vaccinated Archives - The Automatic Earth

The pre-planned horse-paste animal-drug conflating PR campaign by the FDA/CDC was.. MASSIVE

Merck: market cap up $20 billion since press release? $700 billion in next 2-3 years?

Poor little 6-cent IVM..and the entire #$&! world. I'm gonna cry..againhttps://t.co/IliCHYFEQF

— Pierre Kory, MD MPA (@PierreKory) October 12, 2021

Sir Christopher Chope MP

Sir Christopher Chope MP:
“Our hospitals have got a large number of in-patients who are only there because those patients took the vaccine..there is causation between vaccination and damage caused by those vaccines yet the government..seems to be denying that” pic.twitter.com/PJAuq2vOJ6

— paul (@paul8880) October 12, 2021

Try some melatonin. Works vs Covid.

Israel

What we’ve been afraid of for quite some time now.

• The Coming Real Pandemic of the Vaccinated (S&F)

Drs. Trozzi and Alexander explain ADE and other dangers of the ‘vaccines’, and warn of the coming wave of deaths among those who have received these experimental gene therapies. Dr. Mark Trozzi is an ER doctor with 25 years experience. He took a leave of absence early this year to fight Covid tyranny full time. His website is drtrozzi.com. Dr. Paul Alexander is a world-class clinical epidemiologist who was trained at McMaster University, Canada’s top university for epidemiological research. Dr. Alexander was fired from his position at the university for speaking the truth about the harms being caused by the Covid ‘vaccines’.

“78% of the deaths in the U.K. are among the ‘double-vaccinated.” Dr. Mark Trozzi. “If we vaccinate our children the deaths we’ve seen in adults so far we will now see in children.” Dr. Paul Alexander. Watch and share this very important interview. The next fear-mongering tactic coming down the pipe is a ‘wave of pediatric cases’, but in actual fact children are in no danger from Covid whatsoever. Sadly, many are likely to die as a result of the bioweapons being falsely represented as ‘vaccines’.

Just in: Boeing will require its 125,000 workers in the United States to be vaccinated against COVID-19 by Dec. 8.

• Airline Pilot Warns Biden’s Mandate Will Create ‘Massive Disruptions’ (WJ)

An airline pilot and activist for individual liberty told Fox News on Monday that situations such as mass flight cancelations will become more common if the Biden administration refuses to backdown from its hardline stance against coercing Americans to get vaccinated against COVID. Speaking on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Joshua Yoder, a commercial airline pilot and the co-founder of a group called U.S. Freedom Flyers, cautioned that events such as this past weekend’s Southwest Arlines flight cancellations could soon be unavoidable. The reason: Yoder said the people who do skilled jobs, such as flying planes and driving trucks, will stand against President Joe Biden and their own employers. “My motive for resisting [the COVID vaccine] is primarily religious for myself,” Yoder told Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

“Among my friends I saw a need. Many of us don’t want to take this. People were being coerced. I believe in freedom, and I’m here to support the freedom of my fellow employees and all people across this country.” “I’m not going to take a mandate. I’m not going to be forced to do something that I don’t believe in,” he added. “If you have flights reduced by 30 percent because 30 percent of pilots are fired because they won’t take the vaccine, this is going to affect how your goods get here from overseas, how they are distributed to the store,” he said when asked to describe the effect on the national transportation infrastructure. “The same thing is happening with the truckers; it’s happening in the shipping industry. Those Amazon boxes that typically show up in two days, you might be looking at three weeks,” he continued, making note of a reported shortage of truckers and dock workers as ports — such as the one at Long Beach in Los Angeles Country — experience a backlog of ships waiting to be unloaded.

[..] Yoder, when speaking of staffing shortages and logistics, asserted that more shortages of employees, such as the one which that hit Southwest, could come. He blamed Biden for the issues and challenged any notion that the federal government is in control of what American citizens and workers choose with regard to vaccines. “It’s squarely his [Biden’s] fault,” he said. “First of all, we have all the control, and the control comes from a simple word, and that’s ‘no,’” he said. “We just don’t need to comply. As far as I’m concerned, I will never promote a sick-out or a work action that is illegal. With U.S. Freedom Flyers, the organization I’m with, we will never promote such a thing. With that being said, we also cannot control the actions of individuals.”

“And I think that you will see massive disruptions in supply chain and in your travel if we just stand up and say no,” he said. “If these companies fire us and they fire 30% of the workforce, aircraft are going to stop moving, and it’s going to affect you. It’s going to affect your air travel, and it’s going to affect the economy.”

What will the world look like by Christmas? Will anything function at all?

• 911 System In Jeopardy As First Responders Reject Jab (ZH)

The American Ambulance Association (AAA) warned House and Senate leaders the “nation’s EMS system is facing a crippling workforce shortage, a long-term problem that has been building for more than a decade. It threatens to undermine our emergency 9-1-1 infrastructure and deserves urgent attention by Congress.” “The magnitude has really blown up over the last few months,” AAA President Shawn Baird told NBC News. “When you take a system that was already fragile and stretched it because you didn’t have enough people entering the field, then you throw a public health emergency and all of the additional burdens that it put on our workforce, as well as the labor shortages across the entire economy, and it really has put us in a crisis mode,” Baird said.

What’s making the EMS labor shortage worse is President Biden’s vaccine mandates. First responders are quitting across the county because they don’t want to get the jab and have realized they can transfer to other higher-paying jobs. Waldoboro, Maine, town manager Julie Keizer told News Center Maine that “the vaccine mandate has contributed to the loss of first responders.” “I think part of the problem is everybody thought they (workers) would conform because nobody wants to lose their jobs,” Keizer added. “But when you look at the rate of pay for emergency workers, they can make more delivering packages than patients.”

“The purge must be conducted openly, brutally, so that the masses understand that the rules of society have changed forever, that their former rights and freedoms are gone, that from now on any deviation from official ideology will be ruthlessly punished.”

• The Great New Normal Purge (CJ Hopkins)

So, the Great New Normal Purge has begun … right on cue, right by the numbers. As we “paranoid conspiracy theorists” have been warning would happen for the past 18 months, people who refuse to convert to the new official ideology are now being segregated, stripped of their jobs, banned from attending schools, denied medical treatment, and otherwise persecuted. Relentless official propaganda demonizing “the Unvaccinated” is being pumped out by the corporate and state media, government leaders, health officials, and shrieking fanatics on social media. “The Unvaccinated” are the new official “Untermenschen,” an underclass of subhuman “others” the New Normal masses are being conditioned to hate. But it isn’t just a purge of “the Unvaccinated.” Anyone deviating from the official ideology is being systematically demonized and persecuted.

In Germany, Australia, and other New Normal countries, protesting the New Normal is officially outlawed. The New Normal Gestapo is going around to people’s homes to interrogate them about their anti-New Normal Facebook posts. Corporations are openly censoring content that contradicts the official narrative. New Normal goon squads roam the streets, checking people’s “vaccination” papers. And it’s not just governments and corporations carrying out the New Normal Purge. Friends are purging friends. Wives are purging husbands. Fathers are purging children. Children are purging parents. New Normals are purging old normal thoughts. Global “health authorities” are revising definitions to make them conform to New Normal “science.” And so on … a new official “reality” is being manufactured, right before our eyes. Anything and anyone that doesn’t conform to it is being purged, unpersoned, memory-holed, erased.

None of which should come as a surprise. Every nascent totalitarian system, at some stage of its takeover of society, launches a purge of political opponents, ideological dissidents, and other “anti-social deviants.” Such purges can be brief or open-ended, and they can take any number of outward forms, depending on the type of totalitarian system, but you cannot have totalitarianism without them. The essence of totalitarianism — regardless of which costumes and ideology it wears — is a desire to completely control society, every aspect of society, every individual behavior and thought. Every totalitarian system, whether an entire nation, a tiny cult, or any other form of social body, evolves toward this unachievable goal … the total ideological transformation and control of every single element of society (or whatever type of social body it comprises). This fanatical pursuit of total control, absolute ideological uniformity, and the elimination of all dissent, is what makes totalitarianism totalitarianism.

“The CDC’s National Vital Statistics System told mortality data compilers to emphasize COVID-19 as the “cause” of death in a March 2020 alert, departing from a 2003 federal manual on recording infectious disease as a “contributing factor to death” in the presence of preexisting conditions, the letter said.”

• Senators Seek Federal Grand Jury For Covid-19 Statistical Manipulation (JTN)

The CDC adopted a “double-standard exclusively for COVID-19 data collection” that inflated cases and deaths starting early in the pandemic, violating multiple federal laws and distorting mitigation policies, Oregon lawmakers told the feds’ top lawyer in the state. Advised by “a large team of world-renowned doctors, epidemiologists, virologists, and attorneys,” state Senators Kim Thatcher and Dennis Linthicum petitioned U.S. Attorney Scott Asphaug to approve a grand jury investigation into how the pandemic is being measured. “Public health policy must be based upon accurate and independently verifiable data to optimize outcomes and strengthen the public’s trust in the people leading them through this crisis,” the Republican lawmakers, whose state has imposed some of the harshest and longest COVID restrictions, wrote in a letter with several attached exhibits.

One is a synopsis of allegations, findings, relevant law and implicated agencies intended to “assist grand jury members in orienting themselves to the scope of alleged crimes committed.” Their letter is dated Aug. 16, but the materials were not released for a month to “protect those involved,” Stand for Health Freedom (SHF), the holistic medicine and legal nonprofit behind the petition effort, said in last month’s announcement. “I’m not sure there has ever been an allegation of government wrongdoing on this scale,” so the group wanted to assess “accuracy and safety” before going public, relationship manager Bailey Kuykendoll told Just the News. Asphaug’s office said Thursday it referred the petition to the Justice Department’s Office of Legislative Affairs. That office didn’t respond on whether or how it had answered the Oregon lawmakers’ request.

[..] The lawmakers’ petition also accuses the FDA of withholding “safe and effective evidence-based treatments” just as the Tuskegee study withheld penicillin from black men with syphilis. They name vitamin D and ivermectin, which have “extensive clinical histories of safety following the administration of billions of doses.” Doctors who prescribe these for COVID may face loss of license, fines and imprisonment, Thatcher and Linthicum said. [..] Thatcher said she was troubled that even as the infection’s high survivability rate became clear, arbitrary restrictions that worsened child abuse, suicide and mental health remained in place. “I began to really question whether the cure was worse than the disease,” said Thatcher, who is better known in Oregon for her legislative effort to compensate people wrongfully convicted.

Well, they’re doing something alright.

• Are the COVID Shots Working? (Mercola)

In a Twitter thread, Ben M. double-checked and recalculated the vaccine efficacy, taking into account all CLI admissions, not just those where the patient had been vaccinated at least 14 days prior. When adding those previously excluded patients back in, Ben M. came up with a vaccine effectiveness rate of 13%. He also discovered that if you look at how many people actually had a CLI (covid like illness) clinical diagnosis code among the 41,552 included patients, the rate of diagnosis between the unvaccinated, the partially vaccinated and the fully vaccinated was nearly identical: 73% for the unvaccinated, 71% for the partially vaccinated and 72% for the fully vaccinated.

Here’s where it gets interesting. When you look at the rate of CLI, and add in the rate of positive PCR tests, all of a sudden, differences between the groups become clear. Only 2% of the fully vaccinated had a positive PCR test, compared to 6% of the partially vaccinated and 18% of the unvaccinated. Ben M. speculates that vaccinated patients may be tested less routinely (12.5% less frequently to be exact), or unvaccinated patients are tested more routinely (11% more frequently than the vaccinated). But there may be another explanation. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention actually has two different sets of testing criteria, depending on the patient’s vaccination status.

Fully vaccinated individuals suspected of having contracted COVID-19 are to be tested using a CT of 28 or less, whereas unvaccinated patients are to be tested using a CT of 40. Anything over 35 CTs has been shown to produce 97% false positives, so this biased testing guidance virtually guarantees that vaccinated patients are more likely to test negative, while unvaccinated patients are more likely to get a false positive.

v$xxine effectiveness

The myth of 95% v$xxine effectiveness and the reality of the "cure" being worse than the disease. pic.twitter.com/8g7tbp71Gj

— Joel (@RealJoelSmalley) October 12, 2021

“Why anyone who had left Australia would come back again is unclear..”

• Australia Building Quarantine Camps For “Ongoing Operations” (SN)

Despite some states tentatively beginning to lift lockdown restrictions, Australian authorities are building quarantine camps that won’t be completed until next year in order to prepare for “ongoing operations” and to house those “who have not had access to vaccination.” According to ABC Australia, one such 1,000-bed quarantine facility at Wellcamp Airport outside Toowoomba will be fully completed by the end of March 2022. “At this stage, the cabins will be used by domestic travellers returning from COVID hotspots,” states the report. However, it also makes clear that the camp will be used for “ongoing operations” and will be a source of employment for the local area.

The camps is split into different zones and accommodates singles, doubles, and family rooms while being patrolled by police and security guards 24/7. Citing new strains of COVID and people “who have not had access to vaccination,” Queensland Deputy Premier Steven Miles told the media outlet, “We anticipate there to be a continuing need for quarantine facilities.” The government is leasing the land on which the camp is being built from the Wagner Corporation for 12 months with an option for a further 12 months after that. Another 1,000-bed quarantine facility is also being built on a 30-hectare Army barracks site in the industrial area of Pinkenba, near Brisbane Airport.

“Why anyone who had left Australia would come back again is unclear,” writes Dave Blount. “It is possibly the most repressive country in the world regarding Covid tyranny.” As we previously highlighted, state authorities in America are also constructing new “quarantine facilities” for Americans who are “unable to quarantine at home.” As we reported last year, Authorities in Quebec City, Canada announced they will isolate “uncooperative” citizens in a coronavirus facility, the location of which remains a secret. New Zealand also announced plans to place COVID infectees and their family members in “quarantine facilities.” Back in January, German authorities also announced they would hold COVID dissidents who repeatedly fail to properly follow the rules in what was described as a ‘detention camp’ located in Dresden.

“The language, here, is non-scientific: herd immunity is not a creed. It’s how pandemics end.”

• Covid, Lockdown And The Retreat Of Scientific Debate (Kulldorff)

The BMJ article is full of errors that ought to have never found their way into any publication. Here are some examples:

1/ My colleagues and I are described as ‘critics of public health measures to curb Covid-19’. On the contrary, throughout the pandemic we have strongly advocated better public health measures to curb Covid-19 – specifically protection of high-risk older people, with many ‘clearly defined’ proposals. The failure to implement such measures, in our view, has led to many unnecessary Covid deaths.

2/We are described as ‘proponents of herd immunity’ which is akin to accusing someone of being in favour of gravity. Both are scientifically established phenomena. Every Covid strategy leads to herd immunity. The key is to minimise morbidity and mortality. The language, here, is non-scientific: herd immunity is not a creed. It’s how pandemics end.

3/ It says we have ‘expressed opposition to mass vaccination’. Dr. Gupta and I have spent decades on vaccine research and we are all strong advocates for Covid and other vaccines. They are among the greatest inventions in history. To falsely credit the anti-vaccine movement with support from professors at Harvard, Oxford and Stanford is damaging for vaccine confidence. This is unworthy of a medical journal.

4/ The GBD is referred to as a ‘sophisticated science denialism’. Note here how something that challenges an orthodoxy is described as anti-science – a label that presumably could have been applied to any scientific innovator who ever questioned a failed orthodoxy. Collateral public health damage from Covid restrictions are real and enormous on cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, backsliding childhood vaccinations, starvation and mental health, just to name a few. It is not the GBD, but those who downplay lockdown harms who should be equated with those who question the harms of tobacco or climate change.

5/ The GBD was not ‘sponsored by the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) – and I’m pleased to see that the BMJ has at least retracted this claim. We were there for media interviews, with no sponsorship. How did such a blunder end up in print in the first place? The AIER staff did not even know about the Declaration until the day before it was signed, and the AIER president and board did not know about it until after publication. If we had written the Declaration at say, Starbucks, would the BMJ have claimed that it was sponsored by the coffee shop?

6/ The BMJ article mentions ‘AIER contributor Scott Atlas’, but Dr. Atlas has never been affiliated with nor written for AIER. Neither have we – unless the BMJ also views us as affiliated with hundreds of universities and organisations that we have visited during our careers or that have reprinted some of our articles. Dr. Atlas was not even aware that AIER had reprinted one of his articles until the BMJ linked to it. Several AIER employees have gracefully supported the GBD, just like countless other people around the world, but we have never received any money from the AIER. This basic error again exposes how normal checks did not appear to have been applied by the BMJ.

7/The BMJ article ends by saying that my colleagues and I are peddling a ‘well-funded sophisticated science denialist campaign based on ideological and corporate interests’. Nobody has paid us money for our work on the GBD, or for advocating focused protection. None of us would have undertaken this project for professional gain: it is far easier to stay silent than put your head above the parapet. As a vaccine developer, Dr. Gupta has connections with a pharmaceutical start-up, but Dr. Bhattacharya and I are among the few drug/vaccine scientists who purposely avoid pharmaceutical company funding to be free from conflicts of interests.

Weekly testing is still valid. Businesses that go beyond that do that on their own accord.

• OSHA Submits Vaccine Rule To White House (CNN)

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which falls under the Labor Department, has submitted the text of a new vaccine rule for large employers to the Office of Management and Budget, bringing the emergency standard announced by President Joe Biden last month one step closer to taking effect. “The Occupational Safety and Health Administration has been working expeditiously to develop an emergency temporary standard that covers employers with 100 or more employees to ensure their workers are fully vaccinated or undergo weekly testing to protect employees from the spread of coronavirus in the workplace,” a Labor Department spokesman said Tuesday.

“On Tuesday, October 12, as part of the regulatory review process, the agency submitted the initial text of the emergency temporary standard to the Office of Management and Budget.” Once OMB concludes its review of the regulation, the emergency temporary standard will be published in the Federal Register, when it will go into effect. Last month, Biden announced the Labor Department would draft an emergency rule compelling private companies with 100 or more employees to require vaccinations or weekly testing. “While America is in much better shape than it was seven months ago when I took office, I need to tell you a second fact: We’re in a tough stretch and it could last for awhile,” the President said in a White House speech at the time.

The new emergency temporary standard will require large employers to give their workers paid time off to get vaccinated. If businesses don’t comply, the government will “take enforcement actions,” which could include “substantial fines” of up to nearly $14,000 per violation, according to officials. Officials have said the standard was a “minimum” and that some companies may choose to go further, including by mandating the vaccine instead of offering a testing alternative. “Each employer will decide exactly what they want to do, but what we’re saying through the Department of Labor rule making process is a minimum of testing once a week or full vaccination,” a senior administration official previously told CNN.

Make that: Weekly testing is still valid, but not for Kyrie.

• Brooklyn Nets Ban Kyrie Irving From Playing Until He Gets Covid-19 Vaccine (ZH)

The Brooklyn Nets have banned 29-year-old Kyrie Irving from both games and practice until he gets the Covid-19 vaccine, just one week before the team kicks off their regular season against the Bucks. The star point and shooting guard will even be barred from playing during away games – the vast majority which will be held in locations where there is no local vaccine mandate. The Nets said they won’t allow Irving to be deemed “part-time” in terms of his availability for games. The move comes after Irving missed Monday’s preseason loss to the 76ers (115-104) over his refusal to get the jab. “Given the evolving nature of the situation and after thorough deliberation, we have decided Kyrie Irving will not play or practice with the team until he is eligible to be a full participant,” said the team in a statement.

“Kyrie has made a personal choice, and we respect his individual right to choose. Currently, the choice restricts his ability to be a full-time member of the team, and we will not permit any member of our team to participate with part-time availability.” The mostly word-salad statement continues: “It is imperative that we continue to build chemistry as a team and remain true to our long-established values of togetherness and sacrifice. Our championship goals for the season have not changed, and to achieve these goals each member of our organization must pull in the same direction. We are excited for the start of the season and look forward to a successful campaign that will make the borough of Brooklyn proud.” Irving earns more than $400,000 per game – and forfeited some $817,000 in salary in January after missing two games to take part in a league-ordered quarantine after attending a birthday party in a club. He earned around $35 million last season, and was slated to earn $36.6 million this year – the last year of his contract.

“A Federal Judge in TX has temporarily put on hold United Airlines’ policy that places employees on unpaid leave for claiming a religious exemption to the COVID-19 vaccine.”

• Texas Businesses Stuck Between Federal And State Vaccine Rules (Y!)

American Airlines and Southwest Airlines said Tuesday they will continue requiring employees to be vaccinated against Covid-19, deferring to federal regulations as Texas and the White House square off over vaccine mandates. The clash comes as the Republican governor of Texas, Gregg Abbott, signed an order Monday banning all vaccine mandates in his state, including those coming from private companies. But that state rule is in direct contradiction with a regulation announced by President Joe Biden last month, which would require all companies with more than 100 employees to ensure their workers are vaccinated against the coronavirus.

White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki said Tuesday the new Texas law does not change the federal government’s vaccine mandate plans, which could cover some 100 million US workers. “We know that federal law overrides state law,” Psaki said. But the Biden administration has yet to detail the practical applications of the federal order. “There isn’t a big historic precedent for this and we want to get it right,” Psaki said, assuring that plans for the federal order could be expected within “weeks.” As federal contractors, major airlines must require their employees to be vaccinated by December 8, which could prove complicated for those based in Texas. American Airlines said it will defer to federal law over the state law.

“We are reviewing the executive order issued by Gov. Abbott, but we believe the federal vaccine mandate supersedes any conflicting state laws, and this does not change anything for American,” a spokesperson for the carrier said in a statement to AFP. Fellow Texas-based airline Southwest also said Tuesday it would continue requiring vaccines for employees, despite Abbott’s order. “According to the president’s executive order, federal action supersedes any state mandate or law, and we would be expected to comply with the president’s order to remain compliant as a federal contractor,” Southwest said in a statement.

And the Greater Houston Partnership, a Texas business group that includes Exxon Mobil, Chevron, BP, Shell and JP Morgan Chase, said in a statement Tuesday: “The governor’s executive order does not support Texas businesses’ ability and duty to create a safe workplace.” Abbott said Monday he supported vaccination, but would not allow mandates for it in his state. “I issued an Executive Order prohibiting vaccine mandates by ANY entity in Texas,” the governor wrote on Twitter.

“Halloween came early this year, courtesy of the Biden administration..”

• NY Post Editorial Board Bashes Biden’s ‘Cabinet of Horrors’ (NM)

The New York Post Editorial Board has come out to blast the “scandals from top to bottom in Joe Biden’s Cabinet of horrors” in a scathing review of the early struggles of the administration. “Halloween came early this year, courtesy of the Biden administration,” the editorial began. “While the president is primarily to blame for the choices in Afghanistan, the border and holding an infrastructure bill hostage to the Squad, his team is facing their own crises, many self-created. Here, some of the lowlights of many of the members of Joe Biden’s Cabinet of Horrors.” From calling Vice President Kamala Harris the VP in the shadows — “Harris has gone into hiding, barely making public appearances as her favorables have tanked”— to White House chief of staff Ron Klain being the “shadow president,” few were spared in Biden’s Cabinet from the Post’s critique of the administration’s first 10 months. Among the Post’s scathing rebukes:

Secretary of State Antony Blinken: “He has no answers for the debacle in Afghanistan.” Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen: “Yellen promised that she would ‘be a voice for fiscal sanity.’ So much for that!” Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin: How can he trust Gen. Mark Milley after the joint chiefs of staff went behind former President Donald Trump’s back? And “How can he not tell Biden he must be removed from his post?” Attorney General Merrick Garland: His call for the FBI and U.S. attorneys to investigate and prosecute school board protests is “a spectacular overreach of federal power”; yet, the Post adds, “But in a fight between angry moms and a weaponized Department of Justice, our money is on the moms.”

Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland: She moved the Bureau of Land Management to Colorado, “but not enough bureaucrats wanted to live there (300 retired or quit), so Haaland is now moving it back to the swamp.” Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack: Take a Democrat’s word for it: Collin C. Peterson, D-Minn., former House Agriculture Committee chairman. “I would argue this transfer tax, which could be as high as 43.4%, is the worst idea that has been proposed in terms of its impact on agriculture in my lifetime.”Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo: “Argued, counterintuitively, that companies needed to be taxed more in order to compete globally.”Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh: “When 194,000 jobs were added in September, far below the 500,000 forecast, Walsh said, ‘I don’t think it’s as bad as what everyone’s reporting.’ It’s his own department that reported it!”

Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra: “Politico noted that the guy who should be in charge of the nation’s COVID response doesn’t even attend meetings. ‘They brief him,’ a person close to the pandemic response team told the outlet. ‘But he’s not a decider on response activities.’ Why? Because of his ‘lack of experience as a public health policymaker and communicator.'”Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Marcia Fudge: “As Democrats rush to spend even more money, only 11% of the $46 billion in emergency rental assistance has been distributed.”Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg: “With supply issues impacting the economy and cargo ships waiting offshore, Buttigieg’s answer is a task force.”

Drip drip drip.

• Wisconsin’s Election Probe Zeroes In On Democrat Machine Tactics (JTN)

Move over Arizona and hold on Pennsylvania, the next election integrity investigation to take center stage is occurring in Wisconsin, where a former state Supreme Court justice empowered by the Legislature to compel testimony and document production is gathering steam. Interviews with more than a dozen witnesses, officials and lawyers who have interacted with retired Justice Mike Gableman and his staff suggest a strong focus on the role election bureaucracies played in changing the rules — without legislative consent — for how ballots were sent out, filled out, collected and counted.

Gableman’s early investigative work as special counsel appointed by Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos is shining a spotlight among other things on the Wisconsin Election Commission, a statewide body created by GOP lawmakers after an earlier political rigging scandal in the state known as the John Doe investigations. The commission provides guidance and rules to the 1,852 election clerks in the state on how to conduct voting. The commission in 2020 altered numerous state voting rules and procedures during the pandemic, often without seeking legislative permission. The changes range from allowing nursing home staff to help fill out resident ballots to giving permission to election clerks to fill out missing witness information required for absentee ballots.

Those two changes alone affected thousands of ballots in a state in which Joe Biden was declared the winner with a narrow margin of just 20,600 votes. Perhaps even more consequential, the commission gave its blessing to an idea first conceived by election clerks in the blue counties of Dane and Milwaukee that voters could claim the normally rare status of “indefinitely confined” if they were too scared to go out during the COVID outbreak. The change allowed nearly 250,000 people to vote by absentee without complying with required voter ID rules. That advice, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled after the election, was unlawful. Only people who determine they have bona fide disabilities and infirmities are allowed to vote as “indefinitely confined,” and regulators had no right to declare the pandemic as such a condition, the justices ruled in the only major court decision after Nov. 3 to declare a large bloc of votes as potentially illegally cast.

How close is Durham to looking at Hunter Biden?

• Former DNI Ratcliffe Says He’s Given Durham 1,000 Intel Documents (JTN)

Former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe says he’s given John Durham, investigating the Justice Department actions in its Russia collusion probe, a trove of documents that he thinks support charges beyond those recently filed against cybersecurity lawyer Michael Sussman. “Sussmann’s is the first of what I would hope would be a number,” of additional people charged, he told Fox News on Sunday. Ratcliffe made the argument on what he said was “1,000 intelligence community documents” that he thinks support additional charges that he would “expect” Durham to bring, in addition to the declassified documents he’s provided.

Durham, a former Connecticut attorney general, was appointed by the Trump administration to look into the origins of the federal investigation into whether the 2016 Trump presidential campaign colluded with Russia to influence the outcome of the election. A grand jury recently indicted against Sussmann, former federal prosecutor, of lying to the FBI. Ratcliffe, who oversaw the country’s 17 intelligence agencies in the latter part of the Trump administration, announced in October that he handed over the roughly 1,000 pages of materials to the Justice Department to assist with Durham’s investigation, according to the Washington Examiner. Ratcliffe has also declassified two heavily redacted Russia-related documents, including handwritten notes from former CIA Director John Brennan showing he briefed then-President Barack Obama in 2016 on an unverified Russian intelligence report.

The report claimed former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton planned in July 2016 on tying then-candidate Donald Trump to Russia’s hack of the Democratic National Committee to distract from her improper use of a private email server, the Examiner also reports. Sussmann, a former attorney at Perkins Coie, is accused of falsely telling an FBI lawyer he was not representing any clients when acting on behalf of a technology executive and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign during a September 2016 meeting on possible links between Trump and Russia.

The FBI not doing its own investigation remains very weird.

• John Durham and the Amazing Disappearing DNC Hack (Parry)

[..] at the same time as the alleged DNC hack, there were similar reports regarding the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s (“DCCC”) server as well as DNC Chairman John Podesta’s personal email devices. In testimony before the Senate, FBI Director James Comey stated the following: Question (by Senator Burr): Did the FBI request access to those devices [the servers and Podesta’s devices] to perform forensics on? A: Yes, we did. Q: And would that access have provided intelligence or information helpful to your investigation in possibly finding … including to the Intelligence Community Assessment? A: Our forensics folks would always prefer to get access to the original device or server that’s involved. So, it’s the best evidence.

Q: Were you given access to do the forensics on those servers? A: We were not. We were … a highly respected private company eventually got access and shared with us what they saw there. Q: But is that typically the way the FBI would prefer to do the forensics or would your forensic unit rather see the servers and do the forensics themselves? A: We always prefer to have access hands on ourselves, if that’s possible. Q: Do you know why you were denied access to those servers? A: I don’t know for sure. Um, I don’t know for sure. Q: Was there one request or multiple requests? A: Multiple requests at different levels and ultimately what was agreed to is that the private company would share with us what they saw.

So, instead of using a search warrant or some other legal process to perform a direct, hands on forensic examination of the DNC server, the FBI agreed to base its investigation on the findings of a private cybersecurity company. And, as discussed in the previous article, that company, CrowdStrike, was to do the investigation pursuant to its contract with Michael Sussmann of Perkins Coie, the law firm that represented Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Think about that. When presented with allegations of a devastating foreign cyber attack on one of the two major political parties, the FBI meekly agreed to allow CrowdStrike and Perkins Coie to do the forensic examination and, for all intents and purposes, run the investigation.

Not even the lowliest local police department would agree to such an absurd arrangement. What if this was a murder case? Would the Smallville PD allow a private investigator and lawyer hired by the murder victim’s family to process the crime scene, do the autopsy, and tell the police and district attorney what they supposedly found? Wouldn’t such findings be subject to attack in court as coming from sources that may have had an interest in shaping and tailoring the investigative results to suit the needs and desires of their client? Wouldn’t there be legal problems with the evidence’s provenance, chain of custody, and the reliability and comprehensiveness of the investigative work that supposedly produced it? Would the police and district attorney ever allow themselves to get roped into such a bizarre, ridiculous, nightmarish, and self-defeating arrangement?

Of course not. No rational person or organization intent on conducting a serious investigation would. But that, in effect, is precisely what the FBI — the self-proclaimed greatest investigative agency in the world — did when faced with this purportedly monumental foreign attack on the Democrat Party apparatus.

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Debt Rattle August 2 2021

Aug 022021

August 2, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:34 am Finance Tagged with: Craig Murray, incubator, Israel, Kamala, mandates, Pfizer, stupid, vaccinated, vaccine 146 Responses »

René Magritte Empire of light 1950

• Stupid Is Supposed To Hurt (Denninger)

• Only Half Of Israelis Want A Third Covid-19 Vaccine Shot (JPost)

• 233 Staff at 2 San Francisco Hospitals Test Positive in July (NW)

• Pfizer, Moderna, Hike Prices For Covid Jabs By Up To A Quarter For EU (RT)

• Apple Removes Dating App For The Unvaccinated (RT)

• Is Covid-19 On The Run In The UK? (G.)

• Experts Fear Unlocked UK Could Become Incubator For New Covid Variants (CNBC)

• Major Unions Push Back Against Biden’s Vaccine Mandates (ZH)

• Kamala Harris A ‘Historically Unpopular’ VP (RT)

• Keeping Freedom Alive (Craig Murray)

Fort Mill South Carolina 1902. Smallpox, an actual vaccine.

The Sake of Freedom

ICYMI: Neil Oliver: 'For the sake of freedom – yours and mine together – I will cheerfully risk catching Covid.'

Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://t.co/GXXuPQejoZ pic.twitter.com/QeCJ4ZTfW5

— GB News (@GBNEWS) August 1, 2021

But can my stupid hurt someone else please?

• Stupid Is Supposed To Hurt (Denninger)

I’m getting reports from all over the place, including on my forum and mailbag. Nurses are walking out en-masse over vaccine mandates in hospitals and other care settings. This of course leads to demand shifting to other places where they haven’t done so (yet), but that’s a problem too because they’re short-staffed as well. This isn’t a big deal — other than wildly increasing wait times — until and unless you have something going on where waiting could kill you, such as a heart attack. You aren’t seeing these events in the news. Guess why? Yeah, that’s why.= Guess where else this is going to happen? “You didn’t want the firemen to show up and put out your house that’s on fire, did you?

Well, better buy more garden hose because in several large cities it’s been made clear that they will not comply either. Ditto for Streets/San guys. Oh, you want the garbage hauled away? Too bad so sad.” Stupid is supposed to hurt. It’s going to, especially now that it has been admitted that (1) the CDC lied about “unvaccinated are 98% of deaths” when they knew damn well the jabbed were dying on a vertically-accelerating basis in May, we’re two months further down the road now and (2) the CDC has also admitted that those who get “breakthrough” cases are ending up with equal or higher viral loads than unvaccinated people, which means there is no public health argument for the jabs at all since at best they can only protect you and not others.

Back to last night’s discussion:

Yes, they were sold as protecting against infection of both you and those around you. Or no-one would have accepted the term “vaccine”.

“*Only* 59% of respondents said the vaccine protects against infection, 69% said it prevents the spread of the virus and 82% said it protects against developing symptoms.”

And even the most vaccinated country in the world is only at 60%. Try get that to 70%. Good luck. “But it’s our only chance!” No, it’s not. We’re lucky.

• Only Half Of Israelis Want A Third Covid-19 Vaccine Shot (JPost)

Only 52% of Israelis who received two shots of the COVID-19 vaccine said they would take advantage of the opportunity to receive a third shot, according to a survey released Friday by Prof. Michal Grinstein-Weiss, director of the Social Policy Institute (SPI) at Washington University and a visiting professor at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya. When looking at those under the age of 60, only 47% said they would take the shot. Among those 60 and older, 67% said they would get the booster. “We decided, ‘yalla,’ [let’s go] even before the Food and Drug Administration [gives emergency approval], and I think the Health Ministry thought there would be more inclination” to get the shot, Grinstein-Weiss said. “But there is a big drop in the number of people who are interested in vaccinating. It’s surprising, but there is not a real desire for a third vaccination.”

Israel opened up third shots to people over the age of 60 last week. Several thousand people were inoculated on Friday and, despite what the survey shows, already more than 40,000 elderly have signed up to get the jab this coming week. Surveys taken before the COVID vaccine came to the country showed there would be high degree of vaccine hesitancy among the public, but Israel became the quickest country in the world to vaccinate the majority of its people. [..] The survey also asked whether or not parents would give their younger children between the ages of five and 11 a vaccination if it became available and the majority (54%) said they would not. Only 23% said they would vaccinate, while 23% said they were wavering. When broken down between parents who vaccinated themselves versus those who didn’t, no parents who did not receive the vaccine said they would vaccinate their children, while only 27% of those vaccinated said they would.

[..] When it comes to children, parents are most concerned that health officials still do not know the long-term impact of the vaccine. To date, only 35% of people under the age of 20 are fully vaccinated versus 90% of those over the age of 60. However, the survey also found that as the Delta variant spreads across the country, including reinfecting a high percentage of vaccinated individuals, more people believe that the vaccine does not work. Only 59% of respondents said the vaccine protects against infection, 69% said it prevents the spread of the virus and 82% said it protects against developing symptoms. Around 53% of all new cases are people who were fully vaccinated, according to the Health Ministry.

Twist and turn all you want, but it’s the vaccinated.

• 233 Staff at 2 San Francisco Hospitals Test Positive in July (NW)

At least 233 staff members at two major San Francisco hospitals, most of them fully vaccinated, tested positive for the coronavirus this month, and most, according to a hospital official, involved the highly contagious Delta variant. Some of the cases were asymptomatic, most involved mild to moderate symptoms and only two required hospitalization, officials said. The infections were determined to be Delta-related because most samples in San Francisco were tested for the variant, which is now dominant in the city. About 75 to 80 percent of the more than 50 staff members infected at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital were fully vaccinated, Dr. Lukejohn Day, the hospital’s chief medical officer, said in an interview on Saturday. The University of California, San Francisco Medical Center said in a statement issued on Friday that 153 of its 183 infected staff members had been fully vaccinated.

The statement from the U.C.S.F. Medical Center said that two of the infected staff members required hospitalization. None of the infected staff members at San Francisco General have been hospitalized and most had mild to moderate symptoms, Dr. Day said. The asymptomatic cases were discovered through contact tracing. Without vaccinations, Dr. Day said, the hospitalization rate would be much worse. “We’re concerned right now that we’re on the rise of a surge here in San Francisco and the Bay Area,” Dr. Day said. “But what we’re seeing is very much what the data from the vaccines showed us: You can still get Covid, potentially. But if you do get it, it’s not severe at all.”

On July 11, San Francisco ordered that workers in high-risk workplaces, including hospitals, be vaccinated by Sept. 15. The U.C.S.F. statement said that the hospital was “doubling down on our efforts to protect our staff. This includes requiring all employees and trainees to comply with the new UC-systemwide Covid-19 vaccination mandate, with limited exceptions for medical or religious exemptions.” Staff members at both hospitals have continued to wear personal protective equipment, Dr. Day said. But the number of staff infections reported in July is about as many as during the peak of the winter surge. “We’re nervous that we could potentially exceed it,” Dr. Day said.

Before they all find out these things don’t work, might as well squeeze out what we can.

• Pfizer, Moderna, Hike Prices For Covid Jabs By Up To A Quarter For EU (RT)

Pfizer has reportedly raised the price of its Covid vaccine dose by a quarter, with Moderna also ramping up the price in its latest deal with the European Union. The two are making tens of billions of dollars in pandemic profits. According to the Financial Times, which has seen contracts between the two pharmaceutical companies and the EU, Pfizer’s latest price for one vaccine dose was €19.50, or around $23 – up by four euro from the previous unit price of €15.50 euro. Meanwhile, Moderna’s latest price is around €21.50 ($25.50) per dose, up from the previous price of €19 ($22.60). Despite this, the Moderna price is still lower than previously expected – $28.50 – because of the EU purchasing more doses.

Pfizer and Moderna – which earn a profit from the vaccines, unlike AstraZeneca, which is sold at cost – have pulled in tens of billions of dollars from the vaccines, with Pfizer forecasting $33.5 billion in revenue from its doses in this year alone. The forecast is up $7.5 billion from its previous prediction in the last quarter. Moderna, though behind Pfizer in sales, is forecasting $19.2 billion in Covid-19 vaccine revenue for 2021. Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine still hasn’t been approved by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) despite having been registered in 69 of the world’s countries to date, including EU members Hungary and Slovakia.

No worrries, Big Brother shall protect you.

• Apple Removes Dating App For The Unvaccinated (RT)

Apple has removed the dating app Unjected, marketed as a “safe space” for unvaccinated Americans, from its store, saying it “inappropriately refers to the Covid-19 pandemic.” The app’s developers say this amounts to censorship. Unjected describes itself as a “platform for like-minded humans that support medical autonomy.” The dating app has been pitched as a ‘safe space’ of sorts for unvaccinated Americans looking to date without the pressure of being or not being inoculated against Covid-19. Critics, however, have viewed the app as a growing social-media platform for anti-vaxxers and a hotspot of Covid misinformation. After the app was removed from Apple on Saturday, the company blasted the move as “censorship.”

“Apparently, we’re considered ‘too much’ for sharing our medical autonomy and freedom of choice,” the company said in a Saturday statement posted to Instagram. The app remains on the Google Play store, but they acknowledge that the move by Apple may mean a website may be Unjected’s best option moving forward so that they are not reliant on app stores. Other dating apps such as Tinder and Bumble have introduced features to encourage vaccinations, making Unjected stand out even more after launching in May. But the boiling point for the platforms was reached after Unjected added a social feature that allowed more general postings. It was flagged by Google after Unjected’s moderators were accused of not doing enough to police misinformation on Covid-19 and the vaccines available.

In response to Google’s concerns, the social feed was removed, though co-founder Shelby Thompson wants to soon reintroduce it and the flagged posts. “We’ve had to walk a censorship tightrope,” she said, according to Bloomberg News, which first reported Apple removed Unjected on Saturday after being contacted by a reporter about the app. The app also includes lists of businesses that disagree with vaccine mandates. Apple has already had issues with Unjected, initially denying approval for the app during its initial review process. Changes had to be made for it to get approval to be in compliance with the company’s strict policy on Covid-19 “misinformation,” but a spokesperson for Apple said updates to the app, as well as statements made to its thousands of users, have brought it back out of compliance.

That can’t be! How are we going to sell our clickbait?

• Is Covid-19 On The Run In The UK? (G.)

The fact that we are a year and a half into the pandemic and are still being wrongfooted by Covid-19 may seem surprising. After all, in that time, we have developed powerful vaccines to protect against it and have pinpointed critically important drugs to treat patients. Science has worked wonders. Nevertheless, researchers are still very unsure about how Covid-19 will progress in the UK in the coming months. The statistics have certainly been startling. First, case numbers rocketed at the beginning of July. Then they reversed and began to fall, leaving statisticians and scientists struggling to make sense of the fluctuating figures. For good measure, a host of conflicting factors has been put forward to explain Covid case numbers.

Has the opening up of society on 19 July had a major impact? Did Euro 2020 propel the virus through the homes and pubs of England? Could the UK be approaching herd immunity? And what impact have the school holidays had on the progress of the disease? Untangling these factors, as well as understanding the exact impact vaccines have had on society, has now become a complex, urgent business. “It will tell us just how bad things are likely to get when society really opens up in September and October and as winter approaches,” said Edmunds. There is clear agreement on one factor, however. All the evidence indicates that vaccines are now playing a pivotal role in controlling the disease. Had the government completely opened society on an unprotected populace, daily death tolls would by now have soared into their thousands. But just how far has our vaccine protection reached?

It is a crucial question, whose answer will determine just how severe will be the return of Covid-19 in the autumn as schools reopen, the weather chills and people head indoors. A key factor is the degree to which the country has achieved herd immunity. In other words, will we have reached the point where so many people have been either infected or vaccinated – and therefore possess some immunity to the disease – that viral transmission falls or even stops? “You can run some very simple models to see if the case numbers that we saw earlier this month are consistent with effective herd immunity,” said Prof Mark Woolhouse of Edinburgh University. “And in my view the answer is, yes, it is. There are some big caveats but the bottom line is that those figures are consistent with the impact of herd immunity.”

Amid all the fear, new infections were down 37% in one week. Like a deflating puffed-up balloon.

• Experts Fear Unlocked UK Could Become Incubator For New Covid Variants (CNBC)

England’s relaxation of Covid-19 restrictions is risking the emergence of new, potentially more dangerous variants of the virus, scientists have warned. England lifted most of it last remaining restrictions on July 19, including mandatory mask-wearing and social distancing. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland still have some restrictions in place. U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson has previously described the easing of restrictions as “irreversible.” However, the reopening policy has been publicly criticized by a consortium of more than 1,200 scientists from around the world. One concern is around the possible consequences of unlocking society amid high infection rates and a partially vaccinated population, and how unrestricted mixing under those circumstances could shape the way the virus evolves.

“If I were to design a massive experiment to create a more dangerous virus, one that is capable of blasting through our vaccines, I would do what the U.K. is proposing to do,” Michael Haseltine, a U.S. virologist and chair and president of ACCESS Health International, told news show Good Morning Britain on so-called “Freedom Day”. “Half the population vaccinated in the midst of a rampant pandemic, which would allow the virus to learn how to avoid our vaccines. That’s what I would do, and the rest of the world is justifiably concerned.” Each time a person is infected with Covid-19, they go from having a few copies of the virus to hundreds of thousands or even tens of millions of copies in their system. When the virus makes a copy of itself, there’s a chance it might make a mistake in the new copy that could inadvertently give the virus an advantage.

“You’re rolling the dice every time someone’s infected,” Charlotte Houldcroft, a scientist working on virus evolution at the University of Cambridge, told CNBC via telephone. “In a big population with lots of infections going on, you’re just rolling the dice more often — any population with lots of people infected at once is a worry, which is obviously why a lot of the rest of the world is watching the U.K.” During the week ending July 29, 204,669 people tested positive for Covid-19 in the U.K., down 37% from the previous week.

US mandates is/are asking for disaster.

• Major Unions Push Back Against Biden’s Vaccine Mandates (ZH)

Last week, the Biden administration announced sweeping vaccine requirements for federal workers (except, oddly, postal workers). The day before, the nation’s biggest union boss, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, parroted Biden’s push to vaccinate, and said that the union organization supports vaccine mandates. As it turns out, much like in California – not all unions are on board. While labor groups representing federal workers have urged their members to get the jab, most of the leading public sector unions either oppose vaccine mandates or say that it must be negotiated first, according to The Hill. Groups representing educators, postal workers, law enforcement officers, Treasury Department personnel and other government employees expressed unease about the vaccine requirement this week.

Only a few public sector unions outright endorsed the measure. “We expect that the particulars of any changes to working conditions, including those related to COVID-19 vaccines and associated protocols, be properly negotiated with our bargaining units prior to implementation,” said Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents nearly 700,000 workers. Meanwhile, National Treasury Employees Union President Tony Reardon says that his group has “a lot of questions about how this policy will be implemented and how employee rights and privacy will be protected.” And in yet another example, Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association President Larry Cosme said in a statement that mandating vaccinations “is not the American way and is a clear civil rights violation no matter how proponents may seek to justify it.”

According to the report, most public sector unions sounding the alarm over Biden’s vaccine mandates previously supported most aspects of his policy. “In order for everyone to feel safe and welcome in their workplaces, vaccinations must be negotiated between employers and workers, not coerced,” said American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten earlier this week. And the American Postal Workers Union said “it is not the role of the federal government to mandate vaccinations for the employees we represent,” adding that any new rules for its workers would need to be run past union leaders.

Put her in charge of the mandates.

• Kamala Harris A ‘Historically Unpopular’ VP (RT)

Kamala Harris has become the most unpopular vice president six months into an administration in years, according to recent unfavorable polling for the former senator. Harris found her future hopes of ever becoming president a point of mockery over the weekend as critics jumped on a report indicating that recent polling shows she has become the least popular vice president six months into an administration since the 1970s. According to a report from the Telegraph, Democrat strategists have internal worries about the controversial politician, describing her polling as “underwater” at this point. Two recent polls cited by the report show approval ratings of 46% in both, but disapproval ratings of 47% and 48%.

Harris is also struggling with support among significant and influential voting groups, such as young people and Hispanics. An Economist/YouGov poll showed only 36% of respondents between the ages of 18-29 viewed Harris “favorably.” In a recent aggregate put together by RealClearPolitics, 46% also said they viewed Harris unfavorably, three points higher than Biden at the same time. In a poll posted by the Telegraph on Twitter in a thread regarding worries about Harris’ unfavorable view among much of the public, over 50% of over 40,000 voters – as of this writing – said Harris is doing a “bad job.” Approximately 20% said she is doing a “good job,” and another 27% were “not sure.”

Harris has made some noticeable stumbles as vice president. She was heavily criticized for continually avoiding the southern border when put in charge of historic levels of migrants being detained there. When questioned why she hadn’t visited months after being named a leader on the crisis by Biden, Harris responded by saying she also hadn’t visited Europe yet. Harris is still being handed opportunities to succeed as she will soon become the first US vice president to visit Vietnam next month. Harris’ polling and reports on Democrats’ concerns about the California senator who once attempted to run for president and even clashed with Biden made the vice president a point of mockery for critics.

“You have the media on your side and basically nothing to do except for optics and you just can’t do it. It’s amazing,” Federalist editor Christopher Bedford tweeted. “So weird that making her Border Tsar didn’t work,” Texas Monthly editor Christopher Hooks added.

Craig Murray reported to prison yesterday. Who in the UK stands up for him?

• Keeping Freedom Alive (Craig Murray)

I want to make one or two points for you to ponder while I am in jail. This is the last post until about Christmas; we are not legally able to post anything while I am imprisoned. But the Justice for Craig Murray Campaign website is now up and running and will start to have more content shortly. Fora and comments here are planned to stay open. I hope that one possible good effect of my imprisonment might be to coalesce opposition to the imminent abolition of jury trials in sexual assault cases by the Scottish Government, a plan for which Lady Dorrian – who wears far too many hats in all this – is front and centre. We will then have a situation where, as established by my imprisonment, no information at all on the defence case may be published in case it contributes to “jigsaw identification”, and where conviction will rest purely on the view of the judge.

That is plainly not “open justice”, it is not justice at all. And it is even worse than that, because the openly stated aim of abolishing juries is to increase conviction rates. So people will have their lives decided not by a jury of their peers, but by a judge who is acting under specific instruction to increase conviction rates. It is often noted that conviction rates in rape trials are too low, and that is true. But have you ever heard this side of the argument? In Uzbekistan under the Karimov dictatorship, when I served there, conviction rates in rape trials were 100%. In fact very high conviction rates are a standard feature of all highly authoritarian regimes worldwide, because if the state prosecutes you then the state gets what it wants. The wishes of the state in such systems vastly outweigh the liberty of the individual.

My point is simply this. You cannot judge the validity of a system simply by high conviction rates. What we want is a system where the innocent are innocent and the guilty found guilty; not where an arbitrary conviction target is met. The answer to the low conviction rates in sexual assault trials is not simple. Really serious increases in resources for timely collection of evidence, for police training and specialist units, for medical services, for victim support, all have a part to play. But that needs a lot of money and thought. Just abolishing juries and telling judges you want them to convict is of course free, or even a saving.

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Debt Rattle July 27 2021

Jul 272021

July 27, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:17 am Finance Tagged with: Fauci, immunity, Jan6, spike proteins, spreaders, vaccinated 84 Responses »

Roy Lichtenstein Woman in Bath 1963

• Spike Protein Is Still Circulating 5 Months From Vaccination (VT)

• Early Vaccinees Are Twice As Likely To Catch Covid As Later Recipients (ToI)

• New Mandate That MUST Be Enforced NOW (Denninger)

• About The French Guyana Paper From The CDC (IM Doc)

• A Last Word of Caution (VanDen Bossche)

• Journalists: Covid-19 News ‘Censored’ To Create ‘One Official Narrative’ (PG)

• Here We Go Again (Berenson)

• Most Covid Patients In UK Hospitals Only Tested Positive After Admission (ZH)

• A Long-term Perspective On Immunity To COVID (Nature)

• Decline In UK COVID Cases Signals Coming “Inflection” For US (ZH)

• In a Hall of Mirrors You Have To Break Some Glass To See Clearly (Kunstler)

• The Jan. 6th Show Trials Threaten All of Us (Ron Paul)

Science can flourish only in an atmosphere of free speech
– Albert Einstein

Pfizer Purchase Agreement

McCullough: 3-5 years of turmoil

Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH: Something is gone very wrong in the world; I think we are in for about 3-5 year period of turmoil… pic.twitter.com/NAkpNksmRF

— Camus (@camus37) July 25, 2021

Fleming: what’s in the vaccines?

Shocking if true… pic.twitter.com/kithILe24l

— Camus (@camus37) June 30, 2021

Weinstein Tucker

Bret Weinstein – worrisome if true… pic.twitter.com/4tbF6MSceX

— Camus (@camus37) July 26, 2021

Bret Weinstein about vaccines…. pic.twitter.com/xdADwwb1Rr

— Camus (@camus37) July 27, 2021

Twitter thread.

Since the “vaccines” have only been used for some 5 months, this means: “To infinity and beyond!”.

And since Covid is so similar to the flu, what happens if you catch that next year, or the one after that?

• Spike Protein Is Still Circulating 5 Months From Vaccination (VT)

Robert Malone has said you need to measure duration, distribution, and amount for the spike protein. FDA never did this; one of our researchers did. They found spike protein is still circulating 5 months from vaccination in 100% of patients tested (6 people; random pick). And yes, they plan to publish this. But I wanted to give our followers advance notice. One of the 6 had spike in 15% of his monocytes!!! This is NOT limited to 5 months out… This could last for years, we just don’t know yet. The 6 were randomly picked. They wanted to use them as “healthy controls.” Then the researchers freaked out when they found this. Whoa. Anyone can verify this but nobody in academia will attempt to do this. The results will be too embarrassing. It will prove Malone was right the whole time about importance of measuring those 3 things. He said this on the Darkhorse podcast that was censored on YouTube.

THIS IS NOT NORMAL. The antigen is supposed to stick around for a week or two and vanish. Is it any wonder why people who have been vaccinated have long term symptoms? Part of this is permanent damage caused by the inflammation (which causes scarring which doesn’t heal)… The antigen (in this case spike) is SUPPOSED to disappear in 2 weeks. So this can explain long-term vaccine symptoms (along with permanent or temp damage from the inflammation and blood clots caused by the vaccine). Permanent damage is from scarring caused by inflammation. Anyone can replicate this if they have the proper assays. Will anyone? Will they be able to get it published? That’s the big question. Journals censor by deeming unfavorable research as “out of scope” for the journal.

The spike proteins stay, but they don’t protect you (any longer, if they ever did).

• Early Vaccinees Are Twice As Likely To Catch Covid As Later Recipients (ToI)

People vaccinated before late February are twice as likely to catch the coronavirus than other inoculated Israelis, according to new research. “We looked at tens of thousands of people tested in the month of June, alongside data on how long had passed since their second shot, and found that those vaccinated early were more likely to test positive,” Dr. Yotam Shenhar, who headed the research, told The Times of Israel. “This definitely reinforces the argument for giving a third vaccine dose to the elderly.” The report, published by the healthcare provider Leumit, comes on the heels of other Israeli studies that suggest a decreasing vaccine effectiveness, partly as a result of the Delta variant and partly because of the passage of time. However, British data indicates the Israeli studies may be overstating the case.

Data released by the Health Ministry on Thursday suggested that people vaccinated in January were said to have just 16% protection against infection now, while in those vaccinated in April the effectiveness was at 75%. The Leumit study looked only at the apparent waning of protection over time, and divided the vaccinated population into two based on inoculation dates, comparing early vaccinators to late vaccinators. Shenhar, head of Leumit’s labs, acknowledged that the early vaccinators group includes many people who raced to get shots because they have underlying illnesses, which may make them more vulnerable to infection. But he said that could not fully account for the stark effect seen in the data. Shenhar said the data should prompt the government to seriously consider booster shots for over-70s.

[..] In his study, the apparent waning effect in immunity was felt across all ages. For all age groups, early vaccinators were 1.95 times more likely to be confirmed coronavirus positive. Among those aged 60-plus, early vaccinators are twice as likely to get infected. For those aged 40-59 early vaccinators are 2.1 times more vulnerable, and among under 39s they are 1.6 more likely to catch the coronavirus. “In a previous analysis we showed that as time passes since the vaccine, the level of antibodies drops at a rate of about 40% per month. This new study builds a clearer picture of the effect seen in the months after vaccination,” said Shenhar.

As I said in Rage Against the Vaccine, we are finding out that the vaccinated are the spreaders. This is such a blow to the official story, they’ll deny it as long as possible.

• New Mandate That MUST Be Enforced NOW (Denninger)

Work in health care? I don’t care if you are in direct patient-care or not; if you work in a medical facility of any sort this applies to you if you took the jab. We now know if you become infected with Covid, and you had the jab, you will have a higher viral titer before becoming symptomatic, if you become symptomatic at all. That is, you, compared against someone who did not take the jab where you are both infected, are much more likely to transmit the virus to someone else before knowing if you get infected. Since viral replication occurs in hours per cycle, not days, testing, unless on an every day basis, is not sufficient to detect the risk. Nearly everyone coming into a medical facility is at heightened risk of one sort or another; people do not, generally-speaking, go into medical facilities if all is well. This is certainly true for hospitals and “urgent care” facilities.

Masks cannot mitigate this risk as the virus is in aerosols and when you exhale you will thus project it into the environment if it is present. It does not matter if you use an N95 or surgical mask; an N95 will still break the seal around your face when you exhale to some extent and thus you will exhale virus if you are infected. Therefore if you work in such a facility and you took the jab, given what we now know, you are hereby obligated from now until forever into the future, until Covid and any future mutation of it is no longer of material concern, obligated to use both Ivermectin on an every 3-day basis, and Budesonide on an every day basis, both as prophylaxis. This obligation is now attached and permanent so long as you remain employed.

Since people believe that there is nothing wrong with mandating people take non-sterilizing shots to work in health care then, given that you ****ed up and are now putting people at grossly-enhanced risk there is also nothing wrong with this mandate either. Said prophylaxis is to take place on video and be recorded each day for the Budesonide and every three days for Ivermectin. If you refuse you are fired and your medical credentials are stripped. If you infect someone without documented proof that you have taken this prophylaxis as a medical worker and have been jabbed you are charged with felony assault and if they die you are charged with depraved indifference homicide, which in most jurisdictions is Murder 2. If law enforcement will not bring these charges then the relatives of said person who is impacted has every moral and ethical right to personally enforce the appropriate penalties.

A comment at Naked Capitalism confirms it once more: it’s the vaccinated. Who are free to travel, eat indoors etc., … and free to spread the virus.

• About The French Guyana Paper From The CDC (IM Doc)

This is how science – the actual process – not the Fauci version – should be working. I have repeatedly stated that I am seeing much much more vaccinated positives than one would ever have expected. As I have stated, they seem to be much sicker (though not critically so) and they tend to happen in clusters. For the past two months, this has stuck out from the dominant media narrative. I have never had to fight the cognitive dissonance between the media and my own eyeballs in my life. I belong to a large non-public alumni group of my residency program that has literally thousands of IM docs all over America. The first thing a scientist does is to confirm that your observations are general or something you are just seeing. It was quickly obvious from that group that I was far from alone despite the “minimal breakthrough cases” media narrative.

So, then you do everything you can to hypothesize reasons why you are seeing what you are. I have been a physician for 30 years and that experience plays a huge role as well. Having this gigantic number of breakthrough cases just simply does not happen. I continue to see more than half the cases in vaccinated patients and so do many others. UNHEARD OF IN VACCINES BEFORE NOW. Part of hypothesizing why is looking to the literature for evidence. Seldom is this found in RCT at this stage. Case reports and series like this paper are critical. They are seeing the same breakthrough ratio. And they have done a lot more viral research than you can. This is a gold mine for my own questions.

Is there anything in the paper that could possibly explain what I am seeing. Lots of times, it is not in the headline part but in all the test results and discussion. And yes, there is a very important finding deep in the results. Why would clustering and sicker patients be so much more common in the breakthrough patients. – there must be a reason for that? If you look at the brief discussion of cT or cycle threshold you will see that the vaccinated patients have a SIGNIFICANTLY lower cT than the unvaccinated. That is the way the PCR test works. It basically means the vaccinated have a much higher amount of viral active particles than the unvaccinated. That would account for the breakthroughs I and my colleagues are seeing being a bit more ill. And it would explain the clustering.

The vaccinated breakthroughs have much higher viral load so they are much more contagious and the higher viral load makes them more symptomatic. So we now have a suggestion and strong evidence that the vaccinated population may be spreading much more virus than the unvaccinated. I would say that is a critical public health issue and must be further researched immediately. This Certainly needs much more work. THis is not confirmatory of any conclusions. But it is consistent with observation on the ground – unlike most of what the media has been spewing to the American people. But this is how science works. This paper is about the gamma variant but a conference yesterday with experts discussed that similar findings were being found in delta and lambda.

The suggestion in this paper is now on the front of my mind. I am even now thinking of ways to confirm or falsify these conclusions going forward. This is science. Another issue. The writers make the point that the breakthrough rate is extremely divergent from the expected rate. The difference is this paper documents what is happening in REAL LIFE. So much of what we are hearing on our media about vaccine efficacy is research being done in vitro. It is presented as gospel truth. I just want to scream.

Maybe the next big wave after Delta will make people listen to VanDen Bossche.

• A Last Word of Caution (VanDen Bossche)

The current expansion in prevalence of infectious Sars-CoV-2 variants is highly problematic because it erodes natural Ab-based, variant-nonspecific immunity in the non-vaccinated part of the population. The high infectivity rate that results from this expansion not only further enhances the expansion of these variants but may also drive natural selection of viral variants that are featured by an even higher level of infectiousness. Erosion, therefore, of natural Ab-based, variant-nonspecific immunity promotes breeding and transmission of more infectious viral variants in the non-vaccinated part of the population. On the other hand, mass vaccination promotes natural selection of increasingly vaccine immunity (VI)-escaping variants in the vaccinated part of the population.

Taken together, mass vaccination conducted on a background of high infectivity rates enables more infectious, increasingly VI-escaping variants to expand in prevalence. This evolution inevitably results in inclining morbidity rates in both, the non-vaccinated and vaccinated population and precipitates the emergence of circulating viral variants that will eventually fully resist vaccine-mediated immunity (VMI). This is why mass vaccination campaigns should not be conducted during a pandemic of a highly mutable virus, let alone during a pandemic of more infectious variants (unless transmission-blocking vaccines are used!). It is critical to understand that a rapid decline in viral infectivity rates that is not achieved by natural infection but merely results from expedited mass vaccination campaigns will only delay abrupt propagation of emerging, fully vaccine-resistant viral variants and hence, only delay the occurrence of a high wave of morbidity and mortality.

In contrast, mass vaccination campaigns that are progressing more slowly, especially when conducted on a background of relatively low infectious pressure, will result in a steadily growing propagation of increasingly VI-escaping variants and hence, cause a wave of morbidity and mortality that continues to grow bigger and larger as more and more people become vaccinated. It’s only when fully vaccine-resistant viral variants will become dominant that this wave will start to peak. To prevent more detrimental consequences of the ongoing evolution of Sars-CoV-2, we have no choice but to mitigate erosion of natural, Coronavirus (CoV)-nonspecific immunity in non-vaccinated individuals and exertion of strong immune selection pressure on immunodominant vaccinal epitopes in vaccinated individuals.

This is to say that we must stop mass vaccination and lower viral infectivity rates immediately. Continued mass vaccination will only lead to a further increase in morbidity and hospitalization rates, which will subsequently culminate in a huge case fatality wave when expansion of more infectious, vaccine-resistant variants will explode.

No kidding.

• Journalists: Covid-19 News ‘Censored’ To Create ‘One Official Narrative’ (PG)

Elijah, who came up with the group’s name and found it “therapeutic” to talk to others with the same concerns, told Press Gazette: “It’s been unprecedented the way Covid-19 has been reported in the UK but not just in the UK, worldwide. “There’s only been one official narrative played out in the mainstream media and that has not changed over time. “There’s only been one ‘scientific truth’ allowed to be discussed: the one endorsed by worldwide governmental regulatory bodies, even that has been very selective. This has given the public a distorted view of the truth which has been highly damaging.” Elijah said her biggest concern was about “censorship” of information online that goes against this narrative and referred to the Trusted News Initiative, through which the BBC, other publishers and tech giants flag up the most dangerous disinformation to each other.

“For a long time, we’ve been in this dark era of censorship that’s been embodied by the Trusted News Initiative which cuts across big tech and all mainstream media,” she said. “It’s been packaged around this war on disinformation or misinformation- where anything that’s gone against the official narrative has not just been ‘fact checked’ but has been suppressed or removed.” Ex-BBC radio journalist Gosling told Press Gazette he had interviewed two doctors who shared counter-narratives – Dr Tess Lawrie of the Evidence-based Medicine Consultancy in Bath who called for early treatment to take place post-Covid diagnosis, and Florida-based immunologist Dr Stanley Laham who called for the use of ivermectin and warned against the use of the approved but “experimental” vaccines – but that both were removed from Youtube on grounds of misinformation.

Gosling said he wanted to speak out against fear-inducing and sometimes inaccurate coverage. He pointed as one example to a BBC Newsround segment last month in which a contributor claimed the Pfizer vaccine was “100% safe” for 12 to 15-year-olds. Gosling submitted a complaint about the “shocking” and “disgusting” claim and the BBC has since removed the claim from the online article and video and published a correction. Gosling said: “Our main concern is that there’s a very powerful lobby behind many of these Covid measures, including treatment, lack of treatment and vaccines, obviously, but there isn’t much of a lobby in the other direction. And I think most of us feel that our employers of various sorts have not been representing both sides.”

“Deaths began to fall in February. After March 1 – when only 1 in 13 Americans were fully vaccinated – they plunged further. In the five months since, perhaps 80,000 people have died from (or with) Covid – fewer than died in January alone.”

• Here We Go Again (Berenson)

But as I said, even putting aside the issue of how we classify the partially vaccinated, Fauci and Murthy lied about what percentage of coronavirus deaths are now occurring in FULLY vaccinated people. It is much higher than the sub-1 percent figures they offered. This fact should have been obvious to anyone who has seen the data from England, Scotland, and Israel. Those countries vaccinated a greater percentage of their populations more quickly than the United States. They have also been much more transparent about reporting hospitalizations and deaths among vaccinated people. And in all three countries, hospitalizations and deaths have spiked since May – and vaccinated people have accounted for more than HALF of all deaths recently.

The difference does not come from the type of vaccines, either. Israel used only the Pfizer vaccine, which until recently was considered the better of the two mRNA vaccines. The United Kingdom gave many Pfizer doses too. So the comments from Fauci and Murthy defied credibility – how could other countries have so many more deaths in their vaccinated populations? The answer is that Fauci and Murthy are – intentionally – using the wrong denominator. They say “now” or “are.” But they are comparing deaths among the fully vaccinated – which have essentially been an issue only since May – with ALL deaths beginning from the day the United States offered its FIRST vaccine dose (or even possibly from the beginning of the epidemic).

The United States has had roughly a quarter-million deaths from Covid this year (the CDC reports 216,000, a number that will rise somewhat). It has had closer to 300,000 since the first dose was offered on Dec. 14. But more than half those deaths occurred in December and January, when essentially no one was fully vaccinated. Not even 2 percent of Americans were fully vaccinated as of February 1. Deaths began to fall in February. After March 1 – when only 1 in 13 Americans were fully vaccinated – they plunged further. In the five months since, perhaps 80,000 people have died from (or with) Covid – fewer than died in January alone.

Vaccine advocates rarely acknowledge the fact that deaths started dropping long before most people had received shots. In reality, even acknowledging that many people who received vaccines in January and February were older and vulnerable, seasonality and herd immunity seem to have had a greater impact on broad Covid trends than vaccinations.

But are noted as Covid admissions.

• Most Covid Patients In UK Hospitals Only Tested Positive After Admission (ZH)

Over half of those hospitalized with Covid-19 in the UK only tested positive after admission – suggesting that “vast numbers are being classed as hospitalised by Covid when they were admitted with other ailments, with the virus picked up by routine testing,” according to The Telegraph, citing leaked government figures. The takeaway? Oft-cited statistics published daily may far overstate Covid hospitalizations – and consequently, pressures on the National Health Service (NHS).

“The leaked data – covering all NHS trusts in England – show that, as of last Thursday, just 44 per cent of patients classed as being hospitalised with Covid had tested positive by the time they were admitted. The majority of cases were not detected until patients underwent standard Covid tests, carried out on everyone admitted to hospital for any reason. Overall, 56 per cent of Covid hospitalisations fell into this category, the data, seen by The Telegraph, show. Crucially, this group does not distinguish between those admitted because of severe illness, later found to be caused by the virus, and those in hospital for different reasons who might otherwise never have known that they had picked it up.” -Telegraph

In June, UK health officials instructed NHS trusts to provide “a breakdown of the current stock of Covid patients” between those who were hospitalized primarily for Covid and those admitted for other reasons. Thus far, the NHS has failed to publish this now-leaked information. Breaking it down, out of more than 780 hospitalizations dated last Thursday, 44% tested positive within 14 days prior to admission, while 43% tested positive within two days of admission, and 13% tested positive ‘in the days and weeks that followed’ – including those likely to have caught the virus in the hospital. “Experts said the high number of cases being detected belatedly – at a time when PCR tests were widely available – suggested many such patients had been admitted for other reasons,” according to the report.

Plasma.

• A Long-term Perspective On Immunity To COVID (Nature)

Immunological memory is not a long-lasting version of the immediate immune reaction to a particular virus; rather, it is a distinct aspect of the immune system. In the memory phase of an immune response, B and T cells that are specific for a virus are maintained in a state of dormancy, but are poised to spring into action if they encounter the virus again or a vaccine that represents it. These memory B and T cells arise from cells activated in the initial immune reaction. The cells undergo changes to their chromosomal DNA, termed epigenetic modifications, that enable them to react rapidly to subsequent signs of infection and drive responses geared to eliminating the disease-causing agent4. B cells have a dual role in immunity: they produce antibodies that can recognize viral proteins, and they can present parts of these proteins to specific T cells or develop into plasma cells that secrete antibodies in large quantities.

About 25 years ago5, it became evident that plasma cells can become memory cells themselves, and can secrete antibodies for long-lasting protection. Memory plasma cells can be maintained for decades, if not a lifetime, in the bone marrow6. The presence in the bone marrow of long-lived, antibody-secreting memory plasma cells is probably the best available predictor of long-lasting immunity. For SARS-CoV-2, most studies so far have analysed the acute phase of the immune response, which spans a few months after infection, and have monitored T cells, B cells and secreted antibodies7. It has remained unclear whether the response generates long-lived memory plasma cells that secrete antibodies against SARS-CoV-2.

Turner and colleagues took up the challenge of identifying antibody-secreting memory plasma cells in the bone marrow of people who have recovered from COVID-19 (called convalescent individuals). Memory plasma cells are rare, and those specific for a particular disease-causing agent will obviously be extremely scarce. Nevertheless, Turner and colleagues detected memory plasma cells that secreted antibodies specific for the spike protein encoded by SARS-CoV-2 in 15 of 19 individuals, approximately 7 months after infection. Notably, when the authors obtained samples 4 months later (11 months after SARS-CoV-2 infection), the number of such plasma cells had remained stable in all but one of the individuals analysed. Those plasma cells did not proliferate, which classifies them as bona fide memory plasma cells. Their numbers equalled those of memory plasma cells found in the individuals after vaccination against tetanus or diphtheria, and which provide long-term immunity to those diseases.

When Turner et al. tracked the concentrations of antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 in the individuals’ blood serum for up to one year, they observed a biphasic pattern (Fig. 1). In the acute immune response around the time of initial infection, antibody concentrations were high. They subsequently declined, as expected, because most of the plasma cells of an acute immune response are short-lived. After a few months, the antibody concentrations levelled off and remained more or less constant at roughly 10–20% of the maximum concentration observed. This is consistent with the expectation that 10–20% of the plasma cells in an acute immune reaction become memory plasma cells5, and is a clear indication of a shift from antibody production by short-lived plasma cells to antibody production by memory plasma cells. This is not unexpected, given that immune memory to many viruses and vaccines is stable over decades, if not for a lifetime8.

Figure 1 | The immune response to SARS-CoV-2 infection. Data are becoming available that shed light on longer-term aspects of the human immune response to coronavirus infection. One component of the defence response is the production of antibodies that target viral proteins (red line). During the initial, acute phase of the immune response, antibody levels peak rapidly; this peak is generated by short-lived immune cells called plasma cells. Turner et al.1 present clinical evidence, from people who have had COVID-19, that long-lived, memory plasma cells that produce antibodies are generated in the bone marrow. These cells provide long-term antibody production that offers stable protection at a level of 10–20% of that during the acute phase (blue line). Memory plasma cells are a cell type that can be maintained for many years, if not a lifetime. Wang et al.2 have characterized antibody responses at between six months and a year in people who have been infected with SARS-CoV-2; their results also provide evidence for the generation of immunological memory.

Where finance and Covid meet. These guys are good at spotting trends.

• Decline In UK COVID Cases Signals Coming “Inflection” For US (ZH)

Just one week ago, as Dr. Anthony Fauci was cranking the Delta variant “fearmongering” up to 11 once again, JPM’s Croatian quant Marko Kolanovic was telling the bank’s clients that a looming inflection point for new cases in the UK (widely seen as a leading indicator for the direction of new cases in the US) would soon arrive, kick-starting demand for value stocks and reopening plays. Although Kolanovic is a Wall Street quant, not an epidemiologist, it turns out his view was correct. Because one week later, the number of new cases being confirmed in the UK and EU has fallen, even as the UK’s “Freedom Day” has come and gone. Deutsche Bank’s Jim Reid described the decline in new cases in the UK “nothing short of remarkable”.

According to Reuters data, the number of new cases fell for a sixth consecutive day, to 24,950 on Monday from 29,173 on Sunday. The total number of new cases over the past week, at just over a quarter of a million, is more than 20% lower than the prior week. While the UK’s economy-crippling “pingdemic” continues, and many have continued to isolate, meaning the UK is still a way’s away from achieving a return to “normality”. Additionally, despite the fast rise of cases to near peak levels, mortality is currently 95% lower than during the January peak. This should give confidence to investors that delta is not a serious threat to global growth. If the US follows the template of the UK, daily cases might be peaking in the next 12 days…while we think Energy-Epicenter stocks are going to start to rally beginning this week.

While the Delta variant continues to dominate “our discussions with clients,” Kolanovic claimed that fears about the variant are overblown. The UK, he added, appears to be following a timeline similar to what the world saw in India. This should give confidence to investors that Delta isn’t a serious threat to global growth. Well, that and the drop in mortality. Speaking of markets, Kolanovic suggested that this is the start of a rotation into cyclicals. Some might be tempted to attribute the drop in UK cases to a fluke, or the pingdemic, or some other factor. But as Kolanovic reminds us, the trajectory of India’s recent COVID flareup (the first national outbreak to be caused by the delta variant) was similarly swift, as JPM illustrates with a handy chart.

Censorship is everywhere. Because it offers total control.

• In a Hall of Mirrors You Have To Break Some Glass To See Clearly (Kunstler)

I’ll tell you what’s really funny: the new Sam Harris “Making Sense” podcast with Dr. Eric Topol, veep of Scripps Research. These two just can’t make sense of why the folks outside their Southern California smuggery bubble have any reservations about getting vaxed-up against Covid-19. It’s like a mental illness to them — all these selfish, Trump-driven, flag-smooching ignoramuses beyond the pale of Wokery, who are putting at risk their science-loving betters in the PhD hives of the New Normal, while that King Kong of Covid variants (code-name Delta) rages through the hillsides and canyons beneath Mulholland Drive. The insolence! Can’t these morons just follow simple instructions (available 24/7 at CNN)?

Okay, here’s why, Sam and Eric: Because every institution in American life has squandered its credibility in the service of a political program that seeks to destroy whatever used to be worth caring about in Western Civ, including free thought, free speech, free inquiry, free movement, truth, beauty, and the right to resist official coercion. Half the country has no trust in the government’s public health apparatus, led by the — shall we say — slippery Dr. Anthony Fauci. Should they believe NPR? The New York Times? CBS-News? Should they follow every bob and judder of Rachel Maddow’s Adam’s apple? Should they swallow every globule of obvious horse-shit served up by Jen Psaki?

Hey Sam and Eric, have you followed what went on in the US Department of Justice and the FBI the past five years, these supposed redoubts of rectitude? The manufactured “Russian Collusion” hoax? The official lying to FISA courts? The malicious prosecutions? The transparently seditious activities of CIA agent Eric Ciaramella & Co.? The hiding of Hunter Biden’s evidence-stuffed laptop? The enlistment of Facebook, Twitter, and Google in suppression of the news and censorship of opinion? Do you expect people to believe that the basement-haunting “Joe Biden” won an election with those slim victories in the Wokester-controlled, fraud-drenched city precincts of Philadelphia, Atlanta, Milwaukee, and Detroit? Or that Merrick Garland and Christopher Wray wouldn’t lie about it?

Pelosi helping Putin ridicule America.

• The Jan. 6th Show Trials Threaten All of Us (Ron Paul)

The recent felony conviction and eight month prison sentence of January 6th protester Paul Hodgkins is an affront to any notion of justice. It is a political charge and a political verdict by a political court. Every American regardless of political persuasion should be terrified of a court system so beholden to politics instead of justice. We’ve seen this movie before and it does not end well. Worse than this miscarriage of justice is the despicable attempt by the prosecutor in the case to label Hodgkins – who has no criminal record and was accused of no violent crime – a “terrorist.” As journalist Michael Tracey recently wrote, Special Assistant US Attorney Mona Sedky declared Hodgkins a “terrorist” in the court proceedings not for committing any terrorist act, not for any act of violence, not even for imagining a terrorist act.

Sedky wrote in her sentencing memo, “The Government … recognizes that Hodgkins did not personally engage in or espouse violence or property destruction.” She added, “we concede that Mr. Hodgkins is not under the legal definition a domestic terrorist.” Yet Hodgkins should be considered a terrorist because the actions he took – entering the Senate to take a photo of himself – occurred during an event that the court is “framing…in the context of terrorism.” That goes beyond a slippery slope. He is not a terrorist because he committed a terrorist act, but because somehow the “context” of his actions was, in her words, “imperiling democracy.” In other words, Hodgkins deserved enhanced punishment because he committed a thought crime.

The judge on the case, Randolph D. Moss, admitted as much. In carrying a Trump flag into the Senate, he said, Hodgkins was, “declaring his loyalty to a single individual over the nation.” As Tracey pointed out, while eight months in prison is a ridiculously long sentence for standing on the floor of the “People’s House” and taking a photograph, it is also a ridiculously short sentence for a terrorist. If Hodgkins is really a terrorist, shouldn’t he be sent away for longer than eight months?

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Fauci masks

Video: Fauci talking out of both sides of his mouth. The mask charade is over. What a fiasco! pic.twitter.com/JHJJ5ijReS

— Justin Hart (@justin_hart) July 27, 2021

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A Pandemic of The Vaccinated?

Jul 212021

July 21, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 1:44 pm Finance Tagged with: Delta, EUA, immune system, mutation, spike proteins, unvaccinated, vaccinated, vaccines, virus 83 Responses »

John Singer Sargent Palmettos, Florida 1917

I’ve been trying to write this for a week or so, but every time I start, new things happen. The virus landscape has changed enormously, which we of course don’t see reflected in the media. They report only on increases in infections and panicking politicians. Which can all be nicely packed together in “the Delta variant”.

But there should be much more attention -and questions- with regards to those rising numbers, more often than not occurring in highly vaccinated countries, UK, Israel etc. We might learn a thing or two if we don’t look at this through the same glasses we’ve used for a year and a half now. They grossly distorted our view. Here goes:

What do the substances sold to us as “vaccines” -even if they’re not in the general sense of the word-, actually do? They don’t limit the risk of infection, we know that now, but we could have known it already, the producers told us. Of course the politicians and their experts said otherwise for as long as they could, but with recent rapidly rising infection rates among the fully vaccinated, we’ll hear much less of that. That story died.

So what do they do? The one thing left, and which the producers DO claim, is they make (Covid-related) illness less severe. But has anyone seen any irrefutable proof of that? If so, please send it. Not some hint at proof, nothing halfway, we’re not interested in that, but absolute and irrefutable. Like Godot.

Something we do know the vaccines do, the mRNA ones but also AZ and J&J, is they induce your cells to produce spike proteins. And it’s those spike proteins that PCR tests recognize, leading to “positive” test results, also with people who’ve never been infected by the virus.

Which makes me wonder how many people in the wave of the new “infections” test positive because they’ve been injected, not because they’ve been infected. Though the difference may not be easy to detect, other than the first group never getting sick, but then again, 80% of people have natural immunity against Covid to begin with, says Nature Magazine.

So all your victims come from 20% of the population. If you go through the sites that count “cases”, like Worldometer, you can see that there is no country (that I could find) which has seen more than 10% of people test positive. And after 18 months, chances are that percentages won’t rise much, let alone above 20%. In India, 67% of people have antibodies, it was announced today. Those people need no vaccines, their immunity is stronger than a vaccine can offer.

Now, how do you tell those groups apart, the 80% vs 20%? It’s hard enough to begin with but once you inject healthy people with a substance that causes the human body to make (cyto-) toxic spike proteins, telling one from the other may become impossible (cytotoxic means it kills cells).

In short, after some 7 months of the vaccines being used, we know they are useless for preventing infection, even if loud voices keep insisting the world will come to an end if not everyone gets vaccinated. They may lead to a huge number of false positives though, meaning that once your cells start producing spike proteins, you may well get sick anyway. Sort of like a self-fulfilling prescription. Solution from industry and experts: boosters, induce cells to produce more toxic proteins. Hmmm.

I’m not sure you would call the ensuing disease Covid-19, even if it has the same spike proteins, but it will have many of the same symptoms: pulmonary issues, myocarditis, other heart problems, blindness etc.

And death. By now you must have seen some numbers, even if the media and politics keep them from you. The latest count in the US is about 11,000 deaths from the vaccines, and there is a court case being filed that claims the real count is 45,000. It could well be much more, but it’s hard to prove. All we need to know really is that in the past, 25-50 deaths was all it took to shelve a vaccine.

Adverse reactions other than death are if possible even harder to get a grip on. The VAERS system says there are presently some 450,000 reported, but the UK’s MHRA yellow Card system was already well above 1,000,000 there two weeks ago, so you can pick any number you like. These systems typically register between 1-10% of events.

Question is, do you want to pick that number AFTER getting jabbed? I’ve said before, you must count on your immune system being strong enough to fight the vaccine, not just the virus. 80% of people have an immune system that can do that. The 20% who don’t are mostly old, obese or suffering from another disease.

That the 80% is nevertheless also targeted by vaccine salesmen including politicians is pretty strange, even if we’ve come to see it as normal. But that it can actually worsen the health prospects of those involved is another story altogether. We will have to find out from the large numbers of “fully vaccinated” who are now testing positive, but who may simply have started producing spike proteins without getting infected. It will be very difficult to tell the difference, but we should no longer accept anything less.

Not after accepting the failed policies of lockdowns and mask wearing and vaccines. How do we know they failed? Look at the numbers in mid summer! And compare them to last summer. Delta, yeah, yeah, I know, but how deadly is Delta? And how much have the vaccines contributed to the appearance of Delta?

It’s very popular these days to talk about the Pandemic of the Unvaccinated, but what if what we’re really looking at is a Pandemic of the Vaccinated? When the breeding ground for a virus doesn ‘t change much, there is not much reason for it to mutate. That reason comes for instance in the form of a vaccine, especially one that is non-sterilizing (doesn’t prevent further infection) and is used on an enormous scale.

Instead, they’ll have you believe the opposite: that the unvaccinated (80% of whom are safe to begin with) cause a virus to mutate, and the vaccinated stop that mutating, even if they continue to infect people around them. There is no logic in that.

And there’s that question again: what DO the vaccines do? What do they do that is beneficial to us, and which vitamin D and any of an assortment of fully harmless repurposed drugs, research into which was suspended or banned to make the vaccine EUA’s possible, could not have done, and possibly better? For one thing, the vaccines don’t grant you immunity. None. If that’s not enough yet, let’s at least start there.

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Debt Rattle July 18 2021

Jul 182021

July 18, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:01 am Finance Tagged with: Biden, CDC, Cuba, Fauci, Japan, Kamala, sheriff, Taiwan, unvaccinated, vaccinated, Yankees 83 Responses »

Pablo Picasso The blue room 1901

• Infections in Vaccinated Overtake Those in Unvaccinated For the First Time (LDS)

• British Ministers Decide Against Mass Vaccination For Teens (R.)

• The CDC Owes Parents Better Messaging on the Vaccine for Kids (Wired)

• Fauci: US Might ‘Still Have Polio’ If Media Back Then Opposed Vaccine (Y!)

• Biden Denounces Big Tech as “Killing People” By Not Censoring Speech (Turley)

• Sheriff In California Won’t Enforce Mask Mandate: ‘Not Backed By Science’ (RT)

• Game Postponed After 6 New York Yankees Test Positive For Covid-19 (CNN)

• Kamala’s Husband Spreads Misinformation (ZH)

• US-Backed Tech Restores Internet To More Than 1 Million Cubans (ZH)

• Does Japan Control The Trigger For US Nuclear War On China? (Ritter)

There is never a single source of truth. Other than in dictatorships.

WATCH: New Zealand Prime Minister goes full third world dictator: “We will continue to be your single source of truth.” pic.twitter.com/btvGErybVZ

— Election Wizard (@ElectionWiz) July 17, 2021

At what point can this no longer be ignored?

• Infections in Vaccinated Overtake Those in Unvaccinated For the First Time (LDS)

Health Secretary Sajid Javid has tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, despite being vaccinated – and he is far from alone. The latest ZOE data shows that, as of July 12th, infections in the vaccinated (with at least one dose) in the U.K. now outnumber those in the unvaccinated for the first time, as the former continue to surge while the latter plummet (see above). (Note that 68% of the population has had at least one vaccine dose, so there are still at this stage disproportionately more new infections in the unvaccinated, though on current trends that may soon change.) At what point will the Government accept that these vaccines have limited efficacy in preventing infection and transmission, and thus the whole rationale of being vaccinated to protect others – vaccine passports, compulsory vaccination, and so on – is suspect?

The above graph was in yesterday’s report, so I downloaded today’s report (you can get it by signing up to the app and reporting your symptoms) to get the new update. I was dismayed to find the graph was gone. At the bottom, a note explains: Removed incidence graph by vaccination status from the report as there are very few unvaccinated users in the infection survey, the Confidence Intervals are very wide and the trend for unvaccinated people is no longer representative. Which I would say is very convenient, just as infections in the vaccinated became the majority. Perhaps ZOE should try to recruit some more unvaccinated people for its survey, so it can continue to report on this as well as have a control group for its vaccine data? That would seem the scientific thing to do, rather than just stop reporting it because it is suddenly “no longer representative”.

It’s doubly odd because Tim Spector, lead scientist on the ZOE app, made the decline among the unvaccinated a feature of his video this week. So the realisation that the trend is “no longer representative” appears to have been rather sudden, even invalidating the contents of a ZOE ‘data release‘ two days earlier.

Rare light.

• British Ministers Decide Against Mass Vaccination For Teens (R.)

Britain has opted against mass COVID-19 vaccinations for all children and teenagers, with ministers instead preparing to offer doses to vulnerable 12 to 15-year-olds and those about to turn 18, the Telegraph newspaper reported late on Saturday. The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) is believed to have advised ministers against the rollout of vaccines to all children until further evidence on the risks is available, the report added. Under guidance the newspaper said are due to be issued on Monday, vaccine doses will be offered to children between 12 and 15 who are deemed vulnerable to COVID-19 or who live with adults who are immunosuppressed or otherwise vulnerable to the virus.

They will also now be offered to all 17-year-olds within three months of their 18th birthday, according to The Telegraph, which reported that the committee would keep the possibility of vaccinating all children “under review.” In response to the report, Britain’s Health Department said that “no decisions have been made by ministers on whether people aged 12 to 17 should be routinely offered COVID-19 vaccines.” Britain on Saturday reported 54,674 new COVID-19 cases, a rise on the 51,870 new cases reported on the previous day to post a fresh highest daily total in six months.

Yeah: Don’t!

• The CDC Owes Parents Better Messaging on the Vaccine for Kids (Wired)

On June 23, an advisory committee to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention met to discuss, among other topics, vaccine-related cases of myocarditis, which have hospitalized hundreds of adolescents. Evidence of a correlation between the condition, an inflammation of the heart muscle, and the vaccines had been mounting for months. Numerous countries had altered or withheld recommendations for pediatric vaccination, with some citing an ambiguous risk-benefit. One day after the committee meeting, however, CDC director Rochelle Walensky went on TV and calmly reassured viewers that there was nothing to worry about: Vaccinating kids age 12 and up, at the full dosage and same schedule as adults, should continue with alacrity.

Walensky cited a string of statistics that showed “the benefits of vaccination far outweigh any harm.” But some epidemiologists, public health experts, pediatricians, cardiologists, and other scientists dispute the CDC’s numbers, characterizations, and conclusion. The agency, they variously contend, is both exaggerating the risks of Covid-19 to young people and underplaying the potential risks of the vaccine to them. Much data that would support the CDC’s declarations are either unknown, unrevealed, or far messier than the agency and its director portray. And the data that are known and clear have been projected through a specific lens with blunt certainty. The absolute risk of the vaccine still appears to be extremely small for young people but, on balance, when the data are seen through a different frame, the relative individual risk from vaccination, particularly for healthy young males, may be higher than it is to not be vaccinated at this time.

There is no debate among most experts critical of the CDC about the value of vaccines on a societal level to help usher in the end of the pandemic, which is the ultimate goal of the vaccine. Rather, the matter at hand is the CDC’s messaging, which fails to help parents and children make properly informed decisions about the vaccines on an individual level. As Stefan Baral, an epidemiologist and physician at Johns Hopkins, recently tweeted, “One can be both very pro-Covid-19 vaccination and also be worried about the individual risk:benefit profile of Covid-19 vaccines in <16 yo.”

First, the link between the mRNA vaccines and myocarditis, particularly in young males, is sufficiently clear that the FDA revised its vaccine fact sheets to include a warning about it. As of June 11 (the latest date most data were collected for the meeting), 128 cases within seven days of the second dose had been reported in boys aged 12 to 17, when the CDC’s expected number for that same population was zero to four cases. VAERS, the reporting database for vaccine-related adverse events that these statistics are drawn from, has limitations. Some portion of the events reported may be unrelated to the vaccines. But the differential between expected and observed cases within certain cohorts is the statistical equivalent of a blaring siren. (A detailed analysis in Israel estimated the incidence of myocarditis following vaccination in young males to be around one in 5,000, equating to 200 cases per million.)

It took Salk 7 years to get a real vaccine, which you still don’t have, and maybe never will. Nuff said. How did this crazed loose cannon become the most trusted voice, and what does that tell us about America?

• Fauci: US Might ‘Still Have Polio’ If Media Back Then Opposed Vaccine (Y!)

Top US scientist Anthony Fauci on Saturday blasted commentators who sound an anti-vaccination theme, saying America might still be battling smallpox and polio if today’s kind of misinformation existed back then. The comments from the country’s leading infectious disease expert reflected mounting frustration over the sharp slowdown in the Covid-19 vaccination rate in the United States, even as the disease has been surging in states with low rates. It also came days after President Joe Biden expressed his own visible frustration, saying social media that carry widely heard misinformation about vaccines are “killing people.”

Fauci was responding to a CNN interviewer who asked if he thought “we could have defeated the measles or eradicated polio if you had Fox News, night after night, warning people about these vaccine issues that are just bunk.” Fauci said: “We probably would still have smallpox and we probably would still have polio … if we had the kind of false information that’s being spread.” Initial vaccine skepticism in many areas has increasingly evolved into outright hostility, a message magnified by baseless conspiracy theories regularly aired on Fox and other conservative networks. “Maybe it doesn’t work and they’re simply not telling you that,” Tucker Carlson, one of Fox’s most popular commentators, said recently.

“Biden is accusing these companies of actually killing people for refusing even more extensive censorship of speech. The statement equates free speech with death itself.”

• Biden Denounces Big Tech as “Killing People” By Not Censoring Speech (Turley)

President Joe Biden slammed Big Tech companies this week for “killing people” by failing to engage in even greater censorship of free speech on issues related to the pandemic. It was a surprising condemnation of companies who have been loyal allies of Biden, including killing stories embarrassing to his family like the Hunter Biden laptop scandal before the election. It also has censored stories questioning his victory in 2020. Nevertheless, Biden denounced the range of uncensored free speech as the cause of death for many — the ultimate anti-free speech trope for those seeking to convince people to embrace their own censorship. Biden was asked by a reporter what his message was to “platforms like Facebook” on the subject of “COVID misinformation.”

He responded “They’re killing people. The only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated, and they’re killing people.” This comes as these companies have been criticized for censoring debates over the origin or treatment of Covid-19. For a year, Big Tech has been censoring those who wanted to discuss the origins of pandemic. It was not until Biden admitted that the virus may have originated in the Wuhan lab that social media suddenly changed its position. Facebook only recently announced that people on its platform will be able to discuss the origins of Covid-19 after censoring any such discussion. The White House recently admitted that it was flagging “misinformation” for censorship by companies like Facebook. Moreover, White House press secretary Jen Psaki has called for people to be banned from all social media if any one company bans them.

Biden is accusing these companies of actually killing people for refusing even more extensive censorship of speech. The statement equates free speech with death itself. We have seen this type of reckless rhetoric in other areas where disagreement with a policy or proposal is treated as de facto racism or hate speech. That was the case recently with the NAACP official who denounced those of opposing what is commonly referred to as critical race theory lessons as haters of a long litany of groups from the disabled to children to “help people.” This was followed by the chilling words “Let them die.”

Rather than seek to convince the skeptical, Biden wants to silence them and use these companies to control what is read and discussed about the pandemic. What is chilling is the degree to which reporters and academics have supported the massive censorship system in the United States. However, that system is clearly not (to use Sen. Blumenthal’s words) “robust enough” for Biden who wants these companies to carry out a more complete censorship of opposing views.

Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH about censorship

Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH about censorship pic.twitter.com/gDRbj4RvTo

— Camus (@camus37) July 17, 2021

A sheriff who can read. They didn’t count on that. How much did John Wayne ever read when he played one?

• Sheriff In California Won’t Enforce Mask Mandate: ‘Not Backed By Science’ (RT)

Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva has made waves and caused outrage by refusing to enforce the city’s reinstated mask policy, saying the decision is “not backed by science.” Los Angeles County health officials shocked many this week when they announced that their mask mandate would be returning. Similar to the restriction in place before the county began reopening last month, residents have been told to wear masks in indoor settings and large gatherings, regardless of one’s vaccination status. County officials reinstated the mask mandate due to new Covid-19 daily cases reaching over 1,000 every day for a week. Health officials also cited the Delta variant as a reason why people “need to reduce our risk of infection and our risk for potentially infecting others.”

Villanueva, who is up for reelection next year, was quick to respond to the mandate, and made it clear that he and his officers would have no part in helping the county enforce the new rule. “Forcing the vaccinated and those who already contracted COVID-19 to wear masks indoors is not backed by science and contradicts the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines,” he said in a statement. The “underfunded” department, the sheriff added, will not be using their “limited resources” to make sure people are in compliance, though he made sure to say they “have the authority” to enforce if they wanted to. The sheriff is asking for “voluntary compliance” from residents instead.

All fully vaccinated.

• Game Postponed After 6 New York Yankees Test Positive For Covid-19 (CNN)

Six players on the New York Yankees have tested positive for Covid-19, general manager Brian Cashman told reporters Thursday, in the second instance this year of breakthrough cases occurring among some members of the baseball team. “We have three positives, and we have three pending that we’ve had rapid tests on,” Cashman said, saying the three positive rapid tests are being confirmed with additional lab work. The players with confirmed positive tests are pitchers Jonathan Loaisiga, Nestor Cortes Jr. and Wandy Peralta, according to the team. The three unnamed players have results pending.

The three named players were all vaccinated, according to the team. Two of the players received Johnson & Johnson vaccines and the other was from either Pfizer or Moderna, Cashman says. The pitchers are “doing well thus far,” Cashman said, while he declined to comment on the unnamed players until final confirmation of their positive tests are received by the team. Earlier this season, eight positive tests were recorded among coaching and travel staff, all of whom had previously taken the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. Of the team members who tested positive, only one showed mild symptoms and his condition improved, the Yankees said.

He’s as crazy as she is.

• Kamala’s Husband Spreads Misinformation (ZH)

Emhoff spoke to the 44-year-old man as if he was a toddler at the doctor’s office. “Don’t be nervous. It won’t hurt. I’ve had it. I can take it. So don’t be scared,” Emhoff told Posadas. The immigrant then stood off to the side while Emhoff shook hands with doctors and medical staff from Ochsner Health. After posing for photos, Emhoff turns back to Posadas. “Gustava, thank you so much. Muy importante,” Emhoff said in English-accented Spanish. “What do you have to say to people? And you’re going to tell a bunch of people…?” “I tell everybody,” Posadas said in Spanish-accented English. “I don’t want this before. But now I think this is real…” “This is real,” Emhoff says, completing his sentence. “And it’s the only thing that is going to prevent you, your family and others from dying or getting really sick.”

Say what? A vaccine is the only thing that is going to prevent people from dying from COVID? Is this what the Biden administration’s door knockers are telling people in private? The recovery rate for COVID is 98 to 99 percent. Almost all the deaths are due to age or underlying conditions. Johns Hopkins currently has the rate at 98.2 percent in America. Even Dr. Anthony Fauci testified before Congress that the survival rate is actually 99 percent because asymptomatic cases are under counted. Emhoff seemingly doesn’t care to give the facts to Posadas and put the success of the media stunt at risk. “I’m so grateful you’re doing this in front of the cameras so you can tell everyone it’s okay,” said Emhoff. Posadas nods his head. “Everything – my people – I thinks, we want the shot. This is real. I not believe you before, but I feel it now.”

No reporter asks questions. But the obvious one is: How long ago did Posadas not “believe” Emhoff? Who convinced him to take the vaccine? What was told to him in English or Spanish? Emhoff wastes no time with Posadas’s hesitancy. “Well let’s do it!” said the Second Gentleman while the medical staff and clergy applaud. Posadas is put in a white, folding chair. He keeps on the mirrored sunglasses. A woman in scrubs tells him to pull the mask over his nose. He rolls up his sleeve as the woman comes in with the needle. Posadas looks in the opposite direction. “Look at me! Look at me!” Emhoff tells him, while the shot is administered. The crowd applauds. Emhoff holds out his fist, and Posadas bumps him after he stands.

“Thank you for doing this,” Emhoff says, while Posadas rubs his arm and says something in Spanish. “Thank you for telling everyone to do this.” Emhoff walks away to do media interviews while a woman is heard off camera saying, “Gustava, did you get your card with your vaccination on it?” The Second Gentleman tells reporters that, “On the Covid piece, on the vaccinations, I’m not going to stop. This administration is not going to stop until we continue to get the word out here.” Emhoff continues but seems to not remember Posadas’s name. “You heard what he said – it’s real. He didn’t believe it. He believes it now….” Harris’s husband does a hard sell of the vaccines and adds, “We’re going to go door to door, bring the vaccines out to the people until we get this done.”

Biden/Kamala vaccines

Here’s a mashup of VACCINE MISINFORMATION from Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

Does Jen Psaki want Big Tech to CENSOR this?pic.twitter.com/vqnucmZjnj

— Kyle Martinsen (@KyleMartinsen_) July 16, 2021

Ha ha ha! Think they installed a “misinformation” filter?

• US-Backed Tech Restores Internet To More Than 1 Million Cubans (ZH)

With summer uprisings in Cuba, the communist government has discovered ways to cut the internet off to millions of residents, so organized protesting on social media is near impossible. Let’s take a step back to early last week when reports of the Cuban regime used China-made technology systems to block internet and cell phone service to prevent pictures and videos of what was happening on the ground published online near impossible for the outside world to see. The regime also blocked popular social media channels that would make organized protesting impossible. Remember, a decade ago, during Arab Spring, Facebook and Twitter were critical for organizers to orchestrate uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Bahrain.

The Biden administration is finding ways to provide anti-censorship tools to Cubans to access social media during the blackouts. According to Bloomberg, the U.S. government supports a censorship circumvention tool designed to unblock content in Cuba and is powered by a company called Psiphon Inc. As of Thursday, Psiphon tweeted, “1.389 Million daily unique users accessed the open web from Cuba through the Psiphon network. Internet is ON; circumvention tools ARE working.” Psiphon uses proxy servers that disguise internet traffic so Cuban authorities cannot tell if people are accessing social media platforms. The Toronto-based nonprofit has received money from the U.S. government. Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn tweeted Saturday that the proxy service is working well:

The Biden administration has been strategizing on other ways to provide the people of Cuba with internet access. “They have cut off access to the internet. We are considering whether we have the technological ability to reinstate that access,” President Biden said on Friday. Biden commented after Florida Governor Ron Desantis told the president the federal government should restore internet on the island located in the northern Caribbean Sea. Desantis said there’s a technology that would allow the U.S. to broadcast internet access into Cuba remotely. “Technology exists to provide Internet access into Cuba remotely, using the innovation of American enterprise and the diverse industries here,” the governor wrote. He said this reminds him of the Cold War when the U.S. funded radio stations to broadcast information into the Soviet Union.

A bunch of tiny islands and a dispute that no-one ever bothered to resolve. But now if the US wants to stand with Japan, it must stand against Taiwan. And the Chinese are thinking: let’s have that fun.

• Does Japan Control The Trigger For US Nuclear War On China? (Ritter)

Statements made by Japan’s Deputy Prime Minister about his country’s need to defend Taiwan have raised the specter of a “Japan exception” to China’s no-first-use policy on nuclear weapons. In April this year, Japanese Prime Minister Suga Yoshihide became the first foreign leader to visit the White House after the swearing in of Joe Biden as America’s 46th President. After private discussions, Yoshihide and Biden issued a joint statement entitled “US-Japan Global Partnership for a New Era.” What made it stand out from similar joint releases over the past decades of US-Japanese relations was the fact that, for the first time in over 50 years, the Japanese and American leaders made mention of Taiwan, declaring “we underscore the importance of peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait and encourage the peaceful resolution of cross-Strait issues.”

While the statement was, on the surface, rather innocuous, the Chinese Embassy in the US immediately reacted, declaring Beijing’s resolute opposition to what it deemed to be interference in China’s internal affairs, and noting that the talks had gone beyond the scope of normal bilateral relations, harming third-party interests and threatening peace and stability in the region. While most observers might think the Chinese objection was centered on its long-standing claim on Taiwan proper, the trigger point was, more likely, the specific reference made in the statement to a tiny cluster of uninhabited rocky islands situated some 170 kilometers (105 miles) north of Taiwan and around 400 kilometers (248 miles) due west of Okinawa.

These islands, known in Japan as the Senkaku Islands and in China as the Diaoyu Dao Islands, are located not only in rich fishing waters, but also on top of economically viable underwater oil and gas deposits. While their ownership is a matter of ongoing legal dispute, with China viewing them as constituting part of Taiwan, and Japan as part of the Okinawa prefecture, at the present time the islands are administered by Japan. The US-Japanese joint statement reiterated Washington’s “unwavering support for Japan’s defense under the US-Japan Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security, using its full range of capabilities, including nuclear.” It then went on to reaffirm “the fact that Article V of the Treaty applies to the Senkaku Islands,” adding that both the US and Japan “oppose any unilateral action that seeks to undermine Japan’s administration of the Senkaku Islands.”

Left to its own devices, the Sino-Japanese dispute over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Dao Islands should have remained low-key. But on July 6, Japan’s Deputy Prime Minister, Taro Aso, reportedly stated that “If a major problem took place in Taiwan, it would not be too much to say that it could relate to a survival-threatening situation [for Japan],” citing language which specifically triggers Japan’s Constitutionally-mandated right of collective self-defense, where it would be permitted to deploy its armed forces in support of an ally who had been attacked. A “survival-threatening situation” occurs when an armed attack against a foreign country allied with Japan poses a clear risk of threatening Japan’s survival.

“We need to think hard that Okinawa could be the next,” Aso was quoted as saying, indicating the specific nature of the “survival-threatening situation” he spoke of. While China has never expressed any territorial interest in either Okinawa or the other populated islands contained in the Okinawa prefecture, the fact that Japan views the Senkaku Islands as part of Okinawa, and China views the Diaoyu Dao Islands as part of Taiwan, means that any Chinese move on Taiwan would, as a matter of course, include asserting its claim over the disputed islands. This, in turn, would trigger Article V of the US-Japan Treaty of Mutual Cooperation, which is backed by the nuclear arsenal of the United States.

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The Greek Freak is one win away from the NBA title.

“When you focus on the past, that’s your ego.” pic.twitter.com/XKiRMA8Ux2

— Milwaukee Bucks (@Bucks) July 17, 2021

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Debt Rattle July 13 2021

Jul 132021

July 13, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:27 am Finance Tagged with: Big Tech, bitcoin, Cuba, Fauci, Trump, vaccinated, vaccine mandates 80 Responses »

Vincent van Gogh View of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer 1888

• Australia’s COVID Outbreak Worsens Despite Economy-Crippling Lockdowns (ZH)

• Fauci Calls For ‘More Vaccine Mandates At The Local Level’ (ZH)

• ‘You’ve Got To Go One-On-One’: Fauci (F.)

• What If…. (Denninger)

• Infections Decline in the Unvaccinated as They Surge in the Vaccinated (LDS)

• A Bodyguard of Lies (Kunstler)

• Cuba’s Internet Cutoff: A Go-to Tactic To Suppress Dissent (AP)

• White House Urges Cities To Use Covid Funds To Help Combat Violent Crime (JTN)

• Just 5% Of All Bitcoins In Circulation Have Traded In The Past Year (ZH)

• Trump: Why I’m Suing Big Tech (ZH)

• Trump: Big Tech Is ‘Getting The Biggest Subsidy Ever (JTN)

• ‘I Got Impeached Twice, I Became Worse’: Trump (RT)

It’s nice that you don’t have to sew the vaccine proof on your coat

Mercola Zelenko

Dr.Vladimir Zelenko – scary if true… pic.twitter.com/5BOQ1IcLDV

— Husserl (@husserl80) July 12, 2021

Fleming nucleotides

Dr. Richard Fleming – scary if true… pic.twitter.com/eZ4exHtIRZ

— Husserl (@husserl80) July 12, 2021

And literally no-one says perhaps the lockdowns don’t work?!

• Australia’s COVID Outbreak Worsens Despite Economy-Crippling Lockdowns (ZH)

By some inexplicable phenomenon, Sydney’s COVID outbreak has continued to worsen (albeit by margins that most cities would consider negligible) despite the lockdown measures that have been in place for nearly three weeks at this point. Now, the prospect for another lockdown extension looms as Australia’s largest city and the surrounding state – New South Wales, Australia’s largest by population – reports 112 new locally transmitted COVID-19 cases, almost all of which were linked to Sydney. However, there was a silver lining: the number of newly infected out in the community declined to 34 from 45. But fears about the delta variant, which has been driving the spread, might lead to even more draconian measures.

State Premier Gladys Berejiklian said it was this last figure that would, in the coming days, determine whether Sydney’s lockdown, due to end on Friday, would be extended. “That’s the number we need to get as close to zero as possible,” Berejiklian said during her daily televised briefing. “It is really up to us. The health expert advice will be based on what those numbers look like. I can’t be clearer than that.” Sydney is bracing for a longer and stricter lockdown after continued increases in COVID-19 cases, while the New South Wales Premier stated things are going to get worse before they get better. The outbreak has prompted the Australia-Singapore travel bubble to be delayed until at least the end of the year, according to Australian press reports, despite the fact that nearly all of the new cases reported on Monday involved family members or friends of previously diagnosed patients.

Meanwhile, a new report from Deloitte showed that consumer movement-related activity in the city’s central business district has plunged by nearly 90% in the two weeks since the Sydney lockdown started compared to its levels from two years ago. Even in Melbourne, where restrictions were just lifted, movement remained off 80% from the levels a year ago. The drop in activity is placing small businesses and restaurants in a difficult position. The iconic Melbourne rooftop bar Madame Brussels announced Monday that it would become the latest victim of the pandemic when it closes its doors next week after 15 years. “The city’s just not coming back,” co-owner Paula Scholes said.

Power hungry totalitarian creep.

• Fauci Calls For ‘More Vaccine Mandates At The Local Level’ (ZH)

The nation’s highest-paid employee in the US government, Anthony Fauci, has gone full-throttle on vaccines – this time with a Sunday appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union,” where he pushed for vaccine mandates at the local level, and slammed a guest speaker at CPAC (Alex Berenson) for applauding young people for researching vaccine side-effects. Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases Director appeared on CNN’s State of the Union Sunday to give his opinion on vaccine mandates. He agrees with the White House and President Biden himself, saying vaccination mandates should be the next step. “I have been of this opinion, and I remain of that opinion, that I do believe at the local level, Jake, there should be more mandates,” Fauci told host Jake Tapper. “There really should be.”

For fear of more people dying, Fauci strongly supports mandates. “We’re talking about life and death situation. We have lost 600,000 Americans already, and we’re still losing more people,” Fauci said. “There have been 4 million deaths worldwide. This is serious business. So I am in favor of that.” Meanwhile, at the Conservative Political Action Conference, author Alex Berenson called out the vaccination efforts as a scam. “The government was hoping that they could sort of sucker 90% of the population into getting vaccinated,” Berenson said. “And it isn’t happening.” People in the audience cheered when they heard that. On the other hand, Fauci called the reaction “horrifying.”

As a result, the NIAID director says the solution to vaccine hesitancy is official approval from the Food and Drug Administration. “One of the things that will happen, and I think the hesitancy at the local level of doing mandates is because the vaccines have not been officially fully approved,” Fauci said. “But people need to understand that the amount of data right now that shows a high degree of effectiveness and a high degree of safety is more than we’ve ever seen with the emergency use authorization, so these vaccines are as good as officially approved with all the I’s dotted and T’s crossed. It hasn’t been done yet because the FDA has to do certain things. But it’s as good as done. So people should really understand that. But they are waiting now until you get an official approval before. And I think when you do see the official approval, you’ll see a lot more mandates.”

Just over half have gotten at least one shot. That’s very far from Biden’s ideal. And rates decline fast.

• ‘You’ve Got To Go One-On-One’: Fauci (F.)

Dr. Anthony Fauci on Monday defended the Biden administration’s door-to-door vaccine effort as some Republican governors push back on it, stressing targeted, one-on-one outreach would be key to lowering the number of unvaccinated Americans. Speaking to CBS This Morning, Fauci said the U.S. vaccination effort was in the beginning focused on “large efforts like auditoriums or sports arenas filled with people getting vaccinated” but now needed to become more targeted. “You’ve got to go one on one” to reach the “core, lesser group” of unvaccinated Americans, Fauci said. Last week, President Joe Biden announced his administration will begin sending volunteers door-to-door to urge Americans to get immunized, along with other initiatives.

The announcement came after the U.S. fell just short of Biden’s goal of partially or fully vaccinating at least 70% of adults by July 4. Health experts have expressed concern that Biden is not doing enough to convince more Americans to get the shot as vaccination rates remain low and the more infectious Delta variant begins to spread in the U.S. “Now we need to go to community by community, neighborhood by neighborhood, and oftentimes, door to door — literally knocking on doors — to get help to the remaining people protected from the virus,” Biden said in a speech on Tuesday. [..] 55.5%. That’s the percentage of Americans who have received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine. About half of unvaccinated Americans—46%—said they would “definitely not” ever get the vaccine in a recent AP/NORC poll. Just 7% said they “definitely will” get a shot.

“The problem is that if you let your doctor talk you into doing it his way for long enough the damage will be irreversible..”

• What If…. (Denninger)

Why do you think you get told to go ahead and eat the carbs — chase it with drugs if you’re Type II diabetic? The zero cost option is to stop eating the carbs. If you do it early enough then there’s a good chance your body will heal and the damage will not only stop, it will be reversed. No, this doesn’t mean you can go back to eating the pizzas with wild abandon, but it does mean you’ll never need a single blood-sugar related drug, nor will your toes and fingers drop off and your kidneys will likely not fail. The problem is that if you let your doctor talk you into doing it his way for long enough the damage will be irreversible and then you’re beholden to ever-more expensive drugs and, ultimately, likely surgeries and even dialysis. If you walk that path you may or may not expire from something else first but you certainly will spend a hell of a lot of money on the journey with virtually all of it being unnecessary.

What makes you think that’s not what they just did under cover of a respiratory pandemic that was destined to burn itself out like every other respiratory viral pandemic for which we have good records spanning more than 100 years, and in fact which had done so in the United States and was on the wane before the first shot went into the first arm? What if your life and that of your children are now a service, courtesy of Moderna and Pfizer at whatever cost they wish to impose on you now and into the indefinite future with the price of quitting being a much-higher risk of death, and what if that is in fact exactly what pharma, the medical industry, Trump and Biden all had in mind originally and still do? Think I’m wrong? Have a look at the 2018 MTS and what happened to Medicare payments.

This fiscal ended in September of 2018, the second year of Trump’s Presidency. Prescription drug spend was down from 95 billion to $82 billion, a decrease of close to 15%. Hospital spend was nearly flat – up right at 1%. Do you think Pharma and hospital administrators liked that? The next year drug spend was up 3.6% and then ending in September of 2020 it was up 5.3%. Hospitalization? That posted a 26% increase year ending September 2020 with hospitals being paid $39,000 per person by Medicare to shove a tube down your throat and kill you instead of being paid to give you drugs early with them only getting paid when you didn’t get intubated and die. In other words health care as a service which in fact paid more to kill Seniors was good for a 26% increase in what the federal government spent despite killing a half-million people with the vast majority of them being Senior Citizens on Medicare.

We didn’t pay for performance we paid for a subscription even though what it bought sucked and in fact killed your Grandmother. Do you think that’s stopped? Well then you better look at the current MTS which says that while hospitalization spend is down (gee, all the old people who could be easily killed seem to already be dead and we ran out of suckers we could exploit by sticking a toe tag on them) when it comes to prescription drugs the current year spend via said subscription model scam is up 12.4% over last year thus far on a comparable-period basis! Don’t you think we should have proved that wasn’t the model being intended for these shots to be forced on EVERYONE before we started letting people get stabbed when the data before us, on October 15st of 2020, was that indeed that was exactly the model the health care system had run for the previous fiscal year into the maw of the pandemic and got paid to deliberately not treat people early which both led to their death and got them paid a record amount, an utterly obscene additional EIGHTY TWO BILLION DOLLARS above the previous year’s expense?

You better hope that’s not what they tricked you into because if it is you’re screwed at least economically and may be ****ed out of your life. I remind you that the MTS proves that is exactly what they did to Seniors when it came to medical care just during the first six months of the pandemic to the tune of $82 BILLION which was in fact paid out as a reward for generating 500,000 CORPSES. But you still won’t make them stop — will you?

Not the most convincing graph but the trend is clear.

• Infections Decline in the Unvaccinated as They Surge in the Vaccinated (LDS)

I reported last week on the striking fact that, according to data from the ZOE Covid Symptom study, new symptomatic daily infections appeared to be plateauing in the unvaccinated while they were surging in the vaccinated. The trend has continued since then, with infections now entering decline in the unvaccinated while those in the vaccinated (with at least one dose) continue to surge (see graph). Around 67% of the population has received at least one vaccine dose, so the fact that there are still more infections in the smaller unvaccinated group means no conclusion can be drawn from the current figures about the vaccines not being effective.

Also, while more people are being vaccinated all the time, that steady trend is nowhere near large enough to account for the sharp changes in infection incidence we see here. With infections in the unvaccinated already peaking and falling, despite the Delta variant, this drives a coach and horses through arguments for the supposed importance of vaccinating children and hesitant young people – including through inducements like vaccine passports for pubs, clubs and restaurants, now being mooted for the autumn. Why the vaccinated are having their Delta surge later than the unvaccinated is an interesting question. Is it because the vaccines make them more resistant to infection? Does the age difference help explain it? Or is it something else?

Whatever the explanation, the important point is that without any new restrictions or a big new vaccine push, infections in the unvaccinated are already falling. In the current climate of pushes to extend restrictions, delay ‘Freedom Day’, and vaccinate everyone whether they want it or not, this is hugely significant. It means all those arguments to continue restrictions and pile on the pressure for vaccination because of the Delta variant are complete nonsense. That new daily infections are still rising in the population as a whole is now because they are rising among the vaccinated, not the unvaccinated. They will likely peak soon in the vaccinated, too, just as they already have in Scotland.

“..we live in a time when reality is exceptionally slippery..”

• A Bodyguard of Lies (Kunstler)

A bunch of readers sent me a video on the Odysee platform that seems to have lit up the Internet over the weekend, a conversation between the international lawyer Reiner Fuellmich and a character named David Martin, PhD, CEO of M-Cam, a company that researches and advises on intellectual property and patents, especially in medicine. Dr. Martin is “a fellow” at the University of Virginia School of Business Administration and formerly an assistant professor at UVa’s School of Medicine. Mr. Fuellmich is a German national who claims to be bringing a case to the world court to prosecute various parties for hoaxing the world over the coronavirus we call Covid-19.

Mr. Fuellmich’s claim is based on the allegation that the world has been played by “a PCR test pandemic,” not by a novel coronavirus, saying that the PCR test is entirely unreliable, but was used to generate millions of “cases.” Dr. Martin claims that scores of patents were filed as far back as 2008 on features found in Covid 19 — the spike protein, the polybasic cleavage site, and the ace-2 receptor binding domain — by people doing “bioweapons” research at the University of North Carolina (e.g., Dr. Ralph Baric) as well as the US Military’s DARPA, the Wuhan, China, virology lab, and Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), much of it intermediated by Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance, and allegedly involving a criminal conspiracy with several pharmaceutical companies to make a lot of money off an engineered global health emergency. He claims further that the mRNA vaccines are “medical devices” designed to induce illness.

This complex story has its charms (Fuellmich & Martin are very good talkers) and has undergone serial debunkings by some of the usual debunkers, themselves not necessarily reliable organs of debunkery, such as The Washington Post. Dr. Martin appears to be associated with the “Plandemic” crowd and with some marginal crypto-religious groups inveighing against Jewish conspiracies and freemasonry — two big red flags for me.

But we live in a time when reality is exceptionally slippery and there are parts of the story that are now accepted as real in the emergent consensual reality of what actually happened. For instance: that Dr. Anthony Fauci funded gain-of-function research using Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance as a conduit. And the numerous patent records do exist within the stated time-line. The scientific and legal facts around all this are abstruse, and most college-educated (and beyond) Americans might have trouble processing the story.

Suppressing dissent is what the US does at home, better than anyone.

• Cuba’s Internet Cutoff: A Go-to Tactic To Suppress Dissent (AP)

Cubans facing the country’s worst economic crisis in decades took to the streets over the weekend. In turn, authorities blocked social media sites in an apparent effort to stop the flow of information into, out of and within the beleaguered nation. Restricting internet access has become a tried-and-true method of stifling dissent by authoritarian regimes around the world, alongside government-supported disinformation campaigns and propaganda. On the extreme side, regimes like China and North Korea exert tight control over what regular citizens can access online. Elsewhere, service blockages are more limited, often cutting off common social platforms around elections and times of mass protests.

There was no formal organizer of Sunday’s protests; people found out about the rallying points over social media, mostly on Twitter and Facebook, the platforms most used by Cubans. The thousands of Cubans who took to the streets — protesters and pro-government activists alike — wielded smartphones to capture images and send them to relatives and friends or post them online. On Monday, Cuban authorities were blocking Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Telegram, said Alp Toker, director of Netblocks, a London-based internet monitoring firm. “This does seem to be a response to social media-fueled protest,” he said. Twitter did not appear to be blocked, though Toker noted Cuba could cut it off if it wants to.

While the recent easing of access by Cuban authorities to the internet has increased social media activity, Toker said, the level of censorship has also risen. Not only does the cutoff block out external voices, he said, it also squelches “the internal voice of the population who have wanted to speak out.” Internet access in Cuba has been expensive and relatively rare until recently. The country was “basically offline” until 2008, then gradually entered a digital revolution, said Ted Henken, a Latin America expert at Baruch College, City University of New York. The biggest change, he noted, came in December 2018 when Cubans got access to mobile internet for the first time via data plans purchased from the state telecom monopoly. These days, more than half of all Cubans have internet access, Henken said.

The Covid problem must be waning then?!

• White House Urges Cities To Use Covid Funds To Help Combat Violent Crime (JTN)

The White House sent a memo to state and local officials Monday, urging them to use some of the COVD-19 relief funds to help combat the rise of violent crime. The memo outlines how states should use the funds provided by President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package to reduce crime, such as supporting law enforcement, investing in community-based violence interventions, and enforcing gun laws. “The core of the President’s plan is a partnership with cities and states, equipping local leaders with historic levels of federal funding and a range of tools to address the multifaceted challenge of gun violence,” the memo said, according to The Hill.

The memo also notes that Biden requested $300 million in funding for the COPS program, a program made by the Department of Justice for community-centered policing, and an additional $750 million for federal law enforcement agencies. Biden is expected to meet with Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser, Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams – who is also the Democrat nominee for New York City mayor – as well as with other mayors across the country.

50% of value gone, but nobody sells.

• Just 5% Of All Bitcoins In Circulation Have Traded In The Past Year (ZH)

In JPMorgan’s latest weekly bitcoin hit piece (because for some “inexplicable” reason, JPMorgan executive have instructed most of the bank’s strategists, including those covering equity and rates, to slam the cryptocurrency on a weekly if not daily basis while the bank quietly builds out its own proprietary crypto fund, almost as if it is desperate to scare its clients into selling), the bank makes an interesting argument: bitcoin is not liquid enough to be successfully implemented as a legal tender in El Salvador.

We won’t speak to the validity of JPM’s argument – we will soon find out first hand whether or not El Salvador made a mistake in adopting bitcoin as legal tender – although it certainly is simple enough: “daily payment activity in El Salvador would represent ~4% of recent on-chain transaction volume and more than 1% of the total value of tokens which have been transferred between wallets in the past year,” the report said, with the illiquidity and nature of the volume “potentially a significant limitation on its potential as a medium of exchange.”

Perhaps, then again in its brief history bitcoin has certainly demonstrated that it is remarkably scalable and viable even without a central bank propping it up every time there is even a modest risk-flaring hiccup, which is much more than we could ever say about the global stock market or currencies such as Europe’s “whatever it takes” euro. Of course, JPMorgan – a bank that directly benefited form more than one multibilion bailout – will be the last to admit just how much sustainable the cryptocurrency has become, which is why we will ignore the bank’s latest round of propaganda, but will point out an interesting fact unearthed by JPMorgan: it goes straight to the heart of the recurring argument why bitcoin is so volatile.

The reason, as JPM has discovered, is that bitcoin’s float may be as little as 5%, if not less. Discussing the daily trading volumes of bitcoin, JPM notes that a large fraction of Bitcoin are locked up in illiquid entities (liquidity sinks), “with more than 90% not changing hands in more than a year” while roughly 80% – and rising – are held by wallets with light turnover. This means that a paltry 5-10% of all bitcoin in circulation has traded in the past year. Another way of putting it: an asset with a $600 billion market cap has a float of just $30 billion. Which is remarkable as it means that no whales sold bitcoin when it hit its all time high of $65,000. And if they didn’t sell then, they certainly won’t sell now when it’s half that price.

Would be nice if it goes somewhere.

• Trump: Why I’m Suing Big Tech (ZH)

Following last week’s announcement that President Trump was filing a class-action lawsuit suing the CEOs of Facebook, Twitter and Google over allegations of illegal censorship, Trump has published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal where he lays out his legal team’s argument: Big Tech has colluded with government to censor the free speech of the American people, Trump said. Since social media has become “as central to free speech as town meeting halls, newspapers and television networks were in prior generations.” Despite the fact that the internet is “the new public square”, Big Tech has become increasingly “brazen and shameless in censoring and discriminating against ideas, information and people on social media – banning users, deplatforming organizations, and aggressively blocking the free flow of information on which our democracy depends.”

“No longer are Big Tech giants simply removing specific threats of violence. They are manipulating and controlling the political debate itself.” Trump also cited Big Tech’s decision to bar him from Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. “Perhaps most egregious, in the weeks after the election, Big Tech blocked the social-media accounts of the sitting president. If they can do it to me, they can do it to you—and believe me, they are.” While Chinese and Iranian propagandists are allowed to operate with impunity, social media platforms have attacked a Michigan schoolteacher for sharing an article questioning whether mandatory masks are suitable for young children in schools. A Florida couple that lost their 21-year-old son in a fatal car accident caused by a 2x-deported illegal immigrant was censored by Facebook when they posted about border security and immigration enforcement, Trump said.

These regular people will appear as plaintiffs alongside Trump and his America First Policy Institute, which is co-sponsoring the litigation. Worst of all, when Democrats in Congress demand that big tech CEOs “fact check” what they insist are “false” stories, Trump says that these “disinformation” labels are supplied by partisan fact-checkers loyal to the Democratic Party. This is tantamount to “suppression of speech that those in power do not like.” “Through these lawsuits, I intend to restore free speech for all Americans—Democrats, Republicans and independents. I will never stop fighting to defend the constitutional rights and sacred liberties of the American people.” Finally, Trump cited the Trusted News Initiative, a program whereby Twitter, Facebook and Google all take orders from the CDC about which information to combat.

“It’s a Democrat machine; it should be a campaign contribution.”

• Trump: Big Tech Is ‘Getting The Biggest Subsidy Ever (JTN)

Former President Donald Trump discussed his class-action lawsuit against Big Tech censorship on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures,” saying he believes it will be “very successful.” Trump said the lawsuit will “wind its way through the courts, I think it’s gonna be very successful … It’s been very well received, very popular, a lot of legal scholars are saying it’s about time.” The lawsuit was filed against the CEO’s of Google, Facebook, and Twitter, alleging that censorship is a violation of the First Amendment and applies to private companies because they are working for government officials. Section 230 of the 1996 Telecommunications Act allows websites to remove obscene content. Trump is arguing that this immunity is like a government subsidy.

“They’re getting the biggest subsidy that any company has ever gotten from a government,” Trump explained. “They’re immune from so many different things, but they’re not immune from this lawsuit because what they’ve done is such a violation of the Constitution. A violation like we’ve never seen before.” “They work with the Democrats,” he added. “It’s a Democrat machine; it should be a campaign contribution.” Because YouTube, Facebook, and Google suspended his accounts on their platforms, Trump said that it “hurts his ability to support fellow conservatives by campaigning for Republicans running in 2022. He also said it hurts his ability to lay the groundwork for a possible 2024 presidential bid,” Fox News reported.

I admit: I like to see him back.

• ‘I Got Impeached Twice, I Became Worse’: Trump (RT)

In a speech to fans in Texas, Donald Trump repeated claims of election fraud and tirades against “cancel culture.” He also uttered one phrase his opponents would likely agree with, saying he “became worse” after being impeached. Trump took the stage in Dallas, Texas on Sunday night to close out the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), a yearly or twice-yearly gathering of politicians, activists and celebrities from the American right. The CPAC crowd is as friendly to Trump as crowds get, and the former president served them up his signature partisan jokes, rants and one-liners. He railed against President Joe Biden and the Democrats, whom he accused of “rigging” the 2020 election against him. The audience agreed, breaking into chants of “Trump won!”

He thundered against immigration, accusing Biden of turning the US/Mexico border into “the single greatest disaster in American history” and lambasted “big tech’s attack on free speech,” days after suing the social media platforms that banned him in January. All of these complaints and grievances are standard Trump fare, but the receptive crowd at CPAC gave him the opportunity to try out some new material. Turning on his former attorney general, Trump claimed that Bill Barr “became a different man” after House Democrats “viciously stated that they wanted to impeach him” last year. “I didn’t become different,” Trump quipped. “I got impeached twice. I became worse.” His opponents would likely agree with that statement, but “worse” to his supporters clearly meant “better,” as they broke out into applause and cheers.

Trump’s headline appearance, and the warm reception he received, served as a reminder that although he is out of power and absent from social media, he still sets the Republican Party’s agenda. His former vice president, Mike Pence, who voted to certify Biden’s electoral victory, did not appear at the event and was booed and heckled at a conservative conference in Florida several weeks ago. CPAC is considered an opportunity for potential Republican presidential candidates to audition in front of the conservative base, and Trump – who has dropped several hints recently at another run for the White House in 2024 – seemed to acknowledge this. “The Democrats want me out… and here I am. I could have a nice, beautiful life and here I am on a Sunday in Texas,” he said, to which the crowd chanted “Four more years! Four more years!”

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Debt Rattle June 25 2021

Jun 252021

June 25, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:53 am Finance Tagged with: booster, HCQ, Icarus, Merkel, mRNA, Putin, solar panels, vaccinated, variant 57 Responses »

Edward Hopper Summertime 1943

• Structural Basis Of Anti-SARS-CoV-2 Activity of HCQ (RS)

• Half Of New Israel Covid-19 Cases In Last Month Were Fully Vaccinated (INN)

• Nearly All US COVID Deaths Now Among Unvaccinated People (NYP)

• Surgeon Fired For Voicing Safety Concerns About Covid Shots For Children (JCCF)

• ‘Single Most Qualified’ mRNA Expert Speaks About Vaccine Risks (WE)

• CDC Official Says Coronavirus Vaccine Booster May Not be Needed (GR)

• The Delta COVID-19 Variant Has A Mutation Called K417N (R.)

• Almost 600m NHS Home Covid Tests Unaccounted For (G.)

• The Icarus Wax Of The Everything Bubble Is Melting (Von Greyerz)

• The “Conspiracy Theory” Charade (Bovard)

• Merkel Urges ‘Direct Contact’ With Putin (Pol.eu)

• Britain Acknowledges Surprise At Speed Of Russian Reaction To Warship (G.)

• Solar Panels Create 50 Times More Waste Than Predicted, Much Of It Toxic (RT)

A little reminder.

Ivory Hecker

"Within hours, turned around; within days, immense improvement."

A doctor's personal experience with ivermectin, from the excellent report by @IvoryHecker, to be found here (earphones might be needed): https://t.co/nitDopFDQi pic.twitter.com/JgyidnekcS

— Wake Up From COVID (@wakeupfromcovid) June 24, 2021

Singaporean researchers believe that they have discovered a new mechanism of action of Hydroxychloroquine in Covid-19 and very boldly conclude:

“HCQ is a promising candidate to help terminate the pandemic”.

“Most importantly, HCQ-binding residues are identical in SARS-CoV-2 variants and therefore HCQ is likely effective to them all.”

• Structural Basis Of Anti-SARS-CoV-2 Activity of HCQ (RS)

Great efforts have led to successfully developing the spike-based vaccines but challenges still exist to completely terminate the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. SARS-CoV-2 nucleocapsid (N) protein plays the essential roles in almost all key steps of the viral life cycle, thus representing a top drug target. Almost all key functions of N protein including liquid-liquid phase separation (LLPS) depend on its capacity in interacting with nucleic acids. Therefore, only the variants with their N proteins functional in binding nucleic acids might survive and spread in evolution and indeed, the residues critical for binding nucleic acids are highly conserved.

Very recently, hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) was shown to prevent the transmission in a large-scale clinical study in Singapore but so far, no specific SARS-CoV-2 protein was experimentally identified to be targeted by HCQ. Here by NMR, we unambiguously decode that HCQ specifically binds NTD and CTD of SARS- CoV-2 N protein with Kd of 112.1 and 57.1 µM respectively to inhibit their interaction with nucleic acid, as well as to disrupt LLPS essential for the viral life cycle.

Most importantly, HCQ-binding residues are identical in SARS-CoV-2 variants and therefore HCQ is likely effective to them all. The results not only provide a structural basis for the anti-SARS-CoV-2 activity of HCQ, but also renders HCQ to be the first known drug capable of targeting LLPS. Furthermore, the unique structure of the HCQ-CTD complex decodes a promising strategy for further design of better anti-SARS-CoV-2 drugs from HCQ. Therefore, HCQ is a promising candidate to help terminate the pandemic.

VanDen Bossche strikes again.

• Half Of New Israel Covid-19 Cases In Last Month Were Fully Vaccinated (INN)

Israel’s campaign to promote the coronavirus vaccine – now focusing on young teens – is going full steam ahead, in spite of statistics presented by government officials showing that half of those recently infected with Covid-19 were fully vaccinated, Behadrey Haredim reports. Head of Public Health Services, Dr. Sharon Alray-Price, revealed the disturbing facts at a media presentation on Wednesday. According to her data, of the 891 cases of coronavirus confirmed in the last month alone, half had received both doses of Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine. According to a report on Channel 12, in the months since the vaccines were rolled out, 6,765 people who received both shots have contracted coronavirus, and epidemiological tracing has revealed that an additional 3,133 people contracted Covid-19 from those vaccinated individuals.

The 6,765 represent a little more than one percent of the total number of those vaccinated, which now stands at over 5,100,000. It is clear that officials were already aware that the vaccine does not provide sufficient protection, as quarantine regulations for those returning from abroad have recently been changed, requiring even those fully vaccinated to self-isolate upon return from certain countries. In addition, military intelligence has been warning of such a scenario at least since January, when a report was published that suggested a mass vaccination campaign would lead to vaccine-resistant strains of Covid-19 emerging. Also on Wednesday, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett convened a panel of experts together with the heads of the various health service organizations in the country.

“Our aim at the present moment, first and foremost, is to protect Israeli citizens from the Delta strain that is running amok around the world,” Bennett said at the meeting. “As we do so, we will endeavor to limit the impact this has on daily life in Israel. Therefore, we have decided to take immediate action in order to avoid paying a heavier price at a later stage. It all depends on us. If we are meticulous in adhering to the guidelines and behaving responsibly, we will overcome this – together.”

This doesn’t appear to rhyme with Doc Robinson’s numbers yesterday.

• Nearly All US COVID Deaths Now Among Unvaccinated People (NYP)

Nearly all recent COVID-19 deaths in the US were of people who had not been vaccinated, a new analysis found. The examination by the Associated Press of data provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was released as about 63 percent of all eligible American adults have received at least one dose of the vaccine — and 53 percent are fully vaccinated. The AP found that only 150 of the more than 18,000 coronavirus deaths in May were of people who were fully vaccinated. In the same month, more than 853,000 people were hospitalized with COVID-19. Less than 1,200 of them, or roughly 0.1 percent, were fully vaccinated.

On Tuesday, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky spoke of the effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccine. “Nearly every death, especially among adults, due to COVID-19, is, at this point, entirely preventable,” Walensky said. AP’s findings come as COVID-19 deaths per day in the nation have dropped dramatically — from a daily high of about 3,400 in mid-January to currently under 300.

Canada.

• Surgeon Fired For Voicing Safety Concerns About Covid Shots For Children (JCCF)

The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms represents Dr. Francis Christian, Clinical Professor of General Surgery at the University of Saskatchewan and a practising surgeon in Saskatoon. Dr. Christian was called into a meeting today, suspended from all teaching responsibilities effective immediately, and fired from his position with the University of Saskatchewan as of September 2021. There is a recording of Dr. Christian’s meeting today between Dr. Christian and Dr. Preston Smith, the Dean of Medicine at the University of Saskatchewan, College of Medicine, Dr. Susan Shaw, the Chief Medical Officer of the Saskatchewan Health Authority, and Dr. Brian Ulmer, Head of the Department of Surgery at the Saskatchewan College of Medicine.

In addition, the Justice Centre will represent Dr. Christian in his defence of a complaint that was made against him and an investigation by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Saskatchewan. The complaint objects to Dr. Christian having advocated for the informed consent of Covid vaccines for children. Dr. Christian has been a surgeon for more than 20 years and began working in Saskatoon in 2007. He was appointed Director of the Surgical Humanities Program and Director of Quality and Patient Safety in 2018 and co-founded the Surgical Humanities Program. Dr. Christian is also the Editor of the Journal of The Surgical Humanities.

On June 17, Dr. Christian released a statement to over 200 doctors which contained his concerns regarding giving the Covid shots to children. In it he noted that he is pro-vaccine, and that he did not represent any group, the Saskatchewan Health Authority, or the University of Saskatchewan. “I speak to you directly as a physician, a surgeon, and a fellow human being.” Dr. Christian noted that the principle of informed consent was sacrosanct and noted that a patient should always be “fully aware of the risks of the medical intervention, the benefits of the intervention, and if any alternatives exist to the intervention.” “This should apply particularly to a new vaccine that has never before been tried in humans… before the vaccine is rolled out to children, both children and parents must know the risks of m-RNA vaccines,” he wrote.

Interviews in yesterday’s Debt Rattle.

• ‘Single Most Qualified’ mRNA Expert Speaks About Vaccine Risks (WE)

The man who invented the mRNA technology used in some coronavirus vaccines says he was censored by YouTube for sharing his concerns on the vaccines in a podcast. “[O]ne of my concerns are that the government is not being transparent with us about what those risks are. And so, I’m of the opinion that people have the right to decide whether to accept a vaccine or not, especially since these are experimental vaccines,” said Dr. Robert Malone during a Wednesday segment on Fox News’s Tucker Carlson Tonight, saying YouTube deleted a video of him speaking about the associated risks. Opening the segment, Carlson shared some studies showing heart inflammation and death correlating with the use of the vaccines.

“A Norwegian study conducted of 100 nursing home residents who died after receiving Pfizer’s corona shots. They found that at least 10 of those deaths were likely caused by the vaccine. 10%,” Carlson said. “Young adults in the prime of their lives are being forced to take the vaccine because Tony Fauci said that,” he said, contending Malone’s expertise makes him “the single most qualified” person to share information about the technology and warrants him “a right to speak.” Malone clarified that he was not discouraging the use of the vaccine but was providing people with as much fair information as he could about their risks.

“This is a fundamental right having to do with clinical research ethics,” he said. “And so, my concern is that I know that there are risks. But we don’t have access to the data, and the data haven’t been captured rigorously enough so that we can accurately assess those risks — and therefore … we don’t really have the information that we need to make a reasonable decision.” “That’s one of my other objections, is that we toss about these words, risk-benefit analysis, casually as if it’s a very deep science. It’s not. Normally, at this stage, the CDC [Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices] would have performed those risk-benefit analyses. They would be data-based and science-based. They’re not right now,” Malone said.

Malone also said he has “a bias that the benefits probably don’t outweigh the risks” for younger people who are being encouraged or required to take the vaccine. “I can say that the risk-benefit ratio for those 18 and below doesn’t justify vaccines, and there’s a pretty good chance that it doesn’t justify vaccination in these very young adults,” he added. Malone discovered in-vitro and in-vivo RNA transfection when he was at the Salk Institute in 1988, and he subsequently invented mRNA vaccines, which are being used over 20 years later to combat the spread of the coronavirus.

ha ha ha

• CDC Official Says Coronavirus Vaccine Booster May Not be Needed (GR)

A US Centers for Disease Control official stated on Wednesday that, according to information available at present, there is no need for a booster shot for the coronavirus vaccine. However, certain at-risk populations will be closely monitored for the possibility of a booster, including residents of long-term care facilities, adults who are 65 and older, those who are immunocompromised and those who work in health care. The findings so far in mid-June, according to Sara Oliver of the CDC, indicate that the world’s major Covid-19 vaccines offer lasting protection that could diminish any need for frequent booster shots. However, she cautioned that more research is still needed and that virus mutations remain a concern worldwide.

No data that is currently available supports a recommendation for coronavirus booster shots, Oliver told an advisory group, the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, yesterday. Oliver assured the committee that officials will continue to monitor all incoming data to determine if a booster shot is necessary at some point as time goes on. A recommendation for booster shots would likely “only occur” after “evidence of declining protection against illness, such as declines in vaccine effectiveness” or the detection of a “variant of concern substantially impacting vaccine protection,” Oliver told the Committee.

HCQ works against all of them.

• The Delta COVID-19 Variant Has A Mutation Called K417N (R.)

The variant, called “Delta Plus” in India, was first reported in a Public Health England bulletin on June 11. It is a sub-lineage of the Delta variant first detected in India and has acquired the spike protein mutation called K417N which is also found in the Beta variant first identified in South Africa. Some scientists worry that the mutation, coupled with other existing features of the Delta variant, could make it more transmissible. “The mutation K417N has been of interest as it is present in the Beta variant (B.1.351 lineage), which was reported to have immune evasion property,” India’s health ministry said in a statement. Shahid Jameel, a top Indian virologist, said the K417N was known to reduce the effectiveness of a cocktail of therapeutic monoclonal antibodies.

As of June 16, at least 197 cases has been found from 11 countries – Britain (36), Canada (one), India (eight), Japan (15), Nepal (three), Poland (9), Portugal (22), Russia (one), Switzerland (18), Turkey (one), the United States (83). India said on Wednesday around 40 cases of the variant have been observed in the states of Maharashtra, Kerala and Madhya Pradesh, with “no significant increase in prevalence.” The earliest case in India is from a sample taken on April 5. Britain said its first five cases were sequenced on April 26 and they were contacts of individuals who had traveled from, or transited through, Nepal and Turkey. No deaths were reported among the U.K. and Indian cases.

Fraud.

• Almost 600m NHS Home Covid Tests Unaccounted For (G.)

Almost 600m lateral flow tests given to the public in England may not yet have been used, according to a report that says the hugely expensive test-and-trace system is still bedevilled by problems. The National Audit Office said NHS Test and Trace (NSHT&T), which Boris Johnson promised would be world-beating and has a budget exceeding that of the Department for Transport, was struggling with some “fundamental parts” of its role. In a move to help track and suppress the spread of coronavirus, NHST&T distributed 691m quick-result tests to people across England with the aim of helping people to return to workplaces.

The NAO said results from only 14% of them had been registered, meaning almost 600m had gone unaccounted for. “NHST&T does not know whether the tests that have not been registered have been used or not,” the report says. “It has started a programme of research to understand why the registration of test results is so low and is working to increase public awareness of the need to register results and improve its ability to track tests.” The startling finding will increase scrutiny of the test-and-trace system, which was hailed by the prime minister as a vital part of the government’s plan to beat coronavirus, and of its former head Dido Harding, who is seeking to become the next head of the NHS.

Good metaphor.

• The Icarus Wax Of The Everything Bubble Is Melting (Von Greyerz)

When will the wax melt that holds up the global economy? Hubris is driving humans and markets ever higher and closer to the sun. The higher everything goes, the greater the risk that the wax melts and the wings that are supporting the global economy just fall off and everything crashes to the ground. Investing successfully is primarily about managing risk rather than maximising profits. As we reach the end of the biggest bull market in history, investors feel so secure that risk has become an irrelevance. The Hocus Pocus system of finance has offered total downside protection for investors for 1/2 a century. The last big crash that affected a whole generation was the 1929 crash. After a 90% fall in the Dow, it took 1/4 of a century to recover to the 1929 high.

But since Nixon caused the Hocus Pocus system to thrive from 1971, all major crashes have quickly retraced to new highs. The Dow has fallen 40-60% in 1973, 1987, 2000, 2008 and 2020. But instead of taking 25 years to recover like after the 1929 crash, no retracement since 1971 has taken more than 2 years. This is the beauty of Hocus Pocus finance. Through printing and credit expansion you create unlimited access to liquidity for the big investors. Virtually no funds reach ordinary people who need it but instead the Hocus Focus system rewards the Croesus investors which means the haves get more and the have nots become relatively much poorer.

Funny that “Putin Puppet” was never called a conspiracy theory.

• The “Conspiracy Theory” Charade (Bovard)

“Conspiracy theory” is often a flag of convenience for the media. In 2018, the New York Times asserted that Trump’s use of the term “Deep State” and similar rhetoric “fanned fears that he is eroding public trust in institutions, undermining the idea of objective truth and sowing widespread suspicions about the government and news media.” However, after allegations by anonymous government officials spurred Trump’s first impeachment in 2019, New York Times columnist James Stewart cheered, “There is a Deep State, there is a bureaucracy in our country who has pledged to respect the Constitution, respect the rule of law… They work for the American people.” New York Times editorial writer Michelle Cottle proclaimed, “The deep state is alive and well” and hailed it as “a collection of patriotic public servants.” Almost immediately after its existence was no longer denied, the Deep State became the incarnation of virtue in Washington.

The media elite can fabricate “conspiracy theory” designations almost with the flip of a headline. A week after Election Day 2020, the New York Times ran a banner headline across the top of the front page: “Election Officials Nationwide Find No Fraud.” How did the Times know? Their reporters effectively called each state and asked, “Did y’all see any fraud?” Election officials answered “no,” thus proving that anyone who subsequently questioned Biden’s victory was promoting a groundless conspiracy. While top liberal politicians denounced electronic voting companies as unaccountable and dishonest in 2019, any doubts about such companies became “conspiracies” after that headline in the Times. The Times helped spur a media cacophony drowning out anyone complaining about ballot harvesting, illegal mass mailing of absentee ballots, or widespread failures to verify voter identification.

Actually, “conspiracy theory” accusations helped Biden win the 2020 presidential election. As Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) recently noted, if Americans believed that the COVID-19 virus was created in a Chinese government lab, Trump would have likely won the election because voters would have sought a leader who could be tough on China. But the lab origin explanation was quickly labeled a pro-Trump heresy. The Washington Post denounced Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR,) for suggesting the virus originated in the lab, which supposedly was a “conspiracy theory that was already debunked.” Twenty-seven prominent scientists signed a letter in the Lancet: “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin… Conspiracy theories do nothing but create fear, rumours, and prejudice that jeopardise our global collaboration in the fight against this virus.”

The Lancet did not reveal until last week that one of the signers and the person who organized the letter signing campaign ran an organization that received U.S. government subsidies for its work at the Wuhan Institute of Virology lab. President Biden has ordered U.S. intelligence agencies to take another look to seek to determine the origin of COVID-19. Will “conspiracy theory” charges provide a “get out of jail free” card for the FBI and other federal agencies regarding the January 6 clash at the Capitol? After Fox News’s Tucker Carlson featured allegations that FBI informants or agents may have instigated the ruckus, the Washington Post speedily denounced his “wild, baseless theory” while Huffington Post denounced his “laughable conspiracy theory.”

And the EU said no.

• Merkel Urges ‘Direct Contact’ With Putin (Pol.eu)

German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Thursday called on the EU to establish high-level talks with Vladimir Putin, seeking to buttress a Franco-German proposal for a summit with the Russian president that opened up serious divisions within the EU. “In my opinion, we as the European Union must also seek direct contact with Russia and the Russian president,” Merkel told the German Bundestag in a government statement ahead of an EU leaders’ meeting in Brussels on Thursday afternoon, where relations with Russia will be discussed. “It is not enough for U.S. President Joe Biden to talk to the Russian president — I very much welcome that — but the European Union must also create formats for talks here,” she added, referencing Biden’s recent one-on-one meeting with Putin in Geneva. “There is no other way to resolve conflicts.”

The chancellor’s comments were an apparent defense of a Franco-German overture to Putin that was unveiled to EU partners on Wednesday. The divisive proposal suggested EU leaders should endorse both the threat of new economic sanctions against Moscow while also signaling openness to a summit with Putin himself. The offer was immediately met with opposition from some EU countries, especially the three Baltic countries and Poland. The latest draft conclusions for the European Council meeting in Brussels indicate the Franco-German offer is at least being considered, saying EU leaders “will review the existing formats of dialogue with Russia, including at Leaders’ level.” But the phrasing is in brackets, meaning it has not been agreed to and could easily be dropped.

The conclusions also mention the possibility of further economic sanctions against Russia, while also noting the EU’s “openness to a selective engagement with Russia in areas of EU interest” on areas like climate, energy, health, terrorism and some foreign policy areas.

Stupid provocations.

• Britain Acknowledges Surprise At Speed Of Russian Reaction To Warship (G.)

British officials acknowledged they were taken by surprise by the speed of the Russian reaction to HMS Defender’s 36-minute passage through Crimean waters on Wednesday as the British ambassador to Moscow was summoned to the Kremlin. Although a Russian response to the Royal Navy warship’s passage within the 12-mile territorial limit was anticipated, the UK Ministry of Defence did not expect the Kremlin to speedily declare that warning shots had been fired. That dramatically escalated the situation on Wednesday lunchtime, forcing the MoD in London to scramble to establish what had happened, before concluding that the Russians had fired cannon at a safe distance behind the British warship.

“We knew that something might happen, but we didn’t quite expect the Russians to say that,” a defence source said. What had been expected to be a tense, if routine, mission to assert navigation rights in the Black Sea, had escalated into a military and diplomatic incident. The Russian military also claimed that a jet had dropped four bombs in the path of the British destroyer to force it to change course, but that was rapidly debunked, because there was no evidence to support it. Speaking on Thursday, Boris Johnson, the UK prime minister, said the deployment of the HMS Defender was “wholly appropriate” – although Downing St would not confirm whether he personally authorised the mission.

The prime minister added: “The important point is that we don’t recognise the Russian annexation of Crimea. This is part of a sovereign Ukrainian territory, it was entirely right that we should vindicate the law and pursue freedom of navigation in the way that we did, take the shortest route between two points, and that’s what we did.” Russia said it would summon the British ambassador to the foreign ministry in a political escalation after the unexpected diplomatic and military clash in the Black Sea on Wednesday.

Makes you wonder who did the predicting.

• Solar Panels Create 50 Times More Waste Than Predicted, Much Of It Toxic (RT)

Environmentalists’ bright promises of utilising solar energy to power the world are darkening quickly as it becomes clear how much dangerous trash is generated, with tonnes of old panels being discarded in landfill sites. The basic pitch for ‘net zero’ policies to combat climate change is this: a warming world will be devastating, but we can cut emissions down to next-to-nothing by using renewable energy technologies like wind and solar, which will keep on getting cheaper and cheaper. But the idea that we can have it all – energy that is plentiful, zero-carbon, and cheap – is a mirage, at least when it comes to renewables.

There are some obvious, long-standing problems with renewables: what happens when the sun doesn’t shine or the wind doesn’t blow? Some argue in favour of nuclear energy, others for using biomass (which basically means burning wood pellets and planting new trees to soak up the CO2 eventually), while some hope that energy storage using batteries will save the day. Whatever the solution, the problem of low-carbon electricity is going to keep getting bigger as we demand the phasing out of fossil fuels – including a shift to electric cars and banning gas boilers.

Still, renewables do, on the face of it, look like they might be getting cheaper. Solar panels are slowly getting more efficient. More importantly, the price for each panel has plummeted – perhaps by 70 percent. But the total cost of sticking solar panels onto a network has to take into account paying for backup for when those panels aren’t producing power. Yet that backup is very often treated as if it is a separate cost, rather than a necessary consequence of using an intermittent power source. In reality, renewables are a lot more expensive than proponents like to admit. But a new article in the Harvard Business Review points to another cost that is frequently downplayed: waste.

Solar panels are supposed to last for 30 years, and calculations about how much waste will be produced are based on that assumption. The trouble is that as the panels have got cheaper, and a bit more efficient, the economics have changed. Replacing them sooner could make a lot of sense, financially. As the authors of the article point out, that could lead to a tsunami of solar panel waste: “If early replacements occur as predicted by our statistical model, they can produce 50 times more waste in just four years than IRENA [International Renewable Energy Agency] anticipates. That figure translates to around 315,000 metric tonnes of waste, based on an estimate of 90 tonnes per MW weight-to-power ratio.”

And that estimate is just for domestic solar panel users. Throw in commercial users, too, and the mountain of waste will be enormous. Ah, supporters of solar will say, the panels can simply be recycled. But there isn’t much of value to be stripped from old solar panels. They are mostly made of glass, and they’re a pain to remove and transport safely. Recycling could cost $20-$30 per panel. Landfill, by contrast, would cost $1-$2 per panel. So if we’re going to recycle the panels, we need to work out who is going to pay the difference.

We try to run the Automatic Earth on donations. Since ad revenue has collapsed, you are now not just a reader, but an integral part of the process that builds this site. Thank you for your support.

John McAfee

Why power corrupts. pic.twitter.com/cwbKHcaQsd

— John McAfee (@officialmcafee) June 17, 2020

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The Risks to the Fully Vaccinated

Jun 242021

June 24, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 5:32 pm Finance Tagged with: asymptomatic, breakthrough, CDC, deaths, Doc Robinson, hospitalizations, symptomatic, unvaccinated, vaccinated 15 Responses »

Vincent van Gogh Memory of the Garden at Etten (Ladies of Arles) 1888

A bit out of the ordinary, I thought I’d give you a piece from our Comments section yesterday, by highly appreciated commenter “Doc Robinson”. Partly because he spent a lot of time weaving it together from the CDC website, and partly because it’s relevant and even somewhat shocking.

To see that vaccinated people are hospitalized, and die, at an almost twice higher rate than non-vaccinated people, is something that at least deserves much more attention. We have that attention at the Automatic Earth. And sure, we get it, more vulnerable people are more likely to have been vaccinated, but still: a lot of less-vulnerable people have been, too, by now in the US.

And the vaccine story is being heavily skewed towards the “it’s all safe” point of view by media, industry, politics et al. But how reliable is that point of view, and how much of it is just propaganda? Let’s try and find out. You read the data, and you make up your mind. That’s all we ever asked. In that same vein, this is not meant as a definitive thing, we’re just asking questions.

Doc Robinson:

Nearly 4,000 Fully Vaccinated People in Massachusetts Positive for COVID-19

Data for such “breakthrough cases” is being selectively released, and with major spin. I assembled some of the limited data that is available, and made some very rough estimates. It doesn’t look good for the vaccinated.

Among those who get a Covid-19 infection that’s symptomatic, the fully vaccinated (breakthrough cases) have a significantly higher likelihood of hospitalization than the unvaccinated. And looking at the resulting deaths as a percentage of the number of those hospitalized with a Covid-19 infection, the fully vaccinated are dying at a significantly higher rate than the unvaccinated.

Percentage of Symptomatic cases which are Hospitalized:

Unvaccinated 5.8%
Vaccinated 9.4%

Deaths as a percentage of Hospitalized cases:

Unvaccinated 10%
Vaccinated 19%

Below is the data and math behind my estimates (for the US).

For the Unvaccinated:

Covid-19 Symptomatic Illnesses from Feb 2020 to March 2021 (CDC estimate) = 97.1 Million

Covid-19 Hospitalizations from Feb 2020 to March 2021 (CDC estimate) = 5.6 Million

Percentage of Symptomatic cases which are Hospitalized = 5.6/97.1 = 5.8%
(This is the same percentage as for Feb-Dec 2020 when almost zero percent of the population was fully vaccinated.)

Covid-19 Deaths through March 2021 = 0.569 Million [Worldometer]

Deaths as a percentage of Hospitalized cases (unvaccinated) = 0.569/5.6 = 10%

For the Fully Vaccinated:

Using CDC data through April 30
“A total of 10,262 SARS-CoV-2 vaccine breakthrough infections had been reported from 46 U.S. states and territories as of April 30, 2021. Among these cases, 6,446 (63%) occurred in females, and the median patient age was 58 years (interquartile range = 40–74 years). Based on preliminary data, 2,725 (27%) vaccine breakthrough infections were asymptomatic, 995 (10%) patients were known to be hospitalized, and 160 (2%) patients died. Among the 995 hospitalized patients, 289 (29%) were asymptomatic or hospitalized for a reason unrelated to COVID-19… 28 (18%) decedents were asymptomatic or died from a cause unrelated to COVID-19.” [CDC data through April 30]

Number of Symptomatic breakthrough cases = 10,262-2,725 = 7,537

Number of Symptomatic breakthrough cases which are Hospitalized = 995-289 = 706

Percentage of Symptomatic breakthrough cases which are Hospitalized = 706/7,537 = 9.4%

Hospitalized (symptomatic) breakthrough cases resulting in death from Covid-19= 160-28 = 132

Deaths as a percentage of Hospitalized (symptomatic) cases (fully vaccinated) = 132/706 = 19%

Using CDC data through June 14

Hospitalized COVID-19 vaccine breakthrough cases reported to CDC as of June 14 = 3,538
Fatal COVID-19 vaccine breakthrough cases reported to CDC as of June 14 = 671

Deaths as a percentage of Hospitalized cases (fully vaccinated) = 19%

Links to the data used in my comment above:

https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/health-departments/breakthrough-cases.html

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7021e3.htm

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burden.html

https://web.archive.org/web/20210201052324/https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burden.html

For clarification, the disadvantages of vaccination shown in my comment above are only related to Covid-19 infections, and don’t include any hospitalizations or deaths due to adverse reactions from the vaccines.

We try to run the Automatic Earth on donations. Since ad revenue has collapsed, you are now not just a reader, but an integral part of the process that builds this site. Thank you for your support.

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Debt Rattle April 26 2021

Apr 262021

April 26, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:36 am Finance Tagged with: American diet, cheap food, COVID, India, Thailand, Twitter, vaccinated 59 Responses »

Vincent van Gogh Field with Irises near Arles 1888

• EU, UK and US Offer Support As Covid-19 ‘Swallowing’ People In India (EN)

• Global Pledges Of Help For Covid-stricken India (Y!)

• US To Give India Raw Materials For Vaccines, Medical Supplies (CNBC)

• Twitter Admits To Censoring Criticism of The Indian Government (Turley)

• Thai Public Health Miister Defies Calls To Quit Health Post (BKP)

• Dr. Harvey Risch: 60% of New Covid Patients Have Been Vaccinated (WR)

• Vaccinated Americans Will Reportedly Be Allowed Back In Europe This Summer (F.)

• US Set To Be Included On Russia’s New List Of ‘Unfriendly Countries’ (RT)

• Tories Are Reaping The Rewards Of An Economy Built On Rising House Prices (G.)

• The True Costs Of Our Cheap Food And The American Diet (G.)

• Wealthy, Privileged Gather To Lecture Nation On Evils Of Wealth, Privilege (BBee)

This was Saturday. The very next day, the US supposedly led the world in supporting India.

And did we make this connection?

You use it when it’s useful. When it’s not, why bother?

If people let the government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as are the souls of those who live under tyranny.
– Thomas Jefferson

“The virus is swallowing our city’s people like a monster..”

• EU, UK and US Offer Support As Covid-19 ‘Swallowing’ People In India (EN)

The European Union, UK and the United States have pledged to help India as the country battles a devastating surge of COVID-19 infections. For the fourth straight day, India on Sunday set a global daily record of new cases, spurred by an insidious new variant that emerged here. The surge has undermined the government’s premature claims of victory over the pandemic. The 349,691 new infections brought India’s total to more than 16.9 million, behind only the United States. The Health Ministry reported another 2,767 deaths in the past 24 hours, pushing India’s fatalities to 192,311. The death toll could be a huge undercount, as suspected cases are not included, and many COVID-19 deaths are being attributed to underlying conditions.

The crisis is compounded by short supplies of oxygen with families left on their own to ferry people sick with COVID-19 from hospital to hospital in search of treatment. On social media and in television footage, desperate relatives plead for oxygen outside hospitals or weep in the street for loved ones who died waiting for treatment. In response to the spiralling situation in the southeast Asian country, the European Union has activated its Civil Protection Mechanism, which is coordinating with member states to ship oxygen and medicine rapidly.Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen said she was “alarmed by the epidemiological situation in India. We are ready to support.” “The EU is pooling resources to respond rapidly to India’s request for assistance,” she added.

[..] The unfolding crisis is most visceral in India’s overwhelmed graveyards and crematoriums, and in heartbreaking images of gasping patients dying on their way to hospitals due to lack of oxygen. Burial grounds in the capital New Delhi are running out of space. Bright, glowing funeral pyres light up the night sky in other badly hit cities. In the central city of Bhopal, some crematoriums have increased their capacity from dozens of pyres to more than 50. Yet there are still hours-long waits. At the city’s Bhadbhada Vishram Ghat crematorium, workers said they cremated more than 110 people on Saturday, even as government figures in the entire city of 1.8 million put the total number of virus deaths at just 10. “The virus is swallowing our city’s people like a monster,” said Mamtesh Sharma, an official at the site.

“The United States on Sunday led international pledges of support for India..” Bwa ha ha!

• Global Pledges Of Help For Covid-stricken India (Y!)

The United States on Sunday led international pledges of support for India as the country grappled with worsening Covid-19 crisis with record daily death rates and severe medical shortages. The Indian healthcare system has struggled to cope with a huge surge in cases, leaving patients’ families begging for help on social media and the capital New Delhi forced to extend its strict lockdown. Creaking health facilities in poorer countries were also exposed on Sunday when more than 80 people died as fire ripped through a Baghdad hospital for Covid-19 patients, sparking outrage and the suspension of top Iraqi officials. Covid-19 has now killed more than three million people worldwide since emerging in China in December 2019.

India, which has a population of 1.3 billion, has driven increases in global case numbers in recent days, recording 349,691 new infections and 2,767 deaths on Sunday — the highest since the start of the pandemic. Delhi on Sunday reported more than one-quarter of those tested were positive. President Joe Biden said the United States was “determined to help India in its time of need,” immediately making available supplies of vaccine-production material, therapeutics, tests, ventilators and protective equipment. Western nations including Britain, France and Germany have also pledged help. “The United States has identified sources of specific raw material urgently required for Indian manufacture of the Covishield vaccine,” a White House statement said, referring to the India-produced version of the AstraZeneca shot.

But it did not mention whether the US would send millions of surplus AstraZeneca vaccine doses to India, after top US pandemic adviser Anthony Fauci said Sunday that would be considered.

“Sullivan “affirmed America’s solidarity with India..”

• US To Give India Raw Materials For Vaccines, Medical Supplies (CNBC)

The Biden administration said that it will immediately make raw materials needed for India’s coronavirus vaccine production available as the country works to counter the surge of Covid-19 infections. In recent weeks, India has grappled with a staggering rise in new coronavirus infections. Over the weekend, India set another global record for daily cases, bringing the nation’s cumulative total to 16,960,172 cases, according to figures compiled by Johns Hopkins. “Just as India sent assistance to the United States as our hospitals were strained early in the pandemic, the United States is determined to help India in its time of need,” National Security Council spokeswoman Emily Horne said in a statement on Sunday.

Horne added that the United States would send raw materials required for India to manufacture the Covishield vaccine, as well as therapeutics, rapid diagnostic test kits, ventilators and protective equipment. “The U.S. Development Finance Corporation is funding a substantial expansion of manufacturing capability for BioE, the vaccine manufacturer in India, enabling BioE to ramp up to produce at least 1 billion doses of Covid-19 vaccines by the end of 2022,” Horne wrote, adding that the U.S. would also send a team of public health advisors from the Center for Disease Control and USAID to India. The announcement comes on the heels of a Sunday call between Biden National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and India’s National Security Advisor Ajit Doval.

Sullivan “affirmed America’s solidarity with India, the two countries with the greatest number of Covid-19 cases in the world,” according to a readout of the call. The U.S. response comes after Britain, France and Germany pledged aid to India over the weekend. On Sunday, Biden wrote on Twitter that his administration was “determined to help India in its time of need.”

“On Saturday, Twitter complied with the government’s request and prevented people in India from viewing more than 50 tweets that appeared to criticize the administration’s handling of the pandemic. ”

• Twitter Admits To Censoring Criticism of The Indian Government (Turley)

On Saturday, Twitter admitted that it is actively working with the Indian government to censor criticism of its handling of the pandemic as the number of cases and deaths continues to skyrocket. There are widespread reports that the Indian government has misrepresented the number of deaths and the true rate of cases could be as much as 30 times higher than reported. The country has a shortage of beds, oxygen, and other essentials due to a failure to adequately prepare for a new surge. Not surprisingly, the Indian government has moved to crackdown on criticism. This included a call to Twitter to censor such information and Twitter has, of course, complied.

With the support of many Democratic leaders in the United States, Twitter now regularly censors viewpoints in the United States and India had no trouble in enlisting it to crackdown on those raising the alarm over the government handling of the crisis. Buried in an Associated Press story on the raging pandemic and failures of the Indian government are these two lines: “On Saturday, Twitter complied with the government’s request and prevented people in India from viewing more than 50 tweets that appeared to criticize the administration’s handling of the pandemic. The targeted posts include tweets from opposition ministers critical of Modi, journalists and ordinary Indians.”

The article quotes Twitter as saying that it had powers to “withhold access to the content in India only” if the company determined the content to be “illegal in a particular jurisdiction.” Thus, criticism of the government in this context is illegal so Twitter has agreed to become an arm of the government in censoring information. Keep in mind that that some of this information could be true and actually protect lives. It is not “fake news” but efforts by journalists and others to disclose failures by the government that could cost hundreds of thousands of lives.

Et tu Thailand…

• Thai Public Health Miister Defies Calls To Quit Health Post (BKP)

Public Health Minister Anutin Charnvirakul is facing down calls to resign over his failure to contain the Covid-19 crisis. The opposition Move Forward Party on Sunday spoke out on the government’s handling of the third wave of Covid-19 infections, alleging negligence of duty by government officials and the absence of preparations to deal with a resurgence of the virus. The party also slammed the national vaccination drive, saying the government was slow to purchase the required doses. It also criticised the government’s inability to assign beds to Covid-19 patients in a timely manner, after several patients died at home while waiting to be assigned to a treatment facility. All three waves of Covid-19 infections in the country were caused by the government’s complacency and discrimination in enforcing disease control measures, the party said.

The party demanded the minister’s immediate resignation and called on the government to consider its suggestions on the Covid-19 situation.One patient who died at home while waiting to be transferred was an 85-year-old woman living in a shophouse in Bang Kholaem district, where in total six elderly residents were found to be infected. Mr Anutin said he was sorry for the death and promising the ministry will work harder to find beds for those who need them the most. Many experts have warned that unless action is taken, home deaths could follow the same sharp upward trajectory seen in other countries during similar stages of the outbreak. This comes amid reports that some people with Covid are choosing to stay at home rather than seek outside help, possibly endangering other members of the household.

That’s quite something if true.

• Dr. Harvey Risch: 60% of New Covid Patients Have Been Vaccinated (WR)

Dr. Risch reveals a bombshell: 60 percent of new covid patients have been vaccinated.

“..individual countries may be able keep tougher guidelines in for tourists..”

• Vaccinated Americans Will Reportedly Be Allowed Back In Europe This Summer (F.)

American holidaymakers who have received a coronavirus vaccine will be permitted to enter the European Union in time for summer vacation thanks to the success of the U.S. vaccine rollout, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told the New York Times Sunday.The timing of the imminent policy change is still unclear, and will depend on the spread of the virus in both the U.S. and Europe over the next few months, Von der Leyen said told the newspaper.The U.S. has made “huge progress” in their vaccine rollout, she noted, and added she hopes the epidemiological situation in Europe will also improve. Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines, the three that are being distributed within the U.S., have all been approved by the European agency, which Von der Leyen said means they’ll be accepted at European borders.

Discussions between Washington, D.C. and Brussels regarding how travelers will demonstrate they’ve been vaccinated are still ongoing, the Times reported. Transatlantic travel has largely been barred since March 2020, when the onset of the coronavirus pandemic shut down much of society. In recent weeks, countries like France and Greece have hinted they will permit vaccinated American travelers to return to their countries this summer for a much-needed tourism boost. The Times reported that while Von de Leyen is onboard for Americans traveling within the EU, individual countries may be able keep tougher guidelines in for tourists, like mandatory quarantine periods or blocking international travelers altogether.

“..the states that are declared unfriendly “won’t be able to hire Russian citizens to work at their diplomatic and consular missions..”

• US Set To Be Included On Russia’s New List Of ‘Unfriendly Countries’ (RT)

Moscow is putting together a list of unfriendly nations and the US is “obviously” going to be on it, the foreign ministry has revealed. The blacklist is in response to the recent unfriendly moves by the Americans and their allies. Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova explained on Sunday that work on the schedule of states considered to be hostile began after “another round of unfriendly actions by the US. “What are those unfriendly states? The list is being compiled now,” she outlined in an interview with the Rossiya 1 TV channel. “As you understand, and I can confirm it, the US is, obviously, present” on it, Zakharova said, without naming any other countries involved.

In accordance with a decree recently signed by Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, the states that are declared unfriendly “won’t be able to hire Russian citizens to work at their diplomatic and consular missions,” Zakharova added. A fresh diplomatic standoff between Moscow and Washington erupted in mid-April after US President Joe Biden ordered the expulsion of 10 Russian diplomats, accusing the Kremlin of interference in the 2020 US presidential election and of involvement in last year’s SolarWinds cyber-espionage incident. More than 30 Russian individuals and organizations were also sanctioned, while American companies were barred from directly buying shares in Russia’s national debt.

Moscow denied all of Washington’s claims and came up with a tit-for-tat response, asking ten American diplomats to leave and promising measures that would bar US funds and NGOs from interfering in Russian internal affairs.

“There may be no better symbol of our new national priorities than the “Stanley Johnson clause” in the Covid travel rules announced last month, which allows visits to property overseas but not family.”

• Tories Are Reaping The Rewards Of An Economy Built On Rising House Prices (G.)

It was 14 years ago, in the summer of 2007, that the first signs of the global financial crisis appeared: the liquidation of two hedge funds heavily invested in mortgage-backed securities, and the start of the collapse of Northern Rock. This is more than enough time for a new economic model to take shape. After all, 14 years after Richard Nixon signalled the end of the “Keynesian” era by disbanding the fixed exchange rates system that shaped the post-1945 economy, Margaret Thatcher was on the cusp of her third election victory, and London was awash with “yuppies” making fast money out of the stock market. The picture of Britain’s post-crash economic settlement was clear even before the dramatic impact of Covid. To put it bluntly, the proceeds of economic growth in the UK now flow entirely to asset-owners – including homeowners.

Study after study has shown that in the decade after the financial crisis, average real wages simply stopped rising – something that had never happened in two centuries of industrial capitalism. And yet, Britain’s housing market defies all economic threats and shocks. While wages have stagnated, the average British house price is now approximately 50% higher than it was in January 2009, and in London around double. While the economic crisis of 2007-9 was accompanied by a housing crash, the first year of Covid-19 saw a boom in property prices. In 2020, London overtook Hong Kong and New York for the number of “super-luxury” properties (costing more than $10m) sold. There may be no better symbol of our new national priorities than the “Stanley Johnson clause” in the Covid travel rules announced last month, which allows visits to property overseas but not family.

The UK’s ratio of housing wealth to GDP is now above the level seen in Japan before its historic crash in 1991 – but there is no sign that policymakers wish to alter the place of housing wealth in the UK economy, or indeed its dominant imprint on our politics. George Osborne’s refusal to use fiscal policy to support the economy after 2010 meant that the UK became even more dependent on monetary policy – very low interest rates and quantitative easing – which simply allowed more money to be poured into assets, hugely enriching asset-owners at the expense of everyone else.

Interview with bestselling food writer Oliver Milman about his new book Animal, Vegetable, Junk.

“if you look at a chart of health care costs versus food costs, it’s perfect like this. As food costs go up, healthcare costs go down. And as food costs go down, health care costs go up.”

• The True Costs Of Our Cheap Food And The American Diet (G.)

There was a time that almost everyone farmed and grew food for themselves and their neighbors and or trade, local trade and so on. But at some point, surplus became more important than feeding people. Growing food, or growing crops in order to sell them and make money became more important than growing crops to feed people. And that process accelerated since 1500, or whenever you want to say capitalism began. To the point where, in the States at least, 95% of crops are basically grown as cash crops. And the question is almost never ‘What is the land telling us we want to grow? What can we grow that will be most beneficial for our community? What can I grow that’s most nutritious that will damage the land as little as possible?’ Those are not questions that are being asked.

The questions that are being asked or the question that’s being asked is ‘How can I make the most money possible with this land?’ Sometimes that means just selling the land for development. But often, it means growing one crop at a time. And it’s a crop that’s either directly or indirectly subsidized, like corn or soybeans. And it’s a crop that mostly goes into junk food or animal feed, or even ethanol, which is obviously not food at all. I really think the enclosure of the commons was a big deal. When the nobility started dictating to peasants what should be grown and how it should be sold and to whom it should be sold. And peasants began to run out of land to grow food for themselves and their families. That was one of the driving factors in the industrial revolution. And we’ve just seen that accelerate.

[..] One of the most damning statistics is that close to 50% of the food that’s available is in the form of ultra processed food. So ultra processed food is what I call junk food. What many of us call junk food. And it means food that contains non-food ingredients; food that your grandmother, great grandmother, maybe at this point wouldn’t have recognized as food. Food that you can’t cook yourself. Food that you don’t find in your own kitchen in the normal course of cooking and eating. A food that didn’t exist before the 20th century. [..] if you look at a chart of health care costs versus food costs, it’s perfect like this. As food costs go up, healthcare costs go down. And as food costs go down, health care costs go up. So cheap food, that’s a direct correlation. Cheap food has had a terrible impact on public health. As every country switches from a traditional diet to a more American diet, their rates of chronic disease go up. In every single instance. And yet we cannot get government to consider this a crisis.

Oscars.

• Wealthy, Privileged Gather To Lecture Nation On Evils Of Wealth, Privilege (BBee)

According to sources at the 91st annual Academy Awards ceremony this evening, the nation’s wealthy, privileged elite gathered to lecture the nation on the horrendous evils of wealth and privilege. The wealthiest 0.00001% of the nation arrived at the exclusive, walled-off, high-security event in limos and luxury cars driven by servants in order to spend a few hours telling the nation’s poor and middle-class citizens how they need to throw off the yoke of oppression put on them by the wealthy elite.

“It’s the white, privileged, wealth hoarders that are ruining America,” said one white, privileged man whose net worth is estimated at $160 million. “All you people in the cheap seats at home: you need to do better.” “America is just a terrible nation with no opportunity,” said one woman who made $100 million wearing costumes and reading words someone else wrote off a page. “We must stop the 1% from hoarding all the wealth.” Upon being informed she was well within the 1%, she clarified that it was actually the 0.000001% who are the problem. Unfortunately, it looks like the event will proceed as planned next year as well.

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We’ve arranged a society based on science and technology in which nobody understands anything about science and technology. This combustible mixture of ignorance and power, sooner or later, is gonna blow up in our faces.
– Carl Sagan, May 27th, 1996

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