Sep 222022
 


Pablo Picasso Head of a woman 1939

 

Russia Will Mobilize About 1.2% Of Her Mobilizational Potential (Saker)
Russia To Begin Partial Mobilization – Putin (RT)
Russia Announces Partial Mobilization (MoA)
Squelching the Noise about the Ukraine (9Bill)
Defensive West Smears Samarkand Summit (Lauria)
The Plot to Seize Russia & Make It a NATO Vassal – Martin Armstrong (G&E)
The Real US Agenda In Africa Is Hegemony (Escobar)
NATO’s “Green” Masochistic EUthanasia (Vilches)
10,000 anti-Russia Sanctions (Vilches)
Europe Implodes (Vilches)
Federal Reserve Chair Announces Another 75 Point Rate Hike (CTH)
The European Central Bank’s Zimbabwean Model (Hayes)
How the West Poisoned Its Money (Varoufakis)
Beyond the Peak (Greer)
House Democrats Take Ownership of Hunter (Turley)
EU Health Regulator Says Covid Pandemic Not Over (R.)

 

 

 

 

Miller

 

 

 

 

Detroit cringe (I can’t even listen to the end)

 

 

 

 

Biden. Trump.

 

 

 

 

“We are talking only about those soldiers who have an official status of “reserves” and all of them will have to undergo a special training before being sent to the Ukraine.”

Russia Will Mobilize About 1.2% Of Her Mobilizational Potential (Saker)

So, after lots of speculation, we now know that the Kremlin has decided to mobilize about 300’000 soldiers from a total mobilizational potential of 25’000’000 soldiers. That’s just a little over 1% of Russia’s mobilizational potential. We are talking only about those soldiers who have an official status of “reserves” and all of them will have to undergo a special training before being sent to the Ukraine. A few comments about this decision: It will take Russia a few months to gather and retrain (refresher courses) these forces and they will not be immediately available to protect the Lugansk, Donetsk, Zaporozhie and Kherson regions during the upcoming referendum on to whether to join Russia or not. The 3rd volunteer army corps is already deployed in the south and could greatly assist in this.

Putin and Shoigu gave several reasons for this decision, including the very long line of contact, the direct involvement of NATO personnel who are now running the Ukronazi regime in Kiev and the threats by the West to dismantle Russia. Shoigu indicated that the UAF lost about 50% of its personnel (over 100’000 soldiers out of a total potential of about 200’000). He also added that most of the Ukrainian weapons systems, which were of Soviet origin, was mostly destroyed. Russian KIAs are just under 6000 soldiers. Shoigu also clearly spelled out that “we are not so much fighting against the Ukraine but against NATO plus the united (collective) West“. Shoigu also mentioned that all of the NATO satellite capabilities (70 military and 200+ civilian satellites) are used against Russia right now.

Finally, Shoigu added that NATO high precision weapons are deliberately used by NATO commanders to terrorize civilians. In other words, Russia is preparing for an escalation of this war in the coming months. She is basically augmenting her forces to a level which could deal with a major NATO escalation in the Ukraine (and elsewhere as not all mobilized forces would have to be combat units; deploying more C4ISR capabilities, logistics/supply forces or civil affairs and counter-terrorism units would also make sense). The other big news of the day is, of course, that Russia will back and accept the outcome of the referendums in the four regions mentioned above.

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“The Russian leader pledged to support the plebiscites in terms of security and said his government would respect whatever outcomes they produce..”

Russia To Begin Partial Mobilization – Putin (RT)

Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a partial military mobilization during an address to the nation on Wednesday morning. He said the Defense Ministry had recommended drawing military reservists into active service as the country faces a protracted conflict in Ukraine and Donbass. The measure is sensible and necessary under the circumstances, Putin said, considering that Russia is fighting “the entire Western military machine” in Ukraine. He has already signed an order for the call-up to start immediately. The move will see the armed forces draw on military reservists only, and those who have completed national service, the president added. He promised that they would be provided with additional training, along with all the benefits due to people involved in active duty.

Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu revealed some details about the mobilization in a separate statement on Wednesday. He said the ministry wanted to call to arms some 300,000 reservists, or just over 1% of Russia’s full mobilization potential. Putin has accused Kiev of backing away from peace talks with Moscow, which he said it had done on the instructions of its Western backers. Instead, the Ukrainian government has doubled down on military action, he said. “After certain compromises [with Moscow] were reached, Kiev received a de facto direct order to derail all agreements. More weapons were pumped into Ukraine. The Kiev regime deployed more gangs of international mercenaries and nationalists, military units trained to NATO standards and under de facto command of Western advisers,” Putin said.

Russian forces sent to Ukraine in February have secured a large portion of territory claimed by the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, as well as parts of Ukraine, he said. The resulting front line stretches over 1,000km, the president pointed out. He warned the US and its allies against ramping up pressure on Moscow. Western nations are openly pursuing a military defeat of Russia, seeking to push the country into insignificance and to loot its natural wealth, he stated. “Parts of Western elites use every effort to preserve their dominance. That is why they try to block and suppress any sovereign centers of development, so that they can continue to brutally force their will on other nations and peoples, to impose their pseudo-values,” he explained. “Their goal is to weaken, disunite and ultimately destroy our nation.”

Some senior officials in NATO states have even suggested that using tactical nuclear weapons against Russian troops would be justified, according to Putin. The president stressed that Moscow would not hesitate to retaliate to such an attack with its own nuclear weapons. If the territorial integrity of our nation is threatened, we will certainly use all the means that we have to defend Russia and our people. Putin also commented on the upcoming referendums in the two Donbass republics and two regions of Ukraine currently controlled to a large extent by Russian troops. The four entities are putting to a general vote a proposal to ask Moscow to accept them as new parts of the Russian Federation, with polling scheduled to start on Friday.

The Russian leader pledged to support the plebiscites in terms of security and said his government would respect whatever outcomes they produce. Russia’s goal is to protect civilians from the Ukrainian government, which had escalated the persecution of its opponents at home and had been using terrorist tactics against people living in Russia-controlled lands, Putin said.

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“..we can expect that the Russian forces will start to degrade Ukrainian infrastructure on a large scale.”

Russia Announces Partial Mobilization (MoA)

Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said (video, Sputnik report) that 300,000 reservist will be mobilized. Conscripts and people currently studying will not be send to Ukraine. He also said that, so far, 5,937 Russian soldiers have died during the war in Ukraine. (This number does not include the militia of the DPR and LPR, or the Wagner group, who have done most of the frontline work and thus have had higher losses.) Shoigu puts Ukrainian losses at some 62,000 killed and some 50,000 wounded. (I regard this as a low estimate.) Russia’s total military reserve, people who have previously gone through military training, is 25 million. It also has the equipment to arm those forces.

There are rumors that the Ukraine is preparing for an all out offensive, mobilizing and preparing new units from Kiev and further west for one big push against the Russian and allied forces. It will take a few months to prepare for this. The Ukraine will need much more equipment and ammunition from the ‘west’, including ‘western’ tanks and infantry fighting vehicles, and has yet to train troops to be able to use it. It is likely intending to start the offensive only in spring. The call up Russia announced now may have the intent to draw Kiev into a premature launch of its general offensive. The mobilized Russian troops will take about three months to be ready for war. Russia could thus launch its own offensive during the winter season. In the meantime constant defensive work will continue to severely degrade the Ukrainian units which are currently on or near the frontlines.

With a force of an additional 300,000 troops, far beyond the 100,000 to 150,000 engaged now in the war, the Russia forces could change their tactics from the slow grind that is happening now into a larger scale maneuver war with heavy strikes into the operational depth of the Ukrainian army. Belarus, allied with the Russian Federation, is also in the process of getting ready for war. It could, as it had threatened before, cut of the supply lines from the ‘west’ into the Ukraine in the western part of that country. Should current Ukrainian attacks on civilians and infrastructure in Russia and the Donbas regions continue, we can expect that the Russian forces will start to degrade Ukrainian infrastructure on a large scale. The electricity and railway networks would be the primary targets. s

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“The celebrations that will follow these regions joining Russia are likely to be massive: Crimea 2014 times ten.”

Squelching the Noise about the Ukraine (9Bill)

Earlier this morning, Vladimir Putin gave the order to call up army reservists. According to him, the nature and the goals of the Special Military Operation in the Ukraine remain the same. The reservists will be given contracts (they will in essence become salaried employees). Only those with relevant military experience and training will be called up. Shoigu went into further specifics: just 300.000 reservists will be called up in the first phase (roughly 1% of Russia’s total reservists), which will coincide with the normal, regularly scheduled annual training of reserves. They will be equipped, trained and sent in with the task of shoring up and straightening up the battle front. To be sure, they will also be called upon to provide security and to suppress enemy activity on both sides of the border.

Given the current configuration of the battle front, which includes a toehold on the Kharkov region, all of Lugansk, most of Donetsk, most of Zaporozhye and most of Kherson, their mission could conceivably come to include driving the Ukrainian forces out of the remainder of Donetsk and Kherson regions and perhaps setting up and maintaining a buffer zone to make it impossible for Ukrainian artillery to reach within what will soon become territory of the Russian Federation.
To this end, referenda will be held starting this Friday in all of the above formerly Ukrainian regions except for Kharkov, which is excluded. According to most recent opinion polling, the idea of joining the Russian Federation is very popular in all of the above: 94% in favor in Donetsk, 93% in Lugansk, 87% in Zaporozhye and 80% in Kherson.

And why wouldn’t these people want to be part of a peaceful, stable and prosperous state where their native language is the official language rather than stay within a failed state that has been fighting a civil war against them going on nine years? The celebrations that will follow these regions joining Russia are likely to be massive: Crimea 2014 times ten. Finally, I’d like to add a note on the Russian withdrawal from most of the Kharkov region. The region itself is of no consequence to Russia while the city of Kharkov, with its remaining population of around two million and with Ukrainian heavy armor and artillery hiding among high-rise buildings and using civilians as human shields, would be either a hard target, a humanitarian disaster, or both, were the Russians to try to conquer it. Also, although Kharkov is overwhelmingly Russian-speaking, these are some of the most heavily brainwashed, Westernized, Nazified Russian-speakers on the face of the planet and, from a Russian perspective, just not worth the bother.

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Good to see people other than Pepe Escobar cover this angle, too.

Defensive West Smears Samarkand Summit (Lauria)

The Shanghai Cooperation Council (SCO)’s summit in the Uzbek capital of Samarkand last Thursday and Friday was a world historical event for the forces creating this separate world representing the majority of humanity. Major economic deals were concluded and Beijing and Moscow further strengthened their budding alliance. In what should be a worrying sign for Washington, many of its Middle East allies, which have also rejected U.S. pressure to sanction Russia, have applied to join the SCO. For years the West rejected overtures from Russia and China to collaborate in a multipolar world. But that would mean giving up its dominant position, maintained from overtly colonial days. Instead the U.S.-led West pushes for total domination. So rather than acknowledge that its attempt to destroy Russia’s economy and bring down its government has instead led to economic chaos in the West and a threat to its global position, Western leaders are doubling down.

By sanctioning Russian energy and other vital exports, and by shutting out its financial system, the West thought Russia would collapse. Instead Moscow has found markets in the world’s most populous nations so that its currency, its industry and its banking system have survived. The Western response to this growing challenge to its hegemony was reflected in the way Western media covered the Samarkand summit. On top of the dismissive tone of its reporting came distortion of facts that misled its Western audiences to the significance of what Samarkand means to the future. The Daily Telegraph began its report, headlined, “Isolated Putin left at Beijing’s mercy as his disastrous war backfires,” with an account about how Putin was humiliated because he was left waiting for the president of Kyrgyzstan. With the headline, “Putin and Xi plot a new world order to challenge America’s might,”

The Times of London took the same line, writing of “Russia’s dependence on China since its disastrous war in Ukraine.” CNN’s report sowed seeds of doubt about the SCO’s unity, writing about the summit from Hong Kong that the “Ukraine war risks exposing regional divisions.” The New York Times report filed from Washington and Beijing, sought to portray the “limits” of “cooperation” between Russia and China. None of these reports focused on an emerging world order that is leaving the U.S. on the outside looking in. Western media instead seized on a few words uttered to try to frame India and China as criticizing Russia’s war in Ukraine. They completely took out of context Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s words that “today’s era is not of war.” CNN reported:

“Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi appears to have directly rebuffed Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, telling Russian President Vladimir Putin that now is not the time for war. In what was the latest in a series of setbacks for the Russian leader, Modi told him of the need to ‘move onto a path of peace’ and reminded him of the importance of ‘democracy, diplomacy and dialogue.’” After Putin told Modi during their public comments that Ukraine refuses to negotiate, Modi said, according to the English translation on India’s Foreign Ministry website, “I know that today’s era is not of war and we have spoken to you many times on the phone that democracy, diplomacy and dialogue are such things that touch the world. Today we will get a chance to discuss how we can move forward on the path of peace in the coming days.” It is clear that Modi was criticizing Ukraine for not negotiating, rather than criticizing Russia for the war.

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“The Great Reset is basically a debt default and the EU is a disaster that will fall apart.”

The Plot to Seize Russia & Make It a NATO Vassal – Martin Armstrong (G&E)

Martin Armstrong discusses his new book based on declassified documents where in the 1990s the West, NATO, and Russian oligarchy plotted to seize Moscow, loot Russia, and takeover its natural resources. Yeltsin turned to Putin who was not a communist and is not an oligarch. The Moscow apartment bombings or propaganda surrounding them being a false flag would likely have come from Boris Berezovsky. The Great Reset is basically a debt default and the EU is a disaster that will fall apart. At this point most of the attack on Russia is related to “climate change” and to shut down fossil fuels.

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I’m not as negative as Pepe about Guterres. Whatever his faults, I think he’s honestly trying to get the fertilizer to Africa.

The Real US Agenda In Africa Is Hegemony (Escobar)

In a rational environment, the 77th session of the UN General Assembly (UNGA) would discuss alleviating the trials and tribulations of the Global South, especially Africa. That won’t be the case. Like a deer caught in the geopolitical headlights, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres issued platitudes about a gloomy “winter of global discontent,” even as the proverbial imperial doomsayers criticized the UN’s “crisis of faith” and blasted the “unprovoked war” started by Russia. Of course the slow-motion genocide of Donbass russophone residents for eight years would never be recognized as a provocation. Guterres spoke of Afghanistan, “where the economy is in ruins and human rights are being trampled” – but he did not dare to offer context.

In Libya, “divisions continue to jeopardize the country” – once again, no context. Not to mention Iraq, where “ongoing tensions threaten ongoing stability.” Africa has 54 nations as UN members. Any truly representative UNGA meeting should place Africa’s problems at the forefront. Once again, that’s not the case. So it is left to African leaders to offer that much-needed context outside of the UN building in New York. As the only African member of the G20, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa recently urged the US not to “punish” the whole continent by forcing nations to demonize or sanction Russia. Washington’s introduction of legislation dubbed the Countering Malign Russian Activities in Africa Act, he says, “will harm Africa and marginalize the continent.”

South Africa is a BRICS member – a concept that is anathema in the Beltway – and embraces a policy of non-alignment among world powers. An emerging 21st century version of the 1960s Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) is strengthening across the Global South – and especially Africa – much to the revulsion of the US and its minions. Back at the UNGA, Guterres invoked the global fertilizer crisis – again, with no context. Russian diplomacy has repeatedly stressed that Moscow is ready to export 30 million tons of grain and over 20 million tons of fertilizer by the end of 2022. What is left unsaid in the west, is that only the importation of fertilizers to the EU is “allowed,” while transit to Africa is not.

Guterres said he was trying to persuade EU leaders to lift sanctions on Russian fertilizer exports, which directly affect cargo payments and shipping insurance. Russia’s Uralchem, for instance, even offered to supply fertilizers to Africa for free. Yet from the point of view of the US and its EU vassals, the only thing that matters is to counter Russia and China in Africa. Senegal’s President Macky Sall has remarked how this policy is leaving “a bitter taste.”

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I took three separate parts of Jorge Vilshes’ latest. Which is very long, I could have picked more pieces. Of course he helps himself by referencing one of my articles. 😉

NATO’s “Green” Masochistic EUthanasia (Vilches)

The German political class has torn up the social contract agreed with its constituents by swiftly ignoring the historical and most successful existential partnership established with Russia since decades ago. In parallel, Anglo-inspired unelected EU bureaucrats take turns to blindly attack Russia with suicidal Wagnerian style based on hollow virtue-signalling nonsense. Now, the German Vice-Chancellor and Minister for Economic Affairs Robert Habeck (a former mediocre poetry translator…) finally and “bitterly” has admitted that Germany — and thus all of Europe — relies on ´cheap energy from Russia´ or else it´d trigger ”the collapse of energy providers” with a dire ´Lehman moment´.

This would crash the German and European economies with widespread bankruptcies unleashed by margin calls as later explained. Thus the “green” solution now found for this Made-In-Europe mess is a deeper and longer proxy Ukraine war, über-high price inflation, $ 500 billion in subsidies for starters with more coming, new ad hoc high taxes and un-applicable price caps in a supply-driven market … with scarcity all around and “no matter what voters may think or how hard their life may get” (sic). So, European businesses will fail per the terrible damage induced all along upstream supply lines including food and fuels. As brilliantly worded by Rachel Mardsen…“The West cut itself off from its sourcing in order to play geopolitics”… and then blame Russia and supposed “extremist enemies of the state”.

So, if recent declarations from German Foreign Minister Annalena (“Kobold”) Baerbock are of any guide, we shall soon witness street crowds blossoming in Europe. With circumvolutionary style, the EU Commission is now also trying to convince everyone that Europe will become “greener” in a hurry. Actually, with its lignite-fired re-commissioned power stations – the largest ever single source of pollution – Europe will turn “browner” fast, not “greener” thus setting the worst possible example to the rest of the world.It also contradicts its supposed ´moral high ground´ Green Plan. Still, EC spokesman Eric Mamer proudly stated that “The Ukraine invasion will help us speed up our move away from fossil fuels”.

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“And just like small children do, EU leaders still won´t admit it´s bed-time.”

10,000 anti-Russia Sanctions (Vilches)

The EU and the US imposed crippling sanctions on Russia which now finds it impossible – for instance – to comply with energy delivery to Europe. This in turn affects the European entire industry & trade including medicines, fuels, food, heating and everything in between. So the EU complains that Russia is using this energy non-delivery ´excuse´ as a weapon. Actually, sanctions restrict or prohibit trade of anything and everything with Russia from chips to flowers, and also disconnect Russian banks from SWIFT plus block money transfers, penalize all Russian cargo insurance, prohibit Western vessels at Russian ports and access of Russian ships to Europe. So a case in point for nat-gas non-delivery is the NS1 turbines mandatory maintenance/repairs. Contractually, Siemens is the only party allowed to touch them but sanctions do not allow their access per “Contract Violations”.

Europe keeps playing Russian roulette with itself insisting on the game plan of (1) provoking and supporting armed conflict with Russia (2) confiscating Russian assets (2) applying crippling sanctions on everything ´Russian´ (3) betting the farm on militarily winning the Ukraine war — how ??? (4) attempting a regime change in Russia (5) benefit from the spoils (6) simultaneously require Russians to provide whatever the EU may need, or else…??? (7) improvise highly dangerous experiments with well-proven European business models and European livelihoods at stake.

And just like small children do, EU leaders still won´t admit it´s bed-time. So now all that´s left for Main Street Europe is not winning anything other than freezing temperatures, far less food and fuels, ultra high price inflation of anything and everything, and plenty of hardship and discontent. But them all just keep re-arranging the chairs on the deck of an EU sinking Titanic while the orchestra enthusiastically keeps on playing one Strauss vals after another. True enough, Europe is trying its best to unnecessarily divorce Russia. But per Bloomberg – not exactly a pro-Russian mouthpiece — the EU sanctions and new taxes badly hurt Europe while Russia keeps ever improving its geopolitics and finances.

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“..as per the German Vice-Chancellor Robert Habeck´s own words, “just expect the worst“. Meaning areas with no energy, no fuels, no power at any price, period. Or as plain Germans would have it, just expect “kaputt”.

Europe Implodes (Vilches)

Very soon EU sanctions on Russia will start consuming the Europe we know with an ever more self-sufficient and growing Russia just watching the unfortunate scene. For instance, German SMB “Mittelstand” (99% of German GDP) will bankrupt or strain badly. The fact remains that no one has explained exactly what is to be finally gained with the EUthanizing sanctions and new taxes which are not really hurting Russia but are very seriously hurting Europeans and — indirectly — the rest of the world. “Russia rakes in more oil revenue than ever” says the Wall Street Journal by exporting almost as much crude as it did before the conflict in Ukraine… but at much higher prices.

“Now Russia has new buyers, new means of payment, new traders and new ways of financing exports”. By the way, current electricity prices in Germany are already almost ten times higher than a year ago — and keep rising – while the EU’s energy market is rattled by fears over whether highly unstable power plants will be able to provide enough electricity this winter. So it´s not just a matter of even higher prices as grid “wherewithal” is at stake with simply not enough energy available. Unmanageable price inflation is thus unstoppable. From fertilizer to aluminum production and every single commodity in between are all being seriously hindered by current ( self-inflicted ) truly soaring European energy costs.

It´s simple, and as per the German Vice-Chancellor Robert Habeck´s own words, “just expect the worst“. Meaning areas with no energy, no fuels, no power at any price, period. Or as plain Germans would have it, just expect “kaputt”. So this “new” German and European business model does not impress or fly well. And even on the basis of self-righteous exceptionalistic ideologies and newly-found virtuous ´moral´ arguments, current immolation of defenseless Europeans is a nonsensical price to be payed with this freezing green checkmate. Because there are no quick, ready-made, valid replacements of many / most Russian produce Europe depends upon, there is no real grass-roots political support either, and politicians cannot expect people to go along under the extreme hardship conditions soon to come.

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The central banks are not in control.

Federal Reserve Chair Announces Another 75 Point Rate Hike (CTH)

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell announced another 75-point increase in federal interest rates today. This is the third consecutive 0.75 percentage point increase. Additionally, Fed policymakers have pledged to continue raising rates as high as 4.6% in 2023. While Powell walked through his reasoning to continue targeting inflation by lowering consumer demand, not once in any of his remarks did he mention energy policy driving up the cost of materials and goods. The Great Pretending continues.:

The Fed chair is trying to manage the economic policy transition by reducing economic activity to match intentionally diminished energy supplies. Lowering economic activity drops demand for energy. Unfortunately, as admitted by Powell on August 26, 2022, in Jackson Hole, this means a period of “some pain” for Americans as the central banks join together in an effort to lower consumption. What does “some pain” mean? It means lower incomes, higher prices, lowered standards of living and more scarce resources. During this transition to owning nothing and being happy about it, the pain is your wealth being stripped as the economy is intentionally diminished.


We will not be able to afford much; we won’t be able to afford the foods we want; we will not be able to purchase anything except the essentials, and those essentials will cost much more; we won’t be able to vacation, travel, or enjoy recreational activities; we won’t be able to afford any indulgences; but at the end of the process, we will learn to live more meager existences based on lowered expectations needed for sustaining the planet. Pay no attention to the elites who don’t have those concerns, comrade.

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“..Albion is really in squeaky bum time…”

The European Central Bank’s Zimbabwean Model (Hayes)

Though the function of European, German, Japanese and Zimbabwean central banks is to enable the credibility and efficiency of the financial side of their respective economies so that the real side of their economies may achieve the nation’s broader macro economic goals, NATO’s central banks have obviously and disastrously abandoned those tasks for reasons this article makes apparent. Because Zimbabwe, like Germany’s Weimar Republic before it, has reached annual inflation rates of 90 sextillion per cent a year, Europe should not be emulating the financial and economic basket case of Harare. Whatever about Zimbabwe, Germany has been famously down this road before and, in a total reversal of earlier post-war policies, seems determined to traverse it again. The European Central Bank, based in Frankfurt, is printing euros as quickly as their colleagues in Zimbabwe are printing Zimbabwean dollars, as the Confederates printed their Greybacks and as Weimar printed their famously worthless marks.

Although Weimar’s woes were many, two of the most pertinent were that the Kaiser borrowed immensely to fund his armies, whose victories were supposed to enable him to repay his nation’s debts, and that the Western allies bled defeated Germany’s resources dry, thus opening the way for Herr Hitler once Weimar fell. Europe’s central banks are following this very policy today. They are doling out billions to ease energy bills, to bribe farmers and, most notoriously, to feed the money laundering Ponzi scheme that is Zelensky’s Kiev junta. The money supply, at more than 15 trillion euros, is at record levels and real interest rates are in negative terrain, pauperizing pensioners but failing to kick start their fuel starved economies. Inflation,.Germany’s bane, is again on the march as too far much money is in search of far too few bags of fire wood; and English toilet paper has increased in price by 50% in the last few months, Albion is really in squeaky bum time.

As the European Central Bank’s leaders presently have no other card to play, they must think their printing presses are enough to prevail in Ukraine and to allow Europeans to both eat and heat themselves this winter. Not only is that wishful thinking on the part of ECB President Christine Lagarde, the ‘multi cultural’ Parisian, who previously fronted the IMF and who held senior Ministerial positions in the French government but it betrays her fundamental ignorance about monetary policy. The main aim of the euro was to have the stability of the German mark and the Dutch guilder and not to be as volatile as Lagarde’s French franc, which was devalued four times since 1945. Unlike Lagarde, the Central Bank of the Federal Republic of Germany, along with that of Japan, seemed to have understood monetary policy, which is best seen as being like the throttle of a motorbike which must, when necessary, allow more fuel to enter the economic engine but which also must not flood it by drowning it in Zimbabwean dollars, French francs, Confederate Greybacks or Lagardean euros.

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“Today, there is no optimal interest rate that will restore the balance between money demand and money supply ..”

How the West Poisoned Its Money (Varoufakis)

Negative prices make sense for bads, not goods. When a factory wants to remove toxic waste, it charges a negative price for it: its managers pay someone to get rid of it. But when central banks begin to treat money like car manufacturers treat spent sulfuric acid, or nuclear power stations their radioactive wastewater, one knows that something is rotten in the kingdom of financialized capitalism. Some commentators now hope that Western money is being purified in the flames of inflation and interest-rate hikes. But inflation is not driving the poison out of the West’s money system. After more than a decade of addiction to poisoned money, no obvious detoxification method presents itself. Inflation today is not the same beast the West faced in the 1970s and early 1980s.

This time around, it threatens labor, capital, and governments in ways that it could not 50 years ago. Back then, labor was organized enough to demand wage increases that averted a cost-of-living crisis, and neither states nor private corporations relied on free money to keep going. Today, there is no optimal interest rate that will restore the balance between money demand and money supply that does not trigger a massive wave of private and public bankruptcy. That is the long-term price of poisoned money. The US government faces the impossible dilemma of curbing domestic inflation and forcing Corporate America and many friendly governments into a solvency crisis that will threaten America’s own stability.

Things are far worse in the eurozone, where policymakers refused to do the obvious once Europe’s banks had failed after 2008: establish a proper federation’s foundation – a fiscal union. Instead, they let the European Central Bank do “whatever it takes” to save the euro. Only by poisoning its own money could the ECB keep the euro show on the road. Today, the ECB owns huge quantities of Italian, Spanish, French, even Greek debt that it can no longer justify holding as a means of achieving its inflation target, but which it cannot renounce without calling the euro’s existence into question.

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The archdruid finishes off nuclear power.

Beyond the Peak (Greer)

Coal had two world-changing effects. The first, the one everyone thinks of, is that it could be used to power steam engines, replacing wind, water, and muscle power first in dozens, then in hundreds, and finally in thousands of uses. The second, less widely known but just as dramatic, is that it could be used via the Bessemer process to produce steel in previously unimaginable amounts. Steel plus steam power drove the industrial revolution, sent railroads scything across continents and steamships driving through oceans, and transformed human life in a galaxy of ways.

Then, about the time coal reserves started to run short, petroleum (and its gaseous form, natural gas) came into general use. More chemically complex than coal, petroleum had even more net energy, and shifted the industrial revolution into overdrive. Airplanes, automobiles, plastics, industrial lubricants, the entire modern chemical industry—the list just keeps on going. Lewis Mumford, one of the twentieth century’s most insightful students of energy and civilization, argued that the distinction between coal-fired technologies and petroleum-fueled technologies was significant enough to define a change of eras: he called the coal period the Paleotechnic Era, and the petroleum period the Neotechnic Era.

The assumption all along was that petroleum would eventually run short and have to be replaced by something else, leading to a third technic era. By 1950 nearly everyone assumed that what would replace it was nuclear power. You have to read books from that time to get a sense of just how inevitable the coming nuclear era was thought to be. Even avant-garde ecological thinkers treated nuclear power as the next inevitable thing. Pick up any of the works of Paolo Soleri, Frank Lloyd Wright’s most innovative student, who imagined humanity settling in gigantic city-sized buildings called arcologies so that the natural world could be allowed to thrive elsewhere. Each of his arcologies was supposed to be powered by its own nuclear power plant.

That, in turn, was where the dream ran off the rails, because it turned out that nuclear power doesn’t pay for itself. It’s not economically viable, because its net energy is so low. Thus it wasn’t Chernobyl or Fukushima Daiichi that brought the nuclear dream to a grinding halt, it was a long series of financial disasters suffered by utilities that got suckered into the nuclear hoopla, above all the bankruptcy of the Washington Public Power Supply System (WPPSS, unfondly remembered as “Whoops!” by the many thousands who lost money on it).

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“If Republicans take the House as expected in the midterms, the Democrats now effectively took ownership of Hunter — a political proprietary claim that few would relish.”

House Democrats Take Ownership of Hunter (Turley)

House Democrats on the Oversight Committee took a vote on Tuesday that could come back to haunt them. All of the 23 Democrats voted not to inquire into the influence peddling scheme of Hunter Biden and the Biden family. Rep. James Comer (R-KY) proposed a “resolution of inquiry” in light of growing evidence of not just a possible multimillion dollar influence peddling operation by Hunter and his uncle, but the knowledge of his father, President Joe Biden. At a minimum, it appears that President Biden’s repeated public denials of any knowledge of these dealings is false. Yet, the Democrats blocked any inquiry into the corruption. If Republicans take the House as expected in the midterms, the Democrats now effectively took ownership of Hunter — a political proprietary claim that few would relish.

The vote comes after 33 senators asked Attorney General Merrick Garland to appoint a special counsel in the matter, a call that I have repeatedly made in prior columns for over two years. Rep. Carolyn Maloney, the chairwoman of the House Oversight Committee, called the resolution a “nakedly partisan effort” and accused Republicans of being “obsessed” with Hunter Biden. The vote, however, reveals a blind avoidance by Democrats of a corrupt scheme that brought in millions for the Biden family and may have benefitted the President himself. Even if no criminal acts are charged, the foreign dealings of Hunter and his uncle were clearly corrupt and leveraged access to Joe Biden to acquire windfall payments from governments and their surrogates. There is no good faith basis to refuse to investigate such a scheme designed to influence U.S. policy and policymakers.

Why wouldn’t the Congress want to know if there was a multimillion dollar influence peddling scheme reaching the very top of our government, including allegations of the involvement of foreign intelligence figures? The vote, however, does bring a modicum of clarity at long last. The House Democrats are now on record as actively blocking efforts to investigate this massive influence peddling scheme. The implications of that vote will likely become more clear if the House switches hands after the midterm elections. The Democratic members are not alone in such a reckoning. The mainstream media has been clearly moving to re-position itself in anticipation of possible criminal charges after years of blocking or downplaying the story.

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I honestly don’t understand how anyone can promote more vaccines after the New England Journal of Medicine reported Covid Vaccine Destroys Natural Immunity just last week.

EU Health Regulator Says Covid Pandemic Not Over (R.)

An official at the European Union’s drugs regulator said on Tuesday the Covid-19 pandemic was not over, contradicting US President Joe Biden, and that a planned vaccination campaign in the region during the cold season was key to fighting it. “We in Europe still consider the pandemic as ongoing and it’s important that member states prepare for rollout of the vaccines and especially the adaptive vaccines to prevent further spread of this disease in Europe,” the European Medicines Agency’s (EMA) Chief Medical Officer Steffen Thirstrup told a media briefing, referring to vaccines targeting specific strains of the virus. He was asked to comment on Biden’s remark in an interview broadcast on Sunday that “the pandemic is over”. “I cannot obviously answer why President Biden came to that conclusion,” Thirstrup said.


The World Health Organization has said the pandemic remains a global emergency but the end could be in sight if countries use the tools at their disposal. During the media briefing, EMA officials reaffirmed a call by the agency’s Executive Director Emer Cooke made last week in a Reuters Next Newsmaker interview that people in Europe should take whatever Covid-19 booster is available and recommended to them in the coming months. Apart from the original Covid vaccines, the EMA has in recent weeks endorsed a number of vaccines adapted to the Omicron variant of the virus for use as booster shots to ease the burden from a feared surge in infections during autumn and winter in Europe. The EMA’s head of vaccines strategy, Marco Cavaleri, said the agency was also looking into the use of the adapted shots as a primary course of vaccination and that there were discussions on the types of data that could support such an approval.

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Fox MV

 

 

Sociopath
https://twitter.com/i/status/1572284911268003840

 

 

 

 

Hasty

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

Sep 032022
 


Rembrandt van Rijn Belshazzar’s feast 1635-38

 

Unicorns Are Real (Batiushka)
Soul Man (Jim Kunstler)
Physical Integrity Of Nuclear Plant ‘Violated Several Times’ – IAEA Chief (RT)
IAEA Nuclear Watchdog Should Be Mistrusted ‘By Default’ – Zelensky Aide (RT)
The Moment of Greatest Danger (Schryver)
Russia To Halt All Oil Exports To Countries That Impose “Absurd” Price Cap (ZH)
Gazprom “Completely Halts” Nord Stream Gas Supplies Due To “Unexpected” Leak (ZH)
EU Country Bulgaria Wants To Negotiate Gas With Russians Again (NOS)
Hungary Reveals What Weakened EU (RT)
Biden’s Hateful Rhetoric Presents The GOP With A Sterling Opportunity (AT)
US Economic Decline And Global Instability Part 2: Rise of BRICS (PG)
College-Loan Forgiveness Plan Reveals Biden’s Constitutional Cynicism (Turley)
The Pandemic Did This? New York Times Fails Fact Check (Lerman)
Only Nine Percent of Law Professors Identify as Conservatives (Turley)
Biden-Big Tech Collusion Suit Reveals ‘Massive, Sprawling’ Censorship (JTN)
Hunter’s Techies Funded China Bat Virus Researcher (McCormick)

 

 

 

 

I thought he was in jail.

 

 

UDUMBASS
https://twitter.com/i/status/1565441789871415297

 

 

The NIH sneaked back in ivermectin.

 

 

DeSantis War Room

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Quite simply, if you are very ill and you don’t have the money, this year you will die.”

Unicorns Are Real (Batiushka)

An autumn chill is descending on every European country, though in each country in different ways. Gas-dependent Germany and Italy are desperate for Russian gas. It is not just homes, but whole factories which face imminent closure in energy-intensive industries. The result of that will be mass unemployment. By ‘mass’, I mean 20% and more. In France there is popular rejection of President Macron who has told his people that they (i.e. not him) must suffer so that the Ukraine can ‘win’. September is the first month of the annual strike-season in France. French people do not like being cold. Expect some headlines. In Latvia the Russian minority are fearful for their future, but so is everyone else. Heating will not be an option this winter. With a pension of just over 100 euros a month, many pensioners are simply going to die of the cold.

From Slovakia we have received the following: ‘Thanks for your email. Just to give you some idea of the current manufacturing costs here in Slovakia and to be brutally honest throughout the upside down world, We paid last year 85,000 euros for electricity, this year it’s going to be around 500,000 euros. As of 1 Jan 2023 it’s going to be 1.2 million euros at best. So that’s just the electricity, never mind the gas, the increase in raw materials, salaries and all other manufacturing costs, This is a hard way of saying it’s impossible to reduce and every customer of ours has to accept it or not. Surprisingly we have never ever been as busy! You cutting margins down low is of course difficult, but at least you have margins. We simply do not have anything to reduce’.

In Moldova the crisis is profound. As in Latvia and Lithuania up to half the population have fled their countries after they were pillaged by the EU (even though officially Moldova does not even belong to the EU!). Previously medicine came from the Ukraine. Now that is unobtainable, they have to use medicine from Germany. Only that costs ten times more. Quite simply, if you are very ill and you don’t have the money, this year you will die. In Romania, which has lost a quarter of its population to emigration after the great EU pillage, and where a salary of 600 euros per month is considered very good, food prices are the same as in Western Europe, where average salaries are four to five times more, and diesel costs even more than elsewhere. In Ireland restaurants are closing because they cannot afford their energy bills, which have increased by 1,000% (yes, one thousand per cent).

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“The country is verging on an economic catastrophe more consequential than the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the harbinger of it, a financial market crash, is sure to occur before November 8th.”

Soul Man (Jim Kunstler)

“Joe Biden’s” guardian of the rule of law, the DOJ under Merrick Garland, is on a rampage, not just seeking long prison sentences on J-6 misdemeanor defendants, but now going after their very attorneys, officers of the court, for daring to represent them. There is the recent Mar-a-Lago caper, of course, in which the FBI snatched a bale of documentary evidence Donald Trump had collected detailing these agencies’ four-year campaign to overthrow him. And, having gotten their mitts on it, the AG declared all the material part of a bogus “ongoing investigation” in order to prevent the docs being introduced in Mr. Trump’s just-opened defamation and racketeering lawsuit against HRC, her posse of Lawfare ninjas, and most of the people who worked in leadership of the FBI and DOJ circa 2016-2021.

In short, the FBI stole evidence of their own prior crimes to evade prosecution. Something tells me that’s not going to work out so well for AG Mr. Garland and Chris Wray of the FBI. You realize, don’t you, that all of “Joe Biden’s” scripted maundering about “democracy” and “justice” and “the rule of law” is a smokescreen sent up to hide the many crimes committed by his shadowy managers just now breaking into disclosure, and they are running out of dodges and distractions to divert the pliable center of the voting public from seeing it all.

Following Mark Zuckerberg’s epic mistake telling Joe Rogan that the government used his company, Facebook, and Jack Dorsey’s Twitter, to squash the first amendment, the wheels came off any pretense that this was not direct interference in the 2020 election by activists in government. For a whole year, the FBI sat on evidence that candidate “Joe Biden’s” family was running an international grifting operation fronted by his son Hunter, and when news reports about the notorious laptop began to leak out, the agency used its considerable powers of intimidation to make the news disappear.

[..] Thursday night, “Joe Biden” heralded a US economy firing on a gazillion cylinders. “American manufacturing has come alive across the heartland, and the future will be made in America, no matter what the white supremacists and the extremists say,” he declared. Is that so? Of course not. The country is verging on an economic catastrophe more consequential than the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the harbinger of it, a financial market crash, is sure to occur before November 8th. Everybody and his uncle on Wall Street knows that. The shadow regime behind “JB” knows that. He didn’t dare mention the word inflation, as if no one has noticed it. (Anyway, white supremacists did that.)

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“We are glad that the Russian Federation did what it did to keep our inspectors safe”

Physical Integrity Of Nuclear Plant ‘Violated Several Times’ – IAEA Chief (RT)

The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Rafael Grossi has confirmed that damage had been done to the Russian-held Zaporozhye nuclear power plant in Ukraine, but refrained from naming the guilty party. “It’s obvious that… the physical integrity of the plant has been violated several times. By chance or by deliberation, we don’t have the elements to assess that, but this is the reality that we have to recognize,” Grossi told reporters after returning to Ukrainian-controlled territory on Friday. “I worried, I worry and I will continue to worry about the plant until we have a situation that’s more stable, that’s more predictable,” he added.

Grossi, who headed the team of IAEA experts that arrived at the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant on Thursday, said that he “saw a lot”during the visit, personally inspecting some of the “key areas” at the facility, including emergency systems, diesel generators and control rooms. The atomic agency was “not going anywhere”from the plant now, he assured reporters, reiterating that the UN nuclear watchdog plans to establish a permanent presence at the facility. The official also said that some experts from his team will remain at the station until Sunday or Monday to “dig deeper” and collect more data for the report.

Russia said that Ukraine has shelled the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant and sent commandos to storm it on Thursday in a failed attempt to use the UN inspectors as “human shields.” Grossi acknowledged that the security situation at the plant was “difficult” during his visit.“There were moments where fire was obvious – heavy machine gun, artillery, mortars,” he said, adding that on two or three occasions things got “very concerning” for the UN team. Zaporozhye nuclear power plant has been under Russian control since March, but has continued to be operated by the Ukrainian staff. The IAEA chief has praised the “incredible degree of professionalism” of those employees, saying that he saw them “calm and moving.”

Ukrainian attempt to hold IAEA team hostage

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Translate: If they say anything not positive about Ukraine, remember: they cannot be trusted. And translate that in turn: Ukraine is worried about what IAEA will find.

IAEA Nuclear Watchdog Should Be Mistrusted ‘By Default’ – Zelensky Aide (RT)

International organizations including the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) are “cowardly” and cannot be trusted, a senior aide to Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky has said. “I don’t like international institutions and mediation missions in general. They look extremely ineffective, extremely cowardly and extremely unprofessional,” Mikhail Podolyak said in an interview on Thursday evening. This applies “not only to the IAEA”, but also to the UN, Amnesty International, and the International Committee of the Red Cross, the Ukrainian official claimed, adding: “By default, you should not trust them.” Podolyak’s remarks came as he criticized the IAEA mission to the Russia-controlled Zaporozhye nuclear power plant, which arrived earlier in the day.

He expressed his low expectations from the mission, based on the positive remarks that Director General Rafael Grossi made after touring the facility in Ukraine. The Ukrainian official said he was willing to give the IAEA inspectors the benefit of the doubt and wait for them make an official report that would “show the depth of their inner destruction”. He explained his concerns, citing several aspects of Grossi’s visit. They include its relatively short duration, which Podolyak assessed was too short for a proper fact-finding mission. He also criticized the willingness of the IAEA chief to talk to a representative of the Russian atomic energy body Rosatom, who, Podolyak said, “delivered a strange long speech” to the UN official.

The IAEA experts arrived at the station from Kiev despite continued military action in its vicinity. Kiev and Moscow have accused each other of being behind the shelling and of trying to derail the inspection. Some members of the mission stayed behind to monitor the situation, while Grossi and others left. Podolyak said the IAEA should blame Russia for attacks on the plant, and if their report fails to do so, only stating that inspectors witnessed evidence of strikes, his opinion about the organization will be vindicated.

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“..in 2007, at the Munich Security Conference, Putin delivered a landmark speech wherein he put the Empire on notice that Russia was drawing a line in the sand beyond which it would not permit further NATO expansion.”

The Moment of Greatest Danger (Schryver)

[..] this war has reached the stage equivalent to Nazi Germany in mid-January 1945: the war is lost; everyone knows it is lost, and all that remains is the positioning in advance of the inevitable surrender, the unrestrained looting, and the occasional harassment of the never-say-die snipers who will fight to their last round of ammo and last drop of blood. In other words, we’ve finally arrived at the most dangerous juncture of this conflict. You see, as I have frequently observed, this war, at its deepest root, has always been an existential struggle between Russia and the rapidly declining fortunes and dominion of the long-since irredeemably corrupted American Empire. Beginning with the fall of the Soviet Union, and continuing throughout the 1990s, the western vulture capitalists raced to divide, conquer, and despoil the unfathomable natural resource wealth of the former USSR.

And indeed, in ten short years, they managed to extract a massive pile of treasure at Russia’s expense, only to be prematurely thwarted by the unforeseen rise of the previously obscure Vladimir Putin. At first, the finely accoutered locusts believed they could manipulate Putin as easily as they had his immediate predecessors. But they were soon disabused of that fallacy. So then they began to pressure Putin and Russia by methodically assimilating into their “defensive alliance” all the previously unaligned nations that stood between NATO’s 1997 borders and the Russian frontier. This, of course, awakened in Russia a sober sense of their increasingly precarious position, and in 2007, at the Munich Security Conference, Putin delivered a landmark speech wherein he put the Empire on notice that Russia was drawing a line in the sand beyond which it would not permit further NATO expansion.

That line extended from eastern Poland to northern Armenia. Predictably, Putin’s declarations were first mocked and then summarily dismissed. I suspect this was the point at which Russia came to see that war was very likely inevitable in order to retain its sovereignty and security. Nevertheless, Putin exhibited extraordinary patience. While initiating an aggressive military upgrade and expansion program, he bided his time for the next several years. But with the threat to Russia’s strategic naval base in Syria and the US-orchestrated coup d’etat in Ukraine, he was compelled to act, albeit with considerable restraint, to alter the trajectory of events. He dispatched an expeditionary force to Syria to prevent the fall of the Assad regime at the hands of US-supported “moderate rebels”; he moved to reclaim historically Russian Crimea, and to much more aggressively support the ethnic Russian separatists in the Donbass region of Ukraine who were waging a tenuously balanced civil war against the US-installed regime in Kiev.

American designs in Syria were foiled. But the ongoing de facto NATO assimilation of Ukraine continued, as the US and its NATO allies set out to methodically construct what would eventually become the most formidable proxy army in history, with ambitions to lure Putin into a Slavic civil war that would sap Russian strength, mortally wound its still-fragile economy, and induce social unrest within Russia and discontent among its various loci of domestic power, and ultimately effect “regime change” in the Kremlin. But, at every juncture, Putin out-maneuvered them.

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“..companies that impose a price cap will not be among the recipients of Russian oil.”

Janet Yellen sounds especially thick.

Russia To Halt All Oil Exports To Countries That Impose “Absurd” Price-Cap (ZH)

It did not take long for the Kremlin to respond to the G-7 plan to impose price-caps on Russian oil, with Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak warning that Moscow will ban exports of oil and other petroleum products to countries that impose a cap on the price of Russian crude. Novak made the remarks to reporters in Moscow on Sept. 1, according to Russian state media Tass, which came as Western powers were preparing to meet on Sept. 2 to agree on a Russian oil price cap. “We will simply not supply oil and petroleum products to such companies or states that impose restrictions, as we will not work non-competitively,” Novak said, while denouncing the price cap as “completely absurd.”

“It will completely destroy the market,” Novak continued, arguing that interference in market mechanisms in a key commodity like oil would have a destabilizing impact on energy security in countries across the world. US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen took the opportunity of G-7 agreement to a nothingburger plan to take a victory lap: “The price cap will advance our two key objectives; The first, of course, is reducing revenues that Putin needs to continue waging his war of aggression. And the second is maintaining a reliable supply of oil to the global market and putting downward pressure on the price of energy for people in the U.S., in the UK, and around the world.”

But, echoing Novak’s remarks about a Russian oil export ban targeting countries that sign onto the cap, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters during a conference call on Sept. 2 that “companies that impose a price cap will not be among the recipients of Russian oil.”

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This will continue as long as the sanctions do. Remember, only one of six turbines were/are working.

Gazprom Completely Halts Nord Stream Gas Supplies Due To “Unexpected” Leak (ZH)

After a 3-day halt, Russian energy giant Gazprom was expected to resume critical supplies of nat gas to Europe via Nord Stream 1 tomorrow, but it appears that Putin is enjoying the game of cat and mouse a little too much, and gas flows won’t be getting restored any time soon, because moments ago Gazprom announced that it had “completely halted” transport of gas to Nord Stream until a previously undetected oil leakage is rectified. That could take hours, days… or months.
• GAZPROM ISSUES STATEMENT ON NORD STREAM 1 MAINTENANCE
• GAZPROM: TRANSPORT OF GAS TO THE NORD STREAM PIPELINE HAS BEEN COMPLETELY HALTED UNTIL FAULTS ARE RECTIFIED
• GAZPROM: DURING ROUTINE MAINTENANCE WORKS OIL LEAKAGE WAS DETECTED GAS SUPPLIES TO NORD STREAM FULLY STOPPED


That means that Europe will now be forced to rely even more on… well… Russian gas, in the form of much more expensive LNG resold by China. And after tumbling by more than 50% in the past few days, we fully expect European gas prices are about to go super parabolic and take out all time highs as soon as trading returns on Monday.

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Google translate from Dutch.

That makes Hungary, Serbia, Turkey, Bulgaria and some in Austria think of joining.

EU Country Bulgaria Wants To Negotiate Gas With Russians Again (NOS)

Balkan country Bulgaria has made a 180-degree turn towards Russia. The government supported Ukraine and subsequent European sanctions and was subsequently cut off from Russian gas. Meanwhile, there is an interim government in power that cares little about European solidarity. The government is even reaching out to the Russians again, it was announced in a television interview this week: “Talks are being held at the highest level,” Prime Minister Galab Donev said. That announcement – that negotiations are underway with Russia – is causing great concern in the capital Sofia. Hundreds of protesters blocked the main entrance to the government building in recent days. They demand the resignation of the interim government, which has been in power for less than a month.

[..] In the capital Sofia, gas is used for communal district heating. The winters are quite cold and residents in the working-class neighborhoods already have high bills. At the district heating office, Bulgarians walk in and out worrying about their payment. They have no problem with their country renegotiating with Gazprom. Pro-European Prime Minister Kiril Petkov came to power in December. He promised to end corruption and wanted independence from Russia. His government condemned Russian aggression in Ukraine and supported European sanctions. At the end of April, Gazprom turned the tap off for Bulgaria and Poland because of the refusal to pay in rubles. The two countries were thus the first European member states to be cut off from Russian gas. A difficult situation for Bulgaria, the country was 90 percent dependent on gas from Russia.

Prime Minister Petkov then signed an agreement with the United States to supply seven liquefied gas (LNG) tankers to “improve Bulgaria’s energy security”. An agreement mediated by the European Commission. But the Petkov government was overthrown after a vote of no confidence. President Radev appointed an interim government with an energy minister who was quick to announce that “it is practically inevitable that Bulgaria will enter into negotiations with Gazprom Export on the recovery of gas resources under the current contract”.

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“..EU leaders’ failure to “protect people in Europe” has resulted in citizens paying the price for a “war they are not even responsible for.”

Hungary Reveals What Weakened EU (RT)

The armed conflict in Ukraine has “catastrophically” weakened the European Union, Hungary’s Foreign Minister, Peter Szijjarto, has claimed. Speaking at the ‘Open Balkan’ summit in Belgrade on Friday, Szijjarto argued that the Ukraine conflict along with its “economic influence and a ruinous energy crisis… has led to a catastrophic weakening of Europe and the EU.” The diplomat went on to claim that EU leaders’ failure to “protect people in Europe” has resulted in citizens paying the price for a “war they are not even responsible for.” The Hungarian minister stressed that talks are needed within the bloc to ensure that the consequences of the conflict are not “fatal to the continent.” Szijjarto added that food shortages in developing countries caused by the fighting in Ukraine have left “hundreds of thousands of people under the threat of famine,” leading to a “new level of migrants’ aggression” at Hungary’s borders.


The official also stressed the importance of the EU’s expansion in the Western Balkans. Unlike most other EU member states, Hungary has remained relatively neutral since the start of the conflict in February, refusing to provide weapons to either Ukraine or Russia. Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s government has argued that such shipments could see Hungary getting dragged into direct military confrontation – which is not in the country’s interest. Moreover, officials in Budapest have repeatedly criticized EU sanctions against Moscow, insisting that the punitive measures hurt the bloc itself more than they do Russia. Hungary has also called for dialogue with Russia to put an end to the Ukraine conflict.

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But this writer fails to use that opportunity.

Biden’s Hateful Rhetoric Presents The GOP With A Sterling Opportunity (AT)

Never before have government institutions been hijacked and misused to target political opponents. Never before has a virus been misused to impose lockdowns that infringe on the right to freedom of movement and the right to earn a living. Never before have vaccines been mandated causing people to be fired from their jobs or suffer from health issues. Never before has the U.S. government demonized its own citizens, calling them domestic terrorists. Never before has the U.S. government set up a ‘Disinformation Governance Board’ that sits in judgment of the utterances of citizens. Never before has the U.S. been subjected to prolonged disinformation campaigns, the Russian collusion hoax, the Ukraine call hoax, and now the insurrection hoax.

Never before has the U.S. had a president whose cognitive abilities are so impaired that he struggles to read off a teleprompter and causes citizens to wonder who is in charge. Biden continues by claiming that the Republican party is “dominated, driven, intimidated by Donald Trump” and his supporters, calling it “a threat to this country” because “they refuse to accept the results of a free election.” Perhaps Biden forgot the Russian collusion hoax concocted by the Democrats that baselessly attempted to delegitimize the results of the 2016 presidential election. It was the Democrats who refused to accept the results of a free election. Perhaps Biden forgot that big media and big tech suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop scandal prior to the 2020 elections.

A recent poll shows that nearly four of five Americans believe that “truthful” coverage would have changed the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. Perhaps Biden forgot about Mark Zuckerberg spending $419 million to infiltrate sacrosanct electoral infrastructure of the 2020 elections and push for mail-in voting. Perhaps Biden forgot that 69% of voters nationwide cast their ballot nontraditionally i.e., by mail and/or before Election Day for the 2020 elections. Mail votes are highly vulnerable to fraud. Biden also alleged that the “MAGA forces” are aligned with white supremacists, violent extremists, and other undesirables. Perhaps Biden forgot violent Democrat extremists threatening Supreme Court Justices, vandalizing Catholic churches, pregnancy centers, and the offices of pro-life groups.

McCabe

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“..Western media is in ‘lockstep’ with government on foreign policy to a degree that would make real dictators blush”.

US Economic Decline And Global Instability Part 2: Rise of BRICS (PG)

First Amendment of the US constitution- ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.’ It is commonly stated that the press (aka the proverbial ‘4th estate’) in the US is ‘free’ and ‘independent’ and ‘essential for the functioning of a free society’, serving as a ‘watchdog’ on government actions and policies and vital to protect the ‘liberty’ of American citizens. As is often the case, things are not always as they seem. In a recent interview with Brian Berletic, Mark Sleboda commented that “Western media is in ‘lockstep’ with government on foreign policy to a degree that would make real dictators blush”.

While there is no doubt that Western (read corporate) media is indeed promoting US foreign policy, it is not the US government that formulates these polices, rather they are formulated and developed by the ruling elite, using corporate-funded foundations and ‘think tanks’, academic institutions and prominent politicians. These include the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), Rand Corporation, Rockefeller Foundation, American Heritage Foundation, Atlantic Council, Brookings, Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Academic institutions such as The Kennedy School (Harvard), Hoover Institution (Stanford), Walsh School of Foreign Service (Georgetown) and School of Advanced International Studies (Johns Hopkins) not only provide ‘experts’ and government officials, such as Wendy Sherman (Kennedy School) current US Deputy Secretary of State in the Biden Administration, they serve as training grounds for government officials and corporate management, some of whom are employed by above listed universities and foundations.

Once formulated, these policies are ‘sold’ to the American public by a compliant and well-disciplined media. Approximately 90% of US media is controlled by six large corporations- Comcast, Walt Disney, AT&T, Paramount Global, Sony, and Fox, with a combined market cap of circa $500 billions. Like other large corporations, media conglomerates have the same class interests as the financial elite, i.e., promoting policies which increase corporate power and profits and maintain US global hegemony. So called ‘public’ media, such as National Public Radio (NPR) and the BBC, in the UK, function in a similar manner. Corporate media is closely integrated with large financial interests and serves as a ‘cheerleader’ for the Pentagon and US foreign policy.

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“The idea of a president giving away such a fortune with the stroke of a pen should alarm every American.”

College-Loan Forgiveness Plan Reveals Biden’s Constitutional Cynicism (Turley)

In 1987, President Reagan reached a milestone in sending to Congress the first trillion-dollar budget. The size of it caused intense debate in Congress over the debt load, but an eventual “consensus” budget was reached. What is shocking today is not simply the size of the more than $4 trillion federal budget but that President Biden just wiped out what is estimated to be $1 trillion owed to the country — the size of the Reagan budget — without a single vote, let alone approval, by Congress. The idea of a president giving away such a fortune with the stroke of a pen should alarm every American. Not only will the massive payout likely fuel inflation but critics have objected to having working-class people subsidize the debts of college-educated citizens.

Others object that it is unfair to those who sacrificed to pay off their loans or those of their children. When one such father asked Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) whether he would get a refund after struggling to pay off his daughter’s college education, Warren dismissed him with an “of course not.“ Some Democrats in Congress have joined Republicans in condemning the plan. Biden knew he could never get Congress to agree to such a massive write-off, so he did not try. Instead, he acted unilaterally, and Democrats like Warren expressed euphoria, although Warren wanted five times more debt forgiveness. The former law professor saw little problem with a president giving away hundreds of billions of dollars.

As was the case under President Obama when he circumvented Congress, Warren and others are celebrating their own constitutional obsolescence. This is not supposed to happen in a constitutional system based on shared, limited powers: The Constitution gives Congress the power of the purse, but Biden just gave away the store. James Madison described the essence of our system of separation of powers in Federalist 51 as premised on the belief that “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” No branch is supposed to have enough power to govern alone. Biden just did, however.

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“What can a pandemic NOT do?”

The Pandemic Did This? New York Times Fails Fact Check (Lerman)

Yesterday, September 1, 2022, The New York Times had a front page story entitled: “The Pandemic Erased Two Decades of Progress in Math and Reading.”The first paragraph states that “National test results released on Thursday showed in stark terms the pandemic’s devastating effects on American schoolchildren, with the performance of 9-year-olds in math and reading dropping to the levels from two decades ago.” Further down, the article says: “Then came the pandemic, which shuttered schools across the country almost overnight” and “experts say it will take more than the typical school day to make up gaps created by the pandemic.”

The definition of a pandemic, according to the Bulletin of the World Health Organization (ref: Last JM, editor. A dictionary of epidemiology, 4th edition. New York: Oxford University Press; 2001) is “an epidemic occurring worldwide, or over a very wide area, crossing international boundaries and usually affecting a large number of people.” According to the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology, “an epidemic occurs when an infectious disease spreads rapidly to many people.” Thus, a pandemic is a disease that spreads rapidly to many people all over the world. Based on this pretty much universally accepted definition, a pandemic can do exactly one thing: it can spread disease to many people around the world.

What can a pandemic NOT do? A pandemic cannot impose mandates or lockdowns. A pandemic cannot block borders or force people to stop traveling. A pandemic cannot shutter schools – overnight or otherwise. A pandemic cannot impact math and reading. A pandemic cannot cause learning gaps. What can our response to a pandemic do? If we decide to shut down schools for months and years on end in response to a pandemic, then it is our response that has caused whatever educational deficits and devastation to children ensue. It is not the pandemic. In case there’s any doubt that the effects of a pandemic are separate and distinct from society’s response to the pandemic, we can take a look at Sweden, where schools were never shut down, and where there was no learning loss and much less devastation to schoolchildren than in countries that closed schools during the Covid pandemic.

Blaming the pandemic for anything other than disease and/or death is misinformation. The New York Times headline and article contain clear and uncontestable instances of misinformation. Here is the information from the article, stated in a factually correct way: US public health leaders and politicians mandated prolonged school shutdowns in response to the Covid pandemic, and these school shutdowns had devastating effects on schoolchildren, creating learning gaps and erasing decades of progress in math and reading.

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Disaster around the corner.

Only Nine Percent of Law Professors Identify as Conservatives (Turley)

A new study offers further evidence of the alarming decline of ideological diversity on our law faculties. A study by Georgetown University’s Kevin Tobia and MIT’s Eric Martinez was featured on College Fix that finds that only nine percent of law school professors identify as conservative at the top 50 law schools. Notably, a 2017 study found 15 percent of faculties were conservative. This is the result of years of faculty replicating their own ideological preferences and eradicating the diversity that once existed on faculties. When I began teaching in the 1980s, faculties were undeniably liberal but contained a significant number of conservative and libertarian professors. It made for a healthy and balanced intellectual environment. Today such voices are relatively rare and faculties have become political echo chambers, leaving conservatives and Republican students increasingly afraid to speak openly in class.

The trend is the result of hiring systems where conservative or libertarian scholars are often rejected as simply “insufficiently intellectually rigorous” or “not interesting” in their scholarship. This can clearly be true with individual candidates but the wholesale reduction of such scholars shows a more systemic problem. Faculty insist that there is no bias against conservatives, but the obviously falling number of conservative faculty speaks for itself. In racial and gender discrimination cases, this type of pattern of de facto hiring preferences is routinely the basis for lawsuits. Obviously, intellectual diversity is different from racial discrimination. This is no protected class and there is no statutory mandate to support challenges. Faculties know that it is near impossible to challenge their hiring decisions. However, the de facto result of years of biased hiring practices is reflected in the low number of conservative faculty at these schools.

When confronted, faculty will often shrug and say that they are open to promising conservative faculty but they simply have not found any. They will also question what is a conservative or a liberal — even though professors seem to have little problem in answering such polls with those terms. There is little sympathy for conservative and libertarian students who have few faculty offering opposing views — or liberal students who would like exposure to the full array of legal thought and interpretations. Having taught for over three decades, I have never seen a more intolerant and orthodox environment. Schools have reached an ideological critical mass where faculties are replicating their own preferences. The overwhelming composition of faculties then serves to replicate and promote the views of liberal faculty on journals and in conferences.

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“..a 711-page “joint statement on discovery disputes.”

Biden-Big Tech Collusion Suit Reveals ‘Massive, Sprawling’ Censorship (JTN)

Even as President Biden warns the nation of the “extremist threat to our democracy” from Republicans in this fall’s elections, new evidence suggests a much wider campaign by his administration to sic Big Tech on critics than previously thought, going so far as removing a parody of Biden’s chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci. The First Amendment lawsuit by Republican attorneys general and a civil liberties group against Biden, Fauci and several other high-level officials has revealed a “massive, sprawling federal ‘Censorship Enterprise'” related to COVID-19 and elections, the plaintiffs said in a 711-page “joint statement on discovery disputes.”

“If there was ever any doubt the federal government was behind censorship of Americans who dared to dissent from official Covid messaging, that doubt has been erased” by what the defendants have already turned over, New Civil Liberties Alliance lawyer Jenin Younes said. The Justice Department cited its 15,000-page document production to oppose the “anything but reasonably tailored” discovery requests by Missouri’s Eric Schmitt, Louisiana’s Jeff Landry and NCLA, which DOJ called “grossly disproportionate” to this stage of litigation. Twitter, Facebook and Instagram parent Meta, Google’s YouTube and LinkedIn provided information separately.

The “defendants’ position” left out the elephant in the room: the likelihood of even greater harm to Democratic prospects if sensitive communications including Fauci and White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre are required to be divulged before the midterms. Schmitt is the GOP nominee for retiring Sen. Roy Blunt’s seat. The plaintiffs are keen to compel Fauci to discuss the “nature and content” of his oral conversations with Zuckerberg, who gave the long-serving public health bureaucrat his personal cell phone number in March 2020. They also want all Fauci communication with social media platforms related to the anti-lockdown Great Barrington Declaration and its authors, who are represented by NCLA, as well as Trump coronavirus task force member Scott Atlas, former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson, EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak and China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology.

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“Mike McCormick was Joe Biden’s stenographer and witnessed Biden in action around the world. In a recent blog post he claims there’s much more to Hunter Biden’s involvement in the Wuhan lab and Biden’s meetings with President Xi in China.”

Hunter’s Techies Funded China Bat Virus Researcher (McCormick)

Mere days after he returned from his infamous Air Force Two trip to China with his dad in December 2013, Hunter Biden, along with his Rosemont Seneca Technology Partners pals, began a long, intimate, and lucrative business relationship with biowarfare contractor Metabiota — at the very same time its scientists were collaborating on research with virologists associated with Wuhan Institute of Virology and EcoHealth Alliance. [..] Also as an eyewitness to Joe’s dealings — I traveled with him to Ukraine and China — I will present further evidence that he and his staffers directed even more USAID and Department of Defense (DOD) funding towards his and Hunter’s investment in Metabiota for its activities in Ukraine and China. Joe Biden enriching himself and his family by lining up government funding Metabiota is malfeasance, an impeachable offense.

But in my opinion, impeachment hardly answers for his criminal affiliation with this pandemic “predictor.” But the question that must be asked, and it’s only me asking: Who had the idea for Hunter and RSTP to back Metabiota — Joe or Xi? And understand, the only people that can answer that question are Joe and Xi. Because given that prominent CCP virologist Shi Zhengli was leading the Chinese side of this research collaboration, it is entirely reasonable that Xi Jinping would have known about her project. It’s also reasonable that he knew a lot about her research partners, meaning it’s quite likely he knew Metabiota and its founder, Wolfe, were tied to the DOD and highly regarded by the WEF. Whether Metabiota was a biowarfare contractor or a biotech software company, there is no doubt the CCP was keeping close tabs on it, and thus so was Xi.

So now what to make of Joe Biden and his four-and-a-half-hour meeting with Xi Jinping as crude, cruel, and callous Hunter waited in the wings. [..] At this point in time, Xi, the deadly serious president of China, the world’s most “ascendant” nation, thinks he is scheduled to talk to Joe Biden, the often ridiculous vice president of the United States, for only about an hour. Boy, was he wrong. So what changed? What was Joe up to? And why did Xi tolerate it? The meeting took place in the Great Hall of the People, adjacent to Tiananmen Square. It was supposed to adhere to the traditional world leader bilateral formula of a one-hour meeting with advisors present, followed by brief innocuous remarks to the press. But that’s not how it went. I know because I was there … sort of.

Chinese security denied me entry to the building. No reason given. So I retreated to a van in the motorcade and waited and waited and waited. So no, I was not in the meeting between Joe Biden and Xi Jinping. But then, no one was. No senior staffers. Not a one. From either side. And based on reports from White House staffers who did get in the building, they spent four hours sitting on the hard floor of an empty hallway and were as put out as the Chinese by what transpired.Joe had all the advisors leave — Chinese and American. Not Xi, Joe. It was just him and Xi and interpreters — off script, off schedule, off plan. Most unusual. And Joe knew it. His remarks after the meeting began with an apology to Xi’s advisors for not only kicking them out of the room, but then monopolizing Xi’s time.

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Posobiec Dutch farmers

 

 


You don’t have to put on the red light.

 

 


Kingfisher in action. Photo Jaap La Brijn

 

 

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

 

 

 

Dec 292021
 
 December 29, 2021  Posted by at 9:10 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  54 Responses »


Sandro Botticelli Portrait of a Young Woman 1480 – 1485

 

Vaccine Expert Says Mass Deaths and Hospitalisations Are “Now History” (DS)
Can Someone Help Me Understand The White House Strategy Now? (Berenson)
3x Vaccinated More Than 4x As Likely To Have Omicron As Unvaccinated (eugyp)
93% Of People Who Died After Being Vaccinated Were Killed By The Vaccine (Kirsch)
RIP, ‘Pandemic Of The Unvaccinated’ (Welch)
WHO Warns Omicron Could Overwhelm Health Systems (G.)
Why Is Japan Crushing COVID? (Kirsch)
A Perfect Storm of Incentives (AIER)
CDC Drastically Drops Estimate Of US Omicron Cases (G.)
The Zoom Class Gets Covid (Tucker)
Biden’s Troubled Relationship With the Truth – and Consequences (RCP)
The Rise and Fall of Scientism. Do we Need a new Religion? (Ugo Bardi)
Forget The Straws, Over A Billion Masks -Per Month- Now Pollute The Ocean (Evie)
There Will Be No More NATO Expansion – Russia (RT)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Geert’s New Year message: What’s next in 2022

 

 

 

 

“The horrific scenes that we saw a year ago – intensive care units being full, lots of people dying prematurely – that is now history in my view..”

Vaccine Expert Says Mass Deaths and Hospitalisations Are “Now History” (DS)

Professor Sir John Bell, a member of the Vaccines Taskforce, has expressed his optimism that “the horrific scenes that we saw a year ago”, which he says involved the NHS being pushed to breaking point along with mass deaths from the virus, “is now history”. For this reason, Bell has supported Boris Johnson’s move not to tighten Covid restrictions in England. The Mail has more. “The message came as a leading vaccines expert backed Boris Johnson’s refusal to toughen England’s Covid restrictions to bring them into line with the other Home Nations, saying that mass deaths and hospitalisations from the deadly disease are “history”.

Professor Sir John Bell, Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford University and a member of the Vaccines Taskforce, said the public had been “pretty responsible” in its response to the spread of the Omicron variant. Speaking to broadcasters about New Year celebrations this afternoon, Care Minister Gillian Keegan said: “We have always said ‘act cautiously’ since this new variant came among us. “It is highly infectious and many people will know people who have caught this over the Christmas period. “So do be cautious, take an Lateral Flow Test (LFT) before you go out. Go to well-ventilated areas; I have been to a couple of outdoor parties actually, people have moved things to outside. “So just be cautious, but do try to enjoy yourself as well but cautiously.” It came as new figures showed the number of people in hospital with Covid in England is less than half the same time last year – despite cases being three times higher…

Johnson, who is at his Chequers country retreat, left it to Health Secretary Sajid Javid to face the cameras to announce the decision, although he later tweeted advice to Brits to exercise caution at the new year. “The Health Minister has taken advice and looked at the data. I think his judgment where we should go in the next few days is probably fine,” Bell told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme. “There are a lot of people who are aware that we are in the face of this large wave of disease. The behaviour of people in the U.K., in England in particular, has been pretty responsible in terms of trying not to go out and spending a lot of time exposing yourself to the virus.” He added: “The horrific scenes that we saw a year ago – intensive care units being full, lots of people dying prematurely – that is now history in my view and I think we should be reassured that that’s likely to continue.”

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“..patients are being discharged as fast as they are being admitted.”

Can Someone Help Me Understand The White House Strategy Now? (Berenson)

Guys, I don’t know how to say this any more clearly: it is OVER. The Omicold (pronounced Immacold) variant is about to bring this clown show to its inevitable conclusion. I know none of our supposedly non-racist public health authorities were willing to believe the South African numbers, but we now have almost a month of data out of Denmark. They are real. And they are spectacular. Between Dec. 13 and Dec. 20, Denmark reported approximately 50,000 confirmed Omicron cases. Given the approximately one-week lag between infection and hospitalization, those people should be flooding into hospitals. EXCEPT THE NUMBER OF OMICRON PATIENTS IN DANISH HOSPITALS HAS NOT RISEN IN THE LAST WEEK.

You read that right. 50,000 positive tests the week before, no change in hospitalizations. Admissions have risen slightly, but patients are being discharged as fast as they are being admitted. The result: as of Dec. 21, Danish hospitals had 47 Omicron patients, with under five (the report is not more specific) in intensive care. As of Dec. 27, the hospitals had 51 Omicron patients, again with under five in intensive care. The question is no longer whether Omicron is a cold. It’s whether it’s as dangerous as a cold. (And, again, this has nothing to do with Covid vaccines; most South Africans are not vaccinated, and the pattern there was the same.)

The only sane political move at this point is to drop ALL mandates – vaccine and otherwise – and ALL asymptomatic or quarantine testing (dropping all non-hospital testing would be even better) – and declare victory and go home. Even if the country weren’t burned out on scare stories and sick of being lied to, the reality of these figures is already obvious to most people. (Including LeBron James.) When your media water-carriers have to write articles explaining the difference between Covid and a cold… it’s over. So why won’t Uncle Joe just say so? Because the current strategy isn’t working – not politically, and not for the country. It’s time to surrender to the ro like you did to the Taliban and to inflation. At least this time admitting the problem will fix it.

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“..the triple vaccinated were 4.45 times more likely than the unvaccinated to have Omicron..”

3x Vaccinated More Than 4x As Likely To Have Omicron As Unvaccinated (eugyp)

Norman Fenton points out an interesting tidbit in the 21 December UK Office of National Statistics infection survey, on “Characteristics related to having an Omicron compatible result in those who test positive for COVID-19”. The data is for infections from 29 November to 12 December. First, this remarkable passage from the results sheet: Those who have received three doses of a vaccine and test positive for COVID-19 are more likely to be infected with infections compatible with the Omicron variant compared with those who are unvaccinated, though individuals who had received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine continued to be less likely to test positive for COVID-19, regardless of variant. It is too early to draw conclusions from our data on the effectiveness of vaccines against the Omicron variant.

Yes, the numbers are very small. Yes, the 95% confidence intervals are enormous. Nevertheless: According to these numbers, the triple vaccinated were 4.45 times more likely than the unvaccinated to have Omicron, among those who tested positive for Corona. For comparison, those with recent travel abroad were 4.6 times more likely than the unvaccinated to have Omicron, while the double vaccinated were 2.26 times more likely, and the single vaccinated 1.57 times more likely. This squares entirely with the preliminary data from Denmark, which has the double vaccinated sliding into negative efficacy against Omicron (but not Delta) after 90 days. The authors of that study tried to talk away this awkward result by claiming that it “was likely the result of Omicron spreading rapidly initially through single (super-spreading) events causing many infections among young, vaccinated individuals.” The more the same effect is viewed in other data sets, the less likely that explanation becomes.

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The vaccine distributes the spike protein to locations where the virus does not.

Bhakdi and Burkhardt are critizied, of course, but let’s have the discussion.

93% Of People Who Died After Being Vaccinated Were Killed By The Vaccine (Kirsch)

I got an email recently from Mike Yeadon, former VP of Pfizer, who urged me to check out this video. He wrote me this email on 12/24/21: “Steve, This is about the worst 15min I’ve ever seen. Mass covid19 vaccination is leading to mass murder. Mike” The video references this paper, posted on December 10, 2021, On COVID vaccines: why they cannot work, and irrefutable evidence of their causative role in deaths after vaccination by Sucharit Bhakdi, MD and Arne Burkhardt, MD. It has been getting a lot of attention lately. The authors did an autopsy in 15 patients who died (from 7 days to 6 months) after receiving the COVID vaccine. These were all cases where the coroner ruled as NOT being caused by the vaccine. They discovered that in 14 of the 15 patients there was widespread evidence of the body attacking itself, something that is never seen before. The heart was attacked in all 14 cases.


A number of salient aspects dominated in all affected tissues of all cases: • inflammatory events in small blood vessels (endotheliitis), characterized by an abundance of T-lymphocytes and sequestered, dead endothelial cells within the vessel lumen; • the extensive perivascular accumulation of T-lymphocytes; • a massive lymphocytic infiltration of surrounding non-lymphatic organs or tissue with T-lymphocytes. Lymphocytic infiltration occasionally occurred in combination with intense lymphocytic activation and follicle formation. Where these were present, they were usually accompanied by tissue destruction. VAERS as well as other independent studies shows the vaccines are killing people and that cardiac events were highly elevated. This study is consistent with those results. This work independently validates the analysis of Peter Schimacher who showed a minimum of 30% to 40% of the deaths after vaccine were caused by the vaccine.

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“..the problems with the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” message pre-date the variant that rendered it factually ludicrous.”

RIP, ‘Pandemic Of The Unvaccinated’ (Welch)

If you spend too much time observing the way politicians speak, you’ll pick up an almost perceptibly mechanical gear-shift in their heads when the brain-groove reminds them to reproduce an anecdote or talking point they have formulated so many times before. Occasionally the subconscious rebels against the alienating monotony with apologetic prefix clauses like, “That’s why I like to say,” or “I always tell the story that,” but the pre-sets mostly override such human twitches to deliver the desired political result. So it was for President Joe Biden’s counterproductive “pandemic of the unvaccinated” slogan, which the White House COVID-19 Response Team introduced in mid-July, and which the president was still regurgitating inaccurately as late as December 14.

In a local TV interview with News Center 7 in Dayton, Ohio, the president was asked about whether his administration would continue fighting his contested employer vaccine mandates in court. The politician-brain quickly whirred into gear. “This is a pandemic of the unvaccinated. The unvaccinated. Not the vaccinated, the unvaccinated,” Biden emphasized, on the same day that the omicron variant produced a one-day positive-case increase of 16 percent in highly vaccinated New York City. “That’s the problem. And so everybody talks about ‘freedom,’ and not to have a shot or have a test. Well guess what? How about patriotism? How about making sure that you’re vaccinated, so you do not spread the disease to anybody else? What about that?” What about that indeed.

New York City’s one-shot vaccination rate (of 92 percent for adults, 83 percent for kids between 13 and 17) “rivals any number in the free world,” Politico’s Jack Shafer observed last week, and yet somehow my vaccinated teen and boosted self spent Christmas under quarantine. The fact-checkers over at The Poynter Institute’s PolitiFact generously rated Biden’s “vaccinated…do not spread the disease” claim as only “mostly” false, despite epidemiologist quotes like “[the] statement is not accurate,” and “vaccinated individuals can definitely infect other people.” But the problems with the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” message pre-date the variant that rendered it factually ludicrous.

On September 16, one week after Biden reversed serial administration promises by announcing an employer vaccine mandate (while using language such as “We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin. And your refusal has cost all of us”), science writer Yasmin Tayag penned an Atlantic piece headlined “Stop Calling It a ‘Pandemic of the Unvaccinated.'” “Bullying the unvaccinated into getting their shots isn’t going to work in the long run,” Tayag predicted, in a piece surveying a field of study (behavioral science) to which the White House seems oblivious. “The way the mandates are being presented is driving a wedge between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated. If the goal is to inoculate enough people to reach herd immunity, this approach may eventually backfire.”

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The WHO needs to maintain the narrative.

But in reality, the UK on Dec 27 had 143,071 “new cases” and 407 hospitalizations. Not overwhelming.

WHO Warns Omicron Could Overwhelm Health Systems (G.)

The World Health Organization has warned that the Omicron coronavirus variant could lead to overwhelmed healthcare systems even though early studies suggest it sparks milder disease, as daily case records fell across Europe and the US while China, South Africa and Germany brought back tough restrictions to stamp out infections. Covid-19 surges have wreaked havoc around the world, forcing many nations to make tough choices between economically punishing restrictions and controlling the spread of the virus. The United States has halved the isolation period for asymptomatic cases to try and blunt the disruption, while France has ordered companies to have employees work from home at least three days a week.

Contact restrictions were in place in Germany for the second year in a row heading into the New Year, as Europe’s biggest economy shuttered nightclubs and forced sports competitions behind closed doors. Despite facing a much smaller outbreak compared with global virus hotspots, China has not relaxed its “zero Covid” strategy, imposing stay-at-home orders in many parts of the city of Yan’an. [..] Beyond social strife, the pandemic has been punishing economically, in particular for sectors like travel. Some 11,500 flights have been scrapped worldwide since Friday, and tens of thousands more delayed, during one of the year’s busiest travel periods. Multiple airlines have blamed staffing shortages caused by spikes of Omicron cases.

The surge in the US has been fuelled by the Omicron variant, as well as large pockets of unvaccinated residents and a lack of access to quick and easy testing. President Joe Biden said Monday some US hospitals could be “overrun” but that the country was generally well prepared. He stressed that Omicron would not have the same impact as the initial Covid outbreak or the Delta variant surge this year. “Omicron is a source of concern, but it should not be a source of panic,” Biden said.

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“I wonder if it could be caused by the ivermectin? What do you think?”

Why Is Japan Crushing COVID? (Kirsch)

I cannot recall a time in American history where the medical boards would go after you for prescribing an approved drug off-label for a condition that is supported by over 60 positive studies and multiple peer-reviewed systematic reviews and meta-analyses which is the highest level of evidence-based medicine. Can you? Is there a cost-benefit analysis somewhere that I missed showing that ivermectin causes harm? If the cost-benefit analysis is clearly negative, how could those positive meta-analyses been published? Why is the FDA to be on the warpath against ivermectin? Check out this article: TrialSiteNews entitled “Feds Coming After Doctors & Pharmacies that Market Ivermectin as Effective & Safe for COVID-19.” Perhaps they don’t want you to take it because if people found out it works, the pandemic would be over? Wow. That would be really evil.

Let’s look at a country that is allowed to use ivermectin: Japan . Here’s an article describing how Japan is using ivermectin to combat COVID. Here’s an excerpt: “Ivermectin was discarded unceremoniously till now, but Japan has demonstrated that the drug can be used as a more effective cure and a permanent substitute for the Coronavirus vaccines produced by big pharmaceutical companies. The Pandemic in Japan was going out of control, yet the Japanese government was smart enough to look beyond vaccines in its COVID-19 containment efforts. In September, Japan deployed Ivermectin and legalising the use of the anti-parasitic drug has helped people recover from COVID-19 with more durable and long-lasting immunity.

Caseloads have come down rapidly without the need for booster vaccination doses. In Tokyo, there were around 6,000 cases in the middle of August, but the number has now dropped down to below one hundred. Japan is now overcoming the Coronavirus, with the number of COVID tests dropping from 25% in the fag end of August to just 1% mid-October. Ivermectin use is thus helping Japan permanently beat the COVID-19 Pandemic. If and when vaccine efficacy wanes, Japan will have a choice- using an anti-parasitic medicine as a permanent cure to ensure speedy recovery of infected patients with durable immunity. Japan has thus crushed Big Pharma with a small move- deploying the use of Ivermectin.”

Let’s look at death rates in Japan vs. the US. See a difference? On a per capita basis, Japan is beating the US by a factor of 17. As soon as Japan rolled out ivermectin, their death rates dropped rapidly to 0. I wonder if it could be caused by the ivermectin? What do you think?

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Is the Imperial College of London (ICL) the worst predictor ever?

A Perfect Storm of Incentives (AIER)

While most countries imposed lockdowns, Sweden resisted. The Swedish government recommended social distancing and banned gatherings of more than 50 people, but it did not require businesses to close. Because of differences in population mobility, density, size, and the environment, a comparison of Sweden to the United States isn’t possible. What is possible is a comparison of Sweden to Sweden. The Imperial College of London (ICL) produced the early forecasts of Covid deaths. These were the forecasts on which politicians based their policy decisions. Applying the ICL forecast model to Sweden, Swedish epidemiologists predicted that, by July 1 2020, Sweden would have suffered 96,000 deaths if it had done nothing, and 81,600 deaths with the few policies that it did employ. In fact, by July 1, Sweden had suffered only 5,500 deaths.

The ICL model overestimated Sweden’s Covid deaths by a factor of nearly fifteen. Early ICL forecasts indicated that, unchecked, Covid would kill 40 million worldwide in 2020, and that the number could be cut in half by social distancing and isolating the elderly. According to the World Health Organization, worldwide Covid deaths for 2020 totaled 1.8 million. The ICL model overestimated world Covid deaths by a factor of ten. For 2020, the same ICL forecasting model also predicted that, if the countries did nothing in response to Covid, up to 2.2 million people in the US and another 550,000 in the UK would directly die from Covid.

Suppose that ICL predictions of US and UK Covid deaths were overstated only by a factor of three. Then, in the absence of lockdowns and mandatory masks, the United States could have expected around 730,000 Covid deaths and the UK 180,000 in 2020. How many people actually died? In 2020, the number of direct deaths due to Covid were approximately 360,000 in the US and 77,000 in the UK. Thus, even assuming that the ICL model had a significantly smaller bias than it demonstrated elsewhere, the lockdowns appear to have only saved around 370,000 lives in the US and 103,000 in the UK. To further skew these estimates, the ICL model assumes nonpharmaceutical interventions only. The widespread availability in the US of a vaccine, beginning in mid-2020, further reduces the number of lives the lockdowns saved.

In short, however many lives the lockdowns did save, they were far fewer than what the ICL models predicted they would save. As with all things, lockdowns do not come without tradeoffs. Some people died of cancer, kidney disease, and other non-Covid causes because they were afraid to go to hospitals out of fear of contracting Covid. In Canada, cancer screening was suspended so that hospital resources could be devoted to Covid care. Early estimates show up to a 10 percent increase in cancer deaths as a consequence. In the US in the early days of Covid, there was a 30 percent decline in the number of people seeking initial treatment for kidney disease.

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CDC and WHO are useless. One of many things the pandemic has exposed.

CDC Drastically Drops Estimate Of US Omicron Cases (G.)

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has revised down its estimates for US infection by the Omicron variant, stating it accounts for approximately 59% of all Covid cases in the US, not 73% as it previously said. Nevertheless, the figures issued Tuesday indicates that Omicron is spreading rapidly in the US, growing from a revised estimate of 23% of cases as of 18 December. The correction shows that until the week before Christmas, the Delta variant remained dominant. “Setting aside the question of how the initial estimate was so inaccurate, if CDC’s new estimate of #Omicron prevalence is precise then it suggests that a good portion of the current hospitalizations we’re seeing from Covid may still be driven by Delta infections,” Scott Gottlieb, former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, posted on Twitter.

The disparity in estimates, while confirming the rapid spread of Omicron, also speaks to relative lack of precision in detecting a new variant that can only be confirmed by genetic analysis. The news comes as the US surpassed its all-time total for new cases, according to figures from Johns Hopkins, with the daily total soaring above 512,000. However, the numbers come with the caveat that many testing centers were closed over the holiday weekend, and a CDC spokesperson told Politico that the number was likely an “overestimate” due to a delay in state reporting. Separately, the former US surgeon general Jerome Adams criticized the CDC for its revision Monday to cut Covid isolation periods from ten days to five.

“I love the CDC. Grew up wanting to work there and have been one of their most ardent defenders. I never dreamed the day would come when I would advise people NOT to follow their guidance,” Adams said in a tweet on Tuesday. “They wouldn’t even follow it for their own family.” The CDC also announced Tuesday that the United States has administered 505,013,980 doses of the Covid-19 vaccines. The figures show that US health authorities have administered 1,533,313 doses from a day earlier. The agency also estimated that more than 67 million people have received an additional dose of either Pfizer or Moderna’s vaccine since 13 August, when the United States authorized a third dose of the vaccines for people with compromised immune systems.

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“This whole disaster would finally come to an end (or at least the end would begin) when it became obvious that the great strategy of class division and demarcation would fail to protect the Zoom class from infection.”

The Zoom Class Gets Covid (Tucker)

For nearly two years, we’ve wondered how this will end. In retrospect, the clue is in how it began. The initial lockdowns had a strong class-based component. The working classes were assigned the job of delivering groceries, tending to the sick, driving the trucks filled with goods, keeping the lights on, and keeping the fuel running. The professional class, among whom were the people who pushed lockdowns in the name of disease avoidance/suppression, were assigned the job of staying home in their pajamas and staying safe. It all happened seemingly in an instant. We all had to figure out whether our job qualified and what we should do. More striking at the time was the very notion that government bureaucrats could slice and dice the population this way, deciding what can open and what cannot, who must work and who must not, what we can and cannot do based on our station in life.

So it now seems obvious to me. This whole disaster would finally come to an end (or at least the end would begin) when it became obvious that the great strategy of class division and demarcation would fail to protect the Zoom class from infection. That day has finally arrived, with cases soaring in many parts of the country and hitting everyone of every class, whether they are being “careful” and adhering to the “mitigation measures” or not. What’s even more striking is how even the vaccines, which were supposed to codify the wisdom of class segregation, have not protected against infection. All of this seems to have taken place over the course of December 2021, with the arrival of the seemingly mild Omicron variant. Still the other variants circulate widely, causing various degrees of severity with or without hospitalization much less death.

In other words, millions from among all classes of people are finally getting sick. At this point, we seem to be seeing a big shift in attitudes. A lot of this comes from casual conversation. A person comes down with Covid, perhaps confirmed by the newly fashionable at-home tests. “Did you get vaccinated?” the person is invariably asked. The answer comes back: yes and boosted. That’s when the chill happens. It appears that nothing can ultimately protect people from this. In which case, it is time we change our tune. “Thousands who ‘followed the rules’ are about to get covid. They shouldn’t be ashamed,” headlines the Washington Post.

Feeling ashamed about getting covid-19 isn’t healthy or helpful, experts agree…. Remember: You’re not a failure. “Millions of other people have gotten sick,” (Seema) Varma says. “Unfortunately, you’re not alone. You’re not the only one. You’re not the first one to get covid, and you won’t be the last.” And that positive test, she reiterates, “doesn’t make you an irresponsible person.” So on the piece goes, with a complete flip of the narrative they have long preached: anyone who gets Covid has failed to comply, disregards of Fauci’s advice, probably lives in a Red state, rejects the science, and otherwise bears the mark of selfishness and the desire to put freedom ahead of public health.

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“..Manchin refused to be fooled. He announced that he won’t support the bill – effectively killing it in its present shape.”

Biden’s Troubled Relationship With the Truth – and Consequences (RCP)

President Biden’s approval rating has plummeted, and Democrats wonder why. The United States is facing hardships, but hardships alone don’t make a president unpopular. Leaders who are honest about the problems we face and forthright about the solutions they offer tend to do well (think, say, of Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan). Unfortunately, that is not the leadership Americans are getting from this president. Instead, the Biden administration has tried to convince the public of things that are not just untrue but implausible. To note a few, Biden did not (and does not) have a “national strategy” to defeat COVID; our southern border is not “secure;” the Afghan withdrawal was not an “extraordinary success”; the current bout of inflation is neither “temporary” nor “a good thing”; and government spending never takes “the pressure off of inflation.”

Of course, politicians often overstate things and sometimes outright lie. Nothing new there. It’s the in-your-face nature of the administration’s falsehoods that is stunning. For a recent example, take Biden’s efforts to promote his Build Back Better bill. The administration often claims that the legislation really “costs zero dollars” because it is “paid for.” Most Americans realize that paying for something doesn’t make it free. Otherwise, literally everything would be free. Seriously, people get this. In fairness, Biden was attempting to state that BBB wouldn’t add to the deficit because taxing the rich would pay for it. But even that claim didn’t pass the smell test. Just about everybody outside of Washington, D.C., knows that government programs are never actually “paid for.” We are already borrowing from our great-grandkids just to cover our current profligate spending.

[..] The supply-and-demand dynamic and its impact on inflation seem to be mysteries to the administration – but not to most Americans. According to the Penn Wharton Budget Model, the average American family will incur an additional $3,500 in expenses this year solely because of already-surging inflation. It’s the kind of thing people notice. Of course, the administration made this implausible claim only because the bill needed West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin’s support to pass. Manchin, however, made it clear that, with inflation already at a 40-year high, he wouldn’t support legislation that added to the deficit or further swelled prices.

Like most Americans (including Larry Summers), Manchin refused to be fooled. He announced that he won’t support the bill – effectively killing it in its present shape. Rarely deterred by reality, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer then announced that the Senate would move forward with a vote on the bill nonetheless.

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“Scientism’s rituals need to be imposed by the government by means of stiff penalties..”

The Rise and Fall of Scientism. Do we Need a new Religion? (Ugo Bardi)

Unfortunately for the promoters of Scientism, there are enormous problems with their idea. One is that it can be defined as a “granfalloon,” to use Kurt Vonnegut’s term for “a proud and meaningless collection of human beings.” Even though many people see the new liturgy as a service for others, Scientism’s rituals need to be imposed by the government by means of stiff penalties. It is the same as when the Roman Government imposed sacrifices to the Emperor on pain of death. We haven’t arrived at that for the disbelievers of Scientism, so far, but we are clearly sliding in that direction.

A religion that needs to be imposed by force is doomed from the beginning. It means that it cannot create a stable kind of horizontal empathy” natural for human beings. You cannot create it on the basis of the idea that humans are filthy, germ-carrying bags, that need to be kept at a distance from each other or locked in cages. And masked people cannot really speak to each other, they are only expected to receive orders from above. It is a brutish form of “vertical” empathy, based on the powerful giving orders to the powerless. As it happened at the time of the Roman persecutions of Christians, people may lapse into formally surrendering in order to survive, but they remain ready to toss away the veneer of political correctness on the first occasion. Scientism may be already starting an irreversible decline, pushed down by its own supporters who bombard people from TV screens with sentences such as “trust science.”

Another enormous problem with Scientism is that it requires years of training for the adepts (“researchers”) to make them able to perform the complex liturgy required (“scientific experiments”), also because they need expensive liturgic equipment (“instrumentation”). The whole contraption is simply impossible to keep together in a society that’s rapidly sliding down to economic collapse. The Catholic Church lasted for nearly two thousand years, Communism (that the Italian Catholic writer Lorenzo Milani termed “a page torn out of the Christian books”) lasted less than a century. Will scientism last more than a decade? And if not, what will come afterward?

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“Mask waste from the year 2020 alone now makes up 7% of the Great Pacific garbage patch..”

Forget The Straws, Over A Billion Masks -Per Month- Now Pollute The Ocean (Evie)

Urban areas dominated by progressive leadership have dedicated green initiatives to banning single-use plastic like straws or utensils, and many bureaucracies now treat climate change as another public health crisis. Simultaneously, they mandate wearing masks in public places for the supposed safety of the general public, and are silent on the irrevocable damage masks are doing to our environment. Forget the straws – over 1.5 billion masks now pollute the ocean, but even the most publicly vocal on climate change are notably silent. Banning single-use plastic, like straws and utensils in restaurants and other businesses, is now the virtue signal du jour as far as communicating how climate-conscious a city is. But many – namely the public and the business owners who will be affected firsthand by these types of legislation – are understandably concerned about the realistic efficacy of such measures.

[..] Plastic straws and utensils aside, we’re now on the precipice of a genuine environmental crisis, one that was regrettably preventable. Even as lockdown proponents touted the benefits that stay-at-home measures had on traffic and air pollution, we were quickly learning that our “life-saving” disposable masks and other personal protective equipment were having the exact opposite effect. One report in Italy breaks down just how quickly this crisis took hold and became our newest environmental threat. During the country’s Phase II period, when lockdowns were beginning to lessen and public spaces were beginning to open back up, half a billion disposable gloves and one billion masks were needed – per month.

These statistics are frightening on their own when you begin to calculate how long masks and PPE have been needed, but they’re even more terrifying on a global scale. Marine and environmental researchers have estimated that in 2020, 1.56 billion face masks were released into oceans. By August 2021, 8.4 million tons of plastic trash were generated by 193 countries, including – but not limited to – Covid test kits, face masks, gloves, and plastic face shields, as well as the waste generated by unprecedented numbers of online shopping and e-commerce sites. Additionally, disposable masks are estimated to take 450 years to biodegrade. Mask waste from the year 2020 alone now makes up 7% of the Great Pacific garbage patch, an 80,000 ton mass of waste that resides in the Pacific Ocean.

[..] In July 2020, we learned that 85% of individuals who contracted Covid wore masks “always” or “often,” as reported by the CDC. A “systematic review” of 1,453 patients found “no difference in infection rates” between masked and unmasked patients. A study of healthcare workers in Japan conducted nearly 13 years ago discovered that “face mask use in healthcare workers has not been demonstrated to provide benefit in terms of [common] cold symptoms.” We’ve also recently learned that cloth masks are “useless” against the Omicron variant, even though two months ago, we were told that “a well-fitting cloth mask could be better than or equivalent to a surgical mask that’s poorly fitting.”

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“We cannot tolerate NATO expansion. We will not just prevent it. We will put a stop to it..”

There Will Be No More NATO Expansion – Russia (RT)

At upcoming talks with Washington, Moscow will not only obstruct but will put a complete stop to any eastwards expansion of the US-led NATO military bloc, the Russian Deputy Foreign Minister said on Tuesday. Speaking to news agency Interfax, Sergey Ryabkov said his country would go into the negotiations with a clear agenda and reject any attempts by US diplomats to dilute the proposed agreement between the two parties. “Our leadership has repeatedly said we can no longer tolerate the situation that is developing in the immediate vicinity of our borders. We cannot tolerate NATO expansion. We will not just prevent it. We will put a stop to it,” Ryabkov said.


The talks, due to be held on January 10, will focus on two publicly released draft treaties that include a list of promises Russia wants to obtain from the US and NATO. As well as pledges that the bloc won’t expand eastwards, the proposals also include the end of Western cooperation with post-Soviet countries, the removal of US nuclear weapons from Europe, and the withdrawal of NATO troops and missiles away from the Russian border. However, according to Ryabkov, the US wants to ignore Russia’s firm demands, instead proposing a less structured form of negotiations. “We should not come up with some kind of dimensionless agenda when it is in our interest to include topics that have long been sorted out through other channels. We have to focus exclusively on the two draft documents that we have presented,” he said.

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

 

Dec 142021
 


Paul Klee Carnival in the snow 1923

 

Flood-tide of Darkness (Jim Kunstler)
The “If It Does Not Work Do It More” Stage Of The Pandemic (Gato Malo)
Rand Paul: Vaccine Zealots “Won’t Be Happy Until They Get Your Newborn” (SN)
Virginia Hospital In Contempt Of Court For Denying Patient Ivermectin (DW)
Doctor Fired for Trying to Treat COVID Patients With Ivermectin (ET)
Why You Can’t Get COMIRNATY (Steve Kirsch)
First UK Death Recorded With Omicron Variant (BBC)
Boris Johnson’s Biggest Blunder (Chudov)
Queensland to Allow Grocery Stores to Ban the Unvaccinated (SN)
What Leads To More Spike Protein In The Body: Vaccine Or Virus? Part 2 (Joomi)
Reduced Neutralisation Of Omicron By Post-immunisation Serum (medRxiv)
Norway Bans Booze To Tackle Omicron (RT)
Federal Lawmakers Invest Big In Vaccines, Treatments, And Tests Producers (BI)
One In Three UK Small Firms Plan Major Staff Cuts (G.)
The Execution of Julian Assange (Chris Hedges)

 

 

They are literally telling us that we must get vaccinated because omicron is vaccine resistant.

 

 

 

 

Rogan/McCullough

 

 

Deepfake?

 

 

ICU patients in Holland.

 

 

Pilot deaths
https://twitter.com/WeHaveNoRights2/status/1468418285360271361

 

 

“For the moment everything is just froth and noise, and most everybody is in too much of a panic to make sense.”

Flood-tide of Darkness (Jim Kunstler)

The frenzy around the Christmas holiday conceals deeper currents running through advanced techno-industrial societies like froth on the surface of a raging river that surges with dangerous, hidden flotsam. We’re informed that the next James Bond might be a transsexual. But, you see, it’s not just that Hollywood is running out of gimmicks for its floundering “franchises,” but rather that there has been no place for men these days in the struggle to prevent civilization from drowning. The lifeguards are cancelled. All that’s left in the commotion of the flood is the shrieking of women. Thus, the hysteria over Trumpism. America actually needed a rescue operation and, defective as he was personality-wise, Mr. Trump rose above the surge and called for exactly that, and was pulled under for the effrontery of saying so.

It was a bad time to be a man standing out among men. The torrent is in charge now, not the people bobbing and flailing in it. Ride it out, if you can. By and by, the flood will subside and the survivors will be cast back on shore. The shrieking women will also subside, because the men will tell them to cut it out. And then the men and women will go forth reconstructing the human project here in North America. The landscape will not look the same and we will not act like we did before, when we were just carried along helplessly in the flood. There will be fewer of us. All the giant things, too large to save themselves — the corporations, the institutions, the agencies — will be swept away, but we’ll be back on dry land, with a lot debris to sort through, some of it useful for rebuilding a way of life. We’ll be too busy for any more shrieking and hand-wringing, and crybabies will get whapped upside their heads.

That is what you can expect in the decade ahead. For the moment everything is just froth and noise, and most everybody is in too much of a panic to make sense. Humans don’t do well without sense-making. What makes sense is having a roof over your head, something to eat, some purposeful activities to provide those things, some other people to exist with and care for, and some ceremonies to honor our efforts and declare our gratitude for being here in the first place.

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The explanations for why boosters “work” are hilarious. But yes, they will “work” for two weeks or so, so it’s not strictly a lie.

The “If It Does Not Work Do It More” Stage Of The Pandemic (Gato Malo)

We’re clearly going through a round of “the vaccines don’t work so you need to take more vaccines” or even more hilarious and wrongheaded “omicron is vaccine evading, so you need boosters.” This clearly makes no sense and the argument is rapidly falling apart as what sure looks like OAS is causing omi to pop up disproportionately IN the boosted. This is going to be WAY too big to hide. It’s already become utterly apparent that the vaccines do not stop spread. It’s going to take little time for this to spread to boosters. Alas, if you think this is going to discredit the pushers of public health pablum and pseudoscience (or their acolytes), you may want to think again. That’s not how it’s going to go. Doomsday cults become more, not less devout when the world fails to end on tuesday. and they have cards left to play.


The next round is going to be the return of lockdowns. It’s clear they want it, perhaps in general, perhaps only for the unvaxxed. It’s already heating up with the “we need lockdowns to prevent more lockdowns” absurdity and the “we must lock down those not vaxxed with a vaccine that does not stop spread so that they will not spread covid” nonsense. To swallow this after 2 years requires credulity to beggar belief, but the sad fact is: many still buy it. [..] the sunk cost fallacy has set in and all the past sacrifice and belief and proselytization and identity commitment to the cause weighs heavier and heavier. they NEED it to have meant something. It’s a classic behavioral trap. economists study it. they build business models (like gym membership structures) around it.

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“We have 57 for Christmas, no vaccine passport. The only requirement is that you have read and understand the Constitution..”

Rand Paul: Vaccine Zealots “Won’t Be Happy Until They Get Your Newborn” (SN)

Appearing on Hannity Friday night, Senator Rand Paul noted that COVID vaccine pushers are becoming more militant in their demands and efforts to force as many people as possible to take jabs. “You know, these people won’t be happy until they get your newborn,” Paul urged. “I mean, they really want to get your newborn inoculated before they leave the hospital. They’re going to restrict certain things. You know, they’re not going to dispense schooling. But they’re also going to try to get them before they leave the hospital. I think it’s outrageous and ignores the science,” the Senator emphasised. Paul continued, “It’s all based on this misreading of the science that says we haven’t been vaccinating enough and that we’re under-vaccinated.”


“The truth from the CDC is quite the opposite. Over age 75, 97% of people have voluntarily chosen to be vaccinated. Between ages 64 and 75, 99% of people have been vaccinated,” Paul further explained. “So we are voluntarily accepting this,” Paul continued, adding “Most people at high risk have been vaccinated. This is a disease of the elderly, not of children.” Commenting on Anthony Fauci spearheading the medical tyranny, Paul noted “he’s not obeying science. He’s sort of granting his impulse to authoritarianism. His default position is always, how can I control people? How can I regulate people?” The Senator added that Fauci would be apoplectic with the Paul family Christmas plans. “I can tell you — he’s not going to be too happy with the Paul family Christmas. We have 57 for Christmas, no vaccine passport. The only requirement is that you have read and understand the Constitution,” the Senator quipped.

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“..when Chris and a registered nurse went to administer the drug on the night of December 7 on the orders of Maturi, “hospital administration barred [him and the nurse] from entering the ICU with the Ivermectin.”

Virginia Hospital In Contempt Of Court For Denying Patient Ivermectin (DW)

Chris Davies and his father Donald have been fighting for their mother and wife Kathy Davies’ right to try the drug Ivermectin as a COVID-19 treatment at Fauquier Health hospital in Warrenton, Virginia, for the past few weeks. But the hospital — where Chris happens to work as a radiologic technologist — had put his mother through a series of legal hoops seemingly designed to block the treatment from being given to her. On Monday, December 13, Virginia’s 20th Judicial Court found Fauquier Health in contempt of court after refusing to comply with previous orders and ruled that by 9:00 p.m. Eastern time tonight, Kathy Davies must be given the dose of Ivermectin as prescribed by a doctor retained by the Davies family. Additionally — if the hospital did not comply — the state had the right to fine the hospital $10,000 per day.

That order would have been applied retroactively from December 9 onwards. The court also ordered that the Davies family be given police escort if necessary to administer the drug to their mother. But, the court also said that the hospital had an opportunity to purge the contempt charge by complying with the order. The hospital is reportedly now opting to comply with that order after a week of arguing why they could not allow the drug to be given to Kathy Davies as the family requested. The story offers hope for legal respite for many families who have found themselves in similar situations while trying to battle a medical establishment arguably opposed to any treatment not supported by the FDA to fight COVID-19.

The Davies’ saga started in October when Chris Davies’ mother was admitted to the hospital with COVID-19. She was placed on a ventilator in the intensive care unit (ICU) on November 3. Donald was to serve as her medical proxy — and after consultation with Chris and his siblings — wanted doctors to give Kathy Ivermectin in hopes of finding success against COVID-19. The doctors and hospital refused that request and were adamant they would not administer the drug despite the family’s wishes. On December 3, the Davies family notified Fauquier Health that they were hiring attorneys on Kathy’s behalf and filing a lawsuit.

“Pray we get a compassionate judge and that litigation goes smoothly,” Chris emailed friends supporting his mother on December 5. “We just want the right to try Ivermectin!” “Let us pray we can get it to her and it will help her out of this long-suffering!!” he added. “Thanks all and God Bless!!!” On Monday, December 6, according to a court document obtained by The Daily Wire, the court had ruled that Kathy had the right under Virginia law to try Ivermectin or any other order and prescription provided by Dr. Martha Maturi — the doctor retained by the Davies family who had prescribed Ivermectin — regardless of her employment with the hospital. But, when Chris and a registered nurse went to administer the drug on the night of December 7 on the orders of Maturi, “hospital administration barred [him and the nurse] from entering the ICU with the Ivermectin.”

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How and when did we forget that treatment procedure, including medicines, is a doctor’s responsibility?

Doctor Fired for Trying to Treat COVID Patients With Ivermectin (ET)

A Mississippi doctor said he was fired for attempting to treat COVID-19 patients with ivermectin, which is approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to treat parasites, although the hospital in question said he was not an employee but instead was an independent contractor. Dr. John Witcher, an emergency room physician at the Baptist Memorial Hospital in Yazoo City, said was “told not to come back” after taking several COVID-19 patients off Remdesivir, which is approved by the FDA to treat the virus, and allowed them to use ivermectin. “I was very surprised that I was basically told to not come back at the end of the day,” Witcher said on the Stew Peters podcast. “These patients were under my direct care, and so I felt like taking them off Remdesivir and putting them on ivermectin was the right thing to do at the time.”

Baptist Memorial told news outlets that Witcher “no longer practices medicine as an independent physician” at the Yazoo City facility, adding that he was an independent contractor, not an employee at the facility. The hospital system said that it follows “the standards of care recommended by the scientific community and our medical team in the prevention and treatment of COVID-19” such as vaccines and monoclonal antibody treatments. But Witcher said that he was working at the Baptist Memorial emergency room when three new COVID-19 patients arrived on Dec. 10. They were prescribed Remdesivir, but Witcher said that he has concerns about the drug.

“I was there at the hospital for three days straight in the ER and so I felt like this would be a good opportunity to try ivermectin on these inpatient patients that I had been following very closely and just see how well it worked,” Witcher remarked. The hospital couldn’t prescribe ivermectin, he said, adding that he had to call a local pharmacy. The pharmacy, Witcher said, then delivered the drug to the hospital and switched their prescriptions from Remdesivir to ivermectin. However, according to Witcher, Baptist Memorial severed ties with him before he could administer the ivermectin. “There’s a first time for everything, but I wouldn’t say it was experimental,” he said. “There’s been plenty of evidence with patients right here in Mississippi that have taken ivermectin, and they’ve done well.”

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“Do you know the difference between the Pfizer EUA vaccine and the approved vaccine COMIRNATY?”

Why You Can’t Get COMIRNATY (Steve Kirsch)

Do you know the difference between the Pfizer EUA vaccine and the approved vaccine COMIRNATY? Do you know why COMIRNATY isn’t available anywhere? Do you know if it is even approved? Are vaccine mandates legal? Are employers that mandate vaccination, then fire you if you refuse, liable for damages? If you know the answers to all of these questions, then there is no need to watch my latest interview of Alix Mayer, President of Children’s Health Defense, California. But if you don’t, watch it now. You’ll be very pleasantly surprised.

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You just knew they’d come up with a first. No details, because privacy etc. How old was the person, co-morbidities, we have no idea.

And within minutes outlets with the exact same information produced headlines that said the death was FROM Omicron.

First UK Death Recorded With Omicron Variant (BBC)

At least one person in the UK has died with the Omicron coronavirus variant, the prime minister has said. Boris Johnson said the new variant was also resulting in hospital admissions and the “best thing” people could do was get their booster jab. Visiting a vaccination clinic in London, he said people should set aside the idea Omicron was a milder variant. On Sunday, the PM set a new target for all adults in England to be offered a booster by the end of the month. Speaking during a visit near Paddington, west London, Mr Johnson said: “Sadly yes, Omicron is producing hospitalisations and sadly at least one patient has been confirmed to have died with Omicron.


“So I think the idea that this is somehow a milder version of the virus, I think that’s something we need to set on one side and just recognise the sheer pace at which it accelerates through the population.” On Monday, Health Secretary Sajid Javid said 10 people were in hospital in England with the Omicron variant. The booster rollout has been accelerated in response to Omicron, after early analysis suggested two doses of a Covid vaccine were not enough to stop people catching the variant. However, a third booster dose gives around 70% to 75% protection against symptomatic infection with Omicron, analysis by the UK Health Security Agency found.

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“If it does turn out that Omicron triggers ADE in Wuhan spike-vaccinated, it would be extremely dangerous for the course of the Omicron wave in the West.”

Boris Johnson’s Biggest Blunder (Chudov)

Antibody Dependent Enhancement is a frequently encountered problem when developing vaccines. It describes a situation when antibodies developed for a particular antigen (for example, for Wuhan virus spike), when encountering a different virus (for example, Omicron), do not neutralize the virus but instead aid in its infection. ADE happened when scientists were developing vaccines for RSV and measles, for example. On a few occasions ADE has resulted from vaccination: • Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) — RSV is a virus that commonly causes pneumonia in children. A vaccine was made by growing RSV, purifying it, and inactivating it with the chemical formaldehyde. In clinical trials, children who were given the vaccine were more likely to develop or die from pneumonia after infection with RSV. As a result of this finding, the vaccine trials stopped, and the vaccine was never submitted for approval or released to the public.

• Measles — An early version of measles vaccine was made by inactivating measles virus using formaldehyde. Children who were vaccinated and later became infected with measles in the community developed high fevers, unusual rash, and an atypical form of pneumonia. Upon seeing these results, the vaccine was withdrawn from use, and those who received this version of the vaccine were recommended to be vaccinated again using the live, weakened measles vaccine, which does not cause ADE and is still in use today.

The three epidemiological signs of ADE are: 1/ Preferential infection of the vaccinees, compared to the unvaccinated. We definitely see this with Omicron. I discussed this in my previous article. 2/ Worse outcomes in the vaccinated, compared to the unvaccinated. We do NOT yet have any data about that. We might not get this data for a while as it should lead to instant firing of all vaccinators, which they obviously do not want. So if this occurs, this information will be suppressed for a while. 3/ Specific symptoms in the vaccinated, that the unvaccinated do not display. Information about this might come out sooner than the second item. Most likely, my prediction is that it would be cardiac events from Omicron that occur mostly in the vaxxed.

If it does turn out that Omicron triggers ADE in Wuhan spike-vaccinated, it would be extremely dangerous for the course of the Omicron wave in the West. The unvaccinated persons who had Covid previously, have a number of other antibodies (N-antibodies and others) that would likely assist in neutralizing Omicron. It explains why in the barely vaccinated South Africa, where most people had Covid, the outcomes appear to be milder so far than in Denmark. This may, unfortunately, NOT be the case for highly vaccinated and Covid-naive Denmark, UK or USA. What about vaccinated persons who had a breakthrough infection? Plenty of people who were double jabbed, unfortunately, had breakthrough infections, mostly with Delta, post-vaccination.

It seems that they do NOT develop lasting and multi-epitope immunity (different kinds of antibodies) due to the Original Antigenic Sin. Thus, all that these Covid-surviving vaccinees have, is the useless Wuhan antibodies from their vaccines and more from Covid infection, but not a multitude of neutralizing antibodies such as N-antibodies. Therefore, these people are just as open to ADE from Omicron as the Covid-naive vaccinees.

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The Christmas spirit in all its glory.

Queensland to Allow Grocery Stores to Ban the Unvaccinated (SN)

Authorities in Queensland, Australia have told grocery stores that they are free to impose vaccine passport schemes that would ban the unjabbed from being able to buy food. Yes, really. With Queensland set to re-open its borders as a state lockdown comes to an end, Health Minister Yvette D’Ath revealed that new directives will take effect. “In the coming days, the Government will issue the guidelines required for business and industry as our border reopens,” she said in a statement. Citizens will be required to show vaccine passports to enter innumerable venues after December 17, including pubs, restaurants, museums, and cinemas.

However, venues deemed to provide “essential services” like supermarkets, grocery stores, post offices and pharmacies are supposed to be exempt from that requirement. That didn’t stop authorities from inviting all businesses to ban the unvaccinated. “There will also be a range of other businesses who may make the choice just to only have their vaccinated staff and patrons using their business,” said Small Business Minister Di Farmer. “Any business is able to make that decision, and a lot of them are actually thinking about that very seriously,” she said.

“[When Queensland opens up] you will need to be protected and businesses all over Queensland will be making that decision. If a person decides not to be vaccinated, then those are the things that they will take into consideration,” Farmer added. Australia has imposed the most draconian system of COVID-19 population control out of any developed country in the world and can no longer technically be considered a free nation given that it literally imprisons people in COVID gulags and doesn’t allow them to leave without permission. While governments have yet to take the final leap into the fully vaxxed dictatorship by outright banning the unvaccinated from being able to feed themselves, they’re giving businesses free reign to impose similar measures.

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Good long read.

What Leads To More Spike Protein In The Body: Vaccine Or Virus? Part 2 (Joomi)

The SARS-CoV-2 virus has a protein on its surface called the spike protein. The COVID vaccines available in the U.S. work by getting the body to produce this protein, with some modifications. In a previous article, I went over multiple pieces of evidence showing that the spike protein alone, either from the virus or vaccine, was harmful. In Part 1 of this article, I responded to an article by Uri Manor and Jeremy Howard. Their article claimed that: (1) The amount of spike protein from the COVID vaccines was harmless or physiologically negligible. (2) The amount of spike protein from the COVID vaccines was much lower than what one would get under viral infection from SARS-CoV-2. They used these claims to argued that if you were trying to gain immunity, it was safer to get it via the vaccines than with infection by the virus.


In Part 1, I argued that the study that Manor and Howard used to make claim (1) did not actually measure all physiologically relevant spike protein. I also argued that we already had evidence that the levels of spike protein from the vaccines were physiologically relevant. In this article, I’ll examine claim (2).

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The competing interests are something to behold.

Reduced Neutralisation Of Omicron By Post-immunisation Serum (medRxiv)

In this report, we present live neutralisation titres against SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant, compared with neutralisation against Victoria, Beta and Delta variants. Sera from day-28 post second-dose were obtained from participants in the Com-COV2 study who had received a two-dose COVID-19 vaccination schedule with either AstraZeneca (AZD1222) or Pfizer (BNT162b2) vaccines. There was a substantial fall in neutralisation titres in recipients of both AZD1222 and BNT162b2 primary courses, with evidence of some recipients failing to neutralise at all. This will likely lead to increased breakthrough infections in previously infected or double vaccinated individuals, which could drive a further wave of infection, although there is currently no evidence of increased potential to cause severe disease, hospitalisation or death.


Competing Interest Statement G.R.S sits on the GSK Vaccines Scientific Advisory Board and is a founder member of RQ Biotechnology. MDS acts on behalf of the University of Oxford as an investigator on studies funded or sponsored by vaccine manufacturers, including AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer, Novavax, Janssen, Medimmune, and MCM Vaccines. He receives no personal financial payment for this work. AJP reports grants from UKRI, CEPI and NIHR, during the conduct of the study. AJP is Chair of DHSCs Joint Committee on Vaccination & Immunisation (JCVI), but does not participate in discussions on COVID19 vaccines, and is a member of the WHOs SAGE. The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of DHSC, JCVI, NIHR or WHO. The University of Oxford has entered into a partnership with AstraZeneca for the development of a coronavirus vaccine. JSN-V-T is seconded to the Department of Health and Social Care, England (DHSC). The views expressed in this manuscript are those of its authors and not necessarily those of DHSC.

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Banning booze always works….

Norway Bans Booze To Tackle Omicron (RT)

Norway has banned the sale of alcohol in bars and restaurants in an effort to curb the spread of the Covid-19 Omicron variant, which continues to push infections in the country on a sharp rise. New Covid-19 rules will prohibit the sale of alcohol at bars, restaurants, and other service-based venues from Wednesday, while Norwegians are also being urged to work from home if possible. “Infection rates in Norway are increasing sharply, and we have now gained new knowledge about the Omicron variant and how fast it can spread. We are in a more serious situation,” declared Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store, who claimed that the “stricter measures” were necessary “to maintain control of the pandemic.” Store said there was “no doubt the new variant changes the rules,” before acknowledging that the new rules “will feel like a lockdown” for many, “if not of society then of their lives and of their livelihoods.”


Norway’s previous rules – put in place just days before the latest measures, which were announced on Monday – allowed alcohol to be served at bars and restaurants until midnight, though only at tables and only if the venue had enough socially distanced seating to accommodate customers. Covid-19 cases in Norway have experienced a sharp rise since October – recording its highest daily numbers since the start of the pandemic. Last week, Norway recorded 21,457 confirmed cases and 33 deaths. Other countries have had a different response to the rise of the Omicron variant. On Friday, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern hinted that relaxed Covid-19 restrictions could allow for orgies of up to 25 people.

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A vested interest in keeping the pandemic going.

Federal Lawmakers Invest Big In Vaccines, Treatments, And Tests Producers (BI)

Dozens of Republican and Democratic lawmakers on Capitol Hill have invested in companies that have a direct stake in the nation’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to an Insider analysis of federal financial records. In 2020, at least 13 senators and 35 US representatives held shares of Johnson & Johnson, the medical behemoth that produced the single-shot COVID-19 vaccine that more than 15 million Americans have received. At least 11 senators and 34 representatives also held shares in 2020 of another COVID-19 vaccine manufacturer, Pfizer. Two representatives or their spouses held shares of Moderna during the same year that the world went on lockdown in response to the pandemic. Lawmakers held these investments in COVID-19-minded companies as Congress was at the center of pandemic relief efforts.

In 2020 and 2021, members of Congress voted on six relief bills together worth nearly $6 trillion. Congress also authorized more than $10 billion to help drug companies develop and distribute vaccines and forced health insurers to cover the cost of getting the shot. Policymakers especially viewed the coronavirus vaccines developed by Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, and Moderna — which each spent substantial amounts of money lobbying the federal government in 2020 — as critical to helping countries around the planet overcome the grip of the pandemic. The tally of investments is part of the exhaustive Conflicted Congress project, in which Insider reviewed nearly 9,000 financial-disclosure reports for every sitting lawmaker and their top-ranking staffers.

[..] In early January 2020, a share of Moderna traded below $20. As the pandemic took hold, the stock’s value grew exponentially. Moderna peaked in September 2021 at more than $455 a share. After dropping steadily through the autumn, it began rising again in late November. By early December, a share of Moderna traded above $280.

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It will get worse.

One In Three UK Small Firms Plan Major Staff Cuts (G.)

A third of UK small businesses are planning to make staff redundant over the next few months, rising to more than four in 10 in London, according to a new survey. In a clear sign of the financial stress felt by many owner-run businesses as they head into a potentially difficult new year period, many also said they would be forced to raise prices, with Britain’s supply chain meltdown being cited as the main reason – adding further to inflationary pressures. The poll of 442 businesses found many were struggling with repaying the debts they racked up to get them through the pandemic as well as grappling with other challenges from supply chain disruption to shortages of key staff such as drivers and chefs, and high energy costs.

A separate study by the accountants EY, which reveals a clear divide between the winners and losers in the pandemic, found that thousands of firms, mostly major corporate entities, paid down existing debt far faster than predicted in 2021. It said UK businesses would repay £1.6bn over 2021 after borrowing £35bn in 2020, an amount driven by firms that have fared well over the past 20 months. Recently introduced rules relating to the new Omicron variant, which have dealt a blow to many city centre outlets reliant on commuters and made life harder for hospitality businesses such as nightclubs, coupled with the end of the furlough scheme in September, could turn the screw further on many small firms.

Accountancy firm Moore UK said its latest quarterly survey of owner-managed businesses found that 33% were planning to make redundancies over the next six months now that the safety net of furlough had been removed. Businesses in London were more likely than those in any other part of the UK to be planning redundancies, with 42% considering laying off staff. This is likely to reflect the effects of the pandemic on the finances of the hospitality sector – restaurants, pubs, hotels and so on – which makes up a significant part of the capital’s economy. Those UK small businesses planning to make redundancies were, on average, considering shedding 45% of their staff over the next six months.

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Assange’s biggest crime is not jounalism, it’s building an infrastructure that is impenetrable for the CIA with all its money and expertise.

The Execution of Julian Assange (Chris Hedges)

That Assange, who is in precarious physical and psychological health, and who suffered a stroke during court video proceedings on October 27, has been condemned to death should not come as a surprise. The 10 years he has been detained, seven in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London and nearly three in the high-security Belmarsh prison, were accompanied by a lack of sunlight and exercise, and unrelenting threats, pressure, anxiety and stress. “His eyes were out of sync, his right eyelid would not close, his memory was blurry,” his fiancée Stella Moris said of the stroke.

His steady deterioration has led to hallucinations and depression. He takes antidepressant medication and the antipsychotic quetiapine. He has been observed pacing his cell until he collapses, punching himself in the face and banging his head against the wall. He has spent weeks in the medical wing of Belmarsh. Prison authorities found “half of a razor blade” hidden under his socks. He has repeatedly called the suicide hotline run by the Samaritans because he has thought about killing himself “hundreds of times a day.” The executioners have not yet completed their grim work.

Toussaint L’Ouverture, who led the Haitian independence movement, the only successful slave revolt in human history, was physically destroyed in the same manner, locked by the French in an unheated and cramped prison cell and left to die of exhaustion, malnutrition, apoplexy, pneumonia and probably tuberculosis. Assange committed empire’s greatest sin. He exposed it as a criminal enterprise. He documented its lies, callous disregard for human life, rampant corruption and innumerable war crimes. Republican or Democrat. Conservative or Labour. Trump or Biden. It does not matter. The goons who oversee the empire sing from the same Satanic songbook. Empires always kill those who inflict deep and serious wounds.

Shipton
https://twitter.com/i/status/1470573956969250818

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Nail man

 

 

 

 

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

 

Oct 132021
 
 October 13, 2021  Posted by at 9:05 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  33 Responses »


M. C. Escher Bond of union 1956

 

The Coming Real Pandemic of the Vaccinated (S&F)
Airline Pilot Warns Biden’s Mandate Will Create ‘Massive Disruptions’ (WJ)
911 System In Jeopardy As First Responders Reject Jab (ZH)
The Great New Normal Purge (CJ Hopkins)
Senators Seek Federal Grand Jury For Covid-19 Statistical Manipulation (JTN)
Are the COVID Shots Working? (Mercola)
Australia Building Quarantine Camps For “Ongoing Operations” (SN)
Covid, Lockdown And The Retreat Of Scientific Debate (Kulldorff)
OSHA Submits Vaccine Rule To White House (CNN)
Brooklyn Nets Ban Kyrie Irving From Playing Until He Gets Covid-19 Vaccine (ZH)
Texas Businesses Stuck Between Federal And State Vaccine Rules (Y!)
NY Post Editorial Board Bashes Biden’s ‘Cabinet of Horrors’ (NM)
Wisconsin’s Election Probe Zeroes In On Democrat Machine Tactics (JTN)
Former DNI Ratcliffe Says He’s Given Durham 1,000 Intel Documents (JTN)
John Durham and the Amazing Disappearing DNC Hack (Parry)

 

 

Kory Merck

 

 

 

 

Sir Christopher Chope MP

 

 

Try some melatonin. Works vs Covid.

 

 

Israel

 

 

What we’ve been afraid of for quite some time now.

The Coming Real Pandemic of the Vaccinated (S&F)

Drs. Trozzi and Alexander explain ADE and other dangers of the ‘vaccines’, and warn of the coming wave of deaths among those who have received these experimental gene therapies. Dr. Mark Trozzi is an ER doctor with 25 years experience. He took a leave of absence early this year to fight Covid tyranny full time. His website is drtrozzi.com. Dr. Paul Alexander is a world-class clinical epidemiologist who was trained at McMaster University, Canada’s top university for epidemiological research. Dr. Alexander was fired from his position at the university for speaking the truth about the harms being caused by the Covid ‘vaccines’.


“78% of the deaths in the U.K. are among the ‘double-vaccinated.” Dr. Mark Trozzi. “If we vaccinate our children the deaths we’ve seen in adults so far we will now see in children.” Dr. Paul Alexander. Watch and share this very important interview. The next fear-mongering tactic coming down the pipe is a ‘wave of pediatric cases’, but in actual fact children are in no danger from Covid whatsoever. Sadly, many are likely to die as a result of the bioweapons being falsely represented as ‘vaccines’.

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Just in: Boeing will require its 125,000 workers in the United States to be vaccinated against COVID-19 by Dec. 8.

Airline Pilot Warns Biden’s Mandate Will Create ‘Massive Disruptions’ (WJ)

An airline pilot and activist for individual liberty told Fox News on Monday that situations such as mass flight cancelations will become more common if the Biden administration refuses to backdown from its hardline stance against coercing Americans to get vaccinated against COVID. Speaking on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Joshua Yoder, a commercial airline pilot and the co-founder of a group called U.S. Freedom Flyers, cautioned that events such as this past weekend’s Southwest Arlines flight cancellations could soon be unavoidable. The reason: Yoder said the people who do skilled jobs, such as flying planes and driving trucks, will stand against President Joe Biden and their own employers. “My motive for resisting [the COVID vaccine] is primarily religious for myself,” Yoder told Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

“Among my friends I saw a need. Many of us don’t want to take this. People were being coerced. I believe in freedom, and I’m here to support the freedom of my fellow employees and all people across this country.” “I’m not going to take a mandate. I’m not going to be forced to do something that I don’t believe in,” he added. “If you have flights reduced by 30 percent because 30 percent of pilots are fired because they won’t take the vaccine, this is going to affect how your goods get here from overseas, how they are distributed to the store,” he said when asked to describe the effect on the national transportation infrastructure. “The same thing is happening with the truckers; it’s happening in the shipping industry. Those Amazon boxes that typically show up in two days, you might be looking at three weeks,” he continued, making note of a reported shortage of truckers and dock workers as ports — such as the one at Long Beach in Los Angeles Country — experience a backlog of ships waiting to be unloaded.

[..] Yoder, when speaking of staffing shortages and logistics, asserted that more shortages of employees, such as the one which that hit Southwest, could come. He blamed Biden for the issues and challenged any notion that the federal government is in control of what American citizens and workers choose with regard to vaccines. “It’s squarely his [Biden’s] fault,” he said. “First of all, we have all the control, and the control comes from a simple word, and that’s ‘no,’” he said. “We just don’t need to comply. As far as I’m concerned, I will never promote a sick-out or a work action that is illegal. With U.S. Freedom Flyers, the organization I’m with, we will never promote such a thing. With that being said, we also cannot control the actions of individuals.”

“And I think that you will see massive disruptions in supply chain and in your travel if we just stand up and say no,” he said. “If these companies fire us and they fire 30% of the workforce, aircraft are going to stop moving, and it’s going to affect you. It’s going to affect your air travel, and it’s going to affect the economy.”

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What will the world look like by Christmas? Will anything function at all?

911 System In Jeopardy As First Responders Reject Jab (ZH)

The American Ambulance Association (AAA) warned House and Senate leaders the “nation’s EMS system is facing a crippling workforce shortage, a long-term problem that has been building for more than a decade. It threatens to undermine our emergency 9-1-1 infrastructure and deserves urgent attention by Congress.” “The magnitude has really blown up over the last few months,” AAA President Shawn Baird told NBC News. “When you take a system that was already fragile and stretched it because you didn’t have enough people entering the field, then you throw a public health emergency and all of the additional burdens that it put on our workforce, as well as the labor shortages across the entire economy, and it really has put us in a crisis mode,” Baird said.


What’s making the EMS labor shortage worse is President Biden’s vaccine mandates. First responders are quitting across the county because they don’t want to get the jab and have realized they can transfer to other higher-paying jobs. Waldoboro, Maine, town manager Julie Keizer told News Center Maine that “the vaccine mandate has contributed to the loss of first responders.” “I think part of the problem is everybody thought they (workers) would conform because nobody wants to lose their jobs,” Keizer added. “But when you look at the rate of pay for emergency workers, they can make more delivering packages than patients.”

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“The purge must be conducted openly, brutally, so that the masses understand that the rules of society have changed forever, that their former rights and freedoms are gone, that from now on any deviation from official ideology will be ruthlessly punished.”

The Great New Normal Purge (CJ Hopkins)

So, the Great New Normal Purge has begun … right on cue, right by the numbers. As we “paranoid conspiracy theorists” have been warning would happen for the past 18 months, people who refuse to convert to the new official ideology are now being segregated, stripped of their jobs, banned from attending schools, denied medical treatment, and otherwise persecuted. Relentless official propaganda demonizing “the Unvaccinated” is being pumped out by the corporate and state media, government leaders, health officials, and shrieking fanatics on social media. “The Unvaccinated” are the new official “Untermenschen,” an underclass of subhuman “others” the New Normal masses are being conditioned to hate. But it isn’t just a purge of “the Unvaccinated.” Anyone deviating from the official ideology is being systematically demonized and persecuted.

In Germany, Australia, and other New Normal countries, protesting the New Normal is officially outlawed. The New Normal Gestapo is going around to people’s homes to interrogate them about their anti-New Normal Facebook posts. Corporations are openly censoring content that contradicts the official narrative. New Normal goon squads roam the streets, checking people’s “vaccination” papers. And it’s not just governments and corporations carrying out the New Normal Purge. Friends are purging friends. Wives are purging husbands. Fathers are purging children. Children are purging parents. New Normals are purging old normal thoughts. Global “health authorities” are revising definitions to make them conform to New Normal “science.” And so on … a new official “reality” is being manufactured, right before our eyes. Anything and anyone that doesn’t conform to it is being purged, unpersoned, memory-holed, erased.

None of which should come as a surprise. Every nascent totalitarian system, at some stage of its takeover of society, launches a purge of political opponents, ideological dissidents, and other “anti-social deviants.” Such purges can be brief or open-ended, and they can take any number of outward forms, depending on the type of totalitarian system, but you cannot have totalitarianism without them. The essence of totalitarianism — regardless of which costumes and ideology it wears — is a desire to completely control society, every aspect of society, every individual behavior and thought. Every totalitarian system, whether an entire nation, a tiny cult, or any other form of social body, evolves toward this unachievable goal … the total ideological transformation and control of every single element of society (or whatever type of social body it comprises). This fanatical pursuit of total control, absolute ideological uniformity, and the elimination of all dissent, is what makes totalitarianism totalitarianism.

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“The CDC’s National Vital Statistics System told mortality data compilers to emphasize COVID-19 as the “cause” of death in a March 2020 alert, departing from a 2003 federal manual on recording infectious disease as a “contributing factor to death” in the presence of preexisting conditions, the letter said.”

Senators Seek Federal Grand Jury For Covid-19 Statistical Manipulation (JTN)

The CDC adopted a “double-standard exclusively for COVID-19 data collection” that inflated cases and deaths starting early in the pandemic, violating multiple federal laws and distorting mitigation policies, Oregon lawmakers told the feds’ top lawyer in the state. Advised by “a large team of world-renowned doctors, epidemiologists, virologists, and attorneys,” state Senators Kim Thatcher and Dennis Linthicum petitioned U.S. Attorney Scott Asphaug to approve a grand jury investigation into how the pandemic is being measured. “Public health policy must be based upon accurate and independently verifiable data to optimize outcomes and strengthen the public’s trust in the people leading them through this crisis,” the Republican lawmakers, whose state has imposed some of the harshest and longest COVID restrictions, wrote in a letter with several attached exhibits.

One is a synopsis of allegations, findings, relevant law and implicated agencies intended to “assist grand jury members in orienting themselves to the scope of alleged crimes committed.” Their letter is dated Aug. 16, but the materials were not released for a month to “protect those involved,” Stand for Health Freedom (SHF), the holistic medicine and legal nonprofit behind the petition effort, said in last month’s announcement. “I’m not sure there has ever been an allegation of government wrongdoing on this scale,” so the group wanted to assess “accuracy and safety” before going public, relationship manager Bailey Kuykendoll told Just the News. Asphaug’s office said Thursday it referred the petition to the Justice Department’s Office of Legislative Affairs. That office didn’t respond on whether or how it had answered the Oregon lawmakers’ request.

[..] The lawmakers’ petition also accuses the FDA of withholding “safe and effective evidence-based treatments” just as the Tuskegee study withheld penicillin from black men with syphilis. They name vitamin D and ivermectin, which have “extensive clinical histories of safety following the administration of billions of doses.” Doctors who prescribe these for COVID may face loss of license, fines and imprisonment, Thatcher and Linthicum said. [..] Thatcher said she was troubled that even as the infection’s high survivability rate became clear, arbitrary restrictions that worsened child abuse, suicide and mental health remained in place. “I began to really question whether the cure was worse than the disease,” said Thatcher, who is better known in Oregon for her legislative effort to compensate people wrongfully convicted.

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Well, they’re doing something alright.

Are the COVID Shots Working? (Mercola)

In a Twitter thread, Ben M. double-checked and recalculated the vaccine efficacy, taking into account all CLI admissions, not just those where the patient had been vaccinated at least 14 days prior. When adding those previously excluded patients back in, Ben M. came up with a vaccine effectiveness rate of 13%. He also discovered that if you look at how many people actually had a CLI (covid like illness) clinical diagnosis code among the 41,552 included patients, the rate of diagnosis between the unvaccinated, the partially vaccinated and the fully vaccinated was nearly identical: 73% for the unvaccinated, 71% for the partially vaccinated and 72% for the fully vaccinated.

Here’s where it gets interesting. When you look at the rate of CLI, and add in the rate of positive PCR tests, all of a sudden, differences between the groups become clear. Only 2% of the fully vaccinated had a positive PCR test, compared to 6% of the partially vaccinated and 18% of the unvaccinated. Ben M. speculates that vaccinated patients may be tested less routinely (12.5% less frequently to be exact), or unvaccinated patients are tested more routinely (11% more frequently than the vaccinated). But there may be another explanation. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention actually has two different sets of testing criteria, depending on the patient’s vaccination status.

Fully vaccinated individuals suspected of having contracted COVID-19 are to be tested using a CT of 28 or less, whereas unvaccinated patients are to be tested using a CT of 40. Anything over 35 CTs has been shown to produce 97% false positives, so this biased testing guidance virtually guarantees that vaccinated patients are more likely to test negative, while unvaccinated patients are more likely to get a false positive.

v$xxine effectiveness

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“Why anyone who had left Australia would come back again is unclear..”

Australia Building Quarantine Camps For “Ongoing Operations” (SN)

Despite some states tentatively beginning to lift lockdown restrictions, Australian authorities are building quarantine camps that won’t be completed until next year in order to prepare for “ongoing operations” and to house those “who have not had access to vaccination.” According to ABC Australia, one such 1,000-bed quarantine facility at Wellcamp Airport outside Toowoomba will be fully completed by the end of March 2022. “At this stage, the cabins will be used by domestic travellers returning from COVID hotspots,” states the report. However, it also makes clear that the camp will be used for “ongoing operations” and will be a source of employment for the local area.

The camps is split into different zones and accommodates singles, doubles, and family rooms while being patrolled by police and security guards 24/7. Citing new strains of COVID and people “who have not had access to vaccination,” Queensland Deputy Premier Steven Miles told the media outlet, “We anticipate there to be a continuing need for quarantine facilities.” The government is leasing the land on which the camp is being built from the Wagner Corporation for 12 months with an option for a further 12 months after that. Another 1,000-bed quarantine facility is also being built on a 30-hectare Army barracks site in the industrial area of Pinkenba, near Brisbane Airport.

“Why anyone who had left Australia would come back again is unclear,” writes Dave Blount. “It is possibly the most repressive country in the world regarding Covid tyranny.” As we previously highlighted, state authorities in America are also constructing new “quarantine facilities” for Americans who are “unable to quarantine at home.” As we reported last year, Authorities in Quebec City, Canada announced they will isolate “uncooperative” citizens in a coronavirus facility, the location of which remains a secret. New Zealand also announced plans to place COVID infectees and their family members in “quarantine facilities.” Back in January, German authorities also announced they would hold COVID dissidents who repeatedly fail to properly follow the rules in what was described as a ‘detention camp’ located in Dresden.

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“The language, here, is non-scientific: herd immunity is not a creed. It’s how pandemics end.”

Covid, Lockdown And The Retreat Of Scientific Debate (Kulldorff)

The BMJ article is full of errors that ought to have never found their way into any publication. Here are some examples:

1/ My colleagues and I are described as ‘critics of public health measures to curb Covid-19’. On the contrary, throughout the pandemic we have strongly advocated better public health measures to curb Covid-19 – specifically protection of high-risk older people, with many ‘clearly defined’ proposals. The failure to implement such measures, in our view, has led to many unnecessary Covid deaths.

2/We are described as ‘proponents of herd immunity’ which is akin to accusing someone of being in favour of gravity. Both are scientifically established phenomena. Every Covid strategy leads to herd immunity. The key is to minimise morbidity and mortality. The language, here, is non-scientific: herd immunity is not a creed. It’s how pandemics end.

3/ It says we have ‘expressed opposition to mass vaccination’. Dr. Gupta and I have spent decades on vaccine research and we are all strong advocates for Covid and other vaccines. They are among the greatest inventions in history. To falsely credit the anti-vaccine movement with support from professors at Harvard, Oxford and Stanford is damaging for vaccine confidence. This is unworthy of a medical journal.

4/ The GBD is referred to as a ‘sophisticated science denialism’. Note here how something that challenges an orthodoxy is described as anti-science – a label that presumably could have been applied to any scientific innovator who ever questioned a failed orthodoxy. Collateral public health damage from Covid restrictions are real and enormous on cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, backsliding childhood vaccinations, starvation and mental health, just to name a few. It is not the GBD, but those who downplay lockdown harms who should be equated with those who question the harms of tobacco or climate change.

5/ The GBD was not ‘sponsored by the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) – and I’m pleased to see that the BMJ has at least retracted this claim. We were there for media interviews, with no sponsorship. How did such a blunder end up in print in the first place? The AIER staff did not even know about the Declaration until the day before it was signed, and the AIER president and board did not know about it until after publication. If we had written the Declaration at say, Starbucks, would the BMJ have claimed that it was sponsored by the coffee shop?

6/ The BMJ article mentions ‘AIER contributor Scott Atlas’, but Dr. Atlas has never been affiliated with nor written for AIER. Neither have we – unless the BMJ also views us as affiliated with hundreds of universities and organisations that we have visited during our careers or that have reprinted some of our articles. Dr. Atlas was not even aware that AIER had reprinted one of his articles until the BMJ linked to it. Several AIER employees have gracefully supported the GBD, just like countless other people around the world, but we have never received any money from the AIER. This basic error again exposes how normal checks did not appear to have been applied by the BMJ.

7/The BMJ article ends by saying that my colleagues and I are peddling a ‘well-funded sophisticated science denialist campaign based on ideological and corporate interests’. Nobody has paid us money for our work on the GBD, or for advocating focused protection. None of us would have undertaken this project for professional gain: it is far easier to stay silent than put your head above the parapet. As a vaccine developer, Dr. Gupta has connections with a pharmaceutical start-up, but Dr. Bhattacharya and I are among the few drug/vaccine scientists who purposely avoid pharmaceutical company funding to be free from conflicts of interests.

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Weekly testing is still valid. Businesses that go beyond that do that on their own accord.

OSHA Submits Vaccine Rule To White House (CNN)

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which falls under the Labor Department, has submitted the text of a new vaccine rule for large employers to the Office of Management and Budget, bringing the emergency standard announced by President Joe Biden last month one step closer to taking effect. “The Occupational Safety and Health Administration has been working expeditiously to develop an emergency temporary standard that covers employers with 100 or more employees to ensure their workers are fully vaccinated or undergo weekly testing to protect employees from the spread of coronavirus in the workplace,” a Labor Department spokesman said Tuesday.

“On Tuesday, October 12, as part of the regulatory review process, the agency submitted the initial text of the emergency temporary standard to the Office of Management and Budget.” Once OMB concludes its review of the regulation, the emergency temporary standard will be published in the Federal Register, when it will go into effect. Last month, Biden announced the Labor Department would draft an emergency rule compelling private companies with 100 or more employees to require vaccinations or weekly testing. “While America is in much better shape than it was seven months ago when I took office, I need to tell you a second fact: We’re in a tough stretch and it could last for awhile,” the President said in a White House speech at the time.

The new emergency temporary standard will require large employers to give their workers paid time off to get vaccinated. If businesses don’t comply, the government will “take enforcement actions,” which could include “substantial fines” of up to nearly $14,000 per violation, according to officials. Officials have said the standard was a “minimum” and that some companies may choose to go further, including by mandating the vaccine instead of offering a testing alternative. “Each employer will decide exactly what they want to do, but what we’re saying through the Department of Labor rule making process is a minimum of testing once a week or full vaccination,” a senior administration official previously told CNN.

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Make that: Weekly testing is still valid, but not for Kyrie.

Brooklyn Nets Ban Kyrie Irving From Playing Until He Gets Covid-19 Vaccine (ZH)

The Brooklyn Nets have banned 29-year-old Kyrie Irving from both games and practice until he gets the Covid-19 vaccine, just one week before the team kicks off their regular season against the Bucks. The star point and shooting guard will even be barred from playing during away games – the vast majority which will be held in locations where there is no local vaccine mandate. The Nets said they won’t allow Irving to be deemed “part-time” in terms of his availability for games. The move comes after Irving missed Monday’s preseason loss to the 76ers (115-104) over his refusal to get the jab. “Given the evolving nature of the situation and after thorough deliberation, we have decided Kyrie Irving will not play or practice with the team until he is eligible to be a full participant,” said the team in a statement.


“Kyrie has made a personal choice, and we respect his individual right to choose. Currently, the choice restricts his ability to be a full-time member of the team, and we will not permit any member of our team to participate with part-time availability.” The mostly word-salad statement continues: “It is imperative that we continue to build chemistry as a team and remain true to our long-established values of togetherness and sacrifice. Our championship goals for the season have not changed, and to achieve these goals each member of our organization must pull in the same direction. We are excited for the start of the season and look forward to a successful campaign that will make the borough of Brooklyn proud.” Irving earns more than $400,000 per game – and forfeited some $817,000 in salary in January after missing two games to take part in a league-ordered quarantine after attending a birthday party in a club. He earned around $35 million last season, and was slated to earn $36.6 million this year – the last year of his contract.

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“A Federal Judge in TX has temporarily put on hold United Airlines’ policy that places employees on unpaid leave for claiming a religious exemption to the COVID-19 vaccine.”

Texas Businesses Stuck Between Federal And State Vaccine Rules (Y!)

American Airlines and Southwest Airlines said Tuesday they will continue requiring employees to be vaccinated against Covid-19, deferring to federal regulations as Texas and the White House square off over vaccine mandates. The clash comes as the Republican governor of Texas, Gregg Abbott, signed an order Monday banning all vaccine mandates in his state, including those coming from private companies. But that state rule is in direct contradiction with a regulation announced by President Joe Biden last month, which would require all companies with more than 100 employees to ensure their workers are vaccinated against the coronavirus.

White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki said Tuesday the new Texas law does not change the federal government’s vaccine mandate plans, which could cover some 100 million US workers. “We know that federal law overrides state law,” Psaki said. But the Biden administration has yet to detail the practical applications of the federal order. “There isn’t a big historic precedent for this and we want to get it right,” Psaki said, assuring that plans for the federal order could be expected within “weeks.” As federal contractors, major airlines must require their employees to be vaccinated by December 8, which could prove complicated for those based in Texas. American Airlines said it will defer to federal law over the state law.

“We are reviewing the executive order issued by Gov. Abbott, but we believe the federal vaccine mandate supersedes any conflicting state laws, and this does not change anything for American,” a spokesperson for the carrier said in a statement to AFP. Fellow Texas-based airline Southwest also said Tuesday it would continue requiring vaccines for employees, despite Abbott’s order. “According to the president’s executive order, federal action supersedes any state mandate or law, and we would be expected to comply with the president’s order to remain compliant as a federal contractor,” Southwest said in a statement.

And the Greater Houston Partnership, a Texas business group that includes Exxon Mobil, Chevron, BP, Shell and JP Morgan Chase, said in a statement Tuesday: “The governor’s executive order does not support Texas businesses’ ability and duty to create a safe workplace.” Abbott said Monday he supported vaccination, but would not allow mandates for it in his state. “I issued an Executive Order prohibiting vaccine mandates by ANY entity in Texas,” the governor wrote on Twitter.

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“Halloween came early this year, courtesy of the Biden administration..”

NY Post Editorial Board Bashes Biden’s ‘Cabinet of Horrors’ (NM)

The New York Post Editorial Board has come out to blast the “scandals from top to bottom in Joe Biden’s Cabinet of horrors” in a scathing review of the early struggles of the administration. “Halloween came early this year, courtesy of the Biden administration,” the editorial began. “While the president is primarily to blame for the choices in Afghanistan, the border and holding an infrastructure bill hostage to the Squad, his team is facing their own crises, many self-created. Here, some of the lowlights of many of the members of Joe Biden’s Cabinet of Horrors.” From calling Vice President Kamala Harris the VP in the shadows — “Harris has gone into hiding, barely making public appearances as her favorables have tanked”— to White House chief of staff Ron Klain being the “shadow president,” few were spared in Biden’s Cabinet from the Post’s critique of the administration’s first 10 months. Among the Post’s scathing rebukes:

Secretary of State Antony Blinken: “He has no answers for the debacle in Afghanistan.” Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen: “Yellen promised that she would ‘be a voice for fiscal sanity.’ So much for that!” Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin: How can he trust Gen. Mark Milley after the joint chiefs of staff went behind former President Donald Trump’s back? And “How can he not tell Biden he must be removed from his post?” Attorney General Merrick Garland: His call for the FBI and U.S. attorneys to investigate and prosecute school board protests is “a spectacular overreach of federal power”; yet, the Post adds, “But in a fight between angry moms and a weaponized Department of Justice, our money is on the moms.”

Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland: She moved the Bureau of Land Management to Colorado, “but not enough bureaucrats wanted to live there (300 retired or quit), so Haaland is now moving it back to the swamp.” Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack: Take a Democrat’s word for it: Collin C. Peterson, D-Minn., former House Agriculture Committee chairman. “I would argue this transfer tax, which could be as high as 43.4%, is the worst idea that has been proposed in terms of its impact on agriculture in my lifetime.”Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo: “Argued, counterintuitively, that companies needed to be taxed more in order to compete globally.”Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh: “When 194,000 jobs were added in September, far below the 500,000 forecast, Walsh said, ‘I don’t think it’s as bad as what everyone’s reporting.’ It’s his own department that reported it!”

Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra: “Politico noted that the guy who should be in charge of the nation’s COVID response doesn’t even attend meetings. ‘They brief him,’ a person close to the pandemic response team told the outlet. ‘But he’s not a decider on response activities.’ Why? Because of his ‘lack of experience as a public health policymaker and communicator.'”Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Marcia Fudge: “As Democrats rush to spend even more money, only 11% of the $46 billion in emergency rental assistance has been distributed.”Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg: “With supply issues impacting the economy and cargo ships waiting offshore, Buttigieg’s answer is a task force.”

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Drip drip drip.

Wisconsin’s Election Probe Zeroes In On Democrat Machine Tactics (JTN)

Move over Arizona and hold on Pennsylvania, the next election integrity investigation to take center stage is occurring in Wisconsin, where a former state Supreme Court justice empowered by the Legislature to compel testimony and document production is gathering steam. Interviews with more than a dozen witnesses, officials and lawyers who have interacted with retired Justice Mike Gableman and his staff suggest a strong focus on the role election bureaucracies played in changing the rules — without legislative consent — for how ballots were sent out, filled out, collected and counted.

Gableman’s early investigative work as special counsel appointed by Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos is shining a spotlight among other things on the Wisconsin Election Commission, a statewide body created by GOP lawmakers after an earlier political rigging scandal in the state known as the John Doe investigations. The commission provides guidance and rules to the 1,852 election clerks in the state on how to conduct voting. The commission in 2020 altered numerous state voting rules and procedures during the pandemic, often without seeking legislative permission. The changes range from allowing nursing home staff to help fill out resident ballots to giving permission to election clerks to fill out missing witness information required for absentee ballots.

Those two changes alone affected thousands of ballots in a state in which Joe Biden was declared the winner with a narrow margin of just 20,600 votes. Perhaps even more consequential, the commission gave its blessing to an idea first conceived by election clerks in the blue counties of Dane and Milwaukee that voters could claim the normally rare status of “indefinitely confined” if they were too scared to go out during the COVID outbreak. The change allowed nearly 250,000 people to vote by absentee without complying with required voter ID rules. That advice, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled after the election, was unlawful. Only people who determine they have bona fide disabilities and infirmities are allowed to vote as “indefinitely confined,” and regulators had no right to declare the pandemic as such a condition, the justices ruled in the only major court decision after Nov. 3 to declare a large bloc of votes as potentially illegally cast.

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How close is Durham to looking at Hunter Biden?

Former DNI Ratcliffe Says He’s Given Durham 1,000 Intel Documents (JTN)

Former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe says he’s given John Durham, investigating the Justice Department actions in its Russia collusion probe, a trove of documents that he thinks support charges beyond those recently filed against cybersecurity lawyer Michael Sussman. “Sussmann’s is the first of what I would hope would be a number,” of additional people charged, he told Fox News on Sunday. Ratcliffe made the argument on what he said was “1,000 intelligence community documents” that he thinks support additional charges that he would “expect” Durham to bring, in addition to the declassified documents he’s provided.

Durham, a former Connecticut attorney general, was appointed by the Trump administration to look into the origins of the federal investigation into whether the 2016 Trump presidential campaign colluded with Russia to influence the outcome of the election. A grand jury recently indicted against Sussmann, former federal prosecutor, of lying to the FBI. Ratcliffe, who oversaw the country’s 17 intelligence agencies in the latter part of the Trump administration, announced in October that he handed over the roughly 1,000 pages of materials to the Justice Department to assist with Durham’s investigation, according to the Washington Examiner. Ratcliffe has also declassified two heavily redacted Russia-related documents, including handwritten notes from former CIA Director John Brennan showing he briefed then-President Barack Obama in 2016 on an unverified Russian intelligence report.

The report claimed former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton planned in July 2016 on tying then-candidate Donald Trump to Russia’s hack of the Democratic National Committee to distract from her improper use of a private email server, the Examiner also reports. Sussmann, a former attorney at Perkins Coie, is accused of falsely telling an FBI lawyer he was not representing any clients when acting on behalf of a technology executive and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign during a September 2016 meeting on possible links between Trump and Russia.

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The FBI not doing its own investigation remains very weird.

John Durham and the Amazing Disappearing DNC Hack (Parry)

[..] at the same time as the alleged DNC hack, there were similar reports regarding the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s (“DCCC”) server as well as DNC Chairman John Podesta’s personal email devices. In testimony before the Senate, FBI Director James Comey stated the following: Question (by Senator Burr): Did the FBI request access to those devices [the servers and Podesta’s devices] to perform forensics on? A: Yes, we did. Q: And would that access have provided intelligence or information helpful to your investigation in possibly finding … including to the Intelligence Community Assessment? A: Our forensics folks would always prefer to get access to the original device or server that’s involved. So, it’s the best evidence.

Q: Were you given access to do the forensics on those servers? A: We were not. We were … a highly respected private company eventually got access and shared with us what they saw there. Q: But is that typically the way the FBI would prefer to do the forensics or would your forensic unit rather see the servers and do the forensics themselves? A: We always prefer to have access hands on ourselves, if that’s possible. Q: Do you know why you were denied access to those servers? A: I don’t know for sure. Um, I don’t know for sure. Q: Was there one request or multiple requests? A: Multiple requests at different levels and ultimately what was agreed to is that the private company would share with us what they saw.

So, instead of using a search warrant or some other legal process to perform a direct, hands on forensic examination of the DNC server, the FBI agreed to base its investigation on the findings of a private cybersecurity company. And, as discussed in the previous article, that company, CrowdStrike, was to do the investigation pursuant to its contract with Michael Sussmann of Perkins Coie, the law firm that represented Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Think about that. When presented with allegations of a devastating foreign cyber attack on one of the two major political parties, the FBI meekly agreed to allow CrowdStrike and Perkins Coie to do the forensic examination and, for all intents and purposes, run the investigation.

Not even the lowliest local police department would agree to such an absurd arrangement. What if this was a murder case? Would the Smallville PD allow a private investigator and lawyer hired by the murder victim’s family to process the crime scene, do the autopsy, and tell the police and district attorney what they supposedly found? Wouldn’t such findings be subject to attack in court as coming from sources that may have had an interest in shaping and tailoring the investigative results to suit the needs and desires of their client? Wouldn’t there be legal problems with the evidence’s provenance, chain of custody, and the reliability and comprehensiveness of the investigative work that supposedly produced it? Would the police and district attorney ever allow themselves to get roped into such a bizarre, ridiculous, nightmarish, and self-defeating arrangement?

Of course not. No rational person or organization intent on conducting a serious investigation would. But that, in effect, is precisely what the FBI — the self-proclaimed greatest investigative agency in the world — did when faced with this purportedly monumental foreign attack on the Democrat Party apparatus.

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Sep 132021
 
 September 13, 2021  Posted by at 12:30 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , ,  21 Responses »


Thomas Cole The Course of Empire – The Arcadian or Pastoral State 1834

 

 

This essay is from longtime and very dear friend David Holmgren, guru/founder/apostle of permaculture, who says:

“Your constant work has help kept me informed through the roller coaster.

love
david”

 

 

David Holmgren:

As the pandemic rolled into its second year, I became concerned that the psychosocial fallout of the pandemic, and especially the response at the global and local levels, could represent an existential threat to permaculture and kindred movements. At one level, this threat is the same as that to families, workplaces, networks and organisations more generally, where a sense of urgency to implement the official response, especially lockdowns and mass vaccination, is producing a huge gulf between an ever more certain majority and a smaller minority questioning or challenging the official response.

My aim in this essay is to focus on the critical importance of using all our physical, emotional and intellectual resources towards maintaining connections across what could be a widening gulf of frustration and distrust within our movement, reflecting society at large. I want to explore how permaculture ethics and design principles can help us empathetically bridge that gulf without needing to censor our truth or simply avoid the issues.

While the pandemic and the responses to it will pass in time, I believe the future will be characterised by similar issues that test our ability to tolerate uncertainty and diversity and to thus exercise solidarity within kin, collegiate and network communities of practise.

International Permaculture Day May 2013 Daylesford Community Garden

Future Scenarios and the Brown Tech future

The positive grounded thinking that characterises permaculture has always been informed by a dark view of the state of the world and long-term emerging threats. Future Scenarios is my 2008 exploration of four near-future ‘energy descent’ scenarios driven by the variable rates of oil and resource depletion on the one hand and rate of onset of serious climate change on the other. Six years later, I wrote the essay ‘Crash on Demand: Welcome to the Brown Tech Future’ where I ‘called’ Brown Tech as being the already emergent scenario.

In the longer version of this ‘Pandemic brooding’ essay, I review and reinterpret this work in light of the pandemic and responses to it.

Permaculture pluralism

Anyone involved in permaculture knows that permies can come to quite different conclusions about what is the most ethical and practical solution to the same problem. For example faced with marauding wildlife, some will go to considerable expense (and resource consumption) building elaborate fences, anti-aviaries and other deterrents to separate wildlife from food. Others will treat the wildlife as another abundance of the system to be harvested. Various permaculture principles, as well as the fundamental ethic of Care of Earth, might be invoked to support both approaches.

Likewise, many permies believe taxation is essential to redistribute resources from places of abundance to those of scarcity and as an expression of solidarity essential to any functioning, let alone ethical, society. Others see almost all the expenditure by governments of tax revenues as representing rape of Mother Earth’s abundance and theft from Indigenous peoples, and further as either downright evil or at best a bandaid covering festering wounds. An ethical response is to minimise taxpaying (by reducing income and consumption). Again, design principles and ethics can be invoked to support either position.

From my perspective, grappling with the ethical and systemic issue is more important than the notion that there might be a correct answer, and therefore a wrong answer, to the challenge. In the past, there have been heated debates, and agreements to disagree, but rarely would participants in permaculture design courses, convergences or networks see the answers of others as reasons to reject permaculture. Many celebrate personal actions as small-scale experiments with their good, bad and interesting outcomes informing other experiments, especially the next generation’s, as we muddle through energy descent to hopefully more benign, or at least less-bad, futures.

Pandemic flavoured Brown Tech

I believe the pandemic and the responses to it represent a major turning point in crystalising the Brown Tech future. It ticks so many boxes:

  • a nature-driven crisis which has been long predicted, and to some extent, planned for
  • rolling uncertainty that progressively breaks down past expectations
  • a crisis which, like a war, requires the suspension of normal economic activity, personal rights and governance processes
  • a demand for strong action by government for the common good informed by science
  • a revival of Keynesian policies including a massive increase in government debt
  • an enemy (the virus) that can be easily demonised without there being too many defenders to ignore or silence
  • strong censorship of broadcast media and novel efforts to censor social media to sideline debate that could undermine the rapidly emergent and evolving program.

If the crisis is not solved, then demonisation progressively shifts to those resisting the plan.

This situation is creating the fork in the road where some permies will find themselves (perhaps surprisingly) following the program, while others will have become certain that they will at least quietly resist complying to some degree or other, right up to a radicalised public resistance, whether that be through resigning from work, street protest or satirical art.

We can learn and gain, individually and collectively, from these increasingly divergent paths – but the learnings could be painful. Let’s consider the benefits that might have led permies down one or another path, perhaps unwittingly, to increasingly polarised positions.

The mainstream plan

Although there are differences of emphasis and policies around the government responses to the pandemic, these debates are around the margins, even if they are at times heated. Most fundamentally, the mainstream plan, informed by the scientific and medical establishment, takes the following as self-evident:

  • The virus is an existential threat to society that must be contained and disarmed if not eliminated before an establishment of some hoped-for, tolerable new normal.
  • Social distancing, disinfectant cleaning, testing, contract tracing, masks and various levels of quarantine, border controls and lockdowns are the only mechanisms available to prevent collapse of the health system and deaths escalating to horrific levels in the short term.
  • Novel vaccine technology is the only real hope for a tolerable new normal.
  • To achieve effective herd immunity and minimise death, some great majority of the adult population and probably children need to get vaccinated as soon as possible.
  • The adverse effects of these provisionally approved vaccines are minor and/or rare and much less than the risk of the disease.
  • Preventative and early treatments are at best of marginal value, or more likely based on false hope and fraud.
  • The suspension of normal civil liberties is a necessary, albeit temporary, measure to achieve the plan in a timely fashion and reduce the suffering both from the virus and the plan itself.
  • People who actively resist the plan need stronger social, economic and, where necessary, legal sanctions to ensure their actions don’t prevent the plan from working for the common good.
  • Apart from debate around the margins about how best to respond to these givens, debate and questioning at the level of science, logistics, economics, law, politics, media and social media is not just unnecessary, but an existential threat to the plan and society at large, so must be prevented by unprecedented means.
  • It is the responsibility of every citizen to play a part in the plan, be bold in convincing those who are hesitant, and challenging those not following the plan, especially those actively resisting it.

Permies following the plan are likely to see themselves as being part of a society-wide collective effort to minimise pain and suffering in the aged, the disadvantaged and those in poor health; a choice in favour of collective and longer-term gain at the cost of individual and short-term sacrifice. For many of us, this is a perfect metaphor for what is needed to address the climate emergency. By accepting what appears to be a broad consensus of global, national and local medical and scientific experts, we avoid the protracted debate and lack of a technical consensus that has stymied governments in initiating strong action to address the climate emergency.

For permies in despair about the waste and dysfunction of the consumer economy, the closure, albeit temporary, of many discretionary services and businesses is a taste for how we might need to decide what is important; maximum consumer choice for the affluent versus the provision of basic needs for all. The personal sacrifice and adaptation to difficulties, including stay-at-home lockdown, have been opportunities to focus more on the important things in life and get a taste of what social solidarity feels like.

Reports of contrarian views seem to mostly come from sources contaminated by association with climate denial and other views we categorically reject. The resisters’ outrage looks to many like just more selfish, science denying and ignorant right-wing rednecks, trying to prevent collective wisdom and social solidarity from working. Familiar powerful bad players in global corporations or nation states have been replaced by much more immediate angry undesirables, who without much power or vision, could wreck the hard work of the collective to create a workable new normal.

The dissident view

It is more difficult to generalise about those who question or reject the program. A great diversity of views, explanations, feelings and actions flourish in an environment of unprecedented censorship. While there is great sensitivity about the term ‘censorship’, let alone ‘propaganda’ by those supporting the plan, for those on the other side, it is astonishing how rapidly the axe has fallen on enquiry, and debate, in the mainstream media, social media, workplaces and families, let alone in defence of what – until very recently – most of us took as our inalienable rights.

For many permies, the pandemic seems another example of hyped threat like the ‘war on weeds’, ‘war on drugs’, ‘war on terror’ used to manipulate the population to comply with some version of disaster capitalist1Disaster capitalism feeds off natural (climate change) and other disasters to provide recovery and reconstruction services funded by the public that typically benefit the corporate providers and contribute to ongoing dependencies. The term was used by Naomi Klein to describe the evolution of late stage capitalism over recent decades. solutions. Most sceptics acknowledge the virus as real, but not as dangerous as the cure in lockdowns and other draconian measures. The ‘war on the virus’ seems just as futile or misguided as all the other wars on nature, substances and concepts. So much for trying to have nuanced discussions about viruses as an essential and largely symbiotic mechanism for the exchange of genetic material and mediation of evolution!

While the closure and loss of cafés, gyms and hairdressers might not be a great loss, except to those directly affected, many of us have noticed that the official response to the pandemic tends to follow a pattern of support and strengthening of dominant corporations while leading to the weakening and likely collapse of small business and community self-organised activities.

During the first lockdown, ‘stay at home in your household’ was celebrated as a great plus for people getting the RetroSuburbia message. More recently, the messaging about the problem of shared and multi-generation households being suspect has been building, especially in the working-class western suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne where many of essential and less well paid workers live. We have shifted from a joke about ‘which permie created the pandemic?’ to a gritted teeth recognition that the response to the pandemic is working to vacuum people into another level of dependence on techno-industrial systems.

Many permies have taken advantage of the shift online to network more effectively around the country and the world, but we are deeply troubled by our increasing dependence on mediated experiences and what seems like draconian regulation of informal engagement with people and nature. The concerns for what this is doing to children are far more serious than the loss of the regulated version of social interaction that children get at school.

For many of us, it is completely natural to be sceptical about one big fast answer provided by the giants of the pharma industry, while they have been granted legal immunity for the consequences of their novel products.. Many have made the rational assessment that the very low risks of the virus (for most of us at least) seem better than the unknown of a novel technology approved and pushed on a frustrated and frightened population in record time. Some in this camp were sceptical about vaccines in general but most have been influenced by the largely censored views from some leading global experts, that these vaccines are in a totally different risk category to all previous vaccines.

While waiting and seeing what happens next may look selfish to the majority, the difficulty in getting access to data and unbiased interpretation drives many to rely on their gut feelings. One or more examples of spin and manipulation of data by officials, and especially the media, leads to a general collapse in trust about any, and even all, aspects of the official story. For instance:

  • Many of us have seen evidence that existing low cost and low risk treatments are available and used effectively in some countries resisting the ‘no available treatment’ orthodoxy.
  • Most understand that while the vaccines seemed to give some protection from more severe effects at least in the early stages, they do not appear to stop transmission, at least of the latest variant.
  • Many wonder why the build-up of natural immunity from prior exposure to the virus is not considered as part of the solution that should at least be discussed before vaccine passports are implemented.

Concerns about more serious adverse effects of the vaccines, as predicted by some experts, have developed into alarm, anger and resistance as both the evidence increases and efforts at cover up and spin become worse. Extreme consequences that many of us dismissed early on as highly unlikely are now showing up in hard-to-read scientific papers, clinical reports and official records and databases.

A similar process has happened with the official responses. For example vaccine passports are now widely discussed and debated as part of the attempt to get as many people vaccinated as possible, as the efficacy of vaccines falls and concerns about adverse effects lock in resistance by a minority. At the start of the pandemic this possibility was decried as paranoid conspiracy theory.

France has been leading the charge to impose vaccine passports for many public and work spaces including hospitals. It’s hard to assess how large the resistance will be in different countries and circumstances but there are already signs that whole industries will lose a significant part of their workforce as some substantial minority of the population withdraw their work, consumption and investment in the system rather than getting the vaccine. Whether by design, policy stupidity or the unexplained viral power of censored scientists and vaccine doubters to overcome the largest public health education/public relations/propaganda effort in history, it is conceivable that the result could be economic contraction on a much larger scale than has occurred as a result of lockdowns so far.2 I can’t help but see what is unfolding as a bizarre version of my ‘Crash on Demand’ scenario

Economic contraction could mostly be in the discretionary economy, but how would the health system cope with a loss of staff, especially if some combination of ineffective vaccines against new strains and antibody-enhanced disease lead to medically informed people losing faith before the general public? Part of the solution might be doctors and nurses from overseas,3In the week since I wrote this sentence, doctors from overseas are now part of the plan for Australia or the adoption of treatment options for Covid currently being used with success in countries like Mexico and India.

Australia and New Zealand seem to be something of a test bed for the most authoritarian regulations in an attempt to keep Covid as close to zero as possible (and failing). Large numbers of people in other countries see us as a police state and wonder why there hasn’t been more resistance Down Under.

Some of us have noted plans promoted by the World Economic Forum for a Global Reset that will require a command economy to respond to the climate emergency, and that the pandemic is an opportunity to implement some of the structures and processes needed to create what some fear is a global new world order.

For many people, the trajectory from trust to mistrust often leads to either deep depression or an energised anger, mostly focused on the authorities but often expressed to friends and family at great cost to all concerned.

Although I have some of those thoughts and feelings, I mostly feel a great tension between a deep and somewhat detached fascination with the big picture and the sense of urgency I habitually feel in spring to get fully cranking with the seasonal garden and generally keeping our home at Melliodora shipshape. I feel like I finally have a box seat to watch the train of techno-industrial civilization hitting the Limits to Growth stone wall and breaking apart, all in slow motion.

The rapidly evolving situation and all its psychological, sociological and economic dimensions suggest an expanding field of possibilities. These could include:

  • a cyber pandemic that crashes the global financial system,
  • a short war between China and the USA4Part of my ‘A History from the Future’ story happening in 2022
  • rapid reduction in consumption of oil and other critical resources and consequently greenhouse gas emissions as a result of the virus,
  • plus of course accelerating climate disasters.

In different scenarios, concern about the virus and the ability to implement the plan could become ever more intense, or alternatively, be shunted offstage or metasatised into dealing with the next crisis. Consequently, the details of what worked, what didn’t, who takes the credit and who gets the blame, would probably all be lost in the swirling muddy waters of compounding crises.

A personal view of the pandemic

Up until this point, I have not indicated my personal interpretation of either the virus or the response because I wanted to focus on the bigger systemic drivers without getting muddied in the good/bad, right/wrong, us/them polarities. However we all have to face what life throws in our path with whatever internal and collective resources we have at hand. As is my lifelong habit, I have done my own ‘due diligence’ to understand and guide my personal decisions. In the past I have always been open about my conclusions and decisions, whether around the campfire or on the most public of forums. I have often joked about the comfort I feel in being a dissident about most things including being beaten up at primary school in the early days of the Vietnam war for being a ‘commie traitor’ to being ostracised in the 1990s for opposing the ‘war on weeds’ orthodoxy of the environmental mainstream. But today being a dissident is no joking matter. Unfortunately the psychosocial environment has now become so toxic that the pressures to self-censor have become much more complex and powerful. Much more is at stake than personal emotions, ego, reputation or opportunities and penalties.

Following my instinct for transparency, I will state my position, which has been evolving since I first started to consider whether the novel virus in Wuhan might lead to a repeat of the 1919 flu pandemic or even something on the scale of the Black Death. I can summarise my current position and beliefs as follows:

  • The virus is real, novel and kills mostly aged, ill and obese people with symptoms both similar to and different from related corona viruses.
  • It most likely is a result of ‘Gain of Function’ research at Wuhan Institute of Virology in China supported by funding from the US government.
  • Escape rather than release was the more likely start of the pandemic.
  • Vaccines in use in western world countries are based on novel technology developed over many years, but without resulting in effective or safe vaccines previously.
  • The fear about the virus generated by the official response and media propaganda is out of proportion to the impact of the disease.
  • Effective treatment protocols for Covid-19 exist and if those are implemented early in the disease, then hospitalisation and deaths can be greatly reduced, as achieved in some countries that faced severe impacts (especially Mexico and India).
  • The socioeconomic and psychosocial impacts of the response will cause more deaths than the virus has so far, especially in poor countries.
  • The efficacy of vaccines is falling while reported adverse effects are now much greater proportionally than for previous vaccines.
  • The under-reporting of adverse events is also much higher than for previous vaccines, although this is still an open question.
  • The possibility of antibody dependent enhancement (ADE) leading to higher morbidity and death in the future is a serious concern and could be unfolding already in countries such as Israel where early and high rates of vaccination have occurred.

Given the toxic nature of views already expressed about (and by) people I know and respect, I am not going to engage in an extensive collating of evidence, referencing who I think are reliable experts and intermediaries who can interpret the virus, the vaccine or any of the related parts of the puzzle. Outsourcing personal responsibility for due diligence to authorities is a risky strategy at the best of times; in times of challenge and rapid change the risks escalate. I do not want to convince anyone to not have the vaccine, but I do want to provide solidarity with those struggling (often alone and isolated) to find answers, so the following are two starting points that I think could be helpful:

As a healthy 66-year-old I am not personally afraid of the virus, but if greater virulence and death rate do emerge with new variants, I might consider the preventative regimen recommended by the FLCCA doctors. There is no way I will be getting any of the current vaccines in the foreseeable future, no matter what the sanctions and demonisation of my position on this matter.

At this point there may be readers who decide to ignore anything and everything I have written as obviously deluded. These are the costs of transparency.

Valuing the Marginal

Tolerance, let alone celebration of diversity, is not the easy permaculture principle many of us assume. Valuing the marginal can be even harder, especially if we study the darker periods of human history.

Over most of history, minority ethnicities and subcultures lived in ambiguous complementarity with dominant majorities. For hundreds, if not a thousand, years my Jewish ancestors made valuable contributions to European culture while managing to maintain their own culture to an extraordinary extent. They lived in ghettos not just for protection from the eruptions of intolerance in the dominant Christian communities but to ensure their language and culture wasn’t swamped by that of the majority. While the Jews carried the elitist belief that they were God’s Chosen People, they didn’t attempt to gain converts and were naturally respectful to the majority Christians. They survived through all but the worst of antisemitic pogroms by not antagonising the majority, largely accepting the restrictions placed on them by society. What else could they do?

Similar dynamics could emerge from the virus and the vaccine, where a subculture of home birth, home education, home food production and alternative health brings together people of previously diverse subcultures, including permies, who are excluded from society. That exclusion will seem self-inflicted to the majority, but for those excluded it will feel critical to both survival and identity.

Is it sensible to plead for tolerance in line with sensitivities to the rights of other minorities? Or is that just an invitation to be stoned to death, if not literally then virtually, on social media?

Unfortunately one of the weaknesses of western culture, which shows up in both Christian and Muslim traditions, is the idea that if a particular path is the correct one, then everyone should follow it. From the perspective of east Asian philosophy and many Indigenous traditions, harmonious balance is more important than the right way. The yin yang symbol showing each polarity containing the seed of its opposite encapsulates this critically important antidote to the recurring western theme about the triumph of good over evil. In The Patterning Instinct Jeremy Lent explores how these different world views have shaped history and that any emergent ecological world view will foreground the importance of harmonious balance.

The wisdom of the collective

I want to lead by example in trying to understand and articulate why it is good that the majority of the population appears to be strongly behind the official plan and that maybe it is even good that a majority of my permaculture colleagues might be lining up to get vaccinated, when I have no intention of doing so.

Firstly, I acknowledge the obvious reason that if the official story is right, the majority getting vaccinated will combine with naturally acquired immunity and control the worst effects of the virus without the need to get every last dissenter vaccinated.

Secondly, given the pressure to push the vaccination rate in every way possible, encouraging some extra hesitators to resist will only increase the pressure and possibly lead to harsher sanctions as well as more broken family relationships, reputations, pain and suffering, which could be worse than potential adverse effects of the virus, or the vaccine, on those people.

Thirdly, because so many people I respect as intelligent and ethical are following the plan, I won’t fall into the trap of losing respect for who they are, what they have done and what else they might do in the future. And if it turns out this is the start of a more permanent hard fascist command state, then we need people of good values on the inside to keep open whatever channels of communication remain possible.

As systems unravel, the stories that make sense of the world also fall apart and in the desperate search for mental lifeboats, different stories come to the fore. The mainstream story around the pandemic is one such mental lifeboat that allows people to maintain faith and function. Without the renewed source of faith and order from rational science guiding technological wizardry, the psychosocial shock from a pandemic could be enough to create social, economic and political chaos on a historically unprecedented scale, at least in long-affluent countries like Australia.

Whatever the nature of the next crisis, I think it will require citizens to by and large accept that the behaviours, rights and freedoms we took for granted are artifacts of a vanishing world. Further, it will provide a harsh reality check on how dependent most of us are on systems we have no control over, so most will find they have little choice but to accept the new state of affairs.

While I might resent what I see as unnecessary sanctions on those resisting, I accept than in the early stage of Brown Tech energy descent, harsh and by some perspectives, arbitrary, controls on behaviour will be part of our reality and are arguably necessary to maintain some sort of social order (even if short-sighted or not sustainable in the long run). My aim is to focus on how we ameliorate the adverse effects of a predicament that humanity cannot escape.

More philosophically, the virus and the response to it could be seen as a meditation practise showing us how no one is an island separated from the whole of life. To break down the toxic notion that we are free agents to do as we choose without consideration of consequences, especially for future generations and the wider community of life, is something permaculture teaching has tried to bring to daily life. How we do this in meaningful ways is a constant challenge.

Sympathy for the devil

Having at least had a go at seeing the good in the mainstream plan, I now want to articulate quite passionately why the majority should at least tolerate and not seek to further punish the minority for their resistance. To advocate for this within the permaculture movement, I appeal to our pluralism in celebrating the diversity of action. This is especially where permies take the risk of being the unvaccinated guinea pigs, who can at least be a control group in this grand experiment on the human family. Beyond that, I hope our colleagues inside the tent will see the need to express solidarity with our right to chart our own course and not feel they have to be silent for fear of being cast out of the tent.

While I respect the younger permaculture folk following the plan for the common good, I still believe the most creative deep adaptations to the Brown Tech world will be crafted at the geographic and conceptual fringes by younger risk takers coming together in new communities of hope. While the paths to the armoured centre and the feral fringes both have their risks, those on the inside, especially older people, should accept that the young risk takers on the fringes might create pathways though the evolutionary bottleneck of energy descent more effectively than the best resourced and rationally devised plans from within the system of thinking that has created the civilisation crises.

Whether or not the pandemic will lead to the flowering of creative light-footed models for adaptation, the larger energy descent crisis for which permaculture was originally designed (that most permies recognise as the ‘Climate Emergency’) needs these responses at the margins. If the permaculture movement cannot digest this basic truth and at least defend the right of people to craft their own pathways in response to collapse of all certainties, then our movement will have failed the first great test of its relevance in a world of energy descent.

Some permie dissidents will double down in their focus on preparation to survive and thrive in spite of the sanctions, while others will be energised by non-violent direct action to resist what they see as draconian and counterproductive collective punishment. In doing so they may draw on past experience, or inspiration, from the frontlines of anti-war, environmental defence and free communication resistance.

In the past, more apolitical permies trying to introduce permaculture to socially conservative punters could still acknowledge, at least privately, the element of truth in the quip ‘permaculture is revolution disguised as gardening’. In today’s climate, can permies inside the tent accept and appreciate their colleagues on the frontlines of a new resistance movement that might moderate the extremes of how society navigates the larger climate emergency? Or will they flip and decide permaculture was, after all, mostly hippy nonsense now further contaminated with toxic right wing conspiracy madness, so must be dumped as unfit for purpose in our new world?

In saying this, I’m not suggesting we should all follow suit, let alone belittle or demonise those who don’t take the walk on the wild side. That would also be a contradiction of permaculture ethics and design principles. As we have always taught, ethics and design principles are universal but rarely lead to clear and conclusive solutions. Strategies and techniques vary with the context; wonderful elegant design solutions for one context can be hopeless white elephants, or worse, in another. Context is everything and as colleague Dan Palmer has so effectively applied in his Living Design Process, the people context is as complex, subtle and diverse as that of the land and nature.

The sovereignty of persons to choose freely how they grapple with the tension between autonomy and the needs of the commonwealth is not just an ideal from western Enlightenment civilisation working out how to apply the gift of fossil fuel wealth. It is a fundamental expression of how the ecology of context is constantly shifting, and that all systems simultaneously express life through bottom-up autonomy of action and top-down guidance of collective wisdom.

In times of great stability, the distilled wisdom of the collective, embodied in institutions, carries human culture for the long run. Sometimes the sanctions on the individuals who rejected the rules of the collective were harsh and, according to modern thinking, arbitrary but over long periods of relative stability, those rules kept society working. In times of challenge and change it is, ironically, dissidents at the fringes who salvage and conserve some of the truths of the dying culture into the unknown future to craft new patterns of recombinant culture.

What we call ‘science’ had its origins in what Pythagoras salvaged, almost single handedly, from the decadent and corrupt theocracies of ancient Egypt of which he was an initiate, before he walked away from the centre to the margins of civilisation. Major failures in the application of so-called trusted science have been a feature of our lived experience. Tragically, science could be one of the casualties as humanity passes through the cultural evolution bottleneck of climate chaos and energy descent. Permaculture was one attempt to craft a holistic applied design science grounded in observation and interaction, taking personal responsibility and accepting (negative) feedback, designing from patterns to details, and creatively using and responding to change. I still believe that salvaged and retrofitted versions of practical science crafted at the margins will serve humanity better than rigid faith in the priests of arcane specialised knowledge maintained by an empire of extraction and exploitation. Can we be sure what the father of science and mathematics would do in this time of turmoil?

Whatever the historical significance of these times, maintaining connections across differences of understanding and action within permaculture and kindred networks will strengthen us all in dealing with the unfolding challenges and opportunities of the energy descent future.

David Holmgren
Melliodora
September 2021

 

 

 

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Jun 212021
 


Theodoor Rombouts (1597-1637) Prometheus

 

The Pandemic Is Over; Shots are Worthless (Denninger)
The Failure of PCR Mass Testing (SPR)
Is a COVID Vaccine for Children Still Necessary? (WebMD)
What I Know (And Don’t Know) About SARS-CoV-2 (Curtin)
Study On The Electromagnetism Of People Vaccinated In Luxembourg (D.fr)
Manufacturing (New Normal) “Reality” (CJ Hopkins)
Have The Great Reset Technocrats Really Thought This Through? (SCF)
Meet the Censored: Bret Weinstein (Taibbi)
Assange Receives A Visit From His Family For The First Time In 8 Months (Welt)

 

 

 

 

McCullough

 

 

“That was a risk we ran but fortunately the shots were both too late and there are too many hold-outs for this to happen.”

The Pandemic Is Over; Shots are Worthless (Denninger)

Sorry folks, the screamers lose. As I pointed out when this began the natural evolutionary pressure on a virus causes more-easily transmitted and less-virulent strains to “win.” The reason for this is not that a virus has intelligence, but simply mathematics: Each person can get infected once, after which they have immunity. Even if that immunity is not perfect it prevents nearly all serious harm on re-infection; ergo, whatever strain gets you first is the only one you have to worry about. A more-transmissible mutation makes it more-likely for you to get that mutation first. However, a more-virulent strain makes it more-likely that a thinking organism, that is, a human, will shun the person in question because they are visibly ill.

Nobody deliberately exposes themselves to a possibly-deadly pathogen if they see someone who is ill; ergo, once it is established that some disease can kill rather than inconvenience (e.g. the sniffles) anyone displaying symptoms is actively avoided. This makes it less-likely for the virus to “succeed” in infecting the next person. If you tamper with this process with non-sterilizing vaccines that have nearly-universal coverage you can cause highly-virulent strains to circulate without being suppressed since the vaccinated person is both unlikely to be visibly ill and being vaccinated, if you make a public spectacle of it, means people won’t be afraid of them if they display symptoms even though they should be. This is how you get a break-through of a highly-virulent strain that has many times higher fatality rates, and if it happens you’re ****ed.

That was a risk we ran but fortunately the shots were both too late and there are too many hold-outs for this to happen. When uptake started to slow in the US I pointed out that a Marek’s disease nightmare, which was originally one of my concerns, was almost impossible because there was a large reservoir of people who refused the shots (myself included); their side effect profile bothered me a lot, they looked more dangerous compared to my risk from the virus and, in addition, I knew of and had early treatment options the media, government and pharma wanted suppressed and did suppress including HCQ, Ivermectin and now, it appears, some SSRIs.

Read more …

“..by the time someone gets a ‘positive’ test result, the infectious virus is already being neutralized, or in some cases is already long gone.”

The Failure of PCR Mass Testing (SPR)

In March 2020, SPR warned that PCR mass testing in the general population (“test, test, test”) would be a serious mistake. The issue never was that PCR tests didn’t work or that the Drosten PCR paper was “peer-reviewed” in just one day. The issue is that PCR tests cannot determine an acute infection, ongoing infectiousness, and actual disease, especially if ct values are not taken into account. Several studies have since shown that national PCR testing rates have had no influence at all on covid mortality. In addition, a new German study re-analyzed PCR tests of 160,000 people and concluded: “In light of our findings that more than half of individuals with positive PCR test results are unlikely to have been infectious, RT-PCR test positivity should not be taken as an accurate measure of infectious SARS-CoV-2 incidence. Our results confirm the findings of others that the routine use of ‘positive’ RT-PCR test results as the gold standard for assessing and controlling infectiousness fails to reflect the fact ‘that 50-75% of the time an individual is PCR positive, they are likely to be post-infectious.’” (Stang et al, Journal of Infection, May 2021)


Why has mass PCR testing failed so badly? Most likely because of the role of pre-symptomatic transmission: by the time someone gets a ‘positive’ test result, the infectious virus is already being neutralized, or in some cases is already long gone. Hence PCR testing really only makes sense in targeted, preemptive high-risk settings, such as hospitals, nursing homes or early border controls, or possibly in Chinese-style preemptive, pooled mass testings of entire 10-million-people cities. Overall, PCR mass testing has achieved essentially nothing but hundreds of billions in unnecessary costs and large-scale psychological trauma, especially in children. Nevertheless, with millions of deaths, covid was not just a “casedemic” or a “fake pandemic” (as the 2009 swine flu), but a PCR-driven “casedemic” on top of a real pandemic – or in other words: a “strange pandemic”.

Read more …

Was it ever?

Is a COVID Vaccine for Children Still Necessary? (WebMD)

Testing COVID-19 vaccines in young children is going to be tricky. Deciding how to approve them and who should get them may be even more difficult. So far, the vaccines available to Americans ages 12 and up have sailed through the FDA’s regulatory checks, taking advantage of an accelerated clearance process called an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA). EUAs set a lower bar for effectiveness, saying the vaccines may be safe and effective based on just a few months of data. But with COVID cases plummeting in the United States and children historically seeing far less serious cases than adults, a panel of expert advisors to the FDA was asked to discuss whether the agency could consider vaccines for this age group under the same standard.

Said another way: Is COVID an emergency for kids? There’s another wrinkle in the mix, too — heart inflammation, which appears to be a very rare side effect tied to vaccination. It seems to happen more often in teens and young adults. To date, cases of myocarditis and pericarditis appear to be happening in 16 to 30 people for every 1 million doses given. But if it is conclusively linked to the shots, some wonder whether it might tip the balance between benefits and risks for kids. That left some of the experts who sit on the FDA’s advisory committee for vaccines and related biological products urging the FDA to take its time and more thoroughly study the shots before they’re given to millions of children.

Clinical studies of the vaccines in teens and adults have relied on some straightforward math. Researchers take two groups of similar people, giving half of them the vaccine and the other half a placebo, then wait to see which group has more symptomatic infections. To date, the vaccines have dramatically cut the risk of getting severely ill with COVID for every age group tested. But COVID infections are falling rapidly in the US, and that may make it more difficult for researchers to conduct a similar kind of experiment in children. The FDA is considering different approaches to decide whether a vaccine would be effective in kids, including something called an “immunobridging trial.”

In bridging trials, researchers don’t look for infections; rather, they look for proven signs that someone has developed immunity, like antibody levels. Those biomarkers are then compared to the immune responses of younger adults who have demonstrated good protection against infection. The main advantage of bridging studies is speed. It’s possible to get a snapshot of how the immune system responds to a vaccine within weeks of the final dose. The drawback? Researchers don’t know exactly what to look for to judge how well the shots are generating protection.

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” I do not know if the alleged virus has ever been isolated in the sense of being purified or detached from everything else aside from being cultured in a lab. Therefore I do not know if the virus exists.”

What I Know (And Don’t Know) About SARS-CoV-2 (Curtin)

I know that vast numbers of people have been hypnotized by fear, threats, and bribes to accept the corporate mainstream media’s version of COVID-19. I have concluded that many millions are moving in a trance state and do not know this. They have been induced into this state by a well-organized, very sophisticated propaganda campaign that has drawn on the human fear of death and disease. Those behind this have no doubt studied the high incidence of hypochondriasis in the general population and the fear of an invisible “virus” in societies where belief in God and the spiritual invisible has been replaced by faith in science. Knowing their audience well, they have concocted a campaign of fear and confusion to induce obedience.

I do not know, but suspect, that those who have been so hypnotized tend to be mainly members of the middle to the upper classes, those who have invested so much belief in the system. This includes the highly schooled. I know that to lockdown hundreds of millions of healthy people, to insist they wear useless masks, to tell them to avoid human contacts, to destroy the economic lives of regular people have created vast suffering that was meant to teach people a lesson about who was in control and that they better revise their understanding of human relations to adjust to the new digital unreality that the producers of this masquerade are trying to put in place of flesh and blood, face to face human reality. I know that the PCR test invented by Kary Mullis cannot test for the alleged virus or any virus and therefore all the numbers of cases and deaths are based on nothing. They are conjured out of thin air in a massive act of magic.

I know that the belief that it can so test began with the unscientific PCR Corona protocol created by Christian Drosten in Germany in January 2020 that became the standard method for testing for SARS-CoV-2 worldwide. I am sure this was preplanned and part of a high-level conspiracy. This protocol set the cycle threshold (amplification) at 45 which could only result in false positive results. These were then called cases: An act of fraud on a massive scale. I do not know if the alleged virus has ever been isolated in the sense of being purified or detached from everything else aside from being cultured in a lab. Therefore I do not know if the virus exists.

I know that the experimental mRNA “vaccines” that are being pushed on everyone are not traditional vaccines but dangerous experiments whose long-term consequences are unknown. And I know that Moderna says its messenger RNA (mRNA) non-vaccine “vaccine” functions “like an operating system on a computer” and that Dr. Robert Malone, inventor of mRNA vaccine technology, says that the lipid nanoparticles from the injections travel throughout the body and settle in large quantities in multiple organs where the spike protein, being biologically active, can cause massive damage and that the FDA has known this.

Read more …

Google translated. Just for the fun of it.

Study On The Electromagnetism Of People Vaccinated In Luxembourg (D.fr)

Summary presentation of results for the week of study 1 st June to 5 June 2021: Only 30 vaccinated people and 30 unvaccinated people were finally interviewed while the objective was to interview 100 for the first group and 100 for the second. The condition of gender distribution has been respected. In each group, 15 women and 15 men were interviewed. In the non-vaccinated group, out of the 30 individuals questioned, the number of people with magnet attraction is 0 (zero). The experience therefore stops there for this group. In the vaccinated group, on the other hand, out of the 30 individuals questioned, 29 showed attraction to the magnet. That is, the magnet adheres to their skin without difficulty. All of them are vaccinated at the vaccinodrome. NB : The 30 th person, which does not grip the magnet, has not made vaccinate vaccinodrome like any other. She was vaccinated by a nurse with whom she has worked for many years.

Of these 29 individuals, 22 had the magnet adhering to only one shoulder and only to the area of the injection. These 22 people are the ones who only received one injection. The 7 other people of this same group have the magnet which adheres on the two shoulders.

In this group called vaccinated, domiciled or working in Luxembourg, it appears that: 17 received at least one injection from the Pfizer laboratory 7 received at least one injection from the Astra Zeneca laboratory 3 received at least one injection from the Moderna laboratory 3 received the single injection of Johnson & Johnson 6 received the 2 injections from the Pfizer laboratory 1 received the 2 injections from the Astra Zeneca laboratory 1 received the 2 injections from the Moderna laboratory 2 of the individuals in this group, a nurse working at the CHL and having been one of the first to be vaccinated, and a financial analyst, presented totally abnormal electric field emissions.

For the nurse, a video was even made which shows the values emitted by the tester around his left shoulder. For the analyst, the values issued by the tester were approximately the same but the individual abruptly ended his participation in panic. Of the 30 people questioned who were part of the vaccinated group, 29 live or work in Strassen. Only 1 lives in Metz but works in Strassen. It would appear that people who were vaccinated earlier in the government immunization schedule are much more electromagnetic than people who were more recently. The magnet adheres faster and holds much better than in newly vaccinated people.

Read more …

“This is the crucial period for the totalitarian movement. It needs to negate the old “reality” in order to implement the new one, and it cannot do that with reason and facts, so it has to do it with fear and brute force. ”

Manufacturing (New Normal) “Reality” (CJ Hopkins)

The global capitalist ruling classes are implementing a new official ideology, in other words, a new “reality.” That’s what an official ideology is. It’s more than just a set of beliefs. Anyone can have any beliefs they want. Your personal beliefs do not constitute “reality.” In order to make your beliefs “reality,” you need to have the power to impose them on society. You need the power of the police, the military, the media, scientific “experts,” academia, the culture industry, the entire ideology-manufacturing machine. There is nothing subtle about this process. Decommissioning one “reality” and replacing it with another is a brutal business. Societies grow accustomed to their “realities.” We do not surrender them willingly or easily. Normally, what’s required to get us to do so is a crisis, a war, a state of emergency, or … you know, a deadly global pandemic.

During the changeover from the old “reality” to the new “reality,” the society is torn apart. The old “reality” is being disassembled and the new one has not yet taken its place. It feels like madness, and, in a way, it is. For a time, the society is split in two, as the two “realities” battle it out for dominance. “Reality” being what it is (i.e., monolithic), this is a fight to the death. In the end, only one “reality” can prevail.

This is the crucial period for the totalitarian movement. It needs to negate the old “reality” in order to implement the new one, and it cannot do that with reason and facts, so it has to do it with fear and brute force. It needs to terrorize the majority of society into a state of mindless mass hysteria that can be turned against those resisting the new “reality.” It is not a matter of persuading or convincing people to accept the new “reality.” It’s more like how you drive a herd of cattle. You scare them enough to get them moving, then you steer them wherever you want them to go. The cattle do not know or understand where they are going. They are simply reacting to a physical stimulus. Facts and reason have nothing to do with it.

Read more …

“It would seem that the desire to dominate others does not simply come to an end on its own. ”

Have The Great Reset Technocrats Really Thought This Through? (SCF)

The only thing left to destroy in a world populated by elites alone, are other elites. It would seem that the desire to dominate others does not simply come to an end on its own. With the UN World Food Program announcing that some 270 million people worldwide now face starvation, the ongoing debate about the real aims of the technocracy is profound. The question is whether their aim tends more towards major population reduction, or more towards a new type of slavery. It appears that philosophical and long-term practical questions remain a mystery. We will argue that evil, not simply the influence of the base upon the superstructure, is at the core of this endeavor. We have defined evil as inflicting the highest degree of pain upon the greatest number of resisting subjects. In short, we have defined evil as sadism, inflicting evil because it brings satisfaction to those inflicting it.

Because evil is fundamentally a destructive force, it cannot create anything: nothing in it is truly novel nor of use to humanity. Its pleasures are short-lived and spurious. It is unsustainable, self-defeating, ultimately leading to self-destruction. We have adequately assessed from any number of sources that nefarious interests are behind this process, who seek to make the process also about the exercise of power, in addition to several other aims (remaining in power, exercising power in ways consistent with their occult beliefs about evil, etc.). We understand that they are ‘evil’ because they involve a type of ‘power-over’ (as opposed to power-with/consent) which derives this power from fear-mongering and terrorism upon the population. Terrorism here is defined as the operationalized use of fear, pain, and other injury towards socio-political aims.

Had their plans not been rooted in evil, they would have used soft-power tactics like manufacturing consent, to arrive at their ends. The aim of the Great Reset is to transition the ruling plutocratic oligarchy into a technocratic one. The basis of plutocracy is finance, and the introduction of AI and automation eliminates the basis for finance as the foundation of an economy of scale. This is because automation and deflation move in tandem, making new technologies net losers. Therefore a new paradigm accounting for this post-financial ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’, must be introduced. But the ideology of the Great Reset is based within the old financialist paradigm, which is one of cost externalization. When human beings are no longer involved in the valorization process in the production of goods and services, then humanity itself is the cost that requires externalization – elimination.

Read more …

“We are, for instance, vaccinated against yellow fever, typhoid, and rabies. We are not vaccinated against Covid..”

Meet the Censored: Bret Weinstein (Taibbi)

TK: Tech company executives have consistently said they intervene on this subject only for safety reasons, to prevent misleading information that might cause someone to avoid a lifesaving treatment. What is your answer to that? Are you an anti-vaxxer? Could a reasonable person infer from your broadcasts that you’re recommending that adults not get vaccinated?

Weinstein: We are biologists engaging material that is inherently evolutionary. Our upcoming book is on the problem caused by the interface of people with novel technology for which we are not evolutionarily prepared. No one is trained in even a majority of the disciplines relevant to the COVID Pandemic. Virologists aren’t clinicians, aren’t epidemiologists, aren’t evolutionary biologists, aren’t pharmacologists, aren’t data scientists. We state repeatedly that we are not medical doctors and are not making recommendations, but we are sharing our view of scientific material that we are qualified to analyze. It is true that some may become hesitant about the Covid vaccines from our discussions. That may cost lives, as we have taken pains to point out repeatedly. We also surely save lives. For example, it is especially likely that DarkHorse viewers who have had COVID would skip being vaccinated, greatly reducing their risk of adverse reactions without increasing their risk of future COVID.

The question is one of net effect. We have been way ahead of official guidance throughout the pandemic, and we have been very sharp in our criticism of those who have treated SARS-CoV2 casually. We have clearly sobered many up about the issue. Our refrain has been that although the case fatality rate from COVID is moderate, the damage to the body from a case of COVID—even if mild—is often substantial and likely implies reduced longevity. And we have given prescient advice on prevention. We were extremely early in recognizing that conducting business outside, opening windows (especially in cars), keeping conversation with strangers brief, wearing masks, removing masks outside, spending time in the sun, supplementing with vitamin-D, all have protective effects.

The best defense of what we have done on DarkHorse is simply to compare our prevention model with the official guidance. It is the low quality and slow improvement in the official model that constitutes the greatest danger. It takes far too long for official guidance to catch up to the evidence. As to the questions of whether we are vaccinated and/or would get vaccinated again: we (and our children) are more fully vaccinated than most people, in part due to the exposures that our (former) jobs as tropical biologists gave us. We are, for instance, vaccinated against yellow fever, typhoid, and rabies. We are not vaccinated against Covid, and do not intend to get vaccinated against Covid (unless, perhaps, a traditional vaccine were to be produced).

Read more …

Google translated.

Assange Receives A Visit From His Family For The First Time In 8 Months (Welt)

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange received a visit from his fiancée and two young sons for the first time in eight months in the British maximum security prison in Belmarsh. 38-year-old Stella Morris said after Saturday’s visit that Assange’s situation was “utterly unbearable and grotesque.” “It can’t go on like this,” said Morris. Assange torments himself, the detention drives him into a “deep depression and despair”. 49-year-old Assange has been in the maximum security prison in south London for more than two years. He was arrested in the UK in April 2019 after holing up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for seven years.


In January, a court in London rejected a US extradition request for Assange. The judge justified her decision with the mental state of the Australian and the strict prison conditions that would await him in a trial in the USA. There is a “considerable” risk that Assange would commit suicide while in US custody, she said. Because the US government appealed the verdict, Assange was not released for the time being. It is still unclear whether the US application will be granted. She hoped, said Morris to the British news agency PA, that the government in Washington would give in and refrain from extradition. The US administration under President Joe Biden has shown signs that it is committed to freedom of expression, said Morris, adding: “The only logical step would be to drop this entire prosecution (…)”.

Read more …

 

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May 152021
 


Claude Monet Misty Morning on the Seine 1897

 

 

When the covid virustime started, we were told by everyone with a microphone to “follow the science”. But 16 months or so in, we’re not following the science, yet no-one calls us on it. What happened? Where did we lose the thread, where did we lose our heads, where did the science go?

Did we lose it because the vaccine makers got too greedy, or because politicians became too panicky, or because the media realized that scaring the living daylights out of people 24/7 is great for ratings? Or just because we ourselves lost track of what was really going on?

Injecting hundreds of millions of people with substances that have never been properly tested – for which long-established protocols have existed for a long time – is about as unscientific as it gets. Then when you realize there’s no evidence that they keep injectees from being infected or infecting others, but only makes them -hopefully- a little less sick, you might as well stop right there.

From a science point of view, you’re engaging in either a useless enterprise or a giant gamble with people’s health. Both utterly unscientific endeavors, any scientist can tell you that.

Then, when you hear, from the UK government, no less, that only 66% of people can ever be successfully vaccinated and may be protected with the present vaccines, which still leaves out those who don’t want these vaccines, what are you going to think and do?

Shouldn’t you perhaps focus on the fact that over 4 out of 5 people have an immune system that provides them with “adaptive cross-immunity”, meaning they are not at risk of dying or even serious disease? Why would you instead turn to experimental substances that risk putting those immune systems themselves at risk?

Which part of this is us following the science? Why haven’t we seen huge campaigns aimed at making us healthier, and boosting our immune systems? What part of that would be “not following the science”? It’s not as if we don’t know how to boost our immune systems, or for that matter how to make us overall healthier then we are today.

Moreover, the effect of lockdowns is highly debatable -even if such debates are stifled-, as is the effect of facemasks always and everywhere. And, obviously, that of untested “vaccines”. We have the science, mankind has been through epidemics through its entire history, and it’s not as if scientists have never learned anything from that history.

It’s just that we seem to be changing the meaning of the word “science” to mean an industry, and corporations, that produce novel chemicals, as well as societies that do things, lockdowns, masks, that have never been used in the way they have been the past year.

And that is very risky. If people like Geert VanDenBossche are only half right when they say mass-vaccination during a pandemic will only -and inevitably- speed up the ability of an endemic virus to mutate into forms that evade the vaccines, it’s woman and children first. Well, either that or old and overweight men.

I’ve written a lot on the topic over the past year and a half, obviously, and it doesn’t feel all that great to repeat talking points, but I keep finding it difficult to understand why our 21st century world calls for us to follow the science, only to turn its back on that science the very next moment.

And for simply asking that, I risk being vilified. Like some kind of heretic. But as someone said, I think it was Roger Hodkinson, we cannot afford to stifle dissenting voices in this situation, because the discussion they start might be the very step we need to find a way out. We can’t afford to not ask questions.

To just say get your jab and don’t say or ask a word appears to be the most reckless thing we can do. Even if the alleged “vaccines” would do better at protecting us than the present science has evidence for, that would still be only in -the richer- part of the world, while the virus can run rampage in the rest.

As we can still, though you won’t hear anything about this from your media -local or global- or your politicians, strengthen immune systems sufficiently to make the worst threat of Covid go away.

The virus may kill the some of weakest amongst us, the obese, those with co-morbidities, and the elderly, but many other things, like the flu, can -and do- do that too, yet we have never paralyzed our societies and social lives because of those things. While we have zero evidence that the present vaccines, or whatever you call them, will solve these issues.

It doesn’t look to me like we are following the science at all. We’re following something alright, but not that. If and when the vaccine makers themselves state they have no proof their chemicals protect against infection, yet everyone starts opening up their stores and theaters and what have you, but only to the “vaccinated”, I’m at a loss for words.

 

 

 

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May 032021
 
 May 3, 2021  Posted by at 8:35 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , ,  45 Responses »


The marine and the kitten, Korean War, 1952

 

100 Million Americans Now Fully Vaccinated—But The Pandemic Might Continue (F.)
Decline In US Covid Vaccinations:, But How To Shrink Operations? (G.)
There Are THREE Studies; All Showing Serious Harms (Denninger)
Covid-19: Discrepancy Between ‘Cases’ And ‘Illness’ (P&L)
Factories Around The World Stand Ready To Manufacture Covid-19 Vaccines (IC)
Fake Covid-19 Vaccination Record Cards Are A Growing Problem, Says FBI (F.)
Powerful Teachers Union Influenced CDC On School Reopenings (NYP)
This Inflation Will Play Out Differently From Anything Before It (Peters)
NYT, Wapo, NBC Retract Reports About Giuliani’s Contact With FBI (Hill)
Court: EPA Delay “Exposed A Generation Of US Children” To Chlorpyrifos (IC)

 

 

The vaccination rollout is becoming tiresome, because it breaks too many laws to keep track of. There’s the Nuremberg code, and the Helsinki Declaration, and Unesco’s Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights. They all say the same thing: people can not be coerced, let alone mandated, into being part of a medical experiment. It’s highly illegal. Yet that is what’s happening with the so-called vaccines. And no, it’s not about the level of risk involved, it’s simply illegal. These codes and declarations were written to counter the acts of totalitarian regimes, remember that.

People can not be threatened with restrictions of any kind involving travel, or work, or anything else, if they don’t comply. They must be informed fully about the dangers inherent in the experiment, and only then perhaps agree to participate in the experiment. It’s called informed consent. Which of course precludes the participation of children in such an experiment, because they can’t be expected to fully understand the information offered, even if it is offered. But we are still talking about vaccinating children. It’s astonishing.

“The Nuremberg Code requires an individual’s informed consent before receiving experimental medical interventions. And that principle is in the 1964 Helsinki Declaration, which has been codified at Federal and State level in the USA [and many other countries].”

 

 

I agree with Nancy
https://twitter.com/i/status/1388639742674227201

 

 

Gottlieb kids vaccinations

 

 

Leigh Dundas: How an attorney stopped children being vaccinated

 

 

 

How many of the 100 million were jabbed after giving their informed consent?

100 Million Americans Now Fully Vaccinated—But The Pandemic Might Continue (F.)

More than 100 million Americans have now been fully vaccinated against Covid-19, according to the CDC—a major milestone for the U.S. that comes well ahead of schedule—but a sudden dropoff in the vaccination rate could mean a large number of people may not ever get the vaccination, making it impossible to eradicate the virus. Around 55% of U.S. adults have now received at least one shot, meaning the number of fully vaccinated will continue to steadily rise as second doses are administered. After an initial rush for shots, vaccine demand has waned—even though all U.S. adults are now eligible to receive a Covid vaccine. The 7-day rolling average for shots administered in the U.S. has dropped below 2.5 million, according to the CDC—down significantly from a high of more than 3.2 million on April 11.

47.7%. That’s the percentage of Americans who are still unvaccinated that said they’re likely to get a shot, according to the latest Household Pulse Survey from the Census Bureau. States and localities are moving ahead with easing restrictions and lifting mask mandates, despite warnings from federal health officials that it is far too early to do so. Officials like Dr. Anthony Fauci have especially emphasized mask wearing and social distancing need to continue while indoors, as contagious new variants keep spreading. President Joe Biden initially set a goal of having 100 million shots in Americans’ arms by his 100th day in office, but the U.S. blew by that mark—more than doubling it.

Over 237 million shots have now been administered, with “fully vaccinated” being defined as two weeks after someone receives a second dose of either Pfizer or Moderna or the single-dose of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. With around 30% of the population fully vaccinated, the U.S. is ahead of most other major countries in terms of vaccinations, such as the U.K. (21% fully vaccinated) and France (10% fully vaccinated). Only a handful of countries are ahead, like Israel (56%) and Chile (34%). But health experts have repeatedly emphasized widespread vaccinations are the only way to end the pandemic because it will create a level of herd immunity that will end Covid’s ability to spread widely.

Read more …

“Reaching the final percentage of herd immunity,” believed to be at least 70% of all adults, “is going to be dependent on outreach and addressing any vaccine hesitancy..”

Decline In US Covid Vaccinations:, But How To Shrink Operations? (G.)

A decline in daily Covid-19 vaccination rates has left US public health authorities with a new problem – how to effectively shrink operations. In the campaign to immunize all American adults against the coronavirus, most of the difficulties to date have involved overwhelming demand and restricted supply. Now, with less than one-third of Americans fully vaccinated, local public health authorities described a sense of whiplash as they pivot from mass vaccination clinics to outreach campaigns, all within a couple of weeks. “We knew that when folks became eligible the vaccine-ready folks, or eager, [would] come out right away,” said Mary Jo Brogna, director of nursing at Harbor Health Services, which runs a community clinic in Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

“Reaching the final percentage of herd immunity,” believed to be at least 70% of all adults, “is going to be dependent on outreach and addressing any vaccine hesitancy,” said Brogna. For most of 2021, the story of the vaccine campaign has been overwhelming demand. Emergency authorities took over stadiums, big-box stores and community centers staffed with dozens of nurses and volunteers to inoculate thousands of people per day. But in the last two weeks daily vaccination rates in the US have peaked and declined from a high of 3.2m daily vaccine administrations per day to 2.5m. Now, health authorities nationally are experiencing what red states such as Mississippi and Wyoming began to see early signs of – a major slowdown.

“Across the country we started out with mass clinics and those mass clinics worked very well for the older individuals,” said Gary Edwards, executive director of the Salt Lake County health department in Utah. However, he said, “we’ve reached a point, and it’s been very interesting how quick that happened, that the mass-clinic model is not reaching the segment of the population we’re trying to reach,” said Edwards. The phenomenon is repeated across the country. Local authorities in Los Angeles, California; Colorado; Florida; Nevada and Texas are poised to close mass vaccination sites by the end of May.

Read more …

”That wild reaction your body mounts when you get said shot is “your immune system” all right — it is trying to fight off the intentionally introduced harm you foolishly took.”

There Are THREE Studies; All Showing Serious Harms (Denninger)

As it turns out there is not just one study, or even two documenting that the “S” (spike) protein from Covid causes damage. There are now at least three with one dating back in preprint to the first week of December 2020. We start our damning review of the science here, showing direct harms from the spike protein, and which from the date proves that said direct harm was known before the first shot went into the first arm and yet was not considered by the FDA nor discussed in the media. “We show here that S protein alone can damage vascular endothelial cells (ECs) in vitro and in vivo, manifested by impaired mitochondrial function, decreased ACE2 expression and eNOS activity, and increased glycolysis. The underlying mechanism involves S protein downregulation of AMPK and upregulation of MDM2, causing ACE2 destabilization. Thus, the S protein-exerted vascular endothelial damage via ACE2 downregulation overrides the decreased virus infectivity.”

Endothelial cells line every single blood-transporting element of the body and are essential for them. Intentionally producing them via injecting a substance into the muscle, which is highly vascularized and thus results in immediate transport through the body, is thus expected to cause serious and immediate harm. That wild reaction your body mounts when you get said shot is “your immune system” all right — it is trying to fight off the intentionally introduced harm you foolishly took. Some of this damage may be permanent and involve both the lungs and heart, along with the brain and other organs. Oh, and in case you’re wondering while endothelial cells are replaced they have a quite-long lifetime; the average is more than a year so the risk involved here does not rapidly dissipate.

Again, this was known on December 4th of 2020 or before virtually anyone had received a single shot. Not one mention of it was made in the major media nor has our criminal government at all levels, federal state and local, said one word about this paper. On March 8th this paper posted: “One of the most important pathologies, is hypercoagulation and microclots in the lungs of patients. Here we study the effect of isolated SARS-CoV-2 spike protein S1 subunit as potential inflammagen sui generis. Using scanning electron and fluorescence microscopy as well as mass spectrometry, we investigate the potential of this inflammagen to interact with platelets and fibrin(ogen) directly to cause blood hypercoagulation. Using platelet poor plasma (PPP), we show that spike protein may interfere with blood flow.”

In other words the spike protein alone causes blood clotting. Yet we still have the FDA, CDC, Fauci along with the pieces of crap at places like VUMC and myriad other locations including colleges claiming “there is no evidence of serious risk of these events from the vaccines” and some have said they’re going to mandate that college students intentionally be injected with a substance that causes blood clotting in the lungs and elsewhere — now conclusively demonstrated by scientific study. In other words to attend their event or institution you must risk serious and permanent injury or DEATH by a known-dangerous injection despite the fact that for most young people, and in fact most healthy people, Covid-19 never becomes a systemic infection at all.

We know this because on March 6th a study published showing that of professional athletes who had confirmed Covid-19 and recovered: “Findings In this cross-sectional study of RTP cardiac testing performed on 789 professional athletes with COVID-19 infection, imaging evidence of inflammatory heart disease that resulted in restriction from play was identified in 5 athletes (0.6%). No adverse cardiac events occurred in the athletes who underwent cardiac screening and resumed professional sport participation. In other words by natural infection among healthy people it is very rare for there to be systemic involvement. But among those who take said shots 100% of them have systemic involvement intentionally because unlike an infection that starts in the upper respiratory tract an injection deliberately and systemically involves the entire body.

Read more …

“I’ve still yet to see any better evidence that the (vast) majority of ‘cases’ (i.e. positive PCR test results) since the summer of 2020 have been false positives.”

Covid-19: Discrepancy Between ‘Cases’ And ‘Illness’ (P&L)

It’s been a while since we last highlighted the difference between Covid-19 ‘case’ numbers (and by extension this means also hospitalisation numbers and death numbers) and actual Covid-19 illness. The NHS pathways coronavirus triages website (see https://digital.nhs.uk/dashboards/nhs-pathways) provides an accurate representation of actual illness due to Covid-19 as it combines all 999, 111, online and ambulance calls relating to Covid-19 triages. Previous articles make clear what the caveats are. The triage data confirms the real pandemic of spring 2020. I’ve still yet to see any better evidence that the (vast) majority of ‘cases’ (i.e. positive PCR test results) since the summer of 2020 have been false positives.

Read more …

But Pfizer’s bottom line!

Factories Around The World Stand Ready To Manufacture Covid-19 Vaccines (IC)

The Drug Industry has strenuously argued that any legal proposal to allow the sharing of intellectual property and creation of generic coronavirus vaccines is pointless because there are no facilities around the world that can be tapped. Thomas Cueni, the president of the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations, said that sharing IP “wouldn’t give us the tools to produce more doses of vaccines.” Bill Gates, the billionaire philanthropist whose foundations help manage the United States and Europe’s primary Covid-19 outreach efforts to the developing world, known as Covax, was even more blunt. “It’s not like there’s some idle vaccine factory, with regulatory approval, that makes magically safe vaccines,” Gates said last weekend by way of explaining to Sky News why he thought the recipe for making coronavirus vaccine should not be shared.

Except it is exactly like that. Factory owners around the globe, from Bangladesh to Canada, have said they stand ready to retrofit facilities and move forward with vaccine production if given the chance. “We have this production capacity and it’s not being used,” said John Fulton, a spokesperson for Biolyse Pharma, a company based in St. Catharines, Ontario, that produces injectable cancer treatments. Fulton noted that Biolyse has spent years buying equipment to produce biologics and is uniquely prepared to start getting ready to produce vaccines. The company, which Fulton said is best suited for replicating the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, could produce as many as 20 million vaccines per year, he estimated.

Abdul Muktadir, chair and managing director of Incepta, a pharmaceutical firm based in Dhaka, Bangladesh, has told reporters that his firm has the capacity to fill vials for 600 million to 800 million doses of vaccine per year. He has reportedly reached out to Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, and Novavax. “Now is the time to use every single opportunity in every single corner of the world,” Muktadir told the Washington Post. “These companies should make deals with as many countries as possible.” Other firms in South Korea and Pakistan have also reportedly expressed an interest in producing vaccines or vaccine components.

Read more …

Unintended pun by the author:

“When the FBI gets involved, you know that the words “breaking the law” or “oh bleep” may not be too far away. “

Fake Covid-19 Vaccination Record Cards Are A Growing Problem, Says FBI (F.)

“Fake it till you make it” can be very questionable advice. “Fake a Covid-19 vaccination card because you can’t make a vaccination appointment” can be even worse. As I have covered previously for Forbes, a Covid-19 Vaccination Record Card is currently the only real proof that you’ve received the Covid-19 vaccine. In order to get a real version of this cardboard paper card, you have to, you know, actually get the Covid-19 vaccine. So when schools, businesses, and other organizations want to determine who’s really been vaccinated, all they have to do is check for people’s vaccination record cards, because no one lies and cheats in our society, correct?

Well, as you’ve probably seen, for every rule, requirement, or standard, there’s no shortage of people who are willing to break it. Whether it’s resumes, college applications, Avengers membership cards, or pretty much anything else, you’ll find at least some people trying to fake it. So it shouldn’t be a surprise to hear that people have been circulating instructions and means to create fake Covid-19 Vaccination Record Cards. Kevin Collier and Ben Collins reported for NBC News that such instructions and templates have appeared on “pro-Trump forums, like TheDonald.win, which was rebranded to Patriots.Win”, “the extremist forum 4chan”, and “QAnon forums.” Joseph Cox wrote an article for Vice entitled, “I Bought a Fake Covid-19 Vaccine Card on Etsy,” because that’s essentially what he was able to do pretty easily.

The Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Inspector General (HHS-OIG) and the FBI have noticed that such cards have been “advertised on social media websites, as well as e-commerce platforms and blogs,” and issued a stern warning about them: “If you did not receive the vaccine, do not buy fake vaccine cards, do not make your own vaccine cards, and do not fill-in blank vaccination record cards with false information.” In this case, FBI stands for Federal Bureau of Investigation and not Fun Bits Interactive or Fungi, Bacteria, and Insects. When the FBI gets involved, you know that the words “breaking the law” or “oh bleep” may not be too far away.

Read more …

Politics 101.

Powerful Teachers Union Influenced CDC On School Reopenings (NYP)

The American Federation of Teachers lobbied the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on, and even suggested language for, the federal agency’s school-reopening guidance released in February. The powerful teachers union’s full-court press preceded the federal agency putting the brakes on a full re-opening of in-person classrooms, emails between top CDC, AFT and White House officials show. The emails were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by the conservative watchdog group Americans for Public Trust and provided to The Post. The documents show a flurry of activity between CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky, her top advisors and union officials — with Biden brass being looped in at the White House — in the days before the highly-anticipated Feb. 12 announcement on school-reopening guidelines.

“Thank you again for Friday’s rich discussion about forthcoming CDC guidance and for your openness to the suggestions made by our president, Randi Weingarten, and the AFT,” wrote AFT senior director for health issues Kelly Trautner in a Feb 1 email — which described the union as the CDC’s “thought partner.” “We were able to review a copy of the draft guidance document over the weekend and were able to provide some initial feedback to several staff this morning about possible ways to strengthen the document,” Trautner continued. “… We believe our experiences on the ground can inform and enrich thinking around what is practicable and prudent in future guidance documents.”

[..] “We are immensely grateful for your genuine desire to earn our confidence and your committment to partnership,” Trautner said in another email to Walensky on Feb 3. Emails show a call between Walensky and Weingarten — the former boss of New York City’s United Federation of Teachers — was arranged for Feb 7. The lobbying paid off. In at least two instances, language “suggestions” offered by the union were adopted nearly verbatim into the final text of the CDC document. With the CDC preparing to write that schools could provide in-person instruction regardless of community spread of the virus, Trautner argued for the inclusion of a line reading “In the event of high community-transmission results from a new variant of SARS-CoV-2, a new update of these guidelines may be necessary.” That language appeared on page 22 of the final CDC guidance.

Read more …

“..all of us will begin to increasingly wonder, whether digital assets, which have no real history, no anchors, are the first to provide a glimpse of what lays beyond the horizon.”

This Inflation Will Play Out Differently From Anything Before It (Peters)

There are more differences between the 1970s and the 2020s than there are similarities. Demographics, technology, global trade, union membership, consumption patterns, environmental stresses, geopolitics, and domestic politics are all different. There are substantial similarities too. But one thing is identical – this planet remains inhabited by humans. And we never change. We despise iniquity. When Biden entered politics in 1973, the rich/poor divide in America had halved since the late 1920s high. It has since doubled. Returning to those highs. How this inflation plays out will be different from anything that has come before it. It is always so. Naturally, some aspects will resemble the past. This inflation will inevitably be volatile, such periods of price changes typically are. And in the early stages, nearly everyone will persuade themselves that it is transitory.

In the late stages, those same people will conclude that it is permanent. Throughout the process, each of us, individually, will see what we want to see, hear what we want to hear, and believe what we want to believe. Those things are always true, perhaps now more than ever. We will also find the period ahead deeply unsettling. Change is hard to process. And more things are changing now than at any time in our lives – such is today’s utterly unprecedented pace of innovation and disruption. In such a state, it is natural to cling to our anchors:

• Our policymakers will point to the inflation metrics that they themselves have engineered in such a way to ensure stability, even if they long ago diverged from reality.
• Bond investors will look to the spreads between overnight rates and two-year bonds, five-year, ten, thirty. And despite the reality that the government has run 15% deficits for two years, funded by the Fed which simply creates the money, they will cling to the anchors that have governed the well-behaved yield curve for the course of their careers.
• Equity investors will hold tight to the relationships that anchor their value relative to bonds.
• Not a solitary investor in the mainstream will be prepared to deviate from the benchmarks to which they have anchored their careers.
]
And yet, all of us will begin to increasingly wonder, whether digital assets, which have no real history, no anchors, are the first to provide a glimpse of what lays beyond the horizon.

Read more …

They can say what they want. And so they do.

NYT, Wapo, NBC Retract Reports About Giuliani’s Contact With FBI (Hill)

The New York Times, The Washington Post and NBC News walked back their reporting about the FBI’s communication with President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani regarding Russia. The Washington Post was the first to report on Thursday that Giuliani was warned that he was the target of a Russian influence campaign last year. The newspaper, citing people familiar with the matter, also reported that One America News Network (OANN) was given a similar warning. But the Post issued a correction on Saturday saying it had removed assertions that Giuliani and OANN had received such warnings. “An earlier version of this story, published Thursday, incorrectly reported that One America News was warned by the FBI that it was the target of a Russian influence operation,” the correction reads.

“That version also said the FBI had provided a similar warning to Rudolph W. Giuliani, which he has since disputed. This version has been corrected to remove assertions that OAN and Giuliani received the warnings,” the paper said. A spokesperson for the Post had no additional comment when reached by CNN. The New York Times similarly reported on the FBI’s contact with Giuliani. The subject of the Times article was the FBI’s investigation into Giuliani, and it stated that the firing of former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch was at the center of the probe. The Times had written that Giuliani had received a “formal warning” from the FBI about Russian disinformation. The newspaper ran a correction on Saturday saying Giuliani had not received a “so-called defensive briefing.”

“An earlier version of this article misstated whether Rudolph W. Giuliani received a formal warning from the F.B.I. about Russian disinformation. Mr. Giuliani did not receive such a so-called defensive briefing,” the newspaper said. NBC, which also reported that Giuliani received a defensive briefing about the Russian influence operation in 2019, ran a correction Saturday afternoon saying the FBI only prepared a briefing. The correction came after a source said the briefing wasn’t given because of concerns that it could complicate the investigation into Giuliani.

Read more …

“After 14 years of legal battles..!!”

Court: EPA Delay “Exposed A Generation Of US Children” To Chlorpyrifos (IC)

After 14 years of legal battles, a federal court ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to take actions that will likely force the neurotoxic pesticide chlorpyrifos off the market. The federal agency has for years been considering mounting evidence that links the pesticide to brain damage in children — including loss of IQ, learning difficulties, ADHD, and autism — but, as the court acknowledged, has repeatedly delayed taking action. “Rather than ban the pesticide or reduce the tolerances to levels that the EPA could find were reasonably certain to cause no harm, the EPA sought to evade through delay tactics its plain statutory duty,” Judge Jed S. Rakoff wrote in his decision, which was released today by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

“During that time, the EPA’s egregious delay exposed a generation of American children to unsafe levels of chlorpyrifos,” he wrote, and ordered the EPA to issue a final regulation within 60 days. While Rakoff stopped short of requiring the EPA to immediately ban the pesticide, he gave the agency little choice in how to respond. “The EPA’s obligation is clear: it must modify or revoke chlorpyrifos tolerances and modify or cancel chlorpyrifos registrations,” Rakoff wrote in his ruling in the case, which was filed by Earthjustice on behalf of the League of United Latin American Citizens, the Pesticide Action Network, United Farm Workers, and other groups.

The decision marks the culmination of a prolonged and bitter legal battle over one of the most widely used and dangerous pesticides in U.S. agriculture. More than 5 million pounds of chlorpyrifos were applied to crops in 2017, according to the most recent data. Exposure to the pesticide through residue on food and drift near fields where it was applied has wreaked devastation on developing children. According to a team of researchers led by Leonardo Trasande, organophosphate pesticides, of which chlorpyrifos is the most widely used, accounted for an estimated $594 billion in societal costs, including added health care and education, between 2001 and 2016.

Read more …

 

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Mar 172021
 


Vincent van Gogh Peach trees in blossom 1888

 

Russia Stoked Ukraine Allegations To Undermine Biden – US Intel (Pol.)
Big Media Outlets “Independently Confirm” Each Other’s Falsehoods (Greenwald)
US Admits Waging InfoWar Against Russia’s Sputnik Vaccine (ZH)
Biden Gets Away With Exactly What Cuomo Is Accused Of (Emmons)
Pandemic Blunder (Hirschhorn)
New Covid-19 Variant Found In Brittany May Not Show Up In Regular Tests (RT)
Why We All MUST Reject Vaccine Passports (Krainer)
Wall Street Is Greenwashing The Financial World (Fancy)
US Joins India And China In Ramping Up Coal Usage (ZH)
Courts Close In On Gig Economy Firms Globally (G.)
Getting Hyperinflation Right (Dmitry Orlov)

 

 

 

 

This stuff must stop, but it won’t. These idiots are endangering the entire world. And that wanking rodent Schiff pops up again too.

Russia Stoked Ukraine Allegations To Undermine Biden – US Intel (Pol.)

Russia tried again last year to help then-President Donald Trump win the White House, the U.S. intelligence community said Tuesday in a long-awaited postmortem — adding that a “primary” tactic in that effort was the spreading of corruption allegations involving Democratic challenge Joe Biden and Ukraine. But the effort fell short of the Kremlin-backed efforts to assist Trump in his 2016 contest against Hillary Clinton, the spy community wrote in its unclassified assessment of foreign threats to the 2020 U.S. federal elections. And the agencies found no attempts by foreign countries to change vote tallies or final results.

“We assess that Russian President [Vladimir] Putin authorized, and a range of Russian government organizations conducted, influence operations aimed at denigrating President Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party, supporting former President Trump, undermining public confidence in the electoral process, and exacerbating sociopolitical divisions in the U.S.,” the assessment said. “The primary effort,” the document added, “revolved around a narrative-that Russian actors began spreading as early as 2014-alleging corrupt ties between President Biden, his family, and other US officials and Ukraine.” It said Russia’s intelligence services “relied on Ukraine-linked proxies and these proxies’ networks-including their US contacts-to spread this narrative.”


Unlike in 2016, however, “we did not see persistent Russian cyber efforts to gain access to election infrastructure,” added the document, issued by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Iran, meanwhile, waged a “covert influence campaign intended to undercut” Trump’s reelection bid without directly promoting his rivals in order to “undermine public confidence in the election process” and “sow division and exacerbate societal tensions” in the country. “We assess that Supreme Leader Khamenei authorized the campaign and Iran’s military and intelligence services implemented it using overt and covert messaging and cyber operations,” the examination states. The agencies found no efforts by China to interfere in the election, although one intelligence official maintained in a minority opinion that Beijing “took at least some steps to undermine” Trump’s chances, “primarily through social media and official public statements and media.”

Schiff

Read more …

Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia

Big Media Outlets “Independently Confirm” Each Other’s Falsehoods (Greenwald)

For a few weeks following the issuance of the Mueller report, Democrats and media figures gamely attempted to deny that it obliterated the conspiracy theories to which they had relentlessly subjected the country for the prior four years. How could they do otherwise? They staked their entire reputations and the trust of their audience on having this be true. To avoid their day of reckoning, they would hype ancillary events such as Paul Manafort’s conviction on unrelated financial crimes or Michael Flynn’s guilty plea for a minor and dubious charge (for which even Mueller recommended no prison time) or Roger Stone’s various process charges to insist that there was still a grain of truth to their multifaceted geopolitical fairy tale seemingly lifted straight from a Tom Clancy Cold War thriller about the world’s two largest nuclear powers.

But even they knew this was just a temporary survival strategy and that it was unsustainable for the long term. That the crux of the scandal all along was that key Trump allies if not the President himself would be indicted and imprisoned for having conspired with the Russians was too glaring to make people forget about it. That was why former CIA Director John Brennan assured the MSNBC audience in March — just weeks before Mueller closed his investigation with no conspiracy crimes alleged — that it was impossible that the investigation could close without first indicting Trump’s children and other key White House aides on what Brennan correctly said was the whole point of the scandal from the start: “criminal conspiracy involving the Russians . . . . whether or not U.S. persons were actively collaborating, colluding, cooperating, involved in a conspiracy with them or not.”


Brennan strongly insinuated that among those likely to be indicted for criminally conspiring with the Russians were those “from the Trump family.” As we all know, literally none of that happened. Not only were Trump family members not indicted by Mueller on charges of “criminal conspiracy involving the Russians,” no Americans were. Brennan believed there was no way that the Mueller investigation could end without that happening because that was the whole point of the scandal from the start. To explain why it had not happened up to that point after eighteen months of investigation by Mueller’s subpoena-armed and very zealous team of prosecutors, Brennan invented a theory that they were waiting to do that as the final act because they knew they would be fired by Trump once it happened. But it never happened because Mueller found no evidence to prove that it did.


The Advocate, Mar. 10, 2017

Read more …

“Combatting malignant influence in the Americas…”

Who’s the actual malignant influence?

US Admits Waging InfoWar Against Russia’s Sputnik Vaccine (ZH)

The Kremlin on Tuesday called out what’s it’s dubbed the “unprecedented” propaganda war against Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine. The words were issued by spokesman Dmitry Peskov in response to widespread allegations that the Untied States is actively trying to dissuade its allies from purchasing the Russian-produced vaccine. This despite the emerging scientific consensus that’s found it to be at least 91% effective while further preventing inoculated persons from becoming severely ill. The Kremlin is responding to newly emerged proof that the US intervened with the largest country in South America, Brazil.


The Washington Post details that “Buried deep in the dry, 72-page annual report of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services lay a startling admission: U.S. health officials under President Donald Trump worked to convince Brazil to reject Russia’s Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine.” Brazil has long stood as the second highest COVID-19 infected country in the world behind the US, with over 11.5 confirmed infections so far (with the US now approaching the 30 million mark). Here’s the key controversial section from the 71-page document. The section is entitled “Combatting malignant influence in the Americas”…

“Examples include using OGA’s Health Attache office to persuade Brazil to reject the Russian COVID-19 vaccine,” the government report spelled out explicitly. Brazil’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has since claimed it never received directives or “consultations” such as are described in the report from the US, with a statement saying, “the Embassy of Brazil in Washington has not received consultations or actions from United States authorities or companies regarding the possible purchase, by Brazil, of the Russian vaccine against Covid-19.” Kremlin spokesman Peskov in his comments didn’t name the allegations specifically but only denounced generally that “In many countries the scale of pressure is quite unprecedented… such selfish attempts to force countries to abandon any vaccines have no prospects.

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“Cuomo is not liked and, now, not useful. If Biden becomes similarly expendable in the future, he may finally face the same kind of treatment.”

Biden Gets Away With Exactly What Cuomo Is Accused Of (Emmons)

Gov. Andrew Cuomo has been accused of unwanted touching and sexual harassment. President Joe Biden has been accused of everything from creepily sniffing women’s hair to sexual assault. Yet Biden is the one who gets the folksy treatment, perceived as merely touchy-feely, while Cuomo, despite his status as prince of the pandemic press conference, could be facing the end of his career. Prominent Democrats have called for the governor’s resignation over the scandal. Seven women now say they experienced unwanted touching at the governor’s hands. Cuomo claims he never did it, and apologized for making anyone feel bad. By his own admission, Cuomo may be a little handsy. He’s said that “You can go find hundreds of pictures of me kissing people . . . it is my usual and customary way of greeting.”

The public is meant to believe that it’s simply part of his charm. Contrast this to Biden in 2019, who said “I’m not sorry for any of my intentions, I’m not sorry for anything that I have ever done. I have never been disrespectful intentionally or a man or a woman. So that’s not the reputation I’ve had since I was in high school for God’s sake.” Cuomo apologized and he’s going down. Biden refused to apologize, and he’s practically sanctified. “Social norms are changing. I understand that,” Biden said, “and I’ve heard what these women are saying. Politics to me has always been about making connections, but I will be more mindful about respecting personal space in the future. That’s my responsibility and I will meet it.”

But has he? He barely gave a glance at Tara Reade’s accusations, never mind the myriad other women who stepped forward to say that Biden made them uneasy either with touching or his penchant for sniffing. The charges against Biden are well-documented, but it’s Cuomo that’s in the hot seat, and Biden chilling in the Oval. A take down of Biden over sexual harassment charges is simply not politically expedient. But for Democrats, Cuomo has got to go. While they are loath to admit it, the outcry over the sexual harassment scandal is likely about something else. Cuomo is embarrassing for Democrats who praised him during the COVID-19 outbreak. An investigation by the attorney general’s office found that not only did the Cuomo administration undercount nursing home deaths by up to 50 percent, they did so on purpose in order to avoid political fallout.

The Democrats who are intent on hounding Cuomo out of office do not want the political fallout of the nursing home deaths. It’s easier to hold Cuomo’s hands to the fire over these allegations of unwanted touching than it is to deal with the intentional cover-up of elder deaths, in which they may find themselves to have been complicit. In short, Cuomo is not liked and, now, not useful. If Biden becomes similarly expendable in the future, he may finally face the same kind of treatment.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1371660114629849094

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Hirschhorn reached out to me after I published VandenBossche’s piece. I haven’t read his book -yet-. The video seems interesting.

Pandemic Blunder (Hirschhorn)

A huge amount of data and information not covered by mainstream media are in Pandemic Blunder that tells the story of how over 300,000 Americans have died from COVID-19 unnecessarily because the government has blocked early home treatment and prevention.  With 500,000 COVID deaths, learning about safe and effective early home treatment/prevention more important than ever. About the Book: Pandemic Blunder contains considerable medical information and data to support a number of proven safe, cheap generic medicines and protocols that knock out the coronavirus when given early. Read about the pioneering, courageous doctors who have been using innovative approaches to prevent their COVID patients from needing hospital care and facing death.

The book includes many expert opinions from doctors who support the view that 70 to 80 percent of COVID deaths could have been prevented—and still can be. Don’t be victimized by disinformation and propaganda from leftist media. Learn how corrupt forces are aiming to make billions of dollars from expensive medicines and vaccines, and how hundreds of thousands of deaths could have—and should have—been prevented! Pandemic blunder is defined as the failure of the United States public health system and federal agencies to support and promote early home/outpatient treatment for the COVID-19 pandemic disease. 

Considerable medical information and data convincingly show that when given early a number of proven safe, cheap generic medicines and protocols knock out the coronavirus. Early means within the first few days of getting symptoms or a positive test. Some pioneering and courageous doctors have been using innovative approaches to prevent their covid patients from needing hospital care and facing death. Many expert views of doctors support the view that 70 percent to 80 percent of covid deaths could have been prevented – and still can for future victims of the disease.  Learn how hundreds of thousands of deaths could have and should have been prevented.

This book does more than describe the pandemic blunder, particularly in terms of the influence of Dr. Anthony Fauci. It can help Americans protect their lives by not being victimized by disinformation and propaganda from leftist media.  Pandemic management has failed because of corrupt forces aiming to make billions of dollars from expensive medicines and vaccines. There has been a widespread dereliction of duty on the part of many local, state, and federal government officials.

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The virus is endemic. New variants will keep emerging.

New Covid-19 Variant Found In Brittany May Not Show Up In Regular Tests (RT)

France’s health ministry has warned that a new variant of Covid-19 found in the country’s north may evade conventional PCR testing, but initial analysis suggests it is not more contagious or deadly. On Monday, the Directorate General of Health (DGS) said in a press release that a new Covid-19 variant was being investigated after genomic sequencing confirmed the existence of 8 cases at a single hospital, where the new strain had been identified but had initially not shown up after PCR tests. The DGS said the new variant does not appear to be more contagious or deadly, although this is a very early assessment.


The statement adds that the virus appears to have evaded RT-PCR (reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction) test results on nasopharyngeal samples. Instead, the diagnosis had to be made “by serology or by performing RT-PCR on deep respiratory samples.” The statement concludes by noting that the local authorities and prefectures are stepping up measures to curb the transmission of the virus, “as a precaution.” Measures include “speeding up vaccination, reminding people of the importance of social distancing and limiting gatherings.” In a message to healthcare professionals, the DGS said analysis carried out by the Pasteur Institute had revealed the new variant was “carrying nine mutations in the region encoding the S protein but also in other viral regions.”

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Freedom.

Why We All MUST Reject Vaccine Passports (Krainer)

The enemy is fear. We think it is hate; but it is really fear.
– Mohandas Gandhi


To ‘normalize’ vaccine passports, the idea is increasingly being discussed in the media as we trudge on through the umpteenth version of lockdowns. On Saturday (13 March 2021) I got accosted by the police in Cap d’Ail (south of France) for the offense of taking my kids out in the sun without having a justificatif. I have long lost track of the ever changing rules and shifting logic, but I didn’t feel like arguing. The police were just doing their jobs, enforcing shitty rules that harass and antagonize people. For example, I would have been allowed to be where I was if it were a working day, but since it was Saturday, it was verboten. The objective of such rules is nothing to do with public health; they are intended to exasperate us all to the point where we yield to the indignity of vaccine passports when they are rolled out, just so we can live our lives and be left in peace.

Alexis de Tocqueville understood the nature of this dumb, slow march of bankers’ tyranny. In “Democracy in America” (1835) he predicted that the society would fall into a new kind of servitude which, “covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules,” which “does not tyrannise but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes and stupefies people, till each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the sheppard.” De Tocqeville’s book was published mere two years after President Andrew Jackson ended the Second Bank of the United States, and the struggles between the bankers and the society was very pertinent to his observations.


The small complicated rules are a sinister trap and it is imperative that we not fall into it. Even if we are ready to yield on vaccines and vaccine passports to end our present predicament, our children and grandchildren will have to live with the consequences of our compromises. We therefore have no right to decline this struggle.

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Former chief investment officer of Sustainable Investing at BlackRock

Wall Street Is Greenwashing The Financial World (Fancy)

The financial services industry is duping the American public with its pro-environment, sustainable investing practices. This multitrillion dollar arena of socially conscious investing is being presented as something it’s not. In essence, Wall Street is greenwashing the economic system and, in the process, creating a deadly distraction. I should know; I was at the heart of it. As the former chief investment officer of Sustainable Investing at BlackRock, the largest asset manager in the world with $8.7 trillion in assets, I led the charge to incorporate environmental, social and governance (ESG) into our global investments. In fact, our messaging helped mainstream the concept that pursuing social good was also good for the bottom line. Sadly, that’s all it is, a hopeful idea. In truth, sustainable investing boils down to little more than marketing hype, PR spin and disingenuous promises from the investment community.

In many instances across the industry, existing mutual funds are cynically rebranded as “green” — with no discernible change to the fund itself or its underlying strategies — simply for the sake of appearances and marketing purposes. In other cases, ESG products contain irresponsible companies such as petroleum majors and other large polluters like “fast fashion” manufacturing to boost the fund’s performance. There are even portfolio managers who actively mine ESG data to bet against environmentally responsible companies in the name of profit, a short-selling strategy. Risk managers are focused on protecting their investment portfolios from potential damages done by a worsening climate rather than helping prevent that damage from occurring in the first place.


As disheartening as this reality is, claiming to be environmentally responsible is profitable. Last year alone, ESG mutual funds and exchange-traded funds nearly doubled. The investment community understandably reacted to this with cheers. But those cheers were only for fund managers and their bottom lines. No matter what they tout as green investing, portfolio managers are legally bound (as well as financially incentivized) to do nothing that compromises profits. To advance real change in the environment simply doesn’t yield the same return.

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Green New Deal.

US Joins India And China In Ramping Up Coal Usage (ZH)

Major users of coal across the world are set to ramp up their usage of the fossil fuel in coming months. Power plants in the U.S. are expected to consume 16% more coal this year than in 2020 and another 3% on top of that in 2022. China and India also have “no plans to cut back” their use of burning the fossil fueld. In fact, “it’ll almost be as if the pandemic-induced drop in emissions never happened,” Bloomberg reports. Inevitably, this will result in higher emissions, which stands at stark odds with the climate initiatives that President Joe Biden ran on. Amanda Levin, policy analyst at the New York-based National Resources Defense Council said: “We’re going to see a really marked increase in emissions with coal consumption at U.S. power plants returning almost to 2019 levels.”

She says that changes to mitigate usage could happen quickly if Biden implements his planned green-energy policies. In the U.S., the ramp comes as a result of both costlier natural gas, and a broad re-opening from the pandemic. For India and China, the steady use is indicative of growing demand, despite the fact that both countries are trying to use wind and solar, as well. China’s power consumption, for example, has grown, despite the country reducing coal’s share in the nation’s energy makeup. President Biden’s upcoming infrastructure bill is expected to include plans to “fulfill his campaign pledges on climate change, making the U.S. best poised to salvage progress in reducing global emissions,” Bloomberg reports. In China, President Xi Jinping has committed to net-zero emissions by 2060.

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It will be a long fight.

Courts Close In On Gig Economy Firms Globally (G.)

Gig economy companies, including Uber and Deliveroo, have faced at least 40 major legal challenges around the world as delivery drivers and riders try to improve their rights. The analysis of 39 employment cases, and seven linked cases on matters such as competition law, covers legal action in 20 countries including Australia, Chile, Brazil, South Korea, Canada and across Europe. The cases have been brought by gig economy workers seeking access to basic rights, such as minimum wages and sick pay. Put together by the International Lawyers Assisting Workers Network of more than 600 lawyers from at least 70 countries, the report highlights a string of court rulings in favour of drivers including in Italy, where authorities have fined Uber Eats, Glovo, Just Eat, and Deliveroo €733m (£628m) for misclassifying 60,000 couriers. That case is being appealed against.

A court in Spain ruled last year that drivers for food delivery firm Glovo were employees and the government in Madrid has since announced legislation confirming delivery riders’ status as salaried staff. In South Korea, a driver working via the Tada van hailing app was also ruled to be an employee. Last month, the UK supreme court dismissed Uber’s appeal against a landmark employment tribunal ruling that its drivers should be classed as workers with access to the minimum wage and paid holidays. On Tuesday night, Uber announced it will guarantee its 70,000 UK drivers a minimum hourly wage, holiday pay and pensions, in a dramatic u-turn which could put pressure on other gig economy firms to change tack.


Jeff Vogt, at the Washington DC based Solidarity Center workers rights group, said there was a clear trend towards recognising improved rights and employment status for those working for gig economy companies dealing with food delivery and taxi hire. “The courts are closing in on them,” he said. However, the report also warns that not all claims are successful and states must act to enforce the regulations as gig economy firms use their considerable resources to defend their practices. Tactics include contracts with mandatory arbitration clauses, which fend off legal action by forcing those with a grievance to pay costly administration and filing fees in the preliminary stages. This has proved a particular problem in the US.

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”..we have the technology to make hyperinflation safe, comfortable, convenient and fun for the whole family!”

Getting Hyperinflation Right (Dmitry Orlov)

The sheer mechanics of hyperinflation—of printing and issuing ever more notes, repeatedly exchanging older, increasingly worthless notes for newer ones, making payments using cartloads and wagonloads of cash—become increasingly burdensome. When it takes an entire suitcase of cash to pay for a pack of cigarettes or a bar of soap, soap and cigarettes themselves become a makeshift form of currency. Hyperinflation is most unpopular with people who insist on storing their savings in the form of cash. In response, they turn to buying up and hoarding other things, causing shortages and further driving up prices. But all of these problems can now be solved because we have the technology to make hyperinflation safe, comfortable, convenient and fun for the whole family!

However, this requires a change in mindset and a different approach to money. To start with, we need to recognize that money is not a physical quantity. It is dimensionless because it can only be measured relative to other currencies. Unlike any physical quantity, it is measured with infinite precision; any physical measurement, be it in kilograms, cubic meters or kilowatt-hours, has to have error bars on it to be meaningful, while monetary quantities, no matter how large, are precise down to the last penny. It is circularly defined: money derives its value from things that can be purchased with it, and these things in turn derive their price from the value of money.


Although money can be given a physical representation in the form of coins or paper currency, its essential nature is ephemeral, nonphysical and intangible. In essence, money only exists as pure thought in the minds of people who are involved in its exchange. Its physical embodiments are just theatrical props. Its reality is conceptual, similar to that of the irrational number π, which can also be given a physical representation—as, say, a one-meter-diameter circle carved in stone that has a circumference of π meters—but that would be pointless. Just as π is ubiquitous in mathematics, money is ubiquitous in economics.

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