Vitamin D Archives - Page 3 of 4 - The Automatic Earth

My message to my fellow Americans and friends around the world following this week's attack on the Capitol. pic.twitter.com/blOy35LWJ5

— Arnold (@Schwarzenegger) January 10, 2021

Hotep

Epic rant by @UncleHotep

Let the truth be told about the 6th. pic.twitter.com/SLPfRzWI3g

— Hotep Jesus (@HotepJesus) January 10, 2021

“..his first ever tweet on May 4, 2009 was “Be sure to tune in and watch Donald Trump on Late Night with David Letterman as he presents the Top Ten List tonight!”

• A Fond Farewell To Donald Trump’s Twitter Feed (Stone)

The president has lost both the Oval Office and his beloved Twitter account. His posts were hilarious, mad, and occasionally dangerous – but, God, it’s been a helluva ride. @realDonaldTrump, we’ll miss you. Donald Trump governed by social media. Tweeting from bed in his teddy bear pyjamas or on his sofa in front of a huge TV screen, sometimes from a buggy on his golf course. It was never gonna end well, and now it’s all over. Twitter permanently suspended his account yesterday, and he has been indefinitely hoofed off Facebook and Instagram. There are only so many teenage temper tantrums you can have until an adult takes away your smartphone.

Plenty of people say the dumbest things on social media, but they’re not usually the 74-year-old president of the most powerful country in the world, with more than 6,000 nuclear warheads and 1.3 million active duty troops ready to go. Their words don’t rock stock markets. Trump’s Twitter journey all started in pretty limp fashion; his first ever tweet on May 4, 2009 was “Be sure to tune in and watch Donald Trump on Late Night with David Letterman as he presents the Top Ten List tonight!” Just some bland, promotional pap selling the Trump brand. Seven years later, and he was about to be elected president – who’d have thought? That chubby orange-faced dude off ‘The Apprentice’, that serial bankrupt who erected gaudy apartment blocks and casinos and had a steady stream of pneumatic looking wives?

Nah. Don’t be ridiculous. That’s never gonna happen. His first tweet as president was: “I am honered to serve you, the great American people, as your 45th President of the United States!” The typo proved it was really him, and not some public relations drone. He later explained: “My use of social media is not Presidential – it’s MODERN DAY PRESIDENTIAL.” Righto. He has sent thousands of tweets – and retweets such as “If Hillary Clinton can’t satisfy her husband what makes her think she can satisfy America?” Which, uncharacteristically, he deleted. In early June 2020, during the police brutality protests, he sent exactly 200 tweets and retweets in a single day. This being Donald Trump, he didn’t get the irony that this tweet storm came shortly after he’d signed an executive order to regulate the platform after it fact checked one of his tweets. His previous record had been 142, during his impeachment trial in January 2020.

The risks of censorship.

• A Masterclass In Media Control For Dictators Around The World (Dockery)

Cutting off an opponent’s access to the media is step one in the regime change playbook, and the US government would know, having written several of them. When US-sponsored protesters deposed Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic in 2000, the first building they seized after parliament was a TV station. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan avoided a communications blackout by using FaceTime to address the public during an attempted coup against him in 2016. Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak cut off internet access as protesters organized against him in 2011. Every coup or counter-coup hinges on media control, and the only difference between the deplatforming of Trump and the examples above are that for the first time, foreign regime-change strategies are being openly deployed by Americans, against Americans, in America.

As the country’s most despicable journalists and pundits cheer for the unaccountable tech tyrants, budding dictators abroad are surely taking notes. Building relationships with the tech titans is the modern equivalent of seizing a television studio, and popular movements can be easily suppressed with their cooperation. If the world’s loudest and proudest democracy is doing it, why can’t they? And who’s to say Silicon Valley’s giants themselves would stop at the US border? What is to stop them taking a dislike to some politician overseas and snuffing them out like Donald Trump? After all if the leader of the most powerful nation on Earth can be deleted, what chance do the rest of them have?

Back in the US, Trump has far more supporters than the mob who broke into the Capitol on Wednesday. He has 75 million of them, more than the population of the UK. Denied the opportunity to speak freely online and with their views branded as “extremist,” would anyone be surprised if they decided to take more drastic action? After all, the regime change manual closes with a warning: an attempted coup only ever addresses “immediate issues and short-term, rather than longer-term, interests.” For the US, these long-term consequences could have the political class pining for a return to Wednesday’s hooliganism.

I’m not in favor of big words like that.

• The “Crisis” is Corporate Liberal Authoritarianism (Tracey)

The mob that barged into the Capitol Building on Wednesday accomplished a few things. First, it cemented the electoral demise of Donald Trump, whose termination from the presidency was merely delayed for a few hours by the chaos. Second, it put forward a public perception of Trump’s most ardent supporters as a collection of conspiracy-addled violent loons. Third, it humiliated and discredited Trump, who meekly conceded defeat the following day. There was no real “coup attempt,” despite incessant politician and media histrionics to that effect. Just a pitiful outburst that was quickly dispersed. It was clear within about ten minutes of the intrusion that the most severe consequences would stem not from the incident itself, but the deliberately-stoked over-reaction.

The bipartisan political and media class, whether cynically or sincerely, is broadcasting their steadfast conviction that this was something like a “MAGA Terrorist Insurrection” — which is literally how it’s being described on CNN. Under such allegedly extreme circumstances, of course extreme remedial action is going to be demanded. Few entities capitulate to upswells of political hysteria more reliably than the tech companies. Knowing that there will soon be a Democratic presidential administration and Congress to appease, they launched this week what is the most drastic corporate censorship offensive in modern history. Not only was Trump banished from Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter — the latter being his primary communications platform (for better or worse) — multiple high-profile Trump allies were likewise purged.

Steve Bannon was nuked from YouTube. Trump and his supporters are being neutralized online not because he currently poses any kind of bonafide “threat” to the Republic, but because his enemies are desperate for revenge. And they have been gifted with a perfect “crisis” that will justify their getting it. The expulsion of Trump from Twitter was celebrated rapturously by journalists whose conception of the job has markedly shifted away from anything to do with the preservation of protected speech. Instead, they are far more interested in asserting their political and cultural dominance, punishing those perceived to be undesirables, and functioning almost like a collective Human Resources social pressure department. Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Twitter — collectively more powerful than most nation states — have become willing partners in this endeavor.

The rats and the ship.

• PGA Strips Major Golf Championship From Donald Trump’s Bedminster Course (G.)

The PGA of America has announced that it has moved the 2022 PGA Championship from Donald Trump’s Bedminster course in the wake of the invasion of the US Capitol. “The PGA of America Board of Directors voted tonight to exercise the right to terminate the agreement to play the 2022 PGA Championship at Trump Bedminster,’’ said Jim Richerson, president of the PGA of America. Bedminster, located in New Jersey, had been awarded the tournament in 2012, before Trump’s run for the presidency. It was the first time one of his courses had been chosen to host a men’s major although Bedminster hosted the women’s PGA in 2017. The tournament is due to be played in May 2022, and alternative venues include Bethpage Black, Southern Hills and Valhalla.

“We find ourselves in a political situation note of our making,’’ said Seth Waugh, the CEO of the PGA of America, in an interview with the Associated Press. “We’re fiduciaries for our members, for the game, for our mission and for our brand. And how do we best protect that? Our feeling was given the tragic events of Wednesday that we could no longer hold it at Bedminster. The damage could have been irreparable. The only real course of action was to leave.” The Trump Organization said they were disappointed with the decision. “This is a breach of a binding contract and they have no right to terminate the agreement,” a spokesperson told ABC on Sunday. “As an organization we have invested many, many millions of dollars in the 2022 PGA Championship at Trump National Golf Club, Bedminster. We will continue to promote the game of golf on every level and remain focused on operating the finest golf courses anywhere in the world.”

Can’t catch a break.

• Payment Processor Stripe Cuts Ties With Trump Campaign (Hill)

Payment processing company Stripe cut ties with President Trump’s campaign after his supporters rioted at the Capitol last week, a person familiar with the matter confirmed to The Hill on Sunday. Stripe, a San Francisco-based company that manages online card payments for several businesses, will stop processing payments to the campaign, saying the campaign violated its policies against encouraging violence after a pro-Trump mob stormed and vandalized the Capitol. The company requests that users not collect payments for “high risk” activities, including for any business or organization that “engages in, encourages, promotes or celebrates unlawful violence or physical harm to persons or property,” according to its website.

“Neither Trump of Biden would save that baby and the many others like it. The Saudi kingdom, is a profitable friend.”

• Whispers In The Wind (Robinson)

Millions of humans lead their lives despite the petty and often pathetic self importance of US partisan politics and yet somehow, the American empire finds them. Whether it is a drone hovering high above, visiting with random murder or a blockade of warships enforcing an almost ancient embargo, it is the American prevalence in all of our lives that seems to be destroying not only the US itself, but the wider world. And when a victor emerges, the world still gets war. Mostly American wars. These are not civil riots protests that waved a fist against state led bigotry, nor are they anti conscription riots over government forcing individuals to fight overseas in another war. Such past riots, have had limited impact in quelling the growth of government or in tempering its destructive might.

Journalist Julian Assange is held captive in legal purgatory, punished for revealing the crimes of war mongers and lifting the up the skirt of many governments. Ross Ulbricht a prisoner because he created a website, the details of his conviction would make for an unbelievable fiction and yet it was all too real. Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning are pariah patriots, believers in the religious texts that most Americans claim to uphold and yet most of the voting public and voted for rulers disregard the details of such a constitution and Bill of Rights. And millions of poor and desperate foreigners live and die in the frontiers of foreign policy, their homes and day to day ruined so that macho sounding politicians can profit by propping up tyrannies of maniacal madness. Inside the prisons of the US itself are thousands of convicts punished for victimless crimes, the prohibitions and regulations of a cancerous government that claims to be for freedom, when in fact it dissolves it at every chance. The protests are not for any of them.

A small child, perhaps now dead, coiled in infant agony, starved as its innocent eyes bulged in anguish fronted recent articles covering the desperate situation in Yemen. A situation that would be impossible if not for the aid and assistance of the US and it’s imperial allies. Neither Trump of Biden would save that baby and the many others like it. The Saudi kingdom, is a profitable friend. The protesters that support the two coins of US partisan politics do not care about the children of Yemen either. One needs not look too far to find the victims of foreign policy, recent and distant to see the true outcome of such actions, but it seems few actually care to. And should they be presented with such facts and terrible images, a religious fog washes across their eyes, allowing them to either dismiss or contextualize the murder and suffering. But a slob tweeting from the toilet or a hair sniffing buffoon are both credible enough to lead, and be despised because they are not the other.

Not a popular POV these days.

• Trump Said ‘Cheer On Congress… Peacefully’ At Morning White House Rally (NP)

Despite insistence from the mainstream media, Democratic Party, and establishment Republicans that President Trump incited violence at the U.S. Capitol, his morning speech at the White House did precisely the opposite.
As the final speaker of the Save America March in Washington, D.C., President Trump insisted his supporters would “peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard” at the Capitol following his speech. “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and we’re going to cheer on our brave Senators and Congressmen and women,” he outlined – never calling for protestors to breach the building or use physical force. In full his remarks read:

“And after this, we’re going to walk down, and I’ll be there with you. We’re going to walk down. We’re going to walk down anyone you want, but I think right here. We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and we’re going to cheer on our brave Senators and Congressmen and women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong. We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated, lawfully slated. I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard. Today we will see whether Republicans stand strong for integrity.”

Even if it’s true that the challenges contributed to the riots, don’t they have the right to challenge?

• House Democrat’s Resolution To Expel Republicans Who Challenged Election (JTN)

A freshman House Democrat is preparing a resolution to introduce Monday to expel Republican lawmakers who supported challenges to the 2020 election results. Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.), said Sunday in a tweet she believes the election challenges contributed to the deadly riot inside the Capitol on Wednesday. “Tomorrow, I’m introducing my resolution to expel the members of Congress who tried to overturn the election and incited a white supremacist coup attempt that has left people dead,” Bush tweeted. “They have violated the 14th Amendment. We can’t have unity without accountability,” she wrote.

Robber barons.

• War Of The -Financial- Worlds (Nomi Prins)

In The War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells evokes a species — humanity — rendered helpless in the face of a force greater than itself and beyond its control. His depiction of the grim relationship between the Martians and the humans they were suppressing (meant to remind readers of the relationship between British imperialists and those they suppressed in distant lands) cast an eerie light on the power and wealth gap in Great Britain and around the world at the turn of the twentieth century. The book was written in the Gilded Age, when rapid economic growth, particularly in the United States, bred a new class of “robber barons.” Like the twenty-first-century version of such beings, they, too, made money from their money, while the economic status of workers slipped ever lower.

It was an early version of a zero-sum game in which the spoils of the system were increasingly beyond the reach of so many. Those at the top ferociously accumulated wealth, while the majority of the rest of the population barely got by or drowned. A crisis of inequality had been sparked by the Industrial Revolution itself, which started in England and then crossed the Atlantic. By the late nineteenth century, America’s “robber barons” were insanely wealthy. As economist Thomas Piketty wrote, there was a steeper increase in wealth inequality during the Gilded Age than ever before in American history. In 1810, the top 1% of Americans held 25% of the country’s total wealth; between 1870 and 1910 that share leapt to 45%. Today, the top 1% of Americans possess more wealth than the whole of the middle class, a phenomenon first true in 2010 and still the reality of our moment.

By 2018, about 75% of the $113 trillion in aggregate U.S. household assets were financial ones; that is, tied up in stocks, ETF’s, 401Ks, IRAs, mutual funds, and similar investments. The majority of nonfinancial assets in that mix was in real estate. Even before the pandemic, only the richest 20% of American households had recovered fully (or, in the case of the truly wealthy, more than fully) from the financial crisis. That’s mostly because since that crisis, fewer households had participated in the stock market or owned real estate and so had no chance to capitalize on increases in the values of either. Much of the appreciation in stock market and real-estate values has been directly or indirectly related to the Fed’s actions. By the end of December 2020, its balance sheet had increased by $3.164 trillion, reaching a total of $7.35 trillion, 63% more than its book at the height of the decade following the 2008 disaster.

Shill.

• 25 Organizations Say Victoria Nuland Should Be Rejected (CN)

Victoria Nuland, former foreign policy adviser to vice president Dick Cheney, should not be nominated for undersecretary of state [for political affairs], and if nominated should be rejected by the Senate. Nuland played a key role in facilitating a coup in Ukraine that created a civil war costing 10,000 lives and displacing over a million people. She played a key role in arming Ukraine as well. She advocates radically increased military spending, NATO expansion, hostility toward Russia, and efforts to overthrow the Russian government. The United States invested $5 billion in shaping Ukrainian politics, including overthrowing a democratically elected president who had refused to join NATO. Then-Assistant Secretary of State Nuland is on video talking about the U.S. investment and on audiotape planning to install Ukraine’s next leader, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, who was subsequently installed.

The Maidan protests, at which Nuland handed out cookies to protesters, were violently escalated by neo-Nazis and by snipers who opened fire on police. When Poland, Germany, and France negotiated a deal for the Maidan demands and an early election, neo-Nazis instead attacked the government and took over. The U.S. State Department immediately recognized the coup government, and Arseniy Yatsenyuk was installed as Prime Minister. Nuland has worked with the openly pro-Nazi Svoboda Party in Ukraine. She was long a leading proponent of arming Ukraine. She was also an advocate for removing from office the prosecutor general of Ukraine, whom then-Vice President Joe Biden pushed the president to remove.

Nuland wrote this past year that “The challenge for the United States in 2021 will be to lead the democracies of the world in crafting a more effective approach to Russia—one that builds on their strengths and puts stress on Putin where he is vulnerable, including among his own citizens.” She added: “…Moscow should also see that Washington and its allies are taking concrete steps to shore up their security and raise the cost of Russian confrontation and militarization. That includes maintaining robust defense budgets, continuing to modernize U.S. and allied nuclear weapons systems, and deploying new conventional missiles and missile defenses, . . . establish permanent bases along NATO’s eastern border, and increase the pace and visibility of joint training exercises.”

Oh, yes, our moral standards.

• Britain Set To Outlaw Chinese Imports With Links To Human Rights Abuse (Sun)

Britain is to square up to China — by outlawing imports with any links to human rights abuse. Dominic Raab will use the Modern Slavery Act to make firms root out items which are made using forced labour. The Foreign Secretary will also toughen up laws around exporting British goods or technology to China that could be used for repression. The plans will be outlined to MPs tomorrow. Britain’s diplomatic ties with Beijing have been strained since claims China tried to cover up the Covid outbreak and following attacks on democracy campaigners in Hong Kong. The Foreign Office has spoken of “deeply troubling” evidence of Uyghur Muslims forced to produce cotton.

There are fears the textile industry is doing too little due diligence on goods from Xinjiang Province where the Uyghurs are forced to live in “re-education camps”. But to the dismay of some MPs and campaigners, it is understood Britain will not sanction Communist officials linked to camps and forced sterilization programmes. Officials from Russia, Saudi Arabia and North Korea have been banned from entering Britain or using UK banks. But Whitehall insiders said the so-called Magnitsky powers are not expected to be deployed in China — although it is believed ministers have them in their sights.

What comes after central banks go nuts.

• Vietnam And China Buy Indian Rice For First Time In Decades (ZH)

One month ago, we reported that SocGen’s bearish analyst Albert Edwards, who is traditionally well ahead of the curve, looked at charts of soaring food prices and was starting to “panic.” Edwards’ research report concluded by urging his readers to “keep a very close eye as to whether we see a repeat of the 2010/11 surge in food prices” because “on the 10th anniversary of the start of the Arab Spring, and with poverty having already been made much worse by the pandemic, another food price bubble could well be the straw to break the very angry camel’s back.” And while it’s not quite the spring of 2011 just yet (give it a few months) it’s getting dangerously close.

As Rithesh Jain from the World out of Whack blog writes, citing an article in the Reuters, “Vietnam, the world’s third biggest exporter of rice, has started buying the grain from rival India for the first time in decades after local prices jumped to their highest in nine years amid limited domestic supplies.” “For the first time we are exporting to Vietnam,” B.V. Krishna Rao, president of the Rice Exporters Association, told Reuters on Monday. “Indian prices are very attractive. The huge price difference is making exports possible.” Dwindling supplies and continued Philippine buying have lifted Vietnamese rice export prices to a fresh nine-year high.

Vietnam’s 5% broken rice is offered around $500-$505 per tonne, significantly higher compared to Indian prices of $381-$387. This means that, as we have been warning for the past few months, food inflation is indeed back with a vengeance: The purchases underscore tightening supplies in Asia, which could lift rice prices in 2021 and even force traditional buyers of rice from Thailand and Vietnam to switch to India – the world’s biggest exporter of the grain.

Study after study being required. But not for the vaccines.

• Does Vitamin D Combat Covid? (G.)

In March, the government’s scientific advisers examined existing evidence and decided there wasn’t enough to act upon. But in April, dozens of doctors wrote to the British Medical Journal describing the correction of vitamin D deficiencies as “a safe, simple step” that “convincingly holds out a potential, significant, feasible Covid-19 mitigation remedy”. In the Newcastle hospitals, patients found to be vitamin D-deficient were given extremely high oral doses of the nutrient, often up to 750 times the daily measure recommended by Public Health England. In July, clinicians wrote to the journal Clinical Endocrinology to share their initial outcomes. Of the first 134 coronavirus patients given vitamin D, 94 had been discharged, 24 were still receiving inpatient care, and 16 had died. The clinicians hadn’t clearly associated vitamin D levels with overall death rates, but only three patients with high levels of the nutrient died, and all of them were frail and in their 90s.

Increasingly, others followed the lead of the Newcastle doctors and began taking the vitamin themselves. During the first months of the pandemic, up to 1,000 NHS staff received free wellness packs – including vitamin C, vitamin D and zinc – from a voluntary initiative called the Frontline Immune Support Team, after informal demand from clinicians. And as sales of vitamin D supplements significantly increased, some doctors informally recommended it to patients. In a letter, the British Association of Physicians of Indian Origin advised its members to take the nutrient, though it was not made official policy. “We believe that vitamin D3 deficiency is a major risk factor for severe coronavirus infection, for which there is accumulating evidence,” the letter said.

[..] In 1940, when Churchill’s government feared people were particularly at risk of the musculoskeletal condition rickets, margarine companies were ordered to fortify their products with vitamin D “to safeguard the nutritional status of the nation”. (Back then, the nutrient was universally thought only to impact bone and muscle health, rather than having any effect on immune or metabolic health.) Margarine was fortified with vitamin D until 2013, when the government decided that fortification was unnecessary “gold-plating”. It became industry standard to include the nutrient within other fat spreads, but for six years there has been no legal obligation to do so.

To the former Brexit secretary David Davis, the failure to fortify a wider group of foods seems unacceptable. Like clinicians at the height of the first wave of the pandemic, he couldn’t understand why vitamin D wasn’t being pursued as a viable coronavirus treatment. Davis is a Conservative MP with a molecular science degree. In May, he urged the health secretary, Matt Hancock, to review the evidence and consider a free supplement scheme to reverse vitamin D deficiencies, citing the letter sent to the BMJ. Up to 40% of the population is estimated to be vitamin D-deficient this winter.

[..] it is only a Spanish study, conducted in early September, that came close to incontrovertibly proving low vitamin D levels have a pivotal role in causing increased death rates. There, 50 patients with Covid-19 were given a high dose of vitamin D, while another 26 patients did not receive the nutrient. Half of patients who weren’t given vitamin D had to be placed in intensive care, and two later died. Only one patient who received vitamin D required ICU admission, and they were later released with no further complications.

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Virus 1 – Media 0

Dec 192020

December 19, 2020 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 7:35 pm Finance Tagged with: algorithms, Covid19, HCQ, ivermectin, Moderna, mRNA, MSM, Pfizer, society, Trump, vaccine, Vitamin D 10 Responses »

Salvador Dalí Mi esposa desnuda 1945

Over the past 5 years I’ve addressed this numerous times, and it just goes on. When the MSM, WaPo, NYT, CNN, MSNBC, started to feel a real threat to their existence and survival from social media, they changed course radically. They no longer attempted to inform people, they began to shape their readers’ and watchers’ opinions. And it worked.

That change appears to bear fruit. The WaPo announced the other day they’re hiring 150 more “reporters”. Who are not really reporters, in the new setting they’re more like narrators. They’re servants to the narratives favored by editors and owners, the ones they expect -and know- to generate the most clickbaits.

Superficially, the media landscape sort of still looks the same, same logos, same slogans, but below the surface everything has changed. What’s important is no longer News, but the favored interpretation of it. It seems to work miracles for the MSM, but it’s dangerous for the nation. Because: where are you going to get your news, on the basis of which you can form your own opinion?

And if you can’t get news that doesn’t already have an inbuilt opinion, how are you supposed to have a opinion of your own? At the end of the day, you will be left with a nation that is poorly informed and has no opinions of its own. Everyone just regurgitates opinions forced upon them 24/7.

The main difference with 5 years ago is probably that social media have joined the MSM in their strategy. They now all force-shape opinions for clickbait. And nobody puts a loophole in their way:

Facebook Joins Twitter In Reverting To Pre-Election News Feed Algorithms

Facebook has reversed its election-season policy of prioritizing mainstream media stories in News Feed after a similar move from Twitter. This is as Mark Zuckerberg is sued for allegedly helping tip the vote in favor of Joe Biden. An algorithm tweak that saw Facebook users deluged with mainstream media stories following last month’s elections has been reversed, the social media behemoth told the New York Times on Wednesday, insisting that the change – which significantly boosted traffic for establishment outlets like CNN, NPR, and the Times itself while suppressing alt-media and right-wing sites – was never meant to be permanent.

Boosting the importance of “news ecosystem quality,” essentially a reputational score applied to news outlets, was “a temporary change we made to help limit the spread of inaccurate claims about the election,” Facebook spokesman Joe Osborne told the outlet. He explained that the platform was still prioritizing so-called “authoritative and informative news” on “important global topics like elections, Covid-19 and climate change.” The tech giant opted to return to pre-election policies despite the protests of some employees who preferred the “nicer news feed,” sources present at one post-vote Facebook meeting claimed, describing the prioritization of establishment sources as one of several “break glass measures” designed for the care and feeding of a desirable post-election narrative.

And that feeds through to all news:

Twitter To Remove Tweets That Spread Lies About COVID Vaccines

Twitter will remove tweets that spread harmful misinformation, starting with the Covid-19 vaccine, the company has announced – and from 2021 it will begin to label tweets that push conspiracy theories. The move sees the company follow Facebook and YouTube in tightening up policies around the coronavirus vaccination as the rollout of the jab begins across the world. “Starting next week, we will prioritise the removal of the most harmful misleading information,” the US company said in a blogpost. “And during the coming weeks, we will begin to label tweets that contain potentially misleading information about the vaccines.”

This is of course not about lies about vaccines, it’s about questions about vaccines. We are not supposed or allowed to ask questions about them, we’re supposed to take them and shut up. Emergency, don’t you know?! More on that in a minute. First, let’s step back 5 years or so.

The MSM were very quick in denouncing Trump’s candidacy for President. That then led to -much- more of the same when he was elected, by which time they realized Trump meant more clickbait than they could ever have imagined, and that in turn became the Mueller investigation. “Based” on blatant lies and propaganda, it was all reported as “news” for 3-4 years.

More such empty nonsense then led to the impeachment procedure, which the current Hunter Biden probe entirely cuts down to size: there were plenty reasons for Trump to ask Zelensky to look into Hunter’s history with Burisma. And then some. But the one half of Americans who get their “news” from the MSM will have completely missed that, just like they now miss what really goes on in Hunter world.

Negative stories about Trump generate clickbait, and not-so-negative ones do not. That right there is your entire American media landscape today, and yes, again, it’s dangerous for the nation. It’s bad enough if people draw different conclusions from the same news, but it’s a whole other story if they have don’t have access to the news in the first place, but only to half of it, boiled and brewed in a narrative sauce.

Similarly, it took the MSM barely more than 5 minutes to declare Joe Biden the president-elect, even though they know that’s not their announcement to make. They just do it, because they trust their audience won’t notice the difference. Still, that, too, is dangerous.

Which leads us, seamlessly, into the vaccine reporting. It would appear that today is THE day to question the vaccines being rolled out by the billions, but the media tell us we’re not supposed, or allowed, to do that. Take your shot and shut your face.

But the “approved” vaccines so far, the Pfizer and Moderna ones, are based on an entirely new and untested technology, messenger RNA. Could they work, could they be a new frontline for medicine? Yes, perhaps they could. But shouldn’t their mid- and long term effects be assessed? Of course they should. mRNA is being treated like GMOs, which lobby to be declared safe as soon as someone doesn’t drop dead in the first hours. While we’re playing games across generations with our own genetic material.

And at the same time that the mRNA vaccines are being rushed through, potentially much less questionable approaches, like vitamin D, hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, are said to need much more research before they can be rolled out. That looks like there’s a game being played, and the MSM are a big player in it. Nothing to do with reporting the news, but with only a part of it.

We’re getting lost in a -dark?- web of opinions disguised as news. We can not ask the questions that we know everyone should ask. The Moderna mRNA vaccine was approved in the US the other day as it was simultaneously found to offer immunity for just 2 months. And on the basis of that, vaccination passports are being prepared for all of our societies. While we might find much better protection in vitamin D, HCQ and ivermectin. Or the Russian and Chinese vaccines. But those must not be discussed.

Are lockdowns a good idea? From what I can see, only in the short term. And we’re already way past the short term. Beyond that, you start ripping apart society itself, you start tearing down what makes society function, i.e. the people in it, and their interactions. Without which those people won’t be the same people anymore.

We can pretend we still have societies without people’s contacts and interactions, but the longer it takes, the more it becomes pretense. It’s interesting to see how politicians and their scientific advisors behave, and manage to hold on to power and public trust, but if you watch the performance of the media, it’s not terribly surprising.

If you shut down any dissent before it even happens, things will appear hunky-dory for a while. Thing is, it will be short-lived. The odds of the virus vanishing from the northern hemisphere before spring sets in, just based on untested mRNA vaccines, don’t look good. Maybe we should ask the bookies, they’re good at this sort of thing.

But to me it looks like we’re betting everything on red, just because certain parties and interests like it that way. Can mRNA vaccines save us? Perhaps. But we have no way of knowing, we’re just gambling.

We should try a multi-pronged approach, look at all vaccines developed so far, Russian, Chinese, Cuban and Western. Throw in HCQ and ivermectin, get everyone on 5,000 IU of vitamin D per day, and see where we get. We’re doing this wrong, and the media tell us to do it wrong. It’s a business model they’ve perfected in the Trump era.

And we are much poorer for it. We no longer think, we let others think for us. Based on a model of unleashing an overkill cacophony of ever-repeating messages, to which very few of us have any resistance. Neither in politics nor in epidemiology is that ever a wise idea.

But first of all, we need to give everyone back their own thoughts, their own ideas, their own opinion, based on actual news reports. Because if we don’t, this thing will blow up in many more faces than we care to even imagine before spring even arrives. Be careful out there.

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I’d like to take you to the ceremony
Well, that is if I remember the way
You see Jack and Jill they’re going to join their misery
I’m afraid it’s time for everyone to pray

You can see they’ve finally taken cover
They’re willing, yeah they’re willing to obey
Their vows are difficult, they’re for each other
So let nobody put a loophole, a loophole in their way

Why Don’t You Try – Leonard Cohen

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Debt Rattle December 1 2020

Dec 012020

December 1, 2020 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:52 am Finance Tagged with: Assange, billionaires, Covid19, Dominion, Fisk, Flynn, insufficiency, Snowden, Tanden, Trump, Vitamin D, Wuhan, Yates 26 Responses »

Vincent van Gogh Women Picking Olives 1889

• Vitamin D Insufficiency May Account for Almost 9 of 10 COVID19 Deaths (MDPI)

• The Wuhan Files (CNN)

• It Could Take 4 Years To Regain The 22 Million Jobs Lost During COVID19 (F.)

• Black Friday Foot Traffic Down More Than 52% (RetailDive)

• US Billionaires Have Gained $1 Trillion Since The Pandemic Started (ZH)

• Trump’s Hill Allies Could Take One Last Shot To Overturn The Election (Pol.)

• GA Govt Lawyers Defend Dominion ‘Trade Secrets’ To Stop Forensic Analysis (NP)

• Neera Tanden: Unhinged, Venomous, Corrupt, Pathologically Dishonest (Greenwald)

• Biden Picks Budget Director Who Pushed Social Security Cuts (DP)

• The Case Against Sally Yates (Turley)

• Behind the Scenes in Swamptopia (Kunstler)

• Trump Pardons Flynn…It’s a Good Start! (Ron Paul)

• We Can’t Vote ‘Em Out (Lee Camp)

• Establishment Journalists Are Piling On To Smear Robert Fisk (Cook)

Fauci get kids back into school

Dr. Fauci: "The default position should be to try as best as possible within reason to keep the children in school or to get them back to school […] if you look at the data the spread among children and from children is not really big at all"pic.twitter.com/G0MqlA0NDQ

— Corey A. DeAngelis (@DeAngelisCorey) November 29, 2020

How Churchill procured alcohol during prohibition.

White Hat hackers
https://twitter.com/i/status/1333500580287950849

“..statistically attributable..”

• Vitamin D Insufficiency May Account for Almost 9 of 10 COVID19 Deaths (MDPI)

Evidence from observational studies is accumulating, suggesting that the majority of deaths due to SARS-CoV-2 infections are statistically attributable to vitamin D insufficiency and could potentially be prevented by vitamin D supplementation. Given the dynamics of the COVID-19 pandemic, rational vitamin D supplementation whose safety has been proven in an extensive body of research should be promoted and initiated to limit the toll of the pandemic even before the final proof of efficacy in preventing COVID-19 deaths by randomized trials. We read, with great interest, the recent article by Radujkovic et al. that reported associations between vitamin D deficiency (25(OH)D < 12 ng/mL) or insufficiency (25(OH)D < 20 ng/mL) and death in a cohort of 185 consecutive symptomatic SARS-CoV-2-positive patients admitted to the Medical University Hospital Heidelberg, who were diagnosed and treated between 18 March and 18 June 2020 [1].

In this cohort, 118 patients (64%) had vitamin D insufficiency at recruitment (including 41 patients with vitamin D deficiency), and 16 patients died of the infection. With a covariate-adjusted relative risk of death of 11.3, mortality was much higher among vitamin D insufficient patients than among other patients. When translated to the proportion of deaths in the population that is statistically attributable to vitamin D insufficiency (“population attributable risk proportion”), a key measure of public health relevance of risk factors [2], these results imply that 87% of COVID-19 deaths may be statistically attributed to vitamin D insufficiency and could potentially be avoided by eliminating vitamin D insufficiency.

Although results of an observational study, such as this one, need to be interpreted with caution, as done by the authors [1], due to the potential of residual confounding or reverse causality (i.e., vitamin D insufficiency resulting from poor health status at baseline rather than vice versa), it appears extremely unlikely that such a strong association in this prospective cohort study could be explained this way, in particular as the authors had adjusted for age, sex and comorbidity as potential confounders in their multivariate analysis. There are also multiple plausible mechanisms that may well explain the observed associations, such as increased concentrations of pro-inflammatory cytokines, as well as decreased concentrations of anti-inflammatory cytokines in vitamin D insufficiency..

The timing for this report is a tad curious perhaps.

• The Wuhan Files (CNN)

A group of frontline medical workers, likely exhausted, stand huddled together on a video-conference call as China’s most powerful man raises his hand in greeting. It is February 10 in Beijing and President Xi Jinping, who for weeks has been absent from public view, is addressing hospital staff in the city of Wuhan as they battle to contain the spread of a still officially unnamed novel coronavirus. From a secure room about 1,200 kilometers (745 miles) from the epicenter, Xi expressed his condolences to those who have died in the outbreak. He urged greater public communication, as around the world concerns mounted about the potential threat posed by the new disease. That same day, Chinese authorities reported 2,478 new confirmed cases — raising the total global number to more than 40,000, with fewer than 400 cases occurring outside of mainland China.

Yet CNN can now reveal how official documents circulated internally show that this was only part of the picture.In a report marked “internal document, please keep confidential,” local health authorities in the province of Hubei, where the virus was first detected, list a total of 5,918 newly detected cases on February 10, more than double the official public number of confirmed cases, breaking down the total into a variety of subcategories. This larger figure was never fully revealed at that time, as China’s accounting system seemed, in the tumult of the early weeks of the pandemic, to downplay the severity of the outbreak. The previously undisclosed figure is among a string of revelations contained within 117 pages of leaked documents from the Hubei Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention, shared with and verified by CNN.

Taken together, the documents amount to the most significant leak from inside China since the beginning of the pandemic and provide the first clear window into what local authorities knew internally and when. The Chinese government has steadfastly rejected accusations made by the United States and other Western governments that it deliberately concealed information relating to the virus, maintaining that it has been upfront since the beginning of the outbreak. However, though the documents provide no evidence of a deliberate attempt to obfuscate findings, they do reveal numerous inconsistencies in what authorities believed to be happening and what was revealed to the public.

You’re not going to “regain” them, they will have to be new jobs.

• It Could Take 4 Years To Regain The 22 Million Jobs Lost During COVID19 (F.)

As the bull market for stocks rages on and even bests pre-pandemic levels, some American households are bouncing back much more slowly than others, unearthing a pattern indicative of a K-shaped (or lopsided) economic recovery, Goldman Sachs said on Sunday–and without additional fiscal relief, it could take years for employment to fully recover. The biggest driver of the K-shaped recovery taking shape is that pandemic job losses were “highly concentrated in virus-sensitive industries” like retail, leisure and hospitality–all of which disproportionately employ low-wage workers, Goldman analyst Joseph Briggs wrote in a weekend note. Some companies have turned to technology in an effort to boost productivity in the absence of real workers, and it’s working (which is bad news for American workers).

Productivity is up 4% this year despite major job losses, according to Moody’s Analytics, which now estimates the 22 million jobs lost this spring won’t come back until early 2024. While stimulus measures have helped keep overall disposable income afloat during the pandemic, Americans making less than $30 per hour are feeling the most economic pain. Slowed wage growth has also been markedly worse for lower-income workers–further contributing to the disparate economic recovery, the Goldman report goes on to say. Goldman projects a lack of new fiscal relief will cause a fourth-quarter decline in disposable income that will hit the bottom 25% of earners “particularly hard,” while also weighing on consumer spending this winter.

The outlook for lower-income workers will get “significantly worse” if Congress doesn’t pass another fiscal stimulus package of at least $700 billion in the first quarter, Goldman notes, adding that additional relief coupled with widespread vaccination could actually help yield a V-shaped recovery, which is characteristic of a quicker, more equitable economic bounceback. “The largest pandemic casualties have been less productive industries including retailing, leisure and hospitality, while the biggest winners have been in more productive industries like technology, wholesaling and professional services,” Moody’s Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi said in a weekend note, adding that within industries, smaller businesses have fared worse than their larger, more productive counterparts, which are more able to afford large investments in technology and organizational changes.

Shopkeepers will become Amazo delivery workers.

• Black Friday Foot Traffic Down More Than 52% (RetailDive)

With COVID-19 cases hitting new highs, it comes as little surprise that many shoppers opted to stay away from physical stores this year. That said, the differences between Black Friday 2020 and those that preceded it were stark. “Our traditional store checks over the holiday weekend were like none other we’ve ever experienced in our lifetime — no hustle and bustle, no lines at the register,” said MKM Partners Managing Director Roxanne Meyer in an emailed research note. Retailers have anticipated and prepared for that, even nudged consumers into changing up their holiday shopping plans to keep them from packing into stores. Major players like Walmart and Target have been spreading Black Friday-like discounts through the month of November and encouraging online purchases and curbside pickup.

Many also followed Amazon’s lead by launching online sales events in October, which pulled holiday purchases into the month and heralded the beginning of the holiday shopping spree. Black Friday still had a major impact. Sales in the U.S. were up 177% Friday against their October average, according to Criteo data emailed to Retail Dive. By category, fashion was up 240%, consumer electronics were up 359% and home goods were up 148%. However, year-over-year Black Friday sales were down 5%, meaning that even the online sales surge couldn’t fully make up for the lost foot traffic. Criteo’s data shows, however, that the prior weeks’ discounting may have affected sales on Black Friday itself — which was the plan among retailers all along. Sales in the first three weeks of November were up 7% year over year, Criteo said.

Tax the crap out of them.

• US Billionaires Have Gained $1 Trillion Since The Pandemic Started (ZH)

American billionaires haven’t been just immune to the pandemic, they have been thriving in it, drastically increasing their collective wealth. An analysis by Chuck Collins at the Institute for Policy Studies found that American billionaires have been their wealth grow by $1 trillion since March of this year – more than 34 percent. That was not the case during the 2008 financial crisis when it took Forbes’ 400 richest people three years to recoup their losses from the Great Recession. Collins’ findings highlight a wealth gain by a mere 650 individuals that, as Statista’s Niall McCarthy notes, seems obscene at a time when nearly 7 million Americans are at risk of eviction when moratoriums expire at the end of the year.

There are 650 billionaires on the list, out of which 47 are new arrivals with 11 dropping out due to death or financial decline. There were numerous impressive financial gains among notable billionaires on the lit with Jeff Bezos growing his fortune by $69.4 billion between March 17 and November 24. The Amazon boss and richest man on the planet is now with $182.4 billion. The most impressive gain on the list was recorded by Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk who has seen his fortune experience a meteoric rise. In the above period, his weath surged a whopping 414 percent, climbing from “just” $24.6 billion to $126.2 billion, making him the world’s second richest man after Bezos. Illustrating the gulf in financial inequality in the U.S. today, the analysis states that U.S. billionaires own $4 trillion, 3.5 percent of all privately held wealth in the country. Billionaire wealth is now twice the amount of wealth held by the bottom 50 percent of all American households combined, approximately 160 million people.

By running a plan the Dems used extensively.

• Trump’s Hill Allies Could Take One Last Shot To Overturn The Election (Pol.)

The framers declared that the presidential election isn’t official until lawmakers certify the winner. The voters, on Nov. 3, picked 306 electors for Biden and 232 for Trump. Those electors will cast their formal votes for president on Dec. 14. An obscure 1887 law called the Electoral Count Act, and several subsequent updates, spell out the process, setting Jan. 6 after a presidential election as the official certification date and outlining vague, complicated procedures. On that day, the House and Senate meet in a joint session at 1 p.m. — just three days after a newly constituted Congress is sworn in. One of their first orders of business is to pass judgment on the Electoral College vote. That same federal law also gives a tiny number of lawmakers enormous power to challenge the results.

If a single House member and a single senator join forces, they can object to entire slates of presidential electors. They must do so in writing and provide an explanation, though there are no guidelines on how detailed it must be. If they do, the House and Senate must retreat to their chambers and debate the outcome for up to two hours before voting on the matter. Each state’s electors are certified separately, meaning lawmakers bent on challenging the results have multiple chances to force lengthy delays. If the Democrat-run House and GOP-controlled Senate disagree? That outcome has never been tested before, though it would likely give governors in key states — including the Democrats who lead Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan — a larger role.

A few House Democrats have previously tried and failed to challenge GOP presidencies in 2001 and 2017 — after Al Gore and Hillary Clinton won the national popular vote but lost the Electoral College to George W. Bush and Trump, respectively. And congressional Democrats went even further in 2005, when John Kerry lost to Bush, forcing a full-fledged debate on Ohio’s electoral votes before both the House and Senate voted to reject the challenge.

“..defending a private, foreign company’s “trade secrets” instead of attempting to secure the vote of the American public..”

• GA Govt Lawyers Defend Dominion ‘Trade Secrets’ To Stop Forensic Analysis (NP)

A buried lead in Judge Timothy C. Batten’s order released late last night from an Atlantic District Court describes Georgia State lawyers – ostensibly acting on behalf of the public via the local government – defending Dominion Voting Systems’ “trade secrets”. The court ordered that voting software and information contained therein should not be destroyed, or erased or altered in Cobb, Gwinnett, and Cherokee Counties. But the order also revealed: “Defendants’ counsel also argued that allowing such forensic inspections would pose substantial security and proprietary/trade secret risks to Defendants.”

The bizarre nature of government lawyers defending a private, foreign company’s “trade secrets” instead of attempting to secure the vote of the American public will raise further questions about the company’s involvement in U.S. voting systems. The term “trade secret” is used no fewer than NINE times in the contract between Georgia and Dominion Voting Systems.

Is she what the country deserves?

• Neera Tanden: Unhinged, Venomous, Corrupt, Pathologically Dishonest (Greenwald)

The announcement that Joe Biden intends to nominate Neera Tanden as his Director of the Office of Management and Budget — a critical position overseeing U.S. economic and regulatory policy — triggered a wide range of mockery, indignation and disgust from both the left and the right. That should not be surprising: though a thoroughly mediocre and ordinary D.C. swamp creature from the perspective of both ideology and competence, Tanden’s uniquely unhinged, venomous, corrupt and pathologically dishonest conduct as a Clinton Family and DNC apparatchik and President of the corporatist-and-despot-funded Center for American Progress (CAP) has earned her a list of enemies far longer and more impressive than her accomplishments.

[..] Tanden owes her entire career to the patronage of Hillary Clinton, and her devotion to Hillary approaches restraining-order levels of creepiness (here you can watch Tanden beam with adoration as then-Senator Hillary Clinton, on the Senate floor in 2004, explains her steadfast opposition to marriage equality for same-sex couples on the ground that “marriage is a sacred bond between a man and a woman” and “exists between a man and a woman going back into the mists of history” for the primary purpose of raising children — just a few short years before Democrats changed views on this, after which it instantly became the hallmark of an unreconstructed hateful bigot to say this). Few people took Hillary’s 2016 loss to Donald Trump as hard as Tanden, or handled it as poorly. Indeed, she refused to believe it really happened, and encouraged others to similarly refuse to accept its reality.

In the weeks after Trump’s victory, Tanden joined numerous Democrats in encouraging electors of the Electoral College to ignore their states’ votes and refuse to elect Trump as President (many rationale were invoked for this: Tanden’s was a CAP article promoting #Resistance fanatic Richard Painter’s argument that Trump’s violations of the Emolument Clause precluded an Electoral College win). She insisted that Hillary lost because of Russia, claiming the “Russians did enough damage to affect more than 70k votes in 3 states.” And she was not only one of the first to push the Steele Dossier’s claim that Russia held blackmail power over Trump but also one of the last to do so — insisting in 2018 that “the dossier been mostly proven to be true” and claiming as late as 2019 that nothing in this discredited junk report had been disproven.

But what really distinguished Tanden when it came to unhinged and toxic behavior was her repeated (and obviously baseless) claims that Hillary only lost because Russian hackers invaded the U.S. voting system and clandestinely changed Hillary’s votes to Trump’s, costing the real winner — Hillary — her rightful place on the throne, behind the Resolute Desk.

The left doesn’t like Tanden either.

• Biden Picks Budget Director Who Pushed Social Security Cuts (DP)

President-elect Joe Biden will reportedly nominate a White House budget director who has been one of the country’s most prominent critics of U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders and who has previously backed Social Security cuts. Biden — who has repeatedly pushed for Social Security cuts throughout his career — announced his selection of Center for American Progress president Neera Tanden as his choice to run the powerful White House Office of Management and Budget. A longtime aide to Hillary Clinton, Tanden touted her think tank’s 2010 proposal to reduce Social Security benefits in 2012, as Biden was pushing for such cuts in the Obama administration. Tanden’s Social Security push followed the 2010 midterms, during the deficit reduction negotiations between the Obama administration and the new GOP Congress.

Republicans drew a hard line but Obama sought a middle ground. Central to the administration’s efforts, which were led by Biden, was a plan called the “chained CPI” that would have slowed the rate at which Social Security benefits increase over time. Sanders led the fight in the Senate against chained CPI, while outside groups were divided over whether to line up behind the president. Some, like the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, vocally opposed the cuts. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal think tank, found that the chained CPI “would cut Social Security retirement benefits by about 2 percent, on average.” The organization, nevertheless, said it would support the concept under certain conditions.

Tanden’s CAP, at the time considered to be the largest liberal think tank in Washington, also supported the idea and was a significant voice in favor of the administration’s plan. Tanden explained her views in a February 2012 C-SPAN interview. Asked by a caller about entitlement reform, she named Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid as targets for possible cuts, noting that “the president has $300 million in his budget in cuts in Medicare.” “That comes on top of cuts in Medicare for the Affordable Care Act. So he has put specific cuts in the budget in Medicare,” she said. “And they had savings in Medicaid in the past. I think the question really is: If we’re going to have a deal to address long-term deficit reduction, we need to put both entitlements on the table as well as taxes.”

Russiagate in the flesh.

“..she ordered a federal department to refuse to assist the president…”

• The Case Against Sally Yates (Turley)

As Joe Biden fills out his Cabinet, more attention is drawn to the position of attorney general and one of the most cited names on the short list, which is Sally Yates. Her consideration is surprising for a president-elect who has pledged to unify the country and move beyond the destructive politics of the last four years. I always admired the obvious talent and intellect of Yates. But my overall assessment of her changed dramatically almost four years ago, when she staged an epic battle with a newly inaugurated President Trump and thereby forged her own legend. Yates had only a few days left in government when she became acting attorney general in January 2017, following the departure of Attorney General Loretta Lynch.

One week later, Trump signed an executive order that restricted travel to the United States from seven Muslim majority countries. Yates then took the unprecedented step of ordering the Justice Department to refuse to assist the president in implementing the ban. I was an early critic of the travel ban, which had glaring errors like the absence of exceptions for legal residents or green-card holders. (Those errors were corrected in an amended order.) The ban was an issue upon which Trump campaigned and won the presidency and he wanted to move in that first week to carry out some of his core promises. But the order was poorly drafted, poorly executed and, ultimately, poorly defended. Yates could have worked with the White House to seek changes, as would later occur; instead, she ordered a federal department to refuse to assist the president.

[..] This was not her only controversy. Yates signed off on the application for secret surveillance of Carter Page, which was found by the inspector general to be riddled with errors and based on faulty information. Page was never charged with any crime. There is no indication that Yates made any substantive inquiries on the basis for the application, which she now says she would not have signed if she knew what she knows today. She just signed it and assumed it was legal, despite the targeting of a campaign aide in the opposing party. Yates also showed little concern over the basis for investigating Michael Flynn, another key aide to the incoming president of the opposing party.

While she recently expressed a lack of clear memory on the issue, prior reports linked her to raising the possible use against Flynn of the Logan Act, a notoriously unconstitutional law that has never been used to secure a single conviction since its creation in 1799. The basis was Flynn’s conversations with Russian diplomats shortly before becoming Trump’s national security adviser. There was nothing unlawful or even uncommon in such a communication. Indeed, then FBI Director James Comey reportedly told President Obama and Vice President Biden that the meetings appeared legitimate. Yet Yates reportedly went to the White House to raise the alarm and, in a 2017 interview, she had no memory problems in declaring that “there is certainly a criminal statute that was implicated” by the conduct of Flynn.

“Do you suppose that Gen. Flynn does not know about the agency’s cyber-warfare capabilities?”

• Behind the Scenes in Swamptopia (Kunstler)

There is the matter of the Kraken. Perhaps Sidney Powell was not speaking just figuratively about the lurking monster of the deep. The Kraken, apparently, is an actual computer system developed by the Department of Defense (DOD) to ferret out malevolent computer programs as might be deployed in cyber-warfare… or janky elections. Miz Powell has had legal consort all year with General Mike Flynn, the former chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency railroaded on a fake charge by the FBI, now pardoned, free to speak and act. Do you suppose that Gen. Flynn does not know about the agency’s cyber-warfare capabilities? Or that he does not know skilled military technicians who can spell out, say, in a court of law, exactly how the Kraken might be put to use? Or how the Kraken intersects with the two CIA proprietary election hacking programs, Hammer and Scorecard?

Next, there is the matter of where these agencies stand with each other these days. It was not for nothing that the president sacked cheeky Sec’y of Defense Mark Esper and replaced him with Christopher Miller, a Special Forces warrior, lately, as Deputy Assistant Sec-Def, in charge of counterterrorism, Military Information Support Operations (MISO), Information Operations, unconventional warfare, irregular warfare, direct action, special reconnaissance, foreign internal defense, counter proliferation, sensitive special operations. Kind of sounds a little bit like exactly the skill-set you’d need to battle the rogue “resistance” operations across several US government agencies in their four-year quest to overthrow the chief executive climaxing in this election caper — for one example, the CIA.

Somehow, when I think of the CIA, I think of the sinister John Brennan, architect of RussiaGate and probably also somehow behind the activation of his protégé, “whistleblower” (and CIA agent) Eric Ciaramella, the impeachment mole who was allowed to retreat back into the CIA fortress with no consequences after his seditious deed was done. Notice, Mr. Brennan has been tweeting like mad in recent days denouncing election skeptics. Is he worried about something? All of which raises the questions: what role did the agency play in the election, with its mystifying vote-tallying irregularities? Does Mr. Brennan still wield influence in the CIA? And is the agency an enemy of the people?

Not pardoning Snowden and Assange would be nuts.

• Trump Pardons Flynn…It’s a Good Start! (Ron Paul)

Last week President Trump granted a “full pardon” to Gen. Michael Flynn, his first National Security Advisor. In a White House statement announcing the pardon, the Administration pointed out that the relentless pursuit of Flynn was a partisan effort to overturn the results of the 2016 election. The pursuit of Flynn was spearheaded by people who refused to accept the results of the 2016 election and worked to undermine the peaceful transfer of power, said the White House. These same people are the ones accusing Trump of undermining the election by challenging what appears to be serious voting irregularities in the 2020 presidential election. That is called “projection.”

The White House statement also cites partisans in politics, the media, and the Deep State which sought to prevent Trump from being elected, to prevent him from taking office once elected, and to remove him on false pretenses once in office. In order to push the false narrative that Trump was somehow elected due to the intervention of Russian President Vladimir Putin, the coup-masters had to make it appear that a high-ranking official was involved in monkey business with the Russians. Flynn was the unlucky victim of their smear machine, accused of “Russia collusion” over an innocent telephone call with the then-Russian Ambassador in Washington during the transition to a Trump Administration.

Yet when Joe Biden’s transition people bragged recently that Biden was connecting with foreign officials before inaugurated, the media praised it as a welcome return of the “experts” to foreign policy. While it is very good news that President Trump is in the mood to pardon those victims of the warmongering Deep State, I very much hope that he is only warming up. It would be a great tragedy if other Deep State victims are left to suffer for their non-crimes. Tweeting about her legislation that calls for charges against Edward Snowden and Julian Assange to be dropped and the Espionage Act reformed, US Rep. Tulsi Gabbard told President Trump, “since you’re giving pardons to people, please consider pardoning those who, at great personal sacrifice, exposed the deception and criminality of those in the deep state.”

My good friend Rep. Thomas Massie, a Ron Paul Institute Board Member, is a co-sponsor of Rep. Gabbard’s legislation, making it a real bipartisan effort to restore the rule of law in the United States and to rein in the Beltway warmongers. Edward Snowden and Julian Assange are not criminals. They are heroes for telling us the truth about what criminals in government were doing in our name and with our money. The fact is we were lied into war over and over again. While those wars were profitable for the military-industrial-Congressional-media complex, they snuffed out the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent people overseas and robbed our own children and grandchildren of trillions of dollars wasted on neocon lies.

“We already know that Biden’s first national security briefing included two board members of the massive defense contractor Raytheon.”

• We Can’t Vote ‘Em Out (Lee Camp)

It doesn’t matter when you read this, the assholes will still be in power. I know that because here in America we can’t vote out the assholes. We can trouble them, scare them, annoy them, and sometimes even pressure them into doing some small thing that’s mildly progressive. But we can’t vote out the assholes. Of course, right now, if you’re a Joe Biden supporter, you’re yelling out loud to your laptop or phone, “That’s not true! We just DID! We just did vote out the assholes!” And I’m not arguing that Donald Trump and his motley squad of parasitic shit stains aren’t awful. (They are “parashits,” if you will. Copyright pending.) I’m not arguing Trump’s goons aren’t awful. I’m just saying that if you even take a momentary peak at the people Biden is already putting in power for his transition and his future cabinet, they’re still more assholes.

He’s putting war hawks in charge of creating peace, fossil-fuel puppets in charge of fixing the environment, propaganda enthusiasts in charge of the media and cops in charge of fixing a brutal white supremacist police system. I’m pretty sure he’s getting ready to put Rudy Giuliani in charge of election integrity, and a dead skunk who formerly worked for Dow Chemical as the head of the EPA. We can’t vote out the assholes. We already know that Biden’s first national security briefing included two board members of the massive defense contractor Raytheon. Raytheon CEO Gregory Hayes said in a CNBC interview a couple months ago that it would be “ridiculous” to think military spending will be cut under Biden. But it doesn’t stop there.

We now know Biden’s pick for defense secretary is Michele Flournoy and his selection for secretary of state is Tony Blinken. As The Grayzone has reported, these two have played central roles in all the wars waged by Democratic presidents all the way back to Bill Clinton. But to give Biden the benefit of the doubt, it makes sense that one would want a defense secretary with a standard American war criminal past because otherwise they wouldn’t know their way around the Pentagon. You don’t want to get a new guy (or gal) in there as head of our murder machine, and he’s bumbling around muttering, “What lever do I pull to blow up a village in Somalia? I’m sorry. I wasn’t paying attention during the introductory tour. I thought I launched a drone bomb in Libya this morning, and it turned out to be just the button for the coffee machine. But the cappuccino was great. I will say that.”

Smells of what happened to Assange.

• Establishment Journalists Are Piling On To Smear Robert Fisk (Cook)

Something remarkable even by the usually dismal standards of the stenographic media blue-tick brigade has been happening in the past few days. Leading journalists in the corporate media have suddenly felt the urgent need not only to criticise the late, much-respected foreign correspondent Robert Fisk, but to pile in against him, using the most outrageous smears imaginable. He is suddenly a fraud, a fabulist, a fantasist, a liar. What is most ironic is that the journalists doing this are some of the biggest frauds themselves, journalists who have made a career out of deceiving their readers. In fact, many of the crowd attacking Fisk when he can no longer defend himself are precisely the journalists who have the worst record of journalistic malpractice and on some of the biggest issues of our times.

At least I have the courage to criticise them while they are alive. They know dead men can’t sue. It is complete and utter cowardice to attack Fisk when they could have made their comments earlier, to his face. In fact, if they truly believed any of the things they are so keen to tell us now, they had an absolute duty to say them when Fisk was alive rather than allowing the public to be deceived by someone they regarded as a liar and fantasist. They didn’t make public these serious allegations – they didn’t air their concerns about the supposedly fabricated facts in Fisk’s stories – when he was alive because they know he would have made mincemeat of them.

Most preposterous of all is the fact that the actual trigger for this sudden, very belated outpouring of concern about Fisk is a hit-piece written by Oz Katerji. I’m not sure whether I can find the generosity to call Katerji a journalist. Like Elliot Higgins of the US government-funded Bellingcat, he’s more like an attack dog beloved by establishment blue-ticks: he is there to enforce accepted western imperial narratives, disguising his lock-step support for the establishment line as edgy, power-to-the-people radicalism.

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Debt Rattle November 29 2020

Nov 292020

November 29, 2020 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 10:25 am Finance Tagged with: Biden, bitcoin, central bank account, Covid19, facemasks, factchecker, Kraken, Pennsylvania, swamp, Vitamin D 23 Responses »

Canaletto View of the Churches of the Redentore 1750

• The Strangely Unscientific Masking of America (AIER)

• 2.5 Million Vulnerable People To Get Free Supply Of Vitamin D In England (RT)

• UK’s High Covid Spending Delivered Worse Outcomes Than Peers (FT)

• NYC Bar In COVID-19 Hotspot Refuses To Shut Down (NYP)

• Pennsylvania Republicans To Introduce Resolution Disputing Election Results (ZH)

• Case Dismissed? Analysis of Decision in Pennsylvania’s Parnell Case (Reeves)

• Potential Biden Officials’ Firm Is Promising Big Profits (Sirota)

• “Washington Is Exhausted”: Swamp Gears Up For Post-Trump Power Orgy (ZH)

• Ilhan Omar’s Misguided Defense Of John Brennan (Greenwald)

• Candace Owens Challenges Fact-Checker, And Wins (DW)

• A Free Central Bank Account For All To Revamp Monetary System (Varoufakis)

• China Seizes $3.3 Billion Of Bitcoin (Exp.)

France is doing something right. Or you could say they were doing something very wrong before.

I remains a weird sight to see all those masks on people walking outside in fresh air. Are they all “listening to the science”? How is that even possible if the science changes so much and so often?

• The Strangely Unscientific Masking of America (AIER)

On February 29, the U.S. surgeon general infamously tweeted: “Seriously people – STOP BUYING MASKS. . . They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus.” Anthony Fauci, the best-known member of the coronavirus task force, advised Americans not to wear masks around this time. Similarly, in the earliest weeks of the pandemic, the CDC maintained that masks should be worn only by individuals who were symptomatic or caring for a sick person, a position that the WHO stood by even longer. As rapidly as mask use became a matter of ethics, the issue transformed into a political one, exemplified by an article printed on March 27 in the New York Times, entitled “More Americans Should Probably Wear Masks for Protection.”

The piece was heavy on fear-mongering and light on evidence. While acknowledging that “[t]here is very little data showing that flat surgical masks, in particular, have a protective effect for the general public,” the author went on to argue that they “may be better than nothing,” and cited a couple of studies in which surgical masks ostensibly reduced influenza transmission rates. One report reached its conclusion based on observations of a “dummy head attached to a breathing simulator.” Another analyzed use of surgical masks on people experiencing at least two symptoms of acute respiratory illness. Incidentally, not one of these studies involved cloth masks or accounted for real-world mask usage (or misusage) among lay people, and none established efficacy of widespread mask-wearing by people not exhibiting symptoms.

There was simply no evidence whatsoever that healthy people ought to wear masks when going about their lives, especially outdoors. Yet by April, to walk the streets of Brooklyn with one’s nose and mouth exposed evoked the sort of reaction that in February would have been reserved for the appearance of a machine gun. In short order, the politicization intensified. President Trump refused to wear a mask relatively early on, so resistance to them was equated with support for him. By the same token, Democratic politicians across the board eagerly adopted the garb; accordingly, all good liberals were wearing masks religiously by the beginning of April.

The speed with which mask-wearing among the general public transitioned from unheard of to a moral necessity struck me as suspicious. After all, if the science was as airtight as those around me claimed, surely masks would have been recommended by January or February, not to mention during prior infectious disease outbreaks such as the 2009 swine flu. It seemed unlikely that the scientific proof became incontrovertible sometime between late February and late March, particularly in the absence of any new evidence surfacing during that time period.

Apparently the doses supplied are 10 Mg, or some 400 IU, which is less than 10% of what the average person should take. In other words, useless. Is this set up to make it fail?

• 2.5 Million Vulnerable People To Get Free Supply Of Vitamin D In England (RT)

Vulnerable people in England will get a free supply of Vitamin D delivered to their doorstep to help them get through winter and to take some pressure off the NHS, the government has said. The free Vitamin D supplement will be offered to more than 2.5 million people across England, the government announced. Care homes will receive supplies automatically. In the meantime, individuals who are on the “extremely vulnerable” list will get a letter inviting them to apply for four months’ worth of supplements to be delivered directly to their homes. The deliveries will be free of charge and begin in January. Vitamin D helps the body to absorb and use calcium which is vital for bone and muscle health.

While the UK government noted that research on the possible link of Vitamin D and Covid-19 is still ongoing, many now need extra supplements more than ever due to the lockdowns. “Because of the incredible sacrifices made by the British people to control the virus, many of us have spent more time indoors this year and could be deficient in Vitamin D,” Health Secretary Matt Hancock said. He added that staying healthy would “crucially reduce” the pressure on the NHS amid the rise of Covid-19 infections. Last month, Hancock said the government would increase the public messaging that Vitamin D is good for improving general health and that there is “no downside to taking it.”

A bunch of assumptions is all it is.

• UK’s High Covid Spending Delivered Worse Outcomes Than Peers (FT)

The UK has spent more money fighting coronavirus than almost all comparable countries but still languishes towards the bottom of league tables of economic performance in 2020 and deaths caused by the virus, according to Financial Times research. On Wednesday, the independent Office for Budget Responsibility said the UK’s economy was set to shrink by 11.3 per cent in 2020, while the government would need to borrow £394bn to fund a shortfall in taxes and £280bn in public spending to fight Covid-19. Compared with the average of other G7 leading economies, the cost to the UK government is set to be over 80 per cent more, while the UK is also on course to suffer a 90 per cent deeper decline in economic output in 2020 and almost 60 per cent more deaths.

Economists said the UK’s poor performance had stemmed from allowing the virus to become too prevalent both in the spring and autumn before enforcing social distancing, with the result that the government was ultimately forced to impose more draconian restrictions undermining the economy. Chancellor Rishi Sunak has been the voice in cabinet arguing repeatedly for looser restrictions. And in his spending review, Mr Sunak said that the unprecedented peacetime public spending had been well targeted on ensuring lower unemployment rates than in other countries. “The latest data shows the UK’s unemployment rate is lower than Italy, France, Spain, Canada and the United States,” the chancellor said.

Britain’s unusual position in the international data starts with the amount the government has intervened to support jobs, households and companies during the pandemic. Best measured on an international basis by the change in the core budget deficit, the latest data shows that only Canada in the G7 spent more this year on Covid-19. Canada also had an unusually generous response, with Ottawa spending 14 per cent of national income on support measures, notably wage subsidies and generous increases in social security.

Look for much more of this.

• NYC Bar In COVID-19 Hotspot Refuses To Shut Down (NYP)

It’s an “open” rebellion. A Staten Island pub located in a coronavirus hot spot is stealing a page from Seattle’s anarchist cookbook, declaring itself an “autonomous zone,” free from the public-safety restrictions its owners say they will refuse to abide by. “!ATTENTION! We hereby declare this establishment an !!!AUTONOMOUS ZONE!!!” read signs outside and around Mac’s Public House in Grant City, invoking a phrase more commonly associated with the monthlong occupation of Capitol Hill in the Emerald City by anti-cop radicals. “We refuse to abide by any rules and regulations put forth by the Mayor of NYC and Governor of NY State.” The state had been warning for weeks that the South Shore was on the path to orange-zone status, based on the area’s consistent and surging coronavirus positivity rate, and on Monday, Gov. Cuomo made the call.

Restrictions, including the prohibition of indoor dining in bars and restaurants, took effect Wednesday. But Mac’s balked, and defiantly kept its doors open — despite being slapped with thousands of dollars in fines, a shut-down order from the state Health Department and the Friday revocation of its liquor license by the State Liquor Authority, the owners said. “At this point, we’re OK with it, because we’re not paying it,” co-owner Danny Presti said. “[The Sheriff’s Department] is issuing us $1,000 fines, so they keep coming back. We’re still here. We’re not letting them in.” Co-owner Keith McAlarney backed up his partner’s declaration of COVID independence.

“We’re not backing down. You think you scared me by . . . saying I don’t have a license now to serve liquor now? Well guess what? That liquor license is on the wall. If that liquor license is gonna come off the wall, it’s gonna be done by Cuomo. You wanna come down here and pull that license off the wall?” McAlarney says in a YouTube video posted Friday, the same day the bar’s liquor license was yanked. “De Bozo,” he continued, presumably referring to Mayor de Blasio, “you want to come down here and pull the license off the wall?” “Feel free to end up comin’ down, and we’ll end up having a conversation before you even think about stepping foot on my property. I will not back down.”

On Saturday, the joint was operating like it was 2019, as a small group of patrons enjoyed cocktails inside the bar —on the house. “Sure, you can have a drink, we’re not charging,” co-owner McAlarney said. About five customers — most wearing face masks — showed up in about a two-hour span to support the bar, which appeared to be exploiting a loophole for “businesses” in Cuomo’s executive order by not actually charging customers.

26 Senators?!

• Pennsylvania Republicans To Introduce Resolution Disputing Election Results (ZH)

Republican state lawmakers in Pennsylvania released a memo on Nov. 27, advising that they will soon introduce a resolution to dispute the results of the 2020 election. The resolution states that the executive and judicial branches of the Keystone State’s government usurped the legislature’s constitutional power to set the rules of the election. The resolution “declares that the selection of presidential electors and other statewide electoral contest results in this commonwealth is in dispute” and “urges the secretary of the commonwealth and the governor to withdraw or vacate the certification of presidential electors and to delay certification of results in other statewide electoral contests voted on at the 2020 general election.” It also “urges the United States Congress to declare the selection of presidential electors in this Commonwealth to be in dispute.”

The proposed text lists three steps taken by the judicial and executive branches to change the rule of the election. First, on Sept. 17, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court “unlawfully and unilaterally” extended the deadline by which mail ballots could be received, mandated that ballots without a postmark would be treated as timely, and allowed for ballots without a verified voted signature to be accepted, the resolution says. Second, on Oct. 23, upon a petition from the secretary of the commonwealth, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that signatures on mail-in ballots need not be authenticated. And third, on Nov. 2, the secretary of the commonwealth “encouraged certain counties to notify party and candidate representatives of mail-in voters whose ballots contained defects,” the resolution says.

All of the changes are contrary to the Pennsylvania Election Code, which requires mail-in ballots to be received at 8 p.m. on Election Day, mandates that signatures on the mail-in ballots be authenticated, and forbids the counting of defective mail-in ballots. The resolution also lists a variety of election irregularities and potential fraud, including the issues brought up by witnesses during the hearing before the Pennsylvania Senate Majority Policy Committee on Nov. 25. “On November 24, 2020, the Secretary of the Commonwealth unilaterally and prematurely certified results of the November 3, 2020 election regarding presidential electors despite ongoing litigation,” the resolution states. “The Pennsylvania House of Representatives has the duty to ensure that no citizen of this Commonwealth is disenfranchised, to insist that all elections are conducted according to the law, and to satisfy the general public that every legal vote is counted accurately.”

Headed straight to SCOTUS?!

• Case Dismissed? Analysis of Decision in Pennsylvania’s Parnell Case (Reeves)

Earlier this evening, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court issued a brief, three-page order dismissing an election lawsuit brought by Sean Parnell and several other qualified Pennsylvania voters challenging the constitutionality of Pennsylvania’s recently-enacted state law governing mail-in voting. In doing so, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court also vacated a lower court judge’s preliminary injunction preventing the Pennsylvania Secretary of State from certifying the results of the 2020 General Election pending resolution of the lawsuit. In dismissing the lawsuit, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court did so on the narrowest of grounds: that Parnell and the other voters waited too long to file it. By styling their decision thus, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court avoided having to decide the case on the actual merits: Is the Pennsylvania mail-in voting law unconstitutional under the Pennsylvania state constitution? As we shall see below, the answer is most likely “yes.”

The Pennsylvania constitution allows absentee voting under five situations: (1) work; (2) illness; (3) physical disability; (4) the election occurring on a religious holiday; or (5) a person’s election-day duties themselves preventing the person from voting in person. No other justifications are allowed for absentee voting under the Pennsylvania constitution. Towards the end of 2019, a majority of both houses of the Pennsylvania General Assembly passed the relevant mail-in voting legislation at issue here. As I discussed in my previous two articles, this legislation expanded voting by mail beyond the above-five situations under the Pennsylvania constitution to include any situation. In other words, the law purported to allow voting by mail for any reason whatsoever.

But while the General Assembly passed the legislation, this was not, in and of itself, sufficient to amend the Pennsylvania constitution and expand voting by mail beyond the above-five circumstances. To amount to a constitutional amendment, the Pennsylvania constitution requires that the law be passed a second time by a majority vote of both houses of the General Assembly in the next legislative assembly. Once that is done, a majority of Pennsylvania voters then have to approve the mail-in voting legislation in a statewide election. The above process has not taken place. Indeed, the Pennsylvania General Assembly itself appears to have recognized that such an expansion of mail-in voting would have to come about via a constitutional amendment, as the law itself was originally presented as a joint resolution proposing an amendment to the Pennsylvania Constitution.

Parnell and the other voters brought suit on November 21, 2020, in the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania, seeking a declaration that the mail-in voting law is unconstitutional and an injunction barring the Pennsylvania Secretary of State from certifying the results of the General Election until the lawsuit was completed. The Commonwealth Court granted a preliminary injunction, finding that a substantial likelihood existed that the mail-in voting legislation did, in fact, violate the Pennsylvania Constitution. The Pennsylvania Secretary of State immediately appealed the preliminary injunction to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. Earlier today, that court entered an order both dissolving the preliminary injunction and dismissing the entire lawsuit. The only reason it gave for doing so was that Parnell and the other voters had waited too long to bring their lawsuit, and could not do so now, with the electoral college deadline being so close.

If other lawsuit litigation is any predictor, Parnell and the other voters will now seek an expedited petition for a writ of certiorari. They will most likely also apply to Justice Alito—as Circuit Justice for the Third Circuit—for an emergency injunction barring the Pennsylvania Secretary of State from certifying the results of the election pending resolution of the cert petition. To obtain the Court’s review, Parnell and the other voters must show that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s decision somehow violates federal law. While the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s decision is rooted in state law, a good argument can be made that it involves a federal question.

What is the Kraken

WOW.

Listen to General McInerney describe the Kraken and the raid of the CIA facility in Frankfurt, Germany.

1/2 pic.twitter.com/WzmIuw4Ge3

— TheSharpEdge (@TheSharpEdge1) November 29, 2020

Out in the open.

• Potential Biden Officials’ Firm Is Promising Big Profits (Sirota)

Two former government officials who may now run President-elect Joe Biden’s national security team have been partners at a private equity firm now promising investors big profits off government business because of its ties to those officials, according to government documents reviewed by The Daily Poster. Pine Island Capital Partners lists former Under Secretary of Defense Michele Flournoy and retired General Lloyd Austin as a partner in the firm, and lists former Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken as a partner on a leave of absence. Flournoy and Austin are reportedly among the leading candidates being considered for Secretary of Defense, and Blinken is Biden’s designated nominee for Secretary of State. Pine Island’s chairman is John Thain, the former top executive at Merrill Lynch when the company paid out huge executive bonuses as it began to collapse during the financial crisis.

Flournoy and Blinken’s ties to Pine Island were first reported by The American Prospect. In Securities and Exchange Commission filings, Pine Island describes one of its investment vehicles as “a newly organized blank check company incorporated in Delaware” that will use its connections to top officials to take advantage of rising government expenditures on the national security agencies that Flournoy and Blinken could oversee. Pine Island’s first filings about the investment vehicle were made in September — the same month Biden suggested that he will not push for significant reductions in Pentagon expenditures, which have reached record levels.

“The reputations and networks of Pine Island Capital Partners’ team, both individually and collectively, will ensure exposure to a significant number of proprietary opportunities,” the company said in one SEC document. “We believe there will be increased demand in the U.S. defense market for advanced electronics, communications, sensor and detection processing and other technologies that enhance the modernization efforts of the Department of Defense’s military readiness. We believe this demand represents strong growth that our management team is uniquely positioned to capitalize on given our combined investment experience and deeply connected partner group of former U.S. defense and government officials.”

The company says Thain and CEO Philip Cooper founded the firm “on the idea that a talented group of accomplished, highly respected, commercially-savvy and long-tenured former government and military officials, when fully aligned and engaged, could enable a first class investment team with better access, better information, better expertise and better management skills than those typically found in private equity firms.” “This is so explicit that it’s astonishing Pine Island even put it on paper,” said David Segal of Demand Progress, a grassroots group pressing Biden to reject Cabinet appointments tied to corporations. “This is not an example of people who happen to work at a big company — these are partners at a firm whose stated business model is to profit from the revolving door and connections gained from time in government.”

It’s almost funny.

• “Washington Is Exhausted”: Swamp Gears Up For Post-Trump Power Orgy (ZH)

Washington elites are breathing a sigh of relief, as power players on both sides of the aisle gear up for ‘business as usual’ following a four-year disruption in swamp-activities – thanks to one Donald J. Trump, whose perhaps prematurely anticipated departure from the Oval Office has the DC establishment licking their chops. “The classic friendly-rivals dinner party will be back, likely bigger than ever, with VIP guests from the Biden administration, a few formers from the Obama crowd, a senator or two seated next to a Supreme Court justice,” according to the Washington Post’s Roxanne Roberts Shoving the Uniparty’s collective excitement in our plebeian faces, Roberts writes in. full. stops. “Washington is exhausted. Washington is optimistic. Washington is desperate for change. The aristocracy of this city is ready to move on, daring to hope that the last four years was a fever that finally broke and life can get back to normal.”

Poor Washington. “Normal, as in a respect for experience and expertise. Normal, as in civility and bipartisan cooperation. Normal, as in not wanting to punch someone in the face,” Roxanne continues. And who’s about to usher in this period of ‘bipartisan cooperation’ and controlling one’s violent delights? Joe Biden, of course! “Biden and wife Jill Biden “know how to get around Washington, how to be a part of the establishment, how to make it work for them in their everyday lives,” says an influential Republican hostess who, like many of the city’s social leaders, spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak frankly without retribution. “People who have always enjoyed the Washington scene are yearning to get back to that, have some semblance of what they enjoyed so much before. There are a lot of Republicans who sat out the Trump years and bit their tongues for four years who are thrilled to have Biden.” At the heart of this optimism is the belief that politicians on both sides of the aisle get more accomplished when they like each other”. -WaPo

And of course, no self-respecting DC power-player can survive without attending establishment soirées, fundraisers, diplomatic corps and ‘historical traditions’ underpinning the ‘business of Washington’ – which Roxanne says needs ‘bipartisanship to really thrive’ after the Trump administration made everything a ‘test of loyalty.’ “Washington’s elite social world can pivot faster than a prima ballerina,” Roxanne continues – noting that a COVID-19 vaccine and a ‘call for comity’ will allow them to ‘press the reset button and start fresh.’

Certainly an odd couple.

• Ilhan Omar’s Misguided Defense Of John Brennan (Greenwald)

The right to dissent from, and to work against, the official foreign policy of the U.S. Government is vital: foundational to Constitutional liberties. There is very little such dissent in the U.S. Congress, where many of the core tenets of the Foreign Policy Community (from CIA drone warfare and clandestine coups to steadfast support for Gulf State and Middle East tyrannies as well as Israel) enjoy overwhelming, at times virtually unanimous, bipartisan support. That is one of the reasons that — as I’ve said repeatedly — I am glad that there are now members of Congress such as Congresswomen Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan who so vocally and unflinchingly dissent from this general foreign policy orientation and especially from those policies which most members of Congress either cannot or do not want to denounce.

Whether or not one agrees with these two lawmakers on every issue, having members of Congress questioning and objecting to highly consequential foreign policies is inherently healthier than full-scale agreement or fear-driven acquiescence. Dissent strengthens all democracies. That is why I have relentlessly defended Congresswoman Omar, even in the face of less-than-ideally-phrased proclamations, from what I regard as bad faith accusations of bigotry and a lack of patriotism (just as I denounced moronic claims that Trump was a “traitor”): bad faith accusations of bigotry or treason are often designed to demonize attempts to question pieties and ostracize those who do it.

For that very reason, I was quite surprised to see that late Friday night, Congresswoman Omar, in response to something I wrote, defended not only former CIA Director John Brennan — who as Obama’s CIA Director presided over the bombing of numerous countries including Somalia — but also The Logan Act. The Logan Act is nothing more than an unconstitutional attempt to criminalize foreign policy dissidents, like her, and is so dangerous in the hands of the CIA, FBI and federal prosecutors precisely because it lacks any clear definition or meaning. Despite this, Congresswoman Omar depicted that ancient statute not as what it is — an impossibly vague and overly broad attempt to criminalize the core Constitutional right to dissent — but instead as some kind of specific, precisely defined, and well-established precedent, the contours of which are clearly established and easily applied. None of that is true.

“..most people don’t have the money, don’t have the time, and don’t have the platform to go after them — and I have all three..”

• Candace Owens Challenges Fact-Checker, And Wins (DW)

Conservative author and commentator Candace Owens challenged left-leaning fact-checking site PolitiFact, a partner with Facebook, over a “false” rating — and won. Not only did PolitiFact remove their “false” rating and retract an article on why Owens’ video was allegedly false, but the site offered an added “correction” admitting their fault. Owens’ video, which was posted on Nov. 12, offered commentary on the 2020 presidential election, and was captioned, “Joe Biden is literally and legally not the President-elect. So why is the media pretending he is?” The video was hit with a “false” rating, and, as noted by Owens, theoretically, every single person who shared the post was alerted by Facebook that they had shared “false” content.

“Weeks ago, [Facebook] censored a post of mine which truthfully stated that [Joe Biden] is NOT the President-elect. So I got lawyers involved,” she said Saturday via Twitter. “Conclusion? [PolitiFact] uncensored the post & admitted that they LIED by rating my post false. The fact-checkers are lying for Democrats.” The note from PolitiFact reads as follows:”Correction: PolitiFact originally labeled this video false in our capacity as a third-party fact-checker for Facebook. On Nov. 20, an appeal to that decision was made on behalf of Ms. Owens. PolitiFact approved the appeal on Nov. 20, determined that a correction was appropriate, and removed the false rating.”

“At 8 Months pregnant, I unfortunately cannot fight on the ground alongside patriots like I am used to, but I am taking every measure to fight these communists in the court room,” Owens said in a follow-up post. “It is my goal to expose these lying ‘fact-checkers’ one by one. [Joe Biden] is NOT the President-elect.” But the language from PolitiFact’s note perhaps downplays what really happened. The BLEXIT founder told The Daily Wire on Saturday that she reached out to PolitiFact on Nov. 20 with legal representation and immediately heard back, with PolitiFact admitting their error. Language from a lawyer at PolitiFact, according to Owens, read as follows: “Upon first glance, this video from Ms. Owens was labeled false from PolitiFact in error. We already have removed the label from the video and you should now be able to see it unobstructed. As we’re about 25 minutes into this, we still don’t know how or why the post was labeled ‘false.’ We are investigating and hope to share more information with you formally on Monday.”

Owens said she was not further briefed on the supposed “error” and that she felt the retraction wasn’t enough; she wanted PolitiFact to admit publicly that they falsely fact-checked her. “I wanted to show that these fact-checkers just lie, and they usually go unchecked because most people don’t have the money, don’t have the time, and don’t have the platform to go after them — and I have all three,” she said. With pressure from Owens’ legal representation, PolitiFact issued the correction, which she shared with the public on Saturday. That was a win. And another “major win,” she said, was PolitiFact essentially admitting “that Joe Biden is not the President-elect.”

Richard Werner’s comment to Varoufakis: “You want to kill banks everywhere, like the ECB did in Greece. This is treason. Don’t betray your people.”

• A Free Central Bank Account For All To Revamp Monetary System (Varoufakis)

Imagine that the Bank of England were to create a free bank account for everyone. Overnight, it would be far better placed to regulate the money supply in the public interest. Moreover, to stay in business, commercial banks would have to seriously raise their game. In times of trouble, such as the current pandemic, the Bank of England could lift all boats at once by crediting your account directly – instead of printing sterling to lend to commercial banks, as it does now, in the hope that they would then lend to your employer, in the hope that your employer would then invest the money, rather than buy back more of their own shares. And, if the Bank of England felt that it had to rein in the total supply of money, to avert inflation, it would be able to do so easily: just offer to pay you, say, £5 for every £100 in your account that you do not spend within the next 12 months.

Imagine further that the Bank of England, in a bid to promote trust via transparency, were to base its digital sterling ledger on a distributed ledger digital architecture that allowed everyone, in real time, a glimpse at how much money was sloshing around in its system. Now imagine that the Bank of England were to lend its expertise to local authorities around the country to revive their regional economies by creating local digital currencies for the purpose of keeping within their communities as much of the surpluses produced locally as possible. These currencies would be backed by their capacity to pay local taxes and their free-floating exchange rate with sterling would be determined automatically by a transparent formula taking into account the balance of payments between the regions.

Imagine, also, that the Bank of England were to come to an agreement with the central banks of other major economies, reflecting a New Bretton Woods-type of international agreement that allows for global trade imbalances and climate change to cancel each other out. This unlikely feat could be accomplished in three steps: First, central banks agree to create a digital accounting unit, let’s call it the Kosmos or Ks, in which all international trade and cross-border money transfers are denominated (with a free-floating exchange rate between national currencies and Ks). Secondly, they also agree to charge symmetric levies upon net exporters of goods and money (a trade-imbalance levy and a surge levy – see below) that help stabilise world trade and global money flows. Thirdly, the proceeds from these levies fund climate change mitigation projects, especially in the global South.

FInders keepers?

• China Seizes $3.3 Billion Of Bitcoin (Exp.)

Beijing swooped on the South Korean based cryptocurrency exchange called PlusToken and has seized a huge volume of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. The seizure by the Yancheng Intermediate People’s Court has moved the vast amount of digital currency to the control of the nation’s treasury. Bitcoin pioneer Max Keiser (@maxkeiser) has claimed this decision allows China to “own one percent of all bitcoin”. However, the exact details of how Beijing will use the assets in accordance with the nation’s laws has yet to be announced. China has not made public the exact figures on how many of the seized coins are still held by the state. But, if they hold onto the recent haul, it would point to a longer term strategy by the politburo to acquire bitcoin.

Mr Keiser discussed how the US dealt with the bitcoin they seized from the Silk Road website, and although it is not known what China plans to do with its huge haul of cryptocurrency, some analysts claim the communist politburo may hold on to their new asset as they see a potential for future gains. Mr Keiser said: “The United States seized bitcoin when they nabbed the leaders of the Silk Road black market, but the US auctioned off their bitcoin. “A move that history will see as foolish as Gordon Brown selling half of Britain’s gold.” There has been a huge increase in bitcoin mining in China and a general interest from the leadership in digital currencies. Speaking to Express.co.uk Mr Keiser added: “This could be the year China starts to dominate the global economy thanks to bitcoin.”

China could use its bitcoin assets and mining capacity to break the hegemony of the US dollar, Mr Keiser also claimed. He said: “If China holds onto their bitcoin and they continue building their mining capacity, it may be game over for the US dollar as the world reserve currency. “The window of opportunity for the US to avoid bitcoin-irrelevancy is closing fast.”

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Vaccines for Guinea Pigs

Nov 252020

November 25, 2020 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 6:41 pm Finance Tagged with: AstraZeneca, Moderna, mRNA, Pfizer, Sputnik, vaccine, Vitamin D 17 Responses »

Willem de Kooning Door to the river 1960

While I’m trying to read my way into the world of vaccines, not my field at all, I think the logical/philosophical implications should be clear: the model for doing medicine in a global pandemic must of necessity be global cooperation. But we apparently are not capable of that (anymore). Because the pandemic must be mined for profit.

Not so much for the AstraZenaca/Oxford vaccine, which is produced in a not-for-profit capacity, or the Russian Sputnik V vaccine, but certainly for the Pfizer and Moderna ones. We should just refuse those, but we’re -told we are- desperate, and they know it.

So it’s politics and profit that determine the world of vaccines. What a sorrowful state of affairs. And that’s not even the worst of it. Far from it. With vaccines -that we know of- being developed in Cuba (4x), China, Russia (2x), West (multiple), etc., maybe we can have the luxury of choosing the ones that do the least harm?

Well, there’s a trap door hidden somewhere in there. The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines use a whole new (revolutionary!) technique to produce vaccines. Some people even refuse to call them vaccines because of this. Vaccines as we -used to- know them were based on taking a harmless strand of a virus/bacteria and using it to urge your immune system to produce antibodies.

mRNA (messengerRNA) is very different. Here, it’s a synthetic, artificial entity designed to be injected into your cells to provoke certain reactions. And in the case of the Pfizer/Moderna vaccines, it’s basically entirely untested.

They intend to ship out billions of doses of their vaccines, which would essentially create billions of human guinea pigs. The risk is not so much short term, the only thing they would have to provide evidence for, it’s long term, for which they do not. What is that risk? We don’t know, it’s never been tested.

The problem seems obvious: once more people begin to understand this, more people will refuse to be inoculated with these “vaccines”. But then “authorities” will demand you take them to fly/move/just go outside? I don’t see it. What I see is human guinea pigs. And why, if there are other non-mRNA vaccines about to come forward? Money will cure the pandemic? The South China Morning Post had this today:

Pfizer-BioNTech Says Final Analysis Shows Vaccine 95% Effective

A major milestone in the race for a vaccine to counter Covid-19 was reached on Wednesday, when the first vaccine developers to complete phase 3 trials announced results in what has been the fastest vaccine development in history.[..]

Getting enough doses out to the world will take time, coordination and infrastructure. Pfizer and BioNTech have said they could produce 1.3 billion doses by the end of 2021. Several hundred million doses are already booked by major economies like the US and EU. Each immunisation requires two doses and there is an additional hurdle – they need to be transported and stored at minus 70 degrees Celsius (minus 94 Fahrenheit). All told, leading vaccine makers have projected that some 16 billion doses could be made next year..

Pfizer and BioNTech announced results after their trial reached a planned end point of 170 infections of Covid-19 among their nearly 44,000 participants. Of the cases, 162 were observed in the placebo group, while there were eight cases among those who had received the vaccine candidate, BNT162b2. The efficacy rate of 95 per cent was consistent across age, gender, race and ethnicity demographics, the companies said. Notably, the observed efficacy for adults over 65 years of age was over 94 per cent, an important marker for a group whose Covid-19 mortality rate far exceeds younger age groups.

But that makes no mention of the development method, or the risks involved. Which could be huge. I mean, it’s fine to say we need a lot of vaccine doses, and fast, but with AstraZeneca promising 2 billion in 2021, and Russia 1 billion, and China 1 billion or so as well, what exactly is the risk/reward ratio here? Why splurge into mRNA vaccines if you don’t have to? Is it just profit driven? When so many people are dying?

Here’s a bit from an Automatic Earth comments section yesterday. Commenter “upstateNYer” said:

I’m not yet clear on how “the scientists” made sure this mRNA hijacker will quit forcing my cells to produce stuff once its demands are met. Does anyone here with medical knowledge understand how it’s guaranteed that the mRNA strands don’t get just a bit power hungry and take over more than initially agreed upon?

In reaction to which, commenter Doc Robinson cited a Jerusalem Post article from November 17:

Could mRNA COVID-19 Vaccines Be Dangerous In The Long Term?

[..] the fact remains that if Pfizer succeeds – or Moderna, with whom Israel also has a contract – these will be the first-ever messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines brought to market for human patients. In order to receive Food and Drug Administration approval, the companies will have to prove there are no immediate or short-term negative health effects from taking the vaccines. But when the world begins inoculating itself with these completely new and revolutionary vaccines, it will know virtually nothing about their long-term effects.

When Moderna was just finishing its Phase I trial, The Independent wrote about the vaccine and described it this way: “It uses a sequence of genetic RNA material produced in a lab that, when injected into your body, must invade your cells and hijack your cells’ protein-making machinery called ribosomes to produce the viral components that subsequently train your immune system to fight the virus.”

Doc Robinson on the potential risks:

1. the bio-distribution and persistence of the induced immunogen expression
[spreading throughout the body and lasting longer than intended]

2. possible development of auto-reactive antibodies
[potentially leading to auto-immune conditions]

3. toxic effects of any non-native nucleotides and delivery system components.
[such as from nanoparticles and potential allergens like polyethylene glycol (PEG)]

“There is a race to get the public vaccinated, so we are willing to take more risks… But he acknowledged that there are unique and unknown risks to messenger RNA vaccines, including local and systemic inflammatory responses that could lead to autoimmune conditions.

An article published by the National Center for Biotechnology Information, a division of the National Institutes of Health, said other risks include the bio-distribution and persistence of the induced immunogen expression; possible development of auto-reactive antibodies; and toxic effects of any non-native nucleotides and delivery system components.

And then there was this Reuters article from October 29:

Doc Robinson:

The vaccines being developed by Russia, J&J and CanSino use a human adenovirus platform, which is a proven technology used in Ebola vaccines and cancer treatments. The other frontrunners are “based on new, largely unproven technology platforms designed to produce vaccines at speed.” Other vaccine candidates using more conventional approaches won’t have late-stage trial results until sometime in 2021. I am going to avoid mRNA vaccines like the plague, and wait and see whether the conventional approaches produce anything with a good track record and minimal risk.

Next Crop of COVID-19 Vaccine Developers Take More Traditional Route

Many leading candidates now in final-stage testing are based on new, largely unproven technology platforms designed to produce vaccines at speed. They include messenger RNA (mRNA) technology used by Moderna Inc and Pfizer Inc with partner BioNTech SE, and inactivated cold virus platforms used by Oxford University/AstraZeneca Plc, Johnson & Johnson and CanSino Biologics, whose vaccine has been approved for military use in China.

Merck & Co in September started testing a COVID-19 vaccine based on a weakened measles virus that delivers genes from the new coronavirus into the body to stimulate an immune response to the coronavirus. Of these, only the technology offered by J&J and CanSino that use [human] cold viruses as vectors to deliver coronavirus genetic material have ever produced a licensed vaccine – for Ebola. [The Russian vaccine also uses this technology.]

The next set of candidates – with late-stage trial results expected in the first half of 2021 – are heavily skewed toward approaches that have produced successful vaccines. Conventional methods include using a killed or inactivated version of the pathogen that causes a disease to provoke an immune response, such as those used to make flu, polio and rabies vaccines. Also more common are protein-based vaccines that use purified pieces of the virus to spur an immune response. Vaccines against whooping cough, or pertussis, and shingles employ this approach.

I don’t know about you, but this scares the heebees out of me. If given the choice, I’d much rather not be a guinea pig for some Big Pharma experiment. There have been in our past very succesful vaccines, and I would maybe list penicilline in that list, but certainly Jonas Salk’s 1955 polio vaccine, off which nobody got rich, and it feels just completely crazy to now exploit a pandemic for profit. It’s just wrong.

Maybe COVID19 is not our biggest problem? Maybe our own mindset is? If we can no longer work with Russia and China on global issues, but we instead turn to large corporations to solve them for us for profit, we have already conceded defeat? Our own defeat?!

I don’t like the smell of this. Be careful out there. Don’t volunteer to be a human guinea pig just so you can fly a plane, or walk outside.

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Debt Rattle November 25 2020

Nov 252020

November 25, 2020 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 10:02 am Finance Tagged with: AstraZeneca, Covid19, dry ice, Kerry, Moderna, mRNA, Pfizer, Pompeo, profit, Sputnik V, vaccine, Vitamin D 18 Responses »

Willem de Kooning Police Gazette 1955

• Over 1 Billion Doses Of Russia’s COVID Vaccine Expected In 2021 (RT)

• As A Doctor, People Ask Me If It’s Safe To Take A New Covid Vaccine (RT)

• Could mRNA COVID-19 Vaccines Be Dangerous In The Long Term? (JP)

• Short Term, High-Dose Vitamin D Supplementation For COVID-19 (BMJ)

• UPS Stepping Up Dry Ice Production, Freezers For Vaccines (Y!)

• Dragon Flies, Eagle Crashes At Geoeconomic Summits (Escobar)

• Biden Climate Envoy John Kerry Is A Lifelong Joke (NYP)

• Pompeo Spells Out New Normal: All Criticism Of Israel Is ‘Antisemitic’ (Cook)

• The Trump Administration May Privatize Fannie Mae And Freddie Mac (MW)

• The Five-Day Christmas COVID Bubble: How Will It Work? (G.)

Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are based on mRNA technique. AstraZeneca/Oxford’s, and Russian vaccine Sputnik V, use traditional technique. They are also much cheaper. AstraZeneca was developed as a not-for-profit. Russia wants theirs to be cheap. But the EU has banned the Russian vaccine, though it could be the best, because: Russia!

AstraZeneca has said they will produce 2 billion vaccine doses in 2021, Russia 1 billion. Pfizer and Moderna vaccines have already made people billionaires even before production. Why use mRNA vaccines anyway? Money.

But RussiaRussia! Hungary wanted to try it, and the EU said: no! Like a global pandemic doesn’t need a global answer.

• Over 1 Billion Doses Of Russia’s COVID Vaccine Expected In 2021 (RT)

More than 500 million people will be able to take the pioneering Russian Sputnik V vaccine against the coronavirus next year. Its developers say the two-shot jab will be sold cheaper than those of its foreign competitors. The drug will be produced not only in Russia but also by “leading foreign pharmaceutical companies” who agreed to cooperation deals with the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF). Talks with additional international partners are underway to further increase production capacity. “Sputnik V will be two or more times cheaper than mRNA vaccines with similar efficacy levels,” RDIF said in a statement.

A single dose of the Russian vaccine is going to cost $10, according to the producer, meaning it will set each person back $20 for two shots – which is still way below the price tags of US biotech firms Pfizer and Moderna, who are eyeing $39 and $50-74 for their vaccines, respectively. Notably, it’s only foreign buyers who would need to pay up, as the Russians will be getting Sputnik V for free. International customers are scheduled to receive first shipments of the vaccine in January. The new data announced by Moscow’s Gamaleya Center, which developed the Sputnik V formula, suggests that its vaccine is 95 percent effective. The result was based on Phase Three clinical trials that involved almost 20,000 volunteers who were administered two shots of the drug.

By Malcolm Kendrick, doctor and author who works as a GP in the National Health Service in England.

“We are told that none of the mRNA can get into the nucleus of the cell, where it could become incorporated into the DNA. I hope so. Could it trigger an immune cascade? I hope not.”

• As A Doctor, People Ask Me If It’s Safe To Take A New Covid Vaccine (RT)

Now, we have a thing called a messenger RNA vaccine (mRNA). RNA is, effectively, a single strand of DNA – the double helix that sits within our cells and makes up our genetic code. Many viruses are made up of a single strand of RNA, surrounded by a protein sphere. They enter the cell, take over the replication systems, make thousands of copies of themselves, then exit the cell. Sometimes killing the cell as they do so, sometimes exiting more gently. Covid19 (Sars-Cov2) is an RNA virus. Knowing this, rather than attempting to create a weakened virus, which can take years, or break the virus into bits, the vaccine researchers decided to use Sars-Cov2’s RNA against itself. To do this, they isolated the section of RNA which codes for the ‘spike’ protein – which is the thing the virus uses as a ‘key’ to enter cells.

They then worked out how to insert this small section of RNA, messenger RNA, into the cell, where it takes over a part of the protein replication mechanisms that sit inside all cells. They turn the mechanism into a 3D printer, churning out copies of the spike protein. These spike proteins then leave the cell – somehow or other, this bit is unclear. The immune system comes across them, recognises them as ‘alien’ and attacks. In doing so, antibodies are created, and the immune memory system kicks into action. If, later on, a Sars-Cov2 virus gets into the body, the immune system fires up and attacks the remembered spike protein. Hopefully killing the entire virus. This is all, certainly very clever stuff. What, as they say, could possibly go wrong?

The first thing to say is that, with something this new, we don’t really know. It could be that it is absolutely 100 percent safe. We are told that none of the mRNA can get into the nucleus of the cell, where it could become incorporated into the DNA. I hope so. Could it trigger an immune cascade? I hope not. I know that the researchers will be looking very, very, closely at the novel safety issues that could emerge. If they are not, they damned well should be. However, the timelines here are very short. It normally takes many years to create safe and effective vaccines. Here is it happening in, effectively, weeks. The early stage human safety studies have been crammed very tightly together.

In addition, we will also have very little information on such things as whether or not the vaccine actually reduces serious infections or death, as noted by Professor Haseltine in a recent article: “These [vaccine] protocols do not emphasize the most important ramifications of COVID-19 that people are most interested in preventing: overall infection, hospitalization, and death.” Prof. Haseltine also argues that the trials have all been “designed to succeed.” The reality is that we are rushing and rushing. There are very good reasons for this rush, but I advise caution. Should everyone take the vaccine? Probably yes for those at highest risk of serious infection and death, where the potential benefit is high. As for anyone healthy, under the age of sixty, I would wait. As I shall be.

mRNA should be tested first for a much longer time.

• Could mRNA COVID-19 Vaccines Be Dangerous In The Long Term? (JP)

Israelis celebrated on Friday when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that the country had signed a deal with Pfizer Inc. to buy its novel coronavirus vaccine. But the fact remains that if Pfizer succeeds – or Moderna, with whom Israel also has a contract – these will be the first-ever messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines brought to market for human patients. In order to receive Food and Drug Administration approval, the companies will have to prove there are no immediate or short-term negative health effects from taking the vaccines. But when the world begins inoculating itself with these completely new and revolutionary vaccines, it will know virtually nothing about their long-term effects.

“There is a race to get the public vaccinated, so we are willing to take more risks,” Tal Brosh, head of the Infectious Disease Unit at Samson Assuta Ashdod Hospital, told The Jerusalem Post. When Moderna was just finishing its Phase I trial, The Independent wrote about the vaccine and described it this way: “It uses a sequence of genetic RNA material produced in a lab that, when injected into your body, must invade your cells and hijack your cells’ protein-making machinery called ribosomes to produce the viral components that subsequently train your immune system to fight the virus.” “In this case, Moderna’s mRNA-1273 is programmed to make your cells produce the coronavirus’ infamous coronavirus spike protein that gives the virus its crown-like appearance (corona is crown in Latin) for which it is named,” wrote The Independent.

Brosh said that this does not mean the vaccine changes people’s genetic code. Rather, he said it is more like a USB device (the mRNA) that is inserted into a computer (your body). It does not impact the hard drive of the computer but runs a certain program. But he acknowledged that there are unique and unknown risks to messenger RNA vaccines, including local and systemic inflammatory responses that could lead to autoimmune conditions. An article published by the National Center for Biotechnology Information, a division of the National Institutes of Health, said other risks include the bio-distribution and persistence of the induced immunogen expression; possible development of auto-reactive antibodies; and toxic effects of any non-native nucleotides and delivery system components.

Brosh compared the mRNA vaccine to traditional vaccines, such as those for influenza, which use an inactivated virus that was destroyed by heat or chemicals to elicit an immune response without infecting the recipient. Others, such as for measles or mumps, use a weakened virus that is unable to hurt you but can still train your immune system to fight it. Oxford University’s AstraZeneca, the Russian’s Sputnik V and the Israel Institute for Biological Research’s Brilife are all based on more traditional technologies.

Better than a vaccine?

• Short Term, High-Dose Vitamin D Supplementation For COVID-19 (BMJ)

Background Vitamin D has an immunomodulatory role but the effect of therapeutic vitamin D supplementation in SARS-CoV-2 infection is not known.

Aim Effect of high dose, oral cholecalciferol supplementation on SARS-CoV-2 viral clearance.

Design Randomised, placebo-controlled.

Participants Asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 RNA positive vitamin D deficient (25(OH)D<20 ng/ml) individuals.

Intervention Participants were randomised to receive daily 60 000 IU of cholecalciferol (oral nano-liquid droplets) for 7 days with therapeutic target 25(OH)D>50 ng/ml (intervention group) or placebo (control group). Patients requiring invasive ventilation or with significant comorbidities were excluded. 25(OH)D levels were assessed at day 7, and cholecalciferol supplementation was continued for those with 25(OH)D <50 ng/ml in the intervention arm. SARS-CoV-2 RNA and inflammatory markers fibrinogen, D-dimer, procalcitonin and (CRP), ferritin were measured periodically.

Outcome measure Proportion of patients with SARS-CoV-2 RNA negative before day-21 and change in inflammatory markers.

Results Forty SARS-CoV-2 RNA positive individuals were randomised to intervention (n=16) or control (n=24) group. Baseline serum 25(OH)D was 8.6 (7.1 to 13.1) and 9.54 (8.1 to 12.5) ng/ml (p=0.730), in the intervention and control group, respectively. 10 out of 16 patients could achieve 25(OH)D>50 ng/ml by day-7 and another two by day-14 [day-14 25(OH)D levels 51.7 (48.9 to 59.5) ng/ml and 15.2 (12.7 to 19.5) ng/ml (p<0.001) in intervention and control group, respectively]. 10 (62.5%) participants in the intervention group and 5 (20.8%) participants in the control arm (p<0.018) became SARS-CoV-2 RNA negative. Fibrinogen levels significantly decreased with cholecalciferol supplementation (intergroup difference 0.70 ng/ml; P=0.007) unlike other inflammatory biomarkers.

Conclusion Greater proportion of vitamin D-deficient individuals with SARS-CoV-2 infection turned SARS-CoV-2 RNA negative with a significant decrease in fibrinogen on high-dose cholecalciferol supplementation.

Who’s pushing for this when 3 billion doses of non-nMRA vaccine doses are coming?

• UPS Stepping Up Dry Ice Production, Freezers For Vaccines (Y!)

Global shipping giant UPS on Tuesday said it would start making dry ice in the United States and also distribute ultra-cold temperature freezers as it prepares to handle the logistics of shipping Covid-19 vaccines. Facing the world’s largest coronavirus outbreak, the US government’s Operation Warp Speed plans to distribute 6.4 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine in the first week after it’s cleared for emergency use, which could come as soon as December 10. That vaccine requires ultra-cold long-term storage of -70 degrees Celsius (-94 Fahrenheit), and the company has developed special containers with dry ice to keep it cool for up to 15 days, while other vaccines may also need dry ice in transport.

In a statement, UPS said it had added equipment in its facilities that can produce up to 1,200 pounds of dry ice an hour for the shipping needs of these vaccines, which can be distributed within 24 hours of production to US and Canadian hospitals. “Healthcare facilities in Louisville, Dallas and Ontario will ensure we have the capability to produce dry ice to sufficiently pack and replenish shipments as needed to keep products viable and effective,” Wes Wheeler, president of medical arm UPS Healthcare, said in a statement.

QR.

• Dragon Flies, Eagle Crashes At Geoeconomic Summits (Escobar)

Four geoeconomic summits compressed in one week tell the story of where we stand in these supremely dystopian times… The (virtual) signing of RCEP in Vietnam was followed by the equally virtual BRICS meeting hosted by Moscow, the APEC meeting hosted by Malaysia, and the G20 this past weekend hosted by Saudi Arabia. Cynics have not failed to note the spectacular theater of the absurd of having the Top 20 – at least in theory – economies discussing what is arguably the turning point in the world-system linked to a beheading-friendly desert oil hacienda with a 7th century mentality.

The Riyadh declaration did its best to lift the somber planetary mood, vowing to deploy “all available policy tools” (no precise details) to contain Covid-19 and heroically “save” the global economy by “advancing” global pandemic preparedness, vaccine development and distribution – in tandem with debt relief – for the Global South. Not a peep about The Great Reset – the Brave New World scheme concocted by Herr Schwab of Davos and fully supported by the IMF, Big Tech, transnational Big Capital interests and the oh so benign Prince Charles. Meanwhile, off the record, G20 sherpas moaned about the lack of real global governance and multiple attacks on multilateralism.

And not a peep as well about the real life vaccine war between the expensive Western candidates – Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca – and the much cheaper Russia-China versions – Sputnik V and Sinovac. What seems to be the case is that any agenda – sinister or otherwise – fits the one-size-fits-all vow by the G20 to provide “opportunities of the 21st century for all by empowering people, safeguarding the planet, and shaping new frontiers.” At the G20, President Xi Jinping did not waste the chance – after RCEP, BRICS and APEC – to once again emphasize China’s priorities: multilateralism, support for WTO reform, ample international cooperation on vaccine research and production.

But then, in tandem with reducing tariffs and facilitating the trade of crucial medical supplies, Xi proposed a global health QR code – a sound way to restore global travel and trade: “While containing the virus, we need to restore the secure and smooth operation of global industrial and supply chains.” Predictably, there were howls about neo-Orwellian intrusion, comparing the QR code with the exceptionally misunderstood Chinese credit system. Herr Schwab’s Great Reset in fact proposes something similar, with even more neo-Orwellian overtones, disguised under an innocent “Covid Pass” app, or highly secure “health passport”. What Xi has proposed amounts to just a mutual recognition of health certificates, issued by different nations, based on nucleic acid tests. No gene altering vaccines coupled with nanochips. These QR codes, incorporated to health apps, are already used for domestic travel in China.

Kerry is just like Biden. A career sell-out.

“..Biden, having vowed to make fighting climate change a top priority, simply wants someone who’ll look like he’s trying hard — but won’t actually get anything done.”

• Biden Climate Envoy John Kerry Is A Lifelong Joke (NYP)

What was Joe Biden thinking for his choice of climate-change ambassador extraordinaire? John Kerry is one of the biggest gasbags in American politics, singlehandedly responsible for massive amounts of terrible emissions. People have been laughing at him since Yale, when “Doonesbury” creator Garry Trudeau was zinging his pretentious, vacuous self-promotion. We look forward to the anti-carbon lectures from a guy who travels the globe on private jets and luxury yachts. Set aside his deer-in-the-headlights loss as the Democrats’ presidential nominee in 2004. He was a joke as secretary of state under President Barack Obama — off on his yacht during Egypt’s 2013 military coup.

He vowed a crushing response when Syria crossed Obama’s infamous “red line” — only to have Obama pull the rug out from under him and agree to let Russia pretend to take Syria’s chemical weapons away instead. Kerry also cluelessly “negotiated” the Iran nuclear deal even as the real talks were being run out of the White House; then he had to pretend to cheer an accord that gave away several points he’d said were non-negotiable, such as truly tough inspection requirements. And he helped craft the 2015 Paris climate accord — a performative non-binding “triumph.”

The Kerry-initiated Israeli-Palestinian peace talks of 2013-14 went absolutely nowhere. He later blasted President Trump over moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem, insisting it would cause “an absolute explosion” — when it actually helped bring unprecedented Arab-Israeli rapprochement. The only conclusion you can draw is that Biden, having vowed to make fighting climate change a top priority, simply wants someone who’ll look like he’s trying hard — but won’t actually get anything done.

Still crazy.

• Pompeo Spells Out New Normal: All Criticism Of Israel Is ‘Antisemitic’ (Cook)

It is tempting to dismiss last week’s statements by Mike Pompeo, the US secretary of state, equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism and suggesting the global movement to boycott Israel is driven by hatred of Jews, as the last gasp of a dying administration. But that would be foolhardy. Pompeo’s decision to label all but the most tepid criticism of Israel as antisemitism is fully in line with the current redrawing of the limits of western political debate about Israel. To underscore his message, Pompeo issued his statement as he headed to an illegal Jewish settlement in the West Bank – the first such official visit by a US secretary of state.

New guidelines announced that in future the US would mark settlement goods as “Made in Israel”, concealing the fact that they are produced in the occupied Palestinian territories. For good measure, Pompeo described the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement (BDS), widely supported by Palestinians, as a “cancer”. “We will regard the global, anti-Israel BDS campaign as antisemitic,” he added. The state department would identify any individual or group opposed to “doing business in Israel or in any territory controlled by Israel” – that is, in the settlements – “and withdraw US government support”.

They should close both down.

• The Trump Administration May Privatize Fannie Mae And Freddie Mac (MW)

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have been kept in conservatorship limbo for over a decade now. But the Trump administration may move to end that before leaving office in January. In the wake of the government bailouts of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the housing-finance giants were placed into conservatorship. The Federal Housing Finance Agency, a new regulator, was created to oversee the two companies’ operations as the companies recovered from the subprime-mortgage crisis and repaid the federal government. In that time, Fannie and Freddie’s shareholders — other than the federal government — have gone without even a single dividend payment. For most of this time, Fannie and Freddie’s profits have been swept to the Treasury Department.

Conservatorship was not intended to be a permanent thing. In April 2019, Vice President Mike Pence’s former chief economist, Mark Calabria, was confirmed as the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, the main regulator overseeing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Since assuming that post, Calabria has moved to lay the groundwork needed to get the two companies out of conservatorship. But with President Trump’s loss in the elections earlier this month, a wrench was thrown in those plans. Former Vice President Joe Biden is unlikely to be in any hurry to move Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac out of their current arrangement. Faced with that reality, Calabria appears to be considering a plan to move Fannie and Freddie out of conservatorship before the inauguration, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.

Depending on how the exit is orchestrated, it could have a major impact on the housing finance ecosystem. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are not mortgage lenders — they buy and securitize mortgage loans, providing a crucial inflow of capital. All told, nearly half of all mortgages created in the first quarter of 2020 (47%) were backed by Fannie and Freddie, according to data from Inside Mortgage Finance and the Urban Institute. “Director Calabria has previously been quoted as saying that he believed the GSEs would be able to successfully exit the conservatorship sometime in 2022,” said Rick Sharga, a mortgage industry veteran and executive vice president at real-estate analytics firm RealtyTrac. “Accelerating the exit by at least a year seems ambitious at best, and risky at worst, given the critical role Fannie and Freddie play in providing mortgage market liquidity and stability.”

Look, people know you’re just making it up. You’re inviting unrest.

• The Five-Day Christmas COVID Bubble: How Will It Work? (G.)

The government has announced that up to three households will be able to mix indoors and stay with each other overnight from 23 to 27 December under loosened coronavirus restrictions across the UK. But how exactly will these new “Christmas bubbles” work?

Can I eat out with my Christmas bubble? No. In a blow to pubs and restaurants, and families who like to avoid the piles of washing-up, separate households in a Christmas bubble will not be able to meet up in hospitality venues. Restrictions on these venues – which will vary depending on which tier they are placed in from 2 December – will remain in place over the festive period. However, members of a Christmas bubble can meet at home, in places of worship and in outdoor public places including gardens. You can continue to meet people who are not in your Christmas bubble outside your home according to the rules in the tier you are staying in.

Is there a limit on the number of people who can meet up as part of a bubble? There is no maximum size for a Christmas bubble, so you don’t need to worry if you and those you join with live in large households. This means three households of two people each – a total of six people – are allowed to meet, just as three households of, say, six people each – a total of 18 people – are also allowed to meet.

If I’m already in a bubble with another household, do we count as one household or two for the new Christmas rules? Under the rules, a support bubble will count as one household when Christmas bubbles are being formed. In England, support bubbles have been permitted for a number of months throughout Covid restrictions, allowing a household with one adult to join with another household. Those in a support bubble can still visit each other, stay overnight and visit public places together. This means that, technically, if three support bubbles – each comprising two separate households – were to join together in a Christmas bubble, six households would be able to meet.

Can I join more than one Christmas bubble? No, the bubbles have to be exclusive, and they cannot change over the five-day period – so pick your households carefully. This means that you can’t mix with two households on Christmas Day, and then a different two households on Boxing Day. However, children whose parents are separated will be able to move between two Christmas bubbles so they’re able to celebrate with both parents.

Do I need to socially distance from the people in my Christmas bubble? Bubble members will not be required to social distance while they are together, so they can hug or kiss under the mistletoe. However, people are advised to exercise caution if there are vulnerable people involved in their bubble. “This virus is not going to grant a Christmas truce,” Boris Johnson said on Monday.

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Debt Rattle November 2 2020

Nov 022020

November 2, 2020 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 10:17 am Finance Tagged with: bias, Biden, Covid19, election, Electoral College, frailty, hatred, hysteria, lockdowns, polls, RT, Trump, Vitamin D 27 Responses »

Paul Klee Limits of Reason (Grenzen des Verstandes ) 1927

• A Contagion Of Hatred And Hysteria (Sunetra Gupta)

• Trump COVID Adviser Atlas Forced To Apologize For RT Interview (RT)

• ‘Bleak Midwinter’ In Europe As 250 Million Face Lockdown (NZH)

• Bias In Journalism Has Become A Disease (Curtis)

• MI Nov 1, 2020 Presidential Poll (Trafalgar)

• The Complete Election Cheat Sheet: What Happens On And After November 3 (ZH)

• In Defense Of The Electoral College (AT)

• Trump Failed To Fight And Expose The Establishment’s COVID Narrative (Marsden)

• Democrats Are Masking Biden’s Frailty (NYPost)

• Add Vitamin D To Bread And Milk To Help Fight Covid, Urge Scientists (G.)

• Non-Scalable Fence Being Built to Protect Trump During Election Day Unrest (GP)

The first lockdowns made sense, though too long; they were a response to a totally new virus. But policies should have been developed to make sure there would not be a second lockdown.

Such policies were not developed. Therefore, the second lockdowns merely disguise policy failures.

Days are getting shorter, nights are getting colder, and we’re locking down entire populations. The damage will be immense.

This looks funny at first. But at the end is no longer is. Biden copies Hillary word for word.

Tiptoe thru the tulips

This is Biden at his most perfect. You must watch to the end for your little Easter egg. pic.twitter.com/ViAGer8lsh

— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) November 2, 2020

Tucker Trunalimunumaprzure
https://twitter.com/i/status/1323167019806695425

Sunetra Gupta is a professor of theoretical epidemiology at Oxford. She has to run to the Daily Mail to be heard. Like Glenn Greenwald has to go on Tucker Carlson, and Scott Atlas talks to RT.

We must not discuss either Hunter Biden or lockdowns.

• A Contagion Of Hatred And Hysteria (Sunetra Gupta)

Lockdown is a blunt, indiscriminate policy that forces the poorest and most vulnerable people to bear the brunt of the fight against coronavirus. As an infectious diseases epidemiologist, I believe there has to be a better way. That is why, earlier this month, with two other international scientists, I co-authored a proposal for an alternative approach — one that shields those most at risk while enabling the rest of the population to resume their ordinary lives to some extent. I expected debate and disagreement about our ideas, published as the Great Barrington Declaration. As a scientist, I would welcome that. After all, science progresses through its ideas and counter-ideas. But I was utterly unprepared for the onslaught of insults, personal criticism, intimidation and threats that met our proposal.

The level of vitriol and hostility, not just from members of the public online but from journalists and academics, has horrified me. I am not a politician. The hurly-burly of political life and being in the eye of the media do not appeal to me at all. I am first and foremost a scientist; one who is far more comfortable sitting in my office or laboratory than in front of a television camera. Of course, I do have deeply held political ideals — ones that I would describe as inherently Left-wing. I would not, it is fair to say, normally align myself with the Daily Mail. I have strong views about the distribution of wealth, about the importance of the Welfare State, about the need for publicly owned utilities and government investment in nationalised industries.

But Covid-19 is not a political phenomenon. It is a public health issue — indeed, it is one so serious that the response to it has already led to a humanitarian crisis. So I have been aghast to see a political rift open up, with outright abuse meted out to those who, like me, question the orthodoxy. At the heart of our proposal is the recognition that mass lockdowns cause enormous damage. We are already seeing how current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health. The results — to name just a few — include lower childhood vaccination rates, worsening cardiovascular disease outcomes, fewer cancer screenings and deteriorating mental health.

Such pitfalls of national lockdowns must not be ignored, especially when it is the working class and younger members of society who carry the heaviest burden. I was also deeply concerned that lockdowns only delay the inevitable spread of the virus. Indeed, we believe that a better way forward would be to target protective measures at specific vulnerable groups, such as the elderly in care homes. Of course, there will be challenges, such as where people are being cared for in their own multi-generational family homes. I am certainly not pretending I have all the answers, but these issues need to be discussed and thrashed out thoroughly.

That is why I have found it so frustrating how, in recent weeks, proponents of lockdown policies have seemed intent on shutting down debate rather than promoting reasoned discussion. It is perplexing to me that so many refuse even to consider the potential benefits of allowing non-vulnerable citizens, such as the young, to go about their lives and risk infection, when in doing so they would build up herd immunity and thereby protect the lives of vulnerable citizens. Yet rather than engage in serious, rational discussion with us, our critics have dismissed our ideas as ‘pixie dust’ and ‘wishful thinking’.

Scott Atlas can’t talk about lockdowns either other than on RT, “one of the Kremlin’s main propaganda platforms..” It’s safe to say that WaPo and CNN are propaganda platforms; RT, not so much.

• Trump COVID Adviser Atlas Forced To Apologize For RT Interview (RT)

Trump administration Covid-19 adviser Scott Atlas ripped public-health officials for “egregious” policy failures – only to be forced to apologize after mainstream media deflected his points by attacking him for appearing on RT. On Saturday, the Stanford University doctor, who has emerged as President Donald Trump’s top adviser on responses to the Covid-19 pandemic, called the lockdown policies an “epic failure” and argued they are “killing people,” while speaking with Afshin Rattansi on RT’s Going Underground show. “The public-health leadership have failed egregiously, and they’re killing people with their fear-inducing shutdown policies,” Atlas told RT.

“The lockdowns will go down as an epic failure of public policy by people who refuse to accept they were wrong – were wrong, refused to accept they were wrong, didn’t know the data, didn’t care. And it became a frenzy of stopping Covid-19 cases at all costs, and those costs are massive,” he said. “The argument is undeniable: The lockdowns are killing people.” Atlas then pointed to job losses, rising suicides, rising drug abuse and the harm being done to young people, tying the issues to the Covid-19 restrictions put in place. One study showed that 25 percent of Americans aged 18 to 24 thought about killing themselves in June “due to the lockdown”, he said.

“We’re creating a generation of neurotic children, forcing them to wear masks and be six feet apart from their friends, or not even have school in person.” While Atlas’ counter-narrative comments might have been fodder for a serious discussion of public-health policy, mainstream media outlets instead spun the interview into a controversy over a Trump administration official granting an interview to a Russian state-owned outlet. Reporters such as CNN’s Jim Acosta, Politico’s Ryan Lizza and NBC’s David Gura immediately pounced, ignoring the substance of his comments and breathlessly telling their followers that he spoke to an alleged Kremlin mouthpiece. “White House Covid adviser appears on outlet that is described by US intel as one of the Kremlin’s main propaganda platforms,” Washington Post national-security correspondent Greg Miller said.

ScottAtlas apology

I recently did an interview with RT and was unaware they are a registered foreign agent. I regret doing the interview and apologize for allowing myself to be taken advantage of. I especially apologize to the national security community who is working hard to defend us.

— Scott W. Atlas (@SWAtlasHoover) November 1, 2020

Days are gettig shorter, nights are getting colder, and we’re locking down entire populations. The damage will be immense.

• ‘Bleak Midwinter’ In Europe As 250 Million Face Lockdown (NZH)

More than a quarter of a billion Europeans are now in, or facing, fresh lockdowns after a second wave of Covid-19 deluged the continent. UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson grudgingly announced on the weekend that the 55 million residents of England would head into a four-week lockdown – even as some Brits headed off to Spain for autumn holidays. The UK nations of Wales and Northern Island are already in lockdown and Scotland has warned it may be forced to ramp up restrictions following the move in England. Britain joins a host of other nations, including France, Germany, Greece, Belgium, Ireland, Austria and the Czech Republic, in imposing new lockdowns.

It’s been dubbed the “bleak midwinter” as more than 250 million Europeans are now being told to stay at home for all of November. Other countries, such as Italy, Portugal and Spain, have imposed restrictions at a regional level and have warned they also may go into full lockdown mode. On Saturday, the UK PM said a four-week lockdown from November 5 was vital to avert a “medical and moral disaster” for the country’s health service, the NHS. He said deaths could reach “several thousand a day” and could peak above that of April’s lockdown. Johnson had previously vowed not to put England into a second lockdown, relying on regional restrictions to fight outbreaks. However, rising numbers – 22,000 new cases on Saturday alone – have pushed the UK into the one million coronavirus infections club.

[..] Statistically speaking, Belgium has been the European nation hardest hit by Covid-19 with more than 100 deaths per 100,000 population.From Monday, a strict lockdown will be accompanied by a curfew for up to six weeks. Belgium has been challenged by its small geographic size but highly devolved regional governments which has meant virus restrictions have varied, in some cases, from one town to another. Meanwhile in France, a cumulative 700km traffic jam choked the streets of the greater Paris region as residents streamed out of the city to spend a second lockdown in the country where many have second homes. Anyone leaving their home will have to fill out an “attestation” form declaring their reason for doing so.

[..] Despite the increasing number of lockdowns, a number of countries with lower infection rates are holding out against major restrictions. The Nordic nations of Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland are largely lockdown-free. Sweden, which has relied on voluntary guidance rather than legal enforcement, is seeing an increase in cases. But deaths remain low. The Government has asked residents of Stockholm and Gothenburg to avoid heading indoors to gyms and shops in an attempt to reduce infections.

“..we have gone beyond partisanship and into tribalism..”

• Bias In Journalism Has Become A Disease (Curtis)

Glenn Greenwald is the latest big-name journalist to quit a title, leaving the Intercept in a censorship row. This trend is indicative of a media landscape that reflects a polarized society which discourages freedom of thought. Imagine having to resign from something that you co-founded. It can’t be a good feeling. You spend all of your time trying to build it up into something tenable, only for things to fall apart. That’s the position Glenn Greenwald has found himself in at news website, the Intercept. But even more galling for Greenwald is why things turned ugly. As his resignation letter stated, “The Intercept’s editors, in violation of my contractual right of editorial freedom, censored an article I wrote this week, refusing to publish it unless I remove all sections critical of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, the candidate vehemently supported by all New-York-based Intercept editors involved in this effort at suppression. The censored article, based on recently revealed emails and witness testimony, raised critical questions about Biden’s conduct.”

Working on the assumption that what Greenwald said is true, this is a distressing occurrence that’s becoming all too familiar. It’s reminiscent of Bari Weiss and her issues at the New York Times, Ariana Pekary leaving MSNBC, and Andrew Sullivan quitting the New Yorker. Over and over again, we’re seeing journalists who don’t want to adhere to certain partisan views being forced into a situation where they have to leave their publication because they won’t play the cheerleader. This is a worrying trend. Sure, partisanship has been part of journalism as long as it has existed. People will inevitably have biases towards certain belief systems that they adopt. With that said, there is another inevitability, given how flawed humanity is. And this is that flawed humans aren’t going to be able uphold the standards that people with those beliefs expect them to. In short, no one is perfect, and everyone is open to criticism.

However, what we are seeing from certain partisan forces is a desire for any and all criticism from journalists to simply be swept under the carpet. At that point, can it really be classed as journalism? Readers expect journalists to ask questions. Some of those questions are going to be tough; some may even constitute criticism. But those questions and criticisms can open the way to improvement. There’s nothing wrong with being a conservative and being critical of other conservatives, or being a liberal and being critical of other liberals. But when that criticism has to be silenced or is met with outright hostility, we have gone beyond partisanship and into tribalism. And that is not a positive development.

“This pollster is cool, the guy who got 2016 right, says “we take into account the fact that ppl may have one set of ideas n feelings in their local election and a complete different set of ideas n wishes in a national election.” He gets scale.”

• MI Nov 1, 2020 Presidential Poll (Trafalgar)

Cahaly

All the way to December 8?!

• The Complete Election Cheat Sheet: What Happens On And After November 3 (ZH)

It’s after midnight on Nov 3, the US population has voted, and the election results are popping up across the media landscape. When will we know who is the next president? Well, due to the special circumstances surrounding this election including a record number of mail in ballots and countless court challenges involving the voting process, we may have to wait…. a while. Below we lay out a timeline of key events and catalysts that everyone should be aware of. After Election Day on November 3, the results of the election need to generally be finalized by December 8, which is known as the Safe Harbor Day, as this is when states select their EC Voters.

How to follow the news on Election Day. Here are a few tips from Bank of America: Here are a few tips:

• Be wary of exit polls: The track record of exit polls is tenuous at best. In 2004, exit polls showed John Kerry winning the popular vote by 51% to 48% only to ultimately lose by the same margin. Similarly, there were major flaws in the 2016 exit polls which substantially underestimated the number of white working-class voters while overestimating the number of college-educated white voters, leading to bias results favoring Hilary Clinton. Pollsters claim they have fixed the issues ailing Election Day polls but the better mouse trap is yet unproven. Moreover, there has been unprecedented surge in early voting (both in person and mail-in) with over 70mn votes cast nationwide to-date and there is a major skew in voter day preference by party. Admittedly, pollster are aware of this issue and will enhance their methodology by polling at large and early voting centers but nevertheless this creates greater uncertainty in their estimates.

• Brace for head fakes: Results from battleground states should begin to trickle in just after polls close within each state (Table 3). First battleground states to report will be Florida, Georgia and New Hampshire where polls close at 7pm EDT (polls in Florida’s panhandle will close at 8 pm), followed by North Carolina, Ohio and Michigan, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. Type of ballots reported first will vary across states. For example, according to reporting done by the Upshot blog of the New York Times, battleground states such as Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Arizona, and Iowa will report early in-person and processed mail-in votes first. Meanwhile, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Nevada will not follow any specific order. Getting a clear sense of who is winning will be difficult given the large number of early voting by mail and absentee ballots and different rules around processing ballots, which we discuss below.

• Key demographics: In 2016, President Trump was able to tip the election by winning the older and suburban vote. A post-mortem of the 2016 election by the Pew research center showed that Trump won the age groups 50-64 and 65+ by a margin of 6 and 9 points, respectively and edged out the suburban vote by 2 points. During the 2020 election cycle, polls have shown President Trump consistently running below his 2016 election numbers in these key demographic groups. In this context, keep an eye on results coming out of suburban areas such as Maricopa County in Arizona and Peach County in Georgia and older leaning regions such as Sumter County and Pinellas County in Florida. Results in these regions could prove to be a canary in the coalmine.

@TimMurtaugh

@TimMurtaugh on why the polling at Fox News is terrible and why we haven't ever given much thought to those polls.

Their pollster has been paid over $3million this cycle by DEMOCRATS who lost… in their party's primaries pic.twitter.com/LXDx5UsGLW

— Sam (@SunshineSt8Sam) November 1, 2020

The purpose of the Electoral Collage seems obvious. “..the Electoral College erects a constitutional check-and-balance to prevent corrupt urban politicians and voters from wielding disproportionate power..

• In Defense Of The Electoral College (AT)

In the last twenty years, Democrats have twice lost presidential elections when the Electoral College has “trumped” the popular vote, leading to Republican victories. First came George W. Bush’s presidential victory over Al Gore in 2000, then Trump’s shocker over Hillary Clinton in 2016. Thus, radical Democrats demand the abolition of the Electoral College. “It’s undemocratic,” they say. “The will of the people should rule,” they cry. Yes, it’s undemocratic, which, believe it or not, is an exceptionally good thing. That’s because the United States is not, and never has been a “democracy.” The word “democracy” is not in the Constitution. In fact, the founders hated pure, unrestrained democracies.

Instead, Article 4, Section 4, states that the Constitution provides a “Republican” form of government. Not a democracy. There’s a difference. “Democracy” equals mob rule, where angry, fist-shakers “vote” for or demand whatever they want. Imagine that, against the rights and interests of others. Think of the mobs burning Portland and Seattle. “Republic” equals freedom and the rule of law, featuring internal checks-and-balances against overconcentration of power. Remember that phrase, checks-and-balances. It’s key to understanding the Electoral College. That’s because the Electoral College erects a constitutional check-and-balance to prevent corrupt urban politicians and voters from wielding disproportionate power over the less powerful. In this case, that means rural and small-town America. Though the Constitution contains 7 Articles and 27 Amendments, two powerful concepts emerge as keys to understanding the Constitution.

1. To Protect Freedom. First, the Constitution establishes government’s primary role, which is to protect individual freedom. The broadest freedoms designated for governmental protection are found at the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, guaranteeing Americans the right to life, liberty and property. Jefferson expresses a similar concept in the Declaration of Independence, discussing life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. So, protecting freedom is the government’s principal role, not to become a giant lollypop factory dispensing free goodies as the Democrats advocate.

2. A Restraining Device Against Overconcentration of Power. Here’s the second concept: The Constitution is also a restraining device against over-concentrated governmental power. When lecturing on the Constitution, to illustrate a point, I often show a photograph of a drunk driver, just after being arrested by police officers, with handcuffs clamping his hands behind his back. Likewise, the Constitution handcuffs government on multiple levels, restraining excessive governmental power to protect citizens.

Tom Fitton

“Our new study shows 1.8M excess, or ‘ghost’ voters in 353 counties across 29 states. The data highlights the recklessness of mailing blindly ballots/ballot applications to voter registration lists," @TomFitton.
Watch more: https://t.co/PGoq56Vml4
Read at https://t.co/pj584AoaJV pic.twitter.com/cPfZbupNuP

— Judicial Watch ⚖️ (@JudicialWatch) November 2, 2020

He listened to the scientists.

• Trump Failed To Fight And Expose The Establishment’s COVID Narrative (Marsden)

The best thing about the Trump presidency is arguably that every morning, no matter how bad a day you’re having, you can be assured that when you open your Twitter feed alongside your morning coffee, Trump will have said something that will make you shoot your Nescafe out your nose. (That is, if partisan hysteria hasn’t caused you to completely lose your sense of humor.) Modern-day US presidents haven’t exactly been the epitome of statesmanship, but unlike them, at least Trump gives you a chuckle. The problem with his approach is that while Trump is focused on wisecracks – however entertaining they can be – the Covid counter-narrative led by the usual suspects in the Washington establishment and their unelected (but often equally political) specialists and advisors, is one of doom and gloom.

They bombard the public with cherry-picked figures – like the transition to a preference for advancing numbers of ‘cases’ over deaths – and capitalize on Trump’s more fatalistic approach to portray him as incompetent at best and a willfully negligent maniac at worst. Governments around the world have been hard-pressed to prove that they’re doing something – anything – to control the Covid situation. Even if the effectiveness of government actions are still difficult to reliably assess or to separate from pre-existing endemic social and cultural factors that could account for variation in outcomes across or within nations. Yet the establishment is arrogantly and absolutely certain that they have all the answers vis-à-vis a phenomenon that is, by definition, so new that it’s called the ‘novel coronavirus’.

They vilify anyone who deviates from their views. We’ve seen this kind of establishment groupthink before. One example being the issue formerly known as “global warming” (now known as ‘climate change’, or, more recently, ‘climate deregulation’, because the issue was rebranded when it became difficult to explain how supposed ‘warming’ was causing colder weather). Any deviation from conventional establishment wisdom on this results in a pile-on and cancellation – just ask Mike Shellenberger. The same establishment hacks also persist with the simplistic narrative of good guys (America and its allies) versus bad guys (Russia and China, and their allies). This worldview is peddled every time they attempt to ramp up support for a natural resource grab or geopolitical power-play in some part of the world. Why should anyone trust their narrative when it comes to Covid? They’ve proven repeatedly that they’re anything but trustworthy and transparent.

“..he was treating the man who would be president like an invalid. ”

• Democrats Are Masking Biden’s Frailty (NYPost)

Has there been a worse candidate in history than Joe Biden? When this election is over, the books revealing what went on backstage will be illuminating. But the truth is there for anyone with eyes to see. Take Biden’s car rally in Flint, Mich., Saturday, with a star-power assist from Barack Obama. Awkward barely covers it. Obama, effortlessly cool, gave a warmup speech to the assembled cars before ramping up to a dramatic introduction: “My friend, the next president of the United States of America: Joe Biden!” Moments ticked by, but there was no sign of the candidate. “Joe Biden!” Obama repeated, a little less confidently. But still no show. Obama tried a third time: “Joe Biden!” Biden at last emerged from a nearby building and did a pantomime slow jog to the stage.

The worst part came later. After Biden had shouted his way through a short teleprompter speech, Obama came back onstage, perhaps to escort him off, because Biden did not seem to know where he was. Obama mimed an elbow pump with his former VP to signal they should leave the stage and then quietly whispered to him, after which it dawned on Biden he’d forgotten his mask, not for the first time. When your entire campaign is about mask-shaming Trump supporters, it’s not a forgivable lapse. Poor Biden looked like a chastened schoolboy as he fumbled through his folder and all his pockets looking for that pesky piece of cloth.

He walked back to the lectern and searched, to no avail, before fumbling through his pockets again. Finally, he found the mask in his left trouser pocket, held it aloft sheepishly at Obama, and placed it on his face. But then he paused and looked in seeming confusion at the microphone lying on the lectern where he’d left it. He picked it up and held it briefly to his masked face before laying it down again and rejoining Obama. Whatever emotions were going through Obama’s mind at that point he kept under wraps, but he did slow down and look back solicitously as he shepherded Biden down the stairs and away from prying eyes. In other words, he was treating the man who would be president like an invalid.

Really, it was sad.

Let’s do a 10-year study first.

• Add Vitamin D To Bread And Milk To Help Fight Covid, Urge Scientists (G.)

Scientists are calling for ministers to add vitamin D to common foods such as bread and milk to help the fight against Covid-19. Up to half the UK population has a vitamin D deficiency, and government guidance that people should take supplements is not working, according to a group convened by Dr Gareth Davies, a medical physics researcher. Low levels of vitamin D, which our bodies produce in response to strong sunlight, may lead to a greater risk of catching the coronavirus or suffering more severe effects of infection, according to some studies. Last week, researchers in Spain found that 82% of coronavirus patients out of 216 admitted to hospital had low vitamin D levels. The picture is mixed, however – some research shows that vitamin D levels have little or no effect on Covid-19, flu and other respiratory diseases.

Vitamin D deficiency can cause rickets in children and osteomalacia in adults – soft bones that lead to deformities – and children with severe vitamin D deficiency are prone to hypocalcaemia – low levels of calcium in the blood – which leads to seizures and heart failure. However, Public Health England (PHE) and the Department of Health and Social Care have rejected calls over the past 10 years to fortify foods such as milk, bread and orange juice, which is the practice in Finland, Sweden, Australia, the US and Canada. “In my opinion, it is clear that vitamin D could not only protect against disease severity but could also protect against infection,” Davies said. “Food fortification would need careful planning to be rolled out effectively, particularly as people are now taking supplements. Picking the right foods to fortify would need to be done carefully. “But it’s clear that the current policy is not working – at least half the population have a vitamin D deficiency.”

The White House on lockdown. And it’s not for COVID.

• Non-Scalable Fence Being Built to Protect Trump During Election Day Unrest (GP)

Federal agents are set to begin building a non-scalable fence around the White House, Ellipse and Lafayette Square and 250 National Guardsman have been placed on standby to protect President Donald Trump during any election day unrest. Major riots and destruction have been promised by leftist extremists should President Trump win reelection. “The White House on lockdown: A federal law enforcement source tells NBC that beginning tomorrow, crews will build a ‘non-scalable’ fence to secure the WH complex, Ellipse and Lafayette Square,” Geoff Bennett from NBC News tweeted. “250 National Guardsmen have been put on standby, reporting to Metro Police officials.”

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Scary dog
https://twitter.com/i/status/1322949353472864256

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The Early Treatment of Trump

Oct 062020

October 6, 2020 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 12:33 pm Finance Tagged with: antiviral, Covid19, early treatment, HCQ, morbidity, mortality, prophylaxis, Rose Garden, Trump, Vitamin D 22 Responses »

Jacob Lawrence Struggle: From the History of the American People, Panel 8 1954

From the Automatic Earth’s most vocal resident physician, Dr. John Day, in Texas. Who thinks Trump’s meeting with COVID should start a change in America (back) towards preventive healthcare. Why is Trump doing so well so fast? Because his treatment started much earlier.

John Day: The Trumpster was never taken out of action by the virus that has been ravaging Big-Mac consumers his age all year. Uh, how come?

After Returning To White House, Trump Implores Americans Not To Let COVID-19 “Dominate Your Life”

Update (1515ET): Dr. Conley has confirmed that although President Trump isn’t out of the woods yet, he has recovered enough to warrant his safe return back to the West Wing, as the president announced via tweet.

Doctors said that Trump has maintained a full work schedule at Walter Reed. He will receive his fourth dose of remdesivir Monday evening, before taking the fifth and final dose on Tuesday. When pressed by a reporter about the safety risks to the Secret Service agents during Trump’s ride outside Walter Reed Sunday evening, Dr. Conley said that the agents wore PPE, as they have in recent days, and that the trip took place over a “very short period of time”.

Circling back to Trump’s mental acuity, reporters asked whether there had been any fogginess as a result of the medication, or the virus, Dr. Conley assured reporters that “he’s back” and that Trump has been a “great” patient.

Looking ahead, Dr. Conley said advanced diagnostic techniques will be used to detect when the last traces of ‘live’ virus have left the president. Dr. Conley said that people are most at risk of shedding the live virus during the first 5 days of infection, but usually by ten days the last traces have left.

Trump got treated with antiviral medicines shortly after he was diagnosed with SARS-CoV-2, based upon a screening test. A super-spreader cluster was identified at the White House, with 29 people now positive, from that event. The unmasking in the Rose Garden for Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination is blamed, but the people who got sick were all inside without masks for the reception afterward.

I think that’s where the viral cloud got ’em.

Friends, was it the rose garden or the inside party? pic.twitter.com/7j2L28prmw

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb (@nntaleb) October 4, 2020

We have all been told that the only advantage to early and frequent testing is early isolation to reduce spread. All the drugs the Chinese used, and the rest of the world uses, have not been shown to save lives in America, where nobody is allowed to have them until they are almost dying. These antiviral drugs only worked in cell cultures, China which is to blame, and fakes results, and poor countries like India.

Just stay at home until you need a ventilator. Do NOT use drugs from India and Bangladesh! Are you CRAZY?! Trump announced in May that he was taking hydroxychloroquine/zinc prophylaxis, but no mention is made of it now. None. Was it stopped sometime in the summer? Anyway, nobody says he was taking it last week and he’s not taking it now. Hydroxychloroquine/Zn does seem to work as prophylaxis in studies.

There is a progression in the attack of SARS-CoV-2 upon the human body. It’s moderately well understood now, but understandings are broadly misrepresented to the public by the national medical bureaucracy. Many treating physicians have been mocked and belittled in the press for saying that there are treatments to reduce morbidity and mortality from COVID.

Rheumatic fever, from untreated Strep Throat used to be a major cause of death and morbidity in the US. That stopped when strep throat started to be treated promptly with penicillin. Now it’s unheard of. In HIV, we discovered that all the “AIDS-defining-illnesses” like pneumocystis pneumonia, and Kaposis’s Sarcoma would just never happen if viral infection was detected early and antivirals were started before the virus had caused widespread injury. Even Tony Fauci knows that.

Now, with the way Donald Trump is being treated, with antivirals reserved for the hopelessly ill, and getting a rapid recovery from early symptoms, when we know he’s exactly the target this virus likes to find, maybe we can get a national reprieve and Make-America-Average-Intelligent-Again.

What if everybody took a little saliva test every Monday and Thursday? What if people at higher risk or even higher anxiety level, got treated as soon as the test was confirmed, like President Trump did, and some of the other party-goers probably are? Hey, what if all the people who tested positive before elective surgery got treated that way for starters? I bet we could set up a study proposal to do that in about 3 months, and have it reviewed for possible approval by next spring!

To have convincing scientific evidence you have to go through the process. It takes a lot of time. Just treating people, like in the old days, can’t give you convincing evidence that it is better to take ordinary drugs for a life threatening infection, before your life is already threatened. Some people might want to do that if they test positive, of course, but it’s not to be condoned, is it?

What if it was somebody in your family? You know how stressful that can be, right? What if great-aunt, or grandma isolated at home and took some safe, purportedly antiviral combination like ivermectin, zinc and doxycycline, or hydroxychloroquine and zinc if her EKG was ok? Would you go for that? Would it seem OK to you? If auntie-grandma just got a positive screening test after 3 visits to the ER , and couldn’t get the surgery she needed, would you think she should take some treatment, even before she got sick with fever, diarrhea, hurting all over, and gasping for air?

How would you know the medicine really worked if she never got sick enough to be sure? Can’t have that, can you?

Our family is treating Auntie-Grandma. Judge us if you must, but we are weak and subject to temptation. We fear the guilt which would come from inaction if she did get badly sick and suffered, and maybe died. She has started ivermectin, doxycycline, and will get the zinc in a couple of hours when the family-courier gets it to her. We’ll letcha know how it works out. Maybe she can get her surgery without too long of a wait.

We may be on the cusp of paradigm shift. I sure hope we are. Take 5000 units per day of vitamin-D. “Auntie Grandma” is taking 5000 units 3 times a day with her zinc, vitamin-C and NAC 600 mg for the next 10 days.

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Click at the top of the sidebars for Paypal and Patreon donations. Thank you for your support.

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Vitamin D

Sep 282020

September 28, 2020 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 5:33 pm Finance Tagged with: closures, Covid19, Greece, Holland, UK, Vitamin D, zinc 14 Responses »

Rene Magritte Memory 1948

Let me have another go at the shortest essay ever here. Explain the simplest thing ever in the universe. I see the governments of Greece, UK, Holland all declare they have to “fight” the increasing COVD19 numbers in their countries with measures such as closing all bars and restaurants at 10pm. Greece wants everyone to wear a facemask even outside. Try feeding the homeless, as we actively do here, with that kind of premise.

And it’s all pretty much nonsense, as yet another study, this one from Boston University, points out. You can cut your COVID risk by more than half, if you tell your people to take enough Vitamin D. That’s it. Not masks, but a supplement, No big conspiracies, no big anything. Vitamin D. 10,000 daily for the first week, 5,000 after that. Not much else matters. You sort of found your vaccine before it appeared.

For some obscure reason, your government doesn’t want you to know this. I can’t really figure out why. But I will tell all my friends here, and those that read me from other places. How could I do anything else? We’re literally saving lives here, but the topic, and the people, have become politicized. Shame on all of you who allowed that to happen. But make sure you take the Vitamin D. It at least cuts your risk in half.

COVID-19 Patients Who Get Enough Vitamin D Are 52% Less Likely To Die

People who get enough vitamin D are at a 52 percent lower risk of dying of COVID-19 than people who are deficient for the ‘sunshine vitamin,’ new research reveals. Vitamin D plays a crucial role in the immune system and may combat inflammation. These features may make it a key player in the body’s fight against coronavirus. Rates of vitamin D deficiency are also higher in some of the same groups who have been hardest hit by coronavirus: people of color and elderly people. It’s by no means a causal link, but suggests that vitamin D could play a role in who gets COVI-19, who gets sickest from it, and who is spared altogether.

Boston University’s Dr Michael Holick found in his previous research that people who have enough vitamin D are 54 percent less likely to catch coronavirus in the first place. Following on that work, he and his team have found that people who don’t get enough of the vitamin are far more likely to become severely ill, develop sepsis or even die after contracting coronavirus. Because vitamin D deficiency is common in people with other disease that raise coronavirus risks, it’s impossible to say exactly how many lives would be spared if we all got our daily dose of the sunshine vitamin. But we know that about 42 percent of the US population is vitamin D deficient. If that rate held true for the more 203,000 Americans who died of coronavirus, perhaps some 85,000 would have fared better with improved vitamin D levels.

In Britain 20 per cent of the population suffer from the deficiency, according to the British Nutrition Foundation. When the rate is applied to the UK’s 41,936 deaths from coronavirus, it suggests 8,387 of them could have been helped with improved levels of Vitamin D. ‘This study provides direct evidence that vitamin D sufficiency can reduce the complications, including the cytokine storm (release of too many proteins into the blood too quickly) and ultimately death from COVID-19,’ Dr Holick said. Dr Holick and his colleagues took blood samples from 235 patients admitted to hospitals in Tehran for COVID-19. Overall, 67 percent of the patients had vitamin D levels below 30 ng/mL.

There isn’t a clear marker for the ideal level of vitamin D, but 30 ng/mL is considered a sufficient. Anything below that is ‘insufficient,’ but won’t necessarily have broad-ranging health consequences, while levels below 20 ng/mL are considered ‘deficient.’ About 60 percent of elderly people living in nursing homes, for example, are thought to be vitamin D deficient. The most likely explanation is that they simply spend too much time indoors. Sunlight is our primary source of vitamin D. When we are exposed to ultraviolet (UV) radiation in rays of sunshine, it reacts with cholesterol in our skin, triggering the production of vitamin D. In an increasingly indoor world, rates of vitamin D deficiency have climbed.

Imagine you can cut all these disruptive measures by simply supplying your people with Vitamin D. Nah, that would be too easy, wouldn’t it? Sure there must be a more complicated path. Add some zinc. It prevents the virus from replicating. We’ve been saying this since February. We think it’s nuts that people haven’t latched on.

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Debt Rattle September 28 2020

Sep 282020

September 28, 2020 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:23 am Finance Tagged with: Amy Coney Barrett, ballot harvesting, collusion, covid fines, Covid19, illegal, leak, Nagorno-Karabakh, New York Times, Tiktok, Trump taxes, Vitamin D 62 Responses »

Dorothea Lange Abandoned cafe in Carey, Texas “Carey is fast becoming a ghost town of the Texas plains.” 1937

• New York Times Mysteriously Obtains Trump Financial Records (RS)

• New York Times Fails at Outlining President Trump’s Taxes Again (CT)

• Project Veritas Uncovers ‘Ballot Harvesting Fraud’ In Minnesota (NYP)

• Appellate Court Halts Wisconsin Ballot-Counting Extension (AP)

• As Mueller Probe Fizzles, Anti-Trump Cabal Hatches New Collusion Tale (Smith)

• COVID-19 Patients Who Get Enough Vitamin D Are 52% Less Likely To Die (DM)

• New Covid Fines Of Up To £10,000 Come Into Force In England (G.)

• Amy Coney Barrett: A New Feminist Icon (Pol.)

• Federal Judge Gives Temporary Reprieve To TikTok (NBC)

• Azerbaijan & Armenia Carry On Fighting Over Contested Nagorno-Karabakh (RT)

Will we ever find out who leaked Trump’s tax returns from Cyrus Vance’s offices? And does anyone still care that this is highly illegal?

ZeroHedge Nothing Illegal

So if there is nothing illegal, is this one giant ad for Trump's tax accountants?

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) September 27, 2020

Balding tax returns

I'm not a tax law expert but I've worked with enough companies to know pretty much everything I've seen described in the Trump piece is pretty common practice to minimize taxes for business owners. Nothing in there shocking

— CCP Collaborator Balding 大老板 (@BaldingsWorld) September 27, 2020

The New York Times once upon a time had intelligent journalists with a lot of integrity working -hard- for it. Now they go an yet another fishing trip looking to catch something illegal, but they fail, and still try to dress it all up as something terrible. No pride, no integrity.

• New York Times Mysteriously Obtains Trump Financial Records (RS)

The New York Times reports that it has obtained President Trump’s ‘tax information” going back “over two decades.” The leak is from New York County (Manhattan) District Attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr., or one of his underlings. We know Vance has obtained all of the financial records Trump had on file with Deutsche Bank, his primary lender. We know Deutsche Bank complied with the subpoena. And, via the New York Times, we know that these records go back into the 1990s or, in the parlance of the day, “over two decades.” If the New York Times is correct, Trump’s finances being something of a hot mess is not a shocker. Trump has been on the edge of bankruptcy before and has employed mighty financial kung fu to stay solvent.

[..] From the tenor of the article, they think the revelation that Trump was getting a $72.9 million tax refund and only paying $750 in federal income taxes will be damaging. I really doubt that will be the case. There are things in this story that lead me to believe that either the people writing it are stupid or they think you are stupid. For instance: “In fact, those public filings offer a distorted picture of his financial state, since they simply report revenue, not profit. In 2018, for example, Mr. Trump announced in his disclosure that he had made at least $434.9 million. The tax records deliver a very different portrait of his bottom line: $47.4 million in losses.” These two things are not incompatible, and the fact that you declare earnings on a report that asks for earnings and not profit is not deceptive. The technical term is “compliance.”

By far, the most notable thing about this story is the willingness of the New York Times to engage in election interference by timing their release within 60 days of the election (that’s the standard, right? 60 days?). That and the role that seems to have been played by the Manhattan DA’s office in leaking records ostensibly demanded from Deutsche Bank as part of a criminal investigation to facilitate a political hit. The fact that a district attorney’s office is using such records as part of a political attack on the President within 60 days of an election is unprecedented (that’s the word, right? unprecedented?). The actions by Vance or his office virtually guarantee that any tax returns released to that office will find similar use as political ammunition.

There is a good chance that this story was intended to launch much closer to the election had the scope and extent of Hunter Biden’s financial shenanigans and the degree to which the ChiComs have their tentacles sunk into Sundown Joe not come to light…and will get even more light, I suspect, on Tuesday night. When the dust settles on this, I think the story is going to be “very rich guy with a fascination for high-risk business ventures pays lots of brilliant tax lawyers and accountants a crap-load of money to minimize and avoid (but not evade) income taxes and says he makes more money than he really does to golf partners.”

Excellent question from sundance: “Now let’s figure out how DC politicians making $200k/yr are able to become multi-millionaires while holding office..”

• New York Times Fails at Outlining President Trump’s Taxes Again (CT)

Once again the New York Times attempts to make an issue out of President Trump’s real estate holdings working as a tax shelter and reducing income taxes. In the article the Times completely obfuscates the way income taxes are strategically offset by depreciation, mortgage interest and the entire reason why real estate ownership is viewed as a business. John Carney writing for Breitbart gets it: […] So imagine our guy took out an $8 million mortgage at five percent, paying $2 million cash. Now he’s got to pay $400,000 in mortgage payments. He wants to make at least that much so he charges tenants an aggregate of $425,000, which after upkeep comes out to $410,000 of net income. (Remember, if the bank didn’t think he could make more in rent than the mortgage payment, it probably wouldn’t have lent him the money.)

“The interest payment on the loan–let’s call it $390,000–is deductible from his income, leaving him with $20,000 in net income. He gets to keep that and pay no taxes on it, however, because he still gets to apply the $370,000 depreciation charge. He tells the IRS he lost $350,000. Under our tax code, ordinary business expenses can be deducted in the year they are incurred. But when a business pays for a long-lasting item expected to produce income–like machinery, vehicles, or an apartment building–it is considered a capital investment. Instead of getting to write-off the cost all at once, the business is required to write it off over the course of decades. After the 1986 tax code, this was set at 27.5 years for residential real estate.” d

Anyone who has ever operated a business knows that offsetting income is one of the primary reasons to be self-employed. Additionally, the Times completely skips over the tens-of-millions in payroll taxes paid by the Trump organization and tens-of-millions in property and sales taxes paid by all of the various Trump properties. In the commercial real estate market it is common sense to offset income tax liabilities with a host of valid annual expenses, long-term capital depreciation and mortgage interest payments. With over 500 individual business entities within the Trump organization the ability to offset income in one asset with expenses in another is simply good accounting.

Additionally, President Trump donates his $400,000 government salary back to the U.S. government. So to accuse President Trump of only paying $750 in income taxes totally ignores all of the other donations and tax payments he makes. In practical terms no President before Trump has ever had his actual business portfolio so deeply connected to the success of the American economy. It doesn’t cost the American taxpayer a dime to have President Trump in office…. Now let’s figure out how DC politicians making $200k/yr are able to become multi-millionaires while holding office. Anyone?

It’s getting serious. O’Keefe says they have been filming this for months.

• Project Veritas Uncovers ‘Ballot Harvesting Fraud’ In Minnesota (NYP)

A ballot-harvesting racket in Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar’s Minneapolis district — where paid workers illegally gather absentee ballots from elderly Somali immigrants — appears to have been busted by undercover news organization Project Veritas. One alleged ballot harvester, Liban Mohamed, the brother of Minneapolis city council member Jamal Osman, is shown in a bombshell Snapchat video rifling through piles of ballots strewn across his dashboard. “Just today we got 300 for Jamal Osman,” says Mohamed, aka KingLiban1, in the video. “I have 300 ballots in my car right now . . . “Numbers don’t lie. You can see my car is full. All these here are absentee ballots. . . . Look, all these are for Jamal Osman,” he says, displaying the white envelopes.

“Money is the king in this world . . . and a campaign is driven by money.” The video, posted on July 1, was obtained by Project Veritas and included in a 17-minute video expose released Sunday night. Under Minnesota law no individual can be the “designated agent” for more than three absentee voters. The allegations come just five weeks before a presidential election plagued with predictions of voter fraud. Both President Trump and Attorney General Bill Barr have warned that the increased use of mail-in ballots, due to COVID-19 concerns about in-person voting, are vulnerable to fraud, especially when unsolicited ballots are mailed to all voters in certain states.

Project Veritas’ investigation in Minneapolis will pour gasoline on the fire, only 48 hours before Trump debates Joe Biden in the first presidential debate Tuesday, addressing topics including election security. “Our investigation into this ballot harvesting ring demonstrates clearly how these unscrupulous operators exploit the elderly and immigrant communities” said James O’Keefe, founder and CEO of Project Veritas. The alleged involvement of Ilhan Omar, a controversial member of the Squad, and frequent Trump target, is claimed on camera by two people in Veritas’ investigation, including whistleblower Omar Jamal, a Minneapolis community leader and chair of the city’s Somali Watchdog Group.

First of how many?

• Appellate Court Halts Wisconsin Ballot-Counting Extension (AP)

A federal appeals court on Sunday temporarily halted a six-day extension for counting absentee ballots in Wisconsin’s presidential election, a momentary victory for Republicans and President Donald Trump in the key presidential battleground state. As it stands, ballots will now be due by 8 p.m. on Election Day. A lower court judge had sided with Democrats and their allies to extend the deadline until Nov. 9. Democrats sought more time as a way to help deal with an expected historic high number of absentee ballots. The Democratic National Committee, the state Democratic Party and allied groups including the League of Women Voters sued to extend the deadline for counting absentee ballots after the April presidential primary saw long lines, fewer polling places, a shortage of workers and thousands of ballots mailed days after the election.

U.S. District Judge William Conley ruled Sept. 21 that ballots that arrive up to six days after Election Day will count as long as they’re postmarked by Election Day. Sunday’s action puts Conley’s order on hold until the 7th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals or U.S. Supreme Court issues any further action. [..] State election officials anticipate as many as 2 million people will cast absentee ballots to avoid catching the coronavirus at the polls. That would be three times more absentee ballots than any other previous election and could overwhelm both election officials and the postal service, Conley wrote. If the decision had stood it could have delayed knowing the winner of Wisconsin for days. The Republican National Committee, the state GOP and Wisconsin’s Republican legislators argued that current absentee voting rules be left in place, saying people have plenty of time to obtain and return their ballots.

Second installment of a two-part excerpt from Lee Smith’s book “The Permanent Coup: How Enemies Foreign and Domestic Targeted the American President”.

“According to the story the CIA officer and his colleagues would tell, Trump was again in league with a foreign power to defeat a rival candidate. They rotated Ukraine in for Russia and Biden for Clinton.”

• As Mueller Probe Fizzles, Anti-Trump Cabal Hatches New Collusion Tale (Smith)

Just two days after the curtain dropped on the Mueller investigation, Ciaramella was rebooting the collusion narrative. According to the story the CIA officer and his colleagues would tell, Trump was again in league with a foreign power to defeat a rival candidate. They rotated Ukraine in for Russia and Biden for Clinton. The operation’s personnel drew from the same sources as the Russia collusion operation — serving officials from powerful government bureaucracies, the CIA, Pentagon, and State Department, as well as elected officials, political operatives, and the press. Therefore, the process was also the same: The actors would work the operation through the intelligence bureaucracy and the media to start an official proceeding, in this case an impeachment process. The play was set to begin.

Ciaramella first expressed his concern to a CIA lawyer. Frustrated that his action wasn’t moving quickly enough, he turned to the intelligence community inspector general responsible for oversight of all 17 of the nation’s agencies. On August 12, he filed a whistleblower’s report with ICIG Michael Atkinson. It was a version of the dossier, allegations based on second- and thirdhand sources. Steele said that his information came from anonymous Russians; Ciaramella claimed his came from unnamed Americans. “In the course of my official duties,” wrote Ciaramella, “I have received information from multiple U.S. Government officials that the President of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. elections.”

He even replicated a key feature from Steele’s memos that helped the FBI obtain the FISA warrant. The dossier alleged that the Trump campaign had agreed to two Ukraine-related quid pro quos. One, in exchange for the hack and release of DNC emails, the Trump team would sideline Ukraine as campaign issue. Two, in exchange for dropping Ukraine-related sanctions on Russia, a Putin ally promised Trump advisers energy deals. Ciaramella also alleged a Ukraine-related quid pro quo. His August 12 report added a detail missing from the July 26 memo. He claimed in his document he’d learned earlier in July that Trump had “issued instructions to suspend all security assistance to Ukraine.” With this, the CIA official had planted the seed that would grow into the basis of the impeachment charges brought against Trump:

The president had withheld foreign aid in exchange for something that would benefit him personally — an investigation of his political rival. Ciaramella and his confederates had simply taken the boastful blunder Biden made in front of the Manhattan audience and hung it on Trump. Now he was the one using U.S. aid to secure a favor from a Ukrainian president. It was an audacious move, but the Ciaramella dossier was also a defensive maneuver. “It was born out of desperation,” says one of his former colleagues. “He wasn’t just trying to protect Biden,” says the source, a former senior Obama administration intelligence official. [..] When he finds out Trump may get the Burisma investigation restarted, he’s worried for himself, too.”

And 54 percent less likely to catch coronavirus in the first place. And if you do anyway, zinc hinders virus (RNA) replication in your cells. Two simple and cheap ways to protect yourselves and your loved ones.

• COVID-19 Patients Who Get Enough Vitamin D Are 52% Less Likely To Die (DM)

People who get enough vitamin D are at a 52 percent lower risk of dying of COVID-19 than people who are deficient for the ‘sunshine vitamin,’ new research reveals. Vitamin D plays a crucial role in the immune system and may combat inflammation. These features may make it a key player in the body’s fight against coronavirus. Rates of vitamin D deficiency are also higher in some of the same groups who have been hardest hit by coronavirus: people of color and elderly people. It’s by no means a causal link, but suggests that vitamin D could play a role in who gets COVI-19, who gets sickest from it, and who is spared altogether.

Boston University’s Dr Michael Holick found in his previous research that people who have enough vitamin D are 54 percent less likely to catch coronavirus in the first place. Following on that work, he and his team have found that people who don’t get enough of the vitamin are far more likely to become severely ill, develop sepsis or even die after contracting coronavirus. Because vitamin D deficiency is common in people with other disease that raise coronavirus risks, it’s impossible to say exactly how many lives would be spared if we all got our daily dose of the sunshine vitamin. But we know that about 42 percent of the US population is vitamin D deficient. If that rate held true for the more 203,000 Americans who died of coronavirus, perhaps some 85,000 would have fared better with improved vitamin D levels.

In Britain 20 per cent of the population suffer from the deficiency, according to the British Nutrition Foundation. When the rate is applied to the UK’s 41,936 deaths from coronavirus, it suggests 8,387 of them could have been helped with improved levels of Vitamin D. ‘This study provides direct evidence that vitamin D sufficiency can reduce the complications, including the cytokine storm (release of too many proteins into the blood too quickly) and ultimately death from COVID-19,’ Dr Holick said. Dr Holick and his colleagues took blood samples from 235 patients admitted to hospitals in Tehran for COVID-19. Overall, 67 percent of the patients had vitamin D levels below 30 ng/mL.

There isn’t a clear marker for the ideal level of vitamin D, but 30 ng/mL is considered a sufficient. Anything below that is ‘insufficient,’ but won’t necessarily have broad-ranging health consequences, while levels below 20 ng/mL are considered ‘deficient.’ About 60 percent of elderly people living in nursing homes, for example, are thought to be vitamin D deficient. The most likely explanation is that they simply spend too much time indoors. Sunlight is our primary source of vitamin D. When we are exposed to ultraviolet (UV) radiation in rays of sunshine, it reacts with cholesterol in our skin, triggering the production of vitamin D. In an increasingly indoor world, rates of vitamin D deficiency have climbed.

Behind a paywall, the Times reports pub curfew does not apply to bars in Parliament. Way to go.

• New Covid Fines Of Up To £10,000 Come Into Force In England (G.)

A new, more robust chapter in English coronavirus regulations begins on Monday, with fines of up to £10,000 for people who refuse to self-isolate when asked, and enforcement including tip-offs from people who believe that others are breaching the rules. The changes come with the duty to self-isolate moving into law. It becomes a legal obligation if someone is told to do so by test-and-trace staff, but not for those simply using the Covid-19 phone app, which is anonymous. At the same time, the government is introducing a new system of payments of £500 for people on lower incomes who are unable to work because of the mandatory 14-day self-isolation, a system being implemented by councils.

The two-pronged approach, intended to create better compliance with self-isolation rules, was described by the health secretary, Matt Hancock, as “imperative” in helping keep down coronavirus infection rates. According to a health department statement setting out the new system, local authorities are expected to have their test-and-trace support schemes up and running within two weeks, with those self-isolating before then given backdated payments as needed. However, the Local Government Association, which represents councils, has warned it will be “challenging” for these to be set up at speed, adding that “urgent clarity is needed about how councils will be reimbursed for costs of setting up these schemes and the payments themselves”.

To be eligible for the payment, people must have been told to self-isolate by test and trace – having tested positive for coronavirus or being in close contact with someone who has – as well as having lost income as a result, and be recipients of one or more of a series of benefits, including universal credit, income support and housing benefit. Those who do not self-isolate when told to could face fines, which start at £1,000 and rise to £10,000 for repeat offences, or those who instigate breaches of the law, such as an employer who orders or permits people to come to work when they should not. Test-and-trace call handlers will check on those told to self-isolate, with police taking a role in areas or groups seen as high risk, as well as acting on tip-offs from neighbours or others who spot suspected breaches, the government announcement said.

We need tolerance of people who do not think exactly like we do.

• Amy Coney Barrett: A New Feminist Icon (Pol.)

Amy Coney Barrett has been praised for her topflight legal mind, even by those who disagree with her. At 48 years old, she is poised to help shape the court for a generation or more. But that’s not all her elevation to the high court has the potential to accomplish. Barrett’s expected confirmation should serve as a catalyst for rethinking the most powerful social movement in the last half century: feminism. Over the last week, as Justice Ginsburg’s body laid in repose outside the Supreme Court, the nation has rightly celebrated Ginsburg’s trailblazing 1970s legal advocacy, one which pushed both law and culture to reexamine the ways in which women had been pigeonholed as caregivers and men as providers. The late justice’s antidiscrimination wins opened up a new era in which both men and women could respectably and responsibly engage in both avenues of fulfillment, according to their personal talents and circumstances.

But Ginsburg also viewed abortion rights as central to sexual equality, and her leadership helped give rise to a movement that remains laser focused on abortion to this day. Yet rather than make women more equal to men, constitutionalizing the right to abortion as the court did in Roe has relieved men of the mutual responsibilities that accompany sex, and so has upended the duties of care for dependent children that fathers ought equally to share. Barrett embodies a new kind of feminism, a feminism that builds upon the praiseworthy antidiscrimination work of Ginsburg but then goes further. It insists not just on the equal rights of men and women, but also on their common responsibilities, particularly in the realm of family life. In this new feminism, sexual equality is found not in imitating men’s capacity to walk away from an unexpected pregnancy through abortion, but rather in asking men to meet women at a high standard of mutual responsibility, reciprocity and care.

At Barrett’s Senate confirmation hearing in 2017, Sen. Dianne Feinstein tellingly remarked, “You are controversial because many of us that have lived lives as women really recognize the value of finally being able to control our reproductive systems, and Roe entered into that, obviously.” Barrett’s life story puzzles older feminists like Feinstein because bearing and raising a bevy of children has long implied retaining a traditional life script — like staying home with the children — that Barrett has obviously not heeded. To be sure, few mothers of seven could become federal judges, never mind Supreme Court justices. Barrett – “generationally brilliant,” according to her Notre Dame colleague, O. Carter Snead — is likely alone in this set.

It all seems so unlikely: She has risen to the pinnacle of her profession while at once being “radically hospitable” to children, as Snead has described her. An enigma to many, she doesn’t easily fit into any ideological box. If we’re really intent as a country on seeing women flourish in their professions and serve in greater numbers of leadership positions too, it would be worthwhile to interrupt the abortion rights sloganeering for a beat and ask just how this mother of many has achieved so much.

Much ado about an app. China’s worried about the source code.

• Federal Judge Gives Temporary Reprieve To TikTok (NBC)

A federal judge granted a temporary reprieve Sunday to TikTok, the short-form video app that was facing a Trump administration-imposed midnight deadline that would have prevented users from downloading it. The order from U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols of Washington, D.C., allows U.S. app stores to continue offering downloads. Nichols did not rule on a second, more comprehensive ban that would halt U.S. companies from working with TikTok. In a statement, TikTok said that it was pleased with the ruling and that it “will continue defending our rights for the benefit of our community and employees.”

“At the same time, we will also maintain our ongoing dialogue with the government to turn our proposal, which the president gave his preliminary approval to last weekend, into an agreement,” it said. TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, struck a deal with Oracle this month to move the company’s headquarters to the United States. The software giant would oversee its operations. Walmart is also involved in the deal. TikTok has been under scrutiny from the Trump administration for nearly a year over concerns that the Chinese government could gain access to American users’ data. President Donald Trump said in July that he would ban the app. Trump said this month that he had given his “blessing” to the deal and that he had approved it in concept.

This is real war. Stop it.

• Azerbaijan & Armenia Carry On Fighting Over Contested Nagorno-Karabakh (RT)

Intense hostilities between Armenian and Azeri forces continued overnight along the border of the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region. Both sides claimed local victories and reported inflicting heavy casualties on one another. Azerbaijan and Armenia, two historical rivals, kept on fighting throughout Sunday night and Monday morning despite mounting calls from international leaders to hold fire and disengage troops. There have been skirmishes “of different intensity” overnight on the Nagorno-Karabakh border, a spokesperson for the Armenian Defense Ministry reported earlier on Monday. “The adversary resumed offensive using artillery and armor, including the heavy flamethrower system TOS,” the official revealed.

The Armenian military are deterring the attack, “inflicting significant losses on the enemy in manpower and equipment.” Baku, meanwhile, blamed its arch-nemesis for targeting civilian-populated areas. On Monday morning, Armenian forces have been shelling Terter, a border town of roughly 19,000 people, Azerbaijan’s Defense Ministry told the media. “Proper measures” will be taken if the bombardment doesn’t stop, the ministry warned. Previously, Baku suggested at least 550 Armenian soldiers were killed or injured in the Azeri “counteroffensive,” along with dozens of tanks, howitzers, and air defense systems lost in action. Yerevan promptly rebuked the claim as “unfounded.” Nagorno-Karabakh itself reported a loss of 31 Armenian soldiers in the fighting.

The lingering hostilities broke out previously on Sunday morning. Yerevan accused Baku of using combat aircraft and heavy artillery to bomb targets within Nagorno-Karabakh, a disputed region administered and populated by ethnic Armenians but claimed by Azerbaijan as part of its territory. Baku, in turn, said it had counter-attacked in response to Armenian “provocations.” Both sides – which have fought on numerous occasions since the Soviet Union’s demise – sent reinforcements to the frontline and blamed one another for targeting civilians.

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