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“And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.”
– George Orwell, 1984

Biden 1997

Biden in 1997 saying that the only thing that could provoke a "vigorous and hostile" Russian response would be if NATO expanded as far as the Baltic states

pic.twitter.com/D0xG5uITwE

— Alexei Arora (@AlexeiArora) March 7, 2022

Nickel price

Spain electricity prices

India

Well said Arnab pic.twitter.com/ubd7N1UlAS

— Manak Gupta (@manakgupta) March 6, 2022

Famines loom.

• The Biggest Global Food Crisis That Any Of Us Have Ever Seen (Snyder)

By the end of 2022, we are going to witness very serious shortages of food in many parts of the globe. In fact, World Bank President David Malpass is openly admitting that we are now facing “a huge supply shock” as a result of the war in Ukraine. Of course we were already moving into a global food crisis even before the war erupted. According to the UN, worldwide food prices in February 2022 were 20.7 percent higher than they were in February 2021, fertilizer prices have gone absolutely nuts, crop production is down all over the planet due to crazy weather patterns, and supply chain problems caused by the pandemic continue to create ongoing headaches. But now World War 3 has erupted, and that is going to push this rapidly growing global food crisis to a level that none of us have ever seen before.

Under normal conditions, Ukraine exports tremendous amounts of food and is considered to be one of the most important “breadbaskets” on the entire planet. Unfortunately, everything has changed now, and this has pushed the global price of wheat up 55 percent since a week before the invasion happened… “Ukrainian farmers have been forced to neglect their fields as millions flee, fight or try to stay alive. Ports are shut down that send wheat and other food staples worldwide to be made into bread, noodles and animal feed. And there are worries Russia, another agricultural powerhouse, could have its grain exports upended by Western sanctions. While there have not yet been global disruptions to wheat supplies, prices have surged 55% since a week before the invasion amid concerns about what could happen next. If the war is prolonged, countries that rely on affordable wheat exports from Ukraine could face shortages starting in July, International Grains Council director Arnaud Petit told The Associated Press.”

I really don’t like that “shortages starting in July” part. That definitely sounds rather ominous. Right now, the global price of food is the highest that it has ever been, and Russia and Ukraine normally account for “nearly a third of the world’s wheat and barley exports”. Now that exports from Russia will be greatly reduced and exports from Ukraine will be virtually non-existent, some countries will almost immediately be facing extreme stress. [..] Things are going to be very challenging in Europe as well, because Ukraine normally provides almost 60 percent of the corn that Europeans use… “Ukraine supplies the EU with just under 60% of its corn and nearly half of a key component in the grains needed to feed livestock.” Meanwhile, crops all over the world are in surprisingly poor shape because weather conditions have been so strange.

Earlier today, I was stunned to learn that it is being projected that China’s winter wheat crop could be “the worst in history”… “The condition of China’s winter wheat crop could be the “worst in history”, the agriculture minister said on Saturday, raising concerns about grain supplies in the world’s biggest wheat consumer.” And the USDA is reporting that a whopping 71 percent of all winter wheat in the United States has been affected by drought… “A limited supply of soft white wheat, the primary type of wheat grown in the Inland Northwest, has helped lead to a six-year low for wheat exports from the United States. That’s according to the USDA wheat report for February. The report also states that 71 percent of U.S. winter wheat is being hit by drought in 2022.”

“But nobody thought that it would happen this fast.”

• The American Empire Self-Destructs (Michael Hudson)

Empires often follow the course of a Greek tragedy, bringing about precisely the fate that they sought to avoid. That certainly is the case with the American Empire as it dismantles itself in not-so-slow motion. The basic assumption of economic and diplomatic forecasting is that every country will act in its own self-interest. Such reasoning is of no help in today’s world. Observers across the political spectrum are using phrases like “shooting themselves in their own foot” to describe U.S. diplomatic confrontation with Russia and allies alike. For more than a generation the most prominent U.S. diplomats have warned about what they thought would represent the ultimate external threat: an alliance of Russia and China dominating Eurasia. America’s economic sanctions and military confrontation has driven them together, and is driving other countries into their emerging Eurasian orbit.

American economic and financial power was expected to avert this fate. During the half-century since the United States went off gold in 1971, the world’s central banks have operated on the Dollar Standard, holding their international monetary reserves in the form of U.S. Treasury securities, U.S. bank deposits and U.S. stocks and bonds. The resulting Treasury-bill Standard has enabled America to finance its foreign military spending and investment takeover of other countries simply by creating dollar IOUs. U.S. balance-of-payments deficits end up in the central banks of payments-surplus countries as their reserves, while Global South debtors need dollars to pay their bondholders and conduct their foreign trade. This monetary privilege – dollar seignorage – has enabled U.S. diplomacy to impose neoliberal policies on the rest of the world, without having to use much military force of its own except to grab Near Eastern oil.

The recent escalation U.S. sanctions blocking Europe, Asia and other countries from trade and investment with Russia, Iran and China has imposed enormous opportunity costs – the cost of lost opportunities – on U.S. allies. And the recent confiscation of the gold and foreign reserves of Venezuela, Afghanistan and now Russia, along the targeted grabbing of bank accounts of wealthy foreigners (hoping to win their hearts and minds, along with recovery of their sequestered accounts), has ended the idea that dollar holdings or those in its sterling and euro NATO satellites are a safe investment haven when world economic conditions become shaky. So I am somewhat chagrined as I watch the speed at which this U.S.-centered financialized system has de-dollarized over the span of just a year or two.

“..the soul of a nation that once was defined by the life and works of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Gorky, Lenin, Stalin, Sakharov, and Gorbachev was distilled into a shallow caricature of one man — Putin..”

• Pity the Nation (Scott Ritter)

In the past few months, the United States has undergone a kind of transformation that one only reads about in history books — from a nation which imperfectly, yet stolidly, embraced the promise, if not principle, of freedom, especially when it came to that most basic of rights — the freedom of expression. Democracies live and die on the ability of an informed citizenry to engage in open debate, dialogue and discussion about difficult issues. Freedom of speech is one of the touch-stone tenets of American democracy — the idea that, no matter how out of step with mainstream society one’s beliefs might be, the retained right to freely express opinions thus derived without fear of censorship or repression existed. No more.

In the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Russophobia which had taken grip in the United States since Russia’s first post-Cold War president, Boris Yeltsin, handed the reins of power over to his hand-picked successor, Vladimir Putin, has emerged much like the putrid core of an over-ripe boil. That this anti-Russian trend existed in the United States was, in and of itself, no secret. Indeed, the United States had, since 2000, pushed aside classic Russian area studies in the pursuit of a new school espousing the doctrine of “Putinism,” centered on the flawed notion that everything in Russia revolved around the singular person of Vladimir Putin.

The more the United States struggled with the reality of a Russian nation unwilling to allow itself to be once again constrained by the yoke of carpetbagger economics disguised as “democracy” that had been prevalent during the Yeltsin era, the more the dogma of “Putinism” took hold in the very establishments where intellectual examination of complex problems was ostensibly transpiring — the halls of academia which in turn produced the minds that guided policy formulation and implementation. Outliers like Jack Matlock, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Cohen were cashiered in favor of a new breed of erstwhile Russian expert, led by the likes of Michael McFaul, Fiona Hill and Anne Applebaum. Genuine Russian area studies was supplanted by a new field of authoritarian studies, where the soul of a nation that once was defined by the life and works of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Gorky, Lenin, Stalin, Sakharov, and Gorbachev was distilled into a shallow caricature of one man — Putin.

[..] As a former chief weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991-1998, I was uniquely positioned to comment on the veracity of the claims made by the United States that Iraq retained weapons of mass destruction capability in violation of its obligation to be disarmed of such. When my stance was deemed convenient to a narrative attacking a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, I was readily embraced. However, when my fact-based narrative ran afoul of the regime-change policies of Clinton’s successor, George W. Bush, I was cast aside as a pariah.

Greg Mello is the executive director of the Los Alamos Study Group.

• A Proposed Solution to the Ukraine War (Mello)

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, what was a regional conflict has become a global hybrid war with ever-greater stakes, not least the risk of nuclear war. Perhaps the greatest danger lies in the difference of motives between parties, which is also the fundamental cause of this war: Russia seeks security, while the U.S. and its NATO allies have been using Ukraine to deny that security — to “break Russia,” in Henry Kissinger’s 2015 phrase. The U.S. does not want peace, unless it be the peace of a conquered Russia. That is why there is no obvious end to the escalations and counter-escalations. The U.S. and NATO see opportunity in the war they have been trying so hard to provoke.

The tragedy is that few people seem to understand that at the root of the Ukraine crisis is a specific strategy known as the Wolfowitz Doctrine, named after Paul Wolfowitz who, as under secretary of defense in the administration of George H. W. Bush, was one of the authors of a 1992 document that laid out a neo-conservative manifesto aimed at ensuring American dominance of world affairs following the collapse of the Soviet Union. “Our first objective,” stated the document, “is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival [to the United States], either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere. … This is a dominant consideration underlying [a] regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.”

The Wolfowitz Doctrine triggered the post-Cold War use of NATO as an instrument of bloody aggression against Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. It declared, in effect, that diplomacy was dead and that American power ruled by violence if necessary. A resurgent Russia led by Vladimir Putin was next, and on the horizon, a risen China. The 2014 Washington-engineered coup in Ukraine that removed an elected leader who sought to reinforce his country’s relationship with neighboring Russia, was a product of the 1992 Doctrine and the extremism it represented. Victoria Nuland, a neo-conservative ideologue and President Barack Obama’s “point person” in Ukraine, has played the same role in President Joe Biden’s State Department.

The 1992 Doctrine is elaborated in an infamous RAND study on how to overextend and, in Kissinger’s words, “break Russia.” This is U.S. foreign policy today: a fact well understood by the Russian leadership who regard their country as effectively under siege by the United States. The potential of American missiles pointed at Moscow from former Soviet satellite countries, together with NATO troop deployments, is the reality they see. A militarized and virulently anti-Russian Ukraine being used as a tool by the U.S., with an expressed wish for nuclear weapons, on the brink of invading Russian-sympathizing provinces on the Russian border — all that was too much for Russia. What, do you suppose, the U.S. would do if such a situation arose in Mexico or Canada?

Ask yourself: how much of what you first heard about BLM and then the coronavirus turned out to be true? Not a lot of it. It was mostly lies. But you didn’t know that at the time. You were busy being yelled at. Sound familiar? The pattern never changes. (2/3) pic.twitter.com/hU5VP3H4C5

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) March 8, 2022

Enablers.

• US Secretary Of Defense Orders 500 Additional US Troops Deploy To Europe (CNN)

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin ordered additional troops and US military assets to be deployed to different parts of Europe amid the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine to further support the US’s NATO allies, a senior US defense official told reporters on Monday. The Defense Department will send a total of 500 troops in this new deployment, the official said. The deployment will include sending KC-135 refueling aircraft to Greece, but the official could not say how many aircrafts would be sent or where in the US they will be coming from. An air support operation center will be deployed to Poland and Romania, and an ordinance company and a maintenance company will be sent to Germany, the official said.

The ordinance and maintenance companies will provide “additional logistic support to the first armored brigade combat team, third infantry division” in Germany which is already deployed there, the official said. “It’s only 500, small units, enablers, we said at the get-go of deploying forces that we would not rule out additional forces to include enablers, and these units are very much in support of forces that were already sent forward,” the official said. With these additional deployments, the US now has about 100,000 US military personnel either on rotational or permanent orders stationed in Europe right now, the official said. The decision to send these troops and military assets were “based on conversations that the secretary had with the chairman and with Gen. (Tod) Wolters,” the commander of US European command, “that these additional enablers would be useful for the forces that are already” in Europe, the official said.

The additional deployment “were already kind of queued up to go, and again fully in support of our efforts to help defend NATO airspace if needed,” the official added.

CIA in Ukraine – Douglas Valentine

“..the U.S. would be in “no way opposed” to Poland’s “sovereign decision” to transfer its planes..”

• Ukraine Fighter-jet Deal Appears Doomed (Axios)

Efforts to push the Biden administration into supporting the transfer of Russian-made fighter jets to Ukraine appear doomed for both technical and geopolitical reasons. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky pleaded for the jets on Saturday during a Zoom call with more than 300 members of Congress, saying they were badly needed if NATO wouldn’t establish a “no-fly” zone. Those jets would likely be Soviet-era MiG-29s possessed by Poland, which Ukrainian pilots are capable of operating. The U.S. would, in turn, backfill Poland’s fleet with American-made F-16s. White House press secretary Jen Psaki reiterated Monday the U.S. would be in “no way opposed” to Poland’s “sovereign decision” to transfer its planes but stressed there are a number of logistical hurdles.

Those include how the planes would actually enter Ukraine’s heavily contested airspace, as well as how to accelerate the years-long U.S. procurement process for “serious weapon systems” like the F-16. The Russians have also been bombing Ukraine’s airports, raising the specter of the planes having to be based in Poland or other NATO territory — increasing the risk of a Russian attack on soil that would have to be defended by the alliance. Zelensky’s appeal produced an immediate and bipartisan groundswell of support. Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) sent a letter on Monday calling on the Biden administration to “do everything we can to compensate countries that heed Ukraine’s desperate call for fighter jets to defend their homeland.” His Republican counterpart, Sen. Jim Risch (R-Idaho), tweeted: “There is absolutely no reason we can’t supply airplanes to Zelensky and the Ukrainians. Our allies are willing and able to provide them, the admin needs to get out of the way.”

Macgregor
https://twitter.com/i/status/1501024225854902273

This will now define any further communications.

• Blinken Invokes Putin’s Dead Brother (ABC)

As Russian forces continue to advance across Ukraine, the U.S. is accusing the Kremlin of “starving” besieged Ukrainian cities, in the words of Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who on Monday appealed directly to Russian leader Vladimir Putin to “end the war, end it now.” Blinken even appealed to Putin’s family history, comparing the Kremlin’s siege of Ukrainian cities to Nazi Germany’s siege of Russian cities during World War II, which killed Putin’s one-year-old brother Viktor. But amid calls like his, the Ukrainian government, led by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is urging U.S. and Western leaders to do more — beyond condemnations and the historic amount of defensive aid and provide warplanes, missile defense systems, and a no-fly zone. U.S. allies in the Baltics are increasingly nervous about Putin’s advances in Ukraine, with Lithuania’s president warning Monday that the strongman leader “will not stop.”

[..] These sieges echoed Nazi Germany’s siege of Leningrad, Blinken said, where Nazi forces “systematically starved and intentionally destroyed” the city, leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths, Blinken said. “That siege affected millions of Russian families, including President Putin’s, whose one-year-old brother was one of the many victims. Now, Russia is starving out cities like Mariupol. It is shameful. The world is saying to Russia stop these attacks immediately. Let the food and medicine in. Let the people out safely, and end this war of choice against Ukraine,” he said. Putin’s older brother Viktor died of diphtheria during the siege of Leningrad before Putin was born.

But NATO is not.

• Ukraine’s Top Negotiator Says Kiev Open to ‘Non-NATO Models’ (Antiwar)

In an early sign of compromise following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine late last month, a senior member on Kiev’s negotiation team said his country is open to remaining outside of the NATO military bloc – a key security concern raised by Moscow time and again. Speaking to Fox News’s Nana Sajaia about the progress of the talks on Saturday, Ukraine’s chief negotiator David Arakhamia said little had been accomplished so far. With another meeting set for Monday, however, he outlined certain tradeoffs Kiev is willing to make, including its membership in the North Atlantic alliance. “We are ready to discuss some non-NATO models. For example, there could be direct guarantees by different countries like the US, China, UK, maybe Germany and France,” Arakhamia said. “We are open to discuss such things in a broader circle, not only in bilateral discussions with Russia, but also with other partners.”

The negotiator went on to state that, currently, the bloc’s leading members are “not ready to even discuss having us in NATO, not for the closest period of five or 10 years,” despite repeated assurances that Ukraine would be admitted – a promise first made in 2008 but reiterated as recently as last summer. While closing the door on Ukrainian NATO membership could be a step in the right direction and signal flexibility ahead of the next round of talks, it is unlikely to satisfy all of Russia’s demands. In addition to concerns over NATO expansion, Russian President Vladimir Putin has insisted that Kiev cede its claims to the Crimean Peninsula and the breakaway Donbass region, where separatist forces have been under siege by the Ukrainian military for eight years. “I don’t think that we have a choice now to even discuss some models where we would recognize those territories [as independent],” he said. “Our position is firm. We are ready to discuss any other dynamic options, but not recognition of those territories.“

“..cutting off your leg to punish yourself for walking into harm’s way..”

• Nowhere Left to Hide (Kunstler)

Time, they say, is nature’s way of making sure that everything doesn’t happen at once. If that’s so, then maybe time has stopped because all of a sudden everything seems to be happening at once. Three things, actually: 1) a Russian military operation in Ukraine that a lot of people in America want to turn into World War Three; 2) an epic crack-up of the world financial system; and 3) the breakdown of the fishy Covid-19 affair and especially the story behind its holy avatar: the mRNA vaccine. In a sane society, that might be enough to trip the institutional reality-test apparatus, but we are not a sane society these days, so we plunge ever-deeper into a hurly-burly of wrongful endeavor vectoring toward self-destruction. The immediate problem is a nation (us) that is powerfully bamboozled, led by a figurehead nobody believes in, backed by a hidden coterie of actors who appear to hate our country enough to try to sink it.

Forgive me for re-stating the premise of the Ukraine situation but one must counter the propaganda emitted like poison gas by a perfidious news media: Russia objected to the expansion of NATO to its very border, based on long-standing prior agreements about it. “Joe Biden” had every chance to formally recognize that reality and stupidly demurred. The Ukrainian government, ditto. Our side (the USA) had already created enough mischief there in mounting the 2014 coup against a government friendly with Russia, and then arming its replacement to harass Ukraine’s own citizens in its easternmost provinces, Donetsk and Luhansk. Two weeks ago, Russia moved in to forcefully correct all that. After all, Ukraine had been a part of Russia since they wrested it from the Ottoman (Turkish) empire in the 1700s, and in any other sense Ukraine is within Russia’s sphere-of-influence, as such things are defined in geopolitical history.

The US-led response to the Russian op was an attempt to dismantle the complex interbank payment systems of the global economy in order to punish one region (Russia) of the global economy — that is, cutting off your leg to punish yourself for walking into harm’s way. The result of that now is mayhem in the financial markets and in currencies, with global commodities like grain, oil, and ores acting as hostages. This hostage-taking has far-reaching effects because the nations of the world can’t operate without food, energy, and stuff to make products out of. Interfere with the rational distribution of them and you’ll get chaos and death.

How to embarrass your entire country.

• Australia Targets Hardcore Putin Extremists Spreading Hate About Ukraine (DM)

Australia will impose a fresh round of sanctions against Russia, targeting people who disseminate propaganda and disinformation about the invasion of Ukraine. Ten Putin supporters will be sanctioned for encouraging hostility towards Ukraine and driving false claims that a genocide was taking place against ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine. The men targeted are journalists, authors or Putin’s press officers. In addition, Foreign Minister Marise Payne said financial sanctions will be imposed on Russia’s armed forces, as well as six senior military commanders responsible for attacks on Ukraine. ‘Together with partners, we will drive Russia out of our economies, supply chains and airwaves,’ she said in a statement released on Tuesday.

The invasion of Ukraine has been accompanied by a widespread disinformation campaign within Russia. Putin has claimed he invaded to ‘de-nazify’ the country, which the West rejects as a false justification. ‘Tragically for Russia, President Putin has shut down independent voices and locked everyday Russians into a world characterised by lies and disinformation,’ Senator Payne said. ‘The addition of sanctions on those responsible for this insidious tactic recognises the powerful impact that disinformation and propaganda can have in conflict.’ The foreign minister said Australia was working alongside major social media companies to help remove propaganda from their platforms. ‘The assertion that there is a genocidal action happening in Ukraine against Russia, that there is a ‘denazification’ required in Ukraine, is an obscene suggestion,’ Senator Payne told Sky News.

But Newsweek picks the CDC.

• Florida Department of Health to Advise Against COVID Vax for Healthy Kids (NW)

The Florida Department of Health will now tell parents not to give their children the COVID-19 vaccine if they are healthy. Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo made the announcement Monday during a roundtable discussing “failures” of the COVID-19 response in the state. The announcement goes directly against the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which strongly recommends vaccination in children ages 5 and older. The CDC claims that since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the virus has become “one of the top 10 causes of death” for young unvaccinated children. The move, which will be the first taken in any state in the country, has not been officially announced by the Florida Department of Health. However, Ladapo was confident in its future.

“The Florida Department of Health is going to be the first state to officially recommend against the COVID-19 vaccines for healthy children,” he said. “We’re kind of scraping at the bottom of the barrel, particularly with healthy kids, in terms of actually being able to quantify with any accuracy and any confidence the even potential of benefit.” More than 12 million cases of COVID-19 have been reported in children since the beginning of the pandemic, accounting for 19 percent of all U.S. infections, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. The week ending on February 24 saw children make up 26.2 percent of COVID-19 infections in the country. However, health experts have begun pushing back against the potential recommendation.

When asked by Newsweek for comment, the CDC reiterated how children need to be vaccinated against COVID-19, citing its previous research. It is not only the CDC affirming the effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccines currently on the market, but Florida-based healthcare professionals, as well. “The data [is] clear,” UF Health professor Dr. Sonja Rasmussen, who studies epidemiology and pediatrics, told Newsweek in an email, “the benefits of COVID-19 vaccine in children outweigh the very small risks associated with it.”

Is there anyone left who thinks that would be enough?

• Leaders Who Got Covid Wrong Must Admit It And Apologize (NYP)

You, Rochelle Walensky at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, allowed Weingarten to craft absurd, unscientific policies that kept kids out of school. You let her block the schoolhouse door because you were on the same political team. You broke the trust Americans had in their health agencies and we will all suffer the repercussions of that for a long time. Apologize to the children whose lives you’ve stunted and who may never recover from the educational loss. Apologize to the kids who received speech therapy through masks because you refused to acknowledge that masking had been pointless in stopping COVID-19 spread. You may have permanently damaged these children because you refused to admit that you had been wrong for so long. Apologize.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, you fell in love with your own image and could not stay off the TV even as it caused us all harm. In November 2021, you said that people who were criticizing you were “really criticizing science, because I represent science. That’s dangerous.” What’s dangerous is if you really believe that. You frequently got things wrong on TV or reversed your previous comments with no explanations. The science hadn’t changed, you made political calculations to support the diktats of the Biden administration. You actually argued for the passage of the stimulus bill as if you were some kind of lobbyist and not the director of one of our national health agencies. Worst of all, you shut down dissenting opinions from other scientists because you knew yours could not withstand scrutiny. You have been a disaster for this country in leading us through the pandemic. Apologize. Then exit stage left and let us never hear from you again.

You fearful, quiet politicians who let extended lockdowns destroy businesses, fray the fabric of our cities and cost us all so much: We saw you maskless, at concerts and parties, while our 2-year-olds stay masked to this day. We know that you didn’t actually think masking was important like you implored us it was. You loved your power and nothing else mattered. Apologize. And you, compliant media, the disaster of the last two years is at your feet. You created heroes out of people like Gov. Andrew Cuomo, whose nursing home directive cost thousands of lives, while demonizing Gov. Ron DeSantis, who used all of his political capital to correctly force schools open, a decision everyone now pretends was easy but certainly was not. You ran stories about high case numbers in Florida “as schools open” to project that schools were somehow unsafe. You were incurious and did not ever challenge the corrupt health care agencies. You let us down.

Don’t apologize, we don’t believe you anyway.

“Rough calculations from VAERS data suggest that they’re at least several hundred times more dangerous than flu shots.”

• From Sore Arms To Sudden Death (Eugyp)

It is undeniable: The Corona vaccines cause a wide array of adverse events, not all of them understood. Right now it’s hard to assess their population-wide impact, but it is no longer reasonable to doubt that they’re substantially more dangerous than ordinary vaccines. Rough calculations from VAERS data suggest that they’re at least several hundred times more dangerous than flu shots. In addition to acute vaccine reactions – fever, myalgia, swollen lymph nodes and injection site soreness in the days following vaccination – many of you also discussed an array of more disturbing symptoms, including serious tinnitus, heightened blood pressure, chest pains, irregular menstrual bleeding and shortness of breath.

I also had many letters describing shingles and Bell’s Palsy following vaccination; and of more puzzling and potentially more serious neurological problems, from vertigo to muscular tremors to seizures. For the most part, milder acute symptoms disappeared in days, but some you report sore arms and tinnitus lasting many months. Among the severe reactions, myocarditis and stroke have a prominent place in your reports; I had fewer reports of miscarriages, but they were also present. Consistent with internet discussion elsewhere, some of you also report the sudden development or resurgence of cancer following Corona vaccination. Broadly speaking, dose 3 seems to have been worse than dose 2, and dose 2 worse than dose 1. Many, many of the vaccinated among you caught Corona following vaccination.

There are the preponderance of infections in the week following the first and third doses, which we already knew about, but these are but a fraction of post-vaccine infections overall. Probably a big thing that has stalled the political momentum driving mass vaccination, is the prevalence of bad booster reactions followed by breakthrough infection. Another point that emerged from your letters, is the generally high threshold for obtaining an exemption from further vaccination following an adverse reaction. It was disturbing to read several stories of people who were essentially vaccinated to death – dying after dose 3, following a rough reaction to dose 1 and a near-miss with dose 2.

Finally, almost all of you were vaccinated under duress. Some of you accepted vaccination simply to end the medical surveillance or to win back some freedom of movement. That was surprisingly uncommon, though; those who gave in to the petty harassments of the vaccinators generally said they didn’t appreciate the risk of the vaccines, or the outrageousness of the legal regime surrounding them, until later. Most often, people gave in to keep their jobs or to appease insistent family members. Some parents accepted vaccination so that they could attend school events involving their children; other people wanted to see elderly relatives in hospital or care homes.

It looks like death
https://twitter.com/i/status/1500633804830121984

“.. the company knew as early as the 1950s that PCBs were harmful to humans, ordering staff not to eat near the chemicals.”

• Los Angeles Suing Monsanto For Chemicals In Waterways (Y!)

Chemical company Monsanto found itself in the horns of yet another lawsuit Monday, as Los Angeles sued the firm for allegedly knowingly polluting waterways in one of the biggest cities in the United States. The suit — filed last week against three companies including Bayer, the German agro giant that now owns Monsanto Company — comes after a raft of legal action over weedkiller Roundup. The latest legal filing claims Monsanto polluted waterways in Los Angeles with polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) up until 1979. PCBs — a toxic chemical that does not break down easily — were used in paint, ink, paper products, fireproofing products, hydraulic fluids and industrial equipment. “It’s time for Monsanto to clean up and pay up,” said Los Angeles City Attorney Mike Feuer.

“The health and environmental impacts of PCBs — impacts the city has been working hard to reduce in waters throughout LA — are just jaw dropping.” “We allege Monsanto knew decades ago that PCBs are toxic and inevitably would cause widespread contamination,” he charged. “It’s infuriating that Monsanto continued to manufacture and sell them — and, we allege, deceive the public about them.” The lawsuit says exposure to PCBs can lead to cancer, as well as to damage to the liver, thyroid and eyes. It says the chemical can hamper brain development and impact birth weight. City officials, who are seeking payment from Monsanto to clean up waterways, say the company knew as early as the 1950s that PCBs were harmful to humans, ordering staff not to eat near the chemicals.

The lawsuit names three companies that Monsanto spun off in the 1990s: Monsanto Company, now owned by Bayer; Solutia Inc., now owned by Eastman Chemical Company; and Pharmacia LLC., now owned by Pfizer.