WEF Archives - Page 3 of 3 - The Automatic Earth

Russian President Vladimir Putin and his American counterpart Joe Biden have both agreed in “principle” to hold a meeting to halt escalation of conflict in Ukraine, the Elysee Palace said in a statement on Sunday night. Emmanuel Macron “proposed a summit to be held between President Biden and President Putin and then with relevant stakeholders to discuss security and strategic stability in Europe,” according to the statement. “Presidents Biden and Putin have both accepted the principle of such a summit,” it added. However, such a meeting “can only be held at the condition that Russia does not invade Ukraine,” the Elysee palace added. The “substance” of the summit, should it take place, will be prepared by Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken during their meeting expected on Thursday, February 24.

While the Kremlin has yet to issue a comment, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki confirmed that President Biden “accepted in principle a meeting with President Putin following [Blinken-Lavrov] engagement, again, if an invasion hasn’t happened.” French President briefed his US counterpart on Sunday evening on his talks with Vladimir Putin of Russia and Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, in a call that reportedly lasted only 15 minutes on Sunday evening. In a call with Putin earlier on Sunday, Macron offered to mediate talks in the so-called Normandy Format “in the next few hours” to secure a ceasefire along the line of contact in the disputed region of Donbass in eastern Ukraine. The Kremlin confirmed that “the two leaders agreed to maintain contact at various levels,” but did not provide any specific details on such plans.

“..they must take the manufactured crisis to the brink of thermonuclear war, so that Joe Biden can save the world and be seen as this legendary diplomat.”

• Biden-Putin Peace Summit Certain to Bring Nobel Peace Nomination (CTH)

To understand why there has been so much escalating rhetoric about Russia going to invade Ukraine at any moment, you must realize the intent. The motives of the crisis narrative are crystal clear. Everything about the Russia invasion of Ukraine has to be increasingly imminent, horrible and loomingly catastrophic for the planet, so that when it doesn’t happen the glorious victory for Dear Leader Biden can be proclaimed and amplified from the mountaintops. Russia has absolutely no plan to invade Ukraine and doesn’t even have a role in this theatrical production from the White House. The way the game is played; and believe me, everything about this is a game; they must take the manufactured crisis to the brink of thermonuclear war, so that Joe Biden can save the world and be seen as this legendary diplomat.

In the annals of U.S. historym there has never been such an important summit. The nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize, that Ron Klain wants in this mid-term election year, is dependent on magnanimous and strategic Biden overcoming all geopolitical odds to save the world. Everything is carefully planned and scripted with a ‘this’, then ‘that‘ approach toward sequencing. Earlier today, the Sunday news talk shows were filled with pending invasion rhetoric. Putin was mere moments away from a massive army entering Ukraine. The smells of heavy diesel loomed in the valleys as the thundering sound of tank tracks approached ever closer. Dark men with black weapons were beating drums and carrying the flag of Mother Russia, as millions were seen marching by U.S. spy satellites in the region.

The birds all fled as the sounds of the battle groups began converging on the Ukraine border. “The Russians are coming; The Russians are coming” one lad shouted to the CNN crew as he whizzed by on his bicycle, trying to peddle fast while carrying a bag of sausages for his sullen and sickly grandparents in eastern Ukraine. CBS David Martin and Margaret Brennan reported {link} the Russian generals were informing their troop commanders of the invasion plans. CNN then broke into the news cycle quoting three sources {link} “saying that the US has intelligence indicating that orders have been sent to Russian commanders to proceed with an attack on Ukraine.” Things looked really bad just before noon…

Everything within the game needs to be looming on the precipice of crisis in order for it to have maximum impact when it doesn’t happen. However, it was always never going to happen, because it is pretend. It is all a big performance, a ruse, built on a completely manufactured scenario they know will never happen… because the White House is making it up.

“Ukraine’s own assessment is clearly far afield of America’s.”

• Ukraine DM: Low Probability of Major Escalation With Russia (Antiwar)

Ukraine DM Oleksii Reznikov told parliament on Friday that there is a low probability of any major escalation with Russia. He added that Ukraine intelligence sees every move made in the area. Tensions at the Russia-Ukraine border have been ongoing, with several Western nations repeatedly predicting a huge war. Ukraine has chided those nations for causing a panic. Predictions of such a conflict go back years, and while previous Ukraine officials had similar pessimism about it, more recently officials see a lot more chance for diplomacy. President Biden again predicted a Russian invasion Friday, noting a Russian offer to talk later this month and suggesting there’d be no point if invasion happens first. Ukraine’s own assessment is clearly far afield of America’s.

Gazprom has honored all contracts.

• Europe Has Next To No Gas Left – Gazprom (RT)

Underground gas storage facilities (UGS) in Europe were 95.3% empty as of February 17, Russia’s state energy giant and major gas exporter Gazprom said on Saturday, citing data from Gas Infrastructure Europe. This means that Europe now has only 4.7% of its gas reserves left for the remainder of the winter season. The volume of active gas in storage facilities is 21% or 8.3 billion cubic meters less compared to the same time last year. In total, 44.8 billion cubic meters have already been withdrawn from Europe’s UGS this winter. According to Gazprom, gas reserves in underground storage facilities in Ukraine are also at a minimum, having dropped to 10.6 billion cubic meters, which is 45% less than last year. Also, earlier this week, authorities in Germany, which has one of the largest underground storage capacities in Europe, reported a plunge in storage volumes to historically low levels compared to previous years.

The European Union, however, this week claimed that its supplies were sufficient to last several more weeks in the event that Russia stops its gas flow to the bloc amid tensions over Ukraine. Russian gas supplies to European countries had already started to fall in mid-2021, and the decline accelerated at the beginning of 2022. Gazprom, however, repeatedly insisted that it is still supplying Europe with gas in strict accordance with existing contracts. Despite this, the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, on Saturday called Gazprom’s supply policy intentionally harmful. “Gazprom is consciously trying to store and deliver as little as possible while prices and demand are skyrocketing,” she said in a speech at the Munich Security Conference, as quoted by Anadolu news agency.

“The financial system has come to an end.”

• New World Order Desperate as Plan Falls Apart – Martin Armstrong (USAW)

Legendary financial and geopolitical cycle analyst Martin Armstrong thinks the New World Order’s so-called “Great Reset” plan for humanity is falling apart, and the globalists are becoming increasingly “desperate.” Armstrong explains, “They are basically desperate at this stage. I don’t think they anticipate the amount of resistance that they are getting. It’s not just with the truckers in Canada, but this is starting everywhere. There has been an awful lot of resistance consistently that the press does not cover in virtually every city throughout Europe. . . . . They never step out and talk to the people because we are too stupid to actually have an opinion. They know better. This is what Klause Schwab does. He is far more sophisticated than people realize.

He has methodically gone out and created his young global leaders. He is basically sticking people in government positions that are loyal to him. Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau is one of them. . . . They think communism is a step up, and the last time this was attempted, it led to the death of 200 million people. This is absurd. . . . You are not allowed to think freely. That’s what communism really is. . . . You don’t realize this whole thing we are going through right now is the same thing. This is cancel culture. Someone said something I don’t like, and that was 20 years ago, so cancel them. This is exactly what took place in communism. You are destroying the right to speak freely.” The so-called “Great Reset” is all about control and tyranny. Armstrong says, “Just look at Canada. Trudeau is one of Klaus Schwab’s young global leaders. The worst countries have leaders that have graduated from his school. Make everybody comply, and if they don’t, crush them to the ground.”

The only good news is, according to Armstrong and his “Socrates” computer analysis, this is “not going to work out well for the globalists pushing communism.” Armstrong says, “With Karl Marx, at the time, people owned nothing. Schwab is saying, ‘You will own nothing and you will be happy.’ This is absurd because what you are doing is creating a fake image. Schwab is saying I am going to relieve you of all your debt. . . . That is a front because the government has gone to the point of no return. What you have to understand here is it is really the government that has to default. What I have said is, look, governments are going to have to default because this is no longer sustainable.” Armstrong predicted last year, “The financial system has come to an end.”

A WEF overview. Can you still get elected anywhere without being a member?

• The Next Step for the World Economic Forum (Koops)

If I give you the names of the following people – Biden, Trudeau, Ardern, Merkel, Macron, Draghi, Morrison, Xi Jinping – what do you think that they have in common? Yes, they are all pampered and stumble over themselves, but that is also not the connection. One can see very quickly that these names certainly connect to lockdown countries and individuals who have ignored their own laws and/or tried in some way to usurp them. But, there is more to it than that and I will give a hint by providing a link with each name. Joseph Biden, President, United States Boris Johnson, PM of United Kingdom Jacinda Ardern, PM of New Zealand Angela Merkel, Former PM of Germany Emmanuel Macron, President of France Justin Trudeau, PM of Canada Xi Jinping, CCP Leader, China Mario Draghi, PM of Italy Scott Morrison, PM of Australia

They are all associated with the World Economic Forum (WEF), a “nonprofit” private organization started (in 1971) and headed by Klaus “You will own nothing and be happy” Schwab and his family. This is a private organization that has no official bearing with any world governance body, despite the implication of the name. It could just as well have been called the “Church of Schwabies.” The WEF was the origin of the “Great Reset” and I would guess that it was the origin of “Build Back Better” (since most of the above names have used that term recently). If you think that the WEF membership ends with just leaders of countries, here are a few more names: Gavin Newsom, Governor of California Jay Inslee, Governor of Washington State Anthony Fauci, Director NIAID Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House .

Allow me to introduce more of the WEF by giving a list of names for the Board of Trustees. Al Gore, Former VP of the US Mark Carney, UN Special Envoy for Climate Action T. Shanmugaratnam, Seminar Minister Singapore Christine Lagarde, President, European Central Bank Ngozi Okonja-Iweala, Director General, WTO Kristalian Georggieva, Managing Director, IMF Chrystia Freeland, Deputy Minister of Canada Laurence Fink, CEO, BlackRock

You can see a cross section of political and economic leaders on the board. The leader of the organization, that is the leader of the Board, is still Klaus Schwab. He has built an impressive array of followers. If you want to really see the extent of influence, go to the website and pick out the corporate name of your choice; there are many to choose from: Abbott Laboratories, Astra-Zeneca, Biogen, Johnson & Johnson, Moderna, Merck, Novartis, Pfizer, Serum Institute of India, BASF, Mayo Clinic, Kaiser Permanente, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Wellcome Trust, Blackrock, CISCO, Dell, Google, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Zoom, Yahoo, Amazon, Airbus, Boeing, Honda, Rakuten, Walmart, UPS, Coca-Cola, UBER, Bank of China. Bank of America. Deutsche Bank, State Bank of India, Royal Bank of Canada, Lloyds Banking, JP Morgan-Chase, Equifax, Goldman-Sachs, Hong Kong Exchanges, Bloomberg, VISA, New York Times, Ontario (Canada) Teacher’s Pension Plan

“That’s what the State is folks, violence. Always has been. This is why Klaus Schwab and his minions like Trudeau, Arden and others will fail.”

• The Great Reset Becomes The Great Awakening (Luongo)

The reality is that Arden and Trudeau are both hanging on by a thread because public opinion already turned against them. The only thing propping Trudeau up at this point is the shock at the speed he has escalated events. That shock will wear off very soon. If parliament doesn’t act to limit/censure or simply get rid of this guy, Canadians will have a much bigger problem on their hands. Too many Canadians are still asking, “Is this Canada?” When they should be stating, “This is not Canada.” Stop asking for permission to feel outraged and feel the outrage.

In New Zealand, the veil of authority for Arden is thinner thanks to Trudeau’s mistakes in Ottawa. No doubt they are seeing the same things we are and want no part of it. The knives will come out for Arden quickly if she doesn’t back down. I say all the time, spooks start civil wars, militaries end them. In Canada, the civil war there is just beginning. What we’ve not seen in New Zealand means it’s likely over before anyone even realized they were in one. The Great Reset rests on tyrants like Justin Trudeau to win through fear, intimidation and the banal corruption of weak people to support them. With each image of peaceful people being trampled under the bootheel of Canadian stormtroopers, more people awaken from the slumber of the comfortable lie the government protects us from chaos.

That’s what the State is folks, violence. Always has been. This is why Klaus Schwab and his minions like Trudeau, Arden and others will fail. There is no law these people recognize. There is no restraint on their behavior they feel is justified for their holy cause. The sooner we accept that, like many of the truckers who organized this protest, the sooner we can all begin bridging the divide.

Schwab
https://twitter.com/i/status/1487922335864741890

“The problems we have go a lot deeper than the World Economic Forum and Bill Gates.”

• Why People Believe Wrong Things: A Response to Reader Critiques (Eugyp)

People on the establishment side of the debate mainly argue that Corona is an unprecedented and unusual virus, and that the scientific response has been totally reasonable and justified. People on our side of the discussion tend to see Corona as nothing special, but the scientific and political response as something new and unusual. I suggest that it helps to see the virus, despite its laboratory origins, as a biological threat of the kind we’ve lived with for millennia; and that it likewise helps to see our unbalanced reaction to this virus as an expression of our own declining society and institutions. That’s a big reason why fixing this has proven to be so hard.

The problems we have go a lot deeper than the World Economic Forum and Bill Gates. In many ways, those guys are just the surface manifestations of this much deeper rot. I know a lot of you conceive of what happened in 2020 as a kind of mass hysteria or hypnosis, or compare our current policies to National Socialism in the 1930s. I think there can be polemical value in both points, but I also think the most important thing, is to recognise that containment is a characteristic policy not of Nazi Germany, but of western liberal democracies. These regimes have enthusiastically embraced lockdowns, compulsory vaccination, and widespread restrictions. For two years, our governments pursued containment as their highest and most central political goal; it became a kind of ideological system unto itself, and persists as one. These are western, liberal, democratic policies by definition, and they show that something is terribly wrong with our political order.

I think it is important to come to terms with these simple facts, because these dangerous crazy lunatics are still running everything. The pandemicists have come out of the past two years more entrenched and powerful than ever before. Our public health bureaucracies have learned what they can do now, and with what little pretence. SARS-2 research will receive tidal waves of funding for decades to come; even people who study elephants or soil fungi will now find incentives to make their work at least a little bit about Corona. The SARS-related virus research will also continue, there will be more lab leaks, and the vaccinators will show up every fall with their mRNA snake oil. It would be better, if all of this nonsense were directed, or the result of some unusual passing madness. It’s not; it is the way things are. This is the nature of the political and social institutions that govern us.

What’s more striking, that the NYT goes after the CDC, or that they do it only now?

• The CDC Isn’t Publishing Large Portions of the Covid Data It Collects (NYT)

For more than a year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has collected data on hospitalizations for Covid-19 in the United States and broken it down by age, race and vaccination status. But it has not made most of the information public. When the C.D.C. published the first significant data on the effectiveness of boosters in adults younger than 65 two weeks ago, it left out the numbers for a huge portion of that population: 18- to 49-year-olds, the group least likely to benefit from extra shots, because the first two doses already left them well-protected. The agency recently debuted a dashboard of wastewater data on its website that will be updated daily and might provide early signals of an oncoming surge of Covid cases. Some states and localities had been sharing wastewater information with the agency since the start of the pandemic, but it had never before released those findings.

Two full years into the pandemic, the agency leading the country’s response to the public health emergency has published only a tiny fraction of the data it has collected, several people familiar with the data said. Much of the withheld information could help state and local health officials better target their efforts to bring the virus under control. Detailed, timely data on hospitalizations by age and race would help health officials identify and help the populations at highest risk. Information on hospitalizations and death by age and vaccination status would have helped inform whether healthy adults needed booster shots. And wastewater surveillance across the nation would spot outbreaks and emerging variants early.

Without the booster data for 18- to 49-year-olds, the outside experts whom federal health agencies look to for advice had to rely on numbers from Israel to make their recommendations on the shots. Kristen Nordlund, a spokeswoman for the C.D.C., said the agency has been slow to release the different streams of data “because basically, at the end of the day, it’s not yet ready for prime time.” She said the agency’s “priority when gathering any data is to ensure that it’s accurate and actionable.” Another reason is fear that the information might be misinterpreted, Ms. Nordlund said.

[..] Last year, the agency repeatedly came under fire for not tracking so-called breakthrough infections in vaccinated Americans, and focusing only on individuals who became ill enough to be hospitalized or die. The agency presented that information as risk comparisons with unvaccinated adults, rather than provide timely snapshots of hospitalized patients stratified by age, sex, race and vaccination status. But the C.D.C. has been routinely collecting information since the Covid vaccines were first rolled out last year, according to a federal official familiar with the effort. The agency has been reluctant to make those figures public, the official said, because they might be misinterpreted as the vaccines being ineffective.

Ms. Nordlund confirmed that as one of the reasons. Another reason, she said, is that the data represents only 10 percent of the population of the United States. But the C.D.C. has relied on the same level of sampling to track influenza for years. Some outside public health experts were stunned to hear that information exists. “We have been begging for that sort of granularity of data for two years,” said Jessica Malaty Rivera, an epidemiologist and part of the team that ran Covid Tracking Project, an independent effort that compiled data on the pandemic till March 2021. A detailed analysis, she said, “builds public trust, and it paints a much clearer picture of what’s actually going on.”

CDC doesn’t publish, and scientists don’t research.

• Scientists Reluctant to Study Vaccine Side Effects, Notes Top Journal (DS)

While current evidence suggests that serious side effects are rare, the same is true of Covid itself when we’re talking about healthy, young people or those with a prior infection. Hence it’s by no means clear that vaccination actually makes sense for these people – especially if you factor in the possibility of unknown, long-term effects. So far, there’s evidence of an increased risk of blood clots following the Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca vaccines, and an increased risk of heart inflammation following the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines. While the absolute risks are still low, any side effects – however rare – have to be taken seriously. What’s more, there’s evidence that side effects are more common in young people and those who’ve already had Covid – two groups that face very little risk from the disease itself.

However, we still don’t know exactly what the risk of side effects is for specific subgroups, such as ‘people aged 18–30 with a prior infection’. In addition, some conditions that have been linked to the vaccines (including one that resembles long Covid) are not yet well-understood. Shouldn’t scientists be rushing to answer these and other unanswered questions about vaccine side effects? You’d certainly think so. But unfortunately, that isn’t the way science works in our current, politicised era. As this surprisingly candid report in the journal Science notes, scientists have other things to consider aside from how pressing certain questions might be:

“Probing possible side effects presents a dilemma to researchers: They risk fomenting rejection of vaccines that are generally safe, effective, and crucial to saving lives. “You have to be very careful” before tying COVID-19 vaccines to complications, Nath cautions. “You can make the wrong conclusion. … The implications are huge.” [Avindra Nath is clinical director at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke]” Researchers are reluctant to work on vaccine side effects for fear of causing, or being accused of causing, ‘vaccine hesitancy’. The Science report goes on: “Other researchers note the scientific community is uneasy about studying such effects. “Everyone is tiptoeing around it,” Pretorius says. “I’ve talked to a lot of clinicians and researchers at various universities, and they don’t want to touch it.” [Resia Pretorius is a physiologist at Stellenbosch University in South Africa]”

Needless to say, this does not bode well for science. Nor does it bode well for vaccine uptake in the long term. After all, people will only take vaccines – whether for Covid or anything else – if they trust the medical establishment. And ignoring side effects, even rare ones, isn’t the way to build trust.

Wednesday.

• American Truckers Are Launching The People’s Convoy (Malone)

American truckers are launching The People’s Convoy, a peaceful and unified transcontinental movement, on Wednesday, February 23, 2022, from the Adelanto Stadium in Southern California. Starting at 10:00 a.m., hundreds of truckers will hear words of encouragement and blessings from a group of speakers including FLCCC President Dr. Pierre Kory and Godspeak Church Pastor Rob McCoy. The truckers and blue-collar workers of the United States will be joined by freedom-loving supporters from all walks of life – frontline doctors, lawyers, first- responders, former military servicemen and women, students, retirees, mothers, fathers and children – on this peaceful and law-abiding transcontinental journey toward the east coast. The truckers encourage one and all to come out to the stadium in the heart of Adelanto, California to wish them well, see them off and join in the journey.

This convoy is about freedom and unity: the truckers are riding unified across party and state lines and with people of all colors and creeds – Christians, Muslims, Sikhs, Mormons, Agnostics, Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Native Americans, Republican, Democrats. All individuals are welcome to participate by either attending the launch gathering – at 10:00 a.m. on Wednesday February 23, at Adelanto Stadium – or by getting in their own vehicles and following the big rigs from Adelanto toward the east coast! The message of The People’s Convoy is simple. The last 23 months of the COVID-19 pandemic have been a rough road for all Americans to travel: spiritually, emotionally, physically, and – not least – financially.

With the advent of the vaccine and workable therapeutic agents, along with the hard work of so many sectors that contributed to declining COVID-19 cases and severity of illness, it is now time to re-open the country. The average American worker needs to be able to end-run the economic hardships of the last two years, and get back to the business of making bread – so they can pay their rents and mortgages and help jumpstart this economy. To that end, it’s time for elected officials to work with the blue collar and white-collar workers of America and restore accountability and liberty – by lifting all mandates and ending the state of emergency – as COVID is well-in-hand now, and Americans need to get back to work in a free and unrestricted manner.

“Watson said that officers had “done a remarkable job,” and were “very measured in their response.“

• Ottawa Mayor Wants To Sell Confiscated Freedom Convoy Trucks (RT)

Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson has praised the police crackdown on anti-mandate Freedom Convoy protesters in the Canadian capital. With the demonstrations cleared, he told state media that trucks, campers, and vehicles seized from the protesters should be sold off, claiming Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s controversial emergency powers allow him to do so. Speaking to CBC on Saturday, Watson commended police officers for clearing protesters from downtown Ottawa, where they had been camped for three weeks protesting vaccine mandates. The demonstrations were broken by city and federal police officers between Friday and Saturday after Trudeau invoked the never-before-used Emergencies Act on Monday.

Despite video footage showing shocking scenes of police brutality, Watson said that officers had “done a remarkable job,” and were “very measured in their response.” At least 170 protesters have been arrested, more than 50 vehicles have been seized, and the government has frozen the bank accounts of at least 76 protest participants and supporters. “Under the Emergencies Act I’ve asked our solicitor and our city manager, ‘how can we keep the tow trucks and the campers and the vans and everything else that we’ve confiscated, and sell those pieces of equipment to help recoup some of the costs that our taxpayers are absorbing?’” Watson told CBC.

[..] It is unclear whether Watson’s plan will go ahead, and whether the Emergencies Act actually allows the city to auction off seized vehicles. Ottawa Police have previously stated that seized vehicles will be held for seven days, after which time they can be retrieved. Likewise the Emergencies Act is currently being enforced despite not being debated in Parliament, and could end up amended significantly. While some of Canada’s provincial premiers have relaxed their rules on masking and vaccination since the protest began, Trudeau’s nationwide vaccine mandate for cross-border truckers and a rule requiring Canadians be vaccinated to leave the country remain in effect.

Ha! Yeah, that’ll work…

• US Congresswoman Proposes Asylum For Canadian Protesters (RT)

A US congresswoman has promised to introduce legislation to grant asylum to Canadian truckers facing persecution from their government for being involved in the recent ‘Freedom Convoy’ protests against Covid-19 restrictions. Republican New Mexico Congresswoman Yvette Herrell announced her campaign to provide refuge to dissident Canadians on Saturday, comparing Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s “heavy-handed crackdown against peaceful protesters” to that of “an authoritarian regime like Venezuela.”

Arguing that Canada’s treatment of protesters “is not the action of a Western Democracy,” Herrell said the US should provide asylum for protesters “who have been subjected to violence, had their property confiscated, and their bank accounts frozen by a government that is quickly becoming the embarrassment of the free world.” “I am introducing legislation that would temporarily grant asylum to innocent Canadian protesters who are being persecuted by their own government,” she said. “We cannot be silent as our neighbors to the north are treated so badly “

“When these protestors or those that supported them end up in financial hardship because they lose their job, business, or bank account, what will happen to those who try to help them?”

• A Social Credit System Arrives in Canada (Sacks)

On Monday, the rhetoric turned to action when Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act. This heretofore-unused 1988 law gives the government virtually unlimited power for 30 days to deal with a crisis. Invoking the law under the present circumstance would require the threat or use of “serious violence,” yet the vast majority of protesters have been entirely peaceful—playing “We Are the World” and waving Maple Leaf flags. Indeed, the government has made little attempt to justify the need for emergency powers beyond Trudeau’s frequent bemoaning of the truckers’ alleged “hateful rhetoric.” His public safety minister Marco Mendocino stated that such extraordinary measures were necessary due to “intimidation, harassment, and expressions of hate.” Perhaps he doesn’t realize that none of these are listed in the law as valid reasons to invoke it.

Trudeau escalated things further on Tuesday night, when he issued a new directive called the Emergency Economic Measures Order. Invoking a War on Terror law called the Proceeds of Crime and Terrorist Financing Act, the order requires financial institutions—including banks, credit unions, co-ops, loan companies, trusts, and even cryptocurrency wallets—to stop “providing any financial or related services” to anyone associated with the protests (a “designated person”). This has resulted, according to the CBC, in “frozen accounts, stranded money and canceled credit cards.” Banks, according to this new order, have a “duty to determine” if one of their customers is a “designated person.” A “designated person” can refer to anyone who “directly or indirectly” participates in the protest, including donors who “provide property to facilitate” the protests through crowdfunding sites.

In other words, a designated person can just as easily be a grandmother who donated $25 to support the truckers as one of the organizers of the convoy. Because the donor data to the crowdfunding site GiveSendGo was hacked—and the leaked data shows that Canadians donated most of the $8 million raised—many thousands of law-abiding Canadians now face the prospect of financial retaliation and ruin merely for supporting an anti-government protest. Already, a low-level government official in Ontario was fired after her $100 donation came to light. A gelato shop was forced to close when it received threats after its owner was revealed to have donated to the protest. On Wednesday, Justice Minister David Lametti went on Canadian television to say the quiet part aloud, namely that anyone contributing to “a pro-Trump movement” should be “worried” about their bank accounts and other financial assets being frozen.

When these protestors or those that supported them end up in financial hardship because they lose their job, business, or bank account, what will happen to those who try to help them? Will Canadian financial institutions be forced to play Six Degrees of Deplorables? The fear of being ensnared in the dragnet will surely have a chilling effect on the commercial prospects of those suspected of “unacceptable views,” creating a caste of untouchables whom no one will dare to transact with or help. B.J. Dichter, one of the protest organizers who has had all of his bank accounts and credit cards frozen, expressed the sense of desperation: “It feels like being banished from the medieval village left to die.”

Make sure you have cash.

• Trudeau to Make Surveillance Powers over Financial Transactions Permanent (NR)

As all eyes were trained on the aggressive police sweep of the Ottawa trucker convoy this week, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau’s administration was quietly moving to implement a sweeping expansion of surveillance power at the federal level. The Trudeau government’s financial war against the truckers has been covered at length. But one underreported aspect of this broader assault on Canadian civil liberties is the effort to bring crowdfunding and payment service providers — two of the most prominent routes for financial transactions on the Internet — under the permanent control of a centralized government authority.

In a February 14 news conference, Canadian finance minister Chrystia Freeland said that the government was using the Emergencies Act to broaden “the scope of Canada’s anti-money-laundering and terrorist financing rules so that they cover crowdfunding platforms and the payment service providers they use.” That broadened power requires all forms of digital transactions, including cryptocurrencies, to be reported to the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Center of Canada. (I.e., “Fintrac”). “As of today, all crowdfunding platforms and the payment service providers they use must register with Fintrac, and they must report large and suspicious transactions to Fintrac,” Freeland said. She justified the move as a way to “mitigate the risk” of “illicit funds” and “increase the quality and quantity of intelligence received by Fintrac and make more information available to support investigations by law enforcement.” Trudeau, standing behind Freeland at the press conference, nodded his head in agreement.

Freeland said the trucker convoy, which had assembled to protest coronavirus restrictions, had “highlighted the fact” that digital assets and funding mechanisms “weren’t captured” by the Canadian government’s pre-existing surveillance powers. As a result, she said, “the government will also bring forward legislation to provide these authorities to FinTrac on a permanent basis.” Freeland reiterated that point in a subsequent press conference this past Friday. “We reviewed very, very carefully the tools at the disposal of the federal government, and we used all the tools that we had prior to the invocation of the Emergencies Act, and we determined that we needed some additional tools,” she said. “Now some of those tools, we will be putting forward measures to put those tools permanently in place. The authorities of FinTrac, I believe, do need to be expanded to cover crowdsourcing platforms and their payment providers.”

New York can’t pick a decent mayor, can it?

• Eric Adams Admits That Vax Mandates Don’t Work, But Won’t Change Them (NYP)

Mayor Eric Adams admitted Wednesday that vaccine mandates don’t work — yet he’s still going ahead with firing city workers who refuse to show proof they got their shots. “The rule was put in place; to start changing it now would send mixed messages,” he said while lamenting the fact that un-jabbed Brooklyn Nets point guard Kyrie Irving can’t play at his home arena even though unvaxxed out-of-towners can. Mixed messages? We’ve heard time and again that vax mandates are a life-and-death question of public health, fending off some new COVID surge. That’s plainly no longer true, if it ever was. So what’s the point now? New York City’s positivity rate is below 2%, down from an Omicron peak of near 23%. It’s clearly time to rethink draconian COVID approaches

The disconnect between policy and reality here is so glaring that the best Adams can offer in defense is a lukewarm worry that changing it might scramble political messaging. But at least he’s finally, albeit inadvertently, come clean about mandates: They’ve become pure hygiene theater. As we’ve said before: The vaccines are safe and effective and almost everybody should get them. But the data reveal that mandates have near-zero effect on COVID outcomes. Look at Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis actively restricted vaccine mandates. Per Mayo Clinic data, the Sunshine State saw about 347 average daily cases per 100,000 people at its Omicron peak. New York, with vastly stricter policies, saw 366. Florida’s fatality rate at the peak was 1.2% vs. New York’s 1.4%. And those outcomes were this similar even before Delta hit.

But even if you don’t want to “follow the science,” what about basic logic? You are allowed to play ball at Barclays Center or the Garden if you’re not vaccinated; you just can’t play for a New York team. Guess we missed that epidemiological principle: Away players are never disease vectors. A rule so self-contradictory has nothing to do with health. It’s pure power politics. Kyrie Irving is lucky. He earns many multiples of what average Americans will see in a lifetime even with his haircut for missed home games. But what of the hundreds of teachers, cops, firefighters and so on Adams just axed for refusing a vaccine? If the mandate’s main purpose is now literally rhetorical, it’s indefensible.

Police in Paris have joined the march against Covid mandates.

For the 32nd Saturday in a row, Paris protests to end COVID law today. pic.twitter.com/4aWM5ZFXJn

— Aaron Ginn (@aginnt) February 20, 2022

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Debt Rattle February 17 2022

Feb 172022

February 17, 2022 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:07 am Finance Tagged with: crypto, financial warfare, Freedom Convoy, ivermectin, social credit system, SWIFT, totalitarianism, Trudeau, WEF 122 Responses »

Edouard Manet Osny, The road-menders, Rue de Berne 1878

• Trudeau’s Full-Fledged Financial Warfare on Freedom Convoy Protesters (CHD)

• Canada Says ‘Freedom Convoy’ Seeks Regime Change (RT)

• Police Give Ultimatum To Freedom Convoy Truckers (RT)

• Trudeau’s Emergency Powers Endanger Everyone’s Rights (Turley)

• Legal Voices Have Big Concerns With What Trudeau Has Done (Furey)

• 16 Governors, 2 Canadian Premiers: Reinstate Truckers’ Vaccine Exemptions (JTN)

• Russian Government Mocks Incursion Rumors On Twitter (JTN)

• Putin Warns Of ‘Genocide’ (RT)

• Kremlin Teases ‘Alternatives’ To SWIFT If Sanctioned, Including Crypto (ZH)

• There Was No Exit Plan from “Slow the Spread” (Blumen)

• Covid Vaccines During Pregnancy Impact Newborns (RT)

• Ivermectin Bill Advances To South Dakota Senate After Passing House (DNN)

• Idaho Bill To Protect Doctors, Nurses, Pharmacists On Covid Guidelines (ICS)

Oz camp

Whilst the world is celebrating dropping mask and vaccine mandates.. Australia is celebrating the opening of quarantine camps.! pic.twitter.com/2NTt38RkIt

— Pelham (@Resist_05) February 16, 2022

“If this is happening in your country, “you [clearly] don’t live in a free country..”

• Trudeau’s Full-Fledged Financial Warfare on Freedom Convoy Protesters (CHD)

In a move that gives him “sweeping powers,” Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invoked — for the first time in history — Canada’s Emergencies Act in response to what political commentator Krystal Ball characterized as a “pretty much completely peaceful” protest. Those powers include giving Canadian banks the ability, without a court order, to “immediately freeze or suspend accounts” of any Canadians’ who have donated $25 or more to the trucker convoy fundraising accounts. In an episode of “Breaking Points With Krystal and Sagaar,” Ball’s co-host, Saagar Enjeti, said the Canadian government also will be “seizing any funds that go towards the protests, including cryptocurrency.”

With the powers granted to the government by the Emergencies Act “they can not only seize and suspend your driver’s license forever, they can also go and take money out of the owner of the truck’s bank account,” Enjeti said. “So we are looking at full-fledged financial warfare on the truckers.” Not all Canadian leaders are on board with this drastic move, said Ball, pointing to a Reuters report that the premiers of Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan opposed the move. Quebec’s Premier François Legault also opposed the move, stating he feared it would “throw oil on the fire,” according to the Montreal Gazette.

Canada’s War Measures Act, the predecessor to Trudeau’s Emergencies Act, was last used in 1970, when Quebec separatists kidnapped French and Canadian diplomats and murdered one of them. “So that was the last time anything similar to this was invoked,” Ball said. “You have here the Canadian Prime Minister, who is our neighbor to the north, invoking the Emergencies Act, declaring all out financial warfare on his own citizens and suspending civil liberties … in a supposedly free and open society,” Enjeti said. If this is happening in your country, “you [clearly] don’t live in a free country,” he argued.

Very dangerous bullshit.

• Canada Says ‘Freedom Convoy’ Seeks Regime Change (RT)

A senior Canadian security official has said the anti-vaccine-mandate ‘Freedom Convoy’ protest is driven by a desire to overthrow the government, disputing demonstrators who insist they are fed up with the country’s pandemic restrictions. Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino questioned the protesters’ motives, suggesting that outrage over ongoing vaccine mandates is merely cover for a more sinister agenda. “There have been those who have tried to characterize these illegal blockades about vaccines and mandates and fatigue with the pandemic,” he said. “That is not what is driving this movement right now.”

What is driving this movement is a very small, organized group that is driven by an ideology to overthrow the government. While thousands of protesters have descended on the capital city of Ottawa and elsewhere to peacefully demand an end to the mandates, Mendicino cited a group of 11 demonstrators at a border crossing in Coutts, Alberta who were found to be carrying firearms and ammunition, calling the incident a “cautionary tale.” “The seizure of a significant number of illegal firearms by a group that is very committed to the cause is something that we need to be very sober about,” said Mendicino, an ex-federal prosecutor. The 11 individuals were reportedly taken into custody and charged with weapons offenses on Monday.

The minister’s warning of coup plotters comes one day after the federal government invoked the Emergencies Act for the first time in its history to crack down on the “illegal” protest, which some officials have described as a “blockade.” The Act grants authorities a number of temporary powers, including to compel tow-truck companies to remove the large numbers of semi-trucks now parked across the Canadian capital. To date, some firms have refused to haul away the vehicles.

Watch this video from start to finish. Public Safety Minister Marco Mendocino definitively says the people charged with firearms offences in Coutts are connected to far-right groups in Ottawa, but when challenged completely walks back the claim to an unrecognizable point. pic.twitter.com/1ziLUN5IPK

— Andrew Lawton (@AndrewLawton) February 16, 2022

“..The official reason police cited for removing the truckers is that they are committing “mischief” by denying the people of Ottawa “the lawful use, enjoyment and operation of their property..”

• Police Give Ultimatum To Freedom Convoy Truckers (RT)

On Wednesday, police in the Canadian capital Ottawa handed out flyers to the ‘Freedom Convoy’ truckers, ordering everyone to “leave now” or face arrest under PM Justin Trudeau’s emergency declaration. The truckers and their supporters have demonstrated for almost three weeks, demanding an end to strict Covid-19 mandates. “You must leave the area now. Anyone blocking streets, or assisting others in the blocking of streets, are committing a criminal offense and you may be arrested,” Ottawa police announced shortly before noon on Wednesday. Officers handed out fliers with the same message to the protesters and put them on the windshields of vehicles parked in front of the Canadian parliament.

Protesters face arrest, fines, jail, and could have their commercial or even private drivers’ licenses revoked, the police said. While the warning is almost the same as the one the city’s police issued last Wednesday, the new announcement includes language specifically referring to travel restrictions in the Federal Emergencies Act. The law was invoked by Trudeau on Monday, for the first time in Canadian history – and the law it replaced had only been used during the two world wars and a 1970 terrorism crisis. The crackdown comes just a day after Ottawa Police chief Peter Sloly resigned. The official reason police cited for removing the truckers is that they are committing “mischief” by denying the people of Ottawa “the lawful use, enjoyment and operation of their property” and “causing businesses to close.”

Trudeau, police promise action coming to end protest pic.twitter.com/xuChEbCNPU

— Wittgenstein (@backtolife_2022) February 16, 2022

“..it should not matter if you agree or disagree with the underlying cause..”

• Trudeau’s Emergency Powers Endanger Everyone’s Rights (Turley)

For the first time in history, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act to crackdown on what he has described as an attack on democracy itself in Canada. While civil libertarians in Canada have condemned the move as threatening core free speech and associational rights in the country, the American media and legal commentators have largely supported Trudeau in the use of these extreme measures. Indeed, I triggered a tsunami of outrage in stating that Canada could have used such powers to cut off donations for the Civil Rights Movement and arrest Martin Luther King today for such protests. Partly this was due to the distortion of my comments on MLK ever being arrested (as opposed to being subject to arrest under this law).

However, there was also an objection that there is no equivalency between the truckers and the Civil Rights Movement. Again, that is not the point of the reference: it should not matter if you agree or disagree with the underlying cause. The concern is that the Canadian government could declare such an emergency to crackdown on any group engaging in civil disobedience through blockades or occupation protests. It could even happen to Dr. King today if marchers sought to repeat historic marches in Canada. Without meaningful limits under the law, they could also be unilaterally declared threats to Canadian “sovereignty, security and territorial integrity” by Trudeau for acts of civil disobedience.

With the emergency powers, Trudeau can now prohibit travel, public assemblies, conduct widespread arrests, and block donations for the truckers. This also includes freezing bank accounts and ramping up police surveillance and enforcement.

“..until it decided to invoke the Act, the federal government — along with their provincial and municipal counterparts — failed to do very much at all to attempt to disperse the Ottawa protest..”

• Legal Voices Have Big Concerns With What Trudeau Has Done (Furey)

There is no downplaying the magnitude of the decision made by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to invoke the Emergencies Act. It’s a move that’s never been done before, and it’s not a decision to be made lightly. And yet a growing chorus of legal analysis suggests that the PM did in fact make the decision lightly — that the situation just didn’t warrant it. “The federal government has not met the threshold necessary to invoke the Emergencies Act,” said a statement by Nao Mendelsohn Aviv, executive director of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA). “This law creates a high and clear standard for good reason: the Act allows government to bypass ordinary democratic processes. This standard has not been met.” The CCLA added: “Emergency legislation should not be normalized. It threatens our democracy and our civil liberties.”

There are those who claim that civil liberties won’t be violated by Trudeau’s decision because any measures undertaken are subject to the Charter. But that’s not as reassuring as it may first sound. Now that the Emergencies Act has been invoked, a motion to confirm the emergency needs to appear before Parliament within seven sitting days. Until that time, there’s really nothing stopping Trudeau and cabinet from interpreting their new powers however they please. Here’s one of the new things Trudeau can now do: “Regulating and prohibiting public assemblies, including blockades, other than lawful advocacy, protest or dissent.” Now, whatever this means to you is irrelevant; it’s how Trudeau and the Prime Minister’s Office choose to interpret it that matters.

There’s no immediate adversarial review, and there’s no upfront judicial restraint. For example, the new powers Trudeau has given himself to mess with people’s banking who are suspected to be involved in the protests don’t require a court order like they would during usual times. It’s troubling that Trudeau would so readily reach for this lever. “The use of the Act is intended for crises where there are no other options on the table,” explains Aaron Wudrick, a lawyer who works with the Macdonald-Laurier Institute. “Yet until it decided to invoke the Act, the federal government — along with their provincial and municipal counterparts — failed to do very much at all to attempt to disperse the Ottawa protest, making it hard for them to claim they have exhausted all alternatives.”

“Wait, how would the Canadian government, let alone a Canadian bank, know if you voted for Donald Trump? How deep is this rabbit hole Trudeau just put a spotlight on?”

Trudeau's Justice Minister on convoy supporters: “If you are a member of a pro-Trump movement who's donating… you ought to be worried” about your bank account being frozen.

MORE: https://t.co/DEN7zzSz9G pic.twitter.com/Od2CrorjnO

— Rebel News (@RebelNewsOnline) February 17, 2022

Zero chance, and that is worrisome. For one thing, all these people have been elected too..

• 16 Governors, 2 Canadian Premiers: Reinstate Truckers’ Vaccine Exemptions (JTN)

Two Canadian premiers and 16 American governors asked President Joe Biden and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Wednesday to reinstate the vaccine and quarantine exemptions for cross border truck drivers. “We understand the vital importance of vaccines in the fight against COVID-19 and continue to encourage eligible individuals to get vaccinated,” Alberta Premier Jason Kenney wrote in the letter. “However, we are deeply concerned that terminating these exemptions has had demonstrably negative impacts on the North American supply chain, the cost of living, and access to essential products for people in both of our countries.”

Sixteen Republican governors signed the letter along with Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe. The U.S leaders who signed were Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey, Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy, Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, Idaho Gov. Brad Little, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves, Missouri Gov. Mike Parson, Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte, Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox and Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon.

“The timing of your decision to terminate the vaccine and quarantine exemptions could not have been worse as North America already faces grave supply chain constraints,” the letter said. “These constraints, combined with increasing inflation, place significant burdens on the residents of Canada and the United States. Furthermore, transportation associations have informed us that the lack of exemptions will force thousands of drivers out of the trucking industry, which is already facing a significant workforce shortage. The removal of these exemptions is ultimately unnecessary, and we cannot afford to lose any more truck drivers who transport food and other vital supplies across the border.”

Doug Ford

The Premier of Ontario, Doug Ford has just blown up Justin Trudeau’s house of cards. In fact he’s just blown up the entire argument for mandates, vaccine passports and restrictions.

pic.twitter.com/tJRytFvq1F

— James Melville (@JamesMelville) February 15, 2022

“See for yourselves what the collective Western media and officials’ words are worth.”

• Russian Government Mocks Incursion Rumors On Twitter (JTN)

The Russian government has taken to Twitter to mock rumors that the country would invade Ukraine on Wednesday. While the Kremlin claimed it would withdraw some troops from near the border of Ukraine, a senior Biden administration official said that Russia has actually deployed about 7,000 troops to the border in addition to the estimated 150,000 already stationed there. The Embassy of Russia in South Africa tweeted a GIF of John Travolta in “Pulp Fiction” looking around an empty front St. Michael’s Monastery in Kiev, with the caption: “16 February 2022. Meanwhile in Ukraine.”

https://twitter.com/EmbassyofRussia/status/1493884806022713344

Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs tweeted another GIF Wednesday of a tumbleweed. “Today we mark another day of the ‘start of war with Ukraine,’ which did not happen again, to the Western media outlets’ regret, no matter how hard they whip up the hysteria,” the ministry captioned the GIF. “See for yourselves what the collective Western media and officials’ words are worth.” The Foreign Ministry tweeted a photo with a “FAKE” stamp over a collage of websites claiming that Russia would invade Ukraine. “This week we witnessed the culmination of misinformation campaign, launched by the West, on Russia’s mythical ‘invasion’ of Ukraine,” the ministry wrote. “Meanwhile, [NATO] continues to pump weapons into Ukraine under the information cover they’ve created.”

“..parliamentarians push for the Kremlin to recognize the independence of Donetsk and Lugansk.”

Putin has resisted this so far. Because of Minsk. But now Ukraine wants to change Minsk. Time for Berlin and Paris to speak out very clearly.

• Putin Warns Of ‘Genocide’ (RT)

Fierce fighting that has killed thousands of people in eastern Ukraine, home to a large number of ethnic Russians, constitutes a genocide, President Vladimir Putin has claimed as parliamentarians push for the Kremlin to recognize the independence of Donetsk and Lugansk. Speaking on Tuesday at a press conference at the end of crunch talks with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, the Russian leader weighed in on the heightened tensions unfolding in the war-torn region. “I can only add that what is happening in Donbass is genocide,” he said. When asked by reporters about whether the push for the recognition of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Lugansk people’s republics was guided by public opinion and sympathy from Russians, and how such a move could impact a major peace plan, Putin said it was still possible to solve the problems in the region by applying the Minsk agreements.

“We have to do everything to resolve the problem of Donbass, but do it first and foremost based on the possibility of implementing the Minsk agreements,” he explained, adding that he hoped Berlin and Paris would be able to encourage Kiev to fulfill their side of the deal. Scholz, however, expressed concern at the prospect of Donetsk and Lugansk’s recognition, claiming that such a move would violate the protocols and lead to a “political catastrophe.” Putin’s remarks come shortly after lawmakers in his country’s parliament voted overwhelmingly in favor of a resolution, originally put forward by the Communist Party, calling for Putin to recognize the independence of the two regions. MPs said that the move would set the framework for ensuring guarantees and protecting the population, where ethnic Russians make up a large minority, from external threats.

Russia has been preparing for this for decades.

• Kremlin Teases ‘Alternatives’ To SWIFT If Sanctioned, Including Crypto (ZH)

NATO is now talking about Russia’s failure to withdraw troops from near Ukraine even though on Tuesday the Kremlin had announced the start of a draw down of some military units in the south. “Russia’s failure to withdraw can be confirmed through commercial satellite imagery,” NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg said Wednesday. His statement comes less than 24 hours after President Biden addressed the Ukraine situation in a televised speech wherein he alleged that a Russian attack on Ukraine is “still very much a possibility” and that the troop reduction is “not verified yet”. Biden took the opportunity to again warn of “overwhelming international condemnation” and unprecedented sanctions, including “export controls…methods we did not pursue when Russia took Crimea in 2014.”

As part of the “decisive response” the administration has said it has in its arsenal as a maximalist ‘nuclear option’ which would see Russia off from the international SWIFT payment settlement system. But Moscow was quick to respond Wednesday, with Finance Minister Anton Siluanov reaffirming his country has “prepared alternatives” which ensure such US sanctions while yet “unpleasant” would remain “not fatal”. He assured in an online briefing that Russia will fulfill all settlements, and further that “Any restrictions on energy exports will be compensated by corresponding price growth.” “Thank god we have enough forex liquidity and enough forex reserves,” Siluanov told reporters in the briefing. “They say we have a financial shield in the form of gold and forex reserves, budget surplus and [budget] rule, low debt.”

When it comes to the scenario of being cut off from SWIFT, which is being reported as possibly part of a sweeping sanctions package under preparation by US and European officials, Siluanov referenced the his country being able to withstand it, with plans being readied for a “Fortress Russia” approach: “We expect the country’s financial system to continue to focus inwards as part of the “Fortress Russia” strategy and advance digital and fintech sovereignty.” It was reported that as of early February, Russia possesses nearly $635 billion in gold and forex reserves. On the energy question, he affirmed that Russia stands ready to re-route to other markets. The comment about advancing “digital and fintech sovereignty” is particularly interesting in light of President Putin’s October 2021 statements wherein he rattled American financial officials after hinting that cryptocurrencies could be ‘weaponized’ as a dollar replacement.

https://twitter.com/crypto_relevant/status/1493969205523222530

“..can’t work out what we’re even doing here, but he wants us to keep doing it.”

• There Was No Exit Plan from “Slow the Spread” (Blumen)

If we are to believe that a worldwide pandemic grew from an outbreak of twelve people in Wuhan, China to infect nearly the entire world (even indigenous tribes in the Amazon jungle who are by definition quarantined) why would it not do the same when we emerged from our underground fallout shelters? What if through assiduously standing in small circles painted on the floor in grocery stores and wearing underwear on our faces, we succeeded in driving the number of Covid infections down to a very small number? To pick a number, for example, twelve people. Why would the contagion not, in the absence of broader acquired immunity, spread again from that new base of twelve, until eventually reaching all of those remaining uninfected?

It took me some time to give it a name. I settled on “suppression.” The fundamental reason that suppression is not a policy is that it has no exit. For a thing to work it must work within a limited time. If the measures to slow the spread succeeded in slowing it, then what? The nature of the off ramp is the answer to the question, “What happens when we stop doing it?” If the answer is, “It would go right back to what it was doing before,” then there is no exit. During 2020 I had people tell me that we could not end the lockdown because the epidemic would pick up right where it left off and millions would die AND (sometimes the same people ) that if we keep up the restrictive measures for a while then we could stop because the virus would not come back. A bit logic rules out the possibility that the virus could both come back and not come back.

Do we then spend the rest of our lives acting out Covid theater? Dr. Fauci said that he would never shake hands again. Blue check marks fret about quarantining their children. Jenin Younes reflected on a survey in which hypochondriac epidemiologists who are afraid to open their mail explain that they now consider a normal life to be dangerously reckless. Substack author Eugyppius writes about a medical journal editor who “can’t work out what we’re even doing here, but he wants us to keep doing it.”

CDC claims vaccines protect the unborn.

• Covid Vaccines During Pregnancy Impact Newborns (RT)

Babies born to mothers who took the Covid-19 vaccine during their pregnancy are likely to have some form of immunity against the virus, according to the latest research from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), published on Tuesday. Researchers analyzed data from 379 hospitalized infants – 176 suffered from Covid-19 and 203 were admitted for other reasons. The children were all under six months old between July 2021 and January 2022. Their study found that hospitalization risks were reduced by 61% in children whose mothers were vaccinated during pregnancy. Protection increased to 80% when the mothers got their jabs later in their pregnancy (21 weeks to 14 days before delivery).

The effectiveness of the vaccinations dropped as low as 32% for babies whose mother was inoculated earlier during pregnancy. The authors cautioned people not to read too much into the study, given the small sample size used. “Right now we want to ensure that we are protecting both the mom and the infant,” CDC’s Dana Meaney-Delman told reporters. “So, as soon as a pregnant woman is willing to be vaccinated, she should so ahead and do so.” The CDC says that pregnant women are at greater risk of developing complications due to Covid-19, including risks to their own health, as well as preterm births and stillbirths. It is recommended that anyone expecting a baby or trying to get pregnant should keep up to date with their Covid shots.

“Supporters say the bill doesn’t mandate medical professionals to prescribe ivermectin, just gives them permission to do so.”

• Ivermectin Bill Advances To South Dakota Senate After Passing House (DNN)

The South Dakota House has passed a bill to allow medical professionals to prescribe ivermectin to patients suffering from COVID-19. House Bill 1267 passed Monday on a vote of 40 to 28, South Dakota Broadcasters Association Reports. Its prime sponsor is Rep. Phil Jensen (R, Rapid City). The bill gives medical professionals permission to prescribe ivermectin in accordance with accepted medical standards. If ivermectin is prescribed, medical professionals must provide patients with an information sheet about the drug and subsequent healthcare information.

Opponents of the bill argue the legislature should not be telling doctors what they can or cannot prescribe for their patients. Supporters say the bill doesn’t mandate medical professionals to prescribe ivermectin, just gives them permission to do so. Ivermectin is typically used to kill parasites in animals. Some have advocated for the drug to be used to treat COVID-19. However, the FDA says ivermectin should not be used in this way. The bill will go forward in the legislative process and will next be heard on the Senate floor.

“.. the pandemic has made off-label use of ivermectin and other unproven drugs a matter of politics and, now, policy.”

• Idaho Bill To Protect Doctors, Nurses, Pharmacists On Covid Guidelines (ICS)

A bill in the Idaho Legislature would protect the licenses of doctors, nurses and pharmacists who prescribe or dispense unproven medications for COVID-19. Rep. Gayann DeMordaunt, R-Eagle, presented the legislation Friday to the House Business Committee. The committee voted by a voice vote to introduce the bill. The bill would prohibit licensing boards from taking disciplinary action against doctors, physician assistants and advanced-practice registered nurses when the action is “based solely” on their recommendations to patients regarding COVID-19, including prescribing drugs that are not approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to treat the coronavirus disease. The bill also says pharmacists could not “block or attempt to block” a patient’s access to that unapproved drug.

If a pharmacist does not want to dispense the medication, they could direct the patient to a willing pharmacist, the bill says. Pharmacists’ licenses couldn’t be jeopardized by dispensing the drugs, the bill says. In addition, the bill orders Idaho hospitals, nursing facilities and residential care or assisted living facilities to allow a patient to take the unapproved treatment “if a patient has requested and is prescribed” that drug. The FDA has approved some drugs for other uses — ivermectin for intestinal parasites, for example — but not for COVID-19. While “off label” prescribing is sometimes done by health care providers for other ailments, the pandemic has made off-label use of ivermectin and other unproven drugs a matter of politics and, now, policy.

“It’s that integration of the government and big tech companies to police speech that I think is troubling and very evocative of the coming totalitarianism..”

Big tech companies are doing the bidding of the U.S. government in actions that mirror China’s social credit system, and Americans must recognize what’s happening and take action, according to Kara Frederick, a former Facebook intel analyst and a research fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation. Frederick recently authored a Heritage Foundation report titled, “Combating Big Tech’s Totalitarianism: A Road Map,” which details how Big Tech has wielded its power to censor Americans. The report proposes a range of actions Americans can take to counter the situation. “It’s that integration of the government and big tech companies to police speech that I think is troubling and very evocative of the coming totalitarianism,” Frederick said on EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders” program. She calls it a “symbiosis between the government and tech companies.”

She cited a few examples, including in earlier February, when White House press secretary Jen Psaki, at a press conference, urged Spotify and other major tech platforms to take further action to stamp out what the Biden administration deemed as “COVID-19 misinformation.” It’s not the first time Psaki told big tech companies what to do, Frederick noted. In July 2021, Psaki and Surgeon General Vivek Murthy at a press conference urged social media companies to combat what the Biden administration called “health misinformation.” At the time, Psaki singled out 12 people whom she said were “producing 65 percent of anti-vaccine misinformation on social media platforms.”

“All of [the 12 people] remain active on Facebook, despite some even being banned on other platforms, including Facebook—ones that Facebook owns,” Psaki said at the time. A day later, Psaki said, “You shouldn’t be banned from one platform and not others … for providing misinformation out there.” Frederick noted that within a month, all of the users and accounts were booted off the Facebook platform.

No Spying

Media in 2019: There was no spying on Trump.

Media now: Zzzzzzzzz pic.twitter.com/waSMwlcVLT

— NewsBusters (@newsbusters) February 15, 2022

Mascot
https://twitter.com/fun4laugh/status/1493830290040844288

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Debt Rattle February 15 2022

Feb 152022

February 15, 2022 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:56 am Finance Tagged with: Belarus, Emergencies Act, false crisis, Freedom Convoy, Mooselini, Trudeau, Twitter, Ukraine, WEF 205 Responses »

René Magritte Morning star 1938

• We’ve Known How To Cure Covid Since March Of 2020: Dr. Robert Malone (JTN)

• Canada Invokes Emergency Powers To Deal With Trucker Protest (RT)

• Multiple Canadian Premiers Oppose Trudeau Invoking Emergencies Act (Rebel)

• Trudeau Authorizes Bank Accounts Frozen for Social Media Posts (CTH)

• Freedom Convoy Organizers Say They’re Not Deterred by Emergencies Act (ET)

• Trudeau Has Gone Too Far (Toronto Sun Ed.)

• Canada In A Sad State; Plenty Of Blame To Go Around (Lilley)

• Twitter Won’t Censor Tweets Linking To Hacked Freedom Convoy Donor List (DC)

• Speed Wobble (Jim Kunstler)

• Go Ahead, Defend It Now (Denninger)

• GOP Lawmakers Demand Answers From Fauci (RT)

• ‘False Crisis’ Regarding Russia Hurts Relations Between US And Ukraine (JTN)

• State Dep. Tells US Citizens To Leave Belarus And Transnistria ‘Immediately’ (JTN)

• How We Became What We Despised (Ugo Bardi)

John Ioannidis

New data reveals how effective booster shots are against Omicron

New data reveals how effective booster shots are against Omicron pic.twitter.com/KGAQWZv0Ty

— Wittgenstein (@backtolife_2022) February 14, 2022

“And please note that neither Dr. Fauci nor Dr. Collins nor Dr. Lane have any formal training in epidemiology..”

• We’ve Known How To Cure Covid Since March Of 2020: Dr. Robert Malone (JTN)

COVID-19 mask mandates were never necessary, says Dr. Robert Malone. “We’ve known how to cure COVID since about March of 2020,” the mRNA-vaccine-pioneer-turned-critic told “Just the News, Not Noise” TV show cohosts John Solomon and Amanda Head. The sudden scramble two years later by democratic governors to lift mask mandates “is a clear pivot consequent to their horrible polling numbers,” Malone said. “It’s exactly what I predicted when people were asking me, ‘How will we know when this thing is over?’ I’ve said, ‘Well, you’ll know it because they’ll all start giving awards to each other and claiming that they’re the ones that are responsible for curing it.'”

Malone also discussed explosive new data from the Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED) regarding possible COVID vaccine side effects, which three military medical whistleblowers recently came forward with when they saw a significant increase in common vaccine injuries during 2021. “DMED was something that Lt. Col. Theresa Long and some of her colleagues queried when they were busy doing diligence to try to understand what they were seeing with their own warfighter communities that they were sworn to protect as physicians,” Malone explained.

“And they were seeing signals that were unusual, and so they consulted the DMED database and were shocked to find enormous increases in 2021, when the vaccine mandates were implemented to the military, compared to 2020 in a wide variety of diseases, including cancers, things related to reproduction and female reproductive health.” Malone was asked about recently released emails exposing a plan by three top federal public health officials to discredit the anti-lockdown epidemiologists behind the Great Barrington Declaration. The exchange showed the three — then-National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Francis Collins, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director Dr. Anthony Fauci, and NIAID Deputy Director for Clinical Research and Special Projects Dr. Clifford Lane — coordinating “a quick and devastating takedown” of the premises of the declaration, which espouses “focused protection,” a mitigation strategy prioritizing the most vulnerable populations.

“[T]hey slandered and defamed those three as ‘fringe’ epidemiologists, but they happen to be full professors at the obscure universities Oxford, Stanford and Harvard, I believe,” Malone said sarcastically, referring to Sunetra Gupta, Ph.D., Jay Bhattacharya, MD, Ph.D., and Martin Kulldorff, Ph.D., respectively. “And please note that neither Dr. Fauci nor Dr. Collins nor Dr. Lane have any formal training in epidemiology,” Malone added.

Justin is at 16% in the polls.

#Mooselini

• Canada Invokes Emergency Powers To Deal With Trucker Protest (RT)

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has invoked the Emergencies Act for the first time in Canadian history on Monday, citing the threat of “Freedom Convoy” trucker protests in Ottawa and several border crossings in the US. “This is not a peaceful protest,” Trudeau said in a speech on Monday afternoon, adding that “illegal blockades” have been “disrupting the lives of too many Canadians.” After consulting premiers, government and opposition, “the federal government has invoked the Emergencies Act,” Trudeau said, confirming media reports from earlier in the day that he would do so. The measures will be “time-limited, geographically targeted, as well as reasonable and proportionate to the threats they are meant to address,” the PM said. It does not involve calling in the military, or suspending fundamental rights and freedoms.

“This is about keeping Canadians safe, protecting people’s jobs, and restoring confidence in our institutions,” he said. “We are reinforcing the principles, values and institutions that keep all Canadians free.” Trudeau noted that it was the first time a Canadian government has invoked the Emergencies Act, which was passed in 1988 to replace the War Measures Act of 1914. The WMA was used during both world wars to intern Canadians of German and Japanese origin and impose restrictions on the economy, among other things. It was most recently invoked in 1970 by Trudeau’s father Pierre to crack down on Quebec separatists who had kidnapped a lawmaker. Close to 500 people had been arrested on that occasion.

Thousands of Canadian truck drivers and their sympathizers have taken part in nationwide protests since January 22, with a “Freedom Convoy” driving across the country to picket the parliament in Ottawa starting on January 29. The protesters demand an end to Covid-19 vaccine and mask mandates. Trudeau has denounced the truckers as a “fringe minority with unacceptable views” and accused them of bigotry, racism, Nazism and violence, refusing to meet with them. Though several Canadian provinces have announced the end of pandemic restrictions, Trudeau is still refusing to lift the federal mandates.

Despite Justin Trudeau granting himself dictatorial powers just moments ago, the protest continues On Parliament Hill. I am here because we cannot trust the CBC with this moment. https://t.co/nqV5X2Hp0v. pic.twitter.com/yDdDvLTdPZ

— Keean Bexte (@TheRealKeean) February 14, 2022

Federal Emergency Act so far rejected by New Brunswick, Quebec, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba.

• Multiple Canadian Premiers Oppose Trudeau Invoking Emergencies Act (Rebel)

Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe has been making headlines recently, first for standing in support of the truckers convoy, then for being the first premier in Canada to announce an end to vaccine passports in their province. A few other Canadian premiers followed shortly after, with Progressive Conservative Premier Heather Stefanson announcing the planned loosening of restrictions in Manitoba as well. Now, both premiers, followed perhaps somewhat surprisingly by Quebec Premier Francois Legault, are taking a strong stance on the recent news that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is likely to invoke the Emergencies Act as a response to the Freedom Convoy in Ottawa and supportive protests happening across the country along the Canada-U.S. border. Others premiers are rumoured to follow suit.

First, in a statement on Twitter, Premier Moe said: “The illegal blockades must end, but police already have sufficient tools to enforce the law and clear the blockades, as they did over the weekend in Windsor. Therefore, Saskatchewan does not support the Trudeau government invoking the Emergencies Act. If the federal government does proceed with this measure, I would hope it would only be invoked in provinces that request it, as the legislation allows.” The relatively new Conservative premier of Manitoba, Heather Stefanson, also put out an official statement this afternoon, sharing it on Twitter with the caption: “I am proud of Manitoba’s law enforcement officials and have full confidence in them to protect our communities. The proposal from the federal government to use the Emergencies Act is not helpful to the situation at the Emerson Border.”

Quebec Premier Francois Legault, who has been much more strict on COVID-19 restrictions and vaccine mandates, also spoke up, stating “We don’t want it in Quebec territory.” Later in the day, Alberta Premier Jason Kenney also announced his opposition to the use of the Emergencies Act. “This morning I told Prime Minister Trudeau that Alberta’s government is opposed to the invocation of the federal Emergencies Act,” Kenney wrote on Twitter. “We have all of the legal tools and operational resources required to maintain order. The Act would add no relevant additional powers or resources.”

BREAKING: Canada is now regulating crowdfunding platforms and crypto currency under the Terrorist Financing Act. pic.twitter.com/SMzVqonD8v

— True North (@TrueNorthCentre) February 14, 2022

“Not only are people subject to get their bank accounts frozen, but the decision also to freeze the accounts is entirely up to the reviewer, and the reviewer is protected by the government from civil liability for their decision.”

• Trudeau Authorizes Bank Accounts Frozen for Social Media Posts (CTH)

The triggering of an official invocation of the Canadian Emergency Measures Act to eliminate protests is stunning. Using the Emergency Act to target individual citizens in Canada, and their bank accounts, is yet again another level of astonishing. The Canadian Civil Liberties Association has announced their opposition to the government declaration:

I am carefully reviewing the details of the authorization because according to the public statements by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland, they have authorized banks, financial institutions and insurance carriers to suspend the accounts of Canadian citizens based on their social media postings. Yes, you read that correctly. Support of “blockades and/or occupations” are specifically noted. Anyone in Canada (individual or business) who supports or “furthers” the Freedom Convoy or Freedom Protest on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or any other social media platform, is a target to have their bank accounts frozen and insurance policies nullified. But wait, it gets worse.

Not only are people subject to get their bank accounts frozen, but the decision also to freeze the accounts is entirely up to the reviewer, and the reviewer is protected by the government from civil liability for their decision. “Support” and “affiliated with” are loosely defined, and as a result a guy delivering pizzas to an Ottawa “occupation” truckdriver is also running the risk of seeing his bank account frozen simply for providing the food. I can see why the Canadian Civil Liberties Assocation would take issue with this declaration. A banking employee who does not like the politics of a customer as revealed by a review of their social media postings, and merely “suspects” the account holder of supporting or furthering the action, can -without any liability- block the bank accounts of any customer or account holder; and they do not need to provide an explanation.

Freeland: “As of today, a bank or other financial service provider will be able to immediately freeze or suspend an account of an individual or business affiliated with these illegal blockades without a court order. In doing so, they will be protected against civil liability. Federal government institutions will have a new broad authority to share relevant information with banks and other financial service providers to ensure that we can all work together to put a stop to the funding of these illegal blockades.”

“..how can you justify going to a measure like an emergency, measures where a lot of powers can be imposed upon the citizens, when you have not even yourself taken any action to engage.”

• Freedom Convoy Organizers Say They’re Not Deterred by Emergencies Act (ET)

Freedom Convoy organizers say they will continue to protest on Parliament Hill despite the federal government’s declaration of a state of emergency. “We are not afraid. In fact, every time the government decides to further suspend our civil liberties, our resolve strengthens and the importance of our mission becomes clearer,” organizer Tamara Lich said on Feb. 14 in anticipation of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invoking the Emergencies Act over the protests demanding an end to COVID-19 mandates. “We will remain peaceful, but planted on Parliament Hill until the mandates are decisively ended. We recognize that there is a democratic process within which change occurs. We have never stepped outside of that process, nor do we intend to.”

Trudeau is the first prime minister to use the Emergencies Act. The act replaces the War Measures Act, which was last used by Trudeau’s father, then-prime minister Pierre Trudeau, in 1970 during the October Crisis when Quebec separatists kidnapped and killed Quebec cabinet minister Pierre Laporte. The act gives the state additional powers to deal with the protests and blockades, such as providing legal tools to cut funding to protesters, as well as freezing the corporate accounts of companies whose trucks are used in any blockades and removing their insurance. The province of Ontario and the city of Ottawa have also declared states of emergency over the protests.

[..] Brian Peckford, former premier of Newfoundland who is acting as a spokesperson for the Freedom Convoy, said this is “a very, very strange moment in our history.” “This is again government overreach. We don’t do these kinds of things in Canada. We engage in dialogue,” Peckford said. “It’s my understanding that the government of Canada has not reached out once to the truckers since they have arrived in this capital city. I find that very hard to understand, because how can you justify going to a measure like an emergency, measures where a lot of powers can be imposed upon the citizens, when you have not even yourself taken any action to engage.”

Ron Johnson

Here’s a simple solution to the Canadian trucker strike. End the pointless and idiotic vaccine mandates. Respect everyone’s freedom and personal health autonomy. pic.twitter.com/LOzXxtSiOc

— Senator Ron Johnson (@SenRonJohnson) February 14, 2022

“..it was his incompetence that made such an extreme measure necessary..”

• Trudeau Has Gone Too Far (Toronto Sun Ed.)

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s unjustified invoking of the Emergencies Act is deeply problematic and will have long-lasting consequences for the country. Ever since the freedom convoy first touched base in Ottawa a couple of weeks ago, the PM has gone out of his way to increase the tensions. The Liberal government appeared to be hoping for some sort of Jan. 6 style event as happened in the United States last year. All of their rhetoric indicated they were keen to see such an event go down. It never did. The convoy has been peaceful throughout. The only real violence so far has been a vehicular ramming conducted against protesters, which sent four people to hospital. You don’t hear much about that though. Trudeau never condemned it.

Instead, Trudeau has called protesters every name in the book even though they are a diverse crowd in every sense of the word. Now he is giving himself extraordinary powers to deal with these protests. One of the most disturbing parts is how they can now dictate that banks freeze people’s accounts without a court order. People like Canadian hero Kevin Vickers — the Sargeant-at-Arms who personally thwarted the 2014 terrorist attack on Parliament Hill — have called for calm and dialogue. Trudeau doesn’t want that though. He just wants division and more hostility. It appears to be in this spirit that the PM has decided to invoke the Emergencies Act for the first time in Canadian history. At least four Premiers opposed him.

“We have all of the legal tools and operational resources required to maintain order,” Alberta Premier Jason Kenney wrote, in explaining his opposition. “The Act would add no relevant additional powers of resources.” Kenney added that this decision may only “escalate a tense situation” and that Trudeau needs to “end the cross border trucker vaccine mandate, as it serves no useful public health purpose.” The controversial blockade of the Ambassador Bridge was already resolved. The grounds for invoking this act are, according to Joanna Baron of the Canadian Constitution Foundation, “extremely thin”. The protests may be a nuisance and many people may disagree with them, but that doesn’t justify this decision. The only thing that can be said in defence of Trudeau’s invoking of the Emergencies Act is that it was his incompetence that made such an extreme measure necessary.

War Face
https://twitter.com/WeAreTheMSM/status/1493373657061670913

Trudeau, Freeland etc. are among the WEF’s Young Global Leaders.

• Canada In A Sad State; Plenty Of Blame To Go Around (Lilley)

One question kept going through my mind as I watched the events of the last several days. How did we get here? How did we get to the point where both the Ontario and federal governments had to invoke emergency legislation to deal with what started as a political protest? How did we end up at the point where a good portion of the nation’s capital can’t be said to be under any government control or that several border crossings have been shut down? There’s plenty of blame to go around. On the most basic level, there are the actions of the protesters who descended upon Ottawa, and more detrimental to the country, the border crossings. The protest in Ottawa turned into an occupation that annoyed locals while amusing many other Canadians, who hate the capital almost as much as they hate Toronto.

Eventually though, the bemusement across the country gave way to discomfort, and now we’re at the point where 72% of Canadians told the Angus Reid Institute that the protesters need to go home. The frolicking has worn out its welcome, the blocking of border crossings in Windsor, Coutts, Surrey and Emerson has annoyed the nation. We can’t forget the city administration in Ottawa, including its police service, when doling out blame. Somehow city and police leadership in Ottawa missed what everyone else heard ad nauseam before the convoy got to Parliament — they were coming to stay until all their demands were met. Police chief Peter Sloly said he expected them to leave town after the first Sunday. A quick scan of the news would have shown him otherwise. Local handling of the protest since the arrival has been missing in action to put it mildly.

Blame must also go to Trudeau and his government. While much has been said regarding Conservative MPs welcoming the protesters in Ottawa — leadership candidate Pierre Poilievre even saying he is proud of them and stands with them — the Conservatives are not in government. This protest started in opposition to Trudeau’s decision to impose a requirement that truckers crossing the Canada-U.S. border be fully vaccinated. But it has grown into so much more, a mass protest against COVID-19 measures in general. Like he has done so many times, Trudeau attacked those opposed to him in the harshest terms. He called them a “small fringe minority” and said they had “unacceptable views.” He’d previously described those opposed to his COVID policies as racist and misogynistic.

“Twitter’s “distribution of hacked materials” policy bans “the use of our services to directly distribute content obtained through hacking by the people or groups associated with a hack.”

• Twitter Won’t Censor Tweets Linking To Hacked Freedom Convoy Donor List (DC)

Twitter is allowing posts to remain on its platform containing the private information of Freedom Convoy donors reportedly obtained through hacking, according to a review of Twitter’s platform by the Daily Caller News Foundation. Crowdfunding service GiveSendGo was reportedly hacked late Sunday and the personal information of donors to the Freedom Convoy, a group of truckers and individuals protesting Canada’s COVID-19 restrictions, was given to leak-hosting site Distributed Denial of Secrets, the organization said on its website. GiveSendGo has yet to publicly confirm the hack[..]. Twitter’s “distribution of hacked materials” policy bans “the use of our services to directly distribute content obtained through hacking by the people or groups associated with a hack.”

This includes “posting Tweets which include links to hacked content hosted on other websites” as well as “posting hacked content on Twitter (e.g., in the text of a Tweet, or in an image).” A review of Twitter’s platform by the DCNF found several tweets appearing to contain screenshots of the hacked donor list or links to files containing what appeared to be the hacked materials. The donor list contains personally identifying information including full names, zip codes, email handles and IP addresses, as well as donation messages, according to a review of the hacked materials by the DCNF. Twitter previously censored a tweet from the New York Post in October 2020, one month before the 2020 presidential election, linking to a story allegedly containing emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop. The social media company cited its hacked materials policy as the reason for its actions.

“Joe Biden” has so far failed to deliver that war with Russia over Ukraine he promised us..”

• Speed Wobble (Jim Kunstler)

Things are turning, indeed, out there… out in the truck stops and the households fending off repossession and the small businesses struggling desperately for survivial — even in the degenerate halls of government, state-by-state. The armature of Covid-19 tyranny is getting rapidly dismantled by politicians close to running for their very lives. The home-folks have had enough of their insolence and they’re sharpening the tines of their pitchforks. Events also conspire to put the schnitz on the alleged Globalists dream of digital tyranny — if there even is such a cabal of Globalists, which I’m not sure about, or just a coterie of feckless hacks swept along by a malefic zeitgeist, Canada’s Justin Trudeau being the poster-boy for that breed. The timing has gone all awry on them. The Covid-19 hysteria draws to a close against their wishes to drag it on forever.

Even the triple-vaccinated are sick of it — and not a few of them are sick because of it. Governments and the corrupt medical establishment won’t touch this info with a stick, but the morticians and insurance execs are hopping up and down about what looks like a supernatural die-off of folks between 18 and 60 generally not susceptible to early death. Kind of worrisome, a little bit. Anybody with half-a-brain left is declining the offer of yet another booster — though Dr. Fauci was still tirelessly selling them last week. Mainly, though, the window-of-opportunity has closed, in the USA, anyway, for anymore vaccine passport nonsense, and with that goes the dream of roping every last citizen into a corral of total social control, including central bank digital currencies that would turn everyone into a yo-yo to be jerked-around by government.

“Joe Biden” has so far failed to deliver that war with Russia over Ukraine he promised us — which would be like two Craig’s List customers fighting over a twenty-year-old Jeep Wrangler up on blocks with the engine missing. Ukraine president Zelensky is a professional comedian, of course, so one must admire his gag of inviting “Joe Biden” to visit his country, the Gem of Eurasia, “in the coming days,” Mr. Zelenski said, “which will be a powerful signal and contribute to de-escalation.” Plus, all the pierogi and cabbage the US president can eat. All this made National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan gnash his teeth for the trouble he has gone to in prepping the sore-beset American people for World War Three.

“Pick one. Masks, social distancing, kids in schools/not in schools, swabs-up-nose, etc. It’s all bull****, and you saw it on display last night.”

• Go Ahead, Defend It Now (Denninger)

Pick one. Masks, social distancing, kids in schools/not in schools, swabs-up-nose, etc. It’s all bull****, and you saw it on display last night. A packed-full stadium with exactly nobody distancing anything and zero mask enforcement of any sort. They didn’t even try to fake it. If you send your kid to school and let him or her put up with this crap today for one more minute you’re a monster. If you put up with it anywhere for another 15 minutes yourself then you’re stupid. I mock your stupidity. I will openly point and laugh at your ragged face wherever and whenever I see it. You had the “most-serious” game of sportball all year with wild defiance of any such crap in your face, in the city and state with the most-restrictive mandates of all, and exactly nobody gave a wet crap so long as they were cheering on their team after declaring themselves “above it all” simply by buying tickets and, in some cases, paying a thousand bucks to park their car besides.

Save me the bull**** about “vax passports” while you’re at it. You know ******ned well the jabs don’t stop you from getting or transmitting the virus and tens of thousands of bare-faced screaming people packed literally shoulder-to-shoulder expelled whatever they had in their throat and lungs onto everyone within 20′ of them for more than two hours. If the bug was in there, and know damn well it was, the love was spread. Today you burn your mask — or you’re stupid. Today you refuse to allow your children to be abused for one more minute — or you’re a ****ing monster who deserves every evil thing that can possibly happen to you and when it does I will cheer your demise. And today you tell your government to shove its vax passport and all other mandates up its ass sideways and warn them that if they ever try this bull**** again you’re going to remove them and you don’t care how or you’re so far beyond stupid you deserve to be smote.

“..when viewed in light of other publicly available information, demonstrate an apparent effort by you and Dr. Collins not only to cover up the concerns those virologists raised, but to suppress scientific debate about the origins of Covid-19..”

• GOP Lawmakers Demand Answers From Fauci (RT)

US Republican lawmakers have sent a letter pressing chief White House medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci for answers about his alleged silencing of concerns that the Covid-19 virus originally came from a Chinese lab. The letter, sent on Monday by three US House members, cited emails suggesting that Fauci and Dr. Francis Collins, then director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), tried in early 2020 to quash speculation among scientists that the virus may have originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Instead of alerting national security officials to the pandemic’s potentially unnatural origin, Fauci and Collins sought to shut down the debate, the GOP lawmakers said.

The emails, which were obtained by media outlets under Freedom of Information Act requests, reportedly showed that some virology experts saw reason to believe that the virus was lab-created. Some of the messages made reference to a February 2020 conference call in which many scientists leaned toward the lab-leak theory. For instance, Tulane Medical School professor Robert Garry said he could see no “plausible natural scenario” for some aspects of Covid-19 otherwise. “However, those same email communications, particularly when viewed in light of other publicly available information, demonstrate an apparent effort by you and Dr. Collins not only to cover up the concerns those virologists raised, but to suppress scientific debate about the origins of Covid-19,” the letter said.

Representatives Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Washington), Brett Guthrie (R-Kentucky) and Morgan Griffith (R-Virginia) signed the letter. They demanded that Fauci provide details on how those conversations with scientists were initiated and who consulted him and Collins on Covid-19’s likely origins. The lawmakers also requested information on any communications by Fauci and Collins with Chinese scientists, as well as documents related to US funding of the research in Wuhan.

“I have to speak with our people as President, and I say the truth to people, and the truth is that we have different information.”

• ‘False Crisis’ Regarding Russia Hurts Relations Between US And Ukraine (JTN)

The situation in Ukraine is a “false crisis” that has hurt relations between Washington and Kyiv, as the Biden Administration increasingly claims to know the date and method of a Russian incursion against its neighbor, experts told Just the News. The experts made their comments Monday while appearing on the John Solomon Reports podcast. “It’s a false crisis,” said international relations expert Kiron Skinner, who served as an adviser at the State Department under Donald Trump. She made that assessment, she noted, because “there’s been a war of attrition going on between Kyiv and Moscow for eight years.”

International tension has spiked recently as Russia maintains an estimated 100,000 troops along its border with Ukraine and has issued ominous statements about “the start of a countdown” and claims that Moscow is being “provoked.” The U.S. has repeatedly announced that Moscow plans to stage a “false flag” provocation in order to justify an attack on Ukraine, and has said that the attack is “imminent,” and could occur this week. The State Department on Monday shuttered its main embassy in Kyiv, and moved the operations to the western city of Lviv. The announcements and predictions strike a sour note in government circles in Kyiv, according to Dan Hoffman, a former station chief for the CIA in Moscow.

“The relationship between the United States and Ukraine is strained right now, to say the least, because Russia has got 130,000 troops on the border,” Hoffman told Just the News. “President Zelenskyy, rightly so, is questioning, well, where’s the intelligence?” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Sunday said that he had not seen the intelligence assessments regarding an invasion, and that the warnings were stoking panic. “I think there is too much information out there today about a deep full scale war on Russia’s part,” Zelenskyy said. “There is even talk of appropriate dates. We understand all the risks. We understand that the risks are there. If anyone has any additional information about a 100% chance of an invasion, they should give it to us.”

Alternating between English and Ukrainian, Zelenskyy continued: “I have to speak with our people as President, and I say the truth to people, and the truth is that we have different information.”

https://twitter.com/Veracious311/status/1493317362778578945

Transnistria, officially the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic, is an unrecognised breakaway state located in the narrow strip of land between the river Dniester and the Moldovan–Ukrainian border that is internationally recognised as part of Moldova. Its capital and largest city is Tiraspol.

• State Dep. Tells US Citizens To Leave Belarus And Transnistria ‘Immediately’ (JTN)

The State Department on Monday told U.S. citizens in Belarus and Moldova’s unrecognized breakaway state of Transnistria to “depart immediately via commercial or private means.” Both countries are at travel advisory Level 4, the highest possible. The State Department warns U.S. citizens to not travel to Belarus due to “arbitrary enforcement of laws, the risk of detention, unusual and concerning Russian military buildup along Belarus’ border with Ukraine, COVID-19 and related entry restrictions.” Americans are warned to not travel to Moldova due to “COVID-19, the unusual and concerning Russian military activity around Ukraine, and the unresolved conflict between the breakaway region of Transnistria and the central government.”

Transnistria is on the southwest border of Ukraine. The region has been described as where the Soviet Union and Communism “never died.” Late last month, the State Department ordered the evacuation of family members of U.S. diplomats from the embassy in Minsk. The department on Monday also announced plans to relocate the U.S. embassy in Kyiv to Lviv in western Ukraine. The State Department last week urged U.S. citizens in Ukraine “to depart now,” warning that the U.S. government would be unable to evacuate American citizens in the event of Russian military action.

“..rationing seems to be a silly idea but it was done during WW2 and, if there is a serious economic crash — as it is perfectly possible — it can return.”

• How We Became What We Despised (Ugo Bardi)

The combination of abundant resources and relatively low military expenses made it possible for the American citizens (most of them, at least) to enjoy an extravagant lifestyle, unthinkable elsewhere in the world. They lived in suburban houses, had two cars in every garage, could go wherever they wanted, had overseas vacations every year, could buy whatever they wanted without standing in line. The US citizens could even afford a certain degree of variety in the information they received. The state control on the media was enacted in subtle ways, giving citizens the illusion that they were not exposed to propaganda. It was the kind of lifestyle that president Bush said was “not up for negotiation” — except that when you deal with Nature, everything is up to negotiation.

The current problem is that the resources that made the West so rich and so powerful, mainly crude oil and other fossil fuels, are not infinite. They are being depleted, and production costs increase with depletion. And that’s not the only problem: something else is choking the Western economic system: it is the enormous cost of the health care system. In 2018, the US spent $3.6 trillion in health costs, nearly 18% of its GDP. Today, it is probably more than that. Yes, health costs in the US are ten times larger than military costs. It is probably not a coincidence that troubles started to appear when these costs reached the same level, about 20%, of the military expenses for the Soviet Union.

Someone has to pay for those costs and, as always, they fall on the middle class, which becomes poorer and poorer. On one extreme of the wealth distribution curve, former middle class citizens are losing everything they had and they are being gradually squeezed out of the market. And here is the problem: those who have no money to spend can’t buy their sweet buns. They become “non-people,” aka “deplorables.” What is to be done with them? A possible solution (that I am sure some elites are contemplating), is just to let them die and cease to be a problem (it is the zombie scenario). But we are not there, yet. The elites themselves don’t want the chaos that would result from starving a large fraction of the citizens. How to avoid that?

The solution is well known from ancient times: it is rationing. The Romans had already developed a system called “Annona” that distributed food to the poor. During WW2, the US had ration books, ration stamps, food stamps, and the like. The Soviets used a kind of funny money called “ruble.” In the West, rationing seems to be a silly idea but it was done during WW2 and, if there is a serious economic crash — as it is perfectly possible — it can return. It must return because without rationing we’ll have the zombie apocalypse all over simply because there is no mechanism in place to limit those who still have money from hoarding all they can, when they can.

Tucker Lee Smith

.@LeeSmithDC says he keeps hearing people comparing the scandal to Watergate when it doesn’t compare to Watergate at all. We are talking about some of the most secure communications in government been Surveiled by political operatives. pic.twitter.com/f22h5V92vV

— The Dirty Truth (Josh) (@AKA_RealDirty) February 15, 2022

Jon Stewart – Hoenig

Federal Reserve President (Kansas City) Thomas Hoenig Outlines The US Dollar Is A Fiat Fraud Based On Confidence & Mass Delusion. pic.twitter.com/TDRpVkMWEP

— Ben Rickert (@Ben__Rickert) February 14, 2022

https://twitter.com/Owl__Kitty/status/1492783828704055297

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Debt Rattle January 11 2022

Jan 112022

January 11, 2022 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 10:00 am Finance Tagged with: common cold, DARPA, Fauci, Great Barrington, Omicron, pilots, vaccine deaths, WEF 84 Responses »

Rembrandt van Rijn The Adoration of the Magi 16xx

• USCF Covid Doctor: The Hospital Surge Isn’t What You May Think (SFGate)

• Gloomsters Admit They Were Wildly Wrong About 75,000 Omicron Deaths (DM)

• Huge Number of Vax Deaths & It’s Getting Worse – Dr. Pierre Kory (USAW)

• Numbers Killed by Vaccines Much Worse than We Thought (Bhakdi, Yeadon)

• Double Vaccinated Have Double the Infection Rate (DS)

• Omicron 105% More Transmissible Than Delta, Says Study (BS)

• Has The Great Barrington Declaration Been Vindicated? (Unherd)

• T-Cells From Common Colds Can Provide Protection Against Covid-19 (R.)

• Health Officials Let Covid-infected Staff Stay On The Job (AP)

• Light It Up! (Kunstler)

• Where’s The Wood? (Denninger)

• 80% of Airline Pilots Aren’t Going To Take The Booster (Kirsch)

• Military Documents About Gain Of Function Contradict Fauci Testimony (Veritas)

• International Finance Leaders Hold ‘War Game’ Exercise (CHD)

Trends: 99% of Omicron infections are harmless. Vaccine injuries and deaths are now coming to the fore. Can the narrative be controlled for much longer?

“Omicron has learned how to read!!! Of the 30 mutations in its spike gene, 24 have been characterized in scientific publications. Also, it borrowed defining mutations from alpha, beta, delta, eta, epsilon, iota and mu. Even though it was in hiding when these variants emerged.”

Pfizer CEO Vaccine 1.1

Pfizer CEO: "2 Doses Offer Very Limited Protection If Any"

"3 Doses Offer Reasonable Protection"

"New Version of Shot That Will Cover Omicron Will Be Ready In March" pic.twitter.com/bTpjcBsL44

— Covid-1984 (@Spiro_Ghost) January 10, 2022

The greatest proponents for all of these ruinous Covid measures… will be rewriting their own history..
https://twitter.com/i/status/1480295361549946880

Rewriting as we speak….
https://twitter.com/i/status/1480682158238752770

“As currently reported, COVID hospitalization rates greatly exaggerate COVID burden. Incidental positives account for large majority of hospitalized cases in both LA and Bay Area.”

“The vast majority of COVID-plus patients I take care of need no medical care and are quickly discharged home with reassurance.”

• USCF Covid Doctor: The Hospital Surge Isn’t What You May Think (SFGate)

On Saturday, in response to hospitals begging for relief from a massive staffing crisis, the California Department of Public Health announced that most hospitals and skilled nursing facilities can bring COVID-positive and exposed staff back to work without testing or quarantines. The staffers must be asymptomatic, are required to wear N95 masks and are encouraged to work with patients who are already COVID-positive as much as possible. This news might come as a surprise to people who have been reading dire warnings about omicron and some public health officials’ pleas to cancel plans and stay home. Many public health officials have argued these measures are necessary to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed with COVID patients.

Indeed, for the past few weeks, San Francisco hospitals have been in dire straits. But it’s not because people are sick — it’s because of staffing shortages driven by overly strict state quarantine rules, the director of COVID response at UCSF’s emergency department said. After reviewing the charts of every COVID-positive patient at UCSF hospitals on Jan. 4, Dr. Jeanne Noble, an associate professor of emergency medicine at UCSF, determined that 70% of them were in the hospital for other reasons. “The real COVID crisis that our hospitals are facing is a severe staffing shortage that is compromising the quality of our care,” Noble said Friday, shortly before the policy change was announced. Staffing shortages are so severe that California is considering canceling elective surgeries, as happened during the worst of last year’s peak.

“The crisis from the Omicron peak is not generated by serious COVID illness in regions with highly vaxxed populations,” Noble wrote in an email to SFGATE. “The crisis we are suffering in the Bay Area is largely driven by disruptive COVID policies that encourage asymptomatic testing and subsequent quarantines. … The vast majority of COVID-plus patients I take care of need no medical care and are quickly discharged home with reassurance.” It’s true that case counts are shattering records set last year, and Noble predicts the peak is still a week away. But fewer people are hospitalized with COVID today in California compared with this time last year. And, especially in highly vaccinated areas, few of those patients are actually in the hospital because of COVID illness. In LA, where 71% of eligible people are fully vaccinated, two-thirds of hospital cases were caught on screening for the virus, the LA Times reported.

[..] she identified 44 hospitalized patients (both adults and children) with COVID. Of those, just 13 were admitted because of COVID. “I do not expect that number to increase substantially, or become unmanageable in the coming week,” she wrote. “The death rate in California is actually falling. And the predicted peak of cases is only about a week away.” The remaining 31, or 70%, of patients tested positive after being admitted for unrelated reasons, including a hip fracture and a bowel obstruction. They’re all “completely asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic,” Noble said. “[Emergency departments] are flooded with the worried well that are simply seeking testing and reassurance,” she added. “I have not intubated a single COVID patient during this Omicron surge. We have a total of 5 patients with COVID on ventilators across our 4 hospitals. An average of 1.25 intubated COVID patients per hospital is a good news story.”

Neil Ferguson, anyone?

• Gloomsters Admit They Were Wildly Wrong About 75,000 Omicron Deaths (DM)

The scientists who warned that Britain had little option but to impose severe restrictions or face tens of thousands of deaths from Omicron were last night in retreat. First, modellers who advise the Government said winter deaths from the highly transmissible variant would be ‘substantially’ lower than they had originally believed, then Independent SAGE, a group of Left-leaning scientists who have pushed for lockdowns, distanced themselves from the need to impose further curbs. Before Christmas, epidemiologists at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine produced a series of dire scenarios in which they warned Omicron could lead to between 25,000 and 75,000 deaths by the end of April. But one of its leading modellers said last night he believes the true figure will be far lower, mainly due to Omicron being less lethal than originally feared.

Dr Davies said that since mid-December he and his team had been in constant communication with senior civil servants and government scientific advisers, discussing emerging data that pointed towards Omicron having lower severity than originally feared, and the implications this could have for policy Tory MP William Wragg, a member of the party’s Covid Recovery Group, said the U-turn provided evidence that many in the scientific community had been too gloomy about the threat from coronavirus. ‘Once again, it appears that certain scientists and experts so quick to spread gloom and panic at the arrival of Omicron are having to come to terms with a reality that is far from the catastrophe they were predicting,’ he said. ‘It all shows that Boris Johnson and his Cabinet were right to avoid condemning us to another lockdown with the dismal effects on people’s livelihoods and liberties.’

The School of Hygiene’s team built its original models – published on December 11 – on the assumption that Omicron was as naturally lethal as the Delta strain, meaning it would kill the same proportion of unvaccinated people who had not been exposed to Covid before. Dr Davies argued that while South African doctors were already finding Omicron appeared to be less severe, the reports were ‘anecdotal’ so the School of Hygiene’s supposition was ‘a reasonable assumption to make at the time’. Over the past month, however, considerable evidence has built up that Omicron is less dangerous. This includes statistical studies by Imperial College London, Edinburgh University and the UK Health Security Agency, as well as research from South Africa and Denmark. Laboratory studies have also found Omicron is less adept at infecting the lungs.

This is the story coming out, that needs to be suppressed.

• Huge Number of Vax Deaths & It’s Getting Worse – Dr. Pierre Kory (USAW)

Former Pfizer VP Dr. Michael Yeadon said this week, “Max vaccination is leading to mass death.” Dr. Kory agrees and explains, “It’s not only data from a life insurance company that came out this week that is based on CDC data that can’t be explained by Covid alone, there are huge increases of dying in this country this year. . . . They have done huge analysis of the European mortality data as well as the U.S. mortality data and they controlled for vaccination status. They found that for every age range that they looked at, the all-cause mortality of the vaccinated were increased over the unvaccinated. All-cause mortality and that means that you are more likely to die of something if you are vaccinated. . . .

All-cause mortality are coming out of actual databases by credible scientists. You have life insurance companies showing the data, and you have our own federal government showing unexplained large rises in dying. . . . Don’t you think a good scientific question and a good hypothesis to test would be ‘Could these be the vaccines?’ The answer is ‘the vaccines,’ and I cannot find a better fit to answering that hypothesis than that, it’s this mass explosion of this vaccination policy with single, double and booster shots. It’s going like wildfire through the population. If the mortality of the vaccinated is higher than the unvaccinated, you have the data that you can safely and confidently conclude the vaccines are associated with and causing death.”

But it will be hard to keep it silent much longer.

• Numbers Killed by Vaccines Much Worse than We Thought (Bhakdi, Yeadon)

My good friend Dr Sucharit Bhakdi, with whom we and others wrote a series of open letters to the European Medicines Agency, is utterly distraught. Listen carefully. He and his colleague, a pathologist, have confirmed that, even in people who’ve died post-covid-19 vaccination and where their death was not attributed to the adverse effects of vaccination, in almost all cases they DID die as a result of the vaccination. The numbers killed by these vaccines is much worse than what we thought, already. But it’s what they’ve just discovered that’s much worse. We knew of blood clots from expressing spike protein. We were aware of autoimmune attacks on ones own tissues expressing spike protein to which our killer lymphocytes were primed, such as myocarditis.

But what’s new is the revelation that lymph node cells are also being invaded by the gene-based agents and marking THEM for auto destruction. When you destroy that part of the immune system, which we loosely call “immune surveillance”, every manner of nasty, latent infections, by viruses & also bacteria, explode, uncontrolled. Hundreds of millions of people are going to die of unrestrained tuberculosis, Epstein Barr virus, toxoplasmosis etc etc etc AND on top of this, the daily accidental production of cancer cells, normally deleted swiftly by immune surveillance, before they can divide, ceases. Guess what happens next? I don’t care where you’ve sat during this ridiculous “pandemic”. Whether you’ve gone along with it, knowing it was an overreaction. Or even in ignorance.

I am telling you right now: IF YOU PERSONALLY HAVING WATCHED THIS CHOOSE TO SETTLE BACK TO WATCH A FILM, INSTEAD OF CALLING SOME PEOPLE YOU KNOW & TELLING THEM ABOUT IT, THE END OF HUMANITY IS A SHARED BURDEN WITH THE PERPETRATORS. Please put this on every platform. Swamp the ‘fact checkers’. Please do it now. Rescue our civilization while there are innocents to save, ESPECIALLY our children and grandchildren. Thank you sincerely,

And triple?

• Double Vaccinated Have Double the Infection Rate (DS)

The double-vaccinated are almost twice as likely to be infected as unvaccinated people, data from Iceland shows. This is the same pattern as found in data from the U.K. Thorsteinn Siglaugsson has written about the trend in Morgunbladid, the main national newspaper in Iceland, and put up a translation on his website.

“After December 20th, the 14-day incidence of COVID-19 infection by vaccination status took a very unexpected turn in Iceland. The infection rate per 100,000 of fully vaccinated adults with booster is now eleven times higher than on December 20th, and the infection rate of double-vaccinated adults seven times higher. At the same time, infections among unvaccinated people have grown by a factor of 2.6 only. Among children, we see a similar change: a tenfold increase among the fully vaccinated while the rate among the unvaccinated is 2.4 times higher than on December 20th. This change can hardly be explained away by changes in behaviour, such a sudden and decisive change of behavior between groups is impossible. It is also unlikely that testing has suddenly increased this sharply among some groups and not others.

We know the protection against infection from vaccination wanes rapidly, but it is out of the question that it should drop so suddenly. The most likely explanation is the new Omicron variant. Foreign data also indicate that the currently available vaccines have little or no effect against Omicron infection. The data published on covid.is are weighted; the different size of the groups is adjusted for. This means we can use them to conclude regarding probability of infection. At present, triple-vaccinated people are only 30% less likely to get infected than unvaccinated adults, and for vaccinated children the difference is only 15%. This small difference decreases rapidly in both groups. The biggest news, however, is that double-vaccinated people are now 90% more likely to get infected than the unvaccinated. This suggests that the protection provided by two doses of vaccine is in fact less than none, it is the opposite.”

After Siglaugsson’s article was published on January 8th, the Icelandic Chief Epidemiologist claimed the finding was an artefact of the official data overestimating the number of unvaccinated people. However, Siglaugsson suggests the overestimate would have to be an implausible 90% to bring the infection rates level.

Double Vaccinated =2x. Omicron=2x. Are we looking at 2²?

• Omicron 105% More Transmissible Than Delta, Says Study (BS)

The Omicron Covid-19 variant may be 105 per cent more transmissible than Delta, according to a research by French scientists. The study, published on the medRxiv site and yet to be peer-reviewed, analysed 131,478 tests in France from October 25 to December 18, 2021. The team applied statistical models to variant-specific screening tests and full genome sequencing. They compared the number of infections with the Omicron, Alpha and the Delta variants over a 21-day period. The difference in rate of transmissibility in people with the Delta and Omicron was approximately 105 per cent.

“We estimate that the transmission advantage of the Omicron variant over the Delta variant is more than 105 per cent,” said Samuel Alizon, from Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Biology (CIRB) France. Further, the results showed that tests consistent with the presence of the Omicron variant exhibit significantly higher cycle threshold Ct values, which could indicate lower amounts of virus genetic material. “Epidemiological modelling indicates that even if the virulence of the Omicron variant is reduced compared to that of the Delta variant, the increase in reproduction number we estimate from the data can has the potential to maintain critical Covid-19 activity at a high level in French hospitals, if not overloading them,” Alizon said adding that “swift mitigation of the epidemic wave” is essential.

Not as long as Fauci is around.

• Has The Great Barrington Declaration Been Vindicated? (Unherd)

Over the course of the past two years, Italy has implemented some of the strictest and longest lockdowns in the world (indeed, it is the country that “invented” the concept of national lockdown), topping every other Western country in terms of average stringency of anti-Covid measures. Yet Italy is also one of the countries with the highest mortality rate per capita — well above the United Kingdom, Spain, France, Germany, Sweden and several other countries that adopted much less restrictive measures. And there’s evidence that this isn’t despite the lockdowns but, most likely, because of them.

As Piero Stanig and Gianmarco Daniele, two professors at Bocconi University, explain in their book Fallimento lockdown (“Lockdown Failure”), the worst possible thing you can do when dealing with a highly infectious disease that spreads almost exclusively indoors and targets the elderly is to lock old people up inside their homes with other family members, and ban citizens from spending time in arguably the safest place of all: outdoors. In other words, even from the narrow perspective of saving lives, not only were lockdowns not in the collective interest of society, they weren’t even in the interest of those whose lives were actually at risk. Such an outcome was easily predictable. Indeed, the WHO’s 2019 report on pandemic preparedness states that the quarantine of exposed individuals — let alone of the entire population — “is not recommended because there is no obvious rationale for this measure”.

The grotesquery of the global responses becomes even more apparent when we take into account the fact that while governments went out of their way to keep healthy people locked in, chasing runners down solitary beaches or checking shopping trolleys to make sure people were only buying essentials, they all but abandoned those most vulnerable: nursing home residents. According to a recent Collateral Global study, Covid deaths in nursing homes amount on average to a staggering 40% of all Covid deaths in Western countries, despite representing less than 1% of the population. In some countries (Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, the UK and the US), more than 5% of all care home residents were killed.

In view of this, it seems obvious that the focused protection approach championed by the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) — based on “allow[ing] those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk” — was the right course of action. It would have avoided inflicting needless pain on workers, women and children through repeated lockdowns, while arguably saving countless lives, by focusing first and foremost on the elderly and especially on nursing homes.

Exactly what Great Barrington Professor @SunetraGupta said from the very beginning. The common cold had given many of us some protection against Covid.

• T-Cells From Common Colds Can Provide Protection Against Covid-19 (R.)

High levels of T-cells from common cold coronaviruses can provide protection against Covid-19, an Imperial College London study published on Monday has found, which could inform approaches for second-generation vaccines. Immunity against Covid-19 is a complex picture, and while there is evidence of waning antibody levels six months after vaccination, T-cells are also believed to play a vital role in providing protection. The study, which began in September 2020, looked at levels of cross-reactive T-cells generated by previous common colds in 52 household contacts of positive Covid-19 cases shortly after exposure, to see if they went on to develop infection.

It found that the 26 who did not develop infection had significantly higher levels of those T-cells than people who did get infected. Imperial did not say how long protection from the T-cells would last. “We found that high levels of pre-existing T cells, created by the body when infected with other human coronaviruses like the common cold, can protect against Covid-19 infection,” study author Dr Rhia Kundu said. The authors of the study, published in Nature Communications, said that the internal proteins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus which are targeted by the T-cells could offer an alternative target for vaccine makers.

Current Covid-19 vaccines target the spike protein, which mutates regularly, creating variants such as Omicron which lessen the efficacy of vaccines against symptomatic infection. “In contrast, the internal proteins targeted by the protective T-cells we identified mutate much less,” Professor Ajit Lalvani, co-author of the study, said. “Consequently, they are highly conserved between the various SARS-CoV-2 variants, including Omicron. New vaccines that include these conserved, internal proteins would therefore induce broadly protective T cell responses that should protect against current and future SARS-CoV-2 variants.”

But only when vaccinated… You know, to replace the healthy unvaxxed…

• Health Officials Let Covid-infected Staff Stay On The Job (AP)

Health authorities around the U.S. are increasingly taking the extraordinary step of allowing nurses and other workers infected with the coronavirus to stay on the job if they have mild symptoms or none at all. The move is a reaction to the severe hospital staffing shortages and crushing caseloads that the omicron variant is causing. California health authorities announced over the weekend that hospital staff members who test positive but are symptom-free can continue working. Some hospitals in Rhode Island and Arizona have likewise told employees they can stay on the job if they have no symptoms or just mild ones. The highly contagious omicron variant has sent new cases of COVID-19 exploding to over 700,000 a day in the U.S. on average, obliterating the record set a year ago.

The number of Americans in the hospital with the virus is running at about 110,000, just short of the peak of 124,000 last January. Many hospitals are not only swamped with cases but severely shorthanded because of so many employees out with COVID-19. At the same time, omicron appears to be causing milder illness than the delta variant. Last month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that health care workers who have no symptoms can return to work after seven days with a negative test, but that the isolation time can be cut further if there are staffing shortages. France last week announced it is allowing health care workers with mild or no symptoms to keep treating patients rather than isolate.

[..] In California, the Department of Public Health said the new policy was prompted by “critical staffing shortages.” It asked hospitals to make every attempt to fill openings by bringing in employees from outside staffing agencies. Also, infected workers will be required to wear extra-protective N95 masks and should be assigned to treat other COVID-19-positive patients, the department said. “We did not ask for this guidance, and we don’t have any information on whether hospitals will adopt this approach or not,” said Jan Emerson-Shea, a spokesperson for the California Hospital Association. “But what we do know is that hospitals are expecting many more patients in the coming days than they’re going to be able to care for with the current resources.”

Cali
https://twitter.com/i/status/1480547659895169038

“The ballyhooed and mandated vaxxes apparently have the ability to kill and maim people who have taken them long after Covid-19 exits stage-left.”

• Light It Up! (Kunstler)

We are at a strange pass in The Saga of Covid. It seems the spikey virus wants to leave center stage… is weary of all the attention… wants to fade into the eternal parade of microorganisms that cozily coexist within the human life-stream — like Tony Fauci’s HIV, a fellow traveler in the old-time throng of human viruses, now semi-retired, and yet still every bit as mysterious in the actual mechanism of AIDS as it was when Dr. Fauci pinned his NIAID distinguished service medal on its elusive bosom, so to speak (but you’d have to read Bobby Kennedy’s book on Fauci to get the drift of that). Omicron is sweeping the country, as love once did in George Gershwin’s day. (We are a different country now, as anyone tuned into the Turner Classics Movie channel can discover.)

Omicron: the 36-hour head cold that Covid-19 has been demoted to. Omicron: a mere wise-cracking gecko compared to the roaring dragon that was Covid-19 in the winter of 2020. Omicron: kind of an embarrassment to “vaccine” tyrants who still seek to jab every arm on earth, and at ever-shortening intervals — like a med school version of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, only with syringes running amok instead of brooms. The Party-of-Chaos (the one headed by the ectoplasmic “Joe Biden”) does not want to let go of Covid-19, its Swiss army knife of destruction. With Covid-19, you can push people around and mess with their lives every which way, shut down their businesses, lock them in their homes, screw them out of their livelihoods, delete their reputations, board-up their social venues, cancel their careers, revoke their licenses, drag them into court, fine them into penury, cram them into prison camps, and much more.

[..] Which brings us back to the virus. In The Saga of Covid there is a monster under the bed. The ballyhooed and mandated vaxxes apparently have the ability to kill and maim people who have taken them long after Covid-19 exits stage-left. We don’t really know how this works out, but we have plenty of clues: kids dropping dead of heart attacks, pro athletes, ditto, the VAERS numbers reporting over 21,000 vaccine-implicated deaths (out of a grossly under-reported actual figure) plus over a million adverse reaction reports (ditto under-reported). The time may not be far off when we make the ghastly discovery that the “vaccines” actually killed more Americans than the virus did.

“There were safety signals — screaming red flags — in September of 2020, four months before the first shots went into arms on the EUAs and during the trials themselves.”

• Where’s The Wood? (Denninger)

You know, wood, nails, saws, hammers…. and boiled rope? Now Pfizer and Moderna’s CEOs are apparently on Corrupt National Bull**** crowing that a fourth shot is necessary. May I remind you of the lies? How did all this work out for AOC? Or Geraldo, both of whom were “true believers” that if you got the first two shots you absolutely would not get *****. Both got ***** recently after taking the booster, which was the “second” set of lies. There are many words you may choose to describe a drug you have taken three times within a year and shortly thereafter get the disease but if you use the word “*******” given that personal record of ineffectiveness you deserve an immediate Clue-by-4 to the face in a (likely futile) attempt to correct your vapid stupidity.

Nobody in their right mind would expect a condom that only lasts for 15 seconds of sex before breaking to prevent pregnancy or deter transmission of STDs. That’s how ****ing stupid everyone is being at this point with regard to the jabs. I remind you that the original EUA studies were not designed to, and thus did not, demonstrate that the jabs were sterilizing — that is, that having taken them you would neither get or transmit *****-19. The representations that they in fact had that property were knowing, intentional lies; there was no evidence that was the case and in fact the trials were never intended to show that. Even worse was that although the entire case for the EUAs was built around reducing the risk of severe disease the sub-group of people who need that risk reduction — the seriously morbid — were deliberately excluded from the trials! We thus had zero evidence as to whether what we did observe in healthy young adults would translate into older, fatter, sicker people.

The entire edifice built around the jabs was in fact born of lies. Lies repeated by Donald Trump, Geraldo, AOC, Joe Biden, Anthony Fauci and thousands of others. They were not errors or mistakes; they were lies. In addition to the lies on efficacy the manufacturers and so-called “experts” have also lied about safety. There were safety signals in the original trials but they were deliberately ignored. There were safety signals — screaming red flags — in September of 2020, four months before the first shots went into arms on the EUAs and during the trials themselves. Said science strongly implicated the spike protein alone being pathogenic and that in the circulation it was specifically harmful to the endothelial layer that is in all blood vessels. It was known in December of 2020 that the presence of the spike protein in the circulation could lead the body to attack its own circulatory system. We knew at the same time that viremia, that is, virus in the bloodstream, was essentially never happening except in severe, critical and fatal *****-19 infections and that when it killed you this was usually the means by which it happened.

” If 20% of the pilots walk off the job, it’s the end of the commercial airline industry.”

• 80% of Airline Pilots Aren’t Going To Take The Booster (Kirsch)

I interviewed Latane Campbell who is a pilot for a major US airline. Key points:

He knows about 100 pilots and 80% are not going to take the booster. They’ll quit if they are forced to take it.

Virtually all of the pilots know that masks are completely useless.

The pilots all take off their masks as soon as they close the cockpit door. Wearing masks makes flying dangerous.

If 20% of the pilots walk off the job, it’s the end of the commercial airline industry.

The airlines tried to strong arm the pilots into taking the vaccines or else. The pilots resisted and the airlines immediately recanted allowing religious and medical exemptions.

The more you vaccinate, the sicker people get. Most pilots have figured this out.

DARPA.

• Military Documents About Gain Of Function Contradict Fauci Testimony (Veritas)

Project Veritas has obtained startling never-before-seen documents regarding the origins of COVID-19, gain of function research, vaccines, potential treatments which have been suppressed, and the government’s effort to conceal all of this. The documents in question stem from a report at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, better known as DARPA, which were hidden in a top-secret shared drive. DARPA is an agency under the U.S. Department of Defense in charge of facilitating research in technology with potential military applications. Project Veritas has obtained a separate report to the Inspector General of the Department of Defense written by U.S. Marine Corp Major, Joseph Murphy, a former DARPA Fellow.

The report states that EcoHealth Alliance approached DARPA in March 2018, seeking funding to conduct gain of function research of bat borne coronaviruses. The proposal, named Project Defuse, was rejected by DARPA over safety concerns and the notion that it violates the basis gain of function research moratorium. According to the documents, NIAID, under the direction of Dr. Fauci, went ahead with the research in Wuhan, China and at several sites across the U.S.

IMF,BIS,WEF.

• International Finance Leaders Hold ‘War Game’ Exercise (CHD)

High-level international banking officials and organizations last month gathered in Israel for a global “war game” exercise simulating the collapse of the global financial system. The tabletop exercise was reminiscent of “Event 201” — the pandemic simulation exercise that took place in October 2019, shortly before COVID-19 entered the global scene. The “Collective Strength” initiative was held for 10 days, beginning Dec. 9, 2021, at the Israeli Finance Ministry in Jerusalem. It was relocated to Jerusalem from the Dubai World Expo over concerns about the Omicron variant. Israel led a 10-country contingent that also included treasury officials from the U.S., Austria, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Thailand and the United Arab Emirates.

Representatives from supranational organizations, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank and Bank of International Settlements (BIS), also participated. Described as a simulated “war game,” the exercise sought to model the response to various hypothetical large-scale cyberattacks on the global financial system, including the leaking of sensitive financial data on the “Dark Web,” hacks targeting the global foreign exchange system, and subsequent bank runs and market chaos fueled by “fake news.” However, the main theme of “Collective Strength” appears not so much the simulation of such cyberattacks but, as the name of the initiative implies, the strengthening of global cooperation in cybersecurity and the financial sector.

As reported by Reuters, participants in the simulation discussed multilateral responses to a hypothetical global financial crisis. Proposed policy solutions included debt repayment grace periods, SWAP/REPO agreements, coordinated bank holidays and coordinated delinking from major currencies. The idea of simulated delinking from major currencies raised some eyebrows because of its timing — on the same day participants gathered to launch “Collective Strength,” reports circulated that the Biden administration was considering removing Russia from the global electronic-payment-messaging system known as SWIFT, short for Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication.

This measure would be part of a package of economic sanctions the U.S. would levy against Russia should it attack Ukraine. However, what may raise even more eyebrows is the list of participants in the “Collective Strength” simulation, which includes: the IMF and World Bank, and indirectly, the World Economic Forum (WEF). It was the WEF, along with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, which ran the simulated “Event 201” in October 2019. As previously reported by The Defender, the WEF also supported the development of financial instruments, such as credit and debit cards, that would track “personal carbon allowances” on an individualized basis.

Michael Jackson

Michael Jackson was spotted on live television over the weekend. pic.twitter.com/Y9Cc3J3A89

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) January 11, 2022

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Debt Rattle February 6 2021

Feb 062021

February 6, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:37 am Finance Tagged with: Biden, domestic violence, Ecuador, intelligence, minimum wage, Nevada, pandemic, Trump, WEF, Yemen 34 Responses »

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo Allegory of the Planets and Continents 1752

• New Covid Strains ‘May Even Escape The Immune Response’ – Biden Advisor (CNBC)

• Domestic Violence Is a Pandemic Within the COVID-19 Pandemic (Time)

• YouTube Censors Senate Testimony From Doctor On Possible Covid Drug (Turley)

• Biden Revokes Terrorist Designation For Yemen’s Houthis (Fox)

• Biden: Trump Should No Longer Receive Classified Intelligence Briefings (CNN)

• Trump’s Decision Not To Testify Is Not Evidence Of His Guilt (Turley)

• The Fire This Time (Kunstler)

• Sanders Says He Never Intended To Raise Minimum Wage To $15 During Pandemic (JTN)

• EU Parliament Snubs Anti-Corruption Researchers (EUO)

• Ecuador Gov’t Scrambles to Privatize the Central Bank Before Elections (MPN)

• Nevada Bill Would Allow Tech Companies To Create Governments (AP)

• The WEF’s Simulation of a Coming “Cyber Pandemic” (Webb/Vedmore)

Not sure what to make of this. Is she just selling vaccines?

• New Covid Strains ‘May Even Escape The Immune Response’ – Biden Advisor (CNBC)

A member of the Biden-Harris Transition Covid Advisory Board warned about the highly transmissible new Covid variants and vaccine resistance during a Thursday evening interview on CNBC’s “The News with Shepard Smith.” “They’re more virulent, can cause more death, and some of them may even escape the immune response, whether it’s natural or from the vaccine,” said Dr. Celine Gounder. “So it’s really important right now that we do everything possible to preserve the vaccines to make sure they keep working and that means preventing the spread of these new variants.” Three highly contagious mutations of Covid have been detected in at least 33 states across the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Researchers say these highly transmissible variants could prolong the pandemic and potentially create another surge. Projections out of the CDC even predict the U.K. variant to be the dominant variant in the U.S. by March. Gounder, an epidemiologist at NYU, told host Shepard Smith that she’s “concerned” that people will let their guards down in March and that it could potentially lead to another surge. “That’s a time when you might have some families taking spring break, so you would have the additive effect of, again, a holiday where people might be socializing, not taking all the safety measures, on top of this far more contagious variant,” warned Gounder.

Johnson & Johnson announced that it filed emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration for its coronavirus vaccine. Last week it released data showing it was about 66% effective in protecting against the virus. If J&J’s application is approved, it would be the third vaccine in the arsenal authorized for emergency use in the U.S. behind vaccines developed by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna. Unlike the other two shots, however, the J&J vaccine only requires one shot and requires basic refrigeration for storage.

“The abuser says, ‘You can’t go out; you’re not going anywhere,’ and the government also is saying, ‘You have to stay in.’”

• Domestic Violence Is a Pandemic Within the COVID-19 Pandemic (Time)

Growing evidence shows the pandemic has made intimate partner violence more common—and often more severe. “COVID doesn’t make an abuser,” says Jacky Mulveen, project manager of Women’s Empowerment and Recovery Educators (WE:ARE), an advocacy and support group in Birmingham, England. “But COVID exacerbates it. It gives them more tools, more chances to control you. The abuser says, ‘You can’t go out; you’re not going anywhere,’ and the government also is saying, ‘You have to stay in.’” That was Sheila’s experience. “The abuse was going to happen anyway,” she says. “Having the excuse of there’s nowhere to go, there’s nothing to do, didn’t help.”

Surveys around the world have shown domestic abuse spiking since January of 2020—jumping markedly year over year compared to the same period in 2019. According to the American Journal of Emergency Medicine and the United Nations group U.N. Women, when the pandemic began, incidents of domestic violence increased 300% in Hubei, China; 25% in Argentina, 30% in Cyprus, 33% in Singapore and 50% in Brazil. The U.K., where calls to domestic violence hotlines have soared since the pandemic hit, was particularly shaken in June by the death of Amy-Leanne Stringfellow, 26, a mother of one and a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, allegedly at the hands of her 45-year-old boyfriend.

In the U.S., the situation is equally troubling, with police departments reporting increases in cities around the country: for example, 18% in San Antonio, 22% in Portland, Ore.; and 10% in New York City, according to the American Journal of Emergency Medicine. One study in the journal Radiology reports that at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, radiology scans and superficial wounds consistent with domestic abuse from March 11 to May 3 of this year exceeded the totals for the same period in 2018 and 2019 combined. And as the pandemic has dragged on, so too has the abuse. Just as the disease continues to claim more lives, quarantine-linked domestic violence is claiming more victims—and not just women in heterosexual relationships. Intimate partner violence occurs in same-sex couples at rates equal to or even higher than the rates in opposite sex partners.

What’s more, the economic challenges of the pandemic have hit same-sex couples especially hard, with members of the LGBTQ community likelier to be employed in highly affected industries like education, restaurants, hospitals and retail, according to the Human Rights Campaign Foundation. That means higher stress and, concomitantly, the higher risk that that stress will explode into violence. As with so many things, communities of color are affected more severely as well, with systemic inequities often meaning lower income and less access to social and private services. “While one in three white women report having experienced domestic violence [during the pandemic], the rates of abuse increased dramatically to about 50% and higher for those marginalized by race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, citizenship status, and cognitive physical ability,” says Erika Sussman, executive director of the Center for Survivor Advocacy and Justice (CSAJ), a support and research organization.

Turley noticed what happened right after I posted the Pierre Kory video -again- in last week’s Criminal COVID Negligence. A few hours later it was gone. I replaced it with a Kory video from Vimeo. Easy. Still, censoring Senate hearings should be out of the question for Big Tech.

• YouTube Censors Senate Testimony From Doctor On Possible Covid Drug (Turley)

We have have been discussing how writers, editors, commentators, and academics have embraced rising calls for censorship and speech controls, including President-elect Joe Biden and his key advisers. The erosion of free speech has been radically accelerated by the Big Tech and social media companies, including YouTube. Now YouTube has censored actual testimony given to the United States Senate by Dr. Pierre Kory, who was testifying on different drug treatment. So now these companies are going to censor what was told to the government and decide what viewers will be allowed to consider from the public debate. It is a continuation of the movement to prevent people from hearing opposing views and to control what is shared or discussed in a growing attack on free speech.

YouTube removed two videos from a December 8th hearing before the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. It featured Kory who discussed the use of Ivermectin as a potential treatment for Covid-19, particularly in the early stages. It is a drug that treats tropical diseases caused by parasites. Kory was calling for a review by National Institutes of Health on trials for the drug. Ultimately, it does appear that the NIH did change the status of the drug. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) has said that the videos were blocked on his account, including Kory’s testimony. The Federalist maintained that YouTube removed the videos to the platform’s COVID-19 Medical Misinformation Policy. That policy stipulates that anything which goes against “local health authorities’ or the WHO medical information about COVID-19” will be removed.

I can hardly shed light on the merits of the medical debate but this is the censoring of an actual Senate hearing that is so disturbing. YouTube is preventing citizens from watching testimony on an issue of national importance. It is an example of the slippery slope of censorship and how such speech regulation becomes an insatiable appetite for many. [..] There is ample ability of people to challenge such testimony. However, many do not want to engage in a debate. They want to silence others and control what fellow citizens are allowed to consider. In the meantime, hosts on CNN are assuring people that they do not have to call such acts censorship but “harm reduction.” Sen. Richard Blumenthal recently calling for “robust content modification” on the Internet. Those voices of censorship are only growing stronger in the United States.

Indeed, in the wake of the Capitol riot, Democratic members and others are calling for a crackdown on free speech and punitive actions for those viewed as complicit with Trump. What is striking is how censorship, blacklists, and speech controls are being repackaged as righteous and virtuous. Indeed, the failure to sign such anti-free speech screeds is a precarious choice for many as writers and publishers call for blacklists. We are watching the most successful campaign against free speech in the history of the United States. It is being supported by many in the media and academia. If we allow companies like YouTube to succeed in such speech controls, true free speech could become a quaint historical relic in the United States.

Sounds okay, but this whole thing started when he was VP. And he can still bomb the crap out of them.

• Biden Revokes Terrorist Designation For Yemen’s Houthis (Fox)

President Joe Biden’s administration is moving to revoke the designation of Yemen’s Houthis as a terrorist group, citing the need to mitigate one of the world’s worst humanitarian disasters. President Donald Trump’s administration had branded the Iranian-backed Houthis as a foreign terrorist organization, a move that limited the provision of aid to the beleaguered Yemeni people, who have suffered under a yearslong civil war and famine. A senior State Department official confirmed the move Friday after members of Congress were notified of the administration’s plans. The official, who wasn’t authorized to speak publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity, said the removal changed nothing about the Biden administration’s views of the Houthis, who have targeted civilians and kidnapped Americans.

“Our action is due entirely to the humanitarian consequences of this last-minute designation from the prior administration, which the United Nations and humanitarian organizations have since made clear would accelerate the world’s worst humanitarian crisis,” the official said. The move comes a day after Biden announced an end to offensive support to Saudi Arabia’s campaign against the Houthis. The Obama administration in 2015 gave its approval to Saudi Arabia leading a cross-border air campaign targeting Yemen’s Houthi rebels, who were seizing ever more territory, including Sanaa. The Houthis have launched multiple drone and missile strikes deep into Saudi Arabia. The U.S. says the Saudi-led campaign has entrenched Iran’s role in the conflict, on the side of the Houthis.

Obama kept getting the intelligence briefings while he was colluding with intelligence against Trump.

• Biden: Trump Should No Longer Receive Classified Intelligence Briefings (CNN)

President Joe Biden doesn’t believe former President Donald Trump should receive classified intelligence briefings, as is tradition for past presidents, citing Trump’s “erratic behavior unrelated to the insurrection.” When asked in an interview with “CBS Evening News” anchor Norah O’Donnell if he thought Trump should receive an intelligence briefing if he requested one, Biden said, “I think not.” “I’d rather not speculate out loud,” Biden said when asked what he fears could happen if Trump continued to receive the briefings. “I just think that there is no need for him to have the — the intelligence briefings. What value is giving him an intelligence briefing? What impact does he have at all, other than the fact he might slip and say something?”

Former presidents traditionally have been allowed to request and receive intelligence briefings. A senior administration official previously told CNN that Trump has not submitted any requests at this point. There are many ways intelligence can be presented, the official said, something the intelligence community would formulate should any request come in. White House press secretary Jen Psaki told CNN on Thursday that “the intelligence community supports requests for intelligence briefings by former presidents and will review any incoming requests, as they always have.” Trump was not known to fully or regularly read the President’s Daily Brief, the highly classified summary of the nation’s secrets, when he was in office. He was instead orally briefed two or three times a week by his intelligence officials, CNN has reported.

“As the Supreme Court declared in 1964, it is the embodiment of “many of our fundamental values and most noble aspirations.”

• Trump’s Decision Not To Testify Is Not Evidence Of His Guilt (Turley)

[..] the statement of House manager Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., this week was breathtaking. A former law professor, Raskin declared that the decision of Trump not to testify in the Senate could be cited or used by House managers as an inference of his guilt — a statement that contradicts not just our constitutional principles but centuries of legal writing. Presidents have historically not testified at impeachment trials. One reason is that, until now, only sitting presidents have been impeached and presidents balked at the prospect of being examined as head of the Executive Branch by the Legislative Branch. Moreover, it was likely viewed as undignified and frankly too risky. Indeed, most defense attorneys routinely discourage their clients from testifying in actual criminal cases because the risks outweigh any benefits.

Despite the historical precedent for presidents not testifying, Raskin made an extraordinary and chilling declaration on behalf of the House of Representatives. He wrote in a letter to Trump that “If you decline this invitation, we reserve any and all rights, including the right to establish at trial that your refusal to testify supports a strong adverse inference regarding your actions (and inaction) on January 6, 2021.” Raskin justified his position by noting that Trump “denied many factual allegations set forth in the article of impeachment.” Thus, he insisted Trump needed to testify or his silence is evidence of guilt. Under this theory, any response other than conceding the allegations would trigger this response and allow the House to use the silence of the accused as an inference of guilt. This is the nature of “the cruel trilemma of self-accusation, perjury or contempt.” Murphy v. Waterfront Commission, 378 U.S. 52, 55 (1964)

The statement was a conflict with one of the most precious and revered principles in American law that such a refusal to testify cannot be used against an accused party. The statement also highlighted the fact that the House has done nothing to lock in testimony of those who could shed light on Trump’s intent. After using a “snap impeachment,” the House let weeks pass without any effort to call any of the roughly dozen witnesses who could testify on Trump’s statements and conduct in the White House. Many of those witnesses have already given public interviews. Of course, the relative passivity of the House simply shows a lack of effort to actually win this case. The Raskin statement is far more disturbing. The Fifth Amendment embodies this touchstone of American law in declaring that “[n]o person . . . shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.” It was a rejection of the type of abuses associated with the infamous Star Chamber in Great Britain. As the Supreme Court declared in 1964, it is the embodiment of “many of our fundamental values and most noble aspirations.”

“It sure won’t be like 1957 again, but it would give an awful lot of idle people more to do when they get up in the morning.”

• The Fire This Time (Kunstler)

The economy won’t be fixed by policy because the things that have to happen to fix it will be resisted to the death by the parasitical entities feeding on what little remains. For instance, Walmart. Do you think it’s unhealthy that all the profit in American commerce is funneled into Bentonville, Arkansas? It used to be distributed in hundreds of thousands of small businesses in tens of thousands of US towns and cities. What do you think will die first: Walmart or the organism its feeding on? Since the dynamic at work is emergent and non-linear, other forces can come between these relationships and change things. We are already in conflict with China, the land that supplies most of the merchandise in Walmart.

The conflict right now is mostly playing out in the capture of US corporate and cultural enterprise, and in cyberwarfare, and it’s liable to hotten up around the continued sovereignty of Taiwan (America’s China). It’s difficult to assign intentions to another country but it appears that China’s China wishes to cancel the USA as the fading hegemon on the world stage, at least neutralize us, and perhaps dominate us. Mr. Trump is no longer in place to resist that, and the country might be forced to consider all those deals that our new president, “China Joe” enjoyed from the Biden family’s business ventures there over the years. Emergently, then, the Big Box business model could fail, and in fairly short order, which would at least give Americans a chance to self-reorganize the production and distribution of goods in our own country.

It sure won’t be like 1957 again, but it would give an awful lot of idle people more to do when they get up in the morning. Wait for it, and plan accordingly. In the meantime, we are treated to the sordid spectacle of Democratic Wokesters endeavoring to destroy what remains of American cultural life. It’s an incomparably stupid and malign distraction from the imperatives of this historical moment. They will not succeed in cancelling those who object to the systematic disassembly of our national language, myth, and meaning, even if we have to go back to the mimeograph machine to keep these things alive. They will not turn a republic into a psychopathic despotism. Politics, they say, is downstream from culture. Truth is the antidote to a culture of lies. The upcoming impeachment trial of former president Trump will be a showcase for that, and it may prove to be a hoax too far.

Everyone just walks back what they’ve said like it never meant a thing.

“On Biden’s Inauguration Day, Sanders vowed to use budget reconciliation to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour..”

• Sanders Says He Never Intended To Raise Minimum Wage To $15 During Pandemic (JTN)

Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders overnight Thursday helped nix Democrats’ effort to include a hike in the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, as part of their $1.9 trillion COVID relief package, despite having championed such an increase. However, Sanders made clear that he supported the GOP-backed amendment to keep an immediate wage hike out of the relief measure became he wants a gradual increase. “It was never my intention to increase the minimum wage to $15 immediately and during the pandemic,” Sanders, the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, said on the Senate floor late Thursday night. “My legislation gradually increases the minimum wage to $15 an hour over a five-year period and that is what I believe we have got to do.”

The vote took place during a “vote-a-rama” session in which senators voted on amendments to President Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package, which fellow Democrats are seeking to pass through “budget reconciliation” without GOP votes. Sen. Joni Ernst, an Iowa Republican, proposed the amendment that would prohibit an increase of the federal minimum wage during the global COVID-19 pandemic. “A $15 federal minimum wage would be devastating for our hardest-hit small businesses at a time when they can least afford it,” she said. After Sanders spoke up, the measure to keep the hike out of the COVID relief package was then approved through a voice vote, helping avoid a partisan showdown on the issue.

However, Democrats and Sanders, who caucuses with Democrats, are expected to reinsert the wage hike into the package as a gradual increase. On Biden’s Inauguration Day, Sanders vowed to use budget reconciliation to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour if the GOP does not support the move.

“The parliament did the same in 2014, when the NGO launched a similar probe. A letter sent by the parliament’s president at that time claimed itself to be “extremely transparent” and so saw no need to cooperate. It has now sent the very same letter to its most recent study.”

• EU Parliament Snubs Anti-Corruption Researchers (EUO)

The European Parliament refused to cooperate with an EU institutional-wide study on integrity and ethics by Transparency International, one of the world’s most prestigious anti-corruption NGOs. “The European Parliament, despite its publicly-stated support for greater transparency was, in fact, the only institution that refused to cooperate,” said Michiel van Hulten, who heads Transparency International’s EU office in Brussels. The parliament did the same in 2014, when the NGO launched a similar probe. A letter sent by the parliament’s president at that time claimed itself to be “extremely transparent” and so saw no need to cooperate. It has now sent the very same letter to its most recent study.

“They unfortunately did not go through the trouble of writing a new letter,” noted the lead author of the reports, Transparency International’s Leo Hoffmann-Axthelm. He ascribed the parliament’s decision as an overall lack of accountability within its administrative leadership. This includes the ‘Bureau’, composed of the secretary general and the vice presidents. “Honestly we are not sure what ultimately the reason is,” he said, noting that the initial response had been positive. But the final study, also published on Thursday, noted almost zero penalties whenever an MEP breaks internal house conduct rules.

Lenin Moreno is outta here.

• Ecuador Gov’t Scrambles to Privatize the Central Bank Before Elections (MPN)

With just days until Ecuador’s February 7 presidential election and four months remaining on President Lenin Moreno’s mandate, the Ecuadorian government and right-wing elites are still scrambling to privatize the country’s central bank. The process involves fast-tracking an emergency law dubbed the Humanitarian Support Organic Law, which will “lockdown” the central bank, siphon it from the public sector, and place Ecuador’s financial sovereignty at the whims of private interests. According to right-wing figures and the country’s mainstream media apparatus that protects and serves its interest, the unconstitutional move is being touted as a necessity. Both parties have claimed that the measure would “safeguard” the country’s dollarization.

In 2000, the U.S. dollar was implemented as part of the country’s national monetary system during the neoliberal administration of Jamil Mahuad. Sixteen financial institutions were bailed out by his government at a whopping cost of $2.6 billion. Ecuador’s dollarization occurred just months after the infamous “bank holiday,” in which 70% of all banking institutions declared bankruptcy, hurling the Andean Republic into its worst economic crisis in a century. Millions of people lost their life savings during the chaos and the former national currency, the sucre, plummeted in value by 195%. A migrant crisis accompanied the economic downturn. More than 267,000 Ecuadorians fled the country during a two year period (1999 and 2000), eventually leading to a total of 2.2 million Ecuadorians migrating, a figure that at the time represented nearly 20% of the country’s population.

Even more lost their life savings. The middle class was obliterated and inequality worsened. The current claim that the country’s dollarization needs to be “safeguarded,” a claim repeated by the political and economic elites, local media, and the bulk-some of the 15 presidential hopefuls, is rooted in the work of the leading presidential candidate, Andrés Arauz. Since the end of Rafael Correa’s term in office, Arauz has been in charge of the Dollarization Observatory. This organization informs the public on economic matters, often focusing on the ways in which neoliberal interests threaten Ecuador’s economy. The myth claiming that Arauz wants to forcibly remove the dollar as the national currency comes from an article he wrote last April in which he gave examples of “good and bad” de-dollarization processes.

Mussolini smiles.

• Nevada Bill Would Allow Tech Companies To Create Governments (AP)

Planned legislation to establish new business areas in Nevada would allow technology companies to effectively form separate local governments. Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak announced a plan to launch so-called Innovation Zones in Nevada to jumpstart the state’s economy by attracting technology firms, Las Vegas Review-Journal reported Wednesday. The zones would permit companies with large areas of land to form governments carrying the same authority as counties, including the ability to impose taxes, form school districts and courts and provide government services. The measure to further economic development with the “alternative form of local government” has not yet been introduced in the Legislature.

Sisolak pitched the concept in his State of the State address delivered Jan. 19. The plan would bring in new businesses at the forefront of “groundbreaking technologies” without the use of tax abatements or other publicly funded incentive packages that previously helped Nevada attract companies like Tesla Inc. Sisolak named Blockchains, LLC as a company that had committed to developing a “smart city” in an area east of Reno after the legislation has passed. The draft proposal said the traditional local government model is “inadequate alone” to provide the resources to make Nevada a leader in attracting and retaining businesses and fostering economic development in emerging technologies and industries.

The Governor’s Office of Economic Development would oversee applications for the zones, which would be limited to companies working in specific business areas including blockchain, autonomous technology, the Internet of Things, robotics, artificial intelligence, wireless, biometrics and renewable resource technology.

“The forum’s current agenda and its past track record of hosting prophetic simulations demands that the exercise be scrutinized.”

• The WEF’s Simulation of a Coming “Cyber Pandemic” (Webb/Vedmore)

On Wednesday, the World Economic Forum (WEF), along with Russia’s Sberbank and its cybersecurity subsidiary BI.ZONE announced that a new global cyberattack simulation would take place this coming July to instruct participants in “developing secure ecosystems” by simulating a supply-chain cyberattack similar to the recent SolarWinds hack that would “assess the cyber resilience” of the exercise’s participants. On the newly updated event website, the simulation, called Cyber Polygon 2021, ominously warns that, given the digitalization trends largely spurred by the COVID-19 crisis, “a single vulnerable link is enough to bring down the entire system, just like the domino effect,” adding that “a secure approach to digital development today will determine the future of humanity for decades to come.”

The exercise comes several months after the WEF, the “international organization for public-private cooperation” that counts the world’s richest elite among its members, formally announced its movement for a Great Reset, which would involve the coordinated transition to a Fourth Industrial Revolution global economy in which human workers become increasingly irrelevant. This revolution, including its biggest proponent, WEF founder Klaus Schwab, has previously presented a major problem for WEF members and member organizations in terms of what will happen to the masses of people left unemployed by the increasing automation and digitalization in the workplace.

New economic systems that are digitally based and either partnered with or run by central banks are a key part of the WEF’s Great Reset, and such systems would be part of the answer to controlling the masses of the recently unemployed. As others have noted, these digital monopolies, not just financial services, would allow those who control them to “turn off” a person’s money and access to services if that individual does not comply with certain laws, mandates and regulations. The WEF has been actively promoting and creating such systems and has most recently taken to calling its preferred model “stakeholder capitalism.” Though advertised as a more “inclusive” form of capitalism, stakeholder capitalism would essentially fuse the public and private sectors, creating a system much more like Mussolini’s corporatist style of fascism than anything else.

Yet, to usher in this new and radically different system, the current corrupt system must somehow collapse in its entirety, and its replacement must be successfully marketed to the masses as somehow better than its predecessor. When the world’s most powerful people, such as members of the WEF, desire to make radical changes, crises conveniently emerge—whether a war, a plague, or economic collapse—that enable a “reset” of the system, which is frequently accompanied by a massive upward transfer of wealth.

In recent decades, such events have often been preceded by simulations that come thick and fast before the very event they were meant to “prevent” takes place. Recent examples include the 2020 US election and COVID-19. One of these, Event 201, was cohosted by the World Economic Forum in October 2019 and simulated a novel coronavirus pandemic that spreads around the world and causes major disruptions to the global economy—just a few weeks before the first case of COVID-19 appeared. Cyber Polygon 2021 is merely the latest such simulation, cosponsored by the World Economic Forum. The forum’s current agenda and its past track record of hosting prophetic simulations demands that the exercise be scrutinized.

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