Aug 082023
 


Claude Monet Ships in harbor 1873

 

The Great Unravelling: ‘For All That Is Ours, We Must Fight’ (Alastair Crooke)
Trump Demands Supreme Court ‘Intercede’ In Legal Battles (ZH)
Can Trump Get an “Impartial Jury” in DC? (Dershowitz)
DOJ Slapped By Judge In Trump Documents Case (ZH)
Trump Pushes Back On Proposed Gag Order (RT)
Trump May Face Racketeering Charges in Fulton County Election Case (Sp.)
Ukraine’s Counteroffensive May ‘Run Its Course in the Next Few Weeks’ (Sp.)
‘No Compromise’ With Moscow, Kiev Vows (RT)
The West Really Believes Russia Is On The Verge Of ‘Collapse’ (Andrey Sushentsov)
Normies Awake! (Kunstler)
The EU Is A ‘Failed Project’ – Right-wing “Alternative For Germany” Party (RT)
Ukraine Leader in Black Market of Human Organ Trafficking – Zakharova (Sp.)
UK’s NHS Raises Age For Government-Funded Transgender Treatments To Seven (ZH)
Museum Bans JK Rowling From Harry Potter Exhibit (RT)

 

 

 

 

RFK

 

 

Ramaswamy

 

 

 

 

Satire
https://twitter.com/i/status/1688611582639546368

 

 

Ritter Aug 6

 

 

 

 

The idea is to drown Trump in litigation. And then at some point, make up something that puts him in jail. No more campaigning.

“This indictment is a naked threat and act of intimidation by the Democratic Party against any and all of their political opponents’”

The Great Unravelling: ‘For All That Is Ours, We Must Fight’ (Alastair Crooke)

“[The DoJ indictment] “is ‘a declaration of war’ against American voters. It is not about Trump per se. It’s about criminalising dissent and punishing the millions who voted for him. [This week the Justice Department] took the unprecedented step of indicting former President Donald Trump — Biden’s chief rival in the upcoming 2024 election — for repeatedly expressing his opinion that the last election was stolen, rigged, and unfair”. It’s an opinion millions of Americans share, and to which they are unquestionably entitled thanks to the First Amendment. And that includes Trump, who has said repeatedly (and recently) that the 2020 election was stolen. He will probably keep saying it until his dying day, and he has every right to do so. The idea that our Justice Department can indict someone, especially the sitting president’s main political rival, over speech that’s protected by the First Amendment is simply insane … Simply put, this indictment is nothing more than a declaration of war against American voters and their constitutional right to free speech.

“Consider what is alleged and what isn’t: The charges against Trump do not include ‘incitement to violence’ on Jan. 6, 2021. Critically, The indictment simply presupposes that there was no election fraud. It then characterizes Trump’s contrary assertions from November 14, 2020 through January 20, 2021 as “false” – as though this were self-evident. “Trump’s claims were false and that he knew they were false”. On this basis, the indictment claims that 6th Jan was a ‘conspiracy’ – based in deceit – to prevent Electors’ votes from being appropriately counted”. Tom Fitton, president of the Conservative legal and election watchdog group, Judicial Watch, believes: “This indictment is a naked threat and act of intimidation by the Democratic Party against any and all of their political opponents’”.

And The Federalist warns: “If the prosecution of Trump succeeds, it means the First Amendment is a dead letter in America. It means you’re not allowed to have opinions that contradict the Justice Department’s official narrative”. For the sake of clarity, what is being expressed here is that this indictment is part and parcel of the ongoing western ‘culture war’ – just as scientists were cancelled, dismissed from their professions and ostracised for expressing a view about mRNA science; just as views on human biology are subject now to official negation; just as ‘misgendering’ has become a potential criminal offence (hate speech), so ideological and institutional capture is being extended to the political sphere. This is the issue, amongst others, that is set to unravel America – and, in unravelling the U.S., will unravel Europe too.

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SCOTUS wants to remain neutral. But with, what is it, 10 indictments and 42 charges(?!) vs Trump, that neutrality is long gone. Better act while Trump is still a free man.

Trump Demands Supreme Court ‘Intercede’ In Legal Battles (ZH)

Former President Donald J. Trump has called on the Supreme Court to step in and ‘intercede’ in his various legal battles.” “My political opponent has hit me with a barrage of weak lawsuits, including D.A., A.G., and others, which require massive amounts of my time & money to adjudicate,” Trump said in a Friday post to Truth Social. “I am leading in all Polls, including against Crooked Joe, but this is not a level playing field,” he continued “It is Election Interference, & the Supreme Court must intercede. MAGA!” The former president is currently President Joe Biden’s #1 political opponent, and has been charged by Biden’s DOJ with conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of and attempting to obstruct an official proceeding and conspiracy against rights.

He was arraigned on Thursday in a Washington DC courtroom, where he entered a ‘not guilty’ plea on the four charges above. The indictment is the third filed against the former president in the past few months – as opposed to the entire time he’s been out of office. Trump is already facing charges linked to porn-star payoffs and keeping classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago property in Florida, in a locked safe, as opposed to a garage where his crackhead son doing business with the Chinese and the Ukrainians had full access to them. Trump has pleaded not guilty to all charges and maintained that he is being prosecuted for political purposes because of position as the front-runner for the GOP nomination for president in 2024.

All three of Trump’s criminal cases remain in early stages. Although the disputes could eventually end up at the Supreme Court, such an appeal would not take place until further down the road. In his hush money case, Trump has begun the appeal process over a ruling that denied Trump’s attempt to move the case to federal court. That dispute is now in the hands of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. -The Hill Meanwhile, President Biden – who lied about his level of knowledge and involvement in Hunter Biden’s business dealings – says his DOJ is apolitical and makes its own decisions.

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No.

Can Trump Get an “Impartial Jury” in DC? (Dershowitz)

What should happen… when it is virtually impossible for the defendant to get an impartial jury in that state or district? The prosecution of Donald Trump for the events around January 6, 2021 would seem to call for a change of venue. The District of Columbia is the most extreme Democratic district in the country. Approximately 95% of the potential jurors register and vote Democrat. Whereas approximately 5% voted for Trump. Furthermore, the anger against Trump is understandable in light of the fact that the events of January 6th directly involved many citizens of the district. Moreover, the judge randomly selected to preside over this case has a long history of bias against Trump and his supporters, and her law firm has a long history of conflicts and corruption.

It is imperative, therefore, that in a case where the incumbent president has urged his Attorney General to pursue his political opponent aggressively, that all efforts must be made to ensure fairness. Prosecutors must lean over backwards to persuade the public that partisan considerations played absolutely no role in the decision to indict. Agreeing to a change of venue and judge would go a long way toward seeing that justice is done. Change of venue motions are only rarely granted, as are motions to recuse a selected judge. But this is a case where justice demands that these motions be granted, both in the interests of the defendants and in the interests of justice. The government should not oppose such motions, though they generally do if it gives them a tactical advantage.

It is likely therefore that these defense requests will be denied by the trial judge. If an unfair trial results in a conviction, the impact will already be felt, even if it is reversed on appeal after the election, as the prosecution likely anticipates. If the prosecution case is strong, it should have no fear of a jury and judge outside of DC. As the Supreme Court has repeatedly said: the job of a prosecutor is not merely to maximize the chances of winning, but to assure that he wins fairly and justly. In order to achieve that goal, the prosecutors in this case should not oppose defense motions for a change of venue and judge. Nor should it oppose an appeal if the trial judge denies these well-founded defense motions.

In all likelihood, prosecutors will vigorously fight all efforts by the defense to assure an impartial jury and judge, because they want every advantage that will help them secure a victory. They will point to defense efforts to secure advantages for their client and argue that the adversary system of justice requires them to do the same. But that is not the law. The Supreme Court clearly delineated a different role for prosecutors who represent the government: “The United States Attorney is the representative not of an ordinary party to a controversy, but of a sovereignty whose obligation to govern impartially is as compelling as its obligation to govern at all, and whose interest, therefore, in a criminal prosecution is not that it shall win a case, but that justice shall be done.” The prosecutors in the January 6th case should study this opinion before they deny Trump an impartial jury.

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Yeah, he can get a Pyrrhic victory in Florida.

DOJ Slapped By Judge In Trump Documents Case (ZH)

The judge overseeing former President Trump’s classified documents case, Florida District Judge Aileen Cannon, rebuked federal prosecutors on Monday while striking down two of their filings. DOJ special counsel Jack Smith has been directed by the court to unseal two filings and to provide a comprehensive legal rationale for a Washington, D.C. grand jury’s involvement in the investigation. Specifically, Cannon, a Trump appointee, has ordered Smith to explain “the legal propriety” of using a DC Grand Jury in a Florida matter. “The Special Counsel states in conclusory terms that the supplement should be sealed from public view ‘to comport with grand jury secrecy,’ but the motion for leave and the supplement plainly fail to satisfy the burden of establishing a sufficient legal or factual basis to warrant sealing the motion and supplement,” the order reads.

“Among other topics as raised in the Motion, the response shall address the legal propriety of using an out-of-district grand jury proceeding to continue to investigate and/or to seek post-indictment hearings on matters pertinent to the instant indicted matter in this district,” the order adds. Canon was responding to the special counsel’s motion for a “Garcia” hearing, where Smith’s team addressed a potential conflict of interest posed by Stanley Woodward representing defendant Walt Nauta and individuals who could be called to testify in the classified documents case, the Daily Caller reports.

“Trump and Nauta are scheduled to be arraigned Aug. 10 for the classified documents case. Smith issued a superseding indictment July 27 with additional charges for Trump and new charges for Mar-a-Lago employee Carlos De Oliveira who allegedly moved boxes around Trump’s Florida estate. Smith indicted Trump Tuesday for allegedly contesting the 2020 presidential election results and for his alleged role in the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot. The former president pleaded not guilty at an arraignment in Washington, D.C. Thursday and accused Smith of “persecution” for his latest charges.” -Daily Caller. Separately, a grand jury in Washington DC indicted Trump last week on four counts over alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

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A gag order on a campaignig presidential candidate. What’s next? That’s right: jailtime.

Trump Pushes Back On Proposed Gag Order (RT)

Lawyers for former US President Donald Trump have challenged a protective order requested by prosecutors on his election interference case, insisting that only “genuinely sensitive” material should be kept from the public eye. Trump’s legal team responded to the proposed order in a court filing on Monday night, saying that any attempt to prohibit the defense from publicly discussing material obtained from the government, including “exculpatory documents,” would violate Trump’s constitutional rights. “In a trial about First Amendment rights, the government seeks to restrict First Amendment rights,” the attorneys said.

“Worse, it does so against its administration’s primary political opponent, during an election season in which the administration, prominent party members, and media allies have campaigned on the indictment and proliferated its false allegations.” The filing went on to accuse special counsel Jack Smith, who is leading the election interference case against Trump, of seeking to use the court as a “censor” to impose “content-based regulations” on the former commander in chief, instead calling for a “more measured approach.”The defense lawyers suggested an amended protective order that would “shield only genuinely sensitive materials,” rather than “all documents produced by the government, regardless of sensitivity,” as proposed by the prosecution.

Though the attorneys noted they had reached a deal with prosecutors on a “small number” of revisions to the order, they said the government would be unlikely to agree to their full proposal, citing communications with Smith’s team. That leaves the matter to Judge Tanya Chutkan, who will decide on the order sometime before the next hearing scheduled on August 28. Trump was indicted last week on multiple criminal charges linked to alleged interference in the 2020 election, to which he has pleaded not guilty. The ex-president has slammed the case as politically motivated, claiming he was unfairly targeted to remove him as a contender in the 2024 presidential race.

“How can my corrupt political opponent put me on trial(s) during a campaign that I am winning (by a lot!),” Trump said in an all-caps social media post on Monday, apparently referring to President Joe Biden. He added that the legal proceedings are “forcing me to spend time and money away from the ‘campaign trial’ in order to fight bogus accusations.” In addition to the latest case, Trump also faces two other criminal lawsuits launched earlier this year, including dozens of felony charges related to his alleged mishandling of classified documents after leaving office, as well as another linked to alleged hush-money payments made to porn actress Stormy Daniels during his 2016 campaign. He has pleaded not guilty in those cases as well, insisting the charges are part of a “witch hunt” against him.

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Yes, they love him in Georgia, too.

Trump May Face Racketeering Charges in Fulton County Election Case (Sp.)

To date, former US President Donald Trump has faced down three indictments tied to dealings that took place while in his official capacity as commander-in-chief. The trio of cases are currently linked to hush money payments, the mishandling of classified documents and alleged election interference efforts. A looming fourth indictment against former US President Donald Trump may see Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis invoke Georgia’s RICO Act and hit Trump with racketeering charges over his alleged efforts to interfere in the state’s 2020 election results. The state-level act echos much of the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act of 1970, which has largely been used to take down organized crime entities involving mob connections and cartel groups.

Legal scholars noted Willis may utilize the state’s RICO Act as she has a proven success rate in such cases, and because it would allow her to connect various instances in which Trump associates across the US attempted to keep the one-time president in office. Additionally, officials pointed out that Willis early on in her investigation retained John Floyd, who is known as a leading expert on racketeering offenses. “It [invoking Georgia’s RICO Act] gives prosecutors lots of choices as far as venue goes, and it leads to very long complicated trials that wear down defense attorneys,” said Andrew Fleischman, a defense lawyer in Atlanta, to a US media.

The impending grand jury proceedings, scheduled to convene within the next two weeks, will decide whether criminal charges are warranted against Trump and his GOP allies. Already facing federal charges, the election interference case in Georgia proves the second such investigation into the Trump case over the 2020 presidential election. To date, Trump’s legal battles span multiple states, including New York and Florida, where he pleaded not guilty to all charges.

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“The Russians are now fighting with weapons they didn’t have 18 months ago because they didn’t exist 18 months ago.

And that to me is the most impressive thing..”

Ukraine’s Counteroffensive May ‘Run Its Course in the Next Few Weeks’ (Sp.)

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov earlier said that Kiev’s counteroffensive, which was launched on June 4, has been unsuccessful on all fronts as Russia continues its special military operation in Ukraine. The next few weeks will see the Ukrainian counteroffensive “run its course”, former International Monetary Fund (IMF) economist and Bank of America strategist David Woo has told the Russian media. Woo said that he was “really impressed” with the fact that that “the Russian military technology has literally been going through a revolution every three months” and “the Russians are constantly learning from their mistakes.” “The Russians are now fighting with weapons they didn’t have 18 months ago because they didn’t exist 18 months ago.

And that to me is the most impressive thing, […] whereas the West is still walking around in the same circle, Russia’s getting better and better, and this war is gonna [sic] be won by technology in the end,” the former IMF economist argued. He suggested that even though “the Ukrainians are good fighters,” Russia will eventually “crush them”. According to Woo, “if Russia crushes Ukraine, that will be the end of American hegemony, as we know.” Ukraine’s much-hyped counteroffensive kicked off on June 4 after months of delays over a lack of military supplies from Western donors. Russian President Vladimir Putin underscored last month that Ukraine’s counteroffensive, which he said claimed the lives of “tens of thousands” of Ukrainian servicemen, had yielded no results.

“Neither the colossal resources that were pumped into the Kiev regime, nor the supply of Western weapons, tanks, artillery, armored vehicles and missiles helped. The delivery of thousands of foreign mercenaries and advisers who were most actively used in attempts to break through the front of our army did not help either,” Putin told a Russian Security Council meeting at the time. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, for his part, said that “the Kiev regime has no successes” and “is in a very difficult situation.” “The special military operation continues. It is obvious that the counteroffensive is not working out the way it was intended in Kiev,” Peskov told reporters. He was echoed by the Russian Defense Ministry, which in turn, said that Ukrainian troops kept trying, but were failing to advance as they continue to suffer heavy losses in men and materiel. A number of Western media outlets also pointed to the unimpressive results of Kiev’s counteroffensive, admitting that its progress was “slower than desired.”

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‘No Compromise’ = ‘No Ukraine’.

‘No Compromise’ With Moscow, Kiev Vows (RT)

The government in Kiev has not given up on its “peace formula” and rejects all compromise positions, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky’s adviser Mikhail Podoliak announced on Monday. His comments came after the Wall Street Journal suggested Ukraine had softened its stance during the peace conference in Saudi Arabia. “The only basic ‘foundation for negotiations’ is President Zelensky’s Peace Formula,” Podoliak tweeted. “There can be no compromise positions such as ‘immediate ceasefires’ and ‘negotiations here and now’ that give Russia time to stay in the occupied territories. Only the withdrawal of Russian troops to the 1991 border.”

Ukraine accuses Russia of “occupying” not just Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporozhye and Kherson – four regions that chose to join Moscow last year – but also Crimea, which voted overwhelmingly to rejoin Russia after the 2014 US-backed coup in Kiev. “Any scenario of a ceasefire and freezing of the war in Ukraine in the current disposition will mean only one thing – Russia’s actual victory and [President Vladimir] Putin’s personal triumph,” Podoliak added several hours later. “This would be a great defeat for the Western world and the end of the current global security order.”

He also claimed that Moscow would use a “Minsk 3” to rearm and prepare for the “next round” of war, which would return “bigger, bloodier, and better prepared” as soon as “political leaders in key Western countries change.” Minsk 1 and Minsk 2 were ceasefires mediated by Paris and Berlin in 2014 and 2015, after Kiev failed to crush the rebellion in Donetsk and Lugansk by force. The German and French leaders involved in the talks admitted last year that they were buying time so NATO could arm Ukraine for a war against Russia. Podoliak did not specify what prompted his tweets. However, a Wall Street Journal article about the weekend’s talks in Jeddah – which suggested Ukraine had given up on its hardline position – circulated widely on Russian-language social media on Monday.

The talks, to which Russia was not invited, did not appear to accomplish anything. However, the Journal quoted “a senior European official” and two diplomats to report that Ukraine “didn’t push again for its peace plan to be accepted” and “didn’t press the point” about the demand for Russian withdrawal. Moscow has rejected Zelensky’s “peace formula,” a set of ten demands amounting to Russia’s unconditional surrender, as “a useless ultimatum” that only serves to prolong the hostilities. “There can be no negotiation process in the current disposition. The status quo must be changed on the battlefield. This means… more weapons, missiles and aircraft,” Podoliak demanded on Monday afternoon. The US and its allies have already supplied Ukraine with over $100 billion worth of weapons, ammunition and equipment, arguing that Russia “must lose” while insisting they are not actually involved in the conflict.

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Hard to believe, but probably true. It’s what you get when all you see is propaganda.

The West Really Believes Russia Is On The Verge Of ‘Collapse’ (Andrey Sushentsov)

The ongoing Western narrative that Russia is constantly on the verge of imminent collapse stems from the persistent perception that the state is vulnerable to internal combustion because of its perceived fragility, vast territory and critical imbalances. The current crisis serves as a serious stress test for Russia. However, in reality, it has already revealed the country’s remarkable adaptability. Moscow’s current strategic foreign-policy objectives have remained unchanged since they were formulated in November-December 2021. Originally intended to be solved through diplomatic channels, they encompass not only Ukraine but also Russia’s broader relations with the US and the West. An agreement could have been reached through negotiations but, unfortunately, the West did not take this route. As a result, Russia has resorted to military means to achieve its vital interests.

Russia’s plans revolve primarily around ensuring the demilitarization of Ukraine and preventing any formal alliance between Kiev and Washington, as well as countering potential military links with the NATO military bloc. Moscow’s determination to get what it wants remains unwavering, and it is prepared to use all available means. If negotiations resume in the future, it is likely that the issues that figured prominently in the November-December 2021 diplomatic contacts will be revisited. Unfortunately, the dominant narrative in Western countries often focuses on Russia’s supposed imminent collapse, ignoring its will to overcome the crisis. This narrative appears to be fueled by Western politicians’ belief in the country’s perceived weaknesses, which encourages the Western establishment not to seek an end to the conflict.

Based on long-term observations of the situation on the ground, especially after the infamous ‘Prigozhin revolt,’ one can conclude that there are still no clear signs of an impending crisis in Russia. On the contrary, the current state of the country has exceeded expectations in many areas – economic, social, demographic and military, given Russia’s ability to stand up to NATO’s formidable military machine. The current crisis situation serves as a serious stress test, assessing Moscow’s ability to make informed decisions, demonstrate social resilience, use resources effectively, adapt its economic model, sustain its political system, manage information strategies and overcome foreign-policy challenges. Undoubtedly, Russia is under enormous pressure and, like any nation state, is subject to factors that reveal both strengths and weaknesses.

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“Businesses that can’t sell anything stop being businesses..”

Normies Awake! (Kunstler)

What news is suppressed? That the USA is worse than dead broke. That the people were poisoned, apparently on-purpose. That the spectral “Joe Biden” sold out our country. That the war we started in Ukraine, on purpose, for no good reason, is about to be lost, and with it our standing around world. That there actually is such a criminal organism as the Blob at large in our government, responsible for the astounding abnormality immersing us. But never mind all that… for now, just go see Barbie. Have a clam roll, a dip in the ocean, another margarita…. September will be here soon enough.

Eventually, the official perversion of money — especially of borrowing an awesome lot of it with no intention of ever repaying — leads to the unhappy circumstance of money disappearing until nobody has any money. And by such, the broke-ness of the government transmogrifies to a whole land full of broke people. Many banks go broke as well. Even the high-fliers who hoarded things that purport to represent money go broke. Then, nobody has the means to buy anything. Businesses that can’t sell anything stop being businesses. After a while, no activity is meaningful except grubbing in the soil to grow some food, or stealing it from those who grubbed and grew it. By then, you can barely even call it a society.

By September, we’ll have some idea where all that is heading. The bond market is wobbling because the government can’t stop increasing its spending. America issues more and more bonds to borrow ever more money, but to the world’s bond-buyers (a.k.a. lenders), what used to be considered virtually risk-free now looks like a bad bet. So, the enticement to buy, which is called the interest rate, has to go up. But as it goes up, the cash value of existing bonds goes down (who wants the older bonds when the newer ones pay more?)

The holders of bonds are mainly big institutions: banks, pension funds, insurance companies, sovereign wealth funds (other countries). They put their large holdings into bonds because in normal times they are safe and dependable investments. But these are abnormal times. When the value of their bonds goes down a lot, the value of their reserves goes down. And when those reserves get reduced too much in relation to the institutions’ liabilities (what they owe), the institutions go bankrupt. When that happens, the people who are vested in those institutions lose their money, too, and end up having to sell stocks and other property to meet their obligations. This ends up looking like what we call “a crash.” It will get Normies’ attention.

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On their way to becoming the no. 1 party.

The EU Is A ‘Failed Project’ – Right-wing “Alternative For Germany” Party (RT)

The European Union’s migration, climate, and monetary policies have “completely failed,” according to a policy document adopted by the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party on Sunday. However, the party aims to change the EU from within rather than withdraw from the bloc. AfD delegates adopted the document at a party conference in the eastern city of Magdeburg on Sunday. The paper describes the EU as a “failed project,” and calls for the bloc to be reformed as a “federation of European nations,” with significant sovereignty ceded back to its member states. “The EU and the globalist elites that support it have strayed from the original idea of the founding fathers of a European community adopted many years ago,” the document states, citing the 2007 Lisbon Treaty – which gave the EU the power to act as a single legal entity and made EU law supersede national law – as the moment when the bloc became “an EU super state.”

Among a lengthy list of reforms, the AfD is proposing that the EU strengthen its external borders, lessen its military reliance on the US by following a policy of “strategic autonomy,” and protect the “diversity of cultures and traditions of the peoples of Europe” from immigration. While a draft version of the document released in June called for the “orderly dissolution of the EU,” this language is absent from the final version. The party also chose 35 candidates to contest next year’s European Parliament elections at the Magdeburg conference. The list is led by Maximilian Krah, who has been an MEP since 2019. The AfD currently holds nine seats in the parliament, and is the third-largest German party in the EU legislature.

At home, the AfD is currently polling at a record high of 21%, according to Politico. This figure puts the party ahead of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats (SPD) and behind only former chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU). However, Germany’s mainstream parties have repeatedly ruled out entering into coalition with AfD, and a government-funded watchdog group recently called for the party to be banned for its “racist and nationalist” positions. The latest polling figures suggest a doubling in the AfD’s support since 2021, when it garnered 10.3% of votes in the parliamentary elections. This surge in popularity comes as Germany’s economy reels in the wake of Berlin’s decision to impose sanctions on Russia, which was formerly the country’s leading energy supplier. At a rally last year, AfD co-leader Tino Chrupalla accused Scholz’s government of waging an “economic war” on the German people by cutting the country off from Russian energy imports.

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“This is conclusive evidence that the Ukrainian state is covering up and encouraging this bloody business,” Zakharova stated..”

Ukraine Leader in Black Market of Human Organ Trafficking – Zakharova (Sp.)

Rampant corruption and lawlessness in Ukraine have effectively turned the country into a veritable paradise for organ traffickers eager to take advantage of cheap and abundant supply of human tissue. While reports about organs being illegally removed from the bodies of the deceased in Ukraine started emerging as early as in the late 1990s amid the decline of the Ukrainian economy , the illicit organ harvesting and trade in the country started becoming more widespread during the 2000s, noted Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova. In her op-ed in one of the Russian newspapers, Zakharova pointed out that the 2014 coup in Kiev and the armed conflict in Donbass that followed further exacerbated the problem, with OSCE confirming the discovery of the bodies with removed internal organs in mass graves located in the conflict zone.

Things have taken a turn for the worse since the escalation of the Ukrainian conflict in February 2022, while the laws passed by Ukrainian legislators in recent years greatly simplify the work of black market transplant specialists. For example, Zakharova points out, the Law No. 5831 passed by the Ukrainian parliament on December 16, 2021, effectively waives the requirement for a written consent of a living donor or their relatives for organ donation. “There is no need to authenticate signatures, either. In effect, even the removal of organs from children is permitted. The procedure for removing organs from the deceased who did not consent to donation while living has been significantly simplified,” Zakharova surmised.

She added that, under the Ukrainian legislation, the person responsible for the burial of a deceased, such as a head doctor at a hospital or a military unit’s commander, could grant permission for the removal of tissues from the corpse. Furthermore, private clinics in the country have also been granted the right to perform transplantation, while the Law No. 5610 adopted by Ukraine’s parliament on April 14, 2022, made transplantation exempt from VAT. Posthumous organ donations and the sale of human organs abroad have also been legalized in Ukraine. Massive casualties taken by Ukraine’s Armed Forces amid the escalation of the Ukrainian conflict resulted in a steady supply of fresh corpses that could be harvested for organs, leading to the emergence of hearts, livers, kidneys and other body parts of slain Ukrainian soldiers on the darknet marketplaces, Zakharova noted citing media reports.

One black market dealer reportedly claimed that a heart could be procured quickly for €25,000 while kidneys may be obtained for €12,000. The delivery, limited to the EU countries, would be made in a medical box within 48 to 60 hours, either to a predetermined location or directly to the recipient. Zakharova also claimed that people related to the infamous Kosovo Liberation Army – a militant group whose members faced allegations of illegal organ harvesting in the past – may own this illicit organ marketplace or at least have dealings with it. Aside from Ukrainian soldiers, the children of Ukraine also risk falling prey to illicit organ traffickers. For example, in June 2023 a member of a certain charity was detained on the border between Ukraine and Slovakia.

According to Zakharova, the detainee was involved in the trafficking of Ukrainian children abroad, with some of these children trafficked for the purpose of organ transplantation. Despite the severity of the accusations against him, the suspect was released on a 1 million hryvnias (about $27,000) bail and promptly disappeared. “This is conclusive evidence that the Ukrainian state is covering up and encouraging this bloody business,” Zakharova stated, adding that people close to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky may be involved in this sordid trade.

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Sickos.

UK’s NHS Raises Age For Government-Funded Transgender Treatments To Seven (ZH)

Children covered by the services will be offered psychological support and therapy to focus on issues that may have led to feelings concerning their gender, however health experts warn that the new rule could still put children with mental health struggles on a “pathway to medical transition.” The concerns are amplified by the potential consequences of labeling a child’s difficulties as gender-related, potentially pushing them towards a predetermined path of treatment. The decision to implement these changes stems from the NHS’ decision to shutter the Tavistock transgender clinic. Dr. Hilary Cass’ review deemed the clinic as unsafe, raising concerns that young individuals were being rapidly pushed into a medical framework without adequate consideration of alternative factors such as autism and mental health.

“The clinic is being replaced by a set of regional centres that will be led by medical doctors, rather than therapists, and consider the impact of other conditions such as autism and mental health issues. The move came amid growing concern about the impact of gender ideology on children, including in schools where some were being socially transitioned without their parents’ consent. NHS England said that a new service was needed because there was “scarce and inconclusive evidence to support clinical decision-making” at the Tavistock clinic.” -Telegraph

The shift in approach reflects the growing unease around the impact of gender ideology on children. Reports of children undergoing social transitions without parental consent in schools have fueled concerns over the potential consequences of premature interventions. While the move toward evidence-based decision-making is welcomed by many, questions linger about the potential long-term effects of early intervention. Critics argue that more research is needed to fully understand the ramifications of puberty blockers, especially for young patients whose bodies and minds are still developing.

Under the new plans, “Children under seven years of age may not be expected to have sufficiently developed their intellectual understanding of, and comprehension of, sex and gender to be able to understand the reasons for, and potential consequences of, a referral to a specialist gender incongruence service.”” But, according to the UK, by the age of seven, children will “be more established within school, and education professionals and school nurses will be able to contribute to a general observational view as to the appropriateness of a referral.” Right. Previously, children as young as three were being treated by Tavistock, with an average of three children under the age of seven having been referred each month.

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“..scared at times for my safety and, overwhelmingly, for my family’s safety.”

For saying a woman is a woman. Why not try to ban her work outright?

Museum Bans JK Rowling From Harry Potter Exhibit (RT)

The Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle has removed any references to Harry Potter author JK Rowling from an exhibition celebrating the fictional wizard, due to her “super hateful and divisive” comments about the transgender community. “There’s a certain cold, heartless, joy-sucking entity in the world of Harry Potter and, this time, it is not actually a Dementor,” the exhibit’s project manager Chris Moore, who is transgender, wrote in a blog explaining the decision to axe Rowling from the museum. Moore added: “This certain person is a bit too vocal with her super hateful and divisive views to be ignored.” The blog post also explained that the series creator’s absence is a short-term measure to “reduce her impact” while the museum determines its “long-term practices.”

According to the Daily Mail newspaper, the Harry Potter exhibit remains on display but without any mention whatsoever about the creator of the series, which has sold over 500 million books globally since 1997. JK Rowling was inducted into the museum’s hall of fame in 2018. In a statement, the museum said that it is “proud to support our employees and unequivocally stands with the nonbinary and transgender communities.” Rowling initially courted controversy in 2019 when she issued a message on social media in support of a British woman who’d lost her job after she herself tweeted that a woman could not change her biological sex. “I absolutely knew that if I spoke out, many people who love my books would be deeply unhappy with me,” the author said in a podcast interview earlier this year. She added that the backlash against her views has led to her being “scared at times for my safety and, overwhelmingly, for my family’s safety.”

Rowling was absent last year at events to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the release of the first Harry Potter book – with each of the film series’ three stars having expressed their opposition to her statements about transgender people. Daniel Radcliffe, the actor who played Harry Potter in the eight movies that have taken in more than $7.7 billion at the box office globally, said that he was “hurt” by Rowling’s comments. Rupert Grint, who played Ron Weasley, also said, “Trans women are women, trans men are men,” while Emma Watson announced a donation to a transgender charity in the wake of Rowling’s comments. Rowling is one of the world’s most successful authors. In 2008, nine years after the release of the first Harry Potter book, she was named by Forbes magazine as the world’s highest-paid author.

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koi

 

 

Eat bugs

 

 

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Sep 302022
 


Pavel Filonov The Kolkhoznik (Member of a Collective Farm) 1931

 

Kremlin Reveals Next Step On Donbass, Kherson, And Zaporozhye (RT)
Erdogan Speaks On Referendums On Joining Russia (RT)
Pentagon To Create ‘Ukraine Command’ – Media (RT)
Russia Mulling Face-To-Face Nuclear Arms Treaty Talks With US (ZH)
Multipolar World Order – Part 2 (Iain Davis)
West ‘Clinging To The Past’ – Putin (RT)
Putin Outlines Goals Of ‘Geopolitical Adversaries’ (RT)
US Puts Energy Operators On ‘Heightened Alert’ (RT)
Key Russian Black Sea Gas Pipeline Under Threat (RT)
Durham Prosecutes FBI Informants, While Protecting Their Handlers (Sperry)
US Offers A New Definition Of ‘Healthy’ (RT)
NHS Nurses Not Eating At Work In Order To Feed Their Children (G.)
Cardiologist: The Greatest Miscarriage Of Medical Science (ToI)
Safe and Effective: A Second Opinion (Oracle)

 

 

 

 

Gervais
https://twitter.com/i/status/1575538121713672193

 

 

 

 

History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.
– George Orwell, 1984

 

 

 

 

 

 

Russia will officially annex the four regions today. Then Ukraine will no longer be shelling its own -Russian speaking- citizens on its own land. They’ll be shelling Russians on Russian land. Which makes it much easier for Moscow to protect them, something they’re obliged to do. Putin waited 8 years -of constant shelling- to recognize the Donbass republics, and he was’t going to wait another 8. As Gav Don said yesterday at the Saker, htis may be A Possible Strategy For Peace. It may seem a bit contradictory, but it might just work.

Kremlin Reveals Next Step On Donbass, Kherson, And Zaporozhye (RT) 

The Kremlin has revealed when Russian President Vladimir Putin will sign treaties on the inclusion of the two Donbass republics, as well as the self-proclaimed states in Kherson and Zaporozhye, into the Russian Federation. The move follows referendums held in the respective territories. The ceremonial signing will take place in the St. George Hall inside the Kremlin Palace on Friday at 3pm Moscow time, after which Putin will deliver a“voluminous speech,” according to Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov. The Russian president will also personally meet with the heads of the new territories. The announcement comes after the two republics and two self-proclaimed states made official requests to join the Russian Federation after having held public referendums on the issue between September 23 and 27.

The move was overwhelmingly supported by the local population, according to official results announced late on Tuesday. Peskov separately noted that Putin’s speech on Friday will not be a formal address to the Federal Assembly – the country’s parliament – stating that such a speech will be held in a completely different format and is yet to be announced. As explained by Senator Konstantin Kosachev, the vice speaker of the upper house of Russia’s parliament, signing the treaties is only one of the key steps necessary to officially incorporate the new territories into the Russian Federation. After Putin signs the treaties, they must be submitted to the country’s Constitutional Court to ensure they comply with Russian law.

Once they are cleared, the documents have to be ratified by the lower house, the State Duma, and the upper house of parliament, the Federal Council. Only after that will the DPR, LPR, and the regions of Kherson and Zaporozhye officially become integrated into the Russian Federation. The next session of the Federal Council is planned for October 4, according to chairman Valentina Matvienko, who said that if “everything is confirmed” the body will take the treaties on accepting the new territories up for consideration. The EU and the US have repeatedly refused to accept the results of the referendums, calling them a “sham.”Western leaders have also vowed to never recognize “any kind of annexation in Ukraine.” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen claimed she was “determined to make the Kremlin pay for this further escalation,”while US State Secretary Antony Blinken stated that Kiev had “every right” to take back the territories that are trying to secede from its rule.

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“Erdogan claimed that Ukraine and Russia may reach a peace settlement only if Moscow returns to Kiev all the lands that it has captured since the beginning of the military operation..”

Not going to happen.

Erdogan Speaks On Referendums On Joining Russia (RT)

Recent referendums in the Donbass republics and two Ukrainian regions on joining Russia are of great concern, and it would be better to “solve this problem diplomatically,” Türkiye’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told local media on Wednesday. In an interview with CNN Türk on Wednesday, Erdogan sounded the alarm over the public vote, adding that dialogue would be a preferable option in tackling this issue. “The decision to hold referendums in some occupied regions of Ukraine is quite worrying… There may be an annexation here,” he said, adding that “if Putin, whom I know, has put something in his head, he will do it.” Erdogan said that Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky had asked for Türkiye’s diplomatic support on the issue of the referendums.

“[He] wants us to convince Putin. I intend to discuss these issues in detail with Putin tomorrow [on Thursday],” he said. He also noted that another major issue on the agenda would be the UN- Türkiye-brokered deal which unblocked Ukrainian grain exports via the Black Sea. According to Erdogan, 80% of grain shipments from Ukrainian ports “unfortunately went to rich countries.” “This has been a serious concern for Putin. We hope that we will be able to send it to poor countries and achieve the result,” he added. However, on Wednesday, Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov noted that the Russian leader has no talks scheduled with Erdogan. During the interview, Türkiye’s president also stressed that a possible nuclear war would be “catastrophic.”

“One should not even think about this, let alone talk about it. Solving this issue through diplomacy would be the most appropriate step,” he said. This was an apparent reference to the warning the Russian leader issued to the West last week, saying that those who use nuclear blackmail against Moscow “should know that the wind can turn around.” Last week, Erdogan claimed that Ukraine and Russia may reach a peace settlement only if Moscow returns to Kiev all the lands that it has captured since the beginning of the military operation in late February. During the referendums that were held between September 23 and 27, the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics along with Kherson Region and part of Zaporozhye Region overwhelmingly voted to join Russia.

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But they’re not involved in the conflict!

Pentagon To Create ‘Ukraine Command’ – Media (RT)

The Pentagon is working to create a new military command devoted to arming and training Ukrainian soldiers, US officials told multiple media outlets, suggesting the effort will effectively “overhaul” the current process for weapons transfers to Kiev. The command would be based in Wiesbaden, Germany – where the US Army keeps its European headquarters – and be made up of 300 staffers led by General Christopher Cavoli, who heads up the military’s European Command, according to unnamed officials cited by the New York Times and CNN on Thursday. “The changes, which aim to give a formal structure to what has been improvised since the war’s onset, are roughly modeled on US train-and-assist efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past two decades,” the Times reported.

While the new unit would look to make major alterations to the current train-and-equip program for Kiev, Wiesbaden will remain a key component in the scheme, as most Ukrainian troops currently being instructed on American weapons are doing so in or near the city. Since Russia sent troops into the neighboring country in late February, US military aid to Ukraine has largely been managed from Germany and Poland by Lieutenant General Christopher Donahue, who also oversaw the chaotic evacuation of US forces from Afghanistan last year. However, Donahue and his staff are set to return home next month, creating the need for a specialized command oriented toward training and arming Ukrainian troops. The proposal for the new unit was initially floated earlier in the conflict by General Tod Wolters, with Cavoli ‘fine-tuning’ the idea after taking his place at EUCOM in July, according to the Times.

In late August, the Wall Street Journal similarly reported that Washington was looking to appoint a general to lead the arm-and-train program in Ukraine, suggesting the initiative could receive an official mission name, as well as “long-term, dedicated funding” from the US government. The outlet added that the changes would mark a “shift from the largely ad hoc effort to provide training and assistance to the Ukrainians for years.” The US has authorized nearly $17 billion in arms transfers to Ukraine’s military so far this year, with the vast majority of that aid approved since hostilities escalated in February. Though large quantities of gear and ammunition have come directly from existing stockpiles, the Pentagon is also working with arms contractors to manufacture weapons specifically for Kiev, including 18 brand-new High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) announced earlier this week – one of the longest-range platforms provided by Washington to date.

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In the next room, negotiate peace please.

Russia Mulling Face-To-Face Nuclear Arms Treaty Talks With US (ZH)

Russia says it is mulling a face-to-face meeting with US officials in order to discuss the New START nuclear arms treaty (Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms). Amid heightened nuclear tensions related to the Ukraine war, in a rare moment of potential good news, given the prior collapse of several US-Russia Cold War era treaties which were meant to avoid confrontation between nuclear armed superpowers. “Within the framework of the [advisory] commission, a remote discussion continues on what organizational and technical problems need to be addressed. Some of them have been removed, while others have made significant progress,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova told a Thursday press briefing.

But she cited that “a number of significant difficulties remain: the implementation of the treaty’s essentially routine measures is complicated by the unconstructive anti-Russian actions of the United States and its partners,” according to state media. “They continue to introduce new sanctions prohibitions, impede the normal interaction of the parties. We will seek to resolve all problematic issues in the context of the implementation of the Treaty on an equal basis, taking into account our national interests,” Zakharova said of the US administration. In March 2021 the two sides renewed New START for a period of five years, and it will expire in February 2026 if it’s not continued – an increasing possibility given US-Russia relations have deteriorated so fast they are near complete breaking point.

The treaty is intended to limit and reduce nuclear arms on either side, setting a limit of no more than 1,550 deployed warheads and 700 missiles. START I began in 1991, with New START signed under the Obama and Medvedev administrations in 2010 as a successor agreement. Compliance inspections are part of the deal, but that’s precisely a current issue of contention, given that last month Russia informed the US that it was temporarily suspending American inspections of its nuclear weapons sites under the 2010 treaty. “On August 8, 2022, the Russian Federation officially informed the United States via diplomatic channels that our country is temporarily exempting its facilities from inspection activities under the New START Treaty,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said in August, adding it also covers “facilities that can be used for demonstrations under the treaty.”

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Everyone wants one. But only if they’re in the middle.

Multipolar World Order – Part 2 (Iain Davis)

We ask: who wants a multipolar world order? The short answer: everyone. The longer answer: everyone who has sufficient power and influence to change global governance. The multipolar model isn’t being pushed solely by the Russian and Chinese governments, their oligarchs and their think tanks. It’s also being promoted by the erstwhile “leaders” of the unipolar world order. Consider this remark by German Chancellor Olaf Sholtz. His speech, set within the context of Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine—which every member of the Western establishment lambastes for the cameras—was given at the World Economic Forum’s 2022 Davos gathering:

“I see another global development that constitutes a watershed. We are experiencing what it means to live in a multipolar world. The bipolarity of the Cold War is just as much part of the past as the relatively brief phase when the United States was the sole remaining global power[.] [. . .] The crucial question is this: how can we ensure that the multipolar world will also be a multilateral world? [. . .] I am convinced that it can succeed – if we explore new paths and fields of cooperation. [. . .] If we notice that our world is becoming multipolar, then that has to spur us on: to even more multilateralism! To even more international cooperation!”

Western central banks, too, have looked toward the multipolar model. In a 2011 round table discussion at the Banque de France, then-French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde, who subsequently became the head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and then was appointed President of the European Central Bank (ECB), said: “Our starting point is to create the conditions to achieve two closely intertwined objectives, i.e. strong, sustainable, and balanced growth, on the one hand, and an orderly transition to a world that is multipolar in economic and monetary terms, on the other. [. .] The G20 reached agreement [to] promote the orderly transition from a world where a small number of economies, with their currencies, represent the bulk of wealth and trade, to a multipolar world where emerging countries and their currencies represent a growing if not predominant share.”

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Well, their future does’t look very bright.

West ‘Clinging To The Past’ – Putin (RT)

Unwilling to accept the inevitable end of its unipolar hegemony, the West is generating problems and crises everywhere in order to cling to the past, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday. “We are witnessing a complex process of a more just world order being established ” Putin told the video conference of intelligence and security chiefs of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). “Unipolar hegemony is inexorably collapsing, this is an objective reality that the West categorically refuses to accept, and we see everything that follows from this.”

The US and its allies “cling to the past and try to dictate policy everywhere, from international relations and economics to culture and sports,” Putin said, adding that the collective West “does not disdain any method of pressuring countries that choose a sovereign path of development, those who do not wish to submit but freely and independently choose their own future, safeguarding their culture, tradition and values.” Washington has accused Russia and China of revisionism and of challenging the “rules-based world order.” The CIS was created in 1991 from the newly independent republics of the USSR. While the West is trying to foment new crises in their territory, Putin noted, there were plenty of real ones dating back to the Soviet Union’s break-up.

The Russian president pointed to the present conflict with Ukraine but also the recent border battles between Armenia and Azerbaijan, as well as Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, warning that “risks of destabilization are still growing”and threatening to expand to the entire Asia-Pacific. On the other hand, Putin noted, trade, industrial and investment cooperation between Russia and other CIS members has been increasing “in spite of pressure, blackmail and illegal sanctions from the US and its satellites.” In addition to Russia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan make up the CIS. Georgia left the organization in 2009 and Ukraine stopped participating after the US-backed coup in Kiev in 2014.

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“the notorious collective West” was unable to accept the inevitable collapse of the “old unipolar hegemony.”

Putin Outlines Goals Of ‘Geopolitical Adversaries’ (RT)

Russia’s adversaries in the West are willing to create crises and unleash violence anywhere in the post-Soviet world, Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed on Thursday. Addressing a meeting with the heads of intelligence for the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), Putin said Russia’s “geopolitical adversaries” are prepared to turn any country “into a ground zero of a crisis,” and to unleash “bloody massacres.”“We also know that the West is devising scenarios for inciting new conflicts in the CIS. But we already have enough of them,” Putin said by videolink. He pointed to the current military confrontation between Russia and Ukraine, as well as “what is happening on the borders of other CIS countries,” an apparent reference to recent border clashes between Armenia and neighboring Azerbaijan, as well as between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.

All such conflicts have resulted from the collapse of the Soviet Union, Putin said, noting that this was “understandable.” “But the risks of destabilisation are growing again, including the risks of destabilisation in the entire Asia-Pacific region,” he added, claiming that “the notorious collective West” was unable to accept the inevitable collapse of the “old unipolar hegemony.” “We are seeing the difficult process of the forming of a more just world order,” the Russian president said. Putin has long spoken about the end of the so-called “unipolar” world dominated by the United States and its allies. In his infamous speech at the 2007 Munich Security Conference, he slammed Western leaders for deliberately eroding trust and said that a unipolar system was “not only unacceptable but also impossible” in the world today.

Earlier this month, during a meeting with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping, Putin said Western attempts to preserve the existing world order “have taken an absolutely ugly form lately.” The idea of a new “multipolar” world has been discussed in the West, too, most recently by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who told the World Economic Forum at Davos in May that he hopes for “more multilateralism” and “more international co-operation.” Following Moscow’s offensive in Ukraine, however, the West declared its intention to “isolate” Russia and imposed unprecedented sanctions on it. Russia views these actions as another manifestation of Western attempts to “contain” it and maintain the existing world order.

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“With NATO having tested underwater drones near Bornholm this summer, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova called on Washington to “confess” to destroying the pipelines.”

US Puts Energy Operators On ‘Heightened Alert’ (RT)

US Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm warned the American energy industry, including LNG tanker operators, to be on “high alert” after a series of explosions disabled Russia’s Nord Stream gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea. Moscow has suggested that the US was responsible for the blasts. “Everybody should be on high alert,” Granholm told Bloomberg on Wednesday, two days after the vital Russia-Europe gas conduits were taken out. With the flow of gas to Europe halted for the foreseeable future by the blasts, Granholm said the incident illustrated the risks to European countries of “relying on another entity for their energy.”

Multiple US officials have labeled the explosions, which occurred off the Danish island of Bornholm, as “apparent sabotage,” but have not blamed any one country or group. The attacks came after successive US administrations had been attempting to prevent the completion of Nord Stream 2 and convince European states to swap cheap Russian gas for the more expensive American liquefied natural gas. Furthermore, US President Joe Biden said in early February that the US would “end” Nord Stream 2 if Russian troops entered Ukraine, telling a reporter “I promise you, we will be able to do it.” With NATO having tested underwater drones near Bornholm this summer, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova called on Washington to “confess” to destroying the pipelines.

“The scale of destruction indicates that it really was a sort of a [terrorist] act,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov stated, adding that such an attack is unlikely to have happened “without the involvement of some state power.” Granholm’s warning suggests that the US is concerned about attacks on its own gas infrastructure, with LNG shipments in particular being a vulnerable point. The Sandia National Laboratories warned in 2004 that a deliberate attack on one of these ships could cause a fireball that would be hazardous to human health as far as 1.6 kilometers (1 mile) away. “Of course” LNG shipments to Europe should take more precautions, Granholm told Boomberg, adding “we have to be on heightened alert.”

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From sanctions.

Key Russian Black Sea Gas Pipeline Under Threat (RT)

If anything happens to the TurkStream natural gas pipeline, its operator won’t be able to repair the damage, since the Dutch government revoked their license due to EU sanctions against Russia, the US government-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty alleged on Thursday. RFE/RL claimed to have obtained a letter from Oleg Aksyutin, CEO of South Stream Transport BV, informing the company’s managers to stop all work and cancel contracts with Western suppliers. The letter is reportedly dated September 14, and says that the Netherlands where the company is registered – had canceled its operating license, effective September 17.

The suspension affects “all contracts related to the technical support of the gas pipeline,” including “design, manufacture, assembly, testing, repair, maintenance, and training,” according to the US outlet. South Stream Transport operates TurkStream, a pipeline finalized in 2020, which runs under the Black Sea to Türkiye and then on to Serbia and Hungary. It has an annual capacity of 33 billion cubic meters of gas. According to Reuters, SouthStream confirmed on Thursday that their license has been revoked, but said it had requested a resumption of the license and “will continue gas transportation.” While there are no reports about interruptions in the TurkStream supply, RFE/RL noted that much of the pipeline is at the depth of three kilometers, and needs to be constantly monitored for damage due to “seismic activity.”

The revelation comes just days after both Nord Stream pipelines under the Baltic Sea were disabled in a series of explosions, venting millions of cubic meters of gas into the water. Russian President Vladimir Putin has described the explosions as an “act of international terrorism” and Moscow intends to raise it before the UN Security Council. NATO said Thursday that the pipelines were damaged in what appeared to be a “deliberate, reckless, and irresponsible acts of sabotage,” promising to meet any attack on its critical infrastructure “with a united and determined response.” The US, which has long tried to stop NordStream and managed to derail TurkStream’s predecessor SouthStream – which the Dutch-based company was originally supposed to manage – has denied having anything to do with the Baltic Sea explosions.

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Can’t touch the FBI.

Durham Prosecutes FBI Informants, While Protecting Their Handlers (Sperry)

Danchenko’s legal team points out that he turned over an email to the FBI during a January 2017 meeting with agents and analysts that indicated a key dossier subsource may have been fictionalized. Stuart Sears, one of Danchenko’s attorneys, argued earlier this month in a motion to dismiss the charges that investigators “essentially ignored” any concerns they may have had about Danchenko’s sourcing, because they continued to renew the FISA warrants based upon it. Therefore, he argued, any lies his client allegedly told them were inconsequential, making them un-prosecutable under federal statutes requiring such false statements to have a “material” impact on a federal proceeding. While Durham did not dispute the FBI’s apparent complicity in the fraud, he waved it aside as immaterial to the case at hand.

“The fact that the FBI apparently did not identify or address these inconsistencies is of no moment,” he said in his filing. At the same time, Durham acknowledged agents allowed the fabrications to contaminate their wiretap warrants – noting they were “an important part of the FISA applications targeting Carter Page.” But he stopped short of blaming the FBI, even for incompetence. According to Durham, the nation’s premiere law enforcement agency was misled by a serial liar and con man. “He’s painting it as though the FBI was duped when the FBI was more than willing to take the initiative and go after Trump,” Kamenar said, adding that though Danchenko may have been a liar, he was a useful liar to FBI officials and others in the Justice Department who were pursuing Trump.

The special prosecutor’s indifference to the FBI’s role in the scandal is more remarkable in light of what Danchenko admitted in his January 2017 interviews with the FBI. He told investigators that much of what he reported to Steele was “word-of-mouth and hearsay,” while some was cooked up from “conversation that [he] had with friends over beers,” according to a declassified FBI summary of the interviews, which took place over three days. He confessed the most salacious allegations were made in “jest.” Still, the FBI continued to use Danchenko’s claims of a “well-developed conspiracy of cooperation” between Russia and Trump to convince the FISA court to allow investigators to continue to surveil Page, whom the FBI accused of masterminding the conspiracy based on Danchenko’s bogus rumors.

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Frm the least healthy country on earth..

US Offers A New Definition Of ‘Healthy’ (RT)

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Wednesday proposed a new set of standards that food products must meet to be labeled “healthy.” The new rules would align the definition, which has not been updated since 1994, with “current nutrition science,” the watchdog said in a statement. Under the updated definitions, in order to obtain a “healthy” label, the products should satisfy two criteria. First, they need to contain “a certain meaningful amount” of food from at least one of the food groups or subgroups recommended by the ‘Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2020-2025,’ such as fruit, vegetable or dairy. Second, the foods should adhere to specific limits of certain nutrients, such as saturated fat, sodium and added sugars.

The new standards would not only help people to build healthier diets but could also help to improve the quality of food products, the watchdog believes. According to the FDA, in a bid to secure a “healthy” label for their products, manufacturers might include more “fruits, vegetables, dairy and whole grains, and limit saturated fat, sodium, and added sugars” in their products.“Today’s action is just one part of the agency’s ongoing commitment to reduce diet-related chronic diseases and advance health equity,” the FDA, which is part of the Health Department, said. Nutrition-related illnesses are now “the leading cause of death and disability in the country,” according to the agency.

By providing manufacturers with clear guidelines, and customers with clear labels on packaging, the FDA hopes to help people “to build healthy eating patterns” and thus to improve public health in general. The watchdog is suggesting a comprehensive approach to a healthy diet. Under the new rules, some products which currently cannot be labeled “healthy” can eventually get this mark by becoming part of “a diet consistent with current dietary recommendations.” As examples of such products, the FDA cites nuts, seeds, higher-fat fish such as salmon, as well as certain oils.

The public consultations on the proposal will last 90 days. Meanwhile, the FDA is also looking for a new, easily recognizable logo for the labeling of “healthy” products. According to the ‘Dietary Guidelines,’ more than 80% of US residents aren’t eating enough vegetables, fruit and dairy, while most people consume too much added sugars, saturated fats and sodium. The World Population Review this year placed the US in 12th place globally for population obesity, with more than 36% of Americans categorized as obese.

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Well-being pays less than profits.

NHS Nurses Not Eating At Work In Order To Feed Their Children (G.)

Some nurses are so hard up that they are having to not eat at work in order to feed and clothe their children, research among hospital bosses has found. Lack of money is also prompting some NHS staff to call in sick in the days before they get paid because they can no longer afford the travel costs for their shift. Others are taking a second job outside the NHS in an effort to make ends meet. The impact of the cost of living crisis on health service workers in England has emerged in a survey of chief executives, chairs and other senior figures in health trusts undertaken by NHS Providers, which represents trusts. Miriam Deakin, the director of policy and strategy at NHS Providers, said: “There are heart-rending stories of nurses choosing between eating during the day and being able to buy a school uniform for their children at home.


“Increasing numbers of nurses and other staff, particularly in the lower pay bands, are finding they are unable to afford to work in the NHS.” More than a quarter (27%) of trusts already operate food banks for staff, and another 19% plan to open one, to help relieve the acute financial difficulties faced by staff. The survey also found that some staff: Are stopping contributing to their NHS pension in order to free up cash.Cannot fill up their cars because of petrol price rises. Have mental health issues due to the stress of paying their bills. The situation is so serious that some low-paid health staff, such as healthcare assistants, are quitting their jobs in the NHS and taking better-paid roles in pubs and shops instead, NHS chiefs said.

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Malhotra.

Cardiologist: The Greatest Miscarriage Of Medical Science (ToI)

A personal loss and tragedy made Dr Aseem Malhotra look into the evidence on COVID vaccines, specifically the mRNA vaccines. In his recent research paper, Dr Malhotra, a National Health Service (NHS) trained cardiologist, has ‘critically appraised’ the true benefits and potential harms of the messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) coronavirus disease (COVID) vaccines. “I suffered quite a personal tragedy with the sudden death of my father in July last year. He was a very fit and well man. He was 73 years old. During the whole lockdown he was walking 10 to 15 thousand steps a day. He was very conscientious of his diet,” he told a media outlet. “I had assessed his heart a few years earlier, and in fact he had actually improved his lifestyle since then,” he adds.

Dr Malhotra has said that his father’s rapidly progressive coronary artery disease and sudden cardiac arrest was most likely due to the mRNA product. “His postmortem findings really shocked me. There were two severe blockages in his coronary arteries, which did not really make any sense. As a cardiologist and intimately knowing my dad’s lifestyle and health,” he says. Not long after that data started emerging on the possible link between mRNA vaccine and increased risk of heart attacks. From a mechanism of increasing inflammation around the coronary arteries. “Re-analysis of randomised controlled trials using the messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) technology suggests a greater risk of serious adverse events from the vaccines than being hospitalised from Covid-19,” writes Malhotra in peer-reviewed Journal of Insulin Resistance.

“Pharmacovigilance systems and real-world safety data, coupled with plausible mechanisms of harm, are deeply concerning, especially in relation to cardiovascular safety,” he writes in the paper and adds that mirroring a potential signal from the Pfizer Phase 3 trial, a significant rise in cardiac arrest calls to ambulances in England was seen in 2021, with similar data emerging from Israel in the 16–39-year-old age group. I was one of the first to receive two doses of Pfizer’s messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) vaccine and though my individual risk was small due to my optimal metabolic health, “the main reason I took the jab was to prevent transmission of the virus to my vulnerable patients” writes the doctor in his paper.

To steer clear of what he considered as anti-vax propaganda at that time, he was asked to appear on Good Morning Britain to convince film director Gurinder Chadha, Order of the British Empire (OBE) to take the shot. A research study published in November 2021 in Circulation caught his attention, he says. “In over 500 middle-aged patients under regular follow up, using a predictive score model based on inflammatory markers that are strongly correlated with risk of heart attack, the mRNA vaccine was associated with significantly increasing the risk of a coronary event within fiveyears from 11% pre-mRNA vaccine to 25% 2–10 weeks post mRNA vaccine,” he writes. “I wondered whether my father’s Pfizer vaccination, which he received six months earlier, could have contributed to his unexplained premature death and so I began to critically appraise the data,” he adds.

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Great profits for Fauci.

Safe and Effective: A Second Opinion (Oracle)

Safe and Effective: A Second Opinion shines a light on Covid-19 vaccine injuries and bereavements, but also to takes an encompassing look at the systemic failings that appear to have enabled them. We look at leading analysis of pharmaceutical trials, the role of the MHRA in regulating these products, the role of the SAGE behavioural scientists in influencing policy and the role of the media and Big Tech companies in supressing free and open debate on the subject.

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Huawei
https://twitter.com/i/status/1575370629536104448

 

 

 

 

Fuellmilch

 

 


The San Francisco Garter Snake has been on the endangered list since 1967, and has been labeled the most beautiful snake in the U.S. Researches estimate only 1-2 thousand remain

 

 

 

 

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Aug 302022
 


Henri Matisse Open window, collioure 1905

 

Europe Warned Of Danger For Many Winters To Come (RT)
Europe’s Economic And Social Suicide (MoA)
Western Europe Headed For ‘Energy Collapse’ – Hungary (RT)
One In Four Britons Won’t Turn On Heating This Winter (RT)
‘A Horrible Winter Lies Ahead’: Next PM Will Inherit An NHS On Its Knees (G.)
White House Sets Date For First ‘Hunger Conference’ In Decades (RT)
Zelensky Promises To Recapture Donbass (RT)
Ukraine’s Attempt At Counter-offensive Has Failed – Russia (RT)
Ukrainian Drone Downed Over Nuclear Plant – Russia (RT)
Moscow Urges ‘All Nations’ To Pressure Kiev Over Nuclear Site (RT)
Kissinger And The WEF’s Young Global Leaders Program (UH)
How Dick Cheney Created Anthony Fauci (Unherd)
The Wild West (Jim Kunstler)
Trump Calls for New Election Immediately (Celente)
Third of Pakistan Under Water – Official (RT)

 

 

 

 

 

 

German/Soviet deaths

 

 

[..] from 16th Aug, the UK Govt removed advice for pregnant & breastfeeding women to be vaccinated against #COVID19. Source:
https://gov.uk/government/publications/regulatory-approval-of-pfizer-biontech-vaccine-for-covid-19/summary-public-assessment-report-for-pfizerbiontech-covid-19-vaccine

 

 

 

 

Tasmania funeral director
https://twitter.com/i/status/1564178692787818499

 

 

 

 

“The real threat to the world is global cooling. Otherwise known as winter.” – Carlson

Europe Warned Of Danger For Many Winters To Come (RT)

Europe could face gas shortages for several winters as a result of the Russian supply cut, Shell CEO Ben van Beurden told a news conference on Monday, as reported by Reuters. “I do not think this crisis is going to be limited to just one winter. It may well be that we will have a number of winters where we have to somehow find solutions,” van Beurden said. The chief executive pointed out that Europe will remain under pressure as it takes steps to scrap Russian gas supplies by 2027. “If there was no Russian gas supply at all… life would be very hard,” van Beurden noted, adding “We should all be very mindful and responsible when it comes to that.”


According to the Shell CEO, the expectation of a swift resolution to Europe’s energy crisis “is a fantasy we should put aside.” European gas and power futures contracts rocketed to record highs last week, with prices reaching around 10 times above the levels where they were a year ago. The rally followed Russian energy giant Gazprom’s announcement of an upcoming shutdown due to maintenance of the only operational turbine on the Nord Stream 1 pipeline. Gas transit via the route will be entirely suspended from August 31 to September 2.

Read more …

“..The economic and financial breakdown of Europe will be much faster than the obviously necessary political change of its third rate leadership..”

Europe’s Economic And Social Suicide (MoA)

The U.S. has, out of purely egoistic reasons, dragged Europe, and especially Germany, into a trap that will lead to its economic and social destruction. Instead of recognizing the danger, and taking the necessary countermeasure, the European and the German ‘leaders’ committed themselves to help with the process. The best thing for Europe and Germany would of course have been to avoid the crisis. That failed because of a lack of insight and effort. But now, as Europe is deep down in a hole, the politicians should at least stop digging. It is in Europe’s and especially Germany’s obvious interest to keep the crisis as short as possible. But the lunatics who are ruling over Europe are still doing the opposite:

“Germany will keep up its support for Kyiv “for as long as it takes”, Chancellor Olaf Scholz said on Monday, calling for an enlargement of the European Union to eventually include Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia…. Germany had undergone a “fundamental change of heart” in recent months on its military support for Ukraine, he said. “We will keep up this support, reliably and, above all, for as long as it takes,” he told the packed university audience. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen echoed the “as long as it takes” promise to Kyiv in a speech in Slovenia, calling for “a new strategic thinking” to uphold European values.

As those ‘leaders’ seem to see it, affordable energy, warm homes, sufficient food, jobs and pensions of Europe citizens are not part of the ‘European values’ they intend to uphold. The economic and financial breakdown of Europe will be much faster than the obviously necessary political change of its third rate leadership. The only political sector that will not be damaged by all this, at least in France and Germany, is the far right. That in itself is also a danger.

Von der Leyen

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The solutions are obvious. They’re both called Nord Stream.

Western Europe Headed For ‘Energy Collapse’ – Hungary (RT)

Western Europe’s policy of rejecting Russian energy, even in the absence of suitable alternatives, could lead to systemic collapse when the public is left without heat this winter, Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto warned on Monday. “All these statements … from Western Europe on the issue of energy supply simply do not work at all with winterr approaching,” Szijjarto explained to a meeting of his country’s diplomats, according to the Sputnik news agency. The Foreign Minister pointed out that while“ideological, political, communication statements with effective support from the international media can easily inflate balloons that cover people’s eyes,” all the ideology in the world won’t keep EU citizens warm when winter approaches.

It is very difficult to explain to someone in winter that they are not cold when there is no heating. Insisting that Hungary had not yet fallen into this trap, he warned that pressure from other EU governments would only get worse, as the current world order “is approaching a huge collapse, almost at the speed of an asteroid.”Russian sources are integral to European energy security, he argued, implying that without them, social discontent could lead to systemic collapse. Not only will Hungary not entertain talk of sanctions on Russian energy, but other nations will quietly back it on the matter – even if they won’t do so publicly, Szijjarto told the ambassadors.

While Budapest has pushed back against bloc-wide calls for an embargo on Russian oil and gas since the notion first began circulating among EU politicians, other states that once demanded Moscow be punished over Ukraine have quickly realized that no other source of energy can make up for the loss of Russian supplies. Electricity costs in Germany and France shot up to record heights on Friday, driven by Moscow’s threat to shut down the last operational turbine on the Nord Stream 1 pipeline for three days’ maintenance. Those countries are far from the only ones to feel the bite of sanctions that were supposed to punish Russia, however, and Europeans of all nationalities are stockpiling what fuel they do have – whether it’s firewood or coal – for the long winter ahead.

Read more …

“..placing the blame on the “zombie Government in Westminster, and two leadership contenders living on another planet.”

One In Four Britons Won’t Turn On Heating This Winter (RT)

Nearly one in four adults in Britain do not plan on turning on their heating this winter as energy bills are set to skyrocket, The Independent reported on Monday, citing researcher Savanta ComRes. According to a survey conducted by the firm on July 29 and 30, before the new price cap was announced, the figure is even higher for parents with children under 18. The study shows that 23% of those polled (more than 2,000 adults) said they will not turn their heating on at all. Seven in ten (69%) indicated they would switch their heating on less, and one in ten (11%) said they would take out a loan, with the latter figure rising for those with children under 18 (17%).The research comes amid warnings of a dire winter, as the energy price cap is set to rise 80% by October, pushing the average household’s yearly bill up from £1,971 to £3,549 ($2,300 to $4,150).


According to The Independent, the Liberal Democrats, which commissioned the survey, warned that British families are being forced to make difficult choices, with the country “on the brink of the worst cost-of living-crisis in a century.” “Families and pensioners across the country are making heartbreaking decisions because the Government has failed to save them,” the Liberal Democrats’ Cabinet Office spokesperson, Christine Jardine, said, adding, “It is a national scandal that parents are having to choose between heating their homes and feeding their children. It shouldn’t be like this.” Jardine warned that an “economic catastrophe”is “just a month away,” placing the blame on the “zombie Government in Westminster, and two leadership contenders living on another planet.”

Read more …

Is it only this bad in Britain?

‘A Horrible Winter Lies Ahead’: Next PM Will Inherit An NHS On Its Knees (G.)

In a television studio in Stoke-on-Trent last month, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak traded blows over everything from credit card economics to Channel migrants to the accessories chain Claire’s. The list of issues the pair clashed over was dizzyingly long. There was one glaring omission, however. In the hour-long debate there was not a single mention of the NHS – despite being engulfed in its biggest ever crisis. The NHS now shares the same traits as many of those relying upon it to keep them alive and well: it is elderly, has multiple comorbidities, and is in dire need of emergency care. Summer has left it on its knees. Worse is expected this winter.

“The new prime minister will inherit an NHS in its worst state in living memory,” says Matthew Taylor, the chief executive of the NHS Confederation, which represents the healthcare system in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. “There is no escaping that the NHS is in a state of crisis.” The facts, he says, speak for themselves. “There are 105,000 vacancies. A&Es are overcrowded. Around one in seven hospital beds are occupied by patients who can’t be discharged. Some patients have had to wait over 40 hours for an ambulance. Care is being put at risk by neglected buildings due to underinvestment. And then there’s the waiting lists, which stretch into the millions across elective care, mental health and community care.”

Jeremy Hunt, the chair of the health and social care committee, is equally concerned. “The new PM will inherit an NHS facing the most serious crisis in its history,” he warns. “A&Es, ambulances, general practice and social care are in serious peril across the country.” The overriding problem for the new Downing Street incumbent is that, while in previous years problems in the NHS centred on specific areas, today the entire house is on fire. “The NHS has never been as challenged as it is now,” says Alastair McLellan, the editor of Health Service Journal. “There is not one area of NHS provision that isn’t really struggling … There is literally nowhere where it isn’t bad, and in some cases really bad.”

Read more …

Some things need to be read more than once.

“We will announce a national strategy at the Conference that identifies actions the government will take to catalyze the public and private sectors to drive transformative change and address the intersections between food, hunger, nutrition, and health,”

White House Sets Date For First ‘Hunger Conference’ In Decades (RT)

The White House has announced when it plans to hold the first Hunger, Nutrition and Health conference in over 50 years as the US continues to deal with rampant inflation, which is affecting food prices throughout the country. Set to be held on September 28 in Washington, DC, the conference will supposedly bring together “government leaders, academics, activists and Americans from all walks of life” to focus on issues affecting millions of citizens who are faced with food insecurity amid surging prices. “We will announce a national strategy at the Conference that identifies actions the government will take to catalyze the public and private sectors to drive transformative change and address the intersections between food, hunger, nutrition, and health,” a statement by White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre reads.

President Biden’s administration says it aims to improve food access and affordability, empower people to make healthy food choices and enhance food security research in areas experiencing destitution. Washington has claimed it plans to eradicate hunger in the US completely by 2030. “I’ll be convening the White House Conference with Hunger, Nutrition, and Health to bring together anti-hunger and nutrition advocates, food companies, local state governments, tribal and territory committees to lay out our plan to combat hunger and improve nutrition for every American,” Biden said in a video statement back in May. The meeting will come as inflation has put a noticeable strain on the food budgets of many American families as grocery store prices have gone up some 12.2% since last year, according to the Consumer Price Index.

Inflation has reached a 40-year high under the Biden administration, hitting 9.1% in June and currently sitting at 8.5%. With prices of food, fuel, and consumer goods rising, the Biden administration has continued to spend lavishly, with the president allocating more than $54 billion since February for military and economic aid to Ukraine and passing a $739 billion climate, healthcare, and tax reform bill earlier this month. While the bill is named the ‘Inflation Reduction Act’, the Congressional Budget Office has noted that it will saddle middle-class Americans with around $20 billion in additional taxes over the coming decade, whilst having a “negligible” impact on inflation.

Read more …

Mad man.

Zelensky Promises To Recapture Donbass (RT)

President Vladimir Zelensky said in his daily evening address on Sunday that Ukraine will recapture Donbass, which is now almost fully seized by Russian forces. “We have not forgotten and will not forget any of our cities and any of our people,” he said. “Now Donbass is almost destroyed by Russian strikes, devastated. The proud and glorious Ukrainian Donetsk was humiliated by the Russian occupation and robbed. But Ukraine will return. For sure. Life will return. The dignity of the people of Donbass will return. The ability to live will return. The opportunity to live safely and happily,” the president added.


According to him, this is what the Ukrainian flag will symbolize “when we set it up in Donetsk, Gorlovka, Mariupol, in all cities of Donbass, Azov area, in all areas under Russian occupation – in Kharkov, Zaporozhye, Kherson regions. And definitely in Crimea.” “Ukraine remembers everything,” Zelensky said. The US may be helping Ukraine prepare for an impending counteroffensive against Russia, the Washington Post claimed in a piece published this week, pointing to the type of weaponry making up the latest batch of military aid pledged to Kiev by the Pentagon. Last month, a number of top Ukrainian officials suggested that the country’s military would launch a counteroffensive in the south of the country in August to retake the city of Kherson.

Stephen Cohen RIP

Read more …

“Kiev has been talking about a “Kherson counteroffensive” all summer, while soliciting more weapons and ammunition from its Western backers.”

Ukraine’s Attempt At Counter-offensive Has Failed – Russia (RT)

Ukraine’s much-heralded “counter-offensive” in Kherson has “failed miserably,” the Russian Defense Ministry said on Monday, listing the losses suffered by Kiev at the end of the day. Ukrainian forces attempted to attack in three directions on orders of President Vladimir Zelensky but made no gains, Moscow said. Russian troops caused “great losses” to the Ukrainian attackers during the day’s battles, including 26 tanks, 23 armored fighting vehicles, nine more armored vehicles, two SU-25 ground-attack jets and more than 560 troops, the Russian Defense Ministry said in a statement on Monday evening. The enemy’s another attempt at offensive actions has failed miserably.


Earlier in the day, the Ukrainian outlet Suspilne quoted Southern Command spokesperson Natalia Humeniuk as saying that “offensive actions in various directions” had begun, “including in the Kherson region.” She offered no details, however, saying only that “any military operation needs silence.” By Monday evening, however, the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine mentioned only a Russian attack near the village of Potemkino. Kiev has been talking about a “Kherson counteroffensive” all summer, while soliciting more weapons and ammunition from its Western backers. In a video address to the people on Sunday, Zelensky vowed that “Ukraine will return” to Donbass – as well as Kharkov, Zaporozhye, Kherson and “definitely in Crimea.”

Read more …

“Ukrainian artillery launched at least eight large-caliber shells at the city on Sunday, with two of them landing near the nuclear power plant, according to the report.”

Ukrainian Drone Downed Over Nuclear Plant – Russia (RT)

Russian forces on Sunday shot down a Ukrainian drone that was apparently on a mission to strike the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant, the Russian military said on Monday. The drone was shot down by small arms fire and fell on the roof of one of the buildings at the nuclear site, the Russian Defense Ministry said during a daily briefing. The building in question serves as storage for nuclear fuel and waste, it said. The crash didn’t cause any significant damage, the statement added.


The incident was described as part of a pattern of Ukrainian attacks against the Russia-controlled facility and the city of Energodar, which hosts it. Ukrainian artillery launched at least eight large-caliber shells at the city on Sunday, with two of them landing near the nuclear power plant, according to the report. The Ukrainian staff at the facility “ensures the technical condition and operation” of the Zaporozhye plant, the Russian ministry added. It said there was no evidence of radiation leaks from the site.

https://twitter.com/A__Alimov/status/1564187762177331200

Read more …

“We’ve been waiting for this mission for a long time. We believe it to be necessary,” the Kremlin spokesman said..”

Moscow Urges ‘All Nations’ To Pressure Kiev Over Nuclear Site (RT)

Making Ukraine cease its attacks on the Russian-controlled Zaporozhye nuclear power plant will require a joint effort from the whole international community, Kremlin press secretary Dmitry Peskov has said. “We still believe that all countries are obliged to put pressure on the Ukrainian side, so that it stops endangering the European continent by shelling the territory of the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant and adjacent areas,” Peskov told the media on Monday. The statement came hours after International Atomic Energy Agency head Rafael Grossi announced that IAEA experts would visit the nuclear plant this week to assess the security situation and establish a permanent presence at the facility.

“We’ve been waiting for this mission for a long time. We believe it to be necessary,” the Kremlin spokesman said, adding that Moscow was ready to cooperate with the UN atomic agency. He assured that Russia would provide the necessary security to the IAEA inspectors once they reach the plant from Ukrainian-held territory. Peskov also commented on a suggestion by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres that the crisis at Europe’s largest nuclear power station could be resolved by setting up a demilitarized zone around the perimeter. “No, there’s no talk about it,” the Kremlin press secretary said when asked about the proposal.

Russia has repeatedly accused Ukraine of targeting the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant and the nearby town of Energodar with artillery and drones, warning that it could trigger a disaster that would eclipse the 1986 Chernobyl incident. Ukraine, meanwhile, has claimed that Russian forces have turned the nuclear plant into a military base and that they’ve been shelling the facility themselves to pin the blame on Kiev. Moscow, which has denied those accusations, has been insisting on a visit by the IAEA to the site.

Read more …

From Whitney Webb’s outlet.

Kissinger And The WEF’s Young Global Leaders Program (UH)

When the World Economic Forum began their Global Leaders for Tomorrow initiative in the early 1990s, Klaus Schwab’s organization implemented a program of recruitment and training for global leaders which was almost indistinguishable from Kissinger’s CIA-funded International Seminar. Schwab was treading in the footsteps of his mentor, Henry Kissinger, and it was the Dan David Foundation, while Kissinger was seated on their board, which eventually awarded Schwab with the initial funding required to create the current iteration of the program, the Forum for Young Global Leaders. The World Economic Forum has spawned many globalist-aligned heads of states, cabinet ministers, business leaders, entrepreneurs and other powerful actors, through their Global Leaders for Tomorrow and Young Global Leaders initiatives.

Schwab has even spoken openly on how his organization has gone on to “penetrate the cabinets” of supposedly sovereign states, and we should not be naive, as he has been planning on doing exactly this for at least three decades. However, it isn’t the thousands of participants who have completed these programs who we should be most concerned about. Our real concern should be with the billions of democratic voters who have been tricked into believing that any of the leaders produced by either Schwab or Kissinger have their best interests at heart.

Klaus Schwab became the heir to Henry Kissinger’s most important project, the infiltration of individuals and organizations in countries around the world with the aim of creating globalist-aligned governments built within the framework of an outdated and soulless conceptualization of American imperialism. Klaus Schwab’s activities since his time at Harvard can be seen as simply a direct continuation of Kissinger’s work during the 1950s and 1960s, and it would be naive of us to believe that there is not someone else, already groomed and trained, who is ready and willing to pick up Kissinger’s political baton from Schwab and continue in their joint mission towards globalist governance.

Read more …

Fauci’s been there since Reagan.

How Dick Cheney Created Anthony Fauci (Unherd)

Few people in America today are as powerful and polarising as Anthony Fauci. For the Left, Fauci is a consummate cool-headed scientist, emblematic of the essential role of government. On the Right, he is a Deep State operative who destroyed the lives of countless people to serve a hidden agenda, all while mysteriously taking home a bigger paycheck than any other of the country’s two million federal employees (including their collective boss, the President). The reality is that both narratives fundamentally misunderstand the position Fauci occupies in American government. Far from being a public health expert, Fauci sits at the very top of America’s biodefence infrastructure. And contrary to the notion that he is a Deep State string-puller of the Democratic party, it was George W. Bush and Dick Cheney who not only put Fauci there but created the very framework that the immunologist-physician commands.

This in part accounts for the otherwise inexplicable fact that Fauci, loathed by President Trump, was never fired by the notoriously vengeful politician who galvanised his brand with the phrase “You’re fired!”. But Fauci’s untouchability raises an even more perplexing question: Why did the media beatify him as the country’s beneficent, infallible Covid saviour rather than look into the reality of his position and the source of his nearly limitless authority? To understand the rise of Fauci, and his legacy as he retires this year, we must return to the first months of the 2000s, when a hawkish new administration was settling into power. While George W. Bush had come to Washington touting a new brand of “compassionate conservatism”, Cheney came carrying decades of Defense Department experience, including a term as Defense Secretary under George H.W. Bush during Operation Desert Storm.

Bush’s interest in biodefence and pandemic preparedness is frequently traced back to a 2004 book, The Great Influenza. The reality, however, is that the administration came to power with biological weapons and infectious disease very much top of mind, with Cheney seeking to address the gaping hole in America’s national security left by the country’s lack of a coherent biodefence strategy. But if biodefence wasn’t already a priority for the Bush White House, that swiftly changed a week to the day after the 9/11 attacks, a mere eight months into Bush’s first term, when the United States suffered the most serious biological weapons attack in its history. On September 18, 2001, a number of national media outlets, including CBS News, NBC News, ABC News, the New York Post and the National Enquirer, received a series of letters containing a dry white powder.

Three weeks later, a second round of letters was sent to the offices of senators Tom Daschle, then the Senate Majority leader, and Patrick Leahy, head of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Twenty-two people were infected with anthrax, five of whom died. Already in a state of unprecedented military alert, the United States was sent into near-chaos by the anthrax attacks, which, by essentially weaponising the postal system with one of the world’s most lethal pathogens, engendered a sense that the country was under attack by an unseen enemy with unfathomable capabilities.

Hilton Fauci

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“This is the third time in a hundred-odd years that Germany has attempted suicide, and this time it looks like it’s going to work.”

The Wild West (Jim Kunstler)

The West’s biggest project these days, the war it provoked over Ukraine, turned out to be a giant Acme land-mine under the West’s collective Wile E. Coyote ass. As Russia advances implacably there and financial sanctions fizzle, behold the scramble in Europe now among citizens desperate to not freeze to death in the months ahead. This is the third time in a hundred-odd years that Germany has attempted suicide, and this time it looks like it’s going to work. Farewell nice German cars, machine tools, and other symbols of industrial might. In feckless Poland, the folks are out gathering lumps of coal and scouring the forest floor for firewood — they’re forbidden by law from cutting standing timber. Mr. Macron tells France she must accept “reduced living standards.”

Looks like Brexit did not go far enough as the UK holds hands with the rest of NATO tromping into economic oblivion. Think the USA is doing better? The summer rally in financial markets was just another frame in the Loony Tunes festival that American life has become. The Fed Chair, Mr. Powell, said all the parts out loud at the annual Jackson Hole banker meet-up last week: look out below, we’ve decided to take this sucker down (in the immortal words of George W. Bush), since pretending to stoke prosperity via Modern Monetary Theory only results in, duh, ruinous inflation. This raises the question, though, as to which is more politically damaging: inflation or depression? It is really only the difference between having plenty of worthless money or having no money at all.

The institutional rot eating away at our national underpinnings got more exposed last week when Mark Zuckerberg stupidly blurted to Joe Rogan that, yes, in the fall of 2020 the FBI warned Facebook — “came to the folks on our team,” he put it, smarmily — about a Russian disinformation campaign underway, wink wink. And so, Facebook turned the volume down to zero on certain news about a laptop belonging to one Hunter Biden stuffed with selfie porn (prostitutes included), video evidence of narcotics use, and deal memos about worldwide influence peddling involving the whole dang Biden family.

Read more …

‘We thought there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election, we have it on notice that basically there’s about to be some kind of dump that’s similar to that so just be vigilant.’ ”

Trump Calls for New Election Immediately (Celente)

Former President Donald Trump took to social media on Monday to call for an emergency presidential election after the latest developments on the Hunter Biden laptop story. “This is massive Fraud & ELECTION INTERFERENCE at a level never seen before in our country. REMEDY: Declare the rightful winner or, and this would be the minimal solution, declare the 2020 Election irreparably compromised and have a new election.” The move came after Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, told podcaster Joe Rogan about how his company handled the Hunter Biden story and its interactions with the FBI. “Basically, the background here is the FBI basically came to us, some folks on our team, and was like, ‘Hey, just so you know you should be on high alert,’ ” said Zuckerberg. “

‘We thought there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election, we have it on notice that basically there’s about to be some kind of dump that’s similar to that so just be vigilant.’ ” The New York Post noted that when Rogan asked the tech head if the FBI had told Facebook to “be on guard specifically for our story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, Zuckerberg claimed, rather unconvincingly that he did “not remember . . . specifically” but “it basically fit the pattern.” Claiming it was a hoax and never existed, The New York Times reported in March that it was able to finally authenticate emails from Hunter Biden found on a laptop just before the 2020 election, but was snuffed out by Big Tech and mainstream media companies.

[..] The New York Post, citing invoices on Hunter’s abandoned laptop, reported that Burisma Energy in Ukraine, paid the Biden boy $1 million a year while his father was vice president—or about $83,333 per month. The holding company cut his pay in half when his father exited office, the report said. Twitter decided to block the Post’s story—at the height of the election season—due to its “Hacked Material Policy.” On Sunday, Trump called on FBI agents to stand up to their bosses. “When are the great Agents, and others, in the FBI going to say ‘we aren’t going to take it anymore,” much as they did when James Comey read off a list of all of Crooked Hillary Clinton’s crimes, only to say that no reasonable prosecutor would prosecute.,” Trump said.

“The wonderful people of the FBI went absolutely “nuts,” so Comey had to backtrack and do a FAKE INVESTIGATION in order to keep them at bay,” he wrote. “The end result, we won in 2016 (and did MUCH better in 2020!). But now the ‘Left’ has lost their minds!!!”

Read more …

With only 33 million of 242 million affected?

Third of Pakistan Under Water – Official (RT)

The country is faced with a crisis of “unimaginable proportions,” climate change minister Sherry Rehman says. A third of Pakistan is under water as a result of flooding caused by record monsoon rains, the South Asian country’s climate change minister, Sherry Rehman, has said. “It’s all one big ocean, there’s no dry land to pump the water out,” Rehman told the news agency AFP on Monday. Pakistan spans 881,913 square kilometers (340,509 square miles), which makes it the world’s 33rd-largest country by area, ahead of the likes of Turkey, France and Germany. Inhabited by almost 242 million people, it’s also the fifth most populated nation in the world. What’s happening in Pakistan now is “very far from a normal monsoon – it is climate dystopia at our doorstep,” the minister said.


The flooding has created a crisis of “unimaginable proportions” in the country, she added. In a separate interview with Deutsche Welle, Rehman claimed that “we’ve had to deploy the navy for the first time to operate in Indo-Pakistan” because such vast areas are being covered with water. The death toll since mid-June from the monsoon rains had reached 1,061 as of Monday, according to the National Disaster Management Agency. More than 3,000 roads have been destroyed, with 130 bridges and 495,000 homes damaged by flash floods, the agency said. Rehman estimated last week that the disaster had affected around 33 million people in the country.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

 

Reverse racism

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


Ali in Paris

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

Feb 032022
 


James McNeill Whistler Arrangement in Pink, Red and Purple 1883-4

 

Deliberate Infections Give Unique Covid Insight (BBC)
Letter From NHS Clinical Scientist Who is Quitting Over the Covid Vaccines (DS)
Has The Red Carpet Been Rolled Out For A Mainstream Pivot On Ivermectin? (QTR)
New Zealand To End Quarantine Stays And Reopen Its Borders (Fox)
US Truckers Got Booted Off Of Facebook (Kirsch)
Facebook Stock In Free-fall (RT)
Ukraine Invasion No Longer ‘Imminent’ – White House (RT)
Russia Condemns Destructive US Troops Boost In Europe (BBC)
America’s Putin Psychosis (Ritter)
Don’t Blame Putin for Europe’s Energy Crisis (FP)
Why Is Trust In Media Plummeting? Just Look At What’s Happening At CNN (G.)
World Leaders Support Joe Rogan (RT)
MPs Push For Julian Assange To Be Granted Political Asylum In France (EN)

 

 

 

 

PCR “We have built this crisis with this new definition of “cases”.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1488981740303572993

 

 

The 10 billion, 90%-efficacy vaccine shots have caused the noticeable trend break downwards.

 

 

Bunch of idiots

 

 

 

 

ADP predicts huge job losses. Watch tomorrow.

Dave Collum: ”The job market is not tight, it’s broken.”

 

 

1/ The fact that Imperial College did such a study tells you they KNEW no-one was going to die. You can’t take that risk, even if they volunteer. 2/ It was an early version of the virus, which a/ no longer exists, and b/ was 10-100x more lethal than Omicron. And they still already knew there would be no deaths.

Deliberate Infections Give Unique Covid Insight (BBC)

The world’s first Covid “challenge trial” – which deliberately infected people – gives a unique view on the early stages of the disease. The virus was given to 36 young, healthy and unvaccinated volunteers, at the Royal Free hospital, in London. The results show where and when the virus takes hold in the body – and that some resist the infection. Future challenge trials could help find the next generation of Covid vaccines and drugs. They allow scientists to study the earliest stages of an infection, even before symptoms develop. Each of the volunteers, aged 18-30, had an identical dose of Covid – equivalent to the amount in a single droplet propelled out of somebody’s nose during the peak of their Covid infection – squirted up their nose. But only half of them became infected.

And understanding how the others – unvaccinated and without immunity from previous infections – resisted the virus will be the focus of future research. In those that did develop an infection, the virus took off rapidly, the first symptoms and positive test results appearing within just 42 hours. The previous consensus had been it took five days from exposure to the virus to first symptoms. And while the virus takes a foothold in the throat, the greatest amount was found when it moved up to the nose, leading the researchers to stress the importance of facemasks covering both. “It’s a really unique study,” Prof Christopher Chiu, from the Institute of Infection, at Imperial College London, said.

The amount of virus peaked about five days after the infection and remained detectable up to 12 days later. Symptoms were mild but some volunteers had a prolonged loss of their sense of smell. Prof Chiu said: “Lateral flow tests correlate very well with the presence of infectious virus. “Even though in the first day or two they may be less sensitive, if you use them correctly and repeatedly, and act on them if they read positive, this will have a major impact on interrupting viral spread.” The virus used was an early variant taken from a patient at the start of the pandemic. Further studies will explore more recent versions.

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The damage to healthcare will last for a long time.

“.. I know which doctors I will trust when all this is over.”

Letter From NHS Clinical Scientist Who is Quitting Over the Covid Vaccines (DS)

“[..] a letter from an NHS Clinical Scientist of some 25 years – currently employed at an NHS University Hospital Trust but who has just resigned – to Health Secretary Sajid Javid to tell him why she is quitting over the complicity of the health service in the national scandal that is the Covid vaccine rollout.”

A core principle in healthcare is to ensure that patients are given free access to all information, to enable them to make a proper and informed choice about any treatment. As a scientist, I have been and still am gravely concerned about the Government and NHS misrepresentation of these vaccines as ‘safe and effective’ – a mantra still promoted by our Government and media, despite the overwhelming evidence demonstrating otherwise of the MHRA Yellow Card scheme and worldwide databases for reporting adverse effects. Worryingly, the great majority of GPs have not being raising awareness of this scheme, leading to significant under-reporting and, consequently, under-estimation of the actual situation.

I personally have spoken to people who, after experiencing bad reactions to the first dose, have been encouraged by doctors to continue regardless and take the second, with serious consequences for their health. They had never heard of the MHRA Yellow Card scheme and wouldn’t know how to make a report. Misinformation starts from the seniors: I have been told (in writing) by Human Resources senior staff at my hospital that that vaccines have been “licensed”, genuinely oblivious to the fact that MHRA has granted only emergency approval. I have been appalled by the NHS willingness to trample over the concept of personalised medicine in the promotion of products still in phase three trials. There has been no stratified analysis of the balance of risks and benefits.

No scientific reference to real data from the pandemic statistics nor to those of the adverse effects – deaths and life-limiting injuries – reported globally. No mention of the unavailability of medium and long term safety data, which may not be relevant for the elderly but it certainly is for the young. No information about alternative treatments. This is not the NHS I joined and embraced. Primum non nocere: first, do no harm. Equally important is the right to bodily autonomy, including the right to refuse any treatment or medication. Enshrined in law for the protection of all human beings, this core principle extends to everybody, patients and healthcare staff alike. The Government mandate, offering NHS workers the alternative between taking an experimental product against their best judgement or lose their livelihood, can hardly be portrayed as ‘free choice’.

I hope it is clear that the motivation of NHS staff across all professions in resisting this coercion is founded on ethical grounds. Doctors, nurses, pharmacists, clinical scientists – we all feel that our integrity would be compromised, that the fundamental principle of trust, at the core of our unique relationship with the patients we serve, would be irreparably transgressed; and that this erosion of professional ethics would carry the inherent danger of establishing coercion as an acceptable practice in future, with NHS staff imposing procedures on patients against their will – the victim becoming the perpetrator. From a patient prospective, I know which doctors I will trust when all this is over.

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“Duh, of course ivermectin works and we’ve known it all along, it just doesn’t work as well as [insert big pharma drug here]”

Has The Red Carpet Been Rolled Out For A Mainstream Pivot On Ivermectin? (QTR)

I couldn’t help but think when this Japanese study popped up yesterday that the timing sure would be convenient now for the mainstream media to start a pivot on ivermectin. Now that Moderna has received official FDA approval for its vaccine and Pfizer is happily seeking Emergency Use Authorization to jab kids as young as 6 months – and now that major drug manufacturers have had their antiviral Covid pills approved – maybe it can finally be time to pump the brakes on the ivermectin hysteria and allow the truth and reason to nudge their way in. In other words, the fat pigs are finally finished stuffing their gluttonous faces at the trough of the FDA, stocked with newly-printed U.S. dollars.

Unable to physically consume anymore, and noticing that all but a few molecules of feed are even left, they can now reluctantly relinquish their positions at the front of the line and waddle away, leaving the rest of the animals a chance to squabble over the remains. All of the major pharmaceutical companies (and their lobbyists) finally getting the approvals that they want for all of their Covid drugs may roll out the red carpet for us to finally embrace reality and the truth, which I believe is that ivermectin has efficacy. What we’re seeing now in the media is a massive pivot regarding Covid. With the emergence of omicron and many geographic locations around the world lifting their Covid restrictions – and most notably politicians understanding they can’t win an election by locking us in our home [..] the media pivot on Covid has been pronounced since 2022 began.

And not unlike the pivot we’ve already seen on the lab leak and whether or not vaccines would end the virus, I’m expecting we see a similar pivot on ivermectin. Of course, I could be wrong. I don’t mind being wrong. I exist on the fringe, as my readers know. In the words of Peter Venkman: “If I’m wrong, nothing happens! We go to jail – peacefully, quietly. We’ll enjoy it!” But if I’m not…and the narrative on ivermectin does in fact change to wind up as “Duh, of course ivermectin works and we’ve known it all along, it just doesn’t work as well as [insert big pharma drug here]” everybody responsible for suppressing over the last 2 years needs to be held accountable for what, in my opinion, may wind up amounting to crimes against humanity.

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Pointless and endless.

New Zealand To End Quarantine Stays And Reopen Its Borders (Fox)

New Zealand’s government on Thursday said it will end its quarantine requirements for incoming travelers and reopen its borders, a change welcomed by thousands of citizens abroad who have endured long waits to return home. Since the start of the pandemic, New Zealand has enacted some of the world’s strictest border controls. Most incoming travelers need to spend 10 days in a quarantine hotel room run by the military, a requirement that has created a bottleneck at the border. The measures were initially credited with saving thousands of lives and allowed New Zealand to eliminate or control several outbreaks of the coronavirus.

But, increasingly, the border controls have been viewed as out-of-step in a world where the virus is becoming endemic, and in a country where the omicron variant is already spreading. The bottleneck forced many New Zealanders abroad to enter a lottery-style system to try and secure a spot in quarantine and passage home. The shortcomings of the system were highlighted over the past week by pregnant New Zealand journalist Charlotte Bellis, who was stranded in Afghanistan after New Zealand officials initially rejected her application to return home to give birth. After international publicity, officials backed down and offered her a spot in quarantine, which she has accepted.

The border changes mean that vaccinated New Zealanders returning from Australia will no longer need to go into quarantine from the end of this month, and vaccinated New Zealanders returning from the rest of the world can skip quarantine by mid-March. They will still be required to isolate at home. However, most tourists will need to wait until October before they can enter the country without a quarantine stay. And anybody who isn’t vaccinated will still be required to go through quarantine.

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Why does Facebook need to get into this?

US Truckers Got Booted Off Of Facebook (Kirsch)

I just got off the phone with Brian Brase who is organizing the US truckers. He’ll be on the VSRF call tomorrow (register at vacsafety.org). They got kicked off of Facebook because Facebook said they violated their QAnon policy. I suggested Substack and Brian said, “What’s that?” So I suggested I might be able to help them find a group of people who could run the IT for them to provide the truckers and their supporters a way to communicate. If you have both the time and expertise to do this, please volunteer using this form and we’ll get these guys re-platformed ASAP.

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They lost $200 billion in market cap overnight.

Facebook Stock In Free-fall (RT)

Shares of Facebook’s parent company Meta went into a nosedive after the markets closed on Wednesday, following an underwhelming quarterly report, the first since CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the name change. The stock stood strong at $323 a share when the markets closed at 4 pm EST, but collapsed to $249 just half an hour later, for a loss of almost 23%. In just the first eleven minutes of after-hours trading, $16 billion in Meta’s market cap had been wiped out. What triggered the sell-off was Meta’s quarterly report showing lower revenue, earnings per share, and the numbers of daily and monthly active users than expected by investors.


Whereas the investors expected around $30.15 billion, Facebook’s figures showed $27-$29 billion, CNBC reported, citing a Refinitiv survey of market analysts. According to the same source, earnings per share came in at $3.67, short of the expected $3.84. The number of daily active users (DAU) stood at 1.93 billion, less than the expected 1.95 billion, while the monthly active users (MAU) also undershot the 2.95 expectation, ending up at 2.91 billion, according to Street Account. This is the first quarterly report since Zuckerberg announced his social media behemoth would be changing its name to Meta, to better represent its focus on the upcoming “metaverse” and encompass the existing Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp brands.

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Awkward walk back.

Ukraine Invasion No Longer ‘Imminent’ – White House (RT)

The US government is no longer using the word ‘imminent’ in its narrative around the alleged Russian ‘invasion’ of Ukraine, White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters, on Wednesday, explaining that it was sending an unintended message. “I used it once. I think others have used that once, and we stopped using it because I think it sent a message that we weren’t intending to send, which was that we knew that President Putin had made a decision,” Psaki said at a press briefing. “I would say the vast majority of times I’ve talked about it, I’ve said he could invade ‘at any time,’” she added. Psaki’s remarks come after the US envoy to the UN backtracked from the use of ‘imminent’ in an interview with NPR aired on Tuesday.


“No, I would not say that we are arguing that it’s imminent,” Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield told the broadcaster. The official transcript of Psaki’s January 25 briefing says otherwise, however. Asked whether the Russian invasion of Ukraine – which the US media and intelligence agencies have claimed since late October would happen any day now – was still “imminent,” here’s what Psaki had to say. “When we said it was imminent, it remains imminent,” she told one reporter. “Well, ‘imminent’ has a pretty intense meaning. Doesn’t it?” she said in answer to the very next question. “And it’s still the belief that it’s imminent?” was the followup, to which Psaki replied, “Correct.”

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3,000 troops vs 130,000 Russia?!

Russia Condemns Destructive US Troops Boost In Europe (BBC)

Russia has condemned a US decision to send extra troops to Europe to support its Nato allies amid continuing fears of a Russian invasion of Ukraine. Moscow said it was a “destructive” step which heightened tension and reduced the scope for a political solution. The Pentagon said 2,000 US troops would be sent from North Carolina to Poland and Germany, and a further 1,000 already in Germany would go to Romania. Russia has some 100,000 troops near Ukraine. It denies planning to invade. The tensions come eight years after Russia annexed Ukraine’s southern Crimea peninsula and backed a bloody rebellion in the eastern Donbas region.


Moscow accuses the Ukrainian government of failing to implement the Minsk agreement – an international deal to restore peace to the east, where Russian-backed rebels control swathes of territory and at least 14,000 people have been killed since 2014. Responding to US President Joe Biden’s decision to deploy extra troops to Europe this week, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko said it was a “destructive” and an “unjustified” step. Speaking on Wednesday, Mr Grushko added that it would “delight” the Ukrainian authorities, who would continue sabotaging the Minsk agreement “with impunity”. The Pentagon earlier said the American troops being deployed would not fight in Ukraine – but would ensure the defence of Washington’s allies. Their deployment is in addition to the 8,500 troops the Pentagon put on alert last month to be ready to deploy to Europe if needed.

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“They said one thing, they did another,” Putin said. “As people say, they screwed us over, well they simply deceived us.”

America’s Putin Psychosis (Ritter)

The war of words between Russia and the United States over Ukraine escalated further on Tuesday as Russian President Vladimir Putin responded for the first time to the U.S. written reply to Russia’s demands for security guarantees that were expressed in the form of a pair of draft treaties submitted by Moscow to the U.S. and NATO in December. “It is already clear…that the fundamental Russian concerns were ignored. We did not see an adequate consideration of our three key requirements,” Putin said at a press conference that followed his meeting with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban in Moscow.

Putin said the U.S. had failed to give “adequate consideration of our three key demands regarding NATO expansion, the renunciation of the deployment of strike weapons systems near Russian borders, and the return of the [NATO] bloc’s military infrastructure in Europe to the state of 1997, when the Russia-NATO founding act was signed.” He detailed what he alleged was NATO’s long history of deception, re-emphasizing the 1990 verbal commitment by former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker that NATO would not expand “an inch” eastward. “They said one thing, they did another,” Putin said. “As people say, they screwed us over, well they simply deceived us.”

With some 130,000 Russian troops deployed in the western and southern military districts bordering Ukraine, and another 30,000 assembling in neighboring Belarus, U.S. policy makers are scrambling to figure out what Russia’s next move might be, a choice most U.S. policy makers believe boils down to diplomacy or war. Rather than examine the situation from the perspective of Russian national security interests, however, these officials have placed the fate of European peace and security in the hands of a single individual: Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.

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“European natural gas topped $60 per million Btu, equivalent to an oil price of an astonishing $350 per barrel.”

Don’t Blame Putin for Europe’s Energy Crisis (FP)

Europe typically depends on Russia for more than one-third of its natural gas use. Although Russia has been sending less to Europe this winter, it is fulfilling its long-term contractual commitments. The difference now is that it has all but cut off the additional supplies it usually sells on the spot market. If Russia were to cut or reduce contracted deliveries to Europe as well—which half a century of energy relations suggests is unlikely—it would be exceedingly difficult and expensive for Europe to replace lost Russian gas flows. Spot prices, already skyrocketing to unprecedented levels, would go even higher as European buyers tried to pull in LNG supplies otherwise headed for Asia, energy-intensive industries would shut down, and even household heating and electricity use would likely need to be rationed to prevent power outages.

But even if Russian gas flows continue uninterrupted, Europe still faces an energy crisis this year and, more importantly, in the years to come. By late summer of 2021, it was already evident that Europe was facing a looming energy crisis with gas storage levels unusually low. As winter set in, prices predictably soared to record levels, reaching such heights late last year that many industrial firms shut down production. In Britain, nearly 30 power utilities went bankrupt. European natural gas topped $60 per million Btu, equivalent to an oil price of an astonishing $350 per barrel. (Brent crude sells for around $90 a barrel, and the comparable U.S. gas price is around $4.) European household energy bills will rise another 50 percent this year, according to Bank of America.

Faced with public backlash and worries about the impact on the macroeconomy, governments with few other options to keep prices in check have resorted to subsidizing energy costs for people feeling the pinch. Denmark has announced it plans to send checks to households using natural gas for heating to offset the rise in prices. Norway, France, and several other European countries have done the same. Energy prices have eased in recent weeks, but only because Europe has been lucky with the weather. Winter temperatures have not been as cold as feared. The same has been true of Asia, allowing Europe to draw some cargoes of LNG that otherwise would have been needed there.

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Is this the end? The MSM start eating each other, like here the Guardian devouring CNN, in the same way that CNN’s Cuomo and Zucker go after each other. Because: they have no viewers left.

CNN calls itself “the iconic network”, Brian Stelter goes after Rogan saying he’s not credible because he doesn’t have a large media corporation like CNN behind him. He does have 25x more viewers though.

NOTE: wonder if the Guardian knows it’s part of “Media” too, and losing trust.

Why Is Trust In Media Plummeting? Just Look At What’s Happening At CNN (G.)

Media outlets are supposed to report the news not become it. On Wednesday CNN found itself coming afoul of that rule when Jeff Zucker abruptly resigned from his position as network president amid lurid circumstances. In a memo sent to colleagues, Zucker explained he was stepping down after failing to disclose a “consensual relationship” with a close colleague. While Zucker didn’t name the colleague directly, Allison Gollust, CNN’s executive vice-president and chief marketing officer, has confirmed her involvement in a memo to employees. Hang on a minute. Is a powerful man really resigning from a big job because he had a consensual relationship with a colleague? That’s not the usual way of things; many men have been accused of far worse transgressions and still managed to cling to power.

Well here’s some context: Gollust happens to be the former communications director for disgraced former New York governor Andrew Cuomo. And Zucker’s relationship with Gollust came up during an internal investigation into former anchor Chris Cuomo, who was fired from CNN in December after using his job to help his brother, Andrew, combat sexual harassment allegations (leading some commentators to dub CNN the “Cuomo Nepotism Network”.) Zucker stood by Chris Cuomo for months when his conflict-of-interest scandal first hit but eventually fired him a few days after the anchor was accused of sexual misconduct by a junior colleague at another network. Like his brother, it seems Chris holds a grudge. Two sources told Politico that it was Cuomo’s legal team, which is still negotiating his exit from the network, who flagged the relationship between Zucker and Gollust.

A reporter from media startup Puck News has also claimed that CNN received a letter from Cuomo’s lawyers asking for all communications between Zucker, Gollust and Cuomo to be preserved. While Zucker may not be having a very good week, Donald Trump (whose views on CNN are common knowledge) is having a ball. “Jeff Zucker, a world-class sleazebag who has headed ratings and real-news-challenged CNN for far too long, has been terminated for numerous reasons, but predominantly because CNN has lost its way with viewers,” Trump wrote in a statement. I hate to say it, but Trump has a point. You don’t have to be a cynic to reckon that CNN’s dismal ratings may factor into Zucker’s sudden departure: CNN had record ratings during the Trump years but has seen viewership plummet recently.

The Cuomo scandal certainly hasn’t helped the network’s credibility: during the early days of the pandemic Chris Cuomo repeatedly interviewed his brother on air and it was largely treated like hilarious banter instead of a clear conflict of interest. And that’s hardly been the only embarrassment the network has suffered: last year Jeffrey Toobin, CNN’s chief legal analyst exposed himself on a Zoom call with colleagues. While the New Yorker fired Toobin from his staff writer position, CNN gave him a little tap on the wrist and put him back on the air.

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Optimistic headline.

World Leaders Support Joe Rogan (RT)

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and El Salvador President Nayib Bukele both came out in defense of American podcast host Joe Rogan this week after critics, including the White House, encouraged Spotify to censor his show. The campaign – which has attempted to get Rogan’s Spotify show censored after he expressed skepticism over Covid-19 vaccines for young people and hosted several vaccine-skeptic doctors – was bolstered on Tuesday after White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said there was “more that can be done” by Spotify to crack down on speech which goes against the national Covid-19 line. Psaki’s comments were condemned by free speech activists in the US, who claimed they were unconstitutional and amounted to the state pressuring a private company to censor dissidents.


The two world leaders also came out in defense of Rogan’s right to free speech. In a statement, Bolsonaro said, “I’m not sure what [Rogan] thinks about me or about my government, but it doesn’t matter.” “If freedom of speech means anything, it means that people should be free to say what they think, no matter if they agree or disagree with us. Stand your ground! Hugs from Brazil.” Bukele – who has been accused of threatening freedom of the press in his county by criticizing ‘fake news’ journalists – used Psaki’s comments to mock critics who claim free speech “is under attack in El Salvador,” and appeared to argue that the White House’s interference in the Rogan matter amounted to a more egregious attack on free speech than anything his administration is accused of doing. Following calls for Rogan to be censored, Spotify announced it would start adding a ‘content advisory’ to shows that discuss the Covid-19 pandemic. The advisories will direct listeners to allegedly ‘trusted sources’ on the coronavirus, including scientists and academics.

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“WikiLeaks was formerly based in France and Assange’s children live in the country, but his lawyers admitted in 2020 that the fact that he is not on French soil would complicate the process.”

MPs Push For Julian Assange To Be Granted Political Asylum In France (EN)

Four French MPs are pushing for Julian Assange to be offered asylum in France amid the WikiLeaks founder’s ongoing fight against extradition from the UK to the US. Jennifer De Temmerman, Jean Lassalle, Cedric Villani and Francois Ruffin are due to speak at a press conference in Paris on 1 February where they will explain why Assange — currently in prison in the UK — should be given sanctuary in France. Assange’s defence team announced in February 2020 that it would be seeking asylum for him in France, ahead of the hearing in the UK on whether the 50-year-old should be extradited to the US for trial.


Two years on, Assange continues to fight extradition to the US, where would face trial over the release of a trove of classified military documents more than a decade ago. In December 2021, Britain’s High Court overturned a ruling by a lower court that Assange could not be extradited due to concerns over his mental health. In January, Assange won the right to appeal this decision to the UK Supreme Court, further delaying his possible extradition. WikiLeaks was formerly based in France and Assange’s children live in the country, but his lawyers admitted in 2020 that the fact that he is not on French soil would complicate the process.

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Cement use. 3 years vs 100 years.

 

 

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

 

Jan 252022
 


Pablo Picasso Female bust 1922

 

A Real American Hero (Jim Kunstler)
‘Obscene’ COVID Policies Serve Big Pharma Not People, Experts Say (CHD)
Nervous System Disorders After The Jab – A Case Study (Beck)
BA2 Omicron Variant is Worth Discussing (Chudov)
Omicron Variant Breaks The Evolutionary Lineage Of SARS-COV2 Variants (GHA)
Omicron Showing Merits of Targeted Protection, Great Barrington Signers (NW)
Covid Still ‘Full Of Nasty And Cunning’ Surprises – WHO Official (RT)
Unvaccinated Staff Are Holding NHS Together Amid Staff Shortages (GBN)
New York Judge Strikes Down State Mask Mandate (R.)
“They Can Have [Joe] Rogan or [Neil] Young. Not Both.” (RS)
The Globalist American Empire (Revolver)
Russia Planning “Lightning War” To Take Out Ukraine’s Capital: UK’s Johnson (ZH)
Assange Granted Permission To Take Extradition Case To UK Supreme Court (Haddad)

 

 

 

 

Malone at hearing

 

 

 

 

Ryan Cole

 

 

 

 

Hodkins

 

 

 

 

“..poisoned hundreds of millions of Americans in a medical experiment that has only begun to kill possibly more people than the Nazis ever dreamed of murdering..”

You can try and make someone look bad for wearing a Star of David or using the word Nazis, but then there is a Jewish commentator.

A Real American Hero (Jim Kunstler)

Sunday, at the March Against Mandates in our nation’s capital, the resistance to Covid vaccine tyranny laid it out, none with plainer eloquence than Bobby Kennedy: “We love the United States Constitution. And we have witnessed over the past 20 months a coup d’etat against democracy and the demolition, the controlled demolition of the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights. And starting with the censorship. James Madison, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson all said the same thing: we put freedom of speech in the first amendment because all of the other rights that we were trying to protect relied on that right. If you give government the license to silence its critics, you have given them the capacity to commit any atrocity they want, and to obliterate all the amendments and rights in the constitution.”

The message is getting through and the tyrants are running scared. They are perhaps having bad dreams involving torches and pitchforks. Naturally CNN took the lead in attempting to defame Mr. Kennedy as an anti-Semite for mentioning the name of Anne Frank in alluding to the Nazi insanity of the last century and people’s desperate efforts to escape it. CNN said: “The son of former Attorney General and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy has a long history of spreading vaccine misinformation…. Sunday’s event, billed as a protest against vaccine mandates, featured speakers repeatedly spreading misinformation about vaccines and showcased several bigoted comparisons to the Holocaust. At least one man was seen displaying a yellow Star of David, which Jews were required by law to wear as an identifier in Nazi Germany.”

So, wearing a Star of David now makes you an insurrectionist in the twisted logic of Wokery. How stupid and confused are they? Anyway, heroes emerge out of adversity. Let them pile it on, insulting history and reality. In fact, Bobby Kennedy stood in the cold at the Lincoln Memorial as a heroic figure for these times, giving a speech that carefully and succinctly denoted the stupendous criminality of the US public health bureaucracy and the corporate-government fascist partnership with Pharma Inc. that has poisoned hundreds of millions of Americans in a medical experiment that has only begun to kill possibly more people than the Nazis ever dreamed of murdering. There has not been a more important public utterance in this land than RFK Jr.’s since this century began.

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Long write-up of Ron Johnson Senate hearing yesterday.

‘Obscene’ COVID Policies Serve Big Pharma Not People, Experts Say (CHD)

Dr. Pierre Kory, pulmonary and critical care specialist and president and chief medical officer of the Front-Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance, called out the policies of U.S. health systems and their “failed response to this pandemic.” Kory said: “Some of the policies are “so obscene, absurd, illogical and nonscientific that they’re unscientific that they’re almost unspeakable — things like not testing the vaccinated, not recommending vitamin D, not checking vitamin D levels, things that are so fundamentally basic about science and medicine and that they’ve avoided. “If you look at these failed policies, there’s only one way to understand them. They are literally written by pharmaceutical companies. Almost every single policy serves the interest of a pharmaceutical company.”

Kory said there have been numerous successes outside the U.S. using a number of compounds he and his colleagues have identified for effective early treatment of COVID, almost all of which are repurposed or generic drugs, including ivermectin. Yet, in the U.S., ivermectin is regarded as a horse dewormer, horse paste, and is only used by the illiterate, ignorant or unvaccinated, Kory said. Kory pointed to many studies and locations around the world where hospitalizations and deaths were prevented by large percentages through the mass distribution of ivermectin. He said the inexpensive drug eradicated the virus entirely in Uttar Pradesh, India.


Information on ivermectin was buried and suppressed, Kory said. “U.S. health agencies’ structures and policies created over the last 50 years have tightly intertwined the pharmaceutical industry with public health institutions, resulting in repeated policies placing pharmaceutical industry interests ahead of the welfare of U.S. citizens,” he explained. Kory said the industry’s “capture of our health agencies combined with their increasing financial control of most major media, social media and medical journals has led to an ability to widely suppress and/or distort any information which supports the efficacy of repurposed low-cost off-patent medicines.”This “decades-long war on repurposed drugs waged with the ever-pressing goal of protecting the market for novel, patented, obscenely profitable and often barely tested and toxic medications has reached a pinnacle with COVID-19, its an absurdity, its an obscenity and its a crime,” Kory said. “It has to stop.”

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Scary.

Nervous System Disorders After The Jab – A Case Study (Beck)

NERVOUS system disorders following Covid vaccination are being recorded in shocking numbers, with reports to the UK’s Yellow Card Scheme of almost 300,000 injuries and 300 deaths. Despite this, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), who run the Yellow Card scheme and review all suspected injuries, are sticking with their mantra that Covid vaccines are ‘safe and effective’. Their message infuriates music manager Georgia-Rose Segal, 34, from Hertfordshire, a previously active fitness fan. Supremely healthy, and at low risk of contracting Covid-19, she was worried about getting the experimental jab, but decided to take it after being reassured by three GPs. She could then travel abroad for her job, about once a quarter, and visit family in Israel to celebrate Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year.

It is a decision she bitterly regrets as she is now a statistic, one of the 100,000 victims suffering with 300,000 neurological injuries reported up to January 5, 2022, which we have analysed in our special report below. After her adverse jab reaction, Georgia, who is articulate, down-to-earth and had clearly made the effort to be well informed, was admitted to Stoke Mandeville Hospital in Buckinghamshire – a spinal injury specialist – with symptoms which included lack of balance, dizzy spells, tremors, tics, short-term memory loss and brain fog. Georgia had her first dose of Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccination on May 13, 2021 at Hemel Hempstead pop-up vaccine centre. It wiped her out. ‘I felt like I could have slept for a year. I felt like that for a couple of days,’ she said. She had her second dose on June 29.

“Within four hours I felt dizzy and light-headed. I fainted that evening, then over the following days, I began fainting up to three times a day. ‘After ten days I developed neurological symptoms. My legs didn’t feel right. I was struggling to move them, and they felt heavy. ‘I was in Tesco, got to the checkout and couldn’t move my legs. My boyfriend Luke [boxing coach Luke Groves, 29] was outside. I went to phone him, but my brain wouldn’t engage with my hand. ‘I realised then I had a bit of a problem.’ Despite this, on Monday July 12 Georgia attended a wedding in Dorset, and realised there was something seriously wrong. ‘The day before the wedding I collapsed in my hotel room. Luke brought me round by splashing me with cold water and I got into bed, then my body went into its first tremor,’ she said.

‘I managed to go to the wedding the next day and got back to the hotel room. I fainted again and hit my head on the floor. My head began to tremor, and my body followed.‘Luke thought I might need food, so we went to the pub. When we got there my legs gave way underneath me for the first time, and that became my new normal.’ At 5am on the Wednesday morning Luke drove her to Stoke Mandeville hospital, where she spent ten days having ‘every test going including MRI and CT scans and blood tests’. They all came back clear, and doctors were sceptical when she told them she thought it was the vaccine. ‘We’re not sure. We don’t have enough information about it,’ they said.

Thomas Renz

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“..calling BA.2 a sub-variant of Omicron may be factually and genealogically incorrect and their relationship may be more sibling-like than parent-like.”

BA2 Omicron Variant is Worth Discussing (Chudov)

This post offers some news on what will be very important in the coming months. Like many other things, Omicron BA.2 is not on most busy people’s radar, but soon will be the only thing that people talk about. I made a decision to start writing about Omicron very early in the game, and want to write about BA.2 also to keep my readers abreast. Denmark, which was weeks ahead of the UK and US with its Omicron outbreak. Unlike the US and the UK, however, Denmark’s infections are not decreasing, but conversely are shooting up to the sky. The slowdown in Denmark that appeared around Jan 5-8, was quickly overtaken by a rapid rise that offers no signs of slowing down. The same thing happened in France 5 days later. A small drop, quickly overridden by another crazy and relentless case growth.

On a cases-per-million-people, Denmark and France are 2.5 times higher than the US and 3 times higher than the UK. What is going on? A new “variant”, called somewhat incorrectly “Omicron BA.2”, appeared around Christmas and is out-competing, out-infecting, and overall somehow generating even more cases than the original Omicron. In Denmark, Omicron BA2 is already over 50% of all cases, and rising. [..]

BA.2 is considered a sub-lineage of original Omicron (which is now referred to as Omicron BA.1), however these two genetic variants seem to have diverged months BEFORE Omicron actually appeared. BA.2 has 28 more mutations, than Omicron, with no intermediate variants seen between them. This is certainly a genetic oddity, just as Omicron is a genetic oddity with the ancestor that disappeared 1.5 years before Omicron appeared. Both of these oddities raise a possibility that both Omicron BA.1 and BA.2 do not have a natural origin. I said that Omicron (now known as BA.1) may be lab-made on December 2. As they diverged before either of them was introduced, calling BA.2 a sub-variant of Omicron may be factually and genealogically incorrect and their relationship may be more sibling-like than parent-like.

[..] The most disturbing issue here is that even by the time before BA.2 took off in Denmark a week ago, Denmark was likely running out of Covid-naive, uninfected people. What this means is that possibly, BA2 is especially good at REINFECTING Danes and Frenchmen. Not sure if the vaccinated people are more susceptible to reinfection, but it is possible and always seemed to be the case even before Omicron.

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Jean Claude Perez, Valère Lounnas, Pr Luc Montagnier.

Omicron Variant Breaks The Evolutionary Lineage Of SARS-COV2 Variants (GHA)

We analyzed 15 genomes and Spikes of the new OMICRON variant, on the one hand 7 from the very first 21K lineage (South Africa, USA, Belgium, Canada), on the other hand 8 from the later second sister-clade 21L (USA, Switzerland, UK). We applied, at the scale of the whole genome and the spike gene, the biomathematics method of Fibonacci meta-structure fractal analysis applied to the UA / CG proportions. There appears a total rupture of this variant with respect to all the previous variants, and a strong differentiation between these 2 OMICRON lines.We have evidenced the RUPTURE of OMICRON with respect to ALL the previous variants: D614G, ALPHA, BETA, GAMMA, DELTA. In particular, we suggest that the mRNA stabilizing secondary structure (“hairpin” conformation) in the spike of all variants is degraded in OMICRON, probably making its mRNA more fragile.

The loss of long-range fractal meta-structures in the OMICRON spike gene are in line with common knowledge on the mechanisms of epidemic ending, involving recombination of heavily mutated RNA fragments of the virus, with the possible inference of a distinct helper virus. This would indicate that the SARS-CoV2 is under very strong evolutionary pressure, possibly marking the end of the pandemic.Remarkably, it is observed that the density of OMICRON mutations in the SPIKE PRION region is more than 8 times that of the rest of the Spike protein. This high density of mutations of the Prion region in OMICRON appears to completely suppress this possible Prion function, unlike the Spikes of the various variants and mRNAs vaccines where this Prion function is observed.

“Science doesn’t tell us where we’re going – that’s the role of art -; it tells us where we are.” Alan TURING

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“The illusion was that to protect the vulnerable, we needed to control disease spread. The disease spread anyway and the vulnerable were exposed because we didn’t protect them.”

Omicron Showing Merits of Targeted Protection, Great Barrington Signers (NW)

After it was dismissed as a dangerous theory with deadly consequences, the co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration believe officials are coming around to the idea of targeted protection now that it’s clear stopping COVID from spreading is an unrealistic goal.Omicron, a highly infectious variant, is spreading rapidly throughout the United States, causing more than 10 million infections in less than a month. While vaccines are extraordinarily helpful at preventing COVID-19 deaths, the assumption that vaccines would make a significant dent in infections has been proven wrong and Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, believes Omicron will find “just about everybody.” But officials have bucked a return to lockdowns.

Since the world has missed its opportunity to completely suppress COVID-19 transmission, the co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration said policymakers are realizing they have to shift tactics away from population-wide measures. “There’s no question there’s been a sea change in thinking about this,” one of the declaration’s co-authors, Dr. Jayanta Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University, told Newsweek. “The illusion was that to protect the vulnerable, we needed to control disease spread. The disease spread anyway and the vulnerable were exposed because we didn’t protect them.”

The Great Barrington Declaration, which was signed in October 2020, called for a lifting of lockdowns to allow those who were at a lower risk of getting seriously ill from COVID-19, the young and healthy, to resume life as normal. Keeping the restrictions in place, the co-authors argued, would cause “irreparable harm” particularly with regard to the underprivileged. Many of those reentering the world would likely get infected with COVID-19, but being young and healthy, they were less likely to get seriously ill. Their infections would thereby lower the risk of infection to all, including the vulnerable, according to the declaration.

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A cunning virus?!

Covid Still ‘Full Of Nasty And Cunning’ Surprises – WHO Official (RT)

Speaking to Sky News on Monday, the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Covid-19 special envoy, Dr David Nabarro, warned that the pandemic could still throw up “challenges and surprises” despite the progress that has been made in some parts of the world in tackling the coronavirus. Criticizing politicians who are playing down the threat still posed by the virus, Nabarro said they “should not suggest” that Covid be treated like the flu or that it “has suddenly got incredibly weak.”“We must go on treating it as though it is full of surprises, very nasty and rather cunning,” Nabarro stated, claiming that while “the end is in sight,” it is not known how long it is “going to take to get there” or “what sort of difficulties” will emerge along the way out of the pandemic.


“I do want everybody to do one thing, and that is to go on treating this virus with respect. It has not changed. It’s absolutely not suddenly become a soft thing – it is still very serious,” Nabarro added. Directly addressing UK Health Secretary Sajid Javid’s recent comments that Covid should be treated like flu, Nabarro said it is “amazing” that officials keep making predictions that “the WHO don’t know,” as “we know there are more [variants] not far away.”The comments appear to directly contradict the WHO’s Europe director, Hans Kluge, who claimed on Monday that the continent is “moving towards a kind of pandemic endgame,” as Omicron is milder than previous strains. Addressing the potential emergence of new Covid variants, Kluge expressed a different view to his colleague, arguing that, while fresh strains might emerge “towards the end of the year,” it won’t necessarily mean “the pandemic coming back.”

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British humor.

Unvaccinated Staff Are Holding NHS Together Amid Staff Shortages (GBN)

Dr Kate Goodman told Michelle Dewberry for GB News that after “talking to friends and colleagues around the country, it seems it’s the unvaccinated [NHS] staff that are holding services together” as staff shortages continue to plague the health service. On the evening that Michelle Dewberry launched the #OutdateTheMandate campaign against mandatory vaccinations for health care staff that have face-to-face contact with patients, Dr Goodman said that it was “a shame” that a viewer said they would not want an unvaccinated member of staff caring for their elderly relatives. She said: “I’m a very good doctor, I’m an elder care specialist.”


Dr Goodman went on: “I can understand that people are concerned about their loved ones.”But actually we need to talk more about this.” From 1 April 2022, all health and social care workers in England who have face-to-face contact with patients, will need to provide proof they have been fully-vaccinated, unless they are exempt. The policy applies to those working within the private sector as well as the NHS, and affects workers including doctors, nurses, dentists, porters and receptionists.The deadline for the first vaccination is February 1st 2022.

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The judge literally called it “null, void and unenforceable.” But Reuters doesn’t use that quote.

New York Judge Strikes Down State Mask Mandate (R.)

A New York judge struck down the state’s mask mandate on Monday, one week before it was due to expire, ruling the governor overstepped her authority in imposing a rule that needed to have been passed by the state legislature. Judge Thomas Rademaker of New York State Supreme Court on Long Island found that the state legislature last year curbed any governor’s ability to issue decrees, such as a mask mandate, amid a declared state of emergency. It was latest setback for executive branch officials at state and federal levels. Earlier this month, the U.S. Supreme Court blocked President Joe Biden’s vaccination-or-testing mandate for large businesses. A judge in Texas last week ruled that Biden could not require federal employees to be vaccinated.

Governor Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, vowed to fight back, saying in a statement, “We strongly disagree with this ruling, and we are pursuing every option to reverse this immediately.” “My responsibility as Governor is to protect New Yorkers throughout this public health crisis, and these measures help prevent the spread of COVID-19 and save lives,” Hochul said. Disagreements and court action over mandates in a number of states have become a flashpoint of the pandemic response in the United States, often dividing Democrats and Republicans. The requirements in New York state, home to around 20 million people, include wearing masks in schools, on public transit and other public indoor spaces.

Hochul declared a state of emergency almost immediately after the World Health Organization named Omicron as a variant of concern on Nov. 26. At the time, New York state’s seven-day average of new daily cases was around 6,400. That number rapidly rose until peaking at 73,815 on Jan. 10. It has since fallen to about a third of that.

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Easiest choice Spotify ever made.

“They Can Have [Joe] Rogan or [Neil] Young. Not Both.” (RS)

Neil Young posted a since-deleted letter to his management team and record label demanding that they remove his music from Spotify. “I am doing this because Spotify is spreading fake information about vaccines – potentially causing death to those who believe the disinformation being spread by them,” he wrote. “Please act on this immediately today and keep me informed of the time schedule.” “I want you to let Spotify know immediately TODAY that I want all my music off their platform,” he continued. “They can have [Joe] Rogan or Young. Not both.” Young is referencing the steady stream of misinformation about vaccines that Joe Rogan has peddled on The Joe Rogan Experience. Last month, 270 doctors, physicians, and science educators signed an open letter asking Spotify to stop spreading Rogan’s baseless claims.

“With an estimated 11 million listeners per episode, JRE, which is hosted exclusively on Spotify, is the world’s largest podcast and has tremendous influence,” the letter reads. “Spotify has a responsibility to mitigate the spread of misinformation on its platform, though the company presently has no misinformation policy.” Young removed most of his music from Spotify several years ago because he felt the sound quality on the service was too low, but he ultimately relented. “That’s where people get music,” he told Rolling Stone in 2019. “I want people to hear my music no matter what they have to get through to do it. I’m just trying to make it so they hear a lot more and enjoy it a lot more, but sell it for the same price because music is music.”

Young’s letter was addressed to his manager and a Warner executive. At press time, Spotify hadn’t responded to a request from Rolling Stone asking if they planned to remove Young’s music. It’s still available, but it might be smart to listen to Zuma and Rust Never Sleeps while you still can. They could disappear at any moment.

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“Russia’s population is half of what the USSR’s was 30 years ago.”

The Globalist American Empire (Revolver)

The NATO question is the only one that Russia has repeatedly insisted upon. If America were inclined to negotiate, it could. Instead, America has taken the position that Ukraine’s eligibility for NATO is entirely non-negotiable. In fact, basically everything about Ukraine is non-negotiable from the perspective of the State Department. The US State Department also insists it will “never” acknowledge Russian annexation of Crimea, even though Western media outlets admit the local population overwhelmingly supports union with Russia. America’s demand, in essence, is that Russia acknowledge a violent revolution (in the name of “democracy”), return Crimea to Ukraine against its will (again, in the name of “democracy”), and let Ukraine become a military satellite of the United States (in the name of of “peace”).

This is deranged. Adding Ukraine to NATO does nothing to improve the security of the United States, or any of its key allies. Even if Russia literally did conquer and annex all of Ukraine (something it has shown no interest in doing), America’s security interests would remain unchanged. Ukraine doesn’t supply the United States with any irreplaceable natural resources. It doesn’t sit alongside a critical trade route or geographical position. It isn’t physically proximate to the United States. Ukraine matters to America’s domestic security as much as Iraq, Syria, Libya, or Venezuela; i.e. not at all. Just like all four of those other countries, a war over Ukraine would have nothing to do with protecting America’s safety, its prosperity, or its values. Instead, it would be a product of a cloistered foreign policy elite that is not content with controlling one country and instead seeks to boss around the entire planet.

“B-but if we don’t stop him in Donetsk, Putin will drive all the way to the English Channel!” Bullshit. No, he won’t. Russia’s population is half of what the USSR’s was 30 years ago. Its military is smaller. Its economy is only the size of that of Texas. Russia’s frontline in any hypothetical war has shifted hundreds of miles to the east. Russia invading and occupying Europe is as plausible as Canada invading and occupying the United States. The idea of Vladimir Putin steamrolling all of Europe like Hitler or Napoleon would be absurd, even if he aspired to do that. But importantly, there is absolutely zero evidence Putin wants to invade. Putin’s Russia has no desire to ideologically control Western Europe. Its external interests have consistently focused on its immediate neighbors, and regions with Russian minorities. Crimea was Russia’s only land grab, and it only happened when the West sought to make Ukraine a satellite.

Tulsi Tucker
https://twitter.com/i/status/1485693277655343107

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No ground troops would be needed.

Russia Planning “Lightning War” To Take Out Kyiv: UK’s Johnson (ZH)

As we detailed earlier, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell during Monday statements to the press appeared to openly mock the UK and US for their dramatic announcements of embassy personnel evacuations due to threat of a Russian invasion of Ukraine. He said there’s no need to “dramatize” the situation given there’s high hopes that ongoing diplomacy will prevail. Moscow too has continued to condemn what it called “disinformation hysteria” prevailing in the West, which is fueling the crisis further. But it seems London is content to hype things further, with Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Monday citing “gloomy” intelligence from UK intel officials warning that Russia is planning a “lightning war” to take out Ukraine’s capital of Kiev.


Johnson said in a message directed at Russia that an offensive would be a “disastrous step” and “bloody business”. While confirming that some British diplomatic staff have begun to exit the embassy in Kiev and depart of the country, Johnson affirmed “We do think it prudent to make some changes now.” That’s when he said in dramatic fashion… “The intelligence is very clear that there are 60 Russian battle groups on the borders of Ukraine, the plan for a lightning war that could take out Kyiv is one that everybody can see.” “We need to make it very clear to the Kremlin, to Russia, that that would be a disastrous step.” He added during the comments that “from a Russian perspective, (it) is going to be a painful, violent and bloody business.” He concluded with: “I think it’s very important that people in Russia understand that this could be a new Chechnya.”

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The High Court bans the Supreme Court from taking a broader view?! Odd.

Assange Granted Permission To Take Extradition Case To UK Supreme Court (Haddad)

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was granted permission to take his extradition case against the United States to the Supreme Court, a court ruled on Monday. In a short hearing at the Royal Courts of Justice, also known as the High Court, Lord Chief Justice Ian Duncan Burnett refused to grant Assange leave to appeal—respecting the custom of allowing the Supreme Court to decide for itself which cases it hears—but did pave the way for the case to proceed to Britain’s highest court after “certifying” a point of law. Lord Chief Justice Burnett, Britain’s most senior judge, rejected two grounds on which Assange’s defence sought certification, but accepted that the issue of diplomatic assurances provided by the United States at a late stage of the hearing was of sufficient public importance for the upper-most court to consider.

In a written pronouncement explaining the finding, Burnett said: “The Respondent [Assange] sought certification in respect of three points of law, the first of which centred on the circumstances in which an appellate court may receive assurances from a requesting state concerning the future treatment of a requested person if extradited. “We do not consider that the second or third points raise certifiable points. So far as the first is concerned, although the law in this jurisdiction has long been settled it does not appear that the Supreme Court has considered the question. Assurances are at the heart of many extradition hearings.” Following the finding, Assange lawyers Birnberg Peirce Solicitors issued a statement in which they welcome the decision.

“The High Court found against Mr Assange in its ruling, and relied upon the late assurances, but has certified a point of law of general public importance on the question of the courts’ reception of assurances (frequently relied upon by requesting states in extradition proceedings to overcome defence evidence after it has established a bar to extradition) for the first time on appeal. “The identification by the High Court of the question above for the potential consideration of the Supreme Court, involves concepts of procedural fairness and natural justice. There has long been a general approach by the courts that requires that all relevant matters are raised before the District Judge appointed to consider the case in the Magistrates’ Court.

“What has underpinned a departure from those principles in practice is the categorisation of an assurance as an ‘issue’ as opposed to ‘evidence’ and the developing practice, potentially now consolidated in the decision in this case, whereby an assurance can be freely introduced by the requesting state and considered separately and later. “The defence argument is that despite being as demanding of close evidential scrutiny as the evidence already heard, and despite the content of the assurances being applicable to the testimony of witnesses already heard but not heard again, assurances has been afforded a different procedural position. This issue has become of considerable importance in the predictability and progression of extradition cases.

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The convoy is over 70km long.

 

 

It was reported that Biden called Doocy after calling him an SOB, but apparently that was not to apologize.

 

 

 

 

Yeah,. we had some snow. Paralysis ensues.

 

 

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

 

Jan 202022
 


Johannes Vermeer Woman holding a balance 1662-63

 

WHO: Lift International Traffic Bans, Proof Of Vaccination Not Needed (G.)
England Ends All COVID Passports, Mask Mandates, Work Restrictions (ET)
Starbucks Says Will No Longer Require Vaccine Or Testing For Employees (JTN)
Health Department Warning Over Vaccine Mandate For NHS Staff In England (G.)
Perspectives on the Pandemic With Dr. Peter McCullough (Mercola)
Proximal Origin (ET)
The Vaccinators Will Never Stop Vaccinating (eugyp)
Novak Djokovic Holds 80% Of Danish Biotech Developing Covid Treatment (MC)
The Correcting Decades Old Medical Fraud Act (Denninger)
Paul Krugman Is Still Wrong About Money (Steve Keen)
How Did Fox News Become The Voice Of Reason? (RT)
Senate Democrats Fail To Change Filibuster, Handing Biden Stinging Defeat (JTN)
Biden Asked Why Americans Think He’s Not ‘Mentally Fit’ (RT)
Schumer Holds Antitrust Bills As His Daughters Work for Facebook, Amazon (NB)
Why I Am No Longer A Tenured Professor at Uni of Toronto (Jordan Peterson)

 

 

 

 

Schwab
https://twitter.com/i/status/1483418602300661760

 

 

The more vaxx, the more infections.

 

 

180º. Do we get apologies?

WHO: Lift International Traffic Bans, Proof Of Vaccination Not Needed (G.)

The World Health Organization has recommended lifting or easing international traffic bans, citing the ineffectiveness of the measures to suppress the spread of the Omicron variant. The UN health agency recently updated its international health regulations recommendations during an emergency committee meeting on Wednesday. Recommendations included to “lift or ease international traffic bans as they do not provide added value and continue to contribute to the economic and social stress” of some countries. Implementing blanket travel bans are “not effective in suppressing international spread” and “may discourage transparent and rapid reporting of emerging variants of concerns” the agency said in a statement.

The failure of travel restrictions introduced after the detection and reporting of Omicron variant to limit international spread of Omicron demonstrates the ineffectiveness of such measures over time. Travel measures such as masking, testing, isolation/quarantine and vaccination should be based on risk assessments and avoid placing the financial burden on international travellers, according to their recommendations. The WHO also said the requirement to provide proof of vaccination against Covid-19 for international travel may not be needed as “the only pathway or condition” permitting international travel.

Do not require proof of vaccination against Covid-19 for international travel as the only pathway or condition permitting international travel given limited global access and inequitable distribution of Covid-19 vaccines. State parties should consider a risk-based approach to the facilitation of international travel by lifting or modifying measures, such as testing and/or quarantine requirements, when appropriate, in accordance with the WHO guidance.”

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The fun is in the details: no more mask in one week’s time. But you can still be fined for not wearing one till then.

England Ends All COVID Passports, Mask Mandates, Work Restrictions (ET)

Restrictions including COVID-19 passes, mask mandates, and work-from-home guidance will be removed in England, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced on Wednesday. Johnson also suggested that self-isolation rules may also be thrown out at the end of March as the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus pandemic becomes endemic. Effective immediately, the UK government is no longer asking people to work from home. The COVID pass mandate for nightclubs and large events won’t be renewed when it expires on Jan. 26. Also from Jan. 27, indoor mask-wearing will no longer be compulsory anywhere in England. The requirement for secondary school pupils to wear masks during class and in communal areas will be lifted on Jan. 20.


The Department for Education is expected to update its national guidance soon. Health Secretary Sajid Jajid will also announce plans to ease restrictions on care home visits in the coming days. Roaring cheers from lawmakers could be heard in the House of Commons following Johnson’s announcements on masks. People who test positive for COVID-19 and their unvaccinated contacts are still required to self-isolate, but Johnson said he “very much expect[s] not to renew” the rule when the relevant regulations expire on March 24. “As COVID becomes endemic, we will need to replace legal requirements with advice and guidance, urging people with the virus to be careful and considerate of others,” the prime minister said.

UK face masks

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220,000 U.S. employees. Many companies must follow.

Starbucks Says Will No Longer Require Vaccine Or Testing For Employees (JTN)

Starbucks has opted to do away with its COVID-19 vaccine requirement following a decision last week by the Supreme Court that blocked the Biden administration’s attempt to mandate vaccine requirements for large U.S. companies. “We respect the court’s ruling and will comply,” John Culver, chief operating officer for the major coffee shop chain, said Tuesday. The company will continue to encourage employees to get vaccinated, but the shots will not be a requisite of employment.


The “vaccine is the best option we have, by far, when it comes to staying safe and slowing the spread of COVID-19,” Culver also said, in a memo. Prior to the court’s decision, Starbuck’s announced it would be enforcing a vaccine-or-test model for the company’s 220,000 U.S. employees. Last week, the high court, in a 6-3 decision, blocked the Biden administration’s mandate for large employers from taking effect while other legal challenges to the mandate play out in lower courts.

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They basically came out and said: the vaccines don’t work: “32% effectiveness against Omicron infection, which wanes to in effective zero 20 weeks later..

But dismissal letters are ready to get sent in 2 weeks.

Health Department Warning Over Vaccine Mandate For NHS Staff In England (G.)

Ministers have been issued with a stark warning over mandatory Covid vaccines for NHS workers in England, with a leaked document saying growing evidence on the Omicron variant casts doubts over the new law’s “rationality” and “proportionality”. Two jabs will become compulsory for frontline NHS staff from 1 April after MPs voted on the legislation last month. But the document, drawn up by Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) officials and seen by the Guardian, said the evidence base on which MPs voted “has changed”, creating a higher chance of objections and judicial review. The effectiveness of only two vaccine doses against Omicron, and the lower likelihood of hospitalisations from the milder variant, are cited. More than 70,000 NHS staff – 4.9% – could remain unvaccinated by 1 April, the document says. NHS trusts in England are preparing to start sending dismissal letters from 3 February to any member of staff who has not had their first dose by then.


[..] The document prepared by DHSC officials noted that two vaccine doses provide up to 32% effectiveness against Omicron infection, which wanes to in effective zero 20 weeks later. At the time the policy was developed, two-dose effectiveness against infection with the Delta variant was substantially higher – 65% with Oxford/AstraZeneca and 80% with Pfizer/BioNTech, the DHSC memo said. Booster jabs have since been shown to be highly effective but are not part of the law for NHS workers. The document says: “While Omicron is more transmissible there appears to be a substantially lower risk of hospitalisation and mortality for those vaccinated vs Delta. “The low VE [vaccine effectiveness] against infection (and consequently effect on transmission) plus the lower risk posed by Omicron brings into question both the rationality of the VCOD2 policy and its proportionality and makes the case for vaccination requirement weaker than when [ministers] decided on the policy.

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“..It’s the scariest time to be an American, and thank goodness half of Americans didn’t take it.”

Perspectives on the Pandemic With Dr. Peter McCullough (Mercola)

McCullough believes many health care providers and the U.S. public are in a vaccination trance. It defies logic and commonsense how public officials and hospital executives can see the vaccines failing to work, can see the rising cases of adverse effects and deaths, and yet increasingly issue vaccine mandates or recommend the vaccine to groups for which it clearly shouldn’t be, like pregnant women. McCullough likens it to a form of psychosis or a group neurosis. The U.S. public, however, has seen so much fear, hospitalization and death during the pandemic that they may have been prepared to accept casualties associated with the vaccines. Still, a sizable number of Americans aren’t being fooled. “We’re at this pressure point, and I think right now, in talking to American people in my circles, they’re ready to take a time out,” McCullough said.

If it means taking a sabbatical from work or delaying school for a year, many Americans are willing to do it to avoid getting vaccinated. “The only way to stay healthy right now is to stay away from this vaccine. If you get COVID-19, get to one of these treatment networks and get immunity on the other side.” McCullough is a proponent of early treatment of COVID-19 and believes treatment options have been suppressed to allow for mass vaccination: “I think we’ve completely suppressed any form of treatment or help to people in order to promote the vaccine. Now the vaccine doesn’t work completely and it’s, frankly, dangerous. We’re down to almost one message: Take the jab or else … It’s the scariest time to be an American, and thank goodness half of Americans didn’t take it.

We’re going to have to see what this is going to look like. I think the next month or so is going to be incredibly interesting and it’s going to be ominous.” McCullough believes that eventually people will break out of the jab trance and realize that the answer isn’t these injections, while the handling of the pandemic, including mass jabs, will become a course in violation of human ethics and the Nuremberg code. With fear, isolation, hospitalizations and deaths still occurring, however, it may take years before the fog is lifted.

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In the thesaurus under “corruption”.

Proximal Origin (ET)

Four prominent scientists who played key roles in shaping the public narrative around the origin of COVID-19 received substantial increases in grant money from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci, in the subsequent two years, a review of funding data by The Epoch Times has found. Three of these scientists—Kristian Andersen, Robert Garry, and Michael Farzan—were advisers to a teleconference organized by Fauci held on Feb. 1, 2020, in response to increasing public questions about the origin of the virus. The scientists were also instrumental in the publication of Proximal Origin, a highly influential paper that promoted a natural origins theory for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, and has been frequently cited by the government and media.

Emails released under Freedom of Information Act requests, showed that the scientists had told the senior members of Fauci’s teleconference that they were 60 to 80 percent sure that COVID-19 had come out of a lab. Notably, despite their private concerns about the origin of the virus, the first draft of Proximal Origin was completed on the same day as the teleconference. Andersen and Garry were co-authors of Proximal Origin and Farzan was acknowledged in the Nature version of Proximal Origin for his participatory discussions in the article’s creation. Additionally, Fauci’s NIAID provided a substantial increase in funding to EcoHealth’s Peter Daszak, through whom NIAID had funded controversial gain-of-function coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.

Some of these funding amounts have continued through 2021—and one of the newest grants will continue through at least 2025. A significant portion of the funding increase for Daszak, as well as for Andersen and Garry, was provided through NIAID’s creation of the Centers for Research in Emerging Infectious Diseases (CREID). The program, which was originally referred to as Emerging Infectious Diseases Research Centers (EIDRCs) during the early planning stages in 2019, was formally announced under a new name on Aug. 27, 2020. It is not known why the program was initially delayed or why it was renamed.

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“..we now face a prolonged, multi-year struggle to retain control of our bodies and our bloodstreams..”

The Vaccinators Will Never Stop Vaccinating (eugyp)

The vaccinators are deranged lunatics, and whatever happens with Corona, we now face a prolonged, multi-year struggle to retain control of our bodies and our bloodstreams. This is what I get from COVID-19: What’s Next?, a World Economic Forum panel discussion featuring Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel. Like everything produced by the WEF, it’s stultifying, boring and terrifying all at the same time. Below the fold, I’ve transcribed the key moments for you, but the takeaways are simple enough:

—Moderna, just one of multiple pharmaceuticals eager to exploit our new vaccine mania, are expanding their manufacturing capacity to produce as many as 6 billion mRNA vaccine doses per year. —Moderna will have an Omicron-specific vaccine as early as March, and they won’t be the only ones. The compliant triple jabbed can look forward to having their fully vaccinated status revoked once again. —Moderna are working in close collaboration with “Dr. Fauci’s team” and with public health experts to develop an annual combined mRNA flu, RSV and Corona vaccine to reduce “compliance issues.” —The industry more broadly has targeted about 20 pathogens for vaccine development, from Zika to Nipah, with a view towards being able to rapidly deploy mRNA vaccines against future virus threats.

The vaccinators are a great sword of Damocles over our heads. As I type this, they are scouring the earth for the novel pathogens their products require, and they, together with their bureaucratic and academic allies, will do their level best to call into being new pandemic scares and vaccination campaigns whenever possible – perhaps every flu season.

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“The company is developing a peptide, which inhibits the coronavirus from infecting the human cell..”

Novak Djokovic Holds 80% Of Danish Biotech Developing Covid Treatment (MC)

Tennis champion Novak Djokovic has an 80% stake of Danish biotech firm QuantBioRes, which is aiming to develop a medical treatment to counter COVID-19, the company’s chief executive told Reuters on Wednesday. CEO Ivan Loncarevic, who described himself as an entrepreneur, said the investment was made in June 2020 but declined to say how much it was. QuantBioRes has around 11 researchers working in Denmark, Australia and Slovenia, according to Loncarevic, who stressed they were working on a treatment, not a vaccine. The company is developing a peptide, which inhibits the coronavirus from infecting the human cell, expects to launch clinical trials in Britain this summer, he added.

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All forgotten in the space of less than a year.

The Correcting Decades Old Medical Fraud Act (Denninger)

II. Definitions As used in this Title the following terms are defined:
• Sterilizing immunity – The induction of immune response in an individual by either infection or immunization, that both prevents the acquisition of the infection and its forward transmission.
• Durable – In a person of less than 15 years of age protection must be maintained at the specified level for at least five (5) years from the completion of the prescribed original sequence and for a person of 15 years of age or older protection at the specified level must be maintained for least ten (10) years from the completion of the original sequence. Boosters may be required to maintain protection beyond these time limits.

******* – As defined in 25 US Code Sec 4132 (2), a preparation given to a human being for the purpose of, and which does by scientific evidence, produce durable sterilizing immunity in no less than 90% of healthy human subjects.
• Prophylaxis – A preparation given to a human being for the purpose of, and which does by scientific evidence, attenuate or treat the symptoms of a disease should it be contracted, and which is given prior to exposure to the disease-causing agent. Scientific evidence of prevention of the infection or prevention of forward transmission is not required.

III. Prohibitions
1. It shall be unlawful for any medical practitioner in the United States, any public health authority, manufacturer, distributor, retailer or person otherwise providing a substance intended for use in a human being to represent that said substance is a ******* unless that substance has been shown, by scientific evidence, to produce sterilizing immunity when the prescribed sequence is completed for not less than five (5) years in a person under the age of fifteen (15) and for ten (10) years in a person 15 years of age or older.

2. It is the public policy of the United States to strongly discourage the combining of prophylaxis and ******* preparations into one unit dose. In order to discourage this practice a combined preparation that contains both one or more legally-defined *******s and prophylaxis as one unit dose must be labeled as, and treated for the purpose of this title, as a prophylaxis for the purposes of this title and in all matters related to public health.

3. No public health authority, school, business, medical establishment or other entity, public or private, including but not limited to CMS, State Agencies, border and customs agents, health service firms and others, without exception, may require that a person produce evidence of or accept a prophylaxis to condition any right or privilege, including but not limited to employment, transportation, education, lodging or entry into any place or facility within the boundaries of the United States and its territories. All such existing statutes, regulations and private claimed rights of action are void as of the date of enactment of this Title and of no force or effect.

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Isn’t this clear yet? Steve explains again.

Paul Krugman Is Still Wrong About Money (Steve Keen)

When a writer starts a new column, his first battle is to justify why people should read it. Paul Krugman has just made that task much easier for me, by publishing a column on money that, to use his favorite phrase, is “all wrong.” The crucial point at which Krugman gets it “all wrong” —yes, a Nobel Prize winner in Economics is wrong about money—is his assumption that, when they lend, banks lend out reserves: Since the 2008 financial crisis, however, banks have been voluntarily holding vast excess reserves, apparently because they don’t see enough good lending opportunities. If you’ve studied economics, you might think there’s nothing wrong with that statement, because that’s what the textbooks tell you: banks take in deposits from some customers, and then lend out the reserves these deposits create to other customers.


But in 2014, the Bank of England said that the textbooks were wrong: rather than banks lending out deposits that are placed with them, the act of lending creates deposits—the reverse of the sequence typically described in textbooks. Krugman read this paper, and expressed only confusion about it: he began his column with “OK, color me puzzled,” and the post got more puzzling from there. This week’s column, 8 years later, shows that he’s simply ignored what he didn’t understand—and he’s not alone. Virtually all mainstream economists still get this wrong, and textbooks continue to teach a story that the Bank of England said is false. This is a crucial mistake, and it’s why economists are so often wrong about the economy—including their failure to see the 2008 financial crisis coming. So, let’s get it right.

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The neocons have moved to where they think they can do most damage.

How Did Fox News Become The Voice Of Reason? (RT)

Imagine traveling back in time 20 years and explaining the current US geopolitical predicament to someone in 2002. They’d easily believe the country’s leadership is barreling headlong into a war it can’t win for reasons it hasn’t adequately explained. But the American of 2002, if you could pry him away from ‘CSI: Miami,’ would find it shocking to flip on the news networks and find the sole anti-war message at prime time coming from Fox News, and the loudest pro-war shrieking coming from the liberal CNN and MSNBC. As the Biden administration seriously entertains the prospect of war with Russia over Ukraine (the latest bright idea from the White House is to funnel arms to Ukrainian paramilitaries, Syria style), that’s exactly what’s happening. Fox News host Tucker Carlson opined at length on Tuesday night against going to war over Ukraine, arguing that such a conflict would be “incredibly destructive.”

Carlson’s guest, analyst Clint Ehrlich, expounded on this, stating that bringing Ukraine into NATO – the plan that triggered the current descent toward war – would not serve US strategic interests, or those of NATO itself. “It’s not just nuts. It’s dangerous. We’re sleepwalking toward a conflict with a country that has more than 4,000 nuclear weapons,” Ehrlich told Carlson. “It’s just shocking that people are not more upset by this.” Once considered a sewer pipe of neoconservative jingoism, Fox News is now anti-war – or at least its top-rated host is. On the liberal networks, things are different. MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough – a man who once accused “the Russians” of killing Jeffrey Epstein – practically pounded his fists into the news desk earlier this month, demanding that President Joe Biden “move aggressively” against Russia.

“We’ve got to be aggressive in our defense of our allies. And Ukraine, despite what you hear from Putin propagandists … we have to defend our democratic allies,” he said. In print media, rehabilitated warmonger John Bolton is in the Washington Post calling on the US to send troops to Ukraine “and possibly Georgia and others,” Jonah Goldberg is arguing in the LA Times that even meeting with Vladimir Putin is “a concession” to Moscow that the US should avoid, and The Guardian – the favored read of soy-eating peaceniks – is publishing rosy profiles of the brave Ukrainian civilians “ready to resist” a Russian advance because they “don’t like dictators.” Even the relatively centrist Wall Street Journal ran a column this week arguing for the formation of “an American and coalition force to defend Ukraine,” presumably forgetting that such almighty international coalitions were humiliated by shoeless goat-herders in Afghanistan and Iraq, never mind in mechanized combat against a rival superpower.

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Why let it come to a vote if this is obvious?

Senate Democrats Fail To Change Filibuster, Handing Biden Stinging Defeat (JTN)

Senate Democrats failed twice on Wednesday night to pass their signature legislation to nationalize elections, handing President Joe Biden a stinging defeat that was delivered in part by two centrists in his own party. The second vote came late Wednesday night when the Senate refused to change the filibuster rules in a 52-48 vote. Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin (W.V.) and Krysten Sinema (Ariz.) voted with Republicans to keep the filibuster rules, rejecting their party’s bid to end the 60-vote threshold for passing legislation in the chamber. A few hours earlier, Senate Republicans, joined by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), voted against moving forward with the Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act,


The motion to failed in the Senate by 51-49. Schumer joined Republicans “in order to enter a motion to reconsider the vote,” according to the Senate Press Gallery. Minutes before the Senate voted Schumer threatened that “if the GOP blocks this vote—we must change the rules of the Senate to pass these bills.” The bill, which was expected to fail, required 60 votes to move forward and overcome the Republican filibuster. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) complained about the legislation on Twitter. “Dems hv spent afternoon claiming 2 want to debate voting bill, claiming Rs don’t want to then they voted 4 motion 2 CUT OFF debate & amendments same day Senate took up bill w all amendments blocked by Sen Schumer,” he tweeted shortly after the vote.

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Bit of a cheap shot, perhaps, but his numbers set off major alarm bells.

Biden Asked Why Americans Think He’s Not ‘Mentally Fit’ (RT)

US President Joe Biden said he has “no idea” why a growing number of voters see him as mentally unfit, after a new survey found a large proportion of respondents are in doubt of his intellectual capacity. The president was asked about his faculties during a Wednesday news conference, with Newsmax reporter James Rosen fielding a carefully worded question about a poll conducted over the weekend. “I’d like to raise a delicate subject, but with utmost respect for your life accomplishments and the high office you hold,” Rosen said. “A poll released this morning by Politico-Morning Consult found 49 percent of registered voters disagreeing with the statement ‘Joe Biden is mentally fit.’” The journalist added that “not even a majority of Democrats who responded strongly affirmed that statement,” to which Biden replied “I’ll let you all make the judgment whether they’re correct.”


Rosen continued to press, however, asking why “such large segments of the American electorate have come to harbor such profound concerns about your cognitive fitness.” Biden responded curtly: “I have no idea.” “I don’t believe the polls,” Biden said in response to another question about moderate and independent voters increasingly dissatisfied with his job performance. Republican women questioned Biden’s mental state more than any other demographic in the poll, with a combined 87% saying they “strongly” or “somewhat” disagree with the statement that he is fit. Democratic men, meanwhile, were among the least critical. Some 49% of registered voters also said the president is not “stable,” with another 43% stating that he is and the rest declining to answer.

Biden Ukraine

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“..Facebook and Twitter gave over 90 percent of their political contributions to Democrats for the 2020 election cycle..”

Schumer Holds Antitrust Bills As His Daughters Work for Facebook, Amazon (NB)

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer decides what bills come up for a Senate vote. But with Schumer’s daughters employed by Facebook and Amazon, antitrust legislation may go the way of President Joe Biden’s popularity: down into oblivion. As majority leader of the U.S. Senate, Schumer (D-NY) controls the vote timing and selection of legislation that moves through the chamber, according to the New York Post. The Senate Judiciary Committee is reviewing Big Tech legislation that would prevent platforms from favoring their own products over competitors’, and that legislation may come up for a vote soon. Schumer reportedly has not said where he stands on the legislation. Might that stem from the fact that his two daughters work for Big Tech companies? Jessica Schumer is a registered lobbyist for e-commerce giant Amazon, per New York state records. Alison Schumer works for Facebook as a product marketing manager, the New York Post wrote.

The two sisters’ employment, it would seem, poses a potential conflict of interest for Schumer around antitrust legislation. “When they are on opposite sides of the divide it can make the public servant member of the family too sympathetic to the company that employs their child or family member,” Jeff Hauser of Revolving Door Project, which studies money in politics, reportedly told the New York Post. Schumer is not the only lawmaker with a potential tech-related conflict of interest. “When you put together the amount of money Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi made off tech with the fact that leader Schumer’s two kids work for giant tech companies, Democrats are going to have a very hard time explaining if major legislation doesn’t move forward this session,” a “progressive operative” reportedly told the New York Post.

The publication also has reported that the daughter of Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), “one of the most vocal opponents of antitrust bills,” works for Google’s legal team. Big Tech employees have proven before how leftist they are. Facebook employees orchestrated a movement demanding Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg censor then-President Donald Trump in 2020, for instance. Open Secrets records revealed that for “all federal candidates,” by October 2020, both Facebook and Twitter gave over 90 percent of their political contributions to Democrats for the 2020 election cycle, particularly to then-presidential candidate Joe Biden. Hundreds of Amazon employees demanded the platform stop selling a book that challenged the woke left’s narratives on gender identity in July 2021.

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The world is a different place.

Why I Am No Longer A Tenured Professor at Uni of Toronto (Jordan Peterson)

First, my qualified and supremely trained heterosexual white male graduate students (and I’ve had many others, by the way) face a negligible chance of being offered university research positions, despite stellar scientific dossiers. This is partly because of Diversity, Inclusivity and Equity mandates (my preferred acronym: DIE). These have been imposed universally in academia, despite the fact that university hiring committees had already done everything reasonable for all the years of my career, and then some, to ensure that no qualified “minority” candidates were ever overlooked. My students are also partly unacceptable precisely because they are my students. I am academic persona non grata, because of my unacceptable philosophical positions. And this isn’t just some inconvenience. These facts rendered my job morally untenable. How can I accept prospective researchers and train them in good conscience knowing their employment prospects to be minimal?

Second reason: This is one of many issues of appalling ideology currently demolishing the universities and, downstream, the general culture. Not least because there simply is not enough qualified BIPOC people in the pipeline to meet diversity targets quickly enough (BIPOC: black, indigenous and people of colour, for those of you not in the knowing woke). This has been common knowledge among any remotely truthful academic who has served on a hiring committee for the last three decades. This means we’re out to produce a generation of researchers utterly unqualified for the job. And we’ve seen what that means already in the horrible grievance studies “disciplines”. That, combined with the death of objective testing, has compromised the universities so badly that it can hardly be overstated. And what happens in the universities eventually colours everything. As we have discovered.

All my craven colleagues must craft DIE statements to obtain a research grant. They all lie (excepting the minority of true believers) and they teach their students to do the same. And they do it constantly, with various rationalizations and justifications, further corrupting what is already a stunningly corrupt enterprise. Some of my colleagues even allow themselves to undergo so-called anti-bias training, conducted by supremely unqualified Human Resources personnel, lecturing inanely and blithely and in an accusatory manner about theoretically all-pervasive racist/sexist/heterosexist attitudes. Such training is now often a precondition to occupy a faculty position on a hiring committee.

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Québec kids

 

 

 

 

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

 

Jan 192022
 
 January 19, 2022  Posted by at 9:36 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  63 Responses »


Alfred Sisley Snow at Louveciennes 1878

 

US Daily COVID Cases Drop By 47% And Deaths Fall By 38% Week-on-week (DM)
‘Much Brighter Than Before’: COVID-19 Cases Plunge Across US (ET)
The Narrative Is Falling Apart, Piece By Piece (Kirsch)
US Faces Wave Of Omicron Deaths In Coming Weeks, Models Say (AP)
New Research: Covid Less Deadly Than Thought In 1st Year Of Pandemic (JTN)
The Last Days of the Covidian Cult (CJ Hopkins)
Calls Grow To Ditch Compulsory Covid Jabs Law For NHS Staff (DM)
Observations From An Experienced Nurse About The Covid Vaccines (Kirsch)
Think About What Denying Health Care To The Unvaccinated Means (Vezina)
Nicola Sturgeon Announces Lifting Of Omicron Restrictions In Scotland (G.)
New Zealand Closes Borders To New Arrivals Over Omicron Risk (G.)
Grocery Stores Could Close If Labour, Product Shortages Worsen (CP)
Ghislaine Maxwell Ends Fight To Keep Eight ‘John Does’ Secret (CTV)
Western Governments Drop Plans To Cut Russia Off From SWIFT – Media (RT)
5G Network Deployment In The US Spawns A Cluster Of Disruption (TAC)
Multiple Flights to US Suspended Over 5G Fears (RT)

 

 

 

 

Dr. Bowden Houston Methodist

 

 

“The virus is better at immunising than the vaccine”.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1483485364065116163

 

 

That’s a lot.

US Daily COVID Cases Drop By 47% And Deaths Fall By 38% Week-on-week (DM)

Covid infections are falling in the U.S. for the first time since the Omicron variant erupted at the end of 2021. The nation recorded 721,651 new cases on Monday, a steep fall from the 1.364 million cases reported last Monday. America’s new daily case average has also dropped 10 percent over the past seven days, from 766,939 to 684,457. A DailyMail.com analysis of Johns Hopkins University data found there were 717,874 new cases recorded between midnight Monday and midnight Tuesday. Monday is often the day when reported case counts are highest as lagging figures from the weekend are finally reported. Last week’s 1.364 million cases recorded on Monday was the highest single day case total the nation ever recorded.

This week’s total was affected by the Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday, where many local governments and municipalities were closed and did not fully report cases. It is likely that some cases shift to Tuesday this week instead. But Covid cases have been plunging for days in those states hardest hit by Omicron when it first arrived in the US in early December, suggesting the latest phase pandemic could really be drawing to a close. Two-week case averages are generally the most stable figures and can smooth out single day outliers. Over the past 14 days, overall cases in the U.S. are up 40 percent, though that figure is expected to decline further in the coming days as many previous Covid hotspots in the U.S. are now seeing case counts trend in the right direction.

As of Tuesday morning, Johns Hopkins University reports that the U.S. has logged 66,456,516 cases and 851,730 deaths since the pandemic first began. That means there has been one reported Covid case for every five Americans so far – with the figure likely being even higher due to the mass underreporting of cases and test shortages that have been a problem during different waves of the pandemic.Meanwhile, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, put a fly in the ointment after warning that yet another new variant could emerge – and that it could resist existing immunity in those infected or vaccinated.

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As predicted.

‘Much Brighter Than Before’: COVID-19 Cases Plunge Across US (ET)

COVID-19 case counts have dropped across the United States in recent days, stoking optimism that the Omicron-fueled wave is subsiding. 34 states have recorded a decrease in cases in recent days, not including states that reported a single-day drop, according to an Epoch Times analysis. That includes some of the states that saw huge Omicron-fueled increases, including New York, California, and Florida. Other states that have seen fewer cases recently include Alabama, Delaware, Georgia, Louisiana, Nevada, North Dakota, Oregon, and Pennsylvania. States in every region of the country have reported fewer cases, and a smaller number have also seen a lower number of people being admitted to hospitals with or for COVID-19.

Omicron is more transmissible than the Delta variant, which dominated the United States for months last year. However, it causes a smaller percentage of cases that require hospital care or lead to death. States saw a significant increase in positive tests with the emergence of Omicron late last year, in part because the COVID-19 vaccines provide little protection against infection from the strain. Cases in New York shot above 90,000 on Jan. 7, but have since dropped sharply, hitting 26,772 on Monday. Hospitalizations attributed to COVID-19 have also gone down in the northeastern state in recent days. Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, worries that hospital admissions may go back up in the near future, “but overall, the prognosis, the forecast, for COVID is much brighter than it had been before.” “The COVID clouds are parting,” she told reporters in Latham last week.

[..] Overall, the number of new cases nationwide dropped from 1.3 million on Jan. 10 to the mid-800,000s in the following days, according to data reported by states to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. U.S. health officials have said the drop in cases could come quickly, similar to the plunges seen in South Africa and other countries that dealt with earlier Omicron waves.

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“I’m now hearing a lot from prominent formerly pro-vax docs that they are turning on the vaccine. This is great news. Nobody is going public yet, but they are all pissed and realize they have been misled.”

The Narrative Is Falling Apart, Piece By Piece (Kirsch)

Here are some narrative pieces that have been falling apart that were recently brought to my attention. Here are the four new truths:

1/ The vaccines make you more likely to get COVID: It was supposed to make things better, but we’re basically mandating you get a shot that makes you more likely to get infected. That is totally insane, but that’s what we are doing. Check out the graphs here. No age confounding this time: UK Government Data proves the Covid-19 Vaccines DOUBLE your chances of catching Covid-19.

2/ The vaccines aren’t safe: I’m now hearing a lot from prominent formerly pro-vax docs that they are turning on the vaccine. This is great news. Nobody is going public yet, but they are all pissed and realize they have been misled. It will not be pretty. This is of course great news.

3/ Cloth masks don’t work: The CDC finally admits that cloth masks that they said worked before and that everyone wore (including Rochelle Walensky) don’t actually work. The other mask types don’t work either, but it will take them longer to figure out the obvious. P100 respirators do work but only a small percentage of people know that. I can’t wait to see Rochelle Walensky wear a P100 respirator; after all, she should be modelling best practices.

4/ Kids shouldn’t have boosters shots: Top WHO scientist finally admits that kids shouldn’t get boosted!!!! Yet the US colleges and universities aren’t going to back off. Someone is very wrong here and for once it isn’t the WHO.

Here are some older truths that should have been realized by now, but are still going on:

1/ Remdesivir is killing patients, not saving them: RDV is standard operating procedure in the US, but everyone I talk to says it doesn’t work and is much more likely to kill patients than save them. Doctors are forced to give it by hospital policy.

2/ Social distancing doesn’t work: The MIT study came out in April, 2021 that showed social distancing makes no difference. 6 feet or 60 feet made no difference. People still haven’t figured this out.


P100 mask

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There we go again. Omicron deaths, in waves.

US Faces Wave Of Omicron Deaths In Coming Weeks, Models Say (AP)

The fast-moving omicron variant may cause less severe disease on average, but COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. are climbing and modelers forecast 50,000 to 300,000 more Americans could die by the time the wave subsides in mid-March. The seven-day rolling average for daily new COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. has been trending upward since mid-November, reaching nearly 1,700 on Jan. 17 — still below the peak of 3,300 in January 2021. COVID-19 deaths among nursing home residents started rising slightly two weeks ago, although still at a rate 10 times less than last year before most residents were vaccinated. Despite signs omicron causes milder disease on average, the unprecedented level of infection spreading through the country, with cases still soaring in many states, means many vulnerable people will become severely sick. If the higher end of projections comes to pass, that would push total U.S. deaths from COVID-19 over 1 million by early spring.


“A lot of people are still going to die because of how transmissible omicron has been,” said University of South Florida epidemiologist Jason Salemi. “It unfortunately is going to get worse before it gets better.” Morgues are starting to run out of space in Johnson County, Kansas, said Dr. Sanmi Areola, director of the health department. More than 30 residents have died in the county this year, the vast majority of them unvaccinated. But the notion that a generally less severe variant could still take the lives of thousands of people has been difficult for health experts to convey. The math of it — that a small percentage of a very high number of infections can yield a very high number of deaths — is difficult to visualize. “Overall, you’re going to see more sick people even if you as an individual have a lower chance of being sick,” said Katriona Shea of Pennsylvania State University, who co-leads a team that pulls together several pandemic models and shares the combined projections with the White House.

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Ioannidis.

New Research: Covid Less Deadly Than Thought In 1st Year Of Pandemic (JTN)

COVID-19 was less lethal across nearly every age group in its first full year than previously thought, according to an updated review of global research from Stanford University’s Meta-Research Innovation Center (METRIC). Between summer and Christmas 2021, METRIC’s estimates of deaths from infection fell by half in multiple age groups, including young people, and less sharply in others. The international estimates, which have not been peer-reviewed, are not substantially different from the CDC’s own “best estimate” of COVID mortality in the U.S., last updated in March. They use different age ranges, making exact comparisons difficult. The findings raise questions about ongoing COVID restrictions and mandates, particularly for schoolchildren and college students, who remain at the lowest overall risk from infection.

The risk-benefit ratio of vaccine boosters is also under scrutiny, with international authorities souring on their wide deployment and a new Israeli study finding that a fourth dose of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines doesn’t stop the Omicron variant. METRIC codirector John Ioannidis, credited by one medical publisher as having “practically invented” the field of meta-research, warned early in the pandemic that available infection data were “utterly unreliable.” His ongoing tracking of “seroprevalence,” which measures COVID infection rates using the presence of antibodies in blood samples, has made him controversial in scientific circles. Ioannidis led a study in Stanford’s backyard that estimated a much higher infection rate than local authorities were reporting in spring 2020, leading to criticism of his methods. The revised paper was published last spring in an Oxford medical journal.

He has also consistently emphasized that mortality risks for the non-elderly were “very small” even in COVID “hotbeds.” A June 2020 review of seroprevalence studies determined a median “infection fatality rate” (IFR) of 0.26% overall and 0.04% for everyone under 70. [..] The Greece-born Ioannidis told the Greek Reporter this week that he believes the earlier Delta variant is responsible for a substantial portion of recent COVID deaths in the U.S. and Europe, with infections predating the Omicron wave. “Omicron has the characteristics of an endemic wave,” he said, echoing South African research on Omicron infection providing some protection against Delta infection.

The milder variant has a “seasonal appearance, high rates of transmission, [and] disproportionately low death burden in a setting where there is very high background immunity due to prior infection and/or vaccination,” Ioannidis said. The chief epidemiologist at Denmark’s State Serum Institute made the same claim earlier this month, telling Danish TV 2 that “we will have our normal lives back in two months.” Tyra Grove Krause said her organization found the hospitalization risk from Omicron was half that of Delta. It welcomed the spike in cases in recent weeks, saying the “massive spread” of a mild variant will put the country “in a better place than we were before.’

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“And now the clock is running down, and the resistance isn’t crushed … on the contrary, it is growing..”

The Last Days of the Covidian Cult (CJ Hopkins)

This isn’t going to be pretty, folks. The downfall of a death cult rarely is. There is going to be wailing and gnashing of teeth, incoherent fanatical jabbering, mass deleting of embarrassing tweets. There’s going to be a veritable tsunami of desperate rationalizing, strenuous denying, shameless blame-shifting, and other forms of ass-covering, as suddenly former Covidian Cult members make a last-minute break for the jungle before the fully-vaxxed-and-boosted “Safe and Effective Kool-Aid” servers get to them. Yes, that’s right, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, the official Covid narrative is finally falling apart, or is being hastily disassembled, or historically revised, right before our eyes.

The “experts” and “authorities” are finally acknowledging that the “Covid deaths” and “hospitalization” statistics are artificially inflated and totally unreliable (which they have been from the very beginning), and they are admitting that their miracle “vaccines” don’t work (unless you change the definition of the word “vaccine”), and that they have killed a few people, or maybe more than a few people, and that lockdowns were probably “a serious mistake.” I am not going to bother with further citations. You can surf the Internet as well as I can. The point is, the “Apocalyptic Pandemic” PSYOP has reached its expiration date. After almost two years of mass hysteria over a virus that causes mild-to-moderate common-cold or flu-like symptoms (or absolutely no symptoms whatsoever) in about 95% of the infected and the overall infection fatality rate of which is approximately 0.1% to 0.5%, people’s nerves are shot.

We are all exhausted. Even the Covidian cultists are exhausted. And they are starting to abandon the cult en masse. It was always mostly just a matter of time. As Klaus Schwab said, “the pandemic represent[ed] a rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine, and reset our world.” It isn’t over, but that window is closing, and our world has not been “reimagined” and “reset,” not irrevocably, not just yet. Clearly, GloboCap underestimated the potential resistance to the Great Reset, and the time it would take to crush that resistance. And now the clock is running down, and the resistance isn’t crushed … on the contrary, it is growing.

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“..more than 80,000 – 6 per cent of the workforce – remain unvaccinated..”

Calls Grow To Ditch Compulsory Covid Jabs Law For NHS Staff (DM)

Ministers are under pressure from Tory MPs to scrap a law requiring all NHS staff to have a Covid jab as bosses prepare to start sacking 80,000 in a fortnight. All frontline workers must have had two doses of the vaccine by April 1, meaning the first must have been administered by February 3. But more than 80,000 – 6 per cent of the workforce – remain unvaccinated despite repeated efforts to boost take-up. New NHS guidance to employers says staff who have not been jabbed should start being called into formal meetings from February 4 and warned they face dismissal with the notice period ending on March 31. But the Royal College of Nursing and the Royal College of Midwives have urged ministers to delay the rules, saying they could have a ‘catastrophic’ impact on the delivery of services.


And Mark Harper, the chairman of the Covid Recovery Group of Conservative MPs, yesterday urged No 10 to reconsider its approach. He said: ‘The Government is still ploughing on, regardless of the consequences on staffing levels. It’s nonsense. Ministers must change course.’ He posted a link to the Government’s own impact assessment, which says 73,000 NHS staff in England could be lost because of the rules. He added: ‘Here are the stark numbers – which let’s not forget are real people with real families – behind this policy.’ Health Secretary Sajid Javid last week told the Commons the Government remained committed to the plans.

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“It’s time for us to admit that we’ve been completely deceived.”

Observations From An Experienced Nurse About The Covid Vaccines (Kirsch)

One of my nurse friends forwarded this note to me. It was originally written by a nurse, but the source is unknown, probably out of fear of retribution. Among all the vaccines I have known in my life (diphtheria, tetanus, measles, rubella, chickenpox, hepatitis, meningitis, flu, and pneumonia, and tuberculosis) I have never seen a vaccine that forced me to wear a mask and maintain my social distance, even when you are fully vaccinated. I had never heard of a vaccine that spreads the virus even after vaccination. I had never heard of rewards, discounts, incentives to get vaccinated. I never saw discrimination for those who didn’t. If you haven’t been vaccinated no one has tried to make you feel like a bad person. I have never seen a vaccine that threatens the relationship between family, colleagues and friends.

I have never seen a vaccine used to threaten livelihoods, work or school. I have never seen a vaccine that would allow a 12-year-old to override parental consent. After all the vaccines I listed above, I have never seen a vaccine like this one, which discriminates, divides and judges society as it is. And as the social fabric tightens… It’s a powerful vaccine! It does all these things except IMMUNIZATION. If we still need a booster dose after we are fully vaccinated, and we still need to get a negative test after we are fully vaccinated, and we still need to wear a mask after we are fully vaccinated, and still be hospitalized after we have been fully vaccinated, it will likely come to “It’s time for us to admit that we’ve been completely deceived.”

I think she forgot to mention that she’s probably also never seen: • a vaccine which makes it more likely you’ll be infected by the virus they are trying to protect you from (after a brief efficacy period). See Incriminating evidence for all the studies showing this. • a vaccine which helps other latent viruses or cancers to re-emerge with a vengeance. • a vaccine which has killed at least 150,000 previously healthy Americans • a vaccine with over 20,000 deaths reported into VAERS and the CDC can’t find a single death that was due to the vaccine • lockdowns for the unvaccinated that can last for years to come

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“..be careful about deciding what medical ethics we are prepared to amend or abandon in order to “get life back to normal.”

Think About What Denying Health Care To The Unvaccinated Means (Vezina)

Once again, the calls to systemically deny or restrict health care to the unvaccinated are surging, opening the Pandora’s box of changing modern biomedical ethics. Many people are saying it is time for our leaders to have, as they phrase it, the difficult conversation. There are two assumptions made in this. The first is that we have decided a medical system which — overtly and in full view — places certain people’s lives above others is tolerable. It’s true we already have other systems which do this indirectly and subtly. There is no rule, for example, that explicitly states the rich are treated better than the poor, but in practice they are, for numerous reasons. The second assumption is that it is permissible to trade not just the quality of life, but lives themselves, especially in the short term, for securing critical infrastructure.

This is also already the case in our society although, again, it is done indirectly. For example, safeguarding economic infrastructure takes priority over extending people’s lives. Greater priority is given to safeguarding Canadian banks than to affordable housing. The poor are given limited public assistance so that the cost of living does not increase even faster for everyone else. Whether any of this is good or bad is irrelevant. It is simply what happens. But going beyond that, with the Pandora’s box of changing medical ethics having been opened, the following strategies can be considered, all doable and each with its own risks and benefits.

1. Deny health care to the unvaccinated. Benefits: Opens up significant ICU and hospital space; removes people who disagree with modern medical science from the population; perhaps gets us through the COVID-19 pandemic faster. Risks: Potential for widespread civil unrest; long-term effects on medical ethics with a precedent having been set; disproportionate impact on workers and industries required to keep critical infrastructures operational. External control measures, such as business closures and public gatherings would need to be maintained, or vaccinated patients might fill ICUs with uncontrolled Omicron spread.

2. Deny ICU health care to all COVID-only patients, regardless of vaccine status. Benefits: Can restart surgeries rapidly; difficult but easier to ethically justify than the first option; perhaps get through COVID-19 faster. Risks: Easy to abuse in terms of preferential treatment on an individual basis; difficult to implement in terms of practicality; potential staffing shortages, with some frontline health-care workers viewing this as the “last straw” ethically and quitting. With this strategy, external control measures are separated from hospital ICU capacity. Once everyone (of all ages) has an available vaccine to control their personal level of risk, removing control measures and allowing people to decide their risks for themselves becomes more attractive.

3. Reach endemic status rapidly, to decrease hospital load over the long term. By delaying the onset of COVID-19 infections and having hospitals at or exceeding capacity for long periods of time, cancer and many other life-saving surgeries are being further delayed. If the assumption is that everyone will get the virus eventually anyway, then a rapid endemic strategy would be to encourage people to become infected as quickly as possible, through the immediate removal of all external control measures to contain the pandemic. This includes allowing all businesses to reopen at full capacity and removing all limits on the number of people allowed to attend public and private events, as well as in people’s homes. Benefits: Reaches COVID endgame much more quickly, the load on hospital infrastructure recedes much faster, cancer and other life-saving surgeries can be resumed much earlier. Risks: Over the short term, a scenario from hell with increased deaths, the hospital system strained beyond maximum capacity during this period; increased chances of a new Canadian variant developing; it will appear to the public as if governments are abandoning frontline health care. In all of these strategies, the ability or inability of society to recover ethically from what has been done, once the immediate pandemic crisis is over, would be on the table. So be careful about deciding what medical ethics we are prepared to amend or abandon in order to “get life back to normal.”

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People who know more than they tell.

Nicola Sturgeon Announces Lifting Of Omicron Restrictions In Scotland (G.)

Restrictions brought in before Christmas to stem the Omicron surge across Scotland are to be lifted from next Monday, Scotland’s first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, has said. Nightclubs will reopen, there will be an end to social distancing and to a three-household limit indoors, Sturgeon said, adding that the country had “turned the corner on the Omicron wave”. But Sturgeon urged the public to remain “cautious” about socialising in larger groups, while government guidance remains to work from home wherever possible and use face coverings, with vaccine passports still in place for large-scale events. Sturgeon said in her regular statement at Holyrood that the data suggested Omicron peaked in Scotland in the first week of January and that “we are now on the downward slope of this wave of cases” as hospital and intensive care admissions were falling.


Cases were down from 36,526 new cases on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday of last week to 20,268 cases reported this Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. She said that, after discussion with her cabinet, the remaining statutory measures introduced in response to Omicron – limits on indoor public events; the requirement for one-metre physical distancing between different groups in indoor public places; the requirement for table service in hospitality premises serving alcohol on the premises; and the closure of nightclubs – would be lifted from next Monday, 24 January. From that day, the guidance asking people to stick to a three-household limit on indoor gatherings will also be lifted.

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Locking people out of their own country, and home, should be a no-go.

New Zealand Closes Borders To New Arrivals Over Omicron Risk (G.)

New Zealand has temporarily cut off the only pathway home for overseas citizens and visa holders, citing the risk of the Omicron variant. Officials announced on Tuesday evening that new spaces in the country’s managed isolation and quarantine system (MIQ) would not be released. The Covid-19 response minister, Chris Hipkins, said on Wednesday that while the pause was “temporary” there was no date for when spaces would again be available – meaning New Zealand’s border would be closed for an indeterminate time to citizens without an existing booking. “Pausing the next MIQ lobby is a temporary position while MIQ is under extreme pressure from New Zealanders returning with Omicron,” he said.

“No decisions have been made on the date, sequence and conditions for the border reopening and cabinet will consider options within the next couple of weeks based on the most up to date advice. Until then, we are not in a position to release more MIQ rooms.” The MIQ head, Chris Bunny, said there had been an “unprecedented number of Omicron cases coming into New Zealand and MIQ”, with a tenfold increase in cases at the border compared with December, and a seven day rolling average of 33. On Wednesday, New Zealand recorded 24 new cases in the community. One of those cases has been confirmed as Omicron, a household contact of an MIQ worker. Separately, an airport worker tested positive on Wednesday.

New Zealand’s tough border restrictions have been crucial to its avoiding an Omicron outbreak and keeping Covid cases extremely low – but they are also a source of increasing heartache and rage for those who have found themselves locked out, often in extremely difficult personal circumstances. Other than the risky path of chartering a boat across the Tasman sea, securing a spot in MIQ is the only way into New Zealand. Competition for the rooms, which are released via a lottery system, is fierce. At the last release in early January, a queue of 16,000 people were vying to book one of 1,250 available rooms.

For those stranded overseas, the cancellation of future releases was distressing. Maxine Strydom, a member of Grounded Kiwis, which advocates for stranded New Zealanders, said she was stuck in Perth with her two children, and had been unable to secure a spot, despite her job and tenancy in Australia ending. “All of us stranded overseas are affected. We’re all going through mental and emotional stress,” she said. “Soon I’m going to have no money, no house, and no help in a foreign country.” Claire, a New Zealander in San Diego, said: “I feel like every shred of hope has been stripped away … There is no end in sight, it’s just demoralising.” Claire asked to be referred to by first name only amid concerns about criticism by fellow New Zealanders, most of whom have favoured border restrictions.

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Canada screwing up royally.

Grocery Stores Could Close If Labour, Product Shortages Worsen (CP)

Grocery stores are struggling with rising labour and product shortages that could threaten Canada’s food security, experts say. Employee absenteeism due to workers calling in sick and COVID-19 protocols has hit about 30 per cent at some stores and is continuing to rise, Gary Sands, senior vice-president of public policy with the Canadian Federation of Independent Grocers, said Tuesday. Without access to rapid testing in many provinces, he said workers are repeatedly forced to isolate for a week or more after an exposure to COVID-19. If the situation worsens, some grocery stores won’t be able to stay open _ threatening food security in rural and remote areas that rely on a sole independent grocer, Sands said. “If we have to keep sending people home, at a certain point stores are not going to be able to operate,” he said. “We’re very frustrated with the lack of rapid test kits for grocers.”


Health Canada has made some rapid test kits available directly to companies in critical sectors, including the food industry, with 200 or more employees. But many independent grocery stores don’t meet that threshold, putting those kits out of reach, Sands said. Yet many grocers cannot obtain rapid tests through provinces either, he said. “Independent grocers are in a myriad of communities in this country where there is no other grocery store,” Sands said. “If those stores close, you’ve got a food security issue.” Meanwhile, stores are also experiencing a shortage of goods stemming from supply chain issues, including a shortage of truckers, packaging and processing delays and the Canadian winter. Grocers rely on “just in time” delivery, meaning even transient issues like inclement weather can cause delays and shortages, Retail Council of Canada spokesperson Michelle Wasylyshen said.

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How many will be famous?

Ghislaine Maxwell Ends Fight To Keep Eight ‘John Does’ Secret (CTV)

Ghislaine Maxwell will no longer fight to keep the names of eight ‘John Does’ secret and will leave it to the court to decide whether the names should be unsealed, according to a Jan. 12 letter to federal Judge Loretta Preska of the Southern District of New York. The documents containing the names are connected to a 2015 defamation case brought by Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who claimed Epstein sexually abused her while she was a minor and that Maxwell aided in the abuse. The case was settled in 2017. Maxwell, 60, faces up to 65 years in prison after she was found guilty last month in a New York federal court on five federal charges, including sex trafficking of a minor. The charges were related to her role in Epstein’s sexual abuse of minor girls between 1994 and 2004.

“After careful review of the detailed objections submitted by Non-Party Does 17, 53, 54, 55, 73, 93 and 151, counsel for Ghislaine Maxwell writes to inform the Court that she does not wish to further address those objections,” Maxwell attorney Laura Menninger wrote. “Each of the listed Does has counsel who have ably asserted their own respective privacy rights. Ms. Maxwell therefore leaves it to this Court to conduct the appropriate review.” Giuffre’s attorney had filed a brief on Wednesday, arguing for the names to be revealed. “[G]eneralized aversion to embarrassment and negativity that may come from being associated with Epstein and Maxwell is not enough to warrant continued sealing of information. This is especially true with respect to this case of great public interest, involving serious allegations of the sex trafficking of minors,” Guiffre attorney Sigrid McCawley wrote.

“Now that Maxwell’s criminal trial has come and gone, there is little reason to retain protection over the vast swaths of information about Epstein and Maxwell’s sex-trafficking operation that were originally filed under seal in this case.” McCawley said the court has already rejected similar arguments for anonymity and the same standard should apply to the eight ‘John Does’ who still remain anonymous in court documents.

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“Germany would have no way of paying Moscow for its natural gas contracts”

Western Governments Drop Plans To Cut Russia Off From SWIFT – Media (RT)

German newspaper Handelsblatt has reported that Western leaders have ruled out the possibility of disconnecting Russia from the global banking interchange SWIFT. However, the US government has contradicted the assertion. “No option is off the table,” a spokesperson for Washington’s National Security Council told reporters on Monday. The denial comes after Handelsblatt claimed that the US had, in fact, given up on the threat of removing Russia from SWIFT in talks with the German government. If the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication cuts ties with Russian banks, Germany would have no way of paying Moscow for its natural gas contracts. It could also unleash a catastrophic rise in oil and food prices.


Instead, the Düsseldorf-based business daily reported that the US and German governments are discussing “targeted” sanctions against Russia’s largest banks in the event that Moscow “invades” Ukraine. US intelligence has claimed for several weeks now that Russia is preparing an attack on its neighbor. Moscow has rejected the insinuations as “fake news.” Germany has insisted that any sanctions include exceptions so that the import of oil and gas from Russia can continue, according to Handelsblatt. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is expected in Berlin on Thursday to discuss the sanctions proposal with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, the paper added.

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“PULL UP WHOOP WHOOP DON’T SINK TOO LOW GEAR”

5G Network Deployment In The US Spawns A Cluster Of Disruption (TAC)

Something is going on with Runway 10L at Palm Beach International Airport in Florida. Last week, a Bombardier-built CRJ200 regional jet on final approach had the strangest thing happen. The aircraft’s radar altitude abruptly ran down to zero, causing repeated loud aural warnings: PULL UP WHOOP WHOOP DON’T SINK TOO LOW GEAR. The flight landed without incident in good weather, but it wasn’t the first time. “Exact same location multiple times the past two weeks,” the pilot, who was on the flight deck for both anomalies, told The Air Current.

The incidents were reported to the Federal Aviation Administration. It’s not known definitively if the radar altimeter behavior was related to pre-deployment testing of 5G telecommunication technologies, but the unexplained incident underscored the fears of aviators, as well as the confusion and increasing disruption that is now befalling U.S. commercial aviation. International airlines like Emirates, Air India, Japan Airlines and All Nippon Airways have cancelled flights to select cities, citing the 5G C Band interference risk to their aircraft. Boeing on Monday night sent a so-called multi-operator message to carriers flying 777 and 747-8s and “recommends operators do not operate 777 airplanes on approach and landing to U.S. runways” with 5G C Band notices starting on January 19 unless there is an alternative means of compliance with FAA directives, according to guidance reviewed by The Air Current.

“The above recommendation has been determined through the Boeing Safety Review Board and engineering pilot evaluation based on the uncertainty of the 5G operating environment,” the company wrote. The review board meeting was held on January 15. “Boeing recommends that operators develop contingency plans for their operations.” Boeing referred comment to the FAA after saying, like Airbus, it was working with an industry coalition to address the 5G deployment issue with U.S. regulators. The FAA did not respond to questions about the reported incident in Palm Beach.

5G

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Y2K?

Multiple Flights to US Suspended Over 5G Fears (RT)

Prominent airlines from Japan, India, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have suspended flights to airports across the United States after expressing concern over the deployment of 5G. Emirates, Air India, Japan Airlines, and All Nippon Airways canceled flights to New York, New Jersey, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, and Seattle, among other US cities. Air India announced on Tuesday that it would no longer operate flights the next day to New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport, San Francisco International Airport, Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, and New Jersey’s Newark Liberty International Airport “due to deployment of the 5G communications in USA.”


On the same day, Emirates canceled flights to at least nine US cities, again “due to operational concerns associated with the planned deployment of 5G mobile network services in the U.S,” while Japan Airlines and All Nippon Airways canceled at least 13 flights. Airlines and the FAA previously repeatedly voiced concerns about C-band 5G potentially disrupting airplane instruments, namely radio altimeters. So far, the US aviation body cleared less than a half of the nation’s commercial fleet for low-visibility landings at the airports potentially affected by 5G interference. International airlines were also seriously affected, with All Nippon Airways saying that while its Boeing 787 aircraft could operate under the new guidelines, 777’s could not. In response to concerns, AT&T and Verizon postponed the Wednesday rollout of 5G service near some airports, but not all.

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Rogan McMaster

 

 

 

 

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

 

Jan 102022
 


Rembrandt van Rijn The Adoration of the Magi 1634

 

Novak Djokovic Wins Appeal Against Decision To Cancel His Australian Visa (G.)
99.9987% of Under-20s Survive Covid– And 97.1% of the Elderly Do As Well (DS)
100,000 NHS Staff Face The Sack If Mandatory Covid Vaccines Enforced (Exp.)
Advisers Urge Biden To Change COVID-19 Strategy (SAC)
4th COVID Booster Shot Could Cause ‘Immune System Fatigue (CHD)
Saturday Night Fight.. At The Pharmacy (Kory)
New Zealand Not Prepared For Omicron Outbreak Expected In ‘Matter Of Weeks’ (G.)
UK Government Urges All Pregnant Women To Get Immediate Covid Jab (G.)
#BareShelvesBiden Trends On Twitter As Americans Deal With Empty Shelves (PM)
Temporary Empty Shelves are Not a Supply Chain Crisis (CTH)

 

 

 

 

Occam Omicron

 

 

This is almost verbatim the Great Barrington Declaration, according to Fauci and Collins written by “fringe epidemiologists”.

 

 

 

 

 

Walensky

 

 

 

 

How many millions in future tourist income has Australia lost so far in this case? A land of petty vengeful wankers. Where the people suffer from Mass Stockholm Syndrome.

‘Djokovic has won the battle, but might still lose the war!’ Australian immigration minister could use a separate power to personally cancel Novak Djokovic’s visa which could have serious knock-on impacts on the tennis star. He would be banned from the country for 3 years. But then the international tennis federation could bar them from organizing the Australia open for those 3 years.

Novak Djokovic Wins Appeal Against Decision To Cancel His Australian Visa (G.)

Novak Djokovic will be immediately released from immigration detention in Australia, after the federal circuit court ordered a decision to cancel his visa be quashed. But the Australian government’s counsel, Christopher Tran, has revealed the immigration minister will consider exercising a personal power to cancel Djokovic’s visa meaning he is not guaranteed to stay and compete in the Australian Open. The decision now under consideration to cancel Djokovic’s visa anew would result in him being excluded from Australia for three years – significantly upping the stakes in a bizarre border stoush that threatens Djokovic’s quest to win the most grand slam singles titles of all time.

After a lengthy adjournment on Monday the judge Anthony Kelly read a consent minute agreed between the world No 1 male tennis player and the home affairs minister, Karen Andrews. Djokovic, after being temporarily released from immigration detention earlier on Monday to attend the remote hearing, was present off-screen as Kelly ordered the visa cancellation decision be quashed and costs awarded in his favour. After the decision is quashed, Djokovic must be released from detention within 30 minutes with his passport and personal effects be returned to him. Kelly said it was “unreasonable” for Australian Border Force officials to interview Djokovic on Thursday morning and cancel his visa in circumstances where they had agreed to give him until 8.30am to speak to officials and respond to the proposed visa cancellation.


Tran informed the court that another minister of the Australian government – the immigration minister, Alex Hawke – would consider exercising a personal power to cancel Djokovic’s visa. Kelly praised his candour. He questioned if such a power was exercised whether Djokovic would be removed from Australia and unable to return for three years, which Tran confirmed. “The stakes have now risen rather than receded,” the judge said. “I cannot purport to encroach on the valid exercise of a minister of executive power.”

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“..even the proponents of lockdown should be able to accept that this virus is well below a level where restrictions are justifiable…”

99.9987% of Under-20s Survive Covid– And 97.1% of the Elderly Do As Well (DS)

Early last year renowned epidemiologist Professor John Ioannidis published an analysis of seroprevalence (antibody) studies from 2020 which concluded the infection fatality rate (IFR) of COVID-19 – the proportion of those infected who die – was around 0.15% globally. It varied significantly by region, up to 0.3%-0.4% in Europe and the Americas and down to 0.05% in Africa and Asia. Prof. Ioannidis has now published an update, using 2021 seroprevalence studies to find a more recent IFR for the conditions prevailing in the second year of the pandemic. The new study has a special focus on the IFR in the elderly, but also includes estimates for all age groups, though not a new overall estimate. From analysis of 25 seroprevalence surveys across 14 countries, Prof. Ioannidis and his colleague found the IFR varied from 0.0013% in the under-20s to 0.65% in those in their 60s.


For those above 70 not in a care home it was 2.9%, rising to 4.9% for all over-70s. This means that even for the elderly, more than 95% of those infected survive, 97.1% when considering those not in a care home. For younger people the mortality risk is orders of magnitude less, with 99.9987% of under-20s surviving a bout of the virus. The authors note that if you allow for antibody waning of 5% per month in the elderly then the IFR reduces to 2.4% for non-care home residents and 4% for all elderly. They add that IFR varies between countries, and this variation correlates with the proportion of the elderly who are over 85, suggesting much of the difference may be accounted for by the age of the population. The authors conclude that the IFR of COVID-19 has reduced substantially from previously reported figures. They suggest some reasons for this, including better treatments and the vaccine programmes:

“The share of nursing home deaths decreased markedly over time in most high-income countries with some exceptions (e.g. Australia). This change may be reflected in a much lower IFR among the elderly and the entire population after the first wave. Improved treatments (e.g. dexamethasone) and less use of harmful treatments (e.g. [high dose] hydroxychloroquine, improper mechanical ventilation) may also have decreased IFR substantially in late 2020 and in 2021. Other investigators have estimated in 2020 a global IFR of only 0.11% in the absence of effects of new variants and vaccinations. Vaccines that are more effective in protecting against death rather than infection are also expected to have decreased the IFR in 2021. New variants becoming dominant in 2021 may also be associated with further lower IFR…”


The study’s findings confirm that Covid is a mild disease in all but a small minority of cases. With Omicron now reducing the severity several-fold further, even the proponents of lockdown should be able to accept that this virus is well below a level where restrictions are justifiable.

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“Perhaps fire the modellers and keep the NHS staff. Most will already have immunity.”

100,000 NHS Staff Face The Sack If Mandatory Covid Vaccines Enforced (Exp.)

The cross-party alert comes after troops were drafted into hospitals with thousands of employees on sick leave through Covid or stress. Trade union bosses urged Health Secretary Sajid Javid to delay making Covid jabs mandatory by the end of March “with immediate effect”. They fear the exodus it triggers will worsen the staffing crisis, which includes 93,000 unfilled vacancies. And the Government and NHS trusts are facing a two-pronged legal challenge over the policy, by the Together Declaration campaign and Workers of England Union. The Government says that vaccinations are “our best defence” against Covid, preventing infection and saving lives”. But concerned ministers have held private talks with Tory MPs from the Covid Recovery Group about delaying or ditching the plan.

Sir Graham Brady, who chairs the 1922 Committee of Tory backbenchers, said: “The experience of forcing care home workers to be vaccinated was tens of thousands left their jobs, piling extra pressure on NHS beds. “We are about to repeat this folly by forcing NHS staff out of their jobs too. It’s time we took a more rational approach now we know that vaccines don’t stop transmission of Covid. A negative test provides much more reassurance.” In October, Mr Javid brushed off pleas from professionals to “pause” the requirement for care staff to be fully jabbed, saying those who “can’t be bothered” should “get out and get another job”. Around 11,000 left in the two months before the deadline.

Mr Javid was confronted at Kings College Hospital, in south London, on Friday by consultant anaesthetist Steve James. He has had Covid but does not want the vaccine, and is therefore facing dismissal. Mr James told him “the science isn’t strong enough” to justify a compulsory jab. He quoted research showing the vaccine suppressed Covid transmission of the Delta variant for only eight weeks and “is probably less” for Omicron. A senior NHS official at a London trust said: “There are serious ethical questions about forcing people to have medical interventions against their will but the public needs to understand the practical implications too. “We are looking at more than 100,000 people being sacked and some calculations have it at above 200,000.

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“They say the first thing the administration needs to do is take a broader vision, by recognizing that Covid-19 is here to stay.”

Advisers Urge Biden To Change COVID-19 Strategy (SAC)

Six public health advisers who advised President Biden during his presidential transition published three opinion articles in the Journal of the American Medical Association urging Biden to change his strategy in responding to COVID-19 to one aimed at learning how to live with the virus. “The authors are all big names in American medicine; several, including Dr. Luciana Borio, a former acting chief scientist at the Food and Drug Administration, and Dr. David Michaels, a former head of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, have held high-ranking government positions,” The New York Times reported. “The driving force behind the articles is Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, an oncologist, medical ethicist and University of Pennsylvania professor who advised former President Barack Obama.”

“They say the first thing the administration needs to do is take a broader vision, by recognizing that Covid-19 is here to stay. In one article, Dr. Emanuel and two co-authors — Michael T. Osterholm, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, and Dr. Celine Gounder, an infectious disease expert at New York University — pointedly note that in July, Mr. Biden proclaimed that ‘we’ve gained the upper hand against this virus,’ which in retrospect was clearly not the case,” the outlet added. The call for a new strategy comes after the COVID-19 pandemic has worsened to reaching over 1 million new daily cases despite Biden’s promise to “shut down the virus” during his 2020 presidential campaign.

“To be better prepared for inevitable outbreaks, they suggest that the administration lay out goals and specific benchmarks, including what number of hospitalizations and deaths from respiratory viruses, including the coronavirus, that should trigger emergency measures,” The New York Times added. “The authors say the administration needs to acknowledge that Omicron may not mark the end of the pandemic — and to plan for a future that they concede is unknowable. They also make clear that the current rate of Covid hospitalizations and deaths is unacceptably high.”

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“There is one official report of an Israeli dying from Omicron. However, according to The Times of Israel, it is unclear that Omicron caused the death of the individual..”

We are still at zero confirmed deaths… From Omicron, that is. Not from the vaccines.

4th COVID Booster Shot Could Cause ‘Immune System Fatigue (CHD)

COVID-19 booster shots could do more harm than good, according to scientists interviewed late last month by The New York Times. The scientists warned “that too many shots might actually harm the body’s ability to fight COVID” and “might cause a sort of immune system fatigue.” On Monday, Israeli authorities began offering anyone over age 60 a chance to get a fourth shot, or second booster of the COVID vaccine. But scientists told The Times, before Israel confirmed it would offer the fourth shot, the science is not yet settled on using an additional booster shot to combat the new Omicron variant. There is one official report of an Israeli dying from Omicron. However, according to The Times of Israel, it is unclear that Omicron caused the death of the individual — a man in his 60s hospitalized weeks earlier from a pre-existing condition.

A new report from the UK Health Security Agency showed booster doses are less effective against Omicron than previous variants, and their effectiveness wears off in only 10 weeks. Professor Hagai Levine, an epidemiologist and chairman of Israel’s Association of Public Health Physicians, told The New York Times there’s no published scientific evidence a fourth shot is needed to prevent severe illness from Omicron. “Before giving a fourth shot, it is preferable to wait for the science,” Levine said. Benny Muchawsky, an architect based in Israel, told The Times the push to administer boosters for the Omicron variant “seemed like hysteria.” “Israel is the laboratory for the coronavirus vaccine,” Muchawsky said.

Dr. Robert Malone echoed during an interview with Joe Rogan: “These days the country’s name is actually ‘Pfizreal.’ It’s no longer Israel. Their government has a financial deal with Pfizer and they only have the Pfizer vaccine.” Malone told Rogan the scientific data points to booster doses doing more harm than good. Citing data from Denmark, he told Rogan there seems to be “negative efficacy in correlation with increased doses” meaning the more doses or boosters an individual receives, the higher chance they’ll be infected.

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Pierre Kory’s ongoing battle with pharmacists.

Saturday Night Fight.. At The Pharmacy (Kory)

I am exhausted.. physically and emotionally and morally. Although I am not sure moral exhaustion is “a thing,” the daily witnessing of masses of physicians and pharmacists abandoning their core responsibility of placing the welfare of the patient as their primary consideration.. is beyond wearying. As my friend and COVID expert Dr. Hector Carvallo has long ago said, “it’s time for the lawyers.” It is becoming increasingly critical that the law profession aid the medical profession as it has long ago been led astray by captured federal pharmaceutical agencies. Note that I no longer call them “federal health agencies” as all their actions have been 100% consistent with what a pharmaceutical or vaccine manufacturer would want them to do. To prove that point, I simply ask that, when you read an announcement in corporate media that reports a new decision or action by the federal pharmaceutical agencies (FPA’s for short), simply ask yourself “is that what a pharmaceutical company would do?”

Perfect example of this exercise was 2 days ago when it was announced that the “FPA” had authorized boosters for 12-17 year old’s against omicron (a generally mild cold in kids), using a vaccine designed for older, fundamentally different variants that have already spectacularly failed at giving protection against omicron given ever-increasing data of “negative efficacy” (i.e. vaccinated people are getting omicron more frequently than the unvaccinated). Yet the FPA “doubles down” with yet another “non-scientific policy” so that Pharma can increase the total market size of those eligible for a vaccine… and who cares if this decision ends up sending more kids to hospital than the disease ever would. Another brutal assault on public health. Another day in the United States of Pharma.

In the United States of Pharma, the individual docs and pharmacists have been led so far astray, forgivably or unforgivably, due to the relentless barrage of dis-information targeted at them by the FPA’s (supplemented by synchronous Pharma influence over the media and medical journals). The resulting proportion of the two professions that have failed to display even a modicum of either critical thinking or moral conviction.. is terrifying. It is also causing lots of problems for patients and physicians (a colleague of mine now differentiates “doctors” from “physicians”, reserving the latter term for those who follow our guiding principles and ethics by always, always, putting the patient’s welfare as their primary goal above all else, even at personal sacrifice).

Bartiromo/Kory

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All about vaccines that we know don’t help against Omicron.

New Zealand Not Prepared For Omicron Outbreak Expected In ‘Matter Of Weeks’ (G.)

Two of New Zealand’s most prominent Covid-19 experts have warned that the country is unprepared to prevent the health system from being overloaded by an Omicron outbreak, with likely fatal consequences. Otago University’s Dr Nick Wilson and Dr Michael Baker also said it was only a “matter of weeks” before the highly transmissible variant seeped into the community due to border failures. Wilson said that despite New Zealand’s high vaccination rates, the number of adults who had received a booster dose of the vaccine – essential for minimising the effects of Omicron – remains dangerously low, and noted that the vaccine rollout for children between five and 11 still had not begun.

New Zealand received its first shipment of Pfizer’s paediatric vaccine only at the weekend, and intends to begin child vaccinations from 17 January, despite some comparable countries beginning their child vaccine rollout late last year. Omicron’s short incubation period also means New Zealand’s system for identifying and containing new community cases would be much less effective. Wilson panned the country’s traffic light system – which replaced the more stringent alert-level system last year – as “not fit for purpose” with Omicron due to its tolerance for relatively significant social interaction for vaccinated people when Covid is in the community. Baker agreed, calling for the government to rapidly reinstate an amended version of the alert level system.

“The traffic light system won’t help us very much because it was never designed to dampen down transmission, it was only designed to nudge people towards vaccination,” Baker said. Until these weaknesses were fixed, he said, “we need to hugely turn down the tap of people arriving in New Zealand”. Wilson agreed: “The priority is to have a tighter border so that we don’t have to vaccinate kids and conduct a booster program during an outbreak.” The pair called for a “significant tightening” of the number of New Zealanders entering the country.

McCullough Denmark

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Brought to you by Pfizer.

UK Government Urges All Pregnant Women To Get Immediate Covid Jab (G.)

The UK government is warning that almost all pregnant women admitted to hospital with Covid symptoms were unvaccinated in one analysis over several months last year, as it kicks off an advertising campaign encouraging expectant mothers to get boosted. The campaign is calling on pregnant women not to wait to get either their first, second or booster jab. It will highlight the risks of Covid-19 to mothers and babies, with testimonies of pregnant women who have had the vaccine to be broadcast on radio and social media. The government says it has been clear, along with medical experts and institutions, that Covid-19 vaccines are safe for pregnant women and have no impact on fertility.

The Department of Health and Social Care cited statistics from the UK Obstetric Surveillance System which showed 96.3% of pregnant women admitted to hospital with Covid-19 symptoms between May and October were unvaccinated, a third of whom required respiratory support. About 20% of women admitted to hospital with the virus need to be delivered pre-term to help them recover, and 20% of their babies need care in the neonatal unit, the Department of Health and Social Care said. Since April 2021, about 84,000 pregnant women have received one dose and more than 80,000 have received two doses of the Covid-19 vaccine, the department said.

Dr Jen Jardine, from the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, who is seven months pregnant and has had her Covid-19 booster jab, said: “Both as a doctor and pregnant mother myself, we can now be very confident that the Covid-19 vaccinations provide the best possible protection for you and your unborn child against this virus. “I would strongly call on all pregnant women like me, if you haven’t had the vaccine yet, to either speak to your GP or midwife if you still have questions and then book right away today.”

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Enormous amounts of photos on Twitter.

#BareShelvesBiden Trends On Twitter As Americans Deal With Empty Shelves (PM)

The hashtag “BareShelvesBiden” has taken off on Twitter, with Americans nationwide documenting an alarming number of empty shelves in their local grocery stores. It was #6 on Twitter’s trending list at the time of publishing. #BareShelvesBiden became a leading Twitter trend on Sunday evening as social media users across the country took aim at President Joe Biden and his administration for failing to address the ongoing supply chain crisis. A large number of photographs posted using the alliterative hashtag show bare shelves in produce, meat, and dairy areas of stores, and paper goods isles that resemble the mass buying of toilet paper at the beginning of the pandemic.


Throughout the hashtag, Twitter users posted videos and photographs of their local supermarkets across numerous grocery chains. While it’s currently unclear what exactly has caused these widespread shortages in stores across the country, some Twitter users have blamed the Biden administration and a supply chain crisis that hasn’t been solved for the shortages. The shortages appear to have touched a large portion of the country, with Twitter users from California, Maryland, Minnesota, and more states sending in their experiences with the popularized hashtag. Shelves remained unstocked and in a dire state as retail outlets continue to struggle with the shortage of goods, exacerbated by the pandemic and the Biden administration’s continued struggle to remedy the situation.

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“Sundance” with a closer look.

Temporary Empty Shelves are Not a Supply Chain Crisis (CTH)

All of these #BidensEmptyShelves assumptions, which are being heightened by increased attention and social media, are leading to confusion. An empty retail shelf or case for a 24, 36 to 48-hour period is not, I repeat, NOT, part of a systemic supply chain disruption. Those are mostly location and regional specific out of stock situations caused by localized events, weather and employee shortages. What CTH has been describing for the past several months is NOT what is noted above. What we have been describing is a long-term supply chain crisis that will slowly unfold over a period of about a week or two, and then remain a problem over time, for a period of 6+ months. The thirteen bullet points below are the issues we will first notice as the general food supply chain begins to show signs of that type of vulnerability. This outline explains why it is happening and how long it can be expected.

Initial food instability signs in the supply chain. Things to look for:

(1) A shortage of processed potatoes (frozen specifically).

And/Or a shortage of the ancillary products that are derivates of, or normally include, potatoes.

(2) A larger than usual footprint of turkey in the supermarket (last line of protein).

(3) A noticeable increase in the price of citrus products.

(4) A sparse distribution of foodstuffs that rely on flavorings.

(5) The absence of non-seasonal products.

(6) Little to no price difference on the organic comparable (diff supply chain)

(7) Unusual country of origin for fresh product type.

(8) Absence of large container products

(9) Shortage of any ordinary but specific grain derivative item (ex. wheat crackers)

(10) Big brand shortage.

(11) Shortage of wet pet foods

(12) Shortage of complex blended products with multiple ingredients (soups etc)

(13) A consistent shortage of milk products and/or ancillaries.

These notes above are all precursors that show significant stress in the supply chain. Once these issues are consistently visible, we are going to descend into food instability very quickly, sector by sector, category by category.

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“Gives ‘Made In China’ a whole new level of meaning.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Jun 122021
 


René Magritte The therapeutist 1937

 

Should You Get Vaccinated? (Kirsch)
Historians Will See Lockdowns As Most Catastrophic Event Of All Human History (SN)
Lockdowns Major Factor in Doubling of Australia’s Attempted Youth Suidices (SN)
How Fanatics Took Over The World (DR)
EU Batches Of J&J Covid-19 Vaccine Withheld As ‘Precaution’ (RT)
Pakistan Province To Block Phones Of The Unvaccinated (Y!)
The NHS Just Changed How They Count Covid “Cases” (OffG)
US Health Agency Gives Lateral Flow Covid Tests Scathing Report (G.)
Covid Passports Will Be Discriminatory And Must Be Scrapped – UK MPs (G.)
Struggle Session (Kunstler)

 

 

 

 

Idiots run the world

 

 

“..early treatment with an effective protocols reduce your risk of dying by more than 100X ..”

Should You Get Vaccinated? (Kirsch)

  1. At least 6,000 deaths from the vaccine. The OpenVAERS team think it is over 20,000 due to under reporting.
  2. Biodistribution data shows massive accumulation in ovaries of the LNP (which instructs cells in ovaries to sprout toxic spike protein). Whoops. That was never supposed to be leaked out. We obtained it via FOIA request. The CDC never told you about that one, did they? Of course not!
  3. 82% miscarriage rate in first 20 weeks (10% is the normal rate). It is baffling that the CDC says the vaccine is safe for pregnant women when it is so clear that this is not the case. For example, one our family friends is a victim of this. She miscarried at 25 weeks and is having an abortion on 6/9/21. She had her first shot 7 weeks ago, and her second shot 4 weeks ago. The baby had severe bleeding of the brain and other disfigurements. Her gynecologist had never seen anything like that before in her life. They called in a specialist who said it was probably a genetic defect (because everyone buys into the narrative that the vaccine is safe it is always ruled out as a possible cause). No VAERS report. No CDC report. Yet the doctors I’ve talked to say that it is over 99% certain it was the vaccine. The family doesn’t want an autopsy for fear that their daughter will find out it was the vaccine. This is a perfect example of how these horrible side effects just never get reported anywhere.
  4. 25X the possibility of myocarditis for teen boys (can lead to heart failure and death)
  5. Kids already have natural immunity (Science Magazine article), so there is no benefit to vaccination, only risk. Have you ever seen the risk / benefit analysis by the CDC?? Ask for it before you consent.
  6. No point vaccinating those who’ve had COVID-19: Findings of Cleveland Clinic study. No benefit, only risk.
  7. Doctors who attribute adverse events to the vaccine are punished (such as Dr. Hoffe). So under reporting is incentivized.
  8. The CDC refuses to say how many people have died and is “still investigating” heart damage in kids even though it is obvious why (free spike protein causing clotting and inflammation). A 25X increase when the only “new” thing is the vaccine isn’t hard to figure out. Ask the CDC for their current top 5 hypotheses for the cause. It will be more than amusing to see what they say. If it isn’t the vaccine, heads should roll.
  9. The CDC is deliberately misleading the American people. Check out the side effects page. Death, disability, excessive miscarriage rates, heart attacks, stroke, inability to walk, talk, or see, Bell’s Palsy, persistent pain, Parkinson’s like symptoms, re-activation of shingles, blood clots, etc. are all missing.
  10. >500X more deadly than the flu vaccine
  11. COVID vaccines have generated more adverse reports in the last 6 months than all 70 vaccines over the past 30 years combined. They missed that one.
  12. Defective virus design (s1 was never supposed to be free, inclusion of PEG was unnecessary and allows LNP to be widely distributed)
  13. Strong opposition to vaccination by extremely credible voices like Malone, Geert Vanden Bossche, others
  14. NIAID (Cliff Lane) is improperly manipulating the COVID Treatment Guidelines to make it appear these drugs do not work, thus giving the world the false impression that the vaccine, even if imperfect, is the only way out. Ivermectin and fluvoxamine have been confirmed in Phase 3 trials. Ivermectin has a very high quality systematic review, the highest possible level in Evidence Based Medicine. Repurposed drugs are safer and more effective than the current vaccines. In general, early treatment with an effective protocols reduce your risk of dying by more than 100X so instead of 600,000 deaths, we’d have fewer than 6,000 deaths. NOTE: The vaccine has already killed over 6,000 people and that’s from the vaccine alone (and doesn’t count any breakthrough deaths).
  15. Vaccines skipped proper toxicology studies in order to bring to market faster. We don’t know what we don’t know.
  16. The unpredictable and horrifying side effects of this vaccine on heathy kids, such as the 16 year old girl who was unable to speak and see just 48 hours after being vaccinated
  17. Debilitating side effects can happen at any time because vaccine victims are very similar to COVID long haulers (Dr. Bruce Patterson has discovered this) and we all know that long haul can start at anytime (even when the disease is asymptomatic) and could be incurable.
  18. Because the vaccine is not perfectly safe, the government is required by law to warn people of the death and disability risks caused by the vaccine and to obtain informed consent. Always be sure to ask for the 50 most serious side effects and how often they happen. And find out whether they will compensate you if you are disabled for life from the vaccine. This is important because the blood clots can form anywhere with this very unsafe [vaccine] .

McCullough PROPAGANDIZED BIOTERRORISM BY INJECTION

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“We will be counting the catastrophic health and psychological harms, imposed on nearly every poor person on the face of the earth, for a generation.”

Historians Will See Lockdowns As Most Catastrophic Event Of All Human History (SN)

Stanford University professor of medicine Jay Bhattacharya says that in years to come lockdowns will be looked back upon as the most catastrophically harmful policy in “all of history”. Speaking on The London Telegraph podcast ‘Planet Normal’, Bhattacharya noted that government scientific advisors “remain attached” to the policy of lockdown in spite of the total “failure of this strategy”. “I do think that future historians will look back on this and say this was the single biggest public health mistake, possibly of all history, in terms of the scope of the harm that it’s caused,” said Bhattacharya. The epidemiologist added “Every single poor person on the face of the earth has faced some harm, sometimes catastrophic harm, from this lockdown policy.”

“Almost from the very beginning, lockdown was going to have enormous collateral consequences, things that are sometimes hard to see but are nevertheless real,” Bhattacharya added. He further noted that serious mental and physical illnesses have been basically ignored and “we closed our eyes to them because we were so scared about the virus and so enamoured with this idea that the lockdown could stop the virus.” The professor previously told Newsweek that COVID-19 lockdowns are “the single worst public health mistake in the last 100 years,” adding that “We will be counting the catastrophic health and psychological harms, imposed on nearly every poor person on the face of the earth, for a generation.”

Bhattacharya is one of the co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, which has received thousands of signatures from medical and public health scientists. The declaration states that “lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health,” citing “worsening cardiovascular disease outcomes, fewer cancer screenings and deteriorating mental health – leading to greater excess mortality in years to come.”

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“From December 2020 to May 2021, interventions spiked nationally by a whopping 99 per cent compared to the same period a year ago.”

Lockdowns Major Factor in Doubling of Australia’s Attempted Youth Suidices (SN)

COVID-19 lockdowns were found to have been a major contributing factor to a doubling in attempted suicides of those aged between 5-25 in Australia. Over the past 6 months, the Kids Helpline organization revealed that there have been 862 attempted suicides in young people, meaning that interventions have doubled in the space of a year. The group noted that severe depression caused by COVID-19 lockdowns were a major driving factor in the increase. From December 2020 to May 2021, interventions spiked nationally by a whopping 99 per cent compared to the same period a year ago. “We feared an increase in child vulnerability as a result of the pandemic and ensuing lockdowns, however the current spike in emergency interventions on behalf of children and young people across Australia is very disturbing,” said YourTown CEO Tracy Adams.

“It is very clear that the pandemic is taking a toll on the lives of children and young people, however, thankfully by young people seeking help Kids Helpline has supported 862 suicide prevention interventions nationally in the past six months,” she added. Earlier this year, experts in the UK warned that isolation and depression caused by lockdowns had created a “mental health pandemic.” In America, psychiatrists wrote 86% more prescriptions for psychotropic drugs, including antidepressants, during the lockdown months of March and April 2020 compared to January and February.

As we highlighted yesterday, Stanford University professor of medicine Jay Bhattacharya says that in the future, lockdowns will be looked back upon as the most catastrophically harmful policy in “all of history.” “Every single poor person on the face of the earth has faced some harm, sometimes catastrophic harm, from this lockdown policy,” said Bhattacharya. “Almost from the very beginning, lockdown was going to have enormous collateral consequences, things that are sometimes hard to see but are nevertheless real,” he added.

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There is history. There is a plan.

How Fanatics Took Over The World (DR)

Early in the pandemic, I had been furiously writing articles about lockdowns. My phone rang with a call from a man named Dr. Rajeev Venkayya. He is the head of a vaccine company but introduced himself as former head of pandemic policy for the Gates Foundation. Now I was listening. I did not know it then, but I’ve since learned from Michael Lewis’s (mostly terrible) book The Premonition that Venkayya was, in fact, the founding father of lockdowns. While working for George W. Bush’s White House in 2005, he headed a bioterrorism study group. From his perch of influence – serving an apocalyptic president — he was the driving force for a dramatic change in U.S. policy during pandemics. He literally unleashed hell.

That was 15 years ago. At the time, I wrote about the changes I was witnessing, worrying that new White House guidelines (never voted on by Congress) allowed the government to put Americans in quarantine while closing their schools, businesses, and churches shuttered, all in the name of disease containment. I never believed it would happen in real life; surely there would be public revolt. Little did I know, we were in for a wild ride… Last year, Venkayya and I had a 30-minute conversation; actually, it was mostly an argument. He was convinced that lockdown was the only way to deal with a virus. I countered that it was wrecking rights, destroying businesses, and disturbing public health. He said it was our only choice because we had to wait for a vaccine. I spoke about natural immunity, which he called brutal. So on it went.

The more interesting question I had at the time was why this certified Big Shot was wasting his time trying to convince a poor scribbler like me. What possible reason could there be? The answer, I now realized, is that from February to April 2020, I was one of the few people (along with a team of researchers) who openly and aggressively opposed what was happening. There was a hint of insecurity and even fear in Venkayya’s voice. He saw the awesome thing he had unleashed all over the world and was anxious to tamp down any hint of opposition. He was trying to silence me. He and others were determined to crush all dissent. This is how it has been for the better part of the last 15 months, with social media and YouTube deleting videos that dissent from lockdowns. It’s been censorship from the beginning.

For all the problems with Lewis’s book, and there are plenty, he gets this whole backstory right. Bush came to his bioterrorism people and demanded some huge plan to deal with some imagined calamity. When Bush saw the conventional plan — make a threat assessment, distribute therapeutics, work toward a vaccine — he was furious. “This is bulls**t,” the president yelled. “We need a whole-of-society plan. What are you going to do about foreign borders? And travel? And commerce?” Hey, if the president wants a plan, he’ll get a plan. “We want to use all instruments of national power to confront this threat,” Venkayya reports having told colleagues. “We were going to invent pandemic planning.” This was October 2005, the birth of the lockdown idea.

Tucker HCQ

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Confidence booster.

EU Batches Of J&J Covid-19 Vaccine Withheld As ‘Precaution’ (RT)

The European Medicines Agency (EMA) has said it is aware of a contaminated batch of the active substance used to make Johnson & Johnson’s Covid-19 vaccine and that they’re taking precautionary action to prevent possible harm. In a press release on Friday, the EMA said contamination had occurred at a manufacturing site for the active substance in Maryland, US. While the contaminated batch was not intended for the EU market, other batches of the active substance made in the same facilities were intended for the 27-nation bloc. The EU drugs regulator said precautionary measures are being taken “to safeguard the quality of vaccines” and that the relevant authorities have “recommended not releasing vaccine batches containing the active substance made at around the same time that the contamination occurred.”


The EMA statement adds that the authorities will do everything possible to ensure the precautionary measures do not delay the delivery of vaccines. In March, it emerged that Emergent BioSolutions’s manufacturing plant in Maryland had mistakenly used the wrong ingredients in millions of Johnson & Johnson shots, although none of the 15 million jabs left the factory. The New York Times reported that US officials suggested the incident was a result of human error. In April, the US Food and Drug Administration deemed, after an investigation, that the plant was dirty and had procedural problems. It later emerged that as many as 100 million doses would need to be checked for contamination and Emergent BioSolutions CEO Robert Kramer announced that the company would suspend its 24/7 operations.

Spike proteins

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“It will be hard for me if I can’t use my phone, but I am very scared about the vaccine..”

Pakistan Province To Block Phones Of The Unvaccinated (Y!)

A Pakistan province said Friday it will block the mobile phones of people refusing to get Covid-19 jabs, in the latest move to penalise the unvaccinated in a country where only a fraction of the population have been inoculated. It comes after Sindh province said civil servants who refuse to be vaccinated will not be paid from July. A third wave of infections has begun to stabilise in Pakistan after weeks of tough restrictions, and in Punjab — the country’s most populous province which includes the megacity of Lahore — demand for jabs has slowed. “At first this was only a proposal, but people have been very hesitant in getting vaccinated so the decision was made,” said Hammad Raza, spokesman for the Punjab Primary Health department.

He said the state telecoms agency will decide how to implement the measure. Pakistan’s nationwide vaccination rollout has ramped up in recent weeks with more than 200,000 doses administered most days, but it adds up to only a fraction of the 220 million population. Almost 10.5 million doses have been administered, with China supplying most of the vaccines. But concerns about the side effects of the jab, coupled with misinformation that it causes infertility or death within two years, have sparked vaccine hesitancy. “Pakistan’s education level is low. People are also spreading rumours and misinformation about the vaccines,” Salman Haseeb, the head of Pakistan’s Young Doctor’s Association, told AFP. “So information campaigns by the government won’t work for the short-term. They will have to make use of the law to ensure everyone gets vaccinated.”

“It will be hard for me if I can’t use my phone, but I am very scared about the vaccine,” said Saima Bibi, a domestic worker in Lahore. “You can’t force someone to get vaccinated,” added Farwa Hussain, a teacher in Rawalpindi, who has already received a shot. “It makes me a little suspicious.”

Tucker vaccines

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“..it’s the first time any healthcare service has endeavoured to actually catalogue them differently.”

The NHS Just Changed How They Count Covid “Cases” (OffG)

The UK’s National Health Service has received new instructions from the government on how it should record Covid19 “cases”, separating those who are actually sick from those who just test positive. From the beginning of the “pandemic” last spring, the NHS (and other countries all over the world) have defined a “case” as anyone who tests positive for the Sars-Cov-2 virus, regardless of whether or not they have symptoms. Given that as many as 80% of those who have been infected have no symptoms, and the propensity for the flawed PCR tests to return false-positive results, this lead to likely massively inflated numbers of “cases”. Now, though, the NHS is going to attempt to differentiate between patients who actually have the alleged disease “Covid19”, and those who are in hospital for other reasons and only “incidentally” tested positive for the virus.

According to a report in the Independent: “NHS England has instructed hospitals to make the change to the daily flow of data sent by NHS trusts […] Hospitals have been told to change the way they collect data on patients infected with coronavirus to differentiate between those actually sick with symptoms and those who test positive while seeking treatment for something else.” The distinction between “with” and “from” in Covid deaths – and “with” and “for” in hospitalisations – has been one Covid sceptics all over the world have been keen to make for over a year, but this is the first time any institution has really recognised the difference. And, certainly, it’s the first time any healthcare service has endeavoured to actually catalogue them differently.

So what does the NHS expect the impact of this change to be? Again, from the Independent: “One NHS source said the new data would be “more realistic” as not all patients were sick with the virus, adding: “But it will make figures look better as there have always been some, for example stroke [patients], who also had Covid as an incidental finding”. “That’s a frank admission, and an important one. For the last eighteen months, voices all over the alternate media have been saying the Covid numbers are unrealistic, specifically because they include people who were never actually sick. We have been called “deniers” and “conspiracy theorists” for our trouble. But now an NHS source has actually said, going forward, the Covid data will be “more realistic” as it will discount all the patients where Covid was only “an incidental finding”.

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“..the rapid Covid test on which the UK government has based its multibillion-pound mass-testing programme..”

US Health Agency Gives Lateral Flow Covid Tests Scathing Report (G.)

The US Food and Drug Agency (FDA) has raised significant concerns about the rapid Covid test on which the UK government has based its multibillion-pound mass-testing programme. In a scathing review, the US health agency suggested the performance of the test had not been established, presenting a risk to health, and that the tests should be thrown in the bin or returned to its California-based manufacturer Innova. In the UK, these lateral flow Innova tests form the cornerstone of Operation Moonshot, the mass-testing scheme championed by the prime minister’s former chief adviser. The idea was that the ability to deliver results within 30 minutes – that need not be processed in a laboratory, provides a cheap, pragmatic and efficient way to identify people who have caught the virus but not fallen ill.

But critics have raised concerns about accuracy. Given the tests have been offered free to millions in England, for use at home or at test centres, workplaces and schools, with the aim of detecting more cases, breaking chains of transmission and saving lives since April – the FDA announcement is particularly damning. The US agency has not authorised the use of the Innova test in the US, although the manufacturer has submitted a request for authorisation. But when the FDA discovered the Innova test was being distributed for US use regardless, it conducted an inspection of Innova’s medical device operations between March and April 2021.

In its report, the agency accused the company of “false or misleading” estimates of the test’s clinical performance, saying the estimates did not accurately reflect the performance of the diagnostic devices during clinical studies. The FDA also highlighted that the clinical study data submitted by Innova as part of its request for US authorisation was identical to data previously provided by other manufacturers in separate requests.

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What? Reasonable people?

Covid Passports Will Be Discriminatory And Must Be Scrapped – UK MPs (G.)

Covid passports, which will be used by sports fans for the first time at England’s Euro 2020 match on Sunday, will “disproportionately discriminate” based on race, religion, age and socio-economic background, a cross-party committee has concluded. MPs on the public administration and constitutional affairs committee (PACAC) said that the decision to allow certification, giving people access to events and venues if they test negative for coronavirus or have had the vaccine, could be seen as contempt of parliament. The damning conclusions come as England football fans prepare to use the NHS app to show they have received two doses of a Covid-19 vaccine and are therefore at low risk of transmitting the disease before being allowed to enter Wembley stadium.

William Wragg, the Tory chair of the committee, said: “We are entirely unconvinced by the case for their introduction. “As vaccine uptake statistics indicate, any Covid certification system will be a discriminator along the lines of race, religion and age. Frankly, the government needs to scrap any idea of introducing Covid passports.” A report released on Saturday by the committee concludes that any certification system would discriminate and should be halted. “The evidence of vaccine uptake is a clear indication that such a system would likely disproportionately discriminate against people on the basis of race, religion and socioeconomic background, as well as on the basis of age due to the sequencing of the vaccine rollout,” the committee found.

In late April, the transport secretary, Grant Shapps, announced that the NHS app would be used as a Covid passport to give holidaymakers the freedom to go abroad to specific “green list” countries. The committee criticised the government’s decision to make an announcement that pre-empted inquiries of the PACAC and the government itself “without notifying or consulting parliament”. The decision to push ahead with passports could, MPs concluded, be seen as contempt of parliament. “The policy should have been set out in advance of any decision being taken to enable scrutiny, and the House should have been given the opportunity to vote on the proposals,” the report said.

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“I wonder if he’s heard the new caution from the CDC that people who have been “vaccinated” should not fly in airplanes for more than four hours at a time due to the possibility of developing harmful blood clots (deep vein thrombosis) at altitude. “Joe Biden” suffered a cranial aneurysm, 1988, requiring a 13-hour brain surgery.”

Struggle Session (Kunstler)

In late 2020, big pharma companies start releasing mRNA compounds they call “vaccines.” They are not egg-zackly vaccines in the standard sense of what vaccines have been since the British doctor Edward Jenner first inoculated humans for smallpox in 1796 using a weaker cowpox live virus. The Covid-19 “vaccines” are miracles of genetic engineering. They deliver instructions via a lipid nano-particle for the body to manufacture spike proteins of the kind that form the corona of Covid-19, which, in turn prompts the immune system to fight the virus. Sweet! Except they have not gone through the years-long trials usually required by the FDA. By spring of 2021, evidence emerges that the spike protein may have some toxic properties of its own. Uh-oh.

It seems to interfere with women’s reproductive functions; it attacks the epithelial lining of blood vessels; it appears to induce blood clotting that can lead to strokes and infarctions; it can produce neurological disorders; it gets into other organs and messes with them…. Yikes! Ordinarily, vaccines that produce a very few cases of dangerous side-effects are held back from distribution. But under the emergency declaration for Covid-19, the mRNA “vaccines” are proffered even more aggressively. Through May, 2021, The Science (Dr. Fauci) presses to “vaccinate” as many Americans as can possibly be rounded up, including people who have recovered from Covid-19 and have developed their own natural antibodies.

Lately, The Science (Dr. Fauci) has militated for children and teenagers to get “vaccinated.” Only, now it turns out that scores of “vaccinated” young people are showing up with inflammation of the heart muscle (myocarditis), otherwise extremely rare in that demographic. Say what, plus huh, plus WTF? Does it not seem as if The Science (Dr. Fauci) has lurched from one blunder to the next, while also withholding the truth from the public, lying about the origin of the disease, and its (his) role in the development of the “vaccines,” and now rather desperately, it seems, trying to cover its (his) ass? What does “Joe Biden” & Co. do about The Science (Dr. Fauci) now? More and more, it (he) looks like an albatross the size of Rodan the Flying Reptile around Mr. B’s withered neck.

But if they throw it (him) to the wolves, they can no longer use Mr. Trump as the whipping boy for all the damage wreaked by Covid-19 and the government’s response to it (not to mention its role in creating the goshdarn thing.) I guess we’ll have to stand by on all that. For the moment, “Joe Biden” is overseas, dazzling the leaders of foreign lands with his charm and perspicacity. I wonder if he’s heard the new caution from the CDC that people who have been “vaccinated” should not fly in airplanes for more than four hours at a time due to the possibility of developing harmful blood clots (deep vein thrombosis) at altitude. “Joe Biden” suffered a cranial aneurysm, 1988, requiring a 13-hour brain surgery. “Joe Biden” has been vaccinated. Just sayin’.

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Composite image of Milky Way Galactic Center. Courtesy of NASA/CXC/UMass/Q.D. Wang; Radio: NRF/SARAO/MeerKAT./CXC/UMass/Q.D. Wang; Radio: NRF/SARAO/MeerKAT.

 

 

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May 062020
 


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

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

 

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

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

 

 

 

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

 

 

From Worldometer

 

 

From SCMP:

 

 

From COVID19Info.live:

 

 

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more …

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

New Mutation Indicates That Coronavirus Might Be Weakening (NYP)

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

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

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

Read more …

This would be a less contagious strain.

Coronavirus Started Infecting People Globally Late Last Year (Hill)

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


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

Read more …

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

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

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

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

 

Chris Giles is economics editor at the FT.

Read more …

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

Pseudo-Science Behind The Assault On Hydroxychloroquine (ZH)

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

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

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

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

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

Read more …

Not sure if laughing is the best reaction here.

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

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

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

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

Read more …

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more …

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

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

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

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

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

Read more …

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

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

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


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

Read more …

Not sure I can fully incorporate the irony involved here.

K Street Requests Taxpayer Bailout Of Corporate Lobbyists (IC)

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


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

Read more …

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

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

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


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

Read more …

So much for competition as a model.

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

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

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

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

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

Read more …

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

Bluetooth Inventors See Problems For Coronavirus Contact Tracing (IC)

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


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

Read more …

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

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

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


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

Read more …

The FBI is above the law.

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

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

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

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

Read more …

Babylon Bee

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

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


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

Read more …

 

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A great thread, putting together lots of studies:

 

 

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

EVT= Extreme value theory

 

 

 

 

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