Jan 212022
 


Pablo Picasso Portrait of Dora Maar pensive 1937

 

How Many People Have Died Purely Of Covid (Farage)
Sewage Surveillance Reveals Omicron Is Disappearing Fast (ZH)
Investigate the Cause of the Spike in Child Deaths (Craig)
Triple-Jabbed Over-30s Have Higher Infection Rates Than the Unvaccinated (DS)
Over a Million Americans Were Injured by Covid Vaccines (Rescue)
Journal Pulls COVID-19 Vaccine Adverse Events Analysis (ET)
Ivermectin Could Destroy Justification for Lockdowns and Vaccine Mandates (ET)
Unexpected Comeback in the FLCCC Early Treatment Protocol (CE)
France To Lift Covid-19 Restrictions In February (Pol.eu)
Top Russian Senator Blasts American’s ‘Amazing Stupidity’
Germany’s Pivot From America (Pol.eu)
Durham vs. Horowitz (Maté)
Congress’s 1/6 Committee Claims Absolute Power (Greenwald)
Jeremy Grantham Doubles Down on Crash Call, Says Selloff Has Started (BBG)

 

 

 

 

Hodkinson

 

 

 

 

Eva Vlaar

 

 

17,000 deaths purely of Covid in the UK. Worldometer puts it at 152,000. 700,000 die of all causes every year in the UK.

How Many People Have Died Purely Of Covid (Farage)

‘We’ve seen again and again, estimates of how bad this crisis could be that are nearly always massively over-exaggerated, but this has really made me sit up and think.’ Nigel Farage reacts to the amount of people who have died purely of Covid since the start of the pandemic.

 

 

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“The end of omicron is imminent..”

Sewage Surveillance Reveals Omicron Is Disappearing Fast (ZH)

Now, data gleaned from wastewater is being used by the CDC to help determine when the omicron variant may have arrived in the US. As Bloomberg reports, evidence of omicron appeared in US sewage samples collected as early as Nov. 21, according to data collected by state and local health officials from California, Colorado, Houston and NYC. That data was later shared with the CDC. The first infection of omicron in a US-based patient wasn’t confirmed until Dec. 1 (the patient was located in California). “The findings give strong early evidence that the omicron variant was likely present or more widely distributed in these communities than originally indicated by clinical testing alone,” the authors said in CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

The four health authorities were the first to find signs of the variant in their wastewater, according to the study. In its report on the findings, BBG added that “analyzing wastewater containing human feces can be an important way to look for warning signs of new mutations, as well as track those already spreading to determine how long existing surges will last.” Wastewater can also provide advanced warning of a COVID surge. Dutch researchers reported in March 2020 that they were able to find genetic material from the virus in wastewater before COVID cases were reported in the population. Like one BBG source said: “everybody poops”.

The technique “gives you a heads-up because people may not want to pick up the phone for surveys, but everybody poops,” said Gigi Gronvall, an immunologist at the John Hopkins Center for Health Security. “And it’s so unbiased because everybody uses the same sewer system.” The CDC now funds 43 health departments that participate in the National Wastewater Surveillance System, which provides data on COVID’s presence and trends in water systems. The great news is that the last week or so has seen the Boston wastewater RNA data plunge… The end of omicron is imminent… because everybody poops.

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“Any marginal benefit of vaccination for the young must be considered outweighed by even a marginal increase in mortality.”

Investigate the Cause of the Spike in Child Deaths (Craig)

In recent months, a trend has been noted in the England and Wales all-cause mortality data, which has rung some alarm bells. Young males aged 15-19 have shown a rising death rate compared to the five-year average 2015-2019. At the same time, a large insurance company in the U.S. has reported a significant increase in deaths in the under 40s. This is obviously of concern, whatever the cause, but one possible factor which needs to be urgently excluded is any link to vaccine injury. The association between myocarditis and the mRNA vaccines, especially in younger age groups and in males, is already well established. It is particularly urgent as second doses and boosters are being rolled out, possibly putting adolescents at even higher risk, and at a time when the Omicron variant is much milder.

Members of HART, the Health Advisory and Recovery Team, have joined with other senior academics and health professionals to call for an immediate investigation into the increasing death rate amongst 15-19-year-old males since May of this year. At the High Court on Thursday 13th January, the ONS (Office for National Statistics) confirmed that there has been a significant rise in the death rate for adolescent males over the last eight months, compared to the same time period of 2015-2019. There have been at least 65 extra deaths in England and Wales, though the figure may be higher due to reporting delays for coroners’ cases. During the same time frame there were only two deaths involving Covid.

The concern is that this time period coincides with the rollout of vaccinations to this age group, who are known to be at an increased risk of myocarditis (heart inflammation), especially after the second dose. Far from rushing to investigate these deaths as they have arisen, ONS has stated it intends to undertake that work “when more reliable data are available”. The rollout of vaccinations in this age group was always controversial, with risks and benefits finely balanced, but the Chief Medical Officers overturned the original advice, not on health grounds but to “reduce disruption to schools”. Any marginal benefit of vaccination for the young must be considered outweighed by even a marginal increase in mortality. With the reduced risk from Omicron, and with increased risk from second doses, the balance will have tipped still further.

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That effectiveness is very negative.

Triple-Jabbed Over-30s Have Higher Infection Rates Than the Unvaccinated (DS)

This week’s UKHSA vaccine surveillance report has landed – and this week a change. In the (in)famous Table 12, which shows rates of infections, deaths and hospitalisations per 100,000 by vaccination status, the data have suddenly switched to giving rates for triple-jabbed rather than two-or-more doses, meaning we no longer have continuity with our previous data. So sudden was the change in fact, that the report itself has not kept up with it, and the notes under the table still say the rates are for “people who have received either two doses of a COVID-19 vaccine or in people who have not received a COVID-19 vaccine”. The change means we have to start over in our week-by-week comparisons, so the infection rates by age for this period are depicted above and the unadjusted vaccine effectiveness figures are depicted below.

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“We are slowly building a network of the injured..” Why does this make me think of 1984? Why does it have to move underground?

Over a Million Americans Were Injured by Covid Vaccines (Rescue)

The blackout of news regarding covid shot injuries has been so universally successful that it’s almost always a surprise to the vaccine damaged when they find each other. “Travelers in the desert,” is how one put it. Brianne’s extraordinary efforts to connect the injured, tell her story, and correct false facts has taken some interesting turns. Last November she wrote to the New England Journal of Medicine, attempting to have the journal correct inaccuracies in a paper about the AstraZeneca trial it recently published. She wrote: “I was a participant in Astra-Zeneca’s Covid-19 vaccine trial. I suffered serious and severe adverse effects after the first dose…was disabled and remain so today.”

She went on to state that Phase 3 Safety and Efficacy of AZD1222…Covid-19 Vaccine, published at the NEJM, contains numerous errors including that “all serious adverse events” will be recorded through “day 730,” and that she “withdrew” from the trial. Some 180 others are also said by the reporting researchers to have dropped out of the study. In fact, she wrote, “I did not withdraw, I was withdrawn.” The smartphone app she was provided to report symptoms was disabled, she told the NEJM, and trial doctors stopped collecting her data after sixty days. And Brianne heard back right away, receiving a canned rejection note from none other than Dr. Eric J. Rubin, NEJM editor-in-chief and member of the FDA’s review committee that recommended covid shots be okayed for five-year-olds.

But she persisted, telling Rubin again that the article “omitted key safety data in my case” and another she is aware of, and that the NIH gave her a diagnosis of “vaccine injury.” “Omission of adverse reactions is a violation of a key tenet of clinical trial reporting,” she wrote back. But in the end, all the head doctor at the world’s most prestigious medical journal could offer was to forward her letter to the manufacturer and suggest that she herself write to AstraZeneca and the FDA. Despite the widespread social media muffling over “misinformation,” resulting in numerous vaccine-injury sites being silenced, Brianne has managed to discover over 12,000 vaccine-damaged individuals through the website she founded, reAct19.org, simply by word of mouth. She is also affiliated with The Unity Project, a California-based organization working to unify fragmented groups across the state to better fight covid vaccine mandates for children. “We are slowly building a network of the injured,” she said.

That current network, however, could be the proverbial tip of the iceberg. According to VAERS data, as of January 7, 2022, there are vast numbers of covid-19 shot harms, including 1,033,992 vaccine injures, 25,773 cases of myocarditis/pericarditis, 3,594 miscarriages, 11,055 heart attacks, and 21,745 deaths. Within a few weeks of coerced children’s vaccinations, Brianne was contacted by the parents of a number of children, ages five to eleven, experiencing heart damage, some of which doctors said “could lead to heart transplants in five years.” They contacted Brianne because she can put them in touch with doctors knowledgeable and willing to treat vaccine sufferers.

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“The paper also called the vaccines “injectable biological products”—a reference to the fact that they are distinct from all other traditional vaccines.”

Journal Pulls COVID-19 Vaccine Adverse Events Analysis (ET)

Jessica Rose didn’t ask for any of this. She started to analyze data on adverse reactions after COVID-19 vaccines simply as an exercise to master a new piece of software. But she couldn’t ignore what she saw and decided to publish the results of her analysis. The next thing she knew, she was in a “bizzarro world,” she told The Epoch Times. A paper she co-authored based on her analysis was withdrawn by Elsevier, the company publishing the academic journal that ran the article, under circumstances that raised eyebrows among her colleagues. [..] The paper’s conclusions are not necessarily controversial. A recent Danish study concluded, for example, an elevated risk of myocarditis for young people following the Moderna COVID vaccine.

It’s common, however, even for papers that examine potential issues with the vaccines to frame their results in a way that still endorses vaccination. “That’s what you have to say to get your work published these days,” Rose said. Her paper did no such thing. “As part of any risk/benefit analysis which must be completed in the context of experimental products, the points herein must be considered before a decision can be made pertaining to agreeing to 2-dose injections of these experimental COVID-19 products, especially into children and by no means, should parental consent be waived under any circumstances to avoid children volunteering for injections with products that do not have proven safety or efficacy,” the paper said.

The paper also called the vaccines “injectable biological products”—a reference to the fact that they are distinct from all other traditional vaccines. A traditional vaccine uses “whole live or attenuated pathogens” while the COVID vaccines use “mRNA in lipid nanoparticles,” Rose explained via email. She said the lipid nanoparticles include “cationic lipids which are highly toxic.” Pfizer, the manufacturer of the most popular COVID-19 vaccine in many countries, addressed the issue by saying the dose is sufficiently low to ensure “an acceptable safety margin,” according to the European drug authority, the Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use (pdf). Rose also noted that the COVID-19 vaccines haven’t gone “through the 10-15 years of safety testing that vaccines have always had to go through … for obvious reasons.”

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Pretty incredible that this is still seen as news. Then again, how many people know?

Ivermectin Could Destroy Justification for Lockdowns and Vaccine Mandates (ET)

Federal health agencies haven’t recognized ivermectin as an effective treatment for COVID-19 patients. According to Doctor Leland Stillman, the reason is more political than scientific, because otherwise there would be no basis for lockdowns or vaccine mandates. “If ivermectin were recognized by the public health and academic establishment as the drug that it is, that treats acute viral illnesses, one of which is COVID-19, the entire justification for lockdowns, mandates, let alone vaccine research and development would evaporate overnight,” Stillman told The Epoch Times in a recent interview.

According to Section 564 of the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) can only issue emergency use authorization if certain criteria are met, including “there is no adequate, approved, and available alternative to the product.” So if there’s an approved alternative, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)—an agency in HHS—can’t issue emergency use authorization for COVID-19 vaccines. Stillman said it’s not a conspiracy theory or even an isolated opinion that ivermectin works for treating COVID-19, because tens of thousands of physicians all over the world have recognized its effectiveness. [..] Stillman explained why many doctors are silent on recognizing ivermectin as an effective drug for COVID-19[..].

“And the reality that’s really important for people to understand is that doctors can lose their licenses or lose their board certification, which is very important for their income based on insurance guidelines, for speaking out as I have chosen to,” Stillman said. Stillman said he is able to speak up because he’s one of very few doctors in the country who takes cash and doesn’t work with insurance companies. [..] “There’s a lot of politics on this,” Stillman said, referring to the COVID-19 vaccine mandate. “And the way it’s been politicized is really disgraceful and unfortunate. At the end of the day, it’s all about how these corporations who are profiting immensely off of the pandemic.”

Stillman said freedom is the way out of the current problem. “Freedom is absolutely the solution,” Stillman said. “Because if you really allow doctors to treat patients on their own terms, without insurance companies, without all this, it can be very affordable, and it can be very effective. “Because the reality is that a lot of the care being provisioned right now, it’s just being provisioned based on some bureaucrat’s idea of what’s good medicine, not based on what the patients actually want and think is worth it to them.”

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HCQ for the win.

Unexpected Comeback in the FLCCC Early Treatment Protocol (CE)

If you have followed the development of early treatment protocols for COVID-19, you will be aware that for well over a year, Ivermectin was the central agent in the FLCCC protocol, for prevention and early treatment. Ivermectin is also part of the hospital level protocols. Very early on [..] Hydroxychloroquine was present in the protocol, but it was dropped mid-2020. This non-inclusion of Hydroxychloroquine appears to have been in part due to the bad publicity that Hydroxychloroquine was suffering from, as it was targeted by the mainstream media, especially in relation to the presidential campaign in the US – something that we covered extensively.


This January 19 2021, it’s therefore a bit of a surprise to see Hydroxychloroquine to re-appear in the FLCCC prevention and early treatment protocol. The move follows the experience of several frontline doctors who found that Hydroxychloroquine is particularly useful to deal with Omicron, in combination with Ivermectin and other agents, as indicated in the protocol. So, we see with this move a further alleviation of the rift that previously existed, and that had already nearly disappeared, among frontline doctors regarding the nature of the most appropriate agents to be included in early treatment protocols for COVID-19.

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But not really.

France To Lift Covid-19 Restrictions In February (Pol.eu)

French Prime Minister Jean Castex announced Thursday that the government will lift most of its COVID-19 restrictions in February, although the need for a vaccine pass and indoor mask-wearing will remain. The vaccine pass will come into effect on Monday, Castex said at a press conference. People will no longer be allowed to show a negative test to enter restaurants, bars, theaters, museums and stadiums or travel on trains — only proof of vaccination will be accepted. Starting February 2, stadiums, arenas and other large-capacity venues will be allowed to operate at full capacity again. Homeworking obligations will be lifted, though it will still be encouraged, and masks will no longer be required outdoors, as is currently the case in many cities.


On February 16, people will be allowed to eat and drink in stadiums, cinemas and on transport, as well as being allowed to drink while standing in bars. Nightclubs will be allowed to reopen, though the government was unable to specify whether masks would be required. France has had an average of 320,000 COVID-19 cases each day over the past week, an ever-rising number. But Castex said that of the two simultaneous waves hitting the country — of the Delta and Omicron variants — the former was receding, while the latter was starting to fall in the first regions where it appeared, including in Paris. “We are unquestionably in a new phase of the epidemic,” said the prime minister.

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“It is difficult to find people in Russia who would dream of a life like the one in Ukraine now,” he stated. “It is impossible to envy it.”

Top Russian Senator Blasts American’s ‘Amazing Stupidity’

American analysts following Russia and the former Soviet Union repeatedly fail to understand the mentality of people living in the world’s largest country, one of Moscow’s leading senators has raged as experts weigh in on events happening along the border with Ukraine. Taking to Telegram on Thursday, Alexey Pushkov poured scorn on a statement put forward by Michael McFaul, a well-known “Russia watcher” and Stanford professor who previously served as Washington’s ambassador to Russia during President Barack Obama’s era. McFaul’s tweet read that “Ukrainian democracy today, not Ukrainian membership in NATO in some distant future, is the real threat to [Russian President Vladimir] Putin.” Similar remarks have been made by the notoriously anti-Russian academic in recent weeks.


The exchange comes as Moscow aims to seek guarantees from NATO that Ukraine’s long-term ambitions to join the US-led military bloc will not be granted. Hitting out at McFaul’s words, Pushkov blasted the “amazing stupidity of this thesis,” which he insisted is “repeated over and over again in the United States by pseudo-experts on Russia.” It says only one thing, the senator claimed – “they know nothing about the attitude of the vast majority of Russian citizens to what is happening in Ukraine and do not want to know.” He accused Western experts of living “in their false ideologies, where it is comfortable and convenient for them.” “It is difficult to find people in Russia who would dream of a life like the one in Ukraine now,” he stated. “It is impossible to envy it.”

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“While the U.K. scrambles to deliver tanks, rocket artillery and other weaponry to the Ukrainians, Germany has refused to send even rifles.”

Germany’s Pivot From America (Pol.eu)

Over the past decade, the idea that Germany could no longer fully rely on the U.S. for security amid America’s “pivot” to Asia became accepted wisdom among German leaders. The unfolding crisis in Ukraine reveals that reality cuts both ways. Germany’s allies hoped Olaf Scholz’s coalition, which includes the Russia-critical Greens, would back away from the accommodative policies toward Moscow that marked the Angela Merkel era. Recent days have shown such optimism to be misplaced. As Washington has tried to present a united Western front against Russian intimidation in recent weeks, Germany has been a conspicuous outlier. Under the influence of a potent cocktail of energy and commercial interests, and a political culture laced with good old-fashioned anti-Americanism, Germany has strayed from the Western fold.

To outward appearances, Berlin is far from AWOL on Ukraine. “After years of rising tensions, staying silent isn’t a sensible option,” Chancellor Scholz said on Wednesday in reference to Russia’s amassing of troops on the Ukrainian border, stressing that Germany was committed to Ukraine’s territorial integrity. “It’s hard not to see this as a threat,” Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said of the border buildup on a trip to Moscow this week. But when the cameras are turned off, Germany’s tone changes. While the U.K. scrambles to deliver tanks, rocket artillery and other weaponry to the Ukrainians, Germany has refused to send even rifles. And instead of locking arms with the U.S. and other transatlantic allies to help Ukraine prepare for an attack, Germany has sought to placate Russia by taking some of the West’s most powerful deterrents off the table.

As the crisis has intensified, German officials and politicians have strenuously opposed using the threat of suspending Russia from SWIFT, the Belgium-based international payments system, a step that would make it extremely difficult for Russian entities to engage in international commerce. Even Germany’s conservative opposition cautioned against using SWIFT as a bargaining chip. Friedrich Merz, leader of the center-right Christian Democrats, said suspending Russia’s access to the network would be the financial market equivalent of dropping an “atomic bomb.”

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Very thorough from Aaron Maté. Durham is not sitting still, but he faces a lot of resistance.

Durham vs. Horowitz (Maté)

As he documents the role of Hillary Clinton’s campaign in generating false allegations of Trump-Russia collusion, Special Counsel John Durham has also previewed a challenge to the FBI’s claims about how and why its counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign began. At stake is the completeness of the official reckoning within the U.S. government over the Russiagate scandal – and whether there will be an accounting commensurate with the offense: the abuse of the nation’s highest law enforcement and intelligence powers to damage an opposition presidential candidate turned president, at the behest of his opponent from the governing party he defeated.

The drama is playing out against the clashing approaches of the two Justice Department officials tasked with scrutinizing the Russia probe’s origins and unearthing any misconduct: Durham, the Sphinx-like prosecutor with a reputation for toughness whose work continues; and Michael Horowitz, the Department of Justice inspector general, whose December 2019 report faulted the FBI’s handling of the Russia probe but nonetheless concluded that it was launched in good faith. The bureau’s defenders point to Horowitz’s report to argue that the FBI’s Trump-Russia conspiracy investigation, codenamed Crossfire Hurricane, is untainted despite its extensive use of the discredited Clinton-funded Steele dossier. Though highly critical of the bureau’s use of Christopher Steele’s reports, Horowitz concluded that they “played no role in the Crossfire Hurricane opening,” which he said had met the department’s “low threshold” for opening an investigation.

But Durham has made plain his dissent. In response to Horowitz’s report, the special counsel announced that his office had “advised the Inspector General that we do not agree with some of the report’s conclusions as to predication and how the FBI case was opened.” Durham stressed that, unlike Horowitz, his “investigation is not limited to developing information from within component parts of the Justice Department” and has instead obtained “information from other persons and entities, both in the U.S. and outside of the U.S.”

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From Russiagate to 1/6 was a smooth transition.

Congress’s 1/6 Committee Claims Absolute Power (Greenwald)

In its ongoing attempt to investigate and gather information about private U.S. citizens, the Congressional 1/6 Committee is claiming virtually absolute powers that not even the FBI or other law enforcement agencies enjoy. Indeed, lawyers for the committee have been explicitly arguing that nothing proscribes or limits their authority to obtain data regarding whichever citizens they target and, even more radically, that the checks imposed on the FBI (such as the requirement to obtain judicial authorization for secret subpoenas) do not apply to the committee. As we have previously reported and as civil liberties groups have warned, there are serious constitutional doubts about the existence of the committee itself.

Under the Constitution and McCarthy-era Supreme Court cases interpreting it, the power to investigate crimes lies with the executive branch, supervised by the judiciary, and not with Congress. Congress does have the power to conduct investigations, but that power is limited to two narrow categories: 1) when doing so is designed to assist in its law-making duties (e.g., directing executives of oil companies to testify when considering new environmental laws) and 2) in order to exert oversight over the executive branch. What Congress is barred from doing, as two McCarthy-era Supreme Court cases ruled, is exactly what the 1/6 committee is now doing: conducting a separate, parallel criminal investigation in order to uncover political crimes committed by private citizens.

Such powers are dangerous precisely because Congress’s investigative powers are not subject to the same safeguards as the FBI and other law enforcement agencies. And just as was true of the 1950s House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) that prompted those Supreme Court rulings, the 1/6 committee is not confining its invasive investigative activities to executive branch officials or even citizens who engaged in violence or other illegality on January 6, but instead is investigating anyone and everyone who exercised their Constitutional rights to express views about and organize protests over their belief that the 2020 presidential election contained fraud.

Indeed, the committee’s initial targets appear to be taken from the list of those who applied for protest permits in Washington: a perfectly legal, indeed constitutionally protected, act. This abuse of power is not merely abstract. The Congressional 1/6 Committee has been secretly obtaining private information about American citizens en masse: telephone records, email logs, internet and browsing history, and banking transactions. And it has done so without any limitations or safeguards: no judicial oversight, no need for warrants, no legal limitations of any kind.

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“..losses in the U.S. alone may reach $35 trillion.”

Jeremy Grantham Doubles Down on Crash Call, Says Selloff Has Started (BBG)

Jeremy Grantham, the famed investor who for decades has been calling market bubbles, said the historic collapse in stocks he predicted a year ago is underway and even intervention by the Federal Reserve can’t prevent an eventual plunge of almost 50%. In a note posted Thursday, Grantham, the co-founder of Boston asset manager GMO, describes U.S. stocks as being in a “super bubble,” only the fourth of the past century. And just as they did in the crash of 1929, the dot-com bust of 2000 and the financial crisis of 2008, he’s certain this bubble will burst, sending indexes back to statistical norms and possibly further. That, he said, involves the S&P 500 dropping some 45% from Wednesday’s close — and 48% from its Jan. 4 peak — to a level of 2500. The Nasdaq Composite, already down 8.3% this month, may sustain an even bigger correction.

“I wasn’t quite as certain about this bubble a year ago as I had been about the tech bubble of 2000, or as I had been in Japan, or as I had been in the housing bubble of 2007,” Grantham said in a Bloomberg “Front Row” interview. “I felt highly likely, but perhaps not nearly certain. Today, I feel it is just about nearly certain.” In Grantham’s analysis, the evidence is abundant. The first sign of trouble he points to came last February, when dozens of the most speculative stocks began falling. One proxy, Cathie Wood’s Ark Innovation ETF, has since tumbled by 52%. Next, the Russell 2000, an index of mid-cap equities that typically outperforms in a bull market, trailed the S&P 500 in 2021.

Finally, there was what Grantham calls the kind of “crazy investor behavior” indicative of a late-stage bubble: meme stocks, a buying frenzy in electric-vehicle names, the rise of nonsensical cryptocurrencies such a dogecoin and multimillion-dollar prices for non-fungible tokens, or NFTs. “This checklist for a super bubble running through its phases is now complete and the wild rumpus can begin at any time,” Grantham, 83, writes in his note. “When pessimism returns to markets, we face the largest potential markdown of perceived wealth in U.S. history.” It could, he said, rival the impact of the dual collapse of Japanese stocks and real estate in the late 1980s. Not only are equities in a super bubble, according to Grantham there’s also a bubble in bonds, “the broadest and most extreme” bubble ever in global real estate and an “incipient bubble” in commodity prices. Even without a full reversion back to statistical trends, he calculates that losses in the U.S. alone may reach $35 trillion.

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Oct 192021
 


René Magritte The song of love 1948

 

 

Just this morning, Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Bulgaria, Czechia, UK and New Zealand announced record or near-record numbers of positive Covid numbers and/or deaths. Yes, here we go again. Sadly, all of it is completely preventable, and all of us choose to not prevent it, because most have never been told this. Once again, an overview.

 

 

In the UK, a report came out last week about the country’s Covid approach, written by politicians, from the government’s own party nonetheless. It’s titled “Coronavirus: Lessons learned to date”, which is kind of ironic, because the one thing WE learn, at least from the press coverage of it, is that not a single lesson has been learned. BBC:

Covid: UK’s Early Response Worst Public Health Failure Ever

The 150-page document, “Coronavirus: Lessons learned to date”, is from the Health and Social Care Committee and the Science and Technology Committee, and MPs from all parties.


[..] Conservative MPs Jeremy Hunt and Greg Clark, who chair the committees, said the nature of the pandemic meant it was “impossible to get everything right”. “The UK has combined some big achievements with some big mistakes. It is vital to learn from both,” they said. Cabinet Office minister Stephen Barclay said scientific advice had been followed and the government had made “difficult judgements” to protect the NHS. He said the government took responsibility for everything that happened – saying the government would not shy away from any lessons to be learned at the full statutory public inquiry, expected next year.

What were those big mistakes, according to those 150 pages? These:

[..] the UK was not as open to different approaches on earlier lockdowns, border controls and test and trace as it should have been.

And the “big achievements”?

But their report highlighted successes too, including the vaccination rollout. It described the approach to vaccination – from the research and development through to the rollout of the jabs – as “one of the most effective initiatives in UK history”.

I kid you not, the biggest mistakes these politicians could come up with was that the UK should have locked down, shut its borders and start testing and tracing healthy people earlier. That’s it. But none of those come close to being the biggest mistakes. And that after 20 months they all still don’t appear to understand that is a sad, saddening and deadly “mistake” all by itself.

The real biggest mistake is the complete denial, and ignoring, of the crucial role prophylactics and early treatment could and should have played. And since neither plays such a role even today, yes, it will continue to be very deadly. The pharmaceutical industry prevents the use of -most- pharmaceuticals, and allows only the use of some of the newest and -therefore- most profitable ones. The promised “full statutory public inquiry” won’t change that.

 

But first, let’s look at the “big achievements”. Vaccination, “one of the most effective initiatives in UK history”, has resulted in the following picture:

 

“Cases” are, let’s say, “stubbornly high” again (they average about 45,000 recently, and on Monday reached almost 50,000):

 

Hospitalizations are high too, compared to other countries. Which is odd, since the vaccines were supposed to stop severe cases in every country, we were told. After the claims that they stop infection and transmission became untenable:

 

Deaths appear to have normalized a little more in the UK, but what’s worrisome in this graph is the “Other excess deaths”. What are they? Are they vaccine deaths? Hard not to think they may very well be. But also hard to know because information on this is so scarce. In any case, they appear to outnumber Covid deaths. Which is no surprise, but still “good” to see in a graph:

 

 

 

The UK is presently about 65% vaccinated, according to Our World In Data, after “one of the most effective initiatives in UK history”. 65%? How effective have other “initiatives” been? On the bright side, the unvaccinated 35% may well turn out to be the lucky ones.

 

But why were (and are) the “big mistakes” made? A clue is that lockdowns, closed borders, test and trace, and facemasks, are all non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI’s). Any and all things pharmaceutical have been ignored from the get go. And not just ignored: there have even been – and still are- extensive coordinated campaigns against ivermectin (IVM), hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), and recently even aspirin.

Never has there been any advice for people to boost their vit. C and D levels, or zinc and quercetin. Aspirin and melatonin are never mentioned. Still, it’s widely known that these substances can provide protection from Covid in their various ways. So how can it be that all those highly paid medical experts and scientists that advise their governments never seem to talk about them?

Perhaps you need to look at how the field is laid out. The pharmaceutical industry has the by far largest lobbying departments in the world (and you thought it was Big Oil). In Washington alone there are hundreds of lobbyists working for Big Pharma. Who not only support the politicians’ election campaigns, they also pay huge amounts to the same medical experts that advise the same politicians. Moreover, lobbyists often even write the laws for the politicians, who are not experts. Sort of a symbiotic relationship, if you will.

 

The problem that I have with this, and these people apparently don’t, is that this has cost enormous amounts of suffering and deaths. For no apparent reason at all. The UK, and any other -western- country, could have promoted vitamin D -and C-, plus zinc and quercetin, and added on ivermectin and/or HCQ, perhaps doxycycline, and only a fraction of the present victims would have died and/or been incapacitated.

And this is not a story about the past either: it continues to this day. There are no protocols for protecting people, and none for early treatment. It’s still: go home and wait till you get so sick you need a ventilator. What doctor signs up for that? Well, most of them do. Screw Hippocrates. 95% of the deaths and misery could have been prevented with cheap, available, run-of-the-mill pharmaceuticals. And your doctors refused to provide them for you.

We’ve all seen the horse dewormer campaign against ivermectin that especially outlets like CNN, and even Rolling Stone, have put so much energy in recently. But the real story of IVM is completely different. Here are a few countries and states, and their experiences with it.

 

 

 

Puerto Rico:

 

Uttar Pradesh:

 

Tokyo:

 

And Indonesia:


Indonesia ramped up ivermectin production and the government assured national distribution and fair prices. IVM is considered by the government a COVID medicine.

 

 

Good thing we didn’t take that horse dewormer. We were smart, we listened to “The Science”, and spend billions on vaccines. It’s too early to oversee the harm these substances have done and will do, and there’s a lot of pressure not to make it public, but we can get an idea from two countries that were initially spared much of what we experienced. They were genuine Covid success stories, like New Zealand was. Until they started vaccinating. Here’s Taiwan and Singapore.

 

Taiwan:

 

And here is Singapore, bit of a strange graph because the timeline is split in two, but obvious enough:

 

And now we’re sitting here without ivermectin, because it’s been banned in many places, but with increasing pressure to get jabbed with substances that look very suspect. And increasingly without the freedom to choose what we think is best for us and our families.

But you can still choose to boost your immune system with vitamin D, without which it can’t properly function, and vitamin C. Be careful with zinc, but do consider it; it keeps the virus out of your cells. And it works better with quercetin. And do tell your doctor that you would like a prescription for ivermectin -if only to see the reaction- or HCQ. Ask about melatonin. Get some low dose aspirin. Inform yourself.

Since I am not a doctor (I just listen to them a lot), let me close with an old favorite I haven’t used in a long time: This information is for entertainment purposes only.

PS: Oh, and no, these things are not mistakes. Mistakes are not deliberate.

 

 

 

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Sep 172021
 


Thomas Cole The Course of Empire – The Consummation of Empire 1836

 

 

First of all, if you live in a place where politicians and experts have, after 20 months into Covid, still not propagated and executed policies aimed at prophylaxis (prevention) and early treatment, get rid of these people ASAP or move away to an area that does have these policies.

Yes, I know, it might be easier to get rid of them, because there are no areas to move to that do early care. Do it. All anyone appears to do is lock people down and put garments in front of their faces. But that has now cost too many lives, and it has to stop. The other thing all of them do, of course, is try to “vaccinate” everyone. That, too, has to stop, and for the same reason: it kills too many people.

After 20 months of reading into the topic for hours every single day, if there’s one thing I’m convinced of, it’s that a simple sufficient daily intake of vitamin D, zinc and ivermectin or chloroquine (and you can “fancy that up”, check the site below) would have stopped, and still can stop, at least 70% of cases. Ergo: no more overwhelmed heath care, no more lockdowns, no more economic damage. We could, should, have done this 20 months ago. get rid of them.

And then if someone does get sick -immune systems can be heavily compromised, for instance in obese people-, there are protocols aplenty for early treatment. There are entire series of them at c19early.com. 90% of deaths have been entirely preventable. And 90% of those in the future, will be, too. But not for the same reason.

The reason these treatments are being kept from you is that they would destroy the legal basis on which the vaccines operate. But that would be a good thing, because these substances have started to make a lot of victims, killing people or maiming them, and it is enough. It is also what I am afraid of, that those numbers will absolutely skyrocket.

Repeat: The vaccines do not protect you from infecting others or being infected, or from severe disease or death (though that last bit takes time to sink in). They MAY have some effect for a few months, but then their effect starts waning, and you will need more of the same. In the meantime, they appear to enhance the infectiousness of the vaccinated. Who are given vaccine passports and QR codes, for heaven’s sake, so they can go infect more people.

 

The problem is that you are not allowed to know about any of this. But the next problem is they will not be able to hide that fact, for much longer, that the vaccines are killing machines. For now, vaccine deaths are all hidden in Covid death numbers, especially the “Delta cases”, a very convenient grab bag, if not for the fact that Delta was supposed to be a much milder variant than Alpha. And wouldn’t you know, there’s plenty tricks to list vaccinated deaths as unvaccinated.

Was that supposition so far off the mark, or is something else going on? The decrepit adverse reaction tracking systems like VAERS and MHRA already name 10s of 1000s of vaccine deaths and millions of other reactions while tracking 1-10% of cases. We’ve reported numbers into the 100s of 1000s of deaths.

 

Let’s start with Dr. McCullough: “We are very certain about this, the vaccine is directly killing individuals”.

 

Then move on to Gato Malo and his graph from Israel booster (third) shots. Still find that graph scary as hell.

 

 

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

What the graph appears to show is that the third shot -perhaps after some time has passed- has a much more lethal effect than the first two. Which would make sense, since you’re loading up your body with huge amounts of spike proteins -trillions of them-, and at some point your immune system will just give up.

The time between 2nd and 3rd shot may be a factor in that the body has had time to form a lot of antibodies -or the potential to create them fast-, which can then help the spike attack your cells by binding to them. And that in turn is a great recommendation for ivermectin -and probably HCQ-, even that late in the game, because it prevents that binding.

Mind you, the VAERS deaths and paralyzations etc. so far are all after 1 or 2 shots.

 

It all looks like an inevitable sequence of events to me. We had a Twitter thread from Walter Chesnut yesterday, The Spike Will Not Be Found In The Blood. It Travels “Incognito”, that said “The amount of spike protein in cells continues to increase for up to 30 min..”, which is insanely long in virustime, and “..the S1 unit has been found in monocytes 15 months post infection.., which is even more insane.

Once you have put that stuff in your body, there’s no getting rid of it anymore. The only thing you can do, once the effect starts waning (probably after 2-3 months), is to do more of the same, putting your body under ever more stress and ever more risk. And then by shot 5 or 8 or whatever, depending on your health, your body gives up no matter what. I said yesterday:

“100s of millions have been “vaccinated”. If just 1 in 1000 (0.1%) become victims, that means 100s of 1000s. I think it will be close to if not more than 1%, 10 times more. I’m so scared, I can’t find the words to write about this.”

And that’s how I still feel. The last few days have scared the heebees out of me, even if we knew something like this might start to happen. It’s here, and they’re still trying to force you to take these things. I called it Russian Roulette a while back, but it’s worse than that.

Listen to this undertaker from Milton Keynes, who is sure almost all Covid deaths coming in now are vaccine deaths (disguised as Delta), and then tell me I’m afraid of nothing:

 

 

 

 

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Jul 082021
 


Paul Gauguin Why are you angry? 1896

 

Early Covid-19 Therapy With Azithromycin+Nitazoxanide, Ivermectin Or HCQ (SD)
Oh Look, Fraud In Medicine! (Denninger)
WHO Recommends Life-Saving Interleukin-6 Receptor Blockers For Covid-19 (WHO)
California ‘Epsilon’ Covid Variant Contains Three Mutations (DM)
The Nasty Trade-Off (Denninger)
New Zealand Children Falling Ill In High Numbers Due To ‘Immunity Debt’ (G.)
Why Won’t The Lancet Admit It Was Wrong? (Unherd)
Science, Not Speculation, Essential To Find How SARS-CoV-2 Reached Us (Lancet)
The Chinese Miracle, Revisited (Escobar)
Majority Do Not Believe Biden Mentally Capable Of Executing Presidential Duties
Workers Are Funding The War On Themselves (DP)
Pressure Builds For Julian Assange To Be Released (ES)

 

 

I assure you, if it requires coercion, manipulation, gaslighting, 24/7 advertising, fear-mongering, silencing of dissenting opinions and experts, slandering of alternative options, tons of incentives, and indemnification from liability, then it isn’t required for health.

 

 

 

 

It’s safe
https://twitter.com/i/status/1412928096483745793

 

 

Note: Goldman puts this down to vaccinations (what do they know, they’re bankers). How about it’s because Delta is more transmissible and also much less dangerous?

 

 

“For every 1,000 confirmed cases for COVID-19, at least 140 hospitalizations, 50 mechanical ventilations and 5 deaths were prevented with treatment.”

US 34 million cases, 621,000 deaths. Ergo: at 5 deaths per 1000 prevented, this alone could have saved 170,000 lives.

Early Covid-19 Therapy With Azithromycin+Nitazoxanide, Ivermectin Or HCQ (SD)

In a prospective observational study (pre-AndroCoV Trial), the use of nitazoxanide, ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine demonstrated unexpected improvements in COVID-19 outcomes, when compared to untreated patients. The apparent yet likely positive results raised ethical concerns on the employment of further full placebo84 controlled studies in early stage COVID-19. The present analysis aimed to elucidate whether full placebo-control randomized clinical trials (RCTs) on early-stage COVID-19 are still ethically acceptable, through a comparative analysis with two control87 groups.


Active group (AG) consisted of patients enrolled in the Pre AndroCoV-Trial (n = 585). Control Group 1 (CG1) consisted of a retrospectively obtained group of untreated patients of the same population (n = 137), and Control Group 2 (CG2) resulted from a precise prediction of clinical outcomes based on a thorough and structured review of indexed articles and official statements. Patients were matched for sex, age, comorbidities and disease severity at baseline. Compared to CG1 and CG2 AG showed reduction of 31.5-36.5% in viral shedding (p < 0.0001), 70-85% in disease duration (p < 0.0001), and 100% in respiratory complications, hospitalization, mechanical ventilations, and deaths (p < 0.0001 for all).

For every 1,000 confirmed cases for COVID-19, at least 70 hospitalizations, 50 mechanical ventilations and five deaths were prevented. Benefits from the combination of early COVID-19 detection and early pharmacological approaches were consistent and overwhelming when compared to untreated groups, which, together with and well-established safety profile of the drug combinations tested in the Pre-AndroCoV Trial, precluded our study to continue employing full placebo in early COVID-19.

Read more …

“..let’s assume the 600,000 figure is accurate as the “base” across the country. If it’s 22% that’s 132,000 people who did not actually die of Covid-19.”

That’s 170,000 -see above- that need not have died from Covid, plus 130,000 that did not die from it. Roughly half of all US deaths right there.

Oh Look, Fraud In Medicine! (Denninger)

When you pay people to do something without proof the event occurred the outcome is simple: You get institutionalized, mass-fraud. Remember, this is from official “fact checking” sites: “We rate the claim that hospitals get paid more if patients are listed as COVID-19 and on ventilators as TRUE.” Hospitals and doctors do get paid more for Medicare patients diagnosed with COVID-19 or if it’s considered presumed they have COVID-19 absent a laboratory-confirmed test, and three times more if the patients are placed on a ventilator to cover the cost of care and loss of business resulting from a shift in focus to treat COVID-19 cases. Of course USA Today said that there was no evidence that hospitals would game this.

Except…. now there is evidence that not only did they game it, they committed mass-fraud in that they got paid for Covid-19 cases that never existed and deaths that were not Covid-19 caused. “A county in northern California announced last week that it revised the method in how it registered coronavirus deaths that led to a 22% drop in its death toll, a report said.” 22% eh? This is the second one, by the way. Alameda county did the same thing; their drop was 25%. So around 1/4 of all alleged “Covid-19” deaths, if this is representative (and it probably is) weren’t actually Covid-19 related at all. But the hospitals all got paid for them as if they were, and exactly zero of that money will be recovered — right? How much is that?

Well, let’s assume the 600,000 figure is accurate as the “base” across the country. If it’s 22% that’s 132,000 people who did not actually die of Covid-19. More to the point if none of them had ventilators used, and of course we know many of them did, the medical providers BILKED you and I, as we fund the government, out of some $1.716 BILLION in payments and, if half of them were put on vents that figure more than doubles.

Oh, and wait…. what does that do to the claimed “excess death”? I do recall writing an article or three on that in which it was quite clear that in fact uncorrelated data sets, that is, Social Security and the labor numbers, made clear that while there was excess death it was nowhere near what the government and CDC had claimed. Yes, “excess” people died, but many were pulled forward by six months to a year, mostly in nursing homes where 53% of those admitted die within six months. Note that this statistic is from 2010 which means that statistically-speaking those in nursing homes that Covid-19 “got” were highly-likely to have been dead from something within six months anyway. Said deaths were not “excess.”

All death is sad but falsely coding a gunshot or motorcycle wreck victim as Covid-19 in order to grab an extra $19,000 from the taxpayer is fraud, and inflating such statistics to inculcate fear ought to generate decades-long prison terms. We now have hard proof that in fact both happened in size and were not rare. WHERE ARE THE HANDCUFFS AND WHY DON’T JOE-N-HO SEND THEIR TEAMS AROUND TO GO “DOOR TO DOOR” LOCKING UP EVERY HOSPITAL ADMINISTRATOR AND CLINICIAN WHO DID THIS?

Read more …

Hydroxychloroquine is an excellent Interleukin-6 receptor blocker. But there’s no profit in it. So we must re-invent it.

WHO Recommends Life-Saving Interleukin-6 Receptor Blockers For Covid-19 (WHO)

The World Health Organization (WHO) has updated its patient care guidelines to include interleukin-6 receptor blockers, a class of medicines that are lifesaving in patients who are severely or critically ill with COVID-19, especially when administered alongside corticosteroids. These were the findings from a prospective and a living network meta-analysis initiated by WHO, the largest such analysis on the drugs to date. Data from over 10 000 patients enrolled in 27 clinical trials were considered. These are the first drugs found to be effective against COVID-19 since corticosteroids were recommended by WHO in September 2020.

Patients severely or critically ill with COVID-19 often suffer from an overreaction of the immune system, which can be very harmful to the patient’s health. Interleukin-6 blocking drugs – tocilizumab and sarilumab – act to suppress this overreaction. The prospective and living network meta-analyses showed that in severely or critically ill patients, administering these drugs reduce the odds of death by 13%, compared to standard care. This means that there will be 15 fewer deaths per thousand patients, and as many as 28 fewer deaths for every thousand critically ill patients. The odds of mechanical ventilation among severe and critical patients are reduced by 28%, compared with standard care. This translates to 23 fewer patients out of a thousand needing mechanical ventilation.

Clinical trial investigators in 28 countries shared data with WHO, including pre-publication data. Researchers worldwide compiled and analyzed the data. With the support of these critical partnerships, WHO has been able to issue a rapid and trustworthy recommendation for the use of interleukin-6 receptor blockers in severe and critical COVID-19 patients. “These drugs offer hope for patients and families who are suffering from the devastating impact of severe and critical COVID-19. But IL-6 receptor blockers remain inaccessible and unaffordable for the majority of the world,” said WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

Read more …

Catch up on your Greek alphabet, it’ll come in handy.

California ‘Epsilon’ Covid Variant Contains Three Mutations (DM)

Fully vaccinated people may still be at risk of infection from the California ‘Epsilon’ coronavirus variant, a new study finds. Researchers from the University of Washington and Vir Biotechnology, based in San Francisco, found that the variant had three mutations on the spike protein, which the virus uses to enter and infect human cells. These mutations could provide resistance to neutralizing antibodies generated by the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines.
What’s more, the mutations may be able to evade natural antibodies a person forms after being infected with the virus. Health experts say neutralizing antibodies are what protect people from the virus, and the variant’s ability to resist them could leave people in danger. The Epsilon variant is not believed to be more infectious than the original virus, though.

The Epsilon variant was first identified in May 2020 and was virtually nonexistent until October. It would later split into two separate versions, the B.1.427 and the more common B.1.429 mutation. It has remained a relatively quiet variant of the virus outside of California, not causing an outbreak similar to the Indian ‘Delta’ variant. Epsilon still managed to find its way into at least 44 countries, though 97 percent of the 49,221 cases worldwide have been recorded in the U.S. Of the 47,987 cases recorded in the U.S., more than 22,000 have been detected in California. Hawaii and Nevada also dealt with smaller outbreaks of the B.1.429 mutation of the virus. Researchers, who published their data in the journal Science on July 1, found that both types of the variant had the ability to evade the neutralizing antibodies found in the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, which use messenger RNA (mRNA) technology.

Effectiveness of the neutralizing antibodies was reduced by 50 to 70 percent. They also found that neutralizing activity was reduced in 14 of 34 of the antibodies responsible for it. The data is worrying, and is an early sign that the current crop of COVID-19 vaccines may not be enough to permanently protect from the virus. Experts have long believed that a third ‘booster shot’ of the mRNA vaccines – produced by Pfizer and Moderna – would be needed in the future to protect from variants. Both companies have launched clinical trials for a booster shot as well.

Read more …

“If you refuse the “booster” you are at much higher risk of getting sick and dying. If you take the booster you are at much higher risk of the booster making you sick or killing you.”

The Nasty Trade-Off (Denninger)

All viruses mutate over time. All non-sterilizing vaccines potentiate mutation because they prohibit neither infection or transmission — they only suppress the severity of disease. We’ve known this for decades and in fact we know this is why Marek’s disease happened in poultry. Of course we ignored all of this because, well, Warp Speed. We now see evidence of more transmissible variation coming to the forefront. This is the natural evolution of a virus; the more-transmissible variant “wins”; the less loses. Whichever gets the person who can contract it (vaccinated or not, if the vaccine is non-sterilizing) that’s the variant that “wins” and gets to infect someone else. What isn’t yet solidly in evidence is whether those mutations have rendered the stabs effectively worthless.

But what’s bad news whether they are or aren’t is that if the spike protein, which we know is pathogenic, has ‘greater’ binding affinity and thus you want a “booster” to fight it said booster will also have a higher risk of causing nasty adverse effects because it is the spike that causes the problem and if it binds more in the virus so will the version of it used for the “booster.” In other words on the evidence you would expect a variation that produces more transmission to also produce more-serious adverse reactions from jabs that are designed to “protect” against it, all other things being equal. Now add to this that as titers wane you may have no choice if you took the original stabs because as that happens you may wind up with plenty of binding antibodies (which enhance the infection) but not enough neutralizing ones.

If you refuse the “booster” you are at much higher risk of getting sick and dying. If you take the booster you are at much higher risk of the booster making you sick or killing you. Meanwhile those who refused originally sneeze when infected, especially if they employ immediate countermeasures using existing drugs. Yeah, it’ll get some of those folks — but probably not all that many, as the “easy to kill” are already dead from the previous round. That sucks. Is this yet in evidence? No, because thus far boosters don’t exist. But it is exactly what I expect to happen.

Read more …

When a new and dangerous disease appears, what do you do? Why, you weaken the immune system of course! It may take a while, but after the first whole year you should definitely see the first results.

New Zealand Children Falling Ill In High Numbers Due To ‘Immunity Debt’ (G.)

New Zealand hospitals are experiencing the payoff of “immunity debt” created by Covid-19 lockdowns, with wards flooded by babies with a potentially-deadly respiratory virus, doctors have warned. Wellington has 46 children currently hospitalised for respiratory illnesses including respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV. A number are infants, and many are on oxygen. Other hospitals are also experiencing a rise in cases that are straining their resources – with some delaying surgeries or converting playrooms into clinical space. RSV is a common respiratory illness. In adults, it generally only produces very mild symptoms – but it can make young children extremely ill, or even be fatal.

The size and seriousness of New Zealand’s outbreak is likely being fed by what some paediatric doctors have called an “immunity debt” – where people don’t develop immunity to other viruses suppressed by Covid lockdowns, causing cases to explode down the line. Epidemiologist and public health professor Michael Baker used the metaphor of forest brushfires: if a year or two have passed without fire, there is more fuel on the ground to feed the flames. When a fire finally comes, it burns much more fiercely. “What we’re seeing now is we’ve accumulated a whole lot of susceptible children that have missed out on exposure – so now they’re seeing it for the first time,” Baker said.

The “immunity debt” phenomenon occurs because measures like lockdowns, hand-washing, social distancing and masks are not only effective at controlling Covid-19. They also suppress the spread of other illnesses that transmit in a similar way, including the flu, common cold, and lesser-known respiratory illnesses like RSA. In New Zealand, lockdowns last winter led to a 99.9% reduction in flu cases and a 98% reduction in RSV – and near-eliminated the spike of excess deaths New Zealand usually experiences during winter. “This positive collateral effect in the short term is welcome, as it prevents additional overload of the healthcare system,” a collective of French doctors wrote in a May 2021 study of immunity debt.

But in the long term, it can create problems of its own: if bacterial and viral infections aren’t circulating among children, they don’t develop immunity, which leads to larger outbreaks down the line. “The lack of immune stimulation… induced an “immunity debt” which could have negative consequences when the pandemic is under control and [public health intervientions] are lifted,” the doctors wrote. “The longer these periods of ‘viral or bacterial low-exposure’ are, the greater the likelihood of future epidemics.”

Read more …

Because they’re in bed with Daszak and Fauci.

Why Won’t The Lancet Admit It Was Wrong? (Unherd)

Someone needs to tell The Lancet the most basic tenet of crisis management: when in a hole, stop digging. Instead, this world-renowned medical journal seems determined to keep shredding its reputation, in tandem with a group of experts ignorant to the damage they have caused the scientific community as they have stifled debate regarding the pandemic’s origins. Early last year, just as the world was starting to grapple with the trauma of Covid, The Lancet published a highly-controversial statement in support of Chinese scientists, attacking “conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin” and praising Beijing’s “rapid, open and transparent sharing of data”.

Clearly this was absurd given China’s cover-up, silencing of doctors and deletion of key data. But the statement, signed by 27 prominent experts, played a key role in shutting down suggestions the pandemic might have started with a lab incident, rather than spilling over naturally from animals. Scandalously, we later learned it was covertly drafted by British scientist Peter Daszak, £300,000-a-year president of Eco-Health Alliance charity and long-term partner of researchers at Wuhan Institute of Virology. Despite the global furore, Daszak’s gang has gone back into battle with a follow-up statement, as I revealed they were planning to do 10 days ago. Even the headline on The Lancet article — Science, not speculation, is essential to determine how SARS-CoV-2 reached humans — seems designed to gaslight their critics, given their previous stance.

This latest statement is more nuanced but again disingenuous. It claims “the strongest clue” is that the virus evolved in nature, while saying suggestions of a lab leak “remain without scientifically validated evidence”. Yet there is zero firm evidence for natural spillover, and significant circumstantial evidence to raise suspicions of a lab incident. Besides, any leak could have involved a virus sampled from nature. Other scientists, such as Alina Chan from the Broad Institute, have pointed out also that none of the linked articles claiming to support their claims actually provides any evidence of how SARS-CoV-2 might have naturally emerged in Wuhan.

Laughably, the article excuses Daszak’s incredible role in the World Health Organisation mission to probe the origins by saying this was done “as an independent expert in a private capacity” — as though he would have disregarded his personal, professional and financial ties to Wuhan scientists carrying out risky experiments in labs with known safety concerns. The statement even dares argue it is “time to turn down the heat of the rhetoric and turn up the light of scientific inquiry” when no one has been more forceful in pushing the idea that a possible lab leak was “baloney” and a “conspiracy theory” than Daszak.

Once again, regrettably, The Lancet has failed to detail all the conflicts of interest of these signatories such as a trio with recent or current Eco-Health affiliations. It is a shame also to see Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust, and two of his colleagues tarnishing one of science’s finest brands by adding their names again. Yet the most significant aspect of this latest stunt are that three of the more distinguished signatories of the first statement opted not to sign the follow-up. The reason is simple: they symbolise how this debate has shifted in recent months despite the best efforts of Daszak and his allies.

Read more …

Daszak’s lame retort.

Science, Not Speculation, Essential To Find How SARS-CoV-2 Reached Us (Lancet)

On Feb 19, 2020, we, a group of physicians, veterinarians, epidemiologists, virologists, biologists, ecologists, and public health experts from around the world, joined together to express solidarity with our professional colleagues in China.1 Unsubstantiated allegations were being raised about the source of the COVID-19 outbreak and the integrity of our peers who were diligently working to learn more about the newly recognised virus, SARS-CoV-2, while struggling to care for the many patients admitted to hospital with severe illness in Wuhan and elsewhere in China. It was the beginning of a global tragedy, the COVID-19 pandemic. According to WHO, as of July 2, 2021, the pandemic has resulted in 182 101 209 confirmed cases and 3 950 876 deaths, both undoubtedly underestimates of the real toll.

The impact of the pandemic virtually everywhere in the world has been far worse than even these numbers suggest, with unprecedented additional social, cultural, political, and economic consequences that have exposed numerous flaws in our epidemic and pandemic preparedness and in local and global political and economic systems. We have observed escalations of conflicts that pit many parties against one another, including central government versus local government, young versus old, rich versus poor, people of colour versus white people, and health priorities versus the economy. The crisis has highlighted the urgent need to build a better understanding of how science proceeds and the complex, but critical, links science has with health, public health, and politics.

Recently, many of us have individually received inquiries asking whether we still support what we said in early 2020.1 The answer is clear: we reaffirm our expression of solidarity with those in China who confronted the outbreak then, and the many health professionals around the world who have since worked to exhaustion, and at personal risk, in the relentless and continuing battle against this virus. Our respect and gratitude have only grown with time. The second intent of our original Correspondence was to express our working view that SARS-CoV-2 most likely originated in nature and not in a laboratory, on the basis of early genetic analysis of the new virus and well established evidence from previous emerging infectious diseases, including the coronaviruses that cause the common cold as well as the original SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV.

Read more …

No need to fall in love outright, Pepe.

The Chinese Miracle, Revisited (Escobar)

At the start of 2021, before the onset of the Year of the Metal Ox, President Xi Jinping emphasized that “favorable social conditions” should be in place for the CCP centennial celebrations. Oblivious to waves of demonization coming from the West, for Chinese public opinion what matters is whether the CCP delivered. And deliver it did (over 85% popular approval). China controlled Covid-19 in record time; economic growth is back; poverty alleviation was achieved; and the civilization-state became a “moderately prosperous society” – right on schedule for the CCP centennial. Since 1949, the size of the Chinese economy soared by a whopping 189 times. Over the past two decades, China’s GDP grew 11-fold. Since 2010, it more than doubled, from $6 trillion to $15 trillion, and now accounts for 17% of global economic output.

No wonder Western grumbling is irrelevant. Shanghai Capital investment boss Eric Li succinctly describes the governance gap; in the U.S., government changes but not policy. In China, government doesn’t change; policy does. This is the background for the next development stage – where the CCP will in fact double down on its unique hybrid model of “socialism with Chinese characteristics”. The key point is that the Chinese leadership, via non-stop policy adjustments (trial and error, always) has evolved a model of “peaceful rise” – their own terminology – that essentially respects China’s immense historical and cultural experiences. In this case, Chinese exceptionalism means respecting Confucianism – which privileges harmony and abhors conflict – as well as Daoism – which privileges balance – over the boisterous, warring, hegemonic Western model.

This is reflected in major policy adjustments such as the new “dual circulation” drive, which places greater emphasis on the domestic market compared to China as the “factory of the world”. Past and future are totally intertwined in China; what was done in previous dynasties echoes in the future. The best contemporary example is the New Silk Roads, or Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) – the overarching Chinese foreign policy concept for the foreseeable future. As detailed by Renmin University Professor Wang Yiwei, BRI is about to reshape geopolitics, “bringing Eurasia back to its historical place at the center of human civilization.” Wang has shown how “the two great civilizations of the East and the West were linked until the rise of the Ottoman Empire cut off the Ancient Silk Road”.

Read more …

“.. probably couldn’t find his way home after dark.”

Majority Do Not Believe Biden Mentally Capable Of Executing Presidential Duties

A survey conducted by the Convention of States Action in partnership with The Trafalgar Group has found that an overall majority of Americans do not believe that Joe Biden is executing the duties of his office or running policy, and that “others” are doing it in his place. The poll found that 56.5% of American voters do not believe Biden is fully executing the duties of his office, with only 36.4% saying they believe he is directing all policy and agenda. Even close to one third of Democrats (31.7%) said they don’t think Biden is in charge of anything. A whopping 83.6% of Republicans are adamant that Biden isn’t running the show, with 58.4% of Independent voters in agreement.

Mark Meckler, President of Convention of States Action proclaimed that “The American people deserve transparency from the Biden Administration as to the true state of the President’s mental and physical health, and leaders in both parties in Congress need to follow through on this immediately.” “The continued failure to ask hard questions and demand real answers is a disgrace to the foundation of our democracy,” Meckler added. Questions over Biden’s mental health continue to swirl as it is clear he cannot speak for extended periods of time and is often heard asking aides “what am I doing?”

A separate poll by Rasmussen earlier in the year found that 50 percent of Americans are “not confident” Biden is physically and mentally up to the job of being president of the United States. The clear cognitive decline of Biden has caught the attention of foreign media, with Sky News in Australia pointing out earlier this week that Biden “probably couldn’t find his way home after dark.” “Suddenly, the world’s greatest power is in the hands of a slightly dazed bloke who looks like he’s always waking up from heavy anesthesia,” said host Alan Jones.

Alan Jones

Read more …

Pensions and 401(k)’s are the only legit claims on actual money left. Make that “were”.

Workers Are Funding The War On Themselves (DP)

As the private equity industry launches ads to protect its lucrative tax preferences, we should remember that this industry is the unseen man behind the curtain driving many social ills — from high hospital prices to surprise medical bills to nursing home deaths to media layoffs to a housing crisis that has become a human rights emergency. A Businessweek cover put it best: You live in private equity’s world, even if you don’t know it. But a series of new reports remind us that there is another person behind the monocled, mustache-twirling oligarch running the Emerald City’s secret control panel — and that person isn’t a billionaire. It is the faceless pension official in a state capital or city hall who is using workers’ retirement savings to finance the Wall Street takeover of Oz.

In the process, teachers, firefighters, sanitation workers, and other government employees are being fleeced. Their retirement savings are being skimmed by finance industry executives, who are using the cash to lobby for self-enriching tax breaks while waging a class war on everyone else. All that money could end up bankrolling a new round of housing profiteering and infrastructure privatization, using workers’ money to wage a war on workers themselves. [..] In the popular imagination, a pension is known, if at all, as a shitty European hotel, a pool of extra cash that Gordon Gekko tried to pilfer in the Bluestar Airlines deal, or a small bit of subsistence pay that grandpa used to get back in the day, when times were different. But here’s the thing you need to know: Public pensions are a huge business and quite exciting to the world’s richest people in the here and now.

That’s because while fewer and fewer workers today get pension benefits, there is now $5 trillion in public pension systems that have accrued government workers’ retirement savings over decades. That giant pool of capital, overseen by appointees tied to Wall Street-bankrolled politicians, is the fuel behind the finance industry’s conquest of America. Pension money is deferred compensation: Millions of public-sector workers — who are often paid less than their private-sector counterparts — have accepted lower up-front wages in exchange for pension contributions to fund their future retirement benefits. Two decades after pension officials began funneling more of that money into private equity, hedge funds, and real estate, roughly one fifth, or about $1 trillion, of the cash is now in these opaque “alternative” investments.

These investments generate outsized fees for financial firms, bankroll the Wall Street’s political machine, and capitalize the corporations that are pillaging the middle class.

Read more …

But not hard or fast enough.

Pressure Builds For Julian Assange To Be Released (ES)

Pleas for Julian Assange to be freed from prison are being stepped up amid warnings that the WikiLeaks founder is suffering “severe psychological abuse”. The United States administration is appealing against a UK court decision in January not to extradite him, but no date has been set for the hearing, so Mr Assange remains in Belmarsh prison. His legal team said on Wednesday that permission to appeal has been granted by the High Court on a limited basis, allowing only “narrow, technical grounds”. Mr Assange’s fiancee, Stella Moris, said: “Six months ago, Judge Vanessa Baraitser blocked the extradition of my partner, Julian Assange, because consigning him to the US prison system would have amounted to signing his death warrant. That should have been the end of it.

“The case is rotten to the core, and nothing that the US government can say about his future treatment is worth the paper it is written on. This is a country whose agents plotted to kill Julian on British soil, who harried his solicitors and stole legal documents; who even targeted our six-month-old baby. “I am appealing directly to the Biden government to do the right thing, even at this late stage. This case should not be dragged out for a moment longer. End this prosecution, protect free speech and let Julian come home to his family. “The current administration admits that the Trump Department of Justice lacked independence. It seems inconceivable that President Biden would want to continue with this case – because Julian’s freedom is coupled to all our freedoms, and no democratic society can ever make journalism a crime.

“If the Biden Administration does not end this now, the case will limp through the courts while Julian remains in prison indefinitely, unconvicted, suffering and isolated, while our young children are denied their father.” Speaking to journalists outside the Royal Courts of Justice on Wednesday, having visited Mr Assange in Belmarsh earlier in the day, Ms Moris said: “The High Court delivered its decision that it will allow limited permission for the US Government to appeal January’s decision to block Julian’s extradition. “That means he is still at risk of extradition where he faces a 175-year prison sentence and, according to (Judge Baraitser), is certain to lose his life if he is extradited. “The US Government should have accepted the Magistrates’ Court’s decision – instead, it keeps this case going.

“The case is itself falling apart. The lead witness of the US Department of Justice now admits that he lied in exchange for immunity from US prosecutors. The lawyers of Julian were spied on, their offices were broken in to. Even our six-month-old baby was targeted while he was in the embassy. “And now the High Court has limited the grounds on which they are to appeal, so the case is falling apart.”

Read more …

 

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The milky way perfectly aligned with the temple of Karnak in Egypt

 

 

Tucker NSA

 

 

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Jun 252021
 
 June 25, 2021  Posted by at 8:53 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  57 Responses »


Edward Hopper Summertime 1943

 

Structural Basis Of Anti-SARS-CoV-2 Activity of HCQ (RS)
Half Of New Israel Covid-19 Cases In Last Month Were Fully Vaccinated (INN)
Nearly All US COVID Deaths Now Among Unvaccinated People (NYP)
Surgeon Fired For Voicing Safety Concerns About Covid Shots For Children (JCCF)
‘Single Most Qualified’ mRNA Expert Speaks About Vaccine Risks (WE)
CDC Official Says Coronavirus Vaccine Booster May Not be Needed (GR)
The Delta COVID-19 Variant Has A Mutation Called K417N (R.)
Almost 600m NHS Home Covid Tests Unaccounted For (G.)
The Icarus Wax Of The Everything Bubble Is Melting (Von Greyerz)
The “Conspiracy Theory” Charade (Bovard)
Merkel Urges ‘Direct Contact’ With Putin (Pol.eu)
Britain Acknowledges Surprise At Speed Of Russian Reaction To Warship (G.)
Solar Panels Create 50 Times More Waste Than Predicted, Much Of It Toxic (RT)

 

 

A little reminder.

 

 

Ivory Hecker

 

 

Singaporean researchers believe that they have discovered a new mechanism of action of Hydroxychloroquine in Covid-19 and very boldly conclude:

“HCQ is a promising candidate to help terminate the pandemic”.

“Most importantly, HCQ-binding residues are identical in SARS-CoV-2 variants and therefore HCQ is likely effective to them all.”

Structural Basis Of Anti-SARS-CoV-2 Activity of HCQ (RS)

Great efforts have led to successfully developing the spike-based vaccines but challenges still exist to completely terminate the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. SARS-CoV-2 nucleocapsid (N) protein plays the essential roles in almost all key steps of the viral life cycle, thus representing a top drug target. Almost all key functions of N protein including liquid-liquid phase separation (LLPS) depend on its capacity in interacting with nucleic acids. Therefore, only the variants with their N proteins functional in binding nucleic acids might survive and spread in evolution and indeed, the residues critical for binding nucleic acids are highly conserved.

Very recently, hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) was shown to prevent the transmission in a large-scale clinical study in Singapore but so far, no specific SARS-CoV-2 protein was experimentally identified to be targeted by HCQ. Here by NMR, we unambiguously decode that HCQ specifically binds NTD and CTD of SARS- CoV-2 N protein with Kd of 112.1 and 57.1 µM respectively to inhibit their interaction with nucleic acid, as well as to disrupt LLPS essential for the viral life cycle.

Most importantly, HCQ-binding residues are identical in SARS-CoV-2 variants and therefore HCQ is likely effective to them all. The results not only provide a structural basis for the anti-SARS-CoV-2 activity of HCQ, but also renders HCQ to be the first known drug capable of targeting LLPS. Furthermore, the unique structure of the HCQ-CTD complex decodes a promising strategy for further design of better anti-SARS-CoV-2 drugs from HCQ. Therefore, HCQ is a promising candidate to help terminate the pandemic.

Read more …

VanDen Bossche strikes again.

Half Of New Israel Covid-19 Cases In Last Month Were Fully Vaccinated (INN)

Israel’s campaign to promote the coronavirus vaccine – now focusing on young teens – is going full steam ahead, in spite of statistics presented by government officials showing that half of those recently infected with Covid-19 were fully vaccinated, Behadrey Haredim reports. Head of Public Health Services, Dr. Sharon Alray-Price, revealed the disturbing facts at a media presentation on Wednesday. According to her data, of the 891 cases of coronavirus confirmed in the last month alone, half had received both doses of Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine. According to a report on Channel 12, in the months since the vaccines were rolled out, 6,765 people who received both shots have contracted coronavirus, and epidemiological tracing has revealed that an additional 3,133 people contracted Covid-19 from those vaccinated individuals.

The 6,765 represent a little more than one percent of the total number of those vaccinated, which now stands at over 5,100,000. It is clear that officials were already aware that the vaccine does not provide sufficient protection, as quarantine regulations for those returning from abroad have recently been changed, requiring even those fully vaccinated to self-isolate upon return from certain countries. In addition, military intelligence has been warning of such a scenario at least since January, when a report was published that suggested a mass vaccination campaign would lead to vaccine-resistant strains of Covid-19 emerging. Also on Wednesday, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett convened a panel of experts together with the heads of the various health service organizations in the country.

“Our aim at the present moment, first and foremost, is to protect Israeli citizens from the Delta strain that is running amok around the world,” Bennett said at the meeting. “As we do so, we will endeavor to limit the impact this has on daily life in Israel. Therefore, we have decided to take immediate action in order to avoid paying a heavier price at a later stage. It all depends on us. If we are meticulous in adhering to the guidelines and behaving responsibly, we will overcome this – together.”

Read more …

This doesn’t appear to rhyme with Doc Robinson’s numbers yesterday.

Nearly All US COVID Deaths Now Among Unvaccinated People (NYP)

Nearly all recent COVID-19 deaths in the US were of people who had not been vaccinated, a new analysis found. The examination by the Associated Press of data provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was released as about 63 percent of all eligible American adults have received at least one dose of the vaccine — and 53 percent are fully vaccinated. The AP found that only 150 of the more than 18,000 coronavirus deaths in May were of people who were fully vaccinated. In the same month, more than 853,000 people were hospitalized with COVID-19. Less than 1,200 of them, or roughly 0.1 percent, were fully vaccinated.


On Tuesday, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky spoke of the effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccine. “Nearly every death, especially among adults, due to COVID-19, is, at this point, entirely preventable,” Walensky said. AP’s findings come as COVID-19 deaths per day in the nation have dropped dramatically — from a daily high of about 3,400 in mid-January to currently under 300.

Read more …

Canada.

Surgeon Fired For Voicing Safety Concerns About Covid Shots For Children (JCCF)

The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms represents Dr. Francis Christian, Clinical Professor of General Surgery at the University of Saskatchewan and a practising surgeon in Saskatoon. Dr. Christian was called into a meeting today, suspended from all teaching responsibilities effective immediately, and fired from his position with the University of Saskatchewan as of September 2021. There is a recording of Dr. Christian’s meeting today between Dr. Christian and Dr. Preston Smith, the Dean of Medicine at the University of Saskatchewan, College of Medicine, Dr. Susan Shaw, the Chief Medical Officer of the Saskatchewan Health Authority, and Dr. Brian Ulmer, Head of the Department of Surgery at the Saskatchewan College of Medicine.

In addition, the Justice Centre will represent Dr. Christian in his defence of a complaint that was made against him and an investigation by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Saskatchewan. The complaint objects to Dr. Christian having advocated for the informed consent of Covid vaccines for children. Dr. Christian has been a surgeon for more than 20 years and began working in Saskatoon in 2007. He was appointed Director of the Surgical Humanities Program and Director of Quality and Patient Safety in 2018 and co-founded the Surgical Humanities Program. Dr. Christian is also the Editor of the Journal of The Surgical Humanities.

On June 17, Dr. Christian released a statement to over 200 doctors which contained his concerns regarding giving the Covid shots to children. In it he noted that he is pro-vaccine, and that he did not represent any group, the Saskatchewan Health Authority, or the University of Saskatchewan. “I speak to you directly as a physician, a surgeon, and a fellow human being.” Dr. Christian noted that the principle of informed consent was sacrosanct and noted that a patient should always be “fully aware of the risks of the medical intervention, the benefits of the intervention, and if any alternatives exist to the intervention.” “This should apply particularly to a new vaccine that has never before been tried in humans… before the vaccine is rolled out to children, both children and parents must know the risks of m-RNA vaccines,” he wrote.

Read more …

Interviews in yesterday’s Debt Rattle.

‘Single Most Qualified’ mRNA Expert Speaks About Vaccine Risks (WE)

The man who invented the mRNA technology used in some coronavirus vaccines says he was censored by YouTube for sharing his concerns on the vaccines in a podcast. “[O]ne of my concerns are that the government is not being transparent with us about what those risks are. And so, I’m of the opinion that people have the right to decide whether to accept a vaccine or not, especially since these are experimental vaccines,” said Dr. Robert Malone during a Wednesday segment on Fox News’s Tucker Carlson Tonight, saying YouTube deleted a video of him speaking about the associated risks. Opening the segment, Carlson shared some studies showing heart inflammation and death correlating with the use of the vaccines.

“A Norwegian study conducted of 100 nursing home residents who died after receiving Pfizer’s corona shots. They found that at least 10 of those deaths were likely caused by the vaccine. 10%,” Carlson said. “Young adults in the prime of their lives are being forced to take the vaccine because Tony Fauci said that,” he said, contending Malone’s expertise makes him “the single most qualified” person to share information about the technology and warrants him “a right to speak.” Malone clarified that he was not discouraging the use of the vaccine but was providing people with as much fair information as he could about their risks.

“This is a fundamental right having to do with clinical research ethics,” he said. “And so, my concern is that I know that there are risks. But we don’t have access to the data, and the data haven’t been captured rigorously enough so that we can accurately assess those risks — and therefore … we don’t really have the information that we need to make a reasonable decision.” “That’s one of my other objections, is that we toss about these words, risk-benefit analysis, casually as if it’s a very deep science. It’s not. Normally, at this stage, the CDC [Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices] would have performed those risk-benefit analyses. They would be data-based and science-based. They’re not right now,” Malone said.

Malone also said he has “a bias that the benefits probably don’t outweigh the risks” for younger people who are being encouraged or required to take the vaccine. “I can say that the risk-benefit ratio for those 18 and below doesn’t justify vaccines, and there’s a pretty good chance that it doesn’t justify vaccination in these very young adults,” he added. Malone discovered in-vitro and in-vivo RNA transfection when he was at the Salk Institute in 1988, and he subsequently invented mRNA vaccines, which are being used over 20 years later to combat the spread of the coronavirus.

Read more …

ha ha ha

CDC Official Says Coronavirus Vaccine Booster May Not be Needed (GR)

A US Centers for Disease Control official stated on Wednesday that, according to information available at present, there is no need for a booster shot for the coronavirus vaccine. However, certain at-risk populations will be closely monitored for the possibility of a booster, including residents of long-term care facilities, adults who are 65 and older, those who are immunocompromised and those who work in health care. The findings so far in mid-June, according to Sara Oliver of the CDC, indicate that the world’s major Covid-19 vaccines offer lasting protection that could diminish any need for frequent booster shots. However, she cautioned that more research is still needed and that virus mutations remain a concern worldwide.


No data that is currently available supports a recommendation for coronavirus booster shots, Oliver told an advisory group, the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, yesterday. Oliver assured the committee that officials will continue to monitor all incoming data to determine if a booster shot is necessary at some point as time goes on. A recommendation for booster shots would likely “only occur” after “evidence of declining protection against illness, such as declines in vaccine effectiveness” or the detection of a “variant of concern substantially impacting vaccine protection,” Oliver told the Committee.

Read more …

HCQ works against all of them.

The Delta COVID-19 Variant Has A Mutation Called K417N (R.)

The variant, called “Delta Plus” in India, was first reported in a Public Health England bulletin on June 11. It is a sub-lineage of the Delta variant first detected in India and has acquired the spike protein mutation called K417N which is also found in the Beta variant first identified in South Africa. Some scientists worry that the mutation, coupled with other existing features of the Delta variant, could make it more transmissible. “The mutation K417N has been of interest as it is present in the Beta variant (B.1.351 lineage), which was reported to have immune evasion property,” India’s health ministry said in a statement. Shahid Jameel, a top Indian virologist, said the K417N was known to reduce the effectiveness of a cocktail of therapeutic monoclonal antibodies.


As of June 16, at least 197 cases has been found from 11 countries – Britain (36), Canada (one), India (eight), Japan (15), Nepal (three), Poland (9), Portugal (22), Russia (one), Switzerland (18), Turkey (one), the United States (83). India said on Wednesday around 40 cases of the variant have been observed in the states of Maharashtra, Kerala and Madhya Pradesh, with “no significant increase in prevalence.” The earliest case in India is from a sample taken on April 5. Britain said its first five cases were sequenced on April 26 and they were contacts of individuals who had traveled from, or transited through, Nepal and Turkey. No deaths were reported among the U.K. and Indian cases.

Read more …

Fraud.

Almost 600m NHS Home Covid Tests Unaccounted For (G.)

Almost 600m lateral flow tests given to the public in England may not yet have been used, according to a report that says the hugely expensive test-and-trace system is still bedevilled by problems. The National Audit Office said NHS Test and Trace (NSHT&T), which Boris Johnson promised would be world-beating and has a budget exceeding that of the Department for Transport, was struggling with some “fundamental parts” of its role. In a move to help track and suppress the spread of coronavirus, NHST&T distributed 691m quick-result tests to people across England with the aim of helping people to return to workplaces.


The NAO said results from only 14% of them had been registered, meaning almost 600m had gone unaccounted for. “NHST&T does not know whether the tests that have not been registered have been used or not,” the report says. “It has started a programme of research to understand why the registration of test results is so low and is working to increase public awareness of the need to register results and improve its ability to track tests.” The startling finding will increase scrutiny of the test-and-trace system, which was hailed by the prime minister as a vital part of the government’s plan to beat coronavirus, and of its former head Dido Harding, who is seeking to become the next head of the NHS.

Read more …

Good metaphor.

The Icarus Wax Of The Everything Bubble Is Melting (Von Greyerz)

When will the wax melt that holds up the global economy? Hubris is driving humans and markets ever higher and closer to the sun. The higher everything goes, the greater the risk that the wax melts and the wings that are supporting the global economy just fall off and everything crashes to the ground. Investing successfully is primarily about managing risk rather than maximising profits. As we reach the end of the biggest bull market in history, investors feel so secure that risk has become an irrelevance. The Hocus Pocus system of finance has offered total downside protection for investors for 1/2 a century. The last big crash that affected a whole generation was the 1929 crash. After a 90% fall in the Dow, it took 1/4 of a century to recover to the 1929 high.


But since Nixon caused the Hocus Pocus system to thrive from 1971, all major crashes have quickly retraced to new highs. The Dow has fallen 40-60% in 1973, 1987, 2000, 2008 and 2020. But instead of taking 25 years to recover like after the 1929 crash, no retracement since 1971 has taken more than 2 years. This is the beauty of Hocus Pocus finance. Through printing and credit expansion you create unlimited access to liquidity for the big investors. Virtually no funds reach ordinary people who need it but instead the Hocus Focus system rewards the Croesus investors which means the haves get more and the have nots become relatively much poorer.

Read more …

Funny that “Putin Puppet” was never called a conspiracy theory.

The “Conspiracy Theory” Charade (Bovard)

“Conspiracy theory” is often a flag of convenience for the media. In 2018, the New York Times asserted that Trump’s use of the term “Deep State” and similar rhetoric “fanned fears that he is eroding public trust in institutions, undermining the idea of objective truth and sowing widespread suspicions about the government and news media.” However, after allegations by anonymous government officials spurred Trump’s first impeachment in 2019, New York Times columnist James Stewart cheered, “There is a Deep State, there is a bureaucracy in our country who has pledged to respect the Constitution, respect the rule of law… They work for the American people.” New York Times editorial writer Michelle Cottle proclaimed, “The deep state is alive and well” and hailed it as “a collection of patriotic public servants.” Almost immediately after its existence was no longer denied, the Deep State became the incarnation of virtue in Washington.

The media elite can fabricate “conspiracy theory” designations almost with the flip of a headline. A week after Election Day 2020, the New York Times ran a banner headline across the top of the front page: “Election Officials Nationwide Find No Fraud.” How did the Times know? Their reporters effectively called each state and asked, “Did y’all see any fraud?” Election officials answered “no,” thus proving that anyone who subsequently questioned Biden’s victory was promoting a groundless conspiracy. While top liberal politicians denounced electronic voting companies as unaccountable and dishonest in 2019, any doubts about such companies became “conspiracies” after that headline in the Times. The Times helped spur a media cacophony drowning out anyone complaining about ballot harvesting, illegal mass mailing of absentee ballots, or widespread failures to verify voter identification.

Actually, “conspiracy theory” accusations helped Biden win the 2020 presidential election. As Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) recently noted, if Americans believed that the COVID-19 virus was created in a Chinese government lab, Trump would have likely won the election because voters would have sought a leader who could be tough on China. But the lab origin explanation was quickly labeled a pro-Trump heresy. The Washington Post denounced Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR,) for suggesting the virus originated in the lab, which supposedly was a “conspiracy theory that was already debunked.” Twenty-seven prominent scientists signed a letter in the Lancet: “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin… Conspiracy theories do nothing but create fear, rumours, and prejudice that jeopardise our global collaboration in the fight against this virus.”

The Lancet did not reveal until last week that one of the signers and the person who organized the letter signing campaign ran an organization that received U.S. government subsidies for its work at the Wuhan Institute of Virology lab. President Biden has ordered U.S. intelligence agencies to take another look to seek to determine the origin of COVID-19. Will “conspiracy theory” charges provide a “get out of jail free” card for the FBI and other federal agencies regarding the January 6 clash at the Capitol? After Fox News’s Tucker Carlson featured allegations that FBI informants or agents may have instigated the ruckus, the Washington Post speedily denounced his “wild, baseless theory” while Huffington Post denounced his “laughable conspiracy theory.”

Read more …

And the EU said no.

Merkel Urges ‘Direct Contact’ With Putin (Pol.eu)

German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Thursday called on the EU to establish high-level talks with Vladimir Putin, seeking to buttress a Franco-German proposal for a summit with the Russian president that opened up serious divisions within the EU. “In my opinion, we as the European Union must also seek direct contact with Russia and the Russian president,” Merkel told the German Bundestag in a government statement ahead of an EU leaders’ meeting in Brussels on Thursday afternoon, where relations with Russia will be discussed. “It is not enough for U.S. President Joe Biden to talk to the Russian president — I very much welcome that — but the European Union must also create formats for talks here,” she added, referencing Biden’s recent one-on-one meeting with Putin in Geneva. “There is no other way to resolve conflicts.”

The chancellor’s comments were an apparent defense of a Franco-German overture to Putin that was unveiled to EU partners on Wednesday. The divisive proposal suggested EU leaders should endorse both the threat of new economic sanctions against Moscow while also signaling openness to a summit with Putin himself. The offer was immediately met with opposition from some EU countries, especially the three Baltic countries and Poland. The latest draft conclusions for the European Council meeting in Brussels indicate the Franco-German offer is at least being considered, saying EU leaders “will review the existing formats of dialogue with Russia, including at Leaders’ level.” But the phrasing is in brackets, meaning it has not been agreed to and could easily be dropped.

The conclusions also mention the possibility of further economic sanctions against Russia, while also noting the EU’s “openness to a selective engagement with Russia in areas of EU interest” on areas like climate, energy, health, terrorism and some foreign policy areas.

Read more …

Stupid provocations.

Britain Acknowledges Surprise At Speed Of Russian Reaction To Warship (G.)

British officials acknowledged they were taken by surprise by the speed of the Russian reaction to HMS Defender’s 36-minute passage through Crimean waters on Wednesday as the British ambassador to Moscow was summoned to the Kremlin. Although a Russian response to the Royal Navy warship’s passage within the 12-mile territorial limit was anticipated, the UK Ministry of Defence did not expect the Kremlin to speedily declare that warning shots had been fired. That dramatically escalated the situation on Wednesday lunchtime, forcing the MoD in London to scramble to establish what had happened, before concluding that the Russians had fired cannon at a safe distance behind the British warship.

“We knew that something might happen, but we didn’t quite expect the Russians to say that,” a defence source said. What had been expected to be a tense, if routine, mission to assert navigation rights in the Black Sea, had escalated into a military and diplomatic incident. The Russian military also claimed that a jet had dropped four bombs in the path of the British destroyer to force it to change course, but that was rapidly debunked, because there was no evidence to support it. Speaking on Thursday, Boris Johnson, the UK prime minister, said the deployment of the HMS Defender was “wholly appropriate” – although Downing St would not confirm whether he personally authorised the mission.

The prime minister added: “The important point is that we don’t recognise the Russian annexation of Crimea. This is part of a sovereign Ukrainian territory, it was entirely right that we should vindicate the law and pursue freedom of navigation in the way that we did, take the shortest route between two points, and that’s what we did.” Russia said it would summon the British ambassador to the foreign ministry in a political escalation after the unexpected diplomatic and military clash in the Black Sea on Wednesday.

Read more …

Makes you wonder who did the predicting.

Solar Panels Create 50 Times More Waste Than Predicted, Much Of It Toxic (RT)

Environmentalists’ bright promises of utilising solar energy to power the world are darkening quickly as it becomes clear how much dangerous trash is generated, with tonnes of old panels being discarded in landfill sites. The basic pitch for ‘net zero’ policies to combat climate change is this: a warming world will be devastating, but we can cut emissions down to next-to-nothing by using renewable energy technologies like wind and solar, which will keep on getting cheaper and cheaper. But the idea that we can have it all – energy that is plentiful, zero-carbon, and cheap – is a mirage, at least when it comes to renewables.

There are some obvious, long-standing problems with renewables: what happens when the sun doesn’t shine or the wind doesn’t blow? Some argue in favour of nuclear energy, others for using biomass (which basically means burning wood pellets and planting new trees to soak up the CO2 eventually), while some hope that energy storage using batteries will save the day. Whatever the solution, the problem of low-carbon electricity is going to keep getting bigger as we demand the phasing out of fossil fuels – including a shift to electric cars and banning gas boilers.

Still, renewables do, on the face of it, look like they might be getting cheaper. Solar panels are slowly getting more efficient. More importantly, the price for each panel has plummeted – perhaps by 70 percent. But the total cost of sticking solar panels onto a network has to take into account paying for backup for when those panels aren’t producing power. Yet that backup is very often treated as if it is a separate cost, rather than a necessary consequence of using an intermittent power source. In reality, renewables are a lot more expensive than proponents like to admit. But a new article in the Harvard Business Review points to another cost that is frequently downplayed: waste.

Solar panels are supposed to last for 30 years, and calculations about how much waste will be produced are based on that assumption. The trouble is that as the panels have got cheaper, and a bit more efficient, the economics have changed. Replacing them sooner could make a lot of sense, financially. As the authors of the article point out, that could lead to a tsunami of solar panel waste: “If early replacements occur as predicted by our statistical model, they can produce 50 times more waste in just four years than IRENA [International Renewable Energy Agency] anticipates. That figure translates to around 315,000 metric tonnes of waste, based on an estimate of 90 tonnes per MW weight-to-power ratio.”

And that estimate is just for domestic solar panel users. Throw in commercial users, too, and the mountain of waste will be enormous. Ah, supporters of solar will say, the panels can simply be recycled. But there isn’t much of value to be stripped from old solar panels. They are mostly made of glass, and they’re a pain to remove and transport safely. Recycling could cost $20-$30 per panel. Landfill, by contrast, would cost $1-$2 per panel. So if we’re going to recycle the panels, we need to work out who is going to pay the difference.

Read more …

 

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John McAfee

 

 

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May 262021
 
 May 26, 2021  Posted by at 9:08 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  65 Responses »


Théodore Géricault Prancing Grey Horse 1812

 

I Don’t Know Of A Bigger Story In The World (NC)
The Drug That Cracked Covid (Michael Capuzzo)
Finnish Firm Earns US Patent For Covid Drug Containing Ivermectin, HCQ (Yle)
Mild COVID-19 Induces Lasting Antibody Protection (wustl)
Rand Paul Says Dr. Anthony Fauci Should ‘Be Immediately Fired’ (JTN)
Inside India’s “Hunger Games” (Bhandari)
More Bombshells On Covid And Wuhan Lab Connection Should Come Soon (JTN)
The Ghost of Arthur Burns (Stephen S. Roach)
America’s Nuclear Spending Spree (DP)

 

 

19 reasons

 

 

Michael Capuzzo, famous journalist and writer, started looking into ivermectin when his daughter fell ill with Covid. But even Capuzzo couldn’t get his paper published. It’s time to start talking about the untold number of deaths caused by the ban, by politics, media, medical field, social media, of mentioning anything related to ivermectin. This has gone too far.

When my daughter Grace, a vice president at a New York advertising agency, came down with COVID-19 recently, she was quarantined in a “COVID hotel” in Times Square with homeless people and quarantining travelers. The locks on her room door were removed. Nurses prowled the halls to keep her in her room and wake her up every night to check her vitals—not to treat her, because there is no approved treatment for COVID-19; only, if her oxygen plummeted, to move her to the hospital, where there is only a single effective approved treatment for COVID-19, steroids that may keep the lungs from failing.

I Don’t Know Of A Bigger Story In The World (NC)

Michael Capuzzo, a New York Times best-selling author , has just published an article titled “The Drug That Cracked Covid”. The 15-page article chronicles the gargantuan struggle being waged by frontline doctors on all continents to get ivermectin approved as a Covid-19 treatment, as well as the tireless efforts by reporters, media outlets and social media companies to thwart them. Because of ivermectin, Capuzzo says, there are “hundreds of thousands, actually millions, of people around the world, from Uttar Pradesh in India to Peru to Brazil, who are living and not dying.” Yet media outlets have done all they can to “debunk” the notion that ivermectin may serve as an effective, easily accessible and affordable treatment for Covid-19. They have parroted the arguments laid out by health regulators around the world that there just isn’t enough evidence to justify its use.

For his part, Capuzzo, as a reporter, “saw with [his] own eyes the other side [of the story]” that has gone unreported, of the many patients in the US whose lives have been saved by ivermectin and of five of the doctors that have led the battle to save lives around the world, Paul Marik, Umberto Meduri, José Iglesias, Pierre Kory and Joe Varon. These are all highly decorated doctors. Through their leadership of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care (FLCCC) Alliance, they have already enhanced our treatment of Covid-19 by discovering and promoting the use of Corticoid steroids against the virus. But their calls for ivermectin to also be used have met with a wall of resistance from healthcare regulators and a wall of silence from media outlets.

“I really wish the world could see both sides,” Capuzzo laments. But unfortunately most reporters are not interested in telling the other side of the story. Even if they were, their publishers would probably refuse to publish it. That may explain why Capuzzo, a six-time Pulitzer-nominated journalist best known for his New York Times-bestselling nonfiction books Close to Shore and Murder Room, ended up publishing his article on ivermectin in Mountain Home, a monthly local magazine for the of the Pennsylvania mountains and New York Finger Lakes region, of which Capuzzo’s wife is the editor. It’s also the reason why I decided to dedicate today’s post to Capuzzo’s article. Put simply, as many people as possible –particularly journalists — need to read his story. As Capuzzo himself says, “I don’t know of a bigger story in the world.”

Read more …

“A news blackout by the world’s leading media came down on Ivermectin like an iron curtain.”

The Drug That Cracked Covid (Michael Capuzzo)

Marik had been keeping tabs on Ivermectin but hadn’t included it in his protocols. He knew the drug as a core medicine on the WHO Model List of Essential Medicines, and it is wellestablished in the literature as a “wonder drug” that won the 2015 Nobel Prize for its discoverer, Japanese microbiologist Satoshi Omura, for nearly eradicating two of the “most dis guring and devastating diseases” in history, river blindness and elephantiasis, that had plagued millions of people in Africa countries, one of the great achievements in the history of medicine. The drug was also well known as a standard treatment for scabies and lice, from nurseries to nursing homes. A veterinary version keeps millions of family dogs and cats, farm animals, and cattle safe from worms and parasitic diseases.

An over-the-counter medicine in France, Ivermectin is safer than Tylenol and “one of the safest drugs ever given to humanity,” Dr. Marik said, with “3.7 billion doses administered in forty years, that’s B for billion, and only extremely rare serious side e ects.” An earlier Australian study, reported in the journal Antiviral Research, showed that Ivermectin, which blocked other RNA viruses like Dengue virus, yellow fever virus, Zika virus, West Nile virus, influenza, the Avian fu, and HIV1/AIDS in vitro, decimated the coronavirus in vitro, wiping out “essentially all viral material by 48 hours.” But more research was needed in human beings. But by October Marik’s concerns were answered. ¬e studies were well-designed university trials that showed amazing anti-COVID-19 activity at the normal doses used to treat parasites.

Though small and endlessly diverse by large, Western big pharma “one-size-fits all” random control trials, the Ivermectin studies were a mosaic of hundreds of scientists and many thousands of patients in trials all over the world, all showing the same remarkable efficacy against all phases of COVID-19 no matter what dose or age or severity of the patient. “Penicillin never was randomized,” Marik says. “It just obviously worked. Ivermectin obviously works.” Marik was astonished. “If you were to say, tell me the characteristics of a perfect drug to treat COVID-19, what would you ask for?” he said. “I think you would ask rstly for something that’s safe, that’s cheap, that’s readily available, and has anti-viral and anti-inflammatory properties. People would say, “That’s ridiculous. There could not possibly be a drug that has all of those characteristics. That’s just unreasonable. But we do have such a drug. The drug is called Ivermectin.”

———––

A news blackout by the world’s leading media came down on Ivermectin like an iron curtain. Reporters who trumpeted the COVID-19 terror in India and Brazil didn’t report that Ivermectin was crushing the P-1 variant in the Brazilian rain forest and killing COVID-19 and all variants in India. That Ivermectin was saving tens of thousands of lives in South America wasn’t news, but mocking the continent’s peasants for taking horse paste was. Journalists denied the world knowledge of the most effective life-saving therapies in the pandemic, Kory said, especially among the elderly, people of color, and the poor, while wringing their hands at the tragedy of their disparate rates of death.

Three days after Kory’s testimony, an Associated Press “fact-check reporter” interviewed Kory “for twenty minutes in which I recounted all of the existing trials evidence (over fifteen randomized and multiple observational trials) all showing dramatic benefits of Ivermectin,” he said. Then she wrote: “AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. There’s no evidence Ivermectin has been proven a safe or effective treatment against COVID-19.” Like many critics, she didn’t explore the Ivermectin data or evidence in any detail, but merely dismissed its “insufficient evidence,” quoting instead the lack of a recommendation by the NIH or WHO. To describe the real evidence in any detail would put the AP and public health agencies in the difficult position of explaining how the lives of thousands of poor people in developing countries don’t count in these matters.

Not just in media but in social media, Ivermectin has inspired a strange new form of Western and pharmaceutical imperialism. On January 12, 2021, the Brazilian Ministry of Health tweeted to its 1.2 million followers not to wait with COVID-19 until it’s too late but “go to a Health Unit and request early treatment,” only to have Twitter take down the official public health pronouncement of the sovereign fifth largest nation in the world for “spreading misleading and potentially harmful information.” (Early treatment is code for Ivermectin.) On January 31, the Slovak Ministry of Health announced its decision on Facebook to allow use of Ivermectin, causing Facebook to take down that post and removed the entire page it was on, the Ivermectin for MDs Team, with 10,200 members from more than 100 countries.

In Argentina, Professor and doctor Hector Carvallo, whose prophylactic studies are renowned by other researchers, says all his scientific documentation for Ivermectin is quickly scrubbed from the Internet. “I am afraid,” he wrote to Marik and his colleagues, “we have affected the most sensitive organ on humans: the wallet…” As Kory’s testimony was climbing toward nine million views, YouTube, owned by Google, erased his official Senate testimony, saying it endangered the community. Kory’s biggest voice was silenced.

Read more …

Nasal spray.

Finnish Firm Earns US Patent For Covid Drug Containing Ivermectin, HCQ (Yle)

A coronavirus drug developed by Therapeutica Borealis, a pharmaceutical firm in Turku, has been granted a patent by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). The nasal spray contains hydroxychloroquine, among other ingredients. Earlier in May, the company said it had received approval for a patent application, based on which it expected a final patent this month. “The final patent is an important milestone for us on our way to the market. Our next goal is to find an established pharmaceutical industry company with an international business scale,” says Professor Kalervo Väänänen, one of the three inventors and founders of Therapeutica Borealis, in a press release on Monday. Väänänen is a cell biologist and former rector of the University of Turku.

The co-inventors of the drug and co-founders of Therapeutica Borealis are Lauri Kangas, an adjunct professor of science at the University of Turku, and Matti Rihko, a psychologist, and board chair of the Turku Chamber of Commerce and of the University of Turku. He is also a former CEO of the Raisio food corporation, known for its cholesterol-lowering Benecol products. According to the company, the nasal spray acts on cell function in nasal mucous in three ways, impairing the ability of the virus to penetrate the body and multiply, thus reducing the risk of serious illness. [..] The firm said that the drug’s active ingredients – aprotinin, hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin – are well-known and widely used drugs, but in this product are used in a new, targeted manner on the upper respiratory mucous membrane.

All the drug molecules covered by the patent are approved for the treatment of other diseases, but if used systemically, for instance as pills or infusions swallowed by patients, the amounts of drugs would be high and potentially harmful. For topical use, as in a nasal spray, the concentrations of the active ingredients throughout the body remain very low but are sufficient locally to prevent the passage and replication of the virus, making the drug safer and more effective, says Therapeutica Borealis.

Read more …

No vaccines needed.

Mild COVID-19 Induces Lasting Antibody Protection (wustl)

Months after recovering from mild cases of COVID-19, people still have immune cells in their body pumping out antibodies against the virus that causes COVID-19, according to a study from researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Such cells could persist for a lifetime, churning out antibodies all the while. The findings, published May 24 in the journal Nature, suggest that mild cases of COVID-19 leave those infected with lasting antibody protection and that repeated bouts of illness are likely to be uncommon. “Last fall, there were reports that antibodies wane quickly after infection with the virus that causes COVID-19, and mainstream media interpreted that to mean that immunity was not long-lived,” said senior author Ali Ellebedy, PhD, an associate professor of pathology & immunology, of medicine and of molecular microbiology.


“But that’s a misinterpretation of the data. It’s normal for antibody levels to go down after acute infection, but they don’t go down to zero; they plateau. Here, we found antibody-producing cells in people 11 months after first symptoms. These cells will live and produce antibodies for the rest of people’s lives. That’s strong evidence for long-lasting immunity.” During a viral infection, antibody-producing immune cells rapidly multiply and circulate in the blood, driving antibody levels sky-high. Once the infection is resolved, most such cells die off, and blood antibody levels drop. A small population of antibody-producing cells, called long-lived plasma cells, migrate to the bone marrow and settle in, where they continually secrete low levels of antibodies into the bloodstream to help guard against another encounter with the virus. The key to figuring out whether COVID-19 leads to long-lasting antibody protection, Ellebedy realized, lies in the bone marrow.

Read more …

Won’t happen. Not now.

Rand Paul Says Dr. Anthony Fauci Should ‘Be Immediately Fired’ (JTN)

Sen. Rand Paul said Tuesday that National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci has repeatedly lied and should be fired. Paul said on Just the News’ “Water Cooler” show that Fauci lied to Congress when he said the National Institutes of Health did not fund gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. “He oughta be immediately fired,” said Paul, who has repeatedly clashed with Fauci over numerous COVID-19 issues. “He’s been lying to us since the very beginning. He first said no masks work, which wasn’t true. Then he said all masks work and that wasn’t true either. The N95 masks work, the rest of them don’t. But he’s been dishonest from the very beginning.” The Kentucky Republican Paul also said Fauci has lied “so-called with good intentions, noble lies, but he has been dishonest and he should be dismissed.”

Read more …

And you thought your health care was a mess..

Inside India’s “Hunger Games” (Bhandari)

I have just returned from a visit to my family in India. It was hard to escape. To get to the US from India, I needed a COVID test. The Indian government has seriously restricted who can provide COVID testing, treatment, and vaccination. Private doctors and hospitals that are not approved face brutal legal consequences if they provide COVID treatment. Emergency powers were centralized early last year in the hands of the Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi. He gave himself direct control over the bureaucrats of the states, making local governments largely impotent and dependent on him. In their supreme wisdom, government bureaucrats concluded that because the prefix “COVID-” exists in treatment, vaccination, and testing, they must all be performed at the same place.

For my test, I sat in a petri dish of COVID, with those coming out positive sitting right next to me. Desperate, vulnerable old people, who merely wanted to get their jabs, sat among us. Those who were sick for reasons other than COVID were among us too, for the government has required everyone who is sick to be tested for COVID first . A microcosm of how everything is done in India, the tests were given haphazardly, with samples getting mixed up, nurses spending most of their time fighting among themselves, and — lacking a lineup system — people crowded together, pushing and breathing into the mouths of one another. A few days earlier, the government had given notice of the rate of tests and further restricted where they could be performed.

A bribe-taking system would have been my preference to bypass government restrictions, but no such system has evolved yet. Nevertheless, corruption has exploded, and self-centeredness, apathy, a dog-eat-dog environment has come to the surface. You see this everywhere; the scavengers are out in full force. I went to a private COVID hospital. The situation in government hospitals is far worse, beyond my capacity to cope with it. Yet the story of COVID in India is hardly about COVID as such, which is nothing more than a trigger. More than twice as many people died of fairly easily treatable tuberculosis in 2020 than of COVID. Instead, this is a story of foolish rulers, completely hollowed out institutions, and a pathetically irrational and tribal society.

Read more …

Hope.

More Bombshells On Covid And Wuhan Lab Connection Should Come Soon (JTN)

Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.) believes that intelligence on COVID-19 originating from the Wuhan Institute of Virology is forthcoming, and will be revealed by force of legislation if it is not released otherwise. Braun told the “John Solomon Reports” podcast about the COVID-19 Origin Act of 2021 that he introduced with Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.): “Something was afoot even a week to two weeks ago — we were just a little ahead of the game when we rolled that out — where I think we’re going to hear more information. “When you got somebody like Dr. Fauci that moves goalposts from one end zone to the other and then back again, and wherever it needs to kind of plop down, when you hear the head of the WHO, when you hear the Biden administration now saying that there needs to be an investigation — of course, they’re still saying WHO needs to do it itself.


“That’s like the fox in the henhouse metaphor. So something is happening. And that’s why, with our bill out there, it’s now very pertinent.” Braun is confident the truth will soon emerge. “I think we’re gonna get to the bottom of it,” he said. “It’s just a question of, will we need a bill to do it? I don’t even think we’re going to need that because I think there’s going to be stuff coming forward that might flush it out without having to force it legislatively. If not, we’re prepared to roll up the support. Sadly, we probably won’t get one Democrat on it, though.” Braun was asked where Congress could get information on COVID and Wuhan. “How about in our own DHS?” he replied. “How about in our own Director of National Intelligence? That’s the essence of declassifying this stuff. And when you’ve got such a political posture that has dominated the dynamic, we just need that — we need the Freedom of Information Act, in essence, to release all this stuff that’s been classified.”

Read more …

History of CPI.

The Ghost of Arthur Burns (Stephen S. Roach)

Memories can be tricky. I have long been haunted by the inflation of the 1970s. Fifty years ago, when I had just started my career as a professional economist at the Federal Reserve, I was witness to the birth of the Great Inflation as a Fed insider. That left me with the recurring nightmares of a financial post-traumatic stress disorder. The bad dreams are back.

They center on the Fed’s legendary chairman at the time, Arthur F. Burns, who brought a unique perspective to the US central bank as an expert on the business cycle. In 1946, he co-authored the definitive treatise on the seemingly rhythmic ups and downs of the US economy back to the mid-nineteenth century. Working for him was intimidating, especially for someone in my position. I had been tasked with formal weekly briefings on the very subjects Burns knew best. He used that knowledge to poke holes in staff presentations. I found quickly that you couldn’t tell him anything.

Yet Burns, who ruled the Fed with an iron fist, lacked an analytical framework to assess the interplay between the real economy and inflation, and how that relationship was connected to monetary policy. As a data junkie, he was prone to segment the problems he faced as a policymaker, especially the emergence of what would soon become the Great Inflation. Like business cycles, he believed price trends were heavily influenced by idiosyncratic, or exogenous, factors – “noise” that had nothing to do with monetary policy.

This was a blunder of epic proportions. When US oil prices quadrupled following the OPEC oil embargo in the aftermath of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Burns argued that, since this had nothing to do with monetary policy, the Fed should exclude oil and energy-related products (such as home heating oil and electricity) from the consumer price index. The staff protested, arguing that it made no sense to ignore such important items, especially because they had a weight of over 11% in the CPI. Burns was adamant: If we on the staff wouldn’t perform the calculation, he would have it done by “someone in New York” – an allusion to his prior affiliations at Columbia University and the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Then came surging food prices, which Burns surmised in 1973 were traceable to unusual weather – specifically, an El Niño event that had decimated Peruvian anchovies in 1972. He insisted that this was the source of rising fertilizer and feedstock prices, in turn driving up beef, poultry, and pork prices. Like good soldiers, we gulped and followed his order to take food – which had a weight of 25% – out of the CPI.

We didn’t know it at the time, but we had just created the first version of what is now fondly known as the core inflation rate – that purified portion of the CPI that purportedly is free of the volatile “special factors” of food and energy, where gyrations were traceable to distant wars and weather. Burns was pleased. Monetary policy needed to focus on more stable underlying inflation trends, he argued, and we had provided him with the perfect tool to sharpen his focus.

Read more …

Where the big profits are.

America’s Nuclear Spending Spree (DP)

As Capitol Hill lawmakers continue to insist that initiatives like Medicare for All are too expensive, a new congressional report shows that the United States government is on a path to spend more than a half-trillion dollars on nuclear weapons in just the next decade. The report emerges at the same time a separate analysis shows that a handful of top executives at defense contractors are being wildly enriched by a Pentagon spending spree. The first report from the Congressional Budget Office finds that the federal government is on track to spend $634 billion over the next decade to maintain its nuclear forces, according to a new Congressional Budget Office (CBO). Almost two-thirds of those costs are for the Department of Defense, mostly to maintain ballistic missile submarines and intercontinental ballistic missiles. About one-third is for the Department of Energy.

For comparison that is: • 1.5 times the cost of all of the $1,400 stimulus checks that were sent to people through the American Rescue Plan earlier this year • Nearly 14 times the $47 billion that Congress has spent so far this year helping Americans who are behind on rent. • Over one-third of the cost of cancelling the $1.7 trillion in student debt held by Americans, most of which is never going to be repaid. • More than 7 times the estimated $81 billion of outstanding medical debt in America, as of 2018. The new CBO estimate represents a 28-percent increase over the last 10-year estimate that the CBO made on U.S. nuclear forces two years ago.

The figures were released just a few weeks after a new analysis from the Center for International Policy, a foreign policy think tank in Washington, found that “In 2020 alone, the CEOs of the [Pentagon’s] top five contractors received a total of $105.4 million in compensation.” When accounting for all top corporate officials, these firms paid out more than a quarter billion dollars of total executive compensation in 2020 — and paid out more than $1 billion over the last four years.

Read more …

 

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Mar 292021
 


Rufino Tamayo The Dance of Joy 1950

 

 

We’re running two grand experiments at the same time: we inject 100s of millions with untested substances, and then we let them fly and gather and tell them it’s safe to do so.

 

 

First things first: none of the “vaccines” that are being injected as we speak into 100s of millions of people have been approved by “medical authorities”. The Pfizer and Moderna mRNA ones, as well as the AstraZeneca and in some places Johnson&Johnson “substances” have only, best case, gotten a permit for Emergency Use Authorization (EUA).

This is needed because none of these things have ever been properly tested. The “logic” behind this is that we are in an emergency, so there’s no time for testing. Somehow, this “logic” is combined with claims about “listening to the science”. While not testing is the direct opposite of science.

In order to get the Emergency Use Authorizations, you need to show that there are no other substances available that could perform the job that the “vaccines” do. I put “Vaccines” in quotation marks because mRNA are not vaccines in the traditional sense, they are, at least potentially, much more invasive. A factor that has… never been properly tested.

The other substances that might work vs the coronavirus, repurposed drugs such as ivermectin and (hydroxy) chloroquine -about which many doctors have written very positive reviews-, if the (EUA) label is to be put on the new “vaccines”, must also remain untested, just like the “vaccines” themselves.

So there are a few “tests” out there that applied HCQ and ivermectin, but in the wrong environment. See, if you give them only to 80+ year-olds who are already on an intubator and have multiple co-morbidities, you may well end up with the verdict that they did not prevent that person from dying. The thing is, the same would be true if you gave that person an mRNA “vaccine”. But that last bit, we don’t hear about.

We recently had this from a medical journal in Holland, Google translated:

High Fine For Doctors Who Incorrectly Prescribe HCQ Or Ivermectin (MC)

Doctors who prescribe (hydroxy) chloroquine or ivermectin against covid-19 will now receive a fine of up to 150,000 euros imposed by the inspection. This may also include other medications that are prescribed outside the guidelines. The IGJ calls on pharmacists to report. The Health and Youth Care Inspectorate regularly receives reports that doctors prescribe medicines that are contrary to the treatment recommendations for covid-19, the IGJ reports on its website.


When asked, the IGJ spokesperson cannot explain exactly how many doctors this is about and what their specialty is. “We have talked to a number of doctors about this, but because some of them continue to do so, we are now going to impose fines. We are not going to warn anymore, “said the spokesman. [..] According to the IGJ, (hydroxy) chloroquine has been proven to be ineffective against covid-19 and at the same time can cause serious side effects. There is also no scientific basis for the use of ivermectin.

They either don’t test HCQ and ivermectin at all, or they test them in the wrong environment. When someone is dying from old age and co-morbidities, and then catches Covid, you’re not going to save them with HCQ or ivermectin. But nobody ever said you would. Moreover, you wouldn’t save them with mRNA either.

Chloroquine, later (hydroxy) chloroquine, was discovered in 1934, and used as a malaria treatment, for decades. Some 200 million people were treated with it, primarily in Africa, since, with great success. In fact, so many people were treated that it lost its effectiveness because the parasite that causes malaria slowly developed an immunity against it. But we would still have known if it killed large numbers of people. Same goes for ivermectin.

Ivermectin stems from 1975, long time ago, (though Joe Biden had been a senator for 3 years already ;-)), and many many millions were successfully treated with it as an anti-parasite drug. There’s an entire library by now of ivermectin vs Covid 19 studies. But the health board in Holland says :“There is also no scientific basis for the use of ivermectin.”. Yeah, sure. Look, what there is no scientific basis for is the use of the newfangled untested “vaccines”. Not testing equals not scientific. You could label it “technology” if you will, but not science.

 

Then we have Prof Anthony Harnden talking about the AstraZeneca vaccine reducing transmission by some 50%. Given the uncertainties and lack of testing and investigation, I would be inclined to label this prof a ‘lying, dog-faced pony soldier’. Yes, I am getting tired of this spiel.

Vaccines Do Not Completely Stop Transmission, JCVI Member Says

Covid-19 vaccines do not completely prevent transmission, Prof Anthony Harnden, deputy chair of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) has said. He told BBC Breakfast on Sunday that while they appear to reduce transmission by about 50%, vaccinated people can still get the virus and spread it to others. He added:


“There’s some good evidence now from Public Health England and from the Oxford/AstraZeneca trials that the vaccines do prevent transmission. But they don’t completely prevent transmission. The figures are still being calculated but it’s in the order of 50%. So, there will be some reduction in transmission, no doubt at all, but it’s still possible, even though you’ve been vaccinated, to get infected, have no symptoms and transmit it to others. That’s why it’s important that all those who get vaccinated still stick to the rules.”

In other words: Get that needle in your arm, stay home, put some underwear on your face, and keep your clap shut. The European Medicines Agency has two cents to spare as well:

EMA advises against use of ivermectin for the prevention or treatment of COVID-19 outside randomised clinical trials

EMA has reviewed the latest evidence on the use of ivermectin for the prevention and treatment of COVID-19 and concluded that the available data do not support its use for COVID-19 outside well-designed clinical trials. In the EU, ivermectin tablets are approved for treating some parasitic worm infestations while ivermectin skin preparations are approved for treating skin conditions such as rosacea. Ivermectin is also authorised for veterinary use for a wide range of animal species for internal and external parasites. Ivermectin medicines are not authorised for use in COVID-19 in the EU, and EMA has not received any application for such use.

Following recent media reports and publications on the use of ivermectin, EMA reviewed the latest published evidence from laboratory studies, observational studies, clinical trials and meta-analyses. Laboratory studies found that ivermectin could block replication of SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19), but at much higher ivermectin concentrations than those achieved with the currently authorised doses. Results from clinical studies were varied, with some studies showing no benefit and others reporting a potential benefit.

Most studies EMA reviewed were small and had additional limitations, including different dosing regimens and use of concomitant medications. EMA therefore concluded that the currently available evidence is not sufficient to support the use of ivermectin in COVID-19 outside clinical trials. Although ivermectin is generally well tolerated at doses authorised for other indications, side effects could increase with the much higher doses that would be needed to obtain concentrations of ivermectin in the lungs that are effective against the virus. Toxicity when ivermectin is used at higher than approved doses therefore cannot be excluded.

So that’s experiment number 1. 100s of millions of people injected with untested substances. For which there seems to be some evidence that they make a person less sick. But that’s all the evidence there is. They can still be infected, and there’s still no evidence that they can’t infect others. So by all means, let’s bet the house on that, shall we? And if we have to kill drugs that might do a much better job to get there, we will.

 

Then comes experiment number 2. The people who have been injected with this stuff will now be able to get vaccine passports of one sort or another, and travel, get into planes and theaters and what not, and, according to the CDC, gather without wearing masks. While “there’s still no evidence that they can’t infect others”.

I know that politicians are getting desperate, after a full year of lockdowns. But they could all have started nationwide campaigns of improving immune systems through vitamin D a year ago. That was the easiest thing ever, and still is, potentially decreasing both infections and deaths by 50%. Yes, there’s scientific literatute for this.

They could have initiated large scale trials with ivermectin, HCQ, doxycycline and other drugs, but none of them did, outside of countries like India, Peru, Argentina. So that didn’t happen either. Now all they have left are a bunch of non-proven and questionable technologies, and they’re promoting those as if their lives and careers depend on them.

And then we all double down and tell people they’re safe after getting a couple of “jabs”, and everyone around them is too, though there is zero evidence for this. That is a big gamble. But gambling is all we have left. Economies need to open or else. People must be able to see people or else. Governments need to get out of the way and let people take responsibility for their own lives.

We can only wait for the first politician and government and their “expert” advisers to come clean and say they failed. That would at least be a breath of fresh air. Here in Athens after a hard lockdown of almost 6 months, case numbers and intubations are higher than ever. The least they can do is say: we’re sorry, we were wrong, we screwed up.

But politicians and “scientists” don’t do that, unless they’re forced to, even if countless lives are lost in the process. So what do you do? Well, you force them to. And then you make them leave, and start saving lives.

 

 

 

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Mar 282021
 
 March 28, 2021  Posted by at 9:19 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  52 Responses »


Edouard Manet Portrait of Emile Zola 1868

 

High Fine For Doctors Who Incorrectly Prescribe HCQ Or Ivermectin (MC)
New York Launches COVID-19 Vaccination ID Program (JTN)
Keep Your Covid-19 Vaccination Card Safe – You’re Going To Need It (F.)
Mexico Covid Death Toll Leaps 60% To Reach 321,000 (G.)
Race and False Hate Crime Narratives (Q.)
Joe Biden’s ‘Horrible’ Regime Is ‘Way More Racialised’ Than Before (Sky)
What Biden’s Talking Filibuster Could Look Like (IC)
US-NATO vs Russia-China in a Hybrid War To The Finish (Escobar)
The Facebook Filter Bubble (AEA)
Experts Fear Ever Given May Be Stuck In Suez For Weeks (G.)
Monetary Adaptation To Planetary Emergency (UoC)

 

 

 

 

Google translated from Dutch. This is so crazy.

High Fine For Doctors Who Incorrectly Prescribe HCQ Or Ivermectin (MC)

Doctors who prescribe (hydroxy) chloroquine or ivermectin against covid-19 will now receive a fine of up to 150,000 euros imposed by the inspection. This may also include other medications that are prescribed outside the guidelines. The IGJ calls on pharmacists to report. The Health and Youth Care Inspectorate regularly receives reports that doctors prescribe medicines that are contrary to the treatment recommendations for covid-19, the IGJ reports on its website. When asked, the IGJ spokesperson cannot explain exactly how many doctors this is about and what their specialty is. “We have talked to a number of doctors about this, but because some of them continue to do so, we are now going to impose fines. We are not going to warn anymore, “said the spokesman.

The fines could run in the thousands of euros, she says. “There is no real minimum amount and the exact amount of a fine will depend on the circumstances. Did the doctor prescribe the medicine once or several times? How many patients has it been prescribed, things like that. The maximum amount for a fine is 150,000 euros. ” The Inspectorate sees prescription as a risk to the quality of care and points out that all doctors’ professions in the Netherlands advise against using (hydroxy) chloroquine or ivermectin for the prevention or treatment of corona. According to the IGJ, (hydroxy) chloroquine has been proven to be ineffective against covid-19 and at the same time can cause serious side effects. There is also no scientific basis for the use of ivermectin. The IGJ states that it is allowed to prescribe medicines off-label, but that there are strict rules for this.

Pharmacists can also be held responsible if they provide these medicines inappropriately. The IGJ calls on them to report if they are offered prescriptions and suspect that this is for the treatment of corona.

Read more …

Getting vaccinated makes you a guinea pig. And so does sending vaccinated people around the world and into closed spaces.

New York Launches COVID-19 Vaccination ID Program (JTN)

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo this week announced the rollout of his state’s vaccine passport program, a measure the Democratic politician says will help the state continue to reopen its long-shuttered economy. In a statement on Friday, Cuomo revealed the debut of “Excelsior Pass,” what the governor’s office said was a “free, voluntary platform … which utilizes proven, secure technology to confirm an individual’s recent negative PCR or antigen test result or proof of vaccination.” The program, developed in partnership with IBM, will allow users to either “print out their pass or store it on their smartphones,” permitting them to gain access to public venues and establishments such as “major stadiums and arenas, wedding receptions, or catered and other events above the social gathering limit.” “New York State is the first state in the U.S. to formally launch this potentially transformational technology,” the governor’s office said.

Read more …

Wow. We got there. How creepy is that?

Keep Your Covid-19 Vaccination Card Safe – You’re Going To Need It (F.)

Your most precious travel accessory this summer is going to be a small white piece of paper. Some destinations, cruise lines and major sports venues are already requiring travelers to provide proof that they have been fully vaccinated against Covid-19. Other businesses, like Krispy Kreme, are offering freebies and other perks to people who can prove they’ve been inoculated. If you are among the 48 million Americans who have been fully vaccinated against Covid-19, the only proof that you have received your Covid shots is typically your paper vaccination record card with the CDC logo in the upper corner. The vaccination card tells you what Covid-19 vaccine you received, the date you received it, and where you received it — but that information is not being stored in any centralized, easily searchable database.

If you lose your card, you should return to the place you received your vaccination and ask for a replacement. “If you do not receive a Covid-19 vaccination card at your appointment, contact the vaccination provider site where you got vaccinated or your state health department to find out how you can get a card,” says the CDC website. That’s easy enough if you were vaccinated at a pharmacy chain but more difficult if you had to travel cross-state or inter-state to be vaccinated at a drive-through or pop-up event. All Covid-19 vaccination providers are required to report data within 72 hours in their state’s immunization system, so there should be a back-up record of your vaccination status there. The CDC has a list of the Immunization Information System (IIS) in each state, which is where to start if you need a replacement card and either can’t remember where you were vaccinated or have difficulty contacting the facility.

Digital vaccine passports may become a reality in the future, but for now your paper vaccination record card is an extremely valuable possession. Here are five easy ways to protect it for safekeeping.

Read more …

We don’t know anymore who’s counting what, or how.

Mexico Covid Death Toll Leaps 60% To Reach 321,000 (G.)

Mexico’s government has acknowledged that the country’s true death toll from the coronavirus pandemic now stands above 321,000, almost 60% more than the official test-confirmed number of 201,429. Mexico does little testing, and because hospitals were overwhelmed, many Mexicans died at home without getting a test. The only way to get a clear picture is to review “excess deaths” and review death certificates. On Saturday, the government quietly published such a report, which found there were 294,287 deaths linked to Covid-19 from the start of the pandemic through 14 February. Since 15 February there have been an additional 26,772 test-confirmed deaths. The higher toll would exceed that of Brazil, which has the world’s second-highest number of deaths after the US.


The Johns Hopkins coronavirus tracker puts Brazil’s toll at about 307,000 and the United States’ at 548,000, but Mexico’s population of 126 million is far smaller than either of those countries. The new report also confirms just how deadly Mexico’s second wave in January was. At the end of December, excess death estimates suggested a total of about 220,000 deaths related to Covid-19 in Mexico. That number jumped by around 75,000 in just a month and a half. Also suggestive were the overall number of “excess deaths” since the pandemic began, around 417,000. Excess deaths are determined by comparing the deaths in a given year to those that would be expected based on data from previous years.

Read more …

Deceived by storylines.

Race and False Hate Crime Narratives (Q.)

The reaction to the mass shootings in Boulder, Colorado, and Atlanta, Georgia, over the last week has revealed how invested the Democratic establishment is in one all-powerful narrative. Both shootings produced an immediate response from the media, Democratic politicians, and activists—that the slaughters were the result of white supremacy and that white Americans are the biggest threat facing the US. That interpretation was reached, in the case of the Boulder shooting, on the slimmest of evidence, and in the case of the Atlanta shooting, in the face of contradictory facts.

After the Boulder supermarket attacks, social media lit up with gloating pronouncements that the shooter was a violent white male and part of what Vice President Kamala Harris’s niece declared (in a since-deleted tweet) to be the “greatest terrorist threat to our country.” (Video of the handcuffed shooter being led away by the police appeared to show a white male.) Now that the shooter’s identity has been revealed as Syrian-American and his tirades against the “Islamophobia industry” unearthed, that line of thought has been quietly retired and replaced with the stand-by Democratic response to mass shootings—demands for gun control.

But the false narrative about the Atlanta spa shootings still has legs. It represents a double lie—first, that the massacre was the product of Trump-inspired xenophobic hatred, and second, that whites are the biggest perpetrators of violence against Asians. The most striking aspect of these untruths is the fact that they were fabricated in plain sight and in open defiance of reality. Given the enduring hold of the Atlanta story on mainstream discourse, it is worth examining in some detail.

Read more …

“We’re so busy enthralled in race, enthralled in fighting one another.”

Joe Biden’s ‘Horrible’ Regime Is ‘Way More Racialised’ Than Before (Sky)

President Joe Biden’s administration is keeping the “racial narrative” going because it is the “biggest smoke screen” to all its policies, according to US political commentator Benji Irby. Mr Irby told Sky News the country under Joe Biden at the moment is “absolutely horrible”. “The country is way more racialized than usual; everything’s about race,” he said. “Everybody’s concerned about all types of slights and microaggressions and the left are really taking over everything. “We’re in really bad straits here, it’s not very good”.


Mr Irby said the left and the Biden administration are fuelling racial tensions and using it as a “smokescreen”. “No one’s ask asking about Hunter Biden and this new gun scandal, no one’s asking about Joe Biden being bought and sold by China. “No one’s talking about the fact that China now has a larger navy than the US, and that China is making moves towards Taiwan, and is taking over our country as far as busines is concerned. “We’re so busy enthralled in race, enthralled in fighting one another.”

Read more …

Much scarier than the filibuster is the fact that Biden was first elected to the Senate in 1972.

What Biden’s Talking Filibuster Could Look Like (IC)

When President Joe Biden was first elected to the Senate in 1972, the filibuster was rarely deployed, and when it was, it could be beaten back by a vote of two-thirds of the Senate. That almost never happened, and instead the threat of a filibuster would sink legislation, not because the majority couldn’t overcome it but because they didn’t want to waste a few weeks on it and had other pressing business to get to. In 1975, the rule was reformed to lower the threshold from 67 down to 60, though it was still rarely used. The Senate that Biden grew up in — remember, he was 29 when he was elected — largely passed bills by a simple majority vote, including controversial bills. When the debate was over, even senators who opposed the underlying bill would vote yes on what’s known as “cloture,” which means closure of the debate.

That began to change, first with Harry Reid, D-Nev., as Senate minority leader, determined to fight President George W. Bush, and then went into overdrive under Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. McConnell effectively raised the threshold any legislation needed to 60 votes in order to undermine President Barack Obama. For somebody like Biden, that phenomenon — that legislation needs 60 votes to pass — is a relatively new innovation, not the beating heart of the Senate as some people claim. And nobody knows that better, perhaps, than Biden himself. He alluded to his old-school cred in an interview with George Stephanopoulos published Tuesday evening by ABC. “I don’t think that you have to eliminate the filibuster, you have to do it what it used to be when I first got to the Senate back in the old days,” Biden said. “You had to stand up and command the floor, you had to keep talking.”

“You’re for bringing back the talking filibuster?” Stephanopoulos asked. “I am. That’s what it was supposed to be,” Biden said. “It’s getting to the point where, you know, democracy is having a hard time functioning.” Notice that Biden is using the credibility he owns as a Senate traditionalist — he was elected six years before I was even born, and I’m getting old — to make the case that reform is necessary to defend democracy and return the Senate to the working condition it was in when he got there. It’s no secret that Biden was far from progressives’ first choice to win the Democratic nomination, but he may possess a unique ability to disarm centrist and conservative Democrats who otherwise might oppose the same project or program if it was proposed by Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.; Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.; or, really, anybody but Biden.

Read more …

“Nord Stream 2 is really bad for you. A trade/investment deal with China is really bad for you. Now sit. Good girl.”

US-NATO vs Russia-China in a Hybrid War To The Finish (Escobar)

Let’s start with comic relief: the “leader of the free world” has pledged to prevent China from becoming the “leading” nation on the planet. And to fulfill such an exceptional mission, his “expectation” is to run again for president in 2024. Not as a hologram. And fielding the same running mate. Now that the “free world” has breathed a sigh of relief, let’s return to serious matters – as in the contours of the Shocked and Awed 21st Century Geopolitics. What happened in the past few days between Anchorage and Guilin continues to reverberate. As Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov stressed that Brussels “destroyed” the relationship between Russia and the EU, he focused on how the Russia-China comprehensive strategic partnership is getting stronger and stronger.

Not so casual synchronicity revealed that as Lavrov was being properly hosted by Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Guilin – scenic lunch in the Li river included -, US Secretary of State Tony Blinken was visiting NATO’s James-Bondish HQ outside Brussels. Lavrov made it quite clear that the core of Russia-China revolves around establishing an economic and financial axis to counterpunch the Bretton Woods arrangement. That implies doing everything to protect Moscow and Beijing from “threats of sanctions by other states”; progressive de-dollarization; and advances in crypto-currency. This “triple threat” is what is unleashing the Hegemon’s unbounded fury.

On a broader spectrum, the Russia-China strategy also implies that the progressive interaction between the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) will keep apace across Central Asia, Southeast Asia, parts of South Asia, and Southwest Asia – necessary steps towards an ultimately unified Eurasian market under a sort of strategic Sino-Russo management. In Alaska, the Blinken-Sullivan team learned, at their expense, that you don’t mess with a Yoda such as Yang Jiechi with impunity. Now they’re about to learn what it means to mess with Nikolai Patrushev, head of the Russian Security Council. Patrushev, as much a Yoda as Yang Jiechi, and a master of understatement, delivered a not so cryptic message: if the US created “though days” for Russia, as they “are planning that, they can implement that”, Washington “would be responsible for the steps that they would take”.

Meanwhile, in Brussels, Blinken was enacting a Perfect Couple routine with spectacularly inefficient head of the European Commission (EC) Ursula von der Leyen. The script went something like this. “Nord Stream 2 is really bad for you. A trade/investment deal with China is really bad for you. Now sit. Good girl.” Then came NATO, which put on quite a show, complete with an all-Foreign Minister tough guy pose in front of the HQ. That was part of a summit – which predictably did not “celebrate” the 10th anniversary of NATO’s destruction of Libya or the major ass-kicking NATO “endured” in Afghanistan. In June 2020, NATO’s cardboard secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg – actually his US military handlers – laid out what is now known as the NATO 2030 strategy, which boils down to a Global Robocop politico-military mandate. The Global South has (not) been warned.

Read more …

“In the past, everyone was really concerned about what the editor of The New York Times put above the fold. Now, we should be concerned about what Facebook’s algorithm decides to rank higher..”

The Facebook Filter Bubble (AEA)

In his 2020 victory address, President Biden called for an end to what he termed this “era of grim demonization.” He forcefully urged Congress and fellow Americans to overcome their political differences. “The refusal of Democrats and Republicans to cooperate with one another is not due to some mysterious force beyond our control,” Biden said. “It’s a decision. It’s a choice we make.” And yet, that choice isn’t just up to US citizens or individuals on Capitol Hill. It’s also a decision for today’s largest social media company, according to a paper in the American Economic Review. Author Ro’ee Levy found rigorous evidence from a field experiment that Facebook’s algorithm results in people being exposed to more news matching their own opinions, and it may be increasing polarization.


Polarization in the United States has been on the rise for some time. As of 2014, Republicans and Democrats were more divided than at any point in the previous two decades. Other studies have argued that this growing division drives dysfunction in Congress and undermines trust in important institutions. Meanwhile, Facebook has emerged as a dominant source of news. As recently as 2008, fewer than one in eight Americans consumed news on any social media site at all. By 2019, 52 percent of Americans were receiving at least some of their news on Facebook, which was more than the share getting news on all other social media platforms combined. “In the past, everyone was really concerned about what the editor of The New York Times put above the fold. Now, we should be concerned about what Facebook’s algorithm decides to rank higher,” Levy told the AEA in an interview.

Read more …

Syria has already started rationing gasoline.

Experts Fear Ever Given May Be Stuck In Suez For Weeks (G.)

Dredge and pull, dredge and pull. Dislodging a vessel that has become lodged in sand is simple, in theory. If the vessel is as long as New York’s Empire State building is tall, then the process gets more complicated. Dredgers, tugboats and excavators, guided by world-leading consultants in salvaging ships, have been working for days to free the 220,000 tons, 400 metre-long Ever Given that became stuck in the Suez canal last Tuesday. It has created a jam of more than 200 vessels in one of the world’s key trade lanes. The ripple effect on shipping may be felt for weeks – and longer if the Japanese-owned “megaship” cannot be dislodged any time soon. On Saturday the chairman of the Suez Canal Authority (SCA), Osama Rabie, said that work to dislodge the ship was continuing and had so far allowed its stern and rudder to move and its propeller to restart.

But the changing tide had jammed the equipment once again. “The type of soil we’re dealing with is very difficult to manage, as are the tides which affect the vessel due to its size and its cargo load,” he said. Asked when the ship could be afloat again, Rabie suggested it was possible “today or tomorrow, depending on the ship’s responsiveness to the tides”. A key hurdle has been the sheer size and weight of the enormous vessel, part of a class of container ships that has ballooned in size over the past two decades, partly due to the proliferation of “just in time” logistical models that keep companies lean, efficient and reliant on fast deliveries from factories and warehouses overseas.

The experts brought in to free the vessel, the Dutch company SMIT Salvage and Japanese specialists Nippon Salvage, have been working to dislodge tens of thousands of cubic metres of earth around the stricken vessel, as tugboats help to pull it free. “These are the experts, but it took them three days to get into country, now they have to find these large tugboats and get them to the canal, they’re not positioned there,” said Captain John Konrad, a maritime expert and the founder of maritime news-site gCaptain. The refloating process, he explained, will likely involve a manoeuvre called a “backwards twist,” using large tugboats to rotate the ship counterclockwise and dislodge it from the bank after dredging sand from around the bow.

Read more …

“In any economy where money hoarding and accumulation is not curtailed, and where most of the money in circulation is issued by private banks as debt, with or without interest, there will be a system-wide scarcity of money..”

Monetary Adaptation To Planetary Emergency (UoC)

The existence of a Monetary Growth Imperative (MGI) and its implications for economic stability, democracy and environmental sustainability have been put forward by environmental economists for around two decades but recently criticised as invalid. Given the urgency of the climate and ecological crisis alongside spiralling public and private debt, the MGI deserves closer attention. Methods: For this review paper we analysed studies on the MGI, using a selective, iterative approach to the literature review. Results: Our critical review of the research on the MGI revealed several full academic treatments of the argument and even a taxonomy of them, most of which have not been refuted. We articulate one of them in a new way, as well as two more which have not received academic treatment, before considering why it might be thought politically expedient that any MGI should be refuted, or at least seen to be refuted.

Conclusion: In any economy where money hoarding and accumulation is not curtailed, and where most of the money in circulation is issued by private banks as debt, with or without interest, there will be a system-wide scarcity of money available to people and organisations to service their debts – unless, that is, there is continual economic growth. To avoid the deleterious implications of a shortfall of money in an economy, policies are used to maintain economic growth, which is therefore a form of imperative on society. This MGI may be accentuated, at a system-wide level, by the practice of full-reserve re-lending of money.

Interest is not the main driver of the imperative, but because it increases the transfer of money to those who are wealthy and more likely to hold that money in a stagnant form that is not available for debt servicing by others, interest charges may indeed exacerbate the MGI. We conclude that the debt-money system creates a competition for money between debtors and savers which is resolved through creation of more debt-money, which in turn drives growth and the resulting ecological and climate emergency.

Read more …

 

 

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– Lucius Annaeus Seneca

 

 

 

 

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Mar 042021
 


Francisco Goya The Dog 1819-23

 

Biden Slams “Neanderthal-Thinking” Over Texas, Mississippi COVID Policy (ZH)
16 States Are Now Following The Science (Schachtel)
The War on ‘Misinformation’ Claims Two Victims (Pfeiffer)
Brazil’s Covid Outbreak Is Global Threat, Opens Door To Lethal Variants (G.)
Vaccines Tweaked For Covid Variants Fast-Tracked Safely – UK Regulator (G.)
Injuries Reported to CDC After COVID Vaccines Climb by 4,000 in One Week (CHD)
34 Spontaneous Miscarriages, Stillbirths After COVID-19 Vaccination (ET)
Danger of mRNA Vaccines To Elderly: 16 Deaths In Switzerland (GT)
Half Of French Care Home Workers Don’t Trust Vaccine (R.)
Dutch Health Council: “Too Early” For Advice On Vitamin D Against Corona (AD)
Drug Lobby Asks Biden To Punish Countries Pushing For Low-Cost Vaccines (IC)
How the NATO Alliance Is Fighting Russia’s Sputnik V Vaccine (Helmer)
Finland Had a Patent-Free COVID-19 Vaccine Nine Months Ago – But.. (Jac.)
Covid-19 Virus Origin: The Mojiang Miners (SPR)
New York Rolls Out ‘Covid Passport’ At Event Venues (RT)
Giving Kids A Break Is The Best Way For Them To ‘Catch Up’ (G.)
Self Harm Claims Among US Teenagers Increased 99% During Pandemic (F.)

 

 

A bit overloaded today, so two separate Rattles. For all non-Covid news, check Debt Rattle March 4 2021.

 

 

 

 

He should perhaps try and keep the country together….

Biden Slams “Neanderthal-Thinking” Over Texas, Mississippi COVID Policy (ZH)

President Biden has slammed Texas and Mississippi for lifting COVID-19 restrictions, calling it “Neanderthal thinking.” “I think it’s a big mistake…It’s critical, critical, critical that they follow the science…” said Biden.
Newly minted CDC Director Rochelle Walensky wants residents of Texas and Mississippi to continue wearing face masks despite the governors there lifting COVID-19 restrictions amid a decline in cases. “I think we, the CDC, have been very clear that now is not the time to release all restrictions,” said Walensky during a White House pandemic briefing in response to a question about reopening Texas. “Every individual is empowered to do the right thing here, regardless of what states decide.”


On Tuesday, Texas Governor Greg Abbott enraged the left after announcing that the state would lift its mask mandate and reopen businesses next week, while also banning counties from fining or jailing people who disregard local measures. Effective March 10, all businesses will be allowed to open at 100% of capacity, Abbott said during a media briefing in Lubbock on Tuesday. His executive order allows county judges to reinstate anti-virus rules should hospitalizations surge. “Too many Texans have been sidelined from employment opportunities; too many small-business owners have struggled to pay their bills,” the Republican governor said. “It is now time to open Texas 100%.”

Read more …

…because people see things in different ways:

16 States Are Now Following The Science (Schachtel)

It took an entire year, but lockdowns and mask mandates are officially incredibly unpopular with half of the country, to the point that governors are rapidly making sweeping changes to their year-long COVID-19 policies. Jumping onto the coattails of pro-individual freedom leaders like governors Ron DeSantis (R-Florida) and Kristi Noem (R-SD), the governors of Mississippi and Texas decided Tuesday to announce an end to business restrictions and statewide mask mandates. Both Tate Reeves (R-MS) and Greg Abbott (R-TX), who had long taken a nanny state approach to the COVID-19 crisis, acted almost simultaneously to announce the end of statewide restrictions. The centrally planned solutions to COVID-19 have failed spectacularly, and the American people have taken notice of this reality.

Hundreds of millions have now been through a full year of government-imposed tyranny on both a federal and state level. Whether it was a travel ban, an endless series of lockdowns, mask mandates, countless emergency orders, business closures, and the like, not a single top-down order from the federal or state level did anything productive for the wellbeing of Americans. None of it worked. All of it served as a net negative. The people have noticed. Now that their constituents have had enough, politicians on the Right are fast departing from the COVID tyranny, and attempting to secure what is left of their political aspirations. Abbott and Reeves are not the only GOP governors moving fast in ending the restrictions, several other governors have recently acted to roll them back.

On February 12, Montana Governor Greg Gianforte lifted his statewide mask mandate. On February 8, Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds lifted Iowa’s statewide mask mandate along with several other restrictions. On February 22, North Dakota took it a step further. Its legislative body took the bold step in voting to make mask mandates illegal. As of March 2, there are now 16 states that no longer have statewide mask orders. However, across the political divide, there remains no end in sight to the corona madness. Much of the Left continues to embrace and root on endless COVID-19 restrictions, and the hijacking of individual rights in the name of a virus. Governor Gavin Newsom of California took to Twitter in describing the end of restrictions as “absolutely reckless.” It took long enough, but it’s now official: Governors who continue to impose lockdowns and mask mandates are fast becoming as popular as Red Sox fans in the Yankee Stadium bleachers, at least in half of the country.

Read more …

Vit. D, ivermectin, HCQ get heavily censored on social media.

The War on ‘Misinformation’ Claims Two Victims (Pfeiffer)

The effort to manage COVID treatment information has its roots, in part, in a sad chapter in American science and journalism: The Trump endorsement last spring of hydroxychloroquine. In an instant, early treatment was turned into a right-wing myth of interest only to Fox News. The rest of the press was merciless in repeating assertions that a reliable pharmaceutical workhorse used for several diseases was dangerous for COVID. Multiple studies have since refuted that and shown effectiveness in early illness, something most people do not know. Dr. Mobeen Syed was among the first last March to explore HCQ’s potential in a YouTube video that went viral and landed him in a love-it/hate-it, right/left firestorm. “I started getting so many threats,” he said, prompting him to take the piece down himself.

After that, however, YouTube itself decided what the 250,000 subscribers to Drbeen Medical Lectures should see, removing videos willy-nilly, it seemed, on Vitamin D, remdesivir and, what others said was frequently censored, ivermectin. Among other examples of this new censorship trend: On Jan. 31, Facebook removed a page called Ivermectin for MDs Team, with 10,200 members from more than 100 countries. The last straw was a post on the Slovak Ministry of Health’s decision to allow use of ivermectin, which Facebook censors “believe is harmful to physical integrity,” the administrator wrote. Facebook also ruled that news of ivermectin approval by a southern state in Brazil violated its standards. Put another way, the social media giant did not like two independent government decisions and thought it knew better.

On Jan. 12, Twitter ruled a tweet by the Brazilian Ministry of Health — 1.2 million followers — was “spreading misleading and potentially harmful information.” Why? It urged people with COVID symptoms to “go to a Health Unit and request early treatment.” More egregious, YouTube recently expunged two videos posted by a U.S. Senate committee on Dr. Kory’s ivermectin testimony. Further, it purged a video in which a scientist discussed his review of ivermectin as part of a project for a World Health Organization-hosted agency called Unitaid. YouTube even removed a video on its censorship of ivermectin. In a hint at how vast the censorship is, Facebook asserted proudly in a Feb. 8 website post that it had “removed more than 12 million pieces of content on Facebook and Instagram containing misinformation that could lead to imminent physical harm.”

Seven of my posts, on an article I wrote with multiple links to the science of ivermectin, were stricken with that label. (I got off on a 14-hour posting ban.) My efforts were fruitless to get Facebook, Twitter or Google, which owns YouTube, to explain the methodology it uses to censor. In a public post, YouTube says it disallows information that “contradicts local health authorities” and the World Health Organization. Twitter maintains it culls “content that is demonstrably false or misleading and may lead to significant risk of harm.” But who actually decides on a video or post? Are algorithms by technicians making the decisions or scientists and doctors? Should government guidelines be the ultimate yardstick when these are evolving — and sometimes wrong?

Read more …

“This is about the world. It’s global.”

Brazil’s Covid Outbreak Is Global Threat, Opens Door To Lethal Variants (G.)

Brazil’s rampant coronavirus outbreak has become a global threat that risks spawning new and even more lethal variants, one of the South American country’s top scientists has warned as it suffered its deadliest day of the pandemic. Speaking to the Guardian, Miguel Nicolelis, a Duke University neuroscientist who is tracking the crisis, urged the international community to challenge the Brazilian government over its failure to contain an epidemic that has killed more than a quarter of a million Brazilians – about 10% of the global total. “The world must vehemently speak out over the risks Brazil is posing to the fight against the pandemic,” said Nicolelis, who has spent most of the last year confined to his flat on the westside of São Paulo. “What’s the point in sorting the pandemic out in Europe or the United States, if Brazil continues to be a breeding ground for this virus?”

Nicolelis said the problem was not simply Brazil – whose far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, has repeatedly spurned efforts to combat a disease he calls a “little flu” – being “the worst country in the world in its handling of the pandemic”. “It’s that if you allow the virus to proliferate at the levels it is currently proliferating here, you open the door to the occurrence of new mutations and the appearance of even more lethal variants.” Already, one particularly worrying variant (P1) has been traced to Manaus, the largest city in the Brazilian Amazon, which suffered a devastating healthcare breakdown in January after a surge in infections. Six cases of that variant have so far been detected in the UK. “Brazil is an open-air laboratory for the virus to proliferate and eventually create more lethal mutations,” warned Nicolelis. “This is about the world. It’s global.”

The alert came as Brazil hurtled into the most deadly chapter of its year-long Covid crisis, with hospitals around the country collapsing or on the verge of collapse and the average weekly death toll hitting new heights. A record 1,726 fatalities were reported on Tuesday, the highest number since the pandemic began. “It’s a battlefield,” a doctor in the southern city of Porto Alegre told local television after his hospital’s intensive care unit and mortuary ran out of space. Nicolelis said Bolsonaro’s failure to halt the outbreak and launch an adequate vaccination campaign had created a domestic tragedy from which Latin America’s most populous nation was unlikely to emerge until late 2022.

“We’ve now gone past 250,000 deaths and my expectation is that if nothing is done we could have lost 500,000 people here in Brazil by next March. It’s a horrifying and tragic prospect but at this point it’s perfectly possible,” he said, predicting a traumatic month as public and private hospitals buckled. “My forecast is that if the world was appalled by what happened in Bergamo in Italy and what happened in Manaus a few weeks ago, it’s going to be even more shocked by the rest of Brazil if nothing is done.”

Read more …

What does that even mean when the first ones were never properly tested?

Vaccines Tweaked For Covid Variants Fast-Tracked Safely – UK Regulator (G.)

Coronavirus vaccines tweaked to deal with variants will be fast-tracked without compromising on safety or effectiveness, the UK’s regulator has said. The approach will be similar to the regulatory process for the modified flu vaccine, to deal with new strains each year, with a brand new approval not required. Scientists have previously said a Covid-19 variant resistant to the current crop of vaccines is likely to emerge at some point, but vaccines can be adapted quickly. The guidance states coronavirus vaccine manufacturers will need to provide robust evidence that the modified jab produces an immune response. However, lengthy clinical studies are deemed not to add to the regulatory understanding of their safety, quality or effectiveness and will not be needed.


The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) said researchers are in a better position to measure protection by looking at antibodies in the blood after vaccination, reducing the need to wait and see whether people in a trial become infected with the virus. It said this will “significantly reduce” the length of time it takes for the modified vaccine to be ready. The guidance from the Access Consortium – a group made up of regulatory authorities from the UK, Australia, Canada, Singapore and Switzerland – requires that, as well as evidence on immune response, the modified vaccines must be shown to be safe and of the expected quality. It says data from the original clinical trials and ongoing studies on real-world use in millions of people could be used to support any decision by the regulators.

Read more …

Harmless?

Injuries Reported to CDC After COVID Vaccines Climb by 4,000 in One Week (CHD)

The latest data made public by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) on deaths and injuries reported after COVID vaccines are in line with trends that have been emerging since the first data were released in December. Between Dec. 14, 2020 and Feb. 18, 2021, 19,907 reports of adverse events have been reported to VAERS, including 1,095 deaths and 3,767 serious injuries. About a third of the deaths reported occurred within 48 hours of vaccination, and 48% of the people who died became ill within 48 hours of being vaccinated. About 21% of the deaths were cardiac-related. As The Defender reported last month, Dr. J. Patrick Whelan, a pediatric rheumatologist, warned the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in December that mRNA vaccines like those developed by Pfizer and Moderna could cause inflammation of the brain and heart, and other injuries in ways not assessed in safety trials.

Of the reported deaths, 966 were reported in the U.S. and 129 outside the U.S. The average age of the deceased was 77.8, the youngest was 23. Of those who died, 53% were male, 46% female and 1% of the reports did not include gender. Of those who died, 56% received the Pfizer vaccine, and 43% got the Moderna vaccine. The number of serious adverse events reports increased by 641 this week, to a total of 3,767 between Dec. 14, 2020, and Feb. 18. Adverse reaction reports from the latest CDC data include: • 160 reports of adverse reactions affecting pregnancy, including 47 miscarriages/preterm births • 1,135 anaphylactic reactions, 64% of which were reported after a Pfizer vaccine and 35% after the Moderna vaccine • 257 reports of Bell’s palsy (Pfizer 71%; Moderna: 29%)


By comparison, during the same time period — Dec. 14, 2020 – Feb. 18, 2021 — VAERS received reports of 83 deaths following flu vaccines. According to the VAERS website, “it is important to note that for any reported event, no cause-and-effect relationship has been established … VAERS collects data on any adverse event following vaccination, be it coincidental or truly caused by a vaccine. The report of an adverse event to VAERS is not documentation that a vaccine caused the event.” VAERS is the primary mechanism in the U.S. for reporting adverse vaccine reactions. Reports submitted to VAERS require further investigation before a determination can be made as to whether the reported adverse event was directly or indirectly caused by the vaccine.

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Or not harmless?

34 Spontaneous Miscarriages, Stillbirths After COVID-19 Vaccination (ET)

Thirty-four cases of pregnant women experiencing spontaneous miscarriages or stillbirths after receiving a COVID-19 vaccine have been submitted to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). VAERS is a passive reporting system that allows people to submit a report of an adverse event after vaccination and is run by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Research funded by the CDC has shown that fewer than 1 percent of reactions from vaccinations are being reported on VAERS. Reports made to VAERS do not necessarily mean that a vaccine may have caused the event or reaction. Miscarriages are labeled as spontaneous abortions or abortions in the reporting system.

Many cases of spontaneous miscarriages occurred in the first trimester, or the first 12 weeks of the pregnancy, with 25 occurrences after being immunized with a Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. While the four cases of stillborns occurred in either the second (weeks 13-27) or third trimester (weeks 28-40). According to Verywell Health, an online resource on health-related issues: “Research suggests that between 10% and 20% of women with a medically confirmed pregnancy will end in miscarriage. Eighty percent of these will occur during the first trimester.”

[..] Dr. Shelley Cole, MD, an OB-GYN and a member of America’s Frontline Doctors, says it’s concerning that a vaccine still in an experimental phase is being recommended to pregnant and lactating women and that science is no longer protecting them. “As an obstetrician-gynecologist, it is a concern,” Cole told The Epoch Times. “We’re [now] throwing science and the scientific medicine method out the window and jeopardizing pregnancies and future pregnancies.” “It concerns me that the CDC says that there are no studies, but it’s okay to get it and you don’t even need to discuss it with your doctor,” Cole added. “I mean this is the opposite of everything that the scientific models and methods, and standard of care has been for a century.”

[..] The politicization of the drug continues to overshadow studies that show hydroxychloroquine is safe and effective in treating COVID-19. According to c19study.com that tracks clinical trials on hydroxychloroquine around the world, all 27 hydroxychloroquine studies on early treatment reported a “positive effect and an estimated reduction of 65 percent in the effect measured (death, hospitalization, etc.)” However, the drug is “not effective when used very late with high doses over a long period.”

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They all go out of their way to claim there is no proof of a direct link between deaths, and “other adverse reactions”, and vaccines. But it’s a bit much.

Danger of mRNA Vaccines To Elderly: 16 Deaths In Switzerland (GT)

The deaths of 16 elderly people in Switzerland after being inoculated with Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines underscore the potential danger of mRNA vaccines to the age group, Chinese vaccine experts said, further calling for caution. At least 16 people died after receiving vaccines in Switzerland, the Swiss Agency for Therapeutic Products (Swissmedic) was quoted as saying by Sputnik in a report on Saturday. The agency said it had obtained about 364 suspected adverse drug reactions, with 199 incidents linked to the vaccines developed by Pfizer and BioNTech, and 154 to Moderna’s drug, said the report. Swissmedic said the average age of the deaths was 86 and most of them had pre-existing diseases, adding there was no evidence to suggest that the vaccines were the cause of death.


Chinese experts said the incidents should be assessed cautiously to understand whether the deaths were caused by the vaccines or other preexisting conditions in these individuals. Previously, Norway reported 23 deaths in connection with vaccinations, all of whom were over 80 years old. The COVID-19 vaccines from BioNTec/Pfizer and Moderna were used in Norway. A Chinese immunologist who requested anonymity told the Global Times that the large-scale use of mRNA vaccines carries the risk of causing abnormal immune dysfunction, allergy or even death, especially among the elderly and people with underlying diseases. The immunologist suggested individuals with preexisting conditions, the elderly and those with vulnerable immunity not be given vaccines.

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And neither do those in Germany and Switzerland.

Half Of French Care Home Workers Don’t Trust Vaccine (R.)

Around half of health workers in French care homes do not want to be vaccinated, according to the group of experts guiding the state’s vaccine rollout – compared to only 20% of the residents who have not been inoculated. If significant numbers of care home workers do not get the jab, they could transmit the disease to residents who are not vaccinated and at high risk of serious illness, say advocates for the elderly. One reason for the scepticism is that those recommending the vaccine are the same people – the French state – whom care home workers blame for their low pay and tough working conditions, said Malika Belarbi, a care worker and trade union official. “There’s a complete loss of trust,” she said. The issue is not unique to France. In Germany, care home operator BeneVit Group surveyed staff in November and found only 30% wanted to get vaccinated.


Peter Burri, head of ProSenectute, Switzerland’s biggest advocacy group for seniors, said at most half of nursing staff in the medical sector were willing to get inoculated. [..] Regulators around the world have repeatedly said speed will not compromise safety and vaccine developers have said they will not cut corners in testing for safety and efficacy. The quicker results have stemmed from conducting in parallel trials that are usually done in sequence and can take years. Trials for the shots developed by Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson have shown only temporary side-effects. France’s state drug safety watchdog has said the procedure for approving the vaccines ensures they are safe and that it monitors side-effects and has seen nothing to warrant stopping their use.

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Google translate

“It seems as if we don’t care that people come to the hospital and die in the meantime.”

10 micrograms= 400 IU. Useless.

Dutch Health Council: “Too Early” For Advice On Vitamin D Against Corona (AD)

Based on the current state of science, according to the Health Council, it is “impossible to assess” whether taking vitamin D can contribute to the prevention of corona. “There is still too little useful research available on this,” said the government’s advisory body. According to the advisory board, sufficient research is available into the prevention of other acute respiratory infections. The chance of respiratory infections is about 10 percent lower if you take vitamin D. But the Health Council sees no reason in this to adjust the existing advice for taking vitamin D. Children up to four years old, women over 50 and men over 70 and pregnant women are already advised to take 10 micrograms of vitamin D per day.

This also applies to people who produce too little vitamin D in the skin because they get little sunlight or have dark skin. According to the Health Council, many people are not aware of the advice to these groups to take vitamin D. The council wants more attention to be paid to this. In October, several professors of immunology, scientists and doctors called on everyone via this site to take vitamin D. According to those experts, the chance that you will contract a corona infection is smaller and if you do become ill, the disease can be less serious. As a result of this attention to a possible role of vitamin D in combating the Covid-19 pandemic, the State Secretary of Health, Welfare and Sport has asked the Health Council for advice.

However, according to the Health Council, it is “still too early” for an opinion, because there is still too little research of sufficient quality. The scientists are aiming at studies in which vitamin D has been compared with a placebo. At least six such studies are currently underway, the first results of which are expected this spring. Sufficient research is available on vitamin D and the prevention of other acute respiratory infections not related to covid-19. There is some evidence that vitamin D supplements can help prevent these types of respiratory infections, especially in children between the ages of 1 and 16. But the council sees insufficient reason to advise everyone to take preventive vitamin D.

A large group of renowned experts expressed all their anger in December about the government’s wait-and-see attitude about vitamin D. More and more studies show, they say that vitamin D can reduce the chance of getting corona and that the infection is milder. . The wait-and-see attitude of governments goes down the wrong way with scientists. It “frustrates”, for example, professor of immunology at Wageningen University Huub Savelkoul. “There are more and more studies showing the benefit of vitamin D. I think it’s a kind of arrogance that the government wants to wait for a meta-study first. It seems as if we don’t care that people come to the hospital and die in the meantime. You should be careful with that comment, but that’s where my frustration is. “”

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Moral standards.

Drug Lobby Asks Biden To Punish Countries Pushing For Low-Cost Vaccines (IC)

President Joe Biden’s administration is being asked to punish Hungary, Colombia, Chile, and other countries for seeking to ramp up the production of Covid-19 vaccines and therapeutics without express permission from pharmaceutical companies. The sanctions are being urged by the drug industry, which has filed hundreds of pages of documents to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative outlining the alleged threat posed by any effort to challenge “basic intellectual property protections” in the response to the coronavirus pandemic. The drug industry has sharply criticized any attempt to share vaccine patents or the technological knowledge needed to manufacture them, despite global need.

According to one estimate, wealthy countries representing just 16 percent of the world’s population have already secured more than half of all Covid-19 vaccine contracts. And current projections show that much of the middle-income and developing world will not achieve widespread vaccinations for years. Some projections predict that low-income countries such as Mali, South Sudan, and Zimbabwe may not achieve significant levels of vaccination until early 2024. The delay will undoubtedly cost countless lives and risk future, potentially dangerous mutations of the Covid-19 virus. The AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine, initial tests showed, is far less effective against the Covid-19 variant that has spread rapidly through South Africa, for example. A prolonged pandemic will also threaten to extend and exacerbate a global economic downturn.

In response, governments around the world are considering a temporary exemption to traditional intellectual property rights in order to rapidly produce coronavirus treatments at low cost, a demand intensely opposed by American lobbyists for the pharmaceutical industry. The push by foreign governments to unilaterally set the price and pace of production of coronavirus vaccines, drug lobbyists with the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, or BIO, argued, will place “American jobs and the workers who rely on them at risk, and impede scientific advances from reaching society.”

The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, or PhRMA, another drug lobby group, requested that the Biden administration “pursue a variety of enforcement initiatives” and “use all available tools and leverage to ensure America’s trading partners” do not suspend traditional intellectual property rights in the fight against the coronavirus. BIO and PhRMA represent the largest drug firms in the world, including Pfizer, Gilead Sciences, and Johnson & Johnson. The two groups collectively spent more than $38 million lobbying federal officials last year, and member companies maintain extensive ties to prominent think tanks, lawmakers, and academics active in shaping the policy response to the pandemic.

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“The anonymous familiarity formula is a standard practice for anti-Russian fabrications by FT reporters; Bloomberg and Reuters too.”

How the NATO Alliance Is Fighting Russia’s Sputnik V Vaccine (Helmer)

When the organ claiming to be the world’s leading financial newspaper conceals the large price subsidy for the distribution of Covid-19 vaccines manufactured by the NATO allies, in order to accuse Russia of price gouging the poor, you can be sure you are watching an information warfare attack. And when the concealment of the vaccine subsidy operation run by GAVI and COVAX hides the fact that the UK, US, and the Bill Gates (lead image, right) and Melinda Gates Foundation are paying 92% of the $10 billion scheme, then you realise that Covid-19 vaccines are a weapon of war. A war, not only against Russia, but also against China.

GAVI stands for the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation. Originally established with $750 million from the Gates Foundation in 1999, it is based in Geneva and Washngton, DC, and directed by an epidemiologist, Seth Berkley (lead image, centre). He’s an American doctor whose previous jobs were also funded by Gates and several NATO governments, and before that by the Rockefeller Foundation.COVAX is an acronym, created by GAVI, to stand for a multinational scheme of financing Covid-19 vaccine development in Europe and the US; then funding sale and distribution of these vaccines to low-income countries around the world. GAVI claims the scheme “is the only global initiative that is working with governments and manufacturers to ensure COVID-19 vaccines are available worldwide to both higher-income and lower-income countries.” Read more of GAVI’s version here.

Think of COVAX as a bank created by GAVI from money deposited by the NATO governments and either granted or loaned to client government which meet the bank’s eligibility criteria. GAVI’s website publishes a weekly update on what it calls the “Covid-19 vaccine race”. The best known of the 11 vaccines on the GAVI list and marked as medically approved are Moderna, Novavax, and Johnson & Johnson (US); AstraZeneca (UK); Pfizer (Germany); Sinovac (China); and Gamaleya’s Sputnik V (Russia). The American and British vaccines are being promoted and funded by the GAVI-COVAX scheme; the Chinese and Russian vaccines are not.

Last Thursday, on February 25, the Financial Times, a Japanese-owned, London-based, and Lebanese-edited publication, claimed the cost price of the Russian Sputnik V vaccine to the poorest of African Union (AU) country members was “three times more than the price of the Oxford/AstraZeneca and Novavax vaccines, according to people familiar with the procurement process.” The anonymous familiarity formula is a standard practice for anti-Russian fabrications by FT reporters; Bloomberg and Reuters too.

Read more …

“The Finnish vaccine provides a striking case study of the many ways in which the contemporary patent-based funding model has slowed down vaccine development..”

“And typically, the choice is based on what applications they have a patent on, whether it’s the best option or not.”

Finland Had a Patent-Free COVID-19 Vaccine Nine Months Ago – But.. (Jac.)

We felt it was our duty to start developing this type of alternative,” says professor Kalle Saksela, chair of the Department of Virology at the University of Helsinki. “Back in the spring, I still thought that surely some public entity will get involved and start pushing it forward. Turns out that no situation is urgent enough to compel the state to start actively pursuing something like this.” Saksela’s team has had a patent-free COVID-19 vaccine ready since May 2020, which they dubbed “the Linux of vaccines” in a nod to the famous open-source operating system that also originated from Finland. The work is based on publicly available research data and predicated on the principle of sharing all new findings in peer-reviewed journals.

The research team includes some of Finland’s scientific heavyweights, such as Academy professor Seppo Ylä-Herttuala of the A. I. Virtanen Institute, a former president of the European Society of Gene and Cell Therapy, and academician Kari Alitalo, a foreign associated member of the National Academy of Sciences in the United States. They believe their nasal spray, built on well-established technology and know-how, is safe and highly effective. “It’s a finished product, in the sense that the formulation will no longer change in any way with further testing,” Saksela says. “With what we have, we could inoculate the whole population of Finland tomorrow.” But instead of exploring the potential of intellectual property–free research, Finland, like other Western countries, has continued to follow the default policy of the last several decades: to lean fully on Big Pharma.

In the mainstream narrative, the first-generation COVID-19 vaccines from Pfizer, Moderna, and AstraZeneca are typically presented as an illustration of how markets incentivize and accelerate vital innovation. In reality, the fact that the profit motive is the overriding force shaping medical research has been devastating — particularly in a global pandemic. The Finnish vaccine provides a striking case study of the many ways in which the contemporary patent-based funding model has slowed down vaccine development, and how it currently hampers the possibility of conducting effective mass-inoculation campaigns. [..] “Different biotech firms would slap the spike protein onto some type of delivery mechanism, whether it was RNA technology or something else,” Saksela explains. “And typically, the choice is based on what applications they have a patent on, whether it’s the best option or not.”

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” It can explain most or all of the unusual properties of SARS-CoV-2, including its very strong binding to human ACE2 cell receptors and its rather low mutation rate, even without having to assume “gain of function” research (i.e. genetic engineering) — although the hypothesis doesn’t exclude this, either.”

Covid-19 Virus Origin: The Mojiang Miners (SPR)

Virologist Jonathan Latham and geneticist Allison Wilson have proposed a new hypothesis for the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the Covid-19 pandemic. It has been known since February that a bat virus called RaTG13, collected by the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in 2013, is the closest known relative of SARS-CoV-2. It has been known since May (to some) that RaTG13, previously known as BtCoV/4991, was found in bat feces in a mineshaft near Mojiang in southwest China, after six miners fell ill with Covid19-like pneumonia and three of them eventually died. The WIV itself didn’t disclose this link, however. On the contrary, in a March 2020 interview the famous WIV “bat woman” Shi Zhengli falsely claimed “a fungus” had caused the miners’ illness.

It is also known that RaTG13, despite its 96% similarity, cannot be the direct ancestor of SARS-CoV-2, as natural mutations in the environment would have taken at least several decades. But it has been shown computationally that RaTG13 can already infect human lung cells to some extent. Finally, it is known that the sick Mojiang miners, exhibiting severe Covid19-like pneumonia, were hospitalized for up to four months before being either discharged or dying back in 2012. Latham and Wilson now propose that the Mojiang miners were originally infected by RaTG13 and/or similar coronaviruses during their up to two week stay in the mineshaft inhaling aerosols from bat feces. RaTG13 then turned into SARS-CoV-2 (or a precursor virus) through mutations and/or recombinations in the lungs of the miners during their up to four month stay in the hospital.

Thus the infected lungs of the miners may have served as a ‘human incubator’ enabling RaTG13 to adapt to both the human ACE2 cell receptor and the human immune system in just four months instead of several decades as would have been expected in a natural (animal) environment. The Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2012/2013 received tissue and blood samples of the surviving or dead miners that may already have included SARS-CoV-2 (or a precursor). WIV virologists may then have been waiting five more years, until the completion of their BSL-4 (high security) lab in 2017/2018, before beginning to do research on what is now known as SARS-CoV-2. SARS-CoV-2 may then have escaped, in autumn 2019, from the WIV lab, perhaps through an infected lab worker or animal cadaver, initiating what is now a global coronavirus pandemic.

This, in short, is the Latham-Wilson Mojiang Miners Passage (MMP) hypothesis. It can explain most or all of the unusual properties of SARS-CoV-2, including its very strong binding to human ACE2 cell receptors and its rather low mutation rate, even without having to assume “gain of function” research (i.e. genetic engineering) — although the hypothesis doesn’t exclude this, either.

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The “Excelsior Pass”… Whenever you see things like this, remember:

“..all we know about the vaccines is that they will very effectively reduce your risk of severe disease. We haven’t seen any evidence yet indicating whether or not they stop transmission.”

New York Rolls Out ‘Covid Passport’ At Event Venues (RT)

New York has launched a new Covid-19 ‘passport’ program at major event venues, with spectators asked to use a phone app to prove they’ve been vaccinated, as mandated under state guidelines, or else be barred entry. The “Excelsior Pass” was tested for a second time at Madison Square Garden on Tuesday during a New York Rangers game, functioning like a mobile boarding pass that conveys attendees’ vaccine and testing status. While it made its debut at the Barclays Center late last month, Governor Andrew Cuomo unveiled the project in an announcement this week, insisting the data on the pass would be kept “completely confidential.”

“The Excelsior Pass will play a critical role in getting information to venues and sites in a secure and streamlined way, allowing us to fast-track the reopening of these businesses and getting us one step closer to reaching a new normal,” he said, stressing that participation is “voluntary” for now. As an alternative to the mobile app, residents can also present a paper version of the pass to gain entry to events, both using a QR code linked to their health information. The code does not pass any sensitive medical data to event venues, but merely alerts when a pass is invalid. While it has only been tried at two locations, the state government hopes to expand the program further after the testing period.

As of February 23, New York’s pandemic restrictions require venues with more than 10,000 seats to ensure all staff and spectators receive either a negative Covid-19 test within 72 hours of an event, or to prove they’ve been fully vaccinated against the illness. The guidelines also force organizers to “collect contact information from all those in attendance to help inform contact tracing efforts,” though that is done separately from the new Excelsior Pass.

Read more …

Maybe you should question the way education is organized in the first place.

Giving Kids A Break Is The Best Way For Them To ‘Catch Up’ (G.)

Across the UK schools are again preparing for a phased or full return of pupils to the classroom. Most weary parents, compassionate teachers and lonely kids will be delighted to see this day come, but concerns remain about the effect that protracted school closures have had on our children and young people. Much of the debate has focused on how to help pupils “catch up” on their “lost learning”. This narrative is profoundly unhelpful and potentially damaging, due to the psychological pressure it places on children and young people. It’s our national obsession with summative assessment that makes children feel that they have “fallen behind” if they haven’t learned certain things at certain times. But in every year group, pupils are at various stages of cognitive, physical and emotional development.

There is no such thing as “behind”, there is only where children are at. Besides, if we truly believe that everyone can be a lifelong learner, then a few months of parents struggling to teach phonics is a brief bump on their educational journey. When I read recently of measures being planned to help children make up for lost school time through extended school days, tutoring and summer schools, my first instinct was that we should do the exact opposite. Pre-Covid research from the US has been referenced in support of extending school days, but studies have not provided evidence of positive impact on attainment. Research by the Education Endowment Foundation has highlighted limited evidence of small group tutoring benefiting learners who are “falling behind” and some small benefits of summer schools.

Whether the small gains seen in these studies could be replicated on a larger scale post-pandemic is as yet untested, and open to debate. Given limited time and resources, rather than hoping for a slight boost in standardised attainment scores, educators and government should focus instead on addressing the immediate impact of the crisis, with an eye to what interventions will help children most in the long term. Emotional wellbeing is fundamental and foundational for academic attainment. A stressed, anxious child will have difficulty learning anything. On the flip side, promoting wellbeing can boost academic outcomes. A meta-analysis of 213 school-based, social and emotional learning programmes demonstrated an 11% boost in results in standardised achievement tests.

The impact of lockdown on child and adolescent mental health and wellbeing is clear from research on previous school closures, within the health service, and in our own experiences as parents. Social isolation has exacerbated disadvantage and pre-existing vulnerability. It’s vital that long-term planning includes improving the availability and accessibility of therapeutic support for those who need it. Right now, we need to emotionally regulate before we educate.

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Is it the school closures, or is it banning them from meeting?

Self Harm Claims Among US Teenagers Increased 99% During Pandemic (F.)

The coronavirus pandemic has had a devastating impact on the mental health of teenagers in the United States, according to an analysis of medical records and insurance claims conducted by non-profit FAIR Health, which found that overdoses, intentional self-harm claims, substance use disorders and claims for depression and anxiety disorders all increased substantially in 2020 compared to the prior year. FAIR Health analyzed data from over 32 billion private healthcare claim records, tracking month-by-month changes from January to November 2020 compared to the same timeframe in 2019. The most significant spikes were discovered early on in the pandemic, as the overall number of insurance claims for mental health issues among young people aged 13-18 in March and April of 2020, as a percentage of all medical claim procedures, was nearly double compared to the prior year.

Specifically, claims related to overdoses among that age group jumped up 119% in April 2020 versus April 2019, while claim reports for generalized anxiety and major depressive disorders rose 94% and 84%, respectively. Claims for intentional self-harm as a percentage of all medical claim rpeorts in the 13-18 age group increased 99.8% during that time frame. According to the study, these claims remained elevated through November. “We know that teenagers already have high rates of mental illness,” Dr. Jess Shatkin of the Child Study Center at NYU Langone Medical Center told MedPage Today. “Now [with the pandemic], their parents are starting to struggle, with relationships, jobs, food security. It just ups the ante. We already see vulnerability, and this just makes them more vulnerable.”

While confirmed cases of Covid-19 and related fatalities can clearly be tracked, the impact of the pandemic on the mental health of human beings is not as easily quantifiable. The FAIR Health study’s authors cite infection-related fears, grief, economic instability, and social isolation as contributing factors that have triggered and intensified mental health issues. The numbers in the study align with previously reported data on this subject. A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report released last summer found that the prevalence of depression in June 2020 was approximately four times higher than in the second quarter of 2019, with anxiety about three times higher as well. Several other studies have also shown that young people have been particularly vulnerable to mental health issues due in large part to school closures, which have left them isolated from friends and teachers.

Read more …

 

 

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 March 2, 2021  Posted by at 10:00 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,  26 Responses »


Pablo Picasso Acrobat 1930

 

“Did You Agree To This? Everybody’s Locked Up” – Edward Snowden (ZH)
Coronavirus Crisis Unlikely To Be Over By The End Of The Year – WHO (G.)
WHO Panel: Hydroxychloroquine Should Not Be Used To Prevent COVID-19 (Hill)
Data On Long Covid In UK Children Is Cause For Concern, Scientists Say (G.)
A Return To Normalcy Seen In November (K.)
Party Like It’s 1984 (Jim Kunstler)
US, EU Set To Impose Sanctions On Russia (NBC)
Duckworth Calls For Russian Bounties Intelligence To Be Declassified (Hill)
Stefan Halper’s Role In Crossfire Hurricane Larger Than Previously Known (ET)
Halper Reports Reveal Wider-Ranging Operation To Spy On Trump Campaign (JTN)
Bernie Sanders Vows To Force Vote On $15 Minimum Wage (Hill)
Joe Biden Says His Hands Are Tied On $15 Minimum Wage. That’s Not True (Sirota)
Finance As Culture (Luttig)
Mob Justice May Be Poetic Justice, But Cuomo Deserves Due Process (Turley)
Cuomo Swears He Always Kept Mask On While Sexually Harassing Women (BBee)
Odyssey Banned for Violence, Sexism; Is this the End of World Classics? (GR)

 

 

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Word!

“Did You Agree To This? Everybody’s Locked Up” – Edward Snowden (ZH)

A new video montage of recent interviews with former NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden exposes how the global COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns – which have been particularly severe and far-reaching in Western countries like the UK, Canada, and in a number of major US cities – coupled with the already immense power of Silicon Valley and its allies in the national security state, has served to keep individuals and entire populations ‘gated off’ from one another. “This is just the beginning,” Snowden warns of these unprecedented times. “All of these things today have consequences which we are not informed about.” “I would say this is sort of unusual… we’re all spread all over the world in different rooms, everybody’s locked up… but for me this is how I’ve always lived.”

He narrates that so much of our life is “intermediated by the screens.” Increasingly our lives are “intermediated by these screens. We spend less time outside and more and more time staring into glass or through glass to connect with that larger world – something beyond ourselves.”Ultimately he poses the following questions as a warning in the video entitled, “Edward Snowden 2021: The Most VICIOUS HONEST 10 Minutes of your LIFE!”… “Increasingly it feels something distinct from us, something apart from us – something that we are witnessing rather than participating in. Ask yourself: Is this your will? Is this what you want? Did you agree to this? Is this consistent with the vision of the future you want to see?

Snowden continues, “The institutional powers of our day… which have assumed for themselves some mandate – whether to conduct business, whether its to govern the lives of others, whether it’s to make war, .. these institutional powers don’t seem to particularly care about your answer to that question: is this what you wanted? Is this OK? Did you agree to it?” The answer is frequently “you don’t have a choice” as to whether you agree or not… “because they have the gun, they have the baton. And Facebook would say ‘Click OK to continue’ – and if you don’t you can’t do anything…”

Read more …

the “virus is very much in control”…

Coronavirus Crisis Unlikely To Be Over By The End Of The Year – WHO (G.)

Despite the spread of Covid-19 being slowed in some countries due to lockdowns and vaccination programs, it is “premature” and “unrealistic” to the think the pandemic will be over by the end of the year, the World Health Organization’s executive director of emergency services has said. Speaking at a press briefing Geneva, Dr Michael Ryan said while vaccinating the most vulnerable people, including healthcare workers, would help remove the “tragedy and fear” from the situation, and would help to ease pressure on hospitals, the “virus is very much in control”. “It will be very premature, and I think unrealistic, to think that we’re going to finish with this virus by the end of the year,” Ryan said.


“If the vaccines begin to impact not only on death and not only on hospitalisation, but have a significant impact on transmission dynamics and transmission risk, then I believe we will accelerate toward controlling this pandemic.” The number of new global infections rose last week for the first time in almost two months. Reported cases increased in four of the WHO’s six regions: the Americas, Europe, south-east Asia and the eastern Mediterranean. “This is disappointing, but not surprising,” said the director general of the WHO, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. “We’re working to better understand these increases in transmission. Some of it appears to be due to relaxing of public health measures, continued circulation of variants, and people letting down their guard.” He said while vaccines would help to save lives, “if countries rely solely on vaccines, they’re making a mistake”.

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Meawhile in Greece…

A Return To Normalcy Seen In November (K.)

Greek authorities’ main concern is now the timeline for a return to normalcy, after a year of the pandemic. The economy cannot withstand many more months of lockdowns and increasing coronavirus fatigue is gripping the population. Experts say the return to normalcy will happen when “herd immunity” is achieved. For that to happen, they say, 70% of the population must be vaccinated. Then, of course, there are questions of how long the immunity lasts, whether the disease will recur, and so on. According to a team of researchers at Aristotle University in Thessaloniki who have developed a Covid-19 risk evaluation model, the vaccination of 70% of the population, and thus herd immunity, will be achieved in November, provided there are 1 million vaccinations per month.


Under this caveat, the percentage of the vaccinated population, now standing at 9%, will reach 30% at the end of May, 38% in June, 46% in July, 54% in August and 62% in September. By the end of May, a “wall of immunity” for the most vulnerable groups – the elderly and those suffering from serious underlying diseases – will have been built, the researchers say. “[The wall] doesn’t mean complete freedom but at least means the likelihood of lockdown becomes remote,” says Dimosthenis Sarigiannis, professor of environmental engineering at Aristotle University.

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Ok, let’s see the trials.

WHO Panel: Hydroxychloroquine Should Not Be Used To Prevent COVID-19 (Hill)

The anti-inflammatory drug hydroxychloroquine should not be used to prevent COVID-19, according to a new recommendation from the World Health Organization. Multiple clinical trials of more than 6,000 people showed the drug had no meaningful effect on death or admissions to the hospital in people who had no prior exposure to COVID-19. The trials showed a “moderate certainty” that not only did hydroxychloroquine have no meaningful effect on laboratory confirmed COVID-19 infection, it also probably increased the risk of adverse effects.


The WHO’s recommendation was published in The BMJ, a medical journal. A WHO expert panel is studying different drugs that could be used to prevent COVID-19 infection, and the hydroxychloroquine recommendation is the first that the panel has published. “The panel considers that this drug is no longer a research priority and that resources should be used to evaluate other more promising drugs to prevent COVID-19,” the WHO said in a statement. The recommendations are meant “to provide trustworthy guidance on the management of COVID-19 and help doctors make better decisions with their patients,” the WHO said.

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No word on how many children are affected. If it’s just five, maybe they should tell us.

Data On Long Covid In UK Children Is Cause For Concern, Scientists Say (G.)

Scientists have warned that emerging data on long Covid in children should not be ignored given the lack of a vaccine for this age group, but cautioned that the evidence describing these enduring symptoms in the young is so far uncertain. Recently published data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) has caused worry. The data suggest that 13% of under 11s and about 15% of 12- to 16-year-olds reported at least one symptom five weeks after a confirmed Covid-19 infection. ONS samples households randomly, therefore positive cases do not depend on having had symptoms and being tested.

With schools in England poised to reopen on Monday – Prof Christina Pagel, a member of the Independent Sage committee and director of clinical operational research at University College London – in a Twitter post suggested that although emerging data on long Covid in children was uncertain, it should not be ignored, particularly given there was no licensed vaccine for these age groups, and there probably won’t be until the end of this year or early next year. Although children are relatively less likely to become infected, transmit the virus and be hospitalised, the key question is whether even mild or asymptomatic infection can lead to long Covid in children, said Danny Altmann, professor of immunology at Imperial College London.

[..] Some children are initially asymptomatic or have mild symptoms but then it might be six or seven weeks before they start experiencing long Covid symptoms, which can range from standard post-viral fatigue and headaches to neuropsychiatric symptoms such as seizures, or even skin lesions. At the moment there is no consensus on the scale and impact of long Covid in adults, but emerging data is concerning. For children, the data is even more scarce. Recent reports from hospitals in Sweden and Italy have generated concern, but this data is not from national trials – they are single-centre studies – and include relatively small patient numbers, said Sir Terence Stephenson, a Nuffield professor of child health at University College London.

Stephenson was awarded £1.36m last month to lead a study investigating long Covid in 11- to 17-year-olds. “I don’t have a scientific view on what long Covid is in young people is – because frankly, we don’t know,” he said.

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Of course, steers and cows are easier to push around than bulls, and the technology for transforming bulls into steers — or men in to eunuchs — is not that complex or nuanced..

Party Like It’s 1984 (Jim Kunstler)

Chalk up a fatal blow to The Patriarchy. That avatar of toxic masculinity, Mr. Potato Head has been dumped into the same humid chamber of perdition where the ghosts of Nathan Bedford Forrest, Theodore Bilbo, and Phyllis Schlafly howl and squirm — liberating the billions of potatoes world-wide from the mental prison of binary sexuality. The move by Hasbro (bro? really??) may yet disappoint the legions in Wokesterdom as a-bridge-not-far-enough while they await the debut of Transitioning Potato Head, complete with play hormone syringe and play scalpel, so that the under-six crowd can begin to map out their own gender reassignments without the meddling of Adult 1 and Adult 2, formerly known as Mommy and Daddy.

Was it mere coincidence that the action in Toyland happened the same week that one Rachel Levine was grilled in hir Senate confirmation hearing for the post as Assistant Secretary for Health in the Department of Health and Human Services? The hearing tilted toward transphobia when Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) asked zie, a little too aggressively, if they were in favor of pubescent children opting for sexual reassignment in opposition to xyr parents. The nominee, who hirself transitioned from “male” to “female” in 2011, answered that transgender medical issues are “complex and nuanced.” True (perhaps). And probably more than a Senator who transitioned from ophthalmologist to politician might appreciate.

Such are the great preoccupations of American leadership in these late days of empire. Are their any “historic firsts” left for Progressives to achieve in the march to a transhuman nirvana? An “undocumented” president? Animal representation in the House and Senate? A-I “entities” qualifying for public office — Governor Smartphone? Let’s face it, the pitiful old school humans in charge of things for so long are making a hash of our affairs. A cash register could probably do a better job as Chairman of the Federal Reserve than the always-waffley Jerome Powell. And a MacBook Pro might make a better president than Joe Biden in the brief daily operational hours before his managers a “call a lid.” We’d have to come up with some new personal pronouns for them, of course.

Pundits and observers-of-the-scene have warned us that all this artificially-generated turmoil over the sex-of-things is but one part of the prelude to a “Great Reset” in which people the world over are to be herded into corrals of ultra-regulated behavior. Of course, steers and cows are easier to push around than bulls, and the technology for transforming bulls into steers — or men in to eunuchs — is not that complex or nuanced. The question is: will enough American men submit to castration, either chemical, financial, political, or literal? Maybe not.

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Oh, cut it out already.

US, EU Set To Impose Sanctions On Russia (NBC)

The U.S. and the European Union are expected to impose coordinated sanctions on Russia as early as Tuesday for the poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny and his arrest and detention that followed, three sources familiar with the planning said. The sources spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not otherwise authorized to speak to the media. The sanctions will be the first to target Moscow since Joe Biden became president and opened a comprehensive review of U.S.-Russia policy, including the Kremlin’s actions against Navalny, interference into the U.S. election, the Solar Winds hack and reported bounties offered to Taliban-linked groups to target U.S. forces in Afghanistan. The Trump administration declined to take action against Russia for the attempted assassination of Navalny.

The U.S. is expected to use legal authorities to impose sanctions on Russia for its use of a chemical nerve agent against Navalny in August, said a senior administration official, a congressional aide and a Western diplomat. Toxicology tests conducted in Germany, France and Sweden and by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons found that Navalny was poisoned with a novel form of the Novichok nerve agent in violation of the international Chemical Weapons Convention. The Kremlin has denied any involvement in the attack. Upon his return to Russia in January, Navalny was arrested and sentenced to more than two years in jail. He has been transferred to a penal colony. The E.U. has taken action against Russia for poisoning Navalny, restricting travel and freezing the assets of six Russians in October, but this week’s sanctions would be the first issued under the E.U.’s new human rights regime.

E.U. Foreign Minister Josep Borrell told the Atlantic Council last week that Secretary of State Antony Blinken had asked the E.U. to coordinate with the U.S. on the new sanctions. The E.U.’s procedural vote to formally adopt the sanctions will close at noon Tuesday Brussels time. “I wouldn’t want to speak to any measures that we may have coming, but suffice it to say that we have coordinated very closely,” State Department spokesperson Ned Price said Monday about the cooperation between the U.S and the E.U. Price did not elaborate on the timing of the sanctions but added, “We’ve been working on it as an urgent challenge.” An investigation by U.N. experts released Monday found that the attack against Navalny falls within a wider trend, observed over several decades, of arbitrary killings and attempted killings of Russian citizens and government critics, both within Russia and extraterritorially.

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I said cut it out!

Duckworth Calls For Russian Bounties Intelligence To Be Declassified (Hill)

Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) on Monday called for the Biden administration to declassify intelligence related to reports that the Kremlin offered bounties to Taliban forces for targeting U.S. troops in Afghanistan. “While any intelligence assessment on this matter is understandably sensitive, the American public, and Gold Star Families in particular, have a pressing need to know if there is any truth to these claims,” Duckworth wrote in a letter to Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines first obtained by Politico. “I believe such a finding may be presented while protecting classified information.” The intelligence, first reported last year, was dismissed as a “hoax” by then-President Trump.

Last September, Gen. Frank McKenzie, who oversees U.S. troops in Afghanistan, said the military was still investigating, adding that the report “has not been proved to a level of certainty that satisfies me.” Haines has been tasked with reviewing intelligence on recent Russian activity, including the alleged bounty initiative. In her letter, Duckworth asked for Haines to publish an unclassified report to “provide urgently needed transparency on this grave matter.” Duckworth, a veteran who lost both legs in Iraq, was one of the leading voices calling for action in response to the report last year. In July, she led a letter from Senate Democrats asking to see the then-president’s intelligence briefings relating to the alleged bounties.

“Despite my persistent attempts to bring transparency to these alarming reports, the Trump administration failed to provide an official response to basic questions: did the United States Government or our partners assess the likelihood of the existence of the GRU bounty payment activity, and did the United States Government find evidence indicating correlation or causation between GRU bounty payments and deadly attacks on U.S. troops by Taliban-linked militants?” Duckworth wrote in the letter on Monday, referring to Russia’s secretive military intelligence agency.

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Always thought his role was quite substantial.

Stefan Halper’s Role In Crossfire Hurricane Larger Than Previously Known (ET)

Newly released FBI documents shed light on two meetings between FBI Agent Stephen Somma and FBI source Stefan Halper, providing further insight into the wide scope of the FBI’s investigation into the Trump 2016 presidential campaign—and the active role played by Halper, who acted as a confidential human source (CHS) for the FBI. Although Halper was not considered an official CHS for the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation prior to these meetings, Somma had known Halper since 2011, according to the Department of Justice Inspector General’s report on FISA Abuse. Additionally, Somma had served as Halper’s handler from “2011 through 2016” as part of Somma’s “regular investigative activities.”

The FBI’s meetings with Halper on Aug. 11 and 12, 2016, were done at the proposal of Somma, who said he “lacked a basic understanding” of political campaigns. Somma said that he selected Halper because he knew that Halper had been “affiliated with national political campaigns since the early 1970s” and “might have information about, and potentially may have met, one or more of the Crossfire Hurricane subjects”—Trump campaign advisers Carter Page and George Papadopoulos and Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort. Somma said that he did not initially tell Halper that there was already an open FBI investigation or who the subjects were, nor, he told the IG, did he tell Halper of the conversation between Papadopoulos and Australian diplomat Alexander Downer, which was the FBI’s claimed reason for opening Crossfire Hurricane.

Somma was proven to be prophetic, as Halper already had direct knowledge of two of the three people considered subjects of Crossfire Hurricane. And Halper would later fashion a meeting in London with Papadopoulos, the one person he didn’t already know. Halper also managed a meeting with Sam Clovis from the Trump campaign. Additionally, based on the FBI documents obtained by Just The News, it appears that Halper was responsible for pushing Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn as a “person of interest” to the FBI with what appears to have been a false story that the FBI failed to immediately verify—and then later failed to correct as the story gained traction in the media during a crucial period of the Trump presidency.

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Problem remains: who will investigate the investigators?

Halper Reports Reveal Wider-Ranging Operation To Spy On Trump Campaign (JTN)

Once-secret reports show the FBI effort to spy on the Trump campaign was far wider than previously disclosed, as agents directed an undercover informant to make secret recordings, pressed for intelligence on numerous GOP figures, and sought to find “anyone in the Trump campaign” with ties to Russia who could acquire dirt “damaging to Hillary Clinton.” The now-declassified operational handling reports for FBI confidential human source Stefan Halper — codenamed “Mitch” — provide an unprecedented window both into the tactics used by the bureau to probe the Trump campaign and the wide dragnet that was cast to target numerous high-level officials inside the GOP campaign just weeks before Americans chose their next president in the November 2016 election.

Among the revelations, the memos make clear that: Almost immediately after the FBI opened a Russia collusion probe on July 31, 2016 narrowly focused on the foreign lobbying of a single Trump campaign aide named George Papadopoulos, agents pressed Halper for information on more than a half dozen other figures, including future Attorney General Jeff Sessions, foreign policy adviser Sam Clovis, campaign chairman Paul Manafort, economic adviser Peter Navarro, future National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and campaign adviser Carter Page. Halper provided significant exculpatory evidence to the FBI — including transcripts of conversations he recorded of targeted Trump advisers providing statements of innocence — that was never disclosed to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that approved a year of surveillance targeting the Trump campaign, and specifically Page.

While current FBI Director Chris Wray has insisted the bureau did not engage in spying on the Trump campaign, Halper’s taskings include many of the tradecraft tactics of espionage, including the creation of a fake cover story (he wanted a job at the Trump campaign), secret recordings, providing background on targets, suggested questions to ask and even contact information for potential targets. But the memos’ most explosive revelations are the sheer breadth of the FBI’s insufficiently predicated dragnet targeting the Trump campaign, and the agents’ clearly stated purpose of thwarting any Trump campaign effort to get dirt from Russia that could hurt his Democratic rival.

“The Crossfire Hurricane investigative team is attempting to determine if anyone in the Trump campaign is in a position to have received information either directly or indirectly from the Russian Federation regarding the anonymous release of information during the campaign that would be damaging to Hillary Clinton,” one of the early FBI electronic communications (ECs) from Halper’s undercover work stated. Ordinarily, FBI counterintelligence investigations that target Americans legally must be predicated on specific allegations that narrowly focus the bureau’s spy powers on limited targets to avoid unnecessary infringement of privacy and civil liberties. But the Halper documents reveal a large, unfocused FBI search with little substantiation of alleged wrongdoing, and significant evidence that undermined the core allegations, experts told Just the News.

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Bernie vs Ol’ Joe.

Bernie Sanders Vows To Force Vote On $15 Minimum Wage (Hill)

Senate Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) says Democrats should “ignore” the recent ruling of the Senate parliamentarian and is vowing to force the Senate to vote this week on an amendment to set the federal minimum wage at $15 an hour. Sanders on Monday declared he would not back down on his signature wage initiative after Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough ruled last week that a provision setting the federal minimum wage at $15 an hour would not be eligible under special budget rules Democrats are using to avoid a filibuster while passing their coronavirus relief bill. “My personal view is that the idea that we have a Senate staffer, a high-ranking staffer, deciding whether 30 million Americans get a pay raise or not is nonsensical.


“We have got to make that decision, not a staffer who’s unelected, so my own view is that we should ignore the rulings, the decision of the parliamentarian,” Sanders told reporters. Sanders added, “Given the enormous crises facing this country and the desperation of working families, we have got to as soon as possible end the filibuster.” “We cannot have a minority of members define what the American people want,” he said. Sanders said he will force a vote on an amendment raising the federal minimum wage this week. “To the best of my knowledge, there will be a vote on the minimum wage, and we’ll see what happens,” he said. “I intend to offer the bill that will raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, and we’ll see how the votes go.” “If we fail in this legislation, I will be back,” he warned. “We are going to keep going. “We are going to raise that minimum wage very shortly to $15 an hour,” he said.

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LBJ did it.

Joe Biden Says His Hands Are Tied On $15 Minimum Wage. That’s Not True (Sirota)

When a Republican is president, Democratic politicians, pundits and activists will tell you that the presidency is an all-powerful office that can do anything it wants. When a Democrat is president, these same politicians, pundits and activists will tell you that the presidency has no power to do anything. In fact, they will tell you a Democratic president cannot even use the bully pulpit and other forms of pressure to try to shift the votes of senators in his own party. A tale from history proves this latter myth is complete garbage – and that tale is newly relevant in today’s supercharged debate over a $15 minimum wage. In that debate so far, we have seen Democratic senators prepare to surrender the $15 minimum wage their party promised by insisting they are powerless in the face of a non-binding advisory opinion of a parliamentarian they can ignore or fire.

That explanation is patently ridiculous and factually false, so Democratic apologists are starting to further justify the surrender by suggesting that even if the party kept a $15 minimum wage in the Covid relief bill, conservative Democrats such as Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema would block it anyway. The White House itself is now falling back on the idea that it doesn’t have the votes to do much of anything, insinuating that Joe Biden – who occupies the world’s most powerful office – somehow has no power to try to change the legislative dynamic. And this spin is being predictably amplified across social media. [..] it is laughable and preposterous to argue that a newly elected president has zero power to even try to shift the dynamic.

And yet, whether you call this all deliberate deception or learned helplessness, this fantastical myth of the Powerless President will inevitably be used to shield Biden from criticism for abandoning his pledge to fight for a $15 minimum wage. The apologism is particularly absurd because unlike his predecessor Barack Obama, who was a relative newcomer to politics, Biden’s major selling point was that he knows “how to make government work”. The guy explicitly pitched himself as the best Democratic presidential candidate by suggesting that in an era of gridlock, he knows how to make the Democratic agenda a reality and Get Things Done™, like master of the Senate Lyndon Baines Johnson. That’s where LBJ himself comes in to destroy the narrative that Democratic presidents in general – and Biden specifically – are inherently helpless.

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Memes “R” Us.

Finance As Culture (Luttig)

In practice, what does financialization look like? We’ve all heard the institutional narrative. The US stock market has nearly tripled in the past 10 years. The FIRE sector (finance, insurance, real estate) now accounts for 20% of US GDP, versus 10% in 1947. S&P buybacks nearly doubled in the 2010s. IPOs grew 2.5x in 2020. But financialization is no longer purely institutional; it has seeped into our culture. A combination of low interest rates, a historic tech bull run, and the resulting torrent of fomo has tethered us to our monitors to watch candlestick charts. The financialization of culture has manifested in two primary ways: lottery culture and equity culture. We’ve always had lottery culture, in which people trade assets hoping to make money without understanding or conviction of their fundamental value.

In the summer of 1929, for example, Joe Kennedy’s shoe shine boy gave him stock tips, signaling the market peak. But lottery culture has exploded in the past few years. Robinhood has achieved its vision of democratizing access to financial markets, boasting over ten million monthly active users and exponential growth. Retail investor trading as a percentage of stock market volume has more than doubled since 2010. When “stocks only go up”, people realize the stock market is a casino with much better payouts. Gamified trading has tethered us to our phones and bank accounts. Through GameStop, even protest became financialized. At the peak of the GameStop saga, millions of Americans owned GME, arming themselves against hedge funds.

This was part protest, part nihilistic hail mary to get rich. The number of subscribers to the wallstreetbets (WSB) subreddit certainly spiked in 2021, but the exponential compounding for years beforehand implies a degree of inevitability. Memes took lottery culture to new heights. Stocks popular among a retail audience, like Apple, have historically traded at higher multiples than others in their category. Tesla accelerated the divergence between retail excitement and fundamentals: TSLA revenue grew 50% over the past two years, but meme culture helped its market cap grow by 12x. GameStop completed the meme-fundamentals duality: investors don’t even pretend that the company’s fundamentals will ever substantiate its market cap.WSB revealed where Robinhood culture was headed all along: a nihilistic lottery. It was historically viewed as a disorganized and degenerate mob, but the mob has evolved into a laser-focused and motivated militia.

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So do the people who died in care homes.

Mob Justice May Be Poetic Justice, But Cuomo Deserves Due Process (Turley)

In 2012, Attorney General Eric Holder appeared before at Northwestern University Law School to announce President Obama’s “kill list” policy, under which he reserved the right to unilaterally order the death of any American deemed an imminent threat. After all, Holder explained, “the Constitution guarantees due process, not judicial process.” The response was as chilling as the message: The audience of judges, lawyers and law students applauded an attorney general who just told them that any of them could be killed tomorrow on the president’s order. Some of us denounced the “kill list” policy, which foreshadowed what has become a campaign against due process. In our hair-triggered culture of Twitter attacks and “canceling” opponents, due process is treated as hopelessly arcane and inconvenient.

Our political discourse must now be tweet-worthy — less than 280 words — and delivered in a news cycle measured in minutes. Due process, like free speech, is rarely valued until its loss becomes personal. Take Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-N.Y.). Cuomo advanced his political career by positioning himself at the front of every mob pursuing political rivals, as during Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing. Before hearing the defense of now-Justice Kavanaugh, Cuomo described the allegations against him by Christine Blasey Ford as presumptively true. He not only effectively called Kavanaugh a rapist, without any due process, but demanded that Kavanaugh take a polygraph as a condition to be believed. Cuomo was not alone. Many Democratic leaders insisted that “women must be believed” when raising sexual harassment allegations and declared Kavanaugh guilty before hearing any testimony.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) dismissed due process concerns for Kavanaugh, adding: “When we talk about … due process and justice, it must focus on the victim.” Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) said Kavanaugh was not entitled to a presumption of innocence and that men should “just shut up” and accept the allegations. Last year, when Lindsey Boylan’s allegations went public, I wrote a column asking if Cuomo would presume himself guilty, absent a polygraph. Now, after Boylan added details of Cuomo’s alleged kissing and propositioning her, many are struggling with his (and their) prior positions against due process. While CNN, MSNBC and other networks blacked-out the story or barely covered it, others — including many on the right — have declared Cuomo to be guilty and dangerous.

Cuomo deserves due process, despite loudly denying it for others. Simply because Boylan made the allegations is not proof of guilt. Both sides have a right to be heard — not a right to be believed solely on their word. Due process allows us to determine who is a victim — not, as AOC suggested, to vindicate one party as the declared victim. [..] Of course, as Gov. Cuomo has learned, one can lead a mob one day only to be pursued by the mob on the next. It would be easy to leave him to the mob and call it poetic justice, but that is not justice of any kind. Cuomo should receive all of the due process he denied to others — not because he deserves it, but because he embodies the costs of ignoring it.

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He’ll be arrested any day now.

Cuomo Swears He Always Kept Mask On While Sexually Harassing Women (BBee)

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo apologized this weekend for his long-standing habit of sexually abusing young women he holds power over. And while that all sounds quite bad, Governor Cuomo did make it clear to the public that he always wore a mask and socially distanced during these interactions– a fact that has some folks saying he should get off free. “I have the greatest respect for my employees,” Cuomo explained during a press conference. “Especially the girls—we’ve got a lot of young girls on staff who do a really good job.” Cuomo paused for a moment and seemed to wink at someone offscreen.


“And I can guarantee you right now, sure I might be a sexual predator, but not once did I remove my mask, never once broke the six-foot rule during conversations with my girls– at least in 2020. Isn’t that right, Kelly?” Cuomo went on to explain how some of his sexual jokes may not have landed with the women since they couldn’t see his facial expressions. He also claimed that the women may have misheard him since his words were muffled by his mask and they were standing so far apart. “Do I regret making those comments?” Cuomo asked as he stood up to leave the press conference. “No. Now if you’ll excuse me I’ve got some strip poker, er– I mean poker, to play.”

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Ban the Bible!

Odyssey Banned for Violence, Sexism; Is this the End of World Classics? (GR)

Odyssey, Homer’s classic of world literature written in the time of Ancient Greece, was recently banned in Lawrence, Massachusetts for portraying ideas that do not conform to modern norms of behavior. The move, reported recently by the Wall Street Journal, appears to stem from a “social justice” movement, created by Twitter users, called #DisruptTexts. Its proponents believe that any world literature that does not portray the norms that they hold today in terms of gender roles, violence and racial equality must be banned in the interest of shaping a new generation that will not be allowed to come into contact with concepts that they consider repugnant — or even just outdated.

Penelope, sitting at her loom patiently for twenty years while hubby Odysseus goes off to fight in the Trojan War, is not the model of female behavior that teachers who espouse this new type of book banning want their students to emulate. But not only do they not want their students to emulate these behaviors — they want to ban books that contain they want to ban books that portray violence, traditional gender roles and racism, making sure that future generations will never learn about the many adventures of Odysseus and his companions as they made their way across the sea, fought against Troy and wended their way back home after twenty years away.

Books such as this, which provide a treasury of historical references and form the basis of educated peoples’ understanding of the Classical world, naturally contain violent images of battle and strife and portray the social milieu of the day. Until recently, however, teachers would focus on the tremendous literary and historical merit of the world of Homer and other ancient writers, leaving their students to come to their own conclusions as to whether or not they would like to wage warfare or alternatively sit at home weaving while the husband is away at battle.

[..] But the politically-correct rush to judgment, which began in recent years with the banning of American classics such as Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and even more recent works such as How to Kill a Mockingbird — for the use of the n-word — has come back to bite society now that the floodgates have been opened. Originally, the pendulum swung the other way, and it was conservative Americans who were originally guilty of banning books — despite the freedom of speech and expression explicitly enshrined in the Constitution. The first book to be officially banned in America was Thomas Morton’s “New English Canaan,” published in 1637.

A massive, three-volume work, it contained not only Morton’s insightful observations about Native Americans, but also — raising the ire of those who had settled Plymouth and the Massachusetts Bay Company — a biting satire of the Puritans. As the centuries went on, it wasn’t just political positions that drew the ire of book banners, it was more often portrayals of sex that attracted the eye of censors and caused works of literature to come under scrutiny. And the list of banned books in America is shamefully long, including Peyton Place,The Great Gatsby, The Catcher in the Rye, The Grapes of Wrath, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Color Purple, James Joyce’s Ulysses, Beloved, and The Lord of the Flies.

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Tulsi Syria
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