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Debt Rattle June 17 2021

Jun 172021

June 17, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:51 am Finance Tagged with: booster shots, COVID, CureVac, Fed, inflation, Novavax, Putin, Tolstoy, vaccine, Wuhan 47 Responses »

Roy Lichtenstein Crying girl 1963

• They Denied A Lab Leak At Wuhan. They Are Wrong About Other Things (Pfeiffer)

• Novavax CEO: Covid-19 Booster To Be ‘Biggest Market’ In US (Fox)

• A Quarter Of Parents Won’t Let Their Children Get Covid-19 Vaccine (F.)

• Germany’s CureVac Vaccine Shows Only 47% Effect Against Covid-19 (RT)

• Canada’s Treatment Of Religious Communities: Using Covid To Bully (RT)

• Rand Paul Demands Exclusion Of Wuhan Lab Funders From Investigations (ZH)

• Vladimir Putin Quotes Tolstoy As He Reveals His Dark Philosophy On Life (DM)

• Unindicted Co-Conspirators in 1/6 Cases Raise Disturbing Questions (Rev.)

• Is “Running Hot” Inflation Wise and Humane? (RIA)

• Fed Says Might Need To Raise Interest Rates Sooner Than Expected (DM)

Ano Veli Samuel Turtiainen. Listen as he speaks in Finnish Parliament
https://twitter.com/i/status/1405096937813016576

IN-SA-NI-TY

IN-SA-NI-TY pic.twitter.com/BYTrlJH7kB

— Wake Up From COVID (@wakeupfromcovid) June 16, 2021

“The choice was always vaccines OR treatment. Not both.”

“Viewed in the kindest possible way, that delay, that lost year, wasn’t so much intentional as institutionalized.. “

• They Denied A Lab Leak At Wuhan. They Are Wrong About Other Things (Pfeiffer)

From the start, there was no room for both vaccines and treatments under the statute that has allowed millions of Americans to be vaccinated with an unlicensed, largely unstudied substance. The key mechanism on which this turned was the vaccine’s “Emergency Use Authorization,” which can be granted by the FDA only if there is “no adequate, approved, and available alternative to the product for diagnosing, preventing or treating” a disease. But even as the vaccine was minimally tested and maximally hyped, there was an alternative. Ivermectin. “It’s the most effective antiviral agent we have,” Dr. Paul E. Marik, co-founder of Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance, said in a conversation for this article. “If the WHO was to say that or the NIH — were they to approve ivermectin — the EUA for all the vaccines would become invalid.”

Ivermectin, said FLCCC president Dr. Pierre Kory, “would kneecap the entire global vaccine policy around the world.” The choice was always vaccines OR treatment. Not both. Operation Warp Speed spent three times as much — $18 billion — to develop a vaccine as it did to develop a treatment. Moreover, money for therapeutics went largely toward costly new drugs, some of which failed and others still in development. The media did not question the oversight of existing drugs and emerging research. Instead, it became an arm of government in a shared single fixed goal: Vaccinate quickly and at any expense. America’s COVID Czar Anthony Fauci predicted in July of 2020 that an antiviral would be available by that fall.

Then, last December he said his “highest priority” was a quick-acting COVID drug. In reality, NIH waited until April 29, 2021 to announce a large study of safety-tested, FDA-approved drugs. That was roughly 400 days – and nearly 600,000 U.S. deaths — into the pandemic. Forget a few dozen studies – most from other countries — that universally agreed on ivermectin’s efficacy. Forget a peer-reviewed meta-analysis that showed 83 percent fewer deaths. Forget the experiences of hundreds of real treating doctors in the U.S. and around the world.

Viewed in the kindest possible way, that delay, that lost year, wasn’t so much intentional as institutionalized. U.S. treatments are driven by the integral and outsized influence of pharmaceutical money on the regulatory process, and no one was putting up $20 million for what are considered, questionably, the “gold-standard” of evidence-based medicine: randomized control trials. Dr. Robert Malone, a vaccine researcher and inventor of mRNA technology, went bankrupt trying to repurpose old antiviral drugs to treat the Zika virus in the 2010s. “The investment community had zero interest because there’s no way to make a buck,” he said in a must-see podcast on pandemic missteps. “The financial incentives around drug repurposing are such that it doesn’t get done.”

Ivermectin is the penicillin of COVID, particularly when combined with other generics like fluvoxamine and the vilified but effective hydroxychloroquine. Now, however, as at the start of COVID, newly infected patients are still denied treatment and turned back into the community, often to infect others. As Malone put it, “We’re sending people home and telling them not to come back until your lips are blue.” “Were this a hundred years ago,” a Pennsylvania opthamologist named Neil Chasin told me months ago, “and Ivermectin was available, it would be used everywhere.”

See the script

See the script?
See the end goal?
Once EVERYBODY KNOWS,
this cancer will be gone. pic.twitter.com/POV8Fl6UvC

— Wake Up From COVID (@wakeupfromcovid) May 15, 2021

“The boosting story is going to be around for many years to come.”

• Novavax CEO: Covid-19 Booster To Be ‘Biggest Market’ In US (Fox)

Novavax’s CEO said he believes boosters will be the company’s “biggest market” in the U.S. once it receives regulatory approval for its COVID-19 vaccine. “That’ll be probably our biggest market in the U.S. for instance, late this year or next year we expect that it’ll have all the great characteristics of a good boost,” said CEO Stanley Erck during an appearance on FOX Business’ “Varney & Company” hours after the biotech company announced that its vaccine was found to be over 90% effective in a clinical trial. Erck noted that the timing of the trial saw nearly all infections detected stem from variants, which helped prove effective against strains currently gaining ground in the U.S. and elsewhere including the Alpha and Delta types.

“The vaccine works, and as they said 93% if you look at just the variants, the vaccine was 93% effective and that’s just terrific I think,” he said. Shares rose on the developments while other vaccine makers were mixed. Following approval, Erck said the company will likely focus on supplying countries outside of the U.S., including fulfilling agreements already made with Canada, Australia, and another to send 1.1 billion doses to COVAX, the COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access program. Erck added that the company is already involved in a comparative mix and match trial in the U.K. The trial is evaluating safety and effectiveness of vaccine regimens that may include two doses of a mRNA jab and later involve a boost made by a different company. “We expect our vaccine to show the most benign side effects and I think we’re going to look good there,” he said. “The boosting story is going to be around for many years to come.”

Booster shots

Doctors: COVID-19 booster shot needed yearly until lifelong immunity to the virus is created
Source: https://t.co/Nv8AllmtfJ pic.twitter.com/i2IGRmOQbD

— Heidegger (@heidegger79) June 16, 2021

“26%. That’s the percentage of Americans ages 12-15 who have received at least one dose of the Covid-19 vaccine..”

• A Quarter Of Parents Won’t Let Their Children Get Covid-19 Vaccine (F.)

As vaccine hesitancy continues to be an issue, approximately one in four parents say they do not intend to get their child vaccinated against Covid-19, a Harris poll finds—and more than 10% intend to only have their child receive one dose, which may not be enough to protect against the Delta variant now taking hold in the U.S. The poll, conducted June 11-13 among 2,015 U.S. adults, found the vast majority of parents will have their children fully vaccinated against Covid-19, including 62% of those with children under age 12, who are not eligible yet for the vaccine, and 54% of those ages 12 and older, with a further 9% saying their children are already vaccinated. The poll found 27% of parents of children under 12 and 25% of parents of older children say they will not get their children vaccinated.

Their reasons include wanting to wait for more research on vaccines’ safety and effectiveness in children, not thinking Covid-19 is serious enough in children to warrant vaccination and general anti-vaccine sentiment. A further 11% of parents of children under 12 and 12% of parents of children 12 and up say they will only have their children receive one of the two recommended doses of the Covid-19 vaccine. One vaccine dose has been shown to be far less effective against the Delta variant first identified in India—which could soon become the dominant strain in the U.S.—with Public Health England reporting one dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine provides only 36% protection against symptomatic disease.

[..] 26%. That’s the percentage of Americans ages 12-15 who have received at least one dose of the Covid-19 vaccine, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, along with 40% of 16- to 17-year-olds, who became eligible for the shot sooner. Only 12.8% of 12- to 15-year-olds and 29.6% of 16- to 17-year-olds are fully vaccinated.

Anti-vaxxer

Anti-vaxxer pic.twitter.com/kcfZK8D8l7

— Heidegger (@heidegger79) June 16, 2021

More mRNA.

• Germany’s CureVac Vaccine Shows Only 47% Effect Against Covid-19 (RT)

Praised recently as “hope for the unvaccinated world,” a Covid-19 vaccine developed by Germany’s CureVac is only 47% effective against the coronavirus. As its stock collapsed, the company blamed new virus variants. Preliminary results from second and third-phase trials on 40,000 subjects in 10 countries of Europe and Latin America show that CureVac’s jab “did not meet pre-specified statistical success criteria,” the company announced on Wednesday. “In the unprecedented context of at least 13 variants circulating within the study population subset assessed at this interim analysis, CVnCoV demonstrated an interim vaccine efficacy of 47% against [Covid]-19 disease of any severity,” the Tubingen-based company said.

“Initial analyses suggest age and strain dependent efficacy,” the company added, as its stock collapsed on the news of failure. “While we were hoping for a stronger interim outcome, we recognize that demonstrating high efficacy in this unprecedented broad diversity of variants is challenging,” said CureVac CEO Dr. Franz-Werner Haas, adding that “the overall vaccine efficacy may change” as they continue towards the final analysis. The interim analysis assessed 134 cases of Covid-19 occurring at least two weeks after the second dose was administered, of which 124 were successfully sequenced to identify variants. Only one case was due to the original virus, CureVac said. Preliminary results also showed efficacy in younger participants, but not people older than 60; the elderly are the most at-risk group for Covid-19. CureVac said it has reported the results to the European Medicines Agency.

The failure of the trial is a bitter pill for CureVac, founded by one of the German pioneers of mRNA vaccine technology, which is currently used in the US-developed Pfizer and Moderna jabs. As late as May, its vaccine was praised by the New York Times as the jab that could “bring hope to the unvaccinated world.” Unlike the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, the CureVac jab remains stable at refrigerator temperatures – just like the Russian-developed Sputnik V – which would have made it attractive to swathes of Africa, Asia, and Latin America that lack deep freeze facilities. It can even sit at room temperature for 24 hours without spoiling.

“Recently, a Canadian police force was using a helicopter to hunt down religious services that are forced to be held in secret.”

• Canada’s Treatment Of Religious Communities: Using Covid To Bully (RT)

More and more religious services have been cracked down on by Canadian government officials. Police choppers have tracked down services that are forced to hide, while the premiers enjoy lavish dinners. This is an abuse of power. Back in April, I wrote about Canada beginning to crack down on religious services. During that time, a pastor of Polish descent had said the country was turning into World War II Germany, branding police who raided his church ‘gestapo’. Though plainly the nation has not reached those Hitlerian extremes yet, Canada’s actions against religious gatherings continue to be concerning. Recently, a Canadian police force was using a helicopter to hunt down religious services that are forced to be held in secret. After this, several arrests were made, despite Canadian law stating it will protect the right for religious gathering and practice.

Crackdowns on both Jewish and Christian religious gatherings, and the virtual canceling of Ramadan for Muslims, have happened all over Canada, and property seizures on top of these measures are not uncommon. All of this is done on the premise of stopping the spread of Covid-19, but the nation has already begun its vaccine rollout. In fact, Canada has had the vaccine since April, yet still is not allowing religious individuals to go back to their normal lives. But as the faithful continue to be denied the right to practice freely, Canadian government officials are meeting up and throwing a posh dinner at the Alberta Sky Palace, breaking the same rules that they are claiming these religious gatherings violate. There were no arrests made, and all that was given to the public was an empty apology.

Seems obvious.

• Rand Paul Demands Exclusion Of Wuhan Lab Funders From Investigations (ZH)

Senator Rand Paul urged Wednesday that those involved in funding the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s coronavirus ‘gain of function’ research cannot be allowed to be a part of investigations again. Appearing on Fox News, Paul said “Here’s the problem. The WHO investigated this the first time, we suggested three people to send to China. They rejected all three and they accepted a guy named Peter Daszak who was the one that funded the lab.” The Senator continued “So you can’t have the people—like Anthony Fauci or Peter Daszak—who are part of the funding mechanism to send these funds to Wuhan lab. You can’t have them investigating themselves.”

“They have a definite conflict of interest because if this pandemic started in a lab that the U.S. was funding, the people advocating for the funding obviously will have culpability—at least moral culpability,” Paul asserted. Referring to the World Health organisation’s 3 hour visit to the Wuhan lab in February, Paul stated “The WHO did a terrible job the first time. There needs to be an investigation but I’ve been advocating for a congressional investigation.” Paul was one of five GOP Senators to put his name to a letter made public this week demanding the unreacted release of “all records” from Fauci, his deputy Hugh Auchincloss, NIH Director Francis Collins and several other officials “referring or relating to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, COVID-19, coronavirus, EcoHealth Alliance, or Dr. Baric’s 2015 coronavirus study.”

The Senators noted that “release of approximately 4,000 pages of NIH email communications and other documents from early 2020 has raised serious questions about NIH’s handling of COVID-19.” “These documents, though heavily redacted, have shed new light on NIH’s awareness of the virus’ origins in the early stages of the COVID19 pandemic,” the senators noted in the letter to HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra and NIH Director Collins. The letter continues, “It is unclear the extent to which NIH officials, including Dr. Fauci, considered the possibility that the virus originated in a laboratory and what, if any, actions they took to seriously investigate this possibility.”

‘There is no happiness in life, only a mirage of it on the horizon, so cherish that.’

• Vladimir Putin Quotes Tolstoy As He Reveals His Dark Philosophy On Life (DM)

Vladimir Putin channelled his inner Bond villain as he made a dark comment after meeting with President Joe Biden in Geneva on Wednesday. The Russian leader was asked if there was a growing trust and happiness between him and the US president after their meeting. The strongman typically responded: ‘There is no happiness in life, only a mirage of it on the horizon, so cherish that.’ The response, translated to Western reporters at the summit, is attributed to the classic Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, who is said to have remarked it to fellow writer Ivan Bunin. Bunin, then 23, said he met Tolstoy on a frosty night in Moscow in 1894 when the War and Peace author was aged 65. Tolstoy gave words of wisdom to the aspiring novelist but also told him to ‘not expect too much from life’.

Bunin was so enamoured with his idol that he tried to emulate him, visiting sectarian settlements and even illegally distributing Tolstyoan literature. Bunin was later considered a true heir to the realist tradition in Russian literature started by Tolstoy and his contemporary Anton Chekhov. On social media, many said Putin’s remark was typical of his Bond villain image. One remarked it was ‘simultaneously the most Russian and the most Bond villain thing I’ve ever heard a world leader say’. Others compared him to a Marvel villain, saying his comment sounded like it came from the mouth of Thanos.

The FBI organized 1/6?!

• Unindicted Co-Conspirators in 1/6 Cases Raise Disturbing Questions (Rev.)

Of all the questions asked, words spoken, and ink spilled on the so-called “Capitol Siege” of January 6, 2021, none hold the key to the entire event quite like what Sen. Amy Klobuchar asked of Christopher Wray. The Democrat from Minnesota asked the Trump-appointed FBI Director: Did the federal government infiltrate any of the so-called “militia” organizations claimed to be responsible for planning and executing the Capitol Siege? Christopher Wray is able to uncomfortably weasel his way out of answering the question directly, partially because Klobuchar does him the courtesy of not asking him the question directly. Klobuchar instead asks the FBI director if he wishes he had infiltrated the militia organizations allegedly involved in 1/6 — assuming from the outset that there was in fact no infiltration, thereby providing the FBI director an easy way to avoid addressing the question one way or another.

Revolver News is willing to address the matter directly in the following three questions:
• In the year leading up to 1/6 and during 1/6 itself, to what extent were the three primary militia groups (the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys, and the Three Percenters) that the FBI, DOJ, Pentagon and network news have labeled most responsible for planning and executing a Capitol attack on 1/6 infiltrated by agencies of the federal government, or informants of said agencies?
• Exactly how many federal undercover agents or confidential informants were present at the Capitol or in the Capitol during the infamous “siege” and what roles did they play (merely passive informants or active instigators)?
• Finally, of all of the unindicted co-conspirators referenced in the charging documents of those indicted for crimes on 1/6, how many worked as a confidential informant or as an undercover operative for the federal government (FBI, Army Counterintelligence, etc.)?

Tucker Revolver
https://twitter.com/i/status/1404984630160203781

“Resulting from surging income and reduced liabilities, retail sales are running about 15% above the trend of the prior decade.”

• Is “Running Hot” Inflation Wise and Humane? (RIA)

The robust economic recovery is in part the result of nearly $5 trillion in deficit spending. To grasp how the government supported the economy, consider the graph below. The orange line is total personal income. After the second set of direct payments to citizens went out in March, personal income was 25% more than before the Pandemic. The blue line shows organic income, or that earned solely through employers. The difference, the gray area, is payments from the government, known as transfer payments. These direct benefits represented nearly a third of income on multiple occasions over the last year.

Personal consumption represents nearly two-thirds of economic activity (GDP). Over the last six months, consumption was significantly boosted by stimulus programs. Further, the government allowing forbearance of rent, mortgage, student loan, and utility payments provided many with additional money to spend. Resulting from surging income and reduced liabilities, retail sales are running about 15% above the trend of the prior decade. For historical recessionary context, consider retail sales fell by about 13% from its trend during the 2008 recession.

End the Fed.

• Fed Says Might Need To Raise Interest Rates Sooner Than Expected (DM)

Federal Reserve officials have said they might need to raise interest rates sooner than expected to keep inflation from spiraling out of control – as the US economy continues to grow at lightning speed. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said in a press conference Wednesday officials now expect to hike the interest rate from near zero to 0.6 percent by the end of 2023. Back in March, the central bank said it didn’t expect to raise it until at least 2024. The interest rate affects both consumer and business loans, impacting everything from credit cards to mortgages. When the rate set at near zero, borrowing costs are cheap and money ‘floods’ the system. This helps to goose growth, but also can send prices spiraling out of control.

With the economy recovering more rapidly than anticipated from the COVID-19 pandemic, consumer prices soared at a faster rate in May than any time since the Great Recession. Last week, the government warned that overall consumer prices rose 0.6 percent in May, bringing the annual inflation rate to 5 percent – the highest level since August 2008. The updated interest rate projection comes as the Federal Reserve attempts to put a brake on such out-of-control prices. A majority of 11 of 18 Fed officials pencil in at least two quarter-percentage-point rate increases for 2023, even as officials pledged in a statement to keep policy supportive for now to encourage an ongoing jobs recovery. Meanwhile, overall economic growth is expected to hit 7 percent this year.

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Debt Rattle June 15 2021

Jun 152021

June 15, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:47 am Finance Tagged with: Babylon Bee, Biden, Hunter Biden, immunity, live bats, mirror, myocarditis, nuclear leak, Putin, Reality Winner, Wuhan 78 Responses »

Wassily Kandinsky Moscow Red Square 1916

• COVID-19 Natural Immunity vs Vaccine Immunity (CureHub)

• CDC: Heart Inflammation In Young Men Higher Than Expected After mRNA Jabs (R.)

• University Vaccine Mandates Violate Medical Ethics (WSJ)

• California Removes Most Restrictions But Newsom Keeps Emergency Powers (JTN)

• Coronavirus Outpacing Vaccine Effort, Says WHO (G.)

• Live Bats In Cages Kept In Wuhan Institute of Virology (News.au)

• Zuckerberg Group Funnels 6 Figures To Wuhan Lab Partner (NP)

• Vladimir Putin: ‘Don’t Be Mad At The Mirror If You’re Ugly’ (AP)

• Putin: US Destroyers In Baltic, Black Seas a Missile Threat to Russia (Rozoff)

• Chinese Nuclear Plant Warns Of ‘Imminent Radiological Threat’ After Leak (Hill)

• Hunter Biden Invested Millions In Owner of Nuclear Plant Experiencing Leak (NP)

• The Three-way Squeeze (Kunstler)

• Reality Winner Released From Prison For ‘Exemplary Behavior’ (RT)

• Babylon Bee Forces New York Times To Retract Calling Them ‘Misinformation’ (RT)

• In Honor Of Pride Month, Biden Will Also Sniff Men’s Hair (BBee)

NBC: Do you remember your last meeting with Biden?

Putin: Well, I don’t recall our exact conversation, but I’m sure he has a good memory.

🇮🇳 Delhi

Have you seen an improvement like this in any other large, densely populated city?

Differences in a month, from May 12 to June 13, 2021
COVID beds from 82% to 8%
COVID Oxygen beds from 85% to 8%
COVID ICU beds from 99% to 16%
Ivermectin was included at the end of April pic.twitter.com/ZAA395YJKR
— J Chamie (@jjchamie) June 13, 2021

“With all three vaccines your immune system is only exposed to S RBD, therefore S is the only target available for an immune response. However, during natural infection your body is exposed to the entire virus, which includes the other 4 proteins coded in the SARS-CoV-2 genome.”

• COVID-19 Natural Immunity vs Vaccine Immunity (CureHub)

The work presented here, in combination with other reports about immune protection in recovered individuals, provides justification for including natural immunity in COVID-19 herd immunity stats. It is important to remember the immune system is complex and has redundant and overlapping mechanisms. Antibody production against both the SARS-CoV-2 N and S proteins is just one example. The vaccines are indeed very effective, but so too is the human immune system. It would therefore be anti-science, and anti-data, to ignore the role that recovery from COVID-19 plays in protecting against reinfection and ongoing viral spread. Especially when deleterious decisions are being made in order to mitigate COVID-19 risk.

[..] COVID-19 vaccines are effective and induce a strong immune response. Cure-Hub’s own data shows high neutralizing antibody levels after vaccination, especially after the second mRNA dose. In fact, two doses of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines can push antibody production higher than natural infection. However, this does not mean vaccine induced immunity is superior to natural immunity. Below we provide evidence that recovery from natural infection generates a more diverse immune response. There are 5 proteins encoded in the viral genome: Nucleocapsid (N), Spike (S), Hemagglutinin esterase (He), Membrane (M) and Envelope (E). The most important protein is S, which the virus uses to enter human cells. By blocking S, SARS-CoV-2 cannot bind to the human ACE2 receptor and cannot cause an infection.

Due to S protein’s critical role in COVID-19 infection, it is the target for Pfizer, Moderna and J&J COVID-19 vaccines. Specifically, those vaccines are designed against the S protein receptor binding domain (RBD), which is the part that interacts with human ACE2. After vaccination your body produces antibodies that bind to S RBD. As a result you are protected from infection because the virus is neutralized before viral replication occurs. People who recover from a natural infection are also protected, because they too produce antibodies against S RBD. In fact, that is the immune system’s dominant target after infection. The key difference between the Pfizer, Moderna and J&J vaccines, and natural immunity, is the immune system’s starting material. With all three vaccines your immune system is only exposed to S RBD, therefore S is the only target available for an immune response. However, during natural infection your body is exposed to the entire virus, which includes the other 4 proteins coded in the SARS-CoV-2 genome.

Oh well, at least it’s reached Reuters now, even if they’re not sharp.

• CDC: Heart Inflammation In Young Men Higher Than Expected After mRNA Jabs (R.)

A higher-than-expected number of young men have experienced heart inflammation after their second dose of the mRNA COVID-19 shots from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna, according to data from two vaccine safety monitoring systems, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said on Thursday. The CDC and other health regulators have been investigating heart inflammation cases after Israel’s Health Ministry reported that it had found a likely link to the condition in young men who received Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine. read more The agency said it is still assessing the risk from the condition and has not yet concluded that there was a causal relationship between the vaccines and cases of myocarditis or pericarditis.

While some patients required hospitalization, most have fully recovered from their symptoms, the CDC said. More than half of the cases reported to the U.S. Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) after people had received their second dose of either the Pfizer/BioNTech or Moderna vaccines were in people between the ages of 12 and 24, the CDC said. Those age groups accounted for less than 9% of doses administered. “We clearly have an imbalance there,” Dr. Tom Shimabukuro, deputy director of the CDC’s Immunization Safety Office, said in a presentation to an advisory committee to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration meeting on Thursday. The overwhelming majority of the cases have occurred within a week of vaccination, Shimabukuro said.

There were 283 observed cases of heart inflammation after the second vaccine dose in those aged 16 to 24 in the VAERS data. That compares with expectations of 10-to-102 cases for that age range based on U.S. population background incidence rates, the CDC said. Shimabukuro said there was a predominance of males in younger age groups among the reported heart inflammation cases. The median age of patients who experienced the inflammation after a second vaccine dose was 24, according to the VAERS data. Just under 80% of the cases were in men.

“College students aren’t guinea pigs.”

WSJ, so behind a paywall, which I don’t do, but this much is free. And it’s important that the WSJ writes on it.

• University Vaccine Mandates Violate Medical Ethics (WSJ)

Some 450 U.S. colleges and universities—including our institutions—have announced policies mandating that all students be fully vaccinated against Covid-19 before the fall semester, with some requiring vaccination now for the summer term. Schools have for decades required vaccination against infectious diseases, but these mandates are unprecedented—and unethical. Never before have colleges insisted that students or employees receive an experimental vaccine as a condition of attendance or employment.

Even soldiers, whose rights are constrained when they join the service, aren’t being compelled to take a Covid vaccine. In a case involving a vaccine against anthrax, a federal district judge held in 2004 that “the United States cannot demand that members of the armed forces also serve as guinea pigs for experimental drugs” absent informed consent or a presidential waiver of service members’ legal protections. The following year the judge held that an emergency-use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration was insufficient to meet the legal test.

The FDA has issued such authorizations for three Covid vaccines, but it hasn’t fully approved any of them. Students at Notre Dame (for example) resume classes on Aug. 23, and freshmen arrive on campus Aug. 18. The Pfizer vaccine—first in line for approval—requires three weeks before the booster shot, so it would have to be approved by July 28 for students to meet the school’s deadline without making themselves experimental subjects. Pfizer applied to the FDA May 7 for “priority review,” a process that usually takes six months.

Universities might counter that—as with elementary schools requiring pediatric vaccinations—immunization is for students’ own good. But children can be at significant medical risks from the illnesses that we vaccinate them against, particularly when community vaccination rates are low. Not so with Covid. For those under 30, the risks of serious morbidity and mortality are close to zero. By contrast, early indications from passive surveillance systems (which call for follow-up investigation) and a June 10 review by the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee indicated an excess risk for heart inflammation, especially in men 30 and younger.

“I believe it is time for him to hang up his crown and restore our democracy. In California, we don’t grow bananas, so there’s no need for a banana republic.”

• California Removes Most Restrictions But Newsom Keeps Emergency Powers (JTN)

Even though Californians will be able to fill stadiums, concert venues, bars and restaurants, Gov. Gavin Newsom says the COVID-19 pandemic isn’t over. Newsom signed orders rescinding mask mandates, business restrictions and the tiered reopening phases that ebbed and flowed with infection and hospitalization rates, beginning Tuesday. “California is turning the page on this pandemic, thanks to swift action by the state and the work of Californians who followed public health guidelines and got vaccinated to protect themselves and their communities,” Newsom said earlier this month. The state’s “Beyond the Blueprint” doesn’t include Newsom relinquishing his emergency powers, which were bestowed to him by a declaration signed in March 2020 and repeatedly renewed since. “The emergency remains in effect after June 15,” Newsom said at a news conference.

“We’re still in a state of emergency. This disease has not been extinguished. It’s not managed. It’s not taking the summer months off.” What that means is that Newsom keeps his hand on the levers of government restrictions, including business closures and mask mandates, even though the consistent decline in infections and hospitalizations are at lows not seen since the beginning of the pandemic. It also opened Newsom, a Democrat facing a recall election, to criticism from Republicans who have labeled his restrictions as heavy-handed. “If Newsom believes the state is safe enough to reopen, then it’s safe for people to be able to make decisions for themselves without his arbitrary and capricious rules,” Senate Republican Leader Scott Wilk, R-Santa Clarita, said in a June 4 statement. “I believe it is time for him to hang up his crown and restore our democracy. In California, we don’t grow bananas, so there’s no need for a banana republic.”

That’s the same WHO that lied about everything including bats in cages in Wuhan.

• Coronavirus Outpacing Vaccine Effort, Says WHO (G.)

The World Health Organization has warned that Covid-19 is moving faster than the vaccines, and said the vow by G7 countries to share a billion doses with poorer nations was simply not enough. “This is a big help, but we need more, and we need them faster. Right now, the virus is moving faster than the global distribution of vaccines,” World Health Organization (WHO) chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told journalists. “More than 10,000 people are dying every day … these communities need vaccines, and they need them now, not next year.” Global health leaders also warned the pledge was too little, too late, with more than 11bn shots needed. Faced with outrage over disparities in jab access, the Group of Seven industrialised powers pledged during a weekend summit in Britain to take their total dose donations to more than a billion, up from 130m promised in February.

While people in many wealthy nations have some sense of normalcy thanks to their vaccination rates, the shots remain scarce in poorer parts of the world. In terms of doses administered, the imbalance between the G7 and low-income countries, as defined by the World Bank, is 73 to one. Many of the donated G7 doses will be filtered through Covax, a global body charged with ensuring equitable vaccine distribution. Run by the WHO, the Gavi vaccine alliance and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), it has so far shipped more than 87m vaccine doses to 131 countries – far fewer than anticipated. The WHO wants at least 70% of the world’s population vaccinated by the next G7 meeting in Germany next year. “To do that, we need 11bn doses. The G7 and G20 can make this happen,” said Tedros.

“..new footage has revealed that live bats were kept in cages inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology – despite claims from the WHO that such a possibility was a “conspiracy”..”

• Live Bats In Cages Kept In Wuhan Institute of Virology (News.au)

As G7 countries increase calls for a “phase two” investigation into the origins of Covid-19, new footage has revealed that live bats were kept in cages inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology – despite claims from the World Health Organisation (WHO) that such a possibility was a “conspiracy”. The infamous lab is at the centre of a theory – first spruiked by the likes of Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo – that Covid-19 wasn’t, as many scientists believe, transmitted from bats to people via an unknown intermediary, but was instead leaked, intentionally or not, from the institute. A joint WHO/China investigation into the origins of the disease first worked to dispel this line of thinking, calling the chance of a laboratory leak “extremely unlikely” and the idea that bats were held at the institute “an error”.

“No BATS were sent to Wuhan lab for genetic analysis of viruses collected in the field. That’s not how this science works. We collect bat samples, send them to the lab. We RELEASE bats where we catch them,” a member of the WHO team, zoologist Dr Peter Daszak, wrote in a December tweet. “This is a widely circulated conspiracy theory. This piece describes work I’m the lead on and labs I’ve collaborated with for 15 years,” he wrote in another. “They DO NOT have live or dead bats in them. There is no evidence anywhere that this happened. It’s an error I hope will be corrected.” But an official May 2017 video from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, obtained by Sky News, shows bats held in a cage at the institute four years ago and a scientist feeding a worm to one of the creatures.

Earlier this month, Dr Daszak appeared to walk back his earlier denials, writing on Twitter that the WHO team had not asked the institute if they housed bats. “We didn’t ask them if they had bats. I wouldn’t be surprised if, like many other virology labs, they were trying to set up a bat colony,” he wrote. “I know it’s happening in labs here and in other countries. You’re right, labs in US & around (the) world are trying to keep bats to test viral immune responses etc. “None are successfully doing this at scale like lab mice & animals are always screened virus-free before expts, (sic) so even if WIV were trying this, it’s prob irrelevant for origins.”

Well, look who’s here…

• Zuckerberg Group Funnels 6 Figures To Wuhan Lab Partner (NP)

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative – the funding group behind much of the unlawful election changes of 2020 – gave nearly half a million dollars to the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. The university counts Wuhan lab collaborator and gain-of-function proponent Dr. Ralph Baric as a lead researcher. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) Professor – who has also attended conferences at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and is described by the lab’s “bat woman” as her “longtime collaborator” – received the grant from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s philanthropic group in July 2020.

“The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) recently awarded a $433,000 grant to UNC for laboratory equipment that will accelerate research to address the COVID-19 pandemic,” a press release notes. “This grant represents a new collaboration between the West Coast philanthropic organization CZI and UNC in search of a global solution to the pandemic,” a summary adds before detailing how the grant was used: “The grant covers the purchase of a “liquid handler” — a robotic arm that can pipette fluids much more quickly and accurately than humans can — and supporting instruments, including another robot that detects active virus particles in samples and a machine to sequence RNA. Together, these tools increase the rate of testing compounds by 20-fold.”

The grant allegedly helped produce a study – currently awaiting peer review – entitled SARS-CoV-2 infectious virus, viral RNA in nasopharyngeal swabs, and serostatus of symptomatic COVID-19 outpatients in the United States. “Here, we provide a comprehensive analysis of demographic, immunologic, virologic, and clinical disease factors associated with infectious virus isolation and levels of viral RNA in nasopharyngeal swab samples in the largest study of symptomatic outpatient adults with COVID-19 to date,” the summary notes.

A slide from a Baric presentation on the matter also listed support from Gilead Sciences, the National Institutes for Health, and Dr. Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease. Dr. Fauci recently attempted to cover-up his relationship with Zuckerberg by telling MSNBC host Chuck Todd he had “no idea” what Senator Marsha Blackburn was getting at when discussing the pair’s leaked e-mails.

Running circles around Biden and his entire admin. Prepare for crazy media angles.

• Vladimir Putin: ‘Don’t Be Mad At The Mirror If You’re Ugly’ (AP)

Vladimir Putin has accused the US of ‘persecuting political opinions’ for arresting the MAGA mob at the Capitol siege, ahead of his summit with Joe Biden on Wednesday. The Russian president was asked about his jailing of opposition leader Alexei Navalny in an interview filmed in Moscow last week before his meeting with Biden in Switzerland. And he replied by hitting back at the US, equating the arrest of Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol with his treatment of Navalny. He said: ‘We have a saying: ‘Don’t be mad at the mirror if you are ugly,'” he said. “It has nothing to do with you personally. But if somebody blames us for something, what I say is, why don’t you look at yourselves? You will see yourselves in the mirror, not us.’

‘You are presenting it as dissent and intolerance toward dissent in Russia. We view it completely differently,’ he told US broadcaster NBC News. He then pointed at the January 6 MAGA raid on the Capitol, saying: ‘Do you know that 450 individuals were arrested after entering the Congress? … They came there with political demands.’ Putin also reiterated denials that the Kremlin was behind last year’s poisoning of Navalny with a nerve agent that nearly killed him. ‘We don’t have this kind of habit, of assassinating anybody,’ Putin claimed. ‘Did you order the assassination of the woman who walked into the Congress and who was shot and killed by a policeman?’ Putin said, referring to Trump supporter Ashli Babbitt, who was fatally shot by a Capitol Police officer as she tried to climb through a window that led to the House floor.

Putin also sharply dismissed allegations that Russia is carrying out cyberattacks against the United States as baseless. ‘Where is the evidence? Where is proof? It´s becoming farcical,’ Putin said. ‘We have been accused of all kinds of things – election interference, cyberattacks and so on and so forth – and not once, not once, not one time, did they bother to produce any kind of evidence or proof, just unfounded accusations.’ In April, the United States announced the expulsion of 10 Russian diplomats and new sanctions connected to the so-called SolarWinds cyberattack in which several U.S. government branches experienced data breaches. U.S. officials blamed the Russian foreign intelligence service.

In May, Microsoft officials said the foreign intelligence service appeared to be linked to an attack on a company providing services to the U.S. Agency for International Development. Putin also laughed off Joe Biden’s claim he’s a ‘killer’ – heaping praise on Donald Trump before branding his successor a career politician. He was asked by the NBC interviewer Keir Simmons, ‘Mr President, are you a killer?’ Putin avoided directly answering, instead replying: ‘Over my tenure, I’ve gotten used to attacks from all kinds of angles and from all kinds of areas under all kinds of pretext and reasons and of different calibre and fierceness, and none of it surprises me.’ ‘So as far as harsh rhetoric I think this is an overall expression of US culture. Of course in Hollywood, there are some underlying deep things in Hollywood – macho, which can be treated as cinematic art. But that’s part of US political culture, it’s considered normal. By the way, not here, it is not considered normal here.’

“That’s how wars and that’s how a nuclear catastrophe beyond a healthy mind’s powers of comprehension can occur. Sleepwalking into Armaggedon.”

• Putin: US Destroyers In Baltic, Black Seas a Missile Threat to Russia (Rozoff)

In comments that got past editors in the Western news media, President Vladimir Putin in a recent Russian television interview accused the West of abusing what were good relations at the time (1999-2004) to expand NATO up to Russia’s borders. And in doing so, he specified, violated verbal pledges made by American officials to then-Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, adding that the latter is alive and in good health and can confirm what he was told. In a candid assessment of the matter, Putin added, “I do not want to use harsh words, but they simply spat upon our interests and that’s that.” Lengthy excerpts of his comments were published on the English-language site of the government news agency TASS on June 9.

The most significant, and most alarming, aspect of the interview is the Russian president’s warning of Ukraine joining NATO, which contrary to what he acknowledged is a dismissal of that prospect by many experts in Russia and in the West he takes seriously, especially in regard to its membership providing the U.S. and NATO with new missile sites. Without naming them he mentioned that Standard Missile-3 (SM-3) missile defense (so-called) interceptors in Romania and Poland could strike Moscow in 15 minutes if a warhead was added to them; which, although the West denies its intent to do so, could be easily done. Russia has not been invited to inspect the missiles, for example. Paraphrasing the head of state, the TASS report disclosed the above threat is eminently practicable “because the missile defense launch systems stationed there can be used to carry out strikes as well.”

Installing SM-3s in Ukraine, Putin warned, would reduce the time needed to strike Moscow to 7-10 minutes. “Is it a red line for us or not?” he asked. He also drew the inevitable comparison with the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, when he estimated Soviet missiles on that island nation could have hit Washington in 15 minutes, adding another parallel: “To lower this flight time to 7-10 minutes, we should station our missiles on Canada’s southern border or Mexico’s northern border. Is it a red line for the US or not?” Though perfectly transparent and accurate in all regards, his comments have been ignored and, if brought to people’s attention, would be dismissed. That’s how wars and that’s how a nuclear catastrophe beyond a healthy mind’s powers of comprehension can occur. Sleepwalking into Armaggedon.

“..an “imminent radiological threat”, but “..environmental readings of the plant and the surrounding area are reported normal.”

• Chinese Nuclear Plant Warns Of ‘Imminent Radiological Threat’ After Leak (Hill)

An operator of a Chinese nuclear plant has warned U.S. officials of an “imminent radiological threat” after a leak at the plant, multiple news outlets reported on Monday. In a letter obtained by CNN, the French operator of the Taishan Nuclear Power Plant, Framatome, told U.S. officials that Chinese authorities had raised radiation limits outside of the plants to avoid a potential shutdown. U.S. officials told Framatome that they don’t deem the current situation to yet be at a crisis level, according to CNN, but the National Security Council has already held meetings on this situation. Framatome issued a statement on Monday saying that they will support a resolution to the ongoing crisis at the plant.

“Our team is working with relevant experts to assess the situation and propose solutions to address any potential issue.” The owner of Framatome, Électricité de France, also issued a statement saying that they were informed of the rise of “certain rare gases,” even suggesting a board meeting to present data on the crisis The report comes as the U.S. joined other countries in the Group of Seven summit in the United Kingdom over the weekend, with China being one of the main focal points of the summit. The Taishan Nuclear Power Plant released a statement on their website on Sunday adding that the environmental readings of the plant and the surrounding area are reported normal.

Well, look who’s here…

Is that why reports on the leak are so soft?

• Hunter Biden Invested Millions In Owner of Nuclear Plant Experiencing Leak (NP)

A nuclear power plant believed to be experiencing a leak posing an “imminent radiological threat” is run by China General Nuclear Power Corporation: a state-owned firm that has enjoyed millions of dollars in investment from President Joe Biden’s son Hunter. Problems at the facility were exposed via a CNN report, which revealed that the plant’s French partner reached out to the White House for assistance: The warning included an accusation that the Chinese safety authority was raising the acceptable limits for radiation detection outside the Taishan Nuclear Power Plant in Guangdong province in order to avoid having to shut it down, according to a letter from the French company to the US Department of Energy obtained by CNN.

Despite the alarming notification from Framatome, the French company, the Biden administration believes the facility is not yet at a “crisis level,” one of the sources said. The Biden team’s lack of concern comes as the primary operator of the China-based plant – China General Nuclear Power Corporation (CGN) – counts millions in investment from Hunter Biden. BHR Partners – the private equity firm where Hunter Biden served as a director since 2013 – was a $10 million cornerstone investor in CGN’s initial public offering. Occurring in 2014, the IPO was the second largest of the entire year, valued at over $3 billion. The company, which Hunter Biden reportedly retains a sizable stake in, still lists GCN as part of its portfolio on its website.

Jim also has a good take on the vaccines etc. (he reads TAE), but this is even more poignant:

“..you can see the horizon on the “Joe Biden” administration, with sunset probably due this fall. How it will play-out is anybody’s guess. Mine is that, one way or another, some military caretaker administration may have to interrupt the 232-year-long cavalcade of governance led by legitimately-elected presidents.”

• The Three-way Squeeze (Kunstler)

For now, many places are supposedly caught up in the exuberant reopening of daily life activities: restaurants, travel-and-leisure businesses, big league sports. Sounds good, maybe, but the frothy feeling is belied by the still-boarded-up shopfronts and the expanding homeless campgrounds of the big cities and by the noises made by big corporations laying off thousands of employees. One narrative says that many service jobs go begging because too many people still receive government handouts that add up to more than such jobs pay. And some businesses, such as restaurants, say they are offering much higher wages than they used to in a desperate effort to keep operating.

Okay… but consider how long you can run a restaurant paying dishwashers $25-an-hour, for example, especially considering how much of the population is too broke now to eat in restaurants that charge a third-again as much for dinner as they did before Covid-19. What you’re actually looking at is a broken business model for much of the service industry. Sometime this summer, that pretty big problem will be acknowledged, and the nation will see that we are not in a recovery at all, but rather a permanent contraction that will be labeled “a depression.”

Actually, it will not be a “depression,” either, exactly, which implies a cyclical dip, even a big one, because the cycle itself is broken — and to understand that, you must delve into the nature of the long emergency: the energy resource and capital scarcity quandary facing techno-industrial societies. The direct implication of this broken cycle will be even more social distress, which is being aggravated by the racial provocations ginned up by the Woke “Joe Biden” regime, and which will blow up in its face if there is another summer of riots, burning, and looting.

So, to conclude this unusually long edition of the CFN blog, you can see the horizon on the “Joe Biden” administration, with sunset probably due this fall. How it will play-out is anybody’s guess. Mine is that, one way or another, some military caretaker administration may have to interrupt the 232-year-long cavalcade of governance led by legitimately-elected presidents. Perhaps we’ll run a re-do of the last election. Or maybe we’re in for a new phase of the American project, a more uncertain and less appetizing one, featuring dictators and despots. Or maybe we’ll get through this very dangerous defile of history and land in a much lower-key but more coherent disposition of things recognizably American. Stay tuned for developments.

“President Biden owes Reality gratitude because Reality’s actions directly contributed to the fact that the 2020 elections were the most secure presidential elections in American history..”

• Reality Winner Released From Prison For ‘Exemplary Behavior’ (RT)

Reality Winner, the former US intelligence specialist who was imprisoned in 2018 for leaking classified National Security Agency information to media outlet the Intercept, has been released from prison on good behavior.
Winner’s attorney Alison Grinter Allen announced her release on Monday, revealing that, though Winner is “still in custody in the residential re-entry process,” her family and friends are “relieved and hopeful.” “Reality and her family have asked for privacy during the transition process as they work to heal the trauma of incarceration and build back the years lost,” Allen said, adding that Winner’s “release is not a product of the pardon or compassionate release process, but rather the time earned from exemplary behavior while incarcerated.” The attorney said her client was prohibited from making public statements or appearances and thus could not comment on the matter.

Winner was sentenced to five years in prison in 2018 for leaking an NSA intelligence report to the Intercept that claimed Russian hackers had attempted to interfere with the US elections. The Intercept came under heavy fire at the time and was accused of improperly handling Winner’s confidentiality, which critics claim led to her arrest. Last week, Winner’s sister Brittany called on President Joe Biden to pardon the former intelligence specialist, arguing that Biden was only president “because of Reality Winner’s actions.” “President Biden owes Reality gratitude because Reality’s actions directly contributed to the fact that the 2020 elections were the most secure presidential elections in American history,” she said. “Mr. Biden is president because of Reality Winner’s actions and, therefore, he should pardon her.”

Onion squared.

• Babylon Bee Forces New York Times To Retract Calling Them ‘Misinformation’ (RT)

The Babylon Bee is in fact a satirical site and not a “far-right misinformation” one that “feuded” with Facebook and fact-checkers, The New York Times has finally conceded after being threatened with a defamation lawsuit. “This is huge. The NY Times was using misinformation to smear us as being a source of it,” Bee CEO Seth Dillon tweeted on Monday, calling it “malicious” behavior. “We pushed back hard and won. Thanks to everyone who voiced and offered their support. We don’t have to take this nonsense lying down. Remember that,” Dillon added. An article about Facebook censorship of irony in March, authored by the Times’ tech reporter Mike ‘Rat King’ Isaac, described the Bee as a “far-right misinformation site” that sometimes trafficked in fake news disguised as satire to avoid censorship from Big Tech.

It was the only example offered, too. After the initial complaint from Dillon, the Times edited the article to say that the Bee, “a right-leaning satirical site, has feuded with Facebook and the fact-checking site Snopes over whether the site published misinformation or satire.” That, too, was wrong. The update is every bit as damaging (and false) as the original,” Dillon tweeted at the time, and explained that Snopes has actually retracted their insinuation about the Bee’s motives, and even created a whole new label for satire. Snopes has also discontinued their fact-checking partnership with Facebook, in early 2019. A correction dated June 10 – of which the Times notified the Bee on Friday – now says the earlier version of the article “imprecisely” referred to the “right-leaning satirical website,” and that Facebook and Snopes have since dropped the claims the Bee ever trafficked in misinformation.

Misinformation?!

• In Honor Of Pride Month, Biden Will Also Sniff Men’s Hair (BBee)

In a televised address this week, President Biden voiced support for the LGBTQ community and promised to honor them with a commitment to not only sniff women’s hair, but also men’s hair. “Look– I’ve been sniffing the hair of women and girls for many decades,” said Biden. “It’s time for me to recognize the accomplishments of the LGBT folks. I’m maybe gonna get in trouble for this, but if you’re a man, I just may sniff your hair. That’s because I’m not homophobic. I ain’t afraid to sniff a dude! Come on, man!” Biden was then quickly led off the podium by his wife before he could say any more.

“Every gender! I’ll sniff ’em all!” Biden yelled, protesting as he was dragged out of sight of the crowd. According to sources, no gay men have taken up Biden on his offer to sniff their hair. However, hundreds of straight male journalists have lined up outside the White House clapping and cheering, hoping for their chance to be sniffed by the President. Brian Stelter went to bed crying, as he had no hair for President Biden to sniff.

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Map of North America in 1702

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Debt Rattle June 14 2021

Jun 142021

June 14, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:28 am Finance Tagged with: Biden, bitcoin, child vaccination, long covid, Musk, obesity, Putin, spike protein, Tesla, Wuhan 110 Responses »

Vittorio Matteo Corcos Sogni (Dreams) 1896

• 79% Of Democrats Support Employers Forcing Workers To Get Covid-19 Jabs (RT)

• ‘Pretty Safe’ Jab Will Protect Kids From Variant (ST)

• CDC Claims Covid-19 Kills ‘Healthy Young Children’ (JTN)

• The Killer in the Bloodstream: the “Spike Protein” (Whitney)

• UK Lockdown End To Be Delayed (Pol.eu)

• MP Warns Brits ‘Have To Learn To Live With Covid’ For ‘Rest Of Time’ (RT)

• Why Is Britain Now The Capital Of Long Covid? (T.)

• Wisconsin Top Court: Health Agency Lacks Power To Close Schools Over Covid (JTN)

• Too Fat To Fly: FAA Updates Guidelines As American Obesity Crisis Grows (Fed.)

• Biden Calls For Access To Wuhan Labs (RT)

• Biden-Putin: What’s On The Table (ZH)

• “Tesla Only Sold ~10%” Of Its Bitcoin Holdings: Musk Speaks, Bitcoin Moves (WS)

Look how young these inoculated kids are! 236 injuries and fatalities from vaccines in the 0-1 month old group!

Eric Clapton doesn’t agree

"You get caught in a trap: can you believe what your heart tells you is right, or is it going against the narrative?" Deep reflections by an artist with a strong intuition and a pure heart. Much love from TEAM REALITY, Eric! ❤️ 3/3 pic.twitter.com/AORnmw5PdG

— Wake Up From COVID (@wakeupfromcovid) June 13, 2021

And that makes it alright?

• 79% Of Democrats Support Employers Forcing Workers To Get Covid-19 Jabs (RT)

A new poll shows that Democrats and Republicans are just about as divided on an employee’s right to choose whether to get vaccinated against Covid-19 as they are on a woman’s right to choose whether to abort her unborn child. Nearly 80% of Democrats agreed that employers should be able to force their workers to get Covid-19 shots, according to a CBS News-YouGov poll released on Sunday. In contrast, only 39% of Republicans approved of giving businesses such authority over their employees’ medical choices. The overall response was 56-44 in favor of forced jabs. Supporters of the two major parties are more split on vaccine choice than on Covid-19 inoculation in general. While 95% of Democrats have already been vaccinated or are at least considering it, 71% of Republicans are on board or thinking about taking the jab, the poll showed.

That result suggests some improvement in vaccine acceptance in the past two months. A Monmouth University poll released in mid-April indicated that 43% of Republicans don’t intend to get vaccinated against the virus. In the CBS News-YouGov survey, 29% of Republicans said they had ruled out the shots. Overall, only 18% of respondents said they won’t get vaccinated, while 71% said they had either already gotten a jab or planned to do so. The other 11% were undecided. The issue of employer-mandated vaccination is heating up, as a Texas judge on Saturday issued the nation’s first federal court ruling on whether workers can be ordered to receive Covid-19 shots.

“Pretty” safe? Is that a slip of the tongue, or is it a warning?

• ‘Pretty Safe’ Jab Will Protect Kids From Variant (ST)

A scientist advising the government has declared that there is now a “very strong argument” to vaccinate children against the coronavirus as infections rise and evidence emerges that vaccination is “pretty safe”. Professor Peter Openshaw, vice-chairman of Nervtag, a committee that looks out for emerging respiratory threats, said there were indications that the Indian variant was more transmissible among children than the original Wuhan strain. Openshaw, professor of experimental medicine at Imperial College London, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “It strengthens the argument for extending vaccination to children. I’ve been sitting on the fence on this one, but on balance I’m coming to the view that there’s a very strong argument we should go there.

“Evidence has come out about the safety and efficacy of generating an antibody response in children. It looks like it is pretty safe and there are no adverse signals.” Coronavirus testing in secondary schools has collapsed in recent weeks, according to NHS Test and Trace. Nearly two thirds of secondary school pupils failed to take a test in the week before half-term. Data from Public Health England shows 282 Covid-19 outbreaks in schools in the past four weeks, compared with 88 in the previous four weeks.

“In reviewing the medical literature and news reports, and in talking to pediatricians across the country, I am not aware of a single healthy child in the U.S. who has died of COVID-19 to date..”

• CDC Claims Covid-19 Kills ‘Healthy Young Children’ (JTN)

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now claims that “healthy young children” can die from COVID-19. Marty Makary wants to see the evidence. “In reviewing the medical literature and news reports, and in talking to pediatricians across the country, I am not aware of a single healthy child in the U.S. who has died of COVID-19 to date,” the Johns Hopkins University professor of medicine and public health said Thursday. Archived versions of the CDC’s web page comparing COVID-19 and seasonal influenza show that it revised the “differences” in the section “People at High-Risk for Severe Illness” sometime between May 31 and June 8.

“The risk of complications for healthy children is higher for flu compared to COVID-19,” the earlier version says. “However, infants and children with underlying medical conditions are at increased risk for both flu and COVID-19.” The new version flips the emphasis as well as adding a new claim. “Overall, COVID-19 seems to cause more serious illnesses in some people,” it begins. “For young children, especially children younger than 5 years old, the risk of serious complications is higher for flu compared with COVID-19. However, serious COVID-19 illness resulting in hospitalization and death can occur even in healthy young children.”

Makary’s article in MedPage Today, a clinical news publisher where he serves as editor in chief, pushes back on calls to vaccinate kids ages 0 to 12 without comorbidities. He also recommends parents avoid vaccinating children who have recovered from COVID-19 infections, continuing his argument that natural immunity is just as good if not better than vaccine immunity. “The case to vaccinate kids is there, but it’s not compelling right now,” Makary wrote. He’s part of a movement of doctors at medical institutions around the world calling for far more cost-benefit analysis of COVID-19 vaccines for low-risk populations such as children.

“..the spike protein is deadly even absent the virus. ..”

• The Killer in the Bloodstream: the “Spike Protein” (Whitney)

The Spike Protein is a “uniquely dangerous” transmembrane fusion protein that is an integral part of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. “The S protein plays a crucial role in penetrating host cells and initiating infection.” It also damages the cells in the lining of the blood vessel walls which leads to blood clots, bleeding, massive inflammation and death. To say that the spike protein is merely “dangerous”, is a vast understatement. It is a potentially-lethal pathogen that has already killed tens of thousands of people. So, why did the vaccine manufacturers settle on the spike protein as an antigen that would induce an immune response in the body? That’s the million-dollar question, after all, for all practical purposes, the spike protein is a poison. We know that now due to research that was conducted at the Salk Institute. Here’s a summary of what they found:

“Salk researchers and collaborators show how the protein damages cells, confirming COVID-19 as a primarily vascular disease…. SARS-CoV-2 virus damages and attacks the vascular system (aka–The circulatory system) on a cellular level… scientists studying other coronaviruses have long suspected that the spike protein contributed to damaging vascular endothelial cells, but this is the first time the process has been documented…. … the spike protein alone was enough to cause disease. Tissue samples showed inflammation in endothelial cells lining the pulmonary artery walls. The team then replicated this process in the lab, exposing healthy endothelial cells (which line arteries) to the spike protein. They showed that the spike protein damaged the cells by binding ACE2…“If you remove the replicating capabilities of the virus, it still has a major damaging effect on the vascular cells, simply by virtue of its ability to bind to this ACE2 receptor, the S protein receptor, now famous thanks to COVID.”

Remember how everyone laughed at Trump when he said injecting household bleach would cure Covid? How is this any different? It’s not different, and whatever modest protection the vaccines provide as far as immunity, it pales in comparison to the risks they pose to personal health and survival. And did you notice what the author said about stripping-out the virus and leaving the spike protein alone?’ He said “it still has a major damaging effect” implying ‘blood clots, bleeding and severe inflammation.’ In other words, the spike protein is deadly even absent the virus. Here’s how Dr. Byram Bridle (who is a viral immunologist and associate professor at University of Guelph, Ontario) summed it up:

“We made a big mistake. We didn’t realize it until now… We thought the spike protein was a great target antigen, we never knew the spike protein itself was a toxin and was a pathogenic protein. So, by vaccinating people we are inadvertently inoculating them with a toxin.” Think about that for a minute. This is a very big deal, in fact, this is the critical piece of the puzzle that has been missing for the last 15 months. Just as the respiratory virus concealed the real killing-agent in Covid, (the spike protein) so too, the relentless hype surrounding mass-vaccination has concealed the glaring problem with the vaccines themselves, which is, they generate a substance that is “capable of causing disease.”

How bad will the backlash be?

• UK Lockdown End To Be Delayed (Pol.eu)

The U.K.’s final lifting of lockdown restrictions on June 21 is expected to be pushed back by Prime Minister Boris Johnson at a press conference on Monday evening, a government official confirmed to London Playbook. Multiple outlets report that Johnson, alongside cabinet members Rishi Sunak, Michael Gove and Matt Hancock have signed off on a month-long delay, after scientific advisers urged the prime minister to allow enough time for more people to get fully vaccinated. On Friday, The Sun reported that July 19 would be proposed as the new “Freedom Day” of lockdown end, with a review of numbers on July 5 that could see some or all restrictions lifted early.

“The prime minister sees this as the final stretch and wants people to be patient. We are nearly there, it’s one last haul,” a government source told The Times. The rules currently in place that will be kept include the wearing of face masks and limits on indoor and outdoor gatherings. The reopening of nightclubs is also set to be delayed. On the other hand, according to the Financial Times, some allowances may be made for weddings, allowing for larger gatherings as is the case for funerals. Health minister Edward Argar told Sky News on Monday that weddings and those who plan to wed “will be very much in [Johnson’s] mind at the moment.”

Despite reports that Sunak is not planning to extend the furlough scheme to support businesses, Argar said Johnson is “very mindful of the need for businesses and others to get what they need if they continue to be locked down.” On Sunday, 7,490 new COVID cases were reported in the U.K., a considerable increase from 5,341 a week before, on June 6.

“If our very effective vaccines cannot deliver us freedom from restrictions, then nothing ever will.”

• MP Warns Brits ‘Have To Learn To Live With Covid’ For ‘Rest Of Time’ (RT)

Covid Recovery Group chairman and MP Mark Harper opposes delays in the lifting of Covid-19 restrictions, arguing Brits will “have to learn to live with” the virus now that the vulnerable are jabbed, or suffer constant lockdown. Harper took to Twitter after an article on Sunday in the Telegraph citing an unnamed minister claimed the planned lockdown-easing date of June 21 could be delayed until as late as next spring due to the government’s concern about the spread of Covid-19 variants. The Forest of Dean MP warned in response that it “would be devastating for business confidence, people’s livelihoods and wellbeing” if the reopening were delayed, and would send “a clear message to employers and workers that, when Covid cases increase this (and every) autumn and winter, they cannot rely on Govt to keep our society open.”

“Now that the most vulnerable have been protected with their vaccine doses, we have to learn to live with this virus, rather than endure seasonal on-off lockdowns and restrictions,” Harper argued, noting that Chief Scientific Adviser Patrick Vallance has warned that coronavirus mutations “will appear for the rest of time.” Harper also pointed out that the most vulnerable people in the UK – who account for 99% of Covid-19 deaths and 80% of hospitalisations – will all have been offered two vaccine jabs by June 21, making it safer than ever to reopen. “We have to learn to live with it,” concluded Harper. “If our very effective vaccines cannot deliver us freedom from restrictions, then nothing ever will.”

“Many of these patients don’t really believe mental illness will explain their symptoms. They want something tangible, something external like the virus.”

• Why Is Britain Now The Capital Of Long Covid? (T.)

In April, the NHS chief executive Sir Simon Stevens promised to have 83 long Covid clinics open by the end of the month. The Office for National Statistics has estimated that more than 1 million people in Britain have suffered from long Covid. Danny Altmann, a professor of immunology at Imperial College, London, has predicted that long Covid could represent a long-term burden on the NHS comparable to arthritis, which costs the service an estimated £10 billion a year, some 8 per cent of the health budget. Altmann estimates that as many as 20 per cent of Covid sufferers could have longer symptoms; many of them will be younger patients who didn’t initially face severe illness.

It seems Britain is the long Covid capital of the world. This became immediately apparent to me upon moving back here from the US last month. American media has led much of the discussion on long Covid, but fear of the syndrome hasn’t penetrated public sentiment the way it has in Britain, where many young people are terrified of getting the virus not because they fear it will kill them, but because of the potentially debilitating after-effects. The question is why? Is there more long Covid here? And if so, for what reason? Are we simply doing a better job of diagnosing and discussing it, much as we lead the world in using genomic sequencing to find new Covid variants? Or might there be other cultural and societal factors underpinning our pervasive long Covid issue?

The answer could well be some combination of the above. The difficulty in researching long Covid is that every expert that you ask gives you a slightly different answer as to what the illness is and what causes it. “The simple answer is I don’t know [what causes this] and nor does anybody else,” says Dr Paul Harrison, head of Oxford University’s Translational Neurobiology Group. “We have to start with ‘nobody knows’ and keep that uncertainty — and therefore open-mindedness — at the forefront of our approach.” [..] “It’s psychosomatic,” says Jeremy Devine, a resident psychiatrist at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. In March, he wrote a controversial column for The Wall Street Journal, arguing that long Covid was being incorrectly used as a catch-all for a whole host of ailments and issues, many of them psychological. There was a fierce backlash, with several UK-based patient groups writing furious letters to his supervisors.

“People do not like psychological explanations for physical symptoms,” he says. “They want something that’s perceived as real. Many of these patients don’t really believe mental illness will explain their symptoms. They want something tangible, something external like the virus.”

“What is reasonable and necessary cannot be reasonably read to encompass anything and everything.”

• Wisconsin Top Court: Health Agency Lacks Power To Close Schools Over Covid (JTN)

The Wisconsin Supreme Court has ruled against the city of Madison’s public health agency in a dispute over the power to close schools during the pandemic. A top city health official decried Friday’s decision, saying it would put children at risk. “The Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that local health officers cannot close schools within their jurisdictions. We are extremely disappointed in the court’s decision, which has much further reaching implications than just this current pandemic,” health director Janel Heinrich said.. “This decision hinders the ability of local health officers in Wisconsin to prevent and contain public health threats for decades to come.”

The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty brought the case. WILL argued that Public Health Madison & Dane County overstepped its bounds by unilaterally ordering all schools, public and private, to close. WILL also argued the order infringed on parents’ rights to decide about their children’s education. Justice Rebecca Bradley wrote the majority opinion, saying Heinrich’s office had relied on an over-generalized reading of state law. “The power to take measures ‘reasonable and necessary’ cannot be reasonably read as an open-ended grant of authority,” Bradley wrote. “If Heinrich’s argument were correct, then the general provision would essentially afford local health officers any powers necessary to limit the spread of communicable diseases. This cannot be. What is reasonable and necessary cannot be reasonably read to encompass anything and everything.”

One of the main causes of disease and death, also for Covid, and nothing is done about it whatsoever.

• Too Fat To Fly: FAA Updates Guidelines As American Obesity Crisis Grows (Fed.)

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is demanding U.S. airlines submit plans with updated weight averages they will use for passengers and baggage moving forward by Saturday. According to the Wall Street Journal, “Airlines officials say the weight estimates used for passengers and baggage are going up between 5 percent and 10 percent.” “That will affect some flights, possibly requiring that more passengers get bumped or more baggage left behind,” the Journal reported. The new guidelines, and likely travel disruptions to come with them, are yet another symptom of American weight gain with no signs of abatement.

While the novel coronavirus — a virus exacerbated by excessive weight where 78 percent of those hospitalized with infection were overweight or obese — should have served as a wake-up call to the decades-long obesity crisis, Americans instead packed on the pounds with apparently little concern. According to a global Ipsos poll in January, two in five Americans reported gaining weight throughout the lockdowns still in place at the time. Those surveyed said they put on an average of more than 14 pounds, putting the U.S. seventh out of 30 countries in terms of pandemic weight gain. Most Americans appeared relatively unbothered by the weight. Less than half said they believed there was a link between obesity and complications from COVID-19 which data determined early on was a major risk contributor.

“Since the pandemic began,” Science Magazine reported in September, “dozens of studies have reported that many of the sickest COVID-19 patients have been people with obesity.” Overweight patients in one study published in August cited by the flagship journal were 113 percent more likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19 compared to patients of an otherwise healthy weight. Obese patients were found 74 percent more likely to end up in intensive care units (ICU) and 48 percent more likely to die. Pre-pandemic, more than 70 percent of adults 20 years old and older were already overweight with 42 percent categorically “obese” according to the CDC.

Never has rhetoric been more empty.

• Biden Calls For Access To Wuhan Labs (RT)

US President Joe Biden revealed on Sunday that he and other leaders in the G7 spoke about gaining access to the laboratories in Wuhan, China to determine whether Covid-19 was the result of a Chinese experiment gone wrong. During a press conference at the G7 conference in Cornwall, England on Sunday, Biden called on China to start acting “more responsibly in terms of international norms on human rights and transparency.” The president then revealed that one of the concerns he and other leaders at G7 had raised was that “we haven’t had access to the laboratories to determine whether or not” Covid-19 was the result of bats in Chinese marketplaces “interfacing with animals and the environment,” or “an experiment gone awry in a laboratory.”

“I have not reached a conclusion because our intelligence community is not certain yet,” Biden said, adding, however, that it was “important to know the answer” so the international community could predict and prevent another pandemic from happening in the future. “The world has to have access,” he argued, concluding that he and other leaders were trying to figure out a way to gain transparency. Former president Donald Trump has repeatedly argued that Covid-19 came from a Wuhan laboratory, and told podcast host Dan Bongino last month that he had “very, very little doubt” the virus originated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. In a statement on Thursday, he demanded that China pay $10 trillion in “reparations” to the world for “what they allowed to happen.”

Biden is outclassed 1000x. He comes with nothing.

• Biden-Putin: What’s On The Table (ZH)

There is a lot of optimism and big press regarding the upcoming meeting between Biden and Putin. This will be the first meeting of the two since Biden took that seat behind the lovely desk in the Oval Office. There are many issues on the table for discussion and there is tension and excitement in the political press in both the West and especially in Russia. There is a growing belief that this could be a turning point or at least provide some small nudging of relations in a positive direction. This wishful thinking, although pleasant from a moral standpoint, does not reflect the realities of the current divide between the United States and Russia. This meeting simply cannot provide some sort of new start for relations between the countries and will probably look like a head-nodding and pretending-to-listen fest the likes of which we have never seen before.

Hours worth of hot air will be blown to throw words onto deaf ears with some background posturing to boot. One reason for the Russians to be suspicious of any offers from Washington is simply recent precedent. Over ten years ago when Obama was still full of Hope and Change his feisty new Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with a great big smile presented Foreign Minister Lavrov the infamous Russian Reset Button. The red button had the word “overload” accidentally written on it in place of “reset”. This mistake due to a fake desire to make it seem like Washington cared enough to learn one word of Russian was very telling as during the brief era of the Russian Reset, America’s Soft Power machine was working day and night to organize the Maidan in Kiev.

From a Western perspective this revolution was another piece of evidence that the people of Eastern Europe want nothing to do with naughty Moscow, but from a Russian perspective the Maidan was the beginning of an endless waking nightmare. This all led to the genocidal war in the Donbass breaking out, the return of Neo-Nazism to Europe, and the now official systemic racism that Russian speakers have to endure in the “Zimbabwe of Europe”. After an experience like that, can one really expect any sort of optimism from the Russian side because Biden sort of stepped back a bit on the whole Nord-Stream 2 thing?

“But Musk walks on water, and he can assert anything, no problem.”

• “Tesla Only Sold ~10%” Of Its Bitcoin Holdings: Musk Speaks, Bitcoin Moves (WS)

Why can’t this dude just shut up? That’s what people, including the SEC, want to know. But look, he just can’t. Apparently, no one can take his Twitter account away from Elon Musk, and Tesla isn’t putting it under adult supervision, as the SEC has suggested. So he was at it again today, responding to accusations by Magda Wierzycka, CEO of South African tech and financial services firm Sygnia, that he’d pumped up the price of Bitcoin by tweeting all manner of things, and then “sold a big part of his exposure at the peak.” So yes. Musk acknowledged in his tweet today that Tesla had in fact dumped part of its holdings of Bitcoin, but he argued that it wasn’t a big part, that it had “only sold ~10%” of its Bitcoin holdings.

And he came up with a rationalization why Tesla had dumped 10% of its Bitcoin holdings: “to confirm BTC could be liquidated easily without moving market.” That was a joke apparently. Over the past two months, the price of Bitcoin plunged from about $64,800 to around $33,000 at the low and now hovers at $39,000, after the current Musk-induced spike, with the plunge leaving a big-fat question market over his assertion that Bitcoin could be “liquidated easily without moving market.” But Musk walks on water, and he can assert anything, no problem. The second part of Musk’s tweet contained an effort to pump up the price of BTC by walking back his assertion in May that Tesla would no longer allow customers to pay for vehicles with Bitcoin because of the carbon footprint of Bitcoin mining, which was another one of his Bitcoin 180s.

At the time, that statement had whacked the price of Bitcoin. Bitcoin mining is of course the fiat-currency equivalent of “money printing.” But money printing has a tiny carbon footprint, because it needs just enough electricity to move credits by computer and the internet. You don’t need huge arrays of special mining rigs with special power supply and cooling equipment to print money. So today he tried to walk back his carbon-foot print concern, by tweeting: “When there’s confirmation of reasonable (~50%) clean energy usage by miners with positive future trend, Tesla will resume allowing Bitcoin transactions.”

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Debt Rattle June 11 2021

Jun 112021

June 11, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:47 am Finance Tagged with: Biden, cruise, Delta, Goldman, myocarditis, Putin, sanctions, Stalin, Treasury, Trump, Wuhan 60 Responses »

Wassily Kandinsky Free Curve to the Point – Accompanying Sound of Geometric Curves 1925

• Stalin’s Covid Mismanagement Gets International Attention (CM)

• 100s Suffer Heart Inflammation Following COVID Vaccines (ZH)

• Highly Contagious Delta Variant Now Makes Up 91% Of UK’s New Covid Cases (F.)

• As Trump Banned China Travel, Fauci Funded Wuhan Lab Studies (NP)

• There Are No Solutions -Part Two (Jim Quinn)

• Goldman Requires Workers To Report If They Are Vaccinated (ZH)

• Celebrity Cruises Has A Workaround For DeSantis’ Vaccine Passport Ban (F.)

• The Global Pandemic Requires A Global Vaccination Plan (F.)

• China Passes Anti-Foreign Sanctions Law (Y!)

• Cash Gone Nuts: Treasury General Account Drops to $674 Billion (WS)

• Trump Tells Biden To Give Putin His ‘Warmest Regards’ (F.)

• Convert New York’s Entire Grid to Renewables With This One Trick (Vice)

Bhakdi: the authorities who Ok’d this; the EU; all the governments who approved these vaccines.. I think they should all be taken to court.”

Sucharit Bhakdi, Professor Emeritus of Medical Microbiology and Immunology – shocking if true… pic.twitter.com/TgrzlnfZOe

— Heidegger (@heidegger79) June 10, 2021

Come for the headline, stay for the ivermectin.

• Stalin’s Covid Mismanagement Gets International Attention (CM)

In a special live broadcast on June 1 of the DarkHorse podcast, Dr. Bret Weinstein (Ph.D.) and Dr. Pierre Kory (M.D.) discussed the incredible story of the Ivermectin drug in controlling COVID, in which they criticized Tamil Nadu Chief Minister MK Stalin for his irresponsible behavior during the pandemic. In the recent broadcast, Dr.Pierre Kory praised the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) for including Ivermectin in their treatment guidelines. He added,” Some of the states in India went even further and they went much more aggressive. One of the boldest and uplifting moves was that of the Chief Minister of Goa, who recommended the use of Ivermectin for every adult over the age of 18 who was infected with corona. This is what I would have done if I were the Chief Minister of state.”

He went on to say that states like Goa and Uttar Pradesh took bold steps to help India reduce the number of COVID cases in the country. Later, he slammed Tamil Nadu Chief Minister MK Stalin for effectively outlawing Ivermectin and going all-in on Remdesivir, which he claims is the cause of the state’s increasing cases. He also took a dig at MK Stalin’s name recalling the Russian Communist dictator Joseph Stalin who killed thousands of people. “I don’t know why but his name is MK Stalin. I just have to mention that. So, Stalin in India outlawed Ivermectin and it is not going well for the citizens”, he said. In another interview with Sky News Australia, Craig Kelly, Independent Federal Member for Hughes, Australia, also criticized MK Stalin for blocking Ivermectin drug in the state, claiming that it resulted in a rise in mortality and infection rates while every other state that used it experienced a decrease in COVID cases.

“There is one exception in India. It is the state of Tamil Nadu down the south where they have elected a new leader who goes by the name Stalin. People actually went to the ballot boxes and voted for a bloke called Stalin. He decided that Ivermectin wasn’t effective and basically blocked from the state. The death rate and infection rate have gone through the roof while every other state that is using it is seeing massive declines.” he said.

Perfectly safe.

• 100s Suffer Heart Inflammation Following COVID Vaccines (ZH)

Federal authorities have received over 800 reports of heart inflammation in people who received a COVID-19 vaccine, a health official said Thursday. The reports of myocarditis or pericarditis were submitted to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, a passive reporting system run jointly by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration, through May 31. The bulk of the reports described heart inflammation appearing after the second of two doses of either the Pfizer of Moderna vaccines, both of which utilize messenger RNA technology.

Authorities stress that anybody can submit reports through the reporting system but authorities have already verified that 226 of the reports meet the CDC’s working case definition, Dr. Tom Shimabukuro, a deputy director at the agency, said during a presentation of the data. Followup and review are in progress for the rest. Of the 285 case reports for which the disposition was known at the time of the review, 270 patients had been discharged and 15 were still hospitalized, officials said. Myocarditis typically requires hospital care. No deaths were reported.

Update (2000ET): The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced Thursday that it will convene an “emergency meeting” of its advisers on June 18th to discuss rare but higher-than-expected reports of heart inflammation following doses of the mRNA-based Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines. The new details about myocarditis and pericarditis emerged first in presentations to a panel of independent advisers for the Food and Drug Administration, who are meeting Thursday to discuss how the regulator should approach emergency use authorization for using COVID-19 vaccines in younger children.

As CBS reports, the CDC previously disclosed that reports of heart inflammation were detected mostly in younger men and teenage boys following their second dose, and that there was a “higher number of observed than expected” cases in 16- to 24-year-olds. Last month, the CDC urged providers to “ask about prior COVID-19 vaccination” in patients with symptoms of heart inflammation.

If they don’t open on June 21, watch the spectacle.

• Highly Contagious Delta Variant Now Makes Up 91% Of UK’s New Covid Cases (F.)

The highly contagious “delta” variant of the coronavirus originating from India now makes up nearly all of the U.K.’s new coronavirus cases, Health Minister Matt Hancock revealed Thursday, as the rapid spread of the mutant strain adds a new threat to Europe’s reopening. Hancock told lawmakers while under questioning about the government’s handling of the pandemic that intelligence he saw Wednesday night showed 91% of the U.K.’s new cases are made up by the delta variant. While research is still ongoing about its transmission rate, Hancock told Parliament earlier this week that the British government believes the delta variant is 40% more transmissible than the alpha variant (B.1.1.7) first detected in Britain.

Notably, as of Thursday, just three fully vaccinated people in the U.K. infected with the new variant have been hospitalized, according to data cited by Hancock, who emphasized “the jabs are working.” However, government data shows cases have been sharply rising in the U.K.: more than 41,000 new infections were reported in England in the week through June 9, a two-thirds increase from the previous seven-day period. The revelation about the virus’s prevalence in the U.K. came as the World Health Organization on Thursday morning warned the delta variant is “poised to take hold” across Europe. Hans Kluge, WHO’s regional director for Europe, encouraged countries to “act fast on signals of increasing cases” and urged caution as some move to reopen.

Hancock stressed that vaccines appear to be effective against this version of the virus. So far, the U.K. has partially vaccinated over 60% of its population and fully vaccinated nearly 43%, boasting one of the most successful vaccine rollouts in the world. The broader European Union has moved more slowly, with just 42% partially vaccinated and 22% fully vaccinated against the virus. Nonetheless, the spread of the variant is threatening to prolong lockdowns in the U.K. as the government is currently weighing whether it should delay the lifting of restrictions in England scheduled for June 21.

Fauci and Daszak above the law.

• As Trump Banned China Travel, Fauci Funded Wuhan Lab Studies (NP)

Published on February 3rd 2020, the paper entitled Synergistic China–US Ecological Research is Essential for Global Emerging Infectious Disease Preparedness was authored by researchers from the notorious EcoHealth Alliance and several Chinese Communist Party-run scientific institutions, including the Wuhan lab. EcoHealth Alliance – run by self-declared “killer” virus creator Peter Daszak – and the Wuhan lab have both come under increased scrutiny for their potential role in the creation of COVID-19 as well as the cover-up of its true origins. The 14-page paper was the culmination of two-year collaborative project between Chinese and U.S. researchers involving two workshops on “Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution of Infectious Diseases” in Shenzhen, China and the University of California Berkeley in 2018.

“The workshop has two objectives,” a summary notes before explaining: The first objective is to review recent progress in ecology and infectious disease research and identify key gaps in data, information, and knowledge. The second objective is to identify research priority areas and discuss possible mechanisms for joint, international cooperation on research and education activities in ecology and infectious disease research. The paper – which was published in EcoHealth Alliance’s official journal “EcoHealth” – asserts that collaboration between the U.S. and China is key to stopping future pandemics. “International cooperation, particularly between China and the USA, is essential to fully engage the resources and scientific strengths necessary to add this ecological emphasis to the pandemic preparedness strategy,” it posits.

“The global nature of emerging and re-emerging infectious disease threats indicates the critical role of international cooperation, particularly spearheaded by China and the USA, in emerging infectious disease (EID) preparedness,” the paper adds before calling for the two countries to form a “united front for research”: “The world would be much better equipped for curbing the next pandemic, if China and the USA provided a united front for research and progress toward EID preparedness.”

“No scientist ever believes that he has the final answer or the ultimate truth on anything.”
– Carroll Quigley

• There Are No Solutions -Part Two (Jim Quinn)

The boldness and extremeness of their actions since the Fall of 2019 seem out of character with their usual shrouded machinations behind the scenes, where the public is ignorant of their actions. Something broke within the debt saturated financial system and Powell was ordered to restart QE and start reducing interest rates to fend off disaster. In a fascinating coincidence, Event 201, a pandemic simulation, was conducted on October 18 in New York City, jointly run by The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, World Economic Forum, and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The four-year coup attempt by the Deep State against Trump was floundering, with their pathetic last gasp impeachment farce in January 2020.

The weaponization of the Chinese bio-weapon lab virus into a global pandemic narrative accomplished numerous objectives for the Deep State. It provided cover for the Federal Reserve to funnel trillions into the pockets of the criminal Wall Street cabal and their billionaire clientele. It provided the means for Democrat governors and mayors to use it as an excuse to allow mass mail-in voting in order to fraudulently steal the election. Destroying the economy through unnecessary worthless lockdowns and blaming it on Trump gave the Democrats a further impetus to steal the election. Convincing the entire nation masking and lockdowns stopped the spread (they did not) allowed the ruling class to exercise tyrannical authoritarian un-Constitutional mandates with little to no push back from the masses – giving them the confidence to push further.

Cases and deaths were plummeting before vaccines were rolled out in any quantity, but the media mouthpieces and lying politicians will credit the jab for decline. Using propaganda fear, convincing the masses cowering in your basement was brave, using their captured media to lie about “being in this together” as our rulers flaunted their own lockdown dictates, creating social unrest based on the false narrative of systematic racism, forcing people to be scared and suspicious of each other, and pitting families and friends against each other based on falsehoods, has accomplished the mission of tearing the fabric of our society. And now for the coup de grace – forced vaccinations with an experimental untested DNA altering concoction for a virus with a 99.8% survival rate.

The immune systems of all but the sickliest are sufficient to fight off this virus and cheap, effective, and safe treatments like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine have been scientifically proven to successfully defeat this virus. Watching scientists and doctors declare these treatments dangerous and ineffective, with Big Tech censoring anyone dissenting from this narrative, tells you how corrupted the medical and media industries have become. Science is never settled. “No scientist ever believes that he has the final answer or the ultimate truth on anything.” – Carroll Quigley

“..the bank had sent a memo this week informing employees in the US that they had until noon on Thursday to report their vaccination status.”

• Goldman Requires Workers To Report If They Are Vaccinated (ZH)

Goldman Sachs’ bankers dragged themselves back to the office last month, shortly before American workplace safety regulators weighed in on what employers are legally allowed to ask (and not ask) about their vaccination status. As it turns out, vague federal standards will allow Goldman to allow workers to go bare-faced in the office so long as they provided their managers with information confirming they had been vaccinated. Previously, disclosing vaccination status had been “optional” for employees. That has apparently changed, as Andrew Ross Sorkin’s “DealBook” reported Thursday that the bank had sent a memo this week informing employees in the US that they had until noon on Thursday to report their vaccination status.

Bankers can log their vaccination status with the bank’s internal app for employees. Since employers can’t directly ask for this information, the bank will instead ask workers to fill in the date where they received their shots, along with the maker of their vaccine. Goldman has also informed employees through the app that their vaccination status may be shared with managers and used for planning purposes. “Registering your vaccination status allows us to plan for a safer return to the office for all of our people as we continue to abide by local public health measures,” said a section of the memo, which was sent to employees who hadn’t already reported their vaccination status. A copy of the letter was obtained by the NYT.

One of the NYT’s “expert” sources explained that Goldman can share vaccination status “with certain individuals if it’s relevant to the individual’s responsibilities, but they can’t share for no reason,,” according to Jessica Kuester, who specializes in benefits at the law firm Ogletree Deakins. [..] Companies across the US are trying to find out how many workers are vaccinated ahead of full office reopenings. They have conducted surveys and given out cash rewards, mimicking strategies embraced by state governments, as the Biden Administration scrambles to meet its goal of having 70% of American adults at least partially vaccinated by July 4. Though as things stand, it looks like the US is going to miss that target.

No word yet on whether Goldman workers will receive any kind of compensation for getting vaccinated. But seeing as the bank largely skipped bonus compensation offered to junior employees by other banks, we suspect junior bankers who comply will be doing so mostly out of the goodness of their hearts – and their unwillingness to lose their jobs.

“We’re going to manage that. We’ve got codes, we’ve got, you know, if we have to shut down cabin categories or open cabin categories, we are going to make sure that’s on us, not you.”

• Celebrity Cruises Has A Workaround For DeSantis’ Vaccine Passport Ban (F.)

For cruise operators, their mission impossible is to figure out how to follow both the guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Protection (CDC) — which recommends that 98% of crew and 95% of passengers on a ship be vaccinated before setting sail — and avoid violating a much-hyped law from Florida Governor Ron DeSantis that prohibits businesses in his state from verifying the vaccination status of individuals. The first ship slated to sail out of Florida in 15 months is Celebrity Edge, which will depart Fort Lauderdale on June 26 on a seven-night cruise to the Western Caribbean. That’s just the beginning. By mid-summer, nine of the cruise line’s 15 ships will be operating out of Florida and other ports.

On a call with travel agents on Tuesday, Dondra Ritzenthaler, senior VP of sales, trade support and service at Celebrity Cruises, outlined how Celebrity plans to thread the needle to stay on the right side of both the CDC guidance and the Florida law, according a scoop in the unofficial Royal Caribbean Blog, which is not affiliated with the cruise line. Forbes has also obtained a recording of the June 8 call. For context, this is the second such call within two weeks where Ritzenthaler has outlined a possible workaround to travel advisors. Forbes previously obtained a recording of a May 27 call where Ritzenthaler told agents that the DeSantis administration and major cruise lines had discussed a possible exemption to the Florida law for cruise lines. A DeSantis spokesperson denied that the governor had ever considered such an exemption and told reporters that Forbes had “misinterpreted” Ritzenthaler’s comments from that call.

Throughout Tuesday’s 46-minute call, Ritzenthaler outlined the CDC guidance and reiterated multiple times that 95% of passengers on all Celebrity ships would be fully vaccinated. “We will require documentation of full vaccination from all guests who are eligible,” she said. “This is for everybody, but Florida is a little bit different, okay?” “Florida — because we honor the government, we honor DeSantis — we will still go out with 100% of our crew and 95% of our guests vaccinated. But in Florida, we will not require you to have to show proof of vaccination, because we are doing this exactly the right way,” said Ritzenthaler.

“Our President and CEO, Lisa Lutoff-Perlo, right before this call, said, ‘Dondra, you reassure every travel adviser on this call that we will sail with 95% of our guests vaccinated,’” said Ritzenthaler, who did not explain in detail how Celebrity would accomplish this feat except to suggest that, instead of verifying passengers’ vaccination records at the port on embarkation day, Celebrity would manage the ratio of vaccinated-to-unvaccinated guests during the booking process. “Guys, the way we’re going to do that is we’re going to manage the sailing, right?” she told the hundreds of agents on the call. “We’re going to make sure that we open some cabin categories. We close some cabin categories. We are going to make sure that 95% of our guests are vaccinated.”

That would mean that only five percent of any ship’s inventory for any sailing would be made available to unvaccinated passengers. At the end of the call, Ritzenthaler fielded a question from a travel advisor asking for additional clarity on how the cruise line would achieve the 95% vaccination threshold. “That’s not anything you have to worry about,” Ritzenthaler reiterated. “We’re going to manage that. We’ve got codes, we’ve got, you know, if we have to shut down cabin categories or open cabin categories, we are going to make sure that’s on us, not you.”

Don’t laugh, they’re serious.

• The Global Pandemic Requires A Global Vaccination Plan (F.)

As world leaders gather for the annual G7 Leadership Summit, they have one job: end the pandemic by delivering a global roadmap to vaccinate the world. This must be a comprehensive, coordinated strategy that accelerates global Covid-19 vaccine access and delivery in order to achieve at least 70% coverage in all countries. Eighteen months into the Covid-19 pandemic, we find ourselves navigating a schism between the haves and the have-nots where those in high-income countries can see a light at the end of the pandemic tunnel while many in poorer countries are experiencing the persistence of this devastating crisis. More than 85% of vaccine doses administered to date have gone to people in high- and upper-middle-income countries. And low-income countries? Just 0.3%.

What was once the bright spot in the pandemic — the rapid development and manufacture of life-saving vaccines — now points to a vast moral failing. There are many reasons that this has happened, but it boils down to a difficult truth: there is still no end-to-end plan to vaccinate the world to at least 70% coverage and provide the support needed for every country to get vaccines delivered and administered safely. The system that allowed just a few countries to buy nearly all the world’s vaccine supply needs root and branch reform. But right now, we must collectively do more. We are calling for an end-to-end plan that addresses urgent gaps in vaccine supply and delivery. After all, vaccines alone don’t save lives — vaccinations do.

Though the commitment of COVAX — the mechanism to accelerate the development and manufacture of Covid-19 vaccines and guarantee fair and equitable vaccine access — is laudable, to date it is not enough. As WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said to the World Health Assembly, while COVAX has delivered 72 million doses to 125 countries, “those doses are sufficient for barely 1 percent of the combined population of those countries.” President Joe Biden’s announcement last week that shipments of surplus doses have begun is also promising, but global leaders must do more. According to the Launch & Scale Speedometer, the G7 countries (including the whole of the EU) have an excess of 3 billion doses, even after vaccinating their entire population. G7 countries have the opportunity to do the right thing. We urge leadership to share one billion doses by the end of August, and another billion by the end of the year to support the global vaccination effort.

“The law aims to firmly safeguard the sovereign dignity and core interests of the country and oppose Western hegemony and power politics..”

• China Passes Anti-Foreign Sanctions Law (Y!)

China on Thursday passed a new law to counter foreign sanctions, as it looks to build its defences against rising US and EU pressure over trade and human rights. Beijing has accused the United States of “suppressing” Chinese firms and issued veiled threats of retaliation after President Joe Biden last week expanded a blacklist of companies in which Americans are not allowed to invest. Countermeasures in the Chinese law include “refusal to issue visas, denial of entry, deportation… and sealing, seizing, and freezing property of individuals or businesses that adhere to foreign sanctions against Chinese businesses or officials,” according to the text published by the standing committee of the National People’s Congress, China’s top legislature. The restrictions can apply to family members of individuals who fall foul of Beijing.

The law also allows the country’s courts to punish companies that comply with foreign laws, and says that businesses or people in China do not need to comply with foreign restrictions. “The law aims to firmly safeguard the sovereign dignity and core interests of the country and oppose Western hegemony and power politics,” foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbing told a briefing. China has long complained about US sanctions and trade restrictions affecting Chinese companies, calling it an extraterritorial application of US law. Biden has stepped up US criticism of Beijing in recent months over the theft of intellectual property, and alleged human rights abuses in Hong Kong and the restive Xinjiang region. Last week, the White House expanded the blacklist of companies Americans are barred from investing in due to the firms’ links to Beijing’s military.

“..in part responsible for the flood of cash that suddenly started to show up in the banking system that was already up to the gills in cash, and poured out from there.”

• Cash Gone Nuts: Treasury General Account Drops to $674 Billion (WS)

The excess balances in the federal government’s checking account – the “Treasury General Account” (TGA) at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York – that had ballooned to $1.8 trillion by July 2020 plunged to $674 billion as of Wednesday, according to the Fed’s balance sheet, released today, the lowest since April 2, 2020, having now unwound most of the monetized-but-unspent debt-binge spike from spring last year. The Mnuchin Treasury started reducing the balance in the TGA in baby steps by borrowing less than they were spending. The Yellen Treasury announced in February that it would draw down the account to $500 billion by the end of June. $174 billion more to go:

Last spring, the government sold a gigantic amount of debt, piling an additional $3 trillion on top of its mountain of debt in just a few months. At the same time, the Fed bought $3 trillion in securities as part of its QE and wealth effect program, thereby monetizing nearly all of the $3 trillion in new debt that the government issued during that time. But the government didn’t spend all of the $3 trillion in proceeds from the new debt, and the TGA – a liability on the Fed’s balance sheet – soared from around $400 billion in February 2020 to $1.8 trillion in July. This $1.4 trillion addition that the government had borrowed and that the Fed had then monetized didn’t go into the economy and the markets but sat in the government’s checking account.

But now, during the drawdown of the TGA, that money has been going into the economy and the markets. The drawdown so far is money that the government has spent since February but didn’t have to collect in taxes or borrow from investors since it already borrowed it over a year ago, with the Fed having monetized the new debt. Since February, this money has started circulating in the economy, markets, and banking system, as the government spent it, and is in part responsible for the flood of cash that suddenly started to show up in the banking system that was already up to the gills in cash, and poured out from there.

“..don’t fall asleep during the meeting.”

• Trump Tells Biden To Give Putin His ‘Warmest Regards’ (F.)

Less than a week before President Joe Biden’s summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Geneva, Switzerland, former President Donald Trump put out a statement insisting his widely criticized 2018 Helsinki summit with Putin went “great” and telling Biden not to “fall asleep” when meeting with the strongman. Trump said in a statement he had a “great and productive” summit with Putin, at which he contradicted U.S. intelligence on alleged Russian collusion in the 2016 election, stating, “Putin says it’s not Russia. I don’t see any reason why it would be.” Trump said the negative image of that meeting is the result of a “belated Fake News portrayal,” claiming he “won much” from it, including the “respect of President Putin and Russia,” though what they actually discussed in their closed-door meeting remains a mystery.

Trump said it was the “obvious” choice for him to believe Russia over former U.S. intelligence officials with whom he has feuded, including former FBI directors James Comey and Andy McCabe. Trump wished Biden “good luck” in “dealing with President Putin,” and, in a continuation of attacks he made on Biden’s physical and mental capacity during the election, added “don’t fall asleep during the meeting.” “Because of the phony Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, made-up and paid for by the Democrats and Crooked Hillary Clinton, the United States was put at a disadvantage—a disadvantage that was nevertheless overcome by me,” Trump said, reflecting how he feels his presidency was kneecapped by the Russia probe.

The “trick” is more legislation?!

• Convert New York’s Entire Grid to Renewables With This One Trick (Vice)

New York lawmakers are considering legislation that would drastically build out the state’s renewable energy offerings, a step toward a future in which some activists believe energy utilities could be fully renewable and municipally owned. The New York Build Public Renewables Act (Assembly Bill A1466A) would enable the New York Power Authority (NYPA)—the largest state public utility in the country—to develop and operate utility-scale renewable energy projects while requiring it to phase out fossil fuel infrastructure by 2025. The bill was introduced in January by State Senator Kevin Parker and Assemblymember Robert Carroll, and is championed by the Public Power NY Coalition—a statewide collective of environmental justice organizations that includes several Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) chapters and the NY Energy Democracy Alliance.

It is less radical than a previously considered piece of legislation that would have transitioned control over utilities to the state while banning for-profit energy service companies like National Grid and Con Edison. Advocates believe the passage of the Build Public Renewables Act would represent a first meaningful step toward climate action more than two years after the passage of New York’s landmark Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA). Passed in 2019, the CLCPA established a set of legally-binding environmental targets requiring 70 percent of New York’s energy to come from renewable sources by 2030 in order to reduce statewide greenhouse gas emissions by 85 percent by 2050.

The CLCPA was once lauded as the the most ambitious piece of state climate legislation in the country, but activists like Charlie Heller, organizer with the Public Power Coalition, say the state hasn’t upheld its promises. (Just five percent of New York’s energy production is currently generated by wind and solar power, for example.) “If you really think it’s a climate emergency, you wouldn’t just sit there and not pass any major climate bills,” Heller said.

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Debt Rattle June 5 2021

Jun 052021

June 5, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:52 am Finance Tagged with: Daszak, Fauci, infrastructure, Lancet, organ damage, Pentagon, Putin, spike protein, vaccine, Wuhan 59 Responses »

Brassaï Cat 1945

• Vaccine Spike Protein Travels From Injection Site, Can Cause Organ Damage (CHD)

• Patent Filed For Covid Vaccine Just After Contagion Emerged (NYP)

• Ok, Now We’re Done (Denninger)

• State Department Officials Told Probing Wuhan Lab Opens Pandora’s Box (DM)

• The Pentagon Gave $39 Million To Dr. Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance (DM)

• Daszak In Charge Of The Lancet’s Task Force To Investigate COVID Origin (SN)

• Biden Says He’s ‘Very Confident’ In Fauci After 1000s Of Emails Revealed (Fox)

• The Rise and Fall of Dr. Fauci (Howie Carr)

• What If the “Big Lie” Is the Big Lie? (Kunstler)

• Biden Rejects New Republican Infrastructure Offer (R.)

• US Judge Overturns California’s Ban On Assault Weapons (AP)

• Facebook Faces Antitrust Investigation in EU, UK (HE)

• ‘Over Confident’ US Risks Going Down Same Path As Soviet Union – Putin (EN)

A rare photo of Schrödingers cat.

“Research obtained by a group of scientists shows the COVID vaccine spike protein can travel from the injection site and accumulate in organs and tissues including the spleen, bone marrow, the liver, adrenal glands and in “quite high concentrations” in the ovaries.”

• Vaccine Spike Protein Travels From Injection Site, Can Cause Organ Damage (CHD)

COVID vaccine researchers had previously assumed mRNA COVID vaccines would behave like traditional vaccines. The vaccine’s spike protein — responsible for infection and its most severe symptoms — would remain mostly in the injection site at the shoulder muscle or local lymph nodes. But new research obtained by a group of scientists contradicts that theory, a Canadian cancer vaccine researcher said last week. “We made a big mistake. We didn’t realize it until now,” said Byram Bridle, a viral immunologist and associate professor at University of Guelph, Ontario. “We thought the spike protein was a great target antigen, we never knew the spike protein itself was a toxin and was a pathogenic protein. So by vaccinating people we are inadvertently inoculating them with a toxin.”

Bridle, who was awarded a $230,000 grant by the Canadian government last year for research on COVID vaccine development, said he and a group of international scientists filed a request for information from the Japanese regulatory agency to get access to Pfizer’s “biodistribution study.” Biodistribution studies are used to determine where an injected compound travels in the body, and which tissues or organs it accumulates in. “It’s the first time ever scientists have been privy to seeing where these messenger RNA [mRNA] vaccines go after vaccination,” Bridle said in an interview with Alex Pierson where he first disclosed the data. “Is it a safe assumption that it stays in the shoulder muscle? The short answer is: absolutely not. It’s very disconcerting.”

The Sars-CoV-2 has a spike protein on its surface. That spike protein is what allows it to infect our bodies, Bridle explained. “That is why we have been using the spike protein in our vaccines,” Bridle said. “The vaccines we’re using get the cells in our bodies to manufacture that protein. If we can mount an immune response against that protein, in theory we could prevent this virus from infecting the body. That is the theory behind the vaccine.” “However, when studying the severe COVID-19, […] heart problems, lots of problems with the cardiovascular system, bleeding and clotting, are all associated with COVID-19,” he added. “In doing that research, what has been discovered by the scientific community, the spike protein on its own is almost entirely responsible for the damage to the cardiovascular system, if it gets into circulation.” When the purified spike protein is injected into the blood of research animals, they experience damage to the cardiovascular system and the protein can cross the blood-brain barrier and cause damage to the brain, Bridle explained.

Everything about this stinks.

• Patent Filed For Covid Vaccine Just After Contagion Emerged (NYP)

A Chinese Communist Party military scientist who got funding from the National Institutes of Health filed a patent for a COVID-19 vaccine in February last year — raising fears the shot was being studied even before the pandemic became public, according to a new report. Zhou Yusen, a decorated military scientist for the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) who worked alongside the Wuhan Institute of Virology as well as US scientists, filed a patent on Feb. 24 2020, according to documents obtained by The Australian.

The patent -lodged by the “Institute of Military Medicine, Academy of Military Sciences of the PLA”- was filed just five weeks after China admitted there was human-to-human transmission of the virus, and months before Zhou died under mysterious circumstances, the report noted. “This is something we have never seen achieved before, raising the question of whether this work may have started much earlier”, Prof. Nikolai Petrovsky from Flinders University told the paper. Adding to the intrigue, Zhou later died under mysterious circumstances in May last year – something being looked into as part of the international investigation ordered by President Biden, the paper insisted. Despite being an award-winning military scientist, there were no reports or tributes, with him just listed as “deceased” in a Chinese media report in July and a December scientific paper.

Before working for the PLA, Zhou had strong ties to the US, doing postdoctoral research at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and collaborating with the New York Blood Center, the report said. Zhou worked closely with the Wuhan lab at the heart of increasing international focus over its possible links to the pandemic, as well as its now-notorious “bat woman” lead scientist, Shi Zhengli, the report said. The close working relationship between the pair supports declassified US intelligence released in January that said the Wuhan lab was conducting “secret military activity,” The Australian said.

Karl’s take on the article above.

• Ok, Now We’re Done (Denninger)

“A Chinese Communist Party military scientist who got funding from the National Institutes of Health filed a patent for a COVID-19 vaccine in February last year — raising fears the shot was being studied even before the pandemic became public, according to a new report. Zhou Yusen, a decorated military scientist for the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) who worked alongside the Wuhan Institute of Virology as well as US scientists, filed a patent on Feb. 24 2020, according to documents obtained by The Australian.” So what do we now know? • China’s military was in fact involved at the Wuhan lab. It was not just a civilian operation. • The lab’s scientists knew not only the sequencing of the virus but in addition had a patentable way to create an alleged vaccine before the pandemic was public.

• It takes time to draft patents and figure them out. Quite a lot of time, in fact — not a couple weeks or months. • The PLA, China’s military, did file said patent with Zhou’s name on it. • It takes time to prove up patent material, including in the case of a vaccine. To patent something you must be able to demonstrate it; you cannot patent ideas, only embodiments of ideas. In that case you would have to prove immunogenicity which isn’t instantaneous; it takes weeks or even months to get through original science on this with animals and then humans, which means the date of knowledge was not February 24th it was months or even further before that.

• That means they were working on this even before that time because to work on a vaccine you have to know you must or would want to work on it in the first place. This in turn means they knew damn well there was a virulent virus in the wild prior to that date, or they released it or intended to release it into the wild on purpose. Nobody comes up with a vaccine for a virus you intend to and have confined entirely within a laboratory in animal or cell culture testing; that’s worthless. Without an isolate to create a vaccine for and a virus outside of a lab environment where vaccination becomes a “thing” that might be required and thus have value why would you do the work to create one?

What’s the timeline on all this? Many, many months or even a couple of years. That means either the virus was “out” for many months to a couple of years before February of 2020 (not a month or two) or the Chinese intended to release it in the fall of 2019. In either case the evidence is now overwhelming that this was not a virus that “magically appeared” one fine day in late December. That is not just improbable anymore — it is now, on the manifest weight of the evidence, impossible. Further, the person who filed the patent died under “mysterious circumstances.” Gee, I wonder why? Let me guess — did he shoot himself in the back of the head twice?

Next up is exactly what sort of vaccine patent we’re talking about here? Specifically how is it that the “stiffened” areas in the viral vector and mRNA shots we’re using in the US came to be known and proved up? How did Moderna and Pfizer know they needed to do that? That sort of study takes months if not years too, not days or weeks, to both come up with it and then prove it actually works as expected.

[..] Oh wait — the manufacturers didn’t bother with all of making sure it worked as expected, did they? Nope! It sort of works as expected. Yes, the shots produce antibodies – lots of them. But they also cluster in multiple organs where we were told it would not; we were told it would remain in the deltoid muscle where the injection was delivered. That it remained in the muscle was false; the science was not done and it appears we were just told it would do so without evidence. Now, due to a leaked document out of Japan we know the shots do not stay where intended and they bioaccumulate in other places, including the ovaries and spleen and yet this, which was a direct contravention of the predicate upon which the EUAs issued did not lead to immediate revocation. Oh no, the FDA doesn’t care when claims about where it is contained to in the body turn out to be false!

Fauci, Daszak, PLA, CCP, Pentagon, we could go on.

• State Department Officials Told Probing Wuhan Lab Opens Pandora’s Box (DM)

At least four State Department employees said in separate interviews that they repeatedly were ‘warned’ that an investigation into a possible COVID-19 leak from the Wuhan lab would ‘open Pandora’s Box;’ and reveal that the U.S. funded gain-of-function research there. It ‘smelled like a cover-up,’ Thomas DiNanno told Vanity Fair. DiNanno, the former acting assistant secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Arms Control, Verification and Compliance, was one of four State Department officials who told Vanity Fair they wanted to investigate the possibility that COVID-19 spread after it escaped from the Wuhan lab. The others were David Asher, David Feith and Miles Yu. But they were muzzled by other State Department officials as well as the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation and even ‘ostracized,’ Yu told Vanity Fair.

The lab leak was touted by then-President Donald Trump and other right-wing leaders, but was deemed impossible by a ‘scientific consensus’ in a letter signed by 27 scientists, published on February 19, 2020 in the medical journal The Lancet. After that, the Wuhan lab theory was considered to be at best a conspiracy – some even considered it racist – so it wasn’t discussed as a realistic origin of COVID-19 until recently. Yu, the State Department’s principal China strategist, found the government’s and scientists’ silence ‘maddening,’ Vanity Fair reported. He said, ‘Anyone who dares speak out would be ostracized.’ Asher, now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute who ran the State Department’s day-to-day COVID-19 origins inquiry, told Vanity Fair it became clear that ‘there is a huge gain-of-function bureaucracy’ inside the federal government.

Plus $64.7 million from the US Agency for International Development (USAID), $13 million from Health and Human Services, $2.3 million from the Department of Homeland Security, and $2.6 million from the National Science Foundation.

• The Pentagon Gave $39 Million To Dr. Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance (DM)

The Pentagon gave $39 million to a charity that funded controversial coronavirus research at a Chinese lab accused of being the source for Covid-19, federal data reveals. The news comes as the charity’s chief, British-born scientist Dr. Peter Daszak, was exposed in an alleged conflict of interest and back-room campaign to discredit lab leak theories. The charity, EcoHealth Alliance (EHA), has come under intense scrutiny after it emerged that it had been using federal grants to fund research into coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. The U.S. nonprofit, set up to research new diseases, has also partly funded deeply controversial ‘gain of function’ experiments, where dangerous viruses are made more infectious to study their effect on human cells.

A political storm broke when former president Donald Trump canceled a $3.7 million grant to the charity last year amid claims that Covid-19 was created in, or leaked from, the Wuhan lab funded by EHA. But federal grant data assembled by independent researchers shows that the charity has received more than $123 million from the government – from 2017 to 2020 – and that one of its biggest funders is the Department of Defense, funneling almost $39 million to the organization since 2013. Exactly how much of that money went toward research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology is unknown.

Grants from the Pentagon included $6,491,025 from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) from 2017 to 2020 with the description: ‘Understanding the risk of bat-borne zoonotic disease emergence in Western Asia.’ The grant was categorized as ‘scientific research – combating weapons of mass destruction.’ The news comes as the charity’s chief, British-born scientist Dr. Peter Daszak, was exposed in an alleged conflict of interest and back-room campaign to discredit lab leak theories The majority of the DoD funding came from the DTRA, a military branch with a mission to ‘counter and deter weapons of mass destruction and improvised threat networks.’ EHA also received $64.7 million from the US Agency for International Development (USAID), $13 million from Health and Human Services, which includes the National Institutes of Health and Centers for Disease Control, $2.3 million from the Department of Homeland Security, and $2.6 million from the National Science Foundation.

He gets to lead everything, including the ivestigation into himself.

• Daszak In Charge Of The Lancet’s Task Force To Investigate COVID Origin (SN)

Revered scientific journal The Lancet has created a ‘task force’ to investigate the origins of the coronavirus that caused a global pandemic, yet it has decided to employ as it’s leader the very guy who funded the dangerous gain of function research at the Wuhan lab and subsequently allegedly ‘bullied’ other scientists into avoiding looking into the lab as a potential source of the outbreak. In the wake of renewed scrutiny of the lab leak hypothesis, the Lancet’s task force will reportedly “focus on analyzing data on all of the theories put forward on the origins of COVID, on the reasons why SARS-CoV-2 was able to break out of Wuhan and spread globally, and on the most plausible strategies to prevent future pandemics.”

It also states that “The Task Force will review thoroughly and objectively all publicly available evidence, particularly the peer-reviewed literature, and conduct interviews with key leaders in science, medicine, policy and civil society.” ‘Objectively’. Right. Dr Peter Daszak, who is heading up this task force, is perhaps the least suitable scientist on the planet to objectively analyse the data, given his track record. Daszak, as President of the EcoHealth Alliance, shovelled at least $600,000 to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in the past few years to play around with coronaviruses inside the lab through the now infamous ‘gain of function’ research. Daszak, who also works for the World Health Organisation, is on record admitting that he was involved with manipulating coronaviruses.

Daszak notes that “coronaviruses are pretty good… you can manipulate them in the lab pretty easily… the spiked proteins drive a lot about what happens. You can get the sequence you can build the protein, we work with Ralph Baric at UNC to do this, insert into the backbone of another virus and do some work in a lab.” No wonder then that Daszak as lead investigator for the WHO investigation determined within 3 hours of visiting the Wuhan lab in February 2021 that there was ‘nothing to see here’?

They’re stuck with each other, and with Daszak, PLA, CCP, Pentagon.

• Biden Says He’s ‘Very Confident’ In Fauci After 1000s Of Emails Revealed (Fox)

President Biden said he is “very confident” in Dr. Anthony Fauci amid Republican attacks on his chief medical adviser after the revelation of thousands of his emails from the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. The president was updating reporters as he departed Rehoboth Beach, Del., and when he walked out of the room, one shouted to ask if he is “still” confident in Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). Moments later, Biden popped his head back in the room and said, “Yes, I am very confident in Dr. Fauci.” Fauci’s emails, which are heavily redacted, have prompted Republicans to demand answers from the NIAID director about why he did not more aggressively pursue the theory that coronavirus could have leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China.

In one February 2020 email, he also said wearing a mask was “not really effective in keeping out the virus,” though the disease expert has already admitted he downplayed the effectiveness of masks in part so that supply would not run low for medical professionals. At the same time, Fox News has confirmed that State Department officials seeking to demand transparency from the Chinese government say they were explicitly told by colleagues not to explore the WIV’s gain-of-function research because it would bring unwelcomed attention to U.S. government funding of it. “We’ll let him speak for himself,” press secretary Jen Psaki said Thursday when asked about Fauci’s emails. “He’s been an undeniable asset in our country’s pandemic response,” Psaki said. “It’s obviously not that advantageous for me to relitigate the substance of emails from 17 months ago.”

“These Fauci emails are certainly revealing, so revealing, in fact, that the Washington Post isn’t posting them.”

• The Rise and Fall of Dr. Fauci (Howie Carr)

“Fauci Lied, People Died.” If you still occasionally run into some unrepentant Karen glaring at your unmasked following-the-science face, just scrawl the above words on your raggedy mask and wear it one final time. Karen won’t bother you anymore, because what can Karen say after the release of all the Fauci emails from last year? Dr. Anthony Fauci, a hack’s hack since 1968, is many things, but on the level is not one of them. Consider his response to a February 2020 email from a Cornell University professor of medicine who wrote him: “We think there is a possibility that the virus was released from a lab in Wuhan.” Fauci responded by forwarding the prescient warning to one of his minions: “Please handle.” A month later, a government-funded physicist sent Fauci a warning that China was sending out false data, among other things.

Once again, Fauci dismissively fobbed off this 911 call to an underling: “Too long for me to read.” Of course it was. You know how hard it is to concentrate on scientific data when you’re in the green room having the makeup applied for your third or fourth TV live shot of the day. Especially when you’re 80 years old. These Fauci emails are certainly revealing, so revealing, in fact, that the Washington Post isn’t posting them. Almost as revealing are the endless redactions, as if there’s some national security issue here when he’s been pitched by Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook. Fauci is still being defended by the Democrat operatives with press passes — the “serious people,” as ABC hack Jonathan Karl described his fellow cheerleaders last week. But the reality is, his upcoming so-called book, which at 80 pages is almost as short as he is (67 inches high), was pulled this week from the two biggest online booksellers, five months ahead of its publication date.

The publisher claimed that “Expect the Unexpected” had been “prematurely posted.” Yeah, right. At least Gov. Andrew Cuomo had his abysmal $5.1-million COVID tome published before he was busted as a total fraud. Fauci’s book got torched before it even reached the public. The publisher’s sell sheet described him as “one of the world’s greatest medical minds,” but now he ends up the same authorial class as O.J. Simpson and Clifford Irving — their faux books didn’t make it out of the gate either. Fauci joins the long list of great anti-Trump saviors who have been, you’ll pardon the expression, debunked. Like, say, Michael Avenatti, Michael Cohen, Omarosa, Mary Trump, Robert Mueller, Christine Blasey Ford, Julie Swetnick, Lt. Col. Vindman, etc.

“All Joe Biden’s handlers can do now is fade Dr. Fauci out, keep him off the cable channels, and hope the public can be distracted with some new nonsense.”

• What If the “Big Lie” Is the Big Lie? (Kunstler)

Maybe now that Dr. Tony Fauci has begun to spill the beans on his doings in service to the Wuhan virology lab, the phrase “conspiracy theory,” flogged by the media as jauntily and incessantly as by the soviet kommissars of yore, will have worn out its welcome. In a sane polity, Dr. Fauci would be cooked. He looks circumstantially like an epic villain of history, who promoted and funded dangerous research activities knowingly, which led to an international disaster that killed millions of people and destroyed countless livelihoods and households, perhaps even the whole global economy, when all is said and done — and he appears to have lied at every step along the way. As a practical matter, what is the “Joe Biden” admin going to do about him? Throw him under the bus? I don’t think they can at this point.

Dr. Fauci has come to represent not just the falsehoods employed around the Covid-19 fiasco but more generally the long campaign against truth itself by a grossly illiberal Jacobin Democratic Party seemingly out to punish and destroy Western Civ. Whether the Covid-19 pandemic was an overt tactic in that campaign, or just the result of Dr. Fauci’s catastrophic bad judgment, remains to be revealed. But at least half the country will conclude that there’s some connection between the terrible losses suffered in the pandemic year and the political bullshit they were force-fed in the four-year effort to defenestrate Donald Trump. All Joe Biden’s handlers can do now is fade Dr. Fauci out, keep him off the cable channels, and hope the public can be distracted with some new nonsense. You also have good reason to doubt that Merrick Garland will do anything but look the other way and whistle.

The downfall of Dr. Fauci is a watershed moment. There were so many more authorities caught lying over the past five years, but who got off scot-free — Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, James Comey (actually, the whole FBI and DOJ E-suites), John Brennan, James Clapper, Robert Mueller, Andrew Weissman, Adam Schiff, and the editors and producers of the news media, plus the execs of social media — who not only disabled the truth at every opportunity, but just about destroyed the public’s grip on reality.

The result has been an utter collapse of authority in this land, so that now nobody who runs anything is credible, from the current pitiful president of the USA, to most elected and appointed officials, judges, corporate CEOs, college deans and presidents, and now “The Science” itself. Just remember: there is still a sizable faction in America of people who are deeply interested in ascertaining the truth about a lot of things. They are aiming to get at it, too, for example, the truth about the 2020 election. Maybe now you can begin to see why this is important.

Boondoggle.

• Biden Rejects New Republican Infrastructure Offer (R.)

President Joe Biden and Republicans entered the weekend sharply at odds over how to craft an infrastructure deal that could satisfy their camps, imperiling the odds of a bipartisan deal. Democrat Biden shot down a new proposal from the main Republican negotiator on infrastructure, Senator Shelley Moore Capito, that increased spending by about $50 billion over their last offer, the White House said. Biden rejected the offer, saying it “did not meet his objectives to grow the economy, tackle the climate crisis, and create new jobs.” Republicans had previously offered roughly $257 billion in new spending, short of the $2.25 trillion Biden initially offered and suggested he might bring down to as low as $1 trillion.

And while the two sides agreed to speak again on Monday, the White House also strongly signaled that they may seek a path forward with other Republican lawmakers or even with only Democrats. “He indicated to Senator Capito that he would continue to engage a number of Senators in both parties in the hopes of achieving a more substantial package,” White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki said in a statement. Up until now, Capito has been Biden’s primary negotiating partner. Monday’s conversation will be their third in a week. Biden is eager to show that he made a good-faith effort at a bipartisan deal, sources said, but he risks creating division among Democrats, some who believe he is giving up too much to Republicans. Democrats hold narrow majorities in both the House of Representatives and Senate.

This guy likes the arms a bit too much.

• US Judge Overturns California’s Ban On Assault Weapons (AP)

A federal judge Friday overturned California’s three-decade-old ban on assault weapons, ruling that it violates the constitutional right to bear arms. U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez of San Diego ruled that the state’s definition of illegal military-style rifles unlawfully deprives law-abiding Californians of weapons commonly allowed in most other states and by the U.S. Supreme Court. “Under no level of heightened scrutiny can the law survive,” Benitez said. He issued a permanent injunction against enforcement of the law but stayed it for 30 days to give state Attorney General Rob Bonta time to appeal. Gov. Gavin Newsom condemned the decision, calling it “a direct threat to public safety and the lives of innocent Californians, period.”

In his 94-page ruling, the judge spoke favorably of modern weapons, said they were overwhelmingly used for legal reasons. “Like the Swiss Army knife, the popular AR-15 rifle is a perfect combination of home defense weapon and homeland defense equipment. Good for both home and battle,” the judge said in his ruling’s introduction. That comparison “completely undermines the credibility of this decision and is a slap in the face to the families who’ve lost loved ones to this weapon,” Newsom said in a statement. “We’re not backing down from this fight, and we’ll continue pushing for common sense gun laws that will save lives.”

“Are you watching, America?”

• Facebook Faces Antitrust Investigation in EU, UK (HE)

The United Kingdom and European Union opened formal antitrust investigations into Facebook’s classified-ads service, Marketplace. Both the European Commission and the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority said Friday they are investigating whether Facebook revamps data gathered from advertisers who buy ads in order to give illegal advantages to its own services, the Wall Street Journal reports. The cases look specifically at how Facebook uses the data it collects, and whether that would put the company at an advantage in the promotion of its own services in neighboring markets. The U.K. is also investigating whether Facebook uses advertiser data to give similar advantages to its online-dating service. “In today’s digital economy, data should not be used in ways that distort competition,” said Margrethe Vestager, the EU’s antitrust chief.

A Facebook spokesman said its services will “continue to cooperate fully with the investigations to demonstrate that they are without merit.” Though the EU has been informally investigating the Big Tech giant for some time, if the Commission or the U.K.’s CMA finds evidence of any wrongdoing, they can then file formal charges. The new cases are part of a new series of antitrust enforcements throughout Europe. The European Commission filed formal charges against Apple last month for abusing its control over the distribution of music-streaming apps, including Spotify. In November, the EU also filed formal charges against Amazon for using nonpublic data gathered from third-party sellers to unfairly compete against them. Are you watching, America?

“We don’t have any issues with the U.S. But it has an issue with us..”

• ‘Over Confident’ US Risks Going Down Same Path As Soviet Union – Putin (EN)

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday accused Europe and the U.S. of hypocrisy over criticism of the response to anti-government protests in Russia and Belarus and warned that America was at risk of following the path of the Soviet Union. In a speech at an economic forum in St. Petersburg, Putin discussed Russia’s relations with the U.S. ahead of a meeting with President Joe Biden, describing them as “at an extremely low level now.” He criticised sanctions against Russia as well as allegations that Moscow interfered in the U.S. election and said that Washington and Europe had double standards in criticising the police crackdown against protesters in Moscow and Belarus in recent months. “We don’t have any issues with the U.S. But it has an issue with us,” he said.

“It wants to contain our development and publicly talks about it. Economic restrictions and attempts to influence our country’s domestic politics, relying on forces they consider their allies inside Russia, stem from that.” Ties between Russia and the U.S. have sunk to post-Cold War lows over Moscow’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, accusations of Russian interference in elections, and cyberattacks that U.S. officials allege had Russian origins. Putin reiterated that Russia rejects accusations of interfering in U.S. presidential elections, and he spoke critically of the U.S. response to the Capitol attack, which took place as Congress prepared to certify that Biden had defeated then-President Donald Trump in November.

“They weren’t just a crowd of robbers and rioters. Those people had come with political demands,” he said. Putin pointed out that the heavy charges against hundreds of participants in the attack were filed even as the U.S. and its allies strongly criticized Belarus’ crackdown on anti-government protests. He charged that even as the West has criticized Russian authorities for a harsh response to anti-Kremlin demonstrations, protesters in Europe have faced an even tougher police response, with some shot in the eye by what he mockingly called “democratic rubber bullets.” Later, during a call with journalists, Putin criticised the United States as being overconfident and drew a parallel with the Soviet Union.

“You know what the problem is? I will tell you as a former citizen of the former Soviet Union. What is the problem of empires — they think that they are so powerful that they can afford small errors and mistakes,” he said. “But the number of problems is growing. There comes a time when they can no longer be dealt with. And the United States, with a confident gait, a firm step, is going straight along the path of the Soviet Union.”

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Debt Rattle June 4 2021

Jun 042021

June 4, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:04 am Finance Tagged with: Daszak, DRASTIC, Fauci, fungus, gold, ivermectin, lab leak, monoclonal, Nord Stream 2, Redfield, Wuhan, Yeadon 61 Responses »

Pieter Bruegel the Elder Dulle Griet, also known as Mad Meg 1563

• Inside the Fight to Uncover COVID-19’s Origins (Vanity Fair)

• How Amateur Sleuths Broke the Wuhan Lab Story and Embarrassed the Media (NW)

• Fauci Kept Funding Daszak’s Experiments after Trump Canceled Grant (NF)

• Fauci Defends China, Doubles Down On Animal Origins Of Covid (DM)

• Ex-CDC Director Threatened For Saying Covid-19 Likely Originated In A Lab (DM)

• Where’s The Tar and Feathers? (Denninger)

• Covid-19 Cases Hit Lowest Point In US Since Pandemic Began (Axios)

• EU Purchases Its First Monoclonal Antibodies Cocktail For Covid-19 (RT)

• The Netherlands Used Children As A Weapon In The Fight Against Corona (AD)

• Delhi Reports Over 1,000 Cases Of ‘Black Fungus’ Amid Shortage Of Drugs (RT)

• Nord Stream 2 To Cost Kiev $3 Billion In Transit Fees A Year – Zelensky (RT)

• Russia’s $186 Billion Sovereign Wealth Fund Dumps All Dollar Assets (ZH)

When both Vanity Fair and Newsweek come out with in-depth articles about the very same topic (in this case how the DRASTIC group reported the lab leak theory), at the very same moment, that makes me nervous.

What also makes me nervous is the one-dimensional attention for Fauci. Much as I dislike the man, it starts to feel as if others are hiding behind him.

“Ivermectin is an off-patent drug that is one of the most widely used drugs in the world, and we know it is able to reduce Covid-19 symptoms at any stage of the disease by about 90%, so there is no need for vaccines.”

– Michael Yeadon, former CSO of Pfizer

Scary if true… pic.twitter.com/YIxqCQuo0Z

— Wittgenstein (@wittgenstein78) June 3, 2021

Kory

Somber (about Ivermectin)… pic.twitter.com/1BBtDA0K2q

— Wittgenstein (@wittgenstein78) June 3, 2021

“The idea of a lab leak first came to NSC officials not from hawkish Trumpists but from Chinese social media users..”

• Inside the Fight to Uncover COVID-19’s Origins (Vanity Fair)

The idea of a lab leak first came to NSC officials not from hawkish Trumpists but from Chinese social media users, who began sharing their suspicions as early as January 2020. Then, in February, a research paper coauthored by two Chinese scientists, based at separate Wuhan universities, appeared online as a preprint. It tackled a fundamental question: How did a novel bat coronavirus get to a major metropolis of 11 million people in central China, in the dead of winter when most bats were hibernating, and turn a market where bats weren’t sold into the epicenter of an outbreak? The paper offered an answer: “We screened the area around the seafood market and identified two laboratories conducting research on bat coronavirus.”

The first was the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention, which sat just 280 meters from the Huanan market and had been known to collect hundreds of bat samples. The second, the researchers wrote, was the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The paper came to a staggeringly blunt conclusion about COVID-19: “the killer coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan…. Regulations may be taken to relocate these laboratories far away from city center and other densely populated places.” Almost as soon as the paper appeared on the internet, it disappeared, but not before U.S. government officials took note.

By then, Matthew Pottinger had approved a COVID-19 origins team, run by the NSC directorate that oversaw issues related to weapons of mass destruction. A longtime Asia expert and former journalist, Pottinger purposefully kept the team small, because there were so many people within the government “wholly discounting the possibility of a lab leak, who were predisposed that it was impossible,” said Pottinger. In addition, many leading experts had either received or approved funding for gain-of-function research. Their “conflicted” status, said Pottinger, “played a profound role in muddying the waters and contaminating the shot at having an impartial inquiry.”

The bat lady returns.

• How Amateur Sleuths Broke the Wuhan Lab Story and Embarrassed the Media (NW)

If there is a moment when the DRASTIC team coalesced into something more than its disparate parts, it would be this thread. In real time, for all the world to see, they worked through the data, tested various hypotheses, corrected each other, and scored some direct hits. The key facts quickly came together. The genetic sequence for RaTG13 perfectly matched a small piece of genetic code posted as part of a paper written by Shi Zhengli years earlier, but never mentioned again. The code came from a virus the WIV had found in a Yunnan bat. Connecting key details in the two papers with old news stories, the DRASTIC team determined that RaTG13 had come from a mineshaft in Mojiang County, in Yunnan Province, where six men shoveling bat guano in 2012 had developed pneumonia. Three of them died.

DRASTIC wondered if that event marked the first cases of human beings being infected with a precursor of SARS-CoV-2—perhaps RaTG13 or something like it. In a profile in Scientific American, Shi Zhengli acknowledged working in a mineshaft in Mojiang County where miners had died. But she avoided connecting it to RaTG13 (an omission she had made in her scientific papers as well), claiming that a fungus in the cave had killed the miners.

[..] One of those scientists was Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard who recognized the value of the information DRASTIC was producing and began to interpret it for scientists and nonscientists alike in crisp explainers on Twitter that made her a star science communicator. Chan acknowledged the group’s accomplishments in a long thread on Twitter. “Without the work done by the DRASTIC team, I don’t really know where we would be today with the origins of covid-19,” she wrote, adding, “The work of these outsiders…has had a measurable impact on the scientific discourse.” That scientific discourse jumped tracks on January 6, 2021, when the University of Washington virologist Jesse Bloom, one of the country’s most respected COVID-19 researchers, became the first major scientific figure to publicly legitimize DRASTIC’s contributions.

“Yes, I follow the work,” he tweeted, sending tremors through the scientific establishment. “I don’t agree [with] all of it, but some parts seem important & correct.” Bloom singled out Mona Rahalkar’s paper on the Mojiang mine, then added that in the early days of the pandemic, “I thought lab escape very unlikely. Based on subsequent work, I now say quite plausible.” Other scientists pressured Bloom to reconsider, but he held his ground, and the wall of silence began to crumble. In May, 17 scientists from Harvard, Yale, MIT, Stanford, and other leading institutions, including Chan, joined Bloom in a letter in Science calling for a thorough investigation of the Wuhan lab. On nearly the same day, The Seeker struck again. Visiting a database hosted by China’s Ministry of Science and Technology, he searched for all theses supervised by Shi Zhengli. Boom. Three hits. “I got it on my first try,” he says. “Not sure why no one else thought of this before, but I guess no one was looking.”

If there had been any remaining doubt about the WIV’s pattern of deception, these new theses put it to rest. They indicated that the WIV researchers had never believed a fungus had killed the Mojiang miners, contradicting Shi’s remarks in Scientific American and elsewhere. In fact, WIV researchers had been so concerned about a new SARS-like outbreak that they’d tested the blood of neighboring villagers for other cases. And they had known the genetic sequences for the eight other SARS-like viruses from the mine—which could have helped researchers to understand more about SARS-CoV-2 in the early days —long before the pandemic started, and had kept the information to themselves, until DRASTIC called them out.

THIS should be investigated. Fauci as a state within a state.

• Fauci Kept Funding Daszak’s Experiments after Trump Canceled Grant (NF)

Peter Daszak, who studied controversial “gain of function” experiments on coronavirus elements in Wuhan, received $7.5 million from Anthony Fauci after Trump cancelled his grant. Last April, reports emerged that the EcoHealth Alliance, an organization run by one Peter Daszak, was involved in funding and collaborating with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where researchers were examining coronaviruses extremely similar to the one behind the COVID-19 outbreak, and allegedly engaging in “gain of function” research relating to them. In an April 17th press conference, President Trump confirmed that a grant worth around $3.7 million since 2015 given to Daszak’s group by the National Institute for Health would be ended “very quickly” following the reports.

Only one week later on April 24th, all future funding for the EHA was cut, and they were ordered to stop spending the $369,819 remaining from its 2020 grant. “At this time, NIH does not believe that the current project outcomes align with the program goals and agency priorities,” Michael Lauer, the agency’s deputy director for extramural research, wrote in a letter to EcoHealth Alliance officials. From within the treasure trove of 3,200 pages of emails obtained from Anthony Fauci, one email can be found from Daszak, who thanked Fauci for dismissing the lab leak theory as being simply conspiratorial the day after President Trump announced the funding would be cut.

[..] Only a few months later in August, Fauci, who along with being put in charge of America’s response to COVID-19, is the director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, which is part of the NIH, helped confirm that Daszak’s organization would receive a new grant of $7.5 million to study coronaviruses as part of a new network. The CREID network, which contains 11 institutions including the EHA, “coincidentally” will continue to study the emergence of coronaviruses in Southeast Asia. Fauci said that the network will help “enable early warnings of emerging diseases wherever they occur, which will be critical to rapid responses,” while Daszak boasted that they will be working in rural hospitals, according to a statement, “in remote parts of Malaysia and Thailand to get to the front line of where the next pandemic is going to start.”

Video of Anthony Fauci announcing “NIH Lifts Funding Pause on Gain-Of-Function Research” at a NIAID Advisory Council meeting on January 29, 2018.

Video of Anthony Fauci announcing "NIH Lifts Funding Pause on Gain-Of-Function Research" at a NIAID Advisory Council meeting on January 29, 2018.
Source: https://t.co/WVwn6GRYqK pic.twitter.com/ZxbTPbi6ZU

— Wittgenstein (@wittgenstein78) June 3, 2021

That train has passed.

• Fauci Defends China, Doubles Down On Animal Origins Of Covid (DM)

Dr. Anthony Fauci doubled down on claims that the coronavirus likely originated from an animal then was transmitted to humans in a Thursday morning interview on CNN, despite increasing speculation that it leaked from a China lab. Fauci, who served under former President Trump and President Joe Biden, continues to fight the idea that he downplayed theories that the virus originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology after a trove of emails exchange at the beginning of the pandemic revealed he was warned about a potential lab leak. ‘I have always said and will say today to you … that I still believe the most likely origin is from an animal species to a human,’ Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said Thursday on CNN.

Although he said he’s keeping an open mind about the possibility of a lab leak, Fauci said it was ‘far-fetched’ to think the Chinese would kill their own people. ‘The idea, I think, is quite far-fetched that the Chinese deliberately engineered something so that they could kill themselves, as well as other people. I think that’s a bit far out.’ In a separate Thursday morning interview on MSNBC, Fauci said they want to definitively find the cause of the coronavirus pandemic – whatever that origin is – but pointing the finger at China isn’t going to help. ‘It’s in China’s interest to find out exactly what it is,’ Fauci said. ‘Obviously, you want openness and cooperation. One of the ways to get it is not to be accusatory. Try to get a forensic, scientific and investigational approach. I think the accusatory part about it is only going to make (China) pull back more.’

Fauci was asked during the MSNBC interview if he thought it was in China’s best interest to hide information if the origin was a lab leak or if it was designing a weapon. He sidestepped, saying no matter what he says, ‘it will be taken completely out of context,’ which he said has already happened after more than 3,200 of his emails from January to June 2020 were obtained and published by Buzzfeed on Tuesday. The emails showed leading virus experts warned him COVID-19 may have been created in a lab while he publicly played such claims down.

GoF

OMG. Dr Fauci told Congress he hadn’t funded Gain of Function research. ⁦@BrianOSheaSPI⁩ found what appears to be Dr Ralph Baric’s CV. Ten million from Dr Fauci. Gain of function research. Bat lady. Human infections. Bill Gates. ⁦@RandPaul⁩ ⁦@TuckerCarlson⁩ pic.twitter.com/MMzSvVb0Dr

— Dr Naomi Wolf (@naomirwolf) June 3, 2021

“The former director of the Centers for Disease Control received death threats from fellow scientists..”

• Ex-CDC Director Threatened For Saying Covid-19 Likely Originated In A Lab (DM)

The former director of the Centers for Disease Control received death threats from fellow scientists after he said during a TV interview that he believed COVID-19 originated in a lab, according to an interview released Thursday. Robert Redfield, who served as the CDC director under Donald Trump when the pandemic began, told CNN on March 26 that he thought the most likely ‘etiology of this pathogen in Wuhan was from a laboratory – you know, escaped.’ He said he wasn’t insinuating that there was ill intent, but that was his opinion. After that 10-second sound bite, he told Vanity Fair he was ‘threatened and ostracized because I proposed another hypothesis.’ At the time, the Wuhan lab leak was widely considered a ‘fringe theory’ at best, in favor of transmission from an animal to a human.

The Vanity Fair article said ‘death threats flooded his inbox’ from strangers who said he was being racist to prominent scientists, even some he considered friends. One told him to ‘wither and die,’ Vanity Fair reported. ‘I expected it from politicians. I didn’t expect it from science,’ Redfield said. Stephen Goldstein, an evolutionary virologist at the University of Utah, wrote an opinion piece on Webpagetoday on April 5 shooting down Redfield’s assertions on CNN. ‘Questions are undoubtedly going to persist about the origin of SARS-CoV-2 until, and if, a definitive answer is uncovered (and perhaps beyond),’ Goldstein wrote. ‘Until then, it’s imperative that leaders in science, public health, and government continue to call for rigorous study and stick to the science of viral evolution and viral ecology in their public commentary. ‘One of the fundamental principles of a life in science is to admit what you don’t know, and never be afraid to look it up. That’s where Redfield falls short, unfortunately on a big stage.’

[..] The magazine outlined the first moments Redfield heard about a mysterious new pneumonia affecting people in a Wuhan market from Dr. George Fu Gao, head of the Chinese CDC, on January 3, 2020. Redfield told Vanity Fair that he thought it was odd that family clusters were getting sick, and Gao later told Redfield that many cases had nothing to do with the market. That’s when it became apparent the virus was jumping from person to person, and Redfield told Vanity Fair he immediately thought of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. He wanted to send researchers to the facility to rule it out, but the Chinese didn’t allow it, Vanity Fair reported. ‘A team could rule it out as a source of the outbreak in just a few weeks, by testing researchers there for antibodies,’ according to Vanity Fair.

“All you need is for an entire profession involved in some very dangerous research to realize that they ****ed up and believe that through their ****up one percent or more of the population in their nation is about to die..”

• Where’s The Tar and Feathers? (Denninger)

The so-called “MSM” isn’t even debating these parts of the email dump — they’re playing Ostrich instead, hoping they can bury it by “touting” all the “pressure” that was seen in the trove while ignoring that the archive damns not one man but entire professions including the vaccine/pharma connection. Yes, there is even evidence that the intentional refusal to look at and use existing drugs and the “decision” on how they were going to deal with this goes back that far, before the first American died. Bluntly put these people didn’t just ignore the evidence that accumulated by the summer months they literally ignored it all the way back to the start and thus it can be reasonably argued they are personally responsible for all of the deaths. If you want to know how you generate international hysteria you don’t need some cabal pulling a puppet string.

All you need is for an entire profession involved in some very dangerous research to realize that they ****ed up and believe that through their ****up one percent or more of the population in their nation is about to die with nothing they can do about it, and if it gets pinned on them as it should since they caused it every one of them deserves to be swinging from a rope. Oh, incidentally, Fauci also knew that masks in the general population were worthless. He pointed this out directly; that the virus was too small and would go right though it. His own words folks, as I’ve repeatedly pointed out but cannot say as “it’s against the consensus of experts”, according to Google, Facebook, Twitter and others, without being de-monetized, having videos pulled and risking being banhammered.

Now we know factually that Fauci stated this himself, so now the media and other “tech companies” are enforcing a position that the so-called “expert” generated with an intentional lie and they’ve maintained and forced that intentional lie for a year and are continuing to do so to this day. Now you know how the hysteria, cover-ups and outright lying happened. Now contaminate that with pharma money and you get what we’re doing now.

This reads like a vaccine ad. “..the virus really is under control, nationwide and in every state, thanks almost entirely to the vaccines.”

But remember this graph, and remember they refused to use HCQ and ivermectin.

• Covid-19 Cases Hit Lowest Point In US Since Pandemic Began (Axios)

The U.S. has brought new coronavirus infections down to the lowest level since March 2020, when the pandemic began. Nearly every week for the past 56 weeks, Axios has tracked the change — more often than not, the increase — in new COVID-19 infections. Those case counts are now so low, the virus is so well contained, that this will be our final weekly map. The U.S. averaged roughly 16,500 new cases per day over the past week, a 30% improvement over the week before. New cases declined in 43 states and held steady in the other seven. The official case counts haven’t been this low since Americans went into lockdown in March last year — when the pandemic was still new, no one knew how long this would go on, and inadequate testing meant that cases were undercounted.

Overall, roughly 33 million Americans — about 10% of the population — have tested positive for COVID-19. About 595,000 people have died from the virus in the U.S., making it deadlier for Americans than the past 80 years of wars and other armed military conflicts combined, including World War II. The U.S. largely failed to contain the virus until the vaccines arrived. Cities and businesses began shutting down last March. From there, the virus rolled into a second wave last summer, when cases climbed to over 65,000 per day, on average, and hospitals in many parts of the country said they were overwhelmed. That failure was then eclipsed in the winter, when hundreds of thousands of people per day were contracting the virus and deaths climbed over 3,000 per day for about a month.

But now, the virus really is under control, nationwide and in every state, thanks almost entirely to the vaccines. Just over half of American adults are now fully vaccinated, according to the CDC. Cases and deaths are still soaring around the world, especially in the developing world, and the Biden administration is facing consistently mounting pressure to export more vaccines, now that the U.S. has contained the virus. The U.S. was never able to control the virus without vaccines, and it still can’t. The risk is still about as high as it’s ever been for unvaccinated people, as the Washington Post recently reported. An average of about 500 Americans per day are still dying from COVID-19, almost all of them unvaccinated.

There will still be some localized outbreaks in the U.S., especially in areas where relatively few people are vaccinated. But they will likely be small, and vaccinated people will be protected. Over time, the immunity from vaccines will likely wane, which, together with new variants of the virus, will likely require booster shots to stay ahead of another outbreak. For now, though, the U.S. has finally gotten the virus down to a level that just about every expert agrees is safe. Fewer than 20,000 cases per day, spread across the U.S. population of 331.5 million people, is a relatively low number of cases, and that number continues to improve across the board.

Why not simply get ivermectin? Too cheap?

• EU Purchases Its First Monoclonal Antibodies Cocktail For Covid-19 (RT)

The European Union has announced the purchase of 55,000 doses of the Roche-Regeneron Covid-19 drug, marking its first foray into potential treatments involving a cocktail of monoclonal antibodies. The EU announced it secured the shipment of the doses on Wednesday, as the bloc seeks to expand its portfolio of drugs and explores potentially promising treatments that can help in the fight against the virus. The deal was agreed earlier this year but the details were only confirmed on Thursday by an EU spokesperson, who said 55,000 doses of the single-shot treatment had been purchased. Roche stated that the company’s contract will cover 37 countries in Europe, including the UK and other non-EU nations. The cost of the shipment has not been made public by the EU or the pharmaceutical companies.

While the deal agreed between the companies and the EU is for the drug’s infusion version, there is also a shot that has been tested and developed. The Roche-Regeneron treatment is still awaiting formal approval from the European Medicines Agency (EMA) before the shipment is dispatched, with formal authorization expected between August and October 2021. The EMA is currently in the process of conducting a rolling review of preliminary data. The Roche-Regeneron Covid-19 treatment has already been granted emergency US approval for patients with mild to moderate symptoms, with Washington ordering 1.5 million doses. The monoclonal antibodies treatment seeks to replicate or boost the body’s natural immune response, helping to support Covid-19 patients who are at high risk of developing severe disease.

Google translate. Holland closed schools not to protect children, but to make parents stay home. Think about how crazy that is.

• The Netherlands Used Children As A Weapon In The Fight Against Corona (AD)

Due to the Dutch corona policy to close schools and thus keep parents at home, children have been used as a means to fight the epidemic. Our cabinet receives that hard slap on the fingers today in the annual worldwide children’s rights report, the KidsRights Index. According to the makers, the Netherlands has set a very bad example internationally, by not even trying to keep schools open safely. With all the consequences that entails for the mental health of our youth. The corona guidelines from the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child have also been neglected. Youth has not been given any priority in Dutch policy, it sounds.

Statements by corona minister Hugo de Jonge, dated mid-December 2020, are presented as proof. Then De Jonge indeed mentioned on television as the reason why the cabinet decided to close the schools, that parents with children sitting at home will therefore start working from home more quickly. When parents take their children to school, that is another moment of contact, De Jonge explained at the time. “And we also learned from the first wave, when the schools were also closed, that the fact that primary education does not provide physical education also ensures that parents adhere better to another advice, namely: work from home as much as possible. ”, said the minister at the time.

“Children’s rights have been put in second place by the cabinet during corona time,” Marc Dullaert, founder of the international children’s rights organization KidsRights, now told this site. “They were the ankle bracelet for parents. These had to be kept at home in order to effectively fight the epidemic. At the expense of their mental health.” In the first phase, when everyone was looking for the right approach, this was understandable according to Dullaert. ,,But De Jonge’s statements came at a time when it was really no longer acceptable, in the second phase. And other countries – such as Belgium and Sweden – have done everything they can to keep the schools open, so there were alternatives on the table.”

“..it has a fatality rate of around 54%..”

• Delhi Reports Over 1,000 Cases Of ‘Black Fungus’ Amid Shortage Of Drugs (RT)

The number of cases of so-called black fungus, or mucormycosis, has almost doubled in Delhi over the past seven days, reaching 1,044 infections, the local health minister has said. The disease has particularly affected India’s Covid patients. A further 440 people have been diagnosed in the city since last week, when the number of afflicted patients stood at 600. Health minister Satyendra Jain said on Thursday that 89 people had succumbed to the disease in Delhi to date, while 92 others had recovered. The shortage of drugs to treat mucormycosis still remained a problem for the city of 29 million, the minister added. Cases of black fungus have been on the rise in India during the harsh second wave of the coronavirus pandemic.

As of May 25, the country saw 11,700 infections, which prompted several states to declare mucormycosis an epidemic. It also soon became clear that the health authorities didn’t have sufficient quantities of the antifungal drug Amphotericin B for the number of patients. Capitalizing on the weakened immune system in Covid sufferers, the fungi most commonly enter the human body through the nose and mouth before spreading to the lungs, heart, or brain. Its symptoms include facial swelling and black lesions – hence its name – and it has a fatality rate of around 54%. The spike in black fungus incidences among Indian coronavirus patients has been largely linked to the steroids and anti-inflammatory drugs prescribed during their treatment for Covid-19.

The US did this to Ukraine.

• Nord Stream 2 To Cost Kiev $3 Billion In Transit Fees A Year – Zelensky (RT)

The completion of the controversial Nord Stream 2 project will deprive Ukraine of about $3 billion annually, with the country’s pipelines no longer necessary for the transportation of Russian gas to Western Europe. That’s according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who told a delegation from the US Congress that America should do what it can to prevent Nord Stream 2 from being completed. Once finished, the pipeline will connect Germany directly to Russia via the Baltic Sea. It aims to protect Berlin’s energy security and make the process less reliant on third countries transiting gas, thereby lowering the price. As things stand, according to Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak, around 100km remains to be completed, which should be achieved by the end of 2021.

“Only the United States and the administration of President Joe Biden can prevent the completion and commissioning of Nord Stream 2,” Zelensky explained. “Nord Stream 2 will disconnect Ukraine from gas supplies, which means ‘disconnecting’ us from at least $3 billion a year… We will have nothing to pay for the Ukrainian Army.” According to the Ukrainian leader, without this money, the country will no longer have a “powerful and well-supplied army” to continue “defending Europe and European values.” The construction of Nord Stream 2 has been significantly hindered by US sanctions, with Washington imposing numerous packages of measures against companies involved in the building, maintenance, insurance, and certification of the project. The American authorities have claimed that its completion would “undermine Europe’s overall energy security and stability.” However, some have accused the Americans of opposing the pipeline for economic reasons, as the country looks to increase its exports of liquefied natural gas to the continent.

They’ll move into gold.

• Russia’s $186 Billion Sovereign Wealth Fund Dumps All Dollar Assets (ZH)

Following a series of corporate cyberattacks that American intelligence agencies have blamed on Russian actors, Russia’s sovereign wealth fund (officially the National Wellbeing Fund) has decided to dump all of its dollars and dollar-denominated assets in favor of those denominated in euros, yuan – or simply buying precious metals like gold, which Russia’s central bank has increasingly favored for its own reserves. Finance Minister Anton Siluanov made the announcement Thursday morning at the annual St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. “We can make this change rather quickly, within a month,” Siluanov told reporters Thursday.

He explained that the Kremlin is moving to reduce exposure to US assets as President Biden threatens more economic sanctions against Russia following the latest ransomware attacks. The transfer will affect $119 billion in liquid assets, Bloomberg reported, but the sales will largely be executed through the Russian Central bank and its massive reserves, limiting the market impact and reducing visibility on what exactly the sovereign wealth fund will be buying. “The central bank can make these changes to the Wellbeing Fund without resorting to market operations,” said Sofya Donets, economist at Renaissance Capital in Moscow. “This in some sense a technical thing.”

Jordan Rochester, currency strategist at Nomura International PLC, said, “This is a transfer of euros from the central bank to the wealth fund, we’ll then see the central bank the holder of the USDs and it’s up to them to manage it. No initial market impact.” The news isn’t a complete surprise: The Bank of Russia, Russia’s central bank, has steadily reduced its dollar holdings over the last few years amid increasing sanctions pressure from the US and Europe. That trend continued through President Trump’s term. Just a few days ago, we reported that the Russian parliament had just authorized the sovereign wealth fund to buy gold through the central bank. However, the central bank reports its holdings with a six-month lag, making it impossible to determine its current holdings.

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Brilliant Ali on how he wants to be remembered.

Muhammad Ali was asked by David Frost how he would like to be remembered. pic.twitter.com/PqcrfomtZw

— Prof. Frank McDonough (@FXMC1957) June 3, 2021

The red train, Landwasserviadukt, Switzerland. Drone photo by Sebastianmzh

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Debt Rattle June 3 2021

Jun 032021

June 3, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:50 am Finance Tagged with: Bill Gates, Ellsberg, Espionage Act, Fauci, FOIA, myocarditis, nukes, Olympics, Tucker, Wuhan, yuan 53 Responses »

Vincent van Gogh Avenue of Poplars at Sunset 1884

• Tucker Carlson Levels Fauci After FOIA Emails Connect The Dots (ZH)

• Fauci’s Upcoming Book Scrubbed On Amazon, Barnes & Noble Amid Backlash (JTN)

• Wuhan Lab Chief To NIH Conference: ‘No Regulation’ On Virus Manipulation (NP)

• Israel: Likely Link Between Pfizer Vaccine And Myocarditis In Young Males (RT)

• Bill Gates, Warren Buffett To Build New Kind Of Nuclear Reactor In Wyoming (R.)

• Why The US Isn’t Going To Nuke Anyone From Orbit Anytime Soon (RT)

• The New Domestic War on Terror Has Already Begun (Greenwald)

• Daniel Ellsberg Wants The US To Prosecute Him Under The Espionage Act (IC)

• ‘Dying for an iPhone’ (Chris Hedges)

• China Rushes To Pull Back The Yuan From A Three-Year High (CNBC)

• Olympics Will Go Ahead, Says Tokyo Games Chief (G.)

Tucker segment on Fauci's emails, which show his implication in the gain-of-function research that may have led to covid-19:

"From the beginning, Fauci was worried that the public might conclude covid had originated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology."pic.twitter.com/bihrUjaUp4

— NANCY (@9NewsNancy) June 3, 2021

Tucker Berenson

An anagram for Dr Anthony Fauci is China Fraud Tony

“Fauci supported the grotesque and dangerous experiments that appeared to have made COVID possible.”

• Tucker Carlson Levels Fauci After FOIA Emails Connect The Dots (ZH)

Fox News’ Tucker Carlson ripped “the utter fraudulence of Tony Fauci” Wednesday night, after BuzzFeed and the Washington Post obtained thousands of pages of emails through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, revealing that the nation’s top virologist was telling the public one thing, while furiously working on damage control and narrative-shaping as the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded. According to Carlson, Americans assumed “that the man in charge of protecting the US from COVID must be rational and impressive,” adding “We also assumed he must be honest. But we were wrong.

“It soon became clear that Tony Fauci was just another sleazy federal bureaucrat – deeply political and often dishonest. More shocking than that we then learned that Fauci himself was implicated in the very pandemic he’d been charged with fighting.” “Fauci supported the grotesque and dangerous experiments that appeared to have made COVID possible.” -Tucker Carlson. Fauci’s emails collectively show that “from the beginning, Tony Fauci was worried that the public might conclude COVID had originated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” “Why would he be concerned that Americans would conclude that?” Tucker asked. “Possibly because Tony Fauci knew that he had funded gain-of-function experiments at that very same laboratory.”

“The emails prove that Fauci lied about this under oath,” said Tucker, who highlighted an email from scientist Christian G. Anderson to Fauci, saying that he and his fellow scientists felt the virus looked ‘potentially’ engineered, and that members of his team “all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.” Fauci then sent an urgent email to his deputy – Hugh Auchincloss – with the subject “IMPORTANT,” and which read “Hugh, it is essential that we speak this AM. Keep your cell phone on … You will have tasks today that must be done.”

Tucker Fauci

Tucker Carlson: "Tony Fauci is no longer a scientist, assuming he ever was one. Tony Fauci is a figure of religious veneration. He is Jesus for people who don't believe in God." pic.twitter.com/MlqgxfzHar

— Scott Morefield (@SKMorefield) June 3, 2021

Wonder why. Can’t be the negative publicity, there hasn’t been enough of that.

• Fauci’s Upcoming Book Scrubbed On Amazon, Barnes & Noble Amid Backlash (JTN)

White House coronavirus adviser and long-time U.S. infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci’s upcoming book has been scrubbed from and altered on online listings, amid criticism that he is profiting from the deadly COVID-19 pandemic. The book, “Expect the Unexpected,” was earlier pegged for a November release, according to its Amazon listing. As of Wednesday morning, the book’s listing had been entirely scrubbed from Amazon. However, a cached version of the listing, still displayed the book’s promotional description and preorder status. A cached website also shows the book’s listing on Barnes & Noble’s website, though by Wednesday morning that listing was no longer live anymore. The book appeared to still be available for preorder on some lesser known vendors such as Booktopia.

The scrubbing of the book comes after backlash from critics who accused Fauci of profiting off of the deadly pandemic the U.S. response to which he has overseen. Among those criticizing Fauci is Fox News Channel contributor Joe Concha, who compared him to New York Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo signing a seven-figure book deal about his efforts during the pandemic, which resulted in a high number of death among assisted-living residents. “If you look at the numbers again, you had Cuomo profiting off a pandemic, a government official,” said Concha, also a media reporter for The Hill newspaper. “Now we have Fauci doing it as well. I think this is appalling.”

Why go to Wuhan? Well…

• Wuhan Lab Chief To NIH Conference: ‘No Regulation’ On Virus Manipulation (NP)

The National Institutes of Health hosted Wuhan Institute of Virology researchers at a 2011 conference focusing on scientific research that could pose a “significant threat” to human health – including manipulation of bat coronaviruses. At the event, the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s Deputy Director repeatedly asserted that his controversial lab had “no regulation” on this form of risky research, The National Pulse can exclusively reveal. The 2011 event – Continuing the Global Dialogue with the Scientific and Science Policy Community with a Focus on Asia and the Western Pacific – was sponsored by the U.S. government’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) and sought to provide participants with a “greater understanding” of Dual Use Research of Concern (DURC).

Defined by the NIH as research “that could be directly misapplied to pose a significant threat with broad potential consequences to public health and safety,” DURC encompasses gain-of-function studies, which have come under increased scrutiny due to their role in potentially spawning COVID-19. Among the event participants were Wuhan Institute of Virology Deputy Director Yuan Zhiming, NIH Associate Director for Science Policy Amy Patterson, and top American researchers and scientific advisory board members. The NIH’s unearthed role in hosting the event follows National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) Director Anthony Fauci denying his agency’s relationship to the Wuhan lab.

While speaking at the event via telephone, Yuan Zhiming repeatedly emphasized that his lab and China lacked any meaningful regulation of dual-use research. “There’s no regulation in China, there’s no regulation on the identification of some dual-use research, and there’s no regulation on the classification of research or the classification of information,” he explained. “Even China, the biosafety and biosecurity philosophy is regulated by Chinese scientific community, but the dual-use research is not totally regulated. So we need to have some measure or some special program to raise the concern of principal investigators through training.”

Yuan reiterated the sentiment in his closing remarks to the conference, commenting “there’s no regulation on the dual-use identification and classification of some sensitive information, and I think maybe later the Chinese government and the Chinese scientific community will focus on the discussion in this matter.” Since the outbreak of COVID-19, however, Yuan has made rounds on American and Chinese state-run media outlets to discredit the possibility of the virus leaking from his lab.

“The number of cases reported after the second shot was four times greater than those recorded after the first..”

• Israel: Likely Link Between Pfizer Vaccine And Myocarditis In Young Males (RT)

A specially appointed epidemiological team has found “a likelihood of a link” between receiving the second dose of Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine and the onset of myocarditis in young men, Israel’s Health Ministry said in a statement. The ministry says the team was set up following reports of cases of heart inflammation, known as myocarditis, among males aged 16 to 30 shortly after the second dose of the Pfizer vaccine was administered. The link was found to be stronger in people aged 16-19 relative to other age groups, and weakens as the age of the recipients increases. Most patients who experienced the problem spent up to four days in the hospital, and 95% of the cases were classified as mild, according to the ministry.

The Health Ministry commissioned the study after 275 cases of myocarditis were reported in Israel between December 2020 and May 2021. Nearly 150 cases were recorded after the vaccine was administered. The number of cases reported after the second shot was four times greater than those recorded after the first, the ministry said. Myocarditis is a condition characterized by chest pain, shortness of breath, or palpitations, and can be caused by Covid-19, according to the ministry. While the type of vaccine in question is not directly mentioned in the statement, Israel relies almost exclusively on the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, and it’s the only product mentioned on the vaccination information page of the Health Ministry website.

Pfizer said in a statement cited by Reuters that it has not recorded a higher rate of myocarditis than would normally be expected in the general population. The pharma giant added that it was aware of the Israeli observations of myocarditis but has not established a causal link to its vaccine. The Israeli Health Ministry says that given the findings, it will review the 12-15-year-old population’s eligibility for the vaccine. The shot was recently approved in the EU for people aged 12 and older.

Oh, just lovely.

• Bill Gates, Warren Buffett To Build New Kind Of Nuclear Reactor In Wyoming (R.)

Power companies run by billionaire friends Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have chosen Wyoming to launch the first Natrium nuclear reactor project on the site of a retiring coal plant. TerraPower, founded by Gates about 15 years ago, and power company PacifiCorp, owned by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, said on Wednesday that the exact site of the Natrium reactor demonstration plant was expected to be announced by the end of the year. Small advanced reactors, which run on different fuels to traditional reactors, are regarded by some as a critical carbon-free technology than can supplement intermittent power sources like wind and solar as states strive to cut emissions that cause climate change. “We think Natrium will be a game-changer for the energy industry,” Gates told a media conference to launch the project in Cheyenne, Wyoming.

“This is our fastest and clearest course to becoming carbon negative,” Wyoming’s governor, Mark Gordon, said. “Nuclear power is clearly a part of my all-of-the-above strategy for energy” in Wyoming, the country’s top coal-producing state. The project features a 345 megawatt sodium-cooled fast reactor with molten salt-based energy storage that could boost the system’s power output to 500MW during peak power demand. TerraPower said last year that the plants would cost about $1bn. Late last year the US energy department awarded TerraPower $80m in initial funding to demonstrate Natrium technology, and the department has committed additional funding in coming years subject to congressional appropriations.

Chris Levesque, TerraPower’s president and chief executive, said the demonstration plant would take about seven years to build. “We need this kind of clean energy on the grid in the 2030s,” he told reporters. Nuclear power experts have warned that advanced reactors could have higher risks than conventional ones. Fuel for many advanced reactors would have to be enriched at a much higher rate than conventional fuel, meaning the fuel supply chain could be an attractive target for militants looking to create a crude nuclear weapon, a recent report said. Levesque said that the plants would reduce proliferation risks because they reduce overall nuclear waste.

Not even the US is that crazy.

• Why The US Isn’t Going To Nuke Anyone From Orbit Anytime Soon (RT)

Low-orbit space planes have been named as a possible carrier of American nuclear warheads. While theoretically possible, at current technology levels such weapons would be significantly more trouble than they are worth.
According to the director-general of Russian arms manufacturer Almaz-Antey, Yan Novikov, the US has orbital bombers capable of carrying nuclear weapons. Variants of the Boeing X-37 orbital test vehicle, launched in 2010 and officially used for scientific purposes, can theoretically carry up to six warheads, Novikov claimed during a virtual educational forum in Russia in May. In the words of Kyle Mizokami, who wrote an article on this for Popular Mechanics, “this isn’t even a good idea”.

While Mizokami’s take is titled “Don’t believe Russia”, and its main thrust is apparently that Mr. Novikov is hyping up the US orbital nukes threat to boost the sales of Almaz-Antey’s surface-to-space missiles, he does have some good points that explain why the dangers of orbital bombing are more than a little exaggerated. First off, putting nukes on an X-37 to then launch them from orbit will require extensive modification to the weapons, which will only allow two or, at best, three, to be taken on board – not nearly enough for an effective surprise attack. And to carry an element of surprise, it would have to approach Russia from a very specific direction to avoid the radars of early-warning systems – and even so, it won’t be able to hide from visual detection.

Aside from the lack of surprise, there is a long list of problems associated with space planes carrying nuclear payloads. “The idea of placing strategic nuclear weapons in low Earth orbit isn’t new. It emerged with the first successful launches of the Earth’s artificial satellites,” ex-chief of the General Staff of the Air Defense Forces, Honored Military Pilot, Colonel-General of Aviation Igor Maltsev says. According to him, for a number of reasons, space projects like this never went beyond concept or, at best, preliminary design. Why was that the case? Technically, the goal of putting these weapons in space is achievable, says Igor Maltsev. Anything can be launched to space. But when the idea is to create a strategic weapons system in orbit, there are a number of challenges that have, so far, prevented any significant progress along these lines.

“..ahead of a weekend in which potentially violent demonstrations were predicted by the FBI — but never materialized.”

• The New Domestic War on Terror Has Already Begun (Greenwald)

The Department of Homeland Security on Friday issued a new warning bulletin, alerting Americans that domestic extremists may well use violence on the 100th Anniversary of the Tulsa race massacre. This was at least the fourth such bulletin issued this year by Homeland Security (DHS) warning of the same danger and, thus far, none of the fears it is trying to instill into the American population has materialized. The first was a January 14 warning, from numerous federal agencies including DHS, about violence in Washington, DC and all fifty state capitols that was likely to explode in protest of Inauguration Day (a threat which did not materialize). Then came a January 27 bulletin warning of “a heightened threat environment across the United States that is likely to persist over the coming weeks” from “ideologically-motivated violent extremists with objections to the exercise of governmental authority” (that warning also was not realized).

Then there was a May 14 bulletin warning of right-wing violence “to attack higher-capacity targets,” exacerbated by the lifting of COVID lockdowns (which also never happened). And now we are treated to this new DHS warning about domestic extremists preparing violent attacks over Tulsa (it remains to be seen if a DHS fear is finally realized). Just like the first War on Terror, these threats are issued with virtually no specificity. They are just generalized warnings designed to put people in fear about their fellow citizens and to justify aggressive deployment of military and law enforcement officers in Washington, D.C. and throughout the country. A CNN article which wildly hyped the latest danger bulletin about domestic extremists at Tulsa had to be edited with what the cable network, in an “update,” called “the additional information from the Department of Homeland Security that there is no specific or credible threats at this time.”

And the supposed dangers from domestic extremists on Inauguration Day was such a flop that even The Washington Post — one of the outlets most vocal about lurking national security dangers in general and this one in particular — had to explicitly acknowledge the failure: Thousands [of National Guard troops] had been deployed to capitals across the country late last week, ahead of a weekend in which potentially violent demonstrations were predicted by the FBI — but never materialized. Once again on Wednesday, security officials’ worst fears weren’t borne out: In some states, it was close to business as usual. In others, demonstrations were small and peaceful, with only occasional tense moments.

“The study shows American generals enthusiastically planning for the use of nuclear weapons against China.”

• Daniel Ellsberg Wants The US To Prosecute Him Under The Espionage Act (IC)

“The whole idea is to kill the bastards,” Gen. Thomas Power, commander of America’s nuclear forces from 1957 to 1963, once said about the use of atomic weapons. “At the end of the war, if there are two Americans and one Russian, we win.” The hold this nuclear lunacy had on the top of the U.S. government is terrifyingly illuminated in a top-secret study of U.S. war plans newly publicized by famed whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg. The document, produced by the RAND Corporation and copied by Ellsberg at the same time he exfiltrated the Pentagon Papers from RAND, examines the U.S. response to the 1958 Taiwan Strait Crisis. The study’s contents were first reported on May 22 by the New York Times.

The crisis, now completely forgotten, began when China attempted to seize several small islands off its coast from Taiwan. The study shows American generals enthusiastically planning for the use of nuclear weapons against China. It is not simply that the officials looked with equanimity on the possibility of killing millions; rather, many seemed frustrated that there were any delays forced upon them by the rest of the government. If China had not changed course, civilization could have ended then and there. Ellsberg is now speaking out about the study, he said in a phone interview, for a straightforward reason: “I got scared.” The issues that led to the 1958 crisis between the U.S. and China have never been resolved; both countries are now ramping up confrontational rhetoric; and most importantly, the strategic rationale that led the U.S. to consider nuclear war then remains exactly the same today.

“You shouldn’t be confident that the current calculations are any less crazy,” Ellsberg said. His apprehension about the potential use of nuclear weapons is intimately linked to another of his key concerns: the Justice Department’s accelerating use of the 1917 Espionage Act to prosecute leakers. Its chilling effect on potential whistleblowers makes it less and less likely that Americans will even know what their government is doing, much less be able to do anything about it. Ellsberg hopes his latest revelation will prompt a cultural and perhaps legal reckoning for the Act.

“Workers are abused, underpaid and sickened from exposure to chemicals and toxins such as aluminum dust.”

• ‘Dying for an iPhone’ (Chris Hedges)

Global capitalists have turned back the clock to the early days of the Industrial Revolution. The working class is increasingly bereft of rights, blocked from forming unions, paid starvation wages, subject to wage theft, under constant surveillance, fired for minor infractions, exposed to dangerous carcinogens, forced to work overtime, given punishing quotas and abandoned when they are sick and old. Workers have become, here and abroad, disposable cogs to corporate oligarchs, who wallow in obscene personal wealth that dwarfs the worst excesses of the Robber Barons. In fashionable liberal circles there are, as Noam Chomsky notes, worthy and unworthy victims. Nancy Pelosi has called on global leaders not to attend the Winter Olympics, scheduled to be held in Beijing in February, because of what she called a “genocide” being carried out by the Chinese government against the Uyghur minority.

New York Times columnist Nick Kristof in a column rattled off a list of human rights violations overseen by China’s leader Xi Jinping, writing “[Xi] eviscerates Hong Kong freedoms, jails lawyers and journalists, seizes Canadian hostages, threatens Taiwan and, most horrifying, presides over crimes against humanity in the far western region of Xinjiang that is home to several Muslim minorities.” Not a word about the millions of workers in China who are treated little better than serfs. They live separated from their families, including their children, and housed in overcrowded company dormitories, which sees rent deducted from their paychecks, next to factories that have round-the-clock production, often making products for U.S. corporations. Workers are abused, underpaid and sickened from exposure to chemicals and toxins such as aluminum dust.

The suffering of the working class, within and outside the United States, is as ignored by our corporatized media as the suffering of the Palestinians. And yet, I would argue, it is one of the most important human rights issues of our era, since once workers are empowered, they can fend off other human rights violations. Unless workers can organize, here and in countries such as China, and achieve basic rights and living wages, it will cement into place a global serfdom that will leave workers trapped in the appalling conditions described by Friedrich Engels in his 1845 book “The Conditions of the Working Class in England” or Émile Zola‘s 1885 masterpiece “Germinal.”

Small moves so far, more like virtue signalling.

• China Rushes To Pull Back The Yuan From A Three-Year High (CNBC)

China is trying to rein in the yuan as it surges to three-year highs against the U.S. dollar. A stronger yuan makes Chinese goods relatively more expensive to buyers overseas, and has spurred concerns about the competitiveness of Chinese exports — a major contributor to national economic growth. The Chinese yuan traded little changed against the U.S. dollar Thursday after the People’s Bank of China set the yuan’s daily midpoint at 6.3811 versus the greenback. That marked the second-straight day of weaker fixings, reversing six straight trading days of stronger fixings since May 24, according to data from Wind Information.

The PBOC has tried to allow the market to play a greater role in deter mining the yuan’s exchange rate. But the central bank retains some control through daily midpoint fixings against the dollar, allowing the yuan to move 2% higher or lower from that level. The weaker fix followed the central bank’s announcement late Monday that beginning June 15, financial institutions must increase the ratio of their foreign exchange deposits by 2 percentage points — to 7% from 5% currently. The hike forces banks to retain more of their foreign currency holdings, reducing the amount that could be used to influence foreign exchange rates.

It is the first such hike in 14 years since the previous change in May 2007 — before the financial crisis — economists pointed out. They estimate the move will reduce the amount of foreign currency available for long-term trading by $20 billion. Analysts said the exact dollar amount is less significant than the central bank’s message that the yuan will not move in a single direction of continued strengthening against the U.S. dollar.

With 80% of Japanese against.

• Olympics Will Go Ahead, Says Tokyo Games Chief (G.)

The president of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics organising committee, Seiko Hashimoto, has said the Games will go ahead as planned, soon after the Japan’s most senior medical adviser said holding the event under current coronavirus conditions was “not normal”. “We cannot postpone again,” Hashimoto said an interview published on Thursday in the Nikkan Sports newspaper. Shigeru Omi, head of a panel of experts that has been advising the Japanese government on its Covid-19 response since the start of the pandemic, issued his strongest warning yet of the potential risks of holding the Games. “It’s not normal to have the Olympics in a situation like this,” Omi told a parliamentary committee on Wednesday, adding that organisers should explain to a sceptical public why it was pushing ahead with preparations.

Most Japanese people do not want Tokyo 2020 to be held this summer, according to recent opinion polls. Medical journals have questioned the wisdom of allowing 90,000 athletes, media, sponsors, officials and support staff to enter the country in July, while medical unions say the Games will place additional pressure on health services. The public broadcaster NHK reported that about 10,000 of the 80,000 volunteers who signed up to help during the Games have quit, but organisers said the lower numbers would not be “particularly problematic” since the decision had already been taken to ban spectators from overseas. “There’s no mistake that concerns over the coronavirus could have been a factor,” as well as scheduling conflicts due to last year’s postponement, the Nikkei business paper quoted Tokyo 2020 chief executive Toshiro Muto as saying.

[..] Tokyo and several other regions are under a state of emergency that is due to end on 20 June. While the rate of infections is falling in the capital, there is concern about the risks posed by new variants and Japan’s slow vaccine rollout. The vaccination programme has gathered pace in recent days, but only 2.7% of Japan’s 126 million population has been fully vaccinated. In an attempt to speed up the process with just 50 days to go before the opening ceremony, the government has said large companies and universities will be able to start inoculating staff and students from 21 June. Japan has avoided the large-scale infections suffered by many other countries, but serious cases have risen during the latest outbreak. It has reported more than 750,000 cases since the start of the pandemic, and about 13,200 deaths, a relatively high number among Asian countries.

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Debt Rattle May 30 2021

May 302021

May 30, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:25 am Finance Tagged with: COVID, crypto, DeSantis, Dr. Strangelove, mortality, vaccine, Victoria, Vietnam, volatility, Wuhan 59 Responses »

René Magritte The secret player 1927

• Harder To Attribute Mortality To Vaccine Than To Covid? (JTN)

• Vietnam Sees Hybrid Of Covid-19 Variants Identified In India And Britain (ST)

• ‘Wuhan Lab Is Still Conducting The Same Research’: Mike Pompeo (DM)

• Victoria: 5 New Local Covid Cases, ‘Extremely Concerning’ Mystery Case (G.)

• Restricting Freedom Didn’t Defeat COVID (ZH)

• DeSantis Pushes Back On Big Tech Social Media Censorship (JTN)

• Climate Crisis Inflicting Huge ‘Hidden Costs’ On Mental Health (G.)

• Could Facebook’s Diem Become FedCoin By Default? (Jeftovic)

• Increasingly Chaotic Volatility Ahead (CHS)

Moving the yardsticks.

• Harder To Attribute Mortality To Vaccine Than To Covid? (JTN)

Stephanie Dubois, a British model aged 39, and Lisa Shaw, a BBC radio presenter aged 44, died within a day of each other due to serious thrombotic episodes after receiving the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine. Neither had underlying health conditions. Dubois’ case has now been referred to the European Medicines Agency (EMA), as she lived in Cyprus, but she left her own account of her tragic decline on her Facebook page: May 6: “So I had the vaccination today! I hate needles, today was no exception … And now I feel horrendous … pizza and bed for me.” May 14: “Woke up feeling fine and then within an hour I had full body shakes, all my joints seized, and I was struggling to breathe and was cold to the bone with a persistent headache and dizziness … Mum and dad came to look after me and took me for a Covid test, which thankfully was negative … but it still doesn’t explain what the problem is. Maybe I’m having a prolonged reaction to my Covid jab last week.”

That same day she was admitted to the hospital. May 18: “Done being ill now … Couple more tests today! PS — I still don’t like needles — feeling tired.” May 19: Dubois went into a coma. Shaw’s family said in a statement: “Lisa developed severe headaches a week after receiving her AstraZeneca vaccine and fell seriously ill a few days later … She was treated by the [Royal Victoria Infirmary’s] intensive care team for blood clots and bleeding in her head.” According to Britain’s medical watchdog, the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), there have been 332 cases of blood clotting leading to 58 deaths from the AZ vaccine. Statistically, that is very small compared to the estimated 23.9 million first doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine and 9.0 million second doses administered in the U.K. by the same date.

The death of Dubois highlights how much harder it is to attribute deaths to the vaccines than it is to claim death by COVID. Deutsche Welle has even run a fact-check article on other cases titled “No links found between vaccinations and deaths.” The German state broadcaster and publisher sought to debunk claims made in many other countries, including Italy, Austria, South Korea, Germany, Spain, Belgium and the U.S. In a case in a Norwegian nursing home, it quoted the EMA stating: “Pre-existing diseases seemed to be a plausible explanation for death. In some individuals, palliative care had already been initiated before vaccination.” Statens Legemiddelverk of the Norwegian Medicines Agency claimed, “Every day, an average of 45 people die in Norwegian nursing homes … therefore, deaths that occur close to the time of vaccination is expected, but it does not imply a causal relationship to the vaccine.”

Figures for deaths attributed to COVID, meanwhile, are not scrutinized to the same level. Comorbidities are downplayed as causal factors in death when they overlap with COVID — whether the latter is verified or even merely suspected. According to the Office of National Statistics (ONS) in the U.K., “Of the 50,335 deaths that occurred in March to June 2020 involving COVID-19 in England and Wales, 45,859 (91.1%) had at least one pre-existing condition, while 4,476 (8.9%) had none.” The average age of COVID fatalities in the U.K. up to January 2021 was 81. Finding out if COVID was the dominant cause of death is hard to discern without a full autopsy, but the British government document “Guidance for Doctors Completing Medical Certificates of Cause of Death in England and Wales — FOR USE DURING THE EMERGENCY PERIOD ONLY” explains this is not required for COVID cases: “Covid-19 is not a reason on its own to refer a death to a coroner under the Coroners and Justice Act 2009 … Medical practitioners are required to certify causes of death to the best of their knowledge and belief.”

Even medical proof is not necessary under the guidance: “If before death the patient had symptoms typical of COVID- 19 infection, but the test result has not been received, it would be satisfactory to give ‘COVID-19’ as the cause of death … In the circumstances of there being no swab, it is satisfactory to apply clinical judgement.”

Cue VanDenBossche.

• Vietnam Sees Hybrid Of Covid-19 Variants Identified In India And Britain (ST)

Authorities in Vietnam have detected a new coronavirus variant that is a combination of the Covid-19 variants first found in India and Britain, and spreads quickly by air, the health minister said on Saturday (May 29). After successfully containing the virus for most of last year, Vietnam is grappling with a spike in infections since late April that accounts for more than half of the total 6,713 registered cases. So far, there have been 47 deaths. “Vietnam has uncovered a new Covid-19 variant combining characteristics of the two existing variants first found in India and the UK,” Health Minister Nguyen Thanh Long said, describing it as a hybrid of the two known variants.

“That the new one is an Indian variant with mutations that originally belong to the UK variant is very dangerous,” he told a government meeting. The South-east Asian country had previously detected seven virus variants: B1222, B1619, D614G, B117 – known as the variant from Britain, B1351, A231 and B16172 – the variant from India. Mr Long said Vietnam would soon publish genome data of the newly identified variant, which he said was more transmissible than the previously known types.

‘That coverup alone suggests that there’s a lot more that we need to know.’

• ‘Wuhan Lab Is Still Conducting The Same Research’: Mike Pompeo (DM)

Mike Pompeo, the former CIA director and secretary of state, has said that Wuhan Institute of Virology was conducting secret military research and claims there is ‘enormous evidence’ that the virus that causes COVID-19 escaped from the lab. Donald Trump’s former top aide also warned that the dangerous experimentation is ongoing at the lab, raising the specter of another potentially deadly virus leak. ‘What I can say for sure is this: we know that they were engaged in efforts connected to the People’s Liberation Army inside of that laboratory, so military activity being performed alongside what they claimed was just good old civilian research,’ Pompeo told Fox News on Saturday. ‘They refuse to tell us what it was, they refuse to describe the nature of either of those, they refuse to allow access to the World Health Organization,’ Pompeo said.

‘That coverup alone suggests that there’s a lot more that we need to know.’ ‘That virology lab is still up and running. It’s still probably conducting the same kinds of research it was conducting that may have well led to this virus escaping from that laboratory,’ he said. ‘Only the Chinese Communist Party knows the answer, the world deserves the answers and they have to tell us, I hope there will be bipartisan push to demand and hold accountable,’ said Pompeo. He spoke after President Joe Biden ordered an intensive 90-day probe to reinvestigate the possibility of a lab leak origin in the pandemic. ‘It’s really unfortunate they took the position early on that there was nothing to see here,’ Pompeo said in response to the new probe.

‘I’m glad now that they’re looking at this. I hope it’s a serious investigation when they say they are giving 90 days for the intelligence community to look at this. The intelligence community has been looking at this for an awfully long time,’ he said. Pompeo, a former CIA spy chief, has promoted the lab leak theory since the early days of the pandemic, a theory that until recently much of the U.S. media and academia scoffed at as a fringe conspiracy theory. ‘I’ve known since spring of last year, 2020, when I first spoke about this that there is enormous evidence that this escaped from that laboratory in Wuhan,’ he said on Saturday. ‘We know there were people who got sick there, scientists who got sick there, we know they were doing the gain of function research — essentially taking viruses and making them more contagious, potentially more lethal, this administration has to get after this.’

Not exactly winning, are they?

• Victoria: 5 New Local Covid Cases, ‘Extremely Concerning’ Mystery Case (G.)

The Morrison government is continuing to declare getting vaccinated is “not a race” even as Victorian health authorities confirmed five new locally acquired infections – including one mystery case in aged care – on day three of the state’s fourth Covid lockdown. The new cases reported on Sunday morning take the total number in the Melbourne-based outbreak to 40. Victoria’s acting premier, James Merlino, announced a $250m support package for businesses on Sunday while stating he was “beyond disappointed” the prime minister and federal treasurer had declined to help workers with financial assistance. The vaccine roll-out was a race, Merlino insisted. Victoria wanted to go faster but was being held back by the federal government failing to secure enough supply, he said.

One of the new positive cases reported on Sunday was a healthcare provider in an aged care home in the western suburb of Maidstone. Colin Singh, the Arcare chief executive, said the worker had received her first dose of a Covid vaccine, was wearing a mask and had not displayed symptoms when she last worked at the centre on Thursday. “I want to assure you that, whilst we hoped that this would not happen again, we are well prepared, and our infection control practices put us in a good place to manage this outbreak effectively,” he said in the statement on Sunday. Arcare Maidstone has capacity for 90 residents, according to its website. It was relatively untouched by Covid last year – compared to other Victorian facilities – recording only seven cases.

Victoria’s Covid commander, Jeroen Weimar, said on Sunday the case in the aged care home was of “extreme concern” because it was a mystery case. “I am concerned that at this point in time we don’t have an original acquisition source,” for the healthcare worker, Weimar told reporters.

“The more threatening a virus is presumed to be, the more superfluous government force is.”

• Restricting Freedom Didn’t Defeat COVID (ZH)

Let’s travel back in time to March of 2020, when predictions of mass death related to the new coronavirus started to gain currency. One study, conducted by Imperial College’s Neil Ferguson, indicated that U.S. deaths alone would exceed 2 million. The above number is often used, even by conservatives and libertarians, as justification for the initial lockdowns. “We knew so little” is the excuse, and with so many deaths expected, can anyone blame local, state, and national politicians for panicking? The answer is a resounding yes. To see why, imagine if Ferguson had predicted 30 million American deaths. Imagine the fear among the American people then—which is precisely the point: The more threatening a virus is presumed to be, the more superfluous government force is. Really, who needs to be told to be careful if a failure to take precautions could reasonably result in death?

Death predictions aside, the other justification bruited in March of 2020 was that brief lockdowns (two weeks was the number often thrown around) would flatten the hospitalization curve. In this case, the taking of freedom allegedly made sense as a way of protecting hospitals from a massive inflow of sick patients that they wouldn’t have been able to handle, and that would have resulted in a public health catastrophe. Such a view similarly vandalizes reason. Think about it. Who needs to be forced to avoid behavior that might result in hospitalization? Better yet, who needs to be forced to avoid behavior that might result in hospitalization at a time when doctors and hospitals would be so short-staffed as to not be able to take care of admitted patients? Translated for those who need it, the dire predictions made over a year ago about the corona-horrors that awaited us don’t justify the lockdowns; rather they should remind the mildly sentient among us of how cruel and pointless they were.

The common sense that we are to varying degrees born with, along with our genetic predisposition to survive, dictates that a fear of hospitalization or death would have caused Americans to take virus-avoidance precautions that would have well exceeded any rules foisted on them by politicians. To which some will reply with something along the lines of “Not everyone has common sense. In truth, there are lots of dumb, low-information types out there who would have disregarded all the warnings. Lockdowns weren’t necessary for the wise among us; rather they were essential precisely because there are so many who aren’t wise.” Actually, such a response is the best argument of all against lockdowns.

Why is he the only one? 2024.

• DeSantis Pushes Back On Big Tech Social Media Censorship (JTN)

Last week, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law a bill that takes on Big Tech companies in his state. The law, however, is taking criticism — from both right and left — that parts of it may be unconstitutional and that its notable exemptions for some big companies undermine its goal of standing up to domineering industry giants. Florida’s “Big Tech Bill” aims to protect social media users — whether political candidates, journalistic outlets or ordinary users — from ideologically selective censorship by internet platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Google.

Among its major provisions, the law will:
• Fine companies up to $250,000 per day for suspending political candidates from a platform during the run-up to an election
• Require platforms to make public the rules they use to regulate their user content and provide users with explanations as to why they have been censored
• Require companies to provide users an appeals process or chance to “correct” their flagged content
• Prohibit companies from censoring any “journalistic enterprise based on the content of its publication or broadcast.”

Perhaps most importantly, the bill would empower individuals and the office of the Florida attorney general to much more easily sue these companies under the Florida Unfair and Deceptive Trade Practices Act. Yet critics see the law as little more than a symbolic gesture destined to be struck down by the courts on constitutional grounds. “I see this bill as purely performative: It was never designed to be law but simply to send a message to voters,” Santa Clara University Law School professor Eric Goldman told the Washington Post. He argues that the bill will unconstitutionally restrict the editorial discretion of platforms that act as online publishers — a First Amendment violation.

Get ready.

• Climate Crisis Inflicting Huge ‘Hidden Costs’ On Mental Health (G.)

The climate crisis is damaging the mental health of hundreds of millions of people around the world but the huge costs are hidden, scientists have warned. Heatwaves are increasing rates of suicide, extreme weather such as floods and wildfires are leaving victims traumatised, and loss of food security, homes and livelihoods is resulting in stress and depression. Anxiety about the future is also harming people’s mental health, especially the young, the scientists said in a report. Mental health conditions already affect a billion people and cost trillions of dollars a year. The researchers said global heating would worsen the issue unless action was taken. They described a vicious circle where climate impacts increase mental health difficulties, leaving people even more vulnerable to further consequences.

However, they said tackling climate change could turn this into a virtuous circle. Action by individuals, communities and governments not only cuts the impacts of heating but also boosts people’s mental wellbeing by giving them healthier lives and a sense of hope and agency. “Mental health is the unseen impact of climate change at the moment,” said Emma Lawrance of Imperial College London, who led the report. “It is a big problem that is going to affect more and more people into the future, and in particular exacerbate inequality. It is very likely to be a really big unaccounted cost.

“If you have lost your home, if you’re at risk of repeated flooding, if you’re grieving because you’ve lost a family member to a fire or your livelihood because of a drought, that is shock and trauma that translates for some into very prolonged distress and diagnoses of PTSD, anxiety, depression and increased risk of suicide.”

“That was the moment when the establishment elites realized that non-state money had arrived..”

• Could Facebook’s Diem Become FedCoin By Default? (Jeftovic)

I had a reader ask me about Silvergate Capital. They’re a bank holding company with a lot of exposure to the crypto currency space. I hadn’t yet analyzed them deeply, but I did notice that they recently announced a partnership with Facebook on their DiemUSD stablecoin. Diem is Facebook’s rebrand of Libra. Libra was a private crypto currency Facebook proposed to launch which in my mind was a transformative event for nation states and central banks. That was the moment when the establishment elites realized that non-state money had arrived and it posed an existential threat to the status quo. They were able to hold off Facebook’s Libra, for awhile. They fought dirty.

US Senators sent straight up extortion letters to members of Facebook’s Libra Consortium threatening to investigate them for ostensible ties to child pornography on Facebook’s platform if they went through with the project. They all dropped out. My heart didn’t exactly bleed for Facebook, but the incident was instructive. I wrote about it at the time, but I will repeat the salient point here: Should a gigantic platform like Facebook successfully launch their own digital currency, a person’s Facebook account will become more important in their day-to-day lives than their nation state issued passport. Especially if we’re entering an era of drastically curtailed travel for plebeians. The battle between the US, France, et al and Facebook over Libra was an early round in the struggle between waning Nation States and ascendent Network States.

Facebook kept working on their Libra, first under a wallet program called Novi and now as Diem, and Diem USD will be their stablecoin. One can only surmise that behind the scenes something has shifted so that Facebook thinks they can proceed with launching a new stablecoin. This partnership with Silvergate, as well as relocating their Diem Association, which oversees their digital currency projects, from Switzerland back to the United States may be part of that calculus. There have been some rumblings that the US is losing the Central Bank Digital Currency race and that one way to jumpstart a program would be to partner with a private entity who is already further down the road with it. Who would be uniquely situated to provide a solution in some manner of public-private partnership? Facebook, for one.

Balance.

• Increasingly Chaotic Volatility Ahead (CHS)

The standard debate about the future of the economy is: which will we get, high inflation or a deflationary collapse of defaults and asset bubbles popping? The debate goes round and round in widening circles of complexity as analysts delve into every nuance of the debate. A recent conversation with my friend A.T. raised a third possibility few seem to consider: increasingly chaotic volatility will be the new normal, as wild swings between inflation and deflation will increase in amplitude and ferocity as the system destabilizes. Increasingly chaotic volatility is a classic sign of a system that has lost equilibrium and is attempting to regain its dynamic stability by going into overdrive. The amplitude and violence of these fluctuations increase as each attempt to restore stability fails.

This loss of stability is not what people expect. The experience of the past 60 years has been that any hiccup in financial stability–a recession or market crash–is temporary, as the system responds with monetary and fiscal stimulus which quickly restores the system’s stability. That the era of stability has ended and a new era of increasingly chaotic volatility has begun is not on anyone’s radar as a possibility. Human physiology offers a useful analogy: blood glucose homeostasis, which is the system of insulin production and sensitivity that maintains the dynamic stability of glucose in our bloodstream for use as energy. Insulin is produced as needed after a meal to regulate the level of glucose within the ideal bandwidth of homeostasis, i.e. the range of dynamic stability that optimizes insulin production and glucose levels. (3.5 to 5.5 mmol/L or 70 to 130 mg/dL)

In metabolic disorders, the body’s sensitivity to insulin declines, and in response the body increases the production of insulin to compensate for the decline in sensitivity. As the disease progresses, sensitivity drops further, forcing the production of insulin into overdrive. Eventually this overdrive degrades the body’s ability to produce insulin and the regulatory system managing glucose levels crashes.

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Debt Rattle May 29 2021

May 292021

May 29, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:10 am Finance Tagged with: children, EMA, Fauci, Fed, gain of function, mask mandates, Obama, pregnancy, reverse engineering, Wuhan 68 Responses »

John Collier Lady Godiva c1897

• National Horror Story Hour (Kunstler)

• Chinese Scientists Created Covid-19 In A Wuhan Lab – Study (DM)

• Fauci Backed Virus Experiments ‘Despite Pandemic Risk’ (Lauria)

• Broken Parts Of COVID-19 Vaccines Mutate To Trigger Blood Clots (GGI)

• European Regulators OK Pfizer Vaccine For Children 12-15 (AP)

• For The Young: Choose Wisely (Denninger)

• Oklahoma House Bans Mask Mandate, Vaccine Requirements in Schools (ET)

• Georgia Bans Mask Mandates In Public Schools (JTN)

• Employers Get Green Light To “Incentivize” Workers To Get Vaccinated (ZH)

• The Fed Keeps Expanding Its Powers; That’s Making Some People Nervous (Cox)

The Science.

• National Horror Story Hour (Kunstler)

In the early going of the War on Covid-19, The Science told its soldiers, the doctors, to jam ventilators down patients’ throats. Whoops, that didn’t work so well. The Science told everybody to fuggeddabowt Ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, Zinc, and Vitamin D. The Science told New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to stash Covid-19 infected patients in nursing homes. The Science told everybody don’t bother with masks, then to definitely wear masks, then to maybe not wear masks, then to wear double masks, then to get vaccinated and wear masks. Golly, what to believe? Some people began to think that The Science was full of shit — which is, let’s face it, a dangerous thought, and something which, thank Gawd, Facebook, Twitter, and Google corrected for us.

One thing The Science remained adamant about for a whole year was that Covid-19 did not come from the Wuhan, China, Institute of Virology, where-and-to-which, it just happened, one of the US government’s Knights of The Science, Dr. Anthony Fauci, was funneling US taxpayer-funded grant money for the purpose of doing gain-of-function research on exotic bat corona viruses. Gosh, why would you even do that? (Doesn’t gain of function = make it more deadly?)

Supposedly to gain knowledge so that mankind will be prepared to fight the emergence of deadly bat viruses that somehow manage to sneak into the human population at some future date. These things can happen, you know. We’ve already tangled with bird flu and swine flu, so deadly bat flu could hardly be out of the question. Of course, one of the dangers, when you are playing with deadly respiratory viruses in a lab, is that lab workers might inhale a virus or two and become infected with a specimen that The Science has engineered to be especially troublesome… but that was very unlikely, maintained Dr. Anthony Fauci, Chief Science Advisor to the President.

Until this month when Dr. Fauci conceded to a Senate Committee that perhaps an investigation was warranted to find out if, perchance, Covid-19 escaped from the Wuhan lab — since, it turns out, the Wuhan lab was such a sloppy-ass operation that its level of safety was comparable to an ordinary dentist’s office. It also turns out, according to a Wall Street Journal report this week, that three Wuhan lab workers did indeed need to be hospitalized in November 2019, which was around the time the bug got loose among the civilians of Wuhan City, while Chinese tourists and workers were still winging around the world on airplanes by the tens of thousands — prompting one to wonder whether, also perchance, this was something that the CCP wanted to happen? ¿Quién sabe?

Now that “safe and effective” vaccines are available against Covid-19, The Science is urging everybody to take it, pronto, and the government is assisting in the distribution and deployment of vaccinations even to the very borderline of coercing citizens into it by turning the “vaccine hesitant” into social pariahs. No restaurant meals or ballgames for you Science-offending trolls! How’s that working? According to Dr. Fauci, and several other Knights of The Science, more than half of the people on their staffs got vaxed voluntarily. More than half! Now that’s a ringing vote of confidence in The Science!

“..then tried to cover their tracks by reverse-engineering versions of the virus..”

• Chinese Scientists Created Covid-19 In A Wuhan Lab – Study (DM)

An explosive new study claims that Chinese scientists created COVID-19 in a Wuhan lab, then tried to cover their tracks by reverse-engineering versions of the virus to make it look like it evolved naturally from bats. The paper’s authors, British Professor Angus Dalgleish and Norwegian scientist Dr. Birger Sørensen, wrote that they have had ‘prima facie evidence of retro-engineering in China’ for a year – but were ignored by academics and major journals. Dalgleish is a professor of oncology at St George’s University, London, and is best known for his breakthrough creating the first working ‘HIV vaccine’, to treat diagnosed patients and allow them to go off medication for months.

Sørensen, a virologist, is chair of pharmaceutical company, Immunor, which developed a coronavirus vaccine candidate called Biovacc-19. Dalgleish also has share options in the firm. The shocking allegations in the study include accusations of ‘deliberate destruction, concealment or contamination of data’ at Chinese labs, and it notes the silencing and disappearance of scientists in the communist country who spoke out. The journal article, exclusively obtained by DailyMail.com and slated for publication in the coming days, is set to make waves among the scientific community, as the majority of experts have until recently staunchly denied the origins of COVID-19 were anything other than a natural infection leaping from animals to humans.

While analyzing COVID-19 samples last year in an attempt to create a vaccine, Dalgleish and Sørensen discovered ‘unique fingerprints’ in the virus that they say could only have arisen from manipulation in a laboratory. They said they tried to publish their findings but were rejected by major scientific journals which were at the time resolute that the virus jumped naturally from bats or other animals to humans. Even when former MI6 chief Sir Richard Dearlove spoke out publicly saying the scientists’ theory should be investigated, the idea was dismissed as ‘fake news.’

“..in December 2017 Fauci unilaterally reversed an Obama administration 2014 ban on such experiments precisely because of the danger that a leak could cause a pandemic.”

• Fauci Backed Virus Experiments ‘Despite Pandemic Risk’ (Lauria)

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, wrote in an academic paper nine years ago that he supported “gain-of-function” research on viruses despite admitting a “remote” possibility that such “important work” could lead to a global pandemic if such a fortified virus escaped from a lab, The Australian newspaper reported on Friday. In October 2012, Fauci wrote a paper for the American Society for Microbiology, in which he said: “In an unlikely but conceivable turn of events, what if that scientist becomes infected with the virus, which leads to an outbreak and ultimately triggers a pandemic? Many ask reasonable questions: given the possibility of such a scenario – however remote – should the initial experiments have been performed and/or published in the first place, and what were the processes involved in this decision?

Scientists working in this field might say – as indeed I have said – that the benefits of such experiments and the resulting knowledge outweigh the risks. It is more likely that a pandemic would occur in nature, and the need to stay ahead of such a threat is a primary reason for performing an experiment that might appear to be risky.” The newspaper’s revelation comes as President Joe Biden announced this week an investigation into whether the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 leaked out of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV)’s lab in Wuhan, China, where the pandemic first broke out. Fauci, who had dismissed that possibility and insisted the virus had natural transmission from another species to humans, on May 11 reversed himself, saying at a conference that he was “not convinced” of the coronavirus’ natural origins and said authorities needed to learn “exactly what happened.”

[..] in December 2017 Fauci unilaterally reversed an Obama administration 2014 ban on such experiments precisely because of the danger that a leak could cause a pandemic. The Australian quoted former Trump administration officials as saying that no one at the Trump White House knew that Fauci had lifted Obama’s ban. “It kind of just got rammed through,” one official told the newspaper. “I think there’s truth in the narrative that the (National Security Council) staff, the president, the White House chief-of-staff, those people were in the dark that he was switching back on the research.”

“..parts of it break off and create mutated versions of themselves. The mutated versions then enter the body and trigger the blood clots.”

• Broken Parts Of COVID-19 Vaccines Mutate To Trigger Blood Clots (GGI)

German scientists have found out how the broken parts of Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccines branded as Covishield in India mutate to trigger blood clots in recipients. Scientists say the vaccine is sent into the cell nucleus instead of surrounding fluid, where parts of it break off and create mutated versions of themselves. The mutated versions then enter the body and trigger the blood clots. Two vaccines, one manufactured by Oxford-AstraZeneca branded as Covishield in India and the other by Johnson & Johnson, have been linked to blood clotting disorders, particularly among women under the age of 50.

Earlier, German scientists found the exact 2 step process how the COVID-19 vaccine causes blood clots in recipients. They describe a series of events that has to happen in the body before the vaccines create these large clots. Now, researchers at Goethe-University of Frankfurt and Ulm University, in Helmholtz, have found the problem which they say lies in the adenovirus vector — a common cold virus used so both vaccines can enter the body. Scientists believe that in some people, the immune system sees the vaccine as a threat and over-produces antibodies to fight it. These lead to the formation of clumps in the blood, which can become deadly if the clots move towards vital organs and cut off supply.

Bhakdi is clear: this is criminal.

• European Regulators OK Pfizer Vaccine For Children 12-15 (AP)

The European Medicines Agency on Friday recommended that the use of the coronavirus vaccine made by Pfizer and BioNTech be expanded to children ages 12 to 15, a decision that offers younger and less at-risk populations across the continent access to a Covid-19 shot for the first time. The vaccine was the first one granted authorization across the European Union when it was licensed for use in anyone 16 and over in December. So far, about 173 million doses of the shot have been administered in the 27-nation bloc, about three quarters of the total given. “Extending the protection of a safe and effective vaccine in this younger population is an important step forward in the fight against this pandemic,” said Marco Cavaleri, who heads the EMA body that reviewed the vaccine.

The EU regulator had received the necessary data to authorize the vaccine for younger teens and found it to be highly effective against infection, he said. In a study involving 2,000 adolescents in the United States, none of those who received the vaccine got Covid-19, compared with 16 in a control group who received a placebo, said Cavaleri. “The vaccine was well tolerated and the side effect in this age group were very much similar (to) what we’ve seen in young adults and not raising major concern at this point in time,” he added. The EMA decision needs to be rubber-stamped by the European Commission, and individual national regulators must decide whether the vaccine will be administered to children under 16.

The recommendation follows similar decisions by regulators in Canada and the US last month, as rich countries slowly approach their vaccination targets for adults and look to immunize as many people as possible. Researchers will continue to monitor the shot’s long-term protection and safety in the children for another two years.

Bhakdi

https://twitter.com/wakeupfromcovid/status/1398293941305450499

“Isn’t the first question to be asked “how dangerous is it if I say no and get infected, assuming I haven’t been already?” It should be.”

• For The Young: Choose Wisely (Denninger)

Most young people — healthy people under the age of 30 — have no symptoms of significance associated with getting infected with Covid-19. They either get a mild head cold that could be mistaken for anything else or no symptoms at all. Obviously, if you don’t know you are sick or think it’s allergies, asthma or whatever because you never run a fever or really are significantly ill you have no reason to get tested, no reason to believe you had it, and no doctor sees you. You do not show up in the data but you did indeed have Covid-19. Some young people get what seems like a flu and very, very few get really sick or die.

If you had Covid, whether you were tested positive or not, you are presumably protected. The science is that the minimum protection is about 84%. This is a minimum number because not everyone who got it and seroconverted silently was known. This study was among health-care workers who obviously have very high risk as they’re around actively sick people all the time, and they were tested regularly so many “silent” infections were caught, where yours probably wouldn’t have been. Further a recent study funded by Fauci’s NIH showed that most people pick up memory of the infection in their bone marrow (incidentally, getting people to volunteer for that had to be quite a trick; the operation to get the marrow to test is quite painful, which is why the size was very small) which means that protection from at least moderate disease is likely to last decades if not your entire remaining life.

In short there is no science that says you should take the shot if you’ve already had Covid. There are plenty of people saying that but they cannot point to any scientific study that shows you actually lose protection from prior infection any faster than you do from the shots themselves. This is why someone who had the measles does not take a measles shot; you’re presumably protected by fighting off the infection. But what if you haven’t had Covid-19? What do you decide if you’re in that 0-25 age group and someone is trying to demand you get the jab, or all your friends are doing it? Isn’t the first question to be asked “how dangerous is it if I say no and get infected, assuming I haven’t been already?” It should be.

mRNA and pregnancy

Another shocking claim… pic.twitter.com/s5tbqXzXnL

— Wittgenstein (@wittgenstein78) May 27, 2021

How many people will end up still wearing masks and getting “vaccinated”?

• Oklahoma House Bans Mask Mandate, Vaccine Requirements in Schools (ET)

The Oklahoma House has passed a bill banning mask mandates in public schools and requirements for students to be vaccinated against COVID-19. The bill, SB 658, passed the state House by 76–18 and was sent to Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt on May 26. The state Senate had passed the bill by 38–8 a day earlier. “For the sake of children throughout the state, I’m glad this bill is one step closer to becoming law,” Republican state Sen. Rob Standridge said in a statement. “With this legislation, vaccine passports for Oklahoma students will not exist.” Standridge is also one of the authors of the bill. SB 658 would prohibit the boards of education of all public school districts and technology center school districts—including those of higher education—from requiring vaccination against COVID-19 as “a condition of admittance to or attendance of the school or institution.”

It would also prevent vaccine passports or similar documentation from being required. Standridge explained during the session that the COVID-19 vaccine is different from other vaccines that are currently required, like those against diphtheria or tetanus, because it’s “still under emergency use authorization,” News9 reported. SB 658 further forbids implementing a mask mandate for students who haven’t received COVID-19 vaccines. Exceptions include when the governor declares an emergency or after the boards of education consult with their local county health department, but the mask mandate must be reconsidered at each regularly scheduled board meeting.

State after state.

• Georgia Bans Mask Mandates In Public Schools (JTN)

Gov. Brian Kemp signed an executive order Friday that bans masks mandates inside Georgia public schools. The order also lifts most existing COVID-19 restrictions in the state. It blocks schools from implementing policies that would require students and staff to wear masks. Students and teachers still can wear masks if they choose, but they would be optional. “Georgians don’t need the government telling them what their children should do,” Kemp tweeted Thursday. Six Cobb County parents who sued the Cobb County School District over the district’s mask mandate have dropped the lawsuit in response to Kemp’s announcement.

Kemp and Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms had a public dispute last summer over Kemp’s order that restricted local governments from issuing face covering rules that were more restrictive than his. Kemp filed a lawsuit against Atlanta officials in July after the city enacted a face mask-wearing mandate when his executive order encouraged but did not require face coverings. Kemp later abandoned the lawsuit and issued an executive order that allowed certain local governments to issue the mandate. The Georgia Department of Public Health reported Friday the lowest COVID-19 hospitalizations in the state since the beginning of the pandemic. State records show 99 people were hospitalized with COVID-19 symptoms. According to the state’s daily status report, 9.9% of the tests returned were positive Friday for COVID-19.

Playing footsie with anti-discrimination laws.

• Employers Get Green Light To “Incentivize” Workers To Get Vaccinated (ZH)

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has just quietly given American companies the green light to to do whatever it takes to “incentivize” American workers to accept the coronavirus vaccine. As vaccinations continue to slow, and states beef up incentives including lotteries and cash prizes to any adults who agree to get vaccinated who haven’t already, the EEOC has just issued some long-awaited guidance on how far companies can go in pushing workers to be vaccinated. Some companies, including Delta Air Lines, have said they won’t hire anyone who hasn’t already been vaccinated. The updated guidelines say employers may offer incentives for employees to provide documentation showing they have been vaccinated since requesting this proof “is not a disability-related inquiry” or an “unlawful request” under federal anti-discrimination laws.

What’s more, companies who choose to offer the vaccine on-site, or who incentivize employees to get vaccinated elsewhere, can’t offer perks or punishments substantial enough to be “coercive”. The questions, which were by far the most important pieces of the new guidance, were tucked away at the bottom of the update, making the changes an easy thing for reporters to miss before a long holiday weekend.

K.16. Under the ADA, may an employer offer an incentive to employees to voluntarily provide documentation or other confirmation that they received a vaccination on their own from a pharmacy, public health department, or other health care provider in the community? (5/28/21) Yes. Requesting documentation or other confirmation showing that an employee received a COVID-19 vaccination in the community is not a disability-related inquiry covered by the ADA. Therefore, an employer may offer an incentive to employees to voluntarily provide documentation or other confirmation of a vaccination received in the community. As noted elsewhere, the employer is required to keep vaccination information confidential pursuant to the ADA.

K.17. Under the ADA, may an employer offer an incentive to employees for voluntarily receiving a vaccination administered by the employer or its agent? (5/28/21) Yes, if any incentive (which includes both rewards and penalties) is not so substantial as to be coercive. Because vaccinations require employees to answer pre-vaccination disability-related screening questions, a very large incentive could make employees feel pressured to disclose protected medical information. As explained in K.16., however, this incentive limitation does not apply if an employer offers an incentive to employees to voluntarily provide documentation or other confirmation that they received a COVID-19 vaccination on their own from a third-party provider that is not their employer or an agent of their employer.

Employers including Dollar General, Aldi and Instacart have already moved to reward their employees for receiving the Covid-19 vaccine by offering paid time off and cash stipends. And in April, President Joe Biden called on every employer to offer paid time off for workers to recover from potential vaccine side effects.

But independent it is not.

• The Fed Keeps Expanding Its Powers; That’s Making Some People Nervous (Cox)

Bernanke’s successor, Janet Yellen, worked closely with Geithner. Yellen’s successor and current Chairman Jerome Powell had a tight relationship with former President Donald Trump’s Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin. Now, the dynamic has gotten even more intense. Powell and Yellen, who worked together on the Fed for nearly six years, now run the Fed and Treasury respectively. That’s never happened before, and it’s what has some on the Street nervous that the Fed may be tasked with implementing the White House’s economic program. The Fed has long been considered immune to outside pressures, free to move interest rates and otherwise implement policy in the way it deems most appropriate, outside of political concerns. The fear is that the Powell-Yellen dynamic could change that.

“You have the current Treasury secretary who was the boss of the current Fed chairman not so long ago. There’s obviously a very close relationship there,” said Jim Paulsen, chief investment strategist at the Leuthold Group. “They’re still in lockstep. They’re espousing very similar philosophies that go beyond tradition.” Indeed, there’s not much difference between where Powell and Yellen stand on most matters germane to their respective roles. Powell has committed to keep interest rates low until the economy is farther along on the road to recovery, and Yellen has remarked on the pivotal role low rates play so the Biden administration can finance the trillions in spending that it wants. Yellen has been a leading advocate for that muscular fiscal policy, and Powell has said there are economic problems that low interest rates and money printing can’t solve.

But it’s their positions on social issues that have drawn much of the negative attention. The Fed has in the past several months stressed the importance of banks’ planning for climate change-related events. The central bank’s leading advocate for that cause has been Governor Lael Brainard, a close Yellen ally when they served on the Fed together. Along with that, Yellen has been outspoken on the importance of spreading economic benefits evenly at a time when the lowest earners have suffered the worst during the pandemic-era shutdowns. At the same time, the Fed last August changed its mission statement to say it is no longer focused merely on maximizing employment but now has a “a broad-based and inclusive goal” that goes to disparities in how gains are distributed.

“You certainly see some things that at a minimum are very different than how we’ve run things in the past, and it very much gets to the heart of independence in the Fed from overwhelming political influence,” Leuthold’s Paulsen said. “The most egregious departure from the past is the adoption by the Federal Reserve of several which I think many people would consider political goals or a political agenda of the current administration,” he continued. “They’re suddenly going far beyond a macro backstop for the cyclical economy to very much micro-oriented policy implementation.”

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Debt Rattle May 28 2021

May 282021

May 28, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:30 am Finance Tagged with: Babylon Bee, Bezos, Biden, budget, Fauci, Ford Detrick, ivermectin, Pierre Kory, Rand Paul, vaccine lottery, WaPo, Wuhan 67 Responses »

Brassaï Couple on a bench, Paris 1932

• Suppressing Data On Ivermectin Cost ‘Half A Million Lives’ – Kory (WT)

• Inhaled Nanobodies Could Be New Secret Weapon Against Severe Covid (RT)

• US Sitting On ‘Raft’ Of Unexamined Virus Intel (ZH)

• Fort Detrick Base Is Full Of Suspicions – China (RT)

• Rand Paul: “Fauci Cannot Investigate Himself; Get Him Under Oath” (SN)

• California Launches Largest US Covid Vaccine Lottery Yet (G.)

• Facebook Now Banning Anyone Who Says Virus Wasn’t Created In Wuhan Lab (BBee)

• Bezos Weaponizes The Washington Post Homepage (DP)

• Biden’s Budget Assumes a Massive Retroactive Capital Gains Tax (Mish)

• Socialism for 1% Capitalism 99% (Braund)

• CNN Hires Trump As News Anchor To Recover Lost Viewers (BBee)

Just how crazy is this? You can say that the vaccines are not approved, but not that they haven’t been appropriately tested?

Hodkinson

The spike protein in the Covid-19 vaccine binds to the ACE2 receptors. Dr. Roger Hodkinson explains to me how the covid vaccine may affect male and female fertility

Full video: https://t.co/ugiLMX1Mkn pic.twitter.com/7Eu8rBuIXT

— Taylor Hudak (@_taylorhudak) May 28, 2021

“It’s literally criminal.”

• Suppressing Data On Ivermectin Cost ‘Half A Million Lives’ – Kory (WT)

In a recent Zoom call, Dr. Pierre Kory of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance outlined numerous details showing the World Health Organization (WHO) knowingly suppressed data on the effectiveness of ivermectin against the virus in order to benefit the vaccine interests of Big Pharma. “It’s criminal,” Kory said. “It’s literally criminal.” The drug “could have saved half a million lives this year if it had been approved.” The WHO, Kory contends, is simply taking part in the tactics of a time-worn “Disinformation Playbook.” The term was coined by the Union of Concerned Scientists 50 years ago to describe the strategies corporations have developed over decades to “attack science when it goes against their financial interests.”

It consists of five parts:
The Fake – Conduct counterfeit science and try to pass it off as legitimate research.
The Blitz – Harass scientists who speak out with results reviews inconvenient for industry.
The Diversion – Manufacture uncertainty about science where little or none exists.
The Screen – Buy credibility through alliances with academia or professional societies.
The Fix – Manipulate government officials or processes to influence policy inappropriately.

In the full Zoom call, since removed by YouTube but available on Bitchute, Kory describes how the five tactics have been deployed against the scientific findings on ivermectin. One example is the corruption of leading medical journals, whose editors refuse to allow ivermectin studies to advance to peer review. The most egregious institutional participant, however, is the WHO. Kory is the lead author of a scientific review of the studies on ivermectin worldwide, which was published in the May-June edition of The American Journal of Therapeutics. As reported on the FlCCC website, there have been a total of 56 trials involving 469 scientists and 18,447 patients. Of these, 28 were randomized control trials (RCT), the type of trial considered highly authoritative in the medical community.

Together these have shown an 85 percent improvement as a preventative against the disease when taken before exposure. There has been a 78 percent patient improvement when administered early and a 46 percent improvement when delivered late. A 74 percent improvement in mortality was found and a 66 percent improvement across multiple areas in the 28 randomized control trials. Within only 10 days of publication the paper on ivermectin was rated number 13 most-read among the more than 200,000 other scientific publications that appeared during that time, Kory reports. Out of the 17.7 million papers that have been tracked by the rating source since it began, the ivermectin study is already ranked 246.

I’ll take ivermectin instead.

• Inhaled Nanobodies Could Be New Secret Weapon Against Severe Covid (RT)

In search of ways to complement jabs or to treat patients who can’t be vaccinated, scientists have tested inhalable anti-Covid nanobodies on hamsters, saying they’re effective in fighting the virus by targeting its spike protein. The promising new findings came courtesy of researchers from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, marking the first time nanobodies have been tested for inhalation treatment of the coronavirus disease. Nanobodies are similar to monoclonal antibodies, widely used in certain cancer treatments, but are smaller in size and boast a lower cost of production, which may prove key to a global rollout should the treatment gain regulatory approval in future. The researchers previously identified some 8,000 nanobodies which they whittled down to just one highly effective or “ultra potent” version called Nb21, which they then bioengineered to better slot together with the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein.

Their aerosolized nanobody, named Pittsburgh inhalable Nanobody-21 (PiN-21), is said to have reduced the number of infectious virus particles in the test subject hamsters’ nasal cavities, throats and lungs by a million-fold. “We are very excited and encouraged by our data suggesting that PiN-21 can be highly protective against severe disease and can potentially prevent human-to-human viral transmission,” said co-senior author Yi Shi. The study says that hamsters who inhaled PiN-21 at the time of infection experienced no Covid-19 related weight loss, compared to the control group, which received a placebo and lost 16% of their initial body weight within a week of infection. This would be the equivalent to an adult human losing 20lbs (9kg) in one week, it said. Test subjects who inhaled PiN-21 experienced milder changes in lung structure and severely reduced inflammation following infection than the placebo group.

‘an extraordinary amount of computer power’, ‘databases of Chinese communications, the movement of lab workers and the pattern of the outbreak of the disease around the city of Wuhan.”

• US Sitting On ‘Raft’ Of Unexamined Virus Intel (ZH)

Hours after President Biden promised to release the ‘full report’ from US Intelligence community’s 90-day examination of where COVID-19 originated – unless there’s something he’s unaware of… …the New York Times reports, there’s things he’s unaware of. Namely, ‘a raft of still-unexamined evidence that required additional computer analysis that might shed light on the mystery,” according to anonymous senior administration officials. In other words, the US government has been sitting on a large collection of intelligence in perhaps the most important investigation into an economy-wrecking global pandemic, as China destroyed evidence and has refused to cooperate with international probes.

According to the report, Biden’s call for the new investigation was in response to the ‘new’ evidence. While officials declined to describe the new evidence, they are hoping to apply ‘an extraordinary amount of computer power’ to analyze what the Times speculates may be ‘databases of Chinese communications, the movement of lab workers and the pattern of the outbreak of the disease around the city of Wuhan.” Biden’s call was also meant to spur American allies and intelligence agencies to scour their own evidence, such as “intercepts, witnesses or biological evidence — as well as hunt for new intelligence,” to assess whether the Chinese government covered up what happened.

Astute readers will note that the NYT substitutes its own facts, framing any lab release as of course “accidental,” and suggesting that Biden only dismissed the lab origin theory “until the Chinese government this week rejected allowing further investigation by the World Health Organization.” In reality, plenty of evidence existed which the entire leftist establishment and their media surrogates flatly branded a ‘debunked conspiracy theory’ after then-President Trump promoted it, while the World Health Organization (WHO) and US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) parroted CCP propaganda that the virus could have only emerged via ‘natural origin’ (as opposed to the Chinese lab manipulating bat coronaviruses in the same city that the pandemic started).

Two can play that game.

• Fort Detrick Base Is Full Of Suspicions – China (RT)

Beijing has called on the US to provide an explanation for a respiratory disease in northern Virginia and a large-scale outbreak of e-cigarette disease in Wisconsin after Washington launched a new probe into Covid-19’s origins. Speaking on Thursday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian asked the US to reflect on its own role in the pandemic and not “dump” responsibility on China alone. Citing the 33 million Covid-19 cases in the US and 600,000 deaths, Zhao asked “How safe is your conscience?” “I also want to emphasize that the Fort Detrick base is full of suspicions. There are more than 200 biological laboratories in the United States spreading around the world. How many secrets are there?”

The spokesman said that there was an unexplained respiratory disease in northern Virginia in July 2019 and a large-scale outbreak of e-cigarette disease in Wisconsin. “When will the US release detailed data and information on relevant cases to the international community? The United States owes an explanation to the international community.” The Maryland-based US Fort Detrick center hosts a biolab which has become a hot topic on China’s Twitter-like Weibo. In 2019, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention decided to issue a “cease and desist order” to halt operations at the germ lab over safety concerns.

Zhao’s comment comes after US President Joe Biden said on Wednesday that he was giving intelligence agencies 90 days to pinpoint the origins of Covid-19. Biden said his administration would continue to push China to “participate in a full, transparent, evidence-based international investigation and to provide access to all relevant data and evidence.” Reinforcing a statement from the Chinese Embassy in Washington, DC on Wednesday evening, Zhao called on the US to stop “ignoring facts and science” and refrain from “repeatedly clamoring to reinvestigate China.”

Good idea.

• Rand Paul: “Fauci Cannot Investigate Himself; Get Him Under Oath” (SN)

Senator Rand Paul, who has spearheaded the renewed push to investigate the origin of the coronavirus pandemic, has called for Dr Fauci to be placed under oath and made to testify about the murky ‘gain of function’ research he was involved with funding at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Paul also urged that Fauci “needs to be excluded from the investigation” because he is too deeply involved in the whole thing. Appearing on Fox News, Paul spoke about the funding that Fauci and the NIH supplied to China. “Well, sure it’s a lot. And there are some reports that it added up to millions over time. But the other thing he said was that there was no gain of function in the application. There are scientists who looked at the application and who absolutely and categorically disagree with him,” Paul noted.

“The other evidence that we have is Dr. Shi from the Wuhan lab published a paper that is clearly about gain of function and it that she thanks her group and Dr. Fauci for funding that paper. So there are a lot of contradictions going on,” Paul added. “I think Dr. Fauci should be made to testify under oath about the money that was given to the lab,” Paul said, adding “The good news is yesterday I passed an amendment on the Senate floor that says no more gain of function money can be sent to China.” “The bottom line, he cannot investigate himself. If he was responsible for giving this money. He has every incentive to cover it up and not reveal the truth about it because if the pandemic did come from the lab, he would have great culpability in this,” Paul further emphasised.

The Senator, who continues to receive death threats after being so vocal against Fauci, added that “he can’t be investigating this, nor can any of his people that he picks be investigating this. He needs to be excluded from the investigation.” “This is very important because this could happen again,” Paul warned, adding “I mean, they are experimenting with the SARS virus, which is 15 times more deadly than COVID-19. COVID-19 kills 1%… more than 3 million people. If SARS got out of the lab, that could be 50 million people. This is a very important task ahead of us. We have 11 labs in our country that do this kind of research.”

Is Rand Paul now the only honest politician left alive on Earth ? pic.twitter.com/fYvgCQ6Syy

— ProKlausSchwab (1 of us needs jailed) (@ProKlausSchwab) May 27, 2021

Just how crazy is this? Does anyone find it normal?

• California Launches Largest US Covid Vaccine Lottery Yet (G.)

California has become the latest state to offer a vaccine lottery to incentivize getting the coronavirus vaccine – launching the nation’s most valuable single prize draw: $1.5m. The state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, announced on Thursday that residents will be eligible for a total of $116.5m in prize money giveaways, a windfall aimed at getting millions more vaccinated before the nation’s most populous state fully reopens next month. The state’s reopening is pegged for 15 June, and on that day a drawing will be held to award 10 vaccinated people the top prize. Another 30 people will win $50,000 each, with those drawings starting 4 June. Anyone 12 and older who has received at least one shot will be eligible. And the next 2 million people who get vaccinated will get $50 gift cards.

The state estimates about 12 million Californians 12 and older have not been vaccinated. About 63% of the 34 million eligible have gotten shots, though the pace has slowed markedly in recent weeks as infection rates have plummeted to record lows. Ohio this week announced the first $1m winner of its “Vax-a-Million” contest, as well as the first child to win a full college scholarship. The scheme saw more than 2.7 million adults register for a chance to win. Colorado and Oregon also offered $1m prizes. New York is raffling 50 full scholarships to children 12 to 17 to public universities and colleges in the state, selecting 10 winners each of the next five Wednesdays. That California is turning to cash prizes to encourage vaccinations marks a major turnaround from earlier this year, when Californians clamored for shots, with some driving or waiting in line for hours to get one.

Babylon Bee is on a roll.

• Facebook Now Banning Anyone Who Says Virus Wasn’t Created In Wuhan Lab (BBee)

Facebook has updated its community standards today, declaring that anyone who says the COVID-19 virus wasn’t developed in the lab in Wuhan will be banned for sharing fake news. Mark Zuckerberg, may he live forever, announced the change from his royal throne today to a group of reporters gathered in his royal throne room. “Hear ye, hear ye!” Zuckerberg announced. “From henceforth, anyone saying the virus wasn’t created in a lab shall be banned! While previously, those who said the virus was created in a lab were hanged, this royal decree hereby reverses the order, and now, those who deny the obvious truth that it was created in a lab shall be declared anathema and sentenced to die!”

Zuckerberg’s royal scribes then began scrubbing the old rule from the giant Community Standards tablets displayed in the throne room and chiseling the updated rule on top. “So it is written, and so it is done!” announced Zuckerberg. And the people rejoiced and began feasting upon the lamb, and sloths, and carp, and anchovies.

Amazon as the great defender of the minimum wage. Gutsy.

• Bezos Weaponizes The Washington Post Homepage (DP)

A few years after Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, he said it was because it “is the newspaper in the capital city of the most important country in the world” and “has an incredibly important role to play in this democracy.” Now, with more and more legislators scrutinizing his company’s business practices, his newspaper is playing that role — as an advertising platform in defense of Amazon. On Tuesday, hours after the Washington Post reported that the D.C. attorney general is bringing an antitrust lawsuit against Amazon, the front page of the Post’s website was festooned with native ads from Amazon portraying itself as a devoted supporter of a higher federal minimum wage.

The Post ads, which appeared almost like editorial content, are part of a broader campaign by Amazon highlighting its support for a $15 minimum wage. Left unsaid: Amazon only begrudgingly agreed to a higher wage for its own workers after serious public shaming. The company has also continued to bankroll corporate lobbying groups that are leading the fight against a minimum wage hike, and the Washington Post editorial board has campaigned against a $15 wage. Amazon’s ad spending with the newspaper is nothing new: The company has disclosed spending $40.5 million with the Washington Post since 2013 on advertising and digital content, including $8.1 million last year, according to its proxy statements.

The company’s latest ad on the Post homepage was designed to make the tech giant look progressive in advance of the company’s annual meeting on Wednesday and the news that it’s acquiring legendary film studio MGM. If you were casually glancing at the Post page Tuesday, you may not have realized the Amazon language was an advertisement, since portions of it were included in the Washington Post masthead banner. Text boxes in the banner said: “Since 2018, Amazon has paid at least $15/hour. It’s time to raise the $7.25 federal minimum wage.” Corey Quinn, chief cloud economist at The Duckbill Group, noted Tuesday that “these ads aren’t clearly marked as ads, and that crosses a line.”

[..] Of course, as the Washington Post headline noted when Amazon announced it would raise its minimum wage to $15, it did so “following criticism” — most prominently from Sen. Bernie Sanders, Ind.-Vt., who launched a petition to Bezos in August 2018, demanding that he pay his workers “a living wage and improve working conditions at Amazon warehouses all across the country.” Sanders also introduced the “Stop BEZOS Act,” legislation to put a 100-percent tax on government benefits received by workers at large companies, after a report by the New Food Economy found that thousands of Amazon workers were on food stamps.

“His budget and tax hikes are headed to the gutter. Beyond infrastructure, it’s unclear if Biden can pass anything.”

• Biden’s Budget Assumes a Massive Retroactive Capital Gains Tax (Mish)

Biden seeks to hike the top rate on capital gains to 43.4% from 23.8% for households with income over $1 million. He also wants to make the increase retroactive and force capital gains realization at death as well. The WSJ reports Biden’s Budget Said to Assume Capital-Gains Tax Rate Increase Started in April. • Leaders of six biggest U.S. banks, testified to Congress Thursday warning against a retroactive change. • Sen. Mark Warner (D., Va.), wants to maintain a lower tax rate for capital gains than for ordinary income. • Lawmakers from farm states, including Sen. Jon Tester (D., Mont.) and Rep. Cindy Axne (D., Iowa) have objected to the changes on capital gains at death. Biden wants to make it retroactive so that millionaires cannot accelerate gains now. And he wants to make gains taxable at death to prevent heirs from holding.

In short, Biden wants his tax hikes now and later too. He continues to appease the Progressives. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen says the budget is sustainable because long-term yields are below the rate of inflation, conveniently held there by the Fed. The budget also assumes no recession for at least another 9 years despite the fact they happen about every 5 years on average. Finally, Biden’s budget not only assumes retroactive tax hikes but those hikes will bring in more money than the nonpartisan congressional budget office assumes. Meanwhile, Enough is Enough, a Democratic Governor Courageously Says “No More Taxes”

There is bipartisan support for about $900 billion in infrastructure spend, far short of the $2.3 trillion Biden seeks. There is no bipartisan support for tax hikes. Moreover, Biden cannot afford to lose a single Democrat Senator on any issue, but the net impact of all his tax and budget proposals suggests he has lost at least 3 Senators. His budget and tax hikes are headed to the gutter. Beyond infrastructure, it’s unclear if Biden can pass anything.

“Banks can continue to lend money at interest in order to cover their costs, and make a reasonable profit, but they should not be permitted to create new money at interest..”

• Socialism for 1% Capitalism 99% (Braund)

Banks create money by making loans to their customers. This method accounts for around 97 per cent of the money in circulation. Nearly all money is created as debt, repayable at interest. This means that all loans have to be repaid with money also created as debt and loaned at interest. No wonder the economy struggles, when the system of money creation heaps cost upon unnecessary cost. And no wonder the banks generate such enormous profits. This system, known as fractional reserve banking, is an integral part of the nexus of unearned wealth: Banks’ shareholders earn dividends from the super-profits extracted by the process of money creation; banks loan money to their own investment arms to finance speculative activities which undermine the real economy and then pay themselves unwarranted bonuses from the proceeds; and money issued as debt helps drive up asset prices, especially land, through the housing market and the market for commercial property.

Not only does the system of money issue skew the economy in favour of the already wealthy, it places an unnecessary burden on genuine entrepreneurs by charging them for the use of money. Money is not wealth, but it is required to pay for land, labour and capital. Why should enterprising businesspeople pay a premium for the use of money, when without it business is impossible? It gets worse: Through the activities of credit card companies, banks try to cover up their economic misdemeanours by lending money for consumption to those unable to earn enough to get by. This creates an impression that the economy is in good health because people keep spending. In fact, UK personal debt, at £1,452bn is roughly equivalent to the country’s GDP.

If they are to remain in private ownership, banks must be obliged to work under a revised system of full reserve banking: they should only lend money which they can fund from deposits and reserves. If the money supply needs to be increased, new money can be issued through banks by a central authority. Banks can continue to lend money at interest in order to cover their costs, and make a reasonable profit, but they should not be permitted to create new money at interest, and they should be required to compete for business by offering the best possible savings and borrowing rates to their customers. The current system of money issue widens the gap between rich and poor by concentrating its lending for investment on large corporations, while charging the economically excluded exorbitant rates on borrowing for consumption. It conspires against an optimal supply of money by ensuring that the quantity of money in circulation never reflects the amount of wealth being created, thus introducing instability into the economy and driving the damaging cycle of boom and bust.

More Babylon Bee.

• CNN Hires Trump As News Anchor To Recover Lost Viewers (BBee)

In order to bring back the viewers it’s lost since the 2020 election ended, CNN is rehiring the biggest draw for its audience: former President Trump, who will host all the news segments every night on prime time.
“What we’ve discovered since the election is people only watched our station to see Trump, so we’re hiring him to anchor our programs,” said Bob CNN, owner and founder of the cable news station. “This will finally get our ratings out of the dump.” During his first night on the job, Trump simply yelled about election fraud for two hours. “Very sad, very pathetic, worst-run election in history, maybe ever! Worse than North Korea!” he said to an audience of millions, CNN’s largest in many months.

“Frankly, any ballot cast against me is suspect. You really believe that someone would walk into an election booth and look at me and Sleepy Joe and choose Sleepy Joe? No. Can’t happen. Fake news. Not good. Sad!” After this, the rest of the hosts for the night just yelled about Trump yelling about election fraud. According to Trump, the deal was “the biggest deal in the history of television, maybe ever.” Rumors indicate that Trump was given a majority share in the company, billions of dollars, and unlimited Diet Coke. According to insiders, the headquarters of CNN will also be moved to Mar-a-Lago as part of the deal. After the announcement, CNN’s ratings skyrocketed, and they’re finally outperforming the WNBA, soccer, and Saturday Night Live.

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