David Hockney The Big Tree in Autumn 30 October 2020
Good find: Trump concession speech
Keep in mind, these “cases” are really “positive PCR tests”. The virus is endemic.
• Gottlieb: Number Of New Daily US Covid Cases ‘At Least Half A Million’ (CNBC)
Dr. Scott Gottlieb on Friday offered a dismal assessment of the U.S. coronavirus outbreak, suggesting the real number of new infections per day is more than 500,000 — more than four times the current record of daily new diagnosed Covid-19 cases. That record came Thursday, when 121,888 new infections were reported, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. A day earlier, the country saw its daily case count top 100,000 for the first time ever, part of a trend of record-high daily infections as the country’s epidemic ascends further into its third peak ahead of the holiday season.
“Remember 120,000 cases aren’t 120,000 cases. We’re probably, at best, diagnosing 1 in 5 cases right now, maybe a little bit less than that, so this is at least half a million cases a day, probably more in terms of actual numbers of infection,” Gottlieb said on CNBC’s “Closing Bell.” The situation also is unlikely to improve without targeted interventions to reduce transmission in the hardest-hit states, according to Gottlieb, a former U.S. Food and Drug Administration commissioner under President Donald Trump. “But we’re not doing that right now,” he said. “We’re building up a lot of trouble for the future, and I think that this is going to explode in several weeks.”
“You have to be really worried what January is going to look like, what December is going to look like right now given the way this is rising,” added Gottlieb. The worrisome indicators extend beyond just case counts, Gottlieb said. Hospitalization data is troubling, he said. The average number of people hospitalized with Covid-19 is up by at least 5% in 36 states, according to a CNBC analysis of data from the Covid Tracking Project, which is run by journalists at The Atlantic. [..] In the U.S. overall, more than 53,000 people are currently hospitalized with Covid-19, according to the Covid Tracking Project. More than 10,000 people are in intensive care units, Gottlieb said. “That’s a lot, and it’s growing very quickly.”
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Not sure I follow the entire thing.
• Human Recombinant Soluble ACE2 Shows Promise For Treating Severe COVID19 (Nat.)
ACE2 is a crucial receptor target of SARS-CoV-2, which plays a vital role in the pathogenesis of COVID-19, as it enables viral entry into target cells (Fig. 1). The binding affinity between ACE2 and the receptor-binding domain (RBD) of the SARS-CoV-2 spike glycoprotein is 10- to 20-fold higher compared to that with the RBD of SARS-CoV, which likely underpins the higher pathogenesis of SARS-CoV-2 infections. ACE2 is a transmembrane protein typically known for its carboxypeptidase activity and its physiological role in the renin-angiotensin system. ACE2 hydrolyzes angiotensin II to its metabolite, angiotensin 1–7 and angiotensin I to angiotensin 1–9 to protect diverse tissues from injury (Fig. 1). ACE2 is expressed in several human organs at varying levels. It is highly expressed in the lungs (on the surface of type II alveolar epithelial cells), heart (on myocardial cells, coronary vascular endothelial cells, and vascular smooth muscle), kidney (on proximal tubule cells), and small intestine (on the enterocytes).
While membrane-bound ACE2 may mediate cell entry of SARS-CoV-2, a genetically modified soluble form of ACE2, called hrsACE2, may decrease cell entry of SARS-CoV-2 competing for membrane-bound ACE2. APN001 is a hrsACE2 designed by Apeiron Biologics to imitate the human enzyme ACE2. As such, it may decrease cell entry of SARS-CoV-2 to minimize lung injury, and multiple organ dysfunction (Fig. 1). Experimental support for this theoretical idea has come from in vitro studies showing that hrsACE2 reduces viral growth of SARS-CoV-2 by a factor of 1000–5000 in cell-culture, engineered human blood vessels and kidney organoids.4 To date, hrsACE2 has been documented to be safe and tolerable in 89 healthy volunteers in phase-I studies and patients with acute respiratory distress syndrome in phase-II clinical studies. APN01 as a promising therapeutic against COVID-19 has appealing potential and sound underlying scientific rationale.
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Not surprising.
• Counties With Worst Virus Surges Overwhelmingly Voted Trump (AP)
U.S. voters went to the polls starkly divided on how they see President Donald Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. But in places where the virus is most rampant now, Trump enjoyed enormous support. An Associated Press analysis reveals that in 376 counties with the highest number of new cases per capita, the overwhelming majority — 93% of those counties — went for Trump, a rate above other less severely hit areas. Most were rural counties in Montana, the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa and Wisconsin — the kinds of areas that often have lower rates of adherence to social distancing, mask-wearing and other public health measures, and have been a focal point for much of the latest surge in cases.
Taking note of the contrast, state health officials are pausing for a moment of introspection. Even as they worry about rising numbers of hospitalizations and deaths, they hope to reframe their messages and aim for a reset on public sentiment now that the election is over. “Public health officials need to step back, listen to and understand the people who aren’t taking the same stance” on mask-wearing and other control measures, said Dr. Marcus Plescia of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials. “I think there’s the potential for things to get less charged and divisive,” he said, adding that there’s a chance a retooled public health message might unify Americans around lowering case counts so hospitals won’t get swamped during the winter months.
The electoral divide comes amid an explosion in cases and hospitalizations in the U.S. and globally. The U.S. broke another record in the 7-day rolling average for daily new cases, hitting nearly 90,000. The tally for new cases Thursday was on track for another day above 100,000, with massive numbers reported all around the country, including a combined nearly 25,000 in Texas, Illinois and Florida. Iowa and Indiana each reported more than 4,000 cases as well.
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Weird turnout rates.
• Game-On for the Coup? (Anton)
[..] throughout election day, the president consistently outperformed the polls. He crushed his 2016 performance in Florida. He also outperformed in Iowa, Ohio, South Carolina, and Texas. Senators he was supposed to drag down with him, including Joni Ernst, Lindsey Graham, and Mitch McConnell, won handily. Even Susan Collins, who was supposed to be sure goner and lose by at least three, won by nine. A party that was “certain” to lose the Senate has kept it and gained (so far) six seats in the House. Looking at states no one expected Trump to lose, his overperformance is even more stark. The polling average for West Virginia was Trump +17; he won it by 39. Kansas was estimated at +9; the result was +15.
Throughout the day the president was also outperforming his expected result in key states such as Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. He even, for a time, looked like he was within striking distance in Virginia, a state Hillary Clinton won by five points in 2016. At one point the New York Times’s “meter” had Trump’s chances in North Carolina at 92%. The needle was also sliding in the president’s direction in Arizona and Georgia, among others. And then, suddenly, the counting stopped in at least five states (or parts of states): Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin; all but one with a Democratic governor (coincidence, surely!).
When has that ever happened? Well, it happened in Broward County, Florida, in 2018, when a dodgy Democratic election official appeared to be intervening, illicitly, on her party’s behalf. The process only got back underway when the state’s (Republican) governor intervened and had her removed from the process. But getting back to election night, some time in the wee hours, additional ballots were “found” and added to early totals which had Trump ahead. To no one’s surprise, those votes were overwhelmingly—literally as much as 100% in some batches—for Biden. According to Nate Silver, no one’s idea of a Trumpist, one tranche of 23,277 votes that turned up in Philadelphia were “all for Biden.” Absent some kind of harvesting or fraud (or both), that’s a logical and statistical impossibility.
Through the night, all such ballots came from heavily Democratic areas posting unusually, improbably high turnout. 85% in Milwaukee? A city that turned out at only 61% in 2016, and even with Obama on the ballot in 2012, at 71%? But 85% for Sleepy Joe? According to one report, seven Milwaukee precincts returned more presidential votes than they have registered voters. Turnout in Wisconsin overall is alleged to have been 89.25%, more than five standard deviations for the state’s mean turnout since 1960—another statistical impossibility. [..] Why stop the count? Because that’s the only way to know how many votes you need to “win.” Sure, you can just brute force things by backing up a truck full of ballots. But that looks bad. You might even end up counting more votes than there are registered voters in the state. Better to eke out a narrow win. As Joseph Kennedy, Sr. allegedly said to his second son, “I’m not paying for a landslide.”
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It was all gamed?
• Banana Follies: The Mother Of All Color Revolutions (Escobar)
A gaming exercise of the perfect, indigenous color revolution, code-named Blue, was leaked from a major think tank established in the imperial lands that first designed the color revolution concept. Not all the information disclosed here about the gaming of Blue has been declassified. That may well elicit a harsh response from the Deep State, even as a similar scenario was gamed by an outfit called Transition Integrity Project. Both scenarios should qualify as predictive programming – with the Deep State preparing the general public, in advance, for exactly how things will play out. The standard color revolution playbook rules usually start in the capital city of nation-state X, during an election cycle, with freedom fighting “rebels” enjoying full national and international media support.
Blue concerns a presidential election in the Hegemon. In the gaming exercise, the incumbent president, codenamed Buffoon, was painted Red. The challenger, codenamed Corpse, was painted Blue. Blue – the exercise – went up a notch because, compared to its predecessors, the starting point was not a mere insurgency, but a pandemic. Not any pandemic, but a really serious, bad to the bone global pandemic with an explosive infection fatality rate of less than 1%. By a fortunate coincidence, the lethal pandemic allowed Blue operators to promote mail-in ballots as the safest, socially distant voting procedure. That connected with a rash of polls predicting an all but inevitable Blue win in the election – even a Blue Wave.
The premise is simple: take down the economy and deflate a sitting president whose stated mission is to drive a booming economy. In tandem, convince public opinion that actually getting to the polls is a health hazard. The Blue production committee takes no chances, publicly announcing they would contest any result that contradicts the prepackaged outcome: Blue’s final victory in a quirky, anachronistic, anti-direct democracy body called the “electoral college”. If Red somehow wins, Blue would wait until every vote is counted and duly litigated to every jurisdiction level. Relying on massive media support and social media marketing propelled to saturation levels, Blue proclaims that “under no scenario” Red would be allowed to declare victory.
Election Day comes. Vote counting is running smoothly – mail-in count, election day count, up to the minute tallies – but mostly favoring Red, especially in three states always essential for capturing the presidency. Red is also leading in what is characterized as “swing states”. But then, just as a TV network prematurely calls a supposedly assured Red state for Blue, all vote counting stops before midnight in major urban areas in key swing states under Blue governors, with Red in the lead. Blue operators stop counting to check whether their scenario towards a Blue victory can roll out without bringing in mail-in ballots. Their preferred mechanism is to manufacture the “will of the people” by keeping up an illusion of fairness. Yet they can always rely, as Plan B, on urban mail-in ballots on tap, hot and cold, until Blue squeaks by in two particularly key swing states that Red had bagged in a previous election.
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“Initial Supreme Court order to segregate ballots received after Election Day ignored by Pennsylvania counties, Justice Alito issues SECOND order to segregate and separately count these disputed ballots!”
• Justice Alito Orders Late PA ballots Be Kept Separate (JTN)
Justice Samuel Alito ordered Friday that any Pennsylvania ballots received after 8 p.m. on Election Day must be segregated and kept secure, and they must be counted separately. Election officials were already supposed to be doing that with the late-arriving ballots, but now they are under a Supreme Court order to comply. According to Alito’s Order, “… neither the applicant (PA GOP) nor the Secretary has been able to verify that all boards are complying with the Secretary’s guidance, which, it is alleged, is not legally binding on them.” Alito ordered the state to reply by 2 p.m. on Saturday.
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“47 counties [in Michigan] use this same software in the same capacity..”
• Michigan County Flips Back To Trump After Repair Of Software Glitch (JTN)
An election-software glitch in Michigan’s Antrim County that had incorrectly directed Democratic votes to presidential candidate Joe Biden was fixed Friday, putting thousands of votes correctly into President Trump’s totals. The software had reportedly caused a significant number of votes to be allotted to Biden in a county that has for years been reliably red. In the presumed final count, Biden had originally led in the county by roughly 3,000 votes. Revised totals show that Trump won the county by around 2,500. Addressing the alleged software glitch, Michigan GOP Chairwoman Laura Cox said Friday during a press conference that “47 counties [in Michigan] use this same software in the same capacity.” “These counties that use this software need to closely examine their results for similar discrepancies,” she said.
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Strange number.
• Rate Of Rejected Mail-In Ballots 30 Times Lower In PA Than In 2016 (JTN)
Mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania so far this year have been accepted at almost 30 times the rate predicted by historical rejection numbers, raising potential questions in a state in which Democratic challenger Joe Biden is maintaining a lead of just several thousand votes. A county-by-county review by Just the News of accepted and rejected mail-in ballots throughout the state of Pennsylvania show that, when added up, the state only rejected 951 of 2,614,011 mail-in ballots this year, or a rate of 0.03%. That is significantly less than the historical rate of mail-in ballot rejection, which generally hovers around 1%. For first-time mail-in voters the rate can jump as high as 3%.
In 2016, the state saw about 266,208 mail-in ballots; just under 1% of them, 2,534, were rejected, roughly in line with historical expectations, according to the 2016 Election Administration and Voting Survey. At that historical rate of rejection, around 26,000 mail-in ballots would be rejected from this year’s final Pennsylvania tally. Such numbers would not have been unexpected: Last month, for instance, the Bucks County Courier Times estimated that, based on predicted vote-by-mail turnout, around 28,000 Pennsylvanians might have had their ballots pulled, rather than the 951 that were ultimately dumped.
[..] Voting by mail, unsurprisingly, has a significantly higher rejection rate than voting in person. Voters who use mail-in ballots often make errors such as miswritten forms, non-matching signatures and improper vote tabulation. That number goes up for first-time mail-in voters, with rejected rates among that group sometimes reaching rates as high as 3%. Millions of Americans voted by mail for the first time during the 2020 election, largely out of concerns over the COVID-19 pandemic. In Pennsylvania on Friday afternoon, the race between Democrat Joe Biden and Republican President Donald Trump was razor-thin, with nearly all the ballots counted and Biden leading by around 13,000 votes.
Sidney Powell “software glitches”
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Scorecard, Hammer, Dominion. Powerful tools that warrant much more scrutiny then they get.
• ‘The Hammer’ And ‘Scorecard’: Weapons Of Mass (Vote) Manipulation?
In February 2009, the Obama administration commandeered a powerful supercomputer system known as THE HAMMER. THE HAMMER includes an exploit application known as SCORECARD that is capable of hacking into elections and stealing the vote, according to CIA contractor-turned-whistleblower Dennis Montgomery, who designed and built THE HAMMER. THE WHISTLEBLOWER TAPES, confidential audio recordings released by U.S. DIstrict Judge G. Murray Snow’s courtroom in November 2015, revealed that SCORECARD was deployed by the Obama team against Florida election computers to steal the 2012 presidential election on behalf of President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden.
SCORECARD is now being activated to steal the vote on behalf of Joe Biden once again. Biden utilized THE HAMMER and SCORECARD while running for Vice President in 2012. Votes are again being stolen on Joe Biden’s behalf as he runs for President of the United States in 2020. This time, SCORECARD is stealing votes in Florida, Georgia, Texas, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Nevada, and Arizona, according to Montgomery. SCORECARD steals elections by tampering with the computers at the transfer points of state election computer systems and outside third party election data vaults as votes are being transferred. SCORECARD uses a prismatic scoring algorithm that Montgomery created, to achieve the desired results by those that control THE HAMMER and SCORECARD.
In Florida, one of the transfer points is VR Systems Inc, based in Tallahassee. Software vendor VR Systems operates in eight U.S. states. The Democrats tested their technology during the Democrat party primaries. Otherwise Bernie Sanders would have won the 2020 nomination. SCORECARD was utilized on behalf of Joe Biden during the 2020 primary against Bernie Sanders. The Democrat primary was stolen from Bernie Sanders. CIA whistleblower Dennis Montgomery turned over a massive cache of illegally harvested surveillance and election data in August 2015 and December 2015 to the FBI and CIA under two immunity agreements that were granted to Montgomery by Assistant U.S. Attorney Deborah Curtis and FBI General Counsel James Baker.
Montgomery testified regarding SCORECARD and THE HAMMER while under oath and while being videotaped at the FBI’s secure Washington DC Field Office SCIF (Sensive Compartmented Information Facility). If CIA whistleblower Montgomery had lied about anything he would be in prison today for lying to the FBI. Montgomery is not in prison.
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“..a now lethal loss of faith in the essential fairness of American life and the institutions that were created to insure it.”
• With or Without (Kunstler)
The matrix of interests, parties, and people styling themselves as The Resistance, who tried unsuccessfully to cough up Donald Trump like a hairball for four years, may finally succeed by harvesting the magical crop of mail-in ballots delivered by unicorns in the gathering darkness this post-election week of mathematical wonders. America walked wide-eyed into this signal institutional failure, the one that lowers us to the level of places in the world where the loincloth is a business suit and the only instrument of persuasion is a machete. The Attorney General, Mr. Barr, warned the country months ago in so many words that mail-in voting would invite massive fraud, and so it has gone, but exactly as predicted, in plain sight, shamelessly.
The Resistance dared to work this operation because there were no consequences to their previous seditions and felonies. Nobody ever answered for the many crimes of RussiaGate (and possibly never will). The lying slattern Christine Blasey Ford slunk back to her cushy life in California with a big GoFundMe bundle after defaming Judge Kavanaugh. Eric Ciaramella and his UkraineGate accomplices, IC Inspector General Michael Atkinson and Col. Alexander Vindman, never even faced an inquiry over their janky scheme. Judge Emmet Sullivan still refuses to follow the DC Circuit order to close the General Flynn case. Rep. Adam Schiff never paid any price for knowingly lying his ass off, nor did The Washington Post, The New York Times, CNN, and MSNBC. Twitter founder Jack Dorsey and Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg are allowed to suppress the news and deform the public conversation because they’re more important than the rest of us, and they know better, too.
No consequences for these actors in a rough and dirty game, but great consequences for the USA — a now lethal loss of faith in the essential fairness of American life and the institutions that were created to insure it. Shame on us for letting it get this far.
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He will blame anybody but himself.
• Erdogan Fires Turkish Central Bank Governor (ZH)
So what happens next? Well, for one, the latest firing will cement the reality that the Turkish central bank is now merely a branch of Erdogan’s executive presidency, one where the higher the inflation the lower the interest rates. More importantly for Turkey and its residents, Erdogan’s action will trigger a new and even more acute crisis for the Turkish lira, now that it is clear that Erdogan will resume another aggressive rate cut cycle. Only instead of sparking growth, the imminent rate cuts will end up destroying any “carry” currency value the Turkish lira may have had to western investors, leading to what will be a historic dump, perhaps as soon as Monday.
In short, we expect this to be the first salvo in what ultimately culminates as a full-blown currency crisis for the Turkish nation, and while Erdogan may try to impose capital controls, it won’t last for one simple reason: the Turkish central bank is almost out of FX reserves. And once those are gone, the Turkish lira will promptly go bidless and will follow in the footsteps of the Venezuela bolivar.
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