Feb 032022
 


James McNeill Whistler Arrangement in Pink, Red and Purple 1883-4

 

Deliberate Infections Give Unique Covid Insight (BBC)
Letter From NHS Clinical Scientist Who is Quitting Over the Covid Vaccines (DS)
Has The Red Carpet Been Rolled Out For A Mainstream Pivot On Ivermectin? (QTR)
New Zealand To End Quarantine Stays And Reopen Its Borders (Fox)
US Truckers Got Booted Off Of Facebook (Kirsch)
Facebook Stock In Free-fall (RT)
Ukraine Invasion No Longer ‘Imminent’ – White House (RT)
Russia Condemns Destructive US Troops Boost In Europe (BBC)
America’s Putin Psychosis (Ritter)
Don’t Blame Putin for Europe’s Energy Crisis (FP)
Why Is Trust In Media Plummeting? Just Look At What’s Happening At CNN (G.)
World Leaders Support Joe Rogan (RT)
MPs Push For Julian Assange To Be Granted Political Asylum In France (EN)

 

 

 

 

PCR “We have built this crisis with this new definition of “cases”.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1488981740303572993

 

 

The 10 billion, 90%-efficacy vaccine shots have caused the noticeable trend break downwards.

 

 

Bunch of idiots

 

 

 

 

ADP predicts huge job losses. Watch tomorrow.

Dave Collum: ”The job market is not tight, it’s broken.”

 

 

1/ The fact that Imperial College did such a study tells you they KNEW no-one was going to die. You can’t take that risk, even if they volunteer. 2/ It was an early version of the virus, which a/ no longer exists, and b/ was 10-100x more lethal than Omicron. And they still already knew there would be no deaths.

Deliberate Infections Give Unique Covid Insight (BBC)

The world’s first Covid “challenge trial” – which deliberately infected people – gives a unique view on the early stages of the disease. The virus was given to 36 young, healthy and unvaccinated volunteers, at the Royal Free hospital, in London. The results show where and when the virus takes hold in the body – and that some resist the infection. Future challenge trials could help find the next generation of Covid vaccines and drugs. They allow scientists to study the earliest stages of an infection, even before symptoms develop. Each of the volunteers, aged 18-30, had an identical dose of Covid – equivalent to the amount in a single droplet propelled out of somebody’s nose during the peak of their Covid infection – squirted up their nose. But only half of them became infected.

And understanding how the others – unvaccinated and without immunity from previous infections – resisted the virus will be the focus of future research. In those that did develop an infection, the virus took off rapidly, the first symptoms and positive test results appearing within just 42 hours. The previous consensus had been it took five days from exposure to the virus to first symptoms. And while the virus takes a foothold in the throat, the greatest amount was found when it moved up to the nose, leading the researchers to stress the importance of facemasks covering both. “It’s a really unique study,” Prof Christopher Chiu, from the Institute of Infection, at Imperial College London, said.

The amount of virus peaked about five days after the infection and remained detectable up to 12 days later. Symptoms were mild but some volunteers had a prolonged loss of their sense of smell. Prof Chiu said: “Lateral flow tests correlate very well with the presence of infectious virus. “Even though in the first day or two they may be less sensitive, if you use them correctly and repeatedly, and act on them if they read positive, this will have a major impact on interrupting viral spread.” The virus used was an early variant taken from a patient at the start of the pandemic. Further studies will explore more recent versions.

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The damage to healthcare will last for a long time.

“.. I know which doctors I will trust when all this is over.”

Letter From NHS Clinical Scientist Who is Quitting Over the Covid Vaccines (DS)

“[..] a letter from an NHS Clinical Scientist of some 25 years – currently employed at an NHS University Hospital Trust but who has just resigned – to Health Secretary Sajid Javid to tell him why she is quitting over the complicity of the health service in the national scandal that is the Covid vaccine rollout.”

A core principle in healthcare is to ensure that patients are given free access to all information, to enable them to make a proper and informed choice about any treatment. As a scientist, I have been and still am gravely concerned about the Government and NHS misrepresentation of these vaccines as ‘safe and effective’ – a mantra still promoted by our Government and media, despite the overwhelming evidence demonstrating otherwise of the MHRA Yellow Card scheme and worldwide databases for reporting adverse effects. Worryingly, the great majority of GPs have not being raising awareness of this scheme, leading to significant under-reporting and, consequently, under-estimation of the actual situation.

I personally have spoken to people who, after experiencing bad reactions to the first dose, have been encouraged by doctors to continue regardless and take the second, with serious consequences for their health. They had never heard of the MHRA Yellow Card scheme and wouldn’t know how to make a report. Misinformation starts from the seniors: I have been told (in writing) by Human Resources senior staff at my hospital that that vaccines have been “licensed”, genuinely oblivious to the fact that MHRA has granted only emergency approval. I have been appalled by the NHS willingness to trample over the concept of personalised medicine in the promotion of products still in phase three trials. There has been no stratified analysis of the balance of risks and benefits.

No scientific reference to real data from the pandemic statistics nor to those of the adverse effects – deaths and life-limiting injuries – reported globally. No mention of the unavailability of medium and long term safety data, which may not be relevant for the elderly but it certainly is for the young. No information about alternative treatments. This is not the NHS I joined and embraced. Primum non nocere: first, do no harm. Equally important is the right to bodily autonomy, including the right to refuse any treatment or medication. Enshrined in law for the protection of all human beings, this core principle extends to everybody, patients and healthcare staff alike. The Government mandate, offering NHS workers the alternative between taking an experimental product against their best judgement or lose their livelihood, can hardly be portrayed as ‘free choice’.

I hope it is clear that the motivation of NHS staff across all professions in resisting this coercion is founded on ethical grounds. Doctors, nurses, pharmacists, clinical scientists – we all feel that our integrity would be compromised, that the fundamental principle of trust, at the core of our unique relationship with the patients we serve, would be irreparably transgressed; and that this erosion of professional ethics would carry the inherent danger of establishing coercion as an acceptable practice in future, with NHS staff imposing procedures on patients against their will – the victim becoming the perpetrator. From a patient prospective, I know which doctors I will trust when all this is over.

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“Duh, of course ivermectin works and we’ve known it all along, it just doesn’t work as well as [insert big pharma drug here]”

Has The Red Carpet Been Rolled Out For A Mainstream Pivot On Ivermectin? (QTR)

I couldn’t help but think when this Japanese study popped up yesterday that the timing sure would be convenient now for the mainstream media to start a pivot on ivermectin. Now that Moderna has received official FDA approval for its vaccine and Pfizer is happily seeking Emergency Use Authorization to jab kids as young as 6 months – and now that major drug manufacturers have had their antiviral Covid pills approved – maybe it can finally be time to pump the brakes on the ivermectin hysteria and allow the truth and reason to nudge their way in. In other words, the fat pigs are finally finished stuffing their gluttonous faces at the trough of the FDA, stocked with newly-printed U.S. dollars.

Unable to physically consume anymore, and noticing that all but a few molecules of feed are even left, they can now reluctantly relinquish their positions at the front of the line and waddle away, leaving the rest of the animals a chance to squabble over the remains. All of the major pharmaceutical companies (and their lobbyists) finally getting the approvals that they want for all of their Covid drugs may roll out the red carpet for us to finally embrace reality and the truth, which I believe is that ivermectin has efficacy. What we’re seeing now in the media is a massive pivot regarding Covid. With the emergence of omicron and many geographic locations around the world lifting their Covid restrictions – and most notably politicians understanding they can’t win an election by locking us in our home [..] the media pivot on Covid has been pronounced since 2022 began.

And not unlike the pivot we’ve already seen on the lab leak and whether or not vaccines would end the virus, I’m expecting we see a similar pivot on ivermectin. Of course, I could be wrong. I don’t mind being wrong. I exist on the fringe, as my readers know. In the words of Peter Venkman: “If I’m wrong, nothing happens! We go to jail – peacefully, quietly. We’ll enjoy it!” But if I’m not…and the narrative on ivermectin does in fact change to wind up as “Duh, of course ivermectin works and we’ve known it all along, it just doesn’t work as well as [insert big pharma drug here]” everybody responsible for suppressing over the last 2 years needs to be held accountable for what, in my opinion, may wind up amounting to crimes against humanity.

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Pointless and endless.

New Zealand To End Quarantine Stays And Reopen Its Borders (Fox)

New Zealand’s government on Thursday said it will end its quarantine requirements for incoming travelers and reopen its borders, a change welcomed by thousands of citizens abroad who have endured long waits to return home. Since the start of the pandemic, New Zealand has enacted some of the world’s strictest border controls. Most incoming travelers need to spend 10 days in a quarantine hotel room run by the military, a requirement that has created a bottleneck at the border. The measures were initially credited with saving thousands of lives and allowed New Zealand to eliminate or control several outbreaks of the coronavirus.

But, increasingly, the border controls have been viewed as out-of-step in a world where the virus is becoming endemic, and in a country where the omicron variant is already spreading. The bottleneck forced many New Zealanders abroad to enter a lottery-style system to try and secure a spot in quarantine and passage home. The shortcomings of the system were highlighted over the past week by pregnant New Zealand journalist Charlotte Bellis, who was stranded in Afghanistan after New Zealand officials initially rejected her application to return home to give birth. After international publicity, officials backed down and offered her a spot in quarantine, which she has accepted.

The border changes mean that vaccinated New Zealanders returning from Australia will no longer need to go into quarantine from the end of this month, and vaccinated New Zealanders returning from the rest of the world can skip quarantine by mid-March. They will still be required to isolate at home. However, most tourists will need to wait until October before they can enter the country without a quarantine stay. And anybody who isn’t vaccinated will still be required to go through quarantine.

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Why does Facebook need to get into this?

US Truckers Got Booted Off Of Facebook (Kirsch)

I just got off the phone with Brian Brase who is organizing the US truckers. He’ll be on the VSRF call tomorrow (register at vacsafety.org). They got kicked off of Facebook because Facebook said they violated their QAnon policy. I suggested Substack and Brian said, “What’s that?” So I suggested I might be able to help them find a group of people who could run the IT for them to provide the truckers and their supporters a way to communicate. If you have both the time and expertise to do this, please volunteer using this form and we’ll get these guys re-platformed ASAP.

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They lost $200 billion in market cap overnight.

Facebook Stock In Free-fall (RT)

Shares of Facebook’s parent company Meta went into a nosedive after the markets closed on Wednesday, following an underwhelming quarterly report, the first since CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the name change. The stock stood strong at $323 a share when the markets closed at 4 pm EST, but collapsed to $249 just half an hour later, for a loss of almost 23%. In just the first eleven minutes of after-hours trading, $16 billion in Meta’s market cap had been wiped out. What triggered the sell-off was Meta’s quarterly report showing lower revenue, earnings per share, and the numbers of daily and monthly active users than expected by investors.


Whereas the investors expected around $30.15 billion, Facebook’s figures showed $27-$29 billion, CNBC reported, citing a Refinitiv survey of market analysts. According to the same source, earnings per share came in at $3.67, short of the expected $3.84. The number of daily active users (DAU) stood at 1.93 billion, less than the expected 1.95 billion, while the monthly active users (MAU) also undershot the 2.95 expectation, ending up at 2.91 billion, according to Street Account. This is the first quarterly report since Zuckerberg announced his social media behemoth would be changing its name to Meta, to better represent its focus on the upcoming “metaverse” and encompass the existing Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp brands.

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Awkward walk back.

Ukraine Invasion No Longer ‘Imminent’ – White House (RT)

The US government is no longer using the word ‘imminent’ in its narrative around the alleged Russian ‘invasion’ of Ukraine, White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters, on Wednesday, explaining that it was sending an unintended message. “I used it once. I think others have used that once, and we stopped using it because I think it sent a message that we weren’t intending to send, which was that we knew that President Putin had made a decision,” Psaki said at a press briefing. “I would say the vast majority of times I’ve talked about it, I’ve said he could invade ‘at any time,’” she added. Psaki’s remarks come after the US envoy to the UN backtracked from the use of ‘imminent’ in an interview with NPR aired on Tuesday.


“No, I would not say that we are arguing that it’s imminent,” Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield told the broadcaster. The official transcript of Psaki’s January 25 briefing says otherwise, however. Asked whether the Russian invasion of Ukraine – which the US media and intelligence agencies have claimed since late October would happen any day now – was still “imminent,” here’s what Psaki had to say. “When we said it was imminent, it remains imminent,” she told one reporter. “Well, ‘imminent’ has a pretty intense meaning. Doesn’t it?” she said in answer to the very next question. “And it’s still the belief that it’s imminent?” was the followup, to which Psaki replied, “Correct.”

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3,000 troops vs 130,000 Russia?!

Russia Condemns Destructive US Troops Boost In Europe (BBC)

Russia has condemned a US decision to send extra troops to Europe to support its Nato allies amid continuing fears of a Russian invasion of Ukraine. Moscow said it was a “destructive” step which heightened tension and reduced the scope for a political solution. The Pentagon said 2,000 US troops would be sent from North Carolina to Poland and Germany, and a further 1,000 already in Germany would go to Romania. Russia has some 100,000 troops near Ukraine. It denies planning to invade. The tensions come eight years after Russia annexed Ukraine’s southern Crimea peninsula and backed a bloody rebellion in the eastern Donbas region.


Moscow accuses the Ukrainian government of failing to implement the Minsk agreement – an international deal to restore peace to the east, where Russian-backed rebels control swathes of territory and at least 14,000 people have been killed since 2014. Responding to US President Joe Biden’s decision to deploy extra troops to Europe this week, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko said it was a “destructive” and an “unjustified” step. Speaking on Wednesday, Mr Grushko added that it would “delight” the Ukrainian authorities, who would continue sabotaging the Minsk agreement “with impunity”. The Pentagon earlier said the American troops being deployed would not fight in Ukraine – but would ensure the defence of Washington’s allies. Their deployment is in addition to the 8,500 troops the Pentagon put on alert last month to be ready to deploy to Europe if needed.

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“They said one thing, they did another,” Putin said. “As people say, they screwed us over, well they simply deceived us.”

America’s Putin Psychosis (Ritter)

The war of words between Russia and the United States over Ukraine escalated further on Tuesday as Russian President Vladimir Putin responded for the first time to the U.S. written reply to Russia’s demands for security guarantees that were expressed in the form of a pair of draft treaties submitted by Moscow to the U.S. and NATO in December. “It is already clear…that the fundamental Russian concerns were ignored. We did not see an adequate consideration of our three key requirements,” Putin said at a press conference that followed his meeting with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban in Moscow.

Putin said the U.S. had failed to give “adequate consideration of our three key demands regarding NATO expansion, the renunciation of the deployment of strike weapons systems near Russian borders, and the return of the [NATO] bloc’s military infrastructure in Europe to the state of 1997, when the Russia-NATO founding act was signed.” He detailed what he alleged was NATO’s long history of deception, re-emphasizing the 1990 verbal commitment by former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker that NATO would not expand “an inch” eastward. “They said one thing, they did another,” Putin said. “As people say, they screwed us over, well they simply deceived us.”

With some 130,000 Russian troops deployed in the western and southern military districts bordering Ukraine, and another 30,000 assembling in neighboring Belarus, U.S. policy makers are scrambling to figure out what Russia’s next move might be, a choice most U.S. policy makers believe boils down to diplomacy or war. Rather than examine the situation from the perspective of Russian national security interests, however, these officials have placed the fate of European peace and security in the hands of a single individual: Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.

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“European natural gas topped $60 per million Btu, equivalent to an oil price of an astonishing $350 per barrel.”

Don’t Blame Putin for Europe’s Energy Crisis (FP)

Europe typically depends on Russia for more than one-third of its natural gas use. Although Russia has been sending less to Europe this winter, it is fulfilling its long-term contractual commitments. The difference now is that it has all but cut off the additional supplies it usually sells on the spot market. If Russia were to cut or reduce contracted deliveries to Europe as well—which half a century of energy relations suggests is unlikely—it would be exceedingly difficult and expensive for Europe to replace lost Russian gas flows. Spot prices, already skyrocketing to unprecedented levels, would go even higher as European buyers tried to pull in LNG supplies otherwise headed for Asia, energy-intensive industries would shut down, and even household heating and electricity use would likely need to be rationed to prevent power outages.

But even if Russian gas flows continue uninterrupted, Europe still faces an energy crisis this year and, more importantly, in the years to come. By late summer of 2021, it was already evident that Europe was facing a looming energy crisis with gas storage levels unusually low. As winter set in, prices predictably soared to record levels, reaching such heights late last year that many industrial firms shut down production. In Britain, nearly 30 power utilities went bankrupt. European natural gas topped $60 per million Btu, equivalent to an oil price of an astonishing $350 per barrel. (Brent crude sells for around $90 a barrel, and the comparable U.S. gas price is around $4.) European household energy bills will rise another 50 percent this year, according to Bank of America.

Faced with public backlash and worries about the impact on the macroeconomy, governments with few other options to keep prices in check have resorted to subsidizing energy costs for people feeling the pinch. Denmark has announced it plans to send checks to households using natural gas for heating to offset the rise in prices. Norway, France, and several other European countries have done the same. Energy prices have eased in recent weeks, but only because Europe has been lucky with the weather. Winter temperatures have not been as cold as feared. The same has been true of Asia, allowing Europe to draw some cargoes of LNG that otherwise would have been needed there.

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Is this the end? The MSM start eating each other, like here the Guardian devouring CNN, in the same way that CNN’s Cuomo and Zucker go after each other. Because: they have no viewers left.

CNN calls itself “the iconic network”, Brian Stelter goes after Rogan saying he’s not credible because he doesn’t have a large media corporation like CNN behind him. He does have 25x more viewers though.

NOTE: wonder if the Guardian knows it’s part of “Media” too, and losing trust.

Why Is Trust In Media Plummeting? Just Look At What’s Happening At CNN (G.)

Media outlets are supposed to report the news not become it. On Wednesday CNN found itself coming afoul of that rule when Jeff Zucker abruptly resigned from his position as network president amid lurid circumstances. In a memo sent to colleagues, Zucker explained he was stepping down after failing to disclose a “consensual relationship” with a close colleague. While Zucker didn’t name the colleague directly, Allison Gollust, CNN’s executive vice-president and chief marketing officer, has confirmed her involvement in a memo to employees. Hang on a minute. Is a powerful man really resigning from a big job because he had a consensual relationship with a colleague? That’s not the usual way of things; many men have been accused of far worse transgressions and still managed to cling to power.

Well here’s some context: Gollust happens to be the former communications director for disgraced former New York governor Andrew Cuomo. And Zucker’s relationship with Gollust came up during an internal investigation into former anchor Chris Cuomo, who was fired from CNN in December after using his job to help his brother, Andrew, combat sexual harassment allegations (leading some commentators to dub CNN the “Cuomo Nepotism Network”.) Zucker stood by Chris Cuomo for months when his conflict-of-interest scandal first hit but eventually fired him a few days after the anchor was accused of sexual misconduct by a junior colleague at another network. Like his brother, it seems Chris holds a grudge. Two sources told Politico that it was Cuomo’s legal team, which is still negotiating his exit from the network, who flagged the relationship between Zucker and Gollust.

A reporter from media startup Puck News has also claimed that CNN received a letter from Cuomo’s lawyers asking for all communications between Zucker, Gollust and Cuomo to be preserved. While Zucker may not be having a very good week, Donald Trump (whose views on CNN are common knowledge) is having a ball. “Jeff Zucker, a world-class sleazebag who has headed ratings and real-news-challenged CNN for far too long, has been terminated for numerous reasons, but predominantly because CNN has lost its way with viewers,” Trump wrote in a statement. I hate to say it, but Trump has a point. You don’t have to be a cynic to reckon that CNN’s dismal ratings may factor into Zucker’s sudden departure: CNN had record ratings during the Trump years but has seen viewership plummet recently.

The Cuomo scandal certainly hasn’t helped the network’s credibility: during the early days of the pandemic Chris Cuomo repeatedly interviewed his brother on air and it was largely treated like hilarious banter instead of a clear conflict of interest. And that’s hardly been the only embarrassment the network has suffered: last year Jeffrey Toobin, CNN’s chief legal analyst exposed himself on a Zoom call with colleagues. While the New Yorker fired Toobin from his staff writer position, CNN gave him a little tap on the wrist and put him back on the air.

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Optimistic headline.

World Leaders Support Joe Rogan (RT)

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and El Salvador President Nayib Bukele both came out in defense of American podcast host Joe Rogan this week after critics, including the White House, encouraged Spotify to censor his show. The campaign – which has attempted to get Rogan’s Spotify show censored after he expressed skepticism over Covid-19 vaccines for young people and hosted several vaccine-skeptic doctors – was bolstered on Tuesday after White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said there was “more that can be done” by Spotify to crack down on speech which goes against the national Covid-19 line. Psaki’s comments were condemned by free speech activists in the US, who claimed they were unconstitutional and amounted to the state pressuring a private company to censor dissidents.


The two world leaders also came out in defense of Rogan’s right to free speech. In a statement, Bolsonaro said, “I’m not sure what [Rogan] thinks about me or about my government, but it doesn’t matter.” “If freedom of speech means anything, it means that people should be free to say what they think, no matter if they agree or disagree with us. Stand your ground! Hugs from Brazil.” Bukele – who has been accused of threatening freedom of the press in his county by criticizing ‘fake news’ journalists – used Psaki’s comments to mock critics who claim free speech “is under attack in El Salvador,” and appeared to argue that the White House’s interference in the Rogan matter amounted to a more egregious attack on free speech than anything his administration is accused of doing. Following calls for Rogan to be censored, Spotify announced it would start adding a ‘content advisory’ to shows that discuss the Covid-19 pandemic. The advisories will direct listeners to allegedly ‘trusted sources’ on the coronavirus, including scientists and academics.

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“WikiLeaks was formerly based in France and Assange’s children live in the country, but his lawyers admitted in 2020 that the fact that he is not on French soil would complicate the process.”

MPs Push For Julian Assange To Be Granted Political Asylum In France (EN)

Four French MPs are pushing for Julian Assange to be offered asylum in France amid the WikiLeaks founder’s ongoing fight against extradition from the UK to the US. Jennifer De Temmerman, Jean Lassalle, Cedric Villani and Francois Ruffin are due to speak at a press conference in Paris on 1 February where they will explain why Assange — currently in prison in the UK — should be given sanctuary in France. Assange’s defence team announced in February 2020 that it would be seeking asylum for him in France, ahead of the hearing in the UK on whether the 50-year-old should be extradited to the US for trial.


Two years on, Assange continues to fight extradition to the US, where would face trial over the release of a trove of classified military documents more than a decade ago. In December 2021, Britain’s High Court overturned a ruling by a lower court that Assange could not be extradited due to concerns over his mental health. In January, Assange won the right to appeal this decision to the UK Supreme Court, further delaying his possible extradition. WikiLeaks was formerly based in France and Assange’s children live in the country, but his lawyers admitted in 2020 that the fact that he is not on French soil would complicate the process.

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Cement use. 3 years vs 100 years.

 

 

Support the Automatic Earth in virustime with Paypal, Bitcoin and Patreon.

 

Jan 282022
 


Pablo Picasso Bust of woman with arms raised 1922

 

White House Calls CNN Report On Russian Invasion ‘Completely False’ (RT)
The Covid Evidence Dismissed By The BBC As ‘Conspiracy-laden’ (Beck)
The High Cost of Disparaging Natural Immunity to Covid (Makary)
4 Out of 5 Americans Have Covid ‘Natural Immunity’ (KB)
Denmark Declares Covid-19 No Longer ‘Socially Critical Disease’ (TH)
Sweden Opts Against Covid Jabs For Children (RT)
Vaccine Failure In Two Charts And Two Graphs From Four Countries (Berenson)
Most Covid Patients In Wales In Hospital For Other Conditions (BBC)
Biden Admin Used Billions In Hospital Covid-19 Funds To Pay Drugmakers (STAT)
The Folly of Pandemic Censorship (Taibbi)
Joe Rogan, Elon Musk React To Canadian Trucker Convoy (RT)
Truckers Inspired By Canada Begin ‘Freedom’ Convoys Around The World (JTN)
Musk Unloads On ‘Puppet’ Biden In Twitter Rant (RT)
China Warns US Over Ukraine & Blasts “Interference” In Beijing Olympics (ZH)
Why Do American Elites Want War in Ukraine? (Kassam)
What Did Clinton Know and When Did She Know It? (Sperry)

 

 

 

 

US military: average per year 1.7 million reports of all diseases combined. First 10 months 2021: 22 million.

 

 

Scary indeed.

Ryan Cole

 

 

Natasha Bertrand posted a story about a Biden-Zelensky call that didn’t go well, but deleted it soon afterward. Still, people from the White House, Ukraine and CNN itself reacted to it. Was it all for clickbait?

White House Calls CNN Report On Russian Invasion ‘Completely False’ (RT)

The White House has pushed back on a CNN report about Thursday’s phone call between US President Joe Biden and his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky, calling it “completely false.” “President Biden said that there is a distinct possibility that the Russians could invade Ukraine in February. He has previously said this publicly and we have been warning about this for months. Reports of anything more or different than that are completely false,” Emily Horne, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council, tweeted on Thursday evening. She was responding to a tweet by CNN’s senior national security correspondent Alexander Marquardt, who was quoting his colleague in Kiev, Matthew Chance.

“A Russian invasion is now virtually certain once the ground freezes, Biden said to Zelensky, a senior Ukrainian official told [Chance]. Kyiv could be ‘sacked,’ Russian forces may attempt to occupy it, ‘prepare for impact’, Biden said, according to this official,” Marquardt tweeted. CNN’s The Lead with Jake Tapper had Chance cite “the Ukrainian official” live on air. “The capital, Kiev, this city here, could be “sacked.” That’s the word he [Biden] apparently used, according to this Ukrainian official. [It could be] sacked by Russian forces,” Chance told Tapper. Chance went on to quote what he called a “quite impactful line” from the Biden-Zelensky call as narrated to him by the anonymous Ukrainian official. “President Biden [was] telling his Ukrainian counterpart that Ukraine should prepare for impact. Quite a stark warning there from the US leader.”

The quote was quickly picked up by other outlets, such as the Independent, the Express and the Daily Mail. Meanwhile, CNN anchor Jim Sciutto quoted Horne as saying that “anonymous sources are ‘leaking’ falsehoods” about the call. Zelensky’s spokesman Sergii Nykyforov likewise dismissed reports citing the alleged “senior Ukranian official” as “completely false.” “Correct information can only be found in official releases from the Ukrainian and American sides,” he stated.

Phone call

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The UK Yellow Card system fails as badly as VAERS. And that is not a coincidence. It takes 40 minutes to fill out a form.

The Covid Evidence Dismissed By The BBC As ‘Conspiracy-laden’ (Beck)

Ms Bayliss has been gathering witness statements from those who allege they are vaccine-injured, and from potential expert witnesses in the US and the UK. She said: ‘We have subsequently uploaded 103 statements regarding vaccine associated deaths and injury, and 13 from identifiable whistleblowers, medical experts and scientists.’ To build his case, Mr Hyland investigated our medicines regulatory authority, specifically the alleged negligence of June Raine, chief executive of the MHRA. He said: ‘The charge against the MHRA is that they negligently conducted themselves and have caused British citizens real harm and suffering. ‘They have failed to act on any of the Yellow Card reports they have received. There are currently 2,000 deaths reported and 500,000 adverse events. They should have stopped the programme before the deaths reached 100 and launched a thorough investigation.’

The Yellow Card data show that 1 in 120 people have reported an event they considered serious enough to spend 40 minutes filling out a Yellow Card form. ‘This may be just the tip of the iceberg,’ said Ms Bayliss, ‘as the MHRA admit they receive information from around 10 per cent of those damaged.’ The figure is low because some doctors find they cannot access the Yellow Card scheme from their hospital computers, while others do not know about it. Members of the public are generally not informed about Yellow Card and most who complain to their GP that they think they have suffered a serious adverse event are told that the vaccine is an unlikely cause and their symptoms are put down to ‘coincidence’, as the Royal College of General Practitioners has not issued them with any advice.

If the coincidence theory held water, you would expect an even spread of reports across the three vaccinations used in Britain. We have Pfizer-BioNTech’s experimental mRNA jab introduced in December 2020, and Oxford/AstraZeneca’s more traditional one which has been available since January 2021. Plus the new kid on the block, Moderna’s mRNA jab introduced in April 2021. Although we began using it four months after Pfizer and three months after AstraZeneca, Moderna is clocking up 50 per cent more Yellow Cards than AZ, who have 60 per cent more reported injuries than Pfizer. Oxford/AstraZeneca has been received by 24.9million people and the Yellow Card scheme shows that 1 in 103 have been impacted, while Pfizer-BioNTech’s has been received by 25.3million people and Yellow Card shows that 1 in 162 people have been impacted.

Moderna has been given to 1.6million people and its Yellow Card reporting rate shows that 1 in 50 people have been impacted. On average, 1 in 120 people have suffered an adverse reaction. ‘In our view, we have enough evidence to show gross negligence,’ said Mr Hyland. ‘It is clear that the MHRA have failed to follow up concerns about vaccine injury and they failed to withdraw harmful batches when they knew about the issues. ‘They also exaggerated the risk of Covid by failing to distinguish the difference between dying with Covid, which is when someone has other illnesses, or of Covid, which is when the patient has no other illnesses.’ Covid-19, caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, has a low fatality rate: less than one per cent of those who contract it. The Office of National Statistics has revealed under a Freedom of Information request that only 13,597 deaths in England and Wales out of 140,000 attributed to Covid were caused by Covid alone. The bulk of deaths were of people with comorbidities.

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The immune system works.

The High Cost of Disparaging Natural Immunity to Covid (Makary)

For most of last year, many of us called for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to release its data on reinfection rates, but the agency refused. Finally last week, the CDC released data from New York and California, which demonstrated natural immunity was 2.8 times as effective in preventing hospitalization and 3.3 to 4.7 times as effective in preventing Covid infection compared with vaccination. Yet the CDC spun the report to fit its narrative, bannering the conclusion “vaccination remains the safest strategy.” It based this conclusion on the finding that hybrid immunity—the combination of prior infection and vaccination—was associated with a slightly lower risk of testing positive for Covid. But those with hybrid immunity had a similar low rate of hospitalization (3 per 10,000) to those with natural immunity alone. In other words, vaccinating people who had already had Covid didn’t significantly reduce the risk of hospitalization.

Similarly, the National Institutes of Health repeatedly has dismissed natural immunity by arguing that its duration is unknown—then failing to conduct studies to answer the question. Because of the NIH’s inaction, my Johns Hopkins colleagues and I conducted the study. We found that among 295 unvaccinated people who previously had Covid, antibodies were present in 99% of them up to nearly two years after infection. We also found that natural immunity developed from prior variants reduced the risk of infection with the Omicron variant. Meanwhile, the effectiveness of the two-dose Moderna vaccine against infection (not severe disease) declines to 61% against Delta and 16% against Omicron at six months, according to a recent Kaiser Southern California study. In general, Pfizer’s Covid vaccines have been less effective than Moderna’s.

The CDC study and ours confirm what more than 100 other studies on natural immunity have found: The immune system works. The largest of these studies, from Israel, found that natural immunity was 27 times as effective as vaccinated immunity in preventing symptomatic illness. None of this should surprise us. For years, studies have shown that infection with the other coronaviruses that cause severe illness, SARS and MERS, confers lasting immunity. In a study published in May 2020, Covid-recovered monkeys that were rechallenged with the virus didn’t get sick. Public-health officials have a lot of explaining to do. They used the wrong starting hypothesis, ignored contrary preliminary data, and dug in as more evidence emerged that called their position into question.

Many, including Rochelle Walensky, now the CDC’s director, signed the John Snow memorandum in October 2020, which declared that “there is no evidence for lasting protective immunity to SARS-CoV-2 following natural infection.” Many clinicians who talk to other physicians nationwide had have long observed that we don’t see reinfected patients end up on a ventilator or die from Covid, with rare exceptions who almost always have immune disorders. Meanwhile, public-health officials recklessly destroyed the careers of everyday Americans, rallying to fire pilots, truck drivers and others in the supply-chain workforce who didn’t get vaccinated. And in the early months of the vaccine rollout, when supplies were limited, we could have saved many more lives by giving priority to those who didn’t have recorded natural immunity.

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The Great Barrington guys also come from Yale, Harvard, and Stanford. And look what Collins and Fauci did to them.

4 Out of 5 Americans Have Covid ‘Natural Immunity’ (KB)

In the United States, the media barely mention Covid prior infections or the existence of natural immunity. But a CDC-sponsored database in partnership with Yale, Harvard, and Stanford universities shows that the overwhelming majority of Americans have natural immunity from prior infections, Wildfire can exclusively report. The CDC released a study last week called “COVID-19 Cases and Hospitalizations by COVID-19 Vaccination Status and Previous COVID-19 Diagnosis — California and New York, May–November 2021.” The findings were reported by Agence France-Presse. “During America’s last surge of the coronavirus driven by the Delta variant, people who were unvaccinated but survived Covid were better protected than those who were vaccinated and not previously infected,” AFP noted about the new study.


“The finding is the latest to weigh in on a debate on the relative strengths of natural versus vaccine-acquired immunity against SARS-CoV-2, but comes this time with the imprimatur of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC),” AFP added. The U.K.’s Health Security Agency (UKHSA), issued a report that echoes much of the CDC’s findings on natural immunity. It showed that those with prior infections to Covid were much less likely to test positive for Covid infections than those in the vaccinated groups. Those with prior infections even in the pre-Alpha period were tested to have natural immunity roughly equivalent to those with vaccinated immunity acquired from three shots. The UKHSA report also showed that nearly the entire population of Great Britain has some form of antibodies to Covid-19.

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Poof!

Denmark Declares Covid-19 No Longer ‘Socially Critical Disease’ (TH)

As some countries double down on punishing the unvaccinated and continue with draconian Covid-19 restrictions, Denmark has taken the opposite approach, announcing Wednesday that all safety measures will be lifted next week. Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said the Nordic country is reclassifying Covid-19; it will no longer be considered a “socially critical disease.” “Tonight we can shrug our shoulders and find the smile again. We have incredibly good news, we can now remove the last coronavirus restrictions in Denmark,” Frederiksen said at a press conference. Frederiksen acknowledged that the decision may seem unusual as Omicron infections are spiking in the country, with 46,000 new Covid cases reported on Wednesday.


“Recent weeks have seen very high infection rates, in fact the highest in the entire pandemic,” she noted. “Therefore, it may seem strange and paradoxical that we are now ready to let go of the restrictions.” Health Minister Magnus Heunicke pointed to high rates of vaccination and fewer hospitalizations as the reasons officials have taken this approach. “The situation in Denmark is that we have this decoupling between infections and intensive care patients, and it is mainly due to the large attachment among Danes to revaccination. That is the reason why it is safe and the right thing to do now,” Heunicke said. The UK, Ireland and the Netherlands have all taken a similar approach.

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For children 5-11 years old. Fauci wants 3 jabs each for every kid over 6 months.

Sweden Opts Against Covid Jabs For Children (RT)

The Sweden Public Health Agency on Thursday announced that it had opted against following some western countries in endorsing vaccination against Covid-19 for children 5-11 years old. Administering shots in that age group wouldn’t have a major effect on the spread of Covid-19 and would offer little medical benefit to the individual children receiving them, the agency said in its guidance for the upcoming spring term. “With the knowledge we have today, with a low risk for serious disease for kids, we don’t see any clear benefit with vaccinating them,” agency official Britta Bjorkholm told reporters. The decision may be revisited if new information becomes available or a new variant of the virus changes the risk-reward analysis for vaccinating children.


Sweden’s decision is contrary to a trend toward countries approving vaccination of younger and younger children, especially with Covid-19’s Omicron variant spreading rapidly. Such counties as Germany, France, Italy and Spain have approved jabs for children as young as 5. In the US, chief White House medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci told reporters on Wednesday that he expects three-dose regimens to eventually be approved for children as young as 6 months old. Proponents of vaccinating children have argued that even though risks of serious illness or death from Covid-19 are relatively low in young people, they can spread the virus to more vulnerable segments of the population. Swedish health officials, however, argue that vaccinating small kids would entails no great benefit – either to them or to the people around them. “A general vaccination from the age of 5 is also not expected to have any major effect on the spread of infection at present, neither in the group of children aged 5–11 nor among other groups in the population,” the Public Health Agency said.

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Here’s two of them. It’s repeated everywhere. The vaccinated are dying.

Vaccine Failure In Two Charts And Two Graphs From Four Countries (Berenson)

I could make the long case about original antigenic sin, falling antibodies, the issues around cellular immunity, myocarditis, and all the rest. But I’m just going to offer these four images because they speak more clearly than anything I could say. Scotland, Britain, Israel, and Denmark are four of the world’s most highly vaccinated countries. They all have 90 percent adult Covid vaccination rates and 60 percent adult boosters. Yet the vast majority of deaths are occurring in vaccinated people; serious cases are soaring; and infections are almost literally off the charts. This is Covid vaccine failure at the most profound and basic level.


SCOTLAND: Covid death rates (RATES, not raw numbers) by vaccination status for the last four weeks. Death rates in vaccinated but unboosted people have been higher than rates in the unvaccinated each week. Also, 87 percent of total deaths occurred in vaccinated people in the most recent week:

BRITAIN: (the data in the British chart below is United Kingdom-wide and thus includes Scotland – some British readers asked me to make that clear.) Covid deaths by vaccination status in the most recent four weeks (2,845 out of the 3,860 people for whom vaccine status could be determined were vaccinated – 74 percent):

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But you still label them Covid patients?

Most Covid Patients In Wales In Hospital For Other Conditions (BBC)

Well over half of patients with confirmed cases of Covid in hospital in Wales are being treated for other conditions, official figures show for the first time. A total of 42.2% of confirmed Covid patients were being “actively” treated for it on Tuesday. This means nearly six out of 10 are “incidental” Covid patients being treated for other conditions. Meanwhile, Covid hospital figures continue to fall. The number of patients being treated primarily for Covid is far higher for those in critical care – nearly 90%, according to Digital Health and Care Wales. The average for the last week for Covid patients is just over 40% being treated primarily for the virus.


Even though patients might “incidentally” have Covid, it does not mean that it cannot add complications to their health or treatment, and it still presents challenges for patient management for hospitals. Meanwhile, there were another 220 patients who “probably” or “definitely” caught Covid while in hospital, according to Public Health Wales figures for the last week. The daily average number of Covid patients in hospital beds dropped for the 12th day in a row to 560 on Wednesday, according to Digital Health and Care Wales. The daily average for those patients in critical care or on invasive ventilation with Covid has also fallen to 22 – the lowest figure since 11 August. Daily Covid admissions are also still falling, down to 27 a day.

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The big hospitals are fine. The smaller ones, not so much.

Biden Admin Used Billions In Hospital Covid-19 Funds To Pay Drugmakers (STAT)

The Biden administration quietly took nearly $7 billion from a fund meant to help hospitals and clinics affected by the pandemic and used it to buy Covid-19 vaccines and therapeutics, according to a document obtained by STAT. The move is similar to the Trump administration’s decision to divert $10 billion from the same fund to Operation Warp Speed, which STAT reported exclusively in March. Now, the hospital money, known as the Provider Relief Fund, has run dry, and has no new money left to allocate, according to the agency that administers it. Providers have only been able to submit requests for expenses incurred through March 2021 — before both the Delta and Omicron surges battered the health care system.

With the new $7 billion shift, which has not been previously reported, the diversion to drugmakers totals nearly $17 billion, or roughly 10% of the overall money Congress allotted for the fund for hospitals and physician practices. Congress set aside that money to help health care providers pay for pandemic-related expenses including staffing, personal protective equipment, care for uninsured patients, and vaccine distribution. The new details about the Biden administration’s spending decision come as hospitals across the country are struggling with a crushing surge of Covid-19 hospitalizations and deaths due to the Omicron variant. And their representatives in Washington are furious.

[..] A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services said using the money to pay drugmakers for contracts was a reasonable use of the hospital and clinic funds because the vaccines and therapeutics purchased were given to providers at no cost. “All Provider Relief Fund dollars have been used for Provider Relief Fund purposes,” the spokesperson said. However, there is no transparency into which contracts the money was used for, and where those products were distributed. Government watchdog reports offer clues to the timeline of the spending. As of March 1, 2021, $10 billion had been used to pay drugmakers. By Aug. 31, that number jumped to $14.8 billion. And per the document obtained by STAT, the total is $16.7 billion through Dec. 23.

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“People know authorities lie, which is why the more they clamp down, the bigger their trust problem usually becomes. ”

The Folly of Pandemic Censorship (Taibbi)

NIAID director Anthony Fauci has told three different stories about masks, including an episode in which he essentially claimed to have lied to us for our own good, in order to preserve masks for frontline workers — what Slate called one of the “Noble lies about Covid-19.” Officials turned out to be wrong about cloth masks anyway. Here is Fauci again on the issue of what to tell the public about how many people would need to be vaccinated to achieve “herd immunity,” casually explaining the logic of lying to the public for its sake: “When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent. Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, “I can nudge this up a bit,” so I went to 80, 85.”

We’ve seen sudden changes in official positions on the efficacy of ventilators and lockdowns, on the dangers (or lack thereof) of opening schools, and on the risks, however small, of vaccine side effects like myocarditis. The CDC also just released data showing natural immunity to be more effective in preventing hospitalization and in preventing infection than vaccination. The government had previously said, over and over, that vaccination is preferable to natural immunity (here’s NIH director Francis Collins telling that to Bret Baier unequivocally in August). This was apparently another “noble lie,” designed to inspire people to get vaccinated, that mostly just convinced people to wonder if any official statements can be trusted.

To me, the story most illustrative of the problem inherent in policing “Covid misinformation” involves a town hall by Joe Biden from July 21 of last year. In it, the president said bluntly, “You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations,” pretty much the definition of Covid misinformation: It was bad enough when, a month later, the CDC released figures showing 25% of a sample of 43,000 Covid cases involved fully vaccinated people. Far worse was a fact-check by Politifact, which judged Biden’s clearly wrong statement “half true.” “It is rare for people who are fully vaccinated to contract COVID-19, but it does happen,” the site wrote. They then cited CDC data as backup.

“The data that the CDC collected before May 1 show that, of 101 million people vaccinated in the U.S., 10,262 (0.01%) experienced breakthrough cases.” Politifact’s “bottom line”: Biden “exaggerated,” but “cases are rare.” Anyone paying attention to that story will now distrust the president, the CDC, and “reputable” mainstream fact-checkers like the Pew Center’s Politifact. These are the exact sort of authorities whose guidance sites like the Center for Countering Digital Hate will rely upon when trying to pressure companies like Substack to remove certain voices.

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Big campaign to vilify the truckers. Trudeau, had Covid and is well jabbed, happens to get infected and goes in hiding for 5 days, to avoid the PR mess.

Joe Rogan, Elon Musk React To Canadian Trucker Convoy (RT)

Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk and podcaster Joe Rogan have spoken about the Canadian truckers driving across the country to protest the government’s Covid-19 mandates, after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau denounced them as a “fringe minority” with “unacceptable views.” “Canadian truckers rule,” Musk tweeted on Thursday afternoon. The ‘Freedom Convoy’ that set out from British Columbia and is expected to reach the Canadian capital of Ottawa sometime this weekend was ignored by the major media outlets at first. As it approached Ontario, however, the convoy became a political football. Trudeau denounced the truckers and said they “do not represent the views of Canadians” in a televised speech on Wednesday.

On Thursday morning, he announced he had been “exposed” to Covid-19 and would quarantine for five days – thereby missing the convoy’s arrival in Ottawa – even though he has already had the virus and been vaccinated and boosted. Jagmeet Singh, whose New Democrats are propping up Trudeau’s minority government, also condemned the truckers and accused them of spreading “false information” via “inflammatory, divisive and hateful comments.” He also criticized his brother-in-law for donating to the protest. Canadian media reported that Jodhveer Singh Dhaliwal had asked for his donation back after being told of “the true nature” of the convoy.


[..] Benjamin Dichter, one of the organizers of the ‘Freedom Convoy’ and the group’s official spokesman, said they are peaceful and law-abiding. He told the Toronto Sun that the convoy is a protest over Trudeau’s government forcing drivers to wear masks even when alone inside their trucks, a vaccine mandate, and a requirement to get the jab before crossing the US-Canada border. Dichter also denied reports that GoFundMe has frozen some Can$5 million in donations for the convoy, calling them “fake news.” Joe Rogan, who hosts the immensely popular podcast on Spotify, also shone a spotlight on the convoy during his show on Wednesday. Speaking to a guest from Montreal, he showed footage of the truckers and described it as Canada being “in revolt” over the government’s mandates. “It’s a giant convoy of trucks,” Rogan said. “That’s apparently some insane amount of people. Fifty thousand trucks are headed to Ottawa to protest the vaccine mandates by Trudeau.”

Canada: We’re Not Gonna Take it!

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My guess would be Canada won’t be repeated. The truckers also want to block US-Canada border crossings.

Truckers Inspired By Canada Begin ‘Freedom’ Convoys Around The World (JTN)

Truckers around the world are creating their own convoys to protest COVID-19 vaccine mandates after being inspired by the Canadian Freedom Convoy, which reportedly has thousands of trucks. Freedom Convoy 2022, the group that organized the Canadian trucker protest, reported initially having 1,600 trucks. The convoy, which now has nearly 50,000 trucks, will be in Ottowa by Saturday with the goal of getting “the government of Canada to repeal its cross border Covid tracking passport / phone app and ALL Covid-19 vaccine mandates,” according to a press release. The Canadian convoy has reportedly been joined by some American truckers and in Ontario, farmers came in tractors to show support. Both the United States and Canada mandate cross-border truckers to be vaccinated against COVID-19.

Americans are invited to also protest the mandate this Saturday at three border locations: Houlton, Maine; Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan; and Sweet Grass, Montana. In Australia, the “2022 Official Convoy to Canberra” has more than 44,000 members on Facebook and more than 10,000 followers on Telegram as of Thursday. The group is planning to meet in the capital by Jan. 31 to protest vaccine mandates. European truckers are organizing to protest vaccine mandates as well. The European Convoy Telegram channel has more than 7,300 members. Truckers are organizing across Europe, including the Netherlands, France, Hungary and more, to converge on Brussels by Feb. 7. The truckers have received an outpouring of support from celebrities as well.

Entrepreneur Elon Musk, one of the wealthiest men in the world tweeted his support for the convoy. “Canadian truckers rule,” he said, later adding: “If you scare people enough, they will demand removal of freedom. This is the path to tyranny.”

Trudeau hiding
https://twitter.com/i/status/1486870820177649666

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“Last year, the United Auto Workers union said Ford “put corporate greed and more potential profits over American jobs”..”

Musk Unloads On ‘Puppet’ Biden In Twitter Rant (RT)

Tesla tycoon Elon Musk referred to Joe Biden as a “damp sock puppet in human form” on Thursday, in response to the US president’s photo-op with General Motors chair Mary Barra. In the video, which was posted on Biden’s official Twitter account on Wednesday evening, the president praised GM’s investment in electric vehicle manufacturing as a blow to climate change. Responding to the message, Musk argued that electric vehicle manufacturing in the US “Starts with a T / Ends with an A / ESL in the middle.” He then took a dig at the president, completing his tweet with a “sock” emoji.

Musk also claimed that Biden was “treating the American public like fools” while responding to another Twitter user, who argued that Biden was “trying to cancel a great American company and rewrite EV history” by endorsing GM and Ford. Amateur fact-checkers pounced on the thread to back up Musk, posting data that shows Tesla’s Model Y and Model 3 were by far the top-selling electric vehicles in the US – and both made domestically. GM’s Bolt came in at a distant fourth place in 2021, with Ford’s Mustang Mach-E beating it out for third place, according to Car & Driver. In a video with Barra, Biden wrote that “companies like GM and Ford are building more electric vehicles here at home than ever before,” while Barra announced a $7 billion investment in Michigan along with a battery cell plant to be opened in the US.


At least some of Ford’s electric vehicles are manufactured in Mexico, not the US. Last year, the United Auto Workers union said Ford “put corporate greed and more potential profits over American jobs” with a plan to build a new electric model in Mexico, rather than in Ohio.

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1 week till Olympics. Xi is nervous.

China Warns US Over Ukraine & Blasts “Interference” In Beijing Olympics (ZH)

China on Thursday blasted the US for continuing to interfere in its affairs, further saying nothing has fundamentally changed, but instead charging there’s been “new shocks” since the Biden-Xi virtual summit of two months ago. The scathing rebuke came on Thursday as Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi held a phone call with his counterpart Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Importantly, Wang took the opportunity to for the first time side with Russia in the direct communication with the US top diplomat, saying Moscow has “reasonable security concerns” over Ukraine that must be “taken seriously”. Chinese state media and Beijing-linked pundits have also become increasingly vocal on the issue, charging NATO with overstepping…

He urged calm on the part of all sides but specifically called on the West to “abandon its Cold War mentality”. It’s been no secret that Washington sanctions and punitive actions against officials in both countries have served to make Russia and China unlikely allies against a common enemy. “All parties should completely abandon the Cold War mentality and form a balanced, effective and sustainable European security mechanism through negotiation,” Wang spelled out in the call with Blinken, according to AFP. The tough rhetoric echoed the words of Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian during a Wednesday press briefing. In response to US claims that Russia is likely to invade Ukraine during the Beijing Winter Olympics, Zhao said,

“As the world’s largest military alliance, NATO should abandon the outdated Cold War mentality and ideological bias, and do things that are conducive to upholding peace and stability.” He suggested that NATO is outdated and contributes to instability: “China firmly opposes all kinds of small cliques,” he added, and urged “fully consider each other’s legitimate security concerns, avoid antagonism and confrontation, and properly address differences and disputes through equal consultation on the basis of mutual respect.”

Wang focused much of his Thursday call with Blinken on the “urgent priority” that the “US should stop interfering in the Beijing Winter Olympics.” The swipe appeared not just aimed at Washington’s continued emphasis on China’s human rights abuses, including allegations of detention centers and “genocide” targeting Uighur Muslims, but in response to the words the day prior from Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman. Sherman had unexpectedly linked the Ukraine crisis with the Olympic games hosted by China: “We all are aware that the Beijing Olympics begin on Feb. 4, the opening ceremony, and President Putin expects to be there. I think that, probably, [Chinese] President Xi Jinping would not be ecstatic if Putin chose that moment to invade Ukraine, so that may affect his timing and his thinking,” Sherman said in a virtual conference.

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“Putin is the devil and Russia subverted American democracy” has become a moralistic mantra for every Biden booster and Foggy Bottom staffer.”

Why Do American Elites Want War in Ukraine? (Kassam)

George Orwell’s The Lion and the Unicorn (1941) contains the following description of the English elite: “One thing that has always shown that the English ruling class are morally fairly sound, is that in time of war they are ready enough to get themselves killed…. What is to be expected of them is not treachery or physical cowardice, but stupidity, unconscious sabotage, an infallible instinct for doing the wrong thing. They are not wicked, or not altogether wicked; they are merely unteachable. Only when their money and power are gone will the younger among them begin to grasp what century they are living in.”

America’s own ruling class has more than its share of the unteachable types, as well as the cynical scoundrelism of Orwell’s description of the U.S. ruling elite as “mere bandits…consciously clinging to unjust privileges and beating down opposition by bribery and tear-gas bombs.” And when it’s not bombs at home, it’s bombs away. Or perhaps in Joe Biden’s case, both. The current president is perhaps the leading exemplar of American banditry, coupling treachery with an infallible instinct for doing the wrong thing. His own former boss, President Barack Obama, is said to have remarked upon his Vice President’s “ability to f*** things up.” And that ability has not diminished with time.

So, of course, to war. Whether in lock-step or goose-step, the rest of the ruling class amplifies Biden’s thirst for something, anything that provides respite from domestic catastrophe. We are just days away from front-page headlines dubbing the tent cities across America “Bidenvilles.” Something must be done. And that thing, to paraphrase Vice President Kamala Harris, is the thing they have been doing, every day: point at Russia. “Putin is the devil and Russia subverted American democracy” has become a moralistic mantra for every Biden booster and Foggy Bottom staffer. But flaccid, obfuscatory jaw-jawing over the moral turpitude of Russia’s dealings with Ukraine has also whet the appetites of the long-benched war lobby. That lobby wants its turn back at the helm. Sanctions ain’t good enough, cry its advocates on Capitol Hill and in the media. Stiffen the sinews. Summon up someone else’s blood. Cry Ukraine for democracy, Joey and Uncle Sam! No one’s buying it.

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I get the feeling that if Durham doesn’t do it, someone else will. And what did Obama know?

What Did Clinton Know and When Did She Know It? (Sperry)

As indictments and new court filings indicate that Special Counsel John Durham is investigating Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign for feeding false reports to the FBI to incriminate Donald Trump and his advisers as Kremlin agents, Clinton’s role in the burgeoning scandal remains elusive. What did she know and when did she know it? Top officials involved in her campaign have repeatedly claimed, some under oath, that they and the candidate were unaware of the foundation of their disinformation campaign: the 35-page collection of now debunked claims of Trump/Russia collusion known as the Steele dossier. Even though her campaign helped pay for the dossier, they claim she only read it after BuzzFeed News published it in 2017.

But court documents, behind-the-scenes video footage and recently surfaced evidence reveal that Clinton and her top campaign advisers were much more involved in the more than $1 million operation to dredge up dirt on Trump and Russia than they have let on. [..] Dossier author Christopher Steele himself has suggested Clinton was briefed on his reports. On July 5, 2016 — the same day the FBI publicly exonerated Clinton in her email scandal — Steele handed off the first installments of the dossier to an FBI agent overseas who had handled him previously as an informant. In their London meeting, Steele noted that Clinton was aware of his reporting, according to contemporaneous notes Steele took of their conversation.

“The notes reflect that Steele told [his FBI handler Michael Gaeta] that Steele was aware that ‘Democratic Party associates’ were paying for [his] research; the ‘ultimate client’ was the leadership of the Clinton presidential campaign; and ‘the candidate’ was aware of Steele’s reporting,” Justice Department watchdog Michael Horowitz wrote in his 2019 report examining the FBI’s use of the dossier to justify spying on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. Later that same month, during the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, the CIA picked up Russian chatter about a Clinton foreign policy adviser who was trying to develop allegations to “vilify” Trump. The intercepts said Clinton herself had approved a “plan” to “stir up a scandal” against Trump by tying him to Putin. According to handwritten notes, then-CIA chief John Brennan warned President Obama that Moscow had intercepted information about the “alleged approval by Hillary Clinton on July 26, 2016, of a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisers to vilify Donald Trump.”

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Kolakusic
https://twitter.com/i/status/1486641636784357381

 

 

Support the Automatic Earth in virustime with Paypal, Bitcoin and Patreon.

 

Dec 242021
 


Claude Monet Camille Sitting on the Beach at Trouville 1870-71

 

Vaccine Effectiveness Against Infection With Omicron Or Delta (medRxiv)
UK Reveals How Long Boosters Protect From Omicron (RT)
Efficacy And Safety Of Two Neutralising Monoclonal Antibody Therapies (Lancet)
The Mask and the Face (Farrow)
Patriotic Duty My Eye (David Stockman)
If You’ve Had COVID You’re Likely Protected for Life (Mercola)
Ontario List Fluvoxamine As A Covid-19 Treatment To Consider (CTV)
A Myth is Born: How CDC, FDA, and Media Wove a Web of Ivermectin Lies (Resc.)
‘Biden Seems Confused’: CNN Question President’s Cognitive Health (DM)
Fauci et al Withheld Information on China’s Coronavirus Experiments (NW)
US Airlines Cancel Hundreds Of Flights Scheduled For Friday (DM)
Putin Reveals Thinking Behind 2014 Moves In Crimea (RT)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Brian Tyson: 70% of deaths could have been saved with early treatment. I have not lost a single patient (of over 6,000).
https://twitter.com/i/status/1473365779634655234

 

 

When a T cell is exposed to a foreign pathogen, it extends a signaling device or ‘antenna’ known as a vitamin D receptor. It then searches for vitamin D. If there is an inadequate vitamin D level, they won’t begin to mobilize.

 

 

“..but deaths continue to climb”. That’s what the FT gets from this series of graphs. Good grief.

 

 

 

“This study shows that after three months the vaccine effectiveness of Pfizer & Moderna against Omicron is actually negative. Pfizer customers are 76.5% more likely and Moderna customers are 39.3% more likely to be infected than unvaxxed people. “

“Observational study from Denmark indicates that the mRNA vaccines protect for a few weeks only but then SIGNIFICANTLY AUGMENT Omicron infectivity. Is the immune system actually harmed, creating shot repetition dependency (with unknown long-term safety)?”

Vaccine Effectiveness Against Infection With Omicron Or Delta (medRxiv)

In this brief communication we are showing original research results with early estimates from Danish nationwide databases of vaccine effectiveness (VE) against the novel SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant (B.1.1.529) up to five months after a primary vaccination series with the BNT162b2 or mRNA-1273 vaccines. Our study provides evidence of protection against infection with the Omicron variant after completion of a primary vaccination series with the BNT162b2 or mRNA-1273 vaccines; in particular, we found a VE against the Omicron variant of 55.2% (95% confidence interval (CI): 23.5 to 73.7%) and 36.7% (95% CI: -69.9 to 76.4%) for the BNT162b2 and mRNA-1273 vaccines, respectively, in the first month after primary vaccination. However, the VE is significantly lower than that against Delta infection and declines rapidly over just a few months. The VE is re-established upon revaccination with the BNT162b2 vaccine (54.6%, 95% CI: 30.4 to 70.4%).


Note the number of cases in this stat:

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10 weeks. That’s it. Leave the needle in.

Or: realize that Omicron is a very mild version of a disease that 99.97% of people already survived, and keep the needle out forever.

Because after 12 weeks (3 months), see above, “Pfizer customers are 76.5% more likely and Moderna customers are 39.3% more likely to be infected than unvaxxed people. ”

UK Reveals How Long Boosters Protect From Omicron (RT)

While Covid-19 booster shots provide more protection against severe disease from the new Omicron variant, even this starts to wane after 10 weeks, the UK Health Security Agency has announced amid talk of post-Christmas lockdowns. The agency’s data on Omicron in comparison to the previously dominant Delta variant of the virus shows that people infected by the new strain may be up to 70% less likely to end up in a hospital, UKHSA Chief Executive Jenny Harries said on Thursday. She called it an “encouraging early signal” but noted that “this is early data and more research is required to confirm these findings.” Health Secretary Sajid Javid welcomed the findings, but pointed out that “cases of the variant continue to rise at an extraordinary rate – already surpassing the record daily number in the pandemic.”


“Hospital admissions are increasing, and we cannot risk the NHS [National Health Service] being overwhelmed,” Javid said. Protecting the NHS was the rationale for the original 2020 lockdown, based on the early doomsday models from Professor Neil Ferguson at Imperial College in London. Addressing widespread speculation about new restrictions coming after the holidays, Javid said it was “still too early” to tell and that the government was continuing to “monitor the data hour by hour.” He urged Britons to “please stay cautious this Christmas and get your booster as soon as possible to protect yourself and your loved ones.” “While two doses of the vaccine aren’t enough, we know boosters offer significant protection against the variant and early evidence suggests this strain may be less severe than Delta,” the minister said. However, UKHSA data noted that the booster efficacy begins to wane more quickly against Omicron, and is already 15-25% lower after just 10 weeks.

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Hmm. Panacea?

Efficacy And Safety Of Two Neutralising Monoclonal Antibody Therapies (Lancet)

Findings Between Dec 16, 2020, and March 1, 2021, 546 patients were enrolled and randomly assigned to sotrovimab (n=184), BRII-196 plus BRII-198 (n=183), or placebo (n=179), of whom 536 received part or all of their assigned study drug (sotrovimab n=182, BRII-196 plus BRII-198 n=176, or placebo n=178; median age of 60 years [IQR 50–72], 228 [43%] patients were female and 308 [57%] were male). At this point, enrolment was halted on the basis of the interim futility analysis. At day 5, neither the sotrovimab group nor the BRII-196 plus BRII-198 group had significantly higher odds of more favourable outcomes than the placebo group on either the pulmonary scale (adjusted odds ratio sotrovimab 1·07 [95% CI 0·74–1·56]; BRII-196 plus BRII-198 0·98 [95% CI 0·67–1·43]) or the pulmonary-plus complications scale (sotrovimab 1·08 [0·74–1·58]; BRII-196 plus BRII-198 1·00 [0·68–1·46]).

By day 90, sustained clinical recovery was seen in 151 (85%) patients in the placebo group compared with 160 (88%) in the sotrovimab group (adjusted rate ratio 1·12 [95% CI 0·91–1·37]) and 155 (88%) in the BRII-196 plus BRII-198 group (1·08 [0·88–1·32]). The composite safety outcome up to day 90 was met by 48 (27%) patients in the placebo group, 42 (23%) in the sotrovimab group, and 45 (26%) in the BRII-196 plus BRII-198 group. 13 (7%) patients in the placebo group, 14 (8%) in the sotrovimab group, and 15 (9%) in the BRII-196 plus BRII-198 group died up to day 90.

Interpretation Neither sotrovimab nor BRII-196 plus BRII-198 showed efficacy for improving clinical outcomes among adults hospitalised with COVID-19.

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Douglas Bryce Farrow, Professor of Theology and Ethics, McGill, Montréal.

“Yet here we are: masked, isolated, feastless and party-less, sent back online to begin winter term, because this response to COVID has proved the abject failure that honest scientists warned from the outset it would be.”

The Mask and the Face (Farrow)

Dear […] Thank you for responding on behalf of the provost, and for passing on the congratulatory letter to our students from the city’s director of Public Health. As you know, in any McGill communication I receive, I don’t read past the point where it begins offering me unsolicited medical advice, which is beyond the university’s competence and which I have made clear I regard as a form of harassment. But this letter, being from an external bureaucrat, I read through with some interest. I was struck by this line: “La vaccination demeure le geste civique le plus efficace pour préserver nos acquis de cet automne.” “Vaccination remains the most effective civic gesture to preserve our achievements this autumn.” What remarkable transparency and simplicity!

Vaccination—or, more accurately, an experimental injection with lipid nanoparticles of uncertain and possibly toxic effect on bodily tissues, used as a delivery system for genetic instructions designed to reprogram certain cells so as to cause them to produce an unknown quantity of a spike-protein pathogen with equally uncertain, but certainly dangerous, effects on the immune system and on other crucial systems, circulatory, nervous, reproductive, etc.—has, mirabile dictu, become le geste civique. Then again, what else could it become? For plainly it has not become a means of prevention of the spread of a coronavirus, even allowing (as I do not) that preventing spread is a rational and achievable goal. The latest iteration of the virus appears, if anything, to prefer the vaccinated.

Isn’t that convenient? Omicron is highly transmissible but not very severe, so according to the new definition of a “pandemic,” onwards and upwards with pandemic measures! Perhaps the achievement of which Dre. Drouin speaks, then, is merely that of putting the first two needles in every arm, as a prelude to the many more that are to come? With your help, she’s certainly done well with that. Yet here we are: masked, isolated, feastless and party-less, sent back online to begin winter term, because this response to COVID has proved the abject failure that honest scientists warned from the outset it would be. The Great Reset—sorry, the dangerous pandemic—rolls on, with no end in sight. One of your administrative colleagues at a nearby university told some of her professorial charges, who had expressed concern about the psychological and pedagogical well-being of their students, to expect three or four more years of this. I hope there will be some annual variation in the congratulatory note, particularly as the needle count rises and morale drops still more precipitously.

COVID vaccination was always primarily a civic gesture, of course, for it was never medically justified or justifiable for the majority of people, especially young people like our students. That this gesture has been elicited from the latter by manipulation, censorship, bullying and in some sectors coercion, not only of adults but now even of young children, requires one to ask what sort of gesture it really is and what kind of civic life it points toward. So does the fact that, together with associated policies such as lockdowns and denials of early treatment, it has plainly done far more harm than good. You do know, I trust, that in far too many cases the harm was permanent or fatal. That (as FOIA requests have confirmed) is something that was known to Pfizer from early days, and to the regulatory agencies by, at the latest, three months into the rollout.

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The death rate last week of 1.64 per million was down by a god-is-apparently-smiling 91%

Patriotic Duty My Eye (David Stockman)

Rough Rider Teddy must be rolling in his grave as he looks down upon these poseurs gathered in the Roosevelt room. For crying out loud, every one of them is double vaxxed and totally boosted. And they have issued orders to force the same upon more than 130 million of their countrymen—allegedly to prevent the latter from becoming walking vectors of disease and killers of their neighbors. Yet if the Vaxx is actually a spread stopper, why do they sit there in their masks? What’s the need to protect Biden from Fauci when the sainted doctor is armed to the teeth with vaxxed-in antibodies? And why is Biden festooned with the medical equivalent of Depends when he’s already got the accident-prevention protection of the Vaxx?

Or does he? That is to say, if it doesn’t work to stop the spread, the benefit is only private and not public and hence there is no earthly reason for mandating it against the will of millions of citizens who fear that the risks outweigh the benefits. And if it does stop the spread—despite the manifest evidence to the contrary—-why all the face mask virtue signalling on live TV? In short, this “photo op” is worth a thousand words. It’s a live action illustration of what’s been wrong since the beginning in March 2020. Namely, the predicate that one-size-fits all social control mechanisms—lockdowns, closures, distancing, masking, vaxxing—must be preemptively and harshly employed by arms of the state in order to stop the spread of an aerosolized airborne virus which cannot be seen and cannot be stopped.

Indeed, the latest argument for mandatory vaxxing—-that it prevents not transmission and infection but just a serious course of the disease—makes the picture patently absurd. What are these cats afraid of then? The real contagion at loose in the world—especially among the western nations which noisily congratulate themselves as model liberal democracies to be emulated by the more benighted nations inhabiting the purported darker corners of the planet—is a virulent outbreak of statist authoritarianism. That is, a definitely not Black Plague virus of the type that has challenged mankind o’er the ages has become a universal excuse for the wholesale cancellation of civil liberties and property rights like never before—even in times of world war.

Take the pathetic case of the United Kingdom. It is governed by a Conservative Party that’s traitorous to the cause of liberty and led by an unkempt Donald Trump wanna be who has assaulted the essence of liberal democracy to such a sweeping extent that his most authoritarian predecessors (i.e. Winston Churchill, among others) scarcely dreamed of it and the Donald himself couldn’t hold a candle to it. BoJo, in fact, is right now hauling out all the tools of public health authoritarianism in response to what amounts to a run-of-the-mill winter flu among the British population. And that latter proposition is not debatable. Not when you compare the peak January data, when virtually no one was vaccinated compared to 80% of adult Brits today, with the 7-day rolling averages through last week. Thus,

The case rate last week was 1,138 per million or 30% higher than the 875 per million recorded at the January 2021 peaks, but–
The death rate last week of 1.64 per million was down by a god-is-apparently-smiling 91% compared to the 18.21 rate at the January 2021 peak.

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“..immune memory to many viruses and vaccines is stable over decades, if not for a lifetime.”

If You’ve Had COVID You’re Likely Protected for Life (Mercola)

If you’ve had COVID-19, even a mild case, major congratulations to you as you’ve more than likely got long-term immunity, according to a team of researchers from Washington University School of Medicine. In fact, you’re likely to be immune for life, as is the case with recovery from many infectious agents — once you’ve had the disease and recovered, you’re immune, most likely for life. The evidence is strong and promising, and should be welcome and comforting news to a public that has spent the last year, 2020, in a panic over SARS-CoV-2. Increasingly evidence is showing that long-lasting immunity exists. Seasonal coronaviruses, some of which cause common colds, yield only short-lived protective immunity, with reinfections occurring six to 12 months after the previous infection.

Early data on SARS-CoV-2 also found that antibody titers declined rapidly in the first months after recovery from COVID-19, leading some to speculate that protective immunity against SARS-CoV-2 may also be short-lived. Senior author of the study, Ali Ellebedy, Ph.D., an associate professor of pathology and immunology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, pointed out that this assumption is flawed, stating in a news release: “Last fall, there were reports that antibodies waned quickly after infection with the virus that causes COVID-19, and mainstream media interpreted that to mean that immunity was not long-lived. But that’s a misinterpretation of the data. It’s normal for antibody levels to go down after acute infection, but they don’t go down to zero; they plateau.”

The researchers found a biphasic pattern of antibody concentrations against SARS-CoV-2, in which high antibody concentrations were found in the acute immune response that occurred at the time of initial infection. The antibodies declined in the first months after infection, as should be expected, then leveled off to about 10% to 20% of the maximum concentration detected. In a commentary on the study, Andreas Radbruch and Hyun-Dong Chang of the German Rheumatism Research Centre Berlin explained: “This is consistent with the expectation that 10–20% of the plasma cells in an acute immune reaction become memory plasma cells, and is a clear indication of a shift from antibody production by short-lived plasma cells to antibody production by memory plasma cells. This is not unexpected, given that immune memory to many viruses and vaccines is stable over decades, if not for a lifetime.”

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Add to the list.

Ontario List Fluvoxamine As A Covid-19 Treatment To Consider (CTV)

Ontario has become the first province to list an inexpensive and well-known antidepressant as a treatment doctors can “consider” for patients with a mild COVID-19 infection in a bid to keep them out of hospital. In the science table listing on Wednesday, a panel indicated that the drug fluvoxamine can be considered and prescribed to patients with a mild case who are at risk of having more severe symptoms. Fluvoxamine is a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressant that is typically used to treat depression and obsessive-compulsive disorders. “Right now, we’re in a really unprecedented wave of Omicron and we have just a staggering number of patients getting infected,” Dr. Menaka Pai, associate professor of medicine at McMaster University and co-chair of the Ontario COVID-19 Science Advisory Table, told CTV News.


“Our goal is to keep them safe, to keep them out of hospital and also to preserve our scarcest resource, which I would say is our hospital beds.” The drug costs a little more than a dollar a day and would be taken for 15 days, starting with a small dose. In comparison, the antivirals medicines from Pfizer and Merck cost nearly $1,000 dollars per patient. Studies have shown that the drug can cut hospital admissions due to COVID-19 by up to 30 per cent. “When you look at all that data together, it is very likely that fluvoxamine prevents hospitalization in patients with mild COVID-19,” Pai said. “So patients who are not yet on oxygen, and if our goal in this wave of the pandemic is to stop patients with COVID from ending up in those scarce hospital beds, then that I think is a very important finding, indeed.”

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“A fixture on the WHO’s list of 100 essential medicines all hospital systems are recommended to carry..”

A Myth is Born: How CDC, FDA, and Media Wove a Web of Ivermectin Lies (Resc.)

When a Texas cattleman, seventy-nine, died last September in New Mexico after contracting covid, his family never anticipated the worldwide headlines that would ensue. In a ballyhooed press conference, New Mexico Human Services Secretary Dr. David Scrase, the state’s top health chief, announced New Mexico’s first ivermectin “overdose,” soon adding a second fatality allegedly from “ivermectin toxicity.” Now, Scrase has acknowledged that his repeated, what he called “offhand,” assertions were groundless. Two deaths were not caused by ivermectin, a long-used generic drug that was emerging as a covid treatment. Instead, he said that the pair died because they “actually just delayed their care with covid.” That is a big difference.

Scrase backpedaled on December 1 in a little-noticed online press briefing and only after we pressed his agency to provide evidence for its claims of so-called “ivermectin deaths.” Officials had repeatedly said they were awaiting a toxicology report on the cattleman’s death. Yet we learned that the report was never even ordered or done, and, moreover, the man’s death was ruled by the state’s coroner as being from “natural” causes. Not a single media outlet reported Scrase’s admission, even as dozens, including the The Hill and The New York Times, had eagerly covered his original assertions about ivermectin, an anti-parasitic drug awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2015. “I don’t want more people to die,” read one early headline, quoting Scrase. “It’s the wrong medicine for something really serious,” Scrase said in the Times article.

Doctors, scientists, and toxicologists worldwide were puzzled by the assertions, because ivermectin is an extraordinarily safe, FDA-approved drug. A fixture on the WHO’s list of 100 essential medicines all hospital systems are recommended to carry, nearly four billion doses have been given in four decades. New Mexico became a key player in a broad pattern of governmental deception late last summer to portray ivermectin as dangerous, in tandem with three related developments. Research strongly supported the drug’s efficacy against covid; prescriptions were soaring; and public health officials were single-mindedly focused not on treatment but on vaccination.

We previously reported that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s tweeted warning last August against using ivermectin meant for livestock was prompted by incorrect—and unverified—information from Mississippi. Health officials there had posted an alert suggesting the state’s poison control center was deluged with hundreds of calls over ingestion of livestock ivermectin; in reality, we found, four reports were received. But, fueled by bits of contorted evidence like this, the anti-ivermectin train was unstoppable. We have now learned that, in the rush to bury a drug described as “astonishingly safe” and long used globally to quell animal and human parasites, FDA was not alone.

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CNN turns on Biden?!

‘Biden Seems Confused’: CNN Question President’s Cognitive Health (DM)

A CNN correspondent said Wednesday that Joe Biden ‘seemed confused’ in his ABC News interview earlier this week, when the president appeared to mix up COVID-19 at-home tests and antiviral pills. Biden, 79, spoke to ABC’s David Muir for 20 minutes in an interview that aired on Wednesday and defended his administration against criticism of its handling of the pandemic and readiness for the rapidly spreading Omicron variant, but also admitting that there were certain mistakes made. When asked about complaints that the lines to get tested for COVID-19 were excessive, with waits of over five hours in New York City as one example, Biden said that 500 million at-home tests had been ordered.

But several times he referred to the tests as ‘pills’ – potentially thinking of the Pfizer antiviral pills, which were federally approved on the same day. ‘Repeatedly throughout this interview – President Biden seems confused and was confusing the half a billion tests that they’ve ordered with a half a billion pills,’ said Jeff Zeleny, CNN’s chief national affairs correspondent. ‘Of course, pills were in the news today with the Pfizer approval of the anti-viral, so he corrected himself, but that was one thing that stuck out to me.’ Zeleny, appearing on Wolf Blitzer’s show on Wednesday afternoon, accused Biden of ‘really not accepting any responsibility’ for the lack of testing. Biden, asked whether the administration should not have seen Omicron coming and prepared accordingly, said ‘nobody saw it coming’.

Defiant, the president said they were doing the best they could. Zeleny said it was not enough. ‘Simply, this administration, and the president leading the charge here, really not accepting any responsibility at all for this lack of testing,’ Zeleny said. ‘We’ve seen these images across the country, long lines, just the inability to get tests. ‘And yes, Omicron came on very quickly here, but it has been almost a month since Thanksgiving where they knew this was coming. ‘So he said he wishes he could have acted faster, and then explains why he didn’t.’

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And Newsweek turns too…

Fauci et al Withheld Information on China’s Coronavirus Experiments (NW)

The NIH fought for more than a year to keep details about the EcoHealth grant under wraps. The 528 pages of proposals, conditions, emails, and progress reports revealed that EcoHealth had funded experiments at the WIV that were considerably riskier than the ones previously disclosed. The trouble began in May 2016, when EcoHealth informed the NIH that it wanted to conduct a series of new experiments during the third year of its five-year grant. One proposed producing “chimeras” made from one SARS-like virus and the spike proteins (which the virus uses to infiltrate animal cells) of others, and testing them in “humanized” mice, which had been genetically engineered to have human-like receptors in their lungs, making them better stand-ins for people. When such novel viruses are created, there is always a risk they will turn out to be dangerous pathogens in their own right.

Another risky experiment involved the MERS virus. Although MERS is lethal—it kills 35 percent of those who catch it—it’s not highly transmissible, which is partly why it has claimed fewer than 900 lives so far. EcoHealth wanted to graft the spikes of other related coronaviruses onto MERS to see how that changed its abilities. Both experiments seemed to cross the gain-of-function line. NIH program officers said as much, sending Daszak a letter asking him to explain why he thought they didn’t. In his reply, Daszak argued that because the new spikes being added to the chimeras were more distantly related to SARS and MERS than their original spikes, he didn’t anticipate any enhanced pathogenicity or infectiousness. That was a key distinction that arguably made them exempt from the NIH’s prohibition on gain-of-function experiments.

But, of course, one never knows; as a precaution, he offered that if any of the chimeric viruses began to grow 10 times better than the natural viruses, which would suggest enhanced fitness, EcoHealth would immediately stop all experiments, inform the NIH program officers, and together they’d figure out what to do next. The NIH accepted Daszak’s terms, inserting his suggestions into the grant conditions. Scientists at WIV conducted the experiments in 2018. To their surprise, the SARS-like chimeras quickly grew 10,000 times better than the natural virus, flourishing in the lab’s humanized mice and making them sicker than the original. They had the hallmarks of very dangerous pathogens.

WIV and EcoHealth did not stop the experiment as required. Nor did they let the NIH know what was going on. The results were buried in figure 35 of EcoHealth’s year-four progress report, delivered in April 2018. Did the NIH call Peter Daszak in to explain himself? It did not. There are no signs in the released documents that the NIH even noticed the alarming results. In fact, NIH signaled its enthusiasm for the project by granting EcoHealth a $7.5 million, five-year renewal in 2019. (The Trump administration suspended the grant in 2020, when EcoHealth’s relationship with the WIV came under scrutiny.)

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Because airports over the holidays were not chaotic enough yet..

US Airlines Cancel Hundreds Of Flights Scheduled For Friday (DM)

Hundreds of Christmas Eve flights have been canceled as the fast-spreading Omicron variant takes a toll on flight crews and other workers. Chicago-based United Airlines has canceled at least 120 flights for Friday, while Atlanta-based Delta said it has canceled about 90 and Alaska Airlines said it had canceled 17. United and Delta said they were working to contact passengers so they would not be stranded at airports. ‘The nationwide spike in Omicron cases this week has had a direct impact on our flight crews and the people who run our operation. As a result, we’ve unfortunately had to cancel some flights and are notifying impacted customers in advance of them coming to the airport,’ United said.


At least one of the airlines is making it clear that COVID is responsible for the cancellations. When accessing a cancelled flight on United’s website, the following message pops up: ‘Your flight is canceled due to an increase in Covid cases limiting crew availability. We’re sorry for disrupting your holiday plans and for the inconvenience.’ Delta said it has ‘exhausted all options and resources — including rerouting and substitutions of aircraft and crews to cover scheduled flying — before canceling around 90 flights for Friday.’ Delta cited potential inclement weather and the impact of the Omicron variant for the cancellations. Notably, American and Alaska had said they would comply with President Joe Biden’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for government contractors, while Delta’s CEO had promised to fight the rule.

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“..We were put in a situation where we could not do otherwise..”

Putin Reveals Thinking Behind 2014 Moves In Crimea (RT)

Before the Maidan in 2014, Moscow was happy to work closely with all Ukrainian governments and had no plan to take any action in Crimea. However, this changed when a democratically elected leader was overthrown, the Russian president said on Thursday. Speaking to journalists at his annual end-of-year press conference at the Manezh Central Exhibition Hall in Moscow, Putin said he would have continued working closely with Ukrainian partners if there hadn’t been a “bloody coup d’etat,” in which people were “killed and burned.” The current tension between Russia and Ukraine began following the events of the 2014 Maidan, when violent street protests toppled a democratically elected government. Shortly after the uprising in Kiev, Crimea was reabsorbed into Russia following a referendum. The vast majority of the world considers the vote illegitimate and views the peninsula as illegally occupied by Moscow.


Before the Maidan, reabsorbing Crimea was not even on the cards, the Russian president said. “How could we say no to Sevastopol and Crimea, to the people who live there? How could we not take them under our protection, under our wing? Impossible. We were put in a situation where we could not do otherwise,” Putin said. The president also referred to a decision by the Soviet Union to create the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, which saw new borders created inside what was formerly the Russian Empire. According to Putin, those living in Crimea, as well as in the Donbass in eastern Ukraine, were not given a choice of which country they belonged to, and many of those locals wished to be Russian. “They created a country which never existed before,” he claimed, suggesting that today’s crises are ripple effects from that decision.

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Support the Automatic Earth in virustime with Paypal, Bitcoin and Patreon.

 

Oct 162021
 


Paul Gauguin Contes barbares 1902

 

Proof That The CDC Is Lying To The World About Covid Vaccine Safety (Kirsch)
The FDA’s BIG Mistake (Steve Kirsch)
Risk Of Covid-19 Vaccines Worsening Clinical Disease (PubMed)
Want To Get Covid Many Times? (Denninger)
Looking At Snapshots, You’ll Never See Where This Pandemic Is Headed (Geert)
Doctors Covid Collective Doubts Usefulness Of Mass Vaccination, Coronapass (AC)
Ivermectin And The Probability Of Hospitalization Due To Covid-19 (Cdmx)
“Expert” Calls To Deny Life-Saving Hospital Treatment to the Unvaccinated (SN)
Army Doctor To Soldier With Medical Issue: Vaccine Shot Or Court Martial (PM)
NBA Player Claims Covid-19 Vaccine Ended His Season (SBN)
The Worst Is Yet To Come From Biden’s Vaccine Coercion (U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson)
Poster Boy (Jim Kunstler)
Free-Money-Blow-Off Spike in Retail Sales Got Refueled by Spiking Prices (WS)

 

 

France, Ireland, Ukraine, Romania

 

 

What’s going on in Scotland?

 

 

FCCC

 

 

Lobbyists

 

 

Nebraska Attorney General ruling on IVM & HCQ : “Allowing physicians to consider these early treatments will free them to evaluate additional tools that could save lives, keep patients out of hospitals, & provide relief for our already strained healthcare system.”

 

 

Taiwan
https://twitter.com/i/status/1448622309917478915

 

 

 

 

“We kill 15 people to maybe save 1. Are we nuts?“

Proof That The CDC Is Lying To The World About Covid Vaccine Safety (Kirsch)

Furthermore, if we use the same methodology as used by the CDC in their paper to determine the actual underreporting factor for this year, but we use a much more accurate reference, we find that the best estimate for the minimum URF is 41. For less serious events you’d use a higher number since healthcare workers and consumers are far less likely to report less serious events. So using 41 is always “safe” in that it will not overestimate any event. This means that we’ve killed well over 150,000 Americans so far, and all of those deaths had to be caused by the vaccine because there is simply no other explanation that fits all the facts. See this paper for the details. The paper also details 7 other ways that the number was validated and none of those methods used the VAERS data at all. This makes it impossible for anyone to credibly attack the analysis. Nobody wants to debate us on this.

And Pfizer’s own Phase 3 study showed that we save only 1 COVID death for every 22,000 people we vaccinate (you have to see Table S4 in the supplement to learn that 2 people died from COVID who were unvaccinated and 1 person died from COVID who got the vaccine, so a net savings of 1 life). We have fully vaccinated almost 220M Americans which means we may save an estimated 10,000 lives from COVID per the Pfizer study which is the most definitive data we have (since “real scientists” ONLY trust the data in the double-blind randomized controlled trials).

Yet the VAERS data shows we killed over 150,000 Americans from the vaccine to achieve that goal. In other words, we killed 15 people for every COVID life we might save. But it’s worse than that because the Pfizer study was done pre-Delta. The Pfizer vaccine was developed for Alpha variant and is less effective against Delta. So our numbers are even more extreme. This means of course that the FDA, CDC, and their outside committees are all incompetent in their ability to spot safety signals. They couldn’t even spot the death safety signal. It also means that the vaccine mandates are immoral and unethical.

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“They developed ESP:VAERS which was fantastic, but they canned the project because it was too good: uncovered lots of safety signals. So they pulled the plug on it 10 years ago.”

The FDA’s BIG Mistake (Steve Kirsch)

The FDA has been assuming that nearly all of the adverse events reported in VAERS have been due to “over-reporting” of “background events.” In short, there is nothing to see here: it’s all noise. This video proves that that assertion is impossible. It shows compelling evidence that VAERS is actually UNDER-reported by a factor of 4 compared to previous years and the under-reporting factor is 41 for this year. The video also discloses that the FDA and CDC never bothered to compute the two key factors (the URF and PTR) that reveal the truth. They simply assumed everything was fine. This was the BIG mistake. The VAERS data shows, without a doubt, that these vaccines are a train wreck because they kill more people than they save and should have been halted in January 2021 when VAERS was first throwing off extreme safety signals.

However, everyone in the mainstream media, Congress, and the medical community is afraid confronting the truth as it would erode all trust in these institutions. So the deception MUST continue, just like a Ponzi scheme cannot be stopped. NOBODY will debate my team of experts on this. Pfizer will not defend the safety of their own drug. Also, if you ask the FDA or the CDC for the analysis they did to determine the URF and PTR, you will be ignored because they never did the analysis that is needed to properly interpret the VAERS data to spot safety signals. VAERS has been around for 30 years, so you’d think that by now that they should know this stuff. They do know it, but they don’t do it to cover up the safety signals.

They developed ESP:VAERS which was fantastic, but they canned the project because it was too good: uncovered lots of safety signals. So they pulled the plug on it 10 years ago. Naturally, nobody in the medical community has called them out on it because otherwise they would lose their NIH grants. So that’s why I made the video… because I don’t have an NIH grant and someone has to be the truth teller here that points out that the emperor has no clothes. All the mainstream media “fact checkers” will focus on attacking me with ad hominem attacks, because they can’t attack the data or the methodology. None of the “fact checkers” will actually ask the FDA or CDC the embarrassing questions they refuse to answer like “where is the analysis of the URF and PTR?”

NOTE: There is a typo on the slide in the video on the PTR definition. The numerator and denominator should be reversed. So a higher URF this year means a lower propensity to report. The presentation link above has the corrected formula.

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Study aimed at Informed Consent. Published March 2021 at the NIH. They’ve known about the risks all along.

Risk Of Covid-19 Vaccines Worsening Clinical Disease (PubMed)

Aims of the study: Patient comprehension is a critical part of meeting medical ethics standards of informed consent in study designs. The aim of the study was to determine if sufficient literature exists to require clinicians to disclose the specific risk that COVID-19 vaccines could worsen disease upon exposure to challenge or circulating virus.

Methods used to conduct the study: Published literature was reviewed to identify preclinical and clinical evidence that COVID-19 vaccines could worsen disease upon exposure to challenge or circulating virus. Clinical trial protocols for COVID-19 vaccines were reviewed to determine if risks were properly disclosed.

Results of the study: COVID-19 vaccines designed to elicit neutralising antibodies may sensitise vaccine recipients to more severe disease than if they were not vaccinated. Vaccines for SARS, MERS and RSV have never been approved, and the data generated in the development and testing of these vaccines suggest a serious mechanistic concern: that vaccines designed empirically using the traditional approach (consisting of the unmodified or minimally modified coronavirus viral spike to elicit neutralising antibodies), be they composed of protein, viral vector, DNA or RNA and irrespective of delivery method, may worsen COVID-19 disease via antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE). This risk is sufficiently obscured in clinical trial protocols and consent forms for ongoing COVID-19 vaccine trials that adequate patient comprehension of this risk is unlikely to occur, obviating truly informed consent by subjects in these trials.

Conclusions drawn from the study and clinical implications: The specific and significant COVID-19 risk of ADE should have been and should be prominently and independently disclosed to research subjects currently in vaccine trials, as well as those being recruited for the trials and future patients after vaccine approval, in order to meet the medical ethics standard of patient comprehension for informed consent.

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“Covid may never stop “breaking through” in the jabbed. If you took the jab you may well be stuck for life with repeated infections..”

Want To Get Covid Many Times? (Denninger)

How would you like to get Covid-19 more than once? All you have to do is get vaccinated before you get Covid-19. You should build “N” antibodies after a natural infection. So…… with all these vaccine failures where are the N antibodies? They’re……. not there. Indeed, as the vaccinated percentage went up the slope of that line decreased until it….. was flat. This very strongly implies that getting Covid-19 after being vaccinated, which we now know adjusted for vaccination population percentage is more-likely now if you’re vaccinated than if you’re not appears to give you zero “N” antibody protection. That is, it appears the jabs program your immune system to fight it off without building those antibodies at all.

But we know from past experience with coronaviruses that it is the “N” antibodies that are conserved across mutations and thus are critical, over time, to prevent severe outcomes. How long this disabling of “N” antibody production is sustained nobody knows, but that it appears to be entirely suppressed in people who have been vaccinated and then get infected seems to be substantiated in that data. Now we have an explanation for why, when someone who is jabbed gets hammered, they get hammered fast and hard. Oh, and here’s the even-better news: Covid may never stop “breaking through” in the jabbed. If you took the jab you may well be stuck for life with repeated infections, and while protection may well be 50%, 60% or 80% against hospitalization and death for any given single infection if you roll those dice enough times they will come up snake eyes and you’re screwed.


The only good news is that since Delta appears to escape the jabs sufficiently to infect the mutational pressure may be insufficient to continue generating more strains with even better escape potential. If you got jabbed you better hope that’s true; if its not, well…. Oops.

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“..the evolutionary dynamics of a pandemic..”

Looking At Snapshots, You’ll Never See Where This Pandemic Is Headed (Geert)

An increase in infectious pressure leads to a higher risk of rapid viral re-exposure in the population. As far as previously asymptomatically infected unvaccinated individuals are concerned, rapid re-exposure to SARS-CoV-2 may lead to viral replication on a background of suboptimal spike (S)-directed immune pressure (due to suboptimal, short-lived anti-S antibodies [Abs] of low affinity) and even to enhanced susceptibility to disease (due to suppression of functional innate Ab capacity by the afore-mentioned suboptimal anti-S Abs).

When such suboptimal anti-S immunity occurs in a substantial part of the population it is likely to further increase natural immune selection pressure on viral infectiousness and, therefore, promote further expansion of more infectious variants, thereby giving rise to additional waves of infectious cases and morbidity. As the evolutionary dynamics of the virus in highly vaccinated countries/regions are now placing huge immune selection pressure on the viral fitness landscape, it is fair to postulate that the highly diversified spectrum of evolutionary trajectories of this pandemic seen in different highly vaccinated countries will now rapidly narrow down to a more uniform path characterized by the following, prognostically unfavorable features:

• Waning of vaccine efficacy as mirrored by a relative increase of morbidity and mortality rates in vaccinees over time

• A relative increase of morbidity and mortality rates over time in vaccinees as compared to the unvaccinated

• A relative increase in suboptimal immunity over time in both the vaccinees and unvaccinated individuals (due to diminished vaccine efficacy and suboptimal naturally elicited Abs, respectively), which may translate into a relative increase in cases of ADE (Ab-dependent enhancement of Covid-19 disease pathology)

• A relative increase in the base-line infectivity rate over time

• Continuing waves of increased infection, morbidity, and mortality rates

• A relative increase in frequency of more infectious viral variants with immune-resistant phenotypes over time

Conclusion: All experts and public health authorities seem to agree that the evolutionary dynamics of a pandemic are very complex and shaped by an interplay between infectious pressure exerted by the virus on the host immune system and immune pressure exerted by the host on viral infectiousness, and that a pandemic can only come to an end when sufficient herd immunity is developed to control the virus. It is, therefore, surprising that none of these authorities seem to worry about the impact that massive immune intervention could have on the evolutionary dynamics of a pandemic that is now characterized by widespread dominance of highly infectious variants. The impact of any human intervention on these dynamics can only be assessed and measured by monitoring changes in population-level infection, morbidity, and mortality rates, and comparing these rates between vaccinees and unvaccinated individuals as a function of time.

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Google translate from Holland. The percentages at the end are strangely divergent.

Doctors Covid Collective Doubts Usefulness Of Mass Vaccination, Coronapass (AC)

They are against the mass vaccination of the entire population, against the coronapas and against testing people without symptoms. The advice of Doctors Covid Collective differs quite a bit from those of the Health Council and the OMT. “We’re trying to counterbalance it.” More than 32,000 “friends” of which 2,100 BIG-registered doctors and medical professionals are members of the Doctors Covid Collective, the website reports. Most affiliated doctors and professors wish to remain anonymous, “given the strong censorship and pressure felt after going public. Several of the doctors affiliated with us have been ordered to remain silent, some of them lost their jobs.”

[..] One of the main criticisms of the collective is the mass vaccination of the population. “Mass vaccination is unnecessary and even harmful. Only those who belong to a risk group might do well to get a vaccine,” explains Felix van der Wissel, a general practitioner in Amersfoort and spokesperson for the collective. “Think of people over 60 and people with, for example, diabetes or the lung disease COPD. I think vaccination could be wise for them.” Van der Wissel is concerned about the many side effects that have been reported at Lareb and worldwide. “I am especially concerned about the more than 500 reports of deaths after vaccination. Also think of reports of miscarriages, menstrual disorders, strokes, heart attacks and thrombosis in different parts of the body. It is important to thoroughly investigate whether there is a relationship between these reported side effects and the vaccines. It is incomprehensible that the vaccination program continues while science does not yet have an answer to this question.”

The GP is vehemently against vaccinating young people. “In the Netherlands, only three children have died from Covid-19. In contrast, some potentially dangerous side effects such as pericarditis, inflammation of the pericardium, have been reported in young people after vaccination. Massively vaccinating young people with so-called vaccines whose long-term effects we do not know means taking an irresponsible health risk.” While the risks of vaccination should not be underestimated, according to Van der Wissel, the coronavirus is not as dangerous for the vast majority of people as is often thought. “The chance that people will die from an infection is extremely small. Only 0.04 percent of people under the age of 70 who become infected die, a professor has calculated for us. The death rate in children is completely negligible.” Researchers from the RIVM came to a higher percentage in February: an average of 1 percent of the Dutch population dies from an infection.

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Mexican study of an ivermectin-based Medical Kit, published on May 15, 2021.

Ivermectin And The Probability Of Hospitalization Due To Covid-19 (Cdmx)

IVERMECTIN AND THE PROBABILITY OF HOSPITALIZATION FOR COVID-19: EVIDENCE OF A QUASI EXPERIMENTAL ANALYSIS BASED ON A PUBLIC INTERVENTION IN CDMX


Objective To measure the effect of Mexico City’s population-level intervention –an ivermectin-based Medical Kit – – in hospitalizations during the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods A quasi-experimental research design with a Coarsened Exact Matching method using administrative data from hospitals and phone-call monitoring. We estimated logistic-regression models with matched observations adjusting by age, sex, COVID severity, and comorbidities. For robustness checks separated the effect of the kit from phone medical monitoring; changed the comparison period; and subsetted the sample by hospitalization occupancy, Results We found a significant reduction in hospitalizations among patients who received the ivermectin-based medical kit; the range of the effect is 52% – 76% depending on model specification.

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Does he smoke? Does he drink? Does he drive a car? Is he fat?

People have never been denied health care for any reason.

“Expert” Calls To Deny Life-Saving Hospital Treatment to the Unvaccinated (SN)

An “expert” whose work on cybersecurity has been cited by the NY Times and the Washington Post announced on Twitter that the unvaccinated should be denied life-saving hospital treatment because they are “not fit for life on earth.” Chris Vickery, who describes himself as a “data breach hunter” also brags about how his “findings have contributed to investigations conducted by the FTC, FBI, SEC, Secret Service, HHS, SSCI, and more.” During an unhinged Twitter rant, Vickery asserted that a time limit of December 1st should be put on people refusing to take the COVID-19 vaccine. “Set a date now. After that date, no hospital services for the willingly unvaccinated,” he screeched.


“Then, after the chosen date, anyone choosing to refuse the covid-19 vaccine can deal with the consequences of that choice alone,” added Vickery. After claiming there was no “legitimate” reason for anyone to refuse the shot, Vickery ended his rant with a demented call for such people to “separate from the surviving world.” “Human society isn’t a suicide pact. If you are too dumb to get the covid vaccine, then you are not fit for continued life on Earth.” “That’s your choice, but the consequences of refusing to get the vaccine is you having to wave a fond farewell and separate from the surviving world.” Some joked that this was yet another example of the familiar trend of blue checkmarks on Twitter aggressively displaying their virtue while actually calling for mass genocide.

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People want to know the details. Is this true for all soldiers?

Army Doctor To Soldier With Medical Issue: Vaccine Shot Or Court Martial (PM)

A retiring soldier has been threatened to take the vaccine or face a court-martial. In a shocking leaked audio clip, an Army doctor is heard telling the soldier she must either get the shot or possibly face a court martial. Terminal CWO broke the story and Jack Posobiec broadcast it on his hit podcast Human Events Daily, where he analyzed the entire clip. “If we were civilians and you said, ‘Doctor, do you think it’s reasonable for me to not get the vaccine for a few months until I feel comfortable?’ I’d say, yeah, that’s reasonable, you’re young and healthy, it’s reasonable to wait a few months until you feel more comfortable,” the Army doctor said.

“The Army doesn’t allow me to do that, though. So I recommend that you submit an administrative waiver because I can’t grant you a medical waiver unless you had specific medical conditions such as severe allergic reaction to the first shot, unfortunately.” The soldier, who has Endometriosis, is a medical retiree. She notes in the clip that she is going home in six days, but the doctor says a court-martial would prevent her from doing so. The court-martial would, however, only be used should an administrative waiver be rejected. The doctor explains how the soldier would go through a chapter process, where the military determines what kind of discharge the soldier receives.

“And then after the chapter process is concluded, it would go before the general court-martial convening authority, General Doyle, and he would make the determination,” the doctor explained. He describes how that General would determine whether she separates the Army as a medical retiree or Chapter Separation, which is a process in which soldiers are removed from the military. Such a process is used with soldiers who deal with substance abuse or serious crimes like assault. “So I really recommend applying for administrative labour today or getting the shot just because like you’re so close to being done. I hate it when good people get punished,” concluded the doctor.

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“I was fine up until I took the vaccine, I was fine.”

NBA Player Claims Covid-19 Vaccine Ended His Season (SBN)

Former Atlanta Hawks point guard Brandon Goodwin’s season ended early last year due to “minor respiratory condition,” according to a team report this past May. The Hawks went on a deep postseason run to the Eastern Conference Finals and the team decided not to bring the Norcross graduate back after drafting Sharife Cooper and signing Delon Wright. Goodwin has not signed with another NBA team since. Recently, on a Twitch stream, Goodwin revealed his side of the story, and it all starts with him receiving the COVID-19 vaccine. “I got sick and I never quite recovered from it,” Goodwin said on the stream, as posted on YouTube by Cosign Zee. “I would always have back pain, I was just super tired in the games.”

Goodwin used Atlanta’s back-to-back against the Philadelphia 76ers on April 28 and April 30 as an example. “Bro, I was so tired,” he said. “I felt like I couldn’t run up and down the court. My back was hurting.” The Hawks then had a three-game homestand from May 1-5. “My back really started hurting bad,” Goodwin recalled. “Then, I’m like, ‘OK. I need to go to the doctor. That’s when I found out I had blood clots. That all within the span of a month.” Goodwin then left nothing up to the imagination when he revealed what he believed caused the health issues. “I was fine until then,” Goodwin said. “I was fine up until I took the vaccine, I was fine.”

Blood clots have been reported as rare side effects of Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen COVID-19 vaccine, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Women under the age of 50 are advised to remain cautious about the rare but increased risks of developing a blood clot from the J&J vaccine, the CDC says, a risk that “has not been seen” in other vaccine options. “People trying to tell you, ‘No. It’s not the vaccine.’ How do you know?” Goodwin asked. “You don’t know.” In seemingly another Twitch streaming clip (same link as above), Goodwin doubled down on his belief the vaccine caused his health issues. “Yes, the vaccine ended my season,” Goodwin said. “One thousand percent.”

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If Ron Johnson knows, that means the Senate knows. Where are you, Nancy?

The Worst Is Yet To Come From Biden’s Vaccine Coercion (U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson)

As we have seen in New York state, many doctors and nurses who refuse to be vaccinated now must leave health care, either voluntarily or involuntarily, due to vaccine coercion. Their decades of medical skill and knowledge will be lost to the mandates. I have been inundated with testimonials from doctors, nurses, and other health-care workers asking for relief from the mandates and indicating they will not succumb to the pressure. New York’s experience will be replicated throughout America, and the negative impact on health care will be profound. I have been in contact with Lt. Col. Theresa Long, an Army flight surgeon. Her affidavit, which was part of an amended filing in a lawsuit against the military regarding vaccine mandates and injuries in the military, was made public in late September and describes only a small portion of the alarming story she has to tell.

As a result of her efforts to alert her superiors, she is now a pariah to her senior command, and her medical license is being attacked merely for speaking out. The day before her superiors canceled all her appointments with patients, two out of five aviators she saw had developed pericarditis shortly after vaccination, only reporting their symptoms because they read an affidavit online. She has much more to tell but is under a gag order imposed by the military. The recent flight delays involving Southwest Airlines are another harbinger of mandate harm. Although Southwest’s CEO and pilot union officially deny that delays are being caused by a worker slowdown in reaction to vaccine mandates, individuals are confirming what most of us view as obvious.

Last week, I received a letter from a Wisconsin constituent who is a pilot for a U.S.-based airline. His testimonial raises serious concerns regarding airline safety and demonstrates why we can add a growing pilot shortage to the self-inflicted harms of the vaccine mandate. The most alarming anecdote in this letter involved a recently vaccinated pilot who “sustained, over a two-day period, partial blindness in one eye and then severe migraine headaches.” His doctor told him he had suffered “micro strokes.” The pilot did not report his medical condition to his Federal Aviation Administration medical examiner because he feared “he would lose his pilot certifications, and hence his livelihood.”

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“That is your “Joe Biden” government, from top to bottom, a matrix of fakeness and malice..”

Poster Boy (Jim Kunstler)

Sanjay Gupta is now the discredited poster boy for American doctors-without-honor and a medical system in abject collapse. All this lying by the government, the doctors, and the news media led to “Joe Biden’s” dastardly “vaccine mandate” — and fake, too, since there is still no actual legal instrument behind it — that is the final insult to medicine as legions of health-care workers ranging from doctors and nurses to janitors quit their jobs rather than submit to forced “vaccinations.” The vax mandate is in-step with the primary motive of the Democratic party’s neo-Jacobin program, which is to push people around, to coerce them to do things that common sense and the instinct for survival argue against, and then to punish the people sadistically when they refuse, and to do it for the sheer pleasure of inflicting harm on their enemies — who happen to be the citizens of the USA.

That is your “Joe Biden” government, from top to bottom, a matrix of fakeness and malice. The vax mandate is doing a steller job of wrecking every other public service from sea to shining sea as police, firemen, EMTs, 911 operators, and soldiers in the US military demur from the shots. And, of course, there are all he private companies going along suicidally with the scheme: the airlines, the railroads, the truckers, the retailers, you name it, all shedding employees and the ability of the companies to function. Naturally, the news media is trying to hide the damage, but in another week the net effect will be of the world’s biggest-ever general strike. Every activity in the country will stand still; some activities will just crash-and-burn; and many will not return to their prior states-of-operation.

This is not just a matter of the kiddies missing their Christmas presents. That’s just a dumb-ass sentimental ruse to divert your attention from the entire armature of American life imploding at warp speed. Christmas presents! How about no food, no gasoline, no heat, no money, and no public safety? That’s where this is taking us, and in the fast lane. And it hardly matters whether the financial markets manage to stay artificially levitated. Reality has already discounted the financial markets because they have forfeited their basic function, which is to signal the true price of everything. The true price of a society lying to itself about everything will be the sickness and death of the society. We must be very close to a clear majority of the people in America recognizing the danger we are in and identifying the source of that danger. When that moment arrives, will we be able to do anything about it? It may take extraordinary measures not seen before in our political history.

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Pump it up.

Free-Money-Blow-Off Spike in Retail Sales Got Refueled by Spiking Prices (WS)

Total retail sales – powered by inflation, seen in magnificent price increases – rose 0.7% in September from August, to $625 billion (seasonally adjusted), just barely below the mind-boggling free-money-blow-off-spike in March and April. Sales were up 13.9% from a year ago, and by 20% from September 2019:

In this monstrously overstimulated economy, demand for goods has surged, triggering all kinds of shortages that are now rippling through the system, as global supply chains and transportation systems have been buckling for a year. This demand was created by $5 trillion in deficit spending by the Federal government and by $4.5 trillion in money printing by the Fed since March 2020. The magnificent price increases, as tracked by the Consumer Price Index, have inflated retail sales. These product groups account for 52% to the retail sales here:

Food prices: +4.6% year-over-year
Restaurant prices: +4.7% year-over-year
Gasoline price: +42.1% year-over-year
Used vehicle prices: +24.4% year-over-year
New vehicle prices: +8.8% year-over-year.

New & used auto dealers and parts stores: Sales ticked up 0.5% in September from August, to $123 billion (seasonally adjusted), after four months in a row of large declines off the free-money-blow-off spike in March and April. This is the largest retail category, in normal times accounting for over 20% of retail sales. The number of vehicles delivered has collapsed in recent months – new vehicle sales in September plunged by 37% from the free-money peak in March – because dealers have run out of inventory to sell, as automakers are having production shortfalls due to the semiconductor shortage. But there’s plenty of demand still, and so prices have shot sky-high, with many new vehicles being sold at prices substantially over sticker, and used vehicles with ridiculous prices.

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Short Rogan
https://twitter.com/i/status/1449043088136187907

 

 

Loggerhead sea turtle

 

 

 

Support the Automatic Earth in virustime; donate with Paypal, Bitcoin and Patreon.

 

May 052021
 


Edgar Degas The laundress 1873

 

India Latest Country to Approve Use of Ivermectin to Treat Covid-19 (NC)
Do Stupid Things, Win Stupid Prizes (Denninger)
Pfizer Will File For Full FDA Approval By End Of May (F.)
Pfizer Sees Covid-19 As ‘Durable’ Revenue Stream As Profits Rise (Y!)
‘Obscene’ Bonus Hike For AstraZeneca Boss Prompts Investor Anger (G.)
Fauci Tells CNN We’re ‘At Least Halfway Through’ The Covid-19 Pandemic (RT)
US Birth Rate Sees Biggest Fall For Nearly 50 Years (G.)
The Liberals Who Can’t Quit Lockdown (Atl.)
The Dynamics Behind the Ugly Amount of Empty Office Space (WS)
Don’t Be Fooled By Joe Biden (Chris Hedges)
CNN Turns To Disgraced FBI Official For Legal Analysis On Rudy Giuliani (TP)
The Instagram Ads Facebook Won’t Show You (Signal)
Facebook’s New Campaign Should Have Free Speech Advocates Nervous (Turley)

 

 

Some memes are stronger than others.

 

 

 

And this time for real. Until now it was only 2 states.

India Latest Country to Approve Use of Ivermectin to Treat Covid-19 (NC)

[..] the huge uncontrolled wave of infections hitting India is having all sorts of implications for the Modi government. In its desperation to regain control of the virus, India’s government quietly changed its treatment guidelines last week. The new guidelines include the option of prescribing two repurposed medicines for mild Covid patients: budesonid and ivermectin. The former is an inhaled steroid that has been shown to reduce the time to recovery and need for urgent medical care. The latter is an off-patent anti-parasitic that has been discovered to have powerful anti-viral and anti-inflammatory properties. India is no stranger to ivermectin. The medicine has been used as an anti-parasitic for decades. It has also been used in the fight against malaria.

Two of its regions, Uttar Pradesh (population: 230 million) and Bihar, have been using the medicine since August, to dramatic effect. By the end of 2020, Uttar Pradesh (UP) — which distributed free ivermectin for home care — had the second-lowest fatality rate in India at 0.26 per 100,000 residents. Only the state of Bihar, with 128 million residents, had less. But Uttar Pradesh (UP) did more than treat 300,000 mild cases at home through 2020; it also opted to use ivermectin to prevent infection. COVID response teams began taking the drug and they did not catch the illness. The same thing was reported in a study of frontline critical care workers in Argentina. U.P. then had contacts of COVID patients take it, with similar success. “Recognizing the sense of urgency,” Amit Mohan Prasad, a U.P. health official, wrote in a Dec. 30 article, “we decided to go ahead.”


Yet UP’s remarkable success at controlling the virus did not inform national policy — at least not until now. The Indian Council of Medical Research declined in October to recommend ivermectin nationwide, citing, like so many health regulators, the need for more data. But all that changed last week as India became the biggest country on the planet to adopt nationwide use of ivermectin against Covid-19. More than 20 countries are now using ivermectin to treat Covid-19 to one degree or another, with promising results, despite the fact the World Health Organization has not approved its use. They include Mexico, Guatemala, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Portugal, Nigeria, South Africa and Egypt.

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”..the shot is one hundred times more dangerous than the disease..”

Do Stupid Things, Win Stupid Prizes (Denninger)

It’s ok folks, it’s very “rare”. Uh huh, sure it is. High school senior Emma Burkey received her “one and done” Johnson & Johnson coronavirus vaccine on March 20, and within two weeks was in an induced coma following seizures and clotting in her brain. “She’s making a slow recovery, having recently been transfered from the hospital to a rehabilitation center, and the first round of bills totaled $513,000. The 18-year-old’s family friends in the Las Vegas area started a GoFundMe account to help with medical expenses from the very rare vaccine reaction.” An 18 year old, according to the CDC, has a roughly 1/50,000 risk of being killed by Covid-19 assuming the FDA’s and CDC’s “standard of care” which prohibits the use of budesonide, ivermectin, monoclonal antibodies and a whole host o other drugs which we know work.

One of them, budesonide, has a roughly 90% efficacy in preventing hospitalization (and of course death usually is preceded by that if you get Covid); the others also have some efficacy. Stacking just those three likely winds up around 95-99% effective, so your actual risk, if you’re not a dumb-ass and are both young and get Covid-19 is more like 1/500,000. And that’s if you get Covid. The CDC says about 1/10 people have over a year’s time, so your risk as a healthy 18 year old is approximately 1/5,000,000 since to be exposed to the risk of death you first must get the disease and that is not certain. Remember, according to the CDC if you die while Covid-19 positive then your death was caused by Covid-19, even though this is not scientifically proved. This is the same standard that VAERS uses for vaccine death; you died associated with receiving the shot; it is not proved it was caused, but if that’s good enough for the CDC to claim the Coof killed you then it sure as hell is good enough to claim the vaccine killed you.

By the CDCs VAERS numbers and the number of delivered shots into arms the risk of the shot killing you is approximately 1/45,000 and if you take the shot the hazard is 100% probable to be undertaken, obviously. So if you’re not specifically morbid the shot is one hundred times more dangerous than the disease. Oh, and we know the VAERS reports are wildly understated. Why? Because it’s a voluntary system; there is no mandate on any person or health provider to report potential adverse connected effects. While you (as the impacted individual) can report to the system obvious doing that if you’re dead is somewhat difficult. Were this a mandatory system where any death within “X” time of an inoculation had to be reported, with a criminal penalty for not doing so by health providers, we might have a more-full picture. But unlike death certificates which must be issued, and the CDC rules for Covid-19 that say if you were positive any time in the last 28 days, or at death, your death is ruled Covid-related there is no such mandate for VAERS.

Maybe health insurance will pay Emma’s bill, at least in part. What’s Emma’s deductible, if she has insurance? Will she be eating that deductible every year for the rest of her life with a continuing care requirement? Will her insurer refuse to pay entirely, since these were experimental shots? What happens if Emma wants to start a family and tries to get life insurance down the road? Will it be available at any reasonable price? Has her ability to bear a child been damaged or destroyed? What about her ability to enjoy all the things she used to enjoy; will she, for example, still be able to go for a nice jog? Can she hold a driver license? What about a CDL or pilot’s license? What about something as simple as driving a forklift in a warehouse? Have the seizures permanently destroyed those options for Emma?

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Not supposed to be completed until 2023. Nothing matters anymore. All those carefully crafted procedures are just a hindrance.

Pfizer Will File For Full FDA Approval By End Of May (F.)

Pfizer and BioNTech, the manufacturers of one of the three authorized Covid-19 vaccines in the U.S., plan to file for full approval from the Food and Drug Administration by the end of May as they expect the vaccine to generate about $26 billion in revenue this year. Pfizer and German drug manufacturer BioNTech announced their plan to ask the FDA for full approval of its vaccine in its quarterly earnings report. The vaccine, the first Covid-19 jab to be authorized for emergency use in the U.S., was given its emergency use authorization in December, and is currently authorized to be administered to Americans over the age of 16. The vaccine brought it $3.5 billion in revenue in the first three months of 2021. The FDA is expected to expand eligibility for the Pfizer vaccine to adolescents between the ages of 12 and 15 as soon as this week.

Full FDA approval would allow Pfizer to market its vaccine directly to consumers, and could help make Pfizer Covid-19 booster shots–something Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla has said will be necessary–available to the public without needing another emergency use authorization from the FDA. The FDA grants emergency use authorizations when the Secretary of Health and Human Services deems it “appropriate” for the FDA to “authorize unapproved medical products or unapproved uses of approved medical products” when there are few or no alternatives. Vaccination EUA proposals must include “safety data accumulated from phase 1 and 2 studies” and “with an expectation that phase 3 data” will include follow up information on trial subjects. The FDA can then grant an EUA when an FDA panel determines the “known and potential benefits outweigh the known and potential risks.”

It’s likely that all Covid-19 vaccine manufacturers with EUAs will go on to file for full FDA approval because emergency use authorizations can be revoked once a public health crisis subsides. Both Pfizer and Moderna have released phase 3 trial information for their vaccines that showed high levels of protection against Covid-19, which allow them to move forward with filing for full FDA approval. Some health experts hope that full FDA approval for Covid-19 vaccines will help lessen vaccine hesitancy in the U.S. Former U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams wrote in The Washington Post: “Many people who are lower risk understandably ask if the benefits justify taking a medication that has not received the full and traditional FDA stamp of approval,” and wrote “further studies” will “help show skeptics that the authorized COVID vaccines are safe.”

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Surprising they don’t use “sustainable”.

Pfizer Sees Covid-19 As ‘Durable’ Revenue Stream As Profits Rise (Y!)

Pfizer sharply increased its 2021 profit projections on Tuesday, citing much higher Covid-19 vaccine sales which are on track to provide a “durable” revenue stream in the wake of the pandemic. The drugmaker reported a jump in first-quarter profits based on surging revenues, with nearly one-fourth of sales coming from Covid-19 vaccines. With German partner BioNTech, the pharma giant is ramping up vaccine production and now estimates 2021 revenues of $26 billion from the vaccine, up from the $15 billion projected in February. But the surging profits have drawn criticism as governments face pressure to step in to ensure vaccines are provided to underserved countries.

Pfizer, which says it is on the cusp of winning US approval for individuals 12 to 15 years old to receive its vaccine, is holding talks with “basically all governments of the world” about providing booster shots through 2024, Chief Executive Albert Bourla told analysts on a conference call Tuesday. The company is studying the efficacy of giving the jabs six or more months after the second vaccine dose, and developing doses that could be stored at standard refrigerated temperature for up to 10 weeks. Bourla expects “durable demand” for Covid-19 vaccines, similar to that of the flu vaccine. “It is our hope that the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine will continue to have a global impact by helping to get the devastating pandemic under control and helping economies around the world not only open, but stay open,” Bourla said in prepared remarks.

That would create “a scenario in which Pfizer can continue to be both a leader and a beneficiary,” he said. Pfizer has won wide praise for its technological prowess in developing a game-changing vaccine in record time. However, critics called the profits troubling given the divide in vaccine availability between rich and poor countries. World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus last month decried a “shocking imbalance in the global distribution of vaccines” and called for efforts to fortify the WHO’s Covax programs, which aims to ensure that poorer nations can access the shots. India and South Africa are leading an effort in the World Trade Organization to waive intellectual property and patent rules, at least temporarily, which would open the door to broader production of vaccines at a time when the virus is causing mass misery in India and some other countries.

President Joe Biden said Tuesday he had not made a decision on whether to support a vaccine waiver, but that the United States was moving “as quickly as we can” to export doses. Biden also said he was ready to “immediately” begin vaccinations for 12 to 15-year-olds as soon as Pfizer’s Covid shot is approved by regulators for the age group. Pfizer reported net income of $4.9 billion, up 45 percent from the same period of the prior year. Revenues also jumped 45 percent to $14.6 billion, including $3.5 billion in Covid-19 vaccine sales.

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You mean the investors who make obscene profits?

‘Obscene’ Bonus Hike For AstraZeneca Boss Prompts Investor Anger (G.)

AstraZeneca is facing mounting opposition over its plans to award its chief executive, Pascal Soriot, a big increase in bonuses, with three investor advisory groups calling on shareholders to vote against the policy. Pirc, Glass Lewis and Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) have all flagged concerns over moves to raise the maximum share bonus Soriot can receive under a long-term plan from 550% of his £1.3m base salary to 650%. AZ also plans to hoist Soriot’s maximum annual bonus to 250% of salary from 200%, depending on performance targets being hit. The advisory groups recommended investors vote against the pay policy at next Tuesday’s annual meeting.


Neville White, the head of responsible investment policy and research at EdenTree Investment Management, which holds AstraZeneca shares, described the proposed bonus increases as “obscene” and said he would vote against them. He added: “It is obviously tricky, because Pascal is both a hero and an antihero at the moment.” The pay vote comes at a sensitive time, as AstraZeneca has faced a barrage of criticism over its coronavirus vaccine after supply shortages and, in rare cases, a potential link to blood clots. It has, however, pledged to supply the vaccine on a not-for-profit basis during the pandemic, and lost money making it in the first quarter of the year. Soriot has been paid more than £15m in each of the last two years, after overseeing a turnaround as he rebuilt AstraZeneca’s drug portfolio. The firm has faced down several shareholder pay revolts over the years.

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“Podcast host Dave Rubin suggested headlining the Blitzer-Fauci interview, “Drunk on power, highest-paid person in government egomaniac talks to synthetic humanoid news anchor on fake news channel using sports imagery.“

Fauci Tells CNN We’re ‘At Least Halfway Through’ The Covid-19 Pandemic (RT)

White House health expert Anthony Fauci may have quite some time remaining to rule as “master” of all things Covid-19 as he told CNN that Americans are “at least halfway through” the pandemic. “We’ve really got to not declare victory prematurely,” Fauci told CNN host Wolf Blitzer on Tuesday. “So we’re in the late innings, but it’s not over. That’s the thing we’ve got to get people to appreciate.” Pressed by Blitzer to be more specific, in baseball terms, how soon the pandemic will end for Americans, Fauci said, “the bottom of the sixth.” That would mean the battle is more than 60% completed – unless the game can somehow be extended into extra innings. Critics of Fauci, who is chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden, found no encouragement in the doctor’s comments.

“Time to pull Dr. Fauci off the mound,” US Representative Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) said on Twitter, continuing with the baseball analogy. Fauci has a history of flip-flopping on his Covid-19 advice and moving the goalposts at various stages of the pandemic. What started as “15 days to slow the spread” has turned into a 14-month battle, with the doctor calculating another nine to 14 months to go. He admitted last December to purposely deceiving the public about vaccine herd-immunity projections to manipulate opinions. Biden on Tuesday set a new goal of having 70 percent of adults vaccinated with at least one Covid-19 jab by July 4. Earlier in 2020, Fauci said the US could achieve herd immunity once 60-70 percent of the population was fully vaccinated. But he repeatedly moved that target back as the year wore on, going to as high as 85 percent in December.

“We’re going in the right direction,” Fauci said in Tuesday’s CNN interview. “We’re seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, but now’s not a time to declare victory. It’s a time to get more and more people vaccinated.” Fauci has enjoyed rock-star status during the pandemic, being showered with awards and mainstream-media adulation. A children’s book that’s scheduled for release in June bestows him the title “America’s doctor.” His 80th birthday was celebrated as Dr. Anthony Fauci in Washington, DC, and he was serenaded with the birthday song by Biden, then president-elect, and future First Lady Jill Biden. Podcast host Dave Rubin suggested headlining the Blitzer-Fauci interview, “Drunk on power, highest-paid person in government egomaniac talks to synthetic humanoid news anchor on fake news channel using sports imagery.”

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“..the rate has been sliding for more than 10 years and last year dropped to about 1.6, the lowest rate on record..”

US Birth Rate Sees Biggest Fall For Nearly 50 Years (G.)

The US birth rate has fallen 4% in the largest single-year drop in nearly 50 years, according to a government report. The rate dropped for mothers of every major race and ethnicity, and in nearly all age groups, falling to the lowest point since federal health officials started tracking it more than a century ago, the report due to be published on Wednesday said. Births have been declining in younger women for years, as many postponed motherhood and had smaller families. Birth rates for women in their late 30s and in their 40s have been inching up. But not last year. The US once was among only a few developed countries with a fertility rate above the 2.1 children per woman that ensured each generation had enough children to replace itself.


But the rate has been sliding for more than 10 years and last year dropped to about 1.6, the lowest rate on record. “The fact that you saw declines in births even for older moms is quite striking,” said lead author of the report, Brady Hamilton, of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The figures suggest that the current generation will not have enough children to replace itself. The CDC report is based on a review of more than 99% of birth certificates issued last year. The findings echo a recent Associated Press analysis of 2020 data from 25 states showing that births had fallen during the coronavirus outbreak. The pandemic contribute to last year’s big decline, experts said. Anxiety about Covid-19 and its impact on the economy likely caused many couples to think that it was not the right time to have a baby.

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It’s a symbiosis. The MSM only caters to the “left”, which demands ever scarier stories. Happy to provide.

The Liberals Who Can’t Quit Lockdown (Atl.)

Lurking among the jubilant americans venturing back out to bars and planning their summer-wedding travel is a different group: liberals who aren’t quite ready to let go of pandemic restrictions. For this subset, diligence against COVID-19 remains an expression of political identity—even when that means overestimating the disease’s risks or setting limits far more strict than what public-health guidelines permit. In surveys, Democrats express more worry about the pandemic than Republicans do. People who describe themselves as “very liberal” are distinctly anxious. This spring, after the vaccine rollout had started, a third of very liberal people were “very concerned” about becoming seriously ill from COVID-19, compared with a quarter of both liberals and moderates, according to a study conducted by the University of North Carolina political scientist Marc Hetherington.

And 43 percent of very liberal respondents believed that getting the coronavirus would have a “very bad” effect on their life, compared with a third of liberals and moderates. Last year, when the pandemic was raging and scientists and public-health officials were still trying to understand how the virus spread, extreme care was warranted. People all over the country made enormous sacrifices—rescheduling weddings, missing funerals, canceling graduations, avoiding the family members they love—to protect others. Some conservatives refused to wear masks or stay home, because of skepticism about the severity of the disease or a refusal to give up their freedoms. But this is a different story, about progressives who stressed the scientific evidence, and then veered away from it.

For many progressives, extreme vigilance was in part about opposing Donald Trump. Some of this reaction was born of deeply felt frustration with how he handled the pandemic. It could also be knee-jerk. “If he said, ‘Keep schools open,’ then, well, we’re going to do everything in our power to keep schools closed,” Monica Gandhi, a professor of medicine at UC San Francisco, told me. Gandhi describes herself as “left of left,” but has alienated some of her ideological peers because she has advocated for policies such as reopening schools and establishing a clear timeline for the end of mask mandates. “We went the other way, in an extreme way, against Trump’s politicization,” Gandhi said. Geography and personality may have also contributed to progressives’ caution: Some of the most liberal parts of the country are places where the pandemic hit especially hard, and Hetherington found that the very liberal participants in his survey tended to be the most neurotic.

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Some things have changed for good.

The Dynamics Behind the Ugly Amount of Empty Office Space (WS)

Companies are not massively defaulting on their office leases, and that’s the good thing. But they have put a historic amount of vacant office space on the sublease market, while continuing to pay rent to the landlord. They decided they no longer need that much space, now that some form of flexible work, or hybrid work-from-home, or even permanent work-from-anywhere is being integrated into office real estate plans, cost cutting efforts, and footprint-reduction strategies. Now, 14 months into the Pandemic, office occupancy – workers actually showing up at the office – is still dreadfully low. As of the end of April, office occupancy in the 10 largest metros averaged only 26.5% of where it had been just before the Pandemic, according to Kastle Systems today, whose electronic access systems secure thousands of office buildings around the country. In other words, the number of people entering these offices was still down by 73.5% from pre-pandemic levels and has barely made headway in recent months:

The epicenters of work-from-home show the biggest drops in office occupancy rates, according to Kastle’s “Back to Work Barometer” at the end of April: in San Francisco, the occupancy rate was at 14.8% of the pre-Pandemic level, in New York City at 16.2%, and in San Jose at 18.0%. Among tech companies, 95% expect remote work for at least a few days a week; 9% said that they will never return to the office at all; another 47% said that they will need less office space; only 13% said they would need more office space, according to a survey by Savills.A survey of Californian residents found that 82% of the employees who now work at home want to continue working at home at least some of the time. Only 18% don’t want to work at home at all. But even at the top end of office occupancy, working remotely is still king. In Dallas, office occupancy is at 41.2% of where it was pre-Pandemic, and in Austin at 40.2% :

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“Biden is the epitome of the empty, amoral creature produced by our system of legalized bribery.”

Don’t Be Fooled By Joe Biden (Chris Hedges)

Don’t be fooled by Joe Biden. He knows his infrastructure and education bills have as much chance at becoming law as the $15-dollar minimum wage or the $2,000 stimulus checks he promised us as a candidate. He knows his American Jobs Plan will never create “millions of good paying jobs – jobs Americans can raise their families on” any more than NAFTA, which he supported, would, as was also promised, create millions of good paying jobs. His mantra of “buy American” is worthless. He knows the vast majority of our consumer electronics, apparel, furniture and industrial supplies are made in China by workers who earn an average of one or two dollars an hour and lack unions and basic labor rights.

He knows his call to lower deductibles and prescription drug costs in the Affordable Care Act will never be permitted by the corporations that profit from health care. He knows the corporate donors that fund the Democratic Party will ensure their lobbyists will continue to write the laws that guarantee they pay little or no taxes. He knows the corporate subsidies and tax incentives he proposes as a solution to the climate crisis will do nothing to halt oil and gas fracking, shut down coal-fired plants or halt the construction of new pipelines for gas-fired power plants. His promises of reform have no more weight than those peddled by Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, who Biden slavishly served and who also promised social equality while betraying working men and women.

Biden is the epitome of the empty, amoral creature produced by our system of legalized bribery. His long political career in Congress was defined by representing the interests of big business, especially the credit card companies based in Delaware. He was nicknamed Senator Credit Card. He has always glibly told the public what it wants to hear and then sold them out. He was a prominent promoter and architect of a generation of federal “tough on crime” laws that helped militarize the nation’s police and more than doubled the population of the world’s largest prison system with harsh mandatory sentencing guidelines and laws that put people in prison for life for nonviolent drug crimes, even as his son struggled with addiction. He was a principal author of the Patriot Act, which began the stripping away of our most basic civil liberties. And there has never been a weapons system, or a war, he did not support.

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What a dynamic this is. Lying to the FBI doesn’t matter anymore. Not at CNN.

CNN Turns To Disgraced FBI Official For Legal Analysis On Rudy Giuliani (TP)

Disgraced former FBI official Andrew McCabe provided legal analysis on CNN Friday morning of ongoing investigations into former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz. Unmentioned in McCabe’s “New Day” segment was that he was fired by the FBI in 2018 for lying to government officials about his authorization of leaks to the media. Federal prosecutors also opened a grand jury investigation into whether McCabe made false statements to FBI and Justice Department officials about the leaks. The FBI raided Giuliani’s apartment in New York City this week as part of an investigation into whether he violated foreign agent laws through his Ukraine-related work in 2019 and 2020. Federal prosecutors are reportedly looking into whether Gaetz had a sexual relationship with an underage girl.


Both Giuliani and Gaetz have denied any wrongdoing and have both said they are being targeted for political reasons. McCabe addressed reports that the FBI gave so-called defensive briefings to Giuliani and Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson in late 2019 about Russia’s efforts to sow disinformation about Joe Biden. McCabe called the briefing “a big deal,” saying that it shows that the FBI had “a significant amount of information” that Russia was using Giuliani to disseminate information about Biden. McCabe said that the FBI often observes the recipients of the defensive briefing to see how they respond to the information. “If you cut off your interactions with them, that’s a good sign. If you continue to interact with them, which we know Rudy Giuliani did here, that’s a very bad sign,” McCabe said.

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They don’t really want you to know what they know about you.

The Instagram Ads Facebook Won’t Show You (Signal)

Companies like Facebook aren’t building technology for you, they’re building technology for your data. They collect everything they can from FB, Instagram, and WhatsApp in order to sell visibility into people and their lives. This isn’t exactly a secret, but the full picture is hazy to most – dimly concealed within complex, opaquely-rendered systems and fine print designed to be scrolled past. The way most of the internet works today would be considered intolerable if translated into comprehensible real world analogs, but it endures because it is invisible. However, Facebook’s own tools have the potential to divulge what is otherwise unseen. It’s already possible to catch fragments of these truths in the ads you’re shown; they are glimmers that reflect the world of a surveilling stranger who knows you. We wanted to use those same tools to directly highlight how most technology works. We wanted to buy some Instagram ads.

We created a multi-variant targeted ad designed to show you the personal data that Facebook collects about you and sells access to. The ad would simply display some of the information collected about the viewer which the advertising platform uses. Facebook was not into that idea. Ad account disabled. This ad account, its ads and some of its advertising assets are disabled. You can’t use it to run ads. Facebook is more than willing to sell visibility into people’s lives, unless it’s to tell people about how their data is being used. Being transparent about how ads use people’s data is apparently enough to get banned; in Facebook’s world, the only acceptable usage is to hide what you’re doing from your audience. So, here are some examples of the targeted ads that you’ll never see on Instagram. Yours would have been so you.

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By no means only Free Speech Advocates either.

Facebook’s New Campaign Should Have Free Speech Advocates Nervous (Turley)

In 1964, Stanley Kubrick released a dark comedy classic titled “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” The title captured the absurdity of getting people to embrace the concept of weapons of mass destruction. The movie came to mind recently with the public campaign of Facebook calling for people to change her attitudes about the Internet and rethink issues like “content modification” – the new Orwellian term for censorship. The commercials show people like “Joshan” who says that he was born in 1996 and grew up with the internet.” Joshan mocks how much computers have changed and then asks why our regulations on privacy and censorship cannot evolve as much as our technology.

The ads are clearly directed at younger users who may be more willing to accept censorship than their parents who hopelessly cling to old-fashioned notions of free speech. Facebook knows that it cannot exercise more control over content unless it can get people to stop worrying and love the censor. There was a time when this would have been viewed as chilling: a corporate giant running commercials to get people to support new regulations impacting basic values like free speech and privacy. After all, Joshan shows of his first computer was a “giant behemoth of a machine” but that was before he understood “the blending of the real world and the internet world.”

The Facebook campaign is chilling in its reference to “privacy” and “content modification” given the current controversies surrounding Big Tech. On one level, the commercial simply calls for rethinking regulatory controls after 25 years. However, the source of the campaign is a company which has been widely accused of rolling back on core values like free speech. Big Tech corporations are exercising increasing levels of control over what people write or read on the Internet. While these companies enjoy immunity from many lawsuits based on the notion of being neutral communication platforms (akin to telephone companies), they now censor ideas deemed misleading or dangerous on subjects ranging from climate denial to transgender criticism to election fraud.

Moreover, Facebook knows that there is ample support for increasing censorship and speech regulation in Congress and around the world. Free speech is under attack and losing ground — and Facebook knows it. The rise of the corporate censor has challenged long-standing assumptions of the free speech community. Our Constitution and much of free speech writings are focused on the classic model of government censorship and state media. What we have seen in the last few years is that corporations have far greater ability to curtail speech and that you can have a type of state media without the state.

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Apr 182021
 
 April 18, 2021  Posted by at 8:37 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  23 Responses »


Vincent van Gogh Green Wheat Field With Cypress 1889

 

Viral Sequence Suggests Coronavirus Jumped Between Hotel Rooms (G.)
The Blood-Clot Problem Is Multiplying (Atl.)
UK Church Leaders Warn Against ‘Dangerous’ Vaccine Passport Plans (G.)
Denying the Demonic (Edward Curtin)
Ukrainian Envoy: NATO or Nuclear Weapons (Antiwar)
US Laments ‘Unwanted Escalation’ & Warns It Reserves Right To Retaliate (RT)
Czech Govt Expels 18 Russian Diplomats Over 2014 Blast (Y!)
Macron Urges ‘Clear Red Lines’ With Russia Amid Buildup Near Ukraine (Y!)
Russia, Ukraine Expel Diplomats As Tensions Soar (Y!)
CNN Viewership Down By Half Since Biden Took Office (ZH)
Biden Describes Border Surge As ‘Crisis’ For First Time (JTN)

 

 

 

 

 

 

• Florida: No lockdowns or masks
• Texas: Ended lockdowns, restrictions and mask mandates on 10th March 2021
• California: Full lockdown and mask mandate

 

 

What type of ventilation do they have?

Viral Sequence Suggests Coronavirus Jumped Between Hotel Rooms (G.)

Covid-19 appears to have jumped between neighbouring rooms in hotel quarantine in Sydney after seven cases of people arriving from different countries were revealed to have the same viral sequence. NSW Health said today that it had been notified on Friday that the returned travellers had the same viral sequence. The cases may have to be reclassified as locally acquired. The seven cases came from two family groups who arrived from different countries on different days. They stayed in adjacent rooms on the 12th floor of the Adina Apartments Hotel at Sydney’s Town Hall.


Staff who worked on the floor when the original case was believed to have been infectious – between 8 and 11 April – are self-isolating. NSW Health said all security staff who worked on the 12th floor at the time had had at least one vaccination. Other people in quarantine on the 12th floor at the time have all been retested and returned negative results.

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It’s certainly growing. Interesting: the producers have all received immunity. But how about the governments that push these things onto their people?

The Blood-Clot Problem Is Multiplying (Atl.)

For weeks, Americans looked on as other countries grappled with case reports of rare, sometimes fatal blood abnormalities among those who had received the AstraZeneca vaccine against COVID-19. That vaccine has not yet been authorized by the FDA, so restrictions on its use throughout Europe did not get that much attention in the United States. But Americans experienced a rude awakening this week when public-health officials called for a pause on the use of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, after a few cases of the same, unusual blood-clotting syndrome turned up among the millions of people in the country who have received it.

The world is now engaged in a vaccination program unlike anything we have seen in our lifetimes, and with it, unprecedented scrutiny of ultra-rare but dangerous side effects. An estimated 852 million COVID-19 vaccine doses have been administered across 154 countries, according to data collected by Bloomberg. Last week, the European Medicines Agency, which regulates medicines in the European Union, concluded that the unusual clotting events were indeed a side effect of the AstraZeneca vaccine; by that point, more than 220 cases of dangerous blood abnormalities had been identified. Only half a dozen cases have been documented so far among Americans vaccinated with the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, and a causal link has not yet been established. But the latest news suggests that the scope of this problem might be changing.

Whether the blood issues are ultimately linked to only one vaccine, or two vaccines, or more, it’s absolutely crucial to remember the unrelenting death toll from the coronavirus itself—and the fact that COVID-19 can set off its own chaos in the circulatory system, with blood clots showing up in “almost every organ.” That effect of the disease is just one of many reasons the European Medicines Agency has emphasized that the “overall benefits of the [AstraZeneca] vaccine in preventing COVID-19 outweigh the risks of side effects.” The same is true of Johnson & Johnson’s. These vaccines are saving countless lives across multiple continents.

But it’s also crucial to determine the biological cause of any vaccine-related blood conditions. This global immunization project presents a lot of firsts: the first authorized use of mRNA vaccines like the ones from Pfizer and Moderna; the first worldwide use of adenovirus vectors for vaccines like AstraZeneca’s, Johnson & Johnson’s, and Sputnik V; and the first attempt to immunize against a coronavirus. Which, if any, of these new frontiers might be linked to serious side effects? Which, if any, of the other vaccines could be drawn into this story, too? How can a tiny but disturbing risk be mitigated as we fight our way out of this pandemic? And what might be the implications for vaccine design in the years to come?

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Amen:

“For the church of Jesus Christ to shut out those deemed by the state to be social undesirables would be anathema to us and a denial of the truth of the gospel.”

UK Church Leaders Warn Against ‘Dangerous’ Vaccine Passport Plans (G.)

Hundreds of UK church leaders have told the prime minister that plans to use vaccine passports for entry into venues is “one of the most dangerous policy proposals ever to be made in the history of British politics” with the “potential to bring about the end of liberal democracy as we know it”. An open letter to Boris Johnson signed by more than 1,250 clergy from different Christian denominations across the UK says the “introduction of vaccine passports would constitute an unethical form of coercion and violation of the principle of informed consent”. It says people may have valid reasons for being unable or unwilling to be vaccinated against Covid, “including, for some Christians, serious issues of conscience related to the ethics of vaccine manufacture or testing”.

Covid status certificates would be “divisive, discriminatory, and destructive”, it adds. “We risk creating a two-tier society, a medical apartheid in which an underclass of people who decline vaccination are excluded from significant areas of public life. There is also a legitimate fear that this scheme would be the thin end of the wedge. “This scheme has the potential to bring about the end of liberal democracy as we know it and to create a surveillance state in which the government uses technology to control certain aspects of citizens’ lives. As such, this constitutes one of the most dangerous policy proposals ever to be made in the history of British politics.” The letter says there is no logical sense in terms of protecting others in introducing Covid status certificates as a requirement for entry for venues, which could include churches.

“If the vaccines are highly effective in preventing significant disease, as seems to be the evidence from trial results to date, then those who have been vaccinated have already received protection; there is no benefit to them of other people being vaccinated,” it says. Describing the proposal as “illiberal and dangerous”, the signatories say: “As Christian leaders we … envisage no circumstances in which we could close our doors to those who do not have a vaccine passport, negative test certificate, or any other ‘proof of health’. For the church of Jesus Christ to shut out those deemed by the state to be social undesirables would be anathema to us and a denial of the truth of the gospel.”

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“The FDA issued Emergency Use Authorizations (EUAs) for these inoculations only under the proviso that they may make an infection less severe. Yet millions have obediently taken a shot that doesn’t do what they think it does.”

Denying the Demonic (Edward Curtin)

In March of last year as the coronavirus panic was starting, I wrote a somewhat flippant article saying that the obsession with buying and hoarding toilet paper was the people’s vaccine. My point was simple: excrement and death have long been associated in cultural history and in the Western imagination with the evil devil, Satan, the Lord of the underworld, the Trickster, the Grand Master who rules the pit of smelly death, the place below where bodies go. The psychoanalytic literature is full of examples of death anxiety revealed in anal dreams of shit-filled overflowing toilets and people pissing in their pants. Ernest Becker put it simply in The Denial of Death: “No mistake – the turd is mankind’s real threat because it reminds people of death.”

The theological literature is also full of warnings about the devil’s wiles. So too the Western classics from Aeschylus to Melville. The demonic has an ancient pedigree and has various names. Rational people tend to dismiss all this as superstitious nonsense. This is hubris. The Furies always exact their revenge when their existence is denied. For they are part of ourselves, not alien beings, as the tragedy of human history has shown us time and again. Since excremental visions and the fear of death haunt humans – the skull at the banquet as William James put it – the perfect symbol of protection is toilet paper that will keep you safe and clean and free of any reminder of the fear of death running through a panicked world. It’s a magic trick of course, an unconscious way of thinking you are protecting yourself; a form of self-hypnosis.

One year later, magical thinking has taken a different form and my earlier flippancy has turned darker. You can’t hoard today’s toilet paper but you can get them: RNA inoculations, misnamed vaccines. People are lined up for them now as they are being told incessantly to “get your shot.” They are worse than toilet paper. At least toilet paper serves a practical function. Real vaccines, as the word’s etymology – Latin, vaccinus, from cows, the cowpox virus vaccine first used by British physician Edward Jenner in 1800 to prevent smallpox – involve the use of a small amount of a virus. The RNA inoculations are not vaccines. To say they are is bullshit and has nothing to do with cows. To call them vaccines is linguistic mind control.

These experimental inoculations do not prevent the vaccinated from getting infected with the “virus” nor do they prevent transmission of the alleged virus. When they were approved recently by the FDA that was made clear. The FDA issued Emergency Use Authorizations (EUAs) for these inoculations only under the proviso that they may make an infection less severe. Yet millions have obediently taken a shot that doesn’t do what they think it does. What does that tell us? Hundreds of millions of people have taken an injection that allows a bio-reactive “gene-therapy” molecule to be injected into their bodies because of fear, ignorance, and a refusal to consider that the people who are promoting this are evil and have ulterior motives. Not that they mean well, but that they are evil and have evil intentions. Does this sound too extreme? Radically evil? Come on!

So what drives the refusal to consider that demonic forces are at work with the corona crisis? Why do the same people who get vaccinated believe that a PCR test that can’t, according to its inventor Kary Mullis, test for this so-called virus, believe in the fake numbers of positive “cases”? Do these people even know if the virus has ever been isolated? Such credulity is an act of faith, not science or confirmed fact. Is it just the fear of death that drives such thinking? Or is it something deeper than ignorance and propaganda that drives this incredulous belief?

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The Ukraine government really is this crazy.

Ukrainian Envoy: NATO or Nuclear Weapons (Antiwar)

Today Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky seconded a statement by Georgian President Salome Zourabichvili that “it is time for concrete proposals for Ukraine and Georgia to obtain a NATO MAP and a plan to join the EU.” The two countries have been paired as partners for future NATO membership, with both being promised membership in the global military bloc at the NATO summit in Bucharest, Romania in 2008. Ukraine’s ambassador to Germany, Andriy Melnyk, seconded Zelensky’s demand that NATO admit Ukraine as a full member, stating that only that move would prevent a Russian invasion: “The only possibility for this [to prevent alleged invasion plans] is for Ukraine to finally become a NATO member.”

He also claimed that had his country been in NATO in 2014 the secession of Donetsk, Lugansk and Crimea would not have occurred; neither would the now seven-year was in the Donbass. He neglected to state whether the U.S.-engineered uprising and overthrow of an internationally-recognized government would also have occurred. Most likely not, as the populations of NATO nations are not allowed to elect, or if elect, keep any government Washington and Brussels view with disapprobation. The envoy then made this provocative statement: “Ukraine has no other choice: either we are part of an alliance such as NATO and are doing our part to make this Europe stronger, or we have the only option – to arm by ourselves, and maybe think about nuclear status again. How else can we guarantee our defense?”

He also claimed there were 90,000 Russian military personnel deployed to the Donbass border and to Crimea; in his words, “We are dealing with the largest troop movement in Russia since the Second World War.” Which is arrant nonsense. When the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991 a third of total Soviet nuclear weapons were in Ukraine; with 1,700 warheads in the country it had the third largest nuclear arsenal in the world after the U.S. and Russia. In 1994 Ukraine joined the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons as a non-nuclear-weapon nation. It’s that decision the above-cited ambassador suggested be reversed. In fairness, this isn’t the first time the question of Ukraine developing its own nuclear weapons capacity has been broached.

Over the past twenty years NATO-trained military leaders have raised the issue. But never before, and never during a crisis remotely comparable to the present one, has the issue been phrased so brutally: either place Ukraine under NATO Article 5 mutual military assistance status – and NATO acknowledges itself a nuclear alliance – or Ukraine will reassert itself as a nuclear power. The shelling of the Donbass will be mild in comparison to what an armed conflict between a nuclear Ukraine and nuclear Russia would portend.

Russia does the exact same thing the US does and it’s labeled escalation.

US Laments ‘Unwanted Escalation’ & Warns It Reserves Right To Retaliate (RT)

As Russia blacklisted eight current and former American officials and sent ten diplomats packing in retaliation for US sanctions, the State Department has lamented the “escalatory” response and said that Washington might respond. “Our recent actions were proportionate and appropriate to Russia’s harmful activities. Today’s announcement by the Russian government was escalatory and regrettable,” a State Department spokesman said in a statement on Friday evening. “It is not in our interest to get into an escalatory cycle, but we reserve the right to respond to any Russian retaliation against the United States.” Foggy Bottom was responding to the announcement that Moscow will expel 10 US diplomats, restricting the number of short-term visas for State Department staff to 10 per year, and ban the US embassy from hiring citizens of Russia and third countries as administrative staff.

The “open ground” memorandum of 1992, allowing US diplomats to move freely around Russia, has also been “declared invalid due to systematic violations” by Americans, the Russian Foreign Ministry said. There are also plans to “halt the activities… of American foundations and NGOs controlled by the Department of State and other US government agencies” since the US “shows no intention of scaling back its systematic subversive efforts.” These measures were a response to President Joe Biden’s executive orders sanctioning 30 Russian individuals and entities for allegedly interfering in the 2020 US presidential election and alleged involvement in the SolarWinds hack – both of which Russia has vehemently denied. Biden also expelled 10 Russian diplomats and banned US companies from trading in Russian sovereign debt.

Russia also chose to respond to Biden’s March 2 decision to sanction several Russian officials accused – with no evidence provided – of involvement in the alleged “poisoning” of opposition blogger Alexey Navalny. On Friday, Moscow banned eight current and former US officials from entering Russia. The ban applies to FBI Director Christopher Wray, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Attorney General Merrick Garland, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, Director of Federal Bureau of Prisons Michael Carvajal, and President Joe Biden’s domestic policy adviser Susan Rice. Former national security adviser John Bolton made the Russian blacklist as well. As did James Woolsey, who ran the CIA between 1993 and 1995 – and recently authored a book ‘Operation Dragon: Inside the Kremlin’s Secret War on America’, which accused the Soviet Union of assassinating US President John Fitzgerald Kennedy in 1963.

The unusual step to publicize the response was taken “in view of the unprecedented complications in Russia-US relations provoked by Washington,” the Foreign Ministry said. US sanctions and messages from Washington “show that Washington is not willing to listen and does not appreciate the restraint that we have displayed despite the tensions that have been purposefully fueled” by Washington since the Obama administration, said the Foreign Ministry. [..] Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told reporters on Friday that Russia could have inflicted “painful measures” on US businesses, but chose not to do so – at this time.

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Some things are just too insane:

“Czech police said on Saturday they were looking for two men with Russian passports that had also been used by the suspects in the 2018 poisoning attempt on Sergei Skripal in Britain..”

Mark Ames: “If I understand this right, apparently GRU thought it’d be smart to use the same 2 spies to carry out 2 separate deadly operations in NATOland—2014 bombing in Czech Rep, 2018 Skripal poisoning—using exact same aliases & fake passports in both operations.”

Czech Govt Expels 18 Russian Diplomats Over 2014 Blast (Y!)

The Czech government said Saturday it would expel 18 Russian diplomats identified by local intelligence as secret agents of the Russian SVR and GRU services that are suspected of involvement in a 2014 explosion. Czech police also said later they were seeking two Russians in connection with the blast, which killed two people, with passports used by the suspects in the attempted poisoning of former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal in 2018. “Eighteen employees of the Russian embassy must leave our republic within 48 hours,” Foreign Minister Jan Hamacek told reporters. Prime Minister Andrej Babis said Czech authorities had “clear evidence” linking GRU officers from unit 29155 to the blast in a military ammunition warehouse near the eastern Czech village of Vrbetice.

He added that he had received the information on Friday, without explaining why the investigation had taken so long. “The explosion led to huge material damage and posed a serious threat to the lives of many local people, but above all it killed two citizens,” Babis said. The blast occurred on October 16, 2014 at a warehouse with 58 tonnes of ammunition. It was followed months later by another big blast at a nearby warehouse with 98 tonnes of ammunition. The Czech organised crime squad (NCOZ) said it was looking for two men using Russian passports in relation to the explosions. The passports bear the names of Alexander Petrov, born in 1979, and Ruslan Boshirov, born in 1978, and their holders are also wanted in Britain in connection with Skripal’s poisoning in Salisbury.

Russia denied involvement in the poisoning but some 300 diplomats were sent home in subsequent tit-for-tat expulsions. “The two men were present on Czech territory in… October 2014” when the Vrbetice blast occurred, the NCOZ said, adding that the two men also used Tajik and Moldovan identities. Babis said the expulsion of 18 diplomats had the full support of President Milos Zeman, a veteran leftwinger who has fostered close ties with both Moscow and Beijing. Zeman has repeatedly spoken out against his country’s Security Information Service (BIS), which has accused Russian intelligence services of orchestrating recent cyberattacks on the Czech foreign ministry and other targets.

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You said what? Ha ha ha!

“I do prefer constructive dialogue, but to have a constructive and efficient dialogue, you need credibility.”

Macron Urges ‘Clear Red Lines’ With Russia Amid Buildup Near Ukraine (Y!)

French President Emmanuel Macron said the international community has to “define clear red lines with Russia,” in an interview extract released Saturday, adding that countries must be ready to impose sanctions in case of “unacceptable behavior.” His remarks, made during an interview with the US network CBS, came amid high tensions over a major military buildup by Russian forces along the border with Ukraine. Macron said the world needed to make it clear to Moscow that while it preferred “open and frank dialogue,” it will not shy from imposing sanctions after any “unacceptable behavior.” “Indeed, we have to sanction. This is what we did after (Russia annexed Crimea in 2014) or after a series of crises which happen. And I think we have to define clear red lines with Russia. This is the only way to be credible.”


He added: “I think that sanctions are not sufficient in itself, in themselves, but sanctions are part of the package. I do prefer constructive dialogue, but to have a constructive and efficient dialogue, you need credibility.” Russia is believed to have deployed tens of thousands of soldiers near its border with Ukraine and in Crimea. Clashes along the border, which had nearly ceased after a cease-fire reached last summer, have recently resumed. On Thursday, US President Joe Biden announced financial sanctions against Moscow and the expulsion of 10 Russian diplomats over a massive series of cyber attacks against US targets, as well as over Russian interference in American elections. In addition, eight people linked to the “occupation” of Crimea were sanctioned.

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Ukraine tries to resemble an actual country.

Russia, Ukraine Expel Diplomats As Tensions Soar (Y!)

Russia on Saturday said it would expel a Ukrainian diplomat, prompting an immediate pledge of retaliation from Kiev, further escalating tensions over Moscow’s troop build-up on Ukraine’s eastern flank. The detention of a Ukrainian consul in the second city Saint Petersburg comes at a time of global concern of a repeat of Moscow’s 2014 aggression, when Russia annexed the peninsula of Crimea and backed separatists in Ukraine’s east. Moscow claimed the Ukrainian diplomat had been caught “red-handed” trying to obtain sensitive information. In response, the Ukrainian foreign ministry protested “the illegal” detention of its diplomat and said Kiev would expel a senior Russian diplomat. Kiev has been battling Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine since 2014 and clashes intensified early this year, effectively shredding a ceasefire agreed last July.


Around 30 Ukrainian troops have been killed since the start of the year, compared to 50 last year. Most of them were victims of sniper fire. Russia has detained a number of Ukrainian nationals on suspicion of spying in recent years but the arrest of a diplomat is rare. “A Ukrainian diplomat, a consul of Ukraine’s Consulate General in Saint Petersburg, Alexander Sosonyuk, has been detained by Russia’s FSB,” the security service said in a statement, using the Russian language spelling of his name. He was held on Friday, the security service said. Kiev said the diplomat had spent several hours in detention. The Russian foreign ministry said Saturday it had summoned Ukraine’s charge d’affaires Vasyl Pokotylo and told him that the Ukrainian diplomat had 72 hours to leave the country “beginning April 19”.

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Clown News Network.

CNN Viewership Down By Half Since Biden Took Office (ZH)

While CNN may no longer be torturing people in airports, voluntary viewership has fallen over 50% in multiple categories since President Biden took office, according to Fox News. Who knew that their best move during the 2020 election would have been to help Trump win, instead of helping Biden. In the first three weeks of 2021, the network averaged 2.2 million viewers – only to plummet to just one million viewers – a decline of 54%. Among the key advertising demographic of adults age 25-54, ratings are down 60%. From December 28 through Inauguration day, viewership went from 617,000 viewers in that demographic to just 244,000 since Biden took office.

“CNN’s liberal primetime hosts Anderson Cooper, Chris Cuomo and Don Lemon haven’t been able to keep their audiences under the new administration, either. CNN averaged 3.1 million viewers from 8-11 p.m. from Dec. 28 through Inauguration Day but only 1.4 million since for a whopping 55-percent decline. Over the same time period, CNN’s primetime lineup lost 63 percent of its viewers among the crucial demo.” -Fox News. CNN also fared worse than liberal competitor MSNBC, which lost ‘only’ 34% of its total-day viewers, and 30% of primetime viewers under Biden. Fox News points out, of course, that their viewership has remained mostly flat – as declines remained in the single digits.


When asked if he was worried about the ratings disaster, CNN host Don Lemon told the New York Times’ podcaster “Sway”: “No. I’m not worried about it … Trump was a horrible person. And he was terrible for the country. And it is better for all — for the world that he is no longer the President of the United States,” adding “So if that means that cable news ratings go down? Aww. So I’m not really that concerned about it. I would prefer that my ratings go down and Trump not be in office than my ratings be sky-high and him be there. That’s the honest truth.”

https://twitter.com/i/status/1382529326839697409

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“..liberal Democrats complained.”

Biden Describes Border Surge As ‘Crisis’ For First Time (JTN)

President Biden on Saturday called the historic border surge a “crisis” for the first time, even as he pushed ahead with plans to increase the caps for refugees admitted into the United States. ”We’re going to increase the number [of refugees],” he said at a news conference. “The problem was that the refugee part was working on the crisis that ended up on the border with young people. We couldn’t do two things at once. But now we are going to increase the number.” His comments came one day after the Biden administration had to do a flip-flop, first announcing it was freezing refugee caps at the same 15,000 level that President Trump had created and then retreating a few hours later when liberal Democrats complained.


Biden had said in February he planned to raise the cap to 125,000, next year while his administration had suggested the number might increase to 62,000 for this year. The original announcement Friday was met with outrage by far-left Democrats, who then applauded the reversal. “This is a testament to the power that people’s movements, community advocates, & progressive coalitions have built,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted.

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Calvin introduced non-fungible tokens many years ago:

 

 

 

Maher COVID

 

 

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Apr 142021
 


Edgar Degas Leaving the paddock1866
Stolen from Gardner Museum March 18 1990, the single largest art theft in the world. Never recovered

 

Nearly A Quarter Of Registered Covid Deaths Are Not Caused By The Virus (DM)
More Brands Are Putting Money And Clout Behind Covid-19 Vaccine Ads (F.)
Big Pharma Uses Big Tobacco’s Strategy To Defeat Ivermectin (DR)
How Bill Gates Impeded Global Access to Covid Vaccines (TNR)
Russia Accuses US, NATO Of Moving Troops To Its Border (AA)
Biden Urges Russia To De-Escalate Ukraine Tensions In Call With Putin (G.)
Russia Warns US Warships To Stay Far Away From Crimea “For Their Own Good” (ZH)
Biden To Withdraw US Troops From Afghanistan By September 11 (G.)
Joe Biden Is Proceeding With Donald Trump’s Biggest Arms Deal (HuffPo)
The Absentee Vote Logic of the New York Times (RCI)
CNN Staffer Admits Network’s Focus Was To ‘Get Trump Out Of Office’ (Fox)
Crackdown On Cryptocurrencies May Be Coming, Warns Kraken CEO (RT)
Republican Antitrust Bill Would Block All Big Tech Acquisitions (TC)
Mexico’s War on Obesity Sends Junk-Food & Sugary-Drink Giants Scrambling (WS)
Airborne Plastic Pollution ‘Spiralling Around The Globe’ (G.)

 

 

 

 

The indoctrination is so deep that educated people think they’re being objective.
– Noam Chomsky

 

 

We will never ever know the real numbers.

But 50% of under 25s having antibodies doesn’t seem to point to lockdowns as the main “success” factor.

Nearly A Quarter Of Registered Covid Deaths Are Not Caused By The Virus (DM)

Nearly a quarter of registered Covid-19 deaths are now people who are not being killed by the virus, new official figures show as Boris Johnson comes under renewed pressure from Tory backbenchers to end the third lockdown sooner than planned. The latest data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) reveals that 23 per cent of coronavirus deaths which are registered are now people who have died ‘with’ the disease rather than ‘from’ an infection. This means that the person who has died will have tested positive for Covid-19 at some point, but that the disease was not recorded as the victim’s primary cause of death on their death certificate. Even though just 23 deaths were announced yesterday, the Prime Minister is continuing to resist calls from his own party to lift all coronavirus curbs ahead of schedule as he warned that cases will rise in the coming weeks as people meet with friends and family in pubs and parks.

Outdoor hospitality and non-essential retail reopened on Monday under the Government’s roadmap out of lockdown. Thousands of people rushed to high streets to splurge their cash on drinks, haircuts and clothes as economists predict a mini-boom fuelled by pent-up demand. However, in his downcast interview with Sky News, Mr Johnson even appeared to dismiss the efficacy of the vaccines his government has been busily rolling out this winter, as he claimed the shutdown – not jabs – had reduced the number of cases, hospitalisations and deaths. ‘It is very, very important for everybody to understand that the reduction in these numbers – in hospitalisations and in deaths and in infections – has not been achieved by the vaccination programme,’ he said.

‘People don’t, I think, appreciate that it’s the lockdown that has been overwhelmingly important in delivering this improvement in the pandemic and in the figures that we’re seeing. So yes of course the vaccination programme has helped, but the bulk of the work in reducing the disease has been done by the lockdown.’ Conservative backbenchers led by Steve Baker, deputy chairman of the Covid Research Group of Tory MPs, have mounted a campaign to get the country opened up sooner than planned.

Boris
https://twitter.com/i/status/1381922550154981377

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A giant PR campaign for Pfizer, that’s all it is, paid for by the state.

More Brands Are Putting Money And Clout Behind Covid-19 Vaccine Ads (F.)

As the Covid-19 vaccine becomes more widely available, well known companies ranging from tech giants to beer brands are rolling out public service announcements to encourage people to get their shot. This past week, The Boston Beer Company debuted a new Sam Adams campaign promoting the vaccine featuring the brand’s “Cousin From Boston” character. The ad—created by the advertising agency Goodby, Silverstein and Partners—shows the “Cousin” getting vaccinated by a real healthcare worker at Fenway Park’s mega site. But right before getting his jab, he passes out from his fear of needles and dreams of the day he can once again meet up with friends at a bar. (Sam Adams is also offering $7 toward a celebratory beer to the first 10,000 people to share proof of vaccination with the hashtag #ShotForSam on social media.)

According to GS&P cofounder Jeff Goodby—the legendary creative behind the iconic “Got Milk” campaign and countless Super Bowl ads—humor is a good way to reach younger audiences, especially after a year as emotionally draining as 2020. “You know what humor did for me is it puts this in perspective,’ Goodby says. “It’s just an inoculation. We’ve had a million of them in our lifetime, and this one is actually for the good of the community around you as well as for yourself and I think we tried to get that across. And it leads to a certain liberation and togetherness. And beer of course, is central to togetherness. One of the great things about getting inoculated is you can drink beer with people.” While Sam Adams went with humor, it wasn’t without first testing the ad to make sure it would be well-received, despite the serious nature of the topic, says Boston Beer Company CMO Lesya Lysyj.

Before introducing the “Cousin” last year, Sam Adams had been taking a more serious tone, even before the pandemic began. “We felt like it was important to show him showing it since he’s so relatable,” Lysyj says. “And if that guy can do it, anybody can do it . . . We did feel like you could put yourself in the shoes of this guy.” Sam Adams isn’t alone in its messaging. In fact The Ad Council—a nonprofit with a long history of collaborating with marketers to create PSAs for a variety of causes—has raised more than $50 million to fund Covid-19 PSAs and other related initiatives with a goal of appealing to a wide audience. To promote mask-wearing, it teamed up with Warner Media and the CDC in February for “Mask Up America,” a PSA featuring characters—from Harry Potter to the Joker to hobbits from Lord of the Rings—all wearing face masks in iconic scenes.

And in March, it released a vaccine PSA featuring former Presidents Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and George Bush. Heidi Arthur, the Ad Council’s chief campaign officer, says the Covid-19 vaccine effort is the most complicated initiative undertaken by the organization, which also led polio vaccine efforts in the 1950s. “The amount of change can happen so quickly as the medical community learns more about the efficacy of vaccines and making sure that all of our messages and the content we’re creating is really where the science is because it can get very confusing for people with the flip of a switch,” she says.

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It’s about your money, not your health.

Big Pharma Uses Big Tobacco’s Strategy To Defeat Ivermectin (DR)

The Marlboro Man, as Dr. Mukherjee wrote in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Emperor of All Maladies, was the most successful smoking icon by 1955. Dr. Mukherjee describes how the Tobacco Industry fought back by twisting science against the public, first by arguing that an association does not prove cause and effect, and later by offering to perform the studies. The tobacco scientists argued that lung cancer was caused by genetics: if you were born with cancer genes, you developed cancer, and if you weren’t, you didn’t get it. Cigarettes might be associated with cancer, but they argued that more studies were needed if one were to actually “prove a causal link” between cigarettes and cancer. The actual cause of lung cancer, the tobacco scientists concluded, was faulty genetics and not cigarettes.

To assist with these studies, the generous Big Tobacco even offered to fund the research by founding the Tobacco Industry Research Committee. The TIRC is described further in The Emperor of All Maladies, a book I strongly recommend everyone read. The author writes how this ingenious strategy kept the tobacco companies in business and record-breaking profits for the next 50 years despite causing many millions of lung cancer deaths. Blurring or confusing the facts as a tactic proved remarkably effective. But by far, the craftiest ruse was for the Tobacco Industry to pretend to embrace the research and set up their own studies. Because by controlling the study design, they could control the outcome. The same strategy is now used against the public in this pandemic.

Their first victim was Hydroxychloroquine, which proved easy to discredit given that Donald Trump sounded unhinged in his praise for the drug. Later studies seemed to reinforce the belief that HCQ was ineffective; however when academic misconduct was found, it threatened to expose the effort. Big Pharma successfully distanced itself when the fraudulent articles were retracted and blamed on lone scientists acting by themselves. Dr. Tess Lawrie is a highly-respected and independent research consultant to the World Health Organization and NHS. Her work is routinely relied upon in the formation of International Practice Guidelines. She has found HCQ to have an effect against the coronavirus. Most tellingly, when Dr. Tess Lawrie performed her independent review of the data on Ivermectin, she removed the Fonseca study, which purported to show no benefit against COVID with Ivermectin use.

Dr. Lawrie explained, “They (The Fonseca Group) didn’t find that much of a difference between Ivermectin and the control arm. But the control arm received HCQ. So basically, there’s a comparison between two fairly active treatments.” Dr. Lawrie explained that there were many reasons to consider HCQ active against the virus. Thus, two patient groups were compared in Fonseca, both of which received effective drugs against COVID-19, and this was not considered a valid controlled trial of Ivermectin. Therefore the study was eliminated from the meta-analysis.

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Stay away from Bill.

How Bill Gates Impeded Global Access to Covid Vaccines (TNR)

In April [2020], Bill Gates launched a bold bid to manage the world’s scientific response to the pandemic. Gates’s Covid-19 ACT-Accelerator expressed a status quo vision for organizing the research, development, manufacture, and distribution of treatments and vaccines. Like other Gates-funded institutions in the public health arena, the Accelerator was a public-private partnership based on charity and industry enticements. Crucially, and in contrast to the C-TAP, the Accelerator enshrined Gates’s long-standing commitment to respecting exclusive intellectual property claims. Its implicit arguments—that intellectual property rights won’t present problems for meeting global demand or ensuring equitable access, and that they must be protected, even during a pandemic—carried the enormous weight of Gates’s reputation as a wise, beneficent, and prophetic leader.


How he’s developed and wielded this influence over two decades is one of the more consequential and underappreciated shapers of the failed global response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Entering year two, this response has been defined by a zero-sum vaccination battle that has left much of the world on the losing side. Gates’s marquee Covid-19 initiative started relatively small. Two days before the WHO declared a pandemic on March 11, 2020, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced something called the Therapeutics Accelerator, a joint initiative with Mastercard and the charity group the Wellcome Trust to identify and develop potential treatments for the novel coronavirus. Doubling as a social branding exercise for a giant of global finance, the Accelerator reflected Gates’s familiar formula of corporate philanthropy, which he has applied to everything from malaria to malnutrition.

In retrospect, it was a strong indicator that Gates’s dedication to monopoly medicine would survive the pandemic, even before he and his foundation’s officers began to say so publicly. This was confirmed when a bigger version of the Accelerator was unveiled the following month at the WHO. The Access to Covid-19 Tools Accelerator, or ACT-Accelerator, was Gates’s bid to organize the development and distribution of everything from therapeutics to testing. The biggest and most consequential arm, COVAX, proposed to subsidize vaccine deals with poor countries through donations by, and sales to, richer ones. The goal was always limited: It aimed to provide vaccines for up to 20 percent of the population in low-to-middle-income countries. After that, governments would largely have to compete on the global market like everyone else. It was a partial demand-side solution to what the movement coalescing around a call for a “people’s vaccine” warned would be a dual crisis of supply and access, with intellectual property at the center of both.

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“Over 40,000 people and 15,000 units of military equipment and weapons will be deployed on Russia’s western border in the near future..”

“In the spring of this year, the joint armed forces of NATO began the largest exercise in the last 30 years, Defender Europe 2021..”

Russia Accuses US, NATO Of Moving Troops To Its Border (AA)

The US is moving its troops to Russia’s borders, a top Russian official said on Tuesday. Over 40,000 people and 15,000 units of military equipment and weapons will be deployed on Russia’s western border in the near future, Defense Minister Sergey Shoygu said in a video conference with other military chiefs in the northern city of Severodvinsk. “In Poland and the Baltic states, US forces are being reinforced … the intensity of aerial reconnaissance has been doubled compared to last year, and the intensity of naval reconnaissance has increased by one-and-a-half times,” he said.


The minister accused the US and its allies of carrying out active military activities “with a clear anti-Russian orientation,” including up to 40 major military training events in Europe every year. “In the spring of this year, the joint armed forces of NATO began the largest exercise in the last 30 years, Defender Europe 2021,” he said. According to Shoygu, Russia redeployed two army and three airborne units to its western border “to counter the threat.”

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This is propaganda theater. It’s very obviously NATO that’s escalating tensions.

Biden Urges Russia To De-Escalate Ukraine Tensions In Call With Putin (G.)

In a phone call with Vladimir Putin, Joe Biden has called on Russia to de-escalate tensions with Ukraine and proposed a summit between the two leaders amid growing concern over a Russian military buildup on Ukraine’s border. The president emphasized the United States’s unwavering commitment to Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and expressed concern about Russia’s military buildup, the White House said. “President Biden reaffirmed his goal of building a stable and predictable relationship with Russia consistent with US interests, and proposed a summit meeting in a third country in the coming months to discuss the full range of issues facing the United States and Russia.” Biden expressed concern about Russia’s military buildup in the Crimea region of Ukraine and on Ukraine’s border, the White House said in a statement.


It said Biden also made clear that the United States will act “firmly” to defend its national interests in response to Russia’s actions, such as cyber intrusions and election interference. Biden also proposed holding a summit with Putin in a third country in coming months. The phone call came hours after Nato’s secretary general called on Russia to halt its military buildup around Ukraine, describing it as “unjustified, unexplained and deeply concerning”. Flanked by Ukraine’s foreign minister at a press conference on Tuesday morning, Nato’s Jens Stoltenberg said Russia had moved thousands of combat troops to Ukraine’s borders in “the largest massing of Russian troops since the illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014”.

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“The trend in the behavior of the Ukrainian side creates the risk of a resumption of full-scale military action.”

Russia Warns US Warships To Stay Far Away From Crimea “For Their Own Good” (ZH)

At a moment the United States appears poised to send its warships near Ukraine as a strong ‘deterrent message’ against Russian forces built up near the east Ukrainian border, Russia on Tuesday warned that US vessels better stay away from Crimea “for their own good”. A Kremlin statement further called the new US deployment into the Black Sea a serious “provocation” which serves no other purpose but to test Russia’s “strength” and “nerves”. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov issued the Tuesday warning as follows: “There is absolutely nothing for American ships to be doing near our shores, this is purely a provocative action. Provocative in the direct sense of the word: they are testing our strength, playing on our nerves. They will not succeed.”

“We warn the United States that it will be better for them to stay far away from Crimea and our Black Sea coast. It will be for their own good,” he added. It was late last week that Turkey’s foreign ministry confirmed that it’s granted permission for US warships to use the Bosporus and Dardanelles straits to enter the Black Sea. The Pentagon has downplayed the deployment by keeping mostly mum about it, only saying that it’s “routine” for US warships to patrol the Black Sea. The Kremlin has warned that it’s Kiev’s own actions and initial troop build-up in and near Donbass that is risking “broader war” in the region. Days ago Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, “The trend in the behavior of the Ukrainian side creates the risk of a resumption of full-scale military action.”

Russia’s newest warning that US ships better not come near Crimea likely also have in mind Joe Biden’s first words addressing the long-simmering Ukraine crisis issued early in his presidency. He said in a February 26 statement that the US “will never” recognize Russia’s claims over Crimea: The United States does not and will never recognize Russia’s purported annexation of the peninsula, and we will stand with Ukraine against Russia’s aggressive acts. We will continue to work to hold Russia accountable for its abuses and aggression in Ukraine.

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Trump wanted to do it but got obstructed by the Pentagon. So Biden can get all the glory. On 9/11, no less. Oh boy.

“The president has judged that a conditions based approach, which has been the approach of the past two decades, is a recipe for staying in Afghanistan forever.”

No, seriously, that’s not about Trump, it’s about Biden. Don’t try to make this up at home, they have professionals to do it for you.

Biden To Withdraw US Troops From Afghanistan By September 11 (G.)

Joe Biden will withdraw all the remaining US troops from Afghanistan by September 11, the 20th anniversary of the al-Qaida terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, a senior administration official has confirmed. The president is expected to make a formal announcement on Wednesday. There are currently about 2,500 US troops in the country, serving alongside 7,000 other foreign troops as part of a Nato coalition. Most, if not all, Nato allies are likely to withdraw in coordination with the US. “We will remain in lockstep with them as we undergo this operation. We went in together, adjusted together and now we will prepare to leave together,” a US official said. The drawdown of US troops will begin by 1 May, the withdrawal deadline the Trump administration agreed with the Taliban last year, and will be completed by the 9/11 anniversary.

“We went to Afghanistan to deliver justice to those who attacked us on September 11th and to disrupt terrorists seeking to use Afghanistan as a safe haven to attack,” a senior administration official said. “We believe we achieved that objective some years ago. We judge the threat against the homeland now emanating from Afghanistan to be at a level that we can address it, without a persistent military footprint in the country and without remaining at war with the Taliban.” The only remaining US military presence after September 11 this year will be security for the US embassy, a task normally carried out by marines. The Biden administration has said it will negotiate with the Afghan government over the precise security arrangements for the diplomatic mission in Kabul.

About 800,000 US soldiers and other military personnel have served at least once in Afghanistan since the US invasion in 2001, launched in the wake of the September 11 attacks. More than 2,300 have been killed, and 20,000 wounded. The US military orthodoxy until recently has been that any withdrawal from Afghanistan would have to be “conditions based”, meaning it was dependent on the security situation and the threat posed by the Taliban to the democratic and social gains of the past 20 years. The senior US official briefing reporters on the decision said: “The president has judged that a conditions based approach, which has been the approach of the past two decades, is a recipe for staying in Afghanistan forever.”

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“$23.4 billion in sophisticated weaponry”, but only after commitments to human rights.

Joe Biden Is Proceeding With Donald Trump’s Biggest Arms Deal (HuffPo)

President Joe Biden is advancing controversial Trump-era plans to transfer $23.4 billion in sophisticated weaponry to the United Arab Emirates, a State Department spokesperson told HuffPost on Tuesday – despite concerns from influential lawmakers and progressive activists, as well as the Biden administration’s promise to review the package. The news came amid an ongoing lawsuit by a nonprofit group called the New York Center for Foreign Policy Affairs, which echoed criticism of the deal as potentially destabilizing for the Middle East. “While we will not comment on ongoing litigation, we can confirm that that the Administration intends to move forward with these proposed defense sales to the UAE, even as we continue reviewing details and consulting with Emirati officials to ensure we have developed mutual understandings with respect to Emirati obligations before, during, and after delivery,” the spokesperson said.

Last December, nearly all Senate Democrats voted to try and block the sale, citing President Donald Trump’s rushed attempt to push it through and the UAE’s alarming violations of human rights at home and around the region. Biden put the deal – which would give the UAE the F-35 fighter jet, armed drones and associated bombs and missiles — under review shortly after becoming president. The administration has since been vague about that process. The transfers are incredibly complex and will take years to complete, so it was clear that they were not occurring yet. In January, an official told the Wall Street Journal that the UAE sales “were not frozen while they are being examined” – in contrast to Trump-era arms deals for Saudi Arabia, a UAE ally which has also faced growing criticism in Washington.

Still, many observers believed there was an effective pause on the deal and that at some point the administration would offer a public explanation of how it would handle the agreement. Democratic lawmakers and activists, who opposed to the deal because of the UAE’s aggressive activities across the Middle East, wanted to ensure the Biden administration was serious about the review, to the extent of possibly shrinking the package to pressure the Emiratis to respect human rights standards. U.S. officials will continue raising rights and geopolitical concerns with the Emiratis, the State Department spokesperson told HuffPost. “The estimated delivery dates on these sales, if implemented, are scheduled for after 2025 or later. Thus, we anticipate a robust and sustained dialogue with the UAE to [ensure] any defense transfers meet our mutual strategic objectives to build a stronger, interoperable, and more capable security partnership,” the spokesperson wrote in an email.

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“..what of the Times’s cautions over decades that the most common sort of election fraud involves absentee voting?”

The Absentee Vote Logic of the New York Times (RCI)

To pass a law limiting the use of absentee ballots, as Georgia recently did, is no longer to choose a side in a legitimate debate over how to balance ballot integrity and ease of voting. Instead, to express concern about the risk of election fraud is seen as being engaged in a different sort of fraud — an illegitimate effort to disenfranchise the poor and minorities. The New York Times has aggressively insisted the last several months that worries over absentee and mail-in ballots, in particular, are dishonest violations of voting rights. Times staff opinion editor Spencer Bokat-Lindell wrote late in October that “[t]he effort to discredit and discourage mail-in voting” was the “culmination of a decades-long disinformation campaign by the Republican Party and others to suppress votes, especially those cast by Black and Latino Americans.”

Spencer Bokat-Lindell: Times opinion editor: Efforts to discredit mail voting are aimed at suppressing votes, “especially those cast by Black and Latino Americans.” Then what of the Times’s cautions over decades that the most common sort of election fraud involves absentee voting? But what of the Times itself, which for over two decades has warned readers that the most common sort of election fraud involves absentee voting? As recently as September, Times reporters Stephanie Saul and Reid Epstein quoted Richard Hasen, who teaches election law at the University of California, Irvine, saying that “[e]lection fraud in the United States is very rare, but the most common type of such fraud in the United States involves absentee ballots.”

In 2018 operatives working for the Republican candidate for North Carolina’s Ninth Congressional District seat, falsified absentee ballots. Times reporters Alan Blinder and Michael Wines told readers that the state’s long history of election fraud was “under a spotlight.” They quoted lawyer Bill Gilkeson saying that “absentee ballots” were “where the fraud really happens.” In 2019 Blinder wrote, “The Ninth District controversy ranks among the highest-profile examples of modern election fraud,” one that “underscores how absentee ballots remain susceptible to abuse.”

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What comes below fake news on the scale?

CNN Staffer Admits Network’s Focus Was To ‘Get Trump Out Of Office’ (Fox)

A staffer for CNN spoke candidly to an undercover journalist about the political motivations the network had during the 2020 presidential election, boasting the left-leaning outlet helped defeat former President Donald Trump and even calling his own employer “propaganda.” In the first installment of what’s billed as a three-part #ExposeCNN campaign from the right-wing guerilla news outlet Project Veritas, network technical director Charles Chester shed light on how the network wanted to remove its nemesis from the White House and help now-President Biden. “Look at what we did, we got Trump out,” Chester said in a celebratory tone. “I am 100% going to say it. And I 100% believe it that if it wasn’t for CNN, I don’t know that Trump would have got voted out.”

While similar videos are sometimes deceptively edited and taken out of context, many comments made by Chester throughout the video are longer clips that feature him speaking in clear, complete sentences. In a series of sitdowns with an undercover journalist over the past month, Chester — who bragged he was “one step down” from a director — claimed CNN was “creating a story” that questioned Trump’s health that “we didn’t know anything about,” calling it “propaganda” to help remove Trump from office. “Trump was, I don’t know, like shaking his hand or whatever… we brought in like so many medical people to like all tell a story that, like, it was all speculation that he was like neurologically damaged, that he was losing it, he’s unfit to, you know, whatever,” Chester said. “We were creating a story that we didn’t know anything about.”

While Chester claimed CNN wanted to help remove Trump from office, he also said the network wanted to promote the health and fitness of Biden. “We would always show shots of him jogging… him in his aviator shades and like you paint him as a young geriatric,” Chester said of Biden, before dismissing concerns that he wouldn’t make it a full term because he’s a fan of Vice President Kamala Harris. “I think we got him through this term,” Chester said “He’s not going to f—–g die, but I’m OK with that. [Harris] probably could be like a b—-h in like a board meeting and you’d hate her as a boss, but she’s f—–g real and better than what we got regardless.”

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“It would certainly send a message that the government sees this as a superior alternative to their own currency.”

Crackdown On Cryptocurrencies May Be Coming, Warns Kraken CEO (RT)

Governments around the world could start clamping down on the use of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, according to Jesse Powell, the chief executive of the Kraken exchange. “I think there could be some crackdown,” the CEO told CNBC, adding that regulatory uncertainty around crypto isn’t going away anytime soon. Powell’s words follow a recent anti-money laundering rule proposed by the US government that would require people who hold their cryptocurrencies in a private digital wallet to undergo identity checks if they make transactions of $3,000 or more. “Something like that could really hurt crypto and kind of kill the original use case, which was to just make financial services accessible to everyone,” Powell said.


He expressed hopes that “the US and international regulators don’t take too much of a narrow view on this,” noting that “Some other countries, China especially, are taking crypto very seriously and taking a very long-term view.” The chief executive said he feels the US is more “shortsighted” than other nations and is “susceptible” to the pressures of incumbent legacy businesses – in other words, the banks – that “stand to lose from crypto becoming a big deal.” “I also think it might be too late,” Powell added. “Maybe the genie’s out of the bottle and just trying to ban it at this point would make it more attractive. It would certainly send a message that the government sees this as a superior alternative to their own currency.

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The CIA will stop it. Big Tech=Big Intel.

Republican Antitrust Bill Would Block All Big Tech Acquisitions (TC)

There are about to be a lot of antitrust bills taking aim at Big Tech, and here’s one more. Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) rolled out a new bill this week that would take some severe measures to rein in Big Tech’s power, blocking mergers and acquisitions outright. The “Trust-Busting for the Twenty-First Century Act” would ban any acquisitions by companies with a market cap of more than $100 billion, including vertical mergers. The bill also proposes changes that would dramatically heighten the financial pain for companies caught engaging in anti-competitive behavior, forcing any company that loses an antirust suit to forfeit profits made through those business practices.

At its core, Hawley’s legislation would snip some of the red tape around antitrust enforcement by amending the Sherman Act, which made monopolies illegal, and the Clayton Act, which expanded the scope of illegal anti-competitive behavior. The idea is to make it easier for the FTC and other regulators to deem a company’s behavior anti-competitive — a key criticism of the outdated antitrust rules that haven’t kept pace with the realities of the tech industry. The bill isn’t likely to get too far in a Democratic Senate, but it’s not insignificant. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), who chairs the Senate’s antitrust subcommittee, proposed legislation earlier this year that would also create barriers for dominant companies with a habit of scooping up their competitors. Klobuchar’s own ideas for curtailing Big Tech’s power similarly focus on reforming the antitrust laws that have shaped U.S. business for more than a century.

The Republican bill may have some overlap with Democratic proposals, but it still hits some familiar notes from the Trump era of hyperpartisan Big Tech criticism. Hawley slams “woke mega-corporations” in Silicon Valley for exercising too much power over the information and products that Americans consume. While Democrats naturally don’t share that critique, Hawley’s bill makes it clear that antitrust reform targeting Big Tech is one policy area where both political parties could align on the ends, even if they don’t see eye to eye on the why.

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“In Mexico City, the local government has proposed a law that would ban the sale, delivery and distribution of packaged foods with a high caloric and energy content and sugary drinks to children..”

Mexico’s War on Obesity Sends Junk-Food & Sugary-Drink Giants Scrambling (WS)

Since Mexico’s government has passed one of the strictest food labeling laws on the planet in October last year, all soft drinks cans and bottles, bags of chips and other processed food packages must bear black octagonal labels warning of “EXCESS SUGAR”, “EXCESS CALORIES”, “EXCESS SODIUM” or “EXCESS TRANS FATS” — all in big bold letters that are impossible to miss. Many states have also introduced legislation making it much more difficult for retailers to sell junk food and sugary drinks to children. Evidence from other countries suggests that warning labels can be effective. Chile started requiring them in 2016. It also limited cartoon food packaging, prevented schools from selling unhealthy foods, restricted TV adverts, and banned promotional toys.

Over the next two years, sugary drink sales in Chile plunged by 23%. According to one study, the labels reduced the likelihood of people choosing sugary breakfast cereals by 11% and sugary juices by almost 24%. A nightmare for the companies affected. The prospect of something similar transpiring in Mexico, a country almost seven times larger than Chile and that consumes more processed food than any other country in Latin America, unnerved global food and beverage companies. The United States, EU, Canada and Switzerland, home to some of the world’s biggest food companies, tried to derail the new legislation. But to no avail. The arrival of Covid-19, which has proven to be particularly lethal to people with three comorbidities — obesity, diabetes, and hypertension — has strengthened the government’s case and resolve.

Over a dozen of Mexico’s 36 state governments have banned or are in the process of banning the sales of soft drinks and junk food to children. In Mexico City, the local government has proposed a law that would ban the sale, delivery and distribution of packaged foods with a high caloric and energy content and sugary drinks to children. The law will also ban the presence of soft drink vending machines in schools. Mexico’s Senate also recently passed a law that will compel educational authorities to prohibit the sale of foods with low nutritional value and high caloric content in the vicinity of school facilities while promoting the establishment of healthy food outlets. There are also moves afoot to restrict the advertising of foods high in fat, salt, sugar and saturated fats on children’s television channels.

These moves have raised concerns that the government is overstepping its bounds. The business lobby group Coparmex said that banning the sale of junk food and sugary drinks to minors represents a frontal attack on commercial freedom and freedom of choice. It will also have serious economic consequences for businesses in the retail sector. But those consequences are dwarfed by the economic and health impact of widespread obesity. This is particularly true in the time of Covid when the risk of death from the virus is about 10 times higher in countries where more than half of the population is overweight, according to a report released in March by the World Obesity Federation.

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Either our bodies find a way to incorporate plastics, or we’re doomed.

Airborne Plastic Pollution ‘Spiralling Around The Globe’ (G.)

Microplastic pollution is now “spiralling around the globe”, according to a study of airborne plastic particles. The researchers said human pollution has led to a global plastic cycle, akin to natural processes such as the carbon cycle, with plastic moving through the atmosphere, oceans and land. The result is the “plastification” of the planet, said one scientist. The analysis calls plastic pollution one of the most pressing environmental issues of the 21st century. It indicates that the billions of tonnes of plastic discarded into the oceans and land and being broken down into tiny pieces are being thrown back into the air by road traffic and winds over seas and farmland. People are already known to breathe, drink and eat microplastics and the other research suggests levels of pollution will continue to rise rapidly.

The scientists said this “raises questions on the impact of accumulating plastics in the atmosphere on human health. The inhalation of particles can be irritating to lung tissue and lead to serious diseases.” Prof Natalie Mahowald, at Cornell University in the US and part of the research team, said: “What we’re seeing right now is the accumulation of mismanaged plastics just going up. Some people think it’s going to increase by tenfold [per decade]. “But maybe we could solve this before it becomes a huge problem, if we manage our plastics better, before they accumulate in the environment and swirl around everywhere.” She said clearing up ocean plastic could help reduce the amount that gets thrown back up into the atmosphere, and that more biodegradable plastics could be part of the solution.

The research, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, examined airborne microplastics, which have been far less studied than plastic in oceans and rivers. The team had more than 300 samples of airborne microplastics from 11 sites across the western US, the best dataset available globally. These were the basis for atmospheric modelling that estimated the contribution from different sources, the first such study to do so. Virtually none of the airborne microplastics came directly from plastic being discarded in cities and towns, the scientists found, but were the result of road traffic and winds across oceans and farmland whipping up plastic particles already in the environment. “We thought population centres would be a much better source, obviously, but it just didn’t work out that way,” Mahowald said. “Resuspension [of microplastics] makes the most sense with this set of data.”

[..] Microplastic pollution has been detected across the planet, from the summit of Mount Everest to the deepest oceans. The revelation in December of small plastic particles in human placentas was described by scientists as “a matter of great concern”.

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Mick Jagger’s take on Covid. Easy Sleazy. With Dave Grohl.

 

 

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Mar 142021
 
 March 14, 2021  Posted by at 9:44 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  34 Responses »


Pablo Picasso Woman sitting in a armchair 1910

 

One Year Into ‘15 Days To Flatten The Curve’ (Marsden)
Will Kids Ever Forgive Us For Depriving Them Of Their Childhood? (Bridge)
Lockdown Ending Could Trigger Anxiety For Many, Say UK Charities (G.)
Study: Vaccines DO Help To Stop Coronavirus Transmission – By 30% (RT)
Free Speech: And… It’s Gone (Luongo)
Police Round Up Women Mourning London Kidnapping-murder Victim (RT)
If You Thought The Right To Protest Was Inalienable, Then Think Again (Malik)
100+ People To Be Charged In Storming Of US Capitol (RT)
Prosecutors Find No Evidence Of Wide-Ranging Conspiracy To Storm Capitol (RT)
Bandaging The Corpse (Chris Hedges)
The Cannibalization Is Complete: Only Inedible Zombies Remain (CHS)
Cuomo Staffers Have Stopped Showing Up To Work (NYP)
The War In Ukraine May Soon Resume (MoA)
Children Packed Into Border Patrol Tent For Days On End (AP)
CNN Hemorrhages Viewers Post-Trump (RT)
The ‘American Dream’ Of Upward Mobility Is Broken (G.)

 

 

The US goes to Daylight Saving Time today, but Europe not until March 28. I know they do this only to confuse me, and it works. Every single time.

 

 

I am not vaccinated, but I do identify as vaccinated.

 

 

 

 

“The handiwork of government bureaucrats, the form aimed to fit each allowable activity in our daily lives into a neat little box.”

One Year Into ‘15 Days To Flatten The Curve’ (Marsden)

In the 12 months since states first started ordering citizens to stay at home under the pretext of Covid, we’ve come a long way. Particularly in our understanding of how illiberal our politicians can be and how supine we are.
One year ago, at noon on Tuesday, March 17, France went into total lockdown for the first time. Until then, Covid-19 was something of which we were faintly aware – background noise in our daily lives that was mostly relegated to Wuhan, China. But we all had that one moment when we realized that it was about to hit home hard. In my case, that instant came two days before the lockdown, when the local outdoor pool posted a sign on the door drastically reducing the total user capacity to just 100, right before closing entirely the following day.

On March 16, French President Emmanuel Macron addressed the nation to announce what he described as temporary measures, to be implemented for at least 15 days. Only essential trips outside the home would be allowed. Period. Case closed. All in the interests of protecting the French healthcare system, the long-suffering victim of perennial government cutbacks, from being forced onto life-support as it tends to be nearly every year during flu season. The government’s drastic actions successfully convinced many citizens at the outset of the lockdown that the coronavirus must be on par with the plague. Macron opened the first few paragraphs of his national address with the phrase, “We are at war.” Yet even the government didn’t really know what it was dealing with at that point or how to handle it.

The fear mongering was, however, sufficient for people to panic and to accept whatever restrictions the authorities wanted to impose on them. “Stay home, save lives” and “15 days to flatten the curve” became the primary propaganda catchphrases. Then emerged the now-infamous French self-authorization form, mocked around the world. (It wasn’t until the second lockdown or the first or second nightly curfew that more people realized that they could really just tick off anything that they wanted since there was no real way for the authorities to verify claims, and that, in practice, police weren’t too interested in policing people for the “crime” of simply being on the streets.) The handiwork of government bureaucrats, the form aimed to fit each allowable activity in our daily lives into a neat little box.

One box for an hour of exercise, once a day, within a 1km radius from the home. One for a grocery run. One for a doctor’s visit. Public transport was reduced to a trickle as everyone was ordered to work from home with the exception of a limited list of workers that the government defined as essential. The term “essential worker” itself is offensive, particularly coming from government authorities whose income is a direct result of taxes imposed on the hard work of those it apparently considers unessential. The other irony is that when only the most essential workers as defined by the government were permitted by the state to do their jobs – the grocery store clerks, the maintenance workers and repairmen, the nurses and caregivers – it became clear how little their pay reflected their true value to society as defined by the government.

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Will they know the difference?

Will Kids Ever Forgive Us For Depriving Them Of Their Childhood? (Bridge)

Critics of lockdowns & school closures to halt Covid-19 have compared the effects to child abuse. And now that new data points to some deeply disturbing long-term psychological damage, it looks like they were right. Abiding by the new age medical maxim that commands ‘everyone stop living so that you don’t die’ is no way to live. Yet that is exactly how millions of youngsters have been forced to cope with a disease that poses, in the overwhelming majority of cases, no more of a health risk to them than riding a bicycle or crossing an intersection. And while socially isolating the youth may have spared a minuscule fraction from contracting coronavirus, the total impact such measures have had on the mental wellbeing of this demographic has been a disastrous tradeoff.

The results from the most inhumane experiment ever conducted on human beings are in, and we should all be ashamed of ourselves for letting it happen. In a white paper published by the nonprofit FAIR Health, the consequences of lockdowns on the mental health of American students reveal what many people already know: “School closures, having to learn remotely and isolating from friends due to social distancing have been sources of stress and loneliness.” The real shocker, however, is how that statement plays out in real life. In March and April 2020, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, mental health claims among this young demographic exploded 97.0 percent and 103.5 percent, respectively, compared to the same months in 2019.

To break it down even further, there was a dramatic surge in cases involving “intentional self-harm” using a handgun, sharp object and even smashing a vehicle, as the more popular examples. The rate of incidence for such destructive behaviors amid 13-18 year olds jumped 90.71 percent in March 2020 compared to March 2019. The increase was even greater when comparing April 2020 to April 2019, almost doubling (99.83 percent). August 2020 was particularly active in the northeast sector of the country, showing a surge of 333.93 percent. Similarly major increases were found among the 19-22 age category, although not quite as pronounced as the 13-18 group.

Another sign that young Americans have suffered undue psychological distress during the pandemic is observable from the rate of overdoses and substance abuse. For those between the ages of 13-18, overdoses increased 94.91 percent in March 2020 and 119.31 percent in April 2020 over the same periods the year before. Meanwhile, substance use disorders surged in March (64.64 percent) and April (62.69 percent) 2020, compared to 2019.

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Growacet.

Lockdown Ending Could Trigger Anxiety For Many, Say UK Charities (G.)

The lifting of lockdown restrictions and the subsequent return to schools, workplaces and social events could trigger heightened levels of stress and anxiety for many people, UK mental health charities and experts have said. They say some, particularly those with mental health concerns, will be worried or anxious about the readjustment required by the lifting of lockdown restrictions as set out in the government’s gradual roadmap for reopening England. Dr Tine Van Bortel, a senior research associate in public health at the University of Cambridge, said: “Lockdown has given people with mental health conditions like anxiety and PTSD permission to stay at home, and knowing that at some point you’ll have to go out again can actually trigger stress and anxiety.”

Rosie Weatherley, an information content manager at Mind, said: “Some of us might have found there were some unexpected plus points to lockdown – and therefore feel uneasy or anxious at the prospect of it being lifted. For example, we may be worried about ‘normality’ resuming, or not wanting to return to a faster pace with busier daily lives, and less downtime to ourselves.” She said it was “really important” for government and employers to provide empathy and support for those who need it “beyond lockdown lifting”. From 29 March, outdoor gatherings of up to six people, or two households if this is larger, will be able to meet in parks or gardens, and 21 June is the prospective date on which all legal limits on mixing could be removed.


Laura Peters, the head of advice and information at Rethink Mental Illness, welcomed the relaxing of restrictions and the subsequent reduction in social isolation, but said: “It’s important not to assume that everyone’s in the same boat. Everyone will have a different set of circumstances to navigate as restrictions start to ease, and it’s a natural human response to feel anxious in certain situations or during times of uncertainty.” Even among groups such as young people who are broadly optimistic about lockdown ending, concerns remain. A YoungMinds survey conducted in January found that while 79% of young people agreed that their mental health would start to improve when most restrictions were lifted, some were concerned that the end of the lockdown would happen too quickly and result in further lockdowns in future. “Again and again, young people said they felt like they were experiencing ‘Groundhog Day’, and above all they wish for an end to a cycle of freedoms followed by restrictions,” says the report.

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That’s less than vitamin D?!

Study: Vaccines DO Help To Stop Coronavirus Transmission – By 30% (RT)

A new study has found that Covid-19 vaccines stop people passing the virus on to others. The study is one of several with similar findings, and may pave the way for scientists to support the introduction of ‘vaccine passports.’ A preprint study posted on Friday has found that family members of vaccinated British healthcare workers were around 30 percent less likely to catch Covid-19 than those of unvaccinated workers. Though a reduction of 30 percent may seem minor, the study pointed out that these family members were also at risk of catching the virus outside the home, making the figure an “underestimate of the ‘true’ effect of vaccination on transmission.” We provide the first direct evidence that vaccinating individuals working in high-exposure settings reduces the risk to their close contacts – members of their households.

The study was carried out by researchers at a number of top UK universities and institutions, including the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the Imperial College NHS Trust and the MRC Institute of Genetics and Molecular Medicine of University of Edinburgh. Elsewhere, Israeli researchers have also found that US drugmaker Pfizer’s vaccine is 94 percent effective against asymptomatic transmission of the virus, while the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recently loosened its guidelines for people who’ve taken the jab, returning what the press termed “limited freedoms” to this group. However, health officials in the US have insisted that masking and social distancing are here for the long term, regardless of the efficacy of vaccines.


White House adviser Anthony Fauci last month stated that face coverings may be required until 2022, declaring that “there are things, even if you’re vaccinated, that you’re not going to be able to do in society.” The World Health Organization declared last month that “there are still critical unknowns regarding the efficacy of vaccination in reducing transmission,” in a statement advising against the introduction of so-called ‘vaccine passports’ for air travel. This advice is set to be revised in May, and the latest findings from the UK and Israel could bolster the argument for proof of vaccination as a prerequisite for international travel. Devi Sridhar, a professor of public health at Edinburgh University, predicted that the UK study will pave the way for “aviation & international mobility [safely opening] up with testing & vaccine passports,” but added that doing so would raise “major ethical issues.”

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It’s become a joke.

Free Speech: And… It’s Gone (Luongo)

It’s no surprise to me that the war against speech is accelerating. There’s desperation in the air everywhere. From the barricading of the U.S. Capitol since January 6th to the shrill calls for continued lockdowns over a virus mostly behind us, we see those with power lashing out trying to hold on to it. And it’s no more obvious than in the lockdowns on speech. In the past week we’ve seen another major assault on Twitter-alternative Gab. A massive attack on its security architecture handing out the passwords and information of millions of users to the dark web. Then Texas Governor Greg Abbott, you know the guy who let millions of Texans freeze last month rather than order the coal-fired plants brought online in defiance of the DoE, piles on calling Gab “anti-semetic.”

Abbott’s just doing what he’s paid to do, serve everyone but Texas. Gab CEO Andrew Torba then informed us that the attacks on Gab are far deeper than even a putz like Abbott’s. The relentless pressure to cut his company off from the doing business continues, with bank after bank refusing to do business with them. Torba’s invoking Operation Chokepoint is important here. It reminds us that Biden is a cypher put in place to restore Obama to the White House as functional president. Honestly, taking a step back, is this at all rational? All Torba and Gab want to do is operate a social media platform that conforms, ruthlessly, to the first amendment. Nothing more, nothing less.


It’s not like Gab is funded by foreign intelligence services spreading obvious agitprop and propaganda. No, sorry, that’s the job of the mainstream media and Twitter. I thought if we didn’t like the treatment we got on Twitter we could go ‘build our own’ and that would be fine. Separate but equal, freedom of and from association and all that. But, no, any competition that doesn’t adhere to the current orthodoxy of what constitutes ‘acceptable speech’ is now no longer tolerated. Free Speech is not an option. It’s an obvious coordinated assault from every angle to extend ‘cancel culture’ into a cultural revolution. Because it’s not enough to hound people whose opinions you don’t like from the public square, they have to be beaten out of society entirely, even if the means employed to do so are patently hypocritical.

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“The irony of it is so explicit – are you going to drag women off the street for protesting about a woman being dragged off the street?”

Police Round Up Women Mourning London Kidnapping-murder Victim (RT)

A London vigil for murder victim Sarah Everard — held in defiance of a police order amid the Covid-19 pandemic – turned ugly after large numbers of officers arrived and tried to clear people from the area.
Several organizers of Saturday’s vigil at Clapham Common were reportedly arrested, and footage from the scene showed clashes with police. One clip posted on Twitter shows several women standing on the edge of a bandstand where police congregated, including one holding a sign that says, “We aren’t safe in our homes.” Four women are then grabbed from behind by officers, pulled back and arrested after several people in the crowd try unsuccessfully to pull them back.


One of those women was shown face down on the ground being handcuffed by police in a photo posted by actor and political activist Guillaume Rivaud. Talk show host George Galloway, a former member of Parliament, called the shot a “fatal photograph” for Metropolitan Police commissioner Cressida Dick. Home Secretary Priti Patel said she has asked Metropolitan Police for a “full report” on what happened at the vigil, according to Sky News. One clip from the scene shows police being booed and shouted at by the crowd after they stepped onto the bandstand around 6:30 p.m. The March 3 kidnapping and murder of Everard, allegedly by a London police constable, became a rallying cry over the dangers to women on UK streets. Green Party politician Baroness Jenny Jones went so far as to suggest imposing a 6 p.m. curfew on all men.

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“There is a specific section on “imposing conditions on one-person protests…”

If You Thought The Right To Protest Was Inalienable, Then Think Again (Malik)

The next time you take part in protest, don’t shout too loudly, don’t get in anybody’s way and don’t cause a commotion. Best to sit quietly in a corner and whisper your grievances. That certainly would be what many governments would like. Authoritarian regimes, from Myanmar to Saudi Arabia and from Belarus to China, try to impose such curbs by brute force. Democratic nations rely more on “consent”. Consent, however, is a slippery beast, spawned from a process of constant negotiation and renegotiation between the authorities and a multitude of public voices. The pandemic has created a public health emergency requiring constraints on our rights and unprecedented levels of policing. By and large, the authorities have gained the consent of the British public to impose such restrictions.

The question now is how far an exceptional year has shifted our sense of what is acceptable and to what we will consent. One straw in the wind was the attempt by the Metropolitan police to shut down the Reclaim These Streets march on Saturday evening following the death of Sarah Everard. The police stance felt not just astonishingly ham-fisted in the wake of her death, given the public mood and the debate about the right of women to walk the streets safely and without restrictions. It also felt like the latest attempt by the authorities to take advantage of the pandemic to reset the balance of what is acceptable policing. Another straw in the wind is the police, crime, sentencing and courts bill, published last week, to no fanfare, and about which there has been little discussion.

It’s a monstrosity of a bill. Its 296 pages cover everything from making it harder to prosecute police for dangerous driving to new regulations about unauthorised encampments (which appear to be aimed at the Traveller community), from setting minimum sentences for drug trafficking to encouraging the use of British sign language interpreters in courts. At the heart of it, though, is an assault on the ability of people to protest. The government has made clear that the proposed law is the product of a desire to curtail the kinds of protests we saw last summer with Black Lives Matter, on the one hand, and Extinction Rebellion, on the other. The home secretary, Priti Patel, has long expressed her distaste for the Black Lives Matter protests.

The official policy paper on the new bill begins with quotes from Cressida Dick, the commissioner of the Metropolitan police, on how the Extinction Rebellion actions demonstrated the need for new laws “to deal with protests where people are not primarily violent or seriously disorderly” but do cause disruption. The 1986 Public Order Act already allows police to impose restrictions on a demonstration if they believe it could create “serious public disorder, serious damage to property or serious disruption to the life of the community”. The new bill extends these reasons for curbing protests: the police can curtail a demonstration if they believe “the noise” it makes is disrupting the “activities of an organisation” or has a “relevant impact on persons in the vicinity”. It does not matter how small or large a protest is. There is a specific section on “imposing conditions on one-person protests”.

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Not one firearm was confiscated. Not one shot was fired.

100+ People To Be Charged In Storming Of US Capitol (RT)

At least another hundred people connected to the January 6 storming of the US Capitol are expected to be charged with a variety of crimes, according to prosecutors. “The investigation continues and the government expects that at least one hundred additional individuals will be charged,” claimed the prosecutors in court filings first reported by Fox News on Friday, noting that 300 people have already been charged and that the Justice Department is also “investigating conspiratorial activity” that may have taken place before the riot. They added that the investigation and subsequent prosecution “will likely be one of the largest in American history, both in terms of the number of defendants prosecuted and the nature and volume of the evidence.”

Crimes being investigated allegedly include trespassing, violent conduct, assault against police officers, the theft and destruction of government property, civil disorder, conspiracy, and “firearms offenses,” among others. The court filings also claimed that over 900 search warrants have been conducted around the country since the incident, and that over 15,000 hours of footage has been compiled as evidence. Supporters of former President Donald Trump stormed the US Capitol on January 6, just two weeks before the inauguration of President Joe Biden, to protest Trump’s electoral defeat. One Capitol Police officer and four protesters died during the incident, and many others were injured.


The Biden administration used the storming of the Capitol to post thousands of National Guard soldiers in Washington, DC – where they have been positioned for over two months, despite a lack of violent activity in the area – and have requested to keep the soldiers there through late May, despite the National Guard Association calling it “completely inappropriate at best” and “illegal at worst.”

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“..the plan envisaged fending off possible left-wing violence, not storming the Capitol, his defense said.”

Prosecutors Find No Evidence Of Wide-Ranging Conspiracy To Storm Capitol (RT)

A US judge has ordered the release of retired Navy officer Kenneth Caldwell, accused of being part of an Oath Keepers militia plot to invade the Capitol, pending trial, as no evidence to back the conspiracy claims has turned up. Judge Amit Mehta said that Caldwell did not enter the Capitol building, nor was there direct evidence of him trying to force his way in. “There are no text messages, communications by him, that speak to entering a building or trying to enter the building. And ultimately, he did not enter the building,” Mehta said, as he ordered the 65-year-old’s release from jail. Because he did not breach the Capitol grounds, he was “differently situated” from his alleged co-conspirators, the judge said, ordering Caldwell to remain at his Berryville, Virginia home under GPS monitoring.

This conspiracy case is so far the biggest in the investigation into the January 6 riot, in which a crowd of Trump supporters breached the Capitol building and disrupted the counting of electoral votes cast in the presidential election. The conspiracy charges against Caldwell were among the first to be brought in connection with the events in Washington, DC. At Friday’s hearing, Caldwell’s attorney, David Fischer, pointed out that the prosecutors still have to provide evidence that the alleged sinister plan to infiltrate the Capitol actually existed. While admitting that no evidence was unearthed to support the conspiracy charges, federal prosecutor Kathryn Rakoczy insisted that the militia was prepared to resort to violence.

“The bottom line from the government’s perspective is they were prepared to do violence in whatever ways they needed to,” Rakoczy, who was part of the Mueller probe into the debunked theory that former President Donald Trump colluded with Russia, said, according to Politico. Nevertheless, she admitted that prosecutors “do not have, at this point, someone explicitly saying, ‘Our plan is to storm the Capitol to stop certification,’” referring to nine alleged Oath Keepers who had been charged in February with a wide-ranging conspiracy “to commit an offense against the United States, namely, to corruptly obstruct, influence, and impede an official proceeding” as well as entering the Capitol to that effect.

Caldwell was initially described by the media as the leader of the militia. His attorney later argued that Caldwell had never been a member of the group, and although he was involved in the Oath Keepers’ preparations for January 6, the plan envisaged fending off possible left-wing violence, not storming the Capitol, his defense said.

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”Much of this money will be instantly gobbled up by landlords, lenders, medical providers, and credit card companies.”

Bandaging The Corpse (Chris Hedges)

The established ruling elites know there is a crisis. They agreed, at least temporarily, to throw money at it with the $1.9 trillion Covid-19 bill known as the American Rescue Plan (ARP). But the ARP will not alter the structural inequities, either by raising the minimum wage to $15.00 an hour or imposing taxes and regulations on corporations or the billionaire class that has seen its wealth increase by a staggering $1.1 trillion since the start of the pandemic. The health system will remain privatized, meaning the insurance and pharmaceutical corporations will reap a windfall of tens of billions of dollars with the ARP – and this when they are already making record profits. The endless wars in the Middle East, and the bloated military budget that funds them, will remain sacrosanct.

Wall Street and the predatory global speculators that profit from the massive levels of debt peonage imposed on an underpaid working class and loot the US Treasury in our casino capitalism will continue to funnel money upwards into the hands of a tiny, oligarchic cabal. There will be no campaign finance reform to end our system of legalized bribery. The giant tech monopolies will remain intact. The fossil fuel companies will continue to ravage the ecosystem. The militarized police, censorship imposed by digital media platforms, vast prison system, harsher and harsher laws aimed at curbing domestic terrorism and dissent, and wholesale government surveillance will be, as they were before, the primary instruments of state control.


This act will, at best, provide a momentary respite from the country’s death spiral, sending out one-time checks of $1,400 to 280 million Americans, extending $300 weekly unemployment benefits until the end of August, and distributing $3,600 through a tax credit for children under the age of six and $3,000 per child aged six to 17 starting on July 1. Much of this money will be instantly gobbled up by landlords, lenders, medical providers, and credit card companies. The act does, to its credit, bail out some one million unionized workers poised to lose their pensions, and hands $31.2 billion in aid to Native communities, some of the poorest in the nation. But what happens to the majority of Americans, who get government support for only a few months? What are they supposed to do when the checks stop arriving at the end of the year? Will the federal government orchestrate another massive relief package? I doubt it. We will be back where we started.

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“..a starving cannibal grabs a staggering zombie corporation to devour and the zombie instantly turns to dust.”

The Cannibalization Is Complete: Only Inedible Zombies Remain (CHS)

Setting aside the fictional flood of zombie movies for a moment, we find the real-world horror is the cannibalization of our economy, a cannibalization that is now complete. Every organic source of prosperity and productivity has been captured and consumed, hidden behind the convenient curtains of central bank intervention, “market forces” (hahaha), financialization and fiscal stimulus. All that’s left now are zombies feeding off the offal of stimulus. Sadly for the cannibals who’ve feasted so well for decades, zombies are inedible. So now the cannibals are starving. Poor cannibals! Once the stimulus runs out, no more zombies. Poor zombies!

The cannibals feasted on $50 trillion in earnings stripped from the bones of the workforce (Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018, RAND Corporation) and trillions more in fraud and financial gimmickry. And when the cannibals had consumed the bottom 90%, they moved on and devoured the next 5%. That left only the top 5%, which they needed to keep alive to maintain the curtains masking their ghoulish destruction. But after gorging on trillions for so long, the cannibals appetites can never be sated, so they ambushed their loyal toadies, apologists, lackeys, apparatchiks and sycophants of the top 4.9% and ate them, too, but a bit more stealthily because they still needed an army of toadies to do their dirty work.


The top 4.9% have been transformed into zombies so stealthily they still believe they’re in charge and wealthy–hahaha, the jokes on you! With nobody left to devour, the cannibals turned to their last resort: the Federal Reserve. Please print us up some more bodies to feast on, Federal Reserve. We demand it. We want it, we need it, we’re starving. Alas, the Fed can print currency to inflate speculative bubbles, but it can’t print real flesh for the cannibals. All the Fed can do is finance stimulus offal to feed the zombies. Sorry, cannibals, there’s nothing left to consume. There’s only inedible zombies kept alive by the Fed. There’s some sort of karmic irony in this, it seems: a starving cannibal grabs a staggering zombie corporation to devour and the zombie instantly turns to dust.

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Drip every day drip.

Cuomo Staffers Have Stopped Showing Up To Work (NYP)

Disillusioned staffers are abandoning embattled Gov. Cuomo, sources said. “I hear that most people aren’t even coming into work, and the offices at the Capitol are empty,” said one well-placed insider in touch with staffers in recent days.“He’ll fight and fight and fight, but the staffers I’ve talked to are ready for him to hang up the gloves. Everyone feels like there is an inevitable conclusion — I mean at some point will Biden call on him to step down? They [staffers] just want this torture to stop.”Rebellion in the ranks deepened as Cuomo on Friday defiantly refused to step aside and blamed “cancel culture” for his downfall.


“I feel a level of rage toward this fake tough guy,” seethed a second source, an ex-aide. “The guy thinks he’s the toughest, the hardest working, he’s the smartest. The truth is, he’s anything but. He’s the weakest, he’s the dumbest, and he’s the most shallow of them all. He is genuinely a very small man who pretends to be big.” The former aide said many staffers are not coming into the executive offices, but choosing to work remotely or at vaccine sites instead. They are increasingly worried their careers are in jeopardy, just as they were beginning to see light at the end of the tunnel after working around the clock for months during the pandemic. “Sometimes you have an ability to claim to be out in the field,” the ex-aide said.

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What job did they give Victoria Nuland in the end?

The War In Ukraine May Soon Resume (MoA)

Several Russia watchers – Patrick Armstrong, Andrei Martyanov and Andrei Raevsky – are musing about a renewed attack by the government of Ukraine on its eastern Donbass region. The Donbass separated in 2014 after the U.S. driven coup in Kiev installed an anti-Russian government which then waged a war on its ethnic Russian east. There have been a number of reports about heavy Ukrainian equipment moving east and other hints of military preparations. Russia has seen enough such signs to issue a strong warning: “I would like to warn the Kiev regime and the hotheads that are serving it or manipulating it against further de-escalation and attempts to implement a forceful scenario in Donbass,” [Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova] said, commenting on the statement of head of the Ukrainian delegation to the Contact Group for settlement in Donbass Leonid Kravchuk on some “radical steps” of Kiev if Russia refuses to recognize itself as a conflict side in eastern Ukraine.”

Zakharova recalled that the Minsk Agreements clearly outline the conflict sides in Donbass as Kiev, Donetsk and Lugansk. “The unwillingness of Ukrainian negotiators to recognize this fact and their refusal to find agreements with Donbass is the reason that hinders the establishment of long-lasting peace in the region,” the diplomat noted.” The main catalyst for such a war is the sorry state of the government in Kiev. The country is in in the midst of a constitutional crisis: “[T]he Constitutional Court of Ukraine (CCU) recently plunged the country into one of its deepest crises in its 30-year history. Specifically, on October 27, 2020, the Court declared that the main elements of Ukraine’s anti-corruption legislation, adopted between 2014 and 2020, were unconstitutional. In response, President Zelensky introduced legislation calling for the early termination of all Constitutional Court judges. Later, in December, he suspended the chairman of the Court for two months.”


“The result was widespread chaos in Ukraine’s political system. Zelensky’s actions were of questionable legality and provoked harsh criticism from all political sides. The ramifications of the Court’s decision include the cancellation of over 100 pending corruption investigations, a development that potentially could endanger future EU-Ukraine trade and economic cooperation Ukraine under the 2014 Association Agreement.” After the 2014 Euromaidan coup an ‘independent’ National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) was created to oversee the investigation and prosecution of corrupt state officials. The NABU has since been used by the U.S. embassy to bring criminal cases against those oligarchs it dislikes and to cover for those it likes. The constitutional court found that NABU is a criminal investigation agency outside the control of the executive branch which is a contradiction to the Ukrainian constitution.

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AOC!

Children Packed Into Border Patrol Tent For Days On End (AP)

Hundreds of immigrant children and teenagers have been detained at a Border Patrol tent facility in packed conditions, with some sleeping on the floor because there aren’t enough mats, according to nonprofit lawyers who conduct oversight of immigrant detention centers. The lawyers interviewed more than a dozen children Thursday in Donna, Texas, where the Border Patrol is holding more than 1,000 people. Some of the youths told the lawyers they had been at the facility for a week or longer, despite the agency’s three-day limit for detaining children. Many said they haven’t been allowed to phone their parents or other relatives who may be wondering where they are. Despite concerns about the coronavirus, the children are kept so closely together that they can touch the person next to them, the lawyers said.


Some have to wait five days or more to shower, and there isn’t always soap available, just shampoo, according to the lawyers. President Joe Biden’s administration denied the lawyers access to the tent facility. During the administration of former President Donald Trump, attorney visits to Border Patrol stations revealed severe problems, including dozens of children held at one rural station without adequate food, water, or soap. “It is pretty surprising that the administration talks about the importance of transparency and then won’t let the attorneys for children set eyes on where they’re staying,” said Leecia Welch of the National Center for Youth Law, one of the lawyers. “I find that very disappointing.” Although none of the children reported situations as severe as during the Trump era, Welch said the lawyers “weren’t able to lay eyes on any of it to see for ourselves, so we’re just piecing together what they said.”

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This must worry them. Cuomo will get some viewers, but they need more.

CNN Hemorrhages Viewers Post-Trump (RT)

CNN host Brian Stelter has analyzed the ratings losses of niche network Newsmax in the aftermath of former President Donald Trump’s exit from office, but his own team is taking the biggest viewership hit among major cable outlets. A report this week by Variety Intelligence Platform (VIP) showed that three of CNN’s primetime shows were the biggest ratings losers between November 30-December 4, when Trump was still in office, and March 1-5. Programs hosted by Chris Cuomo, Anderson Cooper, and Don Lemon posted declines in viewership of 29%, 32%, and 33% respectively between the two periods, VIP’s data showed. As Stelter acknowledged in his article on the post-election ratings decline at Newsmax, “news ratings rise and fall like tides.”

But among mainstream media outlets, CNN is clearly falling the hardest after losing the so-called ‘Trump Bump’ in ratings. The fourth- and fifth-biggest decliners measured by VIP were both MSNBC shows – hosted by Lawrence O’Donnell and Chris Hayes – which lost 18% and 17% of their audiences, respectively. Lemon’s CNN show nearly doubled their losses with a 33% drop. In contrast, no other primetime show lost more than 12%, and Fox’s Tucker Carlson posted a ratings decline of just 4.8%. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow was second-best in minimizing losses, at 9.1%. The final days of Trump’s presidency were perhaps the best of times for CNN. From the November 3 election through President Joe Biden’s January 20 inauguration, CNN was the most-watched cable news network, with an average of 1.8 million viewers, according to Nielsen ratings.


Fox, the long-time leader, dropped behind both CNN and MSNBC, averaging 1.5 million viewers. But the ranks quickly changed with Trump safely removed to Florida and the public’s appetite for Orange Man Bad conspiracies waning. Fox said it returned to No. 1 in primetime in February, while CNN lost nearly half of its audience. The losses grew after Trump’s impeachment trial ended in acquittal on February 13. When Biden gave a primetime speech on Thursday, nearly 4.1 million viewers watched it on Fox, compared with 2.9 million on MSNBC and 2.6 million on CNN. CNN is averaging 897,000 viewers in March, which Stelter pointed out is way more than Newsmax’s 152,000. But it’s about half the audience that CNN had between Election Day and Inauguration Day. Fox is once again far ahead, at 1.32 million.

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It’s been turned into a joke.

The ‘American Dream’ Of Upward Mobility Is Broken (G.)

The US has long prided itself as being an exceptionally fluid society with respect to social class and economic mobility. The American Dream holds that anyone who works hard can achieve economic success – perhaps even rise from rags to riches. Underlying this belief is the assumption of abundant opportunity and meritocracy. Arriving immigrants often believe they have come to a land of opportunity, with a level playing field allowing for advancement and success. Those who fail to do so tend to blame themselves. Yet according to recent research, the United States has far less mobility and equality of opportunity today than the European Union or other OECD countries.

First, the amount of economic advantage passed down from one generation to the next is much higher in the US. Approximately 50% of a father’s income position is inherited by his son. In contrast, the amount in Norway or Canada is less than 20%. What about rising from rags to riches? In the US, 8% of children raised in the bottom 20% of the income distribution are able to climb to the top 20% as adults, while the figure in Denmark is nearly double at 15%. Equality of opportunity is also much less viable in the US than in other OECD countries. American life expectancy varies by up to 20 years depending on the zip code of residence. Quality of education also differs widely depending on the wealth of the neighborhood that families reside in.


And the chances of being victimized by a crime, exposed to environmental toxins or having unmet healthcare needs is far greater for America’s poor than those impoverished in all other OECD countries. One of the reasons for lower US mobility is that the ladder of opportunity has become much harder to climb – because the rungs of the ladder have grown further apart. This is evidenced by the rising levels of income and wealth inequality. Currently, those in the top 20% of the income distribution earn nearly nine times more than those in the bottom 20%. This difference is far greater than in the European Union or the United Kingdom. Wealth inequality is even more skewed. In the United States, the top 5% of the population own three-quarters of the entire financial wealth of the country, while the bottom 60% possess less than 1%.

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Feb 242021
 


Rembrandt van Rijn The Storm on the Sea of Galilee 1633
On March 18, 1990, the painting was stolen by thieves disguised as police officers. They broke into the Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum in Boston, Massachusetts, and stole this painting, along with twelve other works. The paintings have never been recovered, and it is considered the biggest art theft in history. The empty frames of the paintings still hang in their original location, waiting to be recovered.

 

The Vaccine (Dis)Information War (CJ Hopkins)
Censoring Fox News Is An Insanely Stupid Idea (Taibbi)
House Democrats Are Assaulting Core Press Freedoms (Greenwald)
Twitter Adds Controversial ‘Hacked Materials’ Warning Label To Tweets (Mash.)
Naomi Wolf Sounds Alarm At Growing Power Of ‘Autocratic Tyrants’ (Fox)
Tucker Carlson Calls CNN a ‘Disinformation Network’ (Med.)
60 Years After Eisenhower’s Warning, The ‘Digital-Intelligence Complex’ (RCI)
Why a Durham Report Is Becoming Highly Unlikely (ET)
US And Allies To Build ‘China-free’ Tech Supply Chain (Nikkei)
Finland COVID-19 Variant Reportedly May Not Show Up In Tests (NYP)
Japan Appoints “Minister Of Loneliness” (ZH)

 

 

A Minister of Loneliness in Japannn. That is what the Lockdown Syndrome looks like. And when you weren’t looking because you were getting “vaccinated”, your freedoms were taken away one by one. The freedom to be where you want to be, the freedom to say what you want to say, and the freedom to read what you want to read.

The calls for all manner of censorship are coming fast and furious, including censorship of COVID and vaccine-related information. Because you are not supposed -or allowed- to know. But what’s the value of all these technologies, be they digital or medical, if they end up being used against us?

 

 

 

 

“We could even cure psychiatric disorders, like “antisocial personality disorder,” “oppositional defiant disorder,” and other “conduct disorders” and “personality disorders.” Who knows?”

The Vaccine (Dis)Information War (CJ Hopkins)

So, good news, folks! It appears that GloboCap’s Genetic Modification Division has come up with a miracle vaccine for Covid! It’s an absolutely safe, non-experimental, messenger-RNA vaccine that teaches your cells to produce a protein that triggers an immune response, just like your body’s immune-system response, only better, because it’s made by corporations! OK, technically, it hasn’t been approved for use — that process normally takes several years — so I guess it’s slightly “experimental,” but the US Food and Drug Administration and the European Medicines Agency have issued “Emergency Use Authorizations,” and it has been “tested extensively for safety and effectiveness,” according to Facebook’s anonymous “fact checkers,” so there’s absolutely nothing to worry about.

This non-experimental experimental vaccine is truly a historic development, because apart from saving the world from a virus that causes mild to moderate flu-like symptoms (or, more commonly, no symptoms whatsoever) in roughly 95% of those infected, and that over 99% of those infected survive, the possibilities for future applications of messenger-RNA technology, and the genetic modification of humans, generally, is virtually unlimited at this point. Imagine all the diseases we can cure, and all the genetic “mistakes” we can fix, now that we can reprogram people’s genes to do whatever we want … cancer, heart disease, dementia, blindness, not to mention the common cold! We could even cure psychiatric disorders, like “antisocial personality disorder,” “oppositional defiant disorder,” and other “conduct disorders” and “personality disorders.” Who knows?

In another hundred years, we will probably be able to genetically cleanse the human species of age-old scourges, like racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, transphobia, etcetera, by reprogramming everyone’s defective alleles, or implanting some kind of nanotechnological neurosynaptic chips into our brains. The only thing standing in our way is people’s totally irrational resistance to letting corporations redesign the human organism, which, clearly, was rather poorly designed, and thus is vulnerable to all these horrible diseases, and emotional and behavioral disorders.

But I’m getting a little ahead of myself. The important thing at the moment is to defeat this common-flu-like pestilence that has no significant effect on age-adjusted death rates, and the mortality profile of which is more or less identical to the normal mortality profile, but which has nonetheless left the global corporatocracy no choice but to “lock down” the entire planet, plunge millions into desperate poverty, order everyone to wear medical-looking masks, unleash armed goon squads to raid people’s homes, and otherwise transform society into a pathologized-totalitarian nightmare. And, of course, the only way to do that (i.e., save humanity from a flu-like bug) is to coercively vaccinate every single human being on the planet Earth!

OK, you’re probably thinking that doesn’t make much sense, this crusade to vaccinate the entire species against a relatively standard respiratory virus, but that’s just because you are still thinking critically. You really need to stop thinking like that. As The New York Times just pointed out, “critical thinking isn’t helping.” In fact, it might be symptomatic of one of those “disorders” I just mentioned above.

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“All that remains is to topple a behemoth like Fox as a show of strength, leaving an untouchable Soviet-style union of Chuck Todds and Jennifer Rubins and Max Boots in charge of disseminating an approved™ top-down version of reality. “

Censoring Fox News Is An Insanely Stupid Idea (Taibbi)

Two and a half years ago, when Alex Jones of Infowars was kicked off a series of tech platforms in a clearly coordinated decision, I knew this was not going to be an isolated thing. Given that people like Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy were saying the ouster of Jones was just a “good first step,” it seemed obvious the tactic was not going to be confined to a few actors. But corporate media critics insisted the precedent would not be applied more broadly. “I don’t think we are going to be seeing big tech take action against Fox News… any time soon,” commented CNN’s Oliver Darcy. Darcy was wrong. Just a few years later, calls to ban Fox are not only common, they’re intensifying, with media voices from Brian Stelter on CNN to MSNBC analyst Anand Giridharadas to former Media Matters critic Eric Boehlert to Washington Post columnists Max Boot and Margaret Sullivan all on board.

The movement crested this week with a letter from California House Democrats Anna Eshoo and Jerry McNerney, written to the CEOs of cable providers like Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, Cox, and Dish. They demanded to know if those providers are “planning to continue carrying Fox News, Newsmax, and OANN… beyond any contract renewal date” and “if so, why? The news comes in advance of Wednesday’s House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing on “traditional media’s role in promoting disinformation and extremism.” This sequence of events is ominous because a similar matched set of hearings and interrogations back in 2017 — when Senators like Mazie Hirono at a Judiciary Committee hearing demanded that platforms like Google and Facebook come up with a “mission statement” to prevent the “foment of discord” — accelerated the “content moderation” movement that now sees those same platforms regularly act as de facto political censors.

Sequences like this — government “requests” of speech reduction, made to companies subject to federal regulation — make the content moderation decisions of private firms a serious First Amendment issue. Censorship advocates may think this is purely a private affair, in which the only speech rights that matter are those of companies like Twitter and Google, but any honest person should be able to see this for what it is. [..] Press freedoms have been in steep decline for a while. Barack Obama’s record targeting of whistleblower sources (and in some cases, journalists themselves) using the Espionage Act was a first serious sign, followed by Donald Trump’s prosecution of Julian Assange. We progressed to a particularly dangerous new stage in recent years, with oligopolistic tech companies, urged on by politicians, engaging in anticompetitive agreements to suppress political voices on both the left and the right.

The so-called media reporters at major organizations like CNN and the New York Times have mostly either been silent or have played cheerleading roles during the most eyebrow-raising recent developments: the decision by Facebook and Twitter to block access to a pre-election New York Post story about Hunter Biden, the stunning exercise in monopoly influence by Amazon and Apple in swallowing up the “free speech” platform Parler, the banning of Socialist Worker Party accounts in England and the U.S., and the shutdown of livestream capability by alternative media outlets (and the removal of celebrated footage shot from the Capitol riot by people like Status Coup videographer Jon Farina), a story that amazingly only got major play at… Fox News.

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They’re assaulting free speech. Not just press freedoms.

House Democrats Are Assaulting Core Press Freedoms (Greenwald)

Not even two months into their reign as the majority party that controls the White House and both houses of Congress, key Democrats have made clear that one of their top priorities is censorship of divergent voices. On Saturday, I detailed how their escalating official campaign to coerce and threaten social media companies into more aggressively censoring views that they dislike — including by summoning social media CEOs to appear before them for the third time in less than five months — is implicating, if not already violating, core First Amendment rights of free speech. Now they are going further — much further. The same Democratic House Committee that is demanding greater online censorship from social media companies now has its sights set on the removal of conservative cable outlets, including Fox News, from the airwaves.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee on Monday announced a February 24 hearing, convened by one of its sub-committees, entitled “Fanning the Flames: Disinformation and Extremism in the Media.” Claiming that “the spread of disinformation and extremism by traditional news media presents a tangible and destabilizing threat,” the Committee argues: “Some broadcasters’ and cable networks’ increasing reliance on conspiracy theories and misleading or patently false information raises questions about their devotion to journalistic integrity.” Since when is it the role of the U.S. Government to arbitrate and enforce precepts of “journalistic integrity”? Unless you believe in the right of the government to regulate and control what the press says — a power which the First Amendment explicitly prohibits — how can anyone be comfortable with members of Congress arrogating unto themselves the power to dictate what media outlets are permitted to report and control how they discuss and analyze the news of the day?

[..] For the last four years, we were inundated with media messaging that Trump posed an unprecedented threat to press freedoms. The Washington Post even flamboyantly adopted a new motto to implicitly ratify that accusation (while claiming it was not Trump-specific). Other than the indictment of Julian Assange — which most Washington Democrats cheered — what did the Trump administration do in the way of attacking press freedoms that remotely compares to Democrats abusing their majoritarian power to force the removal of conservative cable outlets from the airwaves, just days after doing the same with dissident voices online?

There is not a peep of protest from any liberal journalists. Do any of the people who spent four years pretending to care so deeply about the vital role of press freedom have anything to say about this full frontal attack by the majority party in Washington on news outlets opposed to their political agenda and ideology?

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Twitter is full of tweets that MIGHT contain hacked materials.

Twitter Adds Controversial ‘Hacked Materials’ Warning Label To Tweets (Mash.)

“These materials may have been obtained through hacking,” reads the disclaimer affixed to a tweet linking to a story from independent news outlet, The Grayzone. The tweet was originally posted on Feb. 20. However, three days later, users began to notice the label added to The Grayzone’s tweet. (It is not yet clear when exactly the label appeared.) Furthermore, readers discovered that an extra step was added when trying to retweet posts linking to The Grayzone’s story: A pop-up appeared reiterating the warning label and asking users to “help keep Twitter a place for reliable info.” A link is included which forwards users to Twitter’s “distribution of hacked materials” policy.


The Grayzone’s story sources recently hacked and leaked documents which allegedly show that the BBC and Reuters participated in a program created by the UK government to “weaken Russia’s state influence.” This appears to be the first instance of Twitter using this particular warning label on an English-language outlet. A search on the platform found one other instance of a version of the “hacked materials” warning label being used. This one was stamped on an Italian outlet’s tweet regarding Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine in January. “These materials may have been obtained through hacking or may be manipulated,” reads the earlier warning label on the tweet, which is in Italian.

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”.. the United States is swiftly “moving into a coup situation, a police state..”

Naomi Wolf Sounds Alarm At Growing Power Of ‘Autocratic Tyrants’ (Fox)

America is becoming a “totalitarian state before our eyes” under President Biden’s leadership, feminist author and former Democratic adviser Naomi Wolf told “Tucker Carlson Tonight” Monday. Wolf, who served as an adviser on Bill Clinton’s reelection campaign in 1996, told host Tucker Carlson that in her view, the United States is swiftly “moving into a coup situation, a police state” as a result of Biden’s ongoing coronavirus-related economic shutdowns. Wolf added that she believes the orders are being improperly extended under the “guise of a real medical pandemic.” “That is not a partisan thing,” Wolf told Carlson. “That transcends everything that you and I might disagree or agree on. That should bring together left and right to protect our Constitution.”

Wolf has ramped up her warnings against extended lockdowns on Twitter in recent months. In November, the author wrote on Twitter that Biden’s openness to reinstating additional shutdowns made her question her decision to vote for him. “The state has now crushed businesses, kept us from gathering in free assembly to worship as the First Amendment provides, is invading our bodies … which is a violation of the Fourth Amendment, restricting movement, fining us in New York state … the violations go on and on,” she said. The outspoken liberal, who previously authored a book outlining the ten steps that “would-be tyrants always take when they want to close down a democracy,” believes the United States is heading toward what she refers to as “step 10.”

“Whether they are on the left or the right, they do these same ten things,” Wolf explained, “and now we’re at something I never thought I would see in my lifetime … it is step 10 and that is the suspension of the rule of law and that is when you start to be a police state, and we’re here. There is no way around it.” Wolf said she has interviewed U.S. citizens of various backgrounds and political affiliations who are in a state of “shock and horror” as “autocratic tyrants at the state and now the national level are creating this kind of merger of corporate power and government power, which is really characteristic of totalism fascism in the ’20’s,” she told Carlson.

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“..more powerful than QAnon and far more destructive.”

Tucker Carlson Calls CNN a ‘Disinformation Network’ (Med.)

Fox News’ Tucker Carlson went after CNN on Tuesday night and called the cable news rival “more powerful” and “more destructive” than the QAnon conspiracy theory. Carlson brought up people on CNN talking about disinformation online and said they’re the ones who are really pushing disinformation, telling viewers that CNN is upset at the internet because “it’s exposing their scam.” In particular Carlson referred to coverage from CNN and others about issues of race and police shootings. “It’s worth finding out where the public is getting all this false information, this disinformation, as we will call it,” Carlson mockingly said. “So we checked. We spent all day trying to locate the famous QAnon, which in the end we learned is not even a website.


“If it’s out there, we could not find it. Then we checked Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Twitter feed because we have heard she traffics in disinformation, CNN told us, but nothing there.” He continued taking shots at CNN, and said the media talking about racism is meant to distract people from questions about Wall Street, before concluding with this: “It takes a sophisticated operator to lie this effectively, to take the central problem of American life, which is the agonizing death of our middle class and cover it with a smokescreen of manufactured race hatred, so that no one even realizes it’s happening. You’d really need to be a — as CNN would put it — a disinformation network to pull that off. And of course the irony is… CNN itself has become a disinformation network, more powerful than QAnon and far more destructive.”

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Inevitable.

60 Years After Eisenhower’s Warning, The ‘Digital-Intelligence Complex’ (RCI)

In June 2019, Susan Gordon stood on a stage at the Washington Convention Center. Behind her loomed three giant letters, “AWS,” the abbreviation for Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing division of the giant Internet retailer. After three decades at the Central Intelligence Agency, Gordon had risen to one of the top jobs in the cloak-and-dagger world: principal deputy director of national intelligence. From that perch she publicly extolled the virtues of Amazon Web Services and the cloud services the tech giant provides the CIA. She told the crowd that the intelligence community’s 2013 decision to sign a multi-year, $600 million contract with AWS for cloud computing “will stand as one of those that caused the greatest leap forward.

… The investment we made so many years ago in order to be able to try and harness the power of the cloud with a partner who wanted to learn and grow with us has left us not only ready for today but positioned for tomorrow.”The agreement was also a “real game-changer,” said André Pienaar, founder and CEO of a tech firm called C5 Capital, whose business includes reselling AWS services. “When the CIA said they were going adopt the AWS cloud platform,” Pienaar said at another AWS event. “People said if the U.S. intelligence community has the confidence to feel secure on the AWS cloud, why can’t we?” Gordon left government in August 2019, two months after her AWS summit talk. In November 2019 she became senior advisor to a consultancy with close Amazon connections and in April joined the board of defense contractor with extensive AWS business.

Gordon is one of scores of former government officials who have landed lucrative work in Big Tech. The synergy between Washington and Silicon Valley can be seen as the latest manifestation of the Beltway’s revolving door. But the size and scope of Big Tech – and the increasing dependence of government on its products and talent – suggest something more: the rise of a Digital-Intelligence Complex. Like the Military-Industrial Complex that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned against in 1961, it represents a symbiotic relationship in which the lines between one and the other are blurred.

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They’re first going demand to see what he has and then silence him.

Why a Durham Report Is Becoming Highly Unlikely (ET)

Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee say they want to know if President Joe Biden’s nominee for Attorney General Merrick Garland will allow Special Counsel John Durham’s investigation into the origins of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Crossfire Hurricane probe to continue. “I have no reason to think he should not remain in place,” Garland told Sen. Chuck Grassley Monday.In reality, if confirmed Garland will not allow Durham to stay in place, never mind issue a report. The prospect that Biden’s attorney general might allow Durham to indict former Barack Obama administration officials is ludicrous. Remember that documents released over the last year gave evidence that as vice-president Biden was not only aware of the spying operation against Trump officials but participated in it.

Biden not only knew that the FBI was framing incoming National Security Advisor Michael Flynn but suggested that the Department of Justice might charge Flynn for violating the Logan Act. In other words, the FBI officials that Durham is reportedly investigating are Biden’s co-conspirators. To allow them to be indicted would not only point to Biden’s guilt but also show that the most powerful man in the world is unable or unwilling to protect allies who have helped advance the cause of the party he now leads. That would show Biden to be weak. Garland understands that his primary duty as Biden’s chief law enforcement officer is not to oversee the fair and equal treatment of all Americans under the law, but to protect the president and the party he serves.

[..] Biden’s attorney general has an additional incentive to shut down Durham for good. Let’s say the special counsel has the evidence to indict the senior FBI officials he has been investigating. That would confirm what Republicans have been saying about Crossfire Hurricane since 2017—the FBI wasn’t investigating Russian interference, it was spying on a presidential candidate and then the commander-in-chief. To show that Biden’s party was lying about that would suggest that maybe the Democrats were lying about other things, too, maybe lying about everything. They lied about the phone call that got Trump impeached; they lied about the “mostly peaceful” George Floyd riots; they lied about the Jan. 6 protests by calling them an armed insurrection; and most importantly, they lied about the transparency and legitimacy of the 2020 election.

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“The U.S. has seen its share of global semiconductor manufacturing capacity plummet in recent decades, according to Boston Consulting Group. What was 37% in 1990 is now down to 12%.”

US And Allies To Build ‘China-free’ Tech Supply Chain (Nikkei)

U.S. President Joe Biden is set to sign an executive order as early as this month to accelerate efforts to build supply chains for chips and other strategically significant products that are less reliant on China, in partnership with the likes of Taiwan, Japan and South Korea. The document will order the development of a national supply chain strategy, and is expected to call for recommendations for supply networks that are less vulnerable to disruptions such as disasters and sanctions by unfriendly countries. Measures will focus on semiconductors, electric-vehicle batteries, rare-earth metals and medical products, according to a draft obtained by Nikkei.

The order states that “working with allies can lead to strong, resilient supply chains,” suggesting that international relationships will be central to this plan. Washington is expected to pursue partnerships with Taiwan, Japan and South Korea in chip production and Asia-Pacific economies including Australia in rare earths. The U.S. plans to share information with allies on supply networks for important products and will look to leverage complementary production. It will consider a framework for speedy sharing of these items in emergencies, as well as discuss securing stockpiles and spare manufacturing capacity. Partners could be asked to do less business with China.

The issue has taken on added urgency with a chip shortage this year that has hit automakers particularly hard. The U.S. has seen its share of global semiconductor manufacturing capacity plummet in recent decades, according to Boston Consulting Group. What was 37% in 1990 is now down to 12%. While it has asked Taiwan — which tops the list at 22% — to ramp up output, plants there are already operating at full blast, and there are few options for boosting supply in the short term.

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You’re using the wrong test.

Finland COVID-19 Variant Reportedly May Not Show Up In Tests (NYP)

Scientists fear that a new COVID-19 variant in Finland — different from the UK and South African strains — may be fueling the spread of the disease by not showing up in tests, according to reports. The Helsinki-based Vita Laboratories, which made the discovery, said it’s unlikely the variant emerged in Finland, given the Scandinavian country’s low rate of infection, the Evening Standard reported. “Vita Laboratoriot Oy and the Institute of Biotechnology at the University of Helsinki have detected a previously unknown variant of the coronavirus in a sample from southern Finland,” the lab said about the variant, dubbed “Fin-796H.”


“Mutations in this variant make it difficult to detect in at least one of the WHO-recommended PCR tests. This discovery could have a significant impact on determining the spread of the disease,” it added. Ilkka Julkunen, a professor of virology at the University of Turku, told the local news outlet Yle that the emergence of the variant was not a major concern yet. “I would not be hugely worried yet because we do not have clear information that this new strain would be more easily transmitted or that it would affect the immune protection brought about by already having had the virus or having received a vaccination,” he said, according to the Standard.

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Lockdown Syndrome.

Japan Appoints “Minister Of Loneliness” (ZH)

Japan like many other developed nations witnessed an alarming rise in suicides or attempted suicides over this past year of pandemic shutdowns and social distancing measures. The country was already at crisis levels even before the pandemic (though generally on a downward trajectory the prior decade), with recent studies showing it to be “the leading cause of death in men among the ages of 20-44 and women among the ages of 15 to 34.” To tackle the crisis, especially in the midst of this COVID-induced period of greater social isolation, Japan’s government has appointed a “Minister of Loneliness” after the UK became the first country to establish such a position in 2018.

The most recent numbers cited in Japanese media reports say that 879 women killed themselves in the country during the month of October, a figure that marks a whopping 70% increase compared to the same month from 2019. Officials have noted that the pandemic and oftentimes mandated social distancing measures have appeared to have a harsher impact on women. According to Japan Times, Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga earlier in the month appointed as the new Minister of Loneliness a 70-year old veteran politician named Tetsushi Sakamoto. It is a cabinet level position which aims to alleviate social isolation among citizens.

He’ll head up an ’emergency taskforce’ to battle the disturbing spike in suicides nationally as his first order of business. “With isolation tied to an array of social woes such as suicide, poverty and hikikomori (social recluses), the Cabinet Office also established a task force Friday that seeks to address the problem of loneliness across various ministries, including by investigating its impact,” Japan Times writes. “According to preliminary figures released by the National Police Agency, 20,919 people took their own lives in 2020, up 750 from the previous year and marking the first year-on-year increase in 11 years. The surge is largely attributed to a noticeable rise in suicides among women and young people,” the report pointed out.

Read more …

 

 

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Oct 292020
 
 October 29, 2020  Posted by at 9:38 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,  20 Responses »


Gustav Klimt Pine forest II 1901

 

Senate Committee: All Bobulinski Materials Reviewed To Date Legitimate (DC)
Tucker Carlson: Bobulinski Documents Intercepted and Removed (sundance)
Zuckerberg: ‘I Would Guess That Our Employee Base Skews Left-Leaning’ (JTN)
Gundlach: Trump Will Win Next Week, “Some Sort Of Revolution” By 2027 (ZH)
Professor Deliberately Catches COVID19 To Test His Immune Response (ST)
Cable News October Ratings Explode As Fox News Hits Historic Highs (Hill)
CNN Won’t Run Trump Ad Warning Biden Will Raise Taxes On Middle Class (Hill)
‘Anonymous’ Anti-Trump Official Revealed As CNN Pundit Miles Taylor (Fox)
ALICE Doesn’t Work Here Anymore (CHS)
The Fed MUST Have Inflation (Rickards)
Ornstein: Impeach Amy Coney Barrett (Turley)
Bellingcat Smears OPCW Whistleblower, Journalists With False Letter (Maté)
Greece Has Protected Its Jobs Better Than The Rest Of The EU (K.)
Jack Dorsey Hires Homeless Man To Fill In For Him At Senate Hearings (BBee)

 

 

“If you can’t expose crime in the government you don’t really have a government. You have a dictatorship that is dressed up like a government.”

– Joe Rogan

 

 

Joe Rogan Greenwald

 

 

“I appreciate that the FBI has a job to do, and I am glad they are finally taking an interest in these concerning financial matters that our Committees have been investigating for months..”

Senate Committee: All Bobulinski Materials Reviewed To Date Legitimate (DC)

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee has been successful in verifying all materials reviewed so far from Hunter Biden’s ex-business partner Tony Bobulinski, the Daily Caller has learned. Committee Chairman Sen. Ron Johnson will not call Bobulinski to testify before the November 3 elections, as the committee is working to review all the information provided to the committee by Bobulinski. The information has to be verified, as it is subject to the same false information to Congress laws that verbal or written testimony does. However, a Johnson spokesperson told the Caller that all the material provided by Bobulinski that has been reviewed so far has turned out to be legitimate. The committee has “also” not come across any “signs” or evidence to suggest the content is false, the spokesperson added.


Bobulinski, who said Tuesday he believes “Joe Biden and the Biden family are compromised” in an interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson, has turned over evidence to the FBI alleging he met twice in the past with the former vice president in regards to business with his son Hunter. The Biden family has not yet disputed this information. [..] Johnson had the chance to interview Bobulinski on Friday and released a statement shortly after saying: “I appreciate that the FBI has a job to do, and I am glad they are finally taking an interest in these concerning financial matters that our Committees have been investigating for months,” Sen. Johnson said. “I expect that Mr. Bobulinski will speak with our committee as soon as possible and fully share his insights into the Biden family’s business dealings.”

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Strange story. He has copies.

Tucker Carlson: Bobulinski Documents Intercepted and Removed (sundance)

Tucker Carlson revealed this evening that someone intercepted an envelope containing documents of evidence supporting the claims by Tony Bobulinski. The documents were mailed by a “well known overnight transport” company and mysteriously were removed in transit from New York to LA. I have a hunch what happened…. but first, WATCH:

Tucker missing documents

I review this story from a position that I cannot fully explain. However, I have personal experience -recent experience- with a similar and rather unusual situation that cannot be explained by any method other than DHS surveillance. So here’s what I think took place. The package, likely a Fed-X delivery, was intercepted by FBI agents using mechanisms for tracking and surveillance that open targeting through portals connected to DHS. As an outcome of the U.S. Patriot Act, the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security has an agreement in place with mail shipping companies, public/private services, that essentially allows them a portal to track all in-state and interstate mail deliveries.

The FBI has access to this data network in the same way the FBI has access to federal transportation records. Just like when you book a flight and DHS portals are open that allow FBI to track your movements domestically. This type of portal is also accessed in private company transportation like Uber, Lyft etc. DHS, and as a consequence the FBI, can easily track your whereabouts. Without much hesitation I will bet the FBI was monitoring the communication of Bobulinski, and by extension the entire Tucker Carlson production network. Once the shipment was known to be taking place, the DHS portals are opened; the package is tracked; and the FBI moves in to intercept the delivery.

The transport company doesn’t need to be participating because they are essentially unneeded. Their system network is connected to the FBI. That’s the likely scenario. Wanna bet?

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Every time these people come in for questioning, nothing happens.

Zuckerberg: ‘I Would Guess That Our Employee Base Skews Left-Leaning’ (JTN)

Under questioning from Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told the Senate Commerce Committee on Wednesday that the employees at his company “skew left-leaning.” “Would you say that the political ideology of the employees at your company is, let’s say, 50:50, conservative versus liberal progressive or do you think it’s closer to 90% liberal and 10% conservative?” Johnson asked during a hearing with the CEOs of Facebook, Twitter and Google on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. “I don’t know the makeup of our employees because it’s not something we ask or focus on,” Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey responded. “It’s not something I look for.”

In response to the same question, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said more than 50% of Google’s 100,000 employees are from outside of California. “It does tend to be proportionate to the areas that we are in,” he said. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said: “I don’t know the exact number but I would guess that our employee base skews left-leaning.” According to OpenSecrets.org, the employees of Facebook, Google and Twitter favored Democrats over Republicans with political contributions in this election cycle. Johnson also asked Dorsey and Zuckerberg if they had “any evidence” that the New York Post’s recent reporting on content from a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden was based on Russian disinformation.

“We don’t,” Dorsey said. Later in the hearing, GOP Sen. Roger Wicker, the committee chairman, asked Zuckerberg if he has evidence that Russia was the source of the information in the New York Post’s reporting. “I would rely on the FBI to make that assessment,” Zuckerberg said but added that he personally does not have that evidence. “I do not, myself.”

@tedcruz and @jack

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“Some people will hedge their bets and split their vote towards retaining the Republican Senate because they view Biden as risky..”

Gundlach: Trump Will Win Next Week, “Some Sort Of Revolution” By 2027 (ZH)

Back at the start of 2016, when nobody else would even consider such an outcome, DoubleLine Capital CEO Jeff Gundlach shocked the economic, financial and political establishments when during the January Barron’s roundtable of that year, he predicted that Donald Trump would become the next US president. He was right. Fast forward to today when one week before the elections, and in an environment when most polls predict that Biden will crush Trump and where Nate Silver gives Trump just as 13% chance of defeating Trump, Jeffrey Gundlach is predicting another victory for President Donald Trump.


As Financial Advisor magazine reported, during a Tuesday webcast as part of Schwab’s 2020 IMPACT conference, Gundlach said that despite polls, analysis and betting odds that suggest otherwise, Trump is likely to outpace former Democratic vice president Joe Biden in the contest. “The polls right now say he isn’t going to win, but they said that four years ago,” said Gundlach referring to the following chart. “Mind you, my conviction is way lower than it was four years ago. But back in [that period], when Trump was little more than an asterisk in the betting odds, I predicted he was going to win. This one is much more murky, but in my eyes, it favors a Trump win.”

Addressing the elephant in the room, Gundlach said that public political polls are often “designed to create impressions” rather than illustrate reality, said Gundlach, and shouldn’t be trusted. He also argued that many Trump voters are unwilling to engage with pollsters and the media because they fear retribution for their political beliefs, also known as the “shy voter” phenomenon according to which “Over 10% Of Trump Voters Won’t Admit Preferences To Pollsters.” Biden also faces an enthusiasm problem, said Gundlach. Gundlach then went on to crush hopes of a Blue Wave, arguing that Republicans will likely keep the Senate regardless of who wins – mainly because of uncertainty around Biden.


“Some people will hedge their bets and split their vote towards retaining the Republican Senate because they view Biden as risky,” said Gundlach, who noted that Trump is often portrayed as riskier than Biden. And yet, in the four years of his presidency, there have been no international conflicts, despite some outrageous and bellicose language. “You might dislike Trump or some of his policies, but risk is not what you’re getting with him, particularly compared to turning the presidency over to another party, and particularly when that party’s candidate isn’t saying what some of his policy positions are.”

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“His conclusion is that there will be no collective immunity to coronavirus despite earlier hopes. The virus is here to stay for a long while, and while vaccines may give immunity this is likely to be temporary.”

Professor Deliberately Catches COVID19 To Test His Immune Response (ST)

Alexander Chepurnov had already recovered once when he re-infected himself in an experiment. The virologist experimented with his own health to check how long the body’s immune response lasted after his first bout of COVID-19. A former researcher at the Vector Centre of Virology and Biotechnology who currently works at the Institute of Clinical and Experimental Medicine, Chepurnov was first infected at the end of February 2020. ‘I was on my way to a skiing holiday from Siberia to France with a stopover in Moscow,’ he said. ‘After getting to the mountains I felt unwell with a high fever and sharp chest pain. My sense of smell has gone, too.’ It was impossible back then to do a COVID-19 test in Europe, he told Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper in Novosibirsk.

He cut the holiday short, returned home to Novosibirsk, and was promptly diagnosed with double pneumonia. A month later in March he did a test which showed antibodies to Covid, confirming that he had been infected with the new virus. ‘I was the first in my team who had COVID-19,’ he said. ‘We started to follow the way antibodies ‘behaved’, how strong they were, and how long they stayed in the body. ‘The observation showed that they were fast to decrease. By the end of the third month from the moment I felt sick the antibodies were no longer detected.’ The scientist, 68 when he was first hit by COVID-19, said that he wanted to study the probability of getting re-infected.

To test the strength of his own immune response, Chepurnov deliberately exposed himself to COVID-19-positive patients wearing no protection. ‘My body’s defence fell exactly six months after I got the first infection. The first sign was a sore throat. The nasopharyngeal PCR smear immediately showed a positive reaction to COVID-19 on the 27th cycle, and two days later already on the 17th cycle, which corresponds to a high viral titre’, Chepurnov said of the second bout. The second illness was more acute, with Chepurnov needing hospitalisation after his saturation fell below 93. ‘For five days, my body temperature remained above 39C,’ he said. ‘I lost the sense of smell, my taste perception changed.

‘On the sixth day of the illness, the CT scan of the lungs was clear, and three days after the scan the X-ray showed double pneumonia. ‘The virus went away rather quickly – after two weeks it was no longer detected in the nasopharyngeal or in other samples.’ His conclusion is that there will be no collective immunity to coronavirus despite earlier hopes. The virus is here to stay for a long while, and while vaccines may give immunity this is likely to be temporary. ‘We need a vaccine that can be used multiple times, a recombinant vaccine will not suit,’ he said. ‘Once injected with the adenoviral vector-based vaccine we won’t be able to repeat it because the immunity against the adenoviral carrier will keep interfering.’

Read more …

I’d be more interested in seeing these numbers for social media.

Cable News October Ratings Explode As Fox News Hits Historic Highs (Hill)

Cable news ratings exploded in October across Fox News, CNN and MSNBC as all three networks saw record numbers for the month, with Fox News having the highest-rated month in cable news history, according to Nielsen Media Research. The month included a positive coronavirus test for the president, who was briefly hospitalized, and a fever pitch on the presidential campaign trail. The month also included a presidential debate, a vice presidential debate and multiple town hall events. Fox News led the way with a whopping 4.9 million total viewers in prime time, the highest number in the history of cable news dating back 40 years. MSNBC was second with 2.7 million viewers, followed by CNN with 2.4 million.


The top five shows for the month included Fox’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight” with an average of 5.3 million viewers, followed by “Hannity” with 5.2 million and “The Five” with 4.1 million despite airing before prime time in the 5 p.m. EDT slot. “The Ingraham Angle” delivered an average of just over 4 million total viewers, finishing fourth overall, with MSNBC’s “Rachel Maddow Show” rounding out the top five with 3.7 million. All three of the major cable news networks also saw substantial growth when compared to the same month last year. Fox News was up 83 percent year-over-year in total viewers and 139 percent in the key 25-54 demographic that advertisers covet most in prime time. CNN saw a 98 percent increase in total viewers when compared to October 2019, and a 116 percent jump in the demographic, while MSNBC is up 38 percent in total viewers and 45 percent in the younger category.

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“..the ad has been approved to run on ABC, AMC, Cooking, CBS, Comcast, DIY, Discovery, ESPN, Food Network, Fox, HGTV, History, Lifetime and The Weather Channel.”

CNN Won’t Run Trump Ad Warning Biden Will Raise Taxes On Middle Class (Hill)

CNN has informed the largest outside group supporting President Trump’s reelection that it will not run one of its new ads, saying the ad is false because it warns Democratic nominee Joe Biden will raise taxes on the middle class and implies that Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) supports socialist policies. The ad, from America First Action (AFA), says Biden “sided with socialists,” while showing pictures of Pelosi and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). The narrator of the ad also warns that Biden will “raise taxes on the middle class” and that “his liberal agenda will cost millions of jobs.” America First Action says the ad has been approved to run on ABC, AMC, Cooking, CBS, Comcast, DIY, Discovery, ESPN, Food Network, Fox, HGTV, History, Lifetime and The Weather Channel.

But in an email, an account executive at Warner Media said the clearance team rejected it. “WarnerMedia Commercial Clearance has not accepted America First Action’s advertisement ‘We Are America’ for its networks as the ad does not meet its commercial clearance standards,” the email states. “Specifically, the ad asserts that Biden will raise taxes on the middle class. That claim is not adequately substantiated and has been judged false by independent fact-checkers. The advertisement also mischaracterizes Nancy Pelosi as a socialist.” [..] In a letter to lawyers at Warner Media, an attorney representing AFA accused the media company of censoring normal political speech that is “at the very least a matter worthy of debate.”

“While AFA’s opponents are, of course, permitted to purchase air time to try to rebut AFA’s claims, it is not the job of your network to censor a statement that is factually supported and relates to an important issue in the upcoming election,” wrote Stephen Kenny of Jones Day. “Indeed, every other cable network is currently airing AFA’s ad. If you continue to decline to air the ad, please let us know why the factual support outlined above is insufficient.”

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The New York Times offers anonymous editorial space to complete nobodies these days. Sweet Jesus. Anything to smear Trump.

‘Anonymous’ Anti-Trump Official Revealed As CNN Pundit Miles Taylor (Fox)

The anonymous senior Trump administration official who authored the infamous New York Times op-ed in 2018 declaring to be part of the “resistance” revealed himself on Wednesday to be former Department of Homeland Security chief of staff Miles Taylor. Taylor, who previously came forward as a critic of President Trump and a supporter of Joe Biden in August, explained that he wrote his 2019 book “A Warning” as Anonymous as a “caution to voters that it wasn’t as bad as it looked inside the Trump administration – it was worse.” “While I claim sole authorship of the work, the sentiments expressed within it were widely held among officials at the highest levels of the federal government,” Taylor wrote in a statement published on Medium. “In other words, Trump’s own lieutenants were alarmed by his instability.”

Taylor was hired by CNN as a contributor in September. However, it is now known that he lied to the network by denying authorship of the op-ed during an Aug. 21 interview with his now-colleague Anderson Cooper. “There was an op-ed, there was a book by someone calling themselves ‘Anonymous.’ Are you aware of who that is?” Cooper asked. “I’m not,” Taylor responded. “Look, that was a parlor game that happened in Washington D.C. of a lot of folks trying to think of who that might be. I’ve got my own thoughts about who that might be, but-” “You’re not Anonymous,” Cooper interjected. “I wear a mask for two things, Anderson: Halloweens and pandemics. So, no,” Taylor answered.

[..] According to CNN anchor Jake Tapper, who broke the news on his network on Wednesday afternoon, “We did not know this until today. [..] White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany released a statement knocking Taylor as a “low-level, disgruntled former staffer,” as well as “a liar and a coward who chose anonymity over action and leaking over leading. “He was ineffective and incompetent during his time as DHS Chief of Staff which is why he was promptly fired after only serving in this role for a matter of weeks,” McEnany added. “It is appalling a low-ranking official would be granted anonymity and it is clear the New York Times is doing the bidding of Never-Trumpers and Democrats.”

White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows also piled on the former Trump official. You have got to be kidding me. Miles Taylor? That’s who the New York Times granted an anonymous editorial article? I’ve seen more exciting reveals in Scooby-Doo episodes. What a monumental embarrassment,” Meadows tweeted.

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“ALICE will never go back to her insecure, low-wage job, ever.”

ALICE Doesn’t Work Here Anymore (CHS)

Meet ALICE: Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed, at least she was employed until the pandemic presented impossible choices between taking care of her children and their education, and her aging parents, and keeping her demanding, low-wage job. Though it doesn’t fit in with the cute mythology of “capitalism” that apologists love to promote, ALICE wasn’t working to get ahead–she was working to barely survive in an economy where wages have stagnated for decades and recently lost ground at an alarming rate as costs for everything from rent to childcare to utilities have soared while her hours have been cut.

This is the neofeudalism I’ve often described here: the modern-day equivalent of the landless (i.e. owns no capital) serf is a landless (i.e. owns no capital) debt-serf with student loans, an auto loan and credit card debt and income that is constrained by globalization, financialization and the scarcity of high-paying work that isn’t reserved for insiders and the privileged few who chose their wealthy, well-educated, socially connected parents wisely. Lacking capital and any realistic means of acquiring any, the debt-serf has only labor to sell, and in a globalized world in which everyone selling their labor is competing globally for work producing tradable goods and services, ordinary labor has lost purchasing power for the past 45 years (see charts below).

The dominance of Big Tech monopoly platforms has created new fields for the exploitation of ordinary labor in the low-paid gig economy and fulfillment centers. The traditional neofeudal fiefdoms (retail outlets, hospitality and restaurants) have been hit by the pandemic pullback in consumer spending, and the other low-wage fiefdoms (fast food and domestic service) have been in structural decline for years. Meanwhile, the owners of the Financial Nobility’s fiefdoms and Big Tech monopolies have enjoyed unprecedented gains in income and wealth (see charts below) as wages’ share of the economy has declined for decades, in effect transferring trillions from labor to the Financial Nobility.

This neofeudal arrangement is about to change as Universal Basic Income (UBI) or its equivalent becomes the accepted status quo solution to neofeudalism’s soaring inequality. Since there’s no limit to how much currency can be created by the Federal Reserve, then why not distribute enough “free money” to the serfs to tamp down the brewing revolt? What the political class and the Financial Nobility don’t yet grasp (due to their complete disconnect from neofeudal daily life) is that ALICE will never go back to her insecure, low-wage job, ever. No matter how meager the UBI, permanent unemployment, stimulus or whatever the political class calls the distribution of “Fed free money,” ALICE will find a way to escape the bonds of neofeudal serfdom.

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But can’t create it, or print it. I’m not a fan of using all sorts of different kids of inflation, but in this case the point remains the same.

The Fed MUST Have Inflation (Rickards)

The Fed says that “price stability” is part of their dual mandate and they are committed to maintaining the purchasing power of the dollar. But the Fed has a funny definition of price stability. Common sense says price stability should be zero inflation and zero deflation. A dollar five years from now should have the same purchasing power as a dollar today. Of course, this purchasing power would be “on average,” since some items are always going up or down in price for reasons that have nothing to do with the Fed. And how you construct the price index matters also. It’s an inexact science, but zero inflation seems like the right target. But the Fed target is 2%, not zero. If that sounds low, it’s not. Inflation of 2% cuts the purchasing power of a dollar in half in 35 years and in half again in another 35 years.


That means in an average lifetime of 70 years, 2% will cause the dollar to 75% of its purchasing power! Just 3% inflation will cut the purchasing power of a dollar by almost 90% in the same average lifetime. But for the Fed, there’s a problem: They can’t produce 2% inflation. Inflation depends on consumer psychology. We have not had much consumer price inflation, but we have had huge asset price inflation. The “inflation” is not in consumer prices; it’s in asset prices. The printed money has to go somewhere. Instead of chasing goods, investors have been chasing yield. Inflation would help diminish the real value of the debt, but central banks have obviously proved impotent at generating inflation. Now central banks face the new depression and more deflation with few policy options to fight it.

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” There is not a single case in history where such a recusal of the justice has occurred under this type of flimsy claim.”

Ornstein: Impeach Amy Coney Barrett (Turley)

My column this morning in the Hill discussed a call by columnist and professor Norm Ornstein to impeach Amy Coney Barrett if she does not yield to a demand to recuse herself from any election challenge before the Court. A demand for such recusal was filed yesterday in the Supreme Court. Ornstein’s call for impeachment is the latest unhinged response to Barrett nomination and further decouples our national debate from any sense rationality and restraint. Ornstein declared on Twitter: “If Amy Coney Barrett goes on the Court and immediately votes for PA voter suppression, she should quickly be impeached. Trump asked her openly to act to tilt the scales of the election.”

I have already addressed the recusal calls as entirely baseless. Recusal under these circumstances would create a dangerous precedent for future nominees who are pressured to recuse solely to influence the outcome of pending or expected cases. There is not a single case in history where such a recusal of the justice has occurred under this type of flimsy claim. Barrett has no personal, professional, or financial interest in pending election cases. We have had only one justice ever impeached in our history. That was Samuel Chase in 1804 and he was acquitted by the Senate in 1805.

The Chase case is a telling point of comparison. Like today, the politics of the time were lethal and hysterical. Chase was a highly partisan Federalist who was tainted by the use of the Alien and Sedition Acts to attack political critics during the Administration of John Adams. The impeachment, supported by Thomas Jefferson, was based on Chase’s presiding on controversial trials for figures like James Callender. Despite the Federalist being in the minority in the Senate, the senators overwhelmingly rejected the case against Chase. It remains to be seen if we have a bipartisan majority of senators equally committed to the integrity of the Court and the Constitution today.

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Bellingcat is a dangerous arm of US, UK intelligence. We will see that soon again in the MH17 mess.

Bellingcat Smears OPCW Whistleblower, Journalists With False Letter (Maté)

Bellingcat, the NATO member state-funded website that has participated in a propaganda effort to accuse Syria of a chemical weapons attack in April 2018 and justify the US-led bombing that followed, has published a new falsehood-ridden attack on an OPCW whistleblower whose suppressed findings exposed the pro-war deception. According to Bellingcat, a leak that it has obtained not only “proves that a chemical attack did occur,” in the Syrian city of Douma in April 2018, but also, “shows that any notion of a cover-up at the OPCW is false.” Contrary to Bellingcat’s account, the website has only added a new chapter to the OPCW cover-up scandal by publishing an article beset with multiple demonstrable falsehoods and outlandish or unsupported claims.

It also features a malicious effort to dox and discredit a veteran, highly-regarded OPCW inspector who challenged the censorship of his team’s investigation. The anonymously authored Bellingcat article’s problems begin with its very premise, which turns out to be a blatant falsehood. The article is based on excerpts of a leaked draft letter that, Bellingcat claims, was sent in June 2019 by OPCW Director General Fernando Arias to Brendan Whelan, a member of the OPCW’s Douma team. However, The Grayzone can reveal that the text that Bellingcat published was never actually sent to Whelan. Indeed, the text of the letter featured by Bellingcat was actually an unsent draft that Whelan never received. This fact dismantles the heart of the NATO state-backed website’s argument.

Dr. Whelan, a 16-year OPCW veteran, first challenged the censorship of his team’s investigation in June 2018, weeks after the OPCW team returned from Syria. A series of leaks show that Whelan and the other OPCW inspectors who deployed to Syria found evidence that undermined allegations of a chemical attack in Douma. Yet their data was suppressed, and, when the censorship was challenged, the inspectors were removed from their own investigation. The cover-up coincided with pressure on the OPCW from the U.S. government, which had bombed Syria, along with the UK and France, in April 2018 based on the pretext that the Syrian government was culpable. The OPCW’s final report in March 2019 omitted the suppressed findings and strongly implied Syrian government guilt.

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Well, it’s something.

Greece Has Protected Its Jobs Better Than The Rest Of The EU (K.)

The Greek government’s measures to protect workers from the effects of the pandemic have served as a shield against unemployment, according to the course of the jobless rate in Greece and the rest of the European Union as revealed by Eurostat figures. In the second quarter of the year, when most of the bloc was in lockdown, the share of workers in Greece who lost their job was below 2% of those employed, against over 6.5% in Spain and between 3.5% and 5% in Italy. Across most EU countries, that rate ranged between 2% and 3.5%, according to an experimental study by the bloc’s statistical service.


Greece achieved that thanks to the introduction of contract suspensions and the subsidy of 534 euros per month to each worker furloughed, which is continuing for more than 160,000 recipients. This puts this country among the member-states that proved best at protecting jobs in the April-June period. On Thursday 116,860 workers will receive the special-purpose compensation for September, adding up to €58 million, and another 41,504 will collect a total of €10.6 million through the Syn-Ergasia labor subsidy program.

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“Don’t harsh my mellow, man. I’m doing this for a couple bags of blow and a $20, man. You suck!”

Jack Dorsey Hires Homeless Man To Fill In For Him At Senate Hearings (BBee)

Jack Dorsey was summoned to the Senate’s hearing on Big Tech today, but he was tripping on acid with the spider-monkeys off the southern coast of St. Bart’s, so he quickly called up his office and had his people hire a homeless man hanging out in front of Twitter’s headquarters to fill in for him. The hobo was holding up a sign reading “Will Go to Senate Hearing for Crack,” and Dorsey’s assistants quickly hired him for the hearing. “Yeah, uh, censorship, I like that. That’s good stuff,” said the hobo to the confused panel. “The apocalypse is coming, man. The signs are all around us!”

“Sorry, Mr., uh, Dorsey, we were expecting a professional-looking CEO, but you’re clearly just a hobo off the streets of San Francisco,” said Senator Mike Lee. “Couldn’t you at least have taken a shower before talking to the United States Senate?” “Hey, bro, chill out,” the hobo responded. “Don’t harsh my mellow, man. I’m doing this for a couple bags of blow and a $20, man. You suck!” For his part, Mark Zuckerberg programmed a lookalike android to testify.

Ron Johnson @jack

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