Mar 132023
 
 March 13, 2023  Posted by at 9:56 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,  73 Responses »


Rembrandt van Rijn Student at a table by candlelight c.1642

 

Fed, TSY, FDIC Announce New Banking System Bailout, Signature Bank Closed (ZH)
Bill Ackman To US Gov’t: Fix Mistake In ‘48 Hours’ Or Face ‘Destruction’ (CT)
Yellen Says Government Will Help SVB Depositors But “No Bailout” (ZH)
HSBC To Buy Silicon Valley Bank’s UK Operations (G.)
Hatred of Putin Makes Washington ‘Do Dumb Things’ – Seymour Hersh (RT)
Liu Xin’s Interview With Seymour Hersh (CGTN)
Zakharova: Ukraine Allegations Russia’s Reluctant To Talk A Colossal Lie (TASS)
Ukraine Won’t Get Western Jets ‘Anytime Soon’ – FM (RT)
Growing Backlash Against Methods To Conscript Ukrainian Men For War (Lavrenin)
Prigozhin Describes Situation In Bakhmut As Very Difficult (TASS)
US ‘Sitting Still’ Amid Growing China-Russia Influence – Bolton (RT)
‘Rigorous’ Maidan Massacre Exposé Suppressed By Top Academic Journal (GZ)
Comer: We Have Documents That Show Biden Family Was Getting Money from CCP (GP)
The Democrats Have Lost the Plot (Taibbi)
Georgian Protesters Unwittingly Imperil Their Nation’s Survival (Scott Ritter)
Could Vitamin D Help Save Our Veterans? (ET)
The Doctor Indicted For Not Killing His Patients (Horowitz)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chansley
https://twitter.com/FreeStateWill/status/1635011407434641408

 

 

 

 

O’Keefe

 

 

Iran Saudi

 

 

 

 

Stone Putin
https://twitter.com/i/status/1634557724619943939

 

 

 

 

 

 

Zakharova: “Every child can explain how the US authorities will ‘support the stability of the banking system’ – with paper and paint. They will print even more unsecured dollars then they will cause even more problems in the world.”

“..pledge collateral at par, not at market value, thus giving banks credit for all those hundreds of billions in unrealized net losses, and allowing banks to “unlock liquidity” based on losses which the Fed and TSY now backstop!”

Fed, TSY, FDIC Announce New Banking System Bailout, Signature Bank Closed (ZH)

On Friday, we said that the Fed will have to make an announcement before the Monday open, and we didn’t have to wait that long: in fact, the Fed waited just 15 minutes after futures opened for trading to announce the new bailout, alongside even more shocking news: the Treasury announced that New York State regulators are shuttering Signature Bank – a major New York bank – adding that all depositors both at Signature Bank, and also the now insolvent Silicon Valley Bank, will have access to their money on Monday. And as we process the shock of yet another small bank failure (which makes JPMorgan even bigger), the Fed just issued a statement saying that “to support American businesses and households, the Federal Reserve Board on Sunday announced it will make available additional funding to eligible depository institutions to help assure banks have the ability to meet the needs of all their depositors.

This action will bolster the capacity of the banking system to safeguard deposits and ensure the ongoing provision of money and credit to the economy.” The Fed also said that it is prepared to address any liquidity pressures that may arise, which in turn has just unveiled the first bailout acronym of the new crisis: the Bank Term Funding Program, or BTFP. Some more details: The financing will be made available through the creation of a new Bank Term Funding Program (BTFP), offering loans of up to one year in length to banks, savings associations, credit unions, and other eligible depository institutions pledging U.S. Treasuries, agency debt and mortgage-backed securities, and other qualifying assets as collateral. These assets will be valued at par. The BTFP will be an additional source of liquidity against high-quality securities, eliminating an institution’s need to quickly sell those securities in times of stress.

The Fed explains that the Department of the Treasury will make available “up to $25 billion from the Exchange Stabilization Fund as a backstop for the BTFP.” And while the Federal Reserve – which was completely clueless about this banking crisis until Thursday – does not anticipate that it will be necessary to draw on these backstop funds, we anticipate that the final number of needed backstop liquidity be somewhere north of $2 trillion. What is more notable is that the BTFP – or Buy The Fucking Pivot – facility, will pledge collateral at par, not at market value, thus giving banks credit for all those hundreds of billions in unrealized net losses, and allowing banks to “unlock liquidity” based on losses which the Fed and TSY now backstop!

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And they did…

Bill Ackman To US Gov’t: Fix Mistake In ‘48 Hours’ Or Face ‘Destruction’ (CT)

Billionaire Bill Ackman has urged the United States government to “guarantee” all deposits held by Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) within the next “48 hours,” or it risks the “destruction” of many financial institutions. In a March 11 tweet, Bill Ackman, CEO of hedge fund management firm Pershing Square Capital Management, said a “giant sucking sound” will be heard from the ”withdrawal of substantially all uninsured deposits” from all banks, not just the “systemically important banks (SIBs),” should the government fail to “guarantee all” of SVB’s deposits before the “open on Monday.”Ackman suggested that this would be the result of “the world” realizing what an uninsured deposit is — “an unsecured illiquid claim on a failed bank.”

https://twitter.com/CaitlinLong_/status/1635047789376974848

He warned that these withdrawals would “drain liquidity” from the community, regional and other banks and “begin the destruction” of these crucial institutions if the United States government fails to protect “all depositors.” Ackman said the only other way to prevent this was in the “unlikely” event that major financial institutions, such as JPMorgan Chase, Citibank or Bank of America, acquire SVB before Monday. He argued that this could have been “avoided” if the U.S. government had “stepped in on Friday” to guarantee SVB’s deposits, adding that the long-standing bank’s “franchise value” could have been safeguarded and “transferred” to a new owner in return for an “equity injection.”


Ackman suggested that SVB’s senior management “made a basic mistake” and should be fired. He noted: “They invested short-term deposits in longer-term, fixed-rate assets. Thereafter short-term rates went up and a bank run ensued. Senior management screwed up and they should lose their jobs. After conducting a “back-of-the-envelope review” of SVB’s balance sheet, Ackman believes that even “in a liquidation,” depositors “should eventually” get back approximately “98% of their deposits”. However, he argued that “eventually” is “too long” when you have “payroll to meet next week.”

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A new meaning for “bailout”.

“No bailout for shareholders and bondholders of SVB. Depositors will be protected.”

“the Fed itself is insolvent. It has exactly the same problem as SVB — it paid top dollar for bonds whose prices have fallen, driving the Fed deep into neg equity (along with BoJ, ECB…)”

Yellen Says Government Will Help SVB Depositors But “No Bailout” (ZH)

With just hours left until futures open for trading late on Sunday afternoon, the situation remains extremely fluid and for now it appears that regulators, central bankers and treasury officials (we won’t mention the White House where the most competent financial advisor is Hunter Biden) still don’t have a clear idea of how they will coordinate or respond. Take Janet Yellen, who said on Sunday morning that the US government was working closely with banking regulators to help depositors at Silicon Valley Bank but dismissed the idea of a bailout. Speaking with CBS on Sunday, the treasury secretary sought to assure US customers of the failed tech lender that policies were being discussed to stem the fallout from the sudden collapse this week. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporate (FDIC) took control of the bank on Friday morning.

“Let me be clear that during the financial crisis, there were investors and owners of systemic large banks that were bailed out . . . and the reforms that have been put in place means we are not going to do that again,” Yellen said (oh but you will, you just don’t know it yet). “But we are concerned about depositors, and we’re focused on trying to meet their needs.” It wasn’t clear which depositors she meant: as we first pointed out on Friday, out of SIVB’s $173 billion of customer deposits at the end of 2022, $152 billion were uninsured (i.e., over the $250,000 FDIC insurance threshold) and only $4.8 billion were fully insured. As we also noted last week, a further look at SIVB funding (pie charts) shows unusually high reliance on corporate/VC funding; only the small red private bank slice looks like traditional retail deposits to us.

As a result, as JPM’s Michael Cembalest says “It’s fair to ask about the underwriting discipline of VC firms that put most of their liquidity in a single bank with this kind of risk profile. At the end of 2022, SIVB only offered 0.60% more on deposits than its peers as compensation for the risks illustrated below; in 2021 this premium was 0.04%”.

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Tech start-ups are sexy.

HSBC To Buy Silicon Valley Bank’s UK Operations (G.)

The government has struck a last-minute deal for HSBC to buy Silicon Valley Bank’s UK operations, saving thousands of British tech startups and investors from big losses after the biggest bank failure since 2008. The takeover will override the Bank of England’s initial decision to place SVB UK into insolvency, after a run on the lender that was originally sparked by fears over the a multibillion-pound shortfall on the US parent company’s balance sheet. The US bank was closed and its assets seized by authorities on Friday. “This morning, the government and the Bank of England facilitated a private sale of Silicon Valley Bank UK to HSBC. Deposits will be protected, with no taxpayer support. I said yesterday that we would look after our tech sector, and we have worked urgently to deliver that promise,” the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, said on Twitter.

HSBC’s takeover is expected to protect the finances of SVB UK’s 3,500 customers, including hundreds of tech startups that feared they would go bust if their deposits were wiped out. Authorities had been considering a range of options to help SVB UK customers pay wages and suppliers, including an emergency fund that could provide a cash lifeline to support startups, as well as government-guaranteed loans for the sector, similar to those offered to businesses during the Covid crisis. It follows a tense 72 hours, with Rishi Sunak having been locked in weekend talks with the Bank of England governor, Andrew Bailey, and Hunt, who warned that tech and life sciences sector were at “serious risk” as a result of the bank’s collapse.

While analysts said there was little chance of contagion across the banking sector – given that the biggest banks serve a wider range of customers and have plenty of capital – tech startups and investors were worried about the ripple effects for the sector. A group of more than 200 tech executives warned in an open letter to Hunt over the weekend that the loss of deposits had the potential to cripple the industry, with many businesses at risk of falling into insolvency overnight.

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“They make it personal. They don’t make it professional.”

Hatred of Putin Makes Washington ‘Do Dumb Things’ – Seymour Hersh (RT)

Legendary investigative journalist Seymour Hersh on Sunday offered a theory for what he sees as the foreign policy “complete idiocy” displayed by US officials, saying they’re so consumed by hatred of Russian President Vladimir Putin that they stumble into bad decisions. Hersh, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who reported last month that US President Joe Biden ordered last fall’s sabotage of the Nord Stream natural gas pipelines, has called the alleged plot one of Washington’s “dumbest” decisions in years. However, the blunder didn’t reflect a lack of intelligence among top officials in Biden’s administration, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, Hersh said in an interview with China’s CGTN.

Top administration officials “all have high degrees of, plenty of, intelligence,” Hersh said. “It’s just what they’re so driven by, I think, hatred of all things particularly Putin, and also communism per se. They’re so cold warriors, they’re really out of sorts. It makes them do dumb things.” The White House dismissed Hersh’s bombshell report on the Nord Stream blast as “complete fiction.” The New York Times, where Hersh did award-winning work on the Watergate scandal and other stories as a star reporter in the 1970s, claimed earlier this month that a “pro-Ukraine group” was behind the Nord Stream attack. The story cited unidentified US officials. Hersh told CGTN that neither the Ukrainian navy nor a non-state actor had the resources to carry out the sabotage, which involved planting C4 explosives on four concrete-encased steel pipelines at the bottom of the Baltic Sea. He said the false claim was made to distract from the fact that US Navy divers planted the remotely detonated explosives under cover of a NATO exercise in the Baltic.

“They’re trying to divert attention from the story that I wrote, which included enormous specifics,” Hersh said. “I was describing a process that began before Christmas of 2021. . . . They had a series of meetings at a secret room in the White House, that I gave clues I know the title of the room.” The veteran journalist argued that being “antagonistic” with China and Russia is counterproductive for Washington. “They make it personal. They don’t make it professional.” He added that Biden’s foreign policy has alienated governments around the world since Russia’s military operation in Ukraine began last year. “Russia has made more friends in the Third World since this began than anybody in this administration seems to appreciate,” Hersh said. “This notion of American hegemony, if you will, just doesn’t work anymore.”

Nordstream attack vessel

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The interview.

Liu Xin’s Interview With Seymour Hersh (CGTN)

As the NYT reports new allegations on the Nord Stream sabotage, Seymour Hersh takes the “pro-Ukrainian group” intel with a pinch of salt. Here’s the reason. Liu Xin: But you think it’s not possible for a “pro Ukrainian group” to carry out this explosion? Seymour Hersh: I know that the few things I know about the Ukrainian navy is they are capable of dropping mines. I’m not an expert on it. I just happen to ask questions after that story came out. They don’t have a working decompression chamber. We’re talking about four pipelines, Nord Stream 1 and 2, each has two. They’re steel tubes covered by a concrete cover to protect themselves from the salinity, the salt in the water. So, you have to have people that know, that are the experts in underwater diving and experts in using the most, the plastic C4, the most volatile stuff there is.And also, they have to be able to go quick. They have to be sure they get the bomb, their weapon and the bomb in the right place that triggers, destroys everything. They have to practice like, they practice for weeks and months on this, I would say, in the waters of the Baltic Sea. “The U.S. is trying to divert attention away from my story,” says Seymour Hersh, after the NTY reported intel pointed at a “pro-Ukrainian group” on the Nord Stream sabotage.

Liu Xin: The fact that the U.S. government officials leaked this intelligence to the New York Times at this particular moment. What do you think they are trying to send as a message? Seymour Hersh: They are trying to divert attention from the story that I wrote, which included enormous specifics. I was describing a process that began before Christmas of 2021. It involved the National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan of the White House for the President. They had a series of meetings at a secret room in the White House. They gave clues, I know the title of the room. They were asked to come up with both reversible and irreversible concepts, ideas. A reversible concept would have been more sanctions. Something irreversible would have been kinetic, a bomb. And then eventually it turned out what they really wanted was a hit on the pipelines. And in this government, the concern has always been that Germany has been getting so much gas at such a cheap price from Russia that it would be very hard to wean them away from Russia. Slamming U.S. foreign policy as “complete idiocy,” Seymour Hersh told Liu Xin he believes American hegemony and the hatred of “all things Putin & communism” are driving the Biden Administration to do dumb things.

Liu Xin: You have also called a part of the called this planning “stupidity.” And you on several occasions you laughed at the intelligence level of the Biden. Seymour Hersh: I was not questioning their intelligence. These are all people, Tony Blinken, the Secretary of State, the one who didn’t go to China to meet his counterpart because of a balloon and Jake Sullivan, who’s the National Security Advisor, and the Undersecretary of State, all have high degrees of, plenty of intelligence. It’s just what they’re so driven by, I think, hatred of all things particularly Putin, and also communism per se. They’re so cold warriors. They’re really out of sorts. It makes them do dumb things. I just think his foreign policy is too complete idiocy, alienating a lot of people around the world. This notion of American hegemony, if you will, it just doesn’t work anymore. That’s what I object to.

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“..this point of view is nothing but a wish of defeat to his country and its non-existence..”

Zakharova: Ukraine Allegations Russia’s Reluctant To Talk A Colossal Lie (TASS)

Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has slammed her Ukrainian counterpart Dmitry Kuleba’s statement that Moscow is reluctant to negotiate the crisis settlement with Kiev as a “colossal lie”. “These days, Kuleba was once again ranting and raving in interview with the Italian newspapers Repubblica and Stampa. He called those Italians who are standing for settling the conflict with Russia through talks rather than in the battlefield hypocrites. In his interpretation, this point of view is nothing but a wish of defeat to his country and its non-existence – “Not peace but ‘rest in peace’ on Ukraine’s grave,” she wrote on her Telegram channel.


“However, he seems to share the opinion that ‘there is always room’ for talks but says he sees no willingness for them in Russia. A colossal lie, bearing in mind the fact that it is the regime he represents that has banned such talks with Russia in its laws”. Moreover, in he words, Kuleba forecasted “the end of Europe if Ukraine is defeated”. “An optimist. In its current shape, Europe ended right when the European Union let Washington govern its political institutions and ultimately surrendered to NATO,” she added.

Ukraine Inc.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1634810341682036738

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“We sat down with Ukrainian representatives and the German armaments industry … and German industry, in my presence, asked the German government for one thing: signed contracts..”

Ukraine Won’t Get Western Jets ‘Anytime Soon’ – FM (RT)

Kiev will not get Western-made fighter jets “anytime soon,” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba admitted during an interview with the German newspaper Bild am Sonntag published late on Saturday. The potential delivery of fighter jets to Kiev to prop it up in its ongoing conflict with Moscow is hindered by assorted technical and logistical issues, Kuleba said. However, he urged that Ukrainian pilots, who are only familiar with Soviet-made aircraft, begin training on the Western planes as soon as possible. “I don’t expect the delivery of fighter jets to happen anytime soon because it’s a very difficult task logistically and technically. Therefore, we advise that the training of Ukrainian pilots on Western jets should start now, so that when the decision to provide aircraft is made, we do not waste time or many months on training,” he said.

The diplomat also urged Berlin to ramp up deliveries of ammunition to Ukraine, namely artillery shells, claiming that while German industry had already expressed a readiness to provide them, the issue lies with the country’s government. “We sat down with Ukrainian representatives and the German armaments industry … and German industry, in my presence, asked the German government for one thing: signed contracts,” he stated. Over the course of the conflict, Ukraine has increasingly demanded more and more sophisticated weapon systems from its Western backers. Kiev has intensified calls for NATO to supply it with fighter jets – namely the US-made F-16 – in recent months after securing a pledge for dozens of Leopard 2 and Leopard 1, M1 Abrams, and Challenger 2 main battle tanks from multiple EU countries, the US, and UK, respectively.

So far, however, the West has been reluctant to provide Ukraine with modern aircraft. Late in February, US President Joe Biden said he was “ruling it out for now.” His Ukrainian counterpart Vladimir Zelensky “doesn’t need F-16s now. There is no basis upon which there is a rationale, according to our military, now, to provide F-16s,” Biden told ABC at the time. Still, American media reported that the Pentagon has already invited Ukrainian pilots to a military base in Arizona to determine how long it would take to train them to fly the F-16. Last week, unnamed officials told NBC that two Ukrainian airmen had already arrived on American soil and more were likely to follow. Russia has repeatedly warned the West against “pumping” Ukraine with assorted weaponry, maintaining it would only prolong the hostilities rather than change the ultimate outcome.

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By Petr Lavrenin, Odessa-born political journalist and expert on Ukraine and the former Soviet Union

Growing Backlash Against Methods To Conscript Ukrainian Men For War (Lavrenin)

Last year, military conscription became an issue in both Russia and Ukraine. However, the extent has been completely different in the two countries. While in Russia the mobilization was partial, lasting barely more than a month and affecting around 300,000 people, according to official figures – a significant part of whom already had military experience – a completely different picture has developed in Ukraine. Kiev instituted a general conscription drive which has been in force for more than a year. The exact number of those taken to the armed forces during this time is not known for certain and the process has been accompanied by numerous scandals. Cases where law enforcement officers have applied force when handing out conscription notices and illegally delivered men to enlistment offices have given rise to public discontent.

However, the Ukrainian authorities clearly have no intention of pausing enlistment because the situation remains critical at some sections of the front. The Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) are losing their grip on fortified areas around Artyomovsk (Bakhmut), and taking huge numbers of casualties, according to the Guardian and other media outlets. Meanwhile, Kiev continues to issue mobilization summonses and is sending people without proper training. According to the country’s legislation, a summons for military duty can only be issued on the street if it specifies the personal data of the person to whom it is given. It is also illegal for military commissars to detain citizens, as they are not the police, and conscripts are not criminals. Yet, that’s exactly how conscription is currently being conducted in Ukraine. Men of military age are being hunted down, and videos showing military commissars going to extreme lengths to hand out summonses, including by force, constantly circulate on social media.

Odessa, in particular, stands out in this respect. For example, military commissars were caught driving around the city in ambulances. When they came across men of the appropriate age, they stopped, handed over summonses and drove on. After videos emerged on social networks, local military commissars had to explain themselves and claimed that they were given the ambulance to use for their work. There were also cases when men in Odessa were detained on the street and forcibly taken to military enlistment offices, even without being handed a mobilization summons. For quite a long time, the AFU’s Operational Command South tried to ignore the illegal, forceful methods used by its military commissars. However, on February 14, a video was released showing military enlistment office staff detaining a man by force. In order to avoid a scandal, the military quickly assured the public that the staff responsible would be disciplined for “incorrect” behavior and the incident investigated.

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Too many tunnels?!

Prigozhin Describes Situation In Bakhmut As Very Difficult (TASS)

The situation is Artyomovsk (known as Bakhmut in Ukraine) is very difficult, with the Ukrainian army receiving “endless reserves,” Wagner PMC founder Yevgeny Prigozhin said on Sunday. “The situation in Bakhmut is difficult, very difficult, with the enemy fighting for each meter. And the closer we are approaching the city center the fiercer fighting is growing, the more artillery and tank being used against us. Ukrainians keep on supplying endless reserves. But we are moving forward and will continue to move forward and we will not cover the glory of Russian arms with shame,” his press service quoted him as saying on its Telegram channel.


Artyomovsk is located in the Kiev-controlled part of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR). Fierce fighting for control of the city is underway. According to the latest data, Russian forces have blocked or taken control of all paved roads to the city while the nascent spring mud season is complicating the logistics of supplying the Ukrainian army with fresh ammunition and personnel. Prigozhin said on Saturday that Russia forces were some 1.2 kilometers from the city’s administrative center.

Prigozhin
https://twitter.com/i/status/1634598452666544128


“Wagner” began storming the underground part of the “Bakhmut Azovstal”. Right now,”Wagner” are making their way into the mine. The battles take place at a depth of up to 320 meters.

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You lost. You were staring blind.

US ‘Sitting Still’ Amid Growing China-Russia Influence – Bolton (RT)

President Joe Biden’s administration is doing nothing to counteract steps by China, Russia, and their allies to work more closely together, jeopardizing US interests and undermining its global influence, former White House National Security Adviser John Bolton has claimed. “We’re sitting still, and the Chinese, the Russians, Iran, North Korea and several others are moving to shore up their relations and threaten us in a lot of different places,” Bolton said on Sunday in a WABC 770 radio interview. He added that while Beijing follows a clear strategy, “we kind of wander around from day to day.”

Bolton, a longtime war hawk who has called for regime changes in Moscow and Tehran, made his comments in the wake of Friday’s announcement that Saudi Arabia and Iran had agreed to re-establish diplomatic ties under a deal brokered by China. He lamented that the agreement reflected diminishing US influence around the world. “It’s an indication that the Saudis and others are trying to hedge their bets with China and Russia, because they don’t think the United States has the resolve and the fortitude necessary to do what they need to do to protect the world against Iran and its intentions,” Bolton said.

The 74-year-old Bolton has worked in the administrations of former Presidents Donald Trump, George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan. Chinese officials have bristled at Washington’s threat claims, arguing that the US and its NATO allies behave as if they’re still fighting the Cold War. Beijing has maintained neutrality on the Ukraine crisis, resisting US pressure to condemn Russia over the conflict, and proposed a 12-point blueprint to end the fighting late last month. Biden dismissed the peace plan, saying it would benefit only Russia.

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Maybe he should name the journal…

‘Rigorous’ Maidan Massacre Exposé Suppressed By Top Academic Journal (GZ)

A peer-reviewed paper initially approved and praised by a prestigious academic journal was suddenly rescinded without explanation. Its author, one of the world’s top scholars on Ukraine-related issues, had marshaled overwhelming evidence to conclude Maidan protesters were killed by pro-coup snipers. The massacre by snipers of anti-government activists and police officers in Kiev’s Maidan Square in late February 2014 was a defining moment in the US-orchestrated overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government. The death of 70 protesters triggered an avalanche of international outrage that made President Viktor Yanukovych’s downfall a fait accompli. Yet today these killings remain unsolved.

Enter Ivan Katchanovski, a Ukrainian-Canadian political scientist at the University of Ottawa. For years, he marshaled overwhelming evidence demonstrating that the snipers were not affiliated with Yanukovych’s government, but pro-Maidan operatives firing from protester-occupied buildings. Though Katchanovski’s groundbreaking has been studiously ignored by the mainstream media, a scrupulous study he presented on the slaughter in September 2015 and August 2021 and published in 2016 and in 2020 has been cited on over 100 occasions by scholars and experts. As a result of this paper and other pieces of research, he has among the world’s most-referenced political scientists specializing in Ukrainian matters.

In the final months of 2022, Katchanovski submitted a new investigation on the Maidan massacre to a prominent social sciences journal. Initially accepted with minor revisions after extensive peer review, the publication’s editor effusively praised the work in a lengthy private note. They said the paper was “exceptional in many ways,” and offered “solid” evidence in support of its conclusions. The reviewers concurred with this judgment. However, the paper was not published, a decision Katchanovski firmly believes to have been “political.” He filed an appeal, but to no avail. Among those fervently supporting Katchanovski’s appeal was renowned US academic Jeffrey Sachs. “You have written a very important, rigorous, and substantial article. It is thoroughly documented. It is on a topic of great significance,” Sachs wrote to the scholar.

“Your paper should be published for reasons of its excellence…The journal will only benefit from publishing such a work of importance and excellence, which will further the scholarly understanding and debate regarding a very important moment of modern history.” Katchanovski declined to name the journal in question, but described it as “top-tier” in the field of social sciences. He believes its refusal to publish his study is “extraordinary,” but nonetheless emblematic of a “far bigger problem in academic publishing and academia.” “The editor who accepted my article only learned it would not be published from my tweets on the subject. This reversal was highly irregular and political. There is growing political censorship concerning Ukraine in academia, and also self-censorship..”

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Let’s see them.

Comer: We Have Documents That Show Biden Family Was Getting Money from CCP (GP)

House Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-KY) joined Maria Bartiromo on Sunday Morning Futures this morning. This was an explosive interview. Comer dropped several bombs on the Biden Crime Family. According to Comer the House Oversight Committee is working with four individuals with close ties to the Bidens. Comer says the committee now has documents that tie the Bidens to the Chinese Communist Party. Biden is finished. James Comer: “It’s as bad as we thought… Since we’ve last spoken we have bank records in hand. We have individuals who are working with our committee. In the last two weeks we’ve met with either these individuals personally or with their attorneys. And that would be four individuals who had ties in with the Biden family in their various schemes around the world. So now we have in hand documents We have in hand documents in hand that show just how the Biden family was getting money from the Chinese Communist Party.”

Comer’s got the goods! This is a pivotal moment in American history. They finally have the goods on the Biden Crime Family.How will Democrats deal with this? With more phony charges against President Trump? Or maybe Old Joe will suffer a slip and fall?

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“They did not want to have a discussion about anything. It was completely opposite to what the party was even ten years ago..”

The Democrats Have Lost the Plot (Taibbi)

One of the crazier parts came at the end of the examination by Garcia, when I ended up becoming just a bystander to a heated and apparently sincerely unfriendly blowup between chairman Jim Jordan and Plaskett: GARCIA: So you’re not gonna tell us when Musk first approached you. TAIBBI: Again, Congresswoman, you’re asking me to, you’re asking your journalist to reveal a source. GARCIA: So then you consider Mr. Musk to be the direct source of all this? TAIBBI: Now you’re, you’re trying to get me to say that he is the source. GARCIA: Well, he isn’t, if you’re telling me you can’t answer because it’s your source, the only logical conclusion is that he is in fact your source. TAIBBI: Well, you’re free to conclude that. GARCIA: Well, sir, I just don’t understand. You can’t have it both ways, but let’s move on, because — JORDAN: Well, no, he can. He’s a journalist. PLASKETT: He can, because either Musk is the source and he can’t talk about it, or Musk is not the source. And if Musk is not the source, then he can discuss.

Did these people really not understand that identifying who is not a source crosses the same line as identifying who is one? You just can’t go into these questions. I started to interject to point this out, then realized that Garcia and Plaskett legitimately didn’t even know the basics of the civil liberties landscape. This was much the same as when Vijaya Gadde acted completely at a loss when Ro Khanna wrote to her in the middle of the Hunter Biden laptop affair, to express concerns about speech rights. Khanna mentioned the New York Times v. Sullivan case and other principles to Gadde, and she seemed to have no idea what he was talking about. This was like that. Garcia also made it clear she didn’t know what Twitter was. At one point she said, regarding yesterday’s Twitter Files thread, that I had said “I had to attribute all the sources to Twitter first.”

I was so confused by this that I paused, worried that I was misunderstanding (my hearing is not so great). She then asked if I “sent it to Twitter first.” As I was replying no, that I’d posted the thread on Twitter, I heard an aide whispering something about “putting it on Twitter.” Garcia seemed to think that Twitter was an editorial body to which I was sending text, maybe for review. It’s understandable, not knowing that the platform doesn’t work that way — not everyone has to be on Twitter obviously — but then why the hostility? Instead of simply asking me in a friendly way about this process, which I would have been glad to explain, she kept blasting away. “First, sir. Yes or no?” The Democrats were angry that Michael and I were there at all. They did not want to have a discussion about anything. It was completely opposite to what the party was even ten years ago, when expression rights were an issue they wanted to own.

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Scott Ritter’s wife is Georgian. He knows the country. This is a harrowing story.

Georgian Protesters Unwittingly Imperil Their Nation’s Survival (Scott Ritter)

In many ways, the critics were correct—the practical outcome of the foreign agents bill would have been to expose the extent to which Georgian politics and governance had become overrun with foreign money and influence. The threat, however, didn’t come from Russia, but rather the United States, which uses the $40 million in aid funneled through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) every year to conduct what amounts to a “soft coup” in Georgia designed to displace the current government with one that will be compliant to American—not Georgian—goals and objectives—including the establishment of a “second front” against Russia. All of this is done, according to Samantha Power, the Director of USID, to build “a country with free expression, a free press, & a path to Euro-Atlantic integration.”

But what she really means is a country that suppresses any dissent as “disinformation,” uses the media as state-sponsored propaganda, and removes from power any politician or political party that dares impede Georgia’s absorption into the US-led NATO sphere of influence. Georgia’s Prime Minister, Irakli Garibashvili, does not want an expanded war with Russia—especially one that drags Georgia into the conflict. As such, Samantha Power and her minions at USAID believe the prime minister of Georgia must now be removed and replaced with an anti-Russian (i.e., pro-war) leader cut from the same pro-American cloth as Georgia’s US-backed President, Salome Zurabishvili.

To accomplish this, USAID funds programs designed to foment a “bottom-up” transformation of Georgian society and politics by empowering “diversity” at the grass-roots level, suppressing opposing points of view in the name of building “societal resilience to disinformation,” and seizing control of the electoral process so that the US-controlled “diversity” movements can prevail in local elections and, by extension, national elections. The Georgian foreign agents bill would have exposed the level to which these USAID-funded programs, and other related US and EU-funded activities, had infiltrated Georgian society. For that reason, the US mobilized its paid activists to take to the streets, forcing the Georgian Prime Minster to pull the plug on the legislation in the interests of public safety.

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This is about suicides, not covid. Why only suicides among veterans? Isn’t it time to widen and broaden this discussion?

Could Vitamin D Help Save Our Veterans? (ET)

Findings from a new study have shown that vitamin D may lower the risk of suicide and suicide attempts in U.S. veterans with low vitamin D levels. The study found that veterans who received vitamin D had a 64 percent lower risk of suicide than those who did not receive supplementation. The study was published in February 2023 in the journal Plos One. Suicide is a serious public health issue and the 12th leading cause of death in the United States. In 2020, 45,979 Americans died by suicide and there were an estimated 1.2 million suicide attempts. According to the CDC, suicide rates increased 36 percent between 2000-2018, and Suicide Awareness Voices of Education states that from 2020 to 2021 there was a 3.6 percent increase in suicides, bumping it up to the 11th leading cause of death in the United States. This is one death every eleven minutes.

When it comes to veterans, however, the statistics change. Veterans are at a 57 percent higher risk of suicide than those who haven’t served, which is more than 1.5 times the national average. Suicide is the second leading cause of death of veterans under the age of 45. Some other notable statistics: • 125,000 veterans have died by suicide since 2001. • There were 6,146 veteran suicides in 2020. • There have been 20 consecutive years with 6,000-plus veteran suicides. The study aimed to determine the association between vitamin D supplementation, vitamin D blood serum levels, suicide attempts, and intentional self-harm in a group of veterans in the Department of Veterans Affairs.

The retrospective cohort study looked at veterans who had filled either a vitamin D3 or vitamin D2 prescription between 2010 and 2018. A cohort of 169,241 vitamin D2-treated veterans and 490,885 vitamin D3-treated veterans were each matched to an equal number of controls that had similar demographics and medical histories. The results of the study showed that vitamin D3 and D2 supplementation was associated with a 45 percent and 48 percent reduced risk of suicide attempt and self-harm. This was an almost 44 percent difference between the groups receiving supplementation and the control group. Additionally, the study found that vitamin D supplementation among black veterans was associated with a 60 percent decline in suicide attempts, and in veterans with vitamin D deficiency, which the study defined as being below 20 nanograms per milliliter (ng/mL), there was a more than 64 percent reduction in potential suicide attempts.

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“..in exceptional circumstances of unjust laws, ethical responsibilities should supersede legal duties.”

The Doctor Indicted For Not Killing His Patients (Horowitz)

All the government officials, pharmaceutical executives, and doctors involved in defrauding the public with taxpayer funding and violating the consent of humanity to mandate dangerous shots are absolved of liability. Meanwhile, a doctor who took his Hippocratic Oath seriously and allegedly saved nearly 2,000 patients (with FULL CONSENT) from the shots, is facing serious federal charges for conspiracy to defraud the government defrauders. We’re all big talkers. We’d like to believe that if we were there in Germany during the late 1930s, we would have protested the budding genocide, which was first rooted in medical experimentation and coerced sterilization. But just like most doctors and scientists went along with the Third Reich, nearly every doctor went along with the Fourth Reich in coercing patients into taking a known dangerous shot because they were “just following orders” and “following the science.”

Dr. Kirk Moore, an experienced plastic surgeon from Utah, on the other hand, has risked his life and career to actually follow the dictates of the Nuremberg Code. Yet despite everything we now know about the shots, which should win him the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his alleged actions, he is the one facing prosecution for a disposing of a shot that is only on the market because of government fraud. In January, Dr. Moore, along with two members of his clinic’s staff and a neighbor, were indicted on conspiracy to defraud the federal government by allegedly offering nearly 2,000 patients saline injections along with vaccine documentation while disposing of the real shots into the sink. To be clear, he is not being accused of tricking patients. He never offered unsuspecting patients fake shots. These were all people (or parents of minors) who desperately sought him out to bypass the genocidal, unconstitutional, inhumane, and immoral jab mandates, so they could go on with their lives unharmed by this terrible technology.

Prosecutors accuse Dr. Moore and staff at the Plastic Surgery Institute of Utah of pretending to administer 391 children shots, 524 adult Pfizer shots, 64 Moderna shots, and 958 J&J shots between October 2021 and Sept. 2022 just based on the inventory of shots that went to that office. That was long after it was known these shots were dangerous, yet Moore, not the Pfizer executives, faces up to five years in federal prison. According to the AMA Medical Code, “When physicians believe a law violates ethical values or is unjust, they should work to change in law.” However, it adds that “in exceptional circumstances of unjust laws, ethical responsibilities should supersede legal duties.”That is clearly going to be part of Moore’s defense if he is indeed shown to have given people saline at their request. Ironically, Moore is being accused of grifting and running a fake vaccine card ring and earning $98,000 off it. Dr. Moore, though, rigorously disputed this fact in an interview on my podcast and notes that when people asked him for his fee for COVID treatment, he told them to donate it to a 501(c)(3) medical freedom group.

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Earth music
https://twitter.com/i/status/1634947463487574018

 

 

 

 

Owl
https://twitter.com/i/status/1634644161239437318

 

 

God made a farmer
https://twitter.com/i/status/1634879637527445504

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

Sep 142022
 


Pablo Picasso Composition “Peasants” 1906

 

Is War What You Asked For? (Kunstler)
Civilisation Or Barbarism – Western Dusk, Eastern Dawn (Hoppe)
Medvedev Issues Apocalyptic Warning To West Over Ukraine (RT)
Kiev Publishes Security Guarantee Proposal (RT)
West Considers Arming Ukraine With More Potent Weapons – FT (RT)
Kremlin Denies Plans For War Declaration & National Draft (ZH)
Leaked Paper Reveals EU Is Unlikely To Cap Price Of Russian Gas (G.)
Why The EU Is Struggling To Bring Its Energy Crisis Under Control (OP)
Berlin Prepares Massive Energy Bailout (RT)
Elegy for a Disappearing Empire (PL)
What’s Behind The Mystery Of Thousands Of Excess Deaths This Summer? (G.)
Liz Truss Energy, Tax Plan ‘Will Give Richest Families 2x As Much Support’ (G.)
Big Banks Making a Killing Off Global Hunger, Energy Crises (CD)
The Fed Is Going To Pivot In 3 Stages – Nomi Prins (CNBC)
New Durham Bombshell: Steele Primary Source Was Paid FBI Informant (JTN)
Charles Will Not Cool On Climate Action, Say Friends (BBC)

 

 

“I believe that scientific knowledge has fractal properties, that no matter how much we learn, whatever is left, however small it may seem, is just as infinitely complex as the whole was to start with. That, I think, is the secret of the Universe.”
– Isaac Asimov, I Asimov, 1995

 

 

 

 

 

 

Moderna: The Art of the Steal
https://twitter.com/i/status/1569684117587128321

 

 

The Mediterranean in Australia

 

 

Tucker books
https://twitter.com/i/status/1569685375110578176

 

 

 

 

“Will Germany, France, Italy, and the rest now leap into a war against Russia on the plains of Ukraine in winter? I think they will sooner overthrow their own WEF-directed governments.”

Is War What You Asked For? (Kunstler)

The New York Times today is ballyhooing the Ukraine military’s “lightning advance” east of Kharkov. I’d argue that what The Times wants you to see is not exactly what is happening. Rather the Russians appear to have made an orderly, tactical retreat from the outskirts of Kharkov, inducing the NATO-trained Ukraine forces eastward across the Siverskyi Donets River and out into the flat, open country where they will be cut off, cauldroned, and slaughtered. Everything that NATO and the US have done in this conflict has been a stupid move. Why should this one be an exception?

At the same time, Russia has hit a number of power generation plants around Ukraine, leaving many Ukrainians without lights, hot water, communications — in short, what’s needed to remain civilized. This was exactly what Russia had hoped to avoid the past eight months, but the obdurate pathological idiocy of our country’s leaders has forced Russia to send a harsher message to provoke some rational thought here about ending this conflict. There is even chatter on the web that Russia is about to declare that the special military operation is now a war, with all that implies about targets.

The US may be crazed beyond redemption, but the people of the NATO member countries might have had a clarifying experience lately watching their governments barter away the natural gas they desperately need to run industry and heat their homes this winter — in the foolish gesture of jumping on America’s sanctions bandwagon. Will Germany, France, Italy, and the rest now leap into a war against Russia on the plains of Ukraine in winter? I think they will sooner overthrow their own WEF-directed governments. This appears to be just what has happened in Sweden’s election on Sunday where a bloc of center-right parties has ousted the left government led by Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson.

The question for now is this: Will the US jump stupidly into World War Three over Ukraine? If not, how much does Russia have to disrupt life in the rest of Ukraine outside the Donbas to drive the US and NATO into serious peace talks? It better happen soon because otherwise the West will be completely preoccupied with the collapse of its financial markets, currencies, and economies — and probably before the November elections here.

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“The proverbial ‘cancel culture’ has become a cancellation of culture,” as President Putin said.”

Civilisation Or Barbarism – Western Dusk, Eastern Dawn (Hoppe)

For some time, the festering unipolar power – the Anglo-American empire – has been the self-appointed magistrate claiming jurisdiction over the planet, as it became the accepted ‘”moral authority of interpretation” in (at least) the western world and was able to exert its influence on public opinion pretty much everywhere. The transatlantic neo-liberal propaganda machine and its various mechanisms of infiltration have always been a powerful tool – they are in fact the imperialist forces’ greatest weapons… stronger than cluster bombs, because they have a global reach and infect minds, while leaving the outward appearance intact.

A brilliantly devious tactic was its appropriation and abuse of symbols, slogans and terminology of the once authentic “left” and “progressive” movements. One of its noxious characteristics is the brazen attempt to rewrite history for its own benefit. With this appropriation, Nazis are seen as freedom fighters, the Russians as Fascists, kleptocracies as democracies, conservatives as right-wingers… and neo-liberals as left-wingers and rebels, with this last group attracting incalculable adulators of the “progressive mindset” in culture and academia, who, in turn, promote the ideas of the neo-liberals. Pasolini clearly expected this back in 1975: “I prophesy the era in which the new power will use your libertarian words to create a new homogenised power, to create a new Inquisition, to create a new conformism. And your clerics will be left-wing clerics.”

Unfortunately, many literary scholars, analysts and journalists have underestimated the imperialist and colonialist infiltration into other cultures around the world… which is why many now seem stupefied at the extent to which postmodern neo-liberal “culture” has overshadowed the local cultures of non-Western countries… Unfortunately the youth of these countries, thanks to global consumerism, have little to no other orientation and roots for their own culture… and they face many identity crises. If one does not conform to the hegemonic narrative, one is erased from the mainstream press, from social media and, in many cases, from society… (And some journalists even end up in prison or are blacklisted.) And this increasingly applies to cultures, as well.

In addition to the fashionable trend today of tearing down statues of those repudiated by the ‘woke magistrates’, artists and thinkers from “territories seen as hostile” by the hegemony and NATO are being erased – for example: Russian artists past and present (e.g. Dostoevsky, Tchaikovsky, Chekhov, conductor Valery Gergiev, soprano Anna Netrebko)… Even the letter “Z” is seen as a hostile character of the alphabet in many western countries… “The proverbial ‘cancel culture’ has become a cancellation of culture,” as President Putin said.

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“Their people will harvest their grief in full. The land will be on fire and the concrete will melt..”

Medvedev Issues Apocalyptic Warning To West Over Ukraine (RT)

Western “half-wits” from “stupid think tanks” are leading their countries down the road of nuclear armageddon with their hybrid war against Moscow, former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev wrote on his Telegram channel on Tuesday. Endlessly funneling weapons and support to Ukraine while pretending not to be directly involved in the conflict will not work, added the deputy chair of the Russian Security Council. The “security guarantees” proposal unveiled by Kiev on Tuesday was “really a prologue to the Third World War,” said Medvedev, calling it a “hysterical appeal” to Western countries engaged in a proxy war against Russia.

If the West continues its “unrestrained pumping of the Kiev regime with the most dangerous types of weapons,” Russia’s military campaign will move to the next level, where “visible boundaries and potential predictability of actions by the parties to the conflict” will be erased and the conflict will take on a life of its own, as wars always do, Medvedev argued. “And then the Western nations will not be able to sit in their clean homes, laughing at how they carefully weaken Russia by proxy. Everything will be on fire around them. Their people will harvest their grief in full. The land will be on fire and the concrete will melt,” Medvedev wrote, before citing a Bible verse from Revelations 9:18.

“Yet still the narrow-minded politicians and their stupid think tanks, thoughtfully twirling a glass of wine in their hands, talk about how they can deal with us without entering into a direct war. Dull idiots with a classical education,”Medvedev wrote. His comments were prompted by Kiev’s publication of a “security treaty” proposal, developed under the tutelage of former NATO secretary-general Anders Fogh Rasmussen. The draft envisions the US and its allies guaranteeing Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders with weapons, ammunition, financial assistance and training, as well as committing to maintain sanctions against Russia for as long as Kiev wants, and handing over any confiscated Russian property to Ukraine.

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Delusion galore.

Kiev Publishes Security Guarantee Proposal (RT)

Ukraine has presented a proposal of recommendations for security guarantees, which would politically and legally bind the country and its guarantor states in a strategic partnership known as the ‘Kiev Security Treaty.’ The proposals, developed at the request of President Vladimir Zelensky and published on Tuesday, were drawn up by an advisory group headed by former NATO secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen. Kiev suggests countries including the US, UK, Australia and Turkey could act as security guarantors for Ukraine. The “multi-level”approach would see a “core” group of allies making clear commitments to support Ukraine’s military, while a broader group would provide non-military guarantees based on sanctions.

“We need a military force strong enough to repel the Russians’ desire for revenge. And one capable of causing irreparable damage to the aggressor if this desire turns out to be irresistible,” Zelensky’s chief of staff Andrey Yermak said. He said the agreement would not be a substitute for joining NATO, but a means of ensuring security until Ukraine officially joins the US-led military bloc. Former NATO secretary general Rasmussen said the “immediate priority” was to achieve victory for Kiev and stressed that Ukraine would require decades of support from its Western partners. Security guarantees for Ukraine was a main sticking point in talks with Russia in Istanbul in March.

Moscow argued that if Ukraine promised not to seek NATO membership, it would be provided with guarantees from a number of countries, including Russia. Talks eventually came to a halt after Ukraine’s negotiators insisted on sovereignty over the Crimean peninsula, which seceded from Kiev’s rule in 2014 and joined the Russian Federation following a public referendum. The ‘Kiev Security Treaty’ proposal has been in the works for months. Russia has previously insisted that the only promises of security for Ukraine can be provided by Moscow. “No one will accept Ukraine into NATO now. The alliance consists of Russophobes, but it is not suicidal,” he said, arguing that the US will cease to care about Ukraine when it is convenient.

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What a great idea.

West Considers Arming Ukraine With More Potent Weapons – FT (RT)

The US and its allies are in talks over whether to send Ukraine more advanced weapons in the future, including fighter aircraft, a US defense official has said, according to the Financial Times. Some of Kiev’s Western allies were emboldened by last week’s successful offensive against Russia in Kharkov Region, the British newspaper reported on Tuesday. They are now discussing “Ukraine’s longer-term needs,”according to the anonymous US source. Some believe it would be appropriate to send warplanes to Ukraine in the “medium to longer term,” the source said, according to the publication. Western nations previously refused to provide fighter jets to Ukraine, citing the time it would take to train Ukrainian pilots, issues with servicing advanced weapon systems on the ground, and a risk of escalation in the conflict with Russia.


Kiev made some progress in talks with Slovakia, a former Warsaw Pact member, which said it could provide its older Soviet-made jets to bolster the Ukrainian legacy fleet. The Slovakian military retired its MiG-29s in late August. The offensive in Kharkov Region was touted by US officials as a major success for the Ukrainian military, which in previous months had suffered a number of defeats on the battlefield against Russian and Moscow-allied forces. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken claimed on Monday that Kiev’s forces had made “significant progress” after benefiting from Western support “in terms of making sure that Ukraine has in its hands the equipment it needs to prosecute this counteroffensive.” Western intelligence agencies played a key part in preparing the Ukrainian operation, according to Mark Warner, the chair of the US Senate Intelligence Committee.

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They had 50,000 troops in the recent war games in the east. Why would they need a draft?

Kremlin Denies Plans For War Declaration & National Draft (ZH)

On Tuesday the Kremlin addressed widespread speculation and rumors that President Vladimir Putin is planning to issue a full declaration of war as Russian forces pull back from Kharkiv, in a Ukraine counteroffensive that Kiev leaders and their Western allies are hailing as a major success. A war declaration would trigger mass mobilization and a draft. “Russia is not planning to declare a mass national draft for the war in Ukraine,” the Kremlin stated, amid reports its forces are suffering fatigue, low moral and manpower shortages. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov emphasized this is not under discussion at this point: “Not at this point. No, we are not discussing that,” he said when asked about widespread reports, as quoted in TASS news.

Peskov was then pressed about the degree to which Ukrainian forces had advanced into Russian lines in the northeast, amid ongoing heavy fighting, but he declined to address the ground situation. “This [question] is for the Defense Ministry. I simply do not have accurate information,” he said. There does appear to be growing pressure from inside Russia to act, according to The Moscow Times: Lawmaker Mikhail Sheremet, a member of the State Duma’s Security Committee and the ruling United Russia party, spoke out in favor of general mobilization on Monday, according to the URA.ru news agency. “Without full mobilization, [without] switching to the war mode, including the economy, we will not achieve the desired results,” the agency quoted Sheremet as saying.

“I am talking about the fact that today society should be consolidated as much as possible and aim for victory,” said the deputy. There have meanwhile also been signs in Russian domestic media and among popular pundits of a narrative shift that is increasingly recognizing recent Russian losses and setbacks, and the need for a strategy overhaul, as well as growing criticism of how the “special operation” is being managed. Very likely there’s under-the-surface ratcheting tensions across the population due to mounting casualties among the country’s young men who’ve been thrust into battle these past seven months.

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Reality 1, Von der Leyen 0.

Leaked Paper Reveals EU Is Unlikely To Cap Price Of Russian Gas (G.)

The EU executive is retreating from imposing a price cap on Russian gas, but pushing ahead with windfall taxes on energy company “surplus” profits, according to a leaked document. A draft regulation on the “electricity emergency tool” seen by the Guardian contains neither a price cap on Russian gas nor on imported gas, after member states were unable to agree on restrictions last week. The EU is expected to levy windfall taxes on the high profits of fossil fuel companies, with a separate cap on revenues of low-carbon electricity producers. The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, is expected to publish Europe’s plan on dealing with surging electricity prices when she makes her annual state of the union speech on Wednesday.

The final text could still change, but the draft reveals the Commission’s doubts over gaining enough support from EU member states for its preferred option of putting a cap on Russian gas in response to what it has called the Kremlin’s weaponisation of supply. EU member states that import large amounts of gas from Russia, including Hungary, Slovakia and Austria, have spoken out against a cap on Russian gas because they fear the Kremlin would halt all gas flows, plunging their countries into recession. The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has already threatened to halt energy exports to Europe if such a plan is agreed.

About a dozen countries, including France and Poland, would like to impose a price cap on all imported gas, which they see as a better way to curb surging prices. The Commission is unenthusiastic about this idea, because it fears the EU would lose out to countries prepared to pay more in the highly competitive market for liquefied natural gas. The Netherlands and Denmark are wary of any price cap, while Germany fears a price cap on Russian gas would be divisive. With member states divided, the Commission, which is responsible for drafting EU legal proposals, is pursuing measures that unite the 27-member club. EU governments are largely supportive of capping the price of electricity from low carbon sources, such as renewables or nuclear, and recycling these funds to vulnerable households and businesses.

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“A few weeks like this and the European economy will just go into a full stop. Recovering from that is going to be much more complicated than intervening in gas markets today..”

Why The EU Is Struggling To Bring Its Energy Crisis Under Control (OP)

Last Friday, the energy ministers of the 27 EU members met for an emergency discussion of the energy supply situation in the bloc. The one thing they agreed on was implementing a ceiling on the revenues of power utilities that do not use gas to generate power. What they did not agree on was everything else the Commission suggested last week, including a price cap on Russian gas, a cap on final energy prices, and a direct intervention in EU electricity markets. It’s hard to get 27 countries to agree on so many things without any compromise. This is why the EU’s survival plans for the winter may never work as intended.

Last week, the European Commission, headed by Ursula von der Leyen, proposed that EU member states impose a price cap on Russian natural gas imports, a mandatory cut in energy consumption across the bloc, and a cap on the revenues of power utilities that do not use gas. The Russian gas price cap was one of the items that divided the EU at the Friday discussions after Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin, warned that any country imposing a price cap on Russian oil or gas would stop receiving them. Some EU members argued in favor of a gas price cap for all gas imports into the bloc, following a similar suggestion made by Poland earlier this month. Some 15 members of the EU were in favor of such a move, but others were skeptical. And they were right to be skeptical: Norway, the EU’s gas savior, has signaled it would not accept a cap on the price it gets for its gas.

“That’s not a solution we’d propose, we don’t think it answers the EU’s challenges,” Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere said, adding, “I tell my European colleagues that I’m not the one who sells the gas.”The problem is that the European Union does not have all the time in the world to discuss how to go about saving its economy and its citizens from blackouts this winter. And as Bloomberg pointed out in a recent analysis of the situation ahead of the energy ministers’ meeting, speed is not among the things the European Union is known for. Belgium’s Prime Minister put it bluntly. “A few weeks like this and the European economy will just go into a full stop. Recovering from that is going to be much more complicated than intervening in gas markets today,” he told Bloomberg last week. “The risk of that is de-industrialization and severe risk of fundamental social unrest.”

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So you pay 4x more for energy, and then you pay another $1,000 per capita to bail out your energy company.

Berlin Prepares Massive Energy Bailout (RT)

Germany is planning to allocate €67 billion ($67 billion) to provide financial aid to domestic energy companies hit by supply shortages resulting from the sharp decrease in natural gas imports from Russia, the business daily Handelsblatt reported on Tuesday, citing sources close to the federal government.The massive financial package is expected to help KfW, the German state-owned investment and development bank, to provide guarantees and liquidity assistance to local energy firms. The funds will reportedly be transferred from the WSF (Economic Stabilization Fund), which was created during the Covid-19 pandemic. “In view of the price increases, forward-looking action by the federal government and KfW is required,” government sources told the media.


Gas prices throughout the EU have surged in recent months as a result of sanctions imposed on Moscow over the conflict in Ukraine, and the reduction of Russian supplies. EU leaders had previously announced plans to reduce gas consumption by 15% from August 1 until the end of March 2023. Member states have discretion over the specific measures adopted to achieve the goal. “The Federal Ministry of Economics has received various applications for liquidity bridging from companies in the gas and energy supply sector, they are currently being examined,” an internal government paper seen by Handelsblatt reads. “The volume of applications is in the low double-digit billions.” Earlier this month, Germany’s largest gas importer, Uniper, asked for extra government aid due to financial losses from its attempts to replace Russian natural gas by buying gas on the spot market.

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“In the grip of a terrible crisis, probably in its last gasps, the US empire can’t even remotely conceive a new Marhall plan. On the contrary, it is behaving like the old Soviet Empire.”

Elegy for a Disappearing Empire (PL)

[..] the Soviet Union just could not afford costs equivalent to the Marshall plan. So, the behavior of the US empire was, and remains, dictated by practical factors rather than ideological ones. When the US had a considerable surplus, it could afford an extravaganza such as the Marshall plan. Not just an extravaganza, though. It was also a good investment since the European states were a much better barrier against a possible Soviet attack if they were economically strong. Note also that the economic aid of the Marshall plan didn’t come without strings attached. To have the money, the Western European states had to cut all ties with the Soviet Union and with the states of the Warsaw Pact. And the local communist parties, at that time still relatively strong, were to be kept outside government coalitions.

Now, of course, things have changed a lot. In the grip of a terrible crisis, probably in its last gasps, the US empire can’t even remotely conceive a new Marhall plan. On the contrary, it is behaving like the old Soviet Empire. The whole West is turning into a police state, where the government controls all the media and criminalizes dissent . Then, it is not surprising that the imperial center is extracting resources from its client states in Western Europe to the point of beggaring them. The discussion could be long and detailed but I think that, as usual, we can find much food for thought in the behavior of past empires. In particular, I think that a good illustration of the behavior of empires is given by how the Romans dealt with the Britons during the period that goes from the 1st century BC to the 3rd century AD.

We see how the annexation of the Britons was only in part obtained by a military invasion. Mostly, it was a question of assimilation. The Romans “romanized” the Britons, making them appreciate such things as the Roman money and the luxury items that money could buy. Then, they tricked them into borrowing money from Rome and, finally, when they could not repay the debt, they used that as an excuse to seize their assets and their lands. The similarities between the behavior of the US empire with Western Europe are evident. First, they offered money to the Europeans to rebuild their economy, and now they are squeezing Europe dry.

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From the chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh: “The real reason is as mundane, and tragic, as an underfunded NHS still struggling with the terrible effects of Covid..”

NHS, extreme heat, and Covid. What vaccines?

What’s Behind The Mystery Of Thousands Of Excess Deaths This Summer? (G.)

Over the past couple of months, deaths in England and Wales have been higher than would be expected for a typical summer. In July and August, there were several weeks with deaths 10% to 13% above the five-year average, meaning that in England about 900 extra people a week were dying compared with the past few years. The leading causes of death are within the typical range (the five-year average): heart and lung diseases, cancers, dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. Covid-19 deaths could account for half of the excess mortality, but the other half is puzzling, as there’s no one clear reason that jumps out.

It’s likely to be a mix of factors: Covid is making us sicker and more vulnerable to other diseases (research suggests it may contribute to delayed heart attacks, strokes, and dementia); an ageing population; an extremely hot summer; and an overloaded health service meaning that people are dying from lack of timely medical care. This winter, the cost of living crisis and concerns about fuel poverty will add to these contributory factors, given the links between deprivation and ill health. So we may see these excess death numbers continue.

The excess mortality puzzle has been weaponised by some to argue that this is a delayed consequence of lockdown. In essence, this is to say that mandatory restrictions on mixing and stay-at-home legal orders, as well as turning the NHS into a Covid health service during the first and second waves of infection, prevented people from being diagnosed or treated for other conditions such as cancer, heart disease, or even depression – and that those long-hidden conditions are now killing people. Of course, some medical care suffered during the pandemic, and delayed diagnosis leads to poor health outcomes. But to say that not having restrictions would have solved this problem is naive. Restrictions ultimately limited the number of people hospitalised for Covid-19 at any one time, so that the health services could cope with these numbers. Healthcare is finite: the best way to preserve resources for non-Covid conditions was to keep Covid infections as low as possible.

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Quelle surprise.

Liz Truss Energy, Tax Plan ‘Will Give Richest Families 2x As Much Support’ (G.)

Liz Truss’s plans for an energy price freeze and sweeping tax cuts will give Britain’s richest households twice as much financial support with living costs as the poorest households, according to a leading thinktank. The Resolution Foundation said the prime minister’s energy package, announced hours before news of the death of the Queen last week, would come with a “colossal” price tag for taxpayers that was poorly targeted to help those most in need when combined with tax cuts promised in her leadership campaign. It said the richest tenth of UK households would receive £4,700 in support, on average, from the government’s “energy price guarantee” and cuts to national insurance – far in excess of the £2,200 support for a typical household in the poorest tenth.


The intervention comes as details of the new prime minister’s plan to support struggling households remain unclear, after she chose to hold back from publishing the costings for her proposal until a mini-budget, expected to take place next week. The Resolution Foundation said the plan to limit an increase in the cost of a typical household energy bill to £2,500 for two years from October would cost about £120bn. It warned that Truss’s plan to avoid a fresh windfall tax on energy producers would mean heaping the cost on taxpayers, with as little as £1 in every £12 spent on energy support for households recouped directly from higher taxes on energy firms.

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Follow the money, not the science.

Big Banks Making a Killing Off Global Hunger, Energy Crises (CD)

Russia’s war on Ukraine has wreaked havoc on global commodity markets, driving up energy and food prices and exacerbating hunger emergencies around the world. But while disastrous for the global poor — millions of whom are living on the brink of famine — the chaos has been a major boon for Wall Street giants, according to new data showing that the world’s 100 largest banks are on pace to smash commodity trading profit records this year. “The 100 biggest banks by revenue are set to make $18 billion from commodities trading in 2022,” Bloomberg reported last week, citing figures from the London-based firm Vali Analytics. “That would be the highest in the data, which goes back 14 years, and exceed the previous high watermark in 2009.”

“The prediction is the latest evidence that the wild swings in energy prices triggered by the war in Ukraine are delivering a boon to commodity traders, even as they push European nations into crisis,” Bloomberg added. “Vali, an analytics firm that tracks trading business, compiled data that includes the leading five banks in commodity trading: Macquarie Group Ltd., Goldman Sachs Group Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Citigroup Inc., and Morgan Stanley.” Though the prices of wheat and other food staples have fallen from their peak in recent months, they remain significantly elevated compared to last year, according to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization, leaving millions vulnerable to hunger and starvation.

The World Food Program estimates that “as many as 828 million people go to bed hungry every night” and “the number of those facing acute food insecurity has soared — from 135 million to 345 million — since 2019.” Energy prices have also eased but remain high, contributing to cost-of-living crises throughout Europe and other parts of the globe. “People’s misery makes capitalists’ superprofit,” Salvatore De Rosa, a researcher at the Lund University Center for Sustainability Studies, tweeted in response to Bloomberg’s reporting. “How do you reform this?” Wall Street banks have not just benefited from the commodity price increases — they’ve actively helped fuel them, experts say.

“We’re in a market where speculators are driving prices up,” Michael Greenberger, former head of the Division of Trading and Markets at the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, told Mongabay in July. “Commodity markets are supposed to be hedging markets for people who are dealing with the commodity involved,” Greenberger said. “In the case of wheat, it would be farmers and people buying wheat. But if we looked at it, there would be banks in there with no interest in what the price of wheat is, writing swaps and controlling this price.”

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“..the Fed’s book still remains just a touch under $9 trillion, which is double what it was going into the pandemic period, and since the financial crisis of 2008.”

The Fed Is Going To Pivot In 3 Stages – Nomi Prins (CNBC)

The U.S. Federal Reserve could be forced to pivot away from its path of aggressive interest rate hikes in three stages, according to author Nomi Prins. Markets expect the central bank to enact a third consecutive 75 basis point hike at its monetary policy meeting later this month, the fastest pace of monetary tightening since policymakers began using the benchmark Fed funds rate as the principal policy tool in the early 1990s. Various Fed officials have reiterated the Federal Open Market Committee’s commitment in recent weeks to reining in inflation, but Prins told CNBC Tuesday that the acceleration of interest rate hikes to soothe the markets was disconnected from the economic reality faced by many.

“This period of accelerating the rate hikes that we’ve seen so far has impacted the real economy because it has squeezed the borrowing costs … for real people, real consumers,” she said. “Whereas for the Street in general, historically money still remains cheap and leverage still remains high in the system, and the Fed’s book still remains just a touch under $9 trillion, which is double what it was going into the pandemic period, and since the financial crisis of 2008.” Despite the broad market expectation for further 75 basis point hikes, Prins – a global economist and outspoken advocate for economic reform – said the Fed would likely pivot away from its hawkish trajectory in three stages as the disconnect between wealthy investors and institutions and the “real economy” widens.

Having firstly reduced the pace of rate hikes to 50 basis points and then neutralized policy, Prins expects the Fed to begin reversing course and becoming “accommodative,” with the U.S. already having recorded two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth. “Whether that’s to cut rates or to increase the size of its book again, that still remains to be seen,” Prins added.

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The swamp stinks.

New Durham Bombshell: Steele Primary Source Was Paid FBI Informant (JTN)

In a bombshell revelation, Special Prosecutor John Durham revealed Tuesday in court filings that the FBI paid a Russian businessman as a confidential human source in the investigation of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign even though it had prior concerns that businessman was tied to Moscow’s intelligence services. Durham persuaded the federal judge in the upcoming trial of Igor Danchenko to unseal a motion revealing that Danchenko, the primary source of the now-discredited Steele dossier, was paid by the FBI as a confidential human source for more than three years until the fall of 2020 when he was terminated for lying to agents. Danchenko is charged with five counts of lying to the bureau during that relationship and faces trial next month in federal court in the Virginia suburbs of Washington D.C.

“In March 2017, the FBI signed the defendant up as a paid confidential human source of the FBI,” Durham’s unsealed court filing disclosed for the first time. “The FBI terminated its source relationship with the defendant in October 2020. As alleged in further detail below, the defendant lied to FBI agents during several of these interviews.” The revelation means that the FBI first fired former MI6 agent Christopher Steele, the author of the Hillary Clinton-funded dossier, as a human source in November 2016 for having unauthorized contacts with the news media. And it then turned around a few months later and hired Steele’s primary informer to work with the bureau even after determining some of Danchenko’s statements in the Steele dossier were uncorroborated or exaggerated.

Even more stunning, Durham confirmed that the FBI had concerns about Danchenko’s ties to Russian intelligence a decade earlier, opening up a counterintelligence probe on him after learning he was trying to buy classified information from the Obama administration. “As has been publicly reported, the defendant was the subject of an FBI counterintelligence investigation from 2009 to 2011,” Durham wrote. “In late 2008, while the defendant was employed by a prominent think tank in Washington, D.C., the defendant engaged two fellow employees about whether one of the employees might be willing or able in the future to provide classified information in exchange for money.

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“Chairman of Natural England and a long-term adviser to Charles, Mr Juniper has spoken of the “incredible depth” of his knowledge and the “absolutely enormous” impact he has had.”

Oh sweet Jesus…

Charles Will Not Cool On Climate Action, Say Friends (BBC)

Will King Charles III turn his back on a lifetime of environmental campaigning? As Prince of Wales he spent decades campaigning, cajoling, and convening meetings to drive action on environmental issues. As king he is subject to different rules – the monarch is obliged to remain politically neutral. But his friends and advisers say he will not cool on the issue of global warming. Might urging action on key global issues like climate change or biodiversity loss be part of what a modern monarchy looks like? King Charles’ interests have ranged from tropical forests to the ocean depths, from sustainable farming practices to water security. They began long before such concerns became mainstream. Within months of his investiture as Prince of Wales in 1969, the 20-year-old Prince Charles wrote to Prime Minister Harold Wilson worried about the decline of salmon stocks in Scottish rivers.

“People are notoriously short-sighted when it comes to questions of wildlife,” he complained. Increasingly he has focused on tackling global warming, which he regards as one of the greatest challenges humanity has ever faced. He was a major presence at the COP26 global climate summit in Glasgow last year, urging world leaders to work together to save the planet during a speech at the opening ceremony. When I interviewed him ahead of COP26 he told me “It has taken far too long” for the world to respond to the risks of climate change. I pointed out world leaders would soon be gathering to talk about the climate crisis, he responded: “But they just talk, the problem is to get action.”

He even said he understood why some people felt motivated to take to the streets with organisations like Extinction Rebellion, noting “people should really notice how despairing so many young people are”. As for the risk of not taking action, he was very clear: “It will be a disaster. It will be catastrophic. It is already beginning to be catastrophic because nothing in nature can survive the stress that is created by these extremes of weather.” The veteran green campaigner Tony Juniper rates the new king as “possibly the most significant environmental figure of all time”. Chairman of Natural England and a long-term adviser to Charles, Mr Juniper has spoken of the “incredible depth” of his knowledge and the “absolutely enormous” impact he has had.

Charles net zero

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Special master

 

 

 

 

Andrew Marr

 

 

 

 

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Jan 272022
 
 January 27, 2022  Posted by at 9:47 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  90 Responses »


Alfred Sisley A Village Street in Winter 1893

 

Whistleblowers Share DOD Vaccine Data (Horowitz)
CDC Study Suggests Unboosted Vaccines Become Worse Than Nothing (JTN)
Fauci Says Children Younger Than 4 Will Get Three Doses Of Covid Vaccines (NYP)
Quebec Bans Unvaccinated From Buying Groceries At Walmart, Costco (TNC)
Mayo Clinic Expert Predicts Covid-19 Will Be Around Until Next Century (DM)
Florida Doctor: Families Sneak Ivermectin to Loved Ones in Hospitals (ET)
OSHA Withdraws Workplace Vaccine Mandate (CHD)
FDA Stonewalls On Vaccine Data, Pfizer Has Now Intervened (BN)
Rand Paul: What To Do When Confronted By ‘Crazy Lunatic’ Mask People (SN)
Spotify Sides With Joe Rogan, Removes Neil Young’s Music: ‘A Costly Move’ (NYP)
Is the Fed Delusional or a Big Pack of Liars? (Mish)
The Ukraine Crisis, Sponsored By US Hegemony And War Profiteers (Maté)

 

 

 

 

 

 

RN NYC
https://twitter.com/i/status/1485736872626339844

 

 

When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn’t become a king. The palace becomes a circus.’
-Turkish proverb

 

 

 

 

A VAERS that works…

Whistleblowers Share DOD Vaccine Data (Horowitz)

On Monday, during Sen. Ron Johnson’s five-hour hearing on a “COVID-19: Second Opinion,” Ohio attorney Thomas Renz, who has been representing clients suing the vaccine mandates, presented DOD medical billing data from the Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED) that paints a shockingly disturbing picture of the health of our service members in 2021. According to the military, DMED is the Armed Forces Health Surveillance Branch’s (AFHSB) “web-based tool to remotely query de-identified active component personnel and medical event data contained within the Defense Medical Surveillance System (DMSS).” In other words, it contains every ICD medical billing code for any medical diagnosis in the military submitted for medical insurance billing during any given period of time.

Three military doctors have presented queried data to Renz that shows a shocking and sudden spike in nearly every ICD code for common vaccine injuries in 2021. In a declaration under penalty of perjury that Renz plans to use in federal court, Drs. Samuel Sigoloff, Peter Chambers, and Theresa Long — three military doctors — revealed that there has been a 300% increase in DMED codes registered for miscarriages in the military in 2021 over the five-year average. The five-year average was 1,499 codes for miscarriages per year. During the first 10 months of 2021, it was 4,182. As Renz explained to me in an interview with TheBlaze, these doctors queried the numbers for hundreds of codes from 2016 through 2020 to establish a baseline five-year average. These codes were generally for ailments and injuries that medical literature has established as being potential adverse effects of the vaccines.

Renz told me the numbers tended to be remarkably similar in all those preceding years, including in 2020, which was the first year of the pandemic but before the vaccines were distributed. But then in 2021, the numbers skyrocketed, and the 2021 data doesn’t even include the months of November and December. For example, some public health officials speculate that COVID itself places women at higher risk for miscarriages. But the number of miscarriage codes recorded in 2020 was actually slightly below the five-year average (1,477). However, they were not drastically below the average on any one category in a way that one can suggest it reflects lockdown-related decreases in doctor’s visits, which somehow led to an increase in 2021 diagnoses.

[..] Some other numbers he did not mention at the hearing but gave to me in the interview are the following:
• myocardial infarction –269% increase
• Bell’s palsy – 291% increase
• congenital malformations (for children of military personnel) – 156% increase
• female infertility – 471% increase
• pulmonary embolisms – 467% increase
All these numbers are among the ambulatory visits because those are where the vast number of diagnoses in the military occur. However, Renz did say the increases were indicated in the hospitalized patients as well. I have seen one of the sworn declarations from one of the military doctors, and it states as follows, “It is my professional opinion that the major increases incidences of the above discussed instances of miscarriages, cancers, and disease were due to COVID-19 ‘vaccinations.'”

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Original Antigenic Sin

CDC Study Suggests Unboosted Vaccines Become Worse Than Nothing (JTN)

Two-dose COVID-19 vaccines may after an initial protective window become less effective against symptomatic infection by the Omicron variant than not getting jabbed at all, according to little-noticed findings in a federal study of how well boosters performed against different variants. The “adjusted odds ratio” crossed 1 for vaccinated versus unvaccinated individuals 7-10 months after vaccination, according to the “original investigation” by Atlanta-based CDC researchers, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association last week. That means the vaccinated were more likely than the unvaccinated to have symptomatic Omicron infections beginning at about the time the former become eligible for boosters. When considering the upper bound of the 95% confidence interval, the disparity emerged two months earlier.

Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine performed worse than Moderna’s, the researchers wrote. “The upper bound of the 95% CI was consistently greater than 1 starting at 3 months after second dose” for the former and six months for the latter. By contrast, the odds ratios for either vaccine never got close to 1 for the Delta variant, even for the upper bound. Even as evidence of the short-lived efficacy of the COVID mRNA vaccines continues to mount, federal regulators stepped in Tuesday to block doctors from using monoclonal antibodies to treat COVID patients. The FDA on Monday revoked authorizations for two such treatments against Omicron infections, including the one used by then-President Trump, finding they were “highly unlikely to be active” against the now-dominant variant.

The little-noticed findings in the JAMA study were highlighted by law professor Todd Zywicki, whose natural immunity lawsuit prompted George Mason University to grant him a medical exemption from its vaccine mandate. “Still more confirmation that Pfizer and Moderna’s CEOs know what they are talking about when they state that 2 doses of vax provides insignificant (at best) protection against Omicron,” Zywicki tweeted Tuesday. [..] The adjusted odds ratio of symptomatic Omicron infection for boosted versus unvaccinated individuals was 0.33, and for boosted versus two-dose recipients, 0.34. That means three doses corresponded with an “estimated effectiveness” of 67% over no doses, and 66% over two doses.

The study confirms that “OVERALL vaccine efficacy is zero,” Zywicki told Just the News: The first few months of protection “rapidly approaches zero” around the six-month mark and then goes negative for a few more months. He said the JAMA study was the fourth to find “basically this same negative [vaccine efficacy] effect” that he documented in an Epoch Times op-ed on “original antigenic sin.” Zywicki highlighted research from Toronto, California and Denmark that found negative VE starting two to six months after vaccination. The California study was “slippery,” he claimed, because “the authors appear to have simply arbitrarily set a floor of zero vaccine efficacy.”

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“Not my kid!”

Fauci Says Children Younger Than 4 Will Get Three Doses Of Covid Vaccines (NYP)

The White House said Wednesday that the COVID-19 vaccine regime for kids younger than 4 years old will likely be three doses when it’s approved — and vowed to make millions more hard-to-find Pfizer anti-viral pills available in coming months. Two clinical trials of the Pfizer vaccine on children ages 6 months to 2 years old, and ages 2 to 4 are underway, but the older group hasn’t yet met standards, White House chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci said at a press conference. “Dose and regimen for children 6 months to 24 months worked well, but it turned out the other group from 24 months to 4 years did not yet reach the level of non-inferiority, so the studies are continued,” Fauci said, referencing effectiveness standard comparison to adults.


“It looks like it will be a three-dose regimen. I don’t think we can predict when we will see it [approved],” he said — adding he can’t speak for the Food and Drug Administration. “We need to be patient,” he said. “That’s why the system works. The FDA is very scrupulous in their ability and in their effort to make sure that, before something gets approved for any age, and especially with children … that they will be safe, and that they will be effective.” Meanwhile, White House officials promised to release millions more Pfizer antiviral pills by June, amid reports that the medicine has been difficult to find in recent weeks. “We’ve purchased 20 million treatment courses of the Pfizer pill and we accelerated delivery of the first 10 million from September to the end of June,” said White House coronavirus response coordinator Jeff Zients.

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No freedom left.

Quebec Bans Unvaccinated From Buying Groceries At Walmart, Costco (TNC)

Unvaccinated Quebecers over 12 years old are now banned from buying groceries at big box stores including Walmart and Costco, while people wishing to access pharmacies inside those outlets will require a store escort. This comes as Quebec’s new vaccine requirement for retail stores over 1500 square meters took effect today. While the new mandate explicitly excluded grocery stores and pharmacies, the Quebec government said they did not consider groceries to be Walmart and Costco’s “principal activity.” The box-store ban comes despite statistics showing that Walmart and Costco are among the top three places where Canadians get their groceries. Quebec’s health minister Christian Dubé is standing by the measure, claiming that the goal is to protect “both the vaccinated and the non-vaccinated.”


An exemption was added for pharmacies located inside big box stores after pharmacy leaders raised concerns in a letter to the government. Unvaccinated people who wish to access those pharmacies must be accompanied by a store employee, who will ensure they make no other purchases. Unvaccinated Quebecers are now subject to the harshest government restrictions in Canada, and some of the strictest in the world. Quebec also requires vaccine passports at government-run liquor and cannabis stores, and a “significant” health tax is on the way. The government also announced that Quebecers would require a third jab for their vaccine passports to remain valid. At one point, the Quebec government even considered banning the unvaccinated from regular grocery stores and pharmacies that offer delivery, but it appears they have abandoned the idea.

Fleury
https://twitter.com/i/status/1486245972858617862

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Maybe. But why would you need vaccines?

Mayo Clinic Expert Predicts Covid-19 Will Be Around Until Next Century (DM)

While many Americans are beginning to look towards a life after Covid, and some experts are making optimistic predictions about the future of the pandemic, the entire scientific community is not in agreement. Dr Gregory Poland, epidemiologist for the Mayo Clinic and is editor-in-chief of the scientific journals ‘Vaccine’ and one of the nation’s top experts on vaccination and immunology, said this week that the virus could be affecting humans for the next century. In a conversation with MarketWatch on Tuesday he gave a grave prediction that counters what some worldwide global health experts are saying.

Due to the rapid transmission of the Omicron Covid variant combined with its more mild nature, experts are hopeful that it be the strain that transitions the virus from a pandemic to an endemic, meaning the pattern of the virus is stable and predictable. Poland does not share the same optimistic point of view. ‘We are not yet at any stage where we could predict endemicity. We’re not going to eradicate it,’ Poland said. He noted that the virus has shown the ability to infect animals, meaning it can potentially circulate indefinitely as it transmits across species and continues to mutate. Poland believes the virus will circulate for so long that people will still be receiving Covid shots for generations down the line.

‘So let me make a prediction, which will be hard for any of you to hold me to because we will all be dead by then, but your great-great-great-grandchildren will still be getting immunized against coronavirus,’ ‘How can I even say such a thing? If you got your flu vaccine this fall you were immunized against a strain of influenza that showed up in 1918 and caused a pandemic.’ This is not the first grim prediction Poland has made, and he has been correct before. Last month, he told DailyMail.com that he believed 32,000 people would die from Covid between early December to the end of the year. ‘32,000 Americans who think they’re going to be alive to celebrate Christmas and New Years are, no pun intended, dead wrong,’ he said on December 9. ‘Not one of them believes [they will die].’ During that period, 31,000 U.S. Covid deaths were recorded, nearly a spot on prediction, per Our World in Data.

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“..those payments are tied to their use of approved treatments only, as outlined in the CARES Act.”

Florida Doctor: Families Sneak Ivermectin to Loved Ones in Hospitals (ET)

A Florida doctor says families of loved ones hospitalized with COVID-19 are resorting to desperate measures when approved treatments have failed. And when it’s not too late, some have seen tremendous success by sneaking medications prohibited by hospitals to patients, says Eduardo Balbona, an independent internist in Jacksonville. He’s helped dozens of seriously ill patients recover using ivermectin and other drugs and supplements not officially approved in the treatment of COVID-19, he says. Hospitals receive payments from the federal government for treating patients with COVID-19. But those payments are tied to their use of approved treatments only, as outlined in the CARES Act. When there’s nothing left to try under those protocols, families naturally research alternatives, Balbona says, often learning about treatments touted by independent physicians around the country.


Hoping to try anything that might work, families around the country have filed lawsuits asking judges to intervene. In some cases, judges have ordered hospitals to allow the use of other treatments, such as ivermectin. Some of those seriously ill patients have recovered. In other cases, judges have sided with hospitals and declined the families’ requests to try. Meanwhile, independent physicians like Balbona watch helplessly, feeling that when families ask, they should be allowed to try medications they believe can turn critically ill patients around. But independent doctors often have limited hospital privileges and may be banned from seeing their own patients in some hospitals.

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“Some states have banned vaccine mandates for private employees, while other states, like New York, require them.”

OSHA Withdraws Workplace Vaccine Mandate (CHD)

The Biden administration is withdrawing its COVID vaccine-or-test mandate for large employers, the U.S. Department of Labor announced today. In pulling the rule, the department said it recognized the Emergency Temporary Standard (ETS) could not be revived after the U.S. Supreme Court blocked it earlier this month. Instead, the Biden administration is working to set a permanent standard for the vaccine mandate based on the Supreme Court’s ruling, according to a notice provided to the court by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). OSHA said in a press release:

“Although OSHA is withdrawing the vaccination and testing ETS as an enforceable emergency temporary standard, the agency is not withdrawing the ETS as a proposed rule. The agency is prioritizing its resources to focus on finalizing a permanent COVID-19 Healthcare Standard.” OSHA could move a version of the vaccine-or-test rule through its rule-making process, but would still likely face legal challenges, according to David Michaels, a former OSHA administrator and professor at George Washington University. The Labor Department’s decision to withdraw the rule means pending legal proceedings will be dropped. The case was on its way back to the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals to be heard on the merits, although the lower court most likely would have followed the Supreme Court’s lead, The New York Times reported.

Without OSHA’s vaccine mandate in effect, employers must follow state and local laws on COVID workplace safety. Some states have banned vaccine mandates for private employees, while other states, like New York, require them. “OSHA continues to strongly encourage the vaccination of workers against the continuing dangers posed by Covid-19 in the workplace,” the Labor Department wrote in the notice of its withdrawal. The Supreme Court on Jan. 13, rejected the Biden administration’s employer mandate. The court’s conservative majority said the administration overstepped its authority by imposing OSHA’s vaccine-or-test rule.

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“Pfizer’s legal bill will likely be multiple times what it would cost the FDA to simply hire a private document review company..”

FDA Stonewalls On Vaccine Data, Pfizer Has Now Intervened (BN)

The Food and Drug Administration thought it was appropriate that it be given 75 years to produce data for vaccines, which have proven to be the basis for the biggest public policy disaster in U.S. history. The judge instead ordered it to fork over the documents at a rate over a hundred times faster what it had requested. “I am pleased to report that a federal judge soundly rejected the FDA’s request and ordered the FDA to produce all the data at a clip of 55,000 pages per month!” Aaron Siri, who is the key litigator in the case, announced earlier on his Substack page. But in an update to the legal battle, Siri now indicates that the FDA is dragging its feet while providing flimsy excuses about why it won’t do what it was ordered.

The FDA “has now asked the Court to make the public wait until May for it to start producing 55,000 pages per month and, even then, claims it may not be able to meet this rate,” Siri writes. “The FDA’s excuse?” he asked rhetorically. “As explained in the brief opposing the FDA’s request, the FDA’s defense effectively amounts to claiming that the 11 document reviewers it has already assigned and the 17 additional reviewers being onboarded are only capable of reading at the speed of preschoolers.” Even more ominously for scientific transparency and the rule of law, Pfizer has even intervened in the case. Siri pointed out that the pharmaceutical company’s reps showed up at the recent court trial.

“As the FDA tries to obtain months of delay, guess who just showed upon in the lawsuit? Yep, Pfizer,” he said. “And it is represented by a global chair and team from a law firm with thousands of lawyers. Pfizer’s legal bill will likely be multiple times what it would cost the FDA to simply hire a private document review company to review, redact, and produce the documents at issue. Within weeks, if not days.” “Pfizer is coming in as a third party,” he added. “But Pfizer assures the Court it is here to help expedite production of the documents. Sure it is! Where was Pfizer before the Court ordered the 55,000 pages per month? Right, doing what it normally does: letting the government work on its behalf – like the way the government mandates, promotes, and defends Pfizer’s product.”

“But the government did not please Pfizer this time and so here it comes, likely looking for a second bite at the apple,” Siri said. “Of course the FDA consented to Pfizer appearing.” The federal judge in the case earlier issued a ruling against the FDA that it had to produce 55,000 pages a month, instead of the originally requested 55 years to release all of them. Aaron Siri weighed in on the importance of the court’s ruling. “No person should ever be coerced to engage in an unwanted medical procedure,” Siri said. ”And while it is bad enough the government violated this basic liberty right by mandating the Covid-19 vaccine, the government also wanted to hide the data by waiting to fully produce what it relied upon to license this product until almost every American alive today is dead. That form of governance is destructive to liberty and antithetical to the openness required in a democratic society.”

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“See, I would say bear spray but I’m afraid that will get me in trouble so I won’t say that..”

Rand Paul: What To Do When Confronted By ‘Crazy Lunatic’ Mask People (SN)

Appearing on Fox News Tuesday, Senator Rand Paul issued advice on what to do if you find yourself confronted by one of the dwindling numbers of mask wearing “lunatics” who continue to appeal for mass “collectivism”. Host Jesse Watters asked Paul about a recent indecent in which two mask Karens attacked a man for not wearing one, and as he was black, kept yelling ‘Black lives Matter’ at him. “These people clearly aren’t well,” Watters noted, adding “Large swaths of America are in a Covid cult.” The host asked the Senator “As a medical professional, as a genteel Senator and a polite individual, Dr. Rand Paul, what would you recommend Americans do when they are confronted with these mask maniacs, when they are yelled at and screamed at and being recorded on their phone? How should they handle that in a respectful but normal way?”


“See, I would say bear spray but I’m afraid that will get me in trouble so I won’t say that,” Paul jokingly responded. He followed up “I think you should back away and say, ‘Lady, you are crazy, leave me the hell alone,’ but you should not confront her.” Paul continued, “You should not use violence. Back away and just say look, can you not find some other lunatic friends to hang around with?” Paul also noted that “Really this is a difference between individualism and collectivism.” “I have an opinion, but I’m not wanting to enforce it on anybody. I’m not telling you that you can’t wear a mask. I’m just saying don’t make me wear a mask when it doesn’t work,” the Senator urged.

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I’d say Spotify sides with itself. They can’t very well censor people every time someone takes offence with something.

Spotify Sides With Joe Rogan, Removes Neil Young’s Music: ‘A Costly Move’ (NYP)

Spotify has sided with its podcast superstar over Neil Young. The legendary folk singer gave the streaming behemoth an ultimatum earlier this week, saying he refused to allow his music on the same platform as Joe Rogan. The “Heart of Gold” singer accused Rogan and his podcast of spreading false information about COVID-19 vaccines. Spotify reportedly paid more than $100 million deal to be the exclusive home of Rogan’s show. Young, meanwhile, stands to lose 60% of his streaming income from his defiant stance, he said in a statement on his website. “We want all the world’s music and audio content to be available to Spotify users,” a spokesperson for the company told the Wall Street Journal. “With that comes great responsibility in balancing both safety for listeners and freedom for creators.”

Since the start of the pandemic, the spokesman noted, Spotify has removed more than 20,000 COVID-related podcast episodes. Still, Young’s protests were not sufficient for it to drop its lucrative star talker. “We regret Neil’s decision to remove his music from Spotify, but hope to welcome him back soon,” the spokesperson added. Rogan’s podcast has attracted an estimated 11 million listeners. Young’s letter — which is now deleted from his website — did not mince words in accusing the streaming giant of giving an undeserved platform to Rogan and his COVID-19 vaccine “misinformation.” “I want you to let Spotify know immediately TODAY that I want all my music off their platform,” wrote the 76-year-old rock icon. “I am doing this because Spotify is spreading fake information about vaccines – potentially causing death to those who believe the disinformation being spread by them.”

[..] Young thanked his publisher Hipgnosis and his label Warner Records/Reprise for supporting his ultimatum. “Losing 60% of worldwide streaming income by leaving SPOTIFY is a very big deal, a costly move, but worth it for our integrity and beliefs. Misinformation about COVID is over the line.” He went on to nudge other artists to take a similar stance. “I sincerely hope that other artists can make a move, but I can’t really expect that to happen,” Young said. “I did this because I had no choice in my heart. It is who I am. I am not censoring anyone. I am speaking my own truth.”Although Young did not specifically note which episodes he took issue with, Rogan did recently host Dr. Robert Malone, the “anti-vaxxer epidemiologist” who was recently booted from Twitter for alleged dissemination of vaccine misinformation…

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I’m trying to get interested.

Is the Fed Delusional or a Big Pack of Liars? (Mish)

Powell: It will soon be appropriate to raise the Federal Funds target rate. …. Reducing our balance sheet will occur after the process of raising interest rates has begun.

Mish: Inflation suggests it was appropriate a year ago. At the very least, expanding the balance sheet now is ridiculous. Yet the Fed will still expand through March 2022. The Fed made similar statements a year or so ago, and thus committed to let inflation burn higher regardless of what happened in the interim.

Powell: Reductions will occur over time in a predictable manner. primarily through adjustments to reinvestments so that securities will roll off our balance sheet. … The Committee has not made decisions regarding specific timing, pace or other details of shrinking the balance sheet. We will discuss these matters in upcoming meetings and provide additional information at the appropriate time.

Mish: This implies a very slow balance sheet reduction. In practice, it’s highly likely the next recession hits before the Fed gets seriously underway with balance sheet reduction.

Chris Rugaber, Associated Press: Are rate hikes at consecutive meetings on the table? Is every meeting a live meeting? Would the Fed consider frontloading rate hikes?

Powell: It is not possible to predict with much confidence what path our policy will take will prove appropriate. … We will be humble and nimble. … We will be led by the incoming data.

Mish: Just like the Fed was led by the incoming inflation data? Here’s the real deal: The Fed will do what it wants and will bend subsequent wishy-washy statements to justify whatever policy it wants to set.

Nick Timiraos, Wall Street Journal: Apart from moving faster to shrink [balance sheet] holdings are there any other ways you and your colleagues are seriously thinking about recalibrating this process? And finally, how much disagreement is there on how you use tools?

Powell: I am afraid to tell you those are all great questions, but those are questions the committee is just turning to now.

Mish: This implies the Fed has been on autopilot all this time, and amazingly is still there despite huge inflation every step of the way. The Fed announced QE through March of 2022 and despite everything that happened, did not waver from announced policy. Yet, the Fed wants us to believe it will decide policy on the basis of incoming data!

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“to see whether Washington is willing to discuss any sort of commitment that constrains U.S. power.”

The Ukraine Crisis, Sponsored By US Hegemony And War Profiteers (Maté)

The row over Ukraine is the outgrowth of an aggressive US posture toward Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union three decades ago, driven by hegemonic policymakers and war profiteers in Washington. Understanding that background is key to resolving the current impasse, if the Biden administration can bring itself to alter a dangerous course. Russia’s central demands – binding guarantees to halt the eastward expansion of NATO, particularly in Ukraine, and to prevent offensive weapons from being stationed near its borders – have been publicly dismissed by the U.S government as non-starters. In rejecting Russian concerns, the Biden administration claims that it is upholding “governing principles of international peace and security.”

These principles, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken says, “reject the right of one country to change the borders of another by force; to dictate to another the policies it pursues or the choices it makes, including with whom to associate; or to exert a sphere of influence that would subjugate sovereign neighbors to its will.” The US government’s real-world commitment to these principles is non-existent. For decades, the US has provided critical diplomatic and military cover for Israel’s de-facto annexations, which have expanded its borders to three different strips of occupied territory (the West Bank, Gaza, and Syria’s Golan Heights). The US is by far the world leader in dictating policies to other countries, be it who their leaders should be; how little to pay minimum-wage workers; or how to share energy supplies.

The Biden administration continues to subjugate sovereign countries to its will, whether it’s “neighbors” like blockade-targeted Cuba; coup-targeted Venezuela; sanctions-targeted Nicaragua; or far-away countries like US military-occupied and sanctions-targeted Syria. Biden just recently embraced the longstanding Monroe Doctrine of a US sphere of influence by declaring Latin America to be the United States’ “front yard.” When not making sanctimonious public pronouncements, US officials are quietly able to acknowledge the real principles that guide their actions. According to the Washington Post, one US official specializing in Russia “believes the Russians are still interested in a real dialogue.” Russia’s real aim, this official says, is “to see whether Washington is willing to discuss any sort of commitment that constrains U.S. power.”

The official added: “The Russians are waiting to see what we’re going to offer, and they’re going to take it back and decide is this serious. Is this something we [the Russians] can sell as a major victory for security, or is it just, from their point of view, another attempt to fob us off and not give us anything?”

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

 

Jan 092022
 


Giovanni Bellini St. Francis in ecstasy 1480

 

Pandemic Soon Over, De-Escalation In 2-3 Weeks (KTG)
End Mass Jabs And Live With Covid, Says Ex-head Of Vaccine Taskforce (G.)
Omicron May Be 100 Times Less Deadly Than Delta (DM)
Propaganda Institutions Collaborate to Refute “Mass Formation Psychosis” (CTH)
Wendepunkt (eugyppius)
Re: Review of Child Vaccination Programme (DS)
New Symptom Of Omicron In Young Children Revealed (RT)
Does Covid19 Cause Diabetes In Kids? (Prasad)
Federal Vaccine Mandate Enters ‘Major Question’ Land (Turley)
People Injured by COVID-19 Vaccine Are Left in the Dark (ET)
2021 Year in Review: The Rise of Centralized Healthcare (Collum)
Household Expense Data, the Same House for 80 Years (Mish)
The Federal Reserve Keeps Buying Mortgages (Pollock)

 

 

The success story of mass vaccination:

 

 

The pic is not very clear, but the message is: so-called “cases” are spiking, but deaths are falling.

 

 

 

McCullough Needle

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dr Rochelle Walensky @CDCDirector: “the overwhelming number of deaths over 75% occurred in people who had at least 4 comorbidities, so really these are people who were unwell to begin with”

 

 

 

 

Greek Deputy Health Minister Mina (aka Lady) Gaga drops this bombshell (echoing Denmark’s chief epidemiologist) on the same day the government says another 40,000 kid vaccines are ready, and vaccines are to become mandatory for everyone over 50.

Don’t think they coordinated the messages. Why would anyone want a vaccine if the pandemic is basically over?

Yes, hospitals will be busy for a while, but that’s what you get when you ramp up rapid testing and those who test positive seek an opinion (I feel fine, doctor, but I guess I’m sick). For a “disease” that is 100x less deadly than Alpha or Delta, during which 99.97% already survived. Or even less deadly than the flu…

But yeah, keep your mask on says Lady Gaga!

Pandemic Soon Over, De-Escalation In 2-3 Weeks (KTG)

Deputy Health Minister Mina Gaga told media on Saturday that the Covid-19 pandemic will soon be over and that people will have to live with it like with a common flu. In an interview with news website iefirmerida.gr, Gaga estimated that things will be better in two to three weeks. however, people should comply with the measures. She predicted a quick de-escalation saying that soon the whole issue will be over. The deputy health minister, who is a medical doctor by profession said that the Omicron variant seems to be now the dominant strain of the virus in Greece, as it concerns up to 90% of new Covid-19 cases. “Internationally – and in our country – with the predominance of Omicron, there is a tendency of stabilization in the so-called hard markers (admissions to ICUs and deaths), which supports the view that this mutation causes a milder disease, especially in the fully vaccinated population,” Gaga told iefimerida.gr.

She stressed that the great contamination caused by Omicron should not be underestimated and that this can affect the proper operation of the health system. With these data, it is still early to predict the end of the pandemic and it is very important to adhere to the measures, namely masks, avoiding crowding and the booster vaccination shot that provides a strong protection, the minister said. “However, I am one of those who believe that we are heading towards the end. We have concluded two years, I think we are close to seeing Covid-19 evolve from now on like the flu. Of course, the virus will still exist, it will not disappear, it will be part of our lives. But we will return to normalcy,” Gaga said adding the whole story will be soon over, it’s a matter of weeks, as long as we have in mind to balance. We are in times of intense transmission, we have to wear mask, keep the measures, be careful.”

[..] Meanwhile, in Cyprus a new variant has been identified, the Deltacron, a mutation with both the strains of Delta and Omicron. According to professor Leontios Kostrikis at the Biological Science Department of the University of Cyprus, the Deltacron mutation has been identified in 25 cases and it seems that the strains have a genetic background of the Delta mutation. The new mutation was detected in 11 hospitalized patients and in 14 people of the general population and its frequency was higher among Covid-patients in hospitalization.

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“Mass population-based vaccination in the UK should now end.”

End Mass Jabs And Live With Covid, Says Ex-head Of Vaccine Taskforce (G.)

Covid should now be treated as an endemic virus similar to flu, and ministers should end mass-vaccination after the booster campaign, the former chairman of the UK’s vaccine taskforce has said. With health chiefs and senior Tories also lobbying for a post-pandemic plan for a straining NHS, Dr Clive Dix called for a major rethink of the UK’s Covid strategy, in effect reversing the approach of the last two years and returning to a “new normality”. “We need to analyse whether we use the current booster campaign to ensure the vulnerable are protected, if this is seen to be necessary,” he said. “Mass population-based vaccination in the UK should now end.”

He said that ministers should urgently back research into Covid immunity beyond antibodies to include B-cells and T-cells (white blood cells), which could be used to create vaccines for vulnerable people specific to Covid variants: “We now need to manage disease, not virus spread. So stopping progression to severe disease in vulnerable groups is the future objective.” His intervention comes as it was revealed more than 150,000 people across the UK have now died from Covid. Official figures published yesterday recorded a further 313 deaths, the highest daily number since February last year when the last peak was receding. It takes the total recorded deaths within 28 days of a positive Covid test to 150,057.

Meanwhile, NHS officials are warning that patient safety has been compromised this winter because of a crippling health and social care staff shortage that requires a million additional workers by the next decade. Writing in the Observer, Chris Hopson, chief executive of NHS Providers, said that the pandemic had exposed “its weakest links”. “There is a clear, regrettable, impact on quality of care and, in the most pressured parts of the system, a worrying increase in patient safety risk,” he writes. “It is now very clear that the NHS and our social care system do not have sufficient capacity. That asking staff to work harder and harder to address that gap is simply not sustainable. That we need a long-term, fully funded, workforce plan to attract and retain the extra one million health and care staff the Health Foundation estimates will be needed by 2031.”

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“..researchers at Washington University modelling the next stage of the pandemic expect Omicron to kill up to 99 per cent fewer people than Delta, in another hint it could be less deadly than flu..”

Omicron May Be 100 Times Less Deadly Than Delta (DM)

Omicron could be even less deadly than flu, scientists believe in a boost to hopes that the worst of the pandemic is over. Some experts have always maintained that the coronavirus would eventually morph into a seasonal cold-like virus as the world develops immunity through vaccines and natural infection. But the emergence of the highly-mutated Omicron variant appears to have sped the process up. MailOnline analysis shows Covid killed one in 33 people who tested positive at the peak of the devastating second wave last January, compared to just one in 670 now. But experts believe the figure could be even lower because of Omicron. The case fatality rate — the proportion of confirmed infections that end in death — for seasonal influenza is 0.1, the equivalent of one in 1,000.

One former Government adviser today said if the trend continues to drop then ‘we should be asking whether we are justified in having any measures we would not bring for a bad flu season’. But other experts say coronavirus is much more transmissible than flu, meaning it will inevitably cause more deaths. Meanwhile, researchers at Washington University modelling the next stage of the pandemic expect Omicron to kill up to 99 per cent fewer people than Delta, in another hint it could be less deadly than flu. No accurate infection-fatality rate (IFR), which is always just a fraction of the CFR because it reflects deaths among everyone who catches the virus, has yet been published for Delta.

But UK Government advisers estimated the overall figure stood at around 0.25 per cent before Omicron burst onto the scene, down from highs of around 1.5 per cent before the advent of life-saving vaccines. If Omicron is 99 per cent less lethal than Delta, it suggests the current IFR could be as low as 0.0025 per cent, the equivalent of one in 40,000, although experts say this is unlikely. Instead, the Washington modelling estimates the figure actually sits in the region of 0.07 per cent, meaning approximately one in 1,430 people who get infected will succumb to the illness. Leading researchers estimate flu’s IFR to sit between 0.01 and 0.05 per cent but argue comparing rates for the two illnesses is complicated.

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“There is no such thing as mass formation psychosis and the masses who believe otherwise have fallen prey to some type of… you know… mass formation psychosis.”

Propaganda Institutions Collaborate to Refute “Mass Formation Psychosis” (CTH)

Well, butter my buns and call me a biscuit… if this ain’t the biggest revealing tell in years. Apparently Big Tech and big propaganda media, Reuters and the Associated Press, have joined together to refute the concept of “Mass Formation Psychosis”, and pushed their collective narrative into the narrative engineering system: The Associated Press and Reuters, quickly rush to the “fact check” typeset to stop people from recognizing what is most likely the cause of their own psychosis. In a world where things are no longer shocking, this is, well, a little shocking, in a weird and seemingly Orwellian kind of way. Yes Alice, the same “experts” and media who are credibly accused of creating/enabling the mass formation psychosis would like to assure us that no such reality exists. This is almost too funny.

(AP) – […] “The concept has no academic credibility,” Stephen Reicher, a social psychology professor at the University of St Andrews in the U.K., wrote in an email to The Associated Press. The term also does not appear in the American Psychological Association’s Dictionary of Psychology. “Psychosis” is a term that refers to conditions that involve some disconnect from reality. According to a National Institutes of Health estimate, about 3% of people experience some form of psychosis at some time in their lives. […] The description of “mass formation psychosis” offered by Malone resembles discredited concepts, such as “mob mentality” and “group mind,” according to John Drury, a social psychologist at the University of Sussex in the U.K. who studies collective behavior.

The ideas suggest that “when people form part of a psychological crowd they lose their identities and their self-control; they become suggestible, and primitive instinctive impulses predominate,” he said in an email. That notion has been discredited by decades of research on crowd behavior, Drury said. “No respectable psychologist agrees with these ideas now,” he said. Multiple experts told the AP that while there is evidence that groups can shape or influence one’s behaviors — and that people can and do believe falsehoods that are put forward by the leader of a group — those concepts do not involve the masses experiencing “psychosis” or “hypnosis.”

Reuters offers this simultaneous rebuttal: (Reuters) – “Mass formation psychosis” is not an academic term recognized in the field of psychology, nor is there evidence of any such phenomenon occurring during the COVID-19 pandemic, multiple experts in crowd psychology have told Reuters. […] There is no evidence to suggest a “mass formation psychosis” has occurred during the pandemic, experts told Reuters. The term itself is not recognised among academics, and modern research into crowd psychology has shown that crowds do not behave in mindless or non-individualistic ways. Once a collective group creates an alternate reality of itself, in this case a totalitarian reality based on government needing to create an irrational illusion of fear that becomes part of the accepted national identity, how can anyone call attention to the outcomes without finding themselves in front of the board of inquisition who organizes the collective?

Put another way… if the pod under your bed malfunctioned, but the pods under all the other beds in the city worked, what happens when you awaken and realize you are not one of them, but you must engage in the world of them while looking for others -like yourself- whose pods hopefully malfunctioned? That is the current challenge for anyone trying to communicate on contrary evidence and yet avoid the ire from the collective board of COVID compliance who have successfully brainwashed the audience. As a rather prescient Lewis Carroll shared so brilliantly in his novel of Alice, Through The Looking Glass:

“If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn’t. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn’t be. And what it wouldn’t be, it would. You see?”

McCullough MFP

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“This is the first time since the Floyd riots in America, that major political leaders and public health authorities have said that preventing Corona can no longer be the highest goal of western society.”

Wendepunkt (eugyppius)

“Where’s the vaccine mandate they promised us?” whines Daniel Brössler, reporter for the Süddeutsche Zeitung, disappointed because yesterday’s Corona summit of German minister presidents returned nothing but some adjustments to quarantine and sharpened testing rules. The double vaccinated will now have to submit negative tests if they want to eat at restaurants. Markus Söder, lockdown- and vaccine mandate-loving minister president of Bavaria, criticised even these milquetoast restrictions, with some bluster about how he’d already taken a hard line against bars and discos. This is after leading German Corona astrologer, Christian Drosten, used his state media podcast to suggest that Germany should start tolerating some of degree of SARS-2 transmission, and that breakthrough infections among the vaccinated should be considered normal. Such statements, which almost surely reflect sentiments within the coalition government, destroy most of the rationale for ongoing restrictions and vaccine mandates.

Meanwhile, in Austria, the thrice-vaccinated chancellor Karl Nehammer has tested positive for Corona. The news comes as Austria announces they will delay implementing their vaccine mandate by two months. It will now take effect in April, if at all. Gerald Gartlehner, an epidemiologist and sometime governmental adviser, suggested that mandates (or at least their enforcement) might have to be re-evaluated in light of Omicron and the widespread immunity the new variant will elicit across the Austrian population. There is every reason to think that Austria will be past the peak of the Omicron wave in April, and that a majority of Austrians with have SARS-2 antibodies by then.

In the United States, former Biden advisers have published a series of editorials in the Journal of the American Medical Association, arguing that it is time to normalise containment and begin managing SARS-2 as one of various seasonal respiratory infections. It is obvious that we are at a turning point, even if everyone has yet to realise it – even if France is sharpening vaccine requirements, even if Italy has imposed vaccine mandates for everyone over 50, and even if Canada is for the moment determined to remain a prison state. This is the first time since the Floyd riots in America, that major political leaders and public health authorities have said that preventing Corona can no longer be the highest goal of western society.

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“In an open letter to the Government’s vaccination advisory committee – the JCVI – the MPs including Miriam Cates, Esther McVey and Sir Desmond Swayne and scientists including Professor Allyson Pollock, Dr Roland Salmon and Professor Brent Taylor write that “the risk to benefit ratio for child Covid vaccination has worsened since September”.

Re: Review of Child Vaccination Programme (DS)

January 2021 – To Members of the Joint Committee on Vaccines and Immunisation, – On September 3rd 2021 the JCVI advised against recommending the mass vaccination of healthy 12-15-year-olds against COVID-19. The principal reason given for this was that, while the known benefits and harms from vaccination to this age group were both very small, the Committee was concerned about the unknown potential harms of the new vaccine, particularly the long-term and possibly serious risks of myocarditis. The JCVI estimated that for every one million 12-15-year-olds vaccinated with two doses, 2.54 ICU admissions would be avoided and up to 51 cases of myocarditis caused. Subsequently, the risk of myocarditis and other adverse events has been shown to be greater than believed by the JCVI at the time.

The Government referred the matter to the CMO, asking him to consider the ‘wider benefits’ to children of vaccination. On September 13th 2021 Professor Chris Whitty recommended that one dose of the vaccine be given to healthy 12-15-year-olds on the basis that it would possibly provide ‘marginal benefits’, specifically in reducing the time spent out of school as a result of Covid infection. This was calculated as a saving of, on average, 15 mins of education per child. (This estimate did not take into account disruption even from short term vaccine side effects and is also based on assumptions about the level of protection one dose of the vaccine gives against infection which have proved to be over-optimistic.)

The risk and benefit calculations made by the JCVI and the CMO were based on less complete data on both the harms and benefits of vaccinating children compared to the evidence now available. Four months later, we are in a very different position, with the virulent Delta variant almost completely replaced by the milder Omicron variant. Additionally, society now has a higher level of robust immunity from natural infection than it had when teenage vaccination was approved. We have seen in recent weeks that Omicron is significantly more infectious than Delta (based on secondary attack rates, it was originally twice as transmissible as Delta, but this has declined to 1.3 times as transmissible as naturally acquired variant-specific immunity to it has risen). Vaccines are also far less effective at stemming the transmission of Omicron, compared to Delta (protection appears to fall to zero, three months after vaccination).

More data have emerged about the frequency of harmful side effects of Covid vaccination. One study found that for males under 40, risk of myocarditis was up to 14 times higher after vaccination than after infection (101 cases after the Moderna second dose, compared to seven cases after infection). It is particularly important to note that the risks of myocarditis in young men and boys seems to increase significantly after a second dose of the vaccine – which is why Chief Medical Officer Professor Chris Whitty initially recommended just one dose be given to 12-15 year olds – and yet we are now offering second doses to children, despite the evidence of risk growing.

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A symptom found only in one place?

New Symptom Of Omicron In Young Children Revealed (RT)

American scientists have identified a new symptom of the Omicron variant in children under five; a “barking” cough that may sound frightening when parents hear it. According to Dr. Buddy Creech, a pediatric infectious diseases expert at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, some Covid patients in the youngest age group develop “croup-like” coughs which can be identified by a “barking” sound. That happens, Creech told NBC news, because “little kids’ airways are so narrow that it takes far less inflammation to clog them.” The best way to protect the youngest children, who are not yet eligible for the vaccines, is to “cocoon” them around vaccinated people, he said.


Croup, which is an infection of the vocal cords, windpipe, and bronchial tubes, is a well-known and usually easily treatable disease, so doctors are telling parents not to panic. While the croup cough may be “scary to hear,” it does not necessarily mean there are any problems with the lungs, said Dr. Amy Edwards, a pediatric infectious diseases expert at the University Hospitals Rainbow Babies and Children’s Hospital in Cleveland.

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No, it’s upside down. Diabetic kids are more vulnerable to Covid. Actually, quite a sinister suggestion.

Does Covid19 Cause Diabetes In Kids? (Prasad)

The CDC is back with a new piece of propagan—- I mean, a new publication. It claims that kids (<18) with COVID are more likely to be diagnosed with diabetes in the next 30 days than kids without COVID or kids with other pre-pandemic respiratory viruses. It asserts this is a causal effect. COVID causes diabetes in kids. To make this claim, the CDC examines 2 databases: IQVIA and HealthVerity. From IQVIA, they pull out kids <18 with COVID19 diagnosis, and age and sex matched kids without the diagnosis, as well as those with a prior non-covid respiratory infection. From HealthVerity, they pull out kids <18 with COVID19 diagnosis and kids <18 who got tested for COVID19 and were negative*. (we shall return to this).

In all cases, administrative/billing codes for COVID19 and diabetes were used to see who had COVID19 and who developed diabetes within 30 days of the index encounter. Of course, many, many more kids had COVID who are not in the database. Some may not have even had symptoms, and others may not have sought testing. In IQVIA, among kids with COVID19, a whopping 68 out of 80,000+ or 0.08% ended with diabetes; among kids without COVID19, it was 132 out of 400,000+ or 0.03% ended up with diabetes, and among kids with prior respiratory infection it was ~0.06% The absolute risk of diabetes due to COVID (if you believed this is causal) appears to be an increase on par with a swiftly eaten bag of skittles.

Now in the HealthVerity database, the risk of diabetes post COVID19 was 0.25% (a quarter of 1 percent), if you were tested for COVID19 but negative, it was 0.19% (one fifth of 1 percent). Here, COVID appears as risky as a McDonalds supersized soda. The CDC trumpets this finding as “children and teens 18 years & younger who have had #COVID19 are up to 2.5 times more likely to have a #diabetes diagnosis after infection” Is that a fair take away or a fear-mongering distortion? First, the whole analysis hinges on the idea that age-sex matched kids without covid should be comparable to the kids who got covid in terms of risk of diabetes. The only difference between the kids should be that some, unfortunately, had covid. But COVID may be more likely to affect kids of lower socioeconomic status, of certain races, and kids who were already overweight or suffering from medical problems.

Does the CDC attempt to correct for any of these confounders? Not at all. They surely have height and weight, and could adjust for BMI, but do not. I am truly puzzled as to why. Second, they don’t have the true denominator. This is only kids who present and have a COVID19 diagnosis. Seroprevalence is needed to find the real denominator of kids with COVID19. This will lower the absolute risks. COVID19 may be downgraded from a whole bag of skittles to a single, red skittle. Does the CDC adjust for this? Nope. Third, kids who seek medical care for COVID19 may get more blood tests than those without COVID19, and perhaps more than those with other respiratory viruses in yesteryear. This too may capture more diabetes. Does the CDC correct for ascertainment? Not at all.

Joe Rogan AF Neil
https://twitter.com/i/status/1479887329925996547

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Turley on Twitter: “Would quoting Justice Breyer or Sotomayor from the vaccine mandate oral argument get one suspension by Twitter for covid disinformation?”

Federal Vaccine Mandate Enters ‘Major Question’ Land (Turley)

“Major-question-land,” the term coined by Louisiana solicitor general Elizabeth Murrill during Friday’s oral arguments over the Biden vaccine mandates, has an almost Disneyesque sound to it. However, unlike Yesterland or Tomorrowland, major-question-land clearly holds no attraction for the Biden administration or the court’s liberal justices. The defenders of the mandates worked mightily to avoid the fact that it’s the first-ever national vaccine mandate and was decided without the approval of Congress. Chief Justice John Roberts, a vital vote needed by the administration, noted that this administration was relying on language passed roughly 50 years ago — closer to the Spanish Flu than the novel coronavirus — and stated ominously, “This is something the federal government has never done before.”

That sounds not just like a question but a major one. The major-questions doctrine maintains that courts should not defer to agency statutory interpretations when the underlying questions concern “vast economic or political significance.” The controversy over the mandates shows the wisdom of the doctrine demanding that Congress not only take action but responsibility, too, for such major decisions. With increasing confusion over changing CDC guidelines and the risk profile associated with the Omicron variant, congressional action could bring both greater legitimacy and clarity to questions swirling around mandates.

Instead, the Supreme Court is grappling with an executive move that was openly discussed not only as an avoidance of Congress but a circumvention of constitutional limitations. It was not a good sign for the administration that the most referenced individual during oral argument was Biden’s chief of staff, Ron Klain, who tweeted that the mandates were “workarounds” of the Constitution. Chief Justice Roberts, Justice Neil Gorsuch, and others referred to Klain’s admission as the administration’s lawyers tried to argue that the executive had the constitutional authority to implement a national mandate.

The liberal justices took the “time is of the essence” argument to an almost apocalyptic degree: Justice Stephen Breyer kept mentioning that every second they wait, more people are getting COVID, and he incorrectly stated there were “750 million new cases yesterday.” Justice Sonia Sotomayor stated as a fact that “Omicron is as deadly as Delta and causes as much serious disease in the unvaccinated as Delta did.” That is not true. Omicron appears to be far more virulent, but less lethal than Delta. Sotomayor also claimed that “we have over 100,000 children, which we’ve never had before, in serious condition, and many on ventilators.” That is also untrue. For patients, up to 17 years old, the seven-day average for hospitalizations was 797.

Tucker Sotomayor

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Agricultural pilot “was told that his inner ears were ruptured, and fluid inside was leaking inward toward the inside of his skull.”

People Injured by COVID-19 Vaccine Are Left in the Dark (ET)

People injured by the COVID-19 vaccine have no meaningful way to get compensated and have been ignored by the federal government, according to an agricultural pilot who has been seriously injured by taking the COVID-19 vaccine. “At this point, the government has totally abandoned us,” Cody Flint, a vaccine-injured pilot, told NTD’s “The Nation Speaks” program in an interview broadcast on Jan. 1. [..] On Feb. 1, 2021, Flint volunteered to get the vaccine. “Just an exciting day—thought we were gonna put this behind us,” Flint recalled.

But within 30 minutes, he developed an odd headache after receiving the vaccine. Two days later, he took his first flight that year. Immediately after takeoff, he had tunnel vision. Flint tried to push forward to keep his commitment to his client. But he felt like a bomb went off inside his head in the end. He couldn’t remember how he landed the plane back on the runway. “Really by the grace of God that there was not an accident. I went to my family doctor immediately,” Flint said. Later, he was told that his inner ears were ruptured, and fluid inside was leaking inward toward the inside of his skull. Doctors explained that only highly elevated intracranial pressure from things like a car wreck, major head trauma, or things of that nature could make that happen to both of his ears at the same time on the same day.

“Obviously, I had none of those. The only thing that changed in my life was I got the vaccine and developed a severe headache immediately that got worse leading up to that point,” Flint said. Flint went through two surgeries and dozens of doctor visits afterward. His condition improved, but he still has trouble driving. “I don’t know what my next stepping stone in life is going to be. I don’t know,” Flint said, noting that his pilot license was taken away. “I don’t know what to do at this point. I spent every dime I’ve saved my entire life on the surgeries and just trying to survive and feed my family since the incident happened.”

Having been an agricultural pilot for 15 years, Flint said he’s not an anti-vaxxer. “I signed up and got it the first day I could possibly get it. I believed in vaccines,” Flint told The Epoch Times last month. Now Flint is critical of the vaccine mandate. “That’s the Achilles heel of the mandate. This does not fit everyone. It’s not a one-size-fits-all solution,” Flint told NTD. “There are thousands and thousands of people around the country. I’ve been in touch with a lot of them that have had absolutely life-altering, career-ending injuries from these vaccines. A lot of them are pilots. It is scary that how many pilots are being injured by this.”

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Dave seems to think we already finished part 1.

2021 Year in Review: The Rise of Centralized Healthcare (Collum)

1/The US and the World appeared to need a vaccine developed and produced. We forked up serious Federal support and threw caution to the wind via Operation Warp Speed. The vaccine policies were coming from the healthcare authorities. In our haste, all safeguards were removed, which led via shoddy methodology to produce a product of questionable efficacy pushed on the public with oppressive tactics. The medium and long-term risks are unknown.

2/ Ivermectin. Early treatment of the disease was completely neglected by policy. Frontline doctors trying to McGyver their way into solutions using Ivermectin and other drugs were shut down completely. Careers were destroyed. The public was duped by a massive media campaign and overt censorship. All this was to ensure that the vaccines and patent-protected antiviral drugs could be developed and sold. There are, however, darker and more sinister interpretations.

3/The lockdowns and social distancing policies came almost exclusively from the medical authorities paying no attention whatsoever to the socioeconomic and other health consequences.

In short, we gave healthcare “authorities” autocratic control over every facet of our society. Rochelle Walensky, the Director of the CDC, went so far as to set policy on apartment evictions. How fucked up is that? We socialized the healthcare costs and privatized the profits. Where have I heard that one before? The Overton Window is now stuck wide open. The FDA and CDC won’t go quiescent, and many of us won’t trust them now. The next crisis will be sooner than you can imagine and be accompanied by calls for further largesse and lockdowns. It will seem so natural to comply. The new normal is in society’s DNA.

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Great data. Since two thirds of the rise is taxation, I would be very careful about calling this inflation.

“My Grandfather was in the same job and same house his entire life. He maintained the same standard of living in all the years I knew him.”

Household Expense Data, the Same House for 80 Years (Mish)

Reader Holly Writes: Dear Mish, Recently I came into possession of the financial records of my grandfather. I plugged a bunch of the numbers into a spreadsheet just for kicks. What is most interesting about these numbers is they start in 1941 when he purchased the home. It was left to my mother, and then to me in 2020 (80 years of finances for the same home!) My Grandfather was in the same job and same house his entire life. He maintained the same standard of living in all the years I knew him. The numbers show that the cost of maintaining a stable standard of living reflects a much higher inflation rate than any of the indexes I have compared it too. After my grandfather passed in 2003 until I acquired the home in 2020 I had to approximate some expenses. I took the records I had from 2020 and 2021 and filled in the missing gaps.


Regards, Holly

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“..24% of all outstanding residential mortgages in this whole big country reside in the central bank..”

There’s neither a housing market nor a mortgage market. Both are cornered.

The Federal Reserve Keeps Buying Mortgages (Pollock)

Runaway house price inflation continues to characterize the U.S. market. House prices across the country rose 15.8% on average in October 2021 from the year before. U.S. house prices are far over their 2006 Bubble peak, and remain over the Bubble peak even after adjustment for consumer price inflation. They will keep on rising at the annual rate of 14–16% for the rest of 2021, according to the AEI Housing Center. Unbelievably, in this situation the Federal Reserve keeps on buying mortgages. It buys a lot of them and continues to be the price-setting marginal buyer or Big Bid in the mortgage market, expanding its mortgage portfolio with one hand, and printing money with the other. It should have stopped before now, but the purchases, financed by newly created fiat money, or monetization, go on.

They proceed at the rate of tens of billions of dollars a month, stoking the house price inflation, making it harder and harder for new families to afford a house. A recent Wall Street Journal opinion piece was entitled “How the Fed Rigs the Bond Market”—it rigs the mortgage market, too. The balance sheet of the Federal Reserve has grown to a size that would have amazed previous generations of Federal Reserve governors and economists. Although we have become somewhat accustomed to it, so fast do perceptions adjust, it would also have surprised readers of Housing Finance International of five years ago, and readers of 15 years ago would probably have judged the current reality simply impossible. Over time, we keep discovering how feeble are our judgments of what is possible or impossible.

The total assets of the Federal Reserve reached $8.7 trillion in November 2021. This is just about double the $4.5 trillion of November 2016, five years before—and we thought it was really big then. Today’s Federal Reserve assets are ten times what they were in November 2006, 15 years ago, when they were $861 billion, and none were mortgages. The Federal Reserve now owns on its balance sheet $2.6 trillion in mortgages. That means about 24% of all outstanding residential mortgages in this whole big country reside in the central bank, which has thereby earned the remarkable status of becoming by far the largest savings and loan institution in the world. Like the historical U.S. savings and loans associations, the Federal Reserve owns very long-term mortgages, with their interest rates fixed for 15 to 30 years, and neither marks its investments to market in its financial statements nor hedges its substantial interest rate risk.

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Size comparison between Hubble and JWST (Webb telescope) primary mirror

 

 

 

Tucker Viagra

 

 

Leave me alone!
https://twitter.com/i/status/1479765306675539970

 

 

God save the queen

 

 

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

 

Dec 222021
 
 December 22, 2021  Posted by at 9:09 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  94 Responses »


Berthe Morisot Julie and her boat1884

 

Omicron Could Be ‘A Christmas Present’ – Malone (WND)
BioNTech CEO Says ‘Even Triple-Vaccinated’ Transmit COVID (SAC)
How Fauci and Collins Shut Down Covid Debate (WSJ Ed.)
Fauci Says Unvaxxed Relatives Not Worthy of Family Christmas Gatherings (CTH)
An Interview With Fauci’s Nemesis (Beck)
Here’s A Reality Check (Denninger)
Prepare For Fourth Covid Jab, Tony Blair Institute Says (RT)
EU Sets Binding 9 Month Validity Of Covid-19 Travel Pass (R.)
Austria Hiring People to “Hunt Down Vaccine Refusers” (SN)
Ryanair CEO Calls For Unvaccinated “Idiots” To Be Ostracised From Society (SN)
Judge Blocks Biden’s Vaccine Mandate for Federal Contractors in 10 States (ET)
Covid Modelling Shows The Most Worrying Scenario, Not The Most Likely (G.)
A Letter from a Concerned Psychologist (Nicassio)
Americans Warned About Risk Of Russian Invasion Of Ukraine (RT)
The Fed Gets Its Ducks in a Row for the Next Wall Street Bailout (Martens)
“If You Could Die Of Irony, She Would Be Dead”: Musk Slams Liz Warren (ZH)

 

 

 

 

For context, in the UK:

• same time last year, 40,000 daily cases of Covid
• this year, 90,000

• same time last year, 21,000 hospitalised
• this year, 8,000

Additionally, hospital stays will likely be much shorter this year.

 

 

First US death

 

 

“..if you believe in a God,” the rise of the omicron variant “looks an awful lot like a Christmas present.”

Omicron Could Be ‘A Christmas Present’ – Malone (WND)

The new omicron variant that is causing renewed panic among government officials and media could turn out to be “a Christmas present,” says the inventor of the mRNA technology behind the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines. Dr. Robert W. Malone, in a video interview Monday with WND, explained that while the original SARS-CoV-2 virus settled in the lungs, a new University of Hong Kong study that is still under peer review is among studies indicating omicron is settling in the upper respiratory tract. That makes it more transmissible but less virulent. Consequently, the new variant, which was first detected in South Africa on Nov. 25, could act similarly to a live attenuated virus vaccine, producing mild symptoms and natural immunity to COVID-19, Malone said.

He urged caution, noting a pre-print U.K. study by Imperial College of London reporting it is finding no difference in omicron hospitalizations compared to delta. However, the U.K. researchers acknowledged in their initial report that hospitalization data “remains very limited at this time.” In fact, South African officials reported last week that only 1.7% of identified COVID-19 cases were admitted to hospitals in the second week of infections in the fourth wave. That’s compared with 19% in the same week of the third delta-driven wave, South African Health Minister Joe Phaahla said at a press conference. [..] Malone also discussed in the WND interview a new study from Ontario, Canada, suggesting vaccination could predispose someone to a higher risk of infection by omicron.

“If so, that would be the clear indication of the vaccine-enhanced infection and disease risk that not just I had been concerned about, but that the FDA was concerned about,” he said. His main caution with the Ontario data is that there is no indication of how many cases were omicron and how many were delta.[..] Malone also commented on the new release of emails showing that outgoing National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins asked White House coronavirus adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci to carry out a “quick and devastating published takedown” of the Great Barrington Declaration in the fall of 2020. [..] “We have now clear, clear evidence of collusion by senior government officials to suppress scientific discussion and debate about one of the most crucial issues that we’ve addressed over the last two years, which is whether or not lockdowns make sense,” Malone said.

“And the data are overwhelming. They don’t.” And, he continued, “the worst part is the rest of the world looks to the U.S. for leadership.” “There’s a good chance that Australia wouldn’t be in this hellhole that they are now in if Francis Collins hadn’t substituted his opinions for actually looking at the data,” Malone said. On Friday, Malone told Fox News host Laura Ingraham that “if you believe in a God,” the rise of the omicron variant “looks an awful lot like a Christmas present.” He said that to “the experienced vaccinologist,” it looks “like a live attenuated virus vaccine that you might design for purpose.” “It’s going to elicit a strong mucosal immune response. This is about as good as we could possibly want right now, in terms of outcomes,” he said.

Yet, Ingraham noted, the media and political establishment are “freaking out,” calling for shutting things down again. “I think they’re disappointed with the good news,” Malone said.

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Admitting your product is worthless, in an attempt to make even more money. And people will fall for it.

BioNTech CEO Says ‘Even Triple-Vaccinated’ Transmit COVID (SAC)

While President Joe Biden and his coronavirus officials are bullying Americans into getting vaccinated or they will face a “deadly winter” for themselves and their families, “one of the scientists behind Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID-19 show said Monday that he believes vaccines alone will not be enough to fight the Omicron variant.” BioNTech CEO Ugur Sahin told French newspaper Le Monde “even triple-vaccinated people can transmit the disease, and they will have to be tested, especially around vulnerable people.” “With the Omicron variant becoming dominant, protective measures will remain essential, especially this winter” he added, who says they are working on yet another version of the vaccine specifically tailored for the Omicron variant that could possibly be available by March.


So according to an actual scientist in an actual science-based company, even being “triple-vaccinated” will not stop people from the winter of death that Biden claims will happen to only those who are not vaccinated. Not only will vaccines and boosters not guarantee you can hug grandma, but there will be yet another vaccine created to push down our throats in the coming months. Sahin says unfortunately those who received the original Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine will lose its efficacy over time. “It’s obvious we are far from the 95 percent effectiveness that we had against the initial virus. But after the third injection our vaccine seems to provide 70 percent or 75 percent protection against any form of the disease, which is still a good result for a vaccine in general — and I think we will be well beyond that for severe forms,” said Sahin.

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When the Wall Street Journal Editorial board turns on Fauci, maybe there’s still hope.

How Fauci and Collins Shut Down Covid Debate (WSJ Ed.)

In public, Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins urge Americans to “follow the science.” In private, the two sainted public-health officials schemed to quash dissenting views from top scientists. That’s the troubling but fair conclusion from emails obtained recently via the Freedom of Information Act by the American Institute for Economic Research. The tale unfolded in October 2020 after the launch of the Great Barrington Declaration, a statement by Harvard’s Martin Kulldorff, Oxford’s Sunetra Gupta and Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya against blanket pandemic lockdowns. They favored a policy of what they called “focused protection” of high-risk populations such as the elderly or those with medical conditions. Thousands of scientists signed the declaration—if they were able to learn about it.

That didn’t please the lockdown consensus enforced by public-health officials and the press. Dr. Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health until Sunday, sent an email on Oct. 8, 2020, to Dr. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “This proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists . . . seems to be getting a lot of attention – and even a co-signature from Nobel Prize winner Mike Leavitt at Stanford. There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises,” Dr. Collins wrote. “Is it underway?” These researchers weren’t fringe and neither was their opposition to quarantining society. But in the panic over the virus, these two voices of science used their authority to stigmatize dissenters and crush debate.

A week after his email, Dr. Collins spoke to the Washington Post about the Great Barrington Declaration. “This is a fringe component of epidemiology,” he said. “This is not mainstream science. It’s dangerous.” His message spread and the alternative strategy was dismissed in most precincts. Dr. Fauci replied to Dr. Collins that the takedown was underway. An article in Wired, a tech-news site, denied there was any scientific divide and argued lockdowns were a straw man—they weren’t coming back. If only it were true. The next month cases rose and restrictions returned. Dr. Fauci also emailed an article from the Nation, a left-wing magazine, and his staff sent him several more. The emails suggest a feedback loop: The media cited Dr. Fauci as an unquestionable authority, and Dr. Fauci got his talking points from the media. Facebook censored mentions of the Great Barrington Declaration. This is how groupthink works.

On CBS last month, Dr. Fauci said Republicans who criticize him are “really criticizing science, because I represent science. That’s dangerous.” He isn’t “science.” And it’s also dangerous for scientific officials to mobilize to quash dissent, without which it’s easy to make tragic mistakes. A scientific debate over pandemic policy was and still is in the public interest, especially during a once-in-a-century plague. Focused protection of nursing homes and other high-risk populations remains the policy road not taken during the pandemic. Perhaps this strategy wouldn’t have prevailed if a debate had been allowed. But it isn’t enough to repeat, as Dr. Collins did on Fox News Sunday, that advocates are “fringe epidemiologists who really did not have the credentials,” and that “hundreds of thousands of people would have died if we had followed that strategy.”

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“These are very disturbed people who have allowed a taste of power and influence to fuel an underlying narcissism.”

Fauci Says Unvaxxed Relatives Not Worthy of Family Christmas Gatherings (CTH)

Dr. Anthony Fauci is a thin-skinned, unstable ideologue with visions of grandiosity. He has wreaked havoc on our nation and permeated a major crisis on the global stage with his poor advice on COVID-19. He personifies a mentally and emotionally unstable person within his worldview. Fauci is representative of a group of psychologically unstable people who need a career operating in government systems and institutions, because they could never be successful in the private sector. They can only succeed in academia and institutions without merit-based structures.


These are very disturbed people who have allowed a taste of power and influence to fuel an underlying narcissism. Their disorder exhibits as vengeful bitterness, the result of adolescent isolation and no emotional balance. History will not look well upon Anthony Fauci any more than history reflects well upon Josef Mengele. In this short Q&A snippet, Anthony Fauci reveals his bitter worldview by saying unvaccinated people should be told to stay away from family events this Christmas. Notice the reference point of the response is that people should appreciate being in his presence.

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“..they control 61 per cent of the biomedical research on earth, so they control pretty much what gets funded.”

An Interview With Fauci’s Nemesis (Beck)

SB: Have you received any legal challenges from Anthony Fauci or Bill Gates? RFK:There is nothing in that book that is untruthful. Secondly, I would welcome a lawsuit from Bill Gates and Tony Fauci, and they know that that would be a giant strategic mistake. Even if I did put something in that book that was defamatory, I don’t think they would challenge it. They’ve got so much to lose from the truth. Their only viable strategy is silence.

SB: What kind of reaction have you had from MSM? RFK: There’s no reviews in the papers [despite the book’s No 1 best-seller status]. I am now being targeted with a barrage of ad hominem articles about me, but they don’t even mention the book, which is weird. They do not want to talk about this book because it’s full of truth. The truth is their deadliest enemy.

SB: Have you ever met either Fauci or Gates? RFK:: I’ve met Tony Fauci. Our paths have crossed for many years. I’ve been working on vaccine issues since 2005 so I’ve seen him in action on many occasions. In 2016, President Trump asked me to run a vaccine safety commission. To do that I had a series of meetings with the regulatory leadership including Fauci and Gates. One of my challenges to them was to say: ‘You have never done a single double-blind placebo-controlled trial for any of the 72 recommended vaccines being given to children.’ Publicly, Fauci was saying I had not been telling the truth about this. I said to him: ‘Show me one trial for any of those 72 jabs.’ He made a show of looking through the files he’d brought with him. He said: ‘We don’t have them here; we’ll send them to you.’ He never did send them to me and a year later I sued them. We filed a suit asking them to show us any of those studies they had and after a year of litigation they came back and said we don’t have any. Ironically, Fauci is now saying that he can’t use ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid without back-up from a double-blind placebo-controlled trials.

SB: The impression I get of Fauci is that he knows what to say in public but he seems like he has a dark side to him. The only reason for providing toxic drugs to people, like remdesivir, that has been so harmful to people with Covid, is because you know many who receive it will die. Does he know that? RFK: Of course he does. He had remdesivir in a study in Africa to see if it worked against Ebola. In 2019, the Data and Safety Monitoring Review Board (DSMB) monitored his work. Two months later, the board was saying it’s not safe, it’s killing people. It’s produced by the pharmaceutical company Gilead which Bill Gates has a huge stake in. Coronavirus does not kill 50 per cent of people who get it whereas trials show that over 50 per cent of people treated with remdesivir died.

SB: In your book you talk about two types of scientists, those who allow Fauci to dictate their careers and those who don’t want to be compromised, but he seems to be very effective at crushing dissent. RFK: Between him, Gates and Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust [part of the Trust’s £29.1billion annual budget comes from Gates], they control 61 per cent of the biomedical research on earth, so they control pretty much what gets funded. Also, that funding power gives them the power to kill studies they do not want and to ruin scientists who are trying to do those studies and to bankrupt universities. I show how that works in the book. If you had a young scientist at let’s say UCLA Medical School, [University of California, Los Angeles] who says why don’t we study whether the vaccines are causing injury by doing a cluster analysis of medical records?

That’s an easy study to do. His dean will get a call from one of Tony Fauci’s flunkeys at the NIH [National Institutes of Health run by Fauci] saying you’d better stop that guy from doing the study, Tony doesn’t want it done. UCLA, like all the medical schools in this country, is getting hundreds of millions of dollars from Fauci and the NIH and are completely dependent on the royalties from pharmaceutical products that Fauci develops in his lab, farms out to the universities for phase 1 and phase 2 trials, then brings in a pharmaceutical company to produce the drug who then shares the patent with the university. Everybody is on the hook; everybody is making money and all of them have a huge incentive not to talk.

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Important to remember: “Every single attempt at vaccination against a coronavirus in the past in both man and beast has failed to produce durable immunity.”

Here’s A Reality Check (Denninger)

Pfizer has disclosed in their own data that for young people the shots are as dangerous, as measured in hospitalization, for ***** as they are for caused myocarditis. Since infection is never certain but inoculation, once you take it, is, there was never an argument for authorizing these jabs in healthy young people simply on the math. We did it anyway and we’re still advocating it. That is just one condition but let’s be clear: If you jab your kid you’re putting them at equal or greater risk of being hospitalized from one side effect of the ******* alone as from *****-19 itself. If you do that as a parent you’re a monster. If you do it as a young adult on your own absent some individualized risk you’re stupid.


Anyone who believes that an agent injected into the muscle of the arm that can and does sometimes cause inflammation of the heart will not also cause inflammation of other tissues and, through doing so, also cause damage to other tissues has rocks in their head. The scope of that additional damage is completely unknown because we’re not performing any surveillance nor did we originally. We have never, for example, taken a group of 100 people, pulled full blood work including markers for inflammation, cardiac damage and others, then vaccinated them and repeated said tests on a 2, 4, 8 and 16 week interval to determine if we got negative metabolic changes and if we did, whether they were transient or durable. Nobody knows because we never did the work.

But it is entirely reasonable to expect that additional risk of stroke, heart attack, pulmonary embolism and more, all of which are life-altering, produce permanent disability and can be fatal, would be made materially more-likely by an agent that causes myocarditis. Indeed that would be a reasonable medical presumption; inflammation in the body is a known contributing factor to strokes and VTE which encompasses pulmonary embolisms. Given the billions that these companies have made you’d think we would have required such in-detail tracing, collection of information and publication of the results. We did not then and still haven’t. Omicron has now thrown mud in everyone’s eye by doing exactly what every coronavirus has done through time — mutationally evaded the neutralization potential of vaccination.


Every single attempt at vaccination against a coronavirus in the past in both man and beast has failed to produce durable immunity. Several attempts have resulted in wildly-enhanced disease. We’re seeing the latter now with attack rates in vaccinated people exceeding that for unvaccinated with Omicron. The only good news is that it may be true that Omicron is less-virulent; there is some early evidence that it is much less replication-competent in the lungs. That’s a good thing because upper respiratory infection is not serious; it is the lung infection that gets you. In other words it may be that Omicron is a nasty cold. That it is more-able to infect vaccinated people than not is troubling but if its less-virulent it may not matter — indeed it may be a blessing. We don’t yet know and won’t for a few months, and that assumes we get honest data — which we may not.

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The moment such people say this, you better prepare for number six. Israel just officially announced number 4. Your country will follow soon.

Prepare For Fourth Covid Jab, Tony Blair Institute Says (RT)

The research institute founded by former UK prime minister Tony Blair has called on the government to create a command-and-control team that could help it remain “ahead of the curve” and quickly roll out more vaccines. In a paper published on Tuesday, the Tony Blair Institute said the British government should seek to develop infrastructure that would allow it to mobilize new vaccination campaigns within 48 hours. With the prospect of yet more Covid variants emerging, it highlighted that “a fourth dose of the vaccine may soon be needed.” The institute contended that the ability to respond to future Covid strain outbreaks would depend on whether administrations could implement “a better approach to ‘command and control’ through a strong and coherent public-health emergency operations center.”


The non-profit organization said the emergence of Omicron highlighted the fact that governments are often forced to react, rather than working to “stay ahead of the curve.” “To achieve this, we need to take decisions fast, take them in a coordinated manner, and execute effectively and at speed. Be prepared at all times,” the paper reads. Noting examples from other nations, the institute said the UK’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation should be doing more, including “rapidly” approving the use of Covid-19 vaccines in children aged five to 11 in an effort to reduce transmission.

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As member countries ponder a 3 month gap between jabs/boosters, the EU goes for 9?!

Interesting that the “primary vaccination schedule” is still just 2 jabs.

EU Sets Binding 9 Month Validity Of Covid-19 Travel Pass (R.)

The European Commission on Tuesday adopted rules that will make the European Union Covid-19 certificate valid for travel nine months after the completion of the primary vaccination schedule. The proposal comes as several EU states introduce additional requirements on travellers in a bid to reduce the spread of the Omicron coronavirus variant. EU Justice Commissioner Didier Reynders told Reuters the EU Commission was against additional requirements, and was assessing the measures. The new rules will be binding on the 27 EU states from Feb. 1. The rule can be blocked by a qualified majority of EU governments or a simple majority of European Parliament members, but officials have said there is sufficient support for it. The rule replaces a non-binding recommendation the EU Commission put forward in November.

Once the rule is effective, EU states will be obliged to let fully vaccinated travellers with a valid pass access their territory. However, as an exception justified by a deteriorating situation, they could still impose further requirements, such as negative tests or quarantines, as long as they are proportionate. Seven EU states are currently requiring fully vaccinated travellers from other EU countries to also show a negative Covid-19 test upon arrival, measures some see as damaging the credibility of the EU pass. The states are Italy, Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Latvia, Cyprus and Austria. “We prefer to use for the free movement in Europe only the certificate without additional measures,” Reynders said. He noted that the additional requirements could be justified by concerns caused by the spread of the Omicron variant, but governments had to prove they were proportionate and necessary.

[..] A primary vaccination schedule for Covid-19 is currently composed in the EU of two shots of vaccines produced by Pfizer-BioNTech , AstraZeneca and Moderna, or a single jab of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.

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“The vaccine refusenik hunters will receive a wage of 2774 euros, which will be paid 14 times a year, making an annual income of 38,863 euros.”

Austria Hiring People to “Hunt Down Vaccine Refusers” (SN)

The Austrian government is hiring people to “hunt down vaccine refusers,” according to a report published by Blick. Yes, really. The burden for enforcing the fines unjabbed Austrians will have to pay as part of their punishment will fall to their employers, necessitating a new army of ‘inspectors’ to ensure that process is running smoothly. The city of Linz, which is home to 200,000 inhabitants, has a relatively low vaccination rate of 63 per cent. In response, “Linz now wants to hire people who are supposed to hunt down vaccine refusers,” reports Swiss news outlet Blick. The role of the inspectors will be to check on “whether those who do not get vaccinated really pay for it.” The vaccine refusenik hunters will receive a wage of 2774 euros, which will be paid 14 times a year, making an annual income of 38,863 euros.


Nice work if you can get it. “The job includes, among other things, the creation of penal orders as well as the processing of appeals,” according to the report, adding that workers need to be “resilient” and willing to work a lot of overtime. The jobs are only open to Austrian citizens, all of whom will either have to be vaccinated against or fully recovered from COVID. As we previously highlighted, the unvaccinated in Austria could find themselves imprisoned for a year under a new administrative law that would force them to pay for their own internment. Austrians who don’t get vaccinated by February face fines of up to €7,200 ($8,000) for non-compliance, and those who refuse to pay would also face a 12 month jail sentence.

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It’s clear who the idiot is here, but then again he’s just another propaganda victim, like 99.9% of people.

Ryanair CEO Calls For Unvaccinated “Idiots” To Be Ostracised From Society (SN)

Michael O’Leary, the CEO of Ryanair has declared that anyone who remains unvaccinated should be completely cut off from society, including not being allowed to travel, go to the supermarket to get food, or the pharmacy to get medicine. “If you’re not vaccinated, you shouldn’t be allowed in the hospital, you shouldn’t be allowed to fly, you shouldn’t be allowed on the London Underground, and you shouldn’t be allowed in the local supermarket or your pharmacy either,” the airline executive said, as reported by The Telegraph. “You can sit at home and you know, get your deliveries of medicines and food. But you should not, you know, go to work or go on public transport unless you have a vaccine certificate,” O’Leary clarified.

O’Leary admitted that making vaccines compulsory is “an infringement of your civil liberties,” but added that the way around it is “you simply make life so difficult. Or [make it that] there are lots of things that you can’t do unless you get vaccinated.” Calling the unvaccinated “idiots,” the Ryanir boss further stated “I don’t think that governments should permit those people who are not vaccinated to go and infect everybody else.” O’Leary sardonically stated “We recognise the rights of everybody to decide not to get vaccinated if you so want. If you personally object to vaccination, because it’s some huge government/big pharma conspiracy; apart from the fact that you would be plainly an idiot, we respect your right to be an idiot.”

Ryanair was previously punished by the advertising standards agency in the UK after running a campaign promoting the sale of summer flights with a “Jab & Go!” gimmick despite having previously stated that it wouldn’t require passengers to take a COVID vaccine before they fly. As we previously reported, other airlines have indicated they will not allow passengers who haven’t had the vaccine to fly, including Singapore Airlines, which became the first carrier to officially launch a COVID passport.

Read more …

I’ll admit, I’m getting confused.

Judge Blocks Biden’s Vaccine Mandate for Federal Contractors in 10 States (ET)

A federal judge in Missouri has issued a temporary hold on the Biden administration’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for federal contractors in 10 U.S. states while litigation plays out. “We just beat the Biden Administration in court again,” Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt announced on Twitter late Monday. “This afternoon, we obtained a preliminary injunction against the vaccine mandate on federal contractors, halting enforcement of that mandate in Missouri and the other states in our coalition.” The preliminary injunction, issued by U.S. Magistrate Judge David Noce, applies to Alaska, Arkansas, Iowa, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming.


Schmitt and Nebraska Attorney General Doug Peterson, both Republicans, on Oct. 29 co-led the 10 states in suing the Biden administration over the mandate, calling it “unconstitutional, unlawful, and unwise.” “It will not harm the federal government to maintain the status quo while the courts decide the issues of the President’s authority and the implications for federalism. The Court concludes that, on balance, consideration of the harms and the public interest weigh in favor of a preliminary injunction,” reads the Monday preliminary injunction order from U.S. Magistrate Judge David Noce. A nationwide preliminary injunction is already in place blocking the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate for federal contractors, after a federal court in Georgia on Dec. 7 granted the injunction in a separate seven-state lawsuit led by Georgia.

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This should be checked for every country.

Covid Modelling Shows The Most Worrying Scenario, Not The Most Likely (G.)

Much of the pandemic modelling to make news headlines since Covid-19 hit has depicted concerning scenarios involving high case numbers and hospitalisations. On Thursday, modelling from the University of NSW and cited by NSW health minister Brad Hazzard found Covid-19 cases in the state could reach 25,000 a day by the end of January. The latest modelling to raise alarm bells came from the Doherty Institute and was leaked to the media on Tuesday after being sent to politicians ahead of a meeting of national cabinet on Wednesday. It said Australia could see 200,000 new Covid cases a day by late January or early February. Early into the pandemic in 2020, other models predicted “hundreds of thousands” of Australian deaths, while health workers in NSW were told to prepare for 8,000 deaths in the first-wave.

But these are worst-case scenario models and are just one scenario out of dozens of different scenarios that are calculated by epidemiologists and biostatisticians. What is often lost in the reporting of these worst-case models is that they rarely ever eventuate, but are calculated to allow governments to see what might happen if they did nothing at all to control an outbreak, and to plan accordingly. The leaked Doherty Institute modelling projecting 200,000 cases came with an important caveat; this would only eventuate if nothing was done, including if people did not change their behaviour at all of their own accords. It also assumed no change to the pace of booster roll-outs, and that only very basic restrictions such as requiring masks in hospitals are maintained.

[..] Ahead of national cabinet meeting on Wednesday the chair of the Australian Health Protection Principal Committee, Prof. Paul Kelly, said of the 200,000 figure “presents one of the worst case of all potential scenarios including assumptions that the Omicron variant is as severe as the Delta variant, an absence of hospital surge capacity, a highly limited booster program, no change to baseline public health and social measures and an absence of spontaneous behaviour change in the face of rising case numbers”. “None of these five assumptions represent the likely state of events, let alone all of them together, therefore presenting that scenario as the likely scenario that will occur is highly misleading.”

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“One can only assume that the provincial health authorities’ relationship-splitting social engineering interventions will increase loneliness and isolation and associated risks for depression, anxiety, PTSD, self-harm, suicide, and drug toxicity for all. This is psychology 101.”

A Letter from a Concerned Psychologist (Nicassio)

Attachment and the need to belong refer to the fundamental human need to maintain close social bonds and stay connected in psychologically and physically safe relationships from cradle to grave. One of the major contributions of psychology research has been to demonstrate that maintaining healthy and secure attachment and belonging is more than a psychological need: Attachment and belonging are primary and critical determinants of mental and physical health. Research in social psychology and neuroscience demonstrates that human beings’ neurobiological response to social exclusion mirrors their response to physical pain and suggests that social exclusion is one of the most painful and threatening events a person can experience.

While it’s not surprising that social exclusion and disturbances in attachment lead to negative emotions and thoughts, what’s less intuitive is that a large body of research has demonstrated that social exclusion is toxic to humans, leading to enduring changes in the brain and biological systems that regulate stress, weakening of the immune system, mental and physical illness, and earlier death. To date the narrative around social restrictions has been, “Well yes, social isolation is hard but restrictions are for the greater good!” But let’s be clear: The newest restrictions are not your run-of-the-mill isolation requirements. These restrictions require British Columbians to selectively exclude and marginalize their unvaccinated friends and loved ones during the most significant season for social gatherings and celebrations.

This is painful for everyone involved, but especially those who will be excluded and spending the holidays alone. It is also qualitatively different from previous social isolation requirements where we were all in it together. Sadly, social exclusion is actually an extremely harmful form of bullying. It’s clear to anyone with an understanding of psychology that these restrictions will cause relational fracturing and personal suffering that will last well beyond the holiday season. Not only is there strong scientific evidence that social exclusion leads to increased morbidity and mortality, but research consistently demonstrates that social exclusion, loneliness, and isolation are predictors of self-harm and suicide. The latest data have also shown a huge escalation in drug toxicity deaths since social restrictions began and this is the tip of the iceberg. One can only assume that the provincial health authorities’ relationship-splitting social engineering interventions will increase loneliness and isolation and associated risks for depression, anxiety, PTSD, self-harm, suicide, and drug toxicity for all. This is psychology 101.

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As we prepare to get rid of Fauci, let’s do the same with Victoria Nuland. Make the world a better place.

Americans Warned About Risk Of Russian Invasion Of Ukraine (RT)

American citizens considering traveling to Ukraine have been advised by Washington to reconsider the trip, citing persistent claims that Russia could be planning an all-out offensive against its Eastern European neighbor. On Monday, the US State Department updated its recommendations for the country, warning that “citizens should be aware of reports that Russia is planning for significant military action against Ukraine.” Americans were informed that this “would severely impact the US Embassy’s ability to provide consular services,” including assisting people in departing from the region in an emergency. The travel notice also continued to advise against travel due to the Covid-19 risk in Ukraine, a recommendation in place for several months.


Guidance urging US citizens to rethink their journey to the former Soviet republic because of its high rates of coronavirus infection had been issued at the end of September. The advisory came after Kiev’s intelligence services and Western officials sounded the alarm in recent weeks, insisting that Moscow could soon launch an all-out offensive against its neighbor. However, the Kremlin has repeatedly rejected the accusations, instead arguing that the prospect of Ukraine becoming a member of NATO destabilizes the situation. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova warned at the beginning of December that the further expansion of the organization toward Russia is a red line, and that Ukraine’s hopes to be admitted were unacceptable. She accused the US of pulling Kiev into the orbit of the military bloc and turning it into a “bridgehead” of confrontation with Russia, which she warned could cause conflict on the European continent.

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“Goldman Sachs Bank USA had $387 billion in assets versus $48 trillion (yes, trillion) in notional (face amount) derivatives.”

The Fed Gets Its Ducks in a Row for the Next Wall Street Bailout (Martens)

Last Friday, with the public’s attention diverted to the surge in Omicron variant cases of COVID in the U.S. and holiday travelers’ attention focused on the safety of air travel and family gatherings, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York quietly announced, in a one sentence statement, that it was adding the following three federally-insured banks to its list of counterparties for its newly-minted $500 billion Standing Repo Facility: Citibank, Goldman Sachs Bank USA, and the New York Branch of Mizuho Bank. If you’re stunned that Goldman Sachs is allowed to own a federally-insured bank under existing U.S. law, see our previous report: Goldman Sachs’ Rich Man’s Bank Backstopped by You and Me. If you’re stunned that a New York branch of Mizuho Bank, part of the Japanese conglomerate Mizuho Financial Group, is able to have federal deposit insurance backstopped by the U.S. taxpayer, welcome to the world of borderless global banking for the one percent.

These three banks have a number of things in common: (1) each financial institution already has a broker-dealer affiliate that is already one of the Fed’s 24 primary dealers that participates in the Fed’s repo operations; (2) each of the three banks’ primary dealer affiliates took large, secret loans from the Fed’s repo facility when credit collapsed on Wall Street on September 17, 2019; (3) all three institutions have trillions of dollars in exposure to derivatives according to data from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). If all three banks already have broker-dealer affiliates participating in the Fed’s repo loan facility, why would another affiliate be added? The first thought that comes to mind is the fact that the Fed puts a daily cap on the dollar amount that each counterparty can borrow per day. By having two affiliates as counterparties, the amount that can be borrowed is doubled.

Why would these three banks need to have a sugar daddy at the Fed to loan them money in a financial crisis? Because all three banks have huge exposure to derivatives. According to the latest report from the OCC, as of September 30, 2021, Goldman Sachs Bank USA had $387 billion in assets versus $48 trillion (yes, trillion) in notional (face amount) derivatives. Citibank had $1.7 trillion in assets versus $44 trillion in notional derivatives. Mizuho’s bank holding company had $48.8 billion in assets versus $6 trillion in derivatives.

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Musk is … different, and that is refreshing.

“If You Could Die Of Irony, She Would Be Dead”: Musk Slams Liz Warren (ZH)

Elon Musk just sat down with the guys from the Babylon Bee for a 54-minute interview, where the Tesla and SpaceX founder savaged Sen. Liz Warren, and described woke culture as a “mind virus.” “You were pretty mean to Senator Warren there on Twitter recently,” said Babylon Bee EIC Kyle Mann. “Ya slammed her man.””Please don’t call the manager on me, Senator Karen,” he continued – citing Musk’s December 14th response to Warren slamming him for not paying ‘enough’ taxes. To which Musk replied: “She struck first, obviously. She called me a freeloader and a grifter who doesn’t pay taxes, basically. And – I’m literally paying the most tax that any individual in history has ever paid, this year, ever. And she doesn’t pay tax… basically at all. And her salary is paid for by the taxpayer, like me.”

“Could you even use the term irony, would that work?” asked one of the Bee guys. “If you could die of irony, she would be dead.” Musk also opined on woke culture – calling it a “mind virus,” and “arguably one of the biggest threats to modern civilization.” “Wokeness wants to make comedy illegal,” Musk continued, adding “Do we want a humorless society that is simply rife with condemnation, and hate? At its heart, wokeness is divisive, exclusionary and hateful. It basically gives mean people a shield to be cruel, armored in false virtue.” When asked why Musk wasn’t appearing on, say, CNN, he replied: “I’m not perverted enough?” perhaps referencing their recent pedo outbreak.

Bee CEO Seth Dillon asked Musk if he gets sick of people badgering him about his wealth, to which he said that until he sold stock, he maintained relatively little cash balances – and that he happens to own 20% of a company that people decided was worth a trillion dollars. He also defended ‘not paying taxes,’ explaining that in 2017 he overpaid, which netted out in 2018, and that since the majority of his wealth is in stock anyway that he wasn’t incurring taxable events. “What am I supposed to do, send shares to the government, somehow?” said Musk.

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

 

Oct 282021
 
 October 28, 2021  Posted by at 7:19 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  74 Responses »


M. C. Escher Drawing hands1948

 

Fauci’s NIH Also Funded Medical Experiments on AIDS Orphans in NYC (GP)
Congress Didn’t Give OSHA Authority to Impose Vaccine Mandates (HF)
Japan Drops Vax Rollout, Goes To Ivermectin, Ends Covid Almost Overnight (HTRS)
Two Indian Drugmakers to End Trials of Generic Merck Pill (R.)
Minnesota Surgeon Fired After Saying Parents Should Decide On Kids’ Masks (JTN)
Instagram Censors Popular Animal Rescuer for Slamming Fauci (GP)
Revolt of the Essential Workers (Tab)
Biden’s Nominee Omarova Wants to Move All Bank Deposits to the Fed (Martens)
China Cannot Offset Its Property Bubble Easily (Lacalle)
EU Fines Poland €1 Million Per Day Over Judicial Reforms (DW)
Pfizer Vaccine To Lower Child Deaths From Almost Zero To Almost Zero (BBee)

 

 

 

 

Wait, so we can’t use Ivermectin because “We don’t have enough data,” But..
“Let’s vaccinate children to see how safe the vaccine is because we don’t have enough data.”

 

 

Tucker FDA
https://twitter.com/i/status/1453180072937107456

 

 

 

 

Such a fine man.

Fauci’s NIH Also Funded Medical Experiments on AIDS Orphans in NYC (GP)

In August Gateway Pundit contributor Cassandra Fairbanks broke the story on Dr. Fauci’s use of taxpayer money to torture beagles in barbaric animal testing. Dr. Fauci funded a study in Tunisia where beagle dogs were eaten alive by parasite-infected flies. Dr. Fauci also spent over $16 million in taxpayer funds on disturbing “toxic brain injection” experiments on monkeys in 2018. And Dr. Fauci was more recently caught funding gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China laboratory blamed for the production and leak of the coronavirus. Fauci lied about his funding of the lab under oath numerous times. Now this… Dr. Fauci’s NIH was also caught funding experiments on AIDS orphans at a New York City hospital in 2004.

The Fauci NIH approved experiments on hundreds of New York City orphans. Government agencies and pharmaceutical companies used the orphans in deadly AIDS drug trials. In 2005, the city of New York hired the VERA Institute to form a final report on the drug trials. VERA was given no access to medical records for any of the children used in trials. Their report was published in 2008. They reported that twenty-five children died during the drug studies, that an additional fifty-five children died following the studies (in foster care), and, according to Tim Ross, Director of the Child Welfare program at VERA (as of 2009), 29% of the remaining 417 children who were used in drug studies had died (out of a total 532 children that are admitted to have been used). [LINK]

The WIKIPEDIA writers cover up all details, as is expected. No payment or compensation has been paid to any of the children used in the trials, or to their families. A hospital nurse later spoke out to reporters about the testing. She reported that children would immediately get sick, break out or throw up during the testing. They were orphans at the Incarnation Children’s Center in New York City. The ICC Investigation website offers several documents and interviews with children and childcare workers at the hospital who participated in the research.

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“OSHA will issue the order. And then get sued.”

Congress Didn’t Give OSHA Authority to Impose Vaccine Mandates (HF)

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration is about to require 80 million working Americans to get vaccinated. You may be among them. There’s just one catch: OSHA lacks the legal authority to impose a vaccine mandate. Declaring that his patience was “wearing thin” with unvaccinated Americans, President Joe Biden on Sept. 9 announced that OSHA would require companies with at least 100 employees to mandate that workers either get vaccinated or submit to weekly COVID-19 tests. OSHA sent a draft mandate to the White House on Oct. 8. Once the White House completes its review, OSHA will issue the order. And then get sued. As we detail in our legal analysis, the courts will almost certainly strike down the OSHA vaccine mandate. Here are a few reasons why:

Congress did not place vaccines within OSHA’s purview. OSHA is establishing the vaccine mandate through an “emergency temporary standard.” This highly unusual process allows OSHA to bypass public notice and comment. Federal agencies, including OSHA, typically must submit major rules to public scrutiny before finalizing them. To take the “emergency temporary standard” shortcut, the agency must persuade a court that workers are in “grave danger” and that it is “necessary” to protect them against that danger. The “grave danger” that an emergency temporary standard must address must come from “exposure to substances or agents determined to be toxic or physically harmful or new hazards.” A toxic substance or agent is a poisonous element or compound. A substance or agent can be “physically harmful” because it is flammable, explosive, or carcinogenic.

The danger a virus causes, by contrast, derives from its ability to replicate within a living organism. Congress created OSHA to promote workplace safety. OSHA inspectors look for hazards that can potentially harm employees, such as improperly stored chemicals, inadequately lighted or ventilated workstations, or lack of protective equipment (e.g., gloves and hard hats). Vaccines against viruses are an entirely different form of protection and are beyond the scope of OSHA’s mandate. Congress tasked the Department of Health and Human Services with determining the safety, efficacy, and appropriate use of vaccines. Congress authorized the Food and Drug Administration to determine whether vaccines should be allowed in interstate commerce. It empowered the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to recommend who should receive such vaccines. Both agencies are within HHS. OSHA resides in the Department of Labor. Congress has given neither OSHA nor the Labor Department authority over vaccines.

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Are US, EU even studying this?

Japan Drops Vax Rollout, Goes To Ivermectin, Ends Covid Almost Overnight (HTRS)

The European Medicines Agency said Thursday that new preliminary data from the Nordic countries supports a warning the agency adopted in July that inflammatory heart conditions called myocarditis and pericarditis can occur in very rare cases following vaccination with Covid-19 shots made by Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech. By far, however, the absolute superstar among foreign nations dealing with COVID is Japan. Japan has PULLED the vaccines and substituted Ivermectin – and in one month, wiped COVID out in that country! [..] By September deaths from the COVID-19 Vaccine jabs were being investigated. At roughly that time, the vials were under scrutiny and metal “magnetic” material was found in them.


Very shortly thereafter, the Japanese minister of health announced doctors could prescribe Ivermectin. A month later, the Western press is shocked that COVID has all but disappeared from the island. [..] This is what it looks like in a country that still has rule of law. The governemnt responds to reports of death and contaminated vaxes, moves to real treatment, people get better, and the virus disappears. Now compare that to what is happening in the United States and in Australia and New Zealand. All three countries are in dismal failure in their handling of COVID-19, and that failure has resulted in staggering loss of freedom and destruction of commerce. This is the biggest news story right now Japan has ended COVID. It did it after it stopped the vax rollout and went to Ivermectin.

Rogan IVM

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Why do they call it generic?

Two Indian Drugmakers to End Trials of Generic Merck Pill (R.)

Two Indian drugmakers have requested permission to end late-stage trials of their generic versions of Merck & Co’s promising experimental oral antiviral drug molnupiravir to treat moderate COVID-19, a week after Merck said its own trial had succeeded for mild-to-moderate patients. Merck earlier this year suspended its own development of molnupiravir as a treatment for hospitalized COVID-19 patients since many of them have reached a phase of the disease that is too late for an antiviral drug to provide much help. The Indian companies – Aurobindo Pharma Ltd and MSN Laboratories – did not exclude hospitalized patients in designing their moderate COVID-19 trials, according to study documents, although it was not known if the trials ultimately included people in the hospital.

Merck spokesperson Melissa Moody said Merck and the Indian companies had defined “moderate” disease differently. Merck’s trials are based on U.S. Food and Drug Administration definitions, which for moderate COVID-19 describe blood oxygen levels as no lower than 93%. It defines blood oxygen levels for severe COVID-19 as 93% or lower. The trials in India define moderate COVID-19 blood oxygen levels as 90% to 93%, according to the trial documents for the two companies.Aurobindo and MSN are continuing to conduct studies of molnupiravir in patients with mild COVID-19 who have not been hospitalized, according to trial documents and the website of the Indian drug regulator’s internal expert committee.

Merck and partner Ridgeback Biotherapeutics last week said molnupiravir had nearly halved the risk of hospitalization or death in at-risk non-hospitalized patients with mild-to-moderate COVID-19, results hailed by experts as potentially a major advance in fight against the illness. The Indian drug regulator’s committee also disclosed on its website that Aurobindo and MSN had presented interim clinical trial data for moderate COVID-19 patients and asked to end the trials.

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“.. it’s still their responsibility. It’s not yours. God gave it to them. Honor their wishes, either side of the fence.”

Minnesota Surgeon Fired After Saying Parents Should Decide On Kids’ Masks (JTN)

A Minnesota surgeon was fired from his job earlier this month for giving a speech to school officials in which he advocated for parents to decide whether their children should wear masks. According to Fox News, Dr. Jeffrey Horak spoke before the Fergus Falls School Board on Oct. 11, arguing that parents should have the final decision concerning the health of their children. Dr. Horak’s comments were in response to a district-wide mask mandate that went into effect the day prior. “Who does God put in charge of these kids? Their parents,” Horak said during the meeting. “God gave each one of these kids… to their parents and they speak for them. They may be wrong, they may be dumb, they may be perfect in their decisions. But it’s still their responsibility. It’s not yours. God gave it to them. Honor their wishes, either side of the fence.”


Horak reportedly said that more than a week later, he was dismissed from his position at Lake Region Healthcare because his “views were no longer congruent” with that of the hospital. A spokesperson for Lake Region confirmed that Horak no longer works there as of Wednesday. The spokesperson went on to say that Lake Region’s didn’t make the decision concerning Horak’s employment, rather it was the “Medical Group Board who made the decision about discontinuing Dr. Horak’s practice.”

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Fauci is a protected species.

Instagram Censors Popular Animal Rescuer for Slamming Fauci (GP)

Instagram has censored the founder of SPARTN Monkey Rescue for blasting Dr. Anthony Fauci over experimental COVID vaccines being injected into sanctuary primates. Michael Robison, a primate expert and rescuer, had stated that Fauci “just helped fund a $37M experimental vaccine trial on 77 chimps via a partnership with Zoetis/Pfizer at a Georgia sanctuary!” “Chimps that were rescued from this mess and other abuse… are now part of the largest animal testing trial in history at his guidance,” Robison continued. Robison added that the use of the experimental vaccines in these rescued primates is a violation of the Endangered Species Act and the CHIMPS Act, both of which are federal laws, “for a version of the vaccine meant for kids!”

The comments were flagged by Instagram for possibly “containing racist language or other content that goes against our community guidelines.” Robison is a well-respected rescuer who has developed quite a following on social media for his charming videos of monkeys and other animals that he has saved. Robison was also recently censored on Twitter for speaking out about his own regrets about getting the vaccine after suffering severe side effects — making his desire to defend the chimps even more urgent. As Gateway Pundit previously reported, one of the largest vaccine testing trials in history will be taking place at Project Chimps — a People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals allied “sanctuary” for great apes. Project Chimps was founded in 2014 following the end of National Institutes of Health funding for biomedical research on these animals.

“About 70% of the chimpanzees at Project Chimps have been trained to receive voluntary injections, and the staff is working on preparing the rest,” Science Magazine reports. The nonhuman COVID-19 vaccine was created by Zoetis, a U.S. company that was originally the animal division of Pfizer. It has only been authorized for experimental use in animals. Testing experimental vaccines on these chimps, many of whom were already used for animal research in the past, does appear to be a direct violation of the Chimpanzee Health Improvement, Management and Protection (CHIMP) Act and the Endangered Species Act. Under the CHIMP Act, which passed in 2007, chimpanzees that are retired from biomedical research are prohibited from being returned to laboratories or used for experimentation.

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Wishful thinking. They don’t even protest a jab for their kids.

Revolt of the Essential Workers (Tab)

Back before the COVID-19 pandemic started, the year 2019 saw anti-government demonstrations in Paris, Manila, La Paz, Port-au-Prince, Bogotá, Prague, Quito , Beirut, Hong Kong, London, Baghdad, Barcelona, Budapest, Santiago, New Delhi, Jakarta, Buenos Aires and more, earning the title “the year of the protest.” It was also a year of resurgent labor activity in the United States. After decades of declining union participation, the country saw 25 major work stoppages involving 425,500 workers, the highest number since 2001.

The economic discontent that propelled both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders to popularity had been building for many years. As a recent article in the journal American Affairs noted, $34 trillion of real equity wealth, in 2017 dollars, was created between 1989 and 2017. Nearly half that sum (44%) consisted of a reallocation of corporate equity to shareholders at the expense of worker compensation, while economic growth accounted for just 25% of that increase in wealth. In other words, despite the advent of seemingly near-miraculous, time- and space-saving digital technologies, the post-Cold War “economic boom” consisted mainly of America’s wealthy shareholders taking money from its increasingly insecure workforce.

America, and other Western societies, had moved from a model of real growth and expanding benefits for all to a model where the rich got richer by impoverishing the less wealthy orders of society—and the lower orders were fighting back. However, after lockdowns were imposed in March 2020, the balance of power abruptly shifted back toward billionaire oligarchs and large corporations. Tech-based U.S. monopolies widened their profit margins as workers and their children were confined to their homes and the Fed pumped money into Wall Street. As the Fed provided unlimited purchases of corporate debt and securities, millions of people filed for unemployment, nearly 1 in 4 households experienced food insecurity, and 200,000 small businesses closed. The result was an estimated loss of $1.3 trillion in household wealth for American workers. Meanwhile, U.S. billionaires gained $1 trillion.

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Have nothing and be happy.

Biden’s Nominee Omarova Wants to Move All Bank Deposits to the Fed (Martens)

This month, the Vanderbilt Law Review published a 69-page paper by Saule Omarova, President Biden’s nominee to head the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the Federal regulator of the largest banks in the country that operate across state lines. The paper is titled “The People’s Ledger: How to Democratize Money and Finance the Economy.” The paper, in all seriousness, proposes the following: (1) Moving all commercial bank deposits from commercial banks to so-called FedAccounts at the Federal Reserve; (2) Allowing the Fed, in “extreme and rare circumstances, when the Fed is unable to control inflation by raising interest rates,” to confiscate deposits from these FedAccounts in order to tighten monetary policy;

(3) Allowing the most Wall Street-conflicted regional Fed bank in the country, the New York Fed, when there are “rises in market value at rates suggestive of a bubble trend,” such as with technology stocks today, to “short these securities, thereby putting downward pressure on their prices”; (4) Eliminate the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) that insures bank deposits; (5) Consolidate all bank regulatory functions at the OCC – which Omarova has been nominated to head. Republican Senator Pat Toomey has been running a Red Scare campaign against Omarova, who was born in the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic (now Kazakhstan) and attended Moscow State University on a Lenin Personal Academic Scholarship.

The real threat that Omarova poses to U.S. financial stability, that Democrats should be calling out, is that she wants to further concentrate all major aspects of the U.S. banking system in the hands of the Federal Reserve, a captured regulator whose 12 regional bank tentacles are, literally, owned by the banks. Omarova offers not one scintilla of a suggestion about restructuring the Fed so that it is not owned by or controlled by the banks. In her paper, Omarova characterizes the current relationship between the Fed and the banks as the Fed running a “franchisor ledger” to assist its franchisee-banks.

But as the Fed’s secret $29 trillion bailout of the mega banks on Wall Street and their foreign derivative counterparties proved following the financial crash in 2008, it’s actually the banks that are cracking the whip and the Fed amicably doing their bidding. That means that the mega banks are the franchisor and they’ve shifted their faux bank examinations and faux stress tests to the Fed, for appearances sake. This point is further demonstrated by the fact that during the Fed’s 2007-2010 bailouts, most of the Fed’s emergency lending programs were farmed out in no-bid contracts to the very banks being bailed out. JPMorgan Chase, a five-count felon, continues to have a contract with the Fed to serve as custodian of more than $2 trillion of the Fed’s agency Mortgage-Backed Securities (MBS).

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“..four times larger than China’s GDP.”

China Cannot Offset Its Property Bubble Easily (Lacalle)

No economy has been able to ignore a property bubble and, even less so, offset it and continue to grow, replacing the bust of the real estate sector with other parts of the economy. Heavily regulated economies from Iceland to Spain have failed to contain the negative impact of a real estate sector collapse. It will not be different in China. China has three real estate problems: the massive size of the sector, its excessive leverage, and the amount of developer debt in the hands of average households and retail investors. According to China researcher George Magnus, writing in The Guardian, “China’s real estate market has been called the most important sector in the world economy. Valued at about $55tn, it is now twice the size of its U.S. equivalent, and four times larger than China’s GDP.”

Considering construction and other real estate services, the sector accounts for more than 25 percent of China’s GDP. Just to consider other previous examples of property bubbles, the average size of the sector was somewhere between 15 and 20 percent of a country’s GDP. And none of those economies managed the excess of the property sector. Of course, the problem of a real estate bubble is always excessive leverage. Developers take on too much debt, and the smallest decrease in housing prices makes their equity vanish and their solvency ratios collapse. In the case of China, the level of debt is simply staggering. According to the Financial Times, the ratio of net debt of 19 of the largest Chinese developers stands at over 60 percent to equity. Evergrande is not even the most indebted.

Two developers stand at more than 120 percent net gearing. The top 10 most indebted Chinese developers amply surpass the level of debt-to-assets that made Spain’s Martinsa-Fadesa collapse. Chinese and foreign retail investors are also heavily exposed to the real estate and construction market. Evergrande was the biggest issuer of commercial paper, and developers’ debt was sold to small investors in different packages. Furthermore, Chinese families have around 78 percent of their wealth tied up in property, more than double the United States, according to a 2018 report by Chengdu’s Southwestern University of Finance and Economics and China Guangfa Bank.

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Bully. All your base are belong to us.

EU Fines Poland €1 Million Per Day Over Judicial Reforms (DW)

The European Court of Justice (ECJ) ordered Poland to pay a fine of €1 million ($1.2 million) per day on Wednesday over its decision to ignore an EU ruling on Warsaw’s judicial reforms. The top EU court imposed the penalty as Poland has not suspended the disciplinary chamber of the Supreme Court. The ECJ had ruled in July that the chamber did not guarantee impartiality. The ECJ said in a press release the fine was “necessary in order to avoid serious and irreparable harm to the legal order of the European Union and to the values on which that Union is founded, in particular that of the rule of law.” The European Commission had requested “financial penalties” be levied on September 9 after Poland failed to comply with the July ruling. On Twitter, Poland’s Deputy Justice Minister Sebastian Kaleta called the fine “usurpation and blackmail.”


The disciplinary chamber was set up in 2018 and is able to dismiss judges and prosecutors. The ECJ fears this could be abused to inflict punitive sanctions on those who show independence in not bowing to political will. Earlier this month, Poland’s constitutional court ruled Polish law supersedes EU law when there is a conflict between the two. Last week, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki told the European Parliament the disciplinary chamber will be abolished, but he gave no timeline for when that would occur and no draft law has been introduced. Poland has been accused of backsliding when it comes to the independence of the judiciary and press freedom by other EU member states. The EU asserts Poland has politicized the judiciary with the placement of judges loyal to the ruling Law and Justice Party.

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“We’re excited to start giving it to them so we can find out.”

Pfizer Vaccine To Lower Child Deaths From Almost Zero To Almost Zero (BBee)

In a moment celebrated by all hard-working lobbyists, Pfizer announced that the COVID-19 vaccine will reduce average daily child COVID deaths from almost zero all the way down to almost zero. “These are phenomenal results. Our internal studies have proven a microscopic benefit to an even more microscopic risk to children,” stated Dee Pimbly, head of Pfizer’s Department of Propaganda to a crowd of journalists who have not allowed their own children to bask in the warm glow of sunlight, or interact with other children for almost no reason whatsoever.


FDA officials praised Pfizer for fighting a virus that is the leading killer of children after cancer, vehicular accidents, suicide, heart disease, drowning, suffocation, the flu, meteors from space, and slipping on a banana peel. Experts say the vaccine will probably kill more kids than it saves, but it’s ok because science. When asked about any safety concerns, an FDA official replied, “We’re excited to start giving it to them so we can find out.”

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Sep 172021
 
 September 17, 2021  Posted by at 8:54 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  42 Responses »


Henri Matisse The painter and his model1916-17

 

Interview with Dr. Vanessa Schmidt-Kruger (Enformt)
Biden Seizes And Rations Supply Of Life-Saving Monoclonal Antibodies (RT)
Delta Poised To Acquire Full Resistance To Wild-type Spike Vaccines (Biorxiv)
Israeli Study Claims Covid Vaccine Boosters Reduce Infection Risk TENFOLD (RT)
Pfizer, Moderna Release Data Supporting Booster Shot (Claus)
UK Study To Test Mixed Covid Vaccines On Children & Teens (RT)
The Plot Against Ivermectin (Bonvie)
France Suspends 3,000 Unvaccinated Health Workers (F24)
China Fully Vaccinates More Than 1 Billion People (RFI)
Clinton Lawyer Michael Sussmann Indicted For Lying to FBI (CTH)
Powell, Juggling Policy And Renomination, Now Faces An Ethics Blowup (R.)
Powell Orders Ethics Review Of Federal Reserve (JTN)
China Braces For “Nightmare Scenario” As Evergrande Collapses (ZH)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Remember a lot of these people died because early treatment and prophylaxis was forbidden. And what’s with the white flags? We surrendered?

 

 

Been reading up on this a little. This is from January, but interesting. About the consistency (integrity) of the vaccines. Which changed a lot from clinical trials to mass production. Who knew? They’re not the same substance at all.

Hearing # 37 of German Corona Extra-Parliamentary Inquiry Committee. 30 January, 2021

Interview with Dr. Vanessa Schmidt-Kruger (Enformt)

We know that normally vaccine development takes a very long time. It’s not just the clinical phase: with this vaccine, it’s set at three times two and a half years, i.e., three phases of 2.5 years each plus the evaluation phase, which makes 7 1/2 years in total. And then one shouldn’t forget that the production optimisation is also important, at least a year would surely be needed for that. That hasn’t taken place at all. The vaccine is already being sold and used, but the production optimisation isn’t yet by any means completed. And there are considerable deficiencies. One issue I would like to discuss are the deficiencies relating to the active substance: by that, I mean the modified RNA that they are synthesising.

As a second issue there are deficiencies in the consistency of the various production batches: they need to always be consistent so that one always obtains the same vaccine volume and quality. The problem that BioNTech had is that in the clinical phase the product, i.e. the RNA, was produced with completely different techniques to how it is being produced now. During the clinical phase they only needed small volumes of vaccine, they were able to use very expensive techniques that delivered highly purified end products. Now that they have entered mass production, that is no longer possible, they have had to switch to lower-cost processes, e.g. using huge quantities of DNA that functions as the substrate to be able to produce the RNA in an in-vitro transcription reaction.

This is done via bacteria, via the fermentation of transformed bacteria that contain this DNA. The bacteria multiply the DNA in huge amounts, and this leads to new dangers or risks, particularly contamination. At the moment for instance the situation is that the DNA is transformed in the bacteria, it is multiplied, next the bacteria are opened and the DNA is extracted, then it is linearised via enzymes, and after that the linearised DNA undergoes in-vitro transcription to produce the RNA using various procedures. The EMA Committee made various requirements of the vaccine manufacturer, i.e. BioNTech. The applicant needs to now develop and introduce various analysis processes to ensure that the substrate is free of microbiological contaminants – they probably mean E Coli bacteria for example.

There don’t seem to be any processes to ensure or monitor for that. They also need to ensure that all the buffers – those are the solvents that are used – are free of RNAses. RNAses are enzymes that degrade RNA. If there are any contaminants of these RNAse solvents, then RNA in the vaccine will be degraded and the vaccine won’t have any effect anymore. They also have to analyse how strong the activity of the enzymes is; that is very important because I explained that after that the RNA is transcribed from the DNA and then the DNA has to be eliminated, it is digested by enzymes: by DNAses. And if this DNA is not digested well enough, if residues are left, this harbours risks – I’ll come back to the risks from DNA residues, but the activity of the enzymes has to be monitored well and at the end you need to have a pure RNA without any more DNA. And that is not the case. BioNTech has admitted that there are DNA contaminants.

[..] It was found that the integrity of the RNA always varies in the batches that had been made. I will come back to that again. There needs to be a standard that is always the same for each batch. This should be used as the reference to measure the standard. And they only have this of course for the processes of the clinical phase. Now we have to generate a new standard for the new manufacturing processes, i.e., for the commercial sales. That hasn’t been done yet, they are in the process of doing that now.

So – the integrity of the RNA means of course the RNA quality. They have found that this is not very high: it was higher for the processes during the clinical phase. In this report they don’t say how high it is, but I have other information that says 78% of the RNA was good [translator: this refers to the integrity], the remainder was not, but now they have found new batches with only 55% RNA integrity, i.e., half of it is basically unviable.

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Politics kills. The only shortages here are those that are created. “The manufacturer has confirmed supplies are ample..”

Biden Seizes And Rations Supply Of Life-Saving Monoclonal Antibodies (RT)

Seven southern US states, mostly led by Republican governors, say they are now facing shortages of monoclonal antibody treatments for Covid-19 after the federal government took over the distribution, citing the need for “equity.” Monoclonal antibodies (MAB) are lab-created proteins that help those already infected deal with the virus. They have been intensively deployed in Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee and Texas – states dealing with the recent surge of Delta-variant cases. With the exception of Louisiana, they are all run by Republicans. On Wednesday, the Biden administration announced it would take over the distribution of these treatments using the Defense Production Act and would be centralizing them under the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). A HHS spokesperson said this was being done to avoid shortages, as the seven states account for 70% of all orders.

“Given this reality, we must work to ensure our supply of these life-saving therapies remains available for all states and territories, not just some,” the spokesperson told CNN. “HHS will determine the amount of product each state and territory receives on a weekly basis. State and territorial health departments will subsequently identify sites that will receive product and how much,” the spokesperson said. “This system will help maintain equitable distribution, both geographically and temporally, across the country – providing states and territories with consistent, fairly-distributed supply over the coming weeks.” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican who has clashed with President Joe Biden on Covid policies – from mask mandates to compulsory vaccination – said that the move has resulted in cutting the supply to his state by more than 50%.

The federal government has allocated fewer than 31,000 doses to Florida this week, while the average need for hospitals and state clinics is 72,000, his office said. DeSantis said on Thursday that he has reached out to GlaxoSmithKline, another pharmaceutical company, to purchase their MAB treatment in order to make up the shortfall. In Texas, the Biden administration told the state “to reduce its use of the therapeutic treatment that has literally been saving lives and reducing hospitalizations,” Mark Keough, a judge in charge of Montgomery County, just north of Houston, said in a Facebook post on Tuesday. “The manufacturer has confirmed supplies are ample but due to the Defense Production Act, the White House and it’s agencies are the only entities who can purchase and distribute this treatment,” Keough added.

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“.. it is necessary to develop vaccines that protect against such complete breakthrough variants..”

There has never been a vaccine against a coronavirus, but this is all you can take away from this?

Delta Poised To Acquire Full Resistance To Wild-type Spike Vaccines (Biorxiv)

mRNA-based vaccines provide effective protection against most common SARS-CoV-2 variants. However, identifying likely breakthrough variants is critical for future vaccine development. Here, we found that the Delta variant completely escaped from anti-N-terminal domain (NTD) neutralizing antibodies, while increasing responsiveness to anti-NTD infectivity-enhancing antibodies. Although Pfizer-BioNTech BNT162b2-immune sera neutralized the Delta variant, when four common mutations were introduced into the receptor binding domain (RBD) of the Delta variant (Delta 4+), some BNT162b2-immune sera lost neutralizing activity and enhanced the infectivity.


Unique mutations in the Delta NTD were involved in the enhanced infectivity by the BNT162b2-immune sera. Sera of mice immunized by Delta spike, but not wild-type spike, consistently neutralized the Delta 4+ variant without enhancing infectivity. Given the fact that a Delta variant with three similar RBD mutations has already emerged according to the GISAID database, it is necessary to develop vaccines that protect against such complete breakthrough variants.

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Wait, where is that graph?

Israeli Study Claims Covid Vaccine Boosters Reduce Infection Risk TENFOLD (RT)

A third dose of Pfizer’s vaccine could cut the risk of Covid infection by more than 10 times in elderly patients, according to an Israeli study, which was peer-reviewed just ahead of a key FDA meeting on boosters for Americans. Published in the New England Journal of Medicine on Wednesday night, the newly peer-reviewed study found that infections and severe Covid cases “were substantially lower among those who received a booster (third) dose of the [Pfizer-BioNTech] vaccine” compared to those who took only two. “The rate of confirmed infection was lower in the booster group than in the nonbooster group by a factor of 11.3,” the study said, also finding the rate of severe illness was slashed by nearly twentyfold, or by a factor of 19.5.


The findings are based on a review of official data for some 1.1 million Israelis over the age of 60, who were divided into two groups: those who received a booster within 5 months of their second dose, and those who did not. Citing ‘other recent research’, the study noted that vaccine-induced immunity could drop significantly in just six months after a recipient’s second dose – providing only twice the protection compared to non-vaccinated individuals. After a third shot, however, effectiveness was pushed back up to 95%, “a value similar to the original vaccine efficacy reported against the alpha variant,” the study said. While the researchers said they did their best to correct for any potential biases in the data, they acknowledged that their findings could reflect “behavioral changes after vaccination” rather than improved immunity alone, as the study did not attempt to measure antibody levels and instead relied on official case counts.

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Brave New Bizarro World.

Note that this is based on research from before mass vaccination.

“88 known breakthrough cases out of 11,431 individuals who had been vaccinated between December of 2020 and March of 2021, compared with 162 such cases out of a total of 14,746 trial subjects who had received their inoculations in July through October of 2020.”

Pfizer, Moderna Release Data Supporting Booster Shot (Claus)

Late on Wednesday, the pharmaceutical firm Moderna released new data regarding breakthrough cases of the coronavirus that it says supports the need for a third booster shot of its coronavirus vaccine. Earlier the Pfizer Corporation had announced that evidence from Israel shows a third coronavirus vaccine shot restores protection back up to the original effectiveness rate of 95% as it made the case to the US Food and Drug Administration for boosters. Pfizer stated that the need for the authorization of a booster shot is in response to what it called an “urgent emerging public health issue” as the much more contagious Delta variant of the virus races across the globe.

Adding further assurance to those who may shun the third shot for fear of additional side effects, Pfizer officials stated that such occurrences are similar to those observed after receiving the second dose of the vaccine. For its part, Moderna officials offered up a new analysis that showed breakthrough Coronavirus cases were experienced less often in those who were more recently vaccinated, indicating that the effectiveness of the shot does indeed wane over time. The Cambridge, Massachusetts firm noted that analysis gleaned from its phase three study showed the incidence of breakthrough cases in fully vaccinated people, occurred less often in a group of trial volunteers who had been inoculated recently, suggesting that immunity for those who received the coronavirus vaccines has begun to wane. In all, Moderna cited a total of 88 known breakthrough cases out of 11,431 individuals who had been vaccinated between December of 2020 and March of 2021, compared with 162 such cases out of a total of 14,746 trial subjects who had received their inoculations in July through October of 2020.

[..] Meanwhile, FDA officials declined earlier on Wednesday to endorse any position regarding Pfizer’s third shots, saying that there is a lack of verified data at this point. As of now, there has been no peer review of the Moderna analysis. The new flurry of vaccine claims appeared on the scene just two days before an important FDA vaccine advisory committee meeting; this initial panel of outside experts is tasked with debating whether or not there is enough evidence to support the wide distribution of booster shots across the country. This advisory group, the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, was also the first body to consider the first coronavirus vaccine to come on the market in November of last year. Now it will debate the administration of a third dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech product.

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But of course. “Informed consent” from a 12-year old. They should look you people up.

UK Study To Test Mixed Covid Vaccines On Children & Teens (RT)

British researchers are set to study the effects of mixed vaccine schedules on children and teens, hoping to figure out whether second doses have the intended immune response in youths amid concerns of possible side effects. Designed by the Oxford Vaccine Group and dubbed “Com-COV3,” the upcoming trial will recruit 360 volunteers aged 12 to 16 in order to better understand how to distribute second doses to younger age groups. The study comes soon after UK health officials approved Covid vaccinations for kids 12 to 15-years-old, which will begin next week.

“This will provide the [Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation] with information crucial to informing their advice about immunising teenagers in the UK,” Matthew Snape, the trial’s head researcher and an associate professor in pediatrics and vaccinology at Oxford, told reporters on Thursday. While all trial participants will be given an initial dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech jab, second doses administered eight weeks later will be divided into four different groups: a full or half dose of Pfizer, a full dose of the jab developed by Novavax, or a half dose of Moderna’s immunization.

“As well as looking at the standard two full doses of the Pfizer vaccine, we will look at how well volunteers respond when their second dose of Pfizer is half that of the first dose, or if different vaccines are used altogether, such as the vaccines manufactured by Moderna or Novavax,” Snape added. However, while vaccinations for the 12-15 age group will begin in a matter of days, British health orgs have approved only a single dose for youths so far due to possible adverse reactions from additional shots. Snape explained the “concern here is about the risks of myocarditis, particularly with the second dose with Pfizer vaccine in young men.”

Bhakdi

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About the “horse paste” calls to the Mississippi Department of Health: “..not 70%, as stated by the state epidemiologist, Dr. Paul Byers, but under 2%..”

Q: does the state epidemiologist still have a job?

The Plot Against Ivermectin (Bonvie)

When the Mississippi Department of Health released a “Health Alert Network” bulletin on August 20th stating that “70% of the recent calls (to its state poison control)” were over people taking livestock versions of the human drug ivermectin, the media went wild. Outlets such as The Hill, The New York Times, The Washington Post and scores of local news stations reported on this “crazy Covid” treatment that so many Mississippians were taking. Only, it just wasn’t true. Despite a retraction by the Associated Press on August 25th on this “erroneously reported” information, the Mississippi alert created a media feeding frenzy generating sexy headlines over people taking a “horse dewormer” for Covid-19 that has persisted to this day – one reason perhaps being that the Mississippi Department of Health has kept the uncorrected alert still posted and in public view.

After several freedom-of-information-act requests, it turns out that the actual number of calls during August 2021 to Mississippi Poison Control over animal ivermectin was not 70 percent, as stated by the state epidemiologist, Dr. Paul Byers, but under two percent – representing 11 inquiries related to people taking veterinary versions of the drug. If you include July in the tally, it’s down to around one percent of calls. So why did the Mississippi Department of Health put out such erroneous information, one that still states that media-mesmerizing 70 percent number? At this point, various print and broadcasting outlets, major, minor and even alternative, all have their own spurious slants on the supposedly grave danger ivermectin veterinary drugs pose to a gullible public trying to treat or prevent Covid-19.

These range from a bogus report that doctors can’t treat gunshot victims at an Oklahoma hospital because they’re too busy handling ivermectin overdoses to claims of poison-control centers around the country being overrun with ivermectin calls to the slandering of an Arkansas prison doctor, accused of “cruel and unusual punishment” after prescribing human-grade ivermectin (referred to as “cow dewormer”) to his inmates to treat Covid. From the extensive research I’ve done, it appears that this “horse/cow dewormer” narrative went into full swing with the issuance of that Mississippi alert. Rather than work these facts into a story, I’ve compiled a timeline that begins on August 18.

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Our hospitals are overwhelmed! Let’s make it worse!

France Suspends 3,000 Unvaccinated Health Workers (F24)

Thousands of health workers across France have been suspended without pay for failing to get vaccinated against Covid-19 ahead of a deadline this week, Health Minister Olivier Veran said Thursday. “Some 3,000 suspensions were notified yesterday to employees at health centres and clinics who have not yet been vaccinated,” Veran told RTL radio. He added that “several dozens” had turned in their resignations rather than sign up for the jabs. That compares with 2.7 million health workers overall, Veran said, adding that “continued healthcare is assured”.


President Emmanuel Macron gave staff at hospitals, retirement home workers and the fire service an ultimatum in July to get at least one shot by September 15 or face unpaid suspension. Many nurses in particular have been reluctant to get vaccinated, citing safety or efficacy concerns, posing the risk that France’s inoculation drive could stall. France’s national public health agency estimated last week that roughly 12 percent of hospital staff and around six percent of doctors in private practices have yet to be vaccinated. Overall, 70 percent of the French have received both doses required to be fully vaccinated, which are available to everyone over age 12 — one of the highest rates in the world.

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“..most young children remain unvaccinated in China, sparking fears that the latest Fujian outbreak could hit the most vulnerable people in the country disproportionately.”

China Fully Vaccinates More Than 1 Billion People (RFI)

China has fully vaccinated more than one billion people against the coronavirus — 71 percent of its population — official figures showed Thursday. The country where the virus was first detected has mostly curbed the virus within its borders, but is racing to get the vast majority of its population vaccinated as a new outbreak flickers in the southeast. “As of September 15, 2.16 billion vaccine doses have been administered nationwide,” said National Health Commission spokesman Mi Feng at a press briefing. Chinese health authorities said late last month that 890 million people in China had been fully vaccinated and two billion doses administered.


The government has not publicly announced a target for vaccination coverage, but top virologist Zhong Nanshan said last month that the country is likely to have 80 percent of its population inoculated by the end of the year, reaching herd immunity. China is currently battling an outbreak of the Delta variant in the southeastern province of Fujian that has infected almost 200 people so far in three cities, dozens of whom are schoolchildren. The Fujian cluster is the biggest rebound in weeks and comes after the country declared the Delta variant under control, in a test of China’s “zero-case” approach to the pandemic. China reported 49 new domestic transmissions on Thursday, the vast majority in Fujian. Authorities said the cluster’s suspected patient zero was a man who had recently returned from Singapore to the city of Putian, and developed symptoms after completing a 14-day quarantine and initially testing negative for the virus.

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But what role did the FBI play in this?

Clinton Lawyer Michael Sussmann Indicted For Lying to FBI (CTH)

U.S. Special Counsel John Durham has released an indictment of Perkins Coie lawyer Michael Sussmann for lying to federal investigators in 2016 about the people and motives behind his FBI contact. He failed to tell them his intent was to spread a false Alfa Bank conspiracy theory on behalf of the Clinton campaign. Working for the Perkins Coie law firm, while under contract with Hillary Clinton’s campaign, partner Michael Sussmann contacted FBI Legal Counsel James Baker to pitch evidence that a Russian bank was in digital communications with servers in Trump Tower. The Alfa Bank allegation was one of the key components for the ridiculous Trump-Russia narrative put together by the Hillary Clinton campaign. Sussmann wanted the FBI to investigate Donald Trump, so that Hillary Clinton could push a political fabrication about Donald Trump working with Russians to steal the presidential election.


According to the indictment, Sussmann failed to tell the FBI that he was giving them this information on behalf of the Clinton campaign. The FBI investigated the claims and found nothing; however, it was the appearance of the investigation that Clinton needed in order to leak/push the Trump-Russia story to the media and stir up the controversy. There had to be something to the “Trump-Russia” story, because the FBI was investigating it. That fabricated smear served its intended purpose, and the media ran with it.

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Do they present it this way so you will think the Fed is accountable to you?

Powell, Juggling Policy And Renomination, Now Faces An Ethics Blowup (R.)

It is perhaps as predictable as it is problematic: Within days of news that two Federal Reserve bank presidents had engaged in controversial stock trades, one of the fiercest critics of the U.S. central bank’s financial system oversight demands new ethics rules that would bar such dealings in the future. For Fed Chair Jerome Powell, however, it is the wrong problem at the wrong time. Under consideration for reappointment as Fed chief while also juggling how to pull off a critical change in U.S. monetary policy, Powell faces a controversy of the Fed’s own making that helps reinforce arguments by progressives for broader change at the central bank.

Powell remains favored for renomination by President Joe Biden, and if history is a guide a decision may come in the weeks between the Fed’s policy meeting next week and its two-day session on Nov. 2-3. That would match a point in the calendar when the last two Fed chair appointments have been announced. Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren’s Wednesday letter to the Fed’s 12 regional presidents asking them to “impose strong and enforceable ethics and financial conflicts of interest rules” and send her an action plan “no later than Oct. 15,” is at a minimum a distraction to Powell at a time when he is steering the Fed through complex debate over monetary policy.

The Fed meets next week and is expected to take a potentially decisive step that flags likely changes to some of its pandemic crisis programs at an upcoming meeting. It is the type of moment that requires deft communication at the Fed chair’s post-meeting press conference – now muddled by likely queries about his colleagues’ investing habits and the possible blow to public trust. “Institutionally, it’s a bad look,” said Tim Duy, chief U.S. economist at SGH Macro Advisors and an economics professor at the University of Oregon. “It’s better to get ahead of this.” Powell has moved to do so, launching a broad review of the Fed’s rules governing investments by senior officials.

But unless change comes quicly, Warren’s direct demands set up a possible clash with a key Democratic lawmaker when Biden’s eventual Fed pick goes for Senate confirmation. Warren, a member of the Senate Banking Committee, which will provide the initial vetting of the nominee, voted against Powell as Fed chair four years ago, has criticized the Fed’s approach to financial regulation on his watch and has yet to state an opinion about his possible renomination. She credited the move by Dallas Fed President Robert Kaplan and Boston Fed President Eric Rosengren to sell the investments in question, but said a decision “made amidst an ethic firestorm” left no guarantee “that Fed officials are acting solely in the public interest, not based on their own financial interests.”

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Thought I’d add this one because of this line:

“Current Fed regulations forbid the trading of individual stocks by senior officials around the time of policy meetings due to the sharing of information that could have significant influence on the nation’s economy.”

You mean like 15 minutes before and 15 mimues after, but otherwise you’re fine?

Powell Orders Ethics Review Of Federal Reserve (JTN)

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell ordered staff to review ethics guidelines governing the financial dealings by top central bank officials. News of Powell’s inquiry broke after Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., sent 12 letters to the Fed’s regional banks demanding stricter ethics guidelines be implemented by the Fed’s top officials. The Massachusetts Democrat called on each president to ban the ownership and trading of personal stocks by top officials at each regional bank office. Powell requested the ethics review late last week, a spokesperson said in a statement, following reports that two regional presidents actively invested during 2020. A Fed spokesperson told CNBC that Powell ordered the review “because the trust of the American people is essential for the Federal Reserve to effectively carry out our important mission.”


According to documents released last week, Fed Presidents Robert Kaplan and Eric Rosengren both bought or sold private stocks in excess of $1 million dollars. Other Fed presidents reported little to no trading activity. Amid the public backlash and scrutiny from Congress, both Kaplan and Rosengren said they would sell any individual stock holdings by the end of the month. Current Fed regulations forbid the trading of individual stocks by senior officials around the time of policy meetings due to the sharing of information that could have significant influence on the nation’s economy. Powell emphasized that although it is not illegal for regional presidents to buy or sell stocks, the Fed’s internal rules require officials to avoid even the appearance of conflict or of using their position for personal gain.

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“..unfinished properties with enough floor space to cover three-fourths of Manhattan..”

China Braces For “Nightmare Scenario” As Evergrande Collapses (ZH)

Up until now the collapse of China’s Evergrande was very much a slow motion affair, captured perhaps best by Forte Securities trader Keith Temperton who said that “the Asian banks will get hit hard if there’s a default, but then there will be a 10-year recovery process. The market’s getting a hang of it. The way they’ve managed the news flow seems quite clever. They haven’t let a swathe of bad news at once.” But while Beijing was indeed successful in extending the period of collapse as long as possible, now that Evergrande is effectively insolvent and having suspended its bonds from trading we have finally gotten to the endgame and the realization that hundreds of billions in capital (Evergrande’s total debt was just over $300 billion) is gone for ever.

This realization has already prompted angry protesters at China Evergrande Group offices across the country as the developer has fallen further behind on promises to more than 70,000 investors. Construction of unfinished properties with enough floor space to cover three-fourths of Manhattan grinds to a halt, leaving more than a million homebuyers in limbo. In an effort to appease its angry (and very soon, poor) stakeholders, Evergrande plans to let consumers and staff bid on discounted properties this month to repay them for billions in overdue investment products as the embattled developer seeks to preserve cash, according to people familiar with the matter.

According to Bloomberg, the company will organize an online property event by Sept. 30 for investors who opt for discounted real estate in lieu of cash, said two employees who were briefed on an internal call Thursday and asked not to be identified. The world’s most-indebted property developer is pushing the discounted real estate as the preferred of three options for angry investors seeking repayments. The high-yield “shadow bank” products paying as much as 13% a year have become a lightning rod for cash-strapped Evergrande, with investors and staff protesting losses and delayed payments from investments that were marketed as safe. Indeed, demonstrations that are breaking out across China could sway any bailout decisions by the government, which places a high priority on social stability, although it’s likely too late for that.

More than 70,000 people bought the products, including many Evergrande employees, Bloomberg reported earlier, citing an executive of Evergrande’s wealth division. And with about 40 billion yuan ($6.2 billion) of them are now due according to Caixin, there is about to be a whole lot of angry investors, who will not be swayed by the company’s hail mary plan to offer steep discounts on property assets. Investors can invest in residential housing units at a 28% discount, offices at a 46% discount and stores and parking units at 52%. Discounted rates can’t be lower than price floors designated by local governments. The property discounts are a voluntary repayment option, according to the briefing.

[..] As Bloomberg notes, it’s impossible to know for sure what would happen if Beijing allows Evergrande’s downward spiral to continue unabated, but China watchers are already mapping out worst-case scenarios as they contemplate how much pain the Communist Party is willing to tolerate. Pressure to intervene is growing as signs of financial contagion increase and as more and more popular anger builds. “As a systemically important developer, an Evergrande bankruptcy would cause problems for the entire property sector,” said Shen Meng, director at Beijing investment bank Chanson & Co. “Debt recovery efforts by creditors would lead to fire sales of assets and hit housing prices. Profit margins across the supply chain would be squeezed. It would also lead to panic selling in capital markets.”

Read more …

 

 

 

 

 

There’s a Cuomo in there!

 

 

 

 

 

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Jul 122021
 


Henri Matisse The goldfish 1912

 

No End In Sight For Sydney Lockdown As Delta Variant Outbreak Worsens (F.)
Covid Unlocking On 19 July Must Come With A Warning: Boris Johnson (G.)
Mask Wearing Will Be ‘Expected’ In UK After 19 July (G.)
40% Of Brits Want Mask Mandates Forever, Travel Ban For Unvaccinated (SN)
Lift All Mask Mandates (HART)
FBI Encourages Family Members To Rat Each Other Out For ‘Extremism’ (RT)
The Fed: The Captured Regulator That’s Wrecking The US Economy (Martens)
Private Equity And Public Ignorance (Buyniski)

 

 

We have reached the end of the usefuless of masks, lockdowns and vaccines. But it will take a long time before we acknowledge it. In the meantime, expect madness. You can’t lock down people for more than a very short time. You can’t make them wear masks for much longer than that. You can’t force them to get jabbed if those jabs don’t work, and instead prove very risky.

So our homework is: what are we going to do with masks, lockdowns and vaccines off the table? The answer is simple: vitamin D, ivermectin and HCQ. Prophylaxis and early treatment. But it will take a long time before we acknowledge that too.

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s fun when the police don’t stand up for the law
https://twitter.com/i/status/1414372211025010689
Anna de Buisseret: “Our expert psychologists evidence states that psychological warfare is being conducted on the population as a whole and on individuals. The expert analysis is that the impact of this is that not a single person is capable of giving informed consent as they have been brainwashed.”

 

 

 

 

Let’s see those white flags please.

No End In Sight For Sydney Lockdown As Delta Variant Outbreak Worsens (F.)

Sydney’s Delta-variant fueled Covid-19 outbreak has shown no signs of relenting as the city and surrounding areas reported yet another daily rise in new cases, a development which may force authorities to further extend the lockdown in the region which has been in place for two and a half weeks now. Australia’s most populous state, New South Wales (NSW), reported a record 112 new locally acquired Covid-19 cases on Monday, most of them in and around its capital Sydney. NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian said at least 34 of new cases had interactions with the community during their infectious period, while the movement of 18 other cases is still being investigated

Monday is the third straight day the state has reported a record high, which could force the local government to extend the current three-week-long lockdown which is scheduled to end on Friday. Berejiklian noted that the state would like to see the number of local infections drop close to zero before ending the lockdown. “A large part of it is dependent on all of us doing the right thing and being extra cautious,” Berejiklian said, adding this was “not the time to cut any corners.” Of the 63 people hospitalized with Covid-19 in the state, 25 are under the age of 55, and 14 are younger than 35, the Sydney Morning Herald reported. Of the 18 people currently in intensive care units, one is in their 20s, one in their 30s, and one in their forties. Local authorities have previously warned that the largely unvaccinated young population remains vulnerable to the more infectious delta variant.

8.37%. That’s the total population of New South Wales that has been fully vaccinated against Covid-19, according to the Sydney Morning Herald’s tracker. This is largely in line with the overall vaccine rollout across Australia which is just under 9%. While close to a quarter of NSW’s population has received at least one vaccine dose, the effectiveness of a single dose against the delta variant is significantly lower. Fearing a Delta variant outbreak, nearly half of Australia’s population went into lockdown for around three days last month with major urban centers across the country tightening their pandemic restrictions due to fears of a delta variant-fueled outbreak. However, the brunt of the current outbreak has largely been restricted to Sydney and its surrounding regions. Australia had previously managed to almost completely clamp down on the local spread of Covid-19 by using a mix of contact tracing, movement curbs, and strict quarantine measures for incoming travelers. But the country’s sluggish vaccine rollout threatens to undo its previous pandemic success.

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Make it as confusing as you can, please.

Covid Unlocking On 19 July Must Come With A Warning: Boris Johnson (G.)

Boris Johnson has said caution is “absolutely vital” before the abandonment of virtually all formal Covid restrictions as ministers toughen their language amid expectations of soaring infection rates. The Guardian understands that ministers have been told to brace for at least one to two million new cases of coronavirus in the coming weeks, though the vaccination programme means far smaller proportions of those infected will be hospitalised and die than in previous waves. The move into the final stage of unlocking on 19 July, to be announced by the prime minister on Monday afternoon, has been billed as the moment for people to rely on their own judgment over coronavirus precautions, rather than official prescriptions.

And while Johnson will outline the end of virtually all statutory restrictions on everything from business capacity to distancing and mask use, people will still be urged to wear masks in crowded enclosed spaces, with similar vigilance expected over the swift return to workplaces. The move “must come with a warning”, said Johnson, who will host a Downing Street press conference at the same time as Sajid Javid, the health secretary, briefs MPs in the Commons. “Cases will rise as we unlock, so as we confirm our plans today, our message will be clear. Caution is absolutely vital, and we must all take responsibility so we don’t undo our progress, ensuring we continue to protect our NHS.”

There has been a marked shift in the tone taken by ministers on the subject of mask-wearing amid government jitters about the risks of the so-called “big bang” approach to unlocking. Nadhim Zahawi, the vaccines minister, stressed the need for the public to remain “cautious and careful”. He told Sky News: “The guidelines that we will set out tomorrow will demonstrate that, including guidelines that people are expected to wear masks in indoor enclosed spaces, and of course to remain vigilant.” His comments contrast with the tone taken a week earlier by Robert Jenrick, the communities secretary, who said he would abandon mask use when the restrictions ended, adding: “I don’t particularly want to wear a mask.”

Adverse
https://twitter.com/i/status/1414368116931444739

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They’re just trying to confuse you, don’t pay them any attention.

Mask Wearing Will Be ‘Expected’ In UK After 19 July (G.)

Masks will still be “expected” in crowded places such as public transport when most remaining Covid restrictions are lifted later this month, a minister has said, in a marked toughening up of rhetoric amid concerns over soaring infection rates. Nadhim Zahawi, the vaccines minister, who in effect confirmed Boris Johnson would announce the reopening on Monday, said the government would provide very clear guidance on issues such as the wearing of masks, as England moves away from using laws to govern the response to Covid. “I think it’s important that we remain cautious and careful,” he told Sky’s Trevor Phillips on Sunday programme. “The guidelines that we will set out tomorrow will demonstrate that, including guidelines that people are expected to wear masks in indoor enclosed spaces, and of course to remain vigilant.”

In another sign that the end of almost all lockdown rules on 19 July will be accompanied by robust messaging on the need for caution, a leading public health official said on Sunday that people should not rush back to offices if possible. “If you are able to do your business effectively from home then I think over the next four to six weeks we should try our best to do that,” said Dr Susan Hopkins, the incident director for Covid at Public Health England. Even once case rates started to fall, it would be better to see “a cautious return to the office”, Hopkins told Times Radio. The comments represent a change in tone from officials over the past week, with Johnson in particular having previously insisted there would be a move away from the government telling people what to do, towards people using their own judgment.

Zahawi said the move to the final stage of reopening from 19 July was responsible, despite predictions from the health secretary, Sajid Javid, that daily infection levels could top 100,000, a record for the pandemic, noting that almost 87% of adults in England had received a first vaccine dose, and that 65% had had two. The target was to double-vaccinate 66% of adults by 19 July, he said, in an earlier interview with BBC’s The Andrew Marr Show. “We will meet that target. So I am confident that we can proceed to step 4, but cautiously. “We will be setting out tomorrow guidelines on everything from mask wearing, the transition from mandating, or government by diktat, to taking personal responsibility, whether for our own actions or corporate responsibility.”

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Always a nation of sheep.

40% Of Brits Want Mask Mandates Forever, Travel Ban For Unvaccinated (SN)

A new poll finds that 40 per cent of Brits want mask mandates to remain in place forever, while almost half think unvaccinated people should be permanently banned from foreign travel. Yes, really. “New polling by Ipsos MORI for the Economist suggests that a high percentage of Brits believe a number of lockdown restrictions should stay in place “permanently”, including nighttime curfews (19%), travel quarantine (35%), and face masks (a whopping 40%!),” reports LockdownSceptics. “Well over 40% of Brits also believe that only those who have been vaccinated against Covid – and are able to prove it – should be allowed to travel abroad (again, “permanently”).” In other words, almost half of the population never want to unmuzzle and think those who haven’t taken the jab should remain under de facto lockdown forever.

That will be music to the ears of government adviser and lifetime Communist Party member Susan Michie, who when asked how long social distancing and mask mandates should remain in place, replied “forever.” More than one-fifth of Brits are also “very nervous” about the lifting of existing lockdown restrictions, which is due to take place on July 19th. The results of the poll once again underscore how behavioral psychologists have been so successful in terrifying the British public into absolute subservience. As we previously highlighted, scientists acting as government advisers acknowledged using “totalitarian” and “unethical” methods of instilling fear into the population as a means to scare them into complying with lockdown rules.


The comments were made by members of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviour (SPI-B), a sub-committee of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) the government’s chief scientific advisory group. Scientists admitted exaggerating the risk of COVID to the public and using “dystopian” methods of “mind control” to make people more fearful than they should have been. As the poll results prove, this has resulted in large numbers of the population developing a form of PTSD which has traumatized them out of thinking life can ever return to the pre-coronavirus normal.

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The only approach that makes sense at this point.

Lift All Mask Mandates (HART)

HART welcomes Boris Johnson’s announcement of his intention to lift the mask mandates on 19 July, and allow people to take personal responsibility for deciding whether to wear one rather than relying on the government diktat. Some SAGE scientists are already expressing concern about lifting this restriction, with psychologists on the Scientific Pandemic Insights Group on Behaviours (SPI-B) being the most vocal, predictably so given that mask wearing comprises a key element of their ethically-dubious covert ‘nudges’ that harness fear and peer pressure to promote compliance with COVID-19 restrictions.

A major concern is that, even if the national mandates are removed, some local businesses will continue to insist that masks are worn on their premises. Persisting with a requirement for face coverings does not take account of the evidence that, in real-world settings, they are of little-to-no benefit in reducing viral transmission and are associated with a range of negative consequences. Nor — contrary to what Professor Whitty said — is it a ‘common courtesy’ to wear a mask because others may feel uncomfortable if they see a person without one. Many people, including the 1-in-5 of UK adults with hearing difficulties who may rely on lip reading, are at risk of social exclusion when around mask wearers. Furthermore, those who are aware of the profound social and psychological harms associated with masking the healthy in the community will also feel uneasy when around those with their faces covered.

It is encouraging to hear the Prime Minister say that we must now live alongside the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Continuously striving to minimise the danger posed by a virus, to the exclusion of the plethora of other risks we all manage as a routine part of a worthwhile life, is counterproductive. Indeed, the continuation of widespread mask wearing after 19 July will perpetuate the excessive fears many currently experience about returning to a normal life: ongoing mask usage is a ‘safety behaviour’ that may lead people to falsely conclude that their survival following social interaction was due to the mask rather than drawing the reassuring conclusion that it is now safe enough to return to normal activities.

HART has no objection to individuals using masks if they so choose, but turning them into a social superstition — and requiring others, such as hospitality staff to conform so as to give a false veneer of ‘safety’ — is wrong. An elderly resident in a care home, during a TV interview, recently said: ‘I want to live until I die’. In keeping with this expressed wisdom, HART believes we should all now be given the option to unmask, reclaim our humanity, and return to an enjoyable and worthwhile life.

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Divide and rule.

FBI Encourages Family Members To Rat Each Other Out For ‘Extremism’ (RT)

The FBI has asked Americans to examine their own family members for signs of “homegrown violent extremism,” and report them. The call for snitches comes as the FBI turns its surveillance powers on regular Americans. “Family members and peers are often best positioned to witness signs of mobilization to violence,” read a tweet from the FBI on Sunday. To help prevent “homegrown violent extremism,” the agency advises Americans to visit its website, “to learn how to spot suspicious behaviors and report them to the FBI.” The link provided by the FBI brings visitors to a 2019 document listing “mobilization indicators” that may suggest an individual is preparing to engage in terrorism – for example, “preparing and disseminating a martyrdom video,” “communicating directly with violent extremists online,” and “preparing to travel to fight with or support terrorist groups.”

The indicators and imagery used in the document suggest that its focus was on radical Islamic terrorism, but the FBI, along with the rest of the US security apparatus, has in recent months has turned its surveillance powers on white, conservative America. Since the pro-Trump riot on Capitol Hill in January, FBI Director Christopher Wray has testified before Congress that the anti-government sentiment responsible for the affray has been “metastasizing” in the US for years, and that “the problem of domestic terrorism … is not going away anytime soon.” Former Assistant Director Frank Figliuzzi was more explicit last month when he called for the arrest of high-level Republicans to “really tackle terrorism, this time domestically.”

President Joe Biden has linked the Capitol mob to “white supremacism,” which he called “the most lethal terrorist threat to our homeland today” during his first speech to Congress in April. Against this supposed “threat,” the Justice Department has asked for new powers of prosecution, and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has claimed that right-wingers and conservatives, “inspired by foreign terrorist groups” and “emboldened by the breach of the US Capitol Building,” are “plotting attacks against government facilities” and “threatening violence against critical infrastructure.” In addition to their own powers, the DHS, FBI, and National Security Council also want to hire third-party ‘researchers’ to spy on Americans, recent reports have claimed.

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“..we have the three great asset classes moving into bubble territory simultaneously.”

The Fed: The Captured Regulator That’s Wrecking The US Economy (Martens)

Fed Chair Jerome Powell will take his seat before the House Financial Services Committee on Wednesday at noon and before the U.S. Senate Banking Committee on Thursday at 9:30 a.m. for his semi-annual testimony on monetary policy. Some embarrassing questions may come up for Powell based on an investigative report on the Fed that’s airing earlier in the week. This Tuesday evening, the PBS investigative program, Frontline, will broadcast a documentary covering its year-long investigation of the Federal Reserve’s bailouts of Wall Street, from the financial crisis of 2008 to the present. According to the information about the program that Frontline has released, the documentary, titled “The Power of the Fed,” will include interviews with multiple people who believe that the Fed has been captured by Wall Street and is creating dangerous asset bubbles.

Legendary investor Jeremy Grantham will tell viewers this about the Fed’s policies: “They have the housing market, the stock market and the bond market all overpriced at the same time. And they will not be able to prevent, sooner or later, the asset prices coming back down. So we are playing with fire because we have the three great asset classes moving into bubble territory simultaneously.” Grantham characterizes what the Fed has created on Wall Street as a “giant bloodsucker,” that is “sucking more than twice the blood out of the rest of the economy.” Andrew Huszar, a former insider at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, where the Federal Reserve has a serial habit of outsourcing its bailout programs for the mega banks on Wall Street (likely because it is literally owned by those same banks) will explain to viewers how he was “single-handedly responsible for directing the deployment of $1.25 trillion of Fed funds, and we did not see the knock-on benefits that we had hoped for the average American.”

Huszar is talking about the $1.25 trillion the Fed spent in buying up agency Mortgage-Backed Securities (MBS) following the 2008 financial crash on Wall Street. Despite the fact that the Fed saw no benefits accrue from that program to the average American, it doubled down on the same program during the pandemic, buying up $40 billion a month in agency MBS. The Fed’s current total of agency MBS on its balance sheet stands at $2.3 trillion as of last Wednesday. The custodian of the securities purchased in the Fed’s MBS program has been, from the outset, JPMorgan Chase, one of the largest owners of the New York Fed. The fact that the bank has received an unprecedented five felony counts from the Department of Justice since 2014 hasn’t changed the Fed’s mind about entrusting the bank with $2.3 trillion of its assets. (JPMorgan Chase admitted to all five felony counts.)

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“Other private equity funds have gotten their blood funnels into the hospital system – where the profits, driven by Covid-19, truly have no end.”

Private Equity And Public Ignorance (Buyniski)

As the US runs out of concrete resources to sell, bankers have had to get clever – whether this means repackaging assets already sold six times over or inventing new ways to cash in on items once considered intangible.
By the time Americans realized that the promised ‘trickle-down’ theory of neoliberal economics was in fact more of a speedy trickle-up, the government had all but destroyed the reputation of unions and the public sector that employed many of them, convincing the average American that these were corrupt and bad. Indeed, the whole public sector was supposed to be corrupt and bad, in the messaging of the Reagan era, but that corruption was somehow negated when offset by private corporations engaged in so-called public-private partnerships.

But far from attempting to reverse the financial bleed of money for social programs into private corporations, politicians have embraced the public-private partnership with a vengeance. This is unsurprising, given the generous handouts they receive from the non-profits who have cast themselves as the only truly righteous replacement for those government programs. This may sound like old news, but the extent to which those firms have morphed into horrifically powerful entities with trillions of dollars under management – including, most likely, your pension or the retirement savings of someone in your family – capable of setting international policy with a mere yearly memo, remains stubbornly unacknowledged by millions.

Perhaps for the sake of their sanity, they just can’t admit their retirement is in the hands of men who see nothing wrong with gambling away millions of Americans’ savings in precarious financial instruments just because they can. The kind of people who’d buy a boat with ill-gotten foreclosure gains, then spit in the face of those ex-homeowners by naming the boat ‘Su casa es mi casa’ [..] In the aftermath of the 2008 mortgage crisis, private equity firms realized they could package and sell anything they wanted – and it doesn’t seem they’ve stopped. Blackstone became notorious for slurping up foreclosed homes at below-market rates, then juicing rent and fees as they turned around to rent out those same properties, in some cases back to the same people. But Blackstone is far from the only private equity firm to participate in these loathsome schemes.

But fiendishly huge as their profits have been, the private equity bunch were still responsible for keeping the properties they rented in some degree of habitability – sometimes even for answering to angry retirement fund execs when the vultures gambled away their money. In order to further shore up profits, the firms have bought big into vertically integrated predation. Blackstone bought up an entire chain of self-storage units to complement its continuing acquisition of houses. The continued inflation of the already precariously bloated real estate bubble (and the mathematical certainty of time running out for the Covid-19 eviction moratorium) means people are going to have to throw their stuff somewhere when the financial feces hit the fan. Other private equity funds have gotten their blood funnels into the hospital system – where the profits, driven by Covid-19, truly have no end.

Read more …

 

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D-dimer test

 

 

 

 

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Jun 172021
 
 June 17, 2021  Posted by at 8:51 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  47 Responses »


Roy Lichtenstein Crying girl 1963

 

They Denied A Lab Leak At Wuhan. They Are Wrong About Other Things (Pfeiffer)
Novavax CEO: Covid-19 Booster To Be ‘Biggest Market’ In US (Fox)
A Quarter Of Parents Won’t Let Their Children Get Covid-19 Vaccine (F.)
Germany’s CureVac Vaccine Shows Only 47% Effect Against Covid-19 (RT)
Canada’s Treatment Of Religious Communities: Using Covid To Bully (RT)
Rand Paul Demands Exclusion Of Wuhan Lab Funders From Investigations (ZH)
Vladimir Putin Quotes Tolstoy As He Reveals His Dark Philosophy On Life (DM)
Unindicted Co-Conspirators in 1/6 Cases Raise Disturbing Questions (Rev.)
Is “Running Hot” Inflation Wise and Humane? (RIA)
Fed Says Might Need To Raise Interest Rates Sooner Than Expected (DM)

 

 

Ano Veli Samuel Turtiainen. Listen as he speaks in Finnish Parliament
https://twitter.com/i/status/1405096937813016576

 

 

IN-SA-NI-TY

 

 

“The choice was always vaccines OR treatment. Not both.”

“Viewed in the kindest possible way, that delay, that lost year, wasn’t so much intentional as institutionalized.. “

They Denied A Lab Leak At Wuhan. They Are Wrong About Other Things (Pfeiffer)

From the start, there was no room for both vaccines and treatments under the statute that has allowed millions of Americans to be vaccinated with an unlicensed, largely unstudied substance. The key mechanism on which this turned was the vaccine’s “Emergency Use Authorization,” which can be granted by the FDA only if there is “no adequate, approved, and available alternative to the product for diagnosing, preventing or treating” a disease. But even as the vaccine was minimally tested and maximally hyped, there was an alternative. Ivermectin. “It’s the most effective antiviral agent we have,” Dr. Paul E. Marik, co-founder of Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance, said in a conversation for this article. “If the WHO was to say that or the NIH — were they to approve ivermectin — the EUA for all the vaccines would become invalid.”

Ivermectin, said FLCCC president Dr. Pierre Kory, “would kneecap the entire global vaccine policy around the world.” The choice was always vaccines OR treatment. Not both. Operation Warp Speed spent three times as much — $18 billion — to develop a vaccine as it did to develop a treatment. Moreover, money for therapeutics went largely toward costly new drugs, some of which failed and others still in development. The media did not question the oversight of existing drugs and emerging research. Instead, it became an arm of government in a shared single fixed goal: Vaccinate quickly and at any expense. America’s COVID Czar Anthony Fauci predicted in July of 2020 that an antiviral would be available by that fall.

Then, last December he said his “highest priority” was a quick-acting COVID drug. In reality, NIH waited until April 29, 2021 to announce a large study of safety-tested, FDA-approved drugs. That was roughly 400 days – and nearly 600,000 U.S. deaths — into the pandemic. Forget a few dozen studies – most from other countries — that universally agreed on ivermectin’s efficacy. Forget a peer-reviewed meta-analysis that showed 83 percent fewer deaths. Forget the experiences of hundreds of real treating doctors in the U.S. and around the world.

Viewed in the kindest possible way, that delay, that lost year, wasn’t so much intentional as institutionalized. U.S. treatments are driven by the integral and outsized influence of pharmaceutical money on the regulatory process, and no one was putting up $20 million for what are considered, questionably, the “gold-standard” of evidence-based medicine: randomized control trials. Dr. Robert Malone, a vaccine researcher and inventor of mRNA technology, went bankrupt trying to repurpose old antiviral drugs to treat the Zika virus in the 2010s. “The investment community had zero interest because there’s no way to make a buck,” he said in a must-see podcast on pandemic missteps. “The financial incentives around drug repurposing are such that it doesn’t get done.”

Ivermectin is the penicillin of COVID, particularly when combined with other generics like fluvoxamine and the vilified but effective hydroxychloroquine. Now, however, as at the start of COVID, newly infected patients are still denied treatment and turned back into the community, often to infect others. As Malone put it, “We’re sending people home and telling them not to come back until your lips are blue.” “Were this a hundred years ago,” a Pennsylvania opthamologist named Neil Chasin told me months ago, “and Ivermectin was available, it would be used everywhere.”

See the script

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“The boosting story is going to be around for many years to come.”

Novavax CEO: Covid-19 Booster To Be ‘Biggest Market’ In US (Fox)

Novavax’s CEO said he believes boosters will be the company’s “biggest market” in the U.S. once it receives regulatory approval for its COVID-19 vaccine. “That’ll be probably our biggest market in the U.S. for instance, late this year or next year we expect that it’ll have all the great characteristics of a good boost,” said CEO Stanley Erck during an appearance on FOX Business’ “Varney & Company” hours after the biotech company announced that its vaccine was found to be over 90% effective in a clinical trial. Erck noted that the timing of the trial saw nearly all infections detected stem from variants, which helped prove effective against strains currently gaining ground in the U.S. and elsewhere including the Alpha and Delta types.


“The vaccine works, and as they said 93% if you look at just the variants, the vaccine was 93% effective and that’s just terrific I think,” he said. Shares rose on the developments while other vaccine makers were mixed. Following approval, Erck said the company will likely focus on supplying countries outside of the U.S., including fulfilling agreements already made with Canada, Australia, and another to send 1.1 billion doses to COVAX, the COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access program. Erck added that the company is already involved in a comparative mix and match trial in the U.K. The trial is evaluating safety and effectiveness of vaccine regimens that may include two doses of a mRNA jab and later involve a boost made by a different company. “We expect our vaccine to show the most benign side effects and I think we’re going to look good there,” he said. “The boosting story is going to be around for many years to come.”

Booster shots

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“26%. That’s the percentage of Americans ages 12-15 who have received at least one dose of the Covid-19 vaccine..”

A Quarter Of Parents Won’t Let Their Children Get Covid-19 Vaccine (F.)

As vaccine hesitancy continues to be an issue, approximately one in four parents say they do not intend to get their child vaccinated against Covid-19, a Harris poll finds—and more than 10% intend to only have their child receive one dose, which may not be enough to protect against the Delta variant now taking hold in the U.S. The poll, conducted June 11-13 among 2,015 U.S. adults, found the vast majority of parents will have their children fully vaccinated against Covid-19, including 62% of those with children under age 12, who are not eligible yet for the vaccine, and 54% of those ages 12 and older, with a further 9% saying their children are already vaccinated. The poll found 27% of parents of children under 12 and 25% of parents of older children say they will not get their children vaccinated.

Their reasons include wanting to wait for more research on vaccines’ safety and effectiveness in children, not thinking Covid-19 is serious enough in children to warrant vaccination and general anti-vaccine sentiment. A further 11% of parents of children under 12 and 12% of parents of children 12 and up say they will only have their children receive one of the two recommended doses of the Covid-19 vaccine. One vaccine dose has been shown to be far less effective against the Delta variant first identified in India—which could soon become the dominant strain in the U.S.—with Public Health England reporting one dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine provides only 36% protection against symptomatic disease.

[..] 26%. That’s the percentage of Americans ages 12-15 who have received at least one dose of the Covid-19 vaccine, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, along with 40% of 16- to 17-year-olds, who became eligible for the shot sooner. Only 12.8% of 12- to 15-year-olds and 29.6% of 16- to 17-year-olds are fully vaccinated.

Anti-vaxxer

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More mRNA.

Germany’s CureVac Vaccine Shows Only 47% Effect Against Covid-19 (RT)

Praised recently as “hope for the unvaccinated world,” a Covid-19 vaccine developed by Germany’s CureVac is only 47% effective against the coronavirus. As its stock collapsed, the company blamed new virus variants. Preliminary results from second and third-phase trials on 40,000 subjects in 10 countries of Europe and Latin America show that CureVac’s jab “did not meet pre-specified statistical success criteria,” the company announced on Wednesday. “In the unprecedented context of at least 13 variants circulating within the study population subset assessed at this interim analysis, CVnCoV demonstrated an interim vaccine efficacy of 47% against [Covid]-19 disease of any severity,” the Tubingen-based company said.

“Initial analyses suggest age and strain dependent efficacy,” the company added, as its stock collapsed on the news of failure. “While we were hoping for a stronger interim outcome, we recognize that demonstrating high efficacy in this unprecedented broad diversity of variants is challenging,” said CureVac CEO Dr. Franz-Werner Haas, adding that “the overall vaccine efficacy may change” as they continue towards the final analysis. The interim analysis assessed 134 cases of Covid-19 occurring at least two weeks after the second dose was administered, of which 124 were successfully sequenced to identify variants. Only one case was due to the original virus, CureVac said. Preliminary results also showed efficacy in younger participants, but not people older than 60; the elderly are the most at-risk group for Covid-19. CureVac said it has reported the results to the European Medicines Agency.


The failure of the trial is a bitter pill for CureVac, founded by one of the German pioneers of mRNA vaccine technology, which is currently used in the US-developed Pfizer and Moderna jabs. As late as May, its vaccine was praised by the New York Times as the jab that could “bring hope to the unvaccinated world.” Unlike the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, the CureVac jab remains stable at refrigerator temperatures – just like the Russian-developed Sputnik V – which would have made it attractive to swathes of Africa, Asia, and Latin America that lack deep freeze facilities. It can even sit at room temperature for 24 hours without spoiling.

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“Recently, a Canadian police force was using a helicopter to hunt down religious services that are forced to be held in secret.”

Canada’s Treatment Of Religious Communities: Using Covid To Bully (RT)

More and more religious services have been cracked down on by Canadian government officials. Police choppers have tracked down services that are forced to hide, while the premiers enjoy lavish dinners. This is an abuse of power. Back in April, I wrote about Canada beginning to crack down on religious services. During that time, a pastor of Polish descent had said the country was turning into World War II Germany, branding police who raided his church ‘gestapo’. Though plainly the nation has not reached those Hitlerian extremes yet, Canada’s actions against religious gatherings continue to be concerning. Recently, a Canadian police force was using a helicopter to hunt down religious services that are forced to be held in secret. After this, several arrests were made, despite Canadian law stating it will protect the right for religious gathering and practice.


Crackdowns on both Jewish and Christian religious gatherings, and the virtual canceling of Ramadan for Muslims, have happened all over Canada, and property seizures on top of these measures are not uncommon. All of this is done on the premise of stopping the spread of Covid-19, but the nation has already begun its vaccine rollout. In fact, Canada has had the vaccine since April, yet still is not allowing religious individuals to go back to their normal lives. But as the faithful continue to be denied the right to practice freely, Canadian government officials are meeting up and throwing a posh dinner at the Alberta Sky Palace, breaking the same rules that they are claiming these religious gatherings violate. There were no arrests made, and all that was given to the public was an empty apology.

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Seems obvious.

Rand Paul Demands Exclusion Of Wuhan Lab Funders From Investigations (ZH)

Senator Rand Paul urged Wednesday that those involved in funding the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s coronavirus ‘gain of function’ research cannot be allowed to be a part of investigations again. Appearing on Fox News, Paul said “Here’s the problem. The WHO investigated this the first time, we suggested three people to send to China. They rejected all three and they accepted a guy named Peter Daszak who was the one that funded the lab.” The Senator continued “So you can’t have the people—like Anthony Fauci or Peter Daszak—who are part of the funding mechanism to send these funds to Wuhan lab. You can’t have them investigating themselves.”

“They have a definite conflict of interest because if this pandemic started in a lab that the U.S. was funding, the people advocating for the funding obviously will have culpability—at least moral culpability,” Paul asserted. Referring to the World Health organisation’s 3 hour visit to the Wuhan lab in February, Paul stated “The WHO did a terrible job the first time. There needs to be an investigation but I’ve been advocating for a congressional investigation.” Paul was one of five GOP Senators to put his name to a letter made public this week demanding the unreacted release of “all records” from Fauci, his deputy Hugh Auchincloss, NIH Director Francis Collins and several other officials “referring or relating to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, COVID-19, coronavirus, EcoHealth Alliance, or Dr. Baric’s 2015 coronavirus study.”

The Senators noted that “release of approximately 4,000 pages of NIH email communications and other documents from early 2020 has raised serious questions about NIH’s handling of COVID-19.” “These documents, though heavily redacted, have shed new light on NIH’s awareness of the virus’ origins in the early stages of the COVID19 pandemic,” the senators noted in the letter to HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra and NIH Director Collins. The letter continues, “It is unclear the extent to which NIH officials, including Dr. Fauci, considered the possibility that the virus originated in a laboratory and what, if any, actions they took to seriously investigate this possibility.”

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‘There is no happiness in life, only a mirage of it on the horizon, so cherish that.’

Vladimir Putin Quotes Tolstoy As He Reveals His Dark Philosophy On Life (DM)

Vladimir Putin channelled his inner Bond villain as he made a dark comment after meeting with President Joe Biden in Geneva on Wednesday. The Russian leader was asked if there was a growing trust and happiness between him and the US president after their meeting. The strongman typically responded: ‘There is no happiness in life, only a mirage of it on the horizon, so cherish that.’ The response, translated to Western reporters at the summit, is attributed to the classic Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, who is said to have remarked it to fellow writer Ivan Bunin. Bunin, then 23, said he met Tolstoy on a frosty night in Moscow in 1894 when the War and Peace author was aged 65. Tolstoy gave words of wisdom to the aspiring novelist but also told him to ‘not expect too much from life’.


Bunin was so enamoured with his idol that he tried to emulate him, visiting sectarian settlements and even illegally distributing Tolstyoan literature. Bunin was later considered a true heir to the realist tradition in Russian literature started by Tolstoy and his contemporary Anton Chekhov. On social media, many said Putin’s remark was typical of his Bond villain image. One remarked it was ‘simultaneously the most Russian and the most Bond villain thing I’ve ever heard a world leader say’. Others compared him to a Marvel villain, saying his comment sounded like it came from the mouth of Thanos.

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The FBI organized 1/6?!

Unindicted Co-Conspirators in 1/6 Cases Raise Disturbing Questions (Rev.)

Of all the questions asked, words spoken, and ink spilled on the so-called “Capitol Siege” of January 6, 2021, none hold the key to the entire event quite like what Sen. Amy Klobuchar asked of Christopher Wray. The Democrat from Minnesota asked the Trump-appointed FBI Director: Did the federal government infiltrate any of the so-called “militia” organizations claimed to be responsible for planning and executing the Capitol Siege? Christopher Wray is able to uncomfortably weasel his way out of answering the question directly, partially because Klobuchar does him the courtesy of not asking him the question directly. Klobuchar instead asks the FBI director if he wishes he had infiltrated the militia organizations allegedly involved in 1/6 — assuming from the outset that there was in fact no infiltration, thereby providing the FBI director an easy way to avoid addressing the question one way or another.


Revolver News is willing to address the matter directly in the following three questions:
• In the year leading up to 1/6 and during 1/6 itself, to what extent were the three primary militia groups (the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys, and the Three Percenters) that the FBI, DOJ, Pentagon and network news have labeled most responsible for planning and executing a Capitol attack on 1/6 infiltrated by agencies of the federal government, or informants of said agencies?
• Exactly how many federal undercover agents or confidential informants were present at the Capitol or in the Capitol during the infamous “siege” and what roles did they play (merely passive informants or active instigators)?
• Finally, of all of the unindicted co-conspirators referenced in the charging documents of those indicted for crimes on 1/6, how many worked as a confidential informant or as an undercover operative for the federal government (FBI, Army Counterintelligence, etc.)?

Tucker Revolver
https://twitter.com/i/status/1404984630160203781

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“Resulting from surging income and reduced liabilities, retail sales are running about 15% above the trend of the prior decade.”

Is “Running Hot” Inflation Wise and Humane? (RIA)

The robust economic recovery is in part the result of nearly $5 trillion in deficit spending. To grasp how the government supported the economy, consider the graph below. The orange line is total personal income. After the second set of direct payments to citizens went out in March, personal income was 25% more than before the Pandemic. The blue line shows organic income, or that earned solely through employers. The difference, the gray area, is payments from the government, known as transfer payments. These direct benefits represented nearly a third of income on multiple occasions over the last year.


Personal consumption represents nearly two-thirds of economic activity (GDP). Over the last six months, consumption was significantly boosted by stimulus programs. Further, the government allowing forbearance of rent, mortgage, student loan, and utility payments provided many with additional money to spend. Resulting from surging income and reduced liabilities, retail sales are running about 15% above the trend of the prior decade. For historical recessionary context, consider retail sales fell by about 13% from its trend during the 2008 recession.

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End the Fed.

Fed Says Might Need To Raise Interest Rates Sooner Than Expected (DM)

Federal Reserve officials have said they might need to raise interest rates sooner than expected to keep inflation from spiraling out of control – as the US economy continues to grow at lightning speed. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said in a press conference Wednesday officials now expect to hike the interest rate from near zero to 0.6 percent by the end of 2023. Back in March, the central bank said it didn’t expect to raise it until at least 2024. The interest rate affects both consumer and business loans, impacting everything from credit cards to mortgages. When the rate set at near zero, borrowing costs are cheap and money ‘floods’ the system. This helps to goose growth, but also can send prices spiraling out of control.


With the economy recovering more rapidly than anticipated from the COVID-19 pandemic, consumer prices soared at a faster rate in May than any time since the Great Recession. Last week, the government warned that overall consumer prices rose 0.6 percent in May, bringing the annual inflation rate to 5 percent – the highest level since August 2008. The updated interest rate projection comes as the Federal Reserve attempts to put a brake on such out-of-control prices. A majority of 11 of 18 Fed officials pencil in at least two quarter-percentage-point rate increases for 2023, even as officials pledged in a statement to keep policy supportive for now to encourage an ongoing jobs recovery. Meanwhile, overall economic growth is expected to hit 7 percent this year.

Read more …

 

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May 292021
 


John Collier Lady Godiva c1897

 

National Horror Story Hour (Kunstler)
Chinese Scientists Created Covid-19 In A Wuhan Lab – Study (DM)
Fauci Backed Virus Experiments ‘Despite Pandemic Risk’ (Lauria)
Broken Parts Of COVID-19 Vaccines Mutate To Trigger Blood Clots (GGI)
European Regulators OK Pfizer Vaccine For Children 12-15 (AP)
For The Young: Choose Wisely (Denninger)
Oklahoma House Bans Mask Mandate, Vaccine Requirements in Schools (ET)
Georgia Bans Mask Mandates In Public Schools (JTN)
Employers Get Green Light To “Incentivize” Workers To Get Vaccinated (ZH)
The Fed Keeps Expanding Its Powers; That’s Making Some People Nervous (Cox)

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Science.

National Horror Story Hour (Kunstler)

In the early going of the War on Covid-19, The Science told its soldiers, the doctors, to jam ventilators down patients’ throats. Whoops, that didn’t work so well. The Science told everybody to fuggeddabowt Ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, Zinc, and Vitamin D. The Science told New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to stash Covid-19 infected patients in nursing homes. The Science told everybody don’t bother with masks, then to definitely wear masks, then to maybe not wear masks, then to wear double masks, then to get vaccinated and wear masks. Golly, what to believe? Some people began to think that The Science was full of shit — which is, let’s face it, a dangerous thought, and something which, thank Gawd, Facebook, Twitter, and Google corrected for us.

One thing The Science remained adamant about for a whole year was that Covid-19 did not come from the Wuhan, China, Institute of Virology, where-and-to-which, it just happened, one of the US government’s Knights of The Science, Dr. Anthony Fauci, was funneling US taxpayer-funded grant money for the purpose of doing gain-of-function research on exotic bat corona viruses. Gosh, why would you even do that? (Doesn’t gain of function = make it more deadly?)

Supposedly to gain knowledge so that mankind will be prepared to fight the emergence of deadly bat viruses that somehow manage to sneak into the human population at some future date. These things can happen, you know. We’ve already tangled with bird flu and swine flu, so deadly bat flu could hardly be out of the question. Of course, one of the dangers, when you are playing with deadly respiratory viruses in a lab, is that lab workers might inhale a virus or two and become infected with a specimen that The Science has engineered to be especially troublesome… but that was very unlikely, maintained Dr. Anthony Fauci, Chief Science Advisor to the President.

Until this month when Dr. Fauci conceded to a Senate Committee that perhaps an investigation was warranted to find out if, perchance, Covid-19 escaped from the Wuhan lab — since, it turns out, the Wuhan lab was such a sloppy-ass operation that its level of safety was comparable to an ordinary dentist’s office. It also turns out, according to a Wall Street Journal report this week, that three Wuhan lab workers did indeed need to be hospitalized in November 2019, which was around the time the bug got loose among the civilians of Wuhan City, while Chinese tourists and workers were still winging around the world on airplanes by the tens of thousands — prompting one to wonder whether, also perchance, this was something that the CCP wanted to happen? ¿Quién sabe?

Now that “safe and effective” vaccines are available against Covid-19, The Science is urging everybody to take it, pronto, and the government is assisting in the distribution and deployment of vaccinations even to the very borderline of coercing citizens into it by turning the “vaccine hesitant” into social pariahs. No restaurant meals or ballgames for you Science-offending trolls! How’s that working? According to Dr. Fauci, and several other Knights of The Science, more than half of the people on their staffs got vaxed voluntarily. More than half! Now that’s a ringing vote of confidence in The Science!

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“..then tried to cover their tracks by reverse-engineering versions of the virus..”

Chinese Scientists Created Covid-19 In A Wuhan Lab – Study (DM)

An explosive new study claims that Chinese scientists created COVID-19 in a Wuhan lab, then tried to cover their tracks by reverse-engineering versions of the virus to make it look like it evolved naturally from bats. The paper’s authors, British Professor Angus Dalgleish and Norwegian scientist Dr. Birger Sørensen, wrote that they have had ‘prima facie evidence of retro-engineering in China’ for a year – but were ignored by academics and major journals. Dalgleish is a professor of oncology at St George’s University, London, and is best known for his breakthrough creating the first working ‘HIV vaccine’, to treat diagnosed patients and allow them to go off medication for months.

Sørensen, a virologist, is chair of pharmaceutical company, Immunor, which developed a coronavirus vaccine candidate called Biovacc-19. Dalgleish also has share options in the firm. The shocking allegations in the study include accusations of ‘deliberate destruction, concealment or contamination of data’ at Chinese labs, and it notes the silencing and disappearance of scientists in the communist country who spoke out. The journal article, exclusively obtained by DailyMail.com and slated for publication in the coming days, is set to make waves among the scientific community, as the majority of experts have until recently staunchly denied the origins of COVID-19 were anything other than a natural infection leaping from animals to humans.

While analyzing COVID-19 samples last year in an attempt to create a vaccine, Dalgleish and Sørensen discovered ‘unique fingerprints’ in the virus that they say could only have arisen from manipulation in a laboratory. They said they tried to publish their findings but were rejected by major scientific journals which were at the time resolute that the virus jumped naturally from bats or other animals to humans. Even when former MI6 chief Sir Richard Dearlove spoke out publicly saying the scientists’ theory should be investigated, the idea was dismissed as ‘fake news.’

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“..in December 2017 Fauci unilaterally reversed an Obama administration 2014 ban on such experiments precisely because of the danger that a leak could cause a pandemic.”

Fauci Backed Virus Experiments ‘Despite Pandemic Risk’ (Lauria)

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, wrote in an academic paper nine years ago that he supported “gain-of-function” research on viruses despite admitting a “remote” possibility that such “important work” could lead to a global pandemic if such a fortified virus escaped from a lab, The Australian newspaper reported on Friday. In October 2012, Fauci wrote a paper for the American Society for Microbiology, in which he said: “In an unlikely but conceivable turn of events, what if that scientist becomes infected with the virus, which leads to an outbreak and ultimately triggers a pandemic? Many ask reasonable questions: given the possibility of such a scenario – however remote – should the initial experiments have been performed and/or published in the first place, and what were the processes involved in this decision?

Scientists working in this field might say – as indeed I have said – that the benefits of such experiments and the resulting knowledge outweigh the risks. It is more likely that a pandemic would occur in nature, and the need to stay ahead of such a threat is a primary reason for performing an experiment that might appear to be risky.” The newspaper’s revelation comes as President Joe Biden announced this week an investigation into whether the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 leaked out of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV)’s lab in Wuhan, China, where the pandemic first broke out. Fauci, who had dismissed that possibility and insisted the virus had natural transmission from another species to humans, on May 11 reversed himself, saying at a conference that he was “not convinced” of the coronavirus’ natural origins and said authorities needed to learn “exactly what happened.”

[..] in December 2017 Fauci unilaterally reversed an Obama administration 2014 ban on such experiments precisely because of the danger that a leak could cause a pandemic. The Australian quoted former Trump administration officials as saying that no one at the Trump White House knew that Fauci had lifted Obama’s ban. “It kind of just got rammed through,” one official told the newspaper. “I think there’s truth in the narrative that the (National Security Council) staff, the president, the White House chief-of-staff, those people were in the dark that he was switching back on the research.”

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“..parts of it break off and create mutated versions of themselves. The mutated versions then enter the body and trigger the blood clots.”

Broken Parts Of COVID-19 Vaccines Mutate To Trigger Blood Clots (GGI)

German scientists have found out how the broken parts of Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccines branded as Covishield in India mutate to trigger blood clots in recipients. Scientists say the vaccine is sent into the cell nucleus instead of surrounding fluid, where parts of it break off and create mutated versions of themselves. The mutated versions then enter the body and trigger the blood clots. Two vaccines, one manufactured by Oxford-AstraZeneca branded as Covishield in India and the other by Johnson & Johnson, have been linked to blood clotting disorders, particularly among women under the age of 50.


Earlier, German scientists found the exact 2 step process how the COVID-19 vaccine causes blood clots in recipients. They describe a series of events that has to happen in the body before the vaccines create these large clots. Now, researchers at Goethe-University of Frankfurt and Ulm University, in Helmholtz, have found the problem which they say lies in the adenovirus vector — a common cold virus used so both vaccines can enter the body. Scientists believe that in some people, the immune system sees the vaccine as a threat and over-produces antibodies to fight it. These lead to the formation of clumps in the blood, which can become deadly if the clots move towards vital organs and cut off supply.

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Bhakdi is clear: this is criminal.

European Regulators OK Pfizer Vaccine For Children 12-15 (AP)

The European Medicines Agency on Friday recommended that the use of the coronavirus vaccine made by Pfizer and BioNTech be expanded to children ages 12 to 15, a decision that offers younger and less at-risk populations across the continent access to a Covid-19 shot for the first time. The vaccine was the first one granted authorization across the European Union when it was licensed for use in anyone 16 and over in December. So far, about 173 million doses of the shot have been administered in the 27-nation bloc, about three quarters of the total given. “Extending the protection of a safe and effective vaccine in this younger population is an important step forward in the fight against this pandemic,” said Marco Cavaleri, who heads the EMA body that reviewed the vaccine.

The EU regulator had received the necessary data to authorize the vaccine for younger teens and found it to be highly effective against infection, he said. In a study involving 2,000 adolescents in the United States, none of those who received the vaccine got Covid-19, compared with 16 in a control group who received a placebo, said Cavaleri. “The vaccine was well tolerated and the side effect in this age group were very much similar (to) what we’ve seen in young adults and not raising major concern at this point in time,” he added. The EMA decision needs to be rubber-stamped by the European Commission, and individual national regulators must decide whether the vaccine will be administered to children under 16.

The recommendation follows similar decisions by regulators in Canada and the US last month, as rich countries slowly approach their vaccination targets for adults and look to immunize as many people as possible. Researchers will continue to monitor the shot’s long-term protection and safety in the children for another two years.

Bhakdi

https://twitter.com/wakeupfromcovid/status/1398293941305450499

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“Isn’t the first question to be asked “how dangerous is it if I say no and get infected, assuming I haven’t been already?” It should be.”

For The Young: Choose Wisely (Denninger)

Most young people — healthy people under the age of 30 — have no symptoms of significance associated with getting infected with Covid-19. They either get a mild head cold that could be mistaken for anything else or no symptoms at all. Obviously, if you don’t know you are sick or think it’s allergies, asthma or whatever because you never run a fever or really are significantly ill you have no reason to get tested, no reason to believe you had it, and no doctor sees you. You do not show up in the data but you did indeed have Covid-19. Some young people get what seems like a flu and very, very few get really sick or die.

If you had Covid, whether you were tested positive or not, you are presumably protected. The science is that the minimum protection is about 84%. This is a minimum number because not everyone who got it and seroconverted silently was known. This study was among health-care workers who obviously have very high risk as they’re around actively sick people all the time, and they were tested regularly so many “silent” infections were caught, where yours probably wouldn’t have been. Further a recent study funded by Fauci’s NIH showed that most people pick up memory of the infection in their bone marrow (incidentally, getting people to volunteer for that had to be quite a trick; the operation to get the marrow to test is quite painful, which is why the size was very small) which means that protection from at least moderate disease is likely to last decades if not your entire remaining life.

In short there is no science that says you should take the shot if you’ve already had Covid. There are plenty of people saying that but they cannot point to any scientific study that shows you actually lose protection from prior infection any faster than you do from the shots themselves. This is why someone who had the measles does not take a measles shot; you’re presumably protected by fighting off the infection. But what if you haven’t had Covid-19? What do you decide if you’re in that 0-25 age group and someone is trying to demand you get the jab, or all your friends are doing it? Isn’t the first question to be asked “how dangerous is it if I say no and get infected, assuming I haven’t been already?” It should be.

mRNA and pregnancy

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How many people will end up still wearing masks and getting “vaccinated”?

Oklahoma House Bans Mask Mandate, Vaccine Requirements in Schools (ET)

The Oklahoma House has passed a bill banning mask mandates in public schools and requirements for students to be vaccinated against COVID-19. The bill, SB 658, passed the state House by 76–18 and was sent to Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt on May 26. The state Senate had passed the bill by 38–8 a day earlier. “For the sake of children throughout the state, I’m glad this bill is one step closer to becoming law,” Republican state Sen. Rob Standridge said in a statement. “With this legislation, vaccine passports for Oklahoma students will not exist.” Standridge is also one of the authors of the bill. SB 658 would prohibit the boards of education of all public school districts and technology center school districts—including those of higher education—from requiring vaccination against COVID-19 as “a condition of admittance to or attendance of the school or institution.”


It would also prevent vaccine passports or similar documentation from being required. Standridge explained during the session that the COVID-19 vaccine is different from other vaccines that are currently required, like those against diphtheria or tetanus, because it’s “still under emergency use authorization,” News9 reported. SB 658 further forbids implementing a mask mandate for students who haven’t received COVID-19 vaccines. Exceptions include when the governor declares an emergency or after the boards of education consult with their local county health department, but the mask mandate must be reconsidered at each regularly scheduled board meeting.

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State after state.

Georgia Bans Mask Mandates In Public Schools (JTN)

Gov. Brian Kemp signed an executive order Friday that bans masks mandates inside Georgia public schools. The order also lifts most existing COVID-19 restrictions in the state. It blocks schools from implementing policies that would require students and staff to wear masks. Students and teachers still can wear masks if they choose, but they would be optional. “Georgians don’t need the government telling them what their children should do,” Kemp tweeted Thursday. Six Cobb County parents who sued the Cobb County School District over the district’s mask mandate have dropped the lawsuit in response to Kemp’s announcement.


Kemp and Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms had a public dispute last summer over Kemp’s order that restricted local governments from issuing face covering rules that were more restrictive than his. Kemp filed a lawsuit against Atlanta officials in July after the city enacted a face mask-wearing mandate when his executive order encouraged but did not require face coverings. Kemp later abandoned the lawsuit and issued an executive order that allowed certain local governments to issue the mandate. The Georgia Department of Public Health reported Friday the lowest COVID-19 hospitalizations in the state since the beginning of the pandemic. State records show 99 people were hospitalized with COVID-19 symptoms. According to the state’s daily status report, 9.9% of the tests returned were positive Friday for COVID-19.

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Playing footsie with anti-discrimination laws.

Employers Get Green Light To “Incentivize” Workers To Get Vaccinated (ZH)

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has just quietly given American companies the green light to to do whatever it takes to “incentivize” American workers to accept the coronavirus vaccine. As vaccinations continue to slow, and states beef up incentives including lotteries and cash prizes to any adults who agree to get vaccinated who haven’t already, the EEOC has just issued some long-awaited guidance on how far companies can go in pushing workers to be vaccinated. Some companies, including Delta Air Lines, have said they won’t hire anyone who hasn’t already been vaccinated. The updated guidelines say employers may offer incentives for employees to provide documentation showing they have been vaccinated since requesting this proof “is not a disability-related inquiry” or an “unlawful request” under federal anti-discrimination laws.

What’s more, companies who choose to offer the vaccine on-site, or who incentivize employees to get vaccinated elsewhere, can’t offer perks or punishments substantial enough to be “coercive”. The questions, which were by far the most important pieces of the new guidance, were tucked away at the bottom of the update, making the changes an easy thing for reporters to miss before a long holiday weekend.

K.16. Under the ADA, may an employer offer an incentive to employees to voluntarily provide documentation or other confirmation that they received a vaccination on their own from a pharmacy, public health department, or other health care provider in the community? (5/28/21) Yes. Requesting documentation or other confirmation showing that an employee received a COVID-19 vaccination in the community is not a disability-related inquiry covered by the ADA. Therefore, an employer may offer an incentive to employees to voluntarily provide documentation or other confirmation of a vaccination received in the community. As noted elsewhere, the employer is required to keep vaccination information confidential pursuant to the ADA.

K.17. Under the ADA, may an employer offer an incentive to employees for voluntarily receiving a vaccination administered by the employer or its agent? (5/28/21) Yes, if any incentive (which includes both rewards and penalties) is not so substantial as to be coercive. Because vaccinations require employees to answer pre-vaccination disability-related screening questions, a very large incentive could make employees feel pressured to disclose protected medical information. As explained in K.16., however, this incentive limitation does not apply if an employer offers an incentive to employees to voluntarily provide documentation or other confirmation that they received a COVID-19 vaccination on their own from a third-party provider that is not their employer or an agent of their employer.

Employers including Dollar General, Aldi and Instacart have already moved to reward their employees for receiving the Covid-19 vaccine by offering paid time off and cash stipends. And in April, President Joe Biden called on every employer to offer paid time off for workers to recover from potential vaccine side effects.

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But independent it is not.

The Fed Keeps Expanding Its Powers; That’s Making Some People Nervous (Cox)

Bernanke’s successor, Janet Yellen, worked closely with Geithner. Yellen’s successor and current Chairman Jerome Powell had a tight relationship with former President Donald Trump’s Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin. Now, the dynamic has gotten even more intense. Powell and Yellen, who worked together on the Fed for nearly six years, now run the Fed and Treasury respectively. That’s never happened before, and it’s what has some on the Street nervous that the Fed may be tasked with implementing the White House’s economic program. The Fed has long been considered immune to outside pressures, free to move interest rates and otherwise implement policy in the way it deems most appropriate, outside of political concerns. The fear is that the Powell-Yellen dynamic could change that.

“You have the current Treasury secretary who was the boss of the current Fed chairman not so long ago. There’s obviously a very close relationship there,” said Jim Paulsen, chief investment strategist at the Leuthold Group. “They’re still in lockstep. They’re espousing very similar philosophies that go beyond tradition.” Indeed, there’s not much difference between where Powell and Yellen stand on most matters germane to their respective roles. Powell has committed to keep interest rates low until the economy is farther along on the road to recovery, and Yellen has remarked on the pivotal role low rates play so the Biden administration can finance the trillions in spending that it wants. Yellen has been a leading advocate for that muscular fiscal policy, and Powell has said there are economic problems that low interest rates and money printing can’t solve.

But it’s their positions on social issues that have drawn much of the negative attention. The Fed has in the past several months stressed the importance of banks’ planning for climate change-related events. The central bank’s leading advocate for that cause has been Governor Lael Brainard, a close Yellen ally when they served on the Fed together. Along with that, Yellen has been outspoken on the importance of spreading economic benefits evenly at a time when the lowest earners have suffered the worst during the pandemic-era shutdowns. At the same time, the Fed last August changed its mission statement to say it is no longer focused merely on maximizing employment but now has a “a broad-based and inclusive goal” that goes to disparities in how gains are distributed.

“You certainly see some things that at a minimum are very different than how we’ve run things in the past, and it very much gets to the heart of independence in the Fed from overwhelming political influence,” Leuthold’s Paulsen said. “The most egregious departure from the past is the adoption by the Federal Reserve of several which I think many people would consider political goals or a political agenda of the current administration,” he continued. “They’re suddenly going far beyond a macro backstop for the cyclical economy to very much micro-oriented policy implementation.”

Read more …

 

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