Nov 262021
 


Pablo Picasso Bather on the beach 1920

 

Ignorant and Afraid (eugyp)
Ex-England Star Wonders If Football Player Collapses Linked To Vaccine (RT)
Ethics of Vaccine Refusal (BMJ)
WHO Calls Special Meeting To Discuss New Covid Variant (CNBC)
Former WHO Director Warns Making Vaccines Mandatory Could Cause Riots (SN)
COVID-19 Vaccine For Babies And Toddlers Could Be Approved Early 2022 (CBC)
Media Tells Americans to Check Vaccine Status of Thanksgiving Dinner Guests (SN)
EU Moves To Place Covid Booster Jabs At Heart Of Travel Rules (G.)
No, You Cuck. This Is How (Denninger)
FDA Report Finds All-Cause Mortality Higher Among Vaccinated (INN)
Marines Face Defining Moment Ahead of Vaccine Mandate Deadline (USN)
Missouri Judge Says Covid-19 Public Health Orders Must Be Lifted (Hill)
Pfizer Vaccine Linked To 26 New Cases Of Myocarditis In Australia (DT)
365 Studies Prove the Efficacy of Ivermectin and HCQ in Treating COVID-19 (GP)
Centrist Dems Sink Biden’s Nominee For Top Bank Regulator (Axios)

 

 

 

 

Heart attacks

 

 

Mount Sinai Long Beach hospital
https://twitter.com/i/status/1463610474482872320

 

 

“Merkel’s remarkable virus paranoia, quietly acknowledged by the press now for months, explains her fixation on social isolation, closures and curfews as the only acceptable pandemic policies.”

Ignorant and Afraid (eugyp)

I’ve mentioned this episode a few times: On 11 March 2020, Angela Merkel held a press conference where she remarked that the best hope was to slow the spread of SARS-2, and that 70% of Germans could be infected. The Italian lockdown was only a few days old, and it was plainly not Merkel’s intent to go down the path of mass containment. The United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden and likely a few other countries too still planned for an ordinary approach to Corona, with minimal mitigations. All the while, though, Team Lockdown was hard at work behind the scenes, to bend policy in their direction. As a leaked email from 20 March shows, German medical bureaucrats deputised by the Ministry of the Interior were soon consulting experts on how best to instil “fear and a willingness to obey in the population.”

Because Western governments doubted their capacity to enforce Chinese-style lockdowns outright, fomenting mass panic became a non-pharmaceutical intervention in its own right. The histrionic media messaging has continued to this day, and it has contributed to a profoundly important division in our society: There are on the one hand those people in essential roles, who have endured exposure to Corona from the beginning, and most of whom have had the virus by now. And there are on the other hand those in Martin Kulldorf’s “laptop class,” that is to say well-off urban professionals, who have spent most of the last 21 months at home, hiding from a virus that many of them believe is approximately as dangerous as SARS. Mass infections among these people are only starting to happen right now.

As members of this privileged, sheltered class, politicians and bureaucrats have absorbed the virus hysteria that they helped seed in their social milieu. In the beginning, Merkel did not especially fear the possibility of mass infections in Germany. Six months of press hysteria later, in October 2020, she had grown accustomed to carrying two plastic envelopes in her bag. One was for the careful, hygienic disposal of used surgical masks. The other carried precious new ones, whenever she judged her current mask had reached a dangerous state of virus saturation. [..] Merkel’s remarkable virus paranoia, quietly acknowledged by the press now for months, explains her fixation on social isolation, closures and curfews as the only acceptable pandemic policies.

She is a 67 year-old sedentary woman who likely suffers from one or more undisclosed health problems. And she is surrounded by other older, unfit government officials, like 73 year-old interior minister Horst Seehofer, who nearly died of a B19 virus infection in 2002, and so has a reason to fear viral infection. For months and months, all of these people have been taking every possible personal precaution – including house-arresting the entire domestic populations of the countries they govern – in the vain hope of escaping Corona. You could feel their collective relief when the vaccines were rolled out. All of them eagerly accepted vaccination. Merkel even provided pictures of her personal yellow vaccine pass to the press, with the stamp documenting her first dose of AstraZeneca. (Her purpose, in part, was to allay public concerns over the propensity of AstraZeneca to cause blood clots.)

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Not allowed to ask.

Ex-England Star Wonders If Football Player Collapses Linked To Vaccine (RT)

Former England and Manchester City player Trevor Sinclair has been criticized online after asking if the recent collapse of a professional footballer may have been linked to the Covid vaccine.Sinclair won 12 caps for England and is remembered for a 14-year stint in the Premier League that began at his most associated club, Queens Park Rangers. Now acting as a pundit in his post-playing days, he made controversial remarks on popular UK radio station TalkSport. On Tuesday, Scottish Sheffield United star John Fleck was rushed to hospital after a scare in his team’s 1-0 victory over Reading. The following evening, in a Champions League clash against Real Madrid, Sheriff Tiraspol’s winger Adama Traore went to the turf clutching his chest and had to be helped off the pitch by medical staff.

Elsewhere, Barcelona’s Sergio Aguero is tipped to retire after a heart incident earlier this month, while Danish midfielder Christian Eriksen suffered a high-profile incident at the European Championships in the summer. But even though there has been no evidence that these occurrences were connected to the Covid vaccine, Sinclair seemingly suggested a link. “I think everyone wants to know if he has had the Covid vaccine,” the 48-year-old began on Fleck. Later on Twitter, he also added: “Everyone I speak to about these heart problems suffered by footballers (which worryingly seem to be happening more regularly) are they linked to Covid vaccines or not??”. Sinclair was widely-attacked for the comments. “This is an inappropriate place to ask that question,” Sinclair was informed.”You are begging for conspiracy theories. Ask a doctor. Ask a medical researcher.

“Do your own research online, being careful of the reliability of the sources. Everything I’ve read says NO.” “Pretty irresponsible stuff to post, Trevor,” said another do-gooder.”If vaccines had anything to do with this, then surely millions of us would be having new heart problems every day all over the world. And we’re not.””Eh, so you came up with an idea and are now asking people on social media if your imagination is reality,” was another criticism.But not everyone jumped on the bandwagon. “We don’t know Trevor as TalkSport cut you off when you asked,” came one reply to his Twitter post.

“Fair play to you for having the balls to ask the question. “Yes Trevor, don’t ask questions or think for yourself ever again,” it was suggested in support, after another user told him to think before he tweets.”All these comments are trying to be politically correct, grow a pair and say it how it is,” demanded another outspoken voice. “One major side effect of the vaccine is inflammation of the heart. Yet we’re supposed to think these sudden cases are a coincidence.”

https://twitter.com/i/status/1463966084428709900

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“Restrictions on freedoms can be justified only if they are reasonably necessary to preserve what makes human life worth living, because freedom is a necessary condition of a life worth living and, therefore, worth preserving.”

Ethics of Vaccine Refusal (BMJ)

Arguments in favour of mandatory universal vaccination rely on the premise that everyone who can be vaccinated has a moral obligation to do so for the sake of those who cannot be vaccinated due to age or certain immune system disorders, or because the public health benefits of universal vaccination are so profound that to refuse vaccination would be unethical. This line of reasoning underpins the ‘obligation to vaccinate’ (OTV) range of arguments. Brennan1 formulates a broadly representative OTV-type argument in terms of an ‘enforceable moral principle that prohibits people from participating in the collective imposition of unjust harm or risk of harm’.

Brennan begins by positing that (A) certain vaccines have a low incidence of side effect and are effective at preventing serious illness; (B) it would be a disaster if a large majority of individuals failed to receive various vaccines; (C) individual freedoms can be overridden to prevent a disaster; therefore, (D) ‘it is permissible to force individuals to receive certain vaccines against dangerous illnesses’. The argument seems to imply that non-vaccination is a sufficient condition of a disaster (would make the disaster imminent) that mandating mass vaccination is a sufficient condition of preventing the disaster, and that the overriding of individual freedoms could not result in a disaster of a different kind. None of these conditions can be assumed to be true.

We could also infer from the above premises that anything conceived of as harm could be classified as a ‘disaster’ and this would automatically give someone a legitimate right to override the freedoms of others, but this is absurd. We must, therefore, conclude that C is false: individual freedoms cannot be overridden just to prevent a disaster. Restrictions on freedoms can be justified only if they are reasonably necessary to preserve what makes human life worth living, because freedom is a necessary condition of a life worth living and, therefore, worth preserving. This is a conceptually appealing formula, but since the criterion of reasonable necessity is as elastic as the notion of disaster, it does not tell us much about practical moral obligations.

Brennan sidesteps this problem by proceeding to hone an OTV-type argument just in virtue of preventing ‘the collective imposition of unjust harm or risk of harm’. The reference to unjust harm makes his moral premise intuitively true but also compels us to identify the underlying injustice. Given that the existing vaccination technology is not risk-free (even if serious adverse reactions are rare) the alleged moral OTV implies that we have an obligation to reduce the risk to the health of others by accepting an increased or unknown health risk to ourselves. If I must accept an increased risk to myself in order to reduce the risk to others, because everyone has a moral obligation to do so, then justice demands that others must also accept an increased risk to themselves in order to reduce the risk to me, therefore, contradiction. This impasse can be resolved only by taking into account what set of ‘risk-permitting rules would tend to benefit everyone as individuals’1; a crucial question to which I will return.

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Very little is known, which is a great reason to panic.

WHO Calls Special Meeting To Discuss New Covid Variant (CNBC)

The World Health Organization is monitoring a new variant with numerous mutations to the spike protein, scheduling a special meeting Friday to discuss what it may mean for vaccines and treatments, officials said Thursday. The variant, called B.1.1.529, has been detected in South Africa in small numbers, according to the WHO. “We don’t know very much about this yet. What we do know is that this variant has a large number of mutations. And the concern is that when you have so many mutations, it can have an impact on how the virus behaves,” Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO’s technical lead on Covid-19, said in a Q&A that was livestreamed on the organization’s social media channels. The monitoring of the new variant comes as Covid cases surge around the world heading into the holiday season, with the WHO reporting hot spots in all regions and particularly in Europe.

South African scientists have detected more than 30 mutations to the spike protein, the part of the virus that binds to cells in the body, South African scientist Tulio de Oliveira said in a media briefing hosted by the South Africa Department of Health on Thursday. The B.1.1.529 variant contains multiple mutations associated with increased antibody resistance, which may reduce the effectiveness of vaccines, along with mutations that generally make it more contagious, according to slides he presented at the briefing. Other mutations in the new variant haven’t been seen until now, so scientists don’t yet know whether they are significant or will change how the virus behaves, according to the presentation. The variant has spread rapidly through the Gauteng province, which contains the country’s largest city of Johannesburg.

“Especially when the spike happens in Gauteng, everybody travels in and out of Gauteng from all corners of South Africa. So it’s a given that in the next few days, the beginning of rising positivity rate and numbers is going to be happening. It’s a matter of days and weeks before we see that,” South Africa Minister of Health Joe Phaahla said during the briefing. The variant has also been detected in Botswana and Hong Kong, Phaahla said. “Right now, researchers are getting together to understand where these mutations are in the spike protein and the furin cleavage site, and what that potentially may mean for our diagnostics or therapeutics and our vaccines,” Van Kerkhove said. She said there are fewer than 100 full genome sequences of the new mutation.

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Not could, will. Just try.

Former WHO Director Warns Making Vaccines Mandatory Could Cause Riots (SN)

Former World Health Organization director Anthony Costello warns that making COVID-19 vaccines mandatory could cause “riots.” Costello, a professor of global health and sustainable development at University College London, made the comments in response to numerous European countries continuing to experience COVID case surges. Although insisting that mandatory vaccinations is a “debate we can have,” Costello said it might sweep up more of the “indifferent” people, but that there were potentially explosive ramifications. “But you will repel a lot of people who lack trust in government and in vaccines. And you may start to see the unpleasant civil disobedience and riots they’ve had across Europe,” he added.


Meanwhile, WHO official Robb Butler called for other European countries to consider making vaccines mandatory. Doing so “can, but does not always, increase uptake,” argued Butler, adding, “We believe it’s time to have that conversation from both an individual and a population-based perspective. It’s a healthy debate to have.” Numerous countries have already seen large scale civil unrest in response to attempts by governments to impose new lockdowns and compulsory vaccinations. Austrians face fines and even prison time if they refuse to get jabbed after a February deadline.

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Warped “logic”: immune systems must fight off the vaccine.

“Children do have a robust immune system and I expect that they will mount a good immune response to the vaccine as well..”

COVID-19 Vaccine For Babies And Toddlers Could Be Approved Early 2022 (CBC)

Canada’s chief public health officer says COVID-19 vaccines for babies and toddlers could be approved early in the new year, depending on how clinical trials play out. In an interview with CBC Radio-Canada, Dr. Theresa Tam said a vaccine for some of Canada’s youngest people could be a turning point in the fight against COVID-19. “Children do have a robust immune system and I expect that they will mount a good immune response to the vaccine as well,” she said. “And for their parents as well, it’s sort of offering them some further hope.” In a major vaccine milestone, children aged five to 11 started to receive their first doses this week after Health Canada approved Pfizer-BioNTech’s vaccine for that age group. Meanwhile, that company is running clinical trials for those aged six months to just under five years.


Moderna is waiting for Health Canada approval on its COVID-19 vaccine for children aged six to 11, and is also in the midst of recruiting younger children for a clinical trial. “I can’t tell you exactly when those results will be available,” Tam said of the trials. “It depends on how many people they recruit and how fast the trials go. But I think all of that is well underway.” Tam said she anticipates seeing results from Pfizer-BioNTech for those aged two to five first. The doctor said she’s hoping to see some trial data toward the end of this year. “Which means for the youngest age group, the most likely timeline is optimistically at the beginning of next year,” she said.

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“..millions of households may need their own Thanksgiving bouncer..”

Media Tells Americans to Check Vaccine Status of Thanksgiving Dinner Guests (SN)

On the eve of Thanksgiving, media outlets urged Americans to perform COVID tests and check the vaccination status of Thanksgiving dinner guests before allowing them into their homes.Yes, really. During a segment on CBS Mornings, psychologist Lisa Damour was asked how nervous Thanksgiving hosts should bring up the subject of vaccination status when welcoming friends and family. “It might be a difficult conversation before people step into your house to say, ‘whoa, wait a minute, where’s your card, what’s your status?’ before you walk into my home,” the host of the show said. “This is tough because people are all over the map on this,” responded Damour. “They’re also all over the map with their risk tolerance. But the rapid tests have made this a lot easier. Whatever people’s vaccination status is, we can actually confirm safety on the spot.”

“If the situation feels weird, maybe make it kind of fun,” she added. “And say, ‘we’re going to start with hors d’oeuvres in the garage. You know, we’ll have drinks, we’ll do our rapid tests, and then come on in,’ right?” You can make it playful, make it fun, and then be able to enjoy the holiday because you’re not worried about safety.” Let’s just take a moment to sympathize with people who are attending Thanksgiving dinner today at a relative’s house who is so paranoid about a virus with a 99.9% survival rate, they want to perform medical tests on their own family members before letting them in. Good luck to those people.

Meanwhile, Axios published an article suggesting that hosts should deploy “Thanksgiving bouncers” to deal with people who fail to comply. “No one really wants this job, but millions of households may need their own Thanksgiving bouncer. The cover charge is a negative COVID test, done ahead of arrival or outside the front door,” the article states. “Normalizing rapid tests is a practical way to help extended families feel a little more normal around the holiday dinner table.” The piece went on to encourage hosts to inform guests ahead of time that they will “be testing everyone at the door for their own safety.” No thanks, think I’ll be staying home this year.

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“The current system, under which countries are added and removed from a safe list, will be dropped, a change officials think offers more certainty.” Huh?

EU Moves To Place Covid Booster Jabs At Heart Of Travel Rules (G.)

People hoping to travel to the European Union next year will have to get a booster jab once their original Covid vaccines are more than nine months old, under new proposals from Brussels. On Thursday, the European Commission proposed a nine-month limit for vaccine validity that would apply for travel within and to the EU. If the plans are approved by EU ministers, from 10 January 2022 non-EU travellers will be required to show proof of an EU-approved booster jab once their original vaccine status is more than nine months old. Similarly, travellers between the member states would have to meet the same requirement to avoid Covid tests, quarantine and other restrictions. The Commission hopes to avoid a confusing mixture of rules across the 27 member states, as governments scramble to tighten restrictions on everyday life following a surge in coronavirus infections.

The plans were unveiled on Thursday as the European Medicines Agency approved the use of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for children aged five to 11, opening the way for governments to extend vaccination campaigns. The EU regulator recommended two injections three weeks apart in the upper arm for primary-school children, at one-third of the adult dose. The latest EU proposals prioritise vaccinated people, as Brussels moves to classify travellers according to individual health and vaccine status, rather than their country of departure. From 1 March 2022, EU member states would only permit entry to vaccinated, recovered or essential travellers, such as lorry drivers. The current system, under which countries are added and removed from a safe list, will be dropped, a change officials think offers more certainty.

The recommendation to make booster jabs necessary after nine months for non-EU non-essential travellers is part scientific advice, part practical policy. Immunity wanes after six months, but EU officials added an extra three to allow governments to get booster-shot programmes up and running. The EU executive also wants to allow entry for travellers with non-EU approved vaccines that are recognised by the World Health Organization, such as China’s Sinopharm and Sinovac and the AstraZeneca vaccine made by the Serum Institute of India. The EU has only approved four vaccines: Pfizer-BioNTech, AstraZeneca (produced in Europe), Janssen (Johnson & Johnson) and Moderna. Most EU member states only permit entry to people with EU-approved vaccines. Under the new proposals, travellers to the EU with a WHO-approved vaccine that is not EU approved, could enter the EU, but would have to produce a negative Covid-test.

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“Hospitals cannot be allowed to become prisons where patients are denied rights they would otherwise have.”

No, You Cuck. This Is How (Denninger)

**** you Daniel. “The family of Sun Ng will definitely have a meaningful Thanksgiving this year thanks to an attorney, a judge, and a doctor who bucked the system and enabled him to get ivermectin when he was at death’s doorstep. Imagine how many thousands of others are missing at this year’s Thanksgiving dinner thanks to the satanic effort to block this lifesaving drug – both outpatient and for those close to death?” It’s not just Ivermectin. These *******s are filling people with Remdesivir, which I remind you failed three times previously, including in a clinical trial for Ebola, a virus that kills half of those who get it. Distribution of patients into that treatment arm was stopped because of safety problems; in other words it was killing people more than the virus itself did, so they stopped using it partway through.

Today hospitals are being paid bounties — yes, actual bonuses — if they use this drug on all Covid-19 patients. So the answer isn’t this: “There is an immediate need for every attorney general to do battle with these hospitals and every legislature to pass a law specifically barring hospitals from blocking any patient from seeking the use of an FDA-approved drug at the direction of a physician to treat COVID. Hospitals cannot be allowed to become prisons where patients are denied rights they would otherwise have.” The way you stop it is simple: Charge the hospital administrators with felony manslaughter for each and every Covid-19 patient who dies and is either (1) denied medication they, their family or their physicians want to use OR (2) is given Remdesivir, which generates a rebuttable presumption that the drug killed them and not the virus.

Said presumption can be rebutted by autopsy if and only if their kidneys and liver are not damaged, which is what the drug does. Charge the hospital administrators with felony manslaughter for everyone they kill this way and watch their tune change immediately. Oh, and people will stop dying of Covid-19 too. Until and unless you advocate and in fact demand that **** you Mr. Auschwitz.

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The winter of excess deaths is coming. And nobody knows why.

FDA Report Finds All-Cause Mortality Higher Among Vaccinated (INN)

The clinical trials of Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine found that the all-cause mortality rate of the vaccinated group was higher than that of the control group, months after the trials were launched, according to a recently released FDA report. According to the report, which was released by the US Food and Drug Administration to provide background information on its August 2021 decision to grant full approval for the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine after offering limited emergency authorization of use in last December, six months after the vaccine’s clinical trial began, the total number of deaths reported in the vaccinated group was nearly one-quarter higher than the number of deaths in the placebo group. The report emphasized that “None of the deaths were considered related to vaccination.”

Just under 22,000 participants were included in each group, with half receiving the coronavirus vaccine, and half receiving a saline solution injection. The initial results of the clinical trials suggested a high-level of efficacy for the vaccine in preventing symptomatic cases of COVID-19, an in particular, serious illness from COVID – but lacked significant data on all-cause mortality, due to the short time-frame and small number of total deaths. A follow-up assessment of participants completed on March 13th of this year looked at the overall health outcomes of the trial participants, six months after they received either the COVID vaccine or the saline solution injection. While Pfizer in July released partial data on the outcomes from the six-month assessment ending March 13th, the new FDA report includes more comprehensive data, and shows a significantly higher number of all-cause fatalities among the vaccinated cohort.

The Pfizer report in late July of this year showed effectively equal all-cause fatality rates between the vaccine and placebo cohorts six months after the tests were conducted, with 15 deaths among the nearly 22,000 vaccine recipients, versus 14 deaths among the nearly 22,000 placebo recipients. Most of the total 29 deaths in both groups were not related to the coronavirus; of the deaths in both groups, three fatalities were listed as being related to the virus; two in the placebo group and one in the vaccinated group. The FDA report, however, revealed a larger number of deaths by all causes in both groups, with 17 deaths among the control group and 21 in the vaccinated cohort.

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“The idea of rejecting an order, that’s counter to Marine Corps culture.”

Marines Face Defining Moment Ahead of Vaccine Mandate Deadline (USN)

The Marine Corps faces a defining moment leading up to its Monday deadline for all Marines to have received a coronavirus vaccine, with reports of a significant number who have refused the shot clashing with the service’s meticulously crafted image as the military’s most disciplined fighting force – and its most potent. Roughly 10,000 of its 186,000-strong active duty force are positioned to miss the deadline the Department of the Navy set for all Marines and sailors to become fully vaccinated, according to the latest data, representing the highest proportion of any of the military services potentially to violate direct orders from the chain of command. Even those who may have waited until the final weeks to begin the vaccination process will ultimately miss the deadline, which requires Marines to have completed the two-week vaccination process.

The 38,000 Marine Corps reservists face a later deadline of Dec. 28. Marine Corps headquarters has so far declined to say how many have applied for or been granted exemptions – a bureaucratic process to accommodate religious, medical or administrative concerns that has taken on outsized relevance in the age of coronavirus vaccine skepticism – or how it will punish those who outright refuse to receive the shot. A spokesman says it continues to study the scope of the issue. But those with deep experience in the corps and its place in the wider military say it has already suffered from the initial refusals, with the potential for greater damage after next week. “For decades the Marine Corps has been about the expeditionary force and readiness.

‘First to Fight,’ ‘Send the Marines’ – all those slogans about how they have to be ready to go on a moment’s notice,” says David Lapan, a former Marine Corps officer and later a spokesman for the Pentagon and Department of Homeland Security. “The Marine Corps prides itself on its discipline and following orders,” he adds. “The idea of rejecting an order, that’s counter to Marine Corps culture.” The Navy, by comparison, facing the same deadlines neared 100 percent vaccination early this month – matching a trend it has maintained in recent months following the catastrophic fallout of outbreaks that sidelined Navy ships early in the pandemic. The Office of Management and Budget revealed Wednesday that 92 percent of the entire federal workforce – including the military – had been vaccinated, with 4 percent receiving exemptions. The mandate takes on a different meaning for the Defense Department, however, as it was issued as a formal order by each service member’s chain of command.

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“.. Among those who filed the lawsuit was Ben Brown, who is running for state Senate in Missouri and owns Satchmo’s Bar and Grill..”

Missouri Judge Says Covid-19 Public Health Orders Must Be Lifted (Hill)

A Missouri judge ruled that local health officials can no longer issue COVID-19 safety orders, which he said infringe upon the constitutional separation of powers between branches of government, reported the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The ruling from Cole County Circuit Court Judge Daniel Green means local health regulations throughout Missouri are struck down and rendered obsolete, reported the Post-Dispatch. “This case is about whether Missouri’s Department of Health and Senior Services regulations can abolish representative government in the creation of public health laws, and whether it can authorize closure of a school or assembly based on the unfettered opinion of an unelected official. This court finds it cannot,” said Green, according to the Post-Dispatch.


“Missouri’s local health authorities have grown accustomed to issuing edicts and coercing compliance. It is far past time for this unconstitutional conduct to stop,” added Green, a Republican who was first elected as county judge in 2010. The lawsuit was originally filed in 2020 and claimed that state health officials were overstepping their authority by issuing coronavirus mitigation measures such as quarantines and business closures, reported the Post-Dispatch. Among those who filed the lawsuit was Ben Brown, who is running for state Senate in Missouri and owns Satchmo’s Bar and Grill, which he fought to keep open during the pandemic against St. Louis County officials’ orders, reported the Post-Dispatch. Brown posted about the ruling on Tuesday on his Twitter account, where he wrote, “The age of mandates and forced quarantine of students by local health departments in our state is over!” and “Freedom wins!”

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Be open about it. It’s the only thing that will work.

Pfizer Vaccine Linked To 26 New Cases Of Myocarditis In Australia (DT)

The number of cases of heart inflammation linked to the Pfizer Covid vaccine in Australia has risen to 341 from about 23.9 million doses. There were 26 new cases of the rare side effect known as myocarditis reported in the week ending November 21. There was also one new blood clots case linked to the AstraZeneca vaccine following a first dose. It involved a 67-year-old woman from Victoria. The new case increased the total Thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome (TTS) or blood clots cases to 164 out of 13.4 million doses. Of these 148 (81 confirmed, 62 probable) related to a first dose and 21 to a second dose (six confirmed, 15 probable).


Eight people have died as a result of blood clots – six of these were women. There have also been a total of 150 reports of suspected Guillain-Barre Syndrome (GBS) occurring after vaccination with AstraZeneca, a rare but sometimes serious immune disorder affecting the nerves. And a total of 90 reports of suspected immune thrombocytopenia (ITP) following vaccination with AstraZeneca, a rare immune reaction that can occur after a viral infection or vaccination when platelets, which help blood to clot, are mistakenly destroyed. [..] Myocarditis is reported in one to two in every 100,000 people who receive Pfizer, although it is more common in young men and teenage boys after the second dose (five to 11 cases per 100,000 doses).

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Poorly written, but still..

365 Studies Prove the Efficacy of Ivermectin and HCQ in Treating COVID-19 (GP)

There have now been 67 Ivermectin COVID-19 controlled studies that show a 67% improvement in COVID patients. [..] Dr. Robert Malone, the inventor of the mRNA vaccines, accused Dr. Fauci and others of lying and causing the death of over 500,000 Americans by preventing HCQ and Ivermectin, and other treatments from COVID-19 patients. Dr. Malone is right. It is well documented that Dr. Fauci and top US doctors conspired to disqualify and condemn hydroxychloroquine as a COVID-19 treatment. Millions died as a result of this. As TGP reported earlier — It wasn’t just Fauci but all of the top US medical leaders who were in on the hydroxychloroquine lie. Dr. Meryl Nass, MD, broke this story in The Defender. According to Dr. Nass, the top health officials were all in on the conspiracy against hydroxychloroquine.

“Fauci runs the NIAID, Collins is the NIH director (nominally Fauci’s boss) and Farrar is director of the Wellcome Trust. Farrar also signed the Lancet letter. And he is chair of the WHO’s R&D Blueprint Scientific Advisory Group, which put him in the driver’s seat of the WHO’s Solidarity trial, in which 1,000 unwitting subjects were overdosed with hydroxychloroquine in order to sink the use of that drug for COVID. Farrar had worked in Vietnam, where there was lots of malaria, and he had also been involved with SARS-1 there. He additionally was central in setting up the UK Recovery trial, where 1,600 subjects were overdosed with hydroxychloroquine.

Even if Farrar didn’t have some idea of the proper dose of chloroquine drugs from his experience in Vietnam, he, Fauci and Collins would have learned about such overdoses after Brazil told the world about how they mistakenly overdosed patients in a trial of chloroquine for COVID. The revelation was made in an article published in the JAMA in mid-April 2020. Thirty-nine percent of the subjects in Brazil who were given high doses of chloroquine died, average age 50.Yet the Solidarity and Recovery hydroxychloroquine trials continued into June, stopping only after their extreme doses were exposed. Fauci made sure to control the treatment guidelines for COVID that came out of the NIAID, advising against both chloroquine drugs and ivermectin. Fauci’s NIAID also cancelled the first large-scale trial of hydroxychloroquine treatment in early disease, after only 20 of the expected 2,000 subjects were enrolled.”

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A curious story. She wants big changes.

Centrist Dems Sink Biden’s Nominee For Top Bank Regulator (Axios)

Five Democratic senators have told the White House they won’t support Saule Omarova to head the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, effectively killing her nomination for the powerful bank-regulator position. The defiant opposition from a broad coalition of senators reflects the real policy concerns they had with Omarova, a Cornell University law professor who’s attracted controversy for her academic writings about hemming in big banks. Their opposition also hints at a willingness of some Democratic senators to buck the White House on an important nomination, even if it hands Republicans a political — and symbolic — victory. Republicans have attacked the Kazakh-born scholar in remarkably personal terms, and turned her nomination into a proxy battle over how banks should be regulated.


In phone call on Wednesday, Sens. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), all members of the Senate Banking Committee, told Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) — the panel’s chairman — of their opposition. They’re joined in opposing her by Sens. John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.) and Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.). Biden officials also have heard directly from the senators. They’re aware of their deep opposition and know Omarova faces nearly impossible odds for confirmation. Still, they continue to back her publicly. “The White House continues to strongly support her historic nomination,” a White House official told Axios. “Saule Omarova is eminently qualified for this position,” the official said. “She has been treated unfairly since her nomination with unacceptable red-baiting from Republicans like it’s the McCarthy era.”

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Temples of the Holy Spirit

 

 

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Nov 222021
 
 November 22, 2021  Posted by at 9:46 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  75 Responses »


Marcel Duchamp Nude descending a staircase 1912

 

UK Data Shows The Vaccines Are Not Saving Any Lives At All. Zero. (Kirsch)
Now Germany Is Set Make Covid Vaccinations Compulsory (DM)
Dutch Deaths More Than 20% Higher Than Previous Years’ Average (FWM)
Scientists Mystified, Wary, As Africa Avoids Covid Disaster (AP)
Pfizer Co-developer Says Covid Vaccination Will Be Annual (RT)
Fauci Gives A ‘Perfectly Honest’ Response To Booster Question (RT)
Fauci Comes Up With New ‘Rule’ To Wear Masks (RT)
It’ll Be ‘Jab Or Death’ For Anti-vaxxers, Orban Predicts (RT)
Fighting For Our Lives: Humanity’s Weapons Against Covid-19 (RT)
Fresh Protests, Violence Against Covid Restrictions (RFI)
Like Covid-19, Digital Passports Could Be With Us Forever (Ford)
Russia Set To Launch Winter Invasion Of Ukraine: US Media (RT)

 

 

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“We are mandating a vaccine which basically kills ~ 800 people per M fully vaccinated..”

UK Data Shows The Vaccines Are Not Saving Any Lives At All. Zero. (Kirsch)

My good friend Mathew Crawford is an amazing statistician. He’s one of the smartest people I know. He just published a new analysis on his substack showing that the UK data show that the COVID vaccines aren’t saving any lives at all. It’s all statistical noise as shown in the graph below from his article. Please check it out and if you like his work, please honor him by subscribing to his substack. Mathew’s work really shouldn’t come as a surprise. It certainly wasn’t a surprise to me. Norman Fenton pointed out two months ago that the UK data shows that vaccinated people are dying at a greater rate than the unvaccinated (even after adjusting for age).

More recently, Fenton showed that with a simple time skew of deaths, we can make the vaccines look extremely effective even if they do absolutely nothing (paper and video). Fenton’s conclusion: we currently have no real evidence that the vaccines work. So now we have two statisticians that I have very high respect for claiming the vaccines are, at best, not saving any lives. And for some odd reason, nobody wants to challenge them in a live video debate. I can’t figure that one out.


We are mandating a vaccine which basically kills ~ 800 people per M fully vaccinated. When you couple that with my 8 ways of estimating the number of deaths from the COVID vaccines in America gives a minimum of 150,000 deaths, our government is basically trying to mandate a vaccine that is a killing machine. Nobody wants to debate this with us. I recently offered $1M for any of the members of the CDC or FDA outside committee members to debate us. Apparently, their time is worth more than a million dollars an hour because none of them accepted my more than generous offer. Is there anyone in a decision making capacity on the vaccines/mandates who wants to talk about the science and the statistics? Or are they all chicken?

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Don’t do it. You will not be able to contain the mayhem.

Respect your ancestors. These things were not born in a vacuum:
1) Nuremberg Code
2) UNESCO Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights (art.6).
3) UN International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (art. 7).
4) UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights (art. 3).

Now Germany Is Set Make Covid Vaccinations Compulsory (DM)

The protest came just hours after it emerged Germany is set to follow Austria’s example in making vaccinations compulsory with ministers admitting that the move is ‘unavoidable’ amid a fourth wave of the pandemic which is crippling the country’s hospitals. Last night also saw similar demonstrations against virus restrictions take place in Austria, Switzerland, Croatia, Italy, Northern Ireland, Austria and North Macedonia on Saturday, a day after Dutch police opened fire on protesters and seven people were injured in rioting that erupted in Rotterdam. Europe has become the epicentre of the pandemic once again, with the World Health Organisation warning that the Continent was the only region in the world where deaths had increased as Covid-related fatalities spiked by five per cent just this week.


In France, the government has warned that the fifth wave of coronavirus are rising at ‘lightning speed’, with new daily Covid cases close to doubling over the past week. In Belgium, cases have been surging, with infections reaching 13,836 on Sunday. In response, the government has introduced restrictions including a ban on the unvaccinated from venues such as restaurants and bars, and an order to work from home at least four days a week. Police said 35,000 protesters marched from the North Station in Brussels on Sunday afternoon against a fresh round of Covid measures announced by the government on Wednesday.

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A world filled with mysteries.

“Other “experts” sadly had no explanation for vaccine failure either.”

Dutch Deaths More Than 20% Higher Than Previous Years’ Average (FWM)

According to the statistical office, the higher mortality can be seen in all age groups. Statistics Netherlands does not yet have an explanation for the higher mortality. More deaths of Corona patients were registered at RIVM last week. According to the CBS, the excess mortality has clearly increased in recent weeks. But since the beginning of August, the mortality has already been above the usual numbers during this period. It is estimated that 2 100 people aged 80 and older died last week. That is almost 500 more than expected. Mortality in this age group has been remarkably high for four weeks. This also applies to people aged 65 to 80. In this age group, 1 200 people died last week, nearly 300 more than expected. Among people under the age of 65, the death rate last week was an estimated 450, more than 50 more than expected.

In the Netherlands, 85 percent of people over the age of 18 are fully vaccinated, and many had their jabs only recently. Vaccine salespeople maintain that the shots offer protection in the first few months before the “protection” starts to wane. They blame the unvaccinated for the rise in deaths. This is obviously false. The number of people getting infected has never been worse, despite the high vaccination rate. The jabs are evidently not doing what had been promised. In total, 23 680 cases were reported on Thursday, the fourth day in a row of record-setting case numbers following a week that broke the record for the highest number of new infections (110 000) since the pandemic began – a 44 percent rise over the week before, and this week’s figures have not yet been added.

Dutch officials have started injecting those 80 with boosters on Thursday, weeks earlier than planned. Anke Huckriede, professor of vaccinology at the University of Groningen, said the intramuscular jabs do not offer protection in the upper respiratory tract, where the virus enters our bodies. With only some 15 percent of the adult population unvaccinated, the Dutch have a higher vaccine uptake than the majority of the world. But Bas van den Putte, professor of health communication at the University of Amsterdam and a member of the scientific advisory board of the RIVM’s Corona Behavioural Unit admitted that he could not explain the dramatic rise in deaths.

Other “experts” sadly had no explanation for vaccine failure either. Frits Rosendaal, professor of clinical epidemiology at the Leiden University Medical Center, blamed geography and population density while Huckriede said she had no idea why this was happening. “We just don’t know.” Based on weekly data from the Office of National Statistics (ONS) in the UK, vaccinated people under 60 are twice as likely to die as unvaccinated people. And overall deaths in Britain are far above normal. As in Germany, Swedes also appear to die at rates 20 percent or more above normal for weeks after receiving their second Covid jab, according to data from a Swedish study.

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Not one word on IVM. Use is widespread. Mystery sounds better?!

Scientists Mystified, Wary, As Africa Avoids Covid Disaster (AP)

“COVID-19 is gone, when did you last hear of anyone who has died of COVID-19?” Ndou said. “The mask is to protect my pocket,” he said. “The police demand bribes so I lose money if I don’t move around with a mask.” Earlier this week, Zimbabwe recorded just 33 new COVID-19 cases and zero deaths, in line with a recent fall in the disease across the continent, where World Health Organization data show that infections have been dropping since July. When the coronavirus first emerged last year, health officials feared the pandemic would sweep across Africa, killing millions. Although it’s still unclear what COVID-19’s ultimate toll will be, that catastrophic scenario has yet to materialize in Zimbabwe or much of the continent.

Scientists emphasize that obtaining accurate COVID-19 data, particularly in African countries with patchy surveillance, is extremely difficult, and warn that declining coronavirus trends could easily be reversed. But there is something “mysterious” going on in Africa that is puzzling scientists, said Wafaa El-Sadr, chair of global health at Columbia University. “Africa doesn’t have the vaccines and the resources to fight COVID-19 that they have in Europe and the U.S., but somehow they seem to be doing better,” she said. Fewer than 6% of people in Africa are vaccinated. For months, the WHO has described Africa as “one of the least affected regions in the world” in its weekly pandemic reports.

Some researchers say the continent’s younger population — the average age is 20 versus about 43 in Western Europe — in addition to their lower rates of urbanization and tendency to spend time outdoors, may have spared it the more lethal effects of the virus so far. Several studies are probing whether there might be other explanations, including genetic reasons or exposure to other diseases. Christian Happi, director of the African Center of Excellence for Genomics of Infectious Diseases at Redeemer’s University in Nigeria, said authorities are used to curbing outbreaks even without vaccines and credited the extensive networks of community health workers. “It’s not always about how much money you have or how sophisticated your hospitals are,” he said.

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Jeffrey A Tucker @jeffreyatucker:
“They changed the definition of case. They changed the definition of infection. They changed the definition of herd immunity. They changed the definition of vaccine. And they wonder why so many people are suspicious that something odd is going on..”

A subtle shift towards normalization here: “Subsequent … vaccinations may only be needed every year – just like [with] influenza,” he said.

Pfizer Co-developer Says Covid Vaccination Will Be Annual (RT)

People around the world will need to get a jab against Covid-19 once a year, at least when it comes to the Pfizer vaccine, BioNTech’s CEO Ugur Sahin said in an interview on Sunday, as he praised the quality of its booster shot In an interview with Germany’s Bild newspaper on Sunday, Sahin said he considers the vaccine, co-developed by his company, to be “very effective.” When asked whether people should be worried about the “breakthrough infections” – in which those vaccinated with the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine still developed Covid-19 symptoms – he dismissed such concerns, saying that the jab offers a “90 percent protection” against cases that require intensive care in those aged over 60.

A “very high” level of protection against severe illness lasts for up to nine months, the BioNTech CEO maintained. He said this level starts decreasing “from the fourth month,” however. To maintain the protection, Sahin strongly pushed for booster shots, arguing that they would not just restore levels of antibodies but would potentially help “to break … chains of infection.” He also encouraged doctors to be “as pragmatic as possible” when it comes to greenlighting vaccination and “not to send people home unvaccinated even though they could be vaccinated without any problems.” In the future, people might need to get booster shots once a year, the BioNTech CEO believes. He said that he expects protection from a booster shot to “last longer” than the initial immunity one acquires after getting two doses of the vaccine.

“Subsequent … vaccinations may only be needed every year – just like [with] influenza,” he said. Currently, the German Federal Center for Health Education – an agency subordinated to the Health Ministry – recommends a booster shot six months after one gets the second dose of a vaccine. It also says that “booster vaccination makes sense after a minimum interval of about four months.” Sahin’s interview comes days after it was revealed that Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna are making a combined profit of $65,000 every minute – all thanks to their Covid-19 jabs. That is according to estimates made by the People’s Vaccine Alliance (PVA) – a coalition demanding wider access to vaccines. The PVA estimated that the three companies are to earn a total of $34 billion in combined pre-tax profits this year alone, which roughly translates into more than $1,000 a second and $93.5 million a day.

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“We don’t know right now, we have to be perfectly transparent and honest.”

Fauci Gives A ‘Perfectly Honest’ Response To Booster Question (RT)

White House health advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci said that the “guidelines” for what makes someone ‘fully vaccinated’ against Covid-19 could soon be changing, depending on the “science.” Appearing on CNN on Sunday, Fauci was asked if booster shots would soon be required for someone to be considered fully inoculated, something required for many to work and enter certain businesses. While not giving a direct yes or no answer, the infectious disease expert said the current administration is open to it. “We’re going to be following that very carefully,” Fauci said, adding that the Joe Biden administration “might modify the guidelines” for what constitutes being fully vaccinated, based on the lasting effects of boosters. We don’t know right now, we have to be perfectly transparent and honest.”

Americans “should not be put off by the fact that as time goes by and we learn more and more about the protection,” the definition of ‘fully vaccinated’ might change, Fauci stressed. Those given two doses of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine or one dose of Johnson & Johnson are currently considered fully vaccinated, but according to Fauci, Pfizer and Moderna recipients should already be getting boosters after six months and Johnson & Johnson recipients after two months. In a separate interview with ABC, Fauci said if boosters need to provide “durability,” or more boosters will be required in the future.

“We’ll continue to follow the data because right now when we’re boosting people, what we’re doing is following them,” he said. “We’re going to see what the durability of that protection is.” If the durability is not up to par, Fauci explained, people could need to get shots every six months to a year. “We would hope, and this is something that we’re looking at very carefully, that that third shot with the mRNA not only boosts you way up, but increases the durability so that you will not necessarily need it every six months or a year,” he said.

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‘I just decided that if anyone came up that I didn’t know, I would put my mask on,..”

“Sally Quinn, an author who used Fauci as the inspiration for a character in an erotic work of fiction ..”

Fauci Comes Up With New ‘Rule’ To Wear Masks (RT)

White House health adviser Anthony Fauci was seen at an elite book party regularly taking his mask on and off, confusing many attendees. An author says Fauci explained to her why he chose to wear it around some and not others. Appearing at a book launch party for journalist Jonathan Karl this week at Cafe Milano in Washington DC, Fauci gained the attention of onlookers, according to Politico, by repeatedly putting on and taking off his mask as he talked to numerous people. This also happened as “gawkers” attempted to get a picture of the unmasked infectious disease expert. Sally Quinn, an author who used Fauci as the inspiration for a character in an erotic work of fiction, eventually approached the doctor and asked about his “ambivalence” towards mask-wearing at the event.


“He said, ‘I just decided that if anyone came up that I didn’t know, I would put my mask on,” the author recalled from her conversation with Fauci. The head of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases was apparently on his own with his mask-wearing tactics, as Quinn reported all others at the event were not masked. Quinn described the “paparazzi” as trying to catch Fauci in a “gotcha” moment, but also suggested that the doctor “was being safe.” All those who attended the party had to show proof of vaccinations beforehand. Washington, DC recently dropped its strict mask mandate, though this does not go into effect until Monday, November 22. Masks will no longer be required in numerous indoor spaces, though they are still required in schools, libraries, public transportation, etc. Private businesses have the option to require or not require masks, under the new guidance.

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Firmly in the Fauci camp. Good luck with that.

It’ll Be ‘Jab Or Death’ For Anti-vaxxers, Orban Predicts (RT)

Vaccination of all Hungarian citizens against Covid-19 is inevitable, PM Viktor Orban has said, stating that even the most hardline anti-vaxxers will ultimately face a choice between dying with the virus and getting a jab. Speaking to Kossuth radio on Friday, the Hungarian leader lashed out at those reluctant to get vaccinated against coronavirus, branding them a threat “not only to themselves but to all others.” In the end, everyone will have to be vaccinated; even the anti-vaxxers will realize that they will either get vaccinated or die. So, I urge everyone to take this opportunity. The EU member state is currently experiencing its fourth wave of coronavirus, Orban stated, blaming the situation on those who had not got vaccinated. “If everybody were inoculated, there would be no fourth wave or it would be just a small one,” the PM claimed.


Apart from urging the unvaccinated to go and finally get their jabs, Orban also promoted booster shots, revealing that he had already taken three doses of a coronavirus vaccine. “The only thing that protects us from the virus is vaccination. And we are now also seeing, at least the experts are unanimous in saying, that four to six months after the second vaccination, the protective power of the vaccine weakens. Therefore, a third vaccination is justified,” he said. Hungary has already announced new anti-Covid measures, though somewhat short of the strict measures proposed by the nation’s Medical Chamber on Wednesday. The medical body called for a blanket ban on mass events, and suggested making entry to restaurants, theaters and other indoor venues conditional on bearing a Covid-19 inoculation certificate. Instead, Budapest rolled out compulsory mask wearing for most indoor environments, as well as making booster shots mandatory for all medical workers, starting from Saturday.

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Even RT only talks about new, and yet-to-be invented, drugs. But that’s not what will solve this.

Fighting For Our Lives: Humanity’s Weapons Against Covid-19 (RT)

Vaccines are not a silver bullet, unfortunately, given the not-so-high level of global immunization and the constantly emerging new strains of the virus. “People might get infected despite having had a vaccine, but I still think the vaccine strategy is going to be central to how we manage this kind of virus going forward,” Prof. Dockrell says. “But we will have other strategies that will be very important. We will have other elements. When we put them all together, it gives us the best opportunity that people can live with coronaviruses, and hopefully, the mortality can be limited to much lower extense than what we’ve sadly seen in the last eighteen months.” Monoclonal antibodies will be central to the ongoing vaccine strategy, Prof. Dockrell explains. These are the antibodies similar to those the body uses to fight the virus.

They are produced in labs and given via infusion or injection to boost the patient’s response against certain diseases. Monoclonal antibody treatment is used for people under a high risk of developing severe infection (including older patients 65+ years old or those with chronic medical conditions). It’s already being used in the US, following last year’s FDA approval. Earlier in November, the European Medicines agency recommended authorizing two monoclonal antibody medicines. In October, UK’s AstraZeneca reported positive results of a Phase 3 study of its antibody combination, which, according to developers, is highly effective in both prevention and treatment of coronavirus. Researchers are also working on a possibility to save Covid-infected patients from the so-called ‘cytokine storm’ – a situation when the immune system reacts so intensely that kills not only the virus, but the whole organism itself. A drug to ‘calm the storm’ was registered in Russia this year, and it’s already being used on patients.

Another way to fight Covid-19 is to use antiviral drugs. When the pandemic started, medics had to use something already existing (like anti-influenza Favipiravir) or something being authorized for emergency use (like remdesivir). Now, more than a year on, the work to create a special drug to specifically cure Covid-19 is giving its results. This month, Russia registered its first injectable anti-Covid medicine. A bit earlier, the UK became the first country to approve an antiviral pill produced by the US-based companies Merck and Ridgeback Biotherapeutics. Another American firm, Pfizer, got positive results from trials of its drug of the same kind. Both firms hope that with a drug in the form of a pill it would be easier to treat people at home. Appreciating all the efforts on the field of developing anti-Covid treatment, Prof. de Noli points out that still, the key issue now is to reduce the spreading of the virus. “The new medicines are developed for people who already got the disease,” he says.

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This will not go away.

Fresh Protests, Violence Against Covid Restrictions (RFI)

A fresh wave of protests broke out in several European cities and in some French overseas territories Sunday, as protesters reacted, sometimes violently, to moves to reintroduce coronavirus restrictions. Police and protesters clashed in the Belgian capital Brussels, in several Dutch cities and overnight into early Sunday in the French Caribbean territory Guadaloupe. There were fresh demonstrations in Austria, where the government is imposing a new lockdown and Covid-19 vaccine mandate. In Brussels, violence broke out at a protest against anti-Covid measures which police said was attended by 35,000 people. The march, in the city’s European Union and government district, largely focused on a ban on the unvaccinated from venues such as restaurants and bars.

It began peacefully but police later fired water cannon and tear gas in response to protesters throwing projectiles, an AFP photographer witnessed. Police told Belga news agency that three officers were injured. Several of the demonstrators caught up in the clash wore hoods and carried Flemish nationalist flags, while others wore Nazi-era yellow stars. Protesters set fire to wood pallets, and social media images showed them attacking police vans with street signs. Protests also erupted in several Dutch cities Sunday, the third night of unrest over the government’s coronavirus restrictions. Demonstrators set off fireworks and vandalised property in the northern cities of Groningen and Leeuwarden, as well as in Enschede to the east and Tilburg to the south, said police. “Riot police are present in the centre to restore order,” a Groningen police spokeswoman told AFP.

Authorities issued an emergency order in Enschede, near the German border, ordering people to stay off the streets, police said on Twitter. A football match in the nearby city of Leeuwarden was briefly disrupted after supporters, who are barred from games because of the Covid restrictions, threw fireworks into the ground, Dutch media reported. On Friday night, there was unrest in Rotterdam and last night in The Hague. So far, more than 100 people have been arrested around the country and at least 12 people have been injured during the demonstrations. From Monday, 8.9 million Austrians will not be allowed to leave home except to go to work, shop for essentials and exercise. And vaccination against Covid-19 in the Alpine nation will be mandatory from February 1 next year.

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“There is no “finishing the fight” against an endemic virus.”

Like Covid-19, Digital Passports Could Be With Us Forever (Ford)

When a government radically alters the way we live and relate to one another, it should be able to explain, at a minimum, why it is doing so. And when their plans involve extraordinary new powers to surveil, coerce, and control the population, we might also hope for an account of how and when those powers will be rescinded, and what limiting principle will constrain their use. Proponents of digital health passports have failed to clear even the most basic of these hurdles. Instead, they have offered conflicting, unrealistic, and sometimes incoherent explanations of what the new digital passport regime is meant to achieve. Are vaccine passports supposed to let us “finish the fight” against SARS-CoV-2, as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has promised? Of course not. There is no “finishing the fight” against an endemic virus.

Will the passports end transmission of the disease? No. The vaccines are not designed to stop transmission, and the virus can be spread by vaccinated and unvaccinated people alike. Is the point to ensure that hospitals and ICUs are not overwhelmed by COVID-19 patients? That is a legitimate goal, but it’s undermined when vaccine mandates result in the firing or suspensions of thousands of front-line healthcare workers, many of whom already have natural immunity. Maybe the passports are just a psychosomatic measure, meant to help vaccinated people feel safer and less anxious as they go about their lives. Or are they a blunt instrument to drive up vaccination rates in hopes of achieving herd immunity? If so, how high does the rate need to be? 80 percent? 90 percent? 100 percent?

What will we do when the vaccine’s efficacy fades, or if new variants emerge with mutated spike proteins that escape vaccine-induced immunity? No one seems to know. Lacking clear or realistic objectives, there is no way to evaluate the success of these new public health measures. And if success or failure cannot be measured, neither can they be declared. This should worry us, because the elected leaders currently enacting vaccine passports have not committed to any limits—either practical or temporal—on these new powers. We should not be overturning our most taken-for-granted social norms without first considering the risks and probable long-term consequences. Because once we go down this road, we may ruefully discover that there is no off-ramp.

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Why does Russia even react to this stuff anymore?

Russia Set To Launch Winter Invasion Of Ukraine: US Media (RT)

Russia is growing more inclined to invade Ukraine now that colder days are approaching, a weekend American media report has claimed. Western officials have accused Russia of staging a military buildup along Kiev’s eastern borders. The likelihood of a potential Russian assault on Ukraine is “increasing as the weather gets colder,” CBS News reported on Saturday, citing the customary unnamed US intelligence “sources.” Quite why Moscow would choose the coldest months of the year, with the shortest days, is left unclear. “An incursion is weather-dependent, but could happen in a matter of weeks, barring intervention from the West,” it continued.

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Wednesday urged Moscow to “be more transparent on the buildup of the forces around on the border of Ukraine.” Austin added that he was “not sure exactly” about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s plan of action. Ukraine initially refused to back the reports in US media about the buildup of Russian troops, but later changed its tune. Brigadier General Kyrylo Budanov, Ukraine’s chief military intelligence officer, told the Military Times on Sunday that Russia is preparing to attack Ukraine by the end of January or the beginning of February. The Ukrainian military produced a map showing how Russia in a “short-term perspective” could invade Ukraine from all directions, including an incursion from the territory of Belarus.

Russia has denied amassing troops along the Ukrainian border. When reports of possible preparation for an invasion began appearing in US media this month, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova dismissed them as “fake” news that she said was part of a larger disinformation campaign waged against Russia. In an interview broadcast on Rossiya-1 TV channel on Sunday, Dmitry Peskov, the spokesperson for the Kremlin, said the West was “artificially stoking hysteria.”

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Nov 212021
 
 November 21, 2021  Posted by at 9:55 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , ,  94 Responses »


Hannah Höch Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany 1919

 

2x More Vaccinated English Adults Under 60 Dying Than Unvaccinated (Berenson)
mRNA COVID Vaccines: a Warning (Circ.)
ACS Risk Biomarkers Significantly Increase After mRNA COVID-19 Vaccine (CA)
Harvard Study: Recovered Immunity Far Stronger Than Vaccine Protection (Kirsch)
French Doctors Urge Against Jabs For Healthy Children (Exp.)
Fauci: Babies, Toddlers Eligible For Covid-19 Vaccine By Early 2022 (Hill)
The War On The ‘Unvaccinated’ Aims To Destroy The Control Group (Schachtel)
FDA Produces First 91+ Pages Of Pfizer’s COVID-19 Vaccine File (Siri)
NIH Director Calls For COVID Conspiracists to be “Brought to Justice” (SN)
Navy Shipbuilder Backpedals On Vaccine Mandate (ZH)
Europe’s Covid Crisis Pits Vaccinated Against Unvaccinated (AP)
Fresh Covid Riots For Second Night Hit Dutch City(Y!)

 

 

Used to be known as healthy.

Perfect excuse to jab everyone, a variant you can’t see, or feel.

 

 

 

 

Vit. D: A hormone
https://twitter.com/i/status/1462110238316896267

 

 

Melissa Ciummei
https://twitter.com/i/status/1462209145269108747

 

 

No more questions, your honor.

2x More Vaccinated English Adults Under 60 Dying Than Unvaccinated (Berenson)

The brown line represents weekly deaths from all causes of vaccinated people aged 10-59, per 100,000 people. The blue line represents weekly deaths from all causes of unvaccinated people per 100,000 in the same age range. I have checked the underlying dataset myself and this graph is correct. Vaccinated people under 60 are twice as likely to die as unvaccinated people. And overall deaths in Britain are running well above normal. I don’t know how to explain this other than vaccine-caused mortality.

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https://www.ahajournals.org/: Mrna COVID Vaccines Dramatically Increase Endothelial Inflammatory Markers and ACS Risk as Measured by the PULS Cardiac Test: a Warning

“..the mRNA vacs dramatically increase inflammation on the endothelium and T cell infiltration of cardiac muscle and may account for the observations of increased thrombosis, cardiomyopathy, and other vascular events following vaccination.”

mRNA COVID Vaccines: a Warning (Circ.)

Our group has been using the PLUS Cardiac Test (GD Biosciences, Inc, Irvine, CA) a clinically validated measurement of multiple protein biomarkers which generates a score predicting the 5 yr risk (percentage chance) of a new Acute Coronary Syndrome (ACS). The score is based on changes from the norm of multiple protein biomarkers including IL-16, a proinflammatory cytokine, soluble Fas, an inducer of apoptosis, and Hepatocyte Growth Factor (HGF)which serves as a marker for chemotaxis of T-cells into epithelium and cardiac tissue, among other markers. Elevation above the norm increases the PULS score, while decreases below the norm lowers the PULS score.The score has been measured every 3-6 months in our patient population for 8 years. Recently, with the advent of the mRNA COVID 19 vaccines (vac) by Moderna and Pfizer, dramatic changes in the PULS score became apparent in most patients.


This report summarizes those results. A total of 566 pts, aged 28 to 97, M:F ratio 1:1 seen in a preventive cardiology practice had a new PULS test drawn from 2 to 10 weeks following the 2nd COVID shot and was compared to the previous PULS score drawn 3 to 5 months previously pre- shot. Baseline IL-16 increased from 35=/-20 above the norm to 82 =/- 75 above the norm post-vac; sFas increased from 22+/- 15 above the norm to 46=/-24 above the norm post-vac; HGF increased from 42+/-12 above the norm to 86+/-31 above the norm post-vac. These changes resulted in an increase of the PULS score from 11% 5 yr ACS risk to 25% 5 yr ACS risk. At the time of this report, these changes persist for at least 2.5 months post second dose of vac. We conclude that the mRNA vacs dramatically increase inflammation on the endothelium and T cell infiltration of cardiac muscle and may account for the observations of increased thrombosis, cardiomyopathy, and other vascular events following vaccination.

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Second take on the same study, this from thecardiologyadvisor.com.

ACS Risk Biomarkers Significantly Increase After mRNA COVID-19 Vaccine (CA)

The risk of developing acute coronary syndrome (ACS) significantly increased in patients after receiving mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, according to a report presented at the American Heart Association (AHA) Scientific Sessions 2021, held from November 13 to 15, 2021. The study included 566 men and women (1:1) aged 28-97 years, who were patients in a preventive cardiology practice. All patients received a new PULS Cardiac Test 2-10 weeks after their second COVID-19 vaccine. This test result was compared with a PULS score from 3-5 months prevaccination. The PULS Cardiac Test measures multiple protein biomarkers, including hepatocyte growth factor [HGF], soluble Fas, and IL-16, and uses the results to calculate a 5-year risk score for new ACS. The PULS score increases with above-normal elevation. All participants received this test every 3-6 months for 8 years.


From prevaccination to postvaccination, the levels of IL-16 increased from 35=/-20 to 82=/-75 above the norm. Soluble Fas showed an increase from 22±15 to 46=/-24 above the norm. HGF rose from 42±12 to 86±31 above the norm. As a result, the 5-year ACS PULS risk score increased from 11% to 25%. By the time the report was published, changes had persisted for 2.5 months or more after the second vaccine dose. The study author concluded that “mRNA [vaccines] dramatically increase inflammation on the endothelium and T cell infiltration of cardiac muscle and may account for the observations of increased thrombosis, cardiomyopathy, and other vascular events following vaccination.”

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The obvious stuff that everyone understands, but that The Science and the media keep trying to cast doubts on.

Harvard Study: Recovered Immunity Far Stronger Than Vaccine Protection (Kirsch)

A new study from Harvard (Continued Effectiveness of COVID-19 Vaccination among Urban Healthcare Workers during Delta Variant Predominance) tracked vaccinated and unvaccinated Massachusetts healthcare workers and showed 0 infections in 74,557 person-days for previously infected patients compared to 49 infections out of 830,084 person-days for fully vaccinated patients. In short, if you’ve recovered from COVID, it is completely nonsensical for you to be vaccinated. You have virtually no chance of being re-infected. Summing it up: • Recovered patients much more protected from re-infection than vaccinated patients • Recovered patients, even if they get COVID, cannot pass it on to anyone else as far as we know (as the CDC was forced to reveal under FOIA from Aaron Siri) • We don’t know if subsequently getting vaccinated after recovering will improve or degrade points 1 or 2

In short, vaccine mandates that don’t exempt those who have recovered are unethical and a danger to the health of society. They are preventing us from getting to “herd immunity” which we can achieve through allowing natural infection and treating with effective early treatment protocols. The study also concluded that the vaccine efficacy was 76.5% (95% CI: 40.9–90.6%) against Delta. Yet other data shows the vaccines do nothing or make things worse. I didn’t see an obvious flaw in this study regarding that determination. I don’t know if they used different Ct values for vaccinated or unvaccinated. If anyone sees a flaw, please comment below.

This study adds more evidence that recovered immunity >> vaccine immunity. Even if the vaccines were perfectly save, forcing everyone to get vaccinated is both unnecessary and jeopardizes public health. Even if I ignore all the other data sources and only believe this one small study, it doesn’t change my opinion on the safety of these vaccines. DO NOT GET VACCINATED. You are always better off getting COVID, getting early treatment as soon as you have symptoms (safer and more effective than any vaccine), and then you are done. This is what Aaron Rodgers did. He maximized benefits for himself, his teammates, and society. Win-win-win.

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Only those with co-morbidities.

French Doctors Urge Against Jabs For Healthy Children (Exp.)

The increase in reported cases across Europe has been used by politicians to renew their push for mass vaccination. It has also reawakened debate about the jabbing of healthy children against the virus. But the French Academy of Medicine (FAM) insists the country’s vaccine roll-out should not extend to all healthy children. It has advised that, for many children, the risk-benefit balance weighs against vaccination. The 200-year-old advisory body, quoted in 20 Minutes, said in a statement that it “recommends extending immunisation against Covid by the vaccine to children at risk of severe forms of the disease due to co-morbidities, whatever their age, as well as to other children living in their family and school environment”. It does not believe that healthy children outside of this bracket should be vaccinated against Covid.

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Fauci doesn’t speak French. And love the use of the word “eligible”, like he’s doing you a favor.

Fauci: Babies, Toddlers Eligible For Covid-19 Vaccine By Early 2022 (Hill)

Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci said Thursday that though he “can’t guarantee it,” babies and toddlers aged 6 months to 5 years could be eligible for COVID-19 vaccination by spring. “Hopefully within a reasonably short period of time, likely the beginning of next year in 2022, in the first quarter of 2022, it will be available to them,” Fauci told Insider in an interview, though he cautioned that he was speculating, adding, “you’ve got to do the clinical trial.” Pfizer-BioNTech previously stated that results from their clinical trial in children in the age ranges of 2 to 5 years and 6 months to 2 years are expected as soon as the fourth quarter of this year. According to a report by ABC Tampa in late October, Pfizer expects to apply this month for approval for its COVID-19 vaccine in children ages 6 months to 5 years, the last age range in the U.S. not yet being vaccinated.

“The Food and Drug Administration and CDC won’t approve the vaccine until there’s some data showing safety and efficacy,” Philip Landrigan, a pediatrician and immunologist at Boston College, told CNN Health earlier this month. “There’s every reason to think that it will be safe, and it will be efficacious,” Landrigan added. “But the agencies need to be cautious, justifiably so, and so they’re not going to give the approval until they have the data.” According to CNN, Pfizer is the furthest along in trials for those aged 6 months to 5 years, but Moderna is also conducting studies in very young children.

“We don’t have enough data now to present it for a regulatory approach, but right now, the data are being collected and analyzed,” Fauci said when speaking to CNN earlier this month. “So we will be able to answer the question, I believe, within a reasonable period of time regarding the safety and the immunogenicity among those lower than 5 years old.” According to CNN, Johnson & Johnson is currently in the first phase three study in adolescents ages 12 to 17 years old and expect results in the coming months. The White House announced Wednesday that 10 percent of children ages 5 to 11 have received their first coronavirus shot, following the approval of the Pfizer pediatric dose.

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The main remaining control group is the children.

The War On The ‘Unvaccinated’ Aims To Destroy The Control Group (Schachtel)

I wanted to turn your attention to a side by side comparison map comparing the COVID pandemic of last year to this year. It is a true “photo is worth a million words” tweet from Rational Ground’s Woke Zombie: The symmetry is indeed amazing. And the conclusion, after over 600 days of COVID Mania, could not be more clear. Not a single “public health expert”-hailed mitigation or suppression measure, including the COVID shots, has done anything significant to solve the reality that lots of people get sick during their area’s annual respiratory season. This global war on a virus is going about as well as the War on Afghanistan went when it came to eliminating the Taliban. The lockdowns failed to stop a virus. The universal masking regime failed to stop a virus. The millions and millions of societal restrictions and business closures failed to stop a virus.

And now it’s become pretty clear that the highly-touted “miracle” mRNA shots are failing to stop a virus.. Instead of accepting this reality, world governments are doubling, tripling, and quadrupling down on the madness. Despite incredibly high compliance rates, with an estimated 7.5+ billion COVID shots delivered in arms, the mRNA “cure” has not lived up to its admittedly impossible to achieve standards. In the span of 6 months, we went from: “You’re not gonna get COVID if you have these vaccinations”. And “vaccinated people don’t get the virus and don’t get sick”. And “all three vaccines are 100 percent effective against hospitalization and death”, To our current reality of another season of lockdowns, restrictions, and the usual, nonsensical “public health measures.”


7.5+ billion shots later, those of us who’ve followed the data closely have found out that all of the aforementioned statements, endorsed by the most renowned Government Health officials in the world, were complete nonsense. Weapons-grade nonsense. They were nowhere near remotely close to even representing a scintilla of truth.

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“..in the 2 1/2 months following EUA, Pfizer received a total of 42,086 reports containing 158,893 “events.”

FDA Produces First 91+ Pages Of Pfizer’s COVID-19 Vaccine File (Siri)

Two months and one day after it was sued, and close to 3 months since it licensed Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine, the FDA released the first round of documents it reviewed before licensing this product. The production consisted of 91 pdf pages, one xpt file, and one txt file. You can download them here. While it is for the scientists to properly analyze, let me share one observation. One of the documents produced is a Cumulative Analysis of Post-Authorization Adverse Event Reports of [the Vaccine] Received Through 28-Feb-2021, which is a mere 2 1/2 months after the vaccine received emergency use authorization (EUA). This document reflects adverse events following vaccination that have completed Pfizer’s “workflow cycle,” both in and outside the U.S., up to February 28, 2021.

Pfizer explains, on page 6, that “Due to the large numbers of spontaneous adverse event reports received for the product, [Pfizer] has prioritised the processing of serious cases…” and that Pfizer “has also taken a [sic] multiple actions to help alleviate the large increase of adverse event reports” including “increasing the number of data entry and case processing colleagues” and “has onboarded approximately [REDACTED] additional fulltime employees (FTEs).” Query why it is proprietary to share how many people Pfizer had to hire to track all of the adverse events being reported shortly after launching its product. As for the volume of reports, in the 2 1/2 months following EUA, Pfizer received a total of 42,086 reports containing 158,893 “events.” Most of these reports were from the U.S. and disproportionately involved women (29,914 vs. 9,182 provided by men) and those between 31 and 50 years old (13,886 vs 21,325 for all other age groups combined, with another 6,876 whose ages were unknown). Also, 25,957 of the events were classified as “Nervous system disorders”.

Females between the ages of 30 and 51. Nervous system disorders. That sounds familiar. As a matter of fact, that sounds similar to the concerns raised by some of the women testifying or described in the videos below. But no cause for alarm since Pfizer explains to the FDA: “The findings of these signal detection analyses are consistent with the known safety profile of the vaccine.” So if they knew these issues were going to arise, then why didn’t they appear to have enough staff to process this expected volume of reports? The grand conclusion by Pfizer to the FDA: “The data do not reveal any novel safety concerns or risks requiring label changes and support a favorable benefit risk profile of to the BNT162b2 vaccine.”

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It may surprise you, but he’s not talking about himself, or Fauci.

NIH Director Calls For COVID Conspiracists to be “Brought to Justice” (SN)

National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Francis Collins has angrily called for anyone who spreads “misinformation” about COVID-19 online to be “brought to justice.” “Conspiracies are winning here. Truth is losing. That’s a really serious indictment of the way in which our society seems to be traveling,” Collins told the Washington Post. Citing an onslaught of angry messages directed at Dr. Anthony Fauci, who Collins appears to believe is above criticism, the bureaucrat demanded that those responsible for such behavior should be identified and “brought to justice.” The article cited one such example of “misinformation” being Fauci’s involvement in barbaric experiments conducted on dogs by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), despite the fact that such cruelty factually occurred under Fauci’s leadership.


While Collins didn’t specify precisely what he meant by “brought to justice,” Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla previously asserted that individuals who spread false information about COVID vaccines are “criminals” who “have literally cost millions of lives.” That’s an interesting benchmark given that it was once considered false to claim that COVID vaccines didn’t stop the vaccinated spreading COVID, which is now an all too obvious fact. Quite what constitutes “misinformation” about COVID-19 is anyone’s guess given that several things that turned out to be plausible or true, such as the origin of the virus behind the Wuhan lab, were once deemed to be “misinformation.” It seems likely that whatever the National Institutes of Health, Anthony Fauci or Pfizer deem to be “misinformation” will become the standard. As we previously highlighted, efforts to brand those who question the safety and efficacy of products manufactured by pharmaceutical corporations that have been plagued by a myriad of historical scandals are also underway in the UK.

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1,000s such stories. We get to see just a handful.

Navy Shipbuilder Backpedals On Vaccine Mandate (ZH)

A federal subcontractor to the US Navy reversed course over the vaccine mandate this week, and announced that most workers will not longer be required to get the Covid-19 vaccine. Huntington Ingalls Industries, parent company of Newport News Shipbuilding made the announcement on Tuesday night notifying employees that they will no longer have to comply with a January 4 deadline. “..with respect to Ingalls Shipbuilding and Newport News Shipbuilding, our customer has confirmed that our contracts do not include a requirement to implement the mandate,” reads the letter. “In light of this development, we are hereby suspending the deadline for vaccination, except where specific Technical Solutions contracts require it.” The shipyard initially announced that all 25,000 employees would need to be fully vaccinated by Dec. 8 as a “condition of continued employment,” only to move it to January – and now, not at all.


Some shipyard employees feel ‘tricked’ however, as they “only got the vaccine because of the mandate,” according to WTKR. “They made me get it and then lifted it,” said Newport News Shipyard employee, Deshawn Royal. “I didn’t want to get it, but they said I had to get it or we were going to get fired. And then they lifted it. Y’all did us wrong.” Another employee, Rodney Apop, said that a lot of co-workers feel the same way. “They went ahead and jumped, and they didn’t have the choice to do it,” he said. “And now when they take [the mandate] away, they wish they had known so they didn’t have to.” Employees speculate the suspension came after workers threatened to quit. “You’re gonna lose your people,” said Royal. “Not everybody is gonna get it. It’s not worth a lot of people’s money to get injected with something they don’t want.”

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It’s the politicians and the media that pit them against each other.

But yeah, let’s talk Christmas. What would Joseph and Mary be doing in a world of vaccine mandates imposed by the Romans? Would Jesus get jabbed in the manger?

Europe’s Covid Crisis Pits Vaccinated Against Unvaccinated (AP)

This was supposed to be the Christmas in Europe where family and friends could once again embrace holiday festivities and one another. Instead, the continent is the global epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic as cases soar to record levels in many countries. With infections spiking again despite nearly two years of restrictions, the health crisis increasingly is pitting citizen against citizen — the vaccinated against the unvaccinated. Governments desperate to shield overburdened healthcare systems are imposing rules that limit choices for the unvaccinated in the hope that doing so will drive up rates of vaccinations. Austria on Friday went a step further, making vaccinations mandatory as of Feb. 1. “For a long time, maybe too long, I and others thought that it must be possible to convince people in Austria, to convince them to get vaccinated voluntarily,” Austrian Chancellor Alexander Schallenberg said.

He called the move “our only way to break out of this vicious cycle of viral waves and lockdown discussions for good.” While Austria so far stands alone in the European Union in making vaccinations mandatory, more and more governments are clamping down. Starting Monday, Slovakia is banning people who haven’t been vaccinated from all nonessential stores and shopping malls. They also will not be allowed to attend any public event or gathering and will be required to test twice a week just to go to work. “A merry Christmas does not mean a Christmas without Covid-19,” warned Prime Minister Eduard Heger. “For that to happen, Slovakia would need to have a completely different vaccination rate.” He called the measures “a lockdown for the unvaccinated.”

Slovakia, where just 45.3% of the 5.5 million population is fully vaccinated, reported a record 8,342 new virus cases on Tuesday. It is not only nations of central and eastern Europe that are suffering anew. Wealthy nations in the west also are being hit hard and imposing restrictions on their populations once again. “It is really, absolutely, time to take action,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Thursday. With a vaccination rate of 67.5%, her nation is now considering mandatory vaccinations for many health professionals. Greece, too, is targeting the unvaccinated. Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis announced a battery of new restrictions late Thursday for the unvaccinated, keeping them out of venues including bars, restaurants, cinemas, theaters, museums and gyms, even if they have tested negative.

“It is an immediate act of protection and, of course, an indirect urge to be vaccinated,” Mitsotakis said. The restrictions enrage Clare Daly, an Irish EU legislator who is a member of the European parliament’s civil liberties and justice committee. She argues that nations are trampling individual rights. “In a whole number of cases, member states are excluding people from their ability to go to work,” Daly said, calling Austria’s restrictions on the unvaccinated that preceded its decision Friday to impose a full lockdown “a frightening scenario.” Even in Ireland, where 75.9 % of the population are fully vaccinated, she feels a backlash against holdouts. “There’s almost a sort of hate speech being whipped up against the unvaccinated,” she said.

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“People want to live, that’s why we’re here..”

But the media just give you the burning cars, because people who just want to live are evil anti-vaxxers.

Fresh Covid Riots For Second Night Hit Dutch City(Y!)

Fresh rioting broke out late Saturday over the Dutch government’s coronavirus measures, with rioters throwing stones and fireworks at police, and setting fire to bicycles as protests turned violent for a second night in the Netherlands. Officers in riot gear charged groups of protesters in The Hague, while a water cannon was used to put out a fire at a busy intersection. Police patrolled on horseback and on bicycles. Police arrested several people in a working class neighbourhood of the city after a day of protests elsewhere in the country which were mainly peaceful, AFP correspondents saw. But the atmosphere changed late on Saturday, with groups of youths pelting officers in The Hague and also in the central town of Urk, as well as cities in the southern Limburg province, the NOS public broadcaster said.

“These people out here are protesting about 2G (restrictions on the unvaccinated) and the lockdown,” Hague pizza shop owner Ferdi Yilmaz told AFP as he surveyed the damage to his shop. “They are angry about it,” said Yilmaz, who added police dragged people out of his shop and “hit me on the head for no reason.” On Friday night, at least two people were injured after police fired shots at protesters and 51 were arrested after an “orgy” of violence in Rotterdam. The Netherlands went back into Western Europe’s first partial lockdown of the winter last Saturday with at least three weeks of curbs, and is now planning to ban unvaccinated people from entering some venues, the so-called 2G option.

Earlier several thousand protesters angry at the latest measures gathered in Amsterdam on Saturday, despite one group earlier in the day having cancelled their rally because of the previous night’s violence. Another thousand marched through the southern city of Breda near the Belgian border, carrying banners with slogans such as “No Lockdown”. Organisers said they opposed Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s plans to exclude the unvaccinated from bars and restaurants. “People want to live, that’s why we’re here,” said organiser Joost Eras. But “we’re not rioters. We come in peace,” he said.

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Final battle
https://twitter.com/i/status/1462158262749450240

 

 

State lines

 

 

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Jan 082021
 
 January 8, 2021  Posted by at 9:57 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  56 Responses »


Joan Miro The tilled field 1924

 

Only In Your Imagination Was That An Attempted “Coup” (Tracey)
Violence in the Capitol, Dangers in the Aftermath (Greenwald)
Enough With The Outrage (PL)
Facebook, Twitter Finally Do Slightly More Than Nothing About Trump (IC)
US Capitol Police Say Reports Of Officer Death Not Accurate (R.)
Donald Trump’s Ruinous Legacy (Tracey)
The US and UK May Not Will Assange’s Death, But … (Cook)
Biden’s One-Two Stimulus Punch (Axios)
There Are So Many Covid Patients, Younger This Time (Anon)
Very Risky To Delay 2nd Dose Of COVID19 Vaccine – Former FDA Director (Hill)
British Scientists Develop World’s First Covid-19 Vaccine Smart Patch (Unilad)
Americans Need Federal Commission To Look Into The 2020 Election (Turley)

 

 

 

 

All I saw was a bunch of clowns.

Only In Your Imagination Was That An Attempted “Coup” (Tracey)

We are being told that a “coup attempt” no longer needs to be understood as constituting an “attempt” to seize control of the government — as had generally been the common understanding of the term before the events of yesterday, which have caused the entire political and media establishment to go completely haywire Is it unusual for a mob to breach the Capitol Building — ransacking offices, taking goofy selfies, and disrupting the proceedings of Congress for a few hours? Yes, that’s unusual. But the idea that this was a real attempt at a “coup” — meaning an attempt to seize by force the reins of the most powerful state in world history — is so preposterous that you really have to be a special kind of deluded in order to believe it.

Or if not deluded, you have to believe that using such terminology serves some other political purpose. Such as, perhaps, imposing even more stringent censorship on social media, where the “coup” is reported to have been organized. Or inflicting punishment on the man who is accused of “inciting” the coup, which you’ve spent four years desperately craving to do anyway. He’s already been effectively banned from Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter — a rubicon-crossing event in the suppression of political speech which, of course, is being cheered by all the usual suspects who otherwise claim to be stalwart defenders of enlightened liberal values. At no point yesterday was the American government at risk of being “overthrown,” as members of Congress have laughably suggested.

Per usual, our guardians of consensus can’t bring themselves to describe what unfolded with any degree of dispassion or calm. Instead we’re told by the incoming Senate Majority Leader, for example, that January 6, 2021 will now “live in infamy” right alongside December 7, 1941. Elected officials issued emotional notices that they were “okay,” like they had just narrowly avoided being crushed in an earthquake, or escaped the World Trade Center on 9/11. This is made all the more odd because the only person upon whom lethal force was committed appears to have been a Trump-supporting woman who was shot point-blank in the throat by a Capitol Hill police officer. She’s now dead. Congress was temporarily inconvenienced.

Journalists and pundits, glorying in their natural state — which is to peddle as much free-flowing hysteria as possible — eagerly invoke all the same rhetoric that they’d abhor in other circumstances on civil libertarian grounds. “Domestic terrorism,” “insurrection,” and other such terms now being promoted by the corporate media will nicely advance the upcoming project of “making sure something like this never happens again.” Use your imagination as to what kind of remedial measures that will entail. Trump’s promotion of election fraud fantasies has been a disaster not just for him, but for his “movement” — such as it exists — and it’s obvious that a large segment of the population actively wants to be deceived about such matters.

But the notion that Trump has “incited” a violent insurrection is laughable. His speech Monday afternoon that preceded the march to the Capitol was another standard-fare Trump grievance fest, except without the humor that used to make them kind of entertaining. Trump didn’t command that his followers physically breach the Capitol Building. In fact, after previously saying he would join the march, he seems to just have gone home to tweet and watch TV. So, basically his normal routine on a typical day, minus a trip to the golf course.

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“..striking at cherished national symbols — the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, the Capitol — ensures rage and terror far beyond body counts or other concrete harms.”

It’s about cliockbait, Glenn. Not reason.

Violence in the Capitol, Dangers in the Aftermath (Greenwald)

The U.S. Capitol remains a potent and cherished symbol even for Americans who are deeply cynical about the ruling class and political system. Its nobility is something continually engrained deep into our collective psyche since childhood, and that meaning endures even when our rational faculties reject it. It is therefore not hard to understand why watching a marauding band of hooligans invade and deface both the House and the Senate, without any identifiable objective other than venting grievances, reflexively engenders a patriotic disgust across the political spectrum. It is unhinged to the point of being obscene to compare yesterday’s incursion to the 9/11 attack or (as Sen. Chuck Schumer did last night) to Pearl Harbor. By every metric, the magnitude and destructiveness of those two events are in an entirely different universe.

But that does not mean there are no applicable lessons to be drawn from those prior attacks. One is that striking at cherished national symbols — the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, the Capitol — ensures rage and terror far beyond body counts or other concrete harms. That is one major reason that yesterday’s event received far more attention and commentary, and will likely produce far greater consequences, than much deadlier incidents, such as the still-motive-unknown 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting that killed 59 or the 2016 Orlando shooting that left 49 dead at the Pulse nightclub. Unlike even horrific indiscriminate shooting sprees, an attack on a symbol of national power will be perceived as an attack on the state or even the society itself.

There are other, more important historical lessons to draw not only from the 9/11 attack but subsequent terrorism on U.S. soil. One is the importance of resisting the coercive framework that demands everyone choose one of two extremes: that the incident is either (a) insignificant or even justifiable, or (b) is an earth-shattering, radically transformative event that demands radical, transformative state responses. This reductive, binary framework is anti-intellectual and dangerous. One can condemn a particular act while resisting the attempt to inflate the dangers it poses. One can acknowledge the very real existence of a threat while also warning of the harms, often far greater, from proposed solutions.

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“They’re not gonna stop. And everyone beware because they’re not gonna stop. They’re not gonna stop before Election Day and they’re not going to stop after Election Day. And everyone should take note of that. They’re not gonna let up and they should not.”

Enough With The Outrage (PL)

Like pretty much all conservatives, I have consistently criticized riots and other forms of political violence for many years. That includes yesterday’s Washington, D.C. riot. You can’t say the same about liberals, however. Until yesterday, one might have thought that liberals consider rioting and other forms of political violence to be as American as apple pie. You could write a book in support of that proposition, but for now let’s cite just a few examples. Do you remember when President Trump was inaugurated on January 20, 2017? Leftist Democrats rioted in Washington that day. That riot was arguably worse, more violent and more destructive, than what happened in D.C. yesterday. The liberal rioters destroyed stores, set vehicles on fire and battled with the police. Six police officers were wounded.

I don’t recall a single Democratic office-holder denouncing the Democrats’ Inauguration Day riot, and the Associated Press came perilously close to praising the rioters. Over the ensuing four years, Antifa and Black Lives Matter rioted countless times, bringing devastation to cities like Portland, Seattle, Kenosha and Minneapolis. Did any Democrats denounce these riots? Not that I remember. Many Democrats endorsed them, or seemed to do so. Kamala Harris, for example, said about the riots in June: “They’re not going to stop. They’re not going to stop. This is a movement, I’m telling you. They’re not gonna stop. And everyone beware because they’re not gonna stop. They’re not gonna stop before Election Day and they’re not going to stop after Election Day. And everyone should take note of that. They’re not gonna let up and they should not.”

This was after 12 people had been killed in Democrat-sanctioned rioting, and billions of dollars in destruction committed. Have any Democrats denounced Black Lives Matter for its role in the riots? Not one. Has any Democrat denounced Antifa? Not that I know of, and some, like Keith Ellison, have specifically endorsed Antifa’s political violence. Democratic Party journalists have joined the party’s politicians in excusing riots. The New York Times, for example, published an admiring profile of Antifa. The Washington Post, likewise, has carried water for Antifa. The litany could go on for a long time. Yesterday’s assault on the Capitol was outrageous, but let’s not forget that last time out-of-control demonstrators interrupted business at the Capitol, shouted down senators and pounded on the doors of the Supreme Court, it was Democrats objecting to the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

And speaking of assaults on capitols, did any Democrats object when leftists occupied the Wisconsin Capitol in Madison for four months, destroying property, impeding public business and violently assaulting conservatives? Not a peep.

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Are we going to celebrate corporate power in politics now? Are we inviting censorship in through the front door?

Facebook, Twitter Finally Do Slightly More Than Nothing About Trump (IC)

The advertising industry is generally acknowledged as one of the most risk-averse and craven industries on the planet, with decision-making guided largely by attempting to be as inoffensive as possible to as many people as possible, taking a position on an issue only in the weakest, safest, most carefully hedged terms available. Though companies like Facebook and Twitter hold the unfathomable power to control the distribution of information to billions of people around the world and like to think of themselves as helping bring humankind to some next level of consciousness, they are still very much in the advertising business.

As advertising companies, cowardice runs deep in the souls of Twitter, Facebook, and Google, companies that have spent the past four years looking the other way, equivocating, and contorting themselves into pretzels in an attempt to justify Trump’s unfettered access to the most powerful information distribution system in world history. Despite perennial speculation in the press as to what might psychologically or ideologically explain Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey’s total unwillingness to meaningfully act, there is just one factor: money. Twitter and Facebook are only worth anything as businesses if they can boast to advertisers of their access to an enormous swath of the American market, across political and ideological lines, and fear of a right-wing backlash has been enough to keep Peter Thiel on Facebook’s board and Trump’s voter suppression dispatches on Twitter’s servers.

According to a Facebook moderator who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity for fear of employer retaliation, watching the company drag its feet, yesterday in particular, has been excruciating. According to internal communications reviewed by The Intercept, the Capitol break-in is now considered, for purposes of Facebook’s willy-nilly application of the rules, “a violating event,” and any “praise,” “support,” or even friendly “representation” is banned on the basis of the company’s “Dangerous Organizations” policies, which this moderator explained is typically applied to posts celebrating terrorist attacks, drug cartel murders, and Aryan street gangs.

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Not sure what is going on with this.

US Capitol Police Say Reports Of Officer Death Not Accurate (R.)

U.S. Capitol Police said in a statement on Thursday that media reports that an officer had died after the storming of the Capitol by supporters of President Donald Trump were inaccurate. The agency said that several officers were injured and some hospitalized after the unrest Wednesday, but that no officers had died as a result. Four people had died after Trump’s supporters swarmed the building on Wednesday in a failed attempt to disrupt efforts to certify President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.

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“..he can rest easy knowing that he successfully used Trump as a vehicle to achieve the generations-long dream of the conservative donor class — a 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court..”

Donald Trump’s Ruinous Legacy (Tracey)

The stultification of Republican electoral strategy stems fundamentally from the fact that there has been no substantial intra-party public debate about the reasons for Trump’s loss. Even now, more than two months later, to merely state that Trump lost provokes profound rage among a large segment of the party’s voters. You can be mercilessly attacked online and threatened with career-ending repudiation for doing so; Purdue and Loeffler couldn’t deviate from this line, for fear of alienating fraud-believing Trump supporters in Georgia. But Republican turnout dipped anyway, most probably because conservative media had been completely inundated with accusations that the Republican-led state government of Georgia was complicit in a conspiracy to oust Trump. It turns out “fraud-pilling” one’s own voters might not be the most reliable path to victory.

The manic Trump-induced obsession with purported fraud thereby delayed any thoroughgoing public discussion of how Congressional Republicans over-performed in November, across many metrics, even as Trump went down to defeat. So instead of capitalising on those gains, Republicans jettisoned them. As for McConnell, it was one of the more astounding moves in recent political history to sacrifice his own Senate majority, which most of his professional life has been structured around preserving at all costs, because he was dead-set against sending out the $2,000 cheques. A figure which in the grand scheme of things, as Trump would say, is “peanuts”.

But even with the majority vanquished, McConnell will maintain a fair amount of power as minority leader. As of 20 January the Senate will stand as split 50-50 with future Vice President Kamala Harris as the tie-breaking vote. The possibility of a few Democratic defections here and there means McConnell will have plenty of opportunities to exert legislative influence. And he can rest easy knowing that he successfully used Trump as a vehicle to achieve the generations-long dream of the conservative donor class — a 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court, as well as some corporate tax cuts.

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Where is the next appeal? And when?

The US and UK May Not Will Assange’s Death, But … (Cook)

[..] while denying the extradition claim, she supported all the arguments advanced by the US accruing to itself the right to prosecute Assange – and any other journalist – for the crime of doing journalism. She ignored the facts, the expert testimony presented in court and the legal arguments – all of which favoured Assange – and backed instead what amounted to a purely political case made by the US. She disregarded warnings from Assange’s legal team that acceptance of the political rationale for extradition amounted to an all-out attack on fundamental journalistic freedoms. She established a terrifying legal precedent for the US to seize foreign journalists and prosecute them for “espionage” if they expose Washington’s crimes. Her ruling will inevitably have a profoundly chilling effect on any publication trying to dig out the truth about the US national-security state, with terrifying consequences for us all.

But while she enthusiastically backed the political case for Assange’s extradition and trial, Baraitser at the same time got the Wikileaks founder off the hook by accepting the humanitarian concerns raised by medical and prison experts. They had counselled that extradition to the US could be expected to lead to Assange spending the rest of his life in a barbaric US super-max prison, exacerbating mental health problems and the risk of suicide. Her ruling, while deeply disturbing in its political and legal implications, did at least suggest that Baraitser was ready to take a compassionate approach in regard to Assange’s health, even if not his journalistic exposure of western war crimes. He should have walked free there and then, had the US not immediately said it would appeal her decision.

Given Assange’s discharge by Baraitser, his team hoped that bail – his release from a high-security prison while the lengthy appeals process unfolds – would prove a formality. They hurried to make such an application after the extradition ruling on Monday, assuming that the legal logic of her decision dictated his release. Baraitser demurred, suggesting that they prepare their case and make it to her more fully on Wednesday. It now seems clear the judge manipulated Assange’s defence team. Apparently like Assange’s lawyers, former British ambassador Craig Murray, who has attended and reported on the hearings in detail, was lulled by Baraitser into assuming that she wanted a cast-iron case from the defence to justify a decision to release Assange on bail.

There were good reasons for their confidence. Any move to prevent his release would look perverse given that she had decided Assange should not be extradited or stand trial in the US. They were deceived. Baraitser denied bail, effectively signalling that she thinks her ruling might be wrong and overturned in a higher court. That is extraordinary. It suggests that she has no confidence in her own judgment of the facts of the case. As Murray has noted: “There was little or no precedent for the High Court overturning any ruling against extradition on Section 91 health grounds.”

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$4 trillion. Green.

Biden’s One-Two Stimulus Punch (Axios)

Joe Biden is considering asking Congress to help suffering Americans in two steps: give them the balance of their coveted $2,000 coronavirus payments, followed by a $3 trillion tax and infrastructure package. Biden is confident he can get multiple packages through Congress after Democrats won both Georgia Senate elections. The president-elect’s team also wants to get cash in Americans’ hands as quickly as possible, according to people familiar with the matter. In July Biden rolled out his Build Back Better plan, which includes billions of dollars for caregivers, incentives for manufacturers and some $4 trillion for green jobs and infrastructure spending.

He proposed paying for this plan with a series of tax increases on the wealthy, including taxing capital gains as regular income and increasing the marginal tax rate for top earners to almost 40%. Democrats are concerned that if they miss early opportunities to combat COVID and reverse its broader effect on the economy, the twin problems could cripple the rest of Biden’s presidency. The first bite would come in the form of $1,400 payments that would be added to the $600 in cash Congress approved last month. Also included in this quick-hit package would be money for state and local aid, as well as funding for vaccine distribution. Biden’s push for a tax and infrastructure plan, which is part of his “Build Back Better” program, will slide to later in the spring and be considered under budget reconciliation rules.

They allow the Senate to pass measures with a simple majority, instead of a more challenging filibuster-proof 60 votes. Biden is essentially dusting off his pre-election plans, back when many of his economic and political advisers assumed that if he won the presidency, he would carry the Senate along with him. Those ambitions were thrown into doubt when Republicans ran strong in the Senate on Election Day and Democrats’ only hope for regaining the majority was if they won the two uphill runoff elections held Tuesday. Biden’s blitz for a quick spending measure could allow him to build goodwill with Senate Republicans for a bigger package in the spring, especially if it includes liability protection the GOP wants for businesses fearing coronavirus lawsuits.

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Britain is brutal. How much of the healthcare system has been budgeted away in the past 20 years?

There Are So Many Covid Patients, Younger This Time (Anon)

Truly, I never imagined it would be this bad. Once again Covid has spread out along the hospital, the disease greedily taking over ward after ward. Surgical, paediatric, obstetric, orthopaedic; this virus does not discriminate between specialities. Outbreaks bloom even in our “clean” areas and the disease is even more ferociously infectious. Although our local tests do not differentiate strains, I presume this is the new variant. The patients are younger this time around too, and there are so many of them. They are sick. We are full. There can be no debate: this is much, much worse than the first surge. We start the morning with 10 new patients to be concerned about. These are just the worst of them; we cannot worry about those who, though less unwell, would have had us scared in days gone by.

They are scattered on general wards around the hospital, being given as much oxygen as possible through a standard mask. Most are lying prone on their fronts, breathing rapid, shallow breaths, too breathless to talk, blood oxygen saturations alarmingly low. The eldest is in his 70s but most are much younger. All urgently need respiratory support. This is ideally given non-invasively using a Cpap mask or very high oxygen flows through the nose. Like most hospitals we have set up a new respiratory-led breathing support unit for this purpose, but it filled up with patients weeks ago. Our intensive care unit, able to deliver these therapies as well as invasive ventilation for the very sickest, is also full despite being stretched and pushed way beyond its previous capacity.

Our neighbouring hospitals are under the same pressures, or worse; even if patients were well enough to transfer out safely there is no space to receive them. We divide and conquer. Some of us rush through the morning ward rounds on the breathing support and intensive care units, desperately hoping to find patients that have improved enough to step down on to a normal ward or could be swapped between the two units according to their needs. Some of us go to assess the new referrals. We make sure that everything possible has been done to avoid the need for more support but our colleagues have already been thorough. They need to come to us, and soon. We initiate difficult conversations with some patients who were frailer before catching Covid and would therefore have less chance of benefit from additional breathing therapy.

We no longer have the luxury of “giving it a go”; we have to ensure that we select only those with the best chance of survival. Getting it wrong may occupy a precious high dependency bed for many days, often ending in a difficult and symptomatic death while preventing other patients from receiving the correct therapy. Conversely, identifying those who will not survive will allow us to ensure better symptom control and a kinder end to life. These conversations, often barely intelligible through our PPE, are draining, fraught, brutal. We must justify to patients and their families, and often our colleagues too, why we cannot offer these therapies to everyone.

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All on red. Casino.

Very Risky To Delay 2nd Dose Of COVID19 Vaccine – Former FDA Director (Hill)

Questions surrounding the deployment and quantity of available COVID-19 vaccine doses linger as inoculations continue, with vaccine reticence and concerns about dose availability dominating the conversation. For the current approved vaccines, two separate shots are required, and some European countries have opted to delay the administration of the second dose in a bid to cultivate broader immunity. Both Pfizer and Moderna’s vaccines require two shots administered intramuscularly roughly three weeks apart, which the U.S. is currently undertaking. As for whether or not the U.S. should follow the lead of countries like the U.K. and Denmark, Norman Baylor, former director of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), called the plan “very risky” on CNBC.

“I understand some of the rationale to do this, but again, it’s not really data driven,” Baylor said. “It’s a very risky venture because if it fails, you’re in worse shape.” Baylor, who previously headed the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, further elaborated that there isn’t enough data to fully illustrate the immunity benefits just one dose with a prolonged second dose will bring. While more people would receive a vaccination by increasing the time between when the administration of both doses, immunity may be different from what promising clinical trials suggest. “The concern though is that space, that time, and how vulnerable you are, because…we don’t have all the data in that will indicate what the duration of protection is,” Baylor said. “If it fails, you’re in worse shape.”

The need to vaccinate more people comes as a more contagious COVID-19 strain makes its rounds through countries including the U.K. and the U.S. The U.K. in particular has seen record new daily confirmed COVID-19 cases, with 403,914 new cases recorded over the past week, per national data. This represents a 42.6 percent increase.

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In 3 years time.

British Scientists Develop World’s First Covid-19 Vaccine Smart Patch (Unilad)

Scientists from Swansea University in Wales are striving to develop the first coronavirus vaccine ‘smart patch’. The patch will use microneedles to both administer the coronavirus vaccine and monitor its efficacy for the patient by tracking the body’s immune response. The research team plans to develop a prototype by the end of March, in the hope it can be put forward for clinical trials and ultimately released to the public, as part of the effort to tackle the coronavirus outbreak. Scientists at Swansea’s IMPACT research centre hope to carry out human clinical studies in partnership with Imperial College London with the aim of making the device commercially available within three years.


Using polycarbonate or silicon millimetre-long microneedles, the smart patch can penetrate the skin to administer a vaccine. It can be held in place with a strap or tape for up to 24 hours, during which time it simultaneously measures a patient’s inflammatory response to the vaccination by monitoring biomarkers in the skin. Once the vaccine has been administered, the device is scanned to produce a data reading that can provide an understanding about the efficacy of the vaccine and the body’s response to it.

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What are the odds?

Americans Need Federal Commission To Look Into The 2020 Election (Turley)

First, and most important, this was an unprecedented election in the reliance of mail-in voting and the use of new voting systems and procedures. We need to review how that worked down to the smallest precincts and hamlets. Second, possibly tens of millions of voters believe that this election was rigged and stolen. I am not one of them. However, the integrity of our elections depends on the faith of the electorate. Roughly 40% of that electorate have lingering doubts about whether their votes actually matter. Most of the cases challenging the election were not decided on the merits. Indeed, it seems they haven’t even been allowed for discovery. Instead, they were largely dismissed on jurisdictional or standing groups or under the “laches” doctrine that they were brought too late.

Those allegations need to be conclusively proven or disproven in the interests of the country. Third, there were problems. There was not proof of systemic fraud or irregularities, but there were problems of uncounted votes, loss of key custodial information and key differences in the rules governing voting and tabulations. We have spent billions to achieve greater security and reliability after prior election controversies. Indeed, we had a prior election commission that failed to achieve those fundamental goals. A real commission will take a couple years to fully address these allegations. It will be meaningless if it’s stacked by the same reliable political cutouts used historically in federal commissions. It should be formed on a commitment of absolute transparency with public hearings and public archiving of underlying material before the issuance of any final report. That way, the public at large can analyze and contribute to the review of this evidence.

[..] The main challenge, however, remains the same: Whether Congress can appoint a real federal commission without rigging the result by appointing partisan members. In 1877, to quote from a speech of Ohio Sen. Allen Granberry Thurman, “It was perfectly clear that any bill that gave the least advantage, ay, the weight of the dust in the balance, to either party, could not become the law of the land.” Nothing has changed. The stakes are too high to allow even a dust particle to tip the difference on the ultimate findings. The dust-free option requires a dependent, not independent, commission. Otherwise, the public will be the loser.

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“Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers another.”
– G.K. Chesterton

 

 

 

 

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Sep 242020
 


Ramón Casas A young decadent 1899

 

Senate Report Slams Bidens For Conflicts Of Interest, Possible Criminal Activity (JTN)
Ron Johnson Requests Documents From Biden, Archer’s Attorneys (JTN)
Hunter Biden Received $3.5m Wire Transfer From Russian Billionaire (NYP)
Judge Orders Eric Trump To Testify Before Election In New York AG Probe (CNBC)
Swamp Thang (Kunstler)
Trump Says Supreme Court Will Decide The Election, Needs A Ninth Justice (ZH)
Fed Prepares To Deposit “Digital Dollars” Directly To “Each American” (ZH)
46% of Americans Struggle To Pay Rent, Bills (NPR)
UK New Covid Restrictions Unscientific Mumbo Jumbo, Exercise In Futility (RT)
Feared Coronavirus Outbreaks In Schools Yet To Arrive (WaPo)
DARPA-Funded Biochip Implant to Detect COVID-19 Could Hit Market by 2021 (MPN)
Assange Could Crochet And Play Bingo In Supermax Prison, US Prosecutor (SMH)
‘Clear’ Julian Assange Is On Autistic Spectrum, Doctor Tells Court (PG)
Doctor Diagnosed Julian Assange With Asperger’s Syndrome (Gosztola)

 

 

How bad are the riots and shootings in the US going to get?

 

 

The biggest problems right now are undoubtedly in Europe. The Netherlands is just one example. Mismanagement at its finest. They’ll just blame the people. None of these people have quit over their own failings.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Netherlands

 

 

Rand Paul and Fauci Long version

 

Rand Paul and Fauci Short version

 

 

 

 

NYT headline: “Republican Inquiry Finds No Evidence of Wrongdoing by Biden” -The report delivered on Wednesday appeared to be little more than a rehashing of unproven allegations that echoed a Russian disinformation campaign.

Sorry, that not what I read.

Senate Report Slams Bidens For Conflicts Of Interest, Possible Criminal Activity (JTN)

A year-long Senate investigation concluded Wednesday that Hunter Biden’s efforts to cash in on foreign business deals during his father’s vice presidency raised alarm among U.S. government officials, who perceived an ethical conflict of interest and flagged concerns about possible criminal activity ranging from bribery to sex trafficking. The long-awaited joint report by the GOP-led Senate Homeland and Government Affairs and Senate Finance Committees delivered several blockbuster revelations less than two months before Election Day, suggesting Obama administration officials ignored clear warning signs about ethical conflicts and possible extortion risks involving Joe Biden’s family. Perhaps the most explosive revelation was that the U.S. Treasury Department flagged payments collected overseas by Hunter Biden and business partner Devon Archer for possible illicit activities.

The so-called Suspicious Activity Reports flagged millions of dollars in transactions from the Ukrainian gas company Burisma Holdings, a Russian oligarch named Yelena Baturina, and Chinese businessmen with ties to Beijing’s communist government, the report said. Senate investigators have yet to determine if the FBI or others investigated the concerns. “The Treasury records acquired by the Chairmen show potential criminal activity relating to transactions among and between Hunter Biden, his family, and his associates with Ukrainian, Russian, Kazakh and Chinese nationals,” the 87-page report disclosed, confirming an earlier report in Just the News. The report, citing U.S. government records, also raised concerns about possible ties to sex and human trafficking rings.


“Hunter Biden paid nonresident women who were nationals of Russia or other Eastern European countries and who appear to be linked to an Eastern European prostitution or human trafficking ring,” the report said. [..] Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Ron Johnson told Just the News Wednesday morning that the sheer volume of suspicious activity in Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings left the Vice President vulnerable to illicit influence or extortion. “The report raises serious questions that former Vice President Biden needs to answer. There are simply too many potential conflict of interest, counterintelligence and extortion threats to ignore,” he said.

Biden Ukraine

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Of course you want the info. How can you not?

Ron Johnson Requests Documents From Biden, Archer’s Attorneys (JTN)

Senator Ron Johnson has requested information from the attorneys of Hunter Biden and Devon Archer after a bombshell Congressional report on Wednesday revealed that the duo had received millions in cash transfers from foreign nationals. A years-long investigation by the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs and Senate Finance Committees revealed on Wednesday that, among other arrangements that raised red flags among government officials, Biden had received a $3.5 million wire transfer from a Moscow politician’s wife and Archer had received over $140,000 from a Kazakhstan businessman.


Johnson, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, told Just the News Editor-in-Chief John Solomon on Wednesday that Senate officials had reached out to attorneys representing the pair for further information regarding the revelations in the Senate report. “We have sent an email to both Devon Archer and Hunter Biden’s attorneys requesting information,” Johnson said on the podcast John Solomon Reports. The senator said that officials have also extended the two men “an opportunity to come in for a transcribed interview.” “From my standpoint, I think it’s important for us to gather this information, you know, validate it, publish it,” Johnson continued.

Sidney Powell
https://twitter.com/i/status/1308833306889400321

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Call him in, let him explain. Or do you want to give the Trump campaign free ammo? Or as Kunstler says: “If Mr. Biden actually shows up at next week’s debate, do you suppose that Mr. Trump will fail to bring up the subject?”

Hunter Biden Received $3.5m Wire Transfer From Russian Billionaire (NYP)

Hunter Biden received a $3.5 million wire transfer from Elena Baturina, the richest woman in Russia and the widow of Yury Luzhkov, the former mayor of Moscow, Senate Republicans revealed in their report on the younger Biden’s work in Ukraine. Baturina is referenced in the 87-page report, which was released Wednesday, addressing her payment to Biden’s investment firm in early 2014. “Baturina became Russia’s only female billionaire when her plastics company, Inteko, received a series of Moscow municipal contracts while her husband was mayor,” it said in providing background on the businesswoman.

The report described her involvement with Biden as “a financial relationship,” but declined to delve deeper into why the wire transfer was made. The probe also found that Baturina sent 11 wires transfers between May and December 2015 to a bank account belonging to BAK USA, a tech startup that filed for bankruptcy in March 2019. Nine of those 11 wire transfers were first sent to Rosemont Seneca Partners, the investment firm founded by Biden and Chris Heinz, stepson of former Secretary of State John Kerry, before being transferred to BAK USA. All 11 transactions described the payments as “Loan Agreement” in the details section.

The report reads, “[B]etween May 6, 2015 and Dec. 8, 2015, Baturina sent 11 wires in the amount of $391,968.21 to a bank account belonging to BAK USA LLC (BAK USA). Nine of the 11 transactions, totaling $241,797.14 were sent from Baturina’s accounts to a Rosemont Seneca Thornton bank account, which then transferred to the money to BAK USA. The 11 transactions all listed ‘Loan Agreement’ in the payment details section. “BAK USA was a startup technology company headquartered in Buffalo, N.Y., that produced tablet computers in cooperation with unnamed Chinese business partners. BAK USA filed for bankruptcy on March 29, 2019, with a reported loss of $39 million. These transactions were identified because of Baturina’s reported criminal activity,” it continues.

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Paving the way for Hunter?!

Judge Orders Eric Trump To Testify Before Election In New York AG Probe (CNBC)

Eric Trump must testify in response to a subpoena from the New York Attorney General’s office before the presidential election as part of an investigation into whether President Donald Trump’s company improperly valued real estate assets in official statements, a judge ordered Wednesday. Eric Trump, who is the president’s middle son and a top executive in the Trump Organization, must testify no later than Oct. 7, Judge Arthur Engoron ruled after a hearing in Manhattan Supreme Court, where Trump’s lawyers had asked to delay his deposition until after the election. Engoron noted that, “Mr. Trump cites no authority in support of his request, and at any event, neither petitioner nor this court is bound by timelines of the national election.”


Attorney General Letitia James’s office called the ruling a “major victory.” “The court’s order today makes clear that no one is above the law, not even an organization or an individual with the name Trump,” James said in a prepared statement. The attorney general is investigating whether the New York-based Trump Organization improperly inflated the values of several real estate assets on annual financial statements that were used to obtain loans, as well as to get economic and tax benefits related to those properties. James last month had filed an action with the court seeking Eric Trump’s compliance with the subpoena after she said that he had reneged on an agreement to testify this summer.

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“If Mr. Biden actually shows up at next week’s debate, do you suppose that Mr. Trump will fail to bring up the subject?”

Swamp Thang (Kunstler)

The climate is changing, all right, but not in the way that some think it is. The political climate is changing, and what has been a pestilential subtropical sink on the Potomac is overdue for that cleansing we’ve heard about. Weeks from now, as the fetid water subsides, the protective miasma above will dissipate and the people from sea to shining sea will finally get a good look at the landscape revealed and the pitiful, wriggling, dying life-forms of the order Democratica stranded on it.

Case in point: Joe Biden. Many will wonder in the days to come whether the sole and otherwise inexplicable reason for his elevation to candidate-for-president was a ruse to avoid prosecution — his own and others. The matter was neatly laid out a year ago during the impeachment ploy: After the color revolution in Ukraine, 2014, Mr. Biden was designated not just “point man” overseeing American interests in that sad-sack country, but specifically as a watchdog against the notorious deep corruption of Ukraine’s entire political ecosystem — as if, you understand, the internal workings of Ukraine’s politics was any of our business in the first place.

The evidence aired publicly last year suggests that Mr. Biden jumped head-first and whole-heartedly into the hog-trough of loose money there, netting his son Hunter and cohorts millions of dollars for no-show jobs on the board of natgas company, Burisma. And then, of course, Mr. Biden stupidly bragged on a recorded panel session at the Council on Foreign Relations about threatening to withhold US aid money as a lever to induce Ukraine President Petro Poroshenko to fire a prosecutor looking into Burisma’s sketchy affairs. Naturally, the Democratic Party impeachment crew accused Mr. Trump of doing exactly what Mr. Biden accomplished a few years earlier.

The impeachment fizzled, but the charges and the odor of the Biden-Burisma scandal lingered without resolution — all the while that Mr. Biden posed as a presidential candidate in the primaries. This week, two Senate committees (Finance and Homeland) are expected to release a joint report detailing findings of their investigation into the Biden family’s exploits abroad. It is expected to not look good. Also implicated are the State Department officers in the Kiev embassy who pretended not to notice any of this, pointing also to their engagement in further shenanigans around the Trump-Clinton election of 2016 — a lot of that entwined in the Clinton-sponsored RussiaGate scheme. Will the committees be so bold as to issue criminal referrals to the Justice Department? If Mr. Biden actually shows up at next week’s debate, do you suppose that Mr. Trump will fail to bring up the subject? Does this finally force Mr. Biden’s withdrawal from what has been the most hollow, illusory, and dispirited campaign ever seen at this level in US political history?

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4-4 really is dangerous.

Trump Says Supreme Court Will Decide The Election, Needs A Ninth Justice (ZH)

Over the weekend, in the aftermath of Ruth Bader GInsburg’s death, we said that the “worst case scenario” for markets – a contested election – had become even more complicated as it now appeared that the US was heading into the most controversial election since Gore vs Bush with a SCOTUS that could end up deadlocked with a 4-4 vote should the election outcome escalate to the Supreme Court. It appears that the president agrees, because moments ago President Trump also predicted that the U.S. Supreme Court will decide the outcome of the November election and argued the Senate should confirm his nominee – who we already know will be a conservative woman – to replace the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to break any tie. Trump said that “I think this will end up in the Supreme Court and I think it’s very important to have nine justices.”


Speaking before reporters at the White House, he continued, claiming that “this scam that the Democrats are pulling, it’s a scam, this scam will be before the United States Supreme Court,” Trump plans on Saturday to announce a nominee to replace Ginsburg, a liberal icon who died Friday at 87. Lawyers representing Trump’s campaign are challenging mail-in voting rules in a host of states, as a result of Trump’s claims that mail-in voting is more susceptible to fraud than in-person voting on Election Day. As reported yesterday, there is a growing probability that the first major test of the new post-RBG iteration of the Supreme Court, which will soon have a 6-3 conservative majority, the GOP is planning to ask SCOTUS to review a major PA state court decision that extended the due date for mail-in ballots in a critical battleground state.

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They must have found a way to let bankers profit even from this.

Fed Prepares To Deposit “Digital Dollars” Directly To “Each American” (ZH)

Over the past decade, the one common theme despite the political upheaval and growing social and geopolitical instability, was that the market would keep marching higher and the Fed would continue injecting liquidity into the system. The second common theme is that despite sparking unprecedented asset price inflation, prices as measured across the broader economy – using the flawed CPI metric and certainly stagnant worker wages – would remain subdued (as a reminder, the Fed is desperate to ignite broad inflation as that is the only way the countless trillions of excess debt can be eliminated and has so far failed to do so).

The Fed’s failure to reach its inflation target – which prompted the US central bank to radically overhaul its monetary dogma last month and unveil Flexible Average Inflation Targeting (or FAIT) whereby the Fed will allow inflation to run hot without hiking rates – has sparked broad criticism from the economic establishment, even though as we showed in June, deflation is now a direct function of the Fed’s unconventional monetary policies as the lower yields slide, the lower the propensity to spend. In other words, the harder the Fed fights to stimulate inflation, the more deflation and more saving it spurs as a result.

In short, ever since the Fed launched QE and NIRP, it has been making the situation it has been trying to “fix” even worse while blowing the biggest asset price bubble in history. And having recently accepted that its preferred stimulus pathway has failed to boost the broader economy, the blame has fallen on how monetary policy is intermediated, specifically the way the Fed creates excess reserves which end up at commercial banks instead of “tricking down” all the way to the consumer level.

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The Fed will have you covered.

46% of Americans Struggle To Pay Rent, Bills (NPR)

Jean was one of more than 3,000 people who took part in a new poll released Wednesday from NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Her story is an especially stark example of how pandemic financial stress is playing out. But the poll found many people reported problems with housing, health care and unsafe workplaces, and a high percentage of Americans — 46% — said they’re having “serious financial problems.” Nearly one out of three respondents had used up all or most of their savings. “Our surprise is how large the numbers are,” says Robert Blendon, a Harvard University public health professor who worked on the poll.


He notes that the poll was conducted during July, months after Congress approved an extra $600 a week in federal unemployment benefits that were still supposed to be flowing to people. Stimulus checks had gone out, too. And yet so many said they’re struggling. One in six households even reported missing or delaying paying major bills just so they could buy food. Blendon says it’s like the government sent 100 Federal Emergency Management Agency trucks into a disaster zone, but a lot of people never saw them or got help. “It’s just like interviewing people in a hurricane area and the people are telling you there’s no relief,” he says, when “it should be there.”

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EU governments all committed the same mistakes. And brute force is not the answer.

UK New Covid Restrictions Unscientific Mumbo Jumbo, Exercise In Futility (RT)

I accept my dissenting voice may not be heeded by the UK government, but when a former Supreme Court judge delivers a damning verdict that the rules are ‘pointless, arbitrary and unnecessary’, shouldn’t they be listening? The UK has announced a fresh suite of draconian Covid restrictions, with Prime Minister Boris Johnson warning they could be in place for six months. But, like all previous attempts, the new rules are worse than useless. You’ve all heard the new rules by now, so I won’t analyse the details of what the individual implications will be. Just as poring over a government white paper based on astrology would be pointless, tepid nit-picking within the nascent pseudoscience of ‘Covidology’ is an exercise in futility. It’s also an immediate acceptance of the quacks’ terms of the argument.

‘The rule of six’ could be ‘the rule of seven’, the pubs could close at midnight or 10pm, level 4, 5 or 75 could be enforced – none of this would make any difference. Nor is it acceptable. The fiddled numbers, the fake compromises, the newspeak – all of it is misdirection. In a nutshell, this doubling down means nothing less than the acceleration of an end to the free, decent life to which all human beings are born entitled. Only a total return to normality should be demanded, and it’s non-negotiable. Just ask former Supreme Court justice Lord Jonathan Sumption, who has been making waves this week with his scathing analysis of the government’s madcap plot. He’s dubbed Johnson’s ‘rule of six’ “pointless, arbitrary and unnecessary”.

It’s pointless, he says, because, without a Stasi-like secret army of citizen spies, it cannot be enforced. He is correct, of course (although I don’t consider the likelihood of an army of snitchers quite as unlikely as he seems to). It’s arbitrary because it’s far from universal – people mix in much larger numbers in schools and workplaces, on public transport and in the streets, all of which is essential. And it’s unnecessary because the increase in positive tests is being driven – as Health Secretary Matt Hancock is so fond of reminding us – by the young, to whom the disease poses relatively little threat.

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Rapid test them 2x a week. What are you waiting for?

Feared Coronavirus Outbreaks In Schools Yet To Arrive (WaPo)

Thousands of students and teachers have become sick with the coronavirus since schools began opening last month, but public health experts have found little evidence that the virus is spreading inside buildings, and the rates of infection are far below what is found in the surrounding communities. This early evidence, experts say, suggests that opening schools may not be as risky as many have feared and could guide administrators as they chart the rest of what is already an unprecedented school year. “Everyone had a fear there would be explosive outbreaks of transmission in the schools. In colleges, there have been. We have to say that, to date, we have not seen those in the younger kids, and that is a really important observation,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.

This does not mean the risk of contracting the coronavirus is zero. Poor and inconsistent reporting in many parts of the country means that experts do not yet have a full view of the situation, and most schools have been open for only a few weeks. It’s also unclear how closely the incidence of the coronavirus in schools is tied to policies in schools such as mandatory mask-wearing. Most of the nation’s largest districts opened with fully remote teaching, so the data are largely from smaller communities. And the pandemic may grow worse as flu season and winter approaches. But the fact that large swaths of the country opened for in-person school while others did not offers the more cautious districts a chance to observe how things have gone elsewhere in charting their next steps.

On Wednesday, researchers at Brown University, working with school administrators, released their first set of data from a new National COVID-19 School Response Data Dashboard, created to track coronavirus cases. It found low levels of infection among students and teachers. Tracking infections over a two-week period beginning Aug. 31, it found that 0.23 percent of students had a confirmed or suspected case of the coronavirus. Among teachers, it was 0.49 percent. Looking only at confirmed cases, the rates were even lower: 0.078 percent for students and 0.15 percent for teachers.

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I know a few people who will refuse any such implant.

DARPA-Funded Biochip Implant to Detect COVID-19 Could Hit Market by 2021 (MPN)

The most significant scientific discovery since gravity has been hiding in plain sight for nearly a decade and its destructive potential to humanity is so enormous that the biggest war machine on the planet immediately deployed its vast resources to possess and control it, financing its research and development through agencies like the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and HHS’ BARDA. The revolutionary breakthrough came to a Canadian scientist named Derek Rossi in 2010 purely by accident. The now-retired Harvard professor claimed in an interview with the National Post that he found a way to “reprogram” the molecules that carry the genetic instructions for cell development in the human body, not to mention all biological lifeforms.

These molecules are called ‘messenger ribonucleic acid’ or mRNA and the newfound ability to rewrite those instructions to produce any kind of cell within a biological organism has radically changed the course of Western medicine and science, even if no one has really noticed yet. As Rossi, himself, puts it: “The real important discovery here was you could now use mRNA, and if you got it into the cells, then you could get the mRNA to express any protein in the cells, and this was the big thing.” [..] As early as 2006, DARPA was already researching how to identify viral, upper respiratory pathogens through its Predicting Health and Disease (PHD) program, which led to the creation of the agency’s Biological Technologies Office (BTO) [..]. In 2014, DARPA’s BTO launched its “In Vivo Nanoplatforms” (IVN) program, which researches implantable nanotechnologies, leading to the development of ‘hydrogel’.

Hydrogel is a nanotechnology whose inventor early on boasted that “If [it] pans out, with approval from FDA, then consumers could get the sensors implanted in their core to measure their levels of glucose, oxygen, and lactate.” This contact lens-like material requires a special injector to be introduced under the skin where it can transmit light-based digital signals through a wireless network like 5G. Once firmly implanted inside the body, human cells are at the mercy of any mRNA program delivered via this substrate, unleashing a nightmare of possibilities. It is, perhaps, the first true step towards full-on transhumanism; a “philosophy” that is in vogue with many powerful and influential people, such as Google’s Ray Kurzweil and Eric Schmidt and whose proponents see the fusion of technology and biology as an inevitable consequence of human progress.

Read more …

It’s getting beyond depravity.

Assange Could Crochet And Play Bingo In Supermax Prison, US Prosecutor (SMH)

The US government has suggested that Julian Assange would not be held in solitary confinement and would be able to crochet and play bingo if he is extradited and jailed on spying charges. The revelation emerged at Assange’s extradition hearing underway at London’s Old Bailey which has this week been focussed on Assange’s mental health. His defence team has called witnesses to testify that he has Autism Spectrum Disorder, Asperger’s, anxiety, hears voices, is depressed and would take his own life if he loses his legal battle. The court has heard that Assange has withheld telling doctors his true mental state while detained in Belmarsh Prison because he fears being placed in solitary confinement.

Assange remains in custody while he fights his extradition arguing that his human rights would be violated. Psychiatrist, Michael Kopelman, emeritus professor of neuropsychiatry at King’s College London, has previously told the court that if Assange is extradited there is a “very high” risk the father of four would take his own life rather than serve out any sentence in a US supermax prison. But Seena Fazel, a professor in forensic psychiatry at Oxford University, who interviewed Assange earlier this year said that he found the prisoner to be “moderately depressed,” an improvement on the severely depressed state he accepted Assange was in as recently as December last year.

Fazel appeared for the prosecution. He disagreed with a psychiatrist called by the defence on Tuesday about the likelihood of Assange committing suicide. He said the 49-year old had shown himself capable of managing his own suicide risk, by taking medication, undergoing counselling and accessing support from the Samaritans – a British mental health charity. On Tuesday the court was told that Assange has made preparations for death, including writing farewell letters, receiving absolution from a Catholic priest and preparing a will.

Read more …

Imagine having your medical record laid out like this in public, for reasons that have nothing to do with what you are -falsely- accused of. That, too, is a form of torture.

‘Clear’ Julian Assange Is On Autistic Spectrum, Doctor Tells Court (PG)

A psychiatrist has told the extradition hearing of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange it is “clear” he is on the autistic spectrum. Dr Quinton Deeley, a consultant neuropsychiatrist, diagnosed Assange with Asperger’s syndrome after witnessing a two-hour autism assessment and conducting six hours of phone calls with the 49-year-old in Belmarsh prison. Assange is fighting extradition to the US, where he is facing an 18-count indictment alleging a plot to hack computers and conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defence information. Giving evidence on Wednesday, Dr Deeley, who also spoke to Assange’s parents during his assessment, said: “To my mind, it’s clear Mr Assange presents as a person with an autistic spectrum condition. “He’s an intelligent person, he’s learnt to adapt to some of those characteristics.”

The Old Bailey heard Assange refused to complete two components of the autism test, including a task to act out brushing his teeth and answering questions about his daily “self-management” or “self-care” routine because he found them “demeaning”. James Lewis QC, for the US government, suggested: “It’s highly unusual for people to refuse these tests?” Dr Deeley, who said he has assessed hundreds of people to determine if they are autistic, replied: “Correct.” He described Assange as “an intelligent person” who shares the characteristics of “many high-functioning people on the autistic spectrum”, including engineers and computer scientists.

Dr Deeley said he has “difficulty discussing his own emotions”, with a “primary focus on his own thoughts and interests” and noted a “failure to initiate or sustain” conversations. Assange’s mother, Christine, told the doctor her son as a child “had a preference for solitary play” but made a small number of friendships in his teens with “geeky” boys who shared his interest in computers, the court heard. The court also heard Assange’s close friend Suelette Dreyfus referred to his “Edwardian style of speaking”, such as talking about Coca-Cola as mead, “like he’s been reading Jane Austen novels”.

Read more …

There are two precedents that did not get extradited for this reason.

Doctor Diagnosed Julian Assange With Asperger’s Syndrome (Gosztola)

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism, while detained in the Belmarsh high-security prison in London. This likely increases Assange’s risk of suicide if confined in restrictive prison conditions in the United States, according to a psychiatrist who testified at his extradition trial. Dr. Quinton Deeley, who works for the National Health Service (NHS), conducted an Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS) test on Assange and produced a report. He interviewed Assange for six hours in July. Assange told Deeley he feared he would be held in isolation in a U.S. prison. He was afraid of the fresh indictment. He was also concerned about the fate of Joshua Schulte, who was held in harsh confinement conditions prior to his trial for allegedly disclosing the “Vault 7” materials to WikiLeaks. (Schulte’s case resulted in a mistrial in March.)

The U.S. Justice Department charged Assange with 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act and one count of conspiracy to commit a computer crime that, as alleged in the indictment, is written like an Espionage Act offense. The charges criminalize the act of merely receiving classified information, as well as the publication of state secrets from the U.S. government. It targets common practices in newsgathering, which is why the case is widely opposed by press freedom organizations throughout the world. In the cases of Lauri Love and Gary McKinnon, the U.S. government was blocked from extraditing them because the United Kingdom High Court of Justice (Love) and the British Home Secretary (McKinnon) recognized their Asperger’s syndrome would result in degrading or inhuman treatment that violated human rights.

Love was accused of hacking into systems controlled by the Federal Reserve, U.S. Army, and a number of other government agencies. McKinnon was accused by the U.S. government of the “biggest military computer hack of all time.” Edward Fitzgerald represented Love, and he is part of Assange’s legal team, and the arguments against extradition that Fitizgerald put forward in Love’s case are nearly identical to the arguments in this case. Particularly: (1) The mere fact of extradition and detention in the United States would be likely to lead to a serious deterioration in the mental health of Mr. Love (2) To the extent that suicide was prevented by Mr. Love being placed on suicide watch, the conditions in which he would be held on suicide watch, or in segregation, would lead to a serious and permanent deterioration in his mental health, which was also related to his physical health.

James Lewis, the lead prosecutor for the Crown Prosecution Authority, which represents the U.S. government in this case, went after Deeley and attempted to discredit his diagnosis. He said Assange has written books, given speeches, and hosted a “chat show” for RT. Plus, no other psychiatrist who saw Assange diagnosed him with Asperger’s syndrome. “It’s possible to both have a diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome and to demonstrate expertise and be authoritative and knowledgeable when talking about certain topics,” Deeley replied.

Read more …

 

 

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Sep 012020
 
 September 1, 2020  Posted by at 9:14 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  18 Responses »


Rembrandt van Rijn Head of a Bearded Man c1630

 

Trump’s America (Newsweek)
Chris Cillizza Blasts President Trump For Using The Word “Riots” (Turley)
The Puppet Candidate in Two Pictures (CT)
Appeals Court Denies Flynn Request To Dismiss Case (ZH)
Russiagate Won’t End: US Appeals Court Reverses Decision To End Flynn Case (RT)
Lucifer’s Hammer (Ben Hunt)
No One Wants to Solve Real Problems (Geraghty)
Coronavirus May Survive On Outdoor Surfaces For Longer In Autumn (SCMP)
Inhaled Nitric Oxide Therapy Benefits Pregnant COVID19 Patients (Harvard)
Bill of Particulars (Jim Kunstler)
Just Put Your Brain on Tesla Autopilot and Believe in It (WS)
Norwegian Researchers Call Against Cleansing Seas Of Plastic Waste (RT)
Waiting for the Old Bailey: Julian Assange (OffG)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Biden 100 years

 

 

 

 

Trump Rittenhouse

 

 

The polls indicated Biden had to be dragged out of his basement to start blaming Trump for the riots and violence. Looks like a hard sell. Certainly when you won’t even allow for Trump to say “riot”.

Trump’s America (Newsweek)

For months, the national media has largely ignored the sustained violent activism plaguing Democrat-run cities. When they do cover these events, it’s portrayed the same way Democratic lawmakers—and the Biden campaign—have chosen to describe them: as “peaceful protests.” But after four effective days of coverage from the Republican National Convention (RNC), shining a spotlight on what’s actually happening, suddenly Democrats are striking a different tone. Now, the Biden-Harris ticket, along with their surrogates, claim the violence in Portland, Kenosha, Seattle, Chicago and the nation’s capital are President Donald Trump’s fault. This is happening, they argue, in “Trump’s America.” The leftists in national media, of course, happily forward the very same dishonest talking point. It will gloriously backfire.

On NBC’s Meet the Press, host Chuck Todd finally tackled the rioting after a deadly night in Portland that left dead someone who appears to be a Trump supporter. He asked Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, if Trump should bear responsibility: “This in Donald Trump’s America. How much responsibility should voters be giving the president for his inability to…keep the streets safe?” Over at CNN, they do much the same. Struggling to make his point, perhaps because he knows how dishonest it is, host Anderson Cooper stumbled his way through the same “this is Trump’s America” talking point. He then used the same talking point the following morning to set up a softball question to Biden, who responded that the “video [of violence] being played is video being played in Donald Trump’s America.”

This talking point is transparently dishonest and offensively dumb. Literally all of the sustained rioting and other violence has occured in Democrat-run cities. The federal government does not have jurisdiction to always send in the feds to wander rioting streets and quell the civil unrest. If Trump did always have such authority and if he acted upon it, he’d be called a fascist. Indeed, Democrats already call him just that. Trump has offered help many times to cities and states that are dealing with these issues. In Portland, feckless Mayor Ted Wheeler bragged about smugly rejecting Trump’s assistance in an August 28 letter that he posted to Twitter. He told the president, “We don’t need your politics of division and demagoguery.”

That night, activists gained entry into Wheeler’s condo, where they occupied the lobby. The next night, after trying to forcibly stop Trump supporters from protesting, a man in a conservative Patriot Front hat was shot to death. This is Trump’s fault? After the president’s RNC speech, mobs of far-left activists harassed and assaulted cops and conservatives leaving the White House. Other mobs spent Saturday night harassing D.C. diners who are supporting restaurants struggling to stay open amidst a pandemic. This is Trump’s doing? Trump has not just been rebuffed by progressive mayors. His offers of help have been met with insidious claims that Trump is really just practicing a dry-run for martial law, in the event he were to lose the election. And the media has been there to dutifully forward that dangerous claim.

Read more …

“.. the majority of citizens believe that the media actively misrepresents facts. Roughly half view the media as biased. This is why. Of course, this is looting and rioting.”

Chris Cillizza Blasts President Trump For Using The Word “Riots” (Turley)

We have previously discussed how some media organizations told their journalists not to call violence after the death of George Floyd “riots,” including the recently much mocked headline of CNN calling the looting and violence in Kenosha “fiery but mostly peaceful.” Now, Chris Cillizza, an editor-at-large for CNN, is under fire for criticized President Donald Trump for labeling the violence in places like Kenoska “riots.” Critics have noted that the picture posted by Cillizza with this tweet shows a building engulfed in flames. Lawyers notoriously parse terms in ways that often deny their obvious meaning but this effort by some in the media would make a Philadelphia lawyer blush. Cillizza tweeted “Trump’s efforts to label what is happening in major cities as ‘riots’ speaks at least somewhat to his desperation, politically speaking, at the moment.”

I do not deny that both sides are using these riots for political purposes. Trump is using the violence to reinforce a law-and-order theme while Democratic politicians are blaming him for the violence and calling for the 2020 election to be a referendum on racial justice. It is the parsing of the term that intrigues me. In Portland, the Portland police have reportedly declared 13 riots in 80 days. Newspapers in these cities have referred to rioting from Portland to Minneapolis to Kenosa. David Brown, the Chicago Police superintendent, said, “This was not an organized protest, rather, this was an incident of pure criminality.” The coverage of recent looting and rioting has been uneven with networks like CNN spending comparatively limited time reporting on the violence while Fox is covering it exhaustively.

Other outlets like NPR have run segments on how the word “rioting” has racist roots. Whether there are riots depends on what news outlet you use. It is the new reality of echo-journalism. Of course, this dispute turns on a noun that is clearly defined as “public violence, tumult, or disorder.” [..] We have been discussing the concern by many that networks like CNN shape the news to fit a narrative. Fox and MSNBC have been accused of the same practice. Many in the public do not know where to turn for unbiased reporting on the left or the right, according to various polls. Even in acknowledging the importance of the media to our system, the majority of citizens believe that the media actively misrepresents facts. Roughly half view the media as biased. This is why. Of course, this is looting and rioting.

Read more …

This was advertized as a “campaign rally”. He was flown out to Pennsylvania for the event, first time he left Delaware in a long time.

The Puppet Candidate in Two Pictures (CT)

This is the image the mainstream media portray:

This is the image that actually reflects the event:

Any questions?…

Read more …

In the US today, an Appeals Court can reverse a decision by the DOJ, which all the judges in the court in the end work for. DOJ, prosecution, and defense all agreed the case should be dropped. Months ago.

Appeals Court Denies Flynn Request To Dismiss Case (ZH)

Michael Flynn’s request to force a judge to immediately dismiss his case was shot down by a federal appeals court on Monday. In an 8-2 ruling, the DC Circuit Court of Appeals struck down Flynn’s petition to force Judge Emmett Sullivan to accept the Justice Department’s motion to drop charges without holding a hearing, according to The Hill. Flynn’s request that Sullivan be forced to recuse himself was also struck down, after his legal team argued that the judge acted improperly when he appointed a partisan outside attorney to argue against the DOJ’s decision to drop the case, and that it was inappropriate to ask the full circuit court to revisit an earlier decision by a three-member panel of the DC Circuit to drop the case.


Unless Flynn’s lawyers appeal to the Supreme Court, Sullivan will be able to move forward with a hearing about the DOJ’s unusual reversal in the case, before deciding whether to allow the Trump administration to withdraw its charges against the president’s former close aide. Flynn had pleaded guilty in 2017 to lying to the FBI about his conversations with the Russian ambassador to the U.S. and agreed to cooperate with the special counsel’s investigation into Russian interference in 2016 election.” -The Hill. The DOJ filed a motion to drop the case against Flynn in May, after it was revealed that the FBI engaged in a ‘perjury trap’ against the former Trump National Security Adviser.

Read more …

“After producing documents revealing that the FBI set out to entrap Flynn, had no valid cause to interview him in the first place, and the prosecutors improperly extorted him into a plea by threatening to charge his son, the Justice Department moved to drop all charges.”

Russiagate Won’t End: US Appeals Court Reverses Decision To End Flynn Case (RT)

A full-bench US federal appeals court has reversed an earlier decision to dismiss the ‘Russiagate’ case against former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, returning it to the judge who refused to let the charges be dropped. In a 8-2 ruling on Monday, the DC Circuit Court of Appeals sided with Judge Emmet Sullivan, and sent the case back to him for review. Sullivan had been ordered by a three-judge panel in June to drop the case against Flynn immediately, but hired an attorney and asked for an en banc hearing instead. [..] The former top lawyer for the Barack Obama administration, Neal Katyal, hailed the decision as “an important step in defending the rule of law” and argued the case should not be dismissed because Flynn had pleaded guilty.

Sidney Powell
https://twitter.com/SidneyPowell1/status/1300472878585065477

Flynn had indeed pleaded guilty to one charge of lying to the FBI, but Powell moved to dismiss the charges due to the failure of his previous attorneys – a law firm with ties to the Democrats – and the government to disclose evidence that could set him free. After producing documents revealing that the FBI set out to entrap Flynn, had no valid cause to interview him in the first place, and the prosecutors improperly extorted him into a plea by threatening to charge his son, the Justice Department moved to drop all charges. Sullivan had other ideas, however. In a highly unusual move, he appointed a retired judge – who had just written a diatribe about the case in the Washington Post – to be amicus curiae and argue the case should not be dropped. It was at this point that Powell took the case to the appeals court, citing Fokker, a recent Supreme Court precedent that Sullivan was violating.

Ignoring the fact that Sullivan had appointed the amicus and sought to prolong the case after the DOJ and the appeals court both told him to drop it, the en banc panel argued the proper procedure means he needs to make the decision before it can be appealed. One of the judges, Thomas Griffith, actually argued in a concurring opinion that it would be “highly unusual” for Sullivan not to dismiss the charges, given the executive branch’s constitutional prerogatives and his “limited discretion” when it came to the relevant federal procedure, but said that an order to drop the case is not “appropriate in this case at this time” because it’s up to Sullivan to make the call first.

[..] With Mueller failing to find any evidence of “collusion” between President Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia, Democrats have latched onto Flynn’s case as proof of their ‘Russiagate’ conspiracy theory. The latest argument is that the effort to drop the charges against Flynn is politically motivated and proof of Attorney General Bill Barr’s “corruption.” Barr is currently overseeing a probe by US attorney John Durham into the FBI’s handling of the investigation against Trump during and after the 2016 election, with the evidence disclosed during the Flynn proceedings strongly implicating not just the senior FBI leadership but senior Obama administration figures as well.

Read more …

“Neither the Democratic party nor the Republican party survives a defeat this November in anything close to their current form. I think several people are starting to think about that. But here’s what’s also true: Neither the Democratic party nor the Republican party survives a victory this November. And no one is thinking about that.”

Lucifer’s Hammer (Ben Hunt)

Four years ago, when I wrote that I thought Trump would defeat Clinton, I said that Trump breaks us by turning every one of our domestic political games from a coordination game – where cooperation in the national interest is at least possible – into a pure competition game where that potential cooperation is impossible. He did. That’s exactly what happened. So today, neither the Trump campaign nor the Biden campaign can see the United States through anything other than the lens of a pure competition game.

Neither campaign or party will take the necessary steps to defuse the growing violence in American cities, like Biden calling for Democratic mayors to request National Guard support or like Trump doing anything to accommodate the voices of nonviolent protesters, because they both think that to do so would place them at a competitive disadvantage in the November election. Neither campaign or party is appropriately afraid of this comet hitting the United States, because they both think that they’ll do just fine in a post-comet world.

They both think that they can handle the aftermath of this comet strike after November 4th. They both are listening to their institutional Ego rather than to the Narrator. They are both sowing the wind. And they will both reap the whirlwind. Neither the Democratic party nor the Republican party survives a defeat this November in anything close to their current form. I think several people are starting to think about that. But here’s what’s also true: Neither the Democratic party nor the Republican party survives a victory this November. And no one is thinking about that.

Read more …

That 6% figure from the CDC that so many are touting is not what it seems.

No One Wants to Solve Real Problems (Geraghty)

The president of the United States retweeted a link to a post on Gateway Pundit, asserting that the real death toll from COVID-19 is merely 9,000, and that the other roughly 178,000 deaths were because of other factors. That was a pretty egregious misinterpretation of the CDC’s data; the CDC stated, “For 6 percent of the deaths, COVID-19 was the only cause mentioned [on the death certificate]. For deaths with conditions or causes in addition to COVID-19, on average, there were 2.6 additional conditions or causes per death.” The list of conditions is long and varied: diabetes, various heart-related conditions including hypertension, cardiac arrest, ischemic heart disease (hardening of the arteries), cardiac arrhythmia and heart disease, chronic kidney disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, chronic lower respiratory diseases, obesity, an immunocompromised state from an organ transplant, coronary art disease, or sickle cell disease.

None of the conditions listed above are death sentences by themselves. With treatment and medication, most people diagnosed with those conditions can live long and happy lives. No one with the slightest understanding of human health can look at someone with one of those conditions listed above dying from COVID-19 and conclude, “that person was going to die soon anyway.” And if your takeaway from this data is that SARS-CoV-2 is only a risk to those with one of those conditions . . . great, now we just have to worry about the 100 million or so Americans with diabetes or prediabetes, the roughly 100 million Americans with high blood pressure, the one in three American adults at risk for chronic kidney disease, the 16 million to 24 million Americans believed to be at risk for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, the 1 in 500 adults who have cardiomyopathy, the millions of Americans either being treated for cancer or who have recovered from cancer, the roughly 100,000 Americans with sickle cell disease, the nearly 49,000 Americans who had an organ transplant last year, and the slightly smaller number of transplant recipients this year.

There are some overlaps among those groups, but we have plenty of Americans who have one or more comorbidities and who would be at risk if they caught SARS-CoV-2.

6%

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Well, we’re all going to be cleaner anyway.

Coronavirus May Survive On Outdoor Surfaces For Longer In Autumn (SCMP)

As the northern hemisphere heads into autumn, the coronavirus may be able to survive on outdoor surfaces for much longer, according to a new US study. Researchers found that in lower temperatures and humidity, the virus could, for example, remain on a hiker’s jacket if it was outside for a week – and remain infectious for that time – whereas in summer its lifespan was estimated to be one to three days. The prolonged survival of the virus on surfaces in autumn could “potentially contribute to new outbreaks”, the team led by Juergen Richt, professor of veterinary microbiology at Kansas State University, wrote in a non-peer-reviewed paper posted on preprint website bioRxiv.org on Monday. They believed the virus would also survive for longer indoors in colder and less humid conditions.

The study found it had an average half-life – or rate of decay – of nearly eight hours on a stainless steel doorknob, or nearly 10 hours on a window, which was about to twice the duration in summer. The coronavirus, which causes the disease Covid-19, has adapted well to humans. But to survive outside its human hosts – it spreads through respiratory droplets and contaminated surfaces – the pathogen is believed to prefer lower temperatures and humidity. For the study, Richt’s team used climate data from America’s Midwest to recreate artificial seasons in biosafety chambers. Temperature was controlled at 13 degrees Celsius and 66 per cent relative humidity for spring and autumn, while for summer it was kept at 25 degrees and 70 per cent. The virus was then applied to the surface of 12 materials people come into contact with every day, such as cardboard, concrete, rubber, gloves and N95 masks.

The aim was to find out if the viability of the virus changed with the season. Earlier in the pandemic, the research community had hoped the spread of the virus would slow in summer, believing it would be less likely to stay in the air in warmer weather. But the resurgence of infections in many areas – especially the United States, the worst-hit country where more than 80,000 cases per day were recorded at the peak of summer – raised the question of whether there was any seasonal impact at all. The result of the Midwest study “clearly demonstrates that the virus survives longer under spring/fall not summer conditions”, the researchers said in the paper. That trend was observed on all materials tested, to varying degrees. Out of all of them, the virus survived longest on Tyvek, a synthetic material used in everything from home insulation to personal protective equipment and outdoor wear, with a half-life of up to 45 hours.

Read more …

So try it on all patients?

Inhaled Nitric Oxide Therapy Benefits Pregnant COVID19 Patients (Harvard)

Inhaled nitric oxide (NO) can be a valuable adjunct respiratory therapy for pregnant women with severe and critical COVID-19, a team of researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) has found. The delivery of the therapeutic gas to six COVID-19 pregnant patients admitted to MGH, as described in a paper in Obstetrics & Gynecology, resulted in a rapid and sustained improvement in cardiopulmonary function and decreased inflammation. The resolution of viral infection within 22 days was observed in five of the six patients, findings that could have important implications for treating viruses like Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The study is the first to investigate the role of inhaled NO in pregnant people with COVID-19.

The patients experienced rapid relief from breathlessness, a lower respiratory rate, and better oxygenation after mask administration of high concentration NO, according to Lorenzo Berra in the Department of Anaesthesia, Critical Care and Pain Medicine at MGH. Berra also reported no negative side effects. “In addition, inflammatory markers showed a rapid decrease after breathing NO and five of the six patients in our study showed viral clearance from nasopharyngeal swabs by 22 days after COVID-19 diagnosis,” Berra, corresponding author of the study, added. “All patients were discharged in stable condition from the hospital. We found these results to be very encouraging.”

Inhaled NO increases oxygenation by dilating or opening constricted blood vessels, especially in more well-ventilated areas of the lung, thereby improving intrapulmonary shunt fraction, or the percentage of blood put out by the heart that is not completely oxygenated. A recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) suggests that pregnant women with COVID-19 are more likely to be hospitalized, are at increased risk of being admitted to the intensive care unit, and more often require mechanical ventilation compared to nonpregnant women.

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“I’m against them heart and soul, and I no longer care what my old friends think about it.”

Bill of Particulars (Jim Kunstler)

RussiaGate was, in the strict sense of the word, a conspiracy to overthrow a president carried out by a coordinated effort of high-ranking government employees across many agencies, who knew exactly what they were doing. It was an exercise in perfidy, bad faith, and lawlessness run by the very Department of Justice entrusted with enforcing federal law, including attorney Andrew Weissmann’s clean-up crew fronted by the dishonorable figurehead Robert Mueller. It remains unresolved due to the tensions in that department and the obdurate resistance of the federal courts — for example in the three-year persecution of General Flynn. The eventual day that the hammer comes down on the perps of RussiaGate, if ever it does come, will be a moment of historic moral and ethical clarification in this sore-beset country.

The 2019 impeachment fiasco was a parallel ruse run by Representative Adam Schiff, former Department of Justice lawyer Mary McCord, and Lawfare warrior Daniel S. Goldman, with help from Resistance intriguers in the National Security Council, Eric Ciaramella and Alexander Vindman, and Hillary Clinton’s holdover confederates in the State Department. Mr. Ciaramella’s pretense to be acting as a “whistleblower” was a nakedly false act, illegally abetted by Intel Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson, himself a former DOJ RussiaGate player. It is amazing that neither of these two has been indicted for sedition.

Add to these matters the associated misdeeds in the FISA courts, the ridiculous, scurrilous charges against Supreme Court Justice nominee Brett Kavanaugh by the mendacious Christine Blasey Ford, the ongoing schemes of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer to rig the vote with unverifiable mail-in ballots, and the wholesale acts against the public interest by Democratic mayors and governors such as Ted Wheeler, Kate Brown, Bill de Blasio, Andrew Cuomo, Lori Lightfoot, J.B. Pritzker, Ralph Northam, Jacob Frey, Tim Walz, Muriel Bowser, Eric Garcetti, Gavin Newsom, Tony Evers and a wider rogues’ gallery of other Democratic Party subalterns such as Minnesota AG Keith Ellison and NYC education Chancellor Richard Carranza and you have a nearly complete picture of this odious faction.

Finally, add the cherry-on-top: Democratic candidate for president, Joe Biden. Does anybody still believe he is a plausible chief executive — even in his own degenerate party? I doubt it. Why they engineered his nomination may remain one of the great mysteries of human existence. Except perhaps to speculate that their sadism has turned inward and become a suicidal death-wish. They are finally so miserably contemptible that they just want to end it all. Personally, I don’t want to see any of these people anywhere near the levers of power in this country. Quite a few of them deserve to be in jail, and I believe before Mr. Trump’s second term is up, they will be — if they don’t try to wreck the United States altogether with new treasons in the November election. I’m against them heart and soul, and I no longer care what my old friends think about it.

Read more …

As someone tweeted earlier: all we have to do now is wait for Tesla to buy Berkshire Hathaway.

Just Put Your Brain on Tesla Autopilot and Believe in It (WS)

Let’s get this straight: Tesla is led by a CEO who is regularly seen walking on water, and its shares are a supernatural phenomenon. Today, those shares, trading for the first time after the 5-for-1 split, surged from $442.61 at the open to $498.32 at the close and then on to $514.74 after-hours at the moment. That’s a 16.3% ride in one day, following weeks of supernatural moves into the heavens. Below is my Triple-WTF Chart of the Year because it just blew away and annihilated my WTF-Chart of the Year of February 4 and my Double-WTF Chart of the Year of July 1 (stock prices via YCharts):

The stock split did the job, based on the logic that a five-dollar bill broken into five ones makes each of those ones suddenly worth $1.16 — or $1.87 if you start counting since the announcement of the split on August 11. I mean, it’s just pure supernatural, and if you don’t get it, too bad, it’s a sign that you just don’t have the right stuff. Back on July 1, Tesla surpassed Toyota as the most valuable automaker in the world. At the time, Tesla traded at $226 a share ($1,130 pre-split). Since that propitious date two months ago, Tesla has skyrocketed another 127%.


At the time when it blew past Toyota, the value that the market put on Tesla (outstanding shares times share price) was $210 billion, which was – and I mean was – a huge number. Now, after-hours, Tesla’s market capitalization, according to YCharts, is $476 billion. Today alone, Tesla’s market cap soared by $64 billion in eight hours, including after hours. That’s $8 billion in “value created” per hour. If you have to ask, “value created by doing what,” then you don’t have the right stuff. Simple as that.

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I can see how trawling is a problem, but how does that mean there is no point in cleaning it up? How about a different method?

Norwegian Researchers Call Against Cleansing Seas Of Plastic Waste (RT)

Cleaning floating plastic from the sea is a “lost cause” and trying to remove it can actually do more harm than good, new research suggests. Instead, clean-up efforts should focus on rubbish washed ashore. Trying to clean up plastic pollution from the open seas is a “waste of time and resources,” researchers with the Norwegian-based SALT company have concluded. “The rubbish in the sea is a lost cause, there is no point in cleaning it up,” the team said in a newly released research paper. Assorted plastic, that is floating around the seas is way too scattered to be easily removed, the researchers argued. Attempting to trawl it out is not only disproportionately costly and time-consuming, but it can also do more harm than good.

Trawling large areas will catch “too much fish and wildlife compared with the amount of rubbish,” the research team noted. “In addition, rubbish is often found in marine life and organic material that is important for the ecosystems and animals that live there. In the worst case, we risk doing more harm than good by trawling over the areas,” lead author of the research paper Jannike Falk-Andersson told broadcaster NRK. Instead of wasting time and recourses on the high seas clean-ups, people should focus on hand-picking trash washed ashore, which is a far more gentle and effective method. “There, you pick one thing at a time. You do not drag large objects across the beach that kills everything it comes across, in an attempt to clean up,” Falk-Andersson explained.

The research has been praised by Norway’s Climate and Environment Minister Sveinung Rotevatn, who, at the same time, described the plastic pollution as a rapidly escalating problem that must be tackled with a broad international effort. “It is very good that a critical spotlight is placed on clearing plastic in the sea. We have long pointed out that cleaning in the sea areas starts at the wrong end and that there is a risk of damage to life in the sea when trawling for plastic,” Rotevatn told NRK. Over the past years, plastic pollution has become one of the main environmental problems with the amount of waste floating around the oceans growing at alarming rates. According to various estimates, some 15 tons of plastic gets into the planet’s seas every minute.

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How many British people realize they have no justice system left? Doesn’t that worry you?

Waiting for the Old Bailey: Julian Assange (OffG)

On September 7, Julian Assange will be facing another round of gruelling extradition proceedings, in the Old Bailey, part of a process that has become a form of gradual state-sanctioned torture. The US Department of Justice hungers for their man. The UK prison authorities are doing little to protect his health. The end result, should it result in his death, will be justifiably described as state-sanctioned murder. This picture was not improved upon by a prison visit from his partner, Stella Morris, accompanied by their two children. Almost six months had passed since the last meeting. Physical distancing was practised during the twenty-minute meeting in Belmarsh Prison.

Morris and Assange wore face masks and visors, a state of affairs curious given the conspicuous lack of protective wear that has been given to Assange during the pandemic. A prohibition on touching was observed. “We had to keep social distancing and Julian was told he would have to self-isolate for two weeks if he touched the children.” Were officials being careful and considerate? Not according to Assange, who claimed it was the first time he had received a mask “because things are very different behind the doors.” Morris noted a prevailing thinness, a yellow armband to indicate prisoner status, and the fact that he was “in a lot of pain.”

What awaits Assange next month promises to be resoundingly ugly. He will have to ready himself for more pain, applied by Judge Vanessa Baraitser. Throughout her steering of proceedings, Baraitser has remained chillingly indifferent to Assange’s needs, a model of considered cruelty. Keen followers of justicia will be crestfallen: limiting access to legal counsel by keeping him caged behind a glass screen; ignoring his health considerations in refusing emergency bail during the COVID-19 pandemic. Her behaviour has been in keeping with that of Chief Magistrate Lady Emma Arbuthnot, who has done her precious bit to soil the citadel of British justice in previous rulings on Assange. With a family well and truly embedded in the British intelligence and military establishment, it was alarming to even see her name allocated to the Assange case.

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Thank you for your ongoing support.

 

 

Three miles north of purgatory – one step from the great beyond
I prayed to the cross, and I kissed the girls, and I crossed the Rubicon

– Bob Dylan

 

 

 

 

Support the Automatic Earth in virustime.

 

Jun 032020
 


DPC ‘On the beach, Palm Beach’ 1905

 

New Zealand Could Return To Normal Life As Early As Next Week (R.)
Coronavirus May Be a Blood Vessel Disease, Which Explains Everything (M.)
Charting Sweden’s Disastrous No-Lockdown Strategy (Ind.)
Brazil Sets Another Record For Daily Coronavirus Deaths (R.)
Greece Suspends Qatar Flights After 12 On One Plane Test Positive (K.)
Handheld High-Intensity UV Lamp Could Kill Coronavirus Once And For All (RT)
Lancet Issues Major Disclaimer On Anti-HCQ Study (ZH)
The Great Unequalizer (El-Erian/Spence)
Food Bank Parcels For Scottish Children ‘At Record High’ (BBC)
What The Flynn Transcripts Do Not Contain: A Crime (Turley)
The 10 Most Important Questions For Rod Rosenstein (Solomon)
Jerry Nadler Moves To Cut Bill Barr’s Budget By $50 Million (R.)
Will Italy Be The Next Country To Leave the EU? (Antonopoulos)
Where Did Policing Go Wrong? (Taibbi)
Police Didn’t Spend Millions On Tank Just To Let Protests Stay Peaceful (Onion)

 

 

New cases past 24 hours in:

• US + 21,608
• Brazil + 28,832
• Russia + 8,952
• India + 8,272
• Peru + 4,845
• Pakistan + 4,065

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Number of cases seems extremely low at less than 80K vs well over 100K for the past week.

Cases 6,474,289 (+ 79,973 from Saturday’s 6,394,316)

Deaths 382,914 (+ 4,948 from Saturday’s 377,966)

 

 

 

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

 

 

From Worldometer:

 

 

From COVID19Info.live:

 

 

 

 

While 99% of the rest of the world stumbles on with no end in sight.

New Zealand Could Return To Normal Life As Early As Next Week (R.)

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said on Wednesday she could lift all social distancing measures to return the country to normal life, bar the international border closure, as early as next week. Ardern will decide on Monday whether the country is ready to shift to alert level 1, more than two months after she imposed a strict level 4 lockdown, shutting most businesses and forcing people to stay home, in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Arden said waiting until Monday would allow her to see if recent changes, like the removal of restrictions on the number of people in bars and at social gatherings, had led to a rise in cases. “If it hasn’t, then we will be in a good position to move,” she said during a televised news conference.


Under level 1 there is no requirement for physical distancing or limits on the number of people allowed in places like bars, clubs, churches, and sports venues, she said. However, there would be one major change from pre-pandemic normality, with no immediate plans to reopen New Zealand’s border. New Zealand recorded no new cases of coronavirus for a 12th consecutive day on Wednesday and has just one active case. Ardern’s decision to swiftly impose one of the harshest lockdowns in the world has been credited with constraining the spread of COVID-19 in New Zealand, which has reported a total of 1,504 cases and 22 deaths.

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Nothing explains everything, but the angle remains interesting.

Coronavirus May Be a Blood Vessel Disease, Which Explains Everything (M.)

In April, blood clots emerged as one of the many mysterious symptoms attributed to Covid-19, a disease that had initially been thought to largely affect the lungs in the form of pneumonia. Quickly after came reports of young people dying due to coronavirus-related strokes. Next it was Covid toes — painful red or purple digits. What do all of these symptoms have in common? An impairment in blood circulation. Add in the fact that 40% of deaths from Covid-19 are related to cardiovascular complications, and the disease starts to look like a vascular infection instead of a purely respiratory one. Months into the pandemic, there is now a growing body of evidence to support the theory that the novel coronavirus can infect blood vessels, which could explain not only the high prevalence of blood clots, strokes, and heart attacks, but also provide an answer for the diverse set of head-to-toe symptoms that have emerged.

“All these Covid-associated complications were a mystery. We see blood clotting, we see kidney damage, we see inflammation of the heart, we see stroke, we see encephalitis [swelling of the brain],” says William Li, MD, president of the Angiogenesis Foundation. “A whole myriad of seemingly unconnected phenomena that you do not normally see with SARS or H1N1 or, frankly, most infectious diseases.” “If you start to put all of the data together that’s emerging, it turns out that this virus is probably a vasculotropic virus, meaning that it affects the [blood vessels],” says Mandeep Mehra, MD, medical director of the Brigham and Women’s Hospital Heart and Vascular Center.

In a paper published in April in the scientific journal The Lancet, Mehra and a team of scientists discovered that the SARS-CoV-2 virus can infect the endothelial cells that line the inside of blood vessels. Endothelial cells protect the cardiovascular system, and they release proteins that influence everything from blood clotting to the immune response. In the paper, the scientists showed damage to endothelial cells in the lungs, heart, kidneys, liver, and intestines in people with Covid-19. “The concept that’s emerging is that this is not a respiratory illness alone, this is a respiratory illness to start with, but it is actually a vascular illness that kills people through its involvement of the vasculature,” says Mehra.

SARS-CoV-2 is thought to enter the body through ACE2 receptors present on the surface of cells that line the respiratory tract in the nose and throat. Once in the lungs, the virus appears to move from the alveoli, the air sacs in the lung, into the blood vessels, which are also rich in ACE2 receptors. “[The virus] enters the lung, it destroys the lung tissue, and people start coughing. The destruction of the lung tissue breaks open some blood vessels,” Mehra explains. “Then it starts to infect endothelial cell after endothelial cell, creates a local immune response, and inflames the endothelium.”

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“The rolling seven-day average for new confirmed deaths per million people in Sweden is now nearly twice that of the US..”

Charting Sweden’s Disastrous No-Lockdown Strategy (Ind.)

Sweden has taken the ignominious title of the country with the world’s highest death rate from Covid-19. The title, which was was briefly held by the UK late last month, comes after Swedish officials decided to ignore the lockdown advice of countless health experts and kept the country largely open during the pandemic. The number of deaths per capita in Sweden is now more than four-times that of its Nordic neighbours. And while its death toll of around 4,500 is a fraction of other badly affected countries like the US (105,000) and the UK (38,000), it is the death rate that reveals the true impact of Sweden’s no-lockdown approach. The rolling seven-day average for new confirmed deaths per million people in Sweden is now nearly twice that of the US, and more than five-times that of France, which had the highest death rate in the world in April.

France imposed a strict lockdown, similar to those of Italy and Spain, in an attempt to contain severe outbreaks of the deadly virus. These lockdowns have proven to be an extremely effective strategy in the fight against coronavirus, with death rates dropping drastically in all of the countries that imposed them. Countries that pre-empted large-scale outbreaks with early lockdowns, such as New Zealand, appear to have almost entirely eliminated the virus.

Yet while social distancing, PPE advice and other containment measures have helped slow the spread in Sweden, a lack of lockdown means the country’s infection rate shows no sign of falling. When Sweden is compared to other Nordic countries, the scale of the country’s coronavirus crisis seems even more pronounced.

Sweden’s hope has been to achieve herd immunity, whereby enough of the population has been infected that coronavirus can no longer spread widely. Yet studies in May suggest that Sweden is nowhere near the threshold needed to realise this. Experts claim that at least 60 per cent of the population would need to have Covid-19 antibodies before herd immunity is reached. The government had hoped for 20 per cent immunity by the end of May, but instead only 7.3 per cent have it. This is lower than most countries that enforced lockdowns, including the UK and US, yet with still no lockdown in place, the full impact for Sweden may still a long way from being realised.

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Rockin’ on.

Brazil Sets Another Record For Daily Coronavirus Deaths (R.)

Brazil registered another record number of novel coronavirus deaths over the last 24 hours, the health ministry said on Tuesday evening, as the pandemic in Latin America’s largest country shows no signs of slowing down. The nation registered 28,936 additional cases of the novel coronavirus, the ministry said, and 1,262 deaths. There are now 555,383 total confirmed coronavirus cases in Brazil and 31,199 coronavirus deaths. The fresh record comes as some Brazilian leaders, including right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro, continue to belittle the virus, warning that the economic fallout from quarantine measures will be worse than the virus itself.


“We lament all deaths, but it’s everyone’s destiny,” Bolsonaro said in front of the presidential residence in Brasilia earlier on Tuesday. Even in states and cities where leaders had previously instituted lockdown orders, authorities have been rapidly loosening restrictions in recent days, despite the number of daily new cases continuing to grow in most regions.

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I don’t get why they let them in in the first place. Qatar entered the top 20 of most cases/infections over the past few days, with over 60,000 cases. Thing is, only 2.8 million people live there. For the US, with 117x more people, that would come down to over 7 million cases. Granted, Qatar reports only 43 total deaths. But how credible is that?

Greece Suspends Qatar Flights After 12 On One Plane Test Positive (K.)

Greece on Tuesday announced they were suspending flights to and from Qatar until mid-June, after 12 out of 91 passengers in a Qatar Airways flight that landed in Athens on Monday tested positive for the coronavirus. Nine of the infected passengers are Pakistani nationals, coming from the city of Gujrat, who have a Greek residence permit, two are Greek nationals coming from Australia and one person is a Japanese national and member of a Greek-Japanese family, the General Secretariat for Civil Protection said in a press release.


All passengers in the flight from Doha to Athens’ International Airport were tested and quarantined in hotels until they got their results back, in line with the current health protocols. Those infected will remain in the hotels for two weeks, while those who tested negative will have to stay for seven days as they are considered close high and low risk contacts, the authority said. Health officers will repeat the tests on the passengers who tested negative after a week.


Timeline of Greece measures

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As billions are thrown at everything everywhere, these people have an entire $90,000 in seed funding.

Handheld High-Intensity UV Lamp Could Kill Coronavirus Once And For All (RT)

We may have a powerful new weapon in the war against Covid-19, as a scientific breakthrough has paved the way for personal, handheld devices that emit high-intensity ultraviolet (UV) light capable of killing the coronavirus. Chemical or UV exposure are the most common methods of sanitizing and disinfecting surfaces from bacteria and viruses. In the latter case, there need to be sufficiently high levels of UV radiation – 200 to 300 nanometers – to kill the unwanted bugs. Such devices do exist at present, but are prohibitively expensive, use discharge lamps that contain mercury, are bulky and short-lived, and require a large amount of power to function. Not exactly ideal for scaling up to rid the world of Covid-19.

However, using theoretical modeling of a range of materials, researchers at Penn State, the University of Minnesota and two Japanese universities believe they have found the holy grail of transparent conductors, which could allow for cheap, easy-to-produce LEDs that emit UV light at a high enough intensity to kill coronavirus. Computer, smartphone and lighting manufacturers have often grappled with finding transparent electrode materials that function in the visible light spectrum, let alone the ultraviolet spectrum. But the researchers have settled on a substance called strontium niobate as the potential game-changer material.

“While our first motivation in developing UV transparent conductors was to build an economic solution for water disinfection, we now realize that this breakthrough discovery potentially offers a solution to deactivate Covid-19 in aerosols that might be distributed in the HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) systems of buildings,” one of the researchers, Joseph Roth, a doctoral candidate in materials science and engineering at Penn State, explains. The researchers have secured $90,000 in seed funding to determine the ‘Goldilocks zone’ for UV intensity and exposure time to eradicate airborne viruses.

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The Lancet looks unprofessional.

Lancet Issues Major Disclaimer On Anti-HCQ Study (ZH)

The Lancet has issued a major disclaimer regarding a study which prompted the World Health Organization to halt global trials of hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), an anti-Malaria drug currently being used around the world to treat COVID-19. As we noted last week, major data discrepancies have called the entire study into question – though the lead author says it does not change the study’s findings that patients who received HCQ died at higher rates and experienced more cardiac complications than without. Until the data has been audited, The Lancet issued the following “expression of concern” regarding the study.


“Important scientific questions have been raised about data reported in the paper by Mandeep Mehra et al,” reads the “expression of concern” from The Lancet. “Although an independent audit of the provenance and validity of the data has been commissioned by the authors not affiliated with Surgisphere and is ongoing, with results expected very shortly, we are issuing an Expression of Concern to alert readers to the fact that serious scientific questions have been brought to our attention. We will update this notice as soon as we have further information.” -The Lancet

Of course, this is yet more evidence of the manufactured disinformation surrounding HCQ that Richard Moss, MD, (via AmericanThinker.com) exposes below… I took hydroxychloroquine for two years. A long time ago as a visiting cancer surgeon in Asia, in Thailand, Nepal, India, and Bangladesh. From 1987 to 1990. Malaria is rife there. I took it for prophylaxis, 400 milligrams once a week for two years. Never had any trouble. It was inexpensive and effective. [..] Chloroquine, the precursor of HCQ, was invented by Bayer in 1934. Hydroxychloroquine was developed during World War II as a safer, synthetic alternative and approved for medical use in the U.S. in 1955.


The World Health Organization considers it an essential medicine, among the safest and most effective medicines, a staple of any healthcare system. In 2017, US doctors prescribed it 5 million times, the 128th most commonly prescribed drug in the country. There have been hundreds of millions of prescriptions worldwide since its inception. It is one of the cheapest and best drugs in the world and has saved millions of lives. Doctors also prescribe it for Lupus and Rheumatoid arthritis patients who may consume it for their lifetimes with few or no ill effects. Then something happened to this wonder drug.

[..] It began when President Trump discussed it as a possible treatment for COVID-19 on March 19, 2020. The gates of hell burst forth on May 18 when Trump casually announced that he was taking it, prescribed by his physician. Attacks on Trump and this otherwise harmless little molecule poured in. The heretofore respected, commonly used, and highly effective medicinal became a major threat to life, a nefarious and wicked chemical that could alter critical heart rhythms, resulting in sudden cataclysmic death for unsuspecting innocents. Trump, more than irresponsible, was evil incarnate for daring to even mention it. While at it, the salivating media trotted out the canard about Trump’s nonrecommendation for injecting Clorox and Lysol or drinking fish-tank cleaner to combat COVID. It was Charlottesville all over again.


[..] the media agonized over, of all things, the prolongation of the now infamous “QT interval,” and the risk of sudden cardiac death. The FDA and NIH piled on, piously demanding randomized, controlled, double-blind studies before physicians prescribed HCQ. No one mentioned that the risk of cardiac arrest was far higher from watching the Superbowl. Nor did the media declare that HCQ and chloroquine have been used throughout the world for half a century, making them among the most widely prescribed drugs in history with not a single reported case of “arrhythmic death” according to the sainted WHO and the American College of Cardiology.

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When the rich warn about society.

The Great Unequalizer (El-Erian/Spence)

As parts of the United States begin to open up after months of coronavirus lockdown, hope is rising that some semblance of economic normalcy could be on the near-term horizon. That hope could still be dashed by lingering health, business, and consumer uncertainties, any of which could slow recovery. But for the least fortunate segments of the population, more economic pain is a virtual certainty. Far from the “great equalizer” that some initially dubbed the pandemic, COVID-19 has walloped the U.S. economy in a way that exacerbated inequalities in income, wealth, and opportunity. Absent a timely policy response, this negative trend could begin to reinforce itself, as one debilitating setback for the disadvantaged increases the odds of another.

The data are stark and alarming, and they will get worse before they get better. GDP is set to contract by 30 percent or more this quarter. More than 40 million workers, or roughly a quarter of the U.S. labor force, have filed jobless claims in the last three months. The unemployment rate is likely to approach—and could even exceed—the 25 percent record set during the Great Depression. And all this despite an enormous fiscal and monetary policy relief effort that cost nearly $6 trillion, or 28 percent of U.S. GDP in 2019. The distributional features of the job and income losses are even more concerning. According to a recent survey by the Federal Reserve, 39 percent of workers in households with annual incomes below $40,000 have been laid off or furloughed.

Women have been hit especially hard, as have minorities: of the 20.5 million jobs that vanished in April, 55 percent belonged to women, pushing the unemployment rate for women to 15 percent and the rate for African American women and Hispanic women to 16.4 percent and 20.2 percent, respectively. There is no question that the pandemic has been an unequal opportunity unemployer. Those whose jobs have withstood the shock of COVID-19 are disproportionately in relatively high-paying professions that can accommodate work-from-home arrangements. According to researchers at the University of Chicago’s Becker Friedman Institute, roughly one-third of U.S. jobs can be done remotely, but there are enormous discrepancies by sector—discrepancies that widen further when adjusted for earnings. Whereas 76 percent of (mostly well-paid) finance and insurance jobs can be done from home, for example, the same is true for just three percent of (mostly low-paid) food and service sector jobs.

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The effects of the unequalizer.

Food Bank Parcels For Scottish Children ‘At Record High’ (BBC)

Food banks in Scotland say they have recorded the largest ever increase in emergency food parcels going to children during the pandemic. The Trussell Trust – which runs 83% of the country’s network – reported total deliveries were up 47% in April compared to the same period in 2019. This included a 62% increase in parcels going to children. The trust is now calling for the government to give help to low-income families, including a £250 lump sum. It also wants an extension of cash payments for children eligible for free school meals until schools reopen in August. The Scottish government said it had committed £350m of additional funding “to support those most at risk”.


A spokesman said it was also supporting over 175,000 children with access to free school meals. More than 100 organisations have signed up to a coalition urging the Scottish and UK governments to help “as widespread concern mounts for children’s wellbeing”. The group includes the Trussell Trust, the / Independent Food Aid Network (IFAN) in Scotland and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF). They want the UK government to introduce a/ temporary/ Coronavirus Emergency Income Support Scheme. The charities say this would “ensure/ everyone has/ enough money in their pocket for essentials during this crisis”.

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There was never a reason for the FBI to investigate Flynn. When they did anyway, they found nothing. And still here we are 40-odd months later, and he’s still not been cleared. People are going to pay for this.

What The Flynn Transcripts Do Not Contain: A Crime (Turley)

“Remember … Ambassador, you’re not talking to a diplomat, you’re talking to a soldier.” When President Trump’s incoming national security adviser, Michael Flynn, said those words to then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, he also spoke to American intelligence agents listening in on the call. For three years, congressional Democrats have assured us Flynn’s calls to Kislyak were so disturbing that they set off alarms in the closing days of the Obama administration. They were right. The newly released transcripts of Flynn’s calls are deeply disturbing — not for their evidence of criminality or collusion but for the total absence of such evidence. The transcripts, declassified Friday, strongly support new investigations by both the Justice Department and by Congress, starting with next week’s Senate testimony by former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

It turns out Flynn’s calls are not just predictable but even commendable at points. When the Obama administration hit the Russians with sanctions just before leaving office, the incoming Trump administration sought to avoid a major conflict at the very start of its term. Flynn asked the Russian to focus on “common enemies” in order to seek cooperation in the Middle East. The calls covered a variety of issues, including the sanctions. What was not discussed was any quid pro quo or anything untoward or unlawful. Flynn stated what was already known to be Trump policy in seeking a new path with Russia. Flynn did not offer to remove sanctions but, rather, encouraged the Russians to respond in a reciprocal, commensurate manner if they felt they had to respond.

The calls, and Flynn’s identity, were leaked by as many as nine officials as the Obama administration left office — a serious federal crime, given their classified status. The most chilling aspect of the transcripts, however, is the lack of anything chilling in the calls themselves. Flynn is direct with Kislyak in trying to tone down the rhetoric and avoid retaliatory moves. He told Kislyak, “l am a very practical guy, and it’s about solutions. It’s about very practical solutions that we’re — that we need to come up with here.” Flynn said he understood the Russians might wish to retaliate for the Obama sanctions but encouraged them not to escalate the conflict just as the Trump administration took office.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1268006146423623683

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Lindsey Graham has a reputation of scaring away from major questions. But he won’t be able to stop this anymore.

The 10 Most Important Questions For Rod Rosenstein (Solomon)

Two years ago, then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein chafed when asked whether congressional Republicans might have legitimate reason to suspect the factual underpinnings of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants that targeted Trump campaign adviser Carter Page in the Russia probe. Seeming a bit perturbed, Rosenstein launched into a mini-lecture on how much care and work went into FISA applications at the FBI and Justice Department. “There’s a lot of talk about FISA applications. Many people I’ve seen talk about it seem not to recognize that a FISA application is actually a warrant, just like a search warrant. In order to get a FISA warrant, you need an affidavit signed by a career law enforcement officer who swears the information is true … And if it is wrong, that person is going to face consequences,” Rosenstein asserted.

[..] On Wednesday, when he appears before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Rosenstein is likely to strike a humbler tone in the face of overwhelming evidence that the FBI-executed FISAs have been chronically flawed, including in the Russia case he supervised. “Even the best law enforcement officers make mistakes, and some engage in willful misconduct,” Rosenstein said in a statement issued ahead of his appearance. “Independent law enforcement investigations, judicial review and congressional oversight are important checks on the discretion of agents and prosecutors.” [..] Here are the 10 most important questions those senators are likely to set out to answer:

  1. Did Rosenstein read the FISA warrant renewal he signed in summer 2017 against Page, review any evidence supporting it, or ask the FBI any questions about the case before affixing his signature?
  2. Does the former No. 2 DOJ official now believe the FISA was so flawed that it should never have been submitted to the court? Does he regret signing it?
  3. Given what he now knows about flaws with the Steele dossier and FBI probe, would Rosenstein have appointed Robert Mueller as the Russia Special Counsel if given a do-over?
  4. Did Rosenstein engage in a conversation with FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe in 2017 about wearing a wire on President Trump as part of a plot to remove the 45th president from office under the 25th Amendment?
  5. Who drafted and provided the supporting materials that Rosenstein used to create the scope of investigation memos that guided Mueller’s probe?
  6. Does Rosenstein have any concerns about the conduct of fired FBI Director James Comey and Deputy Director Andrew McCabe as he looks back on their tenure and in light of the new evidence that has surfaced?
  7. When did Rosenstein learn that the CIA had identified Page as one of its assets — ruling out he was a Russian spy — and that information in Steele’s dossier used in the FISA warrant had been debunked or linked to Russian disinformation?
  8. Does Rosenstein believe the FISA court was intentionally misled, or can the glaring missteps be explained by bureaucratic bungling?
  9. What culpability does Rosenstein assign to himself for the failures in the Russia case he supervised, and what other people does he blame?
  10. Does the former deputy attorney general believe anyone in the Russia case should face criminal charges?

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Everything Nadler touches turns to failure. This will be no exception.

Jerry Nadler Moves To Cut Bill Barr’s Budget By $50 Million (R.)

The Democrat who chairs the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary committee said on Tuesday he will introduce legislation this week to cut $50 million in funding from Attorney General William Barr’s personal office. New York Representative Jerrold Nadler said he would move to reduce funding for Barr’s personal office as a response to what he called “continued defiance of Congress and improper politicization of the Department of Justice.” Nadler said he was making this move and others in the wake of Barr’s refusal to appear before his committee. Passing such a cut would require approval of both the Democratic-controlled House and the Republican-controlled Senate.


“We do not take these actions lightly or with any sense of joy. We have both a duty and a moral obligation to protect the rule of law in our country, and we intend to do just that,” Nadler said. He complained that although Barr “could not find the time to testify” before his committee because of the coronavirus pandemic, the attorney general “took the time to tour the peaceful protests at Lafayette Park just minutes before riot police fired tear gas into the crowd.” A Justice Department spokesman said the Department informed the committee it would consider scheduling a committee appearance by Barr after the expiration at the end of June of current guidance requiring White House approval for such testimony. He added the Department also might be willing to discuss possible testimony by Barr’s deputy at a “a mutually agreeable date.”

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The pic is the cover of a Dutch magazine that says: “Not a nickel extra to Southern Europe”.

Will Italy Be The Next Country To Leave the EU? (Antonopoulos)

On May 27, the political movement Italia Libera submitted a constitutional bill to the Supreme Court of Cassation demanding a referendum for Italy to leave the EU. After years of discussions, the foundation stone was laid for Italians to debate whether they want to remain in the EU or follow the United Kingdom out of the bloc. The draft bill presented by Italia Libera to the Supreme Court of Cassation is entitled “Call for a referendum on the withdrawal of the state from the European Union.” Effectively, Italia Libera has demonstrated that it is possible to follow an institutional path to allow citizens to decide whether they want to remain in the EU or not – and for those who want to leave, now is the best time considering the massive decline in popularity for the bloc after their abandonment of Italy when it was at the peak of the coronavirus pandemic.

There are many positive aspects to the EU, most notably the free movement of people and a coordinated effort to fight crime through Europol, but these multilateral agreements can exist without a European Parliament and domineering institutions based in Brussels and Strasbourg. As Toppi explained, Italy imagined the EU to be “a community of peoples and not of bankers.” It is for this reason that they announced the bill on the same day an unprecedented European Union Recovery Fund became official. This fund was only established because of the backlash received due to the bloc’s initial disinterest in assisting already struggling economies of the EU that were being further devastated financially by the pandemic.

With widespread southern European dissatisfaction with how the EU abandoned its supposed liberal ideals, particularly Germany, in favour of serving inward self-interests, bloc leaders are now playing catch up. President of the European Commission and Angela Merkel’s right-hand man in previous German governments, Ursula Von Der Leyen, and the President of the European Central Bank, Christine Lagarde, who was also a former member of the Troika of bankers, announced the unprecedented measures to assist Europe through its financial woes. This time they promised real aid that would not completely decimate state structures and entire economies like what happened to Greece, Spain, Portugal, and to a lesser extent Italy, for the entirety of the 2010’s.

The Governor of the Bank of Italy expects a 13% drop in GDP in 2020, and for this reason Toppi emphasized that Italy does not need any further indebtedness which will increasingly put Italy in the hands of international speculators. However, Italians remember that Lagarde announced on March 13, just as coronavirus was truly beginning to overwhelm hospitals, that the pandemic was an Italian problem only. This was the catalyst that saw ordinary Italians begin to remove EU flags from public display and replace them with Russian and Chinese flags in gratitude to the significant assistance that these two countries gave to Italy when it was abandoned by Brussels and Berlin.

Read more …

Cultures that have existed for centuries.

Where Did Policing Go Wrong? (Taibbi)

Watching all the terrible news in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd, it’s been hard not to think about Eric Garner. The cases have so many similarities. Once again, an unarmed African-American man in his forties has been asphyxiated in broad daylight by a police officer with a history of abuse complaints. He and his fellow officers ignore cries of “I can’t breathe,” and keep subduing their target even after he stops moving, unconcerned that he’s being filmed. Five years ago, while sketching the outline for a book about the Garner case called I Can’t Breathe, my editor suggested I take on a larger question.

Why, he asked, do we even have police? After all, the history of policing in our country, especially as it pertains to minority neighborhoods, has always rested upon dubious justifications. The early American police forces evolved out of slave patrols in the South, and “progressed” to enforce the Black Codes from the Civil War period and beyond, on to Jim Crow through the late sixties if not longer. In an explicit way, American policing has almost always been concerned on some level with enforcing racial separatism. Because Jim Crow police were upholding a way of life, the actual laws they were given to enforce were deliberately vague, designed to be easily used as pretexts for controlling the movements of black people.

They were charged with punishing “idleness” or “impudence,” and encouraged to enforce a range of vagrancy laws, including such offenses as “rambling without a job” and “leading an idle, profligate, or immoral course of life.” I ended up not taking on that question, focusing on the hard-enough question of what had led two young, amped-up policemen to choke the life out of a harmless father and street character like Garner. I was more interested in those police than all police, and part of me – the white part, probably – thought the answer to the question of why we need police at all was at least somewhat self-evident.

Read more …

“I mean, the city wouldn’t buy a teacher a pencil and then tell them not to use it, right?

Police Didn’t Spend Millions On Tank Just To Let Protests Stay Peaceful (Onion)

In response to concerns that law enforcement officers were escalating violence in the nationwide George Floyd uprisings, Los Angeles Police Department officials announced Tuesday that they didn’t spend millions on an awesome tank just to let protests stay peaceful. “We got the city to drop, like, $10 million on this sick tank and you expect we’ll just let people stand there chanting?” said LAPD chief Michael Moore, adding there was “no way in hell” that the department would let something like peaceful demonstrations stop them from making use of the vehicle’s “totally tricked-out” weapons system, armor, and ability to ram through virtually everything in its path.


“I mean, the city wouldn’t buy a teacher a pencil and then tell them not to use it, right? This is the kind of hardware you just can’t let sit gathering dust—same with the grenade launchers, drones, and tear gas. We have whole storage bays full of projectiles and we’re supposed to just not use them? Get real. They wouldn’t give us all this killer stuff if we weren’t supposed to have a little fun.” LAPD officials added that the city’s residents deserved to witness the full scope of all the badass shit their tax dollars could do.

Read more …

 

 

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 June 2, 2020  Posted by at 11:19 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  21 Responses »


Harris&Ewing F.W. Grand store, Washington, DC 1925

 

China Delayed Releasing Coronavirus Info, Frustrating WHO (AP)
Distancing And Masks Cut COVID19 Risk – Review (R.)
Why Europe is Irrelevant to Challenging China (Balding)
The Forgotten Coup Against ‘The Most Loyal Ally’ (John Pilger)
That Change You Requested…? (Jim Kunstler)
State, Independent Autopsies Agree On George Floyd Homicide, Not On Cause (R.)
Bellingcat: Russians Didn’t Kill George Floyd, But Are Still Bad (RT)
In Appellate Brief, DOJ Unloads On Behavior Of Judge In Flynn Case (Davis)
Julian Assange Too Unwell To Attend Court Hearing (CW)

 

 

Hardware problems this morning, my Chrome on MacBook started crashing and kept on doing it. Figured out it was due to Zerohedge’s ad settings conflicting with that set-up. Will look at the site in Forefox now. Cost a lot of time though.

Thanks for your support for our homeless project in Athens. Some of you are so generous it’s absolutely humbling.

 

 

Brazil overtakes the US for largest COVID-19 growth in the past week.

1 week of NEW cases:
Brazil: 151,600+
US: 144,000+
Russia: 61,400+
India: 51,600+
Peru: 44,500+
Chile: 31,100+

 

 

 

Cases 6,394,316 (+ 106,140 from Saturday’s 6,288,176)

Deaths 377,966 (+ 3,372 from Saturday’s 374,327)

 

 

 

Note: I dropped the SCMP graph, it doesn’t appear very relevant anymore.

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

 

 

From Worldometer:

 

 

From COVID19Info.live:

 

 

 

 

 

 

On January 14, China’s no. 1 health official ordered the country to prepare for a pandemic. Only 8 weeks later did teh WHO declare a pandemic. Explanation?!

“On Jan. 13, WHO announced that Thailand had a confirmed case of the virus, jolting Chinese officials. The next day, in a confidential teleconference, China’s top health official ordered the country to prepare for a pandemic, calling the outbreak the “most severe challenge since SARS in 2003”..”

[..] “On Jan. 22, WHO convened an independent committee to determine whether to declare a global health emergency. After two inconclusive meetings where experts were split, they decided against it — even as Chinese officials ordered Wuhan sealed in the biggest quarantine in history. The next day, WHO chief Tedros publicly described the spread of the new coronavirus in China as “limited.“

China Delayed Releasing Coronavirus Info, Frustrating WHO (AP)

Throughout January, the World Health Organization publicly praised China for what it called a speedy response to the new coronavirus. It repeatedly thanked the Chinese government for sharing the genetic map of the virus “immediately,” and said its work and commitment to transparency were “very impressive, and beyond words.” But behind the scenes, it was a much different story, one of significant delays by China and considerable frustration among WHO officials over not getting the information they needed to fight the spread of the deadly virus, The Associated Press has found. Despite the plaudits, China in fact sat on releasing the genetic map, or genome, of the virus for more than a week after three different government labs had fully decoded the information.

Tight controls on information and competition within the Chinese public health system were to blame, according to dozens of interviews and internal documents. Chinese government labs only released the genome after another lab published it ahead of authorities on a virologist website on Jan. 11. Even then, China stalled for at least two weeks more on providing WHO with detailed data on patients and cases, according to recordings of internal meetings held by the U.N. health agency through January — all at a time when the outbreak arguably might have been dramatically slowed. WHO officials were lauding China in public because they wanted to coax more information out of the government, the recordings obtained by the AP suggest.

Privately, they complained in meetings the week of Jan. 6 that China was not sharing enough data to assess how effectively the virus spread between people or what risk it posed to the rest of the world, costing valuable time. “We’re going on very minimal information,” said American epidemiologist Maria Van Kerkhove, now WHO’s technical lead for COVID-19, in one internal meeting. “It’s clearly not enough for you to do proper planning.” “We’re currently at the stage where yes, they’re giving it to us 15 minutes before it appears on CCTV,” said WHO’s top official in China, Dr. Gauden Galea, referring to the state-owned China Central Television, in another meeting. [..] Although international law obliges countries to report information to WHO that could have an impact on public health, the U.N. agency has no enforcement powers and cannot independently investigate epidemics within countries. Instead, it must rely on the cooperation of member states.

[..] “It’s obvious that we could have saved more lives and avoided many, many deaths if China and the WHO had acted faster,” said Ali Mokdad, a professor at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. However, Mokdad and other experts also noted that if WHO had been more confrontational with China, it could have triggered a far worse situation of not getting any information at all. If WHO had pushed too hard, it could even have been kicked out of China, said Adam Kamradt-Scott, a global health professor at the University of Sydney. But he added that a delay of just a few days in releasing genetic sequences can be critical in an outbreak. And he noted that as Beijing’s lack of transparency becomes even clearer, WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus’s continued defense of China is problematic.

“It’s definitely damaged WHO’s credibility,” said Kamradt-Scott. “Did he go too far? I think the evidence on that is clear….it has led to so many questions about the relationship between China and WHO. It is perhaps a cautionary tale.”

Read more …

Because there are idiots who’d want to contest it. The sky is not blue.

Distancing And Masks Cut COVID19 Risk – Review (R.)

Keeping at least one metre apart and wearing face masks and eye protection are the best ways to cut the risk of COVID-19 infection, according to the largest review to date of studies on coronavirus disease transmission. In a review that pooled evidence from 172 studies in 16 countries, researchers found frequent handwashing and good hygiene are also critical – though even all those measures combined can not give full protection. The findings, published in The Lancet journal on Monday, will help guide governments and health agencies, some of whom have given conflicting advice on measures, largely because of limited information about COVID-19.


“Our findings are the first to synthesise all direct information on COVID-19, SARS, and MERS, and provide the currently best available evidence on the optimum use of these common and simple interventions to help ‘flatten the curve’”, said Holger Schünemann from McMaster University in Canada, who co-led the research. Current evidence suggests COVID-19 is most commonly spread by droplets, especially when people cough, and infects by entering through the eyes, nose and mouth, either directly or via contaminated surfaces. For this analysis, an international research team conducted a systematic review of 172 studies assessing distance measures, face masks and eye protection to prevent transmission of three diseases caused by coronaviruses – COVID-19, SARS and MERS.

Read more …

“..other than rubber rafts and unused vacation time, Europe can and will contribute nothing to Indo Pacific focused institutions, policies, and security strategies. The US should not be bound by historical alliances to fight different security threats and economic objectives.”

Why Europe is Irrelevant to Challenging China (Balding)

One of the most widely watched geopolitical events is how will Europe respond to Chinese aggression from the national security law in Hong Kong to the invasion of India as well as a range of other events. Given that many have built a counter Trump foreign policy contingent upon attracting European allies to confront China, the importance of Europe in the unfolding geopolitical tragedy becomes even more important. The only problem with the Old World obsession? Europe is almost entirely irrelevant to the China problem. America has a European obsession. Coming out of a post World War II geopolitical environment there is good reason why that was the focus of resource allocation.

This resulted in significant work that focused on the trans Atlantic relationship from bilateral and multilateral alliances and institutions to economic and security relationships that built the post war world. In a post war world, rebuilding Europe rapidly and building alliances to confront the Soviet Union was tantamount. This formed the foundation for the post war institutional and alliance order. However, even beyond the broader institutional and alliance focus many in America looked to Europe as a natural ally that shared the same values but also behaved differently acting as a type of moderating influence on US foreign policy. They preferred to highlight different policy domains like the environment and human rights. They focused on institution building whether it was the European Union or whether it was NATO and post 1989 institutions.

This endeared them to many foreign policy wonks in the United States who admired European sensibilities. However, these threads of foreign policy and institutional alliances also overlooked key problems. First, much of this European cooperation flowed from the need to solve uniquely European centric problems. Whether the NATO security alliance facing the USSR to the United Nations Security Council with the two major victorious European powers as members or receiving financial benefits to rebuild Europe, enormous amounts of the cooperation involved European centric or adjacent needs, alliances, and institutions. In a post WWII world this is not a major problem. In a 2020 Asia focused threat theater, this is a problem.

Read more …

Australia went from being a loyal vassal in one empire to the same in the next. A country without an identity or an opinion.

The Forgotten Coup Against ‘The Most Loyal Ally’ (John Pilger)

The Australian High Court has ruled that correspondence between the Queen and the Governor-General of Australia, her viceroy in the former British colony, is no longer “personal” and the property of Buckingham Palace. Why does this matter? Secret letters written in 1975 by the Queen and her man in Canberra, Sir John Kerr, can now be released by the National Archives. Kerr infamously sacked the reformist government of the prime minister, Gough Whitlam, and delivered Australia into the hands of the United States. Today, Australia is a vassal state bar none: its politics, intelligence agencies, military and much of its media are integrated into Washington’s “sphere of dominance” and war plans. In Donald Trump’s current provocations of China, the U.S. bases in Australia are described as the “tip of the spear”.

There is an historical amnesia among Australia’s polite society about the catastrophic events of 1975. An Anglo-American coup overthrew a democratically elected ally in a demeaning scandal in which sections of the Australian elite colluded. This is largely unmentionable. The stamina and achievement of the Australian historian Jenny Hocking in forcing the High Court’s decision are exceptional. Gough Whitlam was driven from government on Nov. 11, 1975. When he died six years ago, his achievements were recognised, if grudgingly, his mistakes noted in false sorrow. The truth of the coup against him, it was hoped, would be buried with him. During the Whitlam years, 1972-75, Australia briefly achieved independence and became intolerably progressive.

The last Australian troops were ordered home from their mercenary service to the American assault on Vietnam. Whitlam’s ministers publicly condemned U.S. barbarities as “mass murder” and the crimes of “maniacs”. The Nixon administration was corrupt, said the Deputy Prime Minister, Jim Cairns, and called for a boycott of American trade. In response, Australian dockers refused to unload American ships. Whitlam moved Australia towards the Non-Aligned Movement and called for a Zone of Peace in the Indian ocean, which the U.S. and Britain opposed. He demanded France cease its nuclear testing in the Pacific. In the UN, Australia spoke up for the Palestinians. Refugees fleeing the CIA-engineered coup in Chile were welcomed into Australia.

Read more …

“..it’s not just black people who struggle to thrive in the USA, but everybody else of any ethnic group who is not a hedge fund veep, an employee of BlackRock Financial, or a K-Street lobbyist..”

That Change You Requested…? (Jim Kunstler)

The nation was already reeling from the weird twelve-week Covid-19 lockdown of everyday life and the economic havoc it brought to careers, businesses, and incomes. In Minnesota, the stay-at-home order was just lifted on May 17, but bars and restaurants were still closed until June. Memorial Day, May 25, was one of the first really balmy days of mid-spring, 78 degrees. People were out-and-about, perhaps even feeling frisky after weeks of dreary seclusion. So, once the video of George Floyd’s death got out, the script was set: take it to the streets!

Few Americans were unsympathetic to the protest marches that followed. Remorse, censure, and tears flowed from every official portal, from the mouth and eyes of every political figure in the land. The tableau of Officer Chauvin’s knee on Mr. Floyd’s neck was readymade for statuary. Indeed, there are probably dozens of statues extant in the world of just such a scene expressing one people’s oppression over another. And yet the public sentiments early-on after the George Floyd killing had a stale, ceremonial flavor: The people demand change! End systemic racism! No justice, no peace! How many times have we seen this movie?

What is changing — and suddenly — is that now it’s not just black people who struggle to thrive in the USA, but everybody else of any ethnic group who is not a hedge fund veep, an employee of BlackRock Financial, or a K-Street lobbyist — and even those privileged characters may find themselves in reduced circumstances before long. The prospects of young adults look grimmest of all. They face an economy so disordered that hardly anyone can find something to do that pays enough to support the basics of life, on top of being swindled by the false promises of higher education and the money-lending racket that animates it. So, it’s not surprising that, when night falls, the demons come out.

Things get smashed up and burned down. And all that after being cooped up for weeks on end in the name of an illness that mostly kills people in nursing homes. Ugly as the ANTIFA movement is, it’s exactly what you get when young people realize their future has been stolen from them. Or, more literally, when they are idle and broke and see fabulous wealth all around them in the banks’ glass skyscrapers, and the car showrooms, and the pageants of celebrity fame and fortune on the boob tube. They are extras in a new movie called The Fourth Turning Meets the Long Emergency but they may not know it.

Read more …

The Hennepin County Medical Examiner tried to get away with “no strangulation”, didn’t expect to be corrected.

State, Independent Autopsies Agree On George Floyd Homicide, Not On Cause (R.)

The medical examiner’s finding that the death was a homicide confirms the same conclusion of the independent autopsy that was also released on Monday, but there are key differences over the cause. A press release from the Hennepin County Medical Examiner said that Floyd, who struggled to breathe as an officer pinned him down by kneeling on his neck, had “recent methamphetamine use” and “fentanyl intoxication” – along with hypertension and coronary artery disease – all of which were possible contributing factors to his death. But two doctors who carried out that independent autopsy of Floyd, 46, and two attorneys for the family said that he had no underlying health conditions that may have contributed to his death.

They argued that not only the officer who was kneeing Floyd’s neck killed him, but also two officers who were pressing their weight onto Floyd’s back while he was on the ground. They added that they did not have information on toxicology and any drug or alcohol use by Floyd. Dr. Allecia Wilson of the University of Michigan, one of the two forensic doctors who performed the independent autopsy, said the evidence pointed to homicide by “mechanical asphyxia” meaning from some physical force that interfered with oxygen supply. While the county’s full autopsy report has not yet been released – Monday’s press release appeared to show authorities walked back their conclusions on what killed Floyd.

The original criminal complaint against the police officer who pinned Floyd with his knee cited the medical examiner’s office when it said it found no findings of strangulation. Carolyn Marinan, a spokeswoman for Hennepin County, did not confirm any reversal, saying only that Monday’s press release were the “final findings.”

Read more …

“Your ‘expose’ is multiplying the stupidity in the world.”

Bellingcat: Russians Didn’t Kill George Floyd, But Are Still Bad (RT)

Bellingcat, the UK-based enablers of Western narratives in Syria and Ukraine now fueling US race riots, selectively translated a satirical post from Russian social media shared by RT’s editor-in-chief to get her “canceled.”
On Sunday, Margarita Simonyan shared a Telegram post by Dmitry Steshin, a war correspondent for the newspaper KP, which purported to give “advice” to rioters in the US on how to make their uprising more “successful” along the lines of the 2014 US-backed coup in Ukraine. Given that the post was entirely in Russian, it was obvious that the real objective of Steshin – and Simonyan – was to comment on the Maidan uprising in Kiev and the ensuing war in Ukraine. Not so, declared the self-proclaimed experts on “open-source” intelligence.

Bellingcat selectively translated a handful of sentences from Steshin’s post and accused Simonyan of – what else? – racism. “Bellingcat accusing me of racism for a repost that used the Russian word for a black person is as baseless as me accusing Bellingcat of racism for calling me Russian, and not Armenian (I am both),” Simonyan said in response to the accusations. RT also responded to Bellingcat on Twitter, pointing out that they “missed the point” of the Telegram post, which was not aimed at black protesters in 2020, but satirized the 2014 Ukrainian unrest. Indeed, Simonyan’s post starts with “good advice to black people of Minnesota from a journalist who covered seven Maidans and color revolutions” – referring to US-backed astroturfed protests that often escalated into riots for the purpose of regime change.

Being in Russian, though, the advice was clearly not meant for Minnesotans. While Steshin’s post might have used rough language, “humor norms vary by country. More so in countries not dealing with [the] burden of once being such enthusiastic African slave traders,” RT noted in a retort to Bellingcat. [..] It needs to be said that the declaration by Bellingcat’s founder Eliot Higgins that “Russia is behind the killing of George Floyd to provoke protests and riots” is a stupid take. It’s also a straw man, because even the media outlets stoking the riots only talk of some “Russian playbook” and sowing discord, and other such vague and unprovable insinuations, just as they’ve done for years with ‘Russiagate.’

Read more …

The court’s deadline for Sullivan to explain his ruling was yesterday. Did he comply?

In Appellate Brief, DOJ Unloads On Behavior Of Judge In Flynn Case (Davis)

The Department of Justice on Monday unloaded on the antics of the rogue federal judge overseeing the Michael Flynn trial, accusing him of usurping the constitutional authority of the executive branch to make prosecutorial decisions and ignoring both statutory law and federal court precedent requiring him to dismiss the case against Flynn. After Judge Emmet G. Sullivan refused to grant the unopposed DOJ motion to dismiss the charges against Flynn after the government unearthed and relevant reams of evidence that the government had abused its power and unlawfully targeted Flynn, Flynn’s attorney Sidney Powell filed a writ of mandamus with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia asking it to order the trial court to dismiss the charges against Flynn.

The appellate court ordered Sullivan to respond by close of business on June 1 and invited DOJ to file its own response as well. [..] Sullivan, who at one point accused Flynn, a decorated military combat veteran, of being a traitor to his country, refused to dismiss the charges and instead appointed John Gleeson, a former federal judge, to make arguments to the court about why the unopposed motion to dismiss charges should be denied. Days before Gleeson was appointed by Sullivan, Gleeson co-authored a Washington Post column calling on Sullivan to deny DOJ’s motion to dismiss the Flynn charges. Sullivan also asked Gleeson to provide the trial court with arguments to support new charges of perjury against Flynn.

“The failure to dismiss the indictment was error,” DOJ wrote in its brief. “And the court’s efforts to pursue additional charges of contempt compounded its error.” “When, like many other defendants, petitioner pleaded guilty but later asserted his innocence, he did not expose himself to prosecution for criminal contempt of court,” Francisco and the other DOJ attorneys noted. “The court lacks authority to bring its own prosecution of petitioner, for two independent reasons.”

Read more …

But the judge simply claims Julian refused to attend. She needs to be excused.

Julian Assange Too Unwell To Attend Court Hearing (CW)

Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, was too unwell to attend a court hearing by video link today at Westminster Magistrates’ Court. Assange’s lawyer, Edward Fitzgerald QC, told the court that his client had had respiratory problems for some time. The WikiLeaks founder faces 17 charges under the 1917 Espionage Act after WikiLeaks published a series of leaks from Chelsea Manning, a former US Army soldier turned whistleblower, in 2010-11. The 48-year-old faces a further charge of conspiracy to commit computer intrusion. The charges, filed in an indictment by the Easter District of Virginia, carry a maximum sentence of 175 years. Observers and journalists dialled in to a short court hearing at Westminster Magistrates’ Court, but frequently had difficulty hearing what the lawyers and judge were saying over noises on the line.

According to one journalist present at the court, district judge Vanessa Baraitser said the court had received an email from Belmarsh Prison, saying Assange was “refusing to attend the hearing and refusing to sign a refusal form”. Fitzgerald told the judge that Assange’s solicitor, Gareth Peirce, had sent the court an email on Friday explaining that Assange was unwell with respiratory problems, 7 News reported. The judge said she had hoped to provide the name of the crown court that could hear Assange’s extradition case today, but said she was still waiting for confirmation of the venue. The court heard that the prosecution had been unable to complete a psychiatric report on Assange because a medical expert had been unable to gain access to Belmarsh Prison during the lockdown.

The judge gave the prosecution a deadline of 31 July to produce the psychiatric report on Assange. James Lewis for the prosecution said the defence had served new evidence that would need to be examined to determine admissibility. The judge ordered the prosecution to present a new skeleton argument to the court on 25 August, with the defence skeleton argument due on 1 September, 7 News reported. The next scheduled hearing will take place on 29 June, and a full three-week hearing is due to start on 7 September. In a separate development, 36 members of the European Parliament have called for Assange to be released from Belmarsh on press freedom and humanitarian grounds.

Read more …

 

 

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https://twitter.com/i/status/1267628157168783363

 

 

 

 

https://twitter.com/_youhadonejob1/status/1267696839073116162

 

 

“Only A Pawn In Their Game”
March on Washington
August 28, 1963


 

 

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Jun 012020
 


Christo & Jeanne Claude The Gates, Central Park NYC 2005 (Christo died yesterday at 84)

 

 

New Coronavirus Losing Potency, Top Italian Doctor Says (R.)
Russia To Roll Out ‘Game Changer’ COVID19 Drug Next Week (R.)
UK Has One Of Highest COVID19-Related Excess Deaths Levels In Europe (G.)
Health Officials Make Last-Minute Plea To Stop Lockdown Easing In England (G.)
It’s The Virus, Stupid! (AHEB)
Australia’s Stalled Migrant Boom Derails Golden Economic Run (R.)
Asia Stocks Hit 3-Month Peaks, Resilient To US Rioting (R.)
Asia’s Factory Pain Worsens As China’s Recovery Fails To Lift Demand (R.)
The Stunning Chart That Blows Up All Of Modern Central Banking (ZH)
FBI’s Top Lawyer Resigns As Agency Faces Pressure From Trump (R.)

 

 

The riots have completely taken over the -US- news cycle from COVID19, to such an extent that I don’t really know what to add to it. Only perhaps to say there is an enormous amount of brutal videos circling around, more than on any topic ever before, and there’s no way that doesn’t influence people on all sides.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Counted from Saturday, since there was no Debt Rattle yesterday:

Cases 6,288,176 (+ 233,399 from Saturday’s 6,054,777)

Deaths 374,327(+ 7,039 from Saturday’s 367,288)

 

 

 

Note: I dropped the SCMP graph, it doesn’t appear very useful anymore.

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

 

 

From Worldometer:

 

 

From COVID19Info.live:

 

 

 

 

Would be good news, but this sounds a little goal-seeked.

New Coronavirus Losing Potency, Top Italian Doctor Says (R.)

The new coronavirus is losing its potency and has become much less lethal, a senior Italian doctor said on Sunday. “In reality, the virus clinically no longer exists in Italy,” said Alberto Zangrillo, the head of the San Raffaele Hospital in Milan in the northern region of Lombardy, which has borne the brunt of Italy’s coronavirus contagion. “The swabs that were performed over the last 10 days showed a viral load in quantitative terms that was absolutely infinitesimal compared to the ones carried out a month or two months ago,” he told RAI television. Italy has the third highest death toll in the world from COVID-19, with 33,415 people dying since the outbreak came to light on Feb. 21. It has the sixth highest global tally of cases at 233,019.

However new infections and fatalities have fallen steadily in May and the country is unwinding some of the most rigid lockdown restrictions introduced anywhere on the continent. Zangrillo said some experts were too alarmist about the prospect of a second wave of infections and politicians needed to take into account the new reality. “We’ve got to get back to being a normal country,” he said. “Someone has to take responsibility for terrorizing the country.” The government urged caution, saying it was far too soon to claim victory. “Pending scientific evidence to support the thesis that the virus has disappeared … I would invite those who say they are sure of it not to confuse Italians,” Sandra Zampa, an undersecretary at the health ministry, said in a statement.


“We should instead invite Italians to maintain the maximum caution, maintain physical distancing, avoid large groups, to frequently wash their hands and to wear masks.” A second doctor from northern Italy told the national ANSA news agency that he was also seeing the coronavirus weaken. “The strength the virus had two months ago is not the same strength it has today,” said Matteo Bassetti, head of the infectious diseases clinic at the San Martino hospital in the city of Genoa. “It is clear that today the COVID-19 disease is different.”

Read more …

A bit better than remdesivir (which is not hard), and worse than HCQ?! What game is it that will be changed?

Russia To Roll Out ‘Game Changer’ COVID19 Drug Next Week (R.)

Russia will start administering its first approved antiviral drug to treat coronavirus patients next week, its state financial backer told Reuters, a move it described as “a game changer” that should speed a return to normal economic life. Russian hospitals can begin giving the drug to patients from June 11, with enough to treat around 60,000 people per month, the head of Russia’s RDIF sovereign wealth fund told Reuters in an interview. There is currently no approved vaccine for the highly contagious and sometimes fatal illness and no consensus within the global scientific community about the efficacy of medication such as the Russian modified antiviral drug.

Registered under the name Avifavir, it is the first potential coronavirus treatment to be approved by Russia’s health ministry, however. It appeared on a government list of approved drugs on Saturday after clinical trials. RDIF head Kirill Dmitriev said clinical trials involved 330 people and showed that the drug successfully treated the virus in most cases within four days. Trials were due to be concluded in around a week, he said, and more would be conducted. The health ministry had given its approval for the drug’s use under a special accelerated process and manufacturing had begun in March, he added. “We believe this is a game changer. It will reduce strain on the healthcare system, we’ll have fewer people getting into a critical condition, and for 90% of people it eliminates the virus within 10 days,” he said.

“We believe that the drug is key to resuming full economic activity in Russia. People need to follow social distancing rules, and of course we need to have a vaccine, but it’s a combination of those three levers.” With 405,843 cases, Russia has the third highest number of infections in the world after Brazil and the United States, though with 4,693 official deaths, a much lower fatality rate, something that has been the focus of debate. Dmitriev said the new drug, which comes in tablet form, would allow people to spend less time in hospital and reduce the time they are contagious, saying the drug had few side-effects but was not suitable for pregnant women. It was particularly effective, he said, for patients suffering from mild or mid-level symptoms.

[..] Avifavir, known generically as favipiravir, was first developed in the late 1990s by a Japanese company later bought by Fujifilm as it moved into healthcare. The drug works by short-circuiting the reproduction mechanism of certain RNA viruses such as influenza. Russian specialists modified the generic drug to enhance its efficacy for treating COVID-19 [..]

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Excess deaths may be the best, if not only, way to get an accurate fatality number for COVID19.

UK Has One Of Highest COVID19-Related Excess Deaths Levels In Europe (G.)

Britain’s excess death toll at the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic was the highest among 11 countries analysed by the Guardian. The UK had the biggest spike among countries including Sweden, France, Germany and Spain. At its peak the UK death toll was more than double that of an average week, at 109%, compared with Spain’s peak in week 14 where the death toll was double the average at 100%. By week 20 of 2020 the UK death toll – inclusive of both Covid-related and non-Covid deaths – was 21% higher than the average of recent years meaning, for every five deaths that occur in the UK in a normal year, six people have died this year to date.

Excess deaths are those above what we might expect to see in normal circumstances. The figure is the difference in the number of people who have died in a given week compared with the average number of deaths that occurred in the same period in the previous five years. Italy and the Netherlands also have excess deaths of 10% or more so far this year according to the latest data, although the data for those countries is not as up to date as that for the UK. Patterns in the data show countries that locked down earlier tended to have fewer deaths. Austria, which imposed strict containment measures on 16 March, when there was just one death attributed to Covid-19 in the country, recorded a peak in excess deaths of 14%.


By contrast, the Netherlands waited until its excess deaths were already 17% higher than usual before locking down, and at its peak the death toll was 74% above average. The data also shows that in Sweden, which has adopted a different approach with no lockdown in place, excess deaths peaked at 46%. The figures come from mortality statistics gathered by the Guardian. Not all of the deaths are directly attributable to Covid-19 but the figures indicate how many people have died directly and indirectly as a result of the virus in different countries.

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That cat’s out of the bag. Too late.

Health Officials Make Last-Minute Plea To Stop Lockdown Easing In England (G.)

Senior public health officials have made a last-minute plea for ministers to scrap Monday’s easing of the coronavirus lockdown in England, warning the country is unprepared to deal with any surge in infection and that public resolve to take steps to limit transmisson has been eroded. The Association of Directors of Public Health (ADPH) said new rules, including allowing groups of up to six people to meet outdoors and in private gardens, were “not supported by the science” and that pictures of crowded beaches and beauty spots over the weekend showed “the public is not keeping to social distancing as it was”.

On Saturday and Sunday, parks and seafronts were packed as people anticipated the lifting of restrictions on what has been dubbed “happy Monday”. Car showrooms and outdoor markets will also be reopened, millions of children will return to primary schools and the most vulnerable “shielded” people will be allowed out for the first time since lockdown began in March, all as long as physical distancing is maintained. But Jeanelle de Gruchy, president of the ADPH, said her colleagues across England were “increasingly concerned that the government is misjudging the balance of risk between more social interaction and the risk of a resurgence of the virus, and is easing too many restrictions too quickly”.


They have called on ministers to postpone the easing of restrictions until more is known about the infection rate, the test-and-trace system is better established and public resolve to maintain physical distancing and hygiene can be reinforced. “We have not spoken out in this way before,” De Gruchy said, “but we are concerned that if there is a spike it will be in our communities. We need to be confident we can get on top of it, and we are not confident yet.”

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Awful headline for a reasonable piece.

It’s The Virus, Stupid! (AHEB)

Many economists expressed disbelief after glancing at recent economic statistics. Since the arrival of the virus and the subsequent lockdowns we have observed a never-before-seen decline in production and consumption. In the UK alone, millions of jobs are at risk immediately. The IMF estimated that, for the UK, the expected economic growth this year will turn into a contraction of 6.5%. It was only the day after the presentation of this forecast when Kristalina Georgieva, the director of the IMF, said that the predictions had been overly positive. Globally, it is predicted that many hundreds of millions of people will fall back below the poverty line. The bad news just doesn’t seem to stop. And what for? To keep a virus in check.

A virus that will cause more death than a serious flu, but that does much less damage to health compared to other diseases like cancer or cardiovascular disease. Assuming an infection mortality risk of 1%, group immunity at 70% and 10 years of life lost per death, we arrive at an average loss of life expectancy of one month for the average UK person. This is in sharp contrast to, for example, the 2 to 3 years with which cancer shortens the life of the average UK person. Some economists read these numbers and conclude that the lockdown has to end immediately. That is understandable at first. The costs per year of life saved are higher than we are willing to spend on regular care. The difference is at least a factor 2, and probably much more. If we weren’t prepared to make such sacrifices for an extra year of life before, why now?


The comparison is flawed. While we can lift the lockdown, we cannot return to normality. If we assume 25% of the UK population is at risk, then 17 million people belong to one of the risk groups. For them, the virus is usually not fatal, but not safe either. Many of these people are likely to adopt a risk-averse position. The risks for the rest of the population are limited. However, they too will likely be cautious, as almost all of them are in direct contact with people from the risk groups. This raises the question to what extent the economic damage is caused by the lockdown or by the virus itself. The way to find out is to lift the lockdown in some regions and continue in others. Obviously, such an experiment will not be allowed because of the ethical aspects.

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We import oil and rich people.

Australia’s Stalled Migrant Boom Derails Golden Economic Run (R.)

Australia’s three decades of uninterrupted prosperity are coming to an abrupt end as the global coronavirus pandemic crashes one of its most lucrative sources of income – immigration. The country has been successful in managing the outbreak and reopening its A$2 trillion ($1.33 trillion) economy, thanks in part to an early closure of its borders. But the policy has led to a halt in mass immigration – a key source of consumer demand, labour and growth – in an economy which is facing its first recession since the early 1990s. Net immigration, including international students and those on skilled worker visas, is expected to fall 85% in the fiscal year to June 2021, curbing demand for everything from cars and property to education and wedding rings.


Gurmeet Tuli, who owns a jewellery store in the Sydney suburb of Parramatta, said his business is already hurting in a neighbourhood which is home to tens of thousands of migrants. “My main clientele is young people who come here to study, they find work here and settle down, fall in love and want to get married,” Tuli said. “I have not sold a single diamond ring in the past two months,” he added, noting business is down about 40% so far this year. So critical is migration to Australia that analysts reckon the economy would have slipped into a recession last year without new arrivals to boost population growth.

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That’s not terribly interesting…

Asia Stocks Hit 3-Month Peaks, Resilient To US Rioting (R.)

Asian shares pushed to three-month highs on Monday as progress on opening up economies helped offset jitters over riots in U.S. cities and unease over Washington’s power struggle with Beijing. There was also relief that while President Donald Trump began the process of ending special U.S. treatment for Hong Kong to punish China, he left their trade deal intact. “With specific and verifiable measures against China appearing to be weak, markets may draw hollow consolation that the U.S. is treading carefully,” said analysts at Mizuho in a note.

After a cautious start Asian markets were led higher by China on signs parts of the domestic economy were picking up. Hong Kong .HSI managed to rally 3.6%, while Chinese blue chips put on 2.4%. An official business survey from China showed its factory activity grew at a slower pace in May but momentum in the services and construction sectors quickened. A private survey showed a return to growth in May, though exports remained depressed. That helped lift MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan 2.1% to its highest since early March. Japan’s Nikkei added 0.7% to also reach a three-month peak.


[..] The resilience was notable given major U.S. cities were cleaning up streets strewn with broken glass and burned out cars as curfews failed to stop confrontations between activists and law enforcement. The turmoil was a fresh setback for the economy which was only just emerging from a downturn akin to the Great Depression. Following poor data on spending and trade out on Friday, the Atlanta Federal Reserve estimated economic output could drop a staggering 51% annualised in the second quarter. The May jobs report due out on Friday is forecast to show the unemployment rate surged to 19.8%, smashing April’s record 14.7%. Payrolls are expected to drop by 7.4 million, on top of the 20.5 million jobs lost the previous month.

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… this is far more interesting. Why are stocks “resilient” and hitting peaks as economies plunge?

Asia’s Factory Pain Worsens As China’s Recovery Fails To Lift Demand (R.)

Asia’s factory pain deepened in May as the slump in global trade caused by the coronavirus pandemic worsened, with export powerhouses Japan and South Korea suffering the sharpest declines in business activity in more than a decade. A series of manufacturing surveys released on Monday suggest any rebound in businesses will be some time off, even though China’s factory activity unexpectedly returned to growth in May. China’s Caixin/Markit Manufacturing Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) hit 50.7 last month, marking the highest reading since January as easing of lockdowns allowed companies to get back to work and clear outstanding orders.


But with many of China’s trading partners still restricted, its new export orders remained in contraction, the private business survey showed on Monday. China’s official PMI survey on Sunday showed the recovery in the world’s second-largest economy intact but fragile. Japan’s factory activity shrank at the fastest pace since 2009 in May, a separate private sector survey showed while South Korea also saw manufacturing slump at the sharpest pace in more than a decade. [..] Taiwan’s manufacturing activity also fell in May. Vietnam, Malaysia and the Philippines saw PMIs rebound from April, though the indices all remained below the 50-mark threshold that separates contraction from expansion. Official data on Monday showed South Korea extending its exports plunge for a third straight month.

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Japan’s policy for years now hs been to force people to spend. The more -and longer- you do that, the more afraid they get and the less they spend.

Also, as mentioned 1000 times, talking about inflation means zilch unless velocity of money is included. The Deutsche bank graph down below gives that point a lot more perspective.

The Stunning Chart That Blows Up All Of Modern Central Banking (ZH)

[..] amusingly it was all the way back in 2015 that we predicted – correctly in retrospect – just what the monetary endgame is: “fear not: when even “moar” QE and NIRP do not work, and the economists of the ECB admit the “monetary twilight zone” was a disaster, there is one last “tool” they can and will use – helicopters. Because when it comes to printing money, whether in digital reserve format, or physical paper format, there is literally no limit how much can and will be created to achieve what is the endgame of the current monetary dead end: the total destruction of fiat as a store of wealth in order to preserve the global equity tranche while wiping away a few hundred trillion in debt.”


Thanks to covid-19, we have now moved beyond merely the “twilight” and are now in the “helicopter” zone. But what about the relationship between rates and savings, and by extension inflation? After all that is the topic of this post. Well, we can now confirm that our intuition from 2015 that negative rates are not only not inflationary but outright deflationary, and encourage consumers to save even more, was correct all along. Below we post a chart from the latest Research Investment Committee report by BofA titled “Stagnation, stagflation or elevation”, which with just one image blows up everything that is flawed with monetary policy. It shows that while lower rates indeed stimulate spending and lead to lower savings, this effect peaks at around 4% and then goes negative. In fact, the lower yields – and rates – drop below 4% – not to mention to 0% or below – the lower the propensity to spend and the higher the savings rate!

There is another reason why this chart of such epic importance: it confirms what so many have known but were afraid to voice as it ran against decades of flawed economic theory: it demonstrates without a shadow of doubt, that hyper-easy monetary policy is not inflationary but is deflationary. Which is catastrophic for central banks, who publicly state that the only reason they are pursuing ultra easy monetary policy which includes QE and negative rates, is not to goose the market higher (even though by now we all know that’s the real reason) but to stimulate inflation. This is how Bank of America summarizes this stunning observation: As low growth & inflation make low-risk-asset income scarce (e.g. from government bonds), households are forced to reduce consumption and increase savings in order to meet retirement goals. Forced saving further depresses demand in a vicious cycle.


This means that the lower (and more negative) central banks push rates, the lower (not higher) the spending, the higher (not lower) the savings rate, the lower the inflation, the higher the disinflation (or outright deflation), which in turn forces central banks to cut rates even more, to add QE, yield curve control, buy junk bonds, buy ETFs, or pursue any of a host of other monetary policies that are even more devastating to consumer psychology, forcing even more savings, resulting in even more disinflation, causing even more intervention by central banks in what is without doubt the most diabolical feedback loop of modern monetary policy and economics. Said otherwise, monetary easing is deflationary. Let that sink in.

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Not entirely sure what this is. The DOJ supposedly tells the FBI’s top lawyer to leave. And there’s no protest, he just does.

Impossible to see this as something wholly separate from the entire developing issue, for which Susan Rice is an appropriate symbol.

FBI’s Top Lawyer Resigns As Agency Faces Pressure From Trump (R.)

The FBI said on Saturday that its top lawyer, Dana Boente, had announced his resignation as the agency faces scrutiny over its investigations of former staffers and supporters of President Donald Trump. As a senior Justice Department official, Boente was involved in the investigation of Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI. The Justice Department has since asked a judge to drop those charges, arguing that prosecutors should not have brought them in the first place. Trump has repeatedly criticized the FBI for investigating Flynn and other allies.


NBC News, citing two sources, said Boente was asked to resign. Boente held several senior roles at the Justice Department and the FBI over the course of a 38-year career. He briefly served as acting Attorney General in 2017 after Trump fired Sally Yates, who held the job during the first weeks of his presidency. “Few people have served so well in so many critical, high-level roles at the Department,” FBI Director Christopher Wray said in a prepared statement.

Read more …

 

 

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May 302020
 


Edward Hopper Folly Beach, Charleston, South Carolina 1929

 

Protests Spread Nationwide: Minnesota Curfew, White House Locks Down (JTN)
Unsanitized: Social Unrest When There’s Nothing to Lose (Dayen)
Trump Orders His Administration To Begin Eliminating Hong Kong Privileges (R.)
Trump Says US To Withdraw From WHO. Does He Have The Authority To Do It? (NPR)
Twitter Targets Trump Again, Flagging Tweet After Executive Order (SAC)
Coronavirus Sinks US Consumer Spending As Savings Hit Record High (R.)
Investors Eye Consumer Discretionary Stocks As US Reopens (R.)
A Chronicle of a Lost Decade Foretold (Varoufakis )
Malaria Drug And Zinc, The Missing Link (Berry)
Australian Anti-Vaxxers Label COVID19 a ‘Scam’ At Anti-5G Protests (AAP)
States Are Copying & Pasting Immunity Laws For Nursing Home Execs (Sirota)
De Blasio Ramps Up Destruction Of Homeless Encampments (Gothamist)
No One Knows Where Ghislaine Maxwell Is (Esq.)

 

 

The conversation has shifted away from corona for now. Is that a good thing?

Total global cases pass 6 million as daily new cases set another record at 125,511.

New cases past 24 hours in:

• US + 25,069
• Brazil + 30,739
• Russia + 8,952
• UK 4,938
• India + 8,105
• Peru + 6,506
• Chile + 4,654

 

 

 

Cases 6,054,777 (+ 122,597 from yesterday’s 5,932,180)

Deaths 367,288 (+ 4,674 from yesterday’s 362,614)

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

From Worldometer:

 

 

From SCMP:

 

 

From COVID19Info.live:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Two sides prone to violence.

Protests Spread Nationwide: Minnesota Curfew, White House Locks Down (JTN)

The anger over George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis police custody fueled intense protests coast to coast Friday night, as activists ignored a Minnesota curfew to set new fires while the White House temporarily locked down over security concerns just outside its gates. The arrest and murder charges filed earlier in the day against the police officer who allegedly knelt on Floyd’s neck did little to quell a swelling rage that drove protests in cities as diverse as New York and San Jose. In Atlanta, protesters spray-painted sayings and broke windows at CNN’s headquarters while tense officers in Brooklyn borough lined up to keep angry, chanting protesters from straying from street protests toward business.


The Secret Service on Friday evening put the White House on brief lockdown, sheltering reporters inside the press room, as several videos on social media showed unruly protesters outside of the Treasury Department, adjacent to the heavily fortified White House, and large groups of protesters walking from the city’s historically black U Street neighborhood chanting, “No peace, no justice.” The protests started Tuesday in Minneapolis, where weary residents and officers faced a fourth night of violence, rioting and fire setting. The Minnesota governor activated the national guard and a strict curfew for 8 p.m. was imposed in the Twin Cities, but it failed to keep large numbers of protesters from taking to the streets anew.

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“..that’s the same brutality..”

Unsanitized: Social Unrest When There’s Nothing to Lose (Dayen)

There’s a reason that Spike Lee set Do the Right Thing on the hottest day of the year in Brooklyn. The pressure from the heat simmered through the community and created sparks that ignited existing tensions. There was a triggering event, which led to a police chokehold and the death of Radio Raheem, and the destruction of Sal’s Pizzeria. The weather was the backdrop as events played out. That was 1989 and it couldn’t be more relevant right now. The death of George Floyd is obviously unforgivable on its own terms. There doesn’t need to be any context. Unreformed police murder in communities of color has been part of America since well before I was born. I have nothing to comment on about looters—at least eight people sent me this Onion headline, “Protestors Criticized For Looting Businesses Without Forming Private Equity Firm First.” (I guess my reputation precedes me.)

I can’t say anything about the burning of the 3rd police precinct. And I have a lot to say about the great misfortune of having Donald J. Trump in a leadership position during this moment, but most of it would be curse words. Decades of disinvestment and routinized brutality and structural racism created these conditions. The officer who killed George Floyd had enough history of violence alone to contribute mightily to this rage. (And yes, Amy Klobuchar declined to prosecute him and many others for these crimes.) But you cannot separate this outpouring of anger from two months of death, economic collapse, and the disproportionate pain raining down right now on communities of color.

Decades of environmental racism have created toxic vectors for spreading the virus; that’s the same brutality. Minority small business owners have had a harder time securing federal aid, owing to more distant relationships with local banks; that’s the same brutality. African Americans are more likely to be in “essential” jobs and unable to work from home and protect themselves; that’s the same brutality. They’re more likely to be in prisons under perhaps the worst conditions of this crisis; that’s definitely the same brutality. “Black Americans are 80 percent more likely than white people to have diabetes,” which puts them at higher risk from COVID-19; that’s the same brutality. Lack of decent food in communities of color, and access to healthcare, and the ability to rent enough space in shelter to physically distance—this is all brutality against a people, manifested today but going back 400 years.

When you are either out of work or on a hair trigger because you know you’re risking your life by going to work; when your business can’t get a bridge loan and you know everything you worked for is about to be extinguished; when you’re cut off from your friends and neighbors; when your source of sustenance is the food bank; when you have nothing to lose, and then on television you see a black man with his neck wedged between a police officer’s knee and the pavement until he chokes, and you hear he died in police custody after pleading “I can’t breathe,” and you remember how those words were spoken by Eric Garner, and you hear that the man was in custody for using counterfeit money and you don’t think that’s a sufficient reason to kill somebody, and you recall that the Minneapolis Police Department has had a really ugly history with the black community for a long time, and when you exhale a little because the cops involved were fired but then the local prosecutor says this murder of a black man doesn’t merit prosecution… what results from this injustice should meet your expectations.

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It boils down to: how big of a threat is China? Opinionsvary.

Trump Orders His Administration To Begin Eliminating Hong Kong Privileges (R.)

U.S. President Donald Trump said on Friday he was directing his administration to begin the process of eliminating special treatment for Hong Kong, in response to China’s plans to impose new security legislation in the territory. Trump made the announcement at a White House news conference, saying China had broken its word over Hong Kong’s autonomy. He said its move against Hong Kong was a tragedy for the people of Hong Kong, China and the world. “We will take action to revoke Hong Kong’s preferential treatment,” he said, adding that the United States would also impose sanctions on individuals seen as responsible for smothering Hong Kong’s autonomy.


Trump’s move follows Chinese plans to impose new national security legislation on the former British colony. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has said the territory no longer warrants special treatment under U.S. law that has enabled it to remain a global financial center. Trump said he was directing his administration to begin the process of eliminating policy agreements on Hong Kong, ranging from extradition treatment to export controls. He said he would also issue a proclamation on Friday to better safeguard vital university research by suspending the entry of foreign nationals from China identified as potential security risks.

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The WHO has failed/refused to reform the way Trump asked them to.

Trump Says US To Withdraw From WHO. Does He Have The Authority To Do It? (NPR)

President Trump has announced that he is immediately halting the decades-long U.S. membership in the World Health Organization over its response to China’s handling of the coronavirus epidemic. In a press briefing Friday at the White House, Trump said, “We will be today terminating our relationship with the World Health Organization and redirecting those funds to other worldwide and deserving urgent global public health needs.” Trump said the decision came because WHO has “failed to make” reforms the U.S. requested. Last week, Trump sent a letter to WHO’s director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, outlining his views on how the agency favors China and asking the organization to “commit to major substantive improvements within the next 30 days.”

It’s not clear what specific reforms the U.S. has requested, because those discussions have not been made public. Nor did Trump say why he acted on the threat after one week rather than waiting a month. The U.S. was a major force in founding WHO in 1948 and is the organization’s top funder, providing around $450 million a year, according to Trump. The level of funding the U.S. provides to WHO has been a sore spot for Trump, who complained at the briefing that the U.S. pays significantly more than China but does not wield more power in the agency. Global health experts said the president’s choice to leave the global health governing body during a pandemic is a dangerous call.

“This decision is really so short-sighted and ill-advised, and all it does is put American lives at risk,” said Dr. Howard Koh, former assistant secretary for health in the Obama administration and now a professor at Harvard’s T. H. Chan School of Public Health. “I disagree with the president’s decision,” said Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, in a statement after the announcement. “Withdrawing U.S. membership could, among other things, interfere with clinical trials that are essential to the development of vaccines, which citizens of the United States as well as others in the world need. And withdrawing could make it harder to work with other countries to stop viruses before they get to the United States.”

It’s questionable whether the president can make a unilateral decision to withdraw from WHO. “It is an overreach of his constitutional powers,” said Larry Gostin, director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University. Gostin said he believes that the president may need congressional approval to terminate U.S. membership in the U.N. agency. “The only situation where he can do this is if Congress had agreed beforehand to give these powers to the president,” said Kelley Lee, a professor of public health at Simon Fraser University. “It is the role of legal advisers to inform the president on what authority he can exert. He is either not receiving good advice or not listening to it.”

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Thugs, huh?

Twitter Targets Trump Again, Flagging Tweet After Executive Order (SAC)

Twitter flagged and hid a tweet posted by President Donald Trump’s early Friday morning after the president signed an Executive Order challenging the growing political bias in tech companies, whose platforms are meant to be neutral. Trump’s tweet was in response to the growing unrest and rioting in Minnesota, in response to the horrific death of George Floyd while in police custody. Thursday night the situation in Minneapolis escalated again when rioters overran a police precinct, forcing police officers, who were told not to respond by city officials, to evacuate before it was burned to the ground.

Trump signed the Executive Order Thursday aimed at social media giants he says, have been operating as biased publishers rather than platforms for free speech. Trump tweeted that these “THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen. Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!”

The National Guard was sent to assist local authorities in containing the rioting. Earlier the president criticized the city’s mayor, who ordered the evacuation of the precinct saying, “the very weak radical left mayor Jacob Frey” if he didn’t bring the city under control. In response, Twitter flagged the President’s tweet and attached a notice saying “we have placed a public interest notice on this Tweet from @realDonaldTrump.” The tweet is actually hidden from public view but can be viewed if the reader so chooses to click on it. “This Tweet violated the Twitter Rules about glorifying violence,” said Twitter. “However, Twitter has determined that it may be in the public’s interest for the Tweet to remain accessible.”

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Consumer spending is way down. Therefore, savings must be way up? is that so?

Coronavirus Sinks US Consumer Spending As Savings Hit Record High (R.)

U.S. consumers cut spending by the most on record for the second straight month in April while boosting savings to an all-time high, and the growing frugality reinforced expectations the economy could take years to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic. The report from the Commerce Department on Friday also showed an economy highly reliant on the government, with financial aid checks from a historic fiscal package worth nearly $3 trillion driving a record surge in personal income. Together with news that monthly exports collapsed, the report left economists anticipating the largest contraction in gross domestic product in the second quarter since the Great Depression. Data has also been dismal this month on the labor market, manufacturing production and homebuilding.

“Right now, the economy is totally dependent upon the largesse of the government,” said Joel Naroff, chief economist at Naroff Economics in Holland, Pennsylvania. “Will the federal government keep sending out checks or will the household and business welfare payments dry up?” The Commerce Department said consumer spending, which accounts for more than two-thirds of U.S. economic activity, plunged 13.6% last month, the biggest drop since the government started tracking the series in 1959. It eclipsed the previous all-time decrease of 6.9% in March.

[..] Personal income surged a record 10.5% last month. Without the government money, income would have declined 6.3% with business closures pushing wages down 8.0%. The unprecedented economic upheaval saw the saving rate hitting a record 33%. “If the economy reopens quickly without consequence, the millions who lost jobs are hired back and have no reason to fear they will lose their jobs again, these savings represent considerable spending power in the second half,” said Chris Low, chief economist at FHN in New York. “If it takes longer to reopen the economy, these savings will be used for sustenance over the next few months. They will limit the decline, but not fuel a sharp rebound.”

[..] In a second report on Friday, the Commerce Department said goods exports tumbled 25.2% to $95.4 billion in April, a 10-year low. The broad decline in exports was led by a 65.9% collapse in shipments of motor vehicles and parts. That outpaced a 14.3% tumble in imports. As a result, the goods trade deficit widened 7.2% to 69.7 billion last month. The larger goods trade deficit is likely a drag on second GDP, which economists expect could drop at as much as a 40% rate, a pace not seen since the 1930s. The economy contracted at a 5.0% annualized rate last quarter, the deepest pace of decline in GDP since the 2007-09 recession. Consumer spending tumbled at a 6.8% rate, the sharpest drop since the second quarter of 1980.

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Everyone buys Amazon, consumers and investors.

Investors Eye Consumer Discretionary Stocks As US Reopens (R.)

Investors are taking a closer look at the market’s consumer discretionary companies as a reopening U.S. economy fuels hopes of a turnaround for some of the sector’s hardest-hit names. Many companies in the sector have been battered by the country-wide coronavirus-fueled lockdowns that have weighed on growth and damaged retail spending over the last several months, though the stocks of a few, like Amazon, have soared. A gradual lifting of lockdowns in some states has stirred hopes for a bounce back for the retailers that make up much of the sector.Some investors, however, say it may be months before consumers return to their previous shopping habits, making it unlikely that the companies will see a pickup in revenues in the near term.

Firms ranging from middle-income retailers such as Gap Iand American Eagle Outfitters to high-end destinations like Tiffany & Co and Vail Resorts Inc are expected to report results in the week ahead. “This particular group is full of landmines,” said Jamie Cox, managing partner for Harris Financial Group. “There is not going to be a lot of investor follow-through until we get some certainty with what future revenue prospects are going to be.” Shares of the Gap, for instance, are down 43% for the year to date. A recession that persists through the fourth quarter of this year would reduce the company’s revenues by 40%, according to a note by research firm Trefis.

Next Friday’s U.S. jobs report is expected to show that the unemployment rate rose to 19.8% in May, smashing April’s record 14.7%, according to a Reuters poll. Non-farm payrolls are expected to drop by 7.4 million, adding to the 20.5 million jobs lost the previous month. Cox is focusing on dominant players such as Amazon.com Inc, Walmart Inc and Target Corp, which have a mix of essential items such as groceries as well as electronics and games that can appeal to customers who may face extended lockdowns during a potential second wave of the virus. Overall, retail companies in the S&P 500 are up 12.9% for the year to date, a gain powered largely by Amazon’s 31% rally. Apparel companies, by comparison, are down 16.2% over the same time.

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Yanis doesn’t want separate countries, though they are likely the best format in a pandemic. No, he wants globalization, just not the one we know. How practical is that?

A Chronicle of a Lost Decade Foretold (Varoufakis )

To exorcise my worst fears about the coming decade, I chose to write a bleak chronicle of it. If, by December 2030, developments have invalidated it, I hope such dreary prognoses will have played a part by spurring us to appropriate action. Before our pandemic-induced lockdowns, politics seemed to be a game. Political parties behaved like sports teams having good or bad days, scoring points that propelled them up a league table that, at season’s end, determined who would form a government and then do next to nothing. Then, the COVID-19 pandemic stripped away the veneer of indifference to reveal the political reality: some people do have the power to tell the rest of us what to do. Lenin’s description of politics as “who does what to whom” seemed more apt than ever.

By June 2020, as lockdowns began to ease, left-wing optimism that the pandemic would revive state power on behalf of the powerless remained, leading friends to fantasize about a renaissance of the commons and a capacious definition of public goods. Margaret Thatcher, I would remind them, left the British state larger, more powerful, and more concentrated than she had found it. An authoritarian state was necessary to support markets controlled by corporations and banks. Those in authority have never hesitated to harness massive government intervention to the preservation of oligarchic power. Why should a pandemic change that? As a result of COVID-19, the grim reaper almost claimed both the British prime minister and the Prince of Wales, and even Hollywood’s nicest star. But it was the poorer and the browner that the reaper actually did claim. They were easy pickings.

[..] Just as cathedrals were the Middle Ages’ architectural legacy, the 2020s left us tall walls, electrified fences, and flocks of surveillance drones. The nation-state’s revival made the world less open, less prosperous, and less free precisely for those who had always found it hard to travel, to make ends meet, and to speak their minds. For the oligarchs and functionaries of Big Tech, Big Pharma, and other megafirms, who got on famously with the strongmen in authority, globalization proceeded apace.

The myth of the global village gave way to an equilibrium between great-power blocs, each sporting burgeoning militaries, separate supply chains, idiosyncratic autocracies, and class divisions reinforced by new forms of nativism. The new socioeconomic cleavages threw the prevailing features of each country’s politics into sharp relief. Like people who become caricatures of themselves in a crisis, whole countries focused on their collective illusions, exaggerating and cementing pre-existing prejudices.

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Your daily dose of anti-remdesivir.

Malaria Drug And Zinc, The Missing Link (Berry)

Mystery surrounds why an anti-malaria drug is not being tested as a Covid-19 treatment in combination with zinc, which doctors say is crucial for efficacy. As we reported recently, President Trump revealed he was taking hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) alongside zinc after reports that many doctors are doing the same to help ward off Covid-19. Criticism of the President rose sharply after a non-randomised study published in the Lancet said that HCQ provided no benefit to hospitalised Covid-19 patients while being linked to increased deaths. What the mainstream media did not point out is that the Lancet study failed to test HCQ with zinc. Other experts have found zinc to be vital for efficacy in this context.

Zinc, available as an over-the-counter supplement, has long been seen as an immune-system booster that helps develop immune cells, or antibodies, and can strengthen the body’s response to a virus. American infectious disease specialist Joseph Rahimian explained that, in relation to Covid-19, zinc ‘does the heavy lifting and is the primary substance attacking the pathogen’. HCQ is said to work as a delivery systemfor zinc in fighting coronavirus. Ironically, the Lancet study came out at the same time as it was reported that India’s premier health body had expanded use of HCQ as a preventive for key workers following three studies showing positive results.

[..] ..a study by the New York University Grossman School of Medicine published this month [..] found that those receiving the triple-drug combination (HCQ, with azithromycin and, crucially, zinc) ‘were 44 per cent less likely to die, compared with the double-drug combination (i.e. without zinc)’. As the study notes:‘This study provides the first in vivo evidence that zinc sulfate in combination with hydroxychloroquine may play a role in therapeutic management for Covid-19.’ The above makes the question of why zinc was not used in the Lancet study more baffling. And why don’t the media note that the combination of zinc and HCQ is crucial?

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This sounds quite confused. “5G = communism”? Where do we start?

Yeah, 5G should be researched much more before it’s lanuched. But how can it turn COVID19 into a scam?

Australian Anti-Vaxxers Label COVID19 a ‘Scam’ At Anti-5G Protests (AAP)

Hundreds of anti-vaccination protesters have defied social distancing measures at rallies in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne. Protesters claiming the Covid-19 pandemic was a “scam” gathered at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Melbourne on Saturday, and carried signs declaring they were against vaccines and 5G technology. Their placards claimed “5G = communism”, “Covid 1984” and “our ignorance is their strength”. They booed police – clad in gloves and face masks – who warned the crowd that they were breaching social distancing rules designed to slow the spread of coronavirus. In a statement, police said those found in breach of Covid-19 directions faced fines of $1,652 each.


In Sydney, up to 500 protesters voiced conspiracy theories regarding not only vaccination but also 5G telecommunication networks, fluoride and large pharmaceutical corporations. The group convened at Hyde Park in the CBD before holding a singalong of anti-vaccination songs and walking to NSW Parliament House. They chanted “freedom of choice” and “my body, my choice” on the march, with some attempting to raise the spectre of a “new world order”. The walk passed without incident or police intervention. When asked about the protest, Victoria’s chief health officer, Brett Sutton, said “there’s no message that can get through to people who have no belief in science”. “There’s probably no reaching them,” he earlier told reporters.

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Hey, you wanted a for-profit medical system.

States Are Copying & Pasting Immunity Laws For Nursing Home Execs (Sirota)

To date, 19 states have enacted some form of immunity for the hospital and nursing home industries during the pandemic. In general, these new policies shield nurses, doctors and other frontline health care workers from liability when they are treating COVID patients. However, New York, Massachusetts and North Carolina go further: unlike other states, the identical language added to their laws explicitly define health care providers as including “a health care facility administrator, executive, supervisor, board member, trustee” or other corporate managers. That exact word-for-word clause appears in emergency legislation in all three states. In practice, it extends immunity to corporate officials who are not on the medical frontlines, but who are making life-and-death decisions across their companies.


“The new measures granting immunity to health care providers and professionals go well beyond protecting front-line workers from lawsuits — many also provide immunity to administrators who make unreasonable and dangerous, even lethal, decisions,” said Syracuse University law professor Nina Kohn. “New York, Massachusetts, and North Carolina take protection for corporate owners and executives to a whole new level by explicitly granting immunity to board members, trustees, and directors.” “This is extraordinary protection which is in no way in the public interest,” Kohn said. “These states are explicitly and unabashedly giving for-profit corporations and corporate executives the green light to make unreasonable decisions that put vulnerable people in imminent danger, and letting them know that they don’t have to worry about being held legally accountable for the avoidable human damage that results.”

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Teaching the poor another lesson will always trump the pandemic.

De Blasio Ramps Up Destruction Of Homeless Encampments (Gothamist)

Trudi and Rickey Reppi live in a tent on a triangular stretch of sidewalk between three lanes of traffic by the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel. The tent serves as a headquarters of sorts for a community of homeless people and panhandlers. Dave, Rob, Richard, Russia, and Seven all often sleep outside, some on mattresses or chairs, some on cardboard and bundled-up clothing. Others drop by frequently throughout the day, accepting packaged meals Trudi and Rickey had picked up from an aid organization (“Homeless people help each other way more than anyone in these hundred thousand dollar cars ever help us,” Trudi says) or fanning out, cardboard signs in hand, to ask passing drivers for money for hours on end.

The police arrive at about 9 a.m, flanked by outreach and Sanitation workers forming a team of around a dozen city employees. Trudi and Rickey wearily begin the weekly routine of taking down their tent, bundling up all the possessions they can carry, and leaving everything else on the side of the street for the Sanitation workers to throw away. For years, Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration has been sending joint teams of NYPD officers, Sanitation workers, and Department of Homeless Services staff to require that homeless people move from locations where they’ve set up shelter. The number of sweeps (also called “clean-ups”) per week has risen dramatically in the last six months, according to homeless people, advocates and case workers.

A DHS employee, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said that the team implementing the sweeps had increased last November from about 3 to about 40. The employee said that the clean-ups would be increasing to twice a week at most encampments; eventually, he suggested, homeless people would give in and accept shelter. Trudi says that she’s been subject to ten to fifteen sweeps in just the last three months. This count doesn’t include the nightly visits the NYPD has paid her in May, sending as many as nine police officers at 3 a.m. to demand that she take down her tent. “In my administration, we made a decision that from our point of view, it was unacceptable to have [a] single encampment anywhere in New York City and they had to be dismantled anytime they’re identified,” Mayor de Blasio said at a press conference earlier this month.

“And we’ve been doing that now for years and it’s really caused the encampments to become a rarity, but whenever we see a new one, we immediately take it down.” But the Center for Disease Control and Prevention has explicitly recommended against clearing encampments or displacing unsheltered homeless people during the pandemic. “If individual housing options are not available, allow people who are living unsheltered or in encampments to remain where they are,” the guidelines read. “Clearing encampments can cause people to disperse throughout the community and break connections with service providers. This increases the potential for infectious disease spread.”

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The Netflix series on Epstein brings her to our attention again.

Still No One Knows Where Ghislaine Maxwell Is (Esq.)

Though multiple survivors have alleged that Maxwell participated in Epstein’s alleged crimes, she’s never been criminally charged. One thing that could stymie potential efforts to level charges against Maxwell is the infamous 2008 plea deal that Epstein struck with the US Attorney for Miami, Alexander Acosta, which found him serving just 13 months in prison after initially facing charges that could have garnered him a life sentence. Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich producer Joe Berlinger described the deal to Esquire as “unprecedented, unheard of sweetheart deal” that “included a non-prosecution agreement for named and unnamed co-conspirators.”

In April, an appeals court upheld the 2007 deal, writing in its opinion that the decision was “not a result we like, but it’s the result we think the law requires.” Maxwell is currently suing Epstein’s estate for money for her legal fees, and for the price of private security, alleging that her “prior employment relationship” with Epstein has caused to her be subjected to death threats. Though once a fixture of the global high-society, Maxwell has been spotted rarely in recent years. Last summer, she was photographed at a Los Angeles In-N-Out Burger, though the authenticity of the photo has been disputed. Her New York townhouse was sold in 2016.

This month, it was reported that lawyers for accusers seeking to file a civil suit against Maxwell have been unable to locate her. According to ABC news, one alleged victim’s “legal team dispatched process servers to five addresses previously connected to Maxwell, including a multi-million dollar brownstone on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, an apartment building in Miami Beach and Epstein’s mansion on Palm Beach Island.” Maxwell is also contending with other civil lawsuits filed by alleged survivors. Just this month, she won the right to delay her questioning in a suit filed by Annie Farmer, the sister of fellow Epstein accuser Maria Farmer, on the grounds that her testimony could be used against her in a current criminal investigation. But with the FBI allegedly investigating Maxwell, her story could be far from over.

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