Nov 052022
 
 November 5, 2022  Posted by at 9:30 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  58 Responses »


Ivan Shishkin Midday. Near Moscow 1869

 

Love Letter to Ireland and to ALL the Debt-Enslaved Nations of the World (Chu)
The One Chart That Explains Everything (Mike Whitney)
UK Was ‘Hours’ Away From Potential Total Meltdown – Bank Of England (RT)
Wells Fargo Braces For More Layoffs As Loan Volumes Collapse 90% YOY (ZH)
Michael Hudson on The Destiny of Civilization (Platypus)
How Bright Are EUropeans ? (Vilches)
Key Takes From Vladimir Putin’s Latest Speech (RT)
British Spies Constructing Secret Terror Army In Ukraine (GZ)
EU Exploring Ways To Use Frozen Russian Assets (RT)
Emily Oster’s Plea Bargain (Kunstler)
What Employment? (Denninger)
FBI Is ‘Rotted At Its Core,’ Republican Lawmakers Say (RT)
Can Licht Make the Cuts? (Byers)
Florida Bans Puberty Blockers, Transgender Surgery For Minors (SAC)
Vaccine-Doubting Doctor Ordered To Pay $1m In Legal Costs (NP)

 

 

 

 

 

 

We’re deeper in debt than ever. And planning to spend trillions on net zero. It doesn’t add up.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Ireland’s external debt is 609% more than her GDP..”

Love Letter to Ireland and to ALL the Debt-Enslaved Nations of the World (Chu)

Sometime in October, 2022, the national debt of the United States will blow through $31 Trillion. That’s a lot of zeros! To give some context on how exponential is this growing number: It took the USA 205 years to surpass $1 Trillion in total national debt on October 22, 1981; but it will only take 41 years to exponentially add another 30 Trillion! Note to all the anal-retentive persons out there: Nothing survives exponential growth. Nothing. All 7 of the G7 nations (USA, Japan, Italy, France, Germany, UK, and Canada) are in the top 10 list of most indebted nations, as far total national debts are concerned. Three of the BRICS nations (China, India and Brazil) are in this top 10 list.

Table 3 shows the “national debt to GDP” ratios for the top 10 nations, in descending scale. One of the ways to understand what this “national debt to GDP” ratio means in layman terms is to use the “credit card to income” analogy. Let’s say that we have a credit card limit of $100,000 USD and our annual income is $50,000 USD. Because of hard times and all, we have maxed out our credit card and we owe $100,000 USD. Well, in our case then, the “credit card debt to income” ratio is 200%. Question: How long can we maintain our lifestyle if our “credit card debt to income” ratio is 200%? Answer: Not very long. All ten nations listed in Table 3 are spending more than they produce in terms of GDP each year.


Six of the G7 nations (Japan, Italy, France, USA, Canada, and UK) are spending more than they produce each year for quite a few years now. None of the BRICS nations are in the top ten of this list. Question: How long can nations like Japan, Greece, Italy, Portugal, etc. continue to incur national debts way beyond their annual national income? Answer: Not very long. All these 10 nations with a “national debt to GDP” ratio over 100% are spending money beyond their means. Japan and Greece are spending money way beyond their means.

Table 4 is a list of the “external debt to GDP” ratios for the top 10 nations, in descending scale. At the #1 spot, Ireland’s external debt is 609% more than her GDP. There is something that we should note about Ireland’s GDP. Apple, maker of the iPhones and all things that begin with an “i”, launders its European sales through its Irish headquarters. Why? To avoid paying taxes as Ireland has one of the most preferential business tax polices in the world. However, Apple’s “contribution” to Ireland’s GDP, which has been as high as 25%, generates ZERO income for the Irish nation. How’s that for a GDP accounting trick? Therefore, this ridiculous 609% is even a lot higher! Now, imagine if our credit card debt is more than 609% of our annual income! What happens when the credit card company demands that we pay off our credit card debt? That’s about to happen to Ireland, Netherlands, UK, etc.

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“This is why we are experiencing the redivision of the world into warring blocs. This is why we are seeing the roll back of 30 years of Globalization and massive suppyline disruption.”

The One Chart That Explains Everything (Mike Whitney)

It explains why Washington is so worried about China’s explosive growth. It explains why the US continues to hector China on the issues of Taiwan and the South China Sea. It explains why Washington sends congressional delegations to Taiwan in defiance of Beijing’s explicit requests. It explains why the Pentagon continues to send US warships through the Taiwan Strait and ship massive amounts of lethal weaponry to Taipei. It explains why Washington is creating anti-China coalitions in Asia that are aimed at encircling and provoking Beijing.

It explains why the Biden administration is stepping up its trade war on China, imposing onerous economic sanctions on its businesses, and banning critical high-tech semi-conductors that are “are essential not just… for virtually every aspect of modern society, from electronic products and transport to the design and production of all manner of goods.” It explains why China has been singled-out in the US National Security Strategy (NSS) as “the only competitor with both the intent and, increasingly, the capability to reshape the international order.” It explains why Washington now regards China as its biggest and most formidable strategic adversary that must be isolated, demonized and defeated.

The chart above explains everything, not just the hostile diplomatic jabs that are designed to discredit and humiliate China, but also the openly belligerent policies that are aimed at Russia as well. People need to understand this. They need to see what is really going on so they can put events in their proper geopolitical context. And what “context” is that? The context of a Third World War; a war that was thoroughly-planned, instigated and (now) prosecuted by Washington and Washington’s proxies. That’s what’s really going on. The increasingly violent conflagrations we see cropping-up in Ukraine and Asia are not the result of “Russian aggression” or “evil Putin”. No. They are the actualization of a sinister geopolitical strategy to quash China’s meteoric rise and preserve America’s dominant role in the world order. Can there be any doubt about that?

No. None. This is why we are experiencing the redivision of the world into warring blocs. This is why we are seeing the roll back of 30 years of Globalization and massive suppyline disruption. And this is why Europe has been thrust headlong into frigid darkness and forced deindustrialisation. All of these suicidal policies were concocted for one purpose and one purpose alone, to maintain America’s exalted spot in the global system. That is why all of humanity is presently embroiled in a Third World War; a war that is designed to prevent China from becoming the world’s biggest economy; a war that is designed to preserve US global primacy.

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Sort of a shame that MissTrust couldn’t finish her ‘mission’.

UK Was ‘Hours’ Away From Potential Total Meltdown – Bank Of England (RT)

U Britain narrowly avoided a financial crisis in September that could have seen some pension funds totally collapse, the governor of the Bank of England, Andrew Bailey, told Channel 4 on Thursday. Asked how close the UK came to a potential total economic meltdown after Liz Truss’ mini-budget was announced, Bailey said: “I think at the point when we intervened, I can tell you that the messages we were getting from the markets were that it was hours.” Truss’s so-called “mini-budget” included the biggest tax cuts since 1972, funded by a huge increase in borrowing, without an explanation as to how the government would pay it back. The measures caused the pound to hit an all-time low against the dollar and the price of UK government bonds – known as gilts – to collapse.


The Bank of England intervened by announcing an expansion of its emergency bond-buying to “restore orderly market conditions.” “It was becoming unstable and it was affecting pension funds, for instance, and how they were operating. So, we had to step in quickly and we had to step in quite decisively. This felt, and was, a very real threat to financial stability,” Bailey said. His interview came just hours after the regulator hiked the interest rate from 2.25% to 3% to try and curb soaring inflation. Bailey also warned that Britain was facing its longest recession since records began and warned of a “tough road ahead” for the UK and its households.

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Let the bailouts begin…

Wells Fargo Braces For More Layoffs As Loan Volumes Collapse 90% YOY (ZH)

Among the growing list of many companies bracing for layoffs is now Wells Fargo, who has seen their U.S. loan volumes “collapse”. The fall off in loan volume has left some workers “idle”, according to a new CNBC report. This, in turn, has them worried about further job cuts. In the early weeks of Q4, the bank had about 18,000 loans in its pipeline, the report says. This is down an astonishing 90% from a year earlier when the pandemic housing boom was in full swing. The dropoff in loan volume is at least partly attributable to a slowing housing market as rates have risen. With the Fed raising rates again this week, it doesn’t look like the spigot on loans is going to be re-opening anytime soon.


Other housing loan companies, like Rocket Mortgage, are also expected to be downsizing as a result of the slowing activity in housing. Wells Fargo “has historically been the most reliant on mortgages” out of all major U.S. banks, CNBC notes. CFO Mike Santomassimo had already warned about the slowdown in mid-October, stating: “We expect it to remain challenging in the near term. It’s possible that we have a further decline in mortgage banking revenue in the Q4 when originations are seasonally slower.” The bank said this week: “The changes we’ve recently made are the result of the broader rate environment and consistent with the response of other lenders in the industry. We regularly review and adjust staffing levels to align with market conditions and the needs of our businesses.”

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“..no country should be obliged to lower its living standards, bankrupt itself, and privatize its public domain in order to pay foreign debts. If a country can’t pay its debt, it’s a bad loan..”

Michael Hudson on The Destiny of Civilization (Platypus)

They’re different kinds of debts, and canceling them requires different kinds of institutions. E.g., what’s most in the news these days is student loan debt and that it could be canceled by just an act of President Biden, which he won’t do, because he’s the person that sponsored the bankruptcy law. That law made it impossible to cancel student debts by bankruptcy laws. It could be done by a congressional law. The government has all sorts of regulatory agencies to handle corporate debt write-downs. Corporate write-downs in bankruptcy proceedings are a normal course, taking place almost continually, and we’re going to see that again. There are real estate debts. When the junk mortgage frauds peaked in 2008, President Obama ran by promising to write-down the junk mortgage debts to the actual market value of the homes bought by the victims of bank fraud and to bring the mortgage payments in line with the current rent.

As soon as he was elected, Obama invited the bankers to the White House and said, “don’t worry. I’m the only guy standing between you and the pitchforks. That was just to get elected. I’m on your side.” He proceeded to evict seven or eight million American families. Not only did Obama not write-down the debts, but he started quantitative easing that has given nine trillion dollars to support the real estate market, the stock market, and the bond market, so that the banks and the wealthy rentier 10% of the American economy would not lose any money. The result was that American home ownership rates have fallen from 69% and plunged into the 50s. America is being turned from a middle-class home ownership economy into a landlord economy.

We’re regressing back towards the 19th century, including its legacy of feudalism. That’s what we’re moving toward, as official government policy. We still have a strong government, but the role of the government is now to enforce the debts, not to write them down, and the most serious debts in the news are actually international debts. And of course, international debts cannot be settled by one nation. What is the vehicle to cancel the debts of global South countries like Argentina, that is now in yet another crisis with the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The Argentinian crisis, Sri Lanka — all this will characterize the Global South by this fall as a result of rising energy prices for oil and gas, rising food prices, and capital flight to the U.S. as it raises its interest rate.

If countries have to pay more for food and energy, how can they afford to pay their foreign debts? It’s necessary to have a new international organization to sponsor this. That’s what both President Putin and President Xi have said: we’re going to create a BRICS bank as an alternative to the World Bank and the IMF and this will have to accompany a new world court. We are going to provide a different philosophy of operations for this bank: the principle is that no country should be obliged to lower its living standards, bankrupt itself, and privatize its public domain in order to pay foreign debts. If a country can’t pay its debt, it’s a bad loan, and just as individuals and corporations are allowed to declare bankruptcy, countries should be able to declare bankruptcy.

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“..EUropeans would just appear to be aggressive, manipulative, and conceited… and not superior to anyone else..”

How Bright Are EUropeans ? (Vilches)

Dr. Josep Borrell is the EU´s topmost senior diplomat as High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy. Recently joined by another un-elected official namely the EU Commission President Ursula von den Leyen both now roughly insist that EUrope´s problems stem from its addictiveness to excellent and cheap Russian energy and resources, to China´s humongous export markets and high productivity dependency, and to the military ´security´ that the US today supposedly renders to them. So, accordingly their solution for EUrope would be to (a) get itself up in arms yet again and (b) to double-down on the ‘battle of narratives´ which should be interpreted to be just some more effective EU propaganda. So from this perspective rather than being bright EUropeans would just appear to be aggressive, manipulative, and conceited… and not superior to anyone else. So why be so proud about it all ?.


Objectively searching into the EUropean political soul it´s easy to find EUrope´s self-EUthanization vis-á-vis its sheer lack of any ´affectio societatis´. This makes EUrope an un-viable business associate to and for anyone, even amongst themselves in view of the current widespread infighting. But JB´s ´brightness´ does not stop there, now proclaiming that “the world needs Europe” and that EUrope is a “garden” and the rest a mere ”jungle” ready to encroach upon it… So at this rate it would be wise to copernically acknowledge that EUrope is not any “global super-power” and that God Almighty has not appointed the un-elected European Commission as the rule-maker for the rest of the world to follow. Furthermore, the “international community”(sic) is not headquartered at Davos or Brussels and 85% of planet Earth does not even wake up in the West every morning. Making that clear would focus EU politics better than complaining about “too many abstentions” in the UN votes regarding this conflict which EU officials fail to understand and accept.

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“Ukraine, Batman and complex identities”…

Key Takes From Vladimir Putin’s Latest Speech (RT)

Russian President Vladimir Putin honored National Unity Day by meeting with historians and dignitaries – including leaders of religious communities – and discussing the role of history in protecting national sovereignty, identity, and culture. Here are some key points from his speech and the subsequent discussion. “Russia’s clash with the neo-Nazi regime that arose in Ukraine was inevitable, and had our country not undertaken the actions it did in February, nothing would have changed, only our position would have been far worse,” Putin said. “Our so-called friends brought the situation in Ukraine to the stage where it was a mortal threat to Russia.” Putin compared the situation with what happened in 1941, when the USSR had ample warning about the upcoming Nazi invasion but did not take steps to defend itself, suggesting that this was one of the reasons millions of Soviet citizens died before victory over Nazism was achieved.

Western countries meddled in Ukraine’s internal affairs after the fall of the Soviet Union and “managed to instill such pseudo-values into the minds of millions of people, which led to the fact that anti-Russia was created on this territory, sowing hatred, violating the minds of people, depriving them of true history,” Putin said. Ukraine has been turned into a grave danger for Russia, but also something suicidal for the Ukrainians themselves, he explained. “It is Ukraine, the Ukrainian people, that is the first and main victim of the deliberate sublimation of hatred towards the Russians and Russia. In Russia, everything is exactly the opposite – you know this very well: we have always treated the Ukrainian people with respect and warmth. It remains so, despite today’s tragic confrontation.”

Speaking further about the current conflict in Ukraine, Putin drew parallels with the Russian Revolution over a hundred years ago. “In fact, the confrontation is going on within one people – just like it was after the upheavals of 1917.” Back then, “foreign powers warmed their hands on the tragedy of our people. They did not care about either the Whites or the Reds, they pursued their own interests, weakened and tore historical Russia to pieces.” The West is doing the same in Ukraine today, Putin said, sacrificing the Ukrainian people to achieve their geopolitical goals, which he described as “weakening, disintegrating and destroying Russia.” Russians need to know the full past of their country, the president argued, without repeating the “mistakes of the Soviet period,” where academia worked to fit ideological patterns.

“Something similar is happening now in some countries in the West, where much is determined by the current radical-liberal establishment. To please it, key historical events are presented in a completely distorted, inverted form, and the truth is canceled,” Putin said. “When someone wishes to deprive the state of sovereignty and turn its citizens into vassals, they begin by twisting the country’s history, in order to deprive people of their roots, doom them to unconsciousness,” the Russian president explained, condemning this as a “deliberately perverted attitude to history.” Pointing to Ukraine as an example of this, Putin said that “there have been similar attempts against Russia, and they do not stop, but we firmly and in time put up a solid barrier against them. “

While Russia is absolutely a part of European civilization, there is no denying that many major colonial empires in the West are now “medium-sized or small countries,” Putin said, comparing the population of Portugal with its former colony Brazil, the UK with India, and how China’s Guangdong province alone has 1.5 times the population of Germany. “European capitals were [once] the center of the universe – but this is already in the past,” the Russian president said. Putin also opted to broach a slightly less political issue. During the question-and-answer session, he noted that academic work won’t be enough without teaming up with popular culture and merchandising. Russian children “know of Batman but not of our own heroes,” Putin said, noting that historical education starts from an early age. “There should be cartoons, films, children’s literature… All of these things are needed. That’s why we’re here today, to nudge this process forward.”

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Thorough.

British Spies Constructing Secret Terror Army In Ukraine (GZ)

Documents obtained by The Grayzone reveal plans by a cell of British military-intelligence figures to organize and train a covert Ukrainian “partisan” army with explicit instructions to attack Russian targets in Crimea. On October 28th, a Ukrainian drone attack damaged the Russian Black Sea fleet’s flagship vessel in the Crimean port of Sevastopol. Moscow immediately blamed Britain for assisting and orchestrating the strike, as well as blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines – the worst acts of industrial sabotage in recent memory. The British Ministry of Defense issued a blustery denial in response, branding the accusations “false claims of an epic scale.” Whoever was behind those specific attacks, suspicions of a British hidden hand in the destruction are not unfounded.

The Grayzone has obtained leaked documents detailing British military-intelligence operatives inking an agreement with the Security Service of Ukraine’s Odessa branch, to create and train a secret Ukrainian partisan terror army. Their plans called for the secret army to conduct sabotage and reconnaissance operations targeting Crimea on behalf of the Ukrainian Security Service (SSU) – precisely the kind of attacks witnessed in past weeks. As The Grazyone previously reported, the same coterie of military-intelligence operatives was responsible for drawing up plans to blow up Crimea’s Kerch Bridge. That goal was fulfilled on October 8th in the form of a suicide truck bomb attack, temporarily disabling the sole connecting point between mainland Russia and Crimea, and triggering a major escalation in Moscow’s attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure.

These blueprints were produced by a military veteran named Hugh Ward, at the request of Chris Donnelly, a British military-intelligence operative best known for hatching the covert, Foreign Office-funded Integrity Initiative information warfare program. The plans were circulated throughout Donnelly’s private transnational network of military officials, lawmakers and intelligence officials. Such high-level connections underline that he is far from a passive observer in this conflict. He has used his position and contacts to secure the resources necessary to train up the secret saboteur battalion in order to attack Russian targets in Crimea. This wrecking strategy is certain to escalate the war, and undercut any momentum toward negotiation.

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“US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in May that seizing the assets was “not something legally permissible in the United States.”

EU Exploring Ways To Use Frozen Russian Assets (RT)

The European Union is trying to determine whether it’s feasible to use the assets of the Russian Central Bank that have been frozen by member states to finance Ukraine, Bloomberg reported on Thursday. The discussions are at an early stage and legal experts have been asked to look into possible options, the outlet wrote, citing people familiar with the matter. Some $300 billion belonging to the Russian Central Bank were frozen by the EU, the US, and their allies as part of anti-Russia sanctions. Any EU action would deal with assets held in Europe, Bloomberg says, adding that the issue has also been raised with the US.


Last month, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said that the EU wanted to confiscate Russian assets in order to use them for the reconstruction of Ukraine but admitted that establishing a legal base for such a move was tricky. US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in May that seizing the assets was “not something legally permissible in the United States.” Russia strongly criticized the freezing of the funds, with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov accusing the West of essentially committing theft.

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“The Atlantic magazine, a house organ of the people in America who know better than you do about… really… everything..”

Emily Oster’s Plea Bargain (Kunstler)

By now, everybody and his uncle has seen Emily Oster’s plea for “pandemic amnesty” in The Atlantic magazine, a house organ of the people in America who know better than you do about… really… everything. Emily’s wazoo is so stuffed with gold-plated credentials (BA, PhD, Harvard; economics prof at Brown U) it’s a wonder that she could sit down long enough to peck out her lame argument that “we need to forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about COVID.” Emily wasn’t “in the dark.” She had access to the same information as the Americans who recognized that everything the public health authorities, the medical establishment, and many elected officials shoveled out about Covid and its putative remedies and preventatives was untrue, with a patina of bad faith and malice — especially when it was used to persecute their political adversaries.

These dissenters turned out to be “right for the wrong reasons,” she declared, the main reason being that they were not aligned in good-think with the Woke-Jacobinism of her fellow “progressives” at Brown U, and academics all across the land, who were righteously busy destroying the intellectual life of the nation, making it impossible for the thinking class to think. Let’s face it: every society actually needs a thinking class, a cohort able to frame important issues-of-the-moment that require argument in the public arena to align our collective thoughts and deeds with reality. America used to have a pretty good thinking class, with a pretty good free press and many other platforms for opinion — all animated by respect for the first amendment to the Constitution.


The thinking class destroyed that by vigorously promoting a new censorship regime in every American institution, shutting down free speech and, more crucially, the necessary debate for aligning our politics with reality. Hence, America’s thinking class became the torchbearers of unreality, in step with the Party of Chaos which held the levers of power. This included the powers of life and death in the matter of Covid-19. These were the people who militated against effective early treatment protocols (to cynically preserve the drug companies’ emergency use authorization (EUA) and thus their liability shields); the people who enforced the deadly remdesivir-and-ventilator combo in hospital treatment; the people who rolled out the harmful and ineffective “vaccines”; who fired and vilified doctors who disagreed with all that; and who engineered a long list of abusive policies that destroyed businesses, livelihoods, households, reputations, and futures.

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Normally October numbers rise for Christmas…

What Employment? (Denninger)

Vomited up the Bureau of Lies and Scams did…. “Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 261,000 in October, and the unemployment rate rose to 3.7 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Notable job gains occurred in health care, professional and technical services, and manufacturing.” Yeah-yeah. I pay near-zero attention to the headline, ever, and this was no exception to my rule in that regard. The market did the hanky-panky on the release but as I write this is up strongly, close to +50 handles on the Spoos. Why? Someone bothered to actually read the internals? I’m impressed, because the internals of the household survey, unadjusted, said +141k and out of that 111 of it came out of the “not in labor force” figures, so in fact its really about +30 net-net on the population itself.


In other words statistically zero. October is usually a very decent hiring month as, which we all know, there’s this thing called “Christmas” coming and the start of the hiring for it is usually reflected here. Prior to the pandemic in 2019 October was +589k on the same unadjusted household number, and 425k of that came from bench-sitters, so economic reasons were enough to get close to half a million off their butts. This time it was only good for 100k and the total impulse was basically all of that. Thus the market reaction: Pavlov’s Dog took this as “The Fed will slow down or reverse course.” Which, incidentally, means they probably won’t because, as I’ve pointed out, that Pavlovian response is exactly what The Fed needs to break before it can take its foot off the rate-increase gas and not only did the market exhibit the exact opposite when the announcement came out it confirmed it this morning.

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“The FBI and its parent agency, the Justice Department, have become political institutions.”

FBI Is ‘Rotted At Its Core,’ Republican Lawmakers Say (RT)

America is no longer a country where citizens are afforded equal justice under the law, as guaranteed by their Constitution, because the nation’s top law enforcement agency has been corrupted by politicized leadership and a “woke, leftist agenda” being imposed from the top, Republican lawmakers have claimed. The allegations were contained in a 1,050-page report released on Friday by Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee. The report, which was based on information gathered from 14 FBI whistleblowers who came forward to expose a pattern of misconduct, argued that the agency was “rotted at its core.” “Quite simply, the problem — the rot within the FBI — festers in and proceeds from Washington,” the report said. “The FBI and its parent agency, the Justice Department, have become political institutions.”

The report detailed such abuses as a secret partnership in which the FBI receives private information on conservative users from Facebook, without seeking their consent or going though the legal processes that would normally be required to tap such data. Whistleblowers also alleged that the FBI “looked the other way” on dozens of attacks against anti-abortion groups, even as the agency sent heavily armed teams of officers to arrest pro-life activists at their homes for alleged violations of selectively enforced crimes. Parents who spoke out at school board meetings over controversial policies were targeted by investigators as alleged terrorists.

At the same time, former FBI official Timothy Thibault “shut down” a probe into the overseas business dealings of President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, and attempted to keep the case from being reopened, the report said. Thibault openly displayed his political bias in social media posts that included his official title. “America’s not America if you have a Justice Department that treats people differently under the law,” Representative Jim Jordan, the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, told Fox News on Friday. “It’s supposed to be equal treatment under the law. That’s not happening, and we know it’s not happening because 14 brave FBI agents came to us as whistleblowers and told us what exactly is going on here.”

The report also accused the FBI of inflating statistics on domestic extremism to help fuel a narrative promoted by President Joe Biden’s administration. FBI employees who have conservative views are being purged from the agency, it claims. Republicans argued that the FBI was plagued by a “systemic culture of unaccountability,” as well as “rampant corruption, manipulation and abuse.” The agency’s shift toward “political meddling” has allegedly pulled resources away from legitimate law enforcement duties. For instance, one whistleblower claimed that he was told after the January 2021 US Capitol riot that child sex-abuse cases were “no longer an FBI priority and should be referred to local law enforcement agencies.”

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CNN has more employees than viewers.

Can Licht Make the Cuts? (Byers)

When Chris Licht became chairman and chief executive of CNN, back in May, his boss David Zaslav asked him to conduct a six-month review of the 4,500-person global news business. During the early months of that review, Licht would repeatedly tell members of his staff that the broad cost-cutting effort that was taking place across Warner Bros. Discovery would not result in layoffs at CNN. The parent company had more than $50 billion in debt, of course, and Zaz had promised to identify at least $3 billion in cost-cutting synergies across his new media empire, but Licht repeatedly assured staff that CNN would be spared: “As it relates to CNN, there are no layoffs per se,” Licht said at one staff-wide event in June. “A lay off is a downsizing, where you are given a target, and that is not happening at CNN.”


During the course of the review, however, Zaslav and his C.F.O. Gunnar Wiedenfelds asked Licht to engage in a hypothetical financial engineering exercise, sources with direct knowledge of the matter told me. If he were to cut costs at the company, how would he manage to achieve savings? Over time, the target number that Zaz and Gunnar were asking for became larger, and the exercise became less hypothetical. Then, last month, staring down the barrel of a recession and another disappointing earnings report, Zaz and Gunnar gave Licht a direct order: he needed to cut $100 million from CNN’s budget. Zaz’s team might argue that such an edict is financially responsible amid the current economic environment, but it is nevertheless significant. The figure, which CNN representatives declined to comment on, likely translates to almost 10 percent of CNN’s overall budget, sources familiar with the financials told me.

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I guess I simply don’t understand where this satanic cult came from. It seems to have appeared from nowhere.

Florida Bans Puberty Blockers, Transgender Surgery For Minors (SAC)

Breaking Friday, Florida’s Board of Medicine and state Board of Osteopathic Medicine voted to ban puberty blockers and sex-reassignment surgery for minors in the state. “The chief point of agreement among all of the experts — and I must emphasize this — is that there is a pressing need for additional, high-quality clinical research,” said the board of medicine’s chair, Dr. David A. Diamond, a radiation oncologist. More than 70 percent of children with gender dysphoria “typically outgrow” it, City Journal reported earlier this year.


National Review reports: “The board of medicine voted 6-3, with five others not present, on Friday to forbid doctors from prescribing puberty blockers and hormones or performing surgeries until a patient is 18. Exceptions will be made for children who are already receiving the treatment. The Florida Board of Osteopathic Medicine also voted to ban the use of puberty blockers and sex-reassignment surgery in new patients who are minors but allowed an exception for children enrolled in clinical studies. Florida is also one of at least nine states that prohibits Medicaid coverage of gender-transition services.”

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Canada is lost.

Vaccine-Doubting Doctor Ordered To Pay $1m In Legal Costs (NP)

When a host of doctors, academics and journalists criticized her COVID vaccine-doubting, anti-lockdown views, Dr. Kulvinder Kaur Gill struck back, filing a $12-million libel suit against them. A judge this week ordered the pediatrician in Brampton, west of Toronto, to pay the defendants as much as $1.1 million in legal costs after her lawsuit was struck down earlier this year as a potential curb on important public debate. Part of the costs were assigned to a fellow plaintiff, Dr. Ashvinder Kaur Lambda, who sued only two of the 23 defendants, but Gill is on the hook for the bulk of the hefty award.


Justice Elizabeth Stewart said the cost sum was appropriate, noting that the damages sought by the two physicians in their suit was “a considerable sum by any calculation and of understandably great concern” to the people they sued. “Although the individual … plaintiffs are not substantial corporations or institutions, they are educated persons who were represented by counsel throughout,” she added. Meanwhile, the doctor faces more legal trouble at Ontario’s College of Physicians and Surgeons. After cautioning Gill last year over some of her COVID statements, the regulator ordered her earlier this month to appear on similar charges before a discipline tribunal, a sort of trial where a guilty verdict could lead to revocation of her licence.

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Asian leopard cat. Its markings look like a python.

 

 

 

 

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Nov 272021
 
 November 27, 2021  Posted by at 9:35 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  85 Responses »


Henri Rousseau The waterfall 1910

 

Classification of Omicron (B.1.1.529): SARS-CoV-2 Variant of Concern (WHO)
This Is How Scientists Detect New Variants Of Covid-19 (WEF)
New Covid-19 Variant Could Show Immune Evasion, Enhanced Transmissibility (CNN)
Big Pharma Unveils Plans To Tackle New ‘Omicron’ Strain (RT)
Biden Delayed Africa Travel Ban On Advice Of Advisers Led By Fauci (NYP)
Decolonize This! (Kunstler)
Why The Retail Industry Is Fighting Vaccine Mandates (NYT)
A Pandemic Of The Vaccinated Or Ivermectin Ignored? (Hope)
Florida Reports Lowest Daily Coronavirus Cases Per Capita In Nation (Fox)
Pharmacy Chains Found Liable For Opioid Crisis In Ohio (PM)
Ukraine Says It’s Ready To Defend Itself Against Russia (RT)
US Stonewalls Probe Into Firm That Spied On Assange For CIA – Spanish Judge (Y!)

 

 

All 4 cases of the new variant in Botswana were in fully vaccinated people.

 

 

Zuby Tucker

 

 

 

 

McCullough Oz

 

 

Dr. Doug Corrigan @ScienceWDrDoug
1) Unleash billions of leaky, mono-antigenic vaccines that create the perfect pressure to generate Spike variants/vaccine-escape mutants.
2) Track variants globally, and when a vaccine resistant strain is found, create media hysteria and blame the unvaccinated.
3) Repeat 1-2.

Something curious about the dates. The WHO on Nov 26 2021:

Classification of Omicron (B.1.1.529): SARS-CoV-2 Variant of Concern (WHO)

The Technical Advisory Group on SARS-CoV-2 Virus Evolution (TAG-VE) is an independent group of experts that periodically monitors and evaluates the evolution of SARS-CoV-2 and assesses if specific mutations and combinations of mutations alter the behaviour of the virus. The TAG-VE was convened on 26 November 2021 to assess the SARS-CoV-2 variant: B.1.1.529.The B.1.1.529 variant was first reported to WHO from South Africa on 24 November 2021. The epidemiological situation in South Africa has been characterized by three distinct peaks in reported cases, the latest of which was predominantly the Delta variant. In recent weeks, infections have increased steeply, coinciding with the detection of B.1.1.529 variant. The first known confirmed B.1.1.529 infection was from a specimen collected on 9 November 2021.

This variant has a large number of mutations, some of which are concerning. Preliminary evidence suggests an increased risk of reinfection with this variant, as compared to other VOCs. The number of cases of this variant appears to be increasing in almost all provinces in South Africa. Current SARS-CoV-2 PCR diagnostics continue to detect this variant. Several labs have indicated that for one widely used PCR test, one of the three target genes is not detected (called S gene dropout or S gene target failure) and this test can therefore be used as marker for this variant, pending sequencing confirmation. Using this approach, this variant has been detected at faster rates than previous surges in infection, suggesting that this variant may have a growth advantage.

There are a number of studies underway and the TAG-VE will continue to evaluate this variant. WHO will communicate new findings with Member States and to the public as needed. Based on the evidence presented indicative of a detrimental change in COVID-19 epidemiology, the TAG-VE has advised WHO that this variant should be designated as a VOC, and the WHO has designated B.1.1.529 as a VOC, named Omicron.

Read more …

And the WEF 4 1/2 months ago, on Jul 12 2021. B.1.1.529 wasn’t just discovered.

This Is How Scientists Detect New Variants Of Covid-19 (WEF)

Scientists in South Africa have discovered a small number of cases of a new COVID variant. They’re working to understand its potential implications but told a news conference that it had a ‘very unusual constellation’ of mutations. They’re concerned that they could help it evade the body’s immune response and make the variant – named B.1.1.529 – more transmissible. These scientists are part of a global network of government scientists and academics searching for new strains of COVID-19, like this and other previous variants – like Delta.

[..] Viruses are microscopic parasites that can’t survive for long outside the body of a host animal. As living organisms, they are much smaller than bacteria – the polio virus, for example, is 10,000 times smaller than a grain of salt. But they do have their own DNA or RNA (Deoxyribonucleic acid and Ribonucleic acid), the building blocks of life. This allows them to mutate into new forms. In the case of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, scientists have so far identified four variants that have been classified as being of concern because they spread more easily, are more virulent or resistant to vaccines.

[..] It’s too early to tell whether vaccines will offer the same level of protection against B.1.1.529 as they do against previous COVID variants. But, vaccine makers, like Pfizer, have been preparing for a scenario where a new COVID variant is able to evade immunity established by existing vaccines and previous infection. However, existing vaccines have continued to offer protection against other variants, such as Delta. “The good news is that all of the WHO emergency use-listed vaccines do protect against developing severe disease, hospitalization and death due to the Delta variant,” said Dr Soumya Swaminathan, the World Health Organization’s chief scientist, on 1 July.

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Or it could not. We just don’t know. Do let’s panic.

New Covid-19 Variant Could Show Immune Evasion, Enhanced Transmissibility (CNN)

South Africa’s health minister announced Thursday the discovery of a new coronavirus variant that appears to be spreading rapidly in parts of the country. “Initially it looked like some cluster outbreaks, but from yesterday, the indication came from our scientists from the Network of Genomic Surveillance that they were observing a new variant,” Minister of Health Joe Phaahla said, stressing that it is currently unclear where the variant — currently dubbed B.1.1.529 — first emerged. It has so far been detected in South Africa, Botswana and in a traveler to Hong Kong from South Africa, Phaahla added. During a news briefing, genomic scientists said the variant has an unusually high number of mutations, with more than 30 in the key spike protein — the structure the virus uses to get into the cells they attack.


Professor Tulio de Oliveira, the director of the Center for Epidemic Response and Innovation, said the variant has “many more mutations than we have expected,” adding it is “spreading very fast and we expect to see pressure in the health system in the next few days and weeks.” He advised the public to “try to avoid super spreading events.” Officials also expressed concern that the mutation could result in immune evasion and enhanced transmissibility of the virus, but added it is too early to tell what kind of impact the mutations will have on vaccine efficacy. More studies also need to be conducted to understand the clinical severity of the variant compared to previous variants, officials said. “The full significance of this variant remains uncertain and the best tool we have is still the vaccines,” De Oliveira said. He added that lab studies still need to be carried out to test vaccine and antibody evasion.

Read more …

200-300 days of Delta: nothing.

But after 100 days of Omicron a tailor-made vaccine is supposed to be available.

Let me guess: $1,000 a pop?

Big Pharma Unveils Plans To Tackle New ‘Omicron’ Strain (RT)

A number of the world’s largest pharmaceutical firms have announced strategies to address a newly identified Covid-19 variant, dubbed Omicron, including plans to alter existing vaccines and develop new boosters. With the World Health Organization (WHO) designating Omicron the latest “variant of concern” following an emergency meeting on Friday, warning that the highly mutated strain could be more infectious than those seen before it, Big Pharma quickly launched into PR-mode, as several firms rushed to outline how they would combat the new variant. Pfizer – which has produced one of the world’s most commonly used Covid immunizations alongside its German partner BioNTech – told Fox Business that it is “remaining vigilant” and “constantly” monitoring new variants that could “potentially escape protection” from its vaccine.

“In the event that [a] vaccine-escape variant emerges, Pfizer and BioNTech expect to be able to develop and produce a tailor-made vaccine against that variant in approximately 100 days, subject to regulatory approval,” the company added, though did not say whether any specific research had been conducted into Omicron so far. BioNTech, in a separate statement, noted that Omicron “differs significantly from previously observed variants as it has additional mutations located in the spike protein,” referring to the mechanism by which the coronavirus gains access to host cells and causes infection. The company also said that a so-called “escape variant” could “require an adjustment of our vaccine if the variant spreads globally.”

Moderna and Johnson & Johnson, two other major Covid vaccine developers, issued similar missives on Friday, with the latter company stating that it’s already testing a booster shot for healthy adults that contains twice the vaccine dosage than what is currently approved. Moderna also said that it is now studying two booster candidates specially designed to “anticipate mutations such as those that have emerged in the Omicron variant.” J&J, whose single-dose vaccine differs from the others on the market, also told Fox that it is testing its Janssen immunization efficacy against Omicron and “closely monitoring” mutations in the virus’ spike protein.

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“Obviously as soon as we find out more information we’ll make a decision as quickly as we possibly can.”

Biden Delayed Africa Travel Ban On Advice Of Advisers Led By Fauci (NYP)

President Biden said Friday that he delayed implementation of a new ban on travel from southern Africa on the advice of his medical advisers, who are led by Dr. Anthony Fauci. A reporter asked Biden why the emergency precaution will take effect Monday, rather than immediately to contain the potentially more contagious Omicron version of COVID-19. “Why not do it now like other countries have done?” the journalist asked Biden, who is spending a long Thanksgiving weekend in Nantucket. Biden said “because that was the recommendation coming from my medical team.” Fauci is Biden’s chief medical adviser and led a half hour briefing for Biden on Friday.

Biden said “we don’t know a lot about the variant except that it is of great concern and it seems to spread rapidly — and I spent about a half hour this morning with my COVID team led by Dr. Fauci and that was the decision we made.” But Biden seemed to have a poor grasp on the travel rules. He misstated the number of countries impacted and said the policy would bar people traveling “to and from” the region, despite official releases only noting restrictions on travel from — but not to — southern Africa. “I’ve decided that we’re going to be cautious and make sure there is no travel to and from South Africa and six other countries in that region, except for American citizens who are able to come back,” Biden said. The eight countries covered by the ban are Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland and Zimbabwe.

Biden also attempted to reassure spooked financial markets. He called a steep drop in stock values during the holiday weekend-shortened session “expected” because of prior drops after poor pandemic news and said he was “not at all” worried. Just hours before the new travel ban was announced, Fauci, the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, gave the impression he wasn’t recommending such bans and cited a need for more data. “There is always the possibility of doing what the UK has done, namely block travel from South Africa and related countries,” Fauci said in a CNN interview. “That’s certainly something you think about and get prepared to do. You’re prepared to do everything you need to protect the American public. But you want to make sure there’s a basis for doing that.” Fauci added in that interview: “Obviously as soon as we find out more information we’ll make a decision as quickly as we possibly can.”

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“..the blue mommies of America follow Pied Pipers like NPR and Sanjay Gupta holding hands with Big Bird to vax-up the kids.”

Decolonize This! (Kunstler)

Now that Thanksgiving with all its racist trimmings is put to bed, will Americans be able to “decolonize” their minds? Not if the masters of universal hysteria can help it. Here it comes, just in time to reignite the limbic channels in your brain with pulses of cosmic terror on the runway to Christmas: The B.1.1.529 Covid-19 variant out of Botswana. It’s a beauty, with thirty-two mutations on its decorative spike protein, supposedly making it a deadly hazard to the already-vaccinated. Except the already-vaccinated were already catching the boring old Delta variant that so energized the year 2021, with its Fauci-inspired affronts to the Bill of Rights, working needle-in-arm with the mystery managers of “Joe Biden,” the cigar-store Indian who has decolonized the oval office from the brutish grip of western civ and all its dastardly legalities.

Yes, I am sorry to tell you that the mRNA “vaccines” are just not working that well. The already-vaccinated millions, marinated in the goodness of their obedience to authority, live in terror of the unvaccinated, who so knavishly spread disease to those vaccinated against it. Say, what? Something ain’t workin’ right here. Half the nation can’t think straight, and for a good reason: The relentless mindfuckery abroad in this land courtesy of your politicized news media, the despotic social networks, the bottomless greed of the pharmaceutical-makers and their errand boys in the CDC, plus the malevolent generosity of sponsors like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and George Soros. Thus, the blue mommies of America follow Pied Pipers like NPR and Sanjay Gupta holding hands with Big Bird to vax-up the kids.

It’s just a cult initiation ceremony, you understand. Vaxing the kids reinforces the psychotic mass formation intoxication of the blue mommies. It does absolutely nothing good for the kids, who realistically have a near-zero chance of being harmed by Covid-19 — but have a fair chance of being harmed by the mRNA “vaccines,” which will mess with their still-developing immune systems and their various organs. All the authority of Anthony Fauci’s officialdom presses remorselessly toward the ever-receding horizon of max vax. It begins to look like enough parents are onto the game and will refuse to go along with it.

Dr. Fauci and his evil network are in the process of being smashed at long last. First, there is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s book just out, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health. I was up reading it at two-thirty in the morning. The Kindle version is $2.95, cheap. Get it. It’s a seamless, gripping, and lucid legal brief against a bureaucratic monster who was allowed to run amuck in forty-plus years of power-seeking, malicious money-grubbing, and death-dealing, and who has capped that career by destroying the economies of the western world and our accustomed liberties with it. RFK lays out exactly what Dr. Fauci has done, footnoted to the max with fact and numbers to back it all up, so that the people still capable of thinking cannot avoid the conclusion that they have been viciously played.

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Survival instinct.

New York Times through a local Greek paper.

Why The Retail Industry Is Fighting Vaccine Mandates (NYT)

The holiday shopping season has arrived, and retailers are ringing it in by doing everything from cutting prices to stocking showrooms to lure back customers who stayed at home last year. What the biggest of them are not doing is the one thing the White House and many public health experts have asked them to: mandate that their workers be vaccinated. As other industries with workers in public-facing roles, like airlines and hospitals, have moved toward requiring vaccines, retailers have dug in their heels, citing concerns about a labor shortage. And a portion of one of the country’s largest workforces will remain unvaccinated, just as shoppers are expected to flock to stores. At the heart of the retailers’ resistance is a worry about having enough people to work.

In a tight labor market, retailers have been offering perks like higher wages and better hours to prospective employees in hopes of having enough people to staff their stores and distribution centers. The National Retail Federation, the industry’s largest trade group, has estimated that retailers will hire up to 665,000 seasonal workers this year. Macy’s, for example, said it planned to hire 76,000 full- and part-time employees this season. The retailer has offered referral bonuses of up to $500 for each friend or relative whom employees recruit to join it. Macy’s asked corporate staff this fall to be vaccinated or test negative for COVID-19 to enter its offices. But store workers are a different story.

“We have a lot of stores that have a lot of openings, and any ruling that we have to mandate those colleagues be vaccinated prior to Christmas is just going to exacerbate our labor shortage going into a really critical period for us,” Jeff Gennette, Macy’s chief executive, said in an interview. The industry showed how strongly it feels about the issue this month when the Biden administration directed companies with 100 or more workers to mandate vaccines or weekly tests by Jan. 4. Five days after that announcement, the National Retail Federation sued to stop the effort.

“We all agree with the premise that vaccines are good and vaccines save lives,” Stephanie Martz, chief administrative officer of the NRF, said in an interview Monday. “But by the same token, you can’t just say, ‘OK, make it so.’” The order is now held up in litigation, challenged by a number of lawsuits from a broad coalition of opponents, and could make its way to the Supreme Court. Court filings by the administration warn that blocking the rule would “likely cost dozens or even hundreds of lives per day.”

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The anti-IVM campaign will continue.

A Pandemic Of The Vaccinated Or Ivermectin Ignored? (Hope)

Gibraltar is the most vaccinated place on the planet with more than 99% of its population fully vaccinated, and with many also having received a booster. A total of 94,019 vaccine doses have been administered to Gibraltarians. Considering Gibraltar has a population of some 30,000, that works out to an average of three shots per person. Newsweek reports that Gibraltar has administered enough shots to have vaccinated about 140% of its population. One might expect that they have no COVID-19 cases. After all, the rest of the world is led to believe that the Holy Grail of herd immunity will come once we have sufficiently jabbed enough people with vaccines and boosters.

However, the truth of the matter is much simpler. Attempting to vaccinate into an active pandemic involving a rapidly mutating virus is not working. It does not prevent transmission, nor does it prevent infection. While smallpox is a DNA virus that is very slow to mutate, COVID-19 is caused by an RNA virus that is prone to rapid mutation. While the vaccines were highly protective against the original Wuhan strain of SARS-CoV-2, they are no longer as effective against the Delta variant. Gibraltar is not alone among highly vaccinated populations exhibiting massive virus surges. According to the CDC, Vermont has a higher vaccination rate – at 72% – than any other state, yet it also has one of the highest rates of new COVID cases, according to an ABC news report.

Where do we find low or no rates of COVID-19 cases, you might ask? Perhaps we could observe those countries or areas and note what they are doing differently to account for their success. For example, we know that India has eliminated its COVID-19 Pandemic after implementing a national Ivermectin policy in the protocol. As a result, Uttar Pradesh and Delhi have no more problems with pandemic surges. Over the last 75 days, Delhi has recorded less than 10 COVID-19 deaths. Likewise, Uttar Pradesh, with more than 230 million people, has recorded fewer than 20 COVID deaths in the past 60 days, while the United States, with a roughly similar population, has recorded some 87,300 deaths – more than 4,000 times as many.

India’s only remaining hotspot remains the highly vaccinated state of Kerala, which continues to pay the price. Over the last 30 days alone, Kerala has logged over 10,000 deaths. The main difference between Kerala and the rest of India was its lower use of Ivermectin, as I wrote on August 23, 2021, in an article published in the Desert Review. Out of India’s 267 deaths reported on November 19, 2021, fully 204 came from Kerala. With 36 million people, tiny Kerala represents only 2.5% of India’s population of 1.399 billion. However, they have 76% of India’s daily COVID-19 deaths. In other words, it is 30 times more likely for an Indian resident of Kerala to die from the virus compared to a resident outside the state.But look at other cases. For example, Indonesia adopted Ivermectin and saw their COVID-19 cases drop from 45,000 in July to 347 cases per day in November of 2021 – a drop of 99.2%.

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“Since then our cases are down by over 95% with no restrictions on people’s freedom.”

Florida Reports Lowest Daily Coronavirus Cases Per Capita In Nation (Fox)

Florida is reporting the lowest amount of coronavirus cases per capita in the nation after Gov. Ron DeSantis was widely criticized by media outlets for his handling of the virus. The Sunshine State reported a daily average of 1,393 coronavirus cases as of Friday, six per 100,000, which was a two percent decrease over the last two weeks. DeSantis has been slammed by critics in the media since the start of the pandemic over his opposition to government-imposed mask and vaccine mandates. In 2020, DeSantis was accused by a Democratic politician of going on a “killing spree” for opposing mask mandates and a Vanity Fair headline from September of this year referred to the governor as an “angel of death.”

At the same time Florida reported the lowest amount of new cases in the country per capita, coronavirus cases are surging in many states where strict lockdown orders were issued by Democratic governors. Michigan, where Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer imposed some of the most controversial restrictions in the nation during the height of the pandemic, leads the nation in daily coronavirus cases per capita. New York is reporting a daily average of 6,666 cases which amounts to 34 per 100,000. Former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat who resigned in disgrace earlier this year, was widely praised by the media for his handling of the coronavirus and even received an Emmy Award.

“It just shows once again the success of Governor DeSantis’s science based and data based policies,” DeSantis Press Secretary Christina Pushaw told Fox News Digital about the case levels in Florida. “He’s always made decisions based on the data and that continued even during the Delta surge this summer what he realized would help was not mask mandates in school or lockdowns but provide treatment that actually works.” “He opened the 25 state-supported monoclonal antibody sites and provided that treatment all over the state free of charge to over 150,000 Floridians, saved thousands of lives, and that happened starting in August,” Pushaw added. “Since then our cases are down by over 95% with no restrictions on people’s freedom.”

Read more …

Next: Covid vaccines.

Pharmacy Chains Found Liable For Opioid Crisis In Ohio (PM)

Walgreens, Walmart, CVS and several other pharmacy chains have been found partially responsible for the opioid crisis in Ohio. According to The Daily Wire, the chains were found liable by a federal jury. “This decision was the first-ever ruling against the retail pharmacy industry and could set the tone for countless other lawsuits across the country that seek to hold pharmacies responsible for the flood of highly addictive opioid pills into communities,” The Hill reported. “For decades, pharmacy chains have watched as the pills flowing out of their doors cause harm and failed to take action as required by law. Instead, these companies responded by opening up more locations, flooding communities with pills, and facilitating the flow of opioids into an illegal, secondary market,” said the plaintiffs who want a payout of about $1 billion to both Lake and Trumbell counties in Ohio.


The opioid crisis is a significant issue in the state of Ohio. J.D. Vance, a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate from Ohio, has even highlighted the crisis in his campaign. “Opioid addiction has devastated my family and my community. More and more Ohioans are falling victim to addiction, which means an entire generation of children orphaned, and another generation of grandparents forced to step up for our community’s kids,” Vance says on his website. As noted, J.D Vance’s family has had a history with opioid addiction, which is visualized in his biographical Netflix film, Hillbilly Elegy. The pharmacy chains also responded to the decision. CVS has expressed interest in appealing the ruling. “[T]he simple facts are that opioid prescriptions are written by doctors, not pharmacists; opioid medications are made and marketed by manufacturers, not pharmacists; and our health care system depends on pharmacists to fill legitimate prescriptions that doctors deem necessary for their patients,” Mike DeAngelis of CVS said in a statement.

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They’re capable of starting a war in their own territory, and blame Russia.

Ukraine Says It’s Ready To Defend Itself Against Russia (RT)

The Ukrainian armed forces are preparing to use all available resources to hold the front line against any Russian invasion, the country’s foreign minister has insisted, as the war of words between East and West ramps up. Speaking during a closed online discussion with French foreign policy think tanks and reporters, Dmitry Kuleba said that Kiev, with Paris and Berlin, continues to stress the importance of negotiating a political and diplomatic solution to avoid a potential conflict with Russia.The top official claimed that his country and its partners are now focusing all of their efforts on deterring Moscow from hostile actions. “At the same time… no one should have any doubts that in the case of a new stage of full-scale aggression from the Russian Federation against our state, Ukraine will be protected by all available means,” he insisted.

Kuleba’s comments come amid rumors of a buildup of Russian troops and military hardware near Ukraine’s border. Several publications have published stories in recent days about a possible armed conflict breaking out between the two Eastern European states after Kiev’s domestic intelligence agency published a theoretical plan of how Russian troops could invade. Ukraine’s top diplomat sounded the alarm earlier this month in communication with his French and German counterparts, urging the two nations to be prepared for the possibility of a Russian attack against his country. “If Russia starts acting, you simply won’t have time physically to coordinate, to go through all the bureaucratic procedures, to coordinate decisions.”

The Kremlin has repeatedly denied the allegations and derided photographs purporting to show military hardware stationed hundreds of kilometers from the border, accusing the US of being behind a disinformation campaign designed to inflame tensions. President Vladimir Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, hit back by arguing that “the movement of some of our military equipment or army units across the territory of the Russian Federation is exclusively our business.”

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Allegedly.

US Stonewalls Probe Into Firm That Spied On Assange For CIA – Spanish Judge (Y!)

The Justice Department has failed to respond to multiple requests from Spanish authorities for help in an investigation into a local security firm suspected of being used by the CIA to conduct aggressive — and potentially illegal — surveillance of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. “I am not so pleased about it,” said Santiago Pedraz, the investigating judge in charge of the case, in an exclusive interview with Yahoo News, when asked about the failure of officials in Washington so far to cooperate with his probe. “They have absolutely not answered anything.” Since June of last year, Spanish judges have sent three requests for information to the Justice Department primarily seeking information about the ownership of IP addresses believed to be in the United States that had access to files documenting Assange’s activities while he was holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, according to copies of the requests reviewed by Yahoo News.

Despite a mutual legal assistance treaty (MLAT) between the U.S. and Spain pledging to assist each other in criminal investigations, none of the Spanish requests have yet elicited any substantive responses from the United States, the judge said. Instead, Justice Department lawyers have asked Spanish authorities for more information about the basis for the inquiry before taking any action. Chief among those puzzle pieces is whether U.S. intelligence officials — as Assange’s lawyers have alleged — arranged for the Spanish security firm UC Global to violate Spanish privacy and bribery laws by installing cameras and hidden microphones inside the Ecuadorian Embassy, including in a women’s bathroom where Assange would sometimes take meetings.

This in turn allowed the company to secretly record or otherwise eavesdrop on conversations that Assange had with his lawyers, doctors, advisers, journalists and others, including in one case a U.S. congressman, according to internal documents from the Spanish case.“We want to find out what was done with this material,” Pedraz said. He pointed to the CIA’s potential role as a principal “theory” that “we are trying to investigate.” He did not rule out, however, that there could be other explanations for the alleged data transfer.

Read more …

 

 

 

Selfish

 

 

 

 

 

 

Solari

 

 

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Aug 162021
 
 August 16, 2021  Posted by at 9:37 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  93 Responses »


Roy Lichtenstein Hopeless 1963

 

Ultrapotent Antibodies vs Diverse & Highly Transmissible Covid19 Variants (Sc.)
Vaccine Inventor Dr. Robert Malone Ruined “His Chances For A Nobel Prize” (TSU)
Shedding of Infectious SARS-CoV-2 Despite Vaccination with Delta (Mx)
Here Comes Nosocomial DISASTER (Denninger)
A Message From France (TBP)
French Covid Permit Scheme Extended To Paris Department Stores (G.)
UAE Covid-19 Death Toll Exceeds 2,000 For First Time, 1,189 New Cases (AlA)
Biden Offers Cash To Florida Schools That Defy Gov. Ron DeSantis (NYP)
China, the WHO and the Powergrab That Fuelled A Pandemic (Times)
The Clocks Are Wrong or Biden’s Camp David Photo Was Taken Months Ago (GP)
White House Twitter Account Apparently ‘Outs’ Intel Officials, Locations (RT)
CNN Praises Taliban For Wearing Masks During Attack (BBee)

 

 

Biden “may talk in a few days”, Kamala is AWOL, and Jen Psaki is gone until August 22.

What do you think when you’re in Hong Kong, or Taiwan, Ukraine, Lithuania? That America’s got your back?

This damage is forever. The US gave itself all away in 24 hours.

 

 

 

 

10% have had 3rd vaxx. Israeli PM Bennett is a confused man.

 

 

 

 

“Our study demonstrates that convalescent subjects previously infected with ancestral variant SARS-CoV-2 produce antibodies that cross-neutralize emerging VOCs with high potency.”

Ultrapotent Antibodies vs Diverse & Highly Transmissible Covid19 Variants (Sc.)

Our key defense against the COVID-19 pandemic is neutralizing antibodies against the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) virus elicited by natural infection or vaccination. Recent emerging viral variants have raised concern because of their potential to escape antibody neutralization. Wang et al. identified four antibodies from early-outbreak convalescent donors that are potent against 23 variants, including variants of concern, and characterized their binding to the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2. Yuan et al. examined the impact of emerging mutations in the receptor-binding domain of the spike protein on binding to the host receptor ACE2 and to a range of antibodies. These studies may be helpful for developing more broadly effective vaccines and therapeutic antibodies.

Blood from 22 convalescent subjects who recovered from SARS-CoV-2 WA-1 infection was screened for neutralizing and binding activity, and four subjects with high reactivity against the WA-1 variant were selected for antibody isolation. SARS-CoV-2 spike (S)–reactive antibodies were identified through B cell sorting with S protein–based probes. WA-1 live-virus neutralization assays identified four RBD-targeting antibodies with high potency [half-maximal inhibitory concentration (IC50) 2.1 to 4.8 ng/ml], two of which were derived from the same IGHV1-58 germline but from different donors. Antigen-binding fragments (Fabs) of these antibodies exhibited nanomolar affinity to S (2.3 to 7.3 nM).

Competition assays and electron microscopy indicated that two of the most potent antibodies blocked angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) and bound open conformation RBD, whereas the other two bound both up and down conformations of RBD and blocked ACE2 binding. Binding and lentivirus neutralization assays against 13 circulating VOCs or variants of interest—including B.1.1.7, B.1.351, B.1.427, B.1.429, B.1.526, P.1, P.2, B.1.617.1, and B.1.617.2—indicated that these antibodies were highly potent against VOCs despite being isolated from subjects infected with early ancestral SARS-CoV-2 viruses. Cryo-EM studies of the two most potent antibodies in complex with S revealed that these antibodies target a site of vulnerability on RBD but have minimal contacts with mutational hotspots, defining the structural basis for their high effectiveness against the emerging VOCs and further delineating an IGHV1-58 antibody supersite.

To investigate potential mechanisms of escape, we applied antibody selection pressure to replication-competent vesicular stomatitis virus (rcVSV) expressing the WA-1 SARS-CoV-2 S (rcVSV-SARS2) and identified S mutations that conferred in vitro resistance. We evaluated these antibodies individually or in combinations for their capacity to prevent rcVSV-SARS2 escape and discovered that antibody combinations with complementary modes of recognition to the RBD lowered the risk of resistance. [..] Our study demonstrates that convalescent subjects previously infected with ancestral variant SARS-CoV-2 produce antibodies that cross-neutralize emerging VOCs with high potency. Structural and functional analyses reveal that antibody breadth is mediated by targeting a site of vulnerability at the RBD tip offset from major mutational hotspots in VOCs. Selective boosting of immune responses targeting specific RBD epitopes, such as the sites defined by these antibodies, may induce breadth against current and future VOCs.


Isolation and characterization of convalescent donor antibodies that effectively neutralize emerging SARS-CoV-2 VOCs.

Antibodies isolated from donors infected with ancestral SARS-CoV-2 viruses showed ultrapotent neutralization of emerging VOCs. The two most potent antibodies shared usage of the IGHV1-58 gene and targeted the RBD with minimal contact to VOC mutational hotspots. Cocktails of antibodies with complementary binding modes suppressed antibody escape.

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“This was a conscious decision to take risk.”

Vaccine Inventor Dr. Robert Malone Ruined “His Chances For A Nobel Prize” (TSU)

This afternoon, The Atlantic wrote a fair piece titled, “The Vaccine Scientist Spreading Vaccine Misinformation.” The article started out with the author, Tom Bartlett, asking: “Robert Malone claims to have invented mRNA technology. Why is he trying so hard to undermine its use?” Again, we think the article is fair and objective. Unlike Logically.AI, which categorically said Dr. Malone was not the original inventor of the vaccine, Mr. Bartlett credited Dr. Malone for being the first person to “demonstrate how RNA could be delivered into cells using lipids.” Below is how Mr. Bartlett describes Dr. Malone’s body of work:

“The abridged version is that when Malone was a graduate student in biology in the late 1980s at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, he injected genetic material—DNA and RNA—into the cells of mice in hopes of creating a new kind of vaccine. He was the first author on a 1989 paper demonstrating how RNA could be delivered into cells using lipids, which are basically tiny globules of fat, and a co-author on a 1990 Science paper showing that if you inject pure RNA or DNA into mouse muscle cells, it can lead to the transcription of new proteins. If the same approach worked for human cells, the latter paper said in its conclusion, this technology “may provide alternative approaches to vaccine development.””

Mr. Bartlett’s piece is not really the purpose of this article. The question is, what did Dr. Malone say or do to jeopardize his chances of winning a Nobel Prize? To answer this question, we need to go back to his TV appearance on June 23. During the interview, Dr. Malone stated that he was not discouraging the use of the vaccine that the government is not being transparent with us about what those risks are. “[O]ne of my concerns are that the government is not being transparent with us about what those risks are. And so, I’m of the opinion that people have the right to decide whether to accept a vaccine or not, especially since these are experimental vaccines,” Dr. Malone said, pointing to the fact the vaccines are not formally approved but instead being administered under Emergency Use Authorization.

Dr. Malone added: “This is a fundamental right having to do with clinical research ethics,” he said. “And so, my concern is that I know that there are risks. But we don’t have access to the data, and the data haven’t been captured rigorously enough so that we can accurately assess those risks — and therefore … we don’t really have the information that we need to make a reasonable decision.” Immediately after the interview, the news about what he said quickly travel across the mainstream media, News York Times, Washington Post, and now, The Atlantic. Since then, Dr. Malone has been under attack. About a month later, Logically.Ai wrote a piece claiming that Dr. Robert Malone did NOT invent mRNA vaccines. Just as Mr. Bartlett said in the Atlantic story, “Whether Malone really came up with mRNA vaccines is a question probably best left to Swedish prize committees, but you could make a case for his involvement.”

Which leads us to Dr. Malone’s chances of getting a Nobel prize. In a tweet this afternoon, Dr. Malone shared a statement from a cellular immunologist Stan Gromkowski who did work on mRNA vaccines in the early 1990s. According to the tweet, Gromkowski said this about Dr. Malone: “He’s fucking up his chances for a Nobel Prize.” In the same tweet, Dr. Malone added that he was well aware of the potential impact on a possible Nobel. “I made a choice,” he wrote. That’s not all. In a follow-up tweet, Dr. Malone said he was “very aware of this risk and discussed it with Bret and Steve right before the infamous Dark Horse podcast, indicating that the stakes were too high to worry about a Prize when trying to save the lives and health of our children. This was a conscious decision to take risk.”

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“68% of individuals infected despite vaccination tested positive with Ct <25, including at least 8 who were asymptomatic at the time of testing.”

Shedding of Infectious SARS-CoV-2 Despite Vaccination with Delta (Mx)

The SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant and its sublineages (B.1.617.2, AY.1, AY.2, AY.3; [1]) can cause high viral loads, are highly transmissible, and contain mutations that confer partial immune escape [2,3]. Using PCR threshold cycle (Ct) data from a single large contract laboratory, we show that individuals in Wisconsin, USA had similar viral loads in nasal swabs, irrespective of vaccine status, during a time of high and increasing prevalence of the Delta variant. Infectious SARS-CoV-2 was isolated from 51 of 55 specimens (93%) with Ct <25 from both vaccinated and unvaccinated persons, indicating that most individuals with Ct values in this range (Wilson 95% CI 83%-97%) shed infectious virus regardless of vaccine status.

Notably, 68% of individuals infected despite vaccination tested positive with Ct <25, including at least 8 who were asymptomatic at the time of testing. Our data substantiate the idea that vaccinated individuals who become infected with the Delta variant may have the potential to transmit SARS-CoV-2 to others. Vaccinated individuals should continue to wear face coverings in indoor and congregate settings, while also being tested for SARS-CoV-2 if they are exposed or experience COVID-like symptoms.

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“Viral loads of breakthrough Delta variant infection cases were 251 times higher than those of cases infected with old strains detected between March-April 2020.”

Here Comes Nosocomial DISASTER (Denninger)

“Methods: We studied breakthrough infections among healthcare workers of a major infectious diseases hospital in Vietnam. We collected demographics, vaccination history and results of PCR diagnosis alongside clinical data. We measured SARS-CoV-2 (neutralizing) antibodies at diagnosis, and at week 1, 2 and 3 after diagnosis. We sequenced the viruses using ARTIC protocol.

Findings: Between 11th–25th June 2021 (week 7–8 after dose 2), 69 healthcare workers were tested positive for SARS-CoV-2. 62 participated in the clinical study. 49 were (pre)symptomatic with one requiring oxygen supplementation. All recovered uneventfully. 23 complete-genome sequences were obtained. They all belonged to the Delta variant, and were phylogenetically distinct from the contemporary Delta variant sequences obtained from community transmission cases, suggestive of ongoing transmission between the workers. Viral loads of breakthrough Delta variant infection cases were 251 times higher than those of cases infected with old strains detected between March-April 2020. Time from diagnosis to PCR negative was 8–33 days (median: 21). Neutralizing antibody levels after vaccination and at diagnosis of the cases were lower than those in the matched uninfected controls. There was no correlation between vaccine-induced neutralizing antibody levels and viral loads or the development of symptoms.”

Reasonable conclusions drawn from this data:
• The vaccines do not prevent health care workers from getting infected; the antibodies are ineffective.
• When health care workers get infected post-vaccination with Delta they are not becoming infected from the community; they are passing it among each other.
• Their viral loads and thus infectiousness are extremely high; in other words they become a reservoir of extreme infection risk to other employees in the facility and, it must be assumed to the patients in their care.
• A reasonable hypothesis (but not proved) is that the vaccines are in fact potentiating viral replication via ADE-type effects, specifically given the paper I pointed to yesterday. That is the act of encouraging or even forcing medical workers to take the jabs is leading to higher viral loads and thus greater infectiousness — that is, greater risk to patients rather than less.

Congratulations folks — you just turned hospitals into death traps for anyone who is medically compromised, particularly if they were either unable to be vaccinated themselves for medical reasons or, far worse, they were vaccinated but due to immune compromise failed to build an effective response. PS: Want to know why this sort of study hasn’t — and won’t — be done here? Because the instantaneous freak-out factor, never mind the nasty words “malpractice” or even “depraved indifference” — would start getting thrown around immediately, that’s why.

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A message of hope. Everything comes to a standstill. Tons of pics of empty cafes and restaurants.

In the US, tens of millions soon’t can’t fly. Will that make the airlines happy?

A Message From France (TBP)

Here in France it has gone to the extreme with the “Health” Pass. Last week on the 21st ALL restaurants, bars, coffee shops, and any leisure activities like sporting events, theaters, cinemas, museums, were closed to anyone without “the pass” and all staff at these places are mandated to get the jab to keep their job. It is now a 6 Month prison sentence if you are caught inside any of these places without the pass (the man who slapped the president in the face got only 3 months prison time). Business owners will get a fine of 45,000 euros and 1 year prison sentence if they do not comply with the use of “the pass” and force all their employees to get the jab. (If you know France, you can commit murder and have less of a sentence)

So the result? All the low paid employees quit, they can make more on welfare here (for now). We can still technically “get take out food” but I just tried last night and every restaurant in our town (that is dine in with take out) has closed their doors due to the lack of staff. As of last week ALL doctors, nurses and health industry workers have been mandated to get the jab or lose their license, practice, job, business etc. (ALL health care here is Govt paid positions and there are no private health care Doctors or Hospitals etc.) Since the Health care system is state run and funded, it has been run into the ground. All the good doctors left France 5 Years ago, all the hospitals look like they are 3rd world hospitals since there is no money to repair them, half of the equipment doesn’t work and not every hospital is stocked with supplies needed for daily needs (masks, gels, disposable gowns etc).

For 5 years Nurses have been understaffed and doing double the work because the Health care system is nearly bankrupt…. So add to this the mandatory jab. So the result? Well they took to the streets by the millions and now all the hospitals just lost another 50% of staff capacity. My doctor just went into early retirement (a.k.a. he quit) and I have yet to find a replacement. As of Aug 1st ALL large malls, retail stores and grocery store owners and their staff need to be jabbed and the health pass is required to enter for employees and customers. This would be the equivalent to closing ALL Targets, Walmarts, Costcos, Home Depots, and all major grocery stores. (basically any building over 20,000 squre meters) to those without “the pass”. Result.?? Aug 15th Truckers will be going on strike nation wide; Blocking all access roads in and out of Paris.

Yesterday an entire airport in Northern France closed due to the majority of staff quitting. As of Sept 15th All public areas and access will be off limits. No farmers markets, no parks, no national parks, lakes, rivers, beaches, recreation areas, campsites etc. and no gathering over 100 people, no churches, no weddings, etc. As of Oct 1st ALL small vendors such as, delis, pizza trucks, sandwich shops, butchers, bakers, vegetable stands etc. So as of Oct 1st I will only be able to purchase food by internet and pick up (if allowed). Food shortages, Truckers strike, hospitals and airports shutting down unemployment going through the roof. Its going to be a bumpy ride folks. Is it me or does all this seem a bit extreme for a “pass” that isn’t exactly working? America, Canada, England, Australia, New Zealand, you’d better wake up.

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Close those too.

French Covid Permit Scheme Extended To Paris Department Stores (G.)

France’s pass sanitaire health permit system will be extended to more than 120 major department stores and shopping centres on Monday in areas where levels of Covid infection are causing concern, including Paris and the Mediterranean coast. The decision to extend the measure restricting entry to customers who can prove they have been vaccinated, have had a negative Covid test or have recovered from coronavirus was made by local officials. The pass will be required for shoppers entering Paris department stores such as Galeries Lafayette, Printemps, BHV, Le Mon Marché and La Samaritaine, and others mainly in the south of the country.


Several large shopping centres around the Channel ports popular with British tourists had feared being included but were given a reprieve as the local Covid infection rates are lower than the national average. Local prefects are imposing the pass on large stores and shopping malls in areas where the infection rate is above 200 per 100,000 people. Although Paris has not reached this level, officials are concerned about the high number of cases especially among young people in the neighbouring areas of Saint-Denis and Val-de-Marne. The worst-hit areas are in departments along the Mediterranean coast. In the Bouches-du-Rhône, which includes the popular holiday areas of Provence, the Côte d’Azur, Marseille, Arles and Aix-en-Provence, the rate has reached 693 per 100,000.s

The French bring their own chairs, table, food. No pass required.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1426810220471361538

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Most vaccinated country on earth. They work great. UAE=9.7 million people.

UAE Covid-19 Death Toll Exceeds 2,000 For First Time, 1,189 New Cases (AlA)

The United Arab Emirates on Sunday recorded 1,189 new coronavirus infections, 1,419 recoveries and four deaths in 24 hours, the country’s National Emergency Crisis and Disasters Management Authority (NCEMA) reported. Health authorities conducted 218,163 COVID-19 tests to determine Sunday’s numbers which indicated another daily decline in infections from Saturday’s 1,206. The UAE’S COVID-19 death toll now sits at 2,001, while total recoveries increased to 679,760, according to NCEMA. The country has recorded a total of 701,776 coronavirus cases since the pandemic’s onset. There are currently 20,015 active cases within the country. As of yet, over 81 percent of the population has received at least one vaccine dose and around 72 percent have been fully inoculated against COVID-19.

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They love hurting DeSantis for 2024.

Biden Offers Cash To Florida Schools That Defy Gov. Ron DeSantis (NYP)

The Biden administration is offering cash to Florida school districts that defy Gov. Ron DeSantis’ mask ban as COVID-19 deaths and hospitalizations rose in the state. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona on Friday sent a letter to DeSantis and the Florida education commissioner saying school districts can at their “sole and complete discretion” use federal funds to pay the salaries of administrators and board members withheld by the state for defying the order. “We are eager to partner with [the Florida Department of Education] on any efforts to further our shared goals of protecting the health and safety of students and educators,” Cardona wrote. “If FLDOE does not wish to pursue such an approach, the Department will continue to work directly with the school districts and educators that serve Florida’s students.”


A DeSantis spokeswoman blasted the Biden administration for wanting to spend federal funds “on the salaries of superintendents and elected politicians, who don’t believe that parents have a right to choose what’s best for their children, than on Florida’s students, which is what these funds should be used for.” The Republican governor last month signed an executive order banning school districts from making face masks mandatory for students and staff defending “parents’ freedom to choose.” The order came days after the CDC recommended all students and staff wear masks when they return this fall. On Monday, the governor’s office threatened to withhold the salaries of school board members and superintendents who did not comply with the ban. DeSantis has also threatened to withhold state funding from districts as well.

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“Beijing had been instrumental in installing Tedros as the £170,000-a-year head of the agency by pulling strings and calling in favours during the 2017 election for the job.”

China, the WHO and the Powergrab That Fuelled A Pandemic (Times)

Barely eight months after taking charge, the director-general of the WHO gave a speech that would prove extraordinarily prophetic. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned that all nations were facing the ever-present threat that a new respiratory illness, such as the Spanish flu, might emerge and spread across the globe in weeks or months, killing millions. It was why, the Ethiopian told the audience at his keynote speech in Dubai in February 2018, he had made it his daily priority since becoming the WHO’s chief to make sure he was up to date on the thousands of reports the health body received every month that might flag up signs of an outbreak The WHO, a Geneva-based United Nations agency with a £5 billion budget from 194 member states, was on a war footing.

Tedros said it would act fast and decisively, because ignoring the signs of an outbreak could “be the difference between global spread of a deadly disease and rapid interruption of transmission”. So far this “new tighter focus” was working, he added. So when the first alert of a mysterious respiratory illness in China, exactly as Tedros had described, was reported by health monitors in Taiwan at the end of December 2019, the health agency should have been prepared and ready for action. In fact the WHO would receive considerable criticism for failing to help stop the spread of the Sars-CoV-2 virus in the opening weeks of the Covid-19 pandemic. Not only did the organisation fail to act but it also promulgated misinformation about the virus originating from China and even discouraged other nations from taking steps that might have contained the spread.

For all his foresight, Tedros would be accused of being ineffective when the big test came. The world paid a heavy price for the WHO’s inaction. As Tedros predicted, the virus has killed more than four million people, and there will be many more. The body that is charged with looking after the world’s health seriously malfunctioned in those opening weeks, when humanity most needed it to come to the rescue. Why? Our investigation reveals today how a concerted campaign over many years by Beijing to grab power inside the WHO appears to have fatally compromised its ability to respond to the crisis. It raises serious concerns about the extent of Beijing’s influence over the WHO and its director-general, and how this undermined the organisation’s capacity — and willingness — to take the steps necessary to avert a global pandemic.

Its leadership put China’s economic interests before public health concerns. The results have been nothing short of catastrophic. It is a story that stretches back many years before the Covid-19 crisis. After being strongly criticised by the health agency for attempting to cover up the 2003 Sars crisis, China set out to increase its influence over the WHO. By applying financial and diplomatic leverage over some of the world’s poorest nations, Beijing won a global power struggle to get its favoured candidates installed at the very top of the organisation. As a result, years later, a body that was set up with the lofty goal of “attainment by all peoples of the highest possible level of health” has been co-opted into aiding the Chinese state’s campaign for global economic dominance.

Its leadership began to speak differently, espousing statements and pursuing policies that were markedly convenient to China — even praising Beijing’s questionable allies such as North Korea, despite its appalling health and human rights record. Beijing had been instrumental in installing Tedros as the £170,000-a-year head of the agency by pulling strings and calling in favours during the 2017 election for the job.

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Or months into the future?

The Clocks Are Wrong or Biden’s Camp David Photo Was Taken Months Ago (GP)

Either the clocks in Camp David are wrong or the photo taken of Joe Biden as Kabul fell to the Taliban is several months old. Former Fox News producer Kyle Becker noticed the time errors and pointed them out in a tweet late Sunday evening. “Recent White House photos show a 3-hour time diff. b/w London & Moscow. There are a few good explanations for this. Either Camp David’s clocks are wrong or the photos are from before March 28, when London went ahead on Daylight Savings Time, but Moscow didn’t. This is *fine,*” Becker wrote. “Also, Tehran is an hour and a half difference from Moscow currently, which is why I circled it when I was checking it out. (And yes, that half-hour difference is right; India has a time zone with a half-hour difference as well.)” — Kyle Becker (@kylenabecker) August 16, 2021

“Also, Tehran is an hour and a half difference from Moscow currently, which is why I circled it when I was checking it out. (And yes, that half-hour difference is right; India has a time zone with a half-hour difference as well.)” Becker added. “This morning, the President and Vice President met with their national security team and senior officials to hear updates on the draw down of our civilian personnel in Afghanistan, evacuations of SIV applicants and other Afghan allies, and the ongoing security situation in Kabul. — The White House (@WhiteHouse) August 15, 2021

The photo discrepancy is particularly odd as Biden has been MIA and did not address the nation as the chaos unfolded. Instead, it was reported that he will do so “in the next couple of days.” Additionally, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki will be taking the entire next week off. Questions sent to Psaki are being met with an autoreply saying that she will be out of the office through August 22. “I will be out of the office from August 15th-August 22nd,” the auto reply email being sent to reporters reads.

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What an incredible mess. There should be awards for this.

White House Twitter Account Apparently ‘Outs’ Intel Officials, Locations (RT)

A White House tweet showing President Joe Biden appearing to be on top of the rapidly deteriorating security situation in Afghanistan may also have inadvertently revealed the faces and locations of intelligence agents. The official White House Twitter account posted a photo on Sunday of Biden meeting by video conference with intelligence officials to hear updates on the drawdown of civilian personnel, “the ongoing security situation in Kabul,” and evacuations of Afghan allies, including interpreters who helped US and NATO forces during the 20-year war. The picture showed other meeting participants on a large screen, including CIA officials and three men at the “Doha Station.” Richard Grenell, former acting director of national intelligence in the Trump administration, called out the apparent blunder, tweeting, “Who took this picture outing intel officials? Dear God.”

One Twitter user quipped, “Umm, is the public supposed to see the faces of the CIA agents? Are we supposed to know there is a Doha Station?” The White House tweet may have been meant to portray Biden as actively involved in the evacuation from Afghanistan amid criticism that he was silent and on vacation while the Taliban was recapturing the country and triggering a rushed evacuation of Americans and allied Afghans from Kabul. Supporters of the president used the photo to brush off the criticism, insisting it shows that Biden is preoccupied with the crisis. Some eagle-eyed commentators suggested that the photo might not even be recent, pointing to the time difference between London and Moscow on the clocks in the conference room. The current difference is two hours, while the clocks above the conference screen show a three-hour difference. This would have been possible before March 28, when the clocks in the UK were moved forward by one hour.

The planned US withdrawal from Afghanistan has turned into a disaster for the Biden administration after the Taliban overran 26 provincial capitals out of 34 in the weeks after last US troops left Bagram’s airfield, their main military base in Afghanistan. Biden has faced backlash for apparently gravely underestimating the Taliban and overestimating the ability of the US-trained Afghan forces to withstand the assault. In July, Biden predicted that the Taliban wouldn’t overrun the country and that the evacuation would be nothing like the fall of Saigon in 1975, when US embassy staffers had to be plucked from the rooftop to escape North Vietnamese forces. On Sunday, two CH-47 Chinook helicopters were seen evacuating US embassy staff in Kabul as Taliban fighters entered the city and Afghan President Ashraf Ghani fled the country.

The White House video conference tweet became more fodder for mockery. Biden supporters argued that identities of the people who appeared on the video-conference screen weren’t necessarily secret, but other observers said the existence of the Doha Station was not publicly known. “Heck of a job, White House communications shop,” National Review contributor Jim Geraghty said. “I figure you would want to crop out the teleconference screens labeled CIA and Doha Station – you panicking, amateur idiots.”

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Not sure we should be laughing.

CNN Praises Taliban For Wearing Masks During Attack (BBee)

Approximately twelve minutes after U.S. troops withdrew from Afghanistan, Taliban fighters have completely taken over the entire country. “Woah, that’s a bummer,” said the Biden Administration’s foreign policy team. “We didn’t see that one coming.” As the Taliban began its campaign of shooting and killing, as is their time-honored tradition, CNN anchors gushed with praise after noticing all the Taliban fighters were responsibly wearing masks to protect themselves and others from COVID. “Wow! In the midst of the battle and bloodshed, these noble desert knights of Islamic superiority are wearing masks! Bravo!” said Brian Stelter.


TV anchor and world-renown polemicist Don Lemon was also quick to weigh in. “All things considered, we ought to be praising the COVID-safe masks these majestic mujahideen warriors are wearing,” he said. “They are showing all of us the proper way to behave during a pandemic—something those horrible idiot Trump supporters don’t seem to get.” Inspired by their example, the Biden Administration has invited the Taliban to the White House to record TikTok videos in hopes of convincing Trump supporters to get vaccinated.

Read more …

 

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Feb 122021
 


Ansel Adams The Tetons and the Snake River 1942

 

Cuomo Aide Admits They Hid Nursing Home Data From Feds (NYP)
Kent Covid Variant Mutation Must Be Taken Seriously, Warns UK Scientist (G.)
‘Denier’ Is The Dirty Word Of The Pandemic (Furedi)
Biden Administration Says No Domestic Travel Restrictions Planned (F.)
Twitter Permanently Suspends ‘Project Veritas’ Group (Hill)
Instagram Removes Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Account With 800,000+ Subscribers (RT)
Reckless Rhetoric Is A Reckless Standard For An Impeachment Trial (Turley)
G7 Seen Backing Issuance Of New IMF SDRs (R.)
Markets Are Giddy About Reopening – And That’s The Problem (Pol.)
The Only Way Out of the Death Trap (Rickards)
Why Victoria Nuland Is Dangerous and Should Not Be Confirmed (Antiwar)
Database Of All Ivermectin COVID-19 Studies (C19I)

 

 

A new insight:

 

 

Myopia.

 

 

Remember the hospital ships Trump set to New York? Cuomo didn’t use them. Because it was Trump.

“Cuomo sent 9000 infected patients into nursing homes instead of the USNS Comfort.”

While he be indicted, along with his helpers? I wouldn’t count on it.

Cuomo Aide Admits They Hid Nursing Home Data From Feds (NYP)

Governor Cuomo’s top aide privately apologized to Democratic lawmakers for withholding the state’s nursing-home death toll from COVID-19 — telling them “we froze” out of fear the true numbers would “be used against us” by federal prosecutors, The Post has learned. The stunning admission of a cover-up was made by Secretary to the Governor Melissa DeRosa during a video conference call with state Democratic leaders in which she said the Cuomo administration had rebuffed a legislative request for the tally in August because “right around the same time, [then-President Donald Trump] turns this into a giant political football,” according to an audio recording of the two-hour-plus meeting.

“He starts tweeting that we killed everyone in nursing homes,” DeRosa said. “He starts going after [New Jersey Gov. Phil] Murphy, starts going after [California Gov. Gavin] Newsom, starts going after [Michigan Gov.] Gretchen Whitmer.” In addition to attacking Cuomo’s fellow Democratic governors, DeRosa said, Trump “directs the Department of Justice to do an investigation into us.” “And basically, we froze,” she told the lawmakers on the call. “Because then we were in a position where we weren’t sure if what we were going to give to the Department of Justice, or what we give to you guys, what we start saying, was going to be used against us while we weren’t sure if there was going to be an investigation.” DeRosa added: “That played a very large role into this.”

After dropping the bombshell, DeRosa asked for “a little bit of appreciation of the context” and offered what appears to be the Cuomo administration’s first apology for its handling of nursing homes amid the pandemic. But instead of a mea culpa to the grieving family members of more than 13,000 dead seniors or the critics who say the Health Department spread COVID-19 in the care facilities with a March 25 state Health Department directive that nursing homes admit infected patients, DeRosa tried to make amends with the fellow Democrats for the political inconvenience it caused them. “So we do apologize,” she said. “I do understand the position that you were put in. I know that it is not fair. It was not our intention to put you in that political position with the Republicans.”

Assembly Health Committee Chairman Richard Gottfried (D-Manhattan) immediately rejected DeRosa’s expression of remorse, according to the recording. “I don’t have enough time today to explain all the reasons why I don’t give that any credit at all,” said Gottfried, one of the lawmakers who demanded the death-toll data in August. State Senate Aging Committee Chairwoman Rachel May (D-Syracuse) — who was battered during her re-election bid last year over the issue of nursing-home deaths — also ripped into DeRosa, saying her former opponent had launched another broadside earlier in the day. “And the issue for me, the biggest issue of all is feeling like I needed to defend — or at least not attack — an administration that was appearing to be covering something up,” she said.

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So start sending out the vitamin D. And boost your ivermectin supplies.

Kent Covid Variant Mutation Must Be Taken Seriously, Warns UK Scientist (G.)

The Kent variant of the coronavirus with a key mutation that enables the South African variant to escape some of the vaccines used against it must be taken very seriously in the UK, according to a leading microbiologist. Prof Ravi Gupta of the Cambridge Institute for Therapeutic Immunology and Infectious Diseases, who is a member of the government’s scientific advisory body Nervtag, warned that the mutated variant, at the moment causing just 21 known cases, should be treated with as much concern as the South African variant. The Kent variant B117, which spreads twice as fast as the original coronavirus, is now dominant in the UK and is present in many countries around the world.

But Public Health England has identified 21 cases of B117 that also have the E484K mutation: 14 in the Bristol region, four in Greater Manchester and three elsewhere. E484K is the change to the spike protein in South Africa that scientists believe is chiefly responsible for vaccines triggering a lower antibody response to infection. Nervtag (new and emerging respiratory virus threats advisory group), which is part of the UK Sage committee of scientists, has designated this a “variant of concern”. This key mutation that had now arisen in the UK has been shown to reduce the efficacy of antibodies in many lab studies, said Gupta. So treating it as we would the South African variant itself is sensible, he said.

“Given that we think this one is responsible for a large knock-off of the effects of vaccine efficacy or even immunity, then, I think it’s wise,” he said. E484K is also found in the Brazilian variant, which it is thought may be infecting people who should be immune because they had previously become ill with the original coronavirus – although the evidence is still anecdotal. “Given all these factors, I think it should be taken very seriously,” he said.

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“The targeting of denial has little to do with the distinct features of any specific issues. It is driven by a mood of intolerance towards those who are sceptical of the received wisdom.”

‘Denier’ Is The Dirty Word Of The Pandemic (Furedi)

Legitimate views about the effectiveness of lockdown are being silenced with accusations of Covid ‘denial’. The misuse of this powerful and emotive word, often associated with the Holocaust, is morally wrong and needs to stop. These days, if you want to shut down critical or dissident views, all you need to do is shout ‘denier’. This morally charged scare word is often hurled at anyone who questions the efficacy of the current lockdown or any of the policies associated with it. Consequently, the term denial is used to delegitimise the view of someone who is sceptical about the lockdown. For some time now, scepticism – an attitude associated with a questioning mind – has been targeted by would-be censors and treated as a marker for insidious behaviour. ‘How climate scepticism turned into something more dangerous’ warns an academic in the Guardian.

The rhetorical strategy of attributing malevolent intent to scepticism is demonstrated by the decision of the Guardian to update its style guide by changing the usage of the term ‘climate sceptic’ to that of ‘climate denier’. With its long-established religious connotation as an expression of heresy, denial communicates an act of mortal sin. This quasi-religious meaning is still conveyed by 21st century moral entrepreneurs. “I have seen Covid denial up close – it was a chilling experience,” writes a commentator. In recent times, the term denial has mutated from its religious connotations to become an all-purpose secular sin. It has emerged as a turbo-charged moral crime because of its association with the Holocaust. [..] This self-conscious exploitation of the Holocaust was illustrated by a journalist for the online magazine Grist, who wanted to see global warming deniers prosecuted like Nazi war criminals.

With the tone of vitriol characteristic of dogmatic inquisitors, he noted that “we should have war crimes trials for these bastards,” adding “some sort of climate Nuremberg.” During the pandemic, the rhetoric of denial has been frequently used to associate people who are sceptical of government policy with the sins of other types of denials. As one commentator explained: “Denial is pernicious and can have dire impacts. Climate change denial leads to lack of action that would preserve a healthy planet. Mask denial leads to increased spread of and mortality from the Covid virus. Denial of sexual abuse leads to horrific instances where an abuser is allowed to persist in their malfeasance for years because those responsible for the institutions in which they operated – schools, churches, companies, scouts, etc) refused to face the terrible reality that existed under their own roofs.”

From this perspective, denial itself, without regard to any specific object is pernicious. The targeting of denial has little to do with the distinct features of any specific issues. It is driven by a mood of intolerance towards those who are sceptical of the received wisdom. The alarmist tone used to rebrand anyone sceptical of a lockdown policy as a denier makes it difficult for many people to openly voice their reservations on the predicament they face. A lockdown sceptic is not simply treated as someone with a different point of view but as a threat to the community. They are also condemned for having blood on their hands. They have “deadly beliefs” which constitute a threat to the survival of a community.

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Florida just made the whole thing up?!

Biden Administration Says No Domestic Travel Restrictions Planned (F.)

The Biden administration has denied reports that it’s actively considering domestic travel restrictions to slow the spread of new coronavirus variants, telling Reuters Thursday that “no specific decisions are under consideration” after Florida Republicans slammed the suggestion that the White House could restrict travel to the state. An anonymous Biden source told the Miami Herald Wednesday the administration was actively discussing “potential travel restrictions within the United States” as a way to curb emerging coronavirus variants, as the more transmissible variant first detected in the United Kingdom is expected to become the U.S.’s primary strain by March.

Though the official said no particular states were so far being targeted by the potential restrictions and no final decisions had yet been made, the variants are especially prevalent in Florida and California, and the official said “all options are on the table.” Republicans heavily opposed the travel restrictions: in a letter to President Joe Biden quoted by the Herald, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said the move would be “an outrageous, authoritarian move that has no basis in law or science.” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis slammed the possibility of restrictions at a press conference Thursday, saying it “would purely be a political attack against the people of Florida” and “it’s unclear why they would even try talking about that.”

A White House spokesperson denied the report to Reuters Thursday, saying that while the administration is “continuing to discuss” potential travel recommendations, “To be clear, there have been no decisions made around additional public health measures for domestic travel safety.” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said at a briefing Thursday that while the administration is “always considering what steps are necessary” for public health, “no decisions have been made” regarding any measures that could affect domestic travel considerations.

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Twitter will go.

Twitter Permanently Suspends ‘Project Veritas’ Group (Hill)

Twitter permanently suspended an account belonging to Project Veritas on Thursday, citing repeat violations of the site’s policies against publishing private information. A Twitter spokesperson confirmed to The Hill that the main Project Veritas account was permanently suspended, while founder James O’Keefe had his account temporarily locked. Several recent tweets on O’Keefe’s timeline appeared to have been deleted by Thursday afternoon. [..] Founded in 2010, Project Veritas is a right-wing group that routinely published undercover sting videos, some of which have been accused of deceptive editing. Last October the group was criticized after claiming to have uncovered a witness to voter fraud in Minnesota only for the witness to backtrack on his claims days later and accuse Project Veritas operatives of trying to bribe him, according to multiple reports.

The group, which frequently targets Democratic politicians and media organizations, scored a victory last year when an ABC News correspondent was suspended after a Veritas video showed him claiming that the network does not care about newsworthy issues. They have also published videos of a “Good Morning America” anchor complaining about the network ignoring her story on disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. O’Keefe, in an emailed statement, told The Hill that the content in question was a video of Project Veritas members questioning a Facebook executive, Guy Rosen.

“Late last night, Twitter locked Project Veritas’s and my Twitter accounts, claiming we violated Twitter Guidelines by posting a video of our journalists asking questions of Facebook’s Vice President Guy Rosen which Rosen refused to answer. Twitter claimed the video published private information, which is false. Twitter invited Project Veritas to, and we did, appeal that decision with Twitter. In an apparent act of retaliation for daring to question their authority, Twitter responded to our appeal by suspending our account, continuing to tell us that Project Veritas could delete the tweet and have our account reinstated,” said O’Keefe. “This is nothing new from Twitter – just last fall Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey admitted in Congress his company’s decision to block the New York Post was erroneous while still demanding the Post kneel before them by deleting the tweet,” he continued, adding: “Here we go again – Twitter opting to delete news and demand fealty when their decision is dared to be questioned.”

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This is worse than thought police. Cut them down to size.

Instagram Removes Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Account With 800,000+ Subscribers (RT)

Facebook has taken down the Instagram page of former president John F. Kennedy’s nephew – a prominent vaccine critic with 800,000 subscribers. The tech giant has recently stepped up its offensive on what it deems Covid-19 disinfo Kennedy’s Instagram account with its massive following was erased on Wednesday. “We removed this account for repeatedly sharing debunked claims about the coronavirus or vaccines,” Facebook said, confirming the deletion of his hugely popular page. The account was yanked shortly after the Washington Post reported that it had alerted the Facebook-owned social network to Kennedy’s post with the viral clip from “Planet Lockdown.” The video is an interview starring Kennedy’s ally, Catherine Austin Fitts, who served as assistant secretary of housing in the George H.W. Bush administration.


In the clip, which has since been scrapped from YouTube, Facebook, and other established social media, Fitts reportedly argues that the vaccination drive against Covid-19 is a sinister plot masterminded by a global cabal, and that vaccines can change people’s DNA or render them infertile. Kennedy, who was known to be a vocal vaccine skeptic long before the pandemic, reposted the video on December 29. It had reportedly racked up some 900,000 views before it was taken down. He also boasts a sizable 214,000-strong following on Twitter, however his handle there appears to be intact. Kennedy Jr. has drawn stark criticism for his anti-vaccine stance from the mainstream media, with CNN’s Jake Tapper labeling him a “menace” for calling Dr. Anthony Fauci a “very sinister guy who has turned” America over to “Big Pharma.”

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Reckless rhetoric reflects our age of rage.

Reckless Rhetoric Is A Reckless Standard For An Impeachment Trial (Turley)

The Trump team is likely to play back similar language used by Democrats in both houses to “fight” for the country and to “retake” Congress. During Trump’s 2017 inauguration, Democrats denounced his legitimacy as riots broke out in Washington involving violent groups. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) later called on people to confront Republicans in public; Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) insisted during 2020’s violent protests that “there needs to be unrest in the streets.” Then-Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) said “protesters should not let up” even as many protests turned violent or deadly. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has condemned fellow members as effectively traitors and the “enemy within.” She was criticized last year for stating, in the midst of violent protests, that “I just don’t know why there aren’t uprisings all over the country. Maybe there will be.”

All of these Democrats insist they meant peaceful acts — and I believe them. But that is the point: Rioters sought to burn federal buildings or occupy state capitals and, in some cases, seized police stations, sections of cities, even a city hall. Democrats’ words did not cause that violence on the left. Yet, this impeachment trial invites the same or similar words to be interpreted subjectively, based on whether you believe or approve of the speaker. Reckless rhetoric reflects our age of rage. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) stood in front of the Supreme Court and, citing two justices by name, declared menacingly: “Hey, Gorsuch. Hey, Kavanaugh — you’ve unleashed a whirlwind. And you’re going to pay the price.” Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) seemed to defend the recent violent takeover of a St. Louis prison by tweeting the words of Martin Luther King that “a riot is the language of the unheard.”

Nor is this limited to Washington: Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) defended state Rep. Cynthia Johnson (D) who called for “soldiers” to “make [Trump supporters] pay” for criticizing and harassing her. Fired FBI director James Comey has been given to reckless rhetoric, too. He recently said: “The Republican Party needs to be burned down … It’s just not a healthy political organization.” Likewise, Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin declared that “We have to collectively, in essence, burn down the Republican Party. We have to level them because if there are survivors, if there are people who weather this storm, they will do it again.” Since the Republican National Committee was targeted with a pipe bomb on Jan. 6, would that constitute incitement to arson or violence?

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The final step towards oblivion.

G7 Seen Backing Issuance Of New IMF SDRs (R.)

Group of Seven finance ministers are likely to back a new allocation of the International Monetary Fund’s own currency, or special drawing rights, at an online meeting on Friday to help low-income countries, sources said. A new issuance is similar to when a central bank prints money as the new SDRs give each IMF member more reserves to draw on in proportion to their shareholding in the Fund. Officials from the United States, the IMF’s biggest shareholder, have signalled they are open to a new issuance of $500 billion, sources said – a clear shift in position under the administration of new U.S. President Joe Biden. “We expect Friday’s G7 meeting to take decisions on important initiatives, and for France that is the question of a new allocation of IMF special drawing rights,” a French finance ministry source said.


A consensus among the G7 rich nations would pave the way for a broader agreement among G20 countries next month, which could in turn set the stage for a formal decision at the IMF’s annual spring meeting in April. Two sources familiar with the matter said U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen had not clearly stated her views on the matter. A third source said Republicans in the U.S. Congress would “have a field day” with the potential boost in funding for China, Iran and Venezuela. Proponents said it would be difficult for countries facing U.S. sanctions to access the cash, however, as they would have to use banks wary of running afoul of Washington. Senior Democratic U.S. senators who back an even larger allocation of 2 trillion SDRs are lobbying U.S. Treasury officials personally to move forward, including through direct calls, a Senate aide said.

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Until the Fed withdraws, there are no markets.

Markets Are Giddy About Reopening – And That’s The Problem (Pol.)

Gas prices are climbing. Home prices are surging. Stock markets keep hitting fresh records as chatroom-driven mania draws in giddy investors. The economy and financial markets appear to be pricing themselves for perfection, betting on rapid vaccinations and a surge of consumer spending later this year that will pull the nation out of its pandemic funk. Serious risks are still lurking just below the surface: Vaccinations could take far longer than expected. New Covid strains could evade vaccines and spur new lockdowns. All of this could trigger falls in stock prices and other assets and stomp on job creation.

But if the dream scenario does arrive, another risk is lurking: A burst of new spending and economic growth coupled with the massive amount of fiscal stimulus in the system — possibly including nearly $2 trillion more under the White House’s latest plan — could lead to a sharp spike in inflation. That would send stocks tumbling and could force the U.S. Federal Reserve to contemplate raising interest rates to cool the economy. The Goldilocks scenario Wall Street and the White House are hoping for includes a successful vaccination effort and enough federal support to keep millions of suffering Americans afloat until then, followed by an economy that runs neither too hot nor too cold. But there is no guarantee Goldilocks will arrive.

“The Biden plan coming on top of last year’s stimulus, the budding increase in union power, the rising risk of import inflation coupled with a ballooning trade deficit, and other data suggest to me that inflation will jump,” said Richard Bernstein of financial firm RBAdvisors. And it could be that all the easy money from the Fed has created dangerous bubbles that could pop, Bernstein warned. “The Fed is providing tons of liquidity, but because banks have been hesitant to lend, the liquidity is trapped in the financial economy and bubbles are forming. Whether it’s Bitcoin, SPACs, Robinhood day traders, or anything similar, it’s clearly not healthy capital formation.”

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“The Fed can call a board meeting, vote on a new policy, walk outside and announce to the world that effective immediately, the price of gold is $5,000 per ounce.”

The Only Way Out of the Death Trap (Rickards)

Economists Ken Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart carried out a long historical survey going back 800 years, looking at individual countries, or empires in some cases, that have gone broke or defaulted on their debt. They put the danger zone at a debt-to-GDP ratio of 90%. Once it reaches 90%, debt becomes a drag on growth. Meanwhile, we’re looking at deficits of $1 trillion or more, long after the pandemic subsides. In basic terms, the United States is going broke. We’re heading for a sovereign debt crisis. I don’t say that for effect. I’m not looking to scare people or to make a splash. That’s just an honest assessment based on the numbers. Tax cuts won’t bring us out of it, neither can structural changes to the economy. Both would help if done properly, but the problem is simply far too large.

So, an economic time bomb is ticking. Velocity is dropping. Debt is growing while growth is slowing. The explosion will come in the form of asset bubbles bursting and stocks crashing. There’s no way out of the debt death trap. Or is there? There is actually a way out. It’s the only solution left, really. And that’s inflation. Deflation increases the real value of debt. With deflation, the value of money increases, making it more burdensome to pay off debt. This is why debtors hate deflation. And guess who is the world’s largest debtor nation? That’s right, the U.S. On the other hand, inflation decreases the real value of debt. It’s easier to pay down debt because you’re paying back debt with dollars that are less valuable than when you originally borrowed them. But the Fed has failed to produce inflation for over a decade now, despite all the trillions of dollars it’s fabricated.

Then how can the government and the Fed produce inflation now? The solution is to increase the price of gold in order to change inflationary expectations. That will increase money velocity and get the growth engine running again. The Fed could actually cause inflation in about 15 minutes if it used this method. FDR did this to perfection in 1933, and his actions began to dig us out of the Great Depression. Jerome Powell, Biden and his Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen could do it again if they wanted to (assuming they know how, which is probably too much to assume). But how could they increase the gold price to increase money velocity and change inflation expectations? I’ve written about it before, but it bears revisiting, especially since there are newer readers who may be unfamiliar with it. Here’s how they can do it:

The Fed can call a board meeting, vote on a new policy, walk outside and announce to the world that effective immediately, the price of gold is $5,000 per ounce. They could make that new price stick by using the Treasury’s gold in Fort Knox and the major U.S. bank gold dealers to conduct “open market operations” in gold. The Fed will be a buyer if the price hits $4,950 per ounce or less and a seller if the price hits $5,050 per ounce or higher. They will print money when they buy and reduce the money supply when they sell via the banks. The Fed would target the gold price rather than interest rates. The point is to cause a generalized increase in the price level. A rise in the price of gold from $1,900 per ounce to $5,000 per ounce is a massive devaluation of the dollar when measured in the quantity of gold that one dollar can buy.

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She was involved in everything from 2000 on. So much suffering.

Why Victoria Nuland Is Dangerous and Should Not Be Confirmed (Antiwar)

Victoria Nuland exemplifies the neocons who have led US foreign policy from one disaster to another for the past 30 years while evading accountability. It is a bad sign that President Joe Biden has nominated Victoria Nuland for the third highest position at the State Department, Under Secretary for Political Affairs. As a top-level appointee, Victoria Nuland must be confirmed by the US Senate. There is a campaign to Stop her confirmation. The following review of her work shows why Victoria Nuland is incompetent, highly dangerous and should not be confirmed.

Afghanistan and Iraq: From 2000 to 2003, Nuland was US permanent representative to NATO as the Bush administration attacked then invaded Afghanistan. The Afghan government offered to work with the US remove Al Qaeda, but this was rejected. After Al Qaeda was defeated, the US could have left Afghanistan but instead stayed, established semi-permanent bases, split the country, and is still fighting there two decades later. From 2003 to 2005 Nuland was principal foreign policy advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney who “helped plan and manage the war that toppled Saddam Hussein, including making Bush administration’s case for preemptive military actions based on Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction.” The foreign policy establishment, with Nuland on the far right, believed that removing Saddam Hussein and installing a US “ally” would be simple. The invasion and continuing occupation have resulted in over a million dead Iraqis, many thousands of dead Americans, hundreds of thousands with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder at a cost of 2 to 6 TRILLION dollars.

[..] Victoria Nuland has promoted a foreign policy of intervention through coups, proxy wars, aggression, and ongoing occupations. The policy has been implemented with bloody and disastrous results in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Ukraine. With consummate hypocrisy she accuses Russia of spreading misinformation in the US, while she openly seeks to put “stress on Putin where he is vulnerable, including among his own citizens.” She wants to “establish permanent bases along NATO’s eastern border and increase the pace and visibility of joint training exercises.”

Victoria Nuland is the queen of chicken hawks, the Lady Macbeth of perpetual war. There are hundreds of thousands of victims from the policies she has promoted. Yet she has not received a scratch. On the contrary, Victoria Nuland probably has profited from a stock portfolio filled with military contractors.Now Victoria Nuland wants to provoke, threaten and “rollback” Russia. A quick look at a map of US military bases shows who is threatening whom. Victoria Nuland is highly dangerous and should not be confirmed.

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Dig in!

Database Of All Ivermectin COVID-19 Studies (C19I)

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Sep 272020
 


Claude Monet The pond at Montgeron 1876

 

Amy Coney Barrett Senate Confirmation Hearing Set To Start Oct. 12 (NBC)
Supreme Court Nomination Is A Testament To The Values Of Feminism (Turley)
If Democrats Attack Her Over ‘People Of Praise’, They’ll Regret It (USAT)
Amy Coney Barrett’s Intellect And Heart Are Unrivaled (USAT)
Betrayal, Infuriating Betrayal (Whitney)
In Which We Debunk A Coividiot Pamphlet (MoA)
‘A One-Off Test Is A Folly’: The Truth Behind False Negative Covid Tests (HuPo)
DeSantis Drops All Florida COVID Restrictions, Promises No More Closures (JTN)
Guardian’s Deceit-Riddled New Statement Betrays Assange And Journalism (Cook)
Avoiding a Climate Lockdown (Mariana Mazzucato)

 

 

Tick tick tick…

 

 

 

 

Cruz on Warren

 

 

A lot of Amy Coney Barrett of course today.

Amy Coney Barrett Senate Confirmation Hearing Set To Start Oct. 12 (NBC)

While President Donald Trump officially announced his nominee for the Supreme Court on Saturday afternoon, an expeditious timeline had already started to take shape that could kick off confirmation hearings as early as mid-October. Senate hearings, which for the last three Supreme Court justices began nearly two months after they were nominated, could start as soon as Oct. 12, a Republican aide familiar with the matter told NBC News before Judge Amy Coney Barrett was officially announced as the nominee. Hours after Trump nominated Barrett to replace the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the aggressive timeline was made official by Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham, who said on Fox News that confirmation hearings will start on Oct. 12, less than one month before the Nov. 3 election.

Graham said hearings will start with an introduction to Barrett, opening statements, and a statement by the nominee. Tuesday and Wednesday of that week will be dedicated to questions and answers and then the markup process would start on Thursday. Per committee rules, the nomination can be held by Democrats for one week because it is the first time the nomination is on the agenda, said Graham, who hopes to have the nominee out of committee by Oct. 26 and then it’s up to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky, to set the floor schedule. “If they treat her as bad as they treated [Justice Brett Kavanaugh], it’s going to blow up in their face,” Graham said of Democrats on Fox News.

“If they continue this pattern of trying to demean this nominee, I think the American people will push back and push back hard.” Both Barrett and Trump acknowledged that her confirmation hearings could get ugly as Democrats attempt to block a vote until after the election. One Judiciary Committee member, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said he would not meet with Barrett, which is customary for committee members, in protest of Trump’s decision to rush ahead with the nomination with the election only 38 days away. “I refuse to treat this process as legitimate and will not meet with Judge Barrett,” Blumenthal said in a statement. Barrett said on Saturday that she has “no illusions that the road ahead of me will be easy, either for the short term or the long haul.”

Balding

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As seen through the eyes of a man?!

Supreme Court Nomination Is A Testament To The Values Of Feminism (Turley)

In her book, “In My Own Words,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote how feminism is a concept best captured in the song “Free to Be You and Me” by Marlo Thomas. That definition defined feminism as allowing women to decide their values without societal dictates or limits. This view sharply contrasts with some who think feminism is adhering to liberal orthodoxy. Ginsburg never believed feminism meant removing the “feet off our necks” by her brothers just to have them replaced by the feet of her sisters. Indeed, true feminism meant allowing women the freedom of choice to find their own voices and values in society. That is why this nomination of a Supreme Court justice is a testament not just to feminism but to Ginsburg.

The women on the short list of President Trump bear striking resemblance to her in their independence and clarity of thought. Most of them, like Ginsburg, balanced family obligations with their career ascensions. The difference is these women reached different conclusions on how the law is read and applied. Many do have legitimate objections for issues like abortion as inimical to the rights of women, but these women are part of the legacy of Ginsburg and her generation in an empowerment of women to reach their own conclusions. The nominee most like Ginsburg is Judge Amy Coney Barrett. They both finished law school at the top of their classes. Both went on to teach at leading law schools and both started their careers with an emphasis on procreational rights and constitutional interpretation. Deeply religious, both cited the role of faith in their careers and convictions.

Like Ginsburg, Barrett refused to yield to the choice of family over career. Barrett has raised seven children, including two adopted from Haiti, while rising to national recognition as a brilliant lawyer and jurist. Both women earned a reputation for civility and what Ginsburg described as showing us that “you can disagree without being disagreeable.”

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Two pieces from USA Today.

If Democrats Attack Her Over ‘People Of Praise’, They’ll Regret It (USAT)

All faiths are at least a little bit weird to those outside of them. Imagine telling someone unfamiliar with Catholicism, “Every chance I get, I eat some bread that I believe is the body of God’s only son, who was executed in Jerusalem under Tiberius.” Totally normal, right? So to all of my friends who think that the religious practice of Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, who is a member of a charismatic ecumenical community called the People of Praise, ought to bring out the bulldog in Kamala Harris and other Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee, I say dear God, no. First, you cannot fight bigotry with bigotry; religious intolerance is just as wrong as any other kind of othering. Indulging it won’t get us a more tolerant America.

And Senators, treating her like the kook that she is not is just what the president is counting on you to do. Unless you want to star in Trump campaign commercials that he’ll say prove Joe Biden is “against God,” don’t even think about it. Yes, women leaders in the People of Praise were until recently referred to as ‘handmaids’ — a biblical reference to Mary, the mother of Jesus. In the Gospel of Luke, when the angel tells her, “You will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall name him Jesus,” she responds, “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord. May it be done to me according to your word.” But the group was not the inspiration for Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel ‘The Handmaid’s Tale.’ “What the people in that book are going through is horrible,” says Joannah Clark, who runs a People of Praise school in Portland, Oregon and has known Barrett since college.

The group does not require a “loyalty oath” or arrange marriages or force women to keep having children. It puts a premium on intellectual life and values education for men, women and children. Its well regarded schools are attended by many non-members. It does have a view of marriage that I don’t share and you might not, either, but that St. Paul certainly did. (As the Church is subordinate to Christ,” says his letter to the Ephesians, “so wives should be subordinate to their husbands in everything.”) You know that favorite pro-choice rejoinder, ‘If you don’t like abortion, don’t have one?’ If deferring to your husband at home and speaking in tongues in prayer is not your brand of theological vodka, then don’t join the People of Praise, or any Pentecostal church in the world.

But don’t be the kind of hypocrite who embraces only those differences that line up with your own cultural views. Just as Biden is not coming for your guns or your suburbs, neither is he coming for your religious liberty. But could we please make sure Dianne Feinstein is aware, so she doesn’t repeat the folly of her 2017 “dogma lives loudly within you” gift to Republicans at Barrett’s confirmation hearing for her appointment to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit?

Kellyanne Conway on Barrett 7th CIrcuit vote

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Nicole Garnett is the John P. Murphy Foundation professor of law at University of Notre Dame.

“Yes, she is brilliant. And, yes, she is a principled, careful judge. But she also is one of the most generous people whom I have ever met.”

Amy Coney Barrett’s Intellect And Heart Are Unrivaled (USAT)

I first met Amy Coney at a Washington, D.C., coffee shop in the spring of 1998. A mutual friend had connected us because we were about to begin clerking together on the Supreme Court (me for Justice Clarence Thomas, her for Justice Antonin Scalia). I don’t remember the details, but I do remember that I walked away thinking I had just met a remarkable woman. We could not have known then that over the next 22 years, our lives would become completely intertwined: That, three years later, she would become my colleague at Notre Dame Law School, that she and her husband would move around the corner from us in South Bend, Indiana, and that we would raise our children together. We could not have known that, in a sense, we would grow up together — as lawyers, teachers, scholars, mothers, friends.

And we certainly could not have imagined that, 22 years later, she would be nominated to serve on the United States Supreme Court. But looking back, everything has changed, except Amy Coney Barrett. The very same qualities that struck me as remarkable on that spring afternoon are the qualities that make her an exceptional judge, award-winning teacher, generous colleague, loyal friend and loving mother. And the obvious pick to serve on the Supreme Court. She is brilliant, to be sure, but also humble, generous, loving, kind. She accepts each new challenge with grace and gives all she has to give (and sometimes it seems more) to all she is called to do. She will bring all those qualities to the Supreme Court, and our nation will be blessed by her years of service as Justice Barrett.

As Harvard Law School professor Noah Feldman, who clerked with us and disagrees with much of her judicial philosophy, recently observed, she stood out as one of the two finest legal minds among the almost 40 clerks. He concludes, “I’m going to be confident that Barrett is going to be a good justice, maybe even a great one — even if I disagree with her all the way.” [..] Yes, she is brilliant. And, yes, she is a principled, careful judge, admired legal scholar and amazing teacher. Her respect among her colleagues and students is reflected in the fact that she has been elected professor of the year three times by the law school’s graduating class and in letters of support for her nomination to the 7th Circuit, including ones signed by all of her full-time faculty colleagues at Notre Dame, all of her fellow Supreme Court clerks, hundreds of former students and dozens of prominent law professors from around the country.

But she also is one of the most generous people I have ever met. The Barrett home is a wellspring of hospitality. It is the kind of place where families gather to share life, where the kids are served hot dogs on a backyard picnic table while the parents are treated to Judge Barrett’s amazing crawfish etouffee. It is where she has prepared countless meals for families welcoming new babies or recovering from surgeries, comforted friends who know that they can always turn to her for support in times of crisis, and served as a sounding board for personal challenges both large (career advice) and small (potty-training advice).

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“..there has never been a more serious crime in American history…”

Betrayal, Infuriating Betrayal (Whitney)

Here’s your political puzzler for the day: Which of these two things poses a greater threat to the country:

1) An incompetent and boastful president who has no previous government experience and who is rash and impulsive in his dealings with the media, foreign leaders and his critics?

2) Or a political party that collaborates with senior-level officials in the Intel agencies, the FBI, the DOJ, the media, and former members of the White House to spy on the new administration with the intention of gathering damaging information that can be used to overthrow the elected government?

The answer is “2”, the greater threat to the country is a political party that engages in subversive activity aimed at toppling the government and seizing power. In fact, that’s the greatest danger that any country can face, an enemy from within. Foreign adversaries can be countered by diplomatic engagement and shoring up the nation’s military defenses, but traitors–who conduct their activities below the radar using a secret network of contacts and connections to inflict maximum damage on the government– are nearly unstoppable. What the Russiagate investigation shows, is that high-ranking members of the Democrat party participated in the type of activities that are described above, they were part of an illicit coup d’etat aimed at removing Donald Trump from office and rolling back the results of the 2016 elections.

It is a vast understatement to say that the operation was merely an attack on Donald Trump when, in fact, it was an attack on the system itself, a full-blown assault on the right of ordinary people to choose their own leaders. That’s what Russiagate is really all about; it was an attempt to torpedo democracy by invoking the flimsy and unverifiable claim that Trump was an agent of the Kremlin. None of this, of course, has been discussed in a public forum because those platforms are all privately-owned media that are linked to the people who executed the junta. But for those who followed events closely, and who know what actually happened, there has never been a more serious crime in American history.

Obama pressure

More text messages

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Moon of Alabama rips an Off Guardain piece to shreds. Good.

In Which We Debunk A Coividiot Pamphlet (MoA)

The next claim in the Off-Guardian nonsense: 3. An immense majority (95%) of fatal evolutions happen in old and frail individuals with premorbidities, with an average age of death at or above 80 years old. That claim is again an outright lie:Of the roughly 1.2 million American deaths that occurred between February 1 and June 17, almost 9% were due to coronavirus. The proportion of deaths due to coronavirus were about the same for each age group above 45 years. Below that, the proportion of deaths due to coronavirus fell dramatically.

The numbers in the second column of the table show that only about half of the total Covid-19 fatalities, not 95%, were “at or above 80 years old”. As for “premorbidities” (being alive is btw one). Hypertension and obesity are named as co-morbidities for Covid-19 cases. The CDC says that 42% of all U.S. inhabitants are obese while some 45% have hypertension. But today these people are alive and reasonably well. Most of them have still several decades of life before them. Would they get infected with SARS-CoV-2 and die, the virus, not their co-morbidities, would have caused their death. On to the next Off-Guardian blooper:

4. Antibody studies, cross immunization with other corona strains and the completion of the death toll curve in many countries are strong evidence that the human population is developing herd immunity against SARS-CoV-2. In this context, a severe “second wave” for SARS-CoV-2 is improbable. We may rather expect a new cold episode from it just like every year, but of regular or even weak intensity thanks to the gained herd immunity.

Antibody prevalence even in hard hit place like New York City is way below the 80% or so that would be needed for some kind of “herd immunity”. In the U.S. and Europe antibody prevalence is in total way less than 10%. The bay area for example has only some 2%. Is the U.S. ready to give 10 times more lives than the 266,000 who have already died of Covid-19 to achieve a potentially only temporary herd immunity?

Cross immunization with other corona viruses is a conjecture. We have so far no data that shows that there is cross immunity from other viruses that works against SARS-CoV-2. (Recent data points in the other direction. Children have an innate immune response to SARS-CoV-2 and it protects them well. Every adult has been infected with dozens of different viruses while growing up. We adults have developed and show an adaptive immune response to SARS-CoV-2. This seems to work less well than the children’s response. Instead of developing cross immunity through other infections our bodies seem to have learned something from previous infections that makes it more difficult to counter SARS-CoV-2.) The “improbable” second wave of Covid 19 is already developing in several European countries. Just take a look at France. And don’t worry. The rise in the still low death toll WILL follow the infection curve with a four weeks lag.

Read more …

Everything about testing is in question.

‘A One-Off Test Is A Folly’: The Truth Behind False Negative Covid Tests (HuPo)

When Sarah found herself suffering sudden bouts of breathlessness in May, she took herself to hospital. But after her Covid-19 swab test came back negative, doctors said she was probably anxious, and sent her home. Despite this, Sarah’s symptoms continued to worsen. A week later, she was rushed to hospital in an ambulance. Paramedics told her that based on her clinic observations, she should be in a coma. Then came more surprising news: She had tested positive for coronavirus. A doctor explained her first test had been a false negative – a result that comes up despite the patient having the virus, and possibly being contagious.

As a clinically vulnerable Covid-19 patient with a chronic illness, I have had frequent contact with hospitals and healthcare systems during this pandemic. I have also been told by doctors that the potential for false negative results is high, so I decided to find out if this was true. The answer, according to the experts I spoke to for this article, is a resounding yes. Sarah’s story – given to a patient safety charity under a pseudonym – is one that resonates with Dr Claudia Paoloni. Paoloni, president of the Hospital Consultants and Specialists Association, detailed another case in which a patient tested negative twice: once when she was first admitted to hospital and once later in her hospital stay. She finally tested positive on her third test – by which time she was on a ventilator in intensive care.

Paolini believes Covid-19 swab tests produce a troublingly high rate of false negative results, and the problem lies in the reliance on a single test. “To use as a one-off test in any capacity to exclude someone from having Covid-19 is a folly.” If you want to exclude someone from having the virus, Paoloni said, you must do multiple tests and collect multiple negative results. “If the test and tracing system is not working, which is the case here, transmission will continue unabated in the community.” Paoloni also warns this could get worse as the government tries to introduce rapid testing.

A study from Imperial College London published earlier in September put the sensitivity rate of rapid testing between 94% and 100%. That’s one in 20 people with Covid-19 who will almost definitely get a negative result. The current rate of false negatives in the UK was originally estimated at 30%, she explained. Things have improved since then, but it’s still around 8%, she said, which is almost two in 20. The most recent data published by the Office for National Statistics says the test’s sensitivity – which it says can tell us how likely it is to return a false-negative result, may be somewhere between 85% and 98%.

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Experiment.

DeSantis Drops All Florida COVID Restrictions, Promises No More Closures (JTN)

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis this week formally lifted all statewide COVID-19 restrictions in the Sunshine State, promising residents that his office would pursue no lockdowns as it moves forward in managing the coronavirus pandemic there. DeSantis’s announcement ended all restrictions on restaurants and bars; it also forbids local governments from closing businesses. Local authorities are further forbidden from imposing restaurant capacity limits below 50%. “We’re … saying in the state of Florida everybody has a right to work,” DeSantis said at a Friday press conference. Local authorities, he said, “can do reasonable regulations, but they can’t just say no.”


Additionally, local governments may not collect fines on pandemic-related regulations such as mask mandates. Private businesses will still be permitted to set their own capacity limits and mask rules under the state’s reopening. Democratic state Senator Linda Stewart criticized the move on Friday, saying she was “not terribly convinced that we’re ready for this right now” and claiming that the state “will find out in three weeks if we’re ready.” Coronavirus cases in Florida peaked in mid-July and have been declining ever since; daily deaths, meanwhile, have declined more slowly, though they appear to have peaked in early August.

Read more …

The Guardian produces smear and slander. FIle a complaint against them.

Guardian’s Deceit-Riddled New Statement Betrays Assange And Journalism (Cook)

A decade ago, remember, the newspaper worked closely in collaboration with Assange and Wikileaks to publish the Iraq and Afghan war diaries, which are now the grounds on which the US is basing its case to lock Assange behind bars in a super-max jail. My first criticism was that the paper had barely bothered to cover the hearing, even though it is the most concerted attack on press freedom in living memory. That position is unconscionably irresponsible, given its own role in publishing the war diaries. But sadly it is not inexplicable. In fact, it is all too easily explained by my second criticism. That criticism was chiefly levelled at two leading journalists at the Guardian, former investigations editor David Leigh and reporter Luke Harding, who together wrote a book in 2011 that was the earliest example of what would rapidly become a genre among a section of the liberal media elite, most especially at the Guardian, of vilifying Assange.

In my earlier post I set out Leigh and Harding’s well-known animosity towards Assange – the reason why one senior investigative journalist, Nicky Hager, told the Old Bailey courtroom the pair’s 2011 book was “not a reliable source”. That was, in part, because Assange had refused to let them write his official biography, a likely big moneymaker. The hostility had intensified and grown mutual when Assange discovered that behind his back they were writing an unauthorised biography while working alongside him. But the bad blood extended more generally to the Guardian, which, like Leigh and Harding, repeatedly betrayed confidences and manoeuvred against Wikileaks rather the cooperating with it. Assange was particularly incensed to discover that the paper had broken the terms of its written contract with Wikileaks by secretly sharing confidential documents with outsiders, including the New York Times.

Leigh and Harding’s book now lies at the heart of the US case for Assange’s extradition to the US on so-called “espionage” charges. The charges are based on Wikileaks’ publication of leaks provided by Chelsea Manning, then an army private, that revealed systematic war crimes committed by the US military. Lawyers for the US have mined from the Guardian book claims by Leigh that Assange was recklessly indifferent to the safety of US informants named in leaked files published by Wikileaks. Assange’s defence team have produced a raft of renowned journalists, and others who worked with Wikileaks, to counter Leigh’s claim and argue that this is actually an inversion of the truth. Assange was meticulous about redacting names in the documents. It was they – the journalists, including Leigh – who were pressuring Assange to publish without taking full precautions.

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Making a connection between COVID and climate change is contentious. And unnecessary.

Avoiding a Climate Lockdown (Mariana Mazzucato)

As COVID-19 spread earlier this year, governments introduced lockdowns in order to prevent a public-health emergency from spinning out of control. In the near future, the world may need to resort to lockdowns again – this time to tackle a climate emergency. Shifting Arctic ice, raging wildfires in western US states and elsewhere, and methane leaks in the North Sea are all warning signs that we are approaching a tipping point on climate change, when protecting the future of civilization will require dramatic interventions. Under a “climate lockdown,” governments would limit private-vehicle use, ban consumption of red meat, and impose extreme energy-saving measures, while fossil-fuel companies would have to stop drilling. To avoid such a scenario, we must overhaul our economic structures and do capitalism differently.

Many think of the climate crisis as distinct from the health and economic crises caused by the pandemic. But the three crises – and their solutions – are interconnected. COVID-19 is itself a consequence of environmental degradation: one recent study dubbed it “the disease of the Anthropocene.” Moreover, climate change will exacerbate the social and economic problems highlighted by the pandemic. These include governments’ diminishing capacity to address public-health crises, the private sector’s limited ability to withstand sustained economic disruption, and pervasive social inequality. These shortcomings reflect the distorted values underlying our priorities. For example, we demand the most from “essential workers” (including nurses, supermarket workers, and delivery drivers) while paying them the least. Without fundamental change, climate change will worsen such problems.

The climate crisis is also a public-health crisis. Global warming will cause drinking water to degrade and enable pollution-linked respiratory diseases to thrive. According to some projections, 3.5 billion people globally will live in unbearable heat by 2070. Addressing this triple crisis requires reorienting corporate governance, finance, policy, and energy systems toward a green economic transformation. To achieve this, three obstacles must be removed: business that is shareholder-driven instead of stakeholder-driven, finance that is used in inadequate and inappropriate ways, and government that is based on outdated economic thinking and faulty assumptions.

Read more …

 

 

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– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

 

Support the Automatic Earth in virustime.

 

Jul 132020
 


Berenice Abbott New York City at Night 1932

 

Florida Sets Record For Single-Day Covid19 Cases As Disney World Reopens (DL)
Who When Where: No Word On WHO Experts’ Coronavirus Trip To China (SCMP)
One In Three South Korean COVID19 Patients Improve With Remdesivir (R.)
Looming Evictions May Soon Make 28 Million Homeless In US (CNBC)
“Too Big To Fail” Banks face Their Worst Quarter Since The Financial Crisis (ZH)
Coronavirus Brings Record $1 Trillion Of New Global Corporate Debt In 2020 (R.)
Tesla Slashes Model Y SUV Price Four Months After Launch (R.)
Coronavirus Has Shown us How to Stop a Climate Disaster (BT)
American Collusion: Weaponizing Media, Big-Tech, & Government (ZH)
That Kind Of Memory Hole Is A Nightmare (Higgins)

 

 

The WHO says yesterday set a new world record. They’re two days behind Worldometer. But bad enough anyway. Florida is something else.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ben Hunt

Ben Hunt Fauci

 

 

“This is an American tragedy.”

Florida Sets Record For Single-Day Covid19 Cases As Disney World Reopens (DL)

Even as Disney World reopens and the Florida state government was being pushed to host in-person classes for the fall school semester, the Sunshine State is setting new records for COVID-19 cases. The Florida Department of Health reported 15,299 new coronavirus cases Sunday. That’s the highest total for any state since the pandemic started. Florida holds the dubious record for second-highest as well, coming in with 11, 434 new cases on July 4, per Johns Hopkins University. Florida’s test positivity rate is a whopping 19.60%, Johns Hopkins said.


Florida Rep. Donna Shalala said the virus is “out of control,” and said it’s likely a second economic shutdown looms. “It’s out of control across the state because our governor won’t even tell everybody to wear masks. At least in Miami-Dade county, everyone must wear a mask when they’re outside,” she told CNN Saturday night. “This is an American tragedy.” About 40 hospitals across Florida have no ICU beds available, according to state data.

Read more …

What should we expect from this? Water under the bridge.

Who When Where: No Word On WHO Experts’ Coronavirus Trip To China (SCMP)

A World Health Organisation advance team is in the Chinese capital this weekend but few other details have been released about a mission that could lay the groundwork for an investigation into the origins of the coronavirus pandemic. The WHO said last week that two experts – an animal health specialist and an epidemiologist – would start work on Saturday but by Sunday evening there was still no word on the name of the specialists, the schedule of the trip, and their agenda. Chinese authorities did not make a statement about the visitors on the weekend and the Chinese media did not report their arrival. And no Chinese institution, including the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, confirmed that it had or would confer with the WHO experts.


Associated Press reported that the two experts were in Beijing on Saturday and Sunday. Their mission is to work with Chinese health officials and scientists to prepare for a larger WHO-led international task force at an undisclosed date. The mission is widely seen as a way to bring more transparency and cooperation to the search for the animal origins of the virus, first identified in Wuhan in central China late last year. But the origins of the pandemic are mired in politics. Some senior members of the US administration have blamed China for the pandemic, including making unsupported claims that the virus could have emerged in a Wuhan laboratory. Chinese officials have pushed back, defending the country’s handling of the outbreak and saying the identification of the virus in China does not mean it originated there.

Read more …

This is an ad. It’s about the headline. Read the article and there’s nothing there: “More research was needed to determine if the improvement was attributable to the drug or other factors..”

One In Three South Korean COVID19 Patients Improve With Remdesivir (R.)

One in three South Korean patients seriously ill with COVID-19 showed an improvement in their condition after being given Gilead Sciences Inc’s (GILD.O) antiviral remdesivir, health authorities said. More research was needed to determine if the improvement was attributable to the drug or other factors such as patients’ immunity and other therapies, they said. Remdesivir has been at the forefront of the global battle against COVID-19 after the intravenously administered medicine helped shorten hospital recovery times in a U.S. clinical trial. Several countries including South Korea have added the drug to the list of treatment for the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. There is no approved vaccine for it.


In its latest update on the drug, Gilead said on Friday an analysis showed remdesivir helped reduce the risk of death in severely ill COVID-19 patients but cautioned that rigorous clinical trials were needed to confirm the benefit. The Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported on Saturday results from a first group of 27 patients given remdesivir in different hospitals. Nine of the patients showed an improvement in their condition, 15 showed no change, and three worsened, KCDC deputy director Kwon Jun-wook told a briefing. The result had yet to be compared with a control group and more analysis was needed to conclude remdesivir’s benefit, Kwon said.

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This is not a fantasy, it’s set to happen. The bottom is falling out.

Looming Evictions May Soon Make 28 Million Homeless In US (CNBC)

Emily Benfer is the chair of the American Bar Association’s Task Force Committee on Eviction and co-creator of the COVID-19 Housing Policy Scorecard with the Eviction Lab at Princeton University. CNBC: How does the eviction crisis brought on by the pandemic compare with the 2008 housing crisis? Emily Benfer: We have never seen this extent of eviction in such a truncated amount of time in our history. We can expect this to increase dramatically in the coming weeks and months, especially as the limited support and intervention measures that are in place start to expire. About 10 million people, over a period of years, were displaced from their homes following the foreclosure crisis in 2008. We’re looking at 20 million to 28 million people in this moment, between now and September, facing eviction.

CNBC: You study the intersection of housing and health. What will all these evictions mean for people’s health during the pandemic?

EB: Eviction negatively impacts the trajectory of an individual’s life, and it can do that in a permanent way. Studies have demonstrated that eviction causes increased mortality and causes respiratory distress, which in the Covid-19 pandemic can put people in even greater peril. It results in depression, suicides and other poor health outcomes. And the primary response to Covid-19 has been to shelter in place. If there’s an increase in homelessness [one economist estimates homelessness could rise by more than 40% this year], that could spread the virus.

CNBC: You’ve been keeping track of what states are doing to protect tenants, mostly through eviction moratoriums. How do you feel the efforts have fallen short?

EB: Some of the moratoriums are limited to different segments of the population, and in their duration. They were also not coupled with financial assistance to ensure that renters don’t accrue this backed-up debt and are stabilized enough to stay in their unit. Another issue is that in some states, landlords were allowed to go forward with a hearing on eviction, and even receive an order of eviction, and it was only forestalled at the execution stage. That means that there are a number of evictions that are just waiting for the sheriffs to execute. The moment the moratoriums lift, all of those families will be immediately put out. And right now, 29 states lack any state level moratorium against evictions.

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As millions of Americans will be evicted, the banks will be bailed out.

“Too Big To Fail” Banks face Their Worst Quarter Since The Financial Crisis (ZH)

U.S. banks could be setting up for their worst quarter in more than a decade as loan loss provisions and the pandemic are set to wreak havoc on bottom lines. Next week, many of the “too big to fail” banks are set to report earnings and are likely going to show that a drop in consumer spending and higher loan losses were not offset by better trading gains. Loan-loss provisions should reach their highest levels since the financial crisis, Barclay’s predicts. Kyle Sanders, an analyst at Edward Jones, told Bloomberg: “We’ve got a full three months of the pandemic coming through the numbers now. The first quarter was rough, but it really only reflected a couple of weeks in March.”

Loan losses are expected to rise as spiking unemployment has left many unable to service, or pay back, their loans. New loans have also dried up as banks tighten their belts. Service charges and credit card fees are also likely going to fall, as large portions of the American economy were shut down for months, suffocating economic activity. And while many banking stocks have recovered somewhat, the S&P 500 Financials index is still down 26% since last December. Wells Fargo alone is down 55% this year and is expected to announce a dividend cut. Bloomberg has predicted that despite increasing provisions in the first quarter of the year, banks are still going to have their worst quarter in a decade when they report this upcoming week.


Wells Fargo Chief Financial Officer John Shrewsberry commented last month that the bank would likely set aside more for bad loans in Q2 than the $4 billion it set aside in Q1. Banks will be looking to trading and underwriting to help try and salvage the quarter. Stock and bond trading was likely up about 31% in Q2 according to estimates. JP Morgan is expected to post the largest increase of about 50%. Citigroup Inc.’s Richard Zogheb, global head of the debt capital-markets division, said he thinks there will be record volumes in trading for the quarter. This stands at odds with previous cyclical downturns, where investment banking and trading revenue would fall as much as 30%.

Read more …

Free money. Much of it will also be bailed out, so why worry?

Coronavirus Brings Record $1 Trillion Of New Global Corporate Debt In 2020 (R.)

Companies around the world will take on as much as $1 trillion of new debt in 2020, as they try to shore up their finances against the coronavirus, a new study of 900 top firms has estimated. The unprecedented increase will see total global corporate debt jump by 12% to around $9.3 trillion, adding to years of accumulation that has left the world’s most indebted firms owing as much as many medium-sized countries. Last year also saw a sharp 8% rise, driven by mergers and acquisitions, and by firms borrowing to fund share buybacks and dividends. But this year’s jump will be for an entirely different reason – preservation as the virus saps profits. “COVID has changed everything,” said Seth Meyer, a portfolio manager at Janus Henderson, the firm that compiled the analysis for a new corporate debt index.


“Now it is about conserving capital and building a fortified balance sheet”. Companies tapped bond markets for $384 billion between January and May, and Meyer estimates that recent weeks have set a new record for debt issuance from riskier “high yield” firms with lower credit ratings. Lending markets had slammed shut for all but the most trusted firms in March, but have been opened up wide again by emergency corporate debt buying programmes from central banks like the U.S. Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank and Bank of Japan. Companies included in the new debt index already owe almost 40% more than they did in 2014, and growth in debt has comfortably outstripped growth in profits.

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“..the first time in the company’s 17-year history that one of its new vehicles turned a profit in its first quarter..”

Tesla Slashes Model Y SUV Price Four Months After Launch (R.)

Tesla cut the price of its sport utility vehicle Model Y by $3,000, just four months after its launch, as the U.S. electric carmaker seeks to maintain sales momentum in the COVID-19 pandemic. The reduction follows price cuts in May on Tesla’s Model 3, Model X and Model S. The company headed by Elon Musk this month posted a smaller-than-expected fall in car deliveries in the second quarter, resilient results despite the pandemic that hit the global auto industry. The Model Y now starts at $49,990, down nearly 6% from its previous price of $52,990, according to the carmaker’s website.


Tesla did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment. The company started deliveries of the Model Y in March, promising a much-awaited crossover that will face competition from European carmakers like Volkswagen rolling out their own electric rivals. In April, Tesla had said the Model Y was already profitable, marking the first time in the company’s 17-year history that one of its new vehicles turned a profit in its first quarter.

Read more …

So we’re going to stop the climate disaster through sheer incompetence?

Sorry, but these sort of things bring out the skeptic in me like little else. I get that they mean well, but…

Let’s begin with scrapping terms like zero carbon, zero emissions and green energy. They are misleading nonsense.

“..for the first time ever, a group of intellectuals associated with Extinction Rebellion (XR) lay out a post-COVID-19 vision for the policies that could deal with the multiple crises we now face — and how a renewal of democracy is essential to save us from future health and ecological disasters. This statement is published exclusively in Byline Times by the XR ‘Brains Trust’, a group of thinkers including David Graeber, Illona Otto, Rupert Read, Jason Hickel, Steve Keen, Steve Melia, Henry Muss, George Barda and Rebecca Bowers.

Coronavirus Has Shown us How to Stop a Climate Disaster (BT)

According to economic textbooks, the role of finance is to allocate economic resources towards best meeting future needs. In the process, we are always told, this guarantees freedom, happiness, and well-being. Global financial markets are, therefore, a kind of superior, planetary substitute for state systems of central planning. But if so, it’s hard to imagine how they could do a more disastrous job, careering from crisis to crisis, requiring endless bailouts, while concentrating most of the world’s wealth in a tiny number of hands, wiping out species after species, and, immanently, rendering large swathes of the planet uninhabitable.

The only plausible explanation is that the economic textbooks are wrong. Global financial markets aren’t really ways of directing resources towards future benefit. They aren’t even really markets. They are power arrangements, which mainly operate by colluding with Governments to extract rents, largely, by creating public and private debt. In these areas, the public and private sector become so closely entwined that it’s difficult to even distinguish them. For instance, the crisis has made clear that Governments with their own currencies are perfectly capable of creating money at will, simply by getting the Central Bank to buy bonds from the Treasury. This can either be done directly, or via the contrivance of selling them first to the finance sector and then buying them back.

So, it follows, the same resources now devoted to keeping destructive industries afloat could simply be redirected to do the opposite. There is no reason not to allow fossil fuel, air travel, and much of current construction to simply collapse for lack of subsidy; redirecting the money instead to green projects, retraining, and a basic citizen’s income. The only way to guarantee humans are protected from future catastrophe then is to ensure a dramatic shift of power relations. Do we expect Governments to just go right ahead and implement this? Obviously not.

Governments are ultimately answerable to their citizens, and one thing citizens clearly don’t want, is to go back to how things were before. A recent survey found only 9% of British citizens want to return to life as it was pre-COVID-19. We can be certain there will never again be such reliance on air travel or commuting. And it’s unlikely citizens will ever again blindly accept ‘there’s just no money’ as an argument for failing to invest or to help the poor. The magic money tree was found, after all, this April.

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“..de facto gatekeepers of information..”

American Collusion: Weaponizing Media, Big-Tech, & Government (ZH)

In late October 2016, Jason Sullivan – then chief Twitter strategist for Roger Stone, used a data-mining tool he created, Power10, to peer into the public sentiment of the election. Outgunning the antiquated polling surveys that got it so wrong, Sullivan witnessed candidate Hilary Clinton catch up to Trump two weeks before the election in real time. He then saw, a few days later, how FBI Director James Comey gave Clinton a temporary boost that helped her overtake Trump when he announced the bureau would reopen the investigation into her email scandal. Since that time, Jason Sullivan hasn’t told his story about what happened behind the scenes leading to the biggest presidential upset election in more than a century. He wasn’t able to.

That’s because the FBI swept Sullivan up in a dawn raid in early 2018, after intimidating other members of his family. The FBI hauled him off to testify under oath of perjury before the Mueller team. Surviving the FBI interrogation, Jason Sullivan retreated from the social media spotlight. That was until this June when he saw the establishment’s coordinated effort to tilt the 2020 election against President Trump, again. The COVID-19 outbreak and subsequent lockdowns gave blue states cover for an all mail-in paper election. The Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Antifa protests, looting and riots further shut down cities across the United States. Some posed the theory that funds donated to BLM flow through ActBlue, another political front company, and into the DNC.

The biggest lever in tilting the election this year, however, emerges with the collusion between the mainstream media and the tech giants as de facto gatekeepers of information. They wield tremendous power to determine what can and cannot be said, seen, shared and posted. They include Twitter, Facebook, Google and YouTube, among others. All this boils down to one objective: Censorship. Surviving the Mueller interrogation, Sullivan developed a strong opinion on both censorship and what transpired during the last presidential election. “On November 8th, 2016, all the laws of gravity were completely defied, and the legitimacy of every last one of the traditional political polls were utterly destroyed and proven beyond a shadow of a doubt to be completely inaccurate in what went down as the single biggest political upset in modern-day history,” Sullivan said.

“The DNC, Hilary Clinton, the Obama administration, all the Democrats, all the leading newspapers and publications, the establishment Republicans and the RINOs were ALL completely caught flat-footed! If any one of the traditional polls were remotely accurate, candidate Trump did not stand a snowball’s chance in hell of winning the presidential election.” Sullivan concluded his first salvo, stating, “There is no one today who will argue that Donald Trump won the presidency because of social media … not even President Trump. But social media is what allowed candidate Donald Trump to completely circumvent the mainstream media and get his message out directly to the people.”

On Twitter shadow-banning, Sullivan observed the “systemized censorship that if Twitter staff members didn’t like a user’s tweet, they would zap the user’s account, for a period of time. Meaning, everything the user would post would not show up on any of his followers news feeds. It’s like getting hit with a digital stun gun.”

Read more …

Orange Man Bad is a profit machine for left and right.

That Kind Of Memory Hole Is A Nightmare (Higgins)

Liberals are losing their minds over the Lincoln Project, a political action committee made up of a coalition of Republican strategists and admen who raised $16.8 million this past quarter to continue their mission of making commercials and posts aimed at upsetting Donald Trump. The group has been regularly praised for its “fearlessness” and the “powerful” content of its ads, liberals say, deeming the anti-Trump commercials “MUST WATCH” because “they are driving him crazy.”

A recent example used the coronavirus pandemic to make the case that Trump is an existential threat to the country. “If we have another four years of this, will there even be (big dramatic pause) an America?” asks a passably Ronald Reagan-imitating voice actor as somber music plays in the background in the punny “Mourning in America”-titled ad that came out this week. It was celebrated by Politico’s Joanna Weiss as a “masterful nugget of compact filmmaking.” Unsurprisingly for a group of former aides to Republican campaigns and party attachés who have run in the same circles for decades, the Lincoln Project is made up of exactly the kind of people who liberals profess to loathe: a collection of right-wing ghouls dominated by angry white men with bigoted, racist views that they’ve seldom been shy about sharing.

The group is reportedly little more than a slush fund for its members. A study on the Lincoln Project from the Center for Responsive Politics in May found the group’s finances suspect, at best, and that the organization was acting as a funnel for what The Atlantic called the coalition’s “motley crew” of leadership by directing the PAC’s cash to the interests and businesses of its directors and staff. “The Lincoln Project reported spending nearly $1.4 million through March,” the Center explained. “Almost all of that money went to the group’s board members and firms run by them.”

The Lincoln Project’s Team is led by eight founders and ten senior advisors, but the group’s core four is made up of George Conway, Steve Schmidt, John Weaver, and Rick Wilson. The quartet self-importantly announced the formation of their PAC in a tedious opinion piece for the New York Times last December, claiming that Trump represents some great departure from American conservatism (beyond saying the quiet part loud) and concluded the piece by likening their consultancy-trough-feeding and make-work organization to the Union forces in the Civil War.

Read more …

 

 

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The man’s making a very good point.

 

 

Support the Automatic Earth in virustime.

 

Jul 032020
 


Theodor Horydczak Washington Monument 1933 (soon to be renamed)

 

US Economic Reboot Menaced By Bug In The System (R.)
Florida Shatters Records With Over 10,000 New COVID19 Cases In Single Day (R.)
China Didn’t Alert WHO To Coronavirus Outbreak — The Internet Did (DC)
House Dems, Liz Cheney Restrict Trump’s Planned Troops Withdrawal (Greenwald)
Gilead Is Profiteering Off A COVID Drug We Already Paid For (Sirota)
Ghislaine Maxwell, Longtime Jeffrey Epstein Associate, Arrested (NYP)
Virginia Giuffre, Alan Dershowitz Both Lose In New Court Ruling (NYPost)
The Strategies of Dementia Politics (NR)
FedEx Asks Washington Redskins To Change The Team’s Name (NBC)

 

 

It’s Julian Assange’s birthday today. Light a candle.

 

 

Again, both the world and the US set new highs.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How Fauci shot his credibility:

 

 

Is a virus a bug?

US Economic Reboot Menaced By Bug In The System (R.)

Like a computer suffering from a pesky virus, the U.S. economy has been shut off and turned back on. This reboot seems to be working. The economy added almost 5 million jobs in June, on top of the roughly 3 million added in May, bringing the unemployment rate down over two percentage points to 11.1%. But as frustrated tech users know, short-term fixes are usually just that. Beyond the decent headline numbers, the labor force participation rate also increased to 61.5%, and around two-fifths of the job gains were in the hard-hit leisure and hospitality sector. Also, the Bureau of Labor Statistics actually revised the net jobs added over the previous two months upwards to 90,000.

But the root source of the economic woes – Covid-19 infections and deaths – is also moving northward. The U.S. reported almost 50,000 new cases on Wednesday, the fifth daily record in a little over a week, according to the New York Times. Texas hit a whopping 8,000 new daily cases. What these relatively decent jobs numbers may actually show is an economy that reopened too quickly. In fact, recent JPMorgan data from around 30 million of its credit- and debit-card holders shows that increased spending in restaurants appeared to be correlated with a rise in new infections three weeks later.

So the fragile recovery could easily crash – or at the very least, freeze. The virus spikes are prompting states and cities to stall or reverse reopenings. Texas has closed bars and limited restaurant occupancy. California shut down bars and indoor dining in 19 counties. And even New York City, which has dramatically reduced infections, decided on Wednesday to delay bringing back indoor dining at restaurants, which had been slated to restart next week.

Ultimately, it’ll be impossible to assess the depth of the lasting economic damage until reopening is mostly complete. In the topsy-turvy world of 2020, jobs numbers are not the best way to predict how the economy will perform. Until the bug is removed from the system, or brought under control, medical statistics will provide perhaps the most important information. With almost 2.7 million confirmed Covid-19 cases and 128,000 deaths, and rising, these numbers aren’t looking good.

Read more …

Time for a holiday…

Florida Shatters Records With Over 10,000 New COVID19 Cases In Single Day (R.)

Florida shattered records on Thursday when it reported over 10,000 new coronavirus cases, the biggest one-day increase in the state since the pandemic started, according to a Reuters tally. Outbreaks in Texas, California, Florida and Arizona have helped the United States break records and send cases rising at rates not seen since April. In June, Florida infections rose by 168% or over 95,000 new cases. The percent of tests coming back positive has skyrocketed to 15% from 4% at the end of May. Florida, with 21 million residents, has reported more new daily coronavirus cases than any European country had at the height of their outbreaks.


To contain the outbreak, Florida has closed bars and some beaches but the governor has resisted requiring masks statewide in public or reimposing a lockdown. Only one other state has reported more than 10,000 new cases in a single day. New York recorded 12,847 new infections on April 10, three weeks after the state implemented a strict lockdown that closed most businesses. While the state has relaxed many measures, it requires masks in public and mandates anyone arriving from 16 other U.S. states with high infections self-quarantine for two weeks. Once the epicenter of the U.S. epidemic, New York saw cases rise by about 6% in June – the lowest rate in the entire country.

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Let’s see how this plays out.

China Didn’t Alert WHO To Coronavirus Outbreak — The Internet Did (DC)

China didn’t alert the World Health Organization (WHO) to the coronavirus outbreak, a new timeline released by the WHO shows. China’s propaganda machine has claimed that China quickly reported the viral outbreak to the WHO, a claim that the WHO’s initial timeline supported. But the WHO found out about the outbreak from the internet, not from Chinese officials contacting them, according to the new timeline. The updated timeline, which was released June 29, says the WHO “picked up a media statement by the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission from their website” and also picked up a report on an American website, though it doesn’t say in what order those two events occurred.

The WHO doesn’t link to the Wuhan health commission’s media statement that it says tipped the organization off to the outbreak. Rep. Michael McCaul, the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, expressed skepticism that the statement even exists. “Even if the Commission posted something on their website – which we have seen no proof they have – the CCP still did not report the outbreak to the WHO as required by the International Health Regulations,” McCaul said in a statement to the Daily Caller News Foundation. “As the updated WHO timeline clearly states, WHO staff ‘picked up a media statement…from their website’ – it was not sent to them by any officials in China,” the Texas Republican continued.

“I have repeatedly requested information from the WHO about what they knew and when they knew it, and I would welcome any clarity from them on this. But, so far, they have refused to answer any of those requests,” McCaul added. Dr. Michael Ryan, a top WHO official, previously said in an April 20 news conference that the American website, ProMED, gave the WHO its first indication of the coronavirus outbreak. “On 31st December information on our epidemic intelligence from open-source platform partners, PRO-MED, was received indicating a signal of a cluster of pneumonia cases in China. That was from open sources from Wuhan,” Ryan said.

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As I was saying yesterday. How did we ever come to see such acts as normal? I have no doubt that a vast a majority of Americans want to bring the troops home.

House Dems, Liz Cheney Restrict Trump’s Planned Troops Withdrawal (Greenwald)

Last night, the House Armed Services Committee voted overwhelmingly in favor of an amendment — jointly sponsored by Democratic Congressman Jason Crow of Colorado and Congresswoman Cheney of Wyoming — prohibiting the expenditure of monies to reduce the number of U.S. troops deployed in Afghanistan below 8,000 without a series of conditions first being met. The imposed conditions are by no means trivial: for these troop reductions from Afghanistan to be allowed, the Defense Department must be able to certify, among other things, that leaving Afghanistan “will not increase the risk for the expansion of existing or formation of new terrorist safe havens inside Afghanistan” and “will not compromise or otherwise negatively affect the ongoing United States counter terrorism mission against the Islamic State, al Qaeda, and associated forces.”

The Crow/Cheney amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) last night passed by a vote of 45-11. The NDAA was then unanimously approved by the Committee by a vote of 56-0. It authorizes $740.5 billion in military spending — roughly three times more than the world’s second-highest spender, China. President Trump throughout the year has insisted that the Pentagon present plans for withdrawing all troops from Afghanistan prior to the end of 2020. Last week, reports indicated that “the Trump administration is close to finalizing a decision to withdraw more than 4,000 troops from Afghanistan by the fall.” Trump’s plan “would reduce the number of troops from 8,600 to 4,500 and would be the lowest number since the very earliest days of the war in Afghanistan, which began in 2001.”

In February, Trump announced an agreement with the Taliban to end the war completely. Shortly after those White House withdrawal plans were reported, anonymous intelligence officials leaked a series of claims to the New York Times regarding “bounties” allegedly being paid by Russia to Taliban fighters to kill U.S. troops. Those leaks emboldened opposition to troop withdrawal from Afghanistan on the ground that it would be capitulating to Russian treachery. It was that New York Times leak that Liz Cheney, along with GOP Congressman Mac Thornberry, cited in a joint statement on Monday to suggest troop withdrawal would be precipitous:

“After today’s briefing with senior White House officials, we remain concerned about Russian activity in Afghanistan, including reports that they have targeted U.S. forces. It has been clear for some time that Russia does not wish us well in Afghanistan. We believe it is important to vigorously pursue any information related to Russia or any other country targeting our forces. Congress has no more important obligation than providing for the security of our nation and ensuring our forces have the resources they need. We anticipate further briefings on this issue in the coming days.”

[..] The NDAA that was approved last night by the Committee also imposed restrictions on Trump’s plan to withdraw troops from Germany. Trump’s plan called for the removal of roughly 9,500 troops from German soil, reducing the number of U.S. troops in this extremely prosperous and rich European nation from 34,500 to 25,000. But by an overwhelming vote of 49-7, the Armed Service Committee approved an amendment to the NDAA that “bans the administration from lowering troop levels below current levels until 180 days after Pentagon leaders present a plan to Congress and certify it will not harm U.S. or allied interests.”

Read more …

Never let a crisis go to waste.

Gilead Is Profiteering Off A COVID Drug We Already Paid For (Sirota)

This is a story of cause and effect — a tale of repeated and calculated public policy decisions that have now led to a predictable outcome. This story begins 25 years ago, when the Clinton administration rescinded a rule that required pharmaceutical companies to charge Americans reasonable prices for medicines developed at government expense. Some progressive lawmakers tried to reinstate the rule, but Republicans and Democrats joined together to halt those initiatives. In the ensuing years, the Obama administration refused Democratic lawmakers’ demand to invoke existing federal laws to force down the price of critical medicines.


Meanwhile, the GOP also blocked legislation to let Medicare use its purchasing power to negotiate lower prices for prescription drugs All of that reflected the lobbying, campaign contributions and indomitable bipartisan power of the pharmaceutical industry in Washington. And it led to a result that this newsletter has been warning about, as Gilead just announced that it will charge privately insured Americans more than $3,000 each for a 5-day COVID treatment that was developed with financial support from the government. That’s a $3,000 price tag for a government-sponsored drug treatment that experts say the company could offer at $10 and still make a profit.

Read more …

Wonder what happened to make it happen at this particular time. She seemed safe holed up in Paris.

Bookmakers are now taking your bets on her suicide.

Ghislaine Maxwell, Longtime Jeffrey Epstein Associate, Arrested (NYP)

Longtime Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell was arrested Thursday on a six-count indictment charging her with grooming young girls for sex. The British socialite, 58, was arrested by the FBI in New Hampshire around 8:30 a.m., authorities said. The just-unsealed indictment charges stem from Maxwell’s role “in the sexual exploitation and abuse of multiple minor girls by Jeffrey Epstein” as early as 1994, court papers say. “The victims were as young as 14 years old when they were groomed and abused by Maxwell and Epstein, both of whom knew that certain victims were in fact under the age of 18,” the indictment says.


She is specifically accused of grooming three underage victims for sex with Epstein in places including his Upper East Side townhouse, Florida, New Mexico and London. Maxwell is charged with six counts — conspiracy to entice minors to travel to engage in illegal sex acts, enticement of a minor to travel to engage in illegal sex acts, conspiracy to transport minors with intent to engage in criminal sexual activity, transportation of a minor with intent to engage in criminal sexual activity and two counts of perjury. Prosecutors also accuse Maxwell — a one-time girlfriend of Epstein’s — of repeatedly lying about her involvement in the financier’s sex trafficking ring during a 2016 deposition.

Read more …

From Wednesday, before Ghislaine was arrested. I’m thinking there is probably a connection, but I don’t know which.

There’s a curious line in here:

“The 13-page ruling said Cooper & Kirk “has not, from what the Court can tell, been actively working on the case.”

She has to destroy all the evidence because her lawyers were not working? What?

Virginia Giuffre, Alan Dershowitz Both Lose In New Court Ruling (NYPost)

Attorneys for alleged Jeffrey Epstein “sex slave” Virginia Roberts Giuffre were ordered Wednesday to destroy evidence from her case against Ghislaine Maxwell — as lawyer Alan Dershowitz was also denied access to the potentially explosive information. Manhattan federal Judge Loretta Preska said she was “troubled” to learn during oral arguments last week that Giuffre’s lawyers, from the firm of Cooper & Kirk, had been given sealed records from her since-settled suit against Maxwell, who Giuffre claims recruited her to have sex with Epstein and his pals while she was underage.

The other men allegedly include Dershowitz, whom Giuffre is suing for defamation over his public denials of her accusations, including calling her a “certified, complete, total liar,” and who is counter-suing Giuffre for causing “serious harm … to his reputation, his business and his health.” “As a practical matter, the Court would be surprised — shocked, even — if Cooper & Kirk was not in some sense ‘using’ the Maxwell discovery in its representation of Ms. Giuffre in her action against Mr. Dershowitz,” the judge wrote.

Preska also rejected claims by Giuffre’s lawyers that they were entitled to the evidence, obtained from her former attorneys at Boies Schiller Flexner, because they’d been hired to represent her in the Maxwell case. The 13-page ruling said Cooper & Kirk “has not, from what the Court can tell, been actively working on the case.” Preska directed the Cooper & Kirk lawyers to destroy the evidence, along with “any material, including work product, derived from” it, and to submit an affidavit afterward.

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I know I’m not supposed to quote right wing media, but this is just too funny. And it raises a valid point: they can’t keep Biden hidden from view forever, and now when he does come out, he’ll be nervous.

The Strategies of Dementia Politics (NR)

Stoke chaos, obstruct economic recovery, and hide Biden in the basement till Election Day.

Joe Biden is tragically suffering a mental eclipse and sliding away at a geometric rate. Understandably, his handlers have kept him out of sight. He stays off the campaign trail on the pretext of the virus and his age-related susceptibility to COVID-19 morbidity. I say “pretext” without apology. Quarantine should not have otherwise stopped Biden over the past three months from doing daily interviews, speeches, and meetings. But each occasion, however scripted, rehearsed, and canned, would only have offered further daily proof that Biden is cognitively unable to be president or indeed to hold any office. Often Biden cannot finish a sentence. Names are vague eddies in his mind’s river of forgetfulness.

He is in a far more dire mental state than a physically failing FDR was in his 1944 campaign for a fourth term. The earlier career of a healthy Biden illustrates that he was not especially sharp even when in control of most of his faculties. We recall the former sane/nutty Biden of Neal Kinnock plagiarism, his “put y’all in chains” demagoguery, the studied racism of Biden’s riffs about a “clean” and well-spoken Obama, and the sane/insane Corn Pop stories. All are the trademark of a once fool Joe Biden, who was at least alert when compared with his current catalepsy. If Donald Trump can be ungrammatical, Biden is agrammatical — he simply streams together half-thoughts without syntax and then abandons the sentence entirely.

If Trump repeats vocabulary, Biden increasingly searches for words, any noun, whatever its irrelevance to the point he is making. Biden seems to suffer dyscognitive seizures, in which for moments he has no idea what he is doing or saying or where he is — a tragic, nearly epileptic condition. In scary episodes, the pale, scaly, and frozen visage of Biden appears almost reptilian, like a lizard freezing and remaining stationary as it struggles to process signals of perceived danger. Inserting memorized answers into rehearsed questions, as if the entire con was spontaneous, only reveals how his once episodic dementia has become chronic as he loses his prompt and place. It was understandable that his handlers saw opportunity in secluding Biden during Trump’s tweeting, alongside the contagion, the lockdown, the recession, and the rioting that in voters’ minds had equated fear of chaos with the culpability of the current commander in chief.

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Redskins was always a problem. But while you’re toppling Washington statues, you want to keep his name linked to the team, the city? Can anyone explain the logic?

FedEx Asks Washington Redskins To Change The Team’s Name (NBC)

FedEx has asked the Washington Redskins to officially change their name, long condemned as an anti-Indigenous slur. The shipping company has communicated to the team a request that it change its name, FedEx confirmed Thursday in a statement to NBC News. FedEx owns the naming rights to the Maryland field where the team plays, and its chief executive, Fred Smith, owns a minority stake in the team. FedEx’s request comes a day after Adweek reported that 87 investment firms and shareholders worth $620 billion sent a letter urging FedEx, Nike and PepsiCo to stop doing business with the team until the name is changed.


In 2017, the Supreme Court struck down part of a law that bans offensive trademarks, which helped the team get the Redskins trademark back in 2018. The Trademark Trial and Appeal Board had canceled the registration as offensive to American Indians. [..] Mayor Muriel Bowser said last month on Washington radio station WTEM that the name has been an obstacle in getting the city its own stadium. “I think it’s past time for the team to deal with what offends so many people,” Bowser said. “And this is a great franchise with a great history that’s beloved in Washington, and it deserves a name that reflects the affection that we’ve built for the team.” [..] Dan Snyder, the team’s majority owner, told USA Today in 2013 that he would “never change the name.” “It’s that simple. NEVER — you can use caps,” he said.

Read more …

 

 

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Mar 292020
 


Joseph Mallord William Turner The Fifth Plague of Egypt 1800

 

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m under the impression that President Trump yesterday wanted to quarantine New York City but let himself get talked out of that by, among others, NY Governor Andrew Cuomo. Cuomo went as far as calling such a measure not merely “un-American”, he said it would be “preposterous” and “anti-American”.

Obviously, Cuomo is not just of the belief, like most Americans, that a country with less than 5% of the world population is really special and superior, but also that a city with less than 4% of that country’s population is even more special than the rest. All pigs are equal, but…

There doesn’t appear to be another explanation for labeling attempts to keep New Yorkers from spreading the coronavirus around the entire country “anti-American”. Still, it would be anti-New York at best, and probably not that either. After Wuhan, China and Lombardy, Italy, New York City has become the third consecutive epicenter for the virus. Cuomo is well aware of this.

Still, he pontificates: “Then we would be Wuhan, China, and that wouldn’t make any sense..” Actually,. it would. Just look at the numbers. But: “..this would cause the stock market to crash in a way that would make it impossible for the US economy to “recover for months, if not years”.

This is possible. But that’s what Wuhan and Milan also experience(d). No stock markets there, true, but both the Italian and Chinese markets have been hit hard nonetheless. In the end it’s a trade-off. You let people die while trying to prop up markets, or you put people first. Cuomo made his choice.

Trump Backs Away From New York Quarantine

Speaking to reporters earlier on Saturday about the situation in New York, Mr Trump said: “We’d like to see [it] quarantined because it’s a hotspot… I’m thinking about that.” He said it would be aimed at slowing the spread of the virus to other parts of the US. “They’re having problems down in Florida. A lot of New Yorkers are going down. We don’t want that,” he said. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo responded by saying that quarantining the state of New York would be “preposterous” and “anti-American”.

“If you said we were geographically restricted from leaving, that would be a lockdown.” He said New York had already implemented “quarantine” measures, such as banning major gatherings and ordering people to remain at home, but that he would oppose any “lockdown” efforts. “Then we would be Wuhan, China, and that wouldn’t make any sense,” he told CNN, adding that this would cause the stock market to crash in a way that would make it impossible for the US economy to “recover for months, if not years”.

“You would paralyse the financial sector,” he said. He added later: “I don’t know how that can be legally enforceable. And from a medical point of view, I don’t know what you would be accomplishing. “But I can tell you, I don’t even like the sound of it.” Mr Cuomo also said he would sue nearby Rhode Island if the authorities there continued targeting New Yorkers and threatening to punish them for failing to quarantine.

And of course Trump made his choice, too, no two ways about it. He’s as close to literally fiddling while Rome burns as you can get in the 21st century. But when he’s trying to limit the damage with a quarantine, the folks who criticize him hardest for not doing enough, protest the loudest.

The idea that it is Trump who killed off the US health care system is tempting for media and politics alike, but it is utter nonsense. Even Fareed Zakaria agrees with me on that one just now on CNN, and that’s so rare I can’t help taking note.

At the very latest starting with Reagan, the idea has been that government is America’s enemy. And now the country needs its government, which is full of people who agree with Reagan’s ideas. So no, this is not going to go well

It’ll be something to behold what happens going forward, with 150,000 Americans infected today, moving towards 1 million by next weekend. Blame it all on Trump? Well, they’ll try. Here’s a little map of flight movements dated March 28, maybe that gives you an idea of how this disease pandemic is spread stateside:

https://twitter.com/flightradar24/status/1244003511098134529

Just about every country has stalled just about any movement of planes, but not the US. And if it’s up to Cuomo, that’s not going to happen either. Not being able to spread the disease is “anti-American”, after all. Sounds like Cuomo should agree with Trump who says: “They’re having problems down in Florida. A lot of New Yorkers are going down. We don’t want that..” Cuomo apparently does not agree.

 

A letter originating from the Henry Ford Health System was published (leaked?) online over the past week that perhaps provides a better definition/description of what is “anti-American” than a NYC quarantine. You be the judge. This is the best version I could find, it was published on Scribd, but later removed (wonder why). Pray tell: is publishing the letter anti-American, or is removing it? It’s still obvious enough.

 

 

The letter was sent to multiple hospitals and deals with the situation that would ensue if and when the health system become overwhelmed, something that’s hardly hypothetical anymore. It describes the practice of “triage” in the world’s richest nation: doctors removing patients who don’t improve fast enough, from equipment such as ventilators, and giving them painkillers to soothe their way into a certain and imminent death. “The other Cuomo” explains in this video:

 

 

But New Yorkers should still be allowed to fly -or drive- to Michigan, right? See, maybe that’s even better. C’mon Manhattanites, drive to Detroit. Support the US automobile industry, they’re having such a hard time.

Meanwhile, hundreds of doctors and nurses have already been infected, as have similar numbers of policemen- and women, and thousands more of each will follow. But that’s all perfectly pro-American.

 

PS: the funniest thing in all this is perhaps that normally Trump would agree with Governor Cuomo’s “exceptionalism” ideas, for both America and New York, but he no longer can, he has a tsunami coming straight at him. Still, doesn’t that mean that maybe Cuomo should drop those silly notions too?

 

 

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Mar 292020
 


Dorothea Lange Kern County, California 1938

 

Trump Backs Off Threat Of Coronavirus Quarantine For NYC Area (NYP)
Florida Coronavirus Cases Are Growing Fast. Here’s What That Means. (TBT)
Rhode Island Door Knocks in Search of Fleeing New Yorkers (AP)
700 N.J. Police Officers Have Tested Positive For Coronavirus (NJ.com)
More Than 500 Members Of The NYPD Have Coronavirus (NYP)
Italy PM Adopts New Measures To Help Coronavirus-Hit Economy (R.)
Home Confinement In France Extended To April 15 (SA)
UK Coronavirus Death Toll Under 20,000 Would Be ‘Good Result’ – Health Chief (R.)
UK To Turn Birmingham Airport Into Mortuary (BBC)
UK Broadband Providers To Lift Data Caps During COVID-19 Lockdown (G.)
“There’s No Gold” – COMEX Report (ZH)
Biden Consolidates Support, But Trails Badly In Enthusiasm (ABC)

 

 

Lost an hour overnight because Europe finally went to Daylight Saving Time. That one hour extra/less between the two sides of the ocean always throws me off-rhythm. The missing hour also shows up in the numbers, but we’ll make that up tomorrow.

Since the US is now the world no. 1, it’s inevitable that much of the news switches there as well. I AM unpleasantly surprised to see the numbers of police officers infected, and I would like to know how that happens. Trump’s notion of a NYC lockdown seemed to make sense, but “wiser” voices prevailed. As NYC has turned into not just the American, but the global center.

 

 

Cases 672,086 (+ 63,819 from yesterday’s 613,829)

Deaths 31,737 (+ 3,508 from yesterday’s 28,229)

 

 

 

From Worldometer yesterday evening (before their day’s close)

 

 

From Worldometer -NOTE: mortality rate for closed cases is at 18% –

 

 

From SCMP: (Note, SCMP numbers have done a little sprint, their US deaths are even higher than Worldometer now)

 

 

From COVID2019Live.info:

 

 

 

 

Did Trump get talked out of it by the likes of Cuomo? As NYC is turning into the global epicenter? Cuomo keeps calling for equipment, but refuses to ponder measures that could make that less important.

Trump Backs Off Threat Of Coronavirus Quarantine For NYC Area (NYP)

President Donald Trump on Saturday night backed off a daylong threat to lock down NYC and the tri-state area — a proposal that had thrown three governors for a loop. “A quarantine will not be necessary,” Trump wrote in a series of tweets Saturday night, reasoning that a travel advisory would suffice. “On the recommendation of the White House CoronaVirus Task Force, and upon consultation with the Governor’s (sic) of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, I have asked the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] to issue a strong Travel Advisory, to be administered by the Governors, in consultation with the Federal Government,” Trump tweeted.


Trump had told reporters outside the White House earlier Saturday that he was considering a regional lockdown to stop the spread of the disease, to the dismay of the tri-state’s governors. New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy said he and Trump spoke just a day before, on Friday, and the idea wasn’t brought up. Gov. Andrew Cuomo said he wouldn’t even know how such a lockdown would be instituted. “I don’t know how that could be legally enforceable and from a medical point of view don’t know what you would be accomplishing, but I can tell you I don’t even like the sound of it,” he told reporters Saturday.. He appeared on CNN later, where he likened the concept to starting a “Civil War,” and called it “preposterous.”

Read more …

Still photos of full beaches.

Florida Coronavirus Cases Are Growing Fast. Here’s What That Means. (TBT)

The number of confirmed coronavirus cases in Florida is doubling every three days, putting the state on a trajectory to see tens of thousands of infections in the coming weeks, a Tampa Bay Times analysis shows. No rigorous model has been calculated for Florida to predict the disease’s spread in detail. Those usually take months to create. But at this point, experts say the math is simple. The number of cases is already past the point of easy containment and infections are growing faster and faster, at what statisticians call an exponential rate. Without dramatic steps, they worry that the epidemic will balloon across Florida and place an unprecedented strain on hospitals and health clinics.


Thomas Hladish, a University of Florida research scientist who specializes in disease modeling and has been advising the state on the outbreak, said that while epidemiologists might disagree on the nuances of their projections, they all agree on the main point. “We do understand the math and the models well enough to say with great confidence that Florida is going to have a huge public health crisis,” Hladish said. “And we are just at the beginning of it right now.” By 11 a.m. Saturday, Florida had reported more than 3,700 cases — an increase of nearly 1,000 in 24 hours. Florida remains one of the few states with a large outbreak not to issue a statewide order to keep residents at home. Several counties across the state, including Hillsborough and Pinellas, issued “safer at home” orders in the last week.

Some public health experts say it will take the more extreme step of shutting down the state to halt the disease’s rapid spread in Florida. Nine hundred Florida healthcare workers had signed a petition by Friday asking for the same thing. The effects of the intervention wouldn’t be apparent right away. The same is true for the smaller steps that have already been taken in Florida, like social distancing or closing restaurants and fitness studios. “We are not going to see the benefits for a few weeks, which is frustrating to everyone,” said Dr. Mary Jo Trepka, an infectious disease epidemiologist and professor at Florida International University.

Read more …

If not the craziest thing around, a solid contender.

Rhode Island Door Knocks in Search of Fleeing New Yorkers (AP)

The Rhode Island National Guard started going door to door on Saturday in coastal areas to inform any New Yorkers who may have come to the state that they must self-quarantine for 14 days while Gov. Gina Raimondo expanded the mandatory self-quarantine to anyone visiting the state. Raimondo also ordered residents to stay at home, with exceptions for getting food, medicines or going to the doctor, and ordered nonessential retail businesses to close Monday until April 13 to help stop the spread of the coronavirus. She also directed realtors and hotel operators to include new requirements that any out-of-state residents must quarantine for 14 days in their purchase agreements.

State Police set up a checkpoint on I-95 in Hope Valley on Friday where drivers with New York license plates must stop and provide contact information and were told to self-quarantine for two weeks, WPRI.com reported. If New Yorkers don’t comply, they face fines and jail time, Raimondo said, adding that that’s not the goal. “I want to be crystal clear about this: If you’re coming to Rhode Island from New York you are ordered into quarantine. The reason for that is because more than half of the cases of coronavirus in America are in New York,” Raimondo said, adding that it’s not meant to be discriminatory.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo called the order “reactionary” and unconstitutional, saying he’d sue Rhode Island if the policy isn’t rescinded but believed they could “work it out.” “I understand the goal … but there’s a point of absurdity, and I think what Rhode Island did is at that point of absurdity,” said Cuomo, a Democrat. “We have to keep the ideas and the policies we implement positive rather than reactionary and emotional.”

Read more …

Insane. How did this happen?

700 N.J. Police Officers Have Tested Positive For Coronavirus (NJ.com)

About 700 New Jersey police officers have tested positive for the coronavirus, officials said Saturday. “There’s more than 700 police officers quarantined at home, and there’s about the same … number that have tested positive from all 21 counties,” Col. Patrick Callahan, acting superintendent of the State Police, said in Trenton during the state’s daily coronavirus press briefing. that amount is far higher than previously known. Newark, Jersey City, NJ Transit, the Port Authority, Fanwood, Hazlet and the State Police have all reported cases. Two officers that were in “serious condition” are now stable, Callahan said. None have died. Testing sites in Bergen and Holmdel were only testing symptomatic first responders Saturday, Gov. Phil Murphy previously said.


There are about 36,000 full-time officers in the state, according to recent State Police data, and experts said the public should not be concerned about a looming officer shortage. “If you have the right officers and you have the right supervisors … we are good,” said Maria Haberfeld, a police science professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. Crime has also dropped in the state, officials have said, which could help departments cope with any short-staffing, according to Jon Shane, a retired Newark police captain who teaches at John Jay. [..] New Jersey has at least 11,124 known cases of the virus overall, including at least 140 known deaths, officials announced Saturday.

Read more …

Seriously, how? Are they infecting each other? Like at the stations?

More Than 500 Members Of The NYPD Have Coronavirus (NYP)

Nearly 200 more NYPD cops tested positive for the coronavirus in less than a day — causing the number of infected department members to soar above 550, officials said Friday. According to a spokesman for the NYPD, 486 uniformed officers and 71 civilian employees have now contracted COVID-19. Late Thursday, 294 cops and 57 civilians were positive. Friday’s figures — the largest daily increase in confirmed cases on the force — come a day after the NYPD lost its first employee to the coronavirus, Dennis Dickson, 62, a civilian cleaner at police HQ, and Deputy Commissioner John Miller was hospitalized in critical condition with severe COVID-19 symptoms.


The potentially deadly virus has been sweeping through the department over the past week, leaving the NYPD without at least 11 percent of its patrol officers, who called out sick. About 375 more cops called out sick Friday. According to the NYPD, 4,111 officers were out ill — nearly four times the average number of cops out sick.

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Italy is finally free to do what it wants financially, the EU is silent.

Italy PM Adopts New Measures To Help Coronavirus-Hit Economy (R.)

Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said on Saturday he had approved a new package of measures to help those worst hit by the coronavirus emergency, including supplying shopping vouchers and food packages. Conte said in a news conference that €4.3 billion ($4.79 billion) would be made immediately available to mayors to deal with theirs citizens’ needs and another 400 million would be provided in a special fund for “people who don’t have the money to do their shopping.” Italy, the country that has suffered most deaths from the coronavirus epidemic, already approved a 25 billion euro stimulus package earlier this month and has promised another one of at least the same size in April.


Economy Minister Roberto Gualtieri, speaking at the same news conference, criticized the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, for appearing to dismiss the need for issuance of common debt by European Union countries. “The commission president’s words were a mistake and I regret that she made them,” he said, adding that Europe would need “a great Marshall Plan” to relaunch its economy after the coronavirus emergency is over.

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What an unsympathetic term.

Home Confinement In France Extended To April 15 (SA)

The Covid-19 home confinement period will be extended for “at least two weeks” beyond the initial two-week period, the French prime minister has announced this afternoon. The obligation to stay at home, with limited exceptions, started at noon on Tuesday March 17 and was scheduled to last until Tuesday March 31 at least and until further notice. Now Prime Minister Edouard Philippe has confirmed it will definitely be extended and will not end before Wednesday April 15. “It is clear that we are only at the beginning of the wave of this epidemic,” he said specifying that the same rules, such as needing a form to go out of the house, will continue to apply.


He said the period could be extended further again if the health situation makes it necessary. On Tuesday, the official scientific committee advising the government said an extension to the confinement period was essential and pleaded for a period of six full weeks from its implementation i.e. until Tuesday April 28. A new extension could be decided “if and only if the health situation requires it,” said Mr Philippe. “Those who do not respect the rules of confinement are few in number and will be severely punished, because the health of everyone is at stake, especially the most fragile among us,” the prime minister added while praising citizens “for their civic-mindedness, patience and solidarity” during this period.

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Prepare to die. Just don’t dare blame Boris.

UK Coronavirus Death Toll Under 20,000 Would Be ‘Good Result’ – Health Chief (R.)

The United Kingdom will do well if it manages to keep the coronavirus death toll below 20,000, a senior health official said on Saturday after the deadliest day so far of the outbreak saw the number of fatalities rise to more than 1,000. Stephen Powis, the medical director of National Health Service England, warned the public against complacency and said everyone had to play their part in hindering the spread of the virus. The number of confirmed cases stood at 17,089 on Saturday morning. The death toll rose by 260 in a day to 1,019, the seventh highest toll in the world behind Italy, Spain, China, Iran, France and the United States.


When asked if Britain was on the same trajectory as Italy, where the death toll has passed 9,000, Powis said that if the public adhered to the nationwide lockdown the total toll could be kept below 20,000. “If it is less than 20,000… that would be a good result though every death is a tragedy, but we should not be complacent about that,” he said at a news conference in Downing Street. Prime Minister Boris Johnson became the first leader of a major power to announce a positive test result for coronavirus on Friday. He is self-isolating in Downing Street but still leading the UK response to the crisis.

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1,500 bodies? How small is that airport?

UK To Turn Birmingham Airport Into Mortuary (BBC)

Work to turn part of Birmingham Airport into a mortuary able to store at least 1,500 bodies has begun. Bosses previously said discussions were under way, but West Midlands Police confirmed the project had started. An airport spokesperson said it was working to provide land and a hangar for the temporary morgue. Police said there was “scope to expand” the starting capacity of 1,500, as the region prepared for a predicted rise in coronavirus deaths. The force said regional mortuaries may close as staff were transferred to the new facility, which could eventually accommodate all deaths across the West Midlands. This would include those unrelated to coronavirus, it said.


The force said it would do everything possible to accommodate religious requirements and that it was “vital” to give people “the utmost dignity and respect” at all times. Senior coroner for Birmingham, Louise Hunt, said: “We understand that it is a very difficult time for everyone and we will do all that we can to make sure bereaved families understand what is happening to their loved ones and to release them for funeral as soon as we can.” Assistant Chief Constable Vanessa Jardine said public sector agencies and their partners were working together “to better deal with this challenge… at a critical time of need”.

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It’s essential that Boris talk to you.

UK Broadband Providers To Lift Data Caps During COVID-19 Lockdown (G.)

All data allowance caps on current fixed broadband services will be removed in a deal struck by the government and telecommunications companies to help vulnerable people stay connected through the pandemic. It is among a range of immediately effective measures agreed by major internet service and mobile providers including BT/EE, Openreach, Virgin Media, Sky, TalkTalk, O2, Vodafone, Three, Hyperoptic, Gigaclear, and KCOM. The companies have pledged that anyone who is struggling to pay their bill due to the pandemic will be treated fairly and appropriately supported, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport said.

The firms have also agreed to offer generous new mobile and landline packages to ensure people are connected and the most vulnerable continue to be supported. These could put users in line for packages featuring data boosts at low prices and free calls from their landline or mobile. Vulnerable customers or those who are self-isolating, who are faced with priority repairs to fixed broadband and landlines which cannot be carried out, should be given alternative methods of communication wherever possible, the companies said.

The digital secretary, Oliver Dowden, said: “It’s fantastic to see mobile and broadband providers pulling together to do their bit for the national effort by helping customers, particularly the most vulnerable, who may be struggling with bills at this difficult time. It is essential that people stay at home to protect the NHS and save lives. This package helps people to stay connected whilst they stay home.” Watchdog Ofcom’s chief executive, Melanie Dawes, said: “We recognise providers are dealing with unprecedented challenges at the moment. So we welcome them stepping up to protect vulnerable customers, at a time when keeping in touch with our friends and families has never been more important.”

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Tik tok.

“There’s No Gold” – COMEX Report (ZH)

While the demand for gold has been soaring as a safe haven asset amid the multiple global crises we are currently facing, forced paper gold liquidation (as leveraged funds scramble to cover margin calls) and unprecedented logistical disruptions created a frantic hunt for actual bars of gold. Specifically, as Bloomberg details, at the center of it all are a small band of traders who for years had cashed in on what had always been a sure-fire bet: shorting gold futures in New York against being long physical gold in London. Usually, they’d ride the trade out till the end of the contract when they’d have a couple of options to get out without marking much, if any, loss. The real price.. for real gold? Nearer $1,800. If you can get it.

“There’s no gold,” says Josh Strauss, partner at money manager Pekin Hardy Strauss in Chicago (and a bullion fan). “There’s no gold. There’s roughly a 10% premium to purchase physical gold for delivery. Usually it’s like 2%. I can buy a one ounce American Eagle for $1,800,” said Josh Strauss. “$1,800!” “The case for gold is simple,” says Strauss. “You want to own gold in times of financial dislocation and or inflation. And that’s been the case since time immemorial. And gold behaves well in those cases. In those cases stocks behave poorly. It’s a great portfolio hedge. Gold does poorly when you’ve got strong economic growth and low inflation. Tell me when that’s going to happen. Gold held its value during 2008 and after all that money printing it tripled over the next three years.”

And in case you doubted this, the cost of an American Eagle one ounce coin at the US Mint is now $2,175…

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Really bad theater.

Biden Consolidates Support, But Trails Badly In Enthusiasm (ABC)

Former Vice President Joe Biden has emerged as Democrats’ top choice for the presidential nomination in a new ABC News/Washington Post poll, but with only bare majority support within his party and a massive enthusiasm gap in a November matchup against President Donald Trump. Indeed, strong enthusiasm for Biden among his supporters – at just 24% – is the lowest on record for a Democratic presidential candidate in 20 years of ABC/Post polls. More than twice as many of Trump’s supporters are highly enthusiastic about supporting him, 53%. Trump’s still-strong rating on the economy is another challenge for Biden. So is this: Among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents who prefer Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders for the nomination, 15% say they’d back Trump over Biden in the fall.

In the nomination contest, 51% of leaned Democrats now prefer Biden vs. 42% for Sanders. That’s a vast 34-point gain for Biden since mid-February, with other candidates having left the race and endorsed him. Sanders gained 10%age points. Yet even as he’s advanced in his party, Biden’s slipped against Trump in a November matchup. The two are locked into essentially a dead heat among registered voters, 49-47%, Biden-Trump, after a slight Biden lead, 52-45%, in February. Biden does better vs. Trump among all adults (Democrats are less apt to be registered), 50-44%. That’s a slight lead, but it was more solidly significant in February, 52-44%.


Perhaps the Democrats’ biggest risk is under the surface, in Trump’s big advantage in backers who are “very” enthusiastic about supporting him. Strong enthusiasm for a candidate can help boost turnout on Election Day, a must-have particularly for Democrats, who rely more on motivating less-frequent voters to come to the polls. While trailing Trump by 29 points in high-level enthusiasm, Biden makes up some of the difference with those who are “somewhat” enthusiastic. But he still trails Trump by 12 points in the combined measure, 74 vs. 86%.

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It must be possible to run a joint like the Automatic Earth on people’s kind donations. These are no longer the times when ads pay for all you read, your donations have become an integral part of it. It has become a two-way street; and isn’t that liberating, when you think about it?

Thanks everyone for your wonderful and generous donations over the past few days. The rest of you: don’t be strangers.

 

 

 

 


Jennifer Baer

 

 

Support us in virustime. Help the Automatic Earth survive. It’s good for you.

 

Sep 022019
 


Strongest storm ever to threaten Florida east coast

 

 

‘Get Ready for Brexit’: Government Launches Information Blitz (G.)
Johnson’s Brexit Gambit Puts Queen in a Tight Spot (Spiegel)
Leaked No-Deal Report Says Lorries Could Face 48-Hour Delays At Dover (PA)
Irish Border After Brexit – All Ideas Beset By Issues Says Secret Paper (G.)
Many US Firms Already Have Ditched China, More On The Way (CNBC)
Hong Kong Students Boycott Classes As Chinese Media Warns ‘End Is Coming’ (G.)
Why Has The U.S. CEO-To-Worker Pay Ratio Increased So Much? (Colombo)
In The Era Of Neurocapitalism, Your Brain Needs New Rights (Vox)
Hollywood Reboots Russophobia For The New Cold War (Parry)
A Black Hole So Big It Shouldn’t Even Exist Is Baffling Scientists (RT)

 

 

After carefully making sure there were no needy people left in the country, and no children were going hungry, the new UK gov decided to spend £100+ million on an advertising campaign. They’re going to absolutely bombard, if not strangle, you with this stuff. You won’t be able to escape it.

‘Get Ready for Brexit’: Government Launches Information Blitz (G.)

The billboards have been unveiled, the branded mugs have been ordered and the adverts will soon start following you around the internet after the government launched what it claimed to be the largest ever public information campaign in an effort to prepare the British public for leaving the EU. The Get Ready for Brexit campaign went live on Sunday, stating that the UK would be leaving the EU on 31 October and urging the public to visit a new website to check what they needed to do to prepare for a no-deal exit. The slogan appeared for the first time on a giant advertising screen next to a John Lewis store at the Westfield shopping centre in Stratford, east London, looming over visitors.

Downing Street has previously briefed that the taxpayer-funded advertising campaign will cost up to £100m, although doubts have been raised over whether the government will realistically be able to spend that much on a campaign lasting just two months. One leading advertising industry source pointed out that this figure was substantially higher than the amount spent on traditional advertising in the UK by major consumer brands such as Amazon, Tesco and Asda in the whole of 2018. This suggests that either the government is overstating the amount it intends to spend in an attempt to draw extra attention or that Downing Street really is launching an advertising campaign that will be unequalled in its ubiquity.


Michael Gove, the cabinet minister in charge of no-deal planning, said: “Ensuring an orderly Brexit is not only a matter of national importance, but a shared responsibility” as he launched the adverts by referring to government polling that showed only 50% of the population thought it was likely the UK would leave the EU on 31 October. The same research found that 42% of small- to medium-sized businesses were still unsure of how they could prepare for Brexit and just a third of the British public have looked for information on what they will need to do, suggesting large-scale ignorance of what Brexit will involve with less than two months to go until the expected departure date.=

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View from Germany: “..the last intact pillar of the United Kingdom: its queen…”

Johnson’s Brexit Gambit Puts Queen in a Tight Spot (Spiegel)

[..] the anger of the masses isn’t being directed solely at the man in Downing Street. One of the last taboos for many Brits has also been broken: blatant criticism of the queen. “The. Queen. Did. Not. Save. Us,” tweeted Labour Party politician Kate Osamor, and hinted at the abolition of the monarchy. Her party leader Jeremy Corbyn asked the queen in writing for a personal meeting to protest against Johnson’s coup. Jo Swinson, the head of the EU-friendly Liberal Democrats, also wrote to the queen asking for an “urgent meeting.” After three years of the country beating itself up in the Brexit debate, Johnson is now leading Britain into the last round of the ordeal – an unprecedented showdown between the executive, the legislative and the judiciary, which, incidentally, threatens to damage the last intact pillar of the United Kingdom: its queen.


It’s impossible to predict what will ensue in the coming weeks – aside from chaos. But there is much to suggest Johnson wants precisely that, and at any cost, in order to deliver the main promise he made to become British prime minister – to lead his country out of the EU on Oct. 31, with or without an agreement. After the G-7 summit in Biarritz, Johnson may have praised the EU’s willingness to compromise, he may have put the chances of no deal at “one in a million,” and the majority of Brits and their elected representatives may be against leaving the EU without a deal, but no one in the betting crazy UK is now likely to bet on there being any agreement between London and Brussels in the end.

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Blame France.

Leaked No-Deal Report Says Lorries Could Face 48-Hour Delays At Dover (PA)

Leaked government documents which reportedly say there could be 48-hour delays at Dover in the event of a no-deal Brexit have moved hauliers to warn of the “clear and present danger” to the UK supply chain. Sky News said it had seen documents which suggest vehicles could face a two-day delay at the Kent port in a no-deal scenario, and the revelation has led to industry insiders saying the government has “failed to deliver”. Rod McKenzie, the managing director of policy at the Road Haulage Association (RHA), said it came as absolutely no surprise to him that such a document existed, adding that there was still no sign of a new customs process with just weeks left before the UK is expected to leave the EU.

He had not seen the Department for Transport documents (DfT), but said he understood they were more recent than the leaked Operation Yellowhammer files which contained predictions of a three-month “meltdown” at ports in the event of no deal. “The Road Haulage Association has been saying this for quite literally years now that if there is a no-deal Brexit, there will be very substantial queues at the border,” McKenzie said. “We have got a very, very serious problem with the UK supply chain if there is a no-deal Brexit on 31 October from where we are now. “This is a clear and present danger to the supply chain on which we all depend, and we are calling on the government in the clearest terms to make it clear what traders have to do to trade with the continent. This they have failed to do so far.”


Sky News said on Sunday night that analysis commissioned by the DfT suggested that on the first day of a no-deal Brexit, the worst-case scenario would be a two-day maximum delay for freight and vehicles at Dover, and an average wait of a day-and-a-half. McKenzie said any delay at the ports would cause a “very, very substantial traffic jam”, adding: “What we are saying is that we urgently need clarity from this government, having not had it from the previous government, we urgently need clarity from this government of what traders have to do to get ready for a no-deal Brexit.”

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Troubles.

Irish Border After Brexit – All Ideas Beset By Issues Says Secret Paper (G.)

All potential solutions to the post-Brexit Irish border are fraught with difficulty and would leave smaller businesses struggling to cope, experts have said, as leaked government papers outline major concerns just two months before Britain is due to leave the EU. A report summarising the findings of the government’s official “alternative arrangements” working groups concluded that there are issues with all the scenarios put forward to try to replace the backstop arrangement. There are also specific concerns over whether any technological solution could be delivered to monitor cross-border trade. Critics said the paper, seen by the Guardian, should “ring alarm bells” across government over how likely it is that alternative arrangements to the backstop will be found.

The dossier marked “official-sensitive” prepared for the EU Exit Negotiations Board is dated 28 August. It details how the findings of all advisory groups informing the government on the Northern Irish border are being kept deliberately under wraps to try to avoid hampering Britain’s intended renegotiation of the backstop agreed to by Theresa May. Alternative systems to avoid a hard Northern Irish border after Brexit have become the central tenet of Boris Johnson’s Brexit strategy. He sees this as a way of unlocking a new deal with Europe and has claimed that there are “abundant solutions”.


However, the damning report shows there is no single deliverable solution at present, despite the fact Johnson is almost a third of the way through the “30 days” target that the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, gave him to come up with a fresh border proposal. The report said: “It is evident that every facilitation has concerns and issues related to them. The complexity of combining them into something more systemic and as part of one package is a key missing factor at present.”

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This will take a long time.

Many US Firms Already Have Ditched China, More On The Way (CNBC)

President Trump rattled Wall Street when he demanded U.S. firms move production out of China. But many have already taken steps to do so, and, in earnings calls just over the past month, dozens of chief executives have signaled plans to further diversify their supply chains amid the intensifying trade war. On Aug. 23, Trump took to Twitter, ordering American companies to “immediately start looking for an alternative to China” and urging them instead to start making their products in the U.S. In doing so, he cited the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) — passed in 1977 to deal with an “unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States.” [..]

Trump doubled down on Friday, attacking General Motors for its significant presence in China and questioning whether the automaker should move the operations to the U.S. “Sometimes you’ve got to take stern measures,” White House economic advisor Larry Kudlow said alongside Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin on the sidelines of the G-7 meeting in France. Kudlow added that American companies should heed the president’s call to leave China. No U.S. president has invoked the law as leverage in a commercial dispute, let alone to sever commercial ties with one of its largest trading partners. Indeed, over the past century, U.S. administrations have mainly deployed the IEEPA to prosecute drug trafficking or financial terrorism through sanctions or other economic penalties.


[..] in an annual survey conducted in June by the U.S.-China Business Council, nearly 30% of the 220 respondents said they have already delayed or cancelled investments in China or the U.S. due to mounting trade uncertainty. Though just 13% said they had plans to specifically move operations out of China, that’s steadily increased from 10% in 2018 and 8% in 2017.

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Peace please.

Hong Kong Students Boycott Classes As Chinese Media Warns ‘End Is Coming’ (G.)

For the last 13 weeks, protesters have come to the streets to demand the formal withdrawal of a bill that would allow extradition to mainland China, which critics fear will be used by Beijing to target those who criticise the ruling Chinese communist party. As the protests have dragged on, they have taken on new forms and other demands including instituting democratic reforms and conducting an independent investigation into police behaviour. On Sunday, demonstrators attempted to lay siege to the airport, prompting a swift response from riot police. On Saturday, riot police stormed a metro station, attacking trapped protesters with batons. Monday’s class boycott was accompanied by a call for a general strike. It followed two days of mass protests where demonstrators paralysed links to airport, and clashed with police outside government buildings and in MTR stations.


Several editorials in Chinese state media on Monday condemned the protesters as “crazy and vicious” for bringing “catastrophe” upon the Hong Kong economy. An editorial on the website of the state-run news agency Xinhua warned “the end is coming for those attempting to disrupt Hong Kong”. The shift of the protests to school campuses is comes after Chinese officials have blamed the protests on the city’s liberal education curriculum. In recent weeks, Beijing has criticised teachers and parents for not instilling patriotic values in students and called for an overhaul of Hong Kong’s education system, which includes topics like the Chinese military’s violent crack down on democracy demonstrators on 4 June, 1989.

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Is capitalism itself at fault or just the excesses it allows for?

Why Has The U.S. CEO-To-Worker Pay Ratio Increased So Much? (Colombo)

MarketWatch recently published a piece about the soaring U.S. CEO-to-worker pay ratio, which hit 278-to-1 in 2018 (up from just 58-to-1 in 1989 and 20-to-1 in 1965) –

“CEO pay has increased 1,008% between 1978 and 2018, while typical worker pay has edged up 12%. [..] In 2018, CEOs in the country’s top 350 businesses were paid $17.2 million on average. Employees working in those industries — ranging from retail to technology and manufacturing — typically earned $64,500, researchers said. Overall, there’s a 278-to-1 pay ratio between workers and CEOs. In 1989, the compensation ratio was 58-to-1 and in 1965, it was 20-to-1. Stock awards and cashed-in stock options averaged $7.5 million of CEO pay in 2017 and 2018, the study added. Incorporating stock in pay arrangements is one way to incentivize CEO, and rising salaries illustrate the market for talent in the C-suite, some observers say.”


Left-leaning economists, politicians, and other commentators frequently use the soaring CEO-to-worker pay ratio as an example of why capitalism is inherently flawed and always leads to the rich getting richer, but my research has found that it is a byproduct of central banking and fiat (i.e., “paper”) currency rather than capitalism. To make a long story short, the Federal Reserve has excessively inflated the financial markets in its attempt to create an economic recovery from the Great Recession. This excessive asset price inflation has pushed U.S. household wealth far out of line with its historic relationship to the GDP, as the chart below shows. The wealthy have been the greatest beneficiaries of this asset price inflation because they own a disproportionate share of the assets that have been inflated by the Fed, which are stocks, bonds, and high-end real estate.

The Fed’s inflation of the U.S. stock market is the primary reason why the CEO-to-worker pay ratio has increased so much. The CEOs of public corporations usually receive stock options as part of their compensation packages, which means that they can benefit greatly when their stock prices rise. As the chart below shows, the CEO-to-worker pay ratio surges during asset bubbles, but falls back down when the bubbles burst (it correlates with the chart above). The current asset bubble is no different and the excesses will be corrected in the form of a strong bear market, just like they always are.

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Elon Muck can’t even produce a decent electric car. How big a threat is he?

In The Era Of Neurocapitalism, Your Brain Needs New Rights (Vox)

“Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters inside your skull.” That’s from George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, published in 1949. The comment is meant to highlight what a repressive surveillance state the characters live in, but looked at another way, it shows how lucky they are: At least their brains are still private. Over the past few weeks, Facebook and Elon Musk’s Neuralink have announced that they’re building tech to read your mind — literally. Mark Zuckerberg’s company is funding research on brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) that can pick up thoughts directly from your neurons and translate them into words. The researchers say they’ve already built an algorithm that can decode words from brain activity in real time.

And Musk’s company has created flexible “threads” that can be implanted into a brain and could one day allow you to control your smartphone or computer with just your thoughts. Musk wants to start testing in humans by the end of next year. Other companies such as Kernel, Emotiv, and Neurosky are also working on brain tech. They say they’re building it for ethical purposes, like helping people with paralysis control their devices. This might sound like science fiction, but it’s already begun to change people’s lives. Over the past dozen years, a number of paralyzed patients have received brain implants that allow them to move a computer cursor or control robotic arms. Implants that can read thoughts are still years away from commercial availability, but research in the field is moving faster than most people realize.


Your brain, the final privacy frontier, may not be private much longer. Some neuroethicists argue that the potential for misuse of these technologies is so great that we need revamped human rights laws — a new “jurisprudence of the mind” — to protect us. The technologies have the potential to interfere with rights that are so basic that we may not even think of them as rights, like our ability to determine where our selves end and machines begin. Our current laws are not equipped to address this.

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Russiagate, the sequel.

Hollywood Reboots Russophobia For The New Cold War (Parry)

In the Cold War, Tinseltown played an important role in the cultural battlefield against the USSR and anti-Soviet paranoia was an ever-present theme in American cinema for decades, from the McCarthy era until the Berlin Wall fell. Contemporaneously, a revival of geopolitical tensions between the United States and the Russian Federation — which many have dubbed a second Cold War — has seen the return of such tropes on the silver screen. Most recently, it has resurfaced in popular web television shows such as the third season of Netflix’s retro science fiction/horror series Stranger Things, as well as HBO’s miniseries Chernobyl, which dramatizes the 1986 nuclear accident in Soviet Ukraine.

It was a famous cinematic work that many believe ominously foreshadowed Chernobyl in Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 science fiction film, Stalker, less than a decade prior to the calamity. It is unlikely that HBO would have been as interested in green-lighting a five-part program on the disaster without the current hysteria surrounding the unproven allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and ‘collusion’ between Moscow and the Trump campaign. ‘Russiagate’ has become a national obsession and suddenly the very idea of corruption and intrigue has been made synonymous with the Kremlin. Hollywood liberal figures have been some of the hoax’s biggest proponents, including the show’s writer, Craig Mazin.


It is equally as hard to imagine Americans themselves being as captivated by a re-enactment of the nuclear accident without the current political climate of fear-mongering bombarding them every day in corporate media. From the perspective of the U.S. political establishment, what better way to deflect attention away from its own sins than onto a manufactured adversary?

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The black hole’s mass is 100 times greater than that of the sun.

M87* is an example of a black hole that is 6.5 billion times as massive as the Sun.

A Black Hole So Big It Shouldn’t Even Exist Is Baffling Scientists (RT)

Scientists may have spotted a black hole that is so enormous, it shouldn’t even exist, although they aren’t quite sure if it even does. The black hole’s mass is 100 times greater than that of the sun. The potential black hole, which is twice as large as what physicists had believed was possible, was detected by the LIGO and Virgo gravitational-wave detectors at the European Gravitational Observatory. A black hole is usually formed when a star collapses after it runs out of fuel, but this only happens when the star’s core is less than 50 times the mass of the Sun, Quanta Magazine explains. Stars with larger masses, between 50-130 times the mass of the Sun, either shed matter until they are small enough, or destroy themselves in a powerful explosion, meaning this new potential black hole defies what scientists understand to be possible.


Black holes that are larger than 130 solar masses can also form when their core’s collapse is too strong to stop. M87* is an example of a black hole that is 6.5 billion times as massive as the Sun. Scientists are scratching their heads trying to figure out how this newly spotted potential large black hole came into being. According to Qanta, they suspect that the black hole could be the result of smaller black holes colliding and merging into one gigantic one. They think it is possible that somewhere in a dense area of the universe, a 30 and 50 solar mass black hole could have merged and that the new black hole then combined with another one, which could explain the signals they detected.

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