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Debt Rattle February 13 2022

Feb 132022

February 13, 2022 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:53 am Finance Tagged with: Barry Manilow, bat virus, booster, Durham, Freedom Convoy, Hillary, police raid, truckers, Trump, Ukraine 161 Responses »

Giuseppe Arcimboldo Four elements – Earth 1566

• New Zealand Plays Barry Manilow To Repel Parliament Protesters (BBC)

• Canada Truckers Protest: After A Police Raid, What Next? (BBC)

• Blockades on Canada-US Border Continue As Protests Swell (AP)

• Democracy Demands That The Truckers Get A Fair Hearing (Burney)

• Biden Tells Putin Ukraine Invasion Would Bring Decisive Response (R.)

• Giant Ukrainian US Lobbying Campaign Revealed (RT)

• The Chinese Bat Virus That Never Shows Up in Any Chinese Bats (Geraghty)

• COVID Booster Loses Potency After 4 Months (Y!)

• Clinton Campaign Paid To ‘Infiltrate’ Trump Tower – Durham (Fox)

• Trump Demands Prosecutions, Reparations After Durham Revelations (JTN)

• John Durham Highlights the Tip of the Iceberg (CTH)

Maher Trudeau: They take up space
https://twitter.com/ezralevant/status/1492485385708052484

Early treatment 2 years in.

Protests all over the world.

Protests all over the world. MSM silent. Ask yourself, why? pic.twitter.com/GHimHfAtkt

— Bryan Ivermectin Pastor (@BryanACPastor) February 12, 2022

McCullough Vaccine deaths

Chris Saucedo asked about causation and I gave him my analysis on a more probable than not basis. The CDC holds all the data and the agency owes Americans an explanation. pic.twitter.com/WbWcPT94DA

— Peter McCullough, MD MPH (@P_McCulloughMD) February 13, 2022

24,200 reports of myocarditis in 2021

already in 2022… 8,392 reports of myocarditis. 1/3 of all reports in the first month.

Ardern attacks Babylon Bee. Or is it Babylon BBC?

• New Zealand Plays Barry Manilow To Repel Parliament Protesters (BBC)

Authorities in New Zealand have been playing Barry Manilow’s greatest hits in an attempt to dislodge protesters camped outside the parliament building. Songs by the US singer are being played on a 15-minute loop, along with the Spanish dance tune, Macarena. The demonstrators, who are angry at Covid-19 vaccine mandates, responded by playing songs such as Twisted Sister’s We’re Not Gonna Take It. The protests began on Tuesday when a convoy of vehicles drove to parliament. Inspired by large rallies against vaccine mandates in Canada, hundreds of protesters arrived in the capital, Wellington, to rally against Covid restrictions. They adopted the name “Convoy for Freedom” and blocked streets in the city.

By Wednesday their numbers had dwindled to the dozens, but they increased again at the weekend. On Thursday police arrested 122 people and charged many with trespassing or obstruction. Tactics used by the authorities to try and get rid of the protesters involved turning on the water sprinklers on the lawn where they were camped on Friday. But protesters retaliated by digging trenches and building makeshift drainpipes to re-route the water, the Associated Press news agency reports. With sprinklers proving ineffective, Parliament Speaker Trevor Mallard settled on a new approach: blasting out Barry Manilow’s greatest hits, which include Mandy and Could It Be Magic, as well as the 1990s hit Macarena and Covid vaccine messages.

The police raid failed. Now what?

“..vehicles are no longer the problem, says Jason Bellaire, deputy chief of operations for the Windsor Police Service. The problem is the people..

• Canada Truckers Protest: After A Police Raid, What Next? (BBC)

A police raid on the bridge blockade at Windsor, Ontario, failed to shut it down. With protesters in Ottawa also digging in, what will it take to get them to budge? They arrived by the bus load – police in balaclavas and carrying long guns, ready to oust dozens of protesters blocking roads leading to the Ambassador Bridge. There were pickups and SUVs festooned with Canadian flags, anti-vaccination slogans and anti-Trudeau epithets, as well as some heavy commercial trucks. About 100 vehicles have been parked along the roughly 2km (1.25 miles) of road leading up to the bridge for almost a week. The Freedom Convoy, as it’s been called, began as a protest against a mandate requiring truckers who cross the US-Canada border to be vaccinated.

But the group is not united by any one occupation – rather, they share a distrust of vaccines, a concern for government overreach and a general dislike of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. More than 12 hours after a court issued an injunction ordering the Windsor site to be cleared, the police moved in on Saturday morning. A number of vehicles agreed to leave immediately, although not without a loud honk or a shout of disapproval. More were ticketed and towed in the evening. But vehicles are no longer the problem, says Jason Bellaire, deputy chief of operations for the Windsor Police Service. The problem is the people, he says. “We need to make it exceeding clear they’re not welcome to stay here, they’re not welcome to disrupt our bridge traffic, they’re not welcome to disrupt our community,” he told the BBC

[..] “They’re going to have to move us out. We’ll be peaceful and we’ll lock arms and show unity,” said Dan, a protester who did not give his last name to the BBC. That leaves both sides in a standstill, with police trying to negotiate with protesters to go home. “We’re negotiating with them, we’re talking to them, we’re doing everything we can to resolve this peacefully and convince them to leave,” says Deputy Chief Bellaire. About 750km (466 miles) east in Ottawa, the protest group that has taken over the nation’s capital also shows no signs of slowing down. Unlike the Windsor crowd, which has been limited to a few hundred people occupying one major road, the Ottawa protest has essentially taken over the centre of a major city, with thousands of people flooding the streets with Canadian flags.

[..] But while French police fired tear gas to prevent their own Freedom Convoy from advancing, that’s a tactic Windsor police don’t seem to want to use. “It will take as long as it takes,” Deputy Chief Bellaire said. “I’m not giving them a timeline.” One thing working in police’s favour is Mother Nature. With temperatures dropping to -17C (1.4 F) overnight, it will not be a pleasant evening for those trying to tough it out.

““It’s a win-win,” Koss said. “The pandemic is rolling down right now, they can remove the mandates, all the mandates, and everyone’s happy. The government does the right thing, and the protesters are all happy.“

• Blockades on Canada-US Border Continue As Protests Swell (AP)

Protesters opposed to COVID-19 vaccine mandates and other restrictions withdrew their vehicles from a key U.S.-Canadian border bridge Saturday though access remained blocked while other demonstrations ramped up in cities across Canada, including the capital, where police said they were awaiting more officers before ending what they described as an illegal occupation. The tense standoff at the Ambassador Bridge linking Detroit and Windsor, Ontario, eased somewhat early in the day when Canadian police persuaded demonstrators to move the trucks they had used to barricade the entrance to the busy international crossing.

But protesters reconvened nearby — with reinforcements — and were still choking off access from the Canadian side late Saturday, snarling traffic and commerce for a sixth day. About 180 remained late Saturday in the sub-freezing cold. In Ottawa, the ranks of protesters swelled to what police said was 4,000 demonstrators. The city has seen that on past weekends, and loud music played as people milled about downtown where anti-vaccine demonstrators have been encamped since late January. The protests at the bridge, in Ottawa and elsewhere have reverberated outside the country, with similarly inspired convoys in France, New Zealand and the Netherlands, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security warned that truck convoys may be in the works in the United States.

[..] Surrounded by dozens of officers in Windsor, a man with “Mandate Freedom” and “Trump 2024” spray-painted on his vehicle left the bridge entrance early in the day as others began dismantling a small, tarp-covered encampment. A trucker honked his horn as he, too, drove off, to cheers and chants of “Freedom!” But hundreds more arrived to bolster the crowd and settled into a faceoff with police about two blocks away, waving flags and yelling. While there were no visible physical confrontations, the crowd still controlled the road to the bridge, and traffic had not resumed as of the evening.

Windsor police tweeted that no one had been arrested but urged people to stay away from the bridge: “We appreciate the cooperation of the demonstrators at this time and we will continue to focus on resolving the demonstration peacefully. Avoid area!” Protester Daniel Koss said shortly before police advanced that the demonstration had succeeded in bringing attention to demands to lift COVID-19 mandates and he was happy it remained peaceful. “It’s a win-win,” Koss said. “The pandemic is rolling down right now, they can remove the mandates, all the mandates, and everyone’s happy. The government does the right thing, and the protesters are all happy.”

“When law-abiding citizens are provoked by indefensible government edicts and denied any hearing by those in power what are they supposed to do? ”

• Democracy Demands That The Truckers Get A Fair Hearing (Burney)

The ability to choose whether or whether not to be vaccinated is a fundamental civil liberty and that is what the Canadian truckers’ “Freedom Convoy,” now being emulated in the U.S. and Europe, is about. The convoy has been infiltrated by a few disreputable elements and has been disruptive in such cities as Ottawa, but the movement has been largely law-abiding, even cheerful. As a Wall Street Journal editorial commented: “When you’ve lost even Canadians, arguably the most law-abiding people on the planet, you’ve lost the political plot.” The concerns protesters are expressing deserve respect from the government and not the prime minister’s dismissive comparison with demonstrations he has supported, such as those of Black Lives Matter.

BLM protests in America erupted into violent criminal behaviour, arson and extensive damage to public and private property in many cities. Having stunted Parliament for two years, the government seems afraid to face real opposition. The prime minister’s claim that the truckers are expressing “unacceptable views” has an authoritarian ring. “Unacceptable” by what definition and in violation of what law? Ottawa’s mayor declared a state of emergency, which he has limited power to enforce. His eminently sensible suggestion that an honest broker be appointed to mediate was ignored by the government. Astonishingly, former Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney described the protest as “sedition,” whereas NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh uttered a peculiar dog whistle about white supremacy.

In an emotional, unsubstantiated rant, Ottawa’s police chief said the protest represented an “insurrection” (prompting the thuggish arrest of a great-grandfather for honking his horn). Comments like these debase legitimate public protests that have featured neither violence nor vandalism. When law-abiding citizens are provoked by indefensible government edicts and denied any hearing by those in power what are they supposed to do? [..] Before we condemn ourselves to a similar fate on the next pandemic, we need to take a deep breath and analyze carefully what went wrong and why. The political paralysis in Ottawa is mind-boggling. The prime minister cannot hide behind a “science” that is being overtaken by events. Give the truckers, now being joined by farmers and others across Canada, a fair hearing. That is what democracy demands, not pompous stonewalling by timid politicians.

@Nat_Vasilyeva· “Zelenskiy in a live broadcast on the US intel: “If you have additional, 100 percent-certain information about a Russian invasion of Ukraine, please share it with us. I cannot agree or disagree with what hasn’t happened yet. Right now there is no full-scale invasion of Ukraine.”

“BREAKING NEWS: Anonymous US intelligence sources say they have concrete evidence that the Russians will invade Ukraine yesterday.”

• Biden Tells Putin Ukraine Invasion Would Bring Decisive Response (R.)

U.S. President Joe Biden told Russia’s Vladimir Putin on Saturday that the West would respond decisively to any invasion of Ukraine, adding such a step would produce widespread suffering and isolate Moscow. In the latest effort to manage growing hostility, the two men spoke by phone for an hour a day after Washington and its allies warned that the Russian military, which has 100,000 troops massed near Ukraine, could invade at any moment. Moscow has dismissed those warnings as “hysteria.” Neither side said there had been any breakthroughs. A senior Biden administration official said the call was professional and substantive, but that there was no fundamental change.

The Kremlin said Putin told Biden Washington has failed to take Russia’s main concerns into account, and it had received no “substantial answer” on key elements including NATO’s expansion and the deployment of offensive forces to Ukraine. The senior Biden administration official said it was unclear whether Putin was committed to diplomacy even as he agreed to stay in touch with Biden. The call took place as Israel, Portugal and Belgium joined the list of countries that have urged their citizens to leave Ukraine immediately. The U.S. State Department ordered most of its embassy staff to leave Ukraine. The Pentagon said it was withdrawing about 150 military trainers.

Been going on for a long time. Hi, Hunter!

• Giant Ukrainian US Lobbying Campaign Revealed (RT)

Ukrainian lobbyists contacted US congressional offices, think tanks, and media figures over 10,000 times last year, according to an analysis of Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) filings reported by the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft on Friday. The Quincy report pointed to the “extraordinary” scale of Ukraine’s lobbying campaign, noting that the lobbying efforts of Saudi Arabia – known as one of the largest foreign lobbies in Washington DC – pales in comparison. According to the report, most of Kiev’s persuasive efforts focused on members of Congress, who were deluged with over 8,000 contacts – emails, phone calls, and meetings – in an effort to convince them of the need to block the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, among other issues.

The Ukrainian Federation of Employers of the Oil and Gas Industry (UFEOGI), the country’s largest energy trade group, would reportedly cite Ukraine’s PM, arguing that the pipeline was “no less an existential threat” to Ukraine’s “security and democracy” than “Russian troops on the border.” The pipeline, which is completed but still has to receive the green light from German regulators, would allow Russia to export gas directly to Europe without having to pay Kiev billions for the transfer of gas. UFEOGI lobbyists apparently centered their efforts on Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who took just several days to channel the Ukrainian PM on social media. In his own message, Cruz likewise referred to the Russian pipeline as an “existential threat.”

The trade group also sought to reach out to senators who had previously backed legislation to thwart the completion of the pipeline, including several members of the Foreign Relations Committee with a history of anti-Russian votes. Cruz, Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas), John Barrasso (R-Wyoming), Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin), and Jeanne Shaheen (D-New Hampshire) were all contacted at least 100 times last year, with some of these contacts resulting in their staffers meeting directly with Ukrainian energy lobbyists, the report claims. The bill proposed by Cruz would have imposed bans on doing business with US companies for those involved with the Nord Stream 2 project, in addition to travel restrictions and asset freezes. It failed to pass, however.

A separate legislative proposal, put forth by Senator Bob Menendez (D-New Jersey) and dubbed “the mother of all sanctions,” would punish senior Russian officials and banks in the event of an invasion of Ukraine. The Quincy report noted that one of Menendez’s former staffers, Brittany Beaulieu, now represents UFEOGI, as well as the ‘Civil Movement for a Just Ukraine’. Apart from the US lawmakers, Ukrainian lobbyists also reportedly courted pro-NATO think tank the Atlantic Council, contacting it hundreds of times. The report noted that one of the richest men in Ukraine, Victor Pinchuk, is also one of the Atlantic Council’s international advisers, while his foundation is a major contributor to the think tank.

“To modify Jon Stewart’s memorable metaphor, this is like finding chocolate everywhere except in the Hershey’s factory.”

• The Chinese Bat Virus That Never Shows Up in Any Chinese Bats (Geraghty)

The MIT Technology Review offers a long and mostly even-handed look at the hunt for the origin of Covid-19, featuring many new quotes from Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology and an account of a tour through the facility’s labs. The piece is generally skeptical of the lab leak theory, but notes that Peter Daszak, who is a prominent advocate of the natural origins theory, “has potential conflicts of interest,” “there are still concerns that the biosafety standards in the Wuhan lab might not have been rigorous enough to prevent research activities from causing the pandemic,” “some of the Wuhan institute’s behavior has certainly raised red flags,” and “instead of tackling the publicity crisis directly, China has exacerbated mistrust by running obfuscation and disinformation campaigns of its own.” It is worth reading in full.

But there’s one line in the MIT Technology Review article I want to focus upon for a moment: “But one year after the WHO’s visit to Wuhan, the disease detectives have yet to find the guilty animal or other indisputable evidence of natural origins.” The WHO team visit to Wuhan was in February 2021, so this means after two years of looking, and “tens of thousands” of samples, no one has found SARS-CoV-2 naturally occurring in animals in and around Wuhan, China. As noted earlier this week, SARS-CoV-2 is spreading like wildfire among American white-tailed deer. The CDC affirms “many mammals, including cats, dogs, bank voles, ferrets, fruit bats, hamsters, mink, pigs, rabbits, racoon dogs, tree shrews, and white-tailed deer can be infected with the virus.”

Gorillas at the Dallas zoo, snow leopards at a Bloomington zoo, lions at the Akron Zoo, – you name the animal, there’s a good chance they’ve caught Covid-19. And of course, we know how contagious this virus is among human beings. So why is this virus so hard to find in Chinese bats? If this virus originated in a bat, and naturally evolved to maximize its ability to infect bats, and is genetically most similar to other viruses found in bats in China… why is SARS-CoV-2 proving impossible to find in bats in China? To modify Jon Stewart’s memorable metaphor, this is like finding chocolate everywhere except in the Hershey’s factory.

Fauci’s reaction? “Vaccines and boosters have proven incredibly effective, and offer the highest level of protection..”

• COVID Booster Loses Potency After 4 Months (Y!)

A fourth dose of the COVID-19 vaccine might be necessary for some Americans. New data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) finds that the mRNA shot’s protection begins to decline after about four months, according to a study released Friday. Although vaccine effectiveness against COVID-related hospitalizations was at 91 percent during the first two months after a third dose, it decreased to 78 percent by the fourth month. The study, which was conducted during the Omicron-dominate phase of the pandemic, focused on those who sought medical treatment for COVID symptoms. It did not include a breakdown of age or whether their third dose was a booster or part of their primary inoculation series, which the CDC recommends for some immunocompromised people.

“There may be the need for yet again another boost — in this case, a fourth-dose boost for an individual receiving the mRNA — that could be based on age, as well as underlying conditions,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, told reporters Tuesday. Fauci clarified that recommendations for a fourth dose will likely not be made “across the board for everyone,” adding: “It very likely will take into account what subset of people have a diminished, or not, protection against the important parameters such as hospitalization.”

The CDC’s update comes after the COVID-19 death toll in the U.S. surpassed 900,000 last week, less than two months after it reached 800,000. President Joe Biden urged Americans who hadn’t gotten their shots yet to get vaccinated as he marked the tragic milestone. “Vaccines and boosters have proven incredibly effective, and offer the highest level of protection,” he said. “Two hundred and fifty million Americans have stepped up to protect themselves, their families, and their communities by getting at least one shot — and we have saved more than one million American lives as a result.”

“The “Tech Executive” in the Durham filing is Rodney Joffe. Joffe’s direct point of contact with the Hillary campaign was Jake Sullivan. Yes, that Jake Sullivan.”

“Jake Sullivan’s wife is a top adviser to Merrick Garland. We have no idea if she has recused from any oversight of the John Durham probe.”

• Clinton Campaign Paid To ‘Infiltrate’ Trump Tower – Durham (Fox)

Lawyers for the Clinton campaign paid a technology company to “infiltrate” servers belonging to Trump Tower, and later the White House, in order to establish an “inference” and “narrative” to bring to government agencies linking Donald Trump to Russia, a filing from Special Counsel John Durham says. Durham filed a motion on Feb. 11 focused on potential conflicts of interest related to the representation of former Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussman, who has been charged with making a false statement to a federal agent. Sussman has pleaded not guilty.

The indictment against Sussman says he told then-FBI General Counsel James Baker in September 2016, less than two months before the 2016 presidential election, that he was not doing work “for any client” when he requested and held a meeting in which he presented “purported data and ‘white papers’ that allegedly demonstrated a covert communications channel” between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank, which has ties to the Kremlin. But Durham’s filing on Feb. 11, in a section titled “Factual Background,” reveals that Sussman “had assembled and conveyed the allegations to the FBI on behalf of at least two specific clients, including a technology executive (Tech Executive 1) at a U.S.-based internet company (Internet Company 1) and the Clinton campaign.”

Durham’s filing said Sussman’s “billing records reflect” that he “repeatedly billed the Clinton Campaign for his work on the Russian Bank-1 allegations.” The filing revealed that Sussman and the Tech Executive had met and communicated with another law partner, who was serving as General Counsel to the Clinton campaign. Sources told Fox News that lawyer is Marc Elias, who worked at the law firm Perkins Coie.

60 Minutes

Another one for the “Trump was right” jar.

pic.twitter.com/N0y4Skk2GK

— Benny (@bennyjohnson) February 13, 2022

“provides indisputable evidence that my campaign and presidency were spied on by operatives paid by the Hillary Clinton Campaign in an effort to develop a completely fabricated connection to Russia..”

• Trump Demands Prosecutions, Reparations After Durham Revelations (JTN)

Former President Donald Trump demanded Saturday that there be prosecutions and reparations after Special Counsel John Durham revealed in an explosive court filing that Hillary Clinton’s campaign plotted to infiltrate the Trump campaign and White House computer servers years ago to concoct false Russia collusion allegations. Durham’s latest court filing “provides indisputable evidence that my campaign and presidency were spied on by operatives paid by the Hillary Clinton Campaign in an effort to develop a completely fabricated connection to Russia,” Trump said.

“This is a scandal far greater in scope and magnitude than Watergate and those who were involved in and knew about this spying operation should be subject to criminal prosecution,” he added. “In a stronger period of time in our country, this crime would have been punishable by death. In addition, reparations should be paid to those in our country who have been damaged by this.” Durham’s court filing said lawyers for the Clinton campaign paid a technology company to “infiltrate” servers belonging to Trump Tower and the Trump White House to create an “inference” of Russia collusion in 2016-17, hoping to get federal agencies to investigate.

Obama arrest
https://twitter.com/PapiTrumpo/status/1492665540992770050

When will they try to silence Durham?

• John Durham Highlights the Tip of the Iceberg (CTH)

Against the latest court filings by John Durham, highlighting the tip of the political surveillance iceberg, I have been asked to re-post the deep dive into the totality of the scale of the iceberg. I will add some of the latest information into the outline to show how it all connects. Barack Obama and Eric Holder did not create a weaponized DOJ and FBI; instead, what they did was take the preexisting system and retool it, so the weapons only targeted one side of the political continuum. Together they recalibrated the domestic surveillance capabilities, the internal spying systems, so that only their political opposition would be targeted. This point is where many people understandably get confused.

In the era shortly after 9/11, the DC national security apparatus was constructed to preserve continuity of government and simultaneously view all Americans as potential threats. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) were created specifically for this purpose. What Barack Obama and Eric Holder did with that new construct was refine the internal targeting mechanisms so that only their ideological opposition became the target of the new national security system. This is a very important nuance to understand as you dig deeper into this research outline. Washington DC created the modern national security apparatus immediately and hurriedly after 9/11/01. DHS came along in 2002 and within the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 the ODNI was formed.

When Barack Obama and Eric Holder arrived a few years later, those newly formed institutions were viewed as opportunities to create a very specific national security apparatus that would focus almost exclusively against their political opposition. The preexisting Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Dept of Justice (DOJ) were then repurposed to become two of the four pillars of the domestic national security apparatus. However, this new construct would have a targeting mechanism based on political ideology. The DHS, ODNI, DOJ and FBI became the four pillars of this new institution. Atop these pillars is where you will find the Fourth Branch of Government.

We were not sleeping when this happened, we were wide awake. However, we were stunningly distracted by the economic collapse that was taking place in 2006 and 2007 when the engineers behind Obama started to assemble the design. By the time Obama took office in 2009, we sensed something profound was shifting, but we can only see exactly what shifted in the aftermath. The four pillars were put into place, and a new Fourth Branch of Government was quietly created. As time passed, and the system operators became familiar with their new tools, technology allowed the tentacles of the system to reach out and touch us. That is when we first started to notice that something very disconcerting was happening.

CNN rooting for the tank

Will Cain on how anyone who questions the high priests neoliberalism must be crushed at all cost pic.twitter.com/94UB7qMnC7

— Wittgenstein (@backtolife_2022) February 12, 2022

Canberra

Australia, hundreds of thousands of people to Parliament House in Canberra to end vaccine mandates. pic.twitter.com/xmK8pELQIC

— RadioGenova (@RadioGenova) February 12, 2022

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Debt Rattle November 10 2021

Nov 102021

November 10, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:40 am Finance Tagged with: border patrol, class action, Durham, Hillary, Moderna, myocarditis, nasal spray, Pfizer, Singapore, whistleblowers 63 Responses »

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• John Durham Is Getting Close to the Jugular (RCP)

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

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

Tucker OSHA

This has nothing to do with the vaccine. It's about power. pic.twitter.com/vjQS2YNP7l

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) November 10, 2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Test site for bankrupting ordinary people.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Have they published the victims’ numbers and accounts?

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

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

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

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

A half year discussion, going nowhere.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• John Durham Is Getting Close to the Jugular (RCP)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mass madness.

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

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

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

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

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Debt Rattle October 31 2021

Oct 312021

October 31, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:44 am Finance Tagged with: COP26, Durham, Hillary, layoffs, unvaxxed 79 Responses »

Paul Gauguin Horsemen on the beach 1902

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

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

• I Said It Would Collapse: IT IS (Denninger)

• You Know What They Sayin’? (Kunstler)

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

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

• NATO Sliding Towards War Against Russia in Ukraine (SCF)

• Vaccine Passport Rules For Public But Not World Leaders At COP26

• COP26 Is A Global Energy Embarrassment (ZH)

• Durham Probe Inches Closer To Hillary (RCI)

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

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

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

The state of our world:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ETS: Emergency Temporary Standard

They figured out way to mandate without a mandate?

• I Said It Would Collapse: IT IS (Denninger)

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

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

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

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

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

• You Know What They Sayin’? (Kunstler)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Putin will call on Erdogan.

• NATO Sliding Towards War Against Russia in Ukraine (SCF)

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

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

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

• Vaccine Passport Rules For Public But Not World Leaders At COP26

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

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

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

• COP26 Is A Global Energy Embarrassment (ZH)

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

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

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

Read to see how deep this shitshow has gone.

• Durham Probe Inches Closer To Hillary (RCI)

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

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

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

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

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

Mr. Ed.

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

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

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

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

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

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Debt Rattle October 21 2021

Oct 212021

October 21, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:11 am Finance Tagged with: adenovirus, Biden, child deaths, Hillary, ivermectin, Libya, Moderna, Pfizer, unvaxxed, USPS 71 Responses »

Pablo Picasso Man with arms crossed 1909

• Child Deaths Are 52% Higher Since They Were Offered The Covid-19 Vaccine (TE)

• White House Details Plan To “Quickly” Vaccinate 28M Children Age 5-11 (ZH)

• Pfizer, Moderna to Rake in $93 Billion in 2022 COVID Vaccine Sales (CHD)

• Adenovirus Covid-19 Vaccine Shows Lower But ‘Stable’ Immunity (RT)

• Repositioning Ivermectin For Covid-19 Treatment (SD)

• The FDA’s War Against The Truth On Ivermectin (AIER)

• Washington State Patrol Staff Shortage, Officers Quit Over Vaccine Mandate (RT)

• Why Are Thousands Of Postal Workers Still Unvaxxed? (WND)

• Djokovic Claims It Would Be ‘Inappropriate’ To Say If He Is Vaccinated (RT)

• Dewey, Cheat’em And Howe (Denninger)

• “The Bidens”: Is the First Family Corrupt, or Merely Crazy? (Taibbi)

• Hillary’s Secretive, Russiagate-Flogging Pair of Super-Lawyers (Maté)

• The Killing Of Gaddafi 10 Years Ago Led To The Death Of The Nation Of Libya (RT)

https://twitter.com/BarryESharp/status/1450924047034826756

Sign at Chick-Fil-A

Just

Show someone who is still asleep this 2 min video. Even if it doesn’t resonate with them at this moment, they just might recall his words of things that are yet to come. #WakeUpAmerica pic.twitter.com/HpiUchudh2

— the girl who questions everything (@freethinkerbabe) October 12, 2021

The Exposé feels a little chaotic at times, but they do the work.

• Child Deaths Are 52% Higher Since They Were Offered The Covid-19 Vaccine (TE)

Chris Whitty advised the UK Government to roll-out the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine to all children over the age of 12 in week 37 of 2021. Thanks to preparations already being made by the NHS to intrude on education in schools and administer the jab to children the programme got underway the following week (week 38). Official Office for National Statistics (ONS) data shows that between week 38 and week 40, the five-year-average number of deaths occurring among children aged between 10 and 14 was 17. However, the latest data available from the ONS shows that between week 38 and week 40, the number of deaths occurring among children aged between 10 and 14 was 26. This represents a 52% increase on the five-year average.

Sixteen of those deaths were among boys, representing a 60% increase on the five-year-average in which there had been 10 deaths among boys between week 38 and week 40. Whilst 10 of those deaths were among girls, representing a 43% increase on the five-year-average in which there had been 7 deaths among girls between week 38 and week 40. What’s even more concerning about the above numbers though is that deaths among children aged between 10 and 14 were significantly lower than the five-year-average up to the point Chris Whitty advised the Government to offer all children over the age of 12 a Covid-19 vaccine.

Official Office for National Statistics (ONS) data shows that between week 1 and week 37, the five-year-average number of deaths occurring among children aged between 10 and 14 was 207. However, the 2021 dataset from the ONS shows that between week 1 and week 37 of 2021 there were just 178 deaths among children aged between 10 and 14. This means deaths among children aged week 10 and 14 were 14% down on the five-year-average prior to being offered the Covid-19 injection.

However, it is known that children deemed to be vulnerable to Covid-19 due to certain underlying conditions were already being offered a Covid-19 injection prior to Chris Whitty’s decision to overrule the JCVI and offer the jab to all healthy children. [..] we assessed the numbers from the ONS five-year-average dataset on deaths (found here) and the ONS 2021 dataset on deaths and discovered that there had also been a notable increase in deaths among children since vulnerable kids had first been given the Covid-19 vaccine. We’ve compiled the following table on the ONS data:

Child Deaths Are 52% Higher?! Let’s jab all the kids.

• White House Details Plan To “Quickly” Vaccinate 28M Children Age 5-11 (ZH)

The Biden administration on Wednesday unveiled its plan to ‘quickly’ vaccinate roughly 28 million children age 5-11, pending authorization from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The jab – which doesn’t prevent transmission of Covid-19 will be available at pediatricians, local pharmacies, and possibly even at schools, according to the White House, which expects FDA authorization of the Pfizer shot for children – the least likely to fall seriously ill or die from the virus, in a matter of weeks, according to the Associated Press. “Federal regulators will meet over the next two weeks to weigh the benefits of giving shots to kids, after lengthy studies meant to ensure the safety of the vaccines. Within hours of formal approval, expected after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisory meeting scheduled for Nov. 2-3, doses will begin shipping to providers across the country, along with smaller needles necessary for injecting young kids, and within days will be ready to go into the arms of kids on a wide scale”. -AP

According to the announcement, the White House has secured enough to supply more than 25,000 doses for pediatricians and primary care physicians who have already signed up to deliver the vaccine, while the country now has enough Pfizer vaccine to jab roughly 28 million kids who will soon be eligible, meaning this won’t be a slow roll-out like we saw 10 months ago when doses and capacity issues meant adults had to wait. Meanwhile, the White House is rolling out an ‘advertising’ campaign to convince parents and kids that the vaccine is safe and effective. According to the report, “the administration believes trusted messengers — educators, doctors, and community leaders — will be vital to encouraging vaccinations.” “COVID has also disrupted our kids lives. It’s made school harder, it’s disrupted their ability to see friends and family, it’s made youth sports more challenging,” said surgeon general Dr. Vivek Murthy in a Wednesday statement to NBC. “Getting our kids vaccinated, we have the prospect of protecting them, but also getting all of those activities back that are so important to our children.”

Why jab the kids? Well…

• Pfizer, Moderna to Rake in $93 Billion in 2022 COVID Vaccine Sales (CHD)

Vaccine makers Pfizer and Moderna are projected to generate combined sales of $93.2 billion in 2022 nearly twice the amount they’re expected to rake in this year, said Airfinity, a health data analytics group. Airfinity put total market sales for COVID vaccines in 2022 at $124 billion, according to the Financial Times. Pfizer vaccine sales are predicted to reach $54.5 billion in 2022, and Moderna’s will hit $38.7 billion. The estimates blow the earlier figures — $23.6 billion for Pfizer and $20 billion for Moderna — out of the water. “The numbers are unprecedented,” Rasmus Beck Hansen, CEO of Airfinity, told the Financial Times. Sales of the mRNA shots will continue to rise in 2022 due to boosters and countries stockpiling to ward off variants, Airfinity said.

Pfizer will generate 64% of its sales, and Moderna 75% of its sales, from high-income countries in 2022, the analysts predicted. In April, Pfizer predicted 2021 COVID vaccine sales of $26 billion. After second-quarter results were reported, Pfizer upped the figure to $33.5 billion. Bernstein analyst Ronny Gal said the company could ring up an additional $10 billion in vaccine sales in 2021. Gal wrote: “The numbers are going to be much higher. The guidance of $33.5B reflects contracts signed to today which reflect total commitment to sell 2.1 million doses (at average price of $15.95). Pfizer notes they expect to manufacture 3 million doses. Presumably much of those will be sold as well, albeit at lower average price as consumption shifts to emerging markets. This is probably another $10 billion.”

“The second quarter was remarkable in a number of ways,” Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said. “Most visibly, the speed and efficiency of our efforts with BioNTech to help vaccinate the world against COVID-19 have been unprecedented, with now more than a billion doses of BNT162b2 having been delivered globally.” On a conference call, Bourla said that while “it’s very early to speak” about the company’s sales expectations for next year, he put Pfizer’s 2022 production capacity at 4 billion doses.

“..mRNA jabs’ initially higher number of antibodies “declines sharply” over the same period..”

• Adenovirus Covid-19 Vaccine Shows Lower But ‘Stable’ Immunity (RT)

Different effects of the world’s Covid injection types are revealed in new study that shines light on ‘Adenovirus v mRNA’ debate The one-shot adenovirus J&J Covid-19 vaccine provides stable but low-level immunity that stays for months, a new study has found, while mRNA jabs’ initially higher number of antibodies “declines sharply” over the same period. An immune response induced by Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen adenovirus vaccine appears to show “minimal-to-no evidence of decline” over eight months, the fresh study in the US reports, detailing the dynamics of the antibody response in the “follow-up period” after immunizations with each of the three American vaccines.

Apparently, Pfizer and Moderna cannot boast a similar durability in their mRNA vaccines’ efficacy, the study shows. Antibody titer levels (a term of measurement) elicited by both of them tend to decline “sharply by six months after vaccination” and fall even further by eight months, according to the data collected by the specialists from the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The two mRNA vaccines apparently still greatly outperform the one-shot Johnson & Johnson jab during the “peak immunity” period, between two and four weeks after full immunization, the study admits. In the long run, however, they quickly lose their sizeable lead in efficacy and eventually land at the same antibody response level as that of the Johnson & Johnson jab based on the adenovirus vector principle – the same as the ones used by the UK’s AstraZeneca and by Russia’s Sputnik V.

The study also demonstrated that the Johnson & Johnson jab supposedly even somewhat outperforms both mRNA vaccines when it comes to antibody responses eight months after full immunization. Its live-virus neutralizing antibody response and a certain type of T-cell response appeared to be higher than those of Pfizer and Moderna jabs at that time. Whether it is indeed better in the long run is difficult to ascertain, though, since the data obtained from just over 60 participants, including only eight immunized with a Johnson & Johnson jab, appear to be somewhat “lacking,” Maxim Skulachev, a leading research associate at the Belozersky Institute at Moscow State University (MSU), believes.

“..a marked reduction of 93% of released virion and 99.98% unreleased virion levels upon administration of IVM..”

• Repositioning Ivermectin For Covid-19 Treatment (SD)

Drug repositioning is a useful and effective idea for Covid-19 antiviral discovery. • Ivermectin has proven effective for HIV-1, Adenovirus, Influenza virus, SARS-CoV, and many more, in the past.• Due to genomic similarity between SARS-CoV-2 and the SARS-CoV, the role of the IMPα/β1 complex for viral protein (NSP12-RdRp) shuttling between the nucleus and cytoplasm holds great potential. • Ivermectin also exhibits great potential in reducing SARS-CoV-2 viral replication via numerous modes of action, such as the disruption of the Importin heterodimer complex (IMPα/β1)

Ivermectin (IVM) is an FDA approved macrocyclic lactone compound traditionally used to treat parasitic infestations and has shown to have antiviral potential from previous in-vitro studies. Currently, IVM is commercially available as a veterinary drug but have also been applied in humans to treat onchocerciasis (river blindness – a parasitic worm infection) and strongyloidiasis (a roundworm/nematode infection). In light of the recent pandemic, the repurposing of IVM to combat SARS-CoV-2 has acquired significant attention. Recently, IVM has been proven effective in numerous in-silico and molecular biology experiments against the infection in mammalian cells and human cohort studies. One promising study had reported a marked reduction of 93% of released virion and 99.98% unreleased virion levels upon administration of IVM to Vero-hSLAM cells.

IVM’s mode of action centres around the inhibition of the cytoplasmic-nuclear shuttling of viral proteins by disrupting the Importin heterodimer complex (IMPα/β1) and downregulating STAT3, thereby effectively reducing the cytokine storm. Furthermore, the ability of IVM to block the active sites of viral 3CLpro and S protein, disrupts important machinery such as viral replication and attachment. This review compiles all the molecular evidence to date, in review of the antiviral characteristics exhibited by IVM. Thereafter, we discuss IVM’s mechanism and highlight the clinical advantages that could potentially contribute towards disabling the viral replication of SARS-CoV-2. In summary, the collective review of recent efforts suggests that IVM has a prophylactic effect and would be a strong candidate for clinical trials to treat SARS-CoV-2.

“The FDA waits for a deep-pocketed sponsor to present a comprehensive package that justifies the approval of a new drug or a new use of an existing drug.”

• The FDA’s War Against The Truth On Ivermectin (AIER)

The FDA judges all drugs as guilty until proven, to the FDA’s satisfaction, both safe and efficacious. By what process does this happen? The FDA waits for a deep-pocketed sponsor to present a comprehensive package that justifies the approval of a new drug or a new use of an existing drug. For a drug like ivermectin, long since generic, a sponsor may never show up. The reason is not that the drug is ineffective; rather, the reason is that any expenditures used to secure approval for that new use will help other generic manufacturers that haven’t invested a dime. Due to generic drug substitution rules at pharmacies, Merck could spend millions of dollars to get a Covid-19 indication for ivermectin and then effectively get zero return. What company would ever make that investment?

With no sponsor, there is no new FDA-approved indication and, therefore, no official recognition of ivermectin’s value. Was the FDA’s warning against ivermectin based on science? No. It was based on process. Like a typical bureaucrat, the FDA won’t recommend the use of ivermectin because, while it might help patients, such a recommendation would violate its processes. The FDA needs boxes checked off in the right order. If a sponsor never shows up and the boxes aren’t checked off, the FDA’s standard approach is to tell Americans to stay away from the drug because it might be dangerous or ineffective. Sometimes the FDA is too enthusiastic and these warnings are, frankly, alarming. Guilty until proven innocent.

There are two reasons that Merck would warn against ivermectin usage, essentially throwing its own drug under the bus. Once they are marketed, doctors can prescribe drugs for uses not specifically approved by the FDA. Such usage is called off-label. Using ivermectin for Covid-19 is considered off-label because that use is not specifically listed on ivermectin’s FDA-approved label. While off-label prescribing is widespread and completely legal, it is illegal for a pharmaceutical company to promote that use. Doctors can use drugs for off-label uses and drug companies can supply them with product. But heaven forbid that companies encourage, support, or promote off-label prescribing. The fines for doing so are outrageous.

During a particularly vigorous two-year period, the Justice Department collected over $6 billion from drug companies for off-label promotion cases. Merck’s lawyers haven’t forgotten that lesson. Another reason for Merck to discount ivermectin’s efficacy is a result of marketing strategy. Ivermectin is an old, cheap, off-patent drug. Merck will never make much money from ivermectin sales. Drug companies aren’t looking to spruce up last year’s winners; they want new winners with long patent lives. Not coincidentally, Merck recently released the clinical results for its new Covid-19 fighter, molnupiravir, which has shown a 50% reduction in the risk of hospitalization and death among high-risk, unvaccinated adults. Analysts are predicting multi-billion-dollar sales for molnupiravir.

While we can all be happy that Merck has developed a new therapeutic that can keep us safe from the ravages of Covid-19, we should realize that the FDA’s rules give companies an incentive to focus on newer drugs while ignoring older ones. Ivermectin may or may not be a miracle drug for Covid-19. The FDA doesn’t want us to learn the truth. The FDA spreads lies and alarms Americans while preventing drug companies from providing us with scientific explorations of existing, promising, generic drugs.

“..The former officers laid their boots and hats on the steps of the Capitol building in a stunt meant to represent “what the state’s lost..“

• Washington State Patrol Staff Shortage, Officers Quit Over Vaccine Mandate (RT)

Some 127 Washington State Patrol employees, more than half of them officers, were terminated after a vaccination deadline passed this week, with the force now bracing for staff shortage in critical areas and major costs. 74 commissioned officers – including 67 troopers, six sergeants and a captain – as well as 53 civil servants were “separated from employment” as they missed the October 18 deadline to provide proof of vaccination, the Washington State Patrol (WSP) reported earlier this week. The WSP stated that the employees quit the force “for varying reasons and in varying ways,” with chief John R. Batiste declaring that “we will miss every one of them.” “I extend a hardy thanks to those who are leaving the agency. I truly wish that you were staying with us,” he said.

The mass exodus from the 2,200-strong force is set to put a strain on the depleted ranks. Speaking to the Oregonian, WSP spokesman Chris Loftis said that in some cases, such as vehicle collisions that result in no casualties or obstruction to traffic, the affected drivers might be told to figure out the incident on their own and “clear the area rather than wait for a trooper to show up,” as would happen under normal circumstances Some employees fired over the vaccine requirement successfully received exemptions from the order, but that did not prevent them from being terminated. Loftis said that over 400 people were granted such exemptions, but not all of them were offered alternative employment due to the nature of the agency’s work. Still, he stressed that the 74 troopers that were effectively forced out “were people that we knew and cared about.”

This wasn’t a situation where 74 troopers left one day because they did something bad – they left in standing opposition to the vaccine mandate, based on their personal principles and convictions. Some of the terminated troopers turned out at the state Capitol on Tuesday in a symbolic protest against the mandate. The former officers laid their boots and hats on the steps of the Capitol building in a stunt meant to represent “what the state’s lost,” one of the participants, ex-trooper Bill Jordan, told local media. Jordan claimed that he received a religious exemption from the mandate, but WSP failed to accommodate him regardless. While Loftis said that the agency would step up its recruitment efforts by filling up new academy classes, the training of would-be troopers will come with a hefty price tag.

It is estimated that the mass exodus could cost taxpayers some $12.4 million, as about $168,000 per year is needed to train just a single cadet – the WSP has lost 67. The Washington State Patrol has not been the only agency to see resistance from state employees to compulsory vaccination orders. More than 1,800 workers in Washington state have been fired, resigned or retired due to the mandate, according to official data released on Tuesday. This amounts to about 3% of the state’s workforce that falls under the mandate, and those numbers could yet rise, as the cases of some 2,887 state employees are still pending.

“They don’t have to. They have friends in the White House.”

• Why Are Thousands Of Postal Workers Still Unvaxxed? (WND)

After spending several futile hours rummaging through media accounts and the United States Postal Service (USPS) website, I still had no answer to the question I set out to address: Are postal workers subject to a vaccine mandate? Wanting the straight skinny, I decided not to call USPS headquarters but to visit a facility and talk to the workers loading and unloading mail. To my good fortune I found a well-spoken, straightforward supervisor who told me, through his mask, what I wanted to know. “We are encouraged to get vaccinated, but we do not face a vaccine mandate like the military does,” he volunteered. “But,” he added helpfully, “we do have an indoor mask mandate.”

Two questions emerge from this encounter. The first is: Why are postal workers exempt from a mandate that is stripping other public service entities, including the military, of thousands of needed personnel? The second, why did I have to ask a postal worker to get the truth? The answer to the second question is the easier of the two – the media don’t want you to know. In mid-September there was a flurry of questions around the status of the USPS. On Sept. 16, the USA Today fact checker put those questions to rest. On that same day, the USPS put out an impressively ambiguous statement on COVID-19 vaccines. After much self-serving blather about the hard work of its 650,000 employees, management concluded:

“We are working closely with our union leadership so that once OSHA’s COVID-19 Vaccination Emergency Temporary Standard (ETS) is issued we can move quickly to determine its applicability to our employees and how best to implement.” Translation: “We are in no big hurry.” The ETS represents the fulfillment of President Joe Biden’s COVID-19 Action Plan announced on Sept. 9. The OSHA ETS runs a perversely long 44 pages and includes any number of useless admonitions, such as: “An employer with one or more employees working in a physical location controlled by another employer must notify the controlling employer when those employees are exposed to conditions at that location that do not meet the requirements of this section.”

On Oct. 12, OSHA submitted the ETS to the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs for approval, which is where it stands as of this writing. USPS brass might argue that their hands are tied until the OSHA ETS is formalized, but unlike many private and public employers, they are making no obvious efforts to prepare their workers for this eventuality. They don’t have to. They have friends in the White House.

“People go too far these days in taking the liberty to ask questions and judge a person. “Whatever you say – ‘yes, no, maybe, I am thinking about it’ – they will take advantage.”

• Djokovic Claims It Would Be ‘Inappropriate’ To Say If He Is Vaccinated (RT)

Novak Djokovic says people are “taking the liberty” to ask questions about vaccine status and “judge a person”, speaking as an Australian head of government warned that unvaccinated players will face a struggle to receive visas. World number one Djokovic has repeatedly expressed his reservations about players being pressured to take a Covid jab, and the reigning Australian Open champion insists his decision is a “private matter” amid a string of controversies surrounding the likes of NBA star Kyrie Irving, who has been left out by the Brooklyn Nets because he is not vaccinated. Djokovic rival Stefanos Tsitsipas found himself at the center of a political row after he made a wide range of remarks about Covid and vaccines, and the Greek – whose own government seemed to distance themselves from views which appeared to include a suggestion that spreading the virus could have positive effects – now appears to be willing to be vaccinated.

Russian contender Andrey Rublev has become the latest player to drop their apparent reluctance because of the logistical issues not being vaccinated could cause, but Djokovic is yet to openly say he has had the treatment. “Things being as they are, I still don’t know if I will go to Melbourne,” Djokovic told Blic, speaking ahead of a first Grand Slam of the year in January which is likely to take place under tight restrictions. “I will not reveal my status, whether I have been vaccinated or not – it is a private matter and an inappropriate inquiry. “People go too far these days in taking the liberty to ask questions and judge a person. “Whatever you say – ‘yes, no, maybe, I am thinking about it’ – they will take advantage.”

“If you mandate, as a private employer, “vaccination” against Covid-19 any and all adverse events as a result of said jabs are now chargeable to you..”

• Dewey, Cheat’em And Howe (Denninger)

Oh, you’re a woke-poke employer eh? You think hiding behind OSHA — or the threat to issue a mandate by the government — in some way prevents you from being liable for injuries and/or deaths related to the vaccines? Uh, how would you like to defend that position in court given all of the following are true: The PREP act has no provision giving you legal immunity and cannot be amended by executive order as it is law, so you would need both houses of Congress to pass such a thing — and they have not. The producing firms and health care providers are immune from damages under that same PREP Act. Therefore under the general principle of joint and several liability guess who gets all of it: You do. You could have tried to claim that the Federal Government refused liability (and got away with it) for direct employees, and that would have been a pretty decent argument….. except, oops, that just went up in a puff of smoke.

“The Federal Employees’ Compensation Act (FECA) covers injuries that occur in the performance of duty. The FECA does not generally authorize provision of preventive measures such as vaccines and inoculations, and in general, preventive treatment is a responsibility of the employing agency under the provisions of 5 U.S.C. 7901. However, care can be authorized by OWCP for complications of preventive measures which are provided or sponsored by the agency, such as adverse reaction to prophylactic immunization. See PM 3-0400.7(a). Further, deleterious effects of medical services furnished by the employing establishment are generally considered to fall within the performance of duty. These services include preventive programs relating to health. See PM 2-0804.19. However, this executive order now makes COVID-19 vaccination a requirement of most Federal employment. As such, employees impacted by this mandate who receive required COVID-19 vaccinations on or after the date of the executive order may be afforded coverage under the FECA for any adverse reactions to the vaccine itself, and for any injuries sustained while obtaining the vaccination.”

Oops. If you mandate, as a private employer, “vaccination” against Covid-19 any and all adverse events as a result of said jabs are now chargeable to you, as the Federal Government itself has deemed that “mandated” vaccinations are indeed injuries that occurred while performing the job in question, irrespective of where the jab took place. Oh by the way your insurance firm has likely inserted a “pandemic exemption” into your liability coverage. That’s shown up in a whole lot of those policies over the last year or so, and it’s odds-on that’s the case for you as well. Incidentally there is plenty of evidence that these jabs will be eventually found to be responsible for a whole host of serious problems, and those do not end within a couple of weeks of the jab itself.

Indeed, the evidence is mounting rapidly (see the all-cause “excess death” rates for various age groups, particularly cardiac and circulatory related, among young people now showing up in places like Scotland and England for examples) that there is a causal link between both strokes and heart attacks. I remind you that the FDA and pharmaceutical industry claimed, not all that long ago, that no such link existed for Vioxx. It was only after about 60,000 Americans had heart attacks and died, and several hundred thousand had non-fatal heart problems caused by it, that it was withdrawn from the market — five years later. Moderna and Pfizer may be immune from lawsuit but you are not, and further, the precedent by the Federal Government itself now exists based on their own public statement that if an employee gets screwed by the jab you demanded they take you’re on the hook whether that injury is evident five minutes afterward or five years later. Good luck *******s; you just got ****ed and it couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch.

“..one somehow feels bad for Hunter Biden. He’s not just a wreck, but a wreck with spectacularly bad luck.”

• “The Bidens”: Is the First Family Corrupt, or Merely Crazy? (Taibbi)

Schreckinger is young, and The Bidens was clearly written in a bit of a hurry, but he’s a skilled storyteller. The initial framing is clever, with a first first chapter titled, “Chekhov’s Laptop,” a reference to Russian playwright’s famous dictum that “if in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired.” Having primed the reader to look for that metaphorical gun on the wall, he opens with a scene that’s bananas even by the outré standards of first son Hunter Biden’s “tumultuous” life. Hunter in October of 2018 had gotten in an argument with his then-girlfriend, Hallie, who according to the funhouse physics of the first family was of course the widow of his late brother Beau.

In the course of that dispute, Hallie had taken his .38 revolver and thrown it out of Hunter’s pickup truck (a pickup truck?) into a trash can outside “Janssen’s, a high-end grocery store near Wilmington the family had long frequented.” When Hunter found out the gun was gone, he chivalrously sent Hallie back into the trash to get it. This turns out to be the first of many moments in The Bidens where despite a seemingly tireless instinct for indulgent selfishness, and a maximally unattractive profile as the coddled scion of political privilege, one somehow feels bad for Hunter Biden. He’s not just a wreck, but a wreck with spectacularly bad luck. In this case, not only has his dead brother’s widow taken advantage of his trusting nature and thrown away his pistol (the one a person with his recreational leanings probably shouldn’t have anyway, but does, and moreover has left unattended), she picked the one bin that’s both across the street from a high school and in a spot where an old man hunting for recyclables somehow finds it.

Now the thing is missing and poor Hunter, who if nothing else has a keen sense of his own potential for disaster, must be imagining the worst, which in his family is likely a headline: Boy, 13, Uses Gun Registered to Dickhead Senator’s Son to Kill Parents, Neighbor, Dog, Self. The Delaware State Police are called, the FBI for some instantly suspicious reason also shows up, the Secret Service also reportedly appears at the store where Hunter bought the gun (I say reportedly because the Secret Service denies this, the first of many details in The Bidens that ends up receding in a fog of conflicting accounts), and the ATF even makes an appearance. The gun was eventually found after a few days, when the old man turned it in. By that point Hunter had already skipped town and begun setting in motion a preposterous chain of events that have ramifications in national politics to the present day.

If a country is not capable of digging up the truth in matters like this (and the Bidens), it is a failed nation.

• Hillary’s Secretive, Russiagate-Flogging Pair of Super-Lawyers (Maté)

The indictment of Hillary Clinton lawyer Michael Sussmann for allegedly lying to the FBI sheds new light on the pivotal role of Democratic operatives in the Russiagate affair. The emerging picture shows Sussmann and his Perkins Coie colleague Marc Elias, the chief counsel for Clinton’s 2016 campaign, proceeding on parallel, coordinated tracks to solicit and spread disinformation tying Donald Trump to the Kremlin. In a detailed charging document last month, Special Counsel John Durham accused Sussmann of concealing his work for the Clinton campaign while trying to sell the FBI on the false claim of a secret Trump backchannel to Russia’s Alfa Bank. But Sussmann’s alleged false statement to the FBI in September 2016 wasn’t all. Just months before, he helped generate an even more consequential Russia allegation that he also brought to the FBI.

In April of that year, Sussmann hired CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm that publicly triggered the Russiagate saga by lodging the still unproven claim that Russia was behind the hack of Democratic National Committee emails released by WikiLeaks. At the time, CrowdStrike was not the only Clinton campaign contractor focusing on Russia. Just days before Sussmann hired CrowdStrike in April, his partner Elias retained the opposition research firm Fusion GPS to dig up dirt on Trump and the Kremlin. These two Clinton campaign contractors, working directly for two Clinton campaign attorneys, would go on to play highly consequential roles in the ensuing multi-year Russia investigation. Working secretly for the Clinton campaign, Fusion GPS planted Trump-Russia conspiracy theories in the FBI and US media via its subcontractor, former British spy Christopher Steele.

The FBI used the Fusion GPS’s now debunked “Steele dossier” for investigative leads and multiple surveillance applications putatively targeting Trump campaign volunteer Carter Page. CrowdStrike, reporting to Sussmann, also proved critical to the FBI’s work. Rather than examine the DNC servers for itself, the FBI relied on CrowdStrike’s forensics as mediated by Sussmann. The FBI’s odd relationship with the two Democratic Party contractors gave Sussmann and Elias unprecedented influence over a high-stakes national security scandal that upended U.S. politics and ensnared their political opponents. By hiring CrowdStrike and Fusion GPS, the Perkins Coie lawyers helped define the Trump-Russia narrative and impact the flow of information to the highest reaches of U.S. intelligence agencies.

“Libyans enjoyed free healthcare, free education, and a high standard of living.”

“We came, we saw, he died,” she said.

• The Killing Of Gaddafi 10 Years Ago Led To The Death Of The Nation Of Libya (RT)

During his 42 years in power, he increased the country’s literacy rate from 25% to 88%. Libyans enjoyed free healthcare, free education, and a high standard of living. Basic necessities such as electricity and gas were cheap, and the country was guaranteed a strong social safety net and welfare programs. Libya is 90% desert. Gaddafi sought to provide fresh water to all Libyans for consumption and agriculture – an endeavor in which he succeeded. He built the world’s largest irrigation project, the ‘Great Man-Made River’ in the 1980s. Boasting the world’s largest pipe network, it provides 70% of all the fresh water in Libya. Gaddafi called it the “Eighth Wonder of the World”. Costing over $25 billion, the project was entirely self-financed, without any loans or credits from foreign banks. Libya had grown to be a very wealthy country and had no external debt. NATO bombed the Great Man-Made River in July 2011, destroying key civilian infrastructure: a war crime.

[..] Instead of an abundance of water, gold and oil in a thriving country with great infrastructure, Libya now has open slave-trade markets. Smugglers and human traffickers take advantage of migrants and refugees passing through to Europe, selling them off into bondage. Rival tribes and political factions fight over oil and other precious resources, determined to seize power for themselves. Meanwhile, pockets of Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS), Al-Qaeda and other jihadist fighters lurk in the shadows, plaguing the war-torn country and its neighbors – groups who wouldn’t have dared establish a presence in Gaddafi’s Libya. Once a prosperous nation, since his fall, it has been taken over by terrorists, opportunists and thieves, and has plunged into chaos. This is what has become of Libya these last 10 years. This is what NATO created.

[..] In the 1970s, he tried to merge Libya with Egypt and Syria to form a unified Arab state. In 2009, he proposed that African nations adopt a single currency: the gold dinar. The Libyan Central Bank, which was 100% state-owned, had reserves of 144 tons of gold that he intended to use for this purpose. Gaddafi proposed that African countries buy and sell their resources exclusively in this new pan-African currency. This would enable them to transition away from the US dollar and the Central Africa (CFA) franc – a colonial currency used in 14 countries and controlled entirely by France. This was Gaddafi’s biggest sin. In wanting African nations to adopt a single currency, to control their own resources and have true independence, he posed a threat to Western monetary hegemony, so he had to go.

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Debt Rattle January 19 2021

Jan 192021

January 19, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 10:26 am Finance Tagged with: antibodies, Assange, Biden, Big Tech, Hillary, Obama, Putin, statues, Trump, vaccine, Zeitgeist 32 Responses »

Claude Monet The house at Yerres 1876

• The Zeitgeist Wants What the Zeitgeist Wants (Kustler)

• Can Joe Biden Succeed Where Barack Obama Failed? (Sirota)

• McConnell, Schumer Close In On Power-Sharing Agreement (CNN)

• Critics Reject $1.9 Trillion Biden COVID Plan As ‘Liberal Wishlist’ (JTN)

• Hillary, Pelosi Wonder if Trump Spoke to Putin on Day of Capitol Riot (BB)

• Kremlin Joins EU Officials In Denouncing Big Tech Censorship (JTN)

• Germany Weighs Up Mandatory FFP2 Masks In Shops And On Transport (G.)

• Evolution of Antibody Immunity to SARS-CoV-2 (Nature)

• Washington State Partners With Starbucks For Vaccine Distribution (F.)

• EU-US Relations Under Biden Won’t Be The Same As Before Trump (EN)

• Trump Announces 200 Statues To Be Built For ‘American Heroes’ (JTN)

• My Letter to President Trump (Joe Lauria)

The internet, our greatest tool of emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen. The internet is a threat to human civilization.
– Julian Assange

“He’ll be great in the war room, I’m sure.”

• The Zeitgeist Wants What the Zeitgeist Wants (Kustler)

The hypothetical Biden Administration is shaping up to be something like a four-year-long séance, a conjuring of apparitions wailing out talking points in a darkened room. The actual location of the inaugural event remains a mystery, or even if it will be an event, maybe just a pre-recorded video concoction of Mr. Biden’s greatest hits of 2020. Check and see if he’s wearing the same necktie from beginning to end. If a hologram is inaugurated, does that make the land-mass between Montauk and Santa Barbara a post-structural figment? The “president-elect,” made an ectoplasmic appearance Sunday talking up “science,” the Democrat’s mental life-preserver, and then shuffled offstage in an apparent fog of confusion as the Ritalin wore off. He’ll be great in the war room, I’m sure.

The mystery surrounding DNI John Ratcliffe’s long overdue report on foreign interference in the election cleared up only a little with the release of a letter sent January 8th to the Senate Intelligence Committee. In it, citing a side report from Intel Community Ombudsman Barry Zulauf, Mr. Ratcliffe refers to “undue pressure being brought to bear” on analysts by CIA management to craft their conclusions according to political loyalties. In other words, once again the CIA appears to be playing games with the American people and can’t be trusted. Isn’t that reassuring?

Meanwhile, The New York Times, CNN, and MSNBC have turned into a nonstop gloat-fest anticipating the punishments to be dished out by progressive Wokesterdom against anyone who ever entertained a thought about or uttered the phrase “stolen election.” They can kiss their livelihoods goodbye. Their college degrees will be revoked by such bastions of free thinking as Harvard. Their websites will be liquidated. Senators and congresspersons must be thrown out of their seats. They’ll be reduced to squatting on filthy blankets at the entrance of the Walmart begging for spare change, or hauled off to re-education camps where NPR lawyers with riding crops preside over their therapeutic struggle sessions, beating the wrongthink out of their hides. For Democrats, vengeance is a dish to be served piping hot. Would you like flies with your shit sandwich?

Ha ha ha. CNN doesn’t like competition. “There are people on YouTube for example that have a larger audience than daytime CNN.” Note the link to ISIS ingested into the conversation. Dangerous people.

Former Facebook insider Alex Stamos tells @brianstelter: "We have to turn down the capability of these Conservative influencers to reach these huge audiences… There are people on YouTube for example that have a larger audience than daytime CNN." pic.twitter.com/gP0XtnjhCQ

— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) January 17, 2021

Obama is very closely behind Biden.

• Can Joe Biden Succeed Where Barack Obama Failed? (Sirota)

Twelve years after Joe Biden was sworn in as the vice president of hope and change, hope is in short supply and the need for change is even more acute. Progressives have a rare opportunity to enact their agenda—but they will need to play the kind of hardball they have backed away from in the past, because Biden continues to send conflicting messages. For every promise of transformational change, he signals a desire to appease a Republican Party intent on destroying his presidency. The stakes could hardly be higher: One out of every thousand Americans has died from a lethal pandemic, with no end yet in sight. The economy is officially still humming along, but millions face eviction, bankruptcy and hunger. Even U.S. democracy is under unprecedented siege by an insurrectionist movement encouraged by the outgoing president and his loyalists in Congress.

The path forward is difficult to envision amid the fog of culture war, political war and the threat of actual, real-life civil war. But it is clear that Biden is at a crossroad and still unsure which way to go. He can follow his boss, Barack Obama, who pursued bipartisanship, comity and compromise—accommodating corporate power. Or he can break toward the path of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who did battle with oligarchy, stood down fascism and welcomed the hatred of the rich. One thing he cannot do is try to go in both directions. The lesson of the Obama administration is that you can have appeasement or transformative progress, but you almost certainly cannot have both.

The boys are back in power.

• McConnell, Schumer Close In On Power-Sharing Agreement (CNN)

The top two Senate leaders are nearing a power-sharing agreement to hash out how the evenly divided chamber will operate, with Democrats in charge of setting the schedule but both parties likely to hold an equal number of seats on Senate committees, according to sources familiar with the talks. The negotiations between Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer and Republican Leader Mitch McConnell have been built largely around how the Senate operated the last time the body was split 50-50: When George W. Bush initially became president in 2001. Final details are still being sorted out between the two leaders, sources said.

Similar to those rules, set in January 2001, Schumer and McConnell aides are discussing allowing bills and nominations to advance to the Senate floor even if they are tied during committee votes, something that could become common given that each party is expected to have the same number of seats on committees. Democrats will hold the chairmanships of the committees, giving them power to set the agenda, and Schumer will be granted the title of majority leader since Vice President-elect Kamala Harris will cast tiebreaking votes on the floor. The full chamber still has to ratify these procedures, but that is expected to occur once Schumer and McConnell have finalized their agreement.

No DC without pork. Tons of it.

• Critics Reject $1.9 Trillion Biden COVID Plan As ‘Liberal Wishlist’ (JTN)

Critics of President-Elect Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion COVID-related spending plan say the proposal goes far beyond coronavirus relief into subsidizing teachers’ unions and prioritizing taxpayer money to be spent on non-white, non-male-owned businesses rather than taking a color- and gender-blind approach. Biden’s proposal comes in addition to the $900 billion passed by Congress and signed by President Trump last month, and on top of the $2.9 trillion stimulus package passed in the spring of 2020. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a self-described “democratic socialist” called Biden’s plan just a “first installment.”

In an interview with the “Just the News AM” television program, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) called the plan “another multitrillion dollar liberal wishlist” that she opposed. “I just hope that President-Elect Biden looks to work with Republicans, rather than just really bowing to the far left, the AOC wing of the party where I think there’s gonna be a lot of pressure to do that,” Stefanik said, alluding to the bloc led by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). Though the Biden plan carves out $70 billion for COVID-related vaccines, therapies and testing (this is on top of the $42 billion passed last month), critics of the plan say that the vast majority of the rest of the funding is more focused on income redistribution to advance long-term Democratic social policies.

It’s a disease. There’s no cure.

• Hillary, Pelosi Wonder if Trump Spoke to Putin on Day of Capitol Riot (BB)

Failed Trump challenger Hillary Clinton said she would “love” to see President Donald Trump’s phone records to see “whether he was talking to Putin the day that the insurgents invaded our Capitol” on January 6, making the remarks during a bonus episode of her podcast You and Me Both released Monday. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) appeared as the featured guest on the bonus episode and discussed the series of events that occurred on January 6 — the day protesters breached the U.S. Capitol as Congress gathered to certify the electoral vote. Clinton, one of the central champions of the debunked Trump-Russia collusion narrative that dominated the first years of Trump’s presidency, revealed her own suspicion that Trump could have been in contact with Russian President Vladimir Putin on the day of the protest.

“We learned a lot about our system of government over the last four years with a president who disdains democracy and, as you have said numerous times, has other agendas,” Clinton said. “What they all are, I don’t think we yet know. I hope historically we will find out who he’s beholden to, who pulls his strings. I would love to see his phone records to see whether he was talking to Putin the day that the insurgents invaded our Capitol,” Clinton continued, also placing blame on Trump’s “enablers,” “accomplices,” and “cult members” — a likely reference to his supporters, whom she famously referred to as “deplorables” during her 2016 campaign. “Do you think we need a 9/11-type commission to investigate and report everything that they can pull together and explain what happened?” Clinton asked the speaker, who responded, “I do.”

“To your point of who is he beholden to, as I’ve said over and over, as I said to him in that picture with my blue suit as I was leaving, what I was saying to him as I was pointing, rudely, at him: ‘With you, Mr. President, all roads lead to Putin,’” Pelosi told Clinton, referring to the January 6 events as a “gift to Putin” as he “wants to undermine democracy in our country and throughout the world.” “And these people, unbeknownst to them, maybe, are Putin puppets. They were doing Putin’s business when they did that at the incitement of an insurrection by the president of the United States,” she added.

Hillary Pelosi Putin

.@SpeakerPelosi and I agree:

Congress needs to establish an investigative body like the 9/11 Commission to determine Trump's ties to Putin so we can repair the damage to our national security and prevent a puppet from occupying the presidency ever again. pic.twitter.com/yR7LQmXm5Z

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) January 18, 2021

What does Hillary think?

• Kremlin Joins EU Officials In Denouncing Big Tech Censorship (JTN)

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Monday joined calls from European Union officials to reign in the censorship power of Big Tech. In a Moscow news conference, Lavrov characterized the tech giants as extra-governmental entities that impose their own rules on public discourse. “Let’s hope that American society will not let its elites use blatant censorship, flagrant infringement of the Constitution and international commitments in its struggle against one other,” Lavrov said in the Jan. 18 news conference. “If it fails to cope with this problem, we all should be ready to face the consequences of such a failure of the American state, and these consequences would be very serious for the global arena.”

Russia’s top diplomat made his comments in the wake of high-profile social media platforms Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram abolishing accounts belonging to President Donald Trump. Although Facebook and Instagram have restored some elements of the president’s accounts, Twitter has not. The platform leader, Jack Dorsey, has disregarded public outcry against Twitter’s seemingly capricious enforcement of its terms of use, and has upheld the ban against Trump. The social media censorship moves against Trump and others last week brought cries of alarm from the European Commission, which is the executive branch of the European Union. A commission official, Prabhat Agarwal, reportedly spoke out Jan. 11 in a meeting with fellow lawmakers.

“It is no longer acceptable in our view that platforms take some key decisions by themselves alone without any supervision, without any accountability, and without any sort of dialogue or transparency for the kind of decisions that they’re taking,” said Agarwal, who leads a commission e-commerce unit. “Freedom of expression is really a key value in this.” [..] “Recent events, including those in the United States, [pertain] to a situation when half a dozen people who have created their technological empires do not even want to know what rights they have in their countries,” Lavrov said. “They themselves define their rights on the basis of so-called corporate norms and they don’t care a bit about the constitutions of their nations. We have clearly seen this in the United States, and this, of course, causes serious concern.”

Took just one year.

• Germany Weighs Up Mandatory FFP2 Masks In Shops And On Transport (G.)

Germany is weighing up following Austria and Bavaria’s lead in making it compulsory to wear full protective filter masks on public transport and in shops, as the country remains on high alert about the impact of possible coronavirus mutations. The Austrian chancellor, Sebastian Kurz, announced on Sunday that wearing single-use filtering facepiece respirator, or FFP2, masks would become mandatory on public transport and in shops from 25 January, as the Alpine state moves to extend its national lockdown until 7 February.

In Germany’s largest and southernmost state, Bavaria, a similar requirement for trains, trams, buses and supermarkets came into force on Monday, though the new rule will not be policed until 24 January and allows for exemptions for bus drivers, ticket inspectors and children under the age of 15. The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, and the heads of the country’s 16 federal states are expected to discuss following the Bavarian blueprint at a summit on Tuesday in spite of a recent reduction of infection rates. A night-time curfew and new remote-working requirements could also accompany an expected extension of the lockdown into February.

When fitted properly, FFP2 masks promise to filter out at least 94% of particles but are also more expensive, usually retailing at between €2 and €5 per mask. If FFP2 masks were made mandatory before suppliers are unable to meet the new demand, prices are expected to rise further. Some virologists warn a new compulsory mask rule could end up being counterproductive. “In theory, the move to more professional masks is welcome,” said Jonas Schmidt-Chanasit, a German virologist and Professor of Arbovirology at the University of Hamburg. “But I’d be wary of simply copying the Bavarian model without considering the possible downsides.

Antibodies evolve along with virus mutations.

• Evolution of Antibody Immunity to SARS-CoV-2 (Nature)

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) has infected 78 million individuals and is responsible for over 1.7 million deaths to date. Infection is associated with development of variable levels of antibodies with neutralizing activity that can protect against infection in animal models. Antibody levels decrease with time, but the nature and quality of the memory B cells that would be called upon to produce antibodies upon re-infection has not been examined. Here we report on the humoral memory response in a cohort of 87 individuals assessed at 1.3 and 6.2 months after infection. We find that IgM, and IgG anti-SARS-CoV-2 spike protein receptor binding domain (RBD) antibody titres decrease significantly with IgA being less affected.

Concurrently, neutralizing activity in plasma decreases by fivefold in pseudotype virus assays. In contrast, the number of RBD-specific memory B cells is unchanged. Memory B cells display clonal turnover after 6.2 months, and the antibodies they express have greater somatic hypermutation, increased potency and resistance to RBD mutations, indicative of continued evolution of the humoral response. Analysis of intestinal biopsies obtained from asymptomatic individuals 4 months after the onset of coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19), using immunofluorescence, or polymerase chain reaction, revealed persistence of SARS-CoV-2 nucleic acids and immunoreactivity in the small bowel of 7 out of 14 volunteers. We conclude that the memory B cell response to SARS-CoV-2 evolves between 1.3 and 6.2 months after infection in a manner that is consistent with antigen persistence.

Testimony to the lack of organization in the US? Or just Corporatism 2.0?

• Washington State Partners With Starbucks For Vaccine Distribution (F.)

As states across the U.S. struggle to administer enough coronavirus vaccines, Washington has picked an unusual partner to help speed up the process: Starbucks. Starbucks, which is based in Seattle, will assign several employees to work on “operational efficiency, scalable modeling and human-centered design expertise and support,” Gov. Jay Inslee announced Monday. Starbucks locations will not serve as vaccination sites, but the company said it will use its technology and logistical “expertise” to help with site selection and “optimize vaccination sites with design principles and solutions focused on efficiency to thruput.” Starbucks is part of a larger public-private partnership announced Monday to help Washington’s vaccine distribution, which includes Microsoft for technology assistance, Costco pharmacies for vaccine delivery and local unions to help staff and train volunteer vaccinators.

The goal of the partnership is to boost its distribution efforts, which like many states has been moving slowly amid logistical and supply challenges. States are already partnering with private companies with pharmacies, such as Walmart, Kroger, CVS and Walgreens, for vaccine distribution, but the Starbucks partnership is unique to Washington, and it’s among the first to involve a company without a clear link to healthcare. “Starbucks is not a healthcare company, but we do operate 33,000 stores at scale, serving 100 million customers per week,” said Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson at a press conference. “And we have a world-class team of human-centered design engineers who are working under the direction of the state and healthcare providers, like Swedish, Kaiser Permanente and others, with Microsoft and many other businesses to help support the creation of vaccination centers that can scale.”

Ironically, the banning of Trump by the Silicon Valley Kings will play a large role in these relations.

• EU-US Relations Under Biden Won’t Be The Same As Before Trump (EN)

EU-US relations will not return to how they were before Donald Trump came to power, according to the European Commission’s top trade official. Sabine Weyland, the EU’s director-general for trade, was speaking at a videoconference for the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, ahead of Joe Biden’s inauguration as the US’ 46th president on Wednesday. “There will be no nostalgia. We are not going to go back to the global order of previous days. The world today is not the same as it was ten or even five years ago,” Weyland said. Weyland’s words suggest four years of hostility towards Europe from Donald Trump’s administration have left a mark.

Nevertheless, Brussels is looking for closer cooperation with the US. It wants to focus on core priorities, like fighting the pandemic and its economic fallout, tackling climate change, and finding common ground on digital and trade policies. Adam Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics said that even with Trump out of the picture, American interests are still what counts most in Washington. “The Biden administration somewhat disappointingly is not just going to reverse all the tariffs,” Posen explained. “They will certainly stop escalating them and they will stop some of the more ridiculous tariffs that were put on allies with national security excuses. But there will be some attempt by the Biden administration to extract things in return for reducing the tariffs.”

Not the Onion.

• Trump Announces 200 Statues To Be Built For ‘American Heroes’ (JTN)

President Donald Trump announced the names on Monday of more than 200 statues to be built as part of his plan for a new “National Garden of American Heroes.” He said the new garden will demolish the “reckless attempt to erase our heroes” that occurred during last year’s protests and riots that occurred following the death of George Floyd, according to the Washington Times. The list of names is headlined by author Harper Lee, actor Jimmy Stewart, abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe, baseball star Roberto Clemente and explorer Christopher Columbus. “In the peace and harmony of this vast outdoor park, visitors will come and learn the amazing stories of some of the greatest Americans who have ever lived,” Trump said in a new executive order, which lists all of the names.

The announcement came on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Both King and his wife, Coretta Scott King, made Trump’s list. Trump left himself off of the list despite being nominated by several people as part of the selection process, government officials said last year. He first announced the list of names to be honored last summer as Black Lives Matter protests were occurring across the nation and statues recalling American history, such as Abraham Lincoln and George Washington, were being torn down. Trump’s decision to implement this “National Garden of American Heroes” was a counter to the statues of “American heroes” being destroyed and removed last summer.

His original list of 31 names received criticism for being too short and lacking diversity, as it consisted mainly of white men. Trump’s new list is much longer and much more diverse, including Native Americans, women and other minority groups. Whether this idea will be moved forward rests in the hands of President-elect Joe Biden as he takes office this week. He could completely eliminate Trump’s proposed list, alter the list of names or push it forward as is.

Please.

• My Letter to President Trump (Joe Lauria)

Dear President Trump,

You are right in many ways that the news media have become the enemies of the people and the friends of the powerful who treat the people as enemies. As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black wrote: “In the First Amendment the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The Government’s power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government.” The role of the press is to keep powerful officials accountable to the electorate. The one journalist who has achieved this above all in recent years is the Australian Julian Assange. He is languishing in a British prison for exposing the powerful in the interests of the people. It is within your power to set him free. Please pardon him, Mr. President.

Joe Lauria

Tucker Assange Kiriakou

Watch @pamfoundation speaking with @TuckerCarlson asking @POTUS to #PardonAssangeNow pic.twitter.com/Y18Ts1IfMy

— Don't Extradite Assange (@DEAcampaign) January 19, 2021

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Debt Rattle December 14 2020

Dec 142020

December 14, 2020 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 10:06 am Finance Tagged with: Assange, autoantibodies, China, COVID relief, Covid19, DNC, evictions, Hillary, hospital capacity, ivermectin, pardon, Snowden, stockpile 44 Responses »

Adolphe Yvon Genius of America c1870

• Data Shows Ample US Hospital Capacity Nationwide (JTN)

• ‘Autoantibodies’ May Be Driving Severe Covid Cases (G.)

• ‘Like Nothing Happened’: Sydney Restaurants Are Bustling (AFR)

• Ivermectin May Improve the Prognosis of Patients With COVID-19 (Science)

• Sen. Manchin: Bipartisan COVID19 Relief Plan To Be Released On Monday (JTN)

• Electoral College Voting Is Slated For Monday (JTN)

• China’s Global Power Tops The US? New Measures Say No! (Brands)

• Major Leak Of Members ‘Lifts The Lid’ On The Chinese Communist Party (Sky.au)

• Expect the Most Evictions in History as Ban Expires (Mish)

• Iowa Autopsy Report: DNC Meddling Led To Caucus Debacle (Pol.)

• Hillary So Far Finds No Role On Team Biden (JTN)

• Britons Told Not To Stockpile Food Ahead Of January (BBC)

• President Trump Open to the Idea of Pardoning Edward Snowden (LH)

Too much panicking about this. To know if a system is overwhelmed at any given point, you must know what its normal occupancy rate is. 90% capacity sounds scary, but not if it’s always at that capacity this time of year.

• Data Shows Ample US Hospital Capacity Nationwide (JTN)

As fears persist of overwhelmed medical systems and at-capacity hospitals nationwide, data indicate that ample hospital space remains available for both COVID-19 patients and other medical needs, with one official at a major hospital network stating that the country is “managing pretty well” the latest surge of COVID-19. For most of 2020, rising positive test results of COVID-19 have brought with them fears of swamped hospitals, overwhelmed medical systems, emergency patients being turned away, and COVID-19 patients being triaged, suffering and dying in hallways and vestibules. Much of that fear crystallized in the early stages of the pandemic, when parts of the northern Italian medical system were put under significant strain due to a crush of COVID-19 patients.

In response, leaders and medical officials around the world suspended elective surgeries and constructed emergency medical facilities to cope with anticipated waves of COVID-19 patients. In many cases those facilities were eventually shuttered for lack of patients, even after millions of dollars had been invested in their construction. In Chicago, for instance, the city spent $120,000,000 on four facilities to treat a total of 38 patients. The latest spike in positive COVID tests has brought renewed fears of hospitals straining under an influx of COVID-19 patients, with some facilities across the country reporting difficulties managing large numbers of patients, either from a dwindling number of scarce beds or not enough medical officials to man them, or both.

Yet federal government data compiled from state-level reports suggests that hospitals nationwide have considerable space left to deal with both routine medical issues and COVID-19 patients. The Department of Health and Human Services offers on its website estimates of hospitalization rates across the United States. The data, the department says, is “estimated from hospital submissions, either reported through their state or reported through HHS Protect,” which the department describes as “a secure data ecosystem … for sharing, parsing, housing, and accessing COVID-19 data.” The HHS numbers belie forecasts of impending collapse of the U.S. medical system. As of Saturday, the department estimated that hospitals nationwide were at about 75% capacity. ICU beds were even lower, at 63.5%. Patients who had tested positive for COVID-19 occupied just under 15% of all beds nationwide.

Even in areas that have recently posted huge surges in positive COVID tests, the numbers were largely similar to the national average: In New York, 76% of hospital beds (and 61% of ICU beds) were taken. Dr. Joanne Roberts, the chief value officer of Providence St. Joseph Health system, told Just the News that “a well-functioning hospital probably runs about 85% capacity on an average day.” The problem, she pointed out, is that a virus like COVID-19 can “quickly overwhelm that last 15%” due to its virulency and ability to send a significant number of patients to the hospital at once.

“Because antibodies can persist for a long time, it’s conceivable that they may contribute to the development of long-Covid diseases..”

• ‘Autoantibodies’ May Be Driving Severe Covid Cases (G.)

Dramatic levels of “friendly fire” from the immune system may drive severe Covid-19 disease and leave patients with “long Covid” – when medical problems persist for a significant time after the virus has been beaten – scientists have said. Researchers at Yale University found that Covid-19 patients had large numbers of misguided antibodies in their blood that targeted the organs, tissues and the immune system itself, rather than fighting off the invading virus. The scientists compared immune responses in patients and uninfected people and discovered scores of aberrant antibodies in the former.These blocked antiviral defences, wiped out helpful immune cells, and attacked the body on multiple fronts, from the brain, blood vessels and liver to connective tissue and the gastrointestinal tract.

Further tests revealed that the more “autoantibodies” patients had in their blood, the worse their disease. The Covid-19 patients had more antibodies that had turned on them than people with lupus, an autoimmune disease caused by similar wayward antibodies. “Covid-19 patients make autoantibodies that actually interfere with immune responses against the virus,” said Aaron Ring, an immunobiologist at Yale and senior author on the study. Numerous other autoantibodies attacked parts of the body that are known to become damaged in those with the disease. “We certainly believe that these autoantibodies are harmful to patients with Covid-19,” said Ring, adding that the harmful effects may well continue after the infection has abated, leaving patients with longer-lasting medical problems. “Because antibodies can persist for a long time, it’s conceivable that they may contribute to the development of long-Covid diseases,” he said. Ring partnered with Akiko Iwasaki, a professor of immunobiology at Yale, to screen 194 patients and hospital workers with varying severities of Covid infection for autoantibodies that targeted nearly 3,000 human proteins.

Antibodies disable viruses by latching on to proteins on the virus surface, but autoantibodies are the wrong shape and mistakenly bind to proteins that are on, or have been released by, human cells. Writing in the study, which has yet to be peer reviewed and published in a journal, the scientists describe how Covid patients had “dramatic increases in autoantibody reactivities” compared with 30 healthy hospital workers who did not have the virus. While certain autoantibodies in some patients were apparently present before Covid-19 infection, others appeared and ramped up as the disease progressed. More than 5% of hospitalised patients had autoantibodies that weakened a key arm of the immune defence that is orchestrated by proteins called interferons. These patients were unable to control the amount of virus in their bodies and so developed more serious illness.

Has the word “ivermectin” been banned on social media? I see people spell it as iv3rm3ctin.

• Ivermectin May Improve the Prognosis of Patients With COVID-19 (Science)

Dear Editor:
The pandemic coronavirus disease 19 (COVID-19), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), has been spread rapidly worldwide with considerable morbidity and mortality. COVID-19 patients have various clinical presentations: asymptomatic, exhibit mild flu-like symptoms, be severely ill or death. In addition to elder age and comorbidities, higher levels of D-dimer and C-reactive protein (CRP) and lower levels of lymphocyte and eosinophil as well as a cytokine storm are associated with disease severity in COVID-19 patients. The virus load may be a main determinant underlying the pathological diversity in COVID-19 patients.

Thus, an effective antiviral treatment is essential to improve the prognosis of patients with COVID-19.7 In the absence of specific anti-SARS-CoV-2 agents, various drugs with antiviral potential are now used to contain the virus in COVID-19 patients. Ivermectin, a US FDA-approved anthelminthic, has garnered enormous interest for treating COVID-19 as it is safe and cheap and has strong antiviral activities against board ranges of viruses including SARS-CoV-2 in vitro. Despite the widespread use of ivermectin, to our knowledge, there is currently no published clinical reports of ivermectin in COVID-19 patients. Here, we assessed the clinical efficacy of ivermectin in COVID-19 patients.

This retrospective study enrolled a total of 325 consecutive patients with SARS-CoV-2 infection confirmed by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) of nasal swabs in SK hospital, a unit dedicated to COVID-19 at Mymensingh Medical College Hospital (MMCH), Mymensingh, Bangladesh, from April to June 2020. Of these, the present study included 248 adult COVID-19 patients free from any other serious pathological conditions: 115 received ivermectin plus standard care (SC), while 133 received only SC. Remaining 77 patients who were under 18 years of age or transferred from other facilities and received different management approaches including partial hospital stays or treated with different therapeutic agents prior to hospital admission were excluded from the analysis.

The two groups were compared in terms of time to SARS-CoV-2 negativity, disease progression (develop pneumonia to severe respiratory distress), duration of hospital stays, and mortality rate. Ivermectin was given once at dose of 12 mg within 24-h after hospital admission. SC was provided as required and included antipyretics for fever, anti-histamines for cough, and antibiotics to control secondary infection. The study was approved by MMCH and informed consent was obtained from all patients or their relatives before starting treatment. Categorical variables are shown as frequencies and percentages and continuous variables as the median and interquartile range (IQR). Differences with 95% confidence intervals (CI) were computed to show the level of certainty. Paired t-tests or Pearson Chi-square test were used to analyze statistical differences. All calculations were performed using SAS, version 9.4 (Cary, NC, USA).

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world…

• ‘Like Nothing Happened’: Sydney Restaurants Are Bustling (AFR)

At lunchtime in Barangaroo in downtown Sydney, it’s as though the pandemic never happened. Restaurants and cafes are bustling, and Matias Munoz, assistant manager at Bel and Brio, says the Italian restaurant has been flat out from open to close. “I think it’s because they’ve had a really tough year and they want to celebrate. That’s what the customers say to me,” Mr Munoz said. The NSW government on Monday lifted a public health order requiring employers to let staff work from home in the hope of bringing customers back to struggling city businesses. New mobility data shows residents in most capital cities are driving more than ever, with Sydney 17 per cent above the benchmark set in January before the pandemic lockdown.

Capacity on NSW’s public transport is being boosted as the government rolls back health restrictions and social distancing requirements. Most employers do not plan to bring workers back to their desks until early next year, and consumer data shows hospitality venues in central business districts have been gutted. But tell that to Mr Munoz, whose restaurant reopened in July after the first lockdown. “We reopened and it looked like nothing happened. People were coming like normal,” he said. The restaurant is handling 400 bookings per day. Trade lulled during the early days of Victoria’s second wave as even Sydneysiders stayed home before quickly recovering.

“Compared to the last year, we’re doing the same numbers,” Mr Munoz said. Even on a Monday, typically their quietest day, the restaurant is packed. Joseph Le, manager at nearby Lotus, was overseeing a full house and said it was good to be back to normal after the worrying he experienced during the early days of the pandemic. “[I thought] am I going to lose my job? How can I pay my bills?” Mr Le said. “I’m so happy and lucky to be here.”

Better get it done, and done well. It’s Christmas time.

• Sen. Manchin: Bipartisan COVID19 Relief Plan To Be Released On Monday (JTN)

Senator Joe Manchin during an interview on Fox News Sunday with host Chris Wallace said that a bipartisan group of lawmakers’ proposed COVID-19 relief legislation will be released on Monday. Wallace asked if a $908 billion compromise plan is off the table, and if there were a chance that Congress would leave Washington for the rest of the year without passing a COVID relief bill. Manchin responded that “the plan is alive and well,” and he shot down the concept of Congress skipping town before approving any relief. “We’ll have a bill produced for the American people tomorrow, $908 billion dollars,” the West Virginia Democrat said about the proposal that will be shared. “We’re trying to get through the toughest first quarter of our country that we’ve ever faced.”

Manchin said he could not guarantee that the legislation would pass. “But I can tell you one thing: What’s the alternative? What are you going to do? We’ve given one month, day and night, our staffs have worked around the clock,” he said. “We’ve done everything we can to put an all-inclusive product together. Pick whatever parts you like, whatever parts you don’t like. Put it all together or take it as a whole. We’re gonna give it to you the way we think the American people need it. In an emergency situation, we need this legislation.”

Sidney Powell announced 4 major cases to go before SCOTUS. We’re not done yet, but we’re getting there.

• Electoral College Voting Is Slated For Monday (JTN)

Members of the Electoral College will cast their votes for president on Monday, with Joe Biden expected to receive 306 electoral votes compared to just 232 for President Trump. A candidate must secure 270 to win the presidency. The step comes as President Trump has so far chosen not to concede to Biden, filing a host of lawsuits alleging that fraud tainted the 2020 election. The U.S. Constitution provides that each state will have a quantity of electors equivalent to the combined number of senators and House members that the state is entitled to have in the nation’s legislature. Thus, states with larger populations have more electoral votes than states with smaller populations. The candidate who wins the national popular vote does not always win the Electoral College vote.

But the Electoral College vote, not the national popular vote, determines which candidate wins the presidential contest. The Associated Press reported that the Electoral College does not meet in one central location, but electors for every state and the District of Columbia gather at a location selected by their own legislature. With the exception of Maine and Nebraska, states award all of their Electoral College votes to the winner of the state’s popular vote. Nevada and Maine divide their Electoral College votes between the statewide winner and the victor in each congressional district. “Maine awards two of its four electoral votes to the statewide winner, but also allocates an electoral vote to the popular vote winner in each of its two congressional districts,” according to CBS News. “Nebraska gives two of its five electoral votes to the statewide winner, with the remaining three going to the popular vote winner in each of its three congressional districts.”

“In 32 states and the District of Columbia, laws require electors to vote for the popular-vote winner,” the AP reported. “Electors almost always vote for the state winner anyway, because they generally are devoted to their political party,” the outlet noted. On Jan. 6, Vice President Mike Pence will preside over a joint session of the U.S. Congress and the votes will be counted. If a minimum of one lawmaker from each chamber of the nation’s bicameral legislature objects via writing to some electoral votes, each chamber would debate the matter separately. “An objection to a state’s electoral vote must be approved by both houses in order for any contested votes to be excluded,” according to the Congressional Research Service.

How to measure power.

• China’s Global Power Tops The US? New Measures Say No! (Brands)

Traditionally, measures of power focused on attributes such as population, energy consumption and production of steel or other indicators of industrial strength. In the information age, these indices tell us relatively little about whether a country can get its way in world affairs. It is still common, though, to assess power through blunt measures like GDP or military spending. Analysts who argue that Beijing is overtaking the U.S. habitually note that China’s GDP may soon surpass America’s. But GDP is a snapshot of activity rather than a measure of overall wealth. Some countries that spend massively on military power, such as Saudi Arabia, are quite useless in projecting it. So how can we determine the balance of advantage in a long rivalry? The groundbreaking academic work is giving us better answers.

The first category focuses on refining our grasp of economic and military might. Michael Beckley of the American Enterprise Institute (where I am also a fellow) has developed a model that measures net power rather than gross power by accounting for things such as security costs (“the price a government pays to police and protect its citizens”) and production costs (how much it costs, in material and environmental degradation, to build that coal power plant). He finds, not surprisingly, that the U.S. fares far better than China, an authoritarian state with vast internal security costs and a prodigiously wasteful approach to stimulating growth. Similarly, it is critical that American per capita GDP dwarfs China’s, because that means the U.S. has more wealth left over, after it feeds its population, to pursue global influence. Other work has better accounted for the way wealth accrues over time, and found that the U.S. will still have far more overall economic power than China even after China’s GDP eclipses America’s.

The second category better captures the reality of “network power.” In a landmark paper published in 2019, Abraham Newman of Georgetown University and Henry Farrell, my colleague at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, argue that the centrality of the dollar to international financial networks — which persists, despite decades of handwringing about its decline — gives the U.S. outsized coercive leverage. Scholars have also affirmed something that policymakers have long understood: America punches far above its own weight in global affairs, because of the network of military, economic and diplomatic partners it leads. China has nothing equivalent.

The third category accounts for less tangible forms of power. For decades, analysts have grasped that soft power — the degree of admiration and emulation a country inspires — matters enormously. An intriguing study by Ted Hopf of the National University of Singapore, Bentley Allan of Johns Hopkins and Srdjan Vucetic of the University of Ottawa demonstrates that, even though America’s global favorability ratings have plummeted under President Donald Trump, there remains strong global support for democracy and free-market economic policies. That’s a body blow for an authoritarian, mercantilist China, which, the authors predict, “is unlikely to become the hegemon in the near term.” It also helps explain why European states are systematically turning away from Beijing even amid enormous turbulence in their relations with the U.S.

A lot of interest in China these days.

• Major Leak Of Members ‘Lifts The Lid’ On The Chinese Communist Party (Sky.au)

A major leak containing a register with the details of nearly two million CCP members has occurred – exposing members who are now working all over the world, while also lifting the lid on how the party operates under Xi Jinping, says Sharri Markson. Ms Markson said the leak is a register with the details of Communist Party members, including their names, party position, birthday, national ID number and ethnicity. “It is believed to be the first leak of its kind in the world,” the Sky News host said. “What’s amazing about this database is not just that it exposes people who are members of the communist party, and who are now living and working all over the world, from Australia to the US to the UK,” Ms Markson said. “But it’s amazing because it lifts the lid on how the party operates under President and Chairman Xi Jinping”.

Ms Markson said the leak demonstrates party branches are embedded in some of the world’s biggest companies and even inside government agencies. “Communist party branches have been set up inside western companies, allowing the infiltration of those companies by CCP members – who, if called on, are answerable directly to the communist party, to the Chairman, the president himself,” she said. “Along with the personal identifying details of 1.95 million communist party members, mostly from Shanghai, there are also the details of 79,000 communist party branches, many of them inside companies”. Ms Markson said the leak is a significant security breach likely to embarrass Xi Jinping. “It is also going to embarrass some global companies who appear to have no plan in place to protect their intellectual property from theft. From economic espionage,” she said.

In a pandemic. Is there a worse idea possible?

• Expect the Most Evictions in History as Ban Expires (Mish)

“Millions of U.S. renters face the prospect of eviction in January unless federal officials extend protections put in place during the Covid-19 pandemic. That month is when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s ban on evictions is set to expire. The moratorium protects tenants who have missed monthly rent payments from being thrown out of their homes if they declare financial hardship. The CDC ordered the halt on evictions under the Public Health Service Act, which allows the federal government to enact regulations that help stop the spread of infectious diseases. Between 2.4 million and 5 million American households are at risk of eviction in January alone, and millions more will be vulnerable in the months after, according to estimates from the investment bank and financial-advisory firm Stout Risius Ross.

Landlords have already filed more than 150,000 eviction petitions during the pandemic in the 27 cities tracked by Princeton University’s Eviction Lab. Many of those tenants have lost their cases, and are now on the hook for all their back rent.” ‘I don’t see how it’s possible that we’re not going to see more evictions on Jan. 1 than we’ve ever seen in a month,’ said John Pollock, staff attorney at the Public Justice Center It’s easy to sympathize with tenants but what about landlords who cannot pay mortgages? Are we to postpone evictions forever while landlords lose their property? There has been no discussion in any of the recent Covid packages for further moratoriums nor aid to landlords who have not been paid for months. So unless there is specific aid sufficient aid in the bill to allow tenants to catch up, millions of evictions are on the way.

After protecting the DNC for years, the press suddenly wake up?!

• Iowa Autopsy Report: DNC Meddling Led To Caucus Debacle (Pol.)

Democratic National Committee meddling, combined with missteps by the state Democratic Party, were the primary drivers of the chaos that torpedoed the Iowa caucuses earlier this year, according to a new audit commissioned by the state party. The report, which was distributed to the Iowa Democratic Party State Central Committee at a meeting Saturday morning and obtained by POLITICO, identified a series of errors made by the DNC, IDP and the technology company contracted by the state party to build a reporting app to collect caucus results. The February caucuses were overrun by foul-ups: The state party was unable to report a winner on caucus night, the mobile app to report results failed to work for many precinct chairs, the back-up telephone systems were jammed and some precincts had initial reporting errors.

The state party chair, Troy Price, resigned in the wake of the debacle, which put Iowa’s status as the first in the nation nominating contest in serious jeopardy. But the report pins the blame squarely on the DNC for the heart of the problem on caucus night — the delay in the reporting of the results. According to the report, the DNC demanded the technology company, Shadow, build a conversion tool just weeks before the caucuses to allow the DNC to have real-time access to the raw numbers because the national party feared the app would miscalculate results. The DNC’s data system used a different database format than Shadow’s reporting app, which caused multiple problems.

“Attempting to graft an entirely new software element onto the back-end reporting system at the proverbial eleventh hour is likely always going to be problematic, and it was ultimately the cause of a major problem on caucus night,” the report concludes. “Furthermore, the IDP was not involved in the development of this tool. The IDP simply permitted the DNC to direct the IDP’s vendor.” The audit states the conversion tool had coding errors that spit out inaccurate numbers and caused confusion about the accuracy of the results, eventually leading to delays in reporting. But the state party’s app never malfunctioned nor was hacked, the report concludes.

“When the DNC’s database conversion tool failed to work correctly, it caused the DNC to wrongly stop the IDP from reporting its results, and the IDP’s entire planned reporting process was thrown into disarray,” the report says. “The DNC’s interjection was the catalyst for the resulting chaos in the boiler room and in the IDP’s attempts to manually collect and confirm caucus results by hand. If the DNC had not interjected itself into the results reporting process based on its erroneous data conversion, caucus night could conceivably have proceeded according to the IDP’s initial plan.”

But Samantha Power is back in, it appears.

• Hillary So Far Finds No Role On Team Biden (JTN)

Have you noticed? Hillary Clinton is suddenly — and finally — nowhere to be found. Well before she lost the 2016 presidential election to President Trump, the former first lady pushed a conspiracy theory that eventually grew into a major, two-year investigation: Trump had colluded with the Russians in order to alter the outcome of the race. That didn’t pan out, but Hillary had other excuses. For months — which turned into years — she blamed FBI Director James Comey, Russia, computer bots, WikiLeaks, Sen. Bernie Sanders, Facebook, Joe Biden, fake news, Twitter, voter ID laws, the vast right-wing conspiracy, sexism, Barack Obama, ageism, child sex pervert Anthony Weiner, white women, xenophobia, black people, the Electoral College, the Democratic National Committee, misogyny, women cowed by their husbands, and even former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani (how America’s Mayor caused Clinton to lose Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and Michigan and Florida is anybody’s guess).

But the mainstream media despises Trump, and Clinton was a reliable gadfly, so she stayed in the news regularly. She even made millions hawking her book, “What Happened,” her take on why she lost the election. Yet it’s been more than a month since Election Day 2020, and Americans haven hardly heard a peep out of her. What’s more, the former secretary of state for President Barack Obama has been given no role in a prospective Biden administration, even though at 72 she’s younger the 78-year-old Biden. It’s not like Biden hasn’t made room for others from former administrations. After all, he found room as climate czar for John Kerry, who served as secretary of state from 2013 to 2017 under Obama. But so far, nothing for Clinton.

Clinton’s omission is odd, given that she won nearly 66 million votes in 2016. She also represents a powerful wing of the party — albeit an old and fading faction — along with her husband, former President Bill Clinton, who remains extremely popular with the rank and file of the party. And she’s got the bona fides: Secretary of State, two-term senator, and architect of a planned overhaul of health care that eventually morphed into Obamacare. As Biden made room for Kerry on climate, he could give Clinton a role on health care. And the former vice president could tap Hillary’s decades of experience, even if just as an adviser, whether formal or informal.

Shortly after Election Day, rumors circulated that Biden was considering Clinton for a role in his administration, perhaps as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. The move “would be a way for Biden to highlight the importance of that position in his administration, and that placing her there would raise the prestige of the U.N. itself at a time when global cooperation and the U.S. role on the world stage, has ebbed,” sources told the Washington Post. But a few weeks later, Biden picked Linda Thomas-Greenfield, a 35-year veteran of the foreign service who oversaw the Bureau of African Affairs during the Obama administration, for the slot.

Yes, you got that right. The day after the UK government tells supermarkets to stockpile food, they now tell their citizens to do the opposite. Sweet Jesus.

• Britons Told Not To Stockpile Food Ahead Of January (BBC)

Households have been warned not to stockpile food and toilet roll ahead of 1 January when the UK stops trading under EU rules. On Sunday, the UK and the EU agreed to extend a deadline aimed at reaching a deal on post-Brexit trade. The British Retail Consortium (BRC) said ongoing uncertainty made it harder for firms to prepare for the New Year. But it said shops had plenty of supplies and shoppers must not buy more food than usual. “Retailers are doing everything they can to prepare for all eventualities on 1 January – increasing the stock of tins, toilet rolls and other longer life products so there will be sufficient supply of essential products,” said BRC chief executive Helen Dickinson.

“While no amount of preparation by retailers can entirely prevent disruption there is no need for the public to buy more food than usual as the main impact will be on imported fresh produce, such as fresh fruit and vegetables, which cannot be stored for long periods by either retailers or consumers.” Supermarkets are now used to dealing with anxious shoppers. During the first lockdown earlier this year to stop the spread of the coronavirus, grocers introduced limits on goods such as toilet roll, dried pasta and UHT milk after panic buying by Britons. There are fears shoppers might think disruption at ports after 31 December could lead to shortages in shops as the UK transitions to new trading rules with the EU.

Of course Snowden has urged him to pardon Assange.

• President Trump Open to the Idea of Pardoning Edward Snowden (LH)

The push to have President Trump pardon NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is heating up as a group in Congress has been urging the President to do the right thing and free this patriot. There have been a growing list of Republicans and Democrats that are pushing the outgoing President to do the right thing and grant a full and complete pardon of Snowden so he can return home to the United States. Edward Snowden is famous for declassifying an NSA program that was used to spy on the American people. He has been hunted for years by the federal government and has sought asylum in multiple countries.

Currently he resides in Russia where is viewed in Liberty circles as a patriot for his act to expose the governments attempt to pry into the lives of ordinary Americans. He deserves a pardon and Trump needs to use one of his last acts as President to make history right. Call your Congressman and women and urge them to put pressure of the White House. Contact the White House as well using this link.

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Debt Rattle October 27 2020

Oct 272020

October 27, 2020 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:19 am Finance Tagged with: ACB, Assange, deplorables, digital yuan, flu, Hillary, lizard brains, Santa Claus, scum, Supreme Court, Trump, Wikileaks 17 Responses »

Henri Matisse Bathers by a River 1910

• Hillary Clinton Says Trump & Russian Media ‘Stole’ Election From Her (RT)

• Meacham Attacks Trump Supporters As Lizard Brains (Turley)

• Supreme Court Rules Wisconsin Ballots Must Be Received By Election Day (Fox)

• Biden’s Parade of Horribles For Changing The Supreme Court (Turley)

• Debt-To-Income Ratios Are Worse Than They Appear (RIA)

• Confirmed Influenza Cases Hit Rock-Bottom, Puzzling Experts (JTN)

• China Moves To Legalise Digital Yuan, Ban Competitors (SCMP)

• China Launches Crackdown On Mobile Web Browsers, ‘Chaos’ Of Information (R.)

• Social Media’s Erasure Of Palestinians Is A Grim Warning For Our Future (Cook)

• The Revelations Of Wikileaks: No. 9 – Opening the CIA’s Vault (CN)

• ‘Iraq War Diaries’ At Ten Years: Truth is Treason (Ron Paul)

• US Pulls Plan To Give Early Vaccine To Santa Claus (BBC)

Making Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court confirmation an election issue may not be the smartest move ever for the Dems.

But not as bad as Hillary again blaming her loss on the Russians. Look, people don’t like you. Go home. Stay home. Like Joe.

Lincoln Project

lmaoooo i audibly snorted at the 0:44 mark in this lincoln project ad. pic.twitter.com/xhczTjavVj

— tsar becket adams (@BecketAdams) October 27, 2020

Strassel Hunter

Why Hinter matters. pic.twitter.com/j7YAGQL6yS

— Kimberley Strassel (@KimStrassel) October 27, 2020

Nothing is ever my fault.

• Hillary Clinton Says Trump & Russian Media ‘Stole’ Election From Her (RT)

Failed 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is claiming Trump “basically stole the election” from her four years after her loss, a statement that is earning her plenty of ridicule on social media. In an interview with journalist Kara Swisher’s podcast for the New York Times Opinions network released on Monday, Clinton spoke about losing in 2016 because of a “disinformation campaign” run by then-Republican candidate Donald Trump and “Russian media.” She even claimed the election was “stolen” from her. “I think that Trump and a lot of the people around him know that his victory was not on the up and up. They had an extensive campaign to suppress black voters. We now know much more about that than we did,” the former secretary of state said.

She also blamed third party voters who handed Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson and Green Party nominee Jill Stein historic results for their parties and claimed they were “boosted” by “Russian media.” “They had third party candidates boosted, particularly by Russian media. And the lies and ridiculous stories made up about me were meant to either keep you at home, or drive you third party if they couldn’t get you to vote for Trump,” she said. Trump, she said, holds a presidency that has an “air of illegitimacy,” something she has said many times over the past four years. She now drives Trump and Republicans “crazy” because “I was the candidate that they basically stole an election from.”

Here, have some more deplorables.

• Meacham Attacks Trump Supporters As Lizard Brains (Turley)

We recently discussed how Vanderbilt professor and historian Jon Meacham gave a quiz in his course on the 2020 Election in which students were asked “Was the Constitution designed to perpetuate white supremacy and protect the institution of slavery?” You had to answer “yes” or get points deducted. It appears that the final exam in the class could prove even more demanding for any intellectually honest student if Meacham asks about the voters themselves. The NBC analyst this week declared that President Trump and his supporters are examples of being controlled by what is called “the lizard brain”. It only got worse from there.

Meacham addressed a simple question of whether Trump helped himself with his base in the second presidential debate Thursday night. It is impossible on NBC, however, to refer to Trump voters without some derisive or insulting precursor. Meacham did not disappoint his audience. “I think Trump did himself good with his base tonight,” Meacham said. “The question for America is how big that base is. There is a lizard brain in this country. Donald Trump is a product of the White man’s, the anguished, nervous White guy’s lizard brain.” Meacham was referring to a primitive part of the brain in psychological literature: “Many people call it the ‘Lizard Brain,’ because the limbic system is about all a lizard has for brain function. It is in charge of fight, flight, feeding, fear, freezing up, and fornication.”

Of course, even with the lead held by Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden in the polls, roughly half of this country still supports Trump (or at least rejects Biden, who Meacham has endorsed). That is a lot of lizard people. What is striking is that Meacham is supposed to give what NBC, MSNBC and PBS present as neutral, scholarly analysis. But his comment about Trump supporters having lizard brains captures why conservative or independent voters view the networks as biased and gratuitously insulting. Indeed, these comments show that networks like NBC are now focusing entirely on Democratic and liberal viewers — writing off half of the American people as gag lines.

[..] I have watched the stereotyping of Trump supporters at media conferences for years. It suggests that roughly 63 million people in this country who voted for Trump in 2016 are knuckle-dragging racists. The media have simply never tried to see any nuance or gain any insight into what is motivating Trump supporters. It is easier to dismiss them as a whole as racists and lizard people. Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin has declared that Trump supporters as a whole are racists. That common stereotyping of Trump supporters is uncontested, even as the media object to Trump’s generalizations about other groups. Miami Herald columnist and NBC analyst Leonard Pitts wrote a column headlined: “No, it’s not the economy, stupid. Trump supporters fear a black and brown America.”

I know we use the term ‘election year’, but I don’t think it was ever meant to be used in this sense. It was always ‘election day’.

• Supreme Court Rules Wisconsin Ballots Must Be Received By Election Day (Fox)

The Supreme Court on Monday ruled against a request by Wisconsin Democrats to allow an extension for mail-in ballots that are received after Election Day. In a 5-3 ruling, the justices refused to reinstate a lower court order that called for mailed ballots to be counted if they are received up to six days after the Nov. 3 election. A federal appeals court had already put that order on hold. Democrats argued that the flood of absentee ballots and other challenges posed by the coronavirus pandemic makes it necessary to extend the period in which ballots can be counted. Wisconsin is one of the nation’s hot spots for COVID-19, with hospitals treating a record high number of patients with the disease.

Republicans had opposed extending the Nov. 3 deadline, saying that voters have plenty of opportunities to cast their ballots by the close of polls on Election Day and that the rules should not be changed so close to the election. The Wisconsin Department of Health Services said that more than 201,000 people in the state have tested positive for COVID-19 as of Monday. The 7th Circuit Court of Appeals had approved a six-day extension of a deadline for absentee ballots to be received in Wisconsin. Absentee ballots postmarked on or before Election Day would have been counted as long as they came in before Nov. 9. Chief Justice John Roberts sided with his conservative colleagues. Justice Elena Kagan, Stephen Breyer, and Sonia Sotomayor dissented.

“He insists Democrats can change the system to guarantee Republicans “will never win another election..”

• Biden’s Parade of Horribles For Changing The Supreme Court (Turley)

The vote on Monday to make Judge Amy Coney Barrett the 115th Supreme Court justice will be more than a confirmation. It will be a dispensation, according to former Vice President Joe Biden and various Democratic senators. They have cited the vote as relieving them of any guilt in fundamentally changing the court to manufacture a liberal majority. Like school kids daring others to step over a line as an excuse to fight, Democrats insist that filling this vacancy will invite changes ranging from “packing” the court to stripping it of authority to rule in certain cases. The problem is that the line the Senate will step over is set by the Constitution, while the proposals by Democrats would retaliate against the use of a power granted by the Constitution. Democrats are floating a parade of horribles to “reform” the Supreme Court and negate its growing conservative majority.

Biden said this week that the court is “out of whack” and, as president, he would assemble a commission of “experts” to explore “a number of alternatives that go well beyond packing.” The commission would report to him 180 days after his inauguration. Polls show almost 60 percent of Americans oppose the court packing scheme supported by Democrats, including Biden’s running mate, Senator Kamala Harris. One person not polled was the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who denounced such a scheme as guaranteeing the court’s destruction. A New York Times and Siena College poll found only 31 percent favor court packing. That is a familiar figure: For the last four years, the same 30 percent of both parties have supported the most destructive political measures and rhetoric.

Those extremes continue to control our politics, while the vast majority of us in the middle watch in disbelief as virtually every Democratic senator embraces one of the most reviled tactics in American history. Those senators are not alone. A host of professors (who likely will be on the short list for Biden’s commission) are giving credibility to court packing. Harvard professor Michael Klarman attacked the foundations of Congress before attacking the foundations of the court. Klarman condemned a “malapportionment” in the Senate that he believes gives Republicans greater power, and referred to their refusal to vote on Obama court nominee Merrick Garland as “stealing a seat.” While controversial (and I was among those calling for a vote on Garland), that decision was clearly constitutional.

Yet Klarman illogically calls it “court packing” to justify any act of retaliation: “Democrats are not initiating this spiral. They are simply responding in kind.” He then says not to worry about Republicans responding with their own court packing when they return to power. He insists Democrats can change the system to guarantee Republicans “will never win another election,” at least not without abandoning their values. Of course, Klarman concedes “the Supreme Court could strike down everything I just described” so the court must be packed in advance to allow these changes to occur. Here are some of the other wacky ideas to get the court back into “whack.”

Only needed to read the headline to understand why.

• Debt-To-Income Ratios Are Worse Than They Appear (RIA)

I recently published an article discussing why “recessions” are a good thing by reverting debt buildups excesses during expansions. The argument against debt reversions is always the same in that “debt-to-income” ratios low. To wit: “One reason (of many) we don’t need a debt reversion is that household debt service costs (interest etc.) as a % of household incomes are currently at a 40 year low.” – S. Porter If you look at a chart, it certainly would seem that would be the case. But, like most data from the Federal Reserve, you have to dig behind the numbers to reveal the real story. So let’s do that, shall we?

Every year, most Americans go further into debt just to “sustain” their standard of living. To wit: “In 1998, monetary velocity peaked and began to turn lower. Such coincides with the point that consumers were forced into debt to sustain their standard of living. For decades, WallStreet, advertisers, and corporate powerhouses flooded consumers with advertising to induce them into buying bigger houses, televisions, and cars. The age of ‘consumerism’ took hold.“

The idea of “maintaining a certain standard of living” has become a foundation in society currently. The average American believes they are “entitled” to a specific type of house, car, and general lifestyle. Such includes living necessities such as food, running water, electricity, and the latest mobile phone, computer, and high-speed internet connection. (Really, what would be the point of living if you didn’t have access to Facebook every two minutes?) However, maintaining this “entitled” lifestyle requires money, and as shown above, when income and savings run short, debt fills the gap.

Are all COVID patients tested for flu?

• Confirmed Influenza Cases Hit Rock-Bottom, Puzzling Experts (JTN)

Even as worries persist over increasing COVID-19 cases in the United States, cases of another virus — influenza — have plummeted relative to their number a year ago. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s FluView influenza tracker lists an influenza-positive test percentage of 0.3% for week 42 of 2020 — a total of 33 positive tests out of 10,809 specimens. That’s down sharply from 2.4% during the same week last year. Visits to healthcare providers for “influenza-like illnesses” during week 42 were also down this year from the last, though not as sharply: This week that rate was 1.2% of all such visits, while last year it was 1.7%.

Sharp drops in influenza have also been observed elsewhere throughout the world over the past several months. World Health Organization global flu surveillance shows a severe dropoff in flu cases starting in early April; whereas in past years flu cases are sustained at a steady plateau over the mid-year months — driven by the Southern Hemisphere’s flu season — WHO observation has cases more or less disappearing from April onwards. “Globally, influenza activity remained at lower levels than expected for this time of the year,” the WHO wrote earlier this month, “though increased detections were reported in some countries.”

[..] Some experts have, perhaps unsurprisingly, cited the still-ongoing lockdowns, mitigation measures, mask mandates and social distancing orders as possible explanations for reduced flu rates worldwide. “It does seem that the rates are lower,” Phyllis Kanki, an infectious disease professor at Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, told Just the News. “I think COVID mitigation measures are likely to lower levels. Some of these mitigation measures may have been particularly effective for high-risk groups for flu, like the elderly and immunosuppressed.” Nevertheless, she acknowledged, at this point there are “more questions than answers.”

[..] Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University, is skeptical about the conventional wisdom that COVID mitigation efforts suppressed this year’s flu. “I think we can dismiss out of hand that that masks and social distancing are responsible for the decline in flu incidence this season,” he told Just the News, while also confessing to being uncertain as to why levels were so low. “First, why would they work for the flu, but not for COVID? Second, there is randomized evidence that those interventions do not work to suppress influenza incidence.” Bhattacharya was referring to a substantial body of evidence indicating that masks do not stop the spread of influenza. A World Health Organization review from last year found “no evidence” that masks helped to stop influenza transmission.

Does this mean they’ll ban Bitcoin?

• China Moves To Legalise Digital Yuan, Ban Competitors (SCMP)

China is inching closer to the launch of its own sovereign digital currency by giving it a legal foundation in an upcoming law revision, while the central bank is also addressing problems that emerged in pilot tests for the digital yuan. The People’s Bank of China (PBOC) published a draft law on Friday that would give legal status to the Digital Currency Electronic Payment (DCEP) system, and for the first time the digital yuan has been included and defined as part of the country’s sovereign fiat currency. The draft law would also forbid any party from making or issuing yuan-backed digital tokens to replace the renminbi in the market.

Mu Changchun, head of the central bank’s digital currency research institute, said on Sunday at the Bund Summit in Shanghai that the DCEP will be allowed to circulate and be converted like physical banknotes and coins. “Its centralised management will be good to fight against cryptocurrencies and global stablecoins and prevent their erosion of currency-issuance rights,” he said. China released its design framework for the digital yuan soon after Facebook unveiled its ambitious Libra token project in the summer of last year, with plans for a two-tier issuance structure and a focus on small retail application scenarios. China appears to be the front runner in the race to issue the world’s first digital currency, having conducted a series of trials in four cities – Suzhou, Shenzhen, Chengdu and Xiongan – as well as at venues for the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing.

Earlier this month, a district in Shenzhen, just across the mainland border from Hong Kong, gave away 50,000 digital “red packets”, totalling 10 million yuan (US$1.5 million), to local residents in the largest-scale test so far. The central government has made it clear that the goals of the DCEP include replacing cash, maintaining government control over the currency and creating as many small retail application scenarios as possible. China is also looking to internationalise the yuan by enhancing its use in international settlements.

“..dissemination of chaos by ‘self-media’“. Don’t think I’ve seen that term before.

• China Launches Crackdown On Mobile Web Browsers, ‘Chaos’ Of Information (R.)

China’s top cyber authority said on Monday it would carry out a “rectification” of Chinese mobile internet browsers to address what it called social concerns over the “chaos” of information being published online. China’s strict internet censorship rules have been tightened numerous times in recent years and in the latest crackdown, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) has told firms operating mobile browsers that they have until Nov. 9 to conduct a “self examination” and rectify problems. The problems include the spreading of rumours, the use of sensationalist headlines and the publishing of content that violates the core values of socialism, it said in a statement.

“For some time, mobile browsers have grown in an uncivilised way … and have become a gathering place and amplifier for dissemination of chaos by ‘self-media’,” the CAC said, referring to independently operated social media accounts, many of which publish news. “After the rectification, mobile browsers that still have outstanding problems will be dealt with strictly according to laws and regulations until related businesses are banned.” The campaign will initially focus on eight of the most influential mobile browsers in China, including those operated by Huawei, Alibaba Group Holding’s UCWeb and Xiaomi Corp, it said.

We all heard of Big Brother. We just never understood who he is.

• Social Media’s Erasure Of Palestinians Is A Grim Warning For Our Future (Cook)

Western publics are waking up very belatedly to the undemocratic power social media wields over them. But if we wish to understand where this ultimately leads, there is no better case study than the very different ways Israelis and Palestinians have been treated by the tech giants. The treatment of Palestinians online serves as a warning that it would be foolish indeed to regard these globe-spanning corporations as politically neutral platforms, and their decisions as straightforwardly commercial. This is to doubly misunderstand their role. Social media firms are now effectively monopolistic communication grids – similar to the electricity and water grids, or the phone network of a quarter of a century ago.

Their decisions are therefore no longer private matters, but instead have huge social, economic and political consequences. That is part of the reason why the US justice department launched a lawsuit last week against Google for acting as a “monopoly gatekeeper for the internet”. Google, Facebook and Twitter have no more a right to arbitrarily decide who and what they host on their sites than telecoms companies once had a right to decide whether a customer should be allowed a phone line. But unlike the phone company, social media corporations control not just the means of communication, but the content too. They can decide, as the Hunter Biden story shows, whether their customers get to participate in vital public debates about who leads them.

The Hunter Biden decision is as if the phone company of old not only listened in to conversations, but was able to cut the line if it did not like the politics of any particular customer. In fact, it is even worse than that. Social media now deliver the news to large sections of the population. Their censoring of a story is more akin to the electricity company turning off the power to everyone’s homes for the duration of a TV broadcast to ensure no one can see it.

At least Merkel said she was angry. But after that, crickets.

• The Revelations Of Wikileaks: No. 9 – Opening the CIA’s Vault (CN)

As its publisher remains in prison awaiting judgment on his extradition case, we continue our series of looking at WikiLeaks’ significant revelations contributing to the public’s right to know. On Feb. 6, 2017, WikiLeaks released documents detailing the Central Intelligence Agency’s espionage program in the months leading up to and following France’s presidential election in 2012. The agency used spies and cyberweapons to infiltrate and hack into the major political parties with competing candidates — the Socialists, the National Front and the Union for a Popular Movement. Their candidates — respectively François Hollande, Marine Le Pen and incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy — were also spied upon individually, as were many other prominent political figures.

The objectives of the program included ascertaining the contending parties’ political strategies and platforms, their views of the U.S., and their relations with the European Union, with other European nations (Germany, Britain) as well as Israel, Palestine, Libya, Syria, and others. The CIA’s French operation lasted 10 months, beginning in November 2011 and enduring until September 2012, several months after Hollande won the election and formed a Socialist government. WikiLeaks’ disclosure of the agency’s project bears a special irony: It was just as WikiLeaks published this material in 2017 that the CIA helped propagate unsubstantiated (and later discounted) “intelligence” that Russian hackers and propagandists were interfering with France’s presidential election that year.

Similar allegations (similarly lacking in evidence) were floated as the European Union held parliamentary elections in May 2019. As WikiLeaks reported at the time of the releases on the CIA’s covert activities in France, those revelations were to serve “as context for its forthcoming CIA Vault 7 series.” WikiLeaks’ apparent intent was to display a CIA’s hacking operation in action. Vault 7, the subject of this latest report on the history of WikiLeaks disclosures, stands as the most extensive publication on record of classified and confidential CIA documents. Never before and not since have the agency’s innumerable programs and capabilities been so thoroughly exposed to public scrutiny.

“People who knowingly lied us into the war like Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, the Beltway neocon “experts,” and most of the media, faced neither punishment nor professional shaming for their acts.”

• ‘Iraq War Diaries’ At Ten Years: Truth is Treason (Ron Paul)

The purpose of journalism is to uncover truth – especially uncomfortable truth – and to publish it for the benefit of society. In a free society, we must be informed of the criminal acts carried out by governments in the name of the people. Throughout history, journalists have uncovered the many ways governments lie, cheat, and steal – and the great lengths they will go to keep the people from finding out. Great journalists like Seymour Hersh, who reported to us the tragedy of the Mai Lai Massacre and the horrors that took place at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, are essential. Ten years ago last week, Julian Assange’s Wikileaks organization published an exposé of US government wrongdoing on par with the above Hersh bombshell stories.

Publication of the “Iraq War Diaries” showed us all the brutality of the US attack on Iraq. It told us the truth about the US invasion and occupation of that country. This was no war of defense against a nation threatening us with weapons of mass destruction. This was no liberation of the country. We were not “bringing democracy” to Iraq. No, the release of nearly 400,000 classified US Army field reports showed us in dirty detail that the US attack was a war of aggression, based on lies, where hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed and injured. We learned that the US military classified anyone they killed in Iraq as “enemy combatants.” We learned that more than 700 Iraqi civilians were killed for “driving too close” to one of the hundreds of US military checkpoints – including pregnant mothers-to-be rushing to the hospital.

We learned that US military personnel routinely handed “detainees” over to Iraqi security forces where they would be tortured and often killed. Ten years after Assange’s brave act of journalism changed the world and exposed one of the crimes of the century, he sits alone in solitary confinement in a UK prison. He sits literally fighting for his life, as if he is successfully extradited to the United States he faces 175 years in a “supermax” prison for committing “espionage” against a country of which he is not a citizen. On the Iraq war we have punished the truth-tellers and rewarded the criminals. People who knowingly lied us into the war like Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, the Beltway neocon “experts,” and most of the media, faced neither punishment nor professional shaming for their acts. In fact, they got off scot free and many even prospered.

Julian Assange explained that he published the Iraq War Diaries because he “hoped to correct some of the attack on truth that occurred before the war, and that continued on since that war officially ended.” We used to praise brave journalists not afraid to take on the “bad guys.” Now we torture and imprison them.

Assange 10 years later

“Nearly every war that has started in the past 50 years has been a result of media lies.”

Ten years ago, Wikileaks published the Iraq War Files exposing US war crimes

Yet today Julian Assange is the one being punished while the war criminals are rewarded pic.twitter.com/v11ltYTaJv

— Sarah Abdallah (@sahouraxo) October 26, 2020

Read it twice, still can’t decide if it’s serious.

• US Pulls Plan To Give Early Vaccine To Santa Claus (BBC)

The US has cancelled plans to offer Santa Claus performers early access to a coronavirus vaccine in exchange for their help in promoting it publicly. Those who perform as Mrs Claus and elves would also have been eligible for the jabs. The festive collaboration was part of a $250m (£192m) government campaign to garner celebrity endorsements of vaccinations once they are approved. But health authorities confirmed the advertising campaign had been scrapped. Ric Erwin, chairman of the Fraternal Order of Real Bearded Santas, called the news “extremely disappointing.”

“This was our greatest hope for Christmas 2020, and now it looks like it won’t happen,” he told the Wall Street Journal, which first reported the story. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has since confirmed the existence of the Santa plan to the New York Times. The idea was initially conceived by Michael Caputo, a former assistant secretary at the department. Mr Caputo announced last month that he would be going on leave, shortly after posting a video to Facebook where he accused government scientists of engaging in “sedition” against President Donald Trump.

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Debt Rattle October 10 2020

Oct 102020

October 10, 2020 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:50 am Finance Tagged with: 25th Amendment, Covid19, CrowdStrike, Hillary, Kamala, Pelosi, political silo, Pompeo, QAnon, SSCI, stimulus, Trump 14 Responses »

Rene Magritte Memory 1948

• Pelosi’s 25th Amendment Commission Is To Replace Biden With Kamala – Trump (RT)

• 25th Amendment Body: Unelected Bureaucrats Vs The Will Of American People (RT)

• Pelosis Take a Big Stake in CrowdStrike (Maté)

• Poll That Called 2016 Election Sees Another Shocking Outcome In November (ZH)

• SSCI Allowed Dan Jones, Fusion-GPS, Shearer to Avoid Questioning (sundance)

• Political Silo (sundance)

• Pompeo: Clinton Private Server Emails Could Be Released Before Election (JTN)

• Well Played, Mr. President. Sorry To Have Doubted You (John Rubino)

• Trump’s Brilliant Stimulus Ploy Rattles Democrats (Peek)

• I Didn’t Vote For Trump In 2016, But I’d Crawl Over Broken Glass Now (Sound)

• State Dept Officials Cast Doubt On Christopher Steele’s Early Reports (DC)

• After The QAnon Ban, Who’s Next? (Taibbi)

• Tomorrow, Come Here Tomorrow…. (Kunstler)

• Goldman Offers Workers Free On-Site COVID-19 Testing (ZH)

We’re digging ever deeper into politics. 25 days to go. And here comes the 25th Amendment commission.

Trump VS Covid – Who Won?! | Russell Brand

“She accused him just this week of being in an “altered state.”

• Pelosi’s 25th Amendment Commission Is To Replace Biden With Kamala – Trump (RT)

Soon after Rep. Nancy Pelosi introduced a commission that would allow Congress to remove a mentally unfit president, Donald Trump tweeted a claim its ulterior motive is to replace Democratic candidate Joe Biden with Kamala Harris.“This is not about President Trump,” Speaker of the House Pelosi said when announcing the legislation on Friday. “He will face the judgment of the voters. But he shows the need for us to create a process for future presidents.” Instead, the commission is needed to give “some comfort to people” about government stability, Pelosi (D-California) insisted. Some, however, were not convinced the commission is meant as just an additional safety mechanism in the time of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Pelosi’s assurance the legislation wasn’t about Trump has quickly sparked a theory that such a commission could be used to replace 77-year-old Joe Biden – whose own mental stability has been steadily questioned – should he win the election next month. President Trump himself floated that theory on Twitter shortly after Pelosi’s announcement. “Crazy Nancy Pelosi is looking at the 25th Amendment in order to replace Joe Biden with Kamala Harris. The Dems want that to happen fast because Sleepy Joe is out of it!!!” Trump wrote. Others, including former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, have similarly lobbed the accusation at Pelosi.

“Pelosi is talking about 25th amendment replacing incapacitated President as trial run for replacing Biden with Harris next Spring if they win,” Gingrich tweeted. “Target is Biden not Trump,” he added. Under the 25th Amendment, a president can be stripped of their authority if they are deemed unfit for some reason to carry out their duties. This requires a two-thirds vote from both houses. Pelosi’s bill, however, would make this potential commission the determining body about a president’s fitness. Pelosi has questioned the health of the president since he was diagnosed with Covid-19 and left Walter Reed Medical Center. She accused him just this week of being in an “altered state.”

“That Harris could become president without winning a single delegate in the primaries – having dropped out before they even started – seems an irony completely lost on the media and the party..”

• 25th Amendment Body: Unelected Bureaucrats Vs The Will Of American People (RT)

In addition to paving the way for a Harris administration, the proposed commission to govern the usurpation of presidential powers would create a ‘Deep State’-like cabal, including former officials, to gate-keep the White House. The pompously named Commission on Presidential Capacity to Discharge the Powers and Duties of Office, unveiled on Friday by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) and Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland) is technically based on the provision in the 25th Amendment of the US Constitution, allowing for “such other body as Congress may by law provide” to govern the process of succession should a president become “incapacitated.”

With just weeks left till the November 3 election, and zero chance of the Republican-majority Senate or President Donald Trump endorsing the proposal, it’s unclear at first why the Democrats would unveil it now. Pelosi swears this isn’t about Trump. “He will face the judgment of the voters,” she told reporters on Friday. “But he shows the need for us to create a process for future presidents.” It didn’t take long for a number of people – from former House Speaker Newt Gingrich to Trump himself – to bring up the obvious: the first target of such a “process” may well be Joe Biden. In one of his more lucid moments, the 77-year-old actually said he wanted his running mate ready to take over “on day one.” Then he picked Senator Kamala Harris for the job.

That Harris could become president without winning a single delegate in the primaries – having dropped out before they even started – seems an irony completely lost on the media and the party normally harping on about “our democracy,” norms and traditions. No less intriguing than the “what” of the commission is the “how.” Raskin’s proposal envisions a 17-member panel, with 16 members appointed by congressional leaders of both parties electing the last one. Half the appointees would be physicians and psychiatrists, while the other eight would be chosen from the pool of former government officials: presidents, vice-presidents, surgeons-general, and heads of the departments of State, Treasury, Defense and Justice.

“Speaker Pelosi is not involved in her husband’s investments and was not aware of the investment until the required filing was made.”

• Pelosis Take a Big Stake in CrowdStrike (Maté)

The cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike rose to global prominence in mid-June 2016 when it publicly accused Russia of hacking the Democratic National Committee and stealing its data. The previously unknown company’s explosive allegation set off a seismic chain of events that engulfs U.S. national politics to this day. The Hillary Clinton campaign seized on CrowdStrike’s claim by accusing Russia of meddling in the election to help Donald Trump. U.S. intelligence officials would soon also endorse CrowdStrike’s allegation and pursue what amounted to a multi-year, all-consuming investigation of Russian interference and Trump’s potential complicity.

With the next presidential election now in its final weeks, the Democrats’ national leader, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and her husband, Paul Pelosi, are endorsing the publicly traded firm in a different way. Recent financial disclosure filings show the couple have invested up to $1 million in CrowdStrike Holdings. The Pelosis purchased the stock at a share price of $129.25 on Sept. 3. At the time of this article’s publication, the price has risen to $142.97. Drew Hammill, spokesman for Pelosi, said: “Speaker Pelosi is not involved in her husband’s investments and was not aware of the investment until the required filing was made. Mr. Pelosi is a private investor and has investments in a number of publicly traded companies. The Speaker fully complies with House Rules and the relevant statutory requirements.” The Pelosis’ sizeable investment in CrowdStrike could revive scrutiny of the company’s involvement in the Trump-Russia saga since the Democrats’ 2016 election loss.

After generating the hacking allegation against Russia in 2016, CrowdStrike played a critical role in the FBI’s ensuing investigation of the DNC data theft. CrowdStrike executives shared intelligence with the FBI on a consistent basis, making dozens of contacts in the investigation’s early months. According to Esquire, when U.S. intelligence officials first accused Russia of conducting malicious cyber activity in October 2016, a senior U.S. government official personally alerted CrowdStrike co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch and thanked him “for pushing the government along.” The final reports of both Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the Senate Intelligence Committee cite CrowdStrike’s forensics. The firm’s centrality to Russiagate has drawn the ire of President Trump. During the fateful July 2019 phone call that would later trigger impeachment proceedings, Trump asked Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky to scrutinize CrowdStrike’s role in the DNC server breach, suggesting that the company may have been involved in hiding the real perpetrators.

Looks very different from all the polls the media cites all the time. How come?

• Poll That Called 2016 Election Sees Another Shocking Outcome In November (ZH)

With Election Day less than a month away, we look at which party will likely control the White House, Senate and House in 2020… and what to watch for on Election Night. Currently, the major polls give former Vice President Biden more than a 9-point lead nationally against President Trump – according to RealClearPolitics National Average. And the Predictit markets imply a 67% probability of Biden winning on November 3rd. Additionally, those markets suggest that Democrats will win both the Senate and House (66% and 88% probabilities, respectively). Quite simply, it appears that a Blue Wave is fast approaching, something which the market has not only priced in, but has successfully digested as a favorable narrative for risk assets.

It would be easy to simply close the books and call the November contest over. But, of course, the major polls were all wrong in 2016; notably about the presidential race. In the following Election Review from Camelot Portfolios, we look at what some of the polling firms that called 2016 correctly are seeing today. “Shocking”, their polling suggests that President Trump will be re-elected, either narrowly or by a large margin. Therefore, as Camelot notes, “capital allocators today cannot easily assume next month’s results.” It’s very possible that Trump will win Florida, North Carolina and Arizona. If so, a win in Pennsylvania or Michigan will likely put him over the top in the electoral college. And speaking of “shocking”, Camelot notes that as far as the Senate and House are concerned, it also appears that Republicans will keep control of the Senate, especially if Trump has a strong night. On the other hand, the House is highly likely to remain in Democratic control.

[..] Trafalgar Group was named best polling firm of 2016 presidential race. It was one of few pollsters to predict Trump would win PA and MI (sources: Trafalgar Group and RealClearPolitics) and also Trump’s victory. [..] The secret to Trafalgar’s success is that it best adjusted its polling to include ‘shy Trump voters’ and the votes missed in other polls. Democracy Institute also correctly predicted Trump’s victory in 2016, as well as Brexit. Which brings us to today, and what Camelot Portfolios sees as the likely firewall states for Trump and Biden:

Which brings us to the punchline, and what Trafalgar sees as the outcome on Nov 3. In a nutshell, based on Trafalgar swing state polls, Trumps wins with 275 electoral votes:

What about the “winner” in the 2016 polling fiasco, the Democracy Institute, and its Latest Poll for September:
• Only asks likely voters, and asks about so-called ‘shy votes’.
• Trump leads Biden 46%-45%, nationally.
• Trump leads in swing states (FL, IA, MI, MN, PA, WI) 47% to 43%.
• Trump’s swing state leads would give him 320 electoral votes, and Biden 218.
• 77% of Trump voters would not admit to friends and family.
• Amy Coney Barrett nomination has little impact on approximately 8 in 10 voters.
• Law and order is top issue (32%). Economy is second (30%).
• Voters trust Trump more on economy than Biden: 60% to 40%, respectively

“The attempt to remove President Trump from office encompassed all three branches of the U.S. government.”

• SSCI Allowed Dan Jones, Fusion-GPS, Shearer to Avoid Questioning (sundance)

A fantastic catch by Twitter user “15poundstogo” highlights a key phrase within the Senate Select Intelligence Committee (SSCI) Russia Report Volume-5, showing how the SSCI allowed those who created the Trump-Russia narrative to avoid questioning. This is a very important detail to underpin the report we shared yesterday about former Dianne Feinstein top staffer Dan Jones attempting to avoid a subpoena from U.S. Attorney John Durham. This key highlight from the SSCI is evidence of how the attempted coup against President Trump was coordinated by people outside government and inside government.

Dan Jones left the SSCI prior to the 2016 election and went to work pushing the Trump-Russia narrative through his media contacts. Jones took over funding Fusion-GPS and Chris Steele in 2017 at the same time Senator Mark Warner took over as SSCI vice-chairman. Dan Jones and Mark Warner coordinated the efforts outside and inside government on the same objective. The Senate Intel Committee was part of the effort. As a result of their alignment and common purpose the SSCI didn’t investigate the origin of the Trump-Russia narrative; and instead positioned themselves as a shield to block any investigative inquiry into what took place. THIS IS A BIG DEAL !

The attempt to remove President Trump from office encompassed all three branches of the U.S. government.
• Executive Branch – FBI, DOJ, CIA, State Dept., and Special Counsel Office.
• Legislative Branch – SSCI in 2017 and 2018 with an assist from House Intelligence Committee and House Judiciary in 2019 and 2020.
• Judicial Branch – FISA Court 2015, 2016, 2017; Federal Judges (Sullivan, Walton, Howell, Berman-Jackson) in alignment with DC intents in 2018, 2019 and 2020.

How does the office of the United States president; and more importantly a constitutional republic itself; survive a coordinated coup effort that involves all three branches of government; while simultaneously those in charge of exposing the corruption fear the scale of the effort is too damaging for the U.S. government to reveal?

A second part of the same article cited above.

• Political Silo (sundance)

On June 7, 2018, an indictment against Senate Intelligence Committee Security Director James Wolfe was unsealed. Approximately six weeks later, July 21, 2018, the DOJ mysteriously declassified and publicly released the Carter Page FISA application. That’s when I noticed the first two documents were related. The FISA application was the “top secret classified document” described in the Wolfe indictment. Immediately I recognized it wasn’t just any copy of the FISA application that was released by the DOJ; but rather a very specific copy of the FISA application. What the DOJ released was the exact copy used in the 2017 leak investigation of James Wolfe. The ramifications of this specific copy being publicly released were immediately noted, although almost everyone seemed to gloss over the issue in favor of discussing the content.

Over the course of the next several months the ramifications became more clear. Despite overwhelming evidence James Wolfe was never charged with leaking the FISA application on March 17, 2017. Quite the contrary, even to this day the official position of the FBI, DOJ and U.S. government is that Wolfe *did not* leak the FISA application. There’s a very big reason for that. First, it must be remembered the goal of the DOJ under former AG Jeff Sessions, despite his recusal on all things Trump, was the removal of political influence in the DOJ. That same objective has been repeated ad infinitum by current AG Bill Barr. This approach is why everyone in/around any issue that skirts on the investigative tissue keeps saying: “a very delicate balance is being navigated”, and “very sensitive approaches” are needed.

None of the former -and some remaining embed- officials in the FBI, DOJ, or Special Counsel actors, had any aversion to the use of weaponized politics in their corrupt investigations of President Trump. However, in the current investigation of the former weaponized political investigations the primary avoidance filter is politics. As expressed by almost everyone in and around the issue, any evidence that comes from inside the political silo is considered unusable. This sets up a rather challenging approach… hence the overused “delicate balances” etc. This overlay, the aggressive need not to use political information, is also frustrating.

Some are beginning to question whether it is actually a shield to justify a lack of accountability or institutional preservation. Keep up the pressure, the concerns are valid. The public doesn’t draw distinctions from the origin of evidence. Regardless of whether information comes from HPSCI ranking member Devin Nunes; and/or Senators Grassley, Johnson or Graham (political silo); or from the DOJ itself via John Bash, Jeff Jensen or John Durham; the public is absorbing all it. However, the current AG Barr instructions imply the non use of evidence emanating from the political silo in very direct terms.

FBI Washington Field Office Special Agent Brian Dugan was given a task in early 2017 to see if he could track down and identify people who were leaking information related to national security. Dugan used a Top-Secret Classified Information request by SSCI Vice-Chairman Mark Warner to begin a very specific leak investigation. On March 17, 2017, Brian Dugan picked-up a copy of the Carter Page FISA application from the FISA Court. He personally delivered that “read and return” copy to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Security Director James Wolfe. Shortly after 4:02 pm that same day, Vice-Chairman Mark Warner reviewed the FISA in the senate “scif”.

It is not known if any other SSCI committee member viewed that FISA (there is a great deal of circumstantial evidence to indicate only Wolfe and Warner saw it); however, what is factually certain – is that on the same day as Wolfe and Warner reviewed the FISA, Security Director James Wolfe leaked its content to journalist Ali Watkins. Both the New York Times and Washington Post began reporting on the FISA application. As soon as Ms. Watkins wrote an article for Buzzfeed, April 3, 2017, outlining Carter Page as “person one” in the application, Agent Dugan knew the FISA had been leaked.

” There are reportedly as many as 33,000 e-mails from Clinton’s private server that haven’t been released publicly..”

• Pompeo: Clinton Private Server Emails Could Be Released Before Election (JTN)

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced Friday that emails from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private email server might be released before the Nov. 3 election. Pompeo was asked if he is concerned that revealing the emails would have national security implications given that some of them likely contain classified information. “I’ve been at this a long time with President Trump, for four years now, almost. I’ve never seen him do anything that would put any kind of asset, any one of our officers in harms way. He wouldn’t do that,” Pompeo said on Fox News. “We’ll get the information out that needs to get out.”

Addressing the timing of the potential release of the emails, Pompeo said, “We’re doing it as fast as we can. I certainly think there will be more to see before the election.” President Trump said this week that he had declassified documents from the investigation into Clinton’s use of the private server for e-mail during her tenure as secretary of state, America’s top diplomat. There are reportedly as many as 33,000 e-mails from Clinton’s private server that haven’t been released publicly.

Joh Rubino is a very longtime friend of the Automatic Earth.

“The strategy of breaking the stimulus bill up into pieces puts the Dems in a tough spot, having to oppose saving big, crucial industries and giving money directly to voters in order to protect bail-outs for Dem-run states.”

• Well Played, Mr. President. Sorry To Have Doubted You (John Rubino)

The political and financial worlds were baffled by President Trump’s decision, just hours after being released from the hospital, to suspend coronavirus stimulus bill negotiations “until after the election.” Leaving aside the stupidity of massive new borrowing and spending on top of the past year’s multi-trillions, walking away from those talks seemed like a really bad political move. But then, in almost the same breath, Trump turns around and demands a huge bailout for the airlines and a new round of $1,200 stimulus checks for individuals. Had he joined Biden in the drift toward senility? Or was there some method to the apparent madness? With a little hindsight, it’s clear that this was one of his “Art of the Deal” tactics, albeit in compressed form.

You walk away from stalled talks, get in your car and drive off, leaving the other side stunned and, hopefully, softened up for compromise. Then you restart negotiations with each side a little more flexible, and — in this case the crucial second part of the strategy — the deal broken up into bite-sized, and thus more easily doable, parts. Huh. It appears to be working. Mnuchin and Pelosi are making hopeful sounds and the stock market – addicted as it is to ever-easier money – is now happily anticipating an extended high. Gold, meanwhile, has concluded that the now-imminent debt binge will indeed crush the dollar, sending capital pouring into safe havens. But the politics of this strategy are even more interesting than the finance.

The big conflict here is the Democrats’ burning desire to bail out their party’s governors and mayors colliding with Trump’s aversion to rewarding those officials’ horrendous mismanagement (and refusal to vote Republican). Remember, California, Illinois, New Jersey, and their peers were looking at pension crises (i.e., functional bankruptcy) before the pandemic hit. The strategy of breaking the stimulus bill up into pieces puts the Dems in a tough spot, having to oppose saving big, crucial industries and giving money directly to voters in order to protect bail-outs for Dem-run states. This is not a good place to be going into the election, but it’s where Trump has put them. So, well-played, Mr. President. Whatever else you’ve done, you have indeed taught the rest of us some lessons in hard-ball negotiating. We’ll be better for it no matter where you end up next year.

” If rejecting the $2.1 trillion “Heroes Act” stuffed with Democratic wish-list items such as imposing federal rules banning voter IDs is the result of downing steroids or Remdesivir, every member of Congress should be force-fed those meds.”

• Trump’s Brilliant Stimulus Ploy Rattles Democrats (Peek)

President Trump confounded the pundits once again when be turned the tables on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and called off further negotiations on stimulus relief. For a president running on his ability to build (and rebuild) a strong economy, pulling the plug on a relief bill poised to prop up consumer spending seemed like an act of madness. Indeed, that was what Pelosi hinted, in one of her more reckless and shameful accusations to date, telling “The View” audience recently that taking coronavirus medications may have impacted the president’s “thinking” and that perhaps he needs an “intervention.” If rejecting the $2.1 trillion “Heroes Act” stuffed with Democratic wish-list items such as imposing federal rules banning voter IDs is the result of downing steroids or Remdesivir, every member of congress should be force-fed those meds.

The story, of course, does not end there. Trump pivoted soon thereafter, challenging Pelosi to accept a stream-lined and targeted relief effort. He tweeted, “If I am sent a Stand Alone Bill for Stimulus Checks ($1,200), they will go out to our great people IMMEDIATELY. I am ready to sign right now. Are you listening Nancy?” It was a brilliant move, and should the two sides come together to help the American people – which is the point, right? – Trump will emerge the consummate dealmaker. Americans are disgusted with Congress and its inability to get anything done. In the latest Gallup survey, only 17 percent of the country approved of Congress, while 80 percent disapproved, making Trump’s approval ratings look golden.

That’s down from 30 percent earlier this year, and surely reflects the ongoing warfare between Democrats and Republicans over, among other things, another relief package. As much as voters dislike congressional dysfunction, they must surely also hate the giant, pork-packed bills that govern our country. The “Heroes Act” weighs in at 2,100 pages. Why should doling out money to needy people and businesses require so much ink? Because that’s how Pelosi and, to be fair, her Republican counterparts, bury handouts to their favored constituents and allies. It is deplorable. Trump’s demand that Pelosi simply send out checks to struggling Americans will strike most people as reasonable. But not Madame Speaker. She loves those overstuffed pieces of legislation. After all, she’s the one who agreed to ObamaCare, saying of that 2,700-page monstrosity, “But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what’s in it.”

The prevailing media-endorsed opinion (aka the Democratic talking point) is that Trump risks being blamed for the cut-off of aid to the unemployed and to small businesses if another bill does not pass. That certainty seems to have prompted Pelosi’s intransigence. She and the Democrats balked at spending anything less than $2 trillion, even knowing the GOP senate would never sign such a bill. But Pelosi has a lot on the line as well. The Blue Dog Democrats wrote a letter to the House speaker recently, in which they urged her “to continue the discussions over the weekend until a deal is achieved.” They further exhorted “Congress [to] stay here in Washington to keep negotiating.” Congress, in fact, has just left town for a six-week break. That’s how much they care about the American people.

” I took him literally but not seriously, in contrast to his supporters who took him seriously but not literally (credit to Peter Thiel for identifying this significant distinction)”

• I Didn’t Vote For Trump In 2016, But I’d Crawl Over Broken Glass Now (Sound)

Even though I had voted for every Republican presidential candidate since 1980, I didn’t vote for Donald Trump in 2016. Many Republican nominees had been huge disappointments to me, and I wasn’t going to vote for yet another GOP candidate I thought would betray my trust. I couldn’t imagine Trump as a genuine conservative who would champion limited government, respect individual freedom and liberty, and protect the unborn — but was I ever wrong. Although I didn’t vote for Trump in 2016, I would crawl over broken glass to vote for him in 2020. In 2016, I was convinced Trump was just another New York liberal. On election night, however, I smiled. I was happy that at least Hillary Clinton wouldn’t be president, and I suspected that the next four years with Trump would at least be entertaining.

The primary reason I didn’t vote for Trump in 2016 was that I didn’t believe him. I didn’t trust that he would be pro-life, a non-negotiable issue for me. His bluster and bravado didn’t appeal to me. I took him literally but not seriously, in contrast to his supporters who took him seriously but not literally (credit to Peter Thiel for identifying this significant distinction). By the time Trump took office, I was willing to give him a chance. He was the president, after all, and deserved the opportunity to prove himself. During the first year of his presidency, I was impressed by his commitment to keeping his campaign promises, unlike most politicians. By the end of 2017, I classified myself as a Trump supporter because of what he had already done as president.

In case you were still wondering exactly how absurd it was that Mueller based his investigation on a report paid for by the Democrats.

• State Dept Officials Cast Doubt On Christopher Steele’s Early Reports (DC)

State Department officials cast doubt on the credibility of several intelligence memos that former British spy Christopher Steele provided the agency in the years before he began investigating Donald Trump, according to emails the Daily Caller News Foundation obtained through a lawsuit. One State Department official, an ambassador to Ukraine, described Steele’s reporting as “flaky.” Another official said that a Steele report sounded “extreme,” and that others “do not ring true.” Despite the potential red flags regarding Steele’s work, the ex-MI6 officer was granted a meeting at Foggy Bottom in the weeks before the 2016 presidential election. During the meeting, Steele shared details later found in a dossier that accused the Trump campaign of conspiring with the Kremlin to influence the election.

Many of Steele’s allegations have been disputed or outright debunked in the years since the dossier was published. The State Department handed over the latest documents as part of a lawsuit that Judicial Watch filed on behalf of The Daily Caller News Foundation on April 25, 2018. The lawsuit sought several categories of records, including all of the reports that Steele provided to State Department officials prior to his investigation of Trump. Steele, who is based in London, had reportedly shared more than 100 intelligence reports about Russia and Ukraine from 2014 to 2016 with Jonathan Winer, who then served as the State Department’s special envoy to Libya.

Winer, a longtime aide to then-Sec. of State John Kerry, passed Steele’s memos to a small group of State Department officials, including Victor Nuland, Paul Jones and Geoffrey Pyatt. The State Department had released heavily redacted versions of Steele’s report through the lawsuit. The officials’ commentary was also largely redacted. The agency disclosed some of the officials’ assessments of Steele’s reports in response to an appeal from Judicial Watch. The email traffic shows initial enthusiasm for Steele’s reports. Nuland, who served as assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, and the other officials said that the reports contained valuable insights into Russia and Ukraine.

Big Tech = Secret Service censorship.

• After The QAnon Ban, Who’s Next? (Taibbi)

Facebook announced Tuesday that it’s stepping up efforts to clean its platform of QAnon content: “Starting today, we will remove any Facebook Pages, Groups and Instagram accounts representing QAnon, even if they contain no violent content…” Facebook had already taken several rounds of action against QAnon, including the removal this summer of “over 1,500 Pages and Groups.” Restricting bans to groups featuring “discussions of potential violence” apparently didn’t do the trick, however, so the platform expended bans to include content “tied to real world harm”: “Other QAnon content [is] tied to different forms of real world harm, including recent claims that the west coast wildfires were started by certain groups, which diverted attention of local officials from fighting the fires and protecting the public.”

Describing what QAnon is, in a way that satisfies what its followers would might say represents their belief system and separates out the censorship issue, is not easy. The theory is constantly evolving and not terribly rational. It’s also almost always described by mainstream outlets in terms that implicitly make the case for its banning, referencing concepts like “offline harm” or the above-mentioned “real-world harm” in descriptions. As you’re learning what QAnon is, you’re usually also learning that it is not tolerable or safe. “QAnon was once a fringe phenomenon, the kind most people could safely ignore,” the New York Times wrote recently. “But in recent months, it’s gone mainstream.”

In rough terms, QAnon is a gospel spun by “Q,” ostensibly a current or former government official, who keeps the public appraised of an epic secret battle between good and evil, undertaken in political shadows. The villains are a globalist pedophile ring involving the mega-rich, Hollywood actors, and the Clintons (among many others), while Donald Trump leads the army of the righteous.

“The Jacobins Reign of Terror comes to its sudden and ignominious end with Robespierre bawling under the national razor.”

• Tomorrow, Come Here Tomorrow…. (Kunstler)

Is it possible that some Democratic Party voters begin to suspect that the party officials running this game have lost their minds? A good signifier, of course, is the ghostly figure carrying their battle-flag, Mr. Biden, the Flying Dutchman candidate whose mind slips in and out of fog-banks as he navigates the shoals of defeat. Why did the Party ship out with him on the poop-deck? My guess would be: to deflect indictments of himself and many other former officials as the steady flow of documentary evidence gets released by new DNI John Ratcliffe, including a batch this past week showing pretty incontrovertibly that everybody and his uncle in the Obama executive branch was keenly aware that RussiaGate was a Hillary campaign ploy and allowed themselves to be weaponized into the scheme — under the assumption that she couldn’t lose and they’d never be found out.

She lost. They’re found out. Grand juries have been convened by Mr. Durham. Something wicked is coming their way. Their ship is going down and the rats are all squeaking desperately in the scuppers at the rising water. Won’t this all be a shock to that crew of media fabulists who stupidly maintain that the Mueller Report actually proved something — the David Frenches, Max Boots, and Rachel Maddows of this world and their True Believer followers? History is rhyming again. It’s like 1794 in Paris. The Jacobins Reign of Terror comes to its sudden and ignominious end with Robespierre bawling under the national razor. So does today’s Reign of Perfidious Sedition close, with Jim Comey bawling, “I can’t recall,” into his laptop.

Incidental to this is the breaking news — sure to not be reported in The New York Times or by CNN — that one Devon Archer, business partner of Hunter Biden (and John Kerry stepson, Christopher Heinz) has just had his previously overturned conviction for security fraud reinstated by a federal appeals court. Sound abstruse? Yeah, kind of, but, believe me this boy is in some serious hot water, the rap being a federal one, and Mr. Archer now poised to sing like a canary to John Durham’s posse about his various financial exploits in Ukraine and other foreign lands with Joe Biden’s son (and Mr. Kerry’s stepson) in exchange for lighter jail time. You just watch.

Keep your ears pricked also for developments involving Senate Select Committee on Intelligence ranking member Mark Warner (D-VA) and his role in 2016-17 as an active disseminator of Steele Dossier RussiaGate dis-info in coordination with the George Soros funded Democracy Integrity Project, run by former Dianne Feinstein chief-of-staff Dan Jones and assisted by swamp lawyer Adam Waldman, a Steele / Warner go-between who happened to be a $40,000-a-month lobbyist for one Oleg Deripaska, a Russian billionaire and Clinton Foundation doner (at least $1-million) who also employed Christopher Steele as a dis-info errand boy. Unpacking that one will be like unpacking the surgical batting in a sucking chest wound. Scrub for it.

Can someone explain why this is not mandatory everywhere?

Dave Collum: “I am so impressed. Free testing. Wow. Somebody tell @GoldmanSachs that @Cornell tests 5,000 people per DAY.”

• Goldman Offers Workers Free On-Site COVID-19 Testing (ZH)

In September, Goldman Sachs employees in New York became the latest to suffer a trading floor outbreak as Wall Street banks called their investment banking workers back into the office before pretty much every other white-collar industry. But now that Microsoft is claiming that it plans to allow some employees to work from home permanently (well, at least some of the time), Goldman is touting its plans to offer all US-based employees antibody tests and saliva-based PCR tests and other on-sight screening for staff at 200 West Street, according to Financial News. The report cited a memo sent to staff dated Oct. 8, which was Thursday. Goldman is considering rolling the program out to other officers around the world, but it hasn’t made any final plans yet.

In New York, the tests will be available to workers first returning to the office, while those remaining at home can be reimbursed for any costs they incur related to their private health care programs and COVID-19 testing. CEO David Solomon is also introducing internal daily screenings and a “tracking and tracing” program to help prevent any future outbreaks. “As high-quality testing has become more available, we have engaged vendor partners to offer off-site COVID-19 tests to eligible people in the US at no cost,” reads the memo sent out to staff on Thursday. “Testing is one part of a comprehensive prevention strategy that includes wearing masks, following general hygiene and handwashing best practices, and practicing social distancing.”

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John Solomon

Fighting for the Truth: @jsolomonreports says @realDonaldTrump shouldn’t tolerate his cabinet slow walking the release of vital Obamagate documents that the American people have the right to see before the election. #AmericaFirst #MAGA #Dobbs pic.twitter.com/045qE4vh4C

— Lou Dobbs (@LouDobbs) October 9, 2020

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Only Trump Can Keep America Together

Oct 082020

October 8, 2020 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:08 pm Finance Tagged with: Biden, Democratic Party, Hillary, Kamala, MSM, Mussolini, Pence, Trump 8 Responses »

Hieronymus Bosch , The Garden of Earthly Delights, centre panel, detail c1500

Nothing partisan today, sorry, and thank you very much, just an observation. Which is that Trump keeps an unparralledly (can I buy a vowel?) divided America together simply because the entire nation focuses on him. One half out of support, the other out of “hatred”, but still. Anyone who saw even part of yesterday’s VP debate knows exactly what I mean. Boring! And that’s one thing Trump is not.

There was this headline that said: “Joe Biden will be a president who brings our country together”, and I thought: does anyone believe that, anywhere on the political spectrum? The purpose of Biden is to give the Democrats the power, not to unite the nation, that’s just rubbish. But yeah, they dragged him all the way out to Gettysburg, to claim some sort of link to Abraham Lincoln. Hoping nobody remembers that Lincoln was a member of the Republican party. Joe even quoted the Republican Lincoln verbatim:

‘Again We Are A House Divided’: Biden Calls For Unity In Gettysburg Speech

Joe Biden delivered a forceful appeal for national unity from the battleground state of Pennsylvania on Tuesday, as the nation lurched from crisis to crisis and the president continued to downplay the severity of the coronavirus after being hospitalized for Covid-19. From the storied civil war battlefield of Gettysburg, a symbol of the divisions that nearly tore the nation in two, Biden cast the election as a “battle for the soul of the nation” and emphasized the stakes this November. “Today, once again we are a house divided,” Biden said, framed by a row of American flags with the rolling hills of Gettysburg behind him.

“But that, my friend, can no longer be. We are facing too many crises. We have too much work to do. We have too bright a future to leave it shipwrecked on the shoals of anger and hate and division.” In a sweeping speech – one that drew on Abraham Lincoln’s address at the same spot, the site of one of the war’s bloodiest battles, and Lyndon Johnson’s remarks from there one hundred years later – Biden warned of the “cost of division” and his fears that partisanship threatened to undermine the central pillars of American democracy. Biden vowed to govern as an “American president”, one who would seek bipartisan solutions to the nation’s most consequential problems, including the coronavirus pandemic, racial injustice and economic turmoil.

Joe Biden is a non-entity. Same for Kamala Harris and Michael Pence. They don’t count in a universe that is also home to Donald Trump. Nothing to do with their opinions or politics or plans or whatever, it’s about attention value. If you ask someone who they think people will pay more attention to, Donald Trump or Kim Kardashian, it’s maybe a toss-up, and it depends on age groups. Ask the same for Joe Biden vs Kim Kardashian, and they’re going to say: what the fcuk are you talking about?

Same for Mike Pence, and Kamala Harris, no question. Hillary, the press could spin into something, but she lost to Trump once already. It’s all, all of it, about clickbait. Trump generates more of it than anyone, and none of the other protagonists seem to have any clue as to why that is. But the press do.

It’s the anti-Trump media that focuses on him even more than the pro-Trump one. Because they know that’s where the money is. Write about Trump, anything, even anything that is not true, and the money will be flowing in. Call him a rapist, racist, misogynist, fascist, anything’s fair game. I saw the term “Little Mussolini” float by when Trump stood on the White House balcony post-Walter Reed and thought again: you guys have no idea about memes. Trump is 6’3, Mussolini was 5’7, and you’re going with “Little Mussolini”? That’s your best shot?

A few days ago, before the VP debate, a commenter here on the Automatic Earth said:

It doesn’t seem Trump will croak from covid, but this image …

…seems more relevant than this one…

.

And I said:

“As long as Trump is part of the game, there’s nothing more relevant than Trump. That’s not an opinion. His presence has driven everything for 4+ years. It’s kept the NYT and CNN/MSNBC alive; they would be gone without him. The Dems’ only message 4+ years in is they are not Trump. That’s it, no other message. If he would be voted out, the MSM would be too. Politics would stop attracting viewers and readers by 50-80%.

Trump generates clickbait; Pence and Biden do not. Pence will never win anything. People detest Kamala more than they did Hillary. I’m afraid that even prior to the election, why wait?, there will be the first instances of a civil war in America. The only thing that still ties the nation together is Trump. Love him or hate him.”

The very same people who most “hate” Trump are the ones whose income most depends on him “Being There”. CNN head Jerry Zucker made it very clear to his staff during the so-called impeachment hearings that the only thing he wanted them to report on was impeachment. Not because he hates Trump, but because he knew that’s where the money is in present-day America: Yes, Trump.

CNN, WaPo, NYT, they’re altogether being busy killing their golden goose. You think these outlets, saved from bankruptcy by the appearance of Trump on the scene, don’t understand the dynamics? Of course they do. But they’re too far gone into their anti-Trump game to turn around. They know they themselves potentially initiated their own downfall by going all-out against Trump and for Joe Biden. But they have nowhere left to turn anymore.

If Biden wins, they’re done, nobody cares about him, nobody would read or watch a single thing about him, or about Kamala if she would take over, even if that switcheroo would give them a short attention “span”.

Trump said, coming out of Walter Reed: don’t let COVID19 dominate your life. Which the so-called left wing MSM turned into: “Don’t let tRump DOMINATE your life”. Bit late for that, guys and gals. You volunteered to let him dominate your lives for 4+ years now.

There doesn’t appear to be much of a plan in the Democratic party, and what plans there are differ hugely from each other. The gaps between Biden, Sanders and AOC are huge, on fracking, health care, you name it. They just find themselves together in the same party, for no obvious reason, other than, you guessed it, Trump. They stand for nothing together, there’s just one thing they agree on: Trump. Orange Man Bad: “I’m the one who ran against the socialists” Joe Biden said when asked about whether a vote for him is a vote for the radical left, despite the fact that Bernie campaigned for him in Michigan today”.

You can only keep that sort of thing together with a common enemy. Trump not only keeps the nation together, he literally keeps the Democratic Party together.

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Debt Rattle October 7 2020

Oct 072020

October 7, 2020 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:14 am Finance Tagged with: Assange, China, CIA, declassification, FBI, FOIA, food banks, Gina Haspel, Hillary, Russia, Trump 22 Responses »

Leonardo da Vinci Head of a Woman 1475-80

• President Trump Reauthorizes Declassification of all Documents (sundance)

• There are Trillions at Stake (sundance)

• Declassified CIA Docs Show Alleged Clinton Plan To Link Trump To Russia (DC)

• Spy Chief Releases Docs On Claim Hillary Clinton Cooked Up Russia Scandal (NYP)

• CIA Director Gina Haspel and the British Role in the Anti-Trump Plot (Farrell)

• Grand Jury Indicts St. Louis Couple Who Defended Home Amid Demonstrations (JTN)

• Jay Powell Wants More Help From Congress: Low Risk Of ‘Overdoing It’ (CNBC)

• Unfavorable Views of China Reach Historic Highs in Many Countries (Pew)

• Court To Rule On UK Freedom Of Information Bids From Overseas (G.)

• The Unprecedented And Illegal Campaign To Eliminate Julian Assange (Glass)

• Top US Food Bank Warns Of Nationwide “Meal Shortages” In Next 12 Months (ZH)

• Media Criticizes Trump For Downplaying Virus Threat By Not Dying (BBee)

Trump disavows

Trump declassification

I have fully authorized the total Declassification of any & all documents pertaining to the single greatest political CRIME in American History, the Russia Hoax. Likewise, the Hillary Clinton Email Scandal. No redactions! https://t.co/GgnHh9GOiq

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 7, 2020

Lawyer “sundance” explains that we’ve been here before, and nothing happened. We’re still where we were in May 2019.

Interesting that he includes Julian Assange. I did say a few weeks ago that Assange may need the right-wing press. And they need him.

• President Trump Reauthorizes Declassification of all Documents (sundance)

President Donald Trump has transmitted an epic tweet-storm seemingly targeted toward all officials within the executive branch; and the intelligence apparatus writ large:

One important note of caution: there is a big difference between “authorized” and “ordered”. On May 23rd, 2019, President Trump authorized AG Bill Barr to declassify all documents and despite much optimism nothing happened {Go DEEP}. However, President Trump references that lack of inaction in the next series of tweets:

Presumably “people” who “acted very slowly” would pertain to AG Bill Barr, FBI Director Chris Wray, CIA Director Gina Haspel, State Dept Secretary Mike Pompeo and former ODNI Dan Coats. President Trump asks those agencies now to “Act!!!” President Trump also expressed the same frustration many of us feel about how these agencies and institutions have operated only to protect their own interests. He even re-tweeted the meme of Bill Barr to drive home the point. [..] Whether anything comes of this latest, seemingly stronger, emphasis and request from President trump is an unknown. However, again, this is an authorization for release of documents and not a direct order.

There are likely legal reasons for this approach, and no doubt there are advisors around the office of the president who would want him to take a more cautious approach. Several people are pointing toward an announcement of a press conference by the DOJ tomorrow and attempting to connect the tweet-storm to the presser. However, my gut tells me they are two distinctly different topics; but we can keep our fingers crossed. We will know if the two events are connected less than 12 hours from now. Interestingly, albeit likely unrelated, the specific participants in the presser hold offices that are directly connected to the previous 2019 indictment of Julian Assange.

Also “sundance”, with an excellent review of how Washington operates.

• There are Trillions at Stake (sundance)

With 30-days left before the election perhaps it’s worthwhile remembering what all of this opposition is about… Something 99% of American voters do not quite understand. Congress doesn’t actually write legislation. The last item of legislation written by congress was sometime around the mid 1990’s. Modern legislation is sub-contracted to a segment of DC operations known as K-Street. That’s where the lobbyists reside. Lobbyists write the laws; congress sells the laws; lobbyists then pay congress lucrative commissions for passing their laws. That’s the modern legislative business in DC. When we talk about paying-off politicians in third-world countries we call it bribery. However, when we undertake the same process in the U.S. we call it “lobbying”.

CTH often describes the system with the phrase: “There are Trillions at Stake.” The process of creating legislation is behind that phrase. DC politics is not quite based on the ideas that frame most voter’s reference points. With people taking notice of DC politics for the first time; and with people not as familiar with the purpose of DC politics; perhaps it is valuable to provide clarity. Most people think when they vote for a federal politician -a House or Senate representative- they are voting for a person who will go to Washington DC and write or enact legislation. This is the old-fashioned “schoolhouse rock” perspective based on decades past. There is not a single person in congress writing legislation or laws.

In modern politics not a single member of the House of Representatives or Senator writes a law, or puts pen to paper to write out a legislative construct. This simply doesn’t happen. Over the past several decades a system of constructing legislation has taken over Washington DC that more resembles a business operation than a legislative body. Outside groups, often called “special interest groups”, are entities that represent their interests in legislative constructs. These groups are often representing foreign governments, Wall Street multinational corporations, banks, financial groups or businesses; or smaller groups of people with a similar connection who come together and form a larger group under an umbrella of interest specific to their affiliation.

Sometimes the groups are social interest groups; activists, climate groups, environmental interests etc. The social interest groups are usually non-profit constructs who depend on the expenditures of government to sustain their cause or need. The for-profit groups (mostly business) have a purpose in Washington DC to shape policy, legislation and laws favorable to their interests. They have fully staffed offices just like any business would – only their ‘business‘ is getting legislation for their unique interests. These groups are filled with highly-paid lawyers who represent the interests of the entity and actually write laws and legislation briefs. In the modern era this is actually the origination of the laws that we eventually see passed by congress. Within the walls of these buildings within Washington DC is where the ‘sausage’ is actually made. Again, no elected official is usually part of this law origination process.

I’ve read many comments on the declassification, and I find all the references to Russia disconcerting. Why not leave Russia out, and then look at what happened? Russia is not the story.

• Declassified CIA Docs Show Alleged Clinton Plan To Link Trump To Russia (DC)

Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe on Tuesday declassified portions of two documents that show the CIA picked up intelligence regarding Hillary Clinton’s alleged approval of a campaign to link Donald Trump to Russia’s hacking efforts. Ratcliffe declassified notes taken in 2016 by then-CIA Director John Brennan during a meeting with President Obama and his national security advisers regarding Russia’s election meddling efforts. The intelligence chief also declassified sections of a Counterintelligence Operation Lead (CIOL) memo that the CIA sent on Sept. 7, 2016 to then-FBI Director James Comey and Peter Strzok, the top counterintelligence investigator on Crossfire Hurricane. “Per FBI verbal request, CIA provided the below examples of information the CROSSFIRE HURRICANE fusion cell has gleaned to date,” reads an unredacted portion of the CIOL.

The memo referred to information related to “US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s approval of a plan concerning US presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering US elections as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.” Brennan has testified that he created a so-called “fusion cell” in July 2016 that consisted of officials from the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency to investigate Russia’s election interference. The CIA documents, obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation, were cited last week in a letter that Ratcliffe sent to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham. That letter said that U.S. intelligence “gained insight” in late July 2016 into “Russian intelligence analysis” that asserted that Clinton had approved a plan to link Trump to Russia’s hacking efforts in order to distract from her use of a private email server.

The documents released Tuesday do not provide much clarification about the underlying CIA intelligence. They do confirm that the CIA obtained the intelligence Ratcliffe referred to in his letter. Republicans asserted that the documents raise questions about whether Clinton personally approved the dissemination of a false allegation linking Trump to Russia. Clinton campaign advisers publicly accused Donald Trump of aiding Russia’s hacking efforts following the July 22, 2016 release of DNC emails through WikiLeaks. A report from the special counsel’s office released last year said there was no evidence that Trump or members of his campaign conspired with Russia to hack and release Democrats’ emails. According to Brennan’s undated notes, he told President Obama that the intelligence community had picked up evidence that Russians had learned that Clinton personally approved a plan on July 28, 2016 to link Trump to Russia’s hacking of the Democrat National Committee.

Brennan’s notes refer to intelligence related to Clinton’s approval “of a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisors to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services.” Brennan appeared on CNN shortly after Ratcliffe declassified the documents, but denied that they showed any wrongdoing on Clinton’s part. He said during the briefing for Obama, he provided examples of “the type of access that the U.S. intelligence community to Russian information and what the Russians were talking about and alleging.” “If in fact what the Russians were alleging, that Hillary was trying to highlight the reported connections between Trump and the Russians — and that’s a big ‘if’ — there is nothing at all illegal about that.”

The docs do seem to move us forward at least a bit.

• Spy Chief Releases Docs On Claim Hillary Clinton Cooked Up Russia Scandal (NYP)

National Intelligence Director John Ratcliffe on Tuesday declassified documents that claim Hillary Clinton ordered “a campaign plan to stir up a scandal” by linking President Trump to Russia in 2016 — and that then-President Barack Obama knew about her possible role. Ratcliffe provided to Fox News an undated set of notes from then-CIA director John Brennan about a briefing for Obama that touched on the allegation, and an investigative referral from the CIA to the FBI describing the claim. “Today, at the direction of President Trump, I declassified additional documents relevant to ongoing Congressional oversight and investigative activities,” Ratcliffe told Fox News Tuesday.

Most of the unredacted content in the documents was released by Ratcliffe last week, though minor new details cast doubt on former FBI Director James Comey’s declaration last week that he could not recall the claim, which Clinton allies deny as baseless potential Russian disinformation. The newly released notes from Brennan, who now is a fiery anti-Trump commentator, indicate that Brennan briefed Obama on “alleged approval by Hillary Clinton on July 28 of a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisors to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services.” Ratcliffe’s initial disclosure said that, according to Brennan’s notes, Clinton allegedly approved the scheme on July 26.

The minor inaccuracy shortens the window of time between Clinton’s alleged approval of the plot and the FBI opening its investigation of possible Trump-Russia collusion on July 31, 2016. A previously undisclosed annotation in Brennan’s notes appears to attribute to Obama an interest in “any evidence of collaboration between Trump campaign + Russia.” The initials “JC” also are on the briefing notes, implying that that then-FBI Director James Comey attended the meeting where Brennan discussed the theory with Obama.

[..] The investigative referral from the CIA to the FBI, meanwhile, contains the previously disclosed passage noting an allegation about “Clinton’s approval of a plan concerning US Presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering US elections as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private mail server.” The actual referral is mostly redacted, but additionally states that the document was sent “per FBI verbal request.” It was addressed to Comey, but to the attention of then-FBI Deputy Assistant Director of Counterintelligence Peter Strzok, who notoriously traded anti-Trump text message on work phones with his mistress FBI lawyer Lisa Page. In his initial disclosure last week, Ratcliffe said the claim against Clinton was unproven and could be an “exaggeration or fabrication.”

The same Gina Haspel is now apparently hampering efforts to declassify documents. Who foisted her on Trump? And what role did she play in the Assange case while she ran the CIA in London?

• CIA Director Gina Haspel and the British Role in the Anti-Trump Plot (Farrell)

We have raised and discussed serious matters of fact and questions about the role of CIA Director Gina Haspel in the Anti-Trump conspiracy. It appears Haspel (while serving as London Chief of Station from 2014 to early 2017) was an active, knowledgeable party to the efforts to target candidate Trump with an FBI-instigated foreign counterintelligence operation. That seditious conspiracy carried forward to a more sophisticated and aggressive plan to carry out a soft coup against President Donald J. Trump. Looking back on news reporting concerning Haspel, we turn (with caution) to a Washington Post article from July 2019 by Shane Harris, titled: “The quiet director: How Gina Haspel manages the CIA’s volatile relationship with Trump”.

We are supposed to believe that Haspel and her office did not cooperate with the reporter for the article. Harris disclaims Haspel involvement by writing: “This report is based on interviews with 26 current and former officials who have worked with Haspel in the United States, particularly when she served in senior management roles at headquarters, and in London, where Haspel served two tours as the CIA’s top representative — chief of station — a plum post that is usually the steppingstone to the agency’s highest ranks.” No Washington Post article in the last decade has contained such a scrupulous sourcing statement. Of course, Haspel had nothing to do with the article. Remember that, won’t you?

Haspel, twice-over Chief of Station in London, had close connections with the British intelligence and security services. Given the nature of the “special relationship” between the two countries, that is hardly surprising. Harris’s interviews of British intelligence officers take things a step further, however: “… what she lacked in after-hours sociability she made up for with deep professional ties to the upper echelon of the British security establishment. ‘She had access to anyone in our service,’ the former British intelligence official said.” Harris goes on to explain: “Haspel has become the CIA’s linchpin to the Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6, its most important foreign partner. Her British colleagues say that she knows them so well — warts and all — that they call her the ‘honorary U.K. desk officer.'”

In the next paragraph, Harris notes breathlessly: “… Trump has accused the United Kingdom of conspiring with American intelligence to spy on his presidential campaign.” President Trump certainly has made that claim, and one believes for very good reasons that seem to compound weekly. Reasons that make the “intelligence community” and 95% of “official Washington” extremely nervous. It is the sort of statement that presidential aides and counsels look nervous about, wring their hands and respectfully, earnestly plead: “But Mr. President, you just can’t say that sort of thing!” Truth be damned.

Hard to see how this is not political.

• Grand Jury Indicts St. Louis Couple Who Defended Home Amid Demonstrations (JTN)

St. Louis couple Mark and Patricia McCloskey, have been indicted by a Grand Jury seated by St. Louis Circuit Prosecutor Kim Gardner’s office, in connection with them defending their home this summer amid Black Lives Matter protests. Al Watkins, an attorney for the couple, confirmed to the Associated Press the indictments against Mark McCloskey, 63, and Patricia McCloskey, 61. Joel Schwartz, a McCloskey attorney, told Just the News on Tuesday night that the indictment is called a “suppressed” indictment and that he’s unaware of what it states. “I am told by sources that this is a suppressed indictment, which makes no sense to me. We had a hearing this morning in court. The hearing was cancelled. Then I was contacted by sources, who learned my clients were indicted. I reached out to the Circuit Attorney’s office. I have yet to received a response,” said Joel Schwartz to Just the News.

Schwartz represents the couple in the criminal case, and Watkins represents the couple in a related civil case. Gardner, a Democrat, charged the McCloskeys with “flourishing” a weapon in connection with the June 28 incident in which social justice protesters entered the couple’s private, gated community during a demonstration and marched past their home. The McCloskeys have said they each went outside with a gun because they feared for the safety of themselves and their home. Missouri GOP Gov. Mike Parson said in July that he was prepared to exercise his pardon powers if prosecutors bring criminal charges in the case. As previously reported by Just the News, Gardner’s campaigns have received tens of thousands of dollars from a political action committee financed by billionaire political philanthropist George Soros.

He’s going to bankrupt untold numbers of Americans.

• Jay Powell Wants More Help From Congress: Low Risk Of ‘Overdoing It’ (CNBC)

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell called Tuesday for continued aggressive fiscal and monetary stimulus for an economic recovery that he said still has “a long way to go.” Noting progress made in job creation, goods consumption and business formation, among other areas, Powell said that now would be the wrong time for policymakers to take their foot off the gas. Doing so, he said, could “lead to a weak recovery, creating unnecessary hardship for households and businesses” and thwart a rebound that thus far has progressed more quickly than expected. “By contrast, the risks of overdoing it seem, for now, to be smaller,” Powell added in remarks to the National Association for Business Economics.

“Even if policy actions ultimately prove to be greater than needed, they will not go to waste. The recovery will be stronger and move faster if monetary policy and fiscal policy continue to work side by side to provide support to the economy until it is clearly out of the woods.” The remarks come amid conflicting signs for an economy trying to shake off the unprecedented impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic. While 11.4 million jobs lost during the associated economic shutdown have been recovered, nearly half of displaced workers remain sidelined. GDP is expected to show a sharp rebound from the 31% second-quarter plunge and housing has been a strong point as well.

However, Powell cautioned that backing off now with fiscal and monetary help runs the risk of losing momentum and bringing about an added downturn that would look not like the government-induced one that began in February, but rather a more traditional downturn that would be harder to recover from and worsen the U.S. wealth gap. That would be one where “weakness feeds on weakness,” he said. “The recovery will be stronger and move faster if monetary policy and fiscal policy continue to work side by side to provide support to the economy until it is clearly out of the woods,” Powell added.

Don’t worry, they hate Trump more.

• Unfavorable Views of China Reach Historic Highs in Many Countries (Pew)

Views of China have grown more negative in recent years across many advanced economies, and unfavorable opinion has soared over the past year, a new 14-country Pew Research Center survey shows. Today, a majority in each of the surveyed countries has an unfavorable opinion of China. And in Australia, the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, the United States, South Korea, Spain and Canada, negative views have reached their highest points since the Center began polling on this topic more than a decade ago. Negative views of China increased most in Australia, where 81% now say see the country unfavorably, up 24 percentage points since last year. In the UK, around three-quarters now see the country in a negative light – up 19 points.

And, in the U.S., negative views of China have increased nearly 20 percentage points since President Donald Trump took office, rising 13 points since just last year. The rise in unfavorable views comes amid widespread criticism over how China has handled the coronavirus pandemic. Across the 14 nations surveyed, a median of 61% say China has done a bad job dealing with the outbreak. This is many more than say the same of the way the COVID-19 pandemic was handled by their own country or by international organizations like the World Health Organization or the European Union. Only the U.S. receives more negative evaluations from the surveyed publics, with a median of 84% saying the U.S. has handled the coronavirus outbreak poorly.

“5 year search for the truth by @SMaurizi continually blocked by UK/US govt.”

Hard to swallow the irony of the Guardian printing this.

• Court To Rule On UK Freedom Of Information Bids From Overseas (G.)

The rights of those living abroad to submit freedom of information requests are to be tested in court after more than a dozen cases – including one relating to Julian Assange’s extradition – were blocked. A combined hearing involving the Home Office, Metropolitan police, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) and 13 separate cases is to be held at an information tribunal in London. At issue is whether applicants overseas are entitled to a response when submitting freedom of information requests to UK government departments and agencies. It is not clear who triggered the “stay” imposed on the 13 requests. The ICO has declined to comment. No date has been set for the case.

The Cabinet Office, which has responsibility for FOI policy, says it complies with ICO guidance, which states: “Anyone can make a freedom of information request – they do not have to be UK citizens, or resident in the UK.” The tribunal, however, has told parties in the suspended cases that it has “decided to deal with the territorial scope” of the Freedom of Information Act 2000. All of the stayed FOI requests are from applicants not resident in Britain. The hearing will also examine whether there is a requirement that those who make FOI requests have a connection to the UK. “The main principle behind freedom of information legislation,” the ICO has said, “is that people have a right to know about the activities of public authorities, unless there is a good reason for them not to.”

One of the blocked cases is an appeal by the Italian journalist Stefania Maurizi, who works for daily newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano and writes about WikiLeaks. She has been pursuing information about how the Crown Prosecution Service dealt with its Swedish counterpart during initial attempts to extradite Assange to Sweden. Her work has been covered by the Guardian. Maurizi has also studied at Imperial College in London. Barristers Jennifer Robinson, who represents Assange, and Estelle Dehon, who specialises in freedom of information, are representing Maurizi. They have asked the tribunal to lift the stay and allow their appeals for the release of further information to proceed. They argue that Maurizi has worked on UK publications and has carried out investigations relating to the UK and UK citizens. She has also taken several other cases to information tribunal hearings.

Let’s declassify the docs behind this.

• The Unprecedented And Illegal Campaign To Eliminate Julian Assange (Glass)

Over the 17 days of Julian Assange’s extradition hearing in London, prosecutors succeeded in proving both crimes and conspiracy. The culprit, however, was not Assange. Instead, the lawbreakers and conspirators turned out to be the British and American governments. Witness after witness detailed illegal measures to violate Assange’s right to a fair trial, destroy his health, assassinate his character, and imprison him in solitary confinement for the rest of his life. Courtroom evidence exposed illegality on an unprecedented scale by America’s and Britain’s intelligence, military, police, and judicial agencies to eliminate Assange. The governments had the edge, like the white man of whom Malcolm X wrote, “He’s a professional gambler; he has all the cards and the odds stacked on his side, and he has always dealt to our people from the bottom of the deck.”

The deck was clearly stacked. Assange’s antagonists were marking the cards as early as February 2008, when the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Center set out, in its words, to “damage or destroy this center of gravity” that was WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks, from the time Assange and his friends created it in 2006, was attracting sources around the world to entrust them, securely and anonymously, with documents exposing state crimes. The audience for the documents was not a foreign intelligence service, but the public. In the governments’ view, the public needed protection from knowledge of what they were doing behind closed doors and in the skies of Afghanistan and Iraq. To plug the leaks, the governments had to stop Assange. The Pentagon, the CIA, the National Security Agency, and the State Department soon followed the Counterintelligence Center’s lead by establishing their own anti-Assange task forces and enlisting the aid of Britain, Sweden, and Ecuador.

What a ride it’s been. The first recorded “black op” against Assange occurred on September 27, 2010, when a suitcase containing three laptops, hard drives, and clothing vanished from the aircraft carrying him from Sweden to Germany. Efforts to retrieve his belongings, which included privileged communications with his legal counsel, elicited vague excuses from the airline that it knew nothing. The fate of the purloined items became public knowledge in 2013 when information from his laptops appeared in prosecution briefs against U.S. Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning. In 2011, FBI agents went to Iceland to employ an 18-year-old informant, Sigurdur “Siggi” Thordarson, to spy on WikiLeaks. When Iceland’s authorities discovered the FBI’s illegal activities, it deported the FBI agents. Thodarson, whom the FBI had paid $5,000 and flown around the world, later confessed to stealing money from WikiLeaks and was convicted for sexually abusing underage boys.

Tulsi for Julian

Tulsi Gabbard calls on the US government to drop all charges against Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, who both acted in the public interest by exposing illegal US mass surveillance, lies, corruption and war crimes. pic.twitter.com/nlPokD4iVd

— Sarah Abdallah (@sahouraxo) October 6, 2020

And not just in the US.

• Top US Food Bank Warns Of Nationwide “Meal Shortages” In Next 12 Months (ZH)

The virus pandemic and resulting recession, crushing millions of households, has produced a new era of hunger nationwide. After seven months of the coronavirus chaos, triggering widespread unemployment and the collapse of small businesses, millions of Americans are going hungry for the first time in their lives ahead of the holiday season. Tens of millions of Americans have turned to their local food banks as food insecurity spirals out of control. According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey from late August, about 10% of adults, 22.3 million, reported they didn’t have enough to eat or lacked food. This figure is up from 18 million in early March.

Now, Feeding America, a nationwide network of more than 200 food banks, serving more than 46 million people, is warning it may experience a massive food shortage within the next twelve months, reported WaPo. Feeding America said it could face a deficit of “10 billion pound shortfall between now and June of 2021 – the equivalent of 8 billion meals.” In July, the nonprofit organization “estimated the total need for charitable food over the next year would be an unprecedented 17 billion pounds, more than three times the food bank network’s last annual distribution of 5 billion pounds.”

Rising food insecurity comes as the economy faces a tidal wave of long-term unemployment as millions of people who lost jobs early in the pandemic and remain out of work, unable to find a job, as job losses increasingly become permanent. At the moment, nearly 4 million jobs have vanished forever. Two problems are developed: rising long-term unemployment and permanent job losses, the combination of the two create deep economic scarring and immense financial pain for households. The Salvation Army recently launched its annual holiday fundraising campaign early this year, for the first time in 130 years, in a bid to “rescue Christmas” to support those households financially ruined by the economic downturn.

Brilliant Babylon Bee.

• Media Criticizes Trump For Downplaying Virus Threat By Not Dying (BBee)

President Donald Trump is once again under fire from the media for recklessly downplaying the danger of COVID by refusing to die. As the president begins to show signs of recovery, many worry that this sends the wrong message about the seriousness of the global pandemic. “Every hour that he lives is another hour that the severity of this virus is undermined!” said reporter Sara Grace Major for CNN. “Why won’t he just DIE and show the American people how deadly this virus truly is?” “Mr. President, are you sure you don’t need to lie down indefinitely or go on a ventilator?” asked another distraught journalist. “Maybe even say goodbye to your loved ones?!”

“Honestly, I feel terrific. Tremendous, really. I was never afraid of this virus before, but now I am even more not afraid. It’s sad, really. I was told this virus would be one tough cookie,“ Trump said to the press. “In fact, I’ve never felt better.” “His defiance is going to get people killed. Dying like he’s supposed to would be the most patriotic thing he could do,” complained CNN correspondent Adam Pelot. “If he lives, how will the people be able to trust science?” At publishing time, members of the press had begun pulling their own hair out as they watched the “incredibly strong and healthy” president go for a jog around the White House grounds.

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“I hated school because I liked to daydream and the system tried to stop me from that.”
– Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Marshall McLuhan

“It is our obsession with the content of the file that drives us”—Marshall McLuhan, 1968 pic.twitter.com/A0heuwfbxS

— Brian Roemmele (@BrianRoemmele) October 7, 2020

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