Apr 292022
 


Leonardo da Vinci (?) La Joconde nue or Monna Vanna 1515

 

The West Misled the Public on Russia’s War Strategy (SWP)
Letters from the Front (Faina Savenkova)
On Ukraine, the World Majority Sides With Russia Over US (Antiwar)
The Schrödinger Euros (Vilches)
Mounting Evidence Canada Trained Ukrainian Military Extremists (CTV)
1st Amendment: An Easy Way For Musk To Restore Free Speech on Twitter (Turley)
WaPo’s Repulsive Defense Of Twitter Execs Makes Even Elon Musk Look Good (Fed.)
France Introduces Digital ID Days After Macron’s Re-election (TCS)
As Europe Approves New Tech Laws, The US Falls Further Behind (NYT)
The Fragmented Trust in Public Health (Prasad)
COVID Vaccine Side Effects on Pregnant Women (ET)
The Sword & the Cross at Albright’s Funeral (CN)

 

 

 

 

Tucker 33 billion. With Biden klepto cameo

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lavrov: sanctions

 

 

“There is growing evidence that Russia used the previous stages of the war to prepare strategic ground for this one.”

The West Misled the Public on Russia’s War Strategy (SWP)

The events in Donbass appear to have caught prominent western military analysts by surprise, who were otherwise quick to affirm an inevitable Russian failure. The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) a known pessimist, was forced to concede on April 27th that Russia was making a “sounder pattern of operational movement” in Donbass and was even forced to admit that Ukrainian defenses in the north of the region were disorganized. Although the ISW continues to maintain that a broader Russian encirclement of the Ukrainian army won’t happen, it is difficult to see how Ukraine is going to turn the tide on this situation even with western support because they simply do not have the geographic advantage. Russia is gaining in the region every single day.

This speaks volumes about Russia’s strategy. When Moscow announced that it was withdrawing from the North and focusing on Donbass, this was marketed as a retreat and a failure, but on closer inspection it appears that the assault on this region was carefully planned in a logical sequence of preparatory steps. There is growing evidence that Russia used the previous stages of the war to prepare strategic ground for this one. Some people might have questioned: Why did Moscow not just charge into Donbass straight away? And seemingly went for Kyiv? And that’s a good question, and the answer is because with the highest concentration of Ukrainian forces there, “their best trained troops” as frequently eluded to, Russia would not have had the battlefield advantages or positions to push them back which they do now.

Before Russia proceeded with its current offensive on Donbass, it first undertaken a process of “shaping the battlefield” which involved distracting Ukraine by invading the North of the country (even if there was a hope Kyiv could be quickly encircled). As these multiple axis’ were opened, Russia then proceeded to invade from Crimea and seize Kherson oblast (to prevent a pre-emptive Ukrainian attack on the peninsula) and advanced into Zaporizhzhia (setting up a Southern launchpad). Mariupol was then encircled and cut off. These multiple fronts being opened allowed Russia to then invade Kharkiv and Luhansk Oblasts, which they then developed into a Northern flank with the capture of Izyum.

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People in the west must understand that the special military operation in Ukraine is seen as “essential” in Russia, and that this is closely linked to WWII, in which some 30 million Russians died. No, they really don’t like nazis. And they’re allergic to threats coming in through their western border.

Letters from the Front (Faina Savenkova)

Hello, great-grandfather Vasily! We are again on the eve of the Victory Day. And I want to ask your forgiveness. Forgive us for failing, forgetting about your exploits and war heroes. In the eternal disputes we have lost the main thing – our history. After all, you defended Moscow, froze in the Belarusian swamps, liberated Prague. And now they say that it was in vain. That your victory was an occupation, that Leningrad could have been surrendered, that I should pity the Nazis, and that the Victory Parade is a victory psychosis. Can I do that? Of course not!

Hello, Grandpa Miron! They told me how you were chasing the Banderovites through the forests of Ukraine without thinking about sleep or warmth. Liberating and slowly advancing. Seeing villages burned down by them and children killed. You got rid of these scum, not sparing your life. And now their descendants say they were heroes. And I am now supposed to say: “Glory to the heroes” and disown you, the Soviet soldier. They say they won the war, but as before they are fighting children and old people, destroying towns and villages, leaving behind scorched earth and ash on their boots. Can it be so, if only 77 years have passed since the Victory? It can. I’m sorry we couldn’t destroy them all.

Hello, great-grandmother Elsa. Sorry for the yellow star being in vogue again, only this time for the Russians. Now they say that a Russian is not a liberator, but a subhuman. How familiar. They used to say the same thing about you during the pogroms in Lviv and Kiev. Who gave them the right to decide who is worthy to be called a human and who is not? We did. By our indifference to our history.

Hello, Russian soldier! Forgive us for not being able to keep our world from war. We calmed down and thought that a peaceful life was forever, and that freedom is granted without a fight. It turned out that it wasn’t. Fascism is all around us. It is once again marching across our land, flashing its flags and chevrons of Azov, Aydar and the Right Sector. It is all around us. It is already here. And that is why you are again back in line, as you were in that terrible year of 41. You are a Chechen, a Bashkir, an Ossetian, an Abkhaz, an Ukrainian, a Buryat or a Belarusian. You are a Russian soldier, whoever you are! You came to defend those who are weak and helpless. You have come to win. Again and again. As once in the trenches of Stalingrad, so now in the steppes of Donbass.

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That’s about 165 countries.

On Ukraine, the World Majority Sides With Russia Over US (Antiwar)

The second pivotal event of 2014 was less noticed and in fact rarely mentioned in the Western mainstream media. In November of that year according to the IMF, China’s GDP surpassed that of the U.S. in purchasing power parity terms (PPP GDP). (This measure of GDP is calculated and published by the IMF, World Bank and even the CIA. Students of international relations like economics Nobel Laureate, Joseph Stiglitz, Graham Allison and many others consider this metric the best measure of a nation’s comparative economic power.) One person who took note and who often mentions China’s standing in the PPP-GDP ranking is none other than Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. From one point of view, the Russian action in Ukraine represents a decisive turn away from the hostile West to the more dynamic East and the Global South. This follows decades of importuning the West for a peaceful relationship since the Cold War’s end.

As Russia makes its Pivot to the East, it is doing its best to ensure that its Western border with Ukraine is secured. Following the Russian action in Ukraine, the inevitable US sanctions poured onto Russia. China refused to join them and refused to condemn Russia. This was no surprise; after all Putin’s Russia and Xi’s China had been drawing ever closer for years, most notably with trade denominated in ruble-renminbi exchange, thus moving toward independence from the West’s dollar dominated trade regime. But then a big surprise. India joined China in refusing to honor the US sanctions regime. And India kept to its resolve despite enormous pressure including calls from Biden to Modi and a train of high level US, UK and EU officials trekking off to India to bully, threaten and otherwise attempting to intimidate India. India would face “consequences,” the tired US threat went up. India did not budge.

India’s close military and diplomatic ties with Russia were forged during the anti-colonial struggles of the Soviet era. India’s economic interests in Russian exports could not be countermanded by US threats. Now India and Russia are now working on trade via ruble-rupee exchange. In fact, Russia has turned out to be a factor that put India and China on the same side, pursuing their own interests and independence in the face of US diktat. Moreover with trade in ruble-renminbi exchange already a reality and with ruble-rupee exchange in the offing, are we about to witness a Renminbi-Ruble-Rupee world of trade – a “3R” alternative to the Dollar-Euro monopoly? Is the world’s second most important political relationship, that between India and China, about to take a more peaceful direction? What’s the world’s first most important relationship?

it would probably be impossible for people to inhabit NYC for hundreds of years after a nuclear war. The life of Russia depends on stopping NATO
https://twitter.com/i/status/1519611295825203200

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“So Russia never gets to use such euros – which actually never see the light of day – and accordingly are not inflationary..”

“..should be considered the most childish proposal ever made in the history of trade..”

The Schrödinger Euros (Vilches)

What ? Payment in Rubles ?? Unthinkable, don´t even mention the word say EU officials and authorities. Instead, Europe has formally demanded to pay for Russian imports with Schrödinger euros as explained below. So it´s high time for psychiatrists to step in as the livelihood of 800 million Europeans depends on whatever this incredible set of un-elected delusional EU leaders decide. Let´s get this straight folks: the EU does not want to pay in Rubles – or gold — because it is playing cutie by pretending to “pay” for Russian imports for free. Be it natural gas, or oil, or coal or whatever Russian, instead of really “paying” the EU pretends to pull a “print & deposit + freeze & hide” wise-up gimmick. To make it clear for any audience, the above would be the equivalent of you pretending to “pay” at the check-out counter of any store with a photo of a fully sealed box that you say contains “money” that you will keep hidden at your home – unopened — as long as you want. Please allow me to explain the EU trickery in layman´s terms.

the “print & deposit + freeze & hide” seizure trick In the past, Russian imports were paid through run-of-the-mill bank transfers made to accounts of Russian exporters at EU banks. Now the EU leadership has mandated for such transfers to be instantly frozen as soon as received so that Russia – or anybody else for that matter – can´t use those euros. So, the ECB would now “print” euros with a keyboard 100% for free and then transfer such euros over to the Russian exporters bank accounts in the EU albeit now under “frozen” status. So Russia never gets to use such euros – which actually never see the light of day – and accordingly are not inflationary in any and every sense of the term as nobody else can use them either. Thus, by not entering into any economy at all in no way, shape, or form the EU outsmarts Heaven and Earth and gets to import Russian produce for free. Easy see ?

It´d be a “print & deposit + freeze & hide” seizure and expect-the-Russians-to-fall-for-it trick…as if they were K6 kids. Now of course I can hear the maniacs in charge arguing that this would only be “temporary” – of course — and that as soon as Russia gets out of Ukraine under “acceptable” terms – of course, yet again — everything will get back to yankee doodle normal. Enter then the “Schrödinger´s euros” whereby the hypothetical ´money´ should be considered to be simultaneously existent and non-existent… a-la-EU. In today´s commercial environment only a fool would accept a Schrödinger payment for anything — not even bubble gum – and should be considered the most childish proposal ever made in the history of trade.

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How many other countries do the same?

Mounting Evidence Canada Trained Ukrainian Military Extremists (CTV)

With mounting evidence pointing to the Canadian Armed Forces having trained members of Ukraine’s military who are also reported to be part of extremist groups, experts say Ottawa needs to strongly bolster its investigation and vetting of the soldiers it trains and arms in the embattled country. The Department of National Defence promised a thorough review of Canada’s mission in Ukraine after CTVNews.ca approached them for comment in October 2021, regarding a report from George Washington University that found extremists in the Ukrainian military were bragging about being trained by Canadians as part of Operation UNIFIER. The group in question – which calls itself Military Order Centuria, or simply Centuria, has links to the far-right Azov movement.

The Canadian military said they were alarmed by the report and denied any knowledge that extremists had taken part in training, adding that it does not have the mandate to screen the soldiers they train from other countries. In the month that followed, an investigation by the Ottawa Citizen found that not only did Canadian officials meet and get briefed by leaders from the Azov Battalion in 2018, they did not denounce the unit’s neo-Nazi beliefs – despite being warned about their views by their colleagues– and their main concern was that media would expose that the meeting had taken place. Officers and diplomats allowed themselves to be photographed with battalion officials which was then used online by Azov as propaganda. The federal government, which has spent more than $890 million training Ukrainian forces through Operation UNIFIER, has repeatedly stressed that it has not and will not ever train soldiers affiliated with Azov.

However, a recent investigation by Radio Canada into documents related to Canada’s mission in Ukraine found evidence that soldiers from the Azov regiment, identified by patches on their clothing and other insignias, have participated in training with the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) as recently as 2020 at the western-backed Zolochiv training centre in Western Ukraine. In a series of messages to CTVNews.ca, a spokesperson for the Azov regiment currently fighting in Mariupol, Ukraine said they were excluded as a group from training with Canadian instructors in Op. UNIFIER but that they “wrote a program” for their own courses and “were instructors in all disciplines in the National Guard of Ukraine training centre,” confirming Radio Canada’s previous reporting.

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” If the government could not stop someone from speaking in a public forum like a town square, Twitter should not do so through private means.”

1st Amendment: An Easy Way For Musk To Restore Free Speech on Twitter (Turley)

Free speech can be undermined by private corporations as well as government agencies. This threat is even greater when politicians openly use corporations to achieve indirectly what they cannot achieve directly. Corporations clearly have free speech rights. Ironically, Democrats have long opposed such rights for companies, but they embrace such rights when it comes to censorship. The Democratic Party embraced corporate governance of free speech once these companies aligned themselves with their political agenda. Starbucks and every other company have every right to pursue a woke agenda. Social media companies, however, sell communications, not coffee. They should be in the business of free speech.

Democrats have continued to treat the First Amendment as synonymous with free speech, as a way to justify greater censorship. Just last week, former President Barack Obama spoke at Stanford to flog this false line. Obama started by declaring himself, against every indication to the contrary, to be “pretty close to a First Amendment absolutist.” He then called for the censorship of anything that he considered “disinformation,” including “lies, conspiracy theories, junk science, quackery, racist tracts and misogynist screeds.” He was able to do that by emphasizing that “The First Amendment is a check on the power of the state. It doesn’t apply to private companies like Facebook or Twitter.”

Well, what if it did? The Constitution does not impose the same standard on Twitter — but Musk could. He could order a new Twitter team to err on the side of free speech while utilizing First Amendment standards to maximize protections on the platform. In other words, if the government could not censor a tweet, Twitter would not do so. The key to such an approach is not to treat Twitter as akin to “government speech,” a category where the government has allowed major speech controls. Rather, tweets are very much as Musk has described them: akin to speech in “the digital town square.” If the government could not stop someone from speaking in a public forum like a town square, Twitter should not do so through private means.

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There’s James Baker again.

WaPo’s Repulsive Defense Of Twitter Execs Makes Even Elon Musk Look Good (Fed.)

At 3:03 a.m. Wednesday, the Post dropped its story on the matter: “Elon Musk boosts criticism of Twitter executives, prompting online attacks: The targeting of employees by Musk’s massive Twitter megaphone is a major concern for workers.” The horror only compounds from there. “Musk’s response Tuesday was the first time he targeted specific Twitter executives by using his nearly singular ability to call attention to topics that interest him,” intoned the Post. “Supporters of Musk, a prolific and freewheeling tweeter with 86 million followers, tend to pile on with his viewpoints.” To be clear, Musk never said anything specific about Gadde, except to imply her role in the decision to ban The New York Post was wrong — an opinion that isn’t controversial, and was publicly stated by Twitter’s previous CEO.

As for Baker, Musk was commenting on his previous conduct as a public official, which by any accurate assessment was defined by poor judgment. Regardless, “sounds bad” is not exactly committing to a definitive judgment of the man, much less in his current role at Twitter. (As for what it says that the FBI’s former general counsel went from a disgraceful role in a spy scandal meant to influence the 2016 election to a lucrative gig at a tech company perhaps best known for its clumsy and dishonest attempts to influence the 2020 election… well, let your imagination run wild. There’s no explanation that isn’t disheartening.)

Neither person was “targeted.” The entire story is more accurately restated by the Washington Post expressing shock and dismay that millionaire tech executives might find themselves receiving public criticism from billionaire tech entrepreneurs. That’s a pretty questionable premise for one of the nation’s most influential news outlets to endorse. As Mike Solana, no stranger to observing the tech industry, put it, “This is a country of over 300 million people. If the rule for acceptable criticism of powerful executives and state propagandists is ‘can’t lead to *someone else* saying something awful,’ you effectively end all vital dissent. Then, that is of course the point.”

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Schwab 2.0.

France Introduces Digital ID Days After Macron’s Re-election (TCS)

Just days after winning the federal election, President Emmanuel Macron authorized the creation of a digital ID for France. The “Digital ID Guarantee Service” (SGIN) was signed into decree following his victory over La Pen, which will allow France to be ‘compliant’ with the European Union’s digital ID. The backlash from the ‘Les Patriots’ group, which seeks independence from the EU, was immediate. “Just after the election, the government announces the launch of ‘a digital identity application’!” said leader Florian Philippot. “The goal: to put social credit in the Chinese way. Control and surveillance company!” [translated from French] “Let’s totally reject this app and fight by any means!”

Macron’s election victory has set off massive protests, wherein Macron has been pelted with tomatoes. France’s move towards a centralized digital ID, and the corresponding resistance from people concerned with a Chinese-style social credit system, is a conflict that’s intensifying in many countries throughout the world. Recently, for example, Nigeria blocked 73 million residents from making phone calls for not linking their cell phones to their national digital ID. In Italy, a municipal government just announced it’s rolling out a soft social credit score in the Fall, the first of its kind in Europe. Domestically, Canada hasn’t issued coercive tactics to this level, and provinces are torn on implementing a digital ID.

While Alberta and Ontario have already rolled theirs out, Saskatchewan recently scrapped its plan to launch one after polling citizens who wanted nothing to do with it. Instead, the provincial government now says they’ll monitor uptake and feedback from colleagues in other jurisdictions.

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Has the EU protested Twitter and Facebook censorship? If not, such laws have no credibility. Or use.

As Europe Approves New Tech Laws, The US Falls Further Behind (NYT)

In just the last few years, Europe has seen a sweeping law for online privacy take effect, approved far-reaching regulations to curb the dominance of the tech giants and Saturday reached a deal on new legislation to protect its citizens from harmful online content. For those keeping score, that’s Europe: 3, United States: 0. The United States may be the birthplace of the iPhone and the most widely used search engine and social network, and it could also bring the world into the so-called metaverse. But global leadership on tech regulations is taking place more than 3,000 miles from Washington, by European leaders representing 27 nations with 24 languages, who have nonetheless been able to agree on basic online protections for their 450 million or so citizens.

In the United States, Congress has not passed a single piece of comprehensive regulation to protect internet consumers and to rein in the power of its technology giants. It’s not for lack of trying. Over 25 years, dozens of federal privacy bills have been proposed and then ultimately dropped without bipartisan support. With every major hack of a bank or retailer, lawmakers have introduced data breach and security bills, all of which have withered on the vine. A flurry of speech bills have sunk into the quicksand of partisan disagreements over freedoms of expression. And antitrust bills to curtail the power of Apple, Amazon, Google and Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, have sat in limbo amid fierce lobbying opposition.

Only two narrow federal tech laws have been enacted – one for children’s privacy and the other for ridding sites of sex-trafficking content – in the past 25 years. “Inertia is too kind of a word to describe what’s happened in the United States; there’s been a lack of will, courage and understanding of the problem and technologies,” said Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a public interest group. “And consumers are left with no protections here and lots of confusion.” The prospects that any legislation will pass imminently are dim, though regulations at some point are almost inevitable because of the way tech touches so many aspects of life. Of all the proposals currently in front of Congress, an antitrust bill that would bar Apple, Alphabet and Amazon from boosting their own products on their marketplaces and app stores over those of their rivals has the best shot.

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“Just as we need trust, public health seems poised to destroy it.”

The Fragmented Trust in Public Health (Prasad)

Building trust in institutions is vital to their success, but as we enter the third year of the pandemic, public health still seems hellbent on destroying itself. In recent weeks, we have seen flip flops on major policy proposal: a vaccine passport for domestic air-travel and authorizing the Pfizer vaccine for kids ages 6mo-4 years. These were publicly flirted with, but eventually abandoned. The administration has pushed medical products through, without the traditional advisory boards (as in the case of the 4th dose for Americans over 50). We have witnessed absurd contradictions – that Kyrie Irving can watch the basketball game from the first row, but not play on the court – and worse, that this rule only applies in New York city. Finally, the prospect that mask mandates may return in the fall looms over us, even as our rules become more absurd, with restaurant servers and preschoolers acting as the last, powerless people tasked with masking for all.

Public health, the institution, must own these absurdities and contradictions because the CDC has the scope and authority to correct them with clear guidance. Just as we need trust, public health seems poised to destroy it . Let’s consider these cases: In early October 2021 Ashish Jha, the newly selected Biden COVID Czar, suggested a vaccine mandate for domestic air travel, a view he reiterated in late January 2022. On Dec 27th, Anthony Fauci emphasized the idea of a vaccine passport for domestic air travel. Politico reports that Dr. Jha has long advised the administration on health policy, and Dr. Jha has confirmed he received “updates and announcements” from the administration prior to his appointment. Then silently, the proposal was abandoned with no action taken. As a close observer, I was confused as to what happened.

Similarly, in Feb 2022, the FDA asked Pfizer to submit data from an ongoing, and to date, negative trial for vaccination in kids ages 6mo to 4 years. An advisory committee was scheduled to discuss the results, which was leaked to news outlets as a reduction in symptomatic cases – one of the trial’s secondary objectives. Then, at the penultimate moment, the application was withdrawn and the advisory committee was cancelled. These flip flops were jarring. In the latter case, many parents were crushed, and felt as if the rug were pulled out from them. Scientists voiced protest, suggesting the vaccine be approved anyway. But I was most concerned that an approval based on inadequate data would further poison vaccine hesitancy at all ages, and for other vaccines (so called spillover effects). Even as it stands, this whipsaw news coverage may yet undermine parental trust.

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“Based on this concern alone, all of these experimental products as a class should have been completely contraindicated in women younger than menopause.”

COVID Vaccine Side Effects on Pregnant Women (ET)

Among the adverse events, particularly alarming are the ones that affected pregnant women. The documents say that there were 274 pregnancy adverse events, of which 75, or 27 percent were “serious.” “49 non-serious and 75 serious, reported clinical events, which occurred in the vaccinated mothers. Pregnancy related events reported in these cases coded to the [patients] Abortion spontaneous (25), Uterine contraction during pregnancy, Premature rupture of membranes, Abortion, Abortion missed, and Foetal death (1 each). Other clinical events which occurred in more than 5 cases coded to the [patients] Headache (33), Vaccination site pain (24), Pain in extremity and Fatigue (22 each), Myalgia and Pyrexia (16 each), Chills (13) Nausea (12), Pain (11), Arthralgia (9), Lymphadenopathy and Drug ineffective (7 each), Chest pain, Dizziness and Asthenia (6 each), Malaise and COVID-19 (5 each),” reads the previously confidential Pfizer documents (pdf).

[..] Michael Yeadon is a big pharma veteran with 32 years in the industry. He retired from Pfizer whilst occupying the most senior research position in that field. “On December 1, 2020, We detailed a series of mechanistic toxicology concerns which we believed were reasonable to hold, unless & until proven not to occur,” Yeadon said in a statement to The Epoch Times. “Among those was that adverse impacts on conception and ability to sustain a pregnancy were foreseeable.” “It’s important to note that none of these gene-based agents had completed what’s called ‘reproductive toxicology.’ Over a year later, this battery of tests in animals still has not been done. So there was and still is no data package supporting safety in pregnancy or prior to conception.”

Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg and Yeadon detailed the concerns on the issue: the spike protein from the virus encoded in the vaccines was related to a minor extent to syncytin that plays a crucial part in the carrying of a baby to term. Yeadon had hoped, back then, that their concerns were paid attention to, since they had already seen the tragedy of thalidomide, a sedative drug that caused congenital malformation, over 60 years ago. “During 2021, I came across two further pieces of evidence which made it much more likely that there’d be adverse effects on pregnancy from COVID-19 ‘vaccines.’”

“It looked like someone had tried to dismiss our concerns by testing for evidence of the particular problem we’d warned about in Dec. 2020. Unfortunately, all they did is to reinforce our concerns. We’d envisioned the risk that, in responding to the synthetic piece of virus spike protein, women’s immune systems would also make an immune response to their own placental protein,” Yeadon said. “That’s exactly what was reported in the pre-print paper.” “Based on this concern alone, all of these experimental products as a class should have been completely contraindicated in women younger than menopause.”

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It’s a big club….

The Sword & the Cross at Albright’s Funeral (CN)

It’s fitting that U.S. President Joe Biden and Bill and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton should eulogize Madeleine Albright at the mammoth Episcopalian institution calling itself the “National Cathedral.” After all, just last year, Albright eulogized fellow war maker, “trailblazer” and fellow Episcopalian Colin Powell there for his “honesty, dignity, loyalty and an unshakable commitment to his calling and word.” Albright, Biden and the Clintons covered for each other’s criminal war making — and ultimately, they all enabled and covered for Republican criminality as well. All showed they were capable of murderous deceits.

It sparked some measure of attention during the 2020 election, but it’s largely been forgotten that the current sitting president, who with great hypocrisy calls Russian President Vladimir Putin a war criminal, Joe Biden, won’t tell the truth about his Iraq war record — and he hasn’t for years. Indeed, the death of Albright on March 23 seemed to almost be a case of Providence attempting to interject history into the current geopolitical situation, most obviously the war in Ukraine. But one should not have expected any reckoning to be heard from the podium at the National Cathedral at her funeral on Wednesday. The war planners have had time to prepare their convoluted case. “Secretary Albright was a trailblazing diplomat” and “a fierce advocate for women” said the Very Rev. Randolph Marshall Hollerith dean of the National Cathedral, echoing the mantra of official Washington.

[..] An examination of Albright’s tenure as secretary of state highlights extraordinary deceit, how we got to this stage — and what’s been lost as minimal democratic participation has atrophied. Most obviously, Albright was perhaps the most important advocate for NATO expansion which clearly antagonized Russia and was a major part of the provocation for the invasion of Ukraine. She stood over Clinton as he signed on to NATO enlargement “for stability and security in the 21st century.” Moreover, the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia was known as “Albright’s War.” That war was triggered by political fabrications perpetrated by Albright and her associates, particularly regarding the Rambouillet text.

It further aggravated Russia and China — whose embassy NATO intentionally bombed at a critical time. It may well have helped ensure the rise of China’s increased militarized posture and the rise of Putin. Further, this first-of-its-kind use of NATO in war in Europe paved the way for its use in Asia (Afghanistan) and Africa (Libya). These moves projected Western military power into each of those continents. Albright’s continuation of the sanctions on Iraq, regardless of Iraqi compliance with weapons inspectors, led to a horrific humanitarian disaster in Iraq as well as the collapse of the UNSCOM weapons inspection regime, a complete break against international law and paving the way for the ultimate invasion of Iraq in 2003. In this as well as the Yugoslavia war, Albright was allied with the Clintons and Joe Biden.

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Scott Ritter: it’s over

 

 


Average tree height across Africa

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

Apr 172022
 
 April 17, 2022  Posted by at 9:19 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , ,  49 Responses »


Andy Warhol Mick Jagger 1975

 

Mariupol Close To Falling As Russia Issues Surrender Ultimatum (EN)
Ukrainian Troops Cleared Out Of Urban Areas Of Mariupol – Russia (F.)
Russia Strikes Ukraine’s Big Cities, Bears Down On Mariupol (AP)
Russia Says It Shot Down Ukrainian Transport Plane Carrying Western Arms (ZH)
Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Maria Zakharova (RT/Saker)
US Intel Officials Reject Biden’s “Genocide” Claims (ZH)
Noam Chomsky on How To Prevent World War III (CA)
Zelensky’s Dream Of Ukraine Becoming ‘Big Israel’ Makes Moscow Nervous (Cook)
Biden Official: US Refused To Address Ukraine, NATO Before Russian Invasion (RS)
Let Them Destroy Themselves (Denninger)
Kids in the U.S. and Europe Are Coming Down With Mysterious Liver Damage
Twitter Faces The ‘Nightmare’ Of Being Forced Into Free Speech (Turley)

 

 

 

 

Poison pills
https://twitter.com/i/status/1515415336396406786

 

 

 

 

Shanghai – Kids taken away

 

 

Malone

 

 

 

 

 

 

Russia executes what it has been saying for a long time.

Mariupol Close To Falling As Russia Issues Surrender Ultimatum (EN)

Mariupol, the last stronghold of Ukrainian troops in the south-east of the country, is very close to falling. Russian troops have given Ukrainian soldiers in the area, a chilling ultimatum to “surrender or die”. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has admitted the situation in Mariupol remains “extremely severe” but has not acknowledged that the city could fall. He warned Moscow that peace talks would be scrapped if the city’s remaining defenders were killed. Despite Russia’s assurances that its offensive would focus on the east of the country, the sinking of the Moskva missile cruiser, which Russia attributes to various non-combat causes, has led to new attacks on targets in the capital, and in western Ukraine.


“The elimination of our troops, of our men, in Mariupol will put an end to any negotiations.- Zelensky”. In Kharkiv, continued Russian shelling is leaving the city in ruins. More and more people are trying to escape to the west, perhaps with the ultimate aim of leaving the country. Ukrainian authorities say that Fridays attack by russian forces has killed several and wounded over 50 people.

Good Friday in Rome

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As planned.

Ukrainian Troops Cleared Out Of Urban Areas Of Mariupol – Russia (F.)

The Russian Defense Ministry claimed Saturday it had cleared Ukrainian forces from all urban areas of the besieged city of Mariupol, Russian news agency RIA reports. Russian Defense Ministry spokesperson Igor Konashenkov said in a statement the only remaining Ukrainian troops were a few fighters blockaded in the Azovstal steel works plant, RIA reports. The Guardian quoted Konashenkov as saying in the statement that the few remaining fighters’ “only chance to save their lives” is to surrender. Konashenkov claimed more than 4,000 Ukrainian troops had died in Mariupol, and nearly 1,500 had surrendered. Forbes could not independently verify Konashenkov’s figures, and Ukrainian officials did not immediately respond to the Russian Defense Ministry’s claims.


Troops from Ukraine’s 36th Marine Brigade fighting in Mariupol reportedly broke through Russian lines earlier this week to join up with soldiers from the Azov Regiment who have been fighting from the Azovstal plant, a sprawling compound where the defenders have been able to find cover to weather Russian assaults. Mariupol, a port city of about 400,000 near the Sea of Azov, has faced heavy bombardment by Russian forces in a siege that has lasted for weeks. Capturing the city has been a key priority for Russia, as it would consolidate a land bridge between mainland Russia and the annexed Crimean peninsula. The city has struggled to evacuate civilians and receive basic supplies due to damage to critical infrastructure by Russian forces. Mariupol Mayor Vadym Boychenko told the Associated Press more than 10,000 residents have died and that he predicts the true death toll could double.

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Deliberately posting some MSM coverage here.

Russia Strikes Ukraine’s Big Cities, Bears Down On Mariupol (AP)

Russian forces renewed missile strikes on Kyiv and intensified shelling of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, in an apparent strategy to hobble Ukraine’s defenses in preparation for what is expected to be a full-scale Russian assault in the east. These attacks and others scattered across the country were an explosive reminder to Ukrainians and their Western supporters that the whole country remains under threat. With the port city of Mariupol under siege, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russia “is deliberately trying to destroy everyone who is there.” He said Ukraine needs more heavy weapons from the West immediately to have any chance of saving the city.

Each day brings new discoveries of civilian victims of an invasion that has shattered European security. In the towns and villages just outside Kyiv, authorities have reported finding the bodies of more than 900 civilians, most shot dead, since Russian troops retreated two weeks ago. After the humiliating loss of the flagship of its Black Sea Fleet, Russia’s military command vowed to step up missile strikes on the capital. The Russians said they hit an armored vehicle plant on Saturday, a day after targeting a missile plant. Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko advised residents who fled the city earlier in the war not to return. “We’re not ruling out further strikes on the capital,” he said. “If you have the opportunity to stay a little bit longer in the cities where it’s safer, do it.”


The mayor said Saturday’s strike killed one person and wounded several. It was not immediately clear from the ground what was hit in the strike on Kyiv’s Darnytskyi district. The sprawling area on the southeastern edge of the capital contains a mixture of Soviet-style apartment blocks, newer shopping centers and big-box retail outlets, industrial areas and railyards. Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said an armored vehicle plant was targeted. He didn’t specify where the factory was located, but there is one in the Darnytskyi district.

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At some location, they load them onto Ukraine planes, then fly them into the country.

Russia Says It Shot Down Ukrainian Transport Plane Carrying Western Arms (ZH)

In what appears Moscow’s “answer” to the US and NATO countries continuing to supply major weapons systems to Ukrainian forces, state agency TASS is claiming that Russian forces have brought down a Ukrainian military transport plane that was transporting Western arms. It would mark a massive battlefield development if confirmed, potentially escalating conflict more directly with the West, now that Russia is actively targeting Western arms shipments. The alleged shoot down occurred outside Odessa via anti-air systems, says TASS, while citing Russian Defense Ministry Spokesman Major-General Igor Konashenkov. Though remaining unconfirmed, China state media has also picked up the report, citing the defense ministry statement, which reads:


“Near Odesa Russian anti-aircraft defense forces have shot down a Ukrainian military transport plane, which was delivering a large shipment of arms supplied to Ukraine by Western counties,” Russian Defense Ministry Spokesman Major-General Igor Konashenkov said Saturday. However, there’s nothing in the way of independent or outside sources confirming it, and Ukraine’s military has not issued any statements, nor are they likely to admit that their military aircraft were transporting Western weapons shipments, even if accurate. Days ago, the Kremlin repeated its threat to attack any inbound shipments of weaponry or supplies coming from Ukraine’s Western backers. The military also said it would hit “decision-making centers” – and on Saturday long-range missiles reportedly struck weapons depots in Kiev. Meanwhile, the Pentagon and US State Department have continued positively boasting that more weapons are en route, in a continuing escalation…

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Zakharova (also) talks about German involvement in Ukraine biolabs. Don’t think I heard that one before.

Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Maria Zakharova (RT/Saker)

Question: Are there any additional details about Germany’s military biological activities in Ukraine?

Maria Zakharova: For you to better understand the situation, I will cite the following facts. Since 2013, under the auspices of the German Federal Foreign Office, the German Government has been implementing the German Biosecurity Programme (GBP) which includes partnership projects with government agencies and research organisations in focus countries, which Ukraine became part of in 2014, the year of Maidan. German specialists from the Institute of Microbiology of the German Armed Forces (Munich), Friedrich Loeffler Institute (Greifswald-Riems Island), Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine (Hamburg) and the Robert Koch Institute (Berlin), which specialise in research of deadly biological agents, are engaged in practical activities. According to the German Federal Foreign Office, the third phase of the GBP will be implemented in 2020-2022. We can infer from the publicly available materials that the GBP’s stated technical goals include, among others, the gathering of epidemic intelligence in third countries, including with the use of big data technology, and developing the infrastructure of partner countries for handling dangerous biological agents.

The Institute of Experimental and Clinical Veterinary Medicine in Kharkov has been the Institute of Microbiology of the German Armed Forces’ main Ukrainian counterparty since 2016, which we know from its own data. The two institutes cooperate under the Ukrainian-German project titled “Initiative on Biological Safety and Biological Defence in the Management of the Zoonotic Risks at the Outer Borders of the European Union.” The fact that its official goal is to “improve the biological defence and security situation” in Ukraine, “particularly in the east of the country” gives rise to the rhetorical question of which border the German military biologists consider an outer border for the purposes of their professional interests. Is it the Russian-Ukrainian border?

The Institute of Microbiology claims in its materials that the project is related to the “potential threat of biological terrorism” in Ukraine amid the unending hostilities in eastern regions of that country. It is crystal clear that this is a way to send a subtle message about the DPR and LPR s possible involvement in hatching plans for the use of internationally prohibited biological weapons. In so doing, the German military have been deliberately intimidating their Ukrainian counterparts for a long time and have, in fact, been psychologically pitting them against the Donbass republics. Ukrainian biological safety experts invariably participate in the medical biodefence conferences that are regularly held by the Institute of Microbiology of the German Armed Forces.

German journalist
https://twitter.com/i/status/1514986138234023947

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“If Russia had that objective or was intentionally killing civilians, we’d see a lot more than less than .01 percent in places like Bucha..”

Biden’s “genocide” and Zelensky’s “our enemies want us to cease to exist”: hyperbole rules.

US Intel Officials Reject Biden’s “Genocide” Claims (ZH)

Earlier this week, President Biden appeared to veer off script in the middle of his ‘blame Putin, not our idiotic policies, for your collapsing cost of living’ speech, when he dropped the ‘g’ word… “Your family budget, your ability to fill up your tank, none of it should hinge on whether a dictator declares war and commits genocide half a world away.” As the world waited for another rapid walk-back by White House staffers of another Biden gaffe, the 79-year-old doubled-down… “Yes, I called it genocide. Because it has become clearer and clearer that Putin is just trying to wipe out the idea of being able to be Ukrainian.” The comments sparked reactions from around the diplomatic world. French President Emmanuel Macron was the most outspoken, refusing to back Biden’s claim that Russia is committing “genocide” in Ukraine.


The French leader instead warned that an escalation of rhetoric wouldn’t bring peace. On the same day Biden accused Russia of genocide, Newsweek published an article quoting a senior official from the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency who said the civilian casualties in Ukraine are typical of modern warfare and “hardly” amount to genocide. The DIA official: said “I am not for a second excusing Russia’s war crimes, nor forgetting that Russia invaded the country.” “But the number of actual deaths is hardly genocide. If Russia had that objective or was intentionally killing civilians, we’d see a lot more than less than .01 percent in places like Bucha,” the official emphasized.

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Lots of ruckus about Chomsky saying negotiations are necessary.

Noam Chomsky on How To Prevent World War III (CA)

Well, I would not criticize Zelensky. He’s acting with great courage, great integrity. You can understand and sympathize with his position from where he sits. However, the Pentagon has a wiser stand. Yes, we could enter the war. We could provide Zelensky with jet planes and advanced weapons. Pretty soon Putin would be radically escalating the attack on Ukraine, would wipe it out which he has the capacity to do. He would be attacking the supply chains that are providing advanced weapons. And we’d be in a war, which would be a nuclear war, which would wipe us all out.

So I’m not criticizing Zelensky; he’s an honorable person and has shown great courage. You can sympathize with his positions. But you can also pay attention to the reality of the world. And that’s what it implies. I’ll go back to what I said before: there are basically two options. One option is to pursue the policy we are now following, to quote Ambassador Freeman again, to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian. And yes, we can pursue that policy with the possibility of nuclear war. Or we can face the reality that the only alternative is a diplomatic settlement, which will be ugly—it will give Putin and his narrow circle an escape hatch. It will say, Here’s how you can get out without destroying Ukraine and going on to destroy the world.


We know the basic framework is neutralization of Ukraine, some kind of accommodation for the Donbas region, with a high level of autonomy, maybe within some federal structure in Ukraine, and recognizing that, like it or not, Crimea is not on the table. You may not like it, you may not like the fact that there’s a hurricane coming tomorrow, but you can’t stop it by saying, “I don’t like hurricanes,” or “I don’t recognize hurricanes.” That doesn’t do any good. And the fact of the matter is, every rational analyst knows that Crimea is, for now, off the table. That’s the alternative to the destruction of Ukraine and nuclear war. You can make heroic statements, if you’d like, about not liking hurricanes, or not liking the solution. But that’s not doing anyone any good.

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“So far Israel has refused to supply Ukraine with weapons or join the West in waging economic warfare on Russia..”

Zelensky’s Dream Of Ukraine Becoming ‘Big Israel’ Makes Moscow Nervous (Cook)

The Israeli government has been trying to keep as low a profile as possible over the war in Ukraine, but Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, seems determined to drag Israel on to centre stage. Zelensky made a direct appeal to the Israeli parliament last month, ostensibly asking for weapons, especially the Iron Dome interception system Israel uses to stop short-range rockets fired out of Gaza by Palestinians trying to draw attention to Israel’s 15-year siege of the enclave. But rather than being flattered by the attention, many Israeli politicians objected to Zelensky’s speech. In it, he compared Russia’s treatment of Ukraine to the Nazis’ “Final Solution” for European Jews. Zelensky, who is Jewish, hoped the parallel would strike home.

To most Israeli ears, it sounded offensive. So far Israel has refused to supply Ukraine with weapons or join the West in waging economic warfare on Russia. It does not help that major Israeli political parties and religious communities have strong geographical and emotional ties to Russia. Or that Moscow is a major actor in the Middle East, not least in neighbouring Syria. Israel coordinates closely with Russia over regular air strikes in Syria – themselves in violation of international law. Israel has been trying its best to tread a difficult diplomatic path over Ukraine. On the one hand, Israel is a regional client state of the United States, under Washington’s protection, and wishes to keep its patron happy. And on the other, Israel’s military interests are to maintain good relations with Moscow.


Furthermore, Israeli leaders are worried about reinforcing the consensus that what the Russian army is doing in Ukraine amounts to war crimes, thereby creating a very public precedent that could be turned against Israel over its own abuses in the occupied territories. Adopting an early role as mediator, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett even urged Zelensky to accept a Russian ceasefire proposal. Nonetheless, Zelensky is intent on tipping the scales in Ukraine’s favour with Israel. He understands that his country’s plight has captured the western media and western public sympathy. He has every incentive to weaponise that sentiment to press-gang Israel into more openly supporting Ukraine. In his speech to the parliament, he appropriated a quote from a former Israeli prime minister, Golda Meir, who claimed that “our enemies want us to cease to exist”. Russia planned to do the same to Ukraine, Zelensky warned.

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“We made clear to the Russians that we were willing to talk to them on issues that we thought were genuine concerns they have that were legitimate in some way..”

Biden Official: US Refused To Address Ukraine, NATO Before Russian Invasion (RS)

A senior Biden administration official recently admitted that prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the United States made no effort to address one of Vladimir Putin’s most often stated top security concerns — the possibility of Ukraine’s membership into NATO. When asked on a podcast published on Wednesday by War on the Rocks — a U.S. foreign and defense policy analysis website — whether NATO expansion into Ukraine “was not on the table in terms of negotiations” before the invasion, Derek Chollet, counselor to Secretary of State Antony Blinken replied that “it wasn’t.” Chollet’s remarks confirm suspicions by many critics who believe the Biden administration wasn’t doing enough — including offering to deny or delay Ukraine’s NATO membership — to prevent Russia from launching a war against Ukraine.

“We made clear to the Russians that we were willing to talk to them on issues that we thought were genuine concerns they have that were legitimate in some way, I mean arms control type things of that nature,” Chollet said, adding that the administration didn’t think that “the future of Ukraine” was one of those issues and that its potential NATO membership was a “non-issue.” “This was not about NATO,” said Chollet, who contradicted himself moments later, saying, “In perpetrating this totally unjustified and unprovoked war, [Putin’s] goal was to try to divide the U.S. from Europe and weaken NATO.” Of course Putin himself stated publicly many times before the invasion that indeed, Ukraine’s potential NATO membership was a key security concern for Russia.


Weeks before Russia launched its war against Ukraine, Putin claimed that Russia’s concerns about NATO enlargement were being ignored. “We need to resolve this question now … [and] we hope very much our concern will be heard by our partners and taken seriously,” he later said. War on the Rocks’ Ryan Evans told Chollet that he takes Putin’s claims about NATO “seriously,” adding, “I’m a little struck by the refusal to even talk about the issue of NATO expansion.” “We talked about NATO in saying that NATO is a defensive alliance. NATO is not a threat to Russia,” Chollet said. Before the Russian invasion, Quincy Institute senior research fellow on Russia and Europe Anatol Lieven wrote that as part of a broader package to stave off war, the United States should propose “the declaration of a moratorium on Ukrainian membership of NATO for a period of 20 years, allowing time for negotiations on a new security architecture for Europe as a whole, including Russia.”

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Energy policies are being decided by people who understand very little about energy. That will become a very big problem.

Let Them Destroy Themselves (Denninger)

This is an amusing headline…. “California regulators unveiled a plan to ban the sale of new gas cars by 2035 on Thursday, the state’s latest effort to combat greenhouse gas emissions. The plan from the California Air Resources Board calls for 35% of new car sales in the state to be battery or hydrogen-powered by 2026, according to CNBC. The board will vote on the proposal in August.” I’m looking forward to this insanity. I hope Vegas has figured out how to do without most of the roughly 25% of the people who come there from Southern California since most of them come by car. The trip is, on the shortest path, 270 miles — which is materially beyond the “safe” distance you can go in an EV on one charge assuming no traffic that slows you down while, of course, you’re baking in the 100+ degree sun and have the A/C running.

While LA -> San Diego is doable (~120 miles) San Diego out to Vegas is definitely not at 332 miles; you will run out of power if you try it in other than excellent weather – with no traffic. Good luck on that “no traffic” thing. In-state travel? Ha! Never mind interstate personal travel. Oh, and have I noted yet (checking notes; nope) that California lacks the electrical grid and generating capacity to deliver the power to charge said vehicles? Sure, with a few percent of the total they are pulling it off. But – and this is important – their cost per kilowatt-hour is ~80% higher than the cost in place like Tennessee or Florida and will go higher still with the new demand. Never mind that at so-called “public” charging stations (e.g. Superchargers, etc.) the rate is typically two to four times – or more – that of your residential rate.


So much for “saving money” too; no you won’t! Oh, and what are those people who live in apartments or other higher-density places without garage space, which means no power connection going to do? I presume the answer isn’t to leave unguarded but metered connections out in the open as doing so is basically-certain to invite wholesale theft by others with….. electric cars. Unlike a gas vehicle which requires actual vandalism to steal the fuel (never mind the risk of blowing yourself up doing it) stealing power from an open receptacle is simply a matter of plugging into it. Yeah that’ll work out well too, especially in California. Go ahead and do it – this is going to be fun to watch.

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Not a single word even about the option that vaccines could be involved. No longer acceptable.

Kids in the U.S. and Europe Are Coming Down With Mysterious Liver Damage

A string of severe hepatitis cases in children has doctors across both sides of the pond spooked. Dozens of children in the UK and Europe, as well as some in the U.S., have come down with symptoms of hepatitis not currently explained by known causes. Theories for the outbreak include the resurgence of an existing but usually quieter germ, complications of covid-19, or even the arrival of a novel or mutated virus. Hepatitis is most often caused by a group of five unrelated viruses (hepatitis A through E), but it’s actually a formal term for any kind of liver inflammation. Various infectious diseases, heavy alcohol use, toxins, and even certain medications can all cause hepatitis. Symptoms range from fever and fatigue to jaundice (yellowed skin and eyes), nausea, abdominal pain, and dark urine. In severe cases, it can lead to liver failure and death.

Since January this year, UK doctors have reported a concerning rise of severe, sometimes life-threatening hepatitis cases in children—above the normal baseline rate of incidence. At least 74 cases documented in the country seem to fit the bill, with children not testing positive for any of the known hepatitis viruses. In a case report by doctors from Scotland published Thursday, the authors noted that three children became so sick that they were evaluated for a possible liver transplant. At least six children in the UK have received a liver transplant, according to a recent summary by the World Health Organization.


This week, health officials in Spain reported three of their own cases, including one child who also needed a transplant. And in the U.S., health officials in Alabama have reported at least nine hepatitis cases in children dating back to October 2021 that similarly elude a simple explanation. A public health alert issued by the Alabama Department of Public Health to doctors in February alluded to one possible case in another state but provided no further details.

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“..the company is “not to be bound by the First Amendment” and will regulate content as “reflective of things that we believe lead to a healthier public conversation.”

Twitter Faces The ‘Nightmare’ Of Being Forced Into Free Speech (Turley)

Twitter’s board of directors gathered this week to sign what sounds like a suicide pact. It unanimously voted to swallow a “poison pill” to tank the value of the social media giant’s shares rather than allow billionaire Elon Musk to buy the company. The move is one way to fend off hostile takeovers, but what is different in this case is the added source of the hostility: Twitter and many liberals are apoplectic over Musk’s call for free speech protections on the site. Company boards have a fiduciary duty to do what is best for shareholders, which usually is measured in share values. Twitter has long done the opposite. It has virtually written off many conservatives — and a large portion of its prospective market — with years of arbitrary censorship of dissenting views on everything from gender identity to global warming, election fraud and the pandemic.

Most recently, Twitter suspended a group, Libs of Tik Tok, for “hateful conduct.” The conduct? Reposting what liberals have said about themselves. The company seemingly has written off free speech too. Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal was asked how Twitter would balance its efforts to combat misinformation with wanting to “protect free speech as a core value” and to respect the First Amendment. He responded dismissively that the company is “not to be bound by the First Amendment” and will regulate content as “reflective of things that we believe lead to a healthier public conversation.” Agrawal said the company would “focus less on thinking about free speech” because “speech is easy on the internet. Most people can speak. Where our role is particularly emphasized is who can be heard.”


Not surprisingly, selling censorship is not a big hit with most consumers, particularly from a communications or social media company. The actions of Twitter’s management have led to roller-coastering share values. While Twitter once reached a high of about $73 a share, it is currently around $45. (Musk was offering $54.20 a share, representing a 54 percent premium over the share price the day before he invested in the company.)

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Travel in groups
https://twitter.com/i/status/1515348562263085066

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

Apr 142022
 
 April 14, 2022  Posted by at 7:41 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , ,  31 Responses »


Andy Warhol Shot Sage Blue Marilyn 1964 (click pic for great article!)

 

Putin Vows ‘Consequences’ For Those Who Interfere In Ukraine (DM)
The Fog of War and the Global Paradigm Shift (Vianna)
How To Wrest War Reparations From Russia: Ukraine, West Count The Ways (JTN)
Zelenskyy’s Steinmeier Snub Triggers Backlash In Germany (Pol.eu)
Bretton Woods III: “Suicidal Europe Saved By Gold?“ (Vilches)
My Video Call With The WHO This Morning (Tess Lawrie)
The Anatomy of Big Pharma’s Political Reach (CHD)
C19 “Vaccine” – The Cause Of Causes (CdC)
GOP Lawmakers Demand FDA Publish Covid Vaccine Safety And Efficacy Data (JTN)
The Horrible, Terrible, Bad, Bad Results of CNBC’s Biden Performance Poll (CTH)
Annual Wholesale Inflation Rises 11.2%, Mirroring Record CPI Numbers (JTN)
Hunter Biden Mixing Business Affairs With Hunger Charity (JTN)
My Personal Experience in Twitter’s Assault on Free Speech (Scott Ritter)

 

 

 

 

“This Is the Largest Experiment on Human Beings Ever Performed in the History of the World”
https://twitter.com/i/status/1514014220345561093

 

 

 

 

The Daily Mail says faltering invasion twice in two sentences. They must be afraid once is not enough.

I saw a headline yesterday about Russia threatening arms shipments into Ukraine, but can’t find it back right now.

Putin Vows ‘Consequences’ For Those Who Interfere In Ukraine (DM)

Vladimir Putin today warned his enemies in the West they will face ‘consequences’ if they ‘worsen the situation’ in Ukraine, as the Russian strongman threatened to create ‘waves of migrants’ in Europe. Putin, speaking in front of dozens of rockets at the Vostochny space launch facility in Russia’s Far East, insisted that his faltering invasion of Ukraine would prevail as he warned of world starvation as a result of Western sanctions against Moscow. The Russian President claimed Russia’s economy and financial system withstood the blow from what he called the Western sanctions ‘blitz’ and insisted the move would backfire by driving up prices for essentials such as fertiliser, leading to food shortages and increased migration to the West.

Despite Putin’s faltering invasion, which saw Russian troops retreat from Ukrainian cities and instead focus on the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine, the leader said his war effort is going to plan as he vowed Russia would triumph in all of its ‘noble’ war aims. Putin said that ‘common sense should prevail’ and added that the West should ‘come back to reason and make well-balanced decisions without losing its face.’ He argued that new Western restrictions on high-tech exports will encourage Russia to move faster to develop new technologies, opening a ‘new window of opportunities.’ Putin also claimed on Tuesday that the images and footage of dead bodies strewn across the Ukrainian town of Bucha were fake, parroting the same lines his spokesman gave earlier this week. He compared the accusations to those concerning the use of chemical weapons by the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. ‘It’s the same kind of fake in Bucha,’ Putin said.

[..] An unconfirmed video uploaded last night appears to show two Russian coastal defence missile systems moving along a road on the Russian side of the border that leads to Helsinki. The missile systems, which were seen driving past a sign to the Finnish capital, are thought to be the K-300P Bastion-P mobile coastal defence system, designed to take out surface ships up to and including aircraft carrier battle groups. The Russian deployment comes as Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin said she expects her government ‘will end the discussion before midsummer’ on whether to apply for NATO membership.

Recent opinions polls by a Finnish market research company put 84% of Finns as viewing Russia as a ‘significant military threat’, up by 25% on last year. In response, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov euphemistically warned the move would ‘not improve’ the security situation in Europe, and Moscow lawmaker Vladimir Dzhabarov added more bluntly it would mean ‘the destruction of the country’. ‘We have repeatedly said that the alliance remains a tool geared towards confrontation and its further expansion will not bring stability to the European continent,’ Peskov said.

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“..the deepening of the continuous and unlimited reproduction and expansion of the american military empire is a reality that became even clearer after the first russian tank entered ukrainian territory..”

The Fog of War and the Global Paradigm Shift (Vianna)

With ukrainian president Vladimir Zelensky being a kind of spokesman of a script written in Washington – or, who knows, Hollywood – the repeated attacks on european leaders who have worked so hard for the normalization of Russian-European Union relations, as is the case of the recent attack on former chancellor Angela Merkel, indicate that the instruments of fourth generation war, already used by the United States in other regions of the planet, are intensifying in the heart of the western alliance. Not only the maintenance, but the deepening of the continuous and unlimited reproduction and expansion of the american military empire is a reality that became even clearer after the first russian tank entered ukrainian territory, even if this meant destabilizing, or even destroying, old and loyal allies.

In this sense, the old premise carried by many scholars of the “realist” school of International Relations, as well as by great thinkers of the World System, that the concentration of global power in a single state would be an essential condition for lasting world peace, falls to the ground. The “Hyperpower Paradox” is confirmed as a slap in the face of the enormous theoretical consensus developed since the mid-1970s of the last century. In other words, since the first minute of the US bombing of Iraq in 1991, which followed the 48 military interventions of the 1990s, and the 24 interventions in the first two decades of the 21st century – which in turn culminated in 100,000 bombings around the globe – the International System is immersed in a somber process of permanent, or infinite, war, which contradicts the kantian utopia of perpetual peace reflected in the idea of hegemonic stability.

Thus, it was a mistake to consider that the unipolar global power that emerged with the victory in the cold war could exercise its hegemony in the name of peace and global stability, assuming, therefore, a responsible leadership and in the name of a great global governance. On the contrary, what we have witnessed over the last 30 years is the escalation of interstate competition, with the reaction of other states to the insane and inconsequential process of power expansion carried out by the American military empire.

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The same way Yemen, Libya, Syria etc etc will wrest war reparations from the US, one would presume.

How To Wrest War Reparations From Russia: Ukraine, West Count The Ways (JTN)

Seven weeks into a war that seems poised to escalate before it ends, Kyiv and Western leaders are calculating ways to exact reparations from an aggressive Moscow. Russian President Vladimir Putin on Feb. 24 launched an attack into Ukraine, pummeling cities and wreaking havoc on lives and infrastructure. Aside from the intangible damages to society, experts have estimated that the damages range from $700 billion to a projected $1.5 trillion. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told Moscow last month that he expected that country to pay for the damages. “We will restore every house, every street, every city,” Zelensky said in a video address. “You will reimburse us for everything you did against our state, against every Ukrainian, in full.”

Although Putin most likely would dismiss such claims, the West may already have the means to earmark reparations on Ukraine’s behalf, one analyst said. “In the past, reparations have been paid after hostilities ended by the aggressor country — that was Germany in the first two world wars,” according to the Brookings Institution’s Robert Litan. “Now, the fact that many countries already have control over Russia’s holdings of foreign currency means that, in effect, reparations for the Ukrainian invasion have been pre-funded by Russia itself,” Litan wrote in a March essay. Significant sums of Russian money have been frozen by governments around the world. But funneling it toward reparations may present a number of hurdles, others say.

European officials reportedly are considering whether the seized property of Russian oligarchs can be applied toward rebuilding Ukraine. A more lucrative move would be to confiscate Russia’s central bank reserves that are held in foreign banks. But such a move would be complex in light of legal constraints, one analyst said. “There is international law that puts property of foreign states under special protection,” according to Stephan Schill, a professor at the Amsterdam Center for International Law.

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This is the US speaking. Pick on someone who has visibility but no power.

Zelenskyy’s Steinmeier Snub Triggers Backlash In Germany (Pol.eu)

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s decision to declare his German counterpart Frank-Walter Steinmeier unwelcome in Kyiv has triggered dismay among German politicians and warnings that the move may backfire. Steinmeier, seen as a symbol of Germany’s soft line on Moscow before the invasion of Ukraine, had planned to visit Kyiv on Wednesday along with the presidents of Poland and the three Baltic states, but the German president had to cancel his trip — which had not been made public in advance for security reasons — after Kyiv indicated that he was not welcome. The move was a humiliation for Steinmeier — a former foreign minister closely associated with Berlin’s previous policy of pursuing close economic and diplomatic ties with Russia — but also for Germany as a whole.

As federal president, Steinmeier is the highest-ranking representative of the German state. The fact that Zelenskyy communicated his decision just hours before Steinmeier’s planned secret trip, after days of preparation between Berlin and Kyiv, and that Ukrainian officials leaked the snub to German tabloid Bild, deepened the diplomatic insult for Germany. Chancellor Olaf Scholz said he found Zelenskyy‘s decision not to welcome Steinmeier “irritating.” Reacting to a Ukrainian invitation for him to visit Ukraine himself, Scholz told RBB24 radio he was not planning any such trip in the near future. The chancellor argued that he had been to Kyiv just about a week before the outbreak of the war and that he was speaking regularly to Zelenskyy on the phone, most recently on Sunday.

In an official statement, a government spokesperson voiced a sober reaction to the Ukrainian move, saying that Steinmeier “has taken and is taking a very clear and unambiguous position on the side of Ukraine,” and stressed that he had also directly appealed to Russian President Vladimir Putin to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty. Others were more critical. “While understanding the existential threat to Ukraine posed by the Russian invasion, I expect Ukrainian representatives to adhere to a minimum level of diplomatic manners and not unduly interfere in our country’s domestic politics,” said Rolf Mützenich, the parliamentary group leader of the center-left Social Democrats, the party of both Steinmeier and Scholz.

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“Goal (A) is having all countries being able to gradually repatriate their gold bullion now theoretically in custody at the Bank of England..”

Good luck with that. Theoretically.

Bretton Woods III: “Suicidal Europe Saved By Gold?“ (Vilches)

In a nutshell, right now our Western Graeco-Roman Judeo-Christian millenary culture needs to rise to the occasion. Dear “Europa”, as the cradle of Western civilization that you are supposed to be, please be advised that this is it. Otherwise, not just our culture but also our species could soon become functionally disabled. Or, in financial terms which technocrats enjoy so much, we can soon become a forever ´non-performing asset´ a.k.a. wasted garbage. Accordingly, this draft Plan attempts to AVOID the UK-EU Armageddon that “NATO´s internal gold war” would necessarily bring about. And also please be advised that our success would be the only way at hand to prove the Davos agenda wrong which actually was what brought us to the situation we are now facing in the first place.

The basic philosophy behind this über urgent project is probably best represented by a photograph taken at Verdun in 1984 wherein French President Francois Mitterand and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl are firmly holding each other´s hand like two school children both looking straight at the camera for the whole world to see. These two most serious, intelligent and very powerfull elderly statesmen were silently screaming something instantly understood by everyone after French and Germans had killed, maimed and hatefully destroyed each other for decades. Say no more.

Lacking public domain data, let´s accept a spitball yet trustworthy “back-of-the-envelope” guesstimate of 5000 tons of gold deposited by EU members for custody at the Bank of England. So, if such tonnage were now physically available at today´s ultra low central-bank-manipulated prices it would pay for all of Europe´s oil & gas imports for one full year …while if gold were priced at USD $ 5000 per ounce Troy it would pay for 2,5 years of Europe´s oil & gas needs… And if gold were priced at USD $ 50,000 per ounce (something quite possible if genuine price-discovery mechanisms were set free without central bank manipulation…) those 5000 metric tons of gold at current oil & gas prices (which could be lower due to deflationary pressures) would pay for 25 years of EU´s fuel needs, or more.

2022 goals of The Plan, Goal (A) is having all countries being able to gradually repatriate their gold bullion now theoretically in custody at the Bank of England if they so desire with a serious and foreseeable schedule in place to be unequivocally complied with. Goal (B) being able to sell such gold bullion even with buyers taking physical delivery but always at a genuine market price most probably very much higher than today´s fully manipulated quotes thru central bank daily interventions. s

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“No one in their right mind would want the WHO in charge of a global pandemic.”

“On Sunday, it launched a so-called ‘public participation process’ and invited video and written submissions. They gave two days to make video submissions, and written submissions must be received by 5pm CEST today. That’s five days for the world’s citizens to have their voices heard. Five days – and no public announcement.”

My Video Call With The WHO This Morning (Tess Lawrie)

As you may know, the WHO is proposing a global pandemic agreement that would give it undemocratic rights over every participating nation and its citizens. Put simply, in the event of a ‘pandemic’, the WHO’s constitution would replace every country’s constitution. Whether your country’s elected government would agree or not, the WHO could impose lockdowns, testing regimes, enforce medical interventions, dictate all public health practice, and much more. Throughout this pandemic, the WHO has demonstrated its incompetence, dishonesty and corruption. It has withheld safe and established older medicines, ignored the experiences of frontline doctors, disregarded evidence from low, middle and high-income countries, and taken no heed of the values and preferences of people affected by their recommendations.


It has ignored the huge numbers of adverse reactions on its own database and has failed to issue warnings about the gene-based vaccines. It has also advertised that the mRNA vaccines are as safe as normal vaccines – and this is simply not the case. No one in their right mind would want the WHO in charge of a global pandemic. And yet, that’s precisely what it is proposing with its global pandemic treaty. The World Council for Health wrote a response to this a while back and has been watching developments closely. Well, this week the WHO pulled a fast one on the world. On Sunday, it launched a so-called ‘public participation process’ and invited video and written submissions. They gave two days to make video submissions, and written submissions must be received by 5pm CEST today. That’s five days for the world’s citizens to have their voices heard. Five days – and no public announcement. If you’re angry, you have every right to be.

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Full portrait of the world’s biggest lobbying enterprise.

The Anatomy of Big Pharma’s Political Reach (CHD)

Pfizer has outspent its peers in six of the last eight election cycles, coughing up almost $9.7 million. During the 2016 election, pharmaceutical companies gave more than $7 million to 97 senators at an average of $75,000 per member. They also contributed $6.3 million to president Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign. The question is: what did big pharma get in return? To truly grasp big pharma’s power, you need to understand how The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) works. ALEC, which was founded in 1973 by conservative activists working on Ronald Reagan’s campaign, is a super secretive pay-to-play operation where corporate lobbyists – including in the pharma sector – hold confidential meetings about “model” bills. A large portion of these bills is eventually approved and become law.

A rundown of ALEC’s greatest hits will tell you everything you need to know about the council’s motives and priorities. In 1995, ALEC promoted a bill that restricts consumers’ rights to sue for damages resulting from taking a particular medication. They also endorsed the Statute of Limitation Reduction Act, which put a time limit on when someone could sue after a medication-induced injury or death. Over the years, ALEC has promoted many other pharma-friendly bills that would: weaken the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) oversight of new drugs and therapies, limit FDA authority over drug advertising, and oppose regulations on financial incentives for doctors to prescribe specific drugs. But what makes these ALEC collaborations feel particularly problematic is that there’s little transparency — all of this happens behind closed doors.

Congressional leaders and other committee members involved in ALEC aren’t required to publish any records of their meetings and other communications with pharma lobbyists, and the roster of ALEC members is completely confidential. All we know is that in 2020, more than two-thirds of Congress — 72 senators and 302 House of Representatives members — cashed a campaign check from a pharma company. The public typically relies on an endorsement from government agencies to help them decide whether or not a new drug, vaccine or medical device is safe and effective. And those agencies, like the FDA, count on clinical research. As already established, big pharma is notorious for getting its hooks into influential government officials.

Here’s another sobering truth: The majority of scientific research is paid for by the pharmaceutical companies. When the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) published 73 studies of new drugs over the course of a single year, they found that a staggering 82% of them had been funded by the pharmaceutical company selling the product, 68% had authors who were employees of that company and 50% had lead researchers who accepted money from a drug company. According to 2013 research conducted at the University of Arizona College of Law, even when pharma companies aren’t directly funding the research, company stockholders, consultants, directors and officers are almost always involved in conducting them.

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“Though myocarditis gets the most notoriety, the entire circulatory system is under attack..”

C19 “Vaccine” – The Cause Of Causes (CdC)

The official Massachusetts database of death certificates contains proof that C19 “vaccines” killed thousands of people in Massachusetts in 2021. This article details a forensic journey in a one-of-a-kind, brute-force, pedestrian, forensic analysis of the official Massachusetts government data to discover what happened and is happening in a population of ~ 6.9 million people at the fore of C19 “science.” Massachusetts is a leading medical and pharmaceutical technology exporter to the world. Some leaders say it is a model for C19 response planning. The truth is that Massachusetts is a model for fraud on the people.

As demonstrated in particularity below, there was a short pandemic of respiratory deaths in 2020. Then, in the year of injections en masse, deaths switched to mainly circulatory system deaths. Something is attacking the circulatory systems of citizens of Massachusetts. Three main events are initially depicted: a pandemic, an extremely attenuated second wave of disease no longer a pandemic, and a nearly steady-state excess death anomaly in the second half of 2021 (likely began around February 2021, but was obscured by lower than normal deaths of 85+yo’s due to culling from C19 in spring 2020).

Investigation of the anomaly indicates that excess deaths are circulatory system involved, also known and documented in the C19 vaccine trial data. Though myocarditis gets the most notoriety, the entire circulatory system is under attack. Hereinafter, the C19 “vaccine” will be called “gene modification” because it is a more accurate descriptor of the biological injectable product. Industry and government chose “vaccine” because it is more psychologically acceptable to consumers. “Vaccine” has product-class recognition and reputation. Ergo, the definition of “vaccine” was changed in 2020 to accommodate the inclusion of C19 gene modification into this product-class. Lawsuits based on this issue of “definition” are pending.

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“Time is of the essence, as the FDA is expected to authorize vaccines for children as young as six months old..”

GOP Lawmakers Demand FDA Publish Covid Vaccine Safety And Efficacy Data (JTN)

Two months after the CDC acknowledged hiding the vast majority of its COVID-19 data, partly to protect the reputation of vaccines, the FDA is under pressure to release its current and future safety and efficacy data on COVID vaccines and therapeutics. “The fact that the data in the FDA’s possession has remained behind an FDA firewall for more than 18 months is appalling,” Rep. Bill Posey (R-Fla.) wrote to Commissioner Robert Califf, noting the agency unsuccessfully asked a court to dribble out Pfizer vaccine data over 55-75 years. Nine House GOP colleagues joined Posey’s April 11 letter, including Kentucky’s Thomas Massie, the leading libertarian in the caucus, and Alabama’s Mo Brooks, who sponsored a bill to defund vaccine mandates.

In light of mandates and liability shields for manufacturers, “[n]othing is more important to physicians, parents, patients, public health officials and elected officials than having access to as much information as possible when evaluating immediate and long-term responses to the pandemic,” the letter says. The House Republicans want the agency to “immediately” release safety and efficacy data for COVID products granted emergency use authorization (EUA) and full approval, and ongoing publication of data within 14 days of receipt by the FDA. It’s already requiring manufacturers to submit most of this information “in redacted and releasable form” and “should have been preparing to immediately release data once licensure was granted” to enable “rigorous independent review,” they said.

[..] The responses of public health agencies to Posey’s previous letters on COVID products and authorization, going back to fall 2020, were “not serious,” Posey spokesperson George Cecala told Just the News. He shared Posey letters calling attention to a British Medical Journal investigation of a Pfizer contractor’s trial practices and a 2021 British study reporting rare polyethylene glycol-induced anaphylaxis from the coating around the vaccine. The Science Committee member also sponsored a bill to establish a COVID commission. Time is of the essence, as the FDA is expected to authorize vaccines for children as young as six months old, Cecala said. Pfizer data showed 2-4 year-olds received no benefit from two doses, but the FDA asked for an EUA application while it tests a third dose.

When the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program was created in the 1980s, “it was regularly understood that it would be a small percentage of people” who suffered, Cecala said. Nobody thought it was a “conspiracy theory,” which is how COVID vaccine injury is portrayed. The feds haven’t used vaccine safety systems “optimally” since the pandemic’s onset, said epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff, who was removed from the CDC’s COVID Vaccine Safety Technical Work Group for criticizing its “pause” in Johnson & Johnson vaccine distribution. The well-known Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System lacks basic health information that can determine “whether the [COVID] vaccine was responsible” for reported side effects, the former Harvard Medical School professor wrote in a Brownstone Institute essay Monday.

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81 million votes.

The Horrible, Terrible, Bad, Bad Results of CNBC’s Biden Performance Poll (CTH)

CNBC commissioned a poll by Hart research and associates, a friendly outfit for the left. Unfortunately, that means CNBC then needed to tell everyone what the results were. That task fell to CNBC’s Steve Liesman; an appropriate name given the task at hand. The irony doubles when you remember this was the same CNBC pundit who refused to accept the horrible economic data that began surfacing last fall. There was even a public broadcast where Liesman said the BLS statistics had to be wrong, because the results were so horrible. A few months later, and here he is explaining how the country now feels about Joe Biden.

(CNBC) – […] The pessimism is clearly dragging on Americans’ opinions of President Joe Biden. In fact, nothing looks to be working in the Biden presidency from the public’s viewpoint. The president’s approval rating sank to a new low of just 38%, with 53% disapproving. Biden’s -15% net approval rating is measurably worse than his -9% approval in the CNBC December survey. What’s more, his approval rating on the economy dropped for a fourth straight survey to just 35%, with 60% disapproving, putting the president a deep 25 points underwater.

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“The Treasury sent out checks, transferring the reserves to people’s banks. The Treasury then borrowed another $2 trillion or so, and sent more checks…”

Annual Wholesale Inflation Rises 11.2%, Mirroring Record CPI Numbers (JTN)

Wholesale prices in March increased by 11.2%, compared to 12 months earlier, the Labor Department said Wednesday. The report also show the prices increased 1.1% from February to March. The newly released numbers follow the agency saying Tuesday the price of consumer goods in March increased by 8.5%, compared to the same time last year, making the Consumer Price Index’s so-called “annualized rate” the highest since December1981. The wholesale numbers, officially the Producer Price Index, measures the price of goods and services that businesses pay one other. The recent invasion of Ukraine by Russia, a global energy provider, has resulted in soaring fuel prices, which were a major fact in the wholesale and consumer inflation.


Another factor continues to be COVID-19-related supply chain problems, with some economists also arguing the federal government’s ongoing fiscal response to the pandemic, particularly the infusion of trillions of dollars into the economy, is another major factor. Hoover Institution economist John H. Cochrane wrote in a beginning-of-year message that reads: “In response to the disruptions of COVID-19, the U.S. government created about $3 trillion of new bank reserves, equivalent to cash, and sent checks to people and businesses. Mechanically, the Treasury issued $3 trillion of new debt, which the Fed quickly bought in return for $3 trillion of new reserves. “The Treasury sent out checks, transferring the reserves to people’s banks. The Treasury then borrowed another $2 trillion or so, and sent more checks. Overall, federal debt rose nearly 30 percent. Is it at all a surprise that a year later inflation breaks out?”

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“In February 2017, Hunter Biden flew to Miami to meet with CEFC chairman Ye Jianming. There, Ye offered Hunter a three-year deal at $10 million per year for “introductions alone.”

Hunter Biden Mixing Business Affairs With Hunger Charity (JTN)

With his father’s eight-year tenure as Barack Obama’s vice president waning, Hunter Biden received a remarkable overture in 2015: One of China’s richest businessmen wanted to make a sizable donation to the World Food Program USA (WFP USA), which was led by the VP’s son. WFP USA is a U.S.-based nonprofit dedicated to raising funds and building U.S. support for the World Food Program, the United Nations organization that fights global hunger. But soon, memos gathered by the FBI show, the charitable discussions evolved into an expanding relationship between Hunter Biden and Chinese energy giant CEFC to include business deals that would eventually reap the Biden family millions of dollars.

“CEFC China is very interested in exploring humanitarian initiatives of mutual interest to the World Food Program USA and discussing investment opportunities with Burnham,” an email received and then forwarded by Hunter Biden in October 2015 stated. Burnham was one of the many firms through which Hunter Biden and his partners like Devon Archer scored large investments. The story of CEFC’s dual pitch for charity and business opportunities is documented in emails and memos stored on the notorious laptop Hunter Biden abandoned at a Delaware computer repair shop. The device was eventually turned over in December 2019 to the FBI, which is leading an investigation into the taxes, finances and foreign business dealings of the president’s son.

The FBI’s former intelligence chief said the Chinese overture to Hunter Biden fits the classic pattern of a foreign influence operation, much like was seen with Democratic congressman Eric Swalwell a few years ago. “First, you have to understand that China does not donate to American led charities because they are altruistic,” explained former FBI Assistant Director for Intelligence Kevin Brock. “And Chinese intelligence operatives like Christine Fang don’t cozy up to Rep. Eric Swalwell because he’s a fun guy to be around. Chinese intelligence does what it does in order to steal information and influence American policy makers.”

[..] In February 2017, Hunter Biden flew to Miami to meet with CEFC chairman Ye Jianming. There, Ye offered Hunter a three-year deal at $10 million per year for “introductions alone.” To close the deal, Ye gave Hunter a three-carat diamond valued at over $80,000, memos show. When asked about this fateful meeting in Miami, Hunter Biden told the New Yorker’s Adam Entous he was there for WFP USA charity work when the meeting unexpectedly “turned to business opportunities.” Hunter Biden, however, went there with two other business partners who had been intimately involved in pitching private business deals to CEFC. Over the next year, the CEFC money began to flow, and Hunter Biden reaped nearly $6 million from the Chinese energy giant.

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Excellent account.

My Personal Experience in Twitter’s Assault on Free Speech (Scott Ritter)

By the evening of April 5, I believed I had more than enough information to try and put forth a counter-narrative to the one being pushed by The New York Times and President Biden, namely that Ukraine, not Russia, was responsible for the Bucha killings. “The Ukrainian National Police,” I composed on Twitter, “committed numerous crimes against humanity in Bucha.” Drawing on the precedent of the Nuremburg International Military Tribunal established at the end of the Second World War to prosecute Nazi war criminals, I then went on to state that “Biden, in seeking to shift blame for the Bucha murders onto Russia, is guilty of aiding and abetting these crimes. Congratulations, America…we’ve created yet another Presidential war criminal!” At 9:42 p.m. I hit “send,” and the deed was done.

As far as Twitter metrics go, this tweet didn’t do so badly—5,976 “likes”, 2,815 retweets, and 321 comments, for a total of what Twitter calls 265,098 “impressions.” It also got me suspended from Twitter. The next day, April 6, at 11:57 a.m., I received an email from Twitter Support, notifying me that my account, @RealScottRitter, “had been suspended for violating Twitter Rules,” specifically for violating rules against abuse and harassment. “You may not engage in the targeted harassment of someone or incite other people to do so. This includes wishing or hoping that someone experiences physical harm.” I re-read the tweet in question, wondering how anyone could possibly interpret its contents as violating the rules cited by Twitter Support. Who had I harassed or incited others to harass?

I followed the procedures to appeal the suspension and went on with my daily routine—minus the part where I interact with the people I follow, and those who followed me, on Twitter. My suspension caught the eye of several people who follow my tweeting activity. Several of these people reached out to inquire as to what happened and were as confused as I was over the grounds cited by Twitter for the suspension. The end result of this was a very heart-warming grass-roots protest against the Twitter decision to suspend my account of such intensity, that one had to believe it caught the eye of one of the Twitter bureaucrats tasked with monitoring the temperature in Twitterdom. On April 6, at 11:54 p.m., I received an email from Twitter Support notifying me that “After further review, we have unsuspended your account as it does not appear to be in violation of the Twitter Rules.”

Life, it seemed, could return to normal, with me safely ensconced in my overstuffed arm chair, frantically working the controls to the television remote while monitoring my all-important, and recently restored, Twitter account. Nothing good, however, lasts forever.

Land of the free

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Maher Joe Rogan
https://twitter.com/i/status/1513983596956196873

 

 

You were warned even as a child…

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

Feb 142022
 


Leonardo da Vinci Saint John the Baptist 1513-16

 

“If There Were Side Effects, We’d Have Seen Them By Now” (Uncut)
Anti-vaxxers Who Changed Their Minds On Covid Vaccines (G.)
NZ Covid Outbreak ‘Like Nothing We’ve Experienced’: Ardern. Cases Skyrocket (G.)
Pelosi Just Gave The Game Away (CTH)
Zelensky Asks Biden To Visit Ukraine (RT)
Ukrainian Ambassador Says Kiev ‘Might’ Drop Bid To Join NATO (RT)
Putin ‘Doesn’t Give A S*** About Sanctions’ – Russian Diplomat (JTN)
‘Oligarchs’ Flee Ukraine – Media (RT)
Most Democrats Want Hillary Clinton Investigated For Russiagate (Sperry)
Free Speech Becomes Roadkill In The Crackdown On Canadian Truckers (Turley)
Monastiraki Kitchen On Greek TV

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hodkinson

 

 

 

 

Yeah, we have to repeat this all the time, don’t we?

“If There Were Side Effects, We’d Have Seen Them By Now” (Uncut)

Changes to the Online Harms bill threaten prison for anyone spreading what the Government call “Covid disinformation”. Yesterday, the Financial Times newspaper carried a piece on vaccination for children, quoting paediatrician Petter Brodin, who says “vaccination offers safe, more controlled exposure to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19 than infection”. He goes on claim that “the jabs also carry a lower risk of unintended consequences”. If more children have a Covid-19 jab after parents read Brodin’s comments and subsequently suffer injuries or death – facts that have been reported to three separate adverse events reporting systems in the UK, EU and US – will Brodin be held responsible? Will he be threatened with prison for “Covid-19 disinformation”? Today, we are helping Petter Brodin by publishing – again – figures from the UK’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency [MHRA], together with real-life accounts from two people severely affected after taking a Covid jab.

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“..kids becoming orphans before their time ..”

The Guardian brings you all the drama that vaccine profits can buy.

Anti-vaxxers Who Changed Their Minds On Covid Vaccines (G.)

Alexis Danielsen sat down and rolled up her sleeve. When the shot went into her arm, one thought flooded her mind: “Finally!” It was May 2021, and she was receiving her first Covid shot – in fact, her first immunization of any kind. She was 39. Danielsen grew up in an anti-vaccine household, views she held well into adulthood. When her son was born, she declined all vaccines for him. Then she hit a personal crisis, and started rethinking all of her beliefs – including on vaccinations. It was like pulling on a thread and watching an entire sweater unravel, she said. “The Covid vaccine was the only logical choice after really re-evaluating what I believe in, what I actually believe is true,” Danielsen said.

Danielsen partly credits her about-face to Lydia Greene and Heather Simpson, the Canada-based founders of Back to the Vax, a support group for people like themselves: one-time vaccine skeptics who’d had a change of heart. “I want to be able to help stop people from going down that road, having been down it myself,” said Greene, now a nursing student. They say their goal is to help families find evidence-based answers to their questions. Vaccine hesitancy was a growing problem even before the pandemic, particularly among parents. Now, nearly one-third of American parents are opposed to vaccinating their children against Covid-19. Although parents still have a lot of questions about vaccines, advocates say that answering them can help.

Online support and in-person community groups can help address longstanding hesitations, some of which arise from poor experiences in the medical system. For example, parents tell Greene they are still waiting for more information to come out on the Covid vaccines before deciding whether to vaccinate their children. “What’s missing is that, in the US right now, millions of children in that age group have been vaccinated and are followed closely with V-Safe and other databases to show the safety of the vaccine,” Greene said. Parents also believe that Covid is mild in children and poses a low risk to them. But kids can suffer from long-term effects – and continued transmission also affects their emotional wellbeing. In the US, more than 167,000 children have lost a caregiver to the virus, Greene said. “We’re seeing this massive epidemic of not just Covid but kids becoming orphans before their time.”

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At least admit that everything you’ve done has utterly failed for 2 years. And go hang your head in shame.

NZ Covid Outbreak ‘Like Nothing We’ve Experienced’: Ardern. Cases Skyrocket (G.)

New Zealand’s prime minister has warned that the country is entering a new phase of its pandemic response that is “like nothing we’ve experienced to date”, as case numbers begin to explode. “We are embarking for the first time in the two years since the start of the outbreak into a period where New Zealanders will see more Covid in the community,” Jacinda Ardern said on Monday. “It is a period of disruption and, I know, of risk and will be like nothing we’ve experienced to date.” Ardern was speaking to reporters after a political reporter produced a positive rapid antigen test moments before the press conference. The empty seats in front of her – and the decision to forge on with the standup regardless – helped illustrate the new era for New Zealand, in which the government expects Omicron to reach every part of the country.

New Zealand has been reporting near-daily record highs in case numbers, as infections begin to hit an exponential growth curve. On Monday, officials announced 981 cases in the community, up from previous all-time highs of 810 on Sunday and 454 the day before. The latest additions mean there are 4,960 active cases recorded across Aotearoa – but experts say the true number is likely much higher, given the lag in test results, and the fact testing is only advised for those with symptoms or who have been a direct contact of a case.

Haka NZ

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Yes, that was obvious. Can’t lose.

Pelosi Just Gave The Game Away (CTH)

We have been looking for this exact political construct and today we got it. Nancy Pelosi appears on ABC This Week with George Stephanopoulos to discuss current events. This was all planned in advance. This is guaranteed to be a political pantomime. The first topic is the “Russia-Ukraine crisis,” with Stephanopoulos asking Pelosi directly if she believes Russian President Vladimir Putin is about to invade Ukraine. Nancy Pelosi’s response tells us all we need to hear:

PELOSI: “Well, I think we have to be prepared for it. And that is what the president is — yes, I do believe that he is prepared for an invasion. I also understand why the President of Ukraine wants to keep people calm and that he wants his economy not to suffer. But, on the other hand, if we were not threatening the sanctions and the rest, it would guarantee that Putin would invade. Let’s hope that diplomacy works. It’s about diplomacy deterrence. Diplomacy deterrence. And the president’s made it very clear. There’s a big price to pay for Russia to go there. So, if Russia doesn’t invade, it’s not that he never intended to. It’s just that the sanctions worked.” … “I’m very proud of the work that the president has done.”

Can you see the domestic political scenario that has been created out of thin air? Democrats need a win on something; anything, to shift the narrative and change the reality of their failure into an illusion of success. First, accuse Vladimir Putin of doing something he never intends to do, a fabricated scenario. Second, tell the world you will strongly respond to the fabricated scenario. Third, tell the world the exact date when the fabricated scenario is supposed to happen. Then, when the fabricated scenario never happens, it is because you are so brilliant and strong to have outmaneuvered and cowed the Russians.

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How likely is that?

Zelensky Asks Biden To Visit Ukraine (RT)

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has called on his US counterpart Joe Biden to fly into Kiev “in the coming days.” The invitation, which was made by Zelensky during a phone call with Biden on Sunday, comes as several nations, including the US itself, ordered most of their diplomatic staff out of the Ukrainian capital citing fears of a possible Russian invasion. “I am convinced that your arrival in Kiev in the coming days, which are crucial for stabilizing the situation, will be a powerful signal and contribute to de-escalation,” Zelensky told Biden, according to a statement issued by his press service. As the US, UK, Israel, Australia and other countries have urged their nationals to leave Ukraine by all means available, Zelensky insisted that Kiev, as well as other major Ukrainian cities, were “safe and under reliable protection.”


A trip to the capital, however, does not appear to be on Biden’s schedule, CNN reported, citing US officials saying that such a visit would be “extremely unlikely.” “A senior Ukrainian official” told the channel that Biden gave “no positive response” to the invitation during the call. The White House’s readout of the Sunday call made no mention of the invitation either. It noted only that Biden promised Zelensky to “respond swiftly and decisively, together with its allies and partners, to any further Russian aggression against Ukraine.” Several media outlets have attempted to predict the most likely day for a Russian invasion, with Bloomberg reporting that it would take place as soon as on Wednesday – even though Russia has insisted it has no plans to invade its neighbor.

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Maybe they won’t if Biden visits?

Ukrainian Ambassador Says Kiev ‘Might’ Drop Bid To Join NATO (RT)

Ukraine’s ambassador to the UK Vadym Prystaiko has appeared to raise the possibility that Kiev could give up its bid to join US-led NATO for the sake of preventing a major conflict with Russia, while admitting that such a proposition would go against his country’s principal law. Asked by BBC Radio 5 Live presenter Stephen Nolan on Sunday if his country might “contemplate not joining NATO” to avert a war, Prystaiko responded: “We might, you know, especially [having] been threatened like that, blackmailed by that, and pushed to it.” He then appeared to indicate that some representatives of the military bloc have also rallied behind that option. “You know, we will sometimes hear voices from NATO that ‘Guys, maybe, really, we will be able to avoid…’” the ambassador said, trailing off mid-sentence.

However, Prystaiko then went on to lament the fact that Ukraine is not part of any military alliance at present, unlike some other countries bordering Russia. He noted that Kiev will have to face the music alone if a crisis like the current one spirals into a military conflict. “We will again stay unprotected by anybody, by any friends, not being a member of any alliance, when everybody, all the neighbors of ours, are already in the organization,” the diplomat said, referring to Poland, the Slovak Republic, Romania, Bulgaria, and Turkey. He argued that these countries’ status as NATO member states “did not change the security of Russia,” insisting that the “addition” of Ukraine wouldn’t change it either.

Asked by Nolan to clarify his remark on NATO so that it is not “lost in translation,” Prystaiko appeared to confirm that Kiev might reconsider its aspirations to join the bloc, but admitted that by saying so he goes “a bit against” the constitution of Ukraine, which since 2019 includes a provision making membership in NATO a strategic goal for the government. “What I’m saying here is that we are flexible, trying to find the best way out. If you have to go through some serious concessions, that’s something we might do, that’s for sure,” the ambassador concluded.

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Translation, remember. But yes, sanctions have made Russia much more independent.

Putin ‘Doesn’t Give A S*** About Sanctions’ – Russian Diplomat (JTN)

Russian leader Vladimir Putin “doesn’t give a s***” about sanctions,” said Russian Ambassador to Sweden Viktor Tatarintsev. The sanctions even helped the Russian economy, the diplomat told Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet in an interview published Saturday evening which was translated by The Independent. “Excuse my language, but we don’t give a s*** about all their sanctions,” he told the outlet. “We have already had so many sanctions, and in that sense, they’ve had a positive effect on our economy and agriculture.” U.S. President Joe Biden has threatened sanctions against Russia if it invades Ukraine. The Kremlin is already subject to various sanctions over its 2014 capture of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula and human rights abuses, among other things.


“New sanctions are nothing positive but not as bad as the West makes it sound,” Tatarintsev said. “The more the West pushes Russia, the stronger the Russian response will be.” He told the outlet that the sanctions have helped Russia make products that are “just as good.” “We are more self-sufficient and have been able to increase our exports,” Tatarintsev said. “We have no Italian or Swiss cheeses, but we’ve learned to make just as good Russian cheeses using Italian and Swiss recipes.” Even though about 100,000 Russian troops are massed along the Ukrainian border, the diplomat stated that the Kremlin wants to avoid war. “That is our political leadership’s most sincere wish,” he told Aftonbladet. “The last thing people in Russia want is war.”

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The most corrupt country.

‘Oligarchs’ Flee Ukraine – Media (RT)

Local media reports have suggested that an exodus of Ukraine’s richest people, including its so-called ‘oligarchs’, is in full swing. A report published by the Ukrayinska Pravda newspaper on Sunday claimed that “about 20 charters and private jets” departed from Kiev on that day alone. The newspaper noted that one of the private jets spotted leaving Ukrainian airspace on Sunday was allegedly owned by Ukraine’s richest man, Rinat Akmetov, whose net worth is estimated at about $7.1 billion, according to Forbes. Pravda reported that the billionaire himself left the country on January 30, however. Ukraine’s second-richest man and fellow steel magnate, Victor Pinchuk, reportedly departed at the end of last month as well.

Both men help to fund The Atlantic Council, a NATO adjacent lobby group, which pushes for Kiev to join the military bloc. Those who Pravda alleged had “fled” Ukraine in the recent days included prominent politician and businessman Vadym Novynskyi, who has an estimated net worth of $1.3 billion; Ukraine’s ninth-richest man, Oleksandr Yaroslavsky; former Verkhovna Rada lawmaker and businessman, Vadim Stolar; and several other high-flying figures – many of whom featured in Forbes Ukraine magazine’s list of its 100 richest people. A number of lawmakers also reportedly scrambled to exit Ukraine. The newspaper said, citing sources, that representative of the Eurosceptic Opposition Platform – For Life party and businessman Igor Abramovych booked a private jet for 50 people to transport them to Vienna, Austria.

Some of the people mentioned in the report as having “fled” Ukraine, however, have already dismissed the claim. For instance, businessman and leader of Ukraine is Our Home party Borys Kolesnikov, who, according to Pravda, left the country on Sunday, called the report “fake news.” “The deceitful and habitually manipulative outlet is, as usual, lying. I’m in Kiev, and I’m not going anywhere until March 1 (The Champions League Final, which takes place in Switzerland),” Kolesnikov wrote on Facebook, threatening to sue the newspaper.

Tulsi

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Wishful thinking?

Most Democrats Want Hillary Clinton Investigated For Russiagate (Sperry)

A surprisingly large share of Democrats wants to see Hillary Clinton investigated over her possible role in manufacturing dirt to try to tie Donald Trump to the Kremlin, a new poll shows. The survey, conducted by TechnoMetrica Institute of Policy and Politics in New Jersey last month, polled 1,308 Americans about the mushrooming investigation by Special Counsel John Durham into the FBI’s probe of Trump’s alleged links to Russia during the 2016 presidential campaign. Nearly three out of four of those polled who are following the story said they think it’s important prosecutors investigate Clinton for her role in the Russiagate scandal along with her top campaign advisers. That includes two-thirds — or 66 percent — of the Democrats polled who said they have been keeping up with the case.


That’s up 20 points from this past October, when TIPP asked the same question of a national panel, and indicates the Durham probe may be turning Democratic opinion regarding Clinton and the controversy. Meanwhile, 91 percent of Republicans in the same group and 65 percent of Independents also called for Clinton to specifically be investigated. Durham has already charged Clinton campaign subcontractor Igor Danchenko for allegedly lying about the sourcing behind the debunked so-called Steele dossier he helped compile, which attempted to frame Trump as a Kremlin agent. Danchenko, a former Brookings Institution analyst, completely fabricated the source for the dossier’s most explosive allegations, according to the indictment. It turns out he also allegedly used a Clinton campaign adviser as another key source for other dirt he gathered. Danchenko was arrested in October and has pleaded not guilty.

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“I have attended protests and rallies in the past when I agreed with the goals, when I supported the people expressing their concerns and their issues, Black Lives Matter is an excellent example of that.”

Free Speech Becomes Roadkill In The Crackdown On Canadian Truckers (Turley)

Canada appears to be facing its greatest threat since Benedict Arnold came close to seizing Ottawa in 1775. The source of this “insurrection” and “attack on democracy,” however, is not a foreign government but Canadians who have descended on their own capital to protest continuing COVID-19 mandates. The protest has been peaceful — and highly successful in cutting off key highways. But the most alarming development has not come from the convoy but from the commentary about it, including calls for mass arrests and even vigilantism. The Ottawa Police Services Board chairman has called it a “nationwide insurrection,” adding, “Our city is under siege.”


CNN analyst and Harvard professor Juliette Kayyem was apoplectic at the thought of truckers shutting down roads and interfering with trade. She tweeted out a call to “slash the tires, empty gas tanks, arrest the drivers, and move the trucks.” CNN correspondent Paula Newton said this act of civil disobedience was nothing less than a “threat to democracy. An insurrection, sedition.” Blocking streets, occupying buildings and shutting down bridges have long been tactics of protesters. Yet what constitutes a protest or an insurrection often seems to depend on the cause involved. When rioters caused billions of dollars in damages, burned police stations and occupied sections of American cities in the summer of 2020, for example, few in the media declared them to be terrorists or a threat to democracy.

But CNN’s Kayyem once called conservative protesters occupying a state capital to be “domestic terrorists.” GoFundMe, which previously helped fund arrested Black Lives Matter (BLM) protesters, froze more than $10 million raised for Canadian truckers to prevent it from being used to support them. After the money was frozen by GoFundMe, supporters switched to GiveSendGo to “adopt a trucker.” The Canadian government then moved successfully to freeze millions of donations to the truckers, and the Supreme Court of Canada approved the freeze in a major blow to free speech and associational rights in Canada.


In the meantime, the government has demonized the convoy. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who praised truckers just two years ago as heroes, has denounced them as “trying to blockade our economy, our democracy.” This is the same Trudeau who praised BLM protesters and stressed that “I have attended protests and rallies in the past when I agreed with the goals, when I supported the people expressing their concerns and their issues, Black Lives Matter is an excellent example of that.”

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Greek national broadcaster ERT did an -almost live- item on the Monastiraki kitchen yesterday. My friend Vasso “translated” part of it. I don’t really know how to make it a separate article. The lovely Filothei is speaking.

Monastiraki Kitchen On Greek TV

She says they do not ask for money but for tomato sauce pasta rice or a voucher for a super market and they send you back the receipt. They also need volunteers to help in food preparation. Their saucepan is for 500 portions every Tuesday at 4.30. Then the reporter asks how the recipients find food the other days of the week and she mentions a place in Peiraeus as well as Allos anthropos. Then she is asked what she sees in the streets as a photographer and she says pain. Also at the beginning she says that they are now in the basement because of the rain.

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https://twitter.com/buitengebieden_/status/1492830918968492034

 

 

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

 

Feb 042022
 


James McNeill Whistler Nocturne in Black and Gold, the Falling Rocket 1875

 

12 Countries Roll Back COVID Restrictions, Israel Scraps ‘Green Pass’ (CHD)
Israel Will Abolish The Vaxx Passport And Most Testing Requirements (Haa.)
Italy’s Covid Despotism Just Got Worse (Salonia)
What The Omicron Wave Is Revealing About Human Immunity (Nature)
Lethal Mutagenesis As An Antiviral Strategy (Science)
British Children Up To 52 Times More Likely To Die Following A Covid Shot (LSN)
Rejoice! An End To The Dreaded Covid Count… (Hoenderkamp)
Study Offers Strongest Proof Yet Of Vitamin D’s Power To Fight Covid (ToI)
Calls for Help From Families of Patients Hospitalized With COVID-19 (ET)
Justin Trudeau is a Bungler and Menace to His Nation (Kohlmayer)
We Were Warned About the Ports (Sammon)
Spotify Spat Shows Why Joe Rogan And His Podcast Matter (FT)
Can Joe Rogan Save Free Speech? (Turley)
North Korea Hacked Him. So He Took Down Its Internet (Wired)
Reporter Shreds Admin Spox Over ‘Russian False Flag’ Claims (ZH)

 

 

 

 

Lab Leak Conspirancy

 

 

 

 

“..no longer a “socially critical disease.”

12 Countries Roll Back COVID Restrictions, Israel Scraps ‘Green Pass’ (CHD)

Europe is accelerating steps to roll back COVID restrictions as efforts to control the spread of the virus have failed and countries downgrade the threat posed by SARS-CoV-2. Sweden and Switzerland joined Denmark, Norway, Finland, Ireland, The Netherlands, Italy, Lithuania, France and the UK in announcing they will lift COVID restrictions and open up their countries. Top Israeli officials also announced this week they are abolishing the country’s “Green Pass” COVID vaccine passport for restaurants, hotels, gyms and theaters. The policy update will take effect Feb. 6, Prime Minister Naftali Bennet’s government said, pending approval by a parliamentary committee. Israel’s proof-of-vaccination policy will remain in effect for events such as parties or weddings.

“To continue the green pass in the same way can create false assurances,” said Nadav Davidovitch, an epidemiologist and public health physician advising Prime Minister Naftali Bennet’s government. “It’s not reducing infections in closed spaces like theatres. It needs to be used mainly for high-risk places like hospitals, elderly care homes, or events when you are eating and singing and dancing.” Sweden will lift all COVID restrictions by Feb. 9, the Swedish government said today. According to Politico, the Swedish Public Health Agency said it reassessed COVID as “not being socially critical” due to a better understanding of the Omicron variant, which is milder and associated with fewer hospitalizations.

“It’s time to open up Sweden,” said Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson. “The pandemic isn’t over, but it is moving into a new phase.” The decision to open Sweden came a day after Switzerland, citing high immunity levels and the milder Omicron variant, announced it will abolish mandatory work-from-home and the quarantine rules beginning today. The government also will lift health measures at the borders and tourists will no longer need to receive Swiss COVID certificates. The Swiss government said it planned to phase out other restrictions after consulting with 26 cantons, employers, trade unions and parliamentary committees.

[..] Just days before Sweden and Switzerland’s announcements, Denmark became the first country in the European Union to lift all COVID restrictions, reclassifying COVID as an endemic disease. Danish Health Minister Magnus Heunicke on Feb. 1 wrote a letter to the parliament’s epidemiology committee stating COVID was no longer a “socially critical disease.” Based on the recommendations of the committee, the government decided to scrap COVID restrictions. [..] Italy, France, Norway, Lithuania, England and Finland also relaxed restrictions, Bloomberg reported. “We should discuss whether it’s time for us to take a different viewpoint and start unwinding restrictions even with a high number of infections,” Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin told reporters. “I hope that we can be rid of restrictions during February.”

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“..effectively removing barriers to entry for the unvaccinated..”

Israel Will Abolish The Vaxx Passport And Most Testing Requirements (Haa.)

Israel’s coronavirus cabinet decided to abolish its so-called green passport program for most places of entertainment, including hotels, restaurants, gyms and movie theaters, effectively removing barriers to entry for the unvaccinated. The new policy will come into effect on Sunday, and will leave the proof of vaccination in place for events “with significantly greater risk of infection,” such as weddings and parties. The cabinet also decided to scrap the requirement to present a PCR test upon exiting the country. Following recommendations of the Health Ministry, the cabinet further scrapped the expiration date on green passports for anyone who has received a third or fourth dose of the vaccine, meaning those passes would be valid indefinitely.


But for people who have only had two doses, or who recovered from the virus but aren’t vaccinated, the pass will be valid for only four months from the date of the second dose or the recovery. Those who are not fully vaccinated and employed in the education, health and welfare sectors will still be required to undergo biweekly tests. The decisions come in the midst of Israel’s omicron wave, with Prime Minister Naftali Bennett saying that he predicts “one-and-a-half to two hard weeks ahead of us.” [..] Meanwhile, the Health Ministry reported that the R number – the average number of people each coronavirus carrier infects – further declined on Tuesday to 0.92. Any number under 1 indicates that the pandemic is shrinking. The figure is calculated according to data from the previous 10 days.

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“..they are to be allowed access to supermarkets only to buy “goods of primary necessity.”

Italy’s Covid Despotism Just Got Worse (Salonia)

A couple of weeks ago, a new decree of the Draghi government established yet more rules restricting the lives of people who have not been injected with the latest vaccine booster and who therefore cannot show the latest version of the Green Pass. These second-class citizens, who have already been stripped of their right to move, work, and participate in a great number of social activities, are now forbidden from entering post offices to withdraw their pension, and they are to be allowed access to supermarkets only to buy “goods of primary necessity.” In other words, the Italian government decides what kind of food and what other goods (if any) these people will be able to purchase.

Among Western countries, Italy has been one of those experiencing the most systematic denial of basic civil rights over the past two years. Coalition governments led first by Giuseppe Conte and then by Mario Draghi have empowered an unelected committee of “experts” called the Comitato Tecnico Scientifico, which has in turn empowered the governments by assigning a scientific aura to every decree, every action, and every word coming from the executive. This has resulted in an endless series of lockdown measures that for long periods have erased freedom of movement, the right to work, property rights over businesses and shops, freedom to assemble, freedom to worship, and even the distinction of jurisdictional spheres between church and political authority (with state bureaucrats closing churches and then handing out petty instructions on what rites could be carried out, how liturgies should be curtailed, and how many people if any could be present at masses and funerals).

In the meantime, the legislative branch has been humbled, and government by urgent decrees from the executive has become the norm. The very constitutional structure of the country has been bent, and a new concept called “stato di emergenza” (state of emergency) has been invented out of thin air, even though it is nowhere to be found in Italy’s republican constitution. If we were not living in the age of CNN, fake news, and outrageous subsidies handed out by politicians to newspapers and the media, one could legitimately wonder where the journalists were while all this was going on? In fact, journalists in Italy are among the main culprits of the current dystopian reality, since they have given platforms to “experts” who agreed with lockdowns and other measures that expanded government control over all aspects of life, while at the same time they ferociously mocked and ostracized doctors and scientists who dared to question the logic of outdoor mask mandates and curfews for restaurants.

Anybody who dared to point out the disastrous consequences of a prolonged lockdown on mental health and on people suffering from other pathologies, or the link between the economy and public health, was accused of being a “covid denier.” This is a pattern that surely readers recognize, as they have seen it in the US and many other countries over the past two years. The fact that virtually every opinion labelled by the media as “conspiracy theory” has turned out to be true just three or four months later has done nothing to shake the arrogance of the corrupt mass media, who are entrenched in their monopoly over the news cycle, thanks to their access to state funding and political favors. And this is true in Italy as virtually everywhere else.

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Nature Magazine tries hard to find a role for the vaccines. It’s not there.

The vaccines don’t want to help or boost our immune system, they want to take over its role. And that is every bit as bad as it sounds.

What The Omicron Wave Is Revealing About Human Immunity (Nature)

Immune memory depends on more than just antibodies. Even when antibody levels drop, memory B cells can recognize a return invader, divide, and quickly start churning out antibodies to fight it. And the memory B-cell response improves over time, at least in the short term. Six months after vaccination, the individuals in Wherry’s study6 had elevated numbers of memory B cells that responded not only to the original SARS-CoV-2, but also to three other variants of concern. And then there are T cells, the third pillar of immune memory. On coming into contact with an antigen, these multiply into a pool of effector cells that act to wipe out the infection. Killer T cells quickly divide to assassinate infected cells, and various types of helper T cell secrete chemical signals that stimulate other parts of the immune system, including B cells. After the threat has passed, some of these cells persist as memory T cells.


Some people might carry memory T cells from past coronavirus infections — such as those that cause common colds — that can recognize SARS-CoV-2. These cells could help to fight the infection, or even stop it completely. One study7 found that health-care workers who were exposed to SARS-CoV-2 but never tested positive had subtle signs of a response to infection. The researchers hypothesize that cross-reactive T cells shut the infection down before it could take hold. “These people did have an infection in a sort of loosest sense of the word,” says Mala Maini, an immunologist at University College London who led the study. But “there’s probably not much virus around because it’s being shut down very quickly”. This idea is still controversial, and the phenomenon might be rare. Memory cells typically can’t block infection in the way that neutralizing antibodies can, but they don’t necessarily need to.

With COVID-19, infection happens quickly, but it takes a little while to cause serious illness. That gives memory T cells some time to do their jobs. When re-exposed to a virus or booster, these cells will kick into overdrive, “proliferating like crazy”, Crotty says. “In a 24-hour period, you can get a tenfold increase in the number of your memory T cells.” That’s probably not fast enough to have much of an effect on getting sick, he adds. But it could be fast enough to prevent hospitalization. And it’s much harder for the virus to find a way around the T-cell response. That’s because T cells in one individual recognize different parts of the virus than do T cells in another individual. So a virus could mutate to escape one person’s T-cell response, but not another’s. “Escape is meaningless at the population level,” Crotty says. Also, T cells can see parts of the virus (or the spike protein) that antibodies can’t, including pieces that are less likely to mutate.

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More on RNA potential to change DNA, via reverse transcriptase. Don’t be a guinea pig.

Lethal Mutagenesis As An Antiviral Strategy (Science)

There is a gap in our knowledge in scaling short-term lab-based assays (using bacteria, animal cells, and animal models) for mutagenic activity with long-term risk to human health. Mutagens that are incorporated during cellular DNA synthesis are problematic for a developing fetus (where cells are undergoing rapid division), male germline cells (which continue to divide throughout life), and cancer risk (where the small fraction of human cells that are dividing have the potential to incorporate a mutation that could contribute to cancer development). Humans are exposed to mutagens throughout life—for example, DNA mutations are induced by x-ray imaging or during air travel—so there are levels of DNA damage that are considered to be largely inconsequential.


If the molnupiravir metabolite NHC really is a mutagen in dividing animal cells, how should negative data in an animal model be interpreted? Are such negative data sufficient to ensure long-term safety in humans, or does the lack of knowledge about the link between negative results in animal assays and long-term outcomes in human health need to be acknowledged? Molnupiravir use will come with some restrictions around short-term risks associated with reproductive health, but it may take years before potential long-term risks are understood. The best outcome, which is the assumption from the negative results in animals, is that molnupiravir treatment falls within the background level of exposure to mutagens that humans already experience and tolerate. The half-life of molnupiravir metabolites in human tissue is unknown.

[..] Molnupiravir has the potential to lower the disease burden of SARS-CoV-2 infections and help contain future emerging RNA viruses. However, how can its potential long-term effects as a mutagen be assessed? The following steps are suggested: Treatment should be restricted to those who will benefit the most, such as those who cannot tolerate other available treatments, those who have a preexisting condition that enhances the risk of COVID-19, and those who are more than 50 years of age and would be less affected by a potential long-term risk of cancer or reproductive risks. A registry of a cohort of people who received molnupiravir should be kept to longitudinally monitor the frequency of cancer and other potential outcomes so that the opportunity to understand the risk (or lack thereof) associated with the use of a mutagenic ribonucleoside as an antiviral is not missed.


Strategies to limit metabolism of mutagenic analogs from the ribonucleotide pool into the 2′ -deoxyribonucleotide pool should be explored to limit the potential DNA mutation load in the host. In addition, the viral population diversity should be evaluated after treatment with molnupiravir in those who fail to clear the virus to see whether the treatment accelerates viral evolution. Lethal mutagenesis has the potential to be an important antiviral strategy for RNA viruses, especially in emerging infections when there is an absence of virus-specific antivirals. The potential of this strategy should be exploited, but the possible risks should be acknowledged and addressed.

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Hmmm. A bit skeptical. The ONS provides stats in 100,000 person-years instead of 100,000 population, and for good reason, but what do they mean when numbers are very low?

British Children Up To 52 Times More Likely To Die Following A Covid Shot (LSN)

In December, the ONS published age-standardized data on the mortality rates of individuals in 5-year age sets in Britain, grouped by their “vaccination” status for the COVID-19 shots. The data accounts for the period from January 1 to October 31, 2021. The ONS tabulated “Monthly age-standardised mortality rates by age-group and vaccination status for deaths involving COVID-19, per 100,000 person-years” but presented the data only for ages 18 and over. However, the jabs are available to children as young as 12, and those children are allowed to receive the shot against their parents’ wishes. In limited cases, children as young as 5 have been given a reduced dosage of the shots.


Nevertheless, as noted by The Exposé, a separate table outlining “deaths and person-years by vaccination status” includes 5-year age groups from 10-years-old and up. From the data provided, a calculation of the mortality rate per 100,000 person-years can be made. The rate per 100,000 person-years delineation is used in preference over the simpler 100,000 population calculation to better represent the mortality rates over a specific period of time, as people in one “vaccination” group – such as un-jabbed, single-jabbed, and double-jabbed – soon move into the next group.

[..] the 100,000 person-years calculation can be made, with the younger group coming out at 20.9 un-jabbed per 100,000 person-years and the older group at 15.9. Following this, the mortality rate per 100,000 person-years is worked out by dividing the number of deaths within each group by the 100,000 person-years calculation. The result is that for the 10-14 year group, the un-jabbed mortality per 100,000 person-years is 4.6 while the un-jabbed mortality rate per 100,000 person-years for the 15 19 group is 10.1. Using the same data set and calculation, the mortality rate for 10-14-year-olds who received one dose of the jabs suffered a 45.1 per 100,000 person-years death rate, while 15 19-year-olds with one jab suffered 18.3 deaths per 100,00 person-years.

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[..] the 15 per cent recorded when the death rate was at its peak in May 2020.. [..] by Tuesday the CFR had fallen to 0.19 per cent…

Rejoice! An End To The Dreaded Covid Count… (Hoenderkamp)

The Government last month signalled its intention to scrap the legal requirement for infected people to self-isolate on March 24, and yesterday it was claimed that it will stop releasing daily Covid updates in April. To which I say ‘Rejoice!’ – but why can’t we end both practices today? And, while we’re about it, stop testing too. If you think such a course sounds alarmingly precipitate, allow me to explain why there is no need to delay a moment longer. The truth is that the advent of the highly infectious (although markedly milder) Omicron variant has changed everything. Last week the Case Fatality Rate (CFR) – the proportion of infected people who died of Covid – was hovering at around 0.95 per cent.


That is way below the 15 per cent recorded when the death rate was at its peak in May 2020 when testing was minimal. And since Monday, when the Office For National Statistics included ‘reinfections’ – people who have contracted the virus more than once – on its daily Covid dashboard for the first time, the CFR has plummeted still further. With the addition of hundreds of thousands of cases to the weekly total, by Tuesday the CFR had fallen to 0.19 per cent, a percentage akin to that of flu, an illness which currently has a fatality rate of between 0.1 and 0.2 per cent. The average age of death from Covid, meanwhile, remains at the pre-pandemic 82, with data from the US showing that 75 per cent of people who die with Covid have no fewer than four underlying serious conditions.

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Oh c’mon, we need to study that? “We found it remarkable, and striking..” says a doctor. How many lives were lost?

Study Offers Strongest Proof Yet Of Vitamin D’s Power To Fight Covid (ToI)

Israel scientists say they have gathered the most convincing evidence to date that increased vitamin D levels can help COVID-19 patients reduce the risk of serious illness or death. Researchers from Bar Ilan University and the Galilee Medical Center say that the vitamin has such a strong impact on disease severity that they can predict how people would fare if infected based on nothing more than their ages and vitamin D levels. Lacking vitamin D significantly increases danger levels, they concluded in newly peer-reviewed research published Thursday in the journal PLOS One. The study is based on research conducted during Israel’s first two waves of the virus, before vaccines were widely available, and doctors emphasized that vitamin supplements were not a substitute for vaccines, but rather a way to keep immunity levels from falling.

Vitamin D deficiency is endemic across the Middle East, including in Israel, where nearly four in five people are low on the vitamin, according to one study from 2011. By taking supplements before infection, though, the researchers in the new Israeli study found that patients could avoid the worst effects of the disease. “We found it remarkable, and striking, to see the difference in the chances of becoming a severe patient when you are lacking in vitamin D compared to when you’re not,” said Dr. Amiel Dror, a Galilee Medical Center physician and Bar Ilan researcher who was part of the team behind the study. He noted that his study was conducted pre-Omicron, but said that the coronavirus doesn’t change fundamentally enough between variants to negate vitamin D effectiveness.

“What we’re seeing when vitamin D helps people with COVID infections is a result of its effectiveness in bolstering the immune systems to deal with viral pathogens that attack the respiratory system,” he told The Times of Israel. “This is equally relevant for Omicron as it was for previous variants.” [..] In June, researchers published preliminary findings showing that 26 percent of coronavirus patients died if they were vitamin D deficient soon before hospitalization, compared to 3% who had normal levels of vitamin D. They also determined that hospitalized patients who were vitamin D deficient were 14 times more likely, on average, to end up in severe or critical condition than others.

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Attorney’s advice: “Stay out of the hospital, no matter what.”

Calls for Help From Families of Patients Hospitalized With COVID-19 (ET)

Attorney Esther Bodek in Aurora, Colorado, also knows of a patient’s family members who were arrested when communications with a hospital went sour. She says requests from families of COVID-19 patients have flooded in since November. “It’s traumatizing,” Bodek said, “because it is a level of civil rights abuses that I have never encountered in my entire life.” In case after case, she’s seen a pattern of separating COVID-19 patients from their families and restricting visitation. “And during that period of time is usually when the remdesivir is administered.” Some families coming to her for help often strenuously object to treatment with remdesivir. When other treatments have failed, they desperately want to try things the hospital won’t allow, such as ivermectin and vitamins.

Those are part of a popular protocol used by independent doctors around the country and by people treating themselves at home. Bodek has fought many times to obtain those medications as a last-ditch effort to save a patient. She said the resistance she faces when dealing with the hospitals is maddening. “Any question about treatment starts immediate combativeness [by hospital staff], from what I’ve seen in the pattern of our cases,” she said. She’s had clients denied fluids and nutrition to the point of near-starvation. Since taking those cases she works night and day seven days a week. On the weekend, “I’ll be on the phone and talking to somebody in tears,” she said. “The hospital’s telling them they want to pull the plug and they’re trying to make a decision.

The doctor says, ‘We’re going to take him off life support now.’ And I’ve had to say ‘No! That’s not their choice!’” One of her clients works in billing in a hospital and told her that hospitals receive a bonus payment of $17,000 from the federal government for every patient confirmed to have COVID-19, Bodek said. A bonus payment of $37,000 is paid for any patient going on a ventilator, according to that client, Bodek said. [..] Bodek’s advice: “Stay out of the hospital, no matter what. And if it happens that you’re admitted, have a medical power of attorney immediately written up to say no to remdesivir.” She’s looking into filing civil rights violations lawsuits if claims of medical malpractice won’t work. “I’m determined to find a way to stop this abuse,” Bodek said. “This is definitely a fight we’re not giving up.”

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Vaccine Insanity Syndrome (VIS).

Justin Trudeau is a Bungler and Menace to His Nation (Kohlmayer)

At the beginning of January, Justin Trudeau, the Prime Minister of Canada, posted a message on Twitter in which he announced that he had just received his Covid vaccine booster and urged others to do likewise. At the end of January, Justin Trudeau posted a message on Twitter in which he announced that he had tested positive for Covid-19. Astoundingly, at the conclusion of his message Trudeau urged everyone to get the shots even though they failed to protect him from the disease. “Everyone, please get vaccinated and get boosted,” he insisted. Trudeau’s message shows the depth of irrationality – bordering on insanity – to which many have fallen victim. We propose to call this phenomenon the Vaccine Insanity Syndrome (VIS).

Those who suffer from VIS have largely lost touch with reality and things like common sense, evidence and logic no longer gain any traction in their thinking. Just to summarize the absurdity of the whole situation: Having been previously vaccinated, Trudeau gets additionally boostered and three weeks later contracts Covid-19. To put it in a different way, shortly after getting his third shot, Canada’s Prime Minister falls ill with the very disease against which these “effective” injections were supposed to protect him. But rather than repenting of his mistake, he goes on Twitter and advises the Canadian people to do the same. Where is any logic in this? Has Covid affected Trudeau’s brain? Or was it the injections that somehow diminished his capacity for thought and reflection?

If anything, Trudeau should be “Exhibit One” for why people should not get vaccinated and boostered, since he is now Canada’s poster boy for vaccine failure. Why, then, is he telling Canadians to do what he did? It cannot be because the vaccines and boosters will protect them against infection. The opposite is, in fact, the case. The data coming from all over the world is showing that the vaccinated are more likely to become infected than the unvaccinated. According to Steve Kirsch, “The numbers in the Denmark study described below are now confirmed by government data from Germany showing that vaccinated people are 8X more likely to develop Omicron than unvaccinated people. This is not surprising since a paper from Germany showed the same thing: the more you vaccinate, the worse it gets.”

Justin Trudeau, however, does not have to go to foreign lands to learn of vaccine failure. Below is a chart from Ontario which gives case numbers according to vaccination status. You will notice that the numbers for the fully vaccinated are more than three times those of the unvaccinated.

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“It took Columbus less time to cross the Atlantic..”

We Were Warned About the Ports (Sammon)

In July 2015, the Federal Maritime Commission, a federal agency with little name recognition and even less influence, released a report sounding the alarm about the state of America’s ports. A congestion crisis had been building for years and was fast becoming untenable; even the country’s relatively tepid economic-growth rate was straining against decades of disinvestment at its most critical trading hubs. Chassis weren’t available, trucks couldn’t get in or out, and terminals stayed perpetually clogged. That crisis had “resulted from events that have developed or emerged over a considerable period of time and from within the system itself, rather than being the result of external shocks, such as unanticipated surges in container volumes or management-labor issues,” the report surmised.

“Many seem to think it is inevitable that embracing ‘business as usual’ will lead to significant further declines in the performance of the U.S. intermodal transportation system.” And then, of course, business went on as usual. Almost five years passed before the coronavirus announced itself on American shores, and another year after that before the disease gave an already fissured supply chain the nudge it needed to fully rupture. And while the circumstances of a global pandemic, its shutdowns and labor shortages, seemed exceptional, it was something as routine as a double-digit import growth, feared specifically by the FMC since at least 2006, that sent shipping container volume skyrocketing and brought the system to a grinding halt. A prophecy that few heard and no one heeded had finally come true.

Before the Biden administration was even sworn in, the ports were already in a state of chaos. It got worse throughout the year, and by the time the administration appointed its ports czar John Porcari and began looking toward emergency intervention, only minor measures were even available to remedy decades of bipartisan mismanagement. Today, congestion at the twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, collectively the nation’s largest, is “at historic high levels,” as the shipping giant Maersk announced in a customer advisory in late December. Reporting indicated that there were 133 vessels en route to San Pedro Bay, with delays stretching upward of 41 days. One ship in particular had left Busan, South Korea, on November 17 and was not scheduled to dock until January 2, a 47-day duration for a routine voyage that should take, at most, half that time. “It took Columbus less time to cross the Atlantic,” said Sal Mercogliano, an associate professor and maritime historian at Campbell University.

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Jemima Kelly’s FT ed. tries to defend Rogan, but what’s this?:

“..when he is wrong, he admits it, as he did recently when his claim that young people were at greater risk of developing myocarditis after the vaccine than they were after contracting Covid was swiftly corrected by a guest on his show..”

Spotify Spat Shows Why Joe Rogan And His Podcast Matter (FT)

The contrast between the vague virtue-signalling of the Sussexes’ statement and Rogan’s engaged response — which seemed authentic, humble and searching — shows why his show has become Spotify’s most popular podcast. With an estimated 11mn listeners per episode, the 54 year-old comedian and mixed martial arts commentator must be considered one of the most influential media figures in the world. With that power comes moral and intellectual responsibility and Rogan does not always seem totally aware of that. He was perhaps not mindful enough of the potential impact on his mainly young fans when he casually declared that if a fit and healthy 21-year-old asked him whether to get vaccinated, he would tell them not to.

He also gets his facts wrong sometimes, despite asserting them confidently. But when he is wrong, he admits it, as he did recently when his claim that young people were at greater risk of developing myocarditis after the vaccine than they were after contracting Covid was swiftly corrected by a guest on his show. One should not imagine that if Rogan were shut down, we would be rid of anyone wanting to pursue ideas that run against the grain. Nor should we want such a world — as Rogan points out in his video, some things once dismissed as conspiracy theories, such as the lab leak theory of Covid-19’s origins, are now considered plausible. Conspiracy theories did not spring into being with the arrival of podcasts or the internet — Gallup polling suggests that in 1976, 81 per cent of Americans believed there had been a conspiracy to kill John F Kennedy, contrary to the official line.

It is surely healthier, then, to have someone like Rogan willing to discuss controversial opinions with those who hold them than to confine these people to a corner of the internet where they are less visible but also less easy to correct when they are wrong. That’s quite apart from the fact that it would be utterly ineffective for Spotify to oust Rogan. The idea that the company gives him a platform that he would otherwise lack is fanciful. When Spotify reportedly paid more than $100mn for the exclusive rights to Rogan’s podcast in 2020, it was so as to benefit from the platform he already had.

I told a friend that I might write about Rogan in my column this week. The response I got was “Oh, God!” and a grimace, quickly followed by a confession that she had actually never listened to his podcast. The truth is that many of the people castigating Rogan haven’t either. If they had, they would know that the presenter is an open-minded host who seeks out all sorts of opinions rather than blindly following those of a particular tribe, and who seems genuinely keen to pursue the truth. Joe Rogan doesn’t need Spotify, but Spotify needs him; maybe we all do.

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“Trust in the media has fallen to just 46 percent and as low as 40 percent in recent polling. Where are people going for information? It seems many have gone to podcasts — and specifically to Joe Rogan, at least 11 million of them.”

Can Joe Rogan Save Free Speech? (Turley)

[..] social media companies and other corporations now regulate speech in the United States to a degree that an actual state media would struggle to replicate. Faced with a growing cancel culture, companies are scrubbing their platforms of dissenting viewpoints and converting forums into echo chambers. In the use of private companies, the left has achieved an ignoble distinction. While liberal writers and artists were blacklisted and investigated in the 1950s, liberal activists have succeeded in censoring opposing views to a degree that would have made Sen. Joe McCarthy (R-Wis.) blush. Rather than burn books, they have simply gotten stores to ban them or blacklist the authors.

For these companies, there is no value to protecting the speech rights of dissenting voices with powerful politicians, academics, and even some in the media demanding more censorship. But then they went after Rogan. Rogan’s popularity is precisely due to the fact that he is uncensored in what he says. As many networks and newspapers have become more of an echo chamber, viewers and readers have fled en masse. Trust in the media has fallen to just 46 percent and as low as 40 percent in recent polling. Where are people going for information? It seems many have gone to podcasts — and specifically to Joe Rogan, at least 11 million of them. While Young reportedly relies on Spotify for 60 percent of his royalty income, Spotify does not rely on Young or other rock stars for its primary profits. It is the reverse of market conditions from just a couple years ago.

The problem with controlling speech is that it has to be complete; it doesn’t work if there are alternatives to echo-chambered media. Rogan’s podcast is one of the biggest. With 11 million listeners, he surpassed cable and network audiences as well as the readership of the largest papers. His program allows people across the political spectrum to speak freely, including those who question official positions on vaccines and treatments. While Rogan has promised to be more careful in how information is presented on his show (and Spotify will add “advisories” on podcasts), his podcast survived the celebrity onslaught. As various investors seek to create free speech alternatives to Twitter and YouTube, there may be an emerging market for free speech products.

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North Korea doesn’t have much internet. But still funny.

North Korea Hacked Him. So He Took Down Its Internet (Wired)

For the past two weeks, observers of North Korea’s strange and tightly restricted corner of the internet began to notice that the country seemed to be dealing with some serious connectivity problems. On several different days, practically all of its websites—the notoriously isolated nation only has a few dozen—intermittently dropped offline en masse, from the booking site for its Air Koryo airline to Naenara, a page that serves as the official portal for dictator Kim Jong-un’s government. At least one of the central routers that allow access to the country’s networks appeared at one point to be paralyzed, crippling the Hermit Kingdom’s digital connections to the outside world.

Some North Korea watchers pointed out that the country had just carried out a series of missile tests, implying that a foreign government’s hackers might have launched a cyberattack against the rogue state to tell it to stop saber-rattling. But responsibility for North Korea’s ongoing internet outages doesn’t lie with US Cyber Command or any other state-sponsored hacking agency. In fact, it was the work of one American man in a T-shirt, pajama pants, and slippers, sitting in his living room night after night, watching Alien movies and eating spicy corn snacks—and periodically walking over to his home office to check on the progress of the programs he was running to disrupt the internet of an entire country.

Just over a year ago, an independent hacker who goes by the handle P4x was himself hacked by North Korean spies. P4x was just one victim of a hacking campaign that targeted Western security researchers with the apparent aim of stealing their hacking tools and details about software vulnerabilities. He says he managed to prevent those hackers from swiping anything of value from him. But he nonetheless felt deeply unnerved by state-sponsored hackers targeting him personally—and by the lack of any visible response from the US government. So after a year of letting his resentment simmer, P4x has taken matters into his own hands. “It felt like the right thing to do here. If they don’t see we have teeth, it’s just going to keep coming,” says the hacker. [..] “I want them to understand that if you come at us, it means some of your infrastructure is going down for a while.”

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You’re inclined to say: EPIC! But it’s really just what every reporter should do every single time.

Reporter Shreds Admin Spox Over ‘Russian False Flag’ Claims (ZH)

Earlier on Thursday the Biden administration and US intelligence came out with some explosive and outlandish claims, saying Russia is planning to release a video depicting graphic scenes of a “staged false explosion with corpses, actors depicting mourners, and images of destroyed locations and military equipment,” as CNN described it. This in order to justify a military invasion of Ukraine, given the false flag operation would feature Russian-backed separatists under attack by Ukrainian forces. Given such a narrative has been advanced in public, grabbing global headlines, but without so much as a shred of evidence – even mainstream media pundits are scratching their heads. Watch Associated Press writer Matt Lee demolish the State Department’s Ned Price, who refuses to provide any level of proof backing the bizarre and surprising claims. “This is like Alex Jones territory you’re getting into now!” Lee points out…


Peace?

[..] “Lee challenged Price, saying the State Department had presented “no evidence” that Russia has actually created a “crisis actor” video and insisting that he wouldn’t be satisfied with the administration’s claims alone. “If you doubt the credibility of the U.S. government, of the British government, of other governments and want to, you know, find solace in information that the Russians are putting out, that is for you to do,” Price responded.” Lee then pointed that given the extraordinary claims, some level of evidence is demanded given the mounting numbers of whopping government lies over the past two decades, including ‘Iraq WMDs’.


Price hid behind the “that’s classified” classic line often used whenever government officials want to shut down legitimate skepticism of their claims… “Like, ‘crisis actors’? This is Alex Jones territory you’re getting into,” he said. “Where is the declassified information?,” he repeated multiple times.In pressing for evidence to justify the administration’s claims, the veteran reporter referenced numerous U.S. intelligence failures that led to catastrophe in recent decades, including the “weapons of mass destruction” speculation that served as a pretext for America’s 2003 military intervention in Iraq as well as the U.S. timeline for Afghanistan’s fall to the Taliban that was totally upended in August.

@StateDeptSpox
https://twitter.com/i/status/1489374971948376064

“We’re declassifying evidence Government X may try to misinform you”
“What’s the evidence you’re declassifying?”
“I just gave you the evidence”
“Uhhh, you just made a statement, that’s not evidence”
“If you don’t trust my bizarre claims, something is wrong with you”

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steroidbanking

 

 

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

 

Jul 282021
 


Blu Mural Rome, 2015 (click for more)

 

CDC Warns Covid-19 May Be A Few Mutations Away From Evading Vaccines (NYP)
Higher COVID Rate Found In Some Counties With Higher Vaccination Rate (CBS)
Booster Vaccines Could Be Offered As Soon As September (NT)
“Zero COVID” Experts Put Grandkids At Risk (ZH)
Unvaccinated Diners Only: California Restaurant (RT)
America, A Nation Which Once Championed Free Speech (Sinclair)
The Price of Conscience – Daniel Hale Sentenced to 45 Months (Chris Hedges)
Biden DOJ Wants Identity Of NoVA Woman’s Employer Kept Secret (Patch)
The Insecurity Industry (Snowden)
Julian Assange Stripped Of Citizenship By Ecuador (G.)

 

 

Does this say that even if a drug will be found to treat COVID19 the contract cannot be voided?!

 

 

 

 

So why would anyone want to get vaccinated now? Why not wait? “You’ll make it worse!” Me? On my own?

CDC Warns Covid-19 May Be A Few Mutations Away From Evading Vaccines (NYP)

COVID-19 may be “just a few mutations” away from being able to evade vaccines, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky warned Tuesday. Walensky said the current vaccines are effective against severe cases of the coronavirus, including those caused by its known variants, but its continuing spread could allow the disease to mutate beyond the immunizations’ protection. “The largest concern that I think we in public health and sciences are worried about is that virus and potential mutations … [have] the potential to evade our vaccine in terms of how it protects us from severe disease and death,” Walensky said at a press briefing.

“Right now, fortunately, we are not there. These vaccines operate really well in protecting us from severe disease and death. But the big concern is the next area that might emerge, just a few mutations potentially away, could potentially evade our vaccines.” The agency chief said the possibility is even more reason for people to get vaccinated — so that the virus can finally be off at the pass before it mutates into something that requires another vaccine. The CDC on Tuesday issued new indoor mask guidelines designed to help slow the spread of the virus in places experiencing surges in cases.

“In areas with substantial and time transmission, CDC recommends fully vaccinated people wear masks in public, indoor settings to help prevent the spread of the Delta variant and protect others,” Walensky said, referring to the highly contagious strain that comprises an estimated 83 percent of new cases nationwide. Health officials have stressed that rising coronavirus case numbers in the US are being driven by unvaccinated Americans. Currently, people who are not vaccinated are responsible for around 99.5 percent of COVID-19 deaths and 97 percent of hospitalizations, officials said.

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CBS Sacramento. The ways the story is “massaged” is a sight to behold.

Higher COVID Rate Found In Some Counties With Higher Vaccination Rate (CBS)

State workers and health care employees will now be required to show proof of vaccine or get tested for COVID at least once a week. The governor announced the new guidance today and is urging private employers to “replicate the example.” This comes as the highly contagious Delta variant is now dominant in the state and COVID rates have skyrocketed in the month since California officially reopened, including breakthrough cases among vaccinated Californians. A new analysis finds several counties with above-average vaccination rates also have higher COVID case rates, while case rates are falling in counties with below-average vaccination rates.

Statewide data analyzed by the Bay Area News Group found five counties, Los Angeles, San Diego, Alameda, Contra Costa, and San Francisco, have both a higher percentage of people who are fully vaccinated than the state average and a higher average daily case rate. Compare that to these five counties: Modoc, Glenn, Lassen, Del Norte, and San Benito, which have below-average vaccination rates and decreasing case rates. However, UCSF infectious disease expert Dr. Phillip Norris clarifies that the data doesn’t mean the vaccine is not working. He notes, first, the counties referenced with higher vaccination and case rates are more densely populated. “If there are a lot of people around you’re more likely to bump into one who has COVID,” Norris explained.

He, like other infectious disease experts, warns that vaccinated people may be unknowingly spreading the virus. Julie: A lot of people think if they’re vaccinated, they can’t transmit. Is that true? Phillip: So, originally we thought that might be true. But he says that’s no longer the case, thanks to the Delta variant. He points to preliminary data from China that indicates the viral load in the nose from the Delta variant may be 1,000 times higher than previous variants. “If that’s the case, even a little bit in somebody who’s vaccinated could be a lot,” he explains.

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Ireland. If I were me, I’d first want to know what’s in those booster shots. Different spike proteins perhaps?

Booster Vaccines Could Be Offered As Soon As September (NT)

A COVID-19 vaccine booster programme could get underway as soon as September, the Health Minister says. Stephen Donnelly says it will be done in conjunction with the flu vaccine, which is usually done in early autumn. It’s believed boosters will be offered first to people at high risk of illness or exposure to COVID-19 – in particular those who were vaccinated early in the rollout. Stephen Donnelly says we’re also likely to see “pop-up” vaccination centres in the coming weeks, to make it as “easy as possible” for young people to get vaccinated. He was speaking after NIAC and the Government gave the green light to extend vaccination to everyone aged 12-15. Around 70% of the adult population is now fully vaccinated against the virus, with nearly 85% having received at least their first dose.


Minister Donnelly told Newstalk Breakfast work is underway to figure out the best way to extend the vaccine programme in the coming weeks. He said: “My priority for some time has been children with underlying conditions. He said teenagers with underlying conditions may be able to book an appointment with their GP. However, it may ultimately be quicker to allow everyone in the age group to register at the same time for appointments in the mass vaccination centres. This weekend will also see the opening of the country’s first walk-in vaccination centres. Minister Donnelly said: “It’s this bank holiday weekend… it’s mRNA vaccines, so Pfizer or Moderna. Anyone over the age of 16… can just walk in.” He said it doesn’t matter if someone has already registered via the vaccine portal – they can still attend the new centre if they haven’t had their first dose yet.

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Zero covid is a thing of the past that hampers effective reactions.

“Zero COVID” Experts Put Grandkids At Risk (ZH)

The need to act on climate change is the fundamental moral imperative of our age, animated by the idea our sacrifices today will save the planet in the future. Yes, energy costs may be higher and some people will lose their jobs, but it’s worth it for the grandkids. Curiously, the grandkids haven’t been given much thought in our response to Covid-19. Our generation has foist extraordinary costs on future generations in a vain attempt to save lives from a disease that is lethal to a few. “The great majority of people … even in their 80s … will survive,” Britain’s chief scientific adviser Chris Whitty said in March last year, before collective psychosis took hold.

“Even in the most vulnerable, oldest groups, in a very stressed health service … the great majority of people who catch the virus – and not everyone will – survive it,” he told a parliamentary committee, having analysed the data from China and Italy. That was true then and it’s true now. Covid-19 was never an existential threat. After 18 months about four million people have died from or with Covid – most of advanced age apart for some tragic exceptions – in a world with a rapidly growing population of almost eight billion people. Sixty million people die every year. But we have behaved like it was, racking up trillions in extra debt and trashing norms of liberal democracy that might not quickly, if ever, return.

The idea that Sydney would be locked down in September 2021 or that American pediatricians would insist anyone over two years old wear a mask outside, to anyone living in February last year would have seemed ridiculous. Yet both, seemingly, are true. On this trend, silencing different scientific opinions or mandating individual tracking devices, all in the name of “saving lives”, may no longer be considered far-fetched. At the end of 2019 the federal budget papers forecast net debt of $361bn by June 2023. The latest budget papers forecast $835bn for the same period, rising to $980bn by mid-2025. Put another way, by 2030 the government’s gross debt burden is forecast to be more than 51 per cent of GDP, compared with 15 per cent forecast in 2019, according to the Intergenerational Report released last month.

By 2060, interest payments on federal debt will have doubled as a share of the economy, if interest rates start to return to more normal levels, it forecasts. A warmer planet won’t be the only burden we’re leaving for the grandkids. Future taxes will need to be higher, and expenditures on other goods and services lower, commensurately, than they otherwise would have been. We will have fewer resources to invest in cancer and dementia research, for example, much greater threats to welfare than Covid-19. “The Covid-19 pandemic and associated containment measures, however, have profoundly affected Australian society and the economy, and are likely to shape the future in ways that are not yet apparent,” the Intergenerational Report says. Who would have foreseen, for instance, a surge in babies being admitted to hospital in New Zealand for an “immunity debt” potentially caused by the government’s closed border policy?

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Of course not, or it would be no fun:

“An employee told the Los Angeles Times that the restaurant is not actually checking patrons’ vaccine status.”

Unvaccinated Diners Only: California Restaurant (RT)

A California restaurant has refused to back down after being bombarded with negative press and customer reviews for posting a sign demanding that all diners provide proof that they have not been vaccinated against Covid-19. With vaccination status increasingly becoming a prerequisite to participate in many ordinary activities, one Huntington Beach eatery has decided to take a slightly different approach to granting privileges based on personal medical decisions. On its storefront window, Basilico’s Pasta e Vino taped a sign reading: “PROOF OF BEING UNVACCINATED REQUIRED. We have zero tolerance for treasonous, anti-American stupidity. Thank you for pondering.”

The restaurant’s owner, Tony Roman, said that the unorthodox policy is designed to get people thinking as some Southern California businesses begin asking customers for proof of vaccination. “With the new and aggressive push for mandatory vax policies, we couldn’t resist, so we are sending a message of our own. Hopefully most are smart enough to read between the lines. Otherwise we will just sit back and have fun watching their heads explode over it,” Roman said in a statement to local media. An employee told the Los Angeles Times that the restaurant is not actually checking patrons’ vaccine status. The restaurant previously declared itself a mask-free zone and refused to shut its doors when eateries were ordered in March 2020 to curtail indoor dining as part of Covid restrictions.

Some appear to appreciate the intended message behind the odd measure. A vaccinated woman who cuts hair at a nearby barbershop told local media that she didn’t feel slighted by the no-vaxxed-allowed policy. “You got other places that want you vaccinated to come in. No different, right?” she noted to a local ABC affiliate. However, many others were furious over the move. The restaurant has been pelted with negative reviews on Yelp. One comment said that the provocative rule was a “slap in the face to all those who died from Covid-19.”

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Good idea, so-so rendition:

America, A Nation Which Once Championed Free Speech (Sinclair)

The elites of Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and Capitol Hill act as the true overlords of Western thought, guarding the borders of allowable speech. How on earth did we allow this to happen – and what can be done now? America has changed beyond recognition over the past few years, and performed a rather rapid about-face on the issue of free speech, a notion it once championed. The source of this is no longer merely the apparatus of Silicon Valley and its desire to control information flows (which it is meant to merely shepherd without bias). The same pressure has come from the superstate structure of America itself, particularly (and ironically) the politically ‘liberal’ faction, as well as from an overarching pressure from the consumer interests of Western-backed global finance.

There appears to be a mass consensus among American money-powers (and thereby state powers) to tightly control information, and to abandon utterly their so recently lauded values of free speech. The FBI in particular has seemingly transitioned into an institution of speech-referees and political oppressors, on guard primarily against America’s own citizens. Ironically, this has not halted America’s saber-rattling about political and informational oppressions from its geopolitical rivals in the east, which find themselves in the reverse role of shocked concern at the willingness of the American superstate to silence its political and moral enemies. Even to the extent of performing show trials.

[..] Facebook has led an initiative to officially create ‘snitches’ among its users, creating their own ‘social credit scheme’, along the lines of China’s. Again, in an act of unbridled obliviousness to the utter reversal of values they held as core only a few scant years ago, and while complaining out of the corner of their mouths about a Chinese variation of the same system. The nation which championed ‘free speech’ will now ban you from the public space and force you out of your job for the crime of ‘misgendering’. Among those who support the hard turn away from free speech, you will find devoted imbibers of neoliberal media, (CNN, MSNBC, BBC, NYT, etc). It is possibly here where you will find these attitudes are ‘created’ before being disseminated downstream among the elites of Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and Capitol Hill.

Once in consensus with the latest media buzzwords, these three may be considered part of a closed feedback loop. From there the true overlords of Western thought are those newly emerged sentinels who guard the borders of allowable speech. Today American citizens are tracked, monitored, and generally threatened more than ever before. Even my writing of this article, what would have been considered an innocuous expression of free political criticism only five or so years ago, might today be considered controversial to the new ‘American Stasi’. We in the West now live behind what we might call a new ‘iron curtain’ – and for those living behind this curtain, there is no longer any illusion of free speech, it is simply no longer talked about.

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Hale was caught because the Intercept got involved.

The Price of Conscience – Daniel Hale Sentenced to 45 Months (Chris Hedges)

Daniel Hale, a former intelligence analyst in the drone program for the Air Force who as a private contractor in 2013 leaked some 17 classified documents about drone strikes to the press, was sentenced Tuesday to 45 months in prison. The documents, published by The Intercept on October 15, 2015, exposed that between January 2012 and February 2013, U.S. special operations airstrikes killed more than 200 people. Of those, only 35 were the intended targets. For one five-month period of the operation, according to the documents, nearly 90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets. The civilian dead, usually innocent bystanders, were routinely classified as “enemies killed in action.”

The Justice Department coerced Hale, who was deployed to Afghanistan in 2012, on March 31 to plead guilty to one count of violating the Espionage Act, a law passed in 1917 designed to prosecute those who passed on state secrets to a hostile power, not those who expose to the public government lies and crimes. Hale admitted as part of the plea deal to “retention and transmission of national security information” and leaking 11 classified documents to a journalist. If he had refused the plea deal, he could have spent 50 years in prison. The sentencing of Hale is one more potentially mortal blow to the freedom of the press. It follows in the wake of the prosecutions and imprisonment of other whistleblowers under the Espionage Act including Chelsea Manning, Jeffrey Sterling, Thomas Drake and John Kiriakou, who spent two-and-a-half years in prison for exposing the routine torture of suspects held in black sites.


Those charged under the act are treated as if they were spies. They are barred from explaining motivations and intent to the court. They cannot provide evidence to the court of the government lawlessness and war crimes they exposed. Prominent human rights organizations, such as the ACLU and PEN, along with mainstream publications, such as The New York Times and CNN, have largely remained silent about the prosecution of Hale. The group Stand with Daniel Hale has called on President Biden to pardon Hale and end the use of the Espionage Act to punish whistleblowers. It is also collecting donations for Hale’s legal fund. The bipartisan onslaught against the press — Barack Obama used the Espionage Act eight times against whistleblowers, more than all other previous administrations combined — by criminalizing those within the system who seek to inform the public is ominous for our democracy. It is effectively extinguishing all investigations into the inner workings of power.

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US woman kills someone on UK motorway, her fault, flees the country. US calls diplomatic immunity of sorts, no extradition. The US attorney who makes that case happens to be the same who tries hard to get Assange extradited the other way around.

Biden DOJ Wants Identity Of NoVA Woman’s Employer Kept Secret (Patch)

Radd Seiger, adviser and spokesperson for the Dunn family, said in a statement Monday that “as any parent might imagine, losing a child is the worst thing that can happen to you.” “But having to deal with the U.S. Government’s abuse and denial of justice as Harry’s family have had to since he died is unprecedented for us here in the U.K.,” he said. “Their conduct is and continues to be frankly unAmerican and against the core values of decency and compassion that we know most Americans hold dear to their hearts, including those who work for the intelligence agencies, many of whom have come forward to us privately to tell us how ashamed they are of their employer.”

Among the Justice Department officials who signed the motion for a protective order was Raj Parekh, acting U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia and an appointee of the Biden administration. In an ironic twist, Parekh supervises hundreds of Justice Department attorneys, including many who are seeking the extradition of foreign nationals to the United States. The most prominent case currently under Parekh’s direction is the U.S. government’s attempt to extradite WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, an Australian citizen, from the U.K. to the United States to face charges under the U.S. Espionage Act of 1917. David Davis, a Conservative member of the U.K. Parliament, wrote in an op-ed on Saturday that his government appears to have a one-sided relationship with the United States on the issue of extradition.

“[T]he UK is one of most amenable nations in the world to the surrender of its citizens to overseas courts — but we do not insist on corresponding arrangements with other governments,” Davis wrote in his July 24 column for the Daily Mail. [..] Sacoolas is scheduled to be deposed by the Dunn family’s lawyers on Aug. 24 as part of the lawsuit against her and her husband. Dunn’s parents were deposed in the civil proceeding in early July. At Sacoolas’s deposition, “she will be questioned regarding her activity as she drove from the base to the accident scene, and Plaintiffs are deeply concerned that the Government’s motion will needlessly thwart a legitimate inquiry on this and other relevant subjects,” the Dunn family lawyers wrote in their court filing on Monday. Seiger, the spokesperson for the Dunn family, said the July 23 motion filed by the Justice Department “is not an attempt to protect state secrets or national security.” “It is an attempt to keep Harry’s family from the truth and minimize what happened to him,” he said.

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“The first thing I do when I get a new phone is take it apart.”

The Insecurity Industry (Snowden)

The first thing I do when I get a new phone is take it apart. I don’t do this to satisfy a tinkerer’s urge, or out of political principle, but simply because it is unsafe to operate. Fixing the hardware, which is to say surgically removing the two or three tiny microphones hidden inside, is only the first step of an arduous process, and yet even after days of these DIY security improvements, my smartphone will remain the most dangerous item I possess. Prior to this week’s Pegasus Project, a global reporting effort by major newspapers to expose the fatal consequences of the NSO Group—the new private-sector face of an out-of-control Insecurity Industry—most smartphone manufacturers along with much of the world press collectively rolled their eyes at me whenever I publicly identified a fresh-out-of-the-box iPhone as a potentially lethal threat.

Despite years of reporting that implicated the NSO Group’s for-profit hacking of phones in the deaths and detentions of journalists and human rights defenders; despite years of reporting that smartphone operating systems were riddled with catastrophic security flaws (a circumstance aggravated by their code having been written in aging programming languages that have long been regarded as unsafe); and despite years of reporting that even when everything works as intended, the mobile ecosystem is a dystopian hellscape of end-user monitoring and outright end-user manipulation, it is still hard for many people to accept that something that feels good may not in fact be good. Over the last eight years I’ve often felt like someone trying to convince their one friend who refuses to grow up to quit smoking and cut back on the booze—meanwhile, the magazine ads still say “Nine of Ten Doctors Smoke iPhones!” and “Unsecured Mobile Browsing is Refreshing!”

In my infinite optimism, however, I can’t help but regard the arrival of the Pegasus Project as a turning-point—a well-researched, exhaustively-sourced, and frankly crazy-making story about a “winged” “Trojan Horse” infection named “Pegasus” that basically turns the phone in your pocket into an all-powerful tracking device that can be turned on or off, remotely, unbeknownst to you, the pocket’s owner.


The microphones inside my actual phone, prepped for surgery

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Officially stateless now? Nice. What says Australia?

Julian Assange Stripped Of Citizenship By Ecuador (G.)

Ecuador has revoked the citizenship of Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks who is currently in a British prison. Ecuador’s justice system formally notified the Australian of the nullity of his naturalisation in a letter that came in response to a claim filed by the South American country’s foreign ministry. A naturalisation is reconsidered when it is granted based on the concealment of relevant facts, false documents or fraud. Ecuadorian authorities said Assange’s naturalisation letter had multiple inconsistencies, different signatures, the possible alteration of documents and unpaid fees, among other issues. Carlos Poveda, Assange’s lawyer, said the decision was made without due process and Assange was not allowed to appear in the case.


“On the date [Assange] was cited he was deprived of his liberty and with a health crisis inside the deprivation of liberty centre where he was being held,” Poveda said. Poveda said he will file appeals asking for an amplification and clarification of the decision. “More than the importance of nationality, it is a matter of respecting rights and following due process in withdrawing nationality.” Assange received Ecuadorian citizenship in January 2018 as part of a failed attempt by the government of then-President Lenín Moreno to turn him into a diplomat to get him out of its embassy in London. On Monday, the Pichincha court for contentious administrative matters revoked this decision. Ecuador’s foreign ministry said the court had “acted independently and followed due process in a case that took place during the previous government and that was raised by the same previous government”.

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


Pablo Picasso Woman sitting in a armchair 1910

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Will they know the difference?

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

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

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

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

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

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Growacet.

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

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

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


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

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That’s less than vitamin D?!

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

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

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


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

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It’s become a joke.

Free Speech: And… It’s Gone (Luongo)

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

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


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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bandaging The Corpse (Chris Hedges)

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

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


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

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

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

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

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


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

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Drip every day drip.

Cuomo Staffers Have Stopped Showing Up To Work (NYP)

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


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

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What job did they give Victoria Nuland in the end?

The War In Ukraine May Soon Resume (MoA)

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

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


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

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AOC!

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

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


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

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

CNN Hemorrhages Viewers Post-Trump (RT)

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

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


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

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It’s been turned into a joke.

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

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

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


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

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Save the bees

 

 

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Feb 132021
 
 February 13, 2021  Posted by at 10:24 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  22 Responses »


James Karales Selma to Montgomery March Alabama 1965

 

Sputnik V Developers Work On Vaccine For Several COVID19 Strains At Once (RT)
South Africans Being Infected With COVID19 Variant Again After Recovering (RT)
The Bombhole Era (Matt Taibbi)
Cuomo And The Lincoln Project Are Media-Created Monsters (DP)
NY Dems Want To Strip Cuomo Of Coronavirus Emergency Powers (JTN)
Inside the Lincoln Project’s ‘Toxic’ Workplace (19th)
Lincoln Project Accused by its Own Co-Founder of Likely Criminality (Greenwald)
Lincoln Project Faces Questions Over The Spending And Compensation (Turley)
Trump Lawyers Argue His Jan. 6 Rhetoric Is ‘Protected’ Free Speech (JTN)
MSM’s Narrative About The Murderous Capitol Mob Has Collapsed (Cox)
Hillary Clinton Could Be Charged Under Precedent Set In Trump Trial (RT)
Great Reset? Putin Says, “Not So Fast” (Luongo)
The Trials of Wokery (Kunstler)

 

 

When you open Pandora’s box, things tend to come out.

@AceSix4
https://twitter.com/i/status/1360063639894507520

 

 

One of the stranger arguments. But sure, let’s inject some controversy.

 

 

 

 

Russia to the rescue.

Sputnik V Developers Work On Vaccine For Several COVID19 Strains At Once (RT)

The Gamaleya Institute behind Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine said it’s working on a technology that will lead to an effective jab against several coronavirus variants and which could also be swiftly updated to tackle new mutations.
The multiplying variants of Covid-19, which could turn out to be resistant to current vaccines and prolong the pandemic even further, have recently become a source of major concern for governments and medics around the globe. But the solution to the problem may be just around the corner, as the Gamaleya Institute’s director, Alexander Gintsburg, revealed that the Moscow-based research body “has developed a technology that allows to quickly and efficiently create vaccine agents that will include antigens not from one, but two, three, four or five different coronavirus variants.”


Such a vaccine should be able to provide immunity from all coronavirus strains that could threaten a population at any given time, Gintsburg said, in an interview with the Rossiya 24 channel. So far, all of the known mutations appear to be covered by the vaccines, but that may well change as RNA viruses like Covid-19 are the most rapidly changing objects in the world, he pointed out. The Russian multi-variant vaccine is currently in its research phase, with clinical trials scheduled to begin by the end of the year. The finished drug will likely be made available to customers in 2022, Gintsburg estimated. Numerous strains of coronavirus have been already discovered by scientists, but three of them are causing the most worries at the moment. The so-called UK, South Africa and Brazil variants have shown multiple changes in their spike protein, through which the virus attaches itself to human cells.

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“substantial or complete escape” from the human body’s neutralizing antibodies that target Covid-19..”

South Africans Being Infected With COVID19 Variant Again After Recovering (RT)

Some people in South Africa have been re-infected with variants of Covid-19 after they had already recovered from the virus, the World Health Organization’s (WHO) chief scientist, Soumya Swaminathan, said on Friday.
“We are now getting reports of people getting re-infected with the new variant of the virus, and there have been some initial reports from South Africa suggesting that people who have had prior infection could get infected again,” she told a WHO news briefing. Swaminathan did not specify the number of people re-infected in South Africa, but said that ongoing scientific studies are looking at how long antibodies protect people after they have contracted the virus.

The scientist did say that a recent UK study of health workers found that 85 percent of the cohort had developed protection against being re-infected with Covid-19 six to eight months after they first caught the virus. One study from South Africa published in pre-print format last month found the country’s indigenous mutation, 501Y.V2, showed “substantial or complete escape” from the human body’s neutralizing antibodies that target Covid-19. “These data highlight the prospect of re-infection” and may “foreshadow reduced efficacy” of vaccines, according to the study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed.

Another larger, more generalized study of 43,000 people with Covid-19 antibodies in Qatar concluded that re-infection is “rare,” and that natural infection elicited strong protection against the virus for at least seven months. The South African variant features more genetic mutations than previous forms of the virus, including the E484K mutation, which appears to have an impact on the body’s immune response, potentially increasing the likelihood of re-infection. It accounts for more than 80 percent of cases in South Africa, and has spread to at least 32 countries worldwide.

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“This technique of using the next bombshell story to push the last one down a memory-hole — call it Bombholing — needed a polarized audience to work.”

The Bombhole Era (Matt Taibbi)

News in the Trump years became a narrative drama, with each day advancing a tale of worsening political emergency, driven by subplots involving familiar casts of characters, in the manner of episodic television. It worked, but news directors and editors hit a stumbling block. If you cover everything like there’s no tomorrow, what happens when there is, in fact, a tomorrow? The innovation was to use banner headlines to saturate news cycles, often to the exclusion of nearly any other news, before moving to the next controversy so quickly that mistakes, errors, or rhetorical letdowns were memory-holed. The American Napoleon generated controversies at such a fantastic rate that stations like CNN and MSNBC (and Fox too) were able to keep ratings high by moving from mania to mania, hyping stories on the way up but not always following them down.

The moment the narrative premise of any bombshell started to fray, the next story in line was bumped to the front. News outlets paid off old editorial promises with new headlines: Ponzi journalism. This technique of using the next bombshell story to push the last one down a memory-hole — call it Bombholing — needed a polarized audience to work. As surveys by organizations like the Pew Center showed, the different target demographics in Trump’s America increasingly did not communicate with one another. Democrats by 2020 were 91 percent of the New York Times audience and 95 percent of MSNBC’s, while Republicans were 93 percent of Fox viewers. When outlets overreached factually, it was possible, if not likely, that the original target audience would never learn the difference.

This reduced the incentive to be careful. Audiences devoured bombshells even when aware on a subconscious level that they might not hold up to scrutiny. If a story turned out to be incorrect, that was okay. News was now more about underlying narratives audiences felt were true and important. For conservatives, Trump was saving America from a conspiracy of elites. For “liberal” audiences, Trump was trying to assume dictatorial power, and the defenders of democracy were trying to stop him. A symbiosis developed. Where audiences once punished media companies for mistakes, now they rewarded them for serving up the pure heroin of shaky, first-draft-like blockbusters. They wanted to be in the trenches of information discovery. Audiences were choosing powerful highs over lasting ones.

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View from the left.

Cuomo And The Lincoln Project Are Media-Created Monsters (DP)

In the chaos of 2020, the national press corps used all of its magical mythmaking and storytelling powers to conjure two towering political heroes for a country in crisis. From the maw of the media machine, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the Lincoln Project emerged as our alleged sentinels bravely battling a deadly pandemic and an authoritarian president — and supposedly leading us with principles and morality into a new era of accountability and integrity. For millions of credulous liberals already binging on West Wing reruns, the twin tales conjured some more of that good old-fashioned hope-and-change nostalgia, and seemed to serve as a cheeky reminder that not all heroes wear capes.


But in the last 24 hours, the entire façade has collapsed, revealing that those bravely trying to sound the alarm for months were right all along — and those benefiting from the media-driven fraud were attempting to evade accountability and self-servingly cover up a grotesquerie of mismanagement, corruption, and abuse. Will the wrongdoers face any consequences or accountability? Or will they be treated like the purveyors of previous frauds, like the Iraq War and the financial crisis, and continue to be platformed and valorized by the press corps? And will our media overlords engage in any self-reflection about the monsters they manufactured? The details of the two tales vary, but the narrative arcs are eerily similar. That they crescendoed in the same single news cycle makes their cautionary tales all the more poignant.

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About a year too late.

NY Dems Want To Strip Cuomo Of Coronavirus Emergency Powers (JTN)

Gov. Andrew Cuomo was reprimanded on Friday by a group of New York Democrats who are demanding that the governor be stripped of his emergency powers that he has exercised in response to the coronavirus pandemic in New York state. The reprimand came in a statement from 14 lawmakers who were acting following the news that Cuomo’s top aide, Melissa DeRosa, had admitted during a video conference call with Democratic leaders that the administration covered up the true extent of nursing home deaths in 2020 because they were concerned about a possible federal investigation by the Trump administration. The New York Post broke the story of DeRosa’s confession to the group of Democratic lawmakers who were thought to be put in a difficult situation as result of the coverup.


“While COVID-19 has tested the limits of our people and state — and, early during the pandemic, required the government to restructure decision making to render rapid, necessary public health judgments,” the prepared statement from the 14 Democratic state senators said — “it is clear that the expanded emergency powers granted to the Governor are no longer appropriate.” “While the executive’s authority to issue directives is due to expire on April 30, we urge the Senate to advance and adopt a repeal as expeditiously as possible.”

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Very toxic. Tucker’s take is dead on.

Inside the Lincoln Project’s ‘Toxic’ Workplace (19th)

The Lincoln Project’s founders were some of the highest-profile players in Republican politics before they rejected Trump and became apostates within their own party. There was George Conway, a high-profile conservative lawyer who is married to Kellyanne Conway, who was a top adviser to Trump. Weaver worked on Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaigns, as did Galen and Schmidt. Mike Madrid is a strategist specializing in Latinx voting trends. Jennifer Horn is a former GOP chair in New Hampshire. Wilson worked on Rudy Giuliani’s mayoral and Senate campaigns. Ron Steslow started his own consulting firm after working at the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Conway was the first to leave in August, citing family obligations. Weaver took medical leave around the same time.

A three-person board — Galen, Madrid and Steslow — was created without input from some of the other co-founders. Eventually, disputes over that board, and its scope, led to bitter infighting that involved individual co-founders lawyering up and threatening one another with “oppo” research, Washington speak for the type of negative information amassed by a political campaign or organization to use against a rival. In late 2020, Conway stepped in to help mediate what was quickly becoming a civil war within the organization. Madrid and Steslow departed in December after signing nondisclosure agreements and receiving separation packages that those familiar with the negotiations describe as lucrative.

On December 21, the Lincoln Project paid Madrid’s firm, Grassroots Lab, two round sum payments of $1.1 million and $300,000. On the same date, it paid Steslow’s firm, TUSK Digital, $900,000. All of the payments were described as for “political strategy consulting” on campaign finance filings. The Lincoln Project was organized as a super PAC, meaning it could raise and spend unlimited sums of money but had to disclose only basic details about where the money was going. The firms that some of the co-founders brought with them to the Lincoln Project’s work became a source of internal frustration, as more than half of the nearly $90 million raised by the project flowed to firms controlled by its various founders. Once it was there, there was usually no way to track how they spent or kept it.

As of late January, Galen’s firm, Summit Strategic Communications, had received roughly $27.5 million from the Lincoln Project, with the bulk of that going to “independent expenditures” such as television or Internet advertisements and nearly $7 million to consulting. Steslow’s firm, TUSK, received $22.4 million, with $7.1 million for consulting. Schmidt’s firm, SES Strategies, received $1.5 million for consulting, but he told the Chicago Tribune he returned it. Madrid’s Grassroots Lab received nearly $2.2 million for consulting services. The Lincoln Project paid Horn directly in amounts of $5,000 or $10,000 per month, campaign finance filings show. In the fall, she began receiving additional payments from LPTV, but in all, her annual compensation was approximately $150,000, sources familiar with the situation said.

Tucker Lincoln Project
https://twitter.com/i/status/1360413135144771585

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George Conway. Strange player in all this.

Lincoln Project Accused by its Own Co-Founder of Likely Criminality (Greenwald)

The group of life-long Republican Party consultants who, under the name “The Lincoln Project,” got very rich in 2020 with anti-Trump online messaging has spent weeks responding to numerous scandals on multiple fronts. Despite the gravity of those scandals, its conduct on Thursday night was in a whole new category of sleaze. It not only infuriated their long-time allies, but also constituted the abuse of Twitter’s platform to commit likely illegal acts. That the primary effect of the Lincoln Project was to personally enrich its key operatives by cynically exploiting the fears of U.S. liberals has long been obvious. Reporting throughout 2020 conclusively demonstrated that the vast majority of the tens of millions of dollars raised by the group was going to firms controlled by its founders.


One of its most prominent founders — GOP consultant Rick Wilson — personally collected $65,000 from liberals through GoFundMe for an anti-Trump film he kept promising but which never came; to this date, he refuses to explain what he did with that money. A study conducted after the 2020 election found that the group’s effect on the election’s outcome was trivial to non-existent — not surprising given its penchant for spending money on ads that aired in electorally irrelevant places such as Washington, D.C. or which circulated almost exclusively in liberal cable news and social media venues, and thus had no purpose other than to enable its consultants to take large commissions from the ad spending. They were producing ads solely for liberals, with the overriding intent not of defeating Trump but inflating their net worth. And it worked: until they were no longer needed.

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Do they ever.

Lincoln Project Faces Questions Over The Spending And Compensation (Turley)

The Lincoln Project has had a rough couple of weeks. One of its co-founders, John Weaver, was accused of sexual harassment of young men and the Project attacked him as a sexual predator. As co-founders like George Conway denied any real familiarity or interaction with Weaver, others accused of the Project of turning a blind eye to his conduct. Then one of its other co-founders, Jennifer Horn, resigned in protest only to be attacked by other Project members as allegedly trying to get more money out of the organization. Now, the Lincoln Project is having serious questions raised over its compensation for co-founders and an accounting for tens of millions of dollars that may have gone to them or their own firms. Lincoln famously declared “with malice toward none, with charity for all,” but the Lincoln Project is accused of malice towards many but charity for a few.

[..] The latest controversy comes after an Associated Press story that the Project was able to raise over $90 million but only spent a third of that ($27 million) on advertisements during the 2020 campaign. The AP noted “That leaves tens of millions of dollars that went toward expenses like production costs, overhead — and exorbitant consulting fees collected by members of the group.” It also suggested that the Project was using tactics to hide the money trial and spending decisions. Reporters Steve Peoples and Brian Slodysko said that “[t]he vast majority of the cash was split among consulting firms controlled by its founders, including about $27 million paid to a small firm controlled by Galen and another $21 million paid to a boutique firm run by former Lincoln Project member Ron Steslow, campaign finance disclosures show.”

I have been critical of some of the Lincoln Project commercials and advertisements. However, my main objection was its role in harassing and even doxxing lawyers who represented the Trump campaign or the Republican party. That effort was funded by thousands of lawyers as well as Democratic donors. At first, I thought the Lincoln Project could serve a useful role in establishing a Republican opposition base to Trump and add greater diversity in the party. Instead, it adopted increasingly juvenile and vicious ads that seemed to pander to the lowest common denominator in politics. This week the Lincoln Project ad features a chicken and taunts Trump for declining to testify despite the fact that presidents traditionally have not testified and such a decision should not be treated as evidence of guilt.

Yet, such commercials play well to donors and bring in more money. The question is whether the windfall of money was the byproduct or the purpose of the Project’s founding. The AP story suggests that the Project has used accounting systems that make it difficult to track payments. The Project can easily make this all transparent. While no one is going to run ads showing the founders juxtaposed with chickens, a few donors may want to know if the founders enriched themselves and their firms as part of the 2020 campaign.

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Pandora’s box.

Trump Lawyers Argue His Jan. 6 Rhetoric Is ‘Protected’ Free Speech (JTN)

Attorney David Schoen argued the impeachment managers relied heavily on media reports to make their case against Trump rather than actual evidence. He said people get more “due process” fighting a parking ticket than Trump did in this trial. Schoen also questioned why the House managers held the “never-before-seen” Capitol security footage and did not release it to the public or Trump himself ahead of the trial. Schoen also argued that the House impeachment managers “manipulated” Trump’s words when playing a clip of him saying there were “fine people on both sides” after the Charlottesville protest. The full remarks included Trump denouncing white supremacists and neo-Nazis.

The House impeachment managers focused heavily on Trump’s “fight like hell” comment during his Jan. 6 speech. Schoen showed video clips of Democrats using rhetoric that could be interpreted as violent. His video montage included House Speaker Nancy Pelosi saying Democrats have to learn how to “throw a punch” and former Vice President Joe Biden saying he would “beat the hell” out of Trump in high school. He also played clips of Democrats like then-Sen. Kamala Harris saying Democrats have to “fight” in the Trump era. “We like a good fight,” Harris said.

House impeachment managers argued that Trump’s “stop the steal” message was unprecedented. To respond to that argument, Schoen showed video of 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton saying that you could be a major political party’s presidential nominee and have the election “stolen” from you. He also played Democratic Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown saying Stacey Abrams’ gubernatorial election was “stolen” from her. Van der Veen played additional video of “robust” rhetoric from Democrats about punching Trump in the face and said the First Amendment should be applied “evenly.” “All robust speech should be protected and it should be protected evenly for all of us,” he said. “The Senate cannot ignore the First Amendment.”

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“..when lead House impeachment manager Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland) got caught lying on Wednesday about the content of an alleged telephone call between Trump and a Republican senator during the Capitol riot, he admitted that his claim was false and shrugged it off.”

MSM’s Narrative About The Murderous Capitol Mob Has Collapsed (Cox)

As their dishonest narrative collapses around them, mainstream media outlets and Democrat politicians are trying to hold together their latest bid to destroy Donald Trump, but some of the lies are getting too big to shrug off. I’m reminded of the media-speak popularized during the Trump era – lightly used words or phrases that became ubiquitous in the talking points, like “violating norms” – especially the term “debunked.” In the eyes of MSM and their controllers, Trump was a president who needed to be debunked thousands of times. Whether it was about the size of his Inauguration Day crowd, the animal-like savagery of MS-13 gang-bangers or the fact that Haiti is “a s**thole”, any Trump claim had to be debunked, false or not.

When an obnoxious loudmouth constantly blurts out things that lift the skirt on the ruling class’ treachery, his voice must be discredited. And even if just part of his story can be attacked, the rest will be forgotten. It’s like a Jenga game where all the pieces automatically fall down when one is removed. But the same standard doesn’t apply to the media’s own story lines. No matter how many times MSM and establishment politicians are exposed as liars — from the MLK bust in the Oval Office to the Russia collusion hoax — the people are supposed to keep believing the gist of their arguments. The Jenga tower can be levitating with entire floors missing, but the con artists insist that it’s still standing. We’re seeing it again in Trump’s second Senate impeachment trial. Giant holes have been blown in the MSM-DNC narrative about the January 6 “insurrection” at the US Capitol, but that’s not supposed to matter.

For instance, when lead House impeachment manager Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland) got caught lying on Wednesday about the content of an alleged telephone call between Trump and a Republican senator during the Capitol riot, he admitted that his claim was false and shrugged it off. “This is much ado about nothing because it’s not critical in any way to our case,” he said. Never mind that the point was apparently considered important enough to submit as evidence. Raskin was essentially allowed to wriggle out as if he said, “The fact that we’re lying about this doesn’t reflect whatsoever on the veracity of anything else we’re telling you.” A far bigger and more central piece of the impeachment Jenga tower shouldn’t be sloughed off so easily. In fact, Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick is so central to the narrative that his cremated remains were displayed in honor at the Capitol Rotunda to remind everyone of the viciousness of the alleged Trump domestic-terrorism army.

The tale of the brutal Trump mob is always punctuated with the fact that five people were “killed” during the riot, er, “white-supremacist insurrection.” One of those people was Ashli Babbitt, one of the rioters, who was fatally shot by a law enforcement officer. Three others were election-fraud protesters who died from health crises – a heart attack, a stroke and an unidentified medical emergency – during the January 6 demonstration and riot. The talking heads who wish Trump supporters dead in every other case are counting Trump supporters in the death toll from an incident perpetrated primarily by Trump supporters. It’s as if they’re leading a story on a hostage crisis by saying that 30 people were killed without mentioning that 25 of those were hostage takers, including 22 who died of food poisoning.

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hypothetical

Hillary Clinton Could Be Charged Under Precedent Set In Trump Trial (RT)

A lawyer for former president Donald Trump said the current impeachment drive is a partisan effort that could backfire on Democrats if they lose leverage, suggesting ex-secretary of state Hillary Clinton could also be impeached. Responding to a question from Senator Marco Rubio (R-Florida) during Friday’s impeachment hearing, Trump attorney Michael van der Veen argued that the Obama-era secretary could face similar impeachment proceedings sometime in the future. “Is it not true that under this new precedent, a future House – facing partisan pressure to ‘lock her up’ – could impeach a former secretary of state, and a future Senate be forced to put her on trial and potentially disqualify her from any future office?” Rubio asked.

“If you see it their way, yes,” van der Veen said, referring to the Democratic impeachment managers. “If you do this the way they want it done, that could happen to the example there – a former secretary of state – but it could happen to a lot of people. And that’s not the way this is supposed to work.” The lead impeachment manager in the House, Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland), pushed back, however, insisting Rubio’s hypothetical had “no bearing on this case,” as Clinton “was not impeached in office for conduct while in office.” At Friday’s hearing, the Trump lawyer also argued that the ex-president’s statements leading up to the January 6 riot on Capitol Hill – which he is accused of “inciting” as the basis of the impeachment effort – were “virtually indistinguishable” from rhetoric used by American politicians for “hundreds of years.”

“Countless politicians have spoken of ‘fighting for our principles.’ Joe Biden’s campaign slogan was ‘Battle for the Soul of America.’ No human being seriously believes that the use of such metaphorical terminology is incitement to political violence,” van der Veen said. He added that while Trump at no point engaged in “language of incitement,” many Democrats in Washington have themselves resorted to “profoundly reckless, dangerous and inflammatory rhetoric in recent years,” singling out Clinton, who he said “ridiculously declared the [2016] election [was] stolen by Russia.”

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“Do you understand what you have done?”

Great Reset? Putin Says, “Not So Fast” (Luongo)

Did you happen to catch the most important political speech of the last six years? It would have been easy to miss given everything going on. In fact, I almost did, and this speech sits at the intersection of nearly all of my areas of intense study. The annual World Economic Forum took place last week via teleconference, what I’m calling Virtual Davos, and at this year’s event, of course, the signature topic was their project called the Great Reset. But if the WEF was so intent on presenting the best face for the Great Reset to the world it wouldn’t have invited either Chinese Premier Xi Jinping or, more importantly, Russian President Vladimir Putin. And it was Putin’s speech that brought down the house of cards that is the agenda of the WEF.

The last time someone walked into a major international forum and issued such a scathing critique of the current geopolitical landscape was Putin’s speech to the United Nations on September 29th, 2015, two days before he sent a small contingency of Russian air support to Syria. There he excoriated not only the U.N. by name but most importantly the U.S. and its NATO allies by inference asking the most salient question, “Do you understand what you have done?” having unleashed chaos in an already chaotic part of the world? As important as that speech was it was Putin’s actions after that which defined the current era of geopolitical chess across the Eurasian continent. Syria became the nexus around which the resistance to the “ISIS is invincible” narrative unraveled

And the mystery of who was behind ISIS, namely the Obama administration, was revealed to anyone paying attention. President Trump may have taken credit for beating ISIS, but it was mostly Putin and Russia’s forces retaking the Western part of Syria which allowed that to happen, while our globalist generals, like James Mattis, did as much damage to Syria itself and as little to ISIS as possible, hoping to use them again another day. And regardless of whether you agree or disagree with the U.S.’s policy in Syria, which I most definitely do not, it is hard to argue that Russia’s intervention there fundamentally changed the regional politics and conflicts for the foreseeable future.

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Jim needs some time to re-focus.

The Trials of Wokery (Kunstler)

How do you like the party you supposedly voted into power so far? Or is it perhaps too much to say they were actually voted into anything? And if so — if there was something, let’s say, a little irregular with the ballot tabulation, maybe even more than a little — have they not succeeded splendidly in pissing-off more than half the people across the land? And then attempted to rub that half’s faces into the squishy, fetid loam of the DC Swamp? I’d say that every move they make, every breath they take, seems calculated to spark a new civil war. Yesterday’s spiteful exercise in cognitive dissonance was a humdinger: Mr. Biden threatened to cut off travel to Florida for flouting his regime’s policy on Covid-19 lockdowns, while over in Texas (and several other states), he ordered a general unlocking-down of the border with Mexico, permitting the unchecked illegal ingress of thousands of possible Covid-19 carriers a day. Ron DeSantis, Florida’s governor, responded, saying — if I may paraphrase — see you in court, asshole.

Meanwhile, the cancellation reign-of-terror among the regime’s self-appointed guardians of Wokeness rages on. In the name of diversity and inclusion, no one in the USA is allowed to publicly question the Woke narrative of the moment, or else be deprived of your livelihood. The New York Times fired forty-year veteran science reporter Donald G. McNeil, Jr., for using the freighted word “n*gg*r” while answering a student’s question about the history of the word’s usage, just as I am explaining his use of it in the incident at issue — that is, academically.

Though Mr. McNeil’s intent was incontrovertibly innocent as viewed by persons not insane — including, only briefly, the paper’s executive editor Dean Baquet — the decision to not sack Mr. McNeil provoked a reflexive uproar among the Times’s staff, as something in the wind might provoke a flight of grasshoppers transforming into a swarm of locusts, and Mr. Baquet reversed himself, forcing Mr. McNeil to choose demotion or resignation. Then, to make matters worse, the Times’s publisher, AG Sulzberger, spiked a column by nominally “conservative” op-ed writer Bret Stephens that attempted to argue some legalistic points about intent in the conduct of a witch hunt, an apparent affront to the Times’s witch-hunters, who seem to prefer their witch-hunting as a straight-up blood sport.

Read more …

 

 

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Jan 232021
 


Zao Wu-Ki Le soleil rouge 1950

 

Here Are the Superheroes To Come and Save Us (MPN)
Dems Demand Social Media Stop ‘Polluting Minds Of American People’ (RT)
New McCarthyism Will Prove An Orwellian Mistake – Hanson (K.)
Big Tech, Big Brother, & The End Of Free Speech (RCP)
The Echo Chamber Era (Matt Taibbi)
500,000 More British Kids Face Mental Health Issues (Wilson)
Israel Analysis Of COVID Vaccine Raises Questions About UK Strategy (Sky)
Are COVID Vaccination Programmes Working? (Nature)
One Dose Of Pfizer Vaccine Could Be Less Effective Than Expected (BMJ)
Hungary First EU Country To Get Russia’s Sputnik V Covid19 Vaccine (RT)
Overall Mortality Is Around Normal For This Time Of Year (RT)
How US CDC Missed Chances To Spot COVID’s Silent Spread (R.)
McConnell Lays Out Trump Impeachment Trial Timeline (ZH)
Rough Ridin’ with Biden (Kunstler)
Home Run King Hank Aaron Dead At 86 (F.)

 

 


Cavafy – Monotony

 

 

 

 

“The few who ventured near the Capitol were mostly somber, as if they were attending a vigil.” “It feels a little postapocalyptic..”

Here Are the Superheroes To Come and Save Us (MPN)

We rely on the media to hold the powerful to account. But in its first hours in office, the corporate press has celebrated, rather than challenged, the new Biden administration. It began immediately during the 78-year-old Delawarean’s inauguration, with senior figures in the media barely able to contain their emotions watching what they saw. “As Lady Gaga sang the national anthem, the sky opened up and sunlight reflected off of the Capitol, illuminating the flag,” wrote Olivia Nuzzi, the New Yorker’s Washington correspondent. The New York Times was in a similarly poetic mood. “Whether or not related to the former president’s absence, a bipartisan lightness seemed to prevail across the stage at President Joe Biden’s inauguration. Snow flurries gave way to sun,” ran its subheadline.


If it were not clear enough that corporate media intends to spend the next four years propping up, rather than scrutinizing President Biden, then senior CNN figures spelled it out. “Trump—>Biden. Lies—>truth. Ignorance—>knowledge. Amorality—>decency. Cruelty—> empathy. Corruption—>public service” wrote CNN’s White House correspondent John J. Harwood on Twitter, attributing several extremely positive (and questionable) qualities to the incoming president. Meanwhile, the company’s head of strategic communications, Matt Dornic, was in an even more bombastic mood. Sharing a picture of fireworks exploding over the Washington Monument, he remarked that, “This team truly understands optics. These images will inspire our friends and shake our foes.”

Leaving aside why some colorful pyrotechnics would terrify Russia, China or any nation, Dornic’s rhetoric worried many who felt the nation’s top journalists should see themselves as the government’s adversaries, rather than their allies. “Note how this CNN imperial stenographer fearmongers about foreign bogeymen with his “foe” rhetoric. The real foe of average working-class Americans isn’t any foreign nation; it’s the parasitic capitalist oligarchs who control everything and their lackeys in politics and the media,” replied Ben Norton of The Grayzone. Perhaps the most adulatory coverage of the inauguration came from MSNBC, however, with analyst John Heilemann depicting the senior politicians present as almost mythical ubermensch. “What was to me so striking about today was that comforting sense,” he said.


“The sight of the Clintons and the Bushes and the Obamas — The Avengers, the Marvel superheroes back up there together all in one place with their friend Joe Biden.” He later went on to compare Biden’s speech to Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address of 1865 after the union victory in the American Civil War and claimed there was a deep sense of relief washing over the nation’s capital.. This sentiment was apparently not shared by ordinary people on the street. Even as it was praising Biden, the New York Times reported that “The few who ventured near the Capitol were mostly somber, as if they were attending a vigil.” “It feels a little postapocalyptic, to be honest,” one told them.

Read more …

How is this not the thought police?

”..algorithms and recommendations that breed extremism and undermine the sense of “objective reality.”

Dems Demand Social Media Stop ‘Polluting Minds Of American People’ (RT)

Democrats in the US Congress have urged major social media platforms to eliminate algorithms and recommendations that breed extremism and undermine the sense of “objective reality.” Representatives Anna Eshoo and Tom Malinowski wrote letters demanding change to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. A similar letter was sent to the CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai, and Susan Wojcicki, the CEO of YouTube, which is owned by Google. “For years, social media companies have allowed harmful disinformation to spread through their platforms, polluting the minds of the American people,” Eshoo tweeted. The lawmakers argued that social media platforms allow content which reinforces “existing political biases, especially those rooted in anger, anxiety, and fear.”


They said the algorithms used by Big Tech “undermine our shared sense of objective reality” and “facilitate connections between extremist users,” which lead to violence in real life, like the storming of the US Capitol in Washington, DC on January 6. Twitter was urged to “immediately make permanent changes to limit the spread of misinformation and other forms of harmful content.” Facebook and YouTube were similarly asked to tweak their recommendation systems in order not to promote “dangerous conspiracy theories” among users. The Democrats and many in the media accused former President Donald Trump of inciting the crowd of his supporters to seize the Capitol in hopes of overturning the results of the 2020 presidential election.

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“We are in a sort of left-wing version of the Corleone “Godfather” cinema family “taking care of business” all at once.”

New McCarthyism Will Prove An Orwellian Mistake – Hanson (K.)

The efforts of “Big Tech” to ban Trump and many of his supporters, while Apple, Google etc in concert made it almost impossible for a conservative site like Parler to exist, are reflections of a Salem Witch trial madness sparked by the trifecta of Trump’s loss, the Capitol violence, and the Republican loss of the Senate. Hysteria reigns as books by conservatives are now canceled, thousands kicked off social media, radio hosts fired etc. We are in a sort of left-wing version of the Corleone “Godfather” cinema family “taking care of business” all at once. Yet this new McCarthyism will prove an Orwellian mistake, and constitute one of the greatest political blunders in modern US history.

Think of the Ayatollah Khamenei calling for the destruction of Israel on Twitter with impunity or Antifa announcing planning sessions for their next riot, on Facebook with impunity – juxtaposed to social media banning those who merely showed up in Washington at a peaceful rally and did not join the violent splinter group who stormed the halls of Congress. In contrast, again, the current Vice President Harris earlier had called for the more protests this summer. Many were violent and occasionally lethal, resulting in mass looting, death and arson by Antifa and BLM. She worked to bail out those arrested for street violence. The public is tiring of such asymmetries. US publishers all the time publish books like “In Defense of Looting” – a manifesto supporting the mass theft from stores this summer. So there is no consistency in the current violations of free speech.

And the effort to remove Trump before his tenure not only failed, but showed his opponents as small-minded and vindictive and further divided a 50/50 divided country. The attempt to coordinate Big Tech to destroy the conservative opposition’s means of communicating with the public came by design on the eve of the most revolutionary moments in modern history to come: Very soon the Left plans to end the 180-year Senate filibuster, the 234-year Electoral College, the 60-year 50-state union (by adding Puerto Rico and Washington DC), and the 150-year-old nine-person Supreme Court – and now will have its critics de-platformed from social media or afraid to express objections in fear of being banned.

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“..When 13-year-olds are entrusted with cellphones and Snapchat accounts, they can use them to bring shame on innocent children and even destroy their lives. Often, this involves spreading false rumors about the person or discrediting them for something they espouse, like their religion, their political beliefs or their sexual identity. Tell me how this is different from what Twitter, Facebook and YouTube have done to Donald Trump..”

Big Tech, Big Brother, & The End Of Free Speech (RCP)

In George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” members of the Outer Party of Oceania engage in the Two Minutes Hate ritual against Emmanuel Goldstein, who is supposed to be the enemy of the people but may actually just be a fabricated symbol to distract the people from their real enemy — Big Brother. In Nancy Pelosi’s “Twenty Twenty-One,” members of the Democratic Party engage in the Two Hours Hate against Donald Trump, who is supposed to be the enemy of the people, but may actually just be a fabricated symbol to distract the people from their real enemy — Big Tech. Two hours of hate — er, debate — was held in the House of Representatives last Wednesday for the avowed purpose of removing a president of the United States. That’s all it took. Two hours. That should tell you everything you need to know about the state of democracy in our country.

[..] In a sense, Big Tech has taken cyberbullying to its logical conclusion. When 13-year-olds are entrusted with cellphones and Snapchat accounts, they can use them to bring shame on innocent children and even destroy their lives. Often, this involves spreading false rumors about the person or discrediting them for something they espouse, like their religion, their political beliefs or their sexual identity. Tell me how this is different from what Twitter, Facebook and YouTube have done to Donald Trump and, by extension, the more than 74 million people who voted for him. This group of post-pubescent cyberbullies in Silicon Valley doesn’t like Donald Trump. They feel justified in calling him names like white supremacist and Nazi and racist. They don’t care whether it hurts him or not. They don’t care whether it is true or not. They are strangely enlivened by what they perceive as their ability to hurt him, to weaken him.

Like the mob that they have attempted to link the president to, these bullies act in mindless concert, emboldened by each other to see who can strike the deeper blow, who can make the victim hurt more. And over what? Differences of opinion, for the most part. Strong border or no border? Mask or no mask? Globalism or Americanism? Carbon credits or fracking? Abortion or no abortion? And then the last straw — fair election or fraudulent election? These should be legitimate subjects for debate in a free society. But not anymore. Big Tech has banned debate about government policy on the coronavirus, and any discussion of election fraud is treated as if it were a crime. But wait? It’s only a crime to question the government in a totalitarian system, like that in communist China or Orwell’s fictional Oceania, right?

In America, we have the right and obligation to question our government, don’t we? Because, if we don’t have that right any longer, then what are they afraid of? What are they hiding? Bottom line: At some point in some election, the allegations of election fraud have to be real. It can’t always just be the figment of some right-wing president’s imagination. And if we aren’t allowed to have free speech, then how do we fight back? If Big Tech and Big Government have their way, we don’t. Just keep your head down and your nose clean — and never ever question what you are told.

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“..not a bad or even a terrible plan, but literally a “nonexistent” plan, despite the fact that 36 million vaccines had already been delivered..”

The Echo Chamber Era (Matt Taibbi)

Blue-state audiences didn’t ask for accounting for those official warnings for the same reason Trump voters never asked what happened to those three million undocumented votes Hillary Clinton supposedly won in 2016: audiences don’t demand explanations for puffed-up claims about other groups. People like Sullivan would have you believe that “balance” is a mandate to give voice to clearly illegitimate points of view, but it’s really about not falling so completely in love with your “values” that you stop caring to avoid mistakes about those who don’t share them, or even just mistakes generally. By any standard, the press had a terrible four years, from the mangling of dozens of Russiagate tales to scandals like the New York Times “Caliphate” disaster and the underappreciated Covington High School story fiasco.

Still, many in the business can’t see how bad it’s been, because they’ve walled themselves off so completely from potential critics. Coupled with the enhanced aggressiveness of Silicon Valley in removing dissenting accounts across the spectrum — Facebook is taking down six Socialist Workers Party accounts in Britain as I write this, a day after zapping a series of Antifa accounts — reporters at places like the Post, the Times, and CNN every day have less and less to worry about in terms of audience blowback, and they know it. Just in the first few days of the Biden administration, we’ve seen editorial decisions that would never have been attempted once upon a time. The Post just tried to remove seven paragraphs of their own archived article about Vice President Kamala Harris, which contained a cringeworthy scene of Harris and her sister joking about prisoners begging for water, only to restore it after an outcry.

CNN meanwhile ran a story that incoming Biden officials had to “build everything from scratch” with regard to Covid-19 policy because the Trump administration had no plan for vaccine distribution at all — not a bad or even a terrible plan, but literally a “nonexistent” plan, despite the fact that 36 million vaccines had already been delivered. In this rare case, rival media organizations cried foul, with reporters from both Politico and the Washington Post blasting the report as untrue and a “gambit to lower expectations” by the incoming administration. In an atmosphere where editors really feared discontent from outside demographics or rival party politicians, a story like that, with an over-the-top-to-impossible premise, would never even be tried.

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COVID is not a one-dimensional issue, but it keeps being treated as such. “500,000 children under 18 in England, with no previous problems, will need mental health care..”

500,000 More British Kids Face Mental Health Issues (Wilson)

The gloom is infectious, as a study out today from the Universities of Birmingham and Oxford confirmed. Formerly freewheeling, high-spirited online chats have morphed into muted complaints and low moods as the novelty of school in the kitchen wore off long ago. The wide, everchanging schoolyard social networks of our children have disappeared, replaced by social contact with whoever happens to be online at the same time they are. Boredom encourages bickering and the subtleties of personal relationships are forced to rely on broadband speed, What’s App chat emojis and access to a shared computer. It is not healthy in any way. We now risk destroying our children’s love of learning while creating a mental health crisis that has struck half a million previously healthy kids across the nation already, according to the Centre for Mental Health.

It says 500,000 children under 18 in England, with no previous problems, will need mental health care due to the devastating economic, health and family pressures caused by the ongoing coronavirus crisis. This has manifested itself in children as young as five reporting self-harm and suicidal thoughts to counsellors and a tripling in the number of eating disorders reported by adolescents. An Ofsted report in November discovered that more than two months of lost schooling last spring had resulted in children regressing in basic skills such as reading and writing. And –as always– it is the poor who suffer worst. It’s estimated 1.1m kids have no computer at home, making attending online lessons impossible. The Institute for Fiscal Studies found that, in the last lockdown, better-off children spent 30 per cent more time on remote learning than disadvantaged ones. The attainment gap between rich and poor pupils will grow markedly.

A survey by England’s Mental Health of Children and Young People survey found that more than a quarter of children aged five to 16 reported disrupted sleep, one in five did not have somewhere quiet to work, and girls had the highest prevalence (27.2 per cent) of probable mental health issues. This is all shocking news. Our children are facing serious problems with their mental health in numbers never seen before and yet with no end date in sight they are expected to sit in front of a screen five hours a day, five days a week. It’s not helping, and it is clear that keeping schools shut is doing immense and lasting damage to our children.

Read more …

We had a discussion in yesterday’s Debt Rattle thread about the first real-world analysis of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine. Which answers some questions, and leaves new ones. The 33% efficacy after two weeks raises alarms. Even if it rises afterwards.

I still have many questions about what exactly constitutes the efficacy. If all it does is keep people from getting more severely ill, that is fine, but at least be open about it.

Israel Analysis Of COVID Vaccine Raises Questions About UK Strategy (Sky)

The first real-world analysis of the Pfizer/BioNTech coronavirus vaccine suggests it is matching its performance in clinical trials, but raises serious questions about the UK’s decision to delay the second dose. Scientists in Israel – which is leading the COVID-19 vaccination race – have told Sky News that they are “very hopeful” having studied preliminary data from 200,000 vaccinated people. But crucially they say their results do not show efficacy at a level close to that used by the UK to justify delaying the second dose of the Pfizer/BioNtech jab. Professor Ran Balicer is a physician, epidemiologist and chief innovation officer for Clalit, the largest health care provider in Israel. He is also an adviser to the WHO. “We compared 200,000 people above the age of 60 that were vaccinated. We took a comparison group of 200,000 people, same age, not vaccinated, that were matched to this group on various variables…” Prof Balicer said.

“Then we looked to see what is the daily positivity rate… And we saw that there was no difference between vaccinated and unvaccinated until day 14 post-vaccination. “But on day 14 post-vaccination, a drop of 33% in positivity was witnessed in the vaccinated group and not in the unvaccinated… this is really good news.” However, UK scientists said in December that trial data had suggested it would be 89% effective after one dose. A document issued by the UK government’s vaccine advisers, the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, to justify delaying the second dose for up to 12 weeks said: “Using data for those cases observed between day 15 and 21, efficacy against symptomatic COVID-19 was estimated at 89%, suggesting that short term protection from dose 1 is very high from day 14 after vaccination.”

This is much more optimistic than the new real-world Israeli data suggests. Responding to the UK government strategy, Prof Balicer said: “The data and estimates I gave are what we have. “We could not see 89% reduction in the data we reported. Further data and analyses will be released in peer reviewer scientific format.” He added: “The practice in Israel is to provide the second vaccine at three weeks. “And so it is impossible for us to tell what would be the impact of not providing the second dose…” Israel is following Pfizer/BioNtech protocol in giving the second dose of the coronavirus vaccine three weeks after the first. It has a smaller population and a regular supply from Pfizer/BioNtech. In return it’s providing detailed data to Pfizer.

Read more …

And this is just incredibly weak: “If vaccines are effective at preventing infections, then their indirect benefit — protecting unvaccinated people — will be visible only once enough people have been immunized..”

Are COVID Vaccination Programmes Working? (Nature)

The results from Israel are among the first to report the impact of vaccines administered to people outside clinical trials. They provide an early indication that the two-dose RNA-based vaccine developed by Pfizer–BioNTech can prevent infection or limit its duration in some vaccinated people. In a preliminary analysis of 200,000 people older than 60 who received the vaccine, compared with a matched group of 200,000 who did not, researchers found that the chances of testing positive for the virus were 33% lower two weeks after the first injection. “We were happy to see this preliminary result that suggests a real-world impact in the approximate timing and direction we would have expected,” says Ran Balicer, an epidemiologist at Israel’s largest health-care provider, Clalit Health Services, in Tel Aviv.

He expects to get more conclusive results several weeks after people receive their second shot. Another analysis, by Maccabi Healthcare Services, found a similar trend, although neither study has been peer-reviewed. Clinical trials of the Pfizer–BioNTech vaccine show it to be around 90% effective at preventing COVID-19, and the preliminary data suggest it can also provide some protection from infection. But it will take longer to establish whether vaccinated people no longer spread the virus to unvaccinated people, says Balicer. As more than 75% of older people in Israel have been vaccinated, Balicer says he expects to see a drop in hospitalizations among vaccinated older people over the coming weeks.

Most countries are prioritizing COVID-19 vaccinations for people who have a high risk of getting severe disease and dying. So, the first evidence that shots are working in those countries will probably be reductions in hospitalizations, and then in deaths, says Alexandra Hogan, an infectious-disease modeller at Imperial College London. If vaccines are effective at preventing infections, then their indirect benefit — protecting unvaccinated people — will be visible only once enough people have been immunized, says Natalie Dean, a biostatistician at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Israel will probably be the first country to see this kind of population-wide impact, say researchers. This is because it is using a high-efficacy vaccine and aiming for wide coverage with the explicit goal of achieving herd immunity, when enough people are immune to a virus for its spread to be controlled.

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Yeah, but effective at what? Not at protecting others, that much is clear now.

One Dose Of Pfizer Vaccine Could Be Less Effective Than Expected (BMJ)

Concerns have been raised over how much protection a single dose of the Pfizer BioNTech covid-19 vaccine provides, following reports from Israel that it is much lower than expected. Israel, which, like the UK, is currently in its third national lockdown, has so far vaccinated more than 75% of its older people with at least one dose. Early reports from the vaccine rollout have suggested that the first dose led to a 33% reduction in cases of coronavirus compared with efficacy of at least 52% reported in clinical trials. A preliminary report from the Clalit Research Institute compared the infection data of 200.000 people aged 60 and over who were not vaccinated with the infection data of 200.000 people of the same age group who received one vaccine dose and were monitored for at least 11 days from the date of vaccination.

On day 14 there was a significant decrease of about 33% in the rate of positive tests for the coronavirus among those who had been vaccinated. This decrease remained the same between days 15 and 17. The report has raised concerns, as published results have suggested that the efficacy of the Pfizer vaccine was 52.4% between the first and second dose (spaced 21 days apart), and data assessed by Public Health England indicated it could be as much as 89% protective from day 15 to 21. The Clalit Research Institute stressed, however, that its results included only people aged 60 and over whereas Pfizer trials also included younger people and that the findings have not yet been peer reviewed. Additionally, the Clalit study identified those infected according to laboratory tests of those who chose to be tested, while Pfizer’s studies only referred to the appearance of symptomatic disease.

In the UK, the vaccine policy prioritises getting as many at risk people vaccinated with one dose over ensuring people get two doses within the time specified in clinical trials. While there are data to suggest the chosen 12 week interval between the two doses is effective for the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine, there are no data to support this interval for the Pfizer vaccine. As such, a leading statistician has written to UK health secretary Matt Hancock urging him to investigate the effects of the decision to extend the gap between the first and second dose of the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine.

Read more …

“Unfortunately, the EU purchases vaccines very slowly, so Hungary continues negotiations with Israel, Russia, and China,” Orban said.”

Hungary First EU Country To Get Russia’s Sputnik V Covid19 Vaccine (RT)

Shortly after becoming the first EU country to approve Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine, Hungary has agreed on a three-stage supply deal with Moscow. Budapest will receive its first delivery of doses in February. The contract between the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) and the government in Budapest was made on Friday, in a meeting between Russian Minister of Health Mikhail Murashko and Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs Péter Szijjártó. According to Murashko, Hungarian experts visited the Gamaleya Institute, where the formula was invented, and conducted a thorough examination of vaccine production sites. The scientists also had the opportunity to review clinical trial results. “Many countries today approve the use of the Russian Sputnik V, and we are actively cooperating with the World Health Organization,” Murashko told the press.


In response, Szijjártó called the announcement of the agreement “a great honor,” assuring Hungary’s citizens that experts from the country’s own National Institute of Pharmacology and Food Safety reviewed the entire process themselves. On Thursday, it was revealed that Budapest had approved Sputnik V for emergency use, despite it not yet being deemed safe by the European Medicines Agency (EMA). On January 8, Hungarian President Victor Orban complained that the European Union was being too slow to make any decisions, putting citizens’ lives at risk. “Unfortunately, the EU purchases vaccines very slowly, so Hungary continues negotiations with Israel, Russia, and China,” Orban said. Two weeks later, his country approved Sputnik V for use.

Read more …

Branch Covidians.

Overall Mortality Is Around Normal For This Time Of Year (RT)

Although the numbers of deaths attributed to the virus in the UK are higher than they’ve ever been, in total, not many more people are dying than in any other cold season. Is the mainstream media finally waking up to this?
A recent article in the Telegraph is one of the first in a mainstream outlet to even suggest a challenge to the official coronavirus narrative. These days, that narrative claims that the ‘second wave’ is actually deadlier than the first. (Recently, some Branch Covidians have been claiming a ‘third wave’, but there is not yet a united front on that.) The basic reasoning of the article is sound, even if it is long overdue. It laments how every day, the media solemnly reports the latest figures on Covid deaths. Presenting this figure in isolation results in graphs such as this one, which does indeed seem to show that we are at the height of a second, worse phase of a pandemic.

But, like any statistics, daily death numbers are meaningless without context, which the media rarely provides. They do not provide context because, if they did, the public might see a graph such as this one, from the Telegraph article.

It quite clearly shows the spring spike in overall mortality, which was caused by Covid (plus lockdowns). After that ends in summer, we see… nothing. Overall mortality ever since, even through this winter, hovers at around the five-year average. And overall mortality, as I’ve repeatedly pointed out, is the only true way to know whether you are in a pandemic or not – all other figures can easily be fiddled. So, why are the excess death data and the Covid deaths data so out of whack? And why isn’t Covid killing lots and lots of people this winter, as it did in spring? Even if you ascribe all excess deaths to Covid and none to lockdown, there really does not seem to be anything out of the normal variation in total deaths from year to year. And surely, by now, the toll of unnecessary deaths caused by untreated cancer, heart disease, depression and so on, has at least begun to register.

Read more …

You mean it was’t all Trump’s fault?

How US CDC Missed Chances To Spot COVID’s Silent Spread (R.)

Critics have widely asserted that the CDC fumbled key decisions during the coronavirus scourge because then-President Donald Trump and his administration meddled in the agency’s operations and muzzled internal experts. The matter is now the subject of a congressional inquiry. Yet Reuters has found new evidence that the CDC’s response to the pandemic also was marred by actions – or inaction – by the agency’s career scientists and frontline staff. At a crucial moment in the pandemic when Americans were quarantined after possible exposure to the virus abroad, the agency declined or resisted potentially valuable opportunities to study whether the disease could be spread by those without symptoms, according to previously undisclosed internal emails, other documents and interviews with key players.

Soon after balking at testing the returnees from Wuhan, the agency delayed testing asymptomatic passengers among 318 evacuees from the Diamond Princess, a contaminated cruise ship in Japan. In addition, the agency failed at that time to make effective use of outside experts and appeared at times unprepared for the crisis on the ground, lacking adequate personal protective gear and ignoring established protocols, Reuters found. “Yes, they were interfered with politically,” said Lawrence Gostin, director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University, referring to alleged meddling by the Trump administration. “But that’s not the only reason CDC didn’t perform optimally during COVID-19. There are a lot of things that went wrong.”

Four top public health experts or ethicists told Reuters that the question of whether to test or engage in research on detained people has always been a sensitive topic. But all said the CDC should have proceeded given the fast-moving public health emergency. Moreover, the CDC finalized rules in 2017 providing that medical testing was expressly allowed in quarantine, as long as participants were given the opportunity to give “informed consent” or opt out. Informed consent means giving people adequate information to understand the risks and benefits of a test or procedure. Gostin said the CDC’s argument against testing was “unreasonable” under the circumstances. “You are asking for consent and not imposing any harm,” he said. “There is a good reason to do it.”

It’s difficult to know whether more aggressive early testing among asymptomatic people would have significantly altered the trajectory of the pandemic in the United States, which has infected 24 million people and killed more than 400,000. The CDC was not the only agency that struggled with this issue. Notably, an official with the World Health Organization called asymptomatic spread “very rare” in June, only to say a day later “we don’t actually have that answer yet.” In recent months, the WHO has said infected people without symptoms can be contagious, but “it is still not clear how frequently this occurs.”

Read more …

The circus is in town.

McConnell Lays Out Trump Impeachment Trial Timeline (ZH)

While the left is split between wanting to hammer the final nail in Trump’s coffin (through the Senate impeachment trial) and tending to its aggressive agenda of new laws, spending, and government control, U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) issued a statement today regarding his proposed timeline for the first phases of an impeachment trial of former president Trump. “I have sent a proposed timeline for the first phases of the upcoming impeachment trial to Leader Schumer and look forward to continuing to discuss it with him. “Senate Republicans are strongly united behind the principle that the institution of the Senate, the office of the presidency, and former President Trump himself all deserve a full and fair process that respects his rights and the serious factual, legal, and constitutional questions at stake.

“Given the unprecedented speed of the House’s process, our proposed timeline for the initial phases includes a modest and reasonable amount of additional time for both sides to assemble their arguments before the Senate would begin to hear them. “At this time of strong political passions, Senate Republicans believe it is absolutely imperative that we do not allow a half-baked process to short-circuit the due process that former President Trump deserves or damage the Senate or the presidency.” Specifically, Leader McConnell shared the following proposed pre-trial timeline with the Republican Conference today: “When the articles arrive, the House Managers would exhibit (read) the articles to the Senate, Senators would be sworn in the Members as the Court of Impeachment, and would issue a summons to former President Trump.

“While we do not know what day the Managers will choose, Leader McConnell has asked for this to occur on Thursday, January 28. Former President Trump would have one week from that day to answer the articles of impeachment (February 4). The House’s pre-trial brief would also be due then. The President would then have one week from the day he submits his answer to submit his pre-trial brief (February 11). That means former president Trump has fourteen total days from when we issue the summons to write his pre-trial brief. The House would also submit its replication on this date. The House would then have two days to submit their rebuttal pre-trial brief (February 13). This approach tracks the structure of the Clinton and Trump pre-trial processes. The periods between due dates are longer than in 1999 or 2020, but this is necessary because of the House’s unprecedented timeline.

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“Who will step forward in his absence? Probably someone we haven’t heard from yet. That’s how these things work.”

Rough Ridin’ with Biden (Kunstler)

As for Mr. Trump, he departed as he had arrived in 2016: stridently contemptuous toward the parasitical oligarchy that finally expelled him like a bladder-stone. The threatened impeachment trial will be a marvel of casuistry — a procedure for removing someone from office who is no longer in office — and also for the transparently flimsy charge of “inciting the insurrection” at the capitol. As if to underscore the absurdity of that, Antifa squads rioted in Portland and Seattle on inauguration night. Their banners expressed less-than-jubilant sentiment for the new regime. The Portland outfit broke windows and spray-painted the city’s Democratic headquarters, faking-out pols who had warned against an uprising of “white supremacists.”

Of course, all those arrested would be promptly released without charges — demonstrating just how serious the Wokester officials running those cities really are about criminal anarchy. The grannies swept into the capitol rotunda by Antifa incursionists January 6th won’t be so lucky. Neither did a much chattered-about military takeover happen during the tension-filled transition hours, though kibitzers on the web insist days later that it remains secretly underway. On his way out, Mr. Trump failed to pardon either Julian Assange or Edward Snowden, a disturbing failure, while he commuted the sentences of a couple of two-bit rap-stars, based on their contributions to advancing human dignity. And whatever Mr. Trump finally rooted out in the way of declassified FBI documents has already disappeared into the DC quicksand.

Much adored as he is for valiantly opposing everything swampish, it might be best now for Mr. Trump to just retire from the political scene and leave the battle to others. He made his point, colorfully and often bravely, considering the astounding bad faith of his adversaries, though he certainly could have articulated the stakes better and with more decorum. He leaves not merely a vacuum but a sucking chest wound of leadership opposing hysterical and tyrannical Wokery. Who will step forward in his absence? Probably someone we haven’t heard from yet. That’s how these things work.

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Muhammad Ali once called Aaron “The only man I idolize more than myself.”

Aaron received the first dose of the Moderna vaccine on Jan 5.

I don’t normally do eulogies for athletes, but this is about so much more. I was thinking about the hardship people like Aaron and Jackie Robinson went through in America’s great national pastime.

Only when Muhammad Ali arrived did that really change. And he paid a big price for that.

Home Run King Hank Aaron Dead At 86 (F.)

Aaron was born in Mobile, Ala., to Herbert Aaron, Sr. and Estella (Pritchett) Aaron in February of 1934. He and his seven siblings grew up poor, in a home without electricity or indoor bathrooms. Aaron didn’t have an opportunity to play organized baseball in high school because only white students had teams. He signed his first baseball contract, which paid him $10 a game, at the age of 17 with a local semi-pro team called the Mobile Black Bears. After a couple of seasons dominating the Negro Leagues, Aaron joined the Atlanta Braves in 1954. Over his incredible 22-year career, Hammerin’ Hank would tally 3,771 hits in 3,298 games played. Remarkably, Aaron still holds the all-time major league records for most RBIs (2,297), total bases (6,856) and extra-base hits (1,477). Yet, Aaron was best known for the long ball.


Despite measuring only six feet and weighing in at around 180 pounds in his prime, Aaron would finish his epic career with 755 career home runs, a mark that survived until Barry Bonds (reportedly with the help of steroids) broke it in 2007. Aaron was a first-ballot inductee into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1982. As he inched closer to passing Babe Ruth’s record of 714 home runs in the early 1970s, Aaron endured an avalanche of death threats from racists that did not want to see a Black man break Ruth’s revered record. In his 1991 autobiography, Aaron described how “when people finally realized I was climbing up Ruth’s back, the “Dear N——r” letters started showing up with alarming regularity. They told me no n——-r had any right to go where I was going.” In a 1992 interview with the Atlanta Journal, Aaron revealed he held onto all the hate letters he’d received. “I’m always going to keep them,” he said. “I don’t care what anybody says. It’s just like telling a Jewish family to forget about the Holocaust. If you’re not part of something, it’s easy to tell somebody to forget about it.”

Read more …

 

 

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Aug 212020
 


Elliott Erwitt New York City, USA 1955

 

Many People Unexposed To Coronavirus Have Immune Cells For COVID19 (SMH)
The Speech Joe Biden Has Been Preparing For His Entire Life (Taibbi)
Team Biden Now Signals Austerity, Despite Campaign Pledges (Sirota)
72% of Detroit’s Absentee Ballot Counts Were Off (DN)
Johnson, Grassley Blast Colleagues For ‘False Narratives’ About Ukraine (JTN)
“I Have A Right To Make Sure That My Home Is Secure” (ZH)
28 Million Americans on Unemployment Insurance, 17.5% of Labor Force (WS)
CEOs Get Big Pre-Bankruptcy Bonuses As Lenders and Employees Stiffed (NC)
Facebook Delenda Est (Ben Hunt)
Florida To Release 750 Million Genetically Modified Mosquitoes (BBC)
‘Bored’ Ravens Straying From Tower Of London Signal Monarchy May Fall (G.)

 

 

It’s not that long ago that it seemed impossible the US would do better than the world in new cases numbers. But here we are.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The author of this particular take on T-cells can’t seem to make up his mind if this is a good thing or not.

Many People Unexposed To Coronavirus Have Immune Cells For COVID19 (SMH)

Evidence is emerging worldwide showing between 20 and 50 per cent of people who have never been exposed to COVID-19 have immune cells that can recognise and react to the virus. The discovery of T cell cross-reactivity has excited immunologists, who hope it could explain some of the mysteries that surround the virus, such as why some people get so much sicker than others. But scientists caution that it is not yet clear what the discovery means for human health. Australian National University’s head of immunology and infectious diseases, Professor David Tscharke, said: “It’s the good, the bad and the ugly – it could help, it could do nothing, or it could make COVID-19 worse.” Professor Tscharke said the cross-reactive T cells might help to fight off the virus, or they might get in the way of the immune system, making the disease worse, a phenomenon known as “original antigenic sin”.


SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus (yellow) emerging from the surface of cells (pink) cultured in a US National Institutes of Health lab. CREDIT:AP

Typically, the human adaptive immune system relies on precision. Antibodies, for example, have to be exactly the right shape to stick to a particular virus and kill it. T cells hunt for tiny fragments of virus protein – as small as eight amino acids long, in a virus that could have thousands of them – that identify a virus has infected a cell. If two viruses share protein fragments, T cells will attack both. SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, shares much of its genetic code, including many of its proteins, with four coronaviruses in frequent circulation among humans. Dr Corey Smith, head of the translational and human immunology laboratory at the QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute, said some sections of the genetic codes were virtually identical.


They cause the common cold and are extremely common – more than 90 per cent of people have been exposed to them. Scientists suspect some people who have been exposed to these viruses develop T cells that can also target SARS-CoV-2. Monash University’s head of microbiology, Professor Stephen Turner, said that in the best-case scenario, cross-reactive T cells do offer some protection. “That’s why we might be seeing so much asymptomatic infection. If there is a level of protection, due to previous exposure, you have less symptoms – because you’re limiting the amount of virus that can grow,” he said. During the 2009 influenza pandemic, scientists found people who had cross-reactive T cells to that virus were less likely to suffer severe symptoms. Professor Turner said T cells needed the right signals to be activated. It was possible SARS-CoV-2 did not trigger them, or they were in the wrong place to fight the infection.

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“Start your livers..”

The Speech Joe Biden Has Been Preparing For His Entire Life (Taibbi)

The DNC drinking game Monday night was so painful (and Tuesday was worse), that I’ve decided to shorten the game tonight to cover Joe Biden’s acceptance speech only. I watched Biden speak probably a half-dozen times during the primary campaign, and perhaps a half-dozen times before. He has definite tendencies, and his stump speech hits the same six or seven notes every time, but convention addresses are different. Every line, every word, will be scripted. There shouldn’t be ad-libs, freak-outs at hecklers, etc. Guessing what an unscripted Joe Biden will do at any given moment is pretty interesting. Here we’re basically trying to guess what Biden and his handlers have decided to put on a teleprompter. Biden will be speaking sometime after 9 p.m. I will be live-streaming with Katie Halper. Details to follow.


Drink EVERY TIME:
• Biden says, “Folks.”
• Biden says, “The United States of America.” Double-shots for any multiple-America construction, e.g. “The best America is an America where Americans believe in the American dream.”
• Biden says, “Middle-class.”
• Biden says, “Get up!” as in, “Folks, you’ve got to get up! This is the United States of America!”
• Biden says, “You guys.”
• Biden says, “Barack” or references the “Obama-Biden administration.”
• Biden says, “Soul of America.”
• Biden points out a surprising percentage of something, e.g. “Look, folks, seventy-four percent of venture capital goes to four cities.”
• Biden says, “My Mom used to say” or mentions one of his father’s relatable jobs, e.g. “He sold a hell of a lot of cars!”
• Biden makes a self-deprecating joke about his age or his tendency to say puzzling things.
• Biden finishes a section of his speech with a rhetorical flourish, and he sounds angry, and you can’t tell why, because he’s talking about something non-angering.
• Biden tells a story about a rewarding interaction with an ordinary person, as in, “I walk over to the guy up in the bucket. And there’s seven guys around him, all with hard hats on. I yelled up and said, ‘Hey, man, thanks!’”
• Biden references a job you’ve never heard of, as in “Why is a sandwich maker being forced to sign a non-compete clause?”
• Biden says “systemic.”
• Biden tells us there’s nothing we can’t accomplish.

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If David Sirota keeps this up, they’ll ban him from the party.

Team Biden Now Signals Austerity, Despite Campaign Pledges (Sirota)

The Democratic convention has sucked up all the political oxygen in America — so much so, that most people missed Team Biden signaling that it may back off the entire agenda it is campaigning on. This monumental declaration went almost completely unnoticed for an entire day — which is a genuinely disturbing commentary on how the biggest of big political news gets routinely ignored. To review the situation: earlier this month, Bloomberg News reported that Biden’s “campaign rolled out a $3.5 trillion economic program over the past month” — one that “promises to invest in clean energy and caregiving, buy more made-in-America goods, and start narrowing the country’s racial wealth gaps.” This, said the news service, was proof that Biden no longer adhered to an ideology of austerity and deficit hawkery — which would be good news.

But then on the eve of Biden’s convention speech, the Democratic nominee’s top aide suggested to Washington reporters that, in fact, that’s not true. Here’s the key excerpt: Former Delaware Sen. Ted Kaufman, a Biden confidant who succeeded him in the Senate, predicted during a Wall Street Journal Newsmakers Live interview Tuesday that a large increase in federal spending would be difficult to achieve in 2021. “When we get in, the pantry is going to be bare,” said Mr. Kaufman, who is leading Mr. Biden’s transition team. “When you see what Trump’s done to the deficit…forget about Covid-19, all the deficits that he built with the incredible tax cuts. So we’re going to be limited.” Economist Dean Baker goes over exactly how destructive and insane this ideology is.

As he says: “The idea that we would not address pressing needs, like climate change, child care, and health care because we are concerned about the debt burden is close to crazy. As long as the economy is not near its capacity, there is zero reason not to spend to address these priorities.” What I find particularly troubling is that Kaufman’s quote made it into the Wall Street Journal yesterday. The newspaper tweeted it out early in the morning. It sat out there for almost 24 hours — an eternity in the current news ecosystem. And yet, as far as I can tell, nobody noticed. Hell, the Journal’s tweet had all of 1 retweets on it as of this morning.

[..] This monumental declaration was in a major newspaper — it should have set off immediate alarm bells from all the think tanks, unions and advocacy groups in Washington whose job is to make sure that this kind of destructive austerity ideology does not once again take hold in the Democratic Party. There should have been press releases, and statements of outrage and congresspeople on TV talking about it. But for an entire day, there was nothing, until it was shamed into the conversation. This is not the first time there’s been silence on stuff like this — less than a month ago Biden explicitly promised his Wall Street donors that despite his public campaign promises, he will not be pushing new legislation to change corporate behavior.

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Hmmm: “..people shouldn’t “expect perfection or anything close” to it..”

72% of Detroit’s Absentee Ballot Counts Were Off (DN)

Recorded ballot counts in 72% of Detroit’s absentee voting precincts didn’t match the number of ballots cast, spurring officials in Michigan’s largest county to ask the state to investigate ahead of a pivotal presidential election. [..] In 46% of all Detroit’s precincts — absentee and Election Day — vote counts were out of balance, according to information presented Tuesday to the Wayne County Board of Canvassers. Specifically, the number of ballots tracked in precinct poll books did not match the number of ballots counted. The situation could amplify the spotlight on absentee ballots in Michigan ahead of an election for which record levels of mail-in voting are expected and President Donald Trump is already raising concerns about how votes will be handled. The election results for the primary weren’t incorrect, said Jonathan Kinloch, a Democrat and one of the canvassing board’s four members.


But, he said, something had gone wrong in the process of tracking ballots precinct by precinct. Having balanced precincts is particularly important in Michigan because precincts whose poll books don’t match with ballots can’t be recounted, according to state law. Instead, the original election results would stand. “It was a perfect storm,” Kinloch said. The “storm” involved a record number of absentee ballots being cast in Michigan’s primary and seasoned election workers not feeling it was safe to help with administering the election because of COVID-19, he added. The Wayne County board is asking Benson, a Detroit resident, to investigate “the training and processes used by the City of Detroit” in the primary election. The board also requested that the first-term Democrat appoint a state monitor to oversee the counting of absentee ballots in the general election.

Detroit had problems with precinct count mismatches in the November 2016 election. Election officials couldn’t reconcile vote totals for 59% of precincts in the city during a countywide canvass of vote results with most of the issues involving too many votes. Those votes couldn’t be recounted when Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein demanded a statewide recount following Donald Trump’s initial 13,000-vote victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton. A recount was started but stopped and nullified by the courts when Stein was ruled ineligible for a recount request because she had no chance at victory. The results eventually were certified as a 10,704-vote victory for Trump, the first Republican presidential nominee to win Michigan in 28 years. It was the Republican businessman’s smallest margin of victory in the nation.

The problems with the Detroit’s numbers in the Aug. 4 primary included ballots being put in the wrong tracking containers, said Monica Palmer, one of the Republican members of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers. “It was so inaccurate that we can’t even attempt to make it right,” said Palmer, chairwoman of the board. Winfrey said the vast majority of the absentee voting precincts in the city were less than three ballots off, plus or minus. Being off by three or fewer is allowed, Winfrey said — but it’s unclear what policy she was referring to. [..] Winfrey also said Thursday that people shouldn’t “expect perfection or anything close” to it after elections staffers have worked more than 20 hours.

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Running out the clock.

Johnson, Grassley Blast Colleagues For ‘False Narratives’ About Ukraine (JTN)

Republican Sens. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Chuck Grassley of Iowa sent letters to two of their Democratic colleagues, lambasting them for claiming that an investigation regarding U.S. policy in Ukraine during the Obama presidency is tainted by Russian disinformation—Democratic Sens. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut are the recipients of the August 20 letters. The investigation that the Democrats have said is poisoned by Russian disinformation pertains to possible conflicts of interest in America’s Ukraine policy when Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter served on the board of Burisma.

A press release says that the two Democratic senators have “falsely claimed that Grassley and Johnson are relying on information from Andriy Derkach as part of their ongoing oversight, despite the chairmen’s clear denials of having any communication with Derkach.” The Republican Senators in their letters said that as far as they know the sole instance of disinformation injected into the investigation has come from Democrats. “Regarding reports that we have received ‘packages’ of information from certain Ukrainian nationals – that is false. Further, the only relevant disinformation that we are aware of are documents that Minority Leader Schumer, Senator Warner, Speaker Pelosi, and Chairman Schiff referenced in their recent letter that your Democratic colleagues have introduced into our investigation,” the senators wrote in the letters to their Democratic colleagues.

“For example, the Schumer letter references a document, created by a Ukrainian national that mentions our names along with other Republican senators and administration officials, to suggest falsely that we might have received information from this individual. Liberal media outlets have picked up that reference, clearly from a leak, even though we have not received any information from that person, including tapes, and we have publicly and privately stated as much. To repeat, the only document in our investigation that has been described as disinformation is a document that your Democratic colleagues, not us, introduced into the record. If you and your colleagues are so concerned about disinformation, why do you continue to promote it?” Johnson and Grassley asked.

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This is so nuts it can only mean she herself is certified nuts.

“I Have A Right To Make Sure That My Home Is Secure” (ZH)

[..] nothing compares to what just happened in Chicago whose Mayor Lori Lightfoot – best known for encouraging local BLM protests, going so far as saying that black lives are “more important that downtown corporations” after the unprecedented looting that took place last week – defended the Chicago Police Department’s ban on protesters being able to demonstrate on the block where she lives, telling reporters Thursday that she and her family at times require heightened security because of threats she receives daily. Yes, Mayor Lori is all about BLM protests… as long as they are literally not in her back yard. Lightfoot refused to elaborate on the specific threats according to the Chicago Tribune, but said she receives them daily against herself, her wife and her home.

Lightfoot also told reporters that comparisons to how the Police Department has protected previous mayors’ homes, such as Rahm Emanuel’s Ravenswood residence, are unfair because “this is a different time like no other.” “I think that residents of this city, understanding the nature of the threats that we are receiving on a daily basis, on a daily basis, understand I have a right to make sure that my home is secure,” Lightfoot said, failing to grasp the simplest truth that all citizens of “her” devastated city also have a right to make sure that their home is secure although unlike Lightfoot they don’t have the local police to protect them. Because when it comes to outrageous liberal hypocrisy, things get complicated.

Lightfoot and Chicago police Superintendent David Brown were asked at an unrelated news conference about a Tribune report noting police have banned protesters from demonstrating on her block in the Logan Square neighborhood, ordering officers to arrest anyone who refuses to leave. The directive surfaced in a July email from then-Shakespeare District Cmdr. Melvin Roman to officers under his command. It did not distinguish between the peaceful protesters Lightfoot regularly says she supports and those who might intend to be destructive, but ordered that after a warning is given to demonstrators, “It should be locked down.” Activists and police sources could not cite instances when the city repeatedly locked down her predecessor Emanuel’s block against protesters.

The Kenwood block where former President Barack Obama lived with his family when his primary residence was in Chicago was shut down for access only by residents after his election. But Lightfoot said such comparisons “don’t make any sense,” after Brown referenced the ongoing coronavirus pandemic – which she has repeatedly overriden as a concern when BLM protests are to be held – as well as civil unrest that have flared since the George Floyd killing at the hands of Minneapolis police. “I’m not going to make any excuses for the fact that, given the threats I have personally received, given the threats to my home and my family, I’m going to do everything I can to make sure they’re protected,” Lightfoot said. “I make no apologies whatsoever for that.”

It wasn’t clear if Lightfoot would apologize to all those millions of Chicago residents who – just like her – are trying to avoid threats against their own families by angry, violent looters; looters whose despicable actions Lightfoot has repeatedly turned her eyes away from in hopes of peak virtue signaling.

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So what’s the plan, guys? Green jobs?

28 Million Americans on Unemployment Insurance, 17.5% of Labor Force (WS)

What happened in the latest reporting week for unemployment claims was disconcerting: “Initial” claims under state unemployment insurance programs by newly laid-off workers rose. And initial claims under the federal Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program provided by the CARES Act that covers gig workers, also rose. This means that people lost their work at a faster rate than they did in the prior week. In terms of “continued” claims: The number of people on unemployment insurance (UI) under state programs (blue bars) declined, as some people returned to work. But the number of people on UI under federal and other programs (red bars) jumped. Combined, the number of people on UI under all programs ticked down by 199k to 28.06 million, the Labor Department reported this morning. It was the least catastrophic reading since mid-May, but still a horrendously huge number, representing about 17.5% of the labor force:

Blue columns: The number of people who continued claiming unemployment insurance under regular state programs fell by nearly 1 million to 14.27 million (not seasonally adjusted), continuing the fairly consistent downtrend that had started in May. Red columns: The number of people on UI under all federal programs and some other programs – after having fallen by 2.4 million last week – jumped by 737k to 13.79 million (not seasonally adjusted), driven by increases in federal Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) claims and in federal Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC) claims.


Initial claims under state programs, filed by newly laid off workers, caused some head-scratching this morning, because they “unexpectedly” rose – and they rose both on a seasonally adjusted basis (by 135k to 1.11 million) and on a not seasonally adjusted basis (by 53k to 892k). So we can’t blame some seasonal adjustments gone awry. This was the first increase since the week ended July 11:

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Yves Smith.

CEOs Get Big Pre-Bankruptcy Bonuses As Lenders and Employees Stiffed (NC)

Nothing like paying for failure. The Financial Times describes how CEOs who ran their companies into the ground are nevertheless rewarded with “retention bonus” payouts shortly before the business declare bankruptcy, often mere days ahead. The absurd rationale is that it is necessary to keep a failed CEO on in order to reduce disruption. It appears instead that boards would rather pay a rich and unwarranted premium to keep a bad known quantity around, perhaps due to personal allegiances to the incumbent or because they might actually have to rouse themselves to oust the dud leader and select a replacement. Are we to believe that the stipends these boards approve has any relationship with the market value of these CEOs, even charitably assuming someone would hire them after their companies collapses underneath them?

Are we to believe there was no able lieutenant worth a battlefield promotion? No retired industry greybeard who could be engaged for an eighteen month to three year gig? No one in the ranks of turnaround expert or “temp for hire” CEOs who would do? Even worse, some of these payments are flat out looting: “Brad Holly, Whiting’s chief executive who joined the company in November 2017, received $6.4m at the end of March under a new compensation plan approved by the board of directors, which he also chairs, less than a week before the company filed for bankruptcy. Whiting, which expects to emerge from Chapter 11 next month, said last week that Mr Holly would step down as chief executive when that happens and would receive an additional $2.53m in severance. In total, Whiting paid out more than $14m to executives just a few days before declaring itself bust. In a regulatory filing on April 1 the company said its pay plan was designed “to align the interests of the Company and its employees”.

$6.4 million for Holly for at most five months of babysitting bankruptcy lawyers? Seriously? Another example: “Briggs & Stratton’s board approved more than $5m in retention payments on June 11, including more than $1m to chief executive Todd Teske, who has led the company for a decade. Four days later the company failed to make a $6.7m interest payment on a bond due later this year, and on July 20 it filed for bankruptcy. On July 19, the company’s board voted to terminate the health and life insurance benefits of the company’s retirees… The company’s 2020 bond is now trading at just a few cents on the dollar, reflecting slim hopes of recovery.

Why are these losers who almost assuredly have nowhere to go being paid in advance? Why aren’t they instead getting $1 per year and working for a contingent payout to be paid when the company emerged from bankruptcy, say tiered based upon results versus specified targets? This is the sort of deal that someone who cared about salvaging the company, as opposed to his personal bottom line, should accept.

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Facebook is the opposite of free speech.

Facebook Delenda Est (Ben Hunt)

I’m pretty close to being a free speech absolutist. Or at least I have an old-school small-l liberal John Stuart Mill-esque belief in free speech, with an extremely high bar for the “harm” that speech must directly inflict on other citizens before a rightfully constituted government, based on the consent of its citizens, has a legitimate duty to regulate that speech. And I believe that the US Supreme Court has been pretty much spot-on with its free speech decisions like Brandenburg v. Ohio and R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul, where they said (roughly speaking) that even speech calling for violent protest against the government is protected speech and that hate speech isn’t a thing. Let me repeat that last one. The US Supreme Court has repeatedly held that hate speech is not a thing. I think this is exactly right.

To be clear, I also believe that a private organization has the right to apply hate speech standards (or any other speech standards) to its members, if those members have the ability to leave the private organization AND that organization does not enjoy unique government support. So, for example, if I choose to attend a private religious college, and they have rules against hateful/blasphemous speech, then it’s fine for them to kick me out when I start doing my hateful blasphemous speech thing. I’d never go to that college in the first place, and there are plenty of other schools I can attend. But if ALL colleges started imposing hate speech standards, or if the ONLY college started imposing hate speech standards, or if ANY public college started imposing hate speech standards … well, I’d have a real problem with any of these circumstances.

And I believe that a just government has a duty to intervene in these circumstances. Now I also believe that the US Supreme Court got it terribly, terribly wrong with Citizens United, where they decided (again, roughly speaking) that non-real life citizens – like corporations or other constructed legal entities – enjoy the same protections for political speech that real life citizens do. I’ll repeat that one, too. The US Supreme Court has held that constructed entities of pooled capital (corporations) or pooled labor (unions) or pooled political influence (parties) have the same protection for their political speech as unconstructed/unpooled you and unconstructed/unpooled me. I think this is nuts.

To be clear, I also believe that limitations on how much money or time real life citizens can spend on their political speech are similarly nuts. So, for example, I believe that really rich American citizens like Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos or George Soros or Charles Koch can spend as much money as they please – literally billions of dollars if they want – to proclaim whatever cockamamie political idea they want to proclaim. What is unacceptable in my view – but is exactly what Citizens United allows – is for really rich guys to spend unlimited amounts of money on political speech after they are dead, or (worse!) for corporations and unions and parties to spend unlimited amounts of other people’s money on political speech, with the same legal protections as real life citizens.

Government does not exist to protect the rights of a dead rich guy’s money. Government does not exist to protect the rights of corporations, unions and political parties. Government EXISTS to protect the unalienable rights of its citizens, and that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

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Because “we” are so much smrter than God.

Florida To Release 750 Million Genetically Modified Mosquitoes (BBC)

Local officials in Florida have approved the release of 750 million mosquitoes that have been genetically modified to reduce local populations. The aim is to reduce the number of mosquitoes that carry diseases like dengue or the Zika virus. The green-lighting of a pilot project after years of debate drew a swift outcry from environmental groups, who warned of unintended consequences. One group condemned the plan as a public “Jurassic Park experiment”. Activists warn of possible damage to ecosystems, and the potential creation of hybrid, insecticide-resistant mosquitoes. But the company involved says there will be no adverse risk to humans or the environment, and points to a slate of government-backed studies.

The plan to release the mosquitoes in 2021 in the Florida Keys, a string of islands, comes months after the modified mosquitoes were approved by federal regulators. In May, the US Environmental Agency granted permission to the British-based, US-operated company Oxitec to produce the genetically engineered, male Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, which are known as OX5034. Aedes aegypti mosquitoes are known to spread deadly diseases to humans such dengue, Zika, chikungunya and yellow fever. Only female mosquitoes bite humans because they need blood to produce eggs. So the plan is to release the male, modified mosquitoes who will then hopefully breed with wild female mosquitoes.

However the males carry a protein that will kill off any female offspring before they reach mature biting age. Males, which only feed on nectar, will survive and pass on the genes. Over time, the aim is to reduce the population of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes in the area and thereby reduce the spread of disease to humans.

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A -large- group of ravens is called an unkindness of ravens, or a conspiracy of ravens.

‘Bored’ Ravens Straying From Tower Of London Signal Monarchy May Fall (G.)

A lack of tourists is driving the ravens at the Tower of London to boredom and causing them to fly away. Legend has it the monarchy and the Tower of London will fall if its six resident ravens leave the fortress. The birds, known as the guardians of the tower, are shrouded in myth and live in lodgings on the South Lawn. There are seven in total – the required six, plus one spare. The tower closed on 20 March and reopened five weeks ago. However, few tourists have returned. Summer visitor numbers would usually exceed 15,000 but because of the coronavirus pandemic, they have fallen to fewer than 800 a day. As a result, the birds are restless for more company.

With a lack of regular tourists, the birds have been venturing away, according to those who work there. Christopher Skaife, a raven master, told the Sun: “If the ravens were to leave, the tower would crumble to dust. The tower is only the tower when the people are here. “The ravens have always been so important … because they’ve been surrounded by myths and legends. We really need people to come back to help the ravens.” The seven ravens are Jubilee, Harris, Gripp, Rocky, Erin, Poppy and Merlina. They are free to roam the tower precincts in the day and preside over four territories within its walls.

Charles II is thought to have been the first to insist that the ravens of the Tower be protected after he was warned the crown and the tower would fall if they left. Skaife said during lockdown they got bored and lonely because there were no full bins to rummage or people bringing them food. He encouraged the Beefeaters who guard the building to throw them their leftovers. Skaife said: “It’s been tough because the ravens only saw me or one warden walking by during the lockdown. They depend on tourists. “Never in a raven’s history have we seen fewer people in the Tower of London. Even in world war two, there were still hundreds in and around.”


Beefeaters and a resident raven. Photo: Lynn Fergusson/Reuters

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