Dec 202022
 
 December 20, 2022  Posted by at 9:56 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  80 Responses »


Saul Leiter 463 1956

 

Managing the Ukraine Denial Narrative (Crooke)
News From The NATOstan-Imposed Meat Grinder (Escobar)
Why Time Isn’t Ripe For Ukraine Talks (Bhadrakumar)
How To Avoid Another World War (Kissinger)
Ukraine Blasts ‘Appeaser’ Henry Kissinger For Urging Peace Negotiations (ZH)
Moscow: Delivery Of Greece’s S-300s To Ukraine Would Be ‘Very Provocative’ (K.)
How Lobbyists Captured The EU (Fazi)
A Christmas Parable (Kunstler)
Will Musk Step Down After Twitter Poll? (Turley)
TWITTER FILES: How The FBI Moved To Quash Hunter Laptop Story (ZH)
‘Twitter Files’ Make it Clear: We Must Abolish the FBI (Ron Paul)
FBI Agent Elvis Chan Gave Twitter Execs Top Secret Clearance (Senger)
Canada Health Director Who Lead Vaccine Rollout Dies Suddenly at 35 (GP)

 

 

 

 

#StopTheTreaty

 

 

Greatest athletic achievement

 

 

Gonzalo

 

 

 

 

“The ‘writing is on the wall’, in other words. Ukraine cannot win.”

Managing the Ukraine Denial Narrative (Crooke)

Look around: the tectonic plates of geo-politics and geo-finance are shifting – shifting radically away from an increasingly flailing West.The inflection has begun. It has been messaged by the Financial Times (FT) and The Economist – the two media that so faithfully transmit any ‘replacement narrative’ to the globalist sherpas (those who carry the baggage up the mountain, on behalf of the mounted nabobs). The Economist leads with interviews with Zelensky, General Zaluzhny and Ukraine’s military field commander, General Syrsky. All three are interviewed – interviewed in The Economist, no less. Such a thing does not occur by happenstance. It is messaging intended to convey the Ruling Class’ new narrative to the ‘golden billion’ (who will all read and absorb it).

On the surface, it is possible to read The Economist piece as a plea for more money and many more weapons. But the underlying messaging is clear: “Anyone who underestimates Russia is heading for defeat”. The Russian force mobilisation was a success; there is no problem with Russian morale; and Russia is preparing a huge winter offensive that will start soon. Russia has huge reserve forces (of up to 1.2 million men); whereas Ukraine now has 200,000 who are militarily trained for conflict. The ‘writing is on the wall’, in other words. Ukraine cannot win. It is appended with a huge shopping list of sought-after weapons. But the shopping list is ‘pie in the sky’; the West simply does not have them in inventory. Period.

The FT’s ‘Big Read’, by contrast, is a venting of deep western anger at those Russian ‘reformist’ siloviki technocrats who, instead of breaking with Putin over the SMO, instead shamefully enabled the Russian economy to survive western sanctions. The message uttered – through clenched teeth – is that Russia’s economy has successfully survived western sanctions. Leading US military strategist, Col. Douglas Macgregor, here expands on the messaging: Even the provision of seven or eight Patriot missiles is “no escalation”. It will have at best – ‘marginal impact’ on the Ukraine battlescape; it is mere window dressing. Scott Ritter, in discussion with Judge Neapolitano, believes that The Economist interviews reveal the West pushing aside Zelensky – as Zaluzhny administers his large dose of reality (that will be shocking to many sherpa loyalists). The Economist interview emphasis thus was unmistakably on General Zaluzhny, with Zelensky pointedly de-emphasised – which Ritter suggests indicates that Washington wishes to ‘switch leadership horses’. Another ‘message’?

Judge Nap/Scott Ritter

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“..Russia can conveniently defeat the whole of NATO as there is hardly anything “there”..

News From The NATOstan-Imposed Meat Grinder (Escobar)

The non-stop trashy parade of Western military analysts is now “assessing” that the first targets of an incoming, joint Russia-Belarus attack on the 404 black hole formerly known as Ukraine will be Lviv, Lutsk, Rivne, Zhytomyr, and why not throw Kiev in the mix straight out of a second axis. The Russian General Staff is attentively monitoring all the action and may even follow the advice of such “analysts”. And then there’s outright panic, as the Ministry of Defense announced that the Strategic Missile Forces have loaded two Yars ICBMs into their intended silos. Cue to widespread shrieks of horror of the “Russia Readies Nuclear Missile Capable Of Striking Deep Into US” variety. Some facts though never change. Number One is NATO as a figment of the collective West’s – extremely impaired – imagination. If push ever came to shove – as Straussian/neo-con armchair warriors hope and pray – Russia can conveniently defeat the whole of NATO as there is hardly anything “there”.

That, of course, would require a massive Russian mobilization. As it stands, Russia may look feeble in a few quarters as they activated at best 100,000 troops against possibly 1 million Ukrainian troops. It’s as if Moscow was not exactly seduced by the idea of “winning” – which may be the case, in a quite twisted way. Even now, Moscow has not mobilized enough troops to occupy Ukraine – which, in theory, would be imperative to completely “denazify” the Kiev racket. The operative concept though is “in theory”. Moscow in fact is busy demonstrating a completely new theory – irrespective of the fact that a few exalted souls have been peddling that Putin should be replaced by the FSB’s Alexander Bortnikov.

With its array of hypersonic missiles, Russia can knock out all NATO bridges, ports, airports as well as power stations, oil and natural gas storage, Rotterdam oil and natural gas installations, in a matter of a few hours. All energy production equipment across NATOstan would be destroyed. Europe would be shut off from natural resources. A dazed and confused Empire would be unable to move troops, any troops, to Europe. And still provocations run unabated. The recent attack by Tu-141 Ukrainian drones against Engels-2 airbase was blamed by Moscow on Kiev – which predictably denied all responsibility. Yet what really mattered was Moscow’s strategic messaging to US/NATO, with Putin flirting with the notion that sooner or later the response may be up a serious notch in case US/NATO weaponry supplied to Kiev is used to strike deep into sensitive Russian Federation territory.

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Drawn in too deep.

Why Time Isn’t Ripe For Ukraine Talks (Bhadrakumar)

A Russian-American “consensus” is forming that the Ukraine conflict is far from a climactic stage leading to peace talks. Russia’s stance is that any settlement will devolve upon Kiev recognising “realities” — namely, acceptance of Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporozhye and Kherson regions being integral parts of Russian Federation. But wouldn’t Russia know that no government in Kiev can afford to concede a demand that entails loss of over a quarter of the country’s territory? On the other hand, Kiev wants to vacate the Russian occupation and restore Ukraine’s 1991 borders and the Biden Administration is supportive. Wouldn’t they know that is a pipe dream?

Truly, since four of the erstwhile Ukrainian oblasts (excluding Crimea) are far from under Russia’s total control and the Kremlin intends to fully “liberate” them, the fighting continues in Donbass and further Russian moves to gain full control over Zaporozhye and Kherson regions will depend on its outcome. But the big question remains: How could any government in Kiev surrender vast tracts of Ukrainian territory after such sacrifices by the people? That may leave Russia with no choice but to seek total victory. The attitude of the Biden Administration is crucial. The clearest indication that the US is far from in a hurry to negotiate comes from none other than the White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan whose visit to Kiev last month (just before the US midterms) had triggered a flurry of speculations that Washington was pressuring President Zelensky to negotiate.

Now, Sullivan’s remarks at an appearance at the Carnegie last weekend made it clear that the US is in Ukraine for the long haul. He said: “We don’t know when this is going to end up. What we do know is that it is our job to continue to sustain our military support to Ukraine so that they are in their best possible position on the battlefield, that if and when diplomacy is ripe, they will be in the best possible position at the negotiating table. “That moment is not ripe now, and so, as a result, we’ve gone to Congress and asked for a substantial amount of further resources to be able to continue to ensure that Ukraine has the means to fight this war. We’re confident we will get bipartisan support for that…

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“Auto-nomous weapons already exist, capable of defining, assessing and targeting their own perceived threats and thus in a position to start their own war.”

How To Avoid Another World War (Kissinger)

As the world’s leaders strive to end the war in which two nuclear powers contest a conventionally armed country, they should also reflect on the impact on this conflict and on long-term strategy of incipient high–technology and artificial intelligence. Auto-nomous weapons already exist, capable of defining, assessing and targeting their own perceived threats and thus in a position to start their own war. Once the line into this realm is crossed and hi-tech becomes standard weaponry – and computers become the principal executors of strategy – the world will find itself in a condition for which as yet it has no established concept. How can leaders exercise control when computers prescribe strategic instructions on a scale and in a manner that inherently limits and threatens human input?


How can civilisation be preserved amid such a maelstrom of conflicting information, perceptions and destructive capabilities? No theory for this encroaching world yet exists, and consultative efforts on this subject have yet to evolve – perhaps because meaningful negotiations might disclose new discoveries, and that disclosure itself constitutes a risk for the future. Overcoming the disjunction between advanced technology and the concept of strategies for controlling it, or even understanding its full implications, is as important an issue today as climate change, and it requires leaders with a command of both technology and history.The quest for peace and order has two components that are sometimes treated as contradictory: the pursuit of elements of security and the requirement for acts of reconciliation. If we cannot achieve both, we will not be able to reach either. The road of diplomacy may appear complicated and frustrating. But progress to it requires both the vision and the courage to undertake the journey.

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“Previously he’s been on record as saying “It was not a wise American policy to attempt to include Ukraine into NATO.”

Ukraine Blasts ‘Appeaser’ Henry Kissinger For Urging Peace Negotiations (ZH)

It didn’t take long for the Ukrainian government to blast and dismiss former US Secretary of State Kissinger’s peace plan proposal as “appeasing the aggressor”. “Mr. Kissinger still has not understood anything… neither the nature of this war, nor its impact on the world order,” Ukrainian presidential aide Mykhailo Podolyak said in response to the 99-year old influential US statesman’s Saturday op-ed in The Spectator entitled How to Avoid Another World War. “The prescription that the ex-Secretary of State calls for, but is afraid to say out loud, is simple: appease the aggressor by sacrificing parts of Ukraine with guarantees of non-aggression against the other states of Eastern Europe,” Podolyak stated, expressing a firm rejection of what Kissinger outlined in his piece.

The Ukrainian official added that the proposal was simplistic, saying: “All supporters of simple solutions should remember the obvious: any agreement with the devil – a bad peace at the expense of Ukrainian territories – will be a victory for Putin and a recipe for success for autocrats around the world.” In his weekend op-ed, Kissinger had warned that continued attempts to render Russia “impotent” could result in an uncontrollable and unpredictable spiral. He laid out that along with the sought after “dissolution” of Russia would come a massive power vacuum out of which new threats to the whole world would emerge as bigger powers rush in. “The dissolution of Russia or destroying its ability for strategic policy could turn its territory encompassing 11 time zones into a contested vacuum,” Kissinger wrote.

“Its competing societies might decide to settle their disputes by violence. Other countries might seek to expand their claims by force. All these dangers would be compounded by the presence of thousands of nuclear weapons which make Russia one of the world’s two largest nuclear powers.” Among the more controversial aspects of Kissinger’s plan was his suggesting the possibility of referendums for contested territories now occupied by Russia and still being fought over “which have changed hands repeatedly over the centuries” [i.e.: particularly the Donbas] – according to the essay. Kissinger last May also angered Ukrainian officails for daring to propose that Ukraine be willing to recognize Crimea as under Russia, and in return Russian forces would fall back to their lines before the Feb. 24 invasion. Previously he’s been on record as saying “It was not a wise American policy to attempt to include Ukraine into NATO.”

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Erdogan plays this game a lot smarter.

Moscow: Delivery Of Greece’s S-300s To Ukraine Would Be ‘Very Provocative’ (K.)

The spokesperson of the Russian Foreign Ministry Maria Zakharova stated on Monday that a potential delivery of Greece’s S-300 PMU1 missile defense system to Ukraine would be considered a very provocative move.“We consider plans to supply the Kyiv regime with S-300s or other Russian/Soviet air defense systems that will be used against Russia very provocative,” stated Zakharova. “The Greek authorities recently underlined their readiness to supply Ukraine with the S-300 PMU1 missile defense system, on condition of receiving additionally American Patriot missile defense systems to replace them,” she added. “There is a complete indifference by Greece on the international limitations on arms trading,” she concluded, stating that the Russian armed forces will locate and destroy all military supplies sent to Ukraine.

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“Bribery and corruption are endemic to the Brussels system — and most of it is perfectly legal.”

How Lobbyists Captured The EU (Fazi)

Addressing a recent European Parliament debate on “human rights in the context of the World Cup”, vice-president Eva Kaili had an unexpected message: “Qatar is a frontrunner in labour rights.” So, perhaps we shouldn’t have been surprised when, last week, she was among six people arrested by Belgian police amid allegations of Qatari corruption and money laundering . Members of the EU establishment have been quick to spin the issue as a problem limited to a few bad apples. Several European Parliament officials told Politico the allegations were limited to a “few individuals” who had gone astray. Others, however, expect more names to be drawn into the widening dragnet. But whether or not the scandal extends to other people is beside the point.

By focusing on “Qatargate”, we risk losing sight of the fact that the scandal is a symptom of a much deeper and more widespread malaise, involving not just the European Parliament but all EU institutions. Bribery and corruption are endemic to the Brussels system — and most of it is perfectly legal. It is estimated that there are more than 30,000 lobbyists working in Brussels, making it the second capital of lobbying in the world after Washington, DC. Most are in the service of corporations and their lobby groups, with huge sums at their disposal: the combined lobbying budget of the 12,400 companies and organisations on the EU lobby register has grown steadily over the years — especially since the pandemic — and today amounts to €1.8 billion.

Topping the list are Big Tech, Big Pharma and Big Energy giants such as Apple, Google, Meta, Bayer and Shell, as well as industry associations such as the European Chemical Industry Council, the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA), and BusinessEurope — all of which declare annual lobbying budgets of €4-6 million. The true figure is likely to be significantly higher, given the long history of businesses under-reporting their spending. Big Pharma and Big Tech, in particular, both significantly boosted their lobbying firepower throughout the pandemic. EFPIA alone — which represents Pfizer, AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson — increased its spending by 20% in 2020. A conservative estimate of total annual EU lobby spending by Big Pharma is now close to €40 million per year, with nearly 300 lobbyists officially working in Brussels to push the industry’s interests (though the actual number is probably higher, since disclosure rules do not capture all the spending on law firms, academic partnerships and activities in individual countries).

It’s safe to say the investment was amply repaid: by the end of 2021, the EU had signed €71 billion worth of confidential contracts, securing up to 4.6 billion doses of vaccines (more than ten doses for each European citizen). EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen negotiated its biggest deal yet with Pfizer — for up to 1.8 billion doses, worth up to €35 billion if fully exercised — via a series of text messages with the company’s chief. The European Public Prosecutor’s Office has opened an investigation into the matter. Such extreme cases, however, mask the true extent of the structural problem that pervades every aspect of the Brussels system. It goes without saying that this army of well-funded lobbyists, which far outnumbers and outspends public interest groups, gives corporations a massive influence over the European decision-making and legislative process.

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“Up rose a social movement, Wokery, that had the earmarks of a histrionic religious mania, with Satanic overtones. Up rose the demons, the Antifa louts, the BLM arsonists, the drag queens.”

A Christmas Parable (Kunstler)

It started when the women of the professional and managerial class watched their avatar, Hillary Clinton, lose the 2016 election against a man who seemed the quintessence of everything they hated about Daddydom. Donald Trump, flawed to perfection, wrecked the chance of the amalgamated successful women of America to run the national household. Out came the pussy-hats, the Wiccans, and the celebrities threatening to “blow up the White House.” Out came a savage animus against men generally, and a campaign to feminize them in retaliation — and then punish them for objecting to it. Up rose a social movement, Wokery, that had the earmarks of a histrionic religious mania, with Satanic overtones. Up rose the demons, the Antifa louts, the BLM arsonists, the drag queens.

Thus unrolled a national psychodrama that continues to spool out as every system, every business, every institution in our country wobbles and flies apart now. The men embedded in the professional and managerial class tried in 2016 to chivalrously protect their womens’ avatar and her steadfast followers and, failing ignobly that grim November day, then turned to actually attack their adversary, Donald Trump, with the explicit intent to destroy him by all means necessary. In the years-long process, they devolved into criminality, and in so doing they entered a vicious cycle of lying about everything they did to escape the consequences of their ostensible exercise in gallantry. In effect, the people running things went from a war against a particular person to a war against reality and its twin sister, truth.

Now they are deeply invested in unreality and untruth to the point where they have forgotten how this whole thing started and all they can do is desperately patch the dike they had to construct against a deluge of information composed of truth and reality coming at them like a tsunami rolling across the sea. The harder they work at this futile task of defense, the more absurd they make themselves, leading to ridicule, humiliation, and, finally condemnation in whatever remains of the legal arena, where their deeds will finally be judged. The first stage of that outcome for them is pretending that none of it is happening. That’s why The New York Times and Washington Post ignore the news that the gallant knights of the FBI and several other tentacles of the Intel octopus mounted a ferocious, long-running psy-op through the new phenomenon of social media — that happened to rise in importance through this whole period of national discord. In effect, the intel agencies seized the transmitters (as Fidel Castro might put it) and used them very effectively to control their hallowed narratives.

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Did he hold the poll just to expose the bots?

Will Musk Step Down After Twitter Poll? (Turley)

Many of us have supported Elon Musk in his fight to restore free speech protections to Twitter despite concerns over decisions like the use of polls to determine if individuals should be allowed back on the social media site. He has now subjected himself to the same poll judgment in asking if he should step down as CEO. After more than 17.5 million users voted, 57 percent said yes. Unless Musk was looking for an exit, it was a mistake. He handed his critics an easy opportunity to remove him. For the left, Musk has been a nightmare because he cannot be bullied like most corporate executives. He is an eccentric billionaire who has refused to yield despite a full mobilization of the political, media, and business establishment. That could now change.

While many on the left spent weeks dismissing Twitter’s polls as unscientific, they are now demanding that Musk follow through and step down. Some 42.5% of users wanted him to stay. On Twitter Sunday, Musk seemed to say that he would follow the results but expressed pessimism about the prospects for a new CEO. He said that the person “must like pain a lot” to run a company that “has been in the fast lane to bankruptcy.” He further noted that “no one wants the job who can actually keep Twitter alive. There is no successor.” That is precisely why the left wants Musk out. As shown in companies like Disney, the left can muscle executives to take actions even against the interests of the company or shareholders. The left has strived to make such campaigns personal for executives, who often yield rather than risk being individually tagged and targeted.

That is why it was essential to remove Musk. The political and media establishments generally are unstoppable forces — but they met their first immovable object in Musk. That immovable object has now taken a step to remove himself from the path of the establishment. One can hardly blame him, but, as Democratic members warned Facebook not to even consider following the path of Twitter, the prospect of Musk’s departure will strengthen the efforts to maintain censorship over social media. It is hard to ask anyone to continue to stand against this alliance of political, media, and business forces. Musk has been made a persona non grata for seeking to reduce censorship on the site. He has put billions on the line for the free speech of others. One can certainly understand why he would want this cup to pass from his lips. However, if he stays the course, his work at Twitter could prove to be his greatest legacy in resisting the trend toward censorship and speech controls in social media.

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Do we understand how crazy this is?

TWITTER FILES: How The FBI Moved To Quash Hunter Laptop Story (ZH)

In the latest episode of ‘THE TWITTER FILES,’ journalist Michael Shellenberger reveals “How the FBI & intelligence community discredited factual information about Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings both after and *before* The New York Post revealed the contents of his laptop on October 14, 2020.” The story begins in December 2019 when a Delaware computer store owner named John Paul (J.P.) Mac Isaac contacts the FBI about a laptop that Hunter Biden had left with him On Dec 9, 2019, the FBI issues a subpoena for, and takes, Hunter Biden’s laptop. By Aug 2020, Mac Isaac still had not heard back from the FBI, even though he had discovered evidence of criminal activity. And so he emails Rudy Giuliani, who was under FBI surveillance at the time. In early Oct, Giuliani gives it to @nypost.

Shortly before 7 pm ET on October 13, Hunter Biden’s lawyer, George Mesires, emails JP Mac Isaac. Hunter and Mesires had just learned from the New York Post that its story about the laptop would be published the next day. 7. At 9:22 pm ET (6:22 PT), FBI Special Agent Elvis Chan sends 10 documents to Twitter’s then-Head of Site Integrity, Yoel Roth, through Teleporter, a one-way communications channel from the FBI to Twitter. 8. The next day, October 14, 2020, The New York Post runs its explosive story revealing the business dealings of President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter. Every single fact in it was accurate. 9. And yet, within hours, Twitter and other social media companies censor the NY Post article, preventing it from spreading and, more importantly, undermining its credibility in the minds of many Americans. Why is that? What, exactly, happened?

10. On Dec 2, @mtaibbi described the debate inside Twitter over its decision to censor a wholly accurate article. Since then, we have discovered new info that points to an organized effort by the intel community to influence Twitter & other platforms

Berman

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“This should be a massive scandal and likely it would have been had it occurred under a Trump Administration.”

‘Twitter Files’ Make it Clear: We Must Abolish the FBI (Ron Paul)

As we learn more and more from the “Twitter Files,” it is becoming all too obvious that Federal agencies such as the FBI viewed the First Amendment of our Constitution as an annoyance and an impediment. In Friday’s release from the pre-Musk era, journalist Matt Taibbi makes an astute observation: Twitter was essentially an FBI subsidiary.The FBI, we now know, was obsessed with Twitter. We learned that agents sent Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth some 150 emails between 2020 and 2022. Those emails regularly featured demands from US government officials for the “private” social media company to censor comments and ban commenters they did not like.

The Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF), a US government entity that included the FBI as well as other US intelligence agencies expressly forbidden from domestic activities, numbered 80 agents engaged regularly in telling Twitter which Tweets to censor and which accounts to ban. The Department of Homeland Security brought in outside government contractors and (government-funded) non-governmental organizations to separately pressure Twitter to suppress speech the US government did not like. US Federal government agencies literally handed Twitter lists of Americans it wanted to see silenced, and Twitter complied. Let that sink in.

This should be a massive scandal and likely it would have been had it occurred under a Trump Administration. Indeed, Congress would be gearing up for Impeachment 3.0 if Trump-allied officials had engaged in such egregious behavior. But since these US government employees were by-and-large acting to suppress pro-Trump sentiment, all we hear are crickets. What is interesting about these Twitter revelations is how obsessed the FBI and its government partners were with satire and humor. Even minor Twitter accounts with small numbers of followers were constantly flagged by the Feds for censorship and deletion. But knowledge of history helps us understand this obsession: in Soviet times the population was always engaged in joking about the ineptitude, corruption, and idiocy of the political class. Underground publications known as samizdat were rich with satire, humor, and ridicule.

Go home

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More insanity.

FBI Agent Elvis Chan Gave Twitter Execs Top Secret Clearance (Senger)

New internal documents from Twitter, revealed today as part of Elon Musk’s “Twitter Files” series, show FBI Agent Elvis Chan arranged for Top Secret security clearance—the highest level of US national security clearance—to be granted to Twitter executives for the purpose of facilitating the censorship of suspected misinformation in advance of the 2020 election. Elvis Chan has long been closely involved in working with social media companies to identify and censor suspected misinformation from sources both foreign and domestic, especially with regard to suspected election interference. This has included regularly sending lists of social media posts to social media companies for them to take down, as well as the suspension of the New York Post and others for what was subsequently borne out to be a true story about Hunter Biden’s laptop.

In his deposition last month, Chan described how the pressure that he and other FBI agents placed on social media companies to censor information about Hunter Biden’s laptop stemmed from a “thesis” that the incriminating content may have been uploaded onto the laptop as part of a Russian “hack-and-leak” operation. But the basis for this Russian hack-and-leak thesis is disputed, in no small part because the FBI took possession of the laptop in December 2019, nearly a year before the story was censored, and because there did not appear to be any new intelligence to suggest that Russia was interfering in the 2020 election. Elvis Chan’s regular emails and weekly meetings with social media executives raise new questions about the level of coordination taking place between the federal government and social media companies for the purpose of censoring suspected misinformation shared by ordinary citizens.

The level of this coordination is currently the subject of lawsuits including my own, Changizi v. Dept. of Health & Human Services, and Missouri v. Biden, in which a damning round of discovery previously revealed that more than 80 federal officials across a dozen agencies had been involved in the censorship of social media content. Upon hearing the news, one FBI agent expressed disgust at what he described as the “gross subservience” that’s been shown by social media companies to the FBI, noting that the “default position” is for private companies to be “totally adversarial” to inquiries by the FBI about their customers.

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Sad.

Canada Health Director Who Lead Vaccine Rollout Dies Suddenly at 35 (GP)

The Director of Parliamentary Affairs at Health Canada, who oversaw the country’s response to Covid-19 and the rollout of the vaccine, passed away unexpectedly at the age of 35. Adam Exton, a long-time Liberal Party organizer, died suddenly on Friday, December 9th, according to his family.“It is with great sadness that the family of Adam Exton announce his passing on December 9th, 2022 at the age of 35 in Ottawa, Ontario. Much loved son of Wendy Exton, brother of Bradley Exton (Ellen Wessel) and son of Allan Exton. He will also be deeply missed by his loving girlfriend, Reesha, as well as his many cousins, aunts, uncles and grandmother, Bette Readman,” his obituary reads. “As a young person, Adam became actively involved in politics and had a passion for public service and volunteering in the community. In 2012, Adam won the Ontario Young Liberal Volunteer of the Year Award.


He received a degree in political science from the University of Toronto. Adam spent many years working at various levels of government, eventually holding the position of Director of Parliamentary Affairs at Health Canada.” Adam Exton was a part of the group that orchestrated the response to Canada’s totalitarian mandates against its own citizens.His obituary stated, “During the challenging times of the pandemic, Adam was part of the leadership team that led Canada’s health response to COVID-19. He was a talented and respected campaign manager that was instrumental in helping to bring cabinet ministers and members to Queens Park and Ottawa. Adam always did and will continue to make his family extremely proud of who he was and his service to his community and country.”

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Smart dogs

 

 

Larry

 

 

It’s a wonderful life
https://twitter.com/i/status/1604624935569313793

 

 

 

 

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Jan 032022
 


Albert Bierstadt Storm in the Mountains c1870

 

 

In my first article of the year, I must thank everyone who has followed us, and read us, and commented, especially those of you who have made donations both to the Automatic Earth, and to the Monastiraki kitchen for the homeless in Athens, Greece. Both don’t reach millions of people, but the thousands we do connect with, we reach them well. Every reader who learns something is a win, and every homeless person who gets a good meal, well, that’s obvious.

Thank you so much. You are the ones who make this happen.

 

 

If I say that 2020 was the year of the virus, and 2021 the year of the vaccine, most people would probably agree. But 2021 was so much more than that; it was also the year of propaganda, media capture and narrative control at levels beyond anything we’ve ever seen. Even if many -most- people haven’t experienced it that way.

And that has likely had more negative impact on us than the vaccine itself. A close call perhaps, I know. The good thing that has come out of this is that so much of it has been exposed. Much of the underlying tendencies towards authoritarianism, and disregard for truth, and blind desire for profit, for a Great Reset, population control, abandonment of freedoms and human rights, it’s all there now for us to see.

We need to act upon that exposure. Get rid of Fauci, Walensky, Pfizer, CDC, and their peers across the planet, of the WHO, of all health “experts” that receive income from/via Pfizer et al (which is the vast majority), put a halt to the influence of money (Bill Gates) on health policy. A society, a country, need to be their own boss over their own fundamental policies. And that means paying for it ourselves.

And not have policies easily changed by a group of politicians and unelected officials (“experts”) who happen to have grabbed power at a particular point in time. A society needs roots, and ours have been uprooted. From principles, from laws, from rights. This will not be easy, we already gave them a 2 year advantage, but if we don’t use this time when the spotlights are directed at them, we will lose even much more than we have already lost. We’ve let them play their games, virtually uncontested, and we cannot afford that.

This appears to culminate in Twitter’s handling of Joe Rogan and Robert Malone recently, and that’s fine, Twitter is not big enough to tackle Rogan, while CNN and MSNBC audiences are drops in the ocean compared to Joe’s. They bit off one too big for them to chew.

But that’s just the US, and that’s just one podcaster, one voice. The control virus that has come with the corona virus has delved much deeper into the world’s various societies. Just yesterday, we saw video from my country of birth, Holland, where police set attack dogs on peaceful elderly protesters, and say what you will, but that country is neither free nor a democracy. That claim is 100% obsolete.

That it is accepted regardless gives credence, and a lot, to Matthias Desmet and his “Mass Formation Syndrome” theories, but we should not really need his analysis, useful as it may be, to figure out what is going on. All we need to do is take a step back and wonder what the hell is going on. To ponder how we saw our societies 2+ years ago, how we ourselves would have seen these recent developments in the light of back then. We can’t have forgotten all of it?!

 

 

That Anthony Fauci is still in his job is absolutely insane. He became head of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), 40 years ago, he’s 81, older than Joe Biden. He’s been building ties to Big Pharma, especially Pfizer, all that time, in the shadows, the best place for such deals.

He was in his position when Pfizer received the biggest criminal fine in US corporate history in 2012, of $2.3 billion, for lying and cheating and more. Now, a few years later, Fauci works with Pfizer and the rest of Big Pharma, and makes their owners billionaires and their shareholders very rich. He is the very last person who should have been in his where he is, both 2 years ago and now.

Fauci is not the best doctor in the US, he’s just the best connected to the pharma industry. That guarantees Americans the worst deal they could get, not the best. And of course anyone else at the upper echelons of the NIAID, CDC, FDA, they need to go too. Fauci et al put them there.

In the US and elsewhere, any politician, individual or through their party or otherwise, and any health experts, individual or through their organization or company, who have received funds from Big Pharma or Bill Gates, should be discarded, put out by the curb. We should be able to figure this out, because it’s NOW that they stand exposed. Perhaps not TO Covid, but certainly BY Covid.

It’s the only way we can cleanse the system. Which is needed if we want to survive, with our health, our conscience, and our freedoms and rights. We have let an enormous amount of mold, rot, grow at the pillars of our societies, and we should be glad we can see it now, because this allows us to exterminate it.

We cannot allow Pfizer to gain even more influence over our health systems. Which will be a very hard fight, because our politicians and experts handed them $100s of billions, which they are using as we speak to buy more politicians and lobbyists and influence, and profit.

You can’t stop this by voting for another party. Pfizer probably has more lobbyists on K Street than all of Big Oil put together. And they have them in party and every every country that matters, in every strategic position that matters, and they will soon have many more. No, you must cut their entire voice out of the politics and health care of your society. Yes, very difficult, sure. But today, you can at least see them. For a short time. That won’t last.

 

 

Along with all that the World Economic Forum, and their Great Reset, it will have to go. They don’t do anyone any good but themselves. A big club that we ain’t in. Which reminds me:

The Automatic Earth has shifted a lot towards Covid over the past 2 years, and surely many readers are not 100% happy with that. But the financial world is still captive to central banks that won’t allow price discovery, which makes “markets” just fake pantomimes that former investors get rich in while the poor suffer.

While the climate issue has been captured by the likes of COP 26, a toy for the rich who want to make you pay to “go green”, in accordance with Davos and the WEF. I feel sorry for the well-meaning people who expect anything from that set-up. Nobody who owes their money or their power to fossil fuels will voluntarily give up either, but they will make you fork over for windmills and solar cells whose energy dynamics you don’t actually understand.

Just like with Covid, if you want to free yourselves from the narrative, you will have to open your eyes and go to battle. An untested vaccine won’t set you free, and neither will an electric car. Those two are just things you are being sold by the narrative.

But believe you me, the no. 1 issue today is the vaccines. We need to stop those, before all of our children grow up with timebombs in their bodies. Every jab means more spike proteins, and boosters are worse because they come after your immune system has learned, and prepared for, how to attack those proteins, who by then may be in every organ in your body. And attack them it will, because they are toxic agents.

I don’t want to tell people to get a vaccine or not, but I do want to tell them to be very careful, to get informed well, and only then give their consent, if they decide to get jabbed. It’s just that you have to be confident that your immune system is strong enough to defend you from the effects of the vaccine, and that’s the opposite of what 99% of people understand is happening to them.

So, 2020 year of the virus, 2021 year of the vaccine, and 2022 year of the adverse effects of the vaccines?! And/or a grand awakening?

 

 

 

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Oct 192021
 


René Magritte The song of love 1948

 

 

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

 

 

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

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

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


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

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

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

And the “big achievements”?

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

 

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

 

 

Puerto Rico:

 

Uttar Pradesh:

 

Tokyo:

 

And Indonesia:


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

 

 

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

 

Taiwan:

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

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Dec 222020
 
 December 22, 2020  Posted by at 7:29 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , ,  11 Responses »


John William Waterhouse It’s Sweet Doing Nothing / Dolce Far Niente 1879

 

 

The very first thing we must conclude from looking at the pork-laden $900 billion US “stimulus bill” is that this is all Washington is capable of anymore. This is it. That it has nothing to do with which party you vote for. If you don’t come to that conclusion, you’re seriously disoriented.

Both parties have been talking about the bill for 8 months, and blamed each other for any delays, while filling up the bill with by now over 5,500 pages of pork, and given representatives who don’t know the contents, just a few hours before voting on it. That is not an accident, that is by design, and both parties designed it together.

Neither gives a flying hoot about their own voters, which the bill is supposed to serve, other than at election time – and even then. If they did, they could have issued a separate bill half a year ago. But the system doesn’t work like that. The system says that if you want to save/serve the people, you absolutely must serve a thousand other interests at the same time. And that’s where things run off the rails.

The Republicans insist on including one special interest that their lobbyists say can’t be left out, then the Democrats and their lobbies say okay, but then we want this interest in, etc., and before you know it, you have 5,500 pages of special interests, and the amounts going to the people will have to be cut because the total amounts are starting to look too high.

Do note -again- that it’s the lobbyists who write the legislation, not the politicians. The politicians, in the media, go through this very predictable cattle trade, they reach an accord, and then they turn around and blame each other for anything their voters and representatives might have wanted in there but didn’t get. Just like they did for the 8 previous months. Same difference. Cool, calculated, a blame game between friends.

 

But the Americans the stimulus is supposed to be for, have no seat at the table. Only the people they voted for do, and among those, only the ones who’ve been there long enough, 30-40 years, and who have amassed huge multi-million dollar fortunes while on 200-300K salaries. Newly elected reps and senators have no say. They may gain a say, but only if they comply with what the lobbyists tell them to do.

If 200 million Americans finally get a $600 check, sometime in spring 2021(?!), that would cost $120 billion. If 300 million do, $180 billion. The pork stimulus package is for $900 billion. And they want you to believe this is meant to help the people, and most of the people believe that. And that works too, because of the way the media, very much complicit in the charade, “report” the entire thing.

But c’mon man! Every American could get a $600 check every month for the next half year if the corporate subsidies and all sorts of other pork were left out of bills like this. But that’s not how Washington operates. Washington is not about people, it’s about money.

Many poor Americans used to have to work 2-3 jobs to make ends meet, but most are lucky to find even one job these days, let alone enough to make ends meet. It’s cool, calm and calculated, and it makes no difference at all whether it’s Pelosi, McConnell, Schumer or Lindsey Graham. They’re in a big club, and you ain’t in it. But at least please stop believing the nonsense they’re spouting. They live in their own world, and you live in yours. And never the twain shall meet.

Of course it can make sense to support businesses as well in virustime. But there’s no urgent need to do that in the very same bill that is meant to support the people. It’s just that the latter is the ideal vehicle to hide the pork in. A separate bill to support business would be much more transparent, and people could see what’s in it. And it wouldn’t be 5,500 pages either.

It’s a design, it’s a model, it’s how this has worked for decades. The same decades that the decision makers have been “serving” on Capitol Hill. There is no accident anywhere in there. It’s a design.

 

 

 

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May 062020
 


Harris&Ewing Less taxes, more jobs, US Chamber of Commerce campaign 1939

 

Now-Dominant Strain Of Coronavirus Could Be More Contagious Than Original (LAT)
New Mutation Indicates That Coronavirus Might Be Weakening (NYP)
Coronavirus Started Infecting People Globally Late Last Year (Hill)
UK COVID-19 Death Toll Rises Above 32,000, Highest In Europe (R.)
Pseudo-Science Behind The Assault On Hydroxychloroquine (ZH)
Goat and Pawpaw ‘Test Positive’ For COVID19 In Tanzania (AlJ)
Pennsylvania Woman Jailed For Refusing To Quarantine After Positive Test (Hill)
White House To Wind Down Coronavirus Task Force, Focus Shifts To Aftermath (R.)
UK Government ‘Using Pandemic To Transfer NHS Duties To Private Sector’ (G.)
K Street Requests Taxpayer Bailout Of Corporate Lobbyists (IC)
US Airlines Burn Through $10 Billion A Month As Traffic Plummets (R.)
After The Covid Rush: Brace For America’s Version Of Saudi Aramco (Cox)
Bluetooth Inventors See Problems For Coronavirus Contact Tracing (IC)
French Beekeepers Look To Lockdown Exit To Sell Bumper Honey Harvest (R.)
Did The Mueller Team Violate Brady and Flynn Orders? (Turley)
China Fires Entire Propaganda Team: US Media Already Does Their Job (BB)

 

 

• US #coronavirus deaths rise by 2,333 in 24 hours: Johns Hopkins

 

 

 

Cases 3,744,765 (+ 82,494 from yesterday’s 3,662,271)

Deaths 258,884 (+ 6,137 from yesterday’s 252,747)

 

 

 

From Worldometer yesterday evening -before their day’s close-

 

 

From Worldometer

 

 

From SCMP:

 

 

From COVID19Info.live:

 

 

 

 

I was reading two things (first two articles in this overview): 1) that a new dominant corona strain appears more contagious, and 2) that it is a weakening strain. Now, that makes perfect sense, it’s a trade-off that’s ubiquitous in nature: when a virus becomes more contagious, it kills fewer of its new hosts. That way the death number remains the same, and enough potential hosts remain.

But that’s not necessarily what people see. The LA Times seems to expect the opposite: “The Los Alamos study does not indicate that the new version of the virus is more lethal than the original.”

It’s of course possible that a more contagious strain is also more lethal, but it wouldn’t seem to be the more logical chain of events.

Now-Dominant Strain Of Coronavirus Could Be More Contagious Than Original (LAT)

Scientists have identified a new strain of the coronavirus that has become dominant worldwide and appears to be more contagious than the versions that spread in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new study led by scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The new strain appeared in February in Europe, migrated quickly to the East Coast of the United States and has been the dominant strain across the world since mid-March, the scientists wrote. In addition to spreading faster, it may make people vulnerable to a second infection after a first bout with the disease, the report warned.

The 33-page report was posted Thursday on BioRxiv, a website that researchers use to share their work before it is peer-reviewed, an effort to speed up collaborations with scientists working on COVID-19 vaccines or treatments. That research has been largely based on the genetic sequence of earlier strains and might not be effective against the new one. Scientists with major organizations working on a vaccine or drugs to combat the coronavirus have told The Times that they are pinning their hopes on initial evidence that the virus is stable and not likely to mutate the way the influenza virus does, requiring a new vaccine every year. The Los Alamos report could upend that assumption.

The mutation identified in the new report affects the now-infamous spikes on the exterior of the coronavirus, which allow it to enter human respiratory cells. The report’s authors said they felt an “urgent need for an early warning” so that vaccines and drugs under development around the world will be effective against the mutated strain. In many places where the new strain appeared, it quickly infected far more people than the earlier strains that came out of Wuhan, China, and within weeks it was the only strain that was prevalent in some nations, according to the report. The new strain’s dominance over its predecessors suggests that it is more infectious, according to the report, though exactly why is not yet known.

The coronavirus, known to scientists as SARS-CoV-2, has infected more than 3.5 million people around the world and caused more than 250,000 COVID-19 deaths since its discovery late last year. The report was based on a computational analysis of more than 6,000 coronavirus sequences from around the world collected by the Global Initiative for Sharing All Influenza Data, a public-private organization in Germany. Time and again, the analysis found the new version was transitioning to become dominant.

[..] The Los Alamos study does not indicate that the new version of the virus is more lethal than the original. People infected with the mutated strain appear to have higher viral loads. But the study’s authors from the University of Sheffield found that among a local sample of 447 patients, hospitalization rates were about the same for people infected with either virus version. Even if the new strain is no more dangerous than the others, it could still complicate efforts to bring the pandemic under control. That would be an issue if the mutation makes the virus so different from earlier strains that people who have immunity to them would not be immune to the new version.

Read more …

If it would follow SARS, it would die out completely. But that’s a long way away, and wishful thinking.

New Mutation Indicates That Coronavirus Might Be Weakening (NYP)

A new coronavirus mutation discovered by Arizona researchers mirrors a change that occurred as the 2003 SARS virus began to weaken, the researchers announced. Lead study author Dr. Efrem Lim, an assistant professor at Arizona State University’s Biodesign Institute, and his team use a new technology called next-generation sequencing to rapidly read through all 30,000 chemical letters of the SARS-CoV-2 genome, or genetic code. That technology helps researchers determine how the virus is spreading, mutating and adapting over time. Out of the 382 nasal swab samples the researchers examined from coronavirus patients in the state, a single sample was missing a significant chunk of its genome. 81 of the letters were permanently deleted, according to the new study published in the Journal of Virology.

“One of the reasons why this mutation is of interest is because it mirrors a large deletion that arose in the 2003 SARS outbreak,” Lim said in a statement. During the middle and late phases of the 2003 SARS epidemic, the virus accumulated mutations that lessened its strength, according to the researchers. “Where the deletion occurs in the genome is pretty meaningful because it’s a known immune protein which means it counteracts the host’s antiviral response,” Lim told the Daily Mail. A weakened virus that causes less severe symptoms may get a leg up if it is able to spread efficiently through populations by people who don’t know they are infected, the scientists say. However, it’s too soon to say whether the novel coronavirus is beginning to lose its potency, according to the researchers.

“The takeaway is that one virus had a large deletion which demonstrates that it is possible for the virus to transmit without having complete portions of its genetic material,” study co-author Matthew Scotch said in an email. “This was one virus and we do not suggest that this means a ‘weakening’ of any kind.” All of the patients whose samples the Arizona scientists analyzed had some clinical coronavirus symptoms — meaning that even the version with 81 deletions was still strong enough to make the patient at least somewhat sick, the Mail reported. This is the first time such a deletion has been seen in the 16,000 coronavirus genomes that have been sequenced to date, according to the researchers. That’s less than half a percent of the strains circulating, according to the scientists. There are about 3.6 million confirmed COVID-19 cases worldwide. “This is a drop in the bucket,” Lim told the Mail.

Read more …

This would be a less contagious strain.

Coronavirus Started Infecting People Globally Late Last Year (Hill)

The coronavirus has been circulating among people since late 2019 and appears to have experienced a highly rapid spread after the first infection, according to a new genetic analysis of 7,600 patients around the world. Researchers in Britain wrote in a report published Tuesday in the journal Infection, Genetics and Evolution that they examined samples taken at different times and from different places, concluding that the virus first began infecting people late last year. The researchers found evidence of quick spread but found no indication that it is becoming any easier to transmit the virus, which was first identified in Wuhan, the capital of China’s Hubei province, in December 2019.


“The virus is changing, but this in itself does not mean it’s getting worse,” genetics researcher Francois Balloux of the University College London Genetics Institute told CNN. The study indicated that infections in the U.S. and Europe specifically could have occurred weeks or months before the first official cases were reported in January and February, making it more difficult to find “Patient Zero” in any particular area. The findings shot down hopes from some doctors that the virus had in fact been circulating under the radar for months before it burst onto the scene, which would have indicated that there could be some immunity already built up. But Balloux told CNN at most only 10 percent of the population has been exposed to the coronavirus.

Read more …

I was wondering why the numbers are so different, but one thing at least is that numbers for the UK, which includes Scotland and Northern Ireland, do not include Scotland and Northern Ireland. Curious.

And then there’s more: the UK appears to undercount deaths by some 20,000.

UK COVID-19 Death Toll Rises Above 32,000, Highest In Europe (R.)

More than 32,000 people in the United Kingdom have died with suspected COVID-19, the highest official toll yet reported in Europe, according to data published on Tuesday. The Office for National Statistics said 29,648 deaths had taken place as of April 24 in England and Wales with COVID-19 mentioned in death certificates. Including deaths for Scotland and Northern Ireland, the official toll now stands at 32,313. That is more than Italy, previously Europe’s worst hit country, though its toll does not include suspected cases. Ministers dislike comparisons of the headline death toll, saying that excess mortality – the number of deaths from all causes that exceed the average for the time of year – is a more meaningful metric.

 

Chris Giles is economics editor at the FT.

Read more …

The case of the “whistleblower”, Rick Bright, is strongly linked to HCQ.

Pseudo-Science Behind The Assault On Hydroxychloroquine (ZH)

Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) was accepted as a COVID-19 treatment by the medical community in the US and worldwide by early April. 67% of the US physicians said they would prescribe HCQ or chloroquine CQ for COVID-19 to a family member (Town Hall, 2020-04-08). An international poll of doctors rated HCQ the most effective coronavirus treatment (NY Post, 2020-04-02). On April 6, Peter Navarro told CNN that “Virtually Every COVID-19 Patient In New York Is Given Hydroxychloroquine.” This might explain decrease in COVID-19 deaths in the New York state after April 15. The time lag is because COVID-19 deaths happen on average 14 days after showing symptoms. But on April 21, several perfectly coordinated events took place, attacking HCQ’s use for COVID-19 patients.

• The COVID-19 Treatment Guidelines Panel of the National Institute of Health issued recommendations with negative-ambivalent stance regarding the use of HCQ as a COVID-19 treatment. This surprising stance was taken contrary to the ample evidence of the efficacy and safety of HCQ and despite absence evidence of its harm. The panel also strongly recommended against the use of hydroxychloroquine with azithromycin (AZ), the combination of choice among practitioners.

• On the same day, a paper (Magagnoli, 2020) was posted on a pre-print server medRxiv, insinuating that HCQ is not only ineffective, but even harmful. This not-yet peer reviewed paper, by unqualified authors with conflicts of interest, received wall-to-wall media coverage, as it if were a cancer cure. It used data from Veterans Administration hospitals, spicing its effects. The paper has shown to be somewhere between junk science and fraud.

• Rick Bright, a government official who was probably more responsible for the low level of preparedness to the epidemic than most others, and had been re-assigned to a lower position earlier, emerged as a “whistleblower.” He claimed he had been demoted for opposing hydroxychloroquine, the claim to be soon debunked by documents bearing his signature. The media also gave him a wall-to-wall coverage.

On April 24, the FDA struck its own blow, issuing a stern warning against use of HCQ for COVID-19 treatment. While these warnings are not binding to doctors, they do produce a chilling effect. Consequently, either patients do not receive necessary treatment, or they receive it with a delay, sharper decreasing its effect. This allows detractors to question HCQ efficacy even more aggressively. Below, I review problems in the NIH COVID-19 Treatment Guidelines and other sources, used to wage anti-HCQ propaganda.

Read more …

Not sure if laughing is the best reaction here.

Goat and Pawpaw ‘Test Positive’ For COVID19 In Tanzania (AlJ)

Tanzania’s President John Magufuli has dismissed imported coronavirus testing kits as faulty, saying they returned positive results on samples taken from a goat and a pawpaw. Magufuli made the remarks during an event in Chato in northwestern Tanzania on Sunday. He said there were “technical errors” with the tests. The president, whose government has already drawn criticism for being secretive about the coronavirus outbreak and has previously asked Tanzanians to pray the coronavirus away, said he had instructed Tanzanian security forces to check the quality of the kits. They had randomly obtained several non-human samples, including from a pawpaw, a goat and a sheep, but had assigned them human names and ages.

These samples were then submitted to Tanzania’s laboratory to test for the coronavirus, with the lab technicians left deliberately unaware of their origins. Samples from the pawpaw and the goat tested positive for COVID-19, the president said, adding this meant it was likely that some people were being tested positive when, in fact, they were not infected by the coronavirus. “There is something happening. I said before we should not accept that every aid is meant to be good for this nation,” Magufuli said, adding the kits should be investigated.

On Saturday, Magufuli announced that he had placed an order for a herbal treatment for the coronavirus touted by the president of Madagascar. “I have already written to Madagascar’s president and we will soon dispatch a plane to fetch the medicine so that Tanzania can also benefit from it,” he said. The herbal remedy, called “Covid Organics” and prepared by the Malagasy Institute for Applied Research, is made out of Artemisia, a plant cultivated on the Indian Ocean island of Madagascar. Despite a lack of scientific evidence, President Andry Rajoelina of Madagascar claimed that the remedy has already cured some Madagascans of COVID-19. Children returning to school have been required to take it.

Read more …

We can neatly divide the country, if not the world, according to people’s reaction to this.

Problem is even if she wasn’t tested at all, she could still be positive.

Pennsylvania Woman Jailed For Refusing To Quarantine After Positive Test (Hill)

A Pennsylvania woman was jailed over the weekend for refusing to quarantine after testing positive for COVID-19, officials said Saturday. Erie County President Judge John Trucilla ordered that the woman be kept on electronic monitoring at home for at least a week after she spent a night in jail Friday for repeatedly violating her isolation order, the Erie Times-News reported. County Solicitor Richard Perhacs said the woman, who was unidentified at her Saturday court hearing, attended a party, did some banking and had her vehicle repaired after she tested positive. As a result, 27 people are now in quarantine after coming in contact with her or someone who was in contact with her.

The woman reportedly cried throughout the emergency proceeding as she appeared via a video call from the Erie County Prison, according to the news outlet. She told Trucilla that she did not understand a letter she signed on April 29 saying the county could take legal action if she did not self-isolate. “I want to explain from the bottom of my heart that I apologize,” she told the judge, according to the Times-News. “It was a mistake. I’ve learned from my actions. I want to go home.” Trucilla ruled in a preliminary order that she had to remain at home until she was tested again on Friday but said she could be jailed for longer if she violated the order again. The judge will determine whether her self-isolation period needs to be extended based on that test.

County officials said they explained the letter to her multiple times. The woman first developed symptoms on April 12 and said Saturday that she was no longer experiencing them. Erie County Chief Public Defender Pat Kennedy, who represented the woman, requested she be electronically monitored at her home. “Based on my interaction with her, I don’t think that day in jail was lost upon her,” Kennedy said, according to the news outlet.

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Shouldn’t Fauci and Birx simply resign? Or do they agree with the re-opening?

White House To Wind Down Coronavirus Task Force, Focus Shifts To Aftermath (R.)

The White House coronavirus task force will wind down as the country moves into a second phase that focuses on the aftermath of the outbreak, President Donald Trump said on Tuesday. Trump confirmed the plans after Vice President Mike Pence, who leads the group, told reporters the White House may start moving coordination of the U.S. response on to federal agencies in late May. “Mike Pence and the task force have done a great job,” Trump said during a visit to a mask factory in Arizona. “But we’re now looking at a little bit of a different form and that form is safety and opening and we’ll have a different group probably set up for that.” Asked if he was proclaiming “mission accomplished” in the fight against the coronavirus, Trump said, “No, not at all. The mission accomplished is when it’s over.”

Trump said Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx, doctors who assumed a high profile during weeks of nationally televised news briefings, would remain advisers after the group is dismantled. Fauci leads the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and Birx was response coordinator for the force. “We can’t keep our country closed for the next five years,” Trump said, when asked why it was time to wind down the task force. More than 70,000 people in the United States have died from COVID-19, the respiratory illness caused by the virus. The U.S. death toll is the highest in the world. Trump acknowledged there might be a resurgence of the virus as states loosen the restrictions on businesses and social life aimed at curbing its spread. “It’ll be a flame and we’re going to put the flame out.”

Earlier, Pence said Trump was starting to look at Memorial Day on May 25 as the time to shift management of the response to the pandemic. [..] Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and Food and Drug Administration chief Stephen Hahn said the Trump administration was committed to accelerating the search for a vaccine, with the goal of producing 100 million doses by the autumn and 300 million doses by the end of the year. “Whether that can be achieved or not, it is realistic,” said Azar. “We would not be doing this if we did not think it were realistic. Is it guaranteed? Of course it is not.” Most experts have suggested clinical trials to guarantee a vaccine is safe and effective could take a minimum of 12 to 18 months.

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The government is intentionally doing such a shitty job, might as well let the for-profit boys do it.

UK Government ‘Using Pandemic To Transfer NHS Duties To Private Sector’ (G.)

The government is using the coronavirus pandemic to transfer key public health duties from the NHS and other state bodies to the private sector without proper scrutiny, critics have warned. Doctors, campaign groups, academics and MPs raised the concerns about a “power grab” after it emerged on Monday that Serco was in pole position to win a deal to supply 15,000 call-handlers for the government’s tracking and tracing operation. They said the health secretary, Matt Hancock, had “accelerated” the dismantling of state healthcare and that the duty to keep the public safe was being “outsourced” to the private sector. In recent weeks, ministers have used special powers to bypass normal tendering and award a string of contracts to private companies and management consultants without open competition.


Deloitte, KPMG, Serco, Sodexo, Mitie, Boots and the US data mining group Palantir have secured taxpayer-funded commissions to manage Covid-19 drive-in testing centres, the purchasing of personal protective equipment (PPE) and the building of Nightingale hospitals. Now, the Guardian has seen a letter from the Department of Health to NHS trusts instructing them to stop buying any of their own PPE and ventilators. From Monday, procurement of a list of 16 items must be handled centrally. Many of the items on the list, such as PPE, are in high demand during the pandemic, while others including CT scanners, mobile X-ray machines and ultrasounds are high-value machines that are used more widely in hospitals.

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Not sure I can fully incorporate the irony involved here.

K Street Requests Taxpayer Bailout Of Corporate Lobbyists (IC)

K Street may soon have its own taxpayer-funded bailout. Industries as varied as oil refining, construction, fast food restaurants, and chemical manufacturing are seeking federal cash to support their lobbyists in Washington, D.C. Many of the largest lobbying forces are organized under the 501(c)(6) section of the tax code as trade groups. Corporations with similar concerns pool their money together to fund trade groups, which in turn employ thousands of lobbyists to shape elections and legislation on a daily basis. But the Paycheck Protection Program, the centerpiece of the small business rescue program, excluded such trade groups. That could change in the next round of stimulus legislation, which Congress is scheduled to debate later this month.


Lobbyists have stepped up a campaign to make sure professional influence peddlers are eligible for the PPP, or P3, funds. The push also includes a demand for an additional $25 billion for canceled events and other lost revenue from the coronavirus pandemic. The American Society of Association Executives, which represents trade group leadership, explained in a letter to lawmakers that trade group lobbyists need federal funding to better advocate for their clients. “These organizations are already relied upon to help coordinate federal resources to combat the coronavirus pandemic, and they require staff to fulfill this duty,” ASAE wrote. Trade groups, the ASAE letter notes, have faced declining revenue as corporations wind down dues payments and sponsorship fees in response to the economic downturn.

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So many sectors of the economy are entire bubbles, and we’re going to bail them all out.

US Airlines Burn Through $10 Billion A Month As Traffic Plummets (R.)

U.S. airlines are collectively burning more than $10 billion in cash a month and averaging fewer than two dozen passengers per domestic flight because of the coronavirus pandemic, industry trade group Airlines for America said in prepared testimony seen by Reuters ahead of a U.S. Senate hearing on Wednesday. Even after grounding more than 3,000 aircraft, or nearly 50% of the active U.S. fleet, the group said its member carriers, which include the four largest U.S. airlines, were averaging just 17 passengers per domestic flight and 29 passengers per international flight. “The U.S. airline industry will emerge from this crisis a mere shadow of what it was just three short months ago,” the group’s chief executive, Nicholas Calio, will say, according to his prepared testimony.


Net booked passengers have fallen by nearly 100% year-on-year, according to the testimony before the Senate Commerce Committee. The group warned that if air carriers were to refund all tickets, including those purchased as nonrefundable or those canceled by a passenger instead of the carrier, “this will result in negative cash balances that will lead to bankruptcy.” Separately, Eric Fanning, who heads the Aerospace Industries Association, will ask Congress to consider providing “temporary and targeted assistance for the ailing aviation manufacturing sector,” in testimony made public by the group. Boeing Co said last week it would cut 16,000 jobs by the end of the year, while GE Aviation plans to cut up to 13,000 jobs and airplane supplier Spirit AeroSystems Holdings Inc is cutting 1,450 jobs.

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So much for competition as a model.

After The Covid Rush: Brace For America’s Version Of Saudi Aramco (Cox)

Calamity creates opportunity. That has always been true when it comes to corporate consolidation. Recall how a series of mega-mergers and acquisitions transformed the banking industry after the 2008 financial panic. Wells Fargo snagged Wachovia. Bank of America scooped up Merrill Lynch. Lloyds TSB bought HBOS. BNP Paribas grabbed Fortis. JPMorgan got Washington Mutual and Bear Stearns. And so on. Before the coronavirus has taken its full physical and economic toll, expect more of the same. Strong banks ate the weak, and they were chivvied along by federal and state governments and regulators worried about the sustainability of their financial systems. Governments will play a central role now, too.

Even before the Great Lockdown, leaders were calling for relaxation of antitrust restrictions as a response to the emergence of stronger Chinese competitors. France and Germany railed against the European Commission blocking the merger between the rail businesses of Siemens and Alstom, complaining it would give Chinese giant CRRC free reign. President Donald Trump has tried to encourage telecom mergers to combat Huawei. These concerns have only become more pronounced as China appears to have rebounded from the virus more rapidly than the rest of the world. The political logic of protecting domestic companies through strategic alliances will apply after the pandemic and across a broad range of industries.

Governments will come away from Covid-19 with new priorities, ranging from safer, more domestic, manufacturing and supply chains to less risky balance sheets. If history rhymes, then pre-virus views about competition may take a back seat. As Edward Chancellor argued, this will lead to an unhealthy concentration of power. For the M&A business it opens all sorts of possibilities once considered taboo. Take the oil patch. Sliding demand has combined with efforts by the world’s largest producer, Saudi Arabia, to flood the market and nudge U.S. drillers toward bankruptcy. As the price of a barrel of West Texas Intermediate crude has fallen below $20 a barrel from $60 at the start of the year, producers have been lobbying Trump for a rescue.

It’s not inconceivable to imagine the largest American producers banding together to squeeze out costs and take a better grip of U.S. oil supply, maybe even aided by government loans and a streamlined regulatory process, effectively creating a potential rival to Saudi Aramco. Merging Exxon Mobil with Chevron would forge a company worth some $350 billion with 35 billion barrels of proved reserves. Heck, they might even fold in BP’s 20 billion of reserves and $75 billion market cap and “ExChevBrit”. It would be a shrimp compared to Aramco’s $1.6 trillion value and 270 billion barrels of proved barrels of oil – and that’s how they would justify a deal.

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The sytem cannot tell if you’re 2 meters or 20 meters away. Next!

Bluetooth Inventors See Problems For Coronavirus Contact Tracing (IC)

Named for the 10th century king Harald “Bluetooth” Gormsson, famous in Scandinavia for uniting (and Christianizing) the Danes, the humble, oft-derided wireless technology included in some form in nearly every portable device from the past decade and beyond is central to coronavirus contact tracing apps pushed by Apple, Google, and governments across the world. Banking on the standard’s ubiquity, and considerably improved reliability since the ’90s, these entities hope to turn billions of Bluetooth-enabled devices into an army of public health automatons that can map anyone who came into contact with someone who tests positive for Covid-19.


Although the exact plans for using Bluetooth vary between governments, the gist is simple: In order for your iPhone to connect to your friend’s Bluetooth speaker, it has to essentially shout its existence into the electromagnetic spectrum, sending repeated radio messages that announce that the device is turned on and willing to pair with another. It’s exactly these short, repeating radio wave bursts that tech companies and public health authorities hope can be used for contact tracing, by collecting an anonymized record of every Bluetooth announcement within a certain range. If one of these “HELLO, I AM BLUETOOTH!” messages ends up coming from an individual who later tests positive for Covid-19, the hope is that anyone else whose phone was able to detect that message could then be alerted and tested (or treated) accordingly.

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No-one here links the good harvest to less pollution or glyphosate. Odd.

French Beekeepers Look To Lockdown Exit To Sell Bumper Honey Harvest (R.)

Beekeepers in France are celebrating a bumper spring honey harvest after weeks of warm weather but will need a smooth unwinding of the coronavirus lockdown if they are to find a market for their produce. Down an overgrown track near the Chantilly Palace, where the James Bond film “A View to a Kill” was filmed in the 1980s, beekeeper Franck Portefaix says it could be the best season in four decades. “The blossom was almost three weeks early and the harvest is very, very good,” said Portefaix, who followed his parents into beekeeping 30 years ago. Nearby, colleagues in protective suits sprayed smoke over hives before opening them to extract the raw honey, most of which Portefaix’s business sells in markets. Temperatures in the l’Oise, north of Paris, in April hit as high as 30 degrees Celsius, more typical of early summer.


In a mediocre harvest, a beehive can produce 4-6 kg of honey, rising to 10 kg in a good harvest, but this spring Portefaix said the best performing among his 500 hives could produce up to 20 kg each. “1976 was really the year of reference, a very good year. And this year has begun much like that year. But not all beekeepers are cheering 2020. While northern and western regions of France basked in ideal April weather, prolonged dry spells hurt harvests in the south. Unfavourable weather also in the Landes region hurt acacia honey production. “With the upheaval to our climate, harvests are becoming increasingly unpredictable. It’s still early in the season, we need to temper our expectations,” said Henri Clement, a spokesman for the National Union of French Beekeeping.

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The FBI is above the law.

Did The Mueller Team Violate Brady and Flynn Orders? (Turley)

With the release of the new material from the case of Michael Flynn, an array of experts came forward to assure the public that it was all standard procedure for investigators to conclude that there was no criminal conduct uncovered and then prosecutors creating a crime (including the use of a clearly unconstitutional law never used to convict anyone since the start of the Republic). Many of these same experts who have been espousing untethered (and ultimately rejected) theories for criminal and impeachment charges for years. Yet, what was most striking is how many also rejected any claim that the undisclosed evidence, at a minimum, violated Brady, the case requiring the government to turn over exculpatory information.

Indeed, Ben Wittes, a staunch defender of James Comey, assured readers “while you might not know much about federal law enforcement,” this is all “standard practices.” In fact, this is a clear and flagrant violation of the both Brady and the orders of Judge Emmet Sullivan. The fact that such violations are also dismissed by mainstream media and experts reflects how rage has distorted legal analysis in this Administration. Brady v. Maryland is a 1963 decision of the Supreme Court that prosecutors must under the Fifth and Fourteenth amendments disclose favorable evidence to defendants upon request, if the evidence is “material” to either guilt or punishment. There are also due process rights requiring the disclosure of any evidence that would allow the defense to attack the reliability, thoroughness, and good faith of the police investigation or to impeach the credibility of the state’s witnesses. Kyles v. Whitley, 514 U.S. 419 (1995).

Courts like Judge Sullivan in the Flynn case issue standard orders under this and other cases requiring disclosure of evidence that are exculpatory or material to issues like impeachment. Many of us who work on the criminal defense side have long frustrating histories with courts in dealing with violations of Brady and other cases. Often these violations are exposed after sentencing (unlike in Flynn). Courts often cite cases like Strickler v. Greene to decline to order a new trial unless “the nondisclosure was so serious that there is a reasonable probability that the suppressed evidence would have produced a different verdict.” That is a standard that is difficult to overcome. However, this case exposes a particularly obvious set of violations.

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Babylon Bee

China Fires Entire Propaganda Team: US Media Already Does Their Job (BB)

The Chinese government has laid off its entire propaganda arm, cutting thousands of jobs at China Central Television and other state-run media outlets as the American media is already doing their job for them. “It seemed kinda redundant for us to have a state-run media when we have the American press,” said President Xi at a press conference Monday. “The American media is carrying water for us. It’s pretty incredible. We unleashed a virus on the world and lied about it for months, and the American press can’t stop praising us. As long as they make their orange leader look bad, they’ll repeat any line we feed them.”


“Really, we Commies could learn a lot from the propaganda of the press over in America,” he added admiringly. The Communist dictator sat the nervous, state-owned journalists down and asked them, “What would you say you do there?” to which they responded, “We take the propaganda and tell it to the people.” But President Xi wasn’t fooled, saying that the American press already does that and the redundancy would be eliminated. Luckily for the state-owned journalists and broadcasters who lost their jobs in China today, CNN was hiring.

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A great thread, putting together lots of studies:

 

 

Taleb. People often don’t get why you need not median values but extremes, maxima, to build a good model, building, theory, policy.

EVT= Extreme value theory

 

 

 

 

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Nov 192016
 
 November 19, 2016  Posted by at 9:49 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  Comments Off on Debt Rattle November 19 2016


Unknown Dutch Gap, Virginia. Picket station of Colored troops 1864

Financial Conditions Are Rigged Against Donald Trump (BBG)
Big Short’s Steve Eisman: ‘Europe is Screwed’ (G)
Emerging Markets Borrowers Owe $3.2 Trillion In -Rising- Dollar Debt (BBG)
Dollar’s Rapid Gain Triggers Angst in Emerging Markets (WSJ)
Global Bonds Post Biggest Two-Week Loss in 26 Years (BBG)
Bond Carnage hits Mortgage Rates. But This Time, it’s Real (WS)
US Dollar Sees Steepest 2-Week Gain Against Yen Since January 1988 (R.)
Bank of Japan Surprises With Plan to Buy Unlimited JGBs at Fixed Rates (WSJ)
US Banks Close Rupee Exchanges After Large Bills Ruled Illegal (BBG)
Lobbyists Leave Trump Transition Team After New Ethics Rule (Pol.)
The Rise Of The ‘Un-Lobbyist’ (Mother Jones)
UK Approves ‘Most Extreme Surveillance In History Of Western Democracy’ (AFP)
Far-Right Group Attacks Refugee Camp On Greek Island Of Chios (G.)

 

 

Just as I wrote on election day in America is The Poisoned Chalice.

Financial Conditions Are Rigged Against Donald Trump (BBG)

The reaction in financial markets to Trump’s election victory – much like the win itself – has defied conventional wisdom, with U.S. equities surging following a sharp drop as the results came in. But if you’re an occasional real estate developer — a self-professed “low interest rate guy” who wants to fix America’s trade deficit while bringing factories back from overseas – it might seem as though markets have been rigged against you. The U.S. dollar spot index (DXY) touched levels not seen since the Clinton administration on Friday morning, and the yield on the 10-year U.S. Treasury has increased by more than 50 basis points since Nov. 9.

This rise in the greenback and borrowing costs for the U.S. constitutes a tightening of financial conditions — a potential obstacle to U.S. growth, as servicing new debt has become more expensive and goods produced domestically are now less attractive to foreigners. Earlier this week, the Goldman Sachs Financial Conditions Index rose above 100 to hit levels not seen since March, when the financial backdrop was trending in a more accommodative direction following the market turmoil that started 2016. The index tracks changes in interest rates, credit spreads, equity prices, and the value of the U.S. dollar: a rise indicates that financial conditions have tightened. “A stronger USD implies lower domestic inflation and higher real rates, a headwind to U.S. growth,” writes Neil Dutta at Renaissance Macro Research.

In her testimony before Congress on Thursday, Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen highlighted this rise in the U.S. dollar as well as interest rates since the election — but not the gains in the stock market. This may serve as an implicit nod at what’s reflected in many financial conditions indexes: There’s a certain degree of asymmetry at play, with the rise in the greenback and U.S. Treasury yields far outweighing the tightening of credit spreads and rise in stock values. That asymmetry perhaps speaks to an unintentional and counterintuitive overlap between how the president-elect and the Federal Reserve interpret how changes in financial conditions affect real economic activity.

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“What is very negative is that in every country in Europe, the largest owner of that country’s sovereign bonds are that country’s banks..”

Big Short’s Steve Eisman: ‘Europe is Screwed’ (G)

In the Oscar-winning The Big Short, Steve Carell plays the angry Wall Street outsider who predicts (and hugely profits from) the great financial crash of 2007-08. [..] In real life he is Steve Eisman, he is still on Wall Street, and he is still shorting stocks he thinks are going to plummet. And while he’s tight-lipped about which ones (unless you have $1m to spare for him to manage) it is evident he has one major target in mind: continental Europe’s banks – and Italy’s are probably the worst. Why Italy? Because, he says, the banks there are stuffed with “non-performing loans” (NPLs). That’s jargon for loans handed out to companies and households where the borrower has fallen behind with repayments, or is barely paying at all. But the Italian banks have not written off these loans as duds, he says.

Instead, billions upon billions are still on the books, written down as worth about 45% to 50% of their original value. The big problem, says Eisman, is that they are not worth anywhere near that much. In The Big Short, Eisman’s staff head to Florida to speak to the owners of newly built homes bundled up in “mortgage-backed securities” rated as AAA by the investment banks. What they find are strippers with loans against multiple homes but almost no income, the mortgages arranged by sharp-suited brokers who know they won’t be repaid, and don’t care. Visiting the housing estates that these triple-A mortgages are secured against, they find foreclosures and dereliction. In a mix of moral outrage at the banks – and investing acumen – Eisman and his colleagues bought as many “swaps” as possible to profit from the inevitable collapse of the mortgage-backed securities, making a $1bn profit along the way.

This time around, Eisman is not padding around the plains of Lombardy because he says the evidence is in plain sight. When financiers look to buy the NPLs off the Italian banks, they value the loans at what they are really worth – in other words, how many of the holders are really able to repay, and how much money will be recovered. What they find is that the NPLs should be valued at just 20% of their original price. Trouble is, if the Italian banks recognise their loans at their true value, it wipes out their capital, and they go bust overnight. “Europe is screwed. You guys are still screwed,” says Eisman. “In the Italian system, the banks say they are worth 45-50 cents in the dollar. But the bid price is 20 cents. If they were to mark them down, they would be insolvent.”

[..] Trump’s victory has sent the bond markets into disarray, with the yield on government bonds rising steeply. While this sounds good for savers – interest rates could rise – it is bad news for the holders of government bonds, which fall in value when the yield rises. Eisman sees that as another woe for Europe’s banks, who hold vast amounts of “sovereign bonds”. “What is very negative is that in every country in Europe, the largest owner of that country’s sovereign bonds are that country’s banks,” he says. As the bonds decline in value, then the capital base of the banks deteriorates.

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The usual victims.

Emerging Markets Borrowers Owe $3.2 Trillion In -Rising- Dollar Debt (BBG)

[..] Companies in these more-vulnerable economies have $340 billion of debt coming due through 2018, and they are going to have a hard time paying all that back if investors keep withdrawing their cash. [..] After the election of Donald Trump as the next U.S. president, many expect his infrastructure spending programs and trade policies to lead to higher consumer prices in the world’s biggest economy. Bonds tend to do poorly when inflation accelerates, especially because such an environment would prompt the Fed to raise benchmark interest rates faster than many expect. That would bad for all types of debt but particularly for notes in emerging markets. That’s because investors will migrate back to higher-rated bonds in developed economies instead of those in less-proven nations.

Also, more U.S. growth typically means a stronger dollar, which is a significant problem for emerging-market nonbank borrowers, which have accumulated more than $3 trillion in dollar-denominated debt, according to BIS data. The higher the dollar rises, the more expensive it becomes to pay back the debt. And already this week, the currency has surged because of the sudden prospect of tighter Fed policies and faster U.S. growth. The sheer scale of leverage in the economy, including “the large increase of emerging-market debt, much of it denominated in dollars,” is one of the biggest risks in the financial system right now, Adair Turner, former U.K. Financial Services Authority chairman, said in a Bloomberg Television interview Friday. All that money is owed to somebody, and a failure to pay it back will cause big ripple effects.

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if the US doesn’t manipulate its currency lower soon, it’s going to lose export markets.

Dollar’s Rapid Gain Triggers Angst in Emerging Markets (WSJ)

The dollar extended its powerful rally, spurring central banks in developing countries to take steps to stabilize their own currencies and threatening to create headwinds for the long-running U.S. expansion. The US currency moved closer to parity with the euro after rising for the 10th straight day, the dollar’s longest winning streak against the euro since the European currency’s inception in 1999. The dollar also moved higher against the yen, which fell to its weakest levels against the U.S. currency since May 30. The gains are even greater against many emerging-market currencies, prompting central banks in a number of countries to intervene to slow the slide. The Mexican peso has fallen 11% against the dollar to record lows since the election, while the Brazilian real has tumbled 6.3%.

The currency’s gains make foreign goods and travel cheaper for U.S. consumers and could give a boost to exports from Japan and Europe. But they also are reigniting fears that the dollar’s strength could slow U.S. corporate profit growth and intensify capital flight from the developing world, which would complicate the prospects for economic growth. “The strong dollar is destabilizing for markets, for foreign assets, for emerging-market nations that pay back their debt in dollars,” said Jonathan Lewis, chief investment officer Fiera Capital. “That’s pretty significant.” The dollar’s gains have been driven by bets that fiscal spending and tax cuts proposed by President-elect Donald Trump will spur U.S. economic growth, as well as by the rising probability that the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates next month.

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Too much is moving in the same direction. Sheep don’t make for healthy markets.

Global Bonds Post Biggest Two-Week Loss in 26 Years (BBG)

Bonds around the world had their steepest two-week loss in at least 26 years as President-elect Donald Trump sends inflation expectations surging. The Bloomberg Barclays Global Aggregate Index has fallen 4% since Nov. 4. It’s the biggest two-week rout in data going back to 1990. Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen contributed to the decline by saying Thursday an interest-rate hike could come “relatively soon.” “We’ve seen a sharp and swift move since the election, which is pricing in the potential future policies of Trump,” said Sean Simko at SEI Investments in Oaks, Pennsylvania. “The big question is to what extent these policies are going to be implemented, and how quickly are they going to be implemented.”

Treasury 10-year note yields climbed five basis points, or 0.05 percentage point, to 2.35% as of 5 p.m. in New York, reaching the highest since November 2015, according to Bloomberg Bond Trader data. The 2% security due in November 2026 closed at 96 27/32. “Trump is a game changer,” Park Sung-jin at Mirae Asset Securities. “I was bearish, but the current level is more than I expected.” The selloff has gone fast enough that it’ll probably pause before yields press higher in 2017, Park said. Yellen, addressing U.S. lawmakers Thursday, signaled the U.S. central bank is close to lifting interest rates as the economy continues to create jobs at a healthy clip and inflation inches higher.

The president-elect’s pledges include tax cuts and spending $500 billion or more over a decade on infrastructure, a combination that’s seen as spurring quicker growth and price gains in the world’s biggest economy. Trump has also blamed China and Mexico for American job losses and threatened punitive tariffs on imports, a move that may spur inflation. The difference between yields on U.S. 10-year notes and similar-maturity Treasury Inflation Protected Securities, a gauge of trader expectations for consumer prices over the life of the debt, rose to as much as 1.97 percentage points this week, the highest since April 2015.

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It’s not just global markets being hit, the US ‘homeowner’ will also pay the price.

Bond Carnage hits Mortgage Rates. But This Time, it’s Real (WS)

The carnage in bonds has consequences. The average interest rate of the a conforming 30-year fixed mortgage as of Friday was quoted at 4.125% for top credit scores. That’s up about 0.5 percentage point from just before the election, according to Mortgage News Daily. It put the month “on a short list of 4 worst months in more than a decade.” One of the other three months on that short list occurred at the end of 2010 and two “back to back amid the 2013 Taper Tantrum,” when the Fed let it slip that it might taper QE Infinity out of existence. Investors were not amused. From the day after the election through November 16, they yanked $8.2 billion out of bond funds, the largest weekly outflow since Taper-Tantrum June.

The 10-year Treasury yield today jumped to 2.36% in late trading the highest since December 2015, up 66 basis point since the election, and up one full percentage point since July! The 10-year yield is at a critical juncture. In terms of reality, the first thing that might happen is a rate increase by the Fed in December, after a year of flip-flopping. A slew of post-election pronouncements by Fed heads – including Yellen’s “relatively soon” – have pushed the odds of a rate hike to 98%. [..] I still think that pullback in yields is going to happen any day now. As I said, nothing goes to heck in a straight line. In terms of dollars and cents, this move has wiped out a lot of wealth. Bond prices fall when yields rise. This chart shows the CBOT Price Index for the 10-year note. It’s down 5.6% since July:

The 30-year Treasury bond went through a similar drubbing. The yield spiked to 3.01%. The mid-week pullback was a little more pronounced. Since the election, the yield has spiked by 44 basis points and since early July by 91 basis points (via StockCharts.com). Folks who have this “risk free” bond in their portfolios: note that in terms of dollars and cents, the CBOT Price Index for the 30-year bond has plunged 13.8% since early July!

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This will now be scaring Abe and Kuroda.

US Dollar Sees Steepest 2-Week Gain Against Yen Since January 1988 (R.)

The dollar rose to its highest level since April 2003 against a basket of currencies on Friday, marking its biggest two-week increase since March 2015 as traders piled bets on a massive dose of fiscal stimulus under a Trump U.S. presidency. Also stoking the dollar rally were growing expectations the Fed would raise interest rates next month on signs of rising inflation and improved economic growth. The greenback has climbed 7.3% against the yen in two weeks, its steepest such gain since January 1988 and its second-strongest performance in the era of floating exchange rates. The dollar has been on a tear following Donald Trump’s Nov. 8 victory over Hillary Clinton, tracking surging U.S. Treasury yields amid concerns government borrowing to fund possible stimulus programs could stoke inflation.

Traders have seized on the tax cuts, deregulation and infrastructure spending that Trump campaigned on as negatives for bonds and positives for the dollar. “It has caused a wave of dollar buying across the board,” said Richard Scalone, co-head of foreign exchange at TJM Brokerage in Chicago. To be sure, it remained unclear how many, if any, of the policy proposals would materialize. Trump’s stance on immigration and trade, if they become law, could hurt the dollar, analysts said. “The dollar is the wild card,” said Richard Bernstein, CEO of Richard Bernstein Advisors. The dollar index, hit 101.48, its highest since early April 2003 before paring gains to 101.25, up 0.4% on the day.

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Yeah, like that’s in your power… “’Interest rates may have risen in the U.S., but that doesn’t mean that we have to automatically allow Japanese interest rates to increase in tandem’, Mr. Kuroda said.”

Bank of Japan Surprises With Plan to Buy Unlimited JGBs at Fixed Rates (WSJ)

The Bank of Japan on Thursday offered to buy an unlimited amount of Japanese government bonds at fixed rates for the first time since the introduction of a new policy framework—a sign of its concerns over recent rises in yields. The move is the first clear sign from the central bank that it intends to take action to keep a lid on rising yields, and took market participants by surprise. “I thought there was still a lot more room left” before the BOJ took action, said Masahiro Ichikawa, senior strategist at Sumitomo Mitsui Asset Management. The BOJ’s move followed a sharp rise in government bond yields globally, sparked by expectations that the presidency of Donald Trump would lift inflation and growth.

Japanese government bond yields have risen as well, but not as sharply. The 10-year yield rose to its highest level since March on Wednesday. Yields on two-year and five-year Japanese government bonds fell Thursday after the BOJ’s announcement. The 10-year yield also briefly fell to 0.010% after hitting as high as 0.025% earlier in the morning. Speaking in parliament, Bank of Japan Gov. Haruhiko Kuroda said he wouldn’t allow market pressure from abroad to dictate the course of Japanese government bond yields, highlighting his resolve to hold interest rates down. “Interest rates may have risen in the U.S., but that doesn’t mean that we have to automatically allow Japanese interest rates to increase in tandem,” Mr. Kuroda said.

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And the winner is … plastic.

US Banks Close Rupee Exchanges After Large Bills Ruled Illegal (BBG)

Aruna Desai has a problem with the thousands of Indian rupees she has with her in the U.S. – she can’t find a bank to exchange her funds and couldn’t give the money away if she tried. Since Indian PM Narendra Modi removed 500- and 1,000-rupee notes from circulation, currency exchange providers in the U.S. have been unable to take the outlawed bills. Some of the country’s biggest banks, including JPMorgan and Citigroup work with vendors to provide rupees to clients and those vendors have made the bills unavailable, spokesmen for the banks said. Wells Fargo also said it can’t supply rupees at this time, while Bank of America said it has never accepted the currency for exchange. “If you have a euro, you can go to a bank and exchange it,” Desai, 76, of Cliffside Park, New Jersey, said. “For an Indian rupee, I don’t think there’s any bank that does that here.”

Five-hundred rupee ($7.34) and 1,000-rupee notes ceased to be legal tender Nov. 9, Modi said last week in a surprise announcement, sweeping away 86% of the total currency in circulation. The move has been seen as an attempt to fulfill his election promise of curbing tax evasion and recovering illegal income, locally known as black money, stashed overseas. The notes will have to be deposited in banks by the end of December, Modi said. “For our clients, it’s very hard,” Nandita Chandra, head of Great Indian Travel’s New York office, said in a telephone interview while visiting New Delhi. “A lot of people are affected and we don’t have a culture that is credit-card friendly, it’s a cash-based economy.”

Mastercard, the second-largest payment network, heralded the move as one that will reduce crime and drive growth in the Indian economy. Modi’s “bold action and leadership is a critical step in positioning India to be a leader in the global cashless and digital economy movement,” Porush Singh, the firm’s president for South Asia, said in a statement. “Mastercard is committed to working with the government to provide the cashless solutions that combat corruption and create growth, and inclusion for all members of society.”

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Will Washington fall apart without the lobbyists who keep it standing up?

Lobbyists Leave Trump Transition Team After New Ethics Rule (Pol.)

At least three lobbyists have left President-elect Donald Trump’s presidential transition operation after the team imposed a new ethics policy that would have required them to drop all their clients. CGCN’s Michael Catanzaro, who was responsible for energy independence; Michael Torrey, who was running the handoff at the Department of Agriculture; and Michael McKenna of MWR Strategies, who was focused on the Energy Department, are no longer part of the transition, POLITICO has learned. Lobbyists who piled into the transition when it was being run by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie were caught off-guard Wednesday by a new ethics policy requiring them to terminate their clients.

“Throughout my time assisting the transition effort, I have adhered closely to the code of ethical conduct and confidentiality agreement that was provided to me,” Torrey said in a statement. “When asked recently to terminate lobbying registration for clients whom I serve in order to continue my role with the transition, I respectfully resigned from my role.” Torrey represents the American Beverage Association, Dean Foods and pizza franchise Little Caesars. Before founding Michael Torrey & Associates in 2005, he was Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman’s deputy chief of staff, advised Kansas Sen. Bob Dole and worked at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Catanzaro lobbies for the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, a refining group, as well as Hess, Encana, Noble Energy and Devon Energy.

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Let’s see how many will be left come January 20.

The Rise Of The ‘Un-Lobbyist’ (Mother Jones)

On Wednesday, Donald Trump’s transition team announced one phase of the president-elect’s plan to “drain the swamp” of corruption—a prohibition on registered lobbyists serving in his administration and a five-year lobbying ban for Trump officials who return to the private sector. Trump’s plan effectively doubles down on a policy that the Obama administration already has in place—one that many good government groups and lobbyists alike believe may have created a new problem: un-lobbyists—that is, influence-peddlers who avoid registering as lobbyists to skirt the administration’s rules.

Obama, like Trump, campaigned on a platform of aggressively rooting out the influence of lobbyists. After taking office, he put in place several major good-government initiatives, including a ban on lobbyists serving in his administration and a two-year cooling-off period before ex-administration officials could register to lobby. Once Obama’s lobbying rules took effect, there was a sharp decline in the number of registered lobbyists. Industry insiders and watchdog groups that track the influence game noted that the decrease was not due to lobbyists hanging up their spurs as hired guns for corporations and special interests. Rather it appeared that lobbyists were finding creative ways to avoid officially registering as such. There was no less influence-peddling going on, but now there was less disclosure of the lobbying that was taking place.

The problem lies with the definition of who is a lobbyist. The federal government requires anyone who spends more than 20% of their time on behalf of a client while making “lobbying contacts”—an elaborate and specifically defined type of contact with certain types of federal officials—to register as a lobbyist and file quarterly paperwork disclosing their clients and the bills or agencies he or she sought to sway. But by avoiding too many official “lobbying contacts” and limiting how much income that kind of work accounts for, lobbyists can shed the scarlet L, describing themselves as government affairs consultants or experts in advocacy and public policy.

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All governments will use all new technology to encroach ever more on all people’s lives.

UK Approves ‘Most Extreme Surveillance In History Of Western Democracy’ (AFP)

The British parliament this week gave the green light to new bulk surveillance powers for police and intelligence services that critics have denounced as the most far-reaching of any western democracy. The Investigatory Powers Bill would, among other measures, require websites to keep customers’ browsing history for up to a year and allow law enforcement agencies to access them to help with investigations. Edward Snowden, the former US National Security Agency contractor turned whistleblower, said the powers “went further than many autocracies”. “The UK has just legalised the most extreme surveillance in the history of western democracy,” he tweeted.

The bill, the first major update of British surveillance laws for 15 years, was passed by the House of Lords and now only needs rubber-stamping by Queen Elizabeth II. Prime Minister Theresa May introduced the bill in March when she was still interior minister, describing it as “world-leading” legislation intended to reflect the change in online communications. It gives legal footing to existing but murky powers such as the hacking of computers and mobile phones, while introducing new safeguards such as the need for a judge to authorise interception warrants. But critics have dubbed it the “snooper’s charter” and say that, in authorising the blanket retention and access by authorities of records of emails, calls, texts and web activity, it breaches fundamental rights of privacy.

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The EU needs to act to stop this. But instead it still hardly resettles refugees at all, and won’t even allow for the refugees to be hosted in mainland Greece. Ugliness guaranteed. Couldn’t have been more effective if they planned it.

Far-Right Group Attacks Refugee Camp On Greek Island Of Chios (G.)

Dozens of people have been driven out of a refugee camp on the Greek island of Chios after two successive nights of attacks by a far-right group. At least two people were wounded after attackers threw Molotov cocktails and rocks as big as boulders from elevated areas surrounding the Souda camp, activists said. Three tents were burned down and three others were hit by rocks. A 42-year-old Syrian man was assaulted, while a Nigerian boy was hit by a rock. Fearing a third attack on Friday night, about 100 former occupants refused to re-enter the camp, instead taking shelter in a nearby car park. “We do not have any kind of protection,” Mostafa al-Khatib, a Syrian refugee, told the Guardian. “No one cares about us.” Gabrielle Tan, an aid worker with Action From Switzerland, a grassroots organisation working on Chios, said those sheltering in the car park included families with babies and toddlers.

“They’d rather sleep outside in the cold than go back inside,” said Tan. The mayor of Chios said the attackers were thought to be affiliated with Greece’s main far-right party, Golden Dawn. “Of course Golden Dawn supporters are suspected to have participated,” Manolis Vournous told the Guardian. Activists and camp occupants said the rocks appeared to have been thrown with the intention of killing people. Tan said: “These rocks were probably the size of a shoebox, weighing approximately 15kg. Some of them I can’t even lift.” There were conflicting reports about who started the clashes on Wednesday. According to Vournous, the unrest began after Algerians and Moroccans stole alcohol and fireworks from a shop, frightening local residents. But some activists claimed the events escalated after a planned assault by Golden Dawn.

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