Nov 022022
 


Balthus Girl at a window 1957

 

Pentagon Confirms US Boots Are On The Ground In Ukraine (ZH)
Outrage Ensues After The Atlantic Suggests ‘Amnesty’ For Pandemic Authoritarians (ZH)
We Need Covid Accountability, Not Amnesty (QTR)
New World Order: The West Will Have To Live Within Its Means (Karaganov)
Zelensky ‘Nullified’ Grain Shipping Deal – Russian Duma Speaker (RT)
There Will Be No Deal – Zelensky Broke The Rules! (Milacic)
Russia Offers Alternative To Ukraine ‘Grain Deal’ (RT)
Russia Demands Black Sea Corridor Guarantees From Ukraine (RT)
Russia Responds To Kiev’s Nuclear Plant ‘Hypocrisy’ (RT)
Blue Checkers Revolt Over Musk’s Threatened Monthly Charge (Turley)
UK Households Face ‘Very, Very Hard’ Winter – National Grid (RT)
Cockamamie Story (Kunstler)
The Tale of Two Greedy Landlords (Catte Black)
Censorship and Suppression of Covid-19 Heterodoxy (Springer)
Fatal Flaw: 42% False Discovery Rate for SARS-CoV-2 nonQ-RT-PCR Test (PR)

 

 

 

 

 

 

GW

 

 

 

 

 

 

“..this is the start of perhaps inevitable ‘mission creep’..”

Pentagon Confirms US Boots Are On The Ground In Ukraine (ZH)

Two bombshell reports by the Associated Press and Washington Post Monday and Tuesday have confirmed that the United States has boots on the ground in the Ukraine conflict. Crucially, these troops are performing tasks separate from mere embassy security. The American troops are said to be performing “inspections” of US weapon caches after last week the State Department and Pentagon unveiled a new plan to track US-supplied weapons in efforts to implement accountability for the billions of dollars worth of arms and ammunition transferred to Ukrainian forces since near the start of the war eight months ago.

“A small number of U.S. military forces inside Ukraine have recently begun doing onsite inspections to ensure that Ukrainian troops are properly accounting for the Western-provided weapons they receive, a senior U.S. defense official told Pentagon reporters Monday,” the AP/WaPo reporting revealed. A Pentagon briefing confirmed this “small” contingency of troops has been advised to not do inspections “close” to the front lines of fighting: The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to provide a military update, would not say where the inspections are taking place or how close to the battlefronts the U.S. troops are getting. The official said U.S. personnel can’t do inspections “close to the front lines,” but said they are going where security conditions allow.

There have already been “several inspections” overseen by U.S. Defense attache and a US Office of Defense Cooperation team based out of the Ukrainian capital. The report underscores that “U.S. President Joe Biden has ruled out any combat role for U.S. forces inside Ukraine.” However, what’s clear is that despite the White House’s ruling out of “combat” troops, this is the start of perhaps inevitable ‘mission creep’ – as has been seen in other conflict zones (such as Syria). If US troops are doing inspections of Ukrainian arms and ammo, and presumably Russia is currently targeting any and all Ukrainian military bases, this puts American troops and assets in Russia’s crosshairs, greatly increasing the possibility that the US and Russia could stumble into a direct shooting war.

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“Hey I’m sorry we scared the hell out of you & lied for years & persecuted & censored anyone who disagreed but there was an election going on & we really wanted to beat Donald Trump so it was important to radically politicize the science even if it destroyed your children’s lives.”

Outrage Ensues After The Atlantic Suggests ‘Amnesty’ For Pandemic Authoritarians (ZH)

The Atlantic has come under fire for suggesting that all the terrible pandemic-era decisions over lockdowns, school closures, masking, and punishing an entire class of people who questioned the efficacy and wisdom of taking a rushed, experimental vaccine – for a virus with a 99% survival rate in most, should all be water under the bridge. “We need to forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about COVID,” writes Brown Professor Emily Oster – a huge lockdown proponent, who now pleads from mercy from the once-shunned. “Let’s acknowledge that we made complicated choices in the face of deep uncertainty, and then try to work together to build back and move forward,” she continues. Except, they weren’t “in the dark” about Covid.


There were numerous sources pointing out the actual science that ran contrary to the mandate claims, and they were deliberately silenced by a vast media campaign. Evidence suggests that media platforms worked in tandem with Big Tech, the CDC and the Biden Administration. It was not a simple matter of overreaction, there was collusion to remove all counter-information. Nice try, Emily. As the Daily Sceptic’s Michael P. Senger puts it: “There’s a lot wrong here. First, no, you don’t get to advocate policies that do extraordinary harm to others, against their wishes, then say, “We didn’t know any better at the time!” Ignorance doesn’t work as an excuse when the policies involved abrogating your fellow citizens’ rights under an indefinite state of emergency, while censoring and cancelling those who weren’t as ignorant. The inevitable result would be a society in which ignorance and obedience to the opinion of the mob would be the only safe position.”

And look at that ratio: In one epic Twitter thread, Claremont Institute Senior Fellow Matthew J. Peterson (@docMJP) excoriates Oster’s entire premise; “Hey—sorry you lost your job b/c of the vax that doesn’t work and your grandmother died alone and you couldn’t have a funeral and your brother’s business was needlessly destroyed and your kids have weird heart problems—but let’s just admit we were all wrong and call a truce, eh? It’s too bad we shut the entire economy down & took on tyrannical powers that have never been used before in this country—looking back, you should have been able to go to church and use public parks while we let people riot in the streets—but it was a confusing time for everyone.

Hey I’m sorry we scared the hell out of you & lied for years & persecuted & censored anyone who disagreed but there was an election going on & we really wanted to beat Donald Trump so it was important to radically politicize the science even if it destroyed your children’s lives. OK, yes we said unvaccinated people should die & not get healthcare while never questioning Big Pharma once but we are compassionate people which is why even though we shut down the entire economy we also bankrupted the nation & caused inflation. You’re welcome! Let’s be friends.”As QTR’s Fringe Finance notes, Oster’s plea for the decency that her ilk failed to offer up to most Americans during the throws of the pandemic comes at a point where the Covid narrative has been all but lost by the Democrats and the mainstream media.

There have been several recent large wins for the unvaccinated who had the constitution and backbone to stand up for themselves throughout a year of being constantly berated and ferociously scorned as second class citizens.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1587148452055629826

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Starting with Emily Oster and the Atlantic..

We Need Covid Accountability, Not Amnesty (QTR)

And now Emily Oster has the gall to write a ho-hum style piece calling for “amnesty” with nary a worthy apology to be seen? Don’t get me wrong, it’s nice to see any common sense making its way through the cracks. I support the apologies to the unvaccinated and the court rulings because I think they are just. I haven’t been gloating about them because I’m over the topic in general and because I’m simply ready to move on and not dwell on it. But the same hubris and arrogance that caused all of this poor decision-making to begin with is still dripping off of The Atlantic’s latest “mea culpa”, which makes an attempt to rewrite history and trivializes the trauma many endured. “Some of these choices turned out better than others,” the article casually writes at one point.

At another point, like an alcoholic who can’t stop himself from taking another swig from the bottle, it begrudgingly has to make a perfunctory and obligatory reference to “misinformation”: We have to put these fights aside and declare a pandemic amnesty. We can leave out the willful purveyors of actual misinformation while forgiving the hard calls that people had no choice but to make with imperfect knowledge. Instead of an apology, we are left with this kumbaya moment: The standard saying is that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. But dwelling on the mistakes of history can lead to a repetitive doom loop as well. Let’s acknowledge that we made complicated choices in the face of deep uncertainty, and then try to work together to build back and move forward.


The Atlantic article can lead me to only one conclusion: many of the left simply don’t know how to apologize. After all, it wasn’t enough to tell honest people that they were wrong during the course of the pandemic for decisions that turned out to be right, The Atlantic now wants to tell them they’re wrong again if they don’t forgive those who made their lives hell over the last two years. A little tip for The Atlantic: next time, write a piece focused on apologizing instead of issuing orders about exactly how, when and why people should be forgiving you. In case you didn’t notice, it was trying to micromanage other peoples’ lives that got you in this mess in the first place. Talk to us when you offer up accountability, not amnesty.

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Professor Sergey Karaganov, honorary chairman of Russia’s Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, and academic supervisor at the School of International Economics and Foreign Affairs Higher School of Economics (HSE) in Moscow

New World Order: The West Will Have To Live Within Its Means (Karaganov)

We are living in a dangerous period, on the brink of a full-fledged third world war that could end humanity’s existence. But if Russia wins, which is more than likely, and the hostilities do not escalate into a full-blown nuclear conflict, we should not look at the coming decades as a time of dangerous chaos (as most in the West are saying). We have been living in this period for a long time. It will be, if we choose a world of constructive creation and the attainment of freedom, justice and dignity by peoples and nations. The old system of institutions and regimes has already collapsed (freedom of trade and respect for private property). Meanwhile, institutions like the WTO, the World Bank the IMF, the OSCE and the EU are, I am afraid, reaching their last years.

New bodies are beginning to emerge to which the future belongs. They are the SCO, ASEAN+, the Organisation of African Unity and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP). The Asian Development Bank is already lending many times more than the World Bank. Not all new institutions will survive, and let us hope that a number of them will survive, especially in the UN system, which urgently needs reform to primarily represent the Global Majority in the secretariat, rather than the West. The main thing is to prevent a losing West from stalling history or derailing it through a world war. Not only Global Majority countries, but Western countries can live quite happily in this world.

The West will simply lose the opportunity to plunder the rest of the planet and it will have to shrink a bit. They will have to live within their means. I am afraid that this new world taking shape now will be created beyond my intellectual or physical life. But my young colleagues and certainly their children will see it. But this beautiful vision has to be fought for, first of all by preventing a third world war, because of the attempted revenge of the West. Again, it was in Europe that the first two world wars were unleashed. Russia is now fighting, among other things, to ensure that the prerequisites for a third are not ripe. But conflicts will occur in an era of rapid change. So the struggle for peace should be one of the main themes of our intellectual community and the world at large.

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Wonder how this will end.

Zelensky ‘Nullified’ Grain Shipping Deal – Russian Duma Speaker (RT)

Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky has rendered the internationally brokered grain shipping agreement void by using the safe passage in the Black Sea to strike Russian warships, Vyacheslav Volodin, the speaker of the State Duma, the lower house of Russia’s parliament, said. Moscow claims that Kiev dispatched attack drones via the route designated for grain vessels. “The resumption of the grain deal is impossible as long as the safe corridor is being used for terrorist attacks,” Volodin wrote on his Telegram channel on Tuesday. “With his actions, Zelensky has nullified all of the agreements that were brokered by Türkiye and the UN. ”The senior legislator said the use of the safe corridor for the attack on Russia’s Black Sea Fleet is “unacceptable” and that the grain agreement “cannot exist on the old terms.”

Under the deal struck in July, the sides agreed to unblock the export of grain and other agricultural products from Ukrainian ports. Ukraine, a major producer, is among the vital suppliers of wheat, corn, and barley. On Saturday, Moscow accused Kiev of sending aerial and seaborne drones to strike warships in the city of Sevastopol in Crimea, which hosts a naval base. A minesweeper was damaged in the raid, according to the Russian Defense Ministry. The ministry claimed that the drones moved along the corridor set up for grain ships, and that one device may have been launched from a civilian vessel hired to transport grain. Moscow also said that a British Navy unit masterminded the attack. London has dismissed the accusation. Russia subsequently announced the closure of the corridor on Monday.

Zelensky accused Russia of blackmail and “deliberately exacerbating the food crisis.” Speaking to reporters on Monday, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that only 3-5% of grain that had been shipped through the safe corridor went to poorer countries. The UN, however, reported last month that 27% of the ships went to “low and lower-middle income countries” such as Egypt, Kenya, and Bangladesh. It said that 26% went to “upper-middle income countries” such as Türkiye and China, while 47% went to “high-income”nations such as Spain and Italy.

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“Western insurance companies, despite official permission, refused to insure cargoes of food and fertilizers from Russian ports under various pretexts.”

There Will Be No Deal – Zelensky Broke The Rules! (Milacic)

Just a few hours after the attack by sea “drones” on the ships of the Black Sea Fleet of the Russian Federation in the early morning of October 29, the Russian Foreign Ministry announced the suspension of the “grain deal” – an agreement that had been in force since July 22 of this year. The fact that Russian military claims that naval drones have passed through the territory included in the “grain deal”, where there is no Russian fleet – it only made that decision stronger! The “grain deal” allowed Kyiv to freely export grain from the Black Sea ports under the auspices of the UN, in exchange for some easing of sanctions against Russian exports of grain and fertilizers. Formally, this agreement was strictly humanitarian and its sole purpose was to provide grain to the countries of Africa and Southeast Asia, dependent on food imports.

During the passage of the Bosporus, ships traveling from Ukraine and back were examined by UN inspectors to exclude the possible import and export of prohibited goods. But the Kremlin did not receive its benefit from the deal … Ukraine, having unblocked the export of grain by sea, at the same time was able to unload land communications and receive a significant income from the export of agricultural products. In addition, its Western partners were once again able to resell Ukrainian grain, which, with the outbreak of hostilities in Ukraine, rose significantly in price. But Russia continued to face difficulties in securing the export of its grain. Western insurance companies, despite official permission, refused to insure cargoes of food and fertilizers from Russian ports under various pretexts.

At the same time, information was increasingly appearing in the media that American and European authorities were putting significant pressure on insurers. Naturally, Moscow was more and more dissatisfied with the terms of the deal concluded before November 19 and doubted the possibility of its extension. The attack on Sevastopol gave the Kremlin a great trump card – the deal was instantly suspended, although the Russian fleet did not suffer significant damage. The military response of Russia also followed very quickly, the communications center and the base of the special forces of the Ukrainian fleet in Ochakiv were destroyed. However, both the attack on the Russian base and the actual breach of the deal with Russian exports are just the tip of the iceberg.

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“Currently, Russia is “not ready to say” what conditions would have to be met for it to resume its participation in the deal.”

Russia Offers Alternative To Ukraine ‘Grain Deal’ (RT)

Russia is ready to provide poorer grain-importing nations with supplies from its own stocks to replace Ukrainian exports, Kremlin Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov told journalists on Monday. Earlier, Russia suspended its participation in the so-called “grain deal” with Ukraine following an attack on its navy base in Sevastopol. “We can guarantee the Russian side’s readiness to compensate for the missing [grain export] volumes from its own stocks,” Peskov said. Earlier, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov said Moscow would continue to support African nations despite halting its compliance with the pact. The Kremlin spokesman also said only a tiny portion of all Ukrainian agricultural products exported under the deal were destined for the poorest nations anyway, while “not-so-poor nations located in Europe got the rest.”

Moscow also believes that the grain deal between Russia and Ukraine, which was reached in Istanbul with UN and Turkish mediation, is now in limbo for security reasons. “The deal could hardly be implemented when Russia says it cannot guarantee maritime security in the designated waters” of the Black Sea, Peskov said, adding that the implementation of the agreement is now “much more risky, dangerous and not guaranteed.” The Kremlin has not said the deal is dead altogether, however. Moscow is “still in contact” with other parties, including the UN and Türkiye, Peskov said. Currently, Russia is “not ready to say” what conditions would have to be met for it to resume its participation in the deal.

Under the agreement reached in July, Russia provided a secure “grain corridor” through the Black Sea waters to facilitate the exportation of Ukrainian agricultural products. The agreement was praised as critical for easing the global food crisis and helping the world’s poorest nations to avoid starvation. Last week’s decision by Russia to halt its compliance with the deal caused a grain price surge. Moscow suspended its participation in the deal last week after a massive drone attack on its naval base in the Crimean port city of Sevastopol. According to the Russian Defense Ministry, the naval drones launched as part of the attack used the grain corridor to reach their targets and one of them may even have been launched from a civilian vessel supposedly chartered to ship Ukrainian grain.

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“Moscow is now ready to supply African nations with “large volumes” of grain and fertilizers out of its own stocks for free..”

Russia Demands Black Sea Corridor Guarantees From Ukraine (RT)

Kiev should provide “real guarantees” that it would not use the Black Sea corridor created as part of an Istanbul grain deal in its military activities, Russian President Vladimir Putin told Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in a phone conversation on Tuesday. The two were discussing the circumstances that could convince Moscow to return to its own commitments under the agreement. Russia indefinitely suspended its participation in the deal last week following a massive drone attack on its naval base in the Crimean port city of Sevastopol. Some of the naval drones launched by Kiev allegedly used the Black Sea grain corridor’s security zone to close in on their targets, according to the Russian military.

“It is necessary to conduct a detailed investigation of … this incident, as well as to get real guarantees from Kiev that it would rigorously abide by the Istanbul agreements, including the non-use of the humanitarian corridor for military purposes,” the Russian president said, according to the Kremlin’s press release. Russia would only consider re-opening this corridor if that happened, Putin added. He also pointed out that the part of the deal that involved lifting restrictions on Russia’s own agricultural and fertilizer exports had never been implemented. The corridor was touted as a way to secure food supplies to the neediest nations as a matter of priority. But this goal has not been reached in the three months since the agreement was established, Putin noted. “Moscow is now ready to supply African nations with “large volumes” of grain and fertilizers out of its own stocks for free, the president confirmed.

The Russian military closed the Black Sea grain corridor on Monday, arguing that its security could not be guaranteed while Kiev used it for military purposes. Moscow had previously blamed Ukraine and UK Navy specialists for the attack on Sevastopol. London has dismissed the accusation. The Russian Defense Ministry said that the corridor would stay closed at least until all the circumstances of the attack were established. Russia has also repeatedly said that it has not left the deal entirely but only suspended its own commitments under the agreement. In the wake of Moscow’s decision, the UN insisted that “food must flow” regardless of the circumstances. Civilian vessels “can never be a military target or held hostage,” the UN coordinator for the Black Sea grain initiative, Amir Abdulla, said.

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“Ukrainian troops are shelling the region almost on a daily basis, threatening the lives and safety of people, but they keep silent about it, while expressing concerns about the fish..”

Russia Responds To Kiev’s Nuclear Plant ‘Hypocrisy’ (RT)

Kiev’s accusations that Moscow is responsible for an alleged environmental disaster at the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant sound hypocritical, given that Ukraine has been constantly targeting the facility, Vladimir Rogov, a member of the administration of Russia’s Zaporozhye Region, said on Tuesday. His statement comes after the Ukrainian state-owned operator, Energoatom, claimed that Russian actions had led to a massive die-off of fish in the facility’s cooling pond.Rogov denounced Kiev’s accusations as the “wildest hypocrisy that knows no bounds.” “Ukrainian troops are shelling the region almost on a daily basis, threatening the lives and safety of people, but they keep silent about it, while expressing concerns about the fish,” he told RIA Novosti.

Moreover, he noted that the plant’s energy units had been shut down precisely because Kiev’s forces have been constantly targeting the area around the facility. On Monday, Ukraine’s Energoatom said that the shutdown of the plant’s energy units had resulted in a decrease in the water temperature in the cooling pond, which led to “mass fish death.” The fish had been “performing a sanitary function” by destroying the green algae and cleaning the cooling tubes of the turbine condenser, it said. However, Ukraine had gone to great lengths to paralyze the plant’s operations and prevent it from coming online again, according to Rogov.

The Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant, which is Europe’s largest, has been under Russian control since March. Last month, Russian President Vladimir Putin officially placed the facility under Moscow’s management. The Russian leader signed the relevant order as Moscow was finalizing the accession of Zaporozhye and Kherson Regions, as well as the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, to Russia following referendums that overwhelmingly supported the move. Russia has on numerous occasions accused Ukraine of shelling the Zaporozhye facility, warning that the attacks could lead to a nuclear disaster. Kiev has denied the allegations, blaming Russia for the shelling instead.

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“Musk is looking for ways to reduce the dependency on advertisers and many of us would support that effort.”

Blue Checkers Revolt Over Musk’s Threatened Monthly Charge (Turley)

As a regular MSNBC pundit is calling for Elon Musk to be stripped of his citizenship for trying to reintroduce free speech protections to Twitter, the new owner is outraging blue checkers by suggesting a monthly charge for verified users. Figures like CNBC’s Jim Cramer declared: “I’m not paying them anything. They should pay me.” Some of us would be willing to pay an added monthly fee to support a true free speech alternative on social media if Musk keeps his word. Of course, for full disclosure, I would first have to get a blue check to get charged for a blue check. I have been barred from being verified for years by Twitter despite being a columnist for newspapers like USA Today and the Hill as well as a legal analyst for CBS, NBC, BBC, and now Fox over the last two decades.

I have been ranked in the top five law professors on Twitter, but I was still turned me down over a dozen times under multiple categories. I have previously joked about the bar on verification and I am not sure how much the blue check honestly does for individuals. Indeed, there are some advantages. I can presumably deny prior statements since they were made by an entirely unverified person using my name for over a decade. Yet, as a long-time critic of Twitter’s censorship system, there has been a long curiosity over the denial. Musk has indicated that he is now looking into such concerns and there may be greater transparency in the weeks to come. However, Musk is looking for ways to reduce the dependency on advertisers and many of us would support that effort.

Recently, General Motors suspended advertising on Twitter until it can evaluate the implications of Musk’s new policies. Some of us immediately criticized the action by GM over the move. The company had no problem with supporting Twitter when it was running one of the largest censorship systems in history — or supporting TikTok (which is Chinese owned and has been denounced for state control and access to data). Twitter has been denounced for years for its bias against conservative and dissenting voices, including presumably many GM customers on the right. None of that was a concern for GM but the pledge to restore free speech to Twitter warrants a suspension.

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“..rolling blackouts could happen during “those deepest darkest evenings in January and February..”

UK Households Face ‘Very, Very Hard’ Winter – National Grid (RT)

Many British households will struggle to pay energy bills this winter that could be double what they are accustomed to despite a government price cap, the National Grid’s CEO, John Pettigrew, has warned. In an interview with the Financial Times on Tuesday, he said he was “under no illusions” and that Brits would find the upcoming winter “financially very, very hard.” “Even with the [taxpayer-funded] price cap this is a doubling-up of what people are used to paying for their energy bills,” Pettigrew said, adding: “Therefore, inevitably there are going to be people who are going to struggle.” The British government has capped the unit cost of energy until April, meaning that an average household would pay about £2,500 ($2,885) over a year on average.

But last winter the equivalent amount was £1,277 ($1,474). Each household will also receive a £400 rebate on utility bills with additional means-tested payments through Social Security benefits. However, that will still be unable to make up the difference given the soaring energy prices. Pettigrew said the National Grid was working on a number of emergency plans to protect the UK against a shortfall of energy from Europe. Earlier, the grid operator’s boss warned that the country could face power cuts on “really cold” evenings this winter due to Europe’s continuing energy squeeze. He said that rolling blackouts could happen during “those deepest darkest evenings in January and February,” likely between 4pm to 7pm.


Such measures were “unlikely,” according to Pettigrew, who warned, however, that there were potential scenarios where Britain’s power generators would fail to secure sufficient supplies from Europe. Normally, during the coldest months and extreme weather events, the UK imports gas and electricity from continental Europe for its gas-fired power plants. However, this year European countries are themselves facing a severe energy crisis exacerbated by anti-Russian sanctions and a sharp decrease in Russian energy supplies.

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Top spot for craziest story.

Cockamamie Story (Kunstler)

So far, police have not disclosed how DePape journeyed from Berkeley to Pacific Heights at 2:00 o’clock in the morning, about fourteen miles. Did he walk from Berkeley across the Bay Bridge and then halfway across town? Mr. DePape is apparently also known to the police as a gay hustler, that is, a person who sells sex for money. Unless I’m mistaken, the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) has a detective department — experienced men and women who go around the city seeking clues, evidence, and testimony in order to make sense of perplexing crimes — and then solve them! Shall we assume they are on-the-job? Now, Paul Pelosi, 82, who made a $300-million fortune running a car service (also shrewd investments in real estate and the stock market), has been in quite a bit of trouble this year.

On May 28, 2022, he was arrested for Driving Under the Influence (DUI) in Napa (near a vineyard estate he owns with Nancy) when his 2021 Porsche crashed into a 2014 Jeep driven by one “John Doe” (as the police identified him). KGO-TV, ABC’s affiliate in the San Francisco area, said that there was a second person in the Porsche with Pelosi at the time of the accident. He has never been identified. In August, Mr. Pelosi was sentenced to five days in jail, a fine of roughly $7,000, a three-month drinking-and-driving course, eight hours of public service, and having an “interlock” device installed on his car that would require him to blow into an alcohol sensor before the engine can ignite. By any chance, were the Napa Police or the County Court contacted in the matter at some point by the US Capitol Police or the FBI? We may never know.

If David DePape didn’t walk fourteen miles from Berkeley to Pacific Heights, or take a cab (expensive), how did he get there? Here’s a theory: he rode the BART subway from Berkeley to the Church Street and Mission station in the city, a five-minute walk to the Castro, San Francisco’s fabled gay district. Sometime before 2:00 a.m. closing time, he met up in a bar there with Paul Pelosi, who drove DePape to the Pelosi house in a car not equipped with an interlock device. That is to say, David DePape was let into the house by Mr. Pelosi. The police and the news media have theorized that DePape broke into the place by smashing a glass door in back. Uh-huh…. Ask yourself: would there not be an alarm system at least on all the ground floor windows and doors in the house? Would there not be security cameras on the back side of the house — the side that burglars might prefer, if they could get over the wall?

Would the Speaker of the House, with a discretionary budget on top of a $300-million fortune, and in a time of epic political rancor, not have a team of security guards in place at her private home? Initial news media chatter had both DePape and Paul Pelosi dressed in their underwear, struggling over a hammer which turned out to belong to Mr. Pelosi. Not until the police entered the house did DePape wrest the hammer from Mr. Pelosi and commence to brain him with it. What does the arrest report actually say about the two men’s state-of-dress? It is not public information. How and why were the police just watching until DePape assaulted Mr. Pelosi — who was hospitalized afterward and had surgery on his cracked skull? (Uh, how did a blow that literally broke his skull not kill the elderly Mr. Pelosi?)

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“what would we do without the Banker to guide us!?”

The Tale of Two Greedy Landlords (Catte Black)

Once upon a time in a land far away and in a time of plenty there were two rich and prosperous Landlords who each owned large and spacious adjoining buildings wherein many people lived. The apartments were warm and comfortable and every week there was a market where grain was brought from Landlord B’s land and fruit and meat and vegetables from Landlord A’s. While wood from Landlord B’s copses kept the Communal Woodpile stocked with seasoned logs. Everyone was happy. The Landlords were both friends with a Banker. The Banker was richer than both the Landlords combined and in fact he owned their houses and their land and watched carefully what they did with them. And one day he invited them to a sumptuous dinner at his house and said “things could be better”.

“How could things be better, friend Banker?” asked Landlord B, “there is food in our granaries and money in our coffers, and everyone is happy”. “Your people are charged too little for too much luxury. They expect fuel for their stoves and food in their markets, and are never grateful enough to you for your kindness.” The two Landlords looked at each other and realized this might be true, for they rarely disagreed with the Banker. “Yes,” said Landlord A, sadly shaking his head, “our people are feckless children that never give enough thanks for our largesse, but alas, what can we do?”. “They need to be taught their place”, the Banker said. “They need to pay a proper price for what you provide and learn to be grateful. You should triple the price of food from your farms and fuel from the Communal Wood Pile”.

The two Landlords looked at each other in apprehension. They were greedy and liked the sound of this very much, but they were also cowards. “But”, said Landlord B, “but if we do that they may just become annoyed and might refuse to pay or break our windows or our bones and then we will be worse off not better!” This was true. And caused the Landlords to shake their heads regretfully. But the Banker was cleverer than either of them. He merely smiled. “They are children”, he said, “and children require stories in order to learn about life’s harsh truths. So, you will tell them a story”. The two Landlords looked at him, but did not understand.

“You will tell them there is a new and terrible plague which has broken the Supply Chain and consequently fuel and food are three times more expensive!” “But…but there is no new and terrible plague”, stammered Landlord A. “Of course there is”, smiled the Banker, “why else would hundreds of people be dying?” “But hundreds of people are not dying”, stammered Landlord B. “Of course they are,” smiled the Banker, “how could they not when there is a new and terrible plague?” They looked at him for a long time before gradual understanding dawned, and their puzzled frowns turned to smiles. “Of course!” they said in unison, “what would we do without the Banker to guide us!?”

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Pierre Kory, MD MPA @PierreKory:

A high quality Sociology journal finally publishes the truth about what happened in Medical Science during Covid.
Phenomenal paper.
Cue censorship by mass media and social media.
Hope Chief Twit starts making changes fast.

Censorship and Suppression of Covid-19 Heterodoxy (Springer)

Abstract: The emergence of COVID-19 has led to numerous controversies over COVID-related knowledge and policy. To counter the perceived threat from doctors and scientists who challenge the official position of governmental and intergovernmental health authorities, some supporters of this orthodoxy have moved to censor those who promote dissenting views. The aim of the present study is to explore the experiences and responses of highly accomplished doctors and research scientists from different countries who have been targets of suppression and/or censorship following their publications and statements in relation to COVID-19 that challenge official views.


Our findings point to the central role played by media organizations, and especially by information technology companies, in attempting to stifle debate over COVID-19 policy and measures. In the effort to silence alternative voices, widespread use was made not only of censorship, but of tactics of suppression that damaged the reputations and careers of dissenting doctors and scientists, regardless of their academic or medical status and regardless of their stature prior to expressing a contrary position. In place of open and fair discussion, censorship and suppression of scientific dissent has deleterious and far-reaching implications for medicine, science, and public health.

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Ouch.

Fatal Flaw: 42% False Discovery Rate for SARS-CoV-2 nonQ-RT-PCR Test (PR)

We have just published a new study that shows that nonQ-RT-PCR (non-quantitative RT-PCR testing as used to diagnose COVID-19 from 2020 to the present day suffers a flaw that ultimately draws into question all of what has been reported on COVID-19 by official channels, including the results of COVID-19. Specifically, assuming a 5% prevalence rate, the high false discovery rate (42%) of the use of nonQ-RT-PCR means


1. For every 50 true positives out of 1,000, a total of 86 people with or without SARS-CoV-2 infection or residual fragments will be reported. Of these, 36 of these will be false positives.
2. For every 50 true positives, 86 people without SARS-CoV-2 infection or residual fragments will be have to be isolated/quarantined. Of these, 36 will not be infected.
3. For every 50 true positives that are tested and found positive in-hospital, 86 people with or without SARS-CoV-2 infection or residual fragments will be told that they “have COVID-19”. If the 36 false positive patients are hospitalized with other COVID-19 patients, they will likely then contract a SARS-CoV-2 infection.
4. The number of “cases” via positive PCR has been overstated by a factor of 72% (the original post read “80:1” assuming a prevalence of 5%).
5. This is true for generic case reporting up until May 2021 when CDC decided to reduce the PCR cycle threshold value (Ct) for the vaccinated to less than 27, leaving the unvaccinated rate biased by high false discovery rate of arbitrarily high Ct, biasing all reported rates in these two groups favoring cases in the unvaccinated from that point on.
6. This +72% bias is true in any clinical trial or any study that used arbitrarily high Ct values, INCLUDING THE VACCINE STUDIES. As a direct result of this fatal flaw, combined with CDC’s gaff “PCR+ = COVID-19″? There are no credible COVID-19 vaccine trial data.

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Rogan list

 

 

 

 

Malone

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

Oct 182022
 


Vincent van Gogh Self-portrait with dark felt hat at the easel 1886

 

A War Russia Set To Win (Bhadrakumar)
Borrell Tells EU Members ‘Don’t Worry About Money’ For Ukraine (RT)
Ukraine Can Retake Crimea By Next Summer, Former Top US Commander Says (ZH)
Turkish Hub May Solve Nord Stream Problems – Gazprom (RT)
US Poised For Slowdown In High-end Munitions Deliveries To Ukraine (Fox)
Musk Compares Crimea To Pearl Harbor
US To See Winter Spike In Natural Gas Prices (RT)
Ghislaine Maxwell Breaks Silence On ‘Special Friendship’ With Bill Clinton (CB)
American Inquisition (Jim Kunstler)
Devastating Report On PCR Test Covered Up (DAK)
Boston University Makes New Covid Strain With 80% Kill Rate (PM)
Cancer Is a Man-Made Disease – Controversial Study (LS)
Biden Export Controls ‘Wreaking Havoc’ On China’s Chip Industry (ZH)
Will Comey and Mueller Be Prosecuted for Lies John Durham Uncovered? (ET)
Why the Jan 6 Committee’s Timing is both Terrible and Telling (Turley)
The Dark Side of Nuclear Fusion (Pepi Cima)

 

 

Fmr. US ambassador to the Soviet Union, Jack Matlock

 

 

 

 

Oborne
https://twitter.com/i/status/1581943171906519041

 

 

 

 

Bourla
https://twitter.com/i/status/1581650848223924225

 

 

 

 

“Contracted price for long-term Russian supply for Germany used to be about $280 per 1,000 cubic metres as against the current market price hovering around $2,000.”

“Russians will settle for nothing less than the ouster of the Zelenskyy regime.”

A War Russia Set To Win (Bhadrakumar)

Two massive terrorist strikes misfired spectacularly and a terrible beauty is born in the Ukraine war. These two carefully planned attacks in quick succession — on Nord Stream gas pipelines and Crimean Bridge — were intended as a knockout blow to Russia. According to President Vladimir Putin, people ‘who want to finally sever ties between Russia and the EU, weaken Europe’ are behind the Nord Stream blasts. He named the US, Ukraine and Poland as ‘beneficiaries’. India should expect the defeat of the US and NATO, which completes the transition to a multipolar world order. Last Wednesday, Russia’s domestic intelligence service FSB identified Ukraine’s military intelligence chief, Kyrylo Budanov, as the mastermind behind the Crimean attack.

The New York Times and Washington Post also pointed fingers at Kiev, quoting ‘sources’. While Nord Stream-1 has been crippled, one of the strings of Nord Stream-2 remains intact. Putin said last week that the pipeline could be restored and Russia could deliver about 27 billion cubic metres of gas. ‘The ball is on the side of the European Union, if they want — let’s turn on the tap,’ he said. But mum’s the word from Brussels. It is a profoundly embarrassing moment for the EU. The triumphalism has vanished as Europe is threatened by years of recession caused by the blowback from sanctions against Russia, where the US insisted on the cut off of energy ties with Moscow.

The EU has now become a captive market for Big Oil and is left to buy LNG from the US at the asking price, which is six to seven times higher than the domestic price in the US. (Contracted price for long-term Russian supply for Germany used to be about $280 per 1,000 cubic metres as against the current market price hovering around $2,000.) Plainly put, the Europeans have been nicely played by the Americans. India should take note of the US’ sense of entitlement. Basically, the Biden administration created a contrived energy crisis whose real aim is war profiteering. The Crimean Bridge attack of October 8 is much more serious. Zelenskyy has crossed a red line that Moscow had repeatedly warned him against.

Putin has disclosed that there have also been three terrorist attacks against the Kursk NPP. Russians will settle for nothing less than the ouster of the Zelenskyy regime. Russia’s retaliation against Ukraine’s ‘critical infrastructure’, something Moscow refrained from so far, has serious implications. Since October 9, Russia has begun systematically targeting Ukraine’s power system and railways. Noted Russian military expert Vladislav Shurygin told Izvestia that if this tempo was kept up for a week or so, it ‘will disrupt the entire logistics of the Ukrainian military — system for transporting personnel, military equipment, ammunition, related cargo, as well as the functioning of military and repair plants.’

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Borrell is not a diplomat, even if they call him that. “Diplomat” and “diplomacy” are words that have an actual meaning. He fits none of that.

Borrell Tells EU Members ‘Don’t Worry About Money’ For Ukraine (RT)

The EU has enough funds to back member nations that send weapons to Ukraine’s military, the bloc’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell said on Monday. His statement comes amid reports that the EU cannot fully reimburse states that are supporting Kiev’s forces. Speaking prior to a Foreign Affairs Council meeting in Luxembourg, Borrell said “there is enough money, don’t worry about money” before walking away. Despite the diplomat’s assurances, last week, Politico reported that the European Peace Facility, a €1.5 billion fund meant to assist EU countries in replacing weapons sent to Kiev, was unable to satisfy more than half the requests that it received.

According to the report, this angered Poland, which is one of Ukraine’s main backers in terms of weapon deliveries, with Warsaw presenting a bill for €1.8 billion ($1.75 billion). Poland later backed down, agreeing to 46% compensation, the outlet said. Meanwhile, the US and Ukraine have both been pressing the EU to do more to support Kiev financially – and in a more expedient manner. Last week, in an apparent reference to Brussels, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen urged international donors “to keep stepping up” their aid efforts, stressing that assistance should go in direct cash payments rather than in loans. Speaking to the Washington Post, one former senior treasury official noted that “I know they’re very frustrated” about the slow progress of aid, adding that “US officials want to see Europe deliver far more quickly.”

Earlier this month Oleg Ustenko, a top economic adviser to Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky called the delays in EU economic aid “unacceptable,” citing the “extreme high pressure” the finance ministry is under. Last week Zelensky said that his country needs as much as $38 billion to cover next year’s estimated budget deficit and another $17 billion to start to restore critical infrastructure. Meanwhile, Washington has committed $8.5 billion in economic aid to Ukraine, with another $4.5 billion slated to arrive by the end of the year. However, according to the Washington Post’s sources, the EU has pledged €11 billion ($10.7 billion) but has so far only handed over roughly one third of that, which was in the form of loans.

Green screen

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Any first year psychology student can tell you about projection.

“..they are doing everything they can to prolong the war..”

“..young men who are now being conscripted as cannon fodder..”

Ukraine Can Retake Crimea By Next Summer, Former Top US Commander Says (ZH)

A top US general, now retired, has said he believes that Ukrainian forces can retake the Crimean Peninsula by next summer. Ben Hodges is the former commanding general of the United States Army Europe, and he’s predicting that “Crimea will be free by summer.” He told German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in statements published over the weekend, “When I look at the situation, I see that the situation of the Russians is getting worse with every week.” Hodges went on to explain that Ukraine’s military is likely to keep this momentum given “far superior” logistics and motivation to fight. “They say war is a test of will and logistics – and on both counts Ukraine is far superior,” Hodges told the German publication. “The Russians have to lose [the war]; otherwise, they’ll try again in two or three years.”

He said the Kremlin is betting big on its “one hope” that the West and NATO countries will lose resolve in their military support for Ukraine. The ex-top Army commander for Europe also said he expects to see more sabotage attacks against Russian assets and crucial logistics and resource hubs, such as with the recent bombings against the Kerch Strait Bridge and the Nord Stream pipelines: “So they are doing everything they can to prolong the war and spread fear and insecurity in the West. Any means will do: The young men who are now being conscripted as cannon fodder, as well as attacks on infrastructure in the West,” Hodges told FAZ. “I believe that we will therefore see more such acts of sabotage and attacks, or at least attempts, in the coming weeks and months.”

This comes as there’s been stepped up cross-border shelling and missile attacks against the Russian city of Belgorod, which lies just north of the Ukrainian border not far from the major Ukraine city of Kherson. But despite much of the past month witnessing headline after headline declare rapid advances of Ukrainian forces against the Russians in the east, the Kremlin on Sunday has announced significant new successes: Russia’s defense ministry says its forces repelled efforts by Ukrainian troops to advance in the Donetsk, Kherson and Mykolaiv regions, inflicting what it described as significant losses against the enemy. A ministry spokesperson said that “during fierce fighting, units of the Russian army held the positions they held, inflicting significant losses on the enemy.”

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South Stream.

Turkish Hub May Solve Nord Stream Problems – Gazprom (RT)

Gazprom CEO Alexey Miller said on Sunday that it would be possible to redirect all of the gas supplies halted due to the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines through a Turkish hub. “We are talking about all those volumes that we lost due to acts of international terrorism at the Nord Stream pipelines, so it can be significant volumes,” Miller said in an interview with Russia 1 TV, commenting on the prospects of creating a major energy hub in Türkiye. Miller highlighted that the company’s experience in preparing the South Stream pipeline project could be valuable.


The project, which would have brought an estimated 63 billion cubic meters of Russian gas annually through the Black Sea to Bulgaria and onward to other countries in Europe, ended up being canceled and replaced by TurkStream. “Thus, even if we talk about the technical documentation for the route, everything has been done for South Stream back then,” the CEO said. Last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin proposed building a major gas hub in Türkiye to handle supplies previously directed through the Nord Stream pipelines. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan backed the idea, adding that both leaders had ordered their respective governments to present construction plans as soon as possible.

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Running out. Raytheon is raising its Christmas bonuses.

US Poised For Slowdown In High-end Munitions Deliveries To Ukraine (Fox)

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin signaled this week that the U.S. and its Western allies are having trouble keeping pace with Ukraine’s demand for the advanced weaponry it needs to fend off Russia’s invasion. That signal reflects dwindling supplies for Ukraine and fear in the White House of escalation that could lead to war between the U.S. and Russia. The risk of reduced U.S. stockpiles of high-end munitions has been reported almost since the U.S. began contributing to Ukraine’s defense. Now, nearly eight months since the start of the war, experts interviewed by Fox News Digital say the U.S. is at or very near the end of its capacity to give. They agreed that Austin’s remarks indicate that the initial rush of high-end munitions like HIMAR rocket launchers, Javelin anti-tank missiles, anti-aircraft Stingers and M-777 Howitzers is over.

These sources said there may be two factors at play that are contributing to this reality. One factor is the issue that Austin addressed directly this week – the U.S. is running low on equipment that it can hand over to Ukraine. At a press conference Wednesday, Austin was asked whether the U.S. and other nations are worried about running so low on domestic supplies of critical munitions that they can no longer help Ukraine. Austin dodged the question by stressing that the desire is there to get Ukraine what it needs, but he left unsaid whether Ukraine’s allies can actually deliver. “Well, it certainly is not a question of lack of will,” Austin replied. Austin had just concluded a meeting with officials from dozens of countries about Ukraine’s munitions needs.

As he described that meeting, he again talked about willpower but hinted at strained capacity to provide more for Ukraine, which is using up munitions faster than the world can deliver them. “We will produce and deliver these highly effective capabilities over the course of the coming months — and in some cases years — even as we continue to meet Ukraine’s most pressing self-defense requirements in real time,” Austin said of the most recent commitment to send HIMARS, vehicles, radar systems and other equipment. Mark Cancian is a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic & International Studies who spent seven years working on DOD procurement issues for the Office of Management and Budget. His assessment based on inventory levels, industrial capacity, and information from the Biden administration is that the U.S. has “limited” supplies of HIMARs, Javelins, Stingers and M-777 Howitzers. “There are some areas where we’re basically at the bottom of the barrel,” he told Fox News Digital.

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“From their standpoint losing Crimea is like [the] USA losing Hawaii & Pearl Harbor.”

Musk Compares Crimea To Pearl Harbor

SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk argued on Monday that Russia views Crimea as an integral part of its territory, and that Ukrainian or Western attempts to seize the peninsula could end in nuclear war. While Musk has previously backtracked on pulling his technological support for Ukraine, he has courted controversy for insisting that Crimea is Russia. “If Russia is faced with the choice of losing Crimea or using battlefield nukes, they will choose the latter,” Musk wrote on Twitter. “We’ve already sanctioned/cutoff Russia in every possible way, so what more do they have left to lose?” he asked, in response to a commenter asking him whether he reckoned the Ukraine conflict could devolve into a nuclear war.

Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky has repeatedly stated that he intends to seize control of Crimea, along with the four former regions of Ukraine that recently voted to join the Russian Federation. Crimea overwhelmingly voted to rejoin Russia in 2014, and as such falls under the protection of Moscow’s nuclear arsenal. As President Vladimir Putin has stated, Russia’s nuclear doctrine allows the state to defend itself with “all available means” if its existence is threatened.“Whether one likes it or not, Crimea is absolutely seen as a core part of Russia by Russia,” Musk continued. “Crimea is also of critical national security importance to Russia, as it is their southern navy base. From their standpoint losing Crimea is like [the] USA losing Hawaii & Pearl Harbor.”

Crimea was formally a part of Russia from 1783 until it was gifted to the Ukrainian SSR by Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in 1954. Musk claimed earlier this month that Khrushchev’s decision was a “mistake,” and suggested that Ukraine abandon its claim to the peninsula as part of a future peace deal with Russia.Musk’s peace plan was condemned by Ukrainian officials and their supporters online, with Ukraine’s former ambassador to Germany, Andrey Melnik, telling the billionaire to “f**k off.”Musk then said that he would take Melnik’s advice and stop providing free Starlink internet access to Ukraine, which he said would cost SpaceX $400 million to run throughout 2023.

Elon

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“..the real problem isn’t shortage but pricing.”

This is how the Ukraine is financed.

US To See Winter Spike In Natural Gas Prices (RT)

Natural gas bills are set to increase in all regions of the United States this winter, with surging demand and colder temperatures potentially forcing Americans to pay nearly 30% more over the previous year, according to projections by the US Department of Energy. A forecast published by the department’s Energy Information Agency (EIA) on Monday predicted a significant price hike over the winter months, suggesting some US households will pay an average of $931 for heating during the cold season – a 28% increase over 2021. Nearly half of all American homes are heated with natural gas.The agency went on to note that the Midwest will see the greatest increase in retail gas prices compared to other regions, though the South, West and Northeast will also experience climbing costs.

While comparatively colder temperatures are expected to contribute to the rising prices, the EIA previously said growing “constraints on liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports to Europe from Russia” were creating “strong international demand” for American gas. The resulting boost in US exports has used “almost all” of the country’s available gas capacity and driven prices upward, with the US reporting its lowest natural gas storage levels in three years last April. Efforts by some European states to curtail Russian energy imports in retaliation for the war in Ukraine have also prompted fears that residents will be unable to heat their homes come winter. In comments to the Wall Street Journal on Sunday, Italy’s Energy Minister Roberto Cingolani warned the coming months could be “dominated by fear and uncertainty,” observing that “the real problem isn’t shortage but pricing.”

“Citizens may be unable to pay their bills and businesses risk closing down,” he said, though voiced hopes the continent will “get through the winter fine” barring any “catastrophes” such as exceptionally cold weather or a major spike in energy consumption. EU leaders are expected to meet later this week to discuss a price cap on natural gas for the bloc in an attempt to head off an energy crisis, with the European Commission reportedly planning to create a mechanism allowing it to intervene to force down prices when they surpass a “dynamic” maximum level.

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“..he is another victim, only because of his association with Jeffrey. I understand that he, like others, can no longer consider me as a friend..”

Ghislaine Maxwell Breaks Silence On ‘Special Friendship’ With Bill Clinton (CB)

Ghislaine Maxwell, the imprisoned former girlfriend of the late, disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted sex trafficker, has broken her silence on those who were close friends. Among those friends was former President Bill Clinton whose friendship she described as “special,” she said in an exclusive interview with The Daily Mail. “It was a special friendship, which continued over the years,” she said of her friendship with the former president. “We had lots in common. I feel bad that he is another victim, only because of his association with Jeffrey. I understand that he, like others, can no longer consider me as a friend. “I said in open court in my statement that meeting Jeffrey Epstein was the greatest mistake of my life,” she said.

[..] She also spoke about her former friendship with Prince Andrew. “Yes, I follow what is happening to him,” she said. “He is paying such a price for the association with Jeffrey Epstein. I care about him, and I feel so bad for him. [..] Earlier this month it was reported that Maxwell, may be getting set to talk and that could mean a world of issues for some famous people. “Bill Clinton should be sweating bullets,” reporter Kari Donavan said for The Republic Brief. “It has long been suspected by court watchers that a notorious list of clientele for Epstein, allegedly including Clinton, would eventually emerge, and they may be right, according to investigators and lawyers who have followed the complex case.

“The shocking warning came out of a new documentary that investigated the role of Britain’s Prince Andrew and his close ties as a client of Epstein’s, when the comments were made that there could be further revelations about other clients of Epstein’s because his madame- Ghislaine Maxwell – who was recently convicted for crimes associated with Epstein has until June 2023 to cooperate with prosecutors, in possibly overturning more names,” she said. In a new documentary, “Prince Andrew Banished,’ Florida-based attorney Spencer Kuvin, who represents some of Epstein’s victims, said that Maxwell has until 2023 to cooperate with authorities to get her free from jail quicker.

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“The board accused her of “fraud, deceit, or misrepresentation” in her practice, “conduct that evidences a lack of ability or fitness,” and being “an immediate jeopardy” to public health.”

American Inquisition (Jim Kunstler)

Case in point: the persecution of Meryl Nass, MD, in the state of Maine by its Board of Licensure in Medicine. Dr. Nass is an internal medicine physician and a recognized expert in bioterrorism who famously uncovered the origin of the mysterious “Gulf War Syndrome” as a reaction to the US Army’s own anthrax vaccine. She has testified before Congress and in many state legislatures about vaccine safety. After the emergence of Covid-19, Dr. Nass spoke out and blogged about the dangers of the new vaccines, and in favor of early treatment protocols using ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. Her outspokeness attracted the ire of Maine Governor Janet Mills, and Mills’s sister, Dora Ann Mills, the “Chief Improvement Officer” at Maine Health, a huge network of twelve hospitals, 1,700 doctors, and 22,000 employees, deeply invested in the Covid vaccine program.

In January of this year, Dr. Nass’s license was suspended by the Licensure Board based on complaints by two “activists” that she was “spreading misinformation” and for her use of early treatment protocols with her own patients. The board compelled Dr. Nass to undergo a neuropsychological evaluation to determine if she was a drug abuser or suffered from mental illness. (Flag that, since it implies official defamation of her character.) The board accused her of “fraud, deceit, or misrepresentation” in her practice, “conduct that evidences a lack of ability or fitness,” and being “an immediate jeopardy” to public health.

For most of this year, the board refused to entertain any defense by Dr. Nass for her suspension until a hearing held last week, October 11, when she appeared before the Licensure Board with her attorney, Gene Libby. The hearing in its entirety can be watched on video at Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s Children’s Health Defense website. (The first two-thirds the board prosecutes its case; the last hour Dr. Nass presents her defense.) Days before the hearing, the Licensure Board withdrew all the “misinformation” charges against Dr. Nass without explanation and now bases its case on Dr. Nass’s use of early treatment protocols.

The hearing was highly instructive on the tactics and strategies for defeating official persecutions against doctors in America (and broadly across all of Western Civ these days), since the Maine licensure Board acted with obvious ignorance and malice that is easily revealed. Dr. Nass’s attorney Gene Libby deftly got the Board on-record attesting to their own deliberate misconduct. For instance, he repeatedly invoked their charges against “spreading misinformation,” forcing the chair, an eye doctor named Maroulla S. Gleaton, to affirm that the charges had been precipitously dropped days before. There was also some lively discussion of the board’s imputations against Dr. Nass’s mental health and insinuations of drug abuse — Dr. Nass testified that she’d never been treated for mental health issues, had never taken pharmaceuticals for them, never took illicit drugs or been accused of it, and, where alcohol was concerned, enjoyed “about five drinks a year.”

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Google translate.

Devastating Report On PCR Test Covered Up (DAK)

Researcher Dr. Rogier Louwen of Erasmus MC concluded after extensive lab research that the PCR test as it is currently used is “pointless”. But the publication of his research is hindered and Louwen was fired by his employer. The ‘resurgence’ of the coronavirus is once again widely in the news. The number of ‘infections’ is rising, the media report daily. Millions of people are still regularly tested for corona. But how reliable is the PCR test? Since the start of the corona crisis, there has been considerable criticism of the test, as it is used, outside the hospital, without additional diagnostics.

This criticism does not only come from opponents of the corona policy. Marion Koopmans, member of the OMT and head of the virology department of Erasmus MC, acknowledged in November 2020 on NPO Radio 1: “You only test whether someone carries a piece of RNA that can be months old”. RIVM acknowledged on its website that large-scale testing of people with mild or no complaints has no added value. This leads to far too many ‘false positive’ results. Rogier Louwen, assistant professor who has been employed by Erasmus MC for 22 years, decided with a number of colleagues to test what a ‘positive’ result from a PCR test means. That research, subsidized by the EU, has been completed.

Louwen concluded that “indiscriminately using the PCR test in a population without too many complaints, and using it as the basis of the policy, is not useful”. He showed that the test is not only positive for pieces of SARS-CoV-2, but also for the presence of other viruses, bacteria and human DNA. However, Louwen was unable to get these interesting results published. According to him, this is due to active “opposition”. In fact, he was fired on the spot in June. That may also have to do with criticism he expressed about the vaccinations. According to Louwen, his situation is symptomatic of the one-sided way in which corona is approached. An open debate is not possible, he says. “People want to destroy you scientifically and personally.”

RFK: FDA is having an public meeting on Oct 19 to discuss adding COVID-19 Vaccine to the childhood schedule. This would give the pharma companies full liability protection and also likely lead to any school requiring it in the US.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1582112199635783680

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Why?

Boston University Makes New Covid Strain With 80% Kill Rate (PM)

Researchers at Boston University’s National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories have created a new strain of the Covid virus, echoing experiments which many believe led to the Covid-19 pandemic. The variant is a hybrid of the Omicron variant which spread over the winter and the original virus that was discovered in Wuhan, with this hybrid killing 80 percent of the mice researchers infected, according to the Daily Mail. Researchers found that when infected with the Omicron variant, a similar group of mice all survived and experienced “mild” symptoms. The new research, which has not been peer reviewed, centers around the role of spike proteins in the pathogenic and antigenic behaviors of the virus.

Researchers extracted Omicron’s spike protein, which binds to and invades human cells, and attached those to the original virus that emerged in Wuhan. Looking at how mice fared against the new hybrid strain, researchers wrote, “In…mice, while Omicron causes mild, non-fatal infection, the Omicron S-carrying virus inflicts severe disease with a mortality rate of 80 percent.” Researchers said that while the spike protein is responsible for rates of infectivity, other changes to the virus’ structure determine its deadliness. In addition to looking at mice, researchers also looked at how different strains affect human lung cells that were grown in the lab.

Researchers found that the new strain produced five times more infectious virus particles than the Omicron variant. Researchers noted that the hybrid virus is likely to be less deadly in humans due to differences in the immune systems of mice and humans. Boston University’s lab is one of 13 biosafety level 4 labs in the US. These labs are authorized to handle the most dangerous pathogens, and conduct experiments that often involve working with animal viruses to advance treatments and vaccines.

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“There is nothing in the natural environment that can cause cancer.”

Cancer Is a Man-Made Disease – Controversial Study (LS)

Is the common nature of cancer worldwide purely a man-made phenomenon? That is what some researchers now suggest. Still, other specialists in cancer and in human fossils have strong doubts about this notion. Cancer is a leading cause of death worldwide, accounting for roughly one in eight of all deaths in 2004, according to the World Health Organization. However, scientists have only found one case of the disease in investigations of hundreds of Egyptian mummies, researcher Rosalie David at the University of Manchester in England said in a statement. The rarity of cancer in mummies suggests it was scarce in antiquity, and “that cancer-causing factors are limited to societies affected by modern industrialization,” researcher Michael Zimmerman at Villanova University in Pennsylvania said in a statement.

“In an ancient society lacking surgical intervention, evidence of cancer should remain in all cases.” Zimmerman was the first to diagnose cancer in an Egyptian mummy by analyzing its tissues on a microscopic level, identifying rectal cancer in an unnamed mummy who had lived in the Dakhleh Oasis during the Ptolemaic period 1,600 to 1,800 years ago. David and Zimmerman also analyzed ancient literature from Egypt and Greece for hints of cancer, as well as medical studies of human and animal remains going back to the age of dinosaurs. They suggested evidence of cancer in animal fossils, non-human primates and early humans was scarce, with a few dozen uncertain examples.

As they analyzed ancient literature, they did not find descriptions of operations for breast and other cancers until the 17th century, and the first reports in the scientific literature of distinctive tumors have only occurred in the past 200 years, such as scrotal cancer in chimney sweepers in 1775, nasal cancer in snuff users in 1761 and Hodgkin’s disease in 1832. One possible reason cancers might have been comparatively rare in antiquity is that the short life span of individuals back then precluded the development of the disease. Still, the researchers did note some people in ancient Egypt and Greece did live long enough to develop such diseases as atherosclerosis, Paget’s disease of bone, and osteoporosis.

David and Zimmerman therefore argue that cancer nowadays is largely caused by man-made environmental factors such as pollution and diet. They detailed their findings in the October issue of the journal Nature Reviews Cancer. “In industrialized societies, cancer is second only to cardiovascular disease as a cause of death, but in ancient times, it was extremely rare,” David said in a statement. “There is nothing in the natural environment that can cause cancer.”

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“..Biden has forced all Americans working in China to pick between quitting their jobs and losing American citizenship..”

Biden Export Controls ‘Wreaking Havoc’ On China’s Chip Industry (ZH)

A Twitter thread translated by Rhodium Group China expert Jordan Schneider provides keen insight into the effects of the Biden administration’s new export controls on the chip industry. To review, the Biden administration last week laid out new rules on chip exports based on US concerns that China will use AI to improve military capabilities, support surveillance for human rights abuses and “disrupt or manufacture outcomes that undermine democratic governance and sow social unrest,” according to Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Export Administration Thea D. Rozman Kendler. The sweeping regulations will curb the sale of semiconductors and chipmaking equipment to its #1 geopolitical rival – which, as Bloomberg puts it, is “sending shockwaves through the $440 billion industry.”

In a Friday Twitter thread which he translated from Hedgehog Computing Group founder Xinran Wang (@lidangzzz), Schneider lays out the carnage in English: “To put it simply, Biden has forced all Americans working in China to pick between quitting their jobs and losing American citizenship,” Schneider writes, adding “One round of sanctions from Biden did more damage than all four years of performative sanctioning under Trump.” Every American executive and engineer working in China’s semiconductor manufacturing industry resigned yesterday, paralyzing Chinese manufacturing overnight.One round of sanctions from Biden did more damage than all four years of performative sanctioning under Trump. — Jordan Schneider (@jordanschnyc) October 14, 2022

Although American semiconductor exporters had to apply for licenses during the Trump years, licenses were approved within a month. With the new Biden sanctions, all American suppliers of IP blocks, components, and services departed overnight —— thus cutting off all service [to China]. Long story short, every advanced node semiconductor company is currently facing comprehensive supply cut-off, resignations from all American staff, and immediate operations paralysis.This is what annihilation looks like: China’s semiconductor manufacturing industry was reduced to zero overnight. Complete collapse. No chance of survival.

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That’s a lot of lies.

Will Comey and Mueller Be Prosecuted for Lies John Durham Uncovered? (ET)

While special counsel John Durham’s prosecution of Steele dossier source Igor Danchenko appears to be headed toward acquittal, Durham has used the trial to make public a number of revelations that cast the entire Trump-Russia collusion narrative in a fresh light. Most prominently, Durham revealed that on Oct. 3, 2016, the FBI had offered dossier author Christopher Steele up to $1 million to provide any information, physical evidence, or documentary evidence that could back up the claims in his dossier. But despite the huge reward on offer, Steele did not provide any such information.Crucially, despite Steele’s failure to back up his dossier, a mere 18 days later the FBI proceeded to obtain a FISA warrant against Trump 2016 presidential campaign adviser Carter Page.

In its application to the FISA court, the FBI used the Steele dossier—specifically, its claim that Page was acting as an agent of Russia—as evidence.Then, after Donald Trump won the presidential election on Nov. 8, 2016, the U.S. intelligence community, which included the FBI, began drafting an intelligence community assessment (ICA) on Russian interference in the election. The ICA was issued in early January 2017, claiming that Russia had helped Trump win the election.The assessment included a summary of the dossier, claiming that it had been partly corroborated. The inclusion of Steele’s dossier in an official U.S. intelligence community product gave the dossier the credibility it had lacked up until that point.

It also gave the media, which had held back from reporting on the dossier between July 2016 and January 2017, the excuse it needed to start doing so. For the next several years, the dossier and its lurid claims became the centerpiece of the media’s campaign against Trump. As Durham has now made public, the inclusion of the dossier in the ICA was based on a lie.Another major revelation exposed by Durham in a pre-trial motion was that Danchenko had been on the FBI’s payroll between March 2017 and October 2020 as a confidential human source (CHS). By bestowing this coveted status on Danchenko, the FBI was able to conceal the existence of Danchenko from congressional and other investigators.

This was crucial, as Danchenko had told FBI investigators in January 2017 that the dossier was based on rumors and gossip made in jest. The admission that the Steele dossier was nothing more than bar talk needed to be concealed if the FBI was to continue its investigation of Trump. Appointing Danchenko as a CHS had another benefit for the FBI. As Danchenko’s handler, FBI agent Kevin Helson, confirmed in court last week, because he was an incoming CHS, Danchenko was directed to scrub his phone. Conveniently, that also meant scrubbing evidence of Danchenko’s alleged lies to the FBI, evidence that Durham now lacks.

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“Why, then, wait until the last hearing, especially if the House may flip to GOP control in a matter of weeks?”

Why the Jan 6 Committee’s Timing is both Terrible and Telling (Turley)

The Jan. 6 committee had a noble mandate but failed to use it to offer a credible investigation for citizens across the political spectrum. From the first to the final hearing, it presented a one-sided narrative in a tightly scripted, packaged production. No defense or alternative explanations for key events or statements were allowed; witnesses were largely asked specific questions to get them to repeat what they said in previously recorded interviews, as members read from a teleprompter. The committee could have been so much more. It could have followed the type of balanced inquiry that pursued allegations tied to the Pearl Harbor attack or Watergate. Even without Republican-appointed members, it could have insisted on balanced hearings with witnesses and dissenting views.

Nevertheless, the committee revealed important, often disturbing details. It was important for Americans to hear from figures like former attorney general Bill Barr and White House lawyers who struggled to counter unfounded advice given to Trump by outside lawyers on challenging the 2020 election. There were painful scenes of Capitol police overwhelmed at barricades and members of Congress hunkered down in offices. Yet, the focus on a single approved narrative gave the hearings the feel of an infomercial selling a product that most of us bought two years earlier. Subpoenaing Trump on the final scheduled hearing only reaffirmed how the committee was driven by political rather than investigative priorities. Indeed, the timing was embarrassingly transparent.

While Trump could appear without a challenge or the Democrats could retain the House, few experts are predicting either outcome. For more than a year, the committee said its investigation was focused on Trump’s intent and actions. Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) explained that the subpoena was essential because “he must be accountable. He is required to answer for his actions on Jan. 6. So we want to hear from him.” Why, then, wait until the last hearing, especially if the House may flip to GOP control in a matter of weeks?

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Via Ugo Bardi.

The Dark Side of Nuclear Fusion (Pepi Cima)

Reading what was written by the scientists who worked in nuclear fusion in the early years of the “atomic age” shows that the development of an energy source for peaceful use, energy “too cheap to meter”, is what motivated them more than anything else. The same arguments were brought forward by Claudio Descalzi, CEO of ENI, a major investor in fusion, addressing the Italian Parliamentary Committee for the Security of the Republic (COPASIR) in a hearing of December 9th 2021: fusion will offer humanity large quantities of energy of a safe, clean and virtually inexhaustible kind.

Wishful thinking: with regard to “inexhaustible,” we cannot do anything in fusion without tritium (an isotope of hydrogen) which is nonexistent on this planet and most of the theoretical predictions, no experiments to date, say that magnetic confinement, the main hope of fusion, will not self-fertilize. Speaking of “clean” energy, Paola Batistoni, head of ENEA’s Fusion Energy Development Division, at reactor shutdown envisages the production of hundreds of thousands of tons of materials unapproachable by humans for hundreds of years. However, the problem I am worried about here is a military problem, mostly ignored, even by COPASIR, the Parliamentary Committee for the Security of the Republic. There are many reasons to worry about nuclear fusion: the huge amount of magnetic energy in the reactor can cause explosions equivalent to hundreds of kilograms of TNT, resulting in the release of tritium, a very radioactive and difficult to contain gas.

On top of it, with the neutrons of nuclear fusion, it is possible to breed fissile materials. But the risks that seem to me most worrisome in the long run will come from new weapons, never seen before. To better understand this issue, let’s review how classical thermonuclear weapons work, the 70-year-old ones. Their exact characteristics are not in the public domain but Wikipedia describes them in sufficient detail. For a more complete introduction, I recommend the highly readable books by Richard Rhodes. There exist today “simple” fission bombs, which use only fissile reactions to generate energy, and “thermonuclear” bombs, which use both fission and fusion for that purpose. Thermonuclear bombs are an example of inertial confinement fusion (ICF), where everything happens so quickly that all the energy is released before the reacting matter has the time to disperse.

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Fetus heart

 

 

Canada GHG
https://twitter.com/i/status/1582068398368096256

 

 

 

 

Olympic

 

 

 

 

Free water

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Dec 312021
 
 December 31, 2021  Posted by at 9:48 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  42 Responses »


Arnold Böcklin The Isle of the Dead III 1883

 

South Africa Says Death Toll ‘Extremely Low’ After Omicron Wave (JTN)
Omicron-Fuelled Fourth Covid Wave Has Passed, Says South Africa (G.)
Fauci Takes Professional Gaslighting to New Levels (CTH)
COVID-19 Genetic Vaccine Safety in Children (Malone)
Officials Ponder What It Means To Be ‘Fully Vaccinated’ (NYT)
Covid and Corrupt Federal Statistics (Bovard)
Justin Trudeau Calls Unvaccinated ‘Racist and Misogynistic Extremists’ (RAIR)
Healthcare Worker Vaccine Mandate Reinstated In Half Of US (JTN)
FDA: PCR Tests For Covid Are ‘Gold Standard’ (JTN)
Has The $230 Trillion LIBOR Derivative Time-Bomb Really Been Defused? (ZH)
NGO Memorial Closed By Russian Court Over ‘Foreign Agent’ Breaches (RT)
Epstein’s Guards Accused Of Sleeping On Job, Falsifying Records Go Free (JTN)
Maxwell Conviction Leaves Glaring Questions Over Lack of Prosecutions (Turley)

 

 

 

 

McCullough

 

 

 

 

“Peak in four weeks and precipitous decline in another two. This Omicron wave is over in the city of Tshwane. It was a flash flood more than a wave..”

South Africa Says Death Toll ‘Extremely Low’ After Omicron Wave (JTN)

South Africa is nearing the end of its fourth COVID-19 wave without seeing as many deaths as previous waves, according to a government statement Wednesday. “Hospitalisations and deaths are lower than the second and third wave,” Premier of Western Cape Alan Winde said. The COVID variant omicron was discovered in South Africa last month, greatly contributing to the fourth wave. While cases are now declining, Winde said, “the gap between cases, admissions and deaths continues to widen during the fourth wave.” Fareed Abdullah of the South African Medical Research Council told The New York Times: “The speed with which the Omicron-driven fourth wave rose, peaked and then declined has been staggering.” “Peak in four weeks and precipitous decline in another two. This Omicron wave is over in the city of Tshwane. It was a flash flood more than a wave,” he said.


The high of South Africa’s most recent wave appears to have occurred the week of Dec. 13. with nearly 163,000 cases, while the wave’s peak death toll seems to have occurred the week of Dec. 20 with 428 deaths, according to World Health Organization data. This sharply contrasts with previous South African waves. For example, during the third wave there, nearly 133,000 people were diagnosed with COVID the week of July 5, and more than 2,800 people died the week of July 19. “While the case numbers and test positivity rate during the fourth wave have exceeded previous waves, admissions are below the peak of both the second and the third wave and deaths remain extremely low, in line with previous interwave periods. There is therefore a widening gap between these metrics, pointing to less severe disease during the fourth wave,” Winde said.

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More much ado.

Omicron-Fuelled Fourth Covid Wave Has Passed, Says South Africa (G.)

South Africa has lifted a nightime curfew on people’s movement with immediate effect, believing the country has passed the peak of its fourth coronavirus wave driven by the Omicron variant. As the head of the World Health Organization sounded an optimistic note about beating the pandemic in 2022, the government in Pretoria removed the midnight-to-4am curfew based on the trajectory of the pandemic, vaccination levels and available capacity in the health sector, the government said on Thursday. “All indicators suggest the country may have passed the peak of the fourth wave at a national level,” a statement from a special cabinet meeting held earlier on Thursday said. “While the Omicron variant is highly transmissible, there has been lower rates of hospitalisation than in previous waves,” the cabinet statement said.


Data from South Africa’s health department showed a 29.7% weekly decrease in new cases detected in the week ending 25 December, the government said. Hospital admissions have declined in eight of South Africa’s nine provinces. South Africa, with close to 3.5 million infections and 91,000 deaths, has been the worst-hit country in Africa during the pandemic on both counts, and was where the Omicron variant of the coronavirus was first detected last month. The country is at the lowest of its five-stage Covid-19 alert levels. Besides lifting the restrictions on public movement, the government also ruled that alcohol shops with licences to operate beyond 11pm may revert back to full licence conditions, a welcome boon for traders and businesses hard hit by the pandemic and looking to recover during the festive season.

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Why don’t I see anyone saying if this is true for kids, it’s true for all hospitalizations? Because that is the inevitable conclusion.

Fauci Takes Professional Gaslighting to New Levels (CTH)

This admission is exactly what people have been arguing for two years. This exact point, and the “with COVID -vs- from COVID” argument within the false narrative, is what justified Big Tech to ban COVID critics from their speech platforms. I’m not going to comment further; at a certain point these reversals just get silly. Suddenly, as the magic politics of COVID infection rates turns into a liability, the accuracy of hospitalized COVID tests is something to clarify. These officials are just throwing magic beans into the audience at this point. In the past ten days, the CDC, NIH and FDA have jumped so far over the justification shark, the light from where justification shark jumping starts could not catch them for years.

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More kids, but also:

“..people in the 65+ demographic are five times as likely to die from the inoculation as from COVID-19 under the most favorable assumptions!”

COVID-19 Genetic Vaccine Safety in Children (Malone)

“Even as experts expressed concern about a marked jump in hospitalizations — an increase more than double that among adults — doctors and researchers said they were not seeing evidence that Omicron was more threatening to children. In fact, preliminary data suggests that compared with the Delta variant, Omicron appears to be causing milder illness in children, similar to early findings for adults.” NY Times, “Omicron Is Not More Severe for Children, Despite Rising Hospitalizations” By Andrew Jacobs Dec. 28, 2021

The risk of death associated with COVID-19 in healthy children is virtually non-existent, as children have significant immunologic advantages relative to the older adult population (> 65 years) which comprises the high risk cohort for COVID-19. The risk of death and disease in children has become even more rare with Omicron. Yet even prior to the advent of Omicron, a peer reviewed study clearly demonstrated (using safety data accumulated during past variant circulation) that the genetic COVID-19 vaccines carry a risk/benefit ratio of five deaths in the older, high risk cohort for every one life saved from COVID-19 (and those data did not account for the reporting bias inherent in US deaths due to COVID consequent to inappropriate use of PCR tests).

“Thus, our extremely conservative estimate for risk-benefit ratio is about 5/1. In plain English, people in the 65+ demographic are five times as likely to die from the inoculation as from COVID-19 under the most favorable assumptions! This demographic is the most vulnerable to adverse effects from COVID-19. As the age demographics go below about 35 years old, the chances of death from COVID-19 become very small, and when they go below 18, become negligible.” The new variant of COVID-19, Omicron, has exploded onto the scene. What was already an inverted risk benefit ratio for genetic vaccination in children and adults (greater risk of death from vaccine than from COVID-19) will become even more inverted since the risks of COVID-19 are further reduced with Omicron.

The Omicron variant is different in five essential ways:
• More infectious and will soon be the dominant variant in the USA
• Less pathogenic
• Poorly matched to currently available vaccines
• Natural immunity is providing good protection against Omicron
• Disease symptoms are more similar to the common cold

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Anyone seen those goalposts?

Officials Ponder What It Means To Be ‘Fully Vaccinated’ (NYT)

Goldman Sachs and Jeffries, the investment banks, are demanding that employees get booster shots. The University of Oregon and other institutions are requiring that students and staff members get boosters. New York state has said it plans to stop considering residents fully vaccinated unless they have gotten the shots. As the highly transmissible Omicron variant spreads from coast to coast, corporations, schools, governments and even sports leagues are reconsidering what it means to be “fully vaccinated.” Now federal health officials, too, have taken on the question. Although top policymakers want to encourage Americans to get three doses, some would like to avoid changing the definition of a phrase that has become pivotal to daily life in much of the country, according to officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations.

Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Tuesday that she and other health officials were “working through that question” now. “There really isn’t debate here in what people should do,” she added. “CDC is crystal clear on what people should do: If they’re eligible for a boost, they should get boosted.” With Omicron’s sharp rise — more than 488,000 new cases were reported Wednesday alone — some experts think the moment for change has arrived. “I think the time is now,” said Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association. From a medical perspective, he said, receiving that additional booster dose “is really what we should be thinking of as fully vaccinated.”

Redefining “fully vaccinated” could lead to enormous logistical challenges, as even supporters of the idea concede, and it is likely to incite political backlash. Tens of millions of Americans who thought of themselves as vaccinated might discover that without boosters, they could lose access to restaurants, offices, concerts, events, gatherings — any place where proof of vaccination is required to enter. Moreover, the change risks undermining trust in public health officials after two years of shifting recommendations, experts said. Some Americans may feel that the goal posts have been moved again, and too suddenly. “While a determination of what constitutes full vaccination may be grounded in science, it does have significant political and economic ripple effects,” said Larry Levitt, executive vice president of KFF, a nonprofit organization that focuses on health issues.

The CDC currently defines “fully vaccinated” as those who have received two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna shots, or one dose of the Johnson & Johnson shot. Although experts continue to believe that these regimens protect against hospitalization and death, the vaccines’ effectiveness against infection with the virus wanes over time. What had been considered full vaccination is substantially less effective against infection with Omicron, which is able to partially evade the body’s antibodies.

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“According to the Vermont Department of Health, “Half of the [Covid] deaths in August were breakthrough cases. Almost three-quarters of them in September were..”

Covid and Corrupt Federal Statistics (Bovard)

During his update on his Winter Covid Campaign on Tuesday, President Biden declared, “Almost everyone who has died from COVID-19 in the past many months has been unvaccinated.” This was true from the start of the pandemic in early 2020, until the vaccines’ efficacy began failing badly in recent months. Oregon officially classifies roughly a quarter of its Covid fatalities since August as “vaccine breakthrough deaths.” In Illinois, roughly 30 percent of Covid fatalities have occurred among fully vaccinated individuals. According to the Vermont Department of Health, “Half of the [Covid] deaths in August were breakthrough cases. Almost three-quarters of them in September were,” as well, according to Burlington, Vermont TV station WCAX.

The Biden administration guaranteed that the vast majority of “breakthrough” infections would not be counted when the Centers for Disease Control in May ceased keeping track of “breakthrough” infections unless they resulted in hospitalization or death. Ignoring that data permitted Biden to go on CNN in July and make the ludicrously false assertion: “You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.” But federal data on fully vaxxed Covid fatalities is far flimsier and less reliable than the numbers compiled by some states. Honestly recognizing the limits of vaccines could be fatal to Biden’s push for compulsory vaccinations.

The same policymakers who claim to be guided by data have little or no idea how many Americans have been hit by Covid. According to the CDC, there have been 51,115,304 Covid cases in America. But a different CDC web page estimates that there had been 146.6 million Covid infections in the US as of October 2, 2021. That CDC analysis estimated that only one in four Covid infections have been reported, which would mean that based on the latest official case numbers, more than 200 million Americans have contracted Covid. For Biden and his fellow policymakers, a potential error of 150 million Covid infections is “close enough for government work.” Relying on the lower number is convenient for policymakers who want to continue ignoring the natural immunity acquired by 199 million Americans who survived Covid infections.

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“..psychopathe fasciste..”

Justin Trudeau Calls Unvaccinated ‘Racist and Misogynistic Extremists’ (RAIR)

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stunned viewers during a television appearance in Quebec when he announced people who do not receive the experimental Covid “vaccine” are “often racist and misogynistic extremists.” The left-wing Canadian leader questioned whether the country needed to “tolerate these people.” He further bashed anyone unvaccinated, smearing them as “science deniers.” Although those refusing to be injected are a “small group of the population,” states Trudeau, they are still “taking up space.” The leader stressed that the only way to end this pandemic is by getting jabbed. “We will emerge from this pandemic through vaccination,” said Trudeau. The radical leaders praised the “80% of Quebecers” who received the injection and “did the right thing.”


Canadians “want to get back to the things we like doing,” stressed Trudeau. “These people who are not [vaccinated] are going to block us now,” warned the leader. In Quebec, 77.6% of residents have received two injections vaccination. A total of 15,245,140 doses have been administered. After his shocking comments, the conservative leader of the People’s Party of Canada, Maxime Bernier, took to Twitter to call Trudeau a “fascist psychopath.”

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Does it get any messier than this?

Healthcare Worker Vaccine Mandate Reinstated In Half Of US (JTN)

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) on Tuesday reversed on a previous decision, and will now mandate health care workers to receive the COVID-19 vaccine within the next month in half of the nation where the mandate has not been put on hold by the court. The new CMS rule reverses a decision made on Nov. 5 that suspended the mandate, making it dependent on the future of two cases, State of Louisiana et al v. Xavier Becerra, Sec. of HHS, et al and Joseph Biden, President of U.S., et al v. Missouri, et al. Half of all U.S. states joined in these lawsuits to stop the federal vaccine requirement for health care employees. The Supreme Court combined the two and will hear arguments next week.


Facilities in states not part of the pending case will be forced to have 100% of staff vaccinated by Jan. 27, 2022. If a health care center has a compliance rate of more than 80% and plans to reach a 100% rate within 60 days, then the facility will not be “subject to additional enforcement action.” Depending on the rate of vaccination, enforcement mechanisms include “plans of correction, civil monetary penalties, denial of payment, termination, etc.” Workers must receive a second dose by Feb. 28, the memo states. All employees must receive the vaccine “regardless” of their job responsibilities or the amount of time they are in contact with patients. Health care employees affected by the new rule are allowed to opt-out of the vaccine mandate, and receive other “accommodations” if they have a “disability or sincerely held religious beliefs, practices, or observations.”

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FDA and CDC play good cop/bad cop.

FDA: PCR Tests For Covid Are ‘Gold Standard’ (JTN)

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky’s recent admission that common tests for COVID-19 can detect long-gone infections has some calling into question the Food and Drug Administration’s claim that the tests represent the “gold standard” for diagnosing coronavirus. The CDC’s new caution also falls in line with reports going back 16 months about widespread false positives among the so-called PCR tests, particularly when labs run them at high “cycle thresholds,” which pick up viral loads that may be dead or too small to transmit. The CDC’s decision Monday to halve the recommended “isolation” time for asymptomatic COVID-19 infections amid the Omicron wave, regardless of whether individuals test negative, prompted consternation in some medical circles.

The agency justified the new 5-day isolation by claiming “the majority of SARS-CoV-2 transmission occurs early in the course of illness, generally in the 1-2 days prior to onset of symptoms and the 2-3 days after.” But Walensky also emphasized that neither rapid antigen tests, which are currently in short supply, nor PCR tests were appropriate for determining if a person can safely leave isolation. She told CBS Mornings that antigen tests may not be sensitive enough to detect infectiousness, while PCR tests are so sensitive that “it can stay positive for up to 12 weeks, for months and months.” People would have to stay isolated “for a very long time if we were relying on PCRs,” she told Good Morning America. The significance of Walensky’s declaration, which has sweeping implications for COVID policy in the workplace, school and travel settings, went largely unnoticed except among skeptics of COVID policy.

“Think of all the lives ruined, jobs lost, education squandered b/c of false positives,” tweeted Justin Hart, chief data analyst for the COVID contrarian website Rational Ground. “We’ve been saying since summer 2020 that the PCR test can be positive at 5 days or 75 days. And ONLY JUST NOW is it being used to adjust policy,” he said. Hart is suing Facebook, Twitter and the feds for viewpoint discrimination by “conspiring … to censor messages with which [the government] disagrees.” The suit was triggered by Facebook suspending him over a graphic questioning the science behind school mask mandates. The New York Times highlighted the sensitivity problem with PCR tests in August 2020. In a review of testing data with cycle thresholds (CTs) from Massachusetts, New York and Nevada, the newspaper found that “up to 90 percent of people testing positive carried barely any virus.” The newspaper said most tests in the U.S. were run at 40 CTs and “a few at 37,” but experts it consulted said the threshold should be 30-35, if that high.

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Slow death.

Has The $230 Trillion LIBOR Derivative Time-Bomb Really Been Defused? (ZH)

Years ago, we predicted that the Fed’s commitment to phase out Libor, the interest rate set by committee (not market forces) that had come to undergird trillions of dollars in loans and securities around the world, would ultimately prove unsuccessful. Now, as the FT points out, it appears we were correct. Libor won’t be phased out completely by the start of next year. While technically speaking no new securities can be bechmarked to Libor, there’s still the matter of the $230 trillion in existing contracts that rely on the benchmark. And the rates that undergird these contracts will continue to be published. Still, plenty of other Libor rates won’t. Only the most popular will survive, according to the FT. So in a way, next month does mark the moment when “four years of arduous preparation to live without it goes into effect.”


“It’s one of the biggest transitions in financial markets in decades,” said Dixit Joshi, group treasurer of Deutsche Bank. “This is a milestone for the regulators since the great financial crisis about lessons learned.” But it’s not a complete break, which is what the world was promised in the wake of the scandals that inspired the decision. Much lower in its story on the impending Libor deadline, the FT concedes that, in order to make the transition “work”, America’s financial regulators had to help build a workaround whereby futures markets based on the US dollar LIbor would need to be allowed to continue on until mid-2023, something we noted a year ago. As a result, the US dollar Libor rates will continue to be published until that point (and potentially beyond mid-2023, once regulators devise some new excuse for keeping it alive for even longer).

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Courtesy of US intel.

NGO Memorial Closed By Russian Court Over ‘Foreign Agent’ Breaches (RT)

A Moscow court has ruled that a prominent organization campaigning on human rights issues should be dissolved after prosecutors insisted that it was breaching the country’s laws regulating ‘foreign agents.’ In a ruling on Wednesday, the Moscow City Court said that the Memorial Human Rights Center would be dissolved. Handing down the verdict, judge Mikhail Kazakov said that he would “rule in favor of the claims of the prosecutor’s office to liquidate the inter-regional public organization [Memorial] in full.” Officials allege that the civil society association repeatedly broke the terms of its ‘foreign agent’ status, imposed over links to overseas funding.

The day before, Russia’s Supreme Court ordered that the group’s sister organization, which is dedicated to the memory of the victims of Communist-era repressions, be dissolved as well. Authorities filed applications to liquidate the two entities in November. During the hearing on Tuesday, the Prosecutor General’s office argued that Memorial had been created in the late 1980s originally “as an organization to perpetuate historical memory, but now it is almost completely focused on distorting historical memory, primarily about the Great Patriotic War,” as WWII is known in Russia. According to officials, the group “creates a false image of the USSR as a terrorist state” and “attempts to whitewash and rehabilitate Nazi war criminals who have the blood of Soviet citizens on their hands… probably because someone is paying for this.”

Memorial had faced a number of fines after authorities found it failed to prominently display its ‘foreign agents’ status on its materials. Russian President Vladimir Putin has previously said that the rules “exist simply to protect Russia from external meddling in its politics,” and insisted that organizations that adhere to them can keep working. However, the legislation has come under fire from a number of groups which argue the measures are too restrictive. In August, an open letter signed by 10 separate outlets asked the Kremlin to investigate the use of the ‘foreign agent’ legislation as part of “the persecution of independent journalism in the country.”

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Timing is everything.

Epstein’s Guards Accused Of Sleeping On Job, Falsifying Records Go Free (JTN)

Federal prosecutors moved Thursday to drop criminal charges against two Bureau of Prisons guards who admitted to falsifying records the night convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein died on their watch. Manhattan guards Tova Noel and Michael Thomas avoided prison time in May 2021 through deferred prosecution agreements mandating that they cooperate with a federal investigation on Epstein’s death and perform 100 hours of volunteer work each. Both complied with the agreements, and the prosecutors asked a judge Thursday to dismiss the charges, Reuters reported. Epstein was awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges. He was found in August 2019 hanging in his Manhattan cell, and the New York City medical examiner officially declared his death a suicide.


Noel and Thomas were accused of falling asleep on the job and surfing online despite having orders to check every half hour on Epstein, who had recently been taken off of suicide watch. Both admitted to “willfully and knowingly” falsifying records of monitoring Epstein that evening. The prosecution’s move comes the day after Epstein’s girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell was convicted on five of the six sex trafficking-related charges brought against her. She is expected to appeal. While Noel’s lawyers could not be reached, Thomas’s lawyer “his client was happy with the dismissal and looked forward to putting the matter behind him,” Reuters reported.

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Records were sealed for a reason.

Maxwell Conviction Leaves Glaring Questions Over Lack of Prosecutions (Turley)

The conviction of Ghislaine Maxwell for five out of six criminal charges was heralded by many as bringing some justice for the girls abused through her actions. Indeed, the Southern District of New York correctly called the underlying conduct as “one of the worst crimes imaginable – facilitating and participating in the sexual abuse of children.” However, that statement only begged the question of why none of the men listed on flights of the “Lolita Express” or on the guest lists of these parties have been prosecuted. That list includes former presidents Bill Clinton and Donald Trump as well as Prince Andrew and an assortment of billionaires. It is not clear if these men committed criminal acts but it is also not clear that they have been formally questioned by the FBI.

As I discussed last night, this criminal enterprise was allegedly not only to bring girls and women to Epstein but to his powerful friends. Without pursuing those alleged “johns,” the Maxwell prosecution seems like arresting a getaway driver but letting the bank robbers escape. The pictures of men on these trips are now well-known. They do not in themselves establish criminal conduct. For example, the pictures of Clinton getting a message from a 22-year-old woman is not illegal and she later described him as a “perfect gentleman.” However, Clinton has been accused of misleading the public on his number of flights with Epstein. The media has reported at least 26 flights with Epstein. Being a repeated guest with an infamous child molester raises obvious concerns. It is certainly enough to warrant questioning by the FBI.

Then there is Prince Andrew who has been pursued for questioning. Much of the litigation, however, has come from civil litigation. Prince Andrew recently put forward a novel defense in one such case. Yet, there is a concern that the Justice Department has previously worked to scuttle rather than to pursue the underlying wrongdoing, including a disgraceful plea agreement. I was an early and vocal critic of that deal with Epstein. Despite a strong case for prosecution, Epstein’s lawyers were able to secure a ridiculous deal with prosecutors. He was accused of abusing more than forty minor girls (with many between the ages of 13 and 17). Epstein pleaded guilty to a Florida state charge of felony solicitation of underage girls in 2008 and served a 13-month jail sentence. Epstein was facing a 53-page indictment that could have resulted in life in prison. However, he got the 13 month deal. Moreover, to my lasting surprise, former Miami U.S. attorney Alexander Acosta was inexplicably made labor secretary under Trump. He later resigned.

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Dec 302021
 
 December 30, 2021  Posted by at 9:28 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,  55 Responses »


Wassily Kandinsky Painting with Houses 1909

 

Researchers Find Silver Lining In Rise Of Covid Variant Omicron (JTN)
Early Estimates Of SARS-CoV-2 Omicron Variant Severity (medRxiv)
SARS-CoV-2 Spike T Cell Responses Remain Robust Against Omicron (medRxiv)
Fauci Says Fourth Covid Vaccine Shot ‘Conceivable’ For Omicron (NYP)
Up To Three Covid Jabs A Year Could Be Needed For Protection (G.)
CDC Admits PCR Tests are Invalid (Martin Armstrong)
Why CDC Doesn’t Require Testing At End Of Isolation (ABC)
Twitter Bans Robert Malone. His Response: ‘Constant Clown Show’ (JTN)
The Pfizer Inoculations For COVID-19 – More Harm Than Good (CCCA)
Joe Rogan’s Sold Out Show Canceled Due To Vaccine Mandates (Hill)
Twitter Suspends John Solomon For Report On Covid Vaccines (JTN)
There Remains No FDA Approved Covid Vaccine In The US (Schachtel)
Ladapo: Biden Admin ‘Actively Preventing’ Monoclonal Antibody Treatments (Fox)
Musk Thinks He Solved Bitcoin’s Greatest Mystery (RT)
Why Assange Fears Being “Epsteined” (Mercer)

 

 

 

 

Clown World
https://twitter.com/i/status/1475657029150986241

 

 

 

 

cloth masks

 

 

“..the “neutralizing immunity” provided by Omicron infection extended to the Delta variant..”

Researchers Find Silver Lining In Rise Of Covid Variant Omicron (JTN)

The rapid spread of the Omicron variant of COVID-19 worldwide “may have positive implications in terms of decreasing the Covid-19 burden of severe disease,” according to a new study funded by the Gates Foundation and South African, U.S. and U.K. government agencies. Led by researchers in South Africa, where the variant was first identified, it’s the latest study to suggest the pandemic is approaching endemic status, calling into question the benefits of strict mitigation policies beyond high-risk groups. The preprint, not yet peer-reviewed, found that the “neutralizing immunity” provided by Omicron infection extended to the Delta variant, which appears to be more “pathogenic” than Omicron and still comprises a substantial proportion of COVID infections in several countries.

It was based on 15 participants, mostly vaccinated, who were tested at a median of four days after symptom onset and again 14 days later. They showed 14.4-fold increased neutralization of subsequent Omicron infection but also 4.4-fold increased neutralization of Delta infection, as determined by antibody response. Two of the original 15 were later excluded because they did not “detectably neutralize Omicron at either timepoint.” The results suggest Omicron infection “may result in decreased ability of Delta to re-infect those individuals,” the researchers wrote. If the new variant is indeed less severe, “the infection may shift to become less disruptive to individuals and society.”

Beyond South African institutions, the 30-odd researchers in the study are affiliated with Columbia University, the University of Washington and Imperial College London. The enhanced immunity to Delta was “especially” strong for vaccinated participants, tweeted lead author Alex Sigal, who is affiliated with the Africa Health Research Institute, University of KwaZulu-Natal and Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology.

Read more …

Very small study.

Early Estimates Of SARS-CoV-2 Omicron Variant Severity (medRxiv)

While it is now evident that Omicron is rapidly replacing Delta, due to a combination of increased transmissibility and immune escape, it is less clear how the severity of Omicron compares to Delta. In Ontario, we sought to examine hospitalization and death associated with Omicron, as compared to matched cases infected with Delta. We conducted a matched cohort study, considering time to hospitalization or death as the outcome, and analyzed with a Cox proportional hazards model. Cases were matched on age, gender, and onset date, while vaccine doses received and time since vaccination were included as adjustment variables.


We identified 6,314 Omicron cases that met eligibility criteria, of which 6,312 could be matched with at least one Delta case (N=8,875) based on age, gender, and onset date. There were 21 (0.3%) hospitalizations and 0 (0%) deaths among matched Omicron cases, compared to 116 (2.2%) hospitalizations and 7 (0.3%) deaths among matched Delta cases. The adjusted risk of hospitalization or death was 54% lower (HR=0.46, 95%CI: 0.27, 0.77) among Omicron cases compared to Delta cases. While severity may be reduced, the absolute number of hospitalizations and impact on the healthcare system could still be significant due to the increased transmissibility of Omicron.

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Who wants vaccine induced T cells if natural infection does the trick better?

SARS-CoV-2 Spike T Cell Responses Remain Robust Against Omicron (medRxiv)

The SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant has multiple Spike (S) protein mutations that contribute to escape from the neutralizing antibody responses, and reducing vaccine protection from infection. The extent to which other components of the adaptive response such as T cells may still target Omicron and contribute to protection from severe outcomes is unknown. We assessed the ability of T cells to react with Omicron spike in participants who were vaccinated with Ad26.CoV2.S or BNT162b2, and in unvaccinated convalescent COVID-19 patients (n = 70). We found that 70-80% of the CD4 and CD8 T cell response to spike was maintained across study groups.


Moreover, the magnitude of Omicron cross-reactive T cells was similar to that of the Beta and Delta variants, despite Omicron harbouring considerably more mutations. Additionally, in Omicron-infected hospitalized patients (n = 19), there were comparable T cell responses to ancestral spike, nucleocapsid and membrane proteins to those found in patients hospitalized in previous waves dominated by the ancestral, Beta or Delta variants (n = 49). These results demonstrate that despite Omicron’s extensive mutations and reduced susceptibility to neutralizing antibodies, the majority of T cell response, induced by vaccination or natural infection, cross-recognises the variant. Well-preserved T cell immunity to Omicron is likely to contribute to protection from severe COVID-19, supporting early clinical observations from South Africa.

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Because it’s so mild…

Fauci Says Fourth Covid Vaccine Shot ‘Conceivable’ For Omicron (NYP)

Dr. Anthony Fauci said Wednesday it’s “conceivable” that a fourth dose of a COVID-19 vaccine will be recommended to protect against the Omicron variant — though more research is needed about how well the current boosters prevent severe disease. “Before we start talking about a fourth shot, it would be very important for us to determine the durability of protection, particularly against severe disease for the third-shot booster of an mRNA [vaccine] and the second shot of a [Johnson & Johnson],” Fauci said at a White House COVID-19 task force press briefing. But Fauci said it’s possible that more protection will be necessary against the variant.


“It is conceivable that in the future, we might need an additional shot, but right now, we are hoping that we will get a greater degree of durability of protection from that booster shot,” Fauci said. “So we’re going to take one step at a time, get the data from the third boost and then make decisions based on scientific data.” Fauci warned that Omicron has been better at evading the immunity provided by vaccines, causing breakthrough infections. But he said that “boosters bring back up that degree of protection to a level that is approximately what it was before.” “So boosters are critical in getting our approach to Omicron to be optimal,” he said.

Read more …

Dutch goverment wants 3rd jab in January, 2 more in 2022, and then no. 6 in 2023. How many people will comply?

Up To Three Covid Jabs A Year Could Be Needed For Protection (G.)

Australians may have to receive two or even three Covid jabs each year to maintain defences against the virus if early results on the efficacy of booster shots turn out to be a useful guide. Weekly data published just before Christmas by the UK’s Health Security Agency shows the effectiveness of both the Pfizer and Moderna boosters against symptomatic diseases is lower for the Omicron than the Delta variant across all periods after the injection. The analysis included 147,597 Delta and 68,489 Omicron cases in the UK. The agency stressed the “results should be interpreted with caution due to the low counts and the possible biases related to the populations with highest exposure to Omicron (including travellers and their close contacts) which cannot fully be accounted for”.


The UK data showed both Pfizer and Moderna boosters had 90% effectiveness against symptomatic diseases from the Delta variant up to at least nine weeks. By contrast, efficacy against the Omicron strain was about 30% lower, and appeared to drop away further after nine weeks. Israel has already begun administering a second booster dose to follow the original three-dose treatment, and at least one US medical centre is considering recommending staff have a second booster. Medical experts in Australia said results beyond the 12-week dataset would be needed to get a longer term picture. Jaya Dantas, a professor of international health at Curtin University, said it was still early days for the understanding of the efficacy of the vaccinations but “it appears that there might be a need for regular boosters”. “You might need boosters, say maybe two a year or three a year,” Dantas said, with elderly people more likely to be in line for a triple annual dose.

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“..the politics in the USA realizes that this is not going well and they need to shift gears or all be thrown out in the next election.”

CDC Admits PCR Tests are Invalid (Martin Armstrong)

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) is finally withdrawing the PCR test for COVID for it is seriously flawed and is incapable of distinguishing between the COVID and influenza viruses. I have stated that I was tested 5 times in 2020 and all were negative only to have two doctors, including the head of pulmonary at the hospital, inform me that they believed I had COVID despite the tests because they were “invalid” and that was back then. Social Media was blocking any discussion about that calling it conspiracy theory and misinformation. This agenda to terrorize the public for political gain has been at the heart of the abuse of politics and media intruding into the medical field. Doctors who have gone along with this terror campaign are a disgrace to their field.

The CDC is withdrawing the COVID PCR Test and the media is not making this front page. The withdraw of the COVID PCR test as valid for detecting and identifying SARS-CoV-2 is critical for all the restrictions and lockdowns. It appears that the collapse in the approval ratings for BIDEN has sent a shock wave through the Democrats as they see their own demise on the horizon. They are now back-peddling in hopes of surviving the 2022 elections. The CDC has stated on its website: “After December 31, 2021, CDC will withdraw the request to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) of the CDC 2019-Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) Real-Time RT-PCR Diagnostic Panel, the assay first introduced in February 2020 for detection of SARS-CoV-2 only.”

The CDC has finally admitted that the PCR test cannot even differentiate between SARS-CoV-2 and influenza viruses. As I was told personally that the test was invalid, the politics in the USA realizes that this is not going well and they need to shift gears or all be thrown out in the next election.

Read more …

“..because PCR tests can stay positive for up to 12 weeks..”

Why CDC Doesn’t Require Testing At End Of Isolation (ABC)

The newly updated CDC guidelines don’t require testing at the end of isolation because PCR tests can stay positive for up to 12 weeks, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky told “Good Morning America” Wednesday. “So we would have people in isolation for a very long time if we were relying on PCRs,” Walensky said. Walensky also addressed Tuesday’s news from the FDA that, according to early data, rapid antigen tests may be less sensitive when it comes to the omicron variant.


“We do know that the most sensitive test you can do is a PCR test,” Walensky said. “So if you have symptoms and you have a negative antigen test, we do ask you to go and get a PCR to make sure those symptoms are not attributable to COVID.” Walensky said rapid tests do work “quite well,” especially in places where people are being tested regularly, like at schools. “They may not work as well as they have for the delta variant,” Walensky said, but “we still are encouraging their use.”

Tolerate

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“Over a half million followers gone in a blink of an eye..”

I think maybe Malone got banned because he’s about to go on Joe Rogan. Whose interview with Peter McCullough was the most popular one he did at 40 million listeners.

Twitter Bans Robert Malone. His Response: ‘Constant Clown Show’ (JTN)

A social media purge may be accelerating against reporting and commentary perceived at odds with conventional storylines on COVID-19. Twitter permanently suspended mRNA vaccine pioneer-turned-critic Robert Malone’s account Wednesday for “spreading misleading and potentially harmful information” about the novel coronavirus, according to a notice Malone shared with Just the News. [..] Malone’s only previous sanction was a 12-hour suspension for “posting something with a commercial intent (near as I could tell),” Malone said. He has also received complaints about his tweets required by “German law” over the past year. But he suspects his “big sin” was sharing the Canadian Covid Care Alliance’s analysis of Pfizer’s “adverse event reports” from the first six months of its COVID vaccine’s emergency use authorization.

In a Substack essay Wednesday, posted before his account went down, Malone characterized that analysis as showing the “inoculations cause more illness than they prevent” – a claim at odds with mainstream scientific opinion. France-owned newswire service AFP countered the Canadian Covid Care Alliance’s claims several months ago and similar claims earlier this month, arguing the Pfizer data had been misconstrued. It quoted a Pfizer spokesperson who said the causes of the 1,223 fatalities among 158,893 adverse effects had not been verified, and reflect “spontaneous” reports from sources in several countries. An FDA spokesperson said “the vast majority of the deaths reported are not directly attributable to the vaccines.”[..]

The last archive of Malone’s Twitter page Wednesday afternoon doesn’t show him promoting the analysis. But his final tweets linked to a British Medical Journal investigation into “data integrity issues in Pfizer’s vaccine trial” and a related interview. He also claimed the World Economic Forum had published a “roadmap” for “managing us,” citing WEF’s “Transformation Map” on peace and resilience. “This is the face of global information control and warfare,” he told Just the News, referring to the map. “It’s not just Twitter.” Malone announced his suspension on Substack and encouraged readers to sign up for his newsletter. “Over a half million followers gone in a blink of an eye,” he wrote, referring to his Twitter audience. “That means I must have been on the mark, so to speak.”

Created less than a month ago to share “deeper” essays and research, the newsletter had 35,000 subscribers Wednesday morning, he told Just the News. It “just exploded” after Twitter deplatformed him later in the day. A much larger audience will get to hear from Malone soon. He’s scheduled to go on Joe Rogan’s podcast, by some measures the most popular in America.

Read more …

The report Malone mentioned.

The Pfizer Inoculations For COVID-19 – More Harm Than Good (CCCA)

Watch this video of the Pfizer 6 month data which shows that Pfizer’s COVID-19 inoculations cause more illness than they prevent. Plus, an overview of the Pfizer trial flaws in both design and execution.

Read more …

Rescheduled for October?! By then, what will he talk about?

Joe Rogan’s Sold Out Show Canceled Due To Vaccine Mandates (Hill)

Joe Rogan’s sold out Vancouver show, scheduled for April 20, has been canceled after the podcast host said he likely would be unable to enter Canada from the U.S., where he lives, because he is not vaccinated against COVID-19. In a Dec. 24 episode of his podcast, “The Joe Rogan Experience,” Rogan told his guest, comedian Tim Dillon, that Rogan’s springtime show in Vancouver was likely to be canceled because of COVID-19 restrictions in British Columbia. The Canadian territory requires proof of vaccination to gain entry into some indoor businesses and event spaces, including Rogers Arena, where Rogan’s show was set to take place.


“I should probably say this because I haven’t yet. My 4/20 show that’s sold out in Vancouver — I don’t think that’s happening,” Rogan said. “I don’t think I can even get into the country. I’m not vaccinated. I’m not gonna get vaccinated. I have antibodies, it doesn’t make any sense.” Rogan announced in an Instagram post in early September that he had been diagnosed with COVID-19 after running a high fever and said he had been taking a mix of medications, including monoclonal antibody treatments, Z-Pak, the anti-inflammatory drug prednisone and the antiparasitic ivermectin, which the FDA has said is not recommended for treating COVID-19.

Read more …

“It is outrageous and unfair that a story that is completely accurate and points out an important legal distinction between the two versions of vaccines gets blocked and my account suspended..”

Twitter Suspends John Solomon For Report On Covid Vaccines (JTN)

Twitter suspended the account of Just the News founder John Solomon for sharing an article about the legal distinctions between Pfizer’s fully approved and emergency use authorization (EUA) COVID-19 vaccines, which could affect the legality of vaccine mandates. The social media company is also warning users who click the link to the article from individual tweets that it “may be unsafe” and “could lead to real-world harm.” An immunologist who reviewed the article told Just the News he saw nothing wrong with it factually. Solomon’s Dec. 27 tweet shared the link and headline: “Pfizer to continue distributing version of COVID-19 vaccine not fully approved by FDA.”

The report noted that Pfizer and several experts have claimed that the fully approved Comirnaty vaccine has the same ingredients and manufacturing process as the EUA vaccine, known as Pfizer-BioNTech. But it also cited the FDA’s acknowledgment that the two are “legally distinct” owing to more stringent requirements for the Comirnaty vaccine, whose biologics license application (BLA) was approved. In a legal challenge to the U.S. military’s vaccine mandate, a federal judge ruled in November that “FDA licensure does not retroactively apply to [EUA vaccine] vials shipped before BLA approval.” U.S. District Judge Allen Winsor cited DOD guidance that limits mandates to fully approved vaccines, which must be “produced at approved facilities.”

“It is outrageous and unfair that a story that is completely accurate and points out an important legal distinction between the two versions of vaccines gets blocked and my account suspended,” Solomon told Just the News. “The distinction was important enough for a federal judge to note. The story and my post weren’t unsafe,” he said. “The only threat is to the safety of the 1st Amendment afflicted by Twitter’s wrongheaded decision.” [..] According to the notice Solomon received, Twitter “temporarily limited” his account features for 12 hours because the tweet violates its policy on “spreading misleading and potentially harmful information” related to COVID.

Read more …

What got Solomon banned.

There Remains No FDA Approved Covid Vaccine In The US (Schachtel)

Is Pfizer refusing to make the fully authorized version available, while continuing to sell an EUA product because doing so could open up Pfizer and BioNTech to legal liability issues? Pfizer and an HHS spokesperson talked to The Washington Post in a previous “fact check,” and claimed that there’s no additional legal immunity benefits between the EUA product and Comirnaty. However, these entities have never explained why Pfizer and the federal government would go through the trouble of recognizing two legally distinct products. An EUA fully protects the drugmaker and grants zero legal recourse to the patient. This surefire protection measure was bolstered by the PREP act and other measures implemented to shield COVID companies from liability. Now, here’s where it all gets very nefarious.

Due to a law passed during the Reagan Administration, in order for drug makers to be granted more robust legal liability protection for their vaccines, they must first secure full approval for the children’s version of their shot. Steve Kirsch has explained this at length last month on his Substack. Additionally, Robert Kennedy Jr mentioned it on a recent podcast with Mikhaila Peterson. I looked into these claims extensively, and they appear accurate. The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA), which was passed into law in 1986, provides a legal liability shield to drug manufacturers if they receive full authorization for all ages. Is Pfizer seeking approval for children so that it can protect itself from lawsuits? The company is working with regulators, even clandestinely altering vaccine ingredients (a process that should require them to get full approval for an entirely separate product), in a seeming bid to clear the path to legal indemnity.

Surely, there’s also a monetary incentive in play, but maybe there’s another reason why Pfizer, Moderna, and others are working relentlessly to authorize their products for children, who face near-zero risk from COVID-19, but continue to showcase alarming side effects from the vaccine. A vaccine on the children’s schedule provides a definitive, government-incentivized liability boost. If Comirnaty becomes available for all ages, that means Pfizer receives an extensive, additional layer of protection. Is Big Pharma using children as legal human shields for their products?

RFK: If a vaccine is introduced under EUA, the maker can’t be sued. When it IS approved, they can be sued. Unless they can get it recommended for children. That’s why 5 year olds are being jabbed.

Read more …

There is no federal solution. Ask Joe….

Ladapo: Biden Admin ‘Actively Preventing’ Monoclonal Antibody Treatments (Fox)

Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo accused the Biden administration of “actively preventing the effective distribution of monoclonal antibody treatments” in the United States, according to a Tuesday letter addressed to Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra.The Biden administration recently paused shipments of COVID-19 antibody treatments manufactured by major drug companies Regeneron and Eli Lilly amid claims that such treatments are not effective against the omicron variant of the coronavirus. The federal government continues to supply Sotrovimab, a monoclonal antibody from the company Glaxosmithkline, which reportedly does work against omicron. Ladapo concluded his letter by referencing comments Biden made Monday that there wasn’t a solution by the federal government to end the nearly two-year-old pandemic.


“There is no federal solution. This gets solved at the state level,” Biden said at the time in response to Arkansas Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson warning the president against letting “federal solutions stand in the way of state solutions.” A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) pushed back against Ladapo’s assertion, telling Fox News Digital in a statement: “The federal government has and will continue to supply Florida with treatments that can help improve patient outcomes, reduce stress on healthcare facilities, and save lives. We have never stopped allocating or shipping COVID-19 therapeutics to Florida. “With regard to monoclonal antibody treatments, the federal government has allocated about 22,000 doses in just the past two weeks (11,050 doses last week and 10,576 doses this week). That’s in addition to the approximately 28,000 doses of product that they have on hand from their previous orders,” the statement continued.

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“He claims not to be Nakamoto, but I’m not sure that’s neither here nor there.”

Musk Thinks He Solved Bitcoin’s Greatest Mystery (RT)

The true identity of Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto, who has been one of the financial world’s enduring mysteries, is still unknown. However, Elon Musk says he might have the answer. Musk says hyper-secretive cryptocurrency expert Nick Szabo might be the creator of the world’s most popular cryptocurrency. “You can look at the evolution of ideas before the launch of Bitcoin and see who wrote about those ideas,” Musk told artificial-intelligence researcher Lex Fridman in a podcast on Tuesday. The Tesla CEO also denied the allegations that he could be Satoshi, stating he would not hide it if he were. Musk said while he “obviously” doesn’t know exactly who created Bitcoin, Szabo’s theories seem fundamental to the creation of the world’s leading cryptocurrency.


“It seems as though Nick Szabo is probably, more than anyone else, responsible for the evolution of those ideas,” he said. “He claims not to be Nakamoto, but I’m not sure that’s neither here nor there. But he seems to be the one more responsible for the ideas behind Bitcoin than anyone else. In 2014, a team of researchers studied Nakamoto’s Bitcoin whitepaper alongside the writing of Szabo and 10 other potential creators. “The number of linguistic similarities between Szabo’s writing and the Bitcoin whitepaper is uncanny,” they said, adding that “none of the other possible authors were anywhere near as good of a match.” Before Bitcoin debuted in 2008, Szabo was seen commenting on his blog about his “intent to create a living version of the hypothetical currency.” He had developed a digital money mechanism known as Szabo Bit Gold between 1998 and 2005.

Read more …

The FBI sealed 20,000 photos seized from Epstein’s residences, as Ghislaine was found guilty. Who’s in those photos? Clinton, Gates, who else?

Summit of irony: The BBC had Alan Dershowitz on to opine on the verdict.

Why Assange Fears Being “Epsteined” (Mercer)

If America’s so free and fair, why is Julian Assange, innocent in natural law, so terrified of being extradited to the USA? And why must journalist Glenn Greenwald live abroad, after heroically helping whistleblower Edward Snowden, now safely ensconced in Russia? American heroes living abroad for fear of the American Security State? Time perhaps to shut up about China? In 2010, Snowden had shared internal NSA documents with Mr. Greenwald, the guardian of American freedoms at the British Guardian newspaper. Facilitated by Greenwald, Snowden divulged that the National Security Agency boasted of having “direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple, Yahoo, PalTalk, YouTube in 2010; Skype and AOL, and other servers.”

It transpired that, contrary to what you’d been told by officials under oath, “the world’s largest surveillance organization” can and does “obtain targeted communications without having to request them from the service providers and without having to obtain individual court orders.” This is contrary to the Bill of Rights, and the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, in particular, which specifies that “warrants shall issue” only “upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” The federal authorities routinely collect data on phone calls Americans make, regardless of whether they have any bearing on a counterterrorism investigation. Tellingly, the tools of Big Media and Big Government had not apprised you of these facts.

It took Snowden to come forth, in his words, “to reveal the criminality.” In Snowden’s poignant words, “You can’t wait around for someone else to act. I had been looking for leaders, but I realized that leadership is about being the first to act. … I’m neither traitor nor hero. I’m an American,” he summed-up so simply. “Thank you for your service,” Mr. Snowden. For his part, a decade before he was broken, an insouciant Assange told the New Yorker that “a social movement to expose secrets could bring down many administrations that rely on concealing reality — including the US administration.” A naïve Assange had vowed to skewer “lying, corrupt and murderous leadership from Bahrain to Brazil.”

With its many epic “data dumps,” Assange’s WikiLeaks enlightened and educated, providing definitive proof that the mass media are lapdogs, not watchdogs. Democratic lapdogs. The colluding quislings of the major American networks and newspapers had actively worked to elect Mrs. Clinton. Thanks to WikiLeaks, Americans also learned of the contempt with which these Democrats hold them. [..] Well, America has jurisdiction over Assange because it has simply asserted it based on trumped-up charges equating his journalism with espionage. Which is why Assange now fears being “Epsteined.”

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Elon and Bernie

 

 

OSCAR WILDE / JULIAN ASSANGE
History repeats itself

 

 

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

 

Oct 052021
 
 October 5, 2021  Posted by at 8:15 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , ,  84 Responses »


M. C. Escher Circle limit III 1959

 

They All Lied. Throw Them All Out NOW (Denninger)
Covid-19: The Hyperferritinemic Syndrome (Chesnut)
Slowly, Then All at Once (Kunstler)
The Age of Exterminations – III (Ugo Bardi)
Italian Court Sides With Nurse Wrongly Suspended For Refusing Covid-19 Jab (LSN)
New Zealand Abandons Controversial ‘Zero COVID’ Policy (SN)
India To Pay $674 Compensation For Every Covid-19 Death (BBC)
Harvard Epidemiologist Censored by LinkedIn for Defending Healthcare Jobs (BI)
New PCR Test Intelligence Suggests Covid-19 Virulent Earlier Than Thought (RM)
Antibodies Last Over A Year After Covid-19 Infection (JTN)
Europe’s Energy Crisis Presents A Real Danger (Lacalle)

 

 


From https://wereldintransitie.files.wordpress.com/2021/10/covid-19-in-perspectief.pdf

 

 

Veritas Pfizer

 

 

Qantas
https://twitter.com/i/status/1444644291758919686

 

 

“The ghouls involved in this up and down the line, from hospital administrators to doctors to nurses to politicians all must hang for this.”

They All Lied. Throw Them All Out NOW (Denninger)

The Government has been analyzing CMS data. Not a shock; they have every person over 65’s medical records, in real time, as everyone over 65, statistically speaking, is on Medicare and the government pays for it. They therefore have the records. The US Government has been analyzing this data through Project Salus. They know that:
• 71% of the Covid-19 cases occurred in these fully-vaccinated people and roughly 80% of the population >65 is vaccinated. In other words they know the vaccines do not stop you from getting Covid.
• Both of the mRNA vaccines lose effectiveness between 4-6 months post-injection; the failure rate doubles between 5-6 months as opposed to 3-4 months.
• Age is NOT why the vaccines lose effectiveness. It is simply that they stop working.
• While Moderna vaccines work slightly better than the Pfizer ones, the key word here is slightly. Both degrade materially and the difference in the 5-6 month timeframe is not statistically significant. Yes, it appears to be slightly better but not statistically so. In other words the damn things do not work to provide durable protection — period.
• The nuclear lie: As of August 7th 60% of hospitalizations were among fully-vaccinated individuals. You have heard repeatedly that this is now a “disease of the unvaccinated.” That is a damned, knowing lie.
• In the 5-6 month timeframe the hospitalization protection also is wildly ineffective; the rate per 100,000 approximately doubles between the 3-4 month and 5-6 month time periods.
• Prior infection is highly protective but post six months vaccination has become much less-so. Note that “prior infection” now goes back 18 months to the first wave. Do we still need to have a conversation about “natural immunity”? No: THE US GOVERNMENT KNOWS DAMNED WELL AND HAS PROVED THAT INFECTION PROTECTS BETTER THAN THEIR FRAUDULENT JABS.

This is now all in the data folks, and the US Government knows it. You have been lied to repeatedly folks — these are not errors, and what Fauci did yesterday on TV was not an error either. These are not “noble” anything; they are lies. The jabs are a failure in that no matter the promise you care to hang your hat on they become more and more worthless over time and that time period is short enough to void the effectiveness which the FDA claims must exist in order to approve such a thing as a “vaccine.” The Government has been analyzing this data and knows damned well the jabs stop working and in fact this is not a disease of the unvaccinated; the claims that the hospitals are “full of unvaccinated people” are damned lies intended to coerce you into a dangerous and, over time worthless act.

At the same time they know that prior infection and recovery is effective and remains effective yet they continue to claim that there is “no data” to prove this. They’re full of crap; they not only have the data they’ve analyzed it and know that’s yet another lie; there is no reason to take a jab that wears off if you have been previously infected. Period. And finally a new analysis shows this is not US-centric; infection rates are not correlated with vaccination percentages, which is hard, statistical proof that the jabs are worthless to stop you from getting and giving Covid-19 to others. The ghouls involved in this up and down the line, from hospital administrators to doctors to nurses to politicians all must hang for this.

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Check your iron.

Covid-19: The Hyperferritinemic Syndrome (Chesnut)

Ferritin is double edged. It is both an inflammation promoter and an immunosuppressant. But, it needs a trigger for BOTH of its abilities to be engaged. That trigger is none other than the Spike Protein’s cytotoxic attack on virtually EVERYTHING due to its affinity for ACE2! It is said that the Devil’s greatest trick is getting mankind to believe he doesn’t exist. It is the WHO’s and the CDC’s greatest trick that they convinced mankind that SARS-CoV-2 is a natural virus. It is a bioweapon. In particular, the Spike Protein. Only something invented could so artfully, perfectly bridge the gap and induce BOTH a hyperinflammatory state and immunosuppression. The result? ARDS in the short term. AUTOIMMUNITY in the long run.

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“Help wanted signs are plastered everywhere and no help is on the way.”

Slowly, Then All at Once (Kunstler)

Meanwhile, the country is too busy committing suicide by Covid-19. The stupid vaccine mandates guarantee the loss of hospital services and the failure of medical care generally as nurses, technicians, doctors, and even the cleaning crew peel away from their jobs. Ditto, public education… and just about everything else, really, where employment is conditioned on getting vaxed. A lot of ordinary people have weighed the costs and benefits and have decided to opt out. No thank you on blood clots and a premature death. Help wanted signs are plastered everywhere and no help is on the way. For many businesses, no parts or raw materials are on the way either. The truckers don’t want the vax. With the vaccine program failing, Pfizer and the gang are looking to ride to the rescue with a new magic Covid cure pill that does exactly what Ivermectin has been doing, though constantly maligned in the mainstream news. Get a load of this statement issued by the Associated Press on Friday.

“Falsely touted as a treatment for Covid-19?” That’s about as maliciously dishonest as you can get, since it will contribute to killing people whose lives would otherwise be saved by the Ivermectin protocol — which has been shown to be safe and effective in the clinical setting around the world. By the way, Ivermectin is an off-patent drug costing only about two dollars a pill. Since the Covid-19 early treatment protocol runs five days, that’s about $10 for that medication. It must gall the pharma companies to see that enormous profit-potential slip through their hands. Their go-to drug the past two years has been Remdesivir, which is neither safe nor effective and costs $3,100 for a course of treatment (NPR-News). How much do you suppose Pfizer will charge for its new ivermectin replacement? So, while America strangles its economy to death, seemingly on-purpose, do you suppose the capital markets will not notice? You bet they will, and that means big trouble for Wall Street, probably soon. This is their season of the witch, you know, and just last week they twitched up-and-down five hundred points a day. Looking a little shaky.


Is it a coincidence, by the way, that four officers of the Federal Reserve have been outed for trading stocks and bonds in a pattern that looks an awful lot like front-running the Fed’s own “guidance?” Robert S. Kaplan, head of the Dallas Fed, and Eric Rosengren, head of the Boston Fed announced their “early retirements” last week over stock-trading ethics issues. Fed Vice-chair Richard Clarida’s financial disclosure statement indicated that he dumped millions of dollars in a Pimco bond fund and jammed them into a Pimco stock fund the day before Fed Chair Jerome Powell announced emergency interventions to battle the Covid-19 epidemic in early 2020. Mr. Clarida was involved in deliberations leading to the change in fed policy. And Richmond Fed president Thomas Barkin is under scrutiny for voting to bail out the corporate bond market while sitting on a portfolio of corporate bonds. In his past role as CFO of McKinsey & Co, a global consulting firm, Barkin advised Purdue Pharma L.P. on maximizing sales of its painkiller OxyContin, the infamous scourge of the US opioid epidemic.

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“In 2020 the average life expectancy in the US has declined by nearly 2% for a total of 600,000 extra deaths, most of them old people. So, we are talking of some 20 billion dollars saved just in terms of pensions. But it is much more than that considering the saving in health care costs.”

The Age of Exterminations – III (Ugo Bardi)

Let’s make a few calculations. In the US, there are nowadays about 46 million retirees living on social security. The US spends about 7% of its GDP on pensions, that is, about 1.5 trillion dollars per year (about $30.000/person/year). That’s more than the about 1 trillion dollars that the US government spends for the military budget, bloated as it is. Assuming that you could remove just 10% of the retirees, it would mean saving some 150 billion dollars per year. But, in practice, much more than that if you take into account the health care costs. For instance, summing nursing care facilities and home care for the elderly, we are talking of something close to 300 billion dollars per year, and that does not include hospitalization costs. The potential savings are truly huge: hundreds of billions of dollars.

Of course, exterminating the elderly cannot be done using the same demonization techniques used in the past against the witches and the Jews. Old people are fathers and grandfathers and their offspring won’t normally like to see them burned at the stake or gassed in extermination chambers. But extermination takes many forms, and it is rarely explicitly proclaimed. After all, it never happened in history that you could find a sign with the words “extermination camp” at the gate of an extermination camp. During WWII. for instance, the Germans were told that the Jews were just being relocated, not that they were being exterminated. In other cases, the people being exterminated were glorified as heroes. So, what form could the extermination of old people take? It would be done using well-known propaganda techniques, the main one being to state the exact opposite of what is being done. In other words, when the idea is to kill some people, propaganda will convince everybody that it is done to do them a favor (do you remember the “humanitarian bombs” dropped on Serbia?)

In practice, the weak spot of the middle-class retirees is that they need medical assistance and that they cannot normally pay the skyrocketing costs on their personal saving. So, they could be gently removed from the state budget by degrading the public health care system while saying that it is being modified in order to protect them. A clever way of doing it would be to focus so much on curing a specific single disease that the result would be a decline of the care for the illnesses that mostly affect aged people: cardiovascular diseases and tumors. A parallel measure to intensify the effect would be to degrade the quality of the food available, making it become less nutritious and contaminated with all sorts of pollutants.This method would not affect the elites, who can pay for good health care and and good food, but it will hit directly those who live on pensions.

Now, let’s take a look at the current situation. In 2020 the average life expectancy in the US has declined by nearly 2% for a total of 600,000 extra deaths, most of them old people. So, we are talking of some 20 billion dollars saved just in terms of pensions. But it is much more than that considering the saving in health care costs. These numbers are not large in comparison to the US budget, but not peanuts, either. And what we are seeing is just the start of a trend.

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“..suspended without pay in February..”

Italian Court Sides With Nurse Wrongly Suspended For Refusing Covid-19 Jab (LSN)

A civil court has sided with a nurse who was suspended without pay after she refused the COVID-19 vaccine. The ruling was given by the Tribunal of Milan on September 16, following the appeal of the Italian nurse, who was not named. She had been suspended without pay in February because she refused to receive the jab in defiance of a vaccine mandate imposed by her employer. The tribunal called the suspension “illegitimate” and ordered the employer to pay the nurse her full wages with interest and arrears. The decision overturns previous court rulings for similar cases. It is the first time in Italy that a court of law has ruled in favor of an employee in a case of a suspension or a dismissal for failure to vaccinate.

The decision comes from one of Italy’s most authoritative courts and is considered particularly significant because it overturns precedents and enshrines in law the illegitimacy of dismissing or suspending employees without pay for failing to vaccinate. “This was one of the first cases of suspension of a healthcare worker,” stated Mauro Sandri, the nurse’s lawyer, in an interview on YouTube. Sandri compared the case to that of 5 nurses in a similar situation; they lost their appeal in May. “Everyone [in Italy] will remember the ruling in Belluno, when 5 nurses who were suspended by their employer launched an appeal and lost it,” he said. “The mainstream [media] amplified the outcome of that ruling by going so far as to say that it was pointless to appeal to suspensions imposed by employers.”

Sandri then recalled that the ruling in that case was “unfortunately emulated by other tribunals, including Modena and Verona” and that “a jurisprudence had been created, giving employers license to suspend their employees.” All of Sandri’s previous attempts to appeal such decisions had been unsuccessful. However, he sees that this new decision had overturned the trend. “This decision was overwhelmingly positive, as it established the illegitimate nature of the suspension,” he said. The nurse in question had been suspended since February and had not received any salary since that time. The court therefore ordered the employer to pay her salary for the full period in which she had not been compensated, with added interest, as Sandri pointed out. “The appeal aimed at obtaining her reinstatement in the workplace (…) So we requested that, as well as a full payment of her wages, with arrears.”

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But the people who implemented it get to stay? How does that work?

New Zealand Abandons Controversial ‘Zero COVID’ Policy (SN)

New Zealand has announced it is dropping its controversial ‘zero COVID’ policy after numerous critics pointed out that such an approach to eliminating the virus was impossible. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern made the announcement earlier today during a press conference in which she acknowledged, “The return to zero has been extremely difficult.” “What we have called a long tail has been more like a tentacle that has been difficult to shake,” she added, noting that the delta variant of the virus forced a change in policy. Critics had repeatedly asked how the country expected to maintain a ‘zero COVID’ policy given the emergence of new variants of the virus and decreasing efficacy of the initial round of vaccinations.


However, with 48% of the population fully vaccinated, no return to normal is expected anytime soon given that Ardern has said 90% will need to be fully vaxxed before the lockdowns will end. Kiwis have faced continuous lockdown measures almost as brutal as their Aussie neighbors since the beginning of the pandemic. As we highlighted in August, Ardern mimicked Australia’s top public health official by telling citizens, “Don’t talk to your neighbors,” after the country went into full lockdown as a result of just a single COVID case being detected. Authorities also previously announced that they would put all coronavirus infectees and their close family members in “quarantine facilities” even if they refuse.

Where will it stop?

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The differences within India are stunning.

India To Pay $674 Compensation For Every Covid-19 Death (BBC)

India’s top court has approved the government’s decision to pay 50,000 rupees ($674; £498) as compensation for every death due to Covid-19. The Supreme Court’s order followed a petition by lawyers seeking compensation under India’s disaster management laws. India has officially recorded more than 447,000 Covid-19 deaths so far. However, experts believe that up to 10 times more people could have died in the pandemic. They have arrived at different estimates after examining excess deaths – a measure of how many more people are dying than would be expected compared to the previous few years. On Monday Justice MR Shah said the “next of kith and kin of the deceased person” shall be paid this compensation within a month of applying. This would be “over and above the amounts paid by the centre and state under various benevolent schemes”, he said.


The court added that the compensation should be paid within 30 days after a family submits an application. In June, petitioners sought the court’s intervention in paying compensation to the families of Covid-19 victims. They said since Covid-19 was “specially” notified as a disaster under India’s National Disaster Management Act, compensation should be paid to the victims. The 2005 law was enacted for efficient management of disasters, including preparation of mitigation strategies, capacity-building and compensation for lost lives, injuries and damaged properties. The law says monetary assistance of 400,000 rupees should be paid to family of people who have lost their lives in a disaster.

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Kulldorff.

Harvard Epidemiologist Censored by LinkedIn for Defending Healthcare Jobs (BI)

Now LinkedIn – owned by Microsoft – appears to have joined the censorship brigade, targeting probably many venues but the Brownstone Institute in particular. The timing is particularly awkward because of the potentially millions of people who could be fired from their positions in the coming weeks and months for non-compliance with Covid mandates. Brownstone has defended the rights of workers to choose against vaccination and in favor of natural immunity or exposure through normal living. The takedowns of our posts began last week when the venue took down a piece arguing against the politicization of disease. The post was put up and disappeared. This happened to everyone who attempted to post the piece. It was a magic disappearing act, clearly targeting the URL and content.

We thought we found a workaround by posting the link for mobile viewing but LinkedIn’s algorithms figured that one out quickly and took it down too. As with all such cases, the first impulse is to believe that there was something about that piece that the censors found objectionable, perhaps in tone or content. And that piece did have an edge about it. Surely it was just once. It won’t happen again, or so we hoped. Now we find a pattern. The famed Harvard epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff – one of three brave scientists who drafted the Great Barrington Declartion one year ago today – wrote a piece in defense of the nurses at a Harvard hospital who are refusing the vaccination. These nurses and others in the hospital had worked mightily and tirelessly for 21 months with daily exposure to SARS-CoV-2 and had thereby acquired natural immunity which all research has shown to be as good or better than the vaccine.

They do not need it. It is unscientific to the point of absurdity for these immunity mandates not to consider natural immunity, about which humanity has known for 2.5 millennia. “Hospitals are firing nurses and other staff with superior natural immunity while retaining those with weaker vaccine-induced immunity,” wrote Kulldorff. “By doing so, they are betraying their patients, increasing their risk for hospital-acquired infections…. If university hospitals cannot get the medical evidence right on the basic science of immunity, how can we trust them with any other aspects of our health?” LinkedIn at first accepted the article on its platform. It unfurled the post with image and excerpt. It achieved a very high reach with many likes and shares. This makes sense because so many people on this platform are either losing their own jobs or losing colleagues in every profession. Kulldorff was bravely coming to their defense.

Within the first hour of posting, the unfurled posts started disappearing. Kulldorff’s own posting on his LinkedIn page disappeared. So did the Brownstone post. Along with it, all shares were made to disappear too. This article – by one of the world’s leading scientists at one of the world’s most prestigious universities that defended workers and their jobs – was being torn down by a platform designed to assist people in their career advancement.

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“..the timeline for when the virus was actually spreading in the wild would dramatically shift: from December 2019 to as early as May 2019..”

New PCR Test Intelligence Suggests Covid-19 Virulent Earlier Than Thought (RM)

The coronavirus may have been spreading through Wuhan, China much earlier than previously thought, according to an analysis of Chinese procurement records by Internet 2.0, a company that specializes in digital forensics and intelligence analysis. According to a report released Monday, entitled “Procuring for a Pandemic: An Assessment of Hubei Province PCR Procurement Contracts,” there was a dramatic increase in the number of Polymerase Chain Reaction, or PCR, contracts inked by Hubei Province and institutions in and around Wuhan in the second half of 2019. [..] PCR tests are the gold standard for COVID-19 virus testing and if there was spike in the use of those tests in the Spring of 2019, as the report suggests, that could mean the timeline for when the virus was actually spreading in the wild would dramatically shift: from December 2019 to as early as May 2019.

Among other things, there was a dramatic increase in the total amount of money spent on these tests in and around Wuhan, in Hubei province, the report said. In 2015, institutions there spent about 19.1 million yuan ($2.9 million) on PCR tests. Two years later, in 2017, they spent about 29.1 million yuan and in 2018, institutions around Wuhan spent 36.7 million on these tests. But when analysts looked at the spending in 2019, the government contract value for PCR tests was higher than the previous two years combined: 67.4 million yuan. (The tests got more expensive, which also suggests they got pricer as demand went up, the report says.) A team of experts from the World Health Organization investigating the origins of the pandemic visited The Wuhan Institute of Virology back in June to see if it could link its research on coronaviruses with the pandemic.

WHO’s findings have been inconclusive, though the Internet 2.0 report notes that the institute was one of the biggest purchasers of PCR tests and equipment in the second half of 2019. The company’s analysis is based on data collected through bidcenter.com.cn, which tracks Chinese government contracts. According to the researchers, there were 52 contracts found in 2015, and about the same number in 2016. In 2019, though, institutions like the Wuhan University of Science and Technology, the Wuhan CDC, and Hubei CDC had secured 135 contracts for PCR tests. Nearly double the number of the previous two years combined.

The monthly breakdown of purchases offers clues, too. There was a significant increase in spending on PCR tests and equipment over the summer of 2019, starting in May, which was remarkably different from the spending patterns in previous years. “The full inventory of this catastrophe is still being compiled,” Robert Potter, one of the authors of the report, said in a written statement. “What is clear is that investigating the coverup of the virus still has some distance to go before it is fully understood. The data presented here gives us a strong indication that the outbreak started prior to December 2019, meaning the information gap and window for the emergence of the virus is larger than when we started this project.”

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Are we measuring the right thing? This appears to suggest that those who had severe Covid are better protected. I doubt it.

Antibodies Last Over A Year After Covid-19 Infection (JTN)

Most people who have been infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, will carry antibodies for at least a year, according to a recent peer-reviewed study. The European Journal of Immunology accepted a study on Sept. 24 from scientists at the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare, who studied 1,292 subjects eight months after infection for the presence of antibodies. Their findings included 96% of subjects still carrying neutralizing antibodies and 66% with the nucleoprotein IgG antibody. After randomly selecting 367 subjects from the original cohort who were not yet vaccinated a year following infection, the scientists found that 89% of subjects still had neutralizing antibodies, and 36% with the IgG antibody.

Subjects who had experienced a severe SARS-CoV-2 infection had higher antibody levels, anywhere from two to seven times as many antibodies as those with mild infections at least 13 months after contracting the disease. While the antibodies provide lasting protection against the original SARS-CoV-2 virus, their neutralization efficiency against the Alpha, Beta, and Delta variants decreased over time. The neutralizing antibodies “were only slightly reduced” in the Alpha variant and “considerably declined” in the Beta variant. However, “over 80% of the subjects who had recovered from severe” SARS-CoV-2 infection still had neutralizing antibodies against the Delta variant a year after being infected.

Nature Medicine published a study in May that found “that neutralization level is highly predictive of immune protection” against SARS-CoV-2. A preliminary study, which is not yet peer-reviewed, found that antibodies decreased 10-fold just seven months after subjects received the second dose of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine.

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The decisions are made by people who don’t understand what energy is.

Europe’s Energy Crisis Presents A Real Danger (Lacalle)

This week the wholesale price of electricity has exceeded the psychological barrier of 200 euros per megawatt hour in most countries of the European Union. Although the daily price currently only affects 15% of the energy sold, since the rest is locked for almost twelve months since last winter at much lower prices, it is a sign of future risk. Thousands of contracts are going to have to be revised with huge price increases in the next three months when the locked contracts expire. The price of liquefied natural gas (LNG) has soared to $34/mmbtu delivered in December and January. In comparable energy terms it would be about $197 per barrel of oil equivalent, according to Morgan Stanley. Meanwhile, the price of natural gas (NBP) has risen more than 200% in 2021.

The price of CO2 emission rights has increased more than 1,000% since 2017, and more than 200% in 2021. This concept, which is a hidden tax for which the governments of the European Union are going to collect more than 21 billion euros in 2021, adds to the inflationary spike.These extraordinary tax revenues should be used to mitigate the price increases in consumer bills and avoid an energy crisis in Europe that will sink the recovery. Two key factors explain the rise in energy prices and in both there is a responsibility of governments: The forced closure of the economy is a key factor to understand the damage generated in the supply chains, and the prohibition of investment in gas resources and abandoning nuclear in Germany has led to a more volatile and expensive energy mix in peak demand periods.

This, coupled with a political decision to impose a volatile and intermittent energy mix has left Europe much more dependent and exposed to gas price fluctuations. Renewable energies work 20% of the time and when they do not work, the only guarantee of supply is to use natural gas, which tends to happen as Asia demand rises and when its price has skyrocketed. Of course, demand is a very important factor, but we cannot forget that, in natural gas, as in coal, there is no supply problem. There is, in fact, excess capacity. Under normal circumstances, the price of natural gas and CO2 would have moderated once the base effect dissipated -in June-, but we forget the disastrous impact of monetary and government interventionism. The rise in CO2 emission rights is directly the fault of the tax voracity of European governments, which have massively limited the supply of these rights so that the price rises.

Additionally, the increase of many goods and services is directly due to the massive money supply growth in 2020, well above the demand for money, generating inflation by political decree. I do not understand how the fiscal voracity of some governments blinds them to two important risks: an energy crisis that leaves businesses and families suffocated by a price increase caused by political decisions, and a massive reaction of the population against environmental policies when they see prices skyrocket due to planning errors (more volatile and intermittent energy mix and dependent on gas) and legislation (charging citizens with the full cost of environmental policies and making those who pollute pay, and those who do not, pay even more ).

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15 years of WikiLeaks
Julian Assange: Why the world needs WikiLeaks (Within months of this talk, #Assange was under house arrest. He has been arbitrarily detained since 7 December 2010.)

 

 

 

Ron Johnson

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

Jul 302021
 
 July 30, 2021  Posted by at 9:20 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  122 Responses »


Paul Gauguin Van Gogh painting sunflowers 1888

 

CDC: Delta Variant Spreads As Easily As Chickenpox, Causes More Severe Infection (CNN)
CDC Expected To Announce Friday That Vaccines Don’t Work on Delta Variant (CTH)
Health Officials Less Confident About Covid Vaccine Due To Delta Variant (JTN)
Gottlieb: Delta Surge May Be Reversing In Hot Spots (ZH)
Antibody Evolution after SARS-CoV-2 mRNA Vaccination (bioRxiv)
Why Is the FDA Attacking a Safe, Effective Drug? (WSJ)
US Capitol Police Walk Back Order To Arrest Those Without A Mask (JTN)
Biden Mandates All Federal Workers Must Be Vaccinated… Except Postal Workers (ZH)
CDC To Drop ‘Gold Standard’ PCR Test (JTN)
German Court Tells Facebook To Reinstate Deleted Posts (Pol.eu)

 

 

Things are shifting, and everyone’s busy saving their faulty faces. It’s about time to decree that only the vaccinated need to wear masks, but they’re not quite there yet.

 

 

Those tests? Whenever you feel like it, Pfizer. No hurry.

 

 

FDA approval in September? That’s 2024, right?!

 

 

 

 

Fleming vax or not risk reduction 0.8-1.25%

 

 

If true, it would be game changing (a first?!). A virus that becomes more transmissible and more lethal at the same time. For now, don’t buy it.

As for those MSNBC interviews, that’s where most people get “informed”. Tragic.

CDC: Delta Variant Spreads As Easily As Chickenpox, Causes More Severe Infection (CNN)

The Delta coronavirus variant surging across the United States appears to cause more severe illness and spread as easily as chickenpox, according to an internal document from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The document — a slide presentation — outlines unpublished data that shows fully vaccinated people might spread the Delta variant at the same rate as unvaccinated people. CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky confirmed the authenticity of the document, which was first reported by The Washington Post. “I think people need to understand that we’re not crying wolf here. This is serious,” she told CNN. “It’s one of the most transmissible viruses we know about. Measles, chickenpox, this — they’re all up there.”

The CDC is scheduled to publish data Friday that will back Walensky’s controversial decision to change guidance for fully vaccinated people. She said Tuesday the CDC was recommending that even fully vaccinated people wear masks indoors in places where transmission of the virus is sustained or high.[..]The presentation also cites three reports that indicate the Delta variant — originally known as B.1.617.2 — might cause more severe disease. The CDC, the document advises, should “acknowledge the war has changed.” It recommends vaccine mandates and universal mask requirements. The virus is once against surging across the US — especially in areas where fewer people are vaccinated. The US averaged more than 61,300 new daily cases over the last week — an average that’s generally risen since the country hit a 2021 low of 11,299 daily cases on June 22, according to Johns Hopkins University data. “The number of cases we have now is higher than any number we had on any given day last summer,” Walensky told CNN.

WaPo

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Nothing to do with the very very effective vaccines of course.

CDC Expected To Announce Friday That Vaccines Don’t Work on Delta Variant (CTH)

The White House would never credit Donald Trump with the vaccine rollout unless there was something negative about the vaccine that is going to hit the newswires; that is a no-brainer. That baseline is why CTH said two months ago to watch for the moment when the White House credits Trump with the vaccine, because that’s the moment when: (1) the vaccine was going to be identified as dangerous; and/or (2) reports would show the vaccine did not work. Today the White House credited President Trump with the vaccine:

….And right on cue, the late-evening reporting indicates that tomorrow the CDC will announce the vaccine doesn’t work (against the Delta variant). Hence, the need for masks, social distancing and/or possibly lockdowns 2.0. Reminder, when the Intelligence Branch needs to get the public relations engaged, they use the New York Times. [New York Times] – […] New research showed that vaccinated people infected with the Delta variant carry tremendous amounts of the virus in the nose and throat, she said in an email responding to questions from The New York Times. The finding contradicts what scientists had observed in vaccinated people infected with previous versions of the virus, who mostly seemed incapable of infecting others. That conclusion dealt Americans a heavy blow: People with so-called breakthrough infections — cases that occur despite full vaccination — of the Delta variant may be just as contagious as unvaccinated people, even if they have no symptoms.”

Bottom line of this narrative shift… vaccinations don’t work. Everything goes back to square one. Blame Trump, not us. There is also data showing that COVID hospitalizations offer no distinction between vaccinated and unvaccinated; and in the example of LA county, the percentage of vaccinated people hospitalized with COVID is identical to the percentage of vaccinated people in the general population. [70% of population vaccinated, 70% of COVID hospitalization patients are vaccinated.] The vaccine offers no benefit from the standing of hospitalization… or so it appears.

In San Francisco, 77% of the population is vaccinated and 83% of the COVID hospitalizations at University of California SF Hospital are previously vaccinated [link]. Again, highlighting the vaccine offers no benefit from the standpoint of hospitalization. Additionally, there’s data from a recent Pfizer study where 44,000 patients were studied. 22,000 were given the vaccine, and 22,000 received the placebo. The results amid both groups was almost identical.

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She keeps at it still: “..in rare occasions, some vaccinated people infected with the Delta variant after vaccination may be contagious..”

What will the message be tomorrow?

Health Officials Less Confident About Covid Vaccine Due To Delta Variant (JTN)

Public health confidence in the COVID-19 vaccine appears to be waning as officials warn of enhanced danger — even for vaccinated individuals — from the “Delta variant” of the SARS-Cov-2 virus. For most of the past year officials have claimed that vaccinations are the only viable path back to normalcy and away from lockdowns and other aggressive mitigation measures. “Look at the folks in your community who have gotten vaccinated and are getting back to living their lives — their full lives,” President Joe Biden said at a May press conference, arguing that the vaccine was “going to help them and their loved ones be safe, get our businesses open again, and get us back to normal.”

The rollout of the vaccines starting last year and continuing throughout the spring and summer of this year has been hailed as the driving force behind the reopening of the economy and the ending of masking mandates and similar restrictions. Yet over the past week the tone from public officials has grown increasingly grim, with leaders now appearing to doubt that the vaccine is sufficient to forestall COVID transmission and potential catastrophe due to the rise of the Delta variant. A marked shift was seen this week from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which reversed its earlier masking guidance and claimed that fully vaccinated individuals should wear masks indoors in areas with high COVID transmission.

The Delta variant “behaves uniquely differently from past strains of the virus that cause COVID-19,” CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said at a press conference this week. “Information on the Delta variant from several states and other countries indicate that in rare occasions, some vaccinated people infected with the Delta variant after vaccination may be contagious and spread the virus to others,” she claimed. “This new science is worrisome and unfortunately warrants an update to our recommendations.” White House coronavirus expert Dr. Anthony Fauci signaled a similar shift during an interview with NPR when he called the Delta variant “a different virus.” The Delta variant “is much more capable of transmitting from people to people,” Fauci claimed, stating that when even fully vaccinated people contract the virus “they are capable of transmitting the infection to someone else.”

The shift from strong confidence in the vaccine to the masking of fully vaccinated individuals comes after several weeks of steadily rising COVID-19 cases throughout the United States. Experts have feared that the Delta variant could cause a surge in hospitalizations and deaths, leading to catastrophic scenarios of the kinds hypothesized at the outset of the pandemic last year.

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But wait, wasn’t it as contagious as ebola?

Gottlieb: Delta Surge May Be Reversing In Hot Spots (ZH)

While hospitalizations and deaths are clearly higher in areas where vaccination rates are lower, rates are still well below their levels from just a few months ago. And although Dr. Anthony Fauci would have you believe that Delta might cause the end of the world as we know it, his isn’t the only view on the matter. Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a former director of the FDA, believes delta will peak within the next two to three weeks. And after breaking the data down to the regional level, Bloomberg has apparently spotted some trends that suggest as Delta’s global conquest has been characterized by “hyperspeed spikes in infections that eased dramatically after about two months.”

s The first US outbreaks that caught officials’ eye were in Missouri and Arkansas, and they both started in earnest around the end of May, per BBG. They noted that the rest of the country will be keeping a close eye on both states (along with a handful of others, including California). The rest of the US will be watching those states closely as infections spread. The cases are prompting authorities to reconsider masking and other public-health measures, but many state and local governments are doing so gingerly and only after outbreaks are well underway. In Florida’s Miami-Dade County, Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said Wednesday that she would require masks again at indoor county facilities such as libraries.

Bloomberg also cited the following tweet from Dr. Gottlieb where he explained how Rt, a virus’s effective reproductive number, plays into forecasts of the virus’s spread. The logic behind it is pretty simple: If Rt falls below 1, then the virus’s spread should start to slow. Gottlieb cited data from covidestim, a project with contributors from Yale School of Public Health, Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Stanford Medicine, showing the Rt rate in the worst hit states is already trending toward 1. When the numbers did this in the UK, seen as being just a few weeks ahead of the US, cases quickly started falling off.

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The conclusion is simple: “..memory antibodies selected over time by natural infection have greater potency and breadth than antibodies elicited by vaccination.”.

But they still need to package it in jargon.

Antibody Evolution after SARS-CoV-2 mRNA Vaccination (bioRxiv)

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection produces B-cell responses that continue to evolve for at least one year. During that time, memory B cells express increasingly broad and potent antibodies that are resistant to mutations found in variants of concern. As a result, vaccination of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) convalescent individuals with currently available mRNA vaccines produces high levels of plasma neutralizing activity against all variants tested. Here, we examine memory B cell evolution 5 months after vaccination with either Moderna (mRNA-1273) or Pfizer-BioNTech (BNT162b2) mRNA vaccines in a cohort of SARS-CoV-2 naive individuals.


Between prime and boost, memory B cells produce antibodies that evolve increased neutralizing activity, but there is no further increase in potency or breadth thereafter. Instead, memory B cells that emerge 5 months after vaccination of naive individuals express antibodies that are equivalent to those that dominate the initial response. We conclude that memory antibodies selected over time by natural infection have greater potency and breadth than antibodies elicited by vaccination. These results suggest that boosting vaccinated individuals with currently available mRNA vaccines would produce a quantitative increase in plasma neutralizing activity but not the qualitative advantage against variants obtained by vaccinating convalescent individuals.

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The WSJ goes ivermectin. Next up NYT, then CNN?

Why Is the FDA Attacking a Safe, Effective Drug? (WSJ)

The Food and Drug Administration claims to follow the science. So why is it attacking ivermectin, a medication it certified in 1996? Earlier this year the agency put out a special warning that “you should not use ivermectin to treat or prevent COVID-19.” The FDA’s statement included words and phrases such as “serious harm,” “hospitalized,” “dangerous,” “very dangerous,” “seizures,” “coma and even death” and “highly toxic.” Any reader would think the FDA was warning against poison pills. In fact, the drug is FDA-approved as a safe and effective antiparasitic. Ivermectin was developed and marketed by Merck & Co. while one of us (Mr. Hooper) worked there years ago.

William C. Campbell and Satoshi Omura won the 2015 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for discovering and developing avermectin, which Mr. Campbell and associates modified to create ivermectin. Ivermectin is on the World Health Organization’s List of Essential Medicines. Merck has donated four billion doses to prevent river blindness and other diseases in Africa and other places where parasites are common. A group of 10 doctors who call themselves the Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance have said ivermectin is “one of the safest, low-cost, and widely available drugs in the history of medicine.” Ivermectin fights 21 viruses, including SARS-CoV-2, the cause of Covid-19. A single dose reduced the viral load of SARS-CoV-2 in cells by 99.8% in 24 hours and 99.98% in 48 hours, according to a June 2020 study published in the journal Antiviral Research.

Some 70 clinical trials are evaluating the use of ivermectin for treating Covid-19. The statistically significant evidence suggests that it is safe and works for both treating and preventing the disease. In 115 patients with Covid-19 who received a single dose of ivermectin, none developed pneumonia or cardiovascular complications, while 11.4% of those in the control group did. Fewer ivermectin patients developed respiratory distress (2.6% vs. 15.8%); fewer required oxygen (9.6% vs. 45.9%); fewer required antibiotics (15.7% vs. 60.2%); and fewer entered intensive care (0.1% vs. 8.3%). Ivermectin-treated patients tested negative faster, in four days instead of 15, and stayed in the hospital nine days on average instead of 15. Ivermectin patients experienced 13.3% mortality compared with 24.5% in the control group.

Moreover, the drug can help prevent Covid-19. One 2020 article in Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications looked at what happened after the drug was given to family members of confirmed Covid-19 patients. Less than 8% became infected, versus 58.4% of those untreated.Despite the FDA’s claims, ivermectin is safe at approved doses. Out of four billion doses administered since 1998, there have been only 28 cases of serious neurological adverse events, according to an article published this year in the American Journal of Therapeutics. The same study found that ivermectin has been used safely in pregnant women, children and infants.

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Fiddling with Nancy’s new hobby.

US Capitol Police Walk Back Order To Arrest Those Without A Mask (JTN)

Capitol police Thursday night walked back a memo that ordered officers to deny entry and possibly arrest those who enter the United States House of Representatives who are not wearing masks after mask mandates were reintroduced earlier this week. “Regarding the House mask rule, there is no reason it should ever come to someone being arrested. Anyone who does not follow the rule will be asked to wear a mask or leave the premises. The Department’s requirements for officers to wear masks is for their health and safety,” the USCP said in a statement Thursday night.


On Wednesday, newly appointed Capitol Police Chief Thomas Manger ordered officers to enforce new mask mandates in the House, including denial of entry and even arrest. “If a visitor or staff member fails to wear a mask after a request is made to do so, the visitor or staff shall be denied entry to the House Office Buildings or House-side of the U.S. Capitol,” Manger said Wednesday. “Any person who fails to either comply or leave the premises after being asked to do so would be subject to an arrest for Unlawful Entry.”

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They must be vaccinated so they spread more virus. A Chinese study claims the viral load is 1,000 times higher.

Biden Mandates All Federal Workers Must Be Vaccinated… Except Postal Workers (ZH)

Earlier in the week Biden suggested that those who are yet to be vaccinated are “sowing enormous confusion.” “We have a pandemic because of the unvaccinated, and they’re sowing enormous confusion,” Biden said. “And there’s only one thing we know for sure, if those other 100 million people got vaccinated, we’d be in a very different world. So get vaccinated. If you haven’t, you’re not nearly as smart as I said you were.” And now he has gone to ’11’ on the ‘your body, no choice’ amplifier, saying tonight that he’ll require federal workers to prove they’ve been vaccinated against Covid-19 or wear masks and submit to frequent coronavirus testing. Additionally, the rules will cover millions of federal workers, including the military and on-site contractors.

“What I’m trying to do is keep people safe,” Biden said Thursday at the White House. “If in fact you’re unvaccinated, you present a problem to yourself, to your family and to those with whom you work.” Biden also asked his team to take steps to apply similar standards to all federal contractors and encourage private sector employers to follow the same approach. There’s just one thing… the federal worker mandate does not apply to postal workers? What do postal workers know about the science that Biden doesn’t? We don’t know, but dare we mention it could be related to the 220,000-member strong union’s leaders waiting to be negotiated with. As The Epoch Times’ Isabel van Brugen detailed earlier,

“The American Postal Workers Union (APWU) has said that it opposes mandatory COVID-19 vaccinations, amid reports that the White House is considering so-called vaccine passports as a condition of employment for federal employees. The union, which represents over 220,000 postal workers, released a statement late Wednesday saying that while it will encourage postal workers to get vaccinated against COVID-19, it is “not the role of the federal government to mandate vaccinations for the employees we represent.” “Issues related to vaccinations and testing for COVID-19 in the workplace must be negotiated with the APWU. At this time the APWU opposes the mandating of COVID-19 vaccinations in relation to U.S. postal workers,” the statement said.

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Not a word about the flu.

CDC To Drop ‘Gold Standard’ PCR Test (JTN)

PCR tests, long hailed as the “gold standard” in detecting SARS-Cov-2 cases, will be dropped by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention at the beginning of next year. Polymerase chain reaction tests have been a mainstay of the U.S. and global response to COVID-19 since early in 2020, but health officials have warned the diagnostic tool poses a risk of false-positive results. The test works by amplifying a biological sample through successive cycles until a virus — if it’s present in the assay — can be detected by the testing machine. The CDC announced this month that it would be withdrawing its request to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for the emergency use authorization of the test. The agency urged laboratories to “begin their transition to another FDA-authorized COVID-19 test.”

CDC spokeswoman Kristen Nordlund told Just the News that the agency was discontinuing its support for the test “given the availability of commercial options for clinical diagnosis of SARS-CoV-2 infection, including multiplexed … and high-throughput options.” “Although the CDC 2019 Novel Coronavirus … Real-Time RT-PCR Diagnostic Panel met an important unmet need when it was developed and deployed and has not demonstrated any performance issues, the demand for this test has declined with the emergence of other higher-throughput and multiplexed assays,” she said via email. Those risks have been acknowledged by multiple prominent public health figures, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, chief medical adviser to President Biden and the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

In a July 2020 interview on an infectious disease podcast, Fauci warned that the sensitive PCR tests might, if allowed to progress through too many amplification cycles, return a “positive” result when it was actually just detecting “dead nucleotides.” The World Health Organization earlier this year warned in a medical product alert that PCR tests carry with them the risk of “false positives” because the test might only be picking up small fragments of the virus via heavy amplification. “[D]isease prevalence alters the predictive value of test results; as disease prevalence decreases, the risk of false positive increases,” the alert stated. “This means that the probability that a person who has a positive result (SARS-CoV-2 detected) is truly infected with SARS-CoV-2 decreases as prevalence decreases, irrespective of the claimed specificity.”

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“We welcome the ruling of the Court, which upholds the principle that platforms like ours are allowed to remove hate speech according to company policies and block the respective user accounts,” said a Facebook spokesperson.

German Court Tells Facebook To Reinstate Deleted Posts (Pol.eu)

Germany’s Federal Court ruled Thursday that Facebook had to reinstate racist comments because it had improperly removed them. In its ruling, the Karlsruhe-based court said that while Facebook had the right to decide what stays on or off the platform, it needs to be more forthcoming with users on how it does so. The court found that the social media company did not inform two users that it had removed their posts. It added that the company should have also informed and given users an opportunity to respond before suspending them from its platform. The decision sets a major precedent for how social media companies police content on their platforms, likely giving a boost to EU lawmakers in Brussels, who are pushing to add further obligations on social media companies.

It also upends a years-long status quo whereby platforms were effectively free to develop and implement content moderation policies on their own, which critics say has resulted in a lack of transparency, information, and potential recourse for the users. The case in question is from 2018, when Facebook removed posts in which two German users attacked migrants because it said the posts violated its policy on hate speech, and then suspended the users’ accounts for several days. The users complained that the posts’ removal was a violation of free speech. The court said while Facebook was entitled to set strict content rules banning hateful speech and to block users, the way it implemented its content moderation policy was not proper.

“Provisions in general terms and conditions are ineffective if they unreasonably disadvantage the contractual partner of the user contrary to the requirements of good faith,” said the court. Facebook will not be allowed to delete the posts again after they are reinstated. “We welcome the ruling of the Court, which upholds the principle that platforms like ours are allowed to remove hate speech according to company policies and block the respective user accounts,” said a Facebook spokesperson.

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Tucker Walensky

 

 

Fauci about delta variant and children…

 

 

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Jul 262021
 
 July 26, 2021  Posted by at 9:08 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  134 Responses »


Henri Matisse Reading woman in violet dress 1898

 

CDC Withdraws PCR Tests: “They Can’t Tell SARS-CoV-2 from Influenza” (GN)
Bill Gates Primary Funder Of MHRA, Owns Major Shares In Pfizer & BioNTech (DE)
Little Known Osteopath In The Spotlight As An Anti-vaxx Superspreader (NYT)
CDC ‘Actively’ Considering Face Cover Advisory For Vaccinated: Fauci (RT)
The Other Side of the COVID Vaccination Argument (CTH)
159 Dead, 593 Hospitalized in Illinois Breakthrough COVID Cases (NBC)
Biden DOJ Drops Civil Rights Probe Of Gov. Cuomo Over Nursing Homes (NYP)
UK Economy Growing At Fastest Rate In 80 Years (G.)
Judge Refuses To Identify 5 Market Participants In VIX Manipulation (ZH)
The Insect Apocalypse: ‘Our World Will Grind To A Halt Without Them’ (G.)
CNN Airs Hour-Long Public Service Message On Dementia (BBee)

 

 

 

 

Seneff long term effects

 

 

Lee Merritt – Synthetic Spike Protein Affects Every Cell
– start at 50 min

 

 

In case you were wondering why there are no flu cases left.

Google translated.

Note: Bill Gates and George Soros bought UK testing firm Mologic just days ago.

CDC Withdraws PCR Tests: “They Can’t Tell SARS-CoV-2 from Influenza” (GN)

On 21 July 2021, the 18 lines that rewrite the history of the Covid-19 pandemic were published. The CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) of the USA, the highest health authority of the American government for monitoring diseases and in particular infectious ones, has launched an alert that assumes the range of a nuclear missile against the rubber wall of the international narrative on the emergency caused by the SARS-Cov-2 virus ( believed to have been built in the laboratory by many scientific researches now ).

“After December 31, 2021, the CDC will withdraw the application to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) of the CDC 2019-Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) Real-Time RT-PCR Diagnostic Panel, the test first introduced in February 2020 for the detection of SARS-CoV-2 only. CDC provides this notice in advance to clinical laboratories to allow sufficient time to select and implement one of the many alternatives authorized by the FDA.”

This is the “Lab Alert” launched by the Division of Laboratory System (DLS), the specialized section of the CDC ( link at the bottom of the article ). Alone, it would already be enough to confirm all the investigations carried out in recent months on 97% unreliable tampons, as claimed by various scientific researches and international judicial authorities . But the official communication of the CDC (branched body in all the confederate states) states between the lines something already shocking, anticipated by Gospa News already last year: that is the risk that the nasopharyngeal swabs PCR, subject to cycles of variable amplifications , may not distinguish Covid-19 from a simple flu.

Visit the FDA website for a list of authorized COVID-19 diagnostic methods. For a summary of the performance of FDA-cleared molecular methods with an FDA reference panel. In preparation for this change, CDC recommends clinical laboratories and testing sites that have used the CDC 2019-nCoV RT-PCR assay to select and begin transitioning to another FDA-cleared COVID-19 assay. The CDC encourages laboratories to consider adopting a multiplex method that can facilitate the detection and differentiation of SARS-CoV-2 and influenza viruses.Such tests can facilitate the continuation of testing for both influenza and SARS-CoV-2 and can save time and resources as we head into the flu season. Laboratories and test sites must validate and verify the selected test within their facility before starting clinical trials. ”

The Real time PCR – also known as Quantitative PCR , abbreviated qPCR – is a method that simultaneously amplifies (polymerase chain reaction or PCR) and quantifies the DNA , similar but not to be confused with the RT-PCR method (Reverse Transcriptase -PCR ) . DNA is amplified by DNA-polymerase chain reactions. After each round of amplification, the DNA is quantified. Common methods of quantification include the use of fluorescent stains that intercalate with double-stranded (ds) DNA and modified DNA oligonucleotides (called probes) which are fluorescent when hybridized with a DNA. Real-time PCR is often combined with Retro Transcriptional PCR (RT-PCR) to quantify the expression levels of specific RNA: retro-transcription (or reverse transcription) produces single-stranded complementary DNA called cDNA (complementary DNA) keeping the relative concentration ratios of the different RNA species unchanged. In this way it is possible, for example, to measure the relative expression of a gene at a particular time, either in a cell or in a particular type of tissue.

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Fully impartial.

Bill Gates Primary Funder Of MHRA, Owns Major Shares In Pfizer & BioNTech (DE)

An investigation has revealed that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation are the primary funders of the UK’s Medicine & Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, and that the Foundation also owns major shares in both Pfizer and BioNTech. The Medicine & Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) extended the emergency authorisation of the Pfizer/BioNTech mRNA jab in the UK to allow it to be given to children between the ages of 12 – 15 on the 4th June 2021. At the time, the Chief Executive of the MHRA, Dr June Raine said the MHRA had “carefully reviewed clinical trial data in children aged 12 to 15 years and have concluded that the Pfizer vaccine is safe and effective in this age group and that the benefits outweigh any risk”.

We are left wondering if Dr June Raine and the MHRA have even read the results of the extremely short and small study. If they have then they would have seen that 86% of children in the study suffered an adverse reaction ranging from mild to extremely serious. Just 1,127 children took part of the trial, however only 1,097 children completed the trial, with 30 of them not participating after being given the first dose of the Pfizer jab. The results do not state why the 30 children did not go on to complete the trial. The information is publicly available [..] There was never any doubt that the MHRA would give emergency authorisation for the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine to be used in children when you consider that a certain Mr Bill Gates owns shares in both Pfizer and BioNTech and is the primary funder of the MHRA.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation bought shares in Pfizer back in 2002, and back in September 2020 Bill Gates ensured the value of his shares went up by announcing to the mainstream media in a CNBC interview that he viewed the Pfizer jab as the leader in the Covid-19 vaccine race. “The only vaccine that, if everything went perfectly, might seek the emergency use license by the end of October, would be Pfizer.” The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation also “coincidentally” bought $55 million worth of shares in BioNTech in September 2019, just before the alleged Covid-19 pandemic struck.

The MHRA received a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 2017 to the tune of £980,000 for a “collaboration” with the foundation. However, a Freedom of Information request which the MHRA responded to in May 2021 revealed that the current level of grant funding received from the Gates Foundation amounts to $3 million and covers “a number of projects”.

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“More than 97% of people hospitalised for COVID-19 are unvaccinated..”

Because the vaccinated are no longer tested.

NYT going after Mercola big time. Who’s next? They’ll pick them off one by one.

Little Known Osteopath In The Spotlight As An Anti-vaxx Superspreader (NYT)

The article that appeared online February 9 began with a seemingly innocuous question about the legal definition of vaccines. Then over its next 3400 words, it declared coronavirus vaccines were “a medical fraud” and said the injections did not prevent infections, provide immunity or stop transmission of the disease. Instead, the article claimed, the shots “alter your genetic coding, turning you into a viral protein factory that has no off-switch”. Its assertions were easily disprovable. No matter. Over the next few hours, the article was translated from English into Spanish and Polish. It appeared on dozens of blogs and was picked up by anti-vaccination activists, who repeated the false claims online. The article also made its way to Facebook, where it reached 400,000 people, according to data from CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned tool.

The entire effort traced back to one person: Joseph Mercola. Mercola, 67, an osteopathic physician in Cape Coral, Florida, has long been a subject of criticism and government regulatory actions for his promotion of unproven or unapproved treatments. But most recently, he has become the chief spreader of coronavirus misinformation online, according to researchers. An internet-savvy entrepreneur who employs dozens, Mercola has published more than 600 articles on Facebook that cast doubt on COVID-19 vaccines since the pandemic began, reaching a far larger audience than other vaccine sceptics, an analysis by The New York Times found. His claims have been widely echoed on Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.

The activity has earned Mercola, a natural health proponent with an Everyman demeanour, the dubious distinction of the top spot in the “Disinformation Dozen,” a list of 12 people responsible for sharing 65 per cent of all anti-vaccine messaging on social media, said the nonprofit Centre for Countering Digital Hate. Others on the list include Robert F. Kennedy jnr, a longtime anti-vaccine activist; and Erin Elizabeth, founder of the website Health Nut News, who is also Mercola’s girlfriend. “Mercola is the pioneer of the anti-vaccine movement,” said Kolina Koltai, a researcher at the University of Washington who studies online conspiracy theories. “He’s a master of capitalising on periods of uncertainty, like the pandemic, to grow his movement.”

Some high-profile media figures have promoted scepticism of the vaccines — notably, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham of Fox News, though other Fox personalities have urged viewers to get the shots. Now Mercola and others in the “Disinformation Dozen” are in the spotlight as vaccinations in the United States slow, just as the highly infectious delta variant has fuelled a resurgence in coronavirus cases. More than 97% of people hospitalised for COVID-19 are unvaccinated, according to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. President Joe Biden has blamed online falsehoods for causing people to refrain from getting the injections. But even as Biden has urged social media companies to “do something about the misinformation,” Mercola shows the difficulty of that task. Over the last decade, Mercola has built a vast operation to push natural health cures, disseminate anti-vaccination content and profit from all of it, said researchers who have studied his network. In 2017, he filed an affidavit claiming his net worth was “in excess of $US100 million”.

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In religion, credibility is not a factor.

CDC ‘Actively’ Considering Face Cover Advisory For Vaccinated: Fauci (RT)

White House health advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci has revealed that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) could soon reconsider its guidelines, recommending vaccinated Americans to mask up again. Top health officials have reportedly been having preliminary talks about revising mask recommendations for vaccinated Americans due to a rise in cases and concerns over the more infectious Delta variant of Covid-19. According to current guidance, those vaccinated against the virus do not need to wear masks in most public spaces. The revision of the mask guidance is indeed “under active consideration,” Fauci confirmed to CNN on Sunday. The infectious disease expert did not give a timeframe for when the federal guidance could change, but he praised those state officials who had already rushed ahead to reinstate local mask mandates in response to rising coronavirus cases.


“If you look at what’s going on locally in the trenches, in places like L.A. County,” Fauci said, “the local officials have the discretion, and the CDC agrees with that ability and discretion capability to say, you know, you’re in a situation where we’re having a lot of dynamics of infection, so even if you are vaccinated, you should wear a mask.” Fauci and other White House officials have used the uptick in cases to continue pushing unvaccinated Americans to get inoculated. Recent polling, however, has signified that those who have refused getting vaccinated thus far have little to no interest in changing their minds.

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Great video.

The Other Side of the COVID Vaccination Argument (CTH)

There is a lot of incoming information from government and the private sector promoting the vaccine. Recently, there has been a significant uptick in compulsory demands for taking the COVID vaccine. This forced vaccination approach has made many people start to question why this coordinated pressure campaign has increased with such ferocity. As a result of such one-side information, people are increasingly skeptical. In this video below you can review the counter-position for why people do not want to take the vaccination shot.


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Very rare.

159 Dead, 593 Hospitalized in Illinois Breakthrough COVID Cases (NBC)

More than 150 people have died and nearly 600 have been hospitalized in Illinois due to COVID-19 in “breakthrough” cases after they were fully vaccinated, according to state health officials. According to data updated Wednesday by the Illinois Department of Public Health, 159 people in Illinois have died due to COVID-19 or complications after being fully vaccinated. That figure equates to 2.3% of COVID-19 deaths in the state since Jan. 1, officials said. At least 593 fully vaccinated people have been hospitalized in Illinois, IDPH said. The state only reports breakthrough infections among those who have been hospitalized or died, following guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, IDPH said.


Those totals mean eight more fully vaccinated individuals have died and 30 more have been hospitalized in the past week since the state last updated its reported numbers. The state does not publicize the number of residents who tested positive after being fully vaccinated but did not die or require hospitalization in order to “help maximize the quality of the data collected on cases of greatest clinical and public health importance,” IDPH’s website reads.

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He’s a made man.

Biden DOJ Drops Civil Rights Probe Of Gov. Cuomo Over Nursing Homes (NYP)

The Department of Justice has decided not to investigate whether the civil rights of residents in New York’s government-run nursing homes were violated by Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s controversial admission policy related to the COVID-19 pandemic. In a letter Friday, the DOJ’s Office of Legislative Affairs told US Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), ranking member of that House Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, that New York was off the hook in connection with potential violations of the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act. In August, the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division requested information from New York in connection with a March 25, 2020, order from the state Department of Health that required nursing homes to admit “medically stable” COVID-19 patients discharged from hospitals.

It also sought records from Pennsylvania, Michigan and New Jersey, which adopted similar rules that the DOJ said “may have resulted in the deaths of thousands of elderly nursing home residents.” “We have reviewed the information provided by these states along with additional information available to the Department,” Deputy Assistant Attorney General Joe Gaeta wrote Friday. “Based on that review, we have decided not to open a CRIPA investigation of any public nursing facility within New York, Pennsylvania, or Michigan at this time.” In a prepared statement, Scalise called it “outrageous that the Department of Justice refuses to investigate the deadly ‘must admit’ orders issued by governors in New York, Pennsylvania, and Michigan that resulted in the deaths of thousands of senior citizens.”

“Where is the justice for nursing home victims and their grieving families? These deadly orders contradicted the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s] guidance, and needlessly endangered the most vulnerable among us to the deadly COVID-19 virus,” Scalise said. “Even worse, Governor Cuomo in New York intentionally tried to cover up the true death toll resulting from his mandate. Grieving families deserve answers and accountability. It’s unconscionable that Biden’s Department of Justice refuses to investigate the deadly actions that went against CDC’s medical guidance taken in these states.”

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Oh sure. As the media scream Armageddon.

UK Economy Growing At Fastest Rate In 80 Years (G.)

The British economy is growing at its fastest pace in 80 years and could recover its pre-pandemic size by the end of this year, according to a leading economic forecaster. Buoyed by the vaccine rollout and a bounce back in consumer spending, the EY Item Club said it now expected GDP to grow by 7.6% – which would be the fastest annual growth in national income since 1941. The UK economy shrank by 9.8% in 2020, the worst performance in the G7. The optimism comes despite the chaos caused by widespread staff shortages as workers self-isolate en masse after being pinged by NHS test and trace. The “pingdemic” is affecting the running of shops, restaurants, factories and even railway services as bosses struggle to find staff to cover shifts.

Although the economy has proved increasingly resilient through lockdowns, the EY Item Club report came with the health warning that the “future pattern of the pandemic and any renewed pandemic-related restrictions will have a significant bearing on whether the forecast is achieved”. The UK economy is more dependent on consumer spending on services, such as recreation and leisure activities, which meant that the lockdowns had a greater economic impact than in other countries, said Martin Beck, the EY Item Club’s senior economic adviser. The reopening of these “face-to-face parts of the economy means the UK should have a correspondingly faster recovery”, he said. In the spring, the group of economists, which is the only non-government forecasting organisation to use the Treasury’s modelling of the economy, pencilled in growth of 6.8%.

This is the second time this year it has upgraded its forecast, putting the economy on track to attain its pre-pandemic peak by the end of 2021. That milestone would now be reached some six months sooner than when it last crunched the numbers in April, with the UK’s successful vaccine programme a key factor. Recent surveys of economic activity have, however, been less encouraging, leading to concerns that the recovery is stalling. The IHS Markit and the Cips survey showed growth at its slowest since March, which was attributed to wide-ranging staff shortages, rising Covid cases and thousands of workers having to isolate owing to the pingdemic. It also highlighted a new mood of caution among the public triggered by the rapidly rising infection rates.

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Because the Fed is one? Because the market makers are?

Judge Refuses To Identify 5 Market Participants In VIX Manipulation (ZH)

[..] on Feb 5, 2018 the steamroller woke up with a vengeance, and shortly after the close, the infamous volmageddon event took place when a handful of the most popular inverse VIX strategies crashed from near record highs to zero in a manner of minutes as ETN liquidation triggers were activated, sending the VIX briefly to record highs and wiping out billions in value and leaving countless retail investors stunned and facing total losses. Yet while to retail investors losses were in the hundreds or, at most, thousands of dollars (recall this was in the pre-stimmy stage when people cared about their money), some hedge funds got completely wiped out. One among them was LJM Partners, a Chicago-based fund that lost $446.8 million in one day from the market moves, wiping out 86.5% of its assets in seconds.

And so LJM and more than two dozen other investors and fund managers sued over the next year to recover losses, claiming unidentified market participants that rigged the index “repeatedly posted and immediately canceled” tens of thousands of quotes for S&P 500 options, whose prices are used to calculate the VIX. The plaintiffs, understandably furious at the events of Feb 5, claiming that unidentified market participants manipulated the VIX by posting S&P 500 options quotes that only stayed in the order book for milliseconds, not long enough for anyone to trade against but enough time for them to be incorporated into the value of the VIX.

That technique, known as “flashing” and popularized back in 2009 first by this website, was unrelated to any legitimate positions the unidentified market participants held or wished to hold, but successfully manipulated the price of S&P 500 options and futures contracts, LJM claimed, even though the CBOE which is the Chicago-based owner of the VIX and the exchange where S&P 500 options trade, has repeatedly dismissed claims of manipulation of the index. And while LJM has yet to recover any funds, on Friday the defunct fund suffered another setback, when a federal judge refused to identify five market participants accused in the lawsuit of manipulating the VIX index.

US District Judge Manish S. Shah, during a telephone conference Friday in Chicago, said the plaintiffs had failed to provide enough evidence of actual manipulation to justify revealing the names of the market participants, who were identified only by code names in exchange records. “Plaintiffs have not demonstrated good cause” for the disclosure, said Shah, who had earlier authorized the release of exchange data to help them make their case. “Rather than specific allegations of manipulation, plaintiffs’ complaints offer a menu of what they characterize as potentially manipulative conduct that may have occurred on February 5 and 6, 2018,” the market participants said in a court filing.

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Many people asking where the bugs on their windshields went. Which is a typical “connection” with nature.

The Insect Apocalypse: ‘Our World Will Grind To A Halt Without Them’ (G.)

In 2015 I was contacted by the Krefeld Society, a group of entomologists who, since the late 1980s, had been trapping flying insects on nature reserves scattered across Germany. They had amassed insects from nearly 17,000 days of trapping across 63 sites and 27 years, a total of 53kg of insects. They sent me their data to ask for my help in preparing it for publication in a scientific journal. In the 27 years from 1989 to 2016 the overall biomass (ie weight) of insects caught in their traps fell by 75%. In midsummer, when in Europe we see the peak of insect activity, the decline was even more marked, at 82%. I thought initially that there must have been some sort of mistake, because this seemed too dramatic a drop to be credible. We knew that wildlife in general was in decline, but for three-quarters of insects to have disappeared so rapidly suggested a pace and scale of decline that had previously not been imagined.

In October 2019 a different group of German scientists published their findings from a study of insect populations in German forests and grasslands over 10 years from 2008 to 2017. The study’s results were deeply troubling. Grasslands fared worst, losing on average two-thirds of their arthropod biomass (the insects, spiders, woodlice and more). In woodlands, biomass dropped by 40%. What about elsewhere? Is there something peculiar going on in Germany? It seems highly unlikely. Perhaps the best-studied insect populations in the world are the UK’s butterflies. They are recorded by volunteers as part of the Butterfly Monitoring Scheme, the largest and longest-running scheme of its kind in the world. The trends it reveals are worrying. Butterflies of the “wider countryside” – common species found in farmland, gardens and so on, such as meadow browns and peacocks – fell in abundance by 46% between 1976 and 2017.

Meanwhile, habitat specialists, fussier species that tend to be much rarer, such as fritillaries and hairstreaks, fell by 77%, despite concerted conservation efforts directed at many of them. Worldwide, although the bulk of insect species – the flies, beetles, grasshoppers, wasps, mayflies, froghoppers and so on – are not systematically monitored, we often have good data on population trends for birds that depend on insects for food, and these are mostly in decline. For example, populations of insectivorous birds that hunt their prey in the air (ie the flying insects that have decreased so much in biomass in Germany) have fallen by more than any other bird group in North America, by about 40% between 1966 and 2013. Bank swallows, common nighthawks (nightjars), chimney swifts and barn swallows have all fallen in numbers by more than 70% in the past 20 years.

In England, populations of the spotted flycatcher fell by 93% between 1967 and 2016. Other once-common insectivores have suffered similarly, including the grey partridge (-92%), nightingale (-93%) and cuckoo (-77%). The red-backed shrike, a specialist predator of large insects, went extinct in the UK in the 1990s. Overall, the British Trust for Ornithology estimates that the UK had 44m fewer wild birds in 2012 compared with 1970. All the evidence above relates to populations of insects and their predators in highly industrialised, developed countries. Information about insect populations in the tropics, where most insects live, is sparse. We can only guess what impacts deforestation of the Amazon, the Congo, or south-east Asian rainforests has had on insect life in those regions. We will never know how many species went extinct before we could discover them.

Read more …

“The strawberries. The strawberries. The strawberries. That’s what makes it work! Airplanes!”

CNN Airs Hour-Long Public Service Message On Dementia (BBee)

As part of a campaign to raise awareness and improve public knowledge on treatment options, CNN aired an hour-long public service announcement on the warning signs of dementia Wednesday night. The PSA, which ran over an hour, showed tragic footage of an old man ranting and making nonsensical, confusing statements. CNN says they hope the footage will encourage family members of the elderly to get them tested for the early warning signs of dementia. The cable news channel displayed a phone number for a hotline people can call if they believe someone they know might be suffering from symptoms of the condition.


“If you or a loved one act like this man,” said Don Lemon, “please, we beg you, get help. Slurred speech, inaccurate statements, an inability to remember where you are—these are all signs that your loved one might be suffering from dementia, whether he’s retired or the president of the United States.” “… and we’d take the rhubarb and we’d put it in the pie, right in the ol’ pie,” the old man said suddenly, in a rare moment of lucidity. “It was incredible. You wouldn’t think rhubarb would taste good, but it’s the sweetness. The strawberries. The strawberries. The strawberries. That’s what makes it work! Airplanes! Airplanes are neat, you know, but they’re a myth. How do they get them up there? They don’t—d-d-don’t even have feathers.” Many of the attendees were touched by both the PSA and the old man.

Read more …

 

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The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those that speak it
George Orwell

 

 

Melenchon
https://twitter.com/i/status/1419092425226678276

 

 

 

 

You

 

 

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Jun 302021
 
 June 30, 2021  Posted by at 8:41 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  63 Responses »


Ivan Aivazovsky The Ninth Wave 1849

 

Why COVID is like AIDS (Berenson)
Covid’s Warped Vaccines (Weisser)
Lisbon Court: Only 0.9% Of Verified Cases Died Of Covid; 152, Not 17,000 (AFD)
The BIGGE$T Lie -Perhaps Ever (Kamen)
Pseudopandemic (Iain Davis)
Ohio Lawmakers Ban Requiring Covid-19 Vaccine At Public Schools, Universities (CD)
Pfizer, Moderna Vaccines May Stand Guard Against COVID for Years (HDN)
The War on Reality (CJ Hopkins)
NYC Mayor’s Race “Plunges Into Chaos” On 130,000 ‘Test-Run’ Votes (ZH)
Toxic Corporations are Destroying the Planet’s Soil (CP)

 

 

And the scribes and Pharisees brought unto him a woman found unvaxxed; and when they had set her in the midst, they say unto him, Master, this woman was found unvaxxed, with no mask. Now Fauci in the law commanded us, that such should be stoned: but what sayest thou?

He lifted up himself, and said unto them, He that is without fault among you, let him first cast a stone at her. And they which heard it, being convinced of their own righteousness, stoned the woman to death, plus all bystanders within 100 feet, and Jesus too, out of an abundance of caution.
– TAE Summary

 

 

Delta doesn’t look very scary.

 

 

 

 

PCR trap

 

 

“They found that in the two younger groups – including adults up to age 60 – being obese was associated with nearly ALL the risk that Covid would lead to intensive care or death “


[..] the findings suggest that for people under 60, weight loss would be the single best way to reduce the risk of Covid – probably even more than a vaccine (and with no side effects).

Original paper: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landia/article/PIIS2213-8587(21)00089-9/fulltext

Why COVID is like AIDS (Berenson)

SARS-COV-2 isn’t even in the same time zone as HIV as a killer. But it is like HIV in one crucial way. It plays favorites. After a year, most of us know that the elderly are at much higher risk from coronavirus (though even well-informed people may not be aware HOW much higher the risk is). But what public health authorities have gone out of their way to obscure is how much obesity – especially severe obesity – drives the risk of the coronavirus in younger people. In April, British researchers published a definitive paper on the subject in The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology, a peer-reviewed journal. The researchers examined the medical records of almost 7 million people in England to look at the link between obesity and severe outcomes from Covid, including hospitalization and death.

The topline findings show only a moderate link between extra weight and Covid risk. But when the researchers looked more closely, they found that’s because in older people, being overweight does NOT drive excess risk. So the researchers divided the patients into four age ranges: 20-39, 40-59, 60-79, and over 80. They found that in the two younger groups – including adults up to age 60 – being obese was associated with nearly ALL the risk that Covid would lead to intensive care or death. The findings held even after they adjusted for many different potential confounding factors, like smoking, non-weight-related illnesses, and wealth. The excess risk was extremely high even for people who weren’t morbidly obese – defined as a body-mass index of 40 or more. A person between 40 and 60 with a BMI of 35 – someone who is 230 pounds and 5’8” – had about five times the risk of dying of Covid of a person of normal weight. For younger adults, the excess risk was even higher, and for morbidly obese people even higher still.

In contrast, people of normal weight under 40 are at essentially no risk of death from Covid. The researchers found their rate to be under 1 in 10,000 per year. Even in the 40 to 59 age range, normal-weight adults had an annual risk well under 1 in 1,000. The researchers did not include those stunning findings in the main body of the paper, only its appendix. Still, they were clear in their discussion about the overall results: “Our findings from this large population-based cohort emphasise that excess weight is associated with substantially increased risks of severe COVID-19 outcomes, and one of the most important modifiable risk factors identified to date.” In fact, the findings suggest that for people under 60, weight loss would be the single best way to reduce the risk of Covid – probably even more than a vaccine (and with no side effects).

Read more …

Robert Malone: “The author apparently was unaware that Moderna was substantially funded by DARPA. and their jab engineered by NIH.”

Covid’s Warped Vaccines (Weisser)

Samuel Langley, the inventor of a catastrophically incompetent ‘flying’ machine is a striking example of governments picking losers. When his 16-metre monster was catapulted into the air in 1903, it instantly plunged into the Potomac river like an obese Icarus. Langley was the beneficiary of the sort of government largesse and boosterism that has lately been lavished on Operation Warp Speed’s Covid vaccines but at least nobody died as a result of his incompetence. The same cannot be said of the Covid vaccines. In the US, the official database for adverse reactions to all the Covid vaccines has now registered almost 6,000 deaths, just in the first five months. Compare this to 2019, when there were only 605 deathreported in the whole year, for all vaccines combined.

That’s more than an order of magnitude increase. There were also almost 330,000 reports of vaccine injury including almost 2,200 heart attacks, more than 1500 reports of blood clots combined with low platelets and more than 15,000 reports of severe allergic reactions. Yes, correlation does not prove causation but adverse events on this scale have never before been seen, in the more than 200 years since the first vaccine was invented and need to be properly investigated and explained. In the UK, Dr Tess Lawrie, a world-class evidence-based medical researcher and consultant to the World Health Organization wrote to the British Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency saying, ‘The MHRA has more than enough evidence on the Yellow Card system to declare C19 vaccines unsafe for use in humans’.

In less than five months in the UK there were over 1,250 deaths and 888,000 adverse reactions including almost 14,000 bleeding, clotting and stroke events (856 fatal) occurring in almost every vein and artery and every organ — brain (152 fatalities), lungs (103 fatalities), heart (81 fatalities), spleen, kidneys, ovaries and liver. There were also almost 55,000 reports of infection and immune disorders, strongly suggesting vaccine-induced immune-compromise and re-activation of latent viruses resulting in shingles, Bell’s palsy and Guillain-Barré syndrome. And there were 4,771 reports of visual impairment including blindness. In the UN’s global database 6,500 deaths have been reported and over a million injuries, most among individuals aged 18 to 64 and 70 per cent women.

Malone censored on LinkedIn

Read more …

Lisbon courts have some clever judges. We’ve seen it before.

Lisbon Court: Only 0.9% Of Verified Cases Died Of Covid; 152, Not 17,000 (AFD)

Following a citizen’s petition, a Lisbon court was forced to provide verified COVID-19 mortality data, reports AndreDias.net. According to the ruling, the number of verified COVID-19 deaths from January 2020 to April 2021 is only 152, not about 17,000 as claimed by government ministries. All the “others” died for various reasons, although their PCR test was positive. “We live in a fraud of unprecedented dimensions,” wrote Dias. “The data are from the Sistema de Informação dos Certificados de Óbito (Death Certificate Information System – SICO), the only such system in Portugal. The reference to 152 death certificated issued ‘under Justice Ministry supervision’ is spurious, as all death certificates are issued under Justice Ministry auspices, being the only institution that issues them.


“In response to a popular suit, a court order was required for the Ministry to respond, desperate not to denounce the fraud. “All those responsible for handling data from ‘cases’ and ‘deaths’ can, thereafter, only be tried for the crime if there is any dignity remaining in the rule of law,” he continued. “If these figures are of the same order of magnitude for other countries as well, and there is no reason to assume otherwise, then the plague is a deception of unprecedented proportions and crimes committed against humanity on a huge scale have been committed here.”

Ioannidis

Read more …

Not terribly impressed, but hey, she was censored too.

The BIGGE$T Lie -Perhaps Ever (Kamen)

The BIGGE$T Lie is this: We do not yet have a medicine that can prevent and treat every phase of COVID-19 disease — from pre-exposure to the critical stage of illness. It’s the BIGGE$T Lie because of this: We we DO have such a pill. It’s ivermectin. A 50-year-old, highly safe, inexpensive, globally available Nobel prize-winning medicine that is dropping case counts and saving lives by the tens of thousands in the countries where it is being used. So why don’t we suggest the truer statement instead. It would read something like this: “We do not have an extremely high-priced, novel pill developed by Big Pharma using billions of taxpayer dollars that can prevent and treat every phase of COVID-19 disease — from pre-exposure to the critical stage of illness. We only have ivermectin, which actually does it all, safely and quickly, but which requires $0 to develop so there are no profits in it for us. So let’s hush it up, make up stuff about it and make it go away so we can rake in billion$. What do you say?”

[..] First, Big Pharma has a greedy hand in the BIGGE$T Lie. Huh? What? Drug companies? Aren’t they in the business of making drugs that save lives and enhance human health? Well, sure they are. And they do plenty of good throughout the world. That much is undeniably true. But the pandemic has blessed Big Pharma with a multi-billion dollar payday…predominantly remuneration for the development of desperately needed vaccines. OK. So what? I’ll tell you what. The reality is that there are people who are vaccine hesitant. Then there are those for whom vaccines are medically contraindicated. Others around the world have no access to the vaccine, and may not for years. What are they supposed to do? For them, finding a medicine — or combination of medicines — that will keep them safe from a killer virus is critical.

They need a bridge, if you will, to the vaccine; or a safety net to keep them well until either the virus recedes or herd immunity is established. Enter ivermectin. The little drug that could. And could. And could.

Read more …

Pseudopandemic is the new book by Iain Davis.

Not too impressed by this either.

Pseudopandemic (Iain Davis)

COVID 19 presented virtually no risk to those of working age and none at all to the young. There was no evidence that children were either at or presented any risk. The school closures were part of the pseudopandemic psy-op. They gave the misleading impression of an emergency and provided fraudulent justification for vaccinating children. The pseudopandemic was planned to lead to the complete transformation of our culture and society. It has irrevocably changed our relationship with governments, has caused catastrophic economic disruption, shutdown global trade and saw millions become reliant on government subsidies. The pseudopandemic was the opening salvo in a global coup d’état.

The new pseudopandemic biosecurity apparatus is designed to control our behaviour as we are forced through a global transformation. Those behind the pseudopandemic intend to change the International Monetary and Financial System (IMFS) and establish global governance in the shape of technocracy. Technocracy is a neofeudal, totalitarian system based upon communitarian principles. We will be offered the illusion of participatory democracy through our required participation and belief in “civil society.” Civil society will be a “stakeholder” in the Technocracy. However, civil society will only be allowed to pursue polices set at the global level.

Applied psychology was used throughout the pseudopandemic to fix our “choice environment.” We were conditioned to believe that following the rules was the responsible and moral choice. In reality our behaviour was being deliberately altered to ensure our compliance with the diktats of the biosecurity state, preparing society for the transition to technocracy. The new global IMFS is built upon carbon trading and a $120 trillion carbon bond market is currently under construction. Assets are being defined in terms of their Stakeholder Capitalism Metrics which rate investments depending upon their environmental, social and governance (ESG) score.

Read more …

“This is about personal rights.”

Ohio Lawmakers Ban Requiring Covid-19 Vaccine At Public Schools, Universities (CD)

Ohio’s public schools and universities couldn’t require students or employees to be vaccinated against COVID-19 under last-minute changes to a bill sent to Gov. Mike DeWine early Tuesday. Under the proposed changes, public schools and universities couldn’t require vaccines that haven’t received full U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval. That includes the three COVID-19 vaccines distributed in America, all of which have been approved via emergency use authorization, which is a rigorous process that includes clinical trials. “Parents, in consultation with their personal doctors, have the right to make decisions about their children especially for vaccinations that are not fully approved by the FDA,” said Sen. Andrew Brenner, R-Powell. “This is about personal rights.”


The bill wouldn’t apply to public hospitals, such as Ohio State University’s Wexner Medical Center, or private schools and universities. “There was a lot of feeling that you just don’t want to force kids to do it if their parents don’t want them to,” said Speaker Bob Cupp, R-Lima. Another amendment offered by Sen. Rob McColley, R-Napoleon, would ask individuals coming from countries designated as the highest risk by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to quarantine for no longer than 48 hours. While quarantined, their food, transportation and accommodations would be paid for by the Ohio Department of Health.

Read more …

They will be a threat to you for the rest of your life. Take your pick.

Pfizer, Moderna Vaccines May Stand Guard Against COVID for Years (HDN)

The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines trigger an immune system response that could fend off the coronavirus for years to come, new research reveals. The latest study bolsters growing evidence that most people immunized with the mRNA vaccines may not need booster shots, with one key caveat: That the virus and its variants don’t evolve too much beyond the virus’ original form. “It’s a good sign for how durable our immunity is from this vaccine,” Ali Ellebedy, an immunologist at Washington University in St. Louis, who led the study, told The New York Times. The study, published Monday in the journal Nature, did not look at the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, but Ellebedy said he expected the immune response for that vaccine to be less durable than that produced by mRNA vaccines.

Last month, Ellebedy and his colleagues reported that immune cells that recognize the virus lingered in bone marrow for at least eight months after COVID-19 infection. Another team found that memory B-cells continue to mature and strengthen for at least a year after infection, the Times reported. Those findings suggested that immunity might last years, possibly a lifetime, in people who were infected and later vaccinated. But whether vaccination alone might demonstrate the same power was unclear. After an infection or a vaccination, a specialized structure called the germinal center forms in lymph nodes, the researchers explained. This structure is where B-cells are trained. After infection with the coronavirus, the germinal center forms in the lungs. But after vaccination, the cells’ education takes place in lymph nodes in the armpits, within reach of researchers.

Ellebedy’s team found that 15 weeks after the first dose of vaccine, the germinal center was still highly active in all 14 study participants, and that the number of memory cells that recognized the coronavirus had not dropped. “The fact that the reactions continued for almost four months after vaccination — that’s a very, very good sign,” Ellebedy told the Times, because terminal centers typically peak one to two weeks after immunization, and then wane.

Dr. Richard Fleming

Read more …

(perception of) Reality has changed a lot lately. But people are not aware of that, so what’s the difference?

The War on Reality (CJ Hopkins)

You could stage an apocalyptic global pandemic that only happened in certain countries, or in certain parts of certain countries, and that more or less mirrored natural mortality, and that didn’t drastically increase historical death rates, but was nonetheless totally apocalyptic. Perfectly healthy people could become “medical cases.” You could count anyone who died of anything as having died of your apocalyptic virus. You could tell people in no uncertain terms that medical-looking masks will not protect them from viruses, and then turn around and tell them that they will, and then, later, publicly admit you were lying in order to manipulate them, and then deny you ever said that, and tell them to wear masks.


You could experimentally “vaccinate” millions of people whose risk of becoming seriously ill or dying from your apocalyptic virus was minuscule or non-existent, and kill tens or hundreds of thousands in the process, and the people whose brains you had methodically broken would thank you for murdering their friends and neighbors, and then rush out to their local discount drugstore to experimentally “vaccinate” their own kids and post pictures of it on the Internet. At that point, you wouldn’t really have to worry about “populist uprisings,” or “terrorism,” or any other type of insurgent activity, because the vast majority of the global population would be scramble-headed automatons who were totally incapable of independent thought, and who had no idea what was real and what wasn’t, so just repeated whatever new script you fed them like customer-service representatives on Haldol.

Read more …

How many of these over the past 5-6 years?

NYC Mayor’s Race “Plunges Into Chaos” On 130,000 ‘Test-Run’ Votes (ZH)

With the New York City Mayoral race “plunged into chaos” (as the NYT puts it), journalist Bob Hardt now reports that the Board of Elections counted 130,000 ‘test-run’ votes, which would account for most of the ‘discrepancy’ reported earlier. Hardt added that the BoE will now head ‘back to the drawing board’ to produce corrected ranked-choice numbers tomorrow. Presumably by then the outcome of the election will have been decided and things can go smoother then…
* * *
Hours after the New York City’s Board of Elections released an updated ranked voting tally for the Democratic Primary which showed frontrunner Eric Adams’ lead shrinking considerably, BOE officials acknowledged a ‘discrepancy’ in the ballot count. At issue: on the day of the primary, the BOE reported just under 800,000 votes with 96.6% of scanners reporting. On Tuesday, however, the tally was 941,832 votes – nearly 20% higher, according to PIX11. The new figures narrows Adams’ lead over former sanitation commissioner Kathryn Garcia to just 51.9% (368,898) to 48.9% (352,990) – while there are still 100,000 absentee ballots which need to be processed, and could tip Garcia over the top.


In response, Adams’ campaign fired off a statement questioning the count, and demanding an explanation for the “irregularities.” “The vote total just released by the Board of Elections is 100,000-plus more than the total announced on election night, raising serious questions,” reads the statement. “We have asked the Board of Elections to explain such a massive increase and other irregularities before we comment on the Ranked Choice Voting projection.” Liberals, in response, accused Adams of going ‘full Trump’ and spreading ‘the big lie’ – that the election isn’t as secure as advertised.

Read more …

People getting rid of people.

Toxic Corporations are Destroying the Planet’s Soil (CP)

A newly published analysis in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Science argues that a toxic soup of insecticides, herbicides and fungicides is causing havoc beneath fields covered in corn, soybeans, wheat and other monoculture crops. The research is the most comprehensive review ever conducted on how pesticides affect soil health. The study is discussed by two of the report’s authors, Nathan Donley and Tari Gunstone, in a recent article appearing on the Scientific American website. The authors state that the findings should bring about immediate changes in how regulatory agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) assess the risks posed by the nearly 850 pesticide ingredients approved for use in the USA.

Conducted by the Center for Biological Diversity, Friends of the Earth and the University of Maryland, the research looked at almost 400 published studies that together had carried out more than 2800 experiments on how pesticides affect soil organisms. The review encompassed 275 unique species or types of soil organisms and 284 different pesticides or pesticide mixtures. Pesticides were found to harm organisms that are critical to maintaining healthy soils in over 70 per cent of cases. But Donley and Gunstone say this type of harm is not considered in the EPA’s safety reviews, which ignore pesticide harm to earthworms, springtails, beetles and thousands of other subterranean species. The EPA uses a single test species to estimate risk to all soil organisms, the European honeybee, which spends its entire life above ground in artificial boxes. But 50-100 per cent of all pesticides end up in soil.

The researchers conclude that the ongoing escalation of pesticide-intensive agriculture and pollution are major driving factors in the decline of soil organisms. By carrying out wholly inadequate reviews, the regulatory system serves to protect the pesticide industry.The study comes in the wake of other recent findings that indicate high levels of the weedkiller chemical glyphosate and its toxic breakdown product AMPA have been found in topsoil samples from no-till fields in Brazil. Writing on the GMWatch website, Claire Robinson and Jonathan Matthews note that, despite this, the agrochemical companies seeking the renewal of the authorisation of glyphosate by the European Union in 2022 are saying that one of the greatest benefits of glyphosate is its ability to foster healthier soils by reducing the need for tillage (or ploughing).

This in itself is misleading because farmers are resorting to ploughing given increasing weed resistance to glyphosate and organic agriculture also incorporates no till methods. At the same time, proponents of glyphosate conveniently ignore or deny its toxicity to soils, water, humans and wildlife. With that in mind, it is noteworthy that GMWatch also refers to another recent study which says that glyphosate is responsible for a five per cent increase in infant mortality in Brazil.

Read more …

 

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Corbyn Assange

 

 

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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.

Read more …

” 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.

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“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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Jun 162021
 
 June 16, 2021  Posted by at 12:54 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  11 Responses »


Nikolay Dubovsky Became Silent 1890

 

 

Ivan Illich (1926-2002) was a Austrian priest and philosopher who used the term “institutionalization” to describe what happens in several fields of knowledge, when these fields are monopolized by a subset of that knowledge. For instance, he saw schools and universities claim a monopoly on education, and doctors and hospitals (medicine) claim a monopoly on health care.

This is both utter nonsense and at the same time widely accepted. In reality, your education comes from everywhere around you, family, friends etc., and schools can merely add a layer to it. While medicine is sick care, not health care: it fails almost entirely in preventing your health from deteriorating (see the food most people eat) and focuses only on “curing” you once you’re already sick. Case in point: covid patients are left to their own “devices”, and no prophylactics are used until it’s time for a respirator. It’s a dangerous monopoly. But people accept it as some god-given truth.

Someone linked to a 2020 piece on Illich recently by David Cayley -see below-, and though it’s good -albeit very long- I think we can do better than that, in light of what Illich’s words mean in our current predicament. Illich said the monopoly claims in various fields would lead to “counterproductivity”, aka diminishing returns, indicating that at some point not only do additional steps no longer lead to progress, they cause regression.

This is very much what we see today when people like Anthony Fauci, politicians across the globe, Big Pharma, the MSM, talk about “The Science”, and don’t you dare question it, because they have the monopoly on it. There is one truth only, and it consists of facemasks, lockdowns and very poorly tested vaccines, and anyone questioning that is a danger to the entirety of mankind.

The reality is we can’t afford not to ask questions, and we can’t afford to stifle questions and dissent. We need every voice. The efficacy of masks and lockdowns is shaky at best, look around you, and so is the efficacy of the vaccines, while the latter raise many new questions about blood clots, heart inflammation, spike proteins accumulating in ovaries and testes etc etc. We’d be crazy not to ask questions.

 

In terms of Illich terminology, the concept of “The Science”, which cannot be questioned, means we have reached institutionalization on steroids, runaway institutionalization. And given the variety of severe adverse reactions to the vaccines, including 1000s of deaths, we also appear to have reached diminishing returns on steroids; in children, for instance, the vaccines appear much more dangerous than the virus they are supposed to fight.

While at the same time, “The Science” monopoly rejects any and all other approaches, vitamin D, ivermectin, HCQ etc. They do that because there are still laws and protocols in place that date from before “The Science”, and spell out procedures that have to be followed to get a novel approach, or drug, approved or even authorized. One of which is that if there is any other effective method for the purpose the vaccines are developed for, there can be no approval.

And that leads to regression in medicine. It also leads to media bans, scientists who are “cancelled”, the works. There is no logical reason to ban certain medicines, and use only certain -new- others. Well, other than money, that is. It would better for mankind to try everything we can, but not for The Science, which revels in its monopoly. And Ivan Illich saw all that coming.

 

Meanwhile, the list of very competent medical professionals who are getting banned, deleted, ostracized, keeps growing. There’s Kary Mullis, the inventor of the PCR test, who said before his death in 2019 that it was unfit for the purpose it’s presently used for. There’s Robert Malone, one of the inventors of mRNA vaccines, who’s very critical of how these are used today and recently said: “What happens to confidence in public health and USG if ivermectin turns out to be safe and effective for COVID, and the genetic vaccines turn out to have significant safety issues? This looks like a very plausible scenario from where I sit.”

Then we have former Pfizer Chief Scientific Officer Michael Yeadon, who said about mRNA vaccines: “There is something very, very bad happening and if you don’t pay attention, you will soon lose any chance to do anything about it. And don’t say you weren’t warned.” as well as “I’d pay a vaccinated person to shop for me before getting vaccinated myself.” We have Nobel Prize virologist Luc Montagnier, we have Roger Hodkinson, and of course FLCCC member Pierre Kory, a fierce advocate for ivermectin. And Peter McCullough:

https://twitter.com/i/status/1404716387247996928

Take all of them together, and I’m sure I forget a few, and you start to realize how insane it is that these people are banned from the discussions and policy decisions. All that expertise that is discarded in favor of a few opinions, it can not be a positive thing. And it’s not science, either: science requires constant questioning and discussion. Yeadon: “There is something very, very bad happening and if you don’t pay attention, you will soon lose any chance to do anything about it.”

 

Here’s from David Cayley’s April 2020 piece on Ivan Illich:

Questions About the Current Pandemic From the Point of View of Ivan Illich

At the beginning of his 1973 book Tools of Conviviality, Illich described what he thought was the typical course of development followed by contemporary institutions, using medicine as his example. Medicine, he said, had gone through “two watersheds.” The first had been crossed in the early years of the 20th century when medical treatments became demonstrably effective and benefits generally began to exceed harms. For many medical historians this is the only relevant marker – from this point on progress will proceed indefinitely, and, though there may be diminishing returns, there will be no point, in principle, at which progress will stop. This was not the case for Illich. He hypothesized a second watershed, which he thought was already being crossed and even exceeded around the time he was writing.

Beyond this second watershed, he supposed, what he called counterproductivity would set in – medical intervention would begin to defeat its own objects, generating more harm than good. This, he argued, was characteristic of any institution, good or service – a point could be identified at which there was enough of it and, after which, there would be too much. Tools for Conviviality, was an attempt to identify these “natural scales” – the only such general and programmatic search for a philosophy of technology that Illich undertook.

Two years later in Medical Nemesis – later renamed, in its final and most comprehensive edition, Limits to Medicine – Illich tried to lay out in detail the goods and the harms that medicine does. He was generally favourable to the large-scale innovations in public health that have given us good food, safe water, clean air, sewage disposal etc. He also praised efforts then underway in China and Chile to establish a basic medical toolkit and pharmacopeia that would be available and affordable for all citizens, rather than allowing medicine to develop luxury goods that would remain forever out of reach of the majority.

But the main point of his book was to identify and describe the counterproductive effects that he felt were becoming evident as medicine crossed its second watershed. He spoke of these fall-outs from too much medicine as iatrogenesis, and addressed them under three headings: clinical, social and cultural. The first everyone, by now, understands – you get the wrong diagnosis, the wrong drug, the wrong operation, you get sick in hospital etc. This collateral damage is not trivial. An article in the Canadian magazine The Walrus – Rachel Giese, “The Errors of Their Ways, April 2012 – estimated 7.5% of the Canadians admitted to hospitals every year suffer at least one “adverse event” and 24,000 die as a result of medical mistakes. Around the same time, Ralph Nader, writing in Harper’s Magazine, suggested that the number of people in the United States who die annually as a result of preventable medical errors is around 400,000. This is an impressive number, even if exaggerated – Nader’s estimate is twice as high per capita as The Walrus’s – but this accidental harm was not, by any means, Illich’s focus.

What really concerned him was the way in which excessive medical treatment weakens basic social and cultural aptitudes. An instance of what he called social iatrogenesis is the way in which the art of medicine, in which the physician acts as healer, witness, and counsellor, tends to give way to the science of medicine, in which the doctor, as a scientist, must, by definition, treat his or her patient as an experimental subject and not as a unique case. And, finally, there was the ultimate injury that medicine inflicts: cultural iatrogenesis. This occurs, Illich said, when cultural abilities, built up and passed on over many generations, are first undermined and then, gradually, replaced altogether. These abilities include, above all, the willingness to suffer and bear one’s own reality, and the capacity to die one’s own death.

The art of suffering was being overshadowed, he argued, by the expectation that all suffering can and should be immediately relieved – an attitude which doesn’t, in fact, end suffering but rather renders it meaningless, making it merely an anomaly or technical miscarriage. And death, finally, was being transformed from an intimate, personal act – something each one can do – into a meaningless defeat – a mere cessation of treatment or “pulling the plug,” as is sometimes heartlessly said. Behind Illich’s arguments lay a traditional Christian attitude. He affirmed that suffering and death are inherent in the human condition – they are part of what defines this condition. And he argued that the loss of this condition would involve a catastrophic rupture both with our past and with our own creatureliness. To mitigate and ameliorate the human condition was good, he said. To lose it altogether was a catastrophe because we can only know God as creatures – i.e. created or given beings – not as gods who have taken charge of our own destiny.

Medical Nemesis is a book about professional power – a point on which it’s worth dwelling for a moment in view of the extraordinary powers that are currently being asserted in the name of public health. According to Illich, contemporary medicine, at all times, exercises political power, though this character may be hidden by the claim that all that is being asserted is care. In the province of Ontario where I live, “health care” currently gobbles up more than 40% of the government’s budget, which should make the point clearly enough. But this everyday power, great as it is, can be further expanded by what Illich calls “the ritualization of crisis.” This confers on medicine “a license that usually only the military can claim.” He continues:

Under the stress of crisis, the professional who is believed to be in command can easily presume immunity from the ordinary rules of justice and decency. He who is assigned control over death ceases to be an ordinary human…Because they form a charmed borderland not quite of this world, the time-span and the community space claimed by the medical enterprise are as sacred as their religious and military counterparts. In a footnote to this passage Illich adds that “he who successfully claims power in an emergency suspends and can destroy rational evaluation. The insistence of the physician on his exclusive capacity to evaluate and solve individual crises moves him symbolically into the neighborhood of the White House.” There is a striking parallel here with the German jurist Carl Schmitt’s claim in his Political Theology that the hallmark of true sovereignty is the power to “decide on the exception.”

Schmitt’s point is that sovereignty stands above law because in an emergency the sovereign can suspend the law – declare an exception – and rule in its place as the very source of law. This is precisely the power that Illich says the physician “claims…in an emergency.” Exceptional circumstances make him/her “immune” to the “ordinary rules” and able to make new ones as the case dictates. But there is an interesting and, to me, telling difference between Schmitt and Illich. Schmitt is transfixed by what he calls “the political.” Illich notices that much of what Schmitt calls sovereignty has escaped, or been usurped from the political realm and reinvested in various professional hegemonies.

 

 

 

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