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As Omicron surges, Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo says the state is working to "unwind" the COVID "testing psychology" that the federal government has prioritized. pic.twitter.com/cju0o1uVJm

— The Recount (@therecount) January 3, 2022

OZ adverse events

REPORT: 79,000 People! – The government now ADMITS to severe vaccine side effects. – Offering some victims over $600,000 in cash and compensation. – Australia. pic.twitter.com/mmSiyfJiqv

— New Granada (@NewGranada1979) December 31, 2021

More people have been infected in 2 MONTHS since Halloween 2021 than in 20 MONTHS before Halloween 2021.

Denmark health chief: “we will have our lives back in two months”. Omicron will end the pandemic.

‘..we will have our normal lives back in two months..’

• Denmark Health Chief: Omicron Is Bringing About The End Of The Pandemic (DM)

A Danish health chief has said the Covid-19 Omicron variant is bringing about the end of the pandemic, saying ‘we will have our normal lives back in two months’. Speaking to Danish TV 2, Tyra Grove Krause – the chief epidemiologist at Denmark’s State Serum Institute – said a new study from the organisation found that the risk of hospitalisation from Omicron is half that seen with the Delta variant. This, she said, has given Danish authorities hope that the Covid-19 pandemic in Denmark could be over in two months. ‘I think we will have that in the next two months, and then I hope the infection will start to subside and we get our normal lives back,’ she said on Monday.

Despite early fears that Omicron could prolong the pandemic due to its increased level of infection, Ms Krause said it actually could spell the end of the pandemic. According to the study: ‘Omicron is here to stay, and it will provide some massive spread of infection in the coming month. When it’s over, we’re in a better place than we were before.’ But while infection numbers in countries with the variant are soaring, the expert said that the highly infectious Omicron appears milder than the Delta variant, and therefore more people will be infected without having serious symptoms. As a result, she said, this will provide a good level of immunity in the population.

Not just overweight, not just obese, severely obese. Teenagers.

“..the obesity rate was 61.4 percent. The severe obesity rate was 60.5 percent..”

• CDC: 61% of Teenagers Hospitalized for COVID-19 Had Severe Obesity (Reason)

One of the only silver linings of the pandemic has been that young people are less affected by COVID-19 than the elderly. In fact, the most vital indicator of negative COVID-19 outcomes is age: Unlike the Spanish flu, which ravaged armies that were overwhelmingly comprised of otherwise healthy young people during World War I, COVID-19’s death toll is dramatically skewed toward those who have already lived many years. (For context, the average age of death from Spanish flu was 28.) That said, about 600 Americans under the age of 18 have died of COVID-19 during the pandemic. A new study from the CDC took a closer look at young people who were hospitalized for COVID-19 in July and August, while the delta variant wave took hold, and largely found that healthy young people continue to mostly evade the worst of COVID-19.

The study found that most young people who suffer severe COVID-19 outcomes had underlying health conditions. The most common, especially for teenagers, was obesity. “Among patients aged 12–17 years, 61.4 percent had obesity,” according to the study, “60.5 percent of whom had severe obesity.” The study looked at six U.S. hospitals—all of them in the American South—and evaluated 915 cases of COVID-19 in adolescents that required hospitalization. The vast majority were hospitalized for COVID-19, though some had other infections as well. Of the 713 patients who were primarily hospitalized for COVID-19, two-thirds had at least one underlying health condition. For the teenage cohort—patients at least 12 years of age—the obesity rate was 61.4 percent.

The severe obesity rate was 60.5 percent. Just one of the eligible patients had been vaccinated, and 11 patients died in total. What this means, of course, is that COVID-19 can be a fatal disease, even for young people—but vaccine status and general health are extremely important variables. It remains the case that healthy children who do not have underlying health conditions—particularly obesity—are by and large safe from negative COVID-19 health outcomes.

They ARE the messengers, and shoot themselves.

• Social Media Companies Shoot The Messenger (JTN)

YouTube removed full episodes of Joe Rogan’s podcast, posted by third parties, with mRNA vaccine pioneer-turned-critic Robert Malone and cardiologist Peter McCullough, formerly vice chief of internal medicine at Baylor University Medical Center. The page for the Malone video says it violated YouTube’s “community guidelines,” which include COVID medical misinformation but not copyright takedown requests. The uploader posted the video on a different platform as a backup. (Spotify holds the exclusive rights to Rogan’s podcast. A different full-length video with more than 100,000 views removed by YouTube has a copyright takedown notice.) GOP Rep. Troy Nehls of Texas responded by submitting the transcript of Malone’s interview to the Congressional Record and posting it on Nehls’ official website. “Twitter and YouTube are once again proving that they don’t work for their users but for big Pharma, big media, and the elites,” he wrote.

McCullough originally tweeted a YouTube video of his interview last month. Both the tweet and video are now gone, though McCullough’s Twitter account remains live. Sharing a clip from that interview, however, got conservative author Melissa Tate suspended by Twitter. Her account, with nearly half a million followers, remains suspended more than two weeks later. Fact-checker Health Feedback claimed that interview included “multiple false and unsubstantiated claims” about COVID vaccines and the pandemic. YouTube does not appear to be uniformly removing videos that summarize Rogan’s interviews with the two controversial figures. Physician Zubin Damania, who goes by “ZDoggMD” on social media, explained McCullough’s claims in a critical analysis with more than half a million views.

[..] University of California San Francisco medical professor Vinay Prasad summed up the argument for social media regulation of COVID-19 debates in a sarcastic blog post Monday: “We need a bunch of group-thinking ideologues with limited scientific experience and scant publications who work for big technology companies and live in coastal cities to police scientific disputes! Of course we do, what could go wrong!”

The CBC is the English language part of Canada’s “state broadcaster”. It might as well be a social media platform.

“It used to be that I was the one furthest to the left in any newsroom [..] I am now easily the most conservative [..] This happened in the span of about 18 months. My own politics did not change.

• Why I Resigned From The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (Tara Henley)

For months now, I’ve been getting complaints about the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, where I’ve worked as a TV and radio producer, and occasional on-air columnist, for much of the past decade. People want to know why, for example, non-binary Filipinos concerned about a lack of LGBT terms in Tagalog is an editorial priority for the CBC, when local issues of broad concern go unreported. Or why our pop culture radio show’s coverage of the Dave Chappelle Netflix special failed to include any of the legions of fans, or comics, that did not find it offensive. Or why, exactly, taxpayers should be funding articles that scold Canadians for using words such as “brainstorm” and “lame.” Everyone asks the same thing: What is going on at the CBC?

When I started at the national public broadcaster in 2013, the network produced some of the best journalism in the country. By the time I resigned last month, it embodied some of the worst trends in mainstream media. In a short period of time, the CBC went from being a trusted source of news to churning out clickbait that reads like a parody of the student press. Those of us on the inside know just how swiftly — and how dramatically — the politics of the public broadcaster have shifted. It used to be that I was the one furthest to the left in any newsroom, occasionally causing strain in story meetings with my views on issues like the housing crisis. I am now easily the most conservative, frequently sparking tension by questioning identity politics. This happened in the span of about 18 months. My own politics did not change.

To work at the CBC in the current climate is to embrace cognitive dissonance and to abandon journalistic integrity. It is to sign on, enthusiastically, to a radical political agenda that originated on Ivy League campuses in the United States and spread through American social media platforms that monetize outrage and stoke societal divisions. It is to pretend that the “woke” worldview is near universal — even if it is far from popular with those you know, and speak to, and interview, and read. To work at the CBC now is to accept the idea that race is the most significant thing about a person, and that some races are more relevant to the public conversation than others. It is, in my newsroom, to fill out racial profile forms for every guest you book; to actively book more people of some races and less of others.

He’s back, Jan 6 is coming up.

• Trump Calls Twitter, Facebook ‘Disgrace To Our Nation’ (JTN)

Former President Donald Trump, who is building his own social media solution, on Monday night called Twitter and Facebook a “disgrace to our Nation” for their continued censorship of conservative voices and implored Americans to abandon their platforms. Trump’s statement was released after a tumultuous 24-hour period in which freshman Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia was banned permanently from Twitter and given a 24-hour timeout on Facebook for information she posted on COVID-19. “Twitter is a disgrace to democracy. They shouldn’t be allowed to do business in this Country,” the former president said.

“Marjorie Taylor Greene has a huge constituency of honest, patriotic, hard-working people. They don’t deserve what’s happened to them on places like low-life Twitter and Facebook.” He married his criticism with a call to action. “Everybody should drop off of Twitter and Facebook. They’re boring, have only a Radical Left point of view, and are hated by everyone,” he added. “They are a disgrace to our Nation. Keep fighting, Marjorie!” Trump’s new Truth social platform, being led by former congressman Devin Nunes, is set to debut later this year and has promised to be a censorship-free forum. Twitter and Facebook, which banned Trump a year ago, say their penalties on users are designed to protect Americans from misinformation.

What if? There’s still a question mark?

• What If The Largest Experiment On Human Beings In History Is A Failure? (Malone)

One farm visitor told me of his foreshadowing massive numbers of deaths within three years consequent to the genetic vaccines, and that this was all about the “Great Reset” and the depopulation agenda of the World Economic Forum (WEF). I tried to reassure him that, in my opinion, this was highly unlikely- while privately thinking about how easily people fall into this type of conspiracy ideation, and how I need to be careful to avoid going there when confronting so many public health decisions that appear either incompetent or nefarious. At the time, I only knew of the WEF as the host of a big annual party in Davos Switzerland where the uber rich and the hoi oligoi of the Western nations went to watch Ted talks, drink the best wine, see and be seen. Silly me. What a long, strange trip this has been. I doubt that even Hunter S. Thompson could have imagined it in his most drug and booze addled state. Suffice to say, I nominate Ralph Steadman as official illustrator of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Or a resurrected Hieronymus Bosch.

But I am wandering from a point that I am afraid to clearly state. It is starting to look to me like the largest experiment on human beings in recorded history has failed. And, if this rather dry report from a senior Indiana life insurance executive holds true, then Reiner Fuellmich’s “Crimes against Humanity” push for convening new Nuremberg trials starts to look a lot less quixotic and a lot more prophetic. Here is what lit me up in this report from The Center Square contributor Margaret Menge.

“The head of Indianapolis-based insurance company OneAmerica said the death rate is up a stunning 40% from pre-pandemic levels among working-age people. “We are seeing, right now, the highest death rates we have seen in the history of this business – not just at OneAmerica,” the company’s CEO Scott Davison said during an online news conference this week. “The data is consistent across every player in that business.” OneAmerica is a $100 billion insurance company that has had its headquarters in Indianapolis since 1877. The company has approximately 2,400 employees and sells life insurance, including group life insurance to employers in the state. Davison said the increase in deaths represents “huge, huge numbers,” and that’s it’s not elderly people who are dying, but “primarily working-age people 18 to 64” who are the employees of companies that have group life insurance plans through OneAmerica.

“And what we saw just in third quarter, we’re seeing it continue into fourth quarter, is that death rates are up 40% over what they were pre-pandemic,” he said. “Just to give you an idea of how bad that is, a three-sigma or a one-in-200-year catastrophe would be 10% increase over pre-pandemic,” he said. “So 40% is just unheard of.”” So, what is driving this unprecedented surge in all-cause mortality? “Most of the claims for deaths being filed are not classified as COVID-19 deaths, Davison said.“What the data is showing to us is that the deaths that are being reported as COVID deaths greatly understate the actual death losses among working-age people from the pandemic. It may not all be COVID on their death certificate, but deaths are up just huge, huge numbers.””

Take a moment to read the entire article. Now. Then let’s continue on, assuming that you have. AT A MINIMUM, based on my reading, one has to conclude that if this report holds and is confirmed by others in the dry world of life insurance actuaries, we have both a huge human tragedy and a profound public policy failure of the US Government and US HHS system to serve and protect the citizens that pay for this “service”. IF this holds true, then the genetic vaccines so aggressively promoted have failed, and the clear federal campaign to prevent early treatment with lifesaving drugs has contributed to a massive, avoidable loss of life. AT WORST, this report implies that the federal workplace vaccine mandates have driven what appear to be a true crime against humanity. Massive loss of life in (presumably) workers that have been forced to accept a toxic vaccine at higher frequency relative to the general population of Indiana.

FURTHERMORE, we have also been living through the most massive, globally coordinated propaganda and censorship campaign in the history of the human race. All major mass media and the social media technology companies have coordinated to stifle and suppress any discussion of the risks of the genetic vaccines AND/OR alternative early treatments.

“..it has to get to a certain threshold and overcome the other organisms in the nose and overcome our own immune system to become a clinical infection. So, there’s about a three-to-five-day window to actually zap the virus directly.”

• McCullough: Outpatient Treatments for COVID-19 Have Been Suppressed (ET)

Dr. Peter McCullough told The Epoch Times that the public should question why the governments and public health officials around the world have put little to no emphasis on outpatient treatments in their efforts to fight the COVID-19 virus, instead promoting a massive effort on vaccines. “Lots of messaging on the vaccine, but zero mentioning on treatment, none. And it’s been from the very beginning. There is a theme here, I hope everyone’s starting to get the theme. There is zero effort, interest, promotion, or care about early treatment, people who are sick with COVID-19,” said McCullough. “But there is a complete and total focus on people who don’t have COVID-19 and giving them a vaccine.”

McCullough is an internist, cardiologist, epidemiologist, and lead author of the first paper on early COVID-19 outpatient treatment involving a multi-drug regimen. In a recent interview with EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders” program, he discussed a wide range of evidence on COVID-19 preventative treatments that are being used around the world. He said that drug treatments must be prioritized in the effort to stamp out the threat of COVID-19. “So early treatment markedly changes spreads. So, we reduce new cases, we reduce the intensity and severity and duration of symptoms. And by that mechanism, we reduce hospitalization and death.” The doctor cited some recent treatments that have been effective in killing the virus at the early stage of infection:

Dr. Iqbal Mahmud Chowdhury conducted a protocol in Bangladesh that used a povidone-iodine rinse in the nose and eyes to kill the virus. Another treatment effort by a French doctor, Didier Raoult, who treated people using hydroxychloroquine, met with great success. “Chowdhury is the first author recognizing the fact that the virus is in the air, people breathe it in, it settles in the nose, and it begins to replicate. And it has to get to a certain threshold and overcome the other organisms in the nose and overcome our own immune system to become a clinical infection. So, there’s about a three-to-five-day window to actually zap the virus directly.”

Masks and hand sanitizer are illogical and the data does not show them to be effective means to prevent COVID-19 infections because the virus is spread through the air, not hands, and is too small to be blocked by most masks said, McCullough. McCullough said COVID creates “terrible inflammation” and hydroxychloroquine has been shown to be effective to reduce that, but instead of seeing an increase in using and studying the effectiveness of that drug, it has instead been restricted and in some countries, doctors can be jailed for using it to treat their patients.

Dr. #PeterMcCullough explains #MassFormationPsychosis
https://twitter.com/i/status/1478170207478816773

Kulldorff & Bhattacharya from the Great Barrington Declaration.

• : The Collins and Fauci Attack on Traditional Public Health (ET)

While tens of thousands of scientists and medical professionals signed the Great Barrington Declaration, why didn’t more speak up in the media? Some did, some tried but failed, while others were very cautious about doing so. When we wrote the Declaration, we knew that we were putting our professional careers at risk, as well as our ability to provide for our families. That was a conscious decision on our part, and we fully sympathize with people who instead decided to focus on maintaining their important research laboratories and activities. Scientists will naturally hesitate before putting themselves in a situation where the NIH Director, with an annual scientific research budget of $42.9 billion, wants to take them down.

It may also be unwise to upset the director of NIAID, with an annual budget of $6.1 billion for infectious disease research, or the director of the Wellcome Trust, with an annual budget of $1.5 billion. Sitting atop powerful funding agencies, Collins, Fauci, and Farrar channel research dollars to nearly every infectious disease epidemiologist, immunologist, and virologist of note in the United States and UK. Collins, Fauci, and Farrar got the pandemic strategy they advocated for, and they own the results together with other lockdown proponents. The GBD was and is inconvenient for them because it stands as clear evidence that a better, less deadly alternative was available.

We now have over 800,000 COVID deaths in the United States, plus the collateral damage. Sweden and other Scandinavian countries—less focused on lockdowns and more focused on protecting the old—have had fewer COVID deaths per population than the United States, the UK, and most other European countries. Florida, which avoided much of the collateral lockdown harms, currently ranks 22nd best in the United States in age-adjusted COVID mortality. In academic medicine, landing an NIH grant makes or breaks careers, so scientists have a strong incentive to stay on the right side of NIH and NIAID priorities. If we want scientists to speak freely in the future, we should avoid having the same people in charge of public health policy and medical research funding.

Except Uttar Pradesh?!

• COVID Activity Ramps Up In India, Middle East (Cidrap)

India today began vaccinating teens as its latest COVID-19 wave gained momentum, and some countries in the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), reported new case rises. Ever since it battled a catastrophic COVID-19 surge last spring, India has been bracing for another round of infections and making preparations. Over the past few days, cases have sharply risen, but hospitalizations remain low, New Delhi health officials said yesterday, according to Reuters. Cases had dropped to about 6,000 a day, but daily totals have risen sharply for 5 days in a row, with 33,750 reported today, with much of the activity from New Delhi and Mumbai. So far, the country has reported 1,700 Omicron cases.

Today, India opened vaccination to teens ages 15 to 18, with campaigns at schools and health centers across the country, according to Reuters. India has the world’s largest adolescent population. So far, the country has immunized more than 3.8 million teens. [..] Despite case reporting delays over the holidays, many countries reported record daily cases over the past few days, including Australia, where hospitalizations are rising, but not at a level that is overwhelming facilities. Staff illnesses, however, are contributing to pressure on the health system.

Britain on Jan 1 reported a new daily record high of 162,572 cases, with hospitalizations and deaths at lower levels than earlier waves. Today, the country’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson said officials are closely watching the numbers and hospital trends, but so far, the virus appears milder and no new restrictions are warranted for now. He also acknowledged that hospitals are likely to face increasing pressure in the weeks ahead. Other European countries reported new daily record highs over the New Year’s holiday, including France, Greece, Italy, and Portugal. Meanwhile, United States on Dec 29 reported a world daily record high of more than 484,000 new cases.

“The Navy servicemembers in this case seek to vindicate the very freedoms they have sacrificed so much to protect.”

• Federal Court Grants Injunction for Navy SEALs Challenging Vaccine Mandate (AP)

The United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas today issued a preliminary injunction, stopping the Department of Defense from punishing military service members who have religious objections to the vaccine mandate. First Liberty Institute filed a federal lawsuit and motion for preliminary injunction on behalf of dozens of U.S. Navy SEALs and other Naval Special Warfare personnel against the Biden Administration and the Department of Defense for their refusal to grant religious accommodations to the COVID-19 vaccine mandate. “Forcing a service member to choose between their faith and serving their country is abhorrent to the Constitution and America’s values,” said Mike Berry, General Counsel for First Liberty Institute.

“Punishing SEALs for simply asking for a religious accommodation is purely vindictive and punitive. We’re pleased that the court has acted to protect our brave warriors before more damage is done to our national security.” In his order, Judge Reed O’Connor said, “The Navy servicemembers in this case seek to vindicate the very freedoms they have sacrificed so much to protect. The COVID-19 pandemic provides the government no license to abrogate those freedoms. There is no COVID-19 exception to the First Amendment. There is no military exclusion from our Constitution.”

The SEALs, who presently serve at various classified and confidential locations, collectively have more than 350 years of military service, and more than 100 combat deployments. When they inquired about seeking religious accommodation for the vaccine, the Navy informed many of the plaintiffs that they could face court-martial or involuntary separation if they don’t receive the vaccine. Each of their religious accommodation denials appear to be identical, suggesting the Navy is not taking their requests seriously.

On Theranos’ Board of Directors, 2014:

former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger
former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry
former Secretary of State George Shultz
former Senators Sam Nunn & Bill Frist
former Marine Corps General James Mattis
former Wells Fargo CEO Dick Kovacevich
former CDC Director William Foege

• Elizabeth Holmes Found Guilty Of Four Charges In Fraud Case (DM)

• A jury has found Elizabeth Holmes guilty of four charges in fraud case that lasted 14 weeks
• Holmes, 37, is the disgraced founder of Theranos, a ‘breakthrough’ blood-testing startup that defrauded investors of $9billion and patients with inaccurate and unreliable results
• After the company went kaput in 2018, bizarre details of Holmes’ life have been made public: like how she styled herself after Steve Jobs, spoke in a fake baritone voice and claimed that her Husky dog was a wolf
• Former employees recalled how the office was overrun by the dog defecating and peeing in the boardroom
• The trial also revealed steamy texts between Holmes and the company’s COO Ramesh ‘Sunny’ Balwani, with whom she had a secret affair and alleged that he abused her and forced her to have sex

Elizabeth Holmes, the 37-year-old disgraced founder of Theranos, has been convicted of four fraud charges for deceiving investors of $9billion and for bilking thousands of patients with inaccurate and false medical reports. Holmes, a Stanford University dropout who founded Theranos in 2003 at age 19, duped thousands of patients with bogus claims her biotech startup company could conduct a full range of medical tests using blood from a simple finger prick. She was convicted of four fraud counts on Monday night, and cleared of four others. Jurors were unable to decide verdicts on the three remaining charges she faced, with prosecutors now able to re-try Holmes on those counts if they wish to. She was, at one point, the youngest female billionaire in the United States and heralded as ‘the next Steve Jobs’ for revolutionizing lab testing with a proprietary blood analysis device nicknamed the ‘Edison.’

The Silicon Valley ‘unicorn’ startup raised $900million and had more than 800 employees. Her company was more valuable that Uber, Spotify and AirBnB. With her trademark heavy eyeliner rimmed eyes, bleached blonde hair, red lipstick and Steve Jobs-like black turtleneck, Elizabeth Holmes swanned through boardrooms, TED Talks and investor meetings as the new darling of Silicon Valley. Early investors included powerhouses like Rupert Murdoch, Larry Ellison, Jim Walton, Robert Kraft, and Betsy DeVos. Sitting on the Board of Directors were Former Secretaries of State, Henry Kissinger and George Shultz alongside former Secretary of Defense, General Jim Mattis, the CEO of Wells Fargo, and CDC Director, William Foege.

He doesn’t need any help.

• The Biden Consultants Working To Sink His Agenda (DP)

President Joe Biden’s top media buying firm is helping Big Pharma’s efforts to kill his party’s watered-down drug pricing legislation and targeting Senate Democrats up for re-election this year. It’s the latest reminder that for the Beltway consultant class, money is far more important than ideology. While Big Pharma’s allies in Congress have already succeeded in scaling back the Democrats’ drug pricing plan, the provision in Biden’s Build Back Better legislation still represents the party’s most sincere effort to fulfill its longtime promise to allow Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices. The idea of allowing the government to negotiate drug prices — like most other high-income countries do — is one of the most popular items in the Biden social agenda bill.

Yet, a top Democratic Party media buying firm, Canal Partners Media, is placing ads for drug industry front groups that want to block Democrats from lowering drug prices as promised in the Biden reconciliation bill. One group argues that Democrats are putting rare disease patients at risk, and is targeting several incumbent Democratic senators by name. The other says Democrats are harming drug companies’ ability to respond to pandemics like COVID-19. These fearmongering ad campaigns conveniently ignore the fact that the federal government regularly subsidizes drug companies’ research and development costs and has spent tens of billions of dollars to fund COVID vaccines and treatments.

[..] “Today, vaccines and antivirals are helping fight the pandemic, because scientists and researchers in America’s biopharmaceutical industry acted fast, after investing billions over years to achieve breakthroughs,” says the new ad from CPA. “But now, Congress is threatening legislation that will devastate private industry’s ability to fund treatments just like these. What’s at stake isn’t corporate profits — it’s public preparedness. Tell Congress to oppose legislation that would harm our ability to fight pandemics.” PhRMA CEO Stephen Ubl made the same argument in November, claiming that Democrats’ drug pricing measure would “upend the same innovative ecosystem that brought us lifesaving vaccines and therapies to combat COVID-19.”

This is totally false: The federal government invests billions each year to subsidize pharmaceutical companies’ research and development costs, and the government has poured tens of billions of dollars into efforts to develop COVID vaccines and treatments. Indeed, a team of government scientists helped develop Moderna’s mRNA-based COVID vaccine — a fact the company fittingly decided to leave out of the patent application for its vaccine technology. Then there’s the newly-approved COVID antiviral treatment from Merck, which “was made possible by government-funded innovation,” according to Stat News. That didn’t stop the company from charging the U.S. government $712 per course of the treatment, or 40 times the $17.74 that it costs to produce.

Question: How are the Steele dossier and the Mueller investigation NOT an attempted coup?

• The Big Lie and the Elastic Truth: How to Invent a Coup (Miele)

I’ve taken a guilty pleasure recently in watching the faux intellectuals on MSNBC and CNN pass judgment on not just Donald Trump, but also on everyone who shares his disdain for authoritarian pronouncements on COVID-19, election integrity, climate change and a host of other issues. From what I can tell after studying Rachel Maddow, Joy Reid, Jake Tapper and the late, lamented Chris Cuomo, liberalism today is characterized by a low regard for the intelligence of average Americans and a very high regard for the elastic nature of language. Essentially, words are expected to mean whatever Democrats and their media enablers want them to mean. This has been most evident in the war against Donald Trump since the 2020 election, but it was certainly in play earlier.

For example, saying that Donald Trump is a “racist” meant he supports border security. Saying Donald Trump is a Russian “colluder” meant that Hillary Clinton had paid a British spy to manufacture a phony dossier implicating Trump. But the campaign to destroy Trump really lifted into the stratosphere after the Nov. 3 election. When they called his claim that the election was stolen “the Big Lie,” what they meant was they don’t agree with him. When they said he made his claims “without evidence,” they meant “without evidence that they agree with” or that they would even look at.

Then — after the Jan. 6 House select committee voted to hold Mark Meadows in contempt of Congress — they pivoted and announced that the Big Lie was now “the Big Coup.” Meadows was chief of staff to President Trump, and since Trump clearly believed the election was stolen, it should be no surprise that Meadows was in constant communication with members of Congress and others who were working to prove that fraud had taken place. But in the Orwellian world of Democrats, trying to prove that fraud was committed by someone else means you are yourself guilty of fraud. Believing the election was stolen means that you yourself tried to steal the election. And worst of all, asking people to march “peacefully and patriotically” to the Capitol means that you were instructing them to riot and overthrow the government.

Schiff

#BREAKING: In a video released to social media, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) announces that he is running for re-election, touting the work of Democrats in the past year while stating that "our democracy is under assault" due to Republicans' "authoritarian quest for power." pic.twitter.com/cYFnKQ8pl0

— Forbes (@Forbes) January 3, 2022

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Debt Rattle December 7 2021

Dec 072021

December 7, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 10:14 am Finance Tagged with: children, excess mortality, failure, Fauci, insanity, madness, mask mandate, Pfizer, unvaxxed 78 Responses »

Vincent van Gogh Outskirts of Paris: Road with Peasant Shouldering a Spade 1887

• ‘Extremely Mild’ Omicron Is Rapidly Killing Off Much More Deadly Delta (CityAM)

• Excess Mortality Among Children After Vaccine Rollout (Rair)

• De Blasio Requiring Kids 5-11 Show Vaccine Card To Dine Out, See Movies (NYP)

• Most In Critical Care Unvaccinated? – Not According To Data (Jamie)

• Fact-Check #13: “ICUs Are Filled With The Unvaccinated” (OffG)

• Suspended UK Doctor Unmasks Mask Mandate, Gets Reinstated (ET)

• Doctor Banned For Questioning Efficacy of Masks Wins High Court Case (SN)

• Supermarket Ad Showing Santa With A Vaccine Pass Cleared By Regulators

• Pfizer Accused Of ‘Sabotaging’ AstraZeneca Jab (RT)

• The War On A Virus Has Resulted In Colossal Failure (Schachtel)

• A Brief History of Epic Mass Madness (Kunstler)

• Sen. Ron Johnson Is Right About Dr. Anthony Fauci & AIDS (AS)

I have one news article today saying 62% more UK children 6-12 years old have died since their vaccinations started. And a 2nd article that says all children 5-11 in New York must be vaccinated. And I’m wondering: how is that not a completely insane world? How do we fail to connect these things?

Norman Fenton: Spike in all-cause mortality after vaccination

Back to normal then?

• ‘Extremely Mild’ Omicron Is Rapidly Killing Off Much More Deadly Delta (CityAM)

Excitement is growing among Coronavirus experts in Southern Africa and around the world as it increasingly seems that the new Omicron variant is rapidly replacing the much more deadly Delta mutation. Experts are so ecstatic because it seems more and more that the Omicron variant is much more contagious and dominant than Delta, but also much milder and less deadly. Some experts are therefore even urging countries to drop restrictions and let Omicron spread so the more infectious but less severe variant can kill off Delta quicker. Infections in South Africa have started to rise rapidly in recent days, a sign that displacement of the lethal Delta variant is in full swing, according to Adrian Puren, the acting executive director of South Africa’s National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD).

“What will outcompete Delta? That has always been the question, in terms of transmissibility at least, … perhaps this particular variant is the variant,” Puren told Reuters in an interview earlier this week. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has said there is early evidence to suggest Omicron has an “increased risk of reinfection” and its rapid spread in South Africa suggests it has a “growth advantage” compared to Delta. Therefore, virologist Marc van Ranst pointed out that “if the omicron variant is less pathogenic but with greater infectivity, allowing Omicron to replace Delta, this would be very positive.” In fact, Omicron could turn out to be “a storm in a teacup” and may blow over within a few weeks, according to a former head of the British government’s vaccine task force.

Clive Dix said that, if the new variant did turn out to be milder but more infectious than Delta, it would be worth easing travel restrictions so to let the milder Omicron mutation spread further. He told UK newspaper i he is “pretty calm and not really worried” about the new variant, adding that “if we look at all the facts that we know so far, none of them are heading in the direction of being a super concern.” “We’re not seeing serious disease yet and we’re not seeing death. The picture looks like it’s now a milder virus – and that’s what you expect with viruses. They mutate to become more transmissible – they’re not looking to be deadly, because otherwise they don’t get transmitted,” Dix explained.

Insanity.

• Excess Mortality Among Children After Vaccine Rollout (Rair)

Deaths of children have been on the rise since the UK started vaccinating teenagers from the age of 12 and older. The risk-benefit analysis raises serious doubts about injecting this age group with the experimental drug. On September 20, the British national health service NHS announced that the coronavirus vaccine would be rolled out for children aged 12 to 15. In part of the biggest vaccination drive in the country’s health service history, nearly three million children can receive a first dose of the Pfizer vaccine. According to the NHS, jabs started in hundreds of schools (week 38), with the injection program rolling out to others in the coming weeks.

Following the government’s vaccine rollout, the UK’s Office of National Statistics shows that the number of deaths between week 38 and week 41 of 2021 among children aged 10-14 were 62% higher than the five-year average for the number of deaths in this age group during the same period. Furthermore, the increase in deaths began when children started receiving the experimental “vaccine.” The trend of increasing deaths among children is continuing. More children in the age group 5-14 years died in week 43 of 2021 than usual. Data from the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) recently revealed that so many children died at the end of October that there was excess mortality.

The decision to jab children over twelve came after the four Chief Medical Officers (CMO’s) of the United Kingdom advised the UK Government to offer the Pfizer injection to them. The government decided to go ahead with the injection program despite the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) previously stating that they could not support universal vaccination of children. Is it just a coincidence that deaths among children have since increased by 62% (up to 400% in vulnerable children) against the five-year average? The CMO admits they do not know the adverse effects the injection will have on children stating, we “acknowledge that there is considerable uncertainty regarding the magnitude of the potential harms.”

When considering whether or not to vaccinate children of that age, the CMO states that the jab will “help prevent classroom outbreaks and further disruptions to education.” However, their reasoning has no factual basis; as the jab has shown, it continuously fails to prevent infection or transmission. Moreover, even Pfizer does not make the CMO’s claim. Therefore, the government’s argument that the benefits outweigh the risks is invalid. Furthermore, the jab is risky for children’s well-being. In May 2021, Pfizer published a 37-page “factsheet” on the safety and use of their vaccine, from which it emerges that 79% of vaccinated children over the age of 12 could expect side effects. Unfortunately, the government ignored Pfizer’s, and the media refuse to report on their admission because it does not seem to fit their current “political narrative.”

Insanity squared.

• De Blasio Requiring Kids 5-11 Show Vaccine Card To Dine Out, See Movies (NYP)

Kids will soon get carded at New York City restaurants and movies — for proof that they’ve been vaccinated against the coronavirus, Mayor Bill de Blasio said Monday. “Vaccination works and vaccine mandates work,” de Blasio said during a remote press briefing on the latest mandate from City Hall. De Blasio said he was taking the “very bold, aggressive action” in response to the lockdown in Germany and other restrictions returning across the globe amid the new Omicron variant — even though the city’s only seen seven cases of it and the overall COVID-19 infection and hospitalization rates here are among the lowest in the nation. Children ages 5 to 11 must show proof of one vaccination dose to eat out, see a show, go to a movie theater, visit a fitness facility, or attend indoor entertainment venues by Dec. 14. Kids over age 12 must have two doses by Dec. 27 unless they received the one-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine.

De Blasio first launched the “Key to NYC” vaccine mandate for adults at all public indoor venues in August. But the new mandate also applies to many school activities. Kids over 5 must now be vaccinated to attend “high risk” extracurricular activities like band, sports, orchestra and dance in schools. The policy earned quick criticism. “Public health and safety is paramount, but Mayor de Blasio’s announced expansions to the Key to NYC vaccine mandate pose additional challenges for an already beleaguered restaurant industry in need of tourism support and revenues this holiday season,” said Andrew Rigie, who heads the NYC Hospitality Alliance. “U.S. families visiting New York City for scheduled holiday vacations may not be able to meet the vaccination requirements for children or themselves in time, and children aged 5-11 across the globe aren’t universally authorized to get vaccinated.”

Pretty obvious. You’re being fooled.

• Most In Critical Care Unvaccinated? – Not According To Data (Jamie)

Each week, NHS England publishes a great deal of information on hospital activity across the country. Within this compilation is the number of patients in critical care beds. Critical care units are specialist hospital wards that treat patients who are seriously ill and need constant monitoring.

The data helpfully splits out how many patients in critical care beds have Covid-19, how many don’t, and how many beds are unoccupied. I recreate this data in the chart below and it shows that currently within England, just over 1 in 5 beds has a critical care patient who has Covid-19. Just under 3 in 5 beds are patients needing care without Covid-19 and the remaining beds are unoccupied. So non-Covid-19 patients make up the bulk of patients across critical care units in the NHS at the moment. Even if every patient with Covid was unvaccinated (more below) the claim that critical care is full of unvaccinated is not supported by the data, based on NHS England’s own data. Of course, the author may refer to a specific unit in the country, but if that was the case, I do not think it should be a headline in a national newspaper.

NHS England does not publish the vaccination status of patients within hospital, but the UK Health Agency gives a snapshot each week within a weekly surveillance report. The report only provides information on those admitted to hospital and does not provide information specific to those in critical care units. Table 4 on page 20 shows that for patients requiring an overnight admission to hospital within 28 days of a positive Covid-19 test, two-thirds were vaccinated and one-third unvaccinated. Remember, not all admissions are because of Covid-19 and NHS England data shows that 1 in 4 admissions are people with Covid but not because of it. If two-thirds of patients going into hospital are vaccinated, it would be remarkable if for those who then required critical care it was the majority unvaccinated. Even more so when most deaths are among vaccinated people.

36%
https://twitter.com/statsjamie/status/1467801344245481476

Just to rub it in a bit more.

• Fact-Check #13: “ICUs Are Filled With The Unvaccinated” (OffG)

A few days ago Dr Hillary Jones, whilst being interviewed on Lorraine Kelly, claimed: “90% of people in hospital are unvaccinated”. Similarly, last week, Kevin Maguire claimed on Jeremy Vine’s show that: “The unvaccinated are filling hospital beds, they’re in ICUs taking up precious resources – there are hospital waiting lists going up because there are so many unvaccinated people in hospitals” Television presenters and news headlines across the United Kingdom have commonly referred to hospitals being filled with unvaccinated covid19 patients. As if it could ever be considered evidence of anything, an anonymous “doctor” wrote a piece for The Guardian, which he filled with nameless anecdotal evidence, and emotively headlined: “ICU is full of the unvaccinated – my patience with them is wearing thin.”

This claim is regularly used as an argument for vaccine mandates, and/or unvaxxed-only lockdowns. But is it true? In a word, no. ICUs are not “full” of unvaccinated covid patients, they’re not even full of covid cases. In fact, they’re not even full at all. As of last week, NHS England’s own bed statistics reported that England has 4330 available critical care beds, of which 894 (21%) are being used by Covid patients, 2608 (60%) non-Covid patients and 828 (19%) were empty. So, England’s critical care beds are not even 90% full, let alone 90% full of unvaccinated covid patients. But let’s be charitable and assume these people misspoke or communicated their point badly. Let’s assume they meant 90% of covid hospitalisations are unvaccinated.

That, at least, is true right? Wrong. The actual number is 35.4% According to the UK’s Health Security Agency data (page 31 of this document) 6639 patients were admitted to hospital “with Covid” in the weeks 44-47 of this year. Of those 6639, 2355 were unvaccinated. So unvaccinated people do not even make up the majority of Covid cases, let alone the majority of ICU admissions in general. So, even going by the official statistics – which we’ve previously shown are routinely inflated to make the “pandemic” appear frightening – the claim is incorrect. And that doesn’t even account for the fact that, according to Public Health England, a “Covid hospitalisation” is anyone admitted to hospital for any reason within 28 days of a positive Covid test. This could include people who are admitted to hospital for something else and then happen to test positive while they are there. We could also discuss the tiny number of hospital beds available in this country, which has more than halved since the 1980s, whilst the population has exploded in that time.

“Vaccination for a coronavirus has never been done successfully, so to roll it out without completion of full clinical trials, knowing full well the results of the SARs-CoV1 trials in animal studies, where they all died, was at best negligent but will in time likely be considered a far worse crime.”

• Suspended UK Doctor Unmasks Mask Mandate, Gets Reinstated (ET)

Dr. Sam White, a longstanding critic of the UK government’s coronavirus measures, feels wearing a mask poses its own health risks. He told me: “Non-grade clinical masks, especially in a non-clinical setting do absolutely nothing to protect anyone. In fact, there is a plentiful supply of scientific evidence to show they cause significant harm. For me, this is especially a concern for children, their neurodevelopment and neuroplasticity.” To those who argue that, as medical professionals wear them, they must serve some purpose, White says: “In a hospital setting, a mask is used in a well-ventilated theatre to prevent mucus secretions entering into an open wound or body cavity.

The surgeon is generally not moving, unlike someone working a 12-hour shift rushing around a warehouse where the mask quickly becomes contaminated with bacteria, viruses, and germs. It’s cruel to subject workers to what is an unsafe medical intervention. What is more, COVID is an aerosolized virus not spread by mucus. It’s like using a chain-link fence to keep sand out.” When I asked White what governments can do to deal with the plethora of COVID variants that are being discovered, he told me: “Whilst it mutates, and I am cynical if true gene sequencing has actually been done in each case of a new variant, it will become more transmissible, but symptoms become milder with each variant.” He added: “It never made sense to create a vaccine for a coronavirus as you can never keep up with the mutations. The vaccines do not prevent transmission, or infection.”

At least Johnson accepts White’s last point and he told reporters: “Our scientists are learning more hour by hour, and it does appear that Omicron spreads very rapidly and can be spread between people who are double vaccinated.” White feels he has a solution: “Ivermectin and other safe, proven, effective therapeutics do keep up with variants and actually work.” The helpful benefits of ivermectin were made very clear in the case of Sun Ng, an elderly COVID-19 patient who was thought to be dying but recovered only after being treated with the therapeutic. However, as The Epoch Times recently reported, the hospital in Illinois had to first be taken to court by his relatives before it would allow the drug to be administered.

The average age of deaths from COVID still remains around 82 and White points out that many of those people were severely deficient in vitamin D. He is equally scathing about the way the vaccines were rushed out without being fully tested: “Vaccination for a coronavirus has never been done successfully, so to roll it out without completion of full clinical trials, knowing full well the results of the SARs-CoV1 trials in animal studies, where they all died, was at best negligent but will in time likely be considered a far worse crime. It also vitiates any principle of informed consent with no long-term safety data available and insufficient short-term data.”

“The ruling concluded that the tribunal’s decision was “an error of law and a clear misdirection,” meaning the decision was “clearly wrong and cannot stand.”

• Doctor Banned For Questioning Efficacy of Masks Wins High Court Case (SN)

A doctor in the UK who was banned from using social media by the General Medical Council for claiming “masks do nothing” has won his case in the High Court. Dr. Samuel White was slapped with and 18 month ban by the GMC after he posted a video to Instagram and Twitter in June questioning the efficacy of face coverings. In the video, White said why he could no longer tolerate working in his previous roles because of the “lies” around the NHS and the government’s response to the pandemic, which were “so vast” he could no longer “stomach” them. White also committed the ultimate sin of remarking, “masks do nothing” to stop the spread of COVID, despite this being the consensus medical opinion at the start of the pandemic before it mysteriously switched almost overnight.

The doctor also expressed concerns about the safety of vaccines and the reliability of COVID tests. White took his case against the GMC to the High Court on the basis of his freedom of expression “to engage in medical, scientific and political debate and discussion,” White’s barrister, Francis Hoar, told a hearing at the Royal Courts of Justice. Hoar added that White’s opinions were “supported by large bodies of scientific and medical opinion” and had been “statements of fact and opinions about pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical interventions in response to the pandemic.” GMC’s Alexis Hearnden claimed that White’s views were not only misinformation, but posed a “risk” to the public because they didn’t align with official pronouncements.

However, the court ruled in favor of White, asserting that the tribunal which banned him from speaking had violated the 1998 Human Rights Act. The ruling concluded that the tribunal’s decision was “an error of law and a clear misdirection,” meaning the decision was “clearly wrong and cannot stand.”

Dr. Samuel White – conspiracy theory or…. pic.twitter.com/twTncANbZZ

— Deleuze (@Kukicat7) September 24, 2021

Next up: Jesus, Joseph and Mary.

• Supermarket Ad Showing Santa With A Vaccine Pass Cleared By Regulators

A supermarket advert that depicts Santa Claus only being able to enter Britain with a vaccine passport has been cleared by regulators, who insist that it doesn’t ‘break our rules’. The short for the Tesco chain of supermarkets in Britain quickly became the second most complained about advert in history as it features the threat of Christmas being cancelled and Santa being quarantined because of COVID restrictions. Over 5000 complaints were registered after the ad, titled “This Christmas, Nothing’s Stopping Us”, also showed Santa averting the crisis by flashing his vaccination status passport, showing that he is fully vaxxed against the virus. In a statement, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) in Britain announced that “Having carefully assessed the 5,000 complaints we received about the Tesco Christmas ad campaign, we have concluded it doesn’t break our rules and there are no grounds for further action.”

The statement further noted “We consider that the depiction of Santa displaying a proof of vaccine status in an airport is likely to be seen as a humorous reference to international travel rules people have experienced this year. It is unlikely to be interpreted as a message about these rules or the Covid-19 vaccine more widely.” Many of the complaints argued that the advert was overtly politicising Christmas, and that it encourages ‘medical discrimination’ against those who are not vaccinated, and promotes the need to take COVID vaccines in order for society to keep functioning.

“While we understand that some people disagree with the vaccine programme and may find the ad in poor taste, we have concluded that the ad is unlikely to be seen as irresponsible or cause serious or widespread offence on the basis suggested,” the ASA statement further noted. While some earlier had celebrated the ‘removal’ of the ad, Tesco says it has not dropped the campaign. A previous ad campaign by Ryan Air that promoted the sale of summer flights with the slogan “Jab & Go!” was later banned by the ASA after thousands of people complained it was misleading.

“‘Dispatches’ said Pfizer’s manufacturing costs were just 76 pence ($1.01) per jab, but the company was charging the UK government £22..”

• Pfizer Accused Of ‘Sabotaging’ AstraZeneca Jab (RT)

US drugsmaker Pfizer is denying any wrongdoing after a British TV documentary showed that a presentation made on its behalf had criticized a rival Covid-19 vaccine manufactured by AstraZeneca as being potentially unsafe. Teasers for a Channel 4 ‘Dispatches’ investigative program, shown on Monday, say a Pfizer presentation described AstraZeneca’s vaccine against Covid-19 as unsafe for patients with compromised immune systems and as having the potential to cause cancer. The speech was delivered in Canada sometime last year, but it was unclear whether it was a one-off event or the speaker had made the claim multiple times. The program, titled ‘Vaccine Wars: The Truth About Pfizer’, airs on Friday.

Pfizer responded to say the presentation had been “wrongly attributed” to it and had been delivered by a third party. “We refute any suggestion that Pfizer has sought to undermine others’ scientific endeavors,” a company spokesman told the Daily Mail. “Our priority has always been getting high-quality, well-tolerated and effective vaccines to patients all over the world as quickly as possible and to help put an end to this deadly pandemic.” The spokesperson explained that Pfizer had paid a third-party agency to create an educational program about vaccines in Canada, after the government in Ottawa had approved Pfizer’s product for use in the country.

‘Dispatches’ said Pfizer’s manufacturing costs were just 76 pence ($1.01) per jab, but the company was charging the UK government £22 ($29.17) per dose – a 3,000% markup. Pfizer said the estimate was “grossly inaccurate” and did not account for the cost of clinical studies, “manufacturing on a massive scale,” and global distribution. AstraZeneca, which developed its jab in cooperation with the University of Oxford, has reportedly sold its vaccine at cost for £3.60 ($4.77), losing out on £21 billion ($27.84 billion) in potential revenue, while Pfizer has seen a windfall from the vaccines. However, the AstraZeneca jab has been dogged by reports of potentially fatal blood clots in certain populations, and the UK has since ordered twice as many Pfizer vaccines instead.

Pfizer CMO

Pfizer CMO: Other vaccines have caused death not Pfizers pic.twitter.com/sHcvopbwxt

— Deleuze (@Kukicat7) December 4, 2021

“[..] .. and the ruling class is determined to cover up this undeniable reality..”

• The War On A Virus Has Resulted In Colossal Failure (Schachtel)

The war on a virus is long lost, and the sunk costs keep piling up. Whether you believe that this was all to bring about a Great Reset or some of the actors involved genuinely wanted to stop a virus, the result is now clear. The war on COVID-19 is over and it has resulted in colossal loss. Not a single battle was won. They lost the war, they know they lost the war, and now the losing side of the war — the global “elite” — is attempting to cover up this reality by any means necessary, even if it means dragging the entirety of humanity down with them. Movement Passes for 5 year olds in New York City and San Francisco. Prison for the non compliant in Austria and Germany. Detention centers for troublesome citizens in Australia and New Zealand. What do all of these places have in common?

First and foremost, as The Dossier readers know well by now, none of these measures are backed by any legitimate scientific precedent. The global “elite” forcibly drafted billions of people into fighting a “war on a virus,” and that war has been an abysmal failure. Now, almost two years into this war, the ruling class won’t give it up. Far from surrendering this unwinnable war, the “generals” of this struggle have decided to attempt to bring us down with them into colossal defeat. The people, organizations, and governments in charge of fighting our “war on a virus” have lost in devastating fashion. Far from a successful global effort to stop a virus, these ruling factions and power centers have failed the billions of people drafted into this war without the consent of the governed.

From Los Angeles to Sydney to Moscow to Rio to New York to Paris to London and everywhere in between, almost every government on every level across the world, with very few exceptions, committed incredible harm against their populations in the name of stopping a virus. And they have absolutely nothing to show for it. They threw every “public health expert” class instrument in the book at the COVID-19 pandemic, and nothing worked. But the people in charge don’t want to be blamed for the chaos they wrought. That’s bad politics, and not an ideal situation for those who believe that they are the personification of science itself. So instead of admitting to gross, criminally negligent and now purposeful failure, these maniacal saboteurs are doubling, tripling, and quadrupling down on sunk costs for the masses. The “elites” know nothing is working, but they’d rather take everyone down with them than to admit to wholesale failure.

“The catch is, they’ve given themselves until February to enforce their foolish vaccine mandates.”

• A Brief History of Epic Mass Madness (Kunstler)

Remember: the Progressive-Woke-Marxist-Jacobins liked nothing better than inflicting punishment. In fact, when you swept away all their ideological bullshit and the associated hustles, the movement was strictly about coercion, about pushing other people around, making them do as the Woke commissars willed. And there was a clearly sado-masochistic edge to all that. They relished cancelling people, wrecking careers, destroying reputations, livelihoods, marriages, families. Their political leaders had no qualms about exterminating hundreds of thousands of small businesses in Covid-19 lockdowns orchestrated by Woke heroes like Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City and Governors Gavin Newsom of California and Jay Inslee of Washington State. And, of course, their darlings of the streets, BLM and Antifa, bashed-in shopfronts, looted all the merch, and burned down the buildings with mad glee.

But, most importantly, Covid-19 gave the political Left something else to focus its angst on once Mr. Trump was finally swept off the scene in the janky election. And until just the last few weeks of 2021, the virus has furnished endless opportunity for ever greater enactments of coercion and tyranny. Except now, suddenly, it’s all falling apart. In America, the claque behind the phantom president “Joe Biden” pulled the trigger on mandating vaccinations — complete with harsh punishments for the vaxx-averse — but then two things happened: 1) Federal Judge Terry Douglas in Louisiana issued an injunction against the mandate that applies in all fifty states; and 2) the news finally started leaking out — despite every effort of the US public health officialdom to hide it — that the vaccines carried an unprecedented risk of harm for medicines enlisted so casually into emergency use among so many millions of people, in addition to their negligible efficacy in preventing illness and contagion.

The Europeans, on the other hand, slid ever-deeper into despotic measures not seen since the Gestapo terrorized the continent. The Europeans face the same primal source of anxiety that the Americans do: the running down of their techno-industrial economies, except their predicament is arguably a little bit keener than ours is, since they have hardly any oil and natural gas of their own to run things on, and suffer terrible uncertainty about who will furnish it for them. If they had not gone out of their minds over what has turned out to be a pretty punk-ass virus — when treated early with a menu of cheaply available drugs — and hadn’t deified the false savior vaccines, they might be a whole lot more concerned about how they are going to heat their homes, fertilize their crops, and produce things of value — in short, remain civilized. The catch is, they’ve given themselves until February to enforce their foolish vaccine mandates.

The Omicron variant may help, too, since it is proving so far to be a grossly over-hyped development, discrediting the paranoia ginned up in the media. Can their courts act as ours have and put a stop to the madness? Between now and then we’re likely to see the defeat of the mass formation psychosis in America, at least, as the country is forced to face the truth of what it has done to itself.

And 40 years later he’s the head of US health care. Madness assured.

• Sen. Ron Johnson Is Right About Dr. Anthony Fauci & AIDS (AS)

Dr. Anthony Fauci’s own words buttress Senator Ron Johnson’s claim that he “overhyped” AIDS during the 1980s. But decades after he issued them neither Rolling Stone nor the Hill nor the Daily Beast bother to question, let alone investigate, Johnson’s accusation. Instead, those publications just take Fauci’s 2021 words at face value and pretend he did not say what he said in 1983. “By the way, Fauci did the same exact thing with AIDS,” Senator Ron Johnson told Brian Kilmeade of Fox News last Wednesday. “He overhyped it. He created all kinds of fear, saying it could infect the entire population when it couldn’t, and he’s doing, he’s using the exact same playbook with COVID: ignoring therapy, pushing a vaccine.” To respond, Fauci retreated, for the second week in a row, to a sycophantic Sunday host.

Last week, Fauci claimed that Republicans criticize him not because of his many errors but because “I represent science.” Just as the jaw-dropping arrogance Fauci displayed on Face the Nation last week did not even raise one of Margaret Brennan’s eyebrows let alone drop her jaw, Jake Tapper seemed dismissive this week of the idea that the senator knew something that maybe a television presenter did not. Instead of digging into Johnson’s claim, he asked Fauci to respond to the senior senator from Wisconsin’s “bizarre and false assertion.” “How do you respond to something as preposterous as that?” Fauci told Tapper. “Overhyping AIDS? It’s killed over 750,000 Americans and 36 million people worldwide. How do you overhype that?”

The way people overhyped AIDS during the 1980s involved scare stories that one could contract the disease by using the wrong pay phone or public restroom. Fauci contributed to that hysteria. He knows he did this. He knows he received criticism for doing it from many quarters, including the late Randy Shilts, a voice generally friendly toward Fauci, in And the Band Played On. He knows exactly what Johnson refers to but he feigns ignorance. “The finding of AIDS in infants and children who are household contacts of patients with AIDS or persons with risks for AIDS has enormous implications with regard to ultimate transmissibility of this syndrome,” Anthony Fauci explained to the American public in 1983. “If routine close contact can spread the disease, AIDS takes on an entirely new dimension.”

But infants and children did not contract the virus that causes AIDS from “routine close contact.” A responsible doctor does not make such a public proclamation. A bureaucrat, more concerned with saving his job than lives, does. It struck as a typical, CYA pronouncement way back when. Beyond this, bureaucrats — whether in defense or health or welfare or education — tend to hype problems to engorge the coffers of their agencies. Fauci based his remarks on nothing scientific but instead on speculation. Thirty-eight years later, Fauci counted on his journalistic cheerleaders to forget what they probably never remembered in the first place. They came through for him.

Galileo: ‘The sun doesn’t revolve around the earth.’

Twitter: ‘This claim is misleading. Learn why religious officials believe the sun revolves around the earth.’

Diamant (activate subtitles)

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It’s Time To Dump Pfizer

Nov 292021

November 29, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 6:58 pm Finance Tagged with: autoimmune, contracts, early treatment, excess mortality, failure, Pfizer, prophylactics, spike protein, vaccines 23 Responses »

Ivan Kramskoy Christ in the desert 1920

It’s time for the world to come to its senses. Maybe Omicron is a good guide for doing that. Because it shows how something that is not a threat at all, as far as anyone knows from evidence, can still be blown out of all proportions in order to manipulate behavior. Kind of a mini version of the past 2 years, a play within a play.

For the past year, we have increasingly given our trust -and money- to Pfizer et al, to save us from the terrible virus. Many millions of people have been injected with their vaccines, and they have failed spectacularly. Of course, since Pfizer, and the governments they signed production and distribution contracts with, have captured the media almost 100%, you won’t read or hear about it, but it’s there for everyone to see in this US graph:

US COVID Deaths In 2021 Have Surpassed 2020’s Total

COVID-19 has killed more people in 2021 than 2020. The virus was reported as the underlying cause of death (or a contributing cause of death) for an estimated 377,883 people in 2020, accounting for 11.3% of deaths, according to the CDC. As of Monday, more than 770,000 people have died from the coronavirus, according to Johns Hopkins University data. That means over 15,000 more people have died in 2021 than last year from COVID-19 – and there’s still more than a month left. his has happened despite the fact that last year no Americans were vaccinated (now 59% of all eligible Americans have had the “life-saving” jab) and some 17% have received booster shots…

In 2020, no American was vaccinated. In 2021, 60% of them were. If the vaccines had been effective, that should have meant 60% fewer positive tests, hospitalizations, and certainly deaths, or if not 60%, at least a substantial percentage. But the opposite happened: Covid deaths went up, and not a little bit. Between mid August and mid November 2021, they increased some … 60%.

That is all you need to know. The vaccines do not work. And not just “not as advertized”, they do not work at all. Granted, there appears to be a 2-3 month window in which they suppress something in the virus, but 2-3 months is not nearly enough to be labeled a “vaccine”. And the “something” may well be just an accumulation of binding antibodies that turn against the “patient”‘s immune system, certainly when boosters are applied.

Of course the media, politics and industry claim it’s because “the unvaccinated act as reservoirs of the virus” (someone actually said that), and it’s because of Delta. But no separate vaccine was ever launched for Delta, and the boosters people get now are the same substance that they claim made boosters necessary in the first place. The Science.

Forget it all. The vaccines don’t work, and we need to move on. But we can’t. Because our “leaders” signed deals with Pfizer et al that gave the latter complete immunity from any harm caused by their vaccines, and -more importantly- made it illegal to use, promote, research, any other drugs that could have worked against Covid. And those deals still stand now that the vaccines have failed.

Robert Bridge is one of the few people who addressed this issue in The EU Is Not Revealing The Details Of Its Contracts With Vaccine Makers. Why?, which details the fruitless efforts from European parliamentarians (!) to see the contracts signed by Brussels and Pfizer et al. They failed.

Still think the vaccines work? That maybe they don’t prevent transmission or infection, but at least they prevent severe disease and hospitalization? I personally don’t see how that can be enough to threaten forced vaccination, get people boosted, have toddlers injected, but yeah, that’s just me. But prevent severe disease and hospitalization? They don’t even do that. If only.

Instead, the vaccines make people more likely to be infected, and to transmit the disease, to have severe disease, and to die. I know that’s 180º different from what you hear every single grinding day, but hey, you yourself fed your body and your life to the machine, not me.

Here’s a few tidbits. First, a Google translate:

German States With Higher Vaccination Rates Have Highest Excess Mortality

The summary of the analysis states: Excess mortality can be found in all 16 states. The number of Covid deaths reported by the RKI in the period under review consistently only represents a relatively small part of the excess mortality and above all cannot explain the critical issue: • The higher the vaccination rate, the higher the excess mortality. The most direct explanation is: • Complete vaccination increases the likelihood of death.

Of course, more indirect explanations are possible: • The higher the proportion of old people, the higher the vaccination rate and excess mortality. Therefore, the vaccination rate and excess mortality also correlate. (This explanation is not very plausible, however, as the proportion of old people would have to have changed significantly between 2016-2020 on the one hand and 2021 on the other.) • Higher vaccination rates are achieved through increased stress and anxiety in the country concerned, and the latter lead to higher numbers of deaths.

[..] The correlation coefficient is +0.31. In the eyes of the two scientists this is “astonishingly high”. Especially since the sign is wrong. Actually, we expect a different relationship: the more vaccinations, the lower the mortality. After all, the intention of the “vaccination” is to protect people. Now the connection is positive: “The excess mortality increases with the increase in the vaccination rate”. This requires urgent clarification, demand the two statisticians.

Infection rates, excess mortality: the vaccines make everything worse.

Official UK Data Says COVID Infection Rates Higher in Vaxxed Than Unvaxxed

In every age group over 30 in the UK, the rates of Covid infection per 100,000 are now higher among the vaxxed than the unvaxxed. Indeed, in the cohorts aged between 40 and 79, infection rates among the vaccinated are more than twice as high as among the unvaccinated. PHE’s fruitlessly rechristened body, the UK Health Security Agency, frantically clarifies that the data ‘should not be used to estimate vaccine effectiveness’, a caveat which I include for the sake of accuracy. But the differences in the infection rates are drastic enough for you to draw your own conclusions.” Shriver then summarizes how that data demolishes the reason for implementing vaccine passport schemes.

“Gatekeeping of pleasure palaces promotes the wrong impression — statistically, the lie — that the unvaccinated riff-raff exiled to the pavement pose a far graver threat of communicable disease than the diners in the nearby banquette who, like you, have righteously got the shot. In truth, the double-jabbed airline passenger in 24A can be just as risky a seat-mate as the great unwashed banished from the flight.” Meanwhile, the Times reports the results of another study which “found the double-jabbed are just as likely to pass on Covid-19 as unvaccinated people.”

After Public Health England published the data, government bureaucrats begin to panic that people would use it to suggest vaccines were not that effective. Office for Statistics Regulation director Ed Humpherson called an urgent meeting with U.K. Health Security Agency during which he worried about the data having “the potential to mislead.” “We noted that these data have been used to argue that vaccines are ineffective,” Humpherson subsequently wrote.

Steve Kirsch interprets Aaron Siri’s stats:

Vaccinated Up To 9x More Likely To Be Hospitalized Than Unvaccinated

A concerned Physician Assistant, Deborah Conrad, convinced her hospital to carefully track the Covid-19 vaccination status of every patient admitted to her hospital. The result is shocking. As Ms. Conrad has detailed, her hospital serves a community in which less than 50% of the individuals were vaccinated for Covid-19 but yet, during the same time period, approximately 90% of the individuals admitted to her hospital were documented to have received this vaccine. These patients were admitted for a variety of reasons, including but not limited to COVID-19 infections.

Even more troubling is that there were many individuals who were young, many who presented with unusual or unexpected health events, and many who were admitted months after vaccination. [..] here’s the part Aaron didn’t point out that needs to be stated very clearly: The only way you can get those numbers is if vaccinated people are 9 times more likely to be hospitalized than unvaccinated; It is mathematically impossible to get to those numbers any other way. Period. Full stop. This is known as an “inconvenient truth.”

Not clear yet? You think these people are all lying, while your politicians, media, Pfizer and Fauci all speak the truth and nothing but the truth?

Let’s try Dr. Geert VanDen Bossche, who’s been warning for over a year about mass vaccination breeding mutations. Hello, Omicron. Geert is more pessimistic than ever. He thinks even people who were not vaccinated, or ever had Covid, are at risk from the mutations caused by the vaccines.

My Opinion On The New African Variants

The world may be taken by surprise but that doesn’t include us. It remains to be seen whether Omicron can outcompete Delta (to be confirmed). If that’s the case, we’re definitely not in good shape. In case of CoV, innate immunity protects the individual and the ‘herd’ (sterilizing immunity, no natural selection pressure, herd immunity) whereas adaptive immunity induced with leaky vaccines has exactly the opposite effect. THE big Q is whether such an immune escape variant could even resist naturally acquired Abs in people who recovered from C19 disease. I am, indeed, cautious and worried about ADE, even in the unvaccinated who recovered from C-19 disease as they may no longer be able to control viral infection. ADE would equal ‘enhanced virulence’. Difficult to predict. Mass vaccination has compressed the evolutionary trajectory of the virus from a few hundred years (?) down to one year. Hope that naturally primed individuals can deal with that speed.

There are three ways in which people can die (and/or get sick) in relation to Covid19.

1/ Die of Covid

We need to say not WITH Covid, but OF Covid. Recent Italian research indicated that only 1% of what is currently labeled a Covid death actually died from it, the rest all have comorbidities (sometimes 5,6) that make that label impossible to assign.

2/ Die of the absence of prophylactics, early treatment

As I said above, the contracts “we” signed with Pfizer et al make it illegal to use, promote, research, any other drugs that could have worked against Covid. Because if anything would work, that would endanger the Emergency Use Authorization the vaccines operate under. Covid is the only disease where people with symptoms are told to go home and not come back until they need to be put on an intubator.

Meanwhile, just about everybody in the Northern hemisphere has Vitamin D levels that are far too low for their immune systems to work properly where and when needed. There is for instance the German study that suggests Mortality Rate Close to Zero Could Theoretically Be Achieved With [Sufficient Vitamin D]. As I said before, “I think that may be a bit much, I always conservatively said boosting vit. D levels can save the first 50%, zinc (+ quercetin) the next 25%, and then ivermectin can get you close to zero.”

But zinc and ivermectin, and quercetin, and hydroxychloroquine, and 100 other repurposed drugs, have all been swept under various carpets, and the highly skilled doctors who promote prophylactic, early treatment, or treatment protocols that involve them have been banned, censored, fired, sued, etc.

When I see a graph like this one, from WHO EU, proclaiming many lives were saved by the vaccines, I have 2 questions: 1/ What data is this based on?, and 2/ How many lives were lost to the lack of prophylactics and early treatment? Wait, there’s a third question: how many lives will be lost to the vaccines?

3/ Die of vaccines

The big unknown. But not entirely. Through adverse reactions registration systems like VAERS in the US, even though they are notorious for catching only between 1% and 10% of events, we know that 100s of thousands of people have died from the vaccines, and millions have had severe adverse effects, often diminishing their lives to a shadow of what they once were. Myocarditis is just one example.

But it’s what lies ahead that is more worrisome. The spike proteins that all popular vaccines induce in your body, can last inside you for a long time, and bond with your binding antibodies, which is where an auto-immune disease starts. Your immune system may be strong enough to ward of the first 1 or 2 shots, but once you move into the booster phase, the odds turn against you.

If you get a booster shot after 6 months (or 8, or 4, or 2), your body is prepared for the spike protein attack. Unfortunately, it may well end up helping the attackers, in some form of Antibody Dependent Enhancement (ADE), a form of auto-immune.

When you get the next booster, and the next, and be sure you will be told to get it, remember the vaccines only “work” for 2-3 months, the autoimmune risk continues to increase. That is also true if there is ever a Omicron vaccine, or pill, or whatever; it’s still all spike proteins.

Do you understand yet why vaccine mandates make no sense at all, at least not from a health point of view? They only serve the interests of Pfizer, and in their wake, your politicians and media.

We have one option left only: get rid of Pfizer, the vaccines, the mandates, the entire circus. It has failed spectacularly, and lost us millions of people and productive lives. Time’s up. This is our moment.

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Why Lockdowns Work

May 042020

May 4, 2020 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 2:30 pm Primers Tagged with: care workers, closure, coronavirus, Covid19, face masks, failure, indefinite, lockdown, Sweden, testing, vaccine, virus 17 Responses »

Steve Schapiro Muhammad Ali (Cassius Clay) with mini gloves, Louisville, KY 1963

There was another comment at the Automatic Earth yesterday questioning the function and wisdom of various lockdowns. I thought I’d explain this in more detail.

Ilargi if you or anyone else could explain what the exit strategy is from a lockdown I’d be interested in hearing it. As it is, this lockdown I repeat is no different than financial QE – everyone comes out weaker than they were before treatment. Financial QE covers up her problem just like lockdown does, but makes it worse in the long run. The only exit strategy I can see is to keep lockdown until a vaccine or effective treatment, neither of which are on the horizon.

If you are arguing that even healthy economies can survive indefinite closure, with intermittent re-openings I don’t know what to tell you. The suggestion is made that Sweden has a huge vested interest in understating fatalities. It is also certainly true that the rest of the world has an even greater vested interest in criticizing the Swedish approach because it demonstrates how useless the total lockdowns are. BTW the reported differences in fatalities between Sweden and the rest of Scandinavia are not statistically significant. Playing with numbers and not understanding how things may not be as they seem.

First, let’s re-establish that no lockdown would have been needed if and when politicians and scientists had done what’s in their job descriptions. That does not mean that no lockdown was called for once they did fail. Indeed, it’s the failure to act at the very beginning, say January 31, when the WHO sent out its first warning, that made lockdowns inevitable.

I don’t say that to exonerate the WHO in any way, because it subsequently, for weeks on end, kowtowed to China’s refusal to allow its teams entry into the country, and followed that up by waiting and hesitating another full 6(!) weeks, until March 11, to declare a pandemic.

Second, a lockdown and the way it’s executed are not the same thing. The decisions to lock down their societies may be the only thing(s) the Little Manager politicians have gotten right, but they still did get it right. And sorry, but you cannot use their ginormous failures made both before and during the lockdowns, to argue that the lockdowns themselves are a failure. These are separate issues, don’t let’s get them mixed up.

Lockdowns in and of themselves, when properly executed, cannot NOT work, simply because of the way viruses spread. Yes, we need to know exactly how they do, but not knowing this in the present case is exactly why we need a lockdown, why we need to keep people, who are all potential hosts AND spreaders, away from each other. Until we know precisely how the virus spreads and/or until we know that the people involved are not virus carriers.

Terms such as “indefinite closure” don’t come from me, so please have the courtesy not to suggest I want one. Questioning the principle of a lockdown is not terribly helpful or smart, and neither is suggesting that Sweden is doing well. If only because such questions and suggestions, if you follow their “logic”, seek to deny the very way viruses spread, if not the existence of a virus in the first place.

Which is one of the few things we do know about COVID19: we know it exists and we know it spreads. We may get distances – between people- and timing – of various stages of infection- wrong, but the principle stands.

The lockdown is useful, make that inevitable, because it prevents further spread of a deadly virus from one host to another. Our ancestors understood this well before they even knew what viruses were, and I don’t understand why we would today no longer possess that wisdom.

The knowledge we have gained since times of old also allows us to understand that if a virus cannot spread to a new host for an x amount of time, it will die off. Which may sound a tad curious because science does not consider viruses to be microbes or “living organisms”, but that’s not really the issue at hand.

However, the NOT spreading will have to happen in as many instances as you have potential hosts, i.e. infected people, to make it work at a societal level, obviously. And that’s why lockdowns are inevitable: it’s all about numbers.

The “good news” is that the very reason lockdowns are useful already signifies that lockdowns don’t have to last until there is a “vaccine or effective treatment”; no “indefinite closure” is needed. You don’t necessarily have to eradicate a virus to inhibit it from jumping from host to host; you can also put distance and other barriers between (potential) hosts.

And there’s more good “news”. I think it was Nassim Taleb who said a while back that the answer to people saying a lockdown is a bad thing because it also isolates healthy people is: we need a lockdown precisely because we don’t know who is healthy or not.

If we do know who is healthy, however, we don’t need a lockdown. Ergo: testing, testing, testing. Certainly in the beginning, we must test people every 24 hours or so, test them for the virus. test them for antibodies, improve our tests, add more tests, test still more, we can all fill in the rest. And no, that is not an indefinite thing either. Testing will tell us to a much higher degree than we know today, when and where to distance people from each other.

Someone who has tested negative every 24 hours for days or weeks on end can be treated differently from someone who has not. And such a person will be, certainly initially, more careful in interacting with people. Take it from there, and you will in the end actually be rid of the virus, because it will not find enough new potential hosts.

That also means you don’t absolutely need a vaccine. Which is a good thing, because no coronavirus vaccine has ever been “discovered”, and because we have no idea what it would contain. Whenever I hear grand theories about grand bad plans elites or whoever are supposed to have with the virus, I first think: what would the virus need to propagate?

And I always come back to the same answer: it only needs our continuing incompetence: other than lockdowns and face masks, we have given it all the space and opportunity it has needed. It doesn’t need any help from 5G radiation or glyphosate (though both should be subject(ed) to the precautionary principle), or anything people come up with in the extra time their lockdown allows for. All it needs is for us to continue doing what we have: not test.

And opening up our societies again without mass testing, of course, will be the biggest gift we can offer it. This doesn’t mean I deny the possible existence of some plan, or that I want to claim to have knowledge of where the virus originated. It only means that from where I’m sitting, the virus doesn’t need any assistance to do what it has done so far, not that it may or may not have gotten any. Still, door A is factual, and door B is purely hypothetical. And we don’t have seas of time to debate this, we have lives to save.

It’s early May, and there no longer are any excuses for anyone in the western world not wearing face coverings in public, and neither are there excuses for countries lacking the capacity to test their citizens appropriately. Still, in most countries, we are nowhere near that capacity. That is inexcusable. Social distancing is not.

What shuts down societies today is not the virus, not the lockdowns, but the failure to adhere to basic principles with which to approach all potentially epidemic microbes or viruses. The failure to be properly prepared -at all times-, because some thirteen-a-dozen politician elected in a popularity contest considers it too expensive, or too much work. Even if warnings about a next epidemic had been sounded for many years.

The exit strategy is testing while Big Pharma looks for a vaccine. Good thing we don’t have to wait for the latter, because, yes, that would risk an indefinite closure. Testing will get us out once our “leaders” resolve to make it a priority. They should all be voted out of office for not having done that yet, and take their scientific advisers with them. And that’s after we may or may not forgive them for their initial failures.

We may need to overhaul a whole bunch of things to make sure no such perfectly preventable failures happen ever again. But you know how people are. And anyway, we’re in a bit of a bind at the moment.

It’s been 125 days since that first WHO warning, and there are still even many rich countries that can’t manage to test their medical and care workers, let alone the rest of their people.

And you want to argue that the problem here is lockdowns?

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Debt Rattle March 13 2020

Mar 132020

March 13, 2020 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 10:45 am Finance Tagged with: airborne, angry old men, Apple, Chelsea Manning, collapse, coronavirus, Covid19, failure, Fed, Iran, Monsanto, Ohio, plastics, UK 59 Responses »

Earl Theisen Walt Disney oiling scale model locomotive at home in LA 1951

• Coronavirus Can Survive in the Air For Up To 3 Hours (GR)

• Clinical Course, Risk Factors For Mortality Of Adults In Wuhan (Lancet)

• Coronavirus May End By June If Countries Take Action – China Adviser (RT)

• Policymakers Ramp Up Support As Coronavirus Shreds Markets (R.)

• Ohio Health Official Estimates 100,000 People In State Have Coronavirus (Hill)

• Many More Families Are Going To Lose Loved Ones Before Their Time (Ind.)

• I’d Rather Be in Italy Than US for the Coronavirus Pandemic (IC)

• Fed Rolls Out Fastest Money Printer Ever, up to $4.5 Trillion in 4 Weeks (WS)

• Fed To Pump In More Than $1 Trillion Into Markets In Dramatic Move (CNBC)

• Market Turmoil Sparked By Coronavirus Fears Worse Than 2008 – Bianco (CNBC)

• Apple Reopens All Its Branded Stores In China (R.)

• US Excludes Some Chinese Medical Products From Tariffs (R.)

• Iran Asks IMF For $5 Billion Emergency Funding To Fight Coronavirus (R.)

• Greening Our Way to Infection (CJ)

• Two Angry Old Men Yelling at Each Other in Arizona (FPM)

• Monsanto’s Secret Funding For Weedkiller Studies (G.)

• Migrants On Greek Islands To Be Offered €2,000 To Go Home (G.)

• Judge Orders Immediate Release Of Chelsea Manning (Ind.)

Over 9,000 new cases in a single day. It’s been a while, if it ever happened. New deaths are also crawling up. And in most places, we’re just getting started. Things like travel, public gatherings will soon be halted all over. There is no other choice. This virus can survive airborne for 3 hours, and patients can remain contagious for up to 37 days.

Get some extra vit.C, vit.D3 while you can, boost your health, wash more often. And prepare to hunker down for as much as 2 months. It’ll be a different world for a while. Get used to that while you can, while it’s voluntary.

And as you’re settling in, also prepare for a godalmighty financial crash. The Fed yesterday paid a nice round trillion for a 10% fall in stocks. Well, at least Chelsea Manning is free, albeit still in hospital.

• Cases 135,809 (+ 9,165 from yesterday’s 126,644)

• Deaths 4,990 (+ 351 from yesterday’s 4,639)

Apart from China, there are just 2 other countries left in this list that have less than 100 new cases.

From Worldometer yesterday evening (before their day’s close)

From SCMP: (Note: the SCMP graph was useful when China was the focal point; they are falling behind now)

From Worldometer (NOTE: mortality rate is back up to 7%!)

From COVID2019.app: (This site is playing with its formats while expanding, now over 200 global contributors)

“We found that viable virus could be detected in aerosols up to 3 hours post aerosolization, up to 4 hours on copper, up to 24 hours on cardboard and up to 2-3 days on plastic and stainless steel. HCoV-19 and SARS-CoV-1 exhibited similar half-lives in aerosols, with median estimates around 2.7 hours. ”

• Coronavirus Can Survive in the Air For Up To 3 Hours (GR)

Scientists at Princeton University, the University of California-Los Angeles and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have released a study on Wednesday according to which the novel form of coronavirus can survive in the air for several hours. Federally funded tests conducted by the scientists indicated that the COVID-19 virus could remain viable in the air “up to 3 hours post aerosolization,” while remaining alive on plastic and other surfaces for up to three days. “Our results indicate that aerosol and fomite transmission of HCoV-19 is plausible, as the virus can remain viable in aerosols for 42 multiple hours and on surfaces up to days,” reads the study’s abstract.

The test results suggest that humans could be infected by the disease simply carried through the air or on a solid surface, even if direct contact with an infected person does not occur. That finding, if accepted, would come in stark contrast to previous media reports that suggested the virus was not easily transmittable outside of direct human contact.

I couldn’t find the 37-day figure this Twitter comment mentions, in the report (didn’t copy the writer). That doesn’t mean it’s wrong.

Study in the Lancet finds that #COVID19 viral shedding can be UP TO 37 DAYS, with an average of 20 DAYS. *Patients may still be contagious during that time* VERY BIG DEAL because current guidelines recommend only a 14 day (2 week) isolation time. This means patients may remain contagious well after they’re no longer symptomatic. And it means current guidelines (14 day isolation) may lead to additional propagation post quarantine.

Check the graph for hospital beds per 1,000 people in your country.

• Clinical Course, Risk Factors For Mortality Of Adults In Wuhan (Lancet)

The level and duration of infectious virus replication are important factors in assessing the risk of transmission and guiding decisions regarding isolation of patients. Because coronavirus RNA detection is more sensitive than virus isolation, most studies have used qualitative or quantitative viral RNA tests as a potential marker for infectious coronavirus. For SARS-CoV, viral RNA was detected in respiratory specimens from about a third of patients as long as 4 weeks after disease onset. Similarly, the duration of MERS-CoV RNA detection in lower respiratory specimans persisted for at least 3 weeks, whereas the duration of SARS-CoV-2 RNA detection has not been well characterised.

In the current study, we found that the detectable SARS-CoV-2 RNA persisted for a median of 20 days in survivors and that it was sustained until death in non-survivors. This has important implications for both patient isolation decision making and guidance around the length of antiviral treatment. In severe influenza virus infection, prolonged viral shedding was associated with fatal outcome and delayed antiviral treatment was an independent risk factor for prolonged virus detection. Similarly, effective antiviral treatment might improve outcomes in COVID-19, although we did not observe shortening of viral shedding duration after lopinavir/ritonavir treatment in the current study.

Click for larger version in new tab

When Zhong Nanshan said in late January that the China epidemic would be over in max 10 days, I said he sounded like a Beijing propagandist. He’s still at it.

• Coronavirus May End By June If Countries Take Action – China Adviser (RT)

The deadly outbreak may be over by the start of summer, provided that all countries mobilize themselves against the pandemic, said Chinese government adviser in charge of tackling the coronavirus. Zhong Nanshan, Chinese coronavirus adviser and the epidemiologist who discovered Severe Acute respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in 2003, made the prediction while speaking to journalists on Thursday. He noted, however, that the breakthrough is heavily dependent on how World Health Organization’s (WHO) members are dealing with the crisis. Some countries still don’t take the situation very seriously and fail to aggressively contain the Covid-19, Zhong said. In this case, the epidemic might be prolonged even despite the summer heat that makes viral stains relatively inactive, the doctor warned.

His remarks come shortly after China’s National Health Commission (NHC) reported a decline in new Covid-19 cases across the mainland. “Broadly speaking, the peak of the epidemic has passed for China,” said Mi Feng, a spokesman for the National Health Commission. “The increase of new cases is falling.” As of Wednesday, the NHC recorded 15 new cases, about half as many as Tuesday’s figure. China has been leading a swift response to the disease, locking down whole provinces, canceling public events and even postponing key sessions of parliament. To contain Covid-19, Beijing dispatched around 42,000 medics who flocked to Hubei province – the epicenter of the epidemic – from all across the country. Academics, leading infectionists, and intensive-care specialists were all called in.

“According to a survey of epidemiologists the coronavirus outbreak probably won’t peak before May, meaning it will be getting worse and worse and worse over the next two months, and for much of that time, presumably, exponentially worse.”

• Policymakers Ramp Up Support As Coronavirus Shreds Markets (R.)

Governments and central banks readied more emergency measures to tackle the economic impacts of the coronavirus on Friday as Asian markets suffered their worst weekly crashes since the 2008 financial crisis. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s wife Sophie was among several thousand people newly diagnosed with the COVID-19 respiratory disease that has now infected almost 135,000 and killed more than 4,900 worldwide. Experts warn that due to a lack of testing and unreported cases, many more people may be affected by the outbreak that emerged in the Chinese city of Wuhan late last year. Major sporting events were canceled or postponed, large public gatherings restricted or banned and schools closed. “There is a sense of fear and panic,” said James Tao, an analyst at stockbroker Commsec in Sydney, where phones at the high-value client desk rang non-stop.

“It’s one of those situations where there is so much uncertainty that no-one quite knows how to respond … if it’s fight or flight, many people are choosing flight at the moment.” Japan’s Nikkei was in freefall, dropping 10% on Friday, after Wall Street stocks slumped around 10% in their worst day since the 1987 “Black Monday” crash. Travelers in Europe rushed to board flights to the United States after U.S. President Donald Trump imposed sweeping restrictions on travel from the continent, a decision that angered European leaders and frightened investors. Trump also suggested that the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo could be delayed by a year. “Maybe they postpone it for a year … if that’s possible,” Trump told reporters. “I like that better than I like having empty stadiums all over the place.”

Simple math: “..at the very least, 1 percent of our population is carrying this virus in Ohio today,” Acton said. “We have 11.7 million people. So the math is over 100,000.”

• Ohio Health Official Estimates 100,000 People In State Have Coronavirus (Hill)

A top health official in Ohio estimated on Thursday that more than 100,000 people in the state have coronavirus, a shockingly high number that underscores the limited testing so far. Ohio Department of Health Director Amy Acton said at a press conference alongside Gov. Mike DeWine (R) that given that the virus is spreading in the community in Ohio, she estimates at least 1 percent of the population in the state has the virus. “We know now, just the fact of community spread, says that at least 1 percent, at the very least, 1 percent of our population is carrying this virus in Ohio today,” Acton said. “We have 11.7 million people. So the math is over 100,000. So that just gives you a sense of how this virus spreads and is spreading quickly.”

She added that the slow rollout of testing means the state does not have good verified numbers to know for sure. “Our delay in being able to test has delayed our understanding of the spread of this,” Acton said. The Trump administration has come under intense criticism for the slow rollout of tests. Dr. Anthony Fauci, a top National Institutes of Health official, acknowledged earlier Thursday it is “a failing” that people cannot easily get tested for coronavirus in the United States. Not everyone with the virus has symptoms, and about 80 percent of people with the virus do not end up needing hospitalization, experts say.

During a House committee hearing, Representative Katie Porter does the math on #coronavirus testing, which added up to $1,331, and got CDC Director Robert Redfield to commit to using his authority under federal regulations to waive the cost of testing for all Americans pic.twitter.com/P2R8PjjJMB

— Reuters (@Reuters) March 13, 2020

Boris Johnson doesn’t understand the simple math that Ohio Department of Health Director Amy Acton, above, does. But he still gets vilified for saying that not 500,000 (at the very least!), but just 10,000 are infected.

Maybe it just takes time to sink in?!

Boris also gets vilified for not closing schools, just like Dutch PM Rutte. Which is indeed a little odd: you ban gatherings of more than 100-200 people, but 1500-2000-pupil schools remain open. On the other hand, where would all those children go?

Here’s a thought: Will their phone addictions now save their lives? Kids these days are perfect isolationists. All they need is a screen.

• Many More Families Are Going To Lose Loved Ones Before Their Time (Ind.)

Up to 10,000 people in the UK probably have coronavirus, officials have said, as they announced they were stepping up Britain’s response to the outbreak with new actions designed to delay its spread. Anyone showing cold or flu-like symptoms is being told to isolate themselves for seven days from Friday onwards – a measure brought forward by at least a week. They should then stay at least two metres, or “about three steps”, away from anyone else, sleep alone and ask for help “to get the things you need”. “Stay away from vulnerable individuals such as the elderly and those with underlying health conditions as much as possible,” the new advice reads.

Schools have been ordered to cancel all foreign trips, and elderly people or those with underlying health conditions are advised not to go on cruise ships. However, ministers have stepped back from immediate closures and sporting events will still go ahead, with fans allowed into stadiums. Patrick Vallance, the government’s chief scientific adviser, said the true number of infections was “likely” to be between 5,000 and 10,000 – many times higher than the current figure of 590. “We are in a period when we have got some, but it hasn’t yet taken off,” he told a press conference. The warning came as Boris Johnson sought to prepare the public for tougher times to come, saying: “This is the worst public health crisis for a generation.”

He dismissed comparisons to seasonal flu: “Because of the lack of immunity, this disease is more dangerous and it’s going to spread further. “Many more families are going to lose loved ones before their time.” Explaining the decision not to move to more draconian restrictions now, unlike almost all neighbouring countries, Mr Johnson said: “The most dangerous period is not now but some weeks away, depending on how fast it spreads. He hinted at a likely shift to banning fans from sporting events, saying: “We are not saying ‘No’ to that sort of measure, of course not – we are keeping it up our sleeve.”

https://twitter.com/EdConwaySky/status/1238177127951982594

“I just can’t shake the terror that the United States, my adopted country, is fundamentally unequipped to handle what lies ahead.”

• I’d Rather Be in Italy Than US for the Coronavirus Pandemic (IC)

I have spent the last week looking for flights from New York to Italy — not because of coronavirus-inspired flash sales, but because I would rather go home to a country that’s currently in the grip of one of the worst outbreaks in the world than stay in the United States, where life is about to get infinitely worse. More than 15,000 people have tested positive for the new coronavirus in Italy, more than 1,000 have died, and hospitals are at a breaking point. Hundreds of medical staff have been infected, and overwhelmed doctors are reporting having to choose which patients to treat. They are begging the rest of the world to take this virus more seriously. The entire country — 60.5 million people — has been on lockdown for almost a week.

In the U.S., meanwhile, where some are just starting to realize the enormity of the crisis and far too many remain in denial, confusion reigns, largely aided by our top officials’ inept response. Last night, after President Donald Trump abruptly announced he was blocking travel from Europe to the U.S. — though officials later retracted and clarified much of that statement — people in Europe raced to airports, reportedly paying as much as $20,000 to try to catch flights out. And still I am trying to figure out how to make the opposite trip. Even as the death toll back home continues to climb and the lockdown gets stricter by the day, I would much rather weather this pandemic in Italy than here. I just can’t shake the terror that the United States, my adopted country, is fundamentally unequipped to handle what lies ahead.

[..] It is a tragic irony that a public health emergency unlike anything we have seen in generations would come as Americans are constantly told that the idea of health care as a fundamental right is entitled, radical, crazy talk. What is crazy, to anyone outside the United States, is that it’s even a question. Back in Italy, people are worried they’ll get themselves or their loved ones sick, they are angry at directives that came late, they are even scared that hospitals won’t be able to keep up. But there are more hospital beds and doctors per capita in Italy than there are in the U.S. The Italian government’s harsh restrictions are in part an effort to stop the virus from spreading to the south, where the health care system is weaker. But for all their fears, Italians don’t have to worry that tests won’t be available, or that they’ll have to pay for those tests, or for any of their care. They don’t have to fear that if they seek help now, they’ll get a surprise bill later or that medical costs will bankrupt them.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1237944481153814529

Could we fix health care with that? How much is that per American?

• Fed Rolls Out Fastest Money Printer Ever, up to $4.5 Trillion in 4 Weeks (WS)

Thursday early afternoon, during the chaos when the S&P 500 was down nearly 9%, what would turn into the worst single-day stock market sell-off since the 1987 crash, the Fed rolled out its fastest mega money-printer yet, after its smaller money-printers malfunctioned. It’s not going to be a long-drawn-out QE – though there is a component that is just that – but it’s going to be trillions of dollars, essentially all at once, front-loaded, starting today, though today fizzled already. This is the Fed’s latest effort to bail out Wall Street, the cherished asset holders that are so essential to the Fed’s “wealth effect,” all repo market participants, the banks, and the Treasury market that suddenly has gone haywire. Lots of things have gone haywire as the Everything Bubble unwinds messily.

Last week, the 10-year Treasury yield had plunged toward zero during the stock market sell-off, which was crazy but in line with the logic that investors were all piling into safe assets, and early Monday morning it fell to an unthinkable all-time low of 0.38%. But then, the 10-year yield more than doubled from 0.38% at the low on Monday to 0.88% at the highpoint on Thursday. That the 10-year yield spikes during a stock market crash is somewhat of a scary thought. It means that both stocks and long-dated Treasury securities are selling off at the same time. And that probably made the Fed very nervous. For stocks, Thursday was the 16th trading day since the S&P 500 peak, and in those 15 trading days, the index has crashed nearly 27%.

Inject a trillion, see markets lose 10%. Never a better moment to end the Fed.

• Fed To Pump In More Than $1 Trillion Into Markets In Dramatic Move (CNBC)

The Federal Reserve stepped into financial markets Thursday for the second day in a row and the third time this week, this time dramatically ramping up asset purchases amid the turmoil created by the coronavirus. “These changes are being made to address highly unusual disruptions in Treasury financing markets associated with the coronavirus outbreak,” the New York Fed said in an early afternoon announcement amid a washout on Wall Street that was heading toward the worst day since 1987. Stocks were off their lows following the announcement though some of the gains were pared as the market digested the moves.

One part of the announcement saw the Fed widen the scale for its $60 billion worth of money the Treasury purchases, which to now had been confined to short-term T-bills. Under the new regime, the Fed will extend its purchases “across a range of maturities” to include bills, notes, Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities and other instruments. The central bank will begin purchasing coupon-bearing securities, something market participants have been clamoring for since late 2019. The purchases start Thursday and will continue through April 13.

The second part of the new operations will see the New York Fed desk offer $500 billion in a three-month repo operation and a one-month operation. The offerings will happen on a weekly basis through the remainder of the program. In addition, the Fed will continue to offer at least $175 billion in overnight repos and $45 billion in two-week operations. Repos are short-term operations in which financial institutions provide high-quality collateral in exchange for cash reserves they use to operate.

“This is their tool. They’ve used it. It should be working”…

• Market Turmoil Sparked By Coronavirus Fears Worse Than 2008 – Bianco (CNBC)

Market researcher James Bianco calls the Federal Reserve’s move to pump $1.5 trillion into the market the “nuclear option” to calm investors gripped by coronavirus fears. Only, it didn’t work Thursday. Instead, stocks saw their worst day since the 1987 Black Monday market crash. “Financial markets are not recovering. It’s incredible to think that a trillion dollars can’t get these markets moving,” the Bianco Research president told CNBC’s “Trading Nation.” “We’re at a critical time — unlike anything I’ve seen in my career even counting 2008.” On Thursday, the Fed attempted to stabilize the markets by massively boosting asset purchases in the market. It came five days before its policy meeting on interest rates.

“What the Fed did was they restarted QE, and they essentially announced that in the next two days they’re going to do more QE than they did in the last five years combined,” added Bianco. “The reason they’re doing it is because the financial markets have stopped functioning properly. There’s no liquidity. There’s hardly any trading.” Stocks initially rebounded, but failed to hold on to gains. The Dow sank 2,352 points or 10% to 21,200 while the S&P 500 fell 261 points or 9.5% to 2,480. The Dow and S&P are deep in bear market territory, off 28% and 27%, respectively, from their all-time highs. “This is their tool. They’ve used it. It should be working”, said Bianco.

According to Bianco, Wall Street may still be in shock due to the magnitude of the Fed’ s move. Plus, he suggests there may be logistical issues. [New York] Governor [Andrew] Cuomo just announced that any gathering of over 500 people in New York State is banned. So, these big dealer desks are now going to have to figure it out from home, he said. “If financial markets don’t start moving, and if a trillion dollars cannot get them off the lows of the day of $500 billion today, $500 billion tomorrow, then we’re going to have to start worrying that a panic is going to set in… and we’re going to see a lot more losses as we go forward,” Bianco said.

Only 16 days ago that the U.S. stock market was at record highs. The fastest time between a new high and a bear market in history.

The old record was set in 1929, when it took 42 days over in Sept/Oct to drop into a bear market.

Never good to breaking a record set in 1929! pic.twitter.com/5vAtHbzLQn

— Jim Bianco (@biancoresearch) March 12, 2020

I love you long time.

• Apple Reopens All Its Branded Stores In China (R.)

Apple has reopened all 42 of its branded stores in China, more than a month after they were shut due to fears over the coronavirus outbreak, the iPhone maker’s Chinese website showed on Friday. Apple’s China website has listed the opening time for all stores, which vary from 10:00 am to 11:00 am local time. The website had previously carried an advisory saying not all stores were open. China placed curbs on travel and asked residents to avoid public places in late January, just ahead of the Lunar New Year festival, a major gift-giving holiday. Those restrictions stayed largely in place through most of February. The company sold fewer than half a million iPhones in China in February, government data showed on Monday, as the outbreak halved demand for smartphones. Apple had announced the shuttering of its branded stores in early February.

Something tells me prices may have just gone up.

• US Excludes Some Chinese Medical Products From Tariffs (R.)

The U.S. Trade Representative’s office said it granted on Thursday exclusions from import tariffs for some medical products imported from China, including face masks, stethoscope covers and blood pressure cuff sleeves. The exclusions were granted as the United States grapples with a coronavirus outbreak that threatens to strain its healthcare system. Earlier this month, USTR granted exclusions for other Chinese medical products, including hand sanitizing wipes and examination gloves.

The products were included in a fourth round of tariffs on Chinese goods imposed by President Donald Trump on Sept. 1, 2019, amid heated U.S.-China trade negotiations. The tariff rate on the medical products was initially set at 15%, but was lowered to 7.5% on Feb. 15 as part of the Phase 1 U.S.-China trade agreement. The deal leaves in place tariffs on about $370 billion worth of imports from China, including 25% duties on goods valued at around $250 billion.

IMF meets sanctions x world health.

• Iran Asks IMF For $5 Billion Emergency Funding To Fight Coronavirus (R.)

Iran has asked the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for emergency funding to help it fight the coronavirus outbreak that has hit the Islamic Republic hard, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said on Thursday. The escalating outbreak in Iran – the worst-affected country in the Middle East – has killed 429 people and infected 10,075. The outbreak has damaged Iranian businesses and is bound to hit its non-oil exports after many neighboring countries and trade partners shut their borders. The IMF managing director, Kristalina Georgieva, “has stated that countries affected by #COVID19 (coronavirus) will be supported via Rapid Financial Instrument. Our Central Bank requested access to this facility immediately”, Zarif said in a tweet.

Iranian Central Bank chief Abdolnaser Hemmati wrote on his Instagram page that “in a letter addressed to the head of IMF, I have requested five billion U.S. dollars from the RFI emergency fund to help our fight against the coronavirus”. Iran’s economy was already battered by U.S. sanctions that curb oil and gas exports crucial for government revenues. A slowdown in economic activity caused by the virus outbreak and a sustained closure of its borders are expected to lead to a contraction this year, analysts have said. As Iran’s clerical rulers struggle to contain the coronavirus outbreak, Tehran has blamed the United States and its “maximum pressure” policy for restricting Iran’s ability to respond effectively to the virus.

Bit right wing for me, but interesting.

• Greening Our Way to Infection (CJ)

The COVID-19 outbreak is giving new meaning to those “sustainable” shopping bags that politicians and environmentalists have been so eager to impose on the public. These reusable tote bags can sustain the COVID-19 and flu viruses—and spread the viruses throughout the store. Researchers have been warning for years about the risks of these bags spreading deadly viral and bacterial diseases, but public officials have ignored their concerns, determined to eliminate single-use bags and other plastic products despite their obvious advantages in reducing the spread of pathogens. In New York State, a new law took effect this month banning single-use plastic bags in most retail businesses, and this week Democratic state legislators advanced a bill that would force coffee shops to accept consumers’ reusable cups—a practice that Starbucks and other chains have wisely suspended to avoid spreading the COVID-19 virus.

John Flanagan, the Republican leader of the New York State Senate, has criticized the new legislation and called for a suspension of the law banning plastic bags. “Senate Democrats’ desperate need to be green is unclean during the coronavirus outbreak,” he said Tuesday, but so far he’s been a lonely voice among public officials. The COVID-19 virus is just one of many pathogens that shoppers can spread unless they wash the bags regularly, which few people bother to do. Viruses and bacteria can survive in the tote bags up to nine days, according to one study of coronaviruses. The risk of spreading viruses was clearly demonstrated in a 2018 study published in the Journal of Environmental Health.

The researchers, led by Ryan Sinclair of the Loma Linda University School of Public Health, sent shoppers into three California grocery stores carrying polypropylene plastic tote bags that had been sprayed with a harmless surrogate of a virus. After the shoppers bought groceries and checked out, the researchers found sufficiently high traces of the surrogate to risk transmission on the hands of the shoppers and checkout clerks, as well as on many surfaces touched by the shoppers, including packaged food, unpackaged produce, shopping carts, checkout counters, and the touch screens used to pay for groceries. The researchers said that the results warranted the adaptation of “in-store hand hygiene” and “surface disinfection” by merchants, and they also recommended educating shoppers to wash their bags.

I admit, included for the headline.

• Two Angry Old Men Yelling at Each Other in Arizona (FPM)

Bernie’s got a problem. He’s struggling in the delegate count and Florida and New York are unlikely to help. He’s got one way to reverse the tide, and that’s destroy Biden in a debate. Destroying Biden is not so hard. He’s a confused and shambling wreck. Even Kamala Harris was temporarily able to pick up some of his voters that way. The trouble is Bernie is nearly as much of a mess. If his people weren’t complete psychos, they might have been able to build an alliance with Elizabeth Warren. Instead, all the bridges were burned, and Sanders benefited little from her dropping out. But Warren, staying in, could have served as Bernie’s hatchet woman. So might Tulsi Gabbard, though she last served as Biden’s hatchet woman.

But considering that she’s polling at nothing, there’s no pretext that could get her into the debate. And Bernie is a poor debater. Not as much as Biden, but close enough. All he can do is respond to every question with an angry rant about corporations and medical care. That’s not going to win anything. After Biden’s victory speech, it’s clear that the current brains behind his campaign have been able to get him to memorize his own speeches and deliver them in an angry tone that passes for energy. That’s Bernie’s shtick. And it’s probably not a coincidence. So the Arizona debate will consist of two old men angrily yelling at each other with stump speeches. Sounds like a winner.

Upside down world: “..the loss of glyphosate would cause very severe impacts on UK agriculture and the environment..”

• Monsanto’s Secret Funding For Weedkiller Studies (G.)

Monsanto secretly funded academic studies indicating “very severe impacts” on farming and the environment if its controversial glyphosate weedkiller were banned, an investigation has found. The research was used by the National Farmers’ Union and others to successfully lobby against a European ban in 2017. As a result of the revelations, the NFU has now amended its glyphosate information to declare the source of the research. Monsanto was bought by the agri-chemical multinational Bayer in 2018 and Bayer said the studies’ failure to disclose their funding broke its principles. However, the authors of the studies said the funding did not influence their work and the editor of the journal in which they were published said the papers would not be retracted or amended. Glyphosate is sold by Bayer as Roundup and is the world’s most widely used weedkiller.

The World Health Organization’s cancer agency, the IARC, declared that glyphosate was “probably carcinogenic to humans” in 2015 but several international agencies, including the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), subsequently came to opposite conclusions. Last year courts in the US ordered Monsanto to pay damages of up to $2bn to individuals with cancer and faces many more lawsuits. Bayer said it “stands fully behind its glyphosate-based products”. The new revelations centre on studies published in 2010 and 2014 by researchers at ADAS, an agricultural and environmental consultancy in the UK. The analyses concluded “the loss of glyphosate would cause very severe impacts on UK agriculture and the environment”. They suggested a 20% fall in wheat and rapeseed production.

You blow up their home and then you toss them a handout to go back to that home.

• Migrants On Greek Islands To Be Offered €2,000 To Go Home (G.)

Migrants on the Greek islands are to be offered €2,000 (£1,764) per person to go home under a voluntary scheme launched by the European Union in an attempt to ease desperate conditions in camps. The amount is more than five times the usual sum offered to migrants to help them rebuild their lives in their country of origin, under voluntary returns programmes run by the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration (IOM). The offer will last one month, as the commission fears an open-ended scheme would attract more migrants to Europe. It will not apply to refugees who have no homes to return to, but is intended to incentivise migrants seeking better living standards to leave the islands.

The EU’s home affairs commissioner, Ylva Johansson, said the scheme was “a window of opportunity for a targeted group”, adding that the IOM would run the scheme with the EU border agency Frontex. “Refugees will not return, of course, they can’t return, but economic migrants that maybe know they will not get a positive asylum decision could be interested in doing that,” she told a small group of reporters. The scheme, she said, could be a quick way to relieve the pressure on camps on the Greek islands, where conditions are “totally unacceptable”. The commission said it hoped 5,000 people will take up the offer, although it acknowledged it lacked statistics on how many people on the Greek islands were “economic migrants”, rather than refugees.

Migrants on the Greek mainland were likely to be offered extra money to leave – much less than €2,000, but higher than the usual resettlement sum of €370. Since 2016, 18,151 people have chosen to return home from Greece under a voluntary returns programme funded by the EU and run by the IOM. Only about one-fifth of them (3,927) were on the islands. [..] More than 20,000 people are living at the Moria camp on Lesbos, up from 5,000 last July. About 85% of last year’s arrivals were refugees, with most coming from Afghanistan and Syria, but also from Iraq, Palestine, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and elsewhere. More than 18,300 Moria residents were living in a facility designed for 2,200, while others were living in nearby olive groves.

” Judge Anthony Trenga did not waive the $256k in penalties levied against her.”

• Judge Orders Immediate Release Of Chelsea Manning (Ind.)

A US judge has ordered the immediate release of Chelsea Manning, the former American army officer who was remanded to prison after refusing to testify against WikiLeaks. The ruling states that it is no longer necessary for her to testify and follows her attorneys’ announcement that she had recently tried to kill herself while imprisoned. She is reportedly recovering in hospital. Ms Manning spent seven years in a military prison after leaking thousands of classified government documents to WikiLeaks before Barack Obama commuted her sentence in 2017. Last year, she was held in contempt of court after refusing to testify before a federal grand jury as part of an investigation into Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. She has been jailed since May.

In his ruling on Thursday, Judge Anthony Trenga did not waive the $256k in penalties levied against her. The ruling says that enforcement of the “accrued, conditional fines would not be punitive but rather necessary to the coercive purpose” of the court’s contempt order. She was scheduled to appear at a hearing in a Virginia federal court today. That appearance has been cancelled.

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Don’t Take The Bait

Jul 162019

July 16, 2019 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:19 pm Primers Tagged with: AOC, bait, Dems, failure, Green New Deal, health care, Mueller, Omar, Pelosi, Pressley, racism, Schumer, system, Tlaib, Trump 16 Responses »

Gustave Moreau Orpheus at the Tomb of Eurydice 1891

“Don’t Take The Bait”, said 4 young congresswomen yesterday in a press conference in Washington DC. They were referring to comments Donald Trump had made about them earlier. However, just the simple act of calling the press conference meant they were … taking the bait.

Yes, Trump was out of line, way out of left field territory out of line. But he did that on purpose, and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, were voluntarily following him into that same left field.

I’ve been saying for over 3 years now that the role of Trump is to expose the -inherent and longtime- failures of the US political system. But when I see things like that press-op, how can I possibly think the system has learned anything at all?

If Trump’s role is to reveal the failures of the system, and that same system turns around and blames Donald Trump for all of those failures, how are we ever supposed to take the next step out of here?

Trump has been especially vicious against the 4 women, and it’s simply not enough to put that down to his racism or anything like that. There’s something else going on; how obvious would you like it?

What is happening here is not Trump pandering or virtue-signalling to his base -that’s just an added feature. The reality is that Trump, in say (re-)election mode, sees a divide within the Democratic party, drives a wedge into that divide, and twists it.

His strong if not vicious attacks on the 4 women are aimed straight at Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and Joe Biden, plus all the rest of the centrist Dems. Trump is calling them out. So they will have to either end up supporting AOC and co, or they will not.

If they don’t the Dems are seriously split. They might have been anyway, but Trump makes it impossible for them to keep hiding that. He forces Pelosi et al to either stand behind AOC et al, or to leave her alone, as Nancy was sort of trying to do last week by saying (paraphrased) that “they are just four women”.

And then these girls take the bait to the extent that they call a press conference, which gets tons of attention, but not because they are so newsworthy, as I’m sure they believe, but because Trump is, as anything Trump still is.

It is Pelosi’s worst nightmare. The most vocal members of her party are the furthest removed from the picture she wants to present of the party. But she has to deal with it, with them. She talks about unity all the time, and for good reason.

And Pelosi is smart enough to understand what Trump is doing. She sees the big divide within the Dems and she sees how the divide could make her party lose in 2020. And she sees how Trump uses that.

But what can she do? Tell AOC to shut up for the good of Joe Biden’s chances? The last big shot the Dems have at redemption is next week’s 5 hour Mueller hearing on Capitol Hill. And if that doesn’t work out, where are they going to go? Is it perhaps not the greatest idea to keep people with such different ideas in one party?

Bernie Sanders wants Medicare for all, as allegedly do AOC and Elizabeth Warren. AOC wants a Green New Deal, whatever shape that may take, and so on and so on. But if they ever agree on one candidate to run against Trump in 2020, will this person (m/f) run on that platform too?

Or will they go for a center kind of like candidate who’s totally out of line with the four women Trump is aggressively railing against, who thinks US healthcare only needs to be tweaked in minor fashion, Biden-style?!

By now, it’s all good by Trump, because he understands how divided the Dems are, and he’s had time to prepare for using that division.

And he also understands that the main thing the Dems are going to run on, because they have nothing else, is that they are not Donald Trump. They’re not going to agree on Medicare for All or absolving all student debt or any grand plans like that, because they’re too divided to do it.

What unites them is Donald Trump. And then he has them where he wants them.

Please note this is not what I prefer, I think America needs a strong Democratic Party, or perhaps by now more than two parties. It’s just that I think -as I have since 2016- that Trump is the ultimate challenge to the US political sytem, and the system is failing miserably in its response.

The Failure Of Party Politics

Mar 272019

March 27, 2019 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 6:26 pm Primers Tagged with: constituents, dissolve, disunited, evil, failure, House, parliament, politics, Tintenfische 2 Responses »

Robert Frank Funeral, St. Helena, South Carolina 1955

Bit unusual, but why not. I was reading British press earlier, trying to figure out what the fcuk is going on in London two days before March 29, and in an article in the Guardian I saw this comment, and thought it should be saved for posterity.

Since the article is/was one of those live updates ones, which tend to get very long, and moreover at the point I read it it already had well over 11,000 other comments, posting it here seemed to be the way to go to achieve that.

It was posted by someone who named themselves Tintenfische (German for squid, octopus?!), and that’s all I know about this person(s), who imagines a speech someone should stand up and deliver in the house. I think it says exactly what needs to be said, what politicians should say, in Britain where civil unrest is much closer than anyone wants to see, in the US where very similar scenarios are playing out, and in many other countries.

The failure of party politics is everywhere to be seen.

Tintenfische: Speech I wish someone would have the courage to give.

As I stand in Parliament today I see the faces of friends and colleagues I’ve worked alongside, struggled alongside, triumphed and lost alongside. Good men and women all from both sides of the house.

We and the parties we represent have fought for our beliefs and battled for our constituents for centuries. We’ve done what we believed to be right, we’ve fought battles we believed should be fought and shown the people across the globe how democracy when at its best is the only route to freedom. In this place too I’m confronted with history. It was here that our predecessors decided to stand up to fascism, where we ended slavery and wrote into law that no man or woman, no matter their race, colour, who they fall in love with or who they pray to is less than any other of us. We declared as a house that injustice must be fought, that evil opposed and democracy triumphed.

Great things have been done in this place, great things by great men, great women and even greater parties. However my friends that legacy is now at an end.

We have failed.

We have failed and our failure has broken this house and the institution we love. We have failed and with that too comes the failure of party politics.

None of us can run from that reality, none of us can hide, deny or challenge that reality. We have through partisan means on both sides of this house broken government of this once united nation. I could list the decisions, the politics, the loyalties which delivered this rupture. I could name names, point out lies and tell of moments when through advantage, greed or idiocy we decided to do what was best for our parties rather than our country, what was best for us rather than our constituents. I could list all those many many occasions when we as servants of the people failed the people, but what would be the point?

The truth is none of us are innocent, none of us escape blame. We as the leaders of this country could have stopped a collapse but we all chose this place and control over it as being more important than those outside. We chose ourselves and our parties ahead of our people.

But what else could we do? We could have stood up, we could have protested, we could have denied our own leaders but to what end? We all believe that we and the parties we represent are best placed to do what is right for this country. We all think that the shared policies, morals and ethics of ourselves and our parties are the right way for a country to be run. If we didn’t believe we knew best we wouldnt be here. But there’s the problem, circumstance has shown this not to be the case. Now we stand atop of a divided, fractured nation one which may never be able to be reformed and that has happened because of us. It is our fault. By following those certainties of righteousness and rightness both of ourselves and of our parties we have precipitated this collapse. We are now the problem.

So what’s to be done? We could just carry on, we could just continue down this same path which every day makes this country more divided, more ungovernable, more leaderless. We certainly could do that and looking around this room it’s easy to see so many of us already resigned to the path of destruction. Resigned to a rapid decline because we’re all too Cowed too timid to say no.

But we could also say no. We could as one house say to the country “I’m sorry but no. We can’t make these decisions, we’re not good enough. We can’t do anything but fail you or your future from here on in”. The people elected us to represent them it is true but we’re no longer capable of that, our parties are no longer capable of that. It is no longer in the national interest that we continue to represent the people when we can’t even govern ourselves.

We need to change ladies and gentlemen, we need to be better. We need to be greater than the sum of our parts. Each and everyone of us needs to decide who and what we our, who we represent. We need to turn away from the saftey and comradeship of party loyalty and act and vote on what we believe to be right, what we believe to be in the best interests of our nation, not what our leaders tell us is best because if we’ve failed then our leaders are double damned by their double failure.

What I’m asking is extreme, I’m asking you my fellow members to destroy the parties you all represent. I’m asking you for the sake of the nation to walk away from rosette loyalty and remember your oaths. I’m asking you to do the right thing.

We are no longer able to govern, we cannot lead and we cannot decide. We must return the question of our place in the world back to the people and once that’s done we must dissolve this house and our parties and a new slate be mined because right now not one of us is fit to stand in this place and claim leadership of this disunited kingdom.

Why There is Trump

Sep 262016

September 26, 2016 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:33 pm Finance Tagged with: Barbarians, Brexit, election, failure, Growth, Hillary, paradigm, Rome, Trump 10 Responses »

Dorothea Lange Family of rural rehabilitation client, Tulare County, CA 1938

It’s over! The entire model our societies have been based on for at least as long as we ourselves have lived, is over! That’s why there’s Trump.

There is no growth. There hasn’t been any real growth for years. All there is left are empty hollow sunshiny S&P stock market numbers propped up with ultra cheap debt and buybacks, and employment figures that hide untold millions hiding from the labor force. And most of all there’s debt, public as well as private, that has served to keep an illusion of growth alive and now increasingly no longer can.

These false growth numbers have one purpose only: for the public to keep the incumbent powers that be in their plush seats. But they could always ever only pull the curtain of Oz over people’s eyes for so long, and it’s no longer so long.

That’s what the ascent of Trump means, and Brexit, Le Pen, and all the others. It’s over. What has driven us for all our lives has lost both its direction and its energy.

We are smack in the middle of the most important global development in decades, in some respects arguably even in centuries, a veritable revolution, which will continue to be the most important factor to shape the world for years to come, and I don’t see anybody talking about it. That has me puzzled.

The development in question is the end of global economic growth, which will lead inexorably to the end of centralization (including globalization). It will also mean the end of the existence of most, and especially the most powerful, international institutions.

In the same way it will be the end of -almost- all traditional political parties, which have ruled their countries for decades and are already today at or near record low support levels (if you’re not clear on what’s going on, look there, look at Europe!)

This is not a matter of what anyone, or any group of people, might want or prefer, it’s a matter of ‘forces’ that are beyond our control, that are bigger and more far-reaching than our mere opinions, even though they may be man-made.

Tons of smart and less smart folks are breaking their heads over where Trump and Brexit and Le Pen and all these ‘new’ and scary things and people and parties originate, and they come up with little but shaky theories about how it’s all about older people, and poorer and racist and bigoted people, stupid people, people who never voted, you name it.

But nobody seems to really know or understand. Which is odd, because it’s not that hard. That is, this all happens because growth is over. And if growth is over, so are expansion and centralization in all the myriad of shapes and forms they come in.

Global is gone as a main driving force, pan-European is gone, and whether the United States will stay united is far from a done deal. We are moving towards a mass movement of dozens of separate countries and states and societies looking inward. All of which are in some form of -impending- trouble or another.

What makes the entire situation so hard to grasp for everyone is that nobody wants to acknowledge any of this. Even though tales of often bitter poverty emanate from all the exact same places that Trump and Brexit and Le Pen come from too.

That the politico-econo-media machine churns out positive growth messages 24/7 goes some way towards explaining the lack of acknowledgement and self-reflection, but only some way. The rest is due to who we ourselves are. We think we deserve eternal growth.

And of course it’s confusing that the protests against the ‘old regimes’ and the growth and centralization -first- manifest in the rise of faces and voices who do not reject all of the above offhand. That is to say, the likes of Marine Le Pen, Donald Trump and Nigel Farage may be against more centralization, but none of them has a clue about growth being over. They don’t get that part anymore than Hillary or Hollande or Merkel do.

So why these people? Look closer and you see that in the US, UK and France, there is nobody left who used to speak for the ‘poor and poorer’. While at the same time, the numbers of poor and poorer increase at a rapid clip. They just have nowhere left to turn to. There is literally no left left.

Dems in the US, Labour in the UK, and Hollande’s ‘Socialists’ in France have all become part of the two-headed monster that is the political center, and that is (held) responsible for the deterioration in people’s lives. Moreover, at least for now, the actual left wing may try to stand up in the form of Jeremy Corbyn or Bernie Sanders, but they are both being stangled by the two-headed monster’s fake left in their countries and their own parties.

Donald Trump, and I say this mere hours before the first debate, may still lose the election, but it doesn’t truly matter. He’s just the figure head -dare we say bobble head?- for a development, even a revolution, that he doesn’t control any more than you and I do. He’s got a role to play but he didn’t write it.

If he wins, his program too, like all the others, will be targeted towards more growth, and there’s no such thing available. And while in a no-growth scenario it’ll be a good thing for America to bring jobs back home, as is trump’s message, they won’t spell anything that even comes close to growth.

‘Leaders’ such as Trump and Le Pen can only be seen as intermediate figures necessary for nations, and indeed the world, to adapt to an entirely different paradigm. One that is at best based on consolidation, on trying not to lose too much, instead of trying to conquer the world.

But also one that is likely to lead to warfare and mayhem, because nobody’s been willing to address even the possibility of no more growth, and therefore everyone will be looking to squeeze growth out of any available place, starting with their neighbors, and the globe’s weakest. It’s the Roman empire all over again, where the core strangled the periphery ever harder until the Barbarians and the Visigoths decided it was enough and then some.

That is the meaning of Donald Trump, and of Brexit. You’re not going to understand these things without taking a few steps back, and without looking at history, and especially without acknowledging the possibility that, in economics, perpetual growth may indeed be what physics has always said it was: an impossible pipedream.

Trump has a role to play in this whether he wins the election or not. He’s the big red flashing American warning sign that the increase in poverty that has so far been felt only among those who it has hit, will shake the familiar political landscape on its foundations, and that this landscape will never return.

Look at European political parties established for decades and you see the exact same thing. Only there you often have other ‘escape valves’, because new parties are easier to form and get onto national forums. But it’s still the same thing.

Centralization, globalization, UN, NATO, IMF, all these ‘principles’ and organizations will see their influence and support dwindle, and rapidly. It’s really over. Debt did it. Or rather, our doomed mission to hide our downfall behind a veil of ever more debt did.

And Donald Trump has a role to play in that. If Hillary wins, it’ll only be more, and ever more, and spastically more, attempts to convince everyone that more globalization is the way to go, and that going to war with Putin and sending young Americans into battle in fields lost before they enter is the way of the future.

Both will be failures. All we really get to do is try to decide who may be the lesser failure.

But anyway, that’s where Trump comes from, and he doesn’t understand the half of it. Trump is there because everything else failed. And he will fail too, win or lose.

Is It Socialism or Just Failure?

Feb 032015

February 3, 2015 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 12:06 am Finance Tagged with: capitalism, EU, failure, Greece, misery, socialism, US 9 Responses »

Harris&Ewing House-Capitol tunnel, Washington, DC Feb 3 1939

It’s all still about Greece, and that makes sense, if nothing else Syriza is a breath if not a tornado of fresh air. But those too pass. The question at the end remains: did anything really change? It’s quite possible, don’t get me wrong, but Tsipras and Vanoufakis are busy looking out for the people who voted for them, not the rest of the Europe, or the world for that matter. And neither should they.

They’ve already gotten good response from Obama, from France and Britain, and if only for that reason they will get more. But you have to understand what they are trying to do: getting a better life for their own people, and that’s hard enough all by itself. The best they can do for now, hopefully, is that. But Greece is merely a symptom of something bigger and deeper that is going wrong.

There’s an ideological battle happening between money and wellbeing, between people and banks. Western leaders have so far chosen to protect money and banks, instead of people and their wellbeing, and that’s why we find ourselves where we do. Choosing money before people can only end in the demise of the system that makes such a choice. That, however, is apparently terribly hard to comprehend.

And that got Greece where it is. That’s why Europe set up a ‘union’ that shares a currency but that has no provisions to transfer funds from – even temporarily – weak regions from stronger ones. Even the US has that, or it would have imploded long ago. It’s the kind of thing that makes you wonder if maybe the EU wasn’t set up from the start so Germany could exploit the Mediterranean.

But even that is not the core issue. It’s money over people that is. And Brussels should not just be ashamed for what they’ve done to Greece, they should be driven out of town with tar and feathers. That’s not how they see it, though. Brussels, in the voice of Eurogroup head Dijsselbloem, when he met with new Greek FinMin Varoufakis, had the audacity – and stupidity, his job is up for grabs – to point out that much progress had been made. As the troika demands have turned Greece into a third world nation. That’s known as progress.

If you think about it, it’s not much different from how US policies have turned Detroit, and many other places, into semi-hellholes. It’s fine if there’s a difference between West Virginia and the Hamptons, it’s just about how big that difference gets.

It all comes down to a system that is failing spectacularly. Failing, that is, even if it’s intentional: there are plenty Darwinists and neo-liberals who would swear the poor only get what they deserve. Just as Brussels apparently saw the Greeks: let ’em bleed, let ’em suffer, let ’em die, it’s only because they borrowed too much.

I can’t seem to figure out the logic there: if they borrowed so much, why are they unemployed and miserable and without health care? The answer to that of course is that they didn’t, it’s 90%+ money that flowed into western banks to make up for their gambling losses. It should by now be a non-issue, because it’s so glaringly obvious, but the narrative is strong.

This is not about Greece, this is about ideology, about economics as a belief system, a system so blind it sacrifices real people and proclaims that is a good thing: ‘much progress had been made’. Some people are saying: you need to help these people who end up on the wrong side of the economic tracks, while others invoke Darwin.

But you need to ask how they got where they are, or you’ll never solve the issue, you’ll just need up murdering people. And whether they deserve it or not, murder is not legal, Mr. Dijsselbloem. And neither is using your job to put people into misery, not even if your economic beliefs say that’s alright.

In the US, a lot of people complain about how the country has turned into a socialist bastion. And even taking into account that the word has a very different connotation stateside than it does in Europe and other parts of the world, it’s simply not correct, it doesn’t fit.

The US, like western Europe, is in the midst of a massive failure of its brand of capitalism. There are no free markets, no price discovery, there are asset bubbles being blown with money that belongs to our grandchildren as people are thrown into despair, while others attain unparalleled riches, and the whole grossly distorted movie is fed to everyone by a well-oiled spin machine.

Yes, 40 million Americans are on food stamps, 100 million are not even officially in the labor force, and perhaps as much as most Americans are receiving some sort of government assistance, but that doesn’t make it socialism. It makes it a failed capitalist system. Socialism is supposed to be about a society that cares, and that’s not what those US government handouts are about. They’re about keeping people quiet in a failed system.

Europe understands the ‘caring society’ definition of socialism much better. Or it used to. Now it has to face the ‘New Greeks’, elected to stand up against a Europe that does not care one bit. That only wants Greece to obey its budget and bailout rules, over the bodies of its own people. The Greeks have democratically voted not to take that anymore.

Can you imagine what would happen in the US if the government pay-outs were halted? If there were no more foodstamps? The epic failure of the economic system would come to light in too many ways to mention. But one thing’s for sure, it would create one big mess of chaos and unrest that would sweep across the streets of the country like a tidal wave.

Nothing to do with socialism, that’s a political ideology, like capitalism is. There’s not much between them, once you put people first in either.

Still, for now, we all live in a failed economic system, and we refuse to admit it, edged on by our self-serving leaders and media. But how is it not obvious? It is in Greece, after all.

The Most Elementary Question Must Not Be Asked

Dec 062014

December 6, 2014 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 10:39 pm Finance Tagged with: Economics, failure, Growth, Keynes, puppetmasters 25 Responses »

Arthur Rothstein Interior of migratory fruit worker’s tent, Yakima, Washington Jul 1936

We’re in dire need of fresh blood and smart new ideas to clean up the mess the present ideologies and their puppets and puppetmasters have created. The present crew has made a neverending series of ‘mistakes’, intentional or not, and they are dead set on making more, if only because they refuse to change the tack that led to all these ‘mistakes’.

I say mistakes because that’s what they are from the point of view of all those who live in the real economy, not because I think the puppetmasters are mistaken from their own point of view. After all, all they do, literally all they do, is take care of their own interests. Where they will find themselves mistaken is down the line, when there is no longer a functioning real economy, and they will of necessity end up going down with it.

However, even though you wouldn’t say it to look at America and Europe these days, we don’t need to be puppets to any masters. I know, I know, most of you don’t even recognize yourselves as puppets – yes, you -. You believe most of what you read, or at least enough to keep going on the beaten track. And they’re good at making you believe. They’ve gotten a lot better at it ever since you were born, whenever you were born.

You only need to listen to things like this week’s US jobs report, which has the media falling over each other and themselves to declare victory. But which, when you take a good look, declares no such thing. And we’ve been going on this road for many years now, a road defined by debt on one side and propaganda on the other, and we stick to it because we are promised on a 24/7 basis that it will lead to growth, which is always just around the corner. Growth is the magic word.

But why do we need growth, and do we even need it at all? That is a question which is considered blasphemous anathema by the current class of economists and leaders. Still, and maybe especially for that reason, it is a question that needs to be asked, perhaps THE question. Because the past 10, 20 or even 40 years have not actually delivered any growth, once you look beyond the propaganda, and the added debt.

And when you add that debt to the equation, they’ve brought the real economy the opposite of growth, while handing the puppet masters unequaled riches. In a nutshell, the past 40 years or so have given us added layers of gadgets at the price of unaffordable education and health care, the price of a deteriorating real economy. And that is just the start of the way down.

Growth is a topic I’ve written a lot about over the years, too much to even try and find it all back again. Here are a few samples. From November 14 2011:

The Growth Paradigm Has Become An Embarrassment

It’s high time to come clean, to stop the incessant lying. To stop pretending things are a bit hard right now, but otherwise just fine. They’re not. Extend and pretend works only so long. Then it snaps back in your face with a vengeance. That’s why the bond markets are so successful in bringing down Italy and Greece. Not because the ECB doesn’t step in, since that would only serve to cover up reality for a little bit longer, but because they’ve both lied for so long about their real predicaments.

No, just stop lying. The consequences and challenges will be formidable, but they’ll be that anyway. You can’t cover up the debt and the losses forever. And the chances of growing your economies out of the cesspit are zero, if not below.

One thing no more lying will achieve is this: it will re-establish confidence in the markets -or what’ll be left of them-. And isn’t that what you guys always say you want to accomplish? Well, I can assure you, it’s the only way to do it: cut the fairy tales. Take a breath of fresh air and get to work. Do something real and rewarding for a change, and for a living.

Oh, and one other thing that must stop something urgent: stop talking about economic growth. There ain’t none, and we need to wonder hard and loud why we still and always unquestioningly assume and accept that we need it. No, the Greek economy will not grow its way out of its misery. Neither will Italy’s, or France’s or America’s. There’s too much debt to grow out of.

But perhaps this is hard to fathom without resorting to more philosophical questions. For those of you who’ve never read or heard Professor Albert Bartlett’s work on exponential growth (since that is what we’re talking bout), get moving. Bartlett is a physicist. That means he’s an actual scientist, and capable of understanding the inevitable endgame of exponential growth. People like Papademos and Monti, as well as just about any political and economic leader on the planet, don’t understand the science involved. Either that or they’re willfully blind to it.

And there’s another layer to the question, one that goes beyond the easy to understand impossibility of endless and eternal growth. That is, when we look around our respective places on the planet, why do we think we need to grow more? Why do we feel we haven’t grown enough? And perhaps more quintessential: what is it that we want to grow into? At what point, if we do want more growth, will it be enough for us? Have we even thought about that?

We are fed the constant growth story because it is indeed a necessity in our present system. When all money issued carries interest i.e. is issued as debt, you will need to grow your GDP at least as much as that interest rate to play even. Just as easy to understand as the exponential growth conundrum. Or so you would think.

But that doesn’t mean that you can always keep issuing enough money to meet your interest payment requirements. Not when a huge part of it is issued as for instance mortgage loans, but very few people buy homes. Not when money is created when banks issue fresh credit to industries, but industries find no market for their products and instead contract.

In other words: if we don’t grow, we will shrink. And that, we are told, is the very definition of armageddon. But why couldn’t we shrink a little and still be comfortable? In theory we could perhaps, but first of all the human mind isn’t made for shrinkage, and second the money we create as credit is virtual, and can disappear as fast as it was created, and into the same nothingness.

If we would for instance consciously choose to shrink by 5%, we’d run a very real risk that we would cause 50% of the money to vanish. The system based on credit will have the tendency to go down like so many dominoes. It has very little resilience and is thus enormously fragile, something we don’t pay attention to when we have growth, and are therefore not prepared for when we no longer do.

And from April 22, 2013:

What Do We Want To Grow Into?

The only good thing about all this is that if and when it becomes clear that there is no growth left in the system, all its one-dimensional advocates, from both the Spend! and the Cut! parties, will disappear into a great void. They have no idea what to do without growth. There is no economics class that teaches them, and they don’t have the brains to come up with an answer themselves.

Indeed, perhaps it’s even true that a “not necessarily growth” situation, simply of its own accord, selects for other “leaders”. That power hungry psychopaths, in all the various degrees to which they float to the top of the dungheap, are wiped out and alienated by such a situation.

That could be a very good thing. It’s on the way there, however, that we will see unimaginable damage, mayhem and bloodshed. The forever and always growth classes have an iron grip on everyone’s lives. If only because everyone believes them. Still, just because they can’t change their ways and views doesn’t mean you can’t. You can see quite easily that, in a material sense, you have more than enough already.

And many of you have clued in to the destruction ever more growth brings to your children’s living world (not to mention their brains). Unfortunately, quite a few then fall for the “more growth, but more greener” delusion. Or some steady state one (we don’t do steady, we don’t stand still).

When you get down to the heart of it, the only reason we need more growth is to pay off our debts. Which we owe largely to the same small group of rich, psychopathic and powerful that incessantly repeats the “need for growth” message, and makes sure it’s the only message available out there. But we will have to have the discussion some day, and it won’t be initiated by the people and powers that rule our societies today; that one’s up to us.

It’s a very simple discussion. You can start it today with Krugman or one of his alleged adversaries: Why do you advocate economic growth? Why do you see a period of non-growth or shrinkage as a necessary evil that needs to be brought down to its knees at – quite literally – all cost?

And what is it you want to grow into? Can you explain that? I’ve never seen that properly defined. Isn’t it perhaps true that if you don’t know the answer to that question, you are by definition blindly chasing a mirage? If you don’t know where you’re going, or why you’re going there, why go at all? Or is that still the sort of issue that can easily be swept under the carpet as “commie”?

So it’s refreshing to see this week a German economist and banker, Dr. Ulrich Salzer, thanks to Tyler Durden, going down that same line of questioning. These questions are long overdue. It’s not just one school of economics or the other failing us, it’s the entire field. Any field that refuses to ponder its most essential questions is per definition dead and useless.

Physicists can explain any time of day why we need Newton’s gravity and Einstein’s relativity in order to make sense of the world, and if anyone can prove them wrong, they’d be welcomed. Economists cannot explain we we need growth, it’s simply assumed to be a given.

Deficit Spending And Money Printing: A German Point Of View

The leading macroeconomic Nobel-Laureates, the Central Bankers as well as most Politicians have reduced their economic judgment on how to get the economies in Europe and Japan back to sustainable growth on just two recipes: public investments in infrastructure to be financed by additional public debt and, second, an expansive money market policy based on printing more money and reducing interest rates to zero or even beyond zero to negative rates!

And if the capital markets don’t swallow additional public debt, then the Central Banks will step in eagerly as Investors – regardless if this is in line with their statutes!

The expected results, backed by the leading macroeconomic wisdom, should be to kick-start economic growth, to induce private industry to invest and banks to lend to private investors, and thereby to reduce unemployment, and get deflationary tendencies back to an inflation rate that is now officially regarded as ideal if it oscillates around 2 % p.a. When and why this “two-percent” benchmark was introduced for the first time I can’t remember, but everybody today takes it for granted and repeats it like as an undisputed target of Central Bank’s money market policy. Included in this assumption is ever more public debt as the guarantor for lasting GDP-growth!

I never understood why macroeconomics should be regarded as an academic discipline if it is in practice reduced to these rather simple theories of how to handle a recession or even deflation! Maybe Alfred Nobel was just as clear-sighted as I am, and consequently never introduced a Nobel-prize for economics. That was done after his death by the Central Bank of Norway, which also contributed the required funds. It still does so, and not the Nobel foundation!

My personal advice is to stop handing out any more Nobel-prizes for economics to any more American professors on any new theory how to steer economic development and sustainable economic growth, because none of them has ever worked.

There is a lot of blame offloaded onto Maynard Keynes by critics of the present ruling opinion of more deficit spending by governments. But I don’t believe that Keynes would approve any of today’s Nobel-Laureates who saw no other way out of recession than by money printing in unlimited amounts and years of deficit spending by already over-indebted economies. According to Keynes public investment on deficit could be regarded as an “ultima ratio” to re-kick-start a slow economy, but he would never have advised any government that is already highly indebted to increase this debt even more!

In his theory, deficit-spending should be a limited action in time and amounts, and directly afterwards this debt should be repaid by the additional tax income from the stronger revenues of industry and private individuals who have profited from the intervention of the State.

But what our economists and central bankers are recommending nowadays is completely different from “short-term-kick-starts” – our systems are so full of the sweet drug of government deficit spending that (like a drug-addict) it constantly needs heavier doses of the same drug!

It was not long ago that the American Treasury Secretary publicly blamed Germany for not using its remaining credit standing for another round of deficit-spending in order to help Italy, France and other Southern European countries. As if more public debt and burning straw in Germany would have any impact on the southern countries’ economies without any serious political and economic reforms in those countries themselves to fight the weakness at its real source!

As long as our “economy doctors” don’t know anything better than to prescribe more drugs instead of getting the patient off the needle and help him to abandon the ever increasing drug doses, we will never get our economies “back to normal”!

We should never forget that at least the European economies had no real problem as long as the public debt to Gross National Product ratio remained within the Maastricht limits of 60% and before liquidity in the banking sector was multiplied without limit, thereby creating big bubbles in the financial assets of the banks which finally led to the financial crisis of 2008.

Japan is the very best example to prove that the therapy of deficit spending and money printing is dangerously wrong: it is now 25 years since Japan has adopted this cure. If anybody needs proof that the prescription was unprofessional and ineffective, he should look at the results to the Japanese economy and its public debt. Although hundreds of billions of Dollars have been spent during this period on programs to stimulate the Japanese economy the effect was that Japan fell from one recession into the next depression and the public debt ratio to GNP has meanwhile reached the astronomic bench mark of 230% (!!), which is double that of Greece and four times higher than the Maastricht criterion!

I am certain that Maynard Keynes would turn in his grave if he knew to what extent his theory was misinterpreted and misused! Of course it’s a big temptation for every politician to utilize the sweet but toxic medicine of deficit spending and more public debt rather than to introduce hard reforms on public budgets, on social spending and other benefits to their voters.

It’s also a big mistake that European governments have disregarded the traditional role of the European Central Bank as the watch-dog against inflation. In creating the ECB, Germany never consented that it should have more responsibilities and more authority than the Deutsche Bundesbank ever had.

It’s just like with deficit spending Keynes had recommended under certain conditions: it may be acceptable if the Central Bank acts as “Lender of last resort” in case of actual liquidity crisis. But this should be strictly on short-term basis. What we experience today is completely contrary to the German (maybe not the U.S.) understanding of the role of the Central Bank. The ECB has now assumed a role not only to protect the value of our common currency against inflation but also to take action as if it is responsible to create economic growth and full employment with instruments like money printing, zero interest rates and unlimited investments in bonds which the free market is rejecting.

We pay a high price for the chimera that we need constant economic growth and that it is a stigma if our GDP-growth is only 1.5% p.a. Can’t we accept that after 50 years of undisturbed peace and continuous prosperity we have reached a certain degree of personal satisfaction where we don’t need a new car every year, another cell-phone, additional furniture, more TV-sets, more laptops etc, etc. Why do we insist upon economic growth, if we don’t actually need the products which are additionally produced every year?

Is it really worth it to increase the already heavy burden of public debt, which our children must service someday, by accepting even more debt in a vain effort to increase public demand? Let’s instead be happy with zero GDP growth, zero inflation and zero growth of public debt! That could be a more rational solution. Why don’t we consider it?

You almost have to step outside of economics, even out of the financial world as a whole, to pose what is the most elementary question about our economy today. That can’t be right.

The most elementary question is not how we can achieve growth, it’s whether we need growth, and what we would need it for that is important enough to destroy our entire societies and economies for. As Salzer says: “Why do we insist upon economic growth, if we don’t actually need the products which are additionally produced every year?” The most elementary question is as simple as that.

I can finish this the way I started it: we need new ideas, new paradigms, to replace the ones that have gotten us the cesspool we find ourselves in, despite the false signals debt and propaganda provide us with. We’re in dire need of fresh blood and smart new ideas to clean up the mess the present ideologies and their puppets and puppetmasters have created.

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