Paul Klee Analysis of Various Perversities 1922
With regards to the top issues of COVID and the US elections, there’s definitively a Groundhog Day feeling about the news.
About the elections, let the process play out and land where it may, provided it’s done legally. The haste to declare Biden President-elect, by people who have no voice in the decision, feels eery. When it comes with warnings that “more people may die” if Trump doesn’t concede yesterday, it feels dishonest.
About COVID, as I said somewhere below: After 10 months, we can’t keep treating COVID as the only problem in town. That’s myopic. We need a bigger picture.
Sidney Powell Outlines Affidavit Showing Purpose of SmartMatic Voting System to Control Elections
Katie Porter New Proof On Why I Am CERTAIN Trump Will Win
And Big Pharma makes all the money.
• The Coronavirus Is Killing Westerners. Immigrants Are Saving Them. (Legrain)
Early results suggest that the COVID-19 vaccine developed by BioNTech and Pfizer is more than 90 percent effective. If it also proves safe and regulators approve it soon, it could save many lives, allow people to resume a normal life, and give struggling economies a shot in the arm. It is hard to think of any other invention that could provide such a huge immediate boost—and the world has Turkish immigrants to Germany to thank for it. Ugur Sahin, the co-founder and chief executive of BioNTech, a German biotech start-up, arrived in Germany as a child. He is the son of an auto worker who came to Germany as part of its postwar guest worker program. BioNTech’s chief medical officer, Ozlem Tureci, who is Sahin’s wife, is the daughter of a Turkish doctor who also moved to Germany. Both went on to become scientists.
Their start-up, which had previously focused on developing innovative cancer treatments, is now set to be the first to use the novel messenger RNA technology to develop a vaccine. Moreover, Moderna, the U.S. biotech company whose vaccine also looks promising, was co-founded by a group that includes two immigrants—Canadian biologist Derrick Rossi and Lebanese-born scientist and investor Noubar Afeyan—and its CEO is French. The achievements of Sahin and Tureci—which were celebrated even by outgoing U.S. President Donald Trump, who rarely has anything good to say about immigrants, let alone Muslim ones—have exposed the fallacy of anti-immigrant discourse in Europe and North America.
While many anti-immigration figures do look more favorably on highly skilled migrants than other foreigners, Sahin could hardly have been selected by the skills-based immigration policies that many governments in rich countries increasingly favor. Indeed, if he hadn’t moved to Germany as a child, the world might never have realized what it had missed out on. For all Sahin’s individual brilliance, he is unlikely to have achieved as much had he not moved to Germany, benefited from an excellent scientific education, and seized the greater research and business opportunities available there.
Panic. Because “the science” has failed to paint a convincing and consistent picture. The science contradicts itself time and again. Just look at all the different measures various governments are taking. Lockdown is just an easy way out of failure.
After 10 months, we can’t keep treating COVID as the only problem in town.
• PA Gov Announces New COVID rules, Including Wearing A Mask In Your House (Fox)
Pennsylvania is planning to take additional steps to address a sharp increase in coronavirus infections and hospitalizations, including requiring masks to be worn indoors with limited exceptions, officials said Tuesday.In addition, starting Friday, anyone who enters Pennsylvania must be tested at least 72 hours before arrival, and if they can or do not get a test, they must quarantine for 14 days. The order does not apply to people who commute to neighboring states for work or health care, officials said, and will be largely self-enforced.Pennsylvania already has a statewide mask mandate, limits on indoor and outdoor gatherings and occupancy restrictions at bars and restaurants.
But the new rules go even further. Masks are required outside where it isn’t possible to maintain at least a six-foot distance from others, according to the order, and inside where people from multiple households are gathering, even if they can maintain a social distance. Like the rest of the nation, Pennsylvania has seen coronavirus infections explode in recent weeks. The state is reporting more than 5,000 new infections per day, up more than 115% in just two weeks, and hospitalizations and the percentage of tests coming back positive are up sharply. Deaths are on the rise, as well.Governors and mayors around the country have been tightening restrictions in response to the worsening pandemic.
On Monday, Philadelphia said it would ban indoor gatherings and indoor dining and shutter casinos, gyms, museums and libraries. Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf imposed a state-at-home order and shuttered businesses deemed “non-life-sustaining” early in the pandemic. In September though, a judge ruled Wolf’s pandemic restrictions unconstitutional.
The rapid test takes an awfully long time to be accepted.
• US Approves First Rapid Home COVID19 Test (Y!)
The US issued an emergency use authorization for the first self-administered rapid coronavirus test Tuesday, as more parts of the country increase restrictions in an attempt to halt a Covid-19 surge. The Food and Drug Administration approved a testing kit for people age 14 and older whom a doctor suspects to have Covid-19. The test, which is by prescription only, delivers results in 30 minutes. “We continue to demonstrate unprecedented speed in response to #COVID19,” tweeted FDA commissioner Stephen Hahn. “FDA authorized the first #COVID19 test that’s fully self-administered & provides results at home. It’s an important advancement, underscoring our commitment to expanding test access.” The authorization is for an at-home nasal sample kit developed by Lucira Health. Users collect a sample with the included nasal swab, then put the sample in a small vial.
The vial is inserted into a small device that tests the sample. A light-up display on the device shows a user’s result in 30 minutes or less. The test is designed to be affordable and is intended to cost less than $50, according to the Lucira Health website. The FDA had previously approved at-home Covid-19 tests, giving the green light in late April and early May to two nasal sample collection kits and one saliva sample collection kit. But samples from those kits had to be sent to a lab for processing, instead of delivering results at home. While the Lucira test provides results on the spot, it still isn’t the kind of cheap and rapid antigen test that some researchers have called to use for large-scale population screening.
We are weak and poisoned cretaures.
• Chemicals Found In Everyday Products Could Hinder COVID Vaccine (G.)
The successful uptake of any vaccine for Covid-19, a crucial step in returning a sense of normalcy after a year ravaged by the coronavirus pandemic, could be hindered by widespread contamination from a range of chemicals used in everyday products. Small amounts of per- and polyfluoroalkyl (or PFAS) chemicals are commonly found in the bodies of people in the US, as well as several other countries. These man-made chemicals, used in everything from non-stick pans to waterproof clothes to pizza boxes, have been linked to an elevated risk of liver damage, decreased fertility and even cancer. But scientists warn some of these chemicals can also cause another little-known but potentially significant defect by reducing the effectiveness of certain administered vaccines.
This impediment could cast a shadow over efforts to roll out a Covid-19 vaccine to enough people that restrictions on day-to-day life are eased. “At this stage we don’t know if it will impact a corona vaccination, but it’s a risk,” said Philippe Grandjean, an adjunct professor of environmental health at the Harvard School of Public Health. “We would have to cross our fingers and hope for the best.” Research led by Grandjean has found that children exposed to PFAS had significantly reduced antibody concentrations after given tetanus and diphtheria vaccinations. A follow-up study of adult healthcare workers found similar results. Meanwhile, a certain type of PFAS, called perfluorobutyrate (or PFBA), accumulates in the lungs and can heighten the severity of illness suffered by people who are infected with Covid-19, separate research by Grandjean, yet to be peer-reviewed, has suggested.
German company BioNTech and the US pharmaceutical giant Pfizer provoked a surge of optimism over an impending Covid vaccine after announcing a contender was 90% effective in preventing people from falling ill with the disease. The scientist behind the vaccine has predicted it will “bash the virus over the head” and help lift the pandemic that has crippled much of the world since the beginning of the year. The Pfizer vaccine is based on messenger RNA genetic material and it’s uncertain if PFAS contamination would disrupt its efficacy in patients. But there are several other vaccine contenders that are formulated around the protein spikes of the virus, similar to vaccines for tetanus and diphtheria, and they may well also have poor results in people who have ingested PFAS.
“People with high exposure to PFAS have a non-protective and very low antibody levels after four vaccinations for diphtheria and tetanus,” Grandjean said. “So if a vaccine for Covid is similar, the PFAS will likely inhibit the response from a vaccine. But it is an unknown at this stage.”
Reminds me of something I quoted recently. But something definitively does not add up.
Howard Beckett tweeted on Sunday about the UK: “Governments own stats have 4% of cases arising from hospitality, 20% from the workplace and a whopping 36% from education. So we shut bars & restaurants and keep schools & universities open.”
• US Govt Study Highlights COVID-19 Risk From Bars And Restaurants (MedE)
A new study by US health authorities published Thursday provided more data showing that, when it comes to catching COVID-19, visiting bars and restaurants is far more dangerous than going shopping, working from an office or using public transport. It was already suspected that this was the case, but few studies have sought to rigorously establish a hierarchy of risk in public activities. The new report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) isn’t perfect: it can’t confirm definitively where people in the cases it studied were infected. CDC officials approached people who had gone for a test at 11 American hospitals in July and asked them to fill out a detailed questionnaire. Overall, about 300 participated, half of whom tested positive and the other half negative.
Participants were asked questions about possible community exposure over the previous 14 days, in settings including public transport, at private gatherings, offices, churches, salons, bars and restaurants. They realized that the participants who tested positive and those who tested negative reported similar mask-wearing behavior and similar levels of exposure in all the settings except bars and restaurants. “Adults with positive SARS-CoV-2 test results were approximately twice as likely to have reported dining at a restaurant than were those with negative SARS-CoV-2 test results,” it found. The risk was even higher for bars when the analysis was restricted to participants who hadn’t reported exposure to a person with a known case of COVID-19. The analysis will need further validation, particularly since it did not distinguish between indoor and outdoor drinking and dining settings.
The courts.
• Why Trump Will Likely Win a Second Term (Phoenix)
The media wants you to believe the election is over. By law, it isn’t. Unless a candidate concedes, the election remains in play until December 14th when states cast their electoral college votes. So, unless President Trump concedes between now and then, Joe Biden hasn’t won anything, no matter what the media tells you. Indeed, the media has no say in this, anymore than they can decide what color the sky is; they’re simply trying to get you angry so you’ll continue to watch their awful shows so they can sell your eyeballs to advertisers. With that in mind, we need to take a step back and assess how this election is likely to play out based on the LAW, not public opinion or media propaganda. Based on the law, it is highly possible and in fact probable that Donald Trump will end up winning the 2020 Presidential election.
Why? Because the election is now in the courts. And the courts have a clear precedent for how contested elections play out. When the courts get involved in an election, it becomes an issue of evidence. Specifically, what a given court decides is compelling versus non-compelling evidence, and how the court chooses to address the issue of voter fraud if indeed there is compelling evidence. For instance, if President Trump’s legal team goes to court and says, “we want to have a vote audit in Michigan because there was voter fraud” the first thing the court will ask them is, “what evidence do you have to support this claim?” If the President Trump’s legal team’s answer is “we saw some numbers that looked suspicious,” the court controls its urge to laugh, throws out the case, and that’s that.
However, if the President’s legal team responds, “we have sworn affidavits from 50 witnesses, video evidence, as well as three whistleblowers” then it’s a completely different story. Once evidence of fraud is introduced to the courts via a lawsuit, the court, NOT the voters and certainly NOT the media, is in charge of the election. The courts can demand a vote audit of every single vote counted in an election. If, during the vote audit, actual fraud is discovered, the court can rule that those votes are no longer valid, the formal vote counts can change, and it is possible that a given state ends up declaring a different winner. Even if fraud is not discovered by the audits, but there is a particular problem with vote cards (the wrong type of ink was used, the hole punch didn’t go all the way through the ballot as was the case in Florida in 2000, etc.), the courts can deem those problematic votes as illegitimate.
This again can mean the formal vote counts can change, and it is possible that a given state ends up declaring a different winner. This process is now underway in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Arizona. Any one of those states could see Biden end up losing (remember, he only won these states by 0.5% for most of them). That means that if Biden loses even 10,000 votes due to fraud or some technicality (the ballots arrived after the deadline), Trump could be declared the winner. Again, I am NOT saying I want this to happen. I am simply outlining how this process works. If a court says “jump” you jump, no matter who you are.
However this may be, it’s a weirdstatement to say these were the most secure elections ever.
Routing votes through Spain
You won't believe this but I've not heard back yet from @CISAKrebs or @CISAgov how routing 78 million US votes through Spain (and maybe Germany) helped to make the 2020 election "the most secure election ever!"
Do they know yet?
— Emerald Robinson ✝️ (@EmeraldRobinson) November 17, 2020
• Trump Fires Agency Head Who Vouched For 2020 Vote Security (AP)
President Donald Trump on Tuesday fired the nation’s top election security official, a widely respected member of his administration who had dared to refute the president’s unsubstantiated claims of electoral fraud and vouch for the integrity of the vote. While abrupt, the dismissal of Christopher Krebs, the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, was not a surprise. Since his loss, Trump has been ridding his administration of officials seen as insufficiently loyal and has been denouncing the conduct of an election that led to an embarrassing defeat to Democrat Joe Biden. That made Krebs a prime target.
He had used the imprimatur of Trump’s own Department of Homeland Security, where his agency was based, to issue a stream of statements and tweets over the past week attesting to the proper conduct of the election and denouncing the falsehoods spread by the president and his supporters — without mentioning Trump by name. Krebs stood by those assertions after his ouster. “Honored to serve. We did it right,” he said in a brief statement on Twitter. “Defend Today, Secure Tomorrow.” He closed with the phrase “Protect 2020,” which had been his agency’s slogan ahead of the election.
The firing of Krebs, a Trump appointee, came the week after the dismissal of Defense Secretary Mark Esper, part of a broader shakeup that put Trump loyalists in senior Pentagon positions. A former Microsoft executive, Krebs ran the agency, known as CISA, from its creation in the wake of Russian interference with the 2016 election through the November election. He won bipartisan praise as CISA coordinated federal state and local efforts to defend electoral systems from foreign or domestic interference. Hours before being dismissed, Krebs tweeted out a report citing 59 election security experts saying there is no credible evidence of computer fraud in the 2020 election outcome.
Jim Jordan
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 18, 2020
Tweet: “The total number of ballots cast in Wayne County was about 863,000. Without Wayne County, Biden’s lead in Michigan would flip to a 177,000 Trump lead. So yes, certifying Wayne County is a big deal. The State of Michigan will now be tasked with attempting certification.”
• Wayne County Fails To Certify Election Results, Then Reverses Course (JTN)
The elections board in Wayne County, Michigan’s largest metropolis and home to the city of Detroit, initially refused Tuesday night to certify the results of its Nov. 3 election before an angry outcry led two Republican members to compromise and approve results showing Joe Biden won. The initial vote and then sudden reversal injected new drama into the legal fight waged by President Trump’s campaign in several battleground states. The Wayne County Board of Canvassers originally deadlocked 2-2, with both Republican members refusing to certify the results after discrepancies were discovered in absentee ballot poll books in a majority of Detroit’s precincts. Similar problems were discovered in the county’s summer primary and the November 2016 election but did not impact the board’s vote then.
But during a tense public comment meeting that followed, angry residents raised issues of race, suggesting majority black voters in Detroit were being disenfranchised. From the sidelines, Democratic congresswoman Rashida Tlaib joined the protest, suggesting the GOP opposition to certification amounted to racism. “The Republican members of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers put politics above their duty to our residents,” Tlaib tweeted. “Suggesting that all of Wayne County can be certified, EXCEPT for Detroit, is horrifying racist and a subversion of our democracy. The two GOP board members then agreed to a compromise of certifying the results provided the count send a demand that Michigan’s Secretary of State conduct a “comprehensive audit” of “unexplained precincts.”
Under Michigan law, a county that fails to canvass within 14 days after the election must yield its documentation to the Secretary of State’s office and Board of State Canvassers to determine if the results should be accepted. The dramatic deadlock came just a week after a city of Detroit elections worker named Jessy Jacob submitted an affidavit saying she personally witnessed and was instructed by supervisors herself to back date absentee ballots the day after the election to make votes look like they had arrived on or before Nov. 3. Jacob testified she believed thousands of ballots had been altered.
Dooxed and threatened
Breaking: This Democrat from Wayne County just threatened and doxxed his fellow board member Monica Palmer's children, announcing the names of their schools live on camera after calling their mother racist.
She changed her decision shortly thereafter.https://t.co/rK3hypBSUe
— Election Sauce (@ElectionSauce) November 18, 2020
You made your bed.
• Biden’s First Climate Appointment Is A Fossil Fuel Industry Ally (DP)
Following a campaign promising bold climate action, president-elect Joe Biden’s transition team named one of the Democratic Party’s top recipients of fossil fuel industry money to a high-profile White House position focusing in part on climate issues. On Tuesday, Politico reported that Biden is appointing U.S. Rep. Cedric Richmond, D-La., to lead the White House Office of Public Engagement, where he is “expected to serve as a liaison with the business community and climate change activists.” During his 10 years in Congress, Richmond has received roughly $341,000 from donors in the oil and gas industry — the 5th highest total among House Democrats, according to previous reporting by Sludge.
That includes corporate political action committee donations of $50,000 from Entergy, an electric and natural gas utility; $40,000 from ExxonMobil; and $10,000 apiece from oil companies Chevron, Phillips 66 and Valero Energy. Richmond has raked in that money while representing a congressional district that is home to 7 of the 10 most air-polluted census tracts in the country. Richmond has repeatedly broken with his party on major climate and environmental votes. During the climate crisis that has battered his home state of Louisiana, Richmond has joined with Republicans to vote to increase fossil fuel exports and promote pipeline development. He also voted against Democratic legislation to place pollution limits on fracking — and he voted for GOP legislation to limit the Obama administration’s authority to more stringently regulate the practice.
“US air passengers have by far the biggest carbon footprint among rich countries. Its aviation emissions are bigger than the next 10 countries combined..”
• 1% Of People Cause Half Of Global Aviation Emissions (G.)
Frequent-flying “‘super emitters” who represent just 1% of the world’s population caused half of aviation’s carbon emissions in 2018, according to a study. Airlines produced a billion tonnes of CO2 and benefited from a $100bn (£75bn) subsidy by not paying for the climate damage they caused, the researchers estimated. The analysis draws together data to give the clearest global picture of the impact of frequent fliers. Only 11% of the world’s population took a flight in 2018 and 4% flew abroad. US air passengers have by far the biggest carbon footprint among rich countries. Its aviation emissions are bigger than the next 10 countries combined, including the UK, Japan, Germany and Australia, the study reports.
The researchers said the study showed that an elite group enjoying frequent flights had a big impact on the climate crisis that affected everyone. They said the 50% drop in passenger numbers in 2020 during the coronavirus pandemic should be an opportunity to make the aviation industry fairer and more sustainable. This could be done by putting green conditions on the huge bailouts governments were giving the industry, as had happened in France. Global aviation’s contribution to the climate crisis was growing fast before the Covid-19 pandemic, with emissions jumping by 32% from 2013-18. Flight numbers in 2020 have fallen by half but the industry expects to return to previous levels by 2024.
They want the internet to have the same bias the MSM have.
• Obama: The Internet Is “The Single Biggest Threat To Our Democracy” (AP)
Back in 2008, Barack Obama famously harnessed the internet and social media to help win the White House. He kept up the embrace once he got there. Now he worries that the internet and social media have helped create “the single biggest threat to our democracy.”Obama has been saying a version of this for four years — since he left the White House — but his words are getting steadily more pointed. He’s clearly sounding an alarm, but it’s not exactly clear what he thinks we should do about it. His latest critique comes in a new interview between Obama and Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg, and before we go any further we should put it in full context: Obama was discussing a media landscape dominated not just by Facebook but by Fox News that allows Americans to choose their own distorted reality.
Which means, he says, we no longer have a shared set of facts. That assessment is now conventional wisdom among many critics of the TV and internet ecosystem. There’s almost no practical, constructive argument about how we should respond to that problem. Obama doesn’t offer one in his interview, either. And again, it’s incorrect to say that Obama is laying the problems of our broken information landscape solely at the feet of Facebook or any other particular tech company. But he is certainly lacing into them now in a way he didn’t do prior to leaving the White House.
Obama: “Now you have a situation in which large swaths of the country genuinely believe that the Democratic Party is a front for a pedophile ring…I was talking to a volunteer who was going door-to-door in Philadelphia in low-income African American communities, and was getting questions about QAnon conspiracy theories.” Goldberg: Is this new malevolent information architecture bending the moral arc away from justice? Obama: I think it is the single biggest threat to our democracy.
perfect example of why Obama really hates the internet https://t.co/8m3o9P40y3
— Dilan Cook (@dilanpcook) November 18, 2020
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