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Debt Rattle December 27 2020

Dec 272020

December 27, 2020 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 10:25 am Finance Tagged with: benefits, Brexit, Covid19, dexamethasone, eugenics, Japan, lockdown, media misconduct, Russiagate, vaccine 17 Responses »

Winslow Homer Spanish Girl with Fan 1885

• Developers of Oxford-AstraZeneca Vaccine Tied to UK Eugenics Movement (Webb)

• The Breakthrough Medicines That Could Change The Course Of Covid (G.)

• Japan Halts All Foreign Arrivals Over UK COVID Variant (AP)

• Britain First To Infect Healthy Volunteers With Covid19 For Research (NYP)

• Scientists Call For UK Lockdown After Rapid Spread Of Covid19 Variant (G.)

• Two Pandemic Assistance Programs Expire, Leaving 12 Million Without Benefits (ZH)

• RussiaGate 2.0, Right on Schedule (Luongo)

• This Brexit Deal Is Emphatically Nothing To Celebrate (Lis)

• Glenn Greenwald: Coverage Of Coronavirus Pandemic ‘Media Misconduct’ (Hill)

Whitney Webb. Long read.

• Developers of Oxford-AstraZeneca Vaccine Tied to UK Eugenics Movement (Webb)

For much of 2020, the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine was treated as an early front-runner, though its lead would later be marred by scandals related to its clinical trials, including the death of participants, sudden trial pauses, the use of a problematic “placebo” with its own host of side effects and the “unintentional” mis-dosing of some participants that skewed its self-reported efficacy rate. The significant issues that emerged during trials have provoked little concern from the vaccine’s two lead developers, despite critical attention from even mainstream media of its complications. The lead developer of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, Adrian Hill, told NBC on December 9th that the experimental vaccine should be approved and distributed to the public before the conclusion of the safety trials, saying,”to wait for the end of the trial would be the middle of next year. That’s too late, this vaccine is effective, available at large scale and easily deployed.”

Sarah Gilbert, the other lead researcher on the vaccine, seemed to believe that pre-mature safety approval was likely, telling the BBC on December 13 that the chances of rolling out the vaccine by the end of the year are “pretty high.” Now, the UK is expected to approve the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine shortly after Christmas, with India also set to approve the vaccine next week. While the controversies surrounding the vaccine’s trials did ultimately undermine its previous frontrunner status, the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine remains heavily promoted as the vaccine of choice for the developing world, as it is cheaper and has much less complicated storage requirement than its main competitors, Pfizer and Moderna.

Earlier this month, Dr. Richard Horton, the editor-in-chief of the Lancet medical journal, told CNBC that “The Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine is the vaccine right now that is going to be able to immunize the planet more effectively, more rapidly than any other vaccine we have” in large part because it is a “vaccine that can get to lower middle-income countries.” CNBC also quoted Andrew Baum, global head of health care for Citi Group, as saying that the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine “is really the only vaccine that is going to suppress or even eradicate SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, in the many millions of individuals in the developing world.”

In addition to longstanding claims that the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine will be the vaccine of choice for the developing world, this vaccine candidate has also been treated by several outlets in the mainstream and even independent media as “good for people, bad for profits” due to the partnership’s “explicit intention of supplying [the vaccine] around the world on a not-for-profit basis, meaning that the poorest nations on the planet will not have to worry about being shut out of a cure due to lack of funds.” However, investigation into the vaccine’s developers and the realities of their “no-profit pledge” reveals a very different story than that which has been spun for most of the year by corporate press releases, experts and academics tied to the vaccine and the mainstream press.

For instance, mainstream media has had little, if anything, to say about the role of the vaccine developers’ private company – Vaccitech – in the Oxford-AstraZeneca partnership, a company whose main investors include former top Deutsche Bank executives, Silicon Valley behemoth Google and the UK government. All of them stand to profit from the vaccine alongside the vaccine’s two developers, Adrian Hill and Sarah Gilbert, who retain an estimated 10% stake in the company. Another overlooked point is the plan to dramatically alter the current sales model for the vaccine following the initial wave of its administration, which would see profits soar, especially if the now obvious push to make COVID-19 vaccination an annual affair for the foreseeable future is made reality.

Yet, arguably most troubling of all is the direct link of the vaccine’s lead developers to the Wellcome Trust and, in the case of Adrian Hill, the Galton Institute, two groups with longstanding ties to the UK Eugenics movement. The latter organization, named for the “father of eugenics” Francis Galton, is the re-named UK Eugenics Society, a group notorious for its promotion of racist pseudoscience and efforts to “improve racial stock” by reducing the population of those deemed inferior for over a century.

Is this a Guardian infomercial? Meant to cast doubt on HCQ and azithromycin, and promote dexamethasone?

• The Breakthrough Medicines That Could Change The Course Of Covid (G.)

It remains one of the most dramatically successful outcomes in the battle against Covid-19. A cheap treatment for inflammation was found to save lives of seriously ill patients while a trio of much-touted therapies were shown to have no effect. It is now estimated that the discovery of the effectiveness of the drug dexamethasone has saved around 650,000 lives across the world, according to Professor Martin Landray, a founder of the Recovery programme – the world’s largest randomised Covid-19 drugs trial – which revealed the medicine’s anti-Covid properties last summer. “In the UK alone, dexamethasone has already prevented more than 12,000 deaths,” he told the Observer.

The breakthrough demonstrates the power of large-scale randomised trials in pinpointing effective medicines and will be followed, in the next few weeks, with results from another handful of promising treatments being studied as part of the Recovery programme. These medicines, which could be crucial in the fight to contain Covid-19 next year, are: convalescent plasma, taken from recovering Covid patients; monoclonal antibodies, made by Regeneron, that were used to treat Donald Trump; two anti-inflammatory drugs, tocilizumab and colchicine; and aspirin. All are undergoing trials carried out by thousands of doctors and nurses on tens of thousands of patients in hospitals across Britain. First results are expected in January or early February.

Recovery was set up by Landray and Peter Horby at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. The two Oxford scientists realised doctors would soon be looking for treatments once cases started pouring into hospitals but would need a clinical trial to find which were effective. It took them nine days from drafting their first protocol to the enrolling of their first patient, a process that normally takes nine months. One in 10 patients hospitalised with Covid have since entered the trial. And such numbers have been crucial to success, added Landray. Comparing 100 people who get a drug with 100 who do not can produce highly variable results. However, by randomising thousands of patients to get contrasting treatments, robust answers are produced.

“You find out which actually work,” said Landray. “In addition, we can discover which patients will benefit most. Will it be the old or the young or the immuno-compromised? You can only find that out if you have a trial with thousands of people in it.” So far, Recovery – short for Randomised Evaluation of Covid-19 Therapy – has pronounced on four medicines: azithromycin, an antibiotic; the drug combination lopinavir-ritonavir; hydroxychloroquine, a treatment for malaria and rheumatic diseases; and dexamethasone. Only the last saved lives or aided recovery. A hit rate of only one in four might seem poor value. However, the extraordinary numbers of lives saved thanks to dexamethasone demonstrates the value of the Recovery programme, the world’s largest randomised Covid-19 drug trial.

The programme also ensured time and money have not been wasted on medicines that were found not to help patients. And that will become an increasingly important issue, Landray said. “When we started Recovery we looked at cheap, widely available but promising drugs, and found one of them – dexamethasone – worked. But the medicines we’re looking at now will cost hundreds of pounds per treatment, so we need to be really sure they work before we deploy them on wide scale,” Landray said.

The world keeps getting smaller.

• Japan Halts All Foreign Arrivals Over UK COVID Variant (AP)

Japan is barring entry of all nonresident foreign nationals as a precaution against a new and potentially more contagious coronavirus variant that has spread across Britain. The Foreign Ministry says the entry ban will start Monday and last through Jan. 31. Last week, Japan banned nonresident foreigners coming from Britain and South Africa after confirming the new variant in seven people over the last two days — five from Britain who tested positive at airports and two others in Tokyo. Japan is also suspending the exemption of a 14-day quarantine for Japanese nationals and resident foreigners in a short-track program that began in November.

The entrants now must carry proof of a negative test 72 hours prior to departure for Japan and self-isolate for two weeks after arrival. Japan is struggling with surging cases since November. It has confirmed a total of 217,312 cases including 3,213 deaths, up 3,700 from the previous 24-hour period. Tokyo alone reported 949 cases, setting a new record, despite calls by experts and government officials for people to spend a “quiet” holiday season.

“..an experimental nasal vaccine..”

• Britain First To Infect Healthy Volunteers With Covid19 For Research (NYP)

The world’s first COVID-19 human challenge is about to start. Britain will infect 2,500 healthy volunteers with coronavirus to study how the infection behaves in the body — specifically the amount it takes before a person develops Covid-19, the Sun reported. The government has budgeted $45 million for the research, which is being conducted by Imperial College, the National Health Service’s Royal Free Hospital and pharmaceutical company hVIVO, a pioneer in viral human challenge models. Human challenge studies aren’t used often because of the ethical questions raised about infecting healthy people.

The Brits, ages 18 to 30, will get a dose of an experimental nasal vaccine, then be infected. The project gets underway in January; scientists expect the first results in May. Alastair Fraser-Urquhart, 18, of Stoke-on-Trent, raised his hand because he wants to help “bring the world out of the pandemic sooner.. “I can’t let this opportunity to do something, to really do something, pass me by when I’m at such low risk.” Fraser-Urquhart and his fellow volunteers will be paid about $5,300 for their three-week stay at the hospital’s specialist diseases clinic, where they will be monitored around the clock, the Mail Online reported. Later, researchers will use the human challenge model to find out how vaccines work to prevent coronavirus.

January will be dark and bleak in many places.

• Scientists Call For UK Lockdown After Rapid Spread Of Covid19 Variant (G.)

Cases of the new variant Covid-19 virus were confirmed in several European countries on Saturday, including Spain, Sweden and Switzerland. All were linked to people who had arrived from the UK. Meanwhile, Japan has announced it is banning all new entries of foreign nationals from Monday following the discovery of the variant in travellers from the UK. The news came at the same time as a further six million people in east and south-east England had tier 4 conditions, England’s strictest Covid level, imposed on them on Boxing Day. Lockdowns were also introduced in Scotland and Northern Ireland. Around 24 million people in England, more than 40% of the population, are now living in tier 4, as pressure mounts for the whole country to be put in this category.

Scientists from the Independent Sage group have urged that all regions of England be placed in tier 4, meaning that non-essential shops, hairdressers, and leisure and entertainment venues must close. Devolved nations were advised to bring forward their own national lockdowns. Tier 4 should include enhanced travel restrictions, the group said, while arguing that an emergency plan be introduced to enable safe education in January and February. This idea is supported by teaching unions, who have demanded that the government keeps schools closed as evidence has grown that the new virus variant is proving to be particularly infectious among children.

This point was backed by Paul Hunter, professor in medicine at the University of East Anglia. “If this new variant is behind the increase in this age group, then that is a big worry,” he said. France announced this weekend that it has discovered its first case of the new variant – a French citizen who arrived in Tours after travelling from London a week ago, according to health officials. In Madrid, Spanish officials said three cases of the new variant recently discovered in the country involved relatives of a man who had arrived from the UK on Christmas Eve, while the fourth case also involved a traveller from the UK. None of the patients was reported to be seriously ill.

Blame it on Trump. But never on Pelosi and Schumer. Let alone Biden.

• Two Pandemic Assistance Programs Expire, Leaving 12 Million Without Benefits (ZH)

With Congressional leaders feigning productivity for two months on a renewed stimulus – only for President Trump to veto their 11th hour porkfest and demand they increase direct stimulus checks from $600 to $2,000 per person – a series of assistance programs are set to lapse into the new year. Two of them, the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program and the Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC) program, will expire Saturday night, leaving around 12 million Americans without the assistance. As we noted in November, this would roughly translate into an income shortfall of $39BN in 1Q if these workers are unable to find work or alternative income support. BofA calculates that based on its work on fiscal multipliers, income loss of $39BN would translate into a 1.2% hit to growth on an annualized basis in 1Q 2021.

One of the two programs expiring Saturday, the PUA, provided unemployment benefits to around 7.3 million gig workers and others not eligible for traditional unemployment, according to the Century Foundation. The expiring programs come after lawmakers cobbled a $900 billion pandemic stimulus package to a $1.4 trillion omnibus spending bill, which President Trump vetoed over the sheer amount of pork and $600 direct checks, which he deemed to small. House Democrats will vote on a standalone bill Monday for $2,000 checks, while Congressional Republicans are expected to flatly reject it. Meanwhile, several additional programs are set to expire on December 31.

Additionally, the concurrent expiration of eviction moratorium, mortgage forbearance programs, and suspension of student loan payments could all be headwinds early next year, creating further obstacles. Unless Trump reverses course and signs the package on Tuesday, the government will shut down – sans another short-term bill to keep it limp things along into 2021.

“..whoever it was behind this attack the one group who was definitely NOT behind it was the Russians.”

• RussiaGate 2.0, Right on Schedule (Luongo)

Without offering any evidence or specifics, Pompeo said Russia was “pretty clearly” behind the cyberattack during an appearance on the conservative talk radio Mark Levin Show. “I can’t say much more, as we’re still unpacking precisely what it is, and I’m sure some of it will remain classified. But suffice it to say there was a significant effort to use a piece of third-party software to essentially embed code inside of US government systems and it now appears systems of private companies and companies and governments across the world as well,” Pompeo explained. Notice how there is no evidence given, just the typical intelligence agency, “believe me” line, which is your first clue that whoever it was behind this attack the one group who was definitely NOT behind it was the Russians.

This week’s cyber attack on the U.S. government was perfectly timed with the Electoral College submitting its votes to the Congress and Joe Biden claiming he’s president-elect. The reason why the release of this ‘attack’ on our government was perfectly timed is because it is a distraction from the growing unrest over the Democrats’ having stolen the election and cowering the courts into irrelevance. This is classic CIA-level misdirection from what was more likely a Chinese or, dare I say it, homegrown operation for the very purpose of blaming the Russians to tamp down the anger and confuse the MAGA crowd. And it resurrects the ghost of RussiaGate for the libs by putting Trump in a Catch-22.

If he doesn’t respond to this it keeps alive the smoldering embers of the TDS crowd watching Rachel Maddow that Trump really does have deep, covert ties to Russia. If he does react, what possible reaction could he take to escalate the tensions with Russia that are already one step below open warfare? Oh, and he has to respond to this while also fighting an uphill battle against the courts and his own bureaucracy to invoke his executive order involving outside interference into the election. [..] Provoking the exact reaction you’d expect from the BlueChecked Sneetches among the Twitterati. RussiaGate was an embarrassment that should have died years ago but it persists precisely because Trump refuses to formally concede and continues to give his people the opportunity to fight the Swamp.

The only way Putin and the Russians were behind this attack on the U.S. government was as a 5-d chess move where Trump invited them to do it on his behalf to ‘prove’ external interference in the election and allow Trump to cross the Rubicon, invoke the Insurrection Act and his 2018 EO on election interference. Yeah, by the way, John Le Carre died this week, life ain’t a movie and Trump isn’t that savvy a player. Ye gods, I wish he was. That we are in this mess proves he isn’t. This pronouncement by Pompeo was just good ol’ fashioned swamp double talk who continues his job of maintaining continuity of U.S. foreign policy on behalf of the Neoconservatives whose raison d’etre is the destruction of Russia to the exclusion of nearly every other consideration of any other human on the planet.

Don’t be confused by this nonsense. Whoever was behind this attack wasn’t the Russians. The motive for this operation lies squarely with China, The Davos Crowd, the Democrats and our own intelligence agencies trying to move the Overton Window away from the real problem, a stolen election. Outing Solarwinds and tying it directly to Dominion Voting Systems is your smoking gun.

“The certainty of no tariffs, yes—but also of trade barriers, red tape and reduced future prosperity.”

• This Brexit Deal Is Emphatically Nothing To Celebrate (Lis)

And so the long wait is finally over. Late in the afternoon on Christmas Eve, at the precise moment businesses were shutting up shop for a four-day national holiday, Boris Johnson took to a podium in Downing Street to herald a trade deal with the European Union. This was a good deal, he said. It allowed us to take back control of our money, borders, laws and fisheries. It provided certainty for businesses. Of course, the Prime Minister was wrong on almost all counts. This was the thinnest deal available within the ruinous red lines he had laid out, and preferable only to no deal at all. We already had control of everything he claimed to have won back—even fisheries, whose viability depends on exporting British catches into the EU. On only one point was he correct: his deal does indeed provide certainty. The certainty of no tariffs, yes—but also of trade barriers, red tape and reduced future prosperity.

The alternate press conferences in London and Brussels amply demonstrated who had made the concessions. This was an inevitable consequence of differential power, wealth and size, and the UK fell short. While both sides seem to have budged on fish, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen emphasised the EU’s success in ensuring the far more important level playing field for competition. The UK would lose key rights such as financial passporting. It would no longer enjoy automatic access to the EU’s invaluable security databases. Fundamentally it was a question of how power is exercised. Sovereignty in the 21st century, she said, meant “pulling each other up, instead of trying to get back to your feet alone.”

While von der Leyen combined detailed information with sensitivity in tone, Johnson took to bluster. He dismissed the media question about security, asserting, without evidence, that everything would work out. He preposterously declared that the deal would eliminate non-tariff barriers, when the truth is our departure from the single market and customs union necessitate the greatest introduction of new bureaucracy and commercial obstacles in recent history. And he batted away the ending of UK access to the Erasmus scheme, which has offered new horizons to thousands of students across the continent. The new “Turing scheme,” he insisted bombastically, would be better and wider reaching.

“.. they’re just manipulating this messaging to sanction certain events that they find politically palatable while demanding everybody stay home for the things that they don’t value .”

• Glenn Greenwald: Coverage Of Coronavirus Pandemic ‘Media Misconduct’ (Hill)

Glenn Greenwald, co-founder of The Intercept, said the media’s coverage of the coronavirus pandemic was the “worst event of media misconduct.” Speaking on Hill.TV’s “Rising,” Greenwald said that the media’s coverage of the pandemic was initially geared toward forcing people to stay home, and shaming those who went outside for acting irresponsibly. Greenwald then added that the media shifted its tone around its coverage after the protests against police brutality over the summer following the police killing of George Floyd in May.

“Suddenly, it all turned to ‘What these people are doing is noble,’” he said. “And not only do you no longer have the obligation to stay at home, you now have the obligation to go and march against racism on the grounds that racism is the worst public [threat] than the coronavirus pandemic.” Greenwald noted that despite its coverage of the protests, the media continued to shame people who went to church or gathered for outdoor protests for different causes. “What it really made it seem like was there’s no trust or confidence due to public health authorities or media narratives surrounding this pandemic,” he said. “That they’re just manipulating this messaging to sanction certain events that they find politically palatable while demanding everybody stay home for the things that they don’t value .”

We try to run the Automatic Earth on donations. Since ad revenue has collapsed, you are now not just a reader, but an integral part of the process that builds this site.

Click at the top of the sidebars for Paypal and Patreon donations. Thank you for your support.

“Cherish those that seek the truth but beware of those that find it.”
– Voltaire

Support the Automatic Earth in virustime, election time, all the time. Click at the top of the sidebars to donate with Paypal and Patreon.

Automatic Earth in Athens Christmas 2020

Dec 172020

December 17, 2020 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 6:56 pm Finance Tagged with: Athens, charity, Christmas, Filothei, homeless, lockdown, Paypal, police, Santa, social kitchen 4 Responses »

Filothei Skitzi Human puzzle on COVID19 days 2020

I know, I know, I’ve been largely silent about most “usual suspect topics” lately, other than in the Debt Rattles, but I must admit, those topics have been draining me, along with the full lockdown here in Greece. I understand why politicians want to do lockdowns, but I also understand why they shouldn’t.

Lockdowns drain life out of societies and communities, and there’s no guarantee that this life will ever come back. As I wrote earlier today, when we wake back up, the world will have changed beyond recognition. And we cannot NOT ask if that is worth the price we pay.

A vaccine is hurriedly being promoted and rolled out that is drowning in question marks, while skipping much of what is considered normal in vaccine development. As things like vitamin D, HCQ and ivermectin are cast in a media cloud of doubt, though there are no such questions about them. Vaccine: no time for research. Everything else: years more research needed.

As for the other main topic in recent months, the US elections, all I see is people calling each other traitors and seditionists planning coups, and that has gone too far now. Let the legal process play out and the dice roll, and stop the clickbaiting propaganda. People are getting hurt.

In that light, I’d much prefer to write about better and happier things, and the Monastiraki kitchen in Athens is certainly one of those. It’s Christmas time, a time you’re supposed to care about, and for, people. I told you I’d have an update, and here it is. I think I’ll let the photos do most of the talking this time.

First of all, things haven’t gotten any easier out there. The lockdown, the police and the homeless are a strange combination. 100 people gathering to wait for a meal is no longer acceptable. So now the team have to go look for many of them. That takes time, because some are quite far away, but at least they know where to find most. These are crazy days, and everyone’s just simply trying their best.

I told you about the Greek athletes’ Love Van initiative last time, and they delivered: tons of winter coats and blankets and sleeping bags and shoes. It was plain to see that the police were standing by wondering what their orders were, but decided that denying people a warm coat was not in their job prescription. It was a wonderful little mess and anarchy for the hour it lasted, though.

But there is always the lingering fear that we, or everyone, might get arrested, or fined €300 each. There are still plenty regular kitchen volunteers who don’t come in because of that fear. They simply don’t have that kind of money.

In reaction to my November 20 article Automatic Earth in Athens November 2020, our very very generous readers donated some €3,000. That is inevitably an estimate because of the way Paypal donations work. I used to take the approximate amount in US dollars, and presume those were euros. But that was when the exchange rate was $1.10 or lower. Today, it’s $1.22.

And that’s not all. Paypal takes a percentage of every donation (2-4%?!), and then more when the dollars are converted to euros (their rate is over $1.26 right now). We could apply for charity status, but then we would have to 1) set up a separate account for the kitchen and 2) be registered as a charity in either the US or EU, which requires a ton of paperwork, rules, regulations, obligations.

We’re not going to do that, for much of the same reasons we won’t register the kitchen as an NGO. We want to be independent. Even if that costs some money. I’ll continue to round off everything in favor of the kitchen, and pay the difference myself, as long as it is somewhat reasonable.

On to happier tidings. The private space I told you about where the cooking takes place now is a small stone yard without a roof.

And since it rains in winter sometimes, we decided to buy one of those big umbrellas you see outside bars and restaurants, it seems the only way to get some shelter while cooking. They’re €200. I said we’ll use €100 from the donations, and I’ll pay the other half. That way we involve all of you to an extent, in day-to-day operations. Maybe we’ll even need two, but we’ll tackle that as the time comes.

Also, I purchased our first new €1,000 batch of supermarket checks (50x€20) on Tuesday, paid for with your fresh donations (Filothei and I are both painfully camera-shy, but the Acropolis in the background more than makes up for that ;-):

And Filothei did a big shopping trip with the checks yesterday:

What I didn’t know last time is that the kitchen still has a pretty solid amount of staples in storage, oil, pasta, tomato paste etc. That takes away some of the pressure, and it will be needed.

And then of course, wouldn’t you know, the crew decided they’re going to add a second day every week to cook. Purely led by increased demand and need. Not a huge surprise, that need is everywhere, just look at US and UK foodbanks. But we will still need to find a way to fund it. Nudge nudge wink wink. Someone like Filothei just says: we will do what must be done, whereas I then say: and how are we going to do that? You know, at €240 per meal? You just doubled the costs…

And still I’m pretty sure we indeed will make it happen, just because we have to. We must find a way, and therefore we will, with your help. And a bit of good cheer goes a long way:

Those Santa hats are brilliant, they change the entire mood and picture. As do these facemasks for the homeless, made by girls who themselves are too “vulnerable” healthwise to come in, but still want to contribute. I love those things:

Same goes for the winterhats (can you say “tuque”?)

As the cherry on the pie, and because everyone deserves a real Christmas, especially if they live on the streets, and very especially in a lockdown, we’re going to hand all our clients a big package of sweets for the festive season.

And then if you’ll allow me, I’ll repeat my last paragraph of the November 20 article, With one main difference: twice the meals will mean twice the costs, by and large. But hey, it’s Christmas. The time when miracles come true!

Sure, I’m a little apprehensive about January and February, with the Christmas hope and spirit gone, and temperatures dipping, but I also know that 4 days from now, the days will start getting longer again in our hemisphere.

Most of you will know the drill of this by now: any Paypal donations ending in $0.99 or $0.37 go straight to the Monastiraki kitchen, while other donations go to the Automatic Earth -which also badly needs them, especially for Christmas-. (Note: a lot of Automatic Earth donations also went to the kitchen the past month).

I dislike few things more than asking people for money, even though the Automatic Earth now runs primarily on donations, and there’s some sweet justice in that as well, in depending on people’s appreciation of what we do, instead of ad revenues.

But I cannot do this on my own right now. To get through the winter in one piece, the Monastiraki kitchen will realistically need about €1,500-2,000 per month. I don’t have that to spare. So I’m calling on you. Unashamedly, because I know there is no reason to be ashamed of the cause.

I love all you people, and I’m sorry I can’t thank you all individually who have supported -and still do- the Monastiraki kitchen and the Automatic Earth all this time, and I ask you to keep on doing just that. The details for donations on Paypal and Patreon, for both causes, are in the top of the two sidebars of this site. Could not be much easier.

Love you. Thank you. This kitchen would not exist without you, these people would not get fed.

We try to run the Automatic Earth on donations. Since ad revenue has collapsed, you are now not just a reader, but an integral part of the process that builds this site.

Click at the top of the sidebars for Paypal and Patreon donations. Thank you for your support.

Support the Automatic Earth in virustime, election time, all the time. Click at the top of the sidebars to donate with Paypal and Patreon.

Debt Rattle December 9 2020

Dec 092020

December 9, 2020 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 10:07 am Finance Tagged with: Assange, evictions, Hitler, ivermectin, lockdown, Raytheon, SCOTUS, Somalia, stay at home, Swalwell, Texas, vaccines 43 Responses »

Paul Cézanne Curtains 1885

• Many Aren’t Buying Public Officials’ ‘Stay-at-home’ Message (LAT)

• Nine Out Of 10 In Poor Nations To Miss Out On Vaccines (G.)

• Tenants, Landlords Face Imminent Crisis As Pandemic Lifelines Expire (ZH)

• Texas Files Lawsuit To SCOTUS Challenging Election Results In 4 States (JTN)

• Professor: Probability of Biden Winning ‘Less Than One In A Quadrillion’ (EW)

• Swalwell Suggests Trump Is Behind Blockbuster Axios Report (Fox)

• Biden Defense Secretary Nominee Under Fire For Industry Connections (IC)

• Former Clinton Aide Confirms Ties to Epstein, MSM Silence Deafening (MPN)

• Trump Exits Somalia (OffG)

• Where’s the Hitler? (CJ Hopkins)

• Melzer Calls For Immediate Release Of Assange After 10 Years Of Detention (UN)

• American People Hire High-Powered Lobbyist To Push Interests In Congress (Onion)

Passionate science: Ivermectin is the miracle drug

I see a tsunami of violent lockdown protests in our immediate future. Maybe it’ll wait till 2021, but not much longer.

“..harm reduction aims to mitigate the risks of dangerous behaviors instead of trying to get people to cease altogether..”

• Many Aren’t Buying Public Officials’ ‘Stay-at-home’ Message (LAT)

With the coronavirus running rampant in Los Angeles and hospitals projected to overflow by Christmas, officials have fallen back on a familiar refrain: Stay home. “My message couldn’t be simpler: It’s time to hunker down. It’s time to cancel everything,” Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said last week. “If you’re able to stay home, stay home.” Some 33 million Californians are now under a new regional stay-at-home order that began Sunday night, a last-ditch effort to turn the corner on an alarming rise in coronavirus cases statewide. The blunt messaging worked to bend the curve in the spring, when fear of the novel virus and the insidious ways it might spread kept many indoors. But nine months later, the words seem to have lost their meaning.

The percentage of Angelenos staying home except for essential activities has remained unchanged since mid-June — around 55% — despite pleas from health officials in recent weeks for people to cut down on their activities, according to a survey conducted by USC. A similar story has played out nationwide, as millions of Americans zigzagged across the country to visit family over the Thanksgiving holiday, flouting the advice of health officials. “It’s not because the public is irresponsible; it’s because they are losing trust in public health officials who put out arbitrary restrictions,” said Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious-disease specialist at UC San Francisco. “We are failing in our public health messaging.” Health officials are up against a fatigued public, as well as a number of people who don’t believe in the danger of the virus, Gandhi said.

But she is also part of a growing number of experts who think there’s a better way to engage those who do want to take the pandemic seriously — by taking a lesson from the public health strategy known as harm reduction. Typically used to describe sex-education programs and needle exchanges for drug users, harm reduction aims to mitigate the risks of dangerous behaviors instead of trying to get people to cease altogether. When it comes to the COVID-19 pandemic, a harm-reduction approach would encourage masking and social distancing instead of demanding that people have no contact at all with friends or family they don’t live with. In other words, even during a pandemic, abstinence-only isn’t effective.

L.A., however, has adopted more of a “just say no” attitude. Last week the county became one of the only places in the nation to halt all outdoor gatherings among people who aren’t in the same household, prohibiting two friends from meeting up in a park or going on a hike with masks on. Gov. Gavin Newsom followed suit and included the ban in his regional stay-at-home order. California officials are desperate to reverse an unprecedented flood of new coronavirus cases up and down the state, and even their critics acknowledge the impossibility of the situation. But banning relatively safe outdoor activities risks alienating people who want to follow the rules but feel exhausted, disregarded and sometimes confused by them, Brown University health economist Emily Oster said. “Some of the things they’re telling you not to do are incredibly low-risk,” Oster said. “When you are so strict about what people can do, they stop listening.”

Close the borders! But seriously, vaccines have become an entirely critiqueless issue. And thereby uninteresting. Once something is blown up to the status of a religion, it’s time to tune out.

• Nine Out Of 10 In Poor Nations To Miss Out On Vaccines (G.)

Nine out of 10 people in 70 low-income countries are unlikely to be vaccinated against Covid-19 next year because the majority of the most promising vaccines coming on-stream have been bought up by the west, campaigners have said. As the first people get vaccinated in the UK, the People’s Vaccine Alliance is warning that the deals done by rich countries’ governments will leave the poor at the mercy of the rampaging virus. Rich countries with 14% of the world’s population have secured 53% of the most promising vaccines. Canada has bought more doses per head of population than any other – enough to vaccinate each Canadian five times, said the alliance, which includes Amnesty International, Frontline AIDS, Global Justice Now and Oxfam.

“No one should be blocked from getting a life-saving vaccine because of the country they live in or the amount of money in their pocket,” said Anna Marriott, Oxfam’s health policy manager. “But unless something changes dramatically, billions of people around the world will not receive a safe and effective vaccine for Covid-19 for years to come.” Supplies of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, approved in the UK last week, will almost all go to rich countries – 96% of doses have been bought by the west. The Moderna vaccine uses a similar technology, which also is claimed to have 95% efficacy, and is going exclusively to rich countries. The prices of both vaccines are high and access for low-income countries will be complicated by the ultra low temperatures at which they need to be stored.

By contrast, the Oxford University/AstraZeneca vaccine, which has 70% efficacy, is stable at normal fridge temperatures and the price has been set deliberately low for global access. The manufacturers have said 64% of doses will go to people in the developing world. The campaigners applaud this commitment, but said one company alone cannot supply the whole world. At most Oxford/AstraZeneca can reach 18% of the world’s population next year. The alliance has used data from science information and analytics company Airfinity to analyse the global deals with the eight leading vaccine candidates. They found that 67 low and lower middle-income countries risk being left behind as rich countries move towards their escape route from the pandemic. Five of the 67 – Kenya, Myanmar, Nigeria, Pakistan and Ukraine – have reported nearly 1.5 million cases between them.

You can’t go out, except when you get evicted.

• Tenants, Landlords Face Imminent Crisis As Pandemic Lifelines Expire (ZH)

January is going to be a mess. America’s small-time landlords, along with their tenants, are in trouble as safety nets are set to expire. Tenants haven’t paid rent in months, with a looming eviction moratorium expiring at the end of December. According to Reuters, the lack of rental income for landlords has also been troublesome, with many skipping mortgage payments, potentially resulting in a firesale of properties in the year ahead. For 12 million Americans and their families – this Christmas will be their worst – as the extended unemployment benefits that have kept many of them afloat are set to expire later this month. Then on New Year’s Day, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s eviction moratorium expires, which could result in a massive wave of evictions in the first half of 2021.

At the moment, $70 billion in unpaid back rent and utilities are set to come due, according to a new report via Moody’s Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi. Last month, Maryland utility companies began to terminate customers with overdue bills, many of which were unable to pay because of job loss due to the coronavirus downturn. New research from the Aspen Institute warns 40 million people could be threatened with eviction over the coming months as the real economic crisis is only beginning. According to Stacey Johnson-Cosby, president of the Kansas City Regional Housing Alliance, landlords are also in deep turmoil. She said more than 40% of the landlords surveyed in her coalition said they will have to sell their units because of the lack of rental income.

“They are sheltering our citizens free of charge, and there’s nothing we can do about it,” said Johnson-Cosby. “This is their retirement income.” She said small landlords are frightened to speak out about non-paying tenants because social justice warriors and their “Cancel Rent” groups have attacked landlords. “What they don’t realize is that if they run us out and we fail, it will be private equity and Wall Street firms that buy up all our properties, just like they did with houses after the last foreclosure crash.”

Louisiana followed suit.

• Texas Files Lawsuit To SCOTUS Challenging Election Results In 4 States (JTN)

In a novel legal strike, the state of Texas has asked the Supreme Court to invalidate the election results in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Georgia, arguing officials in those four battleground states violated the Constitution by making changes to how ballots were cast and counted without legislative approval. The lawsuit filed late Monday night by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton asked the justices to issue a temporary restraining order preventing the states “from taking action to certify presidential electors or to have such electors take any official action including without limitation participating in the electoral college.” The suit argues that changes made by the state’s governors, secretaries of states and election supervisors were “inconsistent with relevant state laws and were made by non-legislative entities, without any consent by the state legislatures. The acts of these officials thus directly violated the Constitution.”

“I’m worried about the credibility of elections, not just right now, but I’m worried about the credibility of elections going forward,” Paxton told Just the News on Tuesday afternoon in a phone interview. “I’m not making a fraud argument, I’m making an argument based on the Constitution. And what we know happened, which was that we know state law was changed by people other than the state legislature, which is the only constitutionally authorized changes that are allowed … My argument is that the law was violated, the constitution was violated. I’m not addressing whether there was 2 million fraudulent ballots cast in Pennsylvania. I don’t know, and there’s no way to know, the way the system got set up, the way the rules got changed.”

States are allowed in certain circumstances to appeal directly to the Supreme Court, bypassing lower federal courts, in disputes involving other states. Paxton argued the state of Texas was wrongly harmed by the unconstitutional acts of the other states. “These non-legislative changes … facilitated the casting and counting of ballots in violation of state law, which, in turn, violated the Electors Clause of Article II, Section 1, Clause 2 of the U.S. Constitution,” the suit stated. “By these unlawful acts, the Defendant States have not only tainted the integrity of their own citizens vote, but their actions have also debased the votes of citizens in Plaintiff State and other States that remained loyal to the Constitution.”

Because Trump was so far ahead as of 3 a.m. on November 4, 2020.

• Professor: Probability of Biden Winning ‘Less Than One In A Quadrillion’ (EW)

In a new lawsuit filed today, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to block four battleground states – Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, from casting “unlawful and constitutionally tainted votes” in the Electoral College. In the brief submitted to the Supreme Court, Texas includes a declaration from Pacific Economics Group member and USC economics professor, Charles J. Cicchetti, Ph.D. Dr. Cicchetti is the former Deputy Director at the Energy and Environmental Policy Center at Harvard University’s John Kennedy School of Government and received his Ph.D. in economics from Rutgers University.

According to Dr. Cicchetti, his calculations show the probability of Joe Biden winning the popular vote in the four states independently given President Trump’s early lead in those States as of 3 a.m. on November 4, 2020, is less than one in a quadrillion. Dr. Cicchetti’s analysis calculates that for Joe Biden to win all four states collectively, the odds of that event happening decrease to less than one in a quadrillion to the fourth power (1 in 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,0004). Stop and think about that. Given President Trump’s massive early lead on election night, the odds — according to Dr. Cicchetti — that Biden came from behind and beat Trump in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin are so unlikely that it’s next to impossible. Dr. Cicchett’s work raises serious suspicions. How did Biden pull off this extraordinarily improbable win?

You mean the report was false?

“Yes, noted pro-Trump, right-wing media outlet *Axios* spent a full year investigating a Chinese spy that infiltrated California politics because of Swalwell’s criticisms of the president.”

• Swalwell Suggests Trump Is Behind Blockbuster Axios Report (Fox)

Rep. Eric Swalwell suggested Tuesday that President Trump was behind Axios’ bombshell report revealing that he was one of several politicians who was entangled with someone suspected to be a Chinese spy. Axios reported on Monday that a Chinese national named Fang Fang or Christine Fang targeted up-and-coming local politicians, including Swalwell, D-Calif. Fang reportedly took part in fundraising for Swalwell’s 2014 reelection campaign although she did not make donations nor was there evidence of illegal contributions. According to Axios, investigators became so alarmed by Fang’s behavior and activities that they alerted Swalwell in 2015 to their concerns, and gave him a “defensive briefing.” Swalwell then cut off all ties with Fang and has not been accused of any wrongdoing, according to an official who spoke to the outlet.

Swalwell, who was one of the most outspoken lawmakers who pushed the Russia collusion narrative since Trump took office, is now hinting that the president was behind Axios’ explosive reporting during an interview with Politico. “I’ve been a critic of the president. I’ve spoken out against him. I was on both committees that worked to impeach him. The timing feels like that should be looked at,” Swalwell said on Tuesday. Swalwell revealed that Axios first approached him about his ties to Fang in July 2019, which was also when he ended his short-lived presidential campaign. But the Democratic lawmaker seemed to suggest that intelligence officials involved in Axios’ reporting were trying to “weaponize” his cooperation with authorities.

“What it appears though that this person — as the story reports — was unsuccessful in whatever they were trying to do. But if intelligence officials are trying to weaponize someone’s cooperation, they are essentially seeking to do what this person was not able to do, which is to try and discredit someone,” Swalwell told Politico. According to Politico, Swalwell “refused to discuss his relationship with Fang” after Axios reported that she had sexual relations with at least two other politicians. He did, however, express confidence that he will maintain his seat on the House Intelligence Commitee. “As the story referenced, this goes back to the beginning of the last decade, and it’s something that congressional leadership knew about it,” Swalwell told Politico.

The swamp.

• Biden Defense Secretary Nominee Under Fire For Industry Connections (IC)

Last month, two progressive members of Congress sent President-elect Joe Biden a letter requesting that he commit to nominating a secretary of defense with no previous ties to weapons manufacturers. The letter, from Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wisc., and Rep. Barbara Lee D-Calif., cited President Donald Trump’s Defense Secretary Mark Esper — a former lobbyist for Raytheon, one the country’s largest defense contractors — and called on Biden to adopt a different standard and find a nominee with “no prior employment history with a defense contractor.” But on Tuesday, Biden announced that he will nominate retired four-star Gen. Lloyd Austin III, once the top commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, and now a member of the board of directors at Raytheon.

The company has been in the spotlight during the Trump administration in part because it supplies air-to-ground munitions for Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen, and Austin’s role with Raytheon could be central to his confirmation fight. Austin oversaw U.S. operations in the Middle East until March of 2016, a year after the Saudi-led intervention began. He retired from the military the next month and later joined the board of United Technologies, a defense contractor that merged with Raytheon earlier this year. In 2019, Raytheon proceeded with an $8 billion arms sale to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which included air-to-ground munitions. After congressional Democrats blocked the sale on human rights grounds, the Trump administration helped force the sale through by declaring a state of emergency.

“Raytheon manufactures the bomb components that are used in Yemen. He bears a direct responsibility,” Phyllis Bennis, who directs the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, told The Intercept. “He was making money as a board member of this company that is directly responsible for the death and destruction there.” William Hartung, the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy, told The Intercept that picking Austin was “tantamount to making the position of Secretary of Defense the Secretary of Defense Contractors.” “The potential for conflicts is huge,” Hartung said. “Raytheon is deeply involved in controversial programs from unworkable missile defense projects to nuclear weapons — the new nuclear-armed cruise missile — to precision-guided bombs that have killed untold numbers of civilians in Saudi Arabia’s brutal war in Yemen. If Gen. Austin were to recuse himself from decisions on programs and policies involving Raytheon he could not carry out large parts of his job as defense secretary.”

Mysteriously vanishing topics. There’s a lot of them.

• Former Clinton Aide Confirms Ties to Epstein, MSM Silence Deafening (MPN)

A top Clinton insider has revealed that the former president visited the Caribbean home of notorious sex predator Jeffrey Epstein. In a long interview last week with Vanity Fair, longtime aide to Bill Clinton, Doug Band, noted that, contrary to the official line, his boss did indeed spend time on Little Saint James, the private island that the billionaire pedophile used as a base to traffick and rape women and children. Neither Band nor his interviewer appeared to realize the gravity of what he was revealing, the subject being touched upon only briefly towards the end of a wide-ranging 7,000-word conversation in which he noted that in January 2003, Clinton flew on Epstein’s notorious “Lolita Express” private jet to the island.

Band appeared to bring the incident up only as a way of distancing himself from the disgraced pedophile, who died under mysterious circumstances in a Manhattan prison in July last year. Band insisted that he knew nothing of Epstein’s misdeeds, but “got enough bad vibes that he advised Clinton to end the relationship,” refusing to travel aboard Epstein’s jet with his employer. Flight logs show Clinton made around two dozen trips on the infamous airplane. Band is certainly a source in the know. For years he served as Clinton’s most trusted aide and confidant, traveling by his side and arranging his appointments for him. The former president famously did not carry even a cellphone, meaning that everyone from journalists to even Hillary and Chelsea Clinton would have had to go through Band to speak to him.

Band’s testimony adds weight to others who have already said they saw him on the island. Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre previously stated that Clinton “strolled into” Epstein’s private villa with “two lovely girls” in his arms. “There was no modesty between any of them,” she said. “I remember asking Jeffrey what’s Bill Clinton doing here,” Giuffre said in an interview earlier this year, “and he laughed it off and said ‘well he owes me a favor.’” Epstein’s former IT and maintenance contractor also said he saw the former president on the island, an assertion that Clinton has denied. The former president was also photographed receiving a massage from Epstein victim Chauntae Davies while at an airport, on route via the Lolita Express.

While the press might be forgiven for focussing more on the pandemic and the election, the virtual silence from corporate media has been deafening. The bombshell that Clinton’s closest confidant — whom friends describe as being like a “son” to him — has been totally ignored by the New York Times, Washington Post, NBC News, MSNBC, CBS News, and CNN, with no relevant results appearing in searches on their websites. ABC News, which for three years sat on information that could have resulted in an arrest, also did not cover the story.

Well, he appears to be trying.

• Trump Exits Somalia (OffG)

These are things that might have been done earlier. During the last, flickering days of the Trump administration, activity is being witnessed across countries which have a US troop presence. Numbers are being reduced. Security wonks are getting the jitters. Is the imperium shrinking? Will President elect Joe Biden wake up and reverse the trend? With the Beltway foreign policy Blob advising him, most likely. In November, acting defence secretary Christopher Miller announced that the number of troops in Afghanistan and Iraq would fall from 4,500 to 2,500 and 3,500 to 2,500 respectively. Somalia has been added to the list of countries which will see US withdrawals in some number. The current troop presence stands at 700, tasked with assisting an African Union-backed peacekeeping force combat the al-Shabaab insurgency.

A good number are also there to train and support Danab, the Somali special forces with eyes on capturing and killing leaders of the insurgent movement. The ultimate objective of US Africa Command in East Africa, then, “is one in which terrorist organizations are not able to threaten the US homeland, US persons, international allies or destabilize the region.” This is a conflict that has a relentless air of eternity to it. Al-Shabaab counts itself as yet another, albeit more formidable militant group, that has thrived in Somalia’s unruly environment. Its claim to radicalised fame came with Ethiopia’s December 2006 invasion of the country. It was encouraged by the Somalian transitional government, with the intention of ousting al-Shabaab and the Islamic Courts Union from Mogadishu, captured by the fundamentalist alliance that June.

According to Robert Wise, the Ethiopian occupation transformed al-Shabaab “from a small relatively unimportant part of a more moderate Islamic movement into the most powerful and radical armed faction in the country.” Yet another salient lesson in the perils of foreign intervention. US administrations might have feared the messiness of the Somali scene. The death of 18 US soldiers in October 1993 in a failed effort to capture the warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid in Mogadishu stung. Cruise-missile humanitarians and interventionists would have to wait for the republic to find its feet again. The attacks of September 11, 2001 on the United States furnished the moment, incarnating the global terrorist phenomenon and the pretext for an international deployment of US forces, officially and covertly. On March 19, 2003, the capture and interrogation of Suleiman Abdallah heralded the return of US troops to Somalia.

Good question. But good luck trying to find people who’ve read all this stuff for four years and now acknowledge they’ve been had 100%.

• Where’s the Hitler? (CJ Hopkins)

All right, that’s it. I’ve run out of patience. No more excuses. Where’s the Hitler? Yes, you heard me. I’m talking to you. You respectable journalists and political pundits. You Intelligence officials and politicians. You fanatical liberals. You pseudo anti-fascists. All you members of the GloboCap “Resistance” who have been hysterically shrieking that “Trump is Hitler!” since he won the nomination back in 2016. Well, OK, it’s November 2020. The show is almost over. When do we get Hitler No, do not tell me “any day now.” You’ve been telling us that for four straight years. Do we look like a bunch of gullible idiots that you can whip up into a four-year frenzy of mindless hatred and paranoia by screaming “Hitler!” over and over, and then not produce an actual Hitler?

Well, we’re not. We remember what you said. You promised us Hitler, and we want Hitler, or at least a decent facsimile of Hitler. And don’t even think of trying to pretend that you didn’t actually promise us Hitler. You did. You want me to prove it? OK. Remember back in 2016, when The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Guardian, the Washington Post, The Inquirer, and other such “leading respectable broadsheets,” and online magazines like Mother Jones, Forward, Slate, Salon, Vox, Alternet, and countless others, warned that Trump was sending secret anti-Semitic “dog whistle” signals to his underground army of Nazi terrorists by talking about “international banks,” “global elites,” the “political establishment,” and even “corporations” and “lobbyists” … all of which was supposedly code for “the Jews,” who he was going to exterminate if won the election?

I do. I remember that, distinctly. How about after he won the election, when The Guardian reported that “white supremacy ha[d] triumphed!,” and The New York Times, NPR, Keith Olberman, and other verified news sources warned that America had descended into “racial Orwellianism,” or Zionist Anti-Semitism, or the “bottomless pit of fascism,” or whatever? Or when Michael Kinsley in the Washington Post confirmed that “Donald Trump is actually a fascist”? Do you remember all that? Because I certainly do. Remember Aaron Sorkin’s letter to his daughter warning her that millions of “Muslim-Americans, Mexican-Americans and African-Americans [were] shaking in their shoes” as they waited for Trump to round them all up and send them to the camps, along with the “Jewish Coastal Elites”?

He’s done this 1000 times.

• Melzer Calls For Urgent Release Of Assange After 10 Years Of Detention (UN)

The UN Special Rapporteur on torture, Nils Melzer, today appealed to British authorities to immediately release Julian Assange from prison or to place him under guarded house arrest during US extradition proceedings. He made the urgent call 10 years after Mr. Assange’s first arrest on 7 December 2010, amid an outbreak of COVID-19 at Belmarsh prison. Reports say 65 of approximately 160 inmates, including a number in the wing where Mr. Assange is being held, have tested positive. In an opinion rendered in December 2015, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention found that since his arrest on 7 December 2010, Mr. Assange had been subjected to various forms of arbitrary deprivation of liberty, including 10 days of detention in London’s Wandsworth prison; 550 days of house arrest, and the continuation of the deprivation of liberty in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London which lasted almost seven years.

Since 11 April 2019, Mr. Assange has been held in near total isolation at Belmarsh. “The British authorities initially detained Mr. Assange on the basis of an arrest warrant issued by Sweden in connection with allegations of sexual misconduct that have since been formally dropped due to lack of evidence. Today, he is detained for exclusively preventative purposes, to ensure his presence during the ongoing US extradition trial, a proceeding which may well last several years,” said Melzer. “Mr. Assange is not a criminal convict and poses no threat to anyone, so his prolonged solitary confinement in a high security prison is neither necessary nor proportionate and clearly lacks any legal basis.”

The progressively severe suffering inflicted on Mr. Assange, as a result of his prolonged solitary confinement, amounts not only to arbitrary detention, but also to torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, Melzer said. He expressed particular concern about Mr. Assange’s exposure to COVID-19 given his pre-existing medical condition. “Prison decongestion measures seen around the world in response to COVID-19 should be extended to all inmates whose imprisonment is not absolutely necessary,” the expert said. “First and foremost, alternative non-custodial measures should be extended to those with specific vulnerabilities such as Mr. Assange who suffers from a pre-existing respiratory health condition.”

“Jack Weldon gives us that access.”

• American People Hire High-Powered Lobbyist To Push Interests In Congress (Onion)

Citing a desire to gain influence in Washington, the American people confirmed Friday that they have hired high-powered D.C. lobbyist Jack Weldon of the firm Patton Boggs to help advance their agenda in Congress. Known among Beltway insiders for his ability to sway public policy on behalf of massive corporations such as Johnson & Johnson, Monsanto, and AT&T, Weldon, 53, is expected to use his vast network of political connections to give his new client a voice in the legislative process. Weldon is reportedly charging the American people $795 an hour. “Unlike R.J. Reynolds, Pfizer, or Bank of America, the U.S. populace lacks the access to public officials required to further its legislative goals,” a statement from the nation read in part. “Jack Weldon gives us that access.”

“His daily presence in the Capitol will ensure the American people finally get a seat at the table,” the statement continued. “And it will allow him to advance our message that everyone, including Americans, deserves to be represented in Washington.” The 310-million-member group said it will rely on Weldon’s considerable clout to ensure its concerns are taken into account when Congress addresses issues such as education, immigration, national security, health care, transportation, the economy, affordable college tuition, infrastructure, jobs, equal rights, taxes, Social Security, the environment, housing, the national debt, agriculture, energy, alternative energy, nutrition, imports, exports, foreign relations, the arts, and crime.

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PCR Tests and COVID Vaccines are Useless

Dec 022020

December 2, 2020 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 3:21 pm Finance Tagged with: Covid19, cycle threshold, false positives, infections, lockdown, Moderna, PCR, Pfizer, prevention, testing, useless, vaccines 45 Responses »

John French Sloan McSorley’s Bar 1912

If you’re enthusiastic about the impact of the newly arriving COVID vaccines, and you expect to “go back to normal” soon, don’t. You’re being fed fairy tales and other narratives. I won’t talk too much here, my quotes are plenty long enough as is.

After first reading an absolute decomposition of the PCR tests this morning, I figured out that the new vaccines being rolled out are equally useless. One has to wonder what goes on here. Just a few days ago, I quoted an article about a Portuguese court saying the PCR tests are 97% unreliable:

Landmark Legal Ruling Finds That Covid PCR Tests Are Not Fit For Purpose

This is not the first challenge to the credibility of PCR tests. Many people will be aware that their results have a lot to do with the number of amplifications that are performed, or the ‘cycle threshold.’ This number in most American and European labs is 35–40 cycles, but experts have claimed that even 35 cycles is far too many, and that a more reasonable protocol would call for 25–30 cycles. (Each cycle exponentially increases the amount of viral DNA in the sample).

[..] The Portuguese judges cited a study conducted by “some of the leading European and world specialists,” which was published by Oxford Academic at the end of September. It showed that if someone tested positive for Covid at a cycle threshold of 35 or higher, the chances of that person actually being infected is less than 3%, and that “the probability of… receiving a false positive is 97% or higher.”

The writer of that article, Peter Andrews, an Irish science journalist, today at RT writes an even more convincing take-down. The Corman-Drosten paper, upon which “our” entire attitude towards the PCR test is based, was written by a number of highly compromised authors, with interests in both the journal that published it, and the companies that perform the tests.

The people now criticizing the paper are a group that includes senior molecular geneticists, biochemists, immunologists, and microbiologists from Europe, the US and Japan. Not some Portuguese judges. Not that there’s anything wrong with Portuguese judges; they seem more sane to me than many other parties.

A Global Team Of Experts Has Found 10 Fatal Flaws In The Main Test For Covid And Is Demanding It’s Urgently Axed

A peer review from a group of 22 international experts has found 10 “major flaws” in the main protocol for such tests. The report systematically dismantles the original study, called the Corman-Drosten paper, which described a protocol for applying the PCR technique to detecting Covid. The Corman-Drosten paper was published on January, 23, 2020, just a day after being submitted, which would make any peer review process that took place possibly the shortest in history. What is important about it is that the protocol it describes is used in around 70 percent of Covid kits worldwide. It’s cheap, fast – and absolutely useless. Among the fatal flaws that totally invalidate the PCR testing protocol are that the test:

• is non-specific, due to erroneous primer design • is enormously variable • cannot discriminate between the whole virus and viral fragments • has no positive or negative controls • has no standard operating procedure • does not seem to have been properly peer reviewed. Oh dear. One wonders whether anything at all was correct in the paper. But wait – it gets worse. As has been noted previously, no threshold for positivity was ever identified.

This is why labs have been running 40 cycles, almost guaranteeing a large number of false positives – up to 97 percent, according to some studies. The cherry on top, though, is that among the authors of the original paper themselves, at least four have severe conflicts of interest. Two of them are members of the editorial board of Eurosurveillance, the sinisterly named journal that published the paper.

And at least three of them are on the payroll of the first companies to perform PCR testing! The 22 members of the consortium that has challenged this shoddy science deserve huge credit. The scientists, from Europe, the USA, and Japan, comprise senior molecular geneticists, biochemists, immunologists, and microbiologists, with many decades of experience between them. They have issued a demand to Eurosurveillance to retract the Corman-Drosten paper, writing: “Considering the scientific and methodological blemishes presented here, we are confident that the editorial board of Eurosurveillance has no other choice but to retract the publication.’’ Talk about putting the pressure on.

It is difficult to overstate the implications of this revelation. Every single thing about the Covid orthodoxy relies on ‘case numbers’, which are largely the results of the now widespread PCR tests. If their results are essentially meaningless, then everything we are being told – and ordered to do by increasingly dictatorial governments – is likely to be incorrect. For instance, one of the authors of the review is Dr Mike Yeadon, who asserts that, in the UK, there is no ‘second wave’ and that the pandemic has been over since June. Having seen the PCR tests so unambiguously debunked, it is hard to see any evidence to the contrary.

[..] Why was this paper rushed to publication in January, despite clearly not meeting proper standards? Why did none of the checks and balances that are meant to prevent bad science dictating public policy kick into action? And why did it take so long for anyone in the scientific community to challenge its faulty methodology? These questions lead to dark ruminations, which I will save for another day.

Even more pressing is the question of what is going to be done about this now. The people responsible for writing and publishing the paper have to be held accountable. But also, all PCR testing based on the Corman-Drosten protocol should be stopped with immediate effect. All those who are so-called current ‘Covid cases’, diagnosed based on that protocol, should be told they no longer have to isolate. All present and previous Covid deaths, cases, and ‘infection rates’ should be subject to a massive retroactive inquiry.

And lockdowns, shutdowns, and other restrictions should be urgently reviewed and relaxed.

Because this latest blow to PCR testing raises the probability that we are not enduring a killer virus pandemic, but a false positive pseudo-epidemic.

And that wasn’t enough to “make my day”. Next up, we see that the newly crafted vaccines are not only potentially dangerous, at least the Pfizer and Moderna ones, they are utterly useless too. They are not designed to keep you from being infected, they merely aim to decrease the impact of the symptoms of infections. Back in September William A. Haseltine, healthcare contributor at Forbes, wrote the following.

Where was the follow-up? Why did Britain proudly announce they’ll start using the Pfizer test by next week, with other countries soon to follow? What’s going on? Why are they all spending billions on vaccines that are utterly useless -and dangerous? The vaccines don’t even pretend to stop you from getting infected, or dying. They only pretend to make you somewhat less sick once you are infected. They fight symptoms, not the infection, not the disease.

Covid-19 Vaccine Protocols Reveal That Trials Are Designed To Succeed

Moderna, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, and Johnson & Johnson are leading candidates for the completion of a Covid-19 vaccine likely to be released in the coming months. These companies have published their vaccine trial protocols. This unusually transparent action during a major drug trial deserves praise, close inspection of the protocols raises surprising concerns. These trials seem designed to prove their vaccines work, even if the measured effects are minimal. What would a normal vaccine trial look like?

Prevention of infection must be a critical endpoint. Any vaccine trial should include regular antigen testing every three days to test contagiousness to pick up early signs of infection and PCR testing once a week to confirm infection by SARS-CoV-2 test the ability of the vaccines to stave off infection. Prevention of infection is not a criterion for success for any of these vaccines. In fact, their endpoints all require confirmed infections and all those they will include in the analysis for success, the only difference being the severity of symptoms between the vaccinated and unvaccinated.

Measuring differences amongst only those infected by SARS-CoV-2 underscores the implicit conclusion that the vaccines are not expected to prevent infection, only modify symptoms of those infected. We all expect an effective vaccine to prevent serious illness if infected. Three of the vaccine protocols—Moderna, Pfizer, and AstraZeneca—do not require that their vaccine prevent serious disease only that they prevent moderate symptoms which may be as mild as cough, or headache.

[..] Vaccine efficacy is typically proved by large clinical trials over several years. The pharmaceutical companies intend to do trials ranging from thirty thousand to sixty thousand participants. This scale of study would be sufficient for testing vaccine efficacy. The first surprise found upon a closer reading of the protocols reveals that each study intends to complete interim and primary analyses that at most include 164 participants. These companies likely intend to apply for an emergency use authorization (EUA) from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) with just their limited preliminary results.

Interim analysis success requires a 70% efficacy. The vaccine or placebo will be given to thousands of people in each trial. For Moderna, the initial interim analysis will be based on the results of infection of only 53 people. The judgment reached in interim analysis is dependent upon the difference in the number of people with symptoms, which may be mild, in the vaccinated group versus the unvaccinated group.

Moderna’s success margin is for 13 or less of those 53 to develop symptoms compared to 40 or more in their control group. For Johnson & Johnson, their interim analysis includes 77 vaccine recipients, with a success margin of 18 or less developing symptoms compared to 59 in the control group. For AstraZeneca, their interim analysis includes 50 vaccine recipients, with a success margin of 12 or less developing symptoms compared to 19 in the 25 person control group. Pfizer is even smaller in its success requirements. Their initial group includes 32 vaccine recipients, with a success margin of 7 or less developing symptoms compared to 25 in the control group.

The primary analyses are a bit more expanded, but need to be less efficacious for success: about sixty percent. AstraZeneca, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, and Pfizer have primary analyses that distribute the vaccine to only 100, 151, 154, and 164 participants respectively. These companies state that they do not “intend” to stop trials after the primary analyses, but there is every chance that they intend to pursue an EUA and focus on manufacturing the vaccine rather than further thorough testing.

The second surprise from these protocols is how mild the requirements for contracted Covid-19 symptoms are. A careful reading reveals that the minimum qualification for a case of Covid-19 is a positive PCR test and one or two mild symptoms. These include headache, fever, cough, or mild nausea. This is far from adequate. These vaccine trials are testing to prevent common cold symptoms.

These trials certainly do not give assurance that the vaccine will protect from the serious consequences of Covid-19.Johnson & Johnson is the only trial that requires the inclusion of severe Covid-19 cases, at least 5 for the 75 participant interim analysis.

One of the more immediate questions a trial needs to answer is whether a vaccine prevents infection. If someone takes this vaccine, are they far less likely to become infected with the virus? These trials all clearly focus on eliminating symptoms of Covid-19, and not infections themselves. Asymptomatic infection is listed as a secondary objective in these trials when they should be of critical importance.

It appears that all the pharmaceutical companies assume that the vaccine will never prevent infection. Their criteria for approval is the difference in symptoms between an infected control group and an infected vaccine group. They do not measure the difference between infection and noninfection as a primary motivation.

A greater concern for the millions of older people and those with preexisting conditions is whether these trials test the vaccine’s ability to prevent severe illness and death. Again we find that severe illness and death are only secondary objectives in these trials. None list the prevention of death and hospitalization as a critically important barrier.

If total infections, hospitalizations, and death are going to be ignored in the preliminary trials of the vaccines, then there must be phase four testing to monitor their safety and efficacy. This would be long term massive scale monitoring of the vaccine. There must be an indication that the authorized vaccines are reducing infection, hospitalization, and death, or else they will not be able to stop this pandemic.

Sometimes I just don’t get this world. If you would like to argue that all of the above is false, that PCR and vaccines are all fine, and they will lift us out of this misery, hey, I’m your man, I can do with some good news. But I’m afraid we’re being played for billions.

Are our politicians and “experts” complicit or are they simply incompetent? Why don’t I leave that choice to you as well?

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Debt Rattle November 30 2020

Nov 302020

November 30, 2020 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:59 am Finance Tagged with: Biden, Covid19, Dominion, election, Georgia, lockdown, nursing homes, poverty, Sidney Powell, small businesses, wilderness 26 Responses »

Jackson Pollock Greyed Rainbow 1953

• Nearly One-Third Of NY, NJ Small Businesses Reportedly Closed In 2020 (NYP)

• Almost 700,000 Driven Into Poverty By COVID Crisis In UK (G.)

• UK Shops To Be Allowed To Open 24 Hours A Day In December And January (G.)

• Covid Infections In England Fall By 30% Over Lockdown (BBC)

• Over 100,000 US Nursing Home Residents, Staff Killed by Pandemic (CD)

• The ‘Smartest Man In The Room’ Has Joined Sidney Powell’s Team (AT)

• Republicans Plan to Occupy Georgia State House (GP)

• The 2020 Presidential Election Is Deeply Puzzling (Basham)

• Biden To Tap Career Russiagater For Top Budgeting Post (RT)

• One Of America’s Great Wildernesses Being Destroyed In A Silent Massacre (LAT)

• The Next Decade Could Be Even Worse (Wood)

The best way to stop Covid-19 is to reset the global financial system. Once most small businesses are bankrupted and the majority of our freedoms have been stripped away virus will disappear.

— Karmic Reset (@daretocontraire) November 29, 2020

• Nearly One-Third Of NY, NJ Small Businesses Reportedly Closed In 2020 (NYP)

It has been a bad year for ma and pa. Nearly one-third of small businesses in New York and New Jersey remain closed since January amid the coronavirus pandemic, according to a watchdog. In the Empire State, 27.8 percent of small businesses have not reopened their doors, while Jersey has lost 31.2 percent as of Nov. 16, according to TrackTheRecovery.org, a Harvard-run database that keeps tabs on the economic impact of the virus. The figures are in line with estimates from the New Jersey Business & Industry Association, which says 28 percent of the Garden State’s small businesses had shut up shop by the end of October, according to the Star Ledger newspaper. And with the region now seeing a resurgence of the virus, business leaders are worried the number could go even higher.

“It’s really bad,” Eileen Kean, New Jersey state director of the National Federation of Independent Businesses told the Star-Ledger. “And without federal dollars coming into New Jersey, the Main Street stores and other establishments are not gonna make it through the winter.” More than half of small businesses in both states were forced to shut their doors in the spring at the height of the pandemic, with both hitting highs in mid-April — 52.5 percent of New York businesses and 53.9 percent in the Garden States, the stats show. “It’s devastating how many restaurants have shuttered and jobs have been lost,” said Andrew Rigie, executive director of NYC Hospitality Alliances, which represents bars, restaurants, and clubs in the Big Apple.

And it happens everywhere. So much of this will never come back. Are we prepared for that?

• Almost 700,000 Driven Into Poverty By COVID Crisis In UK (G.)

Almost 700,000 people in the UK, including 120,000 children, have been plunged into poverty as a result of the Covid economic crisis, according to a thinktank analysis. The Legatum Institute also said an additional 700,000 people had been prevented from falling below the breadline by the chancellor’s temporary £20-a-week boost to universal credit, introduced in April to help claimants cope with the extra costs of the pandemic. Overall, the pandemic has pushed the total number of people in the UK living in poverty to more than 15 million – 23% of the population – according to the institute, which uses poverty measures developed by the independent Social Metrics Commission. The Conservative peer Philippa Stroud, the institute’s chief executive, said the findings showed a “clear need for a comprehensive anti-poverty strategy to be placed at the heart of the UK’s Covid recovery response”.

Lady Stroud, in common with many other anti-poverty campaigners, has called for the government to retain the 12-month uplift to universal credit after it is due to end in April 2021. Ministers last week said they would decide in January. The new analysis relies on “nowcasting” techniques using employment, earnings data and the impact of government policy to enable up-to-date and robust poverty estimates, because official figures for the first year of Covid are not due until 2022. Those hardest hit by the economic crisis were young workers, those in relatively low-paying employment and those working in sectors such as hospitality and retail. Elderly people were financially least badly hit, the analysis found. Of the 700,000 people newly in poverty, just over half had incomes up to 25% below the poverty line, 160,000 were between 35% and 50% below, and 270,000 had slipped more than 50% below, known as “deep poverty”.

Oh wait, there’s our comeback. Shop till you drop at 4 am.

• UK Shops To Be Allowed To Open 24 Hours A Day In December And January (G.)

Shops will be given permission to trade around the clock as the high street tries to recoup some of the losses it has suffered during the pandemic, a cabinet minister has said. Retailers normally have to go through a lengthy process to apply to local authorities under the Town and Country Planning Act if they wish to extend hours outside the window of 9am to 7pm. But the communities secretary, Robert Jenrick, said he wanted to remove the bureaucracy to encourage greater trade – allowing shops to open for up to 24 hours a day in December and January. Writing in the Daily Telegraph, he said: “With these changes local shops can open longer, ensuring more pleasant and safer shopping with less pressure on public transport.

How long will be a matter of choice for the shopkeepers and at the discretion of the council, but I suggest we offer these hard-pressed entrepreneurs and businesses the greatest possible flexibility this festive season. “As local government secretary I am relaxing planning restrictions and issuing an unambiguous request to councils to allow businesses to welcome us into their glowing stores late into the evening and beyond.” It comes after Jenrick suggested some areas could be moved into a lower tier when the first 14-day review of the latest system of tiered local controls takes place in mid-December. A record number of shops closed during the first half of 2020 due to the coronavirus lockdown, according to research from the Local Data Company and PwC.

Sounds nice, but if the virus is endemic, and it sure looks that way, what will happen when those stores open 24/7?

• Covid Infections In England Fall By 30% Over Lockdown (BBC)

Coronavirus infections in England have fallen by about a third over lockdown, according to a major study. Some of the worst-hit areas saw the biggest improvements – but, despite this progress, cases remained high across England. Health Secretary Matt Hancock said the data showed the country could not “take our foot off the pedal just yet”. The findings by Imperial College London were based on swabbing more than 100,000 people between 13-24 November. The React-1 study is highly respected and gives us the most up-to-date picture of Covid-19 in the country. Its researchers estimated the virus’s reproduction (R) rate had fallen to 0.88. That means on average every infection translated to less than one other new infection, so the epidemic is shrinking.

Run alongside pollster Ipsos MORI, the Imperial study involved testing a random sample of people for coronavirus, whether or not they had symptoms. The results of these tests suggested a 30% fall in infections between the last study and the period of 13-24 November. Before that, cases were accelerating – doubling every nine days when the study last reported at the end of October. Now cases are coming down, but more slowly than they shot up – halving roughly every 37 days. In the North West and North East, though – regions with some of the highest numbers of cases – infections fell by more than half. The findings suggest cases are now highest in the East Midlands and West Midlands.

11 months into the mess, “Testing is a struggle, PPE and staff are daily challenges.” Sweet lord.

Kaiser says 40% of US COVID deaths are in long term care homes. I was corrected recently about a Canada graph I posted which said it 98% in Ontario, but even then it was two-thirds of all deaths there.

With such concentrations, anything you can do to decrease the numbers in these homes can change the entire picture of the disease countrywide. Why is that not happening?

NOTE: the graph may be a little misleading; not oly do the numbers of deaths rise, the numbers of states reporting also do.

• Over 100,000 US Nursing Home Residents, Staff Killed by Pandemic (CD)

As of the last week of November, Covid-19 has claimed the lives of more than 100,000 people who live and work in long-term care facilities in the United States, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation’s latest analysis of state-reported data. The following chart depicts the growth in Covid-19 deaths among nursing home residents and staff in the U.S. since April. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF), 40% of the nation’s Covid-19 deaths have occurred in long-term care facilities. “While early action to prevent the spread of coronavirus in long-term care facilities led to strict protocols related to testing, personal protective equipment, and visitor restrictions,” KFF pointed out that “several of these measures have been reversed in recent months, and some long-term care facilities continue to report shortages of PPE and staff.”

According to physician and public health expert Michael Barnett, 7.7% of the nation’s nursing home residents, or one in 13, have now died as a result of Covid-19. “Things have never really gotten better,” he tweeted. “Testing is a struggle, PPE and staff are daily challenges.” Soon after reaching the “bleak milestone” of 100,000 pandemic deaths in long-term care facilities, which happened on Tuesday, the U.S. on Thursday experienced a new record-high number of coronavirus-related hospitalizations, as Common Dreams reported earlier Friday.

Millions of Americans have passed through airports in the past week, despite the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recommendation against traveling for Thanksgiving. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, does not expect conditions to improve by Christmas and the New Year. As KFF explained, the predicted “surge in cases after holiday gatherings and increased time indoors due to winter weather… will have ripple effects on hospitals and nursing homes, given the close relationship between community spread and cases in congregate care settings.”

It’s still not done yet.

• The ‘Smartest Man In The Room’ Has Joined Sidney Powell’s Team (AT)

In her Georgia complaint, Sidney Powell included the declaration of Navid Keshavarz-Nia, an expert witness who stated under oath that there was massive computer fraud in the 2020 election, all of it intended to secure a victory for Joe Biden. Dr. Kershavarz-Nia’s name may not mean a lot to you, but it’s one of the weightiest names in the world when it comes to sniffing out cyber-security problems. We know how important Dr. Kershavarz-Nia is because, just two and a half months ago, the New York Times ran one of its Sunday long-form articles about a massive, multi-million-dollar fraud that a talented grifter ran against the American intelligence and military communities. Dr. Kershavarz-Nia is one of the few people who comes off looking good:

“Navid Keshavarz-Nia, those who worked with him said, “was always the smartest person in the room.” In doing cybersecurity and technical counterintelligence work for the C.I.A., N.S.A. and F.B.I., he had spent decades connecting top-secret dots. After several months of working with Mr. Courtney, he began connecting those dots too. He did not like where they led.” Not only does Dr. Kershavarz-Nia have an innate intelligence, but he’s also got extraordinary academic and practical skills in cyber-fraud detection and analysis. The reason we know about his qualifications is that it takes seven paragraphs for him to list them in the declaration he signed to support the Georgia complaint.

His qualifications include a B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in various areas of electrical and computer engineering. In addition, “I have advanced trained from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), National Security Agency (NSA), DHS office of Intelligence & Analysis (I&A) and Massachusetts Institution of Technology (MIT).” Professionally, Dr. Kershavarz-Nia has spent his career as a cyber-security engineer. “My experience,” he attests,” spans 35 years performing technical assessment, mathematical modeling, cyber-attack pattern analysis, and security intelligence[.]” I will not belabor the point. Take it as given that Dr. Kershavarz-Nia may know more about cyber-security than anyone else in America.

So what does the brilliant Dr. Kershavarz-Nia have to say? This: 1. Hammer and Scorecard is real, not a hoax (as Democrats allege), and both are used to manipulate election outcomes. 2. Dominion, ES&S, Scytl, and Smartmatic are all vulnerable to fraud and vote manipulation — and the mainstream media reported on these vulnerabilities in the past. 3. Dominion has been used in other countries to “forge election results.” 4. Dominion’s corporate structure is deliberately confusing to hide relationships with Venezuela, China, and Cuba. 5. Dominion machines are easily hackable. 6. Dominion memory cards with cryptographic key access to the systems were stolen in 2019.

The strangest case of all so far?! People protest in court against Dominion machines being wiped clean on order of Sec of State, judge orders wiping stopped (it was already in progress), then reverses order because plaintiffs don’t have the machines, then reverses that order again. Buy why would you wipe election machines to begin with, especially before the election has been decided?

• Republicans Plan to Occupy Georgia State House (GP)

A coalition of Republican groups are calling for an occupation of the Georgia State House in response to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger ordering the Dominion voting machines in the state to be wiped. The groups are also calling for a protest at Raffensperger’s home on Monday evening. Raffensperger claims that he was ordering them to be reset ahead of the senate runoff election, but a reset would wipe all votes from the general election — the results of which are still being hotly contested by the Trump campaign. The deletion had been temporarily stopped on Sunday, when Judge Timothy C. Batten, Sr. issued an order to freeze ALL Dominion voting machines in the state of Georgia, but he reversed course within hours.

Currently, there is a major fight going on and it appears that a short time later, a federal judge ordered officials not to reset the machines. The volatile and unknown situation has lead to Republican activists and organizers to call for a full on occupation of the Georgia State House on Monday — as well as protest at the Secretary of State’s house. “After the Secretary of State ordered the voting machines to be wiped in a blatant destruction of evidence, coalition groups plan to OCCUPY THE STATE CAPITOL in Georgia on Monday November 30 at 12pm. They also plan to protest outside the Sec. of States house at 6pm,” Republican activist, influencer, and entrepreneur Mike Coudrey tweeted.

“Defendants are hereby ENJOINED & RESTRAINED from altering, destroying, or erasing, or allowing the alteration, destruction, or erasure of, any software or data on any DOMINION VOTING MACHINE…”

When you look at these numbers, yes, it’s strange.

• The 2020 Presidential Election Is Deeply Puzzling (Basham)

I am a pollster and I find this election to be deeply puzzling. I also think that the Trump campaign is still well within its rights to contest the tabulations. Something very strange happened in America’s democracy in the early hours of Wednesday November 4 and the days that followed. It’s reasonable for a lot of Americans to want to find out exactly what. First, consider some facts. President Trump received more votes than any previous incumbent seeking reelection. He got 11 million more votes than in 2016, the third largest rise in support ever for an incumbent. By way of comparison, President Obama was comfortably reelected in 2012 with 3.5 million fewer votes than he received in 2008. Trump’s vote increased so much because, according to exit polls, he performed far better with many key demographic groups.

Ninety-five percent of Republicans voted for him. He did extraordinarily well with rural male working-class whites. He earned the highest share of all minority votes for a Republican since 1960. Trump grew his support among black voters by 50 percent over 2016. Nationally, Joe Biden’s black support fell well below 90 percent, the level below which Democratic presidential candidates usually lose. Trump increased his share of the national Hispanic vote to 35 percent. With 60 percent or less of the national Hispanic vote, it is arithmetically impossible for a Democratic presidential candidate to win Florida, Arizona, Nevada, and New Mexico. Bellwether states swung further in Trump’s direction than in 2016. Florida, Ohio and Iowa each defied America’s media polls with huge wins for Trump.

Since 1852, only Richard Nixon has lost the electoral college after winning this trio, and that 1960 defeat to John F. Kennedy is still the subject of great suspicion. Midwestern states Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin always swing in the same direction as Ohio and Iowa, their regional peers. Ohio likewise swings with Florida. Current tallies show that, outside of a few cities, the Rust Belt swung in Trump’s direction. Yet, Biden leads in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin because of an apparent avalanche of black votes in Detroit, Philadelphia, and Milwaukee. Biden’s ‘winning’ margin was derived almost entirely from such voters in these cities, as coincidentally his black vote spiked only in exactly the locations necessary to secure victory. He did not receive comparable levels of support among comparable demographic groups in comparable states, which is highly unusual for the presidential victor.

We are told that Biden won more votes nationally than any presidential candidate in history. But he won a record low of 17 percent of counties; he only won 524 counties, as opposed to the 873 counties Obama won in 2008. Yet, Biden somehow outdid Obama in total votes. Victorious presidential candidates, especially challengers, usually have down-ballot coattails; Biden did not. The Republicans held the Senate and enjoyed a ‘red wave’ in the House, where they gained a large number of seats while winning all 27 toss-up contests. Trump’s party did not lose a single state legislature and actually made gains at the state level. Another anomaly is found in the comparison between the polls and non-polling metrics.

The latter include: party registrations trends; the candidates’ respective primary votes; candidate enthusiasm; social media followings; broadcast and digital media ratings; online searches; the number of (especially small) donors; and the number of individuals betting on each candidate. Despite poor recent performances, media and academic polls have an impressive 80 percent record predicting the winner during the modern era. But, when the polls err, non-polling metrics do not; the latter have a 100 percent record. Every non-polling metric forecast Trump’s reelection. For Trump to lose this election, the mainstream polls needed to be correct, which they were not. Furthermore, for Trump to lose, not only did one or more of these metrics have to be wrong for the first time ever, but every single one had to be wrong, and at the very same time; not an impossible outcome, but extremely unlikely nonetheless.

@KateAronoff: “Historic times, ladies: a woman is going to collect surveillance data leading to a targeted drone strikes. Another woman will tell the press that 14 dead civilians is the price of freedom, and yet another woman will say there’s no money left for healthcare”

• Biden To Tap Career Russiagater For Top Budgeting Post (RT)

An Obamacare architect, former Hillary Clinton adviser and career Russiagater, Neera Tanden, has been tapped as potential budget office director under Biden, setting Twitter on fire with recollections of her toxic track record. Tanden was a healthcare adviser under the Barack Obama administration and helped draft his brainchild the Affordable Care Act. A close ally of Hillary Clinton during her unsuccessful 2016 presidential run, she currently heads the pro-Clinton think tank Center for American Progress. Although born and raised in the United States, Tanden’s parents are immigrants from India. The mainstream media have praised her potentially becoming “the first woman of color and the first South Asian American to lead the Office of Management and Budget.”

Known for her combative tweeting, Tanden seems to have a habit of clashing with anyone who questions the wisdom of the Democratic Party’s political machine. Journalist Vincent Bevins joked that her potential nomination should be seen as an inspiration which “shows that a lifetime of posting cringe is not a barrier to higher office.” Grayzone writer and assistant editor Ben Norton labelled Tanden a “neoliberal troll” who “hates the left with a burning passion and spends all her time on here attacking leftists.” In fact, Tanden was openly hostile towards supporters of Vermont senator and two-time presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders. The left-leaning lawmaker accused Tanden last year of “maligning my staff & supporters and belittling progressive ideas.”

Her hostility towards those critical of Clinton reportedly even led to physical scuffles. In 2008, Tanden is said to have assaulted a staffer after he asked Clinton a critical question about the Iraq war. Conservative pundit Mike Cernovich described Tanden as a “garden variety resistance troll,” although this description arguably doesn’t do justice to her impressive output of Russiagate-related outbursts. She was a militant disciple of the debunked theory that Donald Trump’s presidential campaign was in cahoots with Moscow, floating countless bizarre allegations, including, but certainly not limited to, the proposition that Russian hackers had infiltrated Florida’s voting system with Trump’s full knowledge during the 2016 election.

Tanden provocatively alleged that WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange engaged in “fascist behavior” by publishing leaked State Department emails and other US documents. Her foreign policy views have also raised eyebrows. She (in)famously suggested Libya should provide compensation, in the form of oil, to the US as a means of repayment for its “liberation.” A US-led NATO intervention in 2011 turned the North African nation into a safe haven for warlords, terrorists and human traffickers. “Given tonight’s news, I hope oil-rich countries around the world are increasing the security on their rigs and drilling sites,” journalist Glenn Greenwald quipped, citing an email of Tanden’s that was leaked to the Intercept.

We can thank Julian Assange for exposing that Neera Tanden — now Joe Biden’s budget director — wanted to take Libya’s oil as “payback” for the US overthrowing Gaddafi and bombing the country to smithereens, leaving it riddled with open air slave markets.

— Sarah Abdallah (@sahouraxo) November 29, 2020

A decades-long development.

• One Of America’s Great Wildernesses Being Destroyed In A Silent Massacre (LAT)

Hidden away in the heart of the Deep South, one of the nation’s greatest wildernesses is being destroyed, bit by bit, in a silent massacre. You won’t find people chaining themselves to trees to protect this place, or national environmental groups using pictures of it to sign up new members, because few know it exists. And yet, here it is — the Mobile River Basin, one of the richest in the world in terms of the sheer number of species and types of habitat. The major rivers and thousands of creeks feeding into this basin together form the largest inland delta system in the United States, second only to the Mississippi in how much water it dumps into the Gulf of Mexico.

The river system, the fourth-largest in the country in terms of water flow, stretches from the northern edge of Alabama to the Gulf, draining parts of four states, and encompassing hundreds of thousands of acres of forest, from Appalachian hardwood stands to haunted cypress swamps. A dedicated band of locals know it for the incredible hunting and fishing it affords. But few know it for its greatest distinction. That’s a shame, for this is America’s Amazon, far and away the most biodiverse river network in North America. There are more species of oaks on a single hillside on the banks of the Alabama River than you can find anywhere else in the world. The Mobile River Basin makes Alabama home to more species of freshwater fish, mussels, snails, turtles and crawfish than any other state. The contest isn’t even close.

For instance, Alabama is home to 97 crawfish species, while California, three times the size of Alabama, has but nine. There are 450 species of freshwater fish in the state, or about one-third of all species known in the entire nation. The system’s turtle population is even more singular. The Mobile-Tensaw Delta estuary system has 18 turtle species, more than any other river delta system in the world — more than the Amazon and more than the Mekong, both extraordinarily biodiverse ecosystems. Unlike most of the nation’s great river systems, the Mobile Basin — along with its wetlands, floodplain forests and estuary — has survived with its biological community mostly intact. That is due in large measure to an odd combination of benign neglect and the mixed blessing of being located in the heart of Alabama.

Tragically, it now sits on the cusp of decline, facing death by a thousand cuts, just as the scientific community has begun to appreciate its riches. Habitat destruction, development and lax enforcement of environmental regulations conspire to take an increasing toll, making the area a global hot spot for extinctions, particularly of aquatic creatures. In fact, nearly half of all extinctions in the continental United States since the 1800s have occurred among creatures that lived in the Mobile River Basin, according to records maintained by Endangered Species International and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

“The problems are deep and structural – not the type that the tedious process of democratic change can fix in time to forestall mayhem.”

• The Next Decade Could Be Even Worse (Wood)

Peter Turchin, one of the world’s experts on pine beetles and possibly also on human beings, met me reluctantly this summer on the campus of the University of Connecticut at Storrs, where he teaches. Like many people during the pandemic, he preferred to limit his human contact. He also doubted whether human contact would have much value anyway, when his mathematical models could already tell me everything I needed to know. [..] The year 2020 has been kind to Turchin, for many of the same reasons it has been hell for the rest of us. Cities on fire, elected leaders endorsing violence, homicides surging – to a normal American, these are apocalyptic signs. To Turchin, they indicate that his models, which incorporate thousands of years of data about human history, are working. (“Not all of human history,” he corrected me once. “Just the last 10,000 years.”)

He has been warning for a decade that a few key social and political trends portend an “age of discord,” civil unrest and carnage worse than most Americans have experienced. In 2010, he predicted that the unrest would get serious around 2020, and that it wouldn’t let up until those social and political trends reversed. Havoc at the level of the late 1960s and early ’70s is the best-case scenario; all-out civil war is the worst. The fundamental problems, he says, are a dark triad of social maladies: a bloated elite class, with too few elite jobs to go around; declining living standards among the general population; and a government that can’t cover its financial positions. His models, which track these factors in other societies across history, are too complicated to explain in a nontechnical publication.

But they’ve succeeded in impressing writers for nontechnical publications, and have won him comparisons to other authors of “megahistories,” such as Jared Diamond and Yuval Noah Harari. [..] The fate of our own society, he says, is not going to be pretty, at least in the near term. “It’s too late,” he told me as we passed Mirror Lake, which UConn’s website describes as a favorite place for students to “read, relax, or ride on the wooden swing.” The problems are deep and structural – not the type that the tedious process of democratic change can fix in time to forestall mayhem. Turchin likens America to a huge ship headed directly for an iceberg: “If you have a discussion among the crew about which way to turn, you will not turn in time, and you hit the iceberg directly.”

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Support the Automatic Earth in virustime, election time, all the time. Click at the top of the sidebars to donate with Paypal and Patreon.

Debt Rattle November 10 2020

Nov 102020

November 10, 2020 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 10:30 am Finance Tagged with: Biden, Covid19, Dominion, fear machine, grifters, lawsuits, lockdown, mental health, Pfizer, software, system glitches, Trump, vaccine 25 Responses »

Hedy Lamarr Born November 9, 1914. As well as acting in 30 films, during the Second World War she co-developed a frequency-hopping guidance system for American torpedoes, the principles of which are used in Bluetooth and WiFi today.

• Trump Campaign Alleges Potential Fraud In Pennsylvania Election Lawsuit (JTN)

• System ‘Glitch’ Also Uncovered In Wisconsin – Removes Lead from Joe Biden (GP)

• Fore! (Jim Kunstler)

• Maricopa GOP Chair Failed to Show Up to Certify Dominion Voting Machines (GP)

• The Grifters, Chapter 3 – Election Prediction (Ben Hunt)

• US Secretary of Defense Mark Esper Fired And Replaced, Trump Announces (RT)

• COVID19 Vaccine From Pfizer and BioNTech Is Strongly Effective

• China Vaccine Trial Halted After Serious Adverse Event (BBG)

• Chancellor Merkel, Put an End to the COVID “Fear Machine” (German Doctors)

• One In Five COVID19 Patients Develop Mental Illness Within 90 Days (R.)

• Children Regressing And Struggling Mentally In Lockdown (G.)

• Lockdown Named Word Of The Year By Collins Dictionary (G.)

Man of the Year (2006)
https://twitter.com/i/status/1324953850462298112

Wait until you hear about Russia Collusion

Wait until you hear about Russia Collusion. https://t.co/k23xgkd0w6

— The Red-Headed libertarian ™ (@TRHLofficial) November 9, 2020

Predictably, this leads some people to call for Barr’s impeachment. Maybe because the only thing the Dems have been successful at was Trump’s one-sided impeachment. But Barr faces a conundrum: There is a longstanding tradition at the DOJ to not investigate “until after the election certification process is completed”, but that would mean an official result would be there, which would then have to be reversed in case there is serious fraud, but by then it would be much harder to execute.

• Barr Authorizes DOJ Prosecutors To Investigate Election Irregularities (JTN)

Attorney General William Barr has issued a memo in which he said that he authorized federal prosecutors “to pursue substantial allegations of voting and vote tabulation irregularities prior to the certification of elections in your jurisdictions in certain cases, as I have already done in specific instances.” Barr noted that this did not serve to indicate the Justice Department has determined that voting irregularities affected election outcomes. “Such inquiries and reviews may be conducted if there are clear and apparently-credible allegations of irregularities that, if true, could potentially impact the outcome of a federal election in an individual state,” Barr wrote. “Any investigation of claims of irregularities that, if true, would clearly not impact the outcome of a federal election in an individual State should normally be deferred until after the election certification process is completed.

While U.S. Attorneys maintain their inherent authority to conduct inquiries and investigations as they deem appropriate, it will likely be prudent to commence any election-related matters as a preliminary inquiry, so as to assess whether available evidence warrants further investigative steps”. Media outlets recently projected Democrat Joe Biden as the winner of the presidential contest, but President Trump has not conceded and has made allegations of voter fraud. “While it is imperative that credible allegations be addressed in a timely and effective manner, it is equally imperative that Department personnel exercise appropriate caution and maintain the Department’s absolute commitment to fairness, neutrality and non-partisanship,” Barr wrote in the memo.

“While serious allegations should be handled with great care, specious, speculative, fanciful or far-fetched claims should not be a basis for initiating federal inquiries.” “Nothing here should be taken as any indication that the Department has concluded that voting irregularities have impacted the outcome of any election,” Barr wrote. “Rather, I provide this authority and guidance to emphasize the need to timely and appropriately address allegations of voting irregularities so that all of the American people, regardless of their preferred candidate or party, can have full confidence in the results of our elections.”

Heritage Foundation “There was an unprecedented number of lawsuits filed before election day—with one common theme: ALL tried to eliminate security protocols for absentee ballots and tried to implement vote harvesting in every state.”

There was an unprecedented number of lawsuits filed before election day—with one common theme: ALL tried to eliminate security protocols for absentee ballots and tried to implement vote harvesting in every state. pic.twitter.com/1CrbKDydxr

— Heritage Foundation (@Heritage) November 9, 2020

• Trump Campaign Alleges Potential Fraud In Pennsylvania Election Lawsuit (JTN)

The Trump campaign on Monday announced that it had filed a lawsuit against Secretary of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Kathy Boockvar and the Boards of Elections in seven counties. The election-related lawsuit was filed in the United States District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania, and plaintiffs include the Trump campaign and two individuals. “Voters in Pennsylvania were held to different standards simply based on how they chose to cast their ballot, and we believe this two-tiered election system resulted in potentially fraudulent votes being counted without proper verification or oversight, as well as many voters being disenfranchised simply for casting their votes in-person,” Trump 2020 campaign general counsel Matt Morgan said in a statement. “We will not stop fighting for transparency and integrity in our electoral process and ensuring all Americans can trust in the results of a free and fair election.”

A whole series of “glitches” by now. Not worth investigating, you say?!

• System ‘Glitch’ Also Uncovered In Wisconsin – Removes Lead from Joe Biden (GP)

We’ve reported on numerous events identified in the 2020 election already which are being referred to as ‘glitches’ by the Democrats. Tonight we just uncovered another ‘glitch’ in Wisconsin. When this one is confirmed it will result in a 19,500 vote gain for Trump making the Wisconsin race a total toss-up. There is now a pattern of events we have uncovered across the country where votes are being taken from Republicans at all levels and transferred to competing Democrats in offsetting amounts. These are not random because in every case votes are moved from Republicans to Democrats. This is beginning to appear like a strategy used by the Democrats to steal this election.

We reported first on a system glitch, as it was labeled, in Michigan which switched 6,000 votes back to President Trump. Then another example was uncovered in Oakland County Michigan where again a Republican won his race as a result [of] this glitch. Then in Pennsylvania a ‘glitch’ was uncovered where nearly 20,000 votes were moved from President Trump to Biden. When this is confirmed it will result Biden’s lead being cut by 40,000 votes in Pennsylvania bringing this race back to even. Then we found approximately 6,000 votes which were taken from Trump and moved to Biden in Georgia due to a ‘glitch’. Now tonight we have identified approximately 10,000 votes that were moved from President Trump to Biden in just one Wisconsin County.

This information came from an individual who saw this happen in Rock County Wisconsin. On election night the results of the county were presented during the evening and showed that President Trump won Wisconsin in 2016. At 10:59 the votes came in and the race was close with both candidates at around 29,000 ballots. Then by 11:12 President Trump had taken a nearly 1,000 vote lead on Biden with 31,000 votes to Biden’s 30,000. At 11:21 these results had not changed much. Then at 11:43 more votes came in and they showed Trump had taken a commanding lead at 46,649 to Biden’s 37,133. This was a 9,516 vote lead for Trump.

But then suddenly at 11:57 these votes had swapped. Biden was reported with 46,649 and Trump was reduced to Biden’s former total of 37,133. These votes had swapped from the President Trump to Biden – again a swap from a Republican to a Democrat. The net impact was 19,032 votes. We checked these numbers again tonight from a different source and the final numbers are still showing Biden ahead of President Trump by the same 9,516 votes. Currently the race in Wisconsin is showing Biden with a lead of 1,630,570 votes to President Trump’s 1,610,030 votes. When this adjustment is confirmed Biden will only hold a 1,508 vote lead. This of course is before any of the hundreds of thousands of questionable votes showing up for Biden in Milwaukee early in the morning after the election are validated.

“..the software’s development was funded by the Clinton Global Initiative in 2014..”

• Fore! (Jim Kunstler)

The Democrats… the Resistance… “progressives,” the Left — whatever you want to call them — are much less afraid of being caught for committing election fraud than for getting nailed on a long list of previous and quite serious crimes dating back a decade, including SpyGate, MuellerGate (Russian Collusion), Ukraine-WhistleblowerGate, Uranium One, the Skolkovo technology transfer, the Clinton Foundation’s pay-to-play doings, and the recently disclosed influence-peddling and money-laundering schemes of the Biden Family. A little election fraud ain’t nuthin to that massive, reeking landfill of perfidy and sedition, and folks apparently forget that the election happened just on the eve of whatever investigative results John Durham & Company may be ready to drop on the nation — including the afore-alluded-to Biden Family hijinks, of which there is a live case at the DOJ. Boy are they afraid of all that.

Just sayin… in case you put it out of mind in all the excitement. So, now we will discover whether they committed targeted election fraud, and then, perhaps, we’ll find out how those other matters turn. As for the election fraud itself, you can be sure that a holy host of computer nerd statisticians on Mr. Trump’s end have been working backstage, out of the limelight, to sift those kwazy numbers coming out of places like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Nevada where the race was pretty darn tight. From a strictly procedural point-of-view, Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes look like an open-and-shut case of official misfeasance — insofar as that state’s Supreme Court exceeded its authority in changing the election law to allow ballots received after 8p.m. election day to be counted for days afterward (election law being the sole prerogative of the state legislature).

And that’s a lot of ballots. That will likely be adjudicated in the US supreme court, and pretty pronto, given the exigent circumstances. Then there are the janky numbers in all those other states where the Dominion vote tabulation software was used: 130,000 here… 27,000 there… et cetera. By the way, the company that puts out this Dominion product is partly owned by Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein’s husband, Richard C. Blum; one of its top executives is Nancy Pelosi’s former chief-of-staff; and the software’s development was funded by the Clinton Global Initiative in 2014. I guess they know a good thing when it jumps up and bites them on the lips.

“..the company “uploaded something last night, which is not normal, and it caused a glitch.” “That is something that they don’t ever do. I’ve never seen them update anything the day before the election..”

• Maricopa GOP Chair Failed to Show Up to Certify Dominion Voting Machines (GP)

Republican Arizona State Rep. Kelly Townsend is calling on Maricopa County GOP Chairman Rae Chornenky to step down, along with her first Vice Chair, for failing to show up to certify the Dominion Voting Machines. There has been major controversy over their machines due to the company’s ties to Democrats and the Clinton Foundation. “I just found our that Maricopa County GOP Chairman Rae Chornenky failed to show up to certify the Dominion / Machines. For this reason, I call for her resignation, along with her 1st Vice Chair,” Rep. Townsend tweeted.

The machines were used in 33 states, including Arizona, Michigan and Georgia. Mark Malloch Brown, Chairman of the Board of Smartmantics, which makes the machines, also serves on George Soros’ Open Societies Foundation Board. In Georgia, voting was halted for two hours after the company sent an “update” to their machines. Marcia Ridley, elections supervisor at Spalding County Board of Elections, told Politico that the company “uploaded something last night, which is not normal, and it caused a glitch.” “That is something that they don’t ever do. I’ve never seen them update anything the day before the election,” Ridley said. Ridley said she did not know what the upload contained.

“Polls create the plays. Election models create the score. Fivey Fox and “Nate Silver” announce the game. All to create engagement with a giant media corp.

No one understands how to create and sell a spectator sport better than Disney.”

• The Grifters, Chapter 3 – Election Prediction (Ben Hunt)

How do you get more engagement with your news programming? How do you trigger more neurotransmitter brain chemicals in your ABC News audience? By creating “news” that can be transformed into an entertaining/enraging game. By transforming a singular Election Day event into a months-long spectator sport, complete with plays and scores and announcers and cheering/anxious fans. That’s what election modeling does. That’s why public polling and election modeling exist. Polls to create the “news”, election models to create the score, Fivey Fox and “Nate Silver” to announce the game. All to create engagement with a diversified media corporation.

That’s why Disney acquired FiveThirtyEight. That’s why they originally had it within ESPN and then transferred it to ABC News. That’s why they created the cartoon characters of Fivey Fox and “Nate Silver”. No one understands how to create and sell a spectator sport better than Disney. Here’s the kicker. This spectator sport that Disney/ABC News/FiveThirtyEight has created around Election Day has very little connection with the election itself. The “scores” and the “announcing” and the game itself are a totally distinct thing from the process and dynamic and the outcome of our most important political institution. And they know it. And yet they sell their game over and over again as if it were the real thing. That’s what makes it a grift.

In a nutshell, the FiveThirtyEight prediction model is designed around thousands of simulations of statewide results (based on statewide polls and a hypothesized probability distribution on state level results) that are then mapped against the Electoral College. These thousands of simulations of possible statewide results create a probabilistic distribution on the Electoral College outcome, and whatever percentage of outcomes are on the good side of 269 Electoral College votes for a candidate is the answer for the point-in-time odds of that candidate winning. FiveThirtyEight went into Election Day 2020 assigning Joe Biden a 90% chance of winning, which was even more divorced from election reality than their 2016 “prediction” that Hillary Clinton had a 72% chance of winning.

There is zero alpha … zero useful information … in a model that predicts an election outcome with near certainty when in truth that outcome hinges on a few tens of thousands of votes out of 150 million votes cast. To use a spectator sports analogy, FiveThirtyEight set the 2020 betting odds for this “football game” with Joe Biden as a massive favorite, say 20 points. He won by 1 point. In 2016, FiveThirtyEight had Hillary Clinton as a somewhat less massive favorite, say 15 points. She lost by 1 point. There’s nothing “robust” about these predictions, as “Nate Silver” is currently claiming. These predictions are disasters. FiveThirtyEight would be laughed out of Vegas for setting odds like this.

Mark who?

• US Secretary of Defense Mark Esper Fired And Replaced, Trump Announces (RT)

President Donald Trump has announced via Twitter that US Secretary of Defense Mark Esper has been removed from his position, and has already been replaced. Christopher C. Miller, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, will take on the defense secretary role “effective immediately,” Trump tweeted. “Mark Esper has been terminated. I would like to thank him for his service,” he added. Rumors have circulated for months that Esper would either be fired or resign. In June, he publicly disagreed with the president floating the idea of deploying active-duty military to cities dealing with riots stemming from Black Lives Matter protests. The two have disagreed on other issues too, and Trump even suggested in August that Esper was on his way out. Asked if he had confidence in Esper’s leadership, Trump referred to him as “Mark Yesper” and said he “considers” firing everybody. “At some point, that’s what happens,” he said. Esper had served as secretary of defense since June 2019.

Twitter comment: “Wait, the vaccine was known to be successful weeks ago?? Fauci, Biden, media mocked Trump at this time for saying vaccine was close. The Oct announcement just happened to be delayed AFTER the election?”

• COVID19 Vaccine From Pfizer and BioNTech Is Strongly Effective

Pfizer and partner BioNTech said Monday that their vaccine against Covid-19 was strongly effective, exceeding expectations with results that are likely to be met with cautious excitement — and relief — in the face of the global pandemic. The vaccine is the first to be tested in the United States to generate late-stage data. The companies said an early analysis of the results showed that individuals who received two injections of the vaccine three weeks apart experienced more than 90% fewer cases of symptomatic Covid-19 than those who received a placebo. For months, researchers have cautioned that a vaccine that might only be 60% or 70% effective.

The Phase 3 study is ongoing and additional data could affect results. In keeping with guidance from the Food and Drug Administration, the companies will not file for an emergency use authorization to distribute the vaccine until they reach another milestone: when half of the patients in their study have been observed for any safety issues for at least two months following their second dose. Pfizer expects to cross that threshold in the third week of November.

In their announcement of the results, Pfizer and BioNTech revealed a surprise. The companies said they had decided not to conduct the 32-case analysis “after a discussion with the FDA.” Instead, they planned to conduct the analysis after 62 cases. But by the time the plan had been formalized, there had been 94 cases of Covid-19 in the study. It’s not known how many were in the vaccine arm, but it would have to be nine or fewer. Gruber said that Pfizer and BioNTech had decided in late October that they wanted to drop the 32-case interim analysis. At that time, the companies decided to stop having their lab confirm cases of Covid-19 in the study, instead leaving samples in storage. The FDA was aware of this decision.

“Serious adverse events that occur in drug trials include death, immediate risk of death, long term or serious incapacitation, and hospitalization.”

• China Vaccine Trial Halted After Serious Adverse Event (BBG)

The final-stage trial of a Chinese frontrunner vaccine candidate has been halted in Brazil due to a serious adverse event, the first time that any of the Asian nation’s rapidly developed Covid-19 shots have met with such a setback. Testing of Sinovac Biotech Ltd.’s vaccine, called Coronavac, has been halted in Brazil after an event that occurred on Oct. 29, said the Brazil Health Agency on Tuesday, without any further detail on the illness. The study is interrupted in accordance with regulations while the agency analyzes if the study should continue, it said. Serious adverse events that occur in drug trials include death, immediate risk of death, long term or serious incapacitation, and hospitalization.

Such pauses are not uncommon in large-scale drug trials and two western developers – AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson – have paused their vaccine trials in recent months due to serious adverse events, only to re-start them after investigation. But China has already started administering its vaccines, including Coronavac, to hundreds of thousands of people under an expansive emergency use approval, making the prospect of a safety issue being detected at this stage more concerning. Last month, China’s science ministry said its companies have inoculated about 60,000 volunteers in final-stage trials, but there have been no reports of serious adverse events.

You can’t listen only to virologists and epidemiologists. It’s bad science.

• Chancellor Merkel, Put an End to the COVID “Fear Machine” (German Doctors)

Dear Chancellor Dr. Merkel, We, the signatories, are doctors from all areas of healthcare, who have been serving people in practices and clinics for decades. During this time, we have witnessed more than one seasonal infection in Germany, most of them with far more severe conditions and significantly more deaths than since January 2020 from COVID infectious diseases. Together we serve approx. 70.000 people. The circumstances of the coronavirus wave in the FRG have been perceived differently than the media and the ongoing warnings of politics, which were unjustified in fact, presented to the public for months. Predictions of individual advisory virologists with millions of seriously ill and hundreds of thousands of deaths in Germany have not been true in any way.

In the practices, hardly any infected patients were infected and if, then with normal, mostly mild progressions of virus flu. The hospitals have been more empty than ever before. There was no overload of ICU. Doctors, doctors and nurses were skillful in short-term work. Initially, we found the wave of the virus running towards us to be threatening and were able to understand the infection protection measures. However, there are months of secured evidence and facts that this wave of the virus is only slightly more intense than an ordinary seasonal flu and must be considered much more harmless than, for example, influenza infection in 2017/2018 with 27.000 deaths in Germany. According to the data situation, there hasn’t been a threat to the German population from Covid-19 for months. This must be the reason to return to normal life in Germany a life without restrictions, fear and infection hysteria.

We’re increasingly seeing older people with depression, young children and adolescents with severe anxiety and behavioral disorders, people with severe conditions who could have been cured in timely treatment. We notice disruptions in interpersonal cooperation, hysteria and aggression caused by fear of infection, there are more and more vigilations and denunciations of “positive swab victims” – all this leads to an unprecedented tension and division of the population. The development of additional severe chronic diseases is foreseeable. These diseases with their severe consequences are expected to far outweigh the possible Covid-19 damage in the FRG.The signatories therefore call on those responsible for health care and politics to discharge their responsibilities for the people of our country and immediately avert this threatening development.

We demand an immediate revision of the available data by an independent panel of experts from all relevant specialized groups and a prompt implementation of the resulting consequences for the people of our country.We demand that ineffective and possibly even harmful anti-infection measures be stopped immediately and that mass testing is meaningful (e.g. Currently, 1,1 million tests / week, of which 99,3 % negative, cost per week: EUR 82,5 million) to be audited by a panel of independent experts. We demand to intensify the protection of risk patients and only from them, where every viral infection can take a dramatic course – the healthy, immune competent population does not need protection beyond the general hygiene and health measures that have been known and proven for generations.

“Anxiety, depression and insomnia were most common among recovered COVID-19 patients…and the researchers also found significantly higher risks of dementia…”

• One In Five COVID19 Patients Develop Mental Illness Within 90 Days (R.)

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

Doctors and scientists around the world urgently need to investigate the causes and identify new treatments for mental illness after COVID-19, Harrison said. “(Health) services need to be ready to provide care, especially since our results are likely to be underestimates (of the number of psychiatric patients),” he added. The study, published in The Lancet Psychiatry journal, analysed electronic health records of 69 million people in the United States, including more than 62,000 cases of COVID-19. In the three months following testing positive for COVID-19, 1 in 5 survivors were recorded as having a first time diagnosis of anxiety, depression or insomnia. This was about twice as likely as for other groups of patients in the same period, the researchers said.

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

Just lovely! If you catch COVID, you get mental health issues. And if you go into lockdown so you don’t catch COVID….you also get mental health issues.

• Children Regressing And Struggling Mentally In Lockdown (G.)

Children hardest hit by Covid-19 measures have regressed during the pandemic, with some who were potty-trained pre-lockdown reverting to nappies and dummies, and others forgetting basic numbers or how to use a knife and fork, according to the schools watchdog Ofsted. Older children have lost physical fitness as well as reading and writing skills, and some are showing signs of mental distress, which can be seen in an increase in eating disorders and self-harm, according to Ofsted’s chief inspector, Amanda Spielman. More children are being taken out of school to be home-educated, particularly among families from minority ethnic communities, who are at greater risk from Covid and may be more fearful of catching it. Meanwhile, school leaders are “fire-fighting” as concerns grow about budget pressures.

The findings, based on 900 visits to schools and social care settings by Ofsted inspectors since schools fully reopened in September, paint a worrying picture of the impact of the pandemic on children at every stage of the education system in England. While children with good support structures have coped well, those whose parents were unable to work flexibly and have therefore been less available to help have lost out most. Children with special educational needs and disabilities have been “seriously affected” across all age groups, both in their care and education, losing vital support including speech and language services. Ofsted remains worried about children at risk of neglect, exploitation and abuse. Child protection referrals fell while schools were closed to most pupils and have not yet returned to normal levels.

But not facemask?!

• Lockdown Named Word Of The Year By Collins Dictionary (G.)

Lockdown, the noun that has come to define so many lives across the world in 2020, has been named word of the year by Collins Dictionary. Lockdown is defined by Collins as “the imposition of stringent restrictions on travel, social interaction, and access to public spaces”, and its usage has boomed over the last year. The 4.5bn-word Collins Corpus, which contains written material from websites, books and newspapers, as well as spoken material from radio, television and conversations, registered a 6,000% increase in its usage. In 2019, there were 4,000 recorded instances of lockdown being used. In 2020, this had soared to more than a quarter of a million.

“Language is a reflection of the world around us and 2020 has been dominated by the global pandemic,” says Collins language content consultant Helen Newstead. “We have chosen lockdown as our word of the year because it encapsulates the shared experience of billions of people who have had to restrict their daily lives in order to contain the virus. Lockdown has affected the way we work, study, shop, and socialise. With many countries entering a second lockdown, it is not a word of the year to celebrate but it is, perhaps, one that sums up the year for most of the world.” Other pandemic-related words such as coronavirus, social distancing, self-isolate and furlough were on the dictionary’s list of the top 10 words. So was the term key worker.

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Very much worth watching.

Tucker: We heard you. It’s hard to trust anything. Here’s what we know.

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Debt Rattle November 6 2020

Nov 062020

November 6, 2020 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 10:19 am Finance Tagged with: antisemitism, Biden, Corbyn, Covid19, election, excess deaths, House seats, lockdown, Parkinson's, property bubble, Putin, Trump, working class party 17 Responses »

W. Eugene Smith Orson Welles 1942

• Death by Lockdown (AIER)

• China: Life After COVID Is Back To Normal (marc)

• Vladimir Putin ‘Will Quit In January Amid Fears of Parkinson’s Disease’ (DM)

• Which is the Real “Working Class Party” Now? (Taibbi)

• President Trump Delivers Remarks About The Election From White House

• Trump Gets ‘Big Legal Win In Pennsylvania,’ Setback In Michigan, Georgia (RT)

• Dems Melt Down On Conference Call Over Losing House Seats (RT)

• EHRC Antisemitism Report Added Fire To Labour’s Simmering Civil War (Cook)

• Australian Property Bubble Hasn’t Yet Burst Amid The Pandemic (Abc.au)

• Experts Want 15 Days Of Counting To Flatten The Curve Of Votes For Trump (BBee)

Election fatigue is setting in. Good thing I’m not a lawyer.

Bob Hope Democrats
https://twitter.com/i/status/1324577385153470464

“The most startling data concerns the age group 25-44. This is a group with a Covid-related infection fatality rate of 0.0092%, which is to say barely a disease at all for nearly everyone in this group. And yet they are dying at a rate far above what is expected..”

• Death by Lockdown (AIER)

On March 28 – very early in the pandemic – AIER published an article that I felt at the time received far too little attention. “Drugs, Suicide, and Crime: Empirical Estimates of the Human Toll of the Shutdown” by economists Audrey and Thomas Duncan cited empirical literature on the human toll of economic devastation. This article forecasted more than 100,000 excess deaths due to drug overdoses, suicide, alcoholism, homicide, and untreated depression – all a result not of the virus but of policies of mandatory human separation, economic downturn, business and school closures, closed medical services, and general depression that comes with a loss of freedom and choice.

These two economists demonstrated that as bad as a virus is, policies that wreck normal social functioning will cause massive and completely unnecessary suffering and death. Because the article was so well-cited, with references to all the available literature, I thought it would make a difference. But after it appeared, it was crickets. I was amazed. Here you have a beautiful piece of research that perfectly forecasted the nightmare being created by politicians and their advisers and it made no dent in the national narrative. Here we are seven months later and the worst has come true. These two economists should be considered prophets. Sure enough, the Centers for Disease Control has documented a shocking number of excess deaths not from Covid.

Scott Atlas summarizes:
• Hispanic: 40% excess deaths NOT Covid related
• Black: 46% NOT Covid related
• White: 38% NOT Covid related
• 25-44: 77% excess deaths NOT Covid related
• 65+: 39% NOT Covid related

The most startling data concerns the age group 25-44. This is a group with a Covid-related infection fatality rate of 0.0092%, which is to say barely a disease at all for nearly everyone in this group. And yet they are dying at a rate far above what is expected, and mostly from issues not related to Covid. There should not be any excess deaths. Instead we find people dropping dead in ways that are shocking.

“The science is clear, but politicians are clearly no scientists.”

• China: Life After COVID Is Back To Normal (marc)

A few months ago I was lucky to get a visa to China so I could visit the country during the middle of the global pandemic. After 2 weeks in quarantine in Xiamen in late September and a total of 5 COVID tests I was finally allowed to fly to Beijing. When I landed there I had literally arrived in a different world, a world without COVID. Of course I knew that there is no COVID in China anymore, but seeing it for yourself is different. Everything is open again, even bars and clubs. Social distancing is a thing of the past, but when I arrived in Beijing most people still wore face masks, even outside. When I visited Xiamen again last week a lot less people wore them, but maybe that was also because of the much higher temperatures there. Everybody needs to have a health app installed on their phones, without it you can’t enter many public places (the app proves you have no COVID or have not been in contact with COVID-positive people) and you can’t fly without a green QR code on your app (not even if you just want to leave China).

Life is back to normal in China. Interesting is that people work from their offices again: The work-from-home phase did not last here, maybe because people only worked from home for a few weeks instead of a few months. I wonder if that will also happen in the Western world or if people will keep working remotely. Everything is open and there are hardly any restrictions left, although you still need to wear face masks in among others taxis and in school. What dit China do to get here? It’s actually quite simple, they had a complete lockdown of the whole country for a couple of weeks, and for some hotspots like Wuhan for a few months. After that they opened up again, but they did that with ubiquitous testing and obligatory face masks everywhere. Each time a new outbreak occurred they would lock (part of) a city down and test everybody. In that way China got the virus completely under control.

It may be hard to believe if you live in Europe or the US, but it is really not that hard to do. The partial lockdown in many other countries is simply not enough. It turns out that it is much better to have a shorter but very strict lockdown than to have a much longer partial lockdown that just tries to ‘flatten the curve’. I think Europe and the US are shooting themselves in the foot by trying to remain open for business. The long term effect in the Western world will simply be much worse than the short term effect in China.I am actually flabbergasted that the Western economies don’t see this and don’t copy the China playbook. I have argued for a short but full lockdown on Twitter since March, but most people did not take it serious. Of course it’s not the full story, China also had face masks from day one, while many other countries still don’t seem to ‘believe’ in them (although that finally started to change after the summer). The science is clear, but politicians are clearly no scientists.

And of course you need testing capacity, something that seems impossible to scale up in many Western countries. The virus started in January and soon after that it became clear to me that this could be a global danger. As I noted on Twitter, face masks were sold out in Vancouver on January 25 already, simply because most Chinese in Vancouver also saw the risk and started buying them. But governments took a full 6-7 weeks before they started to take it more serious. They lost so much precious time, instead of getting face masks ready and prepare test facilities they downplayed the risk. It was hard to believe for me, but I realized (once again…) that you should never rely on politicians for information but do your own research.

No idea what to make of this, can’t trust western media to say one true thing about Putin, but I do like Scott Adams’ take.

• Vladimir Putin ‘Will Quit In January Amid Fears of Parkinson’s Disease’ (DM)

Vladimir Putin will quit in January amid fears he has Parkinson’s disease, Moscow sources have claimed. The 68-year-old strongman president of Russia is being urged to retire by his former gymnast lover Alina Kabaeva, 37, insiders say. Recent footage of Putin’s legs moving around as he gripped onto the armrest of a chair have raised eyebrows. Eyes are also drawn to a twitching pen in the former KGB operative’s fingers and a cup which analysts told The Sun was filled with painkillers. Earlier this week it emerged that unexpected legislation was being rushed through to ensure that Putin could be made a senator-for-life. The new draft legislation was introduced by Putin himself, and would guarantee him legal immunity and state perks until he dies.

State-run RT media forecast the move will be seen ‘as a sign that the groundwork is being laid for an eventual transition of power in Russia’. It is not the first time that people have speculated that Putin may be suffering from Parkinson’s disease. Others have previously noted his ‘gunslinger’s gait’ – a clearly reduced right arm swing compared to his left, giving him a lilting swagger. An asymmetrically reduced arm swing is a classic feature of Parkinson’s and can manifest in ‘clinically intact subjects with a predisposition to later develop’ the disease, according to the British Medical Journal.

“There were so many serious analyses wondering what could be done to convince Homer Simpson not to vote Trump that it soon became clear Bart’s donut-loving Dad was the closest thing to a Trump voter most educated people could relate to, or knew even.”

• Which is the Real “Working Class Party” Now? (Taibbi)

In an irony he is humorously ill-equipped to appreciate, Donald Trump by losing this week may have gained something for the Republican Party bureaucracy he took such pleasure in humiliating four years ago: a future. Defying years of muddle-headed media analyses, Trump underperformed with white men, but made gains with every other demographic. Some 26 percent of his votes came from nonwhite Americans, the highest percentage for a Republican since 1960. The politician who became instantly famous — and infamous — by saying of Mexican immigrants, “They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists,” performed stunningly well with Latino voters.

Exit polls, which can be unreliable, pegged his national support at 32%-35% of the Latino vote. More tellingly were results in certain counties. Starr County, Texas, the county with the highest percentage of Hispanic or Latino voters – above 95% – voted for Hillary Clinton by a 60-point margin in 2016, but went for Biden by just five points in 2020. Even more amazing was Trump’s performance among Black voters. The man whose 2016 message to “the blacks” was very nearly a parody of long-ago New York mayoral candidate Mario Procaccino’s pledge that “My heart is as black as yours” must have found a new way to connect. Trump doubled his support with Black women, moving from 4% in 2016 to 8%, while upping his support among Black men from 13% to 18%. Remember, this was after four years of near-constant denunciations of Trump as not just a racist, but the leader of a literal white supremacist movement.

Trump’s numbers with the LGBTQ community were a stunner also, jumping from 14% to 28%. In September, a dating app for queer men called Hornet ran a survey that showed 45% support for Trump among gay men. Ever since Trump jumped into politics, media observers have rushed to denounce any Trump-related data that conflicts with conventional wisdom, and the Hornet survey was no different. Out magazine quoted a communications professor from Cal Poly Pomona as saying, “To tout a Hornet poll as evidence of LGBTQ support for Trump is clickbaity, sloppy journalism.” Even the Hornet editor scoffed at his own poll, before it all turned out to be true in the election.

“If you count the legal votes, I easily win..”

• President Trump Delivers Remarks About The Election From White House

As the nation continues waiting to find out who will win the 2020 presidential contest, President Trump on Thursday delivered remarks from the White House. “If you count the legal votes, I easily win,” Trump said. “If you count the illegal votes they can try to steal the election from us, if you count the votes that came in late,” he said. The president said that election polling was weaponized to harm his candidacy. “As everyone now recognizes media polling was election interference, in the truest sense of that word,” Trump said. “By powerful special interests, these really phony polls…were designed to keep our voters at home, create the illusion of momentum for Mr. Biden and diminish Republicans’ ability to raise funds. They were what’s called suppression polls, everyone knows that now.”

“So it will be hopefully cleared up, maybe soon, I hope soon,” he said. “But it’ll probably go through a process, a legal process and as you know I’ve claimed certain states and he’s claiming states…but ultimately I have a feeling judges are gonna have to rule. But there’s been a lotta shenanigans and we can’t stand for that in our country.”

Jo Jorgenson losing half her support in the space of 12 minutes

Georgia count just flipped to Biden.

• Trump Gets ‘Big Legal Win In Pennsylvania,’ Setback In Michigan, Georgia (RT)

As Donald Trump continues to accuse Democrats behind Joe Biden of trying to “steal” the presidential election, he celebrated a “big legal” win in his Pennsylvania lawsuit. “Big legal win in Pennsylvania!” the president tweeted on Thursday, following orders mandating certain mail-in ballots to be placed aside for the time being and allowing Republican poll watchers to observe more closely as votes are counted. It remains to be seen how this “big legal win” will benefit Trump, but it does ensure that it could be even longer before people know who has won the presidential race. Mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania, a key swing state that remains up for grabs, that lack identifying information from their voter will be placed aside and not counted until the court gives further guidance on what to do.

Once ballots are “segregated,” those with information that cannot be confirmed by November 9 will “not be counted until further notice” from the court. Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court has also ordered that Republican poll watchers will be able to observe ballots being counted in Philadelphia from a distance of six feet following complaints that they were being kept too far away from the actual counting. In Michigan, the president has faced a setback with a judge scoffing at Trump’s lawsuit to stop the count in the state due to allegations voter fraud. Michigan Court of Claims Judge Cynthia Stephens said on Thursday she will deny Trump’s request as the accusations of voter fraud are “hearsay” and contain no “firsthand knowledge.”

Michigan has been called in Joe Biden’s favor by multiple US outlets, but Trump has claimed victory in the state, blaming last minute “ballot dumps” on the former vice president’s surge on the night of the election. Earlier, a judge in Georgia also dismissed lawsuit by Trump campaign that requested to ensure that state laws were followed in regards to absentee ballots. Trump’s campaign has also said they will be demanding a recount in Wisconsin, which Biden reportedly won by around 20,000 votes. The incumbent president has also alleged in another lawsuit that thousands of people voted in Nevada who are not residents there.

Will they oust Pelosi?

• Dems Melt Down On Conference Call Over Losing House Seats (RT)

Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Virginia), who is leading her congressional race by a thread, has reportedly blamed the Democrat Party for losing elections “we shouldn’t have lost” due to embracing radical ideas like Defund the Police. During a conference call between Democrats discussing the results of various 2020 elections, Spanberger claimed she nearly lost her race (she’s won by a few thousand votes) because of an attack ad connecting her to the Defund the Police movement. “Don’t say socialism ever again,” the congresswoman said on the call, according to Washington Post reporter Erica Werner.

“We need to be pretty clear … it was a failure. It was not a success,” she added about election night. While the results of the presidential race remain unclear, Democrats had a disappointing election night regardless, as they failed to gain control of the Senate and actually ended up losing seats in the House, where they still remain the majority party. Werner reported that Spanberger did not find a lot of support on the call, with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-California) openly disagreeing with the assessment, and Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan) pushing back and saying former President Barack Obama was called a Muslim and socialist without being connected to movements like Black Lives Matter or Defund the Police.

The totally insane idea that Corbyn is an anti-semite has been as hard to kill by evidence in the UK as Russiagate is in the US and UK. And several lies about Assange. The media has become toxic.

• EHRC Antisemitism Report Added Fire To Labour’s Simmering Civil War (Cook)

It was easy to miss the true significance of last week’s Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) report on the British Labour Party and antisemitism amid the furore over the party suspending its former leader, Jeremy Corbyn. The impression left on the public – aided by yet more frantic media spin – was that the EHRC’s 130-page report had confirmed the claims of Corbyn’s critics that on his watch the party had become “institutionally antisemitic”. In fact, the watchdog body reached no such conclusion. Its report was far more ambiguous. And its findings – deeply flawed, intentionally vague and glaringly inconsistent as they were – were nowhere near as dramatic as the headlines suggested.

The commission concluded that “there were unlawful acts of harassment and discrimination for which the Labour Party is responsible”. Those failings, according to the commission, related to the handling of antisemitism complaints, interference by the leader’s office in the disciplinary procedure, and “unlawful harassment” by two Labour Party “agents”. None of that seemed to amount to anything like the supposed claims of a “plague” and “tidal wave” of antisemitism that have dominated headlines for five years. Paradoxically, the equalities commission’s conclusions sounded a lot like Corbyn’s statement that the scale of Labour’s antisemitism problem had been “dramatically overstated”. That remark quickly became grounds for the party suspending him.

So sustained has the furore about “institutional antisemitism” been in Labour that, according to a recent survey by academics Greg Philo and Mike Berry, the British public estimated that on average a third of Labour members had been disciplined for antisemitism – more than 300 times the real figure. But in the end, the commission could identify only two cases of unlawful antisemitism the party was responsible for. According to the report, there were 18 “borderline” cases, however, “there was not enough evidence to conclude that the Labour Party was legally responsible for the conduct of the individual.”

“The Government also has to consider the political consequences of continuing to throw stimulus at construction over other sectors that are in pain..”

Sorry, but that government is stuck in a corner.

• Australian Property Bubble Hasn’t Yet Burst Amid The Pandemic (Abc.au)

After years of dire predictions that Australia’s property bubble could burst, national house prices continue to withstand the otherwise devastating impact of the coronavirus pandemic, and once again the doomsayers have been proven wrong. Data released this week from CoreLogic shows the national average rose 0.4 per cent in October, following five months of national declines during the COVID-19 pandemic. Every state across Australia (except for Melbourne which suffered the impact of a second COVID lockdown) experienced gains. But how long will the good run last? It’s a question I asked AMP Capital chief economist Shane Oliver, who in late March at the onset of the pandemic in Australia, had warned that house prices could plummet by 20 per cent in a worst-case scenario.

In response to my question, Dr Oliver jokes that when people get their Australian citizenship, it should come with a written warranty saying, ‘Congratulations, you are now guaranteed to live in a country where house prices will continue to rise’. He says over the years regulators and government have always stepped in and introduced measures that stopped the bubble bursting. These range from interest rate cuts, tax incentives for property investors and other measures aimed at propping up construction. During the early 1990s recession, the level of household debt in Australia was around 40 per cent of income, he says, whereas now it is close to 200 per cent — one of the highest levels in the world.

“Each time there’s a downturn people get worried about debt and pay some of it back, but before things go too far [into the positive], the Reserve Bank cuts rates and people start borrowing again — we go back to a new level of debt and it starts the cycle again.” [..] But Dr Oliver and other economists also warn that in the current environment there are limits to how fiercely regulators and governments can fuel house prices. Interest rates are near zero, and tax incentives aimed at housing are already generous (with calls to wind them back as part of a wider tax reform package). The Government also has to consider the political consequences of continuing to throw stimulus at construction over other sectors that are in pain. In short, the pandemic has created several reasons to maintain a level of cynicism about the future of house prices.

“..the CDC quickly reversed its support for the decision, then went back and supported it again, then did it again, etc.”

• Experts Want 15 Days Of Counting To Flatten The Curve Of Votes For Trump (BBee)

After a concerning spike in votes for Trump occurred on election night, experts are calling for 15 days of counting to flatten the curve of votes for the “wrong candidate.” While some scientists recommended just letting the votes for Trump be counted fairly until we all achieve herd immunity to Trump, others said we need to lock down the vote-counting places, and make sure no one can get inside, in order to kill off the virus of Trump. “If we all band together and allow just 15 days of counting, we can flatten the curve of votes for Trump,” said Dr. Fauci. “And we also advise Trump supporters to wear airtight masks. For, you know, science.”

The CDC, WHO, and China are all backing the plan, saying it is “SCIENCE!” and anyone who is opposed to it is “ANTI-SCIENCE!” However, the CDC quickly reversed its support for the decision, then went back and supported it again, then did it again, etc. At publishing time, the experts had revised their recommendation to at least 8 months of counting to flatten the curve.

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Bill Barr in September on mail-in ballots
https://twitter.com/i/status/1324438683336929281

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Trump, COVID and Your Mental Health

Nov 032020

November 3, 2020 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 2:08 pm Finance Tagged with: Assange, Biden, clickbait, election, lockdown, mental health, MSM, Mueller, Trump, Trump Derangement Syndrome 6 Responses »

David Hockney Nichols Canyon 1980

There are two things happening simultaneously in the world today that affect the lives of many millions of people, but that we are told we cannot talk about: Hunter Biden and a second wave of lockdowns. As if the US presidential election and COVID19 are not in and of themselves stressful enough, now we also may not discuss them, other than to “parrot the party line”. This is having a severe impact on our mental health, though nobody apparently wants to talk about that either.

The whipped up fully one-sided frenzy for clickbait in the MSM on the topic of Donald Trump Orange Man Bad, aligned with RussiaRussia, Julian Assange and anything that can be mixed in in order to keep the narratives flowing, have split America, and much of the rest of the western world, in half, though probably not exactly down the middle, as we will find out after the election is done. And there, too, the MSM is sure to whip up more frenzy. Because it sells to pit people against each other.

So we find ourselves with Glenn Greenwald leaving his The Intercept because his own organization refuses to let him discuss Hunter Biden, though he is undoubtedly a newsworthy subject. Even if the entire MSM attempts with all its might to deny this, joined recently by Twitter and Facebook.

As I said a few days ago: “A strong sign of what US media has become, that Greenwald needs to go to Fox to be able to tell his story.” But that’s what this has turned into. Of course now you have people saying: “look who Greenwald’s hanging out with these days”. Well, he’s with the only people who won’t censor him. And say what you will, but Greenwald is as eloquent as ever. You may not like what he says, but that is still undeniable. Which, combined with his track record, means censoring him is nuts. As Matt Taibbi described:

Glenn Greenwald On His Resignation From The Intercept

Greenwald, after commenting pointedly about the reaction by press and Democratic Party officials to the New York Post story, reached out to Intercept editor Betsy Reed to float the idea of writing on the subject. The first hint of trouble came when Reed suggested that yes, it might be a story, if proven correct, but “even if it did represent something untoward about Biden,” that would “represent a tiny fraction of the sleaze and lies Trump and his cronies are oozing in every day.” When Greenwald retorted that deciding not to report on one politician’s scandals because those of another politician are deemed worse is a “corrupt calculus” for reporters, Reed expressed concern. Based on this, on his comments on Twitter, and other factors, she worried that “we are headed for a conflict over the editing of this piece.”

Greenwald insisted he wasn’t planning an overwhelming amount of coverage but wanted to do a single article, reviewing the available facts and perhaps asking the Biden campaign to comment on the veracity of the Post story. Reed agreed that he should write a draft, then they could “see where we are.” An aside: when reporters and editors interact, they speak between the lines. If an editor only ever suggests or assigns stories from a certain angle, you’re being told they don’t particularly want the other angle. If your editor has lots of hypothetical concerns at the start, he or she probably won’t be upset if you choose a different topic. Finally, when an editor lays out “suggestions” about things that might “help” a piece “be even stronger,” it’s a signal both parties understand about what elements have to be put in before the editor will send the thing through.

Tucker Greenwald
https://twitter.com/i/status/1322003267182682113

In exactly that same vein, Sunetra Gupta, a professor of theoretical epidemiology at Oxford, turned to the Daily Mail to express her views on lockdowns. Because nobody else wants to listen.

A Contagion Of Hatred And Hysteria

Lockdown is a blunt, indiscriminate policy that forces the poorest and most vulnerable people to bear the brunt of the fight against coronavirus. As an infectious diseases epidemiologist, I believe there has to be a better way. That is why, earlier this month, with two other international scientists, I co-authored a proposal for an alternative approach — one that shields those most at risk while enabling the rest of the population to resume their ordinary lives to some extent. I expected debate and disagreement about our ideas, published as the Great Barrington Declaration. As a scientist, I would welcome that. After all, science progresses through its ideas and counter-ideas. But I was utterly unprepared for the onslaught of insults, personal criticism, intimidation and threats that met our proposal.

The level of vitriol and hostility, not just from members of the public online but from journalists and academics, has horrified me. I am not a politician. The hurly-burly of political life and being in the eye of the media do not appeal to me at all. I am first and foremost a scientist; one who is far more comfortable sitting in my office or laboratory than in front of a television camera. Of course, I do have deeply held political ideals — ones that I would describe as inherently Left-wing. I would not, it is fair to say, normally align myself with the Daily Mail. I have strong views about the distribution of wealth, about the importance of the Welfare State, about the need for publicly owned utilities and government investment in nationalised industries.

And Trump advisor Scott Atlas went to RT for the same reasons, only to be “forced” into a cowardly mea culpa for having talked to a “propaganda network”. Well, the real propaganda networks are the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN etc. We’ve seen that an awful lot these last few years, people accusing others of exactly what they themselves have done. Which is precisely what makes Hunter Biden a newsworthy story.

Trump COVID Adviser Atlas Forced To Apologize For RT Interview

Trump administration Covid-19 adviser Scott Atlas ripped public-health officials for “egregious” policy failures – only to be forced to apologize after mainstream media deflected his points by attacking him for appearing on RT. On Saturday, the Stanford University doctor, who has emerged as President Donald Trump’s top adviser on responses to the Covid-19 pandemic, called the lockdown policies an “epic failure” and argued they are “killing people,” while speaking with Afshin Rattansi on RT’s Going Underground show. “The public-health leadership have failed egregiously, and they’re killing people with their fear-inducing shutdown policies,” Atlas told RT.

“The lockdowns will go down as an epic failure of public policy by people who refuse to accept they were wrong – were wrong, refused to accept they were wrong, didn’t know the data, didn’t care. And it became a frenzy of stopping Covid-19 cases at all costs, and those costs are massive,” he said. “The argument is undeniable: The lockdowns are killing people.” Atlas then pointed to job losses, rising suicides, rising drug abuse and the harm being done to young people, tying the issues to the Covid-19 restrictions put in place. One study showed that 25 percent of Americans aged 18 to 24 thought about killing themselves in June “due to the lockdown”, he said.

Further on the lockdowns topic, Howard Beckett tweeted on Sunday about the UK: “Governments own stats have 4% of cases arising from hospitality, 20% from the workplace and a whopping 36% from education. So we shut bars & restaurants and keep schools & universities open.”

I’ve said earlier that a lockdown when days get shorter and nights get colder is a dangerous game. It’s a mental health issue, plain and simple, and one that very much MUST be discussed.

Last but very much not least, “At 10:04 PM on the night before an election, we discover that as part of his investigation into DNC hacking/election interference, Mueller declined to indict Assange and WikiLeaks due to a lack of evidence and First Amendment concerns.” But Buzzfeed, which reported the story, still keeps talking about hacked emails. There never were any. It’s the same thing Mueller himself did when he kept accusations against Assange and 12-13 Russians in his final report. The man should be investigated.

Mueller Declined To Indict Assange And Wikileaks Due To Lack Of Evidence

Prosecutors investigated Julian Assange, WikiLeaks, and Roger Stone for the hacking of Democratic National Committee servers as well as for possible campaign finance violations, but ultimately chose not to charge them, newly released portions of the Mueller Report reveal. Although Wikileaks published emails stolen from the DNC in July and October 2016 and Stone — a close associate to Donald Trump — appeared to know in advance the materials were coming, investigators “did not have sufficient evidence” to prove active participation in the hacks or knowledge that the electronic thefts were continuing. In addition, federal prosecutors could not establish that the hacked emails amounted to campaign contributions benefitting Trump’s election chances and furthermore felt their publication might have been protected by the First Amendment, making a successful prosecution tenuous.

The fresh details of special counsel Robert Mueller’s decision not to charge Assange, WikiLeaks, or Stone for their role in influencing the 2016 election come just a day before voters head to the polls for the 2020 presidential election. The material sheds new light on the seriousness with which the special counsel investigated the hacks of Democratic party computers. In July 2018, Mueller indicted 12 Russian officers belonging to the Kremlin’s intelligence directorate, the GRU, for the theft and distribution of those emails. The role that Stone and Assange may have played in the hacks or their distribution has been the subject of much speculation. Little, however, was known about how intently the special counsel focused on those individuals as possible targets for prosecution during the two-year investigation into Russian election interference.

In order to maintain or regain your mental health, you need today to either ignore all news all the time, or you have to make sure you are well-informed. You might even say you have a right to that. But it has become an awful lot harder the last 5 years. Because your formerly trusted media have been selling you out for profit. You have all become clickbait targets instead of respected readers and viewers.

If Trump might lose the election today -or next week, next year, who knows- this entire model will be dead in no time. The media may try to carry on on the back of supposed litigation against him, but that will only go so far. They have bet on one horse, and then tried as hard as they could to cripple it, and now find themselves with nowhere left to turn.

In a way, that’s a good thing. No matter who wins the election, we will end up with better media. If Biden wins, the entire circus will just fizzle out, and if Trump wins, they will be found out. It’s high time. Unfortunately, the brains and minds of countless people will be scarred by the double whammy of Trump Derangement Syndrome and ever more lockdowns for a very long time to come.

But, you guessed it, we cannot talk about that.

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Debt Rattle October 3 2020

Oct 032020

October 3, 2020 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:01 am Finance Tagged with: Assange, Burisma, Covid19, hospital, Hunter Biden, lockdown, Melania, Remdesivir, Trump, Tulsi Gabbard 12 Responses »

René Magritte Le Cri du Coeur 1960

• Trump Checks Into Walter Reed Medical Center As Precaution For COVID19 (JTN)

• From Gloating To Tears (LA Times)

• CNN Thrills With Airing Of Secret Taping of First Lady (Turley)

• Just Before Obama Left Office, US Officials Feared Burisma Paid 2nd Bribe (JTN)

• Media Willfully Ignore Hunter Biden Scandal (Hemingway)

• Michigan Supreme Court Rules Governor Exceeded Her Lockdown Powers (CT)

• 40% of Seoul Residents Have Mental Health Issues Due To COVID19 (KT)

• Why Is The Assange Case Unloved By The Media? (Crikey)

• Reps. Tulsi Gabbard, Massie Call For Charges Against Assange To Be Dropped

Europe is getting out of control.

This made me laugh so hard. The Trump campaign should turn it into a TV ad and play it 100 times a day.

The best part of the debate…hands down!!! Bwahahaha!!! #Debates2020

Biden: “Manufacturing went in the hole, number 1. Number 2…number 3…”

Trump: “No, you were on number 2.” pic.twitter.com/dGf8CLYwu4

— PROPHETABLE™ (@TheProphetable) September 30, 2020

Seems a bit more than just precaution.

Trump is taking Regeneron’s experimental polyclonan antibody cocktail, zinc, vitamin D, famotidine, melatonin, a daily aspirin, and Remdesivir. But no HCQ.

• Trump Checks Into Walter Reed Medical Center As Precaution For COVID19 (JTN)

President Trump is being transported to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center roughly eighteen hours after he announced that he and the First Lady had tested positive for COVID-19, the White House said in a statement. The president was seen departing the White House late Friday afternoon, wearing a suit and a face covering while walking to an awaiting helicopter on the South Lawn. “Out of an abundance of caution, and at the recommendation of his physician and medical experts, the President will be working from the presidential offices at Walter Reed for the next few days,” White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany said in a statement late Friday afternoon.

The president “remains in good spirts, has mild symptoms, and has been working throughout the day,” she added. The president received an experimental antibiotic “cocktail” after his diagnosis with COVID-19, White House physician Sean Conley said earlier in the day. In a memorandum released on Friday afternoon, Conley said Trump had received “a single 8 gram dose of Regeneron’s polyclonan antibody cocktail.” He is also taking “zinc, vitamin D, famotidine, melatonin and a daily aspirin,” Conley added. “As of this afternoon the President remains fatigued but in good spirits,” Conley continued, stating that the president is “being evaluated by a team of experts.”

So many people on Twitter wished for Trump to die that the company issued a statement saying such Tweets will be removed. In other words, as someone also tweeted, Twitter will have a busy weekend.

• From Gloating To Tears (LA Times)

In Atlanta, property appraiser Leslie Sublett cried as she discussed his diagnosis with co-workers, suspicious that it was a lie to minimize the pandemic and to manipulate the battle around the election and the U.S. Supreme Court. Sublett, a 50-year-old Democrat, could not shake the feeling that the United States was collapsing. “I’ve had it up to here,” she said, raising her hand above her head. “If we can’t depend on the basic tenets of our democracy, we’re Rome in the end stages. We will cease to be. Gosh, it sounds so dark and terrible, but that’s what I’m crying over.” In Lake Charles, La., Republican Kevin Lavergne was anxious too — not about the pandemic, which he still believes is exaggerated, but about election security, the U.S. Postal Service and the economy, especially since Hurricane Laura devastated his town in August.

“People are losing their lives, committing suicide because of the stress,” said Lavergne, 48, a construction worker who’s been unemployed since the pandemic effectively shut down the local economy. “If we don’t have it up and running and people making money, how are we going to survive?” The president’s diagnosis came as the coronavirus continued its relentless spread, as did protests over police brutality and complaints of voter suppression and election fraud. Americans across the political spectrum were unnerved and grappling with more upheavals than they have since marches over civil rights and the Vietnam War decades ago.

“We used to call the 1960s tumultuous. The ’20s are looking to be a nation unspooling. We’re losing the threads of our democracy, busting apart,” said professor Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian at Rice University. “It’s been probably the hardest American year since 1968. It’s been one day of bad news after another.” Concern about whether free and fair elections are possible is particularly acute, he said, especially after the first debate between Trump and Joe Biden this week devolved into “a grotesque carnival.” “As a country, we’ve had hard times before,” Brinkley said, but now America feels divided along party lines as they wage a “neo-civil war.” “Everybody is spinning and there’s a kind of depression and our traditional optimism is gone,” he said.

How this can be turned into another scandal is beyond me. Melania “bashed” Christmas Decorations! Details at 8! She tried to help the children, but was told she couldn’t. She gets upset that the press question her but not the Obama’s. That’s was she’s addressing when she says “Give me a f****** break.” That Obama separated children too. But by cutting it off there, they can make it look like she doesn’t care about the children.

“OK, and then I do it and I say that I’m working on Christmas and planning for the Christmas and they said, ‘Oh, what about the children that they were separated?’ Give me a f****** break. Where they were saying anything when Obama did that? I can not go, I was trying get the kid reunited with the mom. I didn’t have a chance — needs to go through the process and through the law.””

• CNN Thrills With Airing Of Secret Taping of First Lady (Turley)

Years ago, American politics left all notion of decency behind in our age of rage. That was evident when the media and liberals celebrated the disgraceful conduct of Maryanne Trump betraying her aunt’s confidence in secretly recording her talking about her brother. The same people reveled in the unethical conduct of former Trump attorney Michael Cohen who not only secretly recorded his client, President Donald Trump, but has been violating any notion of confidentiality in pushing his own tell all book. Now, CNN’s Anderson Cooper has been reduced to shilling for Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, the former assistant and friend of Melania Trump who secretly recorded their confidential chats and is now selling a book by playing embarrassing snip bits.

What is incredible about these people is that, while currying favors as false friends or counsels, they were actively taping people who trusted them in case they wanted to later cash in on their access. In the latest example, CNN ran an entirely valueless significant in primetime to simply show the First Lady swearing and complaining about Christmas obligations. Melania “bashed” Christmas Decorations! Details at 8! This used to be the network of figures like Bernard Shaw. As Melania Trump unburdened herself to her friend, Wolkoff kept recording and hoping for something juicy. What she got was this line “I’m working… my ass off on the Christmas stuff, that you know, who gives a fuck about the Christmas stuff and decorations? But I need to do it, right?”

That thrilled Anderson Cooper, who once would have become physically ill at the notion of running such ill-gotten tripe. Instead, he exclaims “Talk about a war on Christmas! It’s funny that she would be leading that.” Talk about a war on journalism! CNN is now trafficking in material that would make the National Inquirer blush. By the way . . . funny? Is that the most descriptive term for this story. What about pursuing the utter betrayal and dishonesty shown by Wolkoff in setting up a friend and boss? There is nothing “funny” about CNN leading with this type of matter, of course. The most newsworthy aspect of this story was the one largely untouched: the despicable level of dishonesty that motivates this type of banking of secret recordings by people like Wolkoff.

It is the very reason that viewers are abandoning the network and media has plummeted in polling in terms of perceived accuracy and honesty. I still view Cooper as an insightful and intelligent journalist but this is an example of how corrupting the current environment has become for many. There is a new sense of an absolute license to engage in any attack or distort any fact for the greater good. Indeed, we now have leading journalism professors denouncing the very concept of objectivity in journalism.

The usual suspects: Yovanovich, Victoria Nuland. And both Bidens. Note how the mood and message changed the moment Obama left.

• Just Before Obama Left Office, US Officials Feared Burisma Paid 2nd Bribe (JTN)

Twenty-two days before President Obama left office, the U.S. ambassador to Kiev wrote top officials in Washington that she feared Burisma Holdings had made a second bribe to Ukrainian officials — shortly before a corruption probe against Hunter Biden’s natural gas employer was abruptly closed before Donald Trump took office. The concerns are detailed in new memos belatedly released to Just the News under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the State Department. The suit was brought on behalf of the news organization by the public interest law firm the Southeastern Legal Foundation.

Then-Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch’s concerns were first raised in a Ukrainian news story about a Russian-backed fugitive lawmaker in Ukraine, who alleged Burisma had dumped low-priced natural gas into the market for officials near Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to buy low and sell high, making a bribe disguised as a profit. The scheme was confirmed by U.S. officials before Yovanovitch alerted the top State official for Ukraine and Russia policy in Washington at the time, Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, the memos show. “There are accusations that Burisma allegedly had a subsidiary dump natural gas as a way to pay bribes,” Yovanovitch wrote Nuland on Dec. 29, 2016, noting the story “mentions that Hunter Biden and former Polish President Kwasniewski are on the Burisma Board.”

The alert was the second in two years in which the embassy alleged Burisma had paid a bribe while Vice President Joe Biden’s son served on its board. Back in February 2015, then-embassy official George Kent reported to the U.S. Justice Department evidence that Burisma had made a $7 million cash bribe to Ukrainian prosecutors before those prosecutors killed a separate corruption probe in the United Kingdom by failing to produce required evidence. The second alleged bribe in December 2016 was brought to the attention of Yovanovitch and Kent, then a top aide to the ambassador, shortly after the Christmas holiday when a story appeared in the Ukrainian press. “Lots of accusations/innuendo,” Yovanovitch was told in an email. “Mentions Biden’s son and Kwasniewski are on board of Burisma, which allegedly had a subsidiary dump natural gas recently as a way to pay bribes to P2 inner circle.”

P2 was the shorthand State officials in the U.S. embassy in Kiev used to refer to Petro Poroshenko, the Ukrainian president, who was close to Vice President Biden. Because the allegations were first raised by Oleksander Onyschenko, a fugitive in Ukraine who was tied to Russian sources, as well as Radical Party Leader Oleg Lyashko, embassy officials checked them out and confirmed them before telling Nuland. “The dumping part is true,” the embassy’s deputy economic counselor wrote Yovanovitch a few hours after the story surfaced and before Nuland was alerted. The official told the ambassador a major Ukrainian figure close to Poroshenko was “photographed meeting with [Burisma founder Mykola] Zlochevsky in a Vienna restaurant over the weekend, and Zlochevsky may have handed over a suitcase. You can’t make this up.”

He shall not be named has also not been seen in ages.

• Media Willfully Ignore Hunter Biden Scandal (Hemingway)

Last week, a Senate Intelligence Committee report detailed how the son of a major presidential candidate, who has an extensive history of shady foreign business dealings, received a $3.5-million wire transfer from the wife of a Russian politician. The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, and most major media outlets didn’t cover the story at all. Four years ago, not reporting such a story was a possibility too absurd to even contemplate – but then again, no one would have predicted the candidate with the shady Russia ties is not Donald Trump, but Joe Biden. People often talk about how Trump is responsible for destroying political norms, and that’s a valid concern.

However, one of the truly frightening things about the Trump era is how institutions have exploited a perceived crisis in truth-telling to justify abandoning their own standards by blaming it on Trump. Increasingly, we see major stories break where the media establishment decides on a collective omertà because the story undermines its own credibility or might sway voters in directions it doesn’t approve of. When that happens, no news is good news. The problem with hiding the truth is that you can’t suppress it forever, let alone a week, in this news environment. After the initial blackout, we are finally starting to see some coverage of Hunter Biden’s suspect wire transfer – but only after Trump himself raised the issue in the recent presidential debate and forced the media’s hand. The little coverage the issue has received is instructive, and not in a good way.

When Trump raised the issue at the debate, Joe Biden responded by saying the claim was “Totally discredited. Totally discredited.” Given that it’s a direct allegation in a government document and Biden is flatly denying it, you’d think this would be a perfect opportunity for the media to dig in and sort out the truth of the claim. Instead, they have essentially punted on the issue. According to PolitiFact, which refused to rate the claim either true or false, the facts are in dispute because “Biden’s lawyer says he did not co-found the partnership [that received the money] and had no stake in it,” and “Democrats say they reviewed the Republicans’ documentation but did not find a specific link to Hunter Biden.”

[..] So why does the Senate intel committee report that Biden was a “co-founder” of the firm in question? Well, one clue might be that committee members read it in the media. A lengthy New Yorker profile of Hunter Biden from last year, which clearly had extensive cooperation from the Biden team, reported the following: “In June, 2009, five months after Joe Biden became Vice-President, Hunter co-founded a second company, Rosemont Seneca Partners, with Christopher Heinz, Senator John Kerry’s stepson.” That was 15 months ago. For the Biden camp to be disputing this key fact now seems awfully convenient. Further, in that same magazine article, Hunter Biden admits to taking an $80,000 bribe from a Communist Chinese Party-connected tycoon, in the form of a 2.8-carat diamond delivered to his hotel room.

[..] For Joe Biden to tell the American people this accusation is “totally discredited,” when the media hadn’t even touched the story, well, honest fact-checkers would tell it like it is: Joe Biden stood up in front of tens of millions of Americans on Tuesday night and told a self-serving lie – a lie that would have been called a four-alarm trouser conflagration if Trump had said it.

Devin Nunes

SAVAGE! Devin Nunes welcomes you to Schiff's "impeachment committee," and in 6 minutes, destroys EVERY losing strategy and lie that Schiff has pushed… pic.twitter.com/rQVTS0Nwk4

— Tim Young (@TimRunsHisMouth) October 2, 2020

“..the governor is obligated to terminate the state of emergency or state of disaster after 28 days..”

• Michigan Supreme Court Rules Governor Exceeded Her Lockdown Powers (CT)

The supreme court in Michigan has ruled that Governor Gretchen Whitmer exceeded her constitutional authority under state law in the arbitrary enforcement of her unilateral decrees to mitigate the COVID-19 virus. [pdf here] As the court wrote in the opinion rebuking the governor: “The people of this state have been denied a voice and a seat at the table in decisions that have impacted every facet of their lives and their futures over the past eight months. They deserve to have their representatives bring their voice and their concerns into this decision-making process.”

At the heart of the governor’s legal argument was a 1945 law allowing the governor to declare a state of disaster or emergency if she finds one to exist and it remains in place for 28 days, unless the Legislature extends it. The legislature did not extend the declaration, yet the governor continued to restrict the citizens without any representative voice. “MICHIGAN – […] In the 4-3 ruling, the court determined the governor did not have the authority under state law to issue any additional emergency declarations pertaining to the pandemic after April 30. That was the last date when the legislature allowed the governor to declare an emergency. “The governor’s declaration of a state of emergency or state of disaster may only endure for 28 days absent legislative approval of an extension. So, if the Legislature does nothing, as it did here, the governor is obligated to terminate the state of emergency or state of disaster after 28 days,” said the majority opinion, written by Judge Stephen Markman.

[…] “Put simply, and our criticism is not of the Governor in this regard but of the statute in dispute — almost certainly, no individual in the history of this state has ever been vested with as much concentrated and standardless power to regulate the lives of our people, free of the inconvenience of having to act in accord with other accountable branches of government and free of any need to subject her decisions to the ordinary interplay of our system of separated powers and checks and balances, with even the ending date of this exercise of power reposing exclusively in her own judgment and discretion,” the majority wrote.

People need people. Quelle surprise.

• 40% of Seoul Residents Have Mental Health Issues Due To COVID19 (KT)

The prolonged coronavirus pandemic has seen the mental health of Seoul citizens deteriorate more than their physical health, according to a recent survey by Seoul Metropolitan Government (SMG). According to the survey results released on Monday, 1,489 of 3,983 respondents -almost 40%- said their mental health has deteriorated since the start of the pandemic, whereas 22 percent felt it has worsened their physical health. A total of 3,983 Seoul residents aged between 10 and 90 took part in the survey. The poll, organized in cooperation with IBM, was conducted via chatbots.

The main reasons offered for declining mental health were refraining from outdoor activities under social distancing measures, economic hardship, discomfort from wearing face masks, overall lethargy in daily routine, and the absence of human interaction. The survey also revealed that people feel more stressed about isolation than unemployment or decreased income. One third of the respondents stated that restricted leisure activities including travel bans were the main reason for mental stress. It was followed by lack of social interaction, chosen by 26 percent, followed by job loss or pay cuts, which was selected by 24 percent of respondents. “It is normal for people to easily become depressed when they lack physical activity, as physical and mental health are deeply connected.

Engaging in indoor activities such as home workouts or yoga will help,” said Lee Dong-gui, a professor of psychology at Yonsei University. “As COVID-19 has become a part of our daily lives, it may be better for our brains to view the pandemic as a marathon and prepare for it, rather than hoping it will soon come to an end,” advised Lee. Regarding the government’s social distancing measures, a vast majority -92%- consider the measures necessary and effective in containing the spread of the virus..

View from his homeland.

• Why Is The Assange Case Unloved By The Media? (Crikey)

A former employee of a Spanish security firm has told Julian Assange’s extradition hearing of a plan to abduct and even poison the Australian as part of a widespread surveillance operation said to have been ordered by an associate of US President Donald Trump. This revelation, concerning an Australian citizen who is facing 175 years in jail on espionage charges, made it to page 23 of The Sydney Morning Herald. In The Australian, it was given a small corner on page nine in the world news section, beneath a page of analysis on the first presidential debate. Yet the story would appear to have everything. Witnesses fearful for their lives alleging a conspiracy, tangentially involving the US president, to poison or kidnap a significant Australian figure.

Reports on the poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alexander Navalny, allegedly by the Russian government, got higher billing than Assange in the SMH (on top of an opinion piece declaring Navalny a hero). This is typical of the coverage of the Assange case. You can’t accuse the mainstream media of exactly ignoring the case, but it generally comes “mid-paper” (in print and online). It’s just another thing that’s happening in the world. But isn’t the trial of a Walkley award winner a case about press freedom? Compare this to the blanket front page coverage that followed the Right to Know campaign, where mainstream media outlets talked about the impediments they themselves regularly encounter on account of national security laws they otherwise cheer on.

Go Tulsi!

• Reps. Tulsi Gabbard, Massie Call For Charges Against Assange To Be Dropped

Today, Reps. Tulsi Gabbard (HI-02) and Thomas Massie (KY-04) introduced H.Res.1175, a resolution that defends the freedom of the press, noting that newsgathering activities and news organizations ability to acquire and publish information are protected under the First Amendment. The resolution calls for the United States to drop all charges and efforts to extradite Julian Assange.

“Freedom of the press is a vital function of a free democracy in which the government is accountable to the people. Julian Assange published information that exposed lies and abuses of power at the highest levels of our government. His indictment under the Espionage Act sends a chilling message to every member of the media and all Americans,” said Rep. Tulsi Gabbard. “U.S. government prosecutors now claim that any journalist or news organization that publishes classified material is liable to prosecution under the Espionage Act — which would have led to the indictment of the Washington Post for the publication of the Pentagon Papers. The Federal government’s prosecution of Julian Assange sets a dangerous precedent. All extradition efforts and charges under the Espionage Act against Julian Assange must be dropped now.”

“At a time when government officials claim the right to perform warrantless surveillance upon all American citizens, there is an urgent need to zealously guard freedom of the press and to demand government transparency and accountability. The ongoing attempts to prosecute Julian Assange threaten our First Amendment rights, and should be opposed by all who wish to safeguard our constitutional rights now and in the years to come. I join my colleague, Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, in calling for an immediate end to all charges against Mr. Assange,” said Rep. Thomas Massie.

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Incompetence “R” Us

Sep 262020

September 26, 2020 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 5:42 pm Finance Tagged with: Big Pharma, face masks, HCQ, incompetence, lockdown, Sputnik V, vaccine, Vitamin D, zinc 20 Responses »

Dora Maar Model in swimsuit 1936

I’ll try one more time, if only to show you that me heart’s in the right place. Yes, lockdowns work, and so do facemasks. But that doesn’t mean all lockdowns or facemasks or requirements for either work all the time. The UK was very late with its first lockdown, and let in a million people through their airports without testing them. After they did lock down, another 100,000 came in, no testing.

And now people there say lockdowns don’t work. Have you seen this report, or that report? Sorry, but I don’t have to. A virus spreads by jumping from host to potential host. Keep them apart and it can’t spread. I don’t need a “scientific” probe to figure that one out. The principle of a lockdown works, but that’s still only half the story.

The facemask thing is a little more complex perhaps. But it’s complicated only because various governments have neglected to do the one thing they should have: make sure they have the best facemask ready for everyone, the one mask that is proven to be effective, preferably mass-produced in their country/state/territory. But have you seen N95 facilities being erected where you are?

Now the entire world is walking around with masks that they all can see offer little protection, and mostly where they have little effect. Moreover, I see lots of people here in Athens who washed them with their underwear and wear them again the next day, because they’ve been told they have to cover their face with something anything. But that’s not how this works. What little protection those blueish masks that are everywhere offer, is gone once you wash them. What’s left is merely symbolic.

And as for the well-meaning crowd that make their own masks, stop trying, those things don’t do a thing and they make you look stupid. There are actually norms and data and whatnot for this, and putting your panties on your face does not comply with any science whatsoever. It’s just scaring people, and we have enough of that, thank you. Non-woven masks work best, that mean anything to you?

The droplets that the virus hitchhikes on to get from one host to another are way too small to be stopped by granny getting creative with her bathroom curtains. But it’s not you, it’s your government which should have had an N95 mask production facility in place months ago.

They should also have mass-produced vitamin D, and zinc, because these cheap elements would have decreased the new cases, and the severity of them, by probably half. But no western government that I know of has even mentioned the role of these cheap supplements in the COVID story.

How odd is that? It appears to be in line with the hydroxychloroquine story, which went from “It will kill you!” when Trump first mentioned it in public, to “It’s not effective” in Fauci’s terminology. But medical doctors I’m talking to still maintain it works, and perhaps more importantly, continue to treat their infected patients with it.

Sort of the same thing goes for the western Big Pharma attempts to get a vaccine, there were 239 of those trials last time I counted. But there’s never been a vaccine for any of the many coronaviruses, and not for lack of trying. Unless you count the Russian Sputnik V, developed in a fundamentally different way from the western ones, but that wouldn’t make Big Pharma any profits, so we all choose to just ignore and discard it.

It’s “funny” to see how all those politicians like the power to tell people what to do, lock them down etc., but when their measures don’t work, and that’s the case all over Europe, they blame their people and never themselves. I haven’t seen even one say, I’m sorry, I failed, I step down. Instead they all talk about doing more of what didn’t work. More lockdowns. Hey, you failed, move over!

In countries like Britain and Holland, they’re so busy trying not to explain how and why they still didn’t have enough PCR testing capacity 9 months into the pandemic, that they completely fail to see that PCR is the wrong testing method to use on a grand scale. Holland has “identified” 5 rapid testing options and needs until November for their “experts” to find the best one.

Meanwhile they have a “rapid test test” facility where doctors and nurses apply the tests, which should cost perhaps €1 a piece max, but which set you back a very reasonable €225. Good lord. The incompetence is not going to stop here and now, it’s engrained in the political and societal brains and structures.

And it’s not just the politicians, the “experts” also refuse to see and acknowledge that they are utter failures. They, too, blame the people. But just like they should have all secured access to 100 N95 masks for every individual, and Vit. D and zinc, and HCQ if people still get sick, they should have made rapid tests available for everyone to use at home, twice a week or so, if only just to ease the pressure. But health care has been institutionalized, so that will only happen when things get terribly out of hand.

All these failures have cost a lot of lives, and will continue to do so, and do a huge amount of damage economically and mentally. The idea of second lockdowns is insane, given that no N95 masks, no Vit. D, no zinc, no HCQ were ever made available. But the lockdowns will come regardless. Because the politicians and experts can and will blame it all on you.

In an event like this, people’s worlds get much smaller, and they only know what their “local” media tell them, and those media are in line with the respective political systems. In crisis times, you as a journalist don’t attack the leading party, no matter how badly they fail, because they will deflect any criticism right back onto you, and say it’s your critical reports that made people behave badly.

It’s circular logic at its finest. And since all these fine people in all these fine countries got it all wrong in the same way, they can use each other for cover. France can point their finger at Spain, and they at Italy, and all hail the King of Sweden. BTW, has anyone ever seen an explanation for why so many countries and states sent infected elderly people back into care homes? That one puzzles me.

The next threat is hidden right in that finger-pointing. Because they all want to keep their borders open, and that has consequences. Should have gotten it right the first time, guys, because Lockdown 2.0 was always going to be much harder. What you will see now is groups of people in various countries saying they will not do 2.0. While borders are open.

And what then? You’re going to lock them all up (instead of down), in virus-infected prison cells? You guys have no idea what’s coming at you. There is even talk in several places of engaging the army to make people obey. But it’s the politicians and experts who have failed, not the people who have lost faith in them. And those people have had 6 months now to educate themselves on COVID19, so they’re not so easily fooled anymore.

I still don’t believe in the big conspiracy themes. I see a sea of incompetence, of people not up to their jobs who insist on hanging on to those jobs anyway. That’s true, too, for the blunt refusal to even consider N95, Vit.D, zinc and HCQ. They’re just not smart enough. They were not selected for being smart, but for fitting into, and being servants to, the existing system. And then something unexpected happens. And they have no idea what to do.

Many people will not accept Lockdown 2.0. Not because they’re stupid, or suicidal, or they want to kill their neighbors and friends, but because they understand that what they’ve given up over the past 9 months has been of no benefit to them, or their neighbors and friends. And then on top of that they themselves get blamed for things getting worse. That’s the breaking point, right there.

Our “leaders” simply have no clothes on.

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