she sees no need for an investigation because she knows Biden and believes him, adding that she resented being asked about it as a victim of sexual assault. She cut off questions from CNN’s Jake Tapper by saying, “And you know what? That’s all I’m going to say about it.”

They sponsor a legal panel that absolves them from most future claims. How sick is that?

• Bayer Wants To Resolve Future Roundup Liability In A Class Action (R.)

The headlines Wednesday in the mass tort litigation over Bayer’s Roundup weedkiller were all about the company’s decision to pay as much as $9.6 billion – a lot of money! – to settle about 94,000 suits alleging that Roundup is associated with non-Hodgkins lymphoma. But the bigger news, at least for this case’s impact on mass tort litigation, may be in a novel proposal to address all future claims against Bayer. If the mechanism – a class action to determine threshold issues of causation while preserving plaintiffs’ individual rights to sue – ends up winning court approval, it’s going to change the way defendants buy global peace in these sprawling cases.

The Roundup future claims settlement is via a newly-filed prospective class action on behalf of everyone who was exposed to Roundup but has not hired a lawyer to bring a tort claim. (There are subclasses for people who already have cancer and those who don’t.) In a simultaneously-filed motion for preliminary approval of the settlement of the new class action, Bayer and plaintiffs lawyers from Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein, Audet & Partners and The Dugan Law Firm agreed to establish a panel of five scientific experts to decide the threshold questions of whether Roundup can cause cancer and, if so, at what levels of exposure. (For the true class action nerds: The settlement calls for the certification of an issues class to resolve the predominant common question of causation.)

The panel, which Reuters described Wednesday as “a calculated gamble” for Bayer, has at least four years to reach a determination, which is binding on all class members. After the panel’s decision, class members will be free to bring individual tort claims, with the caveat that those threshold causation and exposure questions have already been decided.

In the meantime, Bayer will put up $1.1 billion for diagnostic services for the class and for assistance to class members who develop cancer during the years before the scientific panel’s decision. The proposed settlement features an incredibly elaborate notice program to get the word out to prospective class members, taking into account that the class includes agricultural workers who may not speak English or have permanent residences. Class members have 150 days from the launch of the notice program to opt out of the class. As part of the settlement, future claimants will give up the right to seek punitive damages and medical monitoring fees in individual suits following the scientific panel’s causation decision.

The shame of our generation.

• New Assange Indictment Only Adds ‘Window Dressing’ to ‘Continue Smear Campaign’ (Sp.)

A US federal grand jury has unveiled a new superseding indictment against WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange. However, the filing brings no new charges. A journalist told Sputnik that what Assange does is no different from other reporters and the indictment is an attempt to sour Assange’s name in the media again. “It’s a continuation of the smear campaign against this man, to turn public opinion against him,” Joe Lauria, the editor in chief of Consortium News and author of the book “How I Lost, By Hillary Clinton,” told Radio Sputnik’s Loud and Clear Thursday. “It’s started to turn for him in certain instances recently, so the timing of this is interesting.” Lauria characterized the new accusations as “window dressing,” noting much of the document is simply a recapitulation of the previous charges against Assange.

According to the US Department of Justice’s Wednesday news release announcing the indictment, the new accusations “broaden the scope of the conspiracy surrounding alleged computer intrusions with which Assange was previously charged,” alleging he worked with hacker groups like Anonymous and LulzSec to gain access to classified files that WikiLeaks then published. “This is new: they write negatively about him helping [former NSA analyst-turned-whistleblower Edward] Snowden to get out of Hong Kong and that Assange had booked various other flights for Snowden to provide a diversion, so that he could get out on the one he did,” Lauria noted. “But there’s no charge of ‘aiding a fugitive to get away’ or anything like that, so that’s just thrown in there. We don’t know why.”

“The real essence is, as you say, the details to broaden this first indictment against him, which was for computer intrusion. And, essentially, it says that Assange directed hackers to get material. For example, one example is the recordings of high-level NATO officials, telephone calls that he wanted; also members of parliament of a NATO nation that is apparently Iceland.” Lauria said that to understand if this is a crime or not, he turns to investigative journalist Robert Parry, who founded Consortium News. Lauria noted a piece Parry wrote in 2010, anticipating Washington’s line of attack against Assange, in which he said that what Assange had done was no different than what he did as an investigative reporter, including encouraging sources to give information, and even to commit a small crime in order to prevent a larger one.

“This is key, because here we have in this expanded, superseding indictment, that Assange somehow committed a conspiracy with these hackers to get this information,” Lauria said. “Now, first of all, he’s not being accused of doing the hacking himself; he is accused of encouraging or directing – but not for money, by the way – these hackers to get documents and other materials that he wanted. So maybe two crimes are being committed there: one being the hack, and two, the unauthorized release of information. But Assange is not directly involved, so he’s doing what Bob Parry said he did as a reporter, and that was to get your source to commit a small crime [in order] to prevent a larger one. An example of that is Assange getting from [former US Army analyst Chelsea] Manning the ‘Collateral Murder’ video … the idea being to try to end the illegal war in Iraq,” Lauria told Sputnik.

But doctors are not lawyers.

• Doctors for Assange: UK Officials May be Legally Culpable for His Torture (CN)

Doctors have warned that UK officials could be held accountable for the torture of Julian Assange in an open letter published in The Lancet on International Day in Support of Victims of Torture. The 216 undersigned physicians and psychologists from 33 countries have accused UK and U.S. government officials of intensifying Julian Assange’s psychological torture in spite of the world’s leading authorities on human rights and international law calling for his immediate release from prison. Clinical Psychologist and Australian co-author of the publication, ‘The ongoing torture and medical neglect of Julian Assange’, Dr Lissa Johnson said the failure to properly treat Mr Assange may amount to an act of torture in which state officials, from parliament to court to prison, risk being judged complicit.

“Our letter is published just two days after the US Department of Justice announced a new superseding indictment against Assange representing yet another escalation in psychological torture tactics,” said Dr Johnson. “Introducing extra charges at this late stage, right before the defence evidence deadline and over a year after the indictment deadline, when documents given to the prison generally take two weeks to be passed on, when he has not been supplied with a computer and when he is unable to meet with lawyers under Coronavirus lockdown, serves to ramp up his helplessness jn the face of threat and is a key psychological torture tactic,” she said.

The doctors note that torture is prohibited under UK law, warning that UK officials could be judged “complicit”, including for their “silent acquiescence and consent”. They write that Assange at medical risk due to escalating abuses of his “fundamental human and legal rights at the hands of judicial, prison, and contracted security authorities”. The letter follows Julian Assange’s failure to attend four court hearings in a row on medical grounds. The authors charge UK and US authorities with “collective persecution and judicial harassment” in which “Mr Assange has been unable to engage in his own defence or even participate in his own hearings.”

A copy of the Lancet letter has been sent to the UK Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice, Robert Buckland. It coincides with two open letters to Buckland from 36 members of the European Parliament and 11 current and former politicians from 9 nations, calling for Julian Assange’s immediate release on bail in light of Covid-19, which places him “at grave medical risk” given his medical history, including persistent respiratory issues, the doctors warn. In a 60 Minutes Australia interview on Sunday night, Julian Assange’s fiancé, Stella Moris, stressed that Julian Assange is “very unwell”, expressing her fears that he may not survive.

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Debt Rattle March 14 2020

Mar 142020

March 14, 2020 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 10:42 am Finance Tagged with: Apple, Biden, Big Pharma, collapse, coronavirus, Covid19, curve, dead sea scrolls, delusion, EU, Pelosi, primaries, Trump, Tulsi Gabbard 32 Responses »

• “Flattening the Curve” Is A Deadly Delusion (Bach)

• Higher Temperatures Affect Survival Of New Coronavirus (Accu)

• South Korea’s Drive-Through Testing For Coronavirus Is Fast – And Free (NPR)

• Nancy Pelosi, Trump Administration Reach Deal On Coronavirus Aid Package (NYP)

• EU Ready To Trigger Crisis Clause Allowing Fiscal Stimulus (BBG)

• Big Pharma Prepares To Profit From The Coronavirus (IC)

• Apple To Close All Stores Outside Of China (BI)

• Bad Coronavirus News Starts To Hit US Auto Dealers (R.)

• Next Week’s Primaries To Proceed Despite Coronavirus, Louisiana Delay (R.)

• Major US Internet Firms Agree Not To Cancel Service Over Next 60 Days (R.)

• FBI’s Russia Collusion Case Fell Apart In January 2017

• ‘Dead Sea Scrolls’ At DC Museum Of The Bible Are All Forgeries (NatGeo)

• It Would Take 50 Million Years To Recover New Zealand’s Lost Bird Species (F.)

Yay! We’re setting records! Over 10,000 cases in one day, 2,547 of which in Italy, and 451 deaths, with 250 in Italy.

• Cases 146,327 (+ 10,518 from yesterday’s 135,809)

• Deaths 5,443 (+ 453 from yesterday’s 4,990)

Something went wrong with my usual snapshot from last night’s Worldometer numbers, so yesterday’s “gains” per country are lost. Apologies.

Trajectories are clear though. Spain is a country to watch, as are Denmark, Norway and Sweden. And Switzerland with 220 new cases today, and and and.

Other than that, economic policies are taking the spotlight, and especially the failures. The question arises: can the west do what it did in WWII, and confiscate production facilities?

Just as abhorrent to US “values”: Tulsi Gabbard and Bush economic adviser Greg Mankiw, separate from each other I think, want the US to give every citizen $1,000 a month to counter the corona fallout.

Can America as a nation unite, or is that ability forever lost? Because: if you give out that $1,000, will you allow your firms, say Big Pharma, to charge exorbitant prices for essentials?

In that same vein, Germany appears ready to abandon its long term fiscal prudence, and to drag Europe along for the ride.

I changed the order of the graphs around a bit, SCMP is getting further behind all the time.

From Worldometer (NOTE: mortality rate is back up to 7%!)

From COVID2019.app: (This site is playing with its formats while expanding, now over 200 global contributors)

From SCMP: (Note: the SCMP graph was useful when China was the focal point; they are falling behind now)

Joshua Bach is a scary dude.

• “Flattening the Curve” Is A Deadly Delusion (Bach)

You have all seen a version of this curve of COVID-19 case loads by now:

Or this one:

There are many more. What all these diagrams have in common: They have no numbers on the axes. They don’t give you an idea how many cases it takes to overwhelm the medical system, and over how many days the epidemic will play out. They suggest that currently, the medical system can deal with a large fraction (like maybe 2/3, 1/2 or 1/3) of the cases, but if we implement some mitigation measures, we can get the infections per day down to a level we can deal with. They mean to tell you that we can get away without severe lockdowns as we are currently observing them in China and Italy. Instead, we let the infection burn through the entire population, until we have herd immunity (at 40% to 70%), and just space out the infections over a longer timespan.

These suggestions are dangerously wrong, and if implemented, will lead to incredible suffering and hardship. Let’s try to understand this by putting some numbers on the axes. What is the capacity of the healthcare system? This is a difficult question and cannot be answered in a short post like this. The US has about 924,100 hospital beds (2.8 per 1000 people). California has only 1.8. Countries like Germany have 8. South Korea has 12. (Their hospital system got overloaded nonetheless.) Most of these beds are in use, but we can create more, using improvisation (for instance using hotels and school gyms) and strategic resources of the military, national guard and other organizations.

Based on Chinese data, we can estimate that about 20% of COVID-19 cases are severe and require hospitalization. However, many severe cases will survive if they can be adequately provided for at home (which may include oxygen, IVs and isolation). More important is the number of ICU beds, which by some estimates can be stretched to about a 100,000, and of which about 30,000 may be available. About 5% of all COVID-19 cases need intensive care, and without it, all of them will die. We can also increase the number of ICU beds somewhat, but the equipment that we need to deal with sepsis, kidney, liver and heart failure, severe pneumonia etc. cannot be stretched arbitrarily between them.

An important part of the equation are ventilators. Most of the critically ill COVID-19 cases die of an infection of the lungs that makes it impossible to breathe and even destroys so much tissue that the blood can no longer be sufficiently oxygenated. These patients need intubation and mechanical ventilation to give them a chance of survival, or even an ECMO machine, which oxygenates the blood directly. About 6% of all cases need a ventilator, and if hospitals put all existing ventilators to use, we have 160,000 of them. In addition, the CDC has a strategic stockpile of 8900 ventilators that can be deployed in hospitals that need them. If we take the number of ventilators as a proximate limit on the medical resources, it means we can take care of up to 170,000 critically ill patients at the same time.

How many people will get infected? Without containment, the virus becomes endemic, and leading epidemiologists like Marc Lipsitch (Harvard) and Christian Drosten (Charité Berlin) estimate that between 40% and 70% of the population get infected until we develop some degree of herd immunity. (Unfortunately, we do not know how long this immunity lasts. We already observe multiple strain of COVID-19, and will see many more, due to the large number of carriers.) In a population like the US (327 million), that means between 130 million and 230 million. Let’s assume that 55% of the US population (the middle ground) get infected between March and December, and we are looking at 180 million people.

Saw that picture with the narrow yellow band before. But of course they still don’t agree on anything.

• Higher Temperatures Affect Survival Of New Coronavirus (Accu)

Research from a laboratory-grown copy of the coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) that causes the COVID-19 illness shows that heat affects the virus and impacts its behavior, a top pathologist said new research has shown. But other infectious disease experts aren’t yet convinced. “In cold environments, there is longer virus survival than warm ones,” Hong Kong University pathology professor John Nicholls told AccuWeather exclusively. Nicholls and colleagues from a team at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China, previously produced a study, which was published in February and has yet to be peer-reviewed, noting the effect of heat. Their research is based on one of the world’s first lab-grown copies of SARS-CoV-2.

“Temperature could significantly change COVID-19 transmission,” the authors note in the study. They also pointed out that the “virus is highly sensitive to high temperature.” On March 11, the World Health Organization officially declared the coronavirus outbreak a global pandemic. This is the first pandemic in 11 years, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). One recent research paper supported this assertion by pointing out the proximity of the major hotspots. The authors of the study, which was published last week, wrote that COVID-19 “has established significant community spread in cities and regions only along a narrow east-west distribution roughly along the 30-50 North latitude corridor at consistently similar weather patterns (5-11 degrees C [41 to 51 F] and 47-79 percent humidity).”

“Notably, during the same time, COVID-19 failed to spread significantly to countries immediately south of China,” the paper notes. “The number of patients and reported deaths in Southeast Asia is much less when compared to more temperate regions noted … The association between temperature in the cities affected with COVID-19 deserves special attention.” Some have suggested the possibility that weather factors might affect the virus – particularly the intensity and amount of hours of sunshine as well as heat and humidity. “Obviously, the virus is something we’ve never dealt with before, but if we look at other viruses … they all had their peak during the cold season,” said AccuWeather Founder and CEO Dr. Joel N. Myers.

“The statistics all show that they breed and survive longer when it’s cold and dry,” Myers said. “So, when it’s warmer and more humid and there’s a lot of sunshine, the statistics on all of the others show a virus is less lethal, it spreads less efficiently and less effectively among humans.” Dr. Joseph Fair, a virologist, epidemiologist and infectious disease specialist, suggested sunshine is a critical factor in subduing the virus. “It really doesn’t have anything to do with the warmth, but it has to do with the length of the day and the exposure to sunlight, which inactivates the virus through UV light,” Fair [said]. “We expect a dip in infections as we would see with the cold and flu in the spring and summer months.

But, he cautioned, “The science is still out. We can assume this will follow typical other coronavirus cases. We can expect a dip in the summer. But that doesn’t mean that we will be out of the woods … Everyone in the scientific and public health community expects it to be back in the fall and we expect to be in this for quite some time.”

Transmission electron microscope image shows SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, isolated from a patient in the U.S. Virus particles are emerging from the surface of cells cultured in the lab. The spikes on the outer edge of the virus particles give coronaviruses their name, crown-like. (NIAID-RML)

What a nation is capable of when it starts working together.

• South Korea’s Drive-Through Testing For Coronavirus Is Fast – And Free (NPR)

If you roll up to a drive-through COVID-19 testing center in South Korea, you might notice that safety procedures extend all the way to your car’s air conditioning. You will be advised to hit the recirculation button so that if you’re sick, you can keep your pathogens to yourself, in your car, and avoid infecting the medical personnel doing the testing. The test takes 10 minutes at most. Results are texted to you, usually the next day. And it’s free — paid for by the government. Drive-through centers have helped South Korea do some of the fastest, most-extensive testing of any country. And while nobody is claiming that South Korea has defeated the outbreak, experts credit the emphasis on testing with reducing case numbers and fatalities.

“I think our approach was right,” says professor Lee Hyukmin of the Yonsei University College of Medicine in Seoul. “We will continue to see sporadic infections,” he predicts. “But still, the situation in Daegu,” the epicenter of the outbreak, “is being stabilized.” South Korea has about 8,000 infections. Italy and Iran overtook it this week as the countries with the most cases outside of China. South Korea’s new cases have gradually declined since the end of last month. For the first time since Jan. 20, the number of patients released from treatment on Friday, March 13 — 510 — outnumbered the 110 new cases. A nation of 51 million, South Korea has tested about 250,000 people since its outbreak began on Jan. 20, with a daily capacity of 15,000. It has conducted 3,600 tests per million people compared to five per million in the U.S.

South Korea’s aggressive testing may make it unnecessary to impose the sort of lockdowns to which China and Italy have resorted, although health officials insist that all options remain on the table in dealing with the epidemic. “It’s much better to test and then quarantine a specific person than to do a citywide or provincewide lockdown, which in certain ways prevents the virus from leaving the province but actually doesn’t make the province any less likely to have high infection rates,” says Eric Feigl-Ding, a senior fellow at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington, D.C., and an epidemiologist at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health.

Just like Tulsi: “Greg Mankiw, a former top economic adviser to President George W. Bush, advocated sending $1,000 checks to everyone as soon as possible.”

• Nancy Pelosi, Trump Administration Reach Deal On Coronavirus Aid Package (NYP)

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Trump administration reached a last-minute deal Friday on a sweeping coronavirus aid package that will provide free testing for all Americans. The “Families First Coronavirus Response Act” will guarantee free tests for all Americans, including the uninsured, and provide two weeks of paid sick leave for those affected by the health crisis, Pelosi said. It will also provide up to three months of paid family and medical leave and strengthened unemployment Insurance for those facing layoffs amid the health and economic crisis. The aid package will also strengthen food banks, seniors’ meals and the food stamps program, known as SNAP.

Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin had been locked in feverish negotiations as the crisis rapidly escalated — speaking up to seven times a day — and by Friday morning, senior Democrats were confident the package would pass the House by the end of the day. But the deal appeared to hit a snag when Trump on Friday declared a State of Emergency at the White House Rose Garden and announced he didn’t support the aid package. “We don’t think the Democrats are giving enough,” Trump told reporters. “We are negotiating. We thought we had something, but all of a sudden they didn’t agree to certain things that they agreed to,” he added, without specifying the sticking point.

The president has repeatedly demanded a payroll tax cut be included in the bill, something that has been met with tepid support from within his own administration. “We could have something but we don’t think they are giving enough. They are not doing what is right for the country,” he concluded. Pelosi was bullish about passing the bill on Friday, even though it now languishes until Monday when the Senate returns from a break, calling the health outbreak a “grave and accelerating challenge.” The new bill comes after Trump last week signed into law a separate $8.3 billion in emergency aid for states and local authorities to combat the spread of the virus.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1238516118391791617

Jim Bianco on Twitter:

“German Gov’t will offer unlimited loans to all companies that want them. Will buy stakes in German Governments. Guaranteed every job in Germany. Said “no on will lose their job over a virus.” They are essentially asking all EU countries to do the same as Germany. Couple this with the Fed trillions, the ECB yesterday , the BOE wed and the BoJ overnight … Everyone is “all-in” to stop the decline. If this does not work, closing mkts might be all that is left.”

• EU Ready To Trigger Crisis Clause Allowing Fiscal Stimulus (BBG)

Denmark, Poland and Cyprus tightened their borders to limit the spread of the coronavirus even as European leaders called for more concerted action to contain the economic fallout. Germany, which borders two of those countries, pledged to spend whatever was necessary to protect its economy and the European Commission said it’s ready to green-light widespread spending after a market meltdown and a forecast that the euro zone was headed for recession. With Group of Seven policy makers struggling to forge a united front, the response from national capitals reflects the urgency to avoid the lockdown that hit Italy amid an epidemic that seemed to be spiraling out of control.

In Denmark, only Danes, Danish residents and green card holders will be let in. For everyone else, the country’s borders will be closed until April 14 and people arriving in Denmark will be sent back. “We’re painfully aware that this will have severe consequences,” Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said in Copenhagen on Friday, as she announced borders would close. “We can see how the situation in Italy developed in a catastrophic direction,” she said. “Everything we’re doing is to ensure that we get through this situation in a different way.” Likewise, Cyprus is closing its borders for 15 days to foreigners who don’t live or work on the Mediterranean island, President Nicos Anastasiades said in a televised address.

[..] The ability to travel without border checks has been a fact of life for more than two decades in most of Europe, with passport-free movement arguably the most successful feature of daily life for more than 400 million people in the EU. Officials in Brussels are accepting the new – if temporary – restrictions through gritted teeth. “General travel bans are not seen as being the most effective by the World Health Organization,” said Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, the bloc’s executive arm. “Moreover, they have a strong social and economic impact. They disrupt people’s lives and business across the borders.”

Just hours earlier, German officials announced KfW, the state bank, can lend as much as €550 billion to companies to ensure they survive the pandemic and shield their workers from its impact. Switzerland pledged 10 billion francs ($10.5 billion) of aid for its companies. European stocks surged. “This is the bazooka,” Finance Minister Olaf Scholz. “We’re using it to do what is necessary. We’ll check later to see if we need additional smaller weapons.”

Suspect that unlike in WWII, US industry would be allowed to turn huge profits.

• Big Pharma Prepares To Profit From The Coronavirus (IC)

As the new coronavirus spreads illness, death, and catastrophe around the world, virtually no economic sector has been spared from harm. Yet amid the mayhem from the global pandemic, one industry is not only surviving, it is profiting handsomely. “Pharmaceutical companies view Covid-19 as a once-in-a-lifetime business opportunity,” said Gerald Posner, author of “Pharma: Greed, Lies, and the Poisoning of America.” The world needs pharmaceutical products, of course. For the new coronavirus outbreak, in particular, we need treatments and vaccines and, in the U.S., tests. Dozens of companies are now vying to make them.

“They’re all in that race,” said Posner, who described the potential payoffs for winning the race as huge. The global crisis “will potentially be a blockbuster for the industry in terms of sales and profits,” he said, adding that “the worse the pandemic gets, the higher their eventual profit.” The ability to make money off of pharmaceuticals is already uniquely large in the U.S., which lacks the basic price controls other countries have, giving drug companies more freedom over setting prices for their products than anywhere else in the world. During the current crisis, pharmaceutical makers may have even more leeway than usual because of language industry lobbyists inserted into an $8.3 billion coronavirus spending package, passed last week, to maximize their profits from the pandemic.

[..] According to calculations by Axios, drug companies make 63 percent of total health care profits in the U.S. That’s in part because of the success of their lobbying efforts. In 2019, the pharmaceutical industry spent $295 million on lobbying, far more than any other sector in the U.S. That’s almost twice as much as the next biggest spender — the electronics, manufacturing, and equipment sector — and well more than double what oil and gas companies spent on lobbying. The industry also spends lavishly on campaign contributions to both Democratic and Republican lawmakers. Throughout the Democratic primary, Joe Biden has led the pack among recipients of contributions from the health care and pharmaceutical industries.

Big Pharma’s spending has positioned the industry well for the current pandemic. While stock markets have plummeted in reaction to the Trump administration’s bungling of the crisis, more than 20 companies working on a vaccine and other products related to the new SARS-CoV-2 virus have largely been spared. Stock prices for the biotech company Moderna, which began recruiting participants for a clinical trial of its new candidate for a coronavirus vaccine two weeks ago, have shot up during that time. On Thursday, a day of general carnage in the stock markets, Eli Lilly’s stock also enjoyed a boost after the company announced that it, too, is joining the effort to come up with a therapy for the new coronavirus. And Gilead Sciences, which is at work on a potential treatment as well, is also thriving.

1 day (or is it 2?) after re-opening all Chinese stores.

• Apple To Close All Stores Outside Of China (BI)

Apple will be temporarily shuttering all stores outside China until March 27, in response to mounting concern over the novel coronavirus, Apple CEO Tim Cook announced on Saturday. Cook also said in a tweet that the company will be committing $15 million to recovery efforts and matching employee donations two-to-one as the coronavirus, which causes the disease known as COVID-19, continues to grip the US. “What we’ve learned together has helped us all develop the best practices that are assisting enormously in our global response,” Cook wrote in a press release. “One of those lessons is that the most effective way to minimize risk of the virus’s transmission is to reduce density and maximize social distance.” “As rates of new infections continue to grow in other places, we’re taking additional steps to protect our team members and customers.” The retailer will continue to fulfill purchases made online or through the Apple phone apps.

Can you self-isolate in a car?

• Bad Coronavirus News Starts To Hit US Auto Dealers (R.)

A relentless barrage of bad news surrounding the coronavirus epidemic has begun to affect customer visits at some U.S. auto dealers and even those businesses that have thrived so far believe a big sales decline is imminent if China’s experience is any guide. Since the coronavirus outbreak began in China last year it has killed more than 5,000 people globally, including 41 so far in the United States, where President Donald Trump on Friday declared a national emergency. The outbreak has caused automakers to shutter plants in Asia and Europe, and the mounting responses in the United States – school closures, pro sports leagues suspending play and other big events canceled – are now being felt by some U.S. dealers. For a sign of what may be in store, analysts said look no further than China, where auto sales plunged 79% last month.

“Sales are definitely falling,” said John Luciano, managing partner with Street Volkswagen in Amarillo, Texas, and chairman of Volkswagen’s national dealer council. “We’re waking up in a different world a little bit more every day.” At Russ Shelton’s Buick GMC dealership in Rochester Hills, Michigan, so far this month customer visits are down 30% while the service department has seen a 40% drop in business due to the outbreak. “When schools close, mothers get worried – and this stops economic activity,” industry consultant and former GM executive Warren Browne said. Cox Automotive now sees negative U.S. economic growth in the second quarter and has withdrawn its forecast for 16.6 million new-vehicle sales in the United States this year.

“We’re definitely voting. They voted during the Civil War. We’re gonna vote..”

• Next Week’s Primaries To Proceed Despite Coronavirus, Louisiana Delay (R.)

Louisiana on Friday became the first U.S. state to postpone its presidential nominating contest because of the coronavirus pandemic, while four states holding their primaries next week said those elections would go forward as planned. The Southern state said it would reschedule voting in the run-up to the Nov. 3 election because of the outbreak. Officials there said they would postpone their scheduled April 4 primary to June 20 “to best protect the health and safety of Louisiana voters and voting officials,” Louisiana Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin said at a news conference. The four states holding their primaries on Tuesday – Arizona, Florida, Illinois and Ohio – said in a joint statement they would proceed with their contests while taking steps to ensure public safety.

“Americans have participated in elections during challenging times in the past, and, based on the best information we have from public health officials, we are confident that voters in our states can safely and securely cast their ballots in this election, and that otherwise healthy poll workers can and should carry out their patriotic duties on Tuesday,” election officials from the four states said. “We’re definitely voting. They voted during the Civil War. We’re gonna vote,” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis told reporters on Friday. Louisiana’s move poses a problem for the Democratic Party, which mandates all nominating contests must be held by early June or states risk losing delegates to the party convention in July.

[..] Biden’s attempt to connect with voters via a virtual town hall on Friday was plagued by early technical glitches that delayed its start and made most of his early remarks impossible to understand. The event provided the first glimpse into the challenges of running a virtual campaign. He used his opening remarks to discuss his plan for tackling the coronavirus crisis and pleading for citizens to listen to public health officials and wash their hands. He then turned to virtual attendees for questions and comments. The first person said, “Mr. Biden’s speech was garbled the entire time.”

People what the hell is happening.
pic.twitter.com/cdktiytvXX

— Imraan Siddiqi (@imraansiddiqi) March 14, 2020

Let Washington handle it, make it free.

• Major US Internet Firms Agree Not To Cancel Service Over Next 60 Days (R.)

The Federal Communications Commission said Friday that major internet providers – including Comcast Corp, AT&T Inc and Verizon Communications Inc – agreed not to terminate service for subscribers for the next 60 days if they are unable to pay their bills due to disruptions caused by the coronavirus. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said after calls with more than 50 companies that they also agreed to waive any late fees residential or small business customers incur because of their economic circumstances related to the coronavirus pandemic. They also agreed to open Wi-Fi hotspots to anyone who needs them, the FCC said.

Millions more Americans are expected to work from home as employers and states urge people to telework to reduce the potential to spread the coronavirus outbreak. Others agreeing to take part are Alphabet Inc’s Google Fiber, Charter Communications Inc, CenturyLink Inc, Cox Communications, Sprint Corp, T-Mobile US Inc. “As the coronavirus outbreak spreads and causes a series of disruptions to the economic, educational, medical and civic life of our country, it is imperative that Americans stay connected,” Pai said in a statement. “Broadband will enable them to communicate with their loved ones and doctors, telework, ensure their children can engage in remote learning.”

FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, a Democrat, praised the companies adopting the pledge, but said the FCC should do more. She called on the commission to “provide hotspots for loan for students whose school doors have closed” and should “work with health care providers to ensure connectivity for telehealth services are available for hospitals, doctors, and nurses treating coronavirus patients and those who are quarantined.” Pai also said he had asked providers that offer low-income consumers lower-speed cheaper service to increase speeds and expand eligibility. Comcast said Thursday it was raising its speeds for all its low-income users, while AT&T said it was waiving data caps for consumers that have plans with usage caps.

John Solomon promises more. Will there be elections, though?

• FBI’s Russia Collusion Case Fell Apart In January 2017 (Solomon)

Flynn’s motion is confirmed by a 2018 letter obtained by Just the News between Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office and defense lawyers. It shows the DOJ exoneration memo was written after Flynn had been interviewed by FBI agents in January 2017 and after the government learned the former Defense Intelligence Agency chief had kept his old agency briefed on his contacts with Russia, something that weighed heavily against the notion he was aiding Moscow.

“According to an internal DOJ memo dated January 30, 2017, after the Jan. 24 interview, the FBI advised that based on the interview the FBI did not believe Flynn was acting as an agent of Russia,” Mueller’s team wrote in the letter. U.S. District Judge Emmett Sullivan so far has concluded that the exoneration of Flynn on the Russia collusion charge wasn’t relevant to his conviction since he pled guilty to a different crime, making a false statement to the FBI. But for the American public, such a revelation is momentous. Less than two weeks into Trump’s presidency the FBI had concluded his national security adviser had not been working as an agent of Russia.

While that was the view of federal law enforcement, the false storyline of Flynn as a Russian stooge was broadcasted across the nation, with leaks of his conversations with a Russian ambassador and other tales, for many more months. In an interview with Just the News and its John Solomon Reports podcast, Powell confirmed she was provided by letter three sentences from the DOJ memo but has been unable to get the full document. “It’s just horrible,” Powell said. “They gave us a little three lines summary of it and the letter and told us it existed but have refused to give us the actual document, which I know means there’s a lot of other information in it that would be helpful to us.” Powell also confirmed that Mueller was fully aware of a letter sent in early January 2017 to Flynn from Britain’s national security adviser raising concerns about Steele’s credibility.

The British government “hand-delivered” a letter to Flynn’s team that “totally disavowed any credibility of Christopher Steele, and would have completely destroyed the Russia collusion narrative,” Powell said. Flynn himself has no memory of receiving the communique, but people around him at the time do and confirmed the existence of the document, Powell explained. Flynn was questioned about it during his debriefings by Mueller’s team, she added. “I was told that a copy of the document would have been given to [then-National Security Adviser] Susan Rice as well,” she added. “So the Obama administration knew full well that the entire Russia collusion mess was a farce.”

Evangelical humor.

• ‘Dead Sea Scrolls’ At DC Museum Of The Bible Are All Forgeries (NatGeo)

On the fourth floor of the Museum of the Bible, a sweeping permanent exhibit tells the story of how the ancient scripture became the world’s most popular book. A warmly lit sanctum at the exhibit’s heart reveals some of the museum’s most prized possessions: fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls, ancient texts that include the oldest known surviving copies of the Hebrew Bible. But now, the Washington, D.C. museum has confirmed a bitter truth about the fragments’ authenticity. On Friday, independent researchers funded by the Museum of the Bible announced that all 16 of the museum’s Dead Sea Scroll fragments are modern forgeries that duped outside collectors, the museum’s founder, and some of the world’s leading biblical scholars. Officials unveiled the findings at an academic conference hosted by the museum. “The Museum of the Bible is trying to be as transparent as possible,” says CEO Harry Hargrave.

“We’re victims—we’re victims of misrepresentation, we’re victims of fraud.” In a report spanning more than 200 pages, a team of researchers led by art fraud investigator Colette Loll found that while the pieces are probably made of ancient leather, they were inked in modern times and modified to resemble real Dead Sea Scrolls. “These fragments were manipulated with the intent to deceive,” Loll says. The new findings don’t cast doubt on the 100,000 real Dead Sea Scroll fragments, most of which lie in the Shrine of the Book, part of the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. However, the report’s findings raise grave questions about the “post-2002” Dead Sea Scroll fragments, a group of some 70 snippets of biblical text that entered the antiquities market in the 2000s. Even before the new report, some scholars believed that most to all of the post-2002 fragments were modern fakes.

How long does it take to kill 50 million years?

• It Would Take 50 Million Years To Recover New Zealand’s Lost Bird Species (F.)

Long before people arrived in New Zealand, it was dominated by multitudes of unique birds. They were absolutely everywhere: big birds, little birds, colorful birds, flightless birds. In the absence of reptilian and mammalian predators, birds evolved to fill every available niche, from giant moas that stood 11 feet tall and weighed as much as 230 kilograms (510 pounds) that were the ecological equivalent of deer and antelopes, to the largest eagle that ever lived, which was New Zealand’s apex predator, functioning similarly to lions and tigers and other big cats. But after humans arrived 700 years ago, it took us only a few hundred years to drive more than half of New Zealand’s bird species into extinction, and more than 30% of the birds that survived our original onslaughts are threatened with extinction today. Nearly two-thirds could be under threat in the future.

Considering these dire circumstances, an international team of scientists wondered how long it might take for New Zealand to recover its full diversity of bird species lost to human actions. According to their recently published study, the researchers estimated this process would take approximately 50 million years (50Ma). Further, they found that, if bird species that are currently threatened are allowed to go extinct, it would take an additional 10Ma for New Zealand to achieve today’s (severely compromised) level of species diversity. “The conservation decisions we make today will have repercussions for millions of years to come”, said the lead author of the study, Luis Valente, a Research Associate at the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin.

“Some people believe that if you leave nature alone it will quickly recuperate, but the reality is that, at least in New Zealand, nature would need several million years to recover from human actions — and perhaps will never really recover.” New Zealand is home to a collection of odd birds, including the wrybill, a small shorebird whose bill curves sideways; the iconic kiwis, whose feathers resemble fur and which are the only bird species in the world to have nostrils at the tip of their beak; the flightless kakapo, which resembles a large moss-colored owl and is the heaviest parrot alive today; and of course, the kea, which is the world’s only alpine parrot and who is pushing the boundaries of our understanding of how astonishingly clever parrots can be. Despite this modern surfeit of avian biodiversity, it is just a mere whisper of what once lived on New Zealand, which was the result of many millions of years of evolutionary history.

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Debt Rattle March 13 2020

Mar 132020

March 13, 2020 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 10:45 am Finance Tagged with: airborne, angry old men, Apple, Chelsea Manning, collapse, coronavirus, Covid19, failure, Fed, Iran, Monsanto, Ohio, plastics, UK 59 Responses »

Earl Theisen Walt Disney oiling scale model locomotive at home in LA 1951

• Coronavirus Can Survive in the Air For Up To 3 Hours (GR)

• Clinical Course, Risk Factors For Mortality Of Adults In Wuhan (Lancet)

• Coronavirus May End By June If Countries Take Action – China Adviser (RT)

• Policymakers Ramp Up Support As Coronavirus Shreds Markets (R.)

• Ohio Health Official Estimates 100,000 People In State Have Coronavirus (Hill)

• Many More Families Are Going To Lose Loved Ones Before Their Time (Ind.)

• I’d Rather Be in Italy Than US for the Coronavirus Pandemic (IC)

• Fed Rolls Out Fastest Money Printer Ever, up to $4.5 Trillion in 4 Weeks (WS)

• Fed To Pump In More Than $1 Trillion Into Markets In Dramatic Move (CNBC)

• Market Turmoil Sparked By Coronavirus Fears Worse Than 2008 – Bianco (CNBC)

• Apple Reopens All Its Branded Stores In China (R.)

• US Excludes Some Chinese Medical Products From Tariffs (R.)

• Iran Asks IMF For $5 Billion Emergency Funding To Fight Coronavirus (R.)

• Greening Our Way to Infection (CJ)

• Two Angry Old Men Yelling at Each Other in Arizona (FPM)

• Monsanto’s Secret Funding For Weedkiller Studies (G.)

• Migrants On Greek Islands To Be Offered €2,000 To Go Home (G.)

• Judge Orders Immediate Release Of Chelsea Manning (Ind.)

Over 9,000 new cases in a single day. It’s been a while, if it ever happened. New deaths are also crawling up. And in most places, we’re just getting started. Things like travel, public gatherings will soon be halted all over. There is no other choice. This virus can survive airborne for 3 hours, and patients can remain contagious for up to 37 days.

Get some extra vit.C, vit.D3 while you can, boost your health, wash more often. And prepare to hunker down for as much as 2 months. It’ll be a different world for a while. Get used to that while you can, while it’s voluntary.

And as you’re settling in, also prepare for a godalmighty financial crash. The Fed yesterday paid a nice round trillion for a 10% fall in stocks. Well, at least Chelsea Manning is free, albeit still in hospital.

• Cases 135,809 (+ 9,165 from yesterday’s 126,644)

• Deaths 4,990 (+ 351 from yesterday’s 4,639)

Apart from China, there are just 2 other countries left in this list that have less than 100 new cases.

From Worldometer yesterday evening (before their day’s close)

From SCMP: (Note: the SCMP graph was useful when China was the focal point; they are falling behind now)

From Worldometer (NOTE: mortality rate is back up to 7%!)

From COVID2019.app: (This site is playing with its formats while expanding, now over 200 global contributors)

“We found that viable virus could be detected in aerosols up to 3 hours post aerosolization, up to 4 hours on copper, up to 24 hours on cardboard and up to 2-3 days on plastic and stainless steel. HCoV-19 and SARS-CoV-1 exhibited similar half-lives in aerosols, with median estimates around 2.7 hours. ”

• Coronavirus Can Survive in the Air For Up To 3 Hours (GR)

Scientists at Princeton University, the University of California-Los Angeles and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have released a study on Wednesday according to which the novel form of coronavirus can survive in the air for several hours. Federally funded tests conducted by the scientists indicated that the COVID-19 virus could remain viable in the air “up to 3 hours post aerosolization,” while remaining alive on plastic and other surfaces for up to three days. “Our results indicate that aerosol and fomite transmission of HCoV-19 is plausible, as the virus can remain viable in aerosols for 42 multiple hours and on surfaces up to days,” reads the study’s abstract.

The test results suggest that humans could be infected by the disease simply carried through the air or on a solid surface, even if direct contact with an infected person does not occur. That finding, if accepted, would come in stark contrast to previous media reports that suggested the virus was not easily transmittable outside of direct human contact.

I couldn’t find the 37-day figure this Twitter comment mentions, in the report (didn’t copy the writer). That doesn’t mean it’s wrong.

Study in the Lancet finds that #COVID19 viral shedding can be UP TO 37 DAYS, with an average of 20 DAYS. *Patients may still be contagious during that time* VERY BIG DEAL because current guidelines recommend only a 14 day (2 week) isolation time. This means patients may remain contagious well after they’re no longer symptomatic. And it means current guidelines (14 day isolation) may lead to additional propagation post quarantine.

Check the graph for hospital beds per 1,000 people in your country.

• Clinical Course, Risk Factors For Mortality Of Adults In Wuhan (Lancet)

The level and duration of infectious virus replication are important factors in assessing the risk of transmission and guiding decisions regarding isolation of patients. Because coronavirus RNA detection is more sensitive than virus isolation, most studies have used qualitative or quantitative viral RNA tests as a potential marker for infectious coronavirus. For SARS-CoV, viral RNA was detected in respiratory specimens from about a third of patients as long as 4 weeks after disease onset. Similarly, the duration of MERS-CoV RNA detection in lower respiratory specimans persisted for at least 3 weeks, whereas the duration of SARS-CoV-2 RNA detection has not been well characterised.

In the current study, we found that the detectable SARS-CoV-2 RNA persisted for a median of 20 days in survivors and that it was sustained until death in non-survivors. This has important implications for both patient isolation decision making and guidance around the length of antiviral treatment. In severe influenza virus infection, prolonged viral shedding was associated with fatal outcome and delayed antiviral treatment was an independent risk factor for prolonged virus detection. Similarly, effective antiviral treatment might improve outcomes in COVID-19, although we did not observe shortening of viral shedding duration after lopinavir/ritonavir treatment in the current study.

Click for larger version in new tab

When Zhong Nanshan said in late January that the China epidemic would be over in max 10 days, I said he sounded like a Beijing propagandist. He’s still at it.

• Coronavirus May End By June If Countries Take Action – China Adviser (RT)

The deadly outbreak may be over by the start of summer, provided that all countries mobilize themselves against the pandemic, said Chinese government adviser in charge of tackling the coronavirus. Zhong Nanshan, Chinese coronavirus adviser and the epidemiologist who discovered Severe Acute respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in 2003, made the prediction while speaking to journalists on Thursday. He noted, however, that the breakthrough is heavily dependent on how World Health Organization’s (WHO) members are dealing with the crisis. Some countries still don’t take the situation very seriously and fail to aggressively contain the Covid-19, Zhong said. In this case, the epidemic might be prolonged even despite the summer heat that makes viral stains relatively inactive, the doctor warned.

His remarks come shortly after China’s National Health Commission (NHC) reported a decline in new Covid-19 cases across the mainland. “Broadly speaking, the peak of the epidemic has passed for China,” said Mi Feng, a spokesman for the National Health Commission. “The increase of new cases is falling.” As of Wednesday, the NHC recorded 15 new cases, about half as many as Tuesday’s figure. China has been leading a swift response to the disease, locking down whole provinces, canceling public events and even postponing key sessions of parliament. To contain Covid-19, Beijing dispatched around 42,000 medics who flocked to Hubei province – the epicenter of the epidemic – from all across the country. Academics, leading infectionists, and intensive-care specialists were all called in.

“According to a survey of epidemiologists the coronavirus outbreak probably won’t peak before May, meaning it will be getting worse and worse and worse over the next two months, and for much of that time, presumably, exponentially worse.”

• Policymakers Ramp Up Support As Coronavirus Shreds Markets (R.)

Governments and central banks readied more emergency measures to tackle the economic impacts of the coronavirus on Friday as Asian markets suffered their worst weekly crashes since the 2008 financial crisis. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s wife Sophie was among several thousand people newly diagnosed with the COVID-19 respiratory disease that has now infected almost 135,000 and killed more than 4,900 worldwide. Experts warn that due to a lack of testing and unreported cases, many more people may be affected by the outbreak that emerged in the Chinese city of Wuhan late last year. Major sporting events were canceled or postponed, large public gatherings restricted or banned and schools closed. “There is a sense of fear and panic,” said James Tao, an analyst at stockbroker Commsec in Sydney, where phones at the high-value client desk rang non-stop.

“It’s one of those situations where there is so much uncertainty that no-one quite knows how to respond … if it’s fight or flight, many people are choosing flight at the moment.” Japan’s Nikkei was in freefall, dropping 10% on Friday, after Wall Street stocks slumped around 10% in their worst day since the 1987 “Black Monday” crash. Travelers in Europe rushed to board flights to the United States after U.S. President Donald Trump imposed sweeping restrictions on travel from the continent, a decision that angered European leaders and frightened investors. Trump also suggested that the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo could be delayed by a year. “Maybe they postpone it for a year … if that’s possible,” Trump told reporters. “I like that better than I like having empty stadiums all over the place.”

Simple math: “..at the very least, 1 percent of our population is carrying this virus in Ohio today,” Acton said. “We have 11.7 million people. So the math is over 100,000.”

• Ohio Health Official Estimates 100,000 People In State Have Coronavirus (Hill)

A top health official in Ohio estimated on Thursday that more than 100,000 people in the state have coronavirus, a shockingly high number that underscores the limited testing so far. Ohio Department of Health Director Amy Acton said at a press conference alongside Gov. Mike DeWine (R) that given that the virus is spreading in the community in Ohio, she estimates at least 1 percent of the population in the state has the virus. “We know now, just the fact of community spread, says that at least 1 percent, at the very least, 1 percent of our population is carrying this virus in Ohio today,” Acton said. “We have 11.7 million people. So the math is over 100,000. So that just gives you a sense of how this virus spreads and is spreading quickly.”

She added that the slow rollout of testing means the state does not have good verified numbers to know for sure. “Our delay in being able to test has delayed our understanding of the spread of this,” Acton said. The Trump administration has come under intense criticism for the slow rollout of tests. Dr. Anthony Fauci, a top National Institutes of Health official, acknowledged earlier Thursday it is “a failing” that people cannot easily get tested for coronavirus in the United States. Not everyone with the virus has symptoms, and about 80 percent of people with the virus do not end up needing hospitalization, experts say.

During a House committee hearing, Representative Katie Porter does the math on #coronavirus testing, which added up to $1,331, and got CDC Director Robert Redfield to commit to using his authority under federal regulations to waive the cost of testing for all Americans pic.twitter.com/P2R8PjjJMB

— Reuters (@Reuters) March 13, 2020

Boris Johnson doesn’t understand the simple math that Ohio Department of Health Director Amy Acton, above, does. But he still gets vilified for saying that not 500,000 (at the very least!), but just 10,000 are infected.

Maybe it just takes time to sink in?!

Boris also gets vilified for not closing schools, just like Dutch PM Rutte. Which is indeed a little odd: you ban gatherings of more than 100-200 people, but 1500-2000-pupil schools remain open. On the other hand, where would all those children go?

Here’s a thought: Will their phone addictions now save their lives? Kids these days are perfect isolationists. All they need is a screen.

• Many More Families Are Going To Lose Loved Ones Before Their Time (Ind.)

Up to 10,000 people in the UK probably have coronavirus, officials have said, as they announced they were stepping up Britain’s response to the outbreak with new actions designed to delay its spread. Anyone showing cold or flu-like symptoms is being told to isolate themselves for seven days from Friday onwards – a measure brought forward by at least a week. They should then stay at least two metres, or “about three steps”, away from anyone else, sleep alone and ask for help “to get the things you need”. “Stay away from vulnerable individuals such as the elderly and those with underlying health conditions as much as possible,” the new advice reads.

Schools have been ordered to cancel all foreign trips, and elderly people or those with underlying health conditions are advised not to go on cruise ships. However, ministers have stepped back from immediate closures and sporting events will still go ahead, with fans allowed into stadiums. Patrick Vallance, the government’s chief scientific adviser, said the true number of infections was “likely” to be between 5,000 and 10,000 – many times higher than the current figure of 590. “We are in a period when we have got some, but it hasn’t yet taken off,” he told a press conference. The warning came as Boris Johnson sought to prepare the public for tougher times to come, saying: “This is the worst public health crisis for a generation.”

He dismissed comparisons to seasonal flu: “Because of the lack of immunity, this disease is more dangerous and it’s going to spread further. “Many more families are going to lose loved ones before their time.” Explaining the decision not to move to more draconian restrictions now, unlike almost all neighbouring countries, Mr Johnson said: “The most dangerous period is not now but some weeks away, depending on how fast it spreads. He hinted at a likely shift to banning fans from sporting events, saying: “We are not saying ‘No’ to that sort of measure, of course not – we are keeping it up our sleeve.”

https://twitter.com/EdConwaySky/status/1238177127951982594

“I just can’t shake the terror that the United States, my adopted country, is fundamentally unequipped to handle what lies ahead.”

• I’d Rather Be in Italy Than US for the Coronavirus Pandemic (IC)

I have spent the last week looking for flights from New York to Italy — not because of coronavirus-inspired flash sales, but because I would rather go home to a country that’s currently in the grip of one of the worst outbreaks in the world than stay in the United States, where life is about to get infinitely worse. More than 15,000 people have tested positive for the new coronavirus in Italy, more than 1,000 have died, and hospitals are at a breaking point. Hundreds of medical staff have been infected, and overwhelmed doctors are reporting having to choose which patients to treat. They are begging the rest of the world to take this virus more seriously. The entire country — 60.5 million people — has been on lockdown for almost a week.

In the U.S., meanwhile, where some are just starting to realize the enormity of the crisis and far too many remain in denial, confusion reigns, largely aided by our top officials’ inept response. Last night, after President Donald Trump abruptly announced he was blocking travel from Europe to the U.S. — though officials later retracted and clarified much of that statement — people in Europe raced to airports, reportedly paying as much as $20,000 to try to catch flights out. And still I am trying to figure out how to make the opposite trip. Even as the death toll back home continues to climb and the lockdown gets stricter by the day, I would much rather weather this pandemic in Italy than here. I just can’t shake the terror that the United States, my adopted country, is fundamentally unequipped to handle what lies ahead.

[..] It is a tragic irony that a public health emergency unlike anything we have seen in generations would come as Americans are constantly told that the idea of health care as a fundamental right is entitled, radical, crazy talk. What is crazy, to anyone outside the United States, is that it’s even a question. Back in Italy, people are worried they’ll get themselves or their loved ones sick, they are angry at directives that came late, they are even scared that hospitals won’t be able to keep up. But there are more hospital beds and doctors per capita in Italy than there are in the U.S. The Italian government’s harsh restrictions are in part an effort to stop the virus from spreading to the south, where the health care system is weaker. But for all their fears, Italians don’t have to worry that tests won’t be available, or that they’ll have to pay for those tests, or for any of their care. They don’t have to fear that if they seek help now, they’ll get a surprise bill later or that medical costs will bankrupt them.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1237944481153814529

Could we fix health care with that? How much is that per American?

• Fed Rolls Out Fastest Money Printer Ever, up to $4.5 Trillion in 4 Weeks (WS)

Thursday early afternoon, during the chaos when the S&P 500 was down nearly 9%, what would turn into the worst single-day stock market sell-off since the 1987 crash, the Fed rolled out its fastest mega money-printer yet, after its smaller money-printers malfunctioned. It’s not going to be a long-drawn-out QE – though there is a component that is just that – but it’s going to be trillions of dollars, essentially all at once, front-loaded, starting today, though today fizzled already. This is the Fed’s latest effort to bail out Wall Street, the cherished asset holders that are so essential to the Fed’s “wealth effect,” all repo market participants, the banks, and the Treasury market that suddenly has gone haywire. Lots of things have gone haywire as the Everything Bubble unwinds messily.

Last week, the 10-year Treasury yield had plunged toward zero during the stock market sell-off, which was crazy but in line with the logic that investors were all piling into safe assets, and early Monday morning it fell to an unthinkable all-time low of 0.38%. But then, the 10-year yield more than doubled from 0.38% at the low on Monday to 0.88% at the highpoint on Thursday. That the 10-year yield spikes during a stock market crash is somewhat of a scary thought. It means that both stocks and long-dated Treasury securities are selling off at the same time. And that probably made the Fed very nervous. For stocks, Thursday was the 16th trading day since the S&P 500 peak, and in those 15 trading days, the index has crashed nearly 27%.

Inject a trillion, see markets lose 10%. Never a better moment to end the Fed.

• Fed To Pump In More Than $1 Trillion Into Markets In Dramatic Move (CNBC)

The Federal Reserve stepped into financial markets Thursday for the second day in a row and the third time this week, this time dramatically ramping up asset purchases amid the turmoil created by the coronavirus. “These changes are being made to address highly unusual disruptions in Treasury financing markets associated with the coronavirus outbreak,” the New York Fed said in an early afternoon announcement amid a washout on Wall Street that was heading toward the worst day since 1987. Stocks were off their lows following the announcement though some of the gains were pared as the market digested the moves.

One part of the announcement saw the Fed widen the scale for its $60 billion worth of money the Treasury purchases, which to now had been confined to short-term T-bills. Under the new regime, the Fed will extend its purchases “across a range of maturities” to include bills, notes, Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities and other instruments. The central bank will begin purchasing coupon-bearing securities, something market participants have been clamoring for since late 2019. The purchases start Thursday and will continue through April 13.

The second part of the new operations will see the New York Fed desk offer $500 billion in a three-month repo operation and a one-month operation. The offerings will happen on a weekly basis through the remainder of the program. In addition, the Fed will continue to offer at least $175 billion in overnight repos and $45 billion in two-week operations. Repos are short-term operations in which financial institutions provide high-quality collateral in exchange for cash reserves they use to operate.

“This is their tool. They’ve used it. It should be working”…

• Market Turmoil Sparked By Coronavirus Fears Worse Than 2008 – Bianco (CNBC)

Market researcher James Bianco calls the Federal Reserve’s move to pump $1.5 trillion into the market the “nuclear option” to calm investors gripped by coronavirus fears. Only, it didn’t work Thursday. Instead, stocks saw their worst day since the 1987 Black Monday market crash. “Financial markets are not recovering. It’s incredible to think that a trillion dollars can’t get these markets moving,” the Bianco Research president told CNBC’s “Trading Nation.” “We’re at a critical time — unlike anything I’ve seen in my career even counting 2008.” On Thursday, the Fed attempted to stabilize the markets by massively boosting asset purchases in the market. It came five days before its policy meeting on interest rates.

“What the Fed did was they restarted QE, and they essentially announced that in the next two days they’re going to do more QE than they did in the last five years combined,” added Bianco. “The reason they’re doing it is because the financial markets have stopped functioning properly. There’s no liquidity. There’s hardly any trading.” Stocks initially rebounded, but failed to hold on to gains. The Dow sank 2,352 points or 10% to 21,200 while the S&P 500 fell 261 points or 9.5% to 2,480. The Dow and S&P are deep in bear market territory, off 28% and 27%, respectively, from their all-time highs. “This is their tool. They’ve used it. It should be working”, said Bianco.

According to Bianco, Wall Street may still be in shock due to the magnitude of the Fed’ s move. Plus, he suggests there may be logistical issues. [New York] Governor [Andrew] Cuomo just announced that any gathering of over 500 people in New York State is banned. So, these big dealer desks are now going to have to figure it out from home, he said. “If financial markets don’t start moving, and if a trillion dollars cannot get them off the lows of the day of $500 billion today, $500 billion tomorrow, then we’re going to have to start worrying that a panic is going to set in… and we’re going to see a lot more losses as we go forward,” Bianco said.

Only 16 days ago that the U.S. stock market was at record highs. The fastest time between a new high and a bear market in history.

The old record was set in 1929, when it took 42 days over in Sept/Oct to drop into a bear market.

Never good to breaking a record set in 1929! pic.twitter.com/5vAtHbzLQn

— Jim Bianco (@biancoresearch) March 12, 2020

I love you long time.

• Apple Reopens All Its Branded Stores In China (R.)

Apple has reopened all 42 of its branded stores in China, more than a month after they were shut due to fears over the coronavirus outbreak, the iPhone maker’s Chinese website showed on Friday. Apple’s China website has listed the opening time for all stores, which vary from 10:00 am to 11:00 am local time. The website had previously carried an advisory saying not all stores were open. China placed curbs on travel and asked residents to avoid public places in late January, just ahead of the Lunar New Year festival, a major gift-giving holiday. Those restrictions stayed largely in place through most of February. The company sold fewer than half a million iPhones in China in February, government data showed on Monday, as the outbreak halved demand for smartphones. Apple had announced the shuttering of its branded stores in early February.

Something tells me prices may have just gone up.

• US Excludes Some Chinese Medical Products From Tariffs (R.)

The U.S. Trade Representative’s office said it granted on Thursday exclusions from import tariffs for some medical products imported from China, including face masks, stethoscope covers and blood pressure cuff sleeves. The exclusions were granted as the United States grapples with a coronavirus outbreak that threatens to strain its healthcare system. Earlier this month, USTR granted exclusions for other Chinese medical products, including hand sanitizing wipes and examination gloves.

The products were included in a fourth round of tariffs on Chinese goods imposed by President Donald Trump on Sept. 1, 2019, amid heated U.S.-China trade negotiations. The tariff rate on the medical products was initially set at 15%, but was lowered to 7.5% on Feb. 15 as part of the Phase 1 U.S.-China trade agreement. The deal leaves in place tariffs on about $370 billion worth of imports from China, including 25% duties on goods valued at around $250 billion.

IMF meets sanctions x world health.

• Iran Asks IMF For $5 Billion Emergency Funding To Fight Coronavirus (R.)

Iran has asked the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for emergency funding to help it fight the coronavirus outbreak that has hit the Islamic Republic hard, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said on Thursday. The escalating outbreak in Iran – the worst-affected country in the Middle East – has killed 429 people and infected 10,075. The outbreak has damaged Iranian businesses and is bound to hit its non-oil exports after many neighboring countries and trade partners shut their borders. The IMF managing director, Kristalina Georgieva, “has stated that countries affected by #COVID19 (coronavirus) will be supported via Rapid Financial Instrument. Our Central Bank requested access to this facility immediately”, Zarif said in a tweet.

Iranian Central Bank chief Abdolnaser Hemmati wrote on his Instagram page that “in a letter addressed to the head of IMF, I have requested five billion U.S. dollars from the RFI emergency fund to help our fight against the coronavirus”. Iran’s economy was already battered by U.S. sanctions that curb oil and gas exports crucial for government revenues. A slowdown in economic activity caused by the virus outbreak and a sustained closure of its borders are expected to lead to a contraction this year, analysts have said. As Iran’s clerical rulers struggle to contain the coronavirus outbreak, Tehran has blamed the United States and its “maximum pressure” policy for restricting Iran’s ability to respond effectively to the virus.

Bit right wing for me, but interesting.

• Greening Our Way to Infection (CJ)

The COVID-19 outbreak is giving new meaning to those “sustainable” shopping bags that politicians and environmentalists have been so eager to impose on the public. These reusable tote bags can sustain the COVID-19 and flu viruses—and spread the viruses throughout the store. Researchers have been warning for years about the risks of these bags spreading deadly viral and bacterial diseases, but public officials have ignored their concerns, determined to eliminate single-use bags and other plastic products despite their obvious advantages in reducing the spread of pathogens. In New York State, a new law took effect this month banning single-use plastic bags in most retail businesses, and this week Democratic state legislators advanced a bill that would force coffee shops to accept consumers’ reusable cups—a practice that Starbucks and other chains have wisely suspended to avoid spreading the COVID-19 virus.

John Flanagan, the Republican leader of the New York State Senate, has criticized the new legislation and called for a suspension of the law banning plastic bags. “Senate Democrats’ desperate need to be green is unclean during the coronavirus outbreak,” he said Tuesday, but so far he’s been a lonely voice among public officials. The COVID-19 virus is just one of many pathogens that shoppers can spread unless they wash the bags regularly, which few people bother to do. Viruses and bacteria can survive in the tote bags up to nine days, according to one study of coronaviruses. The risk of spreading viruses was clearly demonstrated in a 2018 study published in the Journal of Environmental Health.

The researchers, led by Ryan Sinclair of the Loma Linda University School of Public Health, sent shoppers into three California grocery stores carrying polypropylene plastic tote bags that had been sprayed with a harmless surrogate of a virus. After the shoppers bought groceries and checked out, the researchers found sufficiently high traces of the surrogate to risk transmission on the hands of the shoppers and checkout clerks, as well as on many surfaces touched by the shoppers, including packaged food, unpackaged produce, shopping carts, checkout counters, and the touch screens used to pay for groceries. The researchers said that the results warranted the adaptation of “in-store hand hygiene” and “surface disinfection” by merchants, and they also recommended educating shoppers to wash their bags.

I admit, included for the headline.

• Two Angry Old Men Yelling at Each Other in Arizona (FPM)

Bernie’s got a problem. He’s struggling in the delegate count and Florida and New York are unlikely to help. He’s got one way to reverse the tide, and that’s destroy Biden in a debate. Destroying Biden is not so hard. He’s a confused and shambling wreck. Even Kamala Harris was temporarily able to pick up some of his voters that way. The trouble is Bernie is nearly as much of a mess. If his people weren’t complete psychos, they might have been able to build an alliance with Elizabeth Warren. Instead, all the bridges were burned, and Sanders benefited little from her dropping out. But Warren, staying in, could have served as Bernie’s hatchet woman. So might Tulsi Gabbard, though she last served as Biden’s hatchet woman.

But considering that she’s polling at nothing, there’s no pretext that could get her into the debate. And Bernie is a poor debater. Not as much as Biden, but close enough. All he can do is respond to every question with an angry rant about corporations and medical care. That’s not going to win anything. After Biden’s victory speech, it’s clear that the current brains behind his campaign have been able to get him to memorize his own speeches and deliver them in an angry tone that passes for energy. That’s Bernie’s shtick. And it’s probably not a coincidence. So the Arizona debate will consist of two old men angrily yelling at each other with stump speeches. Sounds like a winner.

Upside down world: “..the loss of glyphosate would cause very severe impacts on UK agriculture and the environment..”

• Monsanto’s Secret Funding For Weedkiller Studies (G.)

Monsanto secretly funded academic studies indicating “very severe impacts” on farming and the environment if its controversial glyphosate weedkiller were banned, an investigation has found. The research was used by the National Farmers’ Union and others to successfully lobby against a European ban in 2017. As a result of the revelations, the NFU has now amended its glyphosate information to declare the source of the research. Monsanto was bought by the agri-chemical multinational Bayer in 2018 and Bayer said the studies’ failure to disclose their funding broke its principles. However, the authors of the studies said the funding did not influence their work and the editor of the journal in which they were published said the papers would not be retracted or amended. Glyphosate is sold by Bayer as Roundup and is the world’s most widely used weedkiller.

The World Health Organization’s cancer agency, the IARC, declared that glyphosate was “probably carcinogenic to humans” in 2015 but several international agencies, including the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), subsequently came to opposite conclusions. Last year courts in the US ordered Monsanto to pay damages of up to $2bn to individuals with cancer and faces many more lawsuits. Bayer said it “stands fully behind its glyphosate-based products”. The new revelations centre on studies published in 2010 and 2014 by researchers at ADAS, an agricultural and environmental consultancy in the UK. The analyses concluded “the loss of glyphosate would cause very severe impacts on UK agriculture and the environment”. They suggested a 20% fall in wheat and rapeseed production.

You blow up their home and then you toss them a handout to go back to that home.

• Migrants On Greek Islands To Be Offered €2,000 To Go Home (G.)

Migrants on the Greek islands are to be offered €2,000 (£1,764) per person to go home under a voluntary scheme launched by the European Union in an attempt to ease desperate conditions in camps. The amount is more than five times the usual sum offered to migrants to help them rebuild their lives in their country of origin, under voluntary returns programmes run by the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration (IOM). The offer will last one month, as the commission fears an open-ended scheme would attract more migrants to Europe. It will not apply to refugees who have no homes to return to, but is intended to incentivise migrants seeking better living standards to leave the islands.

The EU’s home affairs commissioner, Ylva Johansson, said the scheme was “a window of opportunity for a targeted group”, adding that the IOM would run the scheme with the EU border agency Frontex. “Refugees will not return, of course, they can’t return, but economic migrants that maybe know they will not get a positive asylum decision could be interested in doing that,” she told a small group of reporters. The scheme, she said, could be a quick way to relieve the pressure on camps on the Greek islands, where conditions are “totally unacceptable”. The commission said it hoped 5,000 people will take up the offer, although it acknowledged it lacked statistics on how many people on the Greek islands were “economic migrants”, rather than refugees.

Migrants on the Greek mainland were likely to be offered extra money to leave – much less than €2,000, but higher than the usual resettlement sum of €370. Since 2016, 18,151 people have chosen to return home from Greece under a voluntary returns programme funded by the EU and run by the IOM. Only about one-fifth of them (3,927) were on the islands. [..] More than 20,000 people are living at the Moria camp on Lesbos, up from 5,000 last July. About 85% of last year’s arrivals were refugees, with most coming from Afghanistan and Syria, but also from Iraq, Palestine, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and elsewhere. More than 18,300 Moria residents were living in a facility designed for 2,200, while others were living in nearby olive groves.

” Judge Anthony Trenga did not waive the $256k in penalties levied against her.”

• Judge Orders Immediate Release Of Chelsea Manning (Ind.)

A US judge has ordered the immediate release of Chelsea Manning, the former American army officer who was remanded to prison after refusing to testify against WikiLeaks. The ruling states that it is no longer necessary for her to testify and follows her attorneys’ announcement that she had recently tried to kill herself while imprisoned. She is reportedly recovering in hospital. Ms Manning spent seven years in a military prison after leaking thousands of classified government documents to WikiLeaks before Barack Obama commuted her sentence in 2017. Last year, she was held in contempt of court after refusing to testify before a federal grand jury as part of an investigation into Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. She has been jailed since May.

In his ruling on Thursday, Judge Anthony Trenga did not waive the $256k in penalties levied against her. The ruling says that enforcement of the “accrued, conditional fines would not be punitive but rather necessary to the coercive purpose” of the court’s contempt order. She was scheduled to appear at a hearing in a Virginia federal court today. That appearance has been cancelled.

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