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Debt Rattle August 4 2022

Aug 042022

August 4, 2022 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:07 am Finance Tagged with: artillery, Cipollone, Gazprom, Hunter Biden, mask mandates, POWs, Schroeder, Siemens, turbines 37 Responses »

Wooden statue of priest and scribe Ka-aper Egypt, ca. 2465-2323 BC (originally plastered and painted )

• Siemens Explains Russian Gas Supply Shortfall (RT)

• Gazprom Warns It Can’t Accept Key Turbine (RT)

• German Artillery Donated To Ukraine Failing After Just Weeks Of Use (RMX)

• Russia Ready For Peace On Own Terms – Kremlin (RT)

• German Ex-Chancellor Offers Solution To EU Energy Crisis (RT)

• US Is ‘Directly Involved’ in Ukraine War – Russia (Antiwar)

• Russia Accuses Ukraine Of Mistreating POWs (RT)

• National Crisis Team To Distribute Scarce Dutch Water (NOS)

• DOJ Subpoenas Trump White House Counsel Pat Cipollone (Hill)

• DOD ‘Wiped’ Phones of Senior Trump Officials, Jan. 6 Communications (ET)

• Elites Prepare To Drop Hunter Biden in a “Controlled Demolition” (Turley)

• German Mask Mandates for Those Who Refuse A 4th Dose in the Fall (Eugyp)

Eva

Eva Vlaardingerbroek and Mark Steyn – worrisome… pic.twitter.com/ANl7I7a0Ow

— Wittgenstein (@backtolife_2023) August 3, 2022

Doocy

DOOCY: "You guys gave a whole country to a bunch of people that are on the FBI Most Wanted list. What did you think was going to happen?"

KIRBY: "I take issue with the premise that we gave a whole country to terrorist groups."

pic.twitter.com/Im1DqASG19

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) August 2, 2022

Ali

50 years ago, Muhammad Ali talked about the importance of athletes standing tall and speaking the truth. pic.twitter.com/RXOz9cTRg5

— Vala Afshar (@ValaAfshar) August 2, 2022

Still want to blamePutin?

“Only one turbine is currently operational at the facility, [..] while five turbines are needed for the natural gas pipeline to pump at 100% capacity.”

• Siemens Explains Russian Gas Supply Shortfall (RT)

The compressor station at the starting point of the Nord Stream 1 gas pipeline between Russia and Germany is severely short of functioning equipment, according to turbine manufacturer Siemens Energy. Only one turbine is currently operational at the facility, Siemens Energy CEO Christian Bruch said on Wednesday, while five turbines are needed for the natural gas pipeline to pump at 100% capacity. Bruch’s comments come after the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz visited a Siemens Energy site in north-western Germany, where the firm is keeping a turbine that was due to be returned to Russia after repairs in Canada. “It is in our best interest, with support from the German government, to return this turbine to Russia,” Bruch said. In recent weeks the flow of gas to the EU via Nord Stream 1 was reduced to roughly one fifth of capacity, following a delay in the return of the first Siemens turbine and the shutdown of a second one, which is due for an overhaul.

“..several engines at the compressor station are currently idle due to emergency failures, since Siemens has not repaired them..”

• Gazprom Warns It Can’t Accept Key Turbine (RT)

Western sanctions make it impossible to properly return a turbine for the Nord Stream 1 gas pipeline from Russia to Germany, Russian energy giant Gazprom claimed on Wednesday. The missing equipment has been the key reason for supply cuts. Siemens Energy CEO Christian Bruch earlier said that the German company had fulfilled all conditions for sending the repaired turbine back to Russia. According to Bruch, the company is “extremely interested” in advancing the process and blamed missing documents from the Russian side for the delay. “The sanctions regimes of Canada, the EU, the UK and the inconsistency of the current situation with the current contractual obligations on the part of Siemens make the delivery of the 073 engine to the Portovaya [compressor station] impossible,” Gazprom said on Wednesday.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz visited the Siemens plant in Mülheim an der Ruhr on Tuesday and inspected the Nord Stream turbine located there. According to Scholz, the turbine is ready for operation and could be sent to Russia. In mid-June, Gazprom reduced gas supplies via Nord Stream to 40%, as the German-based Siemens had not returned the turbine in time after repairs in Canada, due to the sanctions. At Berlin’s urging, Canada agreed to send the equipment to Germany, and then on to Russia. On July 25, Gazprom confirmed that it had received documents for the turbine from Siemens. On July 27, Russian gas supplies to Europe via Nord Stream dropped to 20% of their maximum level, due to Gazprom decommissioning another gas turbine engine at the Portovaya compressor station.

Vitaly Markelov, deputy head of Gazprom, said that Siemens was not fulfilling its obligations to repair faulty engines for Nord Stream. According to Markelov, several engines at the compressor station are currently idle due to emergency failures, since Siemens has not repaired them. On July 29, Markelov said that the delivery of the turbine from Canada to Germany, instead of Russia, did not comply with the contract. In addition, he said that Gazprom has not received from Siemens a complete package of documents that allow the transportation and repair of engines for the gas pipeline.

These are not made by Siemens.

• German Artillery Donated To Ukraine Failing After Just Weeks Of Use (RMX)

Barely a month since their delivery, the first German armored self-propelled guns have already ceased service in Ukraine, according to a report by German newspaper Der Spiegel. The German Ministry of Defense was informed by Kyiv last week that an error message appeared on the cannons and that several of them needed to be repaired. According to the Bundeswehr, the reason behind the malfunction may be that the Ukrainians are firing the guns more intensively than the technology is capable of. This means that the stress on the loading systems may be too high. Another problem could be that the soldiers reportedly fire the units from too far away with the special ammunition; the smart grenades used by these cannons were meant for shorter-range, precision hits.

The Bundeswehr explained that misuse of the weapons could have contributed to a more accelerated wear and tear. Despite the problems, however, they agreed to supply Ukraine with additional weapons packages. At the same time, the arming of Ukraine by the West raises several problems. The unlimited flow of weapons can see arms easily end up on the black market or lost. Several European countries have already warned that weapons have on occasion been redirected to other nations. The authorities in Sweden, for example, revealed that anti-tank weapons have already appeared in the circles of criminal gangs in Sweden. Meanwhile, security policy expert Robert C. Castel drew attention to the fact that Western weapon systems — the Javelin anti-tank missile and the Stinger anti-aircraft missile — can be used against civilian and industrial targets as well as military ones. According to him, it is only a matter of time before these weapons deliveries have unintended consequences. These weapons could still be lurking somewhere in Europe for many decades, as the modern equivalent of mines and air bombs left over from the World Wars, he added.

“..the Ukrainian side is well-aware of our terms. One way or another, they will be fulfilled..”

• Russia Ready For Peace On Own Terms – Kremlin (RT)

Ukraine can end the ongoing conflict at any time by conceding to Russia’s conditions, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Wednesday. “Russia is ready [for a peace deal], the Ukrainian side is well-aware of our terms. One way or another, they will be fulfilled,” the official told journalists. Peskov went on to explain that back in late March the two countries were close to settling their differences in a way that was acceptable to Russia, but the draft agreement prepared during a meeting in Istanbul was torpedoed by the Ukrainian side.

Kiev broke off talks with Moscow after accusing Russia of committing war crimes, an allegation that Russia said was based on fabricated evidence. The Ukrainian leadership has since insisted that negotiations can only be resumed after Russia is defeated on the battlefield with the help of Western weapons. Dmitry Peskov also commented on the recent visit to Moscow by former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, who, the Kremlin spokesman confirmed, met with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Despite media speculation that the former German leader could serve as a mediator in the Ukraine conflict, the 78-year-old “expressed no desire” to do so, Peskov said.

Schroeder is still on Gazprom’s board. He is the chairman of the board of Nord Stream AG and of Rosneft. Ideal mediator for peace.

• German Ex-Chancellor Offers Solution To EU Energy Crisis (RT)

Former German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has offered “the simplest solution” to Europe’s current energy crisis – to switch on the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline. Nord Stream 2 “is ready,” the former chancellor told German magazine Stern in an interview published on Wednesday. “The simplest solution would be to put the Nord Stream 2 pipeline into operation. If things get really tight, there is this pipeline, and with both Nord Stream pipelines there would be no supply problem for German industry and German households.” he said. Otherwise, “you have to bear the consequences. And they will be huge in Germany, too,” Schroeder warned.

The Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline runs under the Baltic Sea from Russia to Germany, beside the currently operational Nord Stream 1 route. Its construction was completed last September but the pipeline was denied certification by Germany prior to the crisis in Ukraine. The German government has repeatedly said that launching Nord stream 2 now is out of the question. In recent weeks, Russian energy supplier Gazprom reduced the gas flow via Nord Stream 1 to 20% capacity citing technical problems with Siemens turbines at a compressor station. According to Schroeder, the reduction is Siemens’ fault as the company failed to return a turbine from repairs in Canada on time. Ottawa eventually returned the part to Germany, that was held due to sanctions on Russia, after bowing to pressure from Berlin.

“I can’t tell you whether [we are directly tasking] British and American satellites, but we have very good satellite imagery..”

• US Is ‘Directly Involved’ in Ukraine War – Russia (Antiwar)

The Russian Defense Ministry on Tuesday said Washington was “directly involved” in the war in Ukraine after a Ukrainian official detailed Kyiv’s cooperation with the US before launching strikes with US-provided HIMARS rockets. Vadym Skibitsky, the deputy head of Ukraine’s military intelligence, told The Telegraph that Ukrainian officials consulted with US officials before launching HIMARS strikes and that the US has veto power over the attacks. Skibitsky insisted that the US wasn’t providing “direct targeting information,” but suggested Ukraine was using satellite imagery provided by the US and Britain. “I can’t tell you whether [we are directly tasking] British and American satellites, but we have very good satellite imagery,” Skibitsky said.

Igor Konashenkov, a spokesman for the Russian Defense Ministry, said that this cooperation “proves that contrary to the assurances by the White House and the Pentagon, Washington is directly involved in the conflict in Ukraine.” The comments from the Russian Defense Ministry highlight the danger of the US’s deep involvement in the war, which risks provoking a response from Moscow. Russian officials have cited US military aid as a reason to push further into Ukrainian territory. After Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, the US expanded intelligence sharing with Ukraine’s forces, and US officials have bragged to the media that this cooperation helped kill Russian generals and sink a Russian warship. Although the claims were not verified, the comments themselves were major provocations toward Moscow.

Amnesty has also accused Ukraine of using “human shields”.

• Russia Accuses Ukraine Of Mistreating POWs (RT)

Moscow has scrupulously observed the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners, while the government of Ukraine has tortured, starved and deprived of medical care the Russian soldiers in its captivity, the Russian Defense Ministry claimed on Wednesday. The West’s unwillingness to hold Kiev accountable has resulted in violations and outright crimes, Deputy Defense Minister Alexander Fomin told reporters. Russia has taken “painstaking” steps to observe the Geneva Convention on the treatment of POWs, among them holding more than 40 weekly meetings with representatives of the UN and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and establishing a medical commission on seriously ill and injured prisoners. So far, 18 such prisoners were sent back to Ukraine, General Fomin said.

There have also been 27 exchanges of POWs and the bodies of dead servicemen, while the ICRC has received more than 1,500 letters home from the Ukrainian prisoners. Detained Ukrainian soldiers can also make phone calls to their families, Fomin said, all in accordance with Article 71 of the convention.Fomin’s press conference came after the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine said it was appalled by a video allegedly showing a Russian soldier castrating a bound and gagged Ukrainian captive. In a statement on Friday, the commission reminded everyone that “torture and summary executions of prisoners of war” are war crimes. The Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s office has launched an investigation into the video, to establish where and when it might have taken place.

The Russian general did not address the video directly. He did, however, say that while Russia has treated its prisoners in full accordance with international law, Ukraine has not. According to a survey of exchanged service members, both Russian and those of the Donbass republics, 81% of the prisoners were subjected to beatings and other physical violence, while 55% were forced to film propaganda videos. Some 46% received no medical care, 79% were given no opportunity to contact relatives, and 19% were given poor or insufficient meals. One detention center, run by the Ukrainian security service SBU in Kiev, gave captives only 50 grams of porridge, a piece of bread and a glass of water a day, while keeping them blindfolded.

Fomin also brought up videos circulating onlineshowing “torture and abuse,” as well as extrajudicial executions and “monstrous acts of violence” against Russian and Donbass POWs. “Ukrainian Nazis” have also attempted to extort the families of captives for ransom, he said. Russia has regularly informed the international humanitarian structures of Ukraine’s behavior, with requests to influence the Kiev government, but to little or no effect, Fomin said. In addition to the mistreatment of prisoners, according to the Russian military, Ukrainian forces have been using civilians as human shields, as well as using Western-supplied weapons and banned ordnance – such as cluster munitions and landmines – to target civilians in the Donetsk and Lugansk republics. The international community has turned a blind eye to these atrocities, Fomin said, allowing them to continue.

The country is made of water.

• National Crisis Team To Distribute Scarce Dutch Water (NOS)

As of today, the national Water Shortage Management Team (MTW) determines how scarce water is distributed in the Netherlands. Due to the ongoing drought, there is now a “de facto water shortage”, says Minister Harbers of Infrastructure and Water Management. At the moment no additional measures are needed to prevent problems, but if the drought continues, they will soon. What exactly those measures entail is still unclear. The situation is now so serious that decisions have to be made that go beyond the regions, water boards and stakeholders. It is the task of the MTW to coordinate this. Rijkswaterstaat, the water boards, drinking water companies, provinces and the ministries involved are represented in the team. In this way, decisions can be taken about measures more quickly and more tailor-made, says Harbers.

On July 13, we scaled up to level 1 (impending water shortage) and now to level 2 (actual water shortage). The drought is caused by the high evaporation rate in the Netherlands and the low supply of water from abroad via the rivers. Minister Harbers assures that, despite the drought, sufficient drinking water is and will remain available. But according to him it is important that the Dutch are conscious of their tap water. “Everyone can contribute. That is why I ask all Dutch people to think carefully about whether they should wash their car or fill their inflatable pool completely.” Several water boards have already taken measures in recent weeks. For example, in some areas there is a ban on spraying for agriculture and industry and locks may be used less frequently by shipping. The water level in the IJsselmeer is also kept as high as possible and pumps and pumping stations have been used in some places to better distribute the water.

Mike Davis on Twitter: “The Biden Justice Department is now subpoenaing the prior Counsel to the President. His communications are clearly protected by Executive Privilege. Attorney General Merrick Garland is causing tremendous damage to the Presidency. Biden will regret this.”

• DOJ Subpoenas Trump White House Counsel Pat Cipollone (Hill)

Former White House counsel Pat Cipollone has been subpoenaed by the Justice Department in an investigation increasingly involving former President Trump’s closest advisers, according to reports from multiple news outlets. The subpoena comes as the Justice Department has been bringing other White House officials before a grand jury in its probe into Jan. 6. Cipollone would be able to offer considerable insight into actions at the White House both leading up to and on Jan. 6. His testimony before the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack indicates he had numerous concerns about the former president’s plans for the day and how he responded to the riot.

The Justice Department has already brought two former advisers to then-Vice President Mike Pence before a grand jury. It has also executed search warrants on Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department assistant attorney general who Trump weighed installing as attorney general so he could forward investigations into the president’s baseless claims of election fraud, along with John Eastman. Eastman, a former law professor, crafted memos for the campaign advising they submit alternate electoral certificates and that Pence buck his ceremonial duty to certify the election results. [..] Jan. 6 committee Chair Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) told reporters last month that DOJ had asked for transcripts with the panel’s investigators tied to Trump’s plans to transmit fake elector certificates to Congress.

But the interest in Cipollone suggests the probe could be more wide ranging, especially following reporting by The New York Times indicating that federal prosecutors are beginning to more seriously discuss directly investigating Trump’s actions. Earlier testimony before the House Jan. 6 committee indicated Cipollone pushed back against a plan to issue an executive order allowing the seizing of voting machines. According to testimony from White House aide Cassidy Hutchison, he also expressed legal concerns over Trump’s plans to march to the Capitol, warning they could be charged with “every crime imaginable.” And in a portion of his taped deposition played in the committee’s final hearing of the summer, Cipollone was also shown saying he pushed Trump to call off the mob if his supporters storming the Capitol.

“when an employee separates from DOD or Army he or she turns in the government issued phone, and the phone is wiped”

“U.S. Secret Service text messages sent on the day the breach had also been deleted.”

• DOD ‘Wiped’ Phones of Senior Trump Officials, Jan. 6 Communications (ET)

Some senior Trump administration officials had their phones “wiped” by the Department of Defense (DOD) and the U.S. Army after the former president left office, meaning messages that were sent around the time of the Jan. 6 Capitol breach are no longer accessible, court filings show. The DOD acknowledged that the phones belonging to former Pentagon officials had been wiped as part of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed by American Oversight, a non-profit watchdog organization. American Oversight had sought the communications that those officials had with Trump, former Vice President Pence, Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, or anyone communicating on their behalf on Jan. 6.

The watchdog group submitted the FOIA requests pertaining to the records on Jan. 12, 2021, six days after the breach of the Capitol building. Specifically, FOIA requests sought communications from former acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller, former chief of staff Kash Patel, and former Secretary of the Army Ryan McCarthy, Paul Ney, the Defense Department’s general counsel; and James E. McPherson, the Army’s general counsel. However, in a court filing roughly a year after the request, the Army stated that “when an employee separates from DOD or Army he or she turns in the government issued phone, and the phone is wiped” and that “for those custodians no longer with the agency, the text messages were not preserved and therefore could not be searched.”

The court filing noted, however, that “it is possible that particular text messages could have been saved into other records systems such as email.” The DOD’s admission in the filings creates further transparency issues regarding the Jan. 6 select committee’s investigation into the events of that day in 2021 and how the government responded. It also comes shortly after it was revealed that U.S. Secret Service text messages sent on the day the breach had also been deleted.

“..if a plea has already closed the case, the legal blowback could be confined..”

• Elites Prepare To Drop Hunter Biden in a “Controlled Demolition” (Turley)

I previously wrote a column on the one year anniversary of the Hunter Biden laptop story that marveled at the success of the Biden family in making the scandal vanish before that 2020 election. It was analogized to Houdini making his 10,000-pound elephant Jennie disappear in his act. With the help of the media, the Biden trick occurred live before an audience of millions. The problem is the public can now see the elephant. That is why the media is now recalibrating. That was most evident in the recent statement of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman that “I know The New York Times felt it didn’t pursue it originally as much as it wanted to; then it followed up, as I recall.” Friedman does not explain what overrode that journalistic interest in the story or why the “follow up” came a year after the election of Joe Biden.

It appears that President Biden is no longer seen as a political asset with most Democrats refusing to publicly support him in his promised reelection bid. Biden now could endanger Democratic control of Congress. The question is how to drop Hunter (and even his father) without causing damage to the media, the Democrats, or others in Washington. It requires a controlled demolition. The most important thing is to control the blast. By refusing to appoint a special counsel, Merrick Garland has effectively blocked the risk of a report on the extensive influence peddling, including the repeated references to President Biden. the “Big Guy” is discussed in emails as the potential recipient of a 10 percent cut on a deal with a Chinese energy firm as well as other benefits. Emails also refer to Hunter Biden paying portions of his father’s expenses and taxes. Recently, there was additional support showing that “the Big Guy” was indeed Joe Biden.

The problem is that embarrassing evidence is mounting by the day. That includes the recent disclosure new open influence peddling by Hunter, referencing access to his father. [..] In other words, the case can then be collapsed by triggering a smaller explosion. Rather than pursue wider conspiracies connected to the influence peddling, Hunter could be indicted on a few tax or lobbying counts. That would allow for a plea bargain that would allow the media to focus narrowly on those counts and not the broader influence peddling by the Biden family. Of course, controlled demolition can at times take an unexpected turn. The greatest danger is that either house of Congress could flip to GOP control. That would open up the entire matter to congressional investigation. Yet, if a plea has already closed the case, the legal blowback could be confined. The key to political controlled demolitions “to ‘implode’ the building, that is, make it collapse down into its footprint.” The footprint is now Hunter Biden, confining the implosion to him while leaving the media and establishment untouched.

If these clowns don’t make energy and food available and affordable, they won’t make people wear masks.

• German Mask Mandates for Those Who Refuse A 4th Dose in the Fall (Eugyp)

Our clown health minister Karl Lauterbach and our useless liberal Minister of Justice Marco Buschmann have finally agreed on draft legislation to replace our current Infection Protection Act, which expires in September. As predicted, the compromise is masking and not much else. Specifically, the federal states will receive the option to impose indoor mask mandates, with exceptions for those who can present negative tests, or who have recovered from infection or received vaccination within the past three months. As Julian Reichelt notes, masks will thus become a compulsory (if temporary) label for everyone who refuses dose number four.

My greatest regret about the law, is that it frees the tested and the recovered from mask requirements. I’d prefer that only the vaccinated present bare faces in public, so that they can be subjected to the proper contempt. I was going to write more about my outrage at this ongoing farce, but I find myself too depressed to do so. Instead, I’ll just draw your attention to a small item of vaccinator comedy (h/t Marcus Klöckner), in the form of this otherwise standard job ad for a postdoctoral historian in Austrian history at Kalgenfurt University in Carinthia. At the end is this little nugget:

“The University is aware of its social responsibility in the era of COVID-19. This is demonstrated by the high proportion of fully immunised persons among students and employees. For this reason, continual willingness to be vaccinated against COVID-19 is expected for those entering employment with the University.”A great many academic institutions (and adjacent professions) will now subject themselves to an indefinite festival of annual vaccination with novel mRNA cocktails against a pervasive respiratory virus that is no more dangerous than the flu. This won’t stop SARS-2 and it won’t make university instruction safer; it’ll just kill a few people, make a lot of others sick for no reason, and alienate reasonable employees who don’t like massive bureaucratic organisations rooting around in their personal medical decisions. Great plan. Good luck with that.

Dutch farmers

Dutch farmers are not joking. Respect. pic.twitter.com/aBX4CXph6c

— RadioGenova (@RadioGenova) August 3, 2022

Gervais

still the single greatest moment to have happened on live television pic.twitter.com/TaWVpg5Gc7

— Daniel (@Clark1995Clark) August 3, 2022

Red-eared Firetail

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Debt Rattle June 7 2022

Jun 072022

June 7, 2022 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:00 am Finance Tagged with: Assange, concessions, Elon Musk, ethanol, Lavrov, mask mandates, Ottoman, Putin, Schumer, Soros, Zelensky 54 Responses »

Pablo Picasso Rest (Marie-Thérèse Walter) 1932

• Zelensky Says Ukraine is Being Pushed to Make Concessions to Russia (Celente)

• Blaming Putin Is Helping Putin (Dmitry Orlov)

• Fury In Moscow After Air Closures Block Lavrov Trip To Serbia (AFP)

• Your Show of Shows (Kunstler)

• The White House Keeps Stoking Covid Fears (Bhattacharya)

• COVID-19: Mask Mandates Could Increase Death Rate (Celente)

• Florida Surgeon General Openly Questions Safety Of Covid-19 Vaccines (FP)

• Elon Musk Threatens To Terminate Twitter Deal (PM)

• Biden Admin Quietly Raised Amount of Ethanol Required in Gasoline (CTH)

• Soros Spent $40 Million To Elect 75 ‘Social Justice’ Prosecutors (WE)

• Exasperated Biden Has Only Himself To Blame For Poll Numbers (Levine)

• Why Is Chuck Schumer Trying To Stop Antitrust Reform? (NW)

• Ankara Tries To Sell ‘Ottoman Islands’ Theory (K.)

• Nils Merzel’s New Book Argues Julian Assange Is Being Tortured (Conv.)

Nuclear warheads
https://twitter.com/i/status/1533811236160290817

“Zelensky did not specify exactly what parties are beginning to grow impatient..”

• Zelensky Says Ukraine is Being Pushed to Make Concessions to Russia (Celente)

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Monday told reporters that he is starting to feel pressure from the West to negotiate for peace with Russia from a current position of weakness. Ukrayinska Pravda reported that Zelensky told reporters: “I do not have any negotiations on any plans (on the peace plan, which is being discussed by the United States, the European Union and Britain – ed.); such negotiations are currently at zero. Everyone really wants to push us little by little towards some result that is definitely undesirable for us, because we have not been asked yet, but beneficial for other parties that have their own interests. Again, different: both financial and political. “Fatigue is growing, people want some kind of result for themselves, and you and I need a result – for us. Thus, I did not discuss with them the structures for resolving the issue of this war with a positive result for us.”

Zelensky did not specify exactly what parties are beginning to grow impatient with the war but some high-profile people have recently said that Ukraine should consider some kind of concessions to achieve peace. Zelensky and his closest advisers have been adamant that they will not cede one inch of the country to Russia, despite Russian forces and separatists now controlling about 20 percent of the country. Zelensky has said earlier that Russian troops must leave the country before there can be any talk of a negotiate peace, which many see as an unfeasible position. Last week, Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of the Russian Security Council, called Zelensky’s demand idiotic “and unfeasible in principle,” Newsweek reported.

“Anticipating his inevitable defeat, Ukrainian President Zelensky found a convenient way out of the impasse,” Medvedev said. “No country, no problem. His actions and statements prove that now he is ready to put almost everything on the altar of his political ambitions.”

“The logical steps needed to make it all Putin’s fault are then obvious: the shortages are because of the war and the war is Putin’s fault.”

• Blaming Putin Is Helping Putin (Dmitry Orlov)

The systemic crisis which we are currently witnessing in the West (and in other parts of the world that are too tightly interconnected with the West to avoid experiencing it as well) is objectively being caused by the West itself. But Westerners, being unaccustomed to acknowledging their mistakes (being all superior, indispensable and infallible-like in their own addled minds), are forced to resort to explaining away their epic failures in virtually every sphere by blaming it all on Putin. That is, they don’t even blame Russia in general, but blame Putin personally; after all, Russia can be good and agreeable at times (as it was under Gorbachev and Yeltsin) but Putin makes it misbehave. That’s why it’s all got to be Putin’s fault.

Here’s what it’s come to: an entire President of the United States (or whoever runs his teleprompter), who, in the course of his election campaign, swore up and down that he will take responsibility for whatever happens under his command, now blames “Putin’s Price Hike” so regularly and monotonously that the phrase has become a meme. By now the narrative of “it’s all Putin’s fault” has spread to encompass all of the more sensitive problems: inflation, fuel prices, food price hikes and even… shortages of baby formula! It turns out that the shortages aren’t caused by the discovery of dangerous bacteria in the products of a monopoly producer but by shortages of imported sunflower oil from… the Ukraine. That’s according to the Wall Street Journal, no less! The logical steps needed to make it all Putin’s fault are then obvious: the shortages are because of the war and the war is Putin’s fault.

This wonderful strategy works just fine for the short term, but it has a major vulnerability in the longer term because of a certain mechanism of mass psychology. Superficially, it is simple and seemingly bulletproof: Putin is irrational; he has imperial ambitions, suffers from paranoia, delusions of grandeur, is obsessed with restoring the USSR… Since his motives are irrational, they cannot be dealt with through rational means such as negotiation, diplomacy, compromise and so on. Putin is a crazy dictator with lots of nuclear missiles and so all we can do is suffer. This construct seems good enough for most purposes, such as explaining away social problems, economic issues and failures of leadership. But only in the short term.

“This was a deprivation of a sovereign state of the right to carry out foreign policy.”

• Fury In Moscow After Air Closures Block Lavrov Trip To Serbia (AFP)

Moscow on Monday furiously condemned the rejection by several European countries of a request for Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s plane to pass through their airspace, forcing him to cancel a trip to ally Serbia. “The unthinkable has happened,” Lavrov told an online news conference in Moscow. “This was a deprivation of a sovereign state of the right to carry out foreign policy.” Bulgaria, Macedonia and Montenegro refused a request from Russia for Lavrov’s plane to pass through their airspaces on the way to Serbia because of sanctions imposed over Moscow’s military action in Ukraine. Lavrov had been due to hold talks with top officials in Belgrade, one of Moscow’s few remaining allies in Europe since the launch of the offensive in late February.

Lavrov described the move as “outrageous”, insisting that Moscow’s relations with Belgrade would not be “destroyed”. He said Moscow had invited his Serbian counterpart Nikola Selakovic to visit Russia in the near future instead. The Kremlin also denounced the moves, with President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman calling them “hostile actions”. “We are convinced that such actions will not be able to prevent our country’s continuation of contacts, especially with friendly countries,” Dmitry Peskov told journalists. Lavrov had previously been forced to cancel a trip to Geneva for disarmament talks in late February, after the European Union closed its airspace to Russian aviation.

A Russian diplomatic source told news agency Interfax there had been no choice but to cancel the visit to Serbia. “Russian diplomacy has not yet learned how to teleport,” the source said. The chairman of the foreign affairs committee of the Russian parliament’s upper house, Konstantin Kosachev, suggested NATO was pressuring the three countries. “We are talking about a NATO demarche, and without the United States it could not have happened,” Kosachev said on Telegram.

“..as a final indignity — actually, an advertisement to the world of our depraved weakness — the US military is hosting drag queen shows at our European air bases.”

• Your Show of Shows (Kunstler)

The Party of Chaos certainly doesn’t need to reinforce the mass formation psychosis of its base who maintain that the 2020 election was the fairest-and-squarest in US history. The committee members will chant the talismanic phrase “The Big Lie” ad nauseam to ward off reasonable suspicions that they are the ones doing the lying. Since a kind of maniacal stupidity attends all the party’s doings these days, it could easily backfire on them. Even two years later probes are still pending in several swing states, and only a few weeks ago, the documentary 2000 Mules released time-stamped videocam footage of blatant wholesale drop-box ballot-stuffing around the country. Lawsuits filed lately also claim the committee itself is illegally constituted, since House Speaker Nancy Pelosi disallowed (against the rules) the minority Republicans from appointing their own chosen members.

Instead, she did it for them, planting the vehemently hostile rogues Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger on it, meaning no witnesses will be called who might refute pertinent details of the “insurrection” narrative already constructed. Much of the testimony presented will be videotaped interviews with Trump White House officials and there will be no accounting for what may be edited out. In other words, you have an obvious setup for a star chamber, a device for disregarding individual rights and fair procedure. The context, of course, as I aver above, is a country that is imploding six ways to Sunday — to paraphrase Chuck Schumer, the Party of Chaos’s Senate leader. At least half the public is already onto the extravagant damage inflicted upon our national life by the beneficiaries of the 2020 election.

Thanks to “Joe Biden,” the dollar is hemorrhaging value, we instigated a war in Ukraine that will lead to global famine and mass refugee events, oil and natgas are unaffordable thanks to our destabilizing of global distribution networks, spare parts are unavailable for every imaginable machine in the land, the business model for farming is broken, real estate is groaning under rising mortgage interest rates, the CDC is still pushing Covid vaccines despite proof that they are ineffective and harmful, cities are overwhelmed with criminal violence and psychotic homeless drug fiends, and, as a final indignity — actually, an advertisement to the world of our depraved weakness — the US military is hosting drag queen shows at our European air bases.

“..in at least 35% of pediatric “Covid deaths,” Covid couldn’t have been the cause.”

• The White House Keeps Stoking Covid Fears (Bhattacharya)

“I’ve been a huge advocate of keeping schools fully open to in person education since October of 2020,” Ashish Jha, the White House’s Covid response coordinator, tweeted last week. “Still am.” So why is Dr. Jha engaged in scare-mongering about the danger of Covid to children? In a May 30 tweet, Dr. Jha asserted that Covid is “a far greater threat to kids than the flu is.” He linked to an article by Harvard Medical School instructor Jeremy Faust, which claims that Covid killed more than 600 children in 2021, whereas the flu kills “an average” of only 120 children annually. But Dr. Faust’s data are severely skewed, for three reasons.

First, while flu is seldom tested, everyone admitted to a hospital for any reason gets a Covid test. Between October 2018 and September 2019, 1.4 million flu tests were reported to public-health and clinical labs. As of May 31, 2022, there had been 897 million PCR tests for Covid. Second, evidence from audits of death certificates found that 35% of all pediatric deaths in 2020 “had co-occurring diagnosis codes that could not be plausibly categorized as either a chain-of-event or significant contributing condition,” according to a study published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Put another way, in at least 35% of pediatric “Covid deaths,” Covid couldn’t have been the cause.

Third, Dr. Faust relies on a figure for confirmed flu deaths that is well-known to underestimate actual flu deaths by an order of magnitude. Correcting for the lack of flu testing, the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases estimated 1,161 pediatric flu deaths in the 2012-13 season rather than the 142 that Dr. Faust reported. For the White House to amplify a false message of high Covid risk for children undermines public health and erodes public confidence. It foments an erroneous assessment of risk and is the kind of misinformation that leads to more school closings as well as burdensome mask and quarantine mandates.

“Results from this study strongly suggest that mask mandates actually caused about 1.5 times the number of deaths..”

• COVID-19: Mask Mandates Could Increase Death Rate (Celente)

A new study out of Kansas found that mask mandates could be associated with a higher rate of death due to the spread of COVID-19. The observational study, which was published in Medicine in February considered “whether mandatory mask use influenced the case fatality rate in Kansas” from August 2020 to October of the same year, Town Hall reported. Dr. Zacharias Fögen authored the observational study titled, “The Foegen Effect: A Mechanism by Which Facemasks Contribute to the COVID-19 Case Fatality Rate.” He wrote the main takeaway was that “contrary to the accepted thought that fewer people are dying due to infection rates are reduced by masks, this was not the case.”

“Results from this study strongly suggest that mask mandates actually caused about 1.5 times the number of deaths or 50% more deaths compared to no mask mandates,” the German doctor wrote. Fögen’s theory is that hypercondensed droplets caught by masks are re-inhaled and “introduced deeper into the respiratory tract.” The study focused on Kansas because the decision to force masks was up to the 105 counties and 81 refused to impose them. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention continues to insist that masks are an effective tool in preventing the spread of COVID-19. President Joe Biden has made mask usage one of the central themes in his administration’s fight against the virus. On his first day in office, he signed an executive order requiring masks on federal property and called for their widespread use for 100 days.

“How can you force people to take a vaccine in order to stop transmission when that vaccine is not effective at stopping transmission?”

• Florida Surgeon General Openly Questions Safety Of Covid-19 Vaccines (FP)

Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo on Friday made some of his strongest statements yet against receiving a COVID-19 vaccine. Delivered at a press conference announcing an agreement with the Special Olympics to lift a vaccine mandate, the Florida Department of Health leader went much further. He called into question the efficacy of COVID-19 shots and whether they are even safe to use. “People will say oh, you know, millions of people have taken these vaccines, they must be safe,” he said. “Well, you can’t know the answer to that when it is taboo to talk about having a reaction after vaccines.” Citing only anecdotal evidence, he suggested the vaccine has produced more side effects than others such as flu shots.

“There’s another vaccine that over 100 million Americans take every year, and it’s the influenza vaccine,” he said. “And the stream of adverse events that I’ve heard from people all over this country after these vaccines is nothing like the years of my life when I’ve been in medicine and have been administering the influenza vaccines. There is a difference, and you can’t say that millions of people getting it excuses you from that.” Regarding vaccine mandates, he said those make no sense based on what science now shows about this coronavirus and about vaccines in use now. “Scientifically, it makes zero sense,” Ladapo said. “How can you force people to take a vaccine in order to stop transmission when that vaccine is not effective at stopping transmission?”

“..Parag Agrawal, current CEO said that for Musk to undertake this count he would need access to information that is not currently public.”

You can buy this car, but you cannot look at the engine…

• Elon Musk Threatens To Terminate Twitter Deal (PM)

Elon Musk has accused Twitter of “resisting and thwarting” his inquiries about how many fake, or bot accounts are currently on the Twitter platform. Musk has been trying to get this information since his acquisition process for the platform began. Musk has reportedly called Twitter’s unwillingness to provide the information a “clear material breach” to the terms of the agreement that is still under negotiation. As a result, Musk is reserving his right to not complete the transaction.In the letter to Twitter Chief Legal Officer Vijaya Gadde, Skadden attorney Mike Ringler for Musk said that “Mr. Musk reserves all rights resulting therefrom, including his right not to consummate the transaction and his right to terminate the merger agreement,” according to CNBC.

He said further that Twitter must provide the information that is being requested, and that the merger agreement requires it. Ringler disputed Twitter’s claim that they are not responsible to give that data in order to close the deal. “Mr. Musk is entitled to seek, and Twitter is obligated to provide,” Ringler wrote, “information and data for, inter alia, ‘any reasonable business purpose related to the consummation of the transaction.'” “At this point,” Ringler continued, “Mr. Musk believes Twitter is transparently refusing to comply with its obligations under the merger agreement, which is causing further suspicion that the company is withholding the requested data due to concern for what Mr. Musk’s own analysis of that data will uncover.”

The letter, submitted to the SEC, posited that “If Twitter is confident in its publicized spam estimates, Mr. Musk does not understand the company’s reluctance to allow Mr. Musk to independently evaluate those estimates. As noted in our previous correspondence, Mr. Musk will of course comply with the restrictions provided under Section 6.4, including by ensuring that anyone reviewing the data is bound by a non-disclosure agreement, and Mr. Musk will not retain or otherwise use any competitively sensitive information if the transaction is not consummated.”

Musk has been adamant throughout the process that he needs to know how many of the accounts on Twitter are actual humans. There is speculation that if the number is higher than Twitter execs have reported, Musk could negotiate a new buying price that’s less than the $44 billion initially offered and agreed to. Musk and his team have been willing to do the calculations themselves, but Parag Agrawal, current CEO who took over after founder Jack Dorsey left in the fall, said that for Musk to undertake this count he would need access to information that is not currently public.

From 10% to 15%. But small engines and older car engines cannot take more than 10%.

(bio-) Ethanol fulfills its promise as an unmitigated disaster.

But wait, didn’t we have a food problem?

• Biden Admin Quietly Raised Amount of Ethanol Required in Gasoline (CTH)

Last Friday the Biden administration raised the mandatory amount of biofuel, specifically ethanol, that must be blended within the U.S. gasoline supply. The previous amount of 10% was raised to 15% by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). This is likely to lead to two sets of bigger issues, less food and higher gas prices. First issue. – The Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) is a government mandate, passed in 2005 and expanded in 2007, that requires growing volumes of biofuels to be blended into U.S. transportation fuels like gasoline and diesel every year. Approximately 40 percent of corn grown in the U.S. is used for ethanol. Raising the amount of ethanol required in gasoline will result in the need for more biofuel (corn). With farming costs and outputs already under pressure this could be problematic.

Second issue – The EPA enforces the biofuel standard by requiring refineries to submit purchase credits (known as Renewable Identification Numbers, or RINs) to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proving the purchases. This enforcement requirement sets up a system where the RIN credits are bought and sold by small refineries who do not have the infrastructure to do the blending process. They purchase second-hand RIN credits from parties that blended or imported biofuels directly. This sets up a secondary income stream, a trading market for the larger oil companies, refineries and importers. The RIN credit trading platform is similar to what we might expect to see if the ‘Carbon Trading’ scheme was ever put into place. However, now that the biofuel requirements for blended gasoline have gone from 10% to 15%, the price of the RIN credits will likely jump.

This will cost refineries billions in additional expenses,…. which will mean the cost of the gasoline from the refineries will increase,….. which will mean the cost of the gasoline at the pump will go higher. The EPA theory is that RIN credits should be expensive thereby forcing all oil refineries to invest in infrastructure that makes the blended fuel. All of the infrastructure from the refinery to the gas station would need to be modified to facilitate the new 15% RFS standard. Again, higher prices at the pumps as a result of oil companies and refineries needing to spend billions on upgrades. Which brings us to issue number three.

Third Issue – “Ethanol is a valuable source of octane in finished gasoline, but it is chemically different than petroleum gasoline and cannot be used in concentrations above 10 percent in small engines — like outboard boat motors, motorcycles, lawnmowers, generators or chain saws — or in any cars made before 2001. Complicating matters further, most cars on the road today still aren’t warrantied to run on gasoline with more than 10 percent ethanol. Retail stations also must have compatible infrastructure in order to sell gasoline with higher ethanol blends.” This issue is known within the industry as “The Blend Wall.”

America’s future is being shaped by a foreigner who will not see that future.

• Soros Spent $40 Million To Elect 75 ‘Social Justice’ Prosecutors (WE)

Sky-high campaign donations from liberal anti-police billionaire George Soros and his groups have helped to elect 75 “social justice” prosecutors in whose cities jailings have plummeted and crime has surged, according to a new report provided to Secrets. In a 17-page report compiled by the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund, a decade of spending has put Soros prosecutors in enough big cities that they represent 1 in 5 people, or about 72 million. That includes about half of America’s 50 most populous cities and counties where 40% of U.S. homicides occur. Soros is a well-known proponent of social justice prosecution, which calls for lighter sentences, especially of minorities. The movement, however, has led to higher crime in some cities and has been decried by pro-law-and-order conservatives.

Police have led the charge against liberal prosecutors who have been refusing to file charges that lead to long prison sentences. In a statement to Secrets, LELDF President Jason Johnson hit the Soros funding. “Soros is using that campaign money and the hundreds of millions more for supporting organizations to quietly transform the criminal justice system for the worse, promoting dangerous policies and anti-police narratives to advance his radical agenda,” said Johnson. He added, “Over the past decade, George Soros has spent $40 million to elect 75 of his chosen prosecutors. In campaigns from Houston and Los Angeles to Philadelphia and Orlando, Soros was the campaign’s biggest spender by far — as much as 90% of the dollars spent in some races. Soros isn’t done yet — he’s already spent another million so far this year on his hand-picked district attorneys.”

“Let Joe be Joe” is the thinking.”

• Exasperated Biden Has Only Himself To Blame For Poll Numbers (Levine)

Leaks from the White House suggest that Joe Biden is in a snit over his plummeting poll numbers, now that they’ve sunk below those of Donald Trump. He is exasperated that he is not receiving credit for the great achievements of his administration and feels he is a victim of circumstances beyond his control: inflation, rising fuel prices, the border crisis, Afghanistan, the war in Ukraine, school shootings, COVID-19, and so on. Oh, woe is him. So goes the spin. Biden’s solution is to snarl at staff and demand better messaging. First lady Jill Biden and the president’s sister, Valerie Biden Owens, are reported by Politico to be urging him to get out and about more. “Let Joe be Joe” is the thinking.

But isn’t that part of the problem? When Biden goes off script in front of a teleprompter, things go awry very quickly. He blurts out reckless thought bubbles, like when he said Vladimir Putin “cannot remain in power” or that the US would get involved militarily in Taiwan. The plan is to put the near-octogenarian president on the road to give him more opportunities to connect organically with people and talk up his accomplishments. Perhaps in a sign that he is upping the tempo of his lethargic work output, Biden cut short his weekend sojourn at his Delaware beach house earlier than usual, returning to the White House Sunday rather than Monday morning. But the subtext of the leaks of turmoil in the Oval points to one central grievance: Donald Trump.

The man whose legacy Biden has spent his entire presidency trying to erase just can’t be outstripped. It’s why Biden can’t mention his predecessor’s name, treating him more like Lord Voldemort than a former president. He is “seething,” reports Politico, that his standing in the polls is now worse than that of Trump, “whom Biden routinely refers to in private as ‘the worst president’ in history and an existential threat to the nation’s democracy.” What does that say about his own presidency? Biden’s Trump derangement is “the greatest source of West Wing frustration, coming from behind the Resolute Desk.” Well, no wonder. When you look at the polling comparison between Biden and Trump, there simply is no contest. There is not a single day in which Biden has done better than Trump in his second year in office.

Money?!

• Why Is Chuck Schumer Trying To Stop Antitrust Reform? (NW)

We’re all familiar with the concentrated market power of giant technology companies like Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon, which reach into all corners of Americans’ daily lives. For more than a decade, their monopolistic dominance has spawned Justice Department investigations, congressional hearings, civil lawsuits and legal penalties. Over and over again, antitrust bills are discussed and some are introduced—and then they die in the House and the Senate. Now, though, two bills that would begin to rein in the power of companies like these Big Tech behemoths are under consideration in the Senate. They’ve both passed the Senate Judiciary Committee by impressive margins and are ready for a full vote. But Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has been dragging his feet on bringing them to the floor.

Letting these bills die would be a significant failure of the American antitrust movement, signaling to the Big Tech companies that even modest and highly limited restrictions on their behavior are politically impossible to achieve—that despite overwhelming popular support for reform, Washington is simply too intransigent and too bought and paid for to get anything done. A defeat would give these companies the green light to continue stomping all over their smaller competitors and harming consumers by invading our privacy and limiting our choice. But given Schumer’s own ties to Big Tech, his reluctance to bring this legislation to the floor—where it would almost certainly pass—is no surprise.

Schumer has taken hundreds of thousands of dollars from Big Tech and its employees over the past decade. Between 2013 and 2018—a time period when tough data protections were adopted in the European Union, and there were broad calls for the U.S. to do the same—these corporate giants gave Schumer more than almost any other member of Congress. In 2016, the technology industry gave Schumer $237,000. In just the spring of 2021, when antitrust legislation was under discussion in Congress, Schumer took $120,000 from Google and Apple executives and their aligned PACs. The ties go beyond campaign contributions. Schumer’s staff has been a revolving door for Big Tech. According to the New York Post, more than 80 former Schumer staffers have gone on to subsequently work at the Big Tech firms.

And Schumer’s two daughters have also both worked directly for Big Tech—one for Amazon, and one for Facebook subsidiary Instagram. Alison Schumer also advocated against regulation as a public affairs manager for Airbnb, the technology company that has in many ways distorted housing markets worldwide. Given all that money and those family connections, it’s no wonder that Schumer has been reluctant to take a hard line on the enormous problem of tech market concentration. Indeed, journalists who watch the sector have called Schumer a “quiet but reliable Washington ally” to Big Tech, as well as a “tech booster.” As recently as 2018, he said tech companies were too new to regulate aggressively. He proposed that the companies police themselves—an approach that has clearly failed.

Lausanne Treaty, 1923. Yes, Turkey is smaller than the Ottoman empire. This is turning into a weird revisionist story.

• Ankara Tries To Sell ‘Ottoman Islands’ Theory (K.)

The theory of “Ottoman islands” whose sovereignty has not been given to any country by any treaty is being pushed by Ankara in earnest. Indicatively, the idea has also been picked up and promoted by the Turkish media, targeting specific islands, such as Agathonisi and Farmakonisi. The pro-government Milliyet columnist and director of the Kanal D television network in Ankara, Zafer Sahin, said in an article that “a second Imia crisis is on the brink. This is because the situation has turned into a deep political and military crisis that goes beyond the Imia issue.” Greece and Turkey came close to war in 1996 over the rocky Imia islets.

In his article titled “The Ottoman Islands in the Aegean,” Sahin emphasized that Ankara, in addition to questioning the sovereignty of the eastern Aegean islands that are militarized, is also preparing to raise the issue of the sovereignty of islands whose sovereignty has not been determined, citing Gavdos as an example. “This is located south of Crete and is under a regime whose sovereignty has not been determined,” he said. Turkey has long promulgated theory of “gray zones” regarding the status of 152 Greek islands and islets, but it seems that now there is an attempt to connect them with the Ottoman Empire.

“There are Ottoman islands that have not been transferred to the maps of the US and Great Britain, issued after the Second World War, which appear outside Greek territory,” Sahin claims. These theories began to emerge after the statements of Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu last week, who tried to threaten Greece into demilitarizing these islands. “Otherwise, the debate over sovereignty begins as they have been given [to Greece] under conditions,” he said.

Not a word so far from the new Oz PM.

• Nils Merzel’s New Book Argues Julian Assange Is Being Tortured (Conv.)

It is easy to forget why Julian Assange has been on trial in England for, well, seemingly forever. Didn’t he allegedly sexually assault two women in Sweden? Isn’t that why he holed up for years in the Ecuadorian embassy in London to avoid facing charges? When the bobbies finally dragged him out of the embassy, didn’t his dishevelled appearance confirm all those stories about his lousy personal hygiene? Didn’t he persuade Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning to hack into the United States military’s computers to reveal national security matters that endangered the lives of American soldiers and intelligence agents? He says he is a journalist, but hasn’t the New York Times made it clear he is just a “source” and not a publisher entitled to first amendment protection? If you answered yes to any or all of these questions, you are not alone. But the answers are actually no.

At very least, it’s more complicated than that. To take one example, the reason Assange was dishevelled was that staff in the Ecuadorian embassy had confiscated his shaving gear three months before to ensure his appearance matched his stereotype when the arrest took place. That is one of the findings of the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, Nils Melzer, whose investigation of the case against Assange has been laid out in forensic detail in The Trial of Julian Assange.What is the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Torture doing investigating the Assange case, you might ask? So did Melzer when Assange’s lawyers first approached him in 2018: “I had more important things to do: I had to take care of “real” torture victims!” Melzer returned to a report he was writing about overcoming prejudice and self-deception when dealing with official corruption. “Not until a few months later,” he writes, “would I realise the striking irony of this situation.”

[..] He received nothing like full co-operation in investigating Assange’s case. He gathered around 10,000 pages of procedural files, but a lot of them came from leaks to journalists or from freedom-of-information requests. Many pages had been redacted. Rephrasing Carl Von Clausewitz’s maxim, Melzer wrote his book as “the continuation of diplomacy by other means”. What he finds is stark and disturbing: “The Assange case is the story of a man who is being persecuted and abused for exposing the dirty secrets of the powerful, including war crimes, torture and corruption. It is a story of deliberate judicial arbitrariness in Western democracies that are otherwise keen to present themselves as exemplary in the area of human rights.

“It is the story of wilful collusion by intelligence services behind the back of national parliaments and the general public. It is a story of manipulated and manipulative reporting in the mainstream media for the purpose of deliberately isolating, demonizing, and destroying a particular individual. It is the story of a man who has been scapegoated by all of us for our own societal failures to address government corruption and state-sanctioned crimes.”

Rubik
https://twitter.com/i/status/1533888946723340288

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Debt Rattle July 12 2021

Jul 122021

July 12, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:57 am Finance Tagged with: Delta, extremism, FBI, Fed, ivermectin, lockdowns, mask mandates, private equity, Sydney, UK, vaccines 90 Responses »

Henri Matisse The goldfish 1912

• No End In Sight For Sydney Lockdown As Delta Variant Outbreak Worsens (F.)

• Covid Unlocking On 19 July Must Come With A Warning: Boris Johnson (G.)

• Mask Wearing Will Be ‘Expected’ In UK After 19 July (G.)

• 40% Of Brits Want Mask Mandates Forever, Travel Ban For Unvaccinated (SN)

• Lift All Mask Mandates (HART)

• FBI Encourages Family Members To Rat Each Other Out For ‘Extremism’ (RT)

• The Fed: The Captured Regulator That’s Wrecking The US Economy (Martens)

• Private Equity And Public Ignorance (Buyniski)

We have reached the end of the usefuless of masks, lockdowns and vaccines. But it will take a long time before we acknowledge it. In the meantime, expect madness. You can’t lock down people for more than a very short time. You can’t make them wear masks for much longer than that. You can’t force them to get jabbed if those jabs don’t work, and instead prove very risky.

So our homework is: what are we going to do with masks, lockdowns and vaccines off the table? The answer is simple: vitamin D, ivermectin and HCQ. Prophylaxis and early treatment. But it will take a long time before we acknowledge that too.

It’s fun when the police don’t stand up for the law
https://twitter.com/i/status/1414372211025010689
Anna de Buisseret: “Our expert psychologists evidence states that psychological warfare is being conducted on the population as a whole and on individuals. The expert analysis is that the impact of this is that not a single person is capable of giving informed consent as they have been brainwashed.”

Let’s see those white flags please.

• No End In Sight For Sydney Lockdown As Delta Variant Outbreak Worsens (F.)

Sydney’s Delta-variant fueled Covid-19 outbreak has shown no signs of relenting as the city and surrounding areas reported yet another daily rise in new cases, a development which may force authorities to further extend the lockdown in the region which has been in place for two and a half weeks now. Australia’s most populous state, New South Wales (NSW), reported a record 112 new locally acquired Covid-19 cases on Monday, most of them in and around its capital Sydney. NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian said at least 34 of new cases had interactions with the community during their infectious period, while the movement of 18 other cases is still being investigated

Monday is the third straight day the state has reported a record high, which could force the local government to extend the current three-week-long lockdown which is scheduled to end on Friday. Berejiklian noted that the state would like to see the number of local infections drop close to zero before ending the lockdown. “A large part of it is dependent on all of us doing the right thing and being extra cautious,” Berejiklian said, adding this was “not the time to cut any corners.” Of the 63 people hospitalized with Covid-19 in the state, 25 are under the age of 55, and 14 are younger than 35, the Sydney Morning Herald reported. Of the 18 people currently in intensive care units, one is in their 20s, one in their 30s, and one in their forties. Local authorities have previously warned that the largely unvaccinated young population remains vulnerable to the more infectious delta variant.

8.37%. That’s the total population of New South Wales that has been fully vaccinated against Covid-19, according to the Sydney Morning Herald’s tracker. This is largely in line with the overall vaccine rollout across Australia which is just under 9%. While close to a quarter of NSW’s population has received at least one vaccine dose, the effectiveness of a single dose against the delta variant is significantly lower. Fearing a Delta variant outbreak, nearly half of Australia’s population went into lockdown for around three days last month with major urban centers across the country tightening their pandemic restrictions due to fears of a delta variant-fueled outbreak. However, the brunt of the current outbreak has largely been restricted to Sydney and its surrounding regions. Australia had previously managed to almost completely clamp down on the local spread of Covid-19 by using a mix of contact tracing, movement curbs, and strict quarantine measures for incoming travelers. But the country’s sluggish vaccine rollout threatens to undo its previous pandemic success.

Make it as confusing as you can, please.

• Covid Unlocking On 19 July Must Come With A Warning: Boris Johnson (G.)

Boris Johnson has said caution is “absolutely vital” before the abandonment of virtually all formal Covid restrictions as ministers toughen their language amid expectations of soaring infection rates. The Guardian understands that ministers have been told to brace for at least one to two million new cases of coronavirus in the coming weeks, though the vaccination programme means far smaller proportions of those infected will be hospitalised and die than in previous waves. The move into the final stage of unlocking on 19 July, to be announced by the prime minister on Monday afternoon, has been billed as the moment for people to rely on their own judgment over coronavirus precautions, rather than official prescriptions.

And while Johnson will outline the end of virtually all statutory restrictions on everything from business capacity to distancing and mask use, people will still be urged to wear masks in crowded enclosed spaces, with similar vigilance expected over the swift return to workplaces. The move “must come with a warning”, said Johnson, who will host a Downing Street press conference at the same time as Sajid Javid, the health secretary, briefs MPs in the Commons. “Cases will rise as we unlock, so as we confirm our plans today, our message will be clear. Caution is absolutely vital, and we must all take responsibility so we don’t undo our progress, ensuring we continue to protect our NHS.”

There has been a marked shift in the tone taken by ministers on the subject of mask-wearing amid government jitters about the risks of the so-called “big bang” approach to unlocking. Nadhim Zahawi, the vaccines minister, stressed the need for the public to remain “cautious and careful”. He told Sky News: “The guidelines that we will set out tomorrow will demonstrate that, including guidelines that people are expected to wear masks in indoor enclosed spaces, and of course to remain vigilant.” His comments contrast with the tone taken a week earlier by Robert Jenrick, the communities secretary, who said he would abandon mask use when the restrictions ended, adding: “I don’t particularly want to wear a mask.”

Adverse
https://twitter.com/i/status/1414368116931444739

They’re just trying to confuse you, don’t pay them any attention.

• Mask Wearing Will Be ‘Expected’ In UK After 19 July (G.)

Masks will still be “expected” in crowded places such as public transport when most remaining Covid restrictions are lifted later this month, a minister has said, in a marked toughening up of rhetoric amid concerns over soaring infection rates. Nadhim Zahawi, the vaccines minister, who in effect confirmed Boris Johnson would announce the reopening on Monday, said the government would provide very clear guidance on issues such as the wearing of masks, as England moves away from using laws to govern the response to Covid. “I think it’s important that we remain cautious and careful,” he told Sky’s Trevor Phillips on Sunday programme. “The guidelines that we will set out tomorrow will demonstrate that, including guidelines that people are expected to wear masks in indoor enclosed spaces, and of course to remain vigilant.”

In another sign that the end of almost all lockdown rules on 19 July will be accompanied by robust messaging on the need for caution, a leading public health official said on Sunday that people should not rush back to offices if possible. “If you are able to do your business effectively from home then I think over the next four to six weeks we should try our best to do that,” said Dr Susan Hopkins, the incident director for Covid at Public Health England. Even once case rates started to fall, it would be better to see “a cautious return to the office”, Hopkins told Times Radio. The comments represent a change in tone from officials over the past week, with Johnson in particular having previously insisted there would be a move away from the government telling people what to do, towards people using their own judgment.

Zahawi said the move to the final stage of reopening from 19 July was responsible, despite predictions from the health secretary, Sajid Javid, that daily infection levels could top 100,000, a record for the pandemic, noting that almost 87% of adults in England had received a first vaccine dose, and that 65% had had two. The target was to double-vaccinate 66% of adults by 19 July, he said, in an earlier interview with BBC’s The Andrew Marr Show. “We will meet that target. So I am confident that we can proceed to step 4, but cautiously. “We will be setting out tomorrow guidelines on everything from mask wearing, the transition from mandating, or government by diktat, to taking personal responsibility, whether for our own actions or corporate responsibility.”

Always a nation of sheep.

• 40% Of Brits Want Mask Mandates Forever, Travel Ban For Unvaccinated (SN)

A new poll finds that 40 per cent of Brits want mask mandates to remain in place forever, while almost half think unvaccinated people should be permanently banned from foreign travel. Yes, really. “New polling by Ipsos MORI for the Economist suggests that a high percentage of Brits believe a number of lockdown restrictions should stay in place “permanently”, including nighttime curfews (19%), travel quarantine (35%), and face masks (a whopping 40%!),” reports LockdownSceptics. “Well over 40% of Brits also believe that only those who have been vaccinated against Covid – and are able to prove it – should be allowed to travel abroad (again, “permanently”).” In other words, almost half of the population never want to unmuzzle and think those who haven’t taken the jab should remain under de facto lockdown forever.

That will be music to the ears of government adviser and lifetime Communist Party member Susan Michie, who when asked how long social distancing and mask mandates should remain in place, replied “forever.” More than one-fifth of Brits are also “very nervous” about the lifting of existing lockdown restrictions, which is due to take place on July 19th. The results of the poll once again underscore how behavioral psychologists have been so successful in terrifying the British public into absolute subservience. As we previously highlighted, scientists acting as government advisers acknowledged using “totalitarian” and “unethical” methods of instilling fear into the population as a means to scare them into complying with lockdown rules.

The comments were made by members of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviour (SPI-B), a sub-committee of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) the government’s chief scientific advisory group. Scientists admitted exaggerating the risk of COVID to the public and using “dystopian” methods of “mind control” to make people more fearful than they should have been. As the poll results prove, this has resulted in large numbers of the population developing a form of PTSD which has traumatized them out of thinking life can ever return to the pre-coronavirus normal.

The only approach that makes sense at this point.

• Lift All Mask Mandates (HART)

HART welcomes Boris Johnson’s announcement of his intention to lift the mask mandates on 19 July, and allow people to take personal responsibility for deciding whether to wear one rather than relying on the government diktat. Some SAGE scientists are already expressing concern about lifting this restriction, with psychologists on the Scientific Pandemic Insights Group on Behaviours (SPI-B) being the most vocal, predictably so given that mask wearing comprises a key element of their ethically-dubious covert ‘nudges’ that harness fear and peer pressure to promote compliance with COVID-19 restrictions.

A major concern is that, even if the national mandates are removed, some local businesses will continue to insist that masks are worn on their premises. Persisting with a requirement for face coverings does not take account of the evidence that, in real-world settings, they are of little-to-no benefit in reducing viral transmission and are associated with a range of negative consequences. Nor — contrary to what Professor Whitty said — is it a ‘common courtesy’ to wear a mask because others may feel uncomfortable if they see a person without one. Many people, including the 1-in-5 of UK adults with hearing difficulties who may rely on lip reading, are at risk of social exclusion when around mask wearers. Furthermore, those who are aware of the profound social and psychological harms associated with masking the healthy in the community will also feel uneasy when around those with their faces covered.

It is encouraging to hear the Prime Minister say that we must now live alongside the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Continuously striving to minimise the danger posed by a virus, to the exclusion of the plethora of other risks we all manage as a routine part of a worthwhile life, is counterproductive. Indeed, the continuation of widespread mask wearing after 19 July will perpetuate the excessive fears many currently experience about returning to a normal life: ongoing mask usage is a ‘safety behaviour’ that may lead people to falsely conclude that their survival following social interaction was due to the mask rather than drawing the reassuring conclusion that it is now safe enough to return to normal activities.

HART has no objection to individuals using masks if they so choose, but turning them into a social superstition — and requiring others, such as hospitality staff to conform so as to give a false veneer of ‘safety’ — is wrong. An elderly resident in a care home, during a TV interview, recently said: ‘I want to live until I die’. In keeping with this expressed wisdom, HART believes we should all now be given the option to unmask, reclaim our humanity, and return to an enjoyable and worthwhile life.

Divide and rule.

• FBI Encourages Family Members To Rat Each Other Out For ‘Extremism’ (RT)

The FBI has asked Americans to examine their own family members for signs of “homegrown violent extremism,” and report them. The call for snitches comes as the FBI turns its surveillance powers on regular Americans. “Family members and peers are often best positioned to witness signs of mobilization to violence,” read a tweet from the FBI on Sunday. To help prevent “homegrown violent extremism,” the agency advises Americans to visit its website, “to learn how to spot suspicious behaviors and report them to the FBI.” The link provided by the FBI brings visitors to a 2019 document listing “mobilization indicators” that may suggest an individual is preparing to engage in terrorism – for example, “preparing and disseminating a martyrdom video,” “communicating directly with violent extremists online,” and “preparing to travel to fight with or support terrorist groups.”

The indicators and imagery used in the document suggest that its focus was on radical Islamic terrorism, but the FBI, along with the rest of the US security apparatus, has in recent months has turned its surveillance powers on white, conservative America. Since the pro-Trump riot on Capitol Hill in January, FBI Director Christopher Wray has testified before Congress that the anti-government sentiment responsible for the affray has been “metastasizing” in the US for years, and that “the problem of domestic terrorism … is not going away anytime soon.” Former Assistant Director Frank Figliuzzi was more explicit last month when he called for the arrest of high-level Republicans to “really tackle terrorism, this time domestically.”

President Joe Biden has linked the Capitol mob to “white supremacism,” which he called “the most lethal terrorist threat to our homeland today” during his first speech to Congress in April. Against this supposed “threat,” the Justice Department has asked for new powers of prosecution, and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has claimed that right-wingers and conservatives, “inspired by foreign terrorist groups” and “emboldened by the breach of the US Capitol Building,” are “plotting attacks against government facilities” and “threatening violence against critical infrastructure.” In addition to their own powers, the DHS, FBI, and National Security Council also want to hire third-party ‘researchers’ to spy on Americans, recent reports have claimed.

“..we have the three great asset classes moving into bubble territory simultaneously.”

• The Fed: The Captured Regulator That’s Wrecking The US Economy (Martens)

Fed Chair Jerome Powell will take his seat before the House Financial Services Committee on Wednesday at noon and before the U.S. Senate Banking Committee on Thursday at 9:30 a.m. for his semi-annual testimony on monetary policy. Some embarrassing questions may come up for Powell based on an investigative report on the Fed that’s airing earlier in the week. This Tuesday evening, the PBS investigative program, Frontline, will broadcast a documentary covering its year-long investigation of the Federal Reserve’s bailouts of Wall Street, from the financial crisis of 2008 to the present. According to the information about the program that Frontline has released, the documentary, titled “The Power of the Fed,” will include interviews with multiple people who believe that the Fed has been captured by Wall Street and is creating dangerous asset bubbles.

Legendary investor Jeremy Grantham will tell viewers this about the Fed’s policies: “They have the housing market, the stock market and the bond market all overpriced at the same time. And they will not be able to prevent, sooner or later, the asset prices coming back down. So we are playing with fire because we have the three great asset classes moving into bubble territory simultaneously.” Grantham characterizes what the Fed has created on Wall Street as a “giant bloodsucker,” that is “sucking more than twice the blood out of the rest of the economy.” Andrew Huszar, a former insider at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, where the Federal Reserve has a serial habit of outsourcing its bailout programs for the mega banks on Wall Street (likely because it is literally owned by those same banks) will explain to viewers how he was “single-handedly responsible for directing the deployment of $1.25 trillion of Fed funds, and we did not see the knock-on benefits that we had hoped for the average American.”

Huszar is talking about the $1.25 trillion the Fed spent in buying up agency Mortgage-Backed Securities (MBS) following the 2008 financial crash on Wall Street. Despite the fact that the Fed saw no benefits accrue from that program to the average American, it doubled down on the same program during the pandemic, buying up $40 billion a month in agency MBS. The Fed’s current total of agency MBS on its balance sheet stands at $2.3 trillion as of last Wednesday. The custodian of the securities purchased in the Fed’s MBS program has been, from the outset, JPMorgan Chase, one of the largest owners of the New York Fed. The fact that the bank has received an unprecedented five felony counts from the Department of Justice since 2014 hasn’t changed the Fed’s mind about entrusting the bank with $2.3 trillion of its assets. (JPMorgan Chase admitted to all five felony counts.)

“Other private equity funds have gotten their blood funnels into the hospital system – where the profits, driven by Covid-19, truly have no end.”

• Private Equity And Public Ignorance (Buyniski)

As the US runs out of concrete resources to sell, bankers have had to get clever – whether this means repackaging assets already sold six times over or inventing new ways to cash in on items once considered intangible.
By the time Americans realized that the promised ‘trickle-down’ theory of neoliberal economics was in fact more of a speedy trickle-up, the government had all but destroyed the reputation of unions and the public sector that employed many of them, convincing the average American that these were corrupt and bad. Indeed, the whole public sector was supposed to be corrupt and bad, in the messaging of the Reagan era, but that corruption was somehow negated when offset by private corporations engaged in so-called public-private partnerships.

But far from attempting to reverse the financial bleed of money for social programs into private corporations, politicians have embraced the public-private partnership with a vengeance. This is unsurprising, given the generous handouts they receive from the non-profits who have cast themselves as the only truly righteous replacement for those government programs. This may sound like old news, but the extent to which those firms have morphed into horrifically powerful entities with trillions of dollars under management – including, most likely, your pension or the retirement savings of someone in your family – capable of setting international policy with a mere yearly memo, remains stubbornly unacknowledged by millions.

Perhaps for the sake of their sanity, they just can’t admit their retirement is in the hands of men who see nothing wrong with gambling away millions of Americans’ savings in precarious financial instruments just because they can. The kind of people who’d buy a boat with ill-gotten foreclosure gains, then spit in the face of those ex-homeowners by naming the boat ‘Su casa es mi casa’ [..] In the aftermath of the 2008 mortgage crisis, private equity firms realized they could package and sell anything they wanted – and it doesn’t seem they’ve stopped. Blackstone became notorious for slurping up foreclosed homes at below-market rates, then juicing rent and fees as they turned around to rent out those same properties, in some cases back to the same people. But Blackstone is far from the only private equity firm to participate in these loathsome schemes.

But fiendishly huge as their profits have been, the private equity bunch were still responsible for keeping the properties they rented in some degree of habitability – sometimes even for answering to angry retirement fund execs when the vultures gambled away their money. In order to further shore up profits, the firms have bought big into vertically integrated predation. Blackstone bought up an entire chain of self-storage units to complement its continuing acquisition of houses. The continued inflation of the already precariously bloated real estate bubble (and the mathematical certainty of time running out for the Covid-19 eviction moratorium) means people are going to have to throw their stuff somewhere when the financial feces hit the fan. Other private equity funds have gotten their blood funnels into the hospital system – where the profits, driven by Covid-19, truly have no end.

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D-dimer test

Appalling if true… pic.twitter.com/nebw7Hl9sk

— Husserl (@husserl80) July 12, 2021

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Debt Rattle May 29 2021

May 292021

May 29, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:10 am Finance Tagged with: children, EMA, Fauci, Fed, gain of function, mask mandates, Obama, pregnancy, reverse engineering, Wuhan 68 Responses »

John Collier Lady Godiva c1897

• National Horror Story Hour (Kunstler)

• Chinese Scientists Created Covid-19 In A Wuhan Lab – Study (DM)

• Fauci Backed Virus Experiments ‘Despite Pandemic Risk’ (Lauria)

• Broken Parts Of COVID-19 Vaccines Mutate To Trigger Blood Clots (GGI)

• European Regulators OK Pfizer Vaccine For Children 12-15 (AP)

• For The Young: Choose Wisely (Denninger)

• Oklahoma House Bans Mask Mandate, Vaccine Requirements in Schools (ET)

• Georgia Bans Mask Mandates In Public Schools (JTN)

• Employers Get Green Light To “Incentivize” Workers To Get Vaccinated (ZH)

• The Fed Keeps Expanding Its Powers; That’s Making Some People Nervous (Cox)

The Science.

• National Horror Story Hour (Kunstler)

In the early going of the War on Covid-19, The Science told its soldiers, the doctors, to jam ventilators down patients’ throats. Whoops, that didn’t work so well. The Science told everybody to fuggeddabowt Ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, Zinc, and Vitamin D. The Science told New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to stash Covid-19 infected patients in nursing homes. The Science told everybody don’t bother with masks, then to definitely wear masks, then to maybe not wear masks, then to wear double masks, then to get vaccinated and wear masks. Golly, what to believe? Some people began to think that The Science was full of shit — which is, let’s face it, a dangerous thought, and something which, thank Gawd, Facebook, Twitter, and Google corrected for us.

One thing The Science remained adamant about for a whole year was that Covid-19 did not come from the Wuhan, China, Institute of Virology, where-and-to-which, it just happened, one of the US government’s Knights of The Science, Dr. Anthony Fauci, was funneling US taxpayer-funded grant money for the purpose of doing gain-of-function research on exotic bat corona viruses. Gosh, why would you even do that? (Doesn’t gain of function = make it more deadly?)

Supposedly to gain knowledge so that mankind will be prepared to fight the emergence of deadly bat viruses that somehow manage to sneak into the human population at some future date. These things can happen, you know. We’ve already tangled with bird flu and swine flu, so deadly bat flu could hardly be out of the question. Of course, one of the dangers, when you are playing with deadly respiratory viruses in a lab, is that lab workers might inhale a virus or two and become infected with a specimen that The Science has engineered to be especially troublesome… but that was very unlikely, maintained Dr. Anthony Fauci, Chief Science Advisor to the President.

Until this month when Dr. Fauci conceded to a Senate Committee that perhaps an investigation was warranted to find out if, perchance, Covid-19 escaped from the Wuhan lab — since, it turns out, the Wuhan lab was such a sloppy-ass operation that its level of safety was comparable to an ordinary dentist’s office. It also turns out, according to a Wall Street Journal report this week, that three Wuhan lab workers did indeed need to be hospitalized in November 2019, which was around the time the bug got loose among the civilians of Wuhan City, while Chinese tourists and workers were still winging around the world on airplanes by the tens of thousands — prompting one to wonder whether, also perchance, this was something that the CCP wanted to happen? ¿Quién sabe?

Now that “safe and effective” vaccines are available against Covid-19, The Science is urging everybody to take it, pronto, and the government is assisting in the distribution and deployment of vaccinations even to the very borderline of coercing citizens into it by turning the “vaccine hesitant” into social pariahs. No restaurant meals or ballgames for you Science-offending trolls! How’s that working? According to Dr. Fauci, and several other Knights of The Science, more than half of the people on their staffs got vaxed voluntarily. More than half! Now that’s a ringing vote of confidence in The Science!

“..then tried to cover their tracks by reverse-engineering versions of the virus..”

• Chinese Scientists Created Covid-19 In A Wuhan Lab – Study (DM)

An explosive new study claims that Chinese scientists created COVID-19 in a Wuhan lab, then tried to cover their tracks by reverse-engineering versions of the virus to make it look like it evolved naturally from bats. The paper’s authors, British Professor Angus Dalgleish and Norwegian scientist Dr. Birger Sørensen, wrote that they have had ‘prima facie evidence of retro-engineering in China’ for a year – but were ignored by academics and major journals. Dalgleish is a professor of oncology at St George’s University, London, and is best known for his breakthrough creating the first working ‘HIV vaccine’, to treat diagnosed patients and allow them to go off medication for months.

Sørensen, a virologist, is chair of pharmaceutical company, Immunor, which developed a coronavirus vaccine candidate called Biovacc-19. Dalgleish also has share options in the firm. The shocking allegations in the study include accusations of ‘deliberate destruction, concealment or contamination of data’ at Chinese labs, and it notes the silencing and disappearance of scientists in the communist country who spoke out. The journal article, exclusively obtained by DailyMail.com and slated for publication in the coming days, is set to make waves among the scientific community, as the majority of experts have until recently staunchly denied the origins of COVID-19 were anything other than a natural infection leaping from animals to humans.

While analyzing COVID-19 samples last year in an attempt to create a vaccine, Dalgleish and Sørensen discovered ‘unique fingerprints’ in the virus that they say could only have arisen from manipulation in a laboratory. They said they tried to publish their findings but were rejected by major scientific journals which were at the time resolute that the virus jumped naturally from bats or other animals to humans. Even when former MI6 chief Sir Richard Dearlove spoke out publicly saying the scientists’ theory should be investigated, the idea was dismissed as ‘fake news.’

“..in December 2017 Fauci unilaterally reversed an Obama administration 2014 ban on such experiments precisely because of the danger that a leak could cause a pandemic.”

• Fauci Backed Virus Experiments ‘Despite Pandemic Risk’ (Lauria)

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, wrote in an academic paper nine years ago that he supported “gain-of-function” research on viruses despite admitting a “remote” possibility that such “important work” could lead to a global pandemic if such a fortified virus escaped from a lab, The Australian newspaper reported on Friday. In October 2012, Fauci wrote a paper for the American Society for Microbiology, in which he said: “In an unlikely but conceivable turn of events, what if that scientist becomes infected with the virus, which leads to an outbreak and ultimately triggers a pandemic? Many ask reasonable questions: given the possibility of such a scenario – however remote – should the initial experiments have been performed and/or published in the first place, and what were the processes involved in this decision?

Scientists working in this field might say – as indeed I have said – that the benefits of such experiments and the resulting knowledge outweigh the risks. It is more likely that a pandemic would occur in nature, and the need to stay ahead of such a threat is a primary reason for performing an experiment that might appear to be risky.” The newspaper’s revelation comes as President Joe Biden announced this week an investigation into whether the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 leaked out of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV)’s lab in Wuhan, China, where the pandemic first broke out. Fauci, who had dismissed that possibility and insisted the virus had natural transmission from another species to humans, on May 11 reversed himself, saying at a conference that he was “not convinced” of the coronavirus’ natural origins and said authorities needed to learn “exactly what happened.”

[..] in December 2017 Fauci unilaterally reversed an Obama administration 2014 ban on such experiments precisely because of the danger that a leak could cause a pandemic. The Australian quoted former Trump administration officials as saying that no one at the Trump White House knew that Fauci had lifted Obama’s ban. “It kind of just got rammed through,” one official told the newspaper. “I think there’s truth in the narrative that the (National Security Council) staff, the president, the White House chief-of-staff, those people were in the dark that he was switching back on the research.”

“..parts of it break off and create mutated versions of themselves. The mutated versions then enter the body and trigger the blood clots.”

• Broken Parts Of COVID-19 Vaccines Mutate To Trigger Blood Clots (GGI)

German scientists have found out how the broken parts of Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccines branded as Covishield in India mutate to trigger blood clots in recipients. Scientists say the vaccine is sent into the cell nucleus instead of surrounding fluid, where parts of it break off and create mutated versions of themselves. The mutated versions then enter the body and trigger the blood clots. Two vaccines, one manufactured by Oxford-AstraZeneca branded as Covishield in India and the other by Johnson & Johnson, have been linked to blood clotting disorders, particularly among women under the age of 50.

Earlier, German scientists found the exact 2 step process how the COVID-19 vaccine causes blood clots in recipients. They describe a series of events that has to happen in the body before the vaccines create these large clots. Now, researchers at Goethe-University of Frankfurt and Ulm University, in Helmholtz, have found the problem which they say lies in the adenovirus vector — a common cold virus used so both vaccines can enter the body. Scientists believe that in some people, the immune system sees the vaccine as a threat and over-produces antibodies to fight it. These lead to the formation of clumps in the blood, which can become deadly if the clots move towards vital organs and cut off supply.

Bhakdi is clear: this is criminal.

• European Regulators OK Pfizer Vaccine For Children 12-15 (AP)

The European Medicines Agency on Friday recommended that the use of the coronavirus vaccine made by Pfizer and BioNTech be expanded to children ages 12 to 15, a decision that offers younger and less at-risk populations across the continent access to a Covid-19 shot for the first time. The vaccine was the first one granted authorization across the European Union when it was licensed for use in anyone 16 and over in December. So far, about 173 million doses of the shot have been administered in the 27-nation bloc, about three quarters of the total given. “Extending the protection of a safe and effective vaccine in this younger population is an important step forward in the fight against this pandemic,” said Marco Cavaleri, who heads the EMA body that reviewed the vaccine.

The EU regulator had received the necessary data to authorize the vaccine for younger teens and found it to be highly effective against infection, he said. In a study involving 2,000 adolescents in the United States, none of those who received the vaccine got Covid-19, compared with 16 in a control group who received a placebo, said Cavaleri. “The vaccine was well tolerated and the side effect in this age group were very much similar (to) what we’ve seen in young adults and not raising major concern at this point in time,” he added. The EMA decision needs to be rubber-stamped by the European Commission, and individual national regulators must decide whether the vaccine will be administered to children under 16.

The recommendation follows similar decisions by regulators in Canada and the US last month, as rich countries slowly approach their vaccination targets for adults and look to immunize as many people as possible. Researchers will continue to monitor the shot’s long-term protection and safety in the children for another two years.

Bhakdi

https://twitter.com/wakeupfromcovid/status/1398293941305450499

“Isn’t the first question to be asked “how dangerous is it if I say no and get infected, assuming I haven’t been already?” It should be.”

• For The Young: Choose Wisely (Denninger)

Most young people — healthy people under the age of 30 — have no symptoms of significance associated with getting infected with Covid-19. They either get a mild head cold that could be mistaken for anything else or no symptoms at all. Obviously, if you don’t know you are sick or think it’s allergies, asthma or whatever because you never run a fever or really are significantly ill you have no reason to get tested, no reason to believe you had it, and no doctor sees you. You do not show up in the data but you did indeed have Covid-19. Some young people get what seems like a flu and very, very few get really sick or die.

If you had Covid, whether you were tested positive or not, you are presumably protected. The science is that the minimum protection is about 84%. This is a minimum number because not everyone who got it and seroconverted silently was known. This study was among health-care workers who obviously have very high risk as they’re around actively sick people all the time, and they were tested regularly so many “silent” infections were caught, where yours probably wouldn’t have been. Further a recent study funded by Fauci’s NIH showed that most people pick up memory of the infection in their bone marrow (incidentally, getting people to volunteer for that had to be quite a trick; the operation to get the marrow to test is quite painful, which is why the size was very small) which means that protection from at least moderate disease is likely to last decades if not your entire remaining life.

In short there is no science that says you should take the shot if you’ve already had Covid. There are plenty of people saying that but they cannot point to any scientific study that shows you actually lose protection from prior infection any faster than you do from the shots themselves. This is why someone who had the measles does not take a measles shot; you’re presumably protected by fighting off the infection. But what if you haven’t had Covid-19? What do you decide if you’re in that 0-25 age group and someone is trying to demand you get the jab, or all your friends are doing it? Isn’t the first question to be asked “how dangerous is it if I say no and get infected, assuming I haven’t been already?” It should be.

mRNA and pregnancy

Another shocking claim… pic.twitter.com/s5tbqXzXnL

— Wittgenstein (@wittgenstein78) May 27, 2021

How many people will end up still wearing masks and getting “vaccinated”?

• Oklahoma House Bans Mask Mandate, Vaccine Requirements in Schools (ET)

The Oklahoma House has passed a bill banning mask mandates in public schools and requirements for students to be vaccinated against COVID-19. The bill, SB 658, passed the state House by 76–18 and was sent to Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt on May 26. The state Senate had passed the bill by 38–8 a day earlier. “For the sake of children throughout the state, I’m glad this bill is one step closer to becoming law,” Republican state Sen. Rob Standridge said in a statement. “With this legislation, vaccine passports for Oklahoma students will not exist.” Standridge is also one of the authors of the bill. SB 658 would prohibit the boards of education of all public school districts and technology center school districts—including those of higher education—from requiring vaccination against COVID-19 as “a condition of admittance to or attendance of the school or institution.”

It would also prevent vaccine passports or similar documentation from being required. Standridge explained during the session that the COVID-19 vaccine is different from other vaccines that are currently required, like those against diphtheria or tetanus, because it’s “still under emergency use authorization,” News9 reported. SB 658 further forbids implementing a mask mandate for students who haven’t received COVID-19 vaccines. Exceptions include when the governor declares an emergency or after the boards of education consult with their local county health department, but the mask mandate must be reconsidered at each regularly scheduled board meeting.

State after state.

• Georgia Bans Mask Mandates In Public Schools (JTN)

Gov. Brian Kemp signed an executive order Friday that bans masks mandates inside Georgia public schools. The order also lifts most existing COVID-19 restrictions in the state. It blocks schools from implementing policies that would require students and staff to wear masks. Students and teachers still can wear masks if they choose, but they would be optional. “Georgians don’t need the government telling them what their children should do,” Kemp tweeted Thursday. Six Cobb County parents who sued the Cobb County School District over the district’s mask mandate have dropped the lawsuit in response to Kemp’s announcement.

Kemp and Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms had a public dispute last summer over Kemp’s order that restricted local governments from issuing face covering rules that were more restrictive than his. Kemp filed a lawsuit against Atlanta officials in July after the city enacted a face mask-wearing mandate when his executive order encouraged but did not require face coverings. Kemp later abandoned the lawsuit and issued an executive order that allowed certain local governments to issue the mandate. The Georgia Department of Public Health reported Friday the lowest COVID-19 hospitalizations in the state since the beginning of the pandemic. State records show 99 people were hospitalized with COVID-19 symptoms. According to the state’s daily status report, 9.9% of the tests returned were positive Friday for COVID-19.

Playing footsie with anti-discrimination laws.

• Employers Get Green Light To “Incentivize” Workers To Get Vaccinated (ZH)

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has just quietly given American companies the green light to to do whatever it takes to “incentivize” American workers to accept the coronavirus vaccine. As vaccinations continue to slow, and states beef up incentives including lotteries and cash prizes to any adults who agree to get vaccinated who haven’t already, the EEOC has just issued some long-awaited guidance on how far companies can go in pushing workers to be vaccinated. Some companies, including Delta Air Lines, have said they won’t hire anyone who hasn’t already been vaccinated. The updated guidelines say employers may offer incentives for employees to provide documentation showing they have been vaccinated since requesting this proof “is not a disability-related inquiry” or an “unlawful request” under federal anti-discrimination laws.

What’s more, companies who choose to offer the vaccine on-site, or who incentivize employees to get vaccinated elsewhere, can’t offer perks or punishments substantial enough to be “coercive”. The questions, which were by far the most important pieces of the new guidance, were tucked away at the bottom of the update, making the changes an easy thing for reporters to miss before a long holiday weekend.

K.16. Under the ADA, may an employer offer an incentive to employees to voluntarily provide documentation or other confirmation that they received a vaccination on their own from a pharmacy, public health department, or other health care provider in the community? (5/28/21) Yes. Requesting documentation or other confirmation showing that an employee received a COVID-19 vaccination in the community is not a disability-related inquiry covered by the ADA. Therefore, an employer may offer an incentive to employees to voluntarily provide documentation or other confirmation of a vaccination received in the community. As noted elsewhere, the employer is required to keep vaccination information confidential pursuant to the ADA.

K.17. Under the ADA, may an employer offer an incentive to employees for voluntarily receiving a vaccination administered by the employer or its agent? (5/28/21) Yes, if any incentive (which includes both rewards and penalties) is not so substantial as to be coercive. Because vaccinations require employees to answer pre-vaccination disability-related screening questions, a very large incentive could make employees feel pressured to disclose protected medical information. As explained in K.16., however, this incentive limitation does not apply if an employer offers an incentive to employees to voluntarily provide documentation or other confirmation that they received a COVID-19 vaccination on their own from a third-party provider that is not their employer or an agent of their employer.

Employers including Dollar General, Aldi and Instacart have already moved to reward their employees for receiving the Covid-19 vaccine by offering paid time off and cash stipends. And in April, President Joe Biden called on every employer to offer paid time off for workers to recover from potential vaccine side effects.

But independent it is not.

• The Fed Keeps Expanding Its Powers; That’s Making Some People Nervous (Cox)

Bernanke’s successor, Janet Yellen, worked closely with Geithner. Yellen’s successor and current Chairman Jerome Powell had a tight relationship with former President Donald Trump’s Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin. Now, the dynamic has gotten even more intense. Powell and Yellen, who worked together on the Fed for nearly six years, now run the Fed and Treasury respectively. That’s never happened before, and it’s what has some on the Street nervous that the Fed may be tasked with implementing the White House’s economic program. The Fed has long been considered immune to outside pressures, free to move interest rates and otherwise implement policy in the way it deems most appropriate, outside of political concerns. The fear is that the Powell-Yellen dynamic could change that.

“You have the current Treasury secretary who was the boss of the current Fed chairman not so long ago. There’s obviously a very close relationship there,” said Jim Paulsen, chief investment strategist at the Leuthold Group. “They’re still in lockstep. They’re espousing very similar philosophies that go beyond tradition.” Indeed, there’s not much difference between where Powell and Yellen stand on most matters germane to their respective roles. Powell has committed to keep interest rates low until the economy is farther along on the road to recovery, and Yellen has remarked on the pivotal role low rates play so the Biden administration can finance the trillions in spending that it wants. Yellen has been a leading advocate for that muscular fiscal policy, and Powell has said there are economic problems that low interest rates and money printing can’t solve.

But it’s their positions on social issues that have drawn much of the negative attention. The Fed has in the past several months stressed the importance of banks’ planning for climate change-related events. The central bank’s leading advocate for that cause has been Governor Lael Brainard, a close Yellen ally when they served on the Fed together. Along with that, Yellen has been outspoken on the importance of spreading economic benefits evenly at a time when the lowest earners have suffered the worst during the pandemic-era shutdowns. At the same time, the Fed last August changed its mission statement to say it is no longer focused merely on maximizing employment but now has a “a broad-based and inclusive goal” that goes to disparities in how gains are distributed.

“You certainly see some things that at a minimum are very different than how we’ve run things in the past, and it very much gets to the heart of independence in the Fed from overwhelming political influence,” Leuthold’s Paulsen said. “The most egregious departure from the past is the adoption by the Federal Reserve of several which I think many people would consider political goals or a political agenda of the current administration,” he continued. “They’re suddenly going far beyond a macro backstop for the cyclical economy to very much micro-oriented policy implementation.”

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