Dec 042021
 


René Magritte Popular panorama 1926

 

Boosters And Mass Vaccination Are As Harmful As Mold On A Wall (Vanden Bossche)
‘Fundamentally Evil’ Covid Policies Harming Children (WND)
WHO: “No Evidence” Boosters Would Offer “Greater Protection” to Healthy (SN)
Not One 5 To 18 Year Old Child Has Died Of Covid In Germany (Berenson)
Why I’m Not Vaccinated (Lisa Boothe)
Fury, Rising (Jim Kunstler)
Rand Paul: ‘Throw Fauci In Prison For Five Years (SN)
80 Republicans Vote with Dems to Pass Federal Vaccination Database Bill (KB)
DeSantis Proposes Reestablishing Florida State Guard (JTN)
Special Counsel Durham Found The Emails Fusion GPS Tried To Hide (TFog)
Russia Explains Red Lines On NATO Expansion (RT)

 

 

Where oh where do the heart problems come from? Cannabis, climate change, vaping,stress,poor diets?

 

 

 

The good news about Omicron?!

 

 

 

South Africa
https://twitter.com/i/status/1466243206824267781

 

 

“It is crystal clear, indeed, that none of the C-19 vaccines is capable of blocking transmission, not even by 1 % ! ”

“..mass vaccination is now turning Covid-19 into a disease of young and healthy unvaccinated people..”

Boosters And Mass Vaccination Are As Harmful As Mold On A Wall (Vanden Bossche)

From an immunological point of view, boosters and mass vaccination in general are as harmful as mold on a wall.

The vaccine can not prevent infection nor transmission. By again increasing the antibodies (with the booster), the virus is put under an even higher immune pressure while further expanding its capacity to escape from the vaccinal antibodies (Abs). As a result more infectious variants gain a competitive advantage and hence, will spread stronger amongst the population. This only precipiates and expands the evolutionary capacity of the virus to resist the vaccines. The level of protection WHO has recently been claiming (40%) is anything but due to the vaccines and can only be ascribed to some ‘trained’ innate immunity large parts of the population acquired prior to vaccination as a result of asymptomatic/ mild infection. It is crystal clear, indeed, that none of the C-19 vaccines is capable of blocking transmission, not even by 1 % !

Because vaccinal Abs suppress relevant innate Abs, these vaccines have no capacity whatsoever to confer sterilizing immunity. Consequently, none of these vaccines help to build herd immunity; on the contrary, they generate a breeding ground in vaccinees for more infectious variants, thereby further increasing infection rates and threatening both the unvaccinated and vaccinated. Moreover, vaccinal Abs tend to outcompete innate Abs for binding to SARS-CoV-2 because of their higher affinity for the virus. This particularly applies to naive innate Abs (children!) and already explains why C-19 vaccination is at risk of dramatically weakening people’s first line of immune defense, especially in children. Our innate immunity is not only well armed to protect against COVID-19 (including all its variants!), but also against a number of other viruses causing acute respiratory disease.

There can be no doubt, therefore, that such an assault of our immune system will have dramatic consequences on both individual and public health. Basically, mass vaccination is now turning Covid-19 into a disease of young and healthy unvaccinated people while enabling the virus to break through both the innate and adaptive immune defense of vaccinees due to vaccine-mediated suppression of innate Abs and viral resistance to vaccinal Abs, respectively. For those who didn’t get it thus far, Omicron will repeat that lesson; its teaching will only be a bit tougher and will soon silence all those who are trying to convince their people that they can outsmart the virus and, as they ridiculously claim, ‘stay ahead of the virus’.

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“.. is causing damage that is “deep and profound and will last for decades..”

‘Fundamentally Evil’ Covid Policies Harming Children (WND)

Dr. Robert Malone tells WND the damage is ‘deep and profound and will last for decades’ In a wide-ranging video interview with WND, the vaccine researcher who invented the messenger RNA technology behind the Pfizer and Moderna shots explained why he opposes universal vaccination for the COVID-19 virus and why he’s been willing to risk the reputation he’s cultivated over three decades and weather the scorn of the government and health-care establishment. Dr. Robert Malone cited the evidence for his concerns about the vaccines, the mandates and policies he believes are causing serious harm, particularly to children, but he also offered insight on his personal journey during the pandemic that has rocked the world. Unknown to most critics and allies alike, he said in the 80-minute interview, is that he’s not “right wing.”

“My wife and I are Central Coast Californians by birth and youth, and we actually come from slightly center-left on the political spectrum,” he told WND. “But I’ve got to say, what we’ve observed live the last two years has completely changed our point of view on politics in the United States. “And the thing is, I’m seeing that all across the country.” Malone noted he’s been on podcasts with African Americans and others traditionally on the political left “who are really not happy with what’s happening at all.” “I’m pretty sure what I’m seeing is a major political realignment starting to grow in the United States, and really worldwide, and it’s like a wakeup call.” It’s about the rights of the individual and the fundamental freedom of speech upon which the nation was founded, he said.

“This is scrambling politics,” said Malone of the pandemic, predicting — while acknowledging such prognostications are outside of his “core competency” – a “major sea change in the 2022 midterms.” Malone said the reason he is speaking out, in spite of the considerable personal risks, is simple. “It’s because I’m bloody well pissed off. It’s not right, it’s not fair, it’s hurting people, it is breaking the rules, left and right, people are lying continuously, they’re manipulating data,” he said. “It’s shocking.” He believes the consequences will be fundamental, with a “damaged” hospital and medical-care delivery system and a loss of faith in the government. The insertion of the government in the affairs of the family, with the lockdowns, school shutdowns, and the vaccine and mask mandates, is causing damage that is “deep and profound and will last for decades,” he said. “Evil can sometimes be intentional, and sometimes it’s unintentional, but right now what we’re seeing happening with our children is fundamentally evil,” he said. “It’s just a question in my mind to what extent it’s been intentional. And I hope it hasn’t been.”

[..] His big concern is that the experimental vaccines have been “rushed out the door” without the measures and the time that previously have been employed to ensure safety and efficacy. As a 30-year veteran of vaccine development, he decried “the things that Pfizer is getting away with, the data manipulation, the flat-out fraudulence in some of the clinical trial data.” “If I pulled those tricks, I would be barred from clinical research in the future,” he said “It’s not right in terms of ensuring safety and efficacy for the world’s population.” He called the COVID-19 vaccine rollout the “largest experiment being done on human beings, and it’s being done in a haphazard way that is violating all the norms for how clinical research, advanced development and regulatory affairs are supposed to be managed.”

Pfizer liability

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Leave all healthy people alone. Gone is your pandemic.

WHO: “No Evidence” Boosters Would Offer “Greater Protection” to Healthy (SN)

The World Health Organization has questioned the UK government’s decision to roll out hundreds of millions of booster jabs to its population, asserting there is “no evidence” they would offer “greater protection” to the healthy. UK Health Secretary Sajid Javid’s says the country has secured an additional 114 million vaccine doses for 2022 and 2023 to “buy time” and that everyone over the age of 18 will be offered one by the end of January. Dr. Mike Ryan, head of the WHO’s emergencies program, questioned the logic behind this decision. “Right now, there is no evidence that I’m aware of that would suggest that boosting the entire population would necessarily provide any greater protection for otherwise healthy individuals against hospitalization and death,” he said.


Ryan also noted that the UK was in a “luxurious position” of being able to offer booster shots to its entire population given that many poorer countries don’t even have even vaccines to give all their people one dose. UK medical authorities have also seized upon the Omicron variant to insist that more children receive vaccines. This is odd given that the variant has become noted for only causing “mild” symptoms in younger populations. Experts argue that dismissing Omicron as “mild” is dangerous because South Africa has a very young population (average age 27) and we don’t know how it will impact older people. They then say the solution is to vaccinate more younger people.

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Risk assessment turned into panic.

Not One 5 To 18 Year Old Child Has Died Of Covid In Germany (Berenson)

German physician-scientists reported Monday that not a single healthy child between the ages of 5 and 18 died of Covid in Germany in the first 15 months of the epidemic. Not one. Even including children and adolescents with preexisting conditions, only six in that age range died, the researchers found. Germany is Europe’s largest country, with more than 80 million people, including about 10 million school-age children and adolescents. Serious illness was also extremely rare. The odds that a healthy child aged 5-11 would require intensive care for Covid were about 1 in 50,000, the researchers found. For older and younger children, the odds were somewhat higher, about 1 in 8,000.

Another eight infants and toddlers died, including five with preexisting conditions. In all, 14 Germans under 18 died of Covid, about one per month. About 1.5 million German children or adolescents were infected with Sars-Cov-2 between March 2020 and May 2021, the researchers found. “Overall, the SARS-CoV-2-associated burden of a severe disease course or death in children and adolescents is low,” the researchers reported. “This seems particularly the case for 5-11-year-old children without comorbidities.” The researchers reported their findings in an 18-page paper published to the medrxiv preprint server on Monday. The data came from a registry Germany established in March 2020 intended to capture all hospitalizations of people under 18 with Covid.

All German children’s hospitals, pediatric infectious disease specialists, and pediatric societies were invited to participate. British researchers have posted similar findings, reporting that only six healthy children (including those under 18) out of 12 million died of Covid. Given the known risks of vaccine-induced myocarditis in young men, the fact that Pfizer tested its mRNA vaccines on barely 3,000 children 5-11 and followed most of them for only weeks after the second dose, the German data again raises the question of how health authorities can possibly justify encouraging children or teenagers to be vaccinated. But they have.

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“..41 percent of Democrats believed the unvaccinated have an over-50 percent risk of hospitalization, but, per Gallup, it’s actually “0.89 percent.”

Why I’m Not Vaccinated (Lisa Boothe)

I am not vaccinated. In a sane society, a personal decision like this would not warrant a column, or even an explanation. But we do not live in a sane society. As a healthy 36-year-old woman, COVID-19 does not pose a statistically meaningful threat to my life. I have a 99.97 percent chance of survival. Why would I get a vaccine for a virus that I do not fear and that isn’t a threat to my life—particularly when there is an element of risk from the vaccines? [..] HBO’s Bill Maher recently railed against the COVID-related hysteria that has taken over the nation. Maher pointed to a Gallup poll that found 41 percent of Democrats believed the unvaccinated have an over-50 percent risk of hospitalization, but, per Gallup, it’s actually “0.89 percent.” This then raises the obvious question: Is the Biden administration governing by paranoia or based on the actual underlying facts?

During a July CNN town hall, Biden told the American people, “you’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.” This declaration came after a group of fully vaccinated Texas Democratic state legislators turned a visit to Washington, D.C. into a super-spreader event. Shortly after, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky admitted, “unlike with other variants, vaccinated people infected with Delta can transmit the virus.” In August, Walensky told CNN that the vaccines “continue to work well with Delta with regard to severe illness and death, but what they can’t do anymore is prevent transmission.”

Her comments were in response to a study that examined an outbreak that began on July 3 in Provincetown, Massachusetts, involving 469 cases. Seventy-five percent of the cases in that outbreak occurred in fully vaccinated people, and there was no significant difference found in viral loads between the vaccinated and unvaccinated. A recent study published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases journal came to a similar conclusion, finding that vaccinated people are just as likely to spread the Delta variant as unvaccinated people within their households.

[..] To its mild credit, Big Pharma warned us in advance. Pfizer’s chairman told Lester Holt of “Dateline” last December that he wasn’t sure if the vaccine would stop transmission. Moderna’s chief medical officer told Axios last November, “I think we need to be careful, as we get vaccinated, not to over-interpret the results.” He went on to say, “When we start the deployment of this vaccine, we will not have sufficient concrete data to prove that this vaccine reduces transmission.” It’s unclear why some now seem so surprised that the vaccines haven’t stopped the spread. What’s more, is it possible that our myopic approach is outright counterproductive? Dr. Robert Redfield, former CDC director and now a senior advisor to Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, said that 40 percent of the recent COVID deaths in the state of Maryland were among the fully vaccinated.

It’s tough to know exactly what to make of that, but it surely isn’t encouraging, at minimum. Even though there is some evidence that therapeutics like monoclonal antibodies can cut hospitalization and deaths up to 85 percent, the treatment is rarely discussed. In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis has established monoclonal antibody sites throughout the state, but he was originally criticized for doing so. At the Miami monoclonal antibody site, more than 60 percent of the patients receiving monoclonal antibodies are themselves fully vaccinated. If the goal is saving lives, shouldn’t we embrace an all-of-the-above approach like DeSantis has done in Florida?

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“The Covid psychosis is just a reassignment of the Trump derangement..”

Fury, Rising (Jim Kunstler)

“Acting President” Anthony Fauci and his political advisor, “Joe Biden,” used the hatching of Omicron to beseech the multiply-vaxxed to booster-up — overlooking the perhaps embarrassing reality that the mRNA vaccines do nothing to stop the spread of Covid, though they do have quite a downside in relative harm from adverse reactions. For instance, a new study and warning from the American Heart Association concluded that mRNA vaccines dramatically increase risk of developing heart disease between 11 and 25 percent. Twitter slapped an “unsafe” warning on anyone attempting to transmit this news on its sacred app. Unsafe to whom, or what? Why, to the sacred narrative, of course, which is that the USA must be kept in a never-ending paranoid uproar over Covid — certainly until at least past the 2022 elections, in order to maintain all the emergency main-in ballot provisions that enable voting fraud.

Meanwhile, the emerging reality of Omicron is that it has a much lower transmission coefficient than its predecessor, the Delta variant, and produces only mild symptoms of illness. Someone should tell Acting President Fauci that Halloween is over and he can stop trying to scare everybody. Anyway, two federal judges rendered decisions striking down Acting President Fauci’s vaccine mandates. The second ruling, penned by U.S. District Judge Terry A. Doughty of Louisiana’s Western District, featured a particularly lusty and detailed diagnosis of the mandate’s constitutional impropriety, and extended the injunction against vax mandates to all fifty states. This leaves the USA in a distinctly exceptional position among the other nations within the loose confederation of Western Civ. Thanks to manifestations of sanity on the federal bench, the vax mandates appear DOA here now, while Austria and Germany have rushed into full-blown psychotic fugues over Omicron, announcing harsh punishments for their unvaxxed and, coincidentally, wrecking another Christmas season among people whose Teutonic devotion to the ancient pagan solstice rites runs hot and deep.

There is obvious awareness among German vax protesters, as seen on their T-shirts and placards, that 2021 is looking like a nauseating rerun of 1933. Is it not amazing that the German politicians don’t see that in their diktats? The Covid psychosis is just a reassignment of the Trump derangement, which was provoked by the generalized anxiety about collapsing industrial societies. The reasons for the collapse are not hard to grok: a declining resource base, especially affordable, economically plausible oil, a financial system purposefully detached from on-the-ground material reality, and sets of grossly foolish over-investments in complexity in the techno-narcissistic effort to work-around all that.

This 26 year old Australian, identified as a ‘contact’ of a Covid case but never testing positive, was held at an internment camp outside Darwin without her consent for 14 days. There was no legal process or recourse.

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At least take his job away. Ship him to Elba.

Rand Paul: ‘Throw Fauci In Prison For Five Years (SN)

Senator Rand Paul escalated his feud with Anthony Fauci Thursday by calling for the NAID head’s arrest and imprisonment for continually lying to Congress and denying he funded gain of function research on coronaviruses. Appearing on Fox Business, the Senator remarked “Fauci should go to prison for five years for lying to congress. They [the DOJ] have prosecuted other people and they have selectively gone after republicans, but in no way will they do anything about him lying.” Paul added that Fauci “should be prosecuted for lying, and at the very least he should be taken out of his position because I think he cost people lives through misinformation.“

Every time he tells people, ‘Oh, wear a cloth mask,’ he is actually endangering people. If you are around someone with COVID, you don’t want to wear a mask because they don’t work,” he added. “We’ve referred him to the Department of Justice,” Paul urged, adding “but then again, Merrick Garland is the one now going after parents that go to school board meetings, so I don’t have a lot of hope that Merrick Garland is objectively looking at Fauci’s lying.” Paul joins Senator Ted Cruz who also this week called for Fauci to be prosecuted. Elsewhere during the interview, Paul took aim at the stalled Biden spending bill, noting that Democrats “couldn’t run a 7-Eleven, much less the government.”

Paul explained “If they want to force it through with no amendments and they want to do it in a short period of time, they have to have unanimous consent. Well, a lot of us don’t consent… just because the Democrats are incompetent and haven’t brought it forward that we should speed up time to let them spend more money that is bankrupting our country.”

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Covid1984.

80 Republicans Vote with Dems to Pass Federal Vaccination Database Bill (KB)

The House of Representatives has passed a dangerous bill that would establish a federal vaccination database. Alarmingly, the radical Democrats accomplished this with the help of 80 Republicans, including Minority Leader and Speaker hopeful Kevin McCarthy (R-CA). “Eighty House Republicans voted with Democrats on Tuesday to pass the Immunization Infrastructure Modernization Act, which if passed by the Senate and signed into law would fund a federal vaccination database,” Breitbart reported. “According to the bill, also called H. R. 550, the government would provide $400 million in taxpayer dollars to fund ‘immunization system data modernization and expansion,’ a system otherwise defined as ‘a confidential, population-based, computerized database that records immunization doses administered by any health care provider to persons within the geographic area covered by that database’,” the report noted.


The government bill would spend $400 million on an “immunization system data modernization and expansion,” a system it says is “a confidential, population-based, computerized database that records immunization doses administered by any health care provider to persons within the geographic area covered by that database.” “The database would allow the government to notify people about when their booster shot are due,” one political observer notes. “Although the system is described as confidential, confidential in this case means confidential from the public, until of course records are indiscriminately released like has happened with the IRS, Department of Defense, Veterans Administration, or any number of high-profile government leaks and hacks.”

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Few people know 22 other states already have such Guards.

DeSantis Proposes Reestablishing Florida State Guard (JTN)

Gov. Ron DeSantis has unveiled a military budget proposal that would reestablish the Florida State Guard, “a civilian volunteer force that will assist the National Guard in state-specific emergencies,” according to a press release. The State Guard would consist of 200 civilians who would “be trained in the best emergency response techniques.” Its purpose is to further support the Florida National Guard with “emergency response efforts in the event of a hurricane, natural disasters and other state emergencies,” the governor’s statement reads. DeSantis is requesting $3.5 million to reestablish the State Guard, which began in 1941 and was disbanded in 1947 after filling in for National Guardsmen deployed during World War II, according to The Hill.


The governor said in a press conference Thursday that he wants to make sure Florida has “the flexibility and the ability needed to respond to events in our state in the most effective way possible, and some of that will require us to be able to have access and be able to use support in ways that are not encumbered by the federal government or don’t require federal government.” If the budget proposal is approved, then Florida will be the 23rd state with a state guard recognized by the federal government.

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They never thought Alfa Bank would fight back.

Special Counsel Durham Found The Emails Fusion GPS Tried To Hide (TFog)

For background, the fight arises out of a lawsuit – Fridman, et al. (Alfa Bank) v. Bean LLC a/k/a Fusion GPS, and Glenn Simpson, where the owners of Alfa Bank have sued Fusion GPS and Simpson for falsely accusing “the Plaintiffs—and Alfa (“Alfa”), a consortium in which the Plaintiffs are investors—of criminal conduct and alleged cooperation with the ‘Kremlin’ to influence the 2016 presidential election.” The case was filed in October 2017. Litigation has been ongoing for over four years – with Alfa Bank still fighting to obtain written discovery from Fusion GPS that is material to its case. Our previous report had to do with that very discovery dispute. Back in May, Alfa Bank “filed a motion to compel, asking the Court to require Fusion GPS and Glenn Simpson to produce nearly 500 critically important documents improperly withheld as privileged.”

These documents included e-mail correspondence within Fusion GPS regarding the “Alfa Playbook” and showed the early development of the Fusion GPS/Simpson work on Trump/Russia. One would assume this entails the early or emerging thought process of the “intelligence” group as they sought to falsely accuse the Trump campaign of colluding with Russia. In a later post from July 2021, we observed that records indicated Fusion GPS had been in contact with Michael Sussmann of Perkins Coie regarding Alfa Bank. More communications Fusion GPS is trying to keep secret. What nobody realized at the time, however, was the importance of these communications. Michael Sussmann – the DNC/Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer – would later face false statement charges and be basically accused of being part of a conspiracy to defraud the federal government with respect to the Trump/Alfa Bank allegations.

Today, the attorneys for Alfa Bank filed this their “Supplement to Plaintiffs’ Second Motion to Compel Defendants to Produce Documents Improperly Withheld as Privileged.” The motion was filed to inform the court that Fusion GPS and Glenn Simpson (and/or their attorneys) “possess numerous documents responsive to Plaintiffs’ RFPs [requests for production] that [Fusion/Simpson] neither produced nor included in their privilege log.” [..] In other words, Fusion GPS/Simpson deliberately withheld the disclosure of these e-mails in their privilege log. The very e-mails that very likely point to a conspiracy to push the Alfa Bank/Trump hoax by Perkins Coie, Glenn Simpson, and Rodney Joffe (“Tech Executive-1” listed in the Sussmann complaint), et al. Once Alfa Bank discovered their misconduct, Fusion GPS/Simpson were quick to list these e-mails in their latest privilege log.

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NATO and the CIA are cooking up conflict.

Washington Post today: “Russia planning massive military offensive against Ukraine involving 175000 troops, U.S. intelligence warns”

Russia Explains Red Lines On NATO Expansion (RT)

The expansion of NATO further eastwards is a red line for Moscow, and Ukraine’s possible accession to the US-led bloc is simply unacceptable, Russia’s Foreign Ministry said on Thursday. In a statement, spokeswoman Maria Zakharova warned of “serious negative consequences” if the situation on the border between Russia and Ukraine deteriorates. In recent weeks, there have been constant reports of a troop build-up, with some Western publications suggesting a military conflict is imminent. “Since the end of the Cold War, Russia has been repeatedly assured that NATO’s jurisdiction and military forces will not move an inch eastwards,” Zakharova said. “All these promises have been forgotten and not fulfilled. The result is the current sad state of European security.”

“We are convinced that the only option for resolving the current situation is the joint development of long-term agreements that rule out any further NATO advances eastward and the deployment of weapons systems threatening us in the immediate vicinity of Russian territory,” she continued. According to Zakharova, the US is dragging Kiev into the military orbit of the alliance and turning it into a ”bridgehead” of confrontation with Russia. This could destabilize Europe, she said. The spokeswoman’s comments follow a meeting of NATO foreign ministers in Riga, Latvia earlier this week, where the topic of Ukraine and the present circumstances on the frontier with Russia was front and center. While the bloc spoke about potential sanctions against Moscow, it also refused to guarantee that it would defend Kiev in case of armed conflict.

However, Zakharova believes the alliance is focused on “fighting imaginary threats.” “One of the pivotal topics – not for the first time – was Russia and its ‘possible aggression’ against Ukraine,” she said. “However, if we look at things realistically, it is NATO that has approached us.”

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The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.
– G. K. Chesterton

 

 

 

 

There are two types of people in the world. Avoid both.
– Schopenhauer

 

 

 

 

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Nov 102021
 


Francis Tattegrain La ramasseuse d’épaves (The Beachcomber) 1880

 

Frontline Health Workers In England To Get New Vaccine Guidelines (RT)
Whistleblowers To Play Key Role In Enforcing Biden Vaccine Rule (CBS)
Singapore To Start Charging Covid Patients Who Are ‘Unvaccinated By Choice’ (G.)
More Than Half Of Border Patrol Agents May Be Fired For Being Unvaccinated (SN)
Feds Seek to Block Promotion of a Nasal Spray Against COVID-19 (ET)
French Health Authority Warns Men Under 30 To Avoid Moderna Jab (ZH)
Naturally Immune Federal Workers Lodge Class-Action Over Vaccine Mandate (ET)
FDA Pfizer Doc Suggests Myocarditis From Shot Bigger Threat Than Covid (Bl.)
Doctors Will Never Regain The Public’s Trust After Covid (Huffman)
John Durham Is Getting Close to the Jugular (RCP)
Durham Exposes New Links To Clinton Campaign in Russian Collusion (Turley)
‘Out Of Control’ Pandemic Waste Spewed Into Oceans (RT)

 

 

Tucker OSHA

 

 

That’s it. British health workers get another 5 months to get jabbed. Any sense of urgency or emergency is gone. They won, and they know it. “..Up to 100,000 healthcare staff in England are unvaccinated..”

Frontline Health Workers In England To Get New Vaccine Guidelines (RT)

England’s frontline NHS workers will have to be fully inoculated against Covid-19 by April 1 as a mandatory condition of their employment, Heath Secretary Sajid Javid has said, as tens of thousands of staff are still not jabbed. Speaking on Tuesday to Parliament, Javid confirmed that “all those working in the NHS and social care will have to be vaccinated.” “We must avoid preventable harm and protect patients in the NHS, protect colleagues in the NHS and of course protect the NHS itself.” The deadline set for next spring – April 1 – will give all staff enough time to complete the Covid vaccination course. Up to 100,000 healthcare staff in England are unvaccinated, according to the head of NHS Providers Chris Hopson. Javid also said there would be exemptions for people who cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons, or for those not in face-to-face positions with patients.


The decision comes after consultations began in September on whether to make Covid and flu jabs mandatory for frontline NHS and care workers. The flu vaccine, however, will not be made mandatory just yet, but will be kept under review. Health Secretary Sajid Javid told Sky News last month that he was “leaning towards” mandatory vaccination for NHS staff, but Downing Street was yet to make a final decision. The prospect of mandatory vaccinations for NHS staff has raised concerns that the move could adversely impact an already overstretched health service. Hopson insisted that the government must work closely with NHS trusts to avoid a mass exodus of unvaccinated staff: “We understand why people are vaccine-hesitant. We need to win the argument with them rather than beat them around the head,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today show.

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A nation of snitches. Well done. “Ther are Jews hiding in that building!”

Whistleblowers To Play Key Role In Enforcing Biden Vaccine Rule (CBS)

To enforce President Joe Biden’s new COVID-19 vaccine regulation, the Labor Department is going to need a lot of help. Yet its Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) doesn’t have nearly enough workplace safety inspectors to do the job. The 490-page regulation will cover American businesses with at least 100 workers, or about 84 million employees in all. So the government will rely upon a corps of informers to identify violations of the order: Employees who will presumably be concerned enough to turn in their own employers if their co-workers go unvaccinated or fail to undergo weekly tests to show they’re virus-free.

What’s not known is just how many employees will be willing to accept some risk to themselves — or their job security — for blowing the whistle on their own employers. Without them, though, experts say the government would find it harder to achieve its goal of requiring tens of millions of workers at large businesses to be fully vaccinated by January 4 or be tested weekly and wear a mask on the job. “There is no army of OSHA inspectors that is going to be knocking on employers door or even calling them,” said Debbie Berkowitz, a former OSHA chief of staff who is a fellow at Georgetown University’s Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor. “They’re going to rely on workers and their union representatives to file complaints where the company is totally flouting the law.”

Under the regulation, businesses must maintain records on workers’ vaccination statuses. But for workplaces where employees aren’t required to be vaccinated, workers will need to get weekly tests and wear masks. OSHA said it plans to check on compliance with the latter by doing spot-checks of businesses, and will also rely on complaints the agency receives about businesses that aren’t following the regulation. “We will have our staff available and responsive to complaints, which is a No. 1 way we hear about problems in a workplace,” said Jim Frederick, the acting chief of OSHA, on a conference call with reporters. He also said the agency will focus on job sites “where workers need assistance to have a safe and healthy workplace.”

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Test site for bankrupting ordinary people.

Singapore To Start Charging Covid Patients Who Are ‘Unvaccinated By Choice’ (G.)

Singapore will no longer pay the Covid-19 medical bills for people “unvaccinated by choice”, the government said, as the country grapples with a surge in cases. The government currently covers the full Covid medical costs for all Singaporeans, as well as permanent residents and long-term visa holders, unless they test positive soon after returning home from overseas. However from 8 December, the government said it will “begin charging Covid-19 patients who are unvaccinated by choice”. It said unvaccinated people “make up a sizeable majority of those who require intensive in-patient care and disproportionately contribute to the strain on our healthcare resources”. Covid-related medical bills will still be paid for people who aren’t eligible for a vaccine.


The government will also foot the bill for individuals who are partially vaccinated until 31 December, giving them time to get a second dose. Singapore has among the highest coverage rates in the world, with 85% of the eligible population fully vaccinated. Yet the city state is struggling with rising Covid infections and last month warned its healthcare system was at risk of being “overwhelmed” by surging cases. It came a day after the country expanded quarantine-free travel as part of a shift in its approach to dealing with the pandemic. The prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, previously said the global business hub could not remain closed indefinitely, and Singapore has moved from a zero-tolerance strategy with lockdowns and closed borders to living with Covid-19.

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“..48 percent of agents have not registered their vaccination status, and of the 52 percent who have done that, ten percent are unvaccinated.”

More Than Half Of Border Patrol Agents May Be Fired For Being Unvaccinated (SN)

An internal report from within the US Customs and Border Protection agency suggests that more than half the border patrol workforce remains unvaccinated, and that if vaccine mandates are implemented it could leave just 8000 officers on duty. The document, obtained by Fox News, notes that 48 percent of agents have not registered their vaccination status, and of the 52 percent who have done that, ten percent are unvaccinated. Former chief operating officer of CBP Mark Morgan, who obtained the internal report, told Fox News that Biden’s vaccine mandate is “going to take an agency that’s already gone through an unbelievable catastrophic crisis on the southwest border and deplete its resources further.”

Morgan also provided a screenshot from the report showing tables of different scenarios of depletion within the CBP. The screenshot highlights that “in the worst-case scenario, agents who have not reported their status have done so because they refuse to take the jab, and so they will be terminated (scenario 3). In that case, net attrition could exceed 11,523 agents, leaving a mere 8,013 border agents on patrol.” If this scenario unfolds, it is likely that the border patrol would lose 59 percent of its workforce. Imagine how that would affect the already rampantly out of control border crisis.

If the 10,000 or so border patrol agents who have yet to register their vaccination status do not do so this week, they will be offered counseling, then suspension, then termination, Morgan further noted, emphasising how the document “illustrates the potential impact that this mandate could have on the workforce.” “So, an agency that is dealing with 1.7 million apprehensions, 400,000 got-aways, at that very moment, the same resources are going to be pulled away and distracted to deal with this mandate nonsense,” Morgan urged, adding that the counseling involves further “critical resources,” because border patrol leadership is involved.

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They have to block anything that might work. It’s in their Pfizer contract.

Feds Seek to Block Promotion of a Nasal Spray Against COVID-19 (ET)

The leading U.S. manufacturer of xylitol-based products says the federal government is deliberately trying to conceal a nasal spray it developed that it says has been scientifically proven to be effective in treating and preventing COVID-19. The U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit in federal court against Utah-based company Xlear on Oct. 28, saying it has deceptively advertised its nasal spray as a treatment and preventative of COVID-19. The lawsuit asks a federal court to permanently ban the company from promoting the nasal spray as a treatment for COVID-19 and also asks that monetary penalties be levied against it. COVID-19 is the disease caused by the CCP virus, commonly known as the novel coronavirus.

The DOJ filed the complaint on behalf of the Federal Trade Commission, which alleges the company has violated the Federal Trade Commission Act and the Consumer Protection Act by making false claims about the benefits. The spray’s main ingredients are saline, grapefruit seed extract, and xylitol, a plant-derived sweetener commonly used in oral care products. “Companies can’t make unsupported health claims, no matter what form a product takes, or what it supposedly prevents or treats,” said Samuel Levine, director of the trade commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said in a press release on the lawsuit. “That’s the lesson of this case and many others like it, and it’s why people should continue to rely on medical professionals over ads.” The commission and the Justice Department declined to make any further comment.

Xlear’s attorney Robert Housman, of the Washington firm Book Hill Partners, told The Epoch Times that the commission is “flat out lying” about the company’s claims being unsupported. Housman pointed out that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)—along with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), an arm of the Department of Health and Human Services—funded clinical studies of the use of nasal sprays like Xlear’s and published findings last year that found they were an effective treatment and method of prevention for COVID-19. “When Xlear tells people about scientific studies, even ones republished by the NIH, we are somehow misleading people and making false claims. It’s nonsensical,” Housman told The Epoch Times. “Rather than embrace nasal interventions, the government is trying to eliminate their use because they don’t fit the government’s highly flawed, vaccine-only agenda.”

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Have they published the victims’ numbers and accounts?

French Health Authority Warns Men Under 30 To Avoid Moderna Jab (ZH)

The bad news for Moderna just keeps coming. In the wake of a weak earnings report that sent Moderna shares cratering last week, French health authorities have just released a new advisory recommending that people under 30 don’t get the Moderna vaccine, recommending that they choose the Pfizer-BioNTech jab instead. The decision draws on recently released data showing that the risk of heart inflammation from Pfizer’s jab “appears to be around five times lesser…compared to Modera’s spikevax jab”, per an opinion published by the HAS. Cases of myocarditis mostly manifest within 7 days of vaccination, typically after the second dose has been given.

Most patients who experience side effects are typically men under the age of 30, according to the HAS, which cited research studies. HAS acts as an advisor to the French health sector but it doesn’t have the power to ban medicines or vaccines. The recommendation will apply to first and second doses, as well as a any “booster shot” doses available while the agency awaits additional data. For French men and women aged 30 and over, however, HAS says it sees no problem with administering Moderna’s Spikevax in this group, stating that its efficacy was slightly higher than Pfizer-BioNTech’s jab. Last month saw a handful of Nordic nations place varying restrictions on Moderna’s vaccine.

Tiny Iceland, meanwhile, has banned the Moderna jab from being used across the entire population. Initially. Stockholm announced it would pause the use of Moderna for all of its population born in 1991 or after. Helsinki followed suit, but halted the jabs for young, male Finns only based on a study involving Finland, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden which found that men under 30 had a slightly higher risk of developing heart inflammation. Oslo also suggested that young Norwegian men should consider choosing Comirnaty, the Pfizer jab, over Moderna’s or any of the other options.

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A half year discussion, going nowhere.

Naturally Immune Federal Workers Lodge Class-Action Over Vaccine Mandate (ET)

Federal workers who have recovered from COVID-19 have filed a class-action lawsuit against Dr. Anthony Fauci and other government officials over a COVID-19 vaccine mandate that still forces them to get a jab. The government not only failed to offer a carve-out exemption for naturally immune workers, or those who have recovered, but neither President Joe Biden’s executive order nor the guidance explaining it outlines why naturally acquired immunity isn’t an acceptable alternative to vaccination, the lawsuit states. “Because they already have natural immunity, there is no coherent purpose for the federal government to require them to undertake a medical procedure to be vaccinated if they choose not to, or be terminated from their employment, their careers,” Robert Henneke, general counsel at the Texas Public Policy Foundation and one of the lawyers representing the government workers, told The Epoch Times.


Plaintiffs say the mandate violates the Administrative Procedure Act, which allows courts to overturn government actions deemed “arbitrary, capricious, or an abuse of discretion.” They quoted Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a former Food and Drug Administration commissioner who now sits on the board of Pfizer. During recent television appearances, Gottlieb described natural immunity as “durable” and “robust” and said that government officials should start assimilating it into policy discussions. They also cited Dr. Hooman Noorchashm, an immunologist who has said it is medically unnecessary for the recovered to get vaccinated. Dozens of studies have shown that people who survived COVID-19 have strong immunity against re-infection from the virus that causes it, with some indicating the protection is similar to or higher than that provided by vaccines. Workers tried communicating concerns about the mandate but those “have completely fallen on deaf ears, which is why we’ve turned to litigation,” Henneke said.

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So many things we’ve known forever, that still need to be pointed out every day.

FDA Pfizer Doc Suggests Myocarditis From Shot Bigger Threat Than Covid (Bl.)

In Pfizer’s FDA briefing document prepared for the Oct. 25 meeting was an admission that even according to the company’s own unverified and misleading math, there is a scenario where there would be more hospitalizations among children for myocarditis — just one side effect — than from COVID. “Under Scenario 3 (lowest incidence), the model predicts more excess hospitalizations due to vaccine-related myocarditis/pericarditis compared to prevented hospitalizations due to COVID-19 in males and in both sexes combined,” states Pfizer in page 33 of the document. How in the world could there be any universe where we would approve a shot, much less promote and force it in many settings, when there is a possibility of greater harm than benefit, when the harm is man-made and the virus is left to chance?


They know quite well that this approval will eventually lead to soft and hard mandates, which have already begun in California schools. The document concludes by expressing the same callous attitude toward those raising concerns as toward all their interventions from day one. “However, in consideration of the different clinical implications of hospitalization for COVID-19 versus hospitalization for vaccine-associated myocarditis/pericarditis, and benefits related to prevention of non-hospitalized cases of COVID-19 with significant morbidity, the overall benefits of the vaccine may still outweigh the risks under this lowest incidence scenario.” In other words, sure, we have no clue what’s going to happen, but it’s always better to err on the side of shoving this on children who have a 99.9% recovery rate.

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They have 60% of the people’s trust right now. But what will happen when booster 3,4,5 come along?

Doctors Will Never Regain The Public’s Trust After Covid (Huffman)

One undeniable outcome of the pandemic is that the public’s faith in scientific and medical authorities is perhaps at its lowest point in living memory – and no objective observer can truly be surprised. At the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, the US President’s Chief Medical Adviser Dr Anthony Fauci and US Surgeon General Dr Jerome Adams told us not to wear masks, until they instructed us to wear one everywhere we went. The Covid vaccines were declared to be effective at preventing the spread of disease, until breakthrough cases around the globe proved that wasn’t so, and that effectiveness was downgraded to “against hospitalization and death.”

Both The Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine, two of the most prestigious medical journals in the world, have issued embarrassing retractions to widely publicized papers eventually found to have too little validity to be published. Anyone who suggested that the pandemic originated in a Wuhan laboratory and not a Chinese wet market was labeled a conspiracy theorist by official sources who later had to admit they were possibly correct. The same proved true for everyone who accused Fauci and the National Institutes of Health of funding gain-of-function research at the lab: they were crazy, until they were right.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists urged all pregnant women to be vaccinated, asserting that the new injections were completely safe. Now, a new review of that same data suggests that one in eight women spontaneously aborted her pregnancy after getting the jab. Even medical terms – such as ‘herd immunity’, and the word ‘vaccine’ itself – have literally been redefined over the past few months. All this has shocked a great number of informed, educated people around the world. Should it, though? In fact, a brief glance through the history of science demonstrates that scientists being completely and utterly wrong – in retrospect, often comically so – is the norm, not an aberration. It’s long past time for modern scientific researchers to discover a proper sense of humility and to step down from the pedestal of secular priesthood they’ve ascended.

Stories about an advisory panel’s recommendation to the Food and Drug Administration to approve a Moderna booster shot contained a quote that most might find truly incredible. “It’s more a gut feeling rather than based on really truly serious data,” said biochemistry professor Dr Patrick Moore. “The data itself is not strong, but it is certainly going in the direction that is supportive of this vote.” How can a scientific advisory panel make such a recommendation while admitting it’s based on feeling, not fact? In fact, it happens all the time. ‘Medical consensus’ is a term that carries an authoritative denotation, yet it simply means that a bunch of experts got together and decided amongst themselves what’s correct. The problem is that, today and in the past, those experts – in virtually every field – are so often wrong.

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The jugular is Hillary and Obama. How close can he get?

John Durham Is Getting Close to the Jugular (RCP)

The Clinton team launched this operation with professional expertise. The goal was to produce a powerful anti-Trump story, using whatever materials they could, then share it with the media (to smear Trump) and the FBI (to launch a major investigation and ensnare Trump). Ideally, the campaign’s involvement would be hidden, removed from the damning report by several layers of lawyers, opposition researchers, camp followers, and flacks. To provide that insulation, the campaign used attorney Marc Elias, then at Perkins Coie law firm in Washington (where the recently indicted Michael Sussmann was a colleague), to hire an opposition-research firm, Fusion GPS.

That firm, headed by former reporters Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch, in turn hired Steele, a Brit who had formerly worked for his country’s intelligence services, to produce the damning dossier. To translate some Russian materials, Fusion GPS hired Nellie Ohr, whose husband, Bruce, learned how biased Steele was and told the FBI to treat Steele and his information warily. Bureau agents ignored that early warning and all the others. They quickly learned Steele’s material was a mirage, thanks to their interviews with Danchenko. They also confirmed that Steele’s dossier depended on Danchenko, so its claims of “Russian sourcing” were false. By interviewing Danchenko’s own sources, they learned that their third-hand statements, which were used in the dossier, were mainly rumors and “bar talk.”

The prosecutorial team assembled by Robert Mueller should have known all this, too. They had complete access to this exculpatory FBI material on day one and ignored it. A year and a half later, when Mueller himself finally testified before Congress, he didn’t even know what Fusion GPS was. By that point, Mueller seemed to have genuine difficulty remembering the details of his own investigation. His team of attorneys had no such excuse. Hired by Mueller’s top deputy, Andrew Weissmann, they were among the country’s sharpest and toughest prosecutors — and the most partisan. The more Durham uncovers, the worse the Mueller team will look.

Reviewing this evidence, Kimberly Strassel of the Wall Street Journal has concluded the Steele dossier is misnamed. It should be called the “Clinton dossier,” she says, since Hillary commissioned it, paid for it, and had her aides feed it to the media, the State Department, and the FBI. It was a full-scale disinformation campaign — coherent, well-organized, and well-funded. It was rotten to the core. The question now is whether John Durham can find enough evidence to charge the ones who planned and executed it. The charging documents he filed for Danchenko and Sussmann are far more extensive than the necessary minimum. They suggest that Durham has compiled extensive evidence about a broader conspiracy. Will he settle for the capillaries now that he has the jugular in view?

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“Durham clearly seems to be making a meticulous case that the Steele dossier was a political hit job orchestrated by Clinton operatives.”

Durham Exposes New Links To Clinton Campaign in Russian Collusion (Turley)

“To my good friend … A Great Democrat.” Those words written to a Russian figure in Moscow, inside a copy of a Hillary Clinton autobiography, may be the defining line of special counsel John Durham’s investigation. The message reportedly was written by Charles Dolan, a close Clinton adviser and campaign regular whom news reports identify as the mysterious “PR-Executive 1” in the latest Durham indictment, this time of Igor Danchenko. Danchenko, 43, was a key figure in the compilation of the infamous Steele dossier that led to the now discredited investigation of alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government during the 2016 presidential race. But Danchenko, a Russian emigre living in the U.S., seems unlikely to be the Durham investigation’s apex defendant. In fact, Durham describes him at points more like a shill than a spy, an “investigator” who was fed what to report by Clinton operatives such as Dolan.

Durham is known as a methodical, apolitical and unrelenting prosecutor. Thus far, his work seems to betray a belief that the FBI got played by the Clinton campaign to investigate the Trump team. The question is whether Durham really wants to indict just the figurative tail if he can get the whole dog — a question that now may weigh heavily on a number of Washington figures, just as it did following Durham’s indictment in September of Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann. Danchenko’s indictment on five counts of lying to the FBI serves two obvious purposes. First, these counts — with a possible five years in prison on each — are enough to concentrate the mind of any defendant about possibly flipping for the prosecution. Second, indicting Danchenko “hoists the wretch” for potential targets to see and consider that there but for the grace of God — and Durham — go they.

The background details of Durham’s three indictments so far have assembled an impressive list of “great Democrats” who contributed directly or indirectly to the creation of the Russia collusion scandal. Indeed, the collusion case increasingly is taking on a type of “Murder on the Orient Express” feel, in which all of the suspects may turn out to be culprits. While the statute of limitations may protect some, Durham has shown that he can use the crime of lying to federal investigators (18 U.S.C. 1001) as a handy alternative. Targets must admit to prior misconduct or face a new charge. Thus, Durham clearly seems to be making a meticulous case that the Steele dossier was a political hit job orchestrated by Clinton operatives. His latest indictment connects Danchenko to several intriguing figures and groups that, in turn, relate to the Clinton campaign.

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Mass madness.

‘Out Of Control’ Pandemic Waste Spewed Into Oceans (RT)

A new report claims that 25,000 tons of masks, gloves, and other pandemic-related plastic waste has ended up in our oceans since Covid-19 first emerged. Hospitals, rather than individuals, are the chief culprit. “The recent Covid-19 pandemic has led to an increased demand for single-use plastic, intensifying pressure on this already out-of-control problem,” a team of Chinese and American researchers wrote in a paper published by the US National Academy of Sciences. “More than eight million tons of pandemic-associated plastic waste have been generated globally, with more than 25,000 tons entering the global ocean,” they added. The study is not the first to link the glut of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) produced during the pandemic to a rise in pollution.

The ubiquitous face masks that now litter beaches and high streets can take centuries to decompose, leaching harmful microplastics as they break down. With an estimated 129 billion face masks and 65 billion gloves used globally each month, scientists have already called for the use of more environmentally friendly materials in the production of PPE. The latest study, however, identifies the source and destinations of most of this waste. Hospitals account for nearly 90% of discarded PPE, with individuals responsible for only 7%. The majority of the waste (79%) enters the global ocean via just 10 rivers. Overall, Asian rivers are responsible for 73% of waste discharge, followed by European rivers with 11%.

Once in the ocean, most of this waste remains close to its source, with East and South Asia, South Africa, and the Caribbean identified as hotspots. 13 percent floats in the seawater, 16% sinks to the seabed, and 71% is washed up on the shore. The researchers warned that as “the pandemic will not be completely controlled in a couple of years,” a further 34,000 tons of discarded PPE will end up in the oceans, with much of it adding to huge “garbage patches” in the North and South Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, as well as the Indian Ocean.

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Nov 082021
 


Vincent van Gogh Roofs of Paris 1886

 

No Booster… No Hassle-Free Foreign Travel (DM)
The Mandate on Business Intensifies the Crisis (Tucker)
Experts Rip CDC Study Claiming Vax Protection Beats Natural Immunity (JTN)
UK Excess Deaths At Home Soar Past 65,000 In Just 18 Months (Exp.)
When Will The CDC Correct Its Covid Death Counts, As Italy Just Did? (AT)
Doctors And Researchers Demand That Vaccination In Sweden Be Suspended (LRP)
World Record Freediver Diagnosed With Myopericarditis After Pfizer Vaccine (CW)
Jen Psaki , Gavin Newsom Not Been Seen in Public for Eleven Days (BN)
How Low Will He Go? Biden Approval Rating Now At 38% (JTN)
Stop Looking at Danchenko, Start Looking at Weissmann and Robert Mueller (CTH)
The Biggest Loser Of The Durham Indictments: James Comey’s FBI (JTN)

 

 

 

 

McCullough Spike Protein
https://twitter.com/i/status/1457322772439486464

 

 

“Ministers are drawing up plans to bring back tests and quarantine for those who refuse third Covid jab.”

No Booster… No Hassle-Free Foreign Travel (DM)

British travellers who fail to take their booster jabs face renewed restrictions, The Mail on Sunday can reveal. Plans to reimpose quarantine and testing for those who have refused their third vaccine are currently being drawn up by Ministers to protect the UK against the spread of new coronavirus variants. But they are likely to prove controversial if introduced before most of those eligible for their booster have received it. So far, only 60 per cent have done so. The move would change the definition of ‘fully vaccinated’ from having had two jabs to three. Officials are divided over how soon to implement the measure and are discussing a grace period that would allow people to travel without quarantine if they had sought a booster six months after their second jab but had not yet been offered an appointment.

Under the plans, modelled on the Israeli system, travellers would not be able to avoid the need for a third jab by producing evidence of a negative Covid-19 test. Last night a Government source said: ‘This is not going to happen immediately – but happen it will.’ The news came as Health Secretary Sajid Javid said almost 10 million people have now received their booster jab, but encouraged people to urge their elderly relatives to come forward. Boosters are currently available to over-50s, health workers and the clinically vulnerable, although the scheme is expected to be extended to the over-40s early next year.

Seven out of ten of those over 80 and three in five of the over-50s in England have had their third injection, which can be administered six months after the second. As at present, those who have not been fully vaccinated will have to self-isolate for ten full days on returning to the UK and pay for four expensive PCR tests, two before departure and two back on British soil. It is the definition of ‘fully vaccinated’ that will be extended to include only those who have accepted the booster.

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Overreach.

Opposition To New Biden Vaccine Mandate Explodes As 27 States Join Fight (JTN)

A total of 27 states so far have filed lawsuits against the Biden administration over the COVID-19 vaccine mandate on private businesses of 100 or more employees. The mandate, which is being enforced by the Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), will require employers to ensure all their employees are either vaccinated by Jan. 4 or are tested weekly and wearing masks. If the businesses do not follow the mandate, they could face fines of up to $14,000 per violation. All but one of the states that filed lawsuits, Iowa, have Republican attorneys general. Kansas, Kentucky, and Louisiana are the only three of the 27 states that have Democratic governors, and Iowa’s governor is a Republican.

Kansas Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly criticized President Biden’s vaccine mandate on private businesses on Friday, saying, “While I appreciate the intention to keep people safe, a goal I share, I don’t believe this directive is the correct, or the most effective, solution for Kansas.” Kelly is up for reelection next year, and her GOP challenger is the state attorney general, whose campaign called her out for waiting until the mandate went into effect to criticize it. As for Kentucky Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear, he said he’s unsure if the state lawsuits against the Biden administration over the vaccine mandate have merit, WDRB reported. “I don’t know the nuances of this lawsuit, but in the end, we have to follow the law as a state, so we will prepare to comply,” Beshear said.

According to Louisiana Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards’ spokeswoman, he is reviewing the “directive” and “will continue to ensure that all state resources are available to assist those employers affected by the requirements,” The Advocate reported. Iowa Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds released a statement on the lawsuit that reads: “I believe the vaccine is the best defense against COVID-19, but I also firmly believe in Iowans’ right to make healthcare decisions based on what’s best for themselves and their families, and I remain committed to protecting those freedoms. President Biden should do the same.”

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“..the mandate is a masking and testing one, with an exemption permitted for the vaccinated. That little trick is designed to survive the flurries of inevitable court challenges.”

The Mandate on Business Intensifies the Crisis (Tucker)

It’s hard to imagine that public confidence in everything could fall further, but it surely will. This past week was emblematic. We saw Biden’s party face an electoral rout on Tuesday due mostly to pandemic policy – even the education controversies in Virginia trace to disastrous school closures – followed two days later by an intensification of those very policies with a vaccine mandate on companies with 100 or more employees. That was followed by an announcement from Pfizer the very next day that they have a new therapeutic pill that is 89% effective, in which case, why the vaccine mandate? That’s more than enough to make one’s head spin. But then it got worse: on the same day, the head of the CDC claimed on Twitter that masks reduce “your chance of Covid-19 infection by 80%,” a claim without a shred of evidence in the scientific literature.

At this point, it seems like they will say anything, knowing full well that the fact checkers will leave alone any high official in the federal government. Let’s focus on the mandate on business. The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals has thankfully issued a stay on the entire order pending a closer review, citing grave constitutional problems with the OSHA order. The Biden administration is being asked to respond by tomorrow evening as of this writing. The edict itself relies most fundamentally on the claim that “immunity acquired through infection appears to be less protective than vaccination,” which is unproven and likely false. It is imposed in the midst of evidence all around us that the previous public-sector and contractor mandate has led to sickouts, resignations, and unpaid leave announcements hitting industrial sectors and cities all over the country, from airlines to fire departments to hospitals and academia.

In Senate testimony, Anthony Fauci cited the fantastic success of mandates at United Airlines while failing to mention the hundreds of firings and the pilot and staff revolt at every other airline. One would suppose that this mess would be enough to forestall more mandates but no: now all companies with 100 employees must force vaccines on its employees, or else pay fines of $13,600 per violation. More precisely, the mandate is a masking and testing one, with an exemption permitted for the vaccinated. That little trick is designed to survive the flurries of inevitable court challenges. Yes, it overtly creates a segregated caste system based on one’s willingness to submit to an injection via a government mandate. The rules come into effect on January 4, 2022, which means that businesses all over the country will spend the next two months trying to figure out what to do.

Same with workers, many millions of whom do not believe that they need, and thus do not want this vaccine that neither stops infection, nor transmission and is also associated with unusually high adverse effects for which the vaccine makers bear no liability. Buried in the gigantic text is a request for public comment on expanding this to all businesses of any size. So there is no real escape in the long run. It’s truly hard to imagine how this could happen in the U.S. But the same could be said about nearly everything that has happened in the last 21 months. Citizens are desperately struggling to get out from under the yoke of this despotism, and using every opportunity available to do so. Politicians who back these policies are being swept out of office. And yet they carry on. It appears that the sadistic state is quickly becoming a masochistic one.

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“It’s not even clear enough naturally immune people were hospitalized to reach statistical significance..”

Experts Rip CDC Study Claiming Vax Protection Beats Natural Immunity (JTN)

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published an “early release” study last week that uses a highly curated population to purportedly show that mRNA-vaccinated people have a much lower rate of reinfection by COVID-19 than naturally immune people, contradicting a much larger Israeli study this summer. The CDC study concludes: “All eligible persons should be vaccinated against COVID-19 as soon as possible, including unvaccinated persons previously infected with SARS-CoV-2.” The study analyzed “COVID-19–like illness hospitalizations among adults” across nine states from January through Sept. 2. Because public health authorities portrayed vaccination as the best way to avoid hospitalization, it’s less likely that vaccinated people would seek hospitalization, thus hiding their breakthrough infections relative to the naturally immune.

Attorney Jenin Younes, whose New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA) files legal challenges against COVID vaccine mandates, tweeted that the study contradicts a meta-analysis touted by the CDC, which found “no significant difference” in protection between vaccination and natural immunity. Immunologist Hooman Noorchashm, the medical expert for multiple NCLA challenges, called the study “another teleological piece of propaganda” by the CDC because it excludes the Johnson & Johnson vaccine and likely includes recovered people in the vaccinated group.

Harvard Medical School epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff tweeted that the study has a “major statistical flaw” — falsely portraying hospitalized respiratory patients as “representative of the population” — which renders the odds ratio “wrong.” Former New York Times journalist Alex Berenson argued the study “is meaningless gibberish that would never have been published if the agency did not face huge political pressure to get people vaccinated.” It’s not even clear enough naturally immune people were hospitalized to reach statistical significance, he said, noting there’s no unadjusted odds ratio.

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Nope, not a word about vaccines. It’s all very mysterious. What could it be?

UK Excess Deaths At Home Soar Past 65,000 In Just 18 Months (Exp.)

Figures from the Office of National Statistics for England and Wales show over the past eighteen months there have been at least 74,745 excess deaths – deaths above the five-year average – in private homes. Only 8,759 (12 percent) involved COVID-19. The deaths at home figures from 7 March, 2020 to 17 September, 2021 are 37 percent higher than the 2015 – 2019 average and the numbers are continuing to climb. Last week was the 16th week in a row where the ONS reported extra or “excess” deaths. The disturbing trend includes 15-19-year-old boys. Deaths in this group have risen by 30 percent between January and October this year compared to the same period in 2020 – from 355 to 462. This is 20 percent higher than the five-year average for this period which was 386.


Last night Professor Carl Heneghan, Director of Oxford University’s Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, called for an urgent inquiry into the circumstances behind the deaths to find out whether they could have been prevented. He said: “More people are dying of non-covid causes and we continue to see a considerable and continuing rise in excess deaths this year not caused by Covid-19 and occurring mostly in the home. This is extremely concerning. It is urgent we now launch a proper inquiry to find out whether these deaths could have been prevented. The death certificates only give a snapshot of what is actually going on. “We need to go beyond these and look at those deaths which may not have been covered by coroners. To understand the true cause and what can be done to reduce the high number of excess deaths, particularly those in the home setting.”

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Don’t worry, the first fact checks deriding the Italian Higher Institute of Health are already out.

When Will The CDC Correct Its Covid Death Counts, As Italy Just Did? (AT)

The Summit caught a fascinating story out of Italy: the Italian Higher Institute of Health decided it had miscounted COVID deaths. Instead of looking at people who died with COVID, as it once did, it looked only at people who died from COVID — leading to a 97% decrease in Italy’s COVID death count. So far, the CDC shows no signs of following suit. According to The Summit: “The Italian Higher Institute of Health has drastically reduced the country’s official COVID death toll number by over 97 per cent after changing the definition of a fatality to someone who died from COVID rather than with COVID. Italian newspaper Il Tempo reports that the Institute has revised downward the number of people who have died from COVID rather than with COVID from 130,000 to under 4,000. “Yes, you read that right. Turns out 97.1% of deaths hitherto attributed to Covid were not due directly to Covid,” writes Toby Young.

Of the of the 130,468 deaths registered as official COVID deaths since the start of the pandemic, only 3,783 are directly attributable to the virus alone. “All the other Italians who lost their lives had from between one and five pre-existing diseases. Of those aged over 67 who died, 7% had more than three co-morbidities, and 18% at least two,” writes Young. “According to the Institute, 65.8% of Italians who died after being infected with Covid were ill with arterial hypertension (high blood pressure), 23.5% had dementia, 29.3% had diabetes, and 24.8% atrial fibrillation. Add to that, 17.4% had lung problems, 16.3% had had cancer in the last five years and 15.7% suffered from previous heart failures.”

There’s more interesting material here, for the article discusses the ethics of overcounting to induce panic. Reading between the lines, the problem in Italy was that the socialized medicine system was unable to cope with an influx of patients during a bad flu season. (And it was a bad flu season.) The actual data match closely what those who are not panicking have observed in America. As with every flu season, there are unlucky young (and youngish) people who die from the flu. Overall, though, the ones who die are either very elderly or have comorbidities of the type described in the quoted material above. In America, however, counting COVID deaths is more of an art than it is a science (and that’s not even getting into the way the government incentivized hospitals to count COVID deaths).

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Google translate.

“..the vaccine had a good effect for about two months..”

Doctors And Researchers Demand That Vaccination In Sweden Be Suspended (LRP)

The British Medical Journal (BMJ) revealed on November 2, 2021 that a subcontractor to Pfizer was likely to conduct extensive research fraud during the Phase III study of Pfizer’s covid vaccine in the fall of 2020. The article’s main witness is Brook Jackson, in September 2020 , who worked on Pfizer’s vaccine studies. Jackson’s testimony shows that the company falsified data, blinded patients, hired insufficiently trained vaccinators and was slow to follow up on side effects reported in the Phase III study. The staff who performed quality checks were overwhelmed by the amount of problems they discovered. After repeatedly informing Ventavia of the shortcomings, Brook Jackson sent a complaint via email to the FDA (US Food and Drug Administration) on September 25, 2020.

Ventavia fired her later that day. In support of his criticism, Jackson has provided BMJ with dozens of internal company documents, photos, audio recordings and emails. BMJ substantiates her testimony with statements from many former employees at Ventavia. The article also states that the FDA never did any review of the business where Brook Jackson worked. The article describes that the FDA has too few resources to review clinical trials. In the years 2000 to 2005, only about 1 percent of all studies were reviewed, since then the number of reviews has decreased. In August 2021, the FDA published a summary of the number of reviews of Pfizer’s covid vaccine studies. A total of 9 of 153 study places had been examined, which corresponds to 6 percent of the study’s research centers.

We believe that what BMJ reported is extremely serious. This overturns confidence in Pfizer, which is responsible for testing the vaccine and for the safety of the vaccine currently used by Swedes, of whom hundreds of thousands are children. The extent of the number of reported suspected side effects of the covid vaccine is also gigantic, for example in Sweden during the ten months that vaccination has taken place 83,744 suspected side effects have been reported , which is more than 10 times more than all side effects reported per year during the most recent years for all drugs and vaccines, a total of about 25,000 substances. About twenty studies have shown that the effect of the vaccine is very weak. One of these studies, which is Swedish, showed that the vaccine had a good effect for about two months, that AstraZeneca’s vaccine had no effect against the delta variant after four months and that the same applied to Pfizer’s vaccine after seven months.

The strong suspicion that parts of the clinical trial of Pfizer’s vaccine have not been performed in a scientifically acceptable manner and where the study results can not be considered reliable, combined with the large extent of reported suspected side effects after vaccination, many of a serious nature, make us doctors , researchers and immunologists are deeply concerned. Not least for children who are at extremely low risk of serious illness with covid-19, but who are at risk of serious side effects. The fact that the vaccine’s effect has already subsided sharply after a few months and is weak against the delta variant of the virus contributes to our conclusion that covid vaccination in Sweden should be paused until risk / benefit calculations are made for all age groups. Our position is taken in the light of the revelation in BMJ and what we know today about the risks for the patient.

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End of career.

World Record Freediver Diagnosed With Myopericarditis After Pfizer Vaccine (CW)

Florian Dagoury, currently the world’s top static breath-hold free diver, has been diagnosed with myocarditis and pericarditis 40 days following his second dose with the Pfizer vaccine. He is known for the fact he officially held his breath for 10 minutes and 30 seconds. The elite Freediver, of French origin and based in Thailand, experienced a significant decrease in his breath-hold ability and went to a cardiologist who told him that it’s a common side effect of the Pfizer vaccine. Florian shared his experience on Instagram:

“Myocarditis, Pericarditis and Trivial Mitral regurgitation! Thank you Pfizer. Just want to share my annoying experience after vaccination and perhaps have some testimonials and similar stories around Freedivers. Did you get better? After my 2nd dose I noticed that my heart rate was way higher than normal and my breath hold capacities went down significantly. During sleep, I’m at 65-70bpm instead of 37-45bpm. During the day I’m now always over 100bpm instead of 65bpm, even when I sit down and relax. I once even reached 177bpm while having dinner with friends !!!! 10 days after my 2nd jab, I went to see a cardiologist and he told me it’s a common side effect of Pfizer vaccin, nothing to worry about, just rest it will pass. 40days after 2nd jab, I had no progress so I went to see another cardiologist and got diagnosed with Myocarditis, Pericarditis and Trivial Mitral regurgitation!

Which is basically an inflammation of the heart muscles caused by the immune system and some tiny leaks of blood from the valves that no longer close properly. I’m now struggling to reach 8min breath hold, 150m dyn and I even have a strong urge to breathe doing 40m dives. 30% decrease on my diving performance roughly. My first thought and recommendation to Freedivers around the world is to choose a vaccine which is done the old fashion way like Sputnik, Sinovac, Sinopharm etc…instead of those new mRNA vaccines.”

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Both have sudden family emergencies.

Jen Psaki , Gavin Newsom Not Been Seen in Public for Eleven Days (BN)

Ever since White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki announced that she had a case of Covid-19, despite being fully vaccinated, she has been absent from the public spotlight. This week her role was taken by Deputy Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, who just might be the least credible person on the planet. Psaki disclosed on October 31 that she had a “breatkthrough case” of Covid-19 in what she characterized as an abundance of transparency. “Psaki, who is fully vaccinated, said she has experienced only mild symptoms,” NPR reported. “In a statement, she said she had not had contact with senior White House officials since Wednesday — four days before she tested positive — and last saw Biden on Tuesday, when they were wearing masks and were more than six feet apart from each other, outdoors.”

“The White House had announced early on Thursday morning that Psaki would not be traveling with Biden to the G-20 summit in Rome due to a family emergency,” she said. “That emergency, she said on Sunday, was that members of her household had tested positive for COVID-19.” “Since then, I have quarantined and tested negative (via PCR) for COVID on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. However, today, I tested positive for COVID,” Psaki said. The last press conference given by Jen Psaki was on October 27. Former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, who had multiple myeloma, was reported to have died from “complications of Covid,” despite the 84-year-old being “fully vaccinated.” Powell’s passing caused a spike in searches on breakthrough infections.

As of October 18, 2021, the CDC reports that 41,127 patients have been hospitalized or died as a result of breakthrough COVID infections. The CDC saays that there were 10,857 deaths resulting from breakthrough COVID infections. The CDC claims that there are 189 million fully vaccinated people in the U.S. If mortality rates for these vaccinated Americans were reported the same way ‘Covid-related deaths’ have been since 2020, we would be reading about tens of thousands of “vaccine-related deaths.” Jen Psaki’s disappearance since news of her ‘breakthrough infection’ accompanies another mysterious shrinking from public view: California Govenor Gavin Newsom. As reported earlier today, Gavin Newsom hasn’t been seen in public for eleven days, since he received a ‘mix-and-match’ booster shot. Newsom also explained his cancelation of his trip to Rome as a sudden family emergency.

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Don’t worry, Kamala is still lower..

How Low Will He Go? Biden Approval Rating Now At 38% (JTN)

President Joe Biden’s approval rating has sunk to its lowest point thus far at 38%, according to a new poll released Sunday. USA Today and Suffolk University conducted the poll between Wednesday and Friday last week, following the Democratic party’s loss in the Virginia state elections and as Biden’s legislative agenda was in flux on Capitol Hill, but prior to the passage of the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill, The Hill reported. Biden’s approval rating has continued declining in recent months, after the botched Afghanistan withdrawal, as a Harvard CAPS/Harris poll at the end of last month found it to be at 43%, a five-point reduction from the previous September poll, according to the news outlet.


According to the USA Today/Suffolk University poll, 46% of respondents said Biden’s job as president is worse than expected, including 16% who voted for him last year. A total of 44% of Independents said Biden’s performance is worse than expected. The poll also found that 64% of those surveyed, including 28% of Democrats, didn’t want to see Biden run for reelection in 2024. In comparison, 58% didn’t want to see former President Trump as the GOP presidential nominee for 2024, including 24% of Republicans. Last week, Biden responded to his declining poll numbers, saying “that’s not why I ran,” according to The Hill. He remarked on the volatility of polls, adding that he “didn’t run to determine how well I’m going to do in the polls.”

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FISA applications based on material they knew was false.

Stop Looking at Danchenko, Start Looking at Weissmann and Robert Mueller (CTH)

When Andrew Weissmann and crew entered the DOJ to effectively run the Trump-Russia investigation, their purpose was to: (1) continue what was ongoing; and (2) coverup all that came before. AG Jeff Sessions recused himself, and DAG Rod Rosenstein became the co-dependent enabler for the Weissmann crew’s needs. During a June 2020 Senate hearing, Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein openly admitted to being nothing more than the rubber stamp for every request. Rosenstein approved every request, signed every authorization and agreed to every scope expansion Andrew Weissmann put in front of him. There was nothing Rosenstein ever denied the Weissmann crew. Team Weissmann, under the authorities of a blank-check special counsel, effectively ran Main Justice top to bottom for two years.

When you accept the framework Rosenstein later admitted was in place, then you understand that anything blocked from DOJ/FBI release (see Nunes pleas) was blocked by Weissmann Inc; and everything that ever came out of the DOJ/FBI was released by Weissmann Inc. Reread that as many times as needed until it sinks in. Back to the question about why the DOJ/FBI were protecting Danchenko by not exposing the lies that John Durham is now making public in his indictments. To wit, I would reference you THAT specific moment in July of 2018 when Team Weissmann wrote a letter to the FISA Court that was increasingly distrusting of what they were seeing and hearing within the justice system: Look at how the FISA was used by the Mueller investigation to continue its weaponization throughout 2017 and even into 2018. In July of 2018, long after the source material was debunked, the special counsel office was still telling the FISA court the predication for the FISA application and subsequent renewals was valid.

Drive this point home. This is a key to understanding the scope of how weaponized the Mueller team was. In July of 2018 the special counsel resistance group was lying to the FISA court in order to protect the cornerstone document that permitted them to weaponize the intelligence apparatus. This letter was written July 12, 2018. It is NOT accidental that only a week later, July 21st, the special counsel released the FISA application under the guise of FOIA fulfillment. Aside from the date, the important part of the first page is the motive for sending it. The Mueller team running the DOJ is telling the court in July 2018: based on what they know the FISA application still contains “sufficient predication for the Court to have found probable cause” to approve the application. The resistance unit running the DOJ is defending the Carter Page FISA application as still valid.

On page #8 [Source Document Here] when discussing Christopher Steele’s sub-source, Igor Danchenko, the special counsel group notes the FBI found Danchenko to be truthful and cooperative. This is an incredibly misleading statement to the FISA court, because what the letter doesn’t say is that 18-months earlier Danchenko, also known in the IG report as the “primary sub-source”, disavowed the content and informed the FBI that the material attributed to him in the dossier was essentially junk. By July 2018, the DOJ clearly knew the dossier was full of fabrications, yet they withheld that information from the court and said the predicate was still valid. Why? It doesn’t take a deep-weeds-walker to identify the DOJ motive. In July 2018 Robert Mueller’s investigation was at its apex.

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Wait till Obama’s involvement comes to light.

The Biggest Loser Of The Durham Indictments: James Comey’s FBI (JTN)

Special Counsel John Durham’s latest criminal case is as much an indictment of James Comey’s FBI as it is of the primary source of the Steele dossier, whom Durham accuses of repeatedly lying to agents. The Steele dossier was the central evidence used by the FBI to win four consecutive FISA warrants targeting Trump’s campaign — and in 39 pages of painstaking detail the indictment lays out just how flawed and fake central elements of the dossier were. Those FISA warrants allowed the bureau to spy on former Trump adviser Carter Page and his many contacts in Trump world for nearly a year.

Igor Danchenko, Steele’s primary source for the dossier, contrived an entire source for key allegations in the dossier and relied on a longtime Hillary Clinton-supporting public relations executive for other intelligence without telling the FBI, the indictment charges. That PR executive had extensive ties to Russian government officials, even as he provided Danchenko information that landed in the dossier. For some reason, Comey’s FBI couldn’t detect these serious flaws even though a group of civil lawyers was able to locate several Russians suspected of being Danchenko’s sub-sources, interviewing each of them and securing declarations that the information attributed to them in the dossier was wrong or contrived.

“I believe that Mr. Danchenko framed me as Sub-Source 4 to add credibility to his low-quality work, which is not based on real information or in-depth analysis,” said the witness declaration from Alexey Sergeyevich Dundich. “My impression is that Mr. Danchenko fabricated the information published in the Dossier to make quick money,” he added. “It is apparent to me that the Dossier is a deliberate fraud and a collection of idle rumors.” [..] In the meantime, experts see in Durham’s indictment serious red flags for an FBI counterintelligence probe on Comey’s and deputy Andrew McCabe’s watch before they were fired, an investigation that stretched more than two years without finding any evidence of Trump-Russia collusion.

“The fact pattern that John Durham is methodically establishing shows what James Comey and Andrew McCabe likely knew from day one, that the Steele Dossier was politically-driven nonsense created at the behest of the Clinton campaign,” said Kevin Brock, the FBI’s former intelligence chief and one of the bureau’s most respected retirees. “And yet they knowingly ran with its false information to obtain legal process against an American citizen,” he said. “They defrauded not just a federal court, they defrauded the FBI and the American people.”

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Oct 312021
 
 October 31, 2021  Posted by at 9:44 am Finance Tagged with: , , , ,  79 Responses »


Paul Gauguin Horsemen on the beach 1902

 

Highest Covid Numbers In Hospital Since March Despite 91%+ Jabbed (G.ie)
A Novel Perspective On A Not So Novel Virus (Girardot)
I Said It Would Collapse: IT IS (Denninger)
You Know What They Sayin’? (Kunstler)
Unvaccinated San Francisco Police ‘Discarded Like a Piece of Trash’ (ET)
Over 11,000 Active-Duty Air Force Personnel Unvaxxed Days Before Deadline (ET)
NATO Sliding Towards War Against Russia in Ukraine (SCF)
Vaccine Passport Rules For Public But Not World Leaders At COP26
COP26 Is A Global Energy Embarrassment (ZH)
Durham Probe Inches Closer To Hillary (RCI)
Misinformed Horse Uses Covid-19 Vaccine To Treat Worm Infestation (BVT)

 

 

Yeah, Europe changes time ahead of the US. We have genius on all sides. So I seem a bit late.

I had 3-4 pretty bad days, didn’t leave the apartment, didn’t eat, slept 12-15 hours per day. Did do the Debt Rattles though! And I noticed that everyone I told I wasn’t feeling well, they all said: Covid. That is weird. How would you know without knowing any symptoms, and what do you know about Covid symptoms to begin with? A flu is quite normal this time of year. But there’s only one disease left. We’ve been programmed into saying: Covid! at a first sneeze, and it’s high time to de-program ourselves. Bring back the science.

 

 

The state of our world:

“I think it should be pretty clear by now that anything short of #Fauci claiming that only women can get pregnant is not going to get him fired.”

 

 

The most published cardiologist in the world & his specialty is the study & treatment of disorders of the heart & the blood vessels
https://twitter.com/i/status/1453396847792373770

 

 

LGB
https://twitter.com/i/status/1454146161216983040

 

 

We see more and more of these reports. We also keep seeing countries that claim 85% of their hospital patients are unvaxxed, so get the jab.

Highest Covid Numbers In Hospital Since March Despite 91%+ Jabbed (G.ie)

Ireland now has the highest number of patients in hospital with Covid-19 since March, despite over 91% of the population over-12 being vaccinated – the highest jab rate in the EU. The number of Covid-positive patients in Irish hospitals now stands at 513 – figures not seen since the end of the infamous third wave last winter. 101 of these are in ICU this week – an increase from the 74 seen last week. CMO Dr. Tony Holohan said that he was “increasingly worried about the rising incidence of the disease nationwide.” According to the Irish Times, Dr. Anne Moore, who is a vaccine specialist at UCC, said cases would increase until there was a “transmission-blocking vaccine,” as whatever protection from transmission the current vaccines offered had already begun to wane.


“I think we will eventually have to boost the rest of the population…because we are going to see a huge increase in the number of cases,” she said. To date, over 91% of the Irish population over the age of 12 has been vaccinated, making Ireland the most vaccinated country in the entire EU. Notably, Waterford city, which has the State’s highest rate of Covid-19 infection, has an adult population which is 99.7% fully-vaccinated, making it one of the most vaccinated regions in the entire world.

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“The death toll of the invasion of the Americas ended up being cataclysmic: 2,000 times deadlier than Covid-19!”

A Novel Perspective On A Not So Novel Virus (Girardot)

Within a few years of Columbus’ landing in America, 95% of native Americans were decimated by viruses imported from Europe: 19 out of 20 American Indians died. Not cohabitating with livestock as intensely as Eurasians had for millenia, Aztecs had not built layers of immune defences against influenza, smallpox or measles. Surprisingly, Spanish conquistadores resisted better in the face of the Indians’ own viruses. Likely protected by the Aztecs’ own herd immunity, the Spaniards were not overwhelmed by massive viral loads contingent with an epidemic in a defenceless community.

If these “Noble Savages” weren’t without sin, the most gruesome of which was child sacrifice – they were without virus, at least European ones: Native Americans were “naive” immunologically. Confronted with European viruses, their immune system was like a new-born child seeing for the first time: it had the hardware, but not yet the appropriate software to fight back. No one being immune, the epidemic “avalanche” was uncontained and unstoppable: everyone cross-contaminating one another repeatedly with higher viral doses. The death toll of the invasion of the Americas ended up being cataclysmic: 2,000 times deadlier than Covid-19!

Since January 2020, WHO, health authorities, academia and mainstream media have been contending that SARS-CoV-2 is a completely novel virus, and that it is particularly lethal. There is no doubt, SARS-CoV-2 can be a nasty virus at the individual level. But, why hasn’t the same cataclysm hit our highly connected “naive” world? Why hasn’t the same vicious circle of repeated high viral load contaminations occurred? Why hasn’t “the fire caught on and consumed this immense quantity of dry wood?”

The only logical answer is that SARS-CoV-2 was absolutely not novel. And therefore everything has been blown out of proportion with some very dire consequences for public health and for public liberties. Having killed allegedly 0.05% of the world population in 18 months, SARS-CoV-2 is evidently not particularly lethal to the community. A simple comparison with the ravages of the Conquistador viruses suggests that SARS-CoV-2 isn’t novel after all, and that populations were originally largely immune to it from the beginning.

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ETS: Emergency Temporary Standard

They figured out way to mandate without a mandate?

I Said It Would Collapse: IT IS (Denninger)

The minute that ETS issues it will draw suits and demands for injunctions from dozens of filings. The odds are extremely high that not only will the injunctions issue (after all, a jab in the arm if it goes bad is the very definition of irrevocable harm) but that the ETS itself will eventually get struck as well. When that happens the entirety of the employer base who issued and enforced mandates without the backing of anything are going to have sudden acute need for a proctologist. The burying of adverse events from the jabs that lead to death is not going to last. Nor is the fact that the jabs don’t stop transmission, symptoms, or, very-importantly, giving the virus to others.

Indeed a just-published Lancet study shows that vaccinated people are just as likely to transmit the virus as unvaccinated and only modestly less-likely to get it themselves, meaning that any claim that the vaccines protect others and thus could form a defensible “reason” to issue issue a mandate was and is a bald-faced lie. If you got jabbed with the intent of “protecting” your elderly parents you were conned and may well kill them instead. Oh, and lest you think that’s just one study, it isn’t. A second preprint offers even worse news; potential negative effectiveness (which I remind you has been evident in the UK data now for a couple of months) and what may be the real 900lb Gorilla in the room: Near-complete loss of protection against severe outcomes among men, older frail individuals and those with comorbidities. Those people who got jabbed to protect themselves in fact lose that protection more-seriously and faster.

To those who fear the PREP Act will be extended to employers to give them immunity: No it won’t; there is no authority to do that in the legislation and it won’t happen. The PREP Act is a law already abused in that it was intended for use in a biological weapon attack. Invoking it should have instantly led to challenge with the demand that the government name the attack and the attacker. Of course we now know that’s a problem because they’d have to admit they attacked us internally since the evidence is that the NIH directly funded the Wuhan Lab where the “escape” occurred. If you want to know why hospitals all played lock-step the PREP Act is the reason.

Yes, it was the “Kung Flu” but we paid for the work and funneled it through Eco Health Alliance, so that means the US and European governments were the original source. Yes, both Trump and Biden know damn well this is the case and both parties let it go on and funded it without comment which is why they both have tried to cover it up. Indeed, Obama, love him or hate him (and I’m definitely not one of his fans) detected where what Fauci and his European and Chinese Pals were doing might lead and tried to stop it via Executive Order.

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“.. it is bent absolutely on rooting out, punishing, and torturing its perceived enemies, which in this case are about half the people in the country. That’s really all it seeks to do.”

You Know What They Sayin’? (Kunstler)

Do you marvel, as I do, at this malignant hive organism — arguably worse than the Covid-19 chimera virus — that calls itself “Joe Biden”? The personage of that name is a mere effigy, of course, like one of those grotesque mummies hoisted above the mob in a religious procession from some primitive cannibal kingdom. It’s the mob itself that actually matters, though, the twerking parade of Woke-Progressive Democrats, because it is bent absolutely on rooting out, punishing, and torturing its perceived enemies, which in this case are about half the people in the country. That’s really all it seeks to do. It has never been about anything else, because, get this: the Woke mob is insane.

But now this other half of the country has raised a war cry, “Let’s go Brandon,” in objection. In case anyone does not know what the phrase means, peruse the actual lyrics from one of four rap chants topping the Apple music charts right now: this ditty by entertainer Loza Alexander:

Let’s go, Brandon (fuck Joe Biden)
(Let’s go, Brandon, fuck Joe Biden) you know what they sayin’, hoe
Let’s go, Brandon (fuck Joe Biden)
(Let’s go, Brandon, fuck Joe Biden) you know what they sayin’, hoe

Is that too subtle for anyone? Do you catch the drift? (Know what they sayin’?) The sentiment is timelier and apparently more popular than “I Want to Hold Your Hand” was in 1963. America has had enough of the Woke religious cult and its cavalcade of depravities. America is about to bum-rush the darn thing, seize the ghastly mummy from its skull-bedecked palanquin, and knock the living sawdust out of it.

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Now you know at least one thing: it’s not about your protection.

Unvaccinated San Francisco Police ‘Discarded Like a Piece of Trash’ (ET)

Several dozen San Francisco police officers who are not vaccinated against COVID-19 have been placed on leave, a police union leader told NTD Television. Tony Montoya, president of the San Francisco Police Officers Association, told NTD that there are 41 unvaccinated officers on paid administrative leave. Another 40 are on disability or Family and Medical leave and have yet to report their vaccination status. San Francisco previously allowed its city employees to submit exemptions for the COVID-19 vaccine. They were approved. Later, however, the Department of Public Health issued a health order requiring all city employees to be vaccinated by Oct. 13 or be relieved of their duties.

“DHR [Department of Human Resources] kind of bungled the situation from the onset, where they gave very strict timelines on when things were due,” Montoya said. “My members followed those guidelines, whether it was submitting an application [or] requesting an exemption. And the city has just thrown rules to the wind, and it just really made my members distrustful. It completely lacks transparency, and the members are like, ‘What rules are we supposed to follow?’ Because it’s really unclear what the rules are at this stage. “For some reason we were told they would go under a secondary review process and then we had to answer some additional questions, submit those by a deadline,” Alicia Worthington, a sergeant at the San Francisco Police Department, told NTD.


“We received paperwork that stated that our exemptions were now denied.” Worthington was born and raised in San Francisco, and she said this is her 20th year with the San Francisco Police Department. “It’s been really rough for all of us. I’ve been in contact with my colleagues who were impacted by the mandates and who are on leave, and we’re going through a lot of stress, a lot of heartache. We worked tirelessly through the pandemic. And just to undergo a complete 180, and to be yanked from duty and put on leave, is pretty heartbreaking,” Worthington said. “You’re just discarded like a piece of trash.”

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The dumbest move the US military has made in a very long time. How do you build up any trust or loyalty from here?

Over 11,000 Active-Duty Air Force Personnel Unvaxxed Days Before Deadline (ET)

The Air Force could lose thousands of troops in the coming weeks as over 11,000 active-duty personnel remain without a COVID-19 vaccine, just days before the deadline to get one. Some 96.4 percent of active-duty airmen were partially or fully vaccinated as of Oct. 25, the branch said in its latest vaccination update. That means approximately 11,462 airmen have not begun a vaccination program before the Nov. 2 deadline to become fully vaccinated. Another nearly 12,000 reserve personnel or Space Force members remain unvaccinated, according to data released by the Air Force. Reserves have until Dec. 2 to become fully vaccinated. Fully vaccinated means getting a vaccination regimen and then at least two weeks elapsing.

Members who haven’t yet started a program cannot come into compliance with the mandate. “We don’t anticipate we will be to a 100 percent vaccination rate,” an Air Force spokeswoman told Defense One this week. Any troops who don’t get a vaccine by the deadline and have not received or is not in the process of seeking a religious or medical exemption will be deemed in violation of a lawful order and subject to discipline under Article 92 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. They could be court-martialed or face other disciplinary measures. The mandate stems from Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s order in late August for all troops to get a vaccine unless they receive an exemption.


Each branch head decided separately on mandate details, including deadlines. The Air Force has the earliest deadlines for active-duty troops and reserves. An Air Force spokesperson told The Epoch Times earlier this month that the deadlines would not be pushed back. Hundreds of thousands of troops across the military weren’t vaccinated in the middle of October. As of Oct. 27, over 381,000 troops remain unvaccinated, according to an analysis of Pentagon data. The vast majority, or nearly 320,000, are in the Army, the Army reserve, or the Army National Guard. Army reserves have the most lenient deadline, by far. They have until June 30, 2022, to become fully vaccinated. Active-duty sailors and Marines have until Nov. 28, while active-duty soldiers have until Dec. 15.

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Putin will call on Erdogan.

NATO Sliding Towards War Against Russia in Ukraine (SCF)

As far as Ukraine goes, Ankara seems to be setting the pace for NATO’s deepening involvement in the country’s war. Russia is investigating reports of Turkish attack drones being deployed for the first time in Ukraine’s eight-year civil war. The Ukrainian Armed Forces (UAF) under the command of the Kiev regime claimed that the drones were used earlier this week in combat against ethnic Russian rebels. This is a potentially dramatic escalation in the smoldering war. For it marks the direct involvement of NATO member Turkey in the conflict. Up to now, the United States and other NATO states have been supplying lethal weaponry to the Kiev regime to prosecute its war against the breakaway self-declared republics of Donetsk and Luhansk. American, British and Canadian military advisors are also known to have carried out training missions with UAF combat units.


Britain is in negotiations to sell Brimstone missiles to the Ukrainian navy. But the apparent deployment of Turkish attack drones is a potential game-changer. Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov hinted at the graveness when he announced Wednesday that Moscow was carrying out urgent investigations about the purported participation of Turk-made Bayraktar TB2 Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. Previously, Lavrov rebuked Turkey to stay out of the conflict and to not feed Ukrainian hostilities. Last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin warned that NATO’s support to the Kiev regime was posing a direct threat to Russia’s national security. The Kremlin’s assessment can only be more alarmed on the back of NATO member Turkey being now implicated as one of the war’s protagonists. In all likelihood, Turkish military personnel would be required to assist in operating the drone flights.

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I should really ignore this clown fest, but it’ll be hard the next two weeks.

Vaccine Passport Rules For Public But Not World Leaders At COP26

The COP26 UN Climate Change Conference has been accused of holding world leaders to different Covid-19 standards than the general public after its rules revealed vaccine passports are only mandatory for normal ticket holders. Social media users pointed out on Saturday – just one day before the conference in Glasgow, Scotland – that those who will be attending COP26’s public Green Zone events will be required to show proof of Covid-19 vaccination. “In accordance with Scottish Law, COVID-19 vaccine passports are needed by all visitors to the Green Zone aged over 18 (unless exempt),” the official COP26 website declared, adding that attendees will need to “show that they have been fully vaccinated at least two weeks prior to the date of entry.”


Separate instructions for those attending COP26’s more private Blue Zone events, however, do not mention any vaccine passport requirements and instead state that attendees need to take Covid-19 tests and present proof of a negative result “every day before departing for the Blue Zone.” Another document listing vaccine passport requirements for attendees also featured the disclaimer that “separate guidance has been provided through diplomatic channels” to those who have been “invited” by the UK government to the conference, including world leaders. Protesters on social media soon accused COP26 of enforcing dual standards for the wealthy and powerful, branding it a “them and us” situation and plain, old-fashioned “hypocrisy.”

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No. It’s a much wider embarrassment. Nothing to do with energy.

COP26 Is A Global Energy Embarrassment (ZH)

For 26 futile years, the net-zero maniacs have wasted fuel, energy, and taxpayers’ money to bite the hands that provide their food, energy, welfare, and public-sector jobs. Led by E.U. and AUKUS dreamers, they destroy reliable energy from coal, oil, nuclear, gas, and hydro while forcing us to subsidize net-negative dreams like solar, wind, wave-power, CCUS, hot rocks, pumped hydro, and hydrogen. All such speculative ventures should be funded by speculators, not taxpayers. COP-Out-26 illustrates to the realists of China, Russia, India, and Brazil that the West has lost its marbles and is in terminal decline. For Scott Morrison to surrender Australia to these green wolves betrays an army of miners, farmers, truckies, and workers in primary, secondary, and tertiary industries that support him and his Canberra pack.

The fakery of COP-Out-26 is well illustrated by the provision of diesel generators to recharge the batteries of 26 electric cars provided for show in Glasgow. But that’s OK “because the diesels are run on recycled chip fat.” Horses and covered wagons would be more reliable and appropriate, and dried horse manure could cook their fake meat on their green, chip-fired barbeques. Neither E.U. nor AUKUS green dreamers can run their world on energy plans drafted by neurotic schoolgirls, clueless princes, deluded accountants like Ross Garnaut, and serial climate alarmists like David Attenborough. China loves Net-Zero, using its growing coal power to manufacture the wind turbines, solar panels, electric engines, and rare earth batteries for the woke world.


But the subsidy tap feeding green energy development in the Western world will run dry. Fake energy will fade away, leaving a continent of jobless people with silent mills, refineries, and factories. Our land will be littered with derelict windmills, decaying solar panels, dead batteries, and sagging transmission lines to be cleaned up in order to restore our land to productive grasslands, crops, and forests. Those huge concrete bases of abandoned wind towers will become permanent obstacles to restoration of this land. Next we will see digital carbon credit cards designed by green academics to ration our energy and food usage to achieve their Net-Zero Nirvana. A bleak future beckons.

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Read to see how deep this shitshow has gone.

Durham Probe Inches Closer To Hillary (RCI)

A Hillary Clinton campaign operation to plant a false rumor about Donald Trump setting up a “secret hotline” to Moscow through a Russian bank was much broader than known and involved multiple U.S. agencies, according to declassified documents and sources briefed on an ongoing criminal investigation of the scheme. In addition to the FBI, the 2016 Clinton campaign tried to convince the Obama administration’s State Department, Justice Department and Central Intelligence Agency to look into the hoax, and continued pressing the issue even after Trump was inaugurated in January 2017. The goal was to trigger federal investigative activity targeting her Republican rival and leak the damaging information to the media.

“The Clinton machine flooded the FBI with pressure from a number of angles until investigations of Trump were opened and reopened,” said one of the briefed sources who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive law enforcement matter. “The deception was wide-ranging.” Special Counsel John Durham outlined the FBI part of the scheme in a felony indictment of Michael Sussmann. The former Clinton campaign lawyer was charged last month with making a false statement to the former general counsel of the FBI when he claimed he was not working “for any client” in bringing to the FBI’s attention allegations of a secret channel of communication between computer servers in Trump Tower and the Alfa Bank in Russia.

According to the indictment, Sussmann was in fact acting on behalf of clients including the Clinton campaign, and an unnamed tech executive who RCI has previously reported is Rodney L. Joffe, a regular adviser to the Biden White House on cybersecurity and infrastructure policies. Internal emails reveal the Clinton operatives knew the links they made between Trump and Russia were “weak,” even describing them as a “red herring,” but fed them to investigators anyway. After Sussmann’s meeting with the FBI in September 2016, the Clinton campaign approached the State Department the following month with the same lead, this time using paid Clinton campaign subcontractor Christopher Steele to feed the rumors. A former British intelligence officer, Steele was offered as a reliable source to help corroborate the rumors.

On Oct. 11, 2016, Steele gave his contact at Foggy Bottom documents alleging that a supposed hidden server at Trump Tower was pinging Moscow.Two days later, a State official who previously worked under former secretary Clinton funneled the information to the FBI’s then-top Eurasia/Russia counterintelligence official, Stephen Laycock, according to recently declassified notes and testimony. Laycock, in turn, forwarded the information to Peter Strzok, the FBI agent who led the investigation of Trump and his campaign and had just weeks earlier texted a bureau lawyer, “We’ll stop [Trump from being elected].” “I informed Peter Strzok and another supervisor,” Laycock testified last year in a closed-door Senate hearing. Steele, who later confessed he was “desperate” to defeat Trump, was the author of the debunked dossier claiming Trump colluded with Russia to steal the election. He even misspelled the name of the Russian bank as “Alpha.”

Still, the FBI took his rumors seriously enough to interview tech vendors working for the Trump Organization and obtain warrants to search Trump Tower servers. Within days of receiving the State Department tip, Strzok also used Steele’s dossier to secure a wiretap on Trump adviser Carter Page. Clinton foreign policy adviser and current National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan would put out a written statement trumpeting the Trump-Alfa Bank story, which was shared by then-candidate Clinton on Oct. 31, 2016, after Slate reported on it. Fusion GPS, the Washington opposition-research group that worked for the Clinton campaign as a paid agent, and helped gather dirt on Alfa Bank and draft the materials Sussmann would later submit to the FBI, reportedly pressed Slate to publish the story by the account of its author, journalist Franklin Foer.

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Mr. Ed.

Misinformed Horse Uses Covid-19 Vaccine To Treat Worm Infestation (BVT)

Despite pleas to reconsider his stance by his family and veterinarian, local farm horse Mr. Clip Clop has thrown away his prescribed ivermectin and is using doses of COVID-19 vaccinations to treat his worm problem. “I first heard about this COVID vaccination from a podcast run by Joe Rogan’s horse. You know, Foal Factor?” Clip Clop said, looking up from a map of COVID vaccination clinics near him. “The host said that they gave him one of the shots that Rogan himself rejected, and it cleared him right up.” “I’m glad I found an alternative to ivermectin. I heard from the pony that lives at the farm down the street that one of their horses took too much of that and his balls got really big. And they were pretty big to start with so now he can’t walk.”


Those closest to Clip Clop are concerned with his misguided attempts to treat himself. “We’re really worried he’s going to spread worms to the rest of the stable,” said Clip Clops’s owner Joseph Brown. “We showed him a bunch of articles and research papers showing how there’s no evidence COVID vaccines can kill horse parasites, but you know what they say. You can take a horse to scientific evidence and medical research but you can’t make him believe.” Clip Clop, who would prefer to be referred to as dewormer-hesitant, says that he’s fed up with people questioning his judgment, as well as the restrictions being placed on him by the agricultural board. “People have really bought into this whole horse worm scam-demic and I’m sick of them judging me. I’ve done my own research on this. Granted, I can’t read, but neither can most humans who protest medical science.”

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Halloween
https://twitter.com/i/status/1454370403007270920

 

 

 

 

Haka for freedom in Wellington
https://twitter.com/i/status/1454473301712162820

 

 

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Oct 202021
 


Paul Gauguin Fatata te Miti (By the sea) 1892

 

Even Fully Vaccinated Older People Are At High Risk For Severe Covid (NatGeo)
Even Doctors In Red States Are Punished For Saving People From Covid (Blaze)
‘Terrible Mistake’ Could Send Execs To Jail Over Vaccine Certificates (AFR)
We Accidentally Solved the Flu. Now What? (Atl.)
Study Destroys Justification for Vaccine Mandates (Siri)
SF’s Only In-N-Out Refuses to Enforce the City’s Vaccination Mandate (SFE)
9 In 10 Large Employers Worry About Losing Employees Over Vaccine Mandate (CTH)
Southwest Drops Plan To Put Unvaccinated Staff On Unpaid Leave (CNBC)
Things Are Getting Messy In Draghi’s Italy (NC)
The Frightened Class (Harrington)
Andrew McCabe’s Settlement With The DOJ Is A Signal To John Durham (Brock)
Joe Biden and the Disappearing Elephant (Turley)

 

 

Fauci Fail

 

 

Brought to you by..

 

 

Seattle
https://twitter.com/i/status/1450516369984819200

 

 

 

“If you’re under 45, your chances of dying are almost nonexistent, and then it increases exponentially.”

Even Fully Vaccinated Older People Are At High Risk For Severe Covid (NatGeo)

Mounting data suggest that older people are at higher risk of severe disease from a breakthrough infection of COVID-19—and scientists say that should come as no surprise. After all, older age brackets have been disproportionately at risk throughout the pandemic, and that continues to be true even once someone is fully vaccinated. Concerns about breakthrough infections bubbled up again this week when news broke on October 18 that former Secretary of State Colin Powell had died after contracting COVID-19. Powell was 84, but his cause of death was more complex: The former statesman suffered from multiple myeloma, a cancer of white blood cells. People with this form of cancer tend not to respond well to vaccines.

But in addition to the immunocompromised, health officials are seeing worrying evidence that older age groups continue to be at higher risk from the pandemic. According to the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, people over 65 account for 67 percent of hospitalizations and 85 percent of deaths from breakthrough cases. And recent media reports citing data from Seattle, Washington, and the United Kingdom show that older vaccinated people face similar—and, in some cases, greater—risks of severe disease than unvaccinated children. “The huge risk factor is age,” says William Petri, an immunologist at the University of Virginia. That’s why the U.S. prioritized vaccinating older people and those in long-term care facilities when it first rolled out the vaccines, he explains.

“If you’re under 45, your chances of dying are almost nonexistent, and then it increases exponentially.” [..] Experts say they still don’t have an adequate explanation for why older people were more susceptible to COVID-19 even before vaccines were available. “It’s just one of the great mysteries of the virus,” says Deepta Bhattacharya, an immunologist at the University of Arizona. Scientists who study aging say it likely has to do with some of the hallmarks of getting older. For example, the human body normally clears away cells that have become damaged due to disease, injury, or stress. But as the body ages, this process becomes less efficient, and it starts to accumulate so-called senescent cells, which are damaged but won’t die. These cells secrete chemicals that damage neighboring healthy cells and trigger inflammation. Senescent cells thus weaken the body and make it harder to fight off infections.

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Ryan Cole.

Even Doctors In Red States Are Punished For Saving People From Covid (Blaze)

You are not allowed to treat COVID outpatient. It’s not about any one drug. You will be punished if you dare treat patients with anything that works. What began as 15 days to flatten the hospital curve has grown into a ban on all treatment outside the hospital to ensure everyone sick with moderate disease lands in the ER. No, they will not prosecute a doctor, they will just threaten to pull his license, which is why doctors won’t even prescribe azithromycin or prednisone, much less ivermectin and other proven antiinflammatories. What if you are part of the 1% of doctors who actually save lives — who run toward the fire rather than away from it? Instead of getting a medal of honor, these national heroes are now losing their licenses.

Idaho is not California. In fact, many Californians are fleeing to Idaho to escape the progressive persecution of the once Golden State. Yet now, with their investigation of Dr. Ryan Cole, the Idaho Medical Board wants to ensure that no doctor will ever treat you for this virus. If you contract this virus, there is probably nobody in the world you’d want access to more than Dr. Cole. A Mayo Clinic-trained anatomic and clinical pathologist who is licensed in 12 states, Cole knows the mechanisms of pathogens and various medicines as well as you know the streets of your neighborhood. He has lived the COVID pandemic in his Idaho lab since last March, diagnosing over 100,000 cases, and has given up much of his regular work to treat patients on his own time and own dime for months. His record is remarkable, and I have many friends and listeners of my podcast who are alive today because of his brilliance and kindness.

So there will be a ceremony in the Oval Office next week to present Dr. Cole with a medal for treating people in a pandemic while others let their patients die, right? At least the Idaho governor, Brad Little, will offer him some state reward? Nope. Instead, they are threatening to yank his license. Steven Kohtz, MD, president of the Idaho Medical Association’s board of trustees, and Susie Keller, CEO of the association, wrote a letter to the state’s board of medicine on Oct. 7, lamenting that “he has treated patients ‘from Florida to California'” with ivermectin. The horror! He should have let them die and not treated them at all, like Kohtz and his colleagues have done since last March.

In the letter, they claim Cole’s statements have killed people. “Many of those statements have advocated that people not be treated appropriately and undoubtedly have led to and will continue to lead to poor health outcomes as people are encouraged not to be vaccinated against COVID-19 or obtain appropriate treatment for it when such treatment could improve their health.” Well, how could treating pulmonary symptoms with steroids and antiinflammatories be worse than not treating them at all? This is the ultimate exercise in projection. They assuage their own guilt of letting patients die by preventing others from treating people in the critical early days of the virus.

ADE

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Oops.. There’s a reason your medical data are private.

‘Terrible Mistake’ Could Send Execs To Jail Over Vaccine Certificates (AFR)

Collecting COVID-19 vaccination certificates from customers or employees poses a serious legal and cyber security risk to businesses that exposes them to lawsuits, hefty fines and even executive jail sentences if the data isn’t handled properly, experts warn. The risk is so grave that businesses that have already stored images of government-issued vaccination certificates from employees or customers are advised to scour their email or human resource systems and delete the images, or at the very least remove a sensitive piece of information prominent on the certificate that exposes businesses to a “world of data security pain”, one expert says. As part of state and federal requirements for emerging out of the pandemic lockdown, businesses are asked to check whether customers and employees are vaccinated before allowing them to enter their premises.

Businesses storing information about whether someone has been vaccinated are therefore storing health information, quite possibly for the first time, exposing them to the Privacy Act, which requires they take “reasonable steps” to secure that information, said Anna Johnston, a former NSW deputy privacy commissioner who runs her own data privacy consultancy, Salinger Privacy. Worse than that, the federal government certificates contain a unique identifier, known as the Individual Health Identifier (IHI), that is covered by its own law, with much stricter data security requirements and with punishments that could include jail if that one piece of data is mishandled, Ms Johnston told The Australian Financial Review.

Together with the Tax File Number, the IHI is the most sensitive piece of data used by government, she said. It uniquely identifies Australians for healthcare purposes, far more so than a Medicare number, which can be shared by family members. It’s so sensitive that, when it was brought in 2010, it came with its own privacy legislation, the Healthcare Identifiers Act. “Including the IHI on the vaccination certificate, which is a document we’re supposed to be showing to our gyms, hairdressers and restaurants, as well as to our employers and customers, was a terrible mistake by the federal government,” she said. “It’s a bad data-security problem that the government has created.

“I really feel for small businesses in particular. They don’t have an in-house compliance officer telling them what to do. They don’t have an information security officer telling them how to secure these records. They probably don’t have the foggiest clue that there are special rules for the use and disclosure of the IHI that, if they breach those rules, expose them to both a civil penalty and a criminal penalty. “You face up to two years imprisonment for use or disclosure of the IHI for any purposes outside of supporting healthcare. And now that number is on a PDF that is being emailed around willy nilly.”


Australia’s vaccination certificate has a piece of data experts warn shouldn’t be there.

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Kimberley Strassel: “Here we go. Some of us wondered how long it would take for the liberal/media establishment to argue that we needed to keep pandemic measures going forever–even for things that we previously lived with, like the flu. It didn’t take long..”

We Accidentally Solved the Flu. Now What? (Atl.)

Perhaps the oddest consolation prize of America’s crushing, protracted battle with the coronavirus is the knowledge that flu season, as we’ve long known it, does not have to exist. It’s easy to think of the flu as an immutable fact of winter life, more inconvenience than calamity. But each year, on average, it sickens roughly 30 million Americans and kills more than 30,000 (though the numbers vary widely season to season). The elderly, the poor, and people of color are all overrepresented among the casualties. By some estimates, the disease’s annual economic cost amounts to nearly $90 billion. We accept this, when we think about it at all, as the way things are.

Except that this past year, things were different: During the 2020–21 flu season, the United States recorded only about 2,000 cases, 17,000 times fewer than the 35 million it recorded the season before. That season, the flu killed 199 children; this past season, as far as we know, it killed one. “We’ve looked for flu in communities and doctors’ offices and hospitals, and we’ve gotten almost zero,” says Emily Martin, a University of Michigan epidemiologist who’s part of the CDC’s flu-monitoring network. The same was true of other seasonal respiratory viruses last winter, says Saskia Popescu, an epidemiologist at George Mason University in Virginia, though some have since rebounded. RSV, parainfluenza, rhinovirus, adenovirus—for a while, they all but vanished.

For this, perversely, we can thank the pandemic. The coronavirus itself may have played some role—infection could produce a general immune response that would also confer protection against the flu—but most of the epidemiologists I spoke with instead emphasized the importance of the behavioral changes adopted to slow the spread of the coronavirus: masking, distancing, remote learning, working from home, limiting indoor social gatherings. Despite the inconsistency with which America deployed them, these measures helped tamp down the spread of the virus, but they completely crushed influenza, a less transmissible foe to which the population has considerable preexisting immunity. We set out to flatten the curve, and we ended up stamping out the flu.

This was one of the few blessings in an otherwise abysmal winter, in which COVID cases and deaths surged to their highest levels ever in the U.S. At least we didn’t face the dreaded “twindemic.” But our triumph over the flu also poses a dilemma, as much ethical as epidemiological. We’ve demonstrated conclusively that saving nearly everyone who dies of the flu is within our power. To do nothing now—to return to the roughly 30,000-deaths-a-year status quo without even trying to save some of those lives—would seem irresponsible. So what do we do? Which measures do we maintain and which do we let go?

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You mean there was ever any justification?

Study Destroys Justification for Vaccine Mandates (Siri)

Civil and individual rights are only meaningful if they continue to protect individuals during difficult situations. It is why the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the right of neo-Nazis to march through Jewish neighborhoods. It is why it upheld the right to burn the American flag. Protecting these rights when it is difficult protects us all. It assures that government will not erode these civil and individual rights, including during a pandemic. The CDC and State Health Department scientists just released a study that again reflects the dangers of making civil and individual rights contingent on a medical procedure. This study, titled Shedding of Infectious SARS-CoV-2 Despite Vaccination, reviewed swab specimens from 36 counties in Wisconsin from the end of June to the end of July 2021. They then checked the viral load of SARS-CoV-2 in each swab.

What did they find? High viral load in “158 of 232 unvaccinated (68%…) and 156 of 225 fully vaccinated (69%…) symptomatic individuals.” Meaning there was effectively no difference between the symptomatic vaccinated and unvaccinated in terms of who was carrying, and therefore spreading, the virus. But the study does not end there. It also found high viral loads in “7 of 24 unvaccinated (29%…) and 9 of 11 fully vaccinated asymptomatic individuals (82%…).” Meaning, among asymptomatic individuals, the vaccinated had a higher percentage with a high viral load. As I explained in an interview with Shannon Bream, this reflects that the unvaccinated that catch the virus are more likely to be at home in bed with symptoms, while the vaccinated that catch the virus are more likely to have no symptoms and hence continue their daily routine unknowingly spreading the virus.

These findings are depicted in the following chart. Note that the lower the “N1 Ct value” the higher the viral load (and that a team at Oxford concluded that an N1 Ct value over 24 should not be taken to indicate the presence of any actual virus):

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Make In-N-Out your destination.

“We refuse to become the vaccination police for any government..”

SF’s Only In-N-Out Refuses to Enforce the City’s Vaccination Mandate (SFE)

The only San Francisco location of wildly popular California-based fast food chain In-N-Out Burger was temporarily shut down and remains closed for indoor dining after the SF Department of Public Health found the restaurant was not properly enforcing the city’s vaccination mandate for indoor dining, KRON4 reported first. The city shut down the restaurant at 333 Jefferson Street on Thursday, October 14, after learning staff weren’t checking diners’ proof of vaccination or preventing customers without proof of vaccination from entering. The restaurant has since resumed takeout and outdoor dining, but the company seems to be digging its heels on the vaccination mandate.

In a statement provided to Eater SF, In-N-Out Chief Legal & Business Officer Arnie Wensinger says the company believes requiring its staff to enforce a vaccination mandate constitutes government “overreach” and is refusing to do so. “We fiercely disagree with any government dictate that forces a private company to discriminate against customers who choose to patronize their business,” Wensinger’s statement reads. “This is clear governmental overreach and is intrusive, improper, and offensive.” In an email to Eater SF the San Francisco Department of Public Health says it’s been trying to get In-N-Out to adhere to the city’s vaccination order for weeks.

The city’s Joint Information Center Outreach Team first visited the restaurant on September 24 after receiving a complaint to the 311 non-emergency service line. Inspectors from the Environmental Health division who followed up on October 6, found the restaurant was still in violation of the health order and issued a Notice to Comply. The department finally issued a Notice of Closure on October 14, at which point the restaurant was “instructed to cease all operations on site immediately because of the threat it poses to public health,” according to the Department of Public Health. The owner of the property, Anchorage Holdings LP, which is based in Addison, Texas, was also issued a Notice of Violation.

The company says it has “properly and clearly posted signage to communicate local vaccination requirements.” But In-N-Out also admits employees were not checking customers’ vaccinations cards and IDs, nor were they preventing customers who are not able to prove they’ve been vaccinated from entering the restaurant, which the health department told the company that staff must do. “As a Company, In-N-Out Burger strongly believes in the highest form of customer service and to us that means serving all Customers who visit us and making all Customers feel welcome,” the statement continues. “We refuse to become the vaccination police for any government. It is unreasonable, invasive, and unsafe to force our restaurant Associates to segregate Customers into those who may be served and those who may not, whether based on the documentation they carry, or any other reason.”

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“It will be interesting to see if, and how quickly, a parallel economy with a vaccination option workforce, will take root.”

9 In 10 Large Employers Worry About Losing Employees Over Vaccine Mandate (CTH)

In an unusual twist to the strength of the multinationals, many large corporations are worried they will lose critical employees to smaller organizations with less than 100 employees who do not have to enforce the national worker vaccine mandate. By itself the 100 worker rule, in combination with the exemptions being provided by the federal government for some politically connected union organizations, would seem to undercut the premise of the “national health emergency.” If the COVID pandemic is such a national threat, why would any groups be excluded from the mandate? However, until the Dept of Labor rule is officially registered, court cases to hear such arguments are not possible. A recent survey by The Society for Human Resource Management, as shared by The Hill, indicates that 9 out of 10 large employers are concerned about losing significant amounts of workers due to the federal mandate:

The Hill – […] “The survey reveals uneasiness among employers over the impending workplace rule, which will require employers with 100 or more employees to mandate COVID-19 vaccinations or frequent testing. They’re most concerned about losing workers amid an extremely tight labor market. Another two-thirds of employers surveyed said that they cannot afford to pay for weekly COVID-19 testing for unvaccinated workers. […] Others are worried that they could lose unvaccinated workers to rival firms with fewer than 100 employees or to independent contracting companies that aren’t subject to the rule.”

It will be interesting to see if, and how quickly, a parallel economy with a vaccination option workforce, will take root.

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Well, not really.

Southwest Drops Plan To Put Unvaccinated Staff On Unpaid Leave (CNBC)

Southwest Airlines has scrapped a plan to put unvaccinated employees who have applied for but haven’t received a religious or medical exemption on unpaid leave as of a federal deadline in December. Southwest Airlines and American Airlines are among the carriers that are federal contractors and subject to a Biden administration requirement that their employees are vaccinated against Covid-19 by Dec. 8 unless they are exempt for medical or religious reasons. Rules for federal contractors are stricter than those expected from the Biden administration for large companies, which will allow for regular Covid testing as an alternative to a vaccination.

Executives at both carriers in recent days have tried to reassure employees about job security under the mandate, urging them to apply for exemptions if they can’t get vaccinated for a medical reason or for a sincerely held religious belief. The airlines are expected to face more questions about the mandate when they report quarterly results Thursday morning. Pilots’ labor unions have sought to block the mandates or sought alternatives such as regular testing. Southwest’s senior vice president of operations and hospitality, Steve Goldberg, and Julie Weber, vice president and chief people officer, wrote to staff on Friday that if employees’ requests for an exemption haven’t been approved by Dec. 8, they could continue to work while following mask and distancing guidelines until the request has been reviewed.

The company is giving employees until Nov. 24 to finish their vaccinations or apply for an exemption. It will continue paying them while the company reviews their requests and said it will allow those who are rejected to continue working “as we coordinate with them on meeting the requirements (vaccine or valid accommodation).” “This is a change from what was previously communicated. Initially, we communicated that these Employees would be put on unpaid leave and that is no longer the case,” they wrote in the note, which was reviewed by CNBC. Southwest confirmed the policy change, which comes just weeks before the deadline.

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“..if none of the unvaccinated workers were to cave in to the government’s demands — some will, of course, we just don’t know how many — the number of people without work in Italy would increase by well over 150% — in the space of just one week!”

Things Are Getting Messy In Draghi’s Italy (NC)

As of last Friday all residents of Italy need a covid passport, or Green Pass, to access not only public spaces but also public and private workplaces. The pass proves that they have either been vaccinated against Covid-19, have recovered from the disease in the past six months or have recently tested negative. And now they need it to make a living, to feed their families. The “no jab, no job” rule applies to workers of all kinds, including the self employed, domestic staff and even people working remotely. If you’d still rather not get vaccinated, you have the option of showing proof of a negative test every two days. That can cost anywhere between €15 and €50 each time — far beyond the means of most low-paid workers. If you still refuse to get vaccinated or present proof of negative tests, you face unpaid suspension as well as a fine of up to €1,500. Public sector workers have five days to present the green pass before being suspended. Private sector workers without a green pass face suspension from the first day.

Here’s more from Politico: “By law, all workers must be able to show a so-called Green Pass, proving they are vaccinated against COVID-19 or have tested negative in the past 48 hours. Roughly 81 percent of Italians over 12 are fully vaccinated. While polls suggest the majority of Italians are in favor of vaccine passes (just as the majority of people in all countries are in favour of vaccine passes, according to polls), there are still 3.8 million unvaccinated workers, many in strategic sectors and public services such as ports, trucking, health care and law enforcement, who will be unable to work.”

This is by any measure a massive cull of workers. Three point eight million is more than 5% of Italy’s entire population and over 16% of the country’s officially employed workforce (22.7 million). The total number of people currently unemployed in Italy is 2.3 million. In other words, if none of the unvaccinated workers were to cave in to the government’s demands — some will, of course, we just don’t know how many — the number of people without work in Italy would increase by well over 150% — in the space of just one week! And as the Politico article mentions, many of these workers are in strategic sectors and public services.

This is all happening as Europe — and the world at large — faces the worst supply chain crisis in decades as well as acute energy and labor shortages. The move also risks giving a huge boost to Italy’s already quite large informal economy. Given as much, this is a huge, high-stakes bluff on the part of Draghi’s technocratic government, which was formed eighth months ago. If it pays off, the vast majority of Italy’s vaccine holdouts will fall into line and go back to work, and other governments across Europe will follow suit with similar mandates. If it doesn’t, Italy’s economy could be plunged into chaos.

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Laptoppers.

The Frightened Class (Harrington)

They’re all around us, especially those of us who live in relatively prosperous metropolitan neighborhoods in the US or Western Europe. Despite being—at least in material terms—among the most fortunate people who have ever walked the earth, they are very scared. And they want you to be very frightened too. Indeed, many of them see your refusal to be as frightened as they are about life’s inevitable risks as a grave problem which entitles them and their often powerful and influential fellow travelers to recur to all manner of authoritarian practices to insure that you adhere to their increasingly neurotic view of reality.

This tendency has been in full bloom lately as the people who have sat safely behind their laptops during the last 20 months have harangued and threatened those who have been out on job sites and meatpacking plants mixing freely with others and the virus, to internalize their own obsessions. And when these supposedly ignorant others—whose storehouse of empirical evidence about the dangers of the virus easily outstrips that of the laptoppers—refuse to buckle to the demand to be scared, they are met with all sorts of opprobrium. Viewed in historical terms, it’s an odd phenomenon.

For most of recorded time prosperity and education have been the gateway to a life of relative freedom from worry. But now, the people who most enjoy these benefits are, it seems, wracked with anxiety and, in the not infrequent way of many people suffering that plague, and hellbent on sharing their misery with others. The point here is not to belittle the very real costs of anxiety in the lives of many people, nor to dismiss it as a real public health concern. Rather, it is to ask how and why it is proliferating so rapidly among those who, at least on the surface, have less reason than the vast majority of their fellow human beings to suffer from it.

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“.. the inspector general’s public report states that McCabe lied to investigators on four occasions, three of them while under oath. His firing followed the standards consistently applied to all other FBI agents.”

Andrew McCabe’s Settlement With The DOJ Is A Signal To John Durham (Brock)

Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe was un-fired when the Department of Justice (DOJ) — now firmly under a Democratic administration — agreed to settle with McCabe by fully restoring his FBI pension and removing all records from his FBI personnel file that indicate he was fired for cause. It wasn’t really a settlement. McCabe sued the government, and the DOJ said, “Okay, we’ll give you what you want.” The agreement does not change the findings of DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz that McCabe lied under oath to investigators on three occasions; it simply eliminates all consequences for doing so. Oh, and it also forks over half a million dollars of taxpayer money to cover McCabe’s attorney’s fees. That’ll teach him a lesson for lying after raising his right hand three times and swearing not to.

DOJ’s magnanimity comes as special prosecutor John Durham has begun noose-tightening indictments in his probe of individuals involved in creating and furthering the discredited “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation. The DOJ cannot prevent Durham from pursuing indictments of any former FBI executives, including McCabe, should the evidence lead to that. However, if he does, McCabe’s stunning absolution by a DOJ now controlled by the Democrats strongly indicates that a presidential pardon is likely in play for anyone who so vigorously investigated Republicans without an adequate basis to do so. In other words, it looks like these former FBI executives now have an “insurance policy” — to borrow an infamous phrase from former FBI special agent Peter Strzok.

McCabe’s re-polishing also has the secondary salutary effect of perpetuating the longstanding Washington tradition of pushing blame as far down the hierarchy stack as possible, in order to leave unsullied the elite command staff who set the tone and lead the charge. [..] McCabe was hurriedly fired on the one-yard line just short of retirement eligibility, which affected his access to a full FBI pension. His beef with that action has some merit as inordinately punitive. Restoration of his retirement benefits is not something that most FBI agents are going to begrudge him, given his otherwise long career in the FBI. However, the inspector general’s public report states that McCabe lied to investigators on four occasions, three of them while under oath. His firing followed the standards consistently applied to all other FBI agents.

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“Committee Chairman Adam Schiff assured that public that “this whole smear on Joe Biden comes from the Kremlin.”

Joe Biden and the Disappearing Elephant (Turley)

How Houdini made his 10,000 pound elephant Jennie disappear every night in New York’s Hippodrome remains a matter of some debate. There are no good pictures of his famous cabinet and Houdini later threatened to sue those claiming “disappearing elephants.” What is clear is that the sheer size and the audacity of the act (like that of the Bidens) contributed to the trick. The fact is that Jennie never left the large cabinet, people just didn’t see it. The Bidens achieved the same effect. They made a full-sized scandal disappear with the help of media and members who did not want the public to see it. Twitter banned postings about the laptop until after Biden was elected. The media dismissed the story as a conspiracy theory with some mocking the “New York Post and everyone else who got suckered into the ridiculous Hunter Biden Laptop story. Take a bow.”

Committee Chairman Adam Schiff assured that public that “this whole smear on Joe Biden comes from the Kremlin.” Some 50 former intelligence officials, including Obama’s CIA directors John Brennan and Leon Panetta, also insisted the laptop story was likely the work of Russian intelligence. The laptop is, of course, now recognized as genuine even by some of the early deniers. Hunter remains under criminal investigation for possible tax and money laundering violations. But the greatest “reveal” is the person referred to as “the Big Guy” and “Celtic” in these emails: President Biden.

Recently released emails reference payments to President Biden from son’s accounts and indicate the possible commingling of funds. Even more embarrassing, the shared account may have been used to pay a Russian prostitute named “Yanna.” In one text, a former secret service agent warns Hunter (who was holed up with a prostitute in an expensive hotel) “Come on H this is linked to Celtic’s account.” The question is whether prosecutors will continue to act like they do not see the elephant.

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Oct 132021
 
 October 13, 2021  Posted by at 9:05 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  33 Responses »


M. C. Escher Bond of union 1956

 

The Coming Real Pandemic of the Vaccinated (S&F)
Airline Pilot Warns Biden’s Mandate Will Create ‘Massive Disruptions’ (WJ)
911 System In Jeopardy As First Responders Reject Jab (ZH)
The Great New Normal Purge (CJ Hopkins)
Senators Seek Federal Grand Jury For Covid-19 Statistical Manipulation (JTN)
Are the COVID Shots Working? (Mercola)
Australia Building Quarantine Camps For “Ongoing Operations” (SN)
Covid, Lockdown And The Retreat Of Scientific Debate (Kulldorff)
OSHA Submits Vaccine Rule To White House (CNN)
Brooklyn Nets Ban Kyrie Irving From Playing Until He Gets Covid-19 Vaccine (ZH)
Texas Businesses Stuck Between Federal And State Vaccine Rules (Y!)
NY Post Editorial Board Bashes Biden’s ‘Cabinet of Horrors’ (NM)
Wisconsin’s Election Probe Zeroes In On Democrat Machine Tactics (JTN)
Former DNI Ratcliffe Says He’s Given Durham 1,000 Intel Documents (JTN)
John Durham and the Amazing Disappearing DNC Hack (Parry)

 

 

Kory Merck

 

 

 

 

Sir Christopher Chope MP

 

 

Try some melatonin. Works vs Covid.

 

 

Israel

 

 

What we’ve been afraid of for quite some time now.

The Coming Real Pandemic of the Vaccinated (S&F)

Drs. Trozzi and Alexander explain ADE and other dangers of the ‘vaccines’, and warn of the coming wave of deaths among those who have received these experimental gene therapies. Dr. Mark Trozzi is an ER doctor with 25 years experience. He took a leave of absence early this year to fight Covid tyranny full time. His website is drtrozzi.com. Dr. Paul Alexander is a world-class clinical epidemiologist who was trained at McMaster University, Canada’s top university for epidemiological research. Dr. Alexander was fired from his position at the university for speaking the truth about the harms being caused by the Covid ‘vaccines’.


“78% of the deaths in the U.K. are among the ‘double-vaccinated.” Dr. Mark Trozzi. “If we vaccinate our children the deaths we’ve seen in adults so far we will now see in children.” Dr. Paul Alexander. Watch and share this very important interview. The next fear-mongering tactic coming down the pipe is a ‘wave of pediatric cases’, but in actual fact children are in no danger from Covid whatsoever. Sadly, many are likely to die as a result of the bioweapons being falsely represented as ‘vaccines’.

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Just in: Boeing will require its 125,000 workers in the United States to be vaccinated against COVID-19 by Dec. 8.

Airline Pilot Warns Biden’s Mandate Will Create ‘Massive Disruptions’ (WJ)

An airline pilot and activist for individual liberty told Fox News on Monday that situations such as mass flight cancelations will become more common if the Biden administration refuses to backdown from its hardline stance against coercing Americans to get vaccinated against COVID. Speaking on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Joshua Yoder, a commercial airline pilot and the co-founder of a group called U.S. Freedom Flyers, cautioned that events such as this past weekend’s Southwest Arlines flight cancellations could soon be unavoidable. The reason: Yoder said the people who do skilled jobs, such as flying planes and driving trucks, will stand against President Joe Biden and their own employers. “My motive for resisting [the COVID vaccine] is primarily religious for myself,” Yoder told Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

“Among my friends I saw a need. Many of us don’t want to take this. People were being coerced. I believe in freedom, and I’m here to support the freedom of my fellow employees and all people across this country.” “I’m not going to take a mandate. I’m not going to be forced to do something that I don’t believe in,” he added. “If you have flights reduced by 30 percent because 30 percent of pilots are fired because they won’t take the vaccine, this is going to affect how your goods get here from overseas, how they are distributed to the store,” he said when asked to describe the effect on the national transportation infrastructure. “The same thing is happening with the truckers; it’s happening in the shipping industry. Those Amazon boxes that typically show up in two days, you might be looking at three weeks,” he continued, making note of a reported shortage of truckers and dock workers as ports — such as the one at Long Beach in Los Angeles Country — experience a backlog of ships waiting to be unloaded.

[..] Yoder, when speaking of staffing shortages and logistics, asserted that more shortages of employees, such as the one which that hit Southwest, could come. He blamed Biden for the issues and challenged any notion that the federal government is in control of what American citizens and workers choose with regard to vaccines. “It’s squarely his [Biden’s] fault,” he said. “First of all, we have all the control, and the control comes from a simple word, and that’s ‘no,’” he said. “We just don’t need to comply. As far as I’m concerned, I will never promote a sick-out or a work action that is illegal. With U.S. Freedom Flyers, the organization I’m with, we will never promote such a thing. With that being said, we also cannot control the actions of individuals.”

“And I think that you will see massive disruptions in supply chain and in your travel if we just stand up and say no,” he said. “If these companies fire us and they fire 30% of the workforce, aircraft are going to stop moving, and it’s going to affect you. It’s going to affect your air travel, and it’s going to affect the economy.”

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What will the world look like by Christmas? Will anything function at all?

911 System In Jeopardy As First Responders Reject Jab (ZH)

The American Ambulance Association (AAA) warned House and Senate leaders the “nation’s EMS system is facing a crippling workforce shortage, a long-term problem that has been building for more than a decade. It threatens to undermine our emergency 9-1-1 infrastructure and deserves urgent attention by Congress.” “The magnitude has really blown up over the last few months,” AAA President Shawn Baird told NBC News. “When you take a system that was already fragile and stretched it because you didn’t have enough people entering the field, then you throw a public health emergency and all of the additional burdens that it put on our workforce, as well as the labor shortages across the entire economy, and it really has put us in a crisis mode,” Baird said.


What’s making the EMS labor shortage worse is President Biden’s vaccine mandates. First responders are quitting across the county because they don’t want to get the jab and have realized they can transfer to other higher-paying jobs. Waldoboro, Maine, town manager Julie Keizer told News Center Maine that “the vaccine mandate has contributed to the loss of first responders.” “I think part of the problem is everybody thought they (workers) would conform because nobody wants to lose their jobs,” Keizer added. “But when you look at the rate of pay for emergency workers, they can make more delivering packages than patients.”

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“The purge must be conducted openly, brutally, so that the masses understand that the rules of society have changed forever, that their former rights and freedoms are gone, that from now on any deviation from official ideology will be ruthlessly punished.”

The Great New Normal Purge (CJ Hopkins)

So, the Great New Normal Purge has begun … right on cue, right by the numbers. As we “paranoid conspiracy theorists” have been warning would happen for the past 18 months, people who refuse to convert to the new official ideology are now being segregated, stripped of their jobs, banned from attending schools, denied medical treatment, and otherwise persecuted. Relentless official propaganda demonizing “the Unvaccinated” is being pumped out by the corporate and state media, government leaders, health officials, and shrieking fanatics on social media. “The Unvaccinated” are the new official “Untermenschen,” an underclass of subhuman “others” the New Normal masses are being conditioned to hate. But it isn’t just a purge of “the Unvaccinated.” Anyone deviating from the official ideology is being systematically demonized and persecuted.

In Germany, Australia, and other New Normal countries, protesting the New Normal is officially outlawed. The New Normal Gestapo is going around to people’s homes to interrogate them about their anti-New Normal Facebook posts. Corporations are openly censoring content that contradicts the official narrative. New Normal goon squads roam the streets, checking people’s “vaccination” papers. And it’s not just governments and corporations carrying out the New Normal Purge. Friends are purging friends. Wives are purging husbands. Fathers are purging children. Children are purging parents. New Normals are purging old normal thoughts. Global “health authorities” are revising definitions to make them conform to New Normal “science.” And so on … a new official “reality” is being manufactured, right before our eyes. Anything and anyone that doesn’t conform to it is being purged, unpersoned, memory-holed, erased.

None of which should come as a surprise. Every nascent totalitarian system, at some stage of its takeover of society, launches a purge of political opponents, ideological dissidents, and other “anti-social deviants.” Such purges can be brief or open-ended, and they can take any number of outward forms, depending on the type of totalitarian system, but you cannot have totalitarianism without them. The essence of totalitarianism — regardless of which costumes and ideology it wears — is a desire to completely control society, every aspect of society, every individual behavior and thought. Every totalitarian system, whether an entire nation, a tiny cult, or any other form of social body, evolves toward this unachievable goal … the total ideological transformation and control of every single element of society (or whatever type of social body it comprises). This fanatical pursuit of total control, absolute ideological uniformity, and the elimination of all dissent, is what makes totalitarianism totalitarianism.

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“The CDC’s National Vital Statistics System told mortality data compilers to emphasize COVID-19 as the “cause” of death in a March 2020 alert, departing from a 2003 federal manual on recording infectious disease as a “contributing factor to death” in the presence of preexisting conditions, the letter said.”

Senators Seek Federal Grand Jury For Covid-19 Statistical Manipulation (JTN)

The CDC adopted a “double-standard exclusively for COVID-19 data collection” that inflated cases and deaths starting early in the pandemic, violating multiple federal laws and distorting mitigation policies, Oregon lawmakers told the feds’ top lawyer in the state. Advised by “a large team of world-renowned doctors, epidemiologists, virologists, and attorneys,” state Senators Kim Thatcher and Dennis Linthicum petitioned U.S. Attorney Scott Asphaug to approve a grand jury investigation into how the pandemic is being measured. “Public health policy must be based upon accurate and independently verifiable data to optimize outcomes and strengthen the public’s trust in the people leading them through this crisis,” the Republican lawmakers, whose state has imposed some of the harshest and longest COVID restrictions, wrote in a letter with several attached exhibits.

One is a synopsis of allegations, findings, relevant law and implicated agencies intended to “assist grand jury members in orienting themselves to the scope of alleged crimes committed.” Their letter is dated Aug. 16, but the materials were not released for a month to “protect those involved,” Stand for Health Freedom (SHF), the holistic medicine and legal nonprofit behind the petition effort, said in last month’s announcement. “I’m not sure there has ever been an allegation of government wrongdoing on this scale,” so the group wanted to assess “accuracy and safety” before going public, relationship manager Bailey Kuykendoll told Just the News. Asphaug’s office said Thursday it referred the petition to the Justice Department’s Office of Legislative Affairs. That office didn’t respond on whether or how it had answered the Oregon lawmakers’ request.

[..] The lawmakers’ petition also accuses the FDA of withholding “safe and effective evidence-based treatments” just as the Tuskegee study withheld penicillin from black men with syphilis. They name vitamin D and ivermectin, which have “extensive clinical histories of safety following the administration of billions of doses.” Doctors who prescribe these for COVID may face loss of license, fines and imprisonment, Thatcher and Linthicum said. [..] Thatcher said she was troubled that even as the infection’s high survivability rate became clear, arbitrary restrictions that worsened child abuse, suicide and mental health remained in place. “I began to really question whether the cure was worse than the disease,” said Thatcher, who is better known in Oregon for her legislative effort to compensate people wrongfully convicted.

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Well, they’re doing something alright.

Are the COVID Shots Working? (Mercola)

In a Twitter thread, Ben M. double-checked and recalculated the vaccine efficacy, taking into account all CLI admissions, not just those where the patient had been vaccinated at least 14 days prior. When adding those previously excluded patients back in, Ben M. came up with a vaccine effectiveness rate of 13%. He also discovered that if you look at how many people actually had a CLI (covid like illness) clinical diagnosis code among the 41,552 included patients, the rate of diagnosis between the unvaccinated, the partially vaccinated and the fully vaccinated was nearly identical: 73% for the unvaccinated, 71% for the partially vaccinated and 72% for the fully vaccinated.

Here’s where it gets interesting. When you look at the rate of CLI, and add in the rate of positive PCR tests, all of a sudden, differences between the groups become clear. Only 2% of the fully vaccinated had a positive PCR test, compared to 6% of the partially vaccinated and 18% of the unvaccinated. Ben M. speculates that vaccinated patients may be tested less routinely (12.5% less frequently to be exact), or unvaccinated patients are tested more routinely (11% more frequently than the vaccinated). But there may be another explanation. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention actually has two different sets of testing criteria, depending on the patient’s vaccination status.

Fully vaccinated individuals suspected of having contracted COVID-19 are to be tested using a CT of 28 or less, whereas unvaccinated patients are to be tested using a CT of 40. Anything over 35 CTs has been shown to produce 97% false positives, so this biased testing guidance virtually guarantees that vaccinated patients are more likely to test negative, while unvaccinated patients are more likely to get a false positive.

v$xxine effectiveness

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“Why anyone who had left Australia would come back again is unclear..”

Australia Building Quarantine Camps For “Ongoing Operations” (SN)

Despite some states tentatively beginning to lift lockdown restrictions, Australian authorities are building quarantine camps that won’t be completed until next year in order to prepare for “ongoing operations” and to house those “who have not had access to vaccination.” According to ABC Australia, one such 1,000-bed quarantine facility at Wellcamp Airport outside Toowoomba will be fully completed by the end of March 2022. “At this stage, the cabins will be used by domestic travellers returning from COVID hotspots,” states the report. However, it also makes clear that the camp will be used for “ongoing operations” and will be a source of employment for the local area.

The camps is split into different zones and accommodates singles, doubles, and family rooms while being patrolled by police and security guards 24/7. Citing new strains of COVID and people “who have not had access to vaccination,” Queensland Deputy Premier Steven Miles told the media outlet, “We anticipate there to be a continuing need for quarantine facilities.” The government is leasing the land on which the camp is being built from the Wagner Corporation for 12 months with an option for a further 12 months after that. Another 1,000-bed quarantine facility is also being built on a 30-hectare Army barracks site in the industrial area of Pinkenba, near Brisbane Airport.

“Why anyone who had left Australia would come back again is unclear,” writes Dave Blount. “It is possibly the most repressive country in the world regarding Covid tyranny.” As we previously highlighted, state authorities in America are also constructing new “quarantine facilities” for Americans who are “unable to quarantine at home.” As we reported last year, Authorities in Quebec City, Canada announced they will isolate “uncooperative” citizens in a coronavirus facility, the location of which remains a secret. New Zealand also announced plans to place COVID infectees and their family members in “quarantine facilities.” Back in January, German authorities also announced they would hold COVID dissidents who repeatedly fail to properly follow the rules in what was described as a ‘detention camp’ located in Dresden.

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“The language, here, is non-scientific: herd immunity is not a creed. It’s how pandemics end.”

Covid, Lockdown And The Retreat Of Scientific Debate (Kulldorff)

The BMJ article is full of errors that ought to have never found their way into any publication. Here are some examples:

1/ My colleagues and I are described as ‘critics of public health measures to curb Covid-19’. On the contrary, throughout the pandemic we have strongly advocated better public health measures to curb Covid-19 – specifically protection of high-risk older people, with many ‘clearly defined’ proposals. The failure to implement such measures, in our view, has led to many unnecessary Covid deaths.

2/We are described as ‘proponents of herd immunity’ which is akin to accusing someone of being in favour of gravity. Both are scientifically established phenomena. Every Covid strategy leads to herd immunity. The key is to minimise morbidity and mortality. The language, here, is non-scientific: herd immunity is not a creed. It’s how pandemics end.

3/ It says we have ‘expressed opposition to mass vaccination’. Dr. Gupta and I have spent decades on vaccine research and we are all strong advocates for Covid and other vaccines. They are among the greatest inventions in history. To falsely credit the anti-vaccine movement with support from professors at Harvard, Oxford and Stanford is damaging for vaccine confidence. This is unworthy of a medical journal.

4/ The GBD is referred to as a ‘sophisticated science denialism’. Note here how something that challenges an orthodoxy is described as anti-science – a label that presumably could have been applied to any scientific innovator who ever questioned a failed orthodoxy. Collateral public health damage from Covid restrictions are real and enormous on cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, backsliding childhood vaccinations, starvation and mental health, just to name a few. It is not the GBD, but those who downplay lockdown harms who should be equated with those who question the harms of tobacco or climate change.

5/ The GBD was not ‘sponsored by the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) – and I’m pleased to see that the BMJ has at least retracted this claim. We were there for media interviews, with no sponsorship. How did such a blunder end up in print in the first place? The AIER staff did not even know about the Declaration until the day before it was signed, and the AIER president and board did not know about it until after publication. If we had written the Declaration at say, Starbucks, would the BMJ have claimed that it was sponsored by the coffee shop?

6/ The BMJ article mentions ‘AIER contributor Scott Atlas’, but Dr. Atlas has never been affiliated with nor written for AIER. Neither have we – unless the BMJ also views us as affiliated with hundreds of universities and organisations that we have visited during our careers or that have reprinted some of our articles. Dr. Atlas was not even aware that AIER had reprinted one of his articles until the BMJ linked to it. Several AIER employees have gracefully supported the GBD, just like countless other people around the world, but we have never received any money from the AIER. This basic error again exposes how normal checks did not appear to have been applied by the BMJ.

7/The BMJ article ends by saying that my colleagues and I are peddling a ‘well-funded sophisticated science denialist campaign based on ideological and corporate interests’. Nobody has paid us money for our work on the GBD, or for advocating focused protection. None of us would have undertaken this project for professional gain: it is far easier to stay silent than put your head above the parapet. As a vaccine developer, Dr. Gupta has connections with a pharmaceutical start-up, but Dr. Bhattacharya and I are among the few drug/vaccine scientists who purposely avoid pharmaceutical company funding to be free from conflicts of interests.

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Weekly testing is still valid. Businesses that go beyond that do that on their own accord.

OSHA Submits Vaccine Rule To White House (CNN)

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which falls under the Labor Department, has submitted the text of a new vaccine rule for large employers to the Office of Management and Budget, bringing the emergency standard announced by President Joe Biden last month one step closer to taking effect. “The Occupational Safety and Health Administration has been working expeditiously to develop an emergency temporary standard that covers employers with 100 or more employees to ensure their workers are fully vaccinated or undergo weekly testing to protect employees from the spread of coronavirus in the workplace,” a Labor Department spokesman said Tuesday.

“On Tuesday, October 12, as part of the regulatory review process, the agency submitted the initial text of the emergency temporary standard to the Office of Management and Budget.” Once OMB concludes its review of the regulation, the emergency temporary standard will be published in the Federal Register, when it will go into effect. Last month, Biden announced the Labor Department would draft an emergency rule compelling private companies with 100 or more employees to require vaccinations or weekly testing. “While America is in much better shape than it was seven months ago when I took office, I need to tell you a second fact: We’re in a tough stretch and it could last for awhile,” the President said in a White House speech at the time.

The new emergency temporary standard will require large employers to give their workers paid time off to get vaccinated. If businesses don’t comply, the government will “take enforcement actions,” which could include “substantial fines” of up to nearly $14,000 per violation, according to officials. Officials have said the standard was a “minimum” and that some companies may choose to go further, including by mandating the vaccine instead of offering a testing alternative. “Each employer will decide exactly what they want to do, but what we’re saying through the Department of Labor rule making process is a minimum of testing once a week or full vaccination,” a senior administration official previously told CNN.

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Make that: Weekly testing is still valid, but not for Kyrie.

Brooklyn Nets Ban Kyrie Irving From Playing Until He Gets Covid-19 Vaccine (ZH)

The Brooklyn Nets have banned 29-year-old Kyrie Irving from both games and practice until he gets the Covid-19 vaccine, just one week before the team kicks off their regular season against the Bucks. The star point and shooting guard will even be barred from playing during away games – the vast majority which will be held in locations where there is no local vaccine mandate. The Nets said they won’t allow Irving to be deemed “part-time” in terms of his availability for games. The move comes after Irving missed Monday’s preseason loss to the 76ers (115-104) over his refusal to get the jab. “Given the evolving nature of the situation and after thorough deliberation, we have decided Kyrie Irving will not play or practice with the team until he is eligible to be a full participant,” said the team in a statement.


“Kyrie has made a personal choice, and we respect his individual right to choose. Currently, the choice restricts his ability to be a full-time member of the team, and we will not permit any member of our team to participate with part-time availability.” The mostly word-salad statement continues: “It is imperative that we continue to build chemistry as a team and remain true to our long-established values of togetherness and sacrifice. Our championship goals for the season have not changed, and to achieve these goals each member of our organization must pull in the same direction. We are excited for the start of the season and look forward to a successful campaign that will make the borough of Brooklyn proud.” Irving earns more than $400,000 per game – and forfeited some $817,000 in salary in January after missing two games to take part in a league-ordered quarantine after attending a birthday party in a club. He earned around $35 million last season, and was slated to earn $36.6 million this year – the last year of his contract.

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“A Federal Judge in TX has temporarily put on hold United Airlines’ policy that places employees on unpaid leave for claiming a religious exemption to the COVID-19 vaccine.”

Texas Businesses Stuck Between Federal And State Vaccine Rules (Y!)

American Airlines and Southwest Airlines said Tuesday they will continue requiring employees to be vaccinated against Covid-19, deferring to federal regulations as Texas and the White House square off over vaccine mandates. The clash comes as the Republican governor of Texas, Gregg Abbott, signed an order Monday banning all vaccine mandates in his state, including those coming from private companies. But that state rule is in direct contradiction with a regulation announced by President Joe Biden last month, which would require all companies with more than 100 employees to ensure their workers are vaccinated against the coronavirus.

White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki said Tuesday the new Texas law does not change the federal government’s vaccine mandate plans, which could cover some 100 million US workers. “We know that federal law overrides state law,” Psaki said. But the Biden administration has yet to detail the practical applications of the federal order. “There isn’t a big historic precedent for this and we want to get it right,” Psaki said, assuring that plans for the federal order could be expected within “weeks.” As federal contractors, major airlines must require their employees to be vaccinated by December 8, which could prove complicated for those based in Texas. American Airlines said it will defer to federal law over the state law.

“We are reviewing the executive order issued by Gov. Abbott, but we believe the federal vaccine mandate supersedes any conflicting state laws, and this does not change anything for American,” a spokesperson for the carrier said in a statement to AFP. Fellow Texas-based airline Southwest also said Tuesday it would continue requiring vaccines for employees, despite Abbott’s order. “According to the president’s executive order, federal action supersedes any state mandate or law, and we would be expected to comply with the president’s order to remain compliant as a federal contractor,” Southwest said in a statement.

And the Greater Houston Partnership, a Texas business group that includes Exxon Mobil, Chevron, BP, Shell and JP Morgan Chase, said in a statement Tuesday: “The governor’s executive order does not support Texas businesses’ ability and duty to create a safe workplace.” Abbott said Monday he supported vaccination, but would not allow mandates for it in his state. “I issued an Executive Order prohibiting vaccine mandates by ANY entity in Texas,” the governor wrote on Twitter.

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“Halloween came early this year, courtesy of the Biden administration..”

NY Post Editorial Board Bashes Biden’s ‘Cabinet of Horrors’ (NM)

The New York Post Editorial Board has come out to blast the “scandals from top to bottom in Joe Biden’s Cabinet of horrors” in a scathing review of the early struggles of the administration. “Halloween came early this year, courtesy of the Biden administration,” the editorial began. “While the president is primarily to blame for the choices in Afghanistan, the border and holding an infrastructure bill hostage to the Squad, his team is facing their own crises, many self-created. Here, some of the lowlights of many of the members of Joe Biden’s Cabinet of Horrors.” From calling Vice President Kamala Harris the VP in the shadows — “Harris has gone into hiding, barely making public appearances as her favorables have tanked”— to White House chief of staff Ron Klain being the “shadow president,” few were spared in Biden’s Cabinet from the Post’s critique of the administration’s first 10 months. Among the Post’s scathing rebukes:

Secretary of State Antony Blinken: “He has no answers for the debacle in Afghanistan.” Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen: “Yellen promised that she would ‘be a voice for fiscal sanity.’ So much for that!” Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin: How can he trust Gen. Mark Milley after the joint chiefs of staff went behind former President Donald Trump’s back? And “How can he not tell Biden he must be removed from his post?” Attorney General Merrick Garland: His call for the FBI and U.S. attorneys to investigate and prosecute school board protests is “a spectacular overreach of federal power”; yet, the Post adds, “But in a fight between angry moms and a weaponized Department of Justice, our money is on the moms.”

Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland: She moved the Bureau of Land Management to Colorado, “but not enough bureaucrats wanted to live there (300 retired or quit), so Haaland is now moving it back to the swamp.” Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack: Take a Democrat’s word for it: Collin C. Peterson, D-Minn., former House Agriculture Committee chairman. “I would argue this transfer tax, which could be as high as 43.4%, is the worst idea that has been proposed in terms of its impact on agriculture in my lifetime.”Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo: “Argued, counterintuitively, that companies needed to be taxed more in order to compete globally.”Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh: “When 194,000 jobs were added in September, far below the 500,000 forecast, Walsh said, ‘I don’t think it’s as bad as what everyone’s reporting.’ It’s his own department that reported it!”

Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra: “Politico noted that the guy who should be in charge of the nation’s COVID response doesn’t even attend meetings. ‘They brief him,’ a person close to the pandemic response team told the outlet. ‘But he’s not a decider on response activities.’ Why? Because of his ‘lack of experience as a public health policymaker and communicator.'”Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Marcia Fudge: “As Democrats rush to spend even more money, only 11% of the $46 billion in emergency rental assistance has been distributed.”Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg: “With supply issues impacting the economy and cargo ships waiting offshore, Buttigieg’s answer is a task force.”

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Drip drip drip.

Wisconsin’s Election Probe Zeroes In On Democrat Machine Tactics (JTN)

Move over Arizona and hold on Pennsylvania, the next election integrity investigation to take center stage is occurring in Wisconsin, where a former state Supreme Court justice empowered by the Legislature to compel testimony and document production is gathering steam. Interviews with more than a dozen witnesses, officials and lawyers who have interacted with retired Justice Mike Gableman and his staff suggest a strong focus on the role election bureaucracies played in changing the rules — without legislative consent — for how ballots were sent out, filled out, collected and counted.

Gableman’s early investigative work as special counsel appointed by Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos is shining a spotlight among other things on the Wisconsin Election Commission, a statewide body created by GOP lawmakers after an earlier political rigging scandal in the state known as the John Doe investigations. The commission provides guidance and rules to the 1,852 election clerks in the state on how to conduct voting. The commission in 2020 altered numerous state voting rules and procedures during the pandemic, often without seeking legislative permission. The changes range from allowing nursing home staff to help fill out resident ballots to giving permission to election clerks to fill out missing witness information required for absentee ballots.

Those two changes alone affected thousands of ballots in a state in which Joe Biden was declared the winner with a narrow margin of just 20,600 votes. Perhaps even more consequential, the commission gave its blessing to an idea first conceived by election clerks in the blue counties of Dane and Milwaukee that voters could claim the normally rare status of “indefinitely confined” if they were too scared to go out during the COVID outbreak. The change allowed nearly 250,000 people to vote by absentee without complying with required voter ID rules. That advice, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled after the election, was unlawful. Only people who determine they have bona fide disabilities and infirmities are allowed to vote as “indefinitely confined,” and regulators had no right to declare the pandemic as such a condition, the justices ruled in the only major court decision after Nov. 3 to declare a large bloc of votes as potentially illegally cast.

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How close is Durham to looking at Hunter Biden?

Former DNI Ratcliffe Says He’s Given Durham 1,000 Intel Documents (JTN)

Former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe says he’s given John Durham, investigating the Justice Department actions in its Russia collusion probe, a trove of documents that he thinks support charges beyond those recently filed against cybersecurity lawyer Michael Sussman. “Sussmann’s is the first of what I would hope would be a number,” of additional people charged, he told Fox News on Sunday. Ratcliffe made the argument on what he said was “1,000 intelligence community documents” that he thinks support additional charges that he would “expect” Durham to bring, in addition to the declassified documents he’s provided.

Durham, a former Connecticut attorney general, was appointed by the Trump administration to look into the origins of the federal investigation into whether the 2016 Trump presidential campaign colluded with Russia to influence the outcome of the election. A grand jury recently indicted against Sussmann, former federal prosecutor, of lying to the FBI. Ratcliffe, who oversaw the country’s 17 intelligence agencies in the latter part of the Trump administration, announced in October that he handed over the roughly 1,000 pages of materials to the Justice Department to assist with Durham’s investigation, according to the Washington Examiner. Ratcliffe has also declassified two heavily redacted Russia-related documents, including handwritten notes from former CIA Director John Brennan showing he briefed then-President Barack Obama in 2016 on an unverified Russian intelligence report.

The report claimed former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton planned in July 2016 on tying then-candidate Donald Trump to Russia’s hack of the Democratic National Committee to distract from her improper use of a private email server, the Examiner also reports. Sussmann, a former attorney at Perkins Coie, is accused of falsely telling an FBI lawyer he was not representing any clients when acting on behalf of a technology executive and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign during a September 2016 meeting on possible links between Trump and Russia.

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The FBI not doing its own investigation remains very weird.

John Durham and the Amazing Disappearing DNC Hack (Parry)

[..] at the same time as the alleged DNC hack, there were similar reports regarding the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s (“DCCC”) server as well as DNC Chairman John Podesta’s personal email devices. In testimony before the Senate, FBI Director James Comey stated the following: Question (by Senator Burr): Did the FBI request access to those devices [the servers and Podesta’s devices] to perform forensics on? A: Yes, we did. Q: And would that access have provided intelligence or information helpful to your investigation in possibly finding … including to the Intelligence Community Assessment? A: Our forensics folks would always prefer to get access to the original device or server that’s involved. So, it’s the best evidence.

Q: Were you given access to do the forensics on those servers? A: We were not. We were … a highly respected private company eventually got access and shared with us what they saw there. Q: But is that typically the way the FBI would prefer to do the forensics or would your forensic unit rather see the servers and do the forensics themselves? A: We always prefer to have access hands on ourselves, if that’s possible. Q: Do you know why you were denied access to those servers? A: I don’t know for sure. Um, I don’t know for sure. Q: Was there one request or multiple requests? A: Multiple requests at different levels and ultimately what was agreed to is that the private company would share with us what they saw.

So, instead of using a search warrant or some other legal process to perform a direct, hands on forensic examination of the DNC server, the FBI agreed to base its investigation on the findings of a private cybersecurity company. And, as discussed in the previous article, that company, CrowdStrike, was to do the investigation pursuant to its contract with Michael Sussmann of Perkins Coie, the law firm that represented Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Think about that. When presented with allegations of a devastating foreign cyber attack on one of the two major political parties, the FBI meekly agreed to allow CrowdStrike and Perkins Coie to do the forensic examination and, for all intents and purposes, run the investigation.

Not even the lowliest local police department would agree to such an absurd arrangement. What if this was a murder case? Would the Smallville PD allow a private investigator and lawyer hired by the murder victim’s family to process the crime scene, do the autopsy, and tell the police and district attorney what they supposedly found? Wouldn’t such findings be subject to attack in court as coming from sources that may have had an interest in shaping and tailoring the investigative results to suit the needs and desires of their client? Wouldn’t there be legal problems with the evidence’s provenance, chain of custody, and the reliability and comprehensiveness of the investigative work that supposedly produced it? Would the police and district attorney ever allow themselves to get roped into such a bizarre, ridiculous, nightmarish, and self-defeating arrangement?

Of course not. No rational person or organization intent on conducting a serious investigation would. But that, in effect, is precisely what the FBI — the self-proclaimed greatest investigative agency in the world — did when faced with this purportedly monumental foreign attack on the Democrat Party apparatus.

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Oct 122021
 


Pablo Picasso Two naked figures 1908

 

Covid Response ‘One Of UK’s Worst Ever Public Health Failures’ (G.)
Down To Only One Question Now.. (Denninger)
The Waiting Is The Hardest Part (Kunstler)
Seattle PD May Lose 40% Of Officers Over Covid-19 Vaccine Mandate (ZH)
Southwest Says Staffing Shortages Contributed To Flight Snarls (Y!)
Texas Gov. Abbott Issues Order Banning Covid Vaccination Mandates (NBC)
Ivermectin as Covid Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis Method in Healthcare Workers (NIH)
Russian Drug To Calm Cytokine Storm (RT)
FDA Responds To Nordic Countries Suspending Moderna COVID Vaccine Usage (ET)
Thousands More People Than Usual Are Dying … But It’s Not From Covid (Tel.)
Live Free Or Die: Why Medical Autonomy Matters (Miele)
Is Durham Circling Jake Sullivan? (Turley)
Southwest Offers Free Flights To Anyone Vaccinated Who Can Fly A Plane (BBee)

 

 

 

 

The report itself is as big a failure. What went wrong? Lockdowns came too late.. But the vaccines are a resounding success. Yeah, sure. Just look at all the new cases. Oh, and in the 2nd graph, what are all those recent excess deaths? Where do they come from? Couldn’t be the vaccines, could it?

Not one word on early treatment or prophylaxis. Not one.

Covid Response ‘One Of UK’s Worst Ever Public Health Failures’ (G.)

Britain’s early handling of the coronavirus pandemic was one of the worst public health failures in UK history, with ministers and scientists taking a “fatalistic” approach that exacerbated the death toll, a landmark inquiry has found. “Groupthink”, evidence of British exceptionalism and a deliberately “slow and gradualist” approach meant the UK fared “significantly worse” than other countries, according to the 151-page “Coronavirus: lessons learned to date” report led by two former Conservative ministers. The crisis exposed “major deficiencies in the machinery of government”, with public bodies unable to share vital information and scientific advice impaired by a lack of transparency, input from international experts and meaningful challenge.

Despite being one of the first countries to develop a test for Covid in January 2020, the UK “squandered” its lead and “converted it into one of permanent crisis”. The consequences were profound, the report says. “For a country with a world-class expertise in data analysis, to face the biggest health crisis in 100 years with virtually no data to analyse was an almost unimaginable setback.” Boris Johnson did not order a complete lockdown until 23 March 2020, two months after the government’s Sage committee of scientific advisers first met to discuss the crisis. “This slow and gradualist approach was not inadvertent, nor did it reflect bureaucratic delay or disagreement between ministers and their advisers. It was a deliberate policy – proposed by official scientific advisers and adopted by the governments of all of the nations of the UK,” the report says.


“It is now clear that this was the wrong policy, and that it led to a higher initial death toll than would have resulted from a more emphatic early policy. In a pandemic spreading rapidly and exponentially, every week counted.”

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“.. that the vaccine makes you more likely to both get and give to others the virus is now established.”

Down To Only One Question Now.. (Denninger)

Unfortunately what this means is that now for anyone over 30 you are more likely to get infected, yes, adjusted for the population that is vaccinated, if you are vaccinated. Indeed in the 40-49 age group you’re close to double as probable on a per-population basis. This means that if your employer mandates the jabs he or she can be sued for putting those who can’t get vaccinated at double the risk, on purpose, by enforcing the mandate. Since there are people who can’t (due to immune compromise, such as cancer patients) be vaccinated this is now intentional risk. In other words this is hard, scientific evidence that these mandates by employers have increased the risk of customers (and other employees) contracting Covid-19. This isn’t a natural risk, it’s a man-made one created by the employer.

That’s actionable. So far this is not translating into higher risk of Covid hospitalization and death on a per-100,000 basis. But that the vaccine makes you more likely to both get and give to others the virus is now established. It is fact. It is in fact true for everyone who is over 30. I have pointed out that preventing infection was never in the cards; it was not part of the EUA, it was not part of the studies, it was never demonstrated. But this is much worse because now we are talking about a direct threat to others The CDC, NIH and Biden almost-certainly know this. This is why the mad rush to demand you get jabbed; they know damn well what this means and that while the manufacturer is immune the employers are not and in fact any such mandate leaves them wide open legally as soon as an unvaccinated person gets infected after being at said firm either as an employee or customer and sues the company on the basis of intentionally and maliciously increasing their risk by forcing their employees to get the jab, which is exactly what they did.

The data from England is conclusive in that regard. I bet that they’ve known this was happening right here in the US for months now. I expected no effective protection. What I did not expect was negative protection, but that’s what we got. This portends the potential for very, very bad things. Specifically, if the impairment is only toward Covid-19; that is, this is some sort of VEI specific to Covid, then the issue ends there. For those with natural (recovered) immunity they don’t care and absolutely should not get the jab; indeed, if you’re recovered and take them you may destroy your protection in part or whole and wind up susceptible to repeat infection you would otherwise not be hit with! If you do that you’re stupid and may well win a stupid prize.

But the 900lb Gorilla is that the impairment may not Covid-19 specific. In other words the impairment may be immune system generalized, in which case those who took the jabs are screwed because that immune damage could be long-lasting or even permanent, yet the protection against serious outcomes is specific to Covid. So yes, you’re “safer” against a serious outcome even while screwing everyone else, but at the same time you are wildly more-susceptible to a severe or fatal outcome due to, for example, influenza.

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“If you were paranoid, you might suspect that something was up in this attempt to roadblock cheap, safe, and effective treatments..”

The Waiting Is The Hardest Part (Kunstler)

Meanwhile, we have the arrival on-the-scene of another joker: Merck’s new anti-Covid-19 drug molnupiravir, said to reduce the risk of hospitalization and death from Covid by 50 percent. Merck and its partner, Ridgeback Biotherapeutics, have applied for an emergency use authorization (EUA) from the FDC for this new drug, the same legal loophole that Pfizer and Moderna got for their mRNA vaxes. “Joe Biden” promised to spend $1.2 billion procuring a big batch of the new drug, so bringing it on must be a done deal. The catch is, molnupiravir is in the same order of nucleoside analogue drugs as remdesivir, a clinically-proven failure in the treatment of Covid 19. The stuff killed patients left and right. Molnupiravir’s mutagenic mechanism is supposed to mess with the DNA of Covid-19 viruses, incrementally disabling them and killing them off.


The trouble is, mutagenic drugs are notorious for broad spectrum action, so Molnupiravir might do the same thing to the various cells in your body, too: instant cancer. I guess we’ll have to stand-by and see how that works out. It pays to remember, though, that the EUA didn’t work out so well for the Covid-19 vaccines, did it? The waiting is the hardest part. Molnupiravir was shoved out onstage after two years of the public health authorities (Drs. Fauci, Collins, et al.) and the corporate news media casting curses on the existing suite of cheap drugs that proved clinically effective in the early treatment of Covid-19, namely ivermectin (a.k.a. “horse paste”), hydroxychloroquine, fluvoxamine, prednisone, etc. If you were paranoid, you might suspect that something was up in this attempt to roadblock cheap, safe, and effective treatments in favor of untested novelties that would just happen to be another multibillion-dollar boon for drug companies.

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How many of these “leaders” will give in before Christmas?

Seattle PD May Lose 40% Of Officers Over Covid-19 Vaccine Mandate (ZH)

It was inevitable – as vaccine mandates across the country approach their deadlines, vast swaths of American workers, service members and atheletes face termination or disciplinary action for refusing to take the Covid-19 jab. In Los Angeles, nearly 1,000 firefighters are about to sue the city over the mandate. Southwest Airlines’ pilot union sued the company last week, before staffing shortages led to the cancellation of more than 2,000 flights over the weekend (and more on Monday). Meanwhile, doctors and nurses across the country have begun suing their employers. Interestingly, after a group of officers from the Los Angeles Police Department sued over the mandate, Sheriff Alex Villanueva announced that he would not ‘force anyone’ to take the jab.


But not Seattle – which stands to lose 40% of its 1,000 person force for failing to get vaccinated as an Oct. 18 deadline approaches. “The environment has been pretty toxic and negative,” one officer anonymously told Fox 13. “Not just from this whole mandate, but prior to that as well. I’m not sure this would be a good place for me to work long-term for my mental health. It has been very stressful.” Recall that this is on the heels of the city losing around 300 officers amid Black Lives Matter riots and the “defund the police” movement. By the numbers, as of Oct. 6, 292 sworn personnel had yet to provide proof of a COVID-19 vaccination per the report, down from 354 on Tuesday. An additional 111 officers are awaiting the results of exemption requests, meaning the total number of potentially fired Seattle cops is as high as 403.

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The hide and seek game continues.

Southwest Says Staffing Shortages Contributed To Flight Snarls (Y!)

After initially blaming air traffic control issues and weather for thousands of flight cancelations, Southwest Airlines on Monday acknowledged that staffing shortages also played a role in the service disruption. The carrier cancelled 1,124 flights on Sunday — by far the highest rate of any airline — 800 the day before and another 326 on Monday, according to airline tracker FlightAware. “On Friday evening, the airline ended the day with numerous cancellations, primarily created by weather and other external constraints, which left aircraft and crews out of pre-planned positions to operate our schedule on Saturday,” the low-cost carrier said in a statement. “Unfortunately, the out-of-place aircraft and continued strain on our crew resources created additional cancelations across our point-to-point network that cascaded throughout the weekend and into Monday.”


CNBC reported Southwest Chief Operating Officer Mike Van de Ven acknowledged to employees that the company “is still not where we need to be on staffing, and in particular with flight crews.” Like most airlines, Southwest let employees go when air traffic collapsed as the Covid-19 pandemic began, but has seen business surge this year as vaccinations spur people to travel again. The weekend’s snarls caused speculation that some pilots or other Southwest staff were participating in a work slowdown as a way to express opposition to the company’s decision to require its employees to be vaccinated against Covid-19. In their statement, Southwest said “the operational challenges were not a result of Southwest employee demonstrations” and they hope to restore normal operations “as soon as possible.”

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The value of freedom.

Texas Gov. Abbott Issues Order Banning Covid Vaccination Mandates (NBC)

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott issued an executive order Monday prohibiting any entity, including private businesses, from imposing Covid-19 vaccination requirements on employees or customers. “The COVID-19 vaccine is safe, effective, and our best defense against the virus, but should remain voluntary and never forced,” Abbott said in a statement. Abbott, a Republican, said in his order that it was prompted by the Biden administration’s vaccination mandate, which he said was federal overreach. President Joe Biden announced a mandate last month requiring companies with 100 or more employees to ensure that their workforces are vaccinated or regularly tested. The Labor Department has yet to release details of the emergency rule, but Biden last week called on companies to act now and not to wait for the requirement to go into effect.


Abbott, who tested positive for Covid in August, has also resisted mask mandates and requiring proof of vaccination. Texas has continued to experience a rise in cases and crowded hospitals, prompting Abbott to invest in monoclonal antibody infusion centers. Abbott issued executive orders over the summer banning local governments and school districts from requiring either masks or vaccinations, issuing $1,000 fines to those who failed to comply. School districts in San Antonio and Dallas have challenged the order in court. The Legislature also passed a bill in June banning private businesses from requiring proof of vaccination from customers.

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From the NIH: ” Ivermectin is a drug that has been shown to be active against coronavirus disease 19 (COVID-19) in previous studies”.

Any further questions?

Ivermectin as Covid Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis Method in Healthcare Workers (NIH)

Background: Ivermectin is a drug that has been shown to be active against coronavirus disease 19 (COVID-19) in previous studies. Healthcare personnel are highly exposed to severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection. Therefore, we decided to offer them ivermectin as a pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) method.

Purpose: Primary outcome was to measure the number of healthcare workers with symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection and a positive reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) COVID-19 test in the ivermectin group and in the control group. Secondary outcome was to measure the number of sick healthcare workers with a positive RT-PCR COVID-19 test whose condition deteriorated and required hospitalization and/or an Intensive Care Unit (ICU), or who died, in the ivermectin group and in the control group.

Material and methods: This observational and retrospective cohort study was carried out in two medical centers, Centro Medico Bournigal (CMBO) in Puerto Plata and Centro Medico Punta Cana (CMPC) in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. The study began on June 29, 2020, and ended on July 26, 2020. A Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) Propensity Score Matching procedure was applied in a 1:1 ratio to homogeneously evaluate 271 healthcare personnel that adhered to a PrEP program with ivermectin at a weekly oral (PO) dose of 0.2 mg/kg, and 271 healthcare personnel who did not adhere to the program were assigned as a control group.

Results: In 28 days of follow-up, significant protection of ivermectin preventing the infection from SARS-CoV-2 was observed: 1.8% compared to those who did not take it (6.6%; p-value = 0.006), with a risk reduction of 74% (HR 0.26, 95% CI [0.10,0.71]). Conclusions: These results suggest that compassionate use of weekly ivermectin could be an option as a preventive method in healthcare workers and as an adjunct to immunizations, while further well-designed randomized controlled trials are developed to facilitate scientific consensus.

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Promising, but…

Russian Drug To Calm Cytokine Storm (RT)

A group of Russian scientists have created a drug that may potentially revolutionize the treatment of Covid-19 by defusing the most catastrophic reaction the disease causes in patients, while not destroying their immune response. The drug, called Leitragin, was developed by the Biomedical Technology Research Center of the Russian Federal Medical and Biology Agency (FMBA), and is currently undergoing clinical trials in Russia. Although its base substance was previously known and used in ulcer treatment medicine by Soviet and Russian doctors, it was the FMBA team that discovered how to apply it for the treatment of severe cases of Covid-19 and, potentially, other deadly diseases that cause life-threatening lung inflammation.


The Russian scientists had tasked themselves with finding a substance that would act as an ‘off switch’ for the chain reaction that, after being triggered by the invading SARS-CoV-2 virus, actually causes potential organ failure and death. This reaction of the immune system, dubbed the “cytokine storm,” has been variously described as our body’s overreaction to the virus or a “suicide attack” against the invading pathogen, and even as an evolutionary mechanism to stop the spread of deadly infections with the death of the host. Trying to stop this uncontrolled immune response while still preserving the body’s ability to fight the virus without causing more damage is what scientists and medics in intensive care units across the world have been wrestling with during the Covid-19 pandemic. In that regard, Leitragin is being touted as a game-changer, since its novel mechanism acts in a targeted way, and is said to be completely safe for one’s health.

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Wait, so Iceland ditches Moderna because it has enough Pfizer… which it says has the same effects as Moderna.

FDA Responds To Nordic Countries Suspending Moderna COVID Vaccine Usage (ET)

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) responded to Nordic countries limiting the use of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine last week, saying the shot’s benefits outweigh the risks. Health officials in Finland, Norway, Sweden, and Iceland suspended the use of the Moderna vaccine for younger people due to a risk of side effects including myocarditis. Sweden said it would pause the vaccine for people under the age of 30, and Denmark did the same for those under 18. Finland said that males under the age 30 shouldn’t receive the jab, while Icelandic officials added over the weekend that they would suspend use of the shot.

“The FDA is aware of these data. At this time, FDA continues to find that the known and potential benefits of vaccination outweigh the known and potential risks for the Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine,” an FDA official said in a statement to news outlets over the weekend in response to the Nordic nations’ decision to suspend the vaccine for certain age groups. Moderna, meanwhile, said in a statement after the countries’ decision that it was “aware of the very rare occurrence of myocarditis and/or pericarditis following administration of mRNA vaccines against COVID-19.” “These are typically mild cases and individuals tend to recover within a short time following standard treatment and rest. The risk of myocarditis is substantially increased for those who contract COVID-19, and vaccination is the best way to protect against this,” the company’s statement continued.

Moderna’s vaccine is still being administered under the Food and Drug Administration’s emergency use authorization. The company’s application for full approval is still pending. On Oct. 10, Iceland’s Health Directorate said the Moderna vaccine would be entirely suspended due to the risk of cardiac inflammation. “As the supply of Pfizer vaccine is sufficient in the territory … the chief epidemiologist has decided not to use the Moderna vaccine in Iceland,” according to a statement published on the Health Directorate website. The move was handed down due to “the increased incidence of myocarditis and pericarditis after vaccination with the Moderna vaccine, as well as with vaccination using Pfizer/BioNTech,” its statement continued.

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Sep 24. yeah, we have no idea what kills all those people…

Thousands More People Than Usual Are Dying … But It’s Not From Covid (Tel.)

While focus remains firmly fixed on Covid-19, a second health crisis is quietly emerging in Britain. Since the beginning of July, there have been thousands of excess deaths that were not caused by coronavirus. According to health experts, this is highly unusual for the summer. Although excess deaths are expected during the winter months, when cold weather and seasonal infections combine to place pressure on the NHS, summer generally sees a lull. This year is a worrying outlier. According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), since July 2 there have been 9,619 excess deaths in England and Wales, of which 48 per cent (4,635) were not caused by Covid-19. So if all these extra people are not dying from coronavirus, what is killing them?

Data from Public Health England (PHE) shows that during that period there were 2,103 extra death registrations with ischemic heart disease, 1,552 with heart failure, as well as an extra 760 deaths with cerebrovascular diseases such as stroke and aneurysm and 3,915 with other circulatory diseases. Acute and chronic respiratory infections were also up with 3,416 more mentions on death certificates than expected since the start of July, while there have been 1,234 extra urinary system disease deaths, 324 with cirrhosis and liver disease and 1,905 with diabetes. Alarmingly, many of these conditions saw the biggest drops in diagnosis in 2020, as the NHS struggled to cope with the pandemic.

A report released last week by the Government detailing the direct and indirect health impacts of the pandemic reported that there were an estimated 23 million fewer GP consultations – both in-person and online, in 2020 compared with 2019. Diagnosis of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) fell by 51 per cent, atrial fibrillation 26 per cent, heart failure 20 per cent, diabetes 19 per cent, coronary heart disease, 17 per cent and stroke and transient ischemic attack by 16 per cent.

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“I make my choices, and you make yours. Except with COVID. Then Joe Biden makes my choices, trying to protect me from myself.”

Live Free Or Die: Why Medical Autonomy Matters (Miele)

I think vaccines have done the world a world of good. I remember getting my smallpox vaccine and waiting eagerly to get the scar on my arm that my mother’s arm showed off like a badge of courage, but it never appeared for me. Then when the oral polio vaccine was developed, I remember lining up in the gym at North Garnerville Elementary School in New York to get my first dose on a sugar cube. Yum. So yes, I’m pro-vaccine. I also generally get the flu vaccine every year. I even got a shot last year, although for some peculiar reason, influenza vanished last winter while COVID was enjoying its greatest reign of terror. And naturally, my three children have all been vaccinated against the usual childhood diseases and taken whatever was recommended to keep them safe.

But one thing I never thought of doing was forcing my neighbors to get vaccinated against the flu. Did you know that influenza kills as many as 50,000 Americans a year? That’s approaching the number of U.S. soldiers killed in the entire length of the Vietnam War. On average, flu kills as many Americans every year as car crashes. Yet did anyone — even St. Anthony Fauci — ever dare to suggest that vaccination for flu should be mandatory because it would save lives? Hell, no, and even though many vaccinations are required of school children for good reasons, we also have allowed religious and medical exemptions for families that needed them. Because we aren’t supposed to be a nation of slaves, but a nation of citizens. If someone had a personal reason why they rejected vaccines, we didn’t put them through an inquisition or try to burn them at the stake of public opinion. This was America — land of the free.

I also never thought of celebrating when a person who opted not to get the flu vaccine died of influenza. But vaccine mandate supporters seem to get giddy when a vaccine refusenik falls ill from COVID and dies on a ventilator or worse. This isn’t science; it’s scientific imperialism — and the CDC centurions are ruthless in their application of power to the masses. Obey or die. So why might a reasonable person decide not to be vaccinated against COVID-19 in such a hysterical climate? Maybe because it’s an experimental and untested drug using a technology (mRNA) that has the power to tamper with the very genetic makeup of the cells in my body. Maybe because I’m more worried about herd instinct than herd immunity. Maybe because I’ve heard wonky scientists gloating about the power they wield over everyday Americans.

Maybe because Big Pharma’s getting rich by inventing reasons why you just might need to get a new shot every year. Maybe because I want to decide for myself what’s best for me. Think of it this way. You are afraid of dying of COVID-19. So am I. But that doesn’t mean I am going to die from COVID. In fact, there is what I would characterize as an acceptably small chance I will die of COVID, and I’m 66 years old, right smack in the realm of the supposedly at-risk elderly population. According to data from the CDC reported at RationalGround.com, from Jan. 1, 2020 until Sept. 11, 2021, there were 12,702 U.S. deaths from COVID for my age cohort out of an estimated population of 3,618,069. That’s a death rate of 0.365%.

Meanwhile, 100,449 people my age died during the same period of all causes, suggesting I have about a 12% chance of dying of something this year, a much scarier possibility than dying of COVID-19. Think of it! If I’m going to die this year, I’m 33 times more likely to die of anything else besides COVID. Based on the propaganda we are inundated with every day about the virus, I should be terrified! There are way worse things out there trying to kill me than COVID. But I’m not terrified, not even slightly, because life is always a risk. I can temper my risks by avoiding downhill skiing, ATVs, booze, surfing, and motorsports. Those are my choices, but heaven forbid I should dictate that you have to avoid those activities because they are not 100% safe. Your behavior is none of my business. I make my choices, and you make yours. Except with COVID. Then Joe Biden makes my choices, trying to protect me from myself.

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Wouldn’t he be circling Biden then?

Is Durham Circling Jake Sullivan? (Turley)

As soon as the conspiracy theory was packaged and delivered the FBI and the media by Sussman, the indictment recounts an exchange between some of those “VIPs”: “… on or about September 15, 2016, Campaign Lawyer-1 exchanged emails with the Clinton Campaign’s campaign manager, communications director, and foreign policy advisor concerning the Russian Bank-1 allegations that SUSSMANN had recently shared with Reporter-1.” The campaign lawyer reportedly was Elias, and the “foreign policy advisor” reportedly was Sullivan. Sullivan was quoted in an official campaign press statement as stating that the Alfa Bank allegation “could be the most direct link yet between Donald Trump and Moscow.”

In the statement, Sullivan said: “Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank. This secret hotline may be the key to unlocking the mystery of Trump’s ties to Russia … This line of communication may help explain Trump’s bizarre adoration of Vladimir Putin.” The U.S. intelligence community ultimately rejected the Alfa Bank conspiracy. It also concluded that the Steele dossier not only relied on a suspected Russian agent but likely was used by Russian intelligence to spread disinformation through the Clinton campaign. Yet, when Sullivan was later questioned by Congress, he went full Sergeant Schultz, claiming he basically did not have a clue about the basis or origins of the Alfa Bank controversy or other campaign-orchestrated scandals.

Sullivan was adept at laying qualifiers upon qualifiers to render statements useless: “broadly speaking, at some point in the summer, and I don’t remember exactly when it was, around the convention, I learned that there was an effort to do some research into the ties between Trump and Russia.” That will make any false statement claim difficult absent direct involvement in the planning of these “campaign efforts.” Sullivan denied knowing that Elias or Sussman were working for the Clinton campaign, despite numerous news articles identifying Elias as the campaign’s general counsel. Sullivan just shrugged and said: “To be honest with you, Marc wears a tremendous number of hats, so I wasn’t sure who he was representing. I sort of thought he was, you know, just talking to us as, you know, a fellow traveler in this — in this campaign effort.”

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“..other skills that were not required, but beneficial: Experience calming herds of rabid, sleepless passengers, expertise in flying through mysterious, invisible weather events, and the ability to land the plane.”

Southwest Offers Free Flights To Anyone Vaccinated Who Can Fly A Plane (BBee)

A spokesperson for Southwest Airlines has announced delays in flights due to strange weather that seems to pass over competitors’ planes, only affecting their own signature blue and orange aircraft. The airline has stated these delays have no connection to their pilots protesting vaccine mandates. The spokesperson then announced a new Southwest Airlines incentive program for potential passengers: All flights, domestic or international, are free to any passenger who is vaccinated and can also fly a plane.


“The requirements to take advantage of these incredible savings are simple,” said Southwest CEO Bob Southwest to a crowd of customers who have been stuck at the airport all weekend and were frothing at the mouth in anger. “Show us proof of vaccination against COVID-19 and promise us you know how fly commercial airliners, and your flight is on us.” The CEO then mentioned other skills that were not required, but beneficial: Experience calming herds of rabid, sleepless passengers, expertise in flying through mysterious, invisible weather events, and the ability to land the plane.

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Oct 012021
 
 October 1, 2021  Posted by at 8:26 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , ,  69 Responses »


M. C. Escher Development II 1939

 

Boosters Aren’t Effective Because They Target Viruses Previous Identity (DCP)
The Impact Of Covid Vaccination On Alpha And Delta Variant Transmission (Mxiv)
It’s A MYSTERY! -The Hell It Is (Denninger)
Berejiklian Resigns As New South Wales Premier (Sky)
NSW Threatens Jail Time For Unvaccinated Who Try to Enter Businesses (SN)
Los Angeles Moves Toward Barring The Unvaccinated From Most Businesses (R.)
Majority Of Americans Think Those Refusing Vaccine Should Not Lose Job (JTN)
‘Build Back Better’ Act Proposes To Increase Unvaxx Fines Ten Fold (SN)
Progressive Democrats Derail Pelosi’s Planned Vote On Infrastructure Bill (JTN)
Durham Issues Fresh Round Of Subpoenas (CNN)
The News is America’s New Religion (Taibbi)
Julian Assange Supporters Write To Scott Morrison Over Reported CIA Plot (Abc.au)

 

 

Rand Paul
https://twitter.com/i/status/1443677734383898631

 

 

 

 

Land of the free

 

 

“..Iceland, where 77% are vaccinated but cases are now 677 per-cent higher than a year ago. Norway is 66% vaccinated and cases are up 1.067 per-cent.”

Boosters Aren’t Effective Because They Target Viruses Previous Identity (DCP)

Dr. Ryan Cole, a pathologist and a Mayo Clinic-trained medical expert said the so-called “vaccines” against COVID-19 aren’t really effective because they are made to address the virus as it previously was, not as it is now. “It’s because the coronavirus mutates,” Dr. Cole said when he was interviewed on the Steve Deace Blaze TV show online. Dr. Cole has dealt with thousands of COVID cases in recent months. Deace posed questions about the extremely inconsistent results from around the globe. For example, in Israel, 80% of adults are vaccinated, yet year-to-year cases are up 130% and deaths are up 56%. And in Iceland, where 77% are vaccinated but cases are now 677 per-cent higher than a year ago. Norway is 66% vaccinated and cases are up 1.067 per-cent. But in Malta, cases are down 10% from a year ago.

Cole explained that the inconsistencies and randomness come because the vaccine really isn’t a vaccine; it’s more of a “therapy.” Dr. Cole added, “A true vaccine would allow one to be immune. We’re not seeing that.” “What would be good is to implement are the drugs that shall not be named, as prevention protocols,” Cole explained. Deace then commented, “The government and its media allies have for more than a year now tried to suppress access to and information about products like Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine which have been shown to reduce the impact COVID-19. Dr. Cole responded, “With the existing programs to withhold treatments for COVID, and push ‘vaccines,’ both the vaccinated and unvaccinated get sick.” “Early treatments save lives in both of those groups,” he added.

Dr. Cole further explained, “The viral mutations, however, prevent any developed vaccine from being fully effective, because it was made to address a previous rendition of the bug.” “What we have done is obviously made a shot that was partially effective, but these boosters are the wrong protection for the wrong virus,” Cole added.

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3 months. 12 weeks. Until your next shot.

The Impact Of Covid Vaccination On Alpha And Delta Variant Transmission (Mxiv)

Background Pre-Delta, vaccination reduced transmission of SARS-CoV-2 from individuals infected despite vaccination, potentially via reducing viral loads. While vaccination still lowers the risk of infection, similar viral loads in vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals infected with Delta question how much vaccination prevents onward transmission.

Methods We performed a retrospective observational cohort study of contacts of SARS-CoV-2-infected index cases using contact testing data from England. We used multivariable logistic regression to investigate the impact of index case and contact vaccination on transmission, and how this varies with Alpha and Delta variants (classified using S-gene detection/calendar trends) and time since second vaccination. Results 51,798/139,164(37.2%) contacts tested were PCR-positive. Two doses of BNT162b2 or ChAdOx1 vaccines in Alpha variant index cases independently reduced PCR-positivity in contacts (aOR, adjusted odds ratio vs. unvaccinated=0.18[95%CI 0.12-0.29] and 0.37[0.22-0.63] respectively).

The Delta variant attenuated vaccine-associated reductions in transmission: two BNT162b2 doses reduced Delta transmission (aOR=0.35[0.26-0.48]), more than ChAdOx1 (aOR=0.64[0.57-0.72]; heterogeneity p<0.001). Variation in viral load (Ct values) explained only a modest proportion of vaccine-associated transmission reductions. Transmission reductions declined over time since second vaccination, for Delta reaching similar levels to unvaccinated individuals by 12 weeks for ChAdOx1 and attenuating substantially for BNT162b2. Protection from vaccination in contacts also declined in the 3 months after second vaccination.

Conclusions Vaccination reduces transmission of Delta, but by less than the Alpha variant. The impact of vaccination decreased over time. Factors other than PCR-measured viral load are important in vaccine-associated transmission reductions. Booster vaccinations may help control transmission together with preventing infections.

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“Clotshot indeed.”

It’s A MYSTERY! -The Hell It Is (Denninger)

“During the summer there was a 25 per cent rise in the number of people rushed to the Golden Jubilee National Hospital in Clydebank with partially blocked arteries cutting blood supply to the heart.”

C’mon jackasses — a 25% increase in one year? You know good and damn well that’s not environmental nor is it due to people’s lifestyles. Yes, lifestyle causes this in many cases but it takes decades to get you due to your lifestyle, not months or a year. What did we change in the subject population less than a year ago, and since this is now happening what leads you to believe it is a one-off?

Oh, this is largely in older people too. Which is exactly who the US Government, anyway, would like to see take the dirt nap since that cuts down Medicare expenses and, to the extent they wind up in nursing homes later, Medicaid expenses too if they have no money. Congratulations on increasing your odds of pulling the short straw — by a lot. Oh, and how many people have an occlusive heart attack at 42? Not many. This guy did — here in the US. DVT, heart attack and a PE at 42? Uh huh. You’re damned lucky you’re not dead and you and I both know damned well why it happened too. Clotshot indeed.

Read more …

Some things you can’t make up. Gladys Berejiklian is possibly the worst face of all lockdowns. She resigns because of a corruption investigation. What corruption? I kid you not: She’s been accused of taking tens of millions from Pfizer and AstraZeneca.

Berejiklian Resigns As New South Wales Premier (Sky)

Gladys Berejiklian has resigned as premier of New South Wales after it was revealed she is under investigation from ICAC. She will also step down as the member for Willoughby, which will trigger a by-election. “I have made it clear on numerous occasions that if any of my ministers were the subject of allegations being investigated by an integrity agency or law enforcement, then he or she should stand aside during the course of the investigation until their name was cleared,” Ms Berejiklian said. “The reason for my stance was not to have made any presumptions, as to their conduct, but rather to maintain the integrity of the public office which has held, which that person is held whilst an investigation was completed.


“That same standard must always apply to me also as the premier, however standing aside is not an option for me as the premier of New South Wales as the people of this state need certainty as to who the leader is during the challenging times of the pandemic. “I cannot predict how long it will take the ICAC to complete this investigation, let alone deliver a report in circumstances where I was first called to give evidence in a public hearing nearly 12 months ago. “Therefore, it pains me to announce that I have no option but to resign from the Office of Premier, my resignation will take effect as soon as the New South Wales Liberal Party can elect a new parliamentary leader in order to allow the new leader and government, a fresh start.”

Clive Palmer

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Yeah, same state, same woman.

NSW Threatens Jail Time For Unvaccinated Who Try to Enter Businesses (SN)

Authorities in New South Wales are threatening to jail Australians who don’t show a COVID-19 vaccination pass when they enter businesses. Yes, really. NSW Customer Service Minister Victor Dominello threatened people who he described as “fraudsters” with arrest if they try to enter premises with “fake vaccine passports” “If people want to do the wrong thing, if they get found out, as I said, it could be jail time there,” said Dominello. According to the report, people who also try to enter without showing anything will also be subject to arrest.


“Mr Dominello reiterated that those who refuse to show their vaccine status when entering shops, restaurants and other venues should be reported to the police,” reports News.com.au. Enforcing such a system may be problematic however, as the Police Commissioner of New South Wales recently asserted that his officers wouldn’t be checking medical papers. “The role of police in terms of vaccine passports, we will not be walking through restaurants, cafes and pubs checking if people are double vaccinated,” said Mick Fuller. We now face a two tier society where the unvaccinated are not only brazenly discriminated against, but actually thrown in prison if they try to engage in basic commerce or lifestyle activities.

Read more …

People are planning to leave LA in droves. Businesses will follow.

Los Angeles Moves Toward Barring The Unvaccinated From Most Businesses (R.)

Los Angeles officials on Wednesday signaled they would vote next week to prohibit unvaccinated people from entering most businesses in the United States’ second-largest city, one of the nation’s most severe crackdowns so far of the COVID-19 pandemic. All but one of the City Council members present on Wednesday said they supported the proposed “emergency” ordinance, which would require proof of vaccination to enter restaurants, bars, shopping centers, gyms and other indoor spaces. “I am sick and tired of yahoos going into Trader Joe’s (grocery store) refusing to wear a mask,” City Council member Paul Kerkorian said in angry remarks. “I am fed up with people who want to make this into such a politicized issue they have lost all semblance of civility in our society.”


If the proposal is approved next week, as expected, Los Angeles would join San Francisco and New York among major U.S. cities requiring proof of vaccination for indoor businesses. The new rule would take effect in November. Political leaders across the United States, led by Democratic President Joe Biden, have ratcheted up pressure on the unvaccinated in recent weeks. Laws requiring proof of vaccinations are deeply controversial in the United States, with many Americans criticizing them as unconstitutional and authoritarian. A majority of the Los Angeles City Council was prepared to vote in favor of the proof-of-vaccine measure on Wednesday. They were frustrated in that effort by council member Joe Buscaino, who, by withholding his vote, stood in the way of a so-called “unanimous consent.” Buscaino said the vaccine mandate could not be enforced, citing a report by the city’s Department of Building and Safety that it was not equipped to take on such a law enforcement role.

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Impossible to even imagine a year ago, But here we are.

“..83.5% of Republican voters don’t want the unvaccinated to lose their jobs while 47.9% of Democrats feel the same way..”

Majority Of Americans Think Those Refusing Vaccine Should Not Lose Job (JTN)

New polling on President Joe Biden’s federal vaccine mandate shows the majority of Americans do not think unvaccinated workers should lose their jobs. Convention of States Action released the poll Wednesday, which reports that 65% of surveyed voters “do not believe Americans should lose their jobs if they object to taking the COVID-19 vaccine.” The poll also found 22.2% believe those who refuse the mandate should lose their job, while 12.8% aren’t sure. The data comes as health care workers around the country have lost their jobs for refusing the vaccine, causing staffing problems in some hospitals. Under Biden’s rule, millions of more workers could be in the same position.

Feelings on the mandate differed significantly based on political affiliation. According to the poll, “63.6% of Independent voters do not believe Americans should lose their jobs if they object to taking the COVID-19 vaccine, while 15.5% believe they should, and 20.9% aren’t sure.” Those independents tend to be key swing voters targeted by both parties in election years. The poll found 83.5% of Republican voters don’t want the unvaccinated to lose their jobs while 47.9% of Democrats feel the same way. The mandate in question requires all federal employees and government contractors to be vaccinated. It also requires all businesses with more than 100 employees to ensure their workers are vaccinated or test them weekly, among other new rules and guidelines released by the Biden administration earlier this month.

“This plan will ensure that we are using every available tool to combat COVID-19 and save even more lives in the months ahead, while also keeping schools open and safe, and protecting our economy from lockdowns and damage,” the White House said when announcing the mandate. Convention of States Action partnered with The Trafalgar Group to conduct the survey Sept. 17th through Sept. 19th. They queried 1,000 likely 2022 election voters. Biden already faces lawsuits over the requirement, and more than two dozen Republican governors have made clear their opposition to the vaccine mandate. The legal challenges and nationwide split on the federal order have set up a likely legal showdown that could go to the U.S. Supreme Court.

A different poll from the same group released earlier this month found that Americans support the Republican governors who oppose the mandate. The poll reported that 58.6% of those surveyed “do not believe President Biden has the constitutional authority to force private businesses to require vaccine mandates for employees.”

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“..any business that refuses to mandate COVID vaccination will face financial ruin…”

‘Build Back Better’ Act Proposes To Increase Unvaxx Fines Ten Fold (SN)

Joe Biden’s so called “Build Back Better’ Act has included COVID as an occupational hazard, and proposes to increase fines for non-compliant companies by TEN TIMES, meaning they could face punishments of $700,000 per violation for employees who are not vaccinated. The Daily Mail reports that fines for “willful and repeated violation” of the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 (OSHA) will increase from $70,000 for each violation to $700,000 under the $3.5 trillion spending legislation. The report also notes that serious violations will go up from $7,000 to $70,000, while repeated violations will mean fines of no less than $50,000 per violation, increased from $5,000.


Any business that does not address and correct the violation within an allocated time period will then be fined $70,000 PER DAY, up from $7,000. In other words, any business that refuses to mandate COVID vaccination will face financial ruin. Biden has decreed that any company with over 100 employees will be subjected to the mandate. As we have previously noted, around half of Americans are opposed to the mandate, with almost 60 per cent saying they do not believe Biden has the constitutional authority to enforce vaccine mandates. Biden’s commerce Secretary has claimed that ‘no one is being forced’ to take the vaccines, and that “There’s always been a choice” for workers to stay at home.

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Tastes like a game.

Progressive Democrats Derail Pelosi’s Planned Vote On Infrastructure Bill (JTN)

Progressive Democrats derailed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s planned vote on the Biden-backed $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill on Thursday. Moderate House Democrats had pushed for a vote on the bipartisan Senate infrastructure bill as opposed to waiting for the completion of the Democrats’ final filibuster-proof budget reconciliation bill. To pass the framework in August for the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill, Pelosi negotiated with moderate Democrats and had agreed to hold a vote on the Senate-passed infrastructure bill by Sept. 27. As of Thursday morning, Pelosi was not backing down from holding a vote on that bill, but House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said later in the day that he was not confident the bill would pass alone.

Meanwhile, on the Senate side, West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin reiterated he would not vote for the $3.5 trillion reconciliation proposal and tartly rejected its level of spending on new public benefit programs as “fiscal insanity.” Manchin indicated that he would support some of the tax reform items in the bill. Ahead of the scheduled House vote on the infrastructure bill, many progressives had said they were ready to vote against it if a final $3.5 trillion filibuster-proof budget reconciliation bill wasn’t voted on first. House Progressive Caucus Chairwoman Pramila Jayapal said recently that progressives had enough votes to sink the infrastructure bill. This scenario played out on Thursday evening when the vote was delayed, prompting Pelosi to send out a “Dear Colleague” letter indicating that she was pressing the pause button on the infrastructure bill vote.

“It has been a day of progress in fulfilling the President’s vision to Build Back Better,” Pelosi wrote. “Thanks to so many members and staff, the work is being done. Discussions continue with the House, Senate and White House to reach a bicameral framework agreement to Build Back Better through a reconciliation bill. Many thanks to members of our caucus for your participation and patience over the past few days. The bipartisan infrastructure bill has already had its rule passed and its debate has concluded. All of this momentum brings us closer to shaping the reconciliation bill in a manner that will pass the House and Senate.”

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CNN getting worried about Durham?

Durham Issues Fresh Round Of Subpoenas (CNN)

Special Counsel John Durham has issued a new set of subpoenas, including to a law firm with close ties to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, an indication that Durham could be trying to build a broader criminal case, according to people briefed on the matter. So far, Durham’s two-year probe into the FBI’s Russia investigation hasn’t brought about the cases Republicans has hoped it would. The grand jury subpoenas for documents came earlier this month after Durham charged Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann with lying to the FBI in a September 2016 meeting. During that meeting, Sussmann handed over data purporting to show links between the Trump Organization and Russia’s Alfa Bank. That tip became part of the FBI’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election but the FBI ultimately couldn’t find evidence of a link.

In seeking additional documents from Sussmann’s former law firm, Perkins Coie, investigators from the special counsel’s office appear to be sharpening their focus on the Democratic political machinery during the 2016 campaign and efforts to tie Trump to Russia. Perkins Coie’s clients in 2016 included the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. The law firm also hired on the campaign’s behalf a research company that commissioned the dossier from ex-British spy Christopher Steele that alleged that Trump was compromised by Russia. Durham has already accessed reams of the law firm’s records, such as billing records, meeting calendars and a log of documents that the firm protects under attorney-client privilege. Some of the newly sought-after documents have been guarded so far by attorney-client privilege.

Durham’s new subpoenas could lead to a court fight over privileged information and draw more about the Clinton campaign into the open. While working for Perkins Coie, Sussmann also represented Rodney Joffe, a cybersecurity expert referred to in Durham’s indictment as “Tech Executive-1.” In 2016, Joffe, who has not been previously identified, worked with researchers to collect internet data about the Trump Organization that Sussmann took to the FBI. Durham’s continued use of the federal grand jury in Washington, DC, signals that he could be interested in adding to Sussmann’s charges or bringing cases against additional defendants. Still, more than two years after being commissioned by then Attorney General William Barr to investigate whether federal authorities improperly targeted the Trump campaign, Durham has little to show for his efforts.

His special counsel probe, which has lasted longer than Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, has so far brought only two lying charges against little-known figures, including the case against Sussmann, who has pleaded not guilty. The results have underwhelmed Trump supporters who had hoped former top FBI and intelligence officials would be prosecuted for “spying” on Trump and his campaign. Already the scope of Durham’s probe has narrowed after Barr announced last year that investigators had found no wrongdoing by the CIA. Yet Durham has continued his investigation, largely in secrecy, working out of a non-descript office building near trendy Washington’s Union Market.

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Feels a bit stale, Matt.

The News is America’s New Religion (Taibbi)

News in America used to be fun to talk about, fun to joke about, interesting to think about. Now it’s an interminable bummer, because the press business has taken on characteristics of that other institution where talking, joking, and thinking aren’t allowed: church. We have two denominations, both as fact-averse as real churches, as is shown in polls about, say, pandemic attitudes, where Americans across the board consistently show they know less than they think. Surveys found a third of Republicans think the asymptomatic don’t transmit Covid-19, or that the disease kills fewer people than the flu or car crashes. But Democrats also test out atrociously, with 41% thinking Covid-19 patients end up hospitalized over half the time — the real number is 1%-5% — while also wildly overestimating dangers to children, the percentage of Covid deaths under the age of 65, the efficacy of masks, and other issues.

This is the result of narrative-driven coverage that focuses huge amounts of resources on the wrongness of the rival faith. Blue audiences love stories about the deathbed recantations of red-state Covid deniers, some of which are real, some more dubious. A typical Fox story, meanwhile, might involve a woman who passed out and crashed into a telephone pole while wearing a mask alone in her car. Tales of each other’s stupidity are the new national religion, and especially among erstwhile liberals, we take them more seriously than any religion has been taken in the smart set in a long, long time.

In the eighties we made celebrities out of televangelists like Jimmy Swaggart and Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, but none were believable as religious authorities. They were too interesting: they dressed like Vegas club acts, humped everything that moved, and had the enormous balls to stare at cameras and ask for money so the minister and his wife could be driving the right fully-loaded Caddy when Christ returned. By the Reagan years no one believed in miracles or divine retribution anyway, not even Catholics, whose priests had all read Nietzsche and would quietly concede the church’s whole act was a well-meaning metaphor, if cornered by an adult. (Their rap to kids was obviously different; insert your own joke here).

By the time Trump arrived, there was only one route left for media companies, who’d lost ad revenue to Internet platforms, to make money: putting content behind a paywall. Essentially, news companies passed a hat and asked for donations, just like churches. Also like churches, they began to sell belief instead of fact. They turned viewers and readers into congregationalists, people who’d be less interested in news than calls to spiritual battle. Fox had already proven this revenue model could work. In the Trump years, led by the New York Times — which lost other forms of income but went from 1.2 million digital subscribers in 2016 to 7.5 million in 2020 — the rest of the commercial media followed suit.

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I hope they don’t expect an honest answer.

Julian Assange Supporters Write To Scott Morrison Over Reported CIA Plot (Abc.au)

A group of prominent Australians have written to the Prime Minister, asking what the government knew about an alleged CIA plot to kill or kidnap WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in London, the ABC can reveal. The members of the group, who all visited Assange in London, have also demanded the government reveal whether they were caught up in the US plot and if their lives, too, were ever at risk. The group of 21 lawyers, journalists, academics, and activists wrote to Scott Morrison after revelations in the US media this week the CIA had contemplated kidnapping or assassinating Assange and others in 2017 while the WikiLeaks founder was living in Ecuador’s London embassy.

One of the letter’s signatories, barrister Julian Burnside, who has been negotiating with Canberra to have Assange returned to Australia since 2012, said the new allegations of a planned assassination were of concern. “It’s one thing [for the government] to ignore an Australian overseas who’s in difficulty,” Mr Burnside said. “It’s altogether another to ignore an Australian overseas who may be murdered by another government, a government that is ostensibly an ally.” Another of the signatories, Melbourne lawyer Lizzie O’Shea, said: “Recent events suggest that we’re in a closer relationship with the US than ever before.” “I would like to think that doesn’t come at the expense of our citizens’ rights, and this [letter] is one test of whether that’s true.”

The letter is signed by prominent Australians including Jennifer Robinson, Scott Ludlam, Mary Kostakidis and Kathy Lette. All of them have visited Assange at one time or another. All are concerned they may have been caught up in US intelligence operations. “We wish to know what surveillance or monitoring we have been subjected to by the intelligence agencies of our allies, the United Kingdom and United States,” the letter, sent yesterday afternoon, states. “Were any of us placed on speculative kill lists? “We also believe we have a right to know whether the Australian government was informed or consented to our communications and movements being tracked.”

Read more …

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Sep 162021
 


Pablo Picasso In “Le Lapin Agile” or harlequin with a glass 1905

 

The Spike Will Not Be Found In The Blood. It Travels “Incognito” (Chesnut)
Are Booster Shots Increasing Covid Spread And Covid Deaths? (Gato Malo)
CDC Now Lists Vaccinated Deaths as Unvaccinated (Mercola)
So You’d Like To NOT Have Society Collapse? (Denninger)
39% of Australians Unable To Perform Daily Activities After Vaccine (TE)
Mask Mandates And Vaccine Passports Are A Performance (Stuart Waiton)
91% Of China’s Youth Aged 12-17 Are Fully Vaccinated Against Covid (RT)
Are You Kidding Me, Pfizer, Volume 1 Gazillion (Berenson)
A Slog Vaxicide Special (Ward)
France Leads The Way In Holding Covid Incompetents To Account (RT)
33 Districts In Uttar Pradesh Are Now Covid-free (HT)
EU Red Tape Prevents Russia From Boosting Gas Supplies To Europe – Lavrov (RT)
US ‘Lost Focus’ In War On Terror – Oliver Stone (RT)
Durham Reportedly Seeking Indictment Against Clinton Campaign Lawyer (JTN)

 

 

Looking worse, fast. I’m starting to think you will need ivermectin -and/or HCQ- to fight off the vaccine. Preferably, don’t get vaccinated, but if you have been, get ivermectin. And whatever you do, stay away from booster shots.

“We are very certain about this, the vaccine is directly killing individuals”.

“The growing consensus among vaccination researchers is that exposure to 5-8 of these mRNA jabs over a relatively brief period of time will – dependent on the underlying health of the individual – result in death.”

 

 

McCullough NZ the vaccine is directly killing individuals

 

 

Thread by @Parsifaler (Walter Chesnut). Yikes.

The Spike Will Not Be Found In The Blood. It Travels “Incognito” (Chesnut)

The Autoimmune Mechanism. THE SPIKE WILL NOT BE FOUND IN THE BLOOD. IT IS TRAVELLING “INCOGNITO” INTRACELLULARLY. WE KNEW IT ENTERED CELLS VIA ENDOCYTOSIS IN 2008! Yesterday I observed that every cell the Spike Protein invades seems to cause the body to develop autoimmunity against it. I believe I have discovered the mechanism. It is a very brief and straightforward mechanism. Most likely many spikes do NOT stay on the cell surface, once they are expressed via spike protein therapied. The Spike is proven to be brought into the cell by Endocytosis. The spike protein is internalized into cells rapidly and is detected in cells within 5 mi, a hallmark of endocytosis. The amount of spike protein in cells continues to increase for up to 30 min. Thus, SARS-CoV-2 spike protein enters cells via endocytosis.

Once it is in the cell, its signaling damages mitochondria. The team then replicated this process in the lab, exposing healthy endothelial cells (which line arteries) to the spike protein. They showed that the spike protein damaged the cells by binding ACE2. This binding disrupted ACE2’s molecular signaling to mitochondria (organelles that generate energy for cells), causing the mitochondria to become damaged and fragmented. Once the mitochondria are damaged, this then activates the autoimmune response of the body. The accumulation of defective mitochondria led to overproduction of an inflammatory protein called type 1 interferon.

The findings suggest that failed quality control of mitochondria may cause Sjogren’s, lupus, and other autoimmune diseases through production of interferon. The Spike Protein then proceeds to travel from cell to cell via EXTRACELLULAR VESICLES. This means, of course, they will NOT BE FOUND IN THE BLOOD. We would not have been aware all this time. As the S1 unit has been found in monocytes 15 months post infection, it may be traveling intracellularly, executing a “Sherman’s March Through Georgia” on the mitochondria, resulting in multisystemic autoimmunity. Again, we have known the spike enters cells via endocytosis since 2008.

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“..we are seeing such a strong surge in deaths from a delta variant that looks to have a much lower CFR than prior variants..”

Are Booster Shots Increasing Covid Spread And Covid Deaths? (Gato Malo)

israel has been playing an interesting role as a bit of a canary in the coal mine. They have been pushing vaccines, vaccine passports, and now boosters harder than just about anyplace else on earth. They also make a good lab as they report solid (by covid standards) data and occupy only one regional climate zone so we do not need to adjust for heterogeneous seasonal surges within the aggregate (as we do in the US). And one thing is becoming very clear: whatever they are doing is not working and even their health ministers are having to admit this. This dip was (as i expected) driven by a drop in testing and reporting due to rosh hashanah (and will likely dip again late this week for yom kippur) but next week, we should be starting to get clearer data again.

With over 30% of the total population now having had a booster shot since the commencement of that program in earnest on august 1st, we should be able to get a sense of efficacy. I ran the series of booster uptake and plotted it vs deaths per day. What i saw looked like cause for concern and appears to validate calls from the departing FDA vaccine experts to get a good, hard look at this data before doing anything aggressive. Boosters began to rise and by the time they hit even 0.5%, deaths were starting to rise with them. the two move in near perfect lockstep. Clearly, correlation is not proof of causality, but this is an awful lot of signal to ignore out of hand especially given our strong reasons to presume causal linkage. (that said, the alignment with seasonal surge poses difficulties in separating signal source)


It’s further worrying that even with a 67% vaccination rate at the beginning of this rise and a significant portion of the population having already had exposure to covid and cohorts of the highest risk already having been depleted in past waves, that we are seeing such a strong surge in deaths from a delta variant that looks to have a much lower CFR than prior variants. (0.4% vs 1.1% per UK variants of concern data) It has barely attenuated at all (and it’s not clear we’ve reached highs. Consider the “false flat” from last year and how much later this surge was this year. We could be at the half way mark. This will bear watching.)

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“..if you have received a COVID injection, the CDC’s guidelines call for your PCR test to be run at a CT of 28 or less. If you are unvaccinated, your PCR test is to be run at a CT of 40..”

CDC Now Lists Vaccinated Deaths as Unvaccinated (Mercola)

According to the CDC,6 you’re not counted as fully vaccinated until a full 14 days have passed since your second injection in the case of Pfizer or Moderna, or 14 days after your first dose of Janssen. This is how the CDC defines a vaccine breakthrough case: “… a vaccine breakthrough infection is defined as the detection of SARS-CoV-2 RNA or antigen in a respiratory specimen collected from a person ≥14 days after they have completed all recommended doses of a U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-authorized COVID-19 vaccine.” In other words, if you’ve received one dose of Pfizer or Moderna and develop symptomatic COVID-19, get admitted to the hospital and/or die from COVID, you’re counted as an unvaccinated case. If you’ve received two doses and get ill within 14 days, you’re still counted as an unvaccinated case.

The problem with this is that over 80% of hospitalizations and deaths appear to be occurring among those who have received the jabs, but this reality is hidden by the way cases are defined and counted. A really clever and common strategy of the CDC during the pandemic has been to change the definitions and goalposts so it supports their nefarious narrative. For example, the CDC has quietly changed the definition of “vaccine,” apparently in an attempt to validate calling the COVID mRNA gene therapies vaccines. In an August 26, 2021, archived version7 of vaccine, the CDC defines it as a “product that stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease, protecting the person from that disease.”

But a few days later, a new definition appeared on the CDC’s website,8 which now says a vaccine is a “preparation that is used to stimulate the body’s immune response against diseases.” The differences in the definitions are subtle but distinct: The first one defined a vaccine as something that will “produce immunity.” But, since the COVID-19 vaccines are not designed to stop infection but, rather, to only lessen the degree of infection, it becomes obvious that the new definition was created to cover the COVID vaccines. It’s not just the CDC’s definition of a breakthrough case that skews the data. Even more egregious and illogical is the fact that the CDC even has two different sets of testing guidelines — one for vaccinated patients and another for the unvaccinated.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, the CDC has recommended a PCR test cycle threshold (CT) of 40.9 This flies in the face of scientific consensus, which has long been that a CT over 35 will produce 97% false positives, essentially rendering the test useless. In mid-May 2021, the CDC finally lowered its recommended CT count, but only for patients who have received one or more COVID shots. So, if you have received a COVID injection, the CDC’s guidelines call for your PCR test to be run at a CT of 28 or less. If you are unvaccinated, your PCR test is to be run at a CT of 40, which grossly overestimates the true prevalence of infection. The end result is that unvaccinated individuals who get tested are FAR more prone to get false positives, while those who have received the jab are more likely to get an accurate diagnosis of infection.

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“I give this right up into the Christmas season when Biden’s mandate allegedly will go into effect before it totally screws the economy.”

So You’d Like To NOT Have Society Collapse? (Denninger)

Go ahead Governors, let businesses mandate jabs and masks. Let Biden get away with his bull****. Don’t put in place E/Os and don’t call back the legislature into special session right here and now, today, and put a conclusive stop to all of it. I give this right up into the Christmas season when Biden’s mandate allegedly will go into effect before it totally screws the economy. With that, down goes the market, commercial real estate detonates (what happens when that Lowes closes due to lack of staff and so do another couple of nice big-box stores for the same reason down the street — everywhere at once!) and with it the debt markets.

There are already places where WalMarts are being forced to close to restock shelves as they’re so short of people and can’t hire more, having put in place employee mandates which enough prospective and current employees are responding to with “**** that!” that the only option remaining to them is to lock the doors and repurpose the few people they do have. This area is tourist-heavy and now, with schools allegedly back open, the traffic shifts — down a bit now, down more as we go into the winter. That local places still can’t manage to hire tells the tale — the people are tired of the abuse and, for the offered wage, they won’t apply or work. Give someone 18 months to figure out how to give you the finger and many will do exactly that.

On top of this you have all of those who complied with said mandates and now are out sick, many with the coof which, the company and the government assured us all would not happen if you just rolled up your sleeve. Of course they lied and still are, trying to claim it’s “rare” that people get materially ill after being vaccinated against Covid. That’s just the latest line of bull**** and, given the sick rate among those who have been jabbed it’s obvious if you pay a single bit of attention. Good luck Biden along with governors and local officials — you’re going to need it, and were I you in this market today I’d be rather careful if you’re not ok with a 201k — which is what you might have left of your 401k as we approach Christmas.

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It gets worse fast.

39% of Australians Unable To Perform Daily Activities After Vaccine (TE)

The National Centre for Immunisation and Research (NCIRS) in Australia are currently leading a collaboration with the Australia’s Government known as AusVaxSafety. The group has been conducting active vaccine surveillance of the Covid-19 vaccines in use in Australia to “ensure their ongoing safety”. Up to the 16th August 2021 over 1.4 million Austalians had partipated in the surveillance completing more than 2.4 million safety surveys, outlining their experience following the Covid-19 vaccination and the published results show the following –


Pfizer Vaccine – 1st DoseFollowing the first dose of the Pfizer vaccine 1,007,479 people responded to an SMS/email about their health in the three days after having the jab. The results show that 37.2% reported having an adverse reaction, with 374,832 reporting at least one adverse event. 0.5% of participants also reported seeing a doctor or attending hospital in the three days following vaccination due to an adverse reaction. This equates to 5,037 people. Whilst 6.7% of participants reported missing work, study or routine duties for a short period – meaning 67,501 people were left unable to perform daily activities following their first dose of the Pfizer mRNA Covid-19 injection.

Pfizer Vaccine – 2nd Dose Following the 2nd dose of the Pfizer vaccine 770,864 people responded to an SMS/email about their health in the three days after having the jab. The results show that 56.4% reported having an adverse reaction, a significant increase on the percentage of people who reported having an adverse reaction after having their first dose of the Pfizer jab. 1.3% of participants also reported seeing a doctor or attending hospital in the three days following vaccination due to an adverse reaction. This equates to 10,021 people – double the number of people who reported seeking medical attention after having the first dose despite there being 237,000 less particants in the 2nd dose survey. However, a huge 21.2% of participants were left unable to perform daily activities, that’s 163,423 people who reported missing work, study or routine duties.

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Dr Stuart Waiton is a senior lecturer in sociology and criminology at Abertay University. He is a columnist for the Glasgow Herald, author of three books, and is currently writing a book entitled The Criminalisation of Everything.

Mask Mandates And Vaccine Passports Are A Performance (Stuart Waiton)

The illiberal actions of Western nations over Covid are as much about a worrying shift in politics as it is about ‘the science’. Some very basic freedoms that we have traditionally enjoyed are in grave danger. In America, Joe Biden is putting pressure on workers to get the vaccine. Without proof that you do not have Covid, or evidence of vaccination, you will no longer be able to enter a workplace that has more than 100 staff. This policy will affect two-thirds of the workforce – around 100 million people. While many liberals in America have understandably reacted with outrage at changes to abortion regulations in places such as Texas, the idea of bodily autonomy as a basic human right, a right that should apply to vaccinations, barely gets a mention.

In France, vaccine passports have been introduced in cultural and leisure venues – cinemas and museums, as well as bars, restaurants, cafés, trains… Basically anywhere and everywhere you go in that country, you will be expected to show your papers. In England, thus far, vaccine passports have been ruled out. However, in Scotland, the governing Scottish National Party (SNP) have once again shown that it is always prepared to take authoritarian measures one step further than their English counterparts by introducing passports for major venues. Suggesting a puritanical dimension to this policy, not only are outdoor venues of 10,000 people and indoor venues of 500 being targeted, but all “sexual entertainment venues” will need evidence of vaccination.

Despite the fact that 84% of over-18s have had both jabs, the policy in Scotland is being introduced, in part, and arguably in large part, to put pressure on younger people to get a vaccination for a virus that has little or no effect on them.

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Again: Yikes!

91% Of China’s Youth Aged 12-17 Are Fully Vaccinated Against Covid (RT)

Just over 90% of students in China aged 12-17 have received two doses of a Covid-19 vaccine, state media has revealed. Despite the high inoculation rate, the Ministry of Education has urged caution in schools over the virus.
On Wednesday, People’s Daily shared that the two-dose vaccination rate of teachers and students over 18 years old stands at 95%, slightly higher than the rate among younger pupils. Despite the wide vaccine coverage among China’s school children, the Ministry of Education has issued a notice imploring institutes and schools to make Covid prevention and control a top priority.

The statement came after China’s National Health Commission warned that coronavirus infections were circulating at a primary school in Putian, a city home to three million in East China’s Fujian Province. The region has recorded over 150 local cases in five days, prompting some cities in other parts of the country to impose travel warnings before major holidays. A number of cities in Fujian province, such as Quanzhou and Fuzhou, have decided to suspend primary schools and kindergartens, with others switching classes to online learning.

The Chinese government has manufactured and authorized two of its own Covid jabs. While the domestically produced vaccines have been given the green light for administration to children as young as three, authorities have yet to expand the inoculation campaign to the under-12s. Several regions across China started vaccinating its teenagers against Covid in July, including the capital Beijing. Figures from the National Health Commission showed that China has so far managed to administer close to 2.16 billion vaccine doses.

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“..it conducted a single “Phase 1” trial that covered 12 people over 65..”

Are You Kidding Me, Pfizer, Volume 1 Gazillion (Berenson)

The FDA just released its briefing book for Pfizer’s request for a third dose of Comirnaty (or is that BNT162b2? No matter! It’s approved either way, sorta). It is every bit the mess we all expected. Let’s go to the highlights: Pfizer basically hasn’t bothered to test the booster AT ALL in the people actually at risk – it conducted a single “Phase 1” trial that covered 12 people over 65. The main Phase 2/3 booster trial (beware efforts to cover multiple “phases” of drug research at once, you want it bad you get it bad) included no one over 55. No one. As in NONE. Which makes total sense – why test the booster in people who actually need it because they’re at high risk from the ro? Nothing good can come of that. So that’s our trial design. Now safety:

Of the 300 people who received the booster, one had a heart attack two months later. No worries, Pfizer concluded it wasn’t related. Yay! Five percent of recipients had enlarged lymph nodes. How about effectiveness? Well, we don’t have enough data – or any data, really – telling us how well the booster will work. But the FDA made Pfizer go back and review its data from the pivotal clinical trial from last year. Pfizer compared people who received the vaccine with those who received the placebo and THEN the vaccine (the best we can do at this point, since Pfizer blew up the trial by giving placebo subjects the vaccine, double-yay!) Pfizer concluded that your annual risk of getting Covid-19 IF YOU ARE VACCINATED is about 7 percent.

Further: “An additional analysis appears to indicate that incidence of COVID-19 generally increased in each group of study participants with increasing time post-Dose 2 at the start of the analysis period.” Oh. But don’t worry, Uncle Joe already told you you can get your booster on September 20. If it’s good enough for our fearless leader, it should be good enough for the FDA, amirite? SCIENCE!

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“The growing consensus among vaccination researchers is that exposure to 5-8 of these mRNA jabs over a relatively brief period of time will – dependent on the underlying health of the individual – result in death.”

A Slog Vaxicide Special (Ward)

One can observe categorically that medical researchers in Australia, India, France, the US, Germany and Japan are showing why the mRNA Covid “vaccines” tested by Oxford Recovery on dogs killed all the vaccinated animals. The detailed nature of deadly Cytokinic overreaction is closely allied to the study of how ‘autoantibodies’ develop. These little mothers are not always good news. Antibodies are produced by our B cells in two ways: (i) randomly, and (ii) in response to a foreign protein or substance within the body. Initially, one B cell produces one specific kind of antibody. In either case, the B cell is allowed to proliferate or is killed off through a process called clonal deletion. Normally, the immune system is able to recognise and ignore the body’s own healthy proteins, cells, and tissues.

But sometimes, the immune system ceases to recognise one or more of the body’s normal constituents as “self,” leading to production of pathological autoantibodies. When this happens, these psycho antibodies go into a frenzy of destruction. The more the body is exposed to mRNA formulations, the more certain death becomes. That certainty helps to explain the emerging narrative about “booster” shots of “vaccine”. This is Anthony Fauci of the US CDC from a live media interview five days ago: “You know, I think we are going to need boosters. And I think very likely, when we look back on this, the proper complete regimen for good full protection will almost certainly be three shots – the first two that we’ve spoken about and a late third boost several months later.”

For the already vaxxed, that would make five jabs in all….and no doubt, a new strain would miraculously appear to justify a 6th and 7th top-up. The growing consensus among vaccination researchers is that exposure to 5-8 of these mRNA jabs over a relatively brief period of time will – dependent on the underlying health of the individual – result in death. In a bid to head off awkward questions about the efficacy of such drugs, Fauci then resorted to the current default lie: “This is still an outbreak, a pandemic of the unvaccinated. And when you look at the percentage of cases, particularly those that wind up with severe consequences leading to hospitalization, it is overwhelmingly among the unvaccinated.”

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That would be Macron?!

France Leads The Way In Holding Covid Incompetents To Account (RT)

Former French Health Minister Agnès Buzyn faces a possible prison term and heavy fine for “endangering the life of others” in her mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic, as France leads the way in making its leaders accountable. Despite the massive failures by governments and public health officials across the globe in dealing with the pandemic, it’s only the dead that really pay any sort of price. Most of the so-called experts simply move on, retire, or fade back into academia or big pharma where many of them came from. Not so in France, where the appetite for accountability has landed former Health Minister Agnès Buzyn in la merde,having just been indicted by the Court of Justice of the Republic – a special court established specifically to hold government ministers accountable for their actions – for “endangering the life of others” through mismanagement of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has cost the French 115,000 lives. If found guilty, she faces a year in jail and a €15,000 fine.

Buzyn, a former doctor, did not have a good pandemic. She stood on the steps of the Elysee Palace in January last year and foolishly declared, “The risks of the coronavirus spreading to the population are low.” Ooops. But Buzyn is not the only French politician with their neck on the block. Her successor, Health Minister Olivier Véran, is also under investigation, along with former Prime Minister Edouard Phillippe. Surely, this is the sort of ministerial accountability that every democratic nation should be enforcing. Too often, incompetent, bungling, and plainly dishonest politicians escape sanction when they step aside, trying to present their resignation – or sacking – as some kind of noble gesture for which they should be congratulated, not imprisoned.

[..] But what about the rest of the Covid clowns around the world, with their misinformation, backtracking on guidance, exaggeration, underestimation, and sheer, cack-handed incompetence? Right up there is WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus who, when meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, was full of praise for China’s containment of the coronavirus. The very least we could expect would be the WHO boss clearing his desk. In the US, Dr Anthony ‘Flip-flop’ Fauci faced his own messaging problems, having initially announced that the pandemic posed a “very, very low risk to the United States,” in January 2020. Since then, there have been more than 40 million reported covid cases in the US and around 652,000 deaths. I hope he likes golf, because Dr Fauci might soon have a lot more time to work on his handicap.

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Ivermectin.

33 Districts In Uttar Pradesh Are Now Covid-free (HT)

There are no active cases of the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) in 33 districts of Uttar Pradesh, the state government informed on Friday. About 67 districts have not reported a single new case of the viral infection in the last 24 hours, the government said, noting the steady improvement of the Covid-19 situation in the state. [..] Overall, the state has a total of 199 active cases, while the positivity rate came down to less than 0.01 per cent. The recovery rate, meanwhile, has improved to 98.7 per cent. As per the state’s health bulletin, Uttar Pradesh reported only 11 new Covid-19 cases and zero deaths in the last 24 hours. The fresh cases came out of 2.26 lakh samples that were tested in the last 24 hours.


As of Friday, the state government has conducted 7.42 crore tests, according to the data published by Uttar Pradesh’s health department. On the vaccination front, around 7 crore people in the state have received their first dose of the jab. The vaccination coverage in the state has exceeded 8.47 crores, out of which, 12 lakh people have been inoculated in the last 2 hours. Meanwhile, the overall nationwide tally climbed to 33,174,954 after recording 34,973 cases in the last 24 hours. This was around 19% lower than Thursday when the country had logged 43,263 fresh infections. The death toll stands at 442,009.

India home kit.

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As prices are soaring all over Europe, the EU keeps playing politics. My guess is Merkel will put a stop to that. She does’t want to leave her country in a state of huge unrest.

EU Red Tape Prevents Russia From Boosting Gas Supplies To Europe – Lavrov (RT)

Despite the completion of Nord Stream 2, Europe should not expect the Russian pipeline to start deliveries this year due to bureaucracy within the EU, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov warned on Wednesday. “Now the process of obtaining the necessary permits from the German regulator is underway. The process is not fast. The beginning of 2022 has been indicated,” Lavrov told the press. Experts say this could be the reason behind the current surge in gas prices, which have been smashing records for several days now. According to the press secretary of the German Federal Network Agency (BNetzA), Fita Wolf, Nord Stream 2’s certification may take several months, a prospect which practically forces market participants to raise prices.


To add to the problem, the pipeline’s main adversaries, Ukraine and the United States, have both vowed to complicate the certification procedure. According to Lavrov, there will be many roadblocks before certification is finally granted. “I have no doubt that attempts to attack this gas pipeline will continue,” the Russian foreign minister said. Gas prices in Europe have risen 20% since the start of trading on Wednesday. The price of October futures on the Dutch TTF exchange exceeded $964 per 1,000 cubic meters by 11am GMT, ICE data shows.

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There was ever any focus.

US ‘Lost Focus’ In War On Terror – Oliver Stone (RT)

On the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks, in a conversation with RT, award-winning director Oliver Stone condemned the US response as rooted in “exaggerated hype to go to war” and a misguided attempt at revenge-seeking. Stone condemned the bloody-minded drive for vengeance that characterized the US’ reaction to the attacks from the outset. “‘We’ve gotta get them for this’ – [but] we didn’t even know who ‘them’ were!” he exclaimed to Going Underground’s Afshin Rattansi on Wednesday, pointing out that it was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, rather than the better-known terrorist bogeyman Osama Bin Laden, who put together the entire plan “in his brain.”

“We lost focus in that moment – we were terrified, horrified, but we didn’t really look at what happened. We should have looked at why. A lot of [the government’s reasoning] was BS. A lot of it was exaggerated hype to go to war by the US and Israel,” Stone explained. Regarding US President Joe Biden’s controversial pullout from Afghanistan, Stone’s was a rare voice of support, insisting he “didn’t think it was a bad withdrawal at all” and that the sense of crisis was inflated by the media. “I appreciate a man who isn’t rushing to judgment like Bush was or Trump would be. A man who thinks about things and is deliberate … Most American presidents would fold – change their minds because of the polls,” which are “always tough on presidents.”

Stone observed that the reasons the terrorists gave for the 9/11 attacks were relatively simple: former president George H.W. Bush’s decision to station US troops on Saudi holy land and the US’ increasingly ‘one-sided’ support for Israel, despite international law. “We should have looked at why [the attacks occurred]. Bush said they envy our freedoms, but that was nonsense. They did it because of two reasons, as Osama stated very clearly,” Stone continued. “Instead of disengaging when the war was over in November, we sent in a huge amount of troops, didn’t understand the landscape, went out again and again on patrols, and, as we did in Vietnam, [the US Army] antagonized people by just being there.”

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Coming too close to Clinton?

Durham Reportedly Seeking Indictment Against Clinton Campaign Lawyer (JTN)

Special counsel John Durham reportedly is seeking a grand jury indictment against Michael Sussmann, a cybersecurity lawyer at a Democratic-allied law firm that represented Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign. According to the New York Times, the charge is said to be related to an alleged false statement to the FBI about a client’s identity when Sussmann pushed now-debunked claims about secret communications between Russia’s Alfa Bank and the Trump Organization in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election. Durham “has told the Justice Department that he will ask a grand jury to indict a prominent cybersecurity lawyer on a charge of making a false statement to the FBI,” the New York Times reported on Wednesday, citing “people familiar with the matter.”

Prior testimony and documents show Sussmann, who worked at Perkins Coie, delivered allegations about the Alfa server to then-FBI General Counsel James Baker in fall 2016. Baker has told invetsigators Sussman told him his approach was not on behalf of any client. But Sussmann told Congress he made the approach on behalf of a computer security client. The newspaper said Durham’s team has obtained records showing Sussmann billed work on the Alfa Bank matter to the Clinton campaign, the newspaper said. Sussmann’s lawyers, Sean M. Berkowitz and Michael S. Bosworth, acknowledged Wednesday that they expected him to be indicted, but denied wrongdoing.

“Mr. Sussmann has committed no crime,” they told the Times. “Any prosecution here would be baseless, unprecedented and an unwarranted deviation from the apolitical and principled way in which the Department of Justice is supposed to do its work. We are confident that if Mr. Sussmann is charged, he will prevail at trial and vindicate his good name. Durham has until the weekend to charge Sussmann because of a five-year statute of limitations, the newspaper said.

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McCullough Delta
https://twitter.com/i/status/1438056517001904130

 

 

 

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Feb 272021
 
 February 27, 2021  Posted by at 10:09 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  23 Responses »


Paul Klee Dancing Under the Empire of Fear 1938

 

House Passes Second Largest Stimulus Package In History At $1.9T (JTN)
What IS the Truth About Covid Deaths? (DM)
Nearly 1 In 5 US Adults Have Now Gotten At Least One Covid19 Vaccine Dose (F.)
Johnson & Johnson One-Shot Covid Vaccine Gets Nod From FDA Advisory Panel (G.)
What The Neera Tanden Affair Reveals About The Washington DC Swamp (Sirota)
Biden Doesn’t Penalize Saudi Crown Prince (CNN)
Shadowland (Jim Kunstler)
Trapped (CHS)
IMF To Propose Ways To Improve Transparency Of Trade In SDR (R.)
Bitcoin Energy Use ‘Bigger Than Most Countries’ (BBC)
Congress And The Slippery Slope Of Censorship (Turley)
Durham Steps Down As US Attorney, Remains In Charge Of Russia Probe (JTN)

 

 


Jim Bianco: 13 days past the impeachment vote (Feb 13) and cable news STILL spends more time talking about Trump than Biden.

 

 

Irish scandemic
https://twitter.com/i/status/1365312489198661633

 

 

A highway for Schumer, a bridge for Pelosi… and $1,400, not $2,000 checks.

House Passes Second Largest Stimulus Package In History At $1.9T (JTN)

The Democratic-led House of Representatives passed the second-largest stimulus package in U.S. history in the early hours of Saturday that includes a gradual $15 minimum wage hike, despite the Senate parliamentarian’s ruling. Two Democrats, Rep. Jared Golden of Maine and Rep. Kurt Schrader of Oregon, joined Republicans in voting against the bill. The final vote shortly after 2 a.m. was 219 to 212 and the bill now moves to the Democratic-led Senate. Democrats are using budget reconciliation to pass the American Rescue Plan, which the Senate parliamentarian ruled cannot include a minimum wage increase. Reconciliation allows Democrats to pass the bill without relying on any votes from Senate Republicans. The largest stimulus bill in history was the CARES Act that was passed in March of last year during the start of the coronavirus pandemic.

In addition to $400 weekly federal unemployment benefits and $1,400 direct payments, the legislation includes more than $100 million for transportation projects in New York and California. “This is not a bailout. It is a rescue package,” House Rules Committee Chair Rep. Jim McGovern said on Friday. House Rules Committee Ranking Member Rep. Tom Cole argued that the coronavirus bill is excessive, given that it would add $1.9 trillion to the deficit over a 5-year period. “Last year Congress passed and the president signed into law five bipartisan COVID-19 relief packages that appropriated around $4 trillion. Not all of that money has been spent yet. But if the majority has their way, within one year we will have appropriated just shy of $6 trillion for COVID-19 relief packages,” Cole said. “This is one and one-third times the amount of money the federal government appropriated for all of 2019.”

The national debt is approaching $28 trillion, according to the latest Treasury Department data. Cole said there’s about $1 trillion in unspent stimulus funds. “To make matters worse, of the previous COVID-19 relief packages, there remains nearly $1 trillion in unspent funds. Before we leap ahead into another gigantic spending package that drives the American people further into debt, shouldn’t we at least spend down the funds already allocated and see if new money is actually required?” he said. Texas Republican Rep. Michael Burgess wrote on Twitter before the vote that “the premise of this legislation was to provide relief against COVID-19. Instead it puts forward a partisan agenda.”

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Yes, but .. les jeux sont faits.

What IS the Truth About Covid Deaths? (DM)

Grieving families last night said deaths had been wrongly certified as Covid-19. Demanding an inquiry, top medical experts and MPs also insisted they were ‘certain’ that too many fatalities were being blamed on the virus. One funeral director said it was ‘a national scandal’. The claims are part of a Daily Mail investigation that raises serious questions over the spiralling death toll. More than 100 readers wrote heartbreaking letters following a moving article by Bel Mooney last Saturday. She revealed the death of her 99-year-old father, who suffered from dementia and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, was recorded as coronavirus. Dozens expressed similar frustrations that the causes of death of elderly and already-unwell relatives had been wrongly attributed.

Eight of the families who wrote to the Daily Mail have successfully urged doctors to change causes of death previously recorded as Covid-19. Layla Moran, the Liberal Democrat MP who chairs the all-party parliamentary group on coronavirus, said: ‘The Government should call a public inquiry into the handling of the pandemic immediately with an interim investigation into all Covid deaths that should report as soon as possible.’ Tory MP Paul Bristow, a member of the Commons health committee, said: ‘It’s almost certain that a number of deaths have been wrongly attributed to Covid-19. ‘Not only has this skewed figures when data has been so important in deciding how we respond to the pandemic, it has caused distress and anxiety for relatives.

A funeral director in the North West told the Mail: ‘The way Covid has been recorded and reported is a national scandal and a thorough enquiry should be opened immediately.’ Medical experts have cited pressure on doctors to include Covid-19 as a cause of death because it was last year ruled a ‘notifiable disease’, meaning any case needs to be reported officially.

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This is really starting to scare me. 100s of millions will soon have been injected with hardly tested substances designed to play footsie with their genes.

Nearly 1 In 5 US Adults Have Now Gotten At Least One Covid19 Vaccine Dose (F.)

Nearly one in five American adults have now received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine and the U.S. reached 50 million vaccine doses ahead of schedule, the White House said Friday, as the pace of vaccinations starts to pick up after a slow start ahead of a substantial increase in the country’s vaccine supply.According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) 18.5% of all U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot, and 8.9% of adults have received both doses. The U.S. has doubled its pace of vaccinations since President Joe Biden took office, White House Covid-19 response team advisor Andy Slavitt said at a briefing Friday, and delivered more than 50 million shots in 37 days, which was ahead of the Biden administration’s target.

Nearly half of Americans over age 65 have now gotten at least one shot and nearly 60% of those over 75, the White House advisor said, up from only 8% of Americans over 65 and 14% of over-75s who had been vaccinated six weeks ago. According to the CDC, the states that have the highest vaccination rates are Alaska and New Mexico—where 29.1% and 27% of adults have received at least one dose, respectively—and the lowest vaccination rates are in Texas, Georgia, Tennessee and Alabama, which have all vaccinated approximately 15% to 16% of their adult population. The White House sent out 17.5 million vaccine doses to states this week, up from 13.5 million last week and 8.6 million during Biden’s first week in office—a nearly 70% increase.

As vaccinations ramp up, the share of Americans who are willing to get inoculated soon is increasing: A Kaiser Family Foundation poll conducted Feb. 15-23 found the percentage of U.S. adults who said they were either already vaccinated or would get one as soon as they could increased to 55%, up from 47% in January, and the share who said they would “wait and see” decreased from 31% to 22%. 70.4 million. That’s how many Covid-19 vaccine doses have been administered as of Friday afternoon, according to the CDC. Those doses have covered 47.1 million people who have received at least one dose, with 22.6 million having completed both shots. The KFF poll found that 15% of adults will “definitely not” get the vaccine, as compared with 13% who said the same in January.

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So many questions … under the carpet.

Johnson & Johnson One-Shot Covid Vaccine Gets Nod From FDA Advisory Panel (G.)

The battle against Covid-19 took a major step forward on Friday as the US moved closer to distributing its first one-shot Covid-19 vaccine, after an independent expert advisory panel recommended drug regulators authorize the Johnson & Johnson vaccine for emergency use. The authorization would be a significant boost to the Biden administration’s vaccination plans, making Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine the third available to the public. Janssen, Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine subsidiary, told a congressional hearing this week that it expects to deliver 20m doses by March and a total of 100m doses before the end of June.

The Johnson & Johnson vaccine, along with those from Pfizer and Moderna, should provide the US with more than enough supply to vaccinate every vaccine-eligible person. “We’re still in the midst of this deadly pandemic,” said Dr Archana Chatterjee, a voting member of the panel and an infectious disease pediatrician at Chicago Medical School, as she explained her vote in favor of recommending the vaccine. “There is a shortage of vaccines that are currently authorized, and I think authorization of this vaccine will help meet the needs at the moment.” While regulators at the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) do not always take the advice of their advisory panels, the agency is expected to authorize the vaccine for emergency use.

[..] The convenience of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine comes with caveats. The company’s clinical trials were the first to show the potential impacts of Covid-19 variants, or evolutionary changes in the virus. The vaccine was found to 85% effective at preventing severe disease and to provide complete protection against Covid-19-related hospitalization and death after 28 days. Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine was found to be 72% effective in clinical trials in the US, but only 57% effective in South Africa, where a variant called B1351 originated.

[..] Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine uses different technology from the two vaccines currently available in the US. The new vaccine uses “viral vector” technology, which introduces the body to the genetic code for the spike protein covering the outside of the coronavirus. This code is transmitted by a second, weakened virus called an adenovirus. Immunity is provoked when the body’s immune system then recognizes the coronavirus by this key structure. Vaccines developed by Pfizer and Moderna also prompt the body to recognize spike proteins on the outside of the coronavirus, but deliver the genetic code through lipid nanoparticles, or tiny molecules of fatty acids.

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Well, she’s out for now.

What The Neera Tanden Affair Reveals About The Washington DC Swamp (Sirota)

When sifting through the wreckage to try to make sense of this epoch, future anthropologists should dust off whatever records will be preserved about Neera Tanden’s star-crossed nomination to an obscure-but-powerful White House office. The whole episode is a museum-ready diorama in miniature illustrating so many things that died in the transition from democracy to oligarchy. And in this affair, all the politicians, pundits, news outlets, and Democratic party apparatchiks involved are very blatantly telling on themselves. Tanden is being nominated to run the Office of Management and Budget, which oversees the federal budget. As a political operative and head of a corporate-funded think tank, she does not have especially relevant experience for the appointment — in fact, whether in gubernatorial administrations, mayoral offices, or Capitol Hill budget committees, there are far more qualified experts for this gig.

Moreover, her particular record would raise significant red flags as a job applicant for even a mid-level management position in any organization, much less the White House: during her tenure running the Center for American Progress, she reportedly outed a sexual harassment victim and physically assaulted an employee. While she was running the organization, CAP raked in corporate and foreign government cash and a report was revised in a way that helped a billionaire donor avoid scrutiny of his bigoted policing policy. Critics allege that Tanden busted a union of journalists. And she floated Social Security cuts when Democrats in Congress were trying to stop them.

Even if you discount Tanden’s infamous statement about Libya and oil, as well as her vicious crusade against Senator Bernie Sanders and the progressive base of the Democratic party, all of these other items would seem to disqualify Tanden for a job atop a Democratic administration that claims to respect expertise and want to protect women, workers’ rights, social programs, and government ethics. From the beginning, every single Democratic senator could have simply cited Biden’s promise to be the “most pro-union president” and stated that they would not vote to confirm anyone accused of undermining a union. Or they could have said that they are not going to allow someone who runs a corporate-funded think tank — and whose nomination is being boosted by one of the most diabolical corporate lobbying groups in Washington — to be in charge of the White House office that can grant government ethics waivers. At the absolute barest minimum, these issues should have been major topics of discussion in her confirmation hearings and in the news media.

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No, I’m talking to the father now…

Biden Doesn’t Penalize Saudi Crown Prince (CNN)

Despite promising to punish senior Saudi leaders while on the campaign trail, President Joe Biden declined to apply sanctions to the one the US intelligence community determined is responsible for the death of journalist Jamal Khashoggi: Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The choice not to punish Prince Mohammed directly puts into sharp relief the type of decision-making that becomes more complicated for a president versus a candidate, and demonstrates the difficulty in breaking with a troublesome ally in a volatile region. On Friday, Biden’s administration released an unclassified intelligence report on Khashoggi’s death, an action his predecessor refused to take as he downplayed US intelligence.

The report from the director of national intelligence says the crown prince, known as MBS, directly approved the killing of Khashoggi. But while Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced visa restrictions that affected 76 Saudis involved in harassing activists and journalists, he didn’t announce measures that touch the prince. And while a sanctions list from the Treasury Department named a former deputy intelligence chief and the Saudi Royal Guard’s rapid intervention force, the crown prince wasn’t mentioned. Two administration officials said sanctioning MBS was never really an option, operating under the belief it would have been “too complicated” and could have jeopardized US military interests in Saudi Arabia.

As a result, the administration did not even request the State Department to work up options for how to target MBS with sanctions, one State Department official said. When asked in an interview with Univision about how much he’s willing to push the crown prince to observe human rights, Biden said he was now dealing with the Saudi King and not bin Salman. He said “the rules are changing” and that significant changes could come on Monday. “We are going to hold them accountable for human rights abuses and we’re going to make sure that they, in fact, you know, if they want to deal with us, they have to deal with it in a way that the human rights abuses are dealt with,” Biden said, without being more specific about any plans to punish the crown prince.

It was a far cry from a comment in November 2019, in which Biden promised to punish senior Saudi leaders in a way former President Donald Trump wouldn’t. “Yes,” he said when directly asked if he would. “And I said it at the time. Khashoggi was, in fact, murdered and dismembered, and I believe on the order of the crown prince. And I would make it very clear we were not going to, in fact, sell more weapons to them, we were going to, in fact, make them pay the price and make them the pariah that they are.” “There’s very little social redeeming value in the present government in Saudi Arabia,” he said. “They have to be held accountable.”

Smedley Butler

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“What did they think they were doing when they engineered the election of this empty suit, this blank cartridge, this political mannequin, this man-who-isn’t-there?”

Shadowland (Jim Kunstler)

The State of the Union speech is a somewhat squishy national ritual. Since Franklin Roosevelt, presidents have delivered it early each year in-person to a joint session of congress, with every other dignitary in government on hand — except for one cabinet officer designated the “lone survivior,” who sits it out elsewhere in case, say, the Capitol gets blown up. Before Woodrow Wilson, presidents customarily sent over a written message. Article II, Section 3, Clause 1 of the constitution only stipulates that a president “from time to time” shall report to Congress on how the nation is doing. Lately, it’s mostly just a made-for-TV special, like the Oscars, allowing a lot of familiar faces to preen before the cameras for the home-folks.

Ronald Reagan introduced the gimmick of showboating heroes or victims of this-and-that seated up in the galleries, which has naturally devolved into a maudlin, cringeworthy feature of the show. But often presidents use the occasion to drop a ripe phrase on the big audience that captures the spirit of the moment: “The era of big government is over” (Bill Clinton); “the axis of evil” (G. W. Bush); FDR’s “four freedoms.” In 2020, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi introduced an instant op-ed closer feature to the proceedings, ripping up Mr. Trump’s speech behind his back in a striking display of pique, much applauded by the avatars of rising Wokesterdom, who had only days earlier seen their half-assed impeachment attempt flop. Kinda looks like our current president, Joe Biden, will skip the grand show this year.

Too busy playing “Mario Kart” with the grandkids, or something like that. The Washington press corps has given him a pass on it, apparently. There’s no chatter, no buzz on the cable channels or in The New York Times, though a few newsies have begun to whine about Mr. Biden’s general unwillingness to hold a routine press conference with freely-pitched questions — not hand-picked, vetted ones, as the president’s handlers have insisted. How long will it be before the public realizes that Mr. Biden is being strictly concealed from view by his managers? And how long can they keep it up? A few more weeks, maybe, I’d guess. What did they think they were doing when they engineered the election of this empty suit, this blank cartridge, this political mannequin, this man-who-isn’t-there?

Of all the hundred-million-odd adults over 35-years-of-age in this country, they picked this empty vessel to lead in a year of obvious crisis? Apparently so — an act so collectively insane it makes you shudder to think about it. Like, the Democratic Party really thought this was a good idea? And who’s calling the shots behind this false front? Some committee chaired by Susan Rice? With directives coming into the Oval Office by messenger from Barack Obama’s Kalorama fortress, with, say, Eric Holder, Rahm Emmanuel, David Axelrod, John Brennan, and a few others charting the daily play-by-play?

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…shadow nationalization..

Trapped (CHS)

Back when prosperity was authentic, the Federal Reserve had little need for public relations. But now that “prosperity” is an illusion that must be managed lest the phantasm vanish, the Fed’s public relations pronouncements are a ceaseless flood as the The Babble-On 7 are the spokespeople for a propaganda machine bent on “managing expectations.” Managing Expectations is the code phrase for “front-run what we say and your profits are guaranteed.” When the Fed says it’s going after X, then simply buy whatever will benefit from X happening, and for 12 long years, X unfolds and those who front-ran the FedSpeak reaped billions in essentially zero-risk profits.

Managing Expectations is part of the Fed’s shadow nationalization of key markets. If price discovery of credit and risk is allowed to live, the Fed’s carefully inflated speculative bubbles pop. And so the Fed’s Job One is killing all price discovery via shadow nationalization. The first market shadow nationalized was the mortgage market, the foundation of the housing market. After Wall Street’s epic swindle (subprime mortgages) imploded in 2008, the Fed printed trillions of dollars out of thin air and bought hundreds of billions of dollars in mortgages. The federal government nationalized the quasi-governmental mortgage issuers Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the net result was virtually the entire mortgage market was government guaranteed or owned.

Since Wall Street’s fraud had nearly vaporized the entire global financial system, the Fed also shadow nationalized the stock market, which had imploded once the house of cards collapsed. Thus the S&P 500 has advanced from 667 to 3,850 with just enough brief wobbles to maintain the semblance of an organic market. This shadow nationalization has been the most well-promoted PR campaign in the history of central banking. The flood of FedSpeak and trillions of dollars in direct purchases of assets over the past 12 years has relentlessly trained the Wall Street and retail rats to buy the dip because the Fed has your back, meaning the Fed will never let its nationalized stock market decline for more than a few weeks.

The profits from front-running FedSpeak are in the trillions of dollars. No wonder the Wall Street rats scurry over and frantically press the buy button–the rewards and have been both reliable and immense. Now the Fed is in the process of shadow nationalizing the entire bond market. It signaled its intent long ago with quantitative easing, i.e. strangling price discovery in the Treasury market, and recently it began buying corporate bonds (proxies come in handy here).

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Ultimate globalization.

IMF To Propose Ways To Improve Transparency Of Trade In SDR (R.)

The International Monetary Fund on Friday said it would propose ways to improve the transparency and accountability of how its Special Drawing Rights are used, a key U.S. demand for its support of a new issuance of the IMF’s own currency. Geoffrey Okamoto, first deputy managing director of the IMF, said a new allocation of SDRs would boost the reserve positions of all IMF members, calling it “a far superior option to the alternatives” currently available to poorer countries. “The IMF will respond to the #G20’s call for a proposal on a general allocation of Special Drawing Rights (SDRs),” he said in a tweet.


“So that countries see maximum benefit from new SDRs, we will propose ways to improve transparency and accountability in how SDRs are allocated and traded,” he added. He gave no details. Finance officials from the Group of 20 major economies on Friday expressed broad support for boosting the IMF’s emergency reserves after U.S. officials dropped the previous administration’s opposition. Italy, which heads the G20 this year, is pushing for a $500 billion issuance of SDRs, a move backed by many other G20 members as a way to provide liquidity to poor countries hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic without increasing their debt levels. U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Thursday expressed her qualified support, but called for greater transparency about the trading and use of SDRs.

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“If Bitcoin were to be adopted as a global reserve currency,” he speculates, “the Bitcoin price will probably be in the millions, and those miners will have more money than the entire [US] Federal budget to spend on electricity.”

Bitcoin Energy Use ‘Bigger Than Most Countries’ (BBC)

We’ve all heard the stories of Bitcoin millionaires. Elon Musk is the latest. His electric car company Tesla made a paper profit of more than $900m (£646m) after buying $1.5bn (£1bn) -worth of the cryptocurrency in early February. Its high profile support helped pushed the price of a single Bitcoin to more than $58,000. But it isn’t just the digital asset’s price that has hit an all-time high. So has its energy footprint. And that’s caused blowback for Mr Musk, as the scale of the currency’s environmental impact becomes clearer. It also helped prompt a series of high profile critics to slate the digital currency this week, including US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.


President Biden’s top economic adviser described Bitcoin as “an extremely inefficient way to conduct transactions,” saying “the amount of energy consumed in processing those transactions is staggering”. It’s unclear exactly how much energy Bitcoin uses. Cryptocurrencies are – by design – hard to track. But the consensus is that Bitcoin mining is a very energy-intensive business. The University of Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (CCAF) studies the burgeoning business of cryptocurrencies. It calculates that Bitcoin’s total energy consumption is somewhere between 40 and 445 annualised terawatt hours (TWh), with a central estimate of about 130 terawatt hours. The UK’s electricity consumption is a little over 300 TWh a year, while Argentina uses around the same amount of power as the CCAF’s best guess for Bitcoin. And the electricity the Bitcoin miners use overwhelmingly comes from polluting sources.

The CCAF team surveys the people who manage the Bitcoin network around the world on their energy use and found that about two-thirds of it is from fossil fuels. Huge computing power – and therefore energy use – is built into the way the blockchain technology that underpins the cryptocurrency has been designed. It relies on a vast decentralised network of computers. These are the so-called Bitcoin “miners” who enable new Bitcoins to be created, but also independently verify and record every transaction made in the currency. In fact, the Bitcoins are the reward miners get for maintaining this record accurately. It works like a lottery that runs every 10 minutes, explains Gina Pieters, an economics professor at the University of Chicago and a research fellow with the CCAF team.


[..] We can track how much effort miners are making to create the currency. They are currently reckoned to be making 160 quintillion calculations every second – that’s 160,000,000,000,000,000,000, in case you were wondering. And this vast computational effort is the cryptocurrency’s Achilles heel, says Alex de Vries, the founder of the Digiconomy website and an expert on Bitcoin. All the millions of trillions of calculations it takes to keep the system running aren’t really doing any useful work. “They’re computations that serve no other purpose,” says de Vries, “they’re just immediately discarded again. Right now we’re using a whole lot of energy to produce those calculations, but also the majority of that is sourced from fossil energy.” The vast effort it requires also makes Bitcoin inherently difficult to scale, he argues.”If Bitcoin were to be adopted as a global reserve currency,” he speculates, “the Bitcoin price will probably be in the millions, and those miners will have more money than the entire [US] Federal budget to spend on electricity.”

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“The measures being discussed in Congress have the potential to defeat us all. It is surprisingly easy to convince a free people to give up their freedoms, and exceedingly difficult to regain those freedoms once they are lost.”

Congress And The Slippery Slope Of Censorship (Turley)

Democrats are pushing for cable carriers to explain their “moral” criteria for allowing tens of millions of viewers access to Fox News and other targeted networks. The answer should begin with the obvious principles of free speech and a free press, which are not even referenced in the Eshoo-McNerney letter. Instead, the companies are asked if they will impose a morality judgment on news coverage and, ultimately, public access. This country went through a long and troubling period of morality codes used to bar speakers or censor material that barred atheists, feminists, and others from espousing their viewpoints in newspapers, books, and movies. Indeed, there was a time when the Democratic Party fought such morality rules, in defense of free speech.

Those seeking free-speech limits often speak of speech like it is a swimming pool that must be monitored and carefully controlled for purity and safety. I view speech more as a rolling ocean, dangerous but also majestic and inspiring, its immense size allowing for a natural balance. Free speech allows false ideas to be challenged in the open, rather than forcing dissenting viewpoints beneath the surface. I do not believe today’s activists will succeed in removing the most-watched cable news channel in 2020 from the airways. But, then again, I did not think social media sites — given legal immunity in exchange for being content-neutral — would ever censor viewpoints.

Roughly 70 years ago, Justice William O. Douglas accepted a prestigious award with a speech entitled “The One Un-American Act,” about the greatest threat to a free nation. He warned that the restriction of free speech “is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us.” The measures being discussed in Congress have the potential to defeat us all. It is surprisingly easy to convince a free people to give up their freedoms, and exceedingly difficult to regain those freedoms once they are lost.

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Don’t hold your breath.

Durham Steps Down As US Attorney, Remains In Charge Of Russia Probe (JTN)

John Durham, a decorated career prosecutor, announced Friday he is stepping down at the end of the month as a U.S. attorney in Connecticut but will continue as special prosecutor investigating the origins of the Russia collusion probe that dogged the early Trump presidency. Durham’s announcement, which was widely expected as part of the transition inside the Biden Justice Department, allows him to focus on wrapping up the Russia investigation from Washington DC where the probe has been ongoing since 2019. “My career has been as fulfilling as I could ever have imagined when I graduated from law school way back in 1975,” Durham said. “Much of that fulfillment has come from all the people with whom I’ve been blessed to share this workplace, and in our partner law enforcement agencies.


“My love and respect for this Office and the vitally important work done here have never diminished.” Durham will be succeeded in Connecticut in the interim by his deputy Leonard Boyle. Durham’s special counsel probe is focused on whether the FBI inappropriately opened an investigation into the Trump campaign in the summer of 2016 or committed any criminal acts by continuing the investigation and seeking FISA warrants that contained inaccurate or omitted information. He has secured one criminal conviction of the former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith for doctoring evidence submitted to the FISA court. And in December, the Justice Department signaled Durham’s investigation had found further criminal activity, upgrading him to the position of special counsel.

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