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Debt Rattle December 16 2022

Dec 162022

December 16, 2022 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:55 am Finance Tagged with: Arctic sea ice, China, CIA, doormat, Elon Musk, flying insects, JFK, Orthodox, Qatar scandal, SBF, Twitter, Vatican 84 Responses »

Paul Gauguin When are you getting married? 1892

• Twitter Nukes Liberal Pundits From Platform (ZH)

• Matt Taibbi Discusses Ongoing ‘Big Picture’ Review of Twitter Files (CTH)

• EU Allows US To Wipe Its Feet On The Bloc – Putin (RT)

• Kiev Seizes Assets of Russian Orthodox Clerics (LI)

• Vatican Apologizes For Pope’s Remarks – Moscow (RT)

• European Parliament’s ‘Qatar Scandal’ Tip Of A Corruption Iceberg (Marsden)

• Germany Resorts To Record Borrowing (RT)

• Germany Spends $500 Billion To ‘Keep The Lights On’ – Reuters (RT)

• China Downgrades Omicron Risks To Seasonal Cold (ZH)

• Thousands Of Unedited Government JFK Assassination Files Released (BBC)

• “Effective Altruism”: Could SBF’s Parents Be the Key to a Plea? (Turley)

• Don’t Fall For It (Denninger)

• Arctic Summer Sea Ice Stopped Declining a Decade Ago (DS)

• Flying Insect Numbers Plunge 64% Since 2004 – UK Survey (G.)

Mr. Wonderful

JUST IN: Kevin O’Leary testifies at Senate hearing and says #Binance intentionally put FTX out of business. pic.twitter.com/90pYPYrU5J

— Watcher.Guru (@WatcherGuru) December 14, 2022

Biden 2006

Joe Biden on gay marriage in 2006… pic.twitter.com/ZhoOkpPYwM

— Carrie ❤️ America (@FarmGirlCarrie) December 14, 2022

Pie

This one might just be my angriest yet: Strikes!

Full version here: https://t.co/4zGK80cK0n pic.twitter.com/w2SBQ3oT8n

— Jonathan Pie (@JonathanPieNews) December 15, 2022

Xfiles
https://twitter.com/i/status/1603512101485805569

“We sometimes encounter people, even perfect strangers, who begin to interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly, all at once, before a word has been spoken.”
– Dostoevsky

Open season has been declared on Musk. He and his family are fair game. They paint a target on him and when he wipes it off, they say: see, he doesn’t really advocate free speech!

• Twitter Nukes Liberal Pundits From Platform (ZH)

Twitter on Thursday evening began purging reporters from major media outlets, just one day after new owner Elon Musk changed the platform’s “anti-doxxing” policy in response to a “crazy stalker” who climbed on the hood of a car carrying his two-year-old son. Those kicked off the platform include: Keith Olbermann of MSNBC • Ryan Mac of the NY Times • Anthony Webster of Bellingcat • Donnie O’Sullivan of CNN • Micah F. Lee of The Intercept • Matt Binder of Mashable • Drew Harwell of the Washington Post • Aaron Rupar of his mom’s basement. Also booted was the official account for Twitter competitor Mastadon, which earlier in the day posted a link to track Musk’s private jet. It was unclear what prompted the suspensions, though it appears they are related to doxxing – current or in the past.

“Same doxxing rules apply to “journalists” as to everyone else,” Musk said on Thursday evening, adding “Criticizing me all day long is totally fine, but doxxing my real-time location and endangering my family is not.” “They posted my exact real-time location, basically assassination coordinates, in (obvious) direct violation of Twitter terms of service,” Musk said in a subsequent tweet. [..] Aaron Rupar said in a statement to CNN’s Oliver Darcy: “I never posted anything Elon Jet related or that could violate the policy about disclosing locations. Unless the policy is that you criticize Elon and you get banned.” Except…

UPDATE: Rupar posted screenshots of the location of Elon Musk's private plane

— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) December 16, 2022

Corporate media has framed this as Twitter suspending journalists “who have been covering Elon Musk and the company.” A spokesperson for the NY Times said that the suspensions were ‘questionable and unfortunate,’ and said that no explanation was provided. “We hope that all of the journalists’ accounts are reinstated and that Twitter provides a satisfying explanation for this action,” said Charlie Stadtlander, communications director for the Times.

“..Taibbi notes the current data set does not include access to the inbound requests and instructions from government officials..”

• Matt Taibbi Discusses Ongoing ‘Big Picture’ Review of Twitter Files (CTH)

During a podcast Matt Taibbi describes the big picture takeaway of the data they have been permitted to review so far. Interestingly, Taibbi notes the silo effect within Twitter as the division in charge of taking action on requests is not necessarily the division that receives the requests. There is an inflection point between two silos. Taibbi notes the current data set does not include access to the inbound requests and instructions from government officials, they are limited to only seeing what happens after the request is received.

They are also limited in only seeing the activity that is taken within the action division where the accounts are restricted. The division within Twitter that was in the process of amplifying or boosting accounts, is a different silo. Additionally, as Taibbi also notes, if the scale of what they are seeing in Twitter is representative of outside contacts to other social media platforms, then he is sure Facebook, YouTube, Google, Microsoft, Instagram, Apple etc. also have a process to receive and act upon these inbound DHS/FBI instructions.

Doormat.

• EU Allows US To Wipe Its Feet On The Bloc – Putin (RT)

The current economic troubles in the EU, and the unfriendly attitude displayed by the US towards Europe, are a direct consequence of the weakness shown by the union’s leaders, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday. He made the remarks during a meeting of Russia’s council for strategic development and national projects. “Today, the EU authorities themselves say the policy of their main partner, the US, is leading directly to the de-industrialization of Europe. They are even trying to complain about that to their American overlord. Sometimes there are even words of resentment: ‘Why are you doing this to us?’ I want to ask: ‘What did you expect?’ What else happens to those who allow feet to be wiped on them?” Putin said.

Earlier this month, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen sounded the alarm over US economic policies, urging the EU to “take action” if it wanted to be able to compete with the US government-subsidized green industry. Von der Leyen blasted the tax breaks for consumers who buy American products, introduced under the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), signed by President Joe Biden in August. She warned that such initiatives could “lead to unfair competition, could close markets, and thus fragment critical supply chains.” Other top EU officials have repeatedly voiced concern about an impending recession and potential decades-long deindustrialization. Early in October, Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo said that unless Brussels were to somehow fix the situation with soaring energy prices, it was “risking massive deindustrialization of the European continent and the long-term consequences that might actually be very deep.”

The economic crisis in the EU largely stems from the bloc’s own actions, targeting Russia with a multitude of sanctions over the Ukraine conflict, Putin noted. “What exactly has Europe itself achieved by imposing the restrictions? First of all, there has been an unprecedented, as economists say, jump in inflation in their own home, the eurozone. In November, it amounted to 10% in the eurozone as a whole, with some countries showing extreme figures of more than 20%, even 25%,” Putin noted. At the same time, the collective West, unlike Russia, continues its efforts to grab any resources for itself, the Russian president stated. “Unlike Western countries, which shamelessly pull all of the blankets for themselves, Russia helps the poorest states in Africa, Asia and other regions, delivering food and other goods,” he said.

Dangerous to go after (1,000 years of) religion.

• Kiev Seizes Assets of Russian Orthodox Clerics (LI)

Ukraine has ratcheted up its campaign against a branch of the Eastern Orthodox church with ties to Russia. On the order of President Volodymyr Zelensky, seven senior clerics from the Russian Orthodox church will have their assets seized and face bans on a range of economic and legal activities. During his nightly video address on Sunday, the Ukrainian president said “by decision of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, sanctions were applied against seven people,” adding that his administration is “doing everything to ensure that the aggressor state does not have a single string of Ukrainian society to pull.”

According to Reuters, the new penalties mean that the seven clerics will have “their assets seized and are subject to a ban on a range of economic and legal activities as well as a de facto travel ban.” The vast majority of Ukrainians belong to Eastern Orthodox churches, with many worshiping in parishes that take direction from the Moscow Patriarchate. On December 1, Zelensky announced that Kiev would attempt to expel all religious institutions with ties to Russia, arguing the move would make “it impossible for religious organizations affiliated with centers of influence in the Russian Federation to operate in Ukraine.”

The president went on the claim that the Russian Orthodox Church poses a threat to Ukrainian culture, saying “we will never allow anyone to build an empire inside the Ukrainian soul.” He additionally denounced Ukrainians who continue to attend the allegedly Russia-controlled parishes as succumbing to “the temptation of evil.” Kiev has conducted a series of raids on Russian Orthodox parishes and claims to have uncovered clerics attempting to subvert the Ukrainian government, though has provided little evidence to support its assertions. Nonetheless, Kiev sanctioned 10 top clerics of the church last week, suggesting they threatened ”the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine.”

“This is no longer Russophobia, it’s a perversion on a level I can’t even name..”

• Vatican Apologizes For Pope’s Remarks – Moscow (RT)

The Vatican has issued a formal apology to Russia for derogatory remarks made by Pope Francis last month about some ethnic groups in the country, according to Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova. The ministry received the message on Thursday from Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin. It expressed the Holy See’s respect for “all peoples of Russia, their dignity, faith and culture, just like all other nations and peoples of the world,” Zakharova told a press briefing. “The capacity to recognize one’s mistakes is becoming more rare in international relations today. This situation shows that, behind the Vatican’s calls for dialogue, there is a knack for having such a dialogue and hearing the other side,” the Russian diplomat noted. She added that Moscow considered the incident to be over.

Pope Francis made a negative generalized assessment of the character of Buryats and Chechens, two of the many ethnic groups living in Russia, in an interview published in late November. He described them as “of Russia but… not of the Russian tradition” and claimed that such people were “the cruelest” of the Russian troops in Ukraine. Moscow responded by issuing a formal note of protest to the Vatican, while many Russian officials, including Zakharova, expressed outrage about the remarks. “This is no longer Russophobia, it’s a perversion on a level I can’t even name,” the spokeswoman said at the time. The Vatican and Pope Francis personally offered mediation in the conflict in Ukraine. The pontiff previously angered Kiev by publicly recognizing that NATO’s expansion in Europe was a contributing factor in the conflict, which is part of Moscow’s position on the origin of the violent standoff with Kiev and its foreign backers.

The EU has so far pretended there is no corruption at all.

• European Parliament’s ‘Qatar Scandal’ Tip Of A Corruption Iceberg (Marsden)

In a corruption scandal that strikes at the heart of European Union governance, a vice-president of the European Parliament, Eva Kaili, of Greece, has been stripped of her responsibilities by the EU Parliament, had her assets frozen, and has been charged after police alleged to have found “bags of cash” at her residence. There also was a raid on the home of a Belgian MEP, Marc Tarabella, the vice-chair of the EU’s delegation for relations with the Arab peninsula. Belgian authorities paid another no-knock visit to the home of an assistant to yet another MEP. Earlier this week, authorities searched the EU Parliament offices like it was a common crime scene, reportedly seizing data.

So far, €1.5 million has been seized from private homes, with the Belgian federal prosecutor’s office accusing the four people arrested and charged with “participation in a criminal organization, money laundering and corruption.” It turns out that the officials alleged to have been involved are accused of also lobbying for visa-free EU-Qatar travel and whitewashing Qatar’s labor rights record. For an institution like the European Union, which constantly preaches to other countries about how to clean up their act, you’d think they’d have some strong guardrails in place to prevent the kind of things that these charges allege. That isn’t the case. “The allegations are of utmost concern, very serious,” said an uncharacteristically measured European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. She proposed an independent ethics body to set rules for EU institutions “where there are very clear rules,” adding that it “would be a big step forward.” You mean that didn’t already exist? Why not?

Those who believe that Western democratic institutions practice what they constantly preach might be surprised to learn that the lack of checks and balances to prevent corruption at home is actually pretty staggering. Earlier this year, for example, three US congressional representatives introduced bipartisan legislation to close loopholes allowing foreign funding of think tanks, government officials, and elections. “Right now, foreign governments are able to secretly fund think tanks to push their own agendas, hire former public officials and military officers to lobby for their interests, and have their agents raise millions of dollars for political campaigns,” explained bill sponsor, Congressman Jared Golden. It’s almost like systemic corruption is just an open secret that benefits from an omertà as very few officials actually seem to want to acknowledge or address the issue.

When von der Leyen had the opportunity to address the matter with the Brussels press corps on Monday, she stonewalled journalists – much to their frustration, which they weren’t shy about expressing on Twitter. According to Politico, one journalist even shouted at von der Leyen as she was leaving, “You didn’t answer a single one of the questions.” It’s not exactly the kind of behavior you might expect from someone who routinely speaks of holding others accountable for corruption, a lack of transparency, and other undemocratic practices.

“..the German government has set out a €200 billion “defensive shield” to protect households and businesses from soaring prices..”

• Germany Resorts To Record Borrowing (RT)

Germany’s federal government intends to issue a record volume of debt next year to fund costs associated with the energy crisis, the German Finance Agency has revealed. According to the plan released on Wednesday, debt issuance will balloon to about €539 billion ($573 billion) in 2023 from €449 billion this year. The previous record was in 2021, when the government was attempting to offset the fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic. Borrowing next year will reportedly include federal bonds worth €274 billion and a further €242 billion to be sold on the money market. In addition, between €15 billion and €17 billion will be raised via green federal securities and between €6 billion and €8 billion via inflation-linked federal securities, the agency said.

The plan is “dramatic,” according to Elmar Voelker, a senior fixed-income analyst at LBBW Research in Stuttgart. He told Bloomberg that “on the one hand, yields on longer-dated [bonds] could come under additional upward pressure as investors demand compensation for taking up the additional supply. On the other, the structural shortage of [bonds] could ease a good deal as a result of the additional supply.” According to Reuters, the country’s spending is expected to exceed revenues in the coming year, when the federal government will also have to repay securities worth more than €325 billion to investors.

Germany, Europe’s biggest economy, has been struggling to cope with skyrocketing gas and electricity costs. The nation, which relies mainly on natural gas to power its industry, has vowed to replace imports from its major supplier Russia by as early as mid-2024. However, the attempts to diversify gas supplies have contributed to the current energy crunch. EU sanctions pressure, maintenance issues, as well as the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines, have further exacerbated the problem. In response to the energy crisis, the German government has set out a €200 billion “defensive shield” to protect households and businesses from soaring prices.

“Where does the German economy stand? If we look at price inflation, it has a high fever.”

• Germany Spends $500 Billion To ‘Keep The Lights On’ – Reuters (RT)

Germany has reportedly allocated nearly $500 billion to shore up its energy supplies and “keep the lights on” since the Russia-Ukraine conflict began last February, but the spending binge might not be enough to weather the crisis. The estimated total shows the “cumulative scale” so far of energy bailouts and other schemes that Berlin has employed amid surging oil and natural gas prices and the loss of imports from Russia, Reuters reported on Thursday. The media outlet called the various outlays an “energy bazooka” – equating to $5,400 per resident in Germany, 12% of GDP and an estimated $1.6 billion per day since the conflict in Eastern Europe started – and it added that still more spending may be needed.

“How severe the crisis will be and how long it will last greatly depends on how the energy crisis will develop,” Michael Gromling, head of macroeconomic research at the German Economic Institute, told Reuters. The economic effects of the conflict stem largely from anti-Russia sanctions imposed by the US, Germany and other NATO members. Despite Western efforts to punish and isolate Moscow, Russian government revenue from oil and gas exports has more than doubled from a year earlier to 10 trillion rubles, about $160 billion, in 2022’s first 11 months. Over the same period, rising energy earnings helped push the government budget surplus to 557 billion rubles.

However, as Reuters noted, Europe’s biggest economy now finds itself “at the mercy” of the weather. “Energy rationing is a risk in the event of a long cold spell this winter, Germany’s first in half a century without Russian gas,” the outlet pointed out. Stefan Kooths, vice president at Germany’s Kiel Institute for the World Economy, said uncertain energy supplies have pushed the country’s economy to a “very critical phase.” He added, “Where does the German economy stand? If we look at price inflation, it has a high fever.” Reuters based its calculation of Germany’s spending on bailout packages for energy companies, LNG import infrastructure and funding to help utilities and traders buy gas and coal. “Despite these efforts, there is little certainty over how the country can replace Russia,” the outlet said.

From sealing people into their apartments to ‘it’s just a cold’ in no time flat. Something must have spooked Xi.

• China Downgrades Omicron Risks To Seasonal Cold (ZH)

Although easing zero Covid restrictions in China will be met with reopening hardships as infections soar, earlier this week, one of the top medical advisers in the country said that the omicron variant of the virus is no worse than the flu. Now some Chinese cities are downgrading Covid even further, saying it’s the same as the seasonal cold, and there is no need to panic. We pointed out earlier this week that China’s renowned respiratory disease expert Zhong Nanshan downplayed the risks of the omicron subvariant of Covid-19. He said the death rate from omicron is .1%, equivalent to the common flu, and the infection doesn’t reach the lungs, adding most healthy people recover in less than ten days.

Zhong’s comments come as Beijing pivots from zero Covid to reopen the economy and prevent further economic deceleration. Officials are now telling people they must learn to live with Covid — a similar move that worked in Western countries. According to Shanghai Morning Post, Guangzhou health authorities have assured the public that Covid is less severe than the flu and no more serious than a seasonal cold: s”The virulence of the new coronavirus [Omicron] has now evolved to the level of the seasonal flu, and some are even less virulent than the flu, so you really don’t need to panic,” said Tang Xiaoping, director of the No 8 People’s Hospital in Guangzhou and head of the national key clinical department of infectious diseases.

China downplaying the severity of Covid from flu to cold is the latest sign Beijing is attempting to calm fears and quickly reopen the economy. And why would they be doing that? Well, check out overnight economic data: Overnight, a slew of economic data led to a decline in business activity in November. Retail sales fell 5.9% last month from a year earlier — the biggest decline in consumer spending since May — caused mainly by lockdowns. The unemployment situation also worsened to 5.7% last month, the highest level in six months. And industrial production only rose to 2.2%, about half of October’s figures.

Stones

Rolling Stones to fans on Covid19 vaccines: "We've all had the shot and you better get one too" pic.twitter.com/Or0kHLMUvS

— Wittgenstein (@backtolife_2023) December 15, 2022

Coming clean? Tucker Carlson has far more interesting info than the MSM.

• Thousands Of Unedited Government JFK Assassination Files Released (BBC)

The White House has ordered the release of thousands of documents on the murder of US President John F Kennedy in full for the first time.With the publication of some 13,173 files online, the White House said more than 97% of records in the collection were now publicly available. No huge revelations are expected from the papers, but historians hope to learn more about the alleged assassin. Kennedy was shot during a visit to Dallas, Texas, on 22 November 1963. A 1992 law required the government to release all documents on the assassination by October 2017. On Thursday, President Joe Biden issued an executive order authorising the latest disclosure. But he said some files would be kept under wraps until June 2023 to protect against possible “identifiable harm”. The US National Archives said that 515 documents would remain withheld in full, and another 2,545 documents would be partly withheld.

A 1964 US inquiry, the Warren Commission, found that Kennedy was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald, a US citizen who had previously lived in the Soviet Union, and that he acted alone. He was killed in the basement of the Dallas police headquarters two days after his arrest. JFK’s death spawned decades of conspiracy theories, but on Thursday the CIA said the US spy agency had “never engaged” Oswald, and did not withhold information about him from US investigators. Long-time JFK academics and theorists have hoped the latest release would reveal more information about Oswald’s activities in Mexico City, where he met a Soviet KGB officer in October 1963. In its latest statement, the CIA said that all information held by the agency relating to his trip to Mexico City had previously been released, adding: “There is no new information on this topic in the 2022 release.”

Tucker JFK

Today we spoke to someone who had access to the still-hidden JFK files, and is deeply familiar with their contents. We asked this person directly: did the CIA have a hand in the murder of John F. Kennedy?

Here’s the reply: "The answer is yes. I believe they were involved." pic.twitter.com/3EURZcsaR2

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) December 16, 2022

“The parents have the misfortune of looking like the type of low-hanging fruit prosecutors find irresistible..”

• “Effective Altruism”: Could SBF’s Parents Be the Key to a Plea? (Turley)

As Sam Bankman-Fried faces an eight-count indictment for his alleged massive crypto-fraud, his case could take a sudden turn toward resolution. The prosecutors may have the ultimate inducement for a plea to dangle over Bankman-Fried — actually two: Bankman and Fried. SBF, as he’s known, is not the only person at risk here, particularly with prosecutors making repeated references to unnamed “co-conspirators.” Two at risk could prove his parents, Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried. While there’s no proof of criminal acts on their part, Bankman-Fried surprisingly involved his parents in aspects of his alleged fraudulent operation. If so, the case could bring new meaning to the doctrine of in loco parentis, when people act “in place of a parent” or “instead of a parent.”

Federal prosecutors are notorious for targeting family members as a quarry’s vulnerability; do they see such an opening in Bankman-Fried’s parents’ role in litigating this massive alleged fraud? Both parents of SBF and his close associate and ex-girlfriend, Alameda Research head Caroline Ellison, 28, are professors at leading universities. Ellison’s parents are Massachusetts Institute of Technology professors; Bankman-Fried’s parents are Stanford Law professors. Both children are obviously bright, precocious “fac brats” who spoke of using investments for good deeds. Ellison has said she had only one job before moving over to Alameda and finding herself making huge decisions. Ellison is an obvious target for a cooperation agreement, and her counsel may be moving quickly to get her a chair before the music stops on the next round of indictments.

The more intriguing prospect, however, is using SBF’s parents as his most vulnerable pressure point. The Justice Department has previously targeted family members, as in the Michael Flynn case, to muscle defendants into pleas. While we’ve seen Justice give targets sharply different treatment in past cases, there’s ample reason for the parents to be concerned. Joseph Bankman, a longtime Stanford Law School tax professor, was a paid employee of his son and helped promote the company. He spent considerable time in the Bahamas with Sam during the critical periods of alleged fraud. He and his wife may have benefited from some of the lavish expenditures the Justice Department cited in its indictment, including staying in a $16.4 million house in Old Fort Bay, a gated community in Nassau.

Stanford Law prof Barbara Fried didn’t appear to work for the company but reportedly used money from her son in her Democratic political-advocacy network. Fried, 71, resigned last month as board chairwoman of a political-donor network, Mind the Gap, which she’d helped start to support Democratic campaigns and causes. Fried, who retired this year from Stanford, is an expert on the intersection of law and philosophy. She has notably written about effective altruism, the charitable movement her son and Ellison embraced. SBF pursued effective-altruism models while studying at MIT and later co-founded Alameda. The left heralded Bankman-Fried as showing that effective altruism had “real and growing political power, and an increasing ability to noticeably change the world.”

[..] The parents have the misfortune of looking like the type of low-hanging fruit prosecutors find irresistible. In an ordinary case, they would be on top of the targets list. Reports the parents are concerned they could be financially ruined by legal costs may only increase the interest in using them to pressure their son.

SBF

I made a full video of CNBC pumping SBF, so they don’t even have to do any work. Just put this on air and press play!pic.twitter.com/ym05G5TXui

— Eric @ Grabien (@Grabien_Eric) December 12, 2022

“..even if the energy from the fusion reactions exceeds the energy from the lasers, it’s still only around one percent of the total energy used..”

• Don’t Fall For It (Denninger)

Breathlessly, I tell you, breathlessly, over-unity fusion has been achieved! Don’t buy that bullshit; they’re lying. Specifically its crap until you can show me all of the following: A sustainable reaction that continues for hours, not microseconds. I can’t make power out of a single microsecond event. I can make power out of a reaction that continues for hours and evolves energy while doing so. Until you can do the latter you have nothing and nothing in the current results, assuming they’re real, nor anything in prior results suggests progress toward that. The over-parity ratio of energy output to input is exponentially (that is, by at least 10x) high. A conventional nuclear fission plant requires about 10% of the output nameplate rating in input power just to operate.

This is why you can’t black-start such a plant [..] and this also, to a large degree, applies to other conventional energy such as coal. The scrubbers, conveyors, grinding apparatus for the input fuel and similar all require a lot of energy input, so you have to get a lot back out to make it worth it. Coal, natural gas, nuclear fission and oil all do. Until fusion can produce 10x as much energy on the output side as you put in to cause the fusion its a laboratory curiosity piece, not a source of commercial power. Exactly zero progress has been made toward that in the last 50+ years. The energy produced has to be able to be captured and converted into usable power of some form, either chemical, mechanical or electrical, and thus the above point must be measured after said conversion.

Gamma rays are energy but they’re not usable thus until and unless you can transform them into one of those forms they don’t count. Yes, on a physics level energy is energy but in terms of practical use that is not true and it is fraudulent to represent that which is not the case to others. You must be able to source the reactants with the product energy and have enough left over to be operationally viable as a business. This is non-trivial as well because the fusion we have achieved thus far requires deuterium and/or tritium. Both are exceedingly rare hydrogen isotopes (about ~150 per million for deuterium) and because they are chemically the same as ordinary hydrogen separating them is a five-alarm pain in the neck that requires a great deal of energy itself. In addition tritium is atomically unstable (that is, it decays) so you can’t store it permanently either (deuterium is atomically stable, on the other hand, so with deuterium you can.) Let me know when there’s a viable engineering pathway to the above.

Until then keep they breathless exclamations to yourself; you’re making a fool of yourself promoting and cheering on crap, beyond continuing work on possibly reaching those above points — at some far, far into the future and only after someone pulls a “Scotty” in terms of a breakthrough that today we have no engineering path that places it within reach. And incidentally, if you think they actually got back more than they put in, even leaving the externalities above aside, you were conned on that too. Here’s the salient statement from the article itself: But that changed in the dead of night on Dec. 5. At 1 AM local time, researchers used laser beams to zap a tiny pellet of hydrogen fuel. The lasers produced 2.05 megajoules of energy, and the pellet released roughly 3.15 megajoules.

Sounds great, right? Uh, no…. “It is a big scientific step,” says Ryan McBride, a nuclear engineer at the University of Michigan. But, McBride adds, that does not mean that NIF itself is producing power. For one thing, he says, the lasers require more than 300 megajoules worth of electricity to produce around 2 megajoules of ultraviolet laser light. In other words, even if the energy from the fusion reactions exceeds the energy from the lasers, it’s still only around one percent of the total energy used.

“What they are doing is not science but propaganda..”

• Arctic Summer Sea Ice Stopped Declining a Decade Ago (DS)

Arctic summer sea ice stopped declining a decade ago, but green activists have spared no effort to continue promoting the poster scare that humans will cause it all to disappear within a few years. In his recent BBC Frozen Planet II agitprop, Sir David Attenborough claimed it might all be gone by 2035. In an excellent piece of investigative reporting titled Lies, Damned Lies and Arctic Graphs, the climate writer Tony Heller recently lifted the lid on many of the tactics used to keep the scare in the headlines. “They bury all the oWhat they are doing is not science but propaganda,”lder data and pretend they don’t notice sea ice is increasing again. he charges. he Daily Sceptic has written a number of articles of late noting that summer sea ice extent in the Arctic is recovering. In Greenland, I recently reported, the ice sheet may have increased in the year to August 2022. Invariably, social media commentators reply by publishing the sea ice graph below, compiled by the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC).

This is reproduced from Heller’s YouTube work and shows a linear decrease in September (the lowest point of annual sea ice) from 1979. There is something wrong with this graph, notes Heller, since the minimum is actually higher now than 10 and 15 years ago, but the crude straight black ‘trend’ line tricks the eye into missing this. He plots the data as a moving average to show the real trend more clearly. We see here the end of the decline in summer sea ice started a decade ago. The low point on which most fanciful forecasts of a North Pole passage are based is 2012. Heller notes that sea ice changes are cyclical, not linear. And he is right. Drawing a straight line down from a 1979 high point to a lower point tells us nothing about current trends.

Poison.

• Flying Insect Numbers Plunge 64% Since 2004 – UK Survey (G.)

The number of insects splattered on vehicle number plates in Britain fell by 64% between 2004 and 2022, according to a survey. Each summer citizen scientists record the number of insect splats on their number plates on an app after a journey. The latest Bugs Matter report, produced by Kent Wildlife Trust and Buglife, found another drop in 2022 compared with 2021, with the long-term decrease jumping by five percentage points. The survey supports other scientific studies showing major and ongoing declines in flying insects in western Europe this century that potentially imperil food chains, plant and crop pollination and ultimately life on Earth. Andrew Whitehouse of Buglife said: “For the second year running, Bugs Matter has shown potentially catastrophic declines in the abundance of flying insects.

Urgent action is required to address the loss of the diversity and abundance of insect life. We will look to our leaders at Cop15 for decisive action to restore nature at scale – both for wildlife and for the health and wellbeing of future generations.” The study found continued declines from 2021 to 2022 in England, Northern Ireland and Wales, but this summer appears to have been a better season for flying insects in Scotland. The decline since 2004 in Scotland was 48.5% in 2021 but just 40.3% in 2022. The Bugs Matter survey data is collected when people download a free app and record the insects splattered on their number plates during car journeys over the summer. Nearly 7,000 volunteers have signed up and 4,140 journeys were analysed in 2022’s data. Short journeys and trips in the rain are excluded.

The project is keen to recruit more participants for the 2023 recording, which starts on 1 June next year. Evan Bowen-Jones, the chief executive of Kent Wildlife Trust, said: “Thanks to citizen scientists across the country, we are building a better picture of the health of our insect populations and already we are seeing some concerning patterns in the data. “However, we need more citizen scientists to take part in the Bugs Matter survey next year and into the future, to understand whether we are seeing actual long-term trends or the impact of the extreme temperatures we faced in 2022.”

Edward Dowd

Edward Dowd – scary… pic.twitter.com/V0U61euCyt

— Wittgenstein (@backtolife_2023) December 15, 2022

In 1992, around 29,000 rubber ducks fell off a cargo ship in the Pacific Ocean. This is where they made landfall.

Ice deer
https://twitter.com/i/status/1603334418705567744

An aurochs from a cave in Calabria, made between 12,000 and 14,000 years ago. The wild ancestor of domesticated cattle. The last aurochs died in 1627, one of the first recorded cases of an extinction.

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Debt Rattle February 1 2022

Feb 012022

February 1, 2022 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:33 am Finance Tagged with: checkmate, Freedom Convoy, JFK, Joe Rogan, mutations, Nuland, power grab, revolt, truckers, Trudeau, Ukraine 89 Responses »

Pablo Picasso Woman in an armchair (Olga) 1922

• The Revolt Begins (Jim Kunstler)

• Now Is the Time for Mass Resignations From Within the Ruling Class (Tucker)

• Mandatory Covid Rules Morph Into Global Power-grab (Mitch Feierstein)

• We Are All Canadian Truckers Now! (Ron Paul)

• Trudeau Reappears To Denounce ‘Freedom Convoy’ Truckers (RT)

• No 10 Set For U-turn Over Mandatory Covid Jabs For NHS Staff In England (G.)

• Why Joe Rogan Remains The World’s Most Popular Podcaster (Cheong)

• The Left Tries to Deplatform . . . Critics of Big Pharma? (Geraghty)

• Since We’re Taking Shots…. (Denninger)

• COVID-19-Infected HIV Patient Developed 21 Mutations (ET)

• Documents via FOI from Pfizer (Delaney)

• Newly Released State Memos Undercut Democrats’ Ukraine Impeachment Story (JTN)

• JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass by Oliver Stone (Curtin)

• Checkmate in Ukraine (Ritter)

• Trudeau Tests Positive For Fascism (BBee)

The needle and the damage done…
https://twitter.com/i/status/1486436415390904321

(“Let’s Go, Brandon!”) And Let’s go, Canadian truckers!

• The Revolt Begins (Jim Kunstler)

For now, the truckers seem determined to stick around and disrupt the Canadian capital. Their estimated 50,000 rigs could surround the city and create siege conditions, where food supplies and other goods won’t get in, starving the government into surrendering on its mandates and restrictions. So far, the local Ottawa police have stood by with a very light hand, and there are rumors that they are on the same page as the truckers against federal overreach. Will Mr. Trudeau resort to using the military to break up the revolt? Good luck with that. Like virtually every other “advanced” nation, Canada depends on trucks and truckers to move everything needed for everyday life. The truckers can just say no… we don’t feel like working this month. No poutine or Cornish pasties for you, Ottawa! Then what? Throw them all in jail? How will that help move stuff from Point A to Point B?

It kind of looks like they have Mr. T over a Molson barrel. For now, it’s a stand-off, but it looks to me like the Prime Minister must resign and whoever takes charge next will have to rapidly rethink the country’s entire Covid-19 policy in a not-insane direction. The Canadian revolt appears to be inspiring similar operations in the US, where a movement has started for a massive trucker convoy from California to Washington, DC — the swampy pivot-point of Covid tyranny under the phantasm known as “Joe Biden” — as a very general way of saying we’ve had enough of being pushed around by political grifters and their bureaucratic subalterns.The Covid-19 saga gets darker every day, while the official alibis, cover-stories, and disinfo ops bend ever deeper toward an arc of criminality. The US government has lied about every plot-line in the two-year horror show. In fact, a conscientious observer would have to conclude the following:

That the government’s highest-paid employee, Dr. Anthony Fauci, led surreptitiously in the creation and release of a bioweapon; that he and his cohorts, along with the pharma companies, and other interested parties such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the World Health Organization, enabled the release of so-called “vaccines” (genetic treatments) that were at least as deadly as the disease itself; that as a result of the shots many people of all ages will die before their natural time; that the process is already underway as documented in the all-causes death data tallied by insurance companies; that the same government officials maliciously suppressed viable, inexpensive, FDA-approved treatments for Covid-19 in order to herd the populace into receiving dangerous “vaccines”; that said officials have worked strenuously to muddle and fake the statistics that would show who is actually dying of what; and that the entire fiasco appears to have been ginned up in order to systematically control the population in ways contrary to our natural rights while killing off a substantial number of us.

Wishful thinking?

• Now Is the Time for Mass Resignations From Within the Ruling Class (Tucker)

We’ve been assured by David Hume (1711–1776) and Etienne de la Boétie (1530–1563) that government rule is untenable when it loses the consent of the governed. “Resolve to serve no more,” wrote Boétie, “and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall off his own weight and break into pieces.” That’s inspiring but what does it mean in practice? What precisely is the mechanism by which the overlords in our time are effectively overthrown? We’ve seen this in totalitarian states, in states with one-man rule, in states with unelected monarchies.

But unless I’m missing something, we’ve not seen this in a developed democracy with an administrative state that holds the real power. We have scheduled elections but those are unhelpful when 1) elected leaders are not the real source of power, and 2) when the elections are too far in the distant future to deal with a present emergency. One very easy and obvious path away from the current crisis is for the ruling class to admit error, repeal the mandates, and simply allow for common freedoms and rights for everyone. As easy as that sounds, this solution hits a hard wall when faced with ruling-class arrogance, trepidation, and the unwillingness to admit past errors for fear of what that will mean for their political legacies. For this reason, absolutely no one expects the likes of Trudeau, Ardern, or Biden to humbly apologize, admit that they were wrong, and beg the people’s forgiveness. On the contrary, everyone expects them to continue the game of pretend so long as they can get away with it.

The people on the streets today, and those willing to tell pollsters that they are fed up, are saying: no more. What does it mean for the ruling class not to get away with this nonsense anymore? Presuming that they do not resign, they do not call off the dogs of mandates and lockdowns, what is the next step? My instincts tell me that we are about to discover the answer. Electoral realignment seems inevitable but what happens before then? The obvious answer to the current instability is mass resignations within the administrative state, among the class of politicians that gives it cover, as well as heads of media organs that have propagandized for them. In the name of peace, human rights, and the renewal of prosperity and trust, this needs to happen today. Bury the pride and do what’s right. Do it now while there is still time for the revolution to be velvet.

Justin French

pic.twitter.com/523N3uMzFM

— Wittgenstein (@backtolife_2022) February 1, 2022

“It almost feels like China has taken over the world..”

• Mandatory Covid Rules Morph Into Global Power-grab (Mitch Feierstein)

Enter 2020 and the China virus aka COVID-19. Why was no one allowed to focus or ask about treatment protocols? Instead, a financially conflicted, unelected, 80-year-old bureaucrat named Anthony Fauci dictated tyrannical policies with narratives that had more holes in them than a 100 Kilo block Swiss cheese. Lord Fauci ratcheted the level of public fear up to 11 out of ten and issued the first lie, “two weeks to stop the spread”. Next, he bristled, “masks don’t work”, later demanding “mandatory masks”. Fauci’s dictates became more dictatorial and changeable than a kindergartener’s game of “Simon says”. These mandatory Covid rules morphed into several years of the most unprecedented global and tyrannical power-grab ever made by governments.

Let’s be clear; this authoritarian creep is the greatest existential threat to our western system of freedom—free speech, democracy, and liberty—in history. It almost feels like China has taken over the world. The mantra: It is mandatory you take four doses of an experimental biological agent with questionable efficacy, or we will destroy you, for which the side effects seem underreported, and the effectiveness appears overstated. The dishonest media unleashed an army of apparatchik Karen’s anyone daring non-compliance. If this pandemic was so terrible as to allow government tyranny, destruction of SMEs, and the middle class, why have we not seen a massive increase in total year-on-year global morbidity rates? Now, after using coercion: the fear of death and or the denial to earn a living to force unwilling members of society to participate in mass medical experiments, we have unprecedented numbers of deaths of working-age people ages 18-64 occurring.

A massive number of unexplained deaths have been reported by all insurance companies in Q3 and Q4 of 2021 [..] Regarding these deaths, OneAmerica’s CEO stated, “It may not have said COVID on the death certificates, but deaths in this age group are up massively”. Actuarial data is generally the most accurate data available. We know mass participation in the Pfizer, Moderna, and Astra Zeneca medical experiments with unknown long-term consequences; could these deaths be related? Why is the media not all over his story?

“..now that the Berlin Wall of the tyrants has been breached, it’s just a matter of time before the shockwaves are felt far and wide.”

• We Are All Canadian Truckers Now! (Ron Paul)

We all remember where we were when the Berlin Wall came down. While it may have seemed that communist rule would go on forever, when the people decided that they had enough suddenly the wall fell. Just like that. Thus it is after two years of Covid authoritarianism that in Canada the largest truck convoy in history has smashed through the Berlin Wall of tyranny. I have watched as the Canada I once respected as a haven for antiwar Americans in the 1960s turned into one of the most repressive countries on earth. I wondered how a freedom-loving people could allow themselves to be abused by these mini-Stalins without a peep. But then Canada stood up and showed the rest of the world that freedom can triumph over tyranny if the people demand it. As I say, no army can stop an idea whose time has come.

Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau had been basking in his ability to terrorize the population in the name of fighting a virus. He was so confident in his seemingly unlimited power that he felt he could ridicule any Canadian with different views. The prime minister said in a recent interview that unvaccinated Canadians were “extremists,” “misogynists,” and “racists.” When the Canadian truckers stood up to his tyranny and began their historic convoy to Ottawa, he thought he could continue ridiculing people. The truckers and their supporters were just a “small fringe minority” who hold “unacceptable views,” he confidently claimed. For Trudeau, love of liberty is just an “unacceptable view.”

Less than a week later, as tens of thousands of trucks began entering the capital with millions of supporters behind them, the “brave” Canadian prime minister had fled the city and shuffled off to an undisclosed location. As Elon Musk Tweeted, “It would appear that the so-called ‘fringe minority’ is actually the government.” The Canadian mainstream media is obviously just as obedient to the regime as ours. They ignored the Freedom Convoy for as long as possible. There was almost no reporting. Then, when it became impossible to ignore, they began to attack and ridicule instead of trying to report it accurately. It was disgusting and almost comical to see a “reporter” from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation suggest that the Canadian Freedom Convoy was cooked up by Putin and the Russians!

Thousands of trucks have arrived in Ottawa. They demand an end to covid tyranny. They are backed by millions of citizens, who braved the Canadian winter at night to cheer the truckers on. This protest is so important because it’s not limited to Canada. The truckers are being supported worldwide, and a similar convoy is being planned from California to Washington, DC. In a US where grocery store shelves are increasingly bare, the truckers have more leverage than the powers-that-be would like to admit. If I were prime minister of totalitarian Australia or New Zealand – or most anywhere in Europe – I would be getting pretty nervous right now. Just as the Covid tyranny descended across the globe in a seemingly coordinated fashion, now that the Berlin Wall of the tyrants has been breached, it’s just a matter of time before the shockwaves are felt far and wide.

“Nazi symbolism, racist imagery and desecration of war memorials”

• Trudeau Reappears To Denounce ‘Freedom Convoy’ Truckers (RT)

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau reappeared in public after several days, criticizing the “Freedom Convoy” of truckers protesting his vaccine mandates in Ottawa as tainted by racist, Nazi extremists desecrating war memorials. After reports that he had been moved to an “undisclosed location” over the weekend due to security concerns, Trudeau emerged from hiding on Monday to announce that he tested positive for Covid-19 – despite having had it before, and being triple-vaccinated. He then held a virtual press conference to denounce the protest. “Canadians were shocked, and frankly disgusted by the behavior of some people protesting in our nation’s capital,” he said. “We are not intimidated by those who hurl insults and abuse at small business workers and steal food from the homeless.”

He also referenced reports in the Canadian media that at least three protesters climbed onto the National War Memorial and danced on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and that a Nazi flag and a Confederate flag were spotted at the protest. “Nazi symbolism, racist imagery and desecration of war memorials” are not acceptable free speech but “an insult to memory and truth,” Trudeau said. “We won’t give in to those who fly racist flags, we won’t cave to those who engage in vandalism or dishonor the memory of our veterans.” Trudeau also appealed to the “nearly 90% of truckers who’ve gotten vaccinated” who he said were doing the right thing by continuing to work, saying that “the behavior on display this weekend does not represent you.” “You can rely on us to continue to stand with you and allow you to do your jobs safely,” the PM added.

80,000 is a big number…

• No 10 Set For U-turn Over Mandatory Covid Jabs For NHS Staff In England (G.)

Downing Street appears likely to drop its policy of dismissing frontline NHS and care staff in England who refuse Covid vaccinations, a minister has strongly indicated, after nursing and care organisations called for this to happen. A decision would be made “in the course of the next few days”, according to Simon Clarke, the chief secretary to the Treasury. He said the lower severity of the Omicron variant of Covid did “open a space” for the policy to be reversed. The apparent imminent U-turn came as the Royal College of Nursing argued that both the change in severity from Omicron and the number of NHS vacancies meant the mandatory vaccination policy should be dropped.

The National Care Association said it would also welcome a change of policy, while warning that many unvaccinated care staff had already lost their jobs in the run-up to the 1 April deadline. Speaking in a TV clip on a visit to Essex, Boris Johnson also indicated a likely change, saying Sajid Javid, the health secretary, “is saying a bit more later on about how you might deal with different variants of coronavirus because they have different implications when it comes to transmission”. The Guardian reported this month that an internal document drawn up by the Department of Health and Social Care said the growing evidence on the Omicron variant cast doubts over the new law’s “rationality” and “proportionality”.

Asked about reports of a change to the policy, Clarke told Sky News that ministers had hoped to find “the right balance between having the maximum impact for measures that support public safety in the face of the virus, but also have the minimum impact in terms of our wider freedoms as a society”. He added: “And it’s in that context that a decision was made last autumn to make sure we went ahead with the mandatory vaccination policy, and that was because, obviously, we had the Delta variant, which was extremely dangerous, and was taking a huge toll on our society, and we had to make sure that people going into hospital, very vulnerable people, whether they had Covid or another condition which required treatment, weren’t going to be faced with an increased risk of infection on the wards.

“We continue to monitor that situation very, very closely. What we know about Omicron is that it is much, much more transmissible but less severe – any decision that is taken this week will reflect that reality.

“..the signatories of the open letter to Spotify declared the episode a “mass-misinformation event” and used it as an example to bill Rogan as a menace to public health.”

• Why Joe Rogan Remains The World’s Most Popular Podcaster (Cheong)

While ‘The Joe Rogan Experience’ has enough content to drive itself, much of the public curiosity about the show has been fanned by the hatred the corporate media has for its host. Described by CNN in 2020 as “libertarian-leaning,” Rogan has voted for a wide variety of political candidates, including Libertarian Party nominees Ron Paul and Gary Johnson in 2012 and 2016, and even endorsed left-winger Bernie Sanders in the 2020 Democratic primaries. His politics are fairly middle of the road in terms of American politics. He’s fiscally conservative, but somewhat socially progressive, drawing the line when it comes to open borders, transgenderism in children, the participation of biologically male athletes in women’s sports, and high taxes. He’s also a strong supporter of free speech and the right to bear arms, which places him at odds with the majority of Democrats.

His remarks about transgenderism in sport became a bone of contention for Sanders’ progressive supporters, who described his views as “transphobic.” The subsequent outrage in gay, trans, and other communities over the senator’s embrace of Rogan’s endorsement was one of the more intricate and multifaceted political controversies of the election. In 2021, Rogan kicked the hornet’s nest when he was infected with coronavirus. Having been unvaccinated, he opted to use the antiparasitic drug ivermectin, monoclonal antibody therapy, and a host of other controversial treatments to aid his recovery. CNN claimed he had consumed “horse dewormer” – a point he took up with CNN fixture Dr. Sanjay Gupta when the neurosurgeon was a guest on his podcast. While ivermectin is used in veterinary medicine, it’s also approved for humans, and Rogan said it had been prescribed to him by a doctor – although the US Food and Drug Administration has never approved it as a treatment for Covid-19.

Rogan’s refusal to be vaccinated, his opposition to vaccine mandates, and his willingness to give airtime to guests who have been accused of “spreading medical misinformation” have resulted in numerous calls to get him deplatformed. More recently, he became the target of 270 “experts” – not all of whom, it should be noted, are medical professionals – who objected to the podcast having featured Dr. Robert Malone, one of the co-creators of the mRNA vaccine, because of the views he had expressed in it about the pandemic. Dr. Malone has been banned from Twitter for violating the platform’s Covid-19 misinformation policies, and the signatories of the open letter to Spotify declared the episode a “mass-misinformation event” and used it as an example to bill Rogan as a menace to public health.

‘Godfather of Grunge’ Neil Young then issued the platform with an ultimatum: that he would remove his music unless it removed Rogan, and then following through with his warning. Several other musicians, including Joni Mitchell, then followed suit. In an apparent concession, Spotify’s CEO announced new policies on “combating misinformation” about Covid-19, albeit without referencing Rogan by name. The streaming service will now make sure its creators “understand accountability” for posting “dangerous” content that dismisses Covid-19 as “a hoax” and “promotes or suggests” that coronavirus vaccines “are designed to cause death,” and listeners will be directed to “trusted sources” on these issues.

“Voices on the left are now up in arms because Rogan is showcasing the arguments of critics of Big Pharma.”

• The Left Tries to Deplatform . . . Critics of Big Pharma? (Geraghty)

You may love Joe Rogan, you may hate him, or you may not have strong feelings about him. I suspect that many of people who profess to hate Joe Rogan have either never listened to him or have listened to little more than a snippet. Zaid Jilani observed, “It’s interesting seeing so many conservatives rally around Joe Rogan when he’s probably more liberal than 90 percent of Americans. Agnostic dude who loves drug legalization, Bernie Sanders, thinks the CIA is awful, etc.” He later made the accurate point that the “average episode of Rogan is about [mixed-martial arts] or drugs and these folks think it’s like a Satanic cult ritual.”

Perhaps conservatives are rallying around Joe Rogan because they don’t need a figure to agree with 100 percent of their worldview in order to conclude that he is worth defending from an angry mob that desires censorship of differing views. It’s very clear that the people who are the most determined to “deplatform” Rogan — to force Spotify to cancel his show, and likely with that, get his videos off of YouTube as well — are battling a cartoon-like caricature that they’ve drawn in their heads. If you listen to Rogan defend his choices in a recently taped video, you’ll see that he’s not a lunkhead, and seems the opposite of a wide-eyed extremist ideologue, hungry to hammer a twisted narrative into brainwashed followers:

“There’s a lot of people who have a distorted perception of what I do — maybe based on soundbites or based on headlines of articles that are disparaging. The podcast has been accused of spreading dangerous misinformation. Specifically, about two episodes — a little about some other ones, but specifically about two. One with Dr. Peter McCullough and one with Dr. Robert Malone. Dr. Peter McCullough is a cardiologist, and he is the most published physician in his field in history. Dr. Robert Malone owns nine patents on the creation of MRNA-vaccine technology and is at least partially responsible for the creation of the technology that led to MRNA vaccines. Both these people are very highly credentialed, very intelligent, very accomplished people and they have an opinion that is different from the mainstream narrative. I wanted to hear what their opinion is. I had them on, and because of that, those episodes in particular, were labeled as being dangerous, had dangerous misinformation in them.

The problem I have with the term disinformation, especially today, is that many of the things we thought of as misinformation a short while ago are now accepted as fact. For instance, eight months ago, if you said, “If you get vaccinated, you can still catch Covid, and you can still spread Covid” — you would be removed from social media. They would ban you from certain platforms. Now, that’s accepted as fact. If you said, “I don’t think cloth masks work,” you would be banned from social media. Now, that’s openly and repeatedly stated on CNN. If you said I think it’s possible that Covid-19 came from a lab, you would be banned from many social-media platforms. Now that’s on the cover of Newsweek.* All of those theories, that at one point in time were banned, were openly discussed by those two men that I had on my podcast, that have been accused of “dangerous misinformation.” I do not know if they’re right. I don’t know, because I’m not a doctor, I’m not a scientist. I’m just a person who sits down, and talks to people, and has conversations with them. Do I get things wrong? Absolutely. I get things wrong. But I try to correct them. Whenever I get things wrong, I try to correct them. Because I’m interested in telling the truth.”

For a guy who’s supposed to be a dangerous megalomaniac who’s indoctrinating people into a hardline, deceitful ideology, Rogan seems awfully humble about what he knows and doesn’t know. De-platform Joe Rogan? We should give him a medal and hold him up as a role model for conducting probing, open-minded, respectful interviews. Want to know something spectacularly ironic? Drs. McCullough and Malone are opponents of Covid-19 vaccines in large part because of their skepticism and suspicion of the profit motive of big pharmaceutical companies. Voices on the left are now up in arms because Rogan is showcasing the arguments of critics of Big Pharma.

“..an impossibility unless the vaccine was interfering with building that titer or destroyed existing antibody titers if jabbed after being infected and recovered.”

• Since We’re Taking Shots…. (Denninger)

It is impossible to inject something without some of it ending up in the circulation — that is, in and around the endothelium. That begs the obvious question as to which is more-dangerous: A definite exposure of your endothelium to the spike from an injection or a possible one from infection if, and only if, you get severely hammered? Nobody knows and nobody has done the work to find out. Despite the signal in December of 2020 we went ahead anyway without first disproving that the balance of harms went the wrong way especially in healthy, low-risk individuals.

On top of this we knew very early on that there was no reduction in transmission from the jabs; a person who had a “breakthrough” was just as infectious (per Fauci and the CDC itself) and thus might be more-dangerous because by hiding symptoms you make the problem worse. If I do not know I’m sick I will not self-isolate in my home since I have no reason to suspect I’m infected. An inoculation that does not prevent infection, replication or transmission but prevents symptom expression is thus not only bad from a public health perspective its disastrous. Indeed one can reasonably make the argument that intentional blinding of symptoms is involuntary manslaughter. We have historical precedent for this, incidentally, in the fiasco surrounding the DTP vaccine in the 1970s and the twenty-fold higher case rate for pertussis today after the formula for that jab was changed to DTaP, a non-sterilizing inoculation that prevents neither infection or transmission. Do you think I can’t read history and the CDC’s own data on pertussis cases?

What’s worse is that we now know the jabs don’t work with any degree or durability at all. How do we know this? Because the CDC has proved it with their own contemporary data, that’s how. The >65 cohort is the most vaccinated in the United States. Indeed, the CDC says that 88.3% of those >65 have been fully vaccinated, and 64.3% have received boosters, that is, the third shot.

The proof they don’t work is that the CDC also reports that hospitalization among those >65 for Covid is roughly as high or higher this winter as it was last winter when there were no shots. With nearly 90% of that age cohort fully vaccinated across the entire United States if the jabs worked to prevent severe disease we would see a ratable decrease in hospitalization among that cohort. Indeed, since we know natural immunity is protective against severe disease for much longer than the jabs, at least one year, again by the CDC’s own data, if the jabs did nothing we’d expect to see a lower rate among that segment of the population simply because many of them already had the virus and survived. There are simply not enough unvaccinated and uninfected seniors remaining if the jabs work and yet there is in fact no decrease at all compared with last winter’s surge among the most-vaccinated population subgroup.

This strongly implies that what the jabs are doing is producing VEI (vaccine-enhanced infection); that is, causing actual harm and either wildly potentiating first infections or, far worse, destroying immunity from infection whether prior to or subsequent to vaccination such that people are getting the virus a second or subsequent time and not mildly either; they’re getting hammered since this is not relying on “infections”, it’s hospitalizations. We knew the latter was likely this summer, incidentally, because “N” protein seroprevalence in Britain flatlined during Delta — an impossibility unless the vaccine was interfering with building that titer or destroyed existing antibody titers if jabbed after being infected and recovered.

Never mind that there’s evidence these jabs may be back-boosting other common coronaviruses. That was known to be a risk in May of 2021. We see that in the data too; people showing up in the ER and Urgent Care with “covid-like illness” but they don’t have Covid, and a huge percentage of them are vaccinated. Are these jabs turning the common OC43 and HKU1 coronaviruses, that usually produce mild colds, into severe disease events? Maybe — and we knew they might in May of last year but didn’t bother to follow up on that either. Since OC43 is believed to have been the cause of a Covid-like pandemic in the 1890s if this proves up we will have screwed millions of Americans — or even perhaps tens of millions — instead of helping them.

“Once again our experience reinforces previous reports that effective [anti-retroviral drugs are] the key to controlling such events.”

• COVID-19-Infected HIV Patient Developed 21 Mutations (ET)

A South African woman suffering from “poorly controlled” HIV who also had COVID-19 for nine months saw the CCP virus develop at least 21 mutations while in her body, a recent preprint study found. The woman, 22, was able to overcome the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus which causes COVID-19, within six to nine weeks after she started taking anti-retroviral medication that is used to treat HIV, according to researchers at Stellenbosch and the University of KwaZulu-Natal. They concluded that “increased vigilance is warranted” among HIV patients who contract COVID-19 to “prevent the emergence” of COVID-19 variants. Notably, the Omicron variant was first discovered in South Africa in November 2021, and U.S. health officials say it’s now the dominant strain across the United States.

“This case, like others before, describes a potential pathway for the emergence of novel variants,” the scientists said in the pre-print study, adding that it is still a hypothesis and much more data is needed. “Our experience reinforces previous reports that effective anti-retroviral treatment is the key to controlling such events.” South Africa has the world’s largest HIV epidemic. About 8.2 million of out its 60 million population is infected with the virus. According to the researchers, the patient observed in the study had developed around 10 mutations on the CCP virus spike protein, which allows it to bind to cells, along with 11 other mutations. Some of the mutations were similar to those seen in the Omicron and Lambda variants, whereas others were consistent with mutations that allow the virus to bypass antibodies.

“Once again our experience reinforces previous reports that effective [anti-retroviral drugs are] the key to controlling such events. Once HIV replication is brought under control and immune reconstitution commences, rapid clearance of [the CCP virus] is achieved, probably even before full immune reconstitution occurs,” they said. “This underscores the broader point that gaps in the HIV care cascade need to be closed which will benefit other conditions and public health problems, too, including COVID-19.”

Twitter thread with 11 clips. I lifted out nrs 7 and 8, where Dr. Nagase describes the process that -potentially- allows mRNA to enter and transform your DNA.

• Documents via FOI from Pfizer (Delaney)

Documents via FOI from Pfizer… from over 40000 test subjects 31% suffered death & life long complications. Information was SENT to government health authorities in APRIL 2021

I can’t read the name Nuland without getting shivers.

• Newly Released State Memos Undercut Democrats’ Ukraine Impeachment Story (JTN)

Just months before Joe Biden forced his firing, Ukraine’s chief prosecutor was told by U.S. State Department officials that they were “impressed” with his anti-corruption plan and fully supportive of his work, according to newly released memos that cast doubt on a key Democrat impeachment narrative. During former President Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial two years ago, House Democrats alleged that Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin was fired in March 2016 because State officials were widely displeased with his anti-corruption efforts and not because Shokin’s office was investigating the Ukrainian gas firm that had given then-Vice President Biden’s son Hunter a lucrative job.

But the memos obtained by Just the News and the Southeastern Legal Foundation under a Freedom of Information Act request show senior State Department officials — including then-Secretary of State John Kerry — were sending the opposite message to Shokin the summer before his firing. “We have been impressed with the ambitious reform and anti-corruption agenda of your government,” then-Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland personally wrote Shokin in an official letter dated June 9, 2015 that was delivered to the prosecutor two days later by then-U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt.

Nuland, now President Biden’s undersecretary of state, wrote that “Secretary Kerry asked me to reply on his behalf” to let Shokin know he enjoyed the full support of the United States as he set out to fight endemic corruption in the former Soviet republic. “The ongoing reform of your office, law enforcement, and the judiciary will enable you to investigate and prosecute corruption and other crimes in an effective, fair, and transparent manner,” Nuland added. “The United States fully supports your government’s efforts to fight corruption and other crimes in an effective, fair and transparent manner.”

“..this Nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.”

• JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass by Oliver Stone (Curtin)

Two of the greatest speeches ever delivered by an American president bookend this extraordinary documentary film. It opens with President John F. Kennedy giving the commencement speech at American University on June 10, 1963 and it closes with his civil rights speech to the American people the following day. It is a deft artistic touch that suggests the brevity of JFK’s heroic efforts for world peace and domestic racial equality and justice before he was assassinated in a public execution in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963. In the former anti-war speech, he called for the end to the Cold War with the Soviet Union, the halt to the arms race, and the abolishment of war and its weapons, especially nuclear. He said:

“What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children – not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women – not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.” In the latter address to the American people, having just sent National Guard troops to the University of Alabama to make sure two black students were admitted despite the racist objections of Governor George Wallace, his words transcended the immediate issue at the university and called for the end to the immoral and illegal discrimination against African Americans in every area of the nation’s life. He said:

“One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free. They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice. They are not yet freed from social and economic oppression. And this Nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.” Having framed the documentary thus, Oliver Stone and the screenwriter James DiEugenio do a masterful job of explaining what really happened in the years of Kennedy’s short presidency, why he was such a great threat to the CIA and the military-industrial complex, what really happened when they killed him, and how the Warren Commission, the CIA, and the corporate media have worked hand-in-hand to this day to cover up the truth.

The current two-hour version of JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass will be followed in a month or so by a more detailed four-hour version. The importance of this film is twofold: It establishes an updated historical record since the Assassination Records Review Board (AARB) was established as a result of Stone’s 1991 breakthrough film, JFK, which forced the release of previously hidden documents, and, more importantly, it emphatically shows why JFK’s assassination is crucial for understanding the United States today. For without a clear and unambiguous accounting of why he was killed and by whom (I do not mean the actual shooters), and who in the government and media has covered it up, we are doomed to repeat the past as this country has been doing ever since.

“Russia has already declared that banning it from the Swift system for international monetary transactions will result in the immediate halt of Russian energy supplies to Europe.”

• Checkmate in Ukraine (Ritter)

Despite the repeated Western warnings, Russia is highly unlikely to invade Ukraine — at least not yet. Instead, Russia appears to be entering a new phase of crisis management that seeks to exploit the weaknesses in the U.S./NATO alliance highlighted by their written responses to its demands. First, Russia will keep the diplomatic option open, but on its terms. Moscow has already engaged in so-called Normandy Format talks involving Russia, France, Germany and Ukraine over the ongoing crisis in Donbas. In the initial meeting, all parties agreed to respect the cease-fire in effect and to meet again in 10 days — the exact opposite of any imminent invasion by Russia. Note the absence of the U.S. and NATO from these talks.

Next, Russia will turn the threat of sanctions against the U.S. and Europe. Russia has already declared that banning it from the Swift system for international monetary transactions will result in the immediate halt of Russian energy supplies to Europe. Russia is expected to sign major economic agreements with China soon that will further insulate it from economic sanctions. China has made it clear it supports Russia in the current crisis, recognizing that if the West prevails against Russia, it will soon face a similar attack. Finally, Russia will exploit U.S. hypocrisy on spheres of influence and military alliances by entering military relationships with Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua and deploying a naval squadron to the Caribbean, with the potential for additional force deployments in the future.

With these three measures, Russia seeks to further isolate the U.S. from NATO and Europe. In the end, the U.S. will be confronted with one of two options, either agree to trade NATO’s open-door policy for Russian agreement not to deploy into the Western Hemisphere, or force a confrontation that will result in a Russian invasion of Ukraine that is seen by Europe as being the fault of the U.S.. The chess pieces are already being moved. While the U.S. may not see it, a Russian checkmate can be predicted sooner, rather than later.

“..his replacement glue-on vanity eyebrows are still stuck on a delivery truck somewhere..”

• Trudeau Tests Positive For Fascism (BBee)

From an undisclosed hiding place outside Canada’s capital city, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau confirmed for the world that he has tragically tested positive for fascism. “I took the fascism test this morning,” said Trudeau, beginning to sob. “And the test came back positive. I understand this may come as devastating news to freedom-loving Canadians, and I am here to assure you that everything will be ok… after I crush you underneath the jackboot of government tyranny until you learn to start obeying me.” “Together, we will achieve strength through unity, and unity through faith. In SCIENCE.”

According to sources, Trudeau will remain in his hiding place under quarantine until all the scary protesting truckers go away, after which he will emerge to grind his people into the very dust until they accept his vision for a glorious fascist future for Canada. Fortunately, his plans have been delayed as his replacement glue-on vanity eyebrows are still stuck on a delivery truck somewhere, and the fascist dictator refuses to be seen without them.

• Merck’s COVID-19 pill encourages sexually actively men “to use a reliable method of contraception correctly and consistently during treatment and for at least 3 months after the last dose of molnupiravir. The risk beyond 3 months after the last dose of molnupiravir is unknown..“

• Paxlovid interacts with 32 classes of drugs. Not 32 drugs….32 classes.

• Both are apparently less toxic than ivermectin per the FDA.

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The Narrative of Loss

Sep 122021

September 12, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 5:15 pm Finance Tagged with: 9/11, Delta, fictitious, JFK, lies, loss, narrative, Silverstein, vaccine, WTC 13 Responses »

Thomas Cole The Course of Empire – The Savage State 1834

There is nothing wrong with people remembering their departed loved ones; mourning has a beneficial function for the human mind -and body. It’s a bit different when it becomes a group process, or even one of an entire nation, especially when a vast media complex gets involved to tell readers and viewers what to think.

And when one of the eulogists is the guy who used the deaths to inflict death upon millions of others, it has become real different. Mourning, in its optimal form, binds people together. And if you can’t, or don’t mourn all deaths, it has lost that form. It has become as divisive as the initial cause of all the dying.

Does any American think that whoever killed 3,000 people in New York, should want or expect 2-3-4 million people to die in retribution over the following 20 years? Do you even have a right to mourn your own lost innocent lives if you neglect all other lost innocent lives?

I remember watching a video with Larry Silverstein, who had bought all -or most- of the WTC complex just 3 months before 9/11 (always found that a weird detail), saying at some point during 9/11 the fire department decided to “pull the building”. The video is still up. And I thought: you can only “pull” a building if you loaded it up with explosives first, which for a building the size of WTC7 takes days. Why on earth would you have done that in early September or before??

That’s when I stopped reading 9/11 stories, and trying to figure out what really happened, because it was too clear that we would never find out. It is JFK’s murder all over again. Lots of speculation, but never an answer. Just an endless barrage of deceit.

And lo and behold, we appear to be walking into exactly the same kind of barrage again, eyes wide open. This one has made, at last count, some 655,000 victims in the US alone over the past 20 months. As the country mourns 3,000 victims from 20 years ago. And while the last great deceit led to revenge on people half a world away, this time the target is “our own people”.

Dr. Robert Malone yesterday said: “I have seen reliable estimates that there have been 450,000 excess US deaths attributable to USG blocking early use of ivermectin and HCQ.” Other sources claim some 200,000 have died from the vaccines (and many more will follow). You keeping track of the numbers? We’re at 650,000 out of 655,000 already. And there’s more (or less, if you want). “Covid cases in UK are 26 times higher than a year go. ”

Does the virus even really exist? 7 Laboratories in US Can’t Find COVID-19 in One of 1,500 Positive Tests. It doesn’t even appear to have been isolated either. Just people with influenza A or B jotted down as covid.

And even if the coronavirus exists, how dangerous is it? More and more claim that the Delta variant, which is said to be almost all virus left, is fictitious, and merely a term used as a way to cover up vaccine deaths.

Meanwhile, Moderna is rushing to get a vaccine approved for 5-11 year olds, and working on one for 6 months old and up. Because they might infect their grandparents, or something. Case fatality rates of these kids are infinitesimal, much lower than the risks of the vaccines for them, but The Science has been abandoned by those who claim to represent it. And the grandparents might think: better me dead than my grandchild, but octogenarian Fauci sure ain’t going to ask them what they think.

That the vaccinated are doing much better than the unvaccinated, either in infections or in transmission, is a long dead mantra. But the idea that the vaccines prevent severe disease or death, is also rapidly vanishing. You’ve been spritzed with something that will be a threat for the rest of your life, and your best defense is to get fit and spruce up your immune system as best you can. Take vit. D, zinc and ivermectin, if you can still get it.

What remains is the deceit, from 9/11 to Covid, the government lies that by now should be expected, and the media lies that.. well, should also. Maybe that’s why we have the interwebs, so we can go out and find a kernel of truth in between the deceit. Even if 95% of people use it to do the exact opposite.

Time to start mourning the people who die of or with Covid, and who die of the vaccines, once you’re done with 9/11. And see that they didn’t have to die, that it was a political choice. You may be able to use that grief, and your nascent understanding of why they died, to make sure not more others die of fully preventable causes. Any Americans -and Europeans- who die from now on in will be like the Afghans and Iraqis and Syrians etc. who died post-9/11. Victims of failed -or worse- policy.

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Debt Rattle July 21 2021

Jul 212021

July 21, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:52 am Finance Tagged with: Australia, Clapton, Facebook, Fauci, FDA, JFK, misinformation, Oliver Stone, Pfizer, Rand Paul, statins, terrorist 82 Responses »

René Magritte Mysteries of the horizon (a.k.a. The Masterpiece) 1955

• Debate Erupts Between Trusted Medical Doctor And Dr. Fauci (Bbee)

• Fauci Loses It With Sen. Rand Paul Over Wuhan Lab Funding Accusations (RT)

• Pfizer Granted Priority Review for FDA Vaccine Approval (Claus)

• Over Half Of Australia’s Population Now Under Stay-at-Home Orders (RT)

• NSW Health Official Tells Australians To Refrain From Talking To People (RT)

• More Than 200 Facebook Groups Actively Circulating Vaccine Misinformation (F.)

• World Champion Boxer To Retire Due To Introduction Of Covid Passports (Mir.)

• Statins for Cancer and COVID; Beyond Ivermectin

• Biden Regime Jails a ‘Domestic Terrorist’ (Julie Kelly)

• The Most Splendid Housing Bubbles in Canada (WS)

• Lawmakers Sound Alarm Over China Purchases Of US Farmland (ZH)

• Oliver Stone’s New JFK Assassination Doc Is Being Ignored By The MSM (RT)

Unvaxxed

Unvaccinated…the next steps pic.twitter.com/A8H2rysMpW

— Camus (@camus37) July 20, 2021

Might as well give it a Babylon Bee overdo. Fauci hides behind semantics.

• Debate Erupts Between Trusted Medical Doctor And Dr. Fauci (Bbee)

During an explosive Senate hearing this week, Senator and trusted medical doctor Rand Paul argued with Anthony Fauci—a dangerous conspiracy theorist who thinks vaccines don’t work and that the government is not funding the creation of medical abominations in secret labs. “You are a LIAR!” said Rand Paul, pointing gravely at Dr. Fauci. “You are a LYING LIAR who LIES!” Fauci, who was initially taken aback by the accusation, immediately recovered and said: “NO! It is YOU who is the LIAR, you LIAR!” Fauci then bobbed his head back and forth in a very sassy way and snapped his fingers in a zig-zag pattern.

“OOOOooo! Rand Paul got OWNED!” said CNN. “OOOOooo! Fauci got DESTROYED!” said Fox News. The C-SPAN segment immediately went viral, leading to more requests for the two men to face off in another confrontation. C-SPAN then announced they would be organizing a pay-per-view rematch, in which the trusted medical doctor and Dr. Fauci would call each other liars in an octagon-shaped cage. Unfortunately, Fauci backed out at the last minute after C-SPAN instituted a strict “no bioweapons” policy for the face-off.

Full exchange between Sen. Rand Paul and Dr. Fauci.

Here's the full exchange between Sen. Rand Paul and Dr. Fauci. pic.twitter.com/cxlgIV6qJD

— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) July 20, 2021

“You take an animal virus and you increase its transmissibility to humans, you’re saying that’s not gain-of-function?” Paul asked. “That is correct..”

• Fauci Loses It With Sen. Rand Paul Over Wuhan Lab Funding Accusations (RT)

White House coronavirus adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci has told Kentucky Senator Rand Paul “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” after Paul accused him of lying about his alleged role in controversial virus research in China. Questioning Fauci during a Senate Health Committee hearing on Tuesday about the government’s coronavirus response, Sen. Paul (R) implied that Fauci lied to Congress in May when he said that the National Institute of Health (NIH) did not fund so-called ‘gain-of-function’ research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, believed by many to be the source of the coronavirus pandemic. “I have never lied before the Congress, and I do not retract that statement,” Fauci replied. Paul presented a 2015 academic paper that asserts such research did take place at the Wuhan lab, and was partly funded by the NIH.

One US scientist has reviewed the paper and concluded that the research within “seemed to meet the definition of gain-of-function,” — but that it did not lead to the creation of the novel coronavirus. The term ‘gain-of-function’ refers to modifying and increasing the transmissibility of animal viruses to better study their effect on humans. “This paper that you’re referring to was judged … up and down the chain as not being gain-of-function,” Fauci responded, before Paul interjected. “You take an animal virus and you increase its transmissibility to humans, you’re saying that’s not gain-of-function?” Paul asked. “That is correct, and Senator Paul, you do not know what you are talking about, quite frankly, and I want to say that officially,” Fauci snapped back.

Despite the paper’s own definition of gain-of-function research seemingly being the same as Paul’s, the White House scientist still insisted that the research outlined in the 2015 paper “is not” the same thing. The paper itself does not prove that the Covid-19 coronavirus was created in the Wuhan lab, but it does imply that similar research on bat-borne coronaviruses was carried out there, with the NIH’s financial support. Such research used to be done in the US, but was paused by the Obama administration in 2014 and subsequently outsourced to China. Between 2015 and 2019, the Wuhan lab received, albeit indirectly, more than $800,000 in grants from the NIH. $600,000 in grant payments were given to the institute via EcoHealth Alliance, a private research firm, and $216,000 via the University of California, Irvine.

Fauci GoF
https://twitter.com/i/status/1401891543322185728

Letter to Do: criminal referral

Sen. @RandPaul: “I will be sending a letter to the Department of Justice asking for a criminal referral" into Dr. Fauci
pic.twitter.com/Gh2GBoTTLc

— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) July 21, 2021

As the vaccines are very clearly failing, now is of course the time to speed up the process, because that is what people are not yet allowed to know.

• Pfizer Granted Priority Review for FDA Vaccine Approval (Claus)

Last Friday, the US Food and Drug Administration granted pharmaceutical companies Pfizer and BioNTech priority review designation for their coronavirus vaccine for those who are age 16 and older. This step marks the last hurdle that must be cleared in order for the vaccine — the very first to come onto the world scene, being approved for emergency use back in December of 2020 — to be distributed and marketed like any other inoculation. Until now, the products, like the other two coronavirus vaccines used in the US, have had emergency use authorization (EUA) only — a legal sticking point that has led to some questioning their efficacy and safety and adding to the vaccine hesitancy that continues to plague some areas of the country and the world.

Anti-vaccine proponents argue that they refuse to accept a product that has not been fully cleared by the FDA, and many corporate entities along with the federal government, will not require coronavirus inoculations while they are still under EUA-only status. This status allows for vaccine doses to be shipped to hospitals, clinics, pharmacies and other organizations to be administered to the general public — but not distributed and marketed. Although the vaccine came out in a little more than 300 days since the genome of the virus was determined — an amazing feat of modern medical technology — the perceived delay in the granting of full authorization has led many to speculate that this feeds into an anti-vaccination narrative which may be partly responsible for the spike in infections in the last month worldwide.

As the Delta variant, first detected in India, continues to sweep across the world, the lack of formal approval of the vaccines has sparked concern that a window of opportunity may have been lost, as people for the most part are allowed to gather together without restrictions across the US while sizable pockets of vaccine resistance remain. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported on Friday that the number of new coronavirus cases were up by nearly 70% in just one week, while hospitalizations are up by nearly 36%, after weeks of steeply declining numbers all over the US. The Delta variant appears to be approximately 225% more transmissible than the original strains of the coronavirus. NPR reports that one recent study from China found that those who are infected with Delta have on average about 1,000 times more copies of the virus in their respiratory tracts than those who were infected with the original strain.

Not only that but they also become infectious earlier in the course of their illness, leading to much more transmission since many do not realize they have become infected. The emergency use authorization vaccines that are currently on the market, however, are strikingly effective against the Delta variant. [..] At this point, experts say the picture looks fairly rosy. “The level of antibodies seem to be holding up pretty well, so we have to watch and see what happens over the course of the coming months,” stated National Institutes of Health’s Francis Collins, in an interview with NPR. The New York-based pharma giant must now go through a rigorous review process that experts believe will be completed in January of 2022. Even with expedited handling of the approval process, speeded up from its usual 10 months, the lightning-fast spread of the Delta variant, which is so many more times as transmissible as the original coronavirus, is rushing past that timeline.

Australia is done. Pull the plug and let it pour down the drain. The only things people there think are “wrong” in their isolation campaign are in not building quarantine accomodation, and in not ordering vaccines fast enough. Blind as bats.

• Over Half Of Australia’s Population Now Under Stay-at-Home Orders (RT)

South Australia has entered a snap lockdown of seven days, joining neighboring Victoria and New South Wales as the third state to implement stay-at-home orders, with half of the country’s population now under restrictions. South Australia entered a week-long lockdown to quell a spike in coronavirus cases at 6pm local time on Tuesday. Premier Steven Marshall defended the decision to impose harsh measures, stating that “we hate to put these restrictions in place, but we have just one chance to get this right” to avoid an extended lockdown period and cases spiraling out of control. Under the new rules, all South Australian citizens are required to stay at home unless they are essential workers or need to purchase necessary produce or attend medical appointments.

They are allowed outside to exercise for a maximum of 90 minutes and within a 2.5km (1.5 mile) radius of their home. All educational institutions will be shut and transition to online learning. The decision to impose a strict snap lockdown comes after five coronavirus cases were reported, with the fifth being an isolated incident from the other four cases. All of the cases have been confirmed to be the Delta variant, which is 60% more transmissible than other variants, according to Public Health England. As of Tuesday, some 13 million Australians, over half of the country’s population, are under a stay-at-home mandate. Neighboring Victoria extended its lockdown until July 27. It was intended to last only five days, however, new Covid-19 cases are still being recorded there.

How crazy can one get and still be taken serious? “She was named New South Wales ‘Woman of the Year’ for 2021..”

• NSW Health Official Tells Australians To Refrain From Talking To People (RT)

With Sydney still in lockdown amid a handful of new Covid-19 cases, the top health official for New South Wales has called for a new level of social-distancing inhumanity: not having conversations with other people. After reporting a whopping 78 new Covid-19 cases and one death in the state, Chief Health Officer Dr. Kerry Chant told reporters on Tuesday that Australians shouldn’t engage in conversations, even if both parties were wearing masks, and regardless of vaccination status. “Whilst it’s human nature to engage in conversation with others, to be friendly, unfortunately, this is not the time to do that,” Chant said. So, even if you run into your next-door neighbor in the shopping center … don’t start up a conversation. Now is the time for minimizing your interactions with others.

Masks don’t afford “total protection,” Chant added, so residents must avoid talking to each other and “be absolutely sure that, as we go about our daily lives, we do not come into contact with anyone else that would pose a risk.” Since the pandemic began, Australia has repeatedly staved off the spread of Covid-19 with some of the world’s most draconian lockdown measures, in pursuit of driving new cases down to zero even at the expense of civil liberties. Lockdowns have been reimposed recently, as infections flared up again. In Melbourne, for instance, just about everything other than grocery stores and hospitals was shuttered for nearly four months, and the city entered its fifth lockdown last week. Alice Springs ordered a new lockdown in June after just one new infection was reported.

Much like the White House’s chief medical adviser, Dr. Anthony Fauci, in the US, Chant has been championed by mainstream media outlets as a pandemic-fighting hero. The Guardian referred to the doctor as “unflappable” and a “secret weapon.” She was named New South Wales ‘Woman of the Year’ for 2021. Social media critics weren’t charmed by her advice against having conversations, however. “Unbelievable,” TV presenter and author Tonia Buxton said. “Don’t behave like a human, forget humanity, just do as you are told.”

DON’T ACT LIKE A HUMAN. DON’T TALK TO YOUR FRIENDS

SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA.

DON’T ACT LIKE A HUMAN. DON’T TALK TO YOUR FRIENDS, EVEN WHEN MASKED. DON’T BE FRIENDLY. THIS IS NOT THE TIME. pic.twitter.com/iiPgz2D8Bb

— NoRisk_NoReward (@noreward_norisk) July 20, 2021

Start reading, hoping to find what this misinformation is. Nothing until the last paragraph -apparently you’re supposed to know(?!) but I don’t, where someone says “I truly believe that they are out to kill people with this shot..” Now I still don’t know what misinformation they talk about. Pretty sure that’s on purpose.

• More Than 200 Facebook Groups Actively Circulating Vaccine Misinformation (F.)

After President Biden came down hard on Facebook last week over coronavirus vaccine misinformation, the company responded with almost equal force, insisting in no uncertain terms that it wasn’t responsible for how that type of content has spread on the web. But new research released Tuesday suggests Facebook does indeed remain a place where such misinformation is circulating: Media Matters for America, a liberal tech watchdog organization, says it has found 284 active private and public Facebook Groups currently distributing vaccine misinformation, more than double the amount the researchers found in April. Over a half million users belong to these groups. Media Matters identified six groups with more than 15,000 members, and most of those half-dozen groups are private, underscoring an on-going problem for the social network.

These groups are invite only, making them harder to track and a more fertile ground for misinformation to spread than public ones, which invite more immediate scrutiny. The discussion around Facebook’s role in handling vaccine misinformation was heightened on Friday when President Biden made stark comments about his views on the company’s culpability. “They’re killing people,” he said. The White House has since tried to soften its stance on the matter, and Facebook raced to point to efforts to combat vaccine misinformation. In a blog post released a day after President Biden’s comments, Guy Rosen, Facebook’s vice president of intregrity, said the platform had removed more than 18 million pieces of Covid-19 information since the pandemic started and limited the spread of 167 million pieces its fact checkers judged as inaccurate.

More broadly, Facebook has introduced new tools for users who control Groups, though those features are only as effective as those group leaders want them to be. Groups represent an enormous avenue of growth for Facebook—and an unending source of problems for it. Over the last few years, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has clearly emphasized Groups’ place within the app, and the company launched a redesign in 2019 to encourage their use. Even public Groups tend to encourage more intimate and more engaged conversations than on Facebook’s core Newsfeed, exactly what the company has sought to foster. But Groups have proven to be problematic hotbeds, used to do things such as spread Qanon content and white supremacy posts.

The largest group identified by Media Matters is one called “Canadian Deaths and Adverse Reaction,” which numbers almost 95,000 users. The researchers unearthed a number of posts containing conspiracy theories, including one falsely stating that the vaccines are part of a secret ongoing experimental trial. One user in another large group, Covid19 Vaccine Victims & Families, which has 46,4000 members, wrote this: “I truly believe that they are out to kill people with this shot…I think it causes people who have health issues to have [sic] make it worse and those with no health issues I think this jab is also giving people illnesses they never had. People need to wake up and say no to the jab.”

Tucker VAERS

Tucker on how our leaders want us to shut up & not ask questions pic.twitter.com/pU7FaddCBl

— Camus (@camus37) July 20, 2021

He won’t be alone.

• World Champion Boxer To Retire Due To Introduction Of Covid Passports (Mir.)

World champion boxer Sunny Edwards has vowed to retire if Covid-19 vaccine passports are introduced in September. Boris Johnson announced yesterday that Covid-19 passports will be required for nightclubs and venues with large crowds, which could signal a passport being required at sporting events such as boxing later on in the year. And newly crowned British world champion Edwards has claimed he could hang up his gloves in protest. “Looks like I’m retiring from the game in September.” Edwards posted on Twitter in response to the announcement. The announcement could signal an increase in the uptake of vaccinations across the UK, in particular amongst sports stars who could be required to take the vaccine in order to compete in the future unless they are given immunity from the policy that will be introduced.

Several boxing stars have been caught up with vaccine debates during the pandemic, including undisputed super-lightweight champion Josh Taylor who recently defeated Jose Ramirez in Las Vegas to claim the belts and remain undefeated. He has also posted on Twitter against the idea of vaccine passports, slamming the rules as a ‘dictatorship’ which could signal his stance to any future rules that are introduced into boxing. “Do as [sic] your told or be excluded from society! #Dictatorship ” Taylor posted on his Twitter page today after the announcement. He also responded to a fan who questioned his stance on the passport and whether his choice to do so was an example of freedom.

“The fact you’re being told to take something in order to live life, simply isn’t freedom! It’s oppression.” Taylor said. The pandemic has had a damaging effect on boxing in recent weeks with Tyson Fury’s outbreak in camp causing the third face-off in the ring against Deontay Wilder to be rescheduled for October 9. Despite reports of the ‘Gypsy King’ testing positive himself for the virus, he was pictured greeting fans in Las Vegas amid rumours that he may soon be returning to the UK after the trilogy fight broke down. The lineal heavyweight champion also refused his second vaccine ahead of the fight, after he relayed fears to his team of suffering with ill-effects ahead of his attempt to defeat Wilder for the second time in two years.

Interesting, but statins?

• Statins for Cancer and COVID; Beyond Ivermectin

When my friend contracted Glioblastoma, I reacted by researching what else could be done for him – scientifically. I went through PubMed, and I read the latest studies. I read accounts of medical professionals who survived their terminal cancers. And I found patterns. One concept that arose was the use of repurposed drugs IN ADDITION to the standard of care. Another was that Cancer Stem Cells, CSCs, were very real and could reseed cancer. These roots of cancer were stimulated to spread and regrow with cutting into the tumor [Surgery], poisoning it [Chemotherapy], and radiating it [Radiation Therapy]. I realized, to my horror, our own best treatment was making cancers resistant and causing them to return, often fatally. So why was this information hidden? Everyone should know this.

When I found that Dr. Ben Williams, a Harvard-educated professor, had cured his Glioblastoma using a cocktail of repurposed drugs, I knew my friend had a chance to do the same. And it was up to me to get him this information. I found that a combination of four common drugs, Atorvastatin, Mebendazole, Metformin, and Doxycycline, could almost double the expected GBM survival time when added to the standard of care based upon a study by Dr. Agrawal published in a peer-reviewed medical journal. In addition, these four drugs had been used safely, for decades, to treat other diseases. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6610246/ As I dug deeper, I realized that instead of using this cocktail as a last-ditch effort to save a person from cancer after it has already developed, WHAT IF ONE USED IT TO PREVENT CANCER from ever developing?

I searched Amazon. I found no physicians had written about this to the general public except for Dr. Raymond Chang in 2014. He wrote a book, “Beyond the Magic Bullet.” Dr. Ben Williams, a PhD, had written about his personal experience in beating his GBM with repurposed drugs in “Surviving Terminal Cancer.” These books, unfortunately, had very thin readerships. Finally, a magnificent documentary was made that interviews both of these men, “Surviving Terminal Cancer.” However, very few people have watched this. Most who do, have Glioblastoma, a disease which afflicts about 10,000 Americans each year – people like Beau Biden, people like John McCain, and now my friend Evan.

Only 25 % survive longer than one year. Less than 5% make it past five years. And Ben Williams has now survived 26 years. His friend Professor Richard Gerber has now survived 13 years and uses repurposed drugs. Richard followed Ben Williams’ strategy.

“And therein lies the real crime: Paul Hodgkins, a working-class American who took a bus on the 900-mile journey to the nation’s capital to support his president and protest a clearly rigged election, defiled the ruling class’ palace with a Trump flag.”

• Biden Regime Jails a ‘Domestic Terrorist’ (Julie Kelly)

“Paul Hodgkins is not my enemy.” Fighting back tears, Patrick Leduc, an attorney representing a man charged in connection with the January 6 protest at the Capitol, made that statement in a dramatic court hearing Monday morning. Leduc, by the way, is no snowflake. On Tuesday, the 33-year-old U.S. Army reservist will be deployed to the Middle East for his third tour. Leduc cited his military oath—to protect the country from “against all enemies, foreign and domestic”—to refute the government’s accusation that Paul Hodgkins, 38, is a domestic terrorist. “Words have meaning,” Leduc told U.S. District Court Judge Randoph Moss. “I have been shot at by real terrorists. If we’re going to label this as domestic terrorism, where do we draw that line?”

Sadly, after listening to Monday’s proceedings, I must conclude there is no line. Americans on the political Right are considered an enemy no less lethal than al-Qaeda and minus the civil libertarians to defend them. It’s clear the Biden regime, in cooperation with federal judges, will stop at nothing to destroy the lives of people who protested the 2020 presidential election. This includes people like Paul Hodgkins, who was sentenced to eight months in prison for denouncing what his government was about to do on January 6—certify a rigged, corrupt presidential election—and for supporting Donald Trump. Hodgkins, who lives in a working-class neighborhood in Tampa, took a bus alone from his home in central Florida to Washington, D.C. to attend Donald Trump’s January 6 speech.

After the speech, he walked to Capitol Hill. He later said he had no intention of going inside the building but got caught up in the moment. Like many pro-Trump protesters, Hodgkins did not bring a weapon. He did not assault a police officer or damage any property. He was inside the building for roughly 22 minutes, entered the Senate chamber, hoisted a “Trump 2020” flag, took some selfies, and left. Nonetheless, law enforcement arrested Hodgkins in Tampa on February 16 and charged him with four misdemeanors and one felony count of obstruction of an official proceeding. Joe Biden’s Justice Department has added the obstruction charge to roughly 200 misdemeanor cases so federal prosecutors can get jail time for Capitol defendants.

[..] Paul Hodgkins, who had nothing much to start with, will now lose everything. He will live the rest of his life as a convicted felon. A broken man railroaded by a broken country. But it was clear on social media that the bloodlust of the Left still is unsatiated. Destroying him isn’t enough; they want heads to roll. “We are a country ruled by cancel culture now,” Leduc told me. “There is no compassion or grace.”

You better look good than feel good.

• The Most Splendid Housing Bubbles in Canada (WS)

At least the Bank of Canada is officially acknowledging the craziness of the Canadian housing market, which has been deemed to be the second biggest housing bubble in the world, behind New Zealand, whose central bank also officially acknowledged its housing bubble, and stopped QE cold turkey, unlike the Fed, which has refused to officially acknowledge anything. Starting last October, the Bank of Canada began the process of ending its asset purchases. Since then, it stopped buying mortgage-backed securities, unwound its holdings of repos and Treasury bills, and cut the amount of its weekly purchases of Government of Canada bonds for the third time, from C$5 billion per week last year to C$2 billion per week now. The assets on its balance sheet dropped from C$575 billion in March to C$487 billion as of last week. And in its pronouncements, the housing bubble looms large.

[..] The Teranet-National Bank House Price Index tracks prices of single-family houses through “sales pairs,” similar to the Case-Shiller Home Price Index in the US, comparing the price of a house that sold in the current month to the price of the same house when it sold previously. Since it tracks how many more Canadian dollars it takes to buy the same house over time, it is a measure of house price inflation. In the Greater Toronto Area, the house price spike “decelerated”: In June, the index jumped by 2.7% from May, but that crazy increase (annualized 32%!) was the slowest increase since March. Year-over-year, the index jumped by 15.9%. Note the decline in house prices in 2017, and the wavering that followed, until the BoC opened its vault:

All charts here are on the same scale as the chart for Vancouver, with more white space appearing at the top as we go down the list, indicating the slower price increases over the past 20 years, compared to Vancouver. In Hamilton, Ontario, house prices spiked by 3.8% in June from May, and by a mind-boggling 28.0% year-over-year, thank you Bank of Canada hallelujah. But now the BoC, with an eye on this exponential increase in house price inflation, is pulling back its radical monetary policies. Here too, the housing market had started to decline and waver in 2017, and it was the BoC’s pandemic policies that triggered this spike:

1/3 for China, 1/3 for Bill Gates, 1/3 for Monsanto.

• Lawmakers Sound Alarm Over China Purchases Of US Farmland (ZH)

A group of bipartisan lawmakers are sounding the alarm over foreign purchases of prime US agricultural real estate, in an effort to lessen China’s influence on the US economy. Recent legislation advanced by House lawmakers warns that China’s presence in the American food supply poses a national security risk, while key Senators have expressed interest in keeping American farms in American hands, according to Politico. The debate over farm ownership comes amid broader efforts by Congress and the Biden administration to curb the nation’s economic reliance on China, especially in key industries like food, semiconductors and minerals deemed crucial to the supply chain. The call for tighter limits on who owns America’s farms has come from a wide range of political leaders, from former Vice President Mike Pence to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), after gaining momentum seeded in farm states.

“America cannot allow China to control our food supply,” said Pence during a Wednesday speech at the Heritage Foundation in which he urged President Biden and Congress to “end all farm subsidies for land owned by foreign nationals.” By the beginning of 2020, Chinese owners controlled approximately 192,000 agricultural acres in the US, worth around $1.9 billion – including land used for farming, ranching and forestry, according to the Department of Agriculture. It’s a small but growing percentage of the nearly 900 million acres of total US farmland – with the USDA reporting in 2018 that China’s agricultural investments have grown more than tenfold since 2009.

“The Communist Party has actively supported investments in foreign agriculture as part of its “One Belt One Road” economic development plans, aiming to control a greater piece of China’s food supply chain. “The current trend in the U.S. is leading us toward the creation of a Chinese-owned agricultural land monopoly,” Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.) warned during a recent House Appropriations hearing.= The committee unexpectedly adopted Newhouse’s amendment to the Agriculture-FDA spending bill (H.R. 4356 (117)) that would block any new agricultural purchases by companies that are wholly or partly controlled by the Chinese government and bar Chinese-owned farms from tapping federal support programs. -Politico

Rep. Grace Meng (D-NY) warned that the new law would “perpetuate already rising anti-Asian hate,” however she and committee leaders have indicated a willingness to find a solution as the legislation works its way through Congress, according to the report. It’s expected to reach the House floor before the end of this month as part of a broader appropriations package, however the Senate has yet to draft their own version of the spending bill.

Nobody cares who shot JFK anymore. We now have the Insurrection. Much bigger threat.

• Oliver Stone’s New JFK Assassination Doc Is Being Ignored By The MSM (RT)

When ‘JFK: Revisited’ premiered on Monday, July 12, the mainstream media didn’t praise it or pan it. They pretended it didn’t exist. The New York Times’ vast coverage of Cannes consisted of 11 articles, most focusing on the more salacious content, such as ‘Benedetta’, a steamy story about lesbian nuns, ‘Annette’, a musical where Adam Driver sings while performing oral sex on Marion Cotillard, and ‘Titane’, where a woman has sex with a car and lactates oil. But not once has ‘JFK Revisited’ been mentioned in the supposed ‘paper of record’. The same is true of the Washington Post, Boston Globe, LA Times, Chicago Tribune, the Guardian, the Atlantic, the New Yorker and every mainstream outlet I searched, as none of them acknowledge ‘JFK Revisited’exists at all.

The only media mentions I found were in trade papers likeVariety and the Hollywood Reporter, and in the British press, in the Times and Daily Telegraph. Their reaction to the film was split, with Variety and The Times giving negative reviews and THR and the Daily Telegraph praising it. Considering that Cuba, intelligence agency nefariousness, and conspiracy theories are making headlines, and that the small critical assessment of the documentary is split, it’s curious that the media is maintaining the status quo by endorsing sexual depravity at Cannes instead of pursuing truth by debating ‘JFK Revisited’. I’m kidding, of course. It’s no surprise that the American myth-making media who bequeath to us the official narrative from which ‘respectable’ people will never deviate, are tossing ‘JFK Revisited’ down the memory hole and lavishing praise on horny nuns and coital Cadillacs.

You see, the establishment loves to distract the masses and hate conspiracies – except for the ones they love. JFK assassination conspiracies are rejected outright as unserious, despite a plethora of damning evidence, because they indict the establishment itself. Half of the talking heads on cable news are former (wink-wink) intelligence community members, and the vast majority of journalists are lapdogs for the intel agencies, so they’re not going to bite the hand that feeds them in service to the truth about the JFK assassination. This same anti-conspiratorial press spent four years breathlessly belching up every half-assed Russia conspiracy story they could conjure – including Russiagate, claims of Russia using microwave weapons or hacking into power grids and voting machines – and shouted them from the rooftops 24/7 until they become presumed true despite a complete lack of evidence.

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“The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.”
-George Orwell, 1984

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Debt Rattle September 22 2020

Sep 222020

September 22, 2020 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:09 am Finance Tagged with: Assange, Cassandra, CDC, Covid19, dollar, Epstein, gender reveal, JFK, Lancet, lockdowns, SCOTUS, Tulsi, WHO 21 Responses »

Ray K. Metzker Marseille 1961

• Assange’s Removal From Embassy Was on ‘Direct Orders From US President’ (Sp.)

• 160 Officials From Across The World Call For Assange’s Release (NBC)

• A Second UK COVID19 Lockdown Is Doomed To Fail: Brits Won’t Comply (RT)

• CDC Stumbles Again, Says COVID19 Guidance Posted ‘In Error’ (NBC)

• China, WHO Could Have Helped Prevent Pandemic: Congressional Report (NYP)

• Lancet Changes Editorial Policy After HCQ Study Retraction (G.)

• Ballot Harvesting Party Will Be Over if Tulsi Gabbard Gets Her Way (NM)

• Trump Says Aides Rejected His Request To Adjust Value Of Dollar (R.)

• European Bank Stocks Swoon to 1988 Low (WS)

• Virgin Islands AG Subpoenas Entirety Of Epstein Flight Logs (RT)

• Kennedy’s US-Russia Joint Space Vision Must Be Revived (Ehret)

• Activist Warns Left: Trump Might Pick First Black Female Justice (JTN)

• Trump Fires Giant Pink Glitter Cannon To Reveal SCOTUS Nominee Gender (BBee)

1 million global deaths is not far off. Expect a ton of publicity.

Cassandra is a Trump supporter – but an even stronger Assange supporter- who just proved that the trial is political. Which means Julian cannot under British law be extradited. Or at least that’s what the law says.

• Assange’s Removal From Embassy Was on ‘Direct Orders From US President’ (Sp.)

Journalist Cassandra Fairbanks has informed the court in Julian Assange’s extradition hearing that Arthur Schwartz, who is known as Donald Trump Jr’s “fixer”, had advance warning of the US indictment against the WikiLeaks publisher. Julian Assange’s removal from the Ecuadorian Embassy was done so “on direct orders from the [US] president”, according to information provided to American journalist Cassandra Fairbanks. Ms Fairbanks’ explosive testimony would appear to support to position that Mr Assange’s prosecution has a political dimension and reflected a shift in the government’s attitude with a change in administration from that of former president Barack Obama.

According to Ms Fairbanks’ witness statement, which was read into the court by the defence in Mr Assange’s extradition hearing on 21 September 2020, she was contacted by Arthur Schwartz, “a wealthy GOP donor who does communications for [former Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell] and works as an informal adviser to Donald Trump Jr”. During this phone call, which Ms Fairbanks recorded, Mr Schwartz was panicking because he believed a Tweet that she published revealed “classified information”. Ms Fairbanks attempted to calm down Mr Schwartz saying that she didn’t publish classified information and that she merely shared a link to a report from ABC news which described the role that Mr Grenell played in coordinating Mr Assange’s release.

Mr Schwartz was not put at ease by Ms Fairbanks’ assurances and asked her to delete the Tweet. “I don’t want to go to prison” Mr Schwartz told Ms Fairbanks, adding that people are aware of the fact that the two have been communicating with each other and have been seen with each other. Mr Grenell was acting “on the orders from the president” Mr Schwartz can be heard saying during the recorded conversation. “So, you’re going to punish me because he took orders from the president?” he asked Ms Fairbanks who responded that she wasn’t punishing him she was merely retweeting a report by ABC. Mr Schwartz begged Ms Fairbanks to delete the Tweet which she ultimately agreed to do. Ms Fairbanks is a contributor to the Pro-Trump Gateway Pundit news outlet and she notes that she herself “endorsed [Mr Trump’s] presidency over a number of years”.

Her witness statement says that she “believed Schwartz’s statement [that Mr Grenell coordinated Mr Assange’s removal from the embassy] to be correct because his close personal ties to both President Trump and Grenell are well-known”. The statement also says that her interactions with Mr Schwartz, on the subject of Mr Assange and WikiLeaks, first began after she dropped a link to an interview with Mr Assange’s mother, Christine Assange, into “a direct message group [in October 2018] containing multiple people who either worked for President Trump or were close to him in other ways – along with several other reporters and political commentators”. Among those in the group were then US Ambassador to Germany Mr Grenell as well as Mr Schwartz.

After she put the link to the interview into the group chat, Ms Fairbanks’ statement says that she received a phone call from Mr Schwartz who was “very angry”: “[Mr Schwartz] repeatedly insisted that I stop advocating for WikiLeaks and Assange, telling me that ‘a pardon isn’t going to f**king happen.’ He knew very specific details about a future prosecution against Assange that were later made public and that only those very close to the situation then would have been aware of. He told me that it would be the ‘Manning’ case that he would be charged with and that it would not involve the Vault 7 publication or anything to do with the DNC. He also told me that they would be going after Chelsea Manning. I also recollect being told, I believe, that it would not be before Christmas. Both of these predictions came true just months later.”

“Kidnapping a political refugee” from the Ecuadorian Embassy would be “an act of war”, Ms Fairbanks said to Mr Schwartz, to which he apparently responded “not if they let us”.

Is the mainstream press getting involved now?

• 160 Officials From Across The World Call For Assange’s Release (NBC)

More than 160 current and former world leaders, lawmakers and diplomats have endorsed a call for the U.K. to free WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and stop his extradition to the U.S. The signatories of the open letter, addressed to U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson and several government ministers, included the president of Argentina and two former presidents of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff and Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. [..] The letter was first written by the group Lawyers for Assange in August, and then received the support of the international signatories whose names were released on Monday. It laid out several legal reasons why Assange shouldn’t be extradited, including the claim that he wouldn’t face a fair trial in the U.S., and that he would “be exposed to torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”

His extradition “would gravely endanger freedom of the press,” the letter said. “This demonstrates the growing opposition around the world to U.S. efforts to extradite and prosecute Assange, and the political nature of this case,” Assange’s lawyer, Jennifer Robinson, told NBC News. Many of the letter’s signatories, which also include Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and former Ecuadoran leader Rafael Correa, are fierce critics of the U.S. and have previously spoken out against American foreign policy. Last week, Robinson told a London court that Assange was offered a presidential pardon in 2017 by then-Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., and Trump associate Charles Johnson if he helped to resolve the “ongoing speculation about Russian involvement” in the hacking of Democratic National Committee emails leaked during the 2016 U.S. election campaign.

At the hearing in London on Friday, James Lewis, prosecutor for the U.S. government, said: “The position of the government is we don’t contest these things were said. We obviously do not accept the truth of what was said by others.”

What you gonna do? Arrest them all and throw them into virus-infected prisons?

• A Second UK COVID19 Lockdown Is Doomed To Fail: Brits Won’t Comply (RT)

Now armed with statistics and expert advice, the British public are much better informed about Covid than in March and won’t countenance another lockdown imposed by politicians who have mishandled the pandemic at every turn. A looming second lockdown in the UK, as part of the Government’s haphazard approach to dealing with the coronavirus pandemic, is destined to fail for one reason: the revered ‘Blitz spirit’ that we’re all in this together has vanished. Now it’s everyone for themselves. For several days now, there has been talk of another imminent imposition of harsh restrictions on our movement. While the first national lockdown was universally accepted, any follow-up – call it ‘a circuit breaker’ or whatever clever name you like – is going to be a little trickier.

Look at what’s happened in Madrid over the weekend, where a wave of protests hit the Spanish capital with people taking offence at the regional president’s efforts to reduce an infection rate in some areas of more than 1,000 per 100,000 by restricting the movements of 850,000 people. And when Isabel Dìaz Ayuso bluntly suggested it was the “way of life” of the immigrants living in those neighbourhoods that was contributing to the problems, the mob insisted she resign. What for? Trying to keep them safe? Remember, Spain had a draconian three-month lockdown that saw kids shut up indoors over summer, but they recognised they were all in it together and stuck to their guns. Now that spirit has dissolved, as people claim the government is spreading fear and hatred among already marginalised communities. Attention has turned away from battling the pandemic to fighting among themselves.

That easygoing compliance has hardened in the UK as well. We’re not so accepting of the words coming from the familiar Downing Street podium these days. Because we’ve now had months of expert home tutoring by the impressive duo of government scientists Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance, whose careful, measured explanations and predictions have driven the real narrative behind the boosterism of the government’s “moonshots” and “world-beating” boasts. Last week it was Boris Johnson telling us it would all be over by Christmas. Now Health Secretary Matt Hancock says maybe not. That kind of ‘he said, she said’ nonsense is a test to anyone’s patience, but you can see where the desperate-to-be-loved PM is coming from. People want a return to normal, even if that ‘normal’ is different to what we are used to, and BoJo is keen to be the one to deliver the good news.

And Americans won’t comply either, thanks to BS like this.

It is really only yesterday that I said: “Do they still have any credibility left? You know, after Redfield’s “Act for one Man and one Mask”?”

• CDC Stumbles Again, Says COVID19 Guidance Posted ‘In Error’ (NBC)

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Monday walked back information posted on its website just three days ago, which stated the coronavirus can spread through aerosolized droplets. The CDC now says that Friday’s guidance was posted “in error,” and that new information will be issued shortly. The move is yet another misstep for the nation’s leading public health agency, which recently reversed its guidance for the second time on testing asymptomatic people for the coronavirus. On Friday, an update posted to the CDC’s website stated the virus can be transmitted through tiny, aerosolized droplets that are “produced when an infected person coughs, sneezes, sings, talks, or breathes.”

That information was already well known, according to infectious disease experts. It was “not surprising or jarring,” Dr. Jill Weatherhead, an assistant professor of infectious diseases at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, said. “The scientific community has been raising the alarm about this since February, that airborne spread can happen,” said Joseph Allen, an associate professor in the department of environmental health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. So infectious disease experts were perplexed Monday, when the CDC scrubbed that section of the website of any mention of airborne transmission, writing that “a draft version of proposed changes to these recommendations was posted in error to the agency’s official website.”

[..] “This is so destructive to this incredibly wonderful agency that we have loved and admired our entire careers,” Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the school of public health at Brown University, said. “This is amateur hour.” Science evolves and is guided by what doctors and researchers learn over time, but clear messaging is critical to a proper public health response to the virus. “The CDC is like a North Star in terms of guiding this pandemic,” Weatherhead said. “It’s important that there is clear and concise communication so that everybody is on the same page.” “Hopefully we will get communication from the CDC to better understand why they’re walking back on what we already know to be factual,” she added.

An overly polite headline. It doesn’t include “criminally negligent”.

• China, WHO Could Have Helped Prevent Pandemic: Congressional Report (NYP)

The coronavirus pandemic might have been prevented if not for Chinese cover-ups in the early days of the outbreak and the World Health Organization “parroting” Beijing propaganda, according to a damning audit from the House Foreign Affairs Committee. The 96-page report — obtained by The Post ahead of its planned Monday release — says the Chinese Communist Party destroyed evidence and buried troubling data, while nationalizing the supply chains and limiting exports of US companies 3M and General Motors, keeping key goods in the country.

“It is beyond doubt that the CCP actively engaged in a cover-up designed to obfuscate data, hide relevant public health information, and suppress doctors and journalists who attempted to warn the world,” reads the report, authored by Republican members of the Democrat-held committee. Had China been more transparent and proactive when the first signs of the burgeoning health crisis emerged in Wuhan in late 2019, the outbreak could have been largely contained — potentially saving hundreds of thousands of lives worldwide, the pols wrote.

“Research shows the CCP could have reduced the number of cases in China by up to 95 percent had it fulfilled its obligations under international law and responded to the outbreak in a manner consistent with best practices,” the report said, citing a study on Medrxiv, a Yale University-linked online clearinghouse for medical manuscripts. “It is highly likely the ongoing pandemic could have been prevented,” the report said. Instead, on Jan. 1, CCP officials ordered that the Wuhan wet market from which the contagion is believed to have sprung “be closed and sanitized, destroying forensic evidence that may have provided insight into the origins of the outbreak,” the report said.

It was a classis hit job from the start. And the Lancet bought and swallowed it whole. But HCQ remains banned in many places, so it worked.

• Lancet Changes Editorial Policy After HCQ Study Retraction (G.)

One of the world’s leading medical journals, the Lancet, has reformed its editorial policies following a shocking case of apparent research misconduct involving the study of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for Covid-19. In May, the Lancet published a peer-reviewed study about the controversial drug hydroxychloroquine, which concluded Covid-19 patients who received the drug were dying at higher rates and experiencing more heart-related complications than other virus patients. The large observational study analysed data purported to be from nearly 15,000 patients with Covid-19 who received the drug alone or in combination with antibiotics, comparing this data with 81,000 controls who did not receive the drug.

This data was recorded by hospitals around the world in a database by a US data analytics company known as “Surgisphere”, the Lancet paper said. The findings prompted the World Health Organization to halt its clinical trials of the drug, given the paper’s findings that it was linked with deaths and complications. But days after the paper was published, Guardian Australia revealed issues with the Australian data in the study. Figures on the number of Covid-19 deaths and patients in hospital cited by the authors did not match up with official government and health department data. Senior clinicians involved in Covid-19 research told Guardian Australia they had never heard of the Surgisphere database.

Researchers from other countries identified similar issues with the data from their hospitals, and a further Guardian Australia investigation revealed doubts that the database used by the study authors likely did not even existed. Sapan Desai was a co-author of the paper and founder of the Surgisphere database. Following the revelations, information about Surgisphere was deleted from the internet. It was also revealed that none of the co-authors of the paper had seen the Surgisphere data for themselves, and they said that Desai did not give them access to it even after questions about the paper were raised by Guardian Australia and the research community. The paper’s co-authors, which included a highly respected vascular surgeon, supported the retraction of the paper and distanced themselves from the data.

Go Tulsi!

• Ballot Harvesting Party Will Be Over if Tulsi Gabbard Gets Her Way (NM)

Ballot-harvesting is a voting related practice allowing paid political operatives to collect an unlimited number of ballots, subsequently delivering them into the hands of election officials. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii, recently introduced legislation, The Election Fraud Prevention Act, which if passed would effectively slow down or even put a halt to the practice. The legislation could potentially be in effect in time for November’s all-important 2020 presidential election. When Rep. Gabbard made her run for the Oval Office during the Democratic presidential primaries, the public learned that she was a proud member of the Army National Guard, having served in two Mideast deployments. Currently, she is a major in the Army Reserves.

Rep. Gabbard’s proposed legislation, which is co-sponsored by Rep. Rodney Davis, R-IL, would amend a 2002 act, and if passed would deny certain federal payments to states that permit ballot harvesting. This type of reform could go a long way in helping to prevent a particularly heinous kind of corruption of the electoral process. If ballot-harvesting remains in place, or worse, if its use becomes widespread nationally, special interest groups aligned with a particular candidate or political party may be able to manipulate the results of legitimate elections. As Rep. Gabbard noted, “While some states have prohibited vote harvesting, many states lack any regulations that would stop third-parties from fraudulently collecting and mishandling ballots as has occurred in recent elections.”

‘Sir, we can’t do that. It has to float naturally.’

There are actually people who react to this by saying Trump didn’t know the dollar floats.

• Trump Says Aides Rejected His Request To Adjust Value Of Dollar (R.)

U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday said he was rebuffed when he asked officials to adjust the exchange rate of the dollar to counteract what he described as repeated currency manipulation by China of its yuan. Trump told thousands of supporters at a political rally in Dayton, Ohio, that his policies were saving jobs in the political battleground state after years of inaction to confront China’s aggressive behavior in global markets. “I go to my guys, ‘What about doing a little movement on the dollar?’” he said, but they countered that was not possible. “‘Sir, we can’t do that. It has to float naturally.’”

The Republican president, who is seeking reelection to a second term in the Nov. 3 national poll, repeated his claim – which China denies – that Beijing deliberately changes the value of its currency to gain competitive advantage in global markets. China’s central bank has denied intervening to weaken the yuan and lower the cost of its exports to the United States. The yuan has firmed for eight weeks straight against a softening dollar. Trump gave no details on his conversation about tweaking the dollar’s value, and no comment was immediately available from the U.S. Treasury Department, which is expected to release its long-delayed semi-annual currency report in coming weeks.

[..] Trump in May reversed course and backed a “strong dollar” after years of railing against the dollar’s relative strength as a factor harming U.S. competitiveness. The Treasury Department in January dropped its designation of China as a “currency manipulator”, days before U.S. and Chinese officials signed the Phase 1 trade deal, saying Beijing had agreed to refrain from competitive devaluation.

How many arrests so far?

• European Bank Stocks Swoon to 1988 Low (WS)

The Stoxx 600 Banks index, which covers major European banks, slumped 5.7% on Monday, to close at 81.1, just a smidgen above the multi-decade low, of 79, set in March. The last time before March that the index was below today’s level was in February 1988, during the sell-off that followed Black Monday in October 1987, when it also slumped as low as 79. The index has collapsed by 85% since its peak in May 2007, after having quadrupled over the preceding 12 years. Here are the wondrous European bank stocks going back to 2007:

Not even the promise of more industry consolidation, facilitated by shotgun mergers of big, struggling banks with smaller struggling banks, has stemmed the slide of Europe’s banking shares. Three weeks ago, Spain’s third largest lender, CaixaBank, announced plans to buy majority state-owned Bankia, with money largely provided by the State, to form what will be Spain’s largest domestic bank. Spain’s MSCI rose only slightly in response and is now lower than it was. Today, it wasn’t just banking stocks that had a rough day. European stocks overall were down by 3.9%, as concerns grow over a second wave of the coronavirus. But banks were particularly hard hit.

One reason for the rout was the release of a report by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists on lenders that had facilitated $2 trillion in suspicious transactions. HSBC, Deutsche Bank, Standard Chartered, JPMorgan Chase, and Bank of New York Mellon, were implicated. Over almost two decades, the five banks had “enrich[ed] themselves and their shareholders while facilitating the work of terrorists, kleptocrats, and drug kingpins,” the report said.

I wouldn’t put any money on her actually getting them. Unredacted. National security, don’t you know.

• Virgin Islands AG Subpoenas Entirety Of Epstein Flight Logs (RT)

The US Virgin Islands Attorney General has subpoenaed 21 years’ worth of deceased pedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s flight logs, reportedly striking fear in the hearts of high-profile passengers not yet exposed as Lolita Express riders. Passenger logs for Epstein’s four helicopters and three planes have been subpoenaed by Virgin Islands AG Denise George, who recently sued the disgraced financier’s estate for 22 counts including human trafficking, child abuse, neglect, prostitution, aggravated rape, and forced labor, according to a Sunday report by the UK Mirror. In addition to the passenger lists, George has requisitioned “complaints or reports of potentially suspicious conduct” and any “personal notes” the pilots made while flying Epstein’s alleged harem of underage girls around the world.

She also wants the names and contact information of anyone who worked for the pilots – or who “integrated with or observed” Epstein and his passengers. Epstein pilot David Rodgers previously provided a passenger log in 2009 tying dozens of politicians, actors, and other celebrities to the infamous sex offender – including former US President Bill Clinton, actor Kevin Spacey, and model Naomi Campbell. However, lawyers for Epstein’s alleged victims have argued that list did not include flights by Epstein’s chief pilot, Larry Visoski, who allegedly worked for him for over 25 years. “The records that have been subpoenaed will make the ones Rodgers provided look like a Post-It note,” a source told the Mirror over the weekend, claiming that George’s subpoena had triggered a “panic among many of the rich and famous.”

Epstein’s private plane, nicknamed the Lolita Express, counted among its passengers such luminaries as the UK’s Prince Andrew, celebrity lawyer Alan Dershowitz, actor Chris Tucker, Harvard economist Larry Summers, Hyatt hotel mogul Tom Pritzker, and model agency manager Jean-Luc Brunel along with Campbell, Spacey, and Clinton (who the logs show flew with Epstein over two dozen times). However, the passengers who enjoyed his other aircraft have not been made public – yet. George has also subpoenaed more than 10 banks – including JPMorgan, Citibank, and Deutsche Bank – in her quest to get to the bottom of the financial edifice Epstein built up before he died. The financial institutions have been ordered to submit documents related to some 30 corporations, trusts, and nonprofit entities tied to the predatory playboy.

How did we ever get from Kennedy to Russiagate?

• Kennedy’s US-Russia Joint Space Vision Must Be Revived (Ehret)

September 20th marked the anniversary of the last speech John F Kennedy delivered to the United Nations’ General Assembly. This event bears more relevance upon our present crisis than most people could possibly imagine. This is true not only because it is wise to pay homage to great ideas of the past which lesser souls allowed to slip away and get buried under the sands of time, but also because history provides many of the solutions to seemingly impossible problems in our own time. During his short speech, Kennedy outlined the very same fundamental obstacles to survival faced by our own world 57 years later: “The spectre of nuclear annihilation looming overhead, poverty and the evils of colonialism staining humanity on earth, and the dominance of destructive modes of thinking which have prevented honest dialogue between the west and east who have so many common interests and yet have been blocked from acting upon them for want of creativity, understanding and faith.”

Although it is far too rarely displayed in history, great leaders (those who are beholden to their consciences) recognize that there are solutions to every problem. From Plato to Cicero to Confucius and Christ in ancient times or Thomas More, Benjamin Franklin, Lincoln, and Kennedy in our modern age, these rare but vitally important individuals demonstrate through their words and deeds that when the dominant social rules of the game prevent those necessary and possible solutions from manifesting, then only one course of action becomes possible: Change the rules of the game. The martyred Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin eloquently touched on this truth in 1992 shaking the hands with Yasser Arafat and advancing a two-state solution saying: “The future belongs to those who have the courage to change their axioms.”

Such was the case of John F. Kennedy who recognized early on in his short-lived presidency that the geopolitical “closed system” thinking dominant among the military and foreign policy experts of the west held only the seeds for humanity’s destruction. In his speech of September 20, 1963, Kennedy revisited a theme which he first unveiled on the day of his inaugural address in 1961: A joint U.S.-USSR space program to transform the rules of the Cold War and usher in a new creative age of reason, win-win cooperation and boundless discoveries. In his 1961 inaugural speech, Kennedy ushered in the theme that would animate his next three years saying:

“Together let us explore the stars, conquer the deserts, eradicate disease, tap the ocean depths and encourage the arts and commerce. Let both sides unite to heed in all corners of the earth the command of Isaiah–to “undo the heavy burdens . . . (and) let the oppressed go free.” Ten days later, Kennedy re-iterated this idea during his first state of the Union inviting Russia “to join with U.S. in developing… a new communication satellite program in preparation for probing the distant planets of Mars and Venus, probes which may someday unlock the deepest secrets of the universe”.

Wait a minute. That was my line.

• Activist Warns Left: Trump Might Pick First Black Female Justice (JTN)

An activist group formally launched the “She Will Rise” campaign Monday to call for an African American female judge to be nominated to the Supreme Court. A supporter of the group, Nikole Hannah-Jones, who authored The New York Times’ 1619 Project, warned that President Trump might be the president who picks the first black female justice following the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. “I think this is a case of be careful what you wish for because it’s certainly possible that Trump could appoint a black women but it’s also very possible it could be just as cynical as it was when the second black Supreme Court justice became Clearance Thomas,” she said during a discussion organized by the nonprofit advocacy group Demand Justice.

“You can certainly find a black woman who is extremely conservative; who is a strict constructionist; who is going to align with the most conservative people on the court and that again will be a hollow victory. In some ways, again, that is a very cynical choice because it puts black people in the position of having to argue against the first black woman to go on the bench because the first black woman is not someone who we feel will actually serve our communities well so yeah, that’s possible,” she also said. Trump said this past weekend that he would nominate a female to fill Ginsburg’s seat. Some African American male judges appear on Trump’s public shortlist of potential Supreme Court nominee, but there are currently no African American female judges included. A hispanic female and male judge are on his list.

And then finally there’s the good news, courtesy of the Babylon Bee.

• Trump Fires Giant Pink Glitter Cannon To Reveal SCOTUS Nominee Gender (BBee)

It was a festive occasion, as gender reveals often are, and a crowd brimming with excitement gathered outside the White House to find out from President Trump what gender the nominee for Supreme Court Justice would be. “Oh I sure hope it’s a boy!” yelled one man. “No way! It has to be a girl!” yelled a nearby woman. However, some unhappy citizens gathered in the crowd only to protest how primitive and cis-heteronormative a gender reveal party for a Supreme Court Justice is. “This is so backwards,” yelled local non-binary furry queen-king Yoox Bellavix. “The nominee hasn’t even been questioned by the Senate to determine what gender they identify with! Gender is not the same as biological sex! We need hearings now!”

Trump suddenly appeared on the White House lawn and greeted all the gathered crowd with a wide beaming smile like that of an expectant father. “Thank you, ladies and gentlemen and Democrats and Fake News media! I am very happy, so very happy, I don’t even remember the last time I was this happy, to announce the gender of our nominee to fill the seat!” he said. The crowd erupted in joyous applause as the Secret Service rolled out a giant wheeled cannon similar to a civil war artillery piece and pulled the trigger to send an enormous cloud of pink glitter into the air. “Of course it’s a girl! It’s a girl!” Trump said as he made an hourglass curve gesture with his hands. “Tremendous. Thank you very much!”

At publishing time, all the assembled media figures stood completely covered in pink glitter. The White House lawn is also entirely covered. The EPA estimates it could take up to 12 years for the pristine swamp environment of the White House lawn to return to normal.

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Debt Rattle March 27 2020

Mar 272020

March 27, 2020 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 10:47 am Finance Tagged with: allies, asymptomatic, bear bile, Burkina Faso, coronavirus, Covid19, depression, Dylan, Fed, gig economy, Iraq, JFK, testing, unemployment 34 Responses »

• More People Are Dying Of COVID-19 In The US Than We Know (BF)

• We Could Watch Entire Populations Vanish (IC)

• Coronavirus Could Kill 81,000 In US, Subside In June – Washington U. (R.)

• Hold The Line (M.)

• China Promotes Bear Bile As Coronavirus Treatment (NatGeo)

• Fed Balance Sheet Tops $5 Trillion For First Time (R.)

• Broward Poll Workers Test Positive For COVID-19 (L10)

• Moscow Laboratories Will Conduct 13,000 Tests For Coronavirus Every Day (Tass)

• New Zealand Coronavirus Deaths During Lockdown Could Be Just 20 – Modelling (G.)

• Coronavirus Job Losses Will Raise Mortgage Stress More Than GFC Did (ABC.au)

• France, Czechs, & Other US Allies Exit Iraq Over COVID-19 Fears (ZH)

• Spike in Unemployment Claims is Even More Horrid Than it Appears (WS)

• What Should The EU Do Now: 3-Point Plan For Averting A Depression (Varoufakis)

• Dylan Ratigan: “An Abomination Beyond Comprehension” – “Bernie Folded” (Dore)

• Muder Most Foul (Bob Dylan)

A word about testing. There are stories everywhere of people dying without even having beenn tested, and of doctors not getting permission to test. Many countries have a central body that must give permission for a test, and they often don’t until it’s too late in the game (the life). To a larg extent, this is because politicians simply failed to procure test kits. But there’s another thing: political incentives for massive and accurate testing hardly exist at all (in the short term), while incentives for not testing are obvious: you look better.

The UK testing story could change that all, with its potential finger-prick 15 minute test, but only if that test is at least 95% accurate. I know they claim it is, but we’ll have to see. There are stories about Chinese tests that are 30% accurate, and it’s easy to see why that is useless. But I was talking to someone yesterday who said: there are now tests that are fast and 70% accurate! But isn’t that useless too. No, they can do a better test with those who test negative! Yes, but the 70% applies to the positives too… So 70% means you have to retest everyone. And we haven’t even mentioned asymptomatic cases yet…

Note: we may see the first time that 100,000 new cases come within 24 hours

• Cases 542,385 (+ 55,683 from yesterday’s 486,702)

• Deaths 24,368 (+ 2,347 from yesterday’s 22,021)

From Worldometer yesterday evening (before their day’s close) US: 17,000 cases in a day

From Worldometer -NOTE: mortality rate for closed cases is at 16% –

From SCMP:

From COVID2019Live.info:

Not in the US, everywhere.

• More People Are Dying Of COVID-19 In The US Than We Know (BF)

Medical professionals around the US told BuzzFeed News that the official numbers of people who have died of COVID-19 are not consistent with the number of deaths they’re seeing on the front lines. In some cases, it’s a lag in reporting, caused by delays and possible breakdowns in logging positive tests and making them public. In other, more troubling, cases, medical experts told BuzzFeed News they think it’s because people are not being tested before or after they die. In the US, state and county authorities are responsible for collecting data on cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, and deaths. The data is then reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In California, one ER doctor who works at multiple hospitals in a hard-hit county told BuzzFeed News, “those medical records aren’t being audited by anyone at the state and local level currently and some people aren’t even testing those people who are dead.” “We just don’t know. The numbers are grossly underreported. I know for a fact that we’ve had three deaths in one county where only one is listed on the website,” the doctor said. A spokesperson for the California Department of Health told BuzzFeed News in an email that “local health jurisdictions are required to report all positive COVID-19 cases to the state. In addition, when a death or impending death from COVID-19 occurs, health care facilities must immediately notify their local health jurisdiction and the state.”

[..] two of the hardest-hit areas in the nation — New York City and Los Angeles County — released guidance earlier this week encouraging doctors not to test patients unless they think the test will significantly change their course of treatment. That means that potentially more people in both places could be admitted to hospitals with severe respiratory symptoms and recover — or die — and not be registered as a coronavirus case.

Africa. Pray.

• We Could Watch Entire Populations Vanish (IC)

On March 18, Burkina Faso suffered the first confirmed Covid-19 fatality in all of sub-Saharan Africa. The victim was Rose-Marie Compaoré, the first vice president of the Sahelian nation’s parliament. Tiny, impoverished, and conflict-scarred, Burkina Faso is now West Africa’s worst-affected country, with 146 confirmed cases, including four government ministers. The U.S. ambassador to Burkina Faso, Andrew Young, has also tested positive for the disease. Burkina Faso has seen more than its share of hardships: poverty, drought, hunger, coups. But the coronavirus poses a new kind of threat to a country wracked by a war that has displaced around 700,000 Burkinabe in the last year.

Many of those people now find themselves under great physical and emotional strain, lacking proper shelter, food, and the other necessities — all of which makes them more vulnerable to the pandemic. Experts fear that Covid-19 could decimate entire settlements of Burkina Faso’s displaced, and they are bracing for devastating outbreaks in conflict zones, refugee camps, and the poorest countries in the developing world. Globally, millions of refugees and internally displaced persons, or IDPs, living in cramped, squalid conditions find themselves at risk. “When the virus hits overcrowded settlements in places like Iran, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, and Greece, the consequences will be devastating,” warned Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council [..] He also spoke of “carnage when the virus reaches parts of Syria, Yemen, and Venezuela where hospitals have been demolished and health systems have collapsed.”

[..] I have no reason to believe Moumoumi Sawadogo had Covid-19 when I met him eight weeks ago in Burkina Faso. After living 89 years in an arid, impoverished land on the fringe of the Sahara Desert, surviving a massacre, walking for a week and enduring hunger and homelessness, it was clear that Sawadogo was a survivor. But Covid-19 posed a different kind of danger. “These populations are already very vulnerable to diseases that are otherwise easy to treat. But that’s not the case when they have no access to water or proper sanitation or health care,” Alexandra Lamarche, senior advocate for West and Central Africa at Refugees International, told The Intercept. “We could watch entire populations vanish.”

Modelling is only as good as its initial assumptions. Which in this case come out of hot thin air.

• Coronavirus Could Kill 81,000 In US, Subside In June – Washington U. (R.)

The coronavirus pandemic could kill more than 81,000 people in the United States in the next four months and may not subside until June, according to a data analysis done by University of Washington School of Medicine. The number of hospitalized patients is expected to peak nationally by the second week of April, though the peak may come later in some states. Some people could continue to die of the virus as late as July, although deaths should be below epidemic levels of 10 per day by June at the latest, according to the analysis. The analysis, using data from governments, hospitals and other sources, predicts that the number of U.S. deaths could vary widely, ranging from as low as around 38,000 to as high as around 162,000.

The variance is due in part to disparate rates of the spread of the virus in different regions, which experts are still struggling to explain, said Dr. Christopher Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, who led the study. The duration of the virus means there may be a need for social distancing measures for longer than initially expected, although the country may eventually be able relax restrictions if it can more effectively test and quarantine the sick, Murray said. The analysis also highlights the strain that will be placed on hospitals. At the epidemic’s peak, sick patients could exceed the number of available hospital beds by 64,000 and could require the use of around 20,000 ventilators. Ventilators are already running short in hard-hit places like New York City.

The virus is spreading more slowly in California, which could mean that peak cases there will come later in April and social distancing measures will need to be extended in the state for longer, Murray said. Louisiana and Georgia are predicted to see high rates of contagion and could see a particularly high burden on their local healthcare systems, he added.

Let the caretakers talk. They need to, and we need to hear them.

• Hold The Line (M.)

As an infectious disease epidemiologist (although a lowly one), at this point I feel morally obligated to provide some information on what we are seeing from a transmission dynamic perspective and how they apply to the social distancing measures. Like any good scientist I have noticed two things that are either not articulated or not present in the “literature” of social media. I have also relied on my much smarter infectious disease epidemiologist friends for peer review of this post; any edits are from peer review. Specifically, I want to make two aspects of these measures very clear and unambiguous. First, we are in the very infancy of this epidemic’s trajectory. That means even with these measures we will see cases and deaths continue to rise globally, nationally, and in our own communities in the coming weeks.

This may lead some people to think that the social distancing measures are not working. They are. They may feel futile. They aren’t. You will feel discouraged. You should. This is normal in chaos. But this is normal epidemic trajectory. Stay calm. This enemy that we are facing is very good at what it does; we are not failing. We need everyone to hold the line as the epidemic inevitably gets worse. This is not my opinion; this is the unforgiving math of epidemics for which I and my colleagues have dedicated our lives to understanding with great nuance, and this disease is no exception. I want to help the community brace for this impact. Stay strong and with solidarity knowing with absolute certainty that what you are doing is saving lives, even as people begin getting sick and dying. You may feel like giving in. Don’t.

Second, although social distancing measures have been (at least temporarily) well-received, there is an obvious-but-overlooked phenomenon when considering groups (i.e. families) in transmission dynamics. While social distancing decreases contact with members of society, it of course increases your contacts with group (i.e. family) members. This small and obvious fact has surprisingly profound implications on disease transmission dynamics. Study after study demonstrates that even if there is only a little bit of connection between groups (i.e. social dinners, playdates/playgrounds, etc.), the epidemic isn’t much different than if there was no measure in place. The same underlying fundamentals of disease transmission apply, and the result is that the community is left with all of the social and economic disruption but very little public health benefit. You should perceive your entire family to function as a single individual unit; if one person puts themselves at risk, everyone in the unit is at risk.

This is about wildlife, not economic pessimists. Just in case you were confused.

• China Promotes Bear Bile As Coronavirus Treatment (NatGeo)

Less than a month after taking steps to permanently ban the trade and consumption of live wild animals for food, the Chinese government has recommended using Tan Re Qing, an injection containing bear bile, to treat severe and critical COVID-19 cases. It is one of a number of recommended coronavirus treatments—both traditional and Western—on a list published March 4 by China’s National Health Commission, the government body responsible for national health policy. This recommendation highlights what wildlife advocates say is a contradictory approach to wildlife: shutting down the live trade in animals for food on the one hand and promoting the trade in animal parts on the other. Secreted by the liver and stored in the gallbladder, bile from various species of bears, including Asiatic black bears and brown bears, has been used in traditional Chinese medicine since at least the eighth century.

It contains high levels of ursodeoxycholic acid, also known as ursodiol, which is clinically proven to help dissolve gallstones and treat liver disease. Ursodeoxycholic acid has been available as a synthetic drug worldwide for decades. [..] Traditional Chinese medicine practitioners typically use Tan Re Qing to treat bronchitis and upper respiratory infections. Clifford Steer, a professor at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, has studied the medical benefits of ursodeoxycholic acid. He knows of no evidence that bear bile is an effective treatment for the novel coronavirus. But, he says, ursodeoxycholic acid is distinct from other bile acids in its ability to keep cells alive and may alleviate symptoms of COVID-19 because of its anti-inflammatory properties and ability to calm the immune response.

Although use of bear bile from captive animals is legal in China, bile from wild bears is banned, as is the import of bear bile from other countries. According to Aron White, wildlife campaigner for the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA)—a nonprofit based in London, England, that exposes wildlife crimes—his organization learned first about the Chinese government’s recommendations to treat COVID-19 via social media posts from illegal traders. “We were witnessing how this government recommendation was being coopted by the traffickers to advertise their illegal products as a treatment,” White says. Illegal bile from wild bears is produced in China, he says, and is also imported from wild and captive bears in Laos, Vietnam, and North Korea.

If numbers get big enough, they lose meaning.

• Fed Balance Sheet Tops $5 Trillion For First Time (R.)

The U.S. Federal Reserve’s balance sheet soared past $5 trillion in assets for the first time this week as it scooped up bonds and extended loans to banks, mutual funds and other central banks in its unprecedented effort to backstop the economy in the face of the global coronavirus pandemic. The Fed’s total balance sheet size exploded by more than half a trillion dollars in a single week, roughly twice the pace of the next-largest weekly expansion in the financial crisis in October 2008. As of Wednesday, the Fed’s stash of assets totaled $5.3 trillion, according to data released on Thursday.

The Fed bought $355 billion of Treasuries and mortgage-backed bonds in the last week in what is now an open-ended commitment to stabilize financial markets rocked by the outbreak and the halt in economic activity that has come in its wake. It also offered more than $200 billion in credit through so-called foreign currency swap lines to other central banks to allow them to pump much-needed greenbacks into their jurisdictions to help foreign borrowers stay current with their dollar-denominated liabilities.

The weekly snapshot of the Fed’s balance sheet, released each Thursday, also showed sizable demand for a pair of brand new liquidity facilities aimed at stabilizing money markets and supporting primary dealers, the banks that transact directly with the central bank. The new Primary Dealer Credit Facility had been tapped for $27.7 billion in loans as of Wednesday, while the Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility had borrowings of $30.6 billion.

Which bunch of fools decided to have that vote?

• Broward Poll Workers Test Positive For COVID-19 (L10)

Two poll workers have been positively diagnosed with coronavirus, according to a statement from The Broward County Supervisor of Elections. One of the workers was only at Precinct V011 on Tuesday, March 17, Election Day, which is located at the Martin Luther King Community Center in Hollywood. The other worked at V020 at the David Park Community Center (also in Hollywood) as well as a Weston early voting location. The supervisor said that county staff as well as other poll workers at the locations have been notified of the situation. However, voters who were at the polls in person on March 17 at either of those locations or who voted early at the Weston early voting location may “wish to take appropriate steps and seek medical advice.”

Because of western testing that may seem like a high number, but it’s not.

• Moscow Laboratories Will Conduct 13,000 Tests For Coronavirus Every Day (Tass)

The laboratories in Moscow will carry out up to 13,000 tests for the novel coronavirus per day, Deputy Mayor Anastasiya Rakova said on Thursday. “Last week, only federal laboratories were authorized to conduct tests. We have fully joined this effort, launching nine laboratories. Today we are conducting nearly 4,000 tests for the coronavirus in Moscow laboratories. In the coming week w will boost the capacity to 13,000 [tests] per day,” Rakova told a TV program hosted by Vladimir Solovyov on Rossiya-1 channel. According to Rakova, the authorities were preparing for all scenarios of how the events would unfold. “Increasing the number of people who are to be tested for the coronavirus is a necessary condition and a crucial step for stopping the spread of the virus,” she stressed.

In late December 2019, Chinese authorities notified the World Health Organization (WHO) about the outbreak of a previously unknown pneumonia in the city of Wuhan, central China. Since then, cases of the novel coronavirus – named COVID-19 by the WHO – have been reported in more than 150 countries. [..]Russia has recorded 840 coronavirus cases, with more than half of them in Moscow. Some 38 people have recovered and have been discharged from hospitals, and two people have died.

When the desire for optimist political messaging becomes fully irresponsible.

• New Zealand Coronavirus Deaths During Lockdown Could Be Just 20 – Modelling (G.)

Jacinda Ardern has implored New Zealanders to “stay local” during a four-week countrywide lockdown as modelling showed that strict measures adopted by the country could limit deaths to 0.0004% of the population – or about 20 people. Research released by Te Punaha Matatini suggested that, left unchecked, the virus could eventually infect 89% of New Zealand’s population and kill up to 80,000 people in a worst-case scenario. According to the research, intensive care beds would reach capacity within two months and the number of patients needing intensive care would exceed 10 times capacity by the time the virus peaked.

However, with the strictest suppression measures, which the country has adopted, the fatalities would drop to just 0.0004%. Hospital capacity would not be exceeded for over a year. These measures included physical distancing, case isolation, household quarantine, and closing schools and universities and would require the restrictions to remain in place until a vaccine or other treatment was developed. However, researchers noted such strategies can “delay but not prevent the epidemic”. “When controls are lifted after 400 days, an outbreak occurs with a similar peak size as for an uncontrolled epidemic,” the researchers wrote. The government has currently mandated a four-week lockdown.

Zero recognition of living in a bubble.

• Coronavirus Job Losses Will Raise Mortgage Stress More Than GFC Did (ABC.au)

As job losses continue to rise because of shutdowns in place to fight the coronavirus crisis, the number of Australians struggling to repay their mortgages is expected to lift to higher levels than seen during the global financial crisis. Credit rating agency S&P Global has warned the number of Australians falling behind on their mortgage repayments is likely to soar. “We currently expect increases in arrears to be higher than during the 2008 global financial crisis, given the wide-ranging effects on the economy stemming from the sudden disruption to economic activity,” S&P analyst Erin Kitson said. Australia avoided mass defaults during the GFC, with mortgage arrears rising to 1.69 per cent after the 2008 crisis, from a pre-crisis average of about 1.40 per cent.

The latest S&P data said mortgage arrears were 1.36 per cent in January, up from 1.28 per cent last December. Ms Kitson could not put a number on the exact number of Australian households that would be impacted by arrears but noted that many of those facing difficulty would be the self-employed. But the Federal Government’s stimulus packages and hardship relief measures from banks would limit some of the damage, Ms Kitson added. To fight the economic threat, the Government will announce a third stimulus package, expected within days. Many banks have also recently announced COVID-19 support packages that provide affected borrowers with an option to defer their repayments for up to six months.

The Reserve Bank cuts interest rates to a record low and announces a quantitative easing program for the first time in its history to help prevent a coronavirus-driven recession. And regulator, the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA), has said if a borrower who has been meeting their repayment obligations until recently chooses to take up the repayment holiday, then the bank need not classify that period as “arrears”. Other emergency measures aimed at banks include an emergency interest rate cut and $90 billion in cheap 0.25-per-cent funding for three years for small business loans.

One day the Pentagon stops all troop movements, the next day the US declares Maduro a terrorist, and the allies, want nno part of this.

Seeing your soldiers die of corona would be much too close to WWI mass Spanish flu deaths in the trenches.

• France, Czechs, & Other US Allies Exit Iraq Over COVID-19 Fears (ZH)

The United States has shown itself willing to both keep up its ‘maximum pressure’ campaign on Iran and its proxies while riding roughshod over Iraqi sovereignty by remaining in the country even as Baghdad leaders and the broader population demand a final exit. But in another sign Europe is ready to divorce itself from US aims in the region, France has abruptly withdrawn its forces from the country after being there for five years. Interestingly the prime reason given was troop safety concerns over the coronavirus outbreak, but we imagine European leaders likely now see an opportunity to make a swift and easy exit without provoking the ire of their US counterparts. International correspondents say this includes French withdrawal from six bases, with a small contingent of about 100 troops remaining in the country.

The Czech Ministry of Defense also announced the exit of its forces Wednesday, which followed a large contingent of British forces leaving last week, also on fears of coronavirus exposure during the mission. “British, French, Australian and Czech troops who were coaching Iraqi counterparts were being temporarily sent home as Baghdad had put a hold on training operations to prevent the spread of COVID-19,” reports the AFP this week. All had been there to support coalition anti-ISIL operations led by Washington. But as the US mission to defeat the Islamic State has lately become less relevant given the demise of the terror group, Washington’s focus became Iranian influence inside Iraq – far beyond the original mission scope. The US itself had been reportedly drawing down from certain bases, but is not expected to ultimately depart given the current high state of tensions with Iran-backed militias in the country.

The stimulus bill has opened access to assictance for the entire gig economy.

• Spike in Unemployment Claims is Even More Horrid Than it Appears (WS)

This morning, the US Dept. of Labor announced that 3.283 million people had filed initial unemployment claims in the week ended March 21. We were warned yesterday that today’s initial claims would be horrid. In his press conference yesterday concerning the coronavirus, California Governor Gavin Newsom said that California by itself had “just passed the 1 million mark” in unemployment claims since March 13 — and this might include claims to be reflected in the next reporting week. And it’s going to get worse. The five largest counties of the San Francisco Bay Area were the first major region in the US to go into lockdown on March 17. The State of California followed on March 20, toward the end of the unemployment-claims reporting week (through March 21), and many other states followed within days – and many of those claims were filed after this reporting week had ended. This is the mind-blowing effect what started to happen in the week ended March 21:

The report by the Department of Labor this morning listed some sectors that were particularly hard hit by “COVID-19 virus impacts”: • Services industries broadly, particularly accommodation and food services; • health care and social assistance services; • arts, entertainment and recreation; • transportation and warehousing; • manufacturing industries. However, this horrid spike in claims only shows a partial picture. Since the end of that reporting week, lockdowns have spread to many other states, and companies in those states are now struggling with how to cope. Many companies had already laid off people before the lockdowns – and this is reflected in today’s unemployment claims. But much of the fallout from those lockdowns and their secondary effects will be reflected in future reports.

The gig economy, as the US economy has been called due to the growth of business models that shift labor from employees to contract workers, is unprepared for this. Under current rules, gig workers cannot file for unemployment claims – though the stimulus package will change this. And for now, they have not filed for unemployment claims. But their hours of many have been cut, and others lost their gigs entirely. This includes musicians whose gigs were eliminated when bars, restaurants, and clubs shut down. It includers actors and singers and artists. It includes Uber and Lyft drivers whose business has dwindled. It includes self-employed vacation-rental entrepreneurs with some units on Airbnb that no one is booking because the travel industry has shut down. It includes tech workers whose projects have been put on hold. It includes instructors and coaches of all kinds – such as figure skating coaches, language coaches, and corporate coaches. And so on. Many millions of people.

The battle between getting closer together and staying further apart. Stuck between social distancing and political distancing.

• What Should The EU Do Now: 3-Point Plan For Averting A Depression (Varoufakis)

With Lives, Livelihoods and the Union on the brink, the COVID-19 pandemic is the greatest test of the European project in the history of the Union — and we are failing. Solidarity was meant to be a foundational principle of the EU. But solidarity is missing at the moment it is most needed. COVID-19 has revealed a fundamental truth: Europe is only as healthy as its sickest resident, only as prosperous as its most bankrupted. But the EU’s leadership is paralysed by its beggar-thy-neighbour – and now sicken-thy-neighbour – mindset. The price of this failure will not merely be lives lost and livelihoods destroyed. It will be the disintegration of the Union itself. In line with its Green New Deal for Europe, DiEM25 offers a 3-point plan to protect all European residents, avert an economic depression, and prevent the collapse the Union.

Our plan is premised on four basic facts.
1) Public debt will, and must, rise: The precipitous fall in private sector incomes must be replaced by government expenditure. If not, bankruptcies will destroy much of Europe’s productive capacity and, thus, deplete the tax base even further.

2) The wholesale rise in public debt must not divide us: The last euro crisis wrecked some member-states’ fiscal position while improving the fiscal position of others. The results are wildly different fiscal absorption capacities across the eurozone. If the rise in public debt is not a shared burden, the new euro crisis will destroy the last chance to hold the European Union together once the virus itself has been defeated.

3) A Eurobond is essential, but the devil is in its details: Nine eurozone governments have rightly demanded the issue of a Eurobond so that the burden of rising public debt is shared. But the most important questions remain: Which institution should issue it? And who will back it? DiEM25 believes there is only one answer: an ECB-Eurobond backed solely by the ECB.

4) A Eurobond is essential, but it is not enough: Two more interventions are needed. During the pandemic, Europe must inject directly cash into every citizen’s bank account immediately so as to prevent as many bankruptcies and lost livelihoods as possible. Once the pandemic recedes, Europe must embark upon a sizeable, effective and common green investment program so as to improve Europe’s overall capacity to bounce back.

I haven’t had time to listen to the whole thing. But I miss Dylan Ratigan.

• Dylan Ratigan: “An Abomination Beyond Comprehension” – “Bernie Folded” (Dore)

Jimmy Dore talks to Dylan Ratigan

In the midst of the corona crisis,, Bob Dylan dropped a 17-minute song, on the murder of JFK. It’s his first original song in 8 years, and also of course since getting the Nobel Prize.. And why not. For help with lyrics go here

The day that they killed him, someone said to me, ‘Son
The age of the Antichrist has only begun.’
Air Force One coming in through the gate
Johnson sworn in at 2:38
Let me know when you decide to thrown in the towel
It is what it is, and it’s murder most foul

What’s new, pussycat? What’d I say?
I said the soul of a nation been torn away
And it’s beginning to go into a slow decay
And that it’s 36 hours past Judgment Day

• Muder Most Foul (Bob Dylan)

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Debt Rattle November 23 2019

Nov 232019

November 23, 2019 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:44 am Finance Tagged with: Biden, Bill Barr, Burisma, Epstein, insects, JFK, Solomon, Ukraine, Vindman 9 Responses »

Dorothea Lange Drought hit OK farm family on way to CA Aug 1936

• Former Ukraine MP: Bidens Got $12M Kickback From Burisma Owner (CDM)

• MSM Ignores Hunter Biden Buds’ $130 Million Taxpayer Cookie Jar Raid (ZH)

• The Ukrainian Influence-Peddling Rings, Part 2 (Stockman)

• Responding to Lt. Col. Vindman About My Ukraine Columns (Solomon)

• The Storms of December (Kunstler)

• ‘No One Out There’: The Democrats’ Lack Of Star Power (G.)

• The All-Women MSNBC Debate Panel Was a Right-Wing Disaster (Lazare)

• JFK’s Vision For The Future (Ehret)

• The Next Wave of Debt Monetization Will Be a Disaster (Lacalle)

• Barr Says Epstein Died By A Series Of Coincidences (CJ)

• Light Pollution Is Key ‘Bringer Of Insect Apocalypse’ (G.)

There’s a new Orange Man Bad “bombshell” going around, something about Giuliani and Mike Pompeo being in cahoots about Ukraine and “dirt on Biden”. It’s trying to make John Solomon part of the “conspiracy” as well. You’ll hear a lot about it. Meanwhile, CD Media continues:

• Former Ukraine MP: Bidens Got $12M Kickback From Burisma Owner (CDM)

Update: In further clarification of information provided, CD Media can now report that the $32M referenced below was sent to London, where it was seized by British officials and criminal charges were levied against Zlochevsky. Vice President Biden actively sought to have the charges thrown out in the United Kingdom for Zlochevsky in exchange for the $12M being diverted to Hunter Biden, according to Onyshchenko. Hunter Biden was then brought onto the board of directors at Zlochevsky’s company Burisma and received further payments of $3.1M over a period of months.

KYIV — Former Ukrainian MP Oleksandr Onyshchenko has provided CD Media with information on a transaction in 2013 where Biden family-related companies allegedly received a $12 million illegal kickback while Joe Biden was Vice President of the United States. Onyshchenko alleges the payment was made to gain Biden’s influence in affairs of the group of companies called Burisma owned by Ukrainian oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky, who sold a port facility in Ukraine and shifted partial proceeds of the sale to Hunter Biden. CD Media has already reported on ‘off the books’ payments to Hunter Biden by Burisma.

Onyshchenko alleges that during the sale of the port of Kherson on the Dnepr River in Ukraine in 2013 for approximately $32M, Biden received $12M of that amount illegally. Onyshchenko declared to CD Media that he is providing this information on the money flows to Biden to the U.S. Department of Justice

It wasn’t all Burisma.

• MSM Ignores Hunter Biden Buds’ $130 Million Taxpayer Cookie Jar Raid (ZH)

On Thursday, the Washington Examiner reported that an investment firm central to Hunter Biden’s financial dealings received more than $130 million in federal bailout loans while Joe Biden was vice president. Rosemont Capital – named after former Secretary of State John Kerry’s 90-acre Heinz family estate outside of Fox Chapel, Pennsylvania – was founded by Hunter Biden, Christopher Heinz, and longtime friend Devon Archer. According to the report, Rosemont was one of just 177 firms to participate in Obama’s 2009 Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility (TALF), which issued billions of dollars in favorable loans to investors who agreed to buy bonds from struggling banks, including college and auto loans.

“The Federal Reserve funded as much as 90% of the investments. If the bonds were profitable, the borrowers benefited. If not, the department agreed to take over the depreciated assets with no repercussions for the borrowers. Under the terms for the program, any U.S. company looking to invest in select categories of bonds was eligible to apply for the loans. However, the Treasury Department and Federal Reserve maintained the “right to reject a borrower for any reason,” and the internal selection process was criticized by some lawmakers as opaque and open to corruption. One of the firms that benefited was Rosemont Capital, a company led by Hunter Biden’s business partners, Chris Heinz and Devon Archer. The firm received the loans at a crucial time for Hunter Biden. The younger Biden had stepped down from his lobbying business in late 2008, reportedly due to pressure on his father’s vice presidential campaign.” -Washington Examiner

And while the Examiner reviewed “federal banking and corporate records” for their report, the MSM is completely silent about this obvious graft. CNN, NBC, MSNBC, ABC, CBS and FOX have all been radio silent on this report.

Davis Stockman in excellent -long- form. There’s a link to part 1 in the article.

• The Ukrainian Influence-Peddling Rings, Part 2 (Stockman)

Sometimes you need to call a spade a spade, and Tuesday’s testimony before Adam’s Schiff Show by former NSC official Tim Morrison is just such an occasion. In spades! In his opening statement, this paranoid moron uttered the following lunacy, and it’s all you need to know about what is really going on down in the Imperial City. “I continue to believe Ukraine is on the front lines of a strategic competition between the West and Vladimir Putin’s revanchist Russia. Russia is a failing power, but it is still a dangerous one. The United States aids Ukraine and her people so they can fight Russia over there and we don’t have to fight Russia here.”

Folks, that just plain whacko. The Trump-hating Dems are so feverishly set on a POTUS kill that they have enlisted a veritable posse of Russophobic, right-wing neocon cretins – Morrison, Taylor, Kent, Vindman, among others – to finish off the Donald. But in so doing they have made official Washington’s real beef against Trump crystal clear; and it’s not about the rule of law or abuse of presidential power or an impeachable dereliction of duty. To be sure, foolish politicians like Adam Schiff, Jerry Nadler and the Clintonista apparatus at the center of the Dem party are so overcome with inconsolable grief and anger about losing the 2016 election to Trump that their sole purpose in life is to drive the Donald from office. But that just makes them “useful idiots” or compliant handmaids of the Deep State, which has a far more encompassing and consequential motivation.

To wit, whether out of naiveté, contrariness or just plain common sense, the Donald has declined to embrace the War Party’s Russian bogeyman and demonization of Putin. He thereby threatens the Empire’s raison d’être to the very core. Indeed, that’s the real reason for the whole concerted attack on Trump from the Russian Collusion hoax, through the Mueller Investigation farce to the present UkraineGate and impeachment inquisition. The Deep State deeply and profoundly fears that if Trump remains in office – and especially if he is elected with a new mandate in 2020 – he might actually make peace with Russia and Putin. So in Part 1 we advert to the basics. Without the demonization of Russia, Ukraine would be the no count failed state and cesspool of corruption it actually is, and not a purported “front line” buffer against Russian aggression.

Likewise, it would not have been a recipient of vast US and western military and economic aid – a condition that turned it into a honeypot for the kind of Washington influence peddling which ensnared the Bidens, induced its officials to meddle in the 2016 US election, and, in return, incited Trump’s justifiable quest to get to the bottom of the malignancy that has ensued.

SUPERCUT: Media trying their best to hype "Bombshell!" "Explosive!" impeachment hearings pic.twitter.com/q3TzIFCOmu

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) November 22, 2019

I have no space for all 28 “primary factual elements” here. But do read them.

• Responding to Lt. Col. Vindman About My Ukraine Columns (Solomon)

I honor and applaud Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman’s service to his country. He’s a hero. I also respect his decision to testify at the impeachment proceedings. I suspect neither his service nor his testimony was easy. But I also know the liberties that Lt. Col. Vindman fought on the battlefield to preserve permit for a free and honest debate in America, one that can’t be muted by the color of uniform or the crushing power of the state. So I want to exercise my right to debate Lt. Col. Vindman about the testimony he gave about me. You see, under oath to Congress, he asserted all the factual elements in my columns at The Hill about Ukraine were false, except maybe my grammar

Here are his exact words: “I think all the key elements were false,” Vindman testified. Rep. Lee Zeldin, R-N.Y, pressed him about what he meant. “Just so I understand what you mean when you say key elements, are you referring to everything John Solomon stated or just some of it?” “All the elements that I just laid out for you. The criticisms of corruption were false…. Were there more items in there, frankly, congressman? I don’t recall. I haven’t looked at the article in quite some time, but you know, his grammar might have been right.” Such testimony has been injurious to my reputation, one earned during 30 years of impactful reporting for news organizations that included The Associated Press, The Washington Post, The Washington Times and The Daily Beast/Newsweek.

And so Lt. Col. Vindman, here are the 28 primary factual elements in my Ukraine columns, complete with attribution and links to sourcing. Please tell me which, if any, was factually wrong.

“The parade of State Department diplomats in charge of this-and-that suggests that Ukraine is virtually an occupied territory.”

• The Storms of December (Kunstler)

If the senate majority poohbahs were wise, they would warmly welcome a trial based on articles of impeachment, which would, of course, feature no artificial limits on the witness list, nor on questions that might be asked. The list might start with the UkraineGate “Whistleblower.” Among the many untruths uttered by Adam Schiff was the nonexistent law that gave that shadowy figure a right to anonymity. And besides, in any trial based on due process, the accused has an absolute right to face his accuser. Oddly, a month ago Mr. Schiff was avid to stick his “Whistleblower” in the witness chair, and perhaps not with a black hood over his head.

Then it was discovered that the “Whistleblower” had been consorting at least with Mr. Schiff’s staff members before blowing his fabled whistle, and that they had likely assisted in the assembly of his complaint, and in connecting him to the right lawyers in the Great Blue Okefenokee backwaters of DC lawyerdom, and, naturally, nobody from sea to shining sea over age nine who had paid attention to these antics believed that Mr. Schiff could not know who this “Whistleblower” was. Likewise, the brave Col. Vindman. Both of them deserve some time in a senate witness chair, and Mr. Schiff especially is due some sort of penalty for subjecting the country to his three years of dishonorable, seditious shenanigans — beginning with expulsion from the House and perhaps proceeding to a trial of his very own.

These UkraineGate hearings of the past two weeks raised some additional questions that have not otherwise been aired much in the public arena, chiefly, exactly how much does the US government seek to control the affairs of Ukraine? And how did we become the superintendent of this partially failed state? The parade of State Department diplomats in charge of this-and-that suggests that Ukraine is virtually an occupied territory. Do we realistically suppose that, in the natural course of things, we can shield Ukraine forever from the influence of its neighbor (and former sovereign), Russia?

Bit of a problem perhaps.

• ‘No One Out There’: The Democrats’ Lack Of Star Power (G.)

Too old. Too young. Too white. Too leftwing. Anxiety over Democrats’ failure to find a standout candidate is raising fears that, despite astounding unpopularity and potential impeachment, Donald Trump could win re-election by default. The Democratic primary’s top tier of candidates does not include a person of colour even in the biggest and most diverse field in history. The leader of national opinion polls turned 77 this week and delivered another stumbling debate performance while fending off questions about his son’s foreign business dealings. The poll leader in Iowa, which will get the first say, is the 37-year-old mayor of a small city who in some surveys is polling close to zero with African American voters.

Two more septuagenarians have seen their momentum stall amid criticism that their healthcare reforms are too radical and unaffordable. And then there are two last-minute would-be saviours: an ageing billionaire from New York and a former east coast governor who this week cancelled a campaign event when only two people showed up. Watching it all with glee are Trump and Republicans, hardly able to believe their luck that they might not have to win next year’s election so much as watch Democrats lose it, just as Hillary Clinton did by failing to motivate turnout in crucial states in 2016. This week’s debate in Atlanta showed that the party is struggling again to find a nominee as inspiring as Barack Obama. “When I ask my students, is there anyone on that debate stage tonight who you see as being presidential, most of them say no, there’s no one out there,” said Monika McDermott, a political science professor, at Fordham University in New York.

“And they’re political junkies so they know as much as any of us do. ..] Indeed, Trump is showing resilience in the polls. A survey of 801 registered voters by the Marquette Law School in the all-important state of Wisconsin over 13-17 November showed only the long shot Cory Booker beating Trump in a head-to-head match up (45% to 44%). The president led Biden 47% to 44%, Sanders 48% to 45%, Warren 48% to 43% and Buttigieg 47% to 39%. John Zogby, a Democratic pollster, said: “In most polls nationwide and in the key states, the president is competitive against every one of the major candidates. The Democrats are still kind of fumbling for a message: it’s really not enough to be against Trump.

Anything that has Rachel Maddow in it is a disaster.

• The All-Women MSNBC Debate Panel Was a Right-Wing Disaster (Lazare)

The fifth Democratic presidential debate received an outpouring of praise for its all-woman cast of moderators: Rachel Maddow and Andrea Mitchell of MSNBC, Ashley Parker of the Washington Post, and Kristen Welker of NBC. Writing in the Nation, Joan Walsh asserted that the event “showed us what American political life would look like if women’s concerns were routinely at the center of the conversation.” “Democratic Debate Moderator Panel Of All Women Is Celebrated By Viewers,” reads a Huffington Post headline. “Female moderators = more questions to the rights and burdens of women,” tweeted Clara Jefferey, editor in chief of Mother Jones. “When all the moderators are women, issues that affect women get more attention. Funny how that works,” said Michelangelo Signorile, host of the Michelangelo Signorile Show.

The idea that women’s representation in itself — regardless of who those women are — is a boon to women everywhere is hardly new to US political discourse. But what makes the fawning over the November 20 debate particularly tone-deaf is that the moderators’ questions were both inane and right-wing. Their inquiries were almost entirely premised on defending the benevolence of US empire, marginalizing political positions deemed too far left, and asking “gotcha” questions from the right on issues from health care to immigration. Trapped within these ideological constraints, the debate actually struck a blow against feminism — and was a blessing to the forces of chauvinism and austerity.

[..] Andrea Mitchell was responsible for another low point in the moderation when she said: “President Trump has dramatically changed America’s approach to our adversaries by holding summits with Kim Jong-un, getting out of the Iran nuclear deal, and at times embracing Vladimir Putin and other strongmen. So let’s talk about what kind of commander-in-chief you would be. Senator Harris, North Korea is now threatening to cancel any future summits if President Trump does not make concessions on nuclear weapons. If you were commander in chief, would you make concessions to Kim Jong-un in order to keep those talks going?” Mitchell has long doubled as a stenographer for the national security state, but this question was hawkish even by her standards.

Don’t fight the Deep State. It’s bad for your health.

• JFK’s Vision For The Future (Ehret)

Wall Street’s Dulles Brothers who together ran the CIA and the State Department had made several major efforts to sabotage Kennedy’s “new frontiers” initiative that gripped the imaginations of young and old alike. Kennedy’s program was driven by large scale infrastructure at home and advanced scientific and technological progress in the Developing sector abroad. Attempting to break that trajectory, Allen Dulles had prepared the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba months before Kennedy entered the scene which was a near disaster for the world.

Just days before Kennedy’s inauguration, Allan Dulles ensured that a pro-Kennedy ally who had just recently gained power in the Congo named Patrice Lumumba was assassinated in cold blood knowing that JFK would be blamed, and every effort was made to back up the French fascists trying to stop the Algerian independence movement behind JFK’s back. Both the Cuban invasion and the assassination of Lumumba have been blamed on Kennedy to this day. In response to this treachery, JFK made the bold move of firing CIA director Allan Dulles, and two Wall Street-connected CIA directors on November 29, 1961 saying that he would soon “splinter the C.I.A. in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.”

Recognizing the insanity of the zero sum Cold Warriors who could only look at the world through the perversity of a Hobbesian leans of “each against all”, JFK not only stood alone against the entire array of war-hungry Joint Chiefs calling for war with Russia during the infamous “13 day showdown” and parodied by Kubrick’s brilliant Dr. Strangelove, but also took the advice of Generals MacArthur, and Charles de Gaulle who warned him to avoid all entrapments of a “land war in Vietnam”. On this point, JFK introduced NSAM 263 in October 1963 to begin a full withdrawal from Southeast Asia.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1197290359228944384

All these waves have been.

• The Next Wave of Debt Monetization Will Be a Disaster (Lacalle)

According to the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and the IIF (Institute of International finance), global debt has soared to a new record high. The level of government debt around the world has ballooned since the financial crisis, reaching levels never seen before during peacetime. This has happened in the middle of an unprecedented monetary experiment that injected more than $20 trillion in printed money into the economy and lowered interest rates to the lowest levels seen in history. The balance sheet of the major central banks rose to levels never seen before, with the Bank of Japan at 100 percent of the country’s GDP, the European Central Bank (ECB) at 40 percent, and the Federal Reserve at 20 percent.

If this monetary experiment has proven anything it’s that lower rates and higher liquidity are not tools to help deleverage debt, but to incentivize it. Furthermore, this dangerous experiment has proven that a policy that was designed as a temporary measure due to exceptional circumstances has become the new norm. The so-called normalization process of raising interest rates lasted only a few months in 2018, only for asset purchases and rate cuts to resume. Despite the largest fiscal and monetary stimulus in decades, global economic growth is weakening, and the productivity growth of leading economies is close to zero. Money velocity, a measure of economic activity relative to money supply, thus, goes down.

It’s been explained many times why this happens. Low rates and high liquidity are perverse incentives to push the crowding-out of the private sector by government; they also perpetuate overcapacity due to endless refinancing of non-productive and obsolete sectors to lower rates, and the number of zombie companies—those that cannot pay their interest expenses with operating profits—rises.

Barr is simply saying you’ll never find out. Too many “upstanding” people would be damaged goods.

• Barr Says Epstein Died By A Series Of Coincidences (CJ)

In an interview with Associated Press, US Attorney General William Barr put all conspiracy theories to rest once and for all by assuring the world that alleged sex trafficker and alleged billionaire Jeffrey Epstein’s death was simply the result of a very, very, very long series of unfortunate coincidences. “I can understand people who immediately, whose minds went to sort of the worst-case scenario because it was a perfect storm of screw-ups,” Barr told AP on Thursday.

This perfect storm of unlucky oopsies include Epstein being taken off suicide watch not long after a previous suicide attempt and shortly before his successful suicide, suggestions that the first attempt may have actually been an assault via attempted strangulation inflicted by someone else, two security guards simultaneously falling asleep on the job when they were supposed to be checking on Epstein, one of those guards not even being an actual security guard, security footage of two cameras outside Epstein’s cell being unusable due to a mysterious technical glitch, at least eight Bureau of Prisons officials knowing Epstein wasn’t meant to be left alone in his cell and leaving him alone in his cell anyway, Epstein’s cellmate being transferred out of their shared space the day before Epstein’s death, Epstein signing a will two days before his death, unexplained injuries on Epstein’s wrists and shoulder reported by his family after the autopsy, and a forensic expert who examined Epstein’s body claiming that his injuries were more consistent with homicide than suicide.

“The attorney general also sought to dampen conspiracy theories by people who have questioned whether Epstein really took his own life, saying the evidence proves Epstein killed himself,” AP reports. “He added that he personally reviewed security footage that confirmed that no one entered the area where Epstein was housed on the night he died. Well if reporting that he’s reviewed footage which we were previously told didn’t exist isn’t enough to dampen those kooky conspiracy theories, I don’t know what is. So there you have it. The US government says that an intelligence asset with damning information on many powerful individuals did in fact kill himself due to an admittedly bizarre and wildly unlikely series of strange coincidences. I for one have no more questions. Checkmate, conspiracy theorists.

The whole world as a Christmas tree.

• Light Pollution Is Key ‘Bringer Of Insect Apocalypse’ (G.)

Light pollution is a significant but overlooked driver of the rapid decline of insect populations, according to the most comprehensive review of the scientific evidence to date. Artificial light at night can affect every aspect of insects’ lives, the researchers said, from luring moths to their deaths around bulbs, to spotlighting insect prey for rats and toads, to obscuring the mating signals of fireflies. “We strongly believe artificial light at night – in combination with habitat loss, chemical pollution, invasive species, and climate change – is driving insect declines,” the scientists concluded after assessing more than 150 studies. “We posit here that artificial light at night is another important – but often overlooked – bringer of the insect apocalypse.”

However, unlike other drivers of decline, light pollution was relatively easy to prevent, the team said, by switching off unnecessary lights and using proper shades. “Doing so could greatly reduce insect losses immediately,” they said. Brett Seymoure, a behavioural ecologist at Washington University in St Louis and senior author of the review, said: “Artificial light at night is human-caused lighting – ranging from streetlights to gas flares from oil extraction. It can affect insects in pretty much every imaginable part of their lives.” Insect population collapses have been reported in Germany and Puerto Rico, and the first global scientific review, published in February, said widespread declines threatened to cause a “catastrophic collapse of nature’s ecosystems”. The latest review says: “Insects around the world are rapidly declining. Their absence would have devastating consequences for life on this planet.”

A poster that was put up around Houston in the weeks before JFK visited.

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Epstein Is Like JFK All Over Again

Aug 152019

August 15, 2019 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 7:01 pm Primers Tagged with: autopsy, Baden, Bill Barr, Epstein, FBI, Ghislaine, hanging, hyoid, Jack Ruby, JFK, Lee Harvey Oswald, shredder, strangulation, Teterboro 2 Responses »

Felix Vallotton Verdun 1917

It’s been a few days since I did anything but my news aggregator, and that’s not so strange, since so much of it ‘encircled’ Jeffrey Epstein. Now that he’s supposedly died, though we have no proof of that, from an ‘apparent suicide’, there are other topics as well that we can turn to.

But let’s start with Epstein just for good measure. We still don’t have an autopsy report, though New York City Chief Medical Examiner Barbara Sampson apparently performed one on Epstein on Sunday, which private pathologist Michael Baden “observed on behalf of Epstein’s representatives”.

Q: Which representatives? Q2: Why Baden, who investigated JFK’s death, and Michael Brown’s? The guy’s 85! So yes, he has experience, but also ostensibly experience with presenting the facts as certain people want them presented.

So there’s no autopsy report, for whatever reason, but details have been leaked to the WaPO. Epstein hade multiple broken bones in his neck, and the focus is on the hyoid bone, which breaks much more easily in strangulation than it does in self-imposed hanging. “The hyoid bone is a U-shaped mobile bone situated in the anterior portion of the neck at the level of the C3 vertebra, in the angle between the mandible and the thyroid cartilage..”

And then today we read that an Epstein representative has claimed his remains. Again, what representative? We don’t even know it was Epstein’s body, though between his death and today that could have been established, through DNA for instance. But we’re going to be stuck with that one autopsy, -because the body will be gone- which may or may not be convincing and/or conclusive. Who knows?

And AG Bill Barr can talk all he wants about seeking justice for the victims, but he should know that at this point it’s all about transparency. Tell people what you know when you know it. Because if you don’t, that’s going to turn against you. But perhaps he thinks doing so may turn against him even more.

Or maybe he’s just another tool protecting DC elites, on both sides of the aisle. There’s this story out there that nobody is able to locate Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s enabling madam, though the Daily Mail came up the other day with a property north of Boston, but there’s a few things missing there.

First, she apparently is not on the premises, and second, she would have to be very confident of being “protected”, to be in the US at this point. For one thing, she might want to be somewhere that doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the US. But still, US intelligence can locate you or me in a matter of minutes if not seconds if they so desire, and Maxwell’s essentially been unaccounted for for years?

Epstein had industrial capacity paper and even carpet shredders, first on his Caribbean island, which were then shipped to Manhattan. Every single day Maxwell is not “found” gives her more time to shred whatever she wants (and what other people may went shredded too).

And this is not something that started when Epstein was arrested on July 6 at Teterboro Airport either. Though that is still the big mystery: why was he apprehended there and then? After ten years, or even 30 years if you will of abusing underage girls? Why there and then? Who gave the order? Who had that power? Who wanted him jailed, after he’d been protected all that time? After the 13-month sweetheart deal that saw him abuse girls even while he was serving his sentence?

But look, we don’t even know if the body autopsied was Epstein. They may be lying about that too.

It’s like we’re replaying JFK and Lee Harvey Oswald all over again and Jack Ruby got access to Epstein’s cell and that’s the official story so stop asking questions.

Where’s Jerry Dammers When You Need Him?

Jun 162019

June 16, 2019 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 6:50 pm Finance, Primers Tagged with: Assange, Bob Marley, Coldplay, J.Edgar Hoover, Jerry Dammers, JFK, Joe Strummer, Johnny Cash, Kennedy, Mandela, Radiohead, Springsteen 6 Responses »

David Hockney A Bigger Splash 1967

Just trying to find angles here. Trying to find people who could help Julian Assange. But so many of them are already dead. Can you imagine how different things might have been if Martin Luther King had still been alive to speak out on his situation? Or Muhammad Ali, JFK and Bobby Kennedy? Nelson Mandela? How about Bob Marley? Or, you know, Johnny Cash? Joe Strummer? We lost so many voices, and so few appear to have emerged to take their place. Have we lost too many? Are we done? Is this it?

I was thinking about Jerry Dammers recently. Not a well-known name to many. But he wrote and produced an incredibly strong song and video in the last days that Nelson Mandela was still in captivity. And I was thinking why doesn’t anyone produce something equally as strong for Assange today? And no, I couldn’t come up with an answer. The world has changed enormously, but if the P. Diddys, the Coldplays, Radioheads and Beyonce’s of this world would want to release a song like Jerry Dammers did 35 years ago, they could, and through social media, they could give it as much weight as back then. And where’s Bruce Springsteen anyway?

So here’s calling on all those people. Here’s what Dammers and his brilliant crew did in 1984, and I can’t not notice how it involves both black and white people working seamlessly together. At that time in Britain, that was normal. Try that today with all the Brexit crap and the Hostile Environment nonsense.

So why can’t we have an equally powerful song for Julian Assange? What happened to music? Was Mandela’s situation that much worse than Assange’s? Was the pressure to free him that much stronger? And if so, who applied that pressure? Sure, 21 years in captivity is more than 7, but is there an essential difference? Are you so blind that you cannot see? Are you so deaf that you cannot hear? In the end both men were locked up for all the wrong reasons, no?

Sure, that could have been contested by the South African apartheid regime back when, just as it is by the US apartheid regime today, but does anybody in either case really think any of it is justified?

A month ago, I wrote Julian Assange Is Today’s Martin Luther King, and many people said something in the vein of: “he’s nowhere near”. But is that even true, and even if it were, does that justify the way he’s being treated?

Julian Assange has been smeared with sexual allegations, just like MLK. In MLK’s case it was courtesy of J. Edgar Hoover. In Assange’s case, it was -is- way more elaborate, they have 3-4 governments involved. Imagine Hoover having the tools the FBI and MI6 have today. How scary is that? Well, we’re not so far removed from just that, and Assange was the primary person to warn us about exactly this.

He saw it all coming. It’s why he was brought down. Too smart. He fought the law and the law won (well, the law…). But that is not a good thing for you or me, at all.

But, you know, where is Jerry Dammers? We know where Johnny Cash and Bob Marley are, and Joe Strummer and Nelson Mandela. They’re long gone. But we’re supposed to replace them with equal voices of our own, or whatever they’ve done, the sacrifices they’ve made, will fade into some distant haze.

What’s going on here? Everybody values their bank accounts more than their freedom now? Would you like to talk to Johnny Cash or Bob Marley about that choice? Are we just dumbing down, no more opinions of our own, no more principles?

You too want to be breaking rocks in the hot sun? You’re well on your way.

1984 Is Not The Future

Mar 172018

March 17, 2018 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 2:16 pm Finance Tagged with: Brexit, bullshit, Dallas, Guardian, innovation, JFK, Kennedy, media, objective, Orwell, politics, propaganda, Trump 9 Responses »

Jacobello Alberegno The Beast of the Apocalypse 1360-90

The Guardian ran an article yesterday by one of its editors, David Shariatmadari, that both proves and disproves its own theme at the same time: “An Information Apocalypse Is Coming”. Now, I don’t fancy the term apocalypse in a setting like this, it feels too much like going for a cheap thrill, but since he used it, why not.

My first reaction to the headline, and the article, is: what do you mean it’s ‘coming’? Don’t you think we have such an apocalypse already, that we’re living it, we’re smack in the middle of such a thing? If you don’t think so, would that have anything to do with you working at a major newspaper? Or with your views of the world, political and other, that shape how you experience ‘information’?

Shariatmadari starts out convincingly and honestly enough with a description of a speech that JFK was supposed to give in Dallas right after he was murdered, a speech that has been ‘resurrected’ using technology that enables one to make it seem like he did deliver it.

An Information Apocalypse Is Coming. How Can We Protect Ourselves?

“In a world of complex and continuing problems, in a world full of frustrations and irritations, America’s leadership must be guided by the lights of learning and reason, or else those who confuse rhetoric with reality, and the plausible with the possible will gain the popular ascendancy with their seemingly swift and simple solutions to every world problem.”

John F Kennedy’s last speech reads like a warning from history, as relevant today as it was when it was delivered in 1963 at the Dallas Trade Mart. His rich, Boston Brahmin accent reassures us even as he delivers the uncomfortable message. The contrast between his eloquence and the swagger of Donald Trump is almost painful to hear.

Yes, Kennedy’s words are lofty ones, and they do possess at least some predictive qualities. But history does play a part too. Would we have read the same in them that we do now, had Kennedy not been shot right before he could deliver them? Hard to tell.

What’s more, not long before JFK was elected president America had been in the tight and severe grip of J. Edgar Hoover and Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist campaign, in which lots of reality was replaced with rhetoric, something Kennedy undoubtedly had in mind while writing the speech. JFK was not just addressing future threats, he was talking about the past as well.

But the writer slips into a much bigger faux pas right after: injecting Trump into the picture. It’s fine if someone doesn’t like Trump, but naming him there and then, in an article about ‘information apocalypse’, also means confusing objectivity with regards to your topic with subjectivity concerning your political ideas. While the Kennedy speech item relates to -advancing(?)- technology, a valid part of the apocalypse, mentioning Trump has nothing to do with that apocalypse, at least not objectively. Back to David Shariatmadari:

The problem is, Kennedy never spoke these words. He was killed before he made it to the Trade Mart. You can only hear them now thanks to audio technology developed by a British company, CereProc. Fragments of his voice have been taken from other speeches and public appearances, spliced and put back together, with neural networks employed to mimic his natural intonation. The result is pretty convincing, although there’s a machine-like ring to some of the syllables, a synthetic stutter. Enough to recognise, if you already know, that this is a feat of technology, not oratory.

We like to think of innovation as morally neutral. We empower scientists and engineers to range freely in the hope they might discover things that save labour and lives. The ends to which these are put aren’t the responsibility of the researchers. The agile robots produced by Boston Dynamics might look like they could cheerfully pin you up against a wall and snap your neck, but do we really want to close off this avenue of research? After all, they might equally be capable of performing life-saving surgery. The methods used to resurrect JFK can also help people with illnesses such as motor neurone disease – like the late Stephen Hawking – that affect their ability to speak.

It’s certainly true that we are so ‘geared’ towards progress, we ‘conveniently’ forget and ignore that every next step carries its own shadow side, every yin comes with its yang. ‘Progress’ and ‘innovation’ – and related terms- ring so positive in our eyes and ears it borders on -wilful- blindness. That blindness is set to play a major role in our future, and in our acceptance as gospel of a lot of ‘information’.

“Dual use” of technology is not a new problem. Nuclear physics gave us both energy and bombs. What is new is the democratisation of advanced IT, the fact that anyone with a computer can now engage in the weaponisation of information; 2016 was the year we woke up to the power of fake news, with internet conspiracy theories and lies used to bolster the case for both Brexit and Donald Trump.

Ouch! See, he does it again. This is not an objective discourse on ‘information disinformation’, but a way to make people think -through a method he’s supposed to be exposing- that ‘fake news’ led to Brexit and Trump. That’s a political view, not a neutral one. Yes, there are many voices out there who connect ‘fake news’ directly to things they don’t like, but that’s just a trap.

And as I said, it may have to do with the fact that the writer works for a major newspaper, which of course he wants to, and wishes to, see as some kind of beacon against fake news, but if he lets his own personal views slip into an objective treatment of a topic this easily, it automatically becomes self-defeating.

There is no proof that Trump and Brexit’s success are down to fake news more than their opposite sides, ‘fake news’ is everywhere, and that very much includes the Guardian. The coverage of the UK government accusations against Russia in the poisoning case proves that more than ever.

You can be anti-Trump, anti-Brexit and anti-Putin all you want, but they don’t define fake news or an information apocalypse, any more than ‘commies’ did in the days of Hoover and McCarthy.

We may, however, look back on it as a kind of phoney war, when photoshopping and video manipulation were still easily detectable. That window is closing fast. A program developed at Stanford University allows users to convincingly put words into politicians’ mouths. Celebrities can be inserted into porn videos. Quite soon it will be all but impossible for ordinary people to tell what’s real and what’s not.

That is am almost bewildering line. Does the writer really think ‘ordinary people’ can today tell apart what’s real and what’s not? If his paper had honestly covered his country’s, and his government’s, involvement in the wars all over the Middle East and North Africa over the past decades, would his readers still be supportive of the politicians that today inhabit Westminster?

Or does the paper prefer supporting the incumbents over Nigel Farage and Donald Trump, because it owes its reputation and position and revenues to supporting the likes of Theresa May and Tony Blair? Yeah, I know, with a critical view, yada yada, but when has the Guardian labeled any UK politician a war criminal? Much easier to go after Farage, isn’t it? The question is: what part of this is fake, and what is not?

What will the effects of this be? When a public figure claims the racist or sexist audio of them is simply fake, will we believe them? How will political campaigns work when millions of voters have the power to engage in dirty tricks? What about health messages on the dangers of diesel or the safety of vaccines? Will vested interests or conspiracy theorists attempt to manipulate them?

This appears to make sense, but it does not really. We are way past that. ‘Ordinary people’ have already lost their capacity to tell truth from fiction. Newspapers and TV stations have long disseminated the views of their owners, it’s just that they now have -newfound- competition from a million other sources: the blessings of social media.

The core issue here is that 1984 is not some point in the future, as we for some reason prefer to think. We are living 1984. Perhaps the fact that we are now 34 years past it should give us a clue about that? People tend to think that perhaps Orwell was right, but his predictions were way early. Were they, though?

Also: Orwell may not have foreseen the blessings and trappings of social media, but he did foresee how governments and their media sympathizers would react to them: with more disinformation.

Unable to trust what they see or hear, will people retreat into lives of non-engagement, ceding the public sphere to the already powerful or the unscrupulous? The potential for an “information apocalypse” is beginning to be taken seriously.

This is a full-blown time warp. If it is true that people only now take the potential for an “information apocalypse” seriously, they are so far behind the curve ball that one must question the role of the media in that. Why didn’t people know about that potential when it was an actual issue? Why did nobody tell them?

The problem is we have no idea what a world in which all words and images are suspect will look like, so it’s hard to come up with solutions.

Yes, we do have an idea about that, because we see it around us 24/7. Maybe not with images as fully fabricated as the JFK speech, but the essence is manipulation itself, not the means by which it’s delivered.

Perhaps not very much will change – perhaps we will develop a sixth sense for bullshit and propaganda, in the same way that it has become easy to distinguish sales calls from genuine inquiries, and scam emails with fake bank logos from the real thing.

David, we ARE all bullshitters, we all lie all the time, for a myriad of reasons, to look better, to feel better, to seem better, to get rich, to get laid. It’s who we are. We lie to ourselves most of all. A sixth sense against bullshit and propaganda is the very last thing we will ever develop, because it would force us to face our own bullshit.

But there’s no guarantee we’ll be able to defend ourselves from the onslaught, and society could start to change in unpredictable ways as a result. Like the generation JFK was addressing in his speech, we are on the cusp of a new and scary age. Rhetoric and reality, the plausible and the possible, are becoming difficult to separate. We await a figure of Kennedy’s stature to help us find a way through. Until then, we must at the very least face up to the scale of the coming challenge.

We are not “on the cusp of a new and scary age”, we are in the smack middle of it. We haven’t been able to separate rhetoric and reality, the plausible and the possible, for ages. What’s different from 100 years ago, or 50 years ago, is that now we are faced with an information overload so severe that this in itself makes us less capable of separating chaff from wheat.

So yes, that perhaps is new. But bullshit and propaganda are not. And labeling Trump and Brexit the main threats misses your own topic by miles. You could make an equally valid point that they are the results of many years of bullshit and propaganda by old-style politics and old-style media.

Maybe they’re what happens when ‘ordinary people’ switch off from an overload of bullshit and propaganda forced upon them by people and institutions they grew up to trust. And then feel they were betrayed by. A sixth sense after all.

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