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Debt Rattle July 7 2023

Jul 072023
 
 July 7, 2023  Posted by at 9:19 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  30 Responses »


Camille Pissarro Rue Saint-Honoré in the Afternoon, Effect of Rain 1897

 

• Zelensky Holding Out For NATO To Enter Ukraine Conflict – Lukashenko (TASS)
• Zelensky ‘Dragging Entire Planet’ To Hell – Russian Envoy (RT)
• Kiev Dragging Other Countries Into Conflict – Moscow (RT)
• Lukashenko Outlines Deal With Wagner (RT)
• The Capitalists Are Circling Over Ukraine (Fazi)
• Zelensky Clashes With Bulgarian President Over Weapons Demands (RT)
• Bulgaria Plans $650 Million Nuclear Sale To Ukraine – WSJ (RT)
• Warsaw Wants ‘Gestures’ From Kiev On Massacres (RT)
• South American Leaders Block Zelensky From Summit (RT)
• Raiffeisenbank ‘Postpones’ Plan To Leave Russia – Reuters (RT)
• SCOTUS Is Losing Legitimacy – And Only Has Itself To Blame |(Blankenship)
• Meta Launches Data-Harvesting Twitter Clone, Immediately Starts Censoring (ZH)
• Cocaine at White House Was Found Inside Cubby – Not West Wing Lobby (Sp.)
• Lancet Study on Covid Vaccine Autopsies Finds 74% Were Caused by Vaccine (DS)

 

 

The keyboard Meta used to produce their new app, Threads.

 

 

Gal Luft

 

 

Maersheimer

 

 

The five hottest Julys in the US were 1936, 1901, 1934, 1930 and 1931.

 

 

@JimSteeleSkepti
The jet stream NOT CO2 is our weather control knob. Below is the satellite data from June 28, 2023 showing (above) the wavy behavior of the jet stream and (below) how the troughs coincide with cool temperatures and the ridges with heat domes and high temperatures. On the same dates the public was given very different weather news. Experts reported for Los Angeles under the jet stream’s trough: Records from Downtown Los Angeles, where records date back to 1877, show June 2023 being the coolest such month since 1965.

But in Texas, where the jet stream generated a heat dome, the news misleadingly reported: “Climate change has sent temperatures soaring in Texas” While along the east coast in Connecticut beneath a trough reported: “What’s behind Connecticut’s unusually cool weather in June — and what’s coming next?”

 

 

 

 

“He will insist on Ukraine being admitted to NATO so that NATO will then join the war against Russia…

• Zelensky Holding Out For NATO To Enter Ukraine Conflict – Lukashenko (TASS)

Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky will insist that Ukraine be accepted for NATO membership and that the bloc get directly involved in the conflict, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko said at a meeting with representatives of foreign and Belarusian media outlets. “He (Zelensky – TASS) will insist on Ukraine being admitted to NATO so that NATO will then join the war against Russia,” he said. According to Lukashenko, Zelensky has finally realized that he will not win the war, and so has gradually started making demands on those who pushed his country into it. The Belarusian leader noted that Zelensky’s demands would, above all, concern money and new weaponry. “By July 11 (the start date of NATO’s Vilnius summit – TASS), they [the NATO countries] will be expected to come up with something to demonstrate” support for Kiev, he said.

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“American and European citizens are hardly ready to march in orderly rows to the hell into which the Zelensky government is dragging the entire planet.”

• Zelensky ‘Dragging Entire Planet’ To Hell – Russian Envoy (RT)

Faced with failure on the battlefield, Ukraine’s president is trying to drag NATO into the conflict with a false-flag attack on Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, Russia’s ambassador to the US, Anatoly Antonov, said on Thursday. “News reporters continue to pretend not to notice the obvious: from the very beginning of the special military operation, all the accusations of the Zelensky regime against us turned out to be sabotage operations of Kiev itself,” Antonov told Newsweek in an email interview. The difference now, he added, was that “this time stakes have grown substantially: Europe’s nuclear security is at risk.” Zelensky has accused Russia of planting explosives at the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP). Antonov called it “absurd” to accuse Russia of wanting to damage the facility which it has controlled since March 2022.

Kiev’s “criminal intentions” divert attention from “the failed counteroffensive of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, in which the West has invested enormous resources,” to falsely accuse Russia as a ‘nuclear terrorist’ ahead of the NATO summit, and draw the US-led bloc into the conflict directly, Antonov said. “Western ruling elites should understand that the failures on the battlefield make Kiev eager to create a pretext for the deployment of the NATO contingent to Ukraine, thereby to inflate a regional conflict into World War III,” the Russian ambassador told Newsweek. “We call on the curators of the Kiev regime to exercise responsibility and exert influence on their ‘wards’ in order to avoid a large-scale catastrophe,” he added. “American and European citizens are hardly ready to march in orderly rows to the hell into which the Zelensky government is dragging the entire planet.”

International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors, who are on the ground at the ZNPP, reported on Wednesday that they have found no signs of any mines, either at the cooling pond – as Kiev initially claimed – or on the roofs of the reactor buildings. The IAEA observer mission was deployed to the ZNPP in September 2022. Prior to that, the station and its environs had been repeatedly targeted by Ukrainian artillery, which Kiev admitted at one point. Just before the IAEA mission arrived, Ukrainian commandos also attempted to seize the facility but were driven back. Russia has provided evidence of Ukrainian attacks to the UN, which has avoided assigning blame.

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Bulgaria: “the nation’s new pro-European government – which was formed in early June – confirmed that it would continue to provide Ukraine with military equipment. ..”

• Kiev Dragging Other Countries Into Conflict – Moscow (RT)

Ukraine’s attempts to secure more foreign military aid and make other countries direct participants in the conflict will fail to change its eventual outcome, Kremlin Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov said on Thursday. Speaking to reporters, Peskov was asked to comment on Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky’s trip to Bulgaria, in which he intends to discuss further security assistance to Kiev. “The Kiev regime is doing its best to drag as many countries directly into this conflict as possible,” Peskov said, adding that some nations are already immersed in hostilities from head to toe. Peskov confirmed that he was not surprised such deliberations were taking place, noting that “fundamentally, all these discussions and their results are in no way capable of influencing the outcome of the special military operation.”

“The current frontline situation provides ample proof for that,” the spokesman added. He was referring to the ongoing Ukrainian counteroffensive that, according to the Russian Defense Ministry, has so far failed to gain ground despite being supported by a large amount of Western weaponry. Zelensky’s visit to Bulgaria comes after last week Sofia announced a new package of military aid to Kiev. While it stated that the new batch of military assistance would be “comparable in volume to the aid from the first package” granted last December by the caretaker government, it did not provide any details on its contents. The decision came after the nation’s new pro-European government – which was formed in early June – confirmed that it would continue to provide Ukraine with military equipment.

This stance, however, is not shared by President Rumen Radev, who earlier insisted that Bulgaria should refrain from supporting Ukraine with arms, arguing those policies would not be able to stop the conflict and would only damage the country’s economy. Sofia has been slow to provide Kiev with security assistance, largely due to opposition from the Bulgarian Socialist Party, with the gridlock removed only in December. However, a Euractiv report from October suggested that the Balkan nation emerged as one of the biggest indirect suppliers of military aid to Ukraine, having sent at least €1 billion of weapons and ammunition to Ukraine via brokers. Russia has repeatedly warned the West that weapons deliveries to Ukraine will only prolong hostilities and make it a direct participant in the conflict, without changing the outcome.

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“The experience that Wagner and its commanders have, they’ll gladly pass it on to our military…. The ones that we need: in tactics, combat operations..”

• Lukashenko Outlines Deal With Wagner (RT)

Wagner troops could be used to defend Belarus after they relocate from Russia, where they took part in a failed revolt last month, President Alexander Lukashenko has said. Military personnel attached to Evgeny Prigozhin’s private military company are being transferred to the country subject to “certain conditions,” including that they can be deployed instantly if they’re needed to “defend the state,” he explained. “I’m absolutely not worried and not troubled that we’ll have a certain number of these fighters stationed here [in Belarus],” Lukashenko told journalists on Thursday. The likes of Polish President Andrzej Duda and his Ukrainian counterpart Vladimir Zelensky have vowed that “they won’t leave Belarus alone,” Lukashenko said, adding that “he must react” to such threats as supreme commander of the armed forces.

“The experience that Wagner and its commanders have, they’ll gladly pass it on to our military…. The ones that we need: in tactics, combat operations,” he continued. Wagner was instrumental in the capture of the strategic city of Artyomovsk (Bakhmut) from Ukraine in May. The PMC has also operated in Syria and Africa. When asked about the possibility of Wagner attempting a mutiny in Belarus like they did in Russia last month, Lukashenko replied: “I don’t think that Wagner will somehow rise up and turn its guns against the Belarusian authorities and the Belarusian state. Everything happens in life. But today I don’t see such a situation.” He also provided information regarding the whereabouts of Prigozhin, saying the Wagner head is currently not in Belarus, but in Russia, and that they had talked the previous day.

Kremlin Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov said on Thursday that the Russian authorities “don’t have either the ability or desire” to track Prigozhin’s movements. All of the statements made by Moscow and Belarus regarding the fate of Wagner in the wake of the failed mutiny “remain relevant,” he added. In a short message on social media earlier this week, Prigozhin claimed that the botched uprising by his men was aimed at “fighting traitors and mobilizing the society” of Russia. “I think we succeeded in many of those goals,” he claimed. The two-day insurrection by Wagner in late June was ended through talks between Lukashenko and Prigozhin in close coordination with Russian President Vladimir Putin. According to Moscow, it was agreed that the Wagner chief and his men who took part in the mutiny would avoid prosecution. As part of the deal, Prigozhin left for Belarus, with his men offered the choice of following him, signing contracts with the Russian military, or returning home.

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“..the IMF played a key role in precipitating the 2014 crisis: Ukraine’s then-President, Viktor Yanukovych, refused to accept IMF demands that he cut wages, slash social spending and end gas subsidies in order to integrate with the EU..”

• The Capitalists Are Circling Over Ukraine (Fazi)

Two weeks ago, thousands of representatives from businesses and governments from across the world gathered in London to “support Ukraine’s recovery”. But was the gathering of all those Western corporate elites at the Ukraine Recovery Conference entirely altruistic? There are, after all, massive profit opportunities being created by the war. Last year, the Ukrainian government essentially outsourced the entire post-war “reconstruction” process to BlackRock, the world’s largest asset management firm. They signed an agreement to “provide advisory support for designing an investment framework, with a goal of creating opportunities for both public and private investors to participate in the future reconstruction and recovery of the Ukrainian economy”. In February, J.P. Morgan was brought on board as well.

The two banks will run the Ukraine Development Fund, which aims to raise private investment in projects potentially worth hundreds of billions of dollars across sectors including tech, natural resources, agriculture and health. BlackRock and J.P. Morgan are donating their services, but, as the Financial Times noted, “the work will give them an early look at possible investments in the country”. The opportunities are significant, particularly in the agricultural sector: Ukraine is home to a quarter of the world’s chernozem (“black earth”), an extraordinarily fertile soil, and before the war it was world’s top producer of sunflower meal, oil and seed, and one of the biggest exporters of corn and wheat. From certain perspectives, the war is clearly good for business: indeed, the greater the destruction, the greater the opportunities for reconstruction.

At Davos this year, Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, said he hoped the initiative would turn the country into a “beacon of capitalism”. David Solomon, CEO of Goldman Sachs, also spoke cheerily of Ukraine’s post-war future. “There is no question,” he said, “that as you rebuild, there will be good economic incentives for real return and real investment.” Seeing opportunity amid the tragedy, 500 global businesses from 42 countries have already signed the Ukraine Business Compact “to help realise its huge potential” — or secure their slice of the Ukrainian pie. “Most are standing on the sidelines for now, given the security threat,” the FT reported. “But there are already companies on the cusp of moving in — especially in the low-hanging-fruit industries of construction and materials, agricultural processing and logistics.”

Over the years, across a series of similar events, Western governments and corporate leaders have made no secret of their enthusiasm to use the post-Maidan regime — and now the war — to radically alter Ukraine’s political economy. The agenda: to open up the country and make it safe for Western capital by transforming it into a special economic zone. This neoliberal shock therapy should, in their view, include “strengthening the market economy”, “decentralisation, privatisation, reform of state-owned enterprises, land reform, state administration reform”, and “Euro-Atlantic integration”, as well as widespread “deregulation” and the slashing of “outdated labour legislation leading to complicated hiring and firing process, regulation of overtime, etc”. In short, the Washington Consensus on steroids.

This programme has, arguably, been underway since the mid-Nineties, when the West used IMF loans-cum-conditionalities to impose on Ukraine, just as it did on Russia, a series of radical free-market-minded reforms that crippled the economy. As the Indian economist Prabhat Patnaik has pointed out, the IMF played a key role in precipitating the 2014 crisis: Ukraine’s then-President, Viktor Yanukovych, refused to accept IMF demands that he cut wages, slash social spending and end gas subsidies in order to integrate with the EU, and turned instead to Russia for an alternative economic agreement. This was the backdrop for the Western-backed Euromaidan protests and, eventually, the 2014 regime change.

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So he gets to “new friend” Bulgaria and what does he do?

“Zelensky “savaged” Radev and “opened up with both barrels” to “maul” the Bulgarian president, delivering his words “with measured scorn” and “barbed irony” as Radev “took refuge” in the sheet of paper in his hands.”

• Zelensky Clashes With Bulgarian President Over Weapons Demands (RT)

Bulgarian President Rumen Radev found himself lectured by his Ukrainian guest Vladimir Zelensky on Thursday, after telling him that Sofia had no weapons to spare for Kiev. As TV cameras documented their meeting, Zelensky attacked Radev for advocating a diplomatic solution to the conflict. “I do not agree to provide ammunition, especially from the Bulgarian army reserves,” Radev told Zelensky, according to one of the translations. “I continue to maintain that this conflict has no military solution and more and more weapons will not solve it.” Zelensky objected to Radev’s use of the term “conflict,” insisting that “this is definitely a war.” “God forbid, some tragedy should befall you and you should be in my place,” he added. “And if people with shared values do not help, what will you do? You would say: Putin, please grab Bulgarian territory?”

“I also want to tell you, whatever your army has in terms of munitions, it will not be enough to fight with the Russian Federation. You don’t have a bad army, your people are good but it would not be enough to fight against 160 million people. That is why it is good to give the people to defend themselves, so that the war does not come to you, to the Poles, to the Romanians – war knows no distance, I can tell you,” the Ukrainian leader told his host. “You cannot support Russia and support a balancing position because Russia wants to destroy NATO, wants to destroy Europe and the European Union; these are their goals. Do you get me?” Zelensky told Radev.

According to Politico’s description of the incident, Zelensky “savaged” Radev and “opened up with both barrels” to “maul” the Bulgarian president, delivering his words “with measured scorn” and “barbed irony” as Radev “took refuge” in the sheet of paper in his hands. The Bulgarian president eventually asked the cameras to leave the room. NATO countries have sent billions of dollars worth of weapons, ammunition and equipment to Ukraine since February 2022, while insisting they were not directly involved in the conflict with Russia. Earlier in the day, Zelensky met with the government of PM Nikolai Denkov, who has only been in office for a month. Denkov’s cabinet supports selling weapons to Kiev. The Ukrainian delegation departed Sofia for Prague, on board a Czech air force transport.

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Ukraine has no money.

• Bulgaria Plans $650 Million Nuclear Sale To Ukraine – WSJ (RT)

Bulgaria is close to completing a deal to sell two Russian-made nuclear reactors to Ukraine’s state-owned energy company Energoatom for around $650 million, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday. Under the terms of the proposed deal, which has yet to be completed, Sofia’s energy firm NEK would sell the Ukrainian company two reactors from Bulgaria’s unfinished Belene Nuclear Power Plant. It would be the first time that Russian-designed nuclear equipment would be used to boost Kiev’s energy output, the WSJ said. The same publication also notes that two primary methods of payment for the reactors have so far been proposed. One would see the United States provide part of the funds to Energoatom as part of an aid package for Ukraine, which would subsequently be transferred to NEK.

Another option, the WSJ reported, would be for Sofia to assume a minority shareholding in Ukraine’s Khmelnytsky Nuclear Power Plant, where the reactors would be installed. Ukraine’s president Vladimir Zelensky arrived in Sofia for a one-day visit on Thursday, where it is expected that the nuclear deal will be discussed with Bulgarian officials. Also on Thursday, Sofia’s parliament passed a motion requiring its government to hold negotiations with Kiev regarding the sale of the nuclear equipment. The proposal has been slammed by pro-Moscow opposition parties in Bulgaria, who claim it was rushed through the legislature in order to obstruct any attempts to block it. The possible sale of the reactors further illustrates a European energy market in flux after the EU last year ended most of its imports of Russian oil, gas and coal in the wake of Moscow’s military operation in Ukraine. Prior to this, even Bulgaria relied on Russia for much of its gas supplies.

The still-uncompleted Belene Nuclear Power Plant has been the source of much controversy since the project was first undertaken in the mid-1980s. Construction at the site has been halted and resumed on several occasions, with some Western governments noting their opposition due to the proposed plant possibly being dependent on Russian fuel. It has also received objections from environmental campaigners, who claim that its location in a seismic active zone represents an unnecessary risk. For Kiev, though, the Soviet-designed Khmelnytsky power plant in Ukraine’s west already has technicians trained to operate the Russian-made reactors, potentially establishing new energy exports from Kiev to Europe. On Thursday, two pro-Russian parties in Sofia, the Socialist Party and Revival, a nationalist party, voted against approving the sale of the reactors to Kiev.

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“On last year’s day of remembrance for Polish victims, the Ukrainian leader submitted a draft law to parliament which granted special privileges to modern-day Polish citizens. They are now treated similarly to Ukrainian nationals in many regards..”

• Warsaw Wants ‘Gestures’ From Kiev On Massacres (RT)

Kiev must prove it is taking steps to acknowledge the responsibility of Ukrainian nationalists for the mass murder of ethnic Poles during World War II in Volhynia, a Polish MP involved in implementing Warsaw’s European policy has said. On Sunday, Poland will mark the day of remembrance for victims of the atrocities, which the EU nation considers an act of genocide. The massacres in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia 80 years ago were intended to further the cause of an ethnically uniform Ukrainian nation state. Their perpetrators are considered national heroes by Kiev today. Szymon Szynkowski vel Sek, the Polish secretary of state for European policy, said on Thursday that he expects gestures from the Ukrainian government regarding the tragedy, because “this matter is an unhealed wound.”

Polish officials “have been in contact with the Ukrainian side regarding these commemorations for months, and that’s all I can say at the moment,” the lawmaker told RMF FM radio. Last month, Polish Deputy Foreign Minister Pawel Jablonski identified the dispute over the tragic events as a potential stumbling block on Ukraine’s path towards EU membership, insisting that it must be resolved. Opposition politician Tomasz Siemoniak, a former Polish defense minister, last week argued against driving Kiev into a corner to extract a formal apology. However, he added that he “would expect some gestures, at least in this practical sphere – exhumations, monuments, access.”

In 2017, the Ukrainian government prohibited the search for and exhumation of victims of the massacres on Kiev-controlled territory. The move was retaliation for the dismantling of a monument to Ukrainian nationalists in Poland, although the decision was reversed last year under President Vladimir Zelensky. On last year’s day of remembrance for Polish victims, the Ukrainian leader submitted a draft law to parliament which granted special privileges to modern-day Polish citizens. They are now treated similarly to Ukrainian nationals in many regards, including employment opportunities, access to education, and certain social benefits. Zelensky’s Polish counterpart, Andrzej Duda, noted at the time that he appreciated the symbolism.

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“One EU diplomat told Euractiv that the counter-proposal shows “we are not on the same wavelength” and that “it looks like they want to be perceived as equal partners.”

• South American Leaders Block Zelensky From Summit (RT)

The Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) has purged every reference to Ukraine from the joint declaration proposed by the EU, the outlet Euractiv reported on Thursday. Their objections also forced the EU to un-invite Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky from the joint summit. The 33-member South American bloc is supposed to hold a joint summit with the EU in Brussels, starting on July 17. Spain had initially invited Zelensky to attend, but the invitation was “dropped” after “pushback” from CELAC leaders, Euractiv reported. Ahead of the meeting, the EU sent over a draft of a joint declaration, which included support for Ukraine, climate change and green energy pledges, combating corruption, and other major EU policy goals. On Tuesday, the CELAC sent back a 21-page counter-proposal, which “deleted everything about Ukraine,” one EU diplomat told Euractiv.

The counter-proposal says the EU and CELAC would “advocate for serious and constructive diplomatic solutions to the current conflict in Europe, by peaceful means, which guarantees the sovereignty and security of us all, as well as regional and international peace, stability and security,” according to Euractiv. The EU regards it as “crucial” that the declaration condemns “Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine” and contains specific language about the UN Charter, sovereignty and territorial integrity, said one unnamed diplomat. Brussels also wanted an explicit commitment to Zelensky’s “peace platform,” which the CELAC has rejected. Most Latin American countries have repeatedly said they don’t wish to be dragged into a conflict they see as a primarily European problem.

One CELAC diplomat told Euractiv that the summit needs to be about more than the Ukraine conflict, and address things that matter to the region, including a stalled trade pact between the EU and Mercosur members Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay. The CELAC has also asked Europeans to pay reparations for the damages caused by slavery. One EU diplomat told Euractiv that the counter-proposal shows “we are not on the same wavelength” and that “it looks like they want to be perceived as equal partners.” EU ministers are scheduled to discuss the counter-proposal at a meeting on Friday, and will have to decide how much they are willing to compromise, or if they will press ahead with the summit without a joint communique.

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10,000 staff in Russia.

• Raiffeisenbank ‘Postpones’ Plan To Leave Russia – Reuters (RT)

Austrian banking group Raiffeisen, one of the last major Western lenders in Russia, is delaying its withdrawal despite pressure from EU regulators, Reuters reported on Thursday. The agency quoted officials in Vienna as defending long-standing ties with Moscow. Raiffeisen is viewed as playing an important role in the Russian economy, providing a lifeline for euro payments to and from the country. It is one of only two foreign banks on the Russian central bank’s list of 13 systemically important credit institutions, the other being Italy’s UniCredit. The Austrian lender announced in March its plans to spin off its Russian business by September, following mounting pressure from Western authorities.

The RBI Group, which owns the bank, has been resisting demands from the US and EU to speed up its Russia exit, while Austrian officials have expressed hope of reviving relations with Moscow after the conflict in Ukraine ends, according to Reuters. “Although Austria publicly supports Ukraine, several officials who spoke to Reuters said they were reluctant to completely sever decades-old ties with Russia, thinking it will still be possible to restore relations,” the outlet wrote.

Austria’s second-biggest credit institution has been under growing pressure from Western officials and investors in recent months. The European Central Bank (ECB) has reportedly urged the lender to quit the Russian market, while the RBI Group has faced scrutiny in the US and EU over potential breaches of Western sanctions. Under pressure from Washington, Raiffeisen has transferred data on Russian transactions to the US’ sanctions authority, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), Reuters reported, citing sources. However, Austrian officials have claimed that the bank has been unfairly singled out, the news agency said, citing people familiar with the matter. A spokesperson for the Austrian Finance Ministry reportedly stated that other EU banks were also active in Russia.

RBI has not yet outlined its plans to the ECB, making an exit from Russia unlikely by September, according to Reuters. “RBI’s presence underlines the depth of relations between Austria and Russia, which maintain close ties through Russian gas pipelines and finance, with Vienna a hub for cash from Russia and its former Soviet neighbors,” the outlet noted.Raiffeisen earlier warned that the decision to exit its highly profitable business in Russia would lead to “a decline in income generated by Raiffeisen Bank Russia” and impact RBI’s customers. Senior Raiffeisen executives previously stressed that any spin-off would take four to seven months. RBI has around 2,600 corporate customers, 4 million local account holders, and 10,000 staff in Russia.

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“The question here is not whether something should be done; it is who has the authority to do it.”

• SCOTUS Is Losing Legitimacy – And Only Has Itself To Blame |(Blankenship)

The US Supreme Court (SCOTUS) last Friday struck down President Joe Biden’s plan to provide up to $20,000 in student debt relief to Pell Grant recipients who hold federal student loans and up to $10,000 for all federal loan holders. SCOTUS argued that the HEROES Act, which was passed in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks (not to be confused with a similarly-named law passed during the COVID-19 pandemic), did not grant the administration authority to cancel some $400 billion in debt for 43 million Americans. Chief Justice John Roberts said: “The question here is not whether something should be done; it is who has the authority to do it.” Roberts invoked the “major questions” doctrine, which holds that if an administrative agency – like the Department of Education – ought to be granted a particular power, then Congress must say so explicitly.


SCOTUS ruled that the HEROES Act did not authorize a debt-relief program and, in doing so, implicitly suggested that Congress would need to pass a bill to provide debt relief. For anyone familiar with the current composition of the Supreme Court, this ruling is not entirely surprising. The Court has made it clear that it will break significantly with the country’s traditional legal norms in order to consolidate corporate power. For example, the SCOTUS decision last year on a hypothetical carbon emissions cap broke significantly with the Court’s tradition of only settling matters that are actually an existing issue and leaving political issues to the other branches of government. This was cause enough for alarm that the rule of law no longer exists in the US of A.

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Who wants to be part of this?

• Meta Launches Data-Harvesting Twitter Clone, Immediately Starts Censoring (ZH)

Meta claims that over 10 million people had signed up for its Twitter competitor, Threads, in what CEO Mark Zuckerberg framed as a “friendly” alternative to the little blue bird. “Let’s do this. Welcome to Threads,” wrote Zuckerberg in his first post on the app, which is a “text-based conversation app” where users can publish posts up to 500 characters long, and allows people to post links, photos and videos. Threads is directly linked to Meta-owned Instagram, which has over 2 billion users. The Twitter competitor is being rolled out in over 100 countries for iOS and Android. “The goal is to keep it friendly as it expands. I think it’s possible and will ultimately be the key to its success,” wrote Zuckerberg in a Wednesday post, casting the service as a more wholesome substitute to Twitter. “That’s one reason why Twitter never succeeded as much as I think it should have, and we want to do it differently.”

Meanwhile, data privacy and censorship concerns have emerged, with former Twitter owner Jack Dorsey highlighting the vast amount of data collected by Threads. As journalist Michael Shellenberger notes, Within a few hours of launching, Threads was already secretly censoring users and not offering them the right to appeal. “Meta is already too powerful. One company controls what much of the public is allowed to see. And if Threads succeeds, it will have 80% of the global market outside of Russia and China, according to one industry insider. As such, it’s reasonable to expect that Meta will censor precisely the same way the large news media corporations, including the New York Times, and corporate advertisers want it to. More censorship is what the mainstream news media, big corporations, and their celebrity pitch people have been demanding.

…additionally, Unlike Twitter, Threads collects data about “Health & Fitness,” “Financial Info,” “Sensitive Info,” and “Other Data.” What’s ‘other data’? Shellenberger further noted that within hours of launching, Threads was already secretly censoring users and not offering them the right to appeal. Threads flashed a warning after users clicked on Utley and O’Hanley’s profiles. “Are you sure you want to follow…?” asked the Threads warning. “This account has repeatedly posted false information.” -Public.substack. Other Twitter clones who have taken a shot at the king include Donald Trump’s Truth Social, Jack Dorsey’s Bluesky and Mastadon – all of which have failed to gain large enough user bases to cross into the mainstream. The new leftist echo chamber attracted celebrities such as Kim Kardashian and Jennifer Lopez, as well as Congressional performance artist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who hit a snag after just five minutes.

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They’ll keep changing the story.

“The younger Biden has recently been frequently seen at the White House, leading some to speculate he may have moved in.”

• Cocaine at White House Was Found Inside Cubby – Not West Wing Lobby (Sp.)

A website that records police and fire radio communications revealed on Sunday that a DC firefighter was testing a substance found in the White House, later stating it tested positive for cocaine. Officials are now telling US media that the cocaine discovered at the White House on Sunday was actually found in a different place than was previously reported. According to US media, “multiple officials” have indicated the bag of cocaine was recovered from a cubby near the White House’s West Executive entrance, not a West Wing work area as multiple media outlets reported earlier in the week. Those earlier reports also cited unnamed US officials. Immediately after the substance was first found, outlets initially reported the bag was found in the White House Library. The updated location is reportedly between the foyer and a lower-level lobby, close to where the vice president’s limo and SUV are parked. It is also on the same floor as the Situation Room and dining area.

In addition to changing the location of where the bag was found, officials also shortened the expected investigation time. Reports noted the Secret Service expects to finish its report by Monday, it was previously thought it would take weeks. While White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said on Wednesday that the White House has “confidence” the Secret Service will “get to the bottom” of the incident, officials have been signaling to media outlets that they believe it is unlikely the culprit will be identified. Officials were quick to point out that the area is also heavily trafficked. A Secret Service official said it was found during a routine patrol. Initially, the content of the bag was unknown, causing a brief shutdown of the White House campus until it was tested.

The White House has largely stayed mum on the subject. On Wednesday, Jean-Pierre repeatedly declined to answer reporters’ questions about the illicit drug, referring to the Secret Service and insisting any comment by the White House would “get ahead” of their investigation. “This is their kind of guidance and guidelines, their world. So we are going to let them do their jobs, we are not involved in this,” she said. Jean-Pierre also stressed that the area the bag was found is heavily trafficked by visitors. US President Joe Biden and his family were away when the bag of cocaine was found. However, the commander-in-chief’s son, Hunter Biden, has a documented history of cocaine use and was at the White House on Friday night. The younger Biden has recently been frequently seen at the White House, leading some to speculate he may have moved in.

US Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) has sent a letter to Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle, asking for more information about the investigation. A Secret Service spokesperson confirmed to media outlets that the agency has received the letter and will respond. In the letter, Cotton asked for a complete list of people who are not subject to security screening at the White House or are subject to lesser screenings, information on how the Secret Service uses K-9 screenings, details on internal audits of their security practices and “how often” the agency encountered “illegal drugs at the White House complex” in the past five years. The letter also asks if the Secret Service will arrest the perpetrator if the investigation reveals their identity.

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“Study is Removed Within 24 Hours”

“Dr. Harvey Risch, one of the study’s authors, told the Daily Sceptic he deems it “pure Government-directed censorship, even after the Missouri v. Biden injunction”.

• Lancet Study on Covid Vaccine Autopsies Finds 74% Were Caused by Vaccine (DS)

A Lancet review of 325 autopsies after Covid vaccination found that 74% of the deaths were caused by the vaccine – but the study was removed within 24 hours. The paper, a pre-print that was awaiting peer-review, is written by leading cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough, Yale epidemiologist Dr. Harvey Risch and their colleagues at the Wellness Company and was published online on Wednesday on the pre-print site of the prestigious medical journal. However, less than 24 hours later, the study was removed and a note appeared stating: “This preprint has been removed by Preprints with the Lancet because the study’s conclusions are not supported by the study methodology.” While the study had not undergone any part of the peer-review process, the note implies it fell foul of “screening criteria”.

Background: The rapid development and widespread deployment of COVID-19 vaccines, combined with a high number of adverse event reports, have led to concerns over possible mechanisms of injury including systemic lipid nanoparticle (LNP) and mRNA distribution, spike protein-associated tissue damage, thrombogenicity, immune system dysfunction and carcinogenicity. The aim of this systematic review is to investigate possible causal links between COVID-19 vaccine administration and death using autopsies and post-mortem analysis.

Methods: We searched for all published autopsy and necropsy reports relating to COVID-19 vaccination up until May 18th, 2023. We initially identified 678 studies and, after screening for our inclusion criteria, included 44 papers that contained 325 autopsy cases and one necropsy case. Three physicians independently reviewed all deaths and determined whether COVID-19 vaccination was the direct cause or contributed significantly to death.

Findings: The most implicated organ system in COVID-19 vaccine-associated death was the cardiovascular system (53%), followed by the hematological system (17%), the respiratory system (8%) and multiple organ systems (7%). Three or more organ systems were affected in 21 cases. The mean time from vaccination to death was 14.3 days. Most deaths occurred within a week from last vaccine administration. A total of 240 deaths (73.9%) were independently adjudicated as directly due to or significantly contributed to by COVID-19 vaccination.

Interpretation: The consistency seen among cases in this review with known COVID-19 vaccine adverse events, their mechanisms and related excess death, coupled with autopsy confirmation and physician-led death adjudication, suggests there is a high likelihood of a causal link between COVID-19 vaccines and death in most cases. Further urgent investigation is required for the purpose of clarifying our findings.

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Cone

 

 

Poso

 

 

Angel song

 

 


Charles Bridge, Prague

 

 

Bear

 

 

Polar bear

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

Debt Rattle May 18 2023

May 182023
 
 May 18, 2023  Posted by at 8:14 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  34 Responses »


Giorgio de Chirico The Archaeologists 1927

 

• Durham Found Zero Merit to Trump Russia Claims (CTH)
• Durham Report Condemns FBI’s Russia Probe (Turley)
• Oversight Panel Has Subpoenaed Joe Biden Phone Records (BB)
• The Real Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (Scully)
• Neighbor Countries Ready To Pay Zelensky To Stop Conflict – Seymour Hersh (RT)
• Ukrainian Spymaster Wants 100-km Demilitarized Zone With Russia (TASS)
• Sowing Seeds of Plunder: A Lose-Lose Situation in Ukraine (OffG)
• Russia Confirms Grain Deal Extension By Two Months – Zakharova (TASS)
• NATO’s ‘Reckless’ Expansion To Undermine Security Dialogue – Lavrov (TASS)
• China Notifies Embassies In Beijing Not To Display Ukraine Propaganda (TASS)
• Hungary Urges EU To Redirect Ukraine Aide (RT)
• The Working-Class Revolt Against Net Zero (Spiked)
• Dutch Farmer ‘Families Are Crying At The Kitchen Table Every Day’ (RMX)
• The Harm Caused by Masks (Anderson)
• Global Impact Of The First Year Of Covid-19 Vaccination (Lancet)
• Dollar Dominance ‘Coming To An End’ – Jim Rogers (RT)
• FBI Adds Itself To FBI Watch List (BBee)

 

 

 

 

Fitton

 

 

 

 

Gaetz

 

 

 

 

Patriots
https://twitter.com/i/status/1658919182661042176

 

 

 

 

American lieutenant colonel broke Zelensky’s dream: Forget about returning the territories, you are incapable. Ukrainian forces are unable to dislodge Russian troops from their positions, despite the bold statements of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, US Army Lt. Col. Daniel Davis said.

Answering the question of whether it is possible to realize Zelensky’s dream of returning to Kyiv the territories liberated by Russia, Davis replied that there is not even a theoretical possibility for that. “Simply, there is no fundamental basis to create such a large combat power and to dislodge an enemy as entrenched and equipped as Russia is now. It is a completely unrealistic combat goal,” Davis said in an interview with the YouTube channel “Judging Freedom”.

 

 

 

 

“Mueller’s probe existed in material fact to hide the Obama weaponization to target Donald Trump. Durham knew this; that’s why he never touched it.”

• Durham Found Zero Merit to Trump Russia Claims (CTH)

People ask why I find it difficult to write about the Durham report empirically confirming everything we previously outlined in the past five years. Here’s my answer. Eventually, after the shock & awe of the Durham confirmations wear off, I am hopeful that people will stand back and realize the bigger question that covers all of the Trump-Russia collusion conspiracy nonsense. This was a United States government operation to conduct full-throated surveillance on a U.S. presidential candidate, and then remove that candidate from the office of the presidency after his victory in the 2016 election. With John Durham outlining in granular details how the FBI, DOJ and larger intelligence apparatus acted politically to weaponize government on behalf of an allied presidential candidate in Hillary Clinton, a bigger question remains.

There never was any merit to the Trump-Russia nonsense, so what exactly were Robert Mueller and Andrew Weissmann doing for two years? Using the silo defense as a method of obfuscation, John Durham noted in his report [page #2] as below, never delved into that obvious question. Durham specifically, and with great intent, says he did not look at what Mueller and Weissmann were doing; even though, Durham destroyed any predication that might have given merit to the intention of their special counsel existence. Durham writes a 316-page report, meticulously detailing the false construct of the Trump-Russia narrative. Yet for some reason, the Mueller/Weissmann investigation, an entire special counsel investigation that was predicated and justified by that false Trump-Russia narrative, never found the same evidence?

Durham never looked at it. Why? Because he knew Robert Mueller and Andrew Weissmann were installed to cover up the original fabrications by the CIA, FBI, DOJ and U.S. intelligence apparatus. Mueller’s probe existed in material fact to hide the Obama weaponization to target Donald Trump. Durham knew this; that’s why he never touched it. Stop pretending. Once you stop pretending, you realize just how rotten this system is. John Durham intentionally and with specific foresight, did not want to reveal the criminal conduct of the Mueller/Weissmann special counsel. He knew exactly what they were doing; his investigation paralleled what their investigation would have done if Mueller was not established to hide the originating schemes.

Everything Durham found, Mueller could have easily found, and stated, and ended the nonsense. This reality, and Durham’s intentional decision to avoid confronting the Mueller fraud, is why no one should defend any part of what John Durham was doing, nor the report he delivers in conclusion. Durham is just as dirty as Robert Mueller and Andrew Weissmann. If he wasn’t, he would have outlined the purpose of Mueller and left them naked to the consequences. But that’s not what a good little silo maintainer does. Instead, John Durham simply acts as if Robert Mueller and Andrew Weissmann didn’t exist to try and destroy President Trump. Durham ignores the cleanup operation entirely.

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“In the end, it is not a crime to be unethical or incompetent, so no charges will be filed as a result of the report.”

• Durham Report Condemns FBI’s Russia Probe (Turley)

According to Durham, Comey — who later wrote and sold a book on “ethical leadership” — led the FBI to use “raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence” to effectively tie up a duly elected president for three years. Durham reports that FBI personnel admitted they disregarded standards for surveillance despite “acknowledging — both then and in hindsight — that they did not genuinely believe there was probable cause to believe that the target was knowingly [working for a foreign power].” In the end, it is not a crime to be unethical or incompetent, so no charges will be filed as a result of the report. Durham clearly hopes that the belated transparency provided by his report will produce greater future accountability. That may be the only naive aspect of his findings.

Of course, the FBI promptly issued a statement that it has — once more — reformed itself in light of its failures. But who really believes this is unlikely to occur again? Indeed, the same pattern and figures reemerged in 2020, when another false narrative was created to dismiss the Hunter Biden laptop scandal. Some of the officials involved in the false Russia collusion conspiracy were signatories on the letter by 51 former intelligence officials claiming that the laptop story was likely “Russian disinformation.” And the media again pushed that version before the 2020 election — only to admit, two years later, that the laptop was authentic all along. Conspicuously missing in the aftermath of Durham’s report is the one thing that would establish a clear commitment to reform: an apology. Clinton, Comey, members of Congress and others could apologize to the American people — and, yes, even to Trump.

That, of course, will never happen. Attorney General Merrick Garland, in releasing a report that concluded this investigation never should have occurred, made no statement whatsoever. Thus, Durham was left throwing haymakers in an empty political boxing ring — and those who perpetrated this scandal on the nation are left to carry on making money on books, speeches, TV commentary and lectures about political or electoral ethics. The media, meanwhile, is offering little more than a shoulder-shrug and more spin. So, in the relative silence of media coverage following the report’s release, Durham can contemplate an ultimate Zen-like question: If a 305-page report proves a concerted political hoax but no one is there to read it, does it make a difference?

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“Over an 11-year period, Hunter’s firm paid over $25k for Joe’s second iPhone (1-302-377-xxxx), which circumvented White House security protocols, along with ‘most lines’ on a ‘Wells Fargo credit line’ that Joe utilized. These phone, banking, and other financial records must be subpoenaed.”

• Oversight Panel Has Subpoenaed Joe Biden Phone Records (BB)

The House Oversight Committee has subpoenaed phone records of a phone belonging to President Joe Biden that Hunter Biden’s business paid for, according to Peter Schweizer, Government Accountability Institute president in an interview on Tuesday. Schweizer said in an interview with 77 WABC’s Cats & Cosby that it was discovered on Hunter Biden’s laptop that he was paying a phone bill for his father from 2009 to 2017, which encompassed the time Biden was vice president. “We obtained that phone number and we’ve shared it with individuals and the Oversight Committee in Congress is going to subpoena those phone records. And what’s important here is that’s not a government phone, this is not Joe Biden’s private phone that he’s paying for himself. It’s actually [Hunter] Biden’s business that paid for it,” Schweizer said.


“I think it’s going to yield a lot of interesting information as to who Joe Biden was talking to on this phone that was being paid for by his son,” said Schweizer, who is a senior contributor to Breitbart News and best-selling author of multiple books on corruption by political elites. Schweizer called the reported removal of the investigative team at the IRS looking into Hunter Biden’s alleged tax evasion “very troubling.” The removal came in alleged retaliation to a whistleblower who had contacted Congress about a possible cover-up going on at the IRS on the case. “It’s very troubling — the pattern that we’re seeing here,” Schweizer said, adding:

“You have these whistleblower complaints filed by people in the IRS that were looking at Hunter Biden’s failure to pay taxes. They issued whistleblower complaint to Congress — the report is that those individuals had been removed from the case, which is contrary to the Whistleblower Law — you’re not allowed to remove somebody from their position just because they filed a whistleblower complaint.” Schweizer said the removal of the investigative team is potentially illegal. He explained: “What happened in 2018 was the IRS looked into the fact that Hunter Biden had taken in all this foreign income, we exposed it in Secret Empires in 2018. That sort of launched the grand jury and you had this IRS investigation. And they basically concluded that Hunter Biden had taken in millions of dollars from foreign sources, had not paid taxes on it.


You have this friend, this lawyer in Los Angeles that paid two million to the IRS to pay some of the back taxes, but the IRS was looking into charges of tax evasion. They went to congressional committees and complained that they believe there had been political interference from DOJ. I haven’t seen the details, but this was the claim. And now lo and behold, the IRS says we’re going to remove the team from investigating Hunter Biden, who had been on it now for what, five years, and we’re going to start apparently gonna have to start the whole thing over, so what does that mean to the investigation? What does that mean? I think it’s massive, but first of all…I think it’s illegal by the whistleblower statute. You cannot remove somebody from their position, simply because they made a whistleblower complaint.”

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“Having thus alerted readers that the new candidate with the familiar name is basically a head case, the Post and Times can now put that name back on the blacklist..”

• The Real Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (Scully)

While Republican affairs can certainly get rough and unseemly at times, it’s usually the Democratic Party we can turn to for lessons in cold, unsentimental power politics. Consider, for instance, the reception accorded by the party establishment and like-minded reporters to an unexpected entrant into the 2024 presidential race, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a man who rates, one might have supposed, the respect due a worthy contender and honest dissenter. After declaring his candidacy last month, RFK Jr. immediately showed at 14 percent in polls. Mild alarm followed, among supporters of President Biden, when two weeks later the next round of polling gave Kennedy an average of 20 percent. You could tell this was a bit of a shock because, almost instantly, the Washington Post dismissed it as nothing, in a hurried item headlined “Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Threat to Biden Is Inflated. Here’s Why.”

As surely as any Kennedy could once expect to be fawned over by Post reporters, this Kennedy — especially if he starts drawing crowds and votes — is never to be spared condescension and rebuke. The “why,” in case you haven’t heard, is that RFK Jr. has in recent years been airing “controversial,” “dangerous” views, and this makes him, says the Post, a “fringe figure” you needn’t take seriously. Among his many provocations: Kennedy claims that pandemic lockdowns were calamitous for working people and for children; that citizens should choose for themselves whether to receive vaccines; that corporate influences on government are pervasive and corrupting; and that censorship contrived by the state is intolerable. Worse even than these outrages, during the pandemic this man called into question the conduct and veracity of Anthony Fauci. And this offense — challenging Doctor Fauci! — is still regarded as the most shameful assault on science since the persecution of Galileo.

It doesn’t matter that, point for point, RFK Jr. makes a strong case and most everyone knows it. His problem is, the prohibition on saying such things has not been lifted. A well-established, scientifically tested, and empirically proven phenomenon known as liberal groupthink has set in, preempting even the most obvious conclusions. So, even if Kennedy’s presidential bid is off to an impressive start, in the Post’s analysis he is still relegated to the same category as “fringe figure Lyndon LaRouche,” who — trivia time for Post readers — “in 1996 managed to pull double digits in some primary states.”

The New York Times, in its version of the LaRouche treatment, likewise left the impression of a candidate’s announcement speech strangely and single-mindedly focused on “shaking Americans’ faith in science,” no matter that the candidate himself had said nothing at all along those lines, and no matter that in all of his scientific arguments he cites scientific methods and scientific evidence. Here again the day’s news was predetermined: casting the accomplished son and namesake of Senator Robert F. Kennedy as just another sorry entry in “a history of fringe presidential aspirants from both parties who run to bring attention to a cause, or to themselves.” Having thus alerted readers that the new candidate with the familiar name is basically a head case, the Post and Times can now put that name back on the blacklist, denying Kennedy coverage unless he troubles them further by rising in polls or by making crazy demands for primary debates.

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“Hungary is a big player in this and so are Poland and Germany, and they are working to get Zelensky to come around..”

• Neighbor Countries Ready To Pay Zelensky To Stop Conflict – Seymour Hersh (RT)

Poland is leading a group of European nations that are secretly urging Vladimir Zelensky to find a way to settle the conflict with Russia, veteran journalist Seymour Hersh has reported, citing a “knowledgeable” American official. According to US intelligence, other EU countries that want to see an end to the fighting include Hungary, Germany, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, Hersh wrote in an article published on his Substack page on Wednesday. “Hungary is a big player in this and so are Poland and Germany, and they are working to get Zelensky to come around,” the unnamed official claimed. Those countries have made it clear that “Zelensky can keep what he’s got if he works up a peace deal even if he’s got to be paid off, if it’s the only way to get a deal.” By “keep what he’s got,” the source was referring to the Ukrainian president’s villa in Italy and interests in an offshore bank, Hersh clarified.

However, Zelensky has so far rejected the proposal, while other major European players – France and the UK – “are too beholden” to the Biden administration, which is continuing to back the Ukrainian leader, the official said. One of the main reasons why Poland and the others want the conflict to end is because the burden of accommodating Ukrainian refugees has become too much for them, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist wrote. The problem for those countries “is how to get the US to stop supporting Zelensky,” Hersh’s source suggested. He claimed that US intelligence is well aware that “Ukraine is running out of money and… that the next four or months are critical. And Eastern Europeans are talking about a deal.” However, he added that “it’s not clear to the intelligence community what the president and his foreign policy aides in the White House know of the reality.”

The US is “still training Ukrainians how to fly our F-16s that will be shot down by Russia as soon as they get into the war zone. The mainstream press is dedicated to Biden and the war, and Biden is still talking about the Great Satan in Moscow while the Russian economy is doing great,” the official explained. Russia has repeatedly stated that it’s ready to resolve the conflict at the negotiating table. However, it did not receive any proposals from Ukraine and its Western backers that it could consider reasonable. Zelensky has been promoting his ten-point peace plan, which calls for Russian forces to withdraw to borders claimed by Ukraine, to pay reparations, and to submit to war-crime tribunals. Moscow has rejected the plan as “unacceptable,” saying it ignores the reality on the ground and is actually a sign of Kiev’s unwillingness to solve the crisis through diplomatic means.

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Problem is, they want the DMZ and still become a NATO member. Russia will not let that happen.

• Ukrainian Spymaster Wants 100-km Demilitarized Zone With Russia (TASS)

Top Ukrainian intelligence official Kirill Budanov has proposed creating a 100-km-long demilitarized zone between Ukraine and Russia. “The question of ending the war [involves] the creation of a demilitarized zone; this is our goal,” the head of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry’s Main Intelligence Directorate told the Ukrainian Islandia (Iceland) TV channel. When further elaborating on the practical aspects of creating such a zone, Budanov said that, “this would be a zone that could not be attacked by the usual means.” “In my view, this would absolutely be the right distance,” the top intelligence official pointed out. The Russian government had earlier repeatedly voiced its readiness to negotiate with Ukraine to reach a settlement of the conflict.


At the same time, however, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova pointed out that the main obstacle standing in the way of such talks was the prohibition on conducting negotiations with Russian President Vladimir Putin, which was legally enshrined by Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky’s decree of September 30, 2022, “as well as the initiatives of the Ukrainian head of state, which indicate official Kiev’s complete detachment from modern realities,” including the demand to withdraw Russian troops from the new regions of the country. On February 9, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that Moscow did not see any desire on the part of the Ukrainian side to start a serious conversation on a peaceful settlement.

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“Today, thousands of rural boys and girls, farmers, are fighting and dying in the war. They have lost everything. The processes of free land sale and purchase are increasingly liberalised and advertised. This really threatens the rights of Ukrainians to their land, for which they give their lives.”

• Sowing Seeds of Plunder: A Lose-Lose Situation in Ukraine (OffG)

It’s a lose-lose situation for Ukrainians. While they are dying, financial institutions are insidiously supporting the consolidation of farmland by oligarchs and Western financial interests. So says Frédéric Mousseau, Policy Director of the Oakland Institute, an independent think tank. Depending on which sources to believe, between 100,000 and 300,000 Ukrainian soldiers (possibly more) have died during the conflict with Russia. That figure, of course, does not include civilian casualties. But it is not the purpose of this article to explore these issues. Much has already been written on this elsewhere. But billions of dollars’ worth of military hardware has been sent to Ukraine by the NATO countries and hundreds of thousands of young Ukrainians have died. They died in the belief that they were protecting their nation – their land. A land that is among the most fertile in the world.

Professor Olena Borodina of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine says: “Today, thousands of rural boys and girls, farmers, are fighting and dying in the war. They have lost everything. The processes of free land sale and purchase are increasingly liberalised and advertised. This really threatens the rights of Ukrainians to their land, for which they give their lives.” Borodina is quoted in the February 2023 report by the Oakland Institute War and Theft: The Takeover of Ukraine’s Agricultural Land, which reveals how oligarchs and financial interests are expanding control over Ukraine’s agricultural land with help and financing from Western financial institutions. Aid provided to Ukraine in recent years has been tied to a drastic structural adjustment programme requiring the creation of a land market through a law that leads to greater concentration of land in the hands of powerful interests.

The programme also includes austerity measures, cuts in social safety nets and the privatisation of key sectors of the economy. Frédéric Mousseau, co-author of the report, says: “Despite being at the centre of news cycle and international policy, little attention has gone to the core of the conflict — who controls the agricultural land in the country known as the breadbasket of Europe. [The] Answer to this question is paramount to understanding the major stakes in the war.” The report shows the total amount of land controlled by oligarchs, corrupt individuals and large agribusinesses is over nine million hectares — exceeding 28% of Ukraine’s arable land (the rest is used by over eight million Ukrainian farmers).

The largest landholders are a mix of Ukrainian oligarchs and foreign interests — mostly European and North American as well as the sovereign fund of Saudi Arabia. A number of large US pension funds, foundations and university endowments are also invested in Ukrainian land through NCH Capital – a US-based private equity fund, which is the fifth largest landholder in the country. President Zelenskyy put the land reform into law in 2020 against the will of the vast majority of the population who feared it would exacerbate corruption and reinforce control by powerful interests in the agricultural sector.

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Last time?!

• Russia Confirms Grain Deal Extension By Two Months – Zakharova (TASS)

Moscow confirms that the grain deal has been extended for two more months, providing an opportunity to help ensure global food security, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Wednesday. Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said earlier that the grain deal had been extended for another 60 days. “We confirm the Turkish president’s announcement of a two-month extension of the Black Sea initiative, which is an opportunity to help ensure global food security not in words but in deeds, to help first and foremost the countries that need it most,” she said, adding that “imbalances” in the grain deal’s execution should be “corrected as soon as possible.” Zakharova went on to say that Moscow’s primary views of the deal have not changed.

Agreements on the export of food and fertilizers from Ukraine to the international market were concluded on July 22, 2022, for 120 days and extended in November for the same period. One of the agreements regulates the order of grain supplies from the Kiev-controlled ports of Odessa, Chernomorsk and Yuzhny. Moreover, a memorandum was inked by Russia and the UN on lifting export restrictions for Russian agricultural products and fertilizers to global markets. Moscow notes that the second part of the agreement is not being implemented. On March 18, 2023, Russia announced that the deal was extended for 60 days, warning that this would be enough time to assess the efficacy of the memorandum signed with the UN.

The Russian side has repeatedly stressed that the future decision on extension of the deal depends on implementation of the Russian part of the agreement, adding that the lack of progress on that issue threatens the future of the initiative. Representatives of Russia, Turkey, Ukraine and the UN discussed the issues of extension of the grain deal and the implementation of the Russian part of the agreement on supplies of grain and fertilizers on May 10-11 in Istanbul. The agenda also contained the issues of secure functioning of the grain corridor. Russia was represented by Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Vershinin. No particular decisions on extension of the deal or consideration of Moscow’s requirements were announced following the negotiations.

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Lavrov: The Minsk agreements were the last attempt at diplomacy

• We will no longer rely on the West as a partner that has at least some capacity for an agreement, said Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in an interview with “Tsargrad” television, saying that Moscow will instead turn its attention to the rest of the world that wants to continue cooperation with her.

• According to his words, “there is no real diplomacy anymore” in the West. As he pointed out, it was last “seen” in 2014 and 2015, when the Minsk agreements were signed, but even then it was not real diplomacy, but, as he assessed, “diplomacy of lies”.

• The diplomacy of Western colleagues is reflected in bribing, threatening and forcing other countries to follow their policies, but all this indicates that the West is actually “not sure of the correctness” of its agenda, because if they are right, why should they threaten and use with harsh tactics, concluded Lavrov.

• NATO’s ‘Reckless’ Expansion To Undermine Security Dialogue – Lavrov (TASS)

Reckless NATO expansion and the bloc’s absorption of neutral countries will undermine any prospect for dialogue on European security, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said at a news conference following Moscow talks with his Belarusian counterpart Sergey Aleinik on Wednesday. “NATO’s reckless expansion eastwards, northwards or to other geographical areas undermines the very prospects to continue normal communication on European security,” Lavrov said, adding that “unfortunately, we are witnessing this process amid NATO’s absorption of almost all neutral nations.” “That’s sad,” he added. According to Russia’s top diplomat, the number of countries in Europe who advocate military or political neutrality is getting thinner, now that Finland has joined the alliance.


Sweden “seems to be on course to become a NATO member, too, while Switzerland rejected its neutral status by its actions,” he said. “That [neutrality] was enshrined in the constitutions of respective countries, and they created a space for finding a balance of interests and compromise between European NATO members and, say, the Union State and the Collective Security Treaty Organization,” he lamented.= “When and if the West comes to its senses and realizes that it will not be able to reverse the historically unbiased process of a multipolar world order evolving, that will, of course, require a conversation that will not be limited to Europe only,” Lavrov maintained as he insisted that global security should be “honest and equal.”.

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“..specifically raising the Ukrainian flag or displaying posters in support of Kiev..”

• China Notifies Embassies In Beijing Not To Display Ukraine Propaganda (TASS)

China reminds foreign missions and offices of international organizations based in the country of the need to comply with international diplomatic treaties, Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Wang Wenbin said on Wednesday. Commenting on billboards in support of Ukraine exhibited outside some foreign embassies in Beijing, the Chinese diplomat said, “China is calling on all embassies and representative offices of all international organizations to comply with the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations and carry out activities in line with international agreements.”


Wang’s comment came in response to a question from a reporter who asked whether the Chinese authorities had earlier advised foreign embassies against using the exterior walls of their buildings to display politicized propaganda, specifically raising the Ukrainian flag or displaying posters in support of Kiev. Wang urged all foreign diplomatic missions and organizations in China to respect Chinese laws. Kyodo reported on Tuesday, citing multiple sources, that Chinese officials have requested foreign diplomatic missions and international organizations in Being not to use the outer walls of their buildings for displaying political propaganda. Some embassies have put up signboards in support of Ukraine, the Japanese news agency said.

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“..the funds should be redirected to other regions, namely to the Balkans or North Africa…”

• Hungary Urges EU To Redirect Ukraine Aide (RT)

Budapest has blocked a new €500 million ($544 million) package of EU financial assistance to Kiev, urging Brussels to redirect its support elsewhere. The eighth tranche from the so-called European Peace Facility (EPF) – a €5.6 billion ($6.08 billion) off-budget fund used to finance and supply foreign militaries – was vetoed by Hungary on Monday. Budapest told Reuters that it wanted the EPF to keep its original global scope, instead of being used exclusively to finance Kiev amid its ongoing conflict with Moscow. “Hungary does not agree with the fact that the European Union, along with other existing tools, uses the EPF solely with regard to Ukraine, as this does not allow sufficient funds to be channeled to promote the EU’s interests in other areas,” a government spokesperson wrote in an email to the outlet, adding that the funds should be redirected to other regions, namely to the Balkans or North Africa.

“For the Hungarian government, it is crucial that these issues should be clarified, and that’s why it did not approve the disbursement of the next tranche from the EPF,” the spokesperson concluded. The EPF was originally established in 2021, with a proclaimed goal of boosting the EU’s ability to maintain peace and strengthen regional and international security. The fund is used to reimburse the bloc’s own members, who send arms and equipment overseas, as well as to directly finance foreign militaries.

However, prior to the beginning of the ongoing conflict between Moscow and Kiev in February 2022, the fund was rarely used. A total of less than $125 million was allocated to supply non-lethal military equipment to several nations, including Ukraine. After the hostilities began, however, the EU funneled some €3.6 billion ($3.9 billion) under the EPF scheme to Ukraine in military support. Budapest has found itself at odds with Brussels over the conflict, taking a neutral stance and refusing to supply Kiev with weaponry. Hungary has also prohibited weaponry shipments heading to Ukraine from going through its territory, as well as opposed the bloc’s anti-Russian sanctions.

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“This is a clash between the luxury doom-mongering of an upper-middle class more concerned with its own self-importance than with the self-sufficiency of society..”

• The Working-Class Revolt Against Net Zero (Spiked)

Two kinds of road-blocking are taking place in Europe right now. In the first, the sons and daughters of privilege, people with names like Edred and Tilly, are holding up traffic to put pressure on governments to speed up Net Zero. If we don’t cut carbon emissions drastically, they say in their cut-glass tones, our poor planet will be consumed in a heat death of rotten mankind’s own making. In the second, working people – farmers, truckers, cab drivers – are clogging the streets to put pressure on governments to slow down Net Zero. Or better still, scrap it altogether. If we don’t cut out the Net Zero nonsense, say these people who make and deliver things for the Edreds and Tillys of the world, farms will close, jobs will be lost and economic precarity will intensify.

Whose side should you take? It’s a no-brainer. This is a clash between the luxury doom-mongering of an upper-middle class more concerned with its own self-importance than with the self-sufficiency of society, and the common sense of working people who understand that farming, food production, energy creation and transportation are essential to the survival of our species. Between an elite driven mad by visions of a climate-change apocalypse and ordinary people who still inhabit the reality-based world. Between Net Zero fanatics who want to wind back modernity and Net Zero sceptics who think modernity works pretty well, thank you. It’s the latter road-blockers – the people using their HGVs, tractors and taxis to send a stern message to our eco-elites – that we should be cheering. Their revolt against Net Zero represents a daring populist strike against the delusions and complacency of the 21st-century establishment.

Danish truckers are the latest workers to join the rebellion against green authoritarianism. Yesterday, they caused ‘road havoc’ in Denmark. They parked their huge hauliers side by side on key roads. Sections of the border with Germany were affected, as were the M11 and M16 around Copenhagen. Roads towards the ferry docks at Helsingor – ‘one of the most important ports in Denmark’ – were also briefly clogged by angry truckers. Their beef? The government’s plan to introduce a ‘truck tax’ in 2025. As part of its devotion to the cult of Net Zero, the Danish ruling class wants to slash carbon emissions by 70 per cent before 2030. And one way it intends to do that is by imposing a punitive mileage-based eco-tax on the drivers of diesel trucks, in the hope that the financial pressure will become so unbearable that they’ll switch to electric trucks instead.

The ingratitude is staggering. Truckers are the lifeblood of a modern society. They transport the fuel, food and other goods that are essential to everyday life. They drive alone, for hours, in all weathers, to keep society well stocked. And how do the elites in Copenhagen repay these people who, without fuss or fanfare, bring them everything they need? By slapping them with a new kind of sin tax – the sin in this case being to drive a vehicle that the eco-minded consider to be ‘dirty’ and ‘polluting’.

Read more …

“..they created huge farms because that was the policy promoted by the government and also by the banks. They wanted the farms to scale up their businesses. And now, suddenly the policy is to make smaller farms. This is also the EU policy. ”

• Dutch Farmer ‘Families Are Crying At The Kitchen Table Every Day’ (RMX)

Currently, the Dutch government is looking to offer buyouts for 3,000 farms in the Netherlands, and if they do not accept, their land will be confiscated The government is offering them 120 percent of the value of their land. A) Do you think that’s a fair offer, and B) Do you think they’re going to fight it?

It’s not fair at all because they have smashed these farmers for years now, and the people are so desperate that many families are crying at the kitchen table every day, and even a couple of farmers committed suicide already. Really, it’s that bad. Our government and also the banks supported a plan to create bigger farms, so the farmers bought the land of their neighbors, and they created huge farms because that was the policy promoted by the government and also by the banks. They wanted the farms to scale up their businesses. And now, suddenly the policy is to make smaller farms. This is also the EU policy. Then, you add nitrogen regulations. These farmers now have these huge farms, which means big debts, huge debts, because they had to invest. And now, the government comes up with the idea that they have this nitrogen problem, and farms need to close or be reduced in size.

The banks turn around and say, then your business — because a farm is really a business — is only worth 50 percent compared to yesterday. So these people have huge debts. They are captured in a system that they never asked for. They followed the rules, and now they are pushed in a direction that is really desperate for them. They don’t know what to do. It’s so difficult. These farms have been running from generation to generation. So, there is a lot of history tied up in these farms, and if you are desperate and don’t know what to do anymore, and you’re facing uncertainty year after year, then the government turns around and says, “OK, we have a way out for you, we have money to give you.” I think a lot of farms will do that, which is a disaster because they are the second-largest producer of food in the world after the United States. The Netherlands is just a tiny country, but we are producing so much food for the rest of the world. That’s a problem because we now have 8 billion people.

Read more …

“..while eight times the normal level of carbon dioxide is toxic, research suggests that mask-wearers (specifically those who wear masks for more than 5 minutes at a time) are breathing in 35 to 80 times normal levels..”

• The Harm Caused by Masks (Anderson)

Mask-wearers breathe in greater amounts of air that should have been expelled from their bodies and released out into the open. “[A] significant rise in carbon dioxide occurring while wearing a mask is scientifically proven in many studies,” write the German authors. “Fresh air has around 0.04% CO2,” they observe, while chronic exposure at CO2 levels of 0.3 percent is “toxic.” How much CO2 do mask-wearers breathe in? The authors write that “masks bear a possible chronic exposure to low level carbon dioxide of 1.41–3.2% CO2 of the inhaled air in reliable human experiments.” In other words, while eight times the normal level of carbon dioxide is toxic, research suggests that mask-wearers (specifically those who wear masks for more than 5 minutes at a time) are breathing in 35 to 80 times normal levels. The German study, a scoping review of existing research, aimed “to investigate the toxicological effects of face masks in terms of CO2 rebreathing on developing life, specifically for pregnant women, children, and adolescents.”

The latter two groups, of course, have been among those most frequently subjected to mask mandates in schools, despite Covid’s low levels of risk for them and the evidence that masks don’t work. What can breathing too much carbon dioxide do to you? The authors write that “at levels between 0.05% and 0.5% CO2,” one might experience an “increased heart rate, increased blood pressure and overall increased circulation with the symptoms of headache, fatigue, difficulty concentrating, dizziness, rhinitis, and dry cough.” Rates above 0.5 percent can lead to “reduced cognitive performance, impaired decision-making and reduced speed of cognitive solutions.” Beyond 1 percent, “the harmful effects include respiratory acidosis, metabolic stress, increased blood flow and decreased exercise tolerance.” Again, mask-wearers are likely breathing in CO2 levels between 1.4 percent and 3.2 percent—well above any of these thresholds. What’s more, “Testes metabolism and cell respiration have been shown to be inhibited increasingly by rising levels of CO2.”

So, high blood pressure, reduced thinking ability, respiratory problems, and reproductive concerns are among the many possible results of effectively poisoning oneself by breathing in too much carbon dioxide. The authors write that “it is clear that carbon dioxide rebreathing, especially when using N95 masks, is above the 0.8% CO2 limit set by the US Navy to reduce the risk of stillbirths and birth defects on submarines with female personnel who may be pregnant.” In other words, mandates have forced pregnant women to wear masks resulting in levels of CO2 inhalation that would be prohibited if they were serving on a Navy submarine.

Read more …

The original Lancet article is from Sep. 2022. I don’t usually include “old” things; this is a news aggregator. But the “new” comment on the article warrants interest.

@A1an_M: “I thought of another, simpler way of demonstrating that this Lancet paper claiming the vaccines saved 19.8 million lives is complete and utter bollards, using empirical data. OurWorldInData helpfully tells us how many people had actually been vaccinated at the end of December 2021: 4.55 billion As per my earlier tweet, we know that at worst in early 2020, pre vaccines, the Infection Fatality Rate of SARS-COV-2 averaged 0.25% across the world (Ioannidis). https://medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.13.20101253v3 (By December 2021 it was less than half of that but we’ll let that slide for now) So assuming the vaccinated population was typical of the population as a whole, we can say that only 0.25% of those 4.55 billion vaccinated people were at risk of death from COVID. 0.25% of 4.55 billion is 11.4 million people.

So it is impossible for the vaccines to have saved 19.8 million lives. Fallen at the very first hurdle, the Lancet paper has. How embarrassing. I could go on and talk about how, out of those 11.4 million vaccinated people who were at risk of death, based on the mortality seen in England and Wales in 2020, more than 60% were over 80 and more than 90% had more than one other comorbidity making the chances of the majority of them surviving for a year even in the absence of a vaccine rather slim… or that the vaccines don’t prevent infection, transmission, hospitalisation or death from COVID and therefore it’s quite possible they didn’t save a single life, never mind 11.4 million .. but at this stage the Lancet model is flat on the floor begging for mercy so I will stop here.”

• Global Impact Of The First Year Of Covid-19 Vaccination (Lancet)

The first COVID-19 vaccine outside a clinical trial setting was administered on Dec 8, 2020. To ensure global vaccine equity, vaccine targets were set by the COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access (COVAX) Facility and WHO. However, due to vaccine shortfalls, these targets were not achieved by the end of 2021. We aimed to quantify the global impact of the first year of COVID-19 vaccination programmes. A mathematical model of COVID-19 transmission and vaccination was separately fit to reported COVID-19 mortality and all-cause excess mortality in 185 countries and territories. The impact of COVID-19 vaccination programmes was determined by estimating the additional lives lost if no vaccines had been distributed. We also estimated the additional deaths that would have been averted had the vaccination coverage targets of 20% set by COVAX and 40% set by WHO been achieved by the end of 2021.


Based on official reported COVID-19 deaths, we estimated that vaccinations prevented 14·4 million (95% credible interval [Crl] 13·7–15·9) deaths from COVID-19 in 185 countries and territories between Dec 8, 2020, and Dec 8, 2021. This estimate rose to 19·8 million (95% Crl 19·1–20·4) deaths from COVID-19 averted when we used excess deaths as an estimate of the true extent of the pandemic, representing a global reduction of 63% in total deaths (19·8 million of 31·4 million) during the first year of COVID-19 vaccination. In COVAX Advance Market Commitment countries, we estimated that 41% of excess mortality (7·4 million [95% Crl 6·8–7·7] of 17·9 million deaths) was averted. In low-income countries, we estimated that an additional 45% (95% CrI 42–49) of deaths could have been averted had the 20% vaccination coverage target set by COVAX been met by each country, and that an additional 111% (105–118) of deaths could have been averted had the 40% target set by WHO been met by each country by the end of 2021.

Read more …

“No currency has been on top more than 150 years. Nobody has always been on top, so it’s always happened.”

• Dollar Dominance ‘Coming To An End’ – Jim Rogers (RT)

The US dollar is starting to lose its leading position across the globe, as Washington has become the world’s largest debtor, famed investor Jim Rogers told Sputnik news agency on Wednesday. The co-founder of the Quantum Fund noted that more and more countries are growing hesitant about the greenback, as deep reliance on its use can lead to various problems. “Many friends of America are moving, trying to find something to compete with and ultimately replace the US dollar,” Rogers said in an interview with the Russian outlet. According to the investor, an international currency should have an absolutely neutral status, and the lack of neutrality demonstrated by the White House, along with growing concerns over US creditworthiness, have deprived the greenback of that quality.

“Many people are starting to say: wait a minute, I don’t know if we want to use that money, because it will have a problem someday,” he said. “But also, the world’s international currency is supposed to be completely neutral. Anybody can use it for anything you want. But now Washington is changing the rules. And if they get angry at you, they cut you off.” Rogers explained that a growing number of countries are now seeking an alternative to the greenback, adding that the Chinese yuan could replace the US currency as the most common means for conducting international settlements.

Russia has been boosting economic ties with China over the past few years, adopting the yuan in international trade. In early April, the Chinese currency replaced the dollar as the most-traded foreign currency in Russia. Moreover, the yuan continues to penetrate a number of other markets around the world. “It will happen. It has always happened. And America’s time is coming to an end. The American dollar this time is coming to an end,” Rogers concluded. “No currency has been on top more than 150 years. Nobody has always been on top, so it’s always happened.”

Read more …

“Without the FBI at our disposal, we may have to turn to traditional partners such as the mafia to fight our political enemies..”

• FBI Adds Itself To FBI Watch List (BBee)

In an unprecedented move to protect the safety and security of millions of Americans, the FBI has added itself to the FBI watchlist. “When we reflected on the vast number of pedophiles, insurrectionists, frauds, and killers in our organization, we thought: ‘Holy cow! Someone needs to keep an eye on these weirdos!'” said FBI Director Christopher Wray to reporters. “That’s why today we have decided to place the FBI on the FBI watchlist so the FBI can keep a close eye on the FBI before the FBI does something terrible.” Congress is demanding oversight of the FBI’s monitoring of the FBI, as the FBI has been known in the past to let the FBI get away with horrific crimes.


The FBI in turn is monitoring the Congressional oversight committee in charge of overseeing the FBI’s oversight of the FBI. “Americans shouldn’t worry, we have this all under control,” said Wray. Critics of the move expressed concern this may hamper the FBI’s ability to organize governor kidnapping schemes, insurrections, and mass shootings. “Without the FBI at our disposal, we may have to turn to traditional partners such as the mafia to fight our political enemies,” said one anonymous Washington bureaucrat. “What’s the world coming to?” At publishing time, the FBI announced they now have the FBI in custody. Unfortunately, they released the FBI from custody a few minutes later.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

Soros


Just in from NOAA: April 2023 cooler in the US than April 1895, despite a 1000% increase in industrial era atmospheric CO2.

 

 


Just in from NOAA: No warming in the US since January 2005, despite 44% more atmospheric CO2.

 

 

Oyster swims

 

 

Jellyfish

 

 

NASA

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

Debt Rattle October 30 2021

Oct 302021
 
 October 30, 2021  Posted by at 8:21 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  55 Responses »


M. C. Escher Doric columns1945

 

• COVID-19 Mortality Risk Correlates Inversely with Vitamin D3 Status (NIH)
• Needle-Free Vaccine Patches Coming Soon (Y!)
• New Lancet Study Exposes Limits Of Vaccines At Preventing COVID Infection (ZH)
• And Now, The Admission…. (Denninger)
• Fauci Funded Yet Another Cruel Beagle Experiment (LW)
• COVID-19: Moderna Gets Its Miracle (Whitney Webb)
• Humanity Is Sleepwalking Towards Medical Apartheid (SCF)
• Ice Cube Ditches Movie & $9 Million After Refusing To Get Covid-19 Vaccine (RT)
• Social Media Accounts Could Soon Require Digital ID in France, UK (BMU)
• US Lawyers Argue Assange Healthy Enough to Be Sent to His Death (Medhurst)

 

 

Christine Anderson

 

 

 

 

McCullough

 

 

“Regression suggested a theoretical point of zero mortality at approximately 50 ng/mL D3.”

Problem solved. I’m sure your government is on it at full capacity.

• COVID-19 Mortality Risk Correlates Inversely with Vitamin D3 Status (NIH)

Background: Much research shows that blood calcidiol (25(OH)D3) levels correlate strongly with SARS-CoV-2 infection severity. There is open discussion regarding whether low D3 is caused by the infection or if deficiency negatively affects immune defense. The aim of this study was to collect further evidence on this topic.

Methods: Systematic literature search was performed to identify retrospective cohort as well as clinical studies on COVID-19 mortality rates versus D3 blood levels. Mortality rates from clinical studies were corrected for age, sex, and diabetes. Data were analyzed using correlation and linear regression.

Results: One population study and seven clinical studies were identified, which reported D3 blood levels preinfection or on the day of hospital admission. The two independent datasets showed a negative Pearson correlation of D3 levels and mortality risk (r(17) = -0.4154, p = 0.0770/r(13) = -0.4886, p = 0.0646). For the combined data, median (IQR) D3 levels were 23.2 ng/mL (17.4-26.8), and a significant Pearson correlation was observed (r(32) = -0.3989, p = 0.0194). Regression suggested a theoretical point of zero mortality at approximately 50 ng/mL D3.

Conclusions: The datasets provide strong evidence that low D3 is a predictor rather than just a side effect of the infection. Despite ongoing vaccinations, we recommend raising serum 25(OH)D levels to above 50 ng/mL to prevent or mitigate new outbreaks due to escape mutations or decreasing antibody activity.

Read more …

Lemme guess: $700 a pop?

“..measuring one square centimeter that were dotted with more than 5,000 microscopic spikes..”

• Needle-Free Vaccine Patches Coming Soon (Y!)

Effective vaccines, without a needle: Since the start of the Covid pandemic, researchers have doubled down on efforts to create patches that deliver life-saving drugs painlessly to the skin, a development that could revolutionize medicine. The technique could help save children’s tears at doctors’ offices, and help people who have a phobia of syringes. Beyond that, skin patches could assist with distribution efforts, because they don’t have cold-chain requirements — and might even heighten vaccine efficacy. A new mouse study in the area, published in the journal Science Advances, showed promising results.

The Australian-US team used patches measuring one square centimeter that were dotted with more than 5,000 microscopic spikes, “so tiny you can’t actually see them,” David Muller, a virologist at the University of Queensland and co-author of the paper, told AFP. These tips have been coated with an experimental vaccine, and the patch is clicked on with an applicator that resembles a hockey puck. “It’s like you get a good flick on the skin,” said Muller. The researchers used a so-called “subunit” vaccine that reproduces the spikes that dot the surface of the coronavirus. Mice were injected either via the patch over the course of two minutes, or with a syringe.


The immune systems of those who got the patch produced high levels of neutralizing antibodies after two doses, including in their lungs, vital to stopping Covid, and the patches outperformed syringes. The researchers also found that a sub-group of mice, who were given only one dose of vaccine containing an additional substance called an adjuvant used to spur immune response, “didn’t get sick at all,” said Muller. Vaccines are normally injected into our muscles, but muscle tissue doesn’t contain very many immune cells needed to react to the drug, explained Muller. In addition, the tiny spikes cause localized skin death, which alerts the body to a problem and triggers a greater immune response. For the scientist, the logistical advantages couldn’t be clearer.

Read more …

The Lancet is not worried about its reputation.

• New Lancet Study Exposes Limits Of Vaccines At Preventing COVID Infection (ZH)

The Lancet has just released another study comparing the efficacy of COVID vaccines to the efficacy of protection provided by previous COVID infections. Their conclusion: while vaccines lower the risk of infections with the delta variant within households, those who are fully vaccinated are still vulnerable to a ‘breakthrough’ infection if somebody they live with gets infected. What’s more, people who have been vaccinated against COVID can be equally as infectious as the unvaccinated, the study showed. The new study, which was published Thursday in the Lancet, the British medical journal that published some of the earliest research on COVID, is one of few to use detailed infection data from actual examples of household transmission, and it showed that – as we noted above – the viral loads of both vaccinated and unvaccinated patients infected with COVID are “broadly similar”.

The study involved 621 people in the UK with mild COVID infections, identified via the UK’s contact-tracing system. The data showed that vaccination status doesn’t make a whole lot of difference in the ability to pass COVID on to others. Roughly 25% of vaccinated household members subsequently tested positive for the virus after close contact with a fellow household member with a confirmed case of COVID. That’s compared with 38% of infection for people who haven’t been vaccinated. These data show that the delta variant has a “greater capability for breaching the vaccine’s defenses when compared with predecessors. “Our findings show that vaccination alone is not enough to prevent people from being infected with the Delta variant and spreading it in household settings,” said Professor Ajit Lalvani of Imperial College London, the co-leader of the study.


The study’s author said the lower transmission rates between vaccinated patients is just another reason to get the jab – although not a particularly compelling one. “The ongoing transmission we are seeing between vaccinated people makes it essential for unvaccinated people to get vaccinated to protect themselves from acquiring infection and severe Covid-19, especially as more people will be spending time inside in close proximity during the winter months,” he said. The study also underlines the importance of the vulnerable to get booster shots, since it also shows that vaccine immunity wanes with time. “We found that susceptibility to infection increased already within a few months after the second vaccine dose – so those eligible for Covid-19 booster shots should get them promptly,” the professor said.

Read more …

“What Drosten is telling you is that not only have the vaccines failed to stop you from getting the virus, they’ve screwed everyone.”

• And Now, The Admission…. (Denninger)

In short, the governments lied and now they’re admitting it. “My goal as virologist Drosten, is … I want to have vaccine immunity and then, on top of that, I want to have my first infection, and my second, and my third at some point.“ You mean… like measles? Oh wait… not like measles, because if you take the measles shot you won’t get measles — or give it to anyone else. vOf course this forms the entire premise of so-called “mandatory” vaccinations, all of which has always been a crock of **** and worthy of a piano dropped on the head of anyone arguing for it. The only reason it didn’t happen over the decades is that those other shots were in fact safe (which these are not) and, once taken, you didn’t get the disease.

But now we have an actual Government so-called expert, in this case Germany’s, stating out loud that the vaccines are in fact worthless as a public health measure. They neither prevent you from getting the virus or transmitting it, making them nothing more than a very dangerous flu shot.The flu shot usually doesn’t prevent you from getting or spreading the flu either. Indeed in Canada nurses have won court cases against their employers who argued for mandatory flu shots on exactly this basis. The flu shot, which is pushed heavily by a lot of doctors and so-called “experts”, has the virtue of being quite safe, however, that only about 20 or 25 people die associated with it and it has no record of causing effects like myocarditis. Neither can be said for these jabs that are somewhere between 100 and 1,000 times as dangerous — bad enough that for someone under the age of 30 who doesn’t have a pre-existing life-threatening condition the jab is more-dangerous than the virus itself.

But what’s worse is the continuing stream of data out of England which strongly suggests that not only do these jabs not stop you from getting the virus they also have a very nasty tendency to prevent you from building “N” antibodies if and when you do get infected after being jabbed. That’s very bad, because it is those antibodies that, we have reason to believe, are in fact critical to prevent serious or fatal outcomes.= Nobody cares if they sneeze; indeed, coronaviruses produce that all the time. So why would Drosten say he looks forward to his first, second and third infection post jab? We already know that being infected without being jabbed produces durable immunity. Exactly how durable is open to some question but by the data over the last 18 months the answer is “very durable” with only a tiny fraction of one percent of people becoming symptomatically ill, if not vaccinated, twice.

What Drosten is telling you is that not only have the vaccines failed to stop you from getting the virus they’ve screwed everyone. No, not everyone has or will drop dead from the immediate side effects such as myocarditis, although the longer-term impact of those nasty adverse effects is very likely to be materially worse than the immediate count, which is bad enough. No, the really hideous news, it appears, is that it is basically universal that the jabs produce OAS in every single person who takes them and thus you will not only get Covid, you’ll get it more than once if you were stupid enough to take the shot(s).

Read more …

And many many more. And of course he still has his job.

• Fauci Funded Yet Another Cruel Beagle Experiment (LW)

In July, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the agency of the National Institutes of Health run by Anthony Fauci, gave more than half a million dollars to the veterinarian school at Kansas State University to fund an experiment, which is still ongoing, that involves infecting beagles with mutant versions of a bacteria that’s transmitted by ticks. The experiment, which was discovered through a Freedom of Information Act request by the White Coat Waste Project, is the latest item on a long list of gruesome animal tests underwritten by Fauci’s NIAID.The $536,311 payment was this year’s installment of what has so far totaled $5.6 million in NIAID funding for the research project, which began in December of 2007 and is scheduled to end in 2024.

A 2020 paper based on the experiment’s findings reported that, for that funding cycle, the researchers bought 18 six month-old beagles from a commercial breeder. The researchers created mutant strains of the bacteria Ehrlichia chaffeensis in a laboratory and infected the beagles with them. The E chaffeensis bacteria can cause fever, respiratory distress, weight loss, bleeding disorders, neurological disturbances, anemia, bleeding, lameness and eye problems in dogs. After infecting them, the researchers allowed 200 ticks to feed on each of the beagles for a week, to see whether the ticks would take up the mutated versions of the bacteria. For the next two months, they drew the dogs’ blood for testing. Then they killed them. For the new funding cycle, the researchers proposed continuing this experimentation on 138 more beagles, with 250 ticks per dog.


When asked whether NIAID considered this experimentation humane, a spokesperson emailed: “The use of animals in a grantee’s research is ultimately overseen by his or her own institution’s Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC)” and referred me to Kansas State University. [..] Over the past week, Anthony Fauci, the NIH and NIAID have been widely criticized both in the media and by elected officials for their funding of grisly experiments on dogs and other animals. In response, NIH’s defenders have described the attacks as a “partisan hit job” motivated by unrelated political differences over Fauci’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic. The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank called it a “disinformation campaign” and part of a “crusade against Fauci.” Self-described “fact checkers” amplified Milbank’s claims.

Read more …

Whitney’s 3-part series.

• COVID-19: Moderna Gets Its Miracle (Whitney Webb)

In late 2019, the biopharmaceutical company Moderna was facing a series of challenges that not only threatened its ability to ever take a product to market, and thus turn a profit, but its very existence as a company. There were multiple warning signs that Moderna was essentially another Theranos-style fraud, with many of these signs growing in frequency and severity as the decade drew to a close. Part I of this three-part series explored the disastrous circumstances in which Moderna found itself at that time, with the company’s salvation hinging on the hope of a divine miracle, a “Hail Mary” save of sorts, as stated by one former Moderna employee.

While the COVID-19 crisis that emerged in the first part of 2020 can hardly be described as an act of benevolent divine intervention for most, it certainly can be seen that way from Moderna’s perspective. Key issues for the company, including seemingly insurmountable regulatory hurdles and its inability to advance beyond animal trials with its most promising—and profitable—products, were conveniently wiped away, and not a moment too soon. Since January 2020, the value of Moderna’s stock—which had embarked on a steady decline since its IPO—grew from $18.89 per share to its current value of $339.57 per share, thanks to the success of its COVID-19 vaccine.

Yet, how exactly was Moderna’s “Hail Mary” moment realized, and what were the forces and events that ensured it would make it through the FDA’s emergency use authorization (EUA) process? In examining that question, it becomes quickly apparent that Moderna’s journey of saving grace involved much more than just cutting corners in animal and human trials and federal regulations. Indeed, if we are to believe Moderna executives, it involved supplying formulations for some trial studies that were not the same as their COVID-19 vaccine commercial candidate, despite the data resulting from the former being used to sell Moderna’s vaccine to the public and federal health authorities. Such data was also selectively released at times to align with preplanned stock trades by Moderna executives, turning many of Moderna’s highest-ranking employees into millionaires, and even billionaires, while the COVID-19 crisis meant economic calamity for most Americans.

Not only that, but—as Part II of this three-part series will show, Moderna and a handful of its collaborators at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) seemed to know that Moderna’s miracle had arrived—well before anyone else knew or could have known. Was it really a coincidental mix of “foresight” and “serendipity” that led Moderna and the NIH to plan to develop a COVID-19 vaccine days before the viral sequence was even published and months before a vaccine was even considered necessary for a still unknown disease? If so, why would Moderna—a company clearly on the brink—throw everything into and gamble the entire company on a vaccine project that had no demonstrated need at the time?

Read more …

“Under normal conditions – that is, before scientific inquiry was sent back kicking and screaming to the Dark Ages..”

• Humanity Is Sleepwalking Towards Medical Apartheid (SCF)

Even as scientific studies show that vaccines alone cannot extricate humanity from the Covid-19 crisis, governments are rushing headlong towards the creation of a ‘vaccinated economy’ without any consideration for the consequences. It’s time for an injection of sanity and informed democratic debate. An astonishing thing happened this week that should have – were it not for a media industrial complex that coddles and cossets the powers that be – incited journalists to scream bloody murder around our increasingly imprisoned planet. What the world got instead was the deafening cacophony of crickets.

When a reporter asked New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern about the possibility of the Pacific island nation being fragmented into two distinct classes of citizens – the vaccinated and unvaccinated – Arden didn’t miss a beat as she responded with her trademark Cheshire grin, “That is what it is. So yep. Yep.” After being further prodded by the deferential journalist as to why she favored apartheid, Ardern, who has already mandated vaccines for government employees or else, responded, unscientifically, that “people who have been vaccinated will want to know that they are around other vaccinated people; they’ll want to know that they’re in a safe environment.”

Under normal conditions – that is, before scientific inquiry was sent back kicking and screaming to the Dark Ages – Ardern’s outrageous remark would have been greeted by robust and vigorous debate from both the political and medical communities. After all, the vaccinated should feel absolutely at ease mingling among the unvaccinated in stuffy public places given that they are, supposedly, protected? Isn’t that the point of the vaccines, to protect the vaccinated and get us back to some semblance of ‘normal’? If not, then why the incessant push to jab every single person on the planet, and not just once, as initially promised, but multiple times? The answer, at least according to Queen Ardern, is so that everyone can feel “confident” once again among their fellow man. That makes absolutely zero sense, especially as new studies show no discernible decrease in infection rates among the vaccinated. So why hedge our bets when just the opposite seems to be happening?

In a recent study by Harvard researchers, published in the European Journal of Epidemiology, it was discovered that, looking at statistics around the world, “there appears to be no discernable relationship between percentage of population fully vaccinated and new COVID-19 cases…” The researchers then delivered a brutal body slam to conventional (political) thinking by revealing that “the trend line suggests a marginally positive association such that countries with higher percentage of population fully vaccinated have HIGHER (emphasis added) COVID-19 cases per 1 million people.”

Read more …

No Hell No.

• Ice Cube Ditches Movie & $9 Million After Refusing To Get Covid-19 Vaccine (RT)

Rapper and actor Ice Cube has exited a movie for which he was supposed to be paid $9 million after refusing requests to get the Covid-19 vaccine. Ice Cube has left the ironically titled ‘Oh Hell No’ Sony comedy, according to sources familiar with the matter who spoke to The Hollywood Reporter. Cube, known for films like ‘Friday’ and songs such as ‘It Was a Good Day’, was set to co-star in the feature with comedic actor Jack Black. The production was set to kick off in December in Hawaii. Cube, whose real name is O’Shea Jackson, previously joined numerous other celebrities during the coronavirus pandemic and encouraged mask-wearing, even donating thousands of face coverings to an Oklahoma college. He also sold t-shirts during the pandemic encouraging masking and raising funds for healthcare workers.


The artist’s view on vaccines, however, is a bit more murky. In June of 2020, he tweeted that doctors should “stop lying” about Covid-19. The tweet followed a June message reading, “Got the cue for the coronavirus,” which was linked to an album cover featuring someone getting a substance injected through a needle. The bottom of the image read, “lethal injection.” Cube has declined to comment on his reported parting with the ‘Oh Hell No’ production. Hollywood performers who have stood against vaccine mandates or refused to get a vaccine themselves have thus far been primarily conservative artists. Comedian and actor Rob Schneider has frequently spoken out against mandates through his Twitter.

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The bureaucrats see opportunity.

• Social Media Accounts Could Soon Require Digital ID in France, UK (BMU)

Digital ID may soon be a requirement for social media participation, as both France and the UK have taken steps toward the ban of anonymous social media accounts. The website of the French Senate published a new bill proposing the creation of an independent supervisory authority in charge of collecting user identities when they register with online platforms. According to Conservative Senator Alain Cadec, the creation of the new law would stop an observed increase in cyberbullying and make it easier to prosecute potential offenders. “The proposed law thus aims to facilitate the identification of the perpetrators of offenses, and thereby contribute to putting an end to the real feeling of impunity of the authors of hateful, racist, homophobic or sexist messages,” reads the bill’s explanatory statement.

According to the new document, submitting a scan of their ID upon registration would make users aware that they can be identified quickly, and therefore serve as a deterrent against offending behaviors. The proposed independent administrative authority would comprise representatives of platforms, users, parliamentarians, and magistrates, and would be chaired by a member of parliament. The authority’s duties would encompass the online collection and profile creation of “official data and information allowing the identification of users established on French territory of platforms and social networks exceeding a certain audience threshold in France.”


The identification data would be transmitted at the request of the judge in the event of criminal activity, which would “avoid being submitted to the goodwill of a company located in California or elsewhere in the world.” In addition, the proposed bills suggest the creation of a non-nominative online digital identifier that would enable registration to be finalized with platforms and social networks, and that would be held by the authority.

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“The United States’ lawyers are basically trying to sink the entire case, on a technicality that has nothing to do with psychiatry.”

• US Lawyers Argue Assange Healthy Enough to Be Sent to His Death (Medhurst)

Appealing on five grounds, the two main topics of the High Court appeal dealt with Assange’s health, and diplomatic assurances that he wouldn’t be placed in oppressive prison conditions in the US. The United States lawyers attempted to downplay the severity of Assange’s mental illness, arguing that he was not at high risk of suicide. The prosecutors argued that he did not meet the criteria for his extradition to be oppressive, and that the judge did not apply the test correctly. The case now hinges on whether the United States can prove that Assange is not too sick to be extradited, and that the judge erred in her ruling. To do this they have attacked the medical evidence she cited in her report and the medical experts themselves.

Prof. Michael Kopelman is the key medical expert for Assange’s defense. In his first psychiatric evaluation, Kopelman concealed the identities of Assange’s partner Stella Moris and their children, out of concern for their privacy and safety. This was after revelations that Assange was being spied on in the Ecuadorian embassy. His lawyers told the High Court that Moris even moved to a different address for more protection. It’s against this backdrop of surveillance, attempting to steal DNA, and even contemplating to kill Assange, that Kopelman chose not to disclose the relationship with Moris’, and their children. Outside the High Court, Assange’s partner Stella Moris recalled: “His lawyers had been targeted by name, his Spanish lawyer’s office was broken into, his lawyers’ notes seized and copied, our eldest son’s DNA was instructed to be stolen. My mother was followed, I was followed— Julian was spied on in every single detail.”

The judge deemed this inappropriate, but “an understandable human response to Ms. Morris’s predicament”. She preferred Kopelman’s evidence, as he had spent the most time with Assange, and his reports were more detailed. Despite this point having little to do with medical science or psychiatry, the prosecution have used it to try and discredit all of Kopelman’s medical evidence. They say the judge should have given it little or no weight. They accuse Kopelman of misleading the court, and failing in his duty as an impartial, expert witness. Assange’s lawyer Fitzgerald called it a “miserable attempt to tarnish the reputation of a distinguished neuro-psychiatrist”.

The United States’ lawyers are basically trying to sink the entire case, on a technicality that has nothing to do with psychiatry. In fact, Kopelman is such a renowned neuropsychiatrist that even the US’ lead prosecutor, James Lewis, had solicited his services in another case— an irony which Kopelman highlighted in court.

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Fine People Hoax

 

 

 

 

Oz net zero plan

 

 

 

 

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

 

Debt Rattle September 27 2021

Sep 272021
 
 September 27, 2021  Posted by at 8:53 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  87 Responses »


M. C. Escher Symmetry Drawing 1948

 

• Natural Immunity Emerges As Potential Legal Challenge To Vaccine Mandates (Y!)
• Lancet Covid Origins Panel Disbanded Over Ties To Peter Daszak (DM)
• Dear Idiot: I Will Laugh (Denninger)
• We Are All Cattle Now (Eugyppius)
• The NBA’s Anti-Vaxxers Are Trying to Push Around the League (RS)
• How The US Vaccine Effort Derailed And Why We Shouldn’t Be Surprised (G.)
• Treating Antisocial Elements For What They Are (K.)
• Inside The CIA’s Secret War Plans Against Wikileaks (Y!)
• CIA Was Ready To Wage Gun Battle In London Streets Over Assange (RT)
• Mike Pompeo And The CIA’s War On WikiLeaks and Julian Assange (Gosztola)
• CIA’s Assange Abduction/Murder Plan Raises Questions For Australia (Crikey)

 

 

“Medical science has made such tremendous progress that there is hardly a healthy human left”
– Aldous Huxley

 

 

No infections, lots of excess deaths. Why?

 

 

 

 

O’Looney

 

 

Launch 1,000 cases.

• Natural Immunity Emerges As Potential Legal Challenge To Vaccine Mandates (Y!)

The argument that natural immunity against COVID-19 is an alternative to vaccination is emerging as a potential legal challenge to federally mandated vaccination policies. Vaccination is already required for certain workers and some college students. The federal government, despite steeper legal hurdles to imposing vaccination, has also invoked the U.S. Department of Labor to mandate inoculation for health care workers and is expected to roll out a larger policy effectively mandating vaccination for a majority of U.S. workers. The stated goal behind mandatory vaccination policies is to protect against the spread of disease, meaning that the crux of any policy is immunity.

The notion that a previous COVID-19 infection provides natural immunity that can be at least as good as vaccination in some people is something a judge would likely need to consider in a challenge to a mandatory policy, especially against a government actor. “I think that a judge might reject a rule that’s been issued by a body, like the U.S. Department of Labor or by a state, that has not been sufficiently thought through as it relates to the science,” Erik Eisenmann, a labor and employment attorney with Husch Blackwell, told Yahoo Finance. Some recent research, which looks at hundreds of thousands of cases in Israel and has yet to undergo peer review, indicates that natural immunity might be at least as effective as vaccination in certain people.

Other peer-reviewed research cited by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which looks at dozens of cases in the U.S., indicated that certain people who suffered from a COVID-19 infection did not create antibodies (ie, natural immunity) at all. In August, the CDC published a study of 246 Kentucky residents, concluding that vaccination offers higher protection than a previous COVID infection. The CDC said the study went through a “rigorous multi-level clearance process” before submission, though analysis was conducted before the Delta variant became prevalent in the U.S. The CDC says the Kentucky data indicates that vaccines offer better protection than natural immunity alone, and medical professionals widely recommend vaccination for everyone who is eligible — including those who have experienced a prior COVID-19 infection.

Legally challenging COVID-19 vaccine mandates involves both science and law. The scientific arguments are based on certain studies over the past year, including the Israel study, and studies out of Cleveland Clinic and Washington University. A June study that tracked 52,238 Cleveland Clinic employees found that within 1,359 previously infected and unvaccinated people, none contracted a subsequent COVID-19 infection over the five-month study. The findings led authors to conclude that prior infection makes a person “unlikely to benefit from COVID-19 vaccination.” Nevertheless, Cleveland Clinic stated afterwards that it continued to recommend vaccination for people previously infected, stressing that the research was conducted in late 2020 and early 2021 before the emergence of the Delta variant.

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I don’t trust Jeffrey Sachs.

• Lancet Covid Origins Panel Disbanded Over Ties To Peter Daszak (DM)

The chairman of a COVID-19 origins task force affiliated with the Lancet scientific journals has disbanded the commission over its ties to controversial researcher Peter Daszak and his EcoHealth Alliance. Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs told the Wall Street Journal on Saturday that he was concerned with the links to Daszak, who led the task force until recusing himself from that role in June. Daszak, who lives in New York, devoted his career to championing so-called ‘gain of function’ research to engineer coronavirus to be more deadly to humans, arguing that it was the best chance to detect and prevent a global pandemic. Shocking documents released this week revealed his 2018 proposal to help the Wuhan Institute of Virology engineer bat coronaviruses to be more deadly, by inserting genetic features that are similar to those found in SARS-CoV-2.

There is still no conclusive proof as to whether COVID-19, a coronavirus linked to bats, first jumped to humans from a wild animal or in a lab setting. But from the early days of the pandemic, Daszak has made every effort to paint the lab origin hypothesis as a ‘conspiracy theory,’ including masterminding a letter in the Lancet that established a veneer of scientific consensus that natural origin was the only possibility. If the virus did emerge from a lab performing the experiments he championed, it would be a crushing blow to Daszak’s research. Natural origin, on the other hand, would vindicate his life’s work seeking to prevent the next pandemic. Several members of the disbanded Lancet task force have collaborated with Daszak or EcoHealth Alliance on projects in the past.

‘I just didn’t want a task force that was so clearly involved with one of the main issues of this whole search for the origins, which was EcoHealth Alliance,’ Dr. Sachs told the Journal. Sachs said a new Lancet Covid-19 Commission would continue studying the origins for a report to be published in mid-2022, but broaden its scope to include input from other experts on biosafety concerns, including risky laboratory research. It comes just days after the release of bombshell documents showing Daszak’s 2018 funding request to the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) seeking $14.2 million to fund gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan lab.

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“Their data, official public health data, says that (1) the jabs wear off, (2) those who were jabbed are spreading the disease and (3) you who got jabbed are at high risk of getting ****ed.”

• Dear Idiot: I Will Laugh (Denninger)

So The Miami Herald — and Yahoo — think they can print this without consequence? “That’s why we were glad President Biden stopped asking nicely, started requiring vaccinations everywhere he had power to do so. We were also glad when employers followed suit. And if that’s a problem for you, then, yes, goodbye, sayonara, auf wiedersehen, adios and adieu. We’ll miss you, to be sure. But you’re asking us to choose between your petulance and our lives. And that’s really no choice at all.” Is that so? Well here’s a bit of science for you, *******: The jabs don’t work. In fact you admit they don’t work. If you believed they did work you wouldn’t care about us. You might call us stupid, but that’s the end of it right? You’re safe, we’re not. So what? You live your life and if we kill ourselves, so be it. You don’t ban beer because I can drink myself to death, right?

So why are you all up in arms? There’s only one answer: You know you did something stupid and put yourself in a worse position rather than a better one when you got vaccinated! So now, having done something that you know is dumb you insist others join you in your ritualized suicide cult, headed by Biden, Fauci and Rochelle. Have a look at Scotland if you think I’m wrong on this. Their data, official public health data, says that (1) the jabs wear off, (2) those who were jabbed are spreading the disease and (3) you who got jabbed are at high risk of getting ****ed. Not a little ****ed either. Indeed you traded what was 18 months to get rid of the extra 100lbs for a non-sterilizing, lightly-tested jab that on the history was very unlikely to work out well. It never had before for any coronavirus, so why would you believe, without years or even decades of evidence, that “this time its different”?

So when — not if, when — you get a so-called “breakthrough” infection the evidence is you will get screwed faster, harder, and more-certainly than someone never vaccinated. You’re at least as likely to die. Indeed, if you talk to clinicians they will tell you point-blank that once you get into the hospital being vaccinated has no statistical benefit on outcome. Oh sure, it appears being jabbed comes with a lower risk of death close in to your vaccination date, but remember, when you got vaccinated you also took a wildly-elevated risk of myocarditis which, on the data, progresses to heart failure a frightening part of the time within five years and which is asymptomatic until there is nothing you can do about it because the root, PAH, is not detectable from outside the body by non-invasive means.

If that turns out badly five years down the road you either get a heart transplant (at six-figure cost, permanent disability and permanent dependence on anti-rejection drugs) or you’re dead. Never mind those people who took the first jab, got hammered by it, couldn’t go back for the second due to the risk of immediate death and now are stuck with permanent compromise from infection and wildly elevated risk of mortality. By the way that’s in the data too and your demands and screaming are why those people are screwed. Just in case you missed that let me say it again: You screwed them. Many among us, myself included, calculated that the risk from infection was less than the risk from being jabbed. I was right. I got infected, placed no burden on the health care system, survived, recovered, I have no apparent bad lasting effects, my exercise tolerance is back to where it was and I gained durable, broad and deep immunity which the jabs do not confer.

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“Coronavirus vaccines have been used in animals for years, with extremely unimpressive results.”

• We Are All Cattle Now (Eugyppius)

There is nothing surprising about the failure of our vaccines. In fact it was totally predictable. Coronavirus vaccines have been used in animals for years, with extremely unimpressive results. The problem is that coronaviruses infect the mucosal surfaces of the lungs, at what is basically the very edge of the reach of our immune systems. You could say that this their grand strategy. They work their way in from our least protected borders. Typically, nasal spray vaccines are preferred in animals to stimulate immunity in the mucosa. Unfortunately, even the sprays achieve immunity that „is often short-lived, requires frequent boosting, and may not prevent re-infection.“ This is after decades of vaccine development and the considerably reduced safety standards observed in veterinary medicine.

Our own SARS-2 vaccines, despite their fancy mRNA and virus vector technology, are entirely of a piece with veterinary standards. They have a poor side effect profile, they provide only temporary and partial protection against infection, and they are deployed on a vast scale with no regard for the evolutionary pressure they place on the virus or their broader consequences for infection dynamics. These are normal standards in the context of industrial livestock, where most animals are not raised to live very long in any event, and the risk of occasional accidents — inadvertently favouring or even causing lethal superstrains, or inflicting widespread vaccine injuries — can be weighed against the economic loss associated with mortality from infections.

Of all animal coronavirus vaccines, the most successful is that which prevents IBV, or infectious bronchitis virus, in chickens. IBV is mainly deadly to chicks, who are vaccinated almost immediately after hatching with a live, attenuated virus vaccine. These kinds of vaccines are preferred over deactivated virus vaccines in animals, because they elicit a better immune response. The reason is simple: The weakened vaccine virus actually infects you and your immune system remembers the event accordingly. Some SARS-2 attenuated virus vaccines are even in development for humans, but it is unlikely they will ever be used, because they are very dangerous. The attenuated virus, because it replicates in the cells of the vaccinated, can reacquire its prior virulence via mutations. This happened with early attenuated vaccines against poliovirus in humans.

And there is an added danger, that the recently vaccinated might come into contact with the wild virus, and recombination events might then combine splice together the genomes of both, yielding unpredictable, potentially very lethal, mutant strains. IBV vaccines protect the chickens from infection for only about nine weeks. That‘s long enough for the chickens destined to be eaten, but those raised for their eggs require constant boosters. They receive two or three attenuated virus vaccines at first, and then periodic deactivated virus boosters thereafter, to maintain their protection. Adenovirus vector vaccines have been tried in chickens, with efficacy similar to that induced by the attenuated virus vaccines. This is very likely an unstated reason that vaccine vector and mRNA messenger technology were used for our own SARS-2 jabs. It was known from experience with animals that deactivated virus vaccines would not work nearly as well, and that attenuated viruses were too dangerous.

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You sure it’s not the league trying to push the players around?

• The NBA’s Anti-Vaxxers Are Trying to Push Around the League (RS)

One by one, the basketball players — non-vaccinated star here, fully-inoculated veteran on mute down there, a full-on anti-vaxxer front-and-center — logged into the video conference. The annual summer meeting of the powerful NBA union had gone virtual again on August 7, and high on the agenda for the season ahead was a proposed mandate from the league office that 100 percent of players get vaccinated against Covid-19. One response echoed from squares across the screen, according to players and an executive on the call: “Non-starter. Non-starter.” The NBA had relied on science above all to lead the sports world through the Covid nightmare, from the league’s outbreak-driven shutdown to a pandemic-proof playoff bubble in Disney World to game after game with fans back in the stands.

But after two plagued seasons of non-stop nasal swabbing, quarantining and distrust, unvaccinated players were pushing back. They made their case to the union summit: There should be testing this year, of course, just not during off-days. They’d mask up on the court and on the road, if they must. But no way would they agree to a mandatory jab. The vaccine deniers had set the agenda; the players agreed to take their demands for personal freedom to the NBA’s negotiating table. This month, league officials caught a break: Two of America’s most progressive cities, New York and San Francisco, would require pro athletes to show proof of one Covid-19 vaccination dose to play indoors, except with an approved medical or religious exemption. Which meant that one of the NBA’s biggest stars — one known for being receptive to conspiratorial beliefs — would be under heavy pressure to get a shot. And if Brooklyn Nets superstar Kyrie Irving could be convinced to take the vaccine, then maybe, just maybe, the whole league could create a new kind of bubble together.

When asked directly about Irving’s vaccination status — or his plans to change it — multiple people familiar with his thinking declined to answer directly. But one confidant and family member floated to Rolling Stone the idea of anti-vaxx players skipping home games to dodge the New York City ordinance… or at least threatening to protest them, until the NBA changes its ways. “There are so many other players outside of him who are opting out, I would like to think they would make a way,” says Kyrie’s aunt, Tyki Irving, who runs the seven-time All-Star’s family foundation and is one of the few people in his regular circle of advisors. “It could be like every third game. So it still gives you a full season of being interactive and being on the court, but with the limitations that they’re, of course, oppressing upon you. There can be some sort of formula where the NBA and the players can come to some sort of agreement.”

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“..vaccine misinformation campaigns overwhelmingly popular in conservative circles..”

• How The US Vaccine Effort Derailed And Why We Shouldn’t Be Surprised (G.)

The cause of flagging vaccine uptake in the United States has flummoxed national health authorities, who in May loosened mask guidance in hopes it would encourage more people to get vaccinated, in July again recommended masks because of the Delta variant, and hoped August’s full FDA approval of the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine would increase vaccine mandates. In a September speech, just days before the US slipped behind Japan, Joe Biden channeled national exasperation: “Many of us are frustrated with the nearly 80 million Americans who are still not vaccinated even though the vaccine is safe, effective and free.” He called for vaccine mandates impacting 100 million Americans, two-thirds of US workers.

However, all these strategies have failed to encourage more than 900,000 Americans per day to get vaccinated in recent weeks, far lower than nearly 3m doses administered per day in April, the height of the vaccination push. Finally, in mid-September, the country’s slow progress allowed Japan to surpass the US both in terms of vaccination rate per 100,000 people and percentage of the total population with one or both shots. There are very specific, well-documented reasons that Americans are hesitant to take vaccines. They vary from the troubling way the medical system treats people of color, to vaccine misinformation campaigns overwhelmingly popular in conservative circles, to logistical challenges.

But population health researchers, whose work considers how society as a whole is fairing, said low vaccine uptake may be looked at another way: as the predictable outcome of a campaign subject to entrenched social forces that have diminished American health and life expectancy since the 1980s. “When I look at this I do see a very familiar pattern,” said Dr Steven Woolf, a prominent population health researcher at Virginia Commonwealth University. “When Operation Warp Speed came out I thought I was just seeing a modern example of this old problem where the scientific community developed the vaccine at ‘warp speed,’ but the implementation system for getting it out into the community was inadequate”. Woolf calls this “breakthrough without follow-through”. In that light, the plodding vaccination campaign could be seen as one more aspect of the American “health disadvantage”.

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“These and others in the anti-vax movement are basically enemies of society and need to be treated accordingly, without hesitation…”

• Treating Antisocial Elements For What They Are (K.)

Day-to-day life in Greece is excessively determined by people defying laws, rules and reason; it’s disappointing and extremely frustrating. But this, as former prime minister Kostas Simitis once said, is Greece and it doesn’t look like it’s changing much. It’s exhausting for citizens yearning for basic normalcy to be assailed by the prevalent delinquency and to feel that their quality of life is being constantly undermined, often with the tolerance of the state apparatus. Right now, events are being defined by our fellow citizens who refuse to get the Covid vaccine and by the obstinacy of deniers of all stripes. Whether they’re jerks, kooks, nitwits, thugs, vote-mongers or religious fanatics is neither here nor there. They are a swarm that is endangering the lives of the rest of us, having a negative impact on the quality of everyday life and obstructing the vital functions of society.

The state, therefore, has an obligation to all the “normal” people in this country to decisively deal with such antisocial elements. Admittedly, there are more antisocial Greeks out there. There are the unconscionable priests and monks who preach against the vaccines, the lawyers exploiting the anti-vax movement, the judges approving the exhumation of Covid victims, the relatives suing doctors for a payout, the parents calling the police on teachers implementing the law, the nurses and other state workers who refuse to be vaccinated but expect to keep getting paid… These and others in the anti-vax movement are basically enemies of society and need to be treated accordingly, without hesitation. Especially given that the overwhelming majority of the political world claims to support vaccinations.

The truth is that the antisocial behavior we are seeing right now is not the result of the pandemic. It may appear so, but is, in fact endemic and manifests in all sorts of ways: violence in the soccer arena and on the streets; interminable protest rallies and marches; sit-ins at schools and universities; increasingly aggressive and unruly driving; sound pollution; nasty graffiti; posters pasted willy-nilly on public walls; grimy bowls of water and food scattered here and there for strays; and, of course, in the inability or indifference of the state to these and so many other such phenomena. And even in the favorable decisions and amendments passed by every government to accommodate those breaking the rules and shirking their obligations. At the end of the day, it’s the suckers who dream of a different kind of Greece who end up paying the price.

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Edward Snowden @Snowden: “Stop what you’re doing and read this. The CIA developed plans to kill or kidnap an award-winning journalist whose work they did not like — before they charged him with a crime. The case against Julian Assange must be dropped—and condemned.”

• Inside The CIA’s Secret War Plans Against Wikileaks (Y!)

In 2017, as Julian Assange began his fifth year holed up in Ecuador’s embassy in London, the CIA plotted to kidnap the WikiLeaks founder, spurring heated debate among Trump administration officials over the legality and practicality of such an operation. Some senior officials inside the CIA and the Trump administration even discussed killing Assange, going so far as to request “sketches” or “options” for how to assassinate him. Discussions over kidnapping or killing Assange occurred “at the highest levels” of the Trump administration, said a former senior counterintelligence official. “There seemed to be no boundaries.” The conversations were part of an unprecedented CIA campaign directed against WikiLeaks and its founder. The agency’s multipronged plans also included extensive spying on WikiLeaks associates, sowing discord among the group’s members, and stealing their electronic devices.

While Assange had been on the radar of U.S. intelligence agencies for years, these plans for an all-out war against him were sparked by WikiLeaks’ ongoing publication of extraordinarily sensitive CIA hacking tools, known collectively as “Vault 7,” which the agency ultimately concluded represented “the largest data loss in CIA history.” President Trump’s newly installed CIA director, Mike Pompeo, was seeking revenge on WikiLeaks and Assange, who had sought refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy since 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden on rape allegations he denied. Pompeo and other top agency leaders “were completely detached from reality because they were so embarrassed about Vault 7,” said a former Trump national security official. “They were seeing blood.”

The CIA’s fury at WikiLeaks led Pompeo to publicly describe the group in 2017 as a “non-state hostile intelligence service.” More than just a provocative talking point, the designation opened the door for agency operatives to take far more aggressive actions, treating the organization as it does adversary spy services, former intelligence officials told Yahoo News. Within months, U.S. spies were monitoring the communications and movements of numerous WikiLeaks personnel, including audio and visual surveillance of Assange himself, according to former officials. This Yahoo News investigation, based on conversations with more than 30 former U.S. officials — eight of whom described details of the CIA’s proposals to abduct Assange — reveals for the first time one of the most contentious intelligence debates of the Trump presidency and exposes new details about the U.S. government’s war on WikiLeaks. It was a campaign spearheaded by Pompeo that bent important legal strictures, potentially jeopardized the Justice Department’s work toward prosecuting Assange, and risked a damaging episode in the United Kingdom, the United States’ closest ally.

Isikoff

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With the Russians….

• CIA Was Ready To Wage Gun Battle In London Streets Over Assange (RT)

At the peak of preparations for hostilities in 2017, the CIA was allegedly expecting Russian agents to help Assange flee the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. In such a contingency, the Americans, together with the British, were planning to engage in street battles against the Russians, potentially starting a firefight, ramming a Russian diplomatic vehicle, or shooting at the tires of a Russian plane to prevent it from lifting off, the story said. The attempt to spring Assange was reportedly expected on Christmas Eve. “It was beyond comical,” a former senior official told the outlet regarding the situation in the vicinity of the embassy at the time. “It got to the point where every human being in a three-block radius was working for one of the intelligence services – whether they were street sweepers or police officers or security guards.”

The CIA was also deliberating plans to kill Assange and other members of WikiLeaks, the report said. Alternatively, the agency was considering snatching him from the embassy and bringing him to the US, or handing him over to the British authorities. At the time, the UK wanted Assange for skipping bail in an extradition trial on a request from Sweden – a case that has since been dropped. The possibility of carrying out a successful rendition or assassination were described as “ridiculous” by one intelligence official, because of the location. “This isn’t Pakistan or Egypt – we’re talking about London,” the source was quoted as saying. There was also resistance in the Trump administration because such an operation might be deemed illegal under US law. A source said using CIA powers meant only for spy-versus-spy activities would be “the same kind of crap we pulled in the War on Terror.”

As far as the CIA was concerned, WikiLeaks prompted these extreme measures after the so-called ‘Vault 7’ publications, which exposed a cyber-offensive toolkit used by US agents. The leak of those tools was a major humiliation for US intelligence, so “Pompeo and [then-Deputy CIA Director Gina] Haspel wanted vengeance on Assange,” Yahoo was told. Pompeo had to do some legal maneuvering so the agency could go more aggressively after Assange and WikiLeaks without having then-president Donald Trump sign off such operations. When, shortly after taking office, he infamously called WikiLeaks a “non-state hostile intelligence service” during a public speech, it was more than just rhetoric, according to the report. Designating in that way allowed the CIA to file its snooping under “offensive counterintelligence” activities, which it’s allowed to conduct on its own volition. “I don’t think people realize how much [the] CIA can do under offensive [counterintelligence] and how there is minimal oversight of it,” a former official said.

Credico Isikoff

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Twitter thread.

• Mike Pompeo And The CIA’s War On WikiLeaks and Julian Assange (Gosztola)

Journalists for Yahoo! News finally confirmed a narrative around Mike Pompeo and the CIA’s war on WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange, which I outlined back in October 2019. It’s an important report. WikiLeaks’ publication of “Vault 7” materials from the CIA was hugely embarrassing. Even though the CIA had increased spying operations against WikiLeaks, they still were surprised the media organization obtained a trove of the agency’s extremely sensitive files.

CIA director Mike Pompeo was afraid President Donald Trump would learn about the “Vault 7” materials and think less of him. “Don’t tell him, he doesn’t need to know.” But it was too important. Trump had to be informed.

[..] Recall, CIA director Mike Pompeo’s speech at CSIS, a Washington think tank, where he labeled WikiLeaks “a non-state hostile intelligence service.” That was all to fuel a climate for aggressive action targeted against Assange, WikiLeaks staff, and associates. The CIA could not prove WikiLeaks was working at the behest of the Russian government. So rather than claim authority to target WikiLeaks that way officials sought to reframe the organization as a “hostile entity.” Then it wouldn’t matter that they weren’t working for Russia.

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Australian media are useless too.

• CIA’s Assange Abduction/Murder Plan Raises Questions For Australia (Crikey)

Revelations by a large number of former US officials, reported by Yahoo! News, that the CIA planned to abduct and render Julian Assange to the United States — and contemplated murdering him — raise more uncomfortable questions for the Australian government and its policy of trying to pretend Assange doesn’t exist. Yahoo’s investigation relies on accounts from eight former officials about the plan to kidnap Assange from the Ecuadorean embassy in London, among dozens of other sources about the Trump administration’s determination to go after Assange and WikiLeaks. The Trump administration went where even the whistleblower-hating Obama administration refused to go and launched a prosecution for espionage and conspiracy, but until now it was widely thought its plans were limited to legal extradition.

It is now clear the CIA — under Republican Mike Pompeo, who would go on to be Trump’s secretary of state — developed plans to abduct Assange and illegally render him to the US via a third country. There was discussion “at the highest levels” of the Trump administration of murdering him. There was also scenario planning about what violent measures US and UK agents might take to thwart a hypothetical Russian attempt to help Assange escape to Russia. The most obvious question for the Australian government is whether the CIA discussed with Australian intelligence officials its plans to abduct or murder an Australian citizen, or whether Trump administration figures — some of whom were alarmed by the CIA’s planning — alerted the Turnbull government at a political level.

It would say much about how unimportant Australia was, and how little we have spoken up for Assange, if the entire process was conducted without anyone bothering to raise it with the Australian government. The extent of Australian knowledge of the plans for Assange is likely never to be clarified because Australia’s intelligence agencies are able to operate behind a bipartisan wall of secrecy far stronger than that which applies to US agencies, where independent congressional oversight, a better-protected media, a stronger whistleblower culture and better disclosure laws mean much more scrutiny for intelligence agencies. In Australia there’s virtually none, with limited parliamentary oversight, brutal gag laws for intelligence officials, vexatious prosecutions and police raids on journalists willing to try to pierce the secrecy.

But there’s another angle that is also important. What sparked the CIA’s fury at WikiLeaks and set it to planning to kidnap or murder Assange was that WikiLeaks in 2017 revealed a trove of CIA software exploits, known as “Vault 7”, which had been stolen from the intelligence agency. That release was followed, within months, by news that the National Security Agency had had some of its own trove of software exploits stolen, which led to Microsoft publicly criticising intelligence agencies for failing to alert companies to exploitable software faults. The two cases illustrated how Western intelligence agencies were a key threat to our cybersecurity by intentionally leaving security weaknesses in commonly used systems so they could exploit them — leading to other states, or organised crime, to exploit them as well, in some cases using the very software tools bought or developed by intelligence agencies.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle September 20 2021

Sep 202021
 
 September 20, 2021  Posted by at 9:01 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , ,  53 Responses »


Claude Monet The sheltered path 1888

 

• YouTube Is Always Right (Steve Kirsch)
• Covid-19 Vaccines Are Killing At Least 2 People For Every 1 Life They Save (TE)
• Counting Covid (Attkisson)
• A Plausible Hypothesis, Based On Fact (Denninger)
• Indian Bar Association Issues A Legal Notice To WHO (IF)
• The Weaponisation of Vaccination (NoF)
• Gaming Measurement of Vaccine Efficacy (Crawford)
• Now The Lancet U-turns Over Covid Lab Leak Theory (DM)
• This Week in the New Normal |(OffG)
• Evergrande: Why Most Analysis Is Dead In The Water (Erba)
• France Accuses Britain Of ‘Retreating To America’s Lap’ (Inews)
• BlackRock and Citi Get on Board the Climate Nazi Train (IMan)

 

 

Fullmilch

 

 

Singapore stats. Completely out of hand. Vaccines, is there still any doubt about this? 82% fully vaccinated. Yet Eric Topol, who calls himself a physician-scientist, says:
“Delta can be daunting to contain. The situation in Singapore with over 1,000 new cases today and yesterday, 80% of total population fully vaccinated, 1 of top 3 countries in the world, is an important indicator of the challenge.”

How blind can one be?

And here’s the health minister. The vaccines saved us!

 

 

 

 

 

 

See Us. Hear Us. Believe Us. Heal Us.

 

 

Vaccine Truth tweets: “Steve Kirsch’s last video on YouTube where he admits “Ivermectin doesn’t work” in order to satisfy YouTube policies. It’s hilarious. Let’s see how long it takes before YouTube removes it.”

Note: Kirsch was suspended by Twitter too.

• YouTube Is Always Right (Steve Kirsch)

STOP listening to the science! Whatever YouTube says is what you should believe. The science says that Ivermectin works. The science is wrong. What matters is what YouTube says, not science. Stop thinking for yourself and do whatever YouTube says. Otherwise, you will be banned, block, and demonitized.


Watch all my future content on Rumble.

Read more …

More Kirsch.

• Covid-19 Vaccines Are Killing At Least 2 People For Every 1 Life They Save (TE)

FDA experts have unexpectedly voted against approving Covid-19 vaccination boosters for anyone over the age of 16 in the USA, citing a lack of long term data and stating that the risks do not outweigh any benefits because the Covid-19 vaccines are killing at least 2 people for every 1 life saved. In a live broadcast conducted on the 17th September the Food and Drug Administration vaccine advisory committee met to debate and vote on Pfizer and BioNTech’s application to offer booster shots to the general public. The meeting lasted over 8 hours and contained some shocking revelations. Dr Joseph Fraiman, an emergency medicine physician in New Orleans, spoke for several minutes during the meeting and revealed that no clinical evidence exists to disprove claims that the Covid-109 vaccines are harming more people than they save.


“We need your help on the front lines, to stop vaccine hesitancy. Demand the booster trials are large enough to find a reduction in hospitalisations. “Without this data we the medical establishment cannot confidently call out anti-Covid-vaccine activists who publicly claim the vaccines harm more than they save especially in the young and healthy. “The fact we do not have the clinical evidence to say these activists are wrong should terrify us all”. Dr Joseph Fraiman was then followed by Steve Kirsch, Executive Director of the Covid-19 Early Treatment Fund, who revealed that the Covid-19 vaccines more people than they are saving. “I’m going to focus my remarks today on the elephant in the room that nobody likes to talk about, that the vaccines kill more than they save.

“We were led to believe that the vaccines were perfectly safe but this is simply not true, for example there are four times as many heart attacks in the treatment group in the Pfizer 6 month file report, that wasn’t just bad luck.VAERS shows heart attacks happen 71 times more often following these vaccines compared to any other vaccine,” Steve Kirsch then continued his presentation by showing a slide titled ‘Excess Death: Life ratio is UNACCEPTABLE’. The slide shows how many excess deaths were required following vaccination to save one life due to Covid-19. “Only the VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System) are statistically significant, but the other numbers are troubling.” said Steve Kirsch.


“Even if the vaccines have 100% protection, it still means we kill 2 people to save 1 life. “Four experts did analysis using completely different non US data sources and all of them came up with approximately the same number of excess vaccine related deaths, about 411 deaths per million doses. That translates into 115,000 people have died (due to the Covid-19 vaccines).”

Read more …

“Oh, well that was a typo. They just got put in there by accident.”

• Counting Covid (Attkisson)

As hindsight comes into clearer focus, we’re learning a lot about mistaken advice and policies amid the Covid-19 pandemic. One still murky and disputed area involves the death toll, now upwards of 640,000 in the U.S., according to CDC. Some insist the true count is much higher; others claim it’s lower. Today, we begin with the startling results of our investigation that found in some documented cases, news that Covid was the cause of death was greatly exaggerated. Grand County, Colorado, rural country a hundred miles outside of Denver. Thanksgiving 2020, Lucais Reilly shoots his wife Kristin in the head, then turns the gun on himself, committing suicide. They have alcohol and drugs in their system and a history of domestic troubles. Grand County coroner Brenda Bock explains how the small town tragedy is exposing serious questions about the way Covid deaths are counted.

Brenda Bock: I had a homicide-suicide the end of November, and the very next day it showed up on the state website as Covid deaths. And they were gunshot wounds. And I questioned that immediately because I had not even signed off the death certificates yet, and the state was already reporting them as Covid deaths. Bock says somebody, somewhere had apparently run the couple’s names through a database showing they’d tested positive for Covid within 28 days of their death. Then recorded them as Covid deaths even though they died of gunshots. Sharyl: If we look at the death certificates for the murder-suicide case, what will it say about Covid? Bock: Nothing, absolutely nothing. I paid a forensic pathologist to do the autopsies on those two cases. And nowhere is COVID mentioned on those death certificates. Nowhere.

Bock: This is a copy of the death certificate, and nowhere does it say COVID. So we have a homicide, suicide, nothing to do with COVID. Because there had been no Covid deaths within the geographic boundaries of Grand County in 2020, Bock was in a unique position to challenge the state’s accounting. In many cities and counties, the numbers are too big and the coroners would never know about discrepancies. Within a week of the murder-suicide, two more Grand County deaths popped up on the state’s Covid count. Bock investigated and found out why she had no record of them. Bock: Two of them were actually still alive, and yet they were counting them. Had I not called them on it and asked them who those were, where were they from, all the information about it and it’s like, “Oh, well that was a typo. They just got put in there by accident.”

Attkisson

Read more …

“Despite the presence of antibodies sufficient to suppress a virus with an R0 of nearly 6, twice that of the original strain [..] we had a wild outbreak of disease anyway”

• A Plausible Hypothesis, Based On Fact (Denninger)

The recent JAMA article makes clear several things. First, likely as many as half of those who got a positive PCR test never had Covid-19 at all. The antibody counts they documented in that study do not square with the claimed infection rate nor the low-symptom prevalence where the person in question never sees a doctor and is never tested. Back in the fall of 2020 the folly of the so-called “tests” was laid bare on the table when Elon Musk took four in sequence on the same day and got two positive and two negative results — nothing better than a coin-toss. How many more people were labeled as “diseased” when they either had the flu, some other virus, or nothing? The data from JAMA strongly suggests the answer is “a huge percentage, likely roughly half of so-called positive tests, were in fact not from actual positive Covid-19 individuals.”

The danger of telling someone they had something when they didn’t is they have every reason to think they’re safe when they’re not and thus they are likely to put themselves at severe risk of getting hammered. That’s stupid and contrary to every principle of medicine, say much less ethical behavior. But antibody presence is dispositive. Pre-existing immunity is very, very hard to determine the presence of, since cross-reaction requires you know what you’re looking for — and we don’t. We didn’t do the work, beyond SARS. We didn’t want to do the work because discovering what it was (1) made possible a potential easy infection that would confer actual immunity (e.g. if it’s OC48 which usually causes colds, well, go get inoculated with it on purpose!) and (2) instantly deflates the fear porn, drive for vaccines and every single screaming idiot in the government, social media and on TV.

But then this summer something odd happened. Despite the presence of antibodies sufficient to suppress a virus with an R0 of nearly 6, twice that of the original strain and equal to that claimed for Delta, which I remind you is unsubstantiated and the data from the UK in fact suggests Delta is not materially more-infective than the original wild strain (it only has to be a bit more-so to out-compete, of course), we had a wild outbreak of disease anyway. Much worse is that in Britain it is impossible for there to be widespread communicable disease even for a a virus with an R0 worse than measles: “Based on antibody testing of blood donors, 97.7% of the adult population now have antibodies to COVID-19 from either infection or vaccination compared to 18.1% that have antibodies from infection alone.”

It is impossible for Britain to have any material Covid-19 infectious activity among adults given this level of prevalence unless the jabs are largely or entirely worthless, or much worse, enhance infection. It’s a hypothesis that fits the facts and you can bet not one single penny of government money will go toward proving or disproving it as if it was to be proved then what do you do with all the vaccine companies and every involved government at all levels, local, state and federal, who literally slaughtered their populations with their advocacy and even in some cases attempted mandates for these jabs. Do we have any independent medical science folks remaining, anywhere in the world, who will take this challenge on and prove it up? We’ll see.

But whether they do or not you can’t change facts and the facts are that either the jabs destroyed existing immunity, creating susceptible people out of resistant ones, or the virus has evolved to largely-evade the protection the jabs provided. Which it is doesn’t matter to the person who believed they were safe, and now learns — especially the hard way — that they are not.

Read more …

You go girl.

• Indian Bar Association Issues A Legal Notice To WHO (IF)

Advocate Dipali Ojha of the Indian bar association and a team of young indian lawyers have issued a legal notice to the world health organization over their blatant campaign against any alternative treatments. Her legal action against WHO comes after the tweet from Soumya Swaminathan, WHO chief scientist, who issued tweet against Ivermectin backing it with a link, that was declaration from a private company. The team of indian lawyers seeks to make available all possible affordable options to the masses and hold the highest authorities accountable for their directives, and suspected submission to big pharma lobbying.

Timestamp :

00:00 Intro
01:14 Interview Start
02:03 Dipali Ojha background
03:58 Why did Indian Bar association sue WHO ?
11:08 WHO Scientist Twitter statement against treatments
13:04 History of Iver-mectin & Big Pharma profit motive
16:30 Can 8 billion people get vaccine ? options for poor countries
20:19 Dipali Ohja explains indian Protocol & Lawsuit
23:44 Media blackout on Iver-mectin
24:20 role of fact checkers
25:20 AI bias in social media
26:40 Where was the lawsuit filed?
27:10 Dipahli ojha explains cause of 2nd legal notice
32:38 Effects of legal notice
34:50 Many solutions to the crisis
37:14 Diplai ojha explains the Public Interest Litigation
38:52 Rajiv explains the two lawsuits in one
40:54 Challenging Compulsory Vaccine & civil rights
42:28 Role of Gates Foundation , Fauci & Wuhan lab funding
46:50 Dipali Ohja explains WHO’s compromised investigations
48:40 Vaccine and complementary treatments
50:24 Role of AI in information bias
51:19 Closing statement of Diplai Ojha

Read more …

“The vaccination pass is a mobilisation of state power, an extension of discipline and policing over the free life of civil society.”

• The Weaponisation of Vaccination (NoF)

The vital public health measure of vaccination is being transformed into a project of the extension of state control, with measures such as covid passports and mandatory vaccination. The Israeli minister of health was caught confiding to the minister of the interior that ‘there is no medical or epidemiological justification for the Covid passport, it is only intended to pressure the unvaccinated to vaccinate’. France – the European country with the harshest covid pass laws – shows how this ‘pressure to vaccinate’ is driven by a political rather than a medical impulse. The vaccination pass is a mobilisation of state power, an extension of discipline and policing over the free life of civil society. This rides roughshod over individual liberty, unions, scientific committees and medical logic alike.

Currently, all over-12s in France must present a vaccine passport (‘pass sanitaire’) in order to access restaurants, museums, long-distance trains, and outdoor and indoor sports facilities. All civil society bodies take on a policing function. Covid pass checks are installed at the entrance of open-air horse riding facilities, in bars, at the entrance of swimming pools. The sports instructor checks your covid pass at the start of every class or term. The riding school asks you to ‘prepare your health certificate’ before you are allowed to walk into the open field where the horses are held. The cafe asks you to scan your QR code before sitting down at a table.

The vaccinated person is treated as safe, and the unvaccinated person as risky. This distinction is made not on public health grounds, since vaccinated and unvaccinated transmit the delta variant at similar rates, but because the unvaccinated person stands as the figure that has resisted state authority. The unvaccinated becomes the dissident, the person who refused to roll over. A young French woman who tried to enter a shopping centre without a covid pass was set upon and beaten by a group of armed police. She was beaten not because she is a public health risk, but because she represents a threat to public order. The push for 100% vaccination has become a project of incorporating the whole population, whether it is in their interests to be vaccinated or not.

It is this political impulse that lies behind the hasty extension of vaccination to younger age groups, who stand to benefit little from the vaccine and could suffer from short-term or future side effects. Macron apparently made the decision to extend vaccines to 12-15 year olds suddenly one morning, when he was told by his scientific advisory committee that he had ‘free rein’ to decide whether to vaccinate the young, partly in order to ‘avoid the slowing down of vaccination’. A more reflective scientific ethics advisory committee complained that it has not been given time to make its recommendations, and criticised the ‘hasty’ decision; it judged that the benefits of the vaccine to adolescents were ‘very limited’ and the existing safety data to be too slim to judge its suitability for this age group. Yet now, this age group is forced to take the vaccine.

Read more …

Statistician Mathew Crawford on the problem with the first 14 days after vaccination.

• Gaming Measurement of Vaccine Efficacy (Crawford)

Suppose that tomorrow it is announced that in a Wuhan laboratory—located somewhere between the French-designed Wuhan Institute of Virology and the fabled wet market—that an NIH funded project results in highly valuable intellectual property in the form of the Morris Therapy. After rigorous mandatory testing of the Morris Therapy on Uyghurs, including the high risk elderly, pregnant women, and also children, the Morris Therapy demonstrates 100% efficacy in preventing COVID-19…after day 13. NIAID Princeling, Dr. Anthony Fauci quackly announces an EUA both for the Morris Therapy, and also swift approval of the as of yet unavailable COMorrisY Therapy. Nobody was reached at any governmental organization who could explain which of these has indemnity, and whether citizens pay for those liabilities by giving up their children as they drop them off at school where they are to be treated by swiftly trained gym teachers.

During the first two weeks, 80 million Americans jump at the opportunity to receive Morris Therapy. However, 79.2 million of those Americans seem to be…well…missing. With doctors and morgue owners tight lipped, the CDC reports that indeed, the Morris Therapy has resulted in 100% efficacy in preventing COVID-19 after the first 13 days. Scientists and other people who pay attention to things rush to post videos on YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook pointing out that there are nearly a million reports of death in the Highly Profitable Therapy Adverse Events Reporting System (HPTAERS). Fact checkers [just doing their job] point out that causality of those deaths HPTAERS hasn’t been proved, and censor all those reports. University faculty petitioned to silence, reprimand, or simply harass their colleagues who participated in those reports, labeling them with the pejorative “anti-Morrisers”. No autopsies are performed on the 79.2 million Americans who died during the first 13 days after a dose of Morris Therapy.

What happened is that 99% of the people who received the Morris Therapy dropped dead during the first few days. Even worse, many were taken to the hospital, entered into a database as non-Morrised, and as hospital beds filled up, media outlets declared a “pandemic of the un-Morrised”. All the social pressure makes it hard to talk about the problem. Meanwhile, nobody does autopsies on the bodies that might reveal clues to the deaths, such as the presence of spike-Morris protein in organs all over the body. All the 79.2 million deaths are presumed to be COVID-19 deaths, and the media dedicates itself to a 48 hour marathon of fear porn, lamenting that poorer nations are not receiving their equitable share of limited supplies of Morris Therapy.

Meanwhile, health officials and all those devoted to the success of the Morris Therapy as the final solution to the COVID-19 pandemic…”correctly” point out none of the 800,000 survivors of the Morris Therapy have COVID-19 (though nobody really wants to talk about disease etiology as it might link Morris Therapy as a Type II COVID-19). In the end, the entire population of the SARS-CoV-2 virus decided as a “species” (if we can call a virus a species), that invading the U.S. just wasn’t worth it at all, deciding instead to go live amongst the flies, minks, bats, and pangolins.

Read more …

Have they apologized yet?

• Now The Lancet U-turns Over Covid Lab Leak Theory (DM)

The Lancet medical journal has bowed to pressure over its heavily-criticised coverage of the disputed origins of the Covid pandemic by publishing an ‘alternative view’ from 16 scientists – calling for an ‘objective, open and transparent debate’ about whether the virus leaked from a Chinese laboratory. It was revealed earlier this year that Peter Daszak – a British scientist with long-standing links to the Wuhan Institute of Virology – had secretly orchestrated a landmark statement in The Lancet in February 2020 which attacked ‘conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin’. The now-infamous letter, signed by 27 leading public health experts, said they stood together to ‘strongly condemn’ the theories which they said ‘do nothing but create fear, rumours, and prejudice’.

They also lavished praise on Chinese scientists who they said had ‘worked diligently and effectively to rapidly identify the pathogen behind this outbreak… and share their results transparently with the global health community’. Now, The Lancet has agreed to publish an alternative commentary which discusses the possibility that laboratory research might have played a role in the emergence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. It also directly confronts the efforts of science journals to stifle debate by labelling such theories as ‘misinformation’. In the article, the authors argue that ‘there is no direct support for the natural origin of SARS-CoV-2, and a laboratory-related accident is plausible’. They add that the February 2020 statement ‘imparted a silencing effect on the wider scientific debate’.

[..] The new commentary, published in The Lancet on Friday, said: ‘The world will remain mired in dispute without the full engagement of China, including open access to primary data, documents, and relevant stored material to enable a thorough, transparent and objective search for all relevant evidence.’ One of the signatories, Professor Nikolai Petrovsky of Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, told The Mail on Sunday: ‘It might seem small, but after 18 months of complete denial, the very act of [The] Lancet agreeing to publish this letter acknowledging the origins of Covid-19 remains an open verdict, is a very big deal. ‘For a leading medical journal like Lancet to agree to finally open its doors to a letter from scientists highlighting the ongoing uncertain origins of Covid-19, indicates how far we have come in 18 months in requesting an open scientific debate on the topic, but also indicates just how far we still have to go’.

Read more …

“..once we’ve established “anti-vaxxers” don’t deserve healthcare, those other people she’s so careful to mention – smokers and drunk drivers – they’re next. Along with the obese, or the clumsy, or the religious, or the politically inconvenient.”

• This Week in the New Normal |(OffG)

Ruth Marcus, a deputy editor at the Washington Post, has had enough of people pussy-footing around this issue and is going “come right out and say it” – unvaccinated people deserve healthcare less than vaccinated people. She at least admits this “conflicts radically with accepted medical ethics”, which is completely true but for some reason that doesn’t seem to change her mind: “..under ordinary circumstances, I agree with those rules. The lung cancer patient who’s been smoking two packs a day for decades is entitled to the same treatment as the one who never took a puff. The drunk driver who kills a family gets a team doing its utmost to save him..”

To be clear then – Ruth considers the unvaccinated as morally inferior to a drunk driver who ran over some kids. Which says a lot more about her, than the unvaccinated. This is one of this feeler pieces. An antennae article, gently feeling the ground to see if can bear the weight of the agenda coming behind it. It’s setting up the conversation. Because once we’ve established “anti-vaxxers” don’t deserve healthcare, those other people she’s so careful to mention – smokers and drunk drivers – they’re next. Along with the obese, or the clumsy, or the religious, or the politically inconvenient.

If you don’t believe me, just check the comments under the article. The WaPo has one of the most scripted comments sections on the internet, whose usual job is to play the “bad cop” to the author’s “good cop”. And, sure enough, BTL is full of hundreds of supposedly real humans saying the author doesn’t go far enough, and we should ration all kinds of healthcare based on personal choices. This particular talking point is already being aired on CNN and by late-night talkshow hosts too. Expect it to spread quickly, especially when the flu season starts.

Read more …

Twitter thread by Girolamo Pandolfi da Casio ditto Carlo Dossi Erba.

• Evergrande: Why Most Analysis Is Dead In The Water (Erba)

Evergrande: why most analysis is dead in water and how best to understand and navigate what’s happening? Both denialists and alarmists are getting it wrong. Let’s start by understanding this: what is happening is the result of a CCP-initiated policy change to curb leverage. It started a while back and has seen other defaults, including SOEs. What are the specific policy changes? Most important is the introduction of the 3 red lines a year ago: – L/A < 70% – net leverage < 100% – cash to ST debt > 1. What’s the point of the 3 red lines? First and foremost to forestall a systemic crisis that could have brought down the whole financial sector if left unchecked. Real estate amounts to a significant chunk of China GDP with strong linkages upstream and downstream.


And believe it or not, the sector was levered to the gills. The 3 red lines are hardly draconian, yet all the CCC, a large chunk of the B and a good 1/3 of the BB did not pass them a year ago. Needless to say, it was really not too early. But there is more to it than leverage. One common practice of these construction companies,a game Evergrande excelled at, was to bid land at prices significantly higher than market. It didn’t matter to them, coz the risk got transferred to flat buyers and banks that financed the purchase. That model worked well for local governments, banks and households because house prices were going up. So much so over the last 15 years, that a serious affordability crisis emerged in major cities AND HH debt soared way above disposable inc – below HH debt as % GDP.

So it wasn’t hard to figure out the economic disaster in the making: exponential price rises with explosive HH and Construction leverage. But that’s not all. There is another problem that escapes most China analysts. As a result of years of seeking easy growth through construction and leverage, the misallocation of capital was : 1- capital starving more innovative and high tech sectors (see chart) and 2- creating a headwind for a re-balancing towards a more consumption driven growth. At some point, reigning in lending to the RE sector became vital in order to address the structural issue of capital misallocation. That also explains the curbs on VC investments in RE and most importantly, a curb on all the irregularities that characterized RE.


The issue of irregularities is at the core of what is happening with Evergrande. More on that later. It’s a long introduction, but it seemed important to explain these issues to understand the long term nature of this problem and why its resolution will be tedious. So there is a new paradigm dictated by a set of economic realities that CCP could no longer ignore and most importantly, they can relax the rules a bit, but can’t reverse course. They can’t allow consumers to be bust nor a rogue unproductive sector to balloon further.

Read more …

“It shows our readiness to be hard-headed in defending our interests and challenging unfair practices and malign acts.”

• France Accuses Britain Of ‘Retreating To America’s Lap’ (Inews)

France has continued its war of words in the increasingly bitter diplomatic row over the UK’s new defence pact with the US and Australia. Europe Minister Clement Beaune said Britain had returned into the “American lap” after Australia announced it was scrapping its £30 billion French submarine deal in favour of more powerful nuclear-powered vessels acquired with the help of the UK and US. The announcement prompted President Emmanuel Macron to order the recall of the French ambassadors from Washington and Canberra – a move virtually unheard of among such close allies. However, there was no similar order for the French envoy to London to return to Paris for consultations.

But in a series of interviews with French television, Mr Beaune suggested it was because the UK was the “junior partner” which had accepted its “vassalisation” by the US. “Our British friends explained to us they were leaving the EU to create Global Britain. We can see that this is a return into the American lap and a form of accepted vassalisation,” he said. “The UK is clearly trying to find its feet, perhaps there was a lack of thought about the strategic future. Today they are hiding in the American fold. I hope that will not be their policy for the decades to come.” He later added: “We see through this partnership, this strategic alliance and after the Kabul crisis, that Global Britain seems to be more about a US junior partner than working with different allies.”

New Foreign Secretary Liz Truss has defended the pact, saying it showed Britain would be “hard-headed” in defending its interests. Writing in The Sunday Telegraph, Ms Truss said the UK was a “fierce champion” of freedom and democracy around the world. “It shows our readiness to be hard-headed in defending our interests and challenging unfair practices and malign acts. It also shows our commitment to security and stability in the Indo-Pacific region,” she wrote.

Read more …

Wait. China takes it all over, and that’s supposed to benefit Citi?

• BlackRock and Citi Get on Board the Climate Nazi Train (IMan)

There are some things that bring joy to my soul. My pleasures are simple ones. Peanut butter on toast (the food of gods), witnessing Macron getting a slap, and this…

The awesome thing here is that what is taking place is that our competition on bidding for coal assets has disappeared in a cloud of woke smoke. This will quickly become geopolitical, and the question is this: can BlackRock, Citi, Prudential, HSBC, and their other woke mates decide the fate of nations? They are already affecting the fate of nations. Witness Canada and all of Western Europe. But will they do the same to China? Will they do the same to Russia? The answer to that will only be fully revealed in the due course of time, but we don’t really need any crystal balls here as we just watch actions, not words.

“China put 38.4 gigawatts (GW) of new coal-fired power capacity into operation in 2020, according to new international research, more than three times the amount built elsewhere around the world and potentially undermining its short-term climate goals.” Nearly all of the 60 new coal plants planned across Eurasia, South America and Africa — 70 gigawatts of coal power in all — are financed almost exclusively by Chinese banks” We see all of this on the ground, and while it is taking place, formerly reputable media outlets such as the FT, Reuters, and Bloomberg tell us that: “China’s belt and road initiative creates a problem for China with respect to their climate goals.”

Really? There is no conflict or problem. Let me explain. Here is what is transpiring. They will keep paying lip service to the woke ideology while capturing the bulk of the energy market, and by the time we all wake up, they’ll control the world’s energy and logistics chains. And once they’ve done that, they’ll be able to control the reserve currency and once they’ve done that… well, they will be the dominant power. Game over. At this rate they’ll get there in a frighteningly rapid period of time. No more than a couple of decades.

Read more …

 

 

 

Before machines the only form of entertainment people really had was relationships.”
~ Douglas Coupland

 

 

 

 

Chris Rock: “there’s no money in the cure. The money’s in the medicine. That’s how a drug dealer makes his money… that’s all the government is, a bunch of drug dealers.”
https://twitter.com/i/status/1439792949404045314

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle July 5 2021

Jul 052021
 
 July 5, 2021  Posted by at 9:09 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  46 Responses »


Paul Gauguin We hail thee Mary 1891

 

• “Asymptomatic Covid Spread” Used To Shut Down The Economy Was A Lie (TSN)
• New Research Suggests Ivermectin Works (HART)
• Indonesia to Produce Ivermectin Starting in July (Tempo)
• ‘Perverse Incentives’ in the Vaccine Rollout and the Censorship of Science (ET)
• Lancet Accused Of Doing China’s Dirty Work Denouncing Lab Leak Theory (DM)
• Daszak Refuses House Request For Wuhan Docs, Democrats Fail To Subpoena (JTN) /span>
• Fauci Doubles Back To Masks – For the Vaccinated (JTN)
• Retraction Of Paper On Vaccine Deaths Spurs Call For More Scrutiny (JTN)
• OPEC On Verge Of Collapse After Saudis, UAE Refuse To Budge (ZH)
• No, We Weren’t All Born Yesterday (David Stockman)
• HSBC in Big Trouble in its Biggest Market, China (WS)

 

 

 

 

FLCCC’s Dr. Marik is asked how he would end the pandemic in a month. “I would do a mass distribution program of ivermectin together with melatonin and aspirin. We should’ve done this months ago.” Simple. Safe.

 

 

Mike Yeadon
https://twitter.com/i/status/1411596825103155201

Mike Yeadon variants

 

 

Paul Elias Alexander, PhD, Former COVID Pandemic consultant/advisor to WHO-PAHO and former COVID pandemic advisor to Health and Human Services (HHS), United States; Parvez Dara, MD, MBA; Howard Tenenbaum, DDS, PhD

• “Asymptomatic Covid Spread” Used To Shut Down The Economy Was A Lie (TSN)

There was no credibility to ‘asymptomatic spread’ or transmission in COVID-19 as a key driver of the pandemic nor even as a driver of minimal infection. This is not only our hypothesis, we feel strongly that asymptomatic spread was bogus from the start and was used to underpin the lockdowns and had and has still today, no basis. This was part of pandemic corruption. We have looked at the evidence gathered across the last 16 months and can safely say this was a false narrative along with masking, lockdowns, social distancing, and school closure polices that visited crushing harms on the society and hurt the US and the world immensely. That the US Pandemic Task Force and these illogical, irrational, unscientific medical experts could use this falsehood and shutter the society and cost so much destruction of life, wealth and property is a scandal, shameful, and unforgiveable.

This was all about corruption, this pandemic response, and there certainly were ingredients other than science at play throughout. There are members of the US Task Force that some of us here got the pleasure of working with and some of them are incredibly smart, good people. Decent god-fearing people. But they were and are flat wrong! Have been on everything COVID. Every policy was based on their input and guidance and they created disaster. Many thousands of people died due to them! Their policies! Never has a President been as ill-served as by these Task Force members. They misled and undercut President Trump at each turn and one continues to mislead the current administration.

Who knows, maybe the combination caused a chaotic frenetic collaboration, so maybe the combination doomed them from the start. But on a day-to-day basis, we were watching a clown car in the daily briefings! Their hypothesis cannot be borne out on asymptomatic spread, and we have decided once and for all, to lay out the evidence on asymptomatic spread and give our view. This should have never been about supposition, speculation, assumptions or even whimsy by them. This is not evidence-based research, that is not science. Speculation and assumption is not science. They failed catastrophically and must not be allowed to re-write their history.

Read more …

All serious research says the same thing.

• New Research Suggests Ivermectin Works (HART)

Another conundrum is whether many more lives could have been saved by the early adoption of ivermectin, a repurposed drug, with a long track record of safety for use in parasitic diseases but also shown to have antiviral properties. In the specific case of COVID-19, the mode of action appears to be two-fold: it acts by docking to the SARS-CoV-2 spike receptor-binding domain bound with ACE2 (thus blocking the virus from entering cells), and also acts as an anticoagulant, which protects against the clotting associated with the viral spike protein. Numerous articles summarised by the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance have reported successful use both in treatment and prevention of COVID-19 but have been criticised for lack of peer reviewed RCT data.


Last week Dr Tess Lawrie from the Evidence-Based Medicine Consultancy and colleagues published a peer reviewed systematic review and meta-analysis in the American Journal of Therapeutics that showed moderate-certainty evidence of large reductions in COVID-19 deaths. ‘Moderate-certainty’ may sound like an ‘average’ result, but it in fact represents one of the highest certainties possible and the stringent data filters used in this kind of meta-analysis mean that only the most robust RCT data are included. With mild to moderate disease, ivermectin reaches the threshold for ‘high certainty’ of efficacy meaning it appears to be of immense benefit in both the treatment and prevention of COVID-19. Being out of patent, it is incredibly cheap (cost of production is around 3 cents a tablet) and very safe, particularly in comparison to COVID-19 vaccines:

In relation to the above table, it should be noted that around 4 billion doses of ivermectin have been given to humans since reporting started. Real world experience has been enormous and largely censored — something Dr Lawrie has also been subject to, having been removed from Twitter and had articles deleted from LinkedIn. HART has previously highlighted YouTube’s ‘COVID-19 medical misinformation policy’ which outlaws any claims that ivermectin is an effective treatment for the disease. Unfortunately, the influence of pharmaceutical lobbying in preventing the early adoption of ivermectin is evident and it is the sick and dying who inevitably suffer in a system where profit is a huge driver in dictating what does and does not reach the market. There is a point at which enough evidence of efficacy of a medicine has been provided and anything beyond that is deemed ‘unnecessary’.

Read more …

13 million per month. Good start, but 260 million people.

• Indonesia to Produce Ivermectin Starting in July (Tempo)

State-owned pharmaceutical firm PT Indofarma on Friday spoke about Ivermectin that has recently claimed popularity after a number of public figures claimed the drug’s effectiveness against COVID-19. Asked by Tempo about the price for one pack, Indofarma management stated in a written release on Friday, July 2, that they “established the price for [Ivermectin] at Rp123 thousand.” The product they sell includes 20 tablets of 12 mg per botol. The highest retail price that includes the added-value tax (PPN) is set at Rp157,700 (US$10 in current exchange). Based on Tempo’s observation across online and physical stores the drug is sold at an average price of Rp200,000 (US$13.7) with the highest retail price at Rp256,000 (US$ 17). Ivermectin, as of June 20, has obtained marketing authorization from the Food and Drugs Monitoring Agency (BPOM). Indofarma stated the production of the drug would kickstart in early July, and that it aimed at producing 13.8 million tablets until August 2021.

Read more …

Interview with Bret Weinstein.

• ‘Perverse Incentives’ in the Vaccine Rollout and the Censorship of Science (ET)

You mentioned two areas. One is repurposed drugs therapeutics for COVID, another one is of course, vaccine safety. So what are you seeing? Well, let’s pick one. Let’s go into the vaccine safety first. Dr. Weinstein: Well, I’m not sure that there is even a way to do one without the other. The two appear to be the same story viewed from two different sides. And I think what people need to track is the fact that in order for the vaccines to be administered, they had to get an Emergency Use Authorization. And one of the requirements for the Emergency Use Authorization is that there’d be no safe and effective treatments available. So if the repurposed drugs are as good as some people believe they are, then the vaccines would not be available at all. They would still be in testing.

Add to that the fact that the pharmaceutical companies that manufacture these vaccines have been granted immunity from liability. And these two things in combination, I believe, have created a headlong rush to administering the vaccines to everyone irrespective of medical or epidemiological need. [..] I’ve seen a piece of the censorship on YouTube. YouTube has in their community guidelines, a provision that actually forbids the discussion of ivermectin if the discussion involves the claim that it works. And the problem is that there is substantial evidence that it works. And works doesn’t mean one thing, it actually means two distinct things.

There is strong evidence that ivermectin works for the treatment of COVID, especially if it is given early in the course of disease. It is also apparently highly effective as a prophylactic. And these things are clearly visible in the recent meta-analysis that have been released that show a clear pattern. So somehow on YouTube, the discussion of evidence that has been peer-reviewed and delivered within the scientific literature is forbidden because it contradicts the CDC’s view, which is that ivermectin does not work or that there is no evidence that it works. [..] I learned this from Robert Malone, who is the inventor of mRNA vaccine technology, and he is also somebody who has been involved in a professional capacity inside the regulatory apparatus.

And what he said is that at the point that the Emergency Use Authorizations for the vaccines were granted, there was the opportunity to require extra data to be collected to find out what the impact of these vaccines was on the people who received them. And a choice was made not to collect the data, which I find quite alarming in light of the fact that the process of establishing the safety of these vaccines was necessarily truncated in order to bring them to the public so quickly. [..] the ramifications of it are that we are exposing a huge fraction of the population to what is in effect, a scientific experiment, except that it isn’t a scientific experiment because we are deliberately avoiding collecting data that would allow us to evaluate the impact.

And I find that shocking. It is one thing to argue that we have no choice that COVID-19 is an emergency and we have to make shortcuts that we would not ordinarily consider. I accept that argument. I also accept that these vaccines appear to work at least in the short term. But the right thing to do in order to make proper medically justified decisions and epidemiologically justified decisions is to collect the data on what happens after administration. These are brand new technologies. They have many different ways in which they could fail, and it is our obligation, especially to the people who receive these vaccines, that we collect the data on what happened. And to not do so means that we are very likely to put people in danger in the future with no justification for it.

Read more …

Yup, it’s Daszak.

• Lancet Accused Of Doing China’s Dirty Work Denouncing Lab Leak Theory (DM)

The Lancet letter, signed by 27 experts, played a key part in silencing scientific, political and media discussion of any idea that this pandemic might have begun with a lab incident rather than spilling over naturally from animals. It was even reportedly used by Facebook to flag articles exploring the lab leak hypothesis as ‘false information’ before the social media giant dramatically changed tack last month. Yet it emerged later that The Lancet statement was covertly drafted by British scientist Peter Daszak – a long-term collaborator with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which was carrying out high-risk research on bat coronaviruses and had known safety issues.

Daszak is the £300,000-a-year president of EcoHealth Alliance, a New York-based charity that funnelled funds to his friend Shi Zhengli, the Wuhan virologist known as ‘Batwoman’ for her work in collecting samples from bats. Four months later, The Lancet set up a ‘Covid-19 Commission’ to assist governments and scrutinise the origins. It was led by Jeffrey Sachs, the celebrity economist and author who campaigns on aid with rock star Bono. Sachs recently dismissed claims that China is committing genocide on the Uighurs, adopting Beijing’s line that it is confronting Islamic militancy. Incredibly, he backed Daszak to lead his commission’s 12-person taskforce investigating Covid’s origins – joined by five fellow signatories to The Lancet statement.

Daszak’s conflicts of interest were exposed by this newspaper six months ago. Last week The Lancet finally ‘recused’ him from its commission and published an ‘addendum’ to its statement detailing some of his Chinese links. Yet critics say the journal has still failed to admit that six more signatories to that February statement have ties to Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance as directors or partners. ‘It would have been better for The Lancet to have stated that Daszak’s and other signers’ previous declarations were untruthful and to have attached an editorial expression of concern,’ said Richard Ebright, a bio-security expert and professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

Now The Mail on Sunday has learned that The Lancet is set to publish a second statement by these signatories that presses the case that Covid probably emerged through natural ‘zoonotic’ transmission from animals to humans. ‘We consider that it seems more likely a transmission through an intermediate mammalian host, although other possibilities can’t be fully excluded,’ said one, adding that they were still ‘missing some signatures’. Four of The Lancet’s original experts seem to have since shifted their position, including Charles Calisher, a Colorado virologist. He admits ‘there is too much coincidence’ to ignore the lab leak hypothesis and that ‘it is more likely that it came out of that lab’.

Read more …

And Daszak again.

• Daszak Refuses House Request For Wuhan Docs, Democrats Fail To Subpoena (JTN)

Amajor conduit of federal research funding to the Chinese coronavirus lab at the center of ongoing speculation over the origins of the SARS-Cov-2 virus is not complying with a months-old request from House Republicans for documentation related to his work with that lab, while Democrats in the House have failed to issue a subpoena to compel that evidence. Peter Daszak, the president of the U.S. nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, has been the subject of growing scrutiny over the last several months regarding his role in the funding of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. For several years leading up to the pandemic, EcoHealth Alliance funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal research grants to the WIV for the study of potential pandemic coronaviruses at the Wuhan lab.

As government investigators and journalists dig to uncover the full scope of Daszak’s links to the WIV, Daszak is continuing to spurn a congressional request for that information. In April, Republicans on the House Committee on Energy and Commerce sent Daszak a letter directing him to submit, among many other documents, “all letters, emails, and other communications between [EcoHealth] and [the WIV] related to terms of agreements, bat coronaviruses, genome or genetic sequencing, SARS-CoV-2, and/or laboratory safety practices” pursuant to key NIH research funding through EcoHealth to the Wuhan lab as a grant sub-recipient.

Yet Daszak himself has not cooperated with the request. An aide with the Energy and Commerce Committee confirmed to Just the News this week that the committee has “received no response still from EcoHealth Alliance and Peter Daszak to the April 16th letter from Leaders Rodgers, Guthrie, and Griffith.” Washington GOP Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers has also publicly noted Daszak’s refusal to cooperate with the request made roughly two and a half months ago. “We have asked Daszak to provide information we know he has that sheds light on the origins of this pandemic,” Rodgers said during a House subcommittee hearing this week. “But he refuses to cooperate.” “Dr. Daszak, you received American funds you used to conduct research on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” Rodgers continued. “You owe it to the American people to be transparent.”

[..] The committee itself could subpoena Daszak for the materials; both House and Senate committees enjoy subpoena powers pursuant to investigations within their congressional purviews, something that has been upheld by the Supreme Court several times. Yet subpoena power in both chambers is controlled by whichever party is in the majority. Democrats still hold a slim majority in the House, meaning the ultimate authority to compel Daszak to produce the documentation rests with that party, specifically in this case with Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Frank Pallone.

Read more …

“DOES ANY SANE PERSON CARE WHAT LITTLE NAPOLEON SAYS?”

• Fauci Doubles Back To Masks – For the Vaccinated (JTN)

Less than two months after the government eased its COVID-19 mask requirements, the nation’s chief infectious disease specialist suggested Sunday that vaccinated Americans “go the extra mile” and begin wearing them again in low vaccinated areas. Dr. Anthony Fauci’s recommendation led to howls by many on Twitter, who noted recently released emails from the NIH doctor suggested masks provided little protection. “DOES ANY SANE PERSON CARE WHAT LITTLE NAPOLEON SAYS?,” a woman with the Twitter handle Conservative Gal tweeted Sunday afternoon. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on May 13 eased mask restrictions as vaccinations grew quickly.


Fauci made the rounds on the Sunday shows to address the new, contagious COVID-19 delta variant and slowing vaccination rates, offering his changed advice on masks. “If you put yourself in an environment in which you have a high level of viral dynamics and a very low level of vaccine, you might want to go the extra step and say ‘When I’m in that area where there’s a considerable degree of viral circulation, I might want to go the extra mile to be cautious enough to make sure that I get the extra added level of protection, even though the vaccines themselves are highly effective,’” Fauci told NBC’s “Meet The Press.” Some blue cities like Los Angeles and St. Louis have already reinstated a mask advisory for vaccinated and unvaccinated citizens as the delta variant has spread.

Read more …

The things that nobody wants to know.

• Retraction Of Paper On Vaccine Deaths Spurs Call For More Scrutiny (JTN)

Should public health authorities scrutinize deaths attributed to COVID-19 as closely as they scrutinize deaths attributed to COVID-19 vaccines? Defenders of a controversial study on the risk-benefit ratio of COVID-19 vaccines are calling hypocrisy on a medical journal for retracting the paper a week after publishing it, following the resignations of several journal editors in protest. In a Friday retraction notice in the journal Vaccines, the editor in chief and “several” editorial board members said the paper’s authors were not able to “satisfactorily” answer claims that they conflated correlation with causation. Analyzing data from the Netherlands Pharmacovigilance Centre, known as LAREB, the paper’s authors estimated COVID-19 vaccines take two lives for every three they save. The country leads Europe in vaccine adverse-reaction reporting.

Authors Harald Walach, Rainer Klement and Wouter Aukema challenged criticism from Eugene van Puijenbroek, who leads LAREB’s scientific department, that they had misused its data. “This starts a long-overdue debate on how to gauge the safety of COVID-19 vaccines,” they wrote in a statement provided to Retraction Watch Thursday. “Currently we only have association, we agree, and we never said anything else. But the same is true with fatalities as consequences of SARS-CoV2-infections [sic],” which are “rarely vetted by autopsy or second opinion” to confirm they were caused by the novel coronavirus, rather than incidental to infection. Brown University epidemiologist Andrew Bostom wasn’t impressed by the journal’s “baloney” explanation for the retraction, either.

“The [vaccine] deaths are as causally related as C19 deaths which allow for any positive test within 30-60 days of a death from any cause to be tallied as a C19 death,” he wrote in a Twitter message to Just the News. Bostom pointed to a June study, not yet peer-reviewed, of a sample of deaths in the U.S. Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System reported through April. The sample was limited to people who got early vaccinations, primarily elderly or those with “significant health conditions.” Researchers at the University of London and New Zealand’s Massey University found that they could rule out “vaccine reaction” as a contributing factor in just 14% of deaths. “Contrary to claims that most of these reports are made by lay-people and are hence clinically unreliable, we identified health service employees as the reporter in at least 67%,” they wrote.

Read more …

They’re always on the verge of collapse?!

• OPEC On Verge Of Collapse After Saudis, UAE Refuse To Budge (ZH)

Is the world about to go through another 2014 Thanksgiving massacre when OPEC collapsed sending the price of oil crashing and unleashing a brief if catastrophic wave of destruction across the US shale sector? That’s what commodity traders are wondering this long weekend when just two days after the UAE refused to fall inline with the rest of OPEC+, late on Sunday, in a Bloomberg TV interview, Saudi Prince Abdulaziz said that “we have to extend,” referring to the deal agreed upon by all but the UAE on Friday, according to which oil production would be increased by 400kbd over the next few months, while also extending the broader production quota agreement until the end of 2022 for the sake of stability: “the extension puts lots people in their comfort zone” said the Saudi, adding that Abu Dhabi was isolated within the OPEC+ alliance.

“It’s the whole group versus one country, which is sad to me but this is the reality”, the Saudi summarized the potentially explosive situation, which has seen Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates crank up the tension in their OPEC standoff which as Bloomberg summarizes, has left the global economy guessing how much oil it will get next month. The bitter clash between the Saudis and UAE has forced OPEC+ to halt talks twice already, with the next meeting scheduled for Monday, putting markets in limbo as oil continues its inflationary surge above $75 a barrel. With the cartel discussing its production policy not only for the rest of the year, but also into 2022, the solution to the standoff will shape the market and industry into next year.

While traditionally the oil cartel has been shy of publicity, keeping its spats behind close doors, on Sunday the fight between the two key producers broke into public view with both countries, which typically keep their grievances within the walls of the royal palaces, airing their differences on television, with Riyadh insisting on its plan, backed by other OPEC+ members including Russia, that the group should both increase production over the next few months, while also extending the broader agreement reached in the aftermath of the oil price collapse of 2020 until the end of 2022 to avoid a production glut. Just hours earlier, the Emirati energy minister, Suhail al-Mazrouei, again rejected the Saudi-proposed deal extension, supporting only a short-term increase and demanding better terms for itself for 2022. “The UAE is for an unconditional increase of production, which the market requires,” Al-Mazrouei told Bloomberg Television earlier on Sunday. Yet the decision to extend the deal until the end of 2022 is “unnecessary to take now.”

Read more …

“..only 73% of the state-imposed shrinkage of hours worked has been recovered as of June 2021.”

• No, We Weren’t All Born Yesterday (David Stockman)

According to the mainstream narrative, we were all born yesterday. There is no such thing as context, history or critical analysis – just cherry-picked short-term data-deltas, which are held to be either awesome or at least much improved from last time. That’s why we predictably got this headline from the Wall Street Journal with reference to today’s June employment release, which allegedly showed “employers added 850,000 jobs last month”: Stocks Tick Higher With Strong Jobs Report Well, no, it wasn’t and they (employers) didn’t. In fact, total hours worked in June actually declined from the May level, and, far more importantly, were still down 4.4% from the pre-Covid peak in February 2020.

When expressed in total hours, there is absolutely nothing “strong” at all about the numbers. To wit, at the end of Q2 2021 total hours employed in the nonfarm economy were still down 8 billion hours from the Q4 2019 level. That’s right. Eight billion worker hours are MIA, yet the lazy shills at the WSJ, Bloomberg, Reuters et. al. keep pumping out bilge about an awesome economic rebound! Actually, what has never been noted notwithstanding the fact that it sits there in plain sight on the BLS website is that Dr. Fauci and his economy wreckers dug a far deeper hole in the main street labor market last spring than the narrative led you to believe. At the pre-Covid peak in Q4 2019, the nonfarm economy utilized 257.2 billion labor hours at an annualized rate, but that plunged by nearly -12% to just 227.6 billion hours in Q2 2020.

So doing, Fauci & Co wiped out all of the aggregate nonfarm labor hours gain since Q4 2011. That is to say, it obliterated the awesome gains that had been contained in 102 monthly Jobs Friday reports in the interim. And now, after $4 trillion of freshly printed fiat cash and $6 trillion of stimmies and other bailouts and free stuff only 73% of the state-imposed shrinkage of hours worked has been recovered as of June 2021.

Read more …

By some measures, still the world’s biggest bank.

• HSBC in Big Trouble in its Biggest Market, China (WS)

HSBC, headquartered in the UK, is first and foremost an Asian bank. The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Limited cut its teeth in the 19th century in Greater China. In 2020, its Mainland and Hong Kong operations accounted for 39% of its annual $50 billion in revenue, while the United Kingdom, its second largest market, brought in 28%. The bank is now selling off its retail banking units in France and the United States and scaling back its presence in some emerging markets in order to accelerate its eastward pivot. But there’s a problem with this plan: Its success rests largely on the bank’s ability to maintain good relations with the Chinese government. And that is proving to be a tough proposition.

Relations have soured significantly over the past two years after it was revealed in 2019 that HSBC had ratted out Chinese telecom giant Huawei to the U.S. Department of Justice for breaching U.S. sanctions on Iran. The information provided by HSBC led to the arrest of Meng Wanzhou, Huawei’s chief financial officer and daughter of the company’s founder, in Vancouver in 2018. As geopolitical tensions have escalated between the US and China, HSBC has had to walk a tightrope in its relations with China on the one hand and Washington and London on the other. The lenders’ travails reveal a core challenge for multinational firms operating in China: the market is vital to their growth prospects, but Western firms doing business there increasingly risk being mired in the ratcheting tensions between Beijing and the West.

But given the size and growth of the market, many big global banks have decided to continue expanding in China, whether organically or through acquisitions. HSBC Holdings PLC, Standard Chartered PLC and Citigroup Inc. have all unveiled plans to beef up their wealth management operations in China, targeting the growing middle class. But with net profits for foreign lenders falling precipitously and Beijing demanding that foreign companies toe the line as the US ramps up sanctions on China, it’s getting more and more complicated.

Read more …

 

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Luciferase

 

 

 

 

No jab no dinner

 

 

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Debt Rattle June 5 2021

Jun 052021
 
 June 5, 2021  Posted by at 8:52 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  59 Responses »


Brassaï Cat 1945

 

• Vaccine Spike Protein Travels From Injection Site, Can Cause Organ Damage (CHD)
• Patent Filed For Covid Vaccine Just After Contagion Emerged (NYP)
• Ok, Now We’re Done (Denninger)
• State Department Officials Told Probing Wuhan Lab Opens Pandora’s Box (DM)
• The Pentagon Gave $39 Million To Dr. Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance (DM)
• Daszak In Charge Of The Lancet’s Task Force To Investigate COVID Origin (SN)
• Biden Says He’s ‘Very Confident’ In Fauci After 1000s Of Emails Revealed (Fox)
• The Rise and Fall of Dr. Fauci (Howie Carr)
• What If the “Big Lie” Is the Big Lie? (Kunstler)
• Biden Rejects New Republican Infrastructure Offer (R.)
• US Judge Overturns California’s Ban On Assault Weapons (AP)
• Facebook Faces Antitrust Investigation in EU, UK (HE)
• ‘Over Confident’ US Risks Going Down Same Path As Soviet Union – Putin (EN)

 

 

A rare photo of Schrödingers cat.

 

 

“Research obtained by a group of scientists shows the COVID vaccine spike protein can travel from the injection site and accumulate in organs and tissues including the spleen, bone marrow, the liver, adrenal glands and in “quite high concentrations” in the ovaries.”

• Vaccine Spike Protein Travels From Injection Site, Can Cause Organ Damage (CHD)

COVID vaccine researchers had previously assumed mRNA COVID vaccines would behave like traditional vaccines. The vaccine’s spike protein — responsible for infection and its most severe symptoms — would remain mostly in the injection site at the shoulder muscle or local lymph nodes. But new research obtained by a group of scientists contradicts that theory, a Canadian cancer vaccine researcher said last week. “We made a big mistake. We didn’t realize it until now,” said Byram Bridle, a viral immunologist and associate professor at University of Guelph, Ontario. “We thought the spike protein was a great target antigen, we never knew the spike protein itself was a toxin and was a pathogenic protein. So by vaccinating people we are inadvertently inoculating them with a toxin.”

Bridle, who was awarded a $230,000 grant by the Canadian government last year for research on COVID vaccine development, said he and a group of international scientists filed a request for information from the Japanese regulatory agency to get access to Pfizer’s “biodistribution study.” Biodistribution studies are used to determine where an injected compound travels in the body, and which tissues or organs it accumulates in. “It’s the first time ever scientists have been privy to seeing where these messenger RNA [mRNA] vaccines go after vaccination,” Bridle said in an interview with Alex Pierson where he first disclosed the data. “Is it a safe assumption that it stays in the shoulder muscle? The short answer is: absolutely not. It’s very disconcerting.”

The Sars-CoV-2 has a spike protein on its surface. That spike protein is what allows it to infect our bodies, Bridle explained. “That is why we have been using the spike protein in our vaccines,” Bridle said. “The vaccines we’re using get the cells in our bodies to manufacture that protein. If we can mount an immune response against that protein, in theory we could prevent this virus from infecting the body. That is the theory behind the vaccine.” “However, when studying the severe COVID-19, […] heart problems, lots of problems with the cardiovascular system, bleeding and clotting, are all associated with COVID-19,” he added. “In doing that research, what has been discovered by the scientific community, the spike protein on its own is almost entirely responsible for the damage to the cardiovascular system, if it gets into circulation.” When the purified spike protein is injected into the blood of research animals, they experience damage to the cardiovascular system and the protein can cross the blood-brain barrier and cause damage to the brain, Bridle explained.

Read more …

Everything about this stinks.

• Patent Filed For Covid Vaccine Just After Contagion Emerged (NYP)

A Chinese Communist Party military scientist who got funding from the National Institutes of Health filed a patent for a COVID-19 vaccine in February last year — raising fears the shot was being studied even before the pandemic became public, according to a new report. Zhou Yusen, a decorated military scientist for the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) who worked alongside the Wuhan Institute of Virology as well as US scientists, filed a patent on Feb. 24 2020, according to documents obtained by The Australian.

The patent -lodged by the “Institute of Military Medicine, Academy of Military Sciences of the PLA”- was filed just five weeks after China admitted there was human-to-human transmission of the virus, and months before Zhou died under mysterious circumstances, the report noted. “This is something we have never seen achieved before, raising the question of whether this work may have started much earlier”, Prof. Nikolai Petrovsky from Flinders University told the paper. Adding to the intrigue, Zhou later died under mysterious circumstances in May last year – something being looked into as part of the international investigation ordered by President Biden, the paper insisted. Despite being an award-winning military scientist, there were no reports or tributes, with him just listed as “deceased” in a Chinese media report in July and a December scientific paper.

Before working for the PLA, Zhou had strong ties to the US, doing postdoctoral research at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and collaborating with the New York Blood Center, the report said. Zhou worked closely with the Wuhan lab at the heart of increasing international focus over its possible links to the pandemic, as well as its now-notorious “bat woman” lead scientist, Shi Zhengli, the report said. The close working relationship between the pair supports declassified US intelligence released in January that said the Wuhan lab was conducting “secret military activity,” The Australian said.

Read more …

Karl’s take on the article above.

• Ok, Now We’re Done (Denninger)

“A Chinese Communist Party military scientist who got funding from the National Institutes of Health filed a patent for a COVID-19 vaccine in February last year — raising fears the shot was being studied even before the pandemic became public, according to a new report. Zhou Yusen, a decorated military scientist for the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) who worked alongside the Wuhan Institute of Virology as well as US scientists, filed a patent on Feb. 24 2020, according to documents obtained by The Australian.” So what do we now know? • China’s military was in fact involved at the Wuhan lab. It was not just a civilian operation. • The lab’s scientists knew not only the sequencing of the virus but in addition had a patentable way to create an alleged vaccine before the pandemic was public.

• It takes time to draft patents and figure them out. Quite a lot of time, in fact — not a couple weeks or months. • The PLA, China’s military, did file said patent with Zhou’s name on it. • It takes time to prove up patent material, including in the case of a vaccine. To patent something you must be able to demonstrate it; you cannot patent ideas, only embodiments of ideas. In that case you would have to prove immunogenicity which isn’t instantaneous; it takes weeks or even months to get through original science on this with animals and then humans, which means the date of knowledge was not February 24th it was months or even further before that.

• That means they were working on this even before that time because to work on a vaccine you have to know you must or would want to work on it in the first place. This in turn means they knew damn well there was a virulent virus in the wild prior to that date, or they released it or intended to release it into the wild on purpose. Nobody comes up with a vaccine for a virus you intend to and have confined entirely within a laboratory in animal or cell culture testing; that’s worthless. Without an isolate to create a vaccine for and a virus outside of a lab environment where vaccination becomes a “thing” that might be required and thus have value why would you do the work to create one?

What’s the timeline on all this? Many, many months or even a couple of years. That means either the virus was “out” for many months to a couple of years before February of 2020 (not a month or two) or the Chinese intended to release it in the fall of 2019. In either case the evidence is now overwhelming that this was not a virus that “magically appeared” one fine day in late December. That is not just improbable anymore — it is now, on the manifest weight of the evidence, impossible. Further, the person who filed the patent died under “mysterious circumstances.” Gee, I wonder why? Let me guess — did he shoot himself in the back of the head twice?

Next up is exactly what sort of vaccine patent we’re talking about here? Specifically how is it that the “stiffened” areas in the viral vector and mRNA shots we’re using in the US came to be known and proved up? How did Moderna and Pfizer know they needed to do that? That sort of study takes months if not years too, not days or weeks, to both come up with it and then prove it actually works as expected.

[..] Oh wait — the manufacturers didn’t bother with all of making sure it worked as expected, did they? Nope! It sort of works as expected. Yes, the shots produce antibodies – lots of them. But they also cluster in multiple organs where we were told it would not; we were told it would remain in the deltoid muscle where the injection was delivered. That it remained in the muscle was false; the science was not done and it appears we were just told it would do so without evidence. Now, due to a leaked document out of Japan we know the shots do not stay where intended and they bioaccumulate in other places, including the ovaries and spleen and yet this, which was a direct contravention of the predicate upon which the EUAs issued did not lead to immediate revocation. Oh no, the FDA doesn’t care when claims about where it is contained to in the body turn out to be false!

Read more …

Fauci, Daszak, PLA, CCP, Pentagon, we could go on.

• State Department Officials Told Probing Wuhan Lab Opens Pandora’s Box (DM)

At least four State Department employees said in separate interviews that they repeatedly were ‘warned’ that an investigation into a possible COVID-19 leak from the Wuhan lab would ‘open Pandora’s Box;’ and reveal that the U.S. funded gain-of-function research there. It ‘smelled like a cover-up,’ Thomas DiNanno told Vanity Fair. DiNanno, the former acting assistant secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Arms Control, Verification and Compliance, was one of four State Department officials who told Vanity Fair they wanted to investigate the possibility that COVID-19 spread after it escaped from the Wuhan lab. The others were David Asher, David Feith and Miles Yu. But they were muzzled by other State Department officials as well as the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation and even ‘ostracized,’ Yu told Vanity Fair.


The lab leak was touted by then-President Donald Trump and other right-wing leaders, but was deemed impossible by a ‘scientific consensus’ in a letter signed by 27 scientists, published on February 19, 2020 in the medical journal The Lancet. After that, the Wuhan lab theory was considered to be at best a conspiracy – some even considered it racist – so it wasn’t discussed as a realistic origin of COVID-19 until recently. Yu, the State Department’s principal China strategist, found the government’s and scientists’ silence ‘maddening,’ Vanity Fair reported. He said, ‘Anyone who dares speak out would be ostracized.’ Asher, now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute who ran the State Department’s day-to-day COVID-19 origins inquiry, told Vanity Fair it became clear that ‘there is a huge gain-of-function bureaucracy’ inside the federal government.

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Plus $64.7 million from the US Agency for International Development (USAID), $13 million from Health and Human Services, $2.3 million from the Department of Homeland Security, and $2.6 million from the National Science Foundation.

• The Pentagon Gave $39 Million To Dr. Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance (DM)

The Pentagon gave $39 million to a charity that funded controversial coronavirus research at a Chinese lab accused of being the source for Covid-19, federal data reveals. The news comes as the charity’s chief, British-born scientist Dr. Peter Daszak, was exposed in an alleged conflict of interest and back-room campaign to discredit lab leak theories. The charity, EcoHealth Alliance (EHA), has come under intense scrutiny after it emerged that it had been using federal grants to fund research into coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. The U.S. nonprofit, set up to research new diseases, has also partly funded deeply controversial ‘gain of function’ experiments, where dangerous viruses are made more infectious to study their effect on human cells.

A political storm broke when former president Donald Trump canceled a $3.7 million grant to the charity last year amid claims that Covid-19 was created in, or leaked from, the Wuhan lab funded by EHA. But federal grant data assembled by independent researchers shows that the charity has received more than $123 million from the government – from 2017 to 2020 – and that one of its biggest funders is the Department of Defense, funneling almost $39 million to the organization since 2013. Exactly how much of that money went toward research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology is unknown.

Grants from the Pentagon included $6,491,025 from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) from 2017 to 2020 with the description: ‘Understanding the risk of bat-borne zoonotic disease emergence in Western Asia.’ The grant was categorized as ‘scientific research – combating weapons of mass destruction.’ The news comes as the charity’s chief, British-born scientist Dr. Peter Daszak, was exposed in an alleged conflict of interest and back-room campaign to discredit lab leak theories The majority of the DoD funding came from the DTRA, a military branch with a mission to ‘counter and deter weapons of mass destruction and improvised threat networks.’ EHA also received $64.7 million from the US Agency for International Development (USAID), $13 million from Health and Human Services, which includes the National Institutes of Health and Centers for Disease Control, $2.3 million from the Department of Homeland Security, and $2.6 million from the National Science Foundation.

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He gets to lead everything, including the ivestigation into himself.

• Daszak In Charge Of The Lancet’s Task Force To Investigate COVID Origin (SN)

Revered scientific journal The Lancet has created a ‘task force’ to investigate the origins of the coronavirus that caused a global pandemic, yet it has decided to employ as it’s leader the very guy who funded the dangerous gain of function research at the Wuhan lab and subsequently allegedly ‘bullied’ other scientists into avoiding looking into the lab as a potential source of the outbreak. In the wake of renewed scrutiny of the lab leak hypothesis, the Lancet’s task force will reportedly “focus on analyzing data on all of the theories put forward on the origins of COVID, on the reasons why SARS-CoV-2 was able to break out of Wuhan and spread globally, and on the most plausible strategies to prevent future pandemics.”

It also states that “The Task Force will review thoroughly and objectively all publicly available evidence, particularly the peer-reviewed literature, and conduct interviews with key leaders in science, medicine, policy and civil society.” ‘Objectively’. Right. Dr Peter Daszak, who is heading up this task force, is perhaps the least suitable scientist on the planet to objectively analyse the data, given his track record. Daszak, as President of the EcoHealth Alliance, shovelled at least $600,000 to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in the past few years to play around with coronaviruses inside the lab through the now infamous ‘gain of function’ research. Daszak, who also works for the World Health Organisation, is on record admitting that he was involved with manipulating coronaviruses.

Daszak notes that “coronaviruses are pretty good… you can manipulate them in the lab pretty easily… the spiked proteins drive a lot about what happens. You can get the sequence you can build the protein, we work with Ralph Baric at UNC to do this, insert into the backbone of another virus and do some work in a lab.” No wonder then that Daszak as lead investigator for the WHO investigation determined within 3 hours of visiting the Wuhan lab in February 2021 that there was ‘nothing to see here’?

Read more …

They’re stuck with each other, and with Daszak, PLA, CCP, Pentagon.

• Biden Says He’s ‘Very Confident’ In Fauci After 1000s Of Emails Revealed (Fox)

President Biden said he is “very confident” in Dr. Anthony Fauci amid Republican attacks on his chief medical adviser after the revelation of thousands of his emails from the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. The president was updating reporters as he departed Rehoboth Beach, Del., and when he walked out of the room, one shouted to ask if he is “still” confident in Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). Moments later, Biden popped his head back in the room and said, “Yes, I am very confident in Dr. Fauci.” Fauci’s emails, which are heavily redacted, have prompted Republicans to demand answers from the NIAID director about why he did not more aggressively pursue the theory that coronavirus could have leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China.


In one February 2020 email, he also said wearing a mask was “not really effective in keeping out the virus,” though the disease expert has already admitted he downplayed the effectiveness of masks in part so that supply would not run low for medical professionals. At the same time, Fox News has confirmed that State Department officials seeking to demand transparency from the Chinese government say they were explicitly told by colleagues not to explore the WIV’s gain-of-function research because it would bring unwelcomed attention to U.S. government funding of it. “We’ll let him speak for himself,” press secretary Jen Psaki said Thursday when asked about Fauci’s emails. “He’s been an undeniable asset in our country’s pandemic response,” Psaki said. “It’s obviously not that advantageous for me to relitigate the substance of emails from 17 months ago.”

Read more …

“These Fauci emails are certainly revealing, so revealing, in fact, that the Washington Post isn’t posting them.”

• The Rise and Fall of Dr. Fauci (Howie Carr)

“Fauci Lied, People Died.” If you still occasionally run into some unrepentant Karen glaring at your unmasked following-the-science face, just scrawl the above words on your raggedy mask and wear it one final time. Karen won’t bother you anymore, because what can Karen say after the release of all the Fauci emails from last year? Dr. Anthony Fauci, a hack’s hack since 1968, is many things, but on the level is not one of them. Consider his response to a February 2020 email from a Cornell University professor of medicine who wrote him: “We think there is a possibility that the virus was released from a lab in Wuhan.” Fauci responded by forwarding the prescient warning to one of his minions: “Please handle.” A month later, a government-funded physicist sent Fauci a warning that China was sending out false data, among other things.

Once again, Fauci dismissively fobbed off this 911 call to an underling: “Too long for me to read.” Of course it was. You know how hard it is to concentrate on scientific data when you’re in the green room having the makeup applied for your third or fourth TV live shot of the day. Especially when you’re 80 years old. These Fauci emails are certainly revealing, so revealing, in fact, that the Washington Post isn’t posting them. Almost as revealing are the endless redactions, as if there’s some national security issue here when he’s been pitched by Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook. Fauci is still being defended by the Democrat operatives with press passes — the “serious people,” as ABC hack Jonathan Karl described his fellow cheerleaders last week. But the reality is, his upcoming so-called book, which at 80 pages is almost as short as he is (67 inches high), was pulled this week from the two biggest online booksellers, five months ahead of its publication date.

The publisher claimed that “Expect the Unexpected” had been “prematurely posted.” Yeah, right. At least Gov. Andrew Cuomo had his abysmal $5.1-million COVID tome published before he was busted as a total fraud. Fauci’s book got torched before it even reached the public. The publisher’s sell sheet described him as “one of the world’s greatest medical minds,” but now he ends up the same authorial class as O.J. Simpson and Clifford Irving — their faux books didn’t make it out of the gate either. Fauci joins the long list of great anti-Trump saviors who have been, you’ll pardon the expression, debunked. Like, say, Michael Avenatti, Michael Cohen, Omarosa, Mary Trump, Robert Mueller, Christine Blasey Ford, Julie Swetnick, Lt. Col. Vindman, etc.

Read more …

“All Joe Biden’s handlers can do now is fade Dr. Fauci out, keep him off the cable channels, and hope the public can be distracted with some new nonsense.”

• What If the “Big Lie” Is the Big Lie? (Kunstler)

Maybe now that Dr. Tony Fauci has begun to spill the beans on his doings in service to the Wuhan virology lab, the phrase “conspiracy theory,” flogged by the media as jauntily and incessantly as by the soviet kommissars of yore, will have worn out its welcome. In a sane polity, Dr. Fauci would be cooked. He looks circumstantially like an epic villain of history, who promoted and funded dangerous research activities knowingly, which led to an international disaster that killed millions of people and destroyed countless livelihoods and households, perhaps even the whole global economy, when all is said and done — and he appears to have lied at every step along the way. As a practical matter, what is the “Joe Biden” admin going to do about him? Throw him under the bus? I don’t think they can at this point.

Dr. Fauci has come to represent not just the falsehoods employed around the Covid-19 fiasco but more generally the long campaign against truth itself by a grossly illiberal Jacobin Democratic Party seemingly out to punish and destroy Western Civ. Whether the Covid-19 pandemic was an overt tactic in that campaign, or just the result of Dr. Fauci’s catastrophic bad judgment, remains to be revealed. But at least half the country will conclude that there’s some connection between the terrible losses suffered in the pandemic year and the political bullshit they were force-fed in the four-year effort to defenestrate Donald Trump. All Joe Biden’s handlers can do now is fade Dr. Fauci out, keep him off the cable channels, and hope the public can be distracted with some new nonsense. You also have good reason to doubt that Merrick Garland will do anything but look the other way and whistle.

The downfall of Dr. Fauci is a watershed moment. There were so many more authorities caught lying over the past five years, but who got off scot-free — Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, James Comey (actually, the whole FBI and DOJ E-suites), John Brennan, James Clapper, Robert Mueller, Andrew Weissman, Adam Schiff, and the editors and producers of the news media, plus the execs of social media — who not only disabled the truth at every opportunity, but just about destroyed the public’s grip on reality.

The result has been an utter collapse of authority in this land, so that now nobody who runs anything is credible, from the current pitiful president of the USA, to most elected and appointed officials, judges, corporate CEOs, college deans and presidents, and now “The Science” itself. Just remember: there is still a sizable faction in America of people who are deeply interested in ascertaining the truth about a lot of things. They are aiming to get at it, too, for example, the truth about the 2020 election. Maybe now you can begin to see why this is important.

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Boondoggle.

• Biden Rejects New Republican Infrastructure Offer (R.)

President Joe Biden and Republicans entered the weekend sharply at odds over how to craft an infrastructure deal that could satisfy their camps, imperiling the odds of a bipartisan deal. Democrat Biden shot down a new proposal from the main Republican negotiator on infrastructure, Senator Shelley Moore Capito, that increased spending by about $50 billion over their last offer, the White House said. Biden rejected the offer, saying it “did not meet his objectives to grow the economy, tackle the climate crisis, and create new jobs.” Republicans had previously offered roughly $257 billion in new spending, short of the $2.25 trillion Biden initially offered and suggested he might bring down to as low as $1 trillion.


And while the two sides agreed to speak again on Monday, the White House also strongly signaled that they may seek a path forward with other Republican lawmakers or even with only Democrats. “He indicated to Senator Capito that he would continue to engage a number of Senators in both parties in the hopes of achieving a more substantial package,” White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki said in a statement. Up until now, Capito has been Biden’s primary negotiating partner. Monday’s conversation will be their third in a week. Biden is eager to show that he made a good-faith effort at a bipartisan deal, sources said, but he risks creating division among Democrats, some who believe he is giving up too much to Republicans. Democrats hold narrow majorities in both the House of Representatives and Senate.

Read more …

This guy likes the arms a bit too much.

• US Judge Overturns California’s Ban On Assault Weapons (AP)

A federal judge Friday overturned California’s three-decade-old ban on assault weapons, ruling that it violates the constitutional right to bear arms. U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez of San Diego ruled that the state’s definition of illegal military-style rifles unlawfully deprives law-abiding Californians of weapons commonly allowed in most other states and by the U.S. Supreme Court. “Under no level of heightened scrutiny can the law survive,” Benitez said. He issued a permanent injunction against enforcement of the law but stayed it for 30 days to give state Attorney General Rob Bonta time to appeal. Gov. Gavin Newsom condemned the decision, calling it “a direct threat to public safety and the lives of innocent Californians, period.”


In his 94-page ruling, the judge spoke favorably of modern weapons, said they were overwhelmingly used for legal reasons. “Like the Swiss Army knife, the popular AR-15 rifle is a perfect combination of home defense weapon and homeland defense equipment. Good for both home and battle,” the judge said in his ruling’s introduction. That comparison “completely undermines the credibility of this decision and is a slap in the face to the families who’ve lost loved ones to this weapon,” Newsom said in a statement. “We’re not backing down from this fight, and we’ll continue pushing for common sense gun laws that will save lives.”

Read more …

“Are you watching, America?”

• Facebook Faces Antitrust Investigation in EU, UK (HE)

The United Kingdom and European Union opened formal antitrust investigations into Facebook’s classified-ads service, Marketplace. Both the European Commission and the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority said Friday they are investigating whether Facebook revamps data gathered from advertisers who buy ads in order to give illegal advantages to its own services, the Wall Street Journal reports. The cases look specifically at how Facebook uses the data it collects, and whether that would put the company at an advantage in the promotion of its own services in neighboring markets. The U.K. is also investigating whether Facebook uses advertiser data to give similar advantages to its online-dating service. “In today’s digital economy, data should not be used in ways that distort competition,” said Margrethe Vestager, the EU’s antitrust chief.


A Facebook spokesman said its services will “continue to cooperate fully with the investigations to demonstrate that they are without merit.” Though the EU has been informally investigating the Big Tech giant for some time, if the Commission or the U.K.’s CMA finds evidence of any wrongdoing, they can then file formal charges. The new cases are part of a new series of antitrust enforcements throughout Europe. The European Commission filed formal charges against Apple last month for abusing its control over the distribution of music-streaming apps, including Spotify. In November, the EU also filed formal charges against Amazon for using nonpublic data gathered from third-party sellers to unfairly compete against them. Are you watching, America?

Read more …

“We don’t have any issues with the U.S. But it has an issue with us..”

• ‘Over Confident’ US Risks Going Down Same Path As Soviet Union – Putin (EN)

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday accused Europe and the U.S. of hypocrisy over criticism of the response to anti-government protests in Russia and Belarus and warned that America was at risk of following the path of the Soviet Union. In a speech at an economic forum in St. Petersburg, Putin discussed Russia’s relations with the U.S. ahead of a meeting with President Joe Biden, describing them as “at an extremely low level now.” He criticised sanctions against Russia as well as allegations that Moscow interfered in the U.S. election and said that Washington and Europe had double standards in criticising the police crackdown against protesters in Moscow and Belarus in recent months. “We don’t have any issues with the U.S. But it has an issue with us,” he said.

“It wants to contain our development and publicly talks about it. Economic restrictions and attempts to influence our country’s domestic politics, relying on forces they consider their allies inside Russia, stem from that.” Ties between Russia and the U.S. have sunk to post-Cold War lows over Moscow’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, accusations of Russian interference in elections, and cyberattacks that U.S. officials allege had Russian origins. Putin reiterated that Russia rejects accusations of interfering in U.S. presidential elections, and he spoke critically of the U.S. response to the Capitol attack, which took place as Congress prepared to certify that Biden had defeated then-President Donald Trump in November.

“They weren’t just a crowd of robbers and rioters. Those people had come with political demands,” he said. Putin pointed out that the heavy charges against hundreds of participants in the attack were filed even as the U.S. and its allies strongly criticized Belarus’ crackdown on anti-government protests. He charged that even as the West has criticized Russian authorities for a harsh response to anti-Kremlin demonstrations, protesters in Europe have faced an even tougher police response, with some shot in the eye by what he mockingly called “democratic rubber bullets.” Later, during a call with journalists, Putin criticised the United States as being overconfident and drew a parallel with the Soviet Union.

“You know what the problem is? I will tell you as a former citizen of the former Soviet Union. What is the problem of empires — they think that they are so powerful that they can afford small errors and mistakes,” he said. “But the number of problems is growing. There comes a time when they can no longer be dealt with. And the United States, with a confident gait, a firm step, is going straight along the path of the Soviet Union.”

Read more …

 

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Criminal COVID Negligence

Jan 272021
 
 January 27, 2021  Posted by at 6:21 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , ,  20 Responses »


John William Godward Dolce Far Niente (It’s Sweet Doing Nothing) 1909

 

 

By now, I’m at the point where I wonder why nobody -that I know of- has tried holding governments, scientists, scientific journals, MSM, responsible for their negligence of COVID-related treatment and prophylactic evidence that is everywhere if you’re willing to look for it.

Because this negligence may well be the reason for millions of deaths, hospitalizations, untold misery, and the disruption of entire societies and economies. When will we hold the willfully blind and dumb feet to the fire for causing all this?

So far, there’s no sign we ever will. But there must be someone, in some country, with the courage and means to bring this before a court. If you’ve lost members of your family, and you realize that could -perhaps even easily- have been prevented, or if you’re a Long-COVID patient yourself, why not try and hold those responsible to account?

It may take some effort to determine who ultimately IS responsible, but if you’ve just lost a loved one, why not give it a try? Politicians, when prompted, will point their accusing fingers at their science “experts”, who will point to research and journals, which will point to… Let a judge decide. And more importantly, let’s all take the blinders from our eyes and prevent more unnecessary deaths and suffering.

 

At the Automatic Earth, we’ve been talking, including our in-house medical commenters, since February 2020, about things that could have prevented a lot of COVID cases. And for us it’s astonishing that at least some of these things still haven’t been adopted, that we are exclusively discussing vaccines instead.

The first substance that came up way back when was vitamin D. One of the many times I wrote about it was in September, quoting the Daily Mail. That was four months ago. How many people have died since? While “People who get enough vitamin D are at a 52 percent lower risk of dying of COVID-19?” Why have these people died? Why is there not one single country that has a nationwide program to boost vitamin D levels in all its citizens when both death and infection itself could be lowered by some 50%?

 

Vitamin D

People who get enough vitamin D are at a 52 percent lower risk of dying of COVID-19 than people who are deficient for the ‘sunshine vitamin,’ new research reveals. Vitamin D plays a crucial role in the immune system and may combat inflammation. These features may make it a key player in the body’s fight against coronavirus. Rates of vitamin D deficiency are also higher in some of the same groups who have been hardest hit by coronavirus: people of color and elderly people.


It’s by no means a causal link, but suggests that vitamin D could play a role in who gets COVID-19, who gets sickest from it, and who is spared altogether. Boston University’s Dr Michael Holick found in his previous research that people who have enough vitamin D are 54 percent less likely to catch coronavirus in the first place. [..] about 42 percent of the US population is vitamin D deficient. If that rate held true for the more 203,000 Americans who died of coronavirus, perhaps some 85,000 would have fared better with improved vitamin D levels.

 

The second substance we should discuss -but don’t- is ivermectin. The FLCCC has finally succeeded in getting the US NIH to approve it for use, after Dr. Pierre Kory said almost 2 months ago in the Senate that “If you take [ivermectin], you will not get sick.” How many people died in the USA since his December 8 testimony? What does Dr. Fauci have to say about that? Or is he still focused on remdesivir, which Kory mentions? He must be the only one.

 

‘Miraculous’ Ivermectin Approved For Use In The US For COVID-19

Following the diligent efforts of physicians associated with a group called Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC), the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has upgraded their recommendation for the “miraculous” drug ivermectin, making it an option for use in treating COVID-19 within the United States. The result comes one week after Dr. Paul Marik and Dr. Pierre Kory—founding members of the FLCCC, along with Dr. Andrew Hill, researcher and consultant to the World Health Organization (WHO), presented their data before the NIH Treatment Guidelines Panel. A press release from FLCCC explains the “new designation upgraded the status of ivermectin from ‘against’ [the drug’s use] to ‘neither for nor against,’ which is the same recommendation given to monoclonal antibodies and convalescent plasma, both widely used across the nation.”


“By no longer recommending against ivermectin use,” the statement said, “doctors should feel more open in prescribing ivermectin as another therapeutic option for the treatment of COVID-19. This may clear its path towards FDA [Food and Drug Administration] emergency use approval.” “Ivermectin is one of the world’s safest, cheapest and most widely available drugs,” explained Dr. Kory, President of the FLCCC Alliance. “The studies we presented to the NIH revealed high levels of statistical significance showing large magnitude benefit in transmission rates, need for hospitalization, and death. What’s more, the totality of trials data supporting ivermectin is without precedent.”

Pierre Kory

Pierre Kory (FLCCC Alliance) on the importance of Ivermectin in the treatment of COVID-19 from FLCCC Alliance on Vimeo.

 

The third substance is Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), which was banned because 1) Trump said back in March that he liked it and 2) because the Lancet published a very negative article about it. That article was based on nothing at all, which is curious to say the least for the Lancet, but hey, at least they retracted it back in June.

Anybody seen any HCQ research since then though? That’s seven months ago. How many people have died since then? The Lancet’s editors should be taken to court, too, for publishing that first article without any peer review, if only so we can find out why they published it.

The article below from January 2021 comes at a strange point in time, since the retraction happened in June, but that’s not the essence.

 

Lancet Retracts Study That Claimed HCQ Is Ineffective

A leading medical journal has issued a retraction of their endorsement for a study that concluded the anti-viral drug hydroxychloroquine was ineffective against the COVID-19 virus. This retraction appears to validate the claims then-President Trump made about the medication being a frontline drug in the battle in the pandemic. The Lancet, a respected online medical journal, issued an apology to its readers in an edition last year after the retraction. “We deeply apologize to you, the editors, and the journal readership for any embarrassment or inconvenience that this may have caused,” the publishers of The Lancet said.

Compared to the significantly more expensive medications being used to treat the virus, hydroxychloroquine – a drug widely used to treat malaria – is relatively inexpensive and universally available. Hydroxychloroquine ranges in price from $0.30 to $6.63 per dose depending on location. The Lancet’s endorsement of the study was withdrawn because the Surgisphere Corporation, the company that provided data, refused to provide full access to the information it based its study on. Peer review medical journals typically engage in third-party peer review to validate the findings. The Surgisphere Corporation said it refused to release the study data because it would violate client agreements and confidentiality requirements, raising questions about the study’s legitimacy.


“Based on this development, we can no longer vouch for the veracity of the primary data sources. Due to this unfortunate development, the authors request that the paper be retracted,” The Lancet said in a statement. In the now debunked study, researchers concluded that hydroxychloroquine didn’t aid in curbing the COVID-19 virus. It went on to say that the drug caused heart problems and appeared to elevate the risk of death. The study was immediately embraced by the beleaguered World Health Organization and other groups causing research into the use of the drug to combat COVID-19 to stop.

 

There are other substances that are used in various stages of the disease, in various combinations, and in various groups of people, such as zinc, azithromycin, doxycycline and Quercetin. There is no lack of research into these things, but there certainly is a lack of attention for it. So let’s find out what’s behind that. If only because we owe that to the people who have needlessly died, and to those who will follow them as long as this situation persists.

Is it all just to sell vaccines, as in just let them all get sick and then we’ll give them a jab? Is it to control populations? Is it about a Great societal Reset? There are countries such as India, which since this summer has pushed its Ziverdo kit, which contains zinc, doxycycline ad ivermectin. Here’s what that did:

 

 

Now compare that pattern to the US and tell me what you think you see. Knowing that India has about four times the population of the US, but less than 10% of its new cases. Yes, all the media blame has gone to Trump, and he deserves quite a bit of it. But his scientific head was Dr. Fauci, who has kept his job under Biden, and who keeps pushing the same old mule: vaccines.

 

 

Now imagine if we could have cut the death-, infection- and misery toll in half. And that’s just what sufficient vitamin D levels promise to do. Ivermectin promises much more. We could have saved millions of lives, a manifold of that in hospitalizations and all-over suffering, we wouldn’t have needed to kill our societies and economies, no lockdowns, no facemasks, no overloaded health care systems. Imagine that.

But we didn’t. Fauci and his peers all over the globe simply ignored the science. And replaced it with something that *they* called “the science”. Which they can do because they have degrees and are considered scientists. And are in a position to crowd out other scientists.

 

Just vitamin D, zinc, ivermectin and HCQ. They wouldn’t perhaps have prevented and solved every single case, but the burden on society would have been so much less. And the deaths. And the misery.

So yes, take them to court. Find out what happened, why they decided what they did, why they ignored the simplest and cheapest approaches and went for the new expensive drugs instead.

Can I get a vitamin D, zinc and chloroquine passport, so I can travel again? No, I can’t. But I may be much safer than someone who’s had a Pfizer vaccine. Not that I know, but you see, nobody knows that. Not Pfizer, not Fauci, no-one. Take them to court, the lot of them.

One last bit: there is no way of knowing how long the mRNA vaccines’ protection lasts. But vitamin D, zinc, ivermectin and HCQ continues to protect you, regardless of the variant, that we know. As I said, not 100%, but neither do the vaccines. The main difference appears to be that one option costs just pennies, and the other costs many billions. So much that developing nations won’t get “vaccinated” until 2024. If they’re “lucky”.

Take your government to court over this, whatever country you live in. Get this started. People in other countries will follow you. Promise. All we need is the first spark. Let’s start a movement. To honor those who died for no reason, and to protect those who will if this negligence continues.

 

Please note that none of this means that the various vaccines are completely useless, it just means the urgency to roll them out by the billions wouldn’t have been there. We could have had proper research, peer review, all that. But we didn’t. We now have mRNA vaccines, never tested on humans, being tested on millions upon millions of them. And there was never any reason for that. It was always just an induced panic, that very simple and cheap substances could have made obsolete.

 

 

 

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Lockdowns Make Time Stand Still

Nov 112020
 
 November 11, 2020  Posted by at 4:54 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  19 Responses »


Rembrandt van Rijn Student at a table by candlelight c.1642

 

 

We would by now have expected the narrative surrounding COVID19 to be simpler to understand, but it’s not. We may understand much more about the disease and everything that has to do with it, but we’re finding there is so much that has been left unsaid, not discussed, neglected.

The discussion has been stuck in an All Else Being Equal (Ceteris Paribus) mode, but all things do not remain equal. It’s not even as if you get rid of the disease, all your problems go away. Not only do various COVID measures inflict huge damage on economies, on people’s jobs and incomes, they also cause entire new sets of health problems.

Epidemiologists and virologists are not equipped for such massive problems. They may be able to say the odd wise word in their field -and even that will be 90% rear-view mirror stuff, because they must compare what they see to what happened in the past-, but the disease doesn’t only affect their field. It affects many fields they have no knowledge of.

Their ideas are then taken on board by economists, not exactly the most scientific of sciences, and off go the government policies. But that was 6-7 months ago, and we learned so much since, right? By now we have involved for instance mental health experts on a large scale, right? Yeah, sure.

The point is, you can’t force lockdowns, masks etc. onto people, without looking at what the consequences of that will be. Because all things do not remain equal for 6-7 months.

A nice example comes from a July 2020 study published in the Lancet, which indicates that “..the number of smokers in a population was correlated with a 3% decrease in covid deaths.. Wow, that’s great. Let’s get everybody smoking, said … nobody. But if your sole focus is COVID19, and for many governments it is, why not? That’s of course because smoking is one thing people recognize as “bad”. But how about other things, that are not?

That same Lancet study, as interpreted by a Sebastian Rushworth MD, also says there is no proof that lockdowns work:

 

Does Lockdown Prevent COVID Deaths?

The factors that most strongly predicted the number of people who died of covid in a country were rate of obesity, average age, and level of income disparity. Each percentage point increase in the rate of obesity resulted in a 12% increase in covid deaths. Each additional average year of age in the population increased covid deaths by 10% . On the opposite end of the spectrum, each point in the direction of greater equality on the gini-coefficient (a scale used to determine how evenly resources are distributed across a population) resulted in a 12% decrease in covid deaths. All these results were statistically significant.


Another factor that had an effect that was significant, but more weakly so, was smoking. Each percentage point increase in the number of smokers in a population was correlated with a 3% decrease in covid deaths. Ok, let’s get to the most important thing, which the authors seem to have tried to hide, because they make so little mention of it. Lockdown and covid deaths. The authors found no correlation whatsoever between severity of lockdown and number of covid deaths. And they didn’t find any correlation between border closures and covid deaths either. And there was no correlation between mass testing and covid deaths either, for that matter. Basically, nothing that various world governments have done to combat covid seems to have had any effect whatsoever on the number of deaths.

Which is intriguing, because countries like France, Belgium, Netherlands appear to have had spectacular success with their recent new lockdowns.

 

 

 

Problem is, you can’t lock down countries and people forever. And if the coronavirus has become endemic in the population, the “success” would seem to be inevitably short-lived. In the Netherlands just now, numbers were announced that already are 15% or so up from the 24 hours before. What if a lockdown is not the answer, or not anymore at least? I don’t have the impression that there is a Plan B.

But it would appear to be useful to by now stop throwing all “cases” on one heap, and find a better definition, for instance “positive PCR tests”. Or even “positive PCR tests that require medical attention.” And you will also have to define much better who requires that attention, and who dies. If you’re talking, say 90%, only about people who are either very old and/or have severe underlying conditions, maybe a general lockdown is not your thing.

Maybe you should aim to protect these vulnerable groups, and leave the rest alone. Maybe obese people, who are very much at risk, should be locked down, but not their fit and slimmer neighbors. Maybe you should ban food that causes obesity and diabetes, maybe you should hand out Vitamin D to everybody. Maybe you should simply accept that some people are going to die of the disease.

Whatever else you do, maybe you should prepare for the risk that the virus is endemic, and it’s here to stay. And then take it from there. Because, for one thing, it’s not all that obvious, it’s all still riddled with misconceptions. Renowned medical site medrxiv.org has this:

 

Association Between Living With Children And Outcomes From COVID-19

Close contact with children may provide cross-reactive immunity to SARs-CoV-2 due to more frequent prior coryzal infections from seasonal coronaviruses. Alternatively, close contact with children may increase risk of SARs-CoV-2 infection. We investigated whether risk of infection with SARs-CoV-2 and severe outcomes differed between adults living with and without children.

This is the first population-based study to investigate whether the risk of recorded SARS-CoV-2 infection and severe outcomes from COVID-19 differ between adults living in households with and without school-aged children during the UK pandemic. Our findings show that for adults living with children there is no evidence of an increased risk of severe COVID-19 outcomes although there may be a slightly increased risk of recorded SARS-CoV-2 infection for working-age adults living with children aged 12 to 18 years.

Working-age adults living with children 0 to 11 years have a lower risk of death from COVID-19 compared to adults living without children, with the effect size being comparable to their lower risk of death from any cause. We observed no consistent changes in risk of recorded SARS-CoV-2 infection and severe outcomes from COVID-19 comparing periods before and after school closure. [..] Our results demonstrate no evidence of serious harms from COVID-19 to adults in close contact with children, compared to those living in households without children. This has implications for determining the benefit-harm balance of children attending school in the COVID-19 pandemic.

And yesterday we had this from Reuters: “Anxiety, depression and insomnia were most common among recovered COVID-19 patients…and the researchers also found significantly higher risks of dementia…”

One of the Automatic Earth’s in-house doctors, Doc Robinson, rightly said qualifying insomnia as a mental illness is a very broad stroke. Whereas my attention was drawn to this line:

“.. people with a pre-existing mental illness were 65% more likely to be diagnosed with COVID-19..”

How does that work? Why would you be 65% more likely to catch COVID, or be diagnosed with it, if you’re already depressed? Depressed people are more likely to attend Trump rallies? Or Biden celebrations?

 

One In Five COVID19 Patients Develop Mental Illness Within 90 Days

Many COVID-19 survivors are likely to be at greater risk of developing mental illness, psychiatrists said on Monday, after a large study found 20% of those infected with the coronavirus are diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder within 90 days. Anxiety, depression and insomnia were most common among recovered COVID-19 patients in the study who developed mental health problems, and the researchers also found significantly higher risks of dementia, a brain impairment condition. “People have been worried that COVID-19 survivors will be at greater risk of mental health problems, and our findings … show this to be likely,” said Paul Harrison, a professor of psychiatry at Britain’s Oxford University.


[..] The study also found that people with a pre-existing mental illness were 65% more likely to be diagnosed with COVID-19 than those without. Mental health specialists not directly involved with the study said its findings add to growing evidence that COVID-19 can affect the brain and mind, increasing the risk of a range of psychiatric illnesses. “This is likely due to a combination of the psychological stressors associated with this particular pandemic and the physical effects of the illness,” said Michael Bloomfield, a consultant psychiatrist at University College London.

As I said two days ago: “Just lovely! If you catch COVID, you get mental health issues. And if you go into lockdown so you don’t catch COVID….you also get mental health issues.”

 

Children Regressing And Struggling Mentally In Lockdown

Children hardest hit by Covid-19 measures have regressed during the pandemic, with some who were potty-trained pre-lockdown reverting to nappies and dummies, and others forgetting basic numbers or how to use a knife and fork, according to the schools watchdog Ofsted. Older children have lost physical fitness as well as reading and writing skills, and some are showing signs of mental distress, which can be seen in an increase in eating disorders and self-harm, according to Ofsted’s chief inspector, Amanda Spielman. [..]


The findings, based on 900 visits to schools and social care settings by Ofsted inspectors since schools fully reopened in September, paint a worrying picture of the impact of the pandemic on children at every stage of the education system in England. While children with good support structures have coped well, those whose parents were unable to work flexibly and have therefore been less available to help have lost out most. Children with special educational needs and disabilities have been “seriously affected” across all age groups, both in their care and education, losing vital support including speech and language services.

Lockdowns are based on pretending we can make time stand still. That, like in one of those slick videos, everything else stops moving while you can walk around it. All Else Being Equal. It never is, not for 6-7 months. And that the first lockdown didn’t work, at least not for long, should perhaps be a lesson. Maybe you should look for answers elsewhere. Because the damage just goes on, economically, psychologically, physically.

I’m not pretending I have the answers. I do have questions though. While the situation reminds me of Sisyphus, forced by Zeus to roll a boulder up a hill for eternity. Every time he nears the top of the hill, the boulder rolls back down.

We need to find a balance between the threat of COVID19 and the threat of everything else, very much including those things that are caused by our approach to COVID.

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle September 22 2020

Sep 222020
 
 September 22, 2020  Posted by at 9:09 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , ,  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”.

Read more …

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.”

Read more …

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.

Read more …

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.

Read more …

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.

Read more …

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.

Read more …

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.”

Read more …

‘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.

Read more …

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.

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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.

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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”.

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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.

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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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