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Debt Rattle February 10 2022

Feb 102022
 
 February 10, 2022  Posted by at 9:32 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,  92 Responses »


Giuseppe Arcimboldo Four elements – Water 1566

 

• VAERS Data Supports DoD Whistleblowers (UncoverDC)
• The Rise of Omicron is the Fall of Vaccines (TSN)
• COVID “Conspiracy Theories” Become “Fact-Checked” Mainstream Narrative (QTR)
• Fauci Says ‘Full-Blown’ Covid-19 Pandemic Is Almost Over In US (Fox)
• Mayor Reveals Plan To Deal With Truckers Blocking US-Canada Bridge (RT)
• Dozens Arrested As New Zealand Police & Anti-mandate Protesters Clash (RT)
• Texas Probes GoFundMe Shutdown Of Freedom Convoy Fundraiser (RT)
• What Will Gov. Abbott Do With Vax Mandate In The Texas National Guard? (Blaze)
• CVS Forecasts 80% Drop In Covid Vaccine Sales For 2022 (R.)
• Germany Electricity Prices Soar To World Record Highs (NTZ)
• Joe Rogan Mocks His Controversy In Surprise Stand-up Appearance (RT)
• Britain’s Second Elizabethan Age Has Been 70 Years Of Dismal Decline (Nuttall)
• Glyphosate’s Dirty Secrets — Are We About to Learn More? (CHD)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Blue America

 

 

“..corrupt bureaucrats in Washington have knowingly poisoned our troops and deceived the American people about the safety and efficacy of the COVID injections.”

• VAERS Data Supports DoD Whistleblowers (UncoverDC)

Renz explained to Sen. Johnson that he received significant and damaging data from the DoD whistleblowers under the penalty of perjury. For example, DMED data shows miscarriages increased by nearly 300% over the five-year average. Likewise, data shows an almost 300% increase in cancer over the same five years. Making a point to thank Dr. Ryan Cole for his focused attention to cancer related to COVID jabs and Dr. Pierre Kory for his “stance on the [current] corruption,” Renz continued, presenting the disturbing data to Sen. Johnson, adding:

“We saw—and this one’s amazing—neurological issues, which would affect our [military] pilots, [we saw] over a thousand percent increase—82,000 per year to 863,000 in one year. Our soldiers are being experimented on, injured, and sometimes possibly killed. They know this. And Senator, when these doctors are attacked, they call me. I’m the one dealing with the medical boards. I’m the one watching the witch hunts. I’m the one fighting them off, and I’m going to keep doing that. And let me give you one last thing, Senator—the Sept. 28, 2021, Project Salus weekly report.

Project Salus is a defense department initiative where they take all this data—that [they now say] doesn’t exist, supposedly—and they give it to the CDC. They’re watching these vaccines. On and around that date, I have numerous instances where Fauci and the entire crew were saying, “it’s a crisis of the unvaccinated. It’s 99% unvaxxed in the hospital.” In the project Salus weekly report, the DOD document says specifically 71% of new cases are in the fully vaccinated and 60% of hospitalizations are in the fully vaxxed. This is corruption at the highest level. We need investigations. The secretary of defense needs to be investigated. The CDC needs to be investigated. Thank you so much, Senator, for having the courage to stand up against these special interests.”

[..] UncoverDC spoke with attorney Renz last Friday. Renz shared that he and others believe DMED data is currently “being manipulated to cover up the fact that corrupt bureaucrats in Washington have knowingly poisoned our troops and deceived the American people about the safety and efficacy of the COVID injections.” Furthermore, Renz called claims that the DMED data from 2016-2020 was incorrect “absurd.” He added that we spend millions per year on DMED and the individuals monitoring it. Renz shared that he and his team believe DMED data is currently “being manipulated to cover up the fact that corrupt bureaucrats in Washington have knowingly poisoned our troops and deceived the American people about the safety and efficacy of the COVID injections.”

Read more …

“Omicron may be the death knell of the pandemic…”

• The Rise of Omicron is the Fall of Vaccines (TSN)

Unless one sells vaccines for a living, the overall numbers for the covid-19 variant Omicron will seem wildly encouraging. Take a California study of 53,000 Omicron and 17,000 Delta cases from November 30, 2021, to January 1, 2022. In every way, Omicron patients did far better—a quarter the hospitalizations of Delta, miniscule admissions to ICU, no ventilation whatever, and a death rate of less than one-tenth of one percent. The study, by researchers at UC-Berkeley and Kaiser Permanente, suggests, as do others, that Omicron may be the death knell of the pandemic. But, buried deep within its piles of data, it also calls into question the utility of the vaccines themselves.

Beyond showing that the vaccines faltered as Omicron overtook Delta in December, the study lays bare what until now was a heretical assertion. The share of unvaccinated people hospitalized for Omicron infection was a mere 24 percent—43 of 182 hospitalized patients—compared to 69 percent for Delta. Put the other way around, the vaccinated have morphed into about three-quarters of hospital admissions for the now-dominant Omicron. These figures belie the rock-solid mainstream narrative that hospitals are filled with the unvaccinated. Clearly, the “pandemic of the unvaccinated”—always open to question—is no more.

“This is a huge change,” said Juan Chamie, a covid data expert who verified my conclusion from the data. “It is clearly contradicting the ‘99-percent unvaccinated in hospital’ narrative.” Dr. Mobeen Syed, a YouTube medical educator who favors vaccination of high-risk groups, agreed. The public health message on the hospitalized unvaccinated, he said, was “not up-to-date and transparent enough,” relying on data early in the pandemic when fewer were vaccinated and the variant was different. “They want to scare,” he told me. “They should have the courage to look at the data and say, ‘Hey guys, the risk (with Omicron) is reducing. Become happy, become more comfortable.’”

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“..only now that millions of vaccines have been distributed and the public’s trust in the President and in his Covid response is at all time lows – she has completely and totally changed her tune.”

• COVID “Conspiracy Theories” Become “Fact-Checked” Mainstream Narrative (QTR)

I started out 2022 by predicting that capitalism and common sense would catalyze a massive pivot in how the mainstream media reports on Covid. I believed that the media would eventually start the process of pivoting from hysteria and that politicians, understanding full well that they can’t get re-elected during mid-terms this year on a platform of locking people in their homes, would follow. All I can say one month into the year is holy shit, does it look like I was right. So far in 2022, innumerable U.S. states, in addition to countries like Sweden, Norway and Denmark, are lifting Covid restrictions. Connecticut and Delaware are planning on lifting school mask mandates by the end of March. Oregon officials have also announced that general mask mandates would be lifted March 31. Even New Jersey and California announced they would ease mandates in coming weeks.

And the media narrative has very quickly changed, too. Dr Leana Wen, columnist with The Washington Post and CNN medical analyst who has, in the past, gushed non-stop about following the government’s Covid guidance, has now completely changed her playbook for her appearances on CNN. On Monday of this week, she told CNN: “There was, and is, a time and place for pandemic restrictions. But when they were put in, it was always with the understanding that they would be removed as soon as we can. And, in this case, circumstances have changed. Case counts are declining. Also, the science has changed. The responsibility should shift from a government mandate imposed from the state or the local district of the school … it should shift to an individual responsibility by the family, who can still decide that their child can wear a mask if needed.”

[..] In fact, where the fuck was this woman 6 months ago? On New Years, she was urging people to mask up while heading outdoors to watch the ball drop: “Make sure that you’re vaccinated and boosted. Make sure that you’re wearing a mask even though it’s outdoors. There are lots of people packed around you, wearing a three-ply surgical mask.” In Spring of last year, she was expressing “fears” about the U.S. not being able to reach herd immunity. In Summer of last year, she was spreading the narrative that “we can’t trust the unvaccinated”. Heading into the Fall, she was writing op-eds called “Why Covid-19 Vaccines Should Be Required For All Americans”. And now – and only now that millions of vaccines have been distributed and the public’s trust in the President and in his Covid response is at all time lows – she has completely and totally changed her tune.

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“..you might need a booster only every four or five years.”

• Fauci Says ‘Full-Blown’ Covid-19 Pandemic Is Almost Over In US (Fox)

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the chief medical adviser for President Biden, said in an interview published Tuesday that the U.S. is almost past the “full-blown” pandemic phase of the coronavirus and said he hopes that all virus-related restrictions could wind down in a few months. Fauci discussed his idea of the virus’s trajectory with the Financial Times. He told the paper that the government response to the disease will eventually be handled on a local level and not federal. He did not mention a specific month or season but told the paper that these restrictions — including mask mandates — could end “soon.” The number of people in the hospital with COVID-19 across the U.S. has tumbled more than 28% over the past three weeks to about 105,000 on average, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.


Dr. Chris Beyrer, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told the Associated Press, “What we want to see is that the omicron surge continues to decrease, that we don’t see another variant of concern emerge, that we start to come out of the other side of this.” Fauci told the paper that there is no way to eradicate the virus, but it is his hope that “we are looking at a time when we have enough people vaccinated and enough people with protection from previous infection that the Covid restrictions will soon be a thing of the past.” He also said it may not been needed for all Americans to get boosted in the future. “It will depend on who you are,” he said. “But if you are a normal, healthy 30-year-old person with no underlying conditions, you might need a booster only every four or five years.”

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Well, actually, there is no plan, at least in the article. But he does sound scared.

“You have a number of people who are … part of the protest group who have openly stated … they feel such a passion for this particular cause that they are willing to die for it..”

• Mayor Reveals Plan To Deal With Truckers Blocking US-Canada Bridge (RT)

Trying to forcibly remove truckers blockading the busiest US-Canadian border crossing at the Ambassador Bridge could lead to violence and even death, the mayor of Windsor, Ontario cautioned on Wednesday, while his police chief called for a diplomatic approach. “You have a number of people who are … part of the protest group who have openly stated … they feel such a passion for this particular cause that they are willing to die for it,” Mayor Drew Dilkens told reporters on Wednesday. “If you have people who hold that sentiment, the situation can escalate and get very dangerous for police and those members of the public in very short order. It’s fair to say we don’t want to see anyone get hurt.” Dilkens added that he’s been getting calls from Windsor residents and businesses demanding the forcible removal of the truckers, but said “such action may inflame the situation and cause more folks to come and join the protest.”

The Ambassador Bridge runs between Windsor and Detroit, Michigan. It has been closed to commercial traffic since Monday, when several dozen truckers set up a blockade on the Canadian side, in solidarity with the Freedom Convoy in Ottawa. Another group of truckers and farmers has been blockading a border crossing in the western province of Alberta for over a week as well. Detroit-Windsor bridge traffic accounts for about $355 million worth of goods traded between the US and Canada, more than a quarter of all commerce between the two countries. The Canadian authorities have tried to route trucks to the Blue Water Bridge in nearby Sarnia. On Wednesday, truckers and farmers parked their vehicles near that bridge as well, causing a 4.5-hour delay to enter the US, the Canada Border Services Agency said.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has refused to meet with the protesters in Ottawa, calling them a “fringe minority with unacceptable views,” and accusing them of violence, racism, bigotry, and even Nazi sympathies. Other Canadian officials have denounced the trucker protests as an “insurrection” and a “threat to our democracy.” Trudeau’s public safety minister, Marco Mendicino, called the bridge protests illegal, telling the truckers, “you are hurting Canadians and you are not above the law.” “This is an illegal economic blockade against the people of Ontario and against all Canadians,” Transport Minister Omar Alghabra said, adding that they are putting supply chains of food and manufacturer parts at risk.

Tyranny at its finest

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Ardern and Trudeau. What a couple.

• Dozens Arrested As New Zealand Police & Anti-mandate Protesters Clash (RT)

New Zealand police cracked down on protesters outside Parliament in Wellington on Thursday, arresting more than 50 people after forcibly dispersing the demonstration against Covid-19 restrictions. Shortly before the scuffles erupted, police threatened the crowd of around 150 protesters with arrest if they refused to leave the area voluntarily. Those who ignored the order were subsequently detained by law enforcement. Protesters could be seen chanting “this is not democracy” and “shame on you” as police officers moved in to clear the grounds. Footage showed police officers tearing down tents that had been erected by protesters and scuffling with the protesters unwilling to scatter on their own.


“Police continue to appeal to protestors to leave Parliament Grounds peacefully, as the area is closed to the public,” New Zealand Police said in a statement on Thursday. “We continue to acknowledge people’s rights to protest, however those who behave unlawfully will face arrest,” the statement continued. By 11:30am, New Zealand Police claimed to have arrested more than 50 protesters on charges such as trespassing and obstruction for remaining on Parliament grounds after they decreed the area closed to the public. “Wellingtonians have the right to conduct their lives and go about their business without the interference of ongoing unlawful activity,” the police declared, warning that “additional resources” would be “deployed from around the country” to crack down on protests if they continued.

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“I will not stand by and allow these big tech firms to perniciously cancel or stifle speech they disagree with.”

• Texas Probes GoFundMe Shutdown Of Freedom Convoy Fundraiser (RT)

The Texas state government has opened an investigation into crowdfunding platform GoFundMe after the site shut down a campaign on behalf of Canadian truckers in the Freedom Convoy, a large anti-vaccination mandate protest staged primarily in Ottawa. The state’s attorney general, Ken Paxton, announced the move on Wednesday, saying he would act to “protect Texas consumers” and “get to the bottom of this deceitful action” following the platform’s decision to cancel the Freedom Convoy fund drive. “GoFundMe’s response to an anti-mandate, pro-liberty movement should ring alarm bells to anyone using the donation platform and, more broadly, any American wanting to protect their constitutional rights,” he said, arguing that Texans deserve to “know where their hard-earned money is going, rather than allowing GoFundMe to divert money to another cause” without their consent.

The site halted donations after “multiple discussions with local law enforcement” and “reports of violence and other unlawful activity” at the trucker-led protest against Covid-19 vaccine mandates. Demonstrators have camped out in the Canadian capital, Ottawa, for over a week – what GoFundMe has described as an “occupation.” By the time the campaign shut down, it had raised more than $8 million. While the platform initially said it would issue refunds to donors only if they explicitly requested it – noting that it would otherwise send the money to charities approved by itself and the Freedom Convoy organizers – it has since reversed course. Earlier this week, GoFundMe issued an update, stating that, “due to donor feedback,” refunds would instead be processed automatically.

Two other states have also vowed to launch similar probes. Missouri AG Eric Schmitt told Fox News on Wednesday that his office would investigate “GoFundMe’s actions to silence the Freedom Convoy,” adding, “I will not stand by and allow these big tech firms to perniciously cancel or stifle speech they disagree with.” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis previously said that his state would look into the canceled fund drive, accusing GoFundMe of “deceptive practices.”

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“..they must let some of the pressure out of the balloon and ease some of the restrictions affecting the average family.”

• What Will Gov. Abbott Do With Vax Mandate In The Texas National Guard? (Blaze)

These were supposed to be part-time citizen soldiers, but so many of them have served multiple tours of duty in the Middle East. More recently, nearly all of them are at the Texas-Mexico border attempting to do the job the federal government won’t do. Now that same federal government is threatening to terminate thousands of Texas guardsmen if they fail to get a shot that quite literally is outdated, and numerous data points and testimony from military doctors raise concerns about adverse reactions. Will Texas Gov. Greg Abbott stand up for his Guard? What about other GOP governors? The Biden administration officials know that with mounting opposition to COVID mandates, they must let some of the pressure out of the balloon and ease some of the restrictions affecting the average family.


But they also understand that the military is a minority of the minority and that they can get away with illogical and illegal mandates on it for far longer. At present, it appears that no number of facts on the ground will change the minds in the Pentagon in terminating their July 1 deadline on all Army soldiers, including state guardsmen, to receive the experimental shots. While the damage has already been done in most circles of the active-duty military, there are thousands of Texas guardsmen who have not gotten the shots and are now starring down the barrel of losing their careers and all retirement benefits. Here are the most recent vaccination numbers released by the Texas Military Department obtained by the Blaze:

As you can see, just 47% of the Texas Army National Guard are fully vaccinated, and 45% — accounting for 8,750 troops – have not begun the shots. At the border, 48% of the soldiers, nearly 3,000 of them, are unvaccinated, according to my source. And from speaking to two sources on the ground in the Texas Guard, it appears that most of them will refuse to get the shots. Will Gregg Abbott allow them to be terminated? Will Republicans in the U.S. Senate vote for the upcoming budget bill that continues to fund the DOD mandate?


The obvious question everyone should be asking is why are the GOP governors not uniting at a meeting and declaring the DOD mandate null and void? Remember, while governors have no control over the active-duty military, they do control the chain of command for disciplinary actions in their respective guards, absent a “Title 10” order from the president. At a minimum, each governor should direct the adjunct general of the Guard to announce that the state plans to fight the mandates and will dismiss any officer who encourages, much less coerces, soldiers to get the shots. That is fully within the legal authority of a governor.

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“CVS is not counting on booster shots boosting its business.”

• CVS Forecasts 80% Drop In Covid Vaccine Sales For 2022 (R.)

CVS on Wednesday said it expected a 70% to 80% drop in the number of COVID-19 vaccines its drugstores will administer this year and said 2022 profit would be driven by its health insurance and pharmacy benefit management businesses. Shares of the company fell more than 4% in early trading after the company left its 2022 earnings forecast unchanged despite beating profit expectations in the fourth quarter. CVS made the comments during a conference call to discuss fourth-quarter results, which exceeded Wall Street estimates for profit and sales. The company, which operates one of the largest US drugstore chains, manages pharmacy benefits for employers and health plans and owns the Aetna health insurer, also forecast a 40% to 50% fall in COVID-19 testing at its stores.


It said it expects “modest full-year volume growth” in over-the-counter test kits. CVS said it administered COVID-19 vaccine booster doses during the fourth quarter that it had previously expected to provide in 2022, helping drive a near 13% increase in sales at its retail stores. That was also a factor in not raising the 2022 forecast, it said. While some countries such as Israel have begun giving out fourth vaccine doses, CVS is not counting on booster shots boosting its business.

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Three times higher than international average

• Germany Electricity Prices Soar To World Record Highs (NTZ)

Germany’s power supply, once mostly made up of a mixture of coal and nuclear power, used to be among the most stable and affordable in the world. Power outages were rare and grid interventions were infrequent. But then in the 1990s environmental activists and politicians got involved, believing they could manage and design a grid and power supply that would be technically and environmentally superior than what the leading power generation and electrical engineers and experts themselves had in place. Sun and wind were the way to go, the environmentalist Greens and SPD socialist’s declared. After all, the wind and sun don’t send electric bills and are “free for the taking”. This they somehow managed to convince the public. And so the greening of the grid began.

In 2000, the coalition government of the Socialist’s and Greens, led by Chancellor Gerhard Schroder, introduced the EEG renewable green energies feed-in act. What followed was a green energies construction frenzy with hundreds of megawatts of volatile wind and solar capacity being added to the grid every year while nuclear power was shut down. Today now comes the EED’s price shock. Wind and solar are not free after all. In fact they are outrageously expensive, and they are even more volatiles in terms of supply than the country’s Corona policies! Today German weekly news magazine FOCUS here reports how Germany’s electricity prices have now reached “record” levels: “Germany is the world champion in electricity prices – no country pays more for electricity.

According to new data from the German Association of Energy and Water Industries, German households paid an average of 36.19 cents for a kilowatt hour in January 2022.” That’s over 40 US cents per kilowatt-hour! “Never before have German consumers had to pay so much,” writes FOCUS. “Germans have to pay almost three times as much for electricity from the outlet compared to the international average. This is mainly due to unusually high taxes and eco-taxes in this country.” What’s worse, the country now teeters on power grid collapse, meaning blackouts are a real threat. Moreover, high-tech computer-controlled production machines and plants rely on a steady supply frequency to operate. As grid frequency becomes increasingly unstable due to the volatile wind and solar power input, the equipment risks costly unplanned production shutdowns.

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“kind of weird, people will get really mad if you use that word and tweet about it on a phone that’s made by slaves.”

• Joe Rogan Mocks His Controversy In Surprise Stand-up Appearance (RT)

Headlining a small comedy show in Austin, Texas, Joe Rogan took to the stage to speak about the recent controversy surrounding him and his podcast on Spotify, and comment on the recently circulated video compilation of him using the n-word on his show. “I used to say it if [I was talking about] a Richard Pryor bit or something, I would say it in context,” Rogan said. “Somebody made a compilation of every time I said that word over 14 years and they put it on YouTube, and it turned out that was racist as f**k. Even to me! I’m me and I’m watching it saying, ‘Stop saying it!’ I put my cursor over the video and I’m like, ‘Four more minutes?!’” Rogan added that he hadn’t used the word in years, before saying he found it “kind of weird, people will get really mad if you use that word and tweet about it on a phone that’s made by slaves.”

The number one podcast host then addressed the other major controversy surrounding his show – the alleged Covid and vaccine misinformation. “I talk shit for a living — that’s why this is so baffling to me,” he said. “If you’re taking vaccine advice from me, is that really my fault? What dumb shit were you about to do when my stupid idea sounded better? ‘You know that dude who made people eat animal dicks on TV? How does he feel about medicine?’ If you want my advice, don’t take my advice.” After the show, Rogan held a brief Q&A with the audience, where one fan asked if he would accept the recent $100-million offer to move his show onto Rumble, but the host said he’ll stay where he is for now: “No, Spotify has hung in with me, inexplicably, let’s see what happens.”

In a recent episode with comic Akaash Singh, Rogan has decried the controversy surrounding him as “a political hit job” saying that the video of him saying the n-word had always been out there and was being used now for political reasons. “They’re taking all this stuff I’ve ever said that’s wrong and smushing it all together. It’s good because it makes me address some stuff that I really wish wasn’t out there.” Rogan also responded to criticism leveled against him by former US president Donald Trump and Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who said Rogan shouldn’t have apologized to the mob. “You should apologize if you regret something,” said Rogan, adding that “I do think you have to be careful not to apologize for nonsense.”

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“Great Britain has lost an empire but not yet found a role.”

• Britain’s Second Elizabethan Age Has Been 70 Years Of Dismal Decline (Nuttall)

There’s no doubt that Queen Elizabeth II is a wonderful monarch, perhaps one of the greatest Britain has ever seen. To put her long reign in perspective, she ascended to the throne only seven years after the end of the Second World War, and Winston Churchill was her first prime minister. Her commitment to duty and to her people are beyond reproach, and, as a result, her jubilee will be met with a swathe of celebratory television documentaries and news articles. But let’s not fool ourselves. Although she has been a magnificent monarch, her time on the throne has been one of steep British decline, and a far cry from the glorious first Elizabethan age in the 16th century.

This reign of Elizabeth I, from 1558 to 1603, is regarded as a ‘golden age’ for Britain, one of economic prosperity, technological advancement, and global exploration. She inherited an unstable kingdom, one divided by religion, increasing poverty, and beset with powerful foreign enemies. Under the guidance of its shrewd ‘Virgin Queen’, however, England emerged as a world power able to tackle its outward and internal foes. Her achievements included the restoration of England to Protestantism, the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, and the Royal Navy’s defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, which laid the foundations for Britain to go on to ‘rule the waves’. Indeed, when it comes to the navy, it could be argued that the second Elizabethan period represents the undoing of the first.

When her namesake became Queen in February 1952, Britain was one of the most powerful nations on the planet; alongside the United States and the Soviet Union, it was considered one of the ‘Big Three’. Britain’s strength was augmented later that same year, when it became a nuclear power. At the time, Britain was spending 11.2 percent of GDP on its armed forces, yet this figure today has shrunk to a mere 2.3 percent. In 1952, Britain had a standing army of 871,000. This now stands at 82,000 and is due to be reduced to 72,500 by 2025. This is not really an army, but a corps. It is the same with the Royal Navy. In the 1950s, Britain had a navy worthy of policing the oceans. There were 280 active ships in 1950 and 12 aircraft carriers.

By 2020, however, the Royal Navy only had seventy active vessels, with only two aircraft carriers. Indeed, if coastal patrol vessels are excluded, the number of ships in the Royal Navy has declined by around 74 percent since the Falklands War of 1982. By any measure, this can only be construed as military decline. I am not making an argument in favour of colonialism, but the fact that Britain was prepared to abandon – or “scuttle” as Churchill put it – her empire in such a hurry only serves to highlight the country’s rapidly diminishing status. Indeed, as Dean Acheson, the former US secretary of state, said in 1962, “Great Britain has lost an empire but not yet found a role.”

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“Bayer AG purchased Monsanto and dumped the company name back in 2018. As if … that would be helpful. ”

• Glyphosate’s Dirty Secrets — Are We About to Learn More? (CHD)

Truth will out. Eventually, given enough time, the good, the bad and the ugly will be revealed. Such is the case with Monsanto‘s dubious herbicide glyphosate. The long-winding story on how Monsanto and its governmental enablers at the Environmental Protection Agency first registered the weedkiller Roundup under at best dubious circumstances is sickening. In March 2015 U.S District Judge for the Northern District of California allowed public release of internal Monsanto documents showing how Monsanto influenced EPA to reclassify glyphosate from a Class C carcinogen to a Class E category which paved the way for glyphosate Roundup production. It was nothing short of a cover-up that put greed ahead of public safety.

And now ironically we learn the cover-up may have included Monsanto’s own investors. Bayer AG purchased Monsanto and dumped the company name back in 2018. As if … that would be helpful. Bayer has lost a string of jury trials where glyphosate was believed to be responsible for cases of non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Now Bayer investors are saying the German agri-giant played fast and loose with the facts, misleading them on 1) the safety of glyphosate and Roundup; 2) Bayer’s efforts at due diligence; and 3) the legal risks in the acquisition of Monsanto. Their lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California makes for some interesting reading:

“Defendants specifically downplayed the liability risks related to Monsanto’s Roundup product, emphasizing that Bayer conducted a ‘thorough analysis’ during the due diligence process and ‘undertook appropriate due diligence of litigation and regulatory issues throughout the process’ which led Bayer to finalize the Acquisition. “These and similar statements made by Defendants during the Class Period were false and misleading. In truth, Defendants knew or recklessly disregarded that the Acquisition would not result in the benefits for Bayer that Defendants had represented, due to Monsanto’s significant exposure to liability risk related to Roundup.”

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Nate Hagens Energy Blind | Part 01 of 05 | The Great Simplification

 

 

 

 

 

 

Arnold

 

 

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Debt Rattle February 9 2022

Feb 092022
 
 February 9, 2022  Posted by at 9:34 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  104 Responses »


René Magritte L’éternité 1935

 

• The Pentagon’s Response To The DEMD Data Is An Even Bigger Story (Blaze)
• Pfizer Quietly Adds Language Warning On Data (ZH)
• Let The Re-Writing Of Covid History Begin? (Rossini)
• Joe Rogan Shows Us The Real Purpose Of Cancel Culture (OffG)
• The Blue Stack Strikes Back (Jilani)
• First Canadian Provinces Scrap Covid Mandates (RT)
• Towing Companies Refuse to Move Freedom Convoy Trucks (TC)
• Johnson & Johnson Stops Covid-19 Vaccine Production (RT)
• Americans Have ‘Lost Touch With Reality’ – Russia (RT)
• Scientists Divulge Easy Way To Lose Weight (RT)
• Elon Musk Gives Views On ‘Traditional’ Media (RT)
• Lithium Price Rockets Nearly 500% In A Year (G.)
• Jeff Bezos’ Yacht Can Count On Rotten Eggs (Engelen)

 

 

Jerrycans
https://twitter.com/i/status/1491204379294277632

 

 

 

 

India’s ambassador

 

 

 

 

Calgary police officer

 

 

She loves school

 

 

Why the changes when you know Renz has all the files?

• The Pentagon’s Response To The DEMD Data Is An Even Bigger Story (Blaze)

One thing is clear about the revelation of the 2021 military epidemiological data and the military’s response to it: There is undoubtedly a public health and national security crisis in the military, and the Pentagon’s reaction only seems to be concerned with exonerating the vaccine, not fixing its own alleged problem. It’s now certain that the military’s health surveillance system — DMED — showed a massive increase in sickness and injury diagnoses in 2021 over previous years, particularly in the neurological, cardiovascular, oncological, and reproductive health categories. The military, in a very terse and cryptic statement to PolitiFact last week, admitted as much, but claimed without any further explanation that the data in the system accessed by several military doctors working with attorney Thomas Renz was only a “fraction” of the true numbers that existed. In the words of the Pentagon spokesman, it was a “glitch in the database.”

Where those true numbers existed, why they weren’t in the system for five years, what exactly was in the system, and why the 2021 numbers were accurate according to the DOD account remain a mystery. However, one by one, the military public health officials have been adding back random numbers to the 2016 through 2020 codes. I’m told by Renz and two of the whistleblowers that throughout the past week, they have queried the same data again, and in most of the ICD categories, they have found that the numbers from 2016 through 2020 were “increased” exponentially to look as though 2021 was not an abnormal year. This has been done without any transparency, any press release, any statement of narrative, and sloppily in a way that makes the already unbelievable narrative simply impossible to believe.

In addition to believing that every epidemiological report for five years was somehow completely tainted with false data — including during the first year of the pandemic itself — we would have to believe that the minute they discovered this from Renz, they suddenly discovered the exact numbers. A five-year mistake fixed overnight! Just take a look at the following statement given to the Epoch Times, the only other public comment delivered by an authorized Pentagon spokesman: “Comparing the DMED database to the source data contained in DMSS, AFHSD discovered that the total number of medical diagnoses from 2016-2020 that were accessible in DMED represented only a small fraction of actual medical diagnoses for those years. In contrast, the 2021 total number of medical diagnoses were up to date in DMED. Comparison of 2021 to 2016-2020 resulted in the appearance of significant increased occurrence of all medical diagnoses in 2021 because of the under-reported data for 2016-2020. AFHSD has taken DMED offline to identify and correct the root-cause of the data corruption,” said Maj. Charlie Dietz.

That’s it! They are only concerned with downplaying any potential culpability of the vaccine, not explaining how they were flying blind, according to their official narrative, on such an important endeavor for so many years. Just consider the fact that at last week’s meeting of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), officials revealed that they have been monitoring vaccine safety data from the DOD, among other places.

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Full immunity, but not from investors.

• Pfizer Quietly Adds Language Warning On Data (ZH)

Two weeks ago, the FDA begged a Texas judge to delay production on the first monthly batch of 55,000 pages of Covid-19 vaccine data submitted to the agency by Pfizer. Originally, the agency was set to produce just 500 pages-per-month. Now, Pfizer – which just forecast $54 billion in Covid-related sales in 2022, appears to be anticipating some bad news, as evidenced by several redline changes in their Q4 earnings releases. As Rubicon Capital’s Kelly Brown notes on Twitter, the changes center around disclosures of unfavorable safety data. For example, in Q4 they added: “or further information regarding the quality of pre-clinical, clinical or safety data, including by audit or inspection.”

More from Brown, who notes that Pfizer is now highlighting “concerns about clinical data integrity…” The company also notes that Covid-19 may “diminish in severity or prevalence, or disappear entirely.”

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“Truth and Liberty go hand-in-hand; as do lies and tyranny.”

• Let The Re-Writing Of Covid History Begin? (Rossini)

It took much too long, but it appears that the tide of public opinion has finally turned. The term “trust the science” has suddenly lost its luster, especially when it comes from the mouth of a politician or so-called “expert.” The meanings of the words “science” and “expert” have been blown to pieces. But such is always the case when politicians get involved in things they shouldn’t be involved in. They have an uncanny ability of destroying everything they touch. Well, they touched the words “science” and “expert” and made them completely unrecognizable. I’ve heard the phrase “You can’t tell what’s true anymore” more than enough times over the last several years. We’ve all had a front row seat in what a so-called “post-truth” world looks like — It looks like totalitarian tyranny! Truth and Liberty go hand-in-hand; as do lies and tyranny.

Miraculously, as public opinion has changed, so has the “science”! Imagine that. The “science” now says that masks, lockdowns, and mandates are bad. If only the “science” crystal ball had said such things two years ago! Imagine all the pain, suffering and death that could have been avoided. One must also wonder, if public opinion didn’t change, would the “science” have remained unchanged as well? Who knows? But as the tyranny is (reluctantly) peeled away, the predictable re-writing of history has begun. Think of the Iraq War as an analogy for what you should expect going forward. The mania of lies and smears that led up to that failed war was deafening. Now think about today… How many people actually admit to supporting the Iraq War? Roughly… You can probably count them on one hand. Very (very) few people. Only the hard-core warmongers will admit to it.

Well, as Covid “history” is fabricated and branded into digital ink, you can be sure to see the same behavior from the lying class. Denial, followed by more denial: “I never supported the wearing of masks.” “I was always against lockdowns.” “Vaccine passports? What do you think I am, some kind of Nazi?” Be prepared, because just as people will not admit that they supported the Iraq War, so will they start changing their tunes about being petty dictators for a solid two years. The blame will also be offloaded onto a fictional collective. Be prepared to see the word “we” over and over: “We” should have known better. “We” made mistakes. “We” need to do a better job. The government needs more money. “We” thought that the masks, lockdowns & “vaccines” would work.

Tucker More & more people dying in the prime of life

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“Far more likely is that it was created and deployed to discredit Rogan’s COVID-questioning without having to engage with the Covid sceptic evidence or arguments.”

• Joe Rogan Shows Us The Real Purpose Of Cancel Culture (OffG)

Joe Rogan has just been cancelled. Again. It’s not about covid “misinformation” this time. No, now he’s a racist. Some enterprising young mind combed through 13 years and hundreds of episodes of The Joe Rogan Experience, and cut together around twenty instances of Rogan using “the n-word”. This video was shared by award-winning musician India Arie, and used to explain her pulling her music from Spotify’s platform in protest of Rogan’s continued presence there. Rogan claims that these clips are all taken out of context in his recent apology video, and none were ever intended to be racist. This may well be true…we can’t check for ourselves, because Spotify removed all the episodes. These important bits of context were, naturally, removed from the viral video. Besides, it has since been said that context doesn’t even matter.

And you know what, they’re right. The context doesn’t matter, perhaps the intention doesn’t even matter, what matters is “Why now?” Some of these clips are over twelve years old, and yet there have never been any calls to boycott Spotify or cancel his show until just the last couple of days. Were they not racist before? Or was everyone just OK with the racism? Could there be something else behind this? …but why bother pausing the hate-fest to ask questions, right? The only message that matters is – Joe Rogan is a racist now, and streaming giant Spotify have pulled over seventy episodes of his show from their platform as a result. Of course the cyber-torches and internet-pitchforks coming for Joe Rogan is nothing new. Having preached the tenets of a healthy lifestyle, promoted alternate Covid treatments, and invited dissenting experts onto his show, Rogan has obviously been on the establishment’s hit list for a while.

[..] Rogan’s uses of “the n-word” are not new. They are all several years old and from 23 separate episodes, all multiple hours long. And there are almost 1800 episodes of the show to plough through if you decide to go searching. So making this video is at least two days’ work of simply watching the episodes – and that’s assuming you know where to start looking. And that’s before editing or trying to make it “go viral”. Was all this done on a whim by some bored pro-vaxxer? Does that sound likely? Far more likely is that it was created and deployed to discredit Rogan’s COVID-questioning without having to engage with the Covid sceptic evidence or arguments. It’s even possible the video may even have already existed before the current controversy. After all, why create this climate of stifling sensitivity if you don’t have the tools to use it?

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“It’s designed to look like they’re doing something, but they’re not doing anything. It’s more spectacle than substance.”

• The Blue Stack Strikes Back (Jilani)

[..]The U.S. government, forbidden by contemporary constitutional law from simply censoring Rogan itself, dispatched Surgeon General Vivek Murthy to reinforce President Joe Biden’s message imparted last year that social media platforms are “killing people” by allowing too much freedom of speech about the pandemic, the virus, and the vaccines. “People have a right to make their own decisions, but they also have a right to accurate information to make that decision with,” Murthy told MSNBC. “This is not just about what the government can do,” he coyly noted, “this is about companies and individuals recognizing that the only way we get past misinformation is if we are careful about what we say and use the power that we have to limit the spread of misinformation.”

Murthy’s message reinforced the media outlets that had taken aim at Rogan, inspiring a wave of new reports not only focused on his discussions of COVID but also labeling him problematic in other regards. The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah, whose role in this ecosystem is to disguise Democratic Party talking points as humor, criticized a segment in which Rogan and author Jordan Peterson poke fun at the absurdity of modern racial categorization, noting that nobody is actually “white” or “Black.” CNN signal boosted Noah’s criticism, as did a range of other outlets. Other activists found old clips of Rogan mentioning (but not using) racial slurs. Eventually, Spotify got the message. It announced new platform rules that include adding advisories to select content dealing with COVID.

It began deleting dozens of older Rogan episodes that contained transgressive content. Its CEO promised to devote $100 million of company money on content from “historically marginalized groups,” which in this case is likely to be defined exclusively by progressive activists (don’t expect a lot of sponsored podcasts on Asian American opposition to racial preferences in college admissions). In the span of a week, Rogan posted two separate apologies for his past content. The authors of the open letter that initiated the firestorm, however, are not satisfied. One of them told Rolling Stone that the Spotify advisories will just create a “‘false balance’ problem. It’s designed to look like they’re doing something, but they’re not doing anything. It’s more spectacle than substance.”

These activists know how to play the game. If you look back at any of the recent controversies over free speech—from QAnon to COVID to the last two presidential elections—this is how things work when a development or outcome is seen as unfavorable or undesirable by the favored political camp. First, activists create a panic about misinformation or offensive speech. Second, the social media platforms try to meet them halfway by introducing measures like warning labels. Third, the activists realize they’ve drawn blood, and continue to push for outright censorship. Finally, the social media platforms give in and remove the offending voice from their platforms altogether.

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Nothing much changed so far.

“Kenney just says he won’t bring back the vaccine passport “Unless we redefine full vaccination as having three shots”. Kenney said that “would make practical sense… make a requirement that people get a third shot.”

• First Canadian Provinces Scrap Covid Mandates (RT)

Canada’s province of Saskatchewan announced on Tuesday it would stop requiring vaccine passes and masks. It comes as Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau insisted on the effectiveness of Covid-19 mandates amid trucker protests gripping the capital Ottawa. The prairie province, situated between Alberta and Manitoba, said it would stop requiring vaccine passports from next week and allow the mask mandate to expire at the end of February. It is one of the first Canadian provinces to offer a roadmap to ending the virus restrictions. Praising the soon-to-be-phased-out restrictions for helping to stem the spread of the virus, Premier Scott Moe, however, noted that they had created “two classes of citizens,” arguing that “the benefits of this policy no longer outweigh the costs.”

Urging Canadians not to “judge” their neighbors over their vaccination status, Moe said people should be entitled to decide whether to get vaccinated or not. “This government is going to respect that right,” he added. Another province, Alberta, also moved to ditch the restrictions on Tuesday. From midnight on Wednesday, residents will no longer be required to provide proof of vaccination in public places, and from Monday next week children aged 12 and under would no longer be required to mask up. Compulsory masking will no longer apply to students in schools. “We’ll never be able to do a full accounting of the extent of the pain and hardship that restrictions have caused,” Premier Jason Kenney said.

[..] PM Trudeau has refused to meet with the truckers or hear their demands, referring to them as a “small, fringe minority” engaged in violence and hateful conduct. In a speech to the parliament on Monday, he accused the truckers of “trying to blockade our economy, our democracy, and our fellow citizens’ daily lives,” and demanded that their protest “has to stop” because the people of Ottawa and Canadians in general “deserve to get their lives back.” On Tuesday, the PM defended the mandates and restrictions his government put in place during the pandemic, saying they worked and will not be removed any time soon. “I can understand frustrations with mandates, but mandates are the way to avoid further restrictions,” he told reporters.

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“..heavy-duty tow trucks can transfer air from their system to the trucks to release their brakes. However, he added that “we have all the capabilities on our tow trucks to do it … but I don’t think anyone would want to.”

• Towing Companies Refuse to Move Freedom Convoy Trucks (TC)

“I’ve contacted them all and they’re all refusing, as of today, to provide heavy tow truck work,” city manager Steve Kanellakos told reporters Monday evening, according to a report from the CBC. “Right now we’re reviewing their contracts or standing offer, and reviewing what actions we can take to deal with this unprecedented situation,” Kanellakos added. There are currently more than 400 trucks parked throughout the city in protest, which began over a week ago. The drivers have said that they will not move the trucks until the COVID vaccine mandates for drivers doing trips between the US and Canada are lifted. Kanellakos said that Mayor Jim Watson has also been reaching out to towing companies in other cities, but none are willing to help stop the protest.

“Right now, the consensus seems to be that many of them — or most of them — don’t want to do the work because … they rely on on the the heavy truck industry for their livelihood, and they don’t want to damage that part of their business,” Kanellakos said. “That’s the position they’re taking, at least.” The CBC report added that deputy police chief Steve Bell confirmed that they are having trouble finding a willing tow truck operator in “every jurisdiction that’s faced this, and it’s forcing us to come up with some creative solutions.” While Bell wouldn’t say what those creative solutions may be, he did say that they are moving “toward a position where we’re not going to let the tow truck operators … be an obstacle to ending what’s occurring.”

Also speaking to the CBC, Trucker Lloyd Crowe said that there is no way the city will be able to move the trucks without cooperation from the drivers who are protesting. “If you know anything about truck air brakes, once you pull that button, all 18 wheels are locked,” Crowe told CBC on Wednesday. “Nothing can move it, except maybe a big wrecker. And no wrecker worth his salt is going to come anywhere near this, because they’re on our side.” David Allen, president of Gary’s Towing in Thunder Bay told the news organization that while it would be hard, he does not believe that it is impossible. He explained that heavy-duty tow trucks can transfer air from their system to the trucks to release their brakes. However, he added that “we have all the capabilities on our tow trucks to do it … but I don’t think anyone would want to.”

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Curious.

• Johnson & Johnson Stops Covid-19 Vaccine Production (RT)

US multinational Johnson & Johnson suspended production of its Covid-19 vaccine late last year amid a massive push by the federal government and health officials to promote getting inoculated, The New York Times reported on Tuesday, citing sources familiar with the situation. The pause in production is reportedly temporary, but the one plant producing the vaccine in the Dutch city of Leiden has apparently shifted its focus to producing a potentially more profitable vaccine for an unrelated virus. It’s unclear if the production pause has affected the availability of the single-jab Covid vaccine, as the company has a stockpile of doses. However, one person familiar with the situation says the suspension could mean a reduction in output of a few hundred million doses.


The plant is expected to produce more after a few months’ break. Other facilities are awaiting regulatory approval or to actually be up and running to produce the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, according to the NYT report. Organizations that distribute the vaccine worldwide told the NYT they were unaware of the production pause, with some expressing concern about the timing. “This is not the time to be switching production lines of anything, when the lives of people across the developing world hang in the balance,” Dr. Ayoade Alakija, co-head of African Union vaccine distribution. Unlike the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, Johnson & Johnson’s offering requires only a single shot for the initial inoculation, while the others are delivered via two shots.

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Long ago.

• Americans Have ‘Lost Touch With Reality’ – Russia (RT)

Washington’s rhetoric about the possibility of imposing colossal sanctions on Russia is so outrageous that Moscow sees little point in even responding, one of the country’s top diplomats has said. In an interview with RIA Novosti on Tuesday, Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Pankin was asked about the possibility of Washington imposing unprecedentedly harsh measures on the Russian energy and financial sectors, including additional sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline linking the gas fields of Siberia to consumers in Germany. “It’s long been clear to everyone that American legislators have lost touch with reality and are living in a kingdom of their own phobias regarding our country, churning out obscurantist plans to deter Russia on all fronts, with any justification or without one,” Pankin replied.


“I don’t see the point in reacting to the Capitol’s routine initiatives about this. We can only repeat once more our regret about what has happened, and confirm that there will inevitably be negative consequences from the harsh restrictions laid on us by the Western initiators of such measures,” the diplomat added. Asked whether Russia is prepared for the possibility of being cut off from the SWIFT banking system, which some American and European leaders have threatened if Moscow decides to invade Ukraine, Pankin said, “Our hope is that, as opposed to Washington’s completely unjustified movement towards the ‘sanction field’, reason will still prevail in Brussels and these measures will not happen, which would damage the stability of the international finance system itself, as well as global economic recovery and the possibility of fulfilling the [UN initiative] Sustainable Development Goals on time.”

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Sleep.

• Scientists Divulge Easy Way To Lose Weight (RT)

Sleeping more can help people to consume less calories per day and to lose weight, if those healthy sleeping habits are maintained over a prolonged period of time, according to a new study conducted by researchers at the University of Chicago, Illinois. The findings were published on Monday in peer-reviewed journal JAMA Internal Medicine. The clinical research involved 80 adults aged between 21 and 40. All the participants qualified as overweight with a body mass index ranging from 25 to 29.9, while ‘normal’ body weight falls into the range between 18.5 and 24.9. All the participants also had habitual sleep of 6.5 hours per night or less. The research was conducted for a prolonged period of time, running from November 2014 to October 2020.

The participants were observed for a two-week period to establish a baseline and were then randomly separated in two groups. The control group continued with their sleeping habits without any intervention, while another group received “an individualized sleep hygiene counseling session,” aimed at prolonging their bedtime to some 8.5 hours. No further support beyond the counseling was provided to the participants, who continued to sleep in their own beds, though they wore tracking devices to register the duration of their sleeping time. “Most other studies on this topic in labs are short-lived, for a couple of days, and food intake is measured by how much participants consume from an offered diet,” lead researcher Dr Esra Tasali at the University of Chicago’s Sleep Center stated.

“In our study we only manipulated sleep and had the participants eat whatever they wanted, with no food logging or anything else to track their nutrition by themselves.” The sleep duration was increased for the sleep extension group by 1.2 hours per night on average, which led to a significant decrease in energy intake compared to the control group. The people from the sleep extension group consumed some 270 kilocalories on average less, which is quite significant given that recommended daily intake is 2,000 kilocalories for women and 2,500 for men. “No significant treatment effect in total energy expenditure was found, resulting in weight reduction in the sleep extension group vs the control group,” the study reads.

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Fear sells, not just negative news.

• Elon Musk Gives Views On ‘Traditional’ Media (RT)

Tesla CEO Elon Musk, known for his prolific tweeting, questioned his 73 million followers about why “traditional” media outlets operate as a “relentless hatestream” before then engaging in discussions with his followers on the topic. “Why is the “traditional” media such a relentless hatestream? Real question,” Musk tweeted on Monday. This post was quickly followed by another, clarifying the billionaire’s position. “Most news outlets attempt to answer the question: ‘What are the worst things happening on Earth today?’ It’s a big planet! Obviously, some bad things are happening somewhere at any given time, but focusing relentlessly on those does not give an accurate picture of reality,” he wrote.


Musk then engaged in debate with followers, disagreeing with one view that “negative news sells better,” pointing to some popular “citizen podcasts” which “aren’t negative.” “Maybe part of why traditional media outlets are so negative is because old habits die hard? They so rarely even try to be positive,” Musk added, sharing his frustration over the constant flow of the “news that makes one sad & angry.” The degree of Musk’s apparent disdain for traditional news media became known when he agreed with another commenter who said the target audience of most media was “the amygdala of the bottom 50% of humanity.” “Sadly true,” the carmaker’s chief executive wrote.

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When everyone’s got an EV, they’ll be useless.

• Lithium Price Rockets Nearly 500% In A Year (G.)

Lithium prices have “gone ballistic” as surging electric vehicles sales worldwide create massive demand for the critical component of lithium-ion batteries. According to figures from Benchmark Mineral Intelligence (BMI), the price of the lithium-rich raw material spodumene rose 478.3% between January 2021 and January 2022. In January alone the price of spodumene jumped 45.5% to US$2,400 a tonne, up from $1,650 in December. Similar price rises were recorded for lithium carbonate and hydroxide – refined lithium at different stages of purity – over the past year. BMI is forecasting the price will continue to increase for at least the next six month off the back of massive demand for battery cells.


In January the consulting firm McKinsey predicted the market for lithium batteries would grow to at least $360bn by 2030, with growth averaging 20% a year until the end of the decade. But some analysts have sounded a note of caution as lithium pricing can be volatile – demand can grow quickly but new mines open and increase supply, dropping the price again. Tim Buckley, an energy transition analyst and director of Clean Energy Finance, says demand for lithium is likely to remain high. “It’s unsustainably high – it’s gone ballistic. It’s just brilliant to watch – the world’s transforming before our eyes,” Buckley said. “Nothing excites financial markets more than a 500% increase in prices.”

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Google translation from Dutch.

• Jeff Bezos’ Yacht Can Count On Rotten Eggs (Engelen)

Not so long ago there was a ship whose fortunes could serve as the perfect symbol of the age in which we were then. And no, I’m not talking about the Titanic, that monument of hubris and stupidity, which went down on its maiden voyage and disappeared into the icy ocean with 1,522 people on board, and with that, two years before the outbreak of the First World War, announced the end of the bourgeois belle époque. Not to mention the Probo Koala, that tanker full of chemical waste on its way to the Ivory Coast to discharge its toxic cargo, which suddenly became the focus of our nascent environmental consciousness, only to then, like a hot potato, to be shifted from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, to end up in the harbor of Amsterdam where it lay rotting for months and acted as a constant reminder of the end of our ecological innocence.

No, I’m talking about that Italian cruise ship, the Costa Concordia, which, with over four thousand passengers on board, ran aground at nightfall off the coast of Italy, at the port of Giglio, and began to overturn slowly, because the sun-tanned captain of the ship, and I’m exaggerating oly a little here, let his Moldovan sweetheart give him a blowjob during the maneuver. Meanwhile, a new ship has forced itself as a symbol on our collective consciousness. I am, of course, talking about the three-masted three-masted ship owned by Amazon boss, Jeff Bezos, which is currently being built at a cost of half a billion dollars at yacht builder Oceanco in Alblasserdam and is nearing completion. It would be a sailing yacht with a length of 127 meters long and a height of 55 meters, which, according to news agency Bloomberg, sets a new standard in the wonderful world of superyachts, with many undisclosed details.

In order to be able to choose the sea in the future, however, the yacht has to cross the Nieuwe Maas through the Koningshaven in Rotterdam. As it happens, the iconic Lift Bridge blocks the passage of the yacht: up to 44 meters high, the mouth of the bridge can be opened, too low for the masts of Bezos. And so, despite previous promises to residents, the city council has pledged to dismantle the bridge one more time to allow the yacht to escape. It is again the perfect fusion of an era, in this case of the corona pandemic entering its third year in three weeks, and of the neoliberal nature of the crisis that accompanied it. The measures taken by the state to prevent the spread of the virus and to prevent healthcare overload have had major redistributive consequences. Not only have the billions in monetary easing by central banks further exacerbated wealth inequalities, as the insane house and apartment prices in major cities illustrate: good for investors, bad luck for residents.

The shutting down or throttling of social intercourse has also greatly favored some and disadvantaged others. Household consumption expenditure did not fall during the four so-called lockdowns. What has happened is that one retail channel (the middle class with its physical stores) has been closed and the other retail channel (Amazon) has remained open, with a massive shift in terms of employees, logistics, turnover and thus profits from one channel to another. [..] That is what makes this such a significant event: after two years of corona measures, we have finally arrived in the neofeudal caste society that Thomas Piketty has been warning about since 2014. In that world, ordinary citizens with their bridges are only set pieces in the lives of the super rich. Knowing that will help you understand a little better why Twitter – another such platform – is circulating the call to treat Bezos’ ship with rotten eggs as it passes. You can hardly miss him!

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Brand/Taibbi

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle February 6 2022

Feb 062022
 
 February 6, 2022  Posted by at 9:43 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  70 Responses »


Giuseppe Arcimboldo Four elements – Air 1566

 

• 99% of All Covid Prior Infections Resulted in ‘Natural Immunity’ (BN)
• Pentagon Responds to Claim of Spiking Post-Vaccine Disease Rates (ET)
• This Medical Data From The US DoD Is Explosive (Kirsch)
• Strictly Regular Use Of Ivermectin As Prophylaxis For Covid-19 (RG)
• Ivermectin, A Potential Anticancer Drug Derived From An Antiparasitic Drug (PMC)
• The Power of Protest (Tucker)
• Prosecutors Gear Up As GoFundMe ‘Redirects’ Convoy Donations (RT)
• Retaking Crimea By Force ‘Impossible’ – Ukraine (RT)
• ‘Without Russia, We Won’t Stop A Full-on Ukrainian Offensive’ (RT)
• Joe Rogan Apologizes As Podcasts Disappear From Spotify (RT)
• Joe Rogan Apologizes for Being Joe Rogan, Begs Woke Forgiveness (CTH)
• Man Being Devoured By Hungry Sharks Tries Apologizing To Them (BBee)

 

 

 

 

Good speaker

 

 

 

 

Reuters

 

 

Füllmilch

 

 

“..for three different types of important antibodies, about 95% of people with prior infections retained all three..”

• 99% of All Covid Prior Infections Resulted in ‘Natural Immunity’ (BN)

Johns Hopkins university this week dropped a quiet bombshell of a study that went widely ignored in the mainstream media. Dr. Marty Makary, spearheading a team at Johns Hopkins to do the work that the CDC and NIH refuse to do, showed that 99% of unvaccinated people known to have Covid infections had robust “natural immunity” that did not diminish for at least 650 days. The charts included in the study reveal the story. As you can see, for three different types of important antibodies, about 95% of people with prior infections retained all three. 99% had the anti-RBD positive type of antibody.

Most importantly of all, this is clear indisputable evidence that natural immunity is far more durable than vaccinated immunity: The Covid protection lasted for 650 days with no noticeable decline.

As Becker News reported in October, Dr. Makary was leading a study that would force the CDC and NIH to do their jobs and not merely act as vaccine salesmen. “The NIH should be doing a long-term study of natural immunity instead of torturing thousands of beagle puppies, including cutting their voice box to avoid barking sounds (sick),” he said. “All taxpayer funded. All our health agencies need fresh new leadership.” “My Johns Hopkins research team is leading a long-term study of natural immunity because the NIH and CDC are not doing it,” he added. “They have $50 billion and 30,000 employees and yet can’t seem to conduct one of the most important studies we need done to inform the public.”

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The military is actively trying to tone down the data now.

• Pentagon Responds to Claim of Spiking Post-Vaccine Disease Rates (ET)

Three United States military doctors have blown the whistle on documents allegedly from The United States Department of Defense (DoD) that they had access to, which show “skyrocketing rates of disease” since the introduction and mandating of the CCP virus vaccines in armed forces, human rights attorney Leigh Dundas told The Epoch Times. Dundas was recently approached by Dr. Samuel Sigoloff, Special Forces flight surgeon Lt. Col. Peter Chambers, and Aerospace occupational medicine specialist Lt. Col. Theresa Long. They handed documents to Dundas, who appeared recently with attorney Tom Renz in a five-hour hearing organized by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) titled “COVID-19: Second Opinion.” Renz shared some of the numbers related to medical disorders in the U.S. military data with The Epoch Times.

The whistleblowers, who are represented by Renz, gave him the data “under penalty of perjury,” he said during the hearing. Renz intends to submit the information to the courts, he told Johnson. The DoD responded that the DMED (Defense Medical Epidemiology Database) data from 2016 to 2020 that the whistleblowers brought up was erroneous and incomplete, and is currently under review. “DHA’s Armed Forces Surveillance Division (AFSD) conducted a complete review of the data contained in the Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED) and found that the data was incorrect for the years 2016-2020,” Maj. Charlie Dietz, a spokesperson for the DoD, told The Epoch Times. “DMED is a web-based tool to query de-identified active component personnel and medical event data contained within the Defense Medical Surveillance System (DMSS).

“Comparing the DMED database to the source data contained in DMSS, AFHSD discovered that the total number of medical diagnoses from 2016-2020 that were accessible in DMED represented only a small fraction of actual medical diagnoses for those years. In contrast, the 2021 total number of medical diagnoses were up to date in DMED. Comparison of 2021 to 2016-2020 resulted in the appearance of significant increased occurrence of all medical diagnoses in 2021 because of the under-reported data for 2016-2020. AFHSD has taken DMED offline to identify and correct the root-cause of the data corruption,” Dietz said. Renz responded: “The DoD has claimed that the DMED data from the years 2016-2020 was incorrect. This is absurd.

We spend millions of dollars per year on DMED and people monitoring DMED which is one of the premier epidemiological databases in the world. Accuracy in this database is critical as it is used to monitor for health issues in our troops. “The DoD would have us believe that the DMED database was wrong from 2016-2020 but then magically was corrected in 2021 despite the fact that they had not noticed it was wrong until we pointed it out in our testimony before Senator Johnson. Further, we are asked to believe that in 2020, the year of what they claim to be the greatest pandemic since 1918, and despite the fact that it is documented that the CDC was also watching this database, no one noticed an error of 20 million-plus injury/disease codes per year,” Renz told The Epoch Times.


Ron Johnson letter

Read more …

“VAERS is severely under-reported this year relative to other years by at least a factor of 10.”

• This Medical Data From The US DoD Is Explosive (Kirsch)

I spoke to a doctor in the military who confirmed the high incidence of vaccine-caused events in his practice. This doctor estimates that 85% of the military has been vaccinated, although the military official total is 93%. The doctor is responsible for thousands of service members and has dozens of significant vaccine injuries that are VAERS reportable (most of which have not been filed). This is a significant adverse event rate of more than 0.75%, i.e., nearly 1 in 100 soldiers are vaccine injured, some very seriously. It’s important to note that the soldiers are tough and don’t want anything on their medical records that could limit their responsibilities. So many simply don’t report severe symptoms. So our .75% vaccine injury rate is likely an underestimate. And remember, this is in a very healthy young population.

This doctor has zero VAERS reportable injuries in nearly two decades. So this suggests that the increased rate of reportable adverse events from these vaccines is far more than 500X. But other physicians I know with larger practices report elevated rates of from 600 to over 20,000 from the shots this year. In short, the number of adverse event reports from these vaccines is off the charts compared to other vaccines. This suggests that the 30X increase in the rate of adverse event reports in VAERS is because the vaccine is dangerous, not from reporting bias. It also suggests that VAERS is severely under-reported this year relative to other years by at least a factor of 10.

The FDA has assumed that VAERS is over-reported compared to previous years by 30, our estimate is that VAERS is under-reported compared to previous years by 30. Note that this estimate (comparing the propensity to report between years) doesn’t change our minimum 41 under-reporting factor estimate for events this year. This doctor had no doubts that the vaccine is causing these injuries. Over and over again, severe reactions (some never seen before in his/her career) all started happening shortly after after the soldier was vaccinated.

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Hospitalization rate was reduced by 100% in strict users. 90% reduction in mortality.

• Strictly Regular Use Of Ivermectin As Prophylaxis For Covid-19 (RG)

This is a prospective observational study of the program mention above, that used ivermectin at a dose of 0.2mg/kg/day for two consecutive days, every 15 days. We obtained and analyzed the data regarding the accumulated dose of ivermectin use, in addition to age and comorbidities, to analyze the patterns of reduction of COVID-19 infection, hospitalization, and mortality rates, and risk of dying from COVID-19, according to the regularity and amount of ivermectin used in a 5-month period. Following definitions of regularity, we considered as strictly regular subjects that used at least 180mg of ivermectin (180mg = 30 tablets), and as sporadic users subjects that used 60mg (= 10 tablets) or less during the 5-month period.

Comparisons between subjects that did not use ivermectin and these two levels of regularity of ivermectin use were performed. Analysis of the intermediate levels of ivermectin use are present in the supplement appendix of this study. To analyze hospitalization and mortality rates, we utilized the database of COVID-19 infections of all participants, from Itajai and outside. To analyze COVID-19 infection rate and risk of dying from COVID-19 we utilized the Itajai city database. Propensity score matching (PSM) was employed, followed by multivariate adjusted analysis for residual differences (doubly adjusted analysis). Results: Of the 7,345 cases of COVID-19, 3,034 occurred in non-users, 1,627 in sporadic users, and 289 in strict users, while the remaining cases occurred in the intermediate levels of ivermectin use.

Strict users were older (p < 0.0001) and non-significant higher prevalence of type 2 diabetes and hypertension. COVID-19 infection rate was 39% lower among strict users [4.03% infection rate; risk ratio (RR), 0.61; 95% confidence interval (n = 289 in each group for both comparisons; 95%CI), 0.53 – 0.70; p < 0.0001] than in non-users (6.64% infection rate), and non-significant 11% reduction compared to sporadic users (4.54% infection rate) (n = 1,627 in each group; RR, 0.89; 95%CI 0.76 – 1.03; p = 0.11). Hospitalization rate was reduced by 100% in strict users, compared to non-users and to sporadic users, both before and after PSM (RR, 0.00; 95%CI, not applicable; p < 0.0001).

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But…there’s no money in it..

• Ivermectin, A Potential Anticancer Drug Derived From An Antiparasitic Drug (PMC)

Since the first report that IVM could reverse tumor multidrug resistance (MDR) in 1996, a few relevant studies have emphasized the potential use of IVM as a new cancer treatment. Despite the large number of related studies, there are still some key issues that have not been resolved. First of all, the specific mechanism of IVM-mediated cytotoxicity in tumor cells is unclear; it may be related to the effect of IVM on various signaling pathways, but it is not very clear overall. Second, IVM seems to induce mixed cell death in tumor cells, which is also a controversial issue. Therefore, this review summarized the latest findings on the anticancer effect of IVM and discussed the mechanism of the inhibition of tumor proliferation and the way that IVM induces tumor programmed cell death to provide a theoretical basis for the use of IVM as a potential anticancer drug.


As the cost of the research and development of new anticancer drugs continues to increase, drug repositioning has become increasingly important. Drug repositioning refers to the development of new drug indications that have been approved for clinical use [28]. For some older drugs that are widely used for their original indications and have clinical data and safety information, drug repositioning allows them to be developed via a cheaper and faster cycle and to be used more effectively in clinical use clinically [29]. Here, we systematically summarized the anticancer effect and mechanism of IVM, which is of great significance for the repositioning of IVM for cancer treatment.

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“What exactly were Fauci, Farrar, and Collins doing the whole of February 2020 instead of examining ways that sick people could get well? Why did they use burner phones?”

• The Power of Protest (Tucker)

The great slogan is “living with Covid.” It is an implicit repudiation of everything that has happened for two years. It’s what we should have done along along. But the fanatics took over. The hysterical scream back in 2020 was that the power of the state, backed by media and corporate interests, would somehow make the virus go away. It was always ridiculously unachievable. The attempt unleashed massive abuse against the population, disrupted economies everywhere, and unleashed a tremendous amount of financial corruption that is still going on today. We are nowhere near done with this. Massive restrictions are still in place. Travel is still a disaster. The mask mandate on transportation is as awful as ever. The segregation in D.C., NYC, and Boston is morally repulsive.

Plus, so many lives have been shattered. So many businesses have closed. Public health is in shambles. The demographic disruption has been profound. There are scandals lurking everywhere. What exactly were Fauci, Farrar, and Collins doing the whole of February 2020 instead of examining ways that sick people could get well? Why did they use burner phones? And that article debunking the lab leak in Nature, the one highly criticized later. How did that come about? Mysteries abound about the vaccine trials. And wait until people have a look at the “Emergency Use Approval” documents submitted by the manufacturers. They will discover that the pharma companies never promised much at all. They certainly never said that the vaxx would stop the spread, keep people from being infected, much less end the pandemic. They never said that it would work against variants.

This is only a few of many remarkable shocks that will be pouring out over the coming years. Governments spent many trillions of dollars, most of which ended up in the pockets of well-connected elites in the corporate and banking sectors. The payoffs and graft connected with everything, from testing kits, to masks, to therapeutics will be alarming to behold. And wait until people figure out that all along we might have had solid generics that have a massive effective impact on early treatment. All wars come to an end, but governments rarely think in advance about the exit strategy. Instead, they kill and destroy until exhaustion sets in and then try to sneak away hoping that everyone will just move on. That’s pretty much how things fared with the Iraq War, and the results were devastating for the whole world.

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DeSantis is there too. And Texas.

• Prosecutors Gear Up As GoFundMe ‘Redirects’ Convoy Donations (RT)

West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey and Ohio AG Dave Yost have urged citizens who donated to the anti-vaccine mandate ‘Freedom Convoy’ in Canada to come forward, after crowdfunding site GoFundMe seized nearly $8 million in donations. Morrisey says the platform engaged in “deceptive” practices. “In [West Virginia], organizations must not deceive donors and engage in deceptive advertising practices,” Morrisey, a Republican, tweeted on Friday night. “If you’ve been victimized by a deceptive act or practice, let us know!” Ohio’s Dave Yost, also a Republican, issued a similar statement on Saturday morning, instructing duped donors to file a complaint on his website. It is still unclear what kind of legal action, if any, the AGs are preparing to take.


The ‘Freedom Convoy’, a group of truckers who have clogged up roads in the Canadian capital, Ottawa for a week now, had raised $7,964,141, before GoFundMe shut down their fundraiser on Friday. The decision was seemingly made at the behest of Ottawa’s police department, which thanked the company for “listening to our concerns as a City and a police service.” GoFundMe announced that unless donors request refunds, the site will distribute the seven-figure sum to “credible and established charities.” Even though the truckers confirmed that “funds would be used only for participants who traveled to Ottawa to participate in a peaceful protest,” the crowdfunding platform justified its decision by saying that the protest has become an “occupation” of the Canadian capital. Conservatives on both sides of the US/Canada border were outraged.

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“..the areas of the country currently under the control of separatists in eastern Ukraine. According to Danilov, capturing these areas is also impossible by military means..”

• Retaking Crimea By Force ‘Impossible’ – Ukraine (RT)

Using the Ukrainian military to retake Crimea from Russia is not a realistic proposition, but it could be an option in the future, the chairman of Kiev’s National Security and Defense Council said on Thursday. Speaking to TV channel 1+1, Aleksey Danilov explained that Ukraine would not simply accept that Crimea is now a part of Russia and stated that the government would “do everything” in its power to take control of the peninsula. “Do we have a strategy to return Crimea militarily? Right now, we have a strategy to return Crimea. Whether it will be the military way, whether it will be any other way, it depends on many factors. As of today, I can say that it is impossible,” Danilov said. “What will happen tomorrow or in a year, we will see. It is not such a simple matter.”


Crimea came under the control of Moscow in 2014, when the peninsula was re-absorbed into Russia, following a referendum. The vote took place a month after the events of the Maidan, when violent street protests toppled Kiev’s democratically elected government. Ukraine, as well as most of the world, considers the referendum illegitimate and views Crimea as illegally occupied by Moscow. The national security official also spoke about the areas of the country currently under the control of separatists in eastern Ukraine. According to Danilov, capturing these areas is also impossible by military means, as it would entail a large number of casualties. Speaking last year, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said that Russia would work “to help Ukraine solve the problem” of Donbass, but “Crimea is out of the discussion.”

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“Ukraine has blocked almost 90% of the water supplies flowing into Crimea, after the republic joined Russia ..”

• ‘Without Russia, We Won’t Stop A Full-on Ukrainian Offensive’ (RT)

“It takes time to replace a window. First, they take the measurements and then you have to wait for the window to be made. If we’re talking about just one window, everything will be done more or less fast, but a bulk order, for several families, takes more time to process, coordination takes time. We have had several cases when the customer did not live to receive the promised support. Sometimes, when we finally arrive at an old woman’s house to install a window, it is already too late. She has died, they tell us. It happened on several occasions. Once we were even treated with pastries at a funeral repast.” Vladimir does not attach much importance to the present-day escalation, nor does he believe the status of the Donbass republics is going to change.

He thinks that any offensive, limited to the Donbass – no matter if it comes from Ukraine, or the Donbass republics, or the Russians – will only bring more destruction and take more human lives. “This is an urbanized area, where both conflicting sides spent eight years in the trenches. Debaltsevo was destroyed and, after seven years, it is still in ruins. Why lose more lives, tens of thousands of lives? If Ukraine wins, it will have to address the Crimean issue and the need to restore the Donbass region it has destroyed with its own hands. If the republics get the upper hand, the war will continue, but the frontline will be moved to Mariupol and Slavyansk, instead of Gorlovka and Donetsk,” he says. “Only the Russian peacekeepers can bring this war to a close by launching a massive attack against the rear parts of the Ukrainian armed forces. This is what can help end the war in Donetsk and Gorlovka, in Mariupol and Slavyansk, and in Kharkov, in Odessa, in Kiev.

And this is when Crimea will finally get enough fresh water. [Ukraine has blocked almost 90% of the water supplies flowing into Crimea, after the republic joined Russia – RT.] And I will be able to finally ask this bunch of scum, our public officials – where is the money that was supposed to stop civilian losses? Where has it all gone, I will ask them, and I don’t care if this will make them think that I’m siding with Ukraine.” These people, who fell victim to a geopolitical conflict, do not fool themselves. They do not insist that the path they have chosen is perfect and beyond reproach. The rasputitsa that we witnessed in September 2014 when the first Minsk Protocol was signed, then again in February 2015 with Minsk II, has diverted the Donbass and the rest of Novorossiya from their path of rejoining Russia.

Dirty politics has almost succeeded in confusing millions of people, in persuading them that everything they have gone through – fighting, hardships, friends and family members killed in the war, all the defeats and victories – everything was done for the sake of something entirely different. However, every nation has a special legend they turn to in times of hardships. The Russians of the Donbass are no exception. They go on living in their native land, hoping that this period of rasputitsa triggered by hybrid politics will be over one day, and all the foul and mean things that are happening now will freeze along with the mud of the steppes. And then these people, living in the constant fear that tomorrow may never come for them, will finally get a chance to liberate their towns and themselves. Are they afraid of the “Russian invasion”? No, they are hoping for one. And they call it “humanitarian intervention.”

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Not getting any prettier.

• Joe Rogan Apologizes As Podcasts Disappear From Spotify (RT)

More than 70 episodes of ‘The Joe Rogan Experience’ podcast have vanished from Spotify, as first reported by JRE Missing, a service that monitors the popular podcast. The episodes disappeared this week and feature a variety of guests, from commentator Michael Malice to comedian Tom Segura. News of the pulled episodes comes as Rogan has addressed controversy around his show for the second time in an Instagram video, offering an apology for some past language and jokes highlighted recently by critics calling for the comedian’s widely popular show to be censored or pulled by Spotify. Rogan addressed multiple instances of him using the N-word, as well as another podcast clip that has long been criticized where he appears to compare a black neighborhood he arrived in to the film ‘Planet of the Apes’.


On using the N-word, Rogan revealed he once would use the word “in context,” as in discussing a story or person that involved the word, like comedian Redd Foxx breaking cultural boundaries by using the word on television. Rogan says he knows today that he was wrong in his thinking that ‘context’ mattered. Addressing the ‘Planet of the Apes’ clip, Rogan explained that he acknowledges making a bad joke on the show in question and then recounts what a positive experience he had. “There’s nothing I can do to take that back. I wish I could. Obviously, that’s not possible,” Rogan said. “I certainly wasn’t trying to be racist, and I certainly would never want to offend someone for entertainment with something as stupid as racism.” Rogan ended his statement by saying he hopes this instance is a “teachable moment” to others and offering his “sincerest deepest apologies.” Neither Rogan or Spotify have offered an explanation for the new batch of missing episodes.

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“Joe Rogan stuck the fork in himself – another irrelevant notch on the belt to be forgotten..”

• Joe Rogan Apologizes for Being Joe Rogan, Begs Woke Forgiveness (CTH)

This never ends well. Joe Rogan has self-flagellated while treading water in a pool of Alinsky piranhas. This never ends well. Apparently, the Lightbringer for all modern Alinsky tribal followers, Barack Obama, triggered the final thumbs down and threatened the financial mechanism that supported the embattled Mr. Rogan, Spotify Inc. With the twitch of his pinkie ring, Teh One, the bringer of all racial and progressive enlightenment, Barack Obama, forced the ashamed and humiliated Joe Rogan to kneel before the altar of wokeism and apologize for the mortal sin of using the “N” word. Earlier on Saturday, Mr. Rogan assessed his bank account, glanced at the tin cup and used Woke-Insta to profess his sins and beg forgiveness from the leftist tribe. In an effort to avoid his cancellation, Joe Rogan denounced his skin color, renounced his former shameful conduct and announced his new enlightenment.

Rogan predictably declared the oft familiar last ditch effort phrase, “this is a teachable moment.” Quickly, Joe Rogan’s newly subscribed conservative audience was warm to appreciate his humility and offer their forgiveness. However, that tribe is not the Spotify audience who manage the coliseum of his indentured servitude. Despite their protestations to the contrary, the progressive and enlightened woke tribe never relent until they have achieved their goal – the removal of all Joe Rogan flesh and death by ten thousand screaming piranha bites. For the professional and political left, apology is weakness. Weakness must be punished. The Alinsky clan bait their victims with the false promises of forgiveness; if you just cower strongly enough, bend meekly enough, apologize sincerely enough, it will be okay. But forgiveness is never provided, it is never okay.

The millions of dollars that Joe Rogan might be worth to the corporation known as Spotify are irrelevant to the swarm. Indeed, the mob view higher value as a challenge, a new height for the wokeness to achieve. Rogan just bled into the pool of that swarm. There is no exit now. The professional political left does not control media in all forms as a business proposition, for them it is a weapon. Rogan’s financial value to Spotify means naught – his cancellation is only a matter of time and contractual exit. He’s done; another sacrifice on the altar of Wokeism. Joe Rogan stuck the fork in himself – another irrelevant notch on the belt to be forgotten with hundreds, if not thousands, of previous notches. Everything now is simply a formality. We’ve seen this cancellation show too many times to pretend we don’t know how it ends.

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“Look, these creatures charging me with their blood-drenched teeth and soulless black eyes seem reasonable..”

• Man Being Devoured By Hungry Sharks Tries Apologizing To Them (BBee)

According to sources, a local man was devoured by several hungry Great White Sharks off the coast of California today after several failed attempts to calm down the murderous creatures by apologizing to them. “Look, these creatures charging me with their blood-drenched teeth and soulless black eyes seem reasonable,” said the man. “I must’ve done something to anger them or hurt their feelings! I should just do the right thing and apologize to them.” “Hey there Mr. Shark!” said the man to one of the creatures chewing through his left leg. “I am deeply sorry for any comments I may have made in the past that were hurtful and damaging to the shark community. This has been a time of learning and growth for me. I’m grateful for you and others like you who have called me to ‘do better.’ I am deeply sorry.”

The shark then chewed off the man’s right leg as well. “I suppose I deserved that,” said the man. “Thank you for holding me accountable.” Sources say the man apologized to the brainless underwater killing machines several times until they devoured the rest of him. The man is survived by his family and friends, all of whom have now disowned him. Medics arrived on the scene to find only half of a severed arm left in the water. The severed arm has been hired by The Daily Wire.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

 

Now it makes sense

 

 

Blank

 

 

 

 

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Omicron is the Best Vaccine

Feb 052022
 
 February 5, 2022  Posted by at 2:52 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,  30 Responses »


Lawrence Alma-Tadema Women of Amphissa 1887

 

 

Omicron is the best vaccine available. You can pick between BA.1 and BA.2. That allows us to do a little overview, also because “new“ findings have come out recently. New only in the sense that the media now report on them for the first time, not because we didn’t already know.

Then again, how would YOU know, if not through Joe Rogan, and his recent guests Dr. Malone and Dr. Mc Cullough, and websites like Peak Prosperity and the Automatic Earth? Media capture has been pretty total for 2 years, because 1/ bad news sells better than good news, and 2/ Big Pharma owns the discussion, through its ownership of media and medical “experts”.

That’s all about to change. Omicron can -and will- still be sold as a potentially devastating disease, but if the numbers don’t add up, people will stop listening and reading. So the media’s hands will be forced. The treatment of Joe Rogan is only the culmination of that, of so many voices since early 2020, and it’s good it led to him.

Because Joe doesn’t care, he’s bigger than all of the media assembling against him, and he did nothing but give some people a voice and a space that were being ostracized -and still are, maybe even more-, and Spotify is a Sweden-based company, which not many will be able to touch.

Yeah, yeah, Neil Young, Joni, Streisand, they’re all in Biden and Pelosi’s age-range, but do you think many people will care who are not over 70, if and when Omicron keeps on lowering death numbers? Or are they more likely to side with Canadian truckers and their ideas of freedom?

Will Justin send the army to “take care” of the protests? You would almost hope so. I don’t think he’s stupid enough, not even him, but he’s in an ugly spot. All he would have had to do is go talk to them, but then that’s the overriding theme here, isn’t it, to not talk, let alone discuss?

The idea has been all along to NOT talk to Dr. Malone and Dr. Mc Cullough, or Joe Rogan, or anyone else who doesn’t toe the Pfizer line. And at some point, like when people realize Omicron is the best vaccine available, all that’s left is to enforce mandates with police or armed forces. As I said, you’d almost hope they do it. The “let them eat cake” moment.

I saw this pic yesterday of a headline from German TV channel NTV, which says Pfizer will sue Denmark for loosening its vaccine mandate, because fewer people will get jabbed, and that means less profit. How much of this will we see?

 

 

Back to reality: We have found (or rather, seen confirmed) in the last 2 weeks or so that:

1/ Masks don’t work. The CDC admitted that the cloth masks they recommended for 2 years have no effect whatsoever. But along their own lines of “evidence”, neither do surgical masks, which have holes 1000x bigger than a virus particle. N95 masks could work to some extent, but only if they’re fitted perfectly, by a professional, every time they’re worn.

Maybe the fact that the US government, and CDC and FDA, waited 2 years in promoting them tells you the whole story. And yes, P100 masks might work to some extent, but at that point we might as well go for full-blown gas-masks. In short, face masks “for Covid” have been as entirely useless as they have been completely destructive, in the lives of all of us, but in particular our children.

But the masks still haven’t been as big a disaster as:

2/ Lockdowns don’t work. For 2 years running, all the media and their loyal followers have been citing the CDC, FDA and Johns Hopkins University. But now that Johns Hopkins releases a report that says lockdowns prevented only 0.2% of potential deaths, crickets are a very popular life form all of a sudden. What’s not to love? But yeah, we get it, good news doesn’t sell. In the same vein, an “imminent” Russian invasion of Ukraine, tanks in the streets of Kyiv, gets a lot more clickbait than “nah, all quiet on the eastern front”.

But the lockdowns haven’t been as big a disaster as (we’re working up to a climax here):

3/ The vaccines don’t work.

3.1/ The vaccines were never needed.

The way to create demand for them was to prohibit all other substances that could have saved millions of lives in prophylaxis or early treatment. As I’ve said repeatedly, I think vitamin D could have prevented 50% of all infections and deaths, zinc could have taken care of the next 25%, and for the remaining quarter an entire scala of repurposed drugs, ivermectin, HCQ, fluvoxamine, melatonin, aspirin etc. would have been enough.

You don’t have to aim for zero. Bring the numbers down by 50-75-90%, and any reason to lock down or wear masks is gone. Pfizer needed to ban all these substances, and ban the possible news coverage of their potential, to get an EUA for its vaccine. And that’s why they were all swept under the carpet. Thing is, there are millions of dead bodies under that carpet, too.

But not only were they never needed:

3.2/ The vaccines don’t work.

To be honest: what we know in early February 2022 is that yes, they do seem to “work” for a few months, we’re not exactly sure how or how long. That should never be a question about a vaccine, however, and if it is, call it something else. Moreover, as far as they “work”, they do that by -trying to- take over control from your immune system, which you cannot survive without. Your best option today is to have an immune system strong enough to fight off the vaccine, which is as insane as it sounds. A booster 3rd or 4th or 12th shot will work for even less time, and in the meantime you run the risk of spike proteins lingering and gathering in all of your organs, including your heart and brain. For the rest of your life.

Because:

3.3/ The vaccines cause enormous damage.

The main issue about mRNA vaccines is not even the scores of vaxxed young athletes dropping dead, or the elevated numbers of 10-15 year olds who have myocarditis, devastating as they are; it’s the long-term consequences, never tested for. I’ve been reading a lot about mRNA and cancer recently. Because I see it pop up all over.

 

 

This will not affect everyone. Some of us have robust immune systems. But those that do not, due to age, obesity, you name it, will see the negative effects of spike proteins and other vaccine “by-products”. Not all in the same way, and not all to the same degree. And not all at the same time either. But you’re still all unleashing (cyto-) toxic elements into your body, your bloodstream, your organs.

You’re unleashing more of them with each next shot, or booster, into a body whose immune system has ever less defense against the invading toxic elements. Because your immune system may have “learned” to defend itself against these elements, but then the jabs add ever more of them, and the original antigenic sin kicks in for real. Until the immune system is overwhelmed and gives up.

So why the shots, and the boosters? It doesn’t appear to have much to do with logic. In Britain, Covid is already less threatening than the flu. You may argue that this is due to the vaccines, but how realistic is that given we know their efficacy drops so fast you need a booster every few months?

 

 

Whereas, if you catch Omicron, and many “Experts” now state that we will all catch it at some point (or more than once), the amount of toxic elements entering your body is manageable. Sure, you may need to boost your immune system, lose weight, change your diet, but how could that ever be a bad thing?

Still, if you combine vitamin D with zinc and perhaps IVM, your chances look much better than with 3-4-5-6 boosters. But, you know, if that’s what you want, go for it. Ditto for face masks, and lockdowns, etc. But with what we know today, there is no reason why anyone should dictate any of these things to you. You’re not any safer because of them.

The main difference appears to be that you, the vaxxed/boosted, have a lot more to be wary about for the rest of your life, 30-40-50 years, from “vaccines” that were poorly tested, and not at all tested for that sort of timespan.

Omicron is a one-off that appears to protect you from all -or most- previous and future Covid variants. The vaccines are geared towards one older variant only, which hardly exists anymore. I won’t advice anyone to get Omicron, but if given the choice between Omicron and Comirnaty, is the choice really that clear?

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle February 4 2022

Feb 042022
 
 February 4, 2022  Posted by at 9:20 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  101 Responses »


James McNeill Whistler Nocturne in Black and Gold, the Falling Rocket 1875

 

• 12 Countries Roll Back COVID Restrictions, Israel Scraps ‘Green Pass’ (CHD)
• Israel Will Abolish The Vaxx Passport And Most Testing Requirements (Haa.)
• Italy’s Covid Despotism Just Got Worse (Salonia)
• What The Omicron Wave Is Revealing About Human Immunity (Nature)
• Lethal Mutagenesis As An Antiviral Strategy (Science)
• British Children Up To 52 Times More Likely To Die Following A Covid Shot (LSN)
• Rejoice! An End To The Dreaded Covid Count… (Hoenderkamp)
• Study Offers Strongest Proof Yet Of Vitamin D’s Power To Fight Covid (ToI)
• Calls for Help From Families of Patients Hospitalized With COVID-19 (ET)
• Justin Trudeau is a Bungler and Menace to His Nation (Kohlmayer)
• We Were Warned About the Ports (Sammon)
• Spotify Spat Shows Why Joe Rogan And His Podcast Matter (FT)
• Can Joe Rogan Save Free Speech? (Turley)
• North Korea Hacked Him. So He Took Down Its Internet (Wired)
• Reporter Shreds Admin Spox Over ‘Russian False Flag’ Claims (ZH)

 

 

 

 

Lab Leak Conspirancy

 

 

 

 

“..no longer a “socially critical disease.”

• 12 Countries Roll Back COVID Restrictions, Israel Scraps ‘Green Pass’ (CHD)

Europe is accelerating steps to roll back COVID restrictions as efforts to control the spread of the virus have failed and countries downgrade the threat posed by SARS-CoV-2. Sweden and Switzerland joined Denmark, Norway, Finland, Ireland, The Netherlands, Italy, Lithuania, France and the UK in announcing they will lift COVID restrictions and open up their countries. Top Israeli officials also announced this week they are abolishing the country’s “Green Pass” COVID vaccine passport for restaurants, hotels, gyms and theaters. The policy update will take effect Feb. 6, Prime Minister Naftali Bennet’s government said, pending approval by a parliamentary committee. Israel’s proof-of-vaccination policy will remain in effect for events such as parties or weddings.

“To continue the green pass in the same way can create false assurances,” said Nadav Davidovitch, an epidemiologist and public health physician advising Prime Minister Naftali Bennet’s government. “It’s not reducing infections in closed spaces like theatres. It needs to be used mainly for high-risk places like hospitals, elderly care homes, or events when you are eating and singing and dancing.” Sweden will lift all COVID restrictions by Feb. 9, the Swedish government said today. According to Politico, the Swedish Public Health Agency said it reassessed COVID as “not being socially critical” due to a better understanding of the Omicron variant, which is milder and associated with fewer hospitalizations.

“It’s time to open up Sweden,” said Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson. “The pandemic isn’t over, but it is moving into a new phase.” The decision to open Sweden came a day after Switzerland, citing high immunity levels and the milder Omicron variant, announced it will abolish mandatory work-from-home and the quarantine rules beginning today. The government also will lift health measures at the borders and tourists will no longer need to receive Swiss COVID certificates. The Swiss government said it planned to phase out other restrictions after consulting with 26 cantons, employers, trade unions and parliamentary committees.

[..] Just days before Sweden and Switzerland’s announcements, Denmark became the first country in the European Union to lift all COVID restrictions, reclassifying COVID as an endemic disease. Danish Health Minister Magnus Heunicke on Feb. 1 wrote a letter to the parliament’s epidemiology committee stating COVID was no longer a “socially critical disease.” Based on the recommendations of the committee, the government decided to scrap COVID restrictions. [..] Italy, France, Norway, Lithuania, England and Finland also relaxed restrictions, Bloomberg reported. “We should discuss whether it’s time for us to take a different viewpoint and start unwinding restrictions even with a high number of infections,” Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin told reporters. “I hope that we can be rid of restrictions during February.”

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“..effectively removing barriers to entry for the unvaccinated..”

• Israel Will Abolish The Vaxx Passport And Most Testing Requirements (Haa.)

Israel’s coronavirus cabinet decided to abolish its so-called green passport program for most places of entertainment, including hotels, restaurants, gyms and movie theaters, effectively removing barriers to entry for the unvaccinated. The new policy will come into effect on Sunday, and will leave the proof of vaccination in place for events “with significantly greater risk of infection,” such as weddings and parties. The cabinet also decided to scrap the requirement to present a PCR test upon exiting the country. Following recommendations of the Health Ministry, the cabinet further scrapped the expiration date on green passports for anyone who has received a third or fourth dose of the vaccine, meaning those passes would be valid indefinitely.


But for people who have only had two doses, or who recovered from the virus but aren’t vaccinated, the pass will be valid for only four months from the date of the second dose or the recovery. Those who are not fully vaccinated and employed in the education, health and welfare sectors will still be required to undergo biweekly tests. The decisions come in the midst of Israel’s omicron wave, with Prime Minister Naftali Bennett saying that he predicts “one-and-a-half to two hard weeks ahead of us.” [..] Meanwhile, the Health Ministry reported that the R number – the average number of people each coronavirus carrier infects – further declined on Tuesday to 0.92. Any number under 1 indicates that the pandemic is shrinking. The figure is calculated according to data from the previous 10 days.

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“..they are to be allowed access to supermarkets only to buy “goods of primary necessity.”

• Italy’s Covid Despotism Just Got Worse (Salonia)

A couple of weeks ago, a new decree of the Draghi government established yet more rules restricting the lives of people who have not been injected with the latest vaccine booster and who therefore cannot show the latest version of the Green Pass. These second-class citizens, who have already been stripped of their right to move, work, and participate in a great number of social activities, are now forbidden from entering post offices to withdraw their pension, and they are to be allowed access to supermarkets only to buy “goods of primary necessity.” In other words, the Italian government decides what kind of food and what other goods (if any) these people will be able to purchase.

Among Western countries, Italy has been one of those experiencing the most systematic denial of basic civil rights over the past two years. Coalition governments led first by Giuseppe Conte and then by Mario Draghi have empowered an unelected committee of “experts” called the Comitato Tecnico Scientifico, which has in turn empowered the governments by assigning a scientific aura to every decree, every action, and every word coming from the executive. This has resulted in an endless series of lockdown measures that for long periods have erased freedom of movement, the right to work, property rights over businesses and shops, freedom to assemble, freedom to worship, and even the distinction of jurisdictional spheres between church and political authority (with state bureaucrats closing churches and then handing out petty instructions on what rites could be carried out, how liturgies should be curtailed, and how many people if any could be present at masses and funerals).

In the meantime, the legislative branch has been humbled, and government by urgent decrees from the executive has become the norm. The very constitutional structure of the country has been bent, and a new concept called “stato di emergenza” (state of emergency) has been invented out of thin air, even though it is nowhere to be found in Italy’s republican constitution. If we were not living in the age of CNN, fake news, and outrageous subsidies handed out by politicians to newspapers and the media, one could legitimately wonder where the journalists were while all this was going on? In fact, journalists in Italy are among the main culprits of the current dystopian reality, since they have given platforms to “experts” who agreed with lockdowns and other measures that expanded government control over all aspects of life, while at the same time they ferociously mocked and ostracized doctors and scientists who dared to question the logic of outdoor mask mandates and curfews for restaurants.

Anybody who dared to point out the disastrous consequences of a prolonged lockdown on mental health and on people suffering from other pathologies, or the link between the economy and public health, was accused of being a “covid denier.” This is a pattern that surely readers recognize, as they have seen it in the US and many other countries over the past two years. The fact that virtually every opinion labelled by the media as “conspiracy theory” has turned out to be true just three or four months later has done nothing to shake the arrogance of the corrupt mass media, who are entrenched in their monopoly over the news cycle, thanks to their access to state funding and political favors. And this is true in Italy as virtually everywhere else.

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Nature Magazine tries hard to find a role for the vaccines. It’s not there.

The vaccines don’t want to help or boost our immune system, they want to take over its role. And that is every bit as bad as it sounds.

• What The Omicron Wave Is Revealing About Human Immunity (Nature)

Immune memory depends on more than just antibodies. Even when antibody levels drop, memory B cells can recognize a return invader, divide, and quickly start churning out antibodies to fight it. And the memory B-cell response improves over time, at least in the short term. Six months after vaccination, the individuals in Wherry’s study6 had elevated numbers of memory B cells that responded not only to the original SARS-CoV-2, but also to three other variants of concern. And then there are T cells, the third pillar of immune memory. On coming into contact with an antigen, these multiply into a pool of effector cells that act to wipe out the infection. Killer T cells quickly divide to assassinate infected cells, and various types of helper T cell secrete chemical signals that stimulate other parts of the immune system, including B cells. After the threat has passed, some of these cells persist as memory T cells.


Some people might carry memory T cells from past coronavirus infections — such as those that cause common colds — that can recognize SARS-CoV-2. These cells could help to fight the infection, or even stop it completely. One study7 found that health-care workers who were exposed to SARS-CoV-2 but never tested positive had subtle signs of a response to infection. The researchers hypothesize that cross-reactive T cells shut the infection down before it could take hold. “These people did have an infection in a sort of loosest sense of the word,” says Mala Maini, an immunologist at University College London who led the study. But “there’s probably not much virus around because it’s being shut down very quickly”. This idea is still controversial, and the phenomenon might be rare. Memory cells typically can’t block infection in the way that neutralizing antibodies can, but they don’t necessarily need to.

With COVID-19, infection happens quickly, but it takes a little while to cause serious illness. That gives memory T cells some time to do their jobs. When re-exposed to a virus or booster, these cells will kick into overdrive, “proliferating like crazy”, Crotty says. “In a 24-hour period, you can get a tenfold increase in the number of your memory T cells.” That’s probably not fast enough to have much of an effect on getting sick, he adds. But it could be fast enough to prevent hospitalization. And it’s much harder for the virus to find a way around the T-cell response. That’s because T cells in one individual recognize different parts of the virus than do T cells in another individual. So a virus could mutate to escape one person’s T-cell response, but not another’s. “Escape is meaningless at the population level,” Crotty says. Also, T cells can see parts of the virus (or the spike protein) that antibodies can’t, including pieces that are less likely to mutate.

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More on RNA potential to change DNA, via reverse transcriptase. Don’t be a guinea pig.

• Lethal Mutagenesis As An Antiviral Strategy (Science)

There is a gap in our knowledge in scaling short-term lab-based assays (using bacteria, animal cells, and animal models) for mutagenic activity with long-term risk to human health. Mutagens that are incorporated during cellular DNA synthesis are problematic for a developing fetus (where cells are undergoing rapid division), male germline cells (which continue to divide throughout life), and cancer risk (where the small fraction of human cells that are dividing have the potential to incorporate a mutation that could contribute to cancer development). Humans are exposed to mutagens throughout life—for example, DNA mutations are induced by x-ray imaging or during air travel—so there are levels of DNA damage that are considered to be largely inconsequential.


If the molnupiravir metabolite NHC really is a mutagen in dividing animal cells, how should negative data in an animal model be interpreted? Are such negative data sufficient to ensure long-term safety in humans, or does the lack of knowledge about the link between negative results in animal assays and long-term outcomes in human health need to be acknowledged? Molnupiravir use will come with some restrictions around short-term risks associated with reproductive health, but it may take years before potential long-term risks are understood. The best outcome, which is the assumption from the negative results in animals, is that molnupiravir treatment falls within the background level of exposure to mutagens that humans already experience and tolerate. The half-life of molnupiravir metabolites in human tissue is unknown.

[..] Molnupiravir has the potential to lower the disease burden of SARS-CoV-2 infections and help contain future emerging RNA viruses. However, how can its potential long-term effects as a mutagen be assessed? The following steps are suggested: Treatment should be restricted to those who will benefit the most, such as those who cannot tolerate other available treatments, those who have a preexisting condition that enhances the risk of COVID-19, and those who are more than 50 years of age and would be less affected by a potential long-term risk of cancer or reproductive risks. A registry of a cohort of people who received molnupiravir should be kept to longitudinally monitor the frequency of cancer and other potential outcomes so that the opportunity to understand the risk (or lack thereof) associated with the use of a mutagenic ribonucleoside as an antiviral is not missed.


Strategies to limit metabolism of mutagenic analogs from the ribonucleotide pool into the 2′ -deoxyribonucleotide pool should be explored to limit the potential DNA mutation load in the host. In addition, the viral population diversity should be evaluated after treatment with molnupiravir in those who fail to clear the virus to see whether the treatment accelerates viral evolution. Lethal mutagenesis has the potential to be an important antiviral strategy for RNA viruses, especially in emerging infections when there is an absence of virus-specific antivirals. The potential of this strategy should be exploited, but the possible risks should be acknowledged and addressed.

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Hmmm. A bit skeptical. The ONS provides stats in 100,000 person-years instead of 100,000 population, and for good reason, but what do they mean when numbers are very low?

• British Children Up To 52 Times More Likely To Die Following A Covid Shot (LSN)

In December, the ONS published age-standardized data on the mortality rates of individuals in 5-year age sets in Britain, grouped by their “vaccination” status for the COVID-19 shots. The data accounts for the period from January 1 to October 31, 2021. The ONS tabulated “Monthly age-standardised mortality rates by age-group and vaccination status for deaths involving COVID-19, per 100,000 person-years” but presented the data only for ages 18 and over. However, the jabs are available to children as young as 12, and those children are allowed to receive the shot against their parents’ wishes. In limited cases, children as young as 5 have been given a reduced dosage of the shots.


Nevertheless, as noted by The Exposé, a separate table outlining “deaths and person-years by vaccination status” includes 5-year age groups from 10-years-old and up. From the data provided, a calculation of the mortality rate per 100,000 person-years can be made. The rate per 100,000 person-years delineation is used in preference over the simpler 100,000 population calculation to better represent the mortality rates over a specific period of time, as people in one “vaccination” group – such as un-jabbed, single-jabbed, and double-jabbed – soon move into the next group.

[..] the 100,000 person-years calculation can be made, with the younger group coming out at 20.9 un-jabbed per 100,000 person-years and the older group at 15.9. Following this, the mortality rate per 100,000 person-years is worked out by dividing the number of deaths within each group by the 100,000 person-years calculation. The result is that for the 10-14 year group, the un-jabbed mortality per 100,000 person-years is 4.6 while the un-jabbed mortality rate per 100,000 person-years for the 15 19 group is 10.1. Using the same data set and calculation, the mortality rate for 10-14-year-olds who received one dose of the jabs suffered a 45.1 per 100,000 person-years death rate, while 15 19-year-olds with one jab suffered 18.3 deaths per 100,00 person-years.

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[..] the 15 per cent recorded when the death rate was at its peak in May 2020.. [..] by Tuesday the CFR had fallen to 0.19 per cent…

• Rejoice! An End To The Dreaded Covid Count… (Hoenderkamp)

The Government last month signalled its intention to scrap the legal requirement for infected people to self-isolate on March 24, and yesterday it was claimed that it will stop releasing daily Covid updates in April. To which I say ‘Rejoice!’ – but why can’t we end both practices today? And, while we’re about it, stop testing too. If you think such a course sounds alarmingly precipitate, allow me to explain why there is no need to delay a moment longer. The truth is that the advent of the highly infectious (although markedly milder) Omicron variant has changed everything. Last week the Case Fatality Rate (CFR) – the proportion of infected people who died of Covid – was hovering at around 0.95 per cent.


That is way below the 15 per cent recorded when the death rate was at its peak in May 2020 when testing was minimal. And since Monday, when the Office For National Statistics included ‘reinfections’ – people who have contracted the virus more than once – on its daily Covid dashboard for the first time, the CFR has plummeted still further. With the addition of hundreds of thousands of cases to the weekly total, by Tuesday the CFR had fallen to 0.19 per cent, a percentage akin to that of flu, an illness which currently has a fatality rate of between 0.1 and 0.2 per cent. The average age of death from Covid, meanwhile, remains at the pre-pandemic 82, with data from the US showing that 75 per cent of people who die with Covid have no fewer than four underlying serious conditions.

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Oh c’mon, we need to study that? “We found it remarkable, and striking..” says a doctor. How many lives were lost?

• Study Offers Strongest Proof Yet Of Vitamin D’s Power To Fight Covid (ToI)

Israel scientists say they have gathered the most convincing evidence to date that increased vitamin D levels can help COVID-19 patients reduce the risk of serious illness or death. Researchers from Bar Ilan University and the Galilee Medical Center say that the vitamin has such a strong impact on disease severity that they can predict how people would fare if infected based on nothing more than their ages and vitamin D levels. Lacking vitamin D significantly increases danger levels, they concluded in newly peer-reviewed research published Thursday in the journal PLOS One. The study is based on research conducted during Israel’s first two waves of the virus, before vaccines were widely available, and doctors emphasized that vitamin supplements were not a substitute for vaccines, but rather a way to keep immunity levels from falling.

Vitamin D deficiency is endemic across the Middle East, including in Israel, where nearly four in five people are low on the vitamin, according to one study from 2011. By taking supplements before infection, though, the researchers in the new Israeli study found that patients could avoid the worst effects of the disease. “We found it remarkable, and striking, to see the difference in the chances of becoming a severe patient when you are lacking in vitamin D compared to when you’re not,” said Dr. Amiel Dror, a Galilee Medical Center physician and Bar Ilan researcher who was part of the team behind the study. He noted that his study was conducted pre-Omicron, but said that the coronavirus doesn’t change fundamentally enough between variants to negate vitamin D effectiveness.

“What we’re seeing when vitamin D helps people with COVID infections is a result of its effectiveness in bolstering the immune systems to deal with viral pathogens that attack the respiratory system,” he told The Times of Israel. “This is equally relevant for Omicron as it was for previous variants.” [..] In June, researchers published preliminary findings showing that 26 percent of coronavirus patients died if they were vitamin D deficient soon before hospitalization, compared to 3% who had normal levels of vitamin D. They also determined that hospitalized patients who were vitamin D deficient were 14 times more likely, on average, to end up in severe or critical condition than others.

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Attorney’s advice: “Stay out of the hospital, no matter what.”

• Calls for Help From Families of Patients Hospitalized With COVID-19 (ET)

Attorney Esther Bodek in Aurora, Colorado, also knows of a patient’s family members who were arrested when communications with a hospital went sour. She says requests from families of COVID-19 patients have flooded in since November. “It’s traumatizing,” Bodek said, “because it is a level of civil rights abuses that I have never encountered in my entire life.” In case after case, she’s seen a pattern of separating COVID-19 patients from their families and restricting visitation. “And during that period of time is usually when the remdesivir is administered.” Some families coming to her for help often strenuously object to treatment with remdesivir. When other treatments have failed, they desperately want to try things the hospital won’t allow, such as ivermectin and vitamins.

Those are part of a popular protocol used by independent doctors around the country and by people treating themselves at home. Bodek has fought many times to obtain those medications as a last-ditch effort to save a patient. She said the resistance she faces when dealing with the hospitals is maddening. “Any question about treatment starts immediate combativeness [by hospital staff], from what I’ve seen in the pattern of our cases,” she said. She’s had clients denied fluids and nutrition to the point of near-starvation. Since taking those cases she works night and day seven days a week. On the weekend, “I’ll be on the phone and talking to somebody in tears,” she said. “The hospital’s telling them they want to pull the plug and they’re trying to make a decision.

The doctor says, ‘We’re going to take him off life support now.’ And I’ve had to say ‘No! That’s not their choice!’” One of her clients works in billing in a hospital and told her that hospitals receive a bonus payment of $17,000 from the federal government for every patient confirmed to have COVID-19, Bodek said. A bonus payment of $37,000 is paid for any patient going on a ventilator, according to that client, Bodek said. [..] Bodek’s advice: “Stay out of the hospital, no matter what. And if it happens that you’re admitted, have a medical power of attorney immediately written up to say no to remdesivir.” She’s looking into filing civil rights violations lawsuits if claims of medical malpractice won’t work. “I’m determined to find a way to stop this abuse,” Bodek said. “This is definitely a fight we’re not giving up.”

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Vaccine Insanity Syndrome (VIS).

• Justin Trudeau is a Bungler and Menace to His Nation (Kohlmayer)

At the beginning of January, Justin Trudeau, the Prime Minister of Canada, posted a message on Twitter in which he announced that he had just received his Covid vaccine booster and urged others to do likewise. At the end of January, Justin Trudeau posted a message on Twitter in which he announced that he had tested positive for Covid-19. Astoundingly, at the conclusion of his message Trudeau urged everyone to get the shots even though they failed to protect him from the disease. “Everyone, please get vaccinated and get boosted,” he insisted. Trudeau’s message shows the depth of irrationality – bordering on insanity – to which many have fallen victim. We propose to call this phenomenon the Vaccine Insanity Syndrome (VIS).

Those who suffer from VIS have largely lost touch with reality and things like common sense, evidence and logic no longer gain any traction in their thinking. Just to summarize the absurdity of the whole situation: Having been previously vaccinated, Trudeau gets additionally boostered and three weeks later contracts Covid-19. To put it in a different way, shortly after getting his third shot, Canada’s Prime Minister falls ill with the very disease against which these “effective” injections were supposed to protect him. But rather than repenting of his mistake, he goes on Twitter and advises the Canadian people to do the same. Where is any logic in this? Has Covid affected Trudeau’s brain? Or was it the injections that somehow diminished his capacity for thought and reflection?

If anything, Trudeau should be “Exhibit One” for why people should not get vaccinated and boostered, since he is now Canada’s poster boy for vaccine failure. Why, then, is he telling Canadians to do what he did? It cannot be because the vaccines and boosters will protect them against infection. The opposite is, in fact, the case. The data coming from all over the world is showing that the vaccinated are more likely to become infected than the unvaccinated. According to Steve Kirsch, “The numbers in the Denmark study described below are now confirmed by government data from Germany showing that vaccinated people are 8X more likely to develop Omicron than unvaccinated people. This is not surprising since a paper from Germany showed the same thing: the more you vaccinate, the worse it gets.”

Justin Trudeau, however, does not have to go to foreign lands to learn of vaccine failure. Below is a chart from Ontario which gives case numbers according to vaccination status. You will notice that the numbers for the fully vaccinated are more than three times those of the unvaccinated.

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“It took Columbus less time to cross the Atlantic..”

• We Were Warned About the Ports (Sammon)

In July 2015, the Federal Maritime Commission, a federal agency with little name recognition and even less influence, released a report sounding the alarm about the state of America’s ports. A congestion crisis had been building for years and was fast becoming untenable; even the country’s relatively tepid economic-growth rate was straining against decades of disinvestment at its most critical trading hubs. Chassis weren’t available, trucks couldn’t get in or out, and terminals stayed perpetually clogged. That crisis had “resulted from events that have developed or emerged over a considerable period of time and from within the system itself, rather than being the result of external shocks, such as unanticipated surges in container volumes or management-labor issues,” the report surmised.

“Many seem to think it is inevitable that embracing ‘business as usual’ will lead to significant further declines in the performance of the U.S. intermodal transportation system.” And then, of course, business went on as usual. Almost five years passed before the coronavirus announced itself on American shores, and another year after that before the disease gave an already fissured supply chain the nudge it needed to fully rupture. And while the circumstances of a global pandemic, its shutdowns and labor shortages, seemed exceptional, it was something as routine as a double-digit import growth, feared specifically by the FMC since at least 2006, that sent shipping container volume skyrocketing and brought the system to a grinding halt. A prophecy that few heard and no one heeded had finally come true.

Before the Biden administration was even sworn in, the ports were already in a state of chaos. It got worse throughout the year, and by the time the administration appointed its ports czar John Porcari and began looking toward emergency intervention, only minor measures were even available to remedy decades of bipartisan mismanagement. Today, congestion at the twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, collectively the nation’s largest, is “at historic high levels,” as the shipping giant Maersk announced in a customer advisory in late December. Reporting indicated that there were 133 vessels en route to San Pedro Bay, with delays stretching upward of 41 days. One ship in particular had left Busan, South Korea, on November 17 and was not scheduled to dock until January 2, a 47-day duration for a routine voyage that should take, at most, half that time. “It took Columbus less time to cross the Atlantic,” said Sal Mercogliano, an associate professor and maritime historian at Campbell University.

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Jemima Kelly’s FT ed. tries to defend Rogan, but what’s this?:

“..when he is wrong, he admits it, as he did recently when his claim that young people were at greater risk of developing myocarditis after the vaccine than they were after contracting Covid was swiftly corrected by a guest on his show..”

• Spotify Spat Shows Why Joe Rogan And His Podcast Matter (FT)

The contrast between the vague virtue-signalling of the Sussexes’ statement and Rogan’s engaged response — which seemed authentic, humble and searching — shows why his show has become Spotify’s most popular podcast. With an estimated 11mn listeners per episode, the 54 year-old comedian and mixed martial arts commentator must be considered one of the most influential media figures in the world. With that power comes moral and intellectual responsibility and Rogan does not always seem totally aware of that. He was perhaps not mindful enough of the potential impact on his mainly young fans when he casually declared that if a fit and healthy 21-year-old asked him whether to get vaccinated, he would tell them not to.

He also gets his facts wrong sometimes, despite asserting them confidently. But when he is wrong, he admits it, as he did recently when his claim that young people were at greater risk of developing myocarditis after the vaccine than they were after contracting Covid was swiftly corrected by a guest on his show. One should not imagine that if Rogan were shut down, we would be rid of anyone wanting to pursue ideas that run against the grain. Nor should we want such a world — as Rogan points out in his video, some things once dismissed as conspiracy theories, such as the lab leak theory of Covid-19’s origins, are now considered plausible. Conspiracy theories did not spring into being with the arrival of podcasts or the internet — Gallup polling suggests that in 1976, 81 per cent of Americans believed there had been a conspiracy to kill John F Kennedy, contrary to the official line.

It is surely healthier, then, to have someone like Rogan willing to discuss controversial opinions with those who hold them than to confine these people to a corner of the internet where they are less visible but also less easy to correct when they are wrong. That’s quite apart from the fact that it would be utterly ineffective for Spotify to oust Rogan. The idea that the company gives him a platform that he would otherwise lack is fanciful. When Spotify reportedly paid more than $100mn for the exclusive rights to Rogan’s podcast in 2020, it was so as to benefit from the platform he already had.

I told a friend that I might write about Rogan in my column this week. The response I got was “Oh, God!” and a grimace, quickly followed by a confession that she had actually never listened to his podcast. The truth is that many of the people castigating Rogan haven’t either. If they had, they would know that the presenter is an open-minded host who seeks out all sorts of opinions rather than blindly following those of a particular tribe, and who seems genuinely keen to pursue the truth. Joe Rogan doesn’t need Spotify, but Spotify needs him; maybe we all do.

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“Trust in the media has fallen to just 46 percent and as low as 40 percent in recent polling. Where are people going for information? It seems many have gone to podcasts — and specifically to Joe Rogan, at least 11 million of them.”

• Can Joe Rogan Save Free Speech? (Turley)

[..] social media companies and other corporations now regulate speech in the United States to a degree that an actual state media would struggle to replicate. Faced with a growing cancel culture, companies are scrubbing their platforms of dissenting viewpoints and converting forums into echo chambers. In the use of private companies, the left has achieved an ignoble distinction. While liberal writers and artists were blacklisted and investigated in the 1950s, liberal activists have succeeded in censoring opposing views to a degree that would have made Sen. Joe McCarthy (R-Wis.) blush. Rather than burn books, they have simply gotten stores to ban them or blacklist the authors.

For these companies, there is no value to protecting the speech rights of dissenting voices with powerful politicians, academics, and even some in the media demanding more censorship. But then they went after Rogan. Rogan’s popularity is precisely due to the fact that he is uncensored in what he says. As many networks and newspapers have become more of an echo chamber, viewers and readers have fled en masse. Trust in the media has fallen to just 46 percent and as low as 40 percent in recent polling. Where are people going for information? It seems many have gone to podcasts — and specifically to Joe Rogan, at least 11 million of them. While Young reportedly relies on Spotify for 60 percent of his royalty income, Spotify does not rely on Young or other rock stars for its primary profits. It is the reverse of market conditions from just a couple years ago.

The problem with controlling speech is that it has to be complete; it doesn’t work if there are alternatives to echo-chambered media. Rogan’s podcast is one of the biggest. With 11 million listeners, he surpassed cable and network audiences as well as the readership of the largest papers. His program allows people across the political spectrum to speak freely, including those who question official positions on vaccines and treatments. While Rogan has promised to be more careful in how information is presented on his show (and Spotify will add “advisories” on podcasts), his podcast survived the celebrity onslaught. As various investors seek to create free speech alternatives to Twitter and YouTube, there may be an emerging market for free speech products.

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North Korea doesn’t have much internet. But still funny.

• North Korea Hacked Him. So He Took Down Its Internet (Wired)

For the past two weeks, observers of North Korea’s strange and tightly restricted corner of the internet began to notice that the country seemed to be dealing with some serious connectivity problems. On several different days, practically all of its websites—the notoriously isolated nation only has a few dozen—intermittently dropped offline en masse, from the booking site for its Air Koryo airline to Naenara, a page that serves as the official portal for dictator Kim Jong-un’s government. At least one of the central routers that allow access to the country’s networks appeared at one point to be paralyzed, crippling the Hermit Kingdom’s digital connections to the outside world.

Some North Korea watchers pointed out that the country had just carried out a series of missile tests, implying that a foreign government’s hackers might have launched a cyberattack against the rogue state to tell it to stop saber-rattling. But responsibility for North Korea’s ongoing internet outages doesn’t lie with US Cyber Command or any other state-sponsored hacking agency. In fact, it was the work of one American man in a T-shirt, pajama pants, and slippers, sitting in his living room night after night, watching Alien movies and eating spicy corn snacks—and periodically walking over to his home office to check on the progress of the programs he was running to disrupt the internet of an entire country.

Just over a year ago, an independent hacker who goes by the handle P4x was himself hacked by North Korean spies. P4x was just one victim of a hacking campaign that targeted Western security researchers with the apparent aim of stealing their hacking tools and details about software vulnerabilities. He says he managed to prevent those hackers from swiping anything of value from him. But he nonetheless felt deeply unnerved by state-sponsored hackers targeting him personally—and by the lack of any visible response from the US government. So after a year of letting his resentment simmer, P4x has taken matters into his own hands. “It felt like the right thing to do here. If they don’t see we have teeth, it’s just going to keep coming,” says the hacker. [..] “I want them to understand that if you come at us, it means some of your infrastructure is going down for a while.”

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You’re inclined to say: EPIC! But it’s really just what every reporter should do every single time.

• Reporter Shreds Admin Spox Over ‘Russian False Flag’ Claims (ZH)

Earlier on Thursday the Biden administration and US intelligence came out with some explosive and outlandish claims, saying Russia is planning to release a video depicting graphic scenes of a “staged false explosion with corpses, actors depicting mourners, and images of destroyed locations and military equipment,” as CNN described it. This in order to justify a military invasion of Ukraine, given the false flag operation would feature Russian-backed separatists under attack by Ukrainian forces. Given such a narrative has been advanced in public, grabbing global headlines, but without so much as a shred of evidence – even mainstream media pundits are scratching their heads. Watch Associated Press writer Matt Lee demolish the State Department’s Ned Price, who refuses to provide any level of proof backing the bizarre and surprising claims. “This is like Alex Jones territory you’re getting into now!” Lee points out…


Peace?

[..] “Lee challenged Price, saying the State Department had presented “no evidence” that Russia has actually created a “crisis actor” video and insisting that he wouldn’t be satisfied with the administration’s claims alone. “If you doubt the credibility of the U.S. government, of the British government, of other governments and want to, you know, find solace in information that the Russians are putting out, that is for you to do,” Price responded.” Lee then pointed that given the extraordinary claims, some level of evidence is demanded given the mounting numbers of whopping government lies over the past two decades, including ‘Iraq WMDs’.


Price hid behind the “that’s classified” classic line often used whenever government officials want to shut down legitimate skepticism of their claims… “Like, ‘crisis actors’? This is Alex Jones territory you’re getting into,” he said. “Where is the declassified information?,” he repeated multiple times.In pressing for evidence to justify the administration’s claims, the veteran reporter referenced numerous U.S. intelligence failures that led to catastrophe in recent decades, including the “weapons of mass destruction” speculation that served as a pretext for America’s 2003 military intervention in Iraq as well as the U.S. timeline for Afghanistan’s fall to the Taliban that was totally upended in August.

@StateDeptSpox
https://twitter.com/i/status/1489374971948376064

“We’re declassifying evidence Government X may try to misinform you”
“What’s the evidence you’re declassifying?”
“I just gave you the evidence”
“Uhhh, you just made a statement, that’s not evidence”
“If you don’t trust my bizarre claims, something is wrong with you”

Read more …

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

steroidbanking

 

 

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Debt Rattle February 1 2022

Feb 012022
 
 February 1, 2022  Posted by at 9:33 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  89 Responses »


Pablo Picasso Woman in an armchair (Olga) 1922

 

• The Revolt Begins (Jim Kunstler)
• Now Is the Time for Mass Resignations From Within the Ruling Class (Tucker)
• Mandatory Covid Rules Morph Into Global Power-grab (Mitch Feierstein)
• We Are All Canadian Truckers Now! (Ron Paul)
• Trudeau Reappears To Denounce ‘Freedom Convoy’ Truckers (RT)
• No 10 Set For U-turn Over Mandatory Covid Jabs For NHS Staff In England (G.)
• Why Joe Rogan Remains The World’s Most Popular Podcaster (Cheong)
• The Left Tries to Deplatform . . . Critics of Big Pharma? (Geraghty)
• Since We’re Taking Shots…. (Denninger)
• COVID-19-Infected HIV Patient Developed 21 Mutations (ET)
• Documents via FOI from Pfizer (Delaney)
• Newly Released State Memos Undercut Democrats’ Ukraine Impeachment Story (JTN)
• JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass by Oliver Stone (Curtin)
• Checkmate in Ukraine (Ritter)
• Trudeau Tests Positive For Fascism (BBee)

 

 

 

 

The needle and the damage done…
https://twitter.com/i/status/1486436415390904321

 

 

(“Let’s Go, Brandon!”) And Let’s go, Canadian truckers!

• The Revolt Begins (Jim Kunstler)

For now, the truckers seem determined to stick around and disrupt the Canadian capital. Their estimated 50,000 rigs could surround the city and create siege conditions, where food supplies and other goods won’t get in, starving the government into surrendering on its mandates and restrictions. So far, the local Ottawa police have stood by with a very light hand, and there are rumors that they are on the same page as the truckers against federal overreach. Will Mr. Trudeau resort to using the military to break up the revolt? Good luck with that. Like virtually every other “advanced” nation, Canada depends on trucks and truckers to move everything needed for everyday life. The truckers can just say no… we don’t feel like working this month. No poutine or Cornish pasties for you, Ottawa! Then what? Throw them all in jail? How will that help move stuff from Point A to Point B?

It kind of looks like they have Mr. T over a Molson barrel. For now, it’s a stand-off, but it looks to me like the Prime Minister must resign and whoever takes charge next will have to rapidly rethink the country’s entire Covid-19 policy in a not-insane direction. The Canadian revolt appears to be inspiring similar operations in the US, where a movement has started for a massive trucker convoy from California to Washington, DC — the swampy pivot-point of Covid tyranny under the phantasm known as “Joe Biden” — as a very general way of saying we’ve had enough of being pushed around by political grifters and their bureaucratic subalterns.The Covid-19 saga gets darker every day, while the official alibis, cover-stories, and disinfo ops bend ever deeper toward an arc of criminality. The US government has lied about every plot-line in the two-year horror show. In fact, a conscientious observer would have to conclude the following:

That the government’s highest-paid employee, Dr. Anthony Fauci, led surreptitiously in the creation and release of a bioweapon; that he and his cohorts, along with the pharma companies, and other interested parties such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the World Health Organization, enabled the release of so-called “vaccines” (genetic treatments) that were at least as deadly as the disease itself; that as a result of the shots many people of all ages will die before their natural time; that the process is already underway as documented in the all-causes death data tallied by insurance companies; that the same government officials maliciously suppressed viable, inexpensive, FDA-approved treatments for Covid-19 in order to herd the populace into receiving dangerous “vaccines”; that said officials have worked strenuously to muddle and fake the statistics that would show who is actually dying of what; and that the entire fiasco appears to have been ginned up in order to systematically control the population in ways contrary to our natural rights while killing off a substantial number of us.

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Wishful thinking?

• Now Is the Time for Mass Resignations From Within the Ruling Class (Tucker)

We’ve been assured by David Hume (1711–1776) and Etienne de la Boétie (1530–1563) that government rule is untenable when it loses the consent of the governed. “Resolve to serve no more,” wrote Boétie, “and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall off his own weight and break into pieces.” That’s inspiring but what does it mean in practice? What precisely is the mechanism by which the overlords in our time are effectively overthrown? We’ve seen this in totalitarian states, in states with one-man rule, in states with unelected monarchies.

But unless I’m missing something, we’ve not seen this in a developed democracy with an administrative state that holds the real power. We have scheduled elections but those are unhelpful when 1) elected leaders are not the real source of power, and 2) when the elections are too far in the distant future to deal with a present emergency. One very easy and obvious path away from the current crisis is for the ruling class to admit error, repeal the mandates, and simply allow for common freedoms and rights for everyone. As easy as that sounds, this solution hits a hard wall when faced with ruling-class arrogance, trepidation, and the unwillingness to admit past errors for fear of what that will mean for their political legacies. For this reason, absolutely no one expects the likes of Trudeau, Ardern, or Biden to humbly apologize, admit that they were wrong, and beg the people’s forgiveness. On the contrary, everyone expects them to continue the game of pretend so long as they can get away with it.

The people on the streets today, and those willing to tell pollsters that they are fed up, are saying: no more. What does it mean for the ruling class not to get away with this nonsense anymore? Presuming that they do not resign, they do not call off the dogs of mandates and lockdowns, what is the next step? My instincts tell me that we are about to discover the answer. Electoral realignment seems inevitable but what happens before then? The obvious answer to the current instability is mass resignations within the administrative state, among the class of politicians that gives it cover, as well as heads of media organs that have propagandized for them. In the name of peace, human rights, and the renewal of prosperity and trust, this needs to happen today. Bury the pride and do what’s right. Do it now while there is still time for the revolution to be velvet.

Justin French

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“It almost feels like China has taken over the world..”

• Mandatory Covid Rules Morph Into Global Power-grab (Mitch Feierstein)

Enter 2020 and the China virus aka COVID-19. Why was no one allowed to focus or ask about treatment protocols? Instead, a financially conflicted, unelected, 80-year-old bureaucrat named Anthony Fauci dictated tyrannical policies with narratives that had more holes in them than a 100 Kilo block Swiss cheese. Lord Fauci ratcheted the level of public fear up to 11 out of ten and issued the first lie, “two weeks to stop the spread”. Next, he bristled, “masks don’t work”, later demanding “mandatory masks”. Fauci’s dictates became more dictatorial and changeable than a kindergartener’s game of “Simon says”. These mandatory Covid rules morphed into several years of the most unprecedented global and tyrannical power-grab ever made by governments.

Let’s be clear; this authoritarian creep is the greatest existential threat to our western system of freedom—free speech, democracy, and liberty—in history. It almost feels like China has taken over the world. The mantra: It is mandatory you take four doses of an experimental biological agent with questionable efficacy, or we will destroy you, for which the side effects seem underreported, and the effectiveness appears overstated. The dishonest media unleashed an army of apparatchik Karen’s anyone daring non-compliance. If this pandemic was so terrible as to allow government tyranny, destruction of SMEs, and the middle class, why have we not seen a massive increase in total year-on-year global morbidity rates? Now, after using coercion: the fear of death and or the denial to earn a living to force unwilling members of society to participate in mass medical experiments, we have unprecedented numbers of deaths of working-age people ages 18-64 occurring.

A massive number of unexplained deaths have been reported by all insurance companies in Q3 and Q4 of 2021 [..] Regarding these deaths, OneAmerica’s CEO stated, “It may not have said COVID on the death certificates, but deaths in this age group are up massively”. Actuarial data is generally the most accurate data available. We know mass participation in the Pfizer, Moderna, and Astra Zeneca medical experiments with unknown long-term consequences; could these deaths be related? Why is the media not all over his story?

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“..now that the Berlin Wall of the tyrants has been breached, it’s just a matter of time before the shockwaves are felt far and wide.”

• We Are All Canadian Truckers Now! (Ron Paul)

We all remember where we were when the Berlin Wall came down. While it may have seemed that communist rule would go on forever, when the people decided that they had enough suddenly the wall fell. Just like that. Thus it is after two years of Covid authoritarianism that in Canada the largest truck convoy in history has smashed through the Berlin Wall of tyranny. I have watched as the Canada I once respected as a haven for antiwar Americans in the 1960s turned into one of the most repressive countries on earth. I wondered how a freedom-loving people could allow themselves to be abused by these mini-Stalins without a peep. But then Canada stood up and showed the rest of the world that freedom can triumph over tyranny if the people demand it. As I say, no army can stop an idea whose time has come.

Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau had been basking in his ability to terrorize the population in the name of fighting a virus. He was so confident in his seemingly unlimited power that he felt he could ridicule any Canadian with different views. The prime minister said in a recent interview that unvaccinated Canadians were “extremists,” “misogynists,” and “racists.” When the Canadian truckers stood up to his tyranny and began their historic convoy to Ottawa, he thought he could continue ridiculing people. The truckers and their supporters were just a “small fringe minority” who hold “unacceptable views,” he confidently claimed. For Trudeau, love of liberty is just an “unacceptable view.”

Less than a week later, as tens of thousands of trucks began entering the capital with millions of supporters behind them, the “brave” Canadian prime minister had fled the city and shuffled off to an undisclosed location. As Elon Musk Tweeted, “It would appear that the so-called ‘fringe minority’ is actually the government.” The Canadian mainstream media is obviously just as obedient to the regime as ours. They ignored the Freedom Convoy for as long as possible. There was almost no reporting. Then, when it became impossible to ignore, they began to attack and ridicule instead of trying to report it accurately. It was disgusting and almost comical to see a “reporter” from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation suggest that the Canadian Freedom Convoy was cooked up by Putin and the Russians!

Thousands of trucks have arrived in Ottawa. They demand an end to covid tyranny. They are backed by millions of citizens, who braved the Canadian winter at night to cheer the truckers on. This protest is so important because it’s not limited to Canada. The truckers are being supported worldwide, and a similar convoy is being planned from California to Washington, DC. In a US where grocery store shelves are increasingly bare, the truckers have more leverage than the powers-that-be would like to admit. If I were prime minister of totalitarian Australia or New Zealand – or most anywhere in Europe – I would be getting pretty nervous right now. Just as the Covid tyranny descended across the globe in a seemingly coordinated fashion, now that the Berlin Wall of the tyrants has been breached, it’s just a matter of time before the shockwaves are felt far and wide.

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“Nazi symbolism, racist imagery and desecration of war memorials”

• Trudeau Reappears To Denounce ‘Freedom Convoy’ Truckers (RT)

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau reappeared in public after several days, criticizing the “Freedom Convoy” of truckers protesting his vaccine mandates in Ottawa as tainted by racist, Nazi extremists desecrating war memorials. After reports that he had been moved to an “undisclosed location” over the weekend due to security concerns, Trudeau emerged from hiding on Monday to announce that he tested positive for Covid-19 – despite having had it before, and being triple-vaccinated. He then held a virtual press conference to denounce the protest. “Canadians were shocked, and frankly disgusted by the behavior of some people protesting in our nation’s capital,” he said. “We are not intimidated by those who hurl insults and abuse at small business workers and steal food from the homeless.”


He also referenced reports in the Canadian media that at least three protesters climbed onto the National War Memorial and danced on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and that a Nazi flag and a Confederate flag were spotted at the protest. “Nazi symbolism, racist imagery and desecration of war memorials” are not acceptable free speech but “an insult to memory and truth,” Trudeau said. “We won’t give in to those who fly racist flags, we won’t cave to those who engage in vandalism or dishonor the memory of our veterans.” Trudeau also appealed to the “nearly 90% of truckers who’ve gotten vaccinated” who he said were doing the right thing by continuing to work, saying that “the behavior on display this weekend does not represent you.” “You can rely on us to continue to stand with you and allow you to do your jobs safely,” the PM added.

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80,000 is a big number…

• No 10 Set For U-turn Over Mandatory Covid Jabs For NHS Staff In England (G.)

Downing Street appears likely to drop its policy of dismissing frontline NHS and care staff in England who refuse Covid vaccinations, a minister has strongly indicated, after nursing and care organisations called for this to happen. A decision would be made “in the course of the next few days”, according to Simon Clarke, the chief secretary to the Treasury. He said the lower severity of the Omicron variant of Covid did “open a space” for the policy to be reversed. The apparent imminent U-turn came as the Royal College of Nursing argued that both the change in severity from Omicron and the number of NHS vacancies meant the mandatory vaccination policy should be dropped.

The National Care Association said it would also welcome a change of policy, while warning that many unvaccinated care staff had already lost their jobs in the run-up to the 1 April deadline. Speaking in a TV clip on a visit to Essex, Boris Johnson also indicated a likely change, saying Sajid Javid, the health secretary, “is saying a bit more later on about how you might deal with different variants of coronavirus because they have different implications when it comes to transmission”. The Guardian reported this month that an internal document drawn up by the Department of Health and Social Care said the growing evidence on the Omicron variant cast doubts over the new law’s “rationality” and “proportionality”.

Asked about reports of a change to the policy, Clarke told Sky News that ministers had hoped to find “the right balance between having the maximum impact for measures that support public safety in the face of the virus, but also have the minimum impact in terms of our wider freedoms as a society”. He added: “And it’s in that context that a decision was made last autumn to make sure we went ahead with the mandatory vaccination policy, and that was because, obviously, we had the Delta variant, which was extremely dangerous, and was taking a huge toll on our society, and we had to make sure that people going into hospital, very vulnerable people, whether they had Covid or another condition which required treatment, weren’t going to be faced with an increased risk of infection on the wards.

“We continue to monitor that situation very, very closely. What we know about Omicron is that it is much, much more transmissible but less severe – any decision that is taken this week will reflect that reality.

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“..the signatories of the open letter to Spotify declared the episode a “mass-misinformation event” and used it as an example to bill Rogan as a menace to public health.”

• Why Joe Rogan Remains The World’s Most Popular Podcaster (Cheong)

While ‘The Joe Rogan Experience’ has enough content to drive itself, much of the public curiosity about the show has been fanned by the hatred the corporate media has for its host. Described by CNN in 2020 as “libertarian-leaning,” Rogan has voted for a wide variety of political candidates, including Libertarian Party nominees Ron Paul and Gary Johnson in 2012 and 2016, and even endorsed left-winger Bernie Sanders in the 2020 Democratic primaries. His politics are fairly middle of the road in terms of American politics. He’s fiscally conservative, but somewhat socially progressive, drawing the line when it comes to open borders, transgenderism in children, the participation of biologically male athletes in women’s sports, and high taxes. He’s also a strong supporter of free speech and the right to bear arms, which places him at odds with the majority of Democrats.

His remarks about transgenderism in sport became a bone of contention for Sanders’ progressive supporters, who described his views as “transphobic.” The subsequent outrage in gay, trans, and other communities over the senator’s embrace of Rogan’s endorsement was one of the more intricate and multifaceted political controversies of the election. In 2021, Rogan kicked the hornet’s nest when he was infected with coronavirus. Having been unvaccinated, he opted to use the antiparasitic drug ivermectin, monoclonal antibody therapy, and a host of other controversial treatments to aid his recovery. CNN claimed he had consumed “horse dewormer” – a point he took up with CNN fixture Dr. Sanjay Gupta when the neurosurgeon was a guest on his podcast. While ivermectin is used in veterinary medicine, it’s also approved for humans, and Rogan said it had been prescribed to him by a doctor – although the US Food and Drug Administration has never approved it as a treatment for Covid-19.

Rogan’s refusal to be vaccinated, his opposition to vaccine mandates, and his willingness to give airtime to guests who have been accused of “spreading medical misinformation” have resulted in numerous calls to get him deplatformed. More recently, he became the target of 270 “experts” – not all of whom, it should be noted, are medical professionals – who objected to the podcast having featured Dr. Robert Malone, one of the co-creators of the mRNA vaccine, because of the views he had expressed in it about the pandemic. Dr. Malone has been banned from Twitter for violating the platform’s Covid-19 misinformation policies, and the signatories of the open letter to Spotify declared the episode a “mass-misinformation event” and used it as an example to bill Rogan as a menace to public health.

‘Godfather of Grunge’ Neil Young then issued the platform with an ultimatum: that he would remove his music unless it removed Rogan, and then following through with his warning. Several other musicians, including Joni Mitchell, then followed suit. In an apparent concession, Spotify’s CEO announced new policies on “combating misinformation” about Covid-19, albeit without referencing Rogan by name. The streaming service will now make sure its creators “understand accountability” for posting “dangerous” content that dismisses Covid-19 as “a hoax” and “promotes or suggests” that coronavirus vaccines “are designed to cause death,” and listeners will be directed to “trusted sources” on these issues.

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“Voices on the left are now up in arms because Rogan is showcasing the arguments of critics of Big Pharma.”

• The Left Tries to Deplatform . . . Critics of Big Pharma? (Geraghty)

You may love Joe Rogan, you may hate him, or you may not have strong feelings about him. I suspect that many of people who profess to hate Joe Rogan have either never listened to him or have listened to little more than a snippet. Zaid Jilani observed, “It’s interesting seeing so many conservatives rally around Joe Rogan when he’s probably more liberal than 90 percent of Americans. Agnostic dude who loves drug legalization, Bernie Sanders, thinks the CIA is awful, etc.” He later made the accurate point that the “average episode of Rogan is about [mixed-martial arts] or drugs and these folks think it’s like a Satanic cult ritual.”


Perhaps conservatives are rallying around Joe Rogan because they don’t need a figure to agree with 100 percent of their worldview in order to conclude that he is worth defending from an angry mob that desires censorship of differing views. It’s very clear that the people who are the most determined to “deplatform” Rogan — to force Spotify to cancel his show, and likely with that, get his videos off of YouTube as well — are battling a cartoon-like caricature that they’ve drawn in their heads. If you listen to Rogan defend his choices in a recently taped video, you’ll see that he’s not a lunkhead, and seems the opposite of a wide-eyed extremist ideologue, hungry to hammer a twisted narrative into brainwashed followers:

“There’s a lot of people who have a distorted perception of what I do — maybe based on soundbites or based on headlines of articles that are disparaging. The podcast has been accused of spreading dangerous misinformation. Specifically, about two episodes — a little about some other ones, but specifically about two. One with Dr. Peter McCullough and one with Dr. Robert Malone. Dr. Peter McCullough is a cardiologist, and he is the most published physician in his field in history. Dr. Robert Malone owns nine patents on the creation of MRNA-vaccine technology and is at least partially responsible for the creation of the technology that led to MRNA vaccines. Both these people are very highly credentialed, very intelligent, very accomplished people and they have an opinion that is different from the mainstream narrative. I wanted to hear what their opinion is. I had them on, and because of that, those episodes in particular, were labeled as being dangerous, had dangerous misinformation in them.

The problem I have with the term disinformation, especially today, is that many of the things we thought of as misinformation a short while ago are now accepted as fact. For instance, eight months ago, if you said, “If you get vaccinated, you can still catch Covid, and you can still spread Covid” — you would be removed from social media. They would ban you from certain platforms. Now, that’s accepted as fact. If you said, “I don’t think cloth masks work,” you would be banned from social media. Now, that’s openly and repeatedly stated on CNN. If you said I think it’s possible that Covid-19 came from a lab, you would be banned from many social-media platforms. Now that’s on the cover of Newsweek.* All of those theories, that at one point in time were banned, were openly discussed by those two men that I had on my podcast, that have been accused of “dangerous misinformation.” I do not know if they’re right. I don’t know, because I’m not a doctor, I’m not a scientist. I’m just a person who sits down, and talks to people, and has conversations with them. Do I get things wrong? Absolutely. I get things wrong. But I try to correct them. Whenever I get things wrong, I try to correct them. Because I’m interested in telling the truth.”

For a guy who’s supposed to be a dangerous megalomaniac who’s indoctrinating people into a hardline, deceitful ideology, Rogan seems awfully humble about what he knows and doesn’t know. De-platform Joe Rogan? We should give him a medal and hold him up as a role model for conducting probing, open-minded, respectful interviews. Want to know something spectacularly ironic? Drs. McCullough and Malone are opponents of Covid-19 vaccines in large part because of their skepticism and suspicion of the profit motive of big pharmaceutical companies. Voices on the left are now up in arms because Rogan is showcasing the arguments of critics of Big Pharma.

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“..an impossibility unless the vaccine was interfering with building that titer or destroyed existing antibody titers if jabbed after being infected and recovered.”

• Since We’re Taking Shots…. (Denninger)

It is impossible to inject something without some of it ending up in the circulation — that is, in and around the endothelium. That begs the obvious question as to which is more-dangerous: A definite exposure of your endothelium to the spike from an injection or a possible one from infection if, and only if, you get severely hammered? Nobody knows and nobody has done the work to find out. Despite the signal in December of 2020 we went ahead anyway without first disproving that the balance of harms went the wrong way especially in healthy, low-risk individuals.

On top of this we knew very early on that there was no reduction in transmission from the jabs; a person who had a “breakthrough” was just as infectious (per Fauci and the CDC itself) and thus might be more-dangerous because by hiding symptoms you make the problem worse. If I do not know I’m sick I will not self-isolate in my home since I have no reason to suspect I’m infected. An inoculation that does not prevent infection, replication or transmission but prevents symptom expression is thus not only bad from a public health perspective its disastrous. Indeed one can reasonably make the argument that intentional blinding of symptoms is involuntary manslaughter. We have historical precedent for this, incidentally, in the fiasco surrounding the DTP vaccine in the 1970s and the twenty-fold higher case rate for pertussis today after the formula for that jab was changed to DTaP, a non-sterilizing inoculation that prevents neither infection or transmission. Do you think I can’t read history and the CDC’s own data on pertussis cases?

What’s worse is that we now know the jabs don’t work with any degree or durability at all. How do we know this? Because the CDC has proved it with their own contemporary data, that’s how. The >65 cohort is the most vaccinated in the United States. Indeed, the CDC says that 88.3% of those >65 have been fully vaccinated, and 64.3% have received boosters, that is, the third shot.

The proof they don’t work is that the CDC also reports that hospitalization among those >65 for Covid is roughly as high or higher this winter as it was last winter when there were no shots. With nearly 90% of that age cohort fully vaccinated across the entire United States if the jabs worked to prevent severe disease we would see a ratable decrease in hospitalization among that cohort. Indeed, since we know natural immunity is protective against severe disease for much longer than the jabs, at least one year, again by the CDC’s own data, if the jabs did nothing we’d expect to see a lower rate among that segment of the population simply because many of them already had the virus and survived. There are simply not enough unvaccinated and uninfected seniors remaining if the jabs work and yet there is in fact no decrease at all compared with last winter’s surge among the most-vaccinated population subgroup.

This strongly implies that what the jabs are doing is producing VEI (vaccine-enhanced infection); that is, causing actual harm and either wildly potentiating first infections or, far worse, destroying immunity from infection whether prior to or subsequent to vaccination such that people are getting the virus a second or subsequent time and not mildly either; they’re getting hammered since this is not relying on “infections”, it’s hospitalizations. We knew the latter was likely this summer, incidentally, because “N” protein seroprevalence in Britain flatlined during Delta — an impossibility unless the vaccine was interfering with building that titer or destroyed existing antibody titers if jabbed after being infected and recovered.

Never mind that there’s evidence these jabs may be back-boosting other common coronaviruses. That was known to be a risk in May of 2021. We see that in the data too; people showing up in the ER and Urgent Care with “covid-like illness” but they don’t have Covid, and a huge percentage of them are vaccinated. Are these jabs turning the common OC43 and HKU1 coronaviruses, that usually produce mild colds, into severe disease events? Maybe — and we knew they might in May of last year but didn’t bother to follow up on that either. Since OC43 is believed to have been the cause of a Covid-like pandemic in the 1890s if this proves up we will have screwed millions of Americans — or even perhaps tens of millions — instead of helping them.

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“Once again our experience reinforces previous reports that effective [anti-retroviral drugs are] the key to controlling such events.”

• COVID-19-Infected HIV Patient Developed 21 Mutations (ET)

A South African woman suffering from “poorly controlled” HIV who also had COVID-19 for nine months saw the CCP virus develop at least 21 mutations while in her body, a recent preprint study found. The woman, 22, was able to overcome the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus which causes COVID-19, within six to nine weeks after she started taking anti-retroviral medication that is used to treat HIV, according to researchers at Stellenbosch and the University of KwaZulu-Natal. They concluded that “increased vigilance is warranted” among HIV patients who contract COVID-19 to “prevent the emergence” of COVID-19 variants. Notably, the Omicron variant was first discovered in South Africa in November 2021, and U.S. health officials say it’s now the dominant strain across the United States.

“This case, like others before, describes a potential pathway for the emergence of novel variants,” the scientists said in the pre-print study, adding that it is still a hypothesis and much more data is needed. “Our experience reinforces previous reports that effective anti-retroviral treatment is the key to controlling such events.” South Africa has the world’s largest HIV epidemic. About 8.2 million of out its 60 million population is infected with the virus. According to the researchers, the patient observed in the study had developed around 10 mutations on the CCP virus spike protein, which allows it to bind to cells, along with 11 other mutations. Some of the mutations were similar to those seen in the Omicron and Lambda variants, whereas others were consistent with mutations that allow the virus to bypass antibodies.

“Once again our experience reinforces previous reports that effective [anti-retroviral drugs are] the key to controlling such events. Once HIV replication is brought under control and immune reconstitution commences, rapid clearance of [the CCP virus] is achieved, probably even before full immune reconstitution occurs,” they said. “This underscores the broader point that gaps in the HIV care cascade need to be closed which will benefit other conditions and public health problems, too, including COVID-19.”

Read more …

Twitter thread with 11 clips. I lifted out nrs 7 and 8, where Dr. Nagase describes the process that -potentially- allows mRNA to enter and transform your DNA.

• Documents via FOI from Pfizer (Delaney)

Documents via FOI from Pfizer… from over 40000 test subjects 31% suffered death & life long complications. Information was SENT to government health authorities in APRIL 2021

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I can’t read the name Nuland without getting shivers.

• Newly Released State Memos Undercut Democrats’ Ukraine Impeachment Story (JTN)

Just months before Joe Biden forced his firing, Ukraine’s chief prosecutor was told by U.S. State Department officials that they were “impressed” with his anti-corruption plan and fully supportive of his work, according to newly released memos that cast doubt on a key Democrat impeachment narrative. During former President Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial two years ago, House Democrats alleged that Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin was fired in March 2016 because State officials were widely displeased with his anti-corruption efforts and not because Shokin’s office was investigating the Ukrainian gas firm that had given then-Vice President Biden’s son Hunter a lucrative job.

But the memos obtained by Just the News and the Southeastern Legal Foundation under a Freedom of Information Act request show senior State Department officials — including then-Secretary of State John Kerry — were sending the opposite message to Shokin the summer before his firing. “We have been impressed with the ambitious reform and anti-corruption agenda of your government,” then-Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland personally wrote Shokin in an official letter dated June 9, 2015 that was delivered to the prosecutor two days later by then-U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt.

Nuland, now President Biden’s undersecretary of state, wrote that “Secretary Kerry asked me to reply on his behalf” to let Shokin know he enjoyed the full support of the United States as he set out to fight endemic corruption in the former Soviet republic. “The ongoing reform of your office, law enforcement, and the judiciary will enable you to investigate and prosecute corruption and other crimes in an effective, fair, and transparent manner,” Nuland added. “The United States fully supports your government’s efforts to fight corruption and other crimes in an effective, fair and transparent manner.”

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“..this Nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.”

• JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass by Oliver Stone (Curtin)

Two of the greatest speeches ever delivered by an American president bookend this extraordinary documentary film. It opens with President John F. Kennedy giving the commencement speech at American University on June 10, 1963 and it closes with his civil rights speech to the American people the following day. It is a deft artistic touch that suggests the brevity of JFK’s heroic efforts for world peace and domestic racial equality and justice before he was assassinated in a public execution in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963. In the former anti-war speech, he called for the end to the Cold War with the Soviet Union, the halt to the arms race, and the abolishment of war and its weapons, especially nuclear. He said:

“What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children – not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women – not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.” In the latter address to the American people, having just sent National Guard troops to the University of Alabama to make sure two black students were admitted despite the racist objections of Governor George Wallace, his words transcended the immediate issue at the university and called for the end to the immoral and illegal discrimination against African Americans in every area of the nation’s life. He said:

“One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free. They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice. They are not yet freed from social and economic oppression. And this Nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.” Having framed the documentary thus, Oliver Stone and the screenwriter James DiEugenio do a masterful job of explaining what really happened in the years of Kennedy’s short presidency, why he was such a great threat to the CIA and the military-industrial complex, what really happened when they killed him, and how the Warren Commission, the CIA, and the corporate media have worked hand-in-hand to this day to cover up the truth.

The current two-hour version of JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass will be followed in a month or so by a more detailed four-hour version. The importance of this film is twofold: It establishes an updated historical record since the Assassination Records Review Board (AARB) was established as a result of Stone’s 1991 breakthrough film, JFK, which forced the release of previously hidden documents, and, more importantly, it emphatically shows why JFK’s assassination is crucial for understanding the United States today. For without a clear and unambiguous accounting of why he was killed and by whom (I do not mean the actual shooters), and who in the government and media has covered it up, we are doomed to repeat the past as this country has been doing ever since.

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“Russia has already declared that banning it from the Swift system for international monetary transactions will result in the immediate halt of Russian energy supplies to Europe.”

• Checkmate in Ukraine (Ritter)

Despite the repeated Western warnings, Russia is highly unlikely to invade Ukraine — at least not yet. Instead, Russia appears to be entering a new phase of crisis management that seeks to exploit the weaknesses in the U.S./NATO alliance highlighted by their written responses to its demands. First, Russia will keep the diplomatic option open, but on its terms. Moscow has already engaged in so-called Normandy Format talks involving Russia, France, Germany and Ukraine over the ongoing crisis in Donbas. In the initial meeting, all parties agreed to respect the cease-fire in effect and to meet again in 10 days — the exact opposite of any imminent invasion by Russia. Note the absence of the U.S. and NATO from these talks.

Next, Russia will turn the threat of sanctions against the U.S. and Europe. Russia has already declared that banning it from the Swift system for international monetary transactions will result in the immediate halt of Russian energy supplies to Europe. Russia is expected to sign major economic agreements with China soon that will further insulate it from economic sanctions. China has made it clear it supports Russia in the current crisis, recognizing that if the West prevails against Russia, it will soon face a similar attack. Finally, Russia will exploit U.S. hypocrisy on spheres of influence and military alliances by entering military relationships with Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua and deploying a naval squadron to the Caribbean, with the potential for additional force deployments in the future.

With these three measures, Russia seeks to further isolate the U.S. from NATO and Europe. In the end, the U.S. will be confronted with one of two options, either agree to trade NATO’s open-door policy for Russian agreement not to deploy into the Western Hemisphere, or force a confrontation that will result in a Russian invasion of Ukraine that is seen by Europe as being the fault of the U.S.. The chess pieces are already being moved. While the U.S. may not see it, a Russian checkmate can be predicted sooner, rather than later.

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“..his replacement glue-on vanity eyebrows are still stuck on a delivery truck somewhere..”

• Trudeau Tests Positive For Fascism (BBee)

From an undisclosed hiding place outside Canada’s capital city, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau confirmed for the world that he has tragically tested positive for fascism. “I took the fascism test this morning,” said Trudeau, beginning to sob. “And the test came back positive. I understand this may come as devastating news to freedom-loving Canadians, and I am here to assure you that everything will be ok… after I crush you underneath the jackboot of government tyranny until you learn to start obeying me.” “Together, we will achieve strength through unity, and unity through faith. In SCIENCE.”

According to sources, Trudeau will remain in his hiding place under quarantine until all the scary protesting truckers go away, after which he will emerge to grind his people into the very dust until they accept his vision for a glorious fascist future for Canada. Fortunately, his plans have been delayed as his replacement glue-on vanity eyebrows are still stuck on a delivery truck somewhere, and the fascist dictator refuses to be seen without them.

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• Merck’s COVID-19 pill encourages sexually actively men “to use a reliable method of contraception correctly and consistently during treatment and for at least 3 months after the last dose of molnupiravir. The risk beyond 3 months after the last dose of molnupiravir is unknown..“

• Paxlovid interacts with 32 classes of drugs. Not 32 drugs….32 classes.

• Both are apparently less toxic than ivermectin per the FDA.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle January 28 2022

Jan 282022
 
 January 28, 2022  Posted by at 9:12 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  78 Responses »


Pablo Picasso Bust of woman with arms raised 1922

 

• White House Calls CNN Report On Russian Invasion ‘Completely False’ (RT)
• The Covid Evidence Dismissed By The BBC As ‘Conspiracy-laden’ (Beck)
• The High Cost of Disparaging Natural Immunity to Covid (Makary)
• 4 Out of 5 Americans Have Covid ‘Natural Immunity’ (KB)
• Denmark Declares Covid-19 No Longer ‘Socially Critical Disease’ (TH)
• Sweden Opts Against Covid Jabs For Children (RT)
• Vaccine Failure In Two Charts And Two Graphs From Four Countries (Berenson)
• Most Covid Patients In Wales In Hospital For Other Conditions (BBC)
• Biden Admin Used Billions In Hospital Covid-19 Funds To Pay Drugmakers (STAT)
• The Folly of Pandemic Censorship (Taibbi)
• Joe Rogan, Elon Musk React To Canadian Trucker Convoy (RT)
• Truckers Inspired By Canada Begin ‘Freedom’ Convoys Around The World (JTN)
• Musk Unloads On ‘Puppet’ Biden In Twitter Rant (RT)
• China Warns US Over Ukraine & Blasts “Interference” In Beijing Olympics (ZH)
• Why Do American Elites Want War in Ukraine? (Kassam)
• What Did Clinton Know and When Did She Know It? (Sperry)

 

 

 

 

US military: average per year 1.7 million reports of all diseases combined. First 10 months 2021: 22 million.

 

 

Scary indeed.

Ryan Cole

 

 

Natasha Bertrand posted a story about a Biden-Zelensky call that didn’t go well, but deleted it soon afterward. Still, people from the White House, Ukraine and CNN itself reacted to it. Was it all for clickbait?

• White House Calls CNN Report On Russian Invasion ‘Completely False’ (RT)

The White House has pushed back on a CNN report about Thursday’s phone call between US President Joe Biden and his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky, calling it “completely false.” “President Biden said that there is a distinct possibility that the Russians could invade Ukraine in February. He has previously said this publicly and we have been warning about this for months. Reports of anything more or different than that are completely false,” Emily Horne, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council, tweeted on Thursday evening. She was responding to a tweet by CNN’s senior national security correspondent Alexander Marquardt, who was quoting his colleague in Kiev, Matthew Chance.

“A Russian invasion is now virtually certain once the ground freezes, Biden said to Zelensky, a senior Ukrainian official told [Chance]. Kyiv could be ‘sacked,’ Russian forces may attempt to occupy it, ‘prepare for impact’, Biden said, according to this official,” Marquardt tweeted. CNN’s The Lead with Jake Tapper had Chance cite “the Ukrainian official” live on air. “The capital, Kiev, this city here, could be “sacked.” That’s the word he [Biden] apparently used, according to this Ukrainian official. [It could be] sacked by Russian forces,” Chance told Tapper. Chance went on to quote what he called a “quite impactful line” from the Biden-Zelensky call as narrated to him by the anonymous Ukrainian official. “President Biden [was] telling his Ukrainian counterpart that Ukraine should prepare for impact. Quite a stark warning there from the US leader.”

The quote was quickly picked up by other outlets, such as the Independent, the Express and the Daily Mail. Meanwhile, CNN anchor Jim Sciutto quoted Horne as saying that “anonymous sources are ‘leaking’ falsehoods” about the call. Zelensky’s spokesman Sergii Nykyforov likewise dismissed reports citing the alleged “senior Ukranian official” as “completely false.” “Correct information can only be found in official releases from the Ukrainian and American sides,” he stated.

Phone call

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The UK Yellow Card system fails as badly as VAERS. And that is not a coincidence. It takes 40 minutes to fill out a form.

• The Covid Evidence Dismissed By The BBC As ‘Conspiracy-laden’ (Beck)

Ms Bayliss has been gathering witness statements from those who allege they are vaccine-injured, and from potential expert witnesses in the US and the UK. She said: ‘We have subsequently uploaded 103 statements regarding vaccine associated deaths and injury, and 13 from identifiable whistleblowers, medical experts and scientists.’ To build his case, Mr Hyland investigated our medicines regulatory authority, specifically the alleged negligence of June Raine, chief executive of the MHRA. He said: ‘The charge against the MHRA is that they negligently conducted themselves and have caused British citizens real harm and suffering. ‘They have failed to act on any of the Yellow Card reports they have received. There are currently 2,000 deaths reported and 500,000 adverse events. They should have stopped the programme before the deaths reached 100 and launched a thorough investigation.’

The Yellow Card data show that 1 in 120 people have reported an event they considered serious enough to spend 40 minutes filling out a Yellow Card form. ‘This may be just the tip of the iceberg,’ said Ms Bayliss, ‘as the MHRA admit they receive information from around 10 per cent of those damaged.’ The figure is low because some doctors find they cannot access the Yellow Card scheme from their hospital computers, while others do not know about it. Members of the public are generally not informed about Yellow Card and most who complain to their GP that they think they have suffered a serious adverse event are told that the vaccine is an unlikely cause and their symptoms are put down to ‘coincidence’, as the Royal College of General Practitioners has not issued them with any advice.

If the coincidence theory held water, you would expect an even spread of reports across the three vaccinations used in Britain. We have Pfizer-BioNTech’s experimental mRNA jab introduced in December 2020, and Oxford/AstraZeneca’s more traditional one which has been available since January 2021. Plus the new kid on the block, Moderna’s mRNA jab introduced in April 2021. Although we began using it four months after Pfizer and three months after AstraZeneca, Moderna is clocking up 50 per cent more Yellow Cards than AZ, who have 60 per cent more reported injuries than Pfizer. Oxford/AstraZeneca has been received by 24.9million people and the Yellow Card scheme shows that 1 in 103 have been impacted, while Pfizer-BioNTech’s has been received by 25.3million people and Yellow Card shows that 1 in 162 people have been impacted.

Moderna has been given to 1.6million people and its Yellow Card reporting rate shows that 1 in 50 people have been impacted. On average, 1 in 120 people have suffered an adverse reaction. ‘In our view, we have enough evidence to show gross negligence,’ said Mr Hyland. ‘It is clear that the MHRA have failed to follow up concerns about vaccine injury and they failed to withdraw harmful batches when they knew about the issues. ‘They also exaggerated the risk of Covid by failing to distinguish the difference between dying with Covid, which is when someone has other illnesses, or of Covid, which is when the patient has no other illnesses.’ Covid-19, caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, has a low fatality rate: less than one per cent of those who contract it. The Office of National Statistics has revealed under a Freedom of Information request that only 13,597 deaths in England and Wales out of 140,000 attributed to Covid were caused by Covid alone. The bulk of deaths were of people with comorbidities.

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The immune system works.

• The High Cost of Disparaging Natural Immunity to Covid (Makary)

For most of last year, many of us called for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to release its data on reinfection rates, but the agency refused. Finally last week, the CDC released data from New York and California, which demonstrated natural immunity was 2.8 times as effective in preventing hospitalization and 3.3 to 4.7 times as effective in preventing Covid infection compared with vaccination. Yet the CDC spun the report to fit its narrative, bannering the conclusion “vaccination remains the safest strategy.” It based this conclusion on the finding that hybrid immunity—the combination of prior infection and vaccination—was associated with a slightly lower risk of testing positive for Covid. But those with hybrid immunity had a similar low rate of hospitalization (3 per 10,000) to those with natural immunity alone. In other words, vaccinating people who had already had Covid didn’t significantly reduce the risk of hospitalization.

Similarly, the National Institutes of Health repeatedly has dismissed natural immunity by arguing that its duration is unknown—then failing to conduct studies to answer the question. Because of the NIH’s inaction, my Johns Hopkins colleagues and I conducted the study. We found that among 295 unvaccinated people who previously had Covid, antibodies were present in 99% of them up to nearly two years after infection. We also found that natural immunity developed from prior variants reduced the risk of infection with the Omicron variant. Meanwhile, the effectiveness of the two-dose Moderna vaccine against infection (not severe disease) declines to 61% against Delta and 16% against Omicron at six months, according to a recent Kaiser Southern California study. In general, Pfizer’s Covid vaccines have been less effective than Moderna’s.

The CDC study and ours confirm what more than 100 other studies on natural immunity have found: The immune system works. The largest of these studies, from Israel, found that natural immunity was 27 times as effective as vaccinated immunity in preventing symptomatic illness. None of this should surprise us. For years, studies have shown that infection with the other coronaviruses that cause severe illness, SARS and MERS, confers lasting immunity. In a study published in May 2020, Covid-recovered monkeys that were rechallenged with the virus didn’t get sick. Public-health officials have a lot of explaining to do. They used the wrong starting hypothesis, ignored contrary preliminary data, and dug in as more evidence emerged that called their position into question.

Many, including Rochelle Walensky, now the CDC’s director, signed the John Snow memorandum in October 2020, which declared that “there is no evidence for lasting protective immunity to SARS-CoV-2 following natural infection.” Many clinicians who talk to other physicians nationwide had have long observed that we don’t see reinfected patients end up on a ventilator or die from Covid, with rare exceptions who almost always have immune disorders. Meanwhile, public-health officials recklessly destroyed the careers of everyday Americans, rallying to fire pilots, truck drivers and others in the supply-chain workforce who didn’t get vaccinated. And in the early months of the vaccine rollout, when supplies were limited, we could have saved many more lives by giving priority to those who didn’t have recorded natural immunity.

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The Great Barrington guys also come from Yale, Harvard, and Stanford. And look what Collins and Fauci did to them.

• 4 Out of 5 Americans Have Covid ‘Natural Immunity’ (KB)

In the United States, the media barely mention Covid prior infections or the existence of natural immunity. But a CDC-sponsored database in partnership with Yale, Harvard, and Stanford universities shows that the overwhelming majority of Americans have natural immunity from prior infections, Wildfire can exclusively report. The CDC released a study last week called “COVID-19 Cases and Hospitalizations by COVID-19 Vaccination Status and Previous COVID-19 Diagnosis — California and New York, May–November 2021.” The findings were reported by Agence France-Presse. “During America’s last surge of the coronavirus driven by the Delta variant, people who were unvaccinated but survived Covid were better protected than those who were vaccinated and not previously infected,” AFP noted about the new study.


“The finding is the latest to weigh in on a debate on the relative strengths of natural versus vaccine-acquired immunity against SARS-CoV-2, but comes this time with the imprimatur of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC),” AFP added. The U.K.’s Health Security Agency (UKHSA), issued a report that echoes much of the CDC’s findings on natural immunity. It showed that those with prior infections to Covid were much less likely to test positive for Covid infections than those in the vaccinated groups. Those with prior infections even in the pre-Alpha period were tested to have natural immunity roughly equivalent to those with vaccinated immunity acquired from three shots. The UKHSA report also showed that nearly the entire population of Great Britain has some form of antibodies to Covid-19.

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Poof!

• Denmark Declares Covid-19 No Longer ‘Socially Critical Disease’ (TH)

As some countries double down on punishing the unvaccinated and continue with draconian Covid-19 restrictions, Denmark has taken the opposite approach, announcing Wednesday that all safety measures will be lifted next week. Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said the Nordic country is reclassifying Covid-19; it will no longer be considered a “socially critical disease.” “Tonight we can shrug our shoulders and find the smile again. We have incredibly good news, we can now remove the last coronavirus restrictions in Denmark,” Frederiksen said at a press conference. Frederiksen acknowledged that the decision may seem unusual as Omicron infections are spiking in the country, with 46,000 new Covid cases reported on Wednesday.


“Recent weeks have seen very high infection rates, in fact the highest in the entire pandemic,” she noted. “Therefore, it may seem strange and paradoxical that we are now ready to let go of the restrictions.” Health Minister Magnus Heunicke pointed to high rates of vaccination and fewer hospitalizations as the reasons officials have taken this approach. “The situation in Denmark is that we have this decoupling between infections and intensive care patients, and it is mainly due to the large attachment among Danes to revaccination. That is the reason why it is safe and the right thing to do now,” Heunicke said. The UK, Ireland and the Netherlands have all taken a similar approach.

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For children 5-11 years old. Fauci wants 3 jabs each for every kid over 6 months.

• Sweden Opts Against Covid Jabs For Children (RT)

The Sweden Public Health Agency on Thursday announced that it had opted against following some western countries in endorsing vaccination against Covid-19 for children 5-11 years old. Administering shots in that age group wouldn’t have a major effect on the spread of Covid-19 and would offer little medical benefit to the individual children receiving them, the agency said in its guidance for the upcoming spring term. “With the knowledge we have today, with a low risk for serious disease for kids, we don’t see any clear benefit with vaccinating them,” agency official Britta Bjorkholm told reporters. The decision may be revisited if new information becomes available or a new variant of the virus changes the risk-reward analysis for vaccinating children.


Sweden’s decision is contrary to a trend toward countries approving vaccination of younger and younger children, especially with Covid-19’s Omicron variant spreading rapidly. Such counties as Germany, France, Italy and Spain have approved jabs for children as young as 5. In the US, chief White House medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci told reporters on Wednesday that he expects three-dose regimens to eventually be approved for children as young as 6 months old. Proponents of vaccinating children have argued that even though risks of serious illness or death from Covid-19 are relatively low in young people, they can spread the virus to more vulnerable segments of the population. Swedish health officials, however, argue that vaccinating small kids would entails no great benefit – either to them or to the people around them. “A general vaccination from the age of 5 is also not expected to have any major effect on the spread of infection at present, neither in the group of children aged 5–11 nor among other groups in the population,” the Public Health Agency said.

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Here’s two of them. It’s repeated everywhere. The vaccinated are dying.

• Vaccine Failure In Two Charts And Two Graphs From Four Countries (Berenson)

I could make the long case about original antigenic sin, falling antibodies, the issues around cellular immunity, myocarditis, and all the rest. But I’m just going to offer these four images because they speak more clearly than anything I could say. Scotland, Britain, Israel, and Denmark are four of the world’s most highly vaccinated countries. They all have 90 percent adult Covid vaccination rates and 60 percent adult boosters. Yet the vast majority of deaths are occurring in vaccinated people; serious cases are soaring; and infections are almost literally off the charts. This is Covid vaccine failure at the most profound and basic level.


SCOTLAND: Covid death rates (RATES, not raw numbers) by vaccination status for the last four weeks. Death rates in vaccinated but unboosted people have been higher than rates in the unvaccinated each week. Also, 87 percent of total deaths occurred in vaccinated people in the most recent week:

BRITAIN: (the data in the British chart below is United Kingdom-wide and thus includes Scotland – some British readers asked me to make that clear.) Covid deaths by vaccination status in the most recent four weeks (2,845 out of the 3,860 people for whom vaccine status could be determined were vaccinated – 74 percent):

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But you still label them Covid patients?

• Most Covid Patients In Wales In Hospital For Other Conditions (BBC)

Well over half of patients with confirmed cases of Covid in hospital in Wales are being treated for other conditions, official figures show for the first time. A total of 42.2% of confirmed Covid patients were being “actively” treated for it on Tuesday. This means nearly six out of 10 are “incidental” Covid patients being treated for other conditions. Meanwhile, Covid hospital figures continue to fall. The number of patients being treated primarily for Covid is far higher for those in critical care – nearly 90%, according to Digital Health and Care Wales. The average for the last week for Covid patients is just over 40% being treated primarily for the virus.


Even though patients might “incidentally” have Covid, it does not mean that it cannot add complications to their health or treatment, and it still presents challenges for patient management for hospitals. Meanwhile, there were another 220 patients who “probably” or “definitely” caught Covid while in hospital, according to Public Health Wales figures for the last week. The daily average number of Covid patients in hospital beds dropped for the 12th day in a row to 560 on Wednesday, according to Digital Health and Care Wales. The daily average for those patients in critical care or on invasive ventilation with Covid has also fallen to 22 – the lowest figure since 11 August. Daily Covid admissions are also still falling, down to 27 a day.

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The big hospitals are fine. The smaller ones, not so much.

• Biden Admin Used Billions In Hospital Covid-19 Funds To Pay Drugmakers (STAT)

The Biden administration quietly took nearly $7 billion from a fund meant to help hospitals and clinics affected by the pandemic and used it to buy Covid-19 vaccines and therapeutics, according to a document obtained by STAT. The move is similar to the Trump administration’s decision to divert $10 billion from the same fund to Operation Warp Speed, which STAT reported exclusively in March. Now, the hospital money, known as the Provider Relief Fund, has run dry, and has no new money left to allocate, according to the agency that administers it. Providers have only been able to submit requests for expenses incurred through March 2021 — before both the Delta and Omicron surges battered the health care system.

With the new $7 billion shift, which has not been previously reported, the diversion to drugmakers totals nearly $17 billion, or roughly 10% of the overall money Congress allotted for the fund for hospitals and physician practices. Congress set aside that money to help health care providers pay for pandemic-related expenses including staffing, personal protective equipment, care for uninsured patients, and vaccine distribution. The new details about the Biden administration’s spending decision come as hospitals across the country are struggling with a crushing surge of Covid-19 hospitalizations and deaths due to the Omicron variant. And their representatives in Washington are furious.

[..] A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services said using the money to pay drugmakers for contracts was a reasonable use of the hospital and clinic funds because the vaccines and therapeutics purchased were given to providers at no cost. “All Provider Relief Fund dollars have been used for Provider Relief Fund purposes,” the spokesperson said. However, there is no transparency into which contracts the money was used for, and where those products were distributed. Government watchdog reports offer clues to the timeline of the spending. As of March 1, 2021, $10 billion had been used to pay drugmakers. By Aug. 31, that number jumped to $14.8 billion. And per the document obtained by STAT, the total is $16.7 billion through Dec. 23.

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“People know authorities lie, which is why the more they clamp down, the bigger their trust problem usually becomes. ”

• The Folly of Pandemic Censorship (Taibbi)

NIAID director Anthony Fauci has told three different stories about masks, including an episode in which he essentially claimed to have lied to us for our own good, in order to preserve masks for frontline workers — what Slate called one of the “Noble lies about Covid-19.” Officials turned out to be wrong about cloth masks anyway. Here is Fauci again on the issue of what to tell the public about how many people would need to be vaccinated to achieve “herd immunity,” casually explaining the logic of lying to the public for its sake: “When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent. Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, “I can nudge this up a bit,” so I went to 80, 85.”

We’ve seen sudden changes in official positions on the efficacy of ventilators and lockdowns, on the dangers (or lack thereof) of opening schools, and on the risks, however small, of vaccine side effects like myocarditis. The CDC also just released data showing natural immunity to be more effective in preventing hospitalization and in preventing infection than vaccination. The government had previously said, over and over, that vaccination is preferable to natural immunity (here’s NIH director Francis Collins telling that to Bret Baier unequivocally in August). This was apparently another “noble lie,” designed to inspire people to get vaccinated, that mostly just convinced people to wonder if any official statements can be trusted.

To me, the story most illustrative of the problem inherent in policing “Covid misinformation” involves a town hall by Joe Biden from July 21 of last year. In it, the president said bluntly, “You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations,” pretty much the definition of Covid misinformation: It was bad enough when, a month later, the CDC released figures showing 25% of a sample of 43,000 Covid cases involved fully vaccinated people. Far worse was a fact-check by Politifact, which judged Biden’s clearly wrong statement “half true.” “It is rare for people who are fully vaccinated to contract COVID-19, but it does happen,” the site wrote. They then cited CDC data as backup.

“The data that the CDC collected before May 1 show that, of 101 million people vaccinated in the U.S., 10,262 (0.01%) experienced breakthrough cases.” Politifact’s “bottom line”: Biden “exaggerated,” but “cases are rare.” Anyone paying attention to that story will now distrust the president, the CDC, and “reputable” mainstream fact-checkers like the Pew Center’s Politifact. These are the exact sort of authorities whose guidance sites like the Center for Countering Digital Hate will rely upon when trying to pressure companies like Substack to remove certain voices.

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Big campaign to vilify the truckers. Trudeau, had Covid and is well jabbed, happens to get infected and goes in hiding for 5 days, to avoid the PR mess.

• Joe Rogan, Elon Musk React To Canadian Trucker Convoy (RT)

Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk and podcaster Joe Rogan have spoken about the Canadian truckers driving across the country to protest the government’s Covid-19 mandates, after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau denounced them as a “fringe minority” with “unacceptable views.” “Canadian truckers rule,” Musk tweeted on Thursday afternoon. The ‘Freedom Convoy’ that set out from British Columbia and is expected to reach the Canadian capital of Ottawa sometime this weekend was ignored by the major media outlets at first. As it approached Ontario, however, the convoy became a political football. Trudeau denounced the truckers and said they “do not represent the views of Canadians” in a televised speech on Wednesday.

On Thursday morning, he announced he had been “exposed” to Covid-19 and would quarantine for five days – thereby missing the convoy’s arrival in Ottawa – even though he has already had the virus and been vaccinated and boosted. Jagmeet Singh, whose New Democrats are propping up Trudeau’s minority government, also condemned the truckers and accused them of spreading “false information” via “inflammatory, divisive and hateful comments.” He also criticized his brother-in-law for donating to the protest. Canadian media reported that Jodhveer Singh Dhaliwal had asked for his donation back after being told of “the true nature” of the convoy.


[..] Benjamin Dichter, one of the organizers of the ‘Freedom Convoy’ and the group’s official spokesman, said they are peaceful and law-abiding. He told the Toronto Sun that the convoy is a protest over Trudeau’s government forcing drivers to wear masks even when alone inside their trucks, a vaccine mandate, and a requirement to get the jab before crossing the US-Canada border. Dichter also denied reports that GoFundMe has frozen some Can$5 million in donations for the convoy, calling them “fake news.” Joe Rogan, who hosts the immensely popular podcast on Spotify, also shone a spotlight on the convoy during his show on Wednesday. Speaking to a guest from Montreal, he showed footage of the truckers and described it as Canada being “in revolt” over the government’s mandates. “It’s a giant convoy of trucks,” Rogan said. “That’s apparently some insane amount of people. Fifty thousand trucks are headed to Ottawa to protest the vaccine mandates by Trudeau.”

Canada: We’re Not Gonna Take it!

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My guess would be Canada won’t be repeated. The truckers also want to block US-Canada border crossings.

• Truckers Inspired By Canada Begin ‘Freedom’ Convoys Around The World (JTN)

Truckers around the world are creating their own convoys to protest COVID-19 vaccine mandates after being inspired by the Canadian Freedom Convoy, which reportedly has thousands of trucks. Freedom Convoy 2022, the group that organized the Canadian trucker protest, reported initially having 1,600 trucks. The convoy, which now has nearly 50,000 trucks, will be in Ottowa by Saturday with the goal of getting “the government of Canada to repeal its cross border Covid tracking passport / phone app and ALL Covid-19 vaccine mandates,” according to a press release. The Canadian convoy has reportedly been joined by some American truckers and in Ontario, farmers came in tractors to show support. Both the United States and Canada mandate cross-border truckers to be vaccinated against COVID-19.

Americans are invited to also protest the mandate this Saturday at three border locations: Houlton, Maine; Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan; and Sweet Grass, Montana. In Australia, the “2022 Official Convoy to Canberra” has more than 44,000 members on Facebook and more than 10,000 followers on Telegram as of Thursday. The group is planning to meet in the capital by Jan. 31 to protest vaccine mandates. European truckers are organizing to protest vaccine mandates as well. The European Convoy Telegram channel has more than 7,300 members. Truckers are organizing across Europe, including the Netherlands, France, Hungary and more, to converge on Brussels by Feb. 7. The truckers have received an outpouring of support from celebrities as well.

Entrepreneur Elon Musk, one of the wealthiest men in the world tweeted his support for the convoy. “Canadian truckers rule,” he said, later adding: “If you scare people enough, they will demand removal of freedom. This is the path to tyranny.”

Trudeau hiding
https://twitter.com/i/status/1486870820177649666

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“Last year, the United Auto Workers union said Ford “put corporate greed and more potential profits over American jobs”..”

• Musk Unloads On ‘Puppet’ Biden In Twitter Rant (RT)

Tesla tycoon Elon Musk referred to Joe Biden as a “damp sock puppet in human form” on Thursday, in response to the US president’s photo-op with General Motors chair Mary Barra. In the video, which was posted on Biden’s official Twitter account on Wednesday evening, the president praised GM’s investment in electric vehicle manufacturing as a blow to climate change. Responding to the message, Musk argued that electric vehicle manufacturing in the US “Starts with a T / Ends with an A / ESL in the middle.” He then took a dig at the president, completing his tweet with a “sock” emoji.

Musk also claimed that Biden was “treating the American public like fools” while responding to another Twitter user, who argued that Biden was “trying to cancel a great American company and rewrite EV history” by endorsing GM and Ford. Amateur fact-checkers pounced on the thread to back up Musk, posting data that shows Tesla’s Model Y and Model 3 were by far the top-selling electric vehicles in the US – and both made domestically. GM’s Bolt came in at a distant fourth place in 2021, with Ford’s Mustang Mach-E beating it out for third place, according to Car & Driver. In a video with Barra, Biden wrote that “companies like GM and Ford are building more electric vehicles here at home than ever before,” while Barra announced a $7 billion investment in Michigan along with a battery cell plant to be opened in the US.


At least some of Ford’s electric vehicles are manufactured in Mexico, not the US. Last year, the United Auto Workers union said Ford “put corporate greed and more potential profits over American jobs” with a plan to build a new electric model in Mexico, rather than in Ohio.

Read more …

1 week till Olympics. Xi is nervous.

• China Warns US Over Ukraine & Blasts “Interference” In Beijing Olympics (ZH)

China on Thursday blasted the US for continuing to interfere in its affairs, further saying nothing has fundamentally changed, but instead charging there’s been “new shocks” since the Biden-Xi virtual summit of two months ago. The scathing rebuke came on Thursday as Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi held a phone call with his counterpart Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Importantly, Wang took the opportunity to for the first time side with Russia in the direct communication with the US top diplomat, saying Moscow has “reasonable security concerns” over Ukraine that must be “taken seriously”. Chinese state media and Beijing-linked pundits have also become increasingly vocal on the issue, charging NATO with overstepping…

He urged calm on the part of all sides but specifically called on the West to “abandon its Cold War mentality”. It’s been no secret that Washington sanctions and punitive actions against officials in both countries have served to make Russia and China unlikely allies against a common enemy. “All parties should completely abandon the Cold War mentality and form a balanced, effective and sustainable European security mechanism through negotiation,” Wang spelled out in the call with Blinken, according to AFP. The tough rhetoric echoed the words of Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian during a Wednesday press briefing. In response to US claims that Russia is likely to invade Ukraine during the Beijing Winter Olympics, Zhao said,

“As the world’s largest military alliance, NATO should abandon the outdated Cold War mentality and ideological bias, and do things that are conducive to upholding peace and stability.” He suggested that NATO is outdated and contributes to instability: “China firmly opposes all kinds of small cliques,” he added, and urged “fully consider each other’s legitimate security concerns, avoid antagonism and confrontation, and properly address differences and disputes through equal consultation on the basis of mutual respect.”

Wang focused much of his Thursday call with Blinken on the “urgent priority” that the “US should stop interfering in the Beijing Winter Olympics.” The swipe appeared not just aimed at Washington’s continued emphasis on China’s human rights abuses, including allegations of detention centers and “genocide” targeting Uighur Muslims, but in response to the words the day prior from Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman. Sherman had unexpectedly linked the Ukraine crisis with the Olympic games hosted by China: “We all are aware that the Beijing Olympics begin on Feb. 4, the opening ceremony, and President Putin expects to be there. I think that, probably, [Chinese] President Xi Jinping would not be ecstatic if Putin chose that moment to invade Ukraine, so that may affect his timing and his thinking,” Sherman said in a virtual conference.

Read more …

“Putin is the devil and Russia subverted American democracy” has become a moralistic mantra for every Biden booster and Foggy Bottom staffer.”

• Why Do American Elites Want War in Ukraine? (Kassam)

George Orwell’s The Lion and the Unicorn (1941) contains the following description of the English elite: “One thing that has always shown that the English ruling class are morally fairly sound, is that in time of war they are ready enough to get themselves killed…. What is to be expected of them is not treachery or physical cowardice, but stupidity, unconscious sabotage, an infallible instinct for doing the wrong thing. They are not wicked, or not altogether wicked; they are merely unteachable. Only when their money and power are gone will the younger among them begin to grasp what century they are living in.”

America’s own ruling class has more than its share of the unteachable types, as well as the cynical scoundrelism of Orwell’s description of the U.S. ruling elite as “mere bandits…consciously clinging to unjust privileges and beating down opposition by bribery and tear-gas bombs.” And when it’s not bombs at home, it’s bombs away. Or perhaps in Joe Biden’s case, both. The current president is perhaps the leading exemplar of American banditry, coupling treachery with an infallible instinct for doing the wrong thing. His own former boss, President Barack Obama, is said to have remarked upon his Vice President’s “ability to f*** things up.” And that ability has not diminished with time.

So, of course, to war. Whether in lock-step or goose-step, the rest of the ruling class amplifies Biden’s thirst for something, anything that provides respite from domestic catastrophe. We are just days away from front-page headlines dubbing the tent cities across America “Bidenvilles.” Something must be done. And that thing, to paraphrase Vice President Kamala Harris, is the thing they have been doing, every day: point at Russia. “Putin is the devil and Russia subverted American democracy” has become a moralistic mantra for every Biden booster and Foggy Bottom staffer. But flaccid, obfuscatory jaw-jawing over the moral turpitude of Russia’s dealings with Ukraine has also whet the appetites of the long-benched war lobby. That lobby wants its turn back at the helm. Sanctions ain’t good enough, cry its advocates on Capitol Hill and in the media. Stiffen the sinews. Summon up someone else’s blood. Cry Ukraine for democracy, Joey and Uncle Sam! No one’s buying it.

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I get the feeling that if Durham doesn’t do it, someone else will. And what did Obama know?

• What Did Clinton Know and When Did She Know It? (Sperry)

As indictments and new court filings indicate that Special Counsel John Durham is investigating Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign for feeding false reports to the FBI to incriminate Donald Trump and his advisers as Kremlin agents, Clinton’s role in the burgeoning scandal remains elusive. What did she know and when did she know it? Top officials involved in her campaign have repeatedly claimed, some under oath, that they and the candidate were unaware of the foundation of their disinformation campaign: the 35-page collection of now debunked claims of Trump/Russia collusion known as the Steele dossier. Even though her campaign helped pay for the dossier, they claim she only read it after BuzzFeed News published it in 2017.

But court documents, behind-the-scenes video footage and recently surfaced evidence reveal that Clinton and her top campaign advisers were much more involved in the more than $1 million operation to dredge up dirt on Trump and Russia than they have let on. [..] Dossier author Christopher Steele himself has suggested Clinton was briefed on his reports. On July 5, 2016 — the same day the FBI publicly exonerated Clinton in her email scandal — Steele handed off the first installments of the dossier to an FBI agent overseas who had handled him previously as an informant. In their London meeting, Steele noted that Clinton was aware of his reporting, according to contemporaneous notes Steele took of their conversation.

“The notes reflect that Steele told [his FBI handler Michael Gaeta] that Steele was aware that ‘Democratic Party associates’ were paying for [his] research; the ‘ultimate client’ was the leadership of the Clinton presidential campaign; and ‘the candidate’ was aware of Steele’s reporting,” Justice Department watchdog Michael Horowitz wrote in his 2019 report examining the FBI’s use of the dossier to justify spying on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. Later that same month, during the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, the CIA picked up Russian chatter about a Clinton foreign policy adviser who was trying to develop allegations to “vilify” Trump. The intercepts said Clinton herself had approved a “plan” to “stir up a scandal” against Trump by tying him to Putin. According to handwritten notes, then-CIA chief John Brennan warned President Obama that Moscow had intercepted information about the “alleged approval by Hillary Clinton on July 26, 2016, of a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisers to vilify Donald Trump.”

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Kolakusic
https://twitter.com/i/status/1486641636784357381

 

 

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Debt Rattle December 31 2021

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


Arnold Böcklin The Isle of the Dead III 1883

 

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

 

 

 

 

McCullough

 

 

 

 

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

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

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


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

Read more …

More much ado.

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

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


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

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

• Fauci Takes Professional Gaslighting to New Levels (CTH)

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

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More kids, but also:

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

• COVID-19 Genetic Vaccine Safety in Children (Malone)

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

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

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

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

Read more …

Anyone seen those goalposts?

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Covid and Corrupt Federal Statistics (Bovard)

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

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

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

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“..psychopathe fasciste..”

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

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


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

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Does it get any messier than this?

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

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


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

Read more …

FDA and CDC play good cop/bad cop.

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

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

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

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

Read more …

Slow death.

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

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


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

Read more …

Courtesy of US intel.

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

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

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

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

Read more …

Timing is everything.

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

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


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

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Records were sealed for a reason.

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

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

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

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

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Dog

 

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle October 14 2018

Oct 142018
 
 October 14, 2018  Posted by at 9:14 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  3 Responses »


René Magritte The song of love 1948

 

• Companies Buying Their Own Shares Could Fuel The Next Market Rally (CNBC)
• Market Crash? Another ‘Red Card’ For The Economy (Lacalle)
• 4 Lessons From Iceland On Dealing With A Financial Crisis (WEF)
• ‘Crazy’ That Current Account Deficits Are ‘A Sin:’ Singapore Deputy PM (CNBC)
• Draghi to Rome: Don’t Expect An ECB Rescue If Budget Talks Fail (CNBC)
• Canada ‘Concerned’ About Khashoggi But Will Sell Arms To Saudis – Trudeau (RT)
• David Davis Calls For Cabinet Rebellion Over Brexit Plan (BBC)
• Brexit Negotiators Poised To Miss Deal Deadline As UK Hardliners Rebel (ZH)
• Internet Censorship Just Took An Unprecedented Leap Forward (CJ)
• Professor Exposes Rigged Markets One Academic Paper At A Time (ZH)
• Hammer Time (Jim Kunstler)
• Who The Hell Cares What Old People Think About Climate Change? (Ol.)
• What’s Another Way to Say ‘We’re F-cked’? (Goodell)
• ‘Not Everything Was Looted’: British Museum To Fight Critics (G.)

 

 

“.. in the last 12 months, the companies in the S&P 500 have purchased $646 billion of their own stock, 29 percent more than the previous 12 months..”

“..at least $350 billion of buybacks that have been planned for the year and are just waiting to be put to work.”

• Companies Buying Their Own Shares Could Fuel The Next Market Rally (CNBC)

With stocks down significantly, corporate buybacks could help stabilize the market. Buybacks have been one of the big stories supporting the market this year. DataTrek estimates that in the last 12 months, the companies in the S&P 500 have purchased $646 billion of their own stock, 29 percent more than the previous 12 months. And there’s plenty of “dry powder” left. One firm estimates at least $350 billion of buybacks that have been planned for the year and are just waiting to be put to work. And no, it is not just Apple that is buying its own stock. More than 300 large-cap companies have active buyback programs.

Unfortunately, some traders are resurrecting an old chestnut to help explain the current market weakness. They say we are entering a “blackout” period, when corporations cannot buy their stock because they are about to report quarterly earnings. It’s a neat explanation, except there’s not a lot to it. “Buybacks do occur during blackout periods,” Ben Silverman at InsiderScore told me. “Buyback volume does often decline in the first month of the quarter due to some buyback blackouts,” but companies can, and do, continue to buy back stock, he told me. Another trader (who declined to be identified) confirmed Silverman’s point. Corporate buybacks decline in the month before earnings, but only marginally. He estimated the decline is 30 percent or less.

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“..disproportionate valuations…”

$20 trillion worth of them.

• Market Crash? Another ‘Red Card’ For The Economy (Lacalle)

The first thing we must understand is that we are not facing a panic created by a black swan, that is, an unexpected event, but by three factors that few could deny were evident: 1) Excessive valuations after $20 trillion of monetary expansion inflated most financial assets. 2) Bond yields rising as the US 10-year reaches 3.2%. 3) The evidence of the Yuan devaluation, which is on its way to surpass 7 Yuan per US dollar. 4) Global growth estimates trimmed for the sixth time in as many months. Therefore, the US rate hikes – announced repeatedly and incessantly for years – are not the cause, nor the alleged trade war. These are just symptoms, excuses to disguise a much more worrying illness.

What we are experiencing is the evidence of the saturation of excesses built around central banks’ loose policies and the famous “bubble of everything”. And therein lies the problem. After twenty trillion dollars of reckless monetary expansion, risk assets, from the safest to the most volatile, from the most liquid to the unquoted, have skyrocketed with disproportionate valuations.

The cracks in the building always appear first with currencies. Countries that have become accustomed to the idea that “this time is different” and that debt does not matter, started to multiply their indebtedness in foreign currency. Debt in dollars from emerging countries soared to 41% of their total debt. In the first three months of 2018, global debt rose 11% to a record of 247 trillion dollars (according to the IIF), and that of emerging markets soared by 2.5 trillion to an all-time high of 58.5 trillion. . When the lowest risk bond, the United States 10-year, went to 3.1%, the synchronized growth and complacent veil lifted, and many assets showed how risky they truly are.

Markets woke up to a reality that we had decided to ignore. That rates do rise. And if the safest bond gives a return of 3.2% … Am I willing to buy bonds from much riskier countries with negligible spreads? Add to that “sobriety” effect, another one. The inevitable devaluation of the yuan , which soared to almost 7 against the dollar. Am I willing to buy emerging markets and commodities when China exports its imbalances sending disinflationary pressure to the rest of the world?

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Iceland took it serious. No-one else did.

• 4 Lessons From Iceland On Dealing With A Financial Crisis (WEF)

Days after the collapse of 97% of its banking industry, Icelandic authorities designed a comprehensive policy of accountability, based on two overlapping objectives: establishing the truth and punishing those responsible. An independent truth commission was mandated to document the causes of the meltdown, and the newly established Office of the Special Prosecutor was tasked to thoroughly investigate and prosecute those responsible for any crimes committed in the run up to the crisis. Both mechanisms have been remarkably successful.

Published in 2010, the truth commission’s 2,200-page report not only documented the manifold failings of the financial system in Iceland but also offered specific recommendations to protect state institutions from a future crisis. The report instantly became a bestseller, with copies sold in supermarkets. It was a popular gift – parents even gave it to their children to help them avoid making the same mistakes. The Office of the Special Prosecutor successfully prosecuted 40 bank executives. This is remarkable, especially given the small population of the island and the comparative experience of other European countries affected by the recession, such as Ireland, Cyprus, or the UK (table below).

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Not many people see is that way.

• ‘Crazy’ That Current Account Deficits Are ‘A Sin:’ Singapore Deputy PM (CNBC)

For decades, developing countries have relied on outside investments to boost their growth despite trade imbalances. But running a current account deficit has come to be regarded as “a sin,” according to Singapore’s deputy prime minister. Such a development is just “crazy,” Tharman Shanmugaratnam told CNBC on Friday during the annual meeting of the Institute of International Finance on the Indonesian island of Bali. Shanmugaratnam was referring to the widely held outlook that nations should seek to avoid current account deficits — which indicate they’re operating on borrowed means because the value of incoming goods, services and investments exceeds the amount leaving the country.

“How did the Singapores and Koreas of the world grow?” he said. “We grew by running current account deficits at an early stage of development so we could invest ahead for growth while our savings were being built up.” Singapore was able to rely on financing through foreign direct investments and long-term investors during its early years of growth, as the international financial system at that time had capital flowing to developing economies, Shanmugaratnam said. “Today, it’s a sin to run a current account deficit and that’s crazy,” said the minister, who is also the chairman of the Monetary Authority of Singapore, the country’s central bank and financial regulator. “I mean, it’s bad in economics, it’s bad in policy sense, and the whole world is going to suffer.”

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But Draghi’s still an Italian.

• Draghi to Rome: Don’t Expect An ECB Rescue If Budget Talks Fail (CNBC)

European Central Bank President Mario Draghi is sending a warning to Rome ahead of its formal budget submission: Don’t expect the ECB to save the day. In a Saturday press conference at the IMF and World Bank meetings in Bali, Indonesia, Draghi said he was confident that a budget agreement would be reached and urged all parties to “calm down with the tone.” He also voiced relief that there has not been evidence of a wider spillover effect in European bond markets, even as Italian yields hit multi-year highs. “Everything that happened today is local to Italy.”

When asked whether an eventual realization of contagion or a further rise in Italian yields would force the ECB to scrap tightening plans by year end, Draghi told CNBC: “I don’t want to speculate on this. I just don’t want to conceive such a hypothesis. I’m confident that the authorities — and by the way all parties, not only Italy — all parties will in the end find a compromise solution, an agreement.” He went on to suggest that the situation had been “dramatized,” and that was “not the first time there are deviations from established rules in Europe.” But investors are worried that the Italian government may seize on that precedent and take a gamble that running foul of EU budget rules won’t incur serious penalties, and that, if things do turn worse for Italian financial markets, they”ll be able to lean on the ECB for support. Draghi, for his part, told CNBC that would not be a possibility.

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“..Saudi Arabia expelled the Canadian envoy. It then froze trade talks, cut academic ties, and suspended flights to Canada.”

But arms sales trump everything.

• Canada ‘Concerned’ About Khashoggi But Will Sell Arms To Saudis – Trudeau (RT)

Ottawa will keep its $15bn arms deal with Riyadh despite concerns over Saudi involvement in the disappearance of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi and the diplomatic row over human rights, Prime Minister Trudeau said. “We respected that contract,” Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told reporters on Friday, adding that his cabinet has put forward measures to make the arms sales more transparent. “We are making sure Canadians’ expectations and laws are always being followed,” he said. The contract was signed in 2014 by the previous conservative government, and has since been upheld by Trudeau. The specifics of the sales were originally not disclosed by the parties.

According to documents obtained by CBC News last month, a Canadian company is to ship 742 LAV-6 light armored vehicles to Riyadh. The same outlet revealed in March that hundreds of the LAV-6s will be outfitted as “heavy assault” and “anti-tank” types. [..] Human rights campaigners and journalists have criticized Canada’s approach to Saudi Arabia as inconsistent. They point out that the government doesn’t mince words when attacking the kingdom’s human rights record, but at the same time never waivers in its willingness to ship military hardware to Riyadh. Media reports have also strongly suggested that the Saudis might be using Canadian-made LAVs against civilians in Yemen.

[..] Canada stuck to the arms deal even after becoming embroiled in a diplomatic spat with Riyadh in August. Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland called on the kingdom to release two high-profile dissidents. In response, Saudi Arabia expelled the Canadian envoy. It then froze trade talks, cut academic ties, and suspended flights to Canada.

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She won’t have a cabinet left soon.

• David Davis Calls For Cabinet Rebellion Over Brexit Plan (BBC)

Cabinet ministers should “exert their collective authority” and rebel against Theresa May’s proposed Brexit deal, ex-Brexit Secretary David Davis has said. The PM has suggested a temporary customs arrangement for the whole UK to remain in the customs union while the Irish border issue is resolved. Brexiteers suspect this could turn into a permanent situation, restricting the freedom to strike trade deals. Writing in the Sunday Times, Mr Davis said the plan was unacceptable. “This is one of the most fundamental decisions that government has taken in modern times,” he added.

The issue of the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic Ireland is one of the last remaining obstacles to achieving a divorce deal with Brussels, with wrangling continuing over the nature of a “backstop” to keep the frontier open if a wider UK-EU trade arrangement cannot resolve it. The EU’s version, which would see just Northern Ireland remain aligned with Brussels’ rules, has been called unacceptable by Mrs May and the DUP. Mr Davis said the government’s negotiating strategy had “fundamental flaws”, arising from the “unwise decision in December to accept the EU’s language on dealing with the Northern Ireland border”.

On Saturday evening, German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung reported a deal had already been reached between Mrs May and the EU, and would be announced on Monday. But a No 10 source told the BBC the report was “100%, categorically untrue” and negotiations were ongoing. The paper said it had seen a leaked memo from EU negotiators to EU ambassadors stating: “Deal made.”

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Too many people want too many too different things.

• Brexit Negotiators Poised To Miss Deal Deadline As UK Hardliners Rebel (ZH)

[..] early Sunday in London, the Brexiteer hardliners published an open letter signed by 63 Conservative MPs, including David Davis, the former Brexit secretary, Jacob Rees-Mogg, the chairman of the European Research Group of Eurosceptic backbenchers and former Brexit minister Steve Baker, the former Brexit minister. At the same time, Anne-Marie Trevelyan, a pro-leave MP, published an editorial in the Sunday Telegraph demanding that any possibility that the UK could remain in a “temporary customs arrangement” after the Brexit transition period ends in December 2020 be stricken from the final agreement – because leaving open the possibility would be tantamount to ignoring the political will of the 17.4 million Britons who voted for Brexit.

Meanwhile, Davis demanded in an editorial in the Sunday Times that Cabinet ministers should “exert their collective authority” and rebel against Theresa May’s proposed Brexit deal. All of this is happening amid even more conflicting reports, citing sources from the EU and sources from No. 10 Downing Street, affirming and denying that a deal had been reached. Underscoring the hostility to a deal, the leader of Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party said Sunday that she would prefer a “no deal” Brexit to a “backstop” transition agreement that would require any borders between Northern Ireland and the UK, arguing that this would amount to the “annexation” of Northern Ireland by the EU, per CNBC.

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The Atlantic Council got going. Social media have become too big a threat to the narrative.

• Internet Censorship Just Took An Unprecedented Leap Forward (CJ)

While most indie media was focused on debating the way people talk about Kanye West and the disappearance of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, an unprecedented escalation in internet censorship took place which threatens everything we all care about. It received frighteningly little attention. After a massive purge of hundreds of politically oriented pages and personal accounts for “inauthentic behavior”, Facebook rightly received a fair amount of criticism for the nebulous and hotly disputed basis for that action. What received relatively little attention was the far more ominous step which was taken next: within hours of being purged from Facebook, multiple anti-establishment alternative media sites had their accounts completely removed from Twitter as well.

As of this writing I am aware of three large alternative media outlets which were expelled from both platforms at almost the same time: Anti-Media, the Free Thought Project, and Police the Police, all of whom had millions of followers on Facebook. Both the Editor-in-Chief of Anti-Media and its Chief Creative Officer were also banned by Twitter, and are being kept from having any new accounts on that site as well.

“I unfortunately always felt the day would come when alternative media would be scrubbed from major social media sites,” Anti-Media’s Chief Creative Officer S.M. Gibson said in a statement to me. “Because of that I prepared by having backup accounts years ago. The fact that those accounts, as well as 3 accounts from individuals associated with Anti-Media were banned without warning and without any reason offered by either platform makes me believe this purge was certainly orchestrated by someone. Who that is I have no idea, but this attack on information was much more concise and methodical in silencing truth than most realize or is being reported.”

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Interesting man.

• Professor Exposes Rigged Markets One Academic Paper At A Time (ZH)

Finance professor John Griffin, along with his doctoral student companion, Amin Shams, were the two academics that drew market-moving conclusions about bitcoin last year, while the digital currency was trading around $20,000. After sifting through 2 terabytes of trading data, they alleged that bitcoin was being manipulated by someone using the cryptocurrency Tether to purchase it. Tether remains a relatively little-known crypto, which is pegged to one US dollar. Part of its appeal is that it can “stand in” for dollars when necessary, according to Bloomberg. Griffin and Shams authored a paper in June, with the results of their findings ultimately catalyzing many digital assets to move lower, despite the fact that the CEO of Tether publicly denied that its currency was used to prop up bitcoin.

Griffin works at the University of Texas at Austin, and has become quite an unpopular figure on Wall Street for similar work he has done in the past on ratings companies, the VIX and investment banks. In most of his findings, he claims that these well-known financial instruments and players are, in one way or another, rigged. And the professor seems to enjoy exposing precisely that: rigged, manipulated markets and shady players. “I not only want to understand the world, but make it better,” he told Bloomberg. Griffin’s work has become popular reading within the DOJ and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, according to Bloomberg.

These regulators – many of them low on resources, time and staff – welcome any additional help they can get (the SEC’s budget has forced it into a hiring freeze and the CFTC budget was cut by Congress in March of this year). John Reed Stark, a former attorney in the SEC’s enforcement division, stated: “It’s incredibly helpful to have an expert of Griffin’s caliber.”

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“..the threat to order might be so great that an unprecedented “emergency” has to be declared, with soldiers in the streets of Washington..”

• Hammer Time (Jim Kunstler)

If I were President, I’d declare Oct 12 Greater Fool Day. (Nobody likes Christopher Columbus anymore, that genocidal monster of dead white male privilege.) The futures are zooming as I write, a last roundup for suckers at the OD corral, begging the question: who will show up on Monday. Nobody, I predict. And then what? The great false front of the financial markets resumes falling over into the November election. The rubble from all that buries whatever is left of the automobile business and the housing market. The smoldering aftermath will be described as the start of a long-overdue recession — but it will actually be something a lot worse, with no end in sight.

The Democratic Party might not be nimble enough to capitalize on the sudden disappearance of capital. Their only hope to date has been to capture the vote of every female in America, to otherwise augment their constituency of inflamed and aggrieved victims of unsubstantiated injustices. It’s been fun playing those cards, and the Party might not even know how to play a different game at this point. Democratic politicians may also be among the one-percenters who watch their net worth go up in a vapor in a market collapse, leaving them too numb to act. The last time something like this happened, in the fall of 2008, candidate Barack Obama barely knew what to say about the fall of Lehman Brothers and the ensuing cascade of misery — though unbeknownst to the voters, he was already a hostage of Wall Street.

Complicating matters this time will be the chaos unleashed in politics and governing when the long-running “Russia collusion” melodrama boomerangs into a raft of indictments against the cast of characters in the Intel Community and Department of Justice AND the Democratic National Committee, and perhaps even including the Party’s last standard bearer, HRC, for ginning up the Russia Collusion matter in the first place as an exercise in sedition. The wheels of the law turn slowly, but they’ll turn even while financial markets tumble. And the threat to order might be so great that an unprecedented “emergency” has to be declared, with soldiers in the streets of Washington, as was sadly the case in 1861, the first time the country turned itself upside down.

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Good angle.

• Who The Hell Cares What Old People Think About Climate Change? (Ol.)

The loudest and most powerful voices when it comes to the future of the planet — the ones with their hands on the levers of power — have a strong tactical advantage: they will be dead before the shit really hits the fan. This fact curiously goes unspoken, for the most part. Popular arguments tend to be framed around a rosy vision preserving the planet for future generations, which gives our boomer aristocracy the most effective cover story imaginable. They don’t need to care about that, as nice as it sounds. Why would they? It’s all completely hypothetical to them. You may as well be talking about climate patterns in Narnia. Make no mistake: older generations living in the developed world are part of history’s most under-appreciated death cult.

This isn’t abstract psychoanalysis. There is a brutal calculus going on in the minds of everyone from your skeptic uncle to the bankrollers of squillion dollar think tanks whenever they think or talk about climate change. They know that they will never have to really answer for their opinions on this matter, because they’ll be six feet under (and loving it!) when the world’s arable land is rendered infertile and its coastal cities flooded by rising oceans. In some dark and venal corner of their minds, they’re thinking about that fact all the damn time. Despite the frightening predictions of the new IPCC report, they’ve still got plenty of wiggle room to keep denying until they’re dead – which will be sooner rather than later. With any luck they’ll even avoid being held accountable in any concrete way, which for the conservative commentariat is an even worse fate than the Mad Max hellworld towards which we are hurtling.

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One scary dude.

• What’s Another Way to Say ‘We’re F-cked’? (Goodell)

[..] a scientist named Richard Alley in a Skype discussion with students at Bard College, as well as with Eban Goodstein, director of the Graduate Programs in Sustainability at Bard. It would be just another nerdy Skype chat except Alley is talking frankly about something that few scientists have the courage to say in public: As bad as you think climate change might be in the coming decades, reality could be far worse. Within the lifetime of the students he’s talking with, Alley says, there’s some risk — small but not as small as you might hope — that the seas could rise as much as 15-to-20 feet.

[..] Richard Alley is not a fringe character in the world of climate change. In fact, he is widely viewed as one of the greatest climate scientists of our time. If there is anyone who understands the full complexity of the risks we face from climate change, it’s Alley. And far from being alarmist, Alley is known for his careful, rigorous science. He has spent most of his adult life deconstructing past Earth climates from the information in ice cores and rocks and ocean sediments. And what he has learned about the past, he has used to better understand the future. For a scientist of Alley’s stature to say that he can’t rule out 15 or 20 feet of sea-level rise in the coming decades is mind-blowing.

And it is one of the clearest statements I’ve ever heard of just how much trouble we are in on our rapidly warming planet (and I’ve heard a lot — I wrote a book about sea-level rise). To judge how radical this is, compare Alley’s numbers to the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was released on Monday. That report basically argued that if we don’t get to zero carbon emissions by 2050, we have very little chance of avoiding 1.5 Celsius of warming, the threshold that would allow us to maintain a stable climate. The report projected that with 2 Celsius of warming, which is the target of the Paris Climate Agreement, the range of sea level rise we might see by the end of the century is between about one and three feet.

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Sure. But start giving back what was. Problem is, so much of it WAS looted that the museum would become a pretty empty place.

• ‘Not Everything Was Looted’: British Museum To Fight Critics (G.)

The British Museum is launching an initiative intended to counter the perception that its collections derive only from looted treasures. The monthly Collected Histories talks, which begin on Friday, will provide information on how certain artefacts entered the collection, with the museum saying it will offer a more nuanced take on these stories than is available elsewhere. The museum has long faced criticism for displaying – and refusing to return – looted treasures, including the Parthenon Marbles, Rosetta Stone, and the Gweagal shield.

Earlier this year, the art historian Alice Procter’s Uncomfortable Art Tours around London institutions, including the British Museum, made headlines for their attempts to expose the role of colonialism, with those on the tour given “Display It Like You Stole It” badges. Dr Sushma Jansari, the curator of the Asian ethnographic and South Asia collections at the British Museum, said she had devised Collected Histories in response to Procter’s tours. “There are a lot of partial histories and they tend to focus on the colonial aspect of the collecting so you have a bunch of people who tend to be quite angry and upset,” she said. “We’re trying to reset the balance a little bit. A lot of our collections are not from a colonial context; not everything here was acquired by Europeans by looting.”

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When Trump Met Fibonacci. And Won.

Jun 102018
 
 June 10, 2018  Posted by at 7:33 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , ,  16 Responses »


Edouard Manet A Bar at the Folies-Bergère 1882

 

Something curious happened during the Trump love fest at the G7 over the weekend. And I don’t think many people would have got it. In fact the entire western press, far as I could see, were blaming Trump for the dissolution of the treaties and whatall that the political class had worked so hard on for 50+ years.

But when you look at the whole thing from an energy level, Trump obviously won hands down. Merkel, Macron and Trudeau had no idea what to do with such a disruptive figure -though it could hardly have been a surprise to them- and so they sort of cowered back into a defensive posture as a group, saying Trump shouldn’t rock their boat. But that’s what he came there to do.

Now, these are all people who count as leaders in their own territories. They’ve won elections, they’re presidents and prime ministers. Not the kind of folk who like to see their authority questioned. But at the G7 they feel forced to move as a group. Which is not their thing, they’re very much individuals. That’s how they won their positions.

Still, the only way they see as viable to counter Trump is as a group. Big Mistake. That’s not their natural environment. Now they’re out of their comfort zone, and Trump is still very much in his. Even more so as they’re ganging up on him.

 

At this point, it no longer matters what he says or does. Or what they do. It’s all against one. And he’s already won. But they don’t know that game. They’re used to being the one, not the all. They’re doomed to lose this, because it’s Trump’s game, not theirs.

Trump wants tariffs, they do not, but at this point, it’s hardly relevant anymore. It’s a power game, pure and simply, they’ve all played it to get where they are, but by retreating into their group hug positions -they don’t know where else to go-, they’ve already lost this one.

This is not my endorsement of Trump, I’ve said enough times by now that he is a poor choice for president of the US, but nobody managed to come up with a better one. No, this is about how the mechanics work in -international- politics, and about how anyone who is not Trump seems to come up a mile and a half short when it comes to showing your true colors.

All these dynamics, all of it, were already obvious just from a bunch of headlines in the western press, even if the content of their articles were heavily leaning towards blaming Trump for whatever didn’t work at the G7. The objective news cycle about Trump was replaced long ago with an echo chamber. And those things deafen their own proprietors.

But let’s leave that alone as well for a moment. Though I still despise the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN and MSNBC for making it impossible for me to criticize Trump, because they monopolized that field with fake and made-up so-called news. Jim Kunstler actually thanked me for saying that. He feels the same way, and I’m sure many others do.

 

But then, after I had already contemplated all of this, the German government released a photo that I guess they wanted to present as Angela Merkel looking strong vs Donald Trump. Boy, did they misfire. Germans, I would think, would know some math, and some art history. But look:

 


Jesco Denzel/AFP/Getty Images

 

That, and I saw it in 0.1 seconds, is classic Fibonacci. This is where fractals come from. I don’t know how much of this requires explaining but let’s do a minmum. A Fibonacci sequence is when every number after the first two is the sum of the two preceding ones. So 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377 etc. So you get this:

 

 

And then:

 

 

Most people who saw the Merkel/Trump et al photo above as a ‘classic’ picture (and many did), though, didn’t recognize the Fibonacci. They saw Merkel dominating Trump. But who’s the center of attention in that picture? Not Merkel, says Fibonacci. This is what Fibonacci looks like. Lay that over the photo:

 

 

It doesn’t get more classic. Fibonacci was an Italian born in the 12th century. And yet the Berlin government insisted on releasing the photo as some kind of statement that Merkel was giving Donald Trump a hard time. But the photo says the opposite (if you look close, you see he’s not even looking at Merkel, but at Macron).

I’m not saying that’s necessarily or particularly bad or not, but a lot of voters in many countries have expressed their concern with business as usual, in Washington, Brussels, Rome etc.. That’s why we have Trump and Brexit and 5-Stars.

What the G7 showed more than anything is that things can’t go on the way the establishment planned it. Blaming it all on Trump, as the G6 and their media try to do, is not going to work anymore, and besides now there’s Kim-Jong-un coming up, a potentially huge victory for Trump.

But then, there’s always religion to provide comfort:

 

 

 

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