Jan 212022
 


Pablo Picasso Portrait of Dora Maar pensive 1937

 

How Many People Have Died Purely Of Covid (Farage)
Sewage Surveillance Reveals Omicron Is Disappearing Fast (ZH)
Investigate the Cause of the Spike in Child Deaths (Craig)
Triple-Jabbed Over-30s Have Higher Infection Rates Than the Unvaccinated (DS)
Over a Million Americans Were Injured by Covid Vaccines (Rescue)
Journal Pulls COVID-19 Vaccine Adverse Events Analysis (ET)
Ivermectin Could Destroy Justification for Lockdowns and Vaccine Mandates (ET)
Unexpected Comeback in the FLCCC Early Treatment Protocol (CE)
France To Lift Covid-19 Restrictions In February (Pol.eu)
Top Russian Senator Blasts American’s ‘Amazing Stupidity’
Germany’s Pivot From America (Pol.eu)
Durham vs. Horowitz (Maté)
Congress’s 1/6 Committee Claims Absolute Power (Greenwald)
Jeremy Grantham Doubles Down on Crash Call, Says Selloff Has Started (BBG)

 

 

 

 

Hodkinson

 

 

 

 

Eva Vlaar

 

 

17,000 deaths purely of Covid in the UK. Worldometer puts it at 152,000. 700,000 die of all causes every year in the UK.

How Many People Have Died Purely Of Covid (Farage)

‘We’ve seen again and again, estimates of how bad this crisis could be that are nearly always massively over-exaggerated, but this has really made me sit up and think.’ Nigel Farage reacts to the amount of people who have died purely of Covid since the start of the pandemic.

 

 

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“The end of omicron is imminent..”

Sewage Surveillance Reveals Omicron Is Disappearing Fast (ZH)

Now, data gleaned from wastewater is being used by the CDC to help determine when the omicron variant may have arrived in the US. As Bloomberg reports, evidence of omicron appeared in US sewage samples collected as early as Nov. 21, according to data collected by state and local health officials from California, Colorado, Houston and NYC. That data was later shared with the CDC. The first infection of omicron in a US-based patient wasn’t confirmed until Dec. 1 (the patient was located in California). “The findings give strong early evidence that the omicron variant was likely present or more widely distributed in these communities than originally indicated by clinical testing alone,” the authors said in CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

The four health authorities were the first to find signs of the variant in their wastewater, according to the study. In its report on the findings, BBG added that “analyzing wastewater containing human feces can be an important way to look for warning signs of new mutations, as well as track those already spreading to determine how long existing surges will last.” Wastewater can also provide advanced warning of a COVID surge. Dutch researchers reported in March 2020 that they were able to find genetic material from the virus in wastewater before COVID cases were reported in the population. Like one BBG source said: “everybody poops”.

The technique “gives you a heads-up because people may not want to pick up the phone for surveys, but everybody poops,” said Gigi Gronvall, an immunologist at the John Hopkins Center for Health Security. “And it’s so unbiased because everybody uses the same sewer system.” The CDC now funds 43 health departments that participate in the National Wastewater Surveillance System, which provides data on COVID’s presence and trends in water systems. The great news is that the last week or so has seen the Boston wastewater RNA data plunge… The end of omicron is imminent… because everybody poops.

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“Any marginal benefit of vaccination for the young must be considered outweighed by even a marginal increase in mortality.”

Investigate the Cause of the Spike in Child Deaths (Craig)

In recent months, a trend has been noted in the England and Wales all-cause mortality data, which has rung some alarm bells. Young males aged 15-19 have shown a rising death rate compared to the five-year average 2015-2019. At the same time, a large insurance company in the U.S. has reported a significant increase in deaths in the under 40s. This is obviously of concern, whatever the cause, but one possible factor which needs to be urgently excluded is any link to vaccine injury. The association between myocarditis and the mRNA vaccines, especially in younger age groups and in males, is already well established. It is particularly urgent as second doses and boosters are being rolled out, possibly putting adolescents at even higher risk, and at a time when the Omicron variant is much milder.

Members of HART, the Health Advisory and Recovery Team, have joined with other senior academics and health professionals to call for an immediate investigation into the increasing death rate amongst 15-19-year-old males since May of this year. At the High Court on Thursday 13th January, the ONS (Office for National Statistics) confirmed that there has been a significant rise in the death rate for adolescent males over the last eight months, compared to the same time period of 2015-2019. There have been at least 65 extra deaths in England and Wales, though the figure may be higher due to reporting delays for coroners’ cases. During the same time frame there were only two deaths involving Covid.

The concern is that this time period coincides with the rollout of vaccinations to this age group, who are known to be at an increased risk of myocarditis (heart inflammation), especially after the second dose. Far from rushing to investigate these deaths as they have arisen, ONS has stated it intends to undertake that work “when more reliable data are available”. The rollout of vaccinations in this age group was always controversial, with risks and benefits finely balanced, but the Chief Medical Officers overturned the original advice, not on health grounds but to “reduce disruption to schools”. Any marginal benefit of vaccination for the young must be considered outweighed by even a marginal increase in mortality. With the reduced risk from Omicron, and with increased risk from second doses, the balance will have tipped still further.

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That effectiveness is very negative.

Triple-Jabbed Over-30s Have Higher Infection Rates Than the Unvaccinated (DS)

This week’s UKHSA vaccine surveillance report has landed – and this week a change. In the (in)famous Table 12, which shows rates of infections, deaths and hospitalisations per 100,000 by vaccination status, the data have suddenly switched to giving rates for triple-jabbed rather than two-or-more doses, meaning we no longer have continuity with our previous data. So sudden was the change in fact, that the report itself has not kept up with it, and the notes under the table still say the rates are for “people who have received either two doses of a COVID-19 vaccine or in people who have not received a COVID-19 vaccine”. The change means we have to start over in our week-by-week comparisons, so the infection rates by age for this period are depicted above and the unadjusted vaccine effectiveness figures are depicted below.

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“We are slowly building a network of the injured..” Why does this make me think of 1984? Why does it have to move underground?

Over a Million Americans Were Injured by Covid Vaccines (Rescue)

The blackout of news regarding covid shot injuries has been so universally successful that it’s almost always a surprise to the vaccine damaged when they find each other. “Travelers in the desert,” is how one put it. Brianne’s extraordinary efforts to connect the injured, tell her story, and correct false facts has taken some interesting turns. Last November she wrote to the New England Journal of Medicine, attempting to have the journal correct inaccuracies in a paper about the AstraZeneca trial it recently published. She wrote: “I was a participant in Astra-Zeneca’s Covid-19 vaccine trial. I suffered serious and severe adverse effects after the first dose…was disabled and remain so today.”

She went on to state that Phase 3 Safety and Efficacy of AZD1222…Covid-19 Vaccine, published at the NEJM, contains numerous errors including that “all serious adverse events” will be recorded through “day 730,” and that she “withdrew” from the trial. Some 180 others are also said by the reporting researchers to have dropped out of the study. In fact, she wrote, “I did not withdraw, I was withdrawn.” The smartphone app she was provided to report symptoms was disabled, she told the NEJM, and trial doctors stopped collecting her data after sixty days. And Brianne heard back right away, receiving a canned rejection note from none other than Dr. Eric J. Rubin, NEJM editor-in-chief and member of the FDA’s review committee that recommended covid shots be okayed for five-year-olds.

But she persisted, telling Rubin again that the article “omitted key safety data in my case” and another she is aware of, and that the NIH gave her a diagnosis of “vaccine injury.” “Omission of adverse reactions is a violation of a key tenet of clinical trial reporting,” she wrote back. But in the end, all the head doctor at the world’s most prestigious medical journal could offer was to forward her letter to the manufacturer and suggest that she herself write to AstraZeneca and the FDA. Despite the widespread social media muffling over “misinformation,” resulting in numerous vaccine-injury sites being silenced, Brianne has managed to discover over 12,000 vaccine-damaged individuals through the website she founded, reAct19.org, simply by word of mouth. She is also affiliated with The Unity Project, a California-based organization working to unify fragmented groups across the state to better fight covid vaccine mandates for children. “We are slowly building a network of the injured,” she said.

That current network, however, could be the proverbial tip of the iceberg. According to VAERS data, as of January 7, 2022, there are vast numbers of covid-19 shot harms, including 1,033,992 vaccine injures, 25,773 cases of myocarditis/pericarditis, 3,594 miscarriages, 11,055 heart attacks, and 21,745 deaths. Within a few weeks of coerced children’s vaccinations, Brianne was contacted by the parents of a number of children, ages five to eleven, experiencing heart damage, some of which doctors said “could lead to heart transplants in five years.” They contacted Brianne because she can put them in touch with doctors knowledgeable and willing to treat vaccine sufferers.

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“The paper also called the vaccines “injectable biological products”—a reference to the fact that they are distinct from all other traditional vaccines.”

Journal Pulls COVID-19 Vaccine Adverse Events Analysis (ET)

Jessica Rose didn’t ask for any of this. She started to analyze data on adverse reactions after COVID-19 vaccines simply as an exercise to master a new piece of software. But she couldn’t ignore what she saw and decided to publish the results of her analysis. The next thing she knew, she was in a “bizzarro world,” she told The Epoch Times. A paper she co-authored based on her analysis was withdrawn by Elsevier, the company publishing the academic journal that ran the article, under circumstances that raised eyebrows among her colleagues. [..] The paper’s conclusions are not necessarily controversial. A recent Danish study concluded, for example, an elevated risk of myocarditis for young people following the Moderna COVID vaccine.

It’s common, however, even for papers that examine potential issues with the vaccines to frame their results in a way that still endorses vaccination. “That’s what you have to say to get your work published these days,” Rose said. Her paper did no such thing. “As part of any risk/benefit analysis which must be completed in the context of experimental products, the points herein must be considered before a decision can be made pertaining to agreeing to 2-dose injections of these experimental COVID-19 products, especially into children and by no means, should parental consent be waived under any circumstances to avoid children volunteering for injections with products that do not have proven safety or efficacy,” the paper said.

The paper also called the vaccines “injectable biological products”—a reference to the fact that they are distinct from all other traditional vaccines. A traditional vaccine uses “whole live or attenuated pathogens” while the COVID vaccines use “mRNA in lipid nanoparticles,” Rose explained via email. She said the lipid nanoparticles include “cationic lipids which are highly toxic.” Pfizer, the manufacturer of the most popular COVID-19 vaccine in many countries, addressed the issue by saying the dose is sufficiently low to ensure “an acceptable safety margin,” according to the European drug authority, the Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use (pdf). Rose also noted that the COVID-19 vaccines haven’t gone “through the 10-15 years of safety testing that vaccines have always had to go through … for obvious reasons.”

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Pretty incredible that this is still seen as news. Then again, how many people know?

Ivermectin Could Destroy Justification for Lockdowns and Vaccine Mandates (ET)

Federal health agencies haven’t recognized ivermectin as an effective treatment for COVID-19 patients. According to Doctor Leland Stillman, the reason is more political than scientific, because otherwise there would be no basis for lockdowns or vaccine mandates. “If ivermectin were recognized by the public health and academic establishment as the drug that it is, that treats acute viral illnesses, one of which is COVID-19, the entire justification for lockdowns, mandates, let alone vaccine research and development would evaporate overnight,” Stillman told The Epoch Times in a recent interview.

According to Section 564 of the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) can only issue emergency use authorization if certain criteria are met, including “there is no adequate, approved, and available alternative to the product.” So if there’s an approved alternative, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)—an agency in HHS—can’t issue emergency use authorization for COVID-19 vaccines. Stillman said it’s not a conspiracy theory or even an isolated opinion that ivermectin works for treating COVID-19, because tens of thousands of physicians all over the world have recognized its effectiveness. [..] Stillman explained why many doctors are silent on recognizing ivermectin as an effective drug for COVID-19[..].

“And the reality that’s really important for people to understand is that doctors can lose their licenses or lose their board certification, which is very important for their income based on insurance guidelines, for speaking out as I have chosen to,” Stillman said. Stillman said he is able to speak up because he’s one of very few doctors in the country who takes cash and doesn’t work with insurance companies. [..] “There’s a lot of politics on this,” Stillman said, referring to the COVID-19 vaccine mandate. “And the way it’s been politicized is really disgraceful and unfortunate. At the end of the day, it’s all about how these corporations who are profiting immensely off of the pandemic.”

Stillman said freedom is the way out of the current problem. “Freedom is absolutely the solution,” Stillman said. “Because if you really allow doctors to treat patients on their own terms, without insurance companies, without all this, it can be very affordable, and it can be very effective. “Because the reality is that a lot of the care being provisioned right now, it’s just being provisioned based on some bureaucrat’s idea of what’s good medicine, not based on what the patients actually want and think is worth it to them.”

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HCQ for the win.

Unexpected Comeback in the FLCCC Early Treatment Protocol (CE)

If you have followed the development of early treatment protocols for COVID-19, you will be aware that for well over a year, Ivermectin was the central agent in the FLCCC protocol, for prevention and early treatment. Ivermectin is also part of the hospital level protocols. Very early on [..] Hydroxychloroquine was present in the protocol, but it was dropped mid-2020. This non-inclusion of Hydroxychloroquine appears to have been in part due to the bad publicity that Hydroxychloroquine was suffering from, as it was targeted by the mainstream media, especially in relation to the presidential campaign in the US – something that we covered extensively.


This January 19 2021, it’s therefore a bit of a surprise to see Hydroxychloroquine to re-appear in the FLCCC prevention and early treatment protocol. The move follows the experience of several frontline doctors who found that Hydroxychloroquine is particularly useful to deal with Omicron, in combination with Ivermectin and other agents, as indicated in the protocol. So, we see with this move a further alleviation of the rift that previously existed, and that had already nearly disappeared, among frontline doctors regarding the nature of the most appropriate agents to be included in early treatment protocols for COVID-19.

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But not really.

France To Lift Covid-19 Restrictions In February (Pol.eu)

French Prime Minister Jean Castex announced Thursday that the government will lift most of its COVID-19 restrictions in February, although the need for a vaccine pass and indoor mask-wearing will remain. The vaccine pass will come into effect on Monday, Castex said at a press conference. People will no longer be allowed to show a negative test to enter restaurants, bars, theaters, museums and stadiums or travel on trains — only proof of vaccination will be accepted. Starting February 2, stadiums, arenas and other large-capacity venues will be allowed to operate at full capacity again. Homeworking obligations will be lifted, though it will still be encouraged, and masks will no longer be required outdoors, as is currently the case in many cities.


On February 16, people will be allowed to eat and drink in stadiums, cinemas and on transport, as well as being allowed to drink while standing in bars. Nightclubs will be allowed to reopen, though the government was unable to specify whether masks would be required. France has had an average of 320,000 COVID-19 cases each day over the past week, an ever-rising number. But Castex said that of the two simultaneous waves hitting the country — of the Delta and Omicron variants — the former was receding, while the latter was starting to fall in the first regions where it appeared, including in Paris. “We are unquestionably in a new phase of the epidemic,” said the prime minister.

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“It is difficult to find people in Russia who would dream of a life like the one in Ukraine now,” he stated. “It is impossible to envy it.”

Top Russian Senator Blasts American’s ‘Amazing Stupidity’

American analysts following Russia and the former Soviet Union repeatedly fail to understand the mentality of people living in the world’s largest country, one of Moscow’s leading senators has raged as experts weigh in on events happening along the border with Ukraine. Taking to Telegram on Thursday, Alexey Pushkov poured scorn on a statement put forward by Michael McFaul, a well-known “Russia watcher” and Stanford professor who previously served as Washington’s ambassador to Russia during President Barack Obama’s era. McFaul’s tweet read that “Ukrainian democracy today, not Ukrainian membership in NATO in some distant future, is the real threat to [Russian President Vladimir] Putin.” Similar remarks have been made by the notoriously anti-Russian academic in recent weeks.


The exchange comes as Moscow aims to seek guarantees from NATO that Ukraine’s long-term ambitions to join the US-led military bloc will not be granted. Hitting out at McFaul’s words, Pushkov blasted the “amazing stupidity of this thesis,” which he insisted is “repeated over and over again in the United States by pseudo-experts on Russia.” It says only one thing, the senator claimed – “they know nothing about the attitude of the vast majority of Russian citizens to what is happening in Ukraine and do not want to know.” He accused Western experts of living “in their false ideologies, where it is comfortable and convenient for them.” “It is difficult to find people in Russia who would dream of a life like the one in Ukraine now,” he stated. “It is impossible to envy it.”

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“While the U.K. scrambles to deliver tanks, rocket artillery and other weaponry to the Ukrainians, Germany has refused to send even rifles.”

Germany’s Pivot From America (Pol.eu)

Over the past decade, the idea that Germany could no longer fully rely on the U.S. for security amid America’s “pivot” to Asia became accepted wisdom among German leaders. The unfolding crisis in Ukraine reveals that reality cuts both ways. Germany’s allies hoped Olaf Scholz’s coalition, which includes the Russia-critical Greens, would back away from the accommodative policies toward Moscow that marked the Angela Merkel era. Recent days have shown such optimism to be misplaced. As Washington has tried to present a united Western front against Russian intimidation in recent weeks, Germany has been a conspicuous outlier. Under the influence of a potent cocktail of energy and commercial interests, and a political culture laced with good old-fashioned anti-Americanism, Germany has strayed from the Western fold.

To outward appearances, Berlin is far from AWOL on Ukraine. “After years of rising tensions, staying silent isn’t a sensible option,” Chancellor Scholz said on Wednesday in reference to Russia’s amassing of troops on the Ukrainian border, stressing that Germany was committed to Ukraine’s territorial integrity. “It’s hard not to see this as a threat,” Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said of the border buildup on a trip to Moscow this week. But when the cameras are turned off, Germany’s tone changes. While the U.K. scrambles to deliver tanks, rocket artillery and other weaponry to the Ukrainians, Germany has refused to send even rifles. And instead of locking arms with the U.S. and other transatlantic allies to help Ukraine prepare for an attack, Germany has sought to placate Russia by taking some of the West’s most powerful deterrents off the table.

As the crisis has intensified, German officials and politicians have strenuously opposed using the threat of suspending Russia from SWIFT, the Belgium-based international payments system, a step that would make it extremely difficult for Russian entities to engage in international commerce. Even Germany’s conservative opposition cautioned against using SWIFT as a bargaining chip. Friedrich Merz, leader of the center-right Christian Democrats, said suspending Russia’s access to the network would be the financial market equivalent of dropping an “atomic bomb.”

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Very thorough from Aaron Maté. Durham is not sitting still, but he faces a lot of resistance.

Durham vs. Horowitz (Maté)

As he documents the role of Hillary Clinton’s campaign in generating false allegations of Trump-Russia collusion, Special Counsel John Durham has also previewed a challenge to the FBI’s claims about how and why its counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign began. At stake is the completeness of the official reckoning within the U.S. government over the Russiagate scandal – and whether there will be an accounting commensurate with the offense: the abuse of the nation’s highest law enforcement and intelligence powers to damage an opposition presidential candidate turned president, at the behest of his opponent from the governing party he defeated.

The drama is playing out against the clashing approaches of the two Justice Department officials tasked with scrutinizing the Russia probe’s origins and unearthing any misconduct: Durham, the Sphinx-like prosecutor with a reputation for toughness whose work continues; and Michael Horowitz, the Department of Justice inspector general, whose December 2019 report faulted the FBI’s handling of the Russia probe but nonetheless concluded that it was launched in good faith. The bureau’s defenders point to Horowitz’s report to argue that the FBI’s Trump-Russia conspiracy investigation, codenamed Crossfire Hurricane, is untainted despite its extensive use of the discredited Clinton-funded Steele dossier. Though highly critical of the bureau’s use of Christopher Steele’s reports, Horowitz concluded that they “played no role in the Crossfire Hurricane opening,” which he said had met the department’s “low threshold” for opening an investigation.

But Durham has made plain his dissent. In response to Horowitz’s report, the special counsel announced that his office had “advised the Inspector General that we do not agree with some of the report’s conclusions as to predication and how the FBI case was opened.” Durham stressed that, unlike Horowitz, his “investigation is not limited to developing information from within component parts of the Justice Department” and has instead obtained “information from other persons and entities, both in the U.S. and outside of the U.S.”

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From Russiagate to 1/6 was a smooth transition.

Congress’s 1/6 Committee Claims Absolute Power (Greenwald)

In its ongoing attempt to investigate and gather information about private U.S. citizens, the Congressional 1/6 Committee is claiming virtually absolute powers that not even the FBI or other law enforcement agencies enjoy. Indeed, lawyers for the committee have been explicitly arguing that nothing proscribes or limits their authority to obtain data regarding whichever citizens they target and, even more radically, that the checks imposed on the FBI (such as the requirement to obtain judicial authorization for secret subpoenas) do not apply to the committee. As we have previously reported and as civil liberties groups have warned, there are serious constitutional doubts about the existence of the committee itself.

Under the Constitution and McCarthy-era Supreme Court cases interpreting it, the power to investigate crimes lies with the executive branch, supervised by the judiciary, and not with Congress. Congress does have the power to conduct investigations, but that power is limited to two narrow categories: 1) when doing so is designed to assist in its law-making duties (e.g., directing executives of oil companies to testify when considering new environmental laws) and 2) in order to exert oversight over the executive branch. What Congress is barred from doing, as two McCarthy-era Supreme Court cases ruled, is exactly what the 1/6 committee is now doing: conducting a separate, parallel criminal investigation in order to uncover political crimes committed by private citizens.

Such powers are dangerous precisely because Congress’s investigative powers are not subject to the same safeguards as the FBI and other law enforcement agencies. And just as was true of the 1950s House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) that prompted those Supreme Court rulings, the 1/6 committee is not confining its invasive investigative activities to executive branch officials or even citizens who engaged in violence or other illegality on January 6, but instead is investigating anyone and everyone who exercised their Constitutional rights to express views about and organize protests over their belief that the 2020 presidential election contained fraud.

Indeed, the committee’s initial targets appear to be taken from the list of those who applied for protest permits in Washington: a perfectly legal, indeed constitutionally protected, act. This abuse of power is not merely abstract. The Congressional 1/6 Committee has been secretly obtaining private information about American citizens en masse: telephone records, email logs, internet and browsing history, and banking transactions. And it has done so without any limitations or safeguards: no judicial oversight, no need for warrants, no legal limitations of any kind.

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“..losses in the U.S. alone may reach $35 trillion.”

Jeremy Grantham Doubles Down on Crash Call, Says Selloff Has Started (BBG)

Jeremy Grantham, the famed investor who for decades has been calling market bubbles, said the historic collapse in stocks he predicted a year ago is underway and even intervention by the Federal Reserve can’t prevent an eventual plunge of almost 50%. In a note posted Thursday, Grantham, the co-founder of Boston asset manager GMO, describes U.S. stocks as being in a “super bubble,” only the fourth of the past century. And just as they did in the crash of 1929, the dot-com bust of 2000 and the financial crisis of 2008, he’s certain this bubble will burst, sending indexes back to statistical norms and possibly further. That, he said, involves the S&P 500 dropping some 45% from Wednesday’s close — and 48% from its Jan. 4 peak — to a level of 2500. The Nasdaq Composite, already down 8.3% this month, may sustain an even bigger correction.

“I wasn’t quite as certain about this bubble a year ago as I had been about the tech bubble of 2000, or as I had been in Japan, or as I had been in the housing bubble of 2007,” Grantham said in a Bloomberg “Front Row” interview. “I felt highly likely, but perhaps not nearly certain. Today, I feel it is just about nearly certain.” In Grantham’s analysis, the evidence is abundant. The first sign of trouble he points to came last February, when dozens of the most speculative stocks began falling. One proxy, Cathie Wood’s Ark Innovation ETF, has since tumbled by 52%. Next, the Russell 2000, an index of mid-cap equities that typically outperforms in a bull market, trailed the S&P 500 in 2021.

Finally, there was what Grantham calls the kind of “crazy investor behavior” indicative of a late-stage bubble: meme stocks, a buying frenzy in electric-vehicle names, the rise of nonsensical cryptocurrencies such a dogecoin and multimillion-dollar prices for non-fungible tokens, or NFTs. “This checklist for a super bubble running through its phases is now complete and the wild rumpus can begin at any time,” Grantham, 83, writes in his note. “When pessimism returns to markets, we face the largest potential markdown of perceived wealth in U.S. history.” It could, he said, rival the impact of the dual collapse of Japanese stocks and real estate in the late 1980s. Not only are equities in a super bubble, according to Grantham there’s also a bubble in bonds, “the broadest and most extreme” bubble ever in global real estate and an “incipient bubble” in commodity prices. Even without a full reversion back to statistical trends, he calculates that losses in the U.S. alone may reach $35 trillion.

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Oct 212021
 
 October 21, 2021  Posted by at 8:11 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  71 Responses »


Pablo Picasso Man with arms crossed 1909

 

Child Deaths Are 52% Higher Since They Were Offered The Covid-19 Vaccine (TE)
White House Details Plan To “Quickly” Vaccinate 28M Children Age 5-11 (ZH)
Pfizer, Moderna to Rake in $93 Billion in 2022 COVID Vaccine Sales (CHD)
Adenovirus Covid-19 Vaccine Shows Lower But ‘Stable’ Immunity (RT)
Repositioning Ivermectin For Covid-19 Treatment (SD)
The FDA’s War Against The Truth On Ivermectin (AIER)
Washington State Patrol Staff Shortage, Officers Quit Over Vaccine Mandate (RT)
Why Are Thousands Of Postal Workers Still Unvaxxed? (WND)
Djokovic Claims It Would Be ‘Inappropriate’ To Say If He Is Vaccinated (RT)
Dewey, Cheat’em And Howe (Denninger)
“The Bidens”: Is the First Family Corrupt, or Merely Crazy? (Taibbi)
Hillary’s Secretive, Russiagate-Flogging Pair of Super-Lawyers (Maté)
The Killing Of Gaddafi 10 Years Ago Led To The Death Of The Nation Of Libya (RT)

 

 

https://twitter.com/BarryESharp/status/1450924047034826756

 

 

Sign at Chick-Fil-A

 

 

Just

 

 

The Exposé feels a little chaotic at times, but they do the work.

Child Deaths Are 52% Higher Since They Were Offered The Covid-19 Vaccine (TE)

Chris Whitty advised the UK Government to roll-out the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine to all children over the age of 12 in week 37 of 2021. Thanks to preparations already being made by the NHS to intrude on education in schools and administer the jab to children the programme got underway the following week (week 38). Official Office for National Statistics (ONS) data shows that between week 38 and week 40, the five-year-average number of deaths occurring among children aged between 10 and 14 was 17. However, the latest data available from the ONS shows that between week 38 and week 40, the number of deaths occurring among children aged between 10 and 14 was 26. This represents a 52% increase on the five-year average.

Sixteen of those deaths were among boys, representing a 60% increase on the five-year-average in which there had been 10 deaths among boys between week 38 and week 40. Whilst 10 of those deaths were among girls, representing a 43% increase on the five-year-average in which there had been 7 deaths among girls between week 38 and week 40. What’s even more concerning about the above numbers though is that deaths among children aged between 10 and 14 were significantly lower than the five-year-average up to the point Chris Whitty advised the Government to offer all children over the age of 12 a Covid-19 vaccine.

Official Office for National Statistics (ONS) data shows that between week 1 and week 37, the five-year-average number of deaths occurring among children aged between 10 and 14 was 207. However, the 2021 dataset from the ONS shows that between week 1 and week 37 of 2021 there were just 178 deaths among children aged between 10 and 14. This means deaths among children aged week 10 and 14 were 14% down on the five-year-average prior to being offered the Covid-19 injection.

However, it is known that children deemed to be vulnerable to Covid-19 due to certain underlying conditions were already being offered a Covid-19 injection prior to Chris Whitty’s decision to overrule the JCVI and offer the jab to all healthy children. [..] we assessed the numbers from the ONS five-year-average dataset on deaths (found here) and the ONS 2021 dataset on deaths and discovered that there had also been a notable increase in deaths among children since vulnerable kids had first been given the Covid-19 vaccine. We’ve compiled the following table on the ONS data:

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Child Deaths Are 52% Higher?! Let’s jab all the kids.

White House Details Plan To “Quickly” Vaccinate 28M Children Age 5-11 (ZH)

The Biden administration on Wednesday unveiled its plan to ‘quickly’ vaccinate roughly 28 million children age 5-11, pending authorization from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The jab – which doesn’t prevent transmission of Covid-19 will be available at pediatricians, local pharmacies, and possibly even at schools, according to the White House, which expects FDA authorization of the Pfizer shot for children – the least likely to fall seriously ill or die from the virus, in a matter of weeks, according to the Associated Press. “Federal regulators will meet over the next two weeks to weigh the benefits of giving shots to kids, after lengthy studies meant to ensure the safety of the vaccines. Within hours of formal approval, expected after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisory meeting scheduled for Nov. 2-3, doses will begin shipping to providers across the country, along with smaller needles necessary for injecting young kids, and within days will be ready to go into the arms of kids on a wide scale”. -AP


According to the announcement, the White House has secured enough to supply more than 25,000 doses for pediatricians and primary care physicians who have already signed up to deliver the vaccine, while the country now has enough Pfizer vaccine to jab roughly 28 million kids who will soon be eligible, meaning this won’t be a slow roll-out like we saw 10 months ago when doses and capacity issues meant adults had to wait. Meanwhile, the White House is rolling out an ‘advertising’ campaign to convince parents and kids that the vaccine is safe and effective. According to the report, “the administration believes trusted messengers — educators, doctors, and community leaders — will be vital to encouraging vaccinations.” “COVID has also disrupted our kids lives. It’s made school harder, it’s disrupted their ability to see friends and family, it’s made youth sports more challenging,” said surgeon general Dr. Vivek Murthy in a Wednesday statement to NBC. “Getting our kids vaccinated, we have the prospect of protecting them, but also getting all of those activities back that are so important to our children.”

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Why jab the kids? Well…

Pfizer, Moderna to Rake in $93 Billion in 2022 COVID Vaccine Sales (CHD)

Vaccine makers Pfizer and Moderna are projected to generate combined sales of $93.2 billion in 2022 nearly twice the amount they’re expected to rake in this year, said Airfinity, a health data analytics group. Airfinity put total market sales for COVID vaccines in 2022 at $124 billion, according to the Financial Times. Pfizer vaccine sales are predicted to reach $54.5 billion in 2022, and Moderna’s will hit $38.7 billion. The estimates blow the earlier figures — $23.6 billion for Pfizer and $20 billion for Moderna — out of the water. “The numbers are unprecedented,” Rasmus Beck Hansen, CEO of Airfinity, told the Financial Times. Sales of the mRNA shots will continue to rise in 2022 due to boosters and countries stockpiling to ward off variants, Airfinity said.

Pfizer will generate 64% of its sales, and Moderna 75% of its sales, from high-income countries in 2022, the analysts predicted. In April, Pfizer predicted 2021 COVID vaccine sales of $26 billion. After second-quarter results were reported, Pfizer upped the figure to $33.5 billion. Bernstein analyst Ronny Gal said the company could ring up an additional $10 billion in vaccine sales in 2021. Gal wrote: “The numbers are going to be much higher. The guidance of $33.5B reflects contracts signed to today which reflect total commitment to sell 2.1 million doses (at average price of $15.95). Pfizer notes they expect to manufacture 3 million doses. Presumably much of those will be sold as well, albeit at lower average price as consumption shifts to emerging markets. This is probably another $10 billion.”

“The second quarter was remarkable in a number of ways,” Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said. “Most visibly, the speed and efficiency of our efforts with BioNTech to help vaccinate the world against COVID-19 have been unprecedented, with now more than a billion doses of BNT162b2 having been delivered globally.” On a conference call, Bourla said that while “it’s very early to speak” about the company’s sales expectations for next year, he put Pfizer’s 2022 production capacity at 4 billion doses.

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“..mRNA jabs’ initially higher number of antibodies “declines sharply” over the same period..”

Adenovirus Covid-19 Vaccine Shows Lower But ‘Stable’ Immunity (RT)

Different effects of the world’s Covid injection types are revealed in new study that shines light on ‘Adenovirus v mRNA’ debate The one-shot adenovirus J&J Covid-19 vaccine provides stable but low-level immunity that stays for months, a new study has found, while mRNA jabs’ initially higher number of antibodies “declines sharply” over the same period. An immune response induced by Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen adenovirus vaccine appears to show “minimal-to-no evidence of decline” over eight months, the fresh study in the US reports, detailing the dynamics of the antibody response in the “follow-up period” after immunizations with each of the three American vaccines.

Apparently, Pfizer and Moderna cannot boast a similar durability in their mRNA vaccines’ efficacy, the study shows. Antibody titer levels (a term of measurement) elicited by both of them tend to decline “sharply by six months after vaccination” and fall even further by eight months, according to the data collected by the specialists from the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The two mRNA vaccines apparently still greatly outperform the one-shot Johnson & Johnson jab during the “peak immunity” period, between two and four weeks after full immunization, the study admits. In the long run, however, they quickly lose their sizeable lead in efficacy and eventually land at the same antibody response level as that of the Johnson & Johnson jab based on the adenovirus vector principle – the same as the ones used by the UK’s AstraZeneca and by Russia’s Sputnik V.

The study also demonstrated that the Johnson & Johnson jab supposedly even somewhat outperforms both mRNA vaccines when it comes to antibody responses eight months after full immunization. Its live-virus neutralizing antibody response and a certain type of T-cell response appeared to be higher than those of Pfizer and Moderna jabs at that time. Whether it is indeed better in the long run is difficult to ascertain, though, since the data obtained from just over 60 participants, including only eight immunized with a Johnson & Johnson jab, appear to be somewhat “lacking,” Maxim Skulachev, a leading research associate at the Belozersky Institute at Moscow State University (MSU), believes.

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“..a marked reduction of 93% of released virion and 99.98% unreleased virion levels upon administration of IVM..”

Repositioning Ivermectin For Covid-19 Treatment (SD)

Drug repositioning is a useful and effective idea for Covid-19 antiviral discovery. • Ivermectin has proven effective for HIV-1, Adenovirus, Influenza virus, SARS-CoV, and many more, in the past.• Due to genomic similarity between SARS-CoV-2 and the SARS-CoV, the role of the IMPα/β1 complex for viral protein (NSP12-RdRp) shuttling between the nucleus and cytoplasm holds great potential. • Ivermectin also exhibits great potential in reducing SARS-CoV-2 viral replication via numerous modes of action, such as the disruption of the Importin heterodimer complex (IMPα/β1)

Ivermectin (IVM) is an FDA approved macrocyclic lactone compound traditionally used to treat parasitic infestations and has shown to have antiviral potential from previous in-vitro studies. Currently, IVM is commercially available as a veterinary drug but have also been applied in humans to treat onchocerciasis (river blindness – a parasitic worm infection) and strongyloidiasis (a roundworm/nematode infection). In light of the recent pandemic, the repurposing of IVM to combat SARS-CoV-2 has acquired significant attention. Recently, IVM has been proven effective in numerous in-silico and molecular biology experiments against the infection in mammalian cells and human cohort studies. One promising study had reported a marked reduction of 93% of released virion and 99.98% unreleased virion levels upon administration of IVM to Vero-hSLAM cells.

IVM’s mode of action centres around the inhibition of the cytoplasmic-nuclear shuttling of viral proteins by disrupting the Importin heterodimer complex (IMPα/β1) and downregulating STAT3, thereby effectively reducing the cytokine storm. Furthermore, the ability of IVM to block the active sites of viral 3CLpro and S protein, disrupts important machinery such as viral replication and attachment. This review compiles all the molecular evidence to date, in review of the antiviral characteristics exhibited by IVM. Thereafter, we discuss IVM’s mechanism and highlight the clinical advantages that could potentially contribute towards disabling the viral replication of SARS-CoV-2. In summary, the collective review of recent efforts suggests that IVM has a prophylactic effect and would be a strong candidate for clinical trials to treat SARS-CoV-2.

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“The FDA waits for a deep-pocketed sponsor to present a comprehensive package that justifies the approval of a new drug or a new use of an existing drug.”

The FDA’s War Against The Truth On Ivermectin (AIER)

The FDA judges all drugs as guilty until proven, to the FDA’s satisfaction, both safe and efficacious. By what process does this happen? The FDA waits for a deep-pocketed sponsor to present a comprehensive package that justifies the approval of a new drug or a new use of an existing drug. For a drug like ivermectin, long since generic, a sponsor may never show up. The reason is not that the drug is ineffective; rather, the reason is that any expenditures used to secure approval for that new use will help other generic manufacturers that haven’t invested a dime. Due to generic drug substitution rules at pharmacies, Merck could spend millions of dollars to get a Covid-19 indication for ivermectin and then effectively get zero return. What company would ever make that investment?

With no sponsor, there is no new FDA-approved indication and, therefore, no official recognition of ivermectin’s value. Was the FDA’s warning against ivermectin based on science? No. It was based on process. Like a typical bureaucrat, the FDA won’t recommend the use of ivermectin because, while it might help patients, such a recommendation would violate its processes. The FDA needs boxes checked off in the right order. If a sponsor never shows up and the boxes aren’t checked off, the FDA’s standard approach is to tell Americans to stay away from the drug because it might be dangerous or ineffective. Sometimes the FDA is too enthusiastic and these warnings are, frankly, alarming. Guilty until proven innocent.

There are two reasons that Merck would warn against ivermectin usage, essentially throwing its own drug under the bus. Once they are marketed, doctors can prescribe drugs for uses not specifically approved by the FDA. Such usage is called off-label. Using ivermectin for Covid-19 is considered off-label because that use is not specifically listed on ivermectin’s FDA-approved label. While off-label prescribing is widespread and completely legal, it is illegal for a pharmaceutical company to promote that use. Doctors can use drugs for off-label uses and drug companies can supply them with product. But heaven forbid that companies encourage, support, or promote off-label prescribing. The fines for doing so are outrageous.

During a particularly vigorous two-year period, the Justice Department collected over $6 billion from drug companies for off-label promotion cases. Merck’s lawyers haven’t forgotten that lesson. Another reason for Merck to discount ivermectin’s efficacy is a result of marketing strategy. Ivermectin is an old, cheap, off-patent drug. Merck will never make much money from ivermectin sales. Drug companies aren’t looking to spruce up last year’s winners; they want new winners with long patent lives. Not coincidentally, Merck recently released the clinical results for its new Covid-19 fighter, molnupiravir, which has shown a 50% reduction in the risk of hospitalization and death among high-risk, unvaccinated adults. Analysts are predicting multi-billion-dollar sales for molnupiravir.

While we can all be happy that Merck has developed a new therapeutic that can keep us safe from the ravages of Covid-19, we should realize that the FDA’s rules give companies an incentive to focus on newer drugs while ignoring older ones. Ivermectin may or may not be a miracle drug for Covid-19. The FDA doesn’t want us to learn the truth. The FDA spreads lies and alarms Americans while preventing drug companies from providing us with scientific explorations of existing, promising, generic drugs.

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“..The former officers laid their boots and hats on the steps of the Capitol building in a stunt meant to represent “what the state’s lost..“

Washington State Patrol Staff Shortage, Officers Quit Over Vaccine Mandate (RT)

Some 127 Washington State Patrol employees, more than half of them officers, were terminated after a vaccination deadline passed this week, with the force now bracing for staff shortage in critical areas and major costs. 74 commissioned officers – including 67 troopers, six sergeants and a captain – as well as 53 civil servants were “separated from employment” as they missed the October 18 deadline to provide proof of vaccination, the Washington State Patrol (WSP) reported earlier this week. The WSP stated that the employees quit the force “for varying reasons and in varying ways,” with chief John R. Batiste declaring that “we will miss every one of them.” “I extend a hardy thanks to those who are leaving the agency. I truly wish that you were staying with us,” he said.

The mass exodus from the 2,200-strong force is set to put a strain on the depleted ranks. Speaking to the Oregonian, WSP spokesman Chris Loftis said that in some cases, such as vehicle collisions that result in no casualties or obstruction to traffic, the affected drivers might be told to figure out the incident on their own and “clear the area rather than wait for a trooper to show up,” as would happen under normal circumstances Some employees fired over the vaccine requirement successfully received exemptions from the order, but that did not prevent them from being terminated. Loftis said that over 400 people were granted such exemptions, but not all of them were offered alternative employment due to the nature of the agency’s work. Still, he stressed that the 74 troopers that were effectively forced out “were people that we knew and cared about.”

This wasn’t a situation where 74 troopers left one day because they did something bad – they left in standing opposition to the vaccine mandate, based on their personal principles and convictions. Some of the terminated troopers turned out at the state Capitol on Tuesday in a symbolic protest against the mandate. The former officers laid their boots and hats on the steps of the Capitol building in a stunt meant to represent “what the state’s lost,” one of the participants, ex-trooper Bill Jordan, told local media. Jordan claimed that he received a religious exemption from the mandate, but WSP failed to accommodate him regardless. While Loftis said that the agency would step up its recruitment efforts by filling up new academy classes, the training of would-be troopers will come with a hefty price tag.

It is estimated that the mass exodus could cost taxpayers some $12.4 million, as about $168,000 per year is needed to train just a single cadet – the WSP has lost 67. The Washington State Patrol has not been the only agency to see resistance from state employees to compulsory vaccination orders. More than 1,800 workers in Washington state have been fired, resigned or retired due to the mandate, according to official data released on Tuesday. This amounts to about 3% of the state’s workforce that falls under the mandate, and those numbers could yet rise, as the cases of some 2,887 state employees are still pending.

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“They don’t have to. They have friends in the White House.”

Why Are Thousands Of Postal Workers Still Unvaxxed? (WND)

After spending several futile hours rummaging through media accounts and the United States Postal Service (USPS) website, I still had no answer to the question I set out to address: Are postal workers subject to a vaccine mandate? Wanting the straight skinny, I decided not to call USPS headquarters but to visit a facility and talk to the workers loading and unloading mail. To my good fortune I found a well-spoken, straightforward supervisor who told me, through his mask, what I wanted to know. “We are encouraged to get vaccinated, but we do not face a vaccine mandate like the military does,” he volunteered. “But,” he added helpfully, “we do have an indoor mask mandate.”

Two questions emerge from this encounter. The first is: Why are postal workers exempt from a mandate that is stripping other public service entities, including the military, of thousands of needed personnel? The second, why did I have to ask a postal worker to get the truth? The answer to the second question is the easier of the two – the media don’t want you to know. In mid-September there was a flurry of questions around the status of the USPS. On Sept. 16, the USA Today fact checker put those questions to rest. On that same day, the USPS put out an impressively ambiguous statement on COVID-19 vaccines. After much self-serving blather about the hard work of its 650,000 employees, management concluded:

“We are working closely with our union leadership so that once OSHA’s COVID-19 Vaccination Emergency Temporary Standard (ETS) is issued we can move quickly to determine its applicability to our employees and how best to implement.” Translation: “We are in no big hurry.” The ETS represents the fulfillment of President Joe Biden’s COVID-19 Action Plan announced on Sept. 9. The OSHA ETS runs a perversely long 44 pages and includes any number of useless admonitions, such as: “An employer with one or more employees working in a physical location controlled by another employer must notify the controlling employer when those employees are exposed to conditions at that location that do not meet the requirements of this section.”

On Oct. 12, OSHA submitted the ETS to the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs for approval, which is where it stands as of this writing. USPS brass might argue that their hands are tied until the OSHA ETS is formalized, but unlike many private and public employers, they are making no obvious efforts to prepare their workers for this eventuality. They don’t have to. They have friends in the White House.

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“People go too far these days in taking the liberty to ask questions and judge a person. “Whatever you say – ‘yes, no, maybe, I am thinking about it’ – they will take advantage.”

Djokovic Claims It Would Be ‘Inappropriate’ To Say If He Is Vaccinated (RT)

Novak Djokovic says people are “taking the liberty” to ask questions about vaccine status and “judge a person”, speaking as an Australian head of government warned that unvaccinated players will face a struggle to receive visas. World number one Djokovic has repeatedly expressed his reservations about players being pressured to take a Covid jab, and the reigning Australian Open champion insists his decision is a “private matter” amid a string of controversies surrounding the likes of NBA star Kyrie Irving, who has been left out by the Brooklyn Nets because he is not vaccinated. Djokovic rival Stefanos Tsitsipas found himself at the center of a political row after he made a wide range of remarks about Covid and vaccines, and the Greek – whose own government seemed to distance themselves from views which appeared to include a suggestion that spreading the virus could have positive effects – now appears to be willing to be vaccinated.


Russian contender Andrey Rublev has become the latest player to drop their apparent reluctance because of the logistical issues not being vaccinated could cause, but Djokovic is yet to openly say he has had the treatment. “Things being as they are, I still don’t know if I will go to Melbourne,” Djokovic told Blic, speaking ahead of a first Grand Slam of the year in January which is likely to take place under tight restrictions. “I will not reveal my status, whether I have been vaccinated or not – it is a private matter and an inappropriate inquiry. “People go too far these days in taking the liberty to ask questions and judge a person. “Whatever you say – ‘yes, no, maybe, I am thinking about it’ – they will take advantage.”

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“If you mandate, as a private employer, “vaccination” against Covid-19 any and all adverse events as a result of said jabs are now chargeable to you..”

Dewey, Cheat’em And Howe (Denninger)

Oh, you’re a woke-poke employer eh? You think hiding behind OSHA — or the threat to issue a mandate by the government — in some way prevents you from being liable for injuries and/or deaths related to the vaccines? Uh, how would you like to defend that position in court given all of the following are true: The PREP act has no provision giving you legal immunity and cannot be amended by executive order as it is law, so you would need both houses of Congress to pass such a thing — and they have not. The producing firms and health care providers are immune from damages under that same PREP Act. Therefore under the general principle of joint and several liability guess who gets all of it: You do. You could have tried to claim that the Federal Government refused liability (and got away with it) for direct employees, and that would have been a pretty decent argument….. except, oops, that just went up in a puff of smoke.

“The Federal Employees’ Compensation Act (FECA) covers injuries that occur in the performance of duty. The FECA does not generally authorize provision of preventive measures such as vaccines and inoculations, and in general, preventive treatment is a responsibility of the employing agency under the provisions of 5 U.S.C. 7901. However, care can be authorized by OWCP for complications of preventive measures which are provided or sponsored by the agency, such as adverse reaction to prophylactic immunization. See PM 3-0400.7(a). Further, deleterious effects of medical services furnished by the employing establishment are generally considered to fall within the performance of duty. These services include preventive programs relating to health. See PM 2-0804.19. However, this executive order now makes COVID-19 vaccination a requirement of most Federal employment. As such, employees impacted by this mandate who receive required COVID-19 vaccinations on or after the date of the executive order may be afforded coverage under the FECA for any adverse reactions to the vaccine itself, and for any injuries sustained while obtaining the vaccination.”

Oops. If you mandate, as a private employer, “vaccination” against Covid-19 any and all adverse events as a result of said jabs are now chargeable to you, as the Federal Government itself has deemed that “mandated” vaccinations are indeed injuries that occurred while performing the job in question, irrespective of where the jab took place. Oh by the way your insurance firm has likely inserted a “pandemic exemption” into your liability coverage. That’s shown up in a whole lot of those policies over the last year or so, and it’s odds-on that’s the case for you as well. Incidentally there is plenty of evidence that these jabs will be eventually found to be responsible for a whole host of serious problems, and those do not end within a couple of weeks of the jab itself.

Indeed, the evidence is mounting rapidly (see the all-cause “excess death” rates for various age groups, particularly cardiac and circulatory related, among young people now showing up in places like Scotland and England for examples) that there is a causal link between both strokes and heart attacks. I remind you that the FDA and pharmaceutical industry claimed, not all that long ago, that no such link existed for Vioxx. It was only after about 60,000 Americans had heart attacks and died, and several hundred thousand had non-fatal heart problems caused by it, that it was withdrawn from the market — five years later. Moderna and Pfizer may be immune from lawsuit but you are not, and further, the precedent by the Federal Government itself now exists based on their own public statement that if an employee gets screwed by the jab you demanded they take you’re on the hook whether that injury is evident five minutes afterward or five years later. Good luck *******s; you just got ****ed and it couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch.

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“..one somehow feels bad for Hunter Biden. He’s not just a wreck, but a wreck with spectacularly bad luck.”

“The Bidens”: Is the First Family Corrupt, or Merely Crazy? (Taibbi)

Schreckinger is young, and The Bidens was clearly written in a bit of a hurry, but he’s a skilled storyteller. The initial framing is clever, with a first first chapter titled, “Chekhov’s Laptop,” a reference to Russian playwright’s famous dictum that “if in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired.” Having primed the reader to look for that metaphorical gun on the wall, he opens with a scene that’s bananas even by the outré standards of first son Hunter Biden’s “tumultuous” life. Hunter in October of 2018 had gotten in an argument with his then-girlfriend, Hallie, who according to the funhouse physics of the first family was of course the widow of his late brother Beau.

In the course of that dispute, Hallie had taken his .38 revolver and thrown it out of Hunter’s pickup truck (a pickup truck?) into a trash can outside “Janssen’s, a high-end grocery store near Wilmington the family had long frequented.” When Hunter found out the gun was gone, he chivalrously sent Hallie back into the trash to get it. This turns out to be the first of many moments in The Bidens where despite a seemingly tireless instinct for indulgent selfishness, and a maximally unattractive profile as the coddled scion of political privilege, one somehow feels bad for Hunter Biden. He’s not just a wreck, but a wreck with spectacularly bad luck. In this case, not only has his dead brother’s widow taken advantage of his trusting nature and thrown away his pistol (the one a person with his recreational leanings probably shouldn’t have anyway, but does, and moreover has left unattended), she picked the one bin that’s both across the street from a high school and in a spot where an old man hunting for recyclables somehow finds it.

Now the thing is missing and poor Hunter, who if nothing else has a keen sense of his own potential for disaster, must be imagining the worst, which in his family is likely a headline: Boy, 13, Uses Gun Registered to Dickhead Senator’s Son to Kill Parents, Neighbor, Dog, Self. The Delaware State Police are called, the FBI for some instantly suspicious reason also shows up, the Secret Service also reportedly appears at the store where Hunter bought the gun (I say reportedly because the Secret Service denies this, the first of many details in The Bidens that ends up receding in a fog of conflicting accounts), and the ATF even makes an appearance. The gun was eventually found after a few days, when the old man turned it in. By that point Hunter had already skipped town and begun setting in motion a preposterous chain of events that have ramifications in national politics to the present day.

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If a country is not capable of digging up the truth in matters like this (and the Bidens), it is a failed nation.

Hillary’s Secretive, Russiagate-Flogging Pair of Super-Lawyers (Maté)

The indictment of Hillary Clinton lawyer Michael Sussmann for allegedly lying to the FBI sheds new light on the pivotal role of Democratic operatives in the Russiagate affair. The emerging picture shows Sussmann and his Perkins Coie colleague Marc Elias, the chief counsel for Clinton’s 2016 campaign, proceeding on parallel, coordinated tracks to solicit and spread disinformation tying Donald Trump to the Kremlin. In a detailed charging document last month, Special Counsel John Durham accused Sussmann of concealing his work for the Clinton campaign while trying to sell the FBI on the false claim of a secret Trump backchannel to Russia’s Alfa Bank. But Sussmann’s alleged false statement to the FBI in September 2016 wasn’t all. Just months before, he helped generate an even more consequential Russia allegation that he also brought to the FBI.

In April of that year, Sussmann hired CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm that publicly triggered the Russiagate saga by lodging the still unproven claim that Russia was behind the hack of Democratic National Committee emails released by WikiLeaks. At the time, CrowdStrike was not the only Clinton campaign contractor focusing on Russia. Just days before Sussmann hired CrowdStrike in April, his partner Elias retained the opposition research firm Fusion GPS to dig up dirt on Trump and the Kremlin. These two Clinton campaign contractors, working directly for two Clinton campaign attorneys, would go on to play highly consequential roles in the ensuing multi-year Russia investigation. Working secretly for the Clinton campaign, Fusion GPS planted Trump-Russia conspiracy theories in the FBI and US media via its subcontractor, former British spy Christopher Steele.

The FBI used the Fusion GPS’s now debunked “Steele dossier” for investigative leads and multiple surveillance applications putatively targeting Trump campaign volunteer Carter Page. CrowdStrike, reporting to Sussmann, also proved critical to the FBI’s work. Rather than examine the DNC servers for itself, the FBI relied on CrowdStrike’s forensics as mediated by Sussmann. The FBI’s odd relationship with the two Democratic Party contractors gave Sussmann and Elias unprecedented influence over a high-stakes national security scandal that upended U.S. politics and ensnared their political opponents. By hiring CrowdStrike and Fusion GPS, the Perkins Coie lawyers helped define the Trump-Russia narrative and impact the flow of information to the highest reaches of U.S. intelligence agencies.

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“Libyans enjoyed free healthcare, free education, and a high standard of living.”

“We came, we saw, he died,” she said.

The Killing Of Gaddafi 10 Years Ago Led To The Death Of The Nation Of Libya (RT)

During his 42 years in power, he increased the country’s literacy rate from 25% to 88%. Libyans enjoyed free healthcare, free education, and a high standard of living. Basic necessities such as electricity and gas were cheap, and the country was guaranteed a strong social safety net and welfare programs. Libya is 90% desert. Gaddafi sought to provide fresh water to all Libyans for consumption and agriculture – an endeavor in which he succeeded. He built the world’s largest irrigation project, the ‘Great Man-Made River’ in the 1980s. Boasting the world’s largest pipe network, it provides 70% of all the fresh water in Libya. Gaddafi called it the “Eighth Wonder of the World”. Costing over $25 billion, the project was entirely self-financed, without any loans or credits from foreign banks. Libya had grown to be a very wealthy country and had no external debt. NATO bombed the Great Man-Made River in July 2011, destroying key civilian infrastructure: a war crime.

[..] Instead of an abundance of water, gold and oil in a thriving country with great infrastructure, Libya now has open slave-trade markets. Smugglers and human traffickers take advantage of migrants and refugees passing through to Europe, selling them off into bondage. Rival tribes and political factions fight over oil and other precious resources, determined to seize power for themselves. Meanwhile, pockets of Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS), Al-Qaeda and other jihadist fighters lurk in the shadows, plaguing the war-torn country and its neighbors – groups who wouldn’t have dared establish a presence in Gaddafi’s Libya. Once a prosperous nation, since his fall, it has been taken over by terrorists, opportunists and thieves, and has plunged into chaos. This is what has become of Libya these last 10 years. This is what NATO created.

[..] In the 1970s, he tried to merge Libya with Egypt and Syria to form a unified Arab state. In 2009, he proposed that African nations adopt a single currency: the gold dinar. The Libyan Central Bank, which was 100% state-owned, had reserves of 144 tons of gold that he intended to use for this purpose. Gaddafi proposed that African countries buy and sell their resources exclusively in this new pan-African currency. This would enable them to transition away from the US dollar and the Central Africa (CFA) franc – a colonial currency used in 14 countries and controlled entirely by France. This was Gaddafi’s biggest sin. In wanting African nations to adopt a single currency, to control their own resources and have true independence, he posed a threat to Western monetary hegemony, so he had to go.

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